Going to start a #stablethread on neuroscience and what I'm learning about it here through my meandering curiosities.

I'm no expert. Don't trust me or anyone else. The time to unquestionably trust authority has passed. It won't save you. Become interdependent, not dependent.

First, a gem from Robert Sapolsky's "Behave" which goes into the neurobiology of behavior. Here is a tidbit on how the amygdala not only modulates anxiety and fear, but also in generating aggression. This has been seared into my mind while living in a pandemic:

I wish this article would have gone into the actual structures affected by trauma induced disassociation but I like to read about viewing it as a network of structures. Most people don't understand that cognition is highly distributed in the brain. https://buff.ly/3jfEwg7 

What happens neurologically speaking when someone has an aha moment? @Phillips_M_G

This one is really interesting:

The autonomic nervous system is the part of your being that goes unnoticed by your discursive mind (unless something goes wrong). Breathing, heartbeat, immune system, etc. It doesn't change what you perceive but it changes the intensity of it.

Most people who have experienced intense trauma don't feel the whole trauma at the time it is experienced because the deeper layers of our being take over to protect us. So the hippocampus (where distinctions between past and present are processed) holds on to it.

So our past experiences affect color everything we are currently seeing. If you went through years of trauma as a child, you aren't seeing reality (none of us are really), but you are seeing monsters of your past everywhere. Present moment awareness can help us to realize this.

Remember I'm no expert and this is not science, but it is my empirical understanding of what I have experienced mixed with what I read about neuroscience.