Super Brain (18 page)

Instead, the human brain has added layers of new upon old. (In the case of the cerebral cortex, the outermost layer of the brain, the layers are quite literally like bark on a tree.
Cortex
means “bark” or “rind” in Latin.) This layering keeps integrating what came before rather than throwing it away. While past memories of pain and discomfort drive fear, memories of past pleasures and enjoyment drive desire. Evolution pushes and pulls at the same time. It is impossible to say where wanting pleasure ends and avoiding pain begins. Shakespeare might have been ashamed of his lust, but he didn’t ask for it to be taken away. The emotions based on fear and desire work hand in hand with each other. For example, your fear of rejection
by your social group dovetails with your desire for power and sex, sustaining the individual and the species at the same time.

Emotions feel as urgent as instincts, but a new development is taking place. Freud called instinctual drives
it
because they were too primitive to name. Emotions have names, like
envy
,
jealousy
, and
pride
. When a poet declares that love is like a red, red rose, he’s expressing our fascination with naming our emotions and building an entire world around them. So emotions are a step in the direction of awareness.

The conflict between instincts and emotions teaches us that humans have evolved—with much pain and confusion—to learn. You must be mindful of your fears and desires. They have no control built into them, and neither does the reptilian brain. The complicated limbic system is our center for emotion, but also for obscurely related things like long-term memory and the sense of smell. Smelling a perfume or chocolate cookies is enough to bring memories flooding back from the past (in the case of Marcel Proust, it was dipping a madeleine cookie into tea) because the limbic system unites smell, memory, and emotion. It evolved second, after the reptilian brain, but still early. All four-footed animals, including the earliest amphibians, seem to have a developed limbic system. Emotion, unlike smell, may be a recent development in the story. Or perhaps emotions couldn’t exist until language gave them names.

Our tendency to look down at the lower brain for being primitive is a mistake. You can “smell” trouble, with the kind of certainty that the higher brain envies. The lower brain has no doubts or second thoughts. It can’t talk itself out of what it knows. No one speaks of the wisdom of the sex drive, but our instinctively driven emotions are definitely wise. They stand for the kind of awareness that leads us to be happy. Before the word
geek
was invented, universities started to attract the kind of obsessive young males who were brilliant at writing computer programs. They sat up night and day writing code. The digital age was built on their midnight oil. But there tended to
be a fast turnover in these twenty-somethings, and when asked why, the dean of a leading university sighed. “We can’t keep them from crossing the quad, and as soon as they run into a girl, they vanish.”

The loss to binary codes is humanity’s gain. With the emergence of the emotional brain, awareness began to pry itself loose from physical survival. The various areas of the limbic system, such as the hippocampus and the amygdala, have been precisely mapped, and they can be correlated to all kinds of functions through fMRIs. If this precision tempts neuroscientists to claim that the limbic system is using us for its own purposes, the way instinct does, the claim needs to be resisted. The instinctive brain, because it evolved for survival, needs to use us. Who wants to choose to digest his food after each meal? Who wants to see the car ahead swerve out of control and have to think for a moment before reacting? Huge areas of life should be on automatic pilot, and therefore they are.

But emotions, even as they well up spontaneously, mean something, and meaning is a department we all want to be in charge of. “I can’t help it. Every time I see the ending of
Casablanca
, I cry,” someone may say. Yes, but we choose to go to the movies, and one reason is to feel strong emotions without risk. It’s okay for a man to cry at the ending of
Casablanca
or when Old Yeller is shot, even one who believes that grown men don’t cry. Movies are vacationland for the limbic system—not because the brain needs to cry, but because under the right circumstances, we need to cry. The emotional brain feels no emotions. You feel emotions while using it.

Wrapped up in the emotional phase of the brain, however, is a new conflict, one we’ve already touched upon: memory. Memory is the most powerful way to make emotions stick, and once stuck, they are difficult to remove. We’ve already discussed the stickiness of one emotion, anxiety. In Sanskrit, the stickiness of experience is called
samskara
. It is defined as the impression left by past actions, or karma. These are exotic words, but every Eastern spiritual tradition is rooted in a universal dilemma: the struggle to break the grip of
old conditioning, which creates pain today by remembering the pain of yesterday. The process of laying down karmic impressions is an inextricable aspect of the emotional brain.

Whether you believe in karma or not makes no difference. You are laying down impressions in your nervous system all the time. Every like and dislike you have (
I hate broccoli, I love asparagus. I hate her, I love you
) is due to past impressions. This is more than data processing. Anyone who compares the human brain to a computer should be asked if computers like broccoli or hate fascism. Emotions guide preferences, and computers are devoid of emotion.

Since laying down impressions comes effortlessly, you’d suppose it would be easy to remove them. Sometimes it is. If you misspeak, you can correct yourself with “Forget what I just said,” and your listener will. But impressions that make a lasting difference cannot be removed even with the greatest effort. Trauma stays with you. Because memory is so poorly understood, its footprints cannot be detected in the limbic system. Yet somehow vivid memories are sticky by nature.

You need to have an open emotional life and to value your feelings. But when emotions gain the upper hand, there is more evolving to do. In particular, we believe that you should be a witness to your emotions. This doesn’t mean that you should simply stand by and watch yourself get mad or go into a panic, should those emotions spring up. Emotions want to run their course; like instincts, they want what they want. But you shouldn’t fuel them to excess. Anger, for example, is already hot and raging. It doesn’t need you to throw kerosene on it. By observing your anger, you create a small gap between you and your emotion. If you observe,
This is me getting angry
, the
me
and the anger are now separated. In that tiny act of detachment, the emotion loses momentum. You always have the choice to use any part of your brain as your partner. The terms of the partnership are up to you.

As with any phase of the brain, emotions can go out of balance.

If you are too emotional, you lose perspective. Your feelings convince you that they are the only things that matter. Excessive emotion is exhausting and depletes the whole mind-body system. If you indulge your emotions long enough, you become their prisoner.

If you control your emotions too much, however, you lose touch with how your life feels. This leads to the illusion that intellect alone is enough. Ignorant of how powerful a hidden emotion actually is, you risk unconscious behavior. Repressing the emotions is also strongly linked to becoming prone to illness.

ESSENTIAL POINTS: YOUR EMOTIONAL BRAIN

Let feelings come and go. Coming and going are spontaneous.

Don’t hold on to negative feelings by justifying why you are right and someone else is wrong.

Look at your emotional weak points. Do you fall in love too easily, lose your temper too fast, become afraid of trivial risks?

Start to observe your weaknesses when they come up.

Ask if you really need to be having the reaction you are having. If the answer is no, the unwanted feelings will begin to go back into balance.

Before the Leap

At this point, we reach a leap in evolution, where the higher brain enters. The question of the meaning of life was born in the cerebral cortex, which sits like a philosopher king atop the lower brain. Kings have been known to topple, and the brain is no exception. The lower brain is always there to make its instinctual, at times primitive, demands. Evolution arguably made no greater leap—either on earth or in the cosmos—than the leap to create the cerebral cortex.

DIAGRAM 3: THE LIMBIC SYSTEM

Tucked under the cerebral cortex is the limbic system (shaded). It houses our emotions, feelings of pleasure associated with eating and sex, and short-term memory. Located here are two individual areas, the thalamus and hypothalamus, as well as the amygdala and hippocampus, which control short-term memory.

The amygdala determines what memories are stored based on the emotional response that an experience invokes. The hippocampus is responsible for short-term memories and sends them to appropriate parts of the cerebral cortex for long-term storage. This region is particularly affected in Alzheimer’s disease. The limbic system is tightly connected with the olfactory lobe, which processes smell. This is why a certain scent can trigger such strong memories.

We will give it its own chapter. But first let’s look back at the instinctive and emotional brain. They deserve respect for the complexity of their response to the world. If you found yourself being chased by a tiger, the instinctive brain would instantly kick in to release specific neurochemicals that allow you to best survive the chase.

This neurochemical cocktail, primarily composed of adrenaline, required millions of years to be perfected. Adrenaline is the beginning of a chemical cascade in the brain. It evokes electrochemical activity at specific synapses, telling you to run while also optimizing your heart rate and breathing for maximum physical performance. It will also maximize your concentration to endure the chase and outwit the tiger. It will even make you feel pleasure, while subsiding any preexisting feelings of hunger or thirst or even the need to go to the bathroom.

These potential distractions are instantly dissolved so that all physical and mental activity can be focused on escape and survival. When you were in school, if someone challenged you by trying to take away your lunch money, you fought back without thinking about it. Or if the bully was much bigger than you, you fled without thinking about it.

Evolution honed the alliance between the instinctive and the emotional brain to ensure our survival, but if overused, that alliance can become our worst enemy. This is because the instinctive and emotional brains are “reactive”—they mindlessly induce a state of arousal. Any strong external stimulus—a gunshot, the car in front of you suddenly braking, a glance from a pretty girl or flirtatious man—automatically triggers a reaction that triggers the instinct-emotion alliance.

Rudy recalls an experience with bullying in his childhood, one that serves to take us to our next concern, the higher brain. In elementary
school he was painfully shy and physically awkward at sports. In contrast, his twin sister Anne was a natural athlete from a young age. When he found himself being picked on by the bullies in the schoolyard, Anne stepped in to fight his battles. It became frustrating that a girl was defending him, and a stronger girl at that.

More important was the frustrated fight-or-flight response, because neither side was succeeding. Running away makes a small child lose his sense of pride; getting beat up is humiliating. Yet in a strange way Rudy was duplicating a primal evolutionary problem. Early humans had to figure out how to live together; they couldn’t form a society if they ran away every time adrenaline dictated flight or if they engaged in bloody combat every time adrenaline showed its other side and dictated fight. Rudy had to find a way to solve the same social dilemma. Little by little, as other boys picked on him, he found himself increasingly employing his intellect.

At first the main help was tactical. One time in third grade a bully provoked a fight. The bully hopped onto Rudy’s back, pounding away. Anne watched from the sidelines, ready to jump in. But Rudy, instead of panicking and trying to throw him off, had an idea. He noticed a large oak tree behind them and ran backward toward it as fast as he could, pinning the bully against the tree. With the wind knocked out of him, the bully fell off onto the frozen ground and collapsed. With the memory stuck in his mind, that particular boy never bothered Rudy again. In other words, while Rudy’s instinctive and emotional brains had warned him of the urgency of the situation, for the first time his intellectual brain had devised a tactic that was neither fight nor flight.