Mapping a habit

A hub of the DMN called the posterior cingulate cortex (PCC) connects a bunch of other brain regions.

The PCC is interesting because it gets activated when people are shown pictures that are reminders of or triggers for their addictions.

For example, the PCC lights up with cocaine cue...

Every time you pay attention to your actions, you become more aware of what you actually get from them. 

If you notice that potato chips make you feel crappy when you eat too many, you get less excited about eating the whole bag next time.

Not because you have to force yourself to no...

Anxiety is born when our PFCs don’t have enough information to accurately predict the future

Without accurate information, our brains found it easy to spin stories of fear and dread, based on the latest reports that we had heard or read.

And because of the way our brains are wired, t...

There are different types of people depending on how they react when facing danger.

These people can be categorized into three different groups based on their reactions. These groups are fight, flight, and freeze.

We all get anxious, it’s a part of life, yet how we deal with it is critical.

If we don’t know how anxiety shows up or why, we might get caught up in temporary distractions or short-term fixes that actually feed it, creating bad habits in the process (have you ever eaten ice cream or co...

Sometime in the last million years, humans evolved a new layer on top of our more primitive survival brain; neuroscientists call this the prefrontal cortex (PFC). 

From an anatomical perspective, this “newer” brain region is located just behind our eyes and forehead.

Involved in creat...

The theory sounds—and is—simple. Yet this can easily fall into the thinking trap that was mentioned in the last chapter: you can know that something is bad for you, but thinking doesn’t change behaviors on its own. It isn’t strong enough.

Watch your thoughts. They become words. ...

In neuroscience, the default mode network (DMN), or anatomically the medial fronto-parietal network (M-FPN), is a large-scale brain network primarily composed of the medial prefrontal cortex and the posterior cingulate cortex and angular gyrus.

The DMN was discovered by Marcus Raichle and ...

The anxiety and its close cousin, panic, are both born from fear. It's well known that fear’s main evolutionary function is helping us survive.

Fear is the oldest survival mechanism we’ve got. Fear teaches us to avoid dangerous situations in the future through a brain process called negati...