| ashu |
Posted
on 28-Jun-01 12:05 AM
When Mike Tyson became enraged and bit off a chunk of Evander Holyfield's ear during their 1997 heavyweight boxing title match, it cost him $3 million – the maximum penalty that could be taken from his $30 million purse – and a year's suspension from boxing.
Tyson was, in a sense, a victim of brain's alarm center. Located in the ancient emotional brain, the alarm circuitry centers on a series of structures that ring the brain stem, which are known as the limbic system. The structure that plays the key role in emotional emergencies – that make us "snap" – is the amygdala.
The prefrontal area, the executive center, links to the amygdala through what amounts to a neural superhighway. These neural links between amygdala and prefrontal lobes act as the brain's alarm, a setup that has had immense survival value during the millions of years of human evolution.
The amygdala is the brain's emotional memory bank, repository of all our moments of triumph and failure, hope and fear, indignation and frustration. It uses these stored memories in its role as a sentinel, scanning all incoming information—everything we see and hear from moment to moment—to assess it for threats and opportunities by matching what's happening now to the stored templates of our past experiences.
For Tyson, a head-butting by Holyfield flooded him with angry memories of Holyfield's doing the same eights months earlier, in a match that Tyson also lost – and about which he had complained vociferously. The upshot for Tyson was a classic amygdala hijack, an instantaneous reaction with disastrous consequences.
In evolution, the amygdala most likely used its memory templates to answer questions crucial for survival, such as "Am I its prey, or is it mine?" That answers to such questions required astute senses to take in the situation, and formulate an instantanous, ready response. Not helpful: Pausing to reflect deeply or mull things over.
The brain's crisis response still follows the ancient strategy – it heights sensory acuity, stops complex thought, and triggers the knee-jerk, automatic response—though this can have dramatic drawbacks in modern work life.
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All of the above is taken, as was my earlier posting on the
subject, from: "Working With Emotional Intelligence" by Daniel Goleman. Bloomsbury 1998 (paperback edition). It's a book
I highly recommend to all reading this posting.
Though the truth is far from clear-cut on Nepal's dead monarchs ko case, I think this theory of " amygdala hijacking" seems helpful to theorize about why Dipendra killed his parents, siblings and relatives.
I attribute the blame with tremendous sadness to Dipendra
because so many eye-witnesses, including Kumar Gorakh have
blamed him too.
This idea of amygdala hijacking seems to be ONE of MANY and
MANY way of making sense of the Royal Massacre -- about which
I, as a citizen, still remain shocked.
Please feel free to disagree with this, and that'd be fine.
oohi
ashu
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