As I understand the matter, the amygdala is in the frontal cortex on both lobes.
Now, I tend to be Johnny One Note. I get an idea in my head–here, the amygdala as the center of much emotional dysregulation–and probably exaggerate it. This is because I am not an expert. I can’t describe all the elements of the limbic system in detail.
Still, I recall Sebern Fisher noting that her FPO2 protocol often led to an improved sense of smell. That’s what I think I recall, in any event.
This leads logically to an interesting proposition: psychopathy exists on a continuum. We might measure that continuum by progressive decreases in the ability to distinguish scents. Logically, too, psychopaths are traumatized themselves, which seems obvious. They develop more or less alternate personalities: the glib, social self, and the amygdalic/lizard brain self.
I am tempted to say–and I nearly said this the other day before getting distracted by something or other–that we create in the outside world what we feel inside. We create beauty when, and only when, we feel beauty. And we may have a complex whirl of things flying around in us, and create beauty so as to feel it has a home permanently outside of our own unpredictability. You may move on to despair, but you always have that.
Psychopaths create pain and death.
As I’ve said many times, fight/flight/shame exists on one neurophysiological level, and freeze on another. Freezing–dissociation, clinically–is thingness. You are no longer in your body. You are an onlooker. It would seem obvious that serial killers–the heros of our age–seek in the end to create thingness–dead bodies–in others, because they feel it themselves. Ted Bundy once famously said something close to: “I want to make my victims the equivalent of potted plants.”
And as I’ve said, saying dissociation doesn’t have a feeling tone to it is a mistake. It does. It feels like being trapped on the other side of a glass window, if you stop and really focus on it. It is intensely unpleasant, again if you allow yourself to focus on it, which most people do not. The way most people deal with this is through an external focus and activity. Sadism, for example, is an obvious out.
I am an odd, exceptional (if I do say so myself) person in this regard. I can go deeply painful places and not die, and not break down, and–I hope, although I remain vigilant–become infected by the diseases there. I don’t know why. I assume I was born this way. I was a very robust baby.
In any event, I am a user of essential oils. Logically, increasing my sense of smell might help reregulate my dysregulation (a felicitous phrase like conjunction junction). I have perhaps described my method of tracking the phases of the moon by having fourteen essential oils on a shelf in my bathroom. I mix one with lotion every day and rub it on my body. I go up the list as the moon waxes, and back down as it wanes. One of course I use twice on each end.
I recently decided though to do a full 28. I ordered some Myrtle, Swiss Stone Pine, and Cypress recently, and am going to get more when time permits me to focus a minute. These things make me happy. One odd surprise is that Geranium seems to make me happy directly. There’s something energizing in it, for me at least.
This is a salutary practice which I would recommend to anyone with the funds for it. Many of these oils you can get in 10ml bottles for under $10. I just mix them with unscented body lotion, which is also cheap.
And I always know where the moon is, and what direction it’s going.