" inappropriate uses of my undergraduate major
"So, what is memory, really? Most of us think about it in relation to names, faces, phone numbers, but it is much more than that. It is a basic property of biological systems. Memory is the capacity to carry forward in time some element of an experience. Even muscles have memory, as you can see by the changes in them that result from exercise. Most importantly, however, memory is what the brain does, how it composes us and allows our past to help determine our future." (27)
"I began considering memory and how the brain creates 'associations' when two patterns of neural activity occur simultaneously and repetitively. For example, if the neural activity caused by the visual image of a fire truck and that caused by the sound of a siren co-occur repetitively, these once separate neural chains (visual and sound related-neural networks) will create new synaptic connections and become a single, interconnected network. Once this new set of connections between visual and auditory networks is created, merely stimulating one part of the network (for example hearing the siren) can actually active the visual part of the chain and the person will almost automatically visualize a fire truck." (27)
[ Your brain essentially runs through a mini-check whenever you do an activity. So like, driving becomes automatic because your brain parses different things (road, cars, traffic laws) against previous experience and knowledge and slides into automatic processing. If you had to focus on every aspect all the time, you'd go nuts. Your brain makes 'templates' and then runs through them when experiences come up that match them. ] (28)
"What this also means is that early experiences will necessarily have a far greater impact than later ones. The brain tries to make sense of the world by looking for patterns. When it links coherent, consistently connected patterns together again, it tags them as "normal" or "expected" and stops paying conscious attention." (29) [ The first time you sat as a baby you were like WOAH THIS IS NOVEL /PAYS ATTENTION TO EVERY DETAIL and now you just pay attention to what is out of the ordinary. The same can be said of like driving and etc. ]
[ Patterned stress builds resistance. And not all stress is bad stress. Some of it is just 'stretching the mental muscles' stress. Patterned and predictable stress that is moderate makes the stress system more capable. Sudden, unpredictable stress actually whacks the system out more. The brain also scrambles to try and make patterns out of this. ] (40-42)
There is conditioning! So like if someone rings a bell and then pops a balloon you can become attuned to that bell ringing. And what is the conditioned response isn't the jumping at the balloon pop so much as tensing. So the sudden and strong interruption in your pattern creates that association and you try to prepare for it. So maybe next time you don't jump as much! But your stress system is on high alert and the ringing of the bell cues your body to tense in preparation. You could also become acclimated to this kind of tension but it wears on your mind and body, etc etc.
[ Every day life has like 400 sense input reports that come pouring in. Your brain essentially begins ignoring them as you get older. This is tolerance called habitation. However familiar things (using silverware or brushing your teeth, mundane actions you might otherwise forget) can stick out if out of place ] (46)
"Fear quite literally makes us dumber." (49) [ When relaxed the brain is able to function more in abstractions and do things like dream, plan, be cerebral, etc. When stressed the brain works in the lower functions -- because response time is faster in these more primal areas of the brain. ]
"For infants and young children, incapable of or ineffective at fighting or fleeing, a dissociative response to extreme stressors is common ... During dissociation, the brain prepares the body for injury. Blood is shunted away from the limbs and the heart rate slows to reduce blood loss from wounds. A flood of endogenous opioids [ -- ] is released, killing pain, producing calm and a sense of psychological distance from what is happening." (49-50)
"Ordinary states like daydreaming and transitions between sleep and wakefulness are mild forms of dissociation. In extreme dissociative experiences, however, the person becomes completely focused inward and disconnected from reality. Brain regions that dominate thinking shift from planning action to concerning themselves with brute survival. There is a sense that time has slowed and what's happening isn't "real." Breathing slows. Pain and even fear shut down." (50)
[ Most traumatic experiences mix the above two -- the dissociation and the hyper-vigilance from the 'tensing'. ] (51)
[ Learned helplessness. A two rat experiment -- one rat receives a shock when pressing the food lever (so Rat A receives food and a shock.). The other rat receives a shock when Rat A pushes the lever (so for Rat B the shock seems to come at random). Rat A has control of the shock and acclimates to the stress. Rat B has no control of the shock and draws in and doesn't explore. Even when removed from the stressful situation, Rat B will probably continue to not explore.
Control:Habitation
Lack of Control:Sensitization. ] (53)
"To restore its equilibrium, the brain tries to quiet our sensitized trauma-related memories by pushing us to have repetitive, small "doses" of recall. It seeks to make a sensitized system develop tolerance. And, in many cases, this works. In the immediate aftermath of a distressing or traumatic event we have intrusive thoughts: we keep thinking about what happened we dream about it, we find ourselves thinking about it when we don't want to, we often tell and retell the event to trust friends or loved ones. Children will reenact the events in play, drawings and their daily interactions. The more intense and overwhelming the experience, however, the harder it comes to "desensitize" all of the trauma-related memories." (54)
"[ Because of the order the brain evolved and therefore developed the age in which a trauma occurs creates different sets of symptoms ]. For example, a toddler with no language to describe the painful and repetitive sexual abuse he experiences may develop a complete aversion to being touched, wide-ranging problems with intimacy and relationships and pervasive anxiety. But a ten-year old who is subjected to virtually identical abuse is more likely to develop specific, event-related fears and to work deliberately to avoid particular cues associated with the place, person and manner of abuse. Her anxiety will wax and wane wit exposure to reminders of the molestation. Further, an older child will probably have associated feelings of shame and guilt -- complex emotions mediated by the cortex. That region is far less developed in a toddler, therefore related symptoms are less likely if abuse begins and ends earlier in life.
At any age, however, when people are faced with a frightening situation their brains begin to shut down their highest cortical regions first. We lose the capacity to plan, or to feel hunger, because neither are any use to our immediate survival. Often we lose the ability to "think" or even speak during an acute threat. We just react. And with prolonged fear there can be chronic or near permanent changes in the brain. The brain alterations that result from lingering terror, especially early in life, may cause an enduring shift to a more impulsive, more aggressive, less thoughtful and less compassionate way of responding to the world." (65-66)
"The major predators of human beings are other human beings. Our stress-response systems, therefore, are closely interconnected with the systems that read and respond to human social cues. As a result we are very sensitive to the expressions, gestures and the moods of others. ... We have special cells in our brains that fire, not when we move or express emotions but when we see others do so. Human social life is built on this ability to "reflect" each other and respond to those reflections, with both positive and negative results." (67)
[ Parenting is a feedback loop. When you are a child you can form connections with your parents that is like 'oh mom attends to me' or 'oh mom feeds me' or 'oh dad comes when i am distressed' etc and this feedback in turn cements associations of positivity etc. People who had good parents are more likely to feel attuned and receive pleasure from dealing with babies because of the feedback. ]
"Attachment, then, is a memory template for human-to-human bonds. This template serves as your primary "world view" on human relationships. It is profoundly influenced by whether you experience kind, attuned parenting or whether you receive inconsistent, frequently disrupted, abusive or neglectful "care"." (85)
[ The brain develops use-dependently. So areas that are more used get larger, etc. In the same way that a exercising your arms will make your arm muscles bigger but if you don't exercise your legs you won't accrue muscle mass there. There is a 'sensitive period' in the brain development growing. The reason why children who don't learn language earlier in life have a much harder time. If you kept a kitten's eye closed for a period of time in its early life the kitten may never see out of that eye. The eye may be perfectly healthy, but the neural connections were never made to connect vision to the brain. ] (85-86)
"Children who don't get consistent, physical affection or the chance to build loving bonds simply don't receive the patterned, repetitive stimulation necessary to properly build the systems in the brain that connect reward, pleasure and human-to-human interactions." (86)
"Babies are born with the core elements of the stress response already intact and centered in the lower, most primitive parts of their developing brains. When the infant's brain gets signals from inside the body -- or from her external senses -- that something is not right, these register as distress. This distress can be 'hunger' if she needs calories, 'thirst' if she is dehydrated, or 'anxiety' if she perceives external threat. When this distress is relieved, the infant feels pleasure. This is because our stress-response neurobiology is interconnected with the 'pleasure/reward' areas in the brain, and with other areas that represent pain, discomfort and anxiety." (89)
"Babies immediately find nursing, being held, touched and rocked soothing and pleasurable. If they are parented lovingly, and someone consistently comes when they are stressed by hunger or fear, the joy and relief of being fed and soothed becomes associated with human contact. Thus, in normal childhood, as described above, nurturing human interactions become intimately and powerfully connected with pleasure." (89)
[ There is a lot of feedback between close relations and children. Part of it is that reflectiveness (a child scrapes a knee, is ok but if sees dad's concern starts wailing, etc). And the same way that physical contact with a loved one can soothe fears comes out of this feedback as well. ] "There is aso a class of nerve cells in the brain known as 'mirror' neurons, which respond in synchrony with the behaviour of others." [ Essentially when baby smiles the mirror neurons in mom light up, etc. The mom and baby continue to feed off of each other for positive things and reinforce each other's happiness and connectedness. ] (90)
"However, if a baby's smiles are ignored, if she's left repeatedly to cry alone, if she's not fed or fed roughly without tenderness or without being held, the positive associations between human contact and safety, predictability and pleasure may not develop. ... Not enough repetition occurs to cinch the connection; people are not interchangeable. The price of love is the agony of loss, from infancy onward. The attachment between a baby and his first primary caregivers is not trivial: the love a baby feels for his caregivers is every bit as profound as the deepest romantic connection. Indeed, it is the template memory of this primary attachment that will allow the baby to have healthy intimate relationships as an adult." (91)
"[She] discovered long before we did, that many young victims of abuse and neglect need physical stimulation, like being rocked and gently held, comfort seemingly appropriate for far younger children. ... These children had never received the repeated, patterned physical nurturing needed to develop a well-regulated and responsive stress system." (95)
"Like people who learn a foreign language late in life, Virginia and Laura will never speak the language of love without an accent." (98)
" [...] neglect in early childhood can disrupt the development of the areas in the brain that control empathy and the ability to engage in healthy relationships -- a loss that often leaves people awkward, lonely and socially inept. Emotional deprivation in the first years of life, however, can also predispose people to malice or misanthropy." (99)
"He would probably never admit it or even understand it, but inside he was always on guard, always vigilant and always studying the people around him. Trying to work out who could help him and who could hurt him. What is this person's weak point, what does he want, what does he fear?" (102)
"It wasn't that he didn't know that he should try to appear remorseful. He simply wasn't capable of taking into account the feelings of others in any way other than to take advantage of them. He could not not feel compassion for others, so he couldn't fake it very well, either. ... While his verbal IQ was in the low to normal range, his performance score, which measures things like the ability to properly sequence a series of pictures and manipulate objects in space was quite high. He scored especially well in his ability to read social situations and understand other people's intentions. This split between verbal and performance scores is often seen in abused or traumatized children ..." (104)
[ 'What would you have done differently' in terms of a brutal murder? --> "I don't know. Maybe throw away those boots?" / "Throw away the boots?" / "Yeah. It was the boot prints and the blood on the boots that got me." ]
"Spastic, unpredictable relief from fear, loneliness, discomfort and hunger keeps a baby's stress system on high alert. Receiving no consistent, loving response to his fears and needs, [he] never developed the normal association between human contact and relief from stress. What he learned instead was that the only person he could rely on was himself." (113)
[ He could see that others enjoyed being hugged and touched, but because he didn't have those associations it didn't fulfill anything for him. He could enjoy food or material pleasure or sex but he couldn't really appreciate anything that involved empathy or pleasing others. And rejection didn't bother him very much because he was always being rejected. ] (113-114)
"In order to function socially people need to develop what is known as a 'theory of mind'. They need to know, in other words, that other people are distinct from them, have different knowledge about the world and have different desires and interests. ... [Sociopaths] in essence have a 'theory of mind', but it is twisted. Not being able to fully experience love, they see it as something you promise in order to get sex, for example, not as a genuine feeling. Because they use other people's feelings as a way to manipulate them, sociopaths assume that's what everyone else does too. Not feeling pleasure from relationships, they don't believe others genuinely feel it, either. ... As a result they dismiss appeals for attention or mercy as manipulative and attempts to take power, not as genuine emotional pleas. They are emotionally frozen, in an ice that distorts not only their own feelings, but also how they see the feelings of others and then respond to them." (116-117).
[ Sociopaths have disregulated stress response systems -- that mostly don't respond to anything other than extreme stimulation. ] "It may also mean that far higher levels of painful or pleasurable stimulation are necessary in order for them to feel anything at all." (117)
"In particular, I suspected from the curious slanting gait that whatever had gone wrong had started early in infancy, because coordinated walking relies on a well-regulated midbrain and brainstem, regions crucial in coordinating the stress response." (135)
"It may seem odd, but rhythm is extraordinarily important. ... Regulating this rhythm isn't a static, consistent task, either: the heart and the brain are constantly signaling each other in order to adjust to life's changes. ... If a baby's primary metronome -- his brainsteam -- doesn't function well, not only will his hormonal and emotional reactions to stress be difficult to modulate but his hunger and sleep cycle will be be unpredictable as well." (143)
"Interestingly, the rate at which people rock their babies is about eighty beats per minute, the same as a normal resting adult heart rate." (144)
[ Situation control even if it increases frequency of abuse can help a child function in day to day life but has other long term effects. ] (187)