How Your Brain is Like a Profoundly Retarded Overprotective Mom

I love talking about brains, and not just because The Grumpy Buddha is also a zombie. Which, by the way, is but a tangent from explaining how I ended up here:

but let's leave that for the moment and talk about the topic at hand, which is the horrible way that these two facts overlap:

Your brain is dumb.  

-and-

Your brain is trying to help you. 

The second fact is pretty obvious, but the first one requires some explanation. Well . . . it does, if you're not someone that The Grumpy Buddha knows personally.

If you're one of TGB's buddies, then you have, sadly, heard him give a "Listen to the interesting things I've learned about the brain, and Happiness, and . . . !!!" spiel about eleventy-billion times, and are right now looking for a gun to put in your mouth.

Which just goes to show my point -- you brain is dumb -- because if you were smarter, you'd just close the page and go goof around on Facebook. SO, I will leave the many, many things . . .

. . . wait, you probably need a few seconds to get over that pic, right? I know I do. I mean, ewwwww, talk about gut brainal processes just going YOWZA that's WRONG. At least I didn't post this one.

Let's pause . . .

. . .

and we're back. I'll leave details about how dumb the brain is for another post (*link to be inserted*), and summarize here:

• We evolved to have two general sets of brainal processes - higher-order ones that are generally conscious, and lower-order ones that are generally unconscious.

• The lower-order set evolved in a way that is absolutely not "intelligently designed" and can lead us to make some really horrible decisions.

• Trying to control the second set with the first set is like trying to ride an elephant and control which direction he moves with a thin riding crop and some harsh words; incredibly difficult except under ideal circumstances.

• In sum: we all have some very crappy brainal processes -- and they both hard to observe, and hard to control.

(Those who practice meditation experience this directly. One of the many benefits of meditation is that it helps us become mindful of this phenomena. Furthermore, it allows us to both practice controlling these processes, and accepting that they are so very difficult to control.)

Those interested in more details about the brainal processes can wait for my summary of The Robot's Rebellion and Nettle's books Happiness and Personality, which will appear here sometime in the next twenty years, or go pick up the goddamned books themselves. But some general classes of brainal stupidity:

• Tries to protect us from dangers that aren't really dangers.
• Gives us factually inaccurate cues about pain, energy levels, and other states-of-being. 
• Tries to get us to engage in activities that it claims will make us happy, but won't.
• Causes us to resist getting engaged in activities that will actually make us happy.
• Is horrible at planning for the long term.
• Tries to draw conclusions using information that is trivial and irrelevant.
• Is generally a whiny bitch.

See my problem? It's dizzying how fucked up our brains are. And yet, I want to keep this post to something less than seventeen thousand words. So I will limit the discussion to but one aspect of fuckupitude, and that is one that is relevant to the topic of my last post -- Torpor, i.e., a lack of mental energy.

And here's the catch. Torpor is not, specifically, a lack of mental energy -- at least, the hindrance of torpor is not. It is the perception of a lack of mental energy. Similarly, sloth is not a lack of physical energy; it is the perception of a lack of physical energy.

I shall illustrate.

Say that you have had a long, draining week at work, and were out late Friday night with your friends. You get home about 5AM, and wake up on Saturday at 10AM when there's a loud knock at your door.

You turn over, pulling the pillow over your head, cursing those damned Jehovah's Witnesses.

But there's another loud knock -- they won't go away! You're almost too tired to be angry -- you plan for the day was to sleep twelve hours, get up, and then veg on the couch -- but you drag yourself to the door to chase them away, and instead of finding JoJos, you find, depending on your sexual orientation,

A) Olivia Munn, gamer, comedian, and all-around hottie at your door in her Princess Leia outfit, asking for a quickie before she jets you off to Paris for the rest of the weekend,

or

B) Ryan Reynolds, wondering if you'd like to shred some lettuce on his abs.

Needless to say, they also point out that they find bed hair incredibly sexy.

Current scientific theories propose -- and I agree with them -- that in such circumstances, your energy level, which was hitherto weak and faded, would leap to astronomical proportions.

There are, of course, more mundane examples. (The Google Image searches, though, would have been much less fun.) You might be lying around completely bored and doing nothing, and a friend calls (or drags you out) and an hour late you're having the time of your life. Kids are infamous for being all pouty and "I'm bored/tired" and then going through the roof if they get a new toy, or get to go out for ice cream, or get to go to the shooting range.

The gist is, back in the day before well-stocked shelves with twenty-seven different types of ice cream, getting food was hard work, and it was generally profitable to save every ounce of energy we could. Physical effort burns calories, but so does mental effort, and there was sometimes an evolutionary advantage to sitting on your lazy ass.

So, our brains evolved to save us energy -- which is why they often tell us we are out of gas, when in fact our tanks are in fact half-full. How often have folks committed to working out on a treadmill 20 minutes a day, or even just taking the stairs, and find that their brains come up with excuses for not following through -- and in retrospect, realized that their brains were full of crap?

It's not that your brain hates you. It's that your brain likes you, and is trying to help you. Unfortunately, it's severely retarded -- by several million years or more, which is when the roots of these brainal mechanisms were developed, in our distant ancestors.

And because it's your brain telling you this, it's tough to get it to stop, especially because the thing telling it to stop is another, generally weaker part of the brain.

But it's possible, and in the future I'll talk about some tricks and habit-building processes that make it feasible.

I want to leave you with an excellent Radiolab podcast that a Viewer posted in a prior comments section, about the limits of the human body. It talks about how the brain creates signals to save it energy, and how dedicated athletes train themselves to override them to perform feats that are pretty mind-blowing. (I'll discuss them in detail in the "Everything You Always Wanted To Know About How The Brain Is Dumb But Were Afraid To Ask -- Or You've Already Heard It Fifty Times Over Dinner With The Grumpy Buddha, God He's Dull, I Can So Identify With That Baby With The Gun" post.)



The Radiolab Link