Below is a lightly edited transcript. For the article that inspired this one, see The Amygdala is Not the Fear Centre.

Welcome to the btrmt. Lectures. My name is Dr Dorian Minors, and if there is one thing I’ve learned as a brain scientist, it is that there is no instruction manual for this device in our head. But there are patterns. Patterns of thought, patterns of feeling, patterns of action, because that’s what brains do. So let me teach you. One pattern, one podcast. You see if it works for you.

Now, some of you are going to remember the first lecture I did—almost ten lectures ago now—on stress. In that one, I made a promise. I said, if you’re talking about stress, we don’t need to talk about amygdalas or fight-or-flight responses to understand stress. All we need is a hill. As stress goes up, performance goes up. You’re climbing the hill. But if stress goes up too much, then we start to fall down the other side—performance starts to get worse. Simple as that.

But a few of you came back and you said, well, what about the amygdala then? Because everybody’s heard of the amygdala. It is the fear centre of the brain, after all. It hijacks you. It takes you over. You need to calm it down. You need to get out of the amygdala and into the frontal lobe, as my consultant peers sometimes like to say.

And I thought, yeah, all right, fair enough. Because this is maybe the most egregious piece of pop neuroscience out there. And since this is essentially what I do for a living now—correcting the record on how brains actually work—this one is actually a little bit personal. Not just because it annoyed me when my colleagues would use it in the management consulting world, but also because it has slipped into the educational programme here at Sandhurst. Though I say that, and as always, this is my own perspective, not Sandhurst’s. It’s just Dorian doing his little podcast.

With that said—the amygdala. Let’s get into it.

¶The Fear Centre Myth

The amygdala is a brain structure. Two little almond-shaped clusters, one on either side of your head. And according to pretty much everyone who isn’t a neuroscientist, it’s the fear centre of the brain.

I love this Atlantic article that I linked in my other lecture on stress. I use it all the time when I’m lecturing. It’s a management professor, actually, and he writes: “Negative emotions such as anger and fear activate the amygdala, which increases vigilance towards threats and improves your ability to detect and avoid danger. It makes you fight, flee or freeze. Not think, ‘What would a prudent reaction be at this moment?’ But the odds are you no longer need your amygdala to help you outrun the tiger without asking your conscious brain’s permission. Instead, you use it to handle the non-lethal problems that pester you all day long.”

That is a fairly classic example of the kind of thing I’m talking about, this binding up of amygdala and fear and vigilance and ancient tigers. Essentially, the idea is that the amygdala evolved millions of years ago to detect danger. And when it spots a threat, it hijacks the brain—takes over the rational parts before they can do anything. You end up in this fight, flight, or freeze state, this ancient mechanism that’s just poorly calibrated to the modern world. And now we get this same response—once for tigers—now triggered by email notifications and difficult colleagues.

This idea was popularised in the 90s by a science journalist called Daniel Goleman. He wrote this book that has absolutely dominated business psychology ever since. It’s something we teach here at Sandhurst. It’s something that is taught everywhere. It’s universal. At this stage, the book is bigger than this. But within it, he describes what he calls the “amygdala hijack.” The idea that the amygdala detects something threatening and takes over milliseconds before the neocortex can get in the way. The neocortex being a brain structure that is more evolutionarily recent, and it’s where all the rational bits are supposed to be stored. And then because the amygdala has done this, I guess you become a sort of idiot. I suppose that’s sort of the implication.

And as I’ve made clear, management schools ate this up. Every McKinsey consultant will tell you to get out of the amygdala and into the frontal lobe. Every pop psychology blog trots it out to this day. Thirty years later, this story of the amygdala is the dominant story—the amygdala is the enemy. It’s an ancient tiger detector. It’s a panic button that gets hit even for trivial stresses like email notifications.

¶Fight-or-Flight Was Never About Email

I want you to really pay attention to how we go from the amygdala being a fear detector to bolting on the concept of fight-or-flight. The amygdala hijacks you into fight-or-flight or something like this. But I should make clear—and this is one of my problems with pop psychology more generally, but with this theory in particular—fight-or-flight was never about everyday stress. Fight-or-flight is a concept that comes out of the trauma literature. Hypervigilance, extreme stress responses, threats to survival. These sort of animal models of fear—fight-or-flight has always been in this literature.

And what really bothers me about this theory is: when did email notifications become a threat to survival? Let me tell you something. If email notifications are genuinely inducing a fight-or-flight reaction in you, then you should be getting offered help from people around you, not pithy blog articles. This is not normal and you shouldn’t have to put up with that. Email notifications should be email-notification stressful. It shouldn’t be tiger stressful. And we should be triaging that better as a society, as a community.

I also want to point out something else that should make you suspicious about this common narrative. When I wrote the article that this lecture is based on, I went to check Wikipedia. This was a year or two ago, and there wasn’t a single reference to an academic article on the subject of amygdala hijack. Not one, just some peripheral articles. When I check now, there are a couple more. I’m wondering if this is from people upset at my article. And even if so, they haven’t done a very good job of linking academic articles in support of the amygdala hijack thesis. Both articles are from the 90s. There’s a LeDoux paper—a researcher who was very interested in affective tagging, early emotional signals. And the other is an ancient paper on amygdala response habituation—the amygdala sort of relaxing over time in response to the same facial expressions. Neither of these have anything but the most peripheral relationship to the idea of amygdala hijack.

That should be very telling. This heuristic is not useful to people who actually care how people and brains and behaviour work. It is only for entertaining the people who read the kinds of psychology blogs that populate the Wikipedia reference list.

But I reckon you do care. So let me tell you what the go is with our mate, Miggy.

¶What the Amygdala Actually Does

So here’s what’s actually going on. The amygdala is heavily involved in fear learning. That much is absolutely true. If you damage the amygdala, you might lose your fear response. There’s a lot of interesting stuff about psychopaths and thrill seekers and amygdala abnormalities. Also, if you stimulate part of the amygdala in an animal, you can see fear responses. The fear literature around the amygdala is pretty robust.

The problem is that that’s not the only literature. It’s just the most dominant literature. And it’s the most dominant literature for the most boring reason possible. Basically, it’s easy to scare things in a lab. It’s very hard to produce other emotions like joy or surprise. So fear gets studied more and more, and the amygdala got branded as the fear brain structure.

But the amygdala isn’t the centre of fear processing. It has this sort of complex hand in all emotional learning, from good to bad. Essentially, this is a problem I’ve written about before—the problem of easy measurement.

And I should point out that Goleman himself knew this, because buried in his book is this quote: “Not all limbic hijackings are distressing. When a joke strikes someone as so uproarious that their laughter is almost explosive, that too is a limbic response. It is at work also in moments of intense joy.”

So even the guy who’s popularising this is admitting that it’s not just fear. But fear centre is the thing that makes for the best slides and anecdotes. “Amygdala hijack” is a more snappy name than “emotional processing.”

So what the amygdala really seems to be doing is helping us understand what kinds of things in the world are important. It helps us focus our attention on those important things and helps us remember how important those things are when we see them again. You see something, you feel an emotion, and the amygdala is doing something about tagging the intensity of that emotion—whether it’s good or bad, it’s helping you remember the importance, the intensity of that event.

So if we want a better heuristic than “tiger detector,” we might say that the amygdala is an emotional intensity detector. It’s that thing that charges our perceptions with emotions. High intensity, more amygdala. Low intensity, less amygdala. Fear, joy, whatever.

And critically—and this is maybe more important than the semantics around what we’re going to call the job of the amygdala—we don’t see times where the amygdala is “taking over” from other brain regions. Basically, we see that the amygdala is always involved. It’s just more visible when emotional intensity is higher. Because of course it is. That’s its job—to deal with emotional intensity.

There’s this really nice study that illustrates this. It’s a reappraisal study. You show somebody a distressing image—a person crying outside a church, for example—and the amygdala activation begins to rise. The idea being that you see a person crying outside of a church, it might have something to do with a funeral. But if you tell them that this person is crying at a wedding, the amygdala activation automatically reduces. Same image. Different interpretation. The amygdala is tracking the emotional charge of the situation. What it’s not doing is hijacking the brain in response to a situation. The amygdala isn’t taking over. It’s just mapping its activation to how emotionally charged the situation is.

So it’s not clear to me that it generates anything at all, let alone this sort of outsized stress response, this sort of hijacking. It’s not that sexy, but it’s just detecting emotional intensity.

¶Responding Differently

Now, I know that people like this story about the amygdala—that it’s the fear centre of the brain—because it helps them have a dialogue with that process that feels like a takeover, where a stressful situation occurs and you feel like you’re launched into some more primitive atavistic state. But I don’t think that sharpening our impression of what the amygdala does takes away its power to have a dialogue with those moments. I think it actually makes it a little bit better. So let me tell you how, and then I’ll let you go.

So what are we left with, now that I’ve defanged Miggy? Like I said before, the idea that we’re sometimes emotionally distressed by things that we shouldn’t be, in a way that makes us respond in a way we shouldn’t, is a pretty helpful idea. And that’s why I think we get so excited about this amygdala story in the first place. It’s this convenient villain—the emotionally distressed thing that we could blame for that problematic behaviour. And it’s pretty nice, I think, to be able to distance ourselves from the parts of us that are inconvenient or confusing. I have another article on this that talks about all the different ways that we do this, and all the ways that it’s helpful—not just problematic from a scientific point of view.

But what I want to focus on here is that focusing on the amygdala as the culprit misses the point of the story. Because it’s not your brain that’s the enemy. The amygdala is a distraction from what’s important. Because the amygdala isn’t the problem. It’s the way that you’re responding to the world that’s causing the problem. And the trick isn’t to calm the amygdala. The trick is to learn how to respond differently.

And actually, once you drop this sort of fake neuroscience jargon, you might notice that far from hijacking and taking over the rational parts of the brain, your stress responses are already doing the right thing—the rational thing. I wrote this article on fight-or-flight that makes this point, and I’ll drop it in the show notes. But when you get defensive in an argument, that is assertiveness. And it’s not always a bad thing. In fact, often it’s a good thing—it’s the point of argumentation. Or when you avoid the uncomfortable phone call until you’re ready to take it—that’s strategic withdrawal. There’s no reason to put yourself in these situations unduly. Sometimes that stress response is the right response. When you freeze up, similarly, that’s poise. You’re holding the balance. You’re ready to act. You’re collecting your thoughts. These things aren’t amygdala hijacks. They’re preparatory steps. They’re stress doing its job.

Stress makes us do things. And sometimes that ends up being the wrong thing. But very often it tends to be the right thing. So the question shouldn’t be “how do I stop the stress response?” It should be “is this stress response serving me right now?” And that question isn’t about your amygdala. That question is about you.

And this lesson should sound familiar from the stress lecture because it’s the same principle. We don’t need fancy neuroscience jargon to understand what’s going on. Amygdala hijack, fight-or-flight, getting out of the amygdala and into the frontal lobe—this is all just complicated language for something that’s very simple. And I’ll tell you what—when you take these things out of jargon and put them into what’s actually going on, it’s not the amygdala, it’s your way of responding. Is the way of responding serving you? That’s when you start to see results. That’s when, working in the clinical space, I would start to see people developing. That’s when, working with executives, you start to see them getting it right. Because it’s not jargon anymore—it’s actionable.

So if you’re emotionally overwhelmed, the question isn’t “how do you calm the amygdala?” The question is “how do you respond differently?” And the answer is much more accessible than the jargon suggests.

The amygdala isn’t the fear centre of the brain. It is your emotional intensity detector. And the sooner we stop blaming it for our problems, the sooner we can start working on the things that actually matter—which is how we choose to respond.