Here’s what they found. In the brains of the students who received negative feedback the sympathetic nervous system lit up. This is the “fight or flight” system, the system that mutes the other parts of the brain and thus allows us to focus only on the information most necessary to survive. When this part of the nervous system is triggered, your heart rate goes up, endorphins flood your body, your cortisol levels rise, and you tense for action. This is your brain on negative feedback: it responds as if to a threat, and it narrows its activity. The strong negative emotions produced by criticism “inhibits access to existing neural circuits and invokes cognitive, emotional, and perceptual impairment,” psychology and business professor Richard Boyatzis said in summarizing the researchers findings.

Negative feedback doesn’t enable learning. It systematically inhibits it and is, neurologically speaking, how to create impairment.

In the students who received attention focused on their dreams and how they might go about achieving them, however, the sympathetic nervous system was not activated. Instead it was the parasympathetic nervous system that lit up. This is sometimes referred to as the “rest and digest” system. To quote the researchers again: “[T]he Parasympathetic Nervous System . . . stimulates adult neurogenesis (i.e., growth of new neurons) . . . , a sense of well being, better immune system functioning, and cognitive, emotional, and perceptual openness.”

In other words, positive, future-focused attention gives your brain access to more regions of itself and thus sets you up for greater learning. We’re often told that the key to learning is to get out of our comfort zones, but this finding gives the lie to that particular chestnut—take us out of our comfort zones and our brains stop paying attention to anything other than surviving the experience. It’s clear that we learn most in our comfort zone, because that’s our strengths zone, where our neural pathways are most concentrated. It’s where we’re most open to possibility, and it’s where we are most creative and insightful.

Based initially on electrophysiological studies, signals of brain activity are observable prior to the conscious decision to perform a single action.

Dreaming, for Freud, was the “royal road” to the unconscious. Dreaming, for the physician, may not be a royal road, but it is a byway to unexpected diagnoses and discoveries, and to unexpected insights about how one’s patients are doing. It is a byway full of fascination, and should not be neglected.

I keep the focus on the dream images and point out when the response is too symbolic and explanatory. I ask for reflections, not interpretations. The conversation is not headed for a conclusion but always hovers over the dream. Whether individually or in a group the essential thing is to stop using your hyperactive intelligence to pin the dream down. You have to be receptive, wait for the dream to show you its meaning, put some reins on that demanding intellectual ego of yours. Be more relaxed. Let the dream give you thoughts. Don’t force it into the open. It’s a special skill to allow thoughts to arise into awareness instead of forcing them through mental exertion.

Marmot ended up concluding that the psychic feeling of being in control of your life is extremely important as a source of well-being, and that conversely, being out of control is physiologically harmful as wells s emotionally intolerable.

At various points in this book, we’ve noted that you can tell when a cybernetic system is overloaded because it breaks down. Marmot’s main conclusion from his research was that inequality in society was a major driver of public health risks, but it could be givens cybernetic interpretation too. The connection that he found looks like the result of a variety mismatch; people are, increasingly, unable to regulate the input from their immediate environment, and they correctly perceive this as a threat to health and life.