Second in a four part series entitled:

How to talk to a Christian -

because we have to, whether we want to or not.

Your Reptilian brain is all the rage lately. Arianna Huffington, Tom Atlee and Thom Hartmann have all published work recently that addresses the Bush/Cheney talent for getting into your primitive self and getting it to do what they want. This is important information that I first encountered reading the works of Carl Sagan. One of my greatest regrets is that I never got to discuss the Reptile self with him. As all those who have come after him have done, Dr. Sagan thought we should get over it. The Reptilian brain to him was something to overcome, an inferior part of our psyche that gets in the way of logic, so it must be suppressed. That's only partly correct.

It does get in the way of logic. The mistake is in thinking you can suppress it. That inner beast is coming out one way or another. You either work with it or it works against you. If you want to survive, you'd better make friends with it. We won't get around the Radical Right just by being who we are. In a very real way, we are acting as the "liberal elite" they say we are. We are appealing to reason where no reason yet exists.

Arianna put it succinctly:

"Thanks to the Bush campaign's unremitting fear-mongering, millions of voters are reacting not with their linear and logical left brain but with their lizard brain and their more emotional right brain.

What's more, people in a fog of fear are more likely to respond to someone whose primary means of communication is in the nonverbal realm, neither logical nor language-based. (Sound like any presidential candidate you know?)

Deep in the brain lies the amygdala, an almond-sized region that generates fear. When this fear state is activated, the amygdala springs into action. Before you are even consciously aware that you are afraid, your lizard brain responds by clicking into survival mode. No time to assess the situation, no time to look at the facts, just: fight, flight or freeze."

Tom Atlee asked if we can "move past reptilian logic". The simple answer is "NO". There is no "reptilian logic". There is only reptilian instinct and that instinct shuts down the part of the mind that has logic. It is entirely reactive. Note the tendency to call Bush's cohorts "reactionary". It's pre-verbal, so you can't talk your way around it. It has no language. It's ritualistic, fond of habit and suspicious of change.

Hartmann crafted a nice crash course in brain development, thus:

"We humans, being the product of a long evolutionary process, really have three brains. And, as the Bush psy-ops folks know, politicians who win campaigns do so because they speak to all three of those brains.

First there's the most primitive of our brains, sometimes referred to as the "reptilian brain" because we share it in common with reptiles like alligators and komodo dragons. The reptile brain has a singular focus: survival. It doesn't think in abstract terms, and doesn't feel complex emotions. Instead, it's responsible for fight-or-flight, hunger and fear, attack or run. It's also non-verbal - you can stimulate it with the right words, but it operates purely at the level of visceral stimulus-response.

The second brain is one we share with the animals that came along after reptiles - mammals. The mammalian brain - sometimes referred to as the Limbic Brain because it extends around and off of the reptilian brain in a dog-leg shape that resembles a limb - handles complex emotions like love, indignation, compassion, envy, and hope. Anybody who's worked with animals or had a pet knows that mammals share these emotions with humans, because we share this brain. While a snake can't feel shame or enthusiasm, it's completely natural for a dog or cat. And, like the reptile brain, the mammalian brain can also be stimulated indirectly by words, and is also non-verbal. It expresses itself exclusively in the form of feelings, although these are more often felt in the heart than the gut.

The third brain - the neocortex ("new" cortex) - is something we share with the higher apes, although ours is a bit more sophisticated. Resting over the limbic brain (which is, in turn, atop the reptilian brain), our neocortex is where we process abstract thought, words and symbols, logic and time." [emphasis added]

The neocortex is divided into two hemispheres.

Your right brain operates in a non-linear, pre-verbal way that "thinks" in symbols and pictures. It works in conjunction with your reptile brain to form your intuitive abilities. It loves ritual and symbolism. Your hunches, your "aha" moments, your precognitive dreams, premonitions, ability to view remote scenes and other "psychic" abilities originate here, and are normal functions of the human brain that have been suppressed in our culture so that they are limited to the realm of the priesthood. A person in touch with these abilities is hard to control with laws or commandments and will trust their own intuition over any authority. One function of religion has been to direct and control these abilities toward a common goal. The tricky part is in choosing that goal. Knowing who made the choice and why is important. We'll talk about that in Part III

Your left brain is where you "think". It's the source of your ability to use sequential logic, your words and your ability to reason. Our culture is in love with it's left neocortex. The left neocortex likes things neat and orderly. It wants things to make sense. It enables us to think and read and plan, so there's a lot to love about it. The problem is that it isn't the only brain in town. Acting as if it were causes problems. The trick in life, as in politics, is to get all these brains working together. Neglect any one of them at your peril. Nurture them all, and you'll achieve more than you ever thought possible.

Back to politics now. Hartmann dissects Cheney's mastery in the campaign:

When Dick Cheney recently took John Kerry's comment about sensitivity in the war on terror out of context and spun it for his audiences, he was performing a psychologically masterful manipulation of all three brains.

Only ridicule with a subtext of fear has this power.

"America has been in too many wars for any of our wishes, but not a one of them was won by being sensitive," Cheney said, firing first the thinking brain ("too many wars") and then the limbic brain ("for our wishes[/hopes/ideals]").
And then he went for the reptile brain: "...but not one of them was won by being sensitive."

The comment brought an instant response of laughter - an emotional and involuntary response, as Freud pointed out, that's the result of the neocortex thinking it's moving logically along in one direction (a discussion of too many wars) and then suddenly getting derailed ("but not one of them was won by being sensitive") from that thought. This sudden derailment - known among comedians as the "punch line" - causes the thinking brain to be momentarily confused and triggers a response known as laughter that comes involuntarily from the limbic mammalian brain. (This is why comedy almost always involves misdirection, like in the old Red Skelton classic, "I just flew in from Chicago...and, boy, are my arms tired!")

But then, in a brilliant coup de grâce, Cheney spoke directly to his listener's reptilian brain, the part that most powerfully controls our behaviors because it constantly is vigilant to maintain our survival. "Those that threaten us and kill innocents around the world," he said, arousing the reptilian awareness of threat, "do not need to be treated more sensitively, they need to be destroyed."

To reinforce this message to his listener's most primitive instincts, Cheney continued to invoke the word "sensitive" a half- dozen more times, always wrapping it in surprise and survival.

Not only is this among the most sophisticated of psychological warfare operations, in this case it was also one of the most immoral, since Cheney was quoting Kerry out of context and, thus, basing his entire premise upon what was essentially a lie.

But the deed was done, because all three brains had been touched.

No matter how much the Kerry campaign tried to argue to the thinking neocortex that his words meant we should be sensitive to the needs and values of our allies and not sensitive to our enemies, his response never reached the limbic or reptilian brains of his or Cheney's listeners. Kerry's response - "It's sad they can only be negative" - was one that only reached the thinking neocortex. It didn't provoke a laugh, driving it into the limbic brain, and it didn't address Bush/Cheney failures to keep Americans safe, the main issue of the reptilian brain.

The simple reality is that issues framed in intellect will never trump issues framed in emotions. And to have maximum power, those emotions must include the limbic brain feelings of hope and idealism as well as the reptilian brain instincts for survival and safety. [emphasis added]

Framing is the key. We have to learn to speak lizard/limbic/logic if we want to win.

End of Part II