Battle Royale in the Brain
We all know how fear feels. And most of us probably don’t have to think too far back to remember the last time we felt fear. Maybe the boss was acting funny that day and you felt in danger of losing your job. Or maybe you were driving, thought you knew where you were going, and suddenly found yourself lost. Whatever the cause and whatever the setting, fear involves a high degree of activity in a particular part of the human brain, called the amygdala, often referred to colloquially as the “lizard brain.” Every human has one, and while some people are more conditioned than others to have an active amygdala, every one of us owes our existence in large part to this tiny part of our brains, for it is here that our survival instinct gets the most “air time” in our brains, and, by extension, our bodies.
At the other end of the spectrum is the cerebral cortex, the site of our inner poets. Here is where all of humanity’s refined judgments and accomplishments of the imagination are mustered: our dreams, our hopes, our plans. Our tolerant “best self” is here: the part of us that sees subtle shades of complexity and wants to understand more clearly. The part of us that listens, understands, forgives.
It should come as no surprise that the survival instinct lacks subtlety. It’s easy to forget that we all got here because our distant ancestors outcompeted a lot of rivals, and that while our higher-order thinking no doubt contributed immensely to our success, it must have come in handy for us not to have to empathize with, or contemplate the complexity of, whatever just made that rustling sound in the bushes. Smartly, our lizard brains taught us to…run away! Or stay and fight. Neither of which involved a meaningful meeting of the minds or talking out of our differences.
Yet we find ourselves now early in the 21st Century, in a world of immense complexity, coming into contact day in and day out with people who look different from us, talk different from us, dress and act and eat different from us. More and more, we live near and work with “different” people. Fleeing or fighting are still options, of course, and we often take one of these routes. Some political careers are built on actively advocating for one of these options.
But the lizard brain is not our salvation as a species. It has served an indispensable function for us, and will continue to have a vital role to play in keeping us alive in situations where it’s needed. True progress for our species depends, though, on honoring our poet.
Every last one of us has both. Who among us hasn’t had the experience, in calmer moments, perhaps with just the right music playing, or in just the right kind of light on a spring day, of feeling that anything is possible, that the world is expanse upon expanse of possibility, that there is hope for the world, and that everything might just turn out alright? And who among us hasn’t lived the precise opposite: doom, darkness, hopelessness? What we experience is largely a function of whether the lizard or the poet is running the show at any given moment.
This fundamental duality of humankind has provided fodder for philosophers, theologians, and artists of all stripes down through the ages. In the last decade of the 20th Century, a scholar by the name of Milton Bennett brought this duality powerfully into the budding field of intercultural communication. One of his most famous essays opens with:
Intercultural sensitivity is not natural. It is not part of our primate past, nor has it characterized most of human history. Cross-cultural contact usually has been accompanied by bloodshed, oppression, or genocide.[1]
Ruminate on that, and I'll be back next time with more.
[1] Milton Bennett, “Towards Ethnorelativism: A developmental model of intercultural sensitivity.” In M. Paige (Ed.) Education for the Intercultural Experience. Yarmouth, ME: Intercultural Press, 1993, pp. 21–71.