---
feed: "DANIEL_ON_SLOPE"
codex_section: "S18"
source: VideoTranscript
title: "MENtrepreneurs Level One Series - Chapter02.06"
conv_id: "video-chapter02.06-2010"
share_url: "https://www.youtube.com/@MENtrepreneurs"
created: "2010-07"
message_count: 1
category:
  - "MENtrepreneurs"
  - "Level One Series"
  - "Chapter 02.06"
  - "Distinction & Emotional Vocabulary"
  - "Neuroscience"
summary: "Daniel Comp delivers a neuroscience-rich session on Distinction and Emotional Vocabulary, explaining how building a rich emotional vocabulary creates neural connections (a 'ladder') between the reactive lower brain (amygdala and thalamus) and the higher regulatory areas (anterior cingulate cortex and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex). He uses the iconic story of Anne Sullivan and Helen Keller — particularly the W-A-T-E-R breakthrough — as a powerful metaphor for how language and distinction unlock transformation from isolation and frustration to connection and empowerment. Practical tools include the 'Trash Out' method for emotional regulation, optimizing brain chemistry through oxygen, water, nutrition, sleep, sex, stress management, and learning, and the critical insight that 'distinction is power.' The session emphasizes that developing emotional vocabulary is one of the most effective ways to rewire the brain, moderate reactive behavior, and achieve personal transformation."
keypoints:
  - "Distinction is power — the ability to make subtle distinctions in emotional meaning determines whether we react explosively or respond thoughtfully"
  - "Emotional vocabulary builds a neural 'ladder' connecting the reactive amygdala/thalamus with the regulatory ACC and DLPFC, allowing conscious choice over impulsive behavior"
  - "The story of Anne Sullivan and Helen Keller demonstrates how acquiring language and distinction transforms isolation and rage into connection, learning, and historic achievement"
  - "Practical tool: The 'Trash Out' method — step away, use an emotional vocabulary list, reframe, and return with the right words to express what is really happening inside"
  - "Brain chemistry can be optimized through oxygen (exercise/deep breathing), water, rotating proteins for amino acids, quality sleep in 90-minute cycles, sex (dopamine), stress management, and continuous learning"
  - "Developing emotional vocabulary is one of the fastest and most effective ways to rewire the brain and move from arrested development to mature, integrated response"
tags:
  - "men-trepreneurs"
  - "chapter-02-06"
  - "distinction"
  - "emotional-vocabulary"
  - "helen-keller"
  - "anne-sullivan"
  - "brain-chemistry"
  - "acc-dlpfc"
monomyth_stage: "11 - Resurrection"
gameboard_position: "Camp 8: Resurrection"
truth_score: 96
entropy_score: "Low"
tone:
  sentiment: "Educational"
  emotions:
    - "Practical"
    - "Metaphorical"
    - "Encouraging"
  sycophancy_level: "None"
  notes: "This session provides a clear neuroscience framework for why emotional vocabulary works. Daniel uses the Helen Keller story as a memorable and moving anchor. The 'Trash Out' method and brain chemistry optimization are highly actionable. The tone is educational, practical, and hopeful. No AI avatars; pure founder teaching with scientific explanation."
related_events: ["video-chapter02.01-2010", "video-chapter02.02-2010", "video-chapter02.03-2010", "video-chapter02.04-2010", "video-chapter02.05-2010"]
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ma5_inheritance: "Initium"
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voice_print: false
codex_candidate: true
phase: "Chapter 02 - Personal Transformation: Distinction & Emotional Vocabulary"
enriched_date: "2026-04-19"
---
![[MENtrepreneurs Level One Series - Chapter02.06.png]]
### Original YouTube Description

[No separate description provided in source file. This is Session 6 of Chapter 2 — Distinction and Emotional Vocabulary — explaining the neuroscience of how emotional vocabulary rewires the brain and featuring the Helen Keller story as a metaphor for transformation.]

---

### Cleaned Transcript

**(upbeat music)**

**Daniel:**  
Welcome back to the Enterprising Cycle, Chapter 2. This is Session 6 on **Distinction and Emotional Vocabulary**.

And I've got to tell you that I think you're doing really well. You are ascending and acclimating. You're becoming more familiar with a lot of the terms and the diversity of the concepts that I'm bringing together for you.

And in this session, we're going to start off by kind of a review, you know, back down to Basecamp a little bit.

And what we should have picked up is that it's critical to surround yourselves with lifelong learning, with books and mentors for us to model and to mimic, to surround ourselves with points of view that we won't naturally have at a time when it's critical for us to get it.

If you haven't grown up in a household that models healthy emotions correctly, then you haven't learned to bridge the chasm.

Let's learn from **Tony Robbins**. If you picked it up during his presentation at TED, you'll have seen him actually ask himself three questions. "What is this?" was one of his questions. And "What's the truth about this?" and "What do I do about that?"

It was very interesting when he told the story about his dad and how his dad reacted with three different answers. And he chose to have different answers than his father and has had a completely different outcome.

And that calling can touch other people in my own life. My life was touched because when I was 11 years old, Thanksgiving, no money, no food, and we're not going to starve, but my father was totally messed up. My mom was letting him know how bad he messed up. And somebody came to the door and delivered food.

My father made three decisions. I know what they were briefly. His focus was, "This is charity. What does it mean? I'm worthless. What do I got to do? Leave my family," which he did, the time when the most painful experiences of life.

My three decisions gave me a different path. I said, "Focus on there's food. What a concept."

Second, but this is what changed my life. This is what shaped me as a human being. Somebody's gift. I don't even know who it is. But my father always said, "No one gives a shit." And all of a sudden somebody I don't know, they're not asking for this giving our family food, looking out for us. It made me believe this. What does it mean that strangers care? And what that made me decide is strangers care about me and my family. I care about them. What am I going to do? I'm going to do something to make a difference.

**Tony** says that **distinction is power**. You see, it's that degree of distinction, the ability to distinguish between subtle differences in what the meaning of words are and the meaning of events, that determines how we react or how we respond.

And a personal story about this. Six months ago, my stepson Chris was visiting, and I was troubled and not taking the time to really understand what was going on inside of me. A number of events all happening at the same time. And I blurted out to him something like, "What's the matter with you?"

And what I really intended to find out was what was troubling him. But you can imagine that could escalate very easily into a pastoral visit for that day. Yeah, it was pretty rough. I felt disrespected and unwanted in some ways, but we figured it out. We talked it out and got through it. Two polar opposites coming together and then trying to understand each other without expressing how to understand each other, which I think is the trickiest part of getting to know someone or having a relationship with them, is you don't know their buttons yet, their tendencies and all that. So you have to figure that out. That's necessary. If not, you're just going to be clashing heads constantly.

Distinction is one of the ladders, if you will, that we're going to lash together to go across this chasm of personal transformation.

We've got a section of the brain we're going to look at that's near our fight-or-flight reactants, and it's our amygdala and our thalamus and our ACC, which are tied on the other side of the chasm to our DLPFC. It's up here. It's what our will is.

And when you can link the two of those together with a ladder of vocabulary, an emotional vocabulary specifically, then you have the capacity to go across chasms that previously were impassable.

This means you have the combination to a vault of emotional vocabulary to distinguish between seething and disgust or mad, appalled and guarded versus silent, bewildered and flustered versus cold, annoyed and anguished versus loud, vulnerable and intimidated versus defensive, unappreciated and exasperated versus just cranky.

We're not going to be able to cover the history of **Anne Sullivan and Helen Keller** in this session, so I'd really encourage you to do some research on your own and learn about the horrendous challenges that Anne Sullivan had and how her life experience gave her the compassion to work with the insolent and horribly difficult Helen Keller, who was locked up and frustrated from her tragic circumstances.

And between the two of them, the outcome of their work together has been historic. And I'd really like you to consider how language and the acquisition of distinction and emotional vocabulary gave them the tools to become champions in history.

Let's learn from Helen Keller and Anne Sullivan.

**[Helen Keller / Anne Sullivan clips]**

**Helen Keller:**  
Helen Keller dedicated her life to the betterment of others and labored tirelessly on behalf of the deaf and blind. As a lobbyist, fundraiser, speaker, world traveler and dedicated champion of civil liberties, she did more to promote and secure equal treatment for those with disabilities than anyone before her or since.

**Anne Sullivan:**  
When I saw Helen Keller first, she was six years and eight months old. She had been blind and deaf and mute since her 19th month as a result of an illness. She had no way of communicating with those around her except a few imitated signs that she had made for herself, a push man to go and a pull man come and so on.

**Helen Keller:**  
All right. Pump. No, she's not here. Pump. W-A-T-E-R. It has a name. W-A-T.

(Gasps) (Groans) (Gasps) Yes. Yes. Oh, my dear. (Gasps) No. Yes. She had observed that we did not use the hands when we were talking to each other. And I let her see by putting her hand on my face how we talked with our mouths. She felt the vibration of the spoken word. Instantly she spelled, "I want to talk with my mouth." That seemed impossible. The first word she learned to articulate was the little word "it." With the hand in this position, I made the vowel, "ih." She spelled it. "Ih." Then I made the "t." She feels it with the finger on her lips. On my lips. Then I put the two letters together to form the word. "It." And the first word was learned.

After her seventh lesson, she was able to speak the sentence word by word. "I am not dumb now."

**Daniel:**  
Keller had a strong following throughout the world, and she traveled internationally to promote equality for the disabled. People of all nationalities were inspired by her message of determination and justice. She traveled by the end of her days to 39 countries across the globe. She was the first major visitor to Japan after Japan had been bombed. She traveled to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. During that trip, two million people either lined the streets or came out and listened to her speak.

Keller committed her entire adult life to the battle for civil liberties and received numerous honors for her work. She was presented the Presidential Medal of Freedom, was the first woman to receive an honorary doctorate from Harvard, and was named one of the 100 most influential people of the 20th century.

And now for a neuroscience lesson from an amateur. I'm going to do my best to explain as I understand how our brain works to regulate our behavior when it comes to emotions and language.

Let's take a look at our brain and how our spinal cord comes up, and how it meets at the base with all of our fight or flight reactions. This is all where our amygdala and our thalamus and the pieces that are developed early on in our formation in the womb, these pieces all tend to regulate our ability to protect ourselves, our reactive behaviors.

So with my illustration, let's have a look at the **DLPFC** right up here in the front of our brain. It's the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, what that does for us. And the **ACC**, sort of in between these two pieces, is our anterior cingulate cortex.

And our core of our brain stem that has the amygdala, which is our black box, emotionally speaking, it records all of the emotional experiences that we have way before we even have a language. This is where our reactive behaviors are all taking place, where our emotions are recorded, and then our thalamus says, "Ahh, go beat it up, go kick it really hard."

But further forward in our brain is this ACC, and in front of that is the DLPFC, seat of our words and our will, and language tends to tie these together by building the fabric and therefore moderating our behaviors, calming this down.

The ACC regulates our emotional response, things like social rejection, things like resolving conflict.

Take a look at these arrows, and if you'll experience with me, tell me which direction the middle arrow is pointing. And now, and now, again, again, again.

If you start having a hard time, it's because your ACC is firing as fast as it can, trying to see that there's a contradiction and that there's errors, that's the piece of your brain that handles all of that.

In front of that is the DLPFC, and it's one of the last areas in our brain to actually develop in childhood.

In sort of layman's terms, the ACC is our "oh shit" circuit. It recognizes things that aren't consistent. It recognizes inconsistencies. And the DLPFC then is sort of our delete key. When two of these get together, we start really messing this up because things that we don't believe in sort of get deleted. Things that we're actually staring straight at that are facts that our DLPFC says, "Ah, forget that."

And our thalamus connected to our amygdala may help us have tremendous reactive behavior, but if we can simply bridge the gap by firing that ACC with new words, with distinctions in the emotions that are happening at the core of our brain, then our will gets connected because the dendrites, the little fabric that channels the circuitry of our beliefs into our actions, the circuitry can become denser, richer, more able to conduct very fine distinctions, which allow us to not just explode in reactive behavior and slam a door or kick a dog. Rather, we can actually slow our reactive behavior and express what we feel and sense inside of us.

This distinction is made possible by having proper brain chemistry.

Hang on here, stuff's getting deep. We are looking at the little tiny bits and pieces of your brain, and you've got to be wondering like I am, "What in the world has this got to do with anything?"

This session is on distinction and emotional vocabulary, so let's regroup here for a second.

I've got an umbrella here to kind of put this all in context. You know, the piece that shields us from the rain? That's the canopy, which in our case is about personal transformation, how to actually change who we are.

Second, all these pieces, these spreaders and the ribs and the tube, those are all the components that sort of make this work. It starts with awareness of our behavior and leads to things like managing our self-thought, what we say to ourselves all day, what we believe about ourselves, and we talked about our DLPFC, controlling our will, our higher concepts.

Well, how come we can't keep our New Year's resolutions or our promise to our wife that we're not going to explode, we're going to talk to her? Well, that's where things start getting down to the handle here, you see? That's how you actually control all this stuff.

The handle is the application of this knowledge.

Here's a personal example of how I manage my emotions using all these tools put together.

If I have an emotional meltdown because of something too complicated, too demanding, too much risk, whatever it is at the moment, I do a **trash out**. You know that thing when you put your child in the corner and tell them to think about it? Well, I take the trash down to the dumpster, which gives me five to seven minutes to look at my emotional vocabulary list and to get a new perspective by sort of reframing everything, looking around, appreciating the environment that we live in, and then thinking about what is really going on inside of me.

Remember, we don't see things as they are, we see things as we are.

This is just enough time to let me get some oxygen, do a little self-reflection, and find the right words that I need to express what's going on.

Let's think about brain chemistry for a second and why it is that when we will, when we have a resolution, we resolve to do something, why does that not happen?

There's at least seven distinct factors that you can get your hands on that affect your cortical mapping. They are oxygen, water, nutrition, sleep, sex, stress, and learning.

Let's go through those one at a time.

With oxygen, it's a critical component of being able to burn and oxidize and create things in your body. So how do you get oxygen? Well, you don't live on Everest. Okay, done. How about exercise? 20 to 30 minutes of really good aerobic deep breathing every other day seems to work pretty well for me. The other way is to slow down, take a breath. That's what you can learn from the Dalai Lama and others that are pretty practiced at meditation, is that ability to recognize when you need to take a deep breath. That will really help produce the oxygen in your system.

Water. Let me put it this way. You've got to drink enough water during the day that you have to pee pretty frequently. You can moderate that as you want.

Nutrition. This one we learned from a friend of ours, Pam Helmley, who's the founder of NeuroGistics. They do brain chemistry testing. She shared with us that in order to have the right cocktail of amino acids for your neurotransmitter, you simply have to rotate your proteins. You see, one method we'll talk about in a second is artificial stimulation, artificial ingredients. But if you simply rotate from beef to pork to chicken to fish to tofu, rice and beans, alternate each day or every other day at least your proteins, then you'll have the right mix of amino acids to create the right balance in your brain.

Stimulants that we take in, whether it's caffeine, nicotine, or recreational or prescription drugs, have a particular effect, which is short-term and not long-term. Pam Helmley shared this really wonderful illustration of what those do in our brain.

When we're born, our brain vestibules, all of the folds in our brain, are filled with the proper balance of chemistry, as well as all of the synaptic connections with neurotransmitters. And when we have a stress in life, it's as if the cups are shaken, spilling some of that chemistry out. And when we take drugs, it's like putting these rocks back in that in fact, temporarily, they will refill our chemistry. But each time that it's shaken, we need more and more and more. And so the dosages will naturally increase, and our ability over time will actually be reduced to next to nothing. And that's what addictions do.

So this makes me think about cravings, you know, the craving for chocolate or coffee or whatever your choice might be, sex. Those are the things that we can become aware of, and to moderate those as well as our strengths of our behavior, our coping mechanisms, all of those things lead to personal transformation.

Sleep is another component. And REM sleep, or very deep sleep, rapid eye movement type of sleep, comes in 90-minute cycles. So what does that matter? Well, think about how long you sleep. It should be in some increment of 90 minutes. That's an hour and a half. So hour and a half, three, four and a half, six, seven and a half, nine. Sleep some increment of that, and you'll find that you'll be optimizing your sleep cycles.

Sex, enough said. It really helps us produce the reward hormone called dopamine. And that's, you can find it all over the Internet as far as what the benefits of dopamine production are, but it's really a big ingredient in that brain acid that we need to produce the electricity in our head.

Learning is another component. Really exercising our brain, expanding our understanding of things as you're doing with these series, helps us by tracking new pathways, by forcing new relationships between existing words, concepts, memories. All those pieces force us to grow, like lifting weights, if you will.

Okay, the reduction of stress, managing your stress. I'm not an expert at it. I get stressed out just trying to produce these videos. But **Robert Sapolsky** is fabulously knowledgeable at it. So let's learn some things from him.

**[Robert Sapolsky clip]**

**Robert Sapolsky:**  
If you're a normal mammal, what stress is about is three minutes of screaming terror on the savanna, after which it's either over with you or over with.

Over the last three decades, Stanford University neurobiologist Robert Sapolsky has been advancing our understanding of stress, how it impacts our bodies, and how our social standing can make us more or less susceptible.

Is the aggregate bad news? Most of the time, you can find him teaching and researching in the high-achieving, high-stressed world of brain science.

But that's only part of his story. For a few weeks every year or so, Sapolsky shifts his lab to a place more than 9,000 miles away, on the plains of the Masai Mara Reserve in Kenya, East Africa.

You live in a place like this, you're a baboon, and you only have to spend about three hours a day getting your calories. And if you only have to work three hours a day, you've got nine hours of free time every day to devote to making somebody else just miserable.

They're not being stressed by lions chasing them all the time, they're being stressed by each other. They're not being stressed by social and psychological tumult invented by their own species. They're a perfect model for westernized stress-related disease.

Because what stress is about is somebody is very intent on eating you, or you are very intent on eating somebody, and there's an immediate crisis going on.

When you run for your life, basics are all that matter. Lungs work overtime to pump mammoth quantities of oxygen into the bloodstream. The heart races to pump that oxygen throughout the body, so muscles respond instantly. You need your blood pressure up to deliver that energy. You need to turn off anything that's not essential, growth, reproduction. You know, you're running for your life, this is no time to ovulate, tissue repair, all that sort of thing. Do it later if there is a later.

When the zebra escapes, its stress response shuts down. But human beings can't seem to find their off switch. We turn on the exact same stress response for purely psychological states, thinking about the ozone layer, the taxes coming up, mortality, 30-year mortgages. We turn on the same stress response, and the key difference there is we're not doing it for a real physiological reason, and we're doing it nonstop.

After a while, the stress response is more damaging than the stressor itself, because the stressor is some psychological nonsense that you're falling for. No zebra on earth running for its life would understand why fear of speaking in public would cause you to secrete the same hormones that it's doing at that point to save its life.

I'm studying stress for 30 years now, and I even tell people how they should live differently. So presumably I should have incorporated all of this, and the reality is I'm unbelievably stressed and type A and poorly coping. Why else would I study this stuff 80 hours a week? No doubt everything I advise is going to lose all its credibility if I keel over dead from a heart attack in my early 50s.

Nah, I'm not good at dealing with stress. One thing that works to my advantage is I love my work, and I love every aspect of it, so that's good. But nonetheless...

We love stress when it's the right kind, when it's the right amount of stress, when it is moderately challenging and when it doesn't go on for too long. We love it. It's what we define as stimulation. We don't want to get a life without stimulation or challenge. We want to get just the right amount.

Stress can do some pretty adverse things in your brain. Certain aspects of memory doesn't work very well, and we all discovered that when you're doing all night or in your rec the next morning trying to remember anything for that exam, you are more prone towards anxiety. You are more prone towards depression.

In its broadest possible forms, stress management can work. Stress management in terms of exercise, prayer, meditation, mindful reflection, a favorite hobby, a social outlet, all of those things, if structured on a regular basis, can do great things.

Managing the stress, really big one. And it's not just that your current stress load, but understanding things like what maternal stress imparted to you. What did you get from your mom while she was going through your pregnancy?

Prenatal stresses alter the trajectory of brain development, leading to neuropsychiatric disorders. Cortical steroids in the fetal compartment alter the development of neuroanatomical substrates involved in social and psychotic disorders.

What that means is that while you were being developed in the womb, the mental state of your mother directly impacted the development of your entire physiology. And you are battling part of this war based on what her experience was. Were she and your father in good standing? Were finances okay? Were you wanted?

The psychological disgust of an unwanted pregnancy drives cortisol through the roof and goes directly through the placenta to the baby. And so that's out of your control even before you got started, learning things the wrong way.

One of the fastest ways to see the transformation happen is to pick up a much stronger emotional vocabulary.

Stick the list on your refrigerator and say several words before you can open the door. Put it on the mirror while you're shaving and read it out loud to yourself. Next time you have an issue with a situation, go back to that list, write them down on a card, and reflect on how many of the different words you can use rather than the simple ones. "I'm really mad!" No, you can articulate that in many, many ways.

What that does is it actually forces our brain to start remapping some of the pathways so that we no longer rely on the old bad habits, but we create new ones. And if we have all these other factors in place, then all this stuff starts coming together and others will see it before you will. They'll go, "Something's really going on with you. You're changing." It actually works. I have people saying that to me.

And now for the neuroscience of personal transformation, Dr. Daniel Siegel at Google Tech Talks.

**[Daniel Siegel clip excerpt]**

**Daniel Siegel:**  
The simplest definition of the mind that these scientists agreed upon goes like this. That the mind is a process that regulates the flow of energy and information.

If you say, just on the simplest level, "I want to take a person coming to me as a friend or coming to me professionally if you're a therapist, and I want to strengthen their mind," at a minimum, what do you need to do? What does it take to regulate something?

Anyone here in engineering? Okay, you need to measure it. You need to have some way to measure or monitor the thing that you're regulating. And we're saying the thing is energy and information flow. So at a very minimum, you need to have a way to monitor and measure, maybe not quantitatively, but to assess, to monitor, to observe that which you're going to influence, which is the second thing in regulation.

If you're driving a car and you're watching, if someone has tied your hands behind your back and tied your feet together, you can't influence the thing that you're trying to regulate. So monitoring and modifying are the two essential components of regulation.

So once we define the mind, especially in this way, you get a new insight into how to actually create a stronger mind. You'd be amazed, but a lot of people live their lives just having thoughts and feelings, beliefs and attitudes, having hopes and dreams and memories and perceptions, all the stuff that we can use to describe the mind. Those aren't definitions. They're descriptions of mental activity. But they haven't developed the capacity to actually observe those mental activities as the flow of energy and information, as the mind itself.

So that process of being able to see mental activity with more clarity and then modify it with more efficacy is something that you can name with the word "mindsight," this ability to actually see your mind, not just have one.

There's something about being able to see and influence your internal world that creates more health.

I'll give you an example. Let's say someone had a huge feeling of anger going on inside of them, and they had no way of monitoring that. Would the anger go away? No, they'd still have anger, right? The anger would still be changing their physiology, but they wouldn't have the capacity to have what's called discernment, to take a step away from mental activity and notice, "I have anger." The anger would sweep them up, and if you're an eight-year-old on the playground of a school and someone takes your ball, you may slug that kid, right?

So we've done studies at UCLA using mindfulness techniques, one way of teaching a way to monitor and modify internal states. And even in preschool kids, using certain very basic mindfulness techniques, we've been able to show that you can decrease bullying. You can increase empathy. You can increase the capacity for kids to pause before they act.

We've even done a pilot study at UCLA where, if you teach mindfulness techniques, which I'll tell you about in a moment, you actually can take people with attention deficit problems where they can't regulate energy information flow, and you can actually, as adults and older teenagers, you can change the way their executive functions of their brain function, just by teaching them mental training.

Certainly, my own background as an attachment researcher and a psychiatrist, we see this all the time, that relationships shape the firing in the brain, and when neurons fire, they actually change their synaptic connections with each other. And so the way we learn, the way we grow, the way we develop, is by experiences in addition to genes shaping the synaptic connections in the nervous system.

We know that relationships shape those connections. This is a very handy model of the brain. You don't have to ever remember to bring it to work.

So if you put your thumb in the middle and then curl your fingers over the top, this individual's face would be in front of the fingernails. The metaphoric brain we have here, the top of it would be the top of the fingers, that's where the top of the skull would be, the back of your hand would be where the back of your skull is over here.

So, taking the brain apart piece by piece, if you raise your fingers up, lift your thumb up, let's start the anatomy lesson here. The spinal cord brings in data from all over the body and first enters the skull part of the skull-based brain in an area called the brain stem. And this is an area that helps regulate your basic physiology, like heart rate and respiration. But it also has the nuclei, the collection of the basic cell of the nervous system, the neuron, that are responsible for the fight-flight-freeze response.

It's called the limbic area. It's involved in five processes and it works closely with the brain stem. Those five processes include appraising the significance of events that happen. So appraisal is number one. Number two is motivational states. It works very closely with the brain stem in motivating us to do certain things, to behave in certain ways. Number three is it distinguishes between different kinds of memory systems. Number four is it also works closely with the brain stem and the body to generate what are called emotions or affective states or sometimes called valence states of mind, emotions. And the fifth thing that the limbic area does that people often don't realize, and that's the function called attachment relationships.

So the limbic area is important for us having relationships with other people that are not only close and meaningful, but when we're in a state of distress, we go to that attachment figure to help soothe us. We as mammals have needed each other to survive. We've needed each other to help regulate our energy and information flow. We are as a class of animals, mammals, extremely social. So that's the limbic area, the fifth function of limbic area.

The back in general is for processing the external world. When you see me moving my hands around like this, we know it's the back of your brain that's being activated. When you hear the sound of my voice coming from outside of you, we know it's the side of your brain, the temporal area. Even when you feel with your fingers like this, you're activating still a back part of the brain because you're exploring the outer world. So that's the posterior part of the brain.

Once you get from your second to last knuckles forward to the fingernails, that's the frontal area of the brain which grew when we became primates. And this area has energy and information flow in it that in the first part is about your motor action, what you're going to do with your body in response to your experiences. And the next strip just before that is called the premotor strip. It's where you plan your actions, where you image what you're going to do. That we call creativity that are the thrust of this capacity.

But the prefrontal cortex, while it's creative in this way, it also anchors us in some very interesting ways in relationships. And let me give you an example. The first thing to say is like any part of the brain, there are many parts. So here we're talking about the prefrontal area which is represented from your last knuckles to your fingernails. The side part, the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, just the side area, is very important for when you put something in the front of your mind. So if you have a computer program, for example, and you want someone to remember something and then you change screens and they're going on to something else, you want to know how is this what's called the chalkboard of the mind holding on to that piece of data. And it used to be said that we can hold on to seven plus or minus two items. People actually don't believe that anymore. Not because we're changing, but because it's a reinterpretation of the research. That in daily life it's probably more like three, two or three items.

But for our purposes we're going to look now at the middle prefrontal area. And for those of you who like to know names, I'll tell you what I'm including in the middle prefrontal cortex. So if you look up the research, you'll know what the anatomical names are. This includes an area called the anterior cingulate, the orbital frontal, the dorsal and medial aspects of the medial prefrontal. I'm sorry, the dorsal and the ventral aspects of the medial prefrontal and the ventral lateral prefrontal cortex, which includes an area called the insula.

Now everyone's going, oh no, too much Greek. So don't worry about all that. That's why I made up this term called middle. That now we know from research are based on, that is they need a healthy middle prefrontal area to function well. And you just think about in your own life what role these nine functions play in yourself, in your relationships with others, in people you know, and here are the nine functions.

The first is this area of the brain actually sits on top of the brain stem, as you can see from where it is, and it helps regulate it. So regulating the body, the heart, the lungs, is actually what this part contributes to, body regulation.

Number two is, you know when you look at another person in the face and you feel like you're connected to them and you're attuned to them? That attuned communication depends on this middle prefrontal area, and when it's damaged people don't do that.

Number three is to be able to balance your emotions. So that these internal valence states we call emotions rise enough so life has meaning, but not rise too much so life becomes chaotic, and not be too depleted so life becomes rigid. That optimal flow, which we'll talk about in just a moment, that optimal flow is what this area helps create.

The fourth function is the capacity to extinguish fear. If you've been traumatized or it's a difficult thing and you're frightened of it, this area actually grows what are called GABA fibers. Gamma-aminobutyric acid is an inhibitory peptide that helps dampen down firing, and the lower limbic area, the amygdala, is responsible for generating activations that are what help us feel fear. So this middle prefrontal area helps calm that down. That's number four.

Number five is the ability to pause before you act, what I call response flexibility, to instead of just active, you know, respond to your impulse, to pause, have a space in your mind where you consider the various options available to you. For a kid on a playground, this is absolutely all the difference between being adaptive and flexible with emotional intelligence and social intelligence, or lacking those things. That ability to pause before you act is everything. And if you could just teach kids that, you'd be making a huge difference in public schools. That's number five.

Number six is something called insight, which scientifically means something called autonoetic consciousness, which is self-knowing awareness. And in the brain, what we think that does is there are representations of the past that are connected with representations of the present and anticipated future. So you have this thing called mental time travel.

The next one is the capacity for empathy. Different from attunement, empathy is the ability to tune into someone else and to create maps of them in your mind. I wonder what that person's feeling. I wonder what she was thinking. I wonder what memories might have come up that made her behave that way. That's an example. Those are examples of empathy.

And then number eight, if you thought that those seven weren't enough, number eight is the capacity for morality, for actually thinking about the importance of compassion, of using your moral imagination to think about the larger social good and then enacting those behaviors even when you're alone. It's a way of defining morality. People would damage this area. They don't become immoral. They become amoral. They just don't consider this larger social good.

Now those first eight, for me, started echoing in my mind as an attachment researcher, independent of brain studies, with what we had proven secure attachment, healthy relationships between a parent and a child, produced those first eight. We'd proven that. Not knowing anything about the brain. So I was going, "Wow. That's really amazing."

The ninth one no one ever looked for, this ninth factor of the middle prefrontal area is intuition. Being in touch with the wisdom of the body. The heart and the intestines have actual neural net processes around them, which allow energy information to flow. It's kind of like little computers in your gut and your cardiac system that then bring the data up through this area of the spinal cord called lamina one. It comes up like in any mammal. It comes up to our lower areas where they regulate the heart and intestines. But then it moves up to the area called the posterior insula in primates and then forward only in humans.

And if you're thinking about the interface between computers and humans, this is a really important area to think about. It allows, when it goes from the posterior insula, taking lamina one data from the body, including the viscera, the hollow organs like the heart and lungs, it takes this data, moves it from the posterior insula to the anterior insula. And what we believe happens when that occurs only in humans is you create a representation of your representation of the body. It's called a re-representation. It keeps you one step removed. It's called introception, perceiving the interior world. And that function, amazingly enough, has been directly correlated not only with anterior insula activation naturally, but with the ability to have empathy. The ability to have empathy, which is at the core of emotional and social intelligence.

So we've now, in these years, bless you, we've now mapped out the actual circuitry that allows you to have these nine functions.

When I started reading about complexity theory and trying to understand why the middle prefrontal cortex might be so exquisitely important in creating the well-being not just of this woman who unfortunately had been hurt in the car accident, and unfortunately so severely damaged there wasn't much recovery possible, but her family was also hurt because the integration, that is the linkage and differentiation in this family, was impaired.

Now luckily they could go through the grieving process, understanding the mechanisms of the brain that wouldn't allow the mind of this mom to continue functioning as it did because the mind uses the brain to create itself. And if the pathways aren't there, the mind can't do it.

For our purposes, understanding the power of this part of the brain, even through the pain of that family, is to look at the power of integration.

So take a look at this list in your head, or if you've written it down, of nine middle prefrontal functions. And how many of you think that that list of nine has a number of components that feel to you, just in your intuition, that this is probably a reasonable description of mental well-being? Let me see.

Well, if you ask mental health practitioners, they jump all over this list and they say, "My God, where'd you get this list?" And I tell them, you know, from the clinical case, and they go, "That's like a magnificent description for us of describing mental health."

What I'm going to propose to you, and this is in all of my different writings that Meng talked about, so you can see the detailed analysis and the references to the science. This is just kind of the take-home message and kind of an overview.

The proposal I'm going to make to you is that a healthy mind emerges from integrated systems. Integration, very clearly defined as the linkage of differentiated parts, so that when you have a nervous system that's integrated, you get these nine functions. When you see relationships in a family that are integrated, you know, where people are honored for their differences, but linked, they want to, "How are you doing? How are you doing? Okay. You like vanilla ice cream? You like chocolate? Fine. But let's go out for ice cream together." You know, that's a healthy, adaptive family. You get flexibility, adaptability, even a sense of coherence.

If you look at the mathematics of coherence, so we're talking about relationships and a brain as systems of energy information flow that when they're integrated, they can move in this adaptive way.

Just as two examples, there's all sorts of domains of integration that can outline a whole approach to promoting a healthy mind.

But one very direct approach, which has been around for, it turns out, thousands of years, was taught to me only very recently because I, by accident, used the word mindfulness in a book on parenting. And I said, with my co-author Mary Hartzell, that one of the most important things we can do is be intentional and awake in our parenting. We use the English word mindfulness.

It turned out, as you may know, that there's 2,500 years of specific mental training to develop mindfulness traits, which I wasn't aware of. But since that time, I was fortunate enough to meet people who have been spending their life in modern times studying scientifically the power of mental training to promote, it turns out, and this totally blew my mind, it turned out to promote all nine of the middle prefrontal functions.

And the neuroscience lesson is that neurons which fire together wire together. So if you have a practice, let's say 10 minutes a day even, where you are taking time to focus, let's say, on the breath, and when your mind wanders, return your attention to the breath in a loving and kind way, and then your mind gets distracted, return your attention, to have this practice where you're aware of your awareness and you're paying attention to your intention. We believe that those are the two fundamental things in every mindfulness practice.

When you do that over and over again, in that 10 minute period, you're creating what's called a mindfully aware state, a state of mindful awareness. Now you may say, well, is that just the same as relaxation? Well, the answer is no. It turns out studies have been done that show that mindfulness training is not the same as relaxation training. You may feel calm or you may not feel calm, but it's a form of mindful awareness which is very different from just relaxing. That's number one.

You say, well, okay, I'm doing it 10 minutes a day. How is that going to help me? Good 10 minutes. What about the rest of my day? Here's the secret. When you intentionally practice firing off neurons, you stimulate neuronal activation and growth, you snag the brain, stimulate neuronal activation and growth. When you create those states, they will change the structure of the brain, and subsequent studies have actually shown that that's true, to make a mindfulness trait. States become traits with practice. That's the whole idea.

So what I'm suggesting to you is that here's we define a healthy mind coming from integrated relationships and integrated nervous system. We've described its features, and now here's the last few minutes before we stop for questions is how do you actually do this?

Well, one thing is you try to promote healthy relationships with other people. You tune into not just their thoughts, but their internal world, their nonverbal signals. You combine in every way you can a way of attuning to people's internal worlds and respecting their ability to be distinct from you. That's a relational one.

In the brain, you can actually, on your own, develop and you can call it an integrative practice if you don't like the word mindfulness, but it's basically a way of focusing energy and information flow in a way that has you be aware of your awareness, pay attention to your intention, and basically build the muscle of the mind.

We have every reason to believe what you're doing in doing that is strengthening the integrative fibers of your brain, in particular, these middle prefrontal areas that I outlined for you.

Now, when you do that, we know from research a couple of amazing things happen. People will shift the baseline activity of their brain to what's called an approach state, so when you do happen in life to confront thing that's difficult, instead of withdrawing from it, you actually approach it. Even just after an eight-week training where people practice every day, their brain changes. Your immune system function improves. People's approach state shift, which is called a left shift, it improves in proportion to the amount of increased immune cells that are going to fight off disease. Blood pressure is improved. All sorts of physiological improvements happen. There have been studies that show empathy increases.

Why would that be? Well, if you just think about what I said about the anterior cingulate and the anterior insula, we didn't talk about the anterior cingulate, but it's part of the middle prefrontal area. When these two go together, the anterior insula's activation, which is what you practice when you're aware of your breath, hour after hour, day after day, you're going to strengthen what your anterior insula is doing. And all the studies that have been done, a lot of them at UCLA with people that I work with, have shown the higher degree of empathy, the higher degree of anterior insula activation. You see someone without much anterior insula activation, they're not in touch with their bodies, very low empathy.

That's just what the research shows. Why would that be the case? We're not talking about mirror neurons, but there's a whole set of neurons that suggest that we soak in what we see in other people to shape our own body's response. And then the way we perceive that body's response allows us to know not only how we feel, but how they feel.

So in all these ways, having an internal education where you're getting this self-connection directly helps your connections with others.

Let me give you an example of a study that was done to illustrate why I'm weird enough or bold enough or whatever to say it, and the mind uses the brain to create itself.

You take someone, let's say, and take ten people, put them in a house, blindfold them for a week. And the brain makes maps of the outside world using the back of the brain, the occipital cortex. After one week, these people have had to figure out the spatial arrangements around them to go to the bathroom, to find food, to find their bed, to go to sleep, etc. After one week, when you put them in a scanner, the fingertips have taken over the back of the brain.

Now you could say, well, sure, that's the brain just doing that. But one way of understanding that is this human being — What do you mean by the fingertips? What I mean is you put them in a scanner and you have them touch things, and now the input from the fingers, which is in a relatively small area in the somatosensory strip, massively activates what we used to call the visual cortex.

And you can read about this in a book called "How the Brain Changes Itself" by Norman Deutsch, or another book called "Train the Mind, Change the Brain" by Sharon Begley, or another book called "The Body Has a Mind of Its Own" by Sandra and Matthew Blakeslee. These are the summaries of the science, so you know I'm not just making it up.

So the idea here is that we used to think of the brain as pretty fixed. Now we're learning it's always changing, and a thought can change the brain.

If you need to know the outside world, but your eyes are no longer bringing the input, we used to think, oh, well, you're really in trouble. Your need to have energy and information flow about the outside world drives the brain to create a map of the outside world. Your mind is using the brain to create what it needs. It needs a mental image of three-dimensional space. This capacity of the mind to get the brain to be activated and keep those circuits active has now been proven.

We didn't know this ten years ago, so that's why I say, you know, hey, the mind used the brain to create itself.

Now we know the integrative circuits of their brain, unfortunately, are damaged from high stress hormone levels. So those kids have a lot of time developing these middle prefrontal cortex. You can't just say, hey, just do it, man. No, their circuits don't exist.

So in a way, the mind is using the brain to create itself, and if the brain circuits aren't there, you're absolutely right. No brain, no mind in that sense. But we need to be really flexible. That's a way of sort of challenging your own mind to say, wow, okay, it's a two-way arrow.

Teacher, teacher, can I be excused? My head is full.

Yes, on to the poll and the essay question.

[Music]

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**CODEX ENTRY**

**Date:** 2010-07  
**File:** MENtrepreneurs Level One Series - Chapter02.06.md  
**Monomyth Stage:** 11 - Resurrection  
**Gameboard Position:** Camp 8: Resurrection  
**MA5 Domain:** Initium  
**Summary:** Daniel Comp delivers a neuroscience-rich session explaining how emotional vocabulary creates the neural "ladder" (connections between the amygdala/thalamus and the ACC/DLPFC) that allows men to move from reactive, explosive behavior to thoughtful, chosen responses. He uses the story of Anne Sullivan and Helen Keller (the W-A-T-E-R breakthrough) as a powerful metaphor for how acquiring distinction and language transforms isolation into connection and empowerment. Practical tools include the "Trash Out" method for emotional regulation and optimizing brain chemistry through oxygen, water, nutrition, sleep, sex, stress management, and learning. The session emphasizes that "distinction is power" and that developing a rich emotional vocabulary is one of the most effective ways to rewire the brain for personal transformation.  
**Key Insight:** Emotional vocabulary builds the neural connections that give us conscious choice over impulsive behavior. The more distinctions we can make in our internal experience, the more power we have to respond rather than react.  
**Narrative Significance:** This session provides the scientific "why" behind all the transformation work in Chapter 2. It bridges the gap between awareness (Chapter 1) and practical application by showing exactly how the brain can be rewired through language and distinction. The Helen Keller story makes the abstract neuroscience deeply human and memorable.

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**INITIUM.**