Super Brain (15 page)

Spectacular examples like these can be daunting, but evolution is universal, open to all. The brain is unique among all bodily organs in being able to evolve personally, here and now. A five-year-old learning to read is evolving, as viewed from the physiology of the brain; he is laying down new pathways to give physical reality to the words of a Mother Goose rhyme. The adult brain is evolving when a person learns to manage anger, fly a jet, or develop compassion. The rich possibility of change demonstrates how evolution really works.

The Four-part Brain

Right now the scientific balance is tilted in the direction of brain over mind. Neuroscience uses the two words interchangeably, as if “I changed my mind” could be restated as “I changed my brain.” But the brain has neither will nor intention; only the mind does. The brain also has no free will, even though the higher brain organizes choices and decisions. Neuroscience tries to simplify things by ascribing all human behavior to the brain. One sees journalistic articles about the “Brain in Love” and “God in the Neurons,” which promotes the false assumption that the brain is responsible for love and faith.

To us, this is a mistake. When you hear static on the radio, you don’t say, “There’s something wrong with Beethoven.” You know the difference between a mind (Beethoven’s) and the receiver that brings that mind into the physical world (a radio). Neuroscientists are highly intellectual, sometimes brilliant people. Why don’t they recognize such a basic difference?

A big part of the reason is materialism, the worldview that insists upon all causes being physical. Mind isn’t physical, but if you sweep mind aside, you can study the brain on purely physical grounds. We hope we are making headway in convincing you that the brain exists to be used by the mind. Yet we must concede that evolution, working through genes, has structured the brain, giving you a receiving instrument broken down into definite parts. Our main thrust is that you can guide your own evolution, but on the way we must give credit to all the physical evolution that has already occurred.

For simplicity, we are going to divide the functions of your brain into four phases:

Instinctive

Emotional

Intellectual

Intuitive

These are the four ways that our minds work, as described by Satguru Sivaya Subramuniyaswami in
Merging with Siva
, a book that inspired and made a strong impression on Rudy as he was beginning to explore how ancient traditions of mind might relate to what we know about the brain today. For the human journey, evolution began with the instinctive parts of the brain (the reptilian brain, which is hundreds of millions of years old), then continued with the appearance of the part of the brain responsible for all emotions (the limbic system), and unfolded most recently to reach the higher functions of thinking (represented by the neocortex, which first appears in mammals and no previous animals). In humans, the neocortex forms 90 percent of the overall cortex. The neuroscientist Paul D. MacLean first proposed this “triune brain” in the 1960s. No one has successfully located the structure of the brain that supports intuition, and many neuroscientists would rather sweep the whole issue under the carpet. It is inconvenient for brain research that God is not, in fact, in the neurons; nor is art, music, a sense of beauty and truth, along with many other of our most valued experiences. However, since such experiences have been valued since the dawn of civilization, we include them in our four-part scheme. They must be, if we are to unriddle the brain at all levels of consciousness, from preprogrammed instinctive reactions to the visions of enlightened teachers who change the world.

The Instinctive Phase of the Brain

One-celled organisms that are billions of years old can respond to their environment; many, for example, swim toward the light. From these beginnings, the oldest phase of the brain evolved, the instinctive brain. It corresponds to behavior that is programmed by our genome expressly for the purpose of survival. Hundreds of millions of years of evolution have refined instinct. As massive as dinosaurs were, their behavior required only pea brains, no bigger than a walnut or apricot.

DIAGRAM 2: THE TRIUNE BRAIN

In the triune (three-part) model of the brain, the oldest part is the reptilian brain, or brain stem, designed for survival. It houses vital control centers for breathing, swallowing, and heartbeat, among other things. It also prompts hunger, sex, and the fight-or-flight response.

The limbic system was next to evolve. It houses the emotional brain and short-term memory. Emotions based on fear and desire evolved to serve the instinctive drives of the reptilian brain.

The most recent development is the neocortex, the region for intellect, decision making, and higher reasoning. As our reptilian and limbic brains drive us to do what we need for survival, the neocortex represents the intelligence to achieve our ends while also placing restraints on our emotions and instinctive impulses. Most important for super brain, the neocortex is the center for self-awareness, free will, and choice, making us the user and potentially the master of the brain.

Creatures that possess only this phase of the brain, like birds, can nonetheless display very complex behavior. Reptilian its brain may be, but an African gray parrot can mimic hundreds of words, and if current research is correct, it actually understands what the words mean. But if you gaze into the eyes of lizards and ostriches, frogs and eagles, you will detect no emotion. This vacancy can appear frightening, because we equate it with the merciless strike of a cobra or the pounce of predator on prey. Instinct preceded emotion on the evolutionary ladder.

The instinctive brain provides the natural impulses of the physical body that drive self-preservation, such as hunger, thirst, and sexuality. (When one writer referred to sexual craving as “skin hunger,” his frankness was quite accurate in terms of the instinctual brain.) It includes entirely unconscious processes, too, like the regulation of the digestive system and the circulatory system—basically every bodily function that occurs automatically.

The anxiety that permeates modern society partially stems from our instinctive brain, tirelessly compelling us to pay attention to impulses of fear as if our survival depended on it. You won’t die from a visit to the dentist, and other parts of the brain intervene so that fear doesn’t impel you to jump out of the dentist’s chair and run away. But the instinctive brain only knows how to pump out the impulse, not how to judge it.

If you observe yourself, you’ll notice that the truce you’ve made with the instinctive brain is uneasy. Trying to ignore its impulses makes you restless, insecure, and anxious. Rudy remembers a time early in his college years, shortly after he lost his father to a heart attack. He was writing in his journal incessantly about the overwhelming feelings of anxiety and the cravings that dominate our teenage years. As postpubescent hormones surged, Rudy was baffled by his inability to ignore them. (The famous American food writer M.F.K. Fisher relays an anecdote about a man, grief-stricken by his wife’s sudden death, who drove up and down
the Pacific Coast Highway, stopping at every roadside diner and ordering a steak.)

Rudy intellectually knew that his anxiety-driven craving to go out and party with his friends all freshman year came from an irrational need for social acceptance, external validation, and stature among his peers. But he could not resist the urge to party when he should have been studying. Freshman year turned into a seemingly never-ending battle to somehow find the discipline to stay back at the library and study, while his instinctual brain won most of the victories.

Anxiety retained the upper hand until matters came to a head in 1979, during his senior year. It was New Year’s Eve in Times Square. Rudy was part of the jostling crowd. The feeling in the air was palpably tense. The Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran was holding fifty-two Americans hostage. Bands of youths shouted curses against Iran and threw beer bottles. Rudy wandered away from his fraternity brothers and sat on the sidewalk, leaning against the rails of the subway entrance, feeling his anxiety peaking with the aggression all around him.

In such moments of personal crisis, just when the instinctive brain seems to have the upper hand, a radical shift may occur. Soldiers in battle may experience a sudden inner calm and silence as shells explode all around them. At this moment in Times Square, Rudy realized that all his anxiety was rooted in the basic impulses of fear and desire. Fear created doubt about how secure he was. Desire created appetites that demanded satisfaction, even when the circumstances were inappropriate.

Without yet knowing how the brain’s circuitry is seamlessly integrated (the discovery lay decades ahead), Rudy could feel in himself that this was true. Fear and desire aren’t strangers to each other—they are linked. Fear fuels the desire for activities that will alleviate fear; reciprocally, desire creates the fear that you can’t, or shouldn’t, get what your appetites demand. We turn to scientists and
poets to validate the conflicts that the instinctive phase of our brain creates. Freud spoke of the power of unconscious drives for sex and aggression; these nameless forces are so primitive that he labeled them
id
(“it” in Latin). Id is powerful, and Freud’s slogan for curing his patients was “Where Id is, Ego shall be.” The world constantly witnesses the destructive power of our primal drives. Fear and aggression are waiting to storm the gates of reason.

Shakespeare looked at himself running after women and called lust “the expense of spirit in a waste of shame.” That sonnet could serve as a lesson in brain anatomy, since it maps out the conflict between impulse and reason.

The expense of spirit in a waste of shame

Is lust in action; and till action, lust

Is perjured, murderous, bloody, full of blame,

Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust.

There could hardly be a more accurate description of primitive drives and how people behave when sex overwhelms everything else. If two bighorn sheep butting heads in rutting season wrote poetry, they’d describe their ungoverned urges like this. But being human, Shakespeare looked back upon lust with remorse:

Enjoyed no sooner but despised straight;

Past reason hunted; and no sooner had,

Past reason hated, as a swallowed bait.

He compares himself to an animal that has been lured by bait set in a trap. The satisfaction of lust has brought a new perspective, one of self-reproach. (We have no evidence that Shakespeare had a mistress, but he was a married man who had fathered a daughter and newborn twins when he left his family behind in Stratford to seek his fortune in London in 1585.)

Why was the trap laid? Shakespeare doesn’t blame women. He says the trap was laid by our nature, to drive us mad:

Mad in pursuit, and in possession so …

A bliss in proof, and proved, a very woe
.

He has stepped from the instinctive brain into the emotional brain, which evolved next. Elizabethan poets were always in some high passion, whether of love or hate. But Shakespeare has indulged his feelings enough, and now the higher brain is invoked. It looks at all this mad behavior and delivers a sad moral:

All this the world well knows; yet none knows well

To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell
.

In moments when we are divided, the brain can physically represent every aspect of our mental war. To Rudy, at that moment in Times Square, the setup that causes fear and desire to rule behavior seemed crystal clear. The unruly street kids yelling at Iran and smashing bottles were also himself, even though he was a passive bystander. Fear and desire drove them. An instinctive desire for power and status, as any good psychologist will tell you, creates anxiety driven by the fear of rejection and loss of power. Too intense a desire for success leads to stronger fears of failure, and if fear rises, it can create failure. The instinctive brain traps us between wanting something too much and not getting it at all.

As with any phase of the brain, instincts can go out of balance.

If you are too impulsive, your anger, fear, and desire will run out of control. This leads to rash actions and regret afterward.

If you control your impulses too much, your life becomes cold and repressed. This leads to a lack of bonding with others and with your own basic drives.

ESSENTIAL POINTS: YOUR INSTINCTIVE BRAIN