David Perlmutter Quotes

The amygdala in the emotional center sees and hears everything that occurs to us instantaneously and is the trigger point for the fight or flight response.

It's amazing how much of a bodily experience being scared is. It doesn't take very long of hyperventilating to feel like you're going to pass out. It's one of those things where being scared is more of a physiological response that you can pretty easily manipulate. So in those types of scenes, it just takes a lot of energy.

Once we start believing that the apocalypse is coming, the amygdala goes on high alert, filtering out most anything that says otherwise.

When I get real excited, my muscles go into spasm, so they just shake.

We now know that we imprint information during the day. We sort of - that seed is planted there within the brain during the day. In other words, we learn information. But we also know that that vision that was planted in the brain still remains in the sound of silence, in this - in the dark of night.

The brain works fast when it thinks it’s about to be cut in half.

When you experience the emotion of sadness, there will be changes in facial expression, and your body will be closed in, withdrawn. There are also changes in your heart, your guts: they slow down. And there are hormonal changes.

When you deal with something like compassion for physical pain, which we know is very, very old in evolution - we can find evidence for it in nonhuman species - the brain processes it at a faster speed. Compassion for mental pain took many seconds longer.

The purpose of fear, clearly, is to help you get away - which it does. If your heart rate increases, there is more blood pumping so you can use that blood to fuel your muscles to run away. Oxygen is sent to the lungs so you can run fast. Pupils dilating help you see in the dark. All of that prepares your body to fight or escape.

Nerves are good. They keep you alive.

Neurobiological research has shown that in people with chronic PTSD, both stress hormone secretion and areas of the brain connected to memory function, such as the hippocampus, appear to be affected, although exactly how and why remains controversial.

Seven is more than a lucky number or a famous baseball player's uniform. It's the brain's natural shepherd, herding vast amounts of information into manageable chunks.

I'm interested in how we react when we're heavily pressed. When we're vulnerable and our survival is in question, how do we behave?

The emotional brain responds to an event more quickly than the thinking brain.

While the hippocampus itself doesn't store memories, it serves to triage our experiences based upon their survival significance.

I've always been fascinated with adrenaline; it's saved my life more than once, and it's caused me to need it to save my life more than once. One of the most fascinating responses in human evolution, adrenaline sharpens your brain; it sharpens your responses.

You do run and scream and cry and work yourself up into hysterics, and then you get back to the hotel at the end of the day, and you feel really off and really strange. And that's because rationally, even though you know everything is OK, you have put yourself through this traumatizing experience, and your body is still going.

Adrenaline is so strong that none of us understand it.

When threatened, the nervous system sometimes goes into a 'freeze response.' You assess the risk and determine that fight or flight doesn't help you. Staying put does.

Adrenaline really numbs out all pain.

We have this amazing ability to turn on the exactly same stress response worrying about a mortgage that a zebra does when it's sprinting away from a lion.

As a human, if you're in a scary situation, you pretty much forget about everything else! You just try and survive.

Fight, flight, and screw up royaly.

No one is depressed when they're being chased by a bear.

It wasn't really that hard to act when you see somebody holding a gun to your partner. It's also believing the circumstances and I believed it.