(NOTE: THE FIRST 25% OF THE BOOK IS VERY EASY TO UNDERSTAND , HAS A FEW BRIEF QUOTES FROM THE EXTENDED INTERVIEWS FOUND LATER IN THE BOOK, AND HAS LOTS OF ILLUSTRATIONS TO KEEP YOUR RIGHT BRAIN HAPPY...)

Chapter 6

THE AMYGDALA

You are a complex living organism. Unlike an amoeba that only lives about as long as a couple of old episodes of "I Love Lucy” or the time it takes you to drive to the dry cleaners and back, you stick around for a relatively longer period of time, plenty of time to get into lots of trouble.

The complexity of you started long before the advent of even crummy looking black and white TV programs, something like sixty-five million years ago. This was when Mama Nature started equipping Earth mammals with a brain that could flip a whole lot more kinds of tricks than what a peanut-sized dinosaur’s brain could accomplish, such as merely biting the head off of the smaller dinosaur who lived next door.

We know what happened to the dinosaurs, and it wasn’t so good.

The mammals, on the other hand, thrived and survived to this day, to make pests of themselves, not only by invading the area behind your kitchen stove but also by running for government jobs every couple of years.

One of the reasons for the long success of mammals is a little bit inside the mammal brain that allows furry creatures to experience emotions. Obviously, this emotional brain area is not always functional, as observed in those upright humanoid brains that would cut off funding for badly needed social service programs without blinking an eyelash. But otherwise, this part of the brain is a working little gold nugget of neurophysiology that provides a primary function in the service of species survival.

This emotional hub of this furry mammal brain is called:

THE AMYGDALA

Your dog has an amygdala, a ferret has one, a mouse has one, and so does an anteater. For that matter, you do too.

The amygdala gets its name, meaning "nut” in Greek, because it looks something like an almond or a walnut, not because it looks like Jerry Lewis.

You’ve got two of them, one in each side of your head, one for each hemisphere of your brain.

The amygdala is a hub for forming, retrieving, and processing emotions.

The amygdala is connected to major other parts of the brain. This includes the core reactive parts of the brain which regulates basic body functions as well as the most advanced parts of the brain responsible for complex thought production, abstract creative thought, and social behaviors.

The interaction of all of these areas of the brain results in your emotional response to sights, sounds, sensations, as well as more complex ideas and cues.

EMOTIONAL SHORTCUTS

As a general rule, you are attracted to things that are good for your survival by positive emotions, and you are repelled from things that are bad for your survival by negative emotions. 

By no coincidence, the amygdala is actually directly connected to your olfactory nerves, and your sense of smell. You can easily observe how odors can trigger emotions simply by taking a whiff of something you enjoy, and comparing how you feel when you smell something you do not enjoy.

That’s your amygdala- telling you to run towards fresh buttered popcorn wafting out of the bowl sitting on your kitchen counter and telling you to run away from the moldy yogurt that is crawling out of your refrigerator next to it.

In the same way that a mammal can smell danger or food far in advance of being face to face with it, your amygdala serves as an "early warning system” so that you can respond long before you understand something.

Your amygdala in this sense helps you to "sniff out” threats and rewards, even when you haven’t yet figured out why you might like or loathe something.

This emotional evaluation that you make of things that cross your path happens instantly through your amygdala, faster than you can rationally think about such things. That’s why you still have an amygdala and why it’s never been discarded into the evolutionary garbage heap.

But your amygdala is connected to all of your senses. So even though you can’t smell it, when you see and hear an asteroid flaming down on you through the clouds, you don’t think much about it- Your amygdala instantly tells you, "This is not good. Run like heck!”

DETAILS: TICKLE YOUR AMYGDALA

To "Tickle Your Amygdala” means to consciously and directly stimulate the reward pathways and to activate the pleasure circuits of the human brain, not from random or external causes, but by personal will. You tickle your own amygdala, rather than have it stimulated by accident by whatever you happen to run across.

This is done by consciously invoking the brain’s basic frontal lobes processes of

Cooperation

Imagination

Creativity

Intuition

Logic

These C.I.C.I.L. processes occur singly or in any combination determined by the individual’s preferences and needs.

Your frontal lobes create a positive force expressed by CICIL: Cooperation, Imagination, Creativity, Intuition, Logic.

Cooperation: Constructive Social Interaction

Imagination: Abstract Thought, Ideation of Time

Creativity: Syntheses, New Combination of Disparate Elements

Intuition: Non-verbal Perception, Non-Linear Ideation

Apply one’s frontal lobes skills completely, and you get the whole kit and caboodle- no reality hangover later on.

In order to insure long term positive emotion the organism MUST employ a reliable system, and that means frontal lobes thinking.

By using your frontal lobes, you can tickle your amygdala and keep on truckin’.

By definition, tickling your amygdala indicates enhanced long-term survival, indicated by sustainable positive emotion. The pleasurable reward response is not reversed by a "reality hangover” and negative rebound after-effects.

Amygdala tickling produces effects superior to temporary and randomly stimulated reward responses that do not involve sufficient frontal lobes processes, and that are subject to negative rebound.

Tickling your amygdala results in superior problem solving abilities beyond those accessed by random discovery, negative reinforcement, or poor methods of learning.

The amygdala tickling reward process positive emotional effect may be learned and repeated to produce a positive habit which is self-reinforcing. The results of amygdala tickling are progressive and accumulative over time.

Josh Blue

Stand Up Comedian

Josh Blue tickles his audiences’ amygdala every time he goes on stage. He became a household name in America as the winner of the hit NBC television show Last Comic Standing, (2006). A member of the U.S. Paralympic Soccer Team, he competed in Athens at the Paralympic Games, the world’s second largest sporting event.

He continues to tour full time performing live shows on stage and on television, and has several comedy CDs, a DVD, and an upcoming book to his credit. His life and story illustrates many frontal lobes amygdala tickling principles.

NS: "Where does your humor come from? What is funny, and why?”

JB: "People have such a skewed idea of what disability is and what they think I should be capable of. The fact is, I’m usually smarter than the person who is condescending towards me. That’s funny to me. It’s the bait and switch- ‘Okay, you think I’m that person, so I’ll just lead you down that path to let you think I’m that person, and then I’ll switch it up at the end at a crucial point.’” (laughs)

NS: "What about your parents?”

JB: "My parents home-schooled me. My mom is a librarian, my dad is a language professor, a genius who speaks thirteen languages. My dad told me, ‘You don’t need to know everything; you just need to know where to look it up.’”

NS: "He married the right woman- it was a match made in heaven.”

JB: "My family is very smart, everybody in the family is a teacher, and everybody speaks different languages fluently. All my siblings went to a fancy private school, but because of my handicap my parents had to send me to a public school. It was an experiment, ‘Let’s send one to a public school and see what happens.’ I’m not book smart like my siblings, but I’m street smart and I can beat the hell out of them!” (laughs)

NS: "Well, you make your living out of language, just like everybody else in your family.”

JB: "Yep. And I speak three languages anyway, English, French, and Wolof, the native language of Senegal. If we were speaking Wolof, we would still be greeting each other for ten minutes, ‘How’s your dog? How’s your house? How’s your family? How ya’ doing? You okay?’  Just on and on. It’s a very playful language.”

NS: "Was your humor a mechanism for survival for being different?”

JB: "Humor is the best defense- to make people laugh. If you’re going to make fun of me, but I’ve already said something funnier than anything you’ll ever say, you’ll look really dumb by comparison.

Although I didn’t really fit the norm in school, I could cross all the cliques. I could sit at any lunch table I wanted to. I just chose the all-black girl lunch table, ‘cause it was the most fun. Besides that, if anyone picked on me, those girls could just shred anybody, verbally or any way. (laughs)

After college I went back to Senegal for a while and did some independent study as a zookeeper, which was totally random, but life changing. One time I got the zoo to lock me into a cage for an entire day and put me on display.”

NS: (laughs) "Okay, so what was that like, what happened?”

JB: "I had no shirt on, just shorts. The thing was, if you take cerebral palsy and take it out of context and put it in a cage, people don’t know what the heck is going on. During the afternoon, there would be like seventy people constantly around my cage feeding me peanuts and fruit.

Also, I shared a wall of bars with a four-hundred pound gorilla.”

NS: "What did the gorilla think?”

JB: "Well I established a relationship with him. I was one of three people in the world who could pet him. He was a beast, but cool. So I was on the other half of his enclosure. So during the day’s siesta, everyone has left the zoo, and I decided to stay in there and do the whole day, just like a real animal.

So I’m half asleep on the concrete floor, and nobody is around and all of a sudden I hear this noise. The gorilla has got his hands around the metal door and he’s bending it to get into my half of the cage.

So I had to really quickly start playing with him, running back and forth to keep him distracted so he would stop trying to break into my area, because there was nobody around to save me.

The zookeepers started calling me the ‘Boo Boo Monkey’ that day, and they were telling people that they had captured me in the mountains of the Congo. And I didn’t talk all day. But people were talking about me in Wolof, and nobody thought I could understand them- but it took everything to keep from laughing.

One lady starting talking to me in English and said, ‘You’re crazy!’ and then I suddenly said back to her in Wolof, ‘You’re crazier than me!’ which she didn’t understand but everybody else standing around did, and everybody started laughing, and she didn’t get it at all.

One time I got malaria, and I had to go to the doctor to get a shot. So while I’m talking to the doctor I tell him, ‘You ought to bring your kids to the zoo sometime, because I work there.’ So of course, the day he decides to bring his kids to the zoo is the day I’m in the cage next to the gorilla in my shorts. He’s probably thinking, ‘Oh gosh, the shot didn’t work.’

And he’s looking at me and says through the bars, ‘Do you remember me?’ And I’m just in there grunting like an ape going ‘Oo oo oo’, and I made some ape sign language symbol with my hands for an injection in the butt.

NS: (laughs) "How old were you then?”

JB: "I was about twenty. To be honest with you, at that point in my life I went, ‘Okay, now I can die. If I die now, I can say that I’ve done and accomplished something that probably nobody else has ever done.’”

NS: "For you it was that point where you said, ‘From this point, anything else goes.”...........