Last week, we saw how our ingrained fear response can occasionally lead us to feel threatened and anxious even when we are objectively safe. But these fear responses are also incredibly important survival mechanisms that can keep us alive and kicking in terrifying and dangerous circumstances. Many people who go through extreme traumas retain only fragmented and distorted memories of the actual traumatic event. This memory loss occurs because the brain shuts down the areas responsible for careful thought and processing, which can distract us from reacting to the threat efficiently. Meanwhile, our bodies gear up to fight, run, or…
Comments closedCategory: Psychology
Has your anxiety increased in the last year? If so, you’re not alone. Over the past year, the social, personal, and environmental stressors of the pandemic have caused a dramatic increase in the prevalence of mental disorders—most commonly anxiety and depression. We discussed depression last week, so we know that environmental triggers can worsen or even cause episodes of depression. Perhaps even more than mood disorders, anxiety disorders are strongly impacted by social and psychological context. Anxiety disorders—which include phobias, panic disorders, and trauma disorders—are innately tied to our sense of self-preservation. Evolutionarily speaking, an attuned sense of fear and…
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May is Mental Health Awareness Month, so to continue with our trend of investigating the underpinnings of the brain, we are dedicating this month’s series to the origins and treatments of mental illness. Due in part to the innate complexity of the human brain, the roots of mental illness can be extraordinarily complicated to untangle. Many psychologists use what is known as a biopsychosocial approach to understanding mental health. This approach acknowledges that mental illness emerges from an interconnected web of biological, psychological, and social factors. Reducing any mental illness to simply a matter of faulty neurochemistry, a product of…
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Thousands of years before anyone understood the brain and the mechanics of perception, the Greek philosopher Plato came up with his famous Allegory of the Cave to represent how humans think about and perceive reality and truth. In the allegory, prisoners spend their whole life chained up in a cave, facing a wall with a fire at their back. Many objects, animals, and people pass in front of the fire behind them and cast shadows on the wall of the cave. The prisoners see these shadows and give each form different names. Eventually, a prisoner is released from the cave,…
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In 1985, English musician Clive Wearing suffered a brain infection—herpes encephalitis—that left him with both retrograde and anterograde amnesia. He was unable to remember anything prior to waking up from the coma caused by the encephalitis, and he was unable to form new memories since the coma. “It was as if every waking moment was the first waking moment,” his wife Deborah wrote in the memoir Forever Today. “Clive was under the constant impression that he had just emerged from unconsciousness because he had no evidence in his own mind of ever being awake before.” Despite suffering from one of…
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Now that we understand a little bit about the complicated architecture of the brain, we can finally start to appreciate the beautiful complexity of the world it creates. Everything we see, hear, smell, taste, and touch is filtered through the lens of the brain, refracted through our thoughts and past experiences, and reconfigured to create our unique perception of reality. Because of this complicated system of translating sensation to perception, we never really interface directly with reality. Most of the time, the image that perception creates is fairly accurate—or at least we mostly agree on it. But like any complicated…
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