**No content here is mine;
I use these thoughts to organize my own.**
But I do have a question... What does it mean to be human?
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Between The World and Me
By Ta-Nehisi Coates, 2015
“Race is the child of racism, not the father” (7).
“Good intention is a hall pass through history” (33).
“I tell you now that the question of how one should live within a black body, within a country lost in the Dream, is the question of my life, and the pursuit of this question, I have found, ultimately answers itself…The greatest reward of this constant interrogation, of confrontation with the brutality of my country, is that it has freed me from ghosts and girded me against the sheer terror of disembodiment” (12).
My Conclusion: This killer is not a demon. It is not sent from above nor below. It is made by us—designed by policy, sharpened by silence, and passed down through law and culture, an American heritage of racism, generational trauma, and hypertension (Williamson, Coates 8, 103). Writing this is enough to test one’s sanity. Tracking trauma in medical journals. Finding evidence of grief in blood pressure readings. When the lived experience of Black Americans is so often invalidated, medical evidence becomes necessary—not because it tells the whole story, but because it might be proof enough to say it exists.
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The Body Keeps The Score
By Bessel Van Der Kolk M.D., 2015
SILENCE: “It is a strange thing that all the memories have these two qualities. They are always full of quietness, that is the most striking thing about them; and even when things weren’t like that in reality, they still seem to have that quality. They are soundless apparitions, which speak to me by looks and gestures, wordless and silent—and their silence is precisely what disturbs me.” Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front
“If you were not there, it’s difficult to describe and say how it was. How men function under such stress is one thing, and then how you communicate and express that to somebody who never knew that such a degree of brutality exists seems like a fantasy.”
DRUGS: "More than half a million children and adolescents in America are now taking antipsychotic drugs, which may calm them down but also interfere with learning age-appropriate skills and developing friendships with other children. A Columbia University study recently found that prescriptions of antipsychotic drugs for privately insured two-to five-year-olds had doubled between 2000 and 2007. Only 40 percent of them had received a proper mental health assessment. Until it lost its patent, the pharmaceutical company Johnson & Johnson doled out LEGO blocks stamped with the word “Risperdal” for the waiting rooms of child psychiatrists. Children from low-income families are four times as likely as the privately insured to receive antipsychotic medicines. In one year alone Texas Medicaid spent $96 million on antipsychotic drugs for teenagers and children—including three unidentified infants who were given the drugs before their first birthdays. There have been no studies on the effects of psychotropic medications on the developing brain. Dissociation, self-mutilation, fragmented memories, and amnesia generally do not respond to any of these medications."
SERATONIN: "Other researchers had shown that dominant male monkeys had much higher levels of brain serotonin than lower-ranking animals but that their serotonin levels dropped when they were prevented from maintaining eye contact with the monkeys they had once lorded over. In contrast, low-ranking monkeys who were given serotonin supplements emerged from the pack to assume leadership. The social environment interacts with brain chemistry. Manipulating a monkey into a lower position in the dominance hierarchy made his serotonin drop, while chemically enhancing serotonin elevated the rank of former subordinates."
MEDICAL STAFF: "I usually followed the lead of the experienced nurses, who signaled when to back off or, if that did not work, to restrain a patient. I was surprised and alarmed by the satisfaction I sometimes felt after I’d wrestled a patient to the floor so a nurse could give an injection...After she refused to eat for more than a week and rapidly started to lose weight, the doctors decided to force-feed her. It took three of us to hold her down, another to push the rubber feeding tube down her throat, and a nurse to pour the liquid nutrients into her stomach. Later, during a midnight confession, Sylvia spoke timidly and hesitantly about her childhood sexual abuse by her brother and uncle. I realized then our display of “caring” must have felt to her much like a gang rape."
DYSREGULATION: "One thing is certain: Yelling at someone who is already out of control can only lead to further dysregulation. Just as your dog cowers if you shout and wags his tail when you speak in a high singsong, we humans respond to harsh voices with fear, anger, or shutdown and to playful tones by opening up and relaxing. We simply cannot help but respond to these indicators of safety or danger."
My Conclusion: Your nervous system craves regulation and attunement. Death is extreme loss of homeostasis. Emotional homeostasis is maintained through human vulnerability and connection.
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The Frankfurt Kitchen
By Heidi Laird. 2021
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The Myth of Normal
By Gabor Maté M.D.
“There can be no keener revelation of a society’s soul than the way it treats its children.” —Nelson Mandela
“It’s an almost unconscious calculation of safety, almost at all times.”
"Interpersonal Biology"
"I am convinced such anger, and moreover its obligatory suppression in a society that fears and punishes Black rage, contributes to the elevated risk Black American men face for dying of prostate cancer and Black American women do of succumbing to cancer of the breast."
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Sapiens, Nexus
By Yuval Noah Harari
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Unshrunk
By Laura Delano
"The more I suffered, the more medical treatments I was convinced I needed, but the more treatments I received, the more I suffered."
"'There is no way out,' she said, but she took one step forward." --Ursula K. Le Guin
"In women, blood collected in the breasts indicated madness." --Hippocrates
"Who was I to question any of it?" (xi).
"For fourteen years, I lived tethered to the belief that my brain was broken, and redesigned my entire life around the singular purpose of fixing it" (xii).
"I decided to live beyond labels and categorical boxes and to reject the dominant role that the American mental health industry has come to play in shaping the way we make sense of what it means to be human" (xiv).
My Conclusion: I'm not crazy, I am human.
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The Influential Mind
Tali Sharot, Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience
"This duty we all share is to affect others. We teach our children, guide our patients, advise our clients, help our friends, and inform our online followers. We do this because we each have unique experiences, knowledge, and skills that others may not" (1).
"Beliefs rarely stand on their own; they are intertwined with a network of other beliefs and drives. Considering the other person's existing outlook will help clarify how we can present arguments in a way most convincing to them, rather than a way most convincing to us" (34).
"The great benefit of sharing similar brain function and structure is that it makes it easier for us to communicate ideas, which means that we need not navigate the world on our own...Emotions are especially contagious; by expressing feelings ourselves we are shaping other people's emotional states, and by doing so we make it more likely that the people in front of us us will take on our point of view" (54).
"While warnings and threats limit people's sense of control, emphasizing what needs to be done to reap rewards increases it...Offering control, or even perceived control, is ultimately the best way to get people to act" (78, 103).
"Getting people to listen means shifting that large metaphoric calculator inside their minds, the one that computes the value of information...If the knowledge you have can fill another's information gap, highlight the gap...induce hope, not dread...convey the problem clearly" (128).
"A person's emotional mindset will affect how they react to what you have to say. There needs to be a match between the opinions we are offering and the state of the individual in front of us" (147).
"Even in a swarm, one divergent voice can cause others to act independently. You are influenced by others...others are influenced by you" (171).
"We must assess the likelihood that people's opinions are interdependent and biased, and consider whether they should, in fact, be weighted unequally. In some cases, the crowd does encompass wisdom. But it is not unusual for that wisdom to be held by a minority" (194-195).
"Just like us, the first humans were social creatures. They lived together, moved together, and inevitably, influenced one another...language...writing...the internet...even in comparison to these first humans, our brains are more like theirs than different. Many of their desires, motivations, and fears that shaped their beliefs and actions shape ours today, and the biological principles of how one mind affects another remain" (197-199)
"In the last few years, neuroscientist have shown that you can physically connect two brains so that one brain learns directly from the electrical signals generated by the other...changing behavior is about altering the patterns of neural firing inside a person's brain" (199). Terrifying.
"I am my arms, my legs, my lungs, and my brain...if you affect any of my other organs you will consequently be affecting my brain...Just as neurons in my brain affect other neurons in my brain--altering my memories, values, and actions--they could directly alter the firing of neurons in your brain--changing your memories, values, and actions...Thoughts...are, in essence, electrical-chemical signals in our brains. These signals can be recorded, they can be transmitted, and they can be interpreted, and so it may in principle be possible to affect each other's thoughts in this way" (206-208).
"While you may not be altering another person's brain activity directly, you are nonetheless altering it. You are simply using language, expression, and actions to do so...My hope is that the characters in this book and the stories they tell will live happily at the back of your mind, raising their heads every so often when the time is right" (208-209).
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The Handmaid's Tale
By Margaret Atwood
“The best and most cost-effective way to control women… was through women themselves” (308).
“a brilliant stroke” (308).
“There is more than one kind of freedom… Freedom to and freedom from.” (24).
“She hopes, and I am the vehicle for her hope” (140, 135).
“This is a reconstruction. All of it is a reconstruction” (134). “The things I believe can’t all be true… This contradictory way of believing seems to me, right now, the only way I can believe anything” (106).
My Conclusion: Offred steps forward, not because she’s forced, but because the story Gilead tells, she tells herself. The potential for perceived benefits is easier than recognizing reality. That is Gilead’s Marketing Plan, to tell stories people want to believe.
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Thank you!