Public Speaking: the neuroscience of fear

The Fear of Public Speaking

Our Otago MBA programme began yesterday with an orientation highlighted by a public speaking exercise aimed at getting to know each other.  All participants (students and management team) were paired up and took turns: first introducing their peer (20 sec) and then offering a two-minute talk about themselves.  Many individuals expressed apprehension about the task, with several individuals verbally acknowledging their discomfort (fear).

Here's a brief neuroscience explanation of emotion intended to give our students 

more control over the emotions they experience, especially fear.

In neuroscience, emotions (e.g., fear) are most productively defined as a stress response – initiated by the sympathetic nervous and neuroendocrine systems – and experienced as a physiological reaction in the body that informs the person about what is relevant. The weights and labels we then attached to stimuli and events remain subjective (i.e., a choice) and vary across individuals, over time, and with experience.

Emotion is fundamentally a relevance detector telling you,

"Pay attention: this is important."

An MBA student, for instance, may affectively weight (positive or negative) such things as choosing to return to school, the lost income of attending a full-time programme, conflicting commitments, the thought of receiving a rejection letter, quantitative courses, working in teams, expressing ideas in class, major projects, formal presentations, professional networking, midterm / final exams, failing courses, or even the idea of advancing his or her career. Physiological reactions in the body (triggered by the amygdala and related structures) inform the person about what is relevant and steer her through daily and career-changing decisions.

How does the stress response occur? 

Specifically, the amygdala receives sensory data and highly processed information about experiences out there; as well as endogenous data concerning physiological discomfort (pain), sociopsychological happenings (rejection and uncertainty) and thoughts (returning or failing in school) that knock the individual out of homeostasis.  The amygdala then triggers a peripheral reaction.  

The amygdala projects to the brainstem to activate the sympathetic nervous system, thereby initiating the characteristic physiological stress response: heightened attention, catabolic release of energy from fat cells into the bloodstream, increased blood pressure, galvanic skin response, and the acceleration of cardiac and respiratory output to fuel brain, heart and muscle. The amygdala also projects to the paraventricular nuclei (PVN) of the hypothalamus to initiate a hormonal cascade through the Hypothalamus-Pituitary-Adrenal (HPA) axis leading to the release of adrenal stress hormones.

This combination of autonomic nervous system and hypothalamic neuroendocrine system comprises the efferent limbs through which the brain influences all peripheral stress responses – and those engaged in classical fear-conditioning studies in which a stimulus (e.g., Statistics) acquires emotional value when paired with a biologically significant event.  "I had a bad experience in maths."

For the student, then, physiological responses register in the brain and are reflectively interpreted as “feelings.” The individual names these feelings as specific emotions: he or she chooses labels (e.g., fear). In this manner, emotions arise and a task comes to be viewed as onerous, a fellow student as kind, or thought of pursuing an MBA degree as exciting or terrifying.

Here's the point.  You gain control, if you know the physiological reaction is normal.  

You get to choose the labels you apply (e.g., scary or exciting).

Cheers,

David