Managing Your Brain Part 7. How Your Brain, My Brain, Our Brains Make Decisions and Why They Make Decisions That Way.
Your brain, my brain, their brains are always making decisions all the time-mostly beyond our conscious awareness. If there was any strategic reasons the brain exists, it is for survival in three main perspectives;
How Your Brain Makes Decisions
Now you can see from the figure how it operates. Your brain is always receiving information from within the body and from the environment and processing it and then making decisions on what to do based on that information. I have in this model not included everything that the brain is managing like information from internal organs because this information is dealt with almost automatically with the brain and also because physicians do this better although I understand how it works based on my education in biological sciences to university level. The brain is receiving and processing all this information for two main reasons;
The brain operates almost exactly as a computer works and it uses algorithms and mental programs. It is not a random performance and results machine! It uses "operate systems" and applications. In fact your brain, mine brain, and "their brains' are all operating systems with applications like your mobile phones, only that the brain as operating systems and its applications are far more complex and complicated than any of these other machines and gadgets.
Your Brain's Basic Modus Operandi
So from our senses the same information is transmitted to the brain as identical two sets; one set heads to the emotional brain and the other set heads to the executive centres under the control of the "thinking" brain. But the road between the senses' information collation and signal translation centres and the thinking brain is long and inefficient so information travels around 80 000 times slower along that pathway. In contrast, the distance between the senses' information collation and signal translation and transmission centres is shorter and travels at a speed 80 000 times faster than it travels along the route to the executive centre.
See from the diagram that information from our senses reaches the emotional brain centres first before it reaches the cognitive or "thinking" brain. This means that the emotional brain, which is responsible for survival, vets all the information and makes decisions whether or not to react immediately or to allow the same information to reach the thinking brain to make slower, more calculated decisions.
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If the emotional brains concludes from the information it receives that you are in danger; it initiates a rapid reaction algorithm that springs you into immediate action before the same set of information has reached the executive centres. At the same time, if the emotional brain centre "senses" that the situation is grave, it can block the set of information from reaching the executive centres while the emotional centre takes command and control of the whole situation in a very swift and often crude way. This emotional centre, in these situations is operating using the powerful emotions of anger or fear in its reactions depending on the situation.
Anger triggers your brain to confront the situation and, if requires, marshals blood and energy resources to the limbs that will deal with the "threat" in a confrontational way. Anger will direct blood and energy resources to your arms if your emotional brain decides the best way to deal with threat from a human being or another animal is through engaging it for example when it chooses a physical fight as the best decision. By the way, the desire to fight is a hardwired behaviour.
If the emotional brain judges that the danger is impossible to confront for any reason, fear is triggered. Depending on the circumstances, under the control of fear, the emotional brain can trigger the algorithm to take the whole body as far away from the danger as fast as possible and redirects the bulk of the resources responsible through the blood to your legs and you will flee the scene like a hurricane.
If your information reaching your emotional brain centres tells the emotional brain that the danger is too close for your to escape, it triggers the "freeze" algorithm and you look for a place to hide behind so that you cannot be seen or behind a strong object so that if objects are thrown at you, they will hit the strong object and not you. Alternatively, if there is nowhere to hide, the algorithm will command your whole body to shrink and coil into your smallest possible shape and size so that the threat will have the least possible area for injuring you. In addition, the same fear will direct as much of your blood away from the surface and skin towards the centre of the body. This direction of blood deeper inside your body is designed to make sure, in the event that you are physically attached and your skin is breached or you bleed, you will not lose a lot of blood. I mean you do not think about all this because they are happening fast and the cognitive brain is barely involved. The emotional brain is in command.
The way the brain is designed is excellent in many situations. But the same is also responsible for many serious social ills including murders and other irrational behaviours that have serious negative impacts on humans, companies, businesses, the environment, society and economies.
This is why understanding and managing your brain is important.
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Simon Bere is founder of Berean Resultsology.
©Simon Bere, 2023