I am currently taking MIT’s Neuroscience for Business course, in part because I am fascinated by what neuroscience can teach us about the way we interact with other people. It also happens to be particularly well timed because I am in the middle of writing a book that asks many of the same questions.

Until now, I have mostly referred to it here as my neuroscience-based customer service book, but it has a name: The Hidden Magic Between Us: A Brain-Based Framework for Improving Interactions at Work. The book grew out of years of teaching customer service and communication workshops and noticing how often the advice we give people focuses on what to say or do without helping them understand what may be influencing the interaction in the first place. Hidden Magic looks beneath those interactions at things like expectations, perception, emotion, attention, communication, and previous experiences, then considers how that knowledge might help us navigate interactions more effectively. Although customer service is an important part of the book, its focus is broader because the same processes are at work in our interactions with coworkers, supervisors, employees, customers, and the other people we encounter throughout our workdays.

The manuscript is still very much a work in progress and is not due to my editor until February, which makes taking this course at exactly this point in the writing process both incredibly useful and occasionally uncomfortable. I can learn something during class and realize that I need to go back and reconsider something I wrote months ago. That happened during the third session when the professor discussed two ideas that initially seemed separate but have become increasingly connected for me. One involved the role of empathy when communicating with someone we don’t know well. The other was the statement that the “amygdala hijack” is a myth.

That second one immediately got my attention because I have talked about amygdala hijacking in workshops, and I knew that the concept had influenced some of my thinking about Hidden Magic. After class, I went back to look more closely at what I had written and at the research behind the concept. What I found was more complicated than simply deciding that the amygdala hijack is either real or a myth. The phenomenon the metaphor is attempting to describe has a basis in what we know about the brain. When we perceive something as threatening or highly emotionally significant, our attention, physiological responses, decision-making, and ability to think flexibly can be affected. What becomes problematic is the simplified explanation that the amygdala essentially takes control of the brain while our more rational thinking temporarily goes offline.

Rethinking the Amygdala Hijack

There is a reason the amygdala hijack has become such a popular explanation. It provides an accessible way of understanding an experience most of us recognize. Someone says something that immediately makes us defensive, a customer becomes confrontational, or we receive an email that makes us angry before we have even finished reading it. There can be a physiological component to that experience as well. Our heart rate may change, our muscles may tense, and our attention may narrow toward whatever feels most important or threatening in that moment. Some of these processes happen automatically, so it can genuinely feel as though our reaction has gotten ahead of our thinking.

The problem is not that these responses are imaginary. Stress and emotional arousal can influence cognition, and the amygdala is involved in processing information related to threat and significance. The problem is that the popular explanation takes a much more complicated set of interacting brain processes and turns them into a story about an emotional part of the brain temporarily overpowering a rational one. Contemporary neuroscience does not support such a clean division. The amygdala is part of interconnected systems, and the rest of the brain does not simply shut down while it takes control.

There is also a practical danger in describing this experience as a hijacking because the word itself suggests a loss of agency. If my brain has been hijacked, it becomes easy to explain poor behavior afterward by saying that I could not help what I did. That is not what I want people to take from neuroscience, and it is not what I have been teaching in my own workshops. I have long emphasized the importance of pausing before responding when we notice that we are becoming emotionally activated. Sometimes that really does mean taking a breath before answering. The initial reaction may arrive without our permission, but we can give ourselves some time before deciding what we are going to do with it.

What the course has made me reconsider, therefore, is not the practice I have been teaching but part of the explanation I have used for why that practice matters. There is an awkward contradiction in telling someone that the amygdala has taken over the brain while also telling that person that they can pause and make a deliberate decision about how to respond. A more nuanced explanation makes considerably more sense. Emotional arousal can affect our attention and thinking and make regulating a response more difficult without eliminating our ability or responsibility to regulate our behavior.

This distinction matters in workplace interactions. If I become defensive during a conversation and respond rudely to a coworker, understanding why I became defensive may help me recognize what happened and respond differently in the future, but it does not make the way I treated my coworker acceptable. Neuroscience may help explain why managing my response was more difficult in that moment, but I am still responsible for what I did and for repairing the interaction when necessary.

Taking a breath before responding also fits comfortably within this more complicated understanding of what is happening. The breath is not somehow switching the rational brain back on after the amygdala has turned it off. It gives us a moment to notice our internal response before immediately translating it into action. Depending on the situation, that brief delay may be enough to reconsider an assumption, change what we were about to say, or recognize that continuing the conversation at that particular moment is unlikely to be productive.

When Empathy Leads Us in the Wrong Direction

The discussion of empathy during the same session raised a different question about how we understand other people’s behavior. We often treat empathy as an uncomplicated good in communication, and there are good reasons for valuing it. Trying to consider another person’s perspective can encourage us to approach an interaction with greater compassion. The complication is that empathy does not actually give us access to another person’s internal experience, particularly when we do not know that person well.

Relationships provide context that we do not have when interacting with strangers or casual acquaintances. When I know someone well, I have previous experiences that help me interpret changes in that person’s behavior. If a coworker who is normally talkative suddenly becomes very quiet, I may recognize that the behavior is unusual. Even then, I cannot know with certainty why the person is quiet, but I have more information available to me than I would have if I were observing the same behavior in someone I had just met.

Without that context, empathy can sometimes encourage us to fill in missing information with our own assumptions. The familiar advice to put ourselves in someone else’s shoes sounds as though we are temporarily experiencing the world from that person’s perspective, but we remain ourselves while imagining what their experience might be. We bring our histories, expectations, cultural experiences, biases, and previous relationships into the interpretation. What I imagine I would feel in a particular situation may not resemble what another person is actually experiencing.

This becomes especially relevant in customer service, where we frequently interact with people we do not know. Imagine someone approaching a service desk with crossed arms, limited eye contact, and very short answers. An employee might interpret that behavior as anger, anxiety, embarrassment, impatience, or rudeness depending on the assumptions they bring to the interaction. The person might also be distracted by something completely unrelated to what is happening at the desk. Without additional information, we cannot know which explanation is accurate, even if our interpretation feels empathetic.

This does not make empathy unhelpful. It means empathy works better when it remains connected to curiosity and when we remember that our interpretation is provisional. Imagining possible explanations for someone’s behavior can help us avoid immediately settling on the least generous one, but we still need to recognize that those explanations originated with us. When possible, asking a question or giving the other person room to explain what they need is more reliable than assuming that we have correctly identified what they are thinking or feeling.

What These Ideas Have in Common

The connection between these two topics became clearer to me after I had some time to think about the session. Both involve explanations we construct for human behavior, although one is directed toward ourselves and the other toward someone else. Neuroscience can help us understand some of the processes influencing our own reactions, while empathy can help us consider what another person may be experiencing. Problems emerge when we expect either one to tell us more than it actually can.

In the case of the amygdala hijack, an explanation for why regulating ourselves may become more difficult can turn into a claim that we had no control over our behavior. With empathy, an attempt to understand someone else’s perspective can turn into confidence that we know what that person is thinking or feeling. Neither conclusion is warranted. Our behavior can be influenced by processes that begin outside conscious awareness while still leaving us responsible for how we respond, and we can approach another person with empathy while acknowledging that our understanding of their experience may be incomplete.

This is one of the reasons I continue to find neuroscience useful for thinking about communication, even when learning more about it means giving up some of the simpler explanations I have encountered along the way. I am not interested in attaching a brain region to every workplace behavior or suggesting that understanding what the brain is doing gives us an answer for every difficult interaction. I am interested in whether understanding some of these processes can make us more aware of what may be influencing an interaction and help us make more thoughtful decisions about how we participate in it.

That is also why I am glad Hidden Magic is still a work in progress. I would much rather encounter a challenge to something I have written now, while I still have the opportunity to examine it, than hold onto an explanation simply because it is familiar and easy to teach. The amygdala hijack metaphor helped give people language for an experience they recognized, and that experience has not disappeared because our understanding of the underlying neuroscience has become more complicated. What changes is how carefully I need to explain it.

In some ways, the more nuanced explanation fits the argument I was already making better than the old metaphor did. I have been teaching people to pause before reacting because the first response that appears does not have to become the response we act on. Understanding that our brains can make some responses feel more immediate or make regulation more difficult adds useful context without taking away our responsibility for what happens next. Similarly, understanding the limits of empathy does not mean abandoning empathy. It means recognizing that trying to understand another person should make us more curious about their experience rather than more certain that we already understand it.

As I continue working through the course and revising Hidden Magic, I suspect this will not be the last familiar idea I reconsider, and I am comfortable with that. The purpose of using neuroscience in this work is not to make human behavior seem simpler than it is. Its value is in helping us better understand some of the influences operating beneath our everyday interactions while remembering that understanding an influence is not the same thing as surrendering our agency to it.