My bucket list is virtually impossible and possibly somewhat delusional, but I believe you should either go big or go home. As long as I can remember, I wanted to do something significant to make the world better. After I left teaching and explored a few career cul-de-sacs, I did end up in healthcare administration and started a deeper search for my big impact opportunity. Then came research, and I realized there truly was potential to change the world. It was a few years after I left healthcare administration when I realized where those world changes could be found.
I started working with some brain scientists; neuroscientists and psychiatrists and they taught me about the amygdala. I’ve come to realize that the amygdala is the source of many of our world’s challenges. I’m not sure how I missed this fact, but today I also discovered we have two amygdala sections of the brain, one on either side. That’s like finding out that the bill you got for college is only half of the bill. Now, we’ll have twice as much to deal with on our quest to change the world through amygdalae.
Now, here’s where things get a little more complex but encouraging, the function of the frontal lobe’s prefrontal cortex helps control the amygdala. According to an article titled, “The Brain Made Simple,” You use your prefrontal cortex to think and make decisions. This part of the frontal lobe is also where our personality is formed and where we can carry out higher mental processes. In addition, the frontal lobe is necessary to be able to speak.” Controlling the amygdala via the prefrontal cortex could be the good news except for one very important thing. This part of our brain isn’t completely developed until our early and sometimes even mid-20s. This explains why most teenagers and young adults can be noncompliant regarding the rules of society. It’s this part of our brain that provides some reasoning skills to calm down the amygdala, but it doesn’t do it soon enough.
If you’re still with me, there are still more layers of influencers that contribute to how we act, and they can go back literally millions of years. There are genetic changes that have occurred over generations. Was your mom under stress while you were in the womb? Did your ancestors come from a society where war was always part of their lives? Do you have other specific genetic mutations, or have you been subjected to abuse? Do you have higher levels of testosterone? All these variables can contribute to how you act and react.
Back to my opening sentence. One of my bucket list items, like Miss Universe, is world peace, but now it’s clear that the only way to achieve that efficiently is to find the means to hijack the destructiveness and idiocy that sometimes emerges from the functioning of the amygdalae due to the lack of involvement from the prefrontal cortex.
That’s when I saw that Silicon Valley has employed some of the world’s greatest minds to make programs like Facebook, Instagram, Snap Chat, and LinkedIn addictive. This is great news. Everyone will be so hooked on their phones and computers all war will stop while we wait to see how many LIKES we get from that last cat picture we posted. I’m now on my way to bucket list item number two, Intergalactic travel.
