Our brains were not built for usThe brain comes from a series of conserved adaptive successes, modules, parts, systems that come from way back in evolution, which explains why we are the way we are. Moreover, the structure of our brain is common to all animals that have vertebrae. We cannot be so naïve that this whole set of inherited characteristics within the anatomical and functional structure common to all animals with skulls would not participate in what we are. We have no argument to deny that we are animals. The flatworms at the bottom of the sea had already invented neurons, this system served them to coordinate actions.
We are a story that goes back 550 million years of evolution of the components of the nervous system.
The brain is a whole, an inseparable unitBrain, body and environment, present and past, familiar and ancestral, functioning in their three domains in an instantaneous and constant interaction, absolutely inseparable. Within this ensemble the mind is produced, although we do not know how.
The brain is predictive, it anticipatesIt takes measurements based on its predictions of movements from the senses and from the mind. But with this brain common to all those who have skulls, our predictions and theirs are usually limited to what is in front of our noses, to the present. Those hominids of two million years ago, or one million, or forty thousand years ago, were pressed, urged, harassed by the day to day, full of dangers, inclemencies, and with a very short life expectancy. That brain remained and is in our current brain. This lack of predictive capacity is behind all the addicts, the electoral proposals for this campaign, the lack of prediction of the future of the sedentary, the fanatics, the maladjusted. We do not hear our politicians talking about education for the challenges that await us, nor about climate change, nor about auditing the functioning of the bureaucracy, as in any company, to make it cheap, efficient, technified and to facilitate the life of the citizen. They and we, watching and analysing from our very limited groups of belonging, all of us circulating at night with the short lights of this legislature, of our ideology and of our belonging.
Every brain that makes predictions will be influenced by other brains and it will in turn influence other brains.
Principle exploited by marketing with "the new format, the new model, the latest generation, progressive project". We live with automatisms and internal representations that will guide our decisions.
Need to interpret reality in broad strokes in order to be able to make decisions In that environment of predation or ephemeral opportunities, they had to be seized without delay. And with the addition that the senses do not offer a literal reading of the world, because the brain interprets according to stored contents, seeking to match them in order to save energy. We maintain through all the defence mechanisms our personal construction of the world, our identity, beliefs, phobias and philias. From the beginning of evolution, brains were created that had to decide between black and white; to dwell on details could cost one's life and we have preserved this in today's mind. You can see why simplisms, lies, hoaxes, disqualifications, those on the left and those on the right, the powerful who so fascinate some frustrated politician because he has not been able to reach heaven, the façades, or the banks and capitalism. All this amalgam has accompanied us from the beginning of civilisation until now and all this arsenal of cave emotions are used as weapons to destroy coexistence and against a deep and true understanding of the facts.
This has weighed us down, because this biological need, passed on to our psychology, places us in a situation of simplifying, of eliminating good and bad nuances. With very little interest or capacity for the complex that prevented quick decisions. A rally was supposed to last a few hours in which the party explained its programme; this is not done because we have no mental capacity, no interest, no desire to know it. We are emotionally in the caves of Altamira, and those people needed simple things to go out and live. Changes in nature, in brains need millions of years to take place, genes do not vote for any party and in this the progressives continue to deceive us. Basic emotional attitude, we have already said it as a deficiency perfectly exploited by demagogues, slogans, political proposals, persecutions and exclusions. They are successful because we have inside us simplified summaries that we use for everything, among others about ourselves and the world around us. The brain compares these summaries with the new things that are presented to it, so that they coincide and there is no need to change our opinion or position: I already know this, I already knew that, I already knew that! We are programmed to be paranoid, Where did you leave my socks? Create an external enemy and they will follow you. "Society has made me...! In my house we always vote for..." "I'll vote for so-and-so until I die." Try to shift the blame outside and stimulate our simplicities and we will vote for you. Influenced by simplicities and finding the culprits of... "The fires in the Canary Islands have been the fault of capitalism", a "bastard" way of destroying and failing to tell the truth, but explicable by what I am narrating.
The brain looks for contrasts that give it a rough outline of the simple, because the complex does not allow for quick decisions and it avoids that which requires time in which waiting can be an added danger by demanding costly mental work in terms of energy.
The creation of large categories of functioning through dual thinking..., stayed with us. Thus we already have the basis of electoral propaganda, which will never be the detailed exposition of programmes because humans would not concentrate on studying them; and, otherwise, politics must have the emotional characteristics of religion. See North Korea and the efforts of the current communists to come up with something similar, because Fidel, Maduro and the rest of the bunch have fallen short of the mark.
José Antonio Rodríguez Piedrabuena
Specialist in Psychiatry and Psychoanalysis