Mythbuster #26 - Amygdala Hijack

THE CLAIM

Daniel Goleman?in his 1996 book?Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ claimed that the amygdala is an ancient part of the brain that harbours our emotions & irrational side which can

"can take over the rest of the brain in a millisecond if threatened.".

THE EVIDENCE

Goleman’s thinking is based on the myth that the brain as a three layers with a lizard (emotional visceral brain) in the middle and an rational mammalian brain on the outside.?

Goleman assumes that the amygdala is an ancient part of the brain that predates the cortex. ?But our brains didn’t evolve linearly in layers from ‘simple’ lizard’s amygdala to a ‘complex’ the mammalian prefrontal cortex (PFC).?All animals have a similar brain structure and the amygdala and neocortex have similar structure and function across all species.

Goleman also assumes that the amygdala controls fear conditioning. This idea dates to 1888 & 1937 when experiments that destroyed a rhesus monkey’s amygdala found they had reduced aggression, fear and defensive behaviours. Ever since then, the amygdala has been associated with fear. But we know that lots regions of the brain are involved in our response to fear and no one part of the brain can hijack another.?All parts of our brain are active all the time. This busts another myth that we only use 10% of our brain.

Neuroscientist use fear because it is a difficult emotion to suppress so easy to test. ?Studies that show reduced activation (not a ‘hijack’) in PFC regions?occurs when people watch extremely violent material. Take?this study?for example.?Young (18-25 year olds) female students were asked to watch selected scenes from a commercial movie called?Irreversible.?I have tried to watch it with my partner, so have a couple of my friends – none of us have made it to the end!?It is extreme male to male and female violence.?Hopefully something very few of us will experience and certainly not in the context of organisational change.?

So, like other myths such as the Kubler Ross change curve making extraordinary extrapolations from unrelated fields end up having little meaning. The amygdala ends up being associated with fear not because this is its primary function but because that is the mental state that has been studied most. Similarly, we link neuroscience to organisational change through the effect of stress on the brain, not because change is proven to cause stress but because stress has been studied in more detail than say curiosity or a whole bunch of other mental states that might be associated with change (excitement, indifference) and for some reason we associate pain (e.g. thermal shocks, pin pricks, drowning rats) used in neuroscience experiments with change. So we conclude our brains must hate change.

Covid-19 was an extremely stressful and fearful time, but we didn’t see people ‘fight or take flight’ and run to the hills. Instead, we saw ‘tend and befriend’ behaviours.?It seems that rather than becoming angry and aggressive in stressful conditions we can become prosocial rather than antisocial.?This study for example suggests that Covid-19 led people to becoming more worried about others than themselves (a WIIFUS rather than WIIFME).?You could argue the same might occur in a stressful redundancy.?So again, no 'amygdala hijack' during stress, more like a 'compassionate cortex'.

It seems to take extreme levels of stress for us to start losing cognitive ability and take flight. But even at these extreme levels of stress or fear it only impairs working memory?not verbal explicit memory tasks, or implicit learning tasks that involve neutral or positive stimuli.?So reduced activation in the PFC doesn’t make us irrational.?It may lead to poorer decision making in the short-term, but it doesn’t stop us from reflecting on the past and learning from current experiences.?

?And?what is fear anyway? My fear of a rollercoaster ride (or organisational change) could be your joy.?Fear is highly contextual.?Sapolsky suggests that fear is “unpredictable pain, rather than pain itself” (Behave p 41). Current thinking is that the amygdala is helping the brain deal with surprise (uncertainty and ambiguity) or lack of predictability – too much free energy ?This is a more helpful way of framing the role of the amygdala because we can reduce surprise by updating our beliefs or changing our interpretation of what we see.?I no longer fear a shock if I know when it is coming.

Fear can come from anywhere – fear of rejection from a group or losing our job.?And different people will have different responses to those perceived threats depending on their life experience. Framing organisational change as inducing threat becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy and this metanalysis

“cannot provide sufficient evidence of an association between organisational change and elevated risk of mental health problems” .?

So why do we associate organisational change with pain and stress? Maybe again because of our mental model myth belief that brain hates change.

Lumping people into two sets of reaction to change , people who see it as a threat or opportunity, a growth or fixed mindset, resistors or non-resistors, blinds us to the nuance of human emotions and that they are socially constructed.?Emotions are not fixed or innate no more than they are located or created in one regional of the brain.?They are created by our life experiences and what we are experiencing right now. A better way to understand people would be to ask them to explain what they are feeling rather than label them.?Help people create emotional granularity rather than just assuming they are having a ‘hijack’ and so need to go on an EQ course to learn how to control their amygdala.

In addition to our emotions not being created or residing in our amygdala, it is active during a whole range of different mental states (eating, drinking, receiving rewards, remembering, social interaction etc) so learning to control it (as this suggests in HBR suggests) is not going to be easy ??

THE VERDICT

We should shift our thinking away from the brain as a cluster of functional units (e.g., the amygdala, prefrontal cortex etc) carrying out certain roles to the context determining the roles of the brain functions and how they ‘talk’ to one another. The amygdala, through is connectivity with other brain regions, could help us survive one minute but then remember a taste the next.?How our brain works is state or context dependent.?From this perspective the amygdala can never ‘hijack’ anything.?It is constantly receiving and sending information to other brain regions to create a collective response to a given stimulus.?We might decide to 'fight or flight or freeze' or 'tend & befriend' but this is a decision the whole brain takes not just the amygdala.

THE ALTERNTIVE

Rather than scaremongering and perpetuating potentially damaging myths about organisational change we should try to understanding what levels of uncertainty or ambiguity create anxiety in people at work. This is basic duty of care that organisations should offer employees and would help organisations and practitioners pace their change.