Читать книгу Emotional Confidence: Simple Steps to Build Your Confidence - Gael Lindenfield, Gael Lindenfield - Страница 19

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