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.
There is some stuff in post that is somewhat useful, but the conviction of the statements is a bit much. Nothing in the brain is simple, and most of neuroscience is in it's infancy today. Dandy-Walker syndrome is an especially extreme, but illustrative, case of how strange the brain can be on the inside, yet present as normal on the outside[0].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dandy%E2%80%93Walker_syndrome
Doesn't seem like "normal" presentation to me.
"The person was a married father of two children, and worked as a civil servant, leading an at least superficially normal life, despite having enlarged ventricles with a decreased volume of brain tissue. "What I find amazing to this day is how the brain can deal with something which you think should not be compatible with life", commented Dr. Max Muenke, a pediatric brain-defect specialist at the National Human Genome Research Institute. "If something happens very slowly over quite some time, maybe over decades, the different parts of the brain take up functions that would normally be done by the part that is pushed to the side.""
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?
If we're in a grounded, reflected and self-connected place (i.e. if we have empathy or warm accompaniment from ourselves or someone else), we can interrupt this cycle. The signal "the gut is tight" from the gut can be discerned "ah, interesting, I wonder if it needs to be tight or if I should change the topic or watch a different movie or leave this room", etc.,
Here's an example: You see a tiger in the forest. Your eyes send that signal through their nerves to the brainstem, which makes your stomach tight and activates your legs to run away. The tight stomach and running legs then send their signals of movement and clenching back up through to limbic system ("I'm scared!") and the neocortex (your conscious brain, "I'm running away from the tiger!") to tell it to run. Because all of this happens so fast, our experience is this: We saw the tiger and therefore we're scared and are running away. That's not really what's happening under the hood, we're scared BECAUSE we're running and have a tight gut, the tiger was just a trigger for the brainstem/gut/legs. Makes sense?
Emotional states aren't reified in the brain; they're reified in our physiology. When you're happy, or sad, or scared, or whatever else, that's not a fact about your brain; your brain is just perceiving a fact about your body. (A fact that it worked together with the body to create, but still.)
Think of the brain as the CPU and the body (muscular contraction levels, etc.) as RAM. The brain-as-CPU has registers (informational state held directly in the brain), but your emotions are not held directly in such registers. Emotional states are, instead, patterns of information in the body-as-RAM, that the brain-as-CPU (statelessly) perceives [loads from, polls] in an ongoing way. If the body-as-RAM is polled and shows a certain recognizable pattern of activations, then that is interpreted by the brain as a certain emotional state.
Both the brain-as-CPU and various body parts (devices on the bus) can write to the body-as-RAM. The brain-as-CPU will then notice that the "emotional state" that it reads from the body-as-RAM has changed, and may do something about it (reinforce the change, counteract it, etc.)
What you experience as the qualia of emotion, is the brain's perception of the body-as-RAM, the same one it uses to decide whether to "do something about it."
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"...