ICARUS and 3R, an Erasmus+ crossover

By José Carlos Leon (INDEPCIE, Spain)

Last March I had the great opportunity to accompany the members of Club Magic Extremadura in the national workshops that we developed in the prisons of Cáceres and Badajoz, as well as in the Therapeutic Community La Garrovilla (Mérida), as part of ICARUS Project (2023-1-IT02-KA220-ADU-000152409). And I speak of opportunity because I could see and learn how Juan Antonio Montero, Rodrigo Barbeito, Manuel Pérez Candelario or Vanesa Delgado have been applying chess as a tool for cognitive development, reintegration and social inclusion for years. 

Working with them is very easy, they have been doing it for years with proven and effective results. The only thing I had to do was to accompany them, not to bother them and try to contribute my grain of sand with the application of soft skills and emotional management for the reinsertion of the inmates.

It is curious how the origin of chess and soft skills has a military scenario as a common point. Chess is the staging of a combat between two armies with their different corps, including their kings, generals, cavalry, pawns, etc. Soft skills, on the other hand, emerged in the U.S. Army in the late 1960s. Some commanders were struck by the fact that in maneuvers, the teams with the best technical capabilities (which had to do with the "hard" part, with the weaponry itself) did not always win, but that many times those who were better at leadership or teamwork triumphed, something difficult to measure and which they called "soft skills" as opposed to the other. They did not mean that they were less important, only that they were something else, something different and out of their hands. The problem is that in American culture soft is a rather demeaning label and someone decided that they were not worth learning, or even teaching. It was taken for granted that they were acquired on their own, at the university of life, at home, in the family or at school. Nothing could be further from the truth.

This is not the only coincidence, since almost four years apart we were able to enjoy a crossover within the Erasmus+ program between our ICARUS (2023-1-IT02-KA220-ADU-000152409) and the project '3R. Remember, respire, response' (2020-1-RO01-KA204-079934), which aimed to develop socioemotional competencies in third grade inmates to promote their social reintegration and prevent recividism.

During the visit to the prison in Cáceres, chatting with the inmates, I wanted to share with them an experience I had first-hand a decade ago during a visit to the prison in Córdoba. It was not my first time there, but I must admit that going to a prison is always intimidating. When we entered the assembly hall, packed with more than 200 people, the excitement point went up even one notch. Then, with everyone watching us, we posed a question: Who of you would not be here if you had had a second to think about the consequences of your actions? There was a silence in the room that seemed to go on forever, and suddenly, guys as hard as rocks broke down, and not a few tears fell down many cheeks of men and women who suddenly became aware of something that, had they known it before, could have changed their lives.

It is said that prisons are not full of criminals, but of people who have committed a crime, and it is not the same thing. That question, that instant, that experience, was the germ of 3R, a project based on the emotional intelligence theories of Joseph LeDoux[i] and Daniel Goleman[ii]  on amygdalar hijack. Like any scientific theory, and even more so if it is 30 years old, this one has been revised and sometimes surpassed, until it has become a myth[iii] with little scientific basis[iv] , but it is still a way of explaining what goes through our head when we make an impulsive, almost irrational decision motivated by an instinctive reaction instead of doing it in a balanced way and passed through the filter of reason and logic.

To make a long story short, the amygdala (which in Greek means almond, because of its shape) is a gland that is part of the limbic brain and that, among other functions, is responsible for finding the most appropriate emotional responses at any given moment. In fact, the amygdala is a kind of bouncer that analyzes the external stimuli that are processed in the hypothalamus and that once converted into sensory experience are analyzed by the almond gland with two possible options. When it processes them by gathering all possible information, taking its time to reflect and taking what was later called the long pathway, that stimulus travels to the neocortex (the most evolved part of our brain) and rational and emotionally calculated decisions are generated. But when the brain detects a danger signal, the alarms of our most reptilian and primitive side go off, the one that reacts automatically to an impulse by taking the short pathway and closing the doors to rational functions. The impulsive response wins out over logic, a memory of our less evolved past in which the important thing was to respond quickly to a threat as a matter of survival. Thinking long and hard about the response was not worth it, because it could cost us our lives.

That is, in extreme situations, the amygdala blocks the response of the rational brain when it has not yet made any decision and causes our reaction to be purely animalistic. This is the amygdala hijacking defined by Joseph LeDoux, a neuroscientist at New York University, the first to discover the importance and weight of the amygdala in the emotional brain, and years later Daniel Goleman coined the term amygdalar hijack to refer to those moments when we let ourselves be carried away by our most primitive reactions, provoking an illogical response.

We all remember Zidane's headbutt to Materazzi in the final of the 2006 World Cup in Germany, a play that went around the world and is still inexplicable for many who do not understand the reaction of the former Real Madrid coach. Zizou has always been known for his elegance in the game, his cool head and his authority on the pitch, but that day, in a situation of maximum tension, he was unable to control his impulses and reacted with an aggression that marked the end of his sporting career. And he did it with the whole world as a witness, responding to a provocation that did not know how to find a rational response. And how did he do it? With a kick, with a punch? No, with a headbutt, as an animal would do.

The French "lost his mind", an expression we use to give a name to this emotional abduction. Lawyers call it differently and use it as a mitigating factor in certain crimes: transient mental derangement, a moment of madness that clouds the lucidity to commit an act that under normal circumstances would never happen. The purely emotional response is so animalistic and instinctive that the moment of reflection only comes a second later, when we have realized what we have just done. And then perhaps it is already too late.

Daniel Goleman himself indicated that impulse control was one of the five great tasks of Emotional Intelligence, and the interesting thing is that the body sends us signals that can make us prevent that loss of roles, sometimes irreparable: increase in body temperature, rise in heart rate, a certain context... Learning to manage anger we can identify those moments in which "we are heating up" and we know that we are about to explode. Managing this impulse depends on whether we stop it a second before or regret it a second later.

And can it be controlled? Yes, but it requires training. The first thing to do is to short-circuit the abduction by generating a pause that allows the brain to breathe, oxygenate the amygdala and not pressure it to make an accelerated decision. Mothers have told us all our lives to count to 10, although today we know that the brain needs a break of approximately 90 seconds to break a specific emotional state and return to calm. Thus we generate a temporary window to remember (from the Latin re-cordis, literally to pass twice through the heart) what we want to get out of that moment, what we want to happen and above all what we do not want to happen, because in an emotional kidnapping there is always something broken, wounds that can be healed, but never heal. Finally comes the time to respond, to exercise responsibility, the ability to generate appropriate responses to a particular situation. This process may be difficult at first, but the long road that Goleman talked about is what differentiates us humans from the instinctive and pure animal reaction that makes us lose our roles and much more.

"Yes, but what happens when we have no other options to generate a response? Because we are limited here in prison and we cannot respond in any other way," responded one of the participants in the Cáceres workshop, questioning whether the spirit of 3R could be developed under the conditions experienced by the inmates during their stay in the penitentiary center. Then, Juan Antonio Montero gave an answer that definitely links ICARUS with 3R, in a crossover that is in itself a life lesson. The president of Club Magic replied that "in chess, when you have a check, you have no more freedom of choice, there are no other options but to save the King. But while you do what is urgent and necessary at that moment, although you may only have one move, you start to create new scenarios and new options appear that, later on, can make you win the game".

That is what Viktor Frankl defined in Man's search for meaning as the freedom to choose. What makes us human is the ability to respond to external conditions, the development of a power that no one can take away from you, not even locked in a prison. Something that makes us great, but at the same time gives us an enormous responsibility: to be able to give an interpretation to what happens to us.