Richard Taite

So that's one thing.

Another thing is the ability to be aware of what's happening in your body and to be able to feel it fully.

So you can feel bodily sensations.

You can feel emotions and this inner awareness called introception, you know, is a direct pathway to empathy and compassion and even inner regulation.

So that's really cool.

Uh,

an integrated brain also means you can tune into other people so you can feel their feelings without becoming them so this is where integration is not the same as mirroring um you can feel the pain of someone who's just gone through you know like a neighbor of mine is going through some terrible medical issues and i could be with her husband i could be with her i could feel their pain

But it's not going to help them for me to become them.

You know, I can stay with their pain or other things that are going on and close people in my life.

You know, right.

Literally in these last few days, it's been like the medical nightmare week.

But, you know, you just stay with you.

So this is what today is bringing.

So an integrated brain allows you to do that, you know.

It also allows you to have what's called auto-noetic awareness, which auto just means inner, and noetic means knowing.

You can go back to your past and make sense of the past and have a coherent narrative of who you are.

And it also allows morality, and it allows access to intuition.

So that's just among many functions that when we say an integrated brain, it's literally you look at the structures in the brain and how they're differentiated and linked,

And then you look at the functions of the human being with that integrated brain.

And a study in 2015 by Smith and colleagues showed that the best predictor of every measure of wellbeing was how integrated your brain is by looking at something called the connectome.