Our brains are not looking for the truth, but for everything to be coherent is what is true for them. And they become entrenched there. Once we are committed to something coherent, all the potential of our mind begins to mobilise, which will defend that coherence as the truth. It will no longer be necessary to continue expending energy, or to modify the architecture of the brain, or to activate the entire genetic arsenal, since that would mean changing or learning.
Highly specialised neural circuits composed of many cell types with diverse molecular, anatomical and physiological properties, multiple regions and sub-regions, each comprising many types of neurons, are involved in change and learning. In addition, our emotional systems will oppose change.
Maintaining our bodily existence, learning and changing require a lot of energy. A small example is that every four months red blood cells are completely replaced, skin cells are replaced every few weeks. After seven years or so, another body will have been made, cell by cell. with their corresponding organs. But the brain escapes these rules, which in its enormous flexibility will retain the same neurons, to which it will add some newly manufactured cells, precisely the ones we need to learn.
All species are in a spatial niche, an environment that has allowed us our existence within which we have built our identity. That is why we only feel and see the local, our community, our militancy. What is not in our niche, we either don't see it or we devalue it, or we see it as a threat.. The more immature we are, the more we feel threatened by those who do not coincide with our own. Legislation is made from cities for the countryside and wildlife, and for humans from ideologies that are a niche, in general, to preserve our truths.
All brains have a limitation, they cannot migrate to another concept, another point of view, other militancy because the complex emotional system holds them back. It is as much as to say that we do not see, nor do we understand what is outside our life and our space, the foundations of our identity.
What our brain needs
This brain limitation gives rise to fanaticismThe brain, ideological interpretation, extremism, clinging to routines, to what is already known, to addictions. Our brain generates its own reality, even before it receives information from the senses. We go into reality expecting to match the outside with what we have stored in our memories. We don't recognise anything that we don't already know about. And what little we do see we have tied to our emotional system.
What we experience through any of the senses, such as what we see, is based not so much on the arrival of any reality, but on what we have recorded in our brains. So what we we function by seeking external confirmation of what we believe inWe militate, or feel, what we know, to save energy, and we use a battery of defences and resistances to reject change.
We simply explore, hear, see to find more details to feed and confirm our internal model. We look for what our brain needs, something that has coherence in order to be able to believe, to be a military force, to be managed. It may be coherent for some to dismantle, to empty others of content in order to eliminate them. We no longer kill, but denigrate a father or a son, a fascist, a Christian, a black person.
This means that All animals process only the minimum amount of information necessary to move through the world.. The clichés, the slogans, the closed ideologies, the prejudices; everything whose source and origin is in the emotional system and which we try to confirm.
Because the emotional world is rigid, it has consolidated its keys from millions of years of evolution, plus what has shaped experience in the home, adolescence and the rest of our lives. Our genes determine half of who we areThe rest are internalised environments, in permanent change of brain modules, which is what we call neuronal plasticity.
Preserving our identity
All the processes of our emotional world are there to stay alive, to survive. It has been demonstrated by neuroscience that any decision, experience, belief, thought, personal manifestations are there to survive, from emotions to archaic models common to all animals. Everything we do, think, our intellectual system, projects, in short, all human life is conditioned and guided by this biological "intelligence" common to all species. They are the central core of our emotions. In our case, with the 80% of decisions outside the conscience, they are more a rational discourse generally justifying them.
If I don't listen, if I disqualify, if I take it for granted, it is because we cannot be relearning reality every day.We can neither learn again what we have lived, because extending it produces a genetic and cerebral metabolic revolution, an alteration of communications and cerebral circuits, an expenditure of energy that all living things try to avoid. Hence the routines, so effective in all organisms, in social institutions, but which can be destructive in us and at the origin of many of our ills... like all addictions.
There is not a single human being who is not conservative and clings to what he has built up as a result of his life experience in his family group, his social environment, his militancy and his addictions. Although some consider themselves to be inhabitants of the best, truest, most moral militancy, and try to impugn those who are not in their idealised world, if they do not try to impose it by force.
This gives us an idea that the emotional system is very closed, it does not change, because it shares cranial structures, management structures, with all animals with skulls. And because we need something to maintain our mental structure, our identity, even if it has nothing to do with reality, or if it is a delusional, fanatical belief system, or even contrary to our existence..
On the other hand, we have lived for half a million years in small groups that structured our brains, and in the last nine thousand years we became sedentary. These are not enough to change that structure. We did not need the global during those early millennia, nor was it perceived. Emotional, collective life has changed little, hence the brain resorts to populism as a collective sedative, to return to the atavism that coexisted with our existence from the earliest stages of development to the present-day human that should be sapiens. Our brain has been evolving in very limited data and space until a few millennia ago. It takes many generations to change all this, nine thousand years is not enough..
Experience and objective reality
No one possesses an objective experience of reality: each creature perceives only what its brain has consolidated through its experience.. We tend to look, listen, understand in a superficial way and misinterpret it for our mental stability. It is difficult to shake off the feeling that this superficial observation of what we have seen is reality.
The accumulation of these false realities colours our beliefs and actions by managing them out of consciousness, even if we rebel against this fact, already demonstrated by neuroscience, and even if we pompously talk about change management.
This semi-autonomous, unconscious functioning allows us to remain blissfully unaware of self-criticism and rectification. Neuroscience shows us that our life is the end product of these networks that circulate within the primitive brain outside of consciousness, but which hold the keys to our life and survival. The unconscious brain has been elaborating ideas, consolidating memories, trying out new combinations, evaluating consequences for hours or months, years. What if all the fanatics, dictators, demagogues, denialists, arsonists... really saw what drives them?
*José Antonio Rodríguez Piedrabuena is a specialist in Psychiatry and Psychoanalysis, and in management training, group and couple therapies..