Does Fear Define YOUR Comfort Zone?
In studies of the brain’s neurology, fMRIs show that when faced with uncertainty our brains decrease the blood flow to the reward center while increasing blood flow to our emotional circuitry — the limbic brain, priming us for fight-or-flight response. Conversely, in studies of those with lesions in their orbito prefrontal cortex who couldn’t feel […]
Is Uncertainty Limiting You? You’re in the Ellsberg Paradox!
In studies done in 2005 is was shown that when faced with uncertainty we become limited and take less risks, often creating a perception of “worst case scenario”. In the Ellsberg Paradox groups were presented with this task. They were asked to pick cards from decks. Indviduals were told that the certainty deck contained 1/2 […]
Words have the Power to Heal!
According to Dr. Daniel J. Siegel, author of Mindsight, using words to describe and label your internal world can actually be useful for right-left brain integration and balance. The right hemisphere tends to be associated to the emotion-generting areas and because of this it makes sense that “linking the right and left modes through the […]
Programming and Rewiring your Brain through Technology
There are many different ways to stimulate brain activity through electrical, mechanical, and frequency manipulation. Yet, there is a simple and practical way to use the technology at arm’s reach to help you calm down your fight-or-flight center and engage your higher order thought processes. Meditation addresses this very cycle. What if you were to […]
An Adolescent Approach to the World
The prefrontal cortex is involved with most of our higher order thought functions like patience, goal setting, motivation, empathy, problem solving and much more. The amygdala is involved in more reactive and quicker responses like fight-or-flight, emotional arousal, and survival needs. Studies done at Harvard on teens versus adults asked individuals to label emotional facial […]
Liberals vs. Conservatives: Dueling Brains
The more we exercise an area of our brain, the more neural pathways we grow which increases the thickness of the gray matter. It’s almost like building muscles; the more you use a muscle the more it becomes the one that you lean on often. In recent studies done at the University College of London, […]
False Demons
Our amygdala is masterful at creating imagery that imbued with vivid emotional charge. In fact, it’s expert in the ones relating to fear and survival. Our hippocampus likes to store these charged stories and reference them easily when a current situation only vaguely resembles a previous threatening one. We trigger often at the memory of […]
Unity Consciousness Wired into Our Brains
According to the personal account of Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor’s massive stroke recovery in My Stroke of Insight, she notes that during the eight years of living mostly with right-brain functioning that she was constantly in a state of bliss. “My entire self-concept shifted as I no longer perceied myself as a single, a solid, […]
Multi-tasking Amnesia
Multi-tasking is productive but impairs memory retrieval greatly. Encoding of memories into the hippocampus happens best when the prefrontal cortex can focus on one thing at a time. How much of your life is fading away into the background because you are texting while doing something else? How much more cognitive presence can you have […]
Our Truths at War
Each of us vacillates between truths battling for attention and dominion: closeness and solitude, autonomy and independence, caregiving and mastery, certainty and uncertainty, and the list goes on. According to Dr. Daniel Siegel “Mindsight (mindfulness or meditation) permits us to embrace these states as healthy dimensions of a layered life instead of parts of ourselves […]
