Dr. Dan Segal’s Hand Brain Model 🧠✋🏽 #brain #brainmodel #psychology #psychologyfacts #selfregulation #fyp #foryou

This is called the hand-brain model. All of your fingertips are the upstairs brain, and then under your fingertips are the downstairs brain. So if we go down here at our wrist, this would be the brain stem, and I call that the survival brain, okay? And then right above our wrist, so the palm of our hand is called the limbic system where we process emotional responses. And so this is our emotional and relational brain, and within that is our amygdala, which is the thumb. So the thumb, the amygdala, is what's called the smoke alarm of the brain. This is Van Der Kolk, he's a trauma expert. He wrote the book, The Body Keeps Score. So if you pull your thumb over like this, over the palm of your hand, and now we're left with the upstairs brain. So this is the downstairs brain, the fingers are the upstairs brain. This is the logical part of the brain, our prefrontal cortex right here, planning ahead, holding back impulses, using language even. So if you take your fingers and put it over your thumb like this, it represents the brain, right? It's like almost the size of our brain. Then I like to describe it this way. So the upstairs brain is like an intelligent eagle. The downstairs brain is like a growling wolf. So when the wolf growls, if there's a threat or even a perceived threat, the wolf growls, bears its teeth, the intelligent eagle flies away, and then it's like a lid flip. Our brain is offline. And when our brain is offline and the eagle is somewhere far away, it's hard to access that logical brain. We're actually living in that survival brain.