How to Tame Your Lizard -- Part 1
It's always ready to "help" you
Today I am going to try doing a multi-part story in my newsletter. I think, when we listen to music or watch the first episode of a streaming series, we call this “the hook”. It needs to be interesting enough to make people look forward to the rest. I hope this manages to accomplish that goal.
For those of you who are reading my newsletter regularly, you already know that I love to read. An author whose writing I enjoy is Malcolm Gladwell. Malcolm often takes a contrarian view of things and attempts to explain something we can all relate to in a new and unexpected fashion. One of his books is Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking. The link will take you to a wonderful overview of the book from Wikipedia. It is available almost anywhere and is a fun and breezy read. Thinking without thinking is an intriguing concept. We all know that when we are about to ease into the 4-way intersection and the car with the red light is not slowing down, we lock up the brakes and hope we acted quickly enough. We are rather good at this and we don’t stop and pause and consider all of our options, making a decision matrix in a spreadsheet, we just stop! If we did make such a decision matrix, there would be a lot fewer of us humans on this rock of ours we call Earth.
There are many other consequences of this “real-fast decision engine in that six-pound blob above our necks. When we are infants, there is never a better time to feed that developing brain with fats and sugar. Broad access to sugar was limited until the arrival of Spanish explorers in the New World. While they came in search of gold and silver, the broad development of sugar cane, potatoes, and even chocolate transformed diets in Europe It is safe to say that those discoveries led to an explosion of activity in brainpower and the rise of dentistry! All of those great innovations that resulted in the subsequent centuries were made for practical uses of that gold and silver to fill teeth eroded by the sugar and chocolate in the first place. Maybe all that fuel for our brains led to us eventually building brains of our own called microprocessors. I imagine, in the beginning, royalty enjoyed all of the extra ornamentation and a different crown each day until more consequential uses of gold and silver would be realized.
Most scientists and researchers have safely concluded that what I will call our lizard brain has been around for a while and seems to be common in some shape or form in all animals. It is responsible for that famous “fight or flight” decision and keeps lots of animals safe when they realize they are in a situation that makes them prey. Thank you lizard brain for making me look both ways at the intersection. Figuring out how to survive is pretty important as it leads to more time to do things.
One thing we know about our lizard brain is that it thinks fast! I always think of that childhood practice of tossing a ball to an unsuspecting friend and saying “think fast”. That is no time for a decision matrix spreadsheet. When we humans assess the animals around us, we often refer to instinct. We really don’t consider this stuff thinking but more instinct. That is one of those things that separates us from the beasts, I guess, as the saying goes. What is quite interesting, at least to me, is we have very similar parts of our brains that look and function very similarly to a primitive brain. I think we all have heard about how our brain seems to be a pretty amazing group of different regions each doing different stuff. Scientists have concluded that these primitive “brains” have a commonality with fish. These parts handle basic body functions like breathing, balance, and coordination, and simple survival urges like feeding, mating, and defense. While these functions might be instinctual, they seem pretty important to me and I am sure glad we have a fast and efficient way to satisfy these basic needs. I conclude from these basic functions that my lizard brain is not quite up to par as it imposes some limitations on my dance skills and my coordination on a tennis court. Oh well.
I plan to return with Part 2 tomorrow but the link will take you directly there if you are reading this as an archived previous post. I hope this is interesting enough to bring you back. I try to limit my writing so that it is always a light and breezy commitment.