The Emotional Brain
‘Cause when you feel attacked. That’s a feeling, not a fact.
-Mean Girls Musical– Stop
One theory of the brain is that it’s in three layers. The primal part of the brain where things are hard coded into how we act. The emotional brain sits on top, which dictates how we feel. Then, the prefrontal cortex which is our consciousness. We’re only in control of our consciousness, but we can use it to tap into the other layers of our brain. As the second layer, the emotional brain is easy to be aware of. The emotional brain is incredibly smart and useful, but it didn’t evolve for modern life.
Feelings are primitives. People will do seemingly crazy, irrational things because of feelings. Joining a cult, staying in an abusive job or relationship, spending massive amounts of money on painted, easily replicable parchment. Most of life is internal. It’s how we process the world and people’s actions.
To understand why we do what we do, we must understand ourselves. This involves acknowledging and analyzing our feelings. Only then can we truly relate to others. The emotional brain is most important for all these.
If we were living in a village with one hundred people, then our emotional brain would be incredibly optimal. Social cohesion is necessary for the tribe to stick together and to have deep trust that we’ll provide for each other in times of need. The emotional brain is optimized to sense any disturbances in social cohesion. If you come across a random child in need of help, the emotional brain wants to provide help immediately. This is great for a small tribe and for relations with neighboring tribes.
But in the modern world, if a random stranger says something mean to you, your emotional brain will react as if they’re in your tribe or a neighboring tribe. It’ll be all your emotional brain can think about. But it doesn’t matter. You may never see that person again. If we lived in a tribe of 100 people, then that mean comment would be something that deserves energy and attention to be rectified.
Your emotional brain wants to help anyone you see. If you can help, do something. But in modern life, imagine walking around NYC and personally helping out every homeless person you meet on the street. You’d get nothing done. It doesn’t scale.
John Paul Getty once had his assistant add up all the money people asked him to give them. The amount of money requested of him in one year was greater than his entire net worth. He was the richest man in the world at the time. We can’t give everyone what they want. There are massive opportunity costs.
On the flipside, in a small tribe, we could give everyone everything they asked for. It’s a small group, and members would know to not overask as there’d be social consequences to overasking.
Our emotional brain didn’t evolve to work with exposure to so many humans and communities. It breaks at scale. Incentives change at scale. There are too many moral hazards and free riders. Bad actors are harder to catch and the world has to examined in a more pragmatic manner. Instead of being beholden to ideologies, we should be beholden to the truth. Beholden to results.
The policies that are optimal for a 100 person village are completely separate from the policies that work for hundreds of thousands of people in a city, which are different from the policies that work for millions in a state or hundreds of millions in a country. The only way to figure out the optimal rules and regulations is to A/B test and not let our primal and emotional brains blind us to the truth.
Emotionally, one wants to be as inclusive as possible. Be as egalitarian as possible. No one should have special treatment. But that doesn’t work at scale in society. The most productive should be optimized.
Women are more in tune with their emotional brain than men. There are a ton of benefits to this. They better sense and understand feelings and relationships. Emotional messaging is the only way to affect change.
Our emotions are super important to be aware of. We should understand why we feel the way we do. Meditation helps. Paying attention to our dreams helps here as well. Men are often too removed from their emotions and treat them as an obstacle to their goals, instead of emotions being something they can utilize to better understand themselves and others.
Emotions are fundamental to why people do what they do. They’re core to getting people to feel. We should factor reality as well as emotions. Emotions by themselves can make extremely well intended actions lead to evil consequences. Seek truth.