Video: https://www.tiktok.com/@distilledscience/video/7514459293173746974
Transcript
Why do some people respond to interruptions like this? But for others, it's more like this. Science, please? Science, yes! There are several different levels of neuroscience involved here, and many ways it can go wrong. This is What the Science? Tingles in touch, episode 3. When your eyes and ears send signals to your brain, they first pass through a region called the thalamus, which handles something called sensory gating. It's like your conscious brain is a high-class nightclub, bouncer manning a wall, only letting in VIPs. You don't normally feel your underwear against your skin because your thalamus deems that sort of continuous steady sensation is unimportant, so those signals don't make it over the wall. When you're hyper-focusing on a task, those walls become really tall. Your focus narrows to just what you're working on, which is helpful for productivity, letting your brain focus on the task at hand. But it has some downsides. It can make you lose track of bodily sensations like hunger and thirst, or the fact that you've been sitting on your foot. It can disconnect you from time. making you late, forget other tasks, or stay up until 4 a.m., who's been there. But if there's a strong enough stimulus that manages to get over the wall and pass the bouncer, then suddenly it's this big monster in the nightclub. And everyone freaks out. It gets sent to the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex. The amygdala is your fear center responsible for that fight-or-flight response, and it can respond in just 14 milliseconds. Causing that immediate jerk-startle response before your illogical brain, your prefrontal cortex, has a chance to figure out if that stimulus was actually dangerous. which takes a full half second. Then, if your body's stress response is normally calibrated, you realize it's not actually a monster and you calm down and get back to work. But for those with ADHD, autism, central nervous system dysregulation, sometimes things can go wrong at this step and the interruption gets labeled as a threat, causing your amygdala to spike your heart rate, your blood pressure, and release a whole bunch of nasty stress hormones, making it really hard to get back to whatever you were doing. But there's a way to avoid this. The person doing the interrupting needs to avoid your threat zone, increase the stimuli until it makes it just over the wall. Approach from the front. Use slow waves and gentle name calls, escalating in volume. The subconscious will slowly pick up on it and lower those walls, avoiding the startle. And for way more details and citations, I finally started a Sabastaka. Check it out.
Additional notes
Replying to @breanncookie 🙋♂️Do you get this sort of startle reaction? 🚨Lots of goodies and citations for the free tier! & SPECIAL OFFER: For the first week, anyone signing up for an annual subscription will get 35% off for life! (Ends June 18) URL on my profile 😊 #science #psychology #oxytocin #adhd #autism #neuroscience
References
- Additional citations are referenced as available on Substack; no study titles, DOI, PMID, or source links listed in workbook.