Dharmapunx NYC A World of Possibilities: Stepping Back Into Life with Curiosity, Courage, and Wonder
Mar 18, 2026
A lively exploration of how the brain predicts the world and replays past emotions to shape bodily states. Listeners hear why early attachments and stress overwire negative expectations. The conversation highlights how action and deliberate inaction create prediction errors that can revise beliefs. It connects impermanence to freeing oneself through gentle updating and ends with a guided practice to notice and test predictions.
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Brain Lives In Two Time Zones
- The unconscious brain constantly predicts the present using past memories, shaping emotions and bodily states before conscious awareness kicks in.
- Josh Korda explains memory reinstatement across right-hemisphere regions (dorsal ACC, orbital frontal, hippocampus) that load emotional dispositions from past situations.
Childhood Shapes Persistent Social Predictions
- Early attachment experiences redundantly wire negative memories so they reactivate easily in adult life and bias predictions about safety in relationships.
- Josh Korda describes HPA-axis arousal and adrenaline strengthening childhood memory encoding, making negative social learnings persistent.
Use Exposure To Rewrite Predictions
- Test avoided situations deliberately to generate disconfirming evidence that updates entrenched predictions in the brain.
- Josh Korda advises exposure in real life—speaking at social events or riding a subway—to recalibrate right-hemisphere expectations.