Paleolithic Emotions, Medieval Institutions and God-like Technology

“The real danger is that humanity has paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and god-like technology” – Edward O. Wilson

Paul Maclean first proposed the concept of “The Lizard Brain” back in the 1960s as part of his Triune Brain model, which hypothesized that the human brain has three structures each independently conscious and added sequentially to the forebrain in the course of evolution. Maclean proposed that the “reptilian brain” was responsible for instinctual behaviours involved in aggression, dominance, territoriality and ritual displays. It also includes the amygdala part of our brain, responsible for our fight or flight responses and is heavily involved in decisions to prioritize instant gratification, tangible rewards and short-term hits of dopamine (our brains reward system).

When this reptilian brain is activated, we revert to a paleolithic mindset and a whole set of instinctual mechanisms kick in. The lizard brain uses its internal “machinery” of synapses and nerves to undertake the simplest, most aggressive, most effective action to maximize the basest instincts of the person under its control.

However, humans are amazing creatures and what makes us the dominant species on earth is, if we want to, it only takes us a millisecond to turn on our human brains and override the lizard. When we are in a calm, cerebral, higher-thinking, “human brain” state we are smart, compassionate, long-term thinking, collaborative, social wizards. We can override our base lizard instincts and instead strive for happiness, knowledge, health, wellness, community, charity and all kinds of intangible “human” instincts. When we’re operating in this mode our “machinery” of synapses and nerves still undertake the execution of these higher instincts but we don’t always have the language to talk about it. Artists describe it as “the flow”, athletes as “the zone”, Buddhists as “zen”, but all are describing the situation where we’ve reprogrammed our instincts to accomplish a different goal and we’re leveraging our bodies machinery to execute on it.

Achieving a consistent “human brain” state is extremely difficult though. We’re social animals and each lizard brain makes every brain around it more likely to be…well… lizardly. Individually we are much more likely to act in a “human brain” manner, but when you take us en masse you are far more likely to get lizard-like behaviour. When we scale this up to the macro version, it is highly unsurprising to find that the organizations we form, the institutions we create and the governments we empower to organize us have far more in common with the lizard brain than the human brain.

The lizard brain sets the instinct, the human brain fights to override it, and the machine executes the instructions of the winner.