When Amygdalae Go Wrong – Pet Snake In An Earlobe

You don’t see this everyday:

Glawe said the Ball Python snake, named Bart, was too big to fit all the way through her lobe, and she was unable to extract it on her own. Glawe further explained that she wears gages in her earlobes but had taken them out…

A friend informed concerned commenters that doctors at Portland Adventist Hospital made a slight cut in Glawe’s ear and used Vaseline while further stretching the lobe with a plastic tool so that the snake could wiggle out. Glawe told another commenter that her ear was numbed before the procedure and that the experience hurt “a little,” but Bart was unharmed.

I think childhood trauma manages to disorder amygdalae by making them crave distractions, instead of focusing on pain and potential solutions. I think that the training to seek distractions disrupts the laser-like focus on avoiding the adverse and seeking positive outcomes which the amygdala is designed to perform in a healthy person.

Suddenly instead of plotting a path to financial improvement, or skill acquisition for a useful, goal oriented purpose, you are thinking, “Wouldn’t it be cool to put my disgusting python through my earlobe, and wear him as an ear ring?”

It is strange how those more designed for the harshness of K-selection see the distractions, the neon hair color, the tattoos, the weird piercings, the other unusual things, and instinctually find them discomfiting. If K-selection hit, you would need people with clearly focused amygdalae on your team to optimize your chances of success.

I hope she finds peace and happiness. But by that point, it is a difficult road to come back from, because you have to retrain the amygdala to discard the relaxing distractions, and embrace the adverse, so it can move you to act to seek out the pleasurable. As a general rule, the mind tends to want to escape the pain, if it has an escape, however dysfunctional it may be.

Spread r/K Theory to others, because we need to embrace the reality of what is coming