What to Watch & Read: The Secret Life of Your Mind & Body
Updated: Jun 9, 2019
Being open to diverse ideas, insights and opinions helps me to find solutions for my clients in my Cape Town based hypnotherapy practice by helping either themselves or their children. Here is a list of good reads and documentaries to quell the curious mind this month. Understanding the dynamics of the human mind, brain and body are crucial to understanding our wellness and well-being.
WATCH
Memory Hackers
Memory is the key to our identity. It’s the glue that binds our mental lives. Without it, we’d be prisoners of the present, unable to use the lessons of the past to change our future. From our first step to where we put our keys, memory represents who we are, how we learn and how we navigate the world. This documentary explores cutting edge technology in neuroscience and goes all the way to the implantation of false memories and how fallible our memories are.
Takeout: In simplistic terms the human brain’s main purpose is ultimately to learn and remember in order for us to navigate our day-to-day lives, whether we realise it or not.
Take Your Pills
The pressure to achieve more in a hyper-competitive society is becoming more and more of what it means to be a human being these days. In the age of Ritalin, achieving that can be as close as the local pharmacy. No longer just "a cure for excitable kids”, this film explores the abuse of human capital value and ultimately what it means to put the equivalent of amphetamines (aka speed) in your body and why so many people are doing it.
Takeout: This is some scary stuff, especially when we seeing the over diagnosis of ADHD and ADD and in America the most common users are adults and not children.
What the Health
This film uncovers the impacts of highly processed industrial animal foods on our personal health and greater community, and explores why leading health organisations in the US continue to promote the industry despite countless medical studies and research showing detrimental effects of these products on our health.
Takeout: Subjective, as it namely advocates a vegan lifestyle, so know that you will not see the flip side of this argument, perhaps, where meat in moderation may have benefits. Most importantly, is that science and research is constantly evolving. So, know that our understanding of the world's most chronic diseases now have contrary and updated views, compared to what we have historically been led to believe about them – this is key in understanding wellness.
READ
How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain
Lisa Feldman Barrett
Get your academic hat on, if you don’t have the wherewithal for some layered and complex theories this will be a frustrating read (get the audiobook). However, for those with a more robust palate and a desire to understand the complexities of our mind & the organ (the brain) then it’s worth it. Barrett challenges the classical view of emotions – that they are hard-wired into our brains and generated automatically by distinct regions, making them universally recognisable across all humans. Instead, her psychology and neuroscience research purport a more holistic view: the theory of “constructed emotion”, which she has coined. She presents evidence, in manageable chunks, that emotions are instead created spontaneously, by several brain regions in tandem and shaped by factors like an individual’s previous experiences.
Take out: We are all architects of our own experiences.
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