The following comes courtesy of Neil Slade’s newsletter. You can subscribe via his site, neilslade.com.
Tickle your amygdala and see what happens – image from Wired article cited here
It must be pretty frustrating to be way ahead of your time. TDA Lingo died many years ago, but Neil Slade, his friend and former student, has been bucking the tide of conventional scientific wisdom prejudice about the function of the amygdala for decades since. If I hadn’t stumbled across his website a decade ago and had the simple technique he calls “amygdala tickling” not worked so spectacularly well for me in spite of my doubts, I’d probably still be amongst the skeptics, too. At least I was open-minded enough to try and the rewards have been enormous.
After I discovered firsthand that we’re not pawns in the neurological game of chess and can actually take control of our thoughts and emotions with a simple flip of a switch from reptilian thinking to advanced frontal lobe thinking, I turned to science to see if there was any evidence that the amygdala was anything but the fear center of the brain. To my surprise, there was plenty of evidence, but the majority of scientists were still digging in their heals and saying the amygdala had one function and one function only: to instill fear and the “fight or flight” response. I’m sure that’s still the case and will continue to be so for awhile, but a new study should help put a few more cracks in the wall of scientific dogma.
Study: people without brain’s ‘fear centre’ can still be scared was published in Wired, oddly enough, but the study made its debut in natureneuroscience, a respected scientific journal, so the results may pique the interest of some in the scientific community who might possibly learn something from it if the authoritative inner voice of their all-wise all-knowing former university professors don’t intrude. In a nutshell, the study was done with a group of patients who suffered from a rare disease that damages the amygdala. The assumption was that these people would be fearless, but when exposed to carbon dioxide gas, they not only got scared, they had panic attacks, unlike the control group. This led the researchers to speculate that:
“the fact that the amygdala lesion patients seemed prone to panic (responding at a rate similar to patients with panic disorder), suggests that an intact amygdala might actually inhibit panic. This raises the question of whether some sort of amygdala dysfunction may contribute to panic disorder.”*
Now I’m sure nobody in the scientific community is going to apologize for snubbing TDA Lingo, Neil Slade and those on the fringes of the scientific community who have been saying the same thing for decades, but at least this is an indication of progress.
On a similar note, while you’re here, have a look at my recent article, Explore Your Brain with Brainwave Entrainment. Admittedly, it’s a plug for you to try some products (for free) and I’ll appreciate the commission should you decide to buy, but there’s another reason why I plug Transparent Corp, too. Brainwave entrainment works in ways the hucksters don’t know about and the scientific community refuses to admit.
*Quote taken from Wired article cited above.
I’ve been carrying Neil Slade’s new book, 
Tickle Your Amygdala is Neil’s latest effort to show the world how easy it is to tap into the better parts of your consciousness. He does this in a number of ways, including interviews with a variety of people who, in his opinion, demonstrate advanced frontal lobes brain activity in their daily lives. Not only do these individuals not all practice “amygdala tickling” as Neil explains it on his website, some of them don’t practice it at all, but the results of the practice resonate with them.
One of our greatest human conceits amongst countless others is the contention that “only humans are capable of feeling empathy or compassion.” Anybody who has a pet dog knows that is nonsense, but now even science is coming to the party. Recent studies have proven pretty decisively that mice may be better “Christians” than we are. In one study, an uncaged rat went out of its way to free a caged rat and had to spend a considerable amount of time and effort to figure out a way to open its cage. Not only that, but it chose to engage in this act of compassion despite the enticement of freely available chocolate, which apparently rats love. To make matters even more interesting, it released its captive before it ate the chocolate and freely shared it with the other rat after releasing it. (Sources: 
Some animals kill other animals, just like we do, but they don’t tend to torture them or slaughter them unnecessarily. They’re hungry, they kill and they eat. Foxes didn’t invent bizarre torture chambers like these cages for battery hens, for instance. Humans came up with that idea.
, Julian Jaynes speculates fairly convincingly that until about 3000 years ago, individual consciousness in humans didn’t exist. Until then, our right brains ruled and we did things unconsciously. Just as our hearts beat and our blood circulates without our conscious intervention, we ate, slept, built stuff and even created elaborate myths and legends without even thinking about it. He cites early versions of texts like the Iliad that are written very differently than more recent versions or more recent additions to prove his point.
Does it sound implausible that the pyramids could have been built without extensive planning and design work or that an epic poem or song could arise spontaneously? All you have to do is watch a spider build a web or listen to a bird sing a song and you’ll see that it’s entirely possible. Is it possible for a bunch of people to work together in harmony without rules and regulations imposed from above? Think about the incredible achievements of an colony of ants or bees and you’ll see they are far more efficient workers than we are. Speaking of bees, did you know that they are suffering from “bee colony collapse disorder” thanks to our wonderful pesticides and other chemical goodies? That’s the most plausible theory, anyway.
