Neuroscience of Emotions & Tools for Improving Emotion Regulation | Dr. Ralph Adolphs

“They should take ice baths. I can tell you more about this. Oh, ice baths. I think this helps. Seriously. Yeah, well, ice baths. Yeah, let's definitely talk about ice baths and ultra races because you're training for one. No, but I think what you said is exactly right and extremely important for humans and probably unique to humans as opposed”

“Which brings me to the ice bath. Should I briefly talk about the ice bath? Because this is relevant, actually. So, I started doing these a while back. One of my former colleagues, Justin Feinstein, who now runs a float clinic on Maui. I forget how it came about, but we were talking about floating ice baths.”

“Second week, it's also, you know, your breathing goes up, your heart rate goes up. But gradually, and kind of with some automaticity to it, now I go into the ice bath immediately. My heart rate goes down, my breathing goes down, I get super relaxed.”

“It generalizes for me. This is an experiment of one, but for me, it generalizes. So previously, prior to the ice bath, I'm driving around Pasadena. And I don't know, in the last year or two, this seems to have risen somehow.”

“Well, after the ice bath, it's flat. So there was an immediate automatic down-regulation of my autonomic emotional response to a psychological stressor, to somebody honking at me, that was trained and generalized from the ice bath.”

“awe for the fact that we have so many days of life to live forward. It's very interesting, and it almost speaks to the ice bath again. Like you have this very compressed, stressful experience that gives you that gap, that gap between stimulus and response that seems very hard to access unless we subject ourselves to these kinds of perspectives.”

“I love it. My neuroscience colleagues are doing ice baths, training for 100-mile races, and doing the question is: is it helping my nature papers as a consequence of any of these things? That's a different metric.”

“Yeah, I think it's you know, it's a mixture. On the one hand, you absolutely need emotions. If you have no emotions, as we know from Antonio Damasio's original work in his book, Descartes' Error, which he put out just as I was starting as a postdoc in Iowa in 1994, I think, you know, if you have massive frontal lobe”

“regarded. And then once you get to a DSM-5 diagnosis, you have more and more severe cases of autism with respect to social. Functioning that again, you can quantify using tools like the ADOS, etc. But it's a spectrum that”

“I forget what the culture is, but this is the emotion you feel if something is just unbearably cute. There's a great book. Tiffany Watts Smith has a book. I think it's called The Book of Human Emotions, which is basically like a little dictionary, an entry from A to Z of all the different emotion words in different languages.”

“And so David Anderson and I did that in our book a decade ago or so, now The Neuroscience of Emotion, where we listed some features of emotions that helps to answer the question and sort of get a handle on what is it that these all share in common.”

“really, you can't really say anything about them. The question is just ill-posed or meaningless. I don't think that's the case. Paul Griffiths, a philosopher, wrote a book some years ago, I think 97 or so, What Emotions Really Are, where he first kind of made the claim that, well, they don't really exist, you know.”