Thursday, March 2, 2006

How our anscestors survived?

The emotional brain responds to an event more quickly than the thinking brain. The amygdala in the emotional center sees and hears everything that occurs to us instantaneously and is the trigger point for the fight or flight response. It is the most primitive survival response. If it perceives an emotional emergency, it can take over the rest of the brain before the neo-cortex (the thinking brain) has had time to analyze the signals coming in and decide what to do. That takes a long time in brain time. The amygdala in the meantime has decided, Oh no, I've got to do something! It can hijack the rest of the brain if it thinks there is an emergency, and it is designed to be a hair trigger. In other words, better safe than sorry. This has helped immensely in evolution as a survival mechanism, when you are answering the question: Does it eat me or do I eat it? You can't sit around and think about it; you need to have an instantaneous response.

That's how our ancestors survived.

~ Inspiring thought from Daniel Goleman, author of Emotional Intelligence. A book that sold millions of copies and kicked up the worldwide debate ~ EQ or IQ?

No comments:

Post a Comment