Today, here is a link to a pdf about something very important, which will form the basis of many future posts. I had studied this material for years in another form, which actually required a lot of practical experience to be useful in psychology. However, this form is much more accessible when starting from a prone position, and offers a more detailed understanding, at the basic level.
Some thoughts as you read it:
The amygdala flags stimuli for significance, and then stimulates until there is a “resolution.”
You can control what the amygdala flags, by emphasizing something in certain ways.
Many people carry an innate affect which they carry most often, and most easily, and you can see this. It does speak to psychological tendencies.
Shame (in our sense, ie. socially, not in the pdf’s sense) is triggered by an event which causes a failure to cement a position within the group successfully. If you want to be in the group more, and your brain is firing off in areas designed to get you in the group more, you will feel more shame when you fail and are out-grouped. If your brain is focused on being right, and being right involves being out-grouped, you will feel less shame when out-grouped, since in-grouping was not related to your objective.
In the pdf, the image of the boy with the trains, who is supposed to show the fear affect in response to the sparkler, seems to me to actually be showing more startle, and only the faintest hint of fear. In my experience, startle is a blank expression, whereas fear has an element of frantic desperation, almost akin to how the areas beneath the eyes would look when about to cry, but more intense, with wider eyes. In fear, the area beneath the eyes conveys a desperate, frantic desire to take some form of action to relieve the anxiety, whereas startle is just blankly absorbed in the stimuli, and unmotivated in any particular direction beyond surprised, intense assessment.
This is useful in reading Narcissists, since Narcissists seem to express affect much more aggressively when stressed.
There will be much more, but I want to give people a week or two to pour over this pdf, and internalize the concepts. It is very important to any understanding of the mind.
