Sublime

In primate social life, human and nonhuman alike, groups give power to those who advance the greater good. This basic power dynamic ensures that groups are led by individuals who will not be their undoing but will instead act with enthusiasm, kindness, focus, calm, and openness, thereby benefiting the groups.

These deer, Levine says, have done what we, as humans, seem to have extreme difficulty accomplishing: they entered a state of sympathetic dominance—their brain’s way of protecting them—then fully regained balance, allowing their parasympathetic systems to not just brake but to recover. Animals, then, have the ability to seamlessly shift between sta

There is another way as well—through the secretion of hormones.

Tribal affiliation turns off more brain cells than any other activity 

If the brain is indeed reducing redundancy as Barlow suggests, then only a small number of neurons should be active at a time.

To illustrate, he uses the example of a tiny jellyfish-like animal called a sea squirt: Born with a simple spinal cord and a three hundred–neuron “brain,” the larva motors around in the shallows until it finds a nice patch of coral on which to put down its roots. It has about twelve hours to do so, or it will die. Once safely attached, however, the

The brain of each and every one of us is built around a reptilian core,

Neuroscientists sometimes refer disparagingly to these studies as “blobology,” their tongue-in-cheek label for studies that show which brain areas become activated as subjects experience X or perform task Y.

I begin by trying to clarify the meaning of the nebulous concept of stress and to teach, with a minimum of pain, how various hormones and parts of the brain are mobilized in response to stress.