The human brains did not evolve from reptilian brains by developing additional parts to house emotion. We don't have an inner snake or an emotional monkey to controlThe same is true of some courses, which, however, do not really question anything personal or company-related.
The idea of snake or monkey is just a source of income for these courses based on something totally discarded in neuroscience, i.e. the brain considered triune: reptilian, mammalian and human neocortex. Our task as humans is to to take seriously that we are animals, whose evolutionary origin goes back to multicellular beings..
Our brains are no more evolved than those of a rat or a lizard: they are only has evolved differentlyto navigate in different contexts. It is a network of 128 billion neurons (counted by optical fractionator) connected as a single, massive and flexible structure, a set of interconnected components that function as a unit. Neurons that are so diverse that they have not been described in their entirety. In addition to other cells involved in transmission, defence, nutrition and other tasks.
Therefore, it is not true that we only use the 10% of the same because functions as a whole, managing its own and the whole body's processes and functions.. With millions of different and simultaneous, changing patterns of activity.
Patterns such as memory, emotions, perception, decision-making, pain, moral judgements, imagination, language and empathy. And rage, revenge, creativity, culture creation and all imaginable perversions. Animalists would do well to understand that what our brains have created is far removed from the rest of living beings, subject to ingenious, intelligent, brilliant routines, but from which they can draw no consequences, no flexibility, no variables, no self-criticism. They should understanding the complexity of civilisation and culture. Unique work not available to other animals.
The brain controls the infinite and regulated metabolic mechanisms by which our life on earth is governed, i.e. the management of water, salt, glucose, the hormonal system, mental and convivial life, health and disease, etc.
It manages night and day the body's resources, administering them through subtle intercellular, intracellular and intersystem communication signals.. From this perspective, rationality, the smart thing to do is to spend or save our resources in order to stay alive and healthy. Taking care of ourselves and our global environment would be the rational and intelligent thing to do. That is intelligent and rational behaviour. There is an obvious collective intelligence deficit.
The brains of all mammals are built from a single "blueprint". So the human brain has no added parts. The size of our cerebral cortex, then, is not evolutionarily novel, nor does it require any special explanation. Nor does size say anything about how rational and intelligent we are. It seems that shape does. The brain is organised as a modular system in constant interaction with the environment and our bodies..
The brains of all species have a structure common to our own to perform many complex behaviours: they all need to process sensory information, learn, select actions, navigate their environments, choose food, recognise conspecifics, escape from predators, and so on. Our cortex is just an enlarged version of the relatively smaller cortex found in an animal..
We have the same unspoken capabilities found in bacteria: the only variety of intelligence on which most living things have depended and continue to depend. An intelligence that is hidden from mental inspection. Hidden capacity that aims only to sustain life.
Life without words or thoughts, without feelings or reasons, devoid of mind and consciousness, with automatic mechanisms for survival and adaptation, the unconscious.
Rationality has been considered to be the absence of emotion: thought is considered rational, while emotion is supposedly irrational. Another cultural myth, for all thought stems from some emotion. Ideologies are emotions, which are coated with many masks of reality.
We don't have the brains of a reptile or a monkey, because we are identical to any animalWe are animals, subject to the same rules of survival: for example, demarcation and defence of territory. But our species has used lethal methods, as we see in Ukraine, and fights for territory that animals will never use. Nor hatred, fanaticism of the holders of truths, nor rapists, and the whole range of behaviours that show that our species, in these manifestations, is very far from animals... for the worse.
We are a superorganism, a metagenome - the sum of the genomes - only one per cent of our genes are human, the rest are contributed by bacteria, parasites, viruses, yeasts that are all over the body. We are the result of the sum of human genes and the genes of the microbiome..
We are culture, history, ethical principles, family, civilisation and when some crazy, fanatical people attack any of these components, they undermine and unbalance our most intimate structure.
*José Antonio Rodríguez Piedrabuena is a specialist in Psychiatry and Psychoanalysis, and in management training, group and couple therapies.