Sefton10
Member
- Joined
- Oct 19, 2019
- Messages
- 1,593
"We often think of depression is a mood disorder, but depression is also metabolic disorder – meaning that, fundamentally, there is something wrong with your metabolism and your energy regulation. When you experience depression, you don’t experience that metabolic difficulty directly; you experience it as fatigue or distress, and it’s those symptoms that send you to the doctor. But under the hood, there are real metabolic issues."
"Now, what does it mean for a brain to stop spending? Well, it means that you don’t move around as much and you don’t learn new things. You stay “in your head” too much. Maybe you isolate yourself or surround yourself with people who are really predictable and like you. Maybe you don’t expose yourself to people who are different from you. Maybe you tend to avoid complexity and ambiguity, so you want simple single answers to complex issues and questions.
That, by the way, is the path to authoritarianism and totalitarian thinking. I’m not simplifying things to say, “look, if you’re metabolically compromised, you’re going to become like an authoritarian.” What I’m saying is that while we experience and understand things at the mental and social level, there’s this really basic metabolic level that we’ve been ignoring, and it’s important to understand as a piece of some of the biggest challenges that we face personally and also as a society."
"Now, what does it mean for a brain to stop spending? Well, it means that you don’t move around as much and you don’t learn new things. You stay “in your head” too much. Maybe you isolate yourself or surround yourself with people who are really predictable and like you. Maybe you don’t expose yourself to people who are different from you. Maybe you tend to avoid complexity and ambiguity, so you want simple single answers to complex issues and questions.
That, by the way, is the path to authoritarianism and totalitarian thinking. I’m not simplifying things to say, “look, if you’re metabolically compromised, you’re going to become like an authoritarian.” What I’m saying is that while we experience and understand things at the mental and social level, there’s this really basic metabolic level that we’ve been ignoring, and it’s important to understand as a piece of some of the biggest challenges that we face personally and also as a society."
How your brain is structured to predict what's going to happen next - The Hub
In this Hub Dialogue, The Hub’s editor-at-large Sean Speer speaks to Lisa Feldman Barrett, author of Seven and a Half lessons about the Brain.
thehub.ca