Limbic System Searches for Connection

0:00 if you pay attention to connection rather than to control what you're doing is paying attention to what makes the brain really work it's like our brains have a brain stem which is which controls the bodily functions the brain stem takes information in from our experience and evaluates it for is is my life in danger am i okay am I going to be harmed and your brain stem is the part of you that we're in California so I'll just talk

0:31 about earthquakes part of you that when an earthquake starts you are out the door and down the street although they told you to duck and run before you know it it's like you don't even think you don't decide what you're doing all of a sudden you've done it because your brain stem takes over the whole rest of your brain it's the part that reacts instantly in self-preservation and what's developed around the brain stem is a set of very complex structures

0:56 called the limbic system and this is the seat of our emotions it's where where we process the nonverbal signals that are coming in to us from everywhere it's where we evaluate what the tone of someone's voice indicates about their inner state it's where we where the signals that we send about how we are inside are cooked up and and sent out the limbic system is the source of the gut responses that we

1:27 have to things it's because of the limbic system for instance that you can take a group of students in college and have them go through a teacher's whole course a whole semester and evaluate that teacher in several different ways and the general evaluation will have certain features to it yes good here not so good there and if you show another set of students five seconds of that teachers lesson they will evaluate that teacher although they're guessing but

1:56 their limbic system got enough of who that person was and how they are on the inside to give in general almost the same evaluation it takes you five seconds or less to evaluate whether someone is safe to be with or not your limbic system is that fast and in the limbic system your Sitz long-term memory and in the limbic system sit our emotions and these I don't know how it works physiologically

2:27 it's not my area of expertise someone is figuring it out right now but the way it works functionally in children and in all of us is that when we have an experience that sends danger signals to our either our brain stem or to our limbic system that is frightening or a threatening or upsetting or disappointing or we can't find the person that we're depending on to think about us and we're very small and we can't do without them you know it's that

2:55 it's that 3 3 seconds in the grocery store where your child can't find you because you just happened to walk around the other end of the aisle that sends emotions you know jamming in to the child's brain and the memory of where they are and what was happening also is flooding in so the emotions of fear or grief or shame or whatever I'll get glommed in with the information that they should be processing and kind of filing away for later use but it

3:26 can't get filed away because it's fraught with heavy emotion so for instance there was a parent I was just listening to a couple days ago whose daughter had her adenoids out she prepared her daughter well her daughter went in bravely her daughter did fine with the doctor did fine with the operation did fine with being wheeled in for it you know saw her mommy afterwards she was so proud of her daughter and then they went back for a follow-up

3:53 visit you know two weeks later and the minute she got to the doctor's office she was screaming bloody murder this is because when emotions go in after a scary or what feels like a threatening experience they don't dissolve afterwards they get recorded in the mind along with all the information that got globbed globbed together there with feelings and the next time a child is trying to evaluate a situation and see whether it's safe or not whether

4:19 they're going to be okay what comes up is this big glob of feeling and that feeling attaches to a perfectly safe perfectly fine situation so that a child has already had the operation but didn't cry didn't wasn't scared all of that those feelings went in there at some point probably while they were out of control of their bodies under anesthesia and all of those feelings of oh my gosh I'm not in control am I going to make it

4:44 come up when they are in this nice safe situation that reminds them of the time that was really actually threatening so children have little emotional backpacks that they carry that are full of unresolved feelings from lots of different little moments and big moments when things did not go perfectly for them