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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 "

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.

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.