In 1997 Mike Tyson bit Evander Holyfield’s ear in their title boxing match. It was an expensive bite. Tyson was disqualified and kissed goodbye to the chance of millions of dollars in match fees and prize money.
In 2006 28,8-million viewers in 213 countries watched French football captain Zinedine Zidane head butt Marco Materazzi. It was Zidane’s last career game and many argued that were it not for this incident he would have won the player of the tournament award.
But instead it was another expensive loss of control and dignity.
Daniel Goleman in his book Emotional Intelligence coined the term “amygdala hijack” for this short-fuse response, described usually as “seeing red” or “blowing a gasket”. It takes as little as one-fifth of a second for that small almond-shaped part of the brain’s limbic system to assess the situation and leap into action.
The amygdala is the centre of the emotional brain and responds to an event more quickly than the thinking brain. When the amygdala perceives an emotional emergency, it can take over the rest of the brain’s function before the neocortex (the thinking brain) has had time to analyse the signals more thoughtfully and decide what’s best to be done. The amygdala serves us well in times of danger, when a split-second response makes the difference between life and death.
This month in South Africa television viewers were able to watch two amygdala hijack incidents — except they weren’t about life and death, literally speaking. The first incident was Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging’s general secretary André Visagie losing his cool with political analyst Lebohang Pheko. The second was ANC youth leader Julius Malema evicting a BBC journalist from a press conference and making demeaning remarks about the journalist.
So what are the triggers of such instantaneous response?
In 2008 The NeuroLeadership journal published an article on SCARF (status, certainty, autonomy, relatedness and fairness), a brain-based model that summarises the work of several leading scientists. It indicates the different ways we relate to one another and identifies five “domains of human social experience” in which the amygdala plays an important role in determining the social response.
- Status is about our social standing and our relative importance to others.
- Certainty is about our feeling secure in being able to predict the immediate future in our current circumstances.
- Autonomy is about our sense of control over the events in which we are engaged.
- Relatedness is about our sense of safety with others. Are the people we are interacting with friends or foe?
- Fairness is about our own perception of fair exchanges between people. Being let down, treated unfairly or blamed unjustly are triggers for many of us.
I listened to a radio interview that mentioned the Malema incident. Someone asked: “What was it that pissed off Julius Malema so badly?”
“It was a question related to Zimbabwe,” responded the radio presenter.
Maybe. But what specifically triggered the amygdala hijack? I watched the incident again on YouTube and jotted down the dialogue. A journalist asked Malema about his attitudes to Zimbabwe’s Movement for Democratic Change (MDC). Malema commented negatively about the MDC holding its press conferences in the (non-revolutionary) suburb of Sandton. The BBC journalist quipped that actually Malema himself chose to live in Sandton.
Tell me if I’m wrong, but to my mind it was that quip that triggered Malema’s amygdala. The quip caught him out, red-handed, and he saw red.
Let’s look at the SCARF model and see it at work here. First, the observation of Malema’s residential choice affronted his sense of status; he could lose face in front of others. Second, the observation threw him off guard and his certainty of directing the content and course of the interview was threatened. Third, his autonomy and sense of control over the event was in jeopardy. Fourth, his relatedness, his sense of being in the presence of foe not friend, was at a peak. His animosity towards media, especially white journalists, came to the fore. In terms of SCARF, four of the possible five triggers were present. No wonder he just lost it.
Goleman writes: “We still have that [survival] brain mechanism from our ancestors … the amygdala.” Its response “to perceived emergencies can pitch us into paralysing fear, or rage … So the ability to pause and not to act on that first impulse has become a crucial emotional skill in modern times.”
So when our buttons are being pressed, we need to be able to activate the “pause” button. It was reported that when President Jacob Zuma commented on the Malema/ BBC journalist incident, he said ANC leaders had to “think before they speak” because their utterances had wider implications for the country.
Can we upgrade our “pause” capability? Goleman says yes. Research in a very high-pressure American biotech company showed that meditation training of 30 minutes a day for eight weeks “enhanced the capacity of the brain to catch those impulses and pause rather than react”.
Can you imagine our short-fused politicians committing themselves to eight weeks of meditation training?