Organize Your Mind, Organize Your Life by Margaret Moore Page B

nervous-looking visage, unable to make eye contact, announced the downsizing at your job).
    While the brain areas and circuits that produce emotions may be as well-ordered as a municipal power grid, we all know that emotions can be messy. Modern-day neuroscience supports what is intuitive—thatthese emotional areas of the brain can interfere with even simple cognitive tasks. For example, a 2010 study at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada, found that people who feel anxious while doing math problems can have trouble completing a task as simple as counting past five. This experiment shows that emotion can interfere with rudimentary brain processes.
    The direct analogy is clear. When “turned on,” these emotional centers of the brain can interfere with the basic building blocks (such as attention and focus) of more complex organization. When you are reacting emotionally—whether you’re anxious, sad or angry—you are not thinking well. Studies consistently show how emotion can grab your thoughtful attention and turn it away from the task at hand. So it stands to reason that when you are trying to get to an organized foothold in what may seem like a chaotic life, the last thing you need are emotions that can sway, distract and eventually send you tumbling back down into disorder.
    Ah, but the brain has an answer to emotional distractions in its higher, or “executive,” functioning areas. To go back to our committee metaphor, the executive would be the chairperson. Another way to think of it is as the “central offices” of the brain—the thinking centers in the brain’s cortex (those classic thick folds and crevices seen over the top of the brain) that direct the underlying older, “subcortical” regions (out of sight)—much as a supervisor’s office would develop and direct the actions of the workers on the factory floor. The prefrontal cortex is one such critical cortical area, one that we will come back to time and again throughout this book. As we will see, cortical areas of the brain are involved in emotion and, more importantly, emotional control.
    How do we know this? While scholars since Aristotle have theorized about the structure and operations of the brain, we can now describe that structure and the interactions of its various parts withsome confidence because we’ve been able to see it in action. Brain imaging scans have progressed from being able to document the size and shape of the brain and its components to demonstrating the actual functioning of various regions in action. Some of the most fascinating functional brain scans involve special chemicals (radionuclides) that can travel in the blood to specific areas of the brain and light up for the imaging camera. These chemicals indicate brain activity during a particular task, such as looking at a picture, solving a math problem, or seeing a scary face. Functional brain imaging scans can offer incredible detail of brain activity. These brain scans have informed us about the nature of emotion and cognition and their delicate, dynamic balance. It’s a real-time image of the human brain at work.
    Okay, now let’s go back to the amygdala and see how Eileen’s behavior helps us reveal the inner workings of the “disorganized” brain—but also what the brain can do to get things back in order. We know that the amygdala is part of a fear network in the brain. This region can be identified in functional brain scans, as it “lights up” in the presence of anxiety or fear-provoking stimuli. (Some studies have even used exposure to snakes and spiders to elicit anxiety.)
    And here’s another important aspect of what these studies have found: When the amygdala is “acting up,” the cortical, thinking areas of the brain seem to “quiet down.” In other words, as we become more emotionally heated, we see a lessening of cognitive control, almost as if