Neuroscience

We build upon the key fact that the brain is (part of) the body and as such, like any other bodily organ, the brain is made of cells. The focus on cellular rather than neural, brain processing allows us to underscore the idea that flexible responses to changes in the environments requires flexible adjustments not only through neural, but also... See more

While most people tend to be optimistic, those suffering from depression and anxiety have a bleak view of the future — and that in fact seems to be the chief cause of their problems, not their past traumas nor their view of the present. While traumas do have a lasting impact, most people actually emerge stronger afterward. Others continue... See more

Rather, in our brain’s pursuit to plan, survive, and achieve our goals, it has learned how to guess what the world is actually like based on incoming sensory data. Those predictions are always uncertain, at least to a degree, which is why the goal of predictive processing is often described as minimizing that uncertainty.

But an optimal relationship... See more

Learned helplessness, the failure to escape shock induced by uncontrollable aversive events, was discovered half a century ago. Seligman and Maier (1967) theorized that animals learned that outcomes were independent of their responses—that nothing they did mattered – and that this learning undermined trying to escape. The mechanism of learned... See more

Roshi Joan Halifax tells a story about witnessing a conversation in the early 1970s between Jonas Salk, developer of the polio vaccine, and Gregory Bateson, an anthropologist and systems theorist, about the mind. Bateson asked, “Where is the mind?” Salk pointed to his own head. Bateson chuckled, shook his head, and pointed to the space between... See more

These fndings indicate that, while MBCT is a reliable and e

fcacious intervention,

there is a need to address the sustainability of treatment-related improvements in patients with

BD

So here is the take-home lesson. We have to seek novelty, because this is what lays down new memories in the brain.