It is the time of ripening. Even before she sees the first red berry,
she can smell them on the breeze, mixed with the scent of dust,
leaves, and evaporating dew. She scans for the shape of red berry
bushes, marks their location, and plans her route. Soon she is
filling her basket with bright, ripe berries, working carefully and
quickly, immersed in the feel of the leaves against her skin and
the sweet, sharp smell of berries. She is happy.The opposite of panic is picking berries—quiet focus on a rhythmic,
repetitive task. This mental place is where you want the woman in the
elevator to go. Calmingmeans showing her how to get there.
In technical terms, what you’re trying to do is mimic the functions
of her parasympathetic nervous system, a loop of connected brain centers,
senses, and muscles that regulates relaxed activity. The other large feed-
back loop is the sympathetic nervous system, which mediates the fight or
flight response we discussed in the first chapter. You know what this one
is like—mental alarms clanging, heart pounding, muscles tensing, lungs
sucking air, and mind prepared to kill or die. The physiology of explosions.
Speaking of physiology, before we can talk intelligently about how
the brain affects emotional explosions, we must first agree on a few terms.
The grayish lumps of jelly that make up a human brain go by many names,
depending upon the tools people use to study them. The scalpel, the
microscope, the test tube, and the PET scan all yield different views of
the brain, and these views are often described in what seem to be different
languages. How do synapse and sympathetic system relate to amygdalaor
the cingulate gyrus? And what do serotoninand norepinephrinehave to do
with right brainversus left brainthinking?
As a psychologist, my tools are rather low-tech. Senses and words.
I watch and listen, then use language to try and explain what I see. My
own understanding of how the brain works, like yours, is mostly from
standing outside and looking in. I don’t scan, dissect, electrically stimu-
late, or prescribe chemicals to adjust function, so I’ve had to learn from
the people who do. I’ll do my best to teach you. To make this confus-
ing area clearer, I may have to jump back and forth from one language
to another. I promise, at least, to refrain from making up new terms of
my own.
52 ❧Explosions into Fear