12 ms·

The Roots of Fear: Understanding the Amygdala

146 points by birriel 2y ago

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
amelius 2y ago
> The researchers took samples from brains of humans and rhesus macaque monkeys, separated individual cells and sequenced their RNA. This shows which genes are active (being expressed) in a particular cell and allows researchers to sort them into groups based on gene expression. How do you extract RNA from monkeys without activating the RNA that expresses fear?
- verisimi 2y ago
  > How do you extract RNA from monkeys without activating the RNA that expresses fear? You stroke the back of the monkey's hand and give it banana treats.
- rawgabbit 2y ago
  RNA is the messenger from the nucleus that tells the ribosome what to make. The DNA sequences that create the RNA are called genes. It was only learned the last few decades that genes can be turned off/on. This is how a single embryo cell can produce all the different cells in our body. Unfortunately they chose the word expressed for this concept. What they are saying is they want to study the amygdala aka the primitive pre-evolutionary part of our brain we share with other creatures. It is said the primitive brain controls breathing, heart rate,fear and anger. It is also said emotions like fear or anger is our brain’s faulty perception of our body’s response to all the adrenaline the amygdala is initiates. They know the amygdala has different types of cells. To learn why certain cells malfunction, and cause depression and other disorders, they are studying DNA sequences.
- immibis 2y ago
  The RNA doesn't express fear - it expresses that this is a type of cell that goes in a certain place in the neural circuit that expresses fear.
wayoverthecloud 2y ago
I think there are two types of fear mostly, the innate survival animalistic fear and the self-perpetuating fear caused due to misunderstanding. The animalistic fear is present in all and it's not possible to get rid of. When you see a snake or a tiger in front of you, that fear is natural. The response is to jump or run and is so spontaneous, you can't really control it. It's necessary for survival. But I think we are interested in the other fear, the one that is bound to attachment. You see a tiger, you panic, turns out to be a cat, you laugh it off, go away, that fear is not an issue. But if you go about your day thinking, what if that was a tiger? What if I get jumped by tiger this time? Then, you are creating the fear. The fear has no basis, except for it was implanted to you awhile ago. And now you are attaching yourself to it. You are extending it which is the actual problem. Most of us have fears that go back to childhood. If you think back far enough(like the tiger example), question yourself why you are afraid, you know the answers. One more example, I used to be afraid of getting heart-attacks in the past. Even gas passing would make me panic. Have I ever had a heart-attack before? No. How am I so damn sure that I have a heart-attack if I don't even know what it's supposed to feel like? Heart-attack is a bad thing and it shouldn't be happening to me. How is every acid reflux a heart-attack to me now. I have created my own bubble of fear. When though? I sure as hell didn't know what heartattack is when I was born. So it happened when I was able to comprehend what a heart-attack is right? For me, it's due to people around me passing, it's due to reading on Internet about young celebrities dying to strokes, watching movies, etc. It got implanted in me. I don't know a heartattack I just have an idea of it which is not the same thing. Not even remotely related. Fear arises due to misunderstanding. If you trace it far back enough, fear was implanted mostly in the childhood.
- lloeki 2y ago
  > What if [...]? Sounds more like anxiety than fear. While fear is happening in the present, anxiety is anchored in the future.
  - zusammen 2y ago
    [dead]
- 2y ago
Vecr 2y ago
https://gwern.net/backstop#hui-nengs-flag https://gwern.net/backstop#hui-nengs-flag -- Evolution as Backstop for Reinforcement Learning -- Hui Neng’s Flag -- the mathematics of positive and negative reinforcement https://gwern.net/fiction/batman https://gwern.net/fiction/batman -- The Gift of the Amygdali -- Sci-Fi, anxiety, pain
anodyne33 2y ago
tl:dr - brains are weird man There's a tremendous episode of Radiolab called Fault Line that talks about the effect of a total resection of the Amygdala. It worked out very poorly. I heard it weeks before I was scheduled for a right temporal lobe resection, including Amygdala and it scared the bejeesus out of me. A quick call to my neurosurgeon's coordinator assuaged my fears. The bilateral resection caused Kluver-Busey syndrome in the patient that Fault Line discusses.
spoonfeeder006 2y ago
> The researchers took samples from brains of humans and rhesus macaque monkeys, separated individual cells and sequenced their RNA. This shows which genes are active (being expressed) in a particular cell and allows researchers to sort them into groups based on gene expression. Thats (potentially) a lot of neurons to sift through isn't it? I wonder what their process was, or how many neurons they can sift through. Too bad the paywall (yay for greedy journal institutions profiting off the labor of scientists)
- immibis 2y ago
  They most likely took a big batch of cells and used some chemical methods to separate them into groups, then blended up each group and analyzed it.
  - spoonfeeder006 2y ago
    Are you familiar with a term that refers to that sort of technique?
richrichie 2y ago
[flagged]
- 082349872349872 2y ago
  > not trainable Counterexample: crowd-control horses. [EDIT: we can quibble about terminology; I think it's fair to say that while apprehension may always remain, fear, and certainly panic, can be trained away]
- guerrilla 2y ago
  This is completely wrong, counter to all contemporary scientific theories on the subject. Exposure therapy works exceptionally well and we know how it works: through desensitization. We can measure this in multiple different ways including blood-serum levels of various substances, fMRI, HRV, etc. The physical evidence for that and how it works is staggering.
- fatnoah 2y ago
  A recent experience I had came while walking in a forest with friends about an hour from Seattle. While walking, we heard an animal sound of some kind that cause an immediate "hairs on the back of my neck standing" up reaction along with what felt like an adrenaline rush (time slowing, narrowing of focus, etc). All of this happened immediately, and it took a few moments for my conscious mind to catch up. My friend and I looked at each other and walked briskly away from the sound. It wasn't until we encountered another hiker that we found out a mother bear and cubs had been spotted in that area. This was unlike any other fear of animals, jump scares, or even near-miss types of experiences I've had in the past. It was a very primal and immediate reaction to a sound I've never heard before.
- tartoran 2y ago
  > Fear is fundamentally a hardware attribute and not a software issue (ie not trainable). The fun thing is that this hardware we have can be rewired so it could be trainable in many instances. Maybe in all of them if we only knew how.
  - 2y ago
WhitneyLand 2y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S.M._(patient) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S.M._(patient)
trhway 2y ago
To me very illustrative are the scans here - looks like Honnold's visual cortex (lighted up path at/from the back of the head) doesn't have [that good] connection to amygdala and thus no fear response: https://nautil.us/the-strange-brain-of-the-worlds-greatest-solo-climber-236051/ https://nautil.us/the-strange-brain-of-the-worlds-greatest-s...
aYsY4dDQ2NrcNzA 2y ago
Little-known fact: amygdalae come in pairs. You have two of them.
- endoblast 2y ago
  Yes. My knowledge of neuroscience is derived mainly from articles like this and popular science books where many things are left vague. If someone has a hippocampus or amygdala damaged or removed it's rarely specified whether its the left one, the right one, or both. Presumably it matters! Both the above structures seem mysterious but I understand they both evolved from older cortex which sort of curled up over evolutionary time. 3-layer cortex rather than the 6-layer of the neocortex. I'd be glad to be corrected here. The amygdala is associated with fear but it's concerned with desire too. Unwanted desires can be just as inconvenient as unwanted fears. A classic source of confusion for me is the ubiquitous phrase 'brain circuits'. Is this a metaphor drawn from electronics, or what? 'Circuit' implies a loop but I assume they're just pathways.
  - nuancebydefault 2y ago
    In origin circ is a loop, but I'm quite sure brain circuits is an allusion on electronic circuits[] , which have pathways but not necessarily loops. [] https://www.britannica.com/technology/electric-circuit https://www.britannica.com/technology/electric-circuit
erie 2y ago
I think I got help from studding the experience of the 'anatomy of fear' in 'The Emperor Jones', a 1920 play by American dramatist Eugene O'Neill. It helped me understand how irrational fear would gradually get into me. I was stranded in desert area known for hyenas. Walking with a heavy backpack for 7 hours in complete darkness to reach the camp, I started 'seeing' things in the dark. I started singing first, then praying, couldn't find stones to throw at dark spot I though were water ponds formed during the heavy rain, I had a break down. Then I saw the lights of the camp that showed me how I deviated from the path to it by a far margin. But something pleasant happened afterwards, I felt I conquered fear and my tolerance for unpleasant things got a big boost.
- cnity 2y ago
  This is an awesome illustration of character development by trial, a thing lost in our modern culture. Thanks for the anecdote!
rbanffy 2y ago
Every time the amygdalae come up, I always point out it affects almost all tings human: https://academic.oup.com/scan/article/13/1/43/4596542 https://academic.oup.com/scan/article/13/1/43/4596542
- HPsquared 2y ago
  Reminds me of this classic (funnily enough under the same domain) which the Independent linked under an article called "Disabling parts of the brain with magnets can weaken faith in God and change attitudes to immigrants, study finds": https://academic.oup.com/scan/article/11/3/387/2375059 https://academic.oup.com/scan/article/11/3/387/2375059
  - immibis 2y ago
    IIRC some study also found that right-wing people have noticeably larger amygdalae.
    - detourdog 2y ago
      Probably from exercising it with anxiety. I could see how a certain amount of anxiety can develop high achievers and too much could develop problems with analysis.
      - numewhodis 2y ago
        > Probably from exercising it with anxiety. Or empathy with an imaginary self & kin.
        detourdog 2y ago
        Doesn’t that express as anxiety when the imaginary self, kin and reality don’t aligh.
        numewhodis 2y ago
oigursh 2y ago
During burn out, I had utterly debilitating and constant anxiety. My brain was just a dial-tone and I could barely move or think. Absolutely useless adaptation/response. Just made things worse. An SNRI completely suppressed it.
- detourdog 2y ago
  I’m emerging from a multi decade relationship where my partner’s anxiety was so extreme it got into my subconscious. Once I dropped concerns for their anxiety over the course of a year I discovered my original personality. I felt this personality was slowly degrading as I tried to relieve my partner’s anxiety. I feel young again.
  - tartoran 2y ago
    Empathy has second order side effects I guess. It's still better to be able to empathize than not. As a highly empathetic person myself, I had no choice but to dial it down as I got older. My first instinct at someones' misfortune is of course still one of empathy, but then I ask myself if there's anything I could do to help, if this person deserves it, though it could be an animal in pain. At this point, no matter what the answer is, the empathy signal is no longer useful, I turn it down all the way, think of something else, etc.
FailMore 2y ago
Dreams and fear have an odd and slightly unintuitive relationship. When we are anxious and awake the amygdala is active and norepinephrine (the “fight or flight” neurotransmitter) is high. During REM sleep, surprisingly the amygdala is inactive and norepinephrine is 85% lower than base waking levels (not high anxious levels). So the brain is in a super relaxed state! I wrote a paper on the implications for dream content and interpretation (I’m a psychotherapist in training). If you’re interested you can find the paper here: https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/k6trz https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/k6trz And it was discussed on HN here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19143590 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19143590
- OhHiMarkos 2y ago
  I remember something similar being mentioned in a podcast by Huberman, that dreams serve to get used to stuff that we fear, in a nutshell. Maybe not directly stuff that we fear, but maybe stuff that makes us uncomfortable? Dreams are a way to teach us stuff that seem essential to us but we found them uncomfortable to face. Interesting research topic by the way. I will take a look at your paper.
  - kridsdale3 2y ago
    Like an endogenous version of Ketamine + Exposure Therapy for PTSD
  - numewhodis 2y ago
    Doesn't apply to all the crazy shit some people dream of, as well as sex dreams or simple recollections of events or when the brain dreams in code or practices language skills or works on the integrity of your novels characters and the situations they get in. Dreams don't serve any function at all, they are simply visualisations of brain cells (entire networks) firing in different regions, some of which activate the active processing of touch, smell, sound, taste, vision, and whatever the hell all those 'gut feelings' are, intuition, premonition, even deja vu and the feeling that comes with insights in retrospect. Your brain winds down, disconnects from the party chat, closes the HUD, turns off most sensors, changes the voltages in brain regions and throughout the entire CNS to do all the shit on the running to do list of the day, week, month, year ( think old injuries or unsolved problems ) that it couldn't do because "it had it's hands full" balancing you on two feet and making sure you move properly through space-time and abide by the law of permanence. Cells which are wired together, fire together and vice versa.
burnte 2y ago
The single most impactful book on my mental health was Daniel Goleman's Emotional Intelligence. The Amygdala chapters were truly life altering for me in helping me overcome a lot of childhood trauma. You learn how that little bit works, and how to reprogram it, and it's incredibly powerful. Not easy, but very powerful.
M95D 2y ago
Anxiety is treated effectively and usually permanently by Schema Therapy [1] in a few months. Who would choose lifetime payments for pills? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schema_therapy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schema_therapy

146 points by birriel 2y ago

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

> The researchers took samples from brains of humans and rhesus macaque monkeys, separated individual cells and sequenced their RNA. This shows which genes are active (being expressed) in a particular cell and allows researchers to sort them into groups based on gene expression. How do you extract RNA from monkeys without activating the RNA that expresses fear?

verisimi 2y ago
> How do you extract RNA from monkeys without activating the RNA that expresses fear? You stroke the back of the monkey's hand and give it banana treats.
rawgabbit 2y ago
RNA is the messenger from the nucleus that tells the ribosome what to make. The DNA sequences that create the RNA are called genes. It was only learned the last few decades that genes can be turned off/on. This is how a single embryo cell can produce all the different cells in our body. Unfortunately they chose the word expressed for this concept. What they are saying is they want to study the amygdala aka the primitive pre-evolutionary part of our brain we share with other creatures. It is said the primitive brain controls breathing, heart rate,fear and anger. It is also said emotions like fear or anger is our brain’s faulty perception of our body’s response to all the adrenaline the amygdala is initiates. They know the amygdala has different types of cells. To learn why certain cells malfunction, and cause depression and other disorders, they are studying DNA sequences.
immibis 2y ago
The RNA doesn't express fear - it expresses that this is a type of cell that goes in a certain place in the neural circuit that expresses fear.

wayoverthecloud 2y ago

I think there are two types of fear mostly, the innate survival animalistic fear and the self-perpetuating fear caused due to misunderstanding. The animalistic fear is present in all and it's not possible to get rid of. When you see a snake or a tiger in front of you, that fear is natural. The response is to jump or run and is so spontaneous, you can't really control it. It's necessary for survival. But I think we are interested in the other fear, the one that is bound to attachment. You see a tiger, you panic, turns out to be a cat, you laugh it off, go away, that fear is not an issue. But if you go about your day thinking, what if that was a tiger? What if I get jumped by tiger this time? Then, you are creating the fear. The fear has no basis, except for it was implanted to you awhile ago. And now you are attaching yourself to it. You are extending it which is the actual problem. Most of us have fears that go back to childhood. If you think back far enough(like the tiger example), question yourself why you are afraid, you know the answers. One more example, I used to be afraid of getting heart-attacks in the past. Even gas passing would make me panic. Have I ever had a heart-attack before? No. How am I so damn sure that I have a heart-attack if I don't even know what it's supposed to feel like? Heart-attack is a bad thing and it shouldn't be happening to me. How is every acid reflux a heart-attack to me now. I have created my own bubble of fear. When though? I sure as hell didn't know what heartattack is when I was born. So it happened when I was able to comprehend what a heart-attack is right? For me, it's due to people around me passing, it's due to reading on Internet about young celebrities dying to strokes, watching movies, etc. It got implanted in me. I don't know a heartattack I just have an idea of it which is not the same thing. Not even remotely related. Fear arises due to misunderstanding. If you trace it far back enough, fear was implanted mostly in the childhood.

lloeki 2y ago
> What if [...]? Sounds more like anxiety than fear. While fear is happening in the present, anxiety is anchored in the future.
- zusammen 2y ago
  [dead]
2y ago

Vecr 2y ago

https://gwern.net/backstop#hui-nengs-flag https://gwern.net/backstop#hui-nengs-flag -- Evolution as Backstop for Reinforcement Learning -- Hui Neng’s Flag -- the mathematics of positive and negative reinforcement https://gwern.net/fiction/batman https://gwern.net/fiction/batman -- The Gift of the Amygdali -- Sci-Fi, anxiety, pain

anodyne33 2y ago

tl:dr - brains are weird man There's a tremendous episode of Radiolab called Fault Line that talks about the effect of a total resection of the Amygdala. It worked out very poorly. I heard it weeks before I was scheduled for a right temporal lobe resection, including Amygdala and it scared the bejeesus out of me. A quick call to my neurosurgeon's coordinator assuaged my fears. The bilateral resection caused Kluver-Busey syndrome in the patient that Fault Line discusses.

spoonfeeder006 2y ago

> The researchers took samples from brains of humans and rhesus macaque monkeys, separated individual cells and sequenced their RNA. This shows which genes are active (being expressed) in a particular cell and allows researchers to sort them into groups based on gene expression. Thats (potentially) a lot of neurons to sift through isn't it? I wonder what their process was, or how many neurons they can sift through. Too bad the paywall (yay for greedy journal institutions profiting off the labor of scientists)

immibis 2y ago
They most likely took a big batch of cells and used some chemical methods to separate them into groups, then blended up each group and analyzed it.
- spoonfeeder006 2y ago
  Are you familiar with a term that refers to that sort of technique?

richrichie 2y ago

[flagged]

082349872349872 2y ago
> not trainable Counterexample: crowd-control horses. [EDIT: we can quibble about terminology; I think it's fair to say that while apprehension may always remain, fear, and certainly panic, can be trained away]
guerrilla 2y ago
This is completely wrong, counter to all contemporary scientific theories on the subject. Exposure therapy works exceptionally well and we know how it works: through desensitization. We can measure this in multiple different ways including blood-serum levels of various substances, fMRI, HRV, etc. The physical evidence for that and how it works is staggering.
fatnoah 2y ago
A recent experience I had came while walking in a forest with friends about an hour from Seattle. While walking, we heard an animal sound of some kind that cause an immediate "hairs on the back of my neck standing" up reaction along with what felt like an adrenaline rush (time slowing, narrowing of focus, etc). All of this happened immediately, and it took a few moments for my conscious mind to catch up. My friend and I looked at each other and walked briskly away from the sound. It wasn't until we encountered another hiker that we found out a mother bear and cubs had been spotted in that area. This was unlike any other fear of animals, jump scares, or even near-miss types of experiences I've had in the past. It was a very primal and immediate reaction to a sound I've never heard before.
tartoran 2y ago
> Fear is fundamentally a hardware attribute and not a software issue (ie not trainable). The fun thing is that this hardware we have can be rewired so it could be trainable in many instances. Maybe in all of them if we only knew how.
- 2y ago

WhitneyLand 2y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S.M._(patient) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S.M._(patient)

trhway 2y ago

To me very illustrative are the scans here - looks like Honnold's visual cortex (lighted up path at/from the back of the head) doesn't have [that good] connection to amygdala and thus no fear response: https://nautil.us/the-strange-brain-of-the-worlds-greatest-solo-climber-236051/ https://nautil.us/the-strange-brain-of-the-worlds-greatest-s...

aYsY4dDQ2NrcNzA 2y ago

Little-known fact: amygdalae come in pairs. You have two of them.

endoblast 2y ago
Yes. My knowledge of neuroscience is derived mainly from articles like this and popular science books where many things are left vague. If someone has a hippocampus or amygdala damaged or removed it's rarely specified whether its the left one, the right one, or both. Presumably it matters! Both the above structures seem mysterious but I understand they both evolved from older cortex which sort of curled up over evolutionary time. 3-layer cortex rather than the 6-layer of the neocortex. I'd be glad to be corrected here. The amygdala is associated with fear but it's concerned with desire too. Unwanted desires can be just as inconvenient as unwanted fears. A classic source of confusion for me is the ubiquitous phrase 'brain circuits'. Is this a metaphor drawn from electronics, or what? 'Circuit' implies a loop but I assume they're just pathways.
- nuancebydefault 2y ago
  In origin circ is a loop, but I'm quite sure brain circuits is an allusion on electronic circuits[] , which have pathways but not necessarily loops. [] https://www.britannica.com/technology/electric-circuit https://www.britannica.com/technology/electric-circuit

erie 2y ago

I think I got help from studding the experience of the 'anatomy of fear' in 'The Emperor Jones', a 1920 play by American dramatist Eugene O'Neill. It helped me understand how irrational fear would gradually get into me. I was stranded in desert area known for hyenas. Walking with a heavy backpack for 7 hours in complete darkness to reach the camp, I started 'seeing' things in the dark. I started singing first, then praying, couldn't find stones to throw at dark spot I though were water ponds formed during the heavy rain, I had a break down. Then I saw the lights of the camp that showed me how I deviated from the path to it by a far margin. But something pleasant happened afterwards, I felt I conquered fear and my tolerance for unpleasant things got a big boost.

cnity 2y ago
This is an awesome illustration of character development by trial, a thing lost in our modern culture. Thanks for the anecdote!

rbanffy 2y ago

Every time the amygdalae come up, I always point out it affects almost all tings human: https://academic.oup.com/scan/article/13/1/43/4596542 https://academic.oup.com/scan/article/13/1/43/4596542

HPsquared 2y ago
Reminds me of this classic (funnily enough under the same domain) which the Independent linked under an article called "Disabling parts of the brain with magnets can weaken faith in God and change attitudes to immigrants, study finds": https://academic.oup.com/scan/article/11/3/387/2375059 https://academic.oup.com/scan/article/11/3/387/2375059
- immibis 2y ago
  IIRC some study also found that right-wing people have noticeably larger amygdalae.
  - detourdog 2y ago
    Probably from exercising it with anxiety. I could see how a certain amount of anxiety can develop high achievers and too much could develop problems with analysis.
    - numewhodis 2y ago
      > Probably from exercising it with anxiety. Or empathy with an imaginary self & kin.
      - detourdog 2y ago
        Doesn’t that express as anxiety when the imaginary self, kin and reality don’t aligh.
        numewhodis 2y ago

oigursh 2y ago

During burn out, I had utterly debilitating and constant anxiety. My brain was just a dial-tone and I could barely move or think. Absolutely useless adaptation/response. Just made things worse. An SNRI completely suppressed it.

detourdog 2y ago
I’m emerging from a multi decade relationship where my partner’s anxiety was so extreme it got into my subconscious. Once I dropped concerns for their anxiety over the course of a year I discovered my original personality. I felt this personality was slowly degrading as I tried to relieve my partner’s anxiety. I feel young again.
- tartoran 2y ago
  Empathy has second order side effects I guess. It's still better to be able to empathize than not. As a highly empathetic person myself, I had no choice but to dial it down as I got older. My first instinct at someones' misfortune is of course still one of empathy, but then I ask myself if there's anything I could do to help, if this person deserves it, though it could be an animal in pain. At this point, no matter what the answer is, the empathy signal is no longer useful, I turn it down all the way, think of something else, etc.

FailMore 2y ago

Dreams and fear have an odd and slightly unintuitive relationship. When we are anxious and awake the amygdala is active and norepinephrine (the “fight or flight” neurotransmitter) is high. During REM sleep, surprisingly the amygdala is inactive and norepinephrine is 85% lower than base waking levels (not high anxious levels). So the brain is in a super relaxed state! I wrote a paper on the implications for dream content and interpretation (I’m a psychotherapist in training). If you’re interested you can find the paper here: https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/k6trz https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/k6trz And it was discussed on HN here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19143590 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19143590

OhHiMarkos 2y ago
I remember something similar being mentioned in a podcast by Huberman, that dreams serve to get used to stuff that we fear, in a nutshell. Maybe not directly stuff that we fear, but maybe stuff that makes us uncomfortable? Dreams are a way to teach us stuff that seem essential to us but we found them uncomfortable to face. Interesting research topic by the way. I will take a look at your paper.
- kridsdale3 2y ago
  Like an endogenous version of Ketamine + Exposure Therapy for PTSD
- numewhodis 2y ago
  Doesn't apply to all the crazy shit some people dream of, as well as sex dreams or simple recollections of events or when the brain dreams in code or practices language skills or works on the integrity of your novels characters and the situations they get in. Dreams don't serve any function at all, they are simply visualisations of brain cells (entire networks) firing in different regions, some of which activate the active processing of touch, smell, sound, taste, vision, and whatever the hell all those 'gut feelings' are, intuition, premonition, even deja vu and the feeling that comes with insights in retrospect. Your brain winds down, disconnects from the party chat, closes the HUD, turns off most sensors, changes the voltages in brain regions and throughout the entire CNS to do all the shit on the running to do list of the day, week, month, year ( think old injuries or unsolved problems ) that it couldn't do because "it had it's hands full" balancing you on two feet and making sure you move properly through space-time and abide by the law of permanence. Cells which are wired together, fire together and vice versa.

burnte 2y ago

The single most impactful book on my mental health was Daniel Goleman's Emotional Intelligence. The Amygdala chapters were truly life altering for me in helping me overcome a lot of childhood trauma. You learn how that little bit works, and how to reprogram it, and it's incredibly powerful. Not easy, but very powerful.

M95D 2y ago

Anxiety is treated effectively and usually permanently by Schema Therapy [1] in a few months. Who would choose lifetime payments for pills? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schema_therapy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schema_therapy