It’s about the shape and size of an almond, nearly as old as the dinosaurs, to whose reptilian brains it bears a considerable resemblance. When you’re walking home late at night, it’s shouting out to you, bogging you down with panic as you navigate your way in the dark, ready to jump at every corner at whatever or whoever might be hiding there. It’s there again when you’ve had it with your significant other and the wet towels they’ve left carelessly on the floor, or when you need that company report but your computer crashes the night before. Unfortunately, your twin amygdalae, found deep inside your brain’s temporal lobe, are here to stay, and you’ll need to find a way to manage each time you find yourself ready to have a meltdown — however big or small it may be. The good news is that the amygdalae make up more than just your “reptilian brain” — in fact, that phrase hardly even needs to be taken as an insult.

So while there is the basic learning acquired through doing — taking notes, reading books, practicing a foreign language, it seems that we may have another option — controlling emotion-based learning by controlling the amygdala. What would happen if we could actually use the amygdala to learn calculus or recognize musical notes? Could it be a possibility that really isn’t that far away? A study conducted by neurobiologist James McGaugh has already explored the possibility, and the results seem to suggest that we may indeed not be too far off from tapping a whole new region of the brain for learning in the near future. Using a cortisol injection, a hormone that the brain gives off in response to stress, McGaugh activated the amygdalae of several mice shortly after they ran a maze. Two days later, those given the injections retained more knowledge of the task — a phenomenon that has also been consistent with human subjects.

For much of the last 300 or 400 years, particularly after the introduction of the scientific method into everyday life, humans have placed a significant emphasis on rational thought — valuing what we learn systematically and through reasoning, rather than trusting anything that may enter our heads intuitively without evidence. Contemporary findings, however, seem to be suggesting that our intuition may not necessarily always be wrong. Our hominid ancestors who didn’t have methodical approaches had to rely on this sort of thinking for centuries, but maybe we’ll be the ones to realize the powers our own intuition may hold.

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