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Naming her stress made it fade
He had not noticed anything until she said it. After that he saw her cringe every time he spoke. He couldn't change his voice, and he thanked her for telling him.
Over the two weeks she came back every so often to report that since she had told him, his voice was becoming more tolerable to her. By the end they had become good friends, and they are still in touch.
The recognition that something needs to change is the first step in neuroplasticity. Much of the nervous system runs on reflex, like breathing, heart rate, and walking, which is learned and then done without thinking about each step. Deciding to shift a reaction brings it into awareness, and that cues the brain that the reflex is no longer fated to stay a reflex. Children skip this step because their whole brain has the switch flipped. After that, the prefrontal cortex signals the rest of the nervous system that something is worth paying attention to.
Why does a voice trigger a stress response?
The brain stores emotional memories along with the sensory details present when they formed, such as a tone of voice or a smell. The amygdala links those details to the emotion, so a similar sound can bring the feeling back before conscious thought catches up. This is a form of associative learning, the same kind Pavlov described with dogs and bells. Sound features such as pitch and rhythm are particularly easy for the brain to match.
How does naming a feeling change it?
Matthew Lieberman's lab at UCLA found in 2007 that putting feelings into words reduced activity in the amygdala and increased activity in the right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex. The researchers called this affect labeling. Participants viewed faces showing emotion and either named the emotion or matched the face to a name. Naming produced the calmer amygdala response.
What makes a habit run without thinking?
Repeated actions shift from the prefrontal cortex toward deeper structures called the basal ganglia. Ann Graybiel's work at MIT recorded this change in rats learning a maze, where activity in the striatum came to mark the start and end of a routine. Once a sequence is packaged this way, it runs as a unit. That is why walking and breathing need so little attention.
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