Elizabeth Thornton

Most of us know when we are about to react emotionally. We can feel it. Often there is a brief warning before the amygdala hijack. For some of us, it is butterflies in the stomach; for some, it is an increased heart rate, and for others, it is a feeling of agitation.

Canadian Writer

Peter Diamandis

Now the amygdala is our early warning detector, our danger detector. It sorts and scours through all of the information looking for anything in the environment that might harm us. So given a dozen news stories, we will preferentially look at the negative news.

American Businessman

Mark Goulston

The amygdala is like a point guard in the emotional part of your middle brain. When it is overwhelmed, it hijacks you away from being able to access your upper rational brain and think and assess what to do. It essentially disables your ability to think.

American Psychologist

Simon Baron-Cohen

We've done fMRI scans of people taking the 'Reading the Eyes' test, and what we've found is that the amygdala lights up in trying to figure out people's thoughts and feelings. In people with autism, they show highly reduced amygdala activity.

British Psychologist

Sam Kean

The amygdala is one of those brain structures that a lot of people know a little bit about, and there's a definite tendency to conflate the amygdala and the fear response itself - as if the amygdala, and the amygdala alone, 'causes' fear.

American Writer

Scott Stossel

To say that my anxiety is reducible to the ions in my amygdala is as limiting as saying that my personality or my soul is reducible to the molecules that make up my brain cells or to the genes that underwrote them.

American Journalist

Daniel Goleman

The amygdala in the emotional center sees and hears everything that occurs to us instantaneously and is the trigger point for the fight or flight response.

American Author

Nancy Gibbs

Emotional life grows out of an area of the brain called the limbic system, specifically the amygdala, whence come delight and disgust and fear and anger.

Once we start believing that the apocalypse is coming, the amygdala goes on high alert, filtering out most anything that says otherwise.

Jim Yong Kim

The relationship between the prefrontal cortex and the amygdala fundamentally changes with meditation.

South Korean Public Servant

The amygdala is crucial for processing emotions, not just fear.

Emotional Brain

The amygdala is involved in forming emotional memories, making some memories feel vivid.

Memory Link

When stressed, the amygdala can trigger the body's 'fight or flight' response.

Stress Response

Apart from its brain-related meaning, amygdala also describes similar shapes, like an almond.

Beyond the Brain

Use the shape of an almond to visualize how the amygdala looks.

Visual Analogy

The general shape-based definition is used less commonly than the brain context.

General Use

 So if the amygdala is excited, and this is something important, the messages then cascade into the autonomic nervous system. Your heart starts beating faster. You start sweating to dissipate the heat that you're going to create from muscular exertion. And that's fortunate, because we can put two electrodes on your palm

3 clues to understanding...

 epigenetics is going to produce your amygdala in adulthood as a more excitable form, and you're going to have elevated stress hormone levels. But pushing even further back, back to when you were just a fetus, back to when all you were was a collection of genes. Now, genes are really important to all of this,

The biology of our best...

 the decrease in inhibition and cognitive control might lead to wild associations— and, thanks to the amygdala and cingulate cortex activity, those associations can be between emotionally charged topics. Some researchers think this stage might help us make innovative connections between ideas upon waking.

How long should your...

 releasing oxytocin the oxytocin actually dampens the effects from the amygdala which is the alarm system of the brain so when you feel that sense of trust with a lover in bed you forget temporarily about the danger is out in the world or the possibility that you're gonna die one day instead

Jason Silva on Trust PIPE...

 and they usually elicit compassion and a desire to help in people who see them, so it makes sense that people who tend to lack compassion also tend to be insensitive to these cues. The part of the brain that's the most important for recognizing fearful expressions is called the amygdala.

Why some people are more...

 up program which is actually teaching children about the amygdala about the hippocampus about the different regions of the brain and helping children have some emotional accountability and with emotional accountability comes a level of higher cognitive accountability so

The right brain vs. left...

 First comes the moment you encounter a new piece of information. Each sensory experience activates a unique set of brain areas. In order to become lasting memories, these sensory experiences have to be consolidated by the hippocampus, influenced by the amygdala,

Does stress affect your...

 Studies have shown that disabling certain brain circuits in the amygdala can eliminate pain in rats. And genetic testing in people with rare disorders that prevent them from feeling pain have pinpointed several other possible targets for drugs

The mysterious science...

 our senses bring in way too much data than we can possibly process in our brains. And because nothing is more important to us than survival, the first stop of all of that data is an ancient sliver of the temporal lobe called the amygdala.

Abundance is our future...

 that tends to last much longer. It's all part of the threat detection system, which all animals have to some degree, to help protect us from predators. Anxiety starts in the brain's amygdala, a pair of almond-sized nerve bundles

Amygdala