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Hi everyone, Leo here. I feel grateful for the HN community's response to this post. I only emerged recently to the "real world" again and feel still some hesit

by LeonW 8y ago

Hi everyone, Leo here. I feel grateful for the HN community's response to this post. I only emerged recently to the "real world" again and feel still some hesitation and fear around showing a much more vulnerable part of myself with the work I do now. (Building marketing software was fun too!) So yeah, just want to say thanks and would love to discuss anything this sparks.

adv0r 8y ago
Hi LeonW, I was born in Bozen, I use your software, and I practice meditation every day. I work at a startup where we try to keep stress low in a friendly environment. Wanted to say thanks, nice article, and you are very brave to open up that way ;)
- LeonW 8y ago
  Thanks man! Feel the love over here in the woods. If I can support you or your company with anything, please reach out! (l.widrich@gmail.com)
joe_the_user 8y ago
1) "80% of your body’s signals are sent to the brain from the body and only 20% the other way around." 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.
- Balgair 8y ago
  Thank you. 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dandy%E2%80%93Walker_syndrome
  - solipsism 8y ago
    In the majority of individuals with Dandy–Walker malformation, signs and symptoms caused by abnormal brain development are present at birth or develop within the first year of life Doesn't seem like "normal" presentation to me.
    - Balgair 8y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrocephalus#Exceptional_case https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrocephalus#Exceptional_case "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.""
- sadness2 8y ago
  2) I enjoy the truism that we cannot act lovingly when we are on the defensive. It's more abstracted from the biology, but perhaps that helps it capture the nuances of reality.
tcmb 8y ago
This post resonates a lot with me, in particular items 7 and 2. I subscribed to your newsletter and am looking forward to future content! 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?
- LeonW 8y ago
  Thanks for the support! Yes, I try to strike a balance with that. To me, knowing about it brings me a lot of safety, so I know what I'm getting into when I'm doing a session, crying, contorting, reliving old memories, etc. Ultimately, I agree with you, we can talk about how to ride a bike with as much detail and scientific evidence as we want, eventually we need to ride one to see what its like. The most effective methods I've experienced were Somatic Experiencing, a body-based psychotherapy practice I've also trained in as a therapist. There's also an empathy resonance approach by a woman called Sarah Peyton that I find very effective (her book "Your resonant self" is great). Of course I believe in my own methodology of emotional resilience which is sort of a mix of the two above, I'd be glad to offer a free session to you anytime to experience it. Ultimately there're lots of methods, like meditation, yoga, therapy modalities that try to accomplish what we're intellectually talking about when we say emotional resilience or inner healing. In my experience this is only effective whenever the practitioner has studied and experienced this on their own body and nervous system to offer it to you effectively. And that's hard to know when it's the very thing you're looking for and you only know it intellectually. A bit of a catch 22. And it's not really a requirement when you go to therapy school for example. So it can be a mixed bag. Trial and error, which can be painful when you open yourself up to these aspects inside yourself is your friend too I believe (I tried talk therapy, various meditation practices and a few others and settled on what was both most effective in my personal experience and had the most scientific backing, like the methods I described above). Finally, I think we're all equipped as humans to offer co-regulation and empathic presence to each other to heal from whatever difficult or stressful experience we've had. Most of us just have unlearned it very young or there's not enough emphasis in our environment to practice that with each other. Hope some of that is helpful, let me know if you have any more questions!
quickthrower2 8y ago
Its very interesting to me that you have achieved the financial success that many dream of, which could allow you to retire and do what the heck you like for the rest of your life. But somehow it didn't bring total happiness, so you have actively gone on a mission to seek that out. 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.
- LeonW 8y ago
  Couldn't have said it better myself, that's exactly been my experience and what I'd like to share with others both experientially in sessions and through my writing. And I'm having a lot more fun just being with all aspects of life from a human connection perspective leaving the striving, money, etc., on the side (even though it's hard and creeps back in).
- pharke 8y ago
  To quote Rodney Dangerfield when asked if becoming successful has made life better: "You've still got the same head"
sizzle 8y ago
Loved your post, would love it even more if you included some citations to back up the Neuroscience claims.
- LeonW 8y ago
  thanks! Yeah, I tried my best to link throughout the post. I can see how having the citations neatly at the end may be helpful too if that's what you're saying!
pier25 8y ago
> 80% of your body’s signals are sent to the brain from the body and only 20% the other way around. 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?
- LeonW 8y ago
  Most of the time its a mix, it creates a positive feedback loop, which isn't really so positive, but it can be! Say your gut is tight, it sends a signal to your brain saying "I'm tight", now the brain receives this and reinforces it (the other 20%) by saying, "the gut is tight, we need to keep it tight!", which makes it tighter and the cycle continues. Does that make sense? 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.,
  - pier25 8y ago
    Right, but how does the gut know it has to get tight?
    - LeonW 8y ago
      Yes, this happens through a process that Porges calls "neuroception" (easy to google). Essentially the subconscious part of your nervous system, especially the brainstem constantly scans your environment for threats of any kind (it takes in incredible detail, some say 1000s of times per second without it ever bubbling up to your conscious mind). 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?
agumonkey 8y ago
I found the article very very nice. Concise form but new content (medical field is so vast it takes ages to gather integrated knowledge). Thanks a ton. ps: it's on reddit a few times (I found it so useful I pushed it to a very large one)
ggggtez 8y ago
Hi, not a neurologist here, but it doesn't take more than 5 seconds to realize that everything you wrote in here is wrong. Have you considered deleting it? Edit: Specifically, vagus nerve as cause of emotion, amygdyla+empathy, synapses vs skills, everything about "feigning death", everything about "triggers"...
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

by LeonW 8y ago

adv0r 8y ago

Hi LeonW, I was born in Bozen, I use your software, and I practice meditation every day. I work at a startup where we try to keep stress low in a friendly environment. Wanted to say thanks, nice article, and you are very brave to open up that way ;)

LeonW 8y ago
Thanks man! Feel the love over here in the woods. If I can support you or your company with anything, please reach out! (l.widrich@gmail.com)

joe_the_user 8y ago

1) "80% of your body’s signals are sent to the brain from the body and only 20% the other way around." 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.

Balgair 8y ago
Thank you. 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dandy%E2%80%93Walker_syndrome
- solipsism 8y ago
  In the majority of individuals with Dandy–Walker malformation, signs and symptoms caused by abnormal brain development are present at birth or develop within the first year of life Doesn't seem like "normal" presentation to me.
  - Balgair 8y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrocephalus#Exceptional_case https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrocephalus#Exceptional_case "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.""
sadness2 8y ago
2) I enjoy the truism that we cannot act lovingly when we are on the defensive. It's more abstracted from the biology, but perhaps that helps it capture the nuances of reality.

tcmb 8y ago

This post resonates a lot with me, in particular items 7 and 2. I subscribed to your newsletter and am looking forward to future content! 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?

LeonW 8y ago
Thanks for the support! Yes, I try to strike a balance with that. To me, knowing about it brings me a lot of safety, so I know what I'm getting into when I'm doing a session, crying, contorting, reliving old memories, etc. Ultimately, I agree with you, we can talk about how to ride a bike with as much detail and scientific evidence as we want, eventually we need to ride one to see what its like. The most effective methods I've experienced were Somatic Experiencing, a body-based psychotherapy practice I've also trained in as a therapist. There's also an empathy resonance approach by a woman called Sarah Peyton that I find very effective (her book "Your resonant self" is great). Of course I believe in my own methodology of emotional resilience which is sort of a mix of the two above, I'd be glad to offer a free session to you anytime to experience it. Ultimately there're lots of methods, like meditation, yoga, therapy modalities that try to accomplish what we're intellectually talking about when we say emotional resilience or inner healing. In my experience this is only effective whenever the practitioner has studied and experienced this on their own body and nervous system to offer it to you effectively. And that's hard to know when it's the very thing you're looking for and you only know it intellectually. A bit of a catch 22. And it's not really a requirement when you go to therapy school for example. So it can be a mixed bag. Trial and error, which can be painful when you open yourself up to these aspects inside yourself is your friend too I believe (I tried talk therapy, various meditation practices and a few others and settled on what was both most effective in my personal experience and had the most scientific backing, like the methods I described above). Finally, I think we're all equipped as humans to offer co-regulation and empathic presence to each other to heal from whatever difficult or stressful experience we've had. Most of us just have unlearned it very young or there's not enough emphasis in our environment to practice that with each other. Hope some of that is helpful, let me know if you have any more questions!

quickthrower2 8y ago

Its very interesting to me that you have achieved the financial success that many dream of, which could allow you to retire and do what the heck you like for the rest of your life. But somehow it didn't bring total happiness, so you have actively gone on a mission to seek that out. 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.

LeonW 8y ago
Couldn't have said it better myself, that's exactly been my experience and what I'd like to share with others both experientially in sessions and through my writing. And I'm having a lot more fun just being with all aspects of life from a human connection perspective leaving the striving, money, etc., on the side (even though it's hard and creeps back in).
pharke 8y ago
To quote Rodney Dangerfield when asked if becoming successful has made life better: "You've still got the same head"

sizzle 8y ago

Loved your post, would love it even more if you included some citations to back up the Neuroscience claims.

LeonW 8y ago
thanks! Yeah, I tried my best to link throughout the post. I can see how having the citations neatly at the end may be helpful too if that's what you're saying!

pier25 8y ago

> 80% of your body’s signals are sent to the brain from the body and only 20% the other way around. 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?

LeonW 8y ago
Most of the time its a mix, it creates a positive feedback loop, which isn't really so positive, but it can be! Say your gut is tight, it sends a signal to your brain saying "I'm tight", now the brain receives this and reinforces it (the other 20%) by saying, "the gut is tight, we need to keep it tight!", which makes it tighter and the cycle continues. Does that make sense? 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.,
- pier25 8y ago
  Right, but how does the gut know it has to get tight?
  - LeonW 8y ago
    Yes, this happens through a process that Porges calls "neuroception" (easy to google). Essentially the subconscious part of your nervous system, especially the brainstem constantly scans your environment for threats of any kind (it takes in incredible detail, some say 1000s of times per second without it ever bubbling up to your conscious mind). 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?

agumonkey 8y ago

I found the article very very nice. Concise form but new content (medical field is so vast it takes ages to gather integrated knowledge). Thanks a ton. ps: it's on reddit a few times (I found it so useful I pushed it to a very large one)

ggggtez 8y ago

Hi, not a neurologist here, but it doesn't take more than 5 seconds to realize that everything you wrote in here is wrong. Have you considered deleting it? Edit: Specifically, vagus nerve as cause of emotion, amygdyla+empathy, synapses vs skills, everything about "feigning death", everything about "triggers"...

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]