Are we slaves to our lizard brain?
I recently finished the book Charity & Sylvia. Amazon recommended it to me after I finished Gentleman Jack: The Real Ann Lister (Movie Tie-In). While I think Gentleman Jack is more entertaining to read, I can definitely recommend Charity & Sylvia, especially if you are interested in the history of female husbands in 18th and 19th century US.
But what does this have to do with lizard brains?
Inevitably, toward the end of their lives, they began to suffer a decline in health. The book goes into great detail regarding the various recipes, surgeries, and other remedies the women employed to improve their overall health and recover from various illnesses. As with Gentleman Jack, where I hear a diagnosis of hypothyroidism when I read about the symptoms ascribed to Ann Walker, I hear a diagnosis of heart disease when I read about Charity’s symptoms.
And the endless list of remedies, including such barbaric treatments as ingesting mercury and being bled by leeches, makes me quite thankful I live in an age of more modern medicine. Though there is a line in the book where someone states that the cure is worse than the illness and I couldn’t help but think of chemotherapy for cancer treatment.
But what struck me in the recounting of the efforts was what a small role science played in the process. It seemed that Sylvia and the doctors relied on anecdotal evidence when choosing a remedy. I’m sure someday in the future people will look back on our “modern” medicine and judge it as equally barbaric. At least I hope so.
Why?
I started thinking about #MAGA and the current war on science. Historically speaking, this is nothing new. Religious and political actors throughout history worked diligently and often violently to suppress scientific discovery and knowledge from reaching the masses. Women were beheaded for not producing sons. Scientists were burned at the stake for revealing that the earth revolves around the sun. Fear is a powerful motivator for anger and violence. But thanks to so many brave souls who literally risked their lives so that the truth would be known, scientific knowledge has expanded despite the fierce and bloody opposition to the truth. And this gives me hope.
Let’s look at one specific contemporary war on science–climate change. The predictions are grim. Some studies state that if the trend continues, we’ll reach the point of no return by 2050. Some predictions state that we’ve already reached the point of no return. Regardless, the earth’s climate is becoming increasingly less hospitable for most life, human behavior and consumption is the primary cause, and evolution can’t happen fast enough for species to adapt and survive.
I admit it. I’m afraid. It’s not like our daily lives will remain static until one day, poof, it all goes to hell. No, our living conditions will continue to worsen and more and more people will be adversely affected until…well the rest of that story is TBD, isn’t it?
Fear originates in our lizard brain, which sits on top of our spine and is tiny relative to the other two parts of our brain, the limbic, and the neo-cortex. And sub-conscious response happens long before conscious thought steps in, if it ever does. And as we are all aware, the lizard brain response to fear is binary–flight or fight.
And these binary responses track very neatly to the first two stages of grief, Denial (flight), Anger (fight). Now, I know that is a leap. And I know that many scientists have reported the 5 stages of grief to be a myth or at least not scientifically verified. And I’m going to go on record here stating that I’m relying upon the shaky ground of anecdotal evidence to form my theory. However, many theories started out in just this way. And I’m not in a position to fund or conduct a scientific study to prove or disprove my theory. If someone else conducts the research and disproves my theory, I will pledge to overcome my lizard brain and accept the research conclusions.
My theory goes a bit like this. Fear and our response to fear originate in our lizard brain. The two lizard brain responses are flight or fight. Climate change resulting in the extinction of our species (among others) initially evokes fear. But as we move from Denial and Anger into Bargaining and Depression, our limbic brain is beginning to engage with our sense of loss and grief. By the time we reach Acceptance, our neo-cortex, our conscious brain, has engaged.
Now, even Elisabeth Kübler-Ross acknowledges that the process was not neat, tidy, and linear. Even so, we cannot get to the business of problem-solving until the problem reaches our neo-cortex. Until we accept or believe in the reality of climate change, we not only won’t work on solutions, we can’t.
Trump and other strong men seeking totalitarian power will always win because fear is a lizard brain function and those who are attracted to totalitarian leaders are simply incapable of engaging their neo-cortex.