The amygdala hijack.

Nazareth Castellanos is a researcher, neuroscientist, graduate in theoretical physics, and doctor of medicine. She researches brain neuroplasticity, Alzheimer’s, and brain damage, among other topics. I had the great fortune of discovering her through Antonia Jover, one of the leading aromatherapy experts in our country.

Nazareth’s husband distills aromatic plants in Mallorca, where they reside.

Her husband’s hobby led her to become interested in what happens in the brain when we smell olfactory stimuli; she experienced herself the explosion of sensations when her husband gave her plants or the resulting product of distillation to smell, the essential oils, and this encouraged her to investigate further to find out what was happening in our brain.

“The day you pay attention to your sense of smell is as if you had been blind and suddenly opened your eyes, you discover a new dimension”

Nazareth shows us the path to understand, from a scientific basis, why it’s so important to discover our sense of SMELL.

She says that while her husband distills plants, she distills scientific studies for our better understanding.

The amygdala

It is a brain structure related to emotions:

• It is responsible for “I like this, I don’t like this”
• It provides me with different emotional states.
• It adds emotional content to a memory.
• It activates when we feel fear, anger, rage, stress, or anxiety.

That’s why in neuroscience, strategies are sought to inhibit the amygdala, as this tends to calm and relax.

The olfactory bulb

It is the brain structure that receives olfactory stimuli and is the gateway used by the sense of SMELL to reach the brain. The rest of the senses first pass through another structure called the thalamus, but SMELL is the only sense that has a “direct route” to the brain. And it reaches our most emotional part, the limbic system.

ATTENTION: The olfactory bulb is capable of inhibiting the amygdala.

That’s why certain smells can calm us, because they inhibit the amygdala and control our capacity to explode, to become nervous.

Learning to smell is a way of training emotional processing.

Amygdala hijack

The amygdala can hijack different parts of the brain, meaning it takes control of many parts of it. The time during which we are hijacked by the amygdala is called the refractory period, and during this time, we can only retrieve information that is in the amygdala.

When we are very angry, there is a great excitation of the amygdala, and it has the enormous capacity to make us see only what it wants us to see, in this case, anger, and we will only find reasons to confirm why we are angry. That’s why neuroscience is very interested in anything that inhibits the amygdala.

The amygdala hijack was discovered by Joseph LeDoux, a professor at Columbia University in New York.

Once a journalist went to interview him in 1984 and was very impressed by the discovery, because this gives us a lot of information about how emotions are managed and how sometimes we find ourselves subjected to an emotion without realizing it.

The journalist wrote an article in a major magazine, that article became very famous, and the journalist wrote a book. This journalist was Daniel Goleman and the book he wrote is “Emotional Intelligence” which became a worldwide bestseller.

Joseph LeDoux has a music group called “The Amygdaloids” and he often jokingly says at conferences that he discovered the amygdala hijack, but Goleman wrote the book, and he’s the millionaire.

According to Dr. Castellanos’ own words, it seems that “we have to smell life”.

So go out there and SMELL THE WORLD!

#MuchoMasQueAromas