One of the items on display as ‘The Daily Show with Trevor Noah’ holds a press preview June 15, 2017 as ‘The Daily Show Presents: The Donald J. Trump Presidential Twitter Library’, the first of its kind, showcasing our Commander in Chiefs preferred vessel
Lisa Feldman Barrett does not want her leg to be broken.
But she’ll choose a fractured tibia over the atrophying of her hippocampus any day. A stupid choice in the shaky world of hypotheticals, she tells me, but truth is it’s easier to mend a bone than grow back neurons.Barrett knows plenty about neurons. A University Distinguished Professor of Psychology at Northeastern University, Barrett’s new book, How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain, is a groundbreaking investigation into how our brain creates emotions. While I’m going to discuss this process in an upcoming article, the timeliness of her theory on neuronal damage and justice cannot be ignored. Suffice to say that instead of being reactionary animals in a world of stimulation bombardment, Barrett believes, with plenty of evidence, that humans are creators of cognitive and emotional experiences every step of the way. Emotions don’t happen to you; you create them.
In her book she contemplates how the government treats the concept of harm:
The law protects the integrity of your anatomical body but not the integrity of your mind, even though your body is just a container for the organ that makes you who you are—your brain. Emotional harm is not considered real unless accompanied by physical harm.
If she were to break my leg, she says, she would be held accountable. But what if she berated me? Or inflicted casual brutality, as, say, countless trolls on Twitter every day? Communication and social skills are two reasons we’ve evolved into an apex predator that took control of the planet, yet the same skills compromise our public health when we peck out immature rants on social media. As she says, with a slight laugh,
The best thing for a human nervous system is another human, but the worst thing for the human nervous system is another human.
This problem is especially damaging…
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