Cerebral Entanglements: How the Brain Shapes Our Public and Private Lives – Dr Allan Hamilton
"your brain is editing out what it thinks you should know about and what you shouldn't know about." -Dr. Allan Hamilton Understanding why we react the way we do, where our patterns come from and how we can show up differently gives us strength, agency and internal safety because it increases our ability to choose... choose our boundaries, our behaviors, our values, our preferences. Understanding our brains and nervous systems helps us stop repeating behaviors and over and over again that don't lead to the experiences we truly yearn for, particularly when it comes to our relationships and desire for true, authentic connection. In this episode with Dr. Allan Hamilton, we cover many themes, such as what happen to brains in love and after rejection, gender, the effects of video games and social media on bio-behavioral outcomes, and intergenerational trauma. We also talk about following one’s interests, passions and curiosities - you’ll hear about my beginnings at the age of 6 hosting N-E-R-D radio on my double cassette player 🙂 Learn more about Dr. Hamilton's latest book Cerebral Entanglements: How the Brain Shapes Our Public and Private Lives Listen on: Spotify Apple Podcasts What you will hear as a thread that weaves through our conversation is that... Human connection matters. Safe, trusting relationships have the capacity to buffer the effects of negative influences that exist in our world. Dr. Hamilton explains how the hormone oxytocin plays a pivotal role in fostering trust, affection, and deep connections between individuals. This hormone, often referred to as a "bonding hormone," is crucial for nurturing relationships, whether through intimate conversations, warm hugs, or even petting a dog. The research we discuss highlights the importance of how human connection can offer a buffer against life's challenges. We also see in this interview that.. the brain, more than anything, is a predictive system. It conserves energy by attempting to predict - rather than truly understand - what is in front of it. When information is missing, it fills in the blanks based on its past. It seeks out cues that confirm its predictions and distorts or ignores anything that could contradict what it already predicted to be true. Because we are generally surrounded by the same people over and over again in the first phases of life, many of the sociobiological signals we experience are repeated enough to build up a strong, predictive dataset for our brain to make calculations about what the ‘world’ is like. But this data set is limited. It’s based on only a few people. From this tiny number of people, it creates a model of how the world is - what it contains for us in terms of human-to-human interaction. The brain deals in long-term, repetitive patterns. Until we become aware of these patterns and predictions, we may use them so unconsciously and often that we re-create scenarios that return us to our familiar ways of perceiving and inter...