It’s not as easy as you might think. Turns out it a lot depends upon whether or not your Courtship Command Center’s P1 neurons are hyper-activating your motivation and perception circuitry. If Central Command is flooding your brain with massive amounts of dopamine, chances are increased that you’ll try to put some moves on. But even then, only 44% of the time. Turns out for fruitflies, it’s not about the sex. It’s about the brain – sex is all in their head!
In this spirited TED Talk, physicist Ruben Meerman breaks down the mathematics of weight loss. In the process he exposes a lot of myths and misconceptions about what weight/fat actually is and where it actually goes when we lose it. Hint: You might wonder, but it’s not responsible for global warming.
So, my dissertation research took me around to spiritual communities in Tennessee, Maine, Upstate NY and Sea Ranch in CA. One thing became clear to me over and over: Where and who you live with is as important as how you live. Part of why I stayed at CASBS at Stanford for 10 years (I was only planning to stay for 6 months!) was because of the paradisaical, secure environment up on the top of the hill looking over all of Silicon Valley. No C-Reactive Protein imbalances for me!
Hubris Syndrome: How Power Damages Our BrainIf power were a prescription drug, it would come with a long list of known side effects. It can intoxicate. It can corrupt. It can even make Henry Kissinger believe that he’s sexually magnetic. But can it cause brain damage? Thus begins the opening paragraph of this compelling article. Further, historian Henry Adams described power as “a sort of tumor that ends by killing the victim’s sympathies.” Years of lab and field experiments show that people under the influence of power act as if they have suffered a traumatic brain injury. They become more impulsive, less risk-aware, and less able to see things from other people’s perspective. Like the famous Phineas Gage, they’ve got no Theory of Mind!
I can easily imagine a day when we will be able to readily and painlessly metabolize traumatic memories similar to what happens when people successfully move into and fully through a complex grieving process. Gene and protein applications will very likely play a role. And as you might expect, the Military Industrial Complex is deeply immersed in such research for less than suffering-reduction reasons, unfortunately.
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The Flowering Brain 
Thanks for this article on power. Not only does it corrupt, but it leads to lack of empathy….amazing blockage.
What a smorgasbord of wonderful information and thoughts!
Regarding Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency: As we develop the ability to transfer risk to others – the phrase ”acting with the courage of somebody else’s convictions” springs to mind – it seems that there will be few limits to the impulses of the powerful; an altogether more sinister form of Brave New World (Huxley) rapidly approaches.
Hi Mark,
Thanks for the link to the fascinating article Hubris Syndrome: How Power Damages Our Brain. Seems to me though that the study subjects were people who saw power as having “power over” others, which, in my opinion is not true power. It may not be that all power leads to hubris, just the outdated mode of having “power over” others. My guess would be that true power would lead to greater humility.
Kind regards,
Kathy