We're all no doubt familiar with the sensation of fear undercutting rational thinking and response. Some stimulus triggers the willies, and suddenly your reactions become exaggerated well beyond what you'd consider normal for somebody else.
Psychologist Martha Stout, who helped make sense of a particular kind of senselessness with her alarming book "The Sociopath Next Door," gives a fascinating biological account of how fear short-circuits reason in her more recent "The Paranoia Switch."
Under normal circumstances, the hippocampus part of the brain acts as an efficient and wise traffic cop, integrating sensation with emotional input and assigning ordered reactions accordingly. The result is that after a normal-to-pleasant event, you can mentally reconstruct not just the event but the emotions associated with it. You can build a story, allowing the event to inform and enrich future interactions with the world.
If an event sets off your fear response, however, your hippocampus quickly gets overwhelmed with the urgent emotional messages being broadcast by your limbic system. Memories of the event come together haphazardly and in fragments. "They remain in the brain as incoherent memory traces and sensations, constituting a cruel little hair trigger, a paranoia switch."
When something happens that reminds of you of that traumatic event, you have no coherent story to guide your emotional reactions. Instead, you're stuck in that greatest of fear factories, the unknown, re-experiencing that original limbic tornado.
Fortunately, our brains don't stop at the hippocampus. We have that big ol' cortex, which allows us -- with a lot of practice, attention and effort -- to build reasonable, useful stories even around the nasty stuff.
T
here's a lot about engineering in Tom Vanderbilt's fascinating explanation of why driving sucks, but the most intriguing ideas are of a psychological/sociological nature.
Condensed version: Driving a car is a hugely complex task we're forced to accomplish with a vital piece equipment (your brain) designed for far more basic functions.
Vanderbilt covers topics such as distraction, the inherent narcissism in being a motorist (you're always the best driver on the road) and the phenomenon of risk compensation: Make a system safer, and people with use it in a riskier way that eventually cancels out any advantage.
For my money, the most captivating idea comes as Vanderbilt tries to explain our exaggerated emotional reactions to whatever happens on the highway. If someone cuts you off or makes an inopportune U-turn (quickly emerging as the top new thrill sport in San Francisco), you're likely to get mad and defensive all out of proportion to the actual risk posed by the behavior. Likewise, if another driver does you a courtesy, you'll feel good out of proportion to the significance of what in reality will be a very minor event in your day.
Vanderbilt's explanation is that our brains are wired to handle maybe 100 or so human relationships in a lifetime, reflecting the conditions when our ancestors lived in hunter-gatherer tribes. Back then, any encounter with another person had potential life-changing significance. "Thag scowl at me. Thag no like me. Thag burn down hut!"
Evolution being what it is, that's the basic brain we're still working with. Yes, your higher cortical functions can suss out the relative significance of events if you give it time. But in the moment, your reactions are dictated by a part of the brain that does not recognize the concept of a casual, meaningless social encounter.
I was enjoying yet another lecture on neurology and brain function recently when I was struck by the plastic brain model used to illustrate the lesson.
I don't know if it was the construction, the way different brain segments were colored or what, but a somewhat familiar thought occurred to me with wholly new force: This is not a new brain. This is a basic mammal brain with a bunch of cortex glopped on top.
Now, any engineer will tell you that an old machine retrofitted to serve a new function never works as well as a machine designed specifically for that function. The re-jiggered machine will be big and clumsy, have redundant or useless parts, require complicated rewiring, etc..
Which is precisely what nature has gifted us with, noggin-wise. Yes, we have this big, nifty new cortex that can perform complicated math calculations, compose symphonies and cure polio. But we also have the old brain that evaluates everything strictly in threat/not threat terms, assumes ill intent just to be safe and treats every condition as permanent and irreversible.
And, given the way the parts are situated, the old brain always bats first. Yes, your cortex understands that the TV screen is showing a representation of a lion jumping at something, perfectly safe, notice the coloration on the tail. But in the time it has made those conclusions, the old brain has already made you jump and sweat with its message of "WE"RE GONNA DIE!"
A parable: When I was 10, I lobbied heavily for a new bicycle to replace the coaster-brake clunker I was outgrowing. Three-speed bikes were the norm at that point, and 10-speeds were gaining traction, so I made it clear to my Dad that I needed at least a three-speed model.
My Dad couldn't bear to get rid of anything that still worked, however, especially if it meant spending money for a replacement. Instead of a new bike, he found a Sears kit that supposedly turned a single-speed bike into a three-speed. Installed on my old bike with a few additional adjustments, he tried to sell me on the idea that I now had a brand new three-speeder.
But one ride around the block made the truth obvious to me: I had the same crappy bike, now with this ugly plastic tumor on the crank that played around with chain tension in a half-assed attempt to imitate an actual selection of gears.
And that, metaphorically, is what makes our mental lives so full and challenging. We're trying to navigate the complex, hilly terrain of a modern life full of symbols and ambiguities with the mental equivalent of a single-speed bike inherited from our ancestors.
Yes, we have all sort of dandy new systems bolted on to the old one. But sometimes the proof is in the ride.
