THE SIMPLE THERMODYNAMICS OF ENLIGHTENMENT

When S+H was conceived, evolutionary neuroscientist PEGGY LA CERRA, PhD, awakened to a new understanding of the nature of the mind created by evolution. It’s not widely taught, but the science seems pretty obvious.

- PEGGY LA CERRA, PhD

MY AWAKENING HAPPENED in January of 1996. I’d done a postdoctoral fellowship in evolutionary psychology and cognitive neuroscience, and now I was trying to understand a brain circuit involved in learning and clinical depression. It was a time of extreme focus on this project, and I let go of a serious relationship—a man I had considered marrying. What happened next was, in retrospect, neither uncommon nor surprising: I lost the desire to work, my ability to focus diminished, and I spent a lot of time in bed. But then, as I paused to consider this new state of mind, something remarkable happened: a flash of insight. What I realized is that the circuit in my brain that I had been studying, the circuit responsible for learning behavior and depression, must have down-shifted with the loss of the relationship. This was why my mood had darkened. And then, suddenly, the thrill of having had this insight reversed all my symptoms.

In an instant, I grokked that this learning circuitry in my brain was doing a remarkably complex accounting of the things that mattered to my present and future wellbeing. The loss of a potential life partner had dropped me down physically, behaviorally, emotionally, and cognitively. But the insight that proved critical to my professional future raised me back up.

Why, I wondered, would we have evolved to downshift and upshift so quickly in response to such different life experiences? What was the adaptive pressure that had created such a mechanism in our brains? My mind started to race across all that I knew from basic science as wells as years of research on the brain and behavior, trying to understand what evolution had wrought here. I went back to the most obvious facts of life.

OBVIOUS FACT 1