My favourite part of the brain
The Amygdala. I love my amygdala. Years ago, when I learned it existed, I thanked it for keeping me alive. Not like the parts that remind me to breathe, nope, the amygdala is the survival centre. Flight, fight, or flock.
The amygdala is a scaredy cat. On Red Alert all the time. Doesn’t matter if I imagined that parked car moving toward me, or if the driver really isn’t looking while backing out of the space, my Red Alert, hyper-vigilant amygdala has my back. “LOOK OUT!” it screams. Pretty regularly, if you stop to notice.
My back tenses
For about 4 months I’ve been paying attention. What I notice is, when the “DUCK!” command screams through my brain and my higher cognitive functions reassure me that the risk is minimal or imagined, all the chemicals (like adrenaline) that will keep me safe have been activated. Quite a bit of the time, my back has also stiffened. Because I am consciously working on strengthening my back, I notice this response. I notice it a dozen times a day.
Depending on how I tell the story of my life, a dozen siren-blasts a day sounds extravagant because I live a safe life, or sounds like I don’t get the level of peril around me. Thing is, my scaredy-cat amygdala isn’t subtle. A pothole into which I am about to put my toe might get the same response as a skateboarder doing a near miss as I walk down the sidewalk. The disapproval of a friend, co-worker, or student is also a threat. Fifty angry teenagers, oh yeah, maybe.
Being left out
Social ostracism is a great threat to an organism that needs to belong to maintain health. In fact, some feminists have considered the research that tells us that the amygdala creates a fight or flight response and asked about the millions of people who immediately turn to others when danger is present. A large percentage of those million are female and we tend to “flock” (come together) as often as we flee or fight – even allowing for the broadest, metaphorical fights and flights. So, the threat that we might be left without a social network provokes a strong visceral response.
Consider how vulnerable we are as teenagers. Consider with whom I spend my days. Stressed adults and frightened teenagers. And, then, have a look at the experiment from the 1950s by Solomon Asch:
Which of the lines A, B, or C is the same length as X?
Anybody can see it’s B. But suppose a group of experimenters all said line C was the closest match? You’d still say line B, right? Except for one thing: Gregory Berns http://www.ccnl.emory.edu/greg/Berns%20Conformity%20final%20printed.pdf and his colleagues at Emory University replicated this famous experiment and scanned people’s brains while they performed it. The result? For many people social pressure caused the visual and parietal cortex in the brain to change the information that the eyes took in. The stress of social pressure literally changed how the brain processed what was seen.
The Implications
For me, as a school teacher, working in a stressful environment with stressed kids, the implications are frightening, indeed.
If my amygdala calls the alert a dozen times a day, I am with people who are on alert 24/7. The slightest threat of losing your social network, or you status within that network can cause physical changes in the brain.
I learned this years ago when a student accused me of yelling at him. Now, I am the first to admit that once or twice most years, I “lose it” in the classroom when behaviour is over-the-top and I’m not on the top of my game. Usually looks like me raising my voice and lecturing for just long enough that the kids have shut up in spite of themselves – shocked at seeing me behave in this unexpected way – and me to realize how wrong and ridiculous I am. This year, there was one incident and my “yell” was quieter than some of my enthusiastic voices, but had an intensity that might reasonably be labelled yelling.
I don’t believe I have ever done individual student yelling, but this student was adamant that I had. There is no point in arguing, his experience was of my yelling. I bet his brain literally, physically registered my anger or frustration as yelling. This is one example of stress changing the brain and perception.
What do you do when this is true?
Ah, clearly the basis for my constantly saying “There is on reality; there is only perception.”
If it’s real to that person, it’s real to that person. I used to try to convince people to see the gap between their perception and mine, thinking this was a brilliant way to resolve the issue.
It doesn’t work.
I finally realised that Dale Carnegie was right. First, understand the other person. Act as if their perception is reality (it just might be, after all.)
Then, once you’ve resolved things in their perception, often, there’s no need to do more. Sometimes, though, further discussion is warranted, but at least you’ve made a deposit in their emotional bank account, and have a shot at making the withdrawal, asking for a chance to share your perception.
Ah, Mr. Carnegie. Very wise.
In the Restitution/Control Theory model that I use in my teaching (oh, and with all of you, too!) we call that “stabilizing the identity”. Once someone is heard, believes you believe they are a “good” person, and that you share some points of agreement on the events, we move into “fixing” whatever formulation of the problem we can agree on.