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Lizard Logic



Actually, there's no such thing as lizard logic. Lizards have teeny tiny brains capable of survival thinking: fight-or-flight, eating, and procreating.


That's it.


Which explains why behavioral scientists often refer to the limbic system of the human brain as our 'lizard brain.' When humans are behaving in instinctive survival mode, the limbic portion of the brain is at work. Lizard brain.

Interestingly, baser emotions like fear and anger are also centered in the limbic system. Makes sense, as fear and anger would most likely be manifest in the fight-or-flight mode. And seriously, when's the last time you saw anyone at their rational best when they're afraid or angry?


The prefrontal cortex is the feature of our brains responsible for higher-ordered thinking, reasoning, and problem solving. Because of the ability to reason, humans have the capacity to override the emotional response triggered in the limbic system.


This is worth considering when you look around for even a few minutes, and see more and more people respond emotionally first - so quickly it's almost Pavlovian. And since Pavlov's research involved conditioning a nearly reflexive response to related stimulus, to even make this observation begs the question: have we been conditioned to respond emotionally?


Has formal education indeed conditioned us to go straight into our lizard brain for response? I would also suggest the 24/7 stimuli of media/social media has aided and abetted in this training - and if that's true, the larger question is why? What purpose would be served to have the masses conditioned to remain in the most instinctive cognitive processes? The scriptures would call a person utilizing higher ordered processes an agent "to act". Conversely, a person ever remaining in the lower ordered processes will forever remain an object "to be acted upon" (2 Nephi 2:13-14).


In 2013, I watched an interview with three Utah moms who were concerned about the Common Core standards which were being implemented in public schools across the country. The three moms interviewed a clinical psychologist about the social and emotional ramifications of the standards. Terms like 'social-emotional learning' were already being used to describe what educrats were calling more rigorous educational standards. The gross nature of the deceit in the word 'rigorous' is a topic for another blog.


This interview was where I came to more fully understand that the emotional response was a lower cognitive process, and that it could be trained and made reflexive through the repetition of exposure and practice.


Dr. Joan Landes, the clinical psychologist, reviewed various assignments where middle and high school students were instructed to use 'emotional words' in persuasive essays or speeches, urging community officials to take some particular course of action on a variety of issues. The assignments had a strong current of teaching student activism.


Worse, she illustrated that training focused on emotion was beginning as early as second grade. She used a sample exercise from a workbook which instructed the children to recognize the most emotion-laden words in a fill-in-the-blank exercise:


My mother _____ me to clean my room.,

A. Asks

B. Reminds

C. Nags


The correct answer was the word most laden with emotion - 'nags'. Dr. Landes explained that simple exercises of this nature were sequenced as precursory to the later writing assignments described. She pointed out that while work like this appears innocuous when taken out of context, when taken in the larger context of work given older students, it seems the intention is to train children to be social activists. Moreover, it trains them to tap into the limbic part of their brain rather than override it. As a clinical psychologist, she asserted that the optimal developmental training would be to strengthen the prefrontal cortex rather than weaken it in this manner.


An important conclusion Dr. Landes made was this: students trained in this way are being trained to have their limbic system override the higher-ordered thinking of their prefrontal cortex. She emphasized the folly in training the human brain to turn off  the very part which makes it human. How foolish to train a brain capable of higher-ordered thinking to stay in instinctive behavior patterns centered in the same part of the brain from which non-sentient animals operate.


Foolish? Or by design?


I spoke with Dr. Landes more recently about using this example for this essay, and she said something even more powerful:


"The limbic system is primal and powerful. It takes thousands of years of civilization to partially keep it at bay so the prefrontal cortex can function logically. The limbic system can hijack the prefrontal cortex at any moment. What the woke educators are doing is igniting the wildfires of the limbic system in children, when what is needed is for those primal instincts to be "banked and cooled by a hundred restraints" (citing Will and Ariel Durrant) for the logical brain to develop rational, critical thought." (emphasis added)


The most chilling warning Dr. Landes made in 2013 about this type of education was this: with this mechanism of training the limbic system to hijack the logical brain as its fundamental strategy, educators are training a generation to become social activists by making them more highly susceptible to believing propaganda and demagoguery.


As I write this eleven years later, I can now say her concerns feel all too prescient. The dearth of rational thought seems to be diminishing, and the extremely unusual circumstances of 2020 seemed to only accelerate the downward trajectory. Downward, because civilization does not bode well in a society leading with animalistic instincts.


Consider some observations which I made a year after the first covid outbreak. If you're playing along at home and doing the math, that would be seven years after the Landes interview and ten years after the Common Core standards were first introduced to public schools. That's approximately half of one generation. Fear played a major role in controlling the population. Fear lives in the lizard brain. https://www.laureensimper.com/post/fear-a-reality-check


When responding in any situation, all of us would do well to take a somewhat clinical look at our first responses. Are they more emotional or rational? If emotional, what triggered the response? If more rational, what helped you "bank and cool" that hot first emotional response? Is your ability to do this improving with time and experience? Or worsening?


And if you conclude that media/social media have played a part in a worsening trend, you also have to ask yourself - is manipulating human emotion simply random folly, or is it by design? And if by design, to what end? Are lizards easier to train?


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