#threat response

dissociation is a trickier one to pin down because it’s almost always a product of trauma (and burnout which is a trauma in of itself). it’s ‘this situation is not safe let’s channel a more functional version of me to survive it and ignore the rest of me’ again and again and again for years on end, often starting during childhood, impacting things like memory and ability to access your own emotions, in more severe cases different versions of you not integrating into one whole person.

Introduction:In today’s fast-paced digital world, businesses and individuals are at constant risk of cyber threats. These threats can range from simple malware infections to sophisticated cyber-attacks, which can cause significant damage to your network, devices, and even your reputation. Therefore, it’s crucial to take proactive measures to mitigate these threats and ensure your network and…

Patricia K. Fahy, MD

  We are pulling ourselves onto a new stage with these first blogs.  Lynn and I are sitting with Cory at a round table, three laptops open, all of us with eyes locked on the icons and sample feeds on this freshly minted Tumblr site.  Cory is facile with this stuff, tweets and cookies and multiple tabs and html. She explains how it will work and what we need to do to put our ideas “out there” in a public way.

    I think about SCARF.  An acronym cooked up by neuroscientist David Rock to identify the five social motivators.   Status, Certainty, Autonomy, Relatedness, and Fairness.  We humans slide up and down a continuum that runs from “threat” to “reward” depending on whether these SCARF elements are threatened or safeguarded.  Any encounter with another human may cause subtle or seismic shifts to our SCARF balance.  When teaching leadership courses I’ve used this quote (source unknown) to emphasize how the use of sarcasm, particularly for leaders, is a terrible idea:

“The half-life of a public insult is 20 years.”

This idea of the persistence of an insult is corroborated by David Rock.  He says that threats to our status (the “S” of SCARF) cause the    same   part of the brain to “light up” in functional MRI (fMRI) scans as physical pain.  The difference is—when you reflect back on physical pain that part of your brain doesn’t light up again.  When you reflect back on a status threat the pain site lights up—your brain experiences the threat, and the pain, again.

Monkeys can identify human hunters

Excerpts from Article:

According to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, all four species [of woolly monkey] are hunted for food.

To understand how the monkeys responded to this threat, researchers from Imperial College, London, UK travelled to Ecuador to study the behaviour of Poeppig's woolly monkey.

"We worked with wild woolly monkeys [and] presented them with a person behaving as a hunter, gatherer or researcher at two sites with differing hunting pressure," explained PhD student Sarah Papworth, co-author of the paper.

Gatherers are local people that collect food and materials close to settlements and researchers are academics studying the forest and the animals living within it.

"After seeing a hunter, woolly monkeys are quieter, move less and are less visible than when seeing non-hunters.

Comparing the reactions of monkeys in an area associated with high levels of hunting and a part of the forest where monkeys were under lower hunting pressures, Ms Papworth made a further discovery.

Monkeys in the higher risk area were quiet when gatherers were nearby. But they made more vocalisations when researchers were present whereas monkeys in "safer" areas hid from researchers and not gatherers.

Ms Papworth suggested that, due to their distance from human settlements, this could be because the monkeys were unfamiliar with gatherers.