Forget Everything You Thought You Knew About the Brain

We’ve written before about humans essentially being cave people with computers. Our brains evolved to keep us safe and help us find food, and these same brains make our purchasing decisions today. If you don’t like being compared to a cave person, well, then you’re really going to hate Lisa Feldman Barrett’s 7½ Lessons About the Brain. Barrett’s book ends with, “Once upon a time, you were a little stomach on a stick, floating in the sea.” Caveperson doesn’t sound so bad anymore, does it?

7½ HIGHLIGHTS OF 7½ LESSONS

Barrett’s book is a short and fascinating read on what she considers most interesting about the brain. In telling us what she finds most interesting, she also makes a point of sharing how little we really know about the brain. Beyond that, however, she sets us straight on some oft-shared brain myths.

What stood out to me while reading the book is just how strange and complex the brain and its evolution are. Occam’s razor tells us that the simplest explanation for something is generally the best, but neurobiology seems to break this rule again and again. (William of Ockham lived in the 14th century, so we can’t really blame him for his lack of chops in neuroscience.)

Ready to have your mind blown?

• Your brain network might reach to your gut and intestines, where researchers have found microbes that communicate with your brain through neurotransmitters.
• Human brains don’t finish morphing into their adult version until 25 years of age (a great excuse for all the stupid things you did in your early 20s).
• A baby’s genes are not only impacted by their surrounding environment, but by extra genes introduced by “bacteria and other critters” that affect the brain. (WHAT OTHER CRITTERS???)
• We’ve all heard of Ivan Pavlov’s research with dogs and bells, right? We all heard wrong. Pavlov used a metronome.
• If you experience social stress within an hour of a meal, your body metabolizes the food in a way that adds 104 calories. By my calculations, I could survive on stress alone.
• If you eat the good fat, like the kind in nuts, within a day of being stressed, your body metabolizes the food as if it’s full of bad fat. This is why I’ve replaced my handful of almonds between meals with Slim Jims and ice cream.
• How come language can impact us so much? It’s because the many parts of the brain that process language also control your major organs.
• Last, and only counting for one half since we’ve written about it before, you do not have a lizard brain, or even a part of the brain that is human- or mammal-specific.

YOU’RE ONE COMPLEX WORM

Part of Barrett’s purpose in this book seems to be changing the way we think about the brain entirely. The question of “Why did our brains evolve?” isn’t the question we should be asking, because there is no answer to that question. Our brains did not evolve for a purpose because evolution does not act with purpose. We can only say what the most critical role of the brain is—allostasis. Allostasis is science-speak for getting what you need to survive and not getting eaten by something else in the process.

Hundreds of millions of years ago, there were no predators. Only in the Cambrian period did creatures become able to sense and deliberately eat other creatures. There were still no brains to speak of, but the emergence of predators and the interplay between predators and prey favored those animals that were better at sensing things in their environment, whether to eat it or not get eaten by it. “Once upon a time, you were a little stomach on a stick, floating in the sea.”

My explanation is missing some detail, but basically the emergence of hunting resulted in animals becoming more complex, which eventually required that their body have some kind of “command center” or brain. “Command center” is a metaphor, just like “stomach on a stick” is a metaphor for the tiny, worm-like creature that floated in the sea 550 million years ago.

We often use metaphors to explain complex ideas and systems. Neurobiologists have used many metaphors to help them explain the brain, in fact, which is great for helping people like us understand the brain. Until it comes back to bite us in the behind (which also emerged 550 million years ago, in case you were wondering).

THIS IS YOUR BRAIN ON METAPHORS

You’ve probably heard that the left side of your brain is logical, while the right side is creative. That’s a metaphor. Maybe you’ve heard that your brain has one system dedicated to instinct and a second system that handles the more thoughtful processing. Also a metaphor.

Is the brain a computer, or just like a computer? That one is currently being debated by scientists, but the fact that in the 17th century there was a hydraulic brain model and in the 18th century there was a machine model leads me to suspect that the computer model is likely not perfect.

So, what is your brain? What can we say for sure? It’s a network of billions of neurons. It’s not like a network—it is a network. You might be thinking, “Who cares?” Why does it matter whether a brain is a computer or is just like a computer? It matters because it changes what we think people should be capable of.

We believe in eyewitness testimony because we believe that memories are stored as data files (like a computer!) in our brains. That’s not the case. There is reconstruction going on every time you recall a memory. Reconstruction allows distortion.

For the next two weeks, we’ll dive deeper into some of the ideas presented in Lisa Feldman Barrett’s book. How does our understanding (or misunderstanding) of the brain impact how we see people and judge their actions? How does it impact how we think about ourselves? How does our brain create our reality, and what might it be getting wrong? We’ve come a long way from “stomach on a stick,” but our brains aren’t perfect, and there is much we simply still don’t understand.

We can’t help you with brain critters, but we can help with sales. Contact us at mastery@maestrogroup.co.