This is an important and timely subject. A civil society and mental health are co-dependents. You cannot have one without the other. Consider that the second highest cause of teen death is suicide, and social media is a big cause.
Ben Libet discovered that the right side of the brain is 200 milliseconds faster than the left side. This is profoundly important because in order to catch up, the left side constructs a narrative of the world that helps you fit in, but what if you can't construct a meaningful narrative? You are like the Red Queen, always having to move faster to stay in the same spot.
Babies and infants, whilst suckling in the sake arms of their mother, produce copious amounts of Oxytocin, that opposes vasopressin, and allows the child to produce spindle neurones. These neurone are found in humans many thousands times more than other mammals and allow us to integrate socially and construct a narrative of our place in the world. But a survey of babies born to mother is the Quebec storm in 1998 showed drastically reduced spindle neurones in these babies, along with retarded cognitive abilities. Schizophrenics also have a gene mutation SAP97 that prevents them from constructing a coherent narrative because both sides of the brain are engaged in attention, and if you can attend to things, then you can't construct a narrative, which goes a long way to explain ADD and ADHD, also ASD. The narrative ties both sides of the brain together, but you can actually feel the tension in your gut, which is directly tied into the visceral Right brain, through the vagus nerve; it is called gut feelings.
It is up to society to reduce social tension by supplying Maslow's hierarchy of needs, nutrition, education, shelter, emotional support etc. Why is this?
Consider my dog, who is clever, intelligent, even cunning, which tells me he has a mind, but and conscious awareness, but when I put a mirror in front of him, h will bark as though it is another dog in his territory. Can you see that my dog cannot escape the centripetal force of his own needs. He is locked into his needs. But humans can exceed this Darwinian trap by exceeding Maslow's needs, we can construct our own narrative, called subjective consciousness, that give us AGENCY. This is our transcendency journey.
The necessity of a narrative identify is a really great point, Geoffrey. Not only to give us that 'self' we're so hung up on, but also to build a story of meaning. I might look into this more to write about it at some point :).
For me, happiness is having a good map, knowing where I am on that map and knowing where I want to go. The entorhinal cortex (EC) is in the critical first stop of the brainstem/midbrain and functions as a network hub for memory, navigation, and the perception of time. The EC has grid cells that fire when we move (imaginatively or actually) that gradually build a memory map or grid reference of our location and since we measure motion by time, the EC then needs a time reference. To perceive time, the brain needs a repeatable or stationary reference. There are a few ways to get a time reference. One would be from our circadian rhythm; another would be the rhythmic pulsations (3.75 to 7.5 Hz) coming from the limbic hippocampal regions as seen in the Theta waves. Another would be if the EC could reference or cohere to something stationary or “outside of time”. This could be a quantum influence or our homeostasis. It helps me to have a time sense that extends to an afterlife.
The role of time is interesting here. On the one hand, you want that anticipation and you need at least some foresight to build and manage expectation, but on the other hand, a very long horizon makes it a lot harder to predict our future (emotional) states. (It might even be discouraging if your goals seem too 'far' away.) I wonder how many variation there is in people's preferred/manageable time horizons when it comes to fulfilment and happiness - though I'm sure that also changes over one's lifetime.
This is an important and timely subject. A civil society and mental health are co-dependents. You cannot have one without the other. Consider that the second highest cause of teen death is suicide, and social media is a big cause.
Ben Libet discovered that the right side of the brain is 200 milliseconds faster than the left side. This is profoundly important because in order to catch up, the left side constructs a narrative of the world that helps you fit in, but what if you can't construct a meaningful narrative? You are like the Red Queen, always having to move faster to stay in the same spot.
Babies and infants, whilst suckling in the sake arms of their mother, produce copious amounts of Oxytocin, that opposes vasopressin, and allows the child to produce spindle neurones. These neurone are found in humans many thousands times more than other mammals and allow us to integrate socially and construct a narrative of our place in the world. But a survey of babies born to mother is the Quebec storm in 1998 showed drastically reduced spindle neurones in these babies, along with retarded cognitive abilities. Schizophrenics also have a gene mutation SAP97 that prevents them from constructing a coherent narrative because both sides of the brain are engaged in attention, and if you can attend to things, then you can't construct a narrative, which goes a long way to explain ADD and ADHD, also ASD. The narrative ties both sides of the brain together, but you can actually feel the tension in your gut, which is directly tied into the visceral Right brain, through the vagus nerve; it is called gut feelings.
It is up to society to reduce social tension by supplying Maslow's hierarchy of needs, nutrition, education, shelter, emotional support etc. Why is this?
Consider my dog, who is clever, intelligent, even cunning, which tells me he has a mind, but and conscious awareness, but when I put a mirror in front of him, h will bark as though it is another dog in his territory. Can you see that my dog cannot escape the centripetal force of his own needs. He is locked into his needs. But humans can exceed this Darwinian trap by exceeding Maslow's needs, we can construct our own narrative, called subjective consciousness, that give us AGENCY. This is our transcendency journey.
The necessity of a narrative identify is a really great point, Geoffrey. Not only to give us that 'self' we're so hung up on, but also to build a story of meaning. I might look into this more to write about it at some point :).
Pandoras Box, book I have written on Amazon, and working on another book about the cognitive heuristic we all inherit.
For me, happiness is having a good map, knowing where I am on that map and knowing where I want to go. The entorhinal cortex (EC) is in the critical first stop of the brainstem/midbrain and functions as a network hub for memory, navigation, and the perception of time. The EC has grid cells that fire when we move (imaginatively or actually) that gradually build a memory map or grid reference of our location and since we measure motion by time, the EC then needs a time reference. To perceive time, the brain needs a repeatable or stationary reference. There are a few ways to get a time reference. One would be from our circadian rhythm; another would be the rhythmic pulsations (3.75 to 7.5 Hz) coming from the limbic hippocampal regions as seen in the Theta waves. Another would be if the EC could reference or cohere to something stationary or “outside of time”. This could be a quantum influence or our homeostasis. It helps me to have a time sense that extends to an afterlife.
The role of time is interesting here. On the one hand, you want that anticipation and you need at least some foresight to build and manage expectation, but on the other hand, a very long horizon makes it a lot harder to predict our future (emotional) states. (It might even be discouraging if your goals seem too 'far' away.) I wonder how many variation there is in people's preferred/manageable time horizons when it comes to fulfilment and happiness - though I'm sure that also changes over one's lifetime.
Good point. As a child our time expectations are short. As we get wiser we realize the benefit of delayed gratification.