#neurobiology

#neurobiology

No matter what their gods were, what they did for a living, what they wore, the songs they sang, everything varies except love, and everybody loves. So I became convinced that this was a real thing, that we were built somehow to form partnerships. And then the day came when I thought to myself, "Well, then it must be something in the brain."

Optimism lives in a curious in-between space. It isn't an outcome so much as an expectation about one. Yet optimism and pessimism each have immediate consequences for mental health. When we expect good things, daily life feels safer and more enjoyable. Persistent pessimism, on the other hand, breeds emptiness and depression. As a psychiatrist, I often meet people who undermine their own positive feelings.

Over the course of 17 years, I lost three of my children, Johnny, Reggie, and Miah, each under devastating circumstances. My son Johnny died in a drowning accident in 2005 at just 13 years old. Reggie, who had catastrophic epilepsy, passed away in 2016 at 17 years old. And Miah, my beautiful daughter, died suddenly in 2021 at the age of 21 from the same rare neurodegenerative disorder that took Reggie: dentatorubral-pallidoluysian atrophy. My husband has also passed away from this same inherited disease.

When I think about why a physiological explanation for human behavior is more interesting to me than a philosophical one, I always say that the philosophical, or as it evolves in the 20th century, you get the psychological, and they're sort of the same thing for a little while. Psychology's incredibly useful science, but in a lot of cases, it's an outside-in science. The brain is actually an inside-out mechanism.

"I throw up every day before work now. When I hear his voice, I shake. I can't sleep, and I've lost weight. This job is killing me!" she cried. Kathy worked for a bullying boss whose recent tirades escalated to an unbearable level. The last straw for Kathy occurred when her boss stomped up behind her and slammed a large report binder on her desk, startling her.

'Both states share the same neurobiological "scaffold," but individual psychology builds different experiential "stories" on that foundation.'

Salvia Divinorum is recognized as one of the most powerful hallucinogenic plants, containing the active molecule Salvinorin-A, which has garnered attention in neurobiology research.