Why Do I Need a Teacher When I’ve Got Google

‘flocking’, ‘greeting’, ‘grooming’ and, of course, ‘the use of defecation posts’.
    The interesting thing is that we humans still carry with us these same behaviours and can resort back to them at any point, without being able to stop ourselves. Consider the daily routine of the average lizard:
    1 A slow, cautious emerging in the morning;
    2 A preliminary period of basking followed by:
    3 Defecation;
    4 Local foraging;
    5 An inactive period followed by:
    6 Foraging further afield;
    7 Returning to the shelter area; and
    8 Retirement to shelter or roost.
    Swap foraging for shopping and add something about football and you have a typical Saturday for many men.
    For Maclean, at the heart of this reptilian brain were two small constructions known as the amygdalae after the Greek word for ‘almond’, which best describes their shape. Known more commonly as the single ‘amygdala’, it is this basic but powerful part of our brain that determines how we deal with challenge, how we respond to threat and, because of thedirect link between emotions and long-term memory, how long we remember what we have learned. As Daniel Goleman points out in
Emotional Intelligence
, the amygdala is what is responsible for ‘neural hijacking’ when it perceives a dangerous situation and sends a whole torrent of messages and chemicals across the entire brain to help us, effectively, fly, fight, freeze or flock (Goleman 1995). This is something commonly seen in examples of road, air and IKEA rage.
    It is worth noting too that the teenage brain relies heavily on its amygdala, far more so than on its work-in-progress pre-frontal cortex. This means that where we may have been expecting a balanced and well-reasoned counter-argument to why they should be allowed to sit with their friend at the back of the classroom, we are met instead with a bag thrown across the room and a hefty kick to the chair that’s in their way. What’s more, research shows that the teenager’s reliance on the amygdala can impair their ability to interpret body language and facial expressions. 3 Research at San Diego State University in the US quoted by Feinstein showed that the ability to read other people’s emotions decreased in puberty by up to 20 per cent without reaching normal levels again until the age of about 18 (Feinstein 2004). Further study by Yurgelun-Todd, and cited in an online article entitled
The Teen Brain: Implications for Paediatric Nurses: The Brain Matures: Emotions and Development,
has found that:
    teens were noted to be less skilled in emotional reasoning, showed fewer signs of emotional insight, exhibited more impulsive behavior, and were noted to misread the emotional cues of others more than adults.
    ( www.medscape.com/viewarticle/504350_4 )
    One interesting thing about this amygdala-driven reaction process is the fact that all of this happens in a way that entirely bypasses our rational, thinking brains. We respond to threats at a neural and emotional level
before we intellectually realize they are there
. Just by walking into the school grounds your students may be in a neurally hijacked state without even being aware of it. One of the reasons why helping them to get into the right state for learning is so important at the beginning of the day. (Something that a smile can achieve, by the way.)
    One of the most important elements of developing emotional intelligence – our EQ – is the ability to identify these neural hijackings and seek to manage them. Not to suppress our feelings or ignore them but not to be at their mercy either. To achieve this state of psychological nirvana – the difference between ‘I’m feeling anger’ and ‘I’m angry’ or ‘When you do that thing I experience feelings of annoyance and irritation’ and ‘Youmake me sick’–we need to re-establish chemical control of our brains and quieten down the amygdala. To do this we need to fight fire with fire or, in this case, chemicals with chemicals. Where do these amygdala-dampening chemicals come from? We’re back to our friend from the previous chapter – the pre-frontal cortex.
    According to the research, ‘The prefrontal cortex and the amygdala have synergistic roles in regulating purposive behavior, effected through bidirectional pathways.’ In other words, there are direct lines of communication between our survival-driven ancient lizard brain and our rational, thinking and intellectualizing human fore-brain. What’s more, they