Thoughtful Thursday: How Quickly That Emotional Brain Can Take Over

I am amazed at how quickly people move from hearing something - a name, a decision made by someone else, an opinion - and go straight into an emotional response based on very little other than emotion. Now, I am not immune to this type of response, but I have become a bit more aware of when it is happening to me. When I start to make decisions based in and on my feelings about something with very little regard for thought, fact, or research, I call this being taken over by my emotional brain.

On the other side of things is being taken over by my rational brain. That side is the part of me that takes time to make a decision. It is the brain that wants facts, opinions with commentary, and sound research to make the case for whatever I am trying to decide.

I tend to be more in my rational brain when it comes to making large decisions, but my emotional brain does take over, on occasion. I have learned to recognize when I am responding in a purely emotional manner, and I continue to learn how to navigate the world and relationships when my emotional brain is at the steering wheel. 

I wonder if many other people have this sort of recognition in their own lives.

I'm not sure that they do.

I work with kids who have very little experience with using the rational brain to navigate the world. They move from emotion to emotion and every response is based on emotion rather than thought. Impulse control is a big issue for my clients - many have very little and move from being asked to do a non-preferred task to severe aggression immediately. We work on identifying these emotions and using coping skills to help with the development of that rational brain, but it is not something that is easily learned.

Now, don't get me wrong, we do see improvement in many of my clients, but there is just something about emotion that takes over the prefrontal cortex's function - that of rational thought and impulse control.

We are all emotional beings. Gotta love the limbic system. It has a function for us as human beings, but most of us learn to use our prefrontal cortices to help understand the socially appropriate ways to respond to the limbic events that happen to us all the time. Someone writes a snarky email? Anger can lead to an unprofessional exchange with said someone. Most of us are able to put the brakes on our fingers and remove our emotional response, but some of us are not able to do that. I see this all over the internet and social media.

Is is possible that social media is stimulating that limbic system more and more?

I know that I become more emotional about silly memes and comments on social media than most other forms of interaction. It is so easy to read words and place meaning to them that may or may not be part of the original message. It is easy to re-post something - takes only a few seconds - and share a message that has no basis in anything other than emotion. There are many people out there who are designing posts simply to push that emotional connection and to spread "fake news" and "inspiration" to folks who do not look a bit deeper.

There has been a bit of controversy surrounding a decision made by the American Music Therapy Association. Our new Executive Director, Lee Grossman, is associated by some with an anti-vaccination movement. I've read the comments of people expressing concern with this decision, and I have found many of them to be based in emotion. (This is a difficult paragraph to write, by the way - I know that there will be an emotional response to me talking about the emotions expressed. What a tangle when emotions are involved!)

I remember when it was announced that researchers had found a correlation between vaccinations and the diagnosis of autism. For many of us, this idea made sense but the original research was not all that strong. We adopted a "hunh, hadn't thought of that, but let's see" type of attitude. Some folks jumped on the bandwagon and started the anti-vaccination movement. Vaccinations were demonized and folks who chose to believe this one piece of research engaged in shaming those who chose to vaccinate their kids and there became this attitude of doubt that permeated all society.

Interestingly, the research that has followed the initial finding has found no strong correlation between vaccinations and autism, but that tends to be much more rational in nature - it doesn't stick as easily as the emotional call to "protect your children - don't vaccinate!" Also, the emotional response has a greater half-life than any type of research presented after the fact.

We music therapists have seen this with the Mozart Effect and Hooked on Phonics and other music-based "treatments" guaranteed to "fix" specific human issues and situations.

The controversy right now is that Mr. Grossman, way back when the initial research was presented, seemed to support this idea. Now, I was a professional during this era, and many of us supported this idea when in the initial research was presented. It was an answer to some pretty unanswerable questions. Mr. Grossman seemed to want more research into the idea back then, but also had to represent people with vastly different views. There are some folks who now believe that he is an "anti-vaxxer" - the slang term for someone who thinks that vaccinations are the root of autism. There are many others who support Mr. Grossman, including some of the strongest self-advocates that I know.

We seem to be stuck in an emotional brain response with some attempts to engage the rational brain, but not enough rationality to override the emotion. Now, I don't know any of the people who are making these claims on social media - the folks claiming that Mr. Grossman is an "anti-vaxxer" - so I do not know how they approach other situations in their lives. All I know is how I perceive the information that has been presented.

When I type in the search string "Lee Grossman Autism" into Google, 493 thousand results pop up. The first ones include some videos posted to YouTube in the past year. I haven't watched them all, but the ones that I have watched have led me to conclude that Mr. Grossman has as many questions about autism as anyone else. The strongest case for the "anti-vaxxer" label comes from articles written in 2007 and 2009 when Mr. Grossman was labeled as "Another member, Lee Grossman, is president of the Autism Society of America, which also argues that vaccines can cause the disorder." (See reuters website reference below.) By 2011, Mr. Grossman was not identified as a person who was still arguing that vaccines caused autism, but he was still looking at environmental experiences to see if there was a strong case for causality. (See CNN website reference below.)

In my opinion (and this is a rational brain mediation of an emotional response), Mr. Grossman is an example of what many people have experienced when it comes to this particular situation. I know I went through this as well. We were presented with a specific causal relationship that would explain the unexplainable, and we were pretty excited about that. We had an answer. Then that answer was shown to be erroneous, over and over again. Those folks who read, researched, advocated, and continued to push for answers quickly learned that there is not just one answer to these questions. Many of us changed our minds when it came to our views on vaccinations - several times, back and forth. 

What I like about what I've seen about Mr. Grossman is that he seems to have changed from his initial stance to one that recognizes that research can both support and discount an initial idea. He seems to want to find answers. I hope that he finds some of the answers that he searches for. I'll be watching to see if he can do good things for music therapists, and, if he doesn't do those things, I'll expect AMTA to remove him from his position.

Wow, I'm feeling a bit anxious about publishing this, but please know that it is the OPINION of one music therapist in one area of the world. (Comments are mediated, by the way.)




https://www.reuters.com/article/us-autism-usa/u-s-appoints-autism-advocates-to-new-federal-panel-idINN2755148520071128 

http://www.cnn.com/2011/HEALTH/01/06/med.what.causes.autism/index.html