Mother Nature duly produced the neocortex – commonly known as our ‘thinking brain’.
This amazing piece of grey jelly-like substance has now evolved to such a degree that it provides us with a high-speed analytical decision-making and opinion-forming service. Its intricate web of nerves enables us to feel feelings about an event plus think through ideas about the kind of action we could take in response.
Another of its functions is to enable us to ‘hook’ the emotions of others so they are more likely to give us what we need. For example, we can produce an appealing smile in order to seduce the passions of a fanciable mate, or an angry scowl in order to generate fear in an unwelcome trespasser.
Instant Exercise
Think of an emotional signal you have produced in the last day or so in order to get something you need or want from another person.
WHAT IS THE AMYGDALA AND WHAT IS ITS FUNCTION?
There is another important emotional centre in our brain architecture. It is situated in the pre-frontal lobes, just above the brainstem at the base of the limbic ring – the central terrain of our emotional lives. This centre (known as the amygdala) is also a web of nerves, but it has a much simpler structure. It is, in fact, our original primitive emotional brain. It evolved as a mechanism for getting early humans speedily into fight-or-flight action when danger was sensed. Nowadays it is linked to our thinking centre which, most of the time, controls its activities.
Once a significant event is sensed, our thinking centre analyses it and decides which emotional response is most apt. It then sets off appropriate action in our hormonal and muscular departments to prepare our bodies.
A) our eyes and ears sense a man running towards us who then trips on a banana skin and falls flat on his face
→ our brain thinks about the event and decides pleasure is the appropriate emotional response
→ a signal is sent to activate the production of some endorphins (popularly known as our ‘happy hormones’) which then fuels our muscular system into action to produce a smile, and/or our throat to produce a laugh
B) our eyes and ears sense a man running towards us who is waving his hands to attract our attention
→ our neocortex thinks through the scene and decides that this man could be a nuisance to us and that anxiety is the best response
→ it sends a message to our amygdala, which then activates the pituitary gland to produce a little adrenalin to divert blood from our skin in order to feed our heart and make it pump harder so our muscles have extra energy; we can speed up our pace and cross the road while at the same time screwing our facial muscles into a mildly ‘scary’ scowl
Why Do We Still Sometimes Respond So Primitively?
Recent research into the workings of our brains has been very revealing. It is now known that if one of our senses ‘thinks’ that it has spotted a serious threat to our survival, our signal for action is sent directly to our primitive fight/flight/freeze centre. Here, we each have a store of:
i) past memories of emotional experiences
ii) pre-programmed blueprints of emotional responses which have previously been used with some success
Once an ‘emotional emergency’ signal has been received, our brain scans this store to match the key elements of this new experience with ones that have occurred in the past. Once it has found a ‘good-enough’ match it sets off the pattern of action responses.
It is particularly relevant for our purposes of building emotional confidence to realize that this store includes:
• a wide range of very primitive ancient memories and responses which have been imprinted on our genes over many centuries
– we may have our cavemen forebears’ favourite flight response for approaching spiders stored alongside our Victorian grandparents’ choice freeze response for sexual innuendo!
• memories of our own most powerful and most frequently repeated past emotional experiences, plus the pattern of action which we previously used to respond to these
– if we had repeated unhappy experiences as a result of change in our childhood we may have a blueprint of a ‘childish’ fear response to any new experience programmed into our brain
Instant Exercise
Think of an emotional experience in your own childhood that still influences the way you sometimes react today, especially perhaps when you are under stress.
What Bearing Can the Brain’s Emotional Emergency ‘Service’ Have on Our Emotional Confidence?
There already seem to be many significant findings in this area of brain research, which is still in its infancy. Below I have listed the ones which seem to have the most relevance for our purposes. After briefly summarizing each fact, I have added a note on how this could affect us in everyday emotional situations.
Instant Exercise
As you are reading each of the following sections, try to add an example from your own experience.
| The most dominant emotional memories are the ones which aroused the most feeling at the time they were recorded in the brain. |
This means that events which in the past have given us (or our ancestors!) the biggest scare or biggest thrill are highlighted in our emotional brain. They will be the first memories to be spotted during the emergency scanning process – even though they may have no direct relevance for the current situation.
The fast approach of a large crowd of people into a hall or lift or onto a station platform may reactivate emotional associations with being lost in a busy super-market as a young child – or with the stampede of an army that threatened one of our ancestors!
| The earlier in life that memories are imprinted, the more likely they are to become permanent rapid-action blueprints which will be applied in stressful situations throughout our lives. The very latest methods of photographing the brain have apparently revealed that highly emotionally-charged experiences (such as child abuse) actually make a physical impact on the brain’ neural structure. |
This means that under stress we are more likely to respond automatically with behaviour learned in childhood when we experienced similar emotions.
A normally assertive parent may find him- or herself inappropriately obsequious and passive in the face of a child’s critical teacher.
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Trauma in adulthood can also imprint emergency responses
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