Human Behavior - The Amygdala Hijack

If we’re going to begin our exploration of human behaviour with the most primal parts of ourselves, there’s no better place to start than the amygdala — a small, almond-shaped cluster buried deep within the brain. It is ancient, powerful, and the source of some of our most potent emotional drives. Stimulate the amygdala in a rat, a monkey, or a human, and you trigger unprovoked aggression. Destroy it, and aggression vanishes entirely. The amygdala, in its rawest form, is about survival — aggression when threatened, and fear when vulnerable. It’s the part of us that decides, often before we do, whether to fight, flee, or freeze.

But if you ask a neuroscientist what the amygdala really does, aggression won’t be their first answer. Fear will. The amygdala is about fear — and even more importantly, about learning fear. It is where the brain encodes the memory of danger, linking sights, sounds, and sensations to threat. It’s what ensures that if you once touched a hot stove, you never forget that pain. It’s what makes us jump when we see a snake-shaped stick on a hiking trail, even before we consciously realise it’s harmless.

And that’s the magic — and the peril — of the amygdala.

Picking up from my previous blogs about ‘Why we do, what we do?’ and 'Free Will', lets look into the science behind behavior modulation. The underlying mechanisms that are working in the background that are involved in transforming a thought into an action.

When you see something frightening, say a rattlesnake, your eyes send information to a relay station called the thalamus. From there, the signal takes two routes. The slow road travels up to the visual cortex, where the brain carefully analyses shape, colour, and context, and finally concludes: snake. Only then does it notify the amygdala. But there’s also a shortcut — a direct line from the thalamus straight to the amygdala. This one bypasses conscious processing entirely. The amygdala knows what you’re looking at before you do — within a few hundred milliseconds.

That’s brilliant when you’re facing real danger. You jump back before the snake strikes. But the cost of this speed is accuracy. The amygdala is fast, but it’s also sloppy. It’s built to err on the side of survival. So sometimes, that flash of fear makes us see danger where there is none. It’s how a shadow becomes a burglar. Or in tragic cases, how a cell phone looks like a gun. It preferentially responds to fear-evoking stimuli, even stimuli so fleeting as to be below conscious detection.

The decision before a voluntary action is an emotive decision, which is generated in the emotional system, that is driven by our amygdala that governs our emotions. It can be recognized as an impulse and then leads to a conscious decision in a creation process, which results in our coherent world view.

This system might be less accurate but super important nevertheless, when we need to behave and rely upon our instincts. If we are being chased by a tiger, some lunatic wielding a machete or someone coming right at us on a freeway, we don’t wanna ponder and use rationality to decide what we should do. Our Amygdala kicks in and either we fight, run, ram the breaks or swerve. Unfortunately, this has pretty much become our default state and hence we react more than we respond. The downside to this lack of accuracy is, the amygdala can mistakenly decide it’s seeing a gun before the visual cortex can report that it’s actually a cell phone or get triggered by what someone said or did, before we can take a step back to comprehend the situation and responding appropriately.

It has been found the amygdala in animals can respond to a perception

in as little as twelve thousands of a second.

If we are to understand human behaviour — from our irrational fears to our flashes of rage — we must understand the amygdala. Because at its core lies the oldest story of all: the story of survival in a world that no longer matches the threats our brains evolved to face.

The Modern Amygdala — Fear in the Age of Anxiety

The amygdala’s core function hasn’t changed in tens of thousands of years. Its job is still to detect threats and prepare the body for action. What has changed is the world around it. The amygdala evolved in an environment of immediate physical dangers — predators, hunger, rival tribes. Its “decisions” were simple: fight, flee, or freeze. Survival depended on speed, not nuance.

But the modern world doesn’t operate on those terms. The lion has been replaced by the inbox. The predator by a performance review. The rival tribe by political polarisation. Our amygdala still fires the same alarm system — releasing stress hormones, quickening the heartbeat, sharpening attention — but the threats it reacts to are often abstract, symbolic, or chronic. And that’s where the trouble begins.

In the wild, the stress response was short-lived. Either you escaped the predator, or you didn’t. Today, we can spend months — even years — with our amygdala on alert, simmering in low-grade fear. A looming deadline, financial uncertainty, a constant stream of alarming news — all these keep the amygdala humming. Over time, that state reshapes the brain itself. Chronic stress enlarges the amygdala, making it more reactive. Meanwhile, the prefrontal cortex — the rational, reflective part of the brain that can calm the amygdala — weakens under prolonged stress. The result is a vicious loop: the more anxious we become, the more our brain learns to be anxious.

This circuitry doesn’t just shape individual behaviour. It spills into society. The amygdala isn’t only about personal fear; it’s also about group fear — who we see as “us” and “them.” Functional MRI studies show that when people view faces from an out-group, the amygdala activates automatically, even before conscious bias arises. It’s a snap judgment rooted in survival — ancient circuitry mistaking difference for danger. Tribalism, prejudice, and moral outrage are modern expressions of that same primal wiring.

Add social media to the mix, and we’ve built an environment designed to trigger the amygdala around the clock. Outrage spreads faster than reflection. Fear-based headlines outperform nuance. Every scroll offers a new “threat” — political, environmental, existential — and our brains, built for immediate survival, treat each one as urgent. We are overstimulated by signals our nervous systems were never meant to process continuously.

The irony is that our greatest intelligence now amplifies our oldest instincts. The prefrontal cortex, capable of reason and empathy, often ends up serving the amygdala instead of restraining it — justifying fear after the fact rather than questioning it. As the psychologist Daniel Goleman once said, “The amygdala hijack” occurs when emotion overtakes reason, and we act from fear before thought can intervene.

Yet awareness is the first step toward balance. Understanding the amygdala doesn’t mean vilifying it. Fear is not our enemy; it’s our early warning system. The challenge is to build a modern life where that system doesn’t run our minds on autopilot. To live in the modern world is to learn how to let the amygdala signal — but not steer.

The Hijacked Mind — How Society Triggers the Amygdala

If the amygdala evolved to keep us alive, then modern society has learned how to keep it perpetually alert. What was once a finely tuned alarm for genuine danger has become a button that the modern world presses — relentlessly.

In a world built on attention, the easiest way to capture a mind is to trigger fear. The amygdala doesn’t distinguish between a predator’s growl and a breaking news headline; between tribal warfare and social media outrage. It’s tuned to detect threat — and it reacts instantly, long before the rational brain has a chance to weigh in. Every time a headline provokes outrage, every notification sparks anxiety, or every algorithm amplifies division, our amygdala fires as if our very survival depended on it.

Fear spreads faster than facts. Outrage outperforms nuance. In digital spaces, emotional reactivity has become a commodity. Media, politics, and marketing industries have, often unconsciously, mastered the art of amygdala activation. The more we are alarmed, divided, and distracted, the more predictable and profitable our behaviour becomes. The “attention economy” is, in many ways, an amygdala economy.

And yet, none of this manipulation could work without our biology’s cooperation. We are wired to prioritise potential threats because, for most of human history, failing to do so could mean death. The problem is that the threats we now face are rarely immediate — they are psychological, abstract, and ongoing. The amygdala, however, doesn’t know the difference. It responds to an angry tweet much like it would to a rustling bush in the dark — ready to fight or flee. The consequence is a constant state of vigilance, a background hum of anxiety that depletes our focus, empathy, and clarity.

When fear dominates, the prefrontal cortex — the seat of reason and reflection — goes offline. This is what psychologists call an amygdala hijack: emotion overrides logic. It’s the neurological equivalent of losing the steering wheel while still pressing the accelerator. And when entire populations live in this state, the result is collective reactivity — polarisation, hostility, and moral certainty without reflection.

Calming the Amygdala — From Reactivity to Reflection

If we are strictly governed by our amygdala then where does our ability of impulse control stand? We often form the intent to act in certain ways. But, we don’t always follow through with the action. If we look at some of the morally reprehensible acts, not everyone who has thoughts of raping or killing follow through with it. Which means they all are using some sort of self control and this only happens if done consciously. Just imagine what kind of a world it will be where intentions do not matter and will not have any significance or moral relevance. Intention behind an action should matter right.

So, the real question is how do we influence and construct our intent!!!

Similarly, we often want things but, we don’t always pursue what we want. For instance, we might tell ourselves that we will get up early and go for a run or do yoga, however when the time does come for us to wake up, our brain conjures up all kinds of excuses and reasons for not getting up, like our bed feels so cosy or its raining/snowing outside, better to start on Monday etc etc. So the intent and want might very well be there but it does not translate into an action.

If the amygdala is the spark of instinct, then the frontal cortex is the hand that learns to hold the flame without getting burned. This is the part of the brain that makes us uniquely human — the seat of reasoning, empathy, imagination, and willpower. It’s what allows us to pause, reflect, and choose the harder path when the harder path is the right one.

Our frontal cortex is what reins in the raw impulses of the amygdala. When it functions well, it can say, “Wait — let’s think this through,” before we lash out, panic, or act on fear. It’s the neurological basis of restraint, patience, and moral judgement — qualities that separate us from our more impulsive animal cousins. Without this regulatory balance, we would be driven entirely by instinct — reactive, territorial, and fearful.

This is also why society places boundaries on certain behaviours until a person’s brain has fully matured. The prefrontal cortex — the last part of the brain to develop — doesn’t reach full maturity until around age 25. Before then, the connections between emotion and reason are still wiring themselves together. That’s why teenagers, though capable of extraordinary creativity, can also act with breathtaking impulsivity. Their amygdala is firing on all cylinders, while their prefrontal cortex is still learning to apply the brakes. The legal limits around driving, voting, or drinking aren’t arbitrary; they reflect the slow, deliberate timeline of human neurodevelopment.

The very fact that our prefrontal cortex takes almost 25 years to develop shows that

it is the least effected by genetics and most of it is environmental or epigenetic.

In evolutionary terms, this relationship between the “reptilian,” “limbic,” and “rational” brains tells a larger story. The brainstem — the so-called reptilian brain — governs instinctual survival functions like aggression, dominance, and reproduction. Wrapped around it lies the limbic system, home of emotion and motivation, with the amygdala at its core. Above all this sits the prefrontal cortex — the rational, reflective layer that can observe the other two and, at its best, guide them.

The challenge is that evolution didn’t erase our older circuitry; it merely built new layers on top. The limbic system and reptilian brain still dominate the speed and strength of our responses. They are ancient, deeply wired, and often louder than the quiet voice of reason. The prefrontal cortex, by contrast, is slower, more deliberate — but infinitely wiser when given the chance. The task of being human, then, is learning how to bridge these systems — to let instinct and emotion inform us without letting them control us.

And this is where the notion of free will begins to emerge. If we can exercise even a degree of impulse control and consciously regulate our actions, then there is clearly room for choice — for responding rather than reacting. This capacity lives in the prefrontal cortex, where decisions are made. Interestingly, the very word “decision” comes from the Latin caedere, meaning “to cut.” To decide, then, is not merely to select, but to cut away what is unnecessary or unhelpful. It’s an act of mental clarity — of pruning distractions so that purpose can flourish.

As long as multiple options remain open, temptation lingers. The option to sleep in competes with the choice to wake up and exercise; the path of least resistance always beckons. But once we decide — once we cut off competing alternatives — the mind is liberated. Decision is not deprivation; it’s direction. It frees us from the paralysis of endless choice so we can move forward with intention. That act of choosing — of consciously cutting — is one of the highest functions of the human brain.

Fortunately, modern neuroscience shows that we can strengthen this bridge. Mindfulness, meditation, prayer, and breathwork all enhance communication between the prefrontal cortex and the amygdala. Over time, these practices reduce amygdala reactivity, literally reshaping neural pathways. Regular physical exercise increases the brain’s capacity for emotional regulation. Acts of empathy and gratitude calm the limbic system, fostering resilience. Even a few deep breaths in a moment of stress can shift activity from the amygdala toward the frontal cortex — from reaction to reflection.

In spiritual terms, this is what traditions have long described as self-mastery, mindfulness, or grace: the ability to stay awake to one’s own impulses, to see fear without becoming it. The prefrontal cortex gives us that divine pause — a moment of freedom between stimulus and response. In that space lies the essence of what it means to be human.

When we consider all of these factors, it does make a case for some free will — or rather, freedom in choice. We may be presented with a set of options that are largely predetermined, and much of the time our decisions reflect our conditioning. Yet if we can bring conscious thought into that decision-making process, we can, at least to some extent, override these automatic triggers and forces. Anything driven by autopilot has zero free will. But anything that happens in awareness carries some degree of choice — and the strength of that choice depends on our willpower, intention, and clarity of mind.

So yes, we do have some freedom. The real question is whether we have the will to go with it.

In the end, the true measure of our evolution isn’t technological or economic — it’s psychological. The question is not whether we can build smarter machines, but whether we can outgrow our ancient reflexes. To live consciously in the modern age is to see the amygdala for what it is: a guardian, not a guide. It warns us, but it should not lead us.

To rise above fear is not to silence it, but to integrate it — to hear the amygdala’s ancient whisper without mistaking it for truth. Only then can we move from instinct to insight, from division to understanding, from reaction to response.

Before a neuron can fire, before thought even arises, certain conditions must be met. We don’t control these conditions — they unfold as part of ongoing biological processes, shaped by both internal and external stimuli. Every thought, every feeling, every impulse we experience emerges from this intricate chain of events, none of which we consciously direct.

Yet here lies the mystery: what if we could influence the conditions preceding that neuronal firing? What if awareness itself could alter the landscape of what comes next? Is that even possible? If it is, what would that entail?