metonymy4u

a colleague once asked what i think is a very important question, which i have continued to ponder for some time: what does a neurophysiological description of behavior add to our understanding of human psychology already described with a functional model? today it hit me: it helps me be less judgmental about my own and others’ emotional vulnerability. if i describe emotional vulnerability in terms of the plasticity (learning) of my hippocampal-amygdala-autonomic response circuit to significant events or the relatively prolonged period of time that it takes my autonomic nervous system (ANS) to return to baseline after an emotionally upsetting event, then i think i can be less judgmental about myself and others as being “moody” or “sensitive” or “irrational.” it orients me to an understanding of my own inborn limits and allows me to accept those limits rather than judging them as “wrong” or “bad” as i’ve been taught to do for most of my life. example: once when i had a falling out with a colleague she remarked that i “need to examine my issues and why i put up so many emotional walls.” in the context, it was a statement that i experienced as quite pejorative, invalidating and hostile. needless to say it was not effective in promoting problem solving between us, nor in providing me with useful information about myself (at least at that time…). in fact, i am a person who does not trust easily and finds it difficult to overcome distrust and the neurophysiological model allows me to redescribe the situation: when i learn to “distrust” a situation or person i can validate that in fact it is objectively difficult for me to learn “trust” again just because my brain is especially plastic in that circuit involving the creation of memories and the linking of those memories (synapses in the hippocampus) to my emotional response circuits (amygdala and ANS). as the buddhists would say, i can learn to understand the nature of the way things are (the dharma) rather than being stuck in the shoulds of life.