Sublime

habenula—the part of the brain that stopped our ancestors from eating poisonous berries by reminding them how bad mistakes feel—reduces the amount of the neurotransmitter dopamine in the brain.

Our mirror neurons register their inner experience, and our own bodies make internal adjustments to whatever we notice. Just so, the muscles of our own faces give others clues about how calm or excited we feel, whether our heart is racing or quiet, and whether we’re ready to pounce on them or run away.

hardwired through habit or reflex.

“Cats, dogs, digients, they’re all just substitutes for what we’re supposed to be caring for. Eventually you start to understand what a baby means, what it really means, and everything changes. And then you realize that all the feelings you had before weren’t—” Robyn stops herself. “I mean, for me, it just put things in perspective.”

Starlings. The synchronized movement patterns of a starling flock is also known as a murmuration. Guided by simple rules, starling murmurations can react to their environment as a group without a central leader orchestrating their choices; in any instant, any part of the flock can transform the movement of the whole flock. Collective leadership/par

FREEZE-FRAME allows a spontaneous entrainment or coherence to naturally emerge, thus bypassing any need for cognitive control of breathing. The mind gets out of the way instead of driving the breathing process. This not only feels good but is easy to sustain.

More than a century after Pavlov’s characterization, our bodily reaction to change is no longer called a reflex. It’s termed the orienting response,