Our brain has not been built for us, it comes from a series of preserved adaptive successes, modules, parts, systems that come from evolution, which explain 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 naive that all of the sets of characteristics inherited within the anatomical and functional structure common to all animals with skulls will not participate in who we are. We have no arguments to deny that we are animals. The flat worms at the bottom of the sea had already invented the neurons, this system helps them to coordinate actions.
We have a history that can be traced back 550 million years through the evolution of nervous system components.
The brain is a whole, an inseparable unit: brain, body and environment, present and past, familiar and ancestral, functioning in its three domains in an instantaneous and constant interaction, absolutely inseparable. Within this whole, the mind is formed, although we do not know how.
The brain is predictive, it anticipates: It 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 just under our noses, to the present. Those hominids of two million years ago, or a million years ago, or forty thousand years ago, were in a hurry, urgent, harassed by day to day, full of dangers, inclement weather, and with a very short life expectancy. That brain remained and serves us currently. That 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, of the fanatics, of the misadjusted. We do not hear our politicians talk about the education that we need for the challenges that await us, nor about climate change, nor about doing, as in any company, an audit on the functioning of bureaucracy, so that it is cheap, efficient, technified and to facilitate the life of the citizen. They and we are watching and analyzing from our groups of so limited belonging all circulating at night with the short lights of this legislature, of our ideology and of our belonging.
Each brain that makes predictions will be influenced by other brains and it will be able to influence others
Principle exploited by marketing with «the new format, the new model, the latest generation, progressive project». We live with automatisms and internal representations that are going to be the guides of our decisions.
The need to interpret reality with thick strokes in order to be able to decide in that environment of depredation or ephemeral opportunities had to be grasped 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 that they coincide to save energy. Through all defence mechanisms we maintain our personal construction of the world, our identity, beliefs, phobias and philosophies. From the beginning of evolution, brains were created to decide between black and white; entertaining in details that could cost us our live and we have preserved it in the present mind. They see why simplicities, lies, hoaxes, disqualifications, left- and right-wingers, the powerful that so fascinate some frustrated politician because he has not been able to reach the sky, the facades, or the banks and capitalism. All that amalgam has accompanied us since the beginning of civilization until now and all this arsenal of emotions of the caverns are used as destructive weapons of the coexistence and against the deep and true understanding of facts.
This has weighed us down, because this biological need, passed on to our psychology, places us in a position to simplify, to eliminate good and bad nuances. With very little interest or capacity for the complex that prevents quick decisions. A meeting had to last a few hours in which the party explained its program, this is not done because we do not have mental capacity, nor interest, nor desire to know. We are emotionally in the caves of Altamira, and those needed simple things to get out and live. The changes in nature, in the brains need millions of years to take place, the 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 simplified summaries that we use for everything, among others about ourselves and the world around us. The brain compares these summaries with the new that is presented to it with the intention that they coincide and it is not necessary to change of opinion nor of position: I already know this! I already knew that! We are programmed to be paranoid, where did you leave my socks? Create an outside enemy and they will follow you. «Society has…! In my house we always vote for…» «I will vote for this party until I die. Try to blame guilt outside and stimulate our simplicity and we will vote for you. Influenced by simplicity and by finding the culprits of… «The fires in the Canaries have been the fault of capitalism», a distanced way of destroying and missing the truth, but explainable by my naration.
The brain looks for contrasts that give it a thick outline of simplicity, because the complex does not allow quick decisions and evades extra time that results in waiting that can become an added danger by demanding expensive mental work in terms of energy.
The creation of great 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 programs because humans would not concentrate on studying them; and, for the rest, politics must have the emotional characteristics of religion. See North Korea and the efforts of today’s communists to achieve something similar, because Fidel, Maduro and the rest of the group have been left half-hearted.
José Antonio Rodríguez Piedrabuena
Specialist in Psychiatry and Psychoanalysis