Rich Bello (speaker) defines emotions as rapid reactions to stimuli that evolved to evaluate whether events help or threaten survival, goals, or wellbeing. He outlines a three-layer brain model (brainstem for basic functions; limbic system—including the amygdala—for emotion, learning and memory; and the neocortex/prefrontal cortex for reflection and regulation). Emotions originate as fast, automatic recommendations from the lower mind (matching stimuli to memory); the prefrontal cortex can reappraise and regulate these emotional signals before choosing a response, producing a bottoms-up then top-down cycle of emotional regulation.
Chapters
What are emotions? They're a reaction to some sort of stimulus or trigger. Their role is to quickly decide whether the stimulus is a friend or foe from a biological standpoint, which is where they originate. The question being asked is whether the stimulus is something that will help us to survive or something that will kill us. Right? What's the stimulus? What's this trigger? What's coming at us in our current environment? The. The question is whether the stimulus is something that will either meet our goals or keep us from our goals or happiness or fulfillment. Now the default option is to take action without thinking, right? That used to be the prudent thing to do, especially in the biological response when time may be of the essence. Tiger's coming at you. Run. There's no time to think. You don't have time to think about it. And if you do, you've lost valuable time and you could die. This applies in today's environment as well. If something dangerous happens, but that's not what we're talking about. Walking across the street and a car swears to hit you, jump out of the way. Don't think about it. However, where there is time to think about it, we tend to make better decisions than our first emotional impulse. Now we're going to talk a little bit about the evolution of the brain and how this impacts our emotions. The brain stems the oldest portion of our brain and responsible for all of our basic necessary functions like breathing, digestion, and sleep. That's a given. Next is the limbic system. We call this the old brain, right? This is built on top of the brain stem. This is the area responsible for learning and memory that can help us to adapt to new environments. It's also where our emotions come from that's really important in this discussion especially. And finally, the neocortex. That's the newest part of the brain. And. And this uppermost layer is the portion of the brain we can utilize to master our emotions that come from our limbic system. It regulates them. This is where the prefrontal cortex resides. Everybody talks about the prefrontal cortex, the pfc. This part of the brain provides us with the ability to reflect on the meaning of the trigger and also on the initial recommended response of the lower brain, the emotion. In other words, we get to choose how to respond when we utilize this portion of our brains, as opposed to some sort of automatic response. If we don't, we basically have two minds. We have the old layer or the lower mind, which biologically is where the limbic system is, which houses the amygdala we also have the new layer, or the upper mind, which biologically is where the neocortex is and that's where the prefrontal cortex resides. The way that cause and effect works its way through these two minds is really fascinating. First, the lower mind takes in stimuli from either the outside world or even from a thought inside our minds. Our subconscious mind doesn't really understand the difference between the two things. Everything's real. So our imagination, for instance, then it matches that stimulus against the memory bank and looks for matches from the past so they can advise us what is the best response to take from that particular stimulus. This is a very fast process and is often referred to as fast thinking term popularized by Dan Kahneman. It sends its best recommendations via an emotion, an emotional signal to the new brain or the upper mind, which is where the PFC or prefrontal cortex is located. This is often referred to as a bottoms up process. The PFC examines the emotion and applies a reasoning process to it to check it out, see if it makes sense, a due diligence process, if you will. The old brain, you see, usually overreacts. That's its job. It's looking for danger. It's impulsive because it wants us to act fast. But the new brain usually realize that after applying some reasoning that the emotion should be changed to something that would lead to a better outcome. This is referred to as regulation. It sends the regulated emotion back down to the old brain, which usually calms down the emotions like, okay, now it's calming this emotion down, right? Takes the brain's new brain suggestion. The revised emotion then is sent back up to the new brain, which then proceeds to make a decision as to which action to take or which reaction, right? This is the response to the stimuli and of course results in some type of effect to complete the cycle.
