We often reach for words from someone else's theory.
Dorsal. Ventral. Amygdala. Sympathetic. Growth mindset.
We attach them to brain structures and expect them to create understanding.
But a word doesn't become meaningful simply because someone can repeat it.
Until it connects with lived experience, it's often just vocabulary.
And our understanding of the brain keeps evolving. If we become too attached to one theory or one set of terms, we can miss the deeper patterns those words were trying to describe.
The amygdala doesn't act alone
No brain structure exists apart from the rest of the system.
The amygdala doesn't receive threat information directly. Information first moves through the body, through the senses, and through receptors that have been shaped by a person's unique history.
By the time the brain is making sense of what's happening, experience has already influenced what is being noticed.
That's why no two people are responding to exactly the same world.
Each of us lives inside a reality shaped by years of interaction with other people, environments, and experiences.
Why systems thinking matters
This is why systems thinking sits at the center of everything I teach.
It reminds us that human behavior is always emerging from relationships, not isolated parts.
It also asks something of us.
It asks us to hold our explanations a little more lightly.
Because the less certain we become about one "correct" answer, the better we become at seeing patterns.
And pattern recognition is one of the brain's greatest strengths.
As our understanding grows, we stop depending on the perfect word and start recognizing the patterns of the living system.
Wishing you moments of delight in the aha moments of recognizing patterns*....
Stefanie Faye
*which is associated with the pleasure of dopamine by the way 🙂
P.S. One of the biggest shifts I hope people experience is moving beyond collecting techniques or neuroscience vocabulary,
and toward understanding the patterns underneath them.
When you understand..
... why a long exhale changes the body
... why connection changes physiology
... why attention narrows in one moment and expands in another
... you stop depending on someone else's framework.
You begin seeing the architecture beneath human behavior.
That's what Teach the Nervous System is designed to do.
Rather than giving you another collection of vocabulary or someone else's trademark acronym to memorize,
it gives you a systems-based understanding of the nervous system,
so you can recognize patterns across many situations
and adapt your work with more confidence, flexibility, and scientific grounding.
People engage differently when transformation is explained through biology instead of buzzwords.
9 bite-sized modules • Lifetime access • $44
→ Step inside Teach the Nervous SystemÂ
“The systems-thinking lens allows us to reclaim our intuition about whole systems and hone our abilities to understand parts, see interconnections, ask “what-if ” questions about possible future behaviors, and be creative and courageous about system redesign.”
― Donella H. Meadows, Thinking in Systems: A Primer
References and further reading:
Gruber, M. J., Gelman, B. D., & Ranganath, C. (2014). States of curiosity modulate hippocampus-dependent learning via the dopaminergic circuit. Neuron, 84(2), 486–496.
Meadows, D. H. (2008). Thinking in systems: A primer (D. Wright, Ed.). Chelsea Green Publishing.
Pessoa, L. (2022). The entangled brain: How perception, cognition, and emotion are woven together. The MIT Press.
Macrine, S. L., & Fugate, J. M. B. (Eds.). (2022). Movement matters: How embodied cognition informs teaching and learning. The MIT Press.
Tik, M., Sladky, R., Luft, C. D. B., Willinger, D., Hoffmann, A., Banissy, M. J., Bhattacharya, J., & Windischberger, C. (2018). Ultra-high-field fMRI insights on insight: Neural correlates of the Aha!-moment. Human Brain Mapping, 39(8), 3241–3252.Â
