Lion or Rock?

THE NEUROSCIENCE OF

Jumping to Conclusions

Why We React Before We Think — and How to Rewire the Habit

Joseph P. McFadden Sr.

with Claude AI

February 2026

Part of the Building Intuition Before Equations Series

Introduction

The Snap Judgment That Kept Us Alive

After years of root cause analysis work, along with teaching, mentoring, and simply being an observant human, I have found that we as a species have a persistent problem with correlation and causation. Notice I said we. It is no surprise—and yes, that is a pun in itself—that we so often jump to conclusions. What I have also observed is that jumping is far easier than stopping, taking a deep breath, and thinking it through. I always suspected this was in our nature, and when I set out to understand it more deeply, I dove into the world of neuroscience and evolutionary psychology.

What I found confirmed my suspicion—and then some. Our early human brain developed in an environment that was relentlessly hostile. Predators, rival tribes, sudden weather, scarce food. The world demanded snap decisions and immediate action. There was no time for deliberation when a shadow moved in the tall grass. The humans who hesitated were the ones who did not survive to pass on their genes. The ones who jumped to conclusions—who treated every rustle as a predator and every stranger as a threat—lived long enough to become our ancestors.

Fast forward tens of thousands of years. The predators are largely gone. The tall grass has been replaced by cubicles, classrooms, and comment sections. But the neural hardware that kept us alive on the savanna? It is still running. It is still our default. And it is shaping every decision we make—from how we interact with colleagues to how we take exams, from how we consume news to how we respond to someone who disagrees with us.

This essay is about that inheritance. More importantly, it is about what we can do with the awareness that we carry this ancient system inside us, and how we can learn to work with it rather than be ruled by it.

Part One

The Evolutionary Logic of the Quick Decision

Survival Favors Speed, Not Accuracy

Imagine you are an early human walking across an open plain. You see a shape in the distance. Is it a rock—or a lion?

Your brain has two options. Option one: assume it is a lion, react with fear, and run. If it was a rock, you wasted some energy. No harm done. Option two: pause, analyze the shape carefully, weigh the evidence, and conclude it is a rock. If you are wrong, you are dead.

Evolution solved this problem with a decisive bias toward speed. Our brains evolved to prioritize fast, automatic responses over slow, accurate ones. The cost of a false positive—running from a rock—was trivial compared to the cost of a false negative—standing still in front of a lion. Over millions of years, this asymmetry sculpted a nervous system that defaults to snap judgment.

This is not a flaw. It was, for most of human history, an extraordinarily effective survival strategy. But the world has changed far faster than our biology has been able to follow.

The Energy Budget of the Brain

There is another dimension to this story, and it concerns energy. The brain consumes roughly twenty percent of the body’s total energy despite representing only about two percent of its mass. For our ancestors, calories were hard to come by. Every unit of energy spent thinking was a unit not available for running, fighting, or foraging. The brain evolved under intense pressure to be efficient—to get the most survival value out of the fewest calories.

The result is a system that heavily favors shortcuts. Pattern recognition, heuristics, gut feelings—these are all energy-efficient strategies that allow the brain to arrive at “good enough” decisions without engaging in the metabolically expensive process of deep analysis. The brain, in essence, is wired to be intellectually lazy. Not out of deficiency, but out of evolutionary prudence.

This is the root of the correlation-and-causation confusion that I see so often in my work. The brain sees two things occur together and immediately links them as cause and effect, because in the wild, that heuristic usually worked. Smoke meant fire. A certain bird call meant a predator was nearby. The brain did not need to run a controlled experiment. It just needed to act on the pattern. Today, this same tendency leads us to see causation where there is only coincidence, and certainty where there should be curiosity.

Part Two

The Three Key Brain Regions

To understand what happens when we jump to conclusions—and to build a system for catching ourselves—it helps to know the three key brain regions involved and how they interact under pressure.

The Amygdala: The Alarm System

The amygdala is the oldest and fastest player in the game. It is a small, almond-shaped structure deep in the temporal lobe, and its primary job is threat detection. It scans incoming sensory information and, when it perceives danger, triggers the fight-or-flight response before the conscious mind has even registered what happened.

Here is the critical detail. The amygdala fires roughly six times faster than the prefrontal cortex can process the same information. This means the emotional reaction—the racing heart, the tightened jaw, the surge of adrenaline, the urge to respond immediately—arrives before the reasoning. The feeling comes first. The thinking comes second. And in that gap between feeling and thinking, jumping to conclusions lives.

The amygdala is not the enemy. It is the reason your ancestors survived encounters with predators, hostile strangers, and environmental threats. But it has a fundamental limitation: it cannot distinguish between a lion in the grass and a provocative headline on your phone. It cannot tell the difference between a genuine threat to your safety and a coworker’s offhand remark that triggered an old wound. Its job is to flag. Its job is not to conclude.

The Hippocampus: The Memory and Context Center

The hippocampus sits adjacent to the amygdala in the medial temporal lobe and serves as the brain’s memory consolidation center. If the amygdala is the alarm, the hippocampus is the region that runs to the archives to pull up context. It is the part of the brain that can recognize: “Wait—I have encountered something like this before, and it turned out differently than I expected.”

The hippocampus provides the experiential context that the amygdala lacks. When the amygdala fires an alarm, the hippocampus searches through stored memories to determine whether the current situation truly matches past threats or whether the pattern is superficial. It is the bridge between raw emotional reaction and informed evaluation.

Crucially, the hippocampus can help modulate the amygdala’s response. When it surfaces a relevant memory—“the last time I felt this way about a political argument, I said something I regretted”—it provides evidence that can temper the alarm. But it needs time to do its work, and the amygdala often acts before that context can be retrieved.

The Prefrontal Cortex: The Executive Decision-Maker

The prefrontal cortex is the most recently evolved and the most metabolically expensive part of the brain. Located behind the forehead, it handles executive functions: planning, reasoning, weighing consequences, evaluating evidence, and making deliberate decisions. It is the region that reviews the evidence and decides what action to take.

The prefrontal cortex is slow but accurate. It is the part of your brain that can override the amygdala’s alarm when the evidence does not warrant panic. It can ask: “Yes, I feel angry—but is this situation actually what I think it is? What am I assuming? What evidence do I actually have?”

But the prefrontal cortex has a vulnerability: it is easily overwhelmed. When the amygdala’s alarm is loud enough, when the emotional response is strong enough, the prefrontal cortex’s signal gets drowned out. Neuroscientists call this an “amygdala hijack,” a term coined by Daniel Goleman. In those moments, the executive is effectively offline, and the amygdala is running the show. This is what is happening when someone “sees red,” when they say something they immediately regret, when they fire off that email they should have slept on.

It is worth noting that the prefrontal cortex is the last region of the brain to fully mature. In females, it reaches full development somewhat earlier, but in males, it is not fully developed until approximately age twenty-five. This has real implications for how young people process stress, conflict, and decision-making. Their executive capacity is still under construction.

Part Three

The Connection to Correlation and Causation

This neurological architecture has a direct and profound connection to the confusion between correlation and causation that I encounter constantly in my teaching and professional work.

The amygdala is, at its core, a correlation engine. It detects patterns of co-occurrence and treats them as causal links, because in a survival context, waiting for proof could be fatal.

Two events happen together? They must be related. That person looked at me strangely and then I got bad news? They must have known something. Crime went up after a new policy was introduced? The policy must have caused it.

The prefrontal cortex, by contrast, is the causation evaluator. It is the part of the brain capable of asking: “Is this actually a causal relationship, or am I just seeing a coincidence? Are there confounding variables? Is this a case of reverse causation? Could there be a third factor driving both observations?”

But the prefrontal cortex needs time and energy to do this work, which is precisely why the brain resists engaging it. Deep analytical thinking is metabolically expensive. The brain’s energy conservation bias means that, left to its own devices, it will default to the amygdala’s quick-and-dirty correlation rather than the prefrontal cortex’s careful evaluation of causation.

This is why I believe students—myself included in earlier years—are more comfortable with multiple-choice questions than with essays or open-ended problems. Multiple choice allows the amygdala to pattern-match and select an answer. It “feels right” in the gut. An essay, by contrast, demands that the hippocampus retrieve context and evidence while the prefrontal cortex constructs and evaluates an argument. It is literally harder neurologically. It costs more energy. And the brain—that ancient energy optimizer—resists it.

Part Four

The Pause Protocol: A System for Catching Yourself

Understanding the neuroscience is valuable, but the real question is: what do we do with this knowledge? How do we build a practical system for catching ourselves before the jump—and before the regret that so often follows?

What I tell people, whether they are students, colleagues, or friends ranting about politics or folks in power, is this: when I feel something that invokes a visceral response, that is my trigger to stop and ask, “Why am I feeling this way?” It is not always easy to get ahead of the potential reaction, whether verbal or physical, because after all we are wired this way. But the more we understand ourselves—the more we develop the ability to sense our own internal states—the more we can avoid the jump and the regret that often follows.

Based on the neuroscience, I propose a four-step system I call the Pause Protocol. The goal is simple: create enough space between the amygdala’s alarm and your response to let the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex do their jobs.

Step One. Feel It — Recognize the Alarm

The first step is not to suppress the emotional response. That does not work, and decades of research on emotional suppression confirms it makes things worse. Instead, the first step is to recognize the alarm for what it is. Notice the physical signatures: the racing heart, the heat in your chest, the clenched jaw, the tightened shoulders, the sudden urge to speak or act immediately.

These sensations are data. They are the amygdala doing its job, flagging something as potentially important. The critical shift is learning to treat them as information rather than as a directive. The alarm is raised. It is not the final answer.

Step Two. Name It — Engage Memory and Context

Neuroscientist Matthew Lieberman’s research on what he calls “affect labeling” has shown that the simple act of naming an emotion actually reduces amygdala activation. Saying to yourself—“I am feeling angry,” or “I am feeling threatened,” or “I am feeling defensive”—is neurologically different from simply being angry, threatened, or defensive. The act of labeling recruits the prefrontal cortex and begins to modulate the amygdala’s alarm.

Once you have named the emotion, engage the hippocampus by asking contextual questions. Have I felt this before? What happened last time? Is this pattern familiar? What did I learn from a similar situation in the past? This activates memory retrieval and begins to provide the context that the amygdala’s raw alarm lacks.

Step Three. Pause and Question — Activate the Executive

This is the step where critical thinking enters. With the alarm acknowledged and context being provided, the prefrontal cortex can now do its work. The key questions at this stage go beyond “Why am I feeling this way?” to include more specific analytical prompts: What am I assuming right now? What evidence do I actually have? Am I confusing correlation with causation? What would I advise someone else to do in this situation? Is there another explanation I have not considered?

The question “What would I advise someone else?” is particularly powerful. Research on what psychologists call Solomon’s Paradox shows that people consistently reason more wisely about others’ problems than their own. By mentally stepping outside the situation, you give the prefrontal cortex the psychological distance it needs to override the amygdala’s urgency.

Step Four. Choose the Response — Rather Than React

The final step is the distinction between reacting and responding. A reaction is the amygdala on autopilot—fast, emotional, often regretted. A response is the prefrontal cortex in the driver’s seat—considered, evidence-based, and aligned with your values and long-term interests.

This does not mean the response has to be slow or passive. Sometimes the situation genuinely calls for urgency. But even urgent action taken through the lens of prefrontal evaluation is qualitatively different from a knee-jerk reaction driven by the amygdala’s alarm. The difference is agency. You are choosing your action rather than being dragged into it.

Part Five

Practicing the Pause

Knowing the protocol and executing it are two very different things. The honest truth is that this system requires practice, and it will fail sometimes—especially in the beginning and especially in situations with high emotional charge. This is not a reason to abandon it. It is the nature of building a new neural pathway against the grain of millions of years of evolutionary momentum.

There are several practical approaches that support the development of this skill. Regular mindfulness practice, even as little as ten minutes a day, has been shown to strengthen prefrontal regulation of the amygdala. Journaling after emotionally charged events helps the hippocampus consolidate the lessons so they are more readily available next time. Deliberate practice with low-stakes situations—pausing before responding to a mildly irritating email, for instance—builds the neural habit that can then be deployed in higher-stakes moments.

Physical awareness is also a powerful tool. The amygdala’s alarm manifests in the body before it reaches consciousness. Learning to notice physical tension, changes in breathing, or sudden energy shifts gives you an earlier warning signal—more time in the gap between stimulus and response.

And perhaps most importantly: self-compassion when you fail. You are working against hardware that was optimized over evolutionary time scales. Every instance where you catch yourself—even after the fact—is strengthening the circuit. The goal is not perfection. The goal is increasing the percentage of times you pause before you leap.

Conclusion

From Wiring to Wisdom

We are, all of us, carrying the nervous system of a savanna survivor into board rooms, classrooms, social media feeds, and dinner table conversations. Our primitive brain wants to survive, minimize energy consumption, and act on its initial predictions. This served us brilliantly for hundreds of thousands of years. It is less well suited to a world that rewards nuance, evidence, and the patience to distinguish correlation from causation.

But the remarkable thing about the human brain is its plasticity. We are not prisoners of our evolutionary inheritance. We have the capacity—through awareness, practice, and understanding—to build new pathways that give the prefrontal cortex a fighting chance against the amygdala’s speed. We can learn to treat our visceral responses as signals rather than commands. We can develop the habit of pausing, naming, questioning, and choosing.

The jump to conclusions is in our nature. But so is the capacity to notice the jump, to question it, and to choose a different path. That capacity—the ability to observe our own thinking and intervene in our own automatic processes—may be the most distinctly human thing about us.

The more we understand our wiring, the less we are controlled by it. And in a world that seems designed to trigger the amygdala at every turn, that understanding may be the most important skill we can develop.

Be a driver, not a passenger.

Joseph P. McFadden Sr.

Engineer • Lifelong Learner • Holistic Analyst

Combating Engineering Mind Blindness, One Student at a Time

Remember: every failure tells a story,

and understanding that story is the key to prevention.

McFaddenCAE.com

mcfadden@snet.net