Why call it the emotional brain? Because neuroscientists have shown that emotions are not just a matter of the heart they are also a result of brain biochemistry, thus they named the limbic system the emotional brain. The emotional brain/limbic system stores every emotional experience we have from the first moments of life, long before we acquire the verbal or higher thinking abilities to put them into words. It is like this big warehouse of feelings and impressions that provides a context or meaning for those memories. Traditionally, neuroscientists defended that messages were transmitted to the brain by neurons, traveling through an electrical transmission system. However, in the 70s scientists discovered that our bodies also contain a chemical system for transmitting messages. This system is based on chemicals called peptides, which have receptors in every cell of our bodies. These highly sensitive information substances are thought to be the chemical substrates of emotions, triggering impression memories throughout our lives. Our brains are linked to all our body systems, and it is these peptides that are responsible for the emotions we feel in various parts of our bodies. Though the most curious thing is that this chemical transmission system is in evolutionary history, far older than the electrical brain. When external stimuli are received through one of our five senses, the signal is then sent to the thalamus and translated into the brain's language of chemical signals. The majority of the signal is then sent to the area of the brain that is responsible for the rational thoughts--the neocortex:
Though, if the correct response involves an emotion, the signal is sent on to the amygdala, the brain's emotional center. At the same time that most of the signal is sent to the rational area of the brain for processing, a portion of it is sent straight to the amygdala, before the brain has had the chance to cognitively process the signal. In other words, a strong enough signal from our senses will trigger an immediate emotional response before we have been able to rationalize how we should respond--what Daniel Goleman called an amygdala hijack:
The relationship between the rational and emotional parts of the brain, develops from infancy, as children learn through the emotional relationships they have with their caregivers at the same time that the rational part of the brain is developing. Hence, we can say that emotional incompetence often results from habits deeply learned early in life. These automatic habits are set in place as a normal part of living, as experience shapes the brain. As people acquire their habitual repertoire of thoughts, feelings, and actions, the neural connections that support these are strengthened, becoming dominant pathways for nerve impulses. Connections that are unused become weakened while those that people use over and over grow increasingly strong. When these habits have been so heavily learned, the underlying neural circuitry becomes the brain's default option--what a person does automatically and spontaneously, often with little awareness of choosing to do so. Thus, for the shy person, diffidence is a habit that must be overcome and replaced with a new habit, self-confidence.
Emotional capacities, such as empathy or flexibility, differ from cognitive abilities because they draw on different brain areas. Purely cognitive abilities are based in the neocortex. Yet, with social and emotional competencies, additional brain areas are involved, mainly, the circuitry that runs from the emotional centers--particularly the amygdala--deep in the center of the brain, up to the prefrontal lobes--the brain's executive center. Effective learning for emotional competence has to retune these circuits.
Cognitive learning involves fitting new data and insights into existing frameworks of association and understanding, extending and enriching the corresponding neural circuitry. Although, emotional learning involves that, and more - it requires that we also engage the neural circuitry where our social and emotional habits' repertoire is stored.
Changing habits such as learning to approach people positively, instead of avoiding them, to practice active listening, or to give feedback skillfull, is a more challenging task than simply adding new information to old. What this means for social and emotional learning is that one must first unlearn old habits and then develop new ones. For the learner, this usually means a long and sometimes difficult process involving much daily practice.
The moment you begin to feel the way you think - you begin to think the way you feel. This is because the brain is in constant communication with your body, which makes more chemicals for you to feel the way you think, and then you think the way you feel and so on:
