phone signal is “a million times faster.” The speed of thought is none-too-impressive in the age of electronics.
An example: if your foot was a mile away and someone shot you in that same foot, you would see the gun shot instantly, hear it four seconds later, then feel it twelve seconds after hearing it – a full sixteen seconds after the gun was actually fired. Nerves are sloooooow.
Pro: Without the jellyfish neural net, our nervous system would never have evolved. You couldn’t shake a hand, feel sun on your skin, or pull away from a cactus.
Con: Your nerve cells would communicate more quickly if they yelled messages to one another.
First Scoop: Instinctive Lizard
“Lizard brain” has become somewhat synonymous with our base instincts. Fight-or-flight reactions originate here, as do many of your unconscious reflexes, like ducking when you see something hurdling towards your head or automatically trying to catch something you drop. The downside is that fears of public speaking and panic attacks are related to your lizard brain misinterpreting a stressful situation as dangerous and overriding the rational, relaxed part of your mind. The “lizard brain” represents many core, instinctual actions.
Pro: The lizard brain is as close to a Spider-Sense as a normal person is going to get. You react to danger unconsciously.
Con: Because the lizard brain reacts to danger unconsciously, you don’t get to pick when it decides to hijack your higher functions, send you into fight-or-flight and kick on the adrenal glands. Not convenient when giving a presentation at work.
Second Scoop: Memory Mouse
The mammalian brain at is exemplified by that little workhorse of science labs everywhere: the mouse. Mice brains are able to remember and anticipate. Memory is what lets a mouse solve a maze it’s seen before and the expectation of cheese is what encourages a mouse to figure out a new one. In short: a mouse brain can process time. It can remember the past and guess at the future in a rudimentary way. Every time you remember how to walk home from a new bar or think to buy toilet paper before running out, that’s the mouse brain kicking in. And the anger you feel when you forget how to do either of those things? That’s the mouse brain too – mammalian brains were the first complex enough to emote.
Pro: We remember, anticipate, and emote because of the mighty mouse brain. Mammalian complexity – social nature, nurturing behavior, cross-species bonding – stems from these three essential additions.
Con: In a word: Pavlov. The mouse brain allows rote conditioning. They don’t call it the rat race for nothing.
Third Scoop: The Thinking Ape
Great apes, elephants, dolphins, some pinnipeds and maybe parrots can reason out solutions to problems and abstract situations. Why? The third and final brain scoop does three things. 1) It dramatically amplifies the mouse brain’s anticipatory, memory, and emotional capabilities. 2) It adds the problem solving functions of reason, symbolic communication and abstract thought. 3) It makes powerful, complex connections within itself and the lower parts of the brain. Humans and intelligent animals are able to communicate, recognize themselves in mirrors, plan far in advance, grieve, and develop tight, complex communities all thanks to this final blob of neurons.
Pros: Every aspect of higher thought is a result of the ape brain. Tool use, sympathy, group hunting, symbolic recognition, among many others.
Cons: Complexity results in complications: emotional and mental disorders aren’t something a lizard worries about. And we need an enormous energy budget. Our brain uses approximately 20% of our daily calories. Thinking is hard.
According to Linden, the key separation between humans and apes isn’t brain type but size – Humans just got a super-duper-sized third scoop. Start with a jellyfish cone, add scoops of lizard and mouse, then a gigantic ape scoop, throw on some sprinkles for culture, and you’ve got the human brain. Most astounding, however, is not our closeness to animals, nor that the good-enough-for-now parts evolution de