Sublime

The human mind isn’t a unitary thing that sometimes has irrational feelings. It is a complex system of interacting parts, each with a mind of its own.

Human beings are astoundingly attuned to subtle emotional shifts in the people (and animals) around them.

Simple pleasant and unpleasant feelings come from an ongoing process inside you called interoception. Interoception is your brain’s representation of all sensations from your internal organs and tissues, the hormones in your blood, and your immune system. Think about what’s happening within your body right this second. Your insides are in motion. Y

neuroticism, openness to experience, extraversion, conscientiousness, and agreeableness—commonly referred to as the five-factor or Big Five framework of personality.

I use the general term brain to encompass all of this wonderful complexity of the body proper as it intimately intertwines with its chemical environment and with the portion of neural tissue in the head.

The clinical implications are very clear and have been substantiated by research: teaching clients to pay attention to embodied self-awareness can assist them in changing their thought patterns to more positive and self-consistent ones, to elevating their moods, and enhancing the ability of their prefrontal cortex to link thought and feeling based

also read Descartes’ Error, by the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio.22 Damasio had noticed an unusual pattern of symptoms in patients who had suffered brain damage to a specific part of the brain—the ventromedial (i.e., bottom-middle) prefrontal cortex (abbreviated vmPFC; it’s the region just behind and above the bridge of the nose). Their emotionali

Our self-experience is the product of the balance between our rational and our emotional brains. When these two systems are in balance, we “feel like ourselves.” However, when our survival is at stake, these systems can function relatively independently.

We come to know our own minds through our interactions with others. Our mirror neuron perceptions, and the resonance they create, act quickly and often outside of awareness.