Tuesday, November 28, 2023

Psychology of rage (impulsions) Hidden Brain

This is the podcast about rage and the uncontrolled behaviors it evokes. The transcript is quicker to read than listening to the whole podcast, but both are available at the link below. 

"how does this happen? That you can instantly do this aggression without even being aware, and it's all unconscious? If something in my environment could cause me to suddenly risk life and limb with no conscious thought, I wanted to understand how that worked at a neuroscience level. What's going on in the brain?...The question again was why evolution, which has sculpted our brains and bodies to be skilled survival machines, would preserve systems in the brain that caused us to act with unthinking haste, and violence. Haste and violence that can place our own lives at great risk."

"The conscious brain is too slow and it doesn't have the capacity. So when you're faced with a sudden threat, like a fist thrown to your chin, you have to respond faster than the conscious brain can handle it....So nature has developed high-speed pathways to the amygdala, all our senses go there before they go to the cortex, which is where we have consciousness. And that so you can have this rapid response to a real threat."

" Rational thought isn't just unhelpful. When that basketball is hurtling toward you, it's actually counterproductive. Being deliberate can end up getting you smashed in the face. But short-circuiting logic creates dangers, especially when you're in the grip of an emotion like rage. You can literally stop thinking about your arm as your arm. It becomes a weapon that can be wielded, deployed, sacrificed."

"Rage, in other words, can be productive not because it benefits us or our individual self-interest, but because it helps the groups to which we belong. Rage, in fact, might be one way that nature gets us to prioritize the interest of our groups over our narrow self-interest. By disabling logic and impairing reason, we can be prompted to do things that we would never do if we were only looking out for ourselves."



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