At this, Lester snapped, “This is getting ridiculous! How many stories do
I have to hear about this damn check!” As he was venting, Lester was trying
to stop his tongue from moving but couldn’t. He flushed with both anger
and embarrassment that he had blown his fuse at someone who was power-
less to change the situation. To make matters worse, Lester looked to the
right—and there was the owner, standing in his doorway, staring directly at
him. Lester tried to apologize but he knew the damage had been done.
Three months later, the owner canceled his business.
Lester’s lost account was a casualty of what author Daniel Goleman
termed the “amygdala hijack.” The amygdala is the emotional center in the
brain that, when overloaded with emotion, can trigger an irrational, emo-
tive response. Who doesn’t have a hundred stories of words or actions de-
livered in the heat of passion that we later recall with embarrassment and
regret? Our personal memory banks are stocked with radical examples of
such incidents.
It is in these moments—where impulsivity overrides rationality—that we
do the most harm to ourselves and to the people and things we care most
about. For example, one person says something he shouldn’t to someone he
truly cares about. Another breaks something that she treasures. Another be-
gins to spiral into some sort of self-destructive behavior. All have temporar-
ily been taken hostage as their brains suffer from emotional overload.
Goleman compares the amygdala to an alarm company that stands ready
to send out emergency calls to the police, fire, and ambulance crews. Once
an alarm is sounded, such as anger or fear, urgent messages are dispatched
to every other part of the brain. The body’s fight or flight hormones are se-
creted, the motion centers are put on alert, and the cardiovascular system,
muscles, and gut are tensed. Other circuits send out a flow of norepineph-
rine, which makes all senses more alert and literally sets the brain on edge.
The heart rate and blood pressure escalate and breathing slows, while the
face muscles are locked into a frozen posture animated by the emotion that
triggered the response. We all know what happens at this point: we either say
or do something we will soon regret, or we catch ourselves in time and make
the conscious decision not to respond irrationally.
Neuroscientist Joseph Ledoux was the first to discover the “electronic
backroads” in the brain that lead to the amygdala hijack phenomenon—
popularly known as “losing it.” Ledoux discovered that when your brain re-
ceives information through seeing or hearing, information is sent along
different pathways within the brain. The main path the information travels
on is toward the neocortex, where we can begin to process the information.
What Ledoux found was a “neural back alley,” where the information
reaches the emotion center beforeit has a chance to be fully processed in
Hotheads and Seeing Red 55