Sublime

Top down or bottom up. Structures in the emotional brain decide what we perceive as dangerous or safe. There are two ways of changing the threat detection system: from the top down, via modulating messages from the medial prefrontal cortex (not just prefrontal cortex), or from the bottom up, via the reptilian brain, through breathing, movement, and

le pédagogue français Édouard Séguin (1812-1880)

When the alarm bell of the emotional brain keeps signaling that you are in danger, no amount of insight will silence it.

Today, with the help of brain-scanning technology, we may be getting closer to the answer. In 2005 an Emory University neuroscientist named Gregory Berns decided to conduct an updated version of Asch’s experiments. Berns and his team recruited thirty-two volunteers, men and women between the

Even though we have been in the post-Freudian era for some time, reductive versions of his ideas have become common-sense assumptions for many who have never read a word of his work.

When something does not feel familiar, however, our amygdalae tend to label that unfamiliar thing as dangerous, and they respond by triggering our fight-flight-or-play-dead fear response. If

Learning means trying to select the simplest model that fits the data. Suppose I show you the top card and tell you that the three objects surrounded by thick lines are “tufas.” With so little data, how do you find the other tufas? Your brain makes a model of how these forms were generated, a hierarchical tree of their properties, and then selects

Notre personnalité est en proie à une guerre civile, ainsi que Platon l’affirme, ou comme un navire sans capitaine où chaque membre d’équipage tire dans une direction opposée53. Cette conception de la psyché comme constituée d’instances rivales mues par des pulsions opposées n’est pas très compatible avec les neurosciences. D’ailleurs, David Eaglem