It turns out that in the first condition, when people are matching
faces, their amygdala activates. In the
second condition, when he showed the word matching, and you were supposed to
match the name, the amount of frontal cortex, of (I think it was in this case)
central lateral pre-frontal cortex, this frontal part of the brain, the part of
the gray matter of the brain, the more active that is, the less active the
amygdala was. So he was showing that,
basically, you can check yourself; you can increase the activity in that
frontal lobe of the brain, and decrease the amygdala response, and in his
experiments it's as simple as: by labeling something with the label "African
American" or "Caucasian American."
That's a simple enough path to downgrade the amygdala automatic
reaction. So we're not just our
amygdala. We've got this big brain.
Rob Kall: And the amygdala a much more primitive part
of the brain. The frontal cortex is the
gray matter, the most sophisticated, most recent part of the new brain,
right? So it makes sense that the override
would come from there, and that it would override the more primitive amygdala. Right?
Darren
Schreiber: Yeah, although I think we've
got to be careful when we're talking about these things, in the sense that the
amygdala is very old, so it does have older origins; and it's the neocortex,
that, as you said, "The New Brain is a more recent evolutionary
advantage." But that amygdala that we
have as humans evolved over time along with the neocortex.
So they're really intertwined, and we don't want to too
oversimplify. It's an older structure,
it's been around in our evolutionary history for a long time, but the amygdala
we have now is the amygdala of the 21st century, that has evolved along with
the rest of that brain, and knows how to get instruction from the neocortex and
these other parts. So they're /
Rob Kall: It's kind of like saying you've got a 2013
car; the carburetor you have with that car, is a lot smarter than the
carburetor from a 1940 automobile.
Darren
Schreiber: Exactly. And it's evolved to fit the human condition,
so another interesting thing about the amygdala is, the bigger your social
network is, apparently, the larger your amygdala is, also. So, the amygdala has gotten a kind of bad rap
in the past, because it does so consistently activate when there is a threat
that we're exposed to, but it also has a lot of other functions.
One of ways I always lecture about this when I'm talking to a group of
students or to an audience is I mention the fact that the amygdala is also very
active when you're sexually stimulated.
If your partner is bringing you to orgasm, your amygdala is
activated. So it's probably not a threat
response, it's many, many other things that are entwined in social cognition;
and we don't want to oversimplify how complex the brain is. It's connected in a lot of really nuanced
ways.
Rob Kall: Hmm.
Sex and fear, they come from the amygdala. That's an interesting combination.
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