Four Ways to Respond During An Argument by Marsha Lucas, Ph.D.

First, we've typically thought that our nervous system helps to regulate our reactions to the world has been within two branches. The autonomic nervous system are where these two branches hang out. One of them works like an "accelerator" (the sympathetic branch), and tho other, the "brakes" (the parasympathetic branch). The long-held view is that that these two branches need to be in balance, to work in smooth alternating fashion, depending on the situation. Basically, in this line of thinking, our body's challenge was to balance between vroom! and stop.

That's true as far as it goes -- but wait! There's more! Let's take a look at another, newer theory, from Stephen Porges, PhD, Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Illinois, about our reactions to the stress of life -- and the stress of love. It's a very helpful way to think about rewiring your body's self-regulation, and help you have better, healthier relationships.

Porges takes the notion of "balance" between the brakes and the accelerator in a slightly different direction, one which is vastly more useful as we think about love, attachment, and relationships. His polyvagal theory suggests that there are three circuits (not just two branches), which drive one of three possible responses, depending on how we sense the relative safety, danger, or threat to life in our bodies. This is important: These sensations happen in the body and are first dealt with in the lower, non-thinking, unconscious brain -- not the thinking brain (the better to stay alive -- higher-level thinking slows you down, and you end up being someone's lunch).

From your heart, stomach, and gut, the sensations zoom up your spinal cord and enter the lowest part of your brain (the brainstem), where they are immediately assessed by that fidgety alarm button, your amygdala, and other deep-in-the-brain limbic players, including your insula -- all well below your conscious awareness, before you can even think about it. (In fact, some recent research has shown that your limbic brain responds to what your eyes see even before the visual part of your brain knows you've seen something.) Your limbic brain is what I like to call The Determinator. The Determinator makes one of three calls in the face of your body's signals of potential danger:

• If the Determinator judges the incoming information as life-threatening danger, one of the three parts of the circuit (the dorsal vagus, which runs between the stomach and the brainstem) leaps into action, and the body immobilizes - shuts or slows way down, basically "playing dead" to protect itself.

• If the Determinator determines that there is danger that isn't life-threatening, a different part of the circuit (our old friend the sympathetic branch, a.k.a. "the accelerator") gets the body into mobilization in response to the threat - the all-too-familiar "fight-or-flight" response - which is also a way that the body tries to protect itself.

• Finally - here's the really cool part - if the Determinator's assessment is that the incoming information indicates that things are safe, a third part of the circuit (the ventral vagus) essentially "turns off" the fight-flight response, and social engagement can happen - a calm state that supports being connected with others. Being in this state allows for better health, growth, and communication. This could be thought of as a third, more "advanced" method of self-preservation, and it would make sense that this would be hard-wired into our bodies just like the first two, if only for survival and evolutionary purposes.

That third part of the circuit, the ventral vagus, is a well-insulated, fast-running nerve that runs between the brainstem and the heart. Not only does it calm down the heart and lungs, but it also has a role to play in perceiving the sound of other people's voices and their facial expressions. It activates when we perceive (again, at a level below our awareness) a softening of the facial muscles in others, and a relaxation in their tone of voice -- in other words, when when our body senses that it's safe to be connected. When the ventral vagus is "on", we have a greater capacity to really listen, in a tuned-in way, to others.

So what you want to be able to create in your body and your brain for better relationships is a sense of greater safety -- that way, fight, flight, or playing dead aren't your only choices when things get stressful between you and your significant other.

• In your brain: When your limbic brain -- the Determinator -- isn't acting like a lone vigilante sounding the alarm at every turn, your ventral vagus can be in action more often. As a result, you're more frequently able to recognize (and even create) a zone of safety and comfort, and be primed to engage in connection and attachment.

• In your body: When your body's regulation of it's basic state of affairs - heart rate, breathing, stress-hormone levels, and so on - allows you to feel safer more of the time, you can be active and alert, in balance with feelings of calmness and receptivity, and better at social engagement - that is, being in relationship.

You can see that this can work in sort of self-perpetuating loops: In Loop A, your body perceives safety, and your ventral vagus does it's warm-and-fuzzy thing. Your face softens, your voice is more relaxed, and the person you're with perceives safety, too -- so his face softens, his voice relaxes. Good to go.

If, instead, Loop B is in play, you move through the world with an overall sense that there's a lack of safety, your body and brain are torqued to be hyper-sensitive to threat, your ventral vagus never gets to come out and play. And since you're far less likely to perceive safety, your face is tight, your muscles are tense, your voice is edgy, and you're going to have a much harder time promoting a sense of safety in the person you're sitting with. They respond (as you can -- and do -- imagine) with matching guardedness and discomfort. Good times? Not.

So, being able to get unhooked from the moment in the argument, to remember who you are (not a gazelle being chased by a lion, for example, nor a wounded rabid dog who's been cornered). Take a breath. Feel some compassion for yourself, smiling inwardly. Take another breath, and with compassion for the scared person standing across from you, smile outwardly.

There's much more to say about this whole thing of smiling in the face of danger -- I'm not advocating being a bliss-ninny when your boss is about to trounce you. I'll be writing more about this -- although it'll probably take me more than the concise 140 characters from the Dalai Lama. :)

Marsha Lucas, PhD is a psychologist / neuropsychologist in Washington, DC. Learn more about rewiring your brain at ReWireYourBrainForLove.com, where she offers a free mindfulness meditation download and a monthly e-newsletter with meditation tips. You can also follow @DrMarsha on Twitter, and join her on her Facebook page.

How You Are Who You Are--Styles by Norman N. Holland, Ph.D

We have all these various styles for various activities, yet they have in common that they are our style, not somebody else's. We each have a style of styles. If we could put it into words, we could phrase the very style of our being.

That is what a psychotherapist does or part of it. The way we say things, our style of speaking and writing, consists of many, many choices. Our language provides the best evidence for a pervasive personal style. An analyst understands us through the way we say the things we say. The analyst listens for how we say what we say. The analyst listens with the third ear.

Psychoanalysis and psychotherapy build on that sense of a person's character or identity that will pervade everything he or she says in the session. Indeed, it will pervade everything the patient does in life. One important aim of therapy is to bring that style to consciousness and thus to conscious control.

So far as non-psychotherapists are concerned, we have to know how our fellow humans are going to behave--their style. Imagine yourself in the paleolithic hunter-gatherer band so beloved of evlutionary psychologists. You need to know your 150 or so companions. You need to be able to predict how this or that person will act in the different situations of life on the savanna. You need that knowledge to survive and to spread your genes. You need to know who is likely to do what in response to something that you do. And the same holds true for you yourself. Others need to know how you'll behave, even or especially in our complicated societies where hundreds of Facebook "friends" substitute for the 150-person hunter-gatherer band. The whole band needs to know that Bart Simpson will do one impish thing after another or that Lady Gaga will do more and more outrageously sexy things. Life needs to be, to that extent, predictable. Otherwise chaos.

And people do know you, just as you know about them. They know, even if you don't, how you are who you are. They can pick up your identity-from-outside, as opposed to your own sense of self. Your inner sense of yourself is something only you can feel and think from inside, and it varies widely from moment to moment. Your interior sense of yourself may or may not coincide with others' knowledge from outside of how you are likely to behave.

In brain terms, that interior sense of self seems to be connected to the so-called "default network." This is a set of midline structures that light up in the MRI scanner when you are not being asked to perform some task. These midline structures quiet down when you are asked to do something. Some link these sites to "mind-wandering." Some call them the "task-negative network." Neurologists detect it as very slow but coherent oscillations (less than one every ten seconds) among groups of neurons associated with memory, theory of mind, and integration of behavioral plans.

But that default network and/or interior sense of self is altogether different from somebody else's sense of how you act. When others recognize your posture, your walk, your handwriting, or your way of saying hello on the telephone, they are recognizing your particular, individual style as seen from outside.

Separate styles inform many, many different kinds of activities, writing, walking, talking, interpreting, greeting--you name it. Must not, then, their neurological embodiments be widely scattered in the brain?

I think they are, as I will explain in my continuation blog on this subject.

What Does Music Look Like to Our Brain?

It is natural to assume that the visual information streaming into our eyes determines the visual perceptions we end up with, and that the auditory information entering our ears determines the events we hear.

But the brain is more complicated than this. Visual and auditory information interact in the brain, and the brain utilizes both to guess the single scene to render a perception of. For example, the research of Ladan Shams, Yukiyasu Kamitani and Shinsuke Shimojo at Caltech have shown that we perceive a single flash as a double flash if it is paired with a double beep. And Robert Sekuler and others from Brandeis University have shown that if a sound occurs at the time when two balls pass through each other on screen, the balls are instead perceived to have collided and reversed direction.

These and other results of this kind demonstrate the interconnectedness of visual and auditory information in our brain. Visual ambiguity can be reduced with auditory information, and vice versa. And, generally, both are brought to bear in the brain's attempt to infer the best guess about what's out there.

Your brain does not, then, consist of independent visual and auditory systems, with separate troves of visual and auditory "knowledge" about the world. Instead, vision and audition talk to one another, and there are regions of cortex responsible for making vision and audition fit one another.

These regions know about the sounds of looks and the looks of sounds.

Because of this, when your brain hears something but cannot see it, your brain does not just sit by and refrain from guessing what it might have looked like.

When your auditory system makes sense of something, it will have a tendency to activate visual areas, eliciting imagery of its best guess as to the appearance of the stuff making the sound.

For example, the sound of your neighbor's rustling tree may spring to mind an image of its swaying lanky branches. The whine of your cat heard far way may evoke an image of it stuck up high in that tree. And the pumping of your neighbor's kid's BB gun can bring forth an image of the gun being pointed at Foofy way up there.

Your visual system has, then, strong opinions about the proper look of the things it hears.

And, bringing ourselves back to music, we can use the visual system's strong opinions as a means for gauging music's meaning.

In particular, we can ask your visual system what it thinks the appropriate visual is for music.

If, for example, the visual system responds to music with images of beating hearts, then it would suggest, to my disbelief, that music mimics the sounds of heartbeats. If, instead, the visual system responds with images of pornography, then it would suggest that music sounds like sex. You get the idea.

But in order to get the visual system to act like an oracle, we need to get it to speak. How are we to know what the visual system thinks music looks like?

One approach is to simply ask which visuals are, in fact, associated with music? For example, when people create imagery of musical notes, what does it look like? One cheap way to look into this is simply to do a Google (or any search engine) image search on the term "musical notes." You might think such a search would merely return images of simple notes on the page.

However, that is not what one finds. To my surprise, actually, most of the images are like the one in the nearby figure, with notes drawn in such a way that they appear to be moving through space.

Notes in musical notation never actually look anything like this, and real musical notes have no look at all (because they are sounds). And yet we humans seem to be prone to visually depicting notes as moving all about.

Music tends to be depicted as moving.

Could these images of notes in motion be due to a more mundane association?

Music is played by people, and people have to move in order to play their instrument. Could this be the source of the movement-music association? I don't think so, because the movement suggested in these images of notes doesn't look like an instrument being played. In fact, it is common to show images of an instrument with the notes beginning their movement through space from the instrument: these notes are on their way somewhere, not an indication of the musician's key-pressing or back-and-forth movements.

Could it be that the musical notes are depicted as moving through space because sound waves move through space? The difficulty with this hypothesis is that all sound moves through space. All sound would, if this were the case, be visually rendered as moving through space, but that's not the case. For example, speech is not usually visually rendered as moving through space. Another difficulty is that the musical notes are usually meandering in these images, but sound waves are not meandering -- sound waves go straight. A third problem with sound waves underlying the visual metaphor is that we never see sound waves in the first place.

Another possible counter-hypothesis is that the depiction of visual movement in the images of musical notes is because all auditory stimuli are caused by underlying events with movement of some kind. The first difficulty, as was the case for sound waves, is that it is not the case that all sound is visually rendered in motion. The second difficulty is that, while it is true that sounds typically require movement of some kind, it need not be movement of the entire object through space. Moving parts within the object may make the noise, without the object going anywhere. In fact, the three examples I gave earlier -- leaves rustling, Foofy whining, and the BB gun pumping -- are noises without any bulk movement of the object (the tree, Foofy, and the BB gun, respectively). The musical notes in imagery, on the other hand, really do seem to be moving, in bulk, across space.

Music is like tree-rustling, Foofy, BB guns and human speech in that it is not made via bulk movement through space. And yet music appears to be unique in this tendency to be visually depicted as moving through space.

In addition, not only are musical notes rendered as in motion, musical notes tend to be depected as meandering.

When visually rendered, music looks alive and in motion (often along the ground), just what one might expect if music's secret is that it sounds like people moving.

A Google Image search on "musical notes" is one means by which one may attempt to discern what the visual system thinks music looks like, but another is to simply ask ourselves what is the most common visual display shown during music. That is, if people were to put videos to music, what would the videos tend to look like?

Lucky for us, people do put videos to music! They're called music videos, of course. And what do they look like?

The answer is so obvious that it hardly seems worth noting: music videos tend to show people moving about, usually in a time-locked fashion to the music, very often dancing.

As obvious as it is that music videos typically show people moving, we must remember to ask ourselves why music isn't typically visually associated with something very different. Why aren't music videos mostly of rivers, avalanches, car races, wind-blown grass, lion hunts, fire, or bouncing balls?

These strong opinions about what music looks like make perfect sense if music mimics human movement sounds. In real life, when people carry out complex behaviors, their visual movements are tightly choreographed with the sounds - because the sight and sound are due to the same event. When you hear movement, you expect to see that same movement. Music sounds to your brain like human movement, which is why when your brain hears music, it expects that any visual of it should be consistent with it.

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This was adapted from Harnessed: How Language and Music Mimicked Nature and Transformed Ape to Man (Benbella Books, 2011).

Mark Changizi is Professor of Human Cognition at 2ai, and author of The Vision Revolution.

Can the MBA Brain be changed? Can we make business more ethical through brain science? by Norman Holland

While the oil pours out of BP's deepwater well and blustering, self-justifying ads pour out of BP, I've been wondering about the managers and executives who work there. Are they totally without ethics? They're hardly the first executives to cut corners: just look at Massey Energy, Enron, AIG, in the financial markets. Shortsightedness, greed, indifference to others - where do these people learn these things? In business school?

What do you think of when you see the letters M-B-A? Do you start constructing new meanings, like Me Before Anyone or Management By Accident? "Greed is good," said Gordon Gecko (here's his speech), and his audience all looked like M.B.A.s-in-training.

For an out-of-academia perspective, I checked in with my daughter Kelley Holland. She's been a reporter and editor at Business Week and the business section of The New York Times, where an article she wrote on business education stirred up heated discussions about how business schools should operate. Here’s her take:

An M.B.A. from an elite school has long provided a first class ticket to the fast track - even, in one case, to the White House. But as business disasters have piled up, employers and deans and even university presidents are taking a harder look a whether something is rotten in business school. (Apologies for the Shakespeare mangling, Dad.)

Take agency theory, for example. For decades now, many business school courses have been built around this concept, which analyzes the relationship between managers and shareholders. Michael Jensen, a professor emeritus at Harvard Business School, gained renown by forcefully articulating agency theory, arguing that managers' interests need to be aligned with shareholders' because managers - indeed, all of us - are naturally governed by self interest. "Like it or not, individuals are willing to sacrifice a little of almost anything we care to name, even reputation or morality, for a sufficiently large quantity of other desired things," he wrote in a highly influential paper called "The Nature of Man."

Jensen's thinking has evolved considerably since then. But agency theory, and Jensen's arguments, form the basis of many a business school class--and infuse many an MBA's thinking.

As the financial crisis has turned into a grinding recession, however, critics of business education are speaking out. Rakesh Khurana of Harvard Business School charged at a recent Fordham University conference, where I moderated a panel with him, that agency theory has "removed any notion of considering managers' actions in terms of any transcendental values such as duty." He is calling for a renewed sense of professional responsibility for M.B.A.s.

Edward Freeman of the University of Virginia believes that business schools need to do a better job of educating the whole person. They need to inject some liberal arts education into a curriculum overly focused on technical and financial skills.

The good news, then, is that change is coming, albeit slowly, to business schools. The most tantalizing hint of impending reform came in May, when Harvard chose a reform-minded professor named Nitin Nohria as its new business school dean--partly at the behest of alumni who argued forcefully for someone with fresh ideas. Nohria is widely expected to inplement significant changes. And since Harvard is, well, Harvard, many other business schools will probably follow suit.

Research by Dan Ariely, the MIT behavioral economist who also blogs for PT, has performed a series of experiments, described, that indicate that people do respond to explicit references to a moral code. For instance, he found that students' cheating in an experiment dropped to zero if they recalled the ten commandments ahead of time.

Thus, brain science offers hope that ethical teaching might improve M.B.A.s' and business's behavior. Evolution has apparently built into our brains some sense of responsibility toward others. Most of us have heard about Marc Hauser's research. In the human animal, evolution uses emotions generated by the ventromedial prefrontal cortex and belief attributions in the right temporoparietal junction to support moral actions. John Mikhail of Georgetown University Law Center argues that this new knowldge should be extended to the way we conceive of torts, contracts and criminal law--and, presumably, corporate law and standards of corporate behavior.

In a review article, Jonathan Haidt of the University of Virginia points to certain core principles: emotional intuitions of morality; understanding one's actions as functioning socially (rather than truth-seeking); and "the coevolution of moral minds with cultural practices and institutions that create diverse moral communities." We can all understand this intuitive morality as involving harm and fairness. Haidt would add loyalty, authority, and purity.(Incidentally, you can test your own morality.)

As far as the M.B.A. is concerned, this brain research is showing that we humans have an evolutionary drive to do the right thing, but we fit the right thing to the community we are in. We can build on that positive evolutionary base in our brains. If we change the community, if we change the ethics taught in business schools, we can form more moral business organizations. Let's have no more BPs or Masseys or AIGs.

Whose Brain is it Anyway? Want attention? Carry around a model of the human brain. by Susan R. Barry, Ph.D.

Did you know that Michelangelo may have hidden images of brains in the frescoes on the Sistine Chapel? This idea was discussed in an article in May in the Journal Neurosurgery. The report caused quite a stir with stories about it appearing in major newspapers and on national radio programs. Yet, ten years ago, a report in a different medical journal provided evidence that Michelangelo hid pictures of a kidney in a fresco on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. This revelation attracted far less attention. Brains, it seems, are more interesting than kidneys.

Since I teach biology and neurobiology, I occasionally carry a model of a heart or brain around the college campus to use in classrooms in different buildings. When I carry a model of a heart, no one pays me the least attention. It's a completely different story, however, when I carry around a model of the human brain. People do a double take and run over to get a closer look:

"Is that a brain?" they ask.

"Yup."

"A human brain?"

"Right again."

(With some hesitation) ... "Is it real?"

"No, it's plastic."

"Can I touch it?"

"Sure, it's just plastic."

"It's not life-sized is it? It looks kind of small."

"Actually this model's bigger than life-sized. We may think we are smart, but physically our brains are not that big. Even so, they contain about 100 billion neurons."

Why does everyone stop me when they see me carrying a model of a brain, but not a heart? Why do people care about hidden images of brains but not kidneys on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel? It would be futile to argue about which organs are more important; we need all of them to survive. Yet, heart and kidney transplants are possible, but, with the brain's multiple connections and interactions with the body, we can't transplant a brain. What's more, it's possible to look at a heart and see how it functions, how it pumps the blood. The brain, on the other hand, is still very mysterious. Images of the brain may be pretty iconic, but its gross appearance gives few clues as to how it works, how it helps generate our conscious feelings, memories, and thoughts.

Psychology Jokes

A middle-aged man had an obsession with women's breasts. So he went to a psychologist and told the doctor about his problem. "I am going to do word association," explained the doctor. "I will say a word, and you will say the first thing that come to your mind. Let's begin. Oranges," said the doctor.

"Breasts," replied the patient.

"Apples."

"Breasts."

"Watermelons."

"Breasts."

"Wipers."

"Breasts."

"Wait a minute! I can see the connections between oranges, apples, watermelons and breasts. But automobile wipers? Where is the connection?" asked the doctor.

"Easy: one on the left and one on the right!"

A man goes to a psychologist and tells the doctor, "Doc, I think I have an obsession with sex." The psychologist agrees to examine him and begins by showing him some ink blots.

"What does this look like to you?" asks the doctor.

"Two people having sex in a bed," replies the client.

"And this one?" asks the doctor, showing a new ink blot.

"Two people having sex in a car," says the client.

"And how about this one?"

"Two people having sex in a field."

"Well," says the doctor, "you do seem to have an obsession with sex."

"Me?!" demands the client, "You're the one who keeps showing me the dirty pictures!"

Albert Einstein arrives at a dinner party. He introduces himself to the first person he sees and asks, "What's your IQ?" Larry answers, "165." "That is wonderful!" says Albert. "We will talk about the Grand Unification Theory and the mysteries of the universe. We will have much to discuss!"

Next, Albert introduces himself to a woman and asks, "What's your IQ?" The lady answers, "124."

"That is great!" responds Albert. "We can discuss politics and current affairs. We will have much to discuss!"

Albert goes to another person and asks, "What's your IQ?" The man answers, "51."

Albert responds, "How 'bout them Steelers?"