“… Il convient d’introduire ici une distinction, classique en philosophie, entre repentir et remords : le premier reconnaît la faute pour mieux s’en separer, goûter la grâce de la convalescence, le second s’y maintient par besoin maladif d’en éprouver les brûlures…”[1]

‘MEETmeTONIGHT’[2] is the annual review of Universitary Research in Italy and this year had a single macro theme, ‘The future’: the appointment with dr. Laura Musazzi[3] was about the consequences of the stress on the brain, which indeed – in my opinion – proves itself ‘not an indifferent reader’, as it is also able to judge about individual suffering when communicated to our organs in order to activate a defense.

As we know, in each one of us the neurons change physiologically their shape when just facing anxiety and by a progressive contraction of the  dendrites, responsible for transmitting signals to the organs : it furtherly seems that the muscle activity – which we give space willingly to, when anxiety begins – can compensate that excessive, or prolonged, contraction we produce when stressed, so to favour the presence of beneficial neurotransmitters, the endorphins.

But I was wondering if the sole muscle activity – which can prove also aggressive other than detrimental as we often learn by journalistic reports – even allows our trained body to produce heavier and more prolonged stress loads, with harmful and then uncontrollable effects.

“Anxiety is not outside of us…” was a fair annotation I heard at the beginning of the ‘talk’, but not sufficient in its definitiveness : infact, when you live anxiety without any other ‘placebo’ than your own muscle activity, even pharmacologically fortified, you can incur in a further frustration, but admissible with difficulty.

I think that if the brain is ‘not an indifferent reader’ of one’s body – we’re finally beginning to know something about – which means that our brain can easily acknowledge what anxiety suggests : that is a distance from an a-sexual model, not at all looking like us and – as our own production of stress shows, physiologically and also pathologically, exposing us to a cross and generalized target shooting.

                                                 Marina Bilotta Membretti / Cernusco sul Naviglio - December 11, 2020

[1] “La tyrannie de la pénitence”, by Pascal Bruckner – É É ÉÉditions Grasset & Fasquelle (2006), pp.53-54.

[2] Adhering to the anti Covid19 rules, the review took place online, so offering a number of interesting shortest ‘talks’, each one lasting twenty minutes included questions from the audience, and about specific topics in the five areas of interest, ‘Health’, ‘Humanities’, ‘Smart cities’, ‘Sustainability’, ‘Technology’.

[3] Laura Musazzi is associate professor of ‘Farmacologia’ at the ‘Università degli Studi Milano-Bicocca’, Deparment of ‘Medicina e Chirurgia’ : the ‘talk’ November 28, 2020 was titled ‘Un cervello sotto stress’.