The brain's low road via the Amygdala
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Social Intelligence by Daniel Goleman
Excerpt. (c) Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter One
The Emotional Economy
One day, late for a meeting in midtown Manhattan, I was looking for a
shortcut.
So I walked into an indoor atrium on the ground floor of a skyscraper,
planning
to use an exit door I had spotted on the other side that would give me
a faster
route through the block.
But as soon as I reached the building's lobby, with its banks of
elevators, a
uniformed guard stormed over to me, waving his arms and yelling, "You
can't walk
through here!"
"Why not?" I asked, puzzled.
"Private property! It's private property!" he shouted, visibly
agitated.
I seemed to have inadvertently intruded into an unmarked security
zone. "It
would help," I suggested in a shaky attempt to infuse a bit of
reasoning, "if
there were a sign on the door saying 'Do Not Enter.' "
My remark made him even angrier. "Get out! Get out!" he screamed.
Unsettled, I hastily beat my retreat, his anger reverberating in my
own gut for
the next several blocks.
When someone dumps their toxic feelings on us-explodes in anger or
threats,
shows disgust or contempt-they activate in us circuitry for those very
same
distressing emotions. Their act has potent neurological consequences:
emotions
are contagious. We "catch" strong emotions much as we do a rhinovirus-
and so can
come down with the emotional equivalent of a cold.
Every interaction has an emotional subtext. Along with whatever else
we are
doing, we can make each other feel a little better, or even a lot
better, or a
little worse-or a lot worse, as happened to me. Beyond what transpires
in the
moment, we can retain a mood that stays with us long after the direct
encounter
ends-an emotional afterglow (or afterglower, in my case).
These tacit transactions drive what amounts to an emotional economy,
the net
inner gains and losses we experience with a given person, or in a
given
conversation, or on any given day. By evening the net balance of
feelings we
have exchanged largely determines what kind of day-"good" or "bad"-we
feel we've
had.
We participate in this interpersonal economy whenever a social
interaction
results in a transfer of feeling-which is virtually always. Such
interpersonal
judo has countless variations, but they all come down to our ability
to change
another person's mood, and they ours. When I make you frown, I evoke
in you a
touch of worry; when you make me smile, I feel happy. In this
clandestine
exchange, emotions pass from person to person, from outside to inside-
hopefully
for the best.
A downside of emotional contagion comes when we take on a toxic state
simply by
being around the wrong person at the wrong time. I was an unwitting
victim of
that security guard's fury. Like secondhand smoke, the leakage of
emotions can
make a bystander an innocent casualty of someone else's toxic state.
In moments like mine with that guard, as we confront someone's anger,
our brain
automatically scans to see if it signals some further danger. The
resulting
hypervigilance is driven largely by the amygdala, an almond-shaped
area in the
midbrain that triggers the fight, flight, or freeze response to
danger. Of the
entire range of feeling, fear most powerfully arouses the amygdala.
When it is driven by alarm, the amygdala's extensive circuitry
commandeers key
points throughout the brain, shepherding our thoughts, attention, and
perception
toward whatever has made us afraid. We instinctively become more
attentive to
the faces of the people around us, searching for smiles or frowns that
give us a
better sense of how to interpret signs of danger or that might signal
someone's
intentions.
This increased amygdala-driven vigilance heightens our alertness to
emotional
cues in other people. That intensified focus in turn more powerfully
evokes
their feelings in us, lubricating contagion. And so our moments of
apprehension
increase our susceptibility to another person's emotions.
More generally, the amygdala acts as a radar for the brain, calling
attention to
whatever might be new, puzzling, or important to learn more about. The
amygdala
operates the brain's early warning system, scanning everything that
happens,
ever vigilant for emotionally salient events-especially for potential
threats.
While the amygdala's role as a sentinel and trigger for distress is
old news to
neuroscience, its social role, as part of the brain's system for
emotional
contagion, has been revealed only recently.
THE LOW ROAD: CONTAGION CENTRAL
A man doctors call Patient X had suffered two strokes that destroyed
the
connections between his eyes and the rest of the brain's system for
sight in the
visual cortex. Though his eyes could take in signals, his brain could
not
decipher them, nor even register their arrival. Patient X was
completely
blind-or so it seemed.
On tests where Patient X was presented with various shapes like
circles and
squares, or photos of faces of men and women, he hadn't a clue what
his eyes
were gazing at. Yet when he was shown pictures of people with angry or
happy
faces, he suddenly was able to guess the emotions expressed, at a rate
far
better than chance. But how?
Brain scans taken while Patient X guessed the feelings revealed an
alternative
to the usual pathways for seeing that flow from the eyes to the
thalamus, where
all the senses first enter the brain, and then to the visual cortex.
The second
route sends information straight from the thalamus to the amygdala
(the brain
has a pair, right and left). The amygdala then extracts emotional
meaning from
the nonverbal message, whether it be a scowl, a sudden change of
posture, or a
shift in tone of voice-even microseconds before we yet know what we
are looking
at.
Though the amygdala has an exquisite sensitivity for such messages,
its wiring
provides no direct access to the centers for speech; in this sense the
amygdala
is, literally, speechless. When we register a feeling, signals from
our brain
circuits, instead of alerting the verbal areas, where words can
express what we
know, mimic that emotion in our own bodies. So Patient X was not
seeing the
emotions on the faces so much as feeling them, a condition called
"affective
blindsight."
In intact brains, the amygdala uses this same pathway to read the
emotional
aspect of whatever we perceive-elation in someone's tone of voice, a
hint of
anger around the eyes, a posture of glum defeat-and then processes
that
information subliminally, beneath the reach of conscious awareness.
This
reflexive, unconscious awareness signals that emotion by priming the
same
feeling (or a reaction to it, such as fear on seeing anger) in us-a
key
mechanism for "catching" a feeling from someone else.
The fact that we can trigger any emotion at all in someone else-or
they in
us-testifies to the powerful mechanism by which one person's feelings
spread to
another. Such contagions are the central transaction in the emotional
economy,
the give-and-take of feeling that accompanies every human encounter we
have, no
matter what the ostensible business at hand may be.
Take, for example, the cashier at a local supermarket whose upbeat
patter
infects each of his customers in turn. He's always getting people to
laugh-even
the most doleful folks leave smiling. People like that cashier act as
the
emotional equivalent of zeitgebers, those forces in nature that
entrain our
biological rhythms to their own pace.
Such a contagion can occur with many people at one time, as visibly as
when an
audience mists up at a tragic movie scene, or as subtly as the tone of
a meeting
turning a bit testy. Though we may perceive the visible consequences
of this
contagion, we are largely oblivious to exactly how emotions spread.
Emotional contagion exemplifies what can be called the brain's "low
road" at
work. The low road is circuitry that operates beneath our awareness,
automatically and effortlessly, with immense speed. Most of what we do
seems to
be piloted by massive neural networks operating via the low road-
particularly in
our emotional life. When we are captivated by an attractive face, or
sense the
sarcasm in a remark, we have the low road to thank.
The "high road," in contrast, runs through neural systems that work
more
methodically and step by step, with deliberate effort. We are aware of
the high
road, and it gives us at least some control over our inner life, which
the low
road denies us. As we ponder ways to approach that attractive person,
or search
for an artful riposte to sarcasm, we take the high road.
The low road can be seen as "wet," dripping with emotion, and the high
road as
relatively "dry," coolly rational. The low road traffics in raw
feelings, the
high in a considered understanding of what's going on. The low road
lets us
immediately feel with someone else; the high road can think about what
we feel.
Ordinarily they mesh seamlessly. Our social lives are governed by the
interplay
of these two modes [see Appendix A for details].
An emotion can pass from person to person silently, without anyone
consciously
noticing, because the circuitry for this contagion lies in the low
road. To
oversimplify, the low road uses neural circuitry that runs through the
amygdala
and similar automatic nodes, while the high road sends inputs to the
prefrontal
cortex, the brain's executive center, which contains our capacity for
intentionality-we can think about what's happening to us.
The two roads register information at very different speeds. The low
road is
faster than it is accurate; the high road, while slower, can help us
arrive at a
more accurate view of what's going on. The low road is quick and
dirty, the high
slow but mindful. In the words of the twentieth-century philosopher
John Dewey,
one operates "slam-bang, act-first and think-afterwards," whi...
date: Tue, 4 Dec 2007 05:30:36 -0800 (PST)
author: Lance
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