I hate trouble and when it happens to me I always have to know what or who is the cause of it.
I usually begin with a mental search. Most of the time, I try to understand what the hell just happened. Then I ask, why do people do what they do? Sometimes I have more questions, questions for which there is no answer, as in, will this ever end? Why me? Or what is that on the bottom of my shoe?
The search for causes and explanations goes on and on. Thankfully I can usually blame most of my troubles on someone else. Like my husband, my kid, or the aggravating neighbors next door.
I’ve been studying brain anatomy to understand human behavior. I’ve concluded that one in four people are wacked out. Statistics support this statement even though it sounds crazy. Maybe it’s due to faulty neural wiring. Or defective brain parts, like the amygdala.
I just recently learned about the amygdala and l’ll bet unruly amygdalas account for 90% of all cases of documented and undocumented mental issues. Amygdalas are probably the cause of most troubles in our society. But I don’t know if it’s because people’s amydalas are exhausted, loopy, or just fighting mad.
An amygdala is supposed to be give balance to emotions, not fear reactions or aggressiveness. Not overreaction…just calm sanity. This is not happening, a lot of amygdalas are not working!
The amygdala sits there in the temporal lobes of the brain. It’s a part of the limbic system, a part of the brain which causes our emotions to crash when it’s out of order. It’s an almond sized mess of brain cells and their gray matter, but if its size isn’t just right, things can really get out of hand.
Because the amygdala is concerned with experiencing and integrating emotions, it tempers our emotional behavior, including fear and pleasure, sex. Even religious OCD’s. And to make matters even worse, it interconnects with the rest of the brain.
Anyway, amygdalas don’t seem to working in a lot of people. Besides, amygdalas make for good behavioral scapegoats. Maybe we should all blame our behavioral issues on our amygdalas, as in:
- My amygdala’s been hijacked! Batten down the hatches!
- My amygdala is all boogered up. It’s given me oral diarrhea. And maybe a little of the intestinal kind too.
And I have more questions:
- If your amygdala is the size of your left testicle, does it obliterate all your common sense as it squashes your cerebrum?
- If You eat too much fat, can your amygdala become obese? Will it just sit there…a pulsating, quivering blob, a Jabba the Hutt, not good for anything?
- Or…if your amygdala is hyperactive, does it have ADHD? If so…. Quick! Catch it before it runs down the street!
A couple of links I found interesting:
http://thebrain.mcgill.ca/flash/d/d_04/d_04_cr/d_04_cr_peu/d_04_cr_peu.html
