Sublime

something or somebody just feels off to you, it’s not your imagination; it’s your neuroception.

Brains have a lot of common features; minds, less so, because minds depend in part on micro-wiring that is tuned and pruned by culture.

blood had rushed into a part of the brain called the default mode network, an interconnected set of regions that become active when people think about the self in relation to others. You know how meditation and psychedelics can make you feel like you are less attached to your identity and more one with everything? That’s what happens when you

I agree with Marcel Kinsbourne that the brain is, in one sense, a system of opponent processors. In other words, it contains mutually opposed elements whose contrary influence make possible finely calibrated responses to complex situations.

Brain circuitry operates by the many-to-one principle of degeneracy: instances of a single emotion category, such as fear, are handled by different brain patterns at different times and in different people. Conversely, the same neurons can participate in creating different mental states (one-to-many).

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

A constructionist approach to emotion has a couple of core ideas. One idea is that an emotion category such as anger or disgust does not have a fingerprint. One instance of anger need not look or feel like another, nor will it be caused by the same neurons. Variation is the norm. Your range of angers is not necessarily the same as mine, although if

our nervous systems are all essentially the same. We all need safety, and suffer and express anger and possibly aggression when we are deprived of it.

In contrast, baby brains modify across vast territories.