Hello all! Thank you for reading BrainBlogs and supporting me. A lot of you have made me realized that you have got tired of reading about brain structures. Fair enough! I am not conducting a course and you do not want to do a Ph.D. in neuroscience…let’s leave that for the likes of me. Besides, I do feel you have got an introductory idea about the Body Boss, the Brain and its assistant the Spinal Cord. Henceforth we will be talking about the functionality.
Since I shared with you that I have been feeling low lately, today I have decided to talk about ‘Being Sad’ from the Brains perspective. Let me remind you, Sadness can be acute or chronic. Prolonged sadness has many names like depression, anxiety disorders, bipolar disease, and so on. We are not going to discuss this mental health spectrum. We are going to stick to the acute sadness. The one we encounter daily, monthly, yearly quite often. The one who is a companion for a period of time, which comes and goes. Sadness is one of the 6 emotional siblings from the “Feelings” family, the rest being happiness, anger, surprise, fear, and disgust. Thus, you now know that it is an emotional response to a memory, object, or music. Your brain, does not create it out of the blue….your mind ( conscious/subconscious) does and the brain responds to this reaction of the mind. Firstly, any emotional response circuit in a brain is unimaginably complex….it is not like a motor or sensory response pathway. It does not have a nerve signal traveling from point A to point B. Trust me, there are A to Zillions of neurons bursting at once. What do I mean by bursting? They are working…to produce, transport, receive and terminate brain chemicals…known as Neurotransmitters. It’s all Chemical-locha babumoshay! No joke..IT IS! If I list all the chemicals associated with the sadness…you’ll be sad. Let us talk about those chemicals some other day. I will tell you which part of the brain gets active when you feel sad. These parts are the home ground for memory and emotions. To name a few parts….thalamus (this is one VIP dude…if the brain[cortex] is Harvey Spectar; Thalamus is Mike Ross), Hippocampus, Cingulate gyrus, somatosensory areas etc. Now comes the most interesting part….the brain circuits that get cut off when you are sad are related to PFC-Cortex-vermis…meaning in English, your brain cut off the wires that make you think clearly, sanely. That is the reason you can not, eat, walk, sleep or take important decisions in life when you are sad.
Damn brain! You are supposed to be your own master but clearly, you are executing someone else's commands. Thank god our brain is plastic…we can rewire anything we want…unless of course if we damage the circuit permanently. Not to worry though…if you are feeling sad it’s okay…take a short break and deep breath…give time to you and your brain to rewire. After all, life is all about kabhi khushi kabhi gamm…!
good read
Good read.
I don’t feel so sad anymore 😜