Teaching With the Brain in Mind

Teaching with the Brain in Mind
FIGURE 8.2
Areas of the Brain Strongly Activated by
Emotions
Thalamus
Prefrontal
Cortices
Anterior
Cingulate
Cortex
Amygdala
Hypothalamus
Note: Other areas of the body are
also activated. See Figure 8.4.
Hormonal
System
information will get emotional priority before measured
thinking takes place. Any experience that
evokes threat or activates our brain’s pleasure circuits
activates specific neurons that respond only
to these events.
In an emergency, prolonged evaluation may
cost you your life. Any life-or-death situation needs
immediate resources, not reflection and contemplation.
This allows us to become, as Goleman suggests,
“emotionally hijacked” by our responses
(1995, Chapter 2). While our emotional system is
acting independently, it’s also acting cooperatively
with our cortex. For example, a student who’s getting
threatening looks from another student may
strike back at the perceived threat before even
thinking about it. The teacher’s “behavior improvement
lecture” after the event usually does little to
change the next “automatic” occurrence of hitting.
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Students need to be taught emotional intelligence
skills in a repetitive way that makes positive
behaviors as automatic as negative ones. This point
is particularly important because although today’s
students have no saber-toothed tigers to fight off,
they have equivalent threats. These include fear of
embarrassment, being a failure to their peers, or
getting bullied in the hallway. Their brain has
adapted to treat those emotional, psychological,
and physical threats as if they are life-threatening.
According to Jeff Tooby of the University of
California at Santa Barbara (Marquis 1996), the
expression circuitry of emotion is widely distributed
in our brain. While the old model linked the
entire mid-brain (the limbic system) to emotions,
the amygdala, an almond-shaped structure, seems
most involved. There’s no evidence that other areas
of the so-called “limbic system” are heavily
involved in direct emotions. That’s why the phrase
“limbic system” makes no sense according to
LeDoux (1996).
The amygdala has 12 to 15 distinct emotive
regions on it. So far, only two, the ones linked to
fear, have been identified. Other emotions may
be linked to other areas. The amygdala exerts a
tremendous influence on our cortex. There are
more inputs from the amygdala into the cortex
than the reverse. Yet, information flows both ways.
The design of these feedback circuits ensures that
the impact of emotions will usually be greater. It
becomes the weight to all our thoughts, biases,
ideas, and arguments. It is in fact an emotional flavor
that animates us, not a logical one. When
classroom teachers evaluate student performance,
it’s all about how they feel about what they see and
hear. The feelings strongly flavor the evaluation.
We call it a professional opinion, but to say there’s
no emotion would be a case of serious denial.