 still speculation it wasn’t a suicide at all. Thus, the incident is tainted by one of those pervasive conspiracy theories that reaches all the way to the office of the president of the United States. It’s amazing how quickly conspiracy theories spread when a few basic questions don’t have concrete answers. We can blame the amygdala for many such theories.
The amygdala is made up of two almond-sized chunks of brain matter that communicates directly with the prefrontal cortex. It is the part of our brains that lights up like a cigarette smoker after a 6-hour plane ride when we encounter potential danger. It is where we get our fear response, and subsequently, the place where the roots of anxiety disorders get their sustenance.
Monroe’s life was tragic from the time she was a little girl. Her father’s identity was a mystery, her mother was mentally unstable and struggled financially. Monroe bounced from foster home to foster home and was reportedly even sexually assaulted at one of those stops.
 She went through two high-profile divorces with Joe Dimaggio and Arthur Miller, developed a substance abuse problem resulting in several overdoses, suffered multiple miscarriages, and by the end of her life, was known to be a nightmare to work with on the set.
And these are just the highlights of Monroe’s eff’d up life.
So when she is found lying face down on her bed dead, with the phone receiver in her hand, it’s easy to see why speculation would run rampant. When you add the unanswered questions and oddities surrounding her death to the equation, it becomes ripe for conspiracy theory.
Monroe’s organs were destroyed before being fully examined, as were photographs of them, and reports completed by a toxicologist.
So Monroe’s death had everything a good conspiracy theory needs to get off the ground. It had a tragic victim, but one the public adored, a connection with a politically powerful family with their own shady pasts, a timeline that didn’t make sense, and a bumbled follow-up investigation.
Sure, it could have been a situation where Monroe’s handlers made bad decisions while trying to manage yet another embarrassing overdose situation to avoid the bad publicity, and then took their time to figure out how to save themselves from being implicated in her death. That could have happened, but with all of the other factors at play the equation of ‘Kennedy^2 + Infidelity = Dead Starlet’ also seems to make sense.
This is where we arrive at the amygdala and our brain’s determination to connect the dots to assess a threat.
Any time there is an entity of great power and wealth involved in a situation, believing that entity used its influence to affect an outcome doesn’t take much stretching of the imagination.
That’s just the way things go.
When power and wealth flexes its muscle, those who lie in their way are often powerless to defend themselves. Powerlessness leads to fear, fear leads to anxiety, and that all stems from the amygdala.
Paul Whalen heads the Whalen Lab at Dartmouth College. The Whalen Lab has made its sole mission to study the amygdala and its connection to emotion and anxiety.
When the answer isn’t obvious, our brains go to work trying to figure out what information we need to find it. When that happens, our prefrontal cortex works to calm the amygdala’s response to potential danger and surprise by relying on knowledge we believe to be true.
Our healthy distrust of the government then often becomes a liability in our efforts to find the truth because elaborate scenarios start to take shape as we fill in the blanks to those missing answers.
“Our opinion is the amygdala was built to always consider things are negative, just in case they are,” Whalen said in his 20-minute TED Talk presentation about his studies of the amygdala.
 When we construct, or buy into, a conspiracy theory it is just our way of making sure it doesn’t happen to us, because we know elements of those theories sometimes turn out to be correct.
“Optimism takes work. It takes a little bit more effort. You were built to be a pessimist. These systems were built to protect you. And you have to know that, and its useful to think about this circuitry, you gotta do a little bit more work to keep yourself happy,” Whalen said to conclude his TED Talk.
In the case of Marilyn Monroe, an optimistic view is a troubled actress succumbed to her demons and finally went too far. End of story. The details surrounding the investigation were just run-of-the-mill human errors muddying up the documentation of what happened. It has been more than 50 years since she died and there hasn’t been any valid evidence presented proving otherwise.
The pessimistic view can be found in the countless books written about the conspiracy surrounding her death and all of the speculation about the influence of power and wealth that goes with them.
It’s hard to believe it was just another suicide, especially when new claims about her death continue to crop up, but as Whalen said, optimism takes work.
While it is fun to believe Monroe was murdered because of her involvement in a high-powered love triangle, it might be time to be a little more optimistic about a woman who helped usher in a sexual revolution.
With that said, I think I’m going to settle in and watch my favorite Marilyn Monroe film, Niagara, which was just released on blu-ray last week, and just appreciate the work she left behind.
Irish rockers U2 said they were “floored” by the sudden death of Cranberries singer Dolores O’Riordan on Monday.
The band paid tribute to the rock star who they said was “Limerick’s Bel canto” following Bono’s appearance at Pogues' frontman Shane McGowan’s 60th birthday bash at Dublin’s National Concert Hall.
They posted a black and white picture of the U2 frontman with the Cranberries along with a touching message to Instagram late on Monday night.
In the post they said that the 46-year-old had a voice that could resonate emotions in anyone who heard it.
They said: “The band are floored but it’s of course her family we’re all thinking of right now.
The body of the mother-of-three was found in a London hotel room, where she was staying while recording new music.
Other famous friends including Adele and Lisa Stansfield also continued to pay tribute to the singer.
And Catatonia singer Cerys Matthews dedicated her performance of The Broad Majestic Shannon to O’R iordan at McGowan’s bash on Monday night drawing a standing ovation from the crowd.
Adele simply posted a picture of Dolores along with a love heart to Instagram yesterday morning.
Producer Stephen Street, who worked on nearly every Cranberries recording as well as with Blur and the Smiths, wrote a tribute that appeared in Rolling Stone.
He said: “I first met Dolores when she was barely out of her teenage years at a show the Cranberries were playing at the Marquee club in London.
“The fruit of our labours was the album ‘Everybody Else Is Doing it Why Can’t We?’ and the subsequent singles including ‘Dreams’ and ‘Linger'.
He added: “Dolores gave so much of herself at the gigs and continued to do so over the next decade or so". I knew it was bad, but until I went to her famous blue house in the Coyoacan neighborhood of Mexico City, I didn’t realize how bad it really was. To see some of the many braces and casts that she wore to keep her back straight, in person, made it pretty real for me, as well as the many letters on view to her friends and doctors, detailing her pain and surgeries. The house is now a museum, and unfortunately they made me check my camera at the entrance due to their no photo policy. Damn! But I did get a few in the lovely courtyard...

I love your pictures of Mexico. The art, the architecture and Frida's house! How beautiful. Hope you enjoy your trip.
Any excuse to post cat photos, eh?
You'll hear no complains from me. I have to really, really exercise restraint to not post pix of Rusty all the time.
Frida is such a pretty cat. And she actually looks intelligent in your photo, something neither of the two cats I've had have (had) ever managed to do.
Bummer about your camera being taken away from you for the duration of the tour. I would have loved to see some photos of those scary back braces!
You take AMAZINGLY beautiful pictures!Brave's privacy-focused browser rolls out a version for Apple's M1 Macs
If you have a new M1-powered Mac and you’re looking for a non-Apple, non-Google, non-Mozilla browser, then good news, Brave has updated the release channel of its privacy-focused browser with native Apple Silicon support. At the moment, the Microsoft Edge team is still testing M1 support in its Canary release channel.
For anyone running the `x64` version on a new Apple CPU Mac, please replace with the above (universal/arm64) to see the performance gains. In Settings - About Brave you should see `arm64` instead of `x86_64 translated`.
— Mihai 🎯 (@mihaiplesa) December 30, 2020
In case you’ve forgotten, it’s the Chromium-based browser that blocks ads and trackers by default, while also implementing