Practical Facts about the Human Brain

There are many memory biases including the humor effect, positivity effect and the generation effect.

The humor effect states that humorous items are more easily remembered than non-humorous ones.

Positivity effects states that older adults favor positive over negative information in their memories.

Generation effect states that self-generated information is remembered best.

This is pretty interesting. The idea of not attempt to "command" the body but work with the body and unconscious process is common in a wide variety of martial arts and healing art modalities (Alexander Technique, Qigong, hypnosis, etc).

2) "When your amygdala is active, you can’t have empathy for others"

Unfortunately, this statement seems to suffer from the weakness of popular psychology expositions - a series of fairly pat cause-and-effect statement when the causes of virtually all behavior is more complex and much less certain.

The human brain is fantastically complex thing. Neurologists and psychologists have done many experiments on it. The "replication crisis" is a good indicator how difficult is to go from experiments on a few particulars to a general understanding of how the brain works. I think the criticism of "functional areas" that Luria made in The Working Brain should be read carefully.

The thing about this is: neurological research is great to add if what you're looking for is "what might be", using methods that possibly have scientific and seem effective. But if you operate in terms of "how things absolutely are", then one risks going into the realm of pseudo-science. And there's a lot of supposedly neurologically based new age quackery out there - much of it based things that "the latest findings" whenever said quack happened to get their start.

Maybe that is a warning sign for many people aspiring to make money, that even fully loaded you still have to deal with your own brain. Knowing how your own brain works and how to make yourself happy is a very important skill.

That being said: in my personal experience, having an intellectual understanding of something (like emotional triggers being unintegrated memories) provides some brief relief, but rarely helps me make behavioral or emotional changes in the long run. From your point of view, what is the relation of knowing vs experiencing in making progress towards emotional resilience, and what techniques can you recommend for the experiencing aspect?

So whenever we are afraid or anxious and we feel that thing in our bellies, is it the brain sending messages to the belly or the belly reacting and sending messages to the brain?

Wanted to say thanks, nice article, and you are very brave to open up that way ;)

Thanks a ton.

ps: it's on reddit a few times (I found it so useful I pushed it to a very large one)

Edit: Specifically, vagus nerve as cause of emotion, amygdyla+empathy, synapses vs skills, everything about "feigning death", everything about "triggers"...

But that really should not close one off to reputable sources like Tara Brach (highly recommend people start with her guided sessions which are available free on her site) who have a well of experience honed over the years.

One time in India, some family members took me to an astrologer. I was extremely skeptical but this person was famous in town and well known regionally as well. And when I voiced my concerns that the whole field was all hocus pocus, one of my relatives said that may well be true for many individual practitioners in the field, but if you think about it as a person communicating to you using their own finely tuned heuristic for outcomes, it’s a different story. Maybe the more reputable sources in these fields should be thought of in that way, where you shouldn’t expect perfect accuracy but you should use their thoughts and knowledge as a rough guide to a kind of knowledge we have very few tools to directly explore rather than pure truths.

No offense but your claim is absurd. Other than placebo effect, there are no accepted benefits of "meditation" (whatever that means) within the scientific community.

However in the new age, gluten-free communities...

I worry about this every time I read a "practical" article about the brain. Can anyone tell if the main points in this article is generally accepted in the scientific community?

Leo provides no source for it, and most importantly it sounds like an overly simple model ("your amygdala takes over, and you can't feel any empathy until it's no longer active"), and overly simple models tend to be very wrong when we're trying to describe such complex mechanisms as that of our brains.

Taking research papers and drawing conclusions and interpretations without formal training, in an authoritative manner, can lead to a lot of inaccurate beliefs about the world that people might carry to their grave because they think they're backed by science.

I'd have to check the source, but I'm pretty damn skeptical on all interoceptive information flowing through the vagus nerve. I'm pretty sure my adviser has told me that's Just Plain Wrong.

So the state of the up-stream neuron depends very little on the down-stream neuron: if the down-stream neuron is in it's refractory period and can't process the chemical signal, the up-stream neuron can still fire all day, and the chemicals it releases will essentially fall on deaf ears.

That is a somewhat simplified view, and there is such a thing as retrograde signaling (chemical messaging from the post-synaptic neuron to the pre-synaptic neuron), but it's believed these signals have less to do with the primary flow of information in the brain, and probably relate to slower processes like modifying the strength of the chemical signal in the affected synapse.