Your Emotion Brain – Left Brain / Right Brain Myth
Are you logical, analytical and math savvy (left brained)? Or are you intuitive, creative and great at seeing the ‘big picture’ thinking (right brained)?
Where on this spectrum from left-brained to right-brained do you fall? With a pen or pencil, make a cross on the spectrum where you see yourself…
Left Brain ____________________________________ Right Brain
…Okay, now you’ve gotten that out of your system, never think about yourself in this way again!
Left Brain vs. Right Brain
Sure, I know you’ve heard about the left and right sides of the brain and how they're responsible for different functions…blah, blah. From now on, laugh in the face of anyone who advises you to watch out for too much sterile left-brain thinking or suggests that the path to a more ‘complete’ you is to free your creative right-brain.
Fact is, contrary to what you’ll hear at creativity workshops and read in self-help books written by people who don’t know squat about neuroscience, your brain isn’t functionally divided in this way.
To be clear, your brain is most definitely divided anatomically into left and right hemispheres. However, as psychologist Dr. Joseph Hellige observed in the “New Scientist” magazine: “Neuroscientists have come to see the distinction between the two hemispheres as a subtle one of processing style, with every mental faculty shared across the brain, and each side contributing in a complementary, not exclusive, fashion.”
Beyond simply reminding linear thinkers to explore the creative side of their nature (not their brain) and vice-versa, this spurious “left-linear thinking / right-creative thinking” distinction is useful for impressing people at cocktail parties—ranking slightly above card tricks—and very little else.
In this section, I’m going to explain a far more powerful (and yet still ridiculously simple) way of dividing the brain. This distinction is functionally and anatomically accurate and will most definitely help you manage your emotional states as you work towards exceeding your highest priority goals.
Think Brain And Emotion Brain
From a functional viewpoint, we all have two brains inside our head; a sophisticated Think Brain (a.k.a. prefrontal cortex) wrapped around a more primitive Emotion Brain (a.k.a. limbic system).
Your Think Brain shoulders responsibility for sophisticated activities like problem solving, decision making and creativity. (All the things we considered in the last section.) It explores nuance and ponders ‘shades of gray’.
Your Emotion Brain is far more primitive. When it first developed, the sole purpose of this primal mechanism was to save your distant ancestors’ lives—To propel them into explosive battle or drag them away from a life-threatening situation whenever they perceived a threat.
Your Emotion Brain is a bullying, delusional dictator who rants at your unconscious and screams absolute demands at the world. As far as your Emotion Brain is concerned, it rules the universe.
Make no mistake, whenever a rude salesperson provokes a quickening of your pulse and an unnecessary emotional intensity, you’re unknowingly invoking a battle-scarred remnant of your ancient past to deal with the trivial frustrations of modern living. Self-preservation of the over-the-top kind!
Unpleasant though it may be, we need to explore this dark side of ourselves. It’s as much “who we are” as our Think Brain.
Interconnected
During fetal life, your Think Brain grew out of (and wrapped around) your Emotion Brain. And so your Emotion Brain and Think Brain are widely interconnected—each having many nerve fingers in the other’s “pies”. These interconnections enable you to think about what you’re feeling and feel about what you’re thinking.
For example, your Think Brain can make an educated guess at the consequences of a particular emotional response and fine tune the activity of your Emotion Brain accordingly. And, in turn, your Emotion Brain provides you with an intuitive, gut-level sense of how you feel about the output of your Think Brain—a decision for example. In other words, emotions are necessary for effective thinking.
There are medical cases where the connections between Think Brain and Emotion Brain have been disrupted. The signs these patients display and the symptoms they complain about support the (well-established) scientific concept of an Emotion Brain—Think Brain balance.
The classic example is that of Phineas Gage—a construction site foreman—who accidentally shot an iron rod through his head leaving part of his brain on the end of it. Describing Gage’s condition after the accident, his physician observed that the “balance, so to speak, between his intellectual faculties and his animal propensities seemed to have been destroyed.”
The previously even-tempered, amiable man was now impatient, rude and quick to anger. This suggests that the neural pathways from Think Brain to Emotion Brain were destroyed by the accident. As a result, Gage’s Think Brain was no longer able to suppress his overactive Emotion Brain.
Another case, described as a “modern day Phineas Gage,” concerns a formerly successful corporate lawyer. Following the removal of a brain tumor, this poor man lost his job, wife, home and savings. Nonetheless, he was strikingly neutral about the downward spiral of his life following surgery.
In addition, this man also lost the ability to be decisive. Contemplating even the simplest decision (such as a suitable time for his next medical appointment) sent him into a tailspin of second guessing and indecision.
In a nutshell, this patient’s Emotion Brain had lost the ability to communicate with his Think Brain. As a result (and despite retaining his logical reasoning) he wasn’t able to decide how he felt about one possible option over another. This case illustrates the role of the Emotion Brain in assisting your Think Brain choose one option from a range. Your Emotion Brain colors your options with a emotional value that prevents you getting lost in a world of emotionally-neutral choices.
See how, when your thoughts and emotions are properly managed, each supports the other? It turns out cold logic and gut-feelings are equally critical to our success. Peak performance involves an interplay between Emotion Brain and Think Brain.
What’s more, studies in which subjects were given an IQ test and also asked to carry a beeper and record their emotional state every time it sounded, have shown that there is little to no relationship between a person’s intelligence quotient and emotional mastery. They are separate parameters that we can strengthen independently for success.
In another part of my website I explain how to supercharge the output of your Think Brain and harness it in the service of solving problems. In this section I’m going to teach you a ridiculously simple—but unexpected and counterintuitive—way to manage your feelings and enhance your emotional intelligence.
You’re about to learn how to tame your Emotion Brain. My goal is to protect you from having your enjoyment of life chewed up by chronic anxiety and/or repeated bouts of unnecessary rage. These concrete steps will enhance your happiness in the day-to-day—the here and now.
You need to start thinking about your emotions in a whole new way. And it begins with an introduction to your Emotion Brain…
