
Resilience may be neurobiological - dnetesn
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2018-11-resilience-neurobiological.html
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ggm
Lord Moran, Churchill's physician said courage was a volume. When spent, it
cant be summoned from nowhere.

It's like water behind a dam you call on and not all people have the same
sized dam wall and depth of stored courage.

[https://trove.nla.gov.au/work/32453377?q&versionId=39449396](https://trove.nla.gov.au/work/32453377?q&versionId=39449396)

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colordrops
The analogy seems deeply flawed from my personal experience. I find that
courage is strongly correlated with awareness, and that correlation is not
linear.

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ggm
Perhaps you have never plumbed the depths? I mean, he wrote of men's
experiences in the trenches under continuous bombardment for days, and again
in WWii. I don't mean to diminish anyone's personal experiences, but do you
think absent being on the receiving side in raqqah or the like, current armed
forces routinely undergo anything comparable?

I write as somebody quite timid. I am sure contextually informed or not, I do
not have the resiliency others have in prologued states of stress and fear.

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another-one-off
Being bombarded in a trench for days and still being partially functional as a
soldier is pretty much the gold standard for courage. Nevertheless 'water
behind a dam you call on [with different sizes for different people]' is a
very arguable metaphor.

There are vanishingly few people stupid enough to subject themselves to stress
and fear voluntarily just because. They either see themselves as having no
choice (possibly correctly) or because they perceive a reward to be had
(possibly one related to validating who they see themselves as). It basically
follows ( _handwave_ ) that courage is a combined ability to either not feel
stress (or fear) in some situation - which does not run out - or to push or
regardless of stresses in pursuit of some higher goal.

In the latter case, once someone decides that it isn't worth it they aren't
going to come back again, acting a bit like a dam running out of water. But
their ability to act courageously will change depending on the circumstance,
and in some instances they may be significantly more courageous if they don't
really see themselves as having a choice. Eg, a parent defending their child
vs a parent defending random strangers would be completely different in terms
of how much punishment they endure.

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TheSpiceIsLife
It evidently _can_ be argued that people have different levels of resilience.

People with low resilience are going to fail often and early in all stressful
situations.

Comparing the same person in different situations is probably not the best
metric. Comparing different people across the same / similar situation is
probably closer to experimentally valid.

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pessimizer
> People with low resilience are going to fail often and early in all
> stressful situations.

This isn't an argument, though, just a restatement.

> Comparing the same person in different situations is probably not the best
> metric. Comparing different people across the same / similar situation is
> probably closer to experimentally valid.

It's not reasonable to assume the same relative value for success in two
different people facing the same situation, no matter what criterion you use
to choose the people, including if that criterion is what they self-report.
Usually experiments like this are done for a token value, guaranteed to be
close in absolute value between participants just because those valuations are
insignificant. You can't do an experiment that could measure the amount of
"courage" and how it drains, or even measure through natural observation
without access to internal states that don't have organs called "courage" that
we can examine.

What one patriot might call courage in a trench, an otherwise courageous
person in that trench may call patriotism. They might run out out of "courage"
to stand up to the army overrunning their position and decide to surrender,
but never run out of "courage" defending their children.

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vanderZwan
Unrelated to the usefulness of the research (it sounds pretty interesting and
novel to actually measure which brain networks are involved with resilience),
but the title feels a bit like saying "air might be gaseous in nature". I
mean, isn't all form of thought neurobiological in the end?

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dpatrick86
It might be written better as, "Cardiometabolic resilience may be
neurobiological." Of course, mental resilience being neurobiological would be
a banality, however, they are talking about the strength of a specific brain
network breaking down an association between poorer cardiometabolic health and
neighborhood violence. Definitely a little more interesting, that.

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hirundo
> Like previous studies, we find that youth living in neighborhoods with high
> levels of violence have worse cardiometabolic health than peers from safer
> communities.

I find these results intuitive and not hard to accept, but I see no mention of
an attempt to rule out confounding elements that may correlate to violence,
such as poverty. And with only 218 subjects there may well not be enough
statistical power to do so.

Of course I can only see the abstract without paying $10, so it may be buried
in the details.

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notahacker
Paper is downloadable free on SciHub [http://sci-
hub.tw/10.1073/pnas.1810067115](http://sci-hub.tw/10.1073/pnas.1810067115)

TLDR version: it's controlled for a few neighbourhood factors such as median
household income, distance from nearest food outlet and ethnic mix and a few
individual factors like personal experience of violence and behavioural
evaluations. But ruling out all the confounding factors is hard. The authors
are cautious about causality in their summary though

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vezycash
The cause of neuro-resilience might be explained by attachment theory. Unlike
winning the hereditary lottery, better parent-child bonding is more
attainable.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secure_attachment](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secure_attachment)

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intralizee
Parent-child bonding is the outcome of the hereditary lottery as well.

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fipple
Of course, because everything is neurobiological as uncomfortable as that
makes us feel.

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wu-ikkyu
You're falsely presenting theory as fact, as is quite common in
psychological/psychiatric discussions; social and environmental factors seem
to have very strong effects/influences as well.

