Heroes Not Zombies

Well, these little guys got me thinking. They just sat there doing this motionless three way meeting thing in the sun.
I thought look at the three lizard minds meeting!
And of course that set me off on thinking about the three brains we each have, and how only one of them is a lizard mind! You know that model?
You can think of the human brain as having three distinct waves of evolution, each with its own main area of responsibility and each, intricately connected to the other two. We use all three all the time.
The oldest one is what people call the lizard brain. It’s the brain stem. The deepest and, in evolutionary terms, the oldest part of the brain. It’s the part at the top of the spinal cord and its all about survival. The autonomic nervous system spins out from here (its the accelerator and the brake system which produces, respectively, the fight or flight, and the rest and digest, responses to immediate threats. In fact those are the brain stem’s main duties – to control the heart rate, the breathing rate, the release of sugars and energy and so on. It’s our survival centre. It’s also involved in the production of emotions through its links to the second brain, the limbic system. Some people call the limbic system the mammalian brain, because mammals have it. It has a number of main tasks, primarily associated with memory processing, attraction, and the production of emotions. The big bit on the top, the cerebral cortex, split into left and right hemispheres, is the youngest part in evolutionary terms. It’s a great co-ordinator, analyser, synthesiser, map maker and thinker. This is the bit where we seem to get conscious thought from.
Ok, that’s a VERY simplified account, but I wanted to whet your appetite and hopefully make you curious to become more aware of what’s going on inside your head. We can learn to become more aware of these different areas and their processes and through their intimate two way massive links between each other, and between the brain and the body, we can begin to understand why it makes no sense to create a false model which posits that we can think of the brain and the body as separate. We can’t separate them. What goes on in one part affects all the other parts.
And how do we begin to claim we understand illness when we don’t understand yet what good mental and physical health is (I didn’t even like writing that last phrase because I just don’t think you can divide things between “mental” and “physical” that way)
The other thing I thought, in my meeting of the lizard brains rumination, was thank goodness we don’t have three lizard brains in our heads! Thank goodness, that instead, we have something much more complex, much more evolved, which allows us to experience the world in such unique and intricate ways. I do love uncovering some of the patterns in there by listening to people’s stories and seeing them in the contexts of their lives.
It’s an amazing world. Full of incredible creatures, all so inextricably connected in so many ways……I think we are only just beginning to realise that.