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1 week ago | 
psychologytoday.com | Marianna Pogosyan Ph.D |Devon Frye
The current fascination with dopamine may have something to do with its role in addiction. Dopamine is vital for scores of brain and body functions. Dopamine is key in reinforcement learning: it controls the windows when brain plasticity can occur. Meet the brain molecule of the moment: 4-(2-Aminoethyl)benzene-1,2-diol. You have been its beneficiary from birth. Lately, you might have seen it splashed across the headlines under its common name. Dopamine hits and fixes. Dopamine fasts and detoxes.
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Nov 25, 2024 | 
qoshe.com | Marianna Pogosyan Ph.D
“A word is dead When it is said, Some say. I say it just Begins to live That day.” –Emily DickinsonWe don’t need to turn to the poets to appreciate the weight that even the smallest words can carry on their shoulders. They showcase their powers to us by themselves, daily. Syllable after syllable, words do much more than help us communicate information: from dysregulating our nervous systems to leaving us feeling loved. Dr. Haesun Moon works with words.
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Oct 8, 2024 | 
psychologytoday.com | Marianna Pogosyan Ph.D
Meditation can help us develop a rich inner life and an intimacy with the mind. Meditation creates an inner workspace where we can choose our response to our circumstances. Cultivating the inner attitudes of curiosity and kindness are key in befriending the mind. Extensive research has explored our role as active agents in our own flourishing.
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Oct 8, 2024 | 
qoshe.com | Marianna Pogosyan Ph.D
Extensive research has explored our role as active agents in our own flourishing. In 2020, Cortland Dahl and colleagues from UW-Madison’s Center for Healthy Minds introduced a multi-disciplinary, training-based framework featuring four psychological pathways for cultivating well-being: awareness, connection, insight, and purpose. These dimensions, the authors argue, can be developed through various mental training methods, highlighting the plasticity of human flourishing.
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Sep 18, 2024 | 
qoshe.com | Marianna Pogosyan Ph.D
Imagine having a front-row seat to your nervous system. How would your experience change if you could see, in real-time, how the billions of cells and neurons of your brain and body orchestrate your engagement with your environment, how they respond to your thoughts, emotions, and actions, and how they render love, joy, grief, and rage possible? Such a comprehensive dossier on what it means to be human might not yet be available to us.
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Aug 2, 2024 | 
psychologytoday.com | Marianna Pogosyan Ph.D
In a world that’s keen on spotlighting differences, there’s solace in our ability to connect with each other in ways that foster deep psychological healing. We can happen on such encounters through chance or practice, with kin or strangers, friends or therapists. It’s particularly poignant when a warm and safe holding environment that often heralds any healing emerges between people who, at first glance, are very dissimilar.
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Jun 20, 2024 | 
psychologytoday.com | Marianna Pogosyan Ph.D
Dispositions and mental functioning are among the variables of personality. Personality is malleable and can influence well-being outcomes. Self-knowledge can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Source: Erik Nilsson/PixabayImagine you had to explain the concept of personality to a group of (friendly and curious) aliens. You could start with the etymology of the word: persona in Latin refers to the mask worn in Roman theatres through which (per) resounded the voice of the actor (sonat).
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May 8, 2024 | 
qoshe.com | Marianna Pogosyan Ph.D
Do you believe happiness is the ultimate goal of human life? If yes, then you might be a budding Aristotelian, says Edith Hall, a classics professor at Durham University and a scholar of the ancient Greek philosophers. More than two thousand years since Aristotle’s teachings, science has come a long way in its exploration of happiness. Advice on leading a good life is everywhere, from tending to our physical health and our relationships, to finding meaning and flow.
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Apr 4, 2024 | 
psychologytoday.com | Marianna Pogosyan Ph.D
The effects of others on our biology are well-documented by research. There are evolutionary origins to why humans provide psychosocial support to each other in times of need. A crucial driver of healing in relation is in the quality of our connection to others. Pain, in its many guises, is a mandatory feature of the human experience. Often, we feel alone in our pain. Yet, belonging to our highly social species offers an invaluable resource for coping with it: other people.
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Mar 22, 2024 | 
psychologytoday.com | Marianna Pogosyan Ph.D
If we were tasked with explaining some of our species-defining concepts to alien visitors, we’d probably tell them stories. No dictionary definition of love, joy, regret, or grief encapsulates the majesty and misery of those words as does relating them to the context of everyday lived experience. We humans are a family of storytellers. Thanks to our millennia-long anthology of collective wisdom and tradition, storytelling has become a key marker of what it means to be human.
