We're going to go through the basics. The nervous system is the primary system that kind of creates a relationship between body and mind. So when people say mind, a lot of times we think like brain, but are you sure about that?
Because if you consider part of your mind to be like your emotions, like when you're hangry, the thoughts that go through your head are going to be angry, but it's because you're hungry. Part of that. is caused by this nervous system, which permeates your entire body.
So the nervous system on a physical level is a network of cells that carries information to and from all the parts of the body and connects it to the outside world as well. So if I touched a hot stove, my, you know, nervous system, my nerves would tell me you flip an idiot. Why'd you touch that hot stove and pull my hand away? And now I get information about that part of my environment.
That is hot. Okay, so basic functions of the nervous system at thinking about it in a very process-oriented way. Step one, we receive inputs from the environment.
Step two, we process them and integrate them with past experiences. So now if I see a stove that's like red, I'm going to think, oh, I'm connecting it to my memory. I'm going to input the visual data.
Red stove. Last time I touched a red stove, I got burned. So I'm a not touch that hot stove again by generating the output of my behavioral response, which is actually to not behave. Sometimes showing restraint is the most important thing.
I like this cute little metaphor here of the bacon alarm clock because I found out one day that there were bacon alarm clocks. So the bacon alarm clock would be receiving inputs from the environment and that time continues to march on as it should. And it's going to process inputs.
So as it's taking stock of that external input from the environment, time continuing to march on, it's going to also integrate from past experience. So you're going to set the bacon alarm clock to a particular time. Once time on the outside matches programmed time, it's going to generate an output, which is the bacon. I mean, science is a gosh darn miracle.
Argue with the wall. We would not have bacon alarm clocks without science or something like printers, you know? So something about this investigation must truly work.
And how far and how small we have managed to go is nothing short of incredible. So... at the cellular level of the nervous system, we have neurons, which are these specialized cells that send and receive messages within that system.
When you think neurons, think communication, that is the metaphor. Neuron A and neuron B, they're like the mailboxes. The neurotransmitters are like the mail. Let's say the action potential, the electrical current, whatever, is like the mailman, like the vehicles by which neurotransmitters get from A to B. The whole goal is to communicate.
So that you tell your body what to do, which is why language being a bit of a theme. This chapter is so genius. If I do say so myself. And then we have glial cells, which are like the supporter cells.
They hold neurons in place and supply nutrients and oxygen to neurons. That's actually kind of like a bit of a epiphany too. I think that, yeah, neurons exist to create your brain and nervous system.
There's neurons throughout your spinal cord and whatnot as well. But they also are like their own cells. Like arguably each of them is motivated to live on, like kind of as that being the primary purpose.
And it gets more food and oxygen when it's working well is one way to think about it. And it does indeed need to be sort of fed, you know? Okay, looking at the neuronal structure, isn't she a beaut? On this side, we got the soma or cell body.
It's connected to the dendrites. You see how they look like branches throughout your developmental journey. This is one of the big things that changes in the brain.
Those dendritic branches get more branchy. There's more of them. They connect to more axon terminals, which are over here at the end of the neuron. So you got this big, long axon.
Of course, we're talking about like microscopic, you know, cells, but sometimes these axons are really quite long. The point, again, of neurons is to transmit. um, messages from one area to the other.
So sometimes you're talking about an axon that maybe runs along your whole spine. Um, and it's surrounded by myelin sheath, which is, um, another thing that changes throughout our development is that our axons get more myelinated. So yeah, myelin sheath increases the speed, um, the efficiency of neural communication.
And it's basically this like insulation and, and something about that insulation makes and Kind of overly simply put, but a good way to think about it, like the more you use a neuron, the more it gets myelinated because you know you're going to use it a lot. So might as well, you know, speed this puppy along. And then at the end of the neuron, you have these axon terminals where vesicles are that hold neurotransmitters.
And the arguably the goal of neural communication is to get these neurotransmitters, which we'll get back to neurotransmitters in a minute. into the synapse. The synapse is this gap between neuron A and neuron B. Of course, the brain is billions of neurons. So we're not just talking about neuron A to neuron B.
There's going to be many other neurons around this particular neuron, but basically to get it to the next dendritic branches. So cells communicate with one another by using electrical signals called action potentials, which we'll get back to in a second, along their axons. to send chemical messengers, i.e. neurotransmitters, across the synapse. So we want to get neurotransmitters into the synapse slash across the synapse.
Okay, neurotransmitters. What the heck are they? You've probably heard of a couple. There's like 10-ish basic ones that we talk about a lot, but then there's many more than that.
Like I think I've read something like 100. But we're just going to talk about two, dopamine and serotonin. So dopamine. Another little feature of neurotransmitters is that they can be either inhibitory or excitatory.
So like I said, there's mysteries everywhere. Yeah, kind of the goal is to get the neurons from neuron A to neuron B, which kind of makes it seem like the goal of neural communication is just constantly to continue neural communication. Kind of like the goal of life seems to be arguably just to like perpetuate life. And like I said, neurons are maybe motivated to survive sort of in their own right. That motivation seems to be there.
However, the entirety of the neurological system is much more complex than that. So excitatory neurotransmitters really do seem to be propelling neural communication. Like it tries to get from neuron A to neuron B, kind of to try and get neuron B to continue to perpetuate the cycle of neural communication. But sometimes neurotransmitters can be inhibitory, where the goal kind of seems to be overly simply put to sort of stop the process a little bit.
And I like to think about them as being inhibitory or excitatory. And you can kind of feel the difference between those two. But it's really hard to translate physical data and physical phenomenon precisely to a psychological experience.
So for instance, and your brain is made up of a bunch of neurons, right? But then what does each neuron represent? It's probably not as simplistic as like neuron A represents a thought and neuron B represents another thought. Like that's an overly simplified metaphor, but it's a metaphor that sort of works because in order to produce a thought, neurotransmitters, at least hypothetically, this would be the materialistic perspective.
neurotransmitters would have to fire to produce that thought. And one of the primary theories that has helped us understand things about the brain is each part of the brain, which is made up of different neurons, is responsible for different processes. So that metaphor is a really useful metaphor that like neurotransmitters equals thought, even though it's probably not as simple as like this neurotransmitter is this thought, this neurotransmitter is this thought, it's probably not even as simple as like this neurotransmitter is this word. And this neurotransmitter is this word. Back on track.
So dopamine, as I said, neurotransmitters are both, can be inhibitory or excitatory. And turns out sometimes they can be both like dopamine. Dopamine is responsible for a couple of different things on the very basic like body movement level, because your brain is responsible for thoughts, but also your body. It's important for regulating smooth movements and stability. So someone with Parkinson's who has tremors might not have, or probably does not have, does not have enough dopamine.
Okay, so the truth of this excitatory versus inhibitory effect of different neurotransmitters is one, almost every neurotransmitter have both effects, inhibitory versus excitatory. or inhibitory and excitatory. I'll get back to that in a second.
But there are certain neurotransmitters that are like quintessentially one, but have the opposite effects or quintessentially dual. So my best summary of what I have read is that dopamine is one of the more quintessential dual neurotransmitters, has both. And serotonin, which is the other neurotransmitter that we're going to talk about, is more of like a quintessentially inhibitory, but can do both.
Okay. So here's what you'd have to kind of be willing to plot out if you wanted to understand this effect. Inhibitory means stopping something from happening.
Brain power is not simply I'm going to add brain power and that's going to make my brain do what it needs to do. Instead, you're constantly directing this communication sort of traffic, which means part of what your brain does is stop inputs from happening or like increasing the inhibition. communication because your brain doesn't stop doing anything.
It does, does, does. So when it wants to stop, it has to send a signal to stop. It sends an inhibitory signal, which allows other things to happen.
On the other hand, it also has this excitatory messenger, right? So just apply to something like Parkinson's, understanding how dopamine influences the smoothness of someone's movements. you'd have to observe the inhibitory and excitatory effects that are going on in the brain. And we can kind of like use dopamine as one vehicle to understand what all is going on.
So they're talking about basal ganglia pathways. So when you think about neurons, you like, I don't know, another metaphor might be like looking at a football play, like you got a understand the different pathways you could send the ball that are very direct. On the other hand, if there's a lot of foot traffic, then you want to take the long way around, which is more of an indirect pathway to the touchdown. But that might be the best method that that that could work, or talking about gossiping.
You need to get a message to somebody, but you can't tell them yourselves. Because they're not going to believe you. So you got to somehow tell somebody else to tell them, but they can't know that you told that person, you know, that sort of a thing.
Okay. So that's the game we're playing. Ready? So for something like smooth movements, we have the basal ganglia.
It's a part of the brain. Don't worry about it. And we have different pathways to get there.
Neurons are these connecting pieces that create pathways. Yes, they... When we talk about different parts of the brain, we'll talk about how different parts of the brain get lit up, but there's different pathways to get there.
So in Parkinson's, we have this like decrease in dopamine, right? So let's really like plot this out like it's a football game or something. In a healthy state, dopamine, which can have inhibitory and excitatory effects, activates the direct pathway in the basal ganglia and inhibits the indirect pathway. So it's kind of doing both. The summation of all of this is that it decreases a particular part of the basal ganglia's output.
You can Google with GPI, GPI neuroscience type of part of basal ganglia. So this releases inhibition. So inhibition is like calming, it's stopping. It's a message to calm the heck down on the thalamus and cortex, different parts of the brain. And then look, it translates that for you too.
Promoting movement. In Parkinson's, we see a loss of dopamine that causes an opposite effect, which means that the direct pathway, which is supposed to be activated by dopamine, becomes not active enough. That's what hypoactive means.
You can Google that. So the pathway that dopamine used to be activating is not being activated. And the indirect... pathway becomes hyperactive because dopamine tried to inhibit that pathway.
So the one that was activating becomes too slow. And the one that was inhibiting becomes too fast, something like that. And the summation of all of that is one of the things that kind of causes the issues with Parkinson's is that there's an over inhibition in the thalamus and the cortex, which over inhibition means there's a suppression of movement. Too much stop. equals suppressing.
It's like when you're driving on the road, right? And there's like too many traffic signs. There's too many stop signs, something like that.
That's what it kind of feels like. And it's because dopamine has these like two different effects. One it's activating one it's kind of inhibiting.
And so there's this switch that happens. On the other hand, you could just look at the, the idea of dopamine as being mostly excitatory. and say that a lack of dopamine, which would allow for these fluid, complex motions, right?
A lack of that means rigidity, like a Parkinson's person would have trouble doing something like this. Isn't that cool? Isn't that cool? We plotted it all out.
That's so many more details. Ah, I love neuroscience. Jeez.
Dopamine is also associated with feelings of pleasure, like eating a good meal, sex and thrills, but it's kind of more than that, or it's more sophisticated than that. And here's where the storytelling comes along, which should excite a lot of psychologists. The problem is on most exams, you'd still be sort of expected to memorize that dopamine is associated with feelings of pleasure, like in order to get that question right.
But it's so much more complicated than that. The beauty of it is the story. The beauty of it is this. The beauty of dopamine is like, okay. And the frustrating thing about it is if you set a really big goal for yourself, like graduating or writing a book or something like that, if you accomplish that, that's a lot of lead up to that goal, right?
And a lot of feelings along the way, like, I'm going to work all night just to do this. Even though I'm not going to get rewarded, like literally tomorrow. In fact, if it's something like writing a book or a movie or whatever, you might not ever get rewarded at all. It might not be successful. It might not happen, but you're setting that goal.
And if you do accomplish that goal, you get this big rush of dopamine. It's like joy is what I think of when I think about dopamine. But along the way, you also... will be distracted, right? You'll also want to scroll like, yeah, okay, I want to be a Nobel Prize winning author, but I also want to watch TikToks.
So as you're scrolling, you're getting little hits of like pleasure, like eating a good meal, sex, thrills, distraction, things like that. So that's one of the reasons why dopamine is so associated with something like addiction, you get addicted to really this feeling of pleasure. And you start to associate that with this particular drug or substance, which is going to create all sorts of different experiences. So some people are going to be more likely to get addicted to something that slows down your nervous system, like alcohol.
But they'll still get that rush of dopamine. And then other people will be more likely to get addicted to something like cocaine, even though that increases your nervous system. So those two different drugs do different things to your nervous system.
But there's this underlying experience of something like pleasure, dopamine. Um, which is sort of like an underlying feature of most addictions. So as you're trying to attain something great for yourself, you're going to be constantly tempted by the very neurotransmitter that also is trying to get you to that space. So here's the coolest thing about being able to put it in like a narrative format is that insight helps you look at those experiences quite differently. So I like the metaphor of the good meal version, right?
So I'm driving to this special location six hours away where I'm going to put on this big fancy dinner party for all of my friends and family. And I'm so gosh darn excited about it. But it's a six hour drive. Let's actually make it a 12 hour drive. We're going far away.
So of course, along those 12 hour drives, even though I'm very focused on getting there and doing a good job, I'm going to need to stop for snacks. Like it's not like that's me getting distracted and failing. I need those snacks to survive. You know, like if you're going to study for six hours for the MCATs, you're going to start to feel demotivated.
And that demotivation is going to get in the way of you succeeding at that task, which means you need the feeling of dopamine. Dopamine is like reward. It means I'm going to seek this out and achieve it. So even though you get this rush of dopamine at the end, it's not like you don't get rewarded with dopamine until you accomplish that. It's the feeling of motivation.
It's the hope that I'm going to get something out of it. And again, you have this push and pull of the big win at the end, but also the needs along the way. And they genuinely are needs. So like if you're scrolling on TikTok, if you see it as you failing. then that's going to be associated with like shame and doubt, which is the opposite point of dopamine versus if you scroll and decide to see it as like, I'm feeding this need right now, I'm stopping for snacks.
You continue to fixate the dopamine on your larger goal, but you get what you need and you can start to achieve that goal with a sense of pleasure instead of a sense of denying of oneself. There's a big difference between I'm going to work my ass off, but along the way, I'm going to experience the pleasure of doing something that I'm passionate about. And I'm going to deny myself everything else unless I am 100% working on this task at all times.
So there is this conflict. But at the end of the day, this insight helps you use that conflict with a sense of agency as well as something like discipline. It's probably sort of responsible for the behavioral changes we see in adolescence. So like I said, a lot of y'all don't even have a fully developed. prefrontal lobe yet.
But in adolescence, we see this shift in adolescence ability to like imagine the future for themselves. That's probably because their dopaminergic system changes at that age. So either they start to be able to see the future better, clearer, because they have more dopamine. And that's why little kids really can't. Or they're kind of like forced to because hashtag society and something about that really implicates the dopaminergic system.
And that's why we see this change in dopamine. It's probably the first one. But like I said, constructs all reciprocally influence one another.
Dopamine is also discussed a lot in ADHD. Okay, so most of the time, if you like Google or give like the most simple definition of ADHD, you'll hear something like ADHD is not enough dopamine. And that was kind of like the first step to figuring out what all is going on with dopamine and ADHD individuals. But nowadays, it seems like that is entirely too simple because of course it is. Instead, I've even read somewhere that ADHD brains might release as much or more dopamine even, which is why I kind of put it on the slide as like too much dopamine.
But really what it amounts to is the brain is not super efficient with the dopamine that it has. in that parts of the brain are almost too efficient. So there's things called transporter cells, which I will get to in a little bit, that go and clean up the synapse. And when it cleans up too fast, so if there's too many transporter cells, not enough dopamine gets from neuron A to neuron B.
So what it basically amounts to in ADHD individuals is they're hungry for ADHD, or sorry, they're hungry for dopamine. So they engage in more activities that will increase dopamine. So then arguably they do end up having a lot of dopamine in their system, but because of all of these behaviors that they're doing to try and sort of attain it.
And again, it's got this feeling of hunger of something like deprivation. And it basically amounts to this feeling of like your brain is like releasing the dopamine. So it's like a. firework going off over here.
Oh, that's interesting. A firework going over off over here. Oh, that's interesting.
A firework going over here. That's cool. And the truth is like each of those different thoughts is probably really cool.
And maybe they even all connect to one another at the end of the day, even though ADHD people have a tendency to see themselves as sort of random and tangential. Most tangents can be brought back to the original point. And you might just find that in that tangent is a lot of insight.
Any who's all. So it feels like I can't complete the thought, which is exactly what the argument of what. dopamine, the dopamine kind of hypothesis of ADHD is, is you release that dopamine.
Oh, oh, oh, did I, did I hear something that's maybe smart that I should be able to do at this point? But it doesn't complete the circuit very well. It doesn't sort of kind of complete the thought or help you complete that task because of the inefficiency or ineffectiveness of that system. So it's too simple to say not enough dopamine, but the feeling of it is not enough dopamine, but the behavioral consequences is almost like too much dopamine seeking behaviors, like video games and jumping up and down.
So then we have serotonin, which is an inhibitory neurotransmitter. Serotonin and dopamine are both kind of implicated in something like happiness, but serotonin is more like chill version of dopamine. Dopamine is like joy and like need and...
stuff like that. And then serotonin is more like, yeah, chill. If dopamine increases the feelings of like hunger and seeking that, like the desire for food or the desire for sex or whatnot, serotonin sort of inhibits that. So it's almost kind of sad.
It's almost kind of like enough serotonin makes you not want things that maybe. uh, would bring you joy, but you're not going to be able to have at this particular moment, kind of a thing. So the two really do need to work hand in hand is a good way to think about it.
Serotonin can also inhibit like information processing. So like, I wish I didn't care so much about a lot of things that I care about. If I had more serotonin, maybe I'd care less.
And that less actually gives room for things like being carefree and at peace. It's like for your mood instead of like your immediate emotions. Emotions are like responsive to something that just happened.
Whereas mood is like, what side of the bed did you wake up on this morning? And things like sleeping, eating, and dreaming. So, um, serotonin gets associated with things like depression all the time, including, um, depression slash anxiety. It's a struggle to figure out like why that is with something like serotonin. Because to say that it's the neurotransmitter itself, like if you don't have enough serotonin, you feel depressed.
It makes it seem like serotonin like is this neurotransmitter that makes you feel happy. And other studies have shown that that's far too simple. It's not like a cause and effect type relationship.
So when you see what serotonin is actually responsible for. it seems quite possible that instead what's happening is serotonin is maybe influenced sleeping or eating patterns. And those sleeping and eating patterns are maybe what is causing the depression.
And so when you think about medication, for example, so one of the great things about scientific communities is that, again, they sort of create things. So we have... selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, SSRIs, are often used for people with depression. And what they do, we'll talk about the mechanics of what they do, but they keep more serotonin in the system.
And that's supposed to be helpful for people, some people who have depression. And maybe it's true that having more serotonin in your system can help you re-regulate something like sleeping and eating, but it might be the case. And one of the reasons why SSRIs don't always work in the long term. is if you believe that it is the drug and the serotonin that's influencing your depression, that's not the whole truth. Instead, having a moment I call like a plot twist of neurotransmitters helps you re-regulate or change some of your behaviors.
And if the insight that you're supposed to achieve is actually that your behaviors are different now in terms of sleeping and eating, and maybe your mood helped you socialize with people more, so on and so forth, If you notice that, then maybe the drug has sort of done its job and you've created new patterns in the brain anyway that would persist if you did decrease the amount of SSRIs that you were taking. And if that insight is the truth, then it's important that we help people achieve that. When we oversimplify it to patients, which is sometimes what like psychiatrists will do is simply say, you don't have enough serotonin. If you take this SSRI, you'll have more serotonin in your system.
And it... gives all the credit to this drug, which is simply not the truth. And I think something about humans kind of seek truth. Serotonin seems to be this like regulatory transmitter that regulates anxiety and physiological responses.
If you have too much serotonin, though, because a lot of times we're talking about not having enough, but if you have too much, you might have basically almost like serotonin poisoning, which is associated like way too much with things like anxiety, sweating, and confusion. So again, it seems to be that serotonin is like this regulatory kind of neurotransmitter. I think it's interesting to think about neurotransmitters as all existing kind of in different systems of the body.
So like a lot of serotonin is actually produced in the gut. But at the same time, they all are part of this recipe of your current physiological, emotional consciousness experience. So sometimes it might be helpful to just be like dopamine does this, serotonin does this, but they all work together.
So. Thinking about like the proportion might be kind of helpful. So for example, in older adults, we see like decreases in dopamine and serotonin. So sometimes, so if it's as simple as dopamine and serotonin, or like happiness and joy and pleasure and all this stuff, you lose all of that as you get older, that sounds terrible. But if you actually observe older adult literature, it seems like older adults actually get kind of happier and like, and certainly less anxious than like young people trying to make their way in the world, right?
So it might be. then that neurotransmitters, it's not that simple after all. And older adults are kind of evidence that it's not that simple because even though there's this decrease in serotonin and dopamine, there's not a decrease in the things that serotonin and dopamine are supposed to be associated with. Or it might be that if both of those levels decrease and other neurotransmitter levels decrease, that's about like the proportion of like dopamine to serotonin in the body. So more cool ways to think about things.
Um, another cool way to think about the organism of the human is that the organism of the human exists in an environment. So, and again, the point of the nervous system is to respond to the environment. When you get super obsessed with just a brain, like if you see the brain as like a brain in a jar, and that's what we're studying.
Um, you forget the basics of what the neuro, the nervous system is. So for example, like the, um, seeing dopamine as being reward motivated. basically means like you're motivated to accomplish certain tasks. It's one of the reasons why adolescents start being more willing to want to study because they envision a future for themselves that they want to attain and they're able to be motivated to attain that future more than just playing all the time.
So if you imagine somebody with a lot of dopamine who lives in an environment where reaching goals seems um, possible for them. Like if they do study enough, their parents are doctors, they have tutors. If their school isn't doing a good enough job, they have access to all different types of resources, like educational documentaries and books, and they have a quiet place to study. Then their dopamine is in an environment that's conducive to the job it's trying to do.
Versus if you have a lot of dopamine and you live in a community where almost nobody gets out and you have no quiet place to study. Remember, dopamine is also associated with things like aggression. If you have a quiet place, then you can project all of that aggression onto aggressively studying for something. If you live in a place where people are constantly yelling and there's gunshots or whatever, then all that dopamine might.
again, might instead be associated with the motivation of purely staying alive, which is going to get in the way of quietly studying. So now that person or someone who is working this nine to five job in the middle of nothing, dead end position, whatever, I'm not saying people never escape those environments. I'm saying that that dopamine might actually interfere with that person's well being.
If you are constantly trying to seek a goal that your environment is just going to continue to kind of shoot you down on, then the dopamine might literally kind of drive you crazy. Dopamine is also implicated in things like schizophrenia, for instance. So anyway, as I mentioned, I do think that understanding the consequences or the associations of neurotransmitters to psychological experiences is really important. A lot of times we oversimplify it within that particular individual if we just look one neurotransmitter at a time.
And we really oversimplify it in terms of the environment in which they exist. And we have a tendency to, again, remove something like free will. So if it was as simple as if you have serotonin, you feel happy, SSRIs would kind of work for just about everyone and in the long term.
And that's not really what we see. Neurotransmitters probably are implicated in emotional experiences because some people do find things like SSRIs or anti-anxiety medication that are built off of neurotransmitter hypotheses. The fact that some people find them helpful means that that theory is not complete garbage.
But I think that you can't ignore free will. which is why my favorite way of looking at something like SSRIs and other psychotropics is that it's like this neurological or neurochemical plot twist. But then you still need to feel like you are in charge of what to do with that plot twist.
And the same sort of way is like if you change someone's environment, if you brought them from a hot location to a cold location, their nervous system would change because of that plot twist. Eventually, you would go back to homeostasis, like something there's a beautiful lyric from a new Noah Kahn song. Pain is like cold water. Eventually your body just gets used to it. Eventually, if you change someone from one environment to another one, they're going to seek to go back to homeostasis.
But sometimes that environmental change can change everything. If you take someone from the ghetto and you bring them to Oxford. they are going to seek new knowledge.
Are they eventually going to go back to neutral where Oxford becomes their new normal and probably will even be bored by that? Yeah. But I think the person that like understands, I don't know, neurology and the person who doesn't understand neurology, I do think even though their body goes back to homeostasis, it's different type of homeostasis, maybe.
I don't know. So eventually if you go down all of those different abysses or... uh rabbit holes I do think that sometimes what happens is this feeling of like I don't know We're never going to get to concrete answers.
And maybe that's somewhat true. And maybe that's also kind of the beauty of it. So my recommendation is you genuinely talk about some of these things with people.
I think that compassionate and complex readings and understandings of the consequences of each type of understanding is really important. And what I mean by that, because I know that was a lot of like circular language, I'm so sorry, is... Sometimes for some people, simply saying depression is a neurochemical imbalance is the kindest thing that you can say because they're so used to blaming themselves for depression. So that hypothesis must have value if it is helpful to someone.
However, if that's not the whole truth, the alternative can also be empowering if it's put. well, which is that you still have agency over your own life, at least to a certain degree. I'm not willing to say that we have full agency over our lives because I've seen people be tied to the bottom rungs of the social hierarchy.
You can choose to believe that's not true, that every single person has the ability to outwork society. I don't think so. Even when I look at the people who are the most successful, I don't think they're the most successful. My hypothesis is that they have a fair amount of existential dread. Like, why is it that I've made it this high and so many people have nothing?
Plus, they become targets of society. That is 100% true. The steep price for fame and success is everybody watching you wanting you to fail. I've observed it many, many times now.
Of course, what you get is praise and love and money as well. But it doesn't seem to be like this ultimate answer. I think about some of the hard science people might think that this is like an irrelevant tangent if you are super serious about going to like something like medicine.
But basically, I'm referring to the biopsychosocial model that, yeah, you're an organism and some disciplines are going to mostly focus on what's going on in your like physical body. But that would never be the entire picture because you are an organism within an environment. You're responding to your environment.
Yeah, the most basic science version is like temperature. If it's hot outside, you're going to sweat because it's hot outside, not because of something going on inside. because of something in the environment.
But humans as more sophisticated creatures that have been able to build society and whatnot are responding to society and their mental framework, their cognitions, their motivation, and thus their health. So that being said, I do think that it's important to point out that probably you still have some degree of influence of your own psychological experience. Taking a medication that helps your brain use its serotonin more effectively can be absolutely life-changing.
However, what you decide to do with that extra dose of serotonin, not that it's an extra dose, again, we'll talk about it, but still matters. If you decide to, like, if you take an SSRI and you suddenly feel more chill and relaxed and you let yourself have a good sleep schedule. That's one decision. Another decision is to use that chill and relax and, you know, chilly scroll through TikTok for more hours.
I'm not saying that's the wrong decision. I'm saying that's a different decision. And being able to take stock of your own agency is really important. I like to constantly ask like, what and for whom am I sort of fighting for or in service of? Because you are always fighting for or in service of something.
If you search for evidence to suggest that we are simply the result of the biochemicals in our brain, again, that can be a really kind perspective. But you are going to find evidence to suppose that. The other hypothesis that we have agency over our biology, that's really hard to show scientifically.
It just is. You're never going to be able to take full stock of every single molecule of serotonin in somebody's brain. Which means that if somebody is happier than someone else, you don't know if it's because of their decisions, their environment, or literally the amount of serotonin. So for instance, what I mean by this is like, let's say you're looking into autism.
More and more people are being diagnosed with autism in the United States every year. And maybe that's a really good thing because it helps people get services that are helpful to them. Anything that gets people more help is like Gucci in my mind.
But still, then if you read a study, let's say you know people who are diagnosed with autism. And then you read a study all about how their brain is sort of not functioning well. And in some ways, that's really compassionate to them, right?
It kind of like validates their struggle. On the other hand, it's one thing to say an individual sort of struggles to adjust socially, because that is as much the responsibility of other people and their social environment as it is their responsibility. Some things that we label as autism, like uh, like having a particular area of interest. I think that's an example I've used in the past that you're kind of like obsessive about.
Um, in some ways, maybe that's a diagnosis. In other ways, it might be like a personality trait. So, and it might be just as important for the environment to perceive that, to choose to perceive that person.
Well, if you attach those symptoms to something in the brain, then the idea is that their brain is deficient. in some way and it's more like concrete like if you knew that the differences in that person's brain that are related to them having a special interest are also necessary like it's still their brain is one big neural network and so that neural network is the same thing that produces that person's joy for dancing and like not caring what anybody else thinks kind of a thing would you really want to like treat their brain. Or there's a big difference between flipping the script and just sort of observing, like, wow, that's what makes their brain tick. Again, psychology has this tendency to like, take this, like, let me fix you kind of a perspective. And as we discussed, understanding how your brain ticks is a really great way to assert more agency over the brain, which is essentially like true mental health.
I also like to keep in mind, when are we judging individuals instead of wondering the shortcomings of the systems in which we exist? Basically, attaching specific outcomes to physical differences has been used throughout human history to ostracize, condemn, hate on other people. And doing so using neuroscience is arguably not that different. Let's say that the environment, like not having a good enough environment, not having a good education, so on and so forth, influenced the brain.
Of course it does. Of course it does. If I have a lot of stimuli, my brain is going to learn more stimuli versus if I grow up in a tiny little room without any toys, my brain is not going to develop as much.
Now let's say that race is somewhat relevant to socioeconomic status. And all I did was compare different races of humans. And it looks like different races of humans are associated with different neuro functioning. Then that data kind of justifies those socioeconomic differences. Let's say I don't want to talk about race in America because I'm not ready for it.
This is a neuroscience data. Let's say there's purple people and pink people. The purple people have historically been the purple people are more likely to be.
more likely to end up in lower socioeconomic statuses, right? More likely to live in poverty. What did I say?
Purple people and the pink people are more likely to live in wealth. I'm trying, and then I do a study, and I see that purple people have less brain functioning in the hippocampus associated with memory, and then pink people who have more functioning in the hippocampus. Then that data...
might just you could look at it two ways. One is that that is the outcome of poverty versus wealth. Another way to look at it is like it justifies the way things are.
Pink people are the doctors and purple people are the nurses. And look, of course, there's doctors and nurses, because of actual physical brain differences. It's not my fault. It's not society's fault. It is actual differences between people.
Of course, we know that these biases exist. exist and we try really hard to overcome them. But the fact of the matter is it's good to point out the consequences of looking at things from a purely materialistic way and not zooming out and looking at it in a humane humanities kind of way.
So my advice is to choose interpretations that increase free will and are compassionate to the struggles. Like it's not as simple as just choosing happiness. But you don't want to make people feel like they don't have any free will unless we legitimately don't have free will. Okay, so how do cells actually communicate? They communicate under electrical signals through the mechanism of action potentials, or the experience of action, the phenomenon of action potentials.
So that electrical signal is conducted along the axon to the synapse, which is the gap between neuron A and neuron B. Here's the handy dandy axon, which is myelinated. And then here is a tiny little synaptic gap.
So the really cool thing about action potential is that it's an all or nothing phenomenon. It's like shooting a gun. Once a certain threshold has been met, the electrical signal is going to be conducted all the way down the axon.
It's not like you get a little hiccup and maybe the electrical signal gets like here. It's like once that threshold has been met, it's a bit of a flood and it's gonna send the signal all the way to the axon terminals, which are going to release those neurotransmitters. But... So that's like a categorical difference, right? Remember, we talked about continuous versus categorical.
um definitions or variables or perspectives that's a categorical one but there's a continuous threshold being met like how much um how many ions are being channeled into the dendrites until that threshold has been met so there's this continuous build-up and then there's a categorical like gun being fired Cells usually exist in the polarized state, which means that there's more negative ions on the inside. And then on the outside, you have positively charged sodium ions in general. More positive on the outside, more negative on the inside. And you have these channels that can open if the action potential has been fired off.
So let's look at an example of what this might look like. You have a little bit of excitement. Look at the little doggie. Oh, so cute. I must pet the doggie.
I have a dopamine need to get the reward of getting the little pooch a tap on its head. So neurotransmitters get on the move. So let's say this is neuron B, right?
It's receiving signals from neuron A. We don't see neuron A, but these are the dendrites. So dendrites receive the signals from neuron A.
The axon terminals release the signals to the next neuron. dendrites receive axon terminals release. So here, what we don't see is we're receiving neurotransmitters from other neurons. And those, when enough of that happens, they channel, I know, very sophisticated here.
We're getting the basic idea. Channels open and ions will enter. We're getting excited, right?
But like I said, they're all hanging out in like the cell body. um until depolarization occurs so the action potential gunshot is released and then channels open which let positive ions in which allow this system to move all of that electrical energy to these axon terminal buttons and then what happens if you remember there's vesicles hanging out down there those vesicles get pushed down all the way to the bottom of this axon terminals and then pop open like a balloon and release the neurotransmitters into the synapse. And arguably, the goal is to get the neurotransmitters into the next neuron, into the receptors.
And the receptors are like these specific shapes. And different neurons will have different shapes that fit perfectly like a lock and key into the receptors. And if enough of that occurs, the wave of depolarization influences the next neuron.
So to summarize all of that, dendrites on this neuron receive the input from another neuron. Information goes from the dendrites to the cell body. And if a certain threshold is met, an action potential occurs. And that action potential goes down the axon to... the axon terminals and releases the neurotransmitters into the synapse.
This moment in time is where a lot of psychotropic medications come in, or especially SSRIs, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors. Again, important for depression and sometimes anxiety. So essentially what happens in this gap is a lot of times the neurotransmitters will hang out in the synapse before they can reach the receptor cells. or the receptor receptors on the next neuron. And we have these transporter cells that kind of like sweep up this in between area.
And arguably what happens for some people, and then they kind of send it back to the original neuron. And the way that I would put it is that some people's transporter cells are just like really efficient, they clean up a little too quickly, is the argument is the argument, you know. maybe that person's brain is working perfectly well. And again, they're in a bad environment for their particular brain. And if they change the environment, their brain would be perfectly fine.
But because they need to adapt to their current environment, they're not going to change their lives overnight, then something like SSRIs can be really helpful. Or perhaps it's the case that no matter where that person was, their transporters are just too quick. So what the SSRIs do is basically prevent that from happening. They prevent re-uptake.
uptake. They're inhibiting the reuptake. Way over simply put, they kind of like keep the neurotransmitter.
The goal is to keep the neurotransmitters in the synapse for longer so that more neurotransmitters have the opportunity to get to cell. B, which sometimes seems to be the goal of neuro communication. You know, another way to think about it, though, is just to like simply observe and say that, well, if that was the goal for neuro communication to always be that as many neurotransmitters get from neuron A to neuron B as possible, then why do we even have these transporter cells?
And interesting questions to ask. So. anyway, don't neurons get tired? They sure do.
That's why I'm tired right now. Don't blame it on me. Blame my neurons. They're in the refractory period where the cells can't fire.
During this process, repolarization occurs. So we let negative ions in and we release the positive and return the cell back to, again, a polarized state. So what does this phase feel like? feels like your brain dead.
You know, when you like literally cannot, it turns out you literally cannot. Those cells are not going to work. You can rub them together like you're rubbing together your last two dimes, seeing if you can create some bit of friction. You're not going to make another coin out of that.
They are done. So of course, this can feel really unpleasant when you think you need to use your brain constantly to do what you're supposed to do. right?
But maybe your brain is trying to get you to do what you're supposed to do, and you just have a different opinion. So let's say you're studying for four hours, and halfway through, you legitimately cannot. You're not doing that anymore. Your cells are in the refractory period. So that doesn't necessarily mean that you're done for.
In fact, at that moment, let's say you went and took a walk. Taking a walk is going to use different neurons. When you feel that brain dead feeling, usually it's because you've been doing the same thing for a long period of time. But you're using like certain neurons, you're not using your entire brain to do that one task.
So oftentimes, there can be something kind of pleasant about being sort of tired, especially if you have more freedom in your schedule, where you can at that moment, go out and take a walk. On the other hand, if you're taking like the MCAT that day, and you or you're performing a 12-hour surgery you can't take a walk in that moment so it is really important for people to train their brains to be able to have more um let's say uh resilience or persistence or stamina right you can train your brain to have more stamina you can train yourself to be able to use different parts of your brain on a task so you can train your brain maybe to go back to the polarized state a little bit quicker you So on and so forth, your brain is going to adapt to what you make it do. On the other hand, sometimes it's better to listen to your brain. So if you feel really brain dead doing a different type of activity, we'll use a different part of your brain and it might actually feel kind of pleasant as long as you have that freedom. It's also really interesting to think about something like energy.
So it's a little too simple to say that like, how do I put this? you're, if you're doing something, you're using neural energy. And if you're not doing something, you're not using neural energy, unless you're literally dead.
Even when you're not doing anything, your brain is still working. Again, you're using different parts of your brain. So the feeling of exhaustion, for example, some people can just go take a nap.
And that's really what their brain needs. But a lot of people don't want to just take a nap after that two hour period, they want to do something else. They're other parts of their neurons are craving activation and the neurons you've been overusing are craving, you know, peace and maybe glucose or something. So another thing that's helpful to kind of keep in mind when we put these puzzle pieces together is that the brain is using these electrical impulses. When we get to the consciousness chapter, we'll talk about how brainwaves occur at essentially different frequencies.
It's often kind of overlooked when we talk about neuropsychology, because neuropsychology doesn't exist in a different world as EEG data, where we're measuring kind of overall, again, brainwave frequency, but sort of. Everything kind of ends up existing in a slightly different niche field. But one of the ways we can think about it is like, okay, so when you're when you're chilling, right?
Like, doesn't it feel a little bit like things are going slower? And if we um looked at your brain wave frequency when you're chill there'd be like slower waves basically versus when you're thinking really fast there'd be these higher frequency waves so it's kind of interesting to include that into considering what this phase looks like and instead of being like one is better than the other if you think about someone who's really confident right in their intelligence when they are um working hard at their job, they might not be doing it with as much kind of maybe like anxious energy. They're very slowly, but surely plodding along, not very slowly, but very calmly plodding along. And so that type of vibe is probably indicative of different types of neural energy. And you and going to feel different in terms of this like brain dead kind of versus someone who's like high energy thinking lots of thoughts kind of a thing.
As I said, the fact of the matter is when you're brain dead, you're probably using like one particular part of the brain. Neuronal connections create these different sort of pathways that create different systems, different neural networks. So when we talk about the brain, yeah, we might be talking about when you're doing physics, you're using this one part of the brain, but we're also talking about different particular neurons and different neural pathways, and which pathway different neurons take also tends to be associated with different outcomes.
So just some more nuances to keep in mind. All right, let's... put it all together. You got the anatomy of a neuron, you got neuron A, neuron B, that's the most simplest way to put it. But the truth is they're all going to kind of like pile up on each other and create this neural field.
And then those neural fields compose the different your nervous system entirely and the different like subsystems of your nervous system. So the first subsystem we're going to talk about is a peripheral nervous system. This is pretty much everything except the brain, the star of the show and the spinal cord. So So everything else.
Peripheral nervous system transmits information to and from the central nervous system, your brain and your spinal cord. Mostly we're talking about the brain star of the show. It keeps us in touch with the world and perform sensory and motor functions for the body. So every nerve, for example, there's like bundle of neurons and its entire intention is to like connect to things like the muscles and the organs and tell it what to do. Because again, basic thing of the nervous system.
Yeah. Connecting us to the, uh, outside world and making our inside world, make our body move in order to manipulate the outside world, so on and so forth. But like the building blocks of the nervous system is neurons, which is the main task is to communicate. And then via that communication, we move.
So within the peripheral nervous system, we have the somatic versus autonomic nervous system, starting with somatic, think somatic body, it carries sensory information and controls movement of the skeletal muscles. So So somatic versus autonomic autonomic things like organs and stuff think automatic think stuff that you don't really want to be aware of like i don't want to know my digestive system is doing but i do want to have control over my muscles somatic is like muscles and being able to like perceive your senses so this there's two different pathways within the somatic nervous system the first is your sensory pathway this connects your senses to the central nervous system for instance right now this bunny Might initially have felt like, you know, something very nicely just brushing its feathers. So it would have felt it had the sensation of like feeling because of its senses.
But another one of our senses is vision. And it might see that cat and be like, oh, so your sensory pathway senses to the central nervous system. Central nervous system is your brain. Oh, nice feeling of being pet. Oh, vision of cat.
That's what we're getting right now. Senses. to central nervous system. Then our central nervous system processes that information.
Oh, that's definitely a cat. That thing is evil. That's a predator.
So then the motor pathway sends that information that the central nervous system, the brain just processed to the muscles. And hopefully the duckling knows what's good for it and runs the heck away from that cat. Okay.
That's somatic. Think bodily. Senses to brain. Brain makes decisions over here in the central nervous system and then send signals to the muscles that lets us.
run or do jazz hands. Okay. Then we have the autonomic nervous system. Again, this is within the peripheral.
Autonomic, think automatic. It carries messages between the central nervous system and the organs and glands. You have way less like active decision-making over this part of the nervous system is the best way to think about it.
So it controls activities normally outside of conscious control. Think automatic, automatic. However, me being a psychologist and just who I am as a person, I am a control freak.
I want to have control over literally everything. So my response to that is not with that attitude. So let's think about some of the things that are controlled by the autonomic nervous system. Things like blood pressure and blood rate or heart rate, blood vessels, glands, pupil dilation, digestion, organs. Again, all the stuff that you really don't want that much control over.
Think about the autonomic nervous system as being like the downstream consequences of some of your decisions and parts of the brain that you really don't want to be particularly aware of. Think about how onerous it would be to have to decide every single time you inhale and exhale. That being said, you can decide to inhale and exhale at a different rate.
Like your brain's going to be basically okay with that, but you have to like decide. And By choosing to breathe differently, that's going to eventually affect your heart rate, but you can't just tell your heart to beat at a different rate. Same thing with something like your blood pressure. So most of these things you can influence in a downstream consequence kind of way, but you're not going to be able to digest your food, tell your large intestine to digest at a different rate or just differently in general, the same way you can.
freak out the people watching the video. Another way to think about it, again, is like, your brain, these parts of your brain are set up to like, make you survive, like period, whether or not you wanna. So if you've ever tried to like, hold your breath, for example, you can decide to try and hold your breath, you're going to be fighting with the part of your brain that's controlling your breathing, not.
all of you is ever going to just decide to stop breathing. You're going to be raging against your intuition. If you try to stop, like if you hold your breath in a pool to see who can hold it longer kind of a thing.
Some parts of your autonomic system do involve a ton of neurons that we tend to associate with like mental health. So I've said it a bunch of times already, most of your serotonin is produced in the gut. In fact, your gut contains what we call the second brain. Around the lining of the gut is almost 100 million neurons, which is more than the spinal cord, which is sort of part of your central nervous system. So it's one of the kind of more central, like it's directly connected to the brain.
So when we think about the spinal cord, it's easier to see it as kind of like more important, more central than parts of the peripheral nervous system and more than other parts of the peripheral. nervous system. So when you say like going with your gut, that comes from or is justifying or is justified by this finding that your gut is actually quite smart if we were going to judge smartness by like a number of neurons. When we think about the autonomic nervous system, we think about two different responses, which are kind of their own sub nervous systems, all their own, the sympathetic versus parasympathetic nervous system.
So these two are going to work almost as like a seesaw and influence the functioning of the autonomic nervous system combined with the somatic nervous system is your peripheral nervous system. And the whole point of the peripheral nervous system is to communicate with the central nervous system where you can process information more in-depthly and then send information back to your peripheral nervous system. Okay. So sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system. Hopefully you've heard these terms before.
Basic, just if you haven't, no big deal. We'll talk about it now. I love teaching things.
So the sympathetic nervous system is fight or flight. It's actually, it's the four Fs. It's excitability.
It's fighting, fleeing, feeding. So like want, like desiring, and similarly mating, LOL, because the four Fs and this is a family show. So think like.
High intensity kind of responses. So fight or flight is like your pupils dilating, your heart rate increasing. You might sweat more.
Digestion slows because you can't exert energy on digestion. Digestion makes you feel at peace. And we are not at peace.
We're releasing cortisol, the stress hormone. More oxygen is needed for muscles. You're basically like gearing up.
You're ready to run the race or fight the bear or take that exam. It's da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da. It mobilizes the body for action. Okay, ready?
Real quick from the comfort of our couches. Let's watch the worst day of somebody's life and the fight or flight response in action. This little bear is getting into a poor lady's car. Let's see what will happen next.
There she is. So innocent. Doesn't know what's about to hit her. Oh, dear. Oh, dear.
See, this is like fight. This is like, let me do something. That would be flee.
Now she's fleeing. You see? So that's basically whenever there's a big threat, your body wants to keep you alive.
You got two options. When you see a bear, you can fight it or you can run the heck away. Since then, we've done extra research on like, you know, more modern day threats.
And we observe things like fawning. So if you've ever felt like the professor's about to get mad at you, right, you just start talking about how much you like their class. That's called fawning. Sometimes you don't even realize you're fawning. When you're afraid of somebody, you just try and like befriend them.
That's the other more kind of feminine approach to crises is when there's a crisis, let's say in the community, there's a bear that keeps coming into town and you don't know why the boys are dealing with the bear. The girls have to deal with the fact that everybody is like scared and they got to protect the babies, right? So tend and befriend is like, oh, let me take care of you at the end of a long day, or let me befriend other people in my community to make sure they take care of me. On the other hand, we have the parasympathetic nervous system.
This is rest and digest. This is bringing the body back to neutral, perhaps after the sympathetic nervous system kind of brings it out of neutral. So this is all about slowing the heart rate after escape.
or maintaining a reasonable heart rate and relaxation. It's about responding to times of high stress and also conserving the body and conserving functions for the next time we need to run. So when I think sympathetic, I think like sympathy, and that almost makes me think about like rest and digest.
So you gotta flip it in your mind if that's the connection you make too. Sympathetic is high intensity and parasympathetic is responding to that high intensity or... keeping us chill for the next time we have to respond with high intensity.
So that either one of those is associated with like floods of neurotransmitters and hormones through the body that gives you that your body that type of like vibe. And it's also going to be associated with different types of emotions, like something like anxiety, for example, seems like a real sympathetic nervous system types of response. Something like hysterical crying might be more sympathetic.
And if we're talking about like sadness versus like depression is maybe more parasympathetic, maybe more down. Contentment is probably more parasympathetic, like we chill in versus joy and exuberance is probably more sympathetic nervous system. So neither is good or bad, even though we oftentimes think about the sympathetic nervous system being pure survival and for good reasons, even the mating one is survival of the species. So interestingly, of course, These can go awry, right? They're meant to keep us alive, but they can also drive us crazy.
So something like anxiety, we might say, is your body being overly interested in constantly getting ready to fight. I love this little meme. Fight what?
Just get ready. It's like me and assuming that you guys like are gonna hate these videos, I'm basically like gearing up to try and prove you wrong that I can teach you something when either you're gonna watch it or you're gonna not, it's the truth of the matter. Interestingly, when it comes to like social goals, right?
We get really nervous when we're going out on a date or talking to somebody new or going to a party where we're not sure we know people or maybe going to a party in general. Like hopefully you get excited too, but there's nervousness associated with that too, which is fascinating. In fact, social anxiety is one of the most prominent forms of anxiety because, you know, to really feel at peace, to feel that rest and digest that parasympathetic thing, which we also sort of crave.
We need things like oxytocin, which oftentimes comes from our relationships with other people. So it's kind of like in order to feel truly comfortable, to feel truly happy, you need other people. But perhaps nothing makes us more nervous than other people because we're kind of at the top of the hierarchy in terms of other species.
So our biggest predators or our biggest ops are mostly other people. So of course, our nervous system is going to be implicated in social situations. It's like we're most afraid of what we want. the most.
And that's always going to feel like more sympathetic nervous system, but we want to attain chill. I must attain chill. I would do anything for chill. So arguably we're still seeking that parasympathetic response, but the mere nature of seeking it kind of gets in the way of achieving it.
So you can set the goal of being chill, but you can't set it with too much extremeness is one way to think about it. All right, that's the peripheral nervous system kind of setting the scene for the central nervous system. Of course, the peripheral is important as well. Again, somatic, taking information from the senses to the central nervous system.
And then once the central nervous system decides, it sends that decision to your muscles, to your skeleton to get you to run or chill or whatever. And then autonomic is a lot of stuff you can't really control, like your heart rate and your breathing and your sweating and things like that. And it's balanced via the sympathetic and parasympathetic attempt at maintaining homeostasis or maintaining the best possible response.
Sometimes, yeah, homeostasis is more parasympathetic, like we chill in. But other times you don't want to be chilling. You want excitation. You want to be excited and thrilled and so on and so forth.
And the goal of all of that is, again, communicate with the central nervous system. Let's talk about the first part, the spinal cord. This is one of the primary pathways connecting the brain to the peripheral nervous system.
It is the primary pathway connecting the brain to the peripheral nervous system. Along your spinal cord, you have sensory neurons and motor neurons. So just like we talked about in the somatic system. Uh, sensory neurons receive signals from the senses. So that'd be the sensory pathway.
And then motor neurons send signals to the muscles. Motor mean like getting you to move sensory, meaning like receiving senses. Um, the spinal cord can even like make decisions all on its own without the help of the brain in terms of simple reflexes. We see most of this in like babies, but, um, like if you're, you go to the doctor and they hitched your knee and then you kick it.
That's a simple reflex, which doesn't need the brain's help. The body does it all on its own. Spinal cord, I think is one of the most important things for understanding the mind-body connection in terms of like your full body. Thinking about posture is so powerful.
So I'm going to make you a stand up now. Please just do it. Okay? Hang on. Okay.
So here's what you're standing, right? Get up. You're younger than me. You can do it.
All right, let's go. So here's what I want you to do. I want you to experience how powerful even just your spine or in this case, we're going to think about the spine in terms of like our posture and your mental flavor. I don't know how your brain feels.
Okay, ready? So we're gonna do five shoulder rolls going forward. Don't look at me do it yourself.
Ready? One, two, and each time I want you to feel kind of like a rounding in your spine, not like a bad way, but just like, you know, if you were kind of bummed that day, three, four, and last one, take a big deep breath and then kind of like let your, let your posture like slump, not in an exaggerated way, but in like a day when you like, you're like really bummed out. Like you're just kind of like walking in class.
Like don't make eye contact with me. Maybe your shoulders are super front. Maybe your spine is like, again, kind of rounded. If you're sitting down, get up.
But if you're going to continue to sit down, slump like this in your chair. Okay. So I want us to take a minute to just like, take a couple of inhales and exhales here and like, feel how this feels.
Okay. So We sometimes have a tendency to like judge states like this, right? Where we're just kind of like slumped over. But honestly, there's nothing wrong with this day. Like sometimes this is like your honest way that you feel that day, or just means like you are relaxed and this is the way that you relax.
So I just want us to feel how it feels. Even if we decide we don't in general, like the days where we're kind of walking like this, like don't make eye contact with me, or even like sitting like this, like staring at the floor. Even in general, if we don't like those days, Um, the first step to, uh, sort of achieving the type of mental state that you'd like is to just notice how your body reflects what's going on in your mind.
If you judge it, if then you're like, I have bad posture, that's just going to make you be even more kind of like Eeyore, you know, like disappointed in yourself. So we're just feeling it. Okay. Hopefully by now, if you've had this posture for long enough, you kind of like are hungry to like stand up illustrator. So now we're going to do five shoulder rolls back.
And each time I want you to like lift your chin a little bit. Pretend like there's a string on the, on your spinal cord pulling from here. And something about that is also like lifting you up, creating space in your, in between each of your, what do you call it?
Vertebrae. Two, three, four. And on the fifth one, kind of try and access something like a superhero pose. It's going to feel really cringy at first because we're really cringy about feeling proud of ourselves. It's absolutely insane.
So think like. you know, kind of like your superhero kind of a stance. Feel your clavicle, your chest bones kind of like expanding, and then the back of your shoulder blades expanding as well.
And like I said, something pulling you from here, so you feel lots of space. Let's take a couple breaths here, not assume that this one is better than the other one, but just kind of let ourself feel maybe what it's like to have some extra space in those vertebrae. So like, I do feel like this stance kind of like gives me a little bit more space, a little bit more mental clarity.
I feel a little more awake. It's a little bit easier for my eyes to feel a little bit more open. I imagine the days when I'm walking through school, like, hi, how you doing? Like this, you know, there's something really pleasant about that. I don't think I could stay in this state all day, every day, because it'd be kind of dishonest.
But I think it is true that when you notice yourself slumping like this, if you notice it and you don't hate on yourself for doing it. You have the opportunity to like stand up very straight. In class, if you feel yourself getting bored or tired, deciding to sit like a super studious person is sometimes really, really helpful.
On the other hand, if you feel yourself getting tired or you feel yourself feeling a little bit fake, deciding like it's okay to just kind of like go like this, the point is to choose. And when you choose, you notice how that influences other parts of your body and your kind of like mental clarity. And again, I don't think it's bad or good.
I think the first step is to notice where you naturally are that day and then see what happens if you try and change it up a little bit. And that's kind of like the power of recognizing your spinal cord's connection to your central nervous system and how your central nervous system is going to implicate all of those other downstream consequences through the peripheral nervous system.