Transcription
[Music] My name is Dr. Kate Truitt, and yes, I do have a PowerPoint. See, one of the most important things for me, as both a neuroscientist and a clinical psychologist, is to impart information to humanity at large about how fear, and specifically our amygdala, our fear brain, impacts our brain's ability to function in our day-to-day life.
A little-known fact is that 90% of every present moment is impacted by the experiences of our past. And that becomes really, really, really important when we're living in a world that has stress or anxiety or agitation. And even more important when we've survived big things. As a trauma survivor myself, I can notice those moments where my amygdala starts to send up warning flares. And the ability to decipher her warning flares from what's happening in the present moment has empowered me to create actionable resilience in my day-to-day life and be sustaining in that resilience with intention. It's also deepened my relationship with myself and those in my life. One of the things that I want more than anything in the world is to impart that same gift to other people in the way that makes sense for how they want to be living their lives.
You see, our amygdala is running the show when she's aware of a threat. But the thing is about her awareness regarding threat states is they may not be real in the present moment. Sometimes she becomes aware of a threat that belongs to our past. She could be perceiving a threat here in 2020 that reminds her of something in 1986. When she's in a threat state, and especially when she encodes and remembers an experience that's threatening enough to her to be memorable, she doesn't have a sense of time anymore. She just says, "Oh, I'm going to hold on to this forever because I need to make sure that this person who I belong to, meaning you, stays alive." And a little nuance and little kind of annoying thing about Amy is she doesn't really care about quality of life. She only cares about survival.
So let's unpack, just for a moment, how the amygdala impacts our information processing throughout the course of the day. One of the amazing things about our brain is that it has developed across the course of a lifetime to make sure that we do stay alive. And the amygdala's job, when she's just humming along, nice, slow, easy, calm, is to make sure that we don't do silly things like walk off lips, you know, or eat the thing that smells really gross because it's moldy and it could poison us or make us really sick. But as we know, and you may be experiencing, sometimes she gets in the way and causes a lot of additional disruption. That's the course of the work that we do here in our group, is to say, "Hey Amy, how did we help you calm down and find grounded balance and stable safety right now so that 1986 isn't stampeding into the present moment?"
So in a moment of activation, our brain is encoding information. And, well, actually, it doesn't even have to be a moment of activation. Our brain is always taking in information all the time. And our amygdala specifically speaks the language of the five senses. So what we see, smell, hear, taste, touch. She doesn't speak English. She doesn't speak Mandarin. She doesn't speak French. She doesn't speak ASL. She only speaks electrochemical. And so if she senses a threat in the environment, then she's going to send up a warning flare. And here's the thing: she's fast. Why? Because survival requires us to be fast on our feet. If there's a tiger, we want to know it and we want to be able to take action. She's so fast that I'd like to invite you to just take a moment and blink. Now, guess what? She's faster than that. She's four times faster than that. I blink 75 milliseconds. In fact, so anytime we're taking in sensory information in our environment, our amygdala is processing that data four times faster than we're even consciously aware of it. And while she's processing that data, she's also bringing in all sorts of feedback from our emotional brain and our limbic system. And because of that, she's in relationship with not just our brain and our mind, but also our entire body.
So if you've ever had a moment where you're walking down the street and maybe you stutter-step because you see a hose on the ground and you go, "Oh, that was silly, that's a hose," that's because Amy changed your physiology in that moment to check in on, "Is that a snake?" That's what we call an unconditioned threat stimuli. It's something that we are all born to be aware of because it's killed enough of our species across time that our brain learned, "We better be a little careful about that." So not only is she taking in data four times faster than our thinking brain, which I'll talk about in just a minute, she's also sourcing all of this additional information and can pull our brain and our body into alignment with what she feels needs to be done in any given moment if she perceives a threat.
Now, that being said, information does still get up to our thinking brain. Blink again. That's how long it takes for our thinking brain to begin to chime into the conversation. And if our amygdala is sensing threat and she's pulling on the energy of our brain and our body, she's going to define the way we're thinking and feeling. So our thinking brain is a lot slower than our real actionary brain, and, and that's by design. You know, our thinking brain is pretty new to the experience when we look at our species. And our thinking brain is great for building buildings, building Zoom, which is how I'm able to do this video. Right? I'm sitting in a chair. That thinking brain built. And thumbs, yay thumbs. But that stuff is great. It doesn't necessarily mean it's going to help us survive. She wants to know that we can be reactionary and responsive in any given moment. And so our brain has been built over the course of time to rely on her first, and our thinking brain second.
Now, as a trauma expert who is also a trauma survivor, I've had the firsthand experience of knowing how annoying that can be. Because I knew all the things at the time that there were to know about trauma. Now, I don't think I'll ever know all the things there are to know about trauma and brains and neuroscience. In a way, I believe it's like theoretical neuroscience. We are just on the tipping point of what there is to know about the brain and the body. But I knew a lot, and yet my amygdala can still hijack me into reactions that frankly did not feel very good at all.
Now, you might have noticed that there are two little blanks here that are hanging out, and I haven't talked about those yet. So let's look at those two things. 50 milliseconds. Hmm. It's faster than Amy, isn't it? Yeah, that's cool. That's the opportunity. 50 milliseconds is how quickly our thalamus receives incoming information. And the information, all except for our sense of smell, goes through the thalamus before it gets to our amygdala. In fact, it's our thalamus who assesses for the very first tiniest detection of threat. And that's really, really, really good news. Because the thalamus is implicated in attention and learning, in the schemas and the narratives that we develop throughout the course of our life. We're narrative creatures. And so in the course of the work that we do here in session, we're not only helping the amygdala heal and calm down, but we're helping the brain build new, empowered thought processes, neural pathways, so that you have your empowered brain in your hands. We do our job right, you are in a healthy, balanced, strong relationship with your brain and your body.
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