Donna Jackson Nakazawa

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472 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 2 Jul

Donna Jackson Nakazawa’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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And so I went to a neuroscientist slash psychologist to find out what was going on.

And he did a scan of my brain with a type of thing called QEG and AI, which looks like an fMRI scan.

And there were these ominous red swirls in my brain.

And I remember sitting there in his little dark office looking at my scans and just kind of going, what are those red blobs?

They looked like a bad hurricane on a weather map when you're watching the news.

And he said, oh, those are spurts, earthquakes of rumination erupting all the time in your brain.

And then he took his cursor and he moved it around.

He said, oh, and right here I can see there's some kind of really longstanding emotional stress or, you know, some type of traumatic event.

incident that's triggering rumination still and it's been going on for a really long time across your lifetime.

Then he went to another area that gives rise to rumination.

He said, wow, this is an area where you would be ruminating a lot about chronic illness.

And I was like, what is even going on here?

How do we know so much about this area of the brain and not know how to solve the most common human problem we share?

So to get a little nerdy, this is an area of the brain known as the default mode network, Jonathan.

For a long time, it was thought to be a kind of nothing area of the brain, like a car engine idling in the driveway.

But more recently, we've come to understand that it is the seat of our self-referential thoughts.

And those are often our ruminating thoughts.

What did they think of me?

What did I say wrong?

What did I do wrong?

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