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Kevin Mitchell: How the Wiring of Our Brains Shapes Who We Are

“[Neuroplasticity] is what brains are for, they’re for changing so that we can adapt to our environment, learn from our experiences, live successfully in the world. (…)

While we want to learn from experience, we don’t want to learn from every experience.

What we want to remember is the things that are important to us, things that were salient, rewarding, punishing.

Those plasticity mechanisms only happen if you’re getting a signal from another part of the brain that says: that was rewarding, or punishing.

Those signals are carried by neuromodulatory circuits, things like dopamine, serotonin. and other chemicals from different parts of the brain.

Watching your favorite movies over and over is good for you. The repetition calms you because knowing the outcome of a story helps you to feel safe in an unpredictable world, and it comforts you by recapturing lost feelings.

Jeroen de Rijke/Willem de Rooij - Bouquet I (2002) (via)

“I knew my husband very well.  We’d been living together for twenty-one years.  So it was obvious that something was going on.  Suddenly he started playing guitar and writing songs.  The songs were OK, but I read some of the lyrics and they clearly weren’t written for me.  He started wearing cologne.  He started liking new foods that he’d never even tried before.  So I was suspicious.  Then one night he came home crying.  I said: ‘What happened?  Did you kill someone?’  He told me that he’d gotten a girl pregnant.  She’d just had the baby and didn’t want to keep it.  Then he asked me if I would raise it!  I said: ‘Sure, give it to me.’  I arranged to meet the woman in the park, and she handed me the boy.  He was only three days old.  He felt like my son the moment I held him.  I got rid of my husband a few months later.  But I kept the baby.  He’s sixteen now.”