painting a Nude Male Figure Contemplating his mortality - Video

Andrew Huber man On the ''Will to Live"
There's a brain structure called the anterior mid-cingulate cortex. As we pointed out before, that's a noun, it's a name, and it doesn't mean anything. We could call it the cookie monster. But what's interesting about this brain area is there is now a lot of data in humans, not some mouse study, showing that when people do something they don't want to do, like add three hours of exercise per day or per week, or when people who are trying to diet and lose weight resist eating something, when people do anything that they and this is the important part, that they don't want to do, it's not about adding more work, it's about adding more work that you don't want to do, this brain area gets bigger. Now here's what's especially interesting about this brain area to me, and by the way, I'm only learning this recently because it's new data, but there's a lot of it. The anterior mid-cingulate cortex is smaller in obese people. It gets bigger when they diet. It's larger in athletes. It's tremendous, or grows larger, in people who see themselves as challenged and overcome some challenges. And this area keeps its size in people that live a very long time.
In many ways, scientists are starting to think of the anterior mid-cingulate cortex not just as one of the seats of willpower, but perhaps actually the seat of the ''will to live''. See? Now we're talking. And when I learned about the anterior mid-cingulate cortex, I was almost out of my seat. And I've been in the neuroscience game since I was 20, we're the same age. And I was so pumped because I'd heard of the amygdala, fear, prefrontal cortex, it's planning and action. I could tell you every brain area, I teach neuroanatomy to medical students, but when I started seeing the data on the anterior mid-cingulate cortex, I was like, whoa. This is interesting.