Sublime

If you want to see what a person who is totally removed from relational interaction looks like, examine the brain of someone who endured prolonged solitary confinement in prison.

“The brain is like a muscle. The more you use certain things, the stronger the connection’s getting, and the better things work.”

Their heart rates actually went down. As soon as they entered the danger zone (or the ‘launch pad’, as one guy I spoke with put it) they assumed a state of cold, meditative focus: a mezzanine level of consciousness in which they became one with the device they were working on.

L’activité est passée d’une partie du cerveau à une autre – mais elle restait très forte. Étonné, il s’est alors mis à étudier ce phénomène en détail. Il a appelé la région cérébrale qui s’active quand on pense ne pas faire grand-chose «le réseau du mode par défaut». Et en l’explorant davantage, en analysant le cerveau d’individus quand ils semblai

Just a few weeks of stress causes neurons, particularly neurons in the hippocampus (Illustration 4), a part of the brain involved in memory and learning, to begin to wither and die.