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You Have Three Brains - This Is How to Use Them

Presenter:

Robert Sapolsky

Time:

7:46

Summary

What's the best way to think about the brain? While most of us think of it as a dense gray matter that’s separate from the physical body, that actually couldn’t be further from the truth. Our brain is actually made up of 3 layers, and each layer not only directly impacts the other, but has control over the physical body and how you feel. Neurologist Robert Sapolsky explores these separate brain systems as individual characters, all with different goals and motives.

Transcript

What's the best way to think about the brain? It's insanely complicated. everything connects to everything, a gazillion little sub regions, a middle that complexity. There's a broadly sort of simplifying way to sort of think about aspects of brain function when it comes to behavior. And this was an idea put forth by this guy, Paul McLean, a grand poobah on the field, conceptually of thinking in the brain of the brain is coming in three functional layers, the triune brain. And again, this is highly schematic, the brain really doesn't come in three layers. But one can think of the first most the bottom most the most ancient as being what's often termed the reptilian brain, where basically the parts in there we've got the same wiring isn't a lizard as in any ancient creature, it's been there forever ancient ancient wiring at the base of the brain most inside, and what does that region do all the regulatory stuff, your body temperature changes, it senses it and causes you to sweat or shiver. It's monitoring your blood glucose levels, it's like releasing hormones that are essential to sort of every day, shopkeeping. It's just, you know, keeping regulatory stuff and balance sitting on top of that is conceptually what can be termed the limbic system, the emotional part of the brain. And this is very much mammalian specialty lizards are not well known for their emotional lives, part of the brain having to do with fear, arousal, anxieties, sexual longings, all those sorts of things.


Very mammalian, you're off there in the grasslands, butting heads with somebody else with antlers. And it's your limbic system that's heavily involved in that. Then sitting on the top is the layer three, the cortex, the cortex, spanking new, most recently evolved part of the brain, everybody's got a little bit of cortex, but it's not till you get to primates that you got tons, and then apes and then us. So functionally, it's very easy to think of this simplistic flow of commands layer to the limbic system can make layer one the reptilian brain activate. When is that your heart speeds faster, not because of a regulatory reptilian thing, ooh, you've been caught something painful, but Oh, an emotional state, your will to beast and there are some scary menacing Willoughby's threatening you and your terror. And that emotional state causes your limbic system to activate the reptilian brain and your heart beats faster, you have a stress response, not because a regulatory change happened in your body, but for an emotional reason, then it's very easy to think of layered on top, this cortical area, commanding your second layer, your limbic system to have an emotional response, rather than something emotional. Here's a threatening beast right in front of you something emotional, you see a movie that's emotionally upsetting. See a movie. These are not real characters, they're pixels.

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