Mindfulness & Neurobiology
Emotions, Mindfulness & the pathways of the Brain
The brain is divided into three major areas: the cortex, the limbic system and the brain stem. The cortex, or hemispheres, house the most evolved human functions of reflection and awareness. The limbic system and brain stem are referred to as the “old brain” or animal brains. Their primordial directive is survival. Under stress, the old brain signals the release of 1400 different bio-chemicals that prepare the body for fight-or-flight. The old brain also limits blood flow to the cortex, reducing it’s capacity to function fully during perceived states of threat.
The amygdale, located in the limbic system, is associated with certain aspects of memory storage and with the processing of emotions, especially fear, sadness & anger. “Processing” means generating both the internal emotional state and the external expression of the emotion. As the brains early warning center, it is capable of generating a full-body hormonal (fight/flight) alarm in response to any situation that it perceives to be threatening. It does so by looking for emotional pattern matches between the present and the past. Thus, compared to the precision of the cerebral cortex, the amygdale is often described as sloppy because it makes these decisions rapidly with limited information such as tone of voice, facial expression or overall emotional tone.
As the primary repository of emotional memory, the amygdale is especially active in the first years of life when it is more fully developed than the higher cortical brain centers. During our pre-verbal years, emotional memories create neural networks in response to experiences of fear, threat and hurt etc. Memory intensity is related to the amount of adrenalin active in the system at the time of the event as this biochemical is also involved in stamping the moment for later use by the amygdale. So the more intense the arousal, the stronger the imprint will be in the emotional memory.
This explains the lasting power of early emotional memories, the details of which may remain outside our conscious awareness because these memories were pre-verbal and/or may be recorded without a context. As opposed to explicit memories, which may involve vivid detail, the memories that “hijack” us emotionally have been called implicit. During implicit memory recall, we are not aware of having a memory per se. The biggest tip will be the rush of intense feelings of fear, dread or terror and the activation of the fight/flight system. The result is that we find ourselves repeatedly reacting in ways that are neither effective nor helpful under present circumstances.
The brain’s damper switch for the amygdale is in the prefrontal cortex. Located behind the eyes, one of it’s functions is regulating emotion and emotionally attuned communication. It provides “response flexibility”, the ability to take in information, consider various response options and generate an adaptive response. The problem is that the prefrontal lobe circuits fire after the amygdale has already sounded the alarm. Thus during an “amygdale hijacking”, we find ourselves responding “unconsciously” with behavior that is associated with the triggered implicit memory. Such reactions make little logical sense to a partner who is not yet triggered, and are like gas to a fire when our partners are themselves already triggered.
Recent developments in neuroscience dramatically underscore the importance of mindfulness in addressing this situation. In order to work skillfully with our deeply imprinted emotional memories and the rapid alarm system of the amygdale, we need to bring sharp awareness to our strong emotional arisings before acting or speaking. We have to step back, breath and settle ourselves a bit. This can literally give the prefrontal cortex a chance to catch up with the alarm system, make a more thorough analysis of the present situation and avoid a full scale emotional hijacking that will just result in repeating old response patterns from the past.
Cultivating the ability to be mindfully present in the face of challenging emotional experience literally allows us to replace ineffective neural networks that no longer serve us with new ones created with updated information from the present. Every time an implicit memory is triggered for one of us, we have another opportunity as a team to contribute to the this memory being re-stored with experience from the presence that weakens it’s power to hijack us quite as fully next time. The Neurobiologist Dan Siegal coined the term “Interpersonal Neurobiology” to describe how we can be in resonance with the internal state of another person. We could also call this Empathy.