#neurobiology

#neurobiology

Over the course of 17 years, I lost three of my children, Johnny, Reggie, and Miah, each under devastating circumstances. My son Johnny died in a drowning accident in 2005 at just 13 years old. Reggie, who had catastrophic epilepsy, passed away in 2016 at 17 years old. And Miah, my beautiful daughter, died suddenly in 2021 at the age of 21 from the same rare neurodegenerative disorder that took Reggie: dentatorubral-pallidoluysian atrophy. My husband has also passed away from this same inherited disease.

When I think about why a physiological explanation for human behavior is more interesting to me than a philosophical one, I always say that the philosophical, or as it evolves in the 20th century, you get the psychological, and they're sort of the same thing for a little while. Psychology's incredibly useful science, but in a lot of cases, it's an outside-in science. The brain is actually an inside-out mechanism.

"I throw up every day before work now. When I hear his voice, I shake. I can't sleep, and I've lost weight. This job is killing me!" she cried. Kathy worked for a bullying boss whose recent tirades escalated to an unbearable level. The last straw for Kathy occurred when her boss stomped up behind her and slammed a large report binder on her desk, startling her.

In our current clinical landscape, "trauma" has become a ubiquitous term-both in the scientific literature and in popular discourse. The word is invoked in diagnostic manuals, self-help books, and even casual conversation. The dominant narrative around trauma today often privileges a view of trauma as a "thing"-a technical problem with distinct behavioral, neurobiological, or cognitive symptoms that exists apart from the lived experience of the person.

'Both states share the same neurobiological "scaffold," but individual psychology builds different experiential "stories" on that foundation.'

Salvia Divinorum is recognized as one of the most powerful hallucinogenic plants, containing the active molecule Salvinorin-A, which has garnered attention in neurobiology research.