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People’s words and actions can actually shape your brain — a neuroscientist explains how
Words And Echo Chambers
A comforting word can calm us, and a hateful word can make our brain rush towards a fight or flight mechanism.
People create ‘echo chambers’ where they only see and hear what they want to because it reduces the cognitive and metabolic load on the brain while having a side-effect: They learn nothing new.
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Key Ideas
Survival before Behaviour
Our survival instinct came before any reasoning or behavioral aspects.
The human body is firstly a tool of survival, with rationalizing and the 'mind' perspectives arriving much later.
Neuroscience is a new science
We normally assume that certain sections of the brain carry out a specific set of tasks. This is fair to believe but is not entirely accurate.
The science to scan brain activity is currently in its infancy. Brain scans track blood flow; that does not mean specific functions are limited to that region.
Humans and the environment
Humans believe they are separate from the environment, which is a wrong presumption.
Environmental and climate change and its imminent effects on humans are proof that we are not separate or insulated from our surroundings.
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Key Ideas
Sleep And The Process Of Keeping Our Brains Healthy
- Quality sleep is the one universal factor that can keep our brain healthy.
- Sleep is so important that mammals die in about a week if they are completely deprived of sleep.
Neurophysiology 101
- Neurons are the nervous system cells transmitting electromagnetic signals using action potentials and neurotransmitters.
- Glia is the non-neuronal system cell keeping the neurons healthy and working.
- Cerebrospinal Fluid or CSF is the fluid that our brain lives in.
- Arteries are the blood vessels that carry blood to an organ.
- Veins are the blood vessels carrying blood from the organ.
The Brain Is Like A City
Complex cycles and systems operate in the brain. The Glymphatic (or Glial Lymphatic) system, discovered recently, takes care of the brain waste much like a complex sewer system.
The system is only active when one is asleep, and it clears our brain of all neurotoxic substances that have collected during the day.
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Key Ideas
Human Emotions
An emotion is an objective state that exhibits itself in many ways like behavior, facial expression, heart rate, blood pressure, and stress-hormone levels. Broadly speaking, we kn...
New Kinds of Emotions
- Mix N match Emotions: FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) is a newly coined mix of envy, fear, and sadness.
- Social Emotions: Feelings like guilt, shame and embarrassment are social emotions, and can even be found in dogs.
- Fear: Emotions like fear and anxiety are hard to pinpoint in the brain's geographical area, due to the presence of multiple fear circuits.
If our emotions are constructed by our minds, it means they can also be de-constructed or even reconstructed.
Labelling Emotions
The brain loves to identify, tag, or label all the feelings and emotions that are being experienced.
New studies show that changing the name of the emotion can change the feeling that is produced by hearing that emotion, and the brain may be able to create or make up emotions that don't have a label yet.