That is the crucial difference between these contrasting parts of the brain. The neo-cortex says ‘And? What’s it matter?’ But everything matters to the reptilian brain. It is neurotic on a scale that beggars belief and its affect on human behaviour, individually and collectively, simply cannot be overstated.
How many times in your life have you reacted emotionally or flown into a rage or panic about something when, as you look back, you can see that what wound you up so powerfully didn’t really matter ‘with hindsight’. Sometimes this can happen within seconds or minutes when you start to regret what you did and said and realise that you ‘over-reacted’.
Exactly. ‘Over-reaction’ means the control of your sense of reality by the reptilian brain/amygdala and ‘with hindsight’ is the neo-cortex calmly thinking things through. Human behaviour, however, is dominated by the reptilian brain reaction system overpowering the neo-cortex. People don’t think most of the time, they react.
This leads to constant conflicts between people and, collectively, it means wars and other horrors that come from emotional reaction and not thinking things through.
Those who supported the invasion of Iraq were systematically triggered in their emotional centres by the propaganda of the Bush-Cheney regime. ‘Yeah, Saddam Hussein, is a danger to the world, we gotta get him’, said the reptilian brain with its survival responses activated by a manufactured threat.
How many times in your life have you reacted emotionally or flown into a rage or panic about something when, as you look back, you can see that what wound you up so powerfully didn’t really matter ‘with hindsight’. Sometimes this can happen within seconds or minutes when you start to regret what you did and said and realise that you ‘over-reacted’.
Exactly. ‘Over-reaction’ means the control of your sense of reality by the reptilian brain/amygdala and ‘with hindsight’ is the neo-cortex calmly thinking things through. Human behaviour, however, is dominated by the reptilian brain reaction system overpowering the neo-cortex. People don’t think most of the time, they react.
This leads to constant conflicts between people and, collectively, it means wars and other horrors that come from emotional reaction and not thinking things through.
Those who supported the invasion of Iraq were systematically triggered in their emotional centres by the propaganda of the Bush-Cheney regime. ‘Yeah, Saddam Hussein, is a danger to the world, we gotta get him’, said the reptilian brain with its survival responses activated by a manufactured threat.
The neo-cortex would realise that Saddam was not a danger to the United States and see through the ludicrous ‘logic’ of ‘freeing’ the people of Iraq from tyranny by pepper-bombing them from the sky.
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