In a very real sense we have two minds, one that thinks and one that feels
-Daniel Goleman
Were you ever scared by someone and it took sometime for you to realize what just happened ? Have you ever wondered why babies cry when someone else tries to hold them other than their mother ? why are we scared about certain places or why we enjoy eating at certain place or with certain people? so many questions and answer lies in almond shaped part of your brain – Amygdala
Its quite a curious name and I came across this in a book called Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman. Why are we talking about this and why this has so much importance in our life ? Emotional responses like smile, fear, crying, being sad etc are given out by Amygdala based on external stimuli ( events ). More than 50% of our communications are non-verbal. Emotions are powerful communicator of our thoughts and in turn affect our actions and how we feel post-actions. So lets take an example that you like certain place and it calms you down but WHY ? This happens as our eyes captures this detail and sends to part of our brain called “Thalamus” which sends this information to appropriate sensory cortex ( like visual cortex, auditory cortex etc) which evaluates and assigns a meaning to it and if this meaning tends to be threatening then it sends this information to Amygdala which then sends appropriate emotional responses ( in our case it will be emotionally calm response ).
But recent studies have shown that there is shortcut route which explains why we are scared and then realize what just happened.There is this Direct pathway to Amygdala from thalamus by passing Cortex ( which assigns meanings to events ). This is shorter and hence faster and more dangerous as we are bypassing meaning assigner. This makes us to lose the ability to evaluate the situation and react accordingly thus explaining why sometimes we scold and let out words that hurt others which we later repent or take decisions in an emotional burst and wonder why we did that. This is all just happens in fraction of seconds and before we could realize we could do something and it could be fatal.
Our Mind is an adaptive system which learns continuously based on several factors ( external responses, surroundings etc ). Consider it like a feedback system which takes feedback and learns and stores. It later uses these stored stimuli with current environment and provides appropriate emotional responses. Understanding why we react to something in certain way helps us to learn and understand others and connect with people emotionally. Controlling your emotions helps us to approach every event in a more mature way and lends us life in a better perspective.
“Life is a comedy for those who think and a tragedy for those who feel.”
-HORACE WALPOLE
Emotional self-awareness is a next step to our evolution of seeing and handling events in better perspective. Lets go for it !!
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