The Emotional Life of Your Brain Quotes

“As a result, nature has endowed the human brain with a malleability and flexibility that lets it adapt to the demands of the world it finds itself in. The brain is neither immutable nor static but continuously remodeled by the lives we lead.”
― Richard J. Davidson, The Emotional Life of Your Brain: How Its Unique Patterns Affect the Way You Think, Feel, and Live--and How You Can Change Them

“In short, the brain has the power to recruit healthy neurons to perform the function of the damaged ones. Neuroplasticity enables the brain to reassign jobs.”
― Richard J. Davidson, The Emotional Life of Your Brain: How Its Unique Patterns Affect the Way You Think, Feel, and Live--and How You Can Change Them

“In my research, I have discovered practical, effective ways to do so. I’ll explain more in chapter 11, but for now let it suffice to say that you can modify your Emotional Style to improve your resilience, social intuition, sensitivity to your own internal emotional and physiological states, coping mechanisms, attention, and sense of well-being. The amazing fact is that through mental activity alone we can intentionally change our own brains. Mental activity, ranging from meditation to cognitive-behavior therapy, can alter brain function in specific circuits,”
― Richard J. Davidson, The Emotional Life of Your Brain: How Its Unique Patterns Affect the Way You Think, Feel, and Live--and How You Can Change Them

“But the scientists had the other half of their group of volunteers only imagine playing the notes; they did not actually touch the ivories. Then the researchers measured whether the motor cortex had noticed. It had. The region that controls the fingers of the right hand had expanded in the virtual pianists just as it had in the volunteers who had actually played the piano. Thinking, and thinking alone, had increased the amount of space the motor cortex devoted to a specific function.”
― Richard J. Davidson, The Emotional Life of Your Brain: How Its Unique Patterns Affect the Way You Think, Feel, and Live--and How You Can Change Them

“you will think about someone you care about, such as your parents, sibling, or beloved, and will let your mind be invaded by a feeling of altruistic love (wishing well-being) or of compassion (wishing freedom from suffering) toward them. After some training you will generate such feeling toward all beings and without thinking specifically about someone. While in the scanner, you will try to generate this state of loving-kindness and compassion until an unconditional feeling of loving-kindness and compassion pervades the whole mind as a way of being, with no other consideration or discursive thoughts.”
― Richard J. Davidson, The Emotional Life of Your Brain: How Its Unique Patterns Affect the Way You Think, Feel, and Live - and How You Can Change Them

“People who are very Tuned In to context tend to have strong connections from the hippocampus to areas in the prefrontal cortex that control executive functions and that hold long-term memories in the neocortex.”
― Richard J. Davidson, The Emotional Life of Your Brain: How Its Unique Patterns Affect the Way You Think, Feel, and Live--and How You Can Change Them

“recent research has shown that when we empathize, the brain activates many of the same networks as when we ourselves experience pain, physical or otherwise.”
― Richard J. Davidson, The Emotional Life of Your Brain: How Its Unique Patterns Affect the Way You Think, Feel, and Live--and How You Can Change Them

“mindfulness meditation will transform your reactivity to the signals by turning down the volume on your amygdala and orbital frontal cortex. But if you have trouble discriminating internal bodily cues, mindfulness meditation can amplify them by increasing the gain on the insula.”
― Richard J. Davidson, The Emotional Life of Your Brain: How Its Unique Patterns Affect the Way You Think, Feel, and Live--and How You Can Change Them

“It is rare that the human mind can determine the truths of nature, or even of ourselves, by intuition or casual observation. That”
― Richard J. Davidson, The Emotional Life of Your Brain: How Its Unique Patterns Affect the Way You Think, Feel, and Live--and How You Can Change Them

“This study, which we published in 2007, provided strong evidence that the brain’s attention systems can be trained. Like any form of workout, from weight lifting to cycling to learning a second language, it causes an enduring change in the system that is engaged. In this case, that change is the ability to maintain laser-sharp concentration with less and less activity in the brain’s attention circuit.”
― Richard J. Davidson, The Emotional Life of Your Brain: How Its Unique Patterns Affect the Way You Think, Feel, and Live - and How You Can Change Them

“Research from other labs had linked the neural synchrony of high-frequency brain waves to mental processes such as attention, working memory, learning, and conscious perception; the suspicion is that by firing in sync, neurons cause far-flung networks to work together, with the result that cognitive and emotional processes become more integrated and coherent.”
― Richard J. Davidson, The Emotional Life of Your Brain: How Its Unique Patterns Affect the Way You Think, Feel, and Live - and How You Can Change Them

“This happens when someone who is hyper-focused on social context becomes emotionally paralyzed, so intent on parsing every nuance of the social environment that—like a dinner guest taking her place at an elaborately set table and finding six forks flanking her plate—she is afraid of making the wrong move. Similarly, someone who is extremely sensitive to context might shape her behavior to what she thinks the situation demands, presenting herself as one kind of person to her spouse, another kind to her boss, and still another kind to her friends, until soon she begins to doubt her own sincerity and authenticity.”
― Richard J. Davidson, The Emotional Life of Your Brain: How Its Unique Patterns Affect the Way You Think, Feel, and Live--and How You Can Change Them

“Then we carefully fitted a hairnet with electrodes sewn in place over each volunteer’s scalp, first soaking each sensor’s sponge tip in salt water so it would conduct electrical impulses better. From the control room next door, another assistant monitored the electrical contacts, yelling over the intercom when one needed to be fixed: “Eighty-seven in the right frontal region; thirty-six in the right parietal region!” (In that case, we would use a syringe to drip a little more salt solution onto the electrode’s sponge.) Each participant got a plastic cape to keep the drips off his or her clothes, so between the electrode-studded hairnets and the capes it looked like we were running a futuristic beauty salon.”
― Richard J. Davidson, The Emotional Life of Your Brain: How Its Unique Patterns Affect the Way You Think, Feel, and Live--and How You Can Change Them

“First, babies are very expressive emotionally, giggling or crying or recoiling in terror or disgust so strongly that you have no doubt what they’re feeling. Also, babies are blissfully ignorant of social constraints. An adult might try to stifle a guffaw if he thinks the humor in a video clip is sophomoric (albeit hilarious) and censor a disgusted grimace if he thinks showing disgust is unmanly. Babies wear their emotions on their sleeves.”
― Richard J. Davidson, The Emotional Life of Your Brain: How Its Unique Patterns Affect the Way You Think, Feel, and Live--and How You Can Change Them

“I didn’t trust the film clips we’d been using to induce the emotions we wanted in infants (it takes a more developed comic sensibility to find bathing gorillas amusing, after all), so I decided to go with the basics: video clips of an actress laughing or crying.”
― Richard J. Davidson, The Emotional Life of Your Brain: How Its Unique Patterns Affect the Way You Think, Feel, and Live--and How You Can Change Them

“Yet we had fingered the prefrontal cortex. This region was considered the seat of human reason, the locus of forethought and wisdom and rationality and other cognitive functions that distinguish us from “lower” animals. But we were saying it rules our emotions, too—and that the barricade that psychology had erected between reason and emotion has no basis in fact.”
― Richard J. Davidson, The Emotional Life of Your Brain: How Its Unique Patterns Affect the Way You Think, Feel, and Live--and How You Can Change Them

“Only when both muscle groups participated did we see a shift toward greater left-side activation in the brain. This finding supports the folk wisdom that if you intentionally produce a genuine smile, you will feel happier. We now had brain data to prove it.”
― Richard J. Davidson, The Emotional Life of Your Brain: How Its Unique Patterns Affect the Way You Think, Feel, and Live--and How You Can Change Them