I got your amygdala right here!

Sadly, for the next couple of days I'll be traveling and forced to work at my day job a little bit, so posting will be light and infrequent. Stay tuned to this Bat Channel.

In the meantime, watch as Daniel Goleman attempts to explain the reason behind the vulgar incivility of our electronic existence, otherwise known as the internets.

The emerging field of social neuroscience, the study of what goes on in the brains and bodies of two interacting people, offers clues into the neural mechanics behind flaming.

This work points to a design flaw inherent in the interface between the brain’s social circuitry and the online world. In face-to-face interaction, the brain reads a continual cascade of emotional signs and social cues, instantaneously using them to guide our next move so that the encounter goes well. Much of this social guidance occurs in circuitry centered on the orbitofrontal cortex, a center for empathy. This cortex uses that social scan to help make sure that what we do next will keep the interaction on track.

Research by Jennifer Beer, a psychologist at the University of California, Davis, finds that this face-to-face guidance system inhibits impulses for actions that would upset the other person or otherwise throw the interaction off. Neurological patients with a damaged orbitofrontal cortex lose the ability to modulate the amygdala, a source of unruly impulses; like small children, they commit mortifying social gaffes like kissing a complete stranger, blithely unaware that they are doing anything untoward.

Emoticons, apparently, aren't cutting it. Perhaps the Vega should be color-coded. This color (mauve?) when the text is intended to be eyebrow arching ironic. Red when screeching "disinhibited" ravings about the Cheney administration.