Eat and Be Safe

“The lizard brain only wants to eat and be safe” – Seth Godin

Put simply, the lizard brain wants to eat and be safe, but it wants to perform those things in the same manner we did in the savannah thousands of years ago. Unrefined and let loose, the lizard brain preys on our fear to make us reactive, short-term, irrational, emotion monsters capable of showcasing stunning displays of greed, mob mentality, cruelty, bias and worst, predictability. The lizard brain isn’t complicated.

1. Poke a lizard with a stick and it will hiss and make itself look big. Show a modern human a terrorist attack and it will demand vengeance and tighter immigration controls.

2. Force a lizard to choose between a strong group and a weak group and it will side with the strong group to destroy the weak. Show a modern human a group of cool popular people drinking beer A and a loner drinking beer B and they will buy beer A.

3. Force a lizard to choose between eating food themselves or giving food away to a less advantaged lizard and they will gorge themselves. Show a modern human the opportunity to either make more money or donate more money and they will choose to make more money.

The lizard brain will always prioritize short term gratification and avoidance of pain over long term thinking even when those repeated short term gratifying decisions have devastating long term consequences.

For generations this has been true and there have been those who would seek to leverage these stimuli to hijack our lizard brains and manipulate us. The tools used to undertake these manipulations have historically been relatively crude: billboards, TV ads, “yellow” print journalism, wartime propaganda etc. Broad brush efforts, to manipulate large populations with little personalization. It was hard, but not impossible, to train your brain that stories from news outlet A are sketchy or that buying beer A won’t really make you cool.

In modern times, the hyper-connectivity and porous nature of our personal data paradigm, has led to the ability to manipulate lizard brains on an industrial scale for both political and commercial purposes. The business model of extracting data, customizing content and predictively modelling individual human behaviour is literally what powers our entire current social and economic structure. It’s extremely challenging to train your brain to ignore an algorithmically curated stream of content from Instagram directing you to a certain product or to ignore a political message hyper-tailored to manipulate your confirmation biases, especially when you think all the content you’re seeing is just stuff generated by your friends.

Facebook, Google and Amazon have become the most valuable companies on earth by creating incredible looking and feeling spaces where we can “eat and feel safe” at a level simply not possible in the physical world. We can trigger commercial and social dopamine hits, expertly avoid pain and anonymously indulge in all the tribalism and fear-mongering we can eat without triggering any “human brain” overrides. These platforms create the infrastructure to lull users into this deep lizard brain state and then give interested 3rd parties the ability to buy access to our attention and experiment on what actions they can convince us to do by leveraging our biases. They maximize the price for this attention for is as high as possible by using machine learning algorithms generated from our historical actions on the platforms to help these 3rd parties predict our behaviour with the greatest scale and accuracy possible. Predictive consumer modelling sounds academic and strategic, but it’s really lizard brain manipulation at an industrial scale.