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Your body remembers the feeling
How the brain defaults
That is the nervous system at work. The brain is designed to keep you safe, and it is not designed to help you grow. It doesn't know you are an adult with credit cards and free will. When a spouse says something that returns you to being a kid, it goes to what it always knows to do, because the path of least resistance conserves energy.
Children versus adults
Children are bottom-up: they feel it in the body first, then create narratives in the head. Adults are top-down. They start in the head and overthink, partly because the feelings are so intense.
It isn't the jungle anymore and nothing is chasing us, but the tiger has become the cellphone.
Why do songs bring back old feelings?
In a 2009 study in Cerebral Cortex, Petr Janata of the University of California, Davis scanned people while they listened to excerpts of popular songs from their youth. Songs that stirred autobiographical memories activated a part of the dorsal medial prefrontal cortex, and the activity tracked how strongly each song was tied to a memory. Participants often reported a feeling attached to the song before they could say where the memory came from.
Why does the brain default to old habits?
The brain makes up about 2 percent of body weight but uses roughly 20 percent of the body's energy at rest. Habits save that energy. Ann Graybiel's lab at MIT showed that neurons in the basal ganglia group a learned sequence of actions into a single chunk that then runs automatically. Once a pattern is chunked, it takes less effort to repeat it than to change it.
Why do children feel first and think later?
The prefrontal cortex matures late. Longitudinal MRI studies led by Jay Giedd at the National Institute of Mental Health tracked the brains of children and teens and found that gray matter in the frontal lobes peaks around puberty and is then pruned well into the twenties. The regions that support planning and impulse control are among the last to finish developing.
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