Highlights
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There is no wrong way to do a meditation—the right way is what feels right to you.
un tema controversial!
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Last, if I know one thing for sure, it’s that you can do small things inside your mind that will lead to big changes in your brain and your experience of living. I’ve seen this happen again and again with people I’ve known as a psychologist or as a meditation teacher, and I’ve seen it in my own thoughts and feelings as well. You really can nudge your whole being in a better direction every day.
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When your mind changes, your brain changes, too. In the saying from the work of the psychologist Donald Hebb: when neurons fire together, they wire together—mental activity actually creates new neural structures (Hebb 1949; LeDoux 2003). As a result, even fleeting thoughts and feelings can leave lasting marks on your brain, much like a spring shower can leave little trails on a hillside.
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As you become a happier person, the left frontal region of your brain becomes more active (Davidson 2004).
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What flows through your mind sculpts your brain. Thus, you can use your mind to change your brain for the better—which will benefit your whole being, and every other person whose life you touch.
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Your brain is three pounds of tofu-like tissue containing 1.1 trillion cells, including 100 billion neurons. On average, each neuron receives about five thousand connections, called synapses, from other neurons (Linden 2007).
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Each neural signal is a bit of information; your nervous system moves information around like your heart moves blood around.
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even though it’s only 2 percent of the body’s weight, it uses 20– 25 percent of its oxygen and glucose (Lammert 2008).
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it uses about the same amount of energy whether you’re deep asleep or thinking hard (Raichle and Gusnard 2002).
interesante y contraintuitivo!
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The number of possible combinations of 100 billion neurons firing or not is approximately 10 to the millionth power, or 1 followed by a million zeros, in principle; this is the number of possible states of your brain. To put this quantity in perspective, the number of atoms in the universe is estimated to be “only” about 10 to the eightieth power.
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In the largest sense, your mind is made by your brain, body, natural world, and human culture—as well as by the mind itself (Thompson and Varela 2001). We’re simplifying things when we refer to the brain as the basis of the mind.
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The mind and brain interact with each other so profoundly that they’re best understood as a single, co-dependent, mind/brain system.
niveles de astraccion diferentes, quizas similar a lo q sucede con las hormigas y la colonia
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Like science, Buddhism encourages people to take nothing on faith alone and does not require a belief in God. It also has a detailed model of the mind that translates well to psychology and neurology.
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Mental activity, whether conscious or unconscious, maps to neural activity, much like a picture of a sunset on your computer screen maps to a pattern of magnetic charges on your hard drive.
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Of course, no one yet knows exactly how the brain makes the mind, or how—as Dan Siegel puts it—the mind uses the brain to make the mind. It’s sometimes said that the greatest remaining scientific questions are: What caused the Big Bang? What is the grand unified theory that integrates quantum mechanics and general relativity? And what is the relationship between the mind and the brain, especially regarding conscious experience? The last question is up there with the other two because it is as difficult to answer, and as important.
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meanwhile, a reasonable working hypothesis is that the mind is what the brain does.
Me parece una posición súper simplista. El cerebro hace muchas cosas que tienen que ver solamente con el cuerpo, a menos que asumamos la posición de la Biología del Conocimiento, en donde todo sistema autopoiético es un sistema cognitivo. Ahora bien, no sé si esto calza con la noción de “mente” que el autor propone.
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when experienced Tibetan practitioners go deep into meditation, they produce uncommonly powerful and pervasive gamma brainwaves of electrical activity, in which unusually large regions of neural real estate pulse in synchrony 30– 80 times a second (Lutz et al. 2004), integrating and unifying large territories of the mind. So, with a deep bow to the transcendental, we will stay within the frame of Western science and see what modern neuropsychology, informed by contemplative practice, offers in the way of effective methods for experiencing greater happiness, love, and wisdom.
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Only we humans worry about the future, regret the past, and blame ourselves for the present. We get frustrated when we can’t have what we want, and disappointed when what we like ends. We suffer that we suffer. We get upset about being in pain, angry about dying, sad about waking up sad yet another day. This kind of suffering—which encompasses most of our unhappiness and dissatisfaction—is constructed by the brain. It is made up. Which is ironic, poignant—and supremely hopeful.
aqui etra el psicoanalisis para analizar el efecto del lenguaje, la autoconsciencia y l dialectica del ser sobre el deseo y el sufrimiento
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Virtue simply involves regulating your actions, words, and thoughts to create benefits rather than harms for yourself and others.
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Mindfulness involves the skillful use of attention to both your inner and outer worlds. Since your brain learns mainly from what you attend to, mindfulness is the doorway to taking in good experiences and making them a part of yourself
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Wisdom is applied common sense, which you acquire in two steps. First, you come to understand what hurts and what helps—in other words, the causes of suffering and the path to its end (the focus of chapters 2 and 3). Then, based on this understanding, you let go of those things that hurt and strengthen those that help (chapters 6 and 7). As a result, over time you’ll feel more connected with everything, more serene about how all things change and end, and more able to meet pleasure and pain without grasping after the one and struggling with the other.
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Your brain regulates itself—and other bodily systems—through a combination of excitatory and inhibitory activity: green lights and red lights. It learns through forming new circuits and strengthening or weakening existing ones.
proceso secundario
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It’s a remarkable fact that the people who have gone the very deepest into the mind—the sages and saints of every religious tradition—all say essentially the same thing: your fundamental nature is pure, conscious, peaceful, radiant, loving, and wise, and it is joined in mysterious ways with the ultimate underpinnings of reality, by whatever name we give That.
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It’s a general moral principle that the more power you have over someone, the greater your duty is to use that power benevolently. Well, who is the one person in the world you have the greatest power over? It’s your future self. You hold that life in your hands, and what it will be depends on how you care for it.
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you can tend to the causes of a better future. Most of the ways you’ll do this are small and humble. To use examples from later in this book, you could take a very full inhalation in a tense meeting to force a long exhalation, thus activating the calming parasympathetic nervous system (PNS).
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You were once a young child, just as worthy of care as any other. Can you see yourself as a child? Wouldn’t you wish the best for that little person?
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Progressing along your path of awakening will make you more effective in your work and relationships. Think about the many ways that others will benefit from you being more good-humored, warm-hearted, and savvy.
argumento q se observa en la “correcta actitud” del practicante budista: por la liberacion de todos los seres… Probablemente el moksha mundial se dara como un potencial de accion: todo o nada!
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neurons that fire together wire together. And what happens in your brain changes your mind, since the brain and mind are a single, integrated system.
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Therefore, you can use your mind to change your brain to benefit your mind—and everyone else whose life you touch.
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To make any problem better, you need to understand its causes. That’s why all the great physicians, psychologists, and spiritual teachers have been master diagnosticians. For example, in his Four Noble Truths, the Buddha identified an ailment (suffering), diagnosed its cause (craving: a compelling sense of need for something), specified its cure (freedom from craving), and prescribed a treatment (the Eightfold Path).
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Life began around 3.5 billion years ago. Multicelled creatures first appeared about 650 million years ago. (When you get a cold, remember that microbes had nearly a three-billion-year head-start!) By the time the earliest jellyfish arose about 600 million years ago, animals had grown complex enough that their sensory and motor systems needed to communicate with each other; thus the beginnings of neural tissue. As animals evolved, so did their nervous systems, which slowly developed a central headquarters in the form of a brain.
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Nonetheless, the modern cortex has great influence over the rest of the brain, and it’s been shaped by evolutionary pressures to develop ever-improving abilities to parent, bond, communicate, cooperate, and love (Dunbar and Shultz 2007).
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Over hundreds of millions of years of evolution, our ancestors developed three fundamental strategies for survival: Creating separations—in order to form boundaries between themselves and the world, and between one mental state and another Maintaining stability—in order to keep physical and mental systems in a healthy balance Approaching opportunities and avoiding threats—in order to gain things that promote offspring, and escape or resist things that don’t These strategies have been extraordinarily effective for survival. But Mother Nature doesn’t care how they feel. To motivate animals, including ourselves, to follow these strategies and pass on their genes, neural networks evolved to create pain and distress under certain conditions: when separations break down, stability is shaken, opportunities disappoint, and threats loom. Unfortunately, these conditions happen all the time, because: Everything is connected. Everything keeps changing. Opportunities routinely remain unfulfilled or lose their luster, and many threats are inescapable (e.g., aging and death) Let’s see how all this makes you suffer.
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To live, an organism must metabolize: it must exchange matter and energy with its environment. Consequently, over the course of a year, many of the atoms in your body are replaced by new ones. The energy you use to get a drink of water comes from sunshine working its way up to you through the food chain—in a real sense, light lifts the cup to your lips. The apparent wall between your body and the world is more like a picket fence.
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Language and culture enter and pattern your mind from the moment of birth (Han and Northoff 2008). Empathy and love naturally attune you to other people, so your mind moves into resonance with theirs (Siegel 2007). These flows of mental activity go both ways as you influence others.
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Truly, you’re here because a lot of stars blew up. Your body is made of stardust.
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glial cells perform metabolic support functions such as wrapping axons in myelin and recycling neurotransmitters.
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The regulators of the systems of your life, from the molecular bottom all the way up to the interpersonal top, must keep trying to impose static order on inherently unstable processes.
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regions in the PFC that support consciousness are updated five to eight times a second (Cunningham and Zelazo 2007).
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Everything changes. That’s the universal nature of outer reality and inner experience. Therefore, there’s no end to disturbed equilibria as long as you live. But to help you survive, your brain keeps trying to stop the river, struggling to hold dynamic systems in place, to find fixed patterns in this variable world, and to construct permanent plans for changing conditions.
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your brain is forever chasing after the moment that has just passed, trying to understand and control it.
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In order to pass on their genes, our animal ancestors had to choose correctly many times a day whether to approach something or avoid it. Today, humans approach and avoid mental states as well as physical objects; for example, we pursue self-worth and push away shame. Nonetheless, for all its sophistication, human approaching and avoiding draws on much the same neural circuitry used by a monkey to look for bananas or a lizard to hide under a rock.
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That aspect of experience—whether it is pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral—is called, in Buddhism, its feeling tone (or, in Western psychology, its hedonic tone). The feeling tone is produced mainly by your amygdala (LeDoux 1995) and then broadcast widely. It’s a simple but effective way to tell your brain as a whole what to do each moment: approach pleasant carrots, avoid unpleasant sticks, and move on from anything else.
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Two major neural systems keep you chasing carrots. The first system is based on the neurotransmitter dopamine. Dopamine-releasing neurons become more active when you encounter things that are linked to rewards in the past—for
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a part of your brain called the cingulate cortex (about the size of your finger, on the interior edge of each hemisphere) tracks whether the rewards you expected—fun with your friend, good food—actually arrive (Eisenberger and Lieberman 2004). If they do, dopamine levels stay steady. But if you’re disappointed—maybe your friend is in a bad mood—the cingulate sends out a signal that lowers dopamine levels.
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The second system, based on several other neuromodulators, is the biochemical source of the pleasant feeling tones that come from the actual—and anticipated—carrots in life. When these “pleasure chemicals”—natural opioids (including endorphins), oxytocin, and norepinephrine—surge into your synapses, they strengthen the neural circuits that are active, making them more likely to fire together in the future.
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When you’re awake and not doing anything in particular, the baseline resting state of your brain activates a “default network,” and one of its functions seems to be tracking your environment and body for possible threats (Raichle et al. 2001). This basic awareness is often accompanied by a background feeling of anxiety that keeps you vigilant.
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The brain typically detects negative information faster than positive information. Take facial expressions, a primary signal of threat or opportunity for a social animal like us: fearful faces are perceived much more rapidly than happy or neutral ones, probably fast-tracked by the amygdala (Yang, Zald, and Blake 2007). In fact, even when researchers make fearful faces invisible to conscious awareness, the amygdala still lights up (Jiang and He 2006). The brain is drawn to bad news.
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Negative events generally have more impact than positive ones. For example, it’s easy to acquire feelings of learned helplessness from a few failures, but hard to undo those feelings, even with many successes (Seligman 2006).
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Even if you’ve unlearned a negative experience, it still leaves an indelible trace in your brain (Quirk, Repa, and LeDoux 1995). That residue lies waiting, ready to reactivate if you ever encounter a fear-provoking event like the previous one.
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Negative experiences create vicious cycles by making you pessimistic, overreactive, and inclined to go negative yourself.
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anxiety also makes it harder to bring attention inward for self-awareness or contemplative practice, since the brain keeps scanning to make sure there is no problem.
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In Buddhism, it’s said that suffering is the result of craving expressed through the Three Poisons: greed, hatred, and delusion.
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Only a small fraction of the inputs to your occipital lobe comes directly from the external world; the rest comes from internal memory stores and perceptual-processing modules (Raichle 2006). Your brain simulates the world—each of us lives in a virtual reality that’s close enough to the real thing that we don’t bump into the furniture.
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Mini-movies keep us stuck by their simplistic view of the past and by their defining out of existence real possibilities for the future, such as new ways to reach out to others or dream big dreams. Their beliefs are the bars of an invisible cage, trapping you in a life that’s smaller than the one you could actually have. It’s like being a zoo animal that’s released into a large park—yet still crouches within the confines of its old pen.
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First darts are unpleasant to be sure. But then we add our reactions to them. These reactions are “second darts”—the ones we throw ourselves. Most of our suffering comes from second darts.
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In relationships, second darts create vicious cycles: your second-dart reactions trigger reactions from the other person, which set off more second darts from you, and so on.
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Suffering cascades through your body via the sympathetic nervous system (SNS) and the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis (HPAA) of the endocrine (hormonal) system.
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Social and emotional conditions can pack a wallop like physical ones since psychological pain draws on many of the same neural networks as physical pain (Eisenberger and Lieberman 2004); this is why getting rejected can feel as bad as a root canal.
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The hypothalamus—the brain’s primary regulator of the endocrine system—prompts the pituitary gland to signal the adrenal glands to release the “stress hormones”epinephrine (adrenaline) and cortisol.
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SNS/HPAA arousal stimulates the amygdala, which is hardwired to focus on negative information and react intensely to it. Consequently, feeling stressed sets you up for fear and anger.
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most of us experience ongoing SNS/HPAA arousal. Even if your pot isn’t boiling over, just simmering along with second-dart activation is quite unhealthy. It continually shunts resources away from long-term projects—such as building a strong immune system or preserving a good mood—in favor of short-term crises. And this has lasting consequences.
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In our evolutionary past, when most people died by forty or so, the short-term benefits of SNS/HPAA activation outweighed its long-term costs. But for people today who are interested in living well during their forties and beyond, the accumulating damage of an overheated life is a real concern.
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frequent SNS/HPAA activation wears down the hippocampus, which is vital for forming explicit memories—clear records of what actually happened.
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In less extreme situations, the one-two punch of a revved-up amygdala and a weakened hippocampus can lead to feeling a little upset a lot of the time without exactly knowing why.
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Parasympathetic activation is the normal resting state of your body, brain, and mind. If your SNS were surgically disconnected, you’d stay alive (though you wouldn’t be very useful in an emergency). If your PNS were disconnected, however, you’d stop breathing and soon die.
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Happiness, love, and wisdom aren’t furthered by shutting down the SNS, but rather by keeping the autonomic nervous system as a whole in an optimal state of balance:
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As the saying goes, pain is inevitable but suffering is optional. If you can simply stay present with whatever is arising in awareness—whether it’s a first dart or a second one—without reacting further, then you will break the chain of suffering right there. Over time, through training and shaping your mind and brain, you can even change what arises, increasing what’s positive and decreasing what’s negative.
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Much as your body is built from the foods you eat, your mind is built from the experiences you have.
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pain today breeds more pain tomorrow. For instance, even a single episode of major depression can reshape circuits of the brain to make future episodes more likely (Maletic et al. 2007).
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Turn positive facts into positive experiences. Good things keep happening all around us, but much of the time we don’t notice them; even when we do, we often hardly feel them.
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The longer that something is held in awareness and the more emotionally stimulating it is, the more neurons that fire and thus wire together, and the stronger the trace in memory (Lewis 2005).
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When a memory is activated, a large-scale assembly of neurons and synapses forms an emergent pattern. If other things are in your mind at the same time—and particularly if they’re strongly pleasant or unpleasant—your amygdala and hippocampus will automatically associate them with that neural pattern (Pare, Collins, and Pelletier 2002). Then, when the memory leaves awareness, it will be reconsolidated in storage along with those other associations.
Para publicar hay que darle más contexto.
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When neurons fire together—within a few milliseconds of each other—they strengthen their existing synapses and form new ones; this is how they “wire” together (Tanaka et al. 2008).
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on the way to adulthood, adolescents can lose up to 10,000 synapses per second in the prefrontal cortex (PFC) (Spear 2000).
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Emotional arousal facilitates learning by increasing neural excitation and consolidating synaptic change (Lewis 2005).
juego y aprendizaje, un nuevo setting para el estudio
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Imagine that the positive contents of your awareness are sinking down into old wounds, soothing chafed and bruised places like a warm golden salve, filling up hollows, slowly replacing negative feelings and beliefs with positive ones.
efectivamente las tecnicas meditativas de este tipo si tienen un efecto real. Como en Osho: toma el sufrimiento del mundo en tu respiracion y con tu amor transmutalo
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mental activity has greater direct influence over the ANS than any other bodily system.
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Parasympathetic fibers are spread throughout your lips; thus, touching your lips stimulates the PNS. Touching your lips can also bring up soothing associations of eating or even of breastfeeding when you were a baby.
zona erogena!
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Mindfulness just means being fully aware of something, in the moment with it, and not judging or resisting it. Be attentive to physical sensations; that’s all there is to it.
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The key to reaping the rewards of meditation is to develop a regular, daily practice, no matter how brief. How about making a personal commitment never to go to sleep without having meditated that day, even if for just one minute?
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Feelings of safety tell the brain that it can afford to bring in the troops that have been manning the watchtowers, and put them to work internally to increase concentration and insight—or just let them get some rest.
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Recognize fear when it arises, observe the feeling of it in your body, watch it try to convince you that you should be alarmed, see it change and move on. Verbally describe to yourself what you’re feeling, to increase frontal lobe regulation of the limbic system (Hariri, Bookheimer, and Mazziotta 2000; Lieberman et al. 2007). Notice how the awareness which contains fear is itself never fearful. Keep separating from the fear; settle back into the vast space of awareness through which fear passes like a cloud.
repesentacion palabra y conciencia, separacion del observador y lo observado al no implicarse en el pensamiento
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Insecure attachment modes appear to be associated with characteristic patterns of neural activity, such as a lack of integration between the prefrontal cortex (PFC) and the limbic system (Siegel 2001).
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Develop self-understanding of how your upbringing affected your relationships with your parents, especially in early childhood; acknowledge any insecure attachment.
para hacerlo efectivamente es necesaria una psicoterapia. La asociacion libre permite revelar dimesiones que se encuentran inaccesibles al dicurso consciente, que es activamente construido en funcion de evitar el diplacer y generar cohesion y coherencia
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Deliberately feeling safer helps control the hardwired tendency to look for and overreact to threats. Feel safer by relaxing, using imagery, connecting with others, being mindful of fear itself, evoking inner protectors, being realistic, and increasing your sense of secure attachment.
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The diencephalon consists of the thalamus (the brain’s central switchboard for sensory information) and the hypothalamus, which directs your autonomic nervous system and influences your endocrine system through the pituitary gland. The hypothalamus regulates primal drive states (e.g., for water, food, sex) and primal emotions (e.g., terror, rage).
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The limbic system evolved from the diencephalon, and includes the amygdala, hippocampus, and basal ganglia. It’s basically Grand Central Station for emotion.
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The lower levels have more direct control over your body and less capacity to change their own neural networks. The upper levels are the opposite: although they’re more removed from the action, they have vastly greater neuroplasticity—the
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In sum, the ACC is at the center of top-down, deliberate, centralized, reasoned motivation.
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When you get motivated in any significant way, it means the subcortical regions that connect to the amygdala have synchronized with each other. The neural networks in the limbic system, hypothalamus, and brain stem start pulsing together, usually in the theta frequency of four to seven times a second (Kocsis and Vertes 1994; Lewis 2005). In sum, the amygdala is at the center of bottom-up, reactive, distributed, passionate motivation.
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desire per se is not the root of suffering; craving is. You can wish for or intend something without craving the results; for example, you can decide to get eggs from the refrigerator without craving them—and without getting upset if there are none left.
Hay que darle más contexto antes de publicar.
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Just as making the facial expression of an emotion will heighten that feeling (Niedenthal 2007), engaging the muscle movements of strength will increase your experience of it.
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The ancient circuitry of the brain is continually driving you to react one way or another—and equanimity is your circuit breaker. Equanimity breaks the chain of suffering by separating the feeling tones of experience from the machinery of craving, neutralizing your reactions to those feeling tones.
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With equanimity, situations have only characteristics, not demands.
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Equanimity is neither apathy nor indifference: you are warmly engaged with the world but not troubled by it.
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Be aware of sounds. Hear without being caught by what’s heard. Be aware of sensations. Sense without being caught by what’s sensed. Be aware of thoughts. Think without being caught by what’s thought.
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When you are equanimous, you don’t grasp after enjoyable experiences or push against disagreeable ones. Rather, you have a kind of space around experiences—a buffer between you and their feeling tones. This state of being is not based on standard prefrontal control of emotions, in which there is inhibition and direction of limbic activity. Instead, with equanimity, the limbic system can fire however it “wants.” The primary point of equanimity is not to reduce or channel that activation, but simply not to respond to it. This is very unusual behavior for the brain, which is designed by evolution to respond to limbic signals, particularly to pulses of pleasant and unpleasant feeling tones.
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Equanimity also involves remaining aware of the passing stream without letting any bit of it hook you. This entails anterior cingulate oversight, especially in the beginning stages of equanimity. As equanimity deepens, meditators report an effortless continuity of mindfulness, which presumably correlates with reduced ACC activity and self-organizing stability in the neural substrates of awareness.
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If you can break the link between feeling tones and craving—if you can be with the pleasant without chasing after it, with the unpleasant without resisting it, and with the neutral without ignoring it—then you have cut the chain of suffering, at least for a time. And that is an incredible blessing and freedom.
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Although the wolf of hate gets more headlines, the wolf of love has been painstakingly bred by evolution to be more powerful—and more central to your deepest nature.
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During the past 150-million-year journey of animal evolution, the advantages of social abilities were arguably the most influential factor driving the development of the brain.
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In the dry language of evolutionary neuroscience, the “computational requirements” of selecting a good mate, sharing food, and keeping young alive required increased neural processing in mammals and birds (Dunbar and Shultz 2007). A squirrel or sparrow has to be smarter than a lizard or shark: better able to plan, communicate, cooperate, and negotiate. These are the exact skills that human couples discover are critical when they become parents, especially if they want to remain mates.
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the more sociable a primate species is—measured by things like breeding group size, number of grooming partners, and complexity of hierarchies—the bigger its cortex is compared to the rest of the brain (Dunbar and Shultz 2007; Sapolsky 2006). More-complex relationships require more-complex brains.
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Further, only the great apes—the most modern family of primates, which includes chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans, and humans—have developed spindle cells, a remarkable type of neuron that supports advanced social capabilities (Allman et al. 2001; Nimchinsky et al. 1999). For example, great apes routinely console other members of their troop who are upset, although this type of behavior is rare among other primates (de Waal 2006). Like us, chimpanzees laugh and cry (Bard 2006).
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humans have many more spindle neurons than the other great apes; these create a kind of information superhighway running from the cingulate cortex and the insula—two regions that are crucial to social and emotional intelligence—to other parts of your brain (Allman et al. 2001). Although an adult chimpanzee is better than a two-year-old child at figuring out the physical world, that young human is already much smarter about relationships (Herrmann et al. 2007).
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As the human brain evolved and grew larger, childhood grew longer (Coward 2008). Consequently, hominid bands had to evolve ways to keep their members connected for many years in order to sustain—in the African proverb—“the village it takes to raise a child” and thus pass on the band’s genes (Gibbons 2008). To accomplish this, the brain acquired powerful circuitry and neurochemistry to generate and maintain love and attachment.
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Distinct neural networks handle infatuation and long-term attachment. In its early stages, it’s natural for a romantic relationship to be dominated by intense, often volatile rewards that draw heavily on dopamine-based neural networks. Later, the relationship shifts gradually toward more diffuse and stable fulfillments that rely on oxytocin and related systems.
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Physical pain and social pain are based on overlapping neural systems (Eisenberger and Lieberman 2004): quite literally, rejection hurts.
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The human parent-child relationship is unique in the animal kingdom, and it has a singular power to shape how each of us pursues and expresses love as an adult;
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loyalty and protection toward “us,” and fear and aggression toward “them.”
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Cooperation and aggression evolved synergistically: bands with greater cooperation were more successful at aggression, and aggression between bands demanded cooperation within bands
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There’s a Zen saying, Nothing left out. Nothing left out of your awareness, nothing left out of your practice, nothing left out of your heart.
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As soon as you place anyone outside of the circle of “us,” the mind/brain automatically begins to devalue that person and justify poor treatment of him
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Being realistic and honest about the wolf of hate—and its impersonal, evolutionary origins—brings self-compassion. Your own wolf of hate needs taming, sure, but it’s not your fault that it lurks in the shadows of your mind, and it probably afflicts you more than anyone else.
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Empathy contains an inherent generosity: you give the willingness to be moved by another person.
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Our core emotions are expressed through universal facial expressions (Ekman 2007).