Word: amygdala
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When Banaji, along with cognitive neuroscientist Liz Phelps of New York University, conducted brain scans of subjects using functional magnetic resonance imaging, they uncovered the reasons for the results. White subjects respond with greater activation of the amygdala--a region that processes alarm--when shown images of black faces than when shown images of white faces. "One of the amygdala's critical functions is fear-conditioning," says Phelps. "You attend to things that are scary because that's essential for survival." Later studies have shown similar results when black subjects look at white faces...
...brain, of course, is not all amygdala, and there are higher regions that can talk sense to the lower ones. Phelps cites studies showing that when blacks and whites are flashed pictures of faces from the other race so quickly that the subjects weren't consciously aware of seeing them, their amygdalae reacted predictably. When the images were flashed more slowly so that subjects could process them consciously, the anterior cingulate cortex and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex--regions that temper automatic responses--kicked...
...McLean Hospital in Belmont, Mass., Harvard neuropsychologist Deborah Yurgelun-Todd did an elegant series of FMRI experiments in which both kids and adults were asked to identity the emotions displayed in photographs of faces. "In doing these tasks," she says, "kids and young adolescents rely heavily on the amygdala, a structure in the temporal lobes associated with emotional and gut reactions. Adults rely less on the amygdala and more on the frontal lobe, a region associated with planning and judgment." While adults make few errors in assessing the photos, kids under 14 tend to make mistakes. In particular, they identify...
...they're fiercely monogamous lovers and caring parents.) But more recently, scientists have begun to determine how oxytocin functions in the human brain - or, more specifically, how it malfunctions. Studies have shown that people with autism tend to have low levels of oxytocin, as well as hyperactivity in the amygdala, where most oxytocin receptors are located. The amygdala is also where memories are formed, and where our brains process and assign emotional meaning to sensory information - that is, where we turn perception (seeing someone smile) into "neuroception" (understanding the feeling of happiness that the smile reflects), says Stephen Porges...
There's evidence on both sides. The systems that are involved in adding emotional content include a brain structure called the amygdala, which gets activated when we experience strong emotions, particularly negative emotions, and it does influence memory systems - in particular, a structure known as the hippocampus. So there's opportunity there to influence how strongly memories get laid down. But the hippocampus is involved in both the storage as well as the retrieval of memory. Things that are emotionally charged may simply be memories that are more likely to be accessed or used...