Strong emotions focus and lock our attention ... everything is simplified to a black-or-white choice...
The ‘thinking’ part of our brains (the neocortex) is relatively new in evolutionary terms. Before our brains developed into the awesome organs they are now, enabling us to plan, imagine, analyse things and make judgements, we relied for our survival on our more primitive ‘mammalian’ brain.
The mammalian brain, a set of structures which lie underneath the neocortex, is often termed the ‘emotional brain’, because it is concerned with instinctive responses involving emotions – most notably the fight-or-flight (anger or fear) response. All instinctive behaviour concerns survival: feeding, mating, fighting or fleeing. And our instincts induce emotions that require us to take action (ideally to carry out the instinctive behaviour so as to lower the arousal again). All emotional needs arise out of this fundamental survival programme.
When the neocortex developed, we had rational intelligence at our disposal, as well as emotional intelligence, and, in the ordinary everyday, the two intelligences work together in partnership, with the rational brain adding subtlety and perspective to the raw feelings of the emotional brain, and the emotional brain tempering the rational brain’s cool clinical judgements. But emotions can often overpower the rational brain, as we shall see.
The emotional brain contains a very small and powerful structure known as the amygdala – so called because it is almond-shaped and amygdala in ancient Greek means almond.
In effect, the amygdala acts as the body’s alarm system. It has access to our store of emotional memories and learned responses and its job is to be alert to any possible danger to us by matching new events to patterns in its store and, from that, judging whether we might be at risk.
For instance, suppose we are walking alone down a dark street late at night and there is a sudden unexpected crunching sound or a quick movement. Our attention is drawn to it instantly and, in less than a split second, our amygdala decides whether the sound or movement could signify danger.
It pattern matches the sound to the crunch of footsteps. It pattern matches the movement to that of a person darting out of an alleyway. Making its best guess, on the basis of what it knows from its memory stores that the sound or movement could signify, the amygdala takes the worst-case scenario and sets off the alarm by making you feel anxiety.
In effect, it concludes, “We are under threat! Or, at least, we might be! So we had better be ready to turn and fight or else run for it.”
Because it needs to make an instant decision to get us out of any potential danger as quickly as possible, the amygdala’s pattern matching is very crude. It is black and white – a situation is either safe or it isn’t. Therefore, it doesn’t have the sophistication of the thinking brain, which can introduce some shades of grey to the situation and might conclude that, yes, the crunch is definitely footsteps but the owner of the feet, far from being a psychopathic killer, is probably only a neighbour from down the street.
And the sense of movement from the alleyway is not a shadowy alien figure with ill intent but merely a black bin bag blowing in the breeze.
But, at this point, the thinking brain hasn’t yet had a look in.
When the amygdala decides that we might be under threat, it takes the steps required (by sending chemical signals) to set the fight-or-flight response in motion without seeking any by your leave from the neocortex.
In fact, this has all already happened by the time the neocortex gets to know what is going on half a second later. Our heart is already pounding, our legs shaking and our breathing coming short and quick by the time we recognise Bob or Nancy from two doors down or identify the bin bag.
We quickly calm down then, of course, and become reasonable people again, instead of gibbering wrecks.
