Neuroscience
Caffeine: The Most Popular Psycho-Active Addiction on the Planet
Re-emerging from the 2021 Mill Valley Film Festival (33 films in ten days – is that an addiction?) easing into an acknowledged if benevolent addiction of reading good books, I’ve just finished the chapter on caffeine in Michael Pollan’s This Is Your Mind on Plants, a delightful exploration of three mind-altering drugs: opium, caffeine, and […]
One of Those “You Just Never Know” Moments
It really happened this way. A young man from Alberta, Canada emailed his appreciation of my post The Neuroscience of Resilience: Nervous System Regulation. “…exceptionally well-written…gave me a new perspective…connecting a few dots differently that I had prior to reading the article….” [See below for the article] Honestly, for a moment, I couldn’t recollect exactly […]
Heading into winter/summer/holidays – don’t lose your balance
We’re heading into winter in the northern hemisphere, summer vacation in the southern hemisphere, end of year holidays – Hanukkah, Christmas, New Year’s – around the globe, when people can experience the joy of sharing festivities with loved ones, sometimes the heartbreak of distance or rupture from loved ones. And, as always in the human […]
Newsletter: Using Our Somatic Intelligence to Recover Our Resilience
These posts offer ways to cope skillfully when things go haywire. Our most basic responses to all of life’s challenges and adversities begin in our bodies, so this month’s posts offer body-based tools of breath, touch, movement and visualization to recover your natural baseline physiological equilibrium; you learn to “keep calm and carry on.” This […]
How the Brain “Unlearns” Patterns that De-Rail Resilience
As we’re learning how the brain learns, we also want to learn how to use the brain’s neuroplasticity to un-learn patterns of response that derail our resilience or no longer serve us so well. This post offers tools to unlearn some of the most common thought patterns that block clear thinking and genuine response flexibility […]
Newsletter – Conditions that Accelerate Brain change
In recent 2018 posts, I’ve been exploring how the brain learns anything, ever. How the repetition of experiences, chosen or unchosen, creates new neural circuitry, creating new habits of perception and response to life events, helpful or unhelpful. I’ve also written a bit about the brain’s innate neuroplasticity that makes any of this learning, and […]
Learning to Work with the Brain to Become More Resilient
Whatever hopes and plans we have for 2018, we turn our intentions toward learning the skills we need to manifest them and strengthening the resilience we need to cope when we don’t. And all of that learning and cultivating necessitates becoming very proficient at using the neuroplasticity innate in the brain to create new patterns […]