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38 Power Up Your Mind

to learning. One 68-year-old man started crying when he recalled
his experience of a particular lesson at school. The fear of his fail-
ure came rushing back to him, still powerful nearly six decades later.
Or it could be fear of a current threat. You have already dis-
covered how the most primitive “fight or flight” mechanism is con-
trolled by the most basic part of your brain. In crude evolutionary
terms, it does not do for human beings to be musing on the meaning
of life if there is a woolly mammoth bearing down on them at speed.
In too many workplaces today there are the contemporary
equivalents of the woolly mammoth, who create a climate of threat
around them. Not surprisingly, people in these situations find it
difficult even to begin to think about learning.
In the 1970s, researchers showed that when we think we are
under threat, we cease to perform effectively. We stop being able to
pick up subtle clues, process information less well, become more
limited in our range of behaviors, and tend to overreact.
Another common inhibiting factor is stress. We know that
stress affects the brain’s ability to function properly. US politician
Dan Quayle famously misspelled potato by adding an extra “e” and
a UK education minister failed to answer a simple multiplication
sum correctly (7 × 8) under the stress of a BBC radio interview.
When we talk of something “completely going out of my head,”
we are referring to the fact that our minds don’t function well under
great stress. Many of us have memories of examination situations
when we know we didn’t perform to the best of our ability because of
stress. Something similar is going on when actors dry up on stage.

A HIERARCHY OF EMOTIONAL NEEDS

The most famous description of this aspect of learning theory dates
back to the 1940s and the work of psychologist Abraham Maslow. It
grew out of his more general work to understand human motivation
and is often referred to as a hierarchy of needs, running from phys-
iological needs such as food and sleep, through safety, love, and
belonging and esteem needs, to self-actualization needs, realizing
your full potential.