e 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 decided to preserve hinder us from becoming hyper-logical super beings, but that our most human behaviors come from all our brains working together. Linden asserts that love – a mental state that requires instinctual emotion, higher understanding, and logical reasoning while simultaneously transcending all three – would not be present in human beings if our brains were not so poorly engineered by evolution.
So the next time you get that dreamy feeling when you look at your special someone, remember it’s because your animalistic ice-cream-cone brain.