Biological Psychology Says Otherwise

Claude Generated

I was in a boardroom advocating for neurodiverse families when someone across the table said, "Take the emotion out of it."

The room was quiet for a moment. The kind of quiet where everyone waits to see what you will do with that.

I said, "Then remove the system reasoning."

Because that is what people do not understand. Emotion and reasoning are not on opposite sides of a wall. They are built from the same neural architecture, regulated by the same neurotransmitters, processed through the same interconnected circuits. You cannot cleanly remove one without dismantling the other. If my emotion has to go, so does your logic. They are made of the same thing.

I am a computational social scientist who studies how the brain processes information. So I heard that sentence differently than they intended it. What they meant was: be more objective. What they were actually asking was neurobiologically impossible.

Somewhere along the way, we decided that emotion and reason are opposites. That good thinking means removing feeling. That the clearest decisions come from the calmest people, and that getting emotional is a sign that you have lost your grip on the situation.

Biological psychology says otherwise.

At the most fundamental level of how the brain works, emotion and cognition are not separate processes. They are not housed in different departments. They do not take turns. They are chemically, structurally, and functionally intertwined, and they have been since before we had language to describe either one.

What Actually Happens at the Synapse

When a neuron fires, it releases neurotransmitters into the synaptic cleft, the tiny gap between one neuron and the next. What happens at that synapse determines whether the next neuron fires or stays quiet. An excitatory postsynaptic potential, or EPSP, pushes the next neuron closer to firing. An inhibitory postsynaptic potential, or IPSP, pulls it back. When enough excitatory signals accumulate and cross a threshold, the neuron generates an action potential, a rapid electrical signal that travels down the axon and starts the process again at the next synapse.

This is the basic language of the brain. Every thought, every perception, every decision, every feeling is built from this conversation between excitation and inhibition happening across billions of synapses simultaneously.

Here is what matters: the neurotransmitters doing this work do not distinguish between "thinking" and "feeling." Serotonin regulates mood. It also regulates memory, sleep, and learning. Dopamine drives motivation and reward. It also drives attention, motor control, and cognitive flexibility. Norepinephrine activates the stress response. It also sharpens focus and enhances memory consolidation.

These are not emotion chemicals and cognition chemicals. They are the same chemicals doing both at the same time. The brain does not have a toggle switch between feeling and thinking. It has a single integrated system where emotional and cognitive processing share the same molecular infrastructure.

The Prefrontal Cortex and the Amygdala Are Not Competing

The popular version of neuroscience tells a simple story: the prefrontal cortex is the rational brain, the amygdala is the emotional brain, and maturity means learning to let the rational side win. That story is useful as a metaphor. It is misleading as biology.

The prefrontal cortex and the amygdala are densely interconnected. They send signals to each other constantly. The amygdala does not just process fear and threat. It tags incoming information with emotional significance, and that tagging directly influences what the prefrontal cortex prioritizes, attends to, and acts on. The prefrontal cortex does not override the amygdala. It integrates the information the amygdala provides.

Antonio Damasio's research made this concrete. He studied patients who had damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, the area where emotional processing and decision-making converge. These patients could reason. They could analyze. They could weigh pros and cons with perfect logic. What they could not do was decide. Without access to emotional signals, without what Damasio called somatic markers, the body's way of encoding past emotional experience into present decision-making, they were paralyzed by options they could evaluate but not feel their way through.

The implication is direct: remove emotion from the process and you do not get better decisions. You get no decisions. Emotion is not the noise in the system. It is part of the signal.

Fight, Flight, Freeze Is Not a Behavior Problem

When a person perceives threat, the autonomic nervous system responds. Heart rate increases. Cortisol and adrenaline flood the system. Blood flow shifts toward large muscle groups. The prefrontal cortex, the part responsible for planning, language, and flexible thinking, receives less resources as the brain prioritizes survival.

This is not a character flaw. This is the nervous system doing exactly what it evolved to do.

A child sitting in a classroom under fluorescent lights, overwhelmed by sensory input, struggling to process instructions delivered at a pace their nervous system cannot match, is not choosing to shut down. Their biology is responding to an environment that their brain has registered as threatening. A parent sitting in an IEP meeting being told their child is failing, surrounded by professionals using language they do not fully understand, being asked to remain objective about the most important person in their life, is not being irrational when their voice shakes. Their body is doing what bodies do when the stakes are high and the power dynamic is uneven.

Telling that child to calm down is asking them to override their autonomic nervous system with conscious effort, which is neurobiologically difficult under the best circumstances and nearly impossible when the system is already activated. Telling that parent not to get emotional is asking them to suppress the somatic markers that are giving them real information about the situation they are in.

In both cases, we are treating a biological response as a behavioral problem. We are pathologizing the nervous system for doing its job.

The Brain Was Built to Adapt

Neuroplasticity is the brain's ability to reorganize itself in response to experience, environment, and demand. It is not a special feature. It is the foundational operating principle of the organ. Synaptic connections strengthen with use and weaken without it. New neural pathways form when existing ones are insufficient. The brain is, at its most basic structural level, an organ designed for adaptation.

This is true across the lifespan, but it is especially true during development. A child's brain is not a fixed system waiting to be filled with content. It is a dynamic system actively wiring itself in response to what it encounters. The environment shapes the architecture. The experiences shape the connections. The relationships shape the neurochemistry.

Which raises a question worth sitting with: the organ itself is built for flexibility, variability, and adaptation. Why are so many of the systems we build around it designed for the opposite?

Where This Shows Up

In my work at Expert IEP, I see what happens when systems ignore the biology they claim to serve. I see documents that describe children's neurological responses as behavior problems. I see language that frames emotional expression as dysregulation without ever asking what the nervous system is responding to. I see meetings where parents are expected to suppress every biological signal their body is sending them in order to be taken seriously.

The patterns are consistent. When a child's stress response activates in a classroom, the documentation rarely asks what in the environment triggered activation. It records the behavior. When a parent advocates with urgency, the system often codes that urgency as conflict rather than recognizing it as a proportionate response to what is at stake.

These are not failures of intention. They are failures of biological literacy. The people writing these documents and running these meetings are not malicious. They are operating inside systems that were designed without accounting for how the brain actually processes threat, emotion, memory, and decision-making.

Otherwise

We built professional norms around the idea that emotion compromises judgment. We built educational systems around the idea that calm compliance signals readiness to learn. We built meeting structures around the idea that objectivity means suppressing what you feel.

Biological psychology says otherwise.

Emotion and cognition share the same neurotransmitters, the same neural circuits, the same synaptic infrastructure. The amygdala and the prefrontal cortex are partners, not opponents. Somatic markers are not noise. They are data. The stress response is not a malfunction. It is a design feature. And the brain itself was built to adapt, which means rigid systems are not serving the organ. They are working against it.

The next time someone says "let's keep emotion out of this," it is worth asking what they think they are removing. Because the biology is clear. You cannot take emotion out of thinking. You can only pretend you have.