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Pain seems to be a basic homeostatic drive, and, like other inbuilt drives, affects the state of the body. Stress and sleep disturbance are major somatic consequences of pain.
It would not be advantageous to allow the dispositions controlling basic biological processes to change much. [We can influence the effects of these drives and dispositions, for example by holding breath, or even, with effort, affect heart beat or blood pressure.] But in none of these instances is there evidence tha....
Damasio, Antonio R., "Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain", Penguin Books, 1994, 115
...die prematurely. In short, a sustained stress response can kill certain brain cells! At present, we know that this neurotoxic effect can be produced in both experimental laboratory animals and those confronting real-life stressors in the wild, and that comparable changes can occur simply as a function of aging.80 Sin....
Panksepp, Jaak, "Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions", Oxford University Press, 1998, 119
Psychologists have traditionally had a difficult time generating a satisfactory definition of “stress." In psychobiology, it is much easier: Stress is anything that activates the pituitary-adrenal system (the ACTH-cortisol axis). Everything that is typically considered to be a stressor in humans generates this brain res....
Panksepp, Jaak, "Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions", Oxford University Press, 1998, 118
…within the few seconds immediately following their receiving the monetary reward or having to pay the penalty, normal subjects as well as frontally damaged subjects were suitably affected, and a skin conductance response ensued. [The latency of the sympathetic nervous system response becoming observable through skin....
Damasio, Antonio R., "Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain", Penguin Books, 1994, 220
During waking, the EEG is typically full of low-amplitude, high-frequency beta waves, which indicate that the brain is processing information. As one goes into quiet sleep, which deepens through several stages, the cortex exhibits increasingly large high-amplitude slow waves. This reflects a brain state where very littl....
Panksepp, Jaak, "Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions", Oxford University Press, 1998, 125
Although we do not presently know exactly how memories are consolidated during REM, we can anticipate that the hippocampus will be in the middle of the neuronal action. After all, the hippocampus is the brain area that is well established to be a mediator between short- and long-term memories, and it goes into a charact....
Panksepp, Jaak, "Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions", Oxford University Press, 1998, 129
[REM is hypothesized to restore neurotransmitter efficacy in the brain, but the specific mechanism is unknown.] I favor an alternative neurochemical viewpoint that sees REM as providing a period of relatively selective rejuvenation in the synaptic efficacy of the serotonin (i.e., 5-HT) system, with no clear hypothesis w....
Panksepp, Jaak, "Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions", Oxford University Press, 1998, 141
Helplessness and immobilization keep people from utilizing their stress hormones to defend themselves. When that happens, their hormones still are being pumped out, but the actions they’re supposed to fuel are thwarted. Eventually, the activation patterns that were meant to promote coping are turned back against the org....
Van Der Kolk, Bessel, "The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma", Penguin Books, 2015, 219
Only the cleverness of behavioral researchers has brought these nightmarish circumstances into a rat’s life. Without posttraining REM sleep, rats take very much longer to master such emotionally difficult tasks. Apparently they cannot extract the meaningful, but counterintuitive, relationships that exist in the situatio....
Panksepp, Jaak, "Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions", Oxford University Press, 1998, 139-40
Specific hormonal changes tend to occur during specific components of sleep and waking cycles. For instance, during waking, the release of insulin is linked to the act of eating—being secreted in proportion to the amount of energy consumed that needs to be tucked away in fat stores (see Chapter 9). These stores eventual....
Panksepp, Jaak, "Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions", Oxford University Press, 1998, 136
One impressive line of evidence that SWS does restore bodily functions is the fact that secretion of growth hormone (GH) from the anterior pituitary is tightly linked to SWS onset. Usually there are several pulses of GH during the night, with the largest one occurring during the early periods of SWS, which are typically....
Panksepp, Jaak, "Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions", Oxford University Press, 1998, 136
More to the point, the restorative effects of sleep may be even broader, permitting restoration and rebalancing of many neurochemical systems in the brain. Future research should consider the possibility that SWS is a special period when behavioral excitatory processes in the brain are restored, while REM sleep is a per....
Panksepp, Jaak, "Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions", Oxford University Press, 1998, 141
Indeed, it is a demonstrated fact that the amount of dreaming sleep goes up when organisms are confronted by stressful, emotionally challenging situations. [What happens under pain stress, when dreaming sleep is suppressed?]
Panksepp, Jaak, "Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions", Oxford University Press, 1998, 128
Since schizophrenic breaks can also be precipitated by stress, it is especially noteworthy that the mesolimbic DA system (A 10) is highly stress-responsive, more so than the other brain DA systems.98 During stress, certain ascending DA systems become rapidly depleted of DA, with consequent development of hypersensitivit....
Panksepp, Jaak, "Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions", Oxford University Press, 1998, 162
End of included memoes/notes