Anger without thought

I wander if you,like me, have ever experienced losing it? Perhaps you, like me, were driving in the freeway and someone pulled out in front of you and even though at sane moments you know that the best thing to do is to forgive and forget you suddenly get angry in spit of yourself.

When that happens or any other major emotions take over your normal rational mind your neurons have been hijacked.

In the human brain there are two almond shaped collections of interconnected structures (one in each hemisphere) called the amygdala.  The human amygdala is larger than any other primates.  When animals have their amygdala removed they lack emotions such as fear and rage and can no longer compete or cooperate.

Joseph LeDoux, a neuroscientist at the Center for Neural Science at New York University, was the first to discover the role of the amaygdala in the emotional brain. Joseph LeDoux discovered there is the normal pathway of signals going from the sensory system to the motor cortex telling the body to react. 

This is from say the eyes to the visual thalamus to the visual cortex and various layers of the thinking neocortex until a decision is made to react.  some of this thinking is conscious thinking. So you see a problem in the freeway, you have time to think. and your brain sends a signal to your hands to steer and your foot to press the breaks.

This pathway is very efficient when there is time for thinking and conscious decision making.  However, there are times when under emergency conditions when it is much better to react without conscious thinking.  At these times a signal goes directly from the thalamus to the amygdala allowing the body to respond before messages are fully registered by the neocortex.

This is half way between direct reflex action which does not even go to the brain (is processed from the afferent (incoming) sensory nerves to the efferent (outgoing) motor nerves via reflex arc by synapse in the spinal cord) to fully conscious decisions made by the cortex and neocortex.

In a seminal experiment LeDoux first conditioned rats to associate a tone and an electric shock.  The rats rapidly learned to fear the tone.  Next he performed the same experiment after destroying the auditory cortex of the rats. The rats still were conditioned and learned to fear the tone, even though the sound could not register in their neocortex.  “Instead ,the sound took the direct rout from ear to thalamus to amygdala, skipping all higher avenues….  The amygdala perceieved, remembered, and orchestrated their fear independently.” If you remove the amygdala this does not happen.
   

According to LeDoux, “Some emotional reactions and emotional memories can be formed without any conscious, cognitive participation at all.”  Therefore when there is an amygdala based neural hijacking we let our behavior be completely taken over by our emotions without any conscious control.

One problem is that when our brains have been hijacked by automatic amygdala based emotions it is extremely difficult to consciously recover from the anger or other negative emotion. The best way is to preempt such neural hijacking by relaxing (self hypnosis - meditation), and also having a positive loving kindness attitude toward all.

I find that on days that I affirm "God bless you," on a continual basis to all on the freeway other peoples driving does not bother me.

Reminds me the child who is being driven to school by the mother instead of the daily drive by the father. The child asks her mother, "Mom, where are all those 'ahole drivers' today?"

The mother smiles and clamly replies, "They are waiting till tomorrow when your father will be driving."