Sublime

state changes in several areas (specifically the insular cortex, anterior cingulate, amygdala, and nucleus accumbens) allowed them to predict moments when participants would switch between new emotional states.

“It’s almost as though, without sleep, the brain had reverted back to more primitive patterns of activity, in that it was unable to put emotional experiences into context and produce controlled, appropriate responses.”

There are three basic systems at work, two enabling us to be ON, one enabling us to switch OFF. Both of the ON systems manage and direct our energies and attention towards or away from things in our world in anxiety, fear, reward or pleasure.

Take a look at people walking down the street, driving in their cars, eating alone in restaurants and cafes. Not so long ago, these people wouldn’t be doing anything else. Their minds would wander and they would daydream; their DMN would be active, and, although they were totally unaware of it, they would be tagging recent memories for processing

The conscious mind may be in the present, but the subconscious body-mind is living in the past.

Forgetting, then, would not be the loss of a memory, but the erection of a mental barrier between the conscious mind and our long-term memory. Psychologists call this mechanism active inhibition (cf. MacLeod, 2007).

No matter how much insight and understanding we develop, the rational brain is basically impotent to talk the emotional brain out of its own reality.

Our brain’s prefrontal cortex is responsible for analyzing tasks, prioritizing them, and assigning our mental resources to them. When we inundate it with too much information or make it switch focus too quickly, it simply slows down.