How to Encourage The Evolution of Your Brain, with Rudolph Tanzi
Renowned medical researcher Dr. Rudolph Tanzi takes you on a tour of the brain, and explains why positive thinking might be the best gift you can give your genes this holiday season. Tanzi’s latest book is “Super Genes: Unlock the Astonishing Power of Your DNA for Optimum Health and Well-Being”
Read more at BigThink.com: http://bigthink.com/videos/rudolph-ta…
Follow Big Think here:
YouTube: http://goo.gl/CPTsV5
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/BigThinkdotcom
Twitter: https://twitter.com/bigthink
Transcript – Emotion is so interesting. If you think about the evolution of emotions, you know, first there was 400 million years ago the brain was – the reptilian brain as we call it. And these are memories that were instinctively programmed by genetics. You don’t need to learn how to run away when you’re attacked or how to fight – fight or flight. You don’t need to learn how to find food or to go find sex to reproduce, right. It’s instinctively programmed. And then it was only about 100 million years ago that if I use what’s called the handy brain that Dan Siegel uses. This is brainstem down here, you tuck your thumb in, that’s the mid brain so that’s the 100 milling, 400 million. And then that’s the frontal cortex, that’s only four million years old. That’s meaning, creativity, purpose, self-awareness. Well tucked in here that’s where we live. That’s short-term memory. And the first short-term memories we had were based on the roots of our emotions – fear and desire. And what was fear? Then the first memory of pain and the anticipation of pain in the future. Pain or punishment. And what is desire but the first memory of pleasure and reward and then the desire, the anticipation of that in the future. So the first messages of acquired memories that involved us living our lives and saying, you know, I remember that was – remembering something was bad and fearing in the future, having anxiety. Or remembering something’s good and say I want it again. We still live in that part of the brain. Now our emotions become more complicated as jealous, as greed, as resentment. But they’re all based in basically reward and punishment. Remembering reward, seeking it again, punishment, remembering that and avoiding it again, right. So the way to think about this is when you live in that short-term memory the reason why we live there is that sensations are coming in all the time. We’re seeing, all your five senses are bringing information to you. It’s all packaged in one big bundle called the performant pathway because it perforates the short-term memory – or the short-term memory area is called the hippocampus and it’s Greek for seahorse because it looks like this. Read Full Transcript Here: http://goo.gl/UhKA73
