Taxi

Of all teachings given by the emotion intelligence guru Daniel Goleman, none is more important than that of the almond-shaped amygdala in an area of the human brain called the limbic system. Disgust, fear and anger, it is said time and again, come from the amygdala which acts like a central alarm system calling for a full-fledged "fight or flight" response.

My recent lectures in Beijing brought back the nineteen-year-old memory of my first (this is my second) visit of Beijing. As so often happened to tourists in mainland China, I found my amygdala sending messages of apprehension, making me edgy and easily startled, say, on a bus or at the train station. I am not sure if you've heard those stories of tourists being mugged and robbed of their kidneys, but I was stupefied to imagine myself coming back with single kidney.

The extent to which our neural circuitry overwhelms us with fear is no news to us. Fear and anger, on the other hand, can be reshaped or relearned. After attending the dialysis conference in Beijing, I traveled around on my last day there. When I went aboard a bus yesterday, I found out there wasn't conductor. That means I had to tender the exact fare – which I didn't have. It seemed clear to me that I should get changes with the passengers on the bus. I tried it sheepishly with my ten-yuan renminbi banknote. You can imagine how nervous I must have been as my Mandarin skill won't allow me to utter more than a few simple sentences. In hindsight, I realized that I had undoubtedly made myself look stupid enough, and I was thrilled when the passenger volunteered to pay for me!

When I headed for the airport in the evening, I took a taxi. I ended up paying 70 yuan while the taxi meter stated 60 yuan. Only a foolhardy gambler would bet that I didn't protest when I had been shortchanged. But no, I didn't. Just why I didn't fly into a fury and quarrel with the taxi driver, to be sure, had nothing to do with my poor Mandarin. Good mood, which lasted after the pleasant experience on the bus in the morning, had probably got my amygdala rewired, short-circuiting the path to irritability and hostility.

A postscript to my story of taxi ride: It is not the case that I was shortchanged, I reckoned afterwards, because the extra ten yuan went to the toll fee.