ABSTRACT
It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.
Mark Twain
Rather than organize this chapter according to anatomical or functional neural regions, such as cortical, limbic (amygdala and hippocampus), brainstem (vagal), and cellular level work, we chose to organize this chapter by neuroscientific topics that appear to be directly and indirectly pertinent to the four relational domains of patient-centered care on which we are focused: decision making, health behavior change, information transfer, and clinician emotional self-care. The advances listed below touch on several topics in neuroscience: neural connections between learning and recall and emotions, and between labeling emotions and self-regulation; mirror neurons, brain plasticity, and interpersonal relationships; the neural substrates of empathy and those between empathy and self-regulation; implicit memory and subcortical activity; vagal tone and attachment relationships; and neural phenomenon in decision making.
