This represents the front of a car from a toddler’s eye view.
Somehow I had escaped and gotten into the street. After coming to a screeching halt, a scared-to-death man got out, and my father came running over, and carried me into their upstairs apartment. I remember lying on my bed after I had been punished. My feeling on looking back at this, is just matter-of fact. I simply have these visual memories.
This infant, just a few days old and so peacefully sleeping, was skillfully captured by the photographer. The mother and father are happily providing a home. They are making many adjustments to meet this infants’ needs, including having this photograph taken. And no doubt they are also comforting this child who cries to be fed, or changed. Maybe the infant just wants his parents to hold him over a shoulder, and pat him (her) steadily, firmly, and calmly to help release a burp or to move a bubble along in her (his) intestines. The baby feels better, and calms down, and the parent feels wonderful in reassuring the young one that he or she is there, “willing to accept each tear” that he (she) will weep. This is joy! The baby’s parents are assuring him that in holding all of his present present tears, they are holding all of his future tears as well
. This is deeply bonded joy!
The following poem from the Death section of Poems, by Regena Larrabee Seehausen (1964), gives the flip side after a still birth:
After the Baby Died
There is a comfort in the darkness now, the only thing found willing to accept each tear he might have wept.
It is a heavy vigil sorrow keeps . My longing arms must cradle the whole night wherein he sleeps.
And my mind sifts the darkness all alone seeking that part that is my own.
Amygdalae, the basal ganglia, and the brain diagram. The diagram is from this link.
There are two amygdalae, one on each side of the brain, each attached to a basal ganglion, one on each side of the brain.
The amygdala exists in the brain as two almond shaped organs, referred in their plural as amygdalae. They receive all kinds of internal and sensory inputs, on which they quickly perform pain-related pattern recognition, and assemble “combinatorial memories of pain-related patterns”.
This statement from Gerry Vassar’s online article, The Amygdala & Emotions , also tells us that the amygdala makes this pattern perception within 20 milliseconds (msec), whereas we are aware of the associated perception within 300 milliseconds. A psychiatric neuropharmacologist, (Personal communication, 2015) said that parts of the brain recognize inputs within 33 msec. The unchecked amygdala produces ” quick and dirty — knee jerk responses”, fight or flight, which can be quieted by the rest of the basal ganglion of which it is a part. My psychiatric neuropharmacologist source also said that
“we generally think of the prefrontal cortex as being the main modulator of the amygdala, although those signals may travel through the basal ganglia first… ”
( Anger is one of the responses of the brain. The speed with which the amygdala reacts to incoming information explains the speed with which we get angry.
The rest of Vassar’s article contains very interesting, rich and concise information about the brain, which is useful to anyone on a personal level.
The patterns representing the danger are already present in brain. I think of all patterns in the brain as sets of “mind points”, my own descriptive term. I am happy to have some anatomical and functional information to integrate with what I already know from my general experience.
One of my grandmothers said that the way to have a good, long, healthy, or positive life was to “Keep your feet warm, and your head cool.” I have to control my amygdala in order to do that.