Everyone’s been told the amygdala is the fear centre of the brain. That it hijacks your rational mind and throws you into fight-or-flight at the sound of an email notification. This is nonsense—the kind of nonsense that makes every McKinsey consultant sound like a neuroscientist and every neuroscientist cringe. The amygdala is an emotional intensity detector, not an emotional dictator. And focusing on it is distracting you from what actually matters: how you respond to the world.

• The Betterment article that inspired this
• Stress is Good (Lecture 1) — the stress lecture that set this up
• More on stress and the Yerkes-Dodson Law
• Why fight-or-flight isn’t what you think
• Pop Neuroscience is Just a Fancy Way of Saying “Calm Down” — the next lecture in this thread
• How we make meaning in the brain

• The Atlantic article — the management professor’s piece on stress and the amygdala
• Daniel Goleman, Emotional Intelligence (1995)
• Amygdala hijack (Wikipedia) — note the lack of academic citations
• Amygdala (Wikipedia) — particularly the section on emotional learning
• Pessoa (2010): Emotion and cognition (PDF) — reappraisal evidence, pg 44
• Janak & Tye (2015): From circuits to behaviour in the amygdala — the complexity of amygdala function
• Adolphs (2015): “The unsolved problems of neuroscience” — on the amygdala and emotional significance