Month: August 2016

The Survival Machine

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So, why did I reference the concept of the various ages of the human brain and potentially how the brain developed in my last post?   The discussion of why the brain works, and to some degree how certain parts of the brain work, is important to truly understanding addiction and recovery as processes of learned behavior.[1]

I think, that as a society, as a culture, as an evolved species with an impressive capacity to think and consider abstract concepts, we lose sight of the fact that the human brain was not originally designed to “think”, at least not in the context of how we might consider the action of “thinking” today. The oldest parts of our brains originally evolved to act instinctively in order to keep the organism alive. Our brain is, in the words of James Zull, “a survival machine.”

Today we live in our highly evolved glory surrounded by a robust social safety net that includes abundant resources for nutrition. Our lives in the United States include a great deal of technology to keep us safe from the threats that our ancestors faced on a daily basis: vaccines to keep us healthy, animal control to keep predators at bay, heated homes to protect us from the elements. We lose sight of the fact that everything about our brain evolved on the basis of managing threat or danger and experiencing things that sustained the species (and generated pleasure).

It is easy to understand the necessity of the “fear center” in your brain when you consider the conditions that most humans have lived in. If you look back beyond the aberration of the last 120 years, the ability to recognize a threat and instantaneously respond to it with movement and problem-solving served us well when, as a species, we were dancing with lions and tigers and bears all day. During our days filled with higher order thinking (hmmm… what will I order as take-out tonight?) it is very easy to lose conscious awareness of how important and powerful the fear and threat management mechanisms in our brains really are.

Our first breaths were taken not because we thought and made the choice to breathe. Our first breaths were taken because certain structures deep in our brains responded to external stimulus and impelled us to do so.

Let’s take the survival mechanisms of the human brain out for a test drive. Let’s demonstrate how the survival pathways in our brain trump the power of conscious thought.

Take a deep breath and hold it.Unknown-2

Repeat the following thought in your mind:

“I am not going to breathe, I am not going to breathe.”

Wait thirty seconds. Wait 45 seconds. What happens?

Your chest begins to feel a little tight; your body begins to tense. If you hold your breath long enough your face will flush, you will begin to sweat and all of sudden, against your will, you will exhale.

Why?

Because those “unconscious” survival pathways of your brain are doing their job – they are keeping you alive – regardless of what you are thinking.

If you continue to resist, what happens? Your body shuts down unnecessary processing – like conscious thought – you lose consciousness and your body returns to “normal” breathing. Such is the power of the threat management strategies of the human brain and body.

Each day hundreds of thousands of “invisible” biochemical processes occur in your brain – all designed to keep you alive and the species evolving. Breathing; eating; moving; turning your head toward an unexpected sound; ducking your head when something falls off a shelf – all seemingly “unconscious” processes that occur over and over with little, if any, “thought” on your part. All processes designed to keep the organism that is you alive and functioning for one more day without you consciously thinking about it.

How do you think this might be related to the disease of addiction?  I’d love to hear your comments.

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Zull, J. (2002). The Art of Changing the Brain. Sterling, VA: Stylus Publishing

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[1] N.B. Throughout my posts, I reference certain processes or functions of areas of the human brain. My goal here is to explain what is relevant about brain functionality and evolution, not to spend a great deal of time on the how of brain function. There are a number of useful resources that explain how the brain works (for instance, McGill University has a wonderful resource online about brain structures and how they interact).

Very Old Technology

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So, let’s start with a question: Exactly how old are you? Early 30’s? Early 70’s? Somewhere in between?

My answer to this question is a little different. In my understanding, “you” are at minimum tens of thousands if not somewhere in the realm of hundreds of millions of years old. That is when the nature and structure of the core processors of your brain were developed. That is when the “technology” – the basic operating system that supports “you” – was initially coded.

While I would love to tell you that you are unique and different and the latest release of this incredible wetware, the unfortunate reality is that your brain – and the brain of everyone standing around you – runs on release 1.0 of the Reptile operating system developed before there was code.

I happen to be a dinosaur. I had the privilege of using computers when the idea of a personal computer (PC) was first commercialized in the late 1980s and early 1990s. At the time, MS-DOS (an acronym for Microsoft Disk Operating System) was the prevailing operating system for most PCs. This operating system was the basis for main-stream personal computing for over a decade (the Microsoft Windows systems was a hybrid of this system until the Millennial Edition).

A disk operating system is basically group of rules and processes that govern how information is accessed and stored on a computer. The traffic laws that govern commuter traffic could be considered an analogy for it. There are rules for how cars can get on and off the highway, where they can park, how fast they can move and how many can be moving at once. The disk operating system governed how data could move and was stored on early computers.

So, way back in the day, software architects would develop computer programs using this underlying, basic computer operating system, a basic set of rules for the management of data. Because the basic operating system was initially effective in meeting certain fundamental computing needs, as new programs were developed the existing effective processes were added to and expanded on instead of being replaced. Developers would create programs with advanced features and functionality using the basic DOS operating system as the underlying computer platform. Release after release (meaning Windows 3.1, Windows 95, Windows 98, etc.) offered incrementally increasing functionality and flexibility while all using some version of MS-DOS as the underlying computing strategy.

Much like the evolution of computing technology, so occurred the evolution of human grey matter over many millennia. It is suggested by some scientists that the “human brain” has doubled in size over the course of the last 7 million years. Much of this growth has occurred over the last 2 million years. This growth included the addition of new structures that function on an ancient base.

The brain stem is the oldest part of the human brain – it is what is sometimes referred to as the “reptilian” part of the human brain. It controls the basic operating of the human body – breathing, circulation, balance, vision and hearing. The brain stem represents the basic operating system of the human brain. As humans developed higher order reasoning capacity, the additional structures of the brain did not recreate the basic operating system, but instead developed more sophisticated features using the functioning of the brain stem as a platform.

Like the evolutionary process supporting the development of PCs, where the original operating rules remain consistent release after release with more sophisticated applications being developed on top of them, so too did human grey matter evolve around the basic functionality of the brain stem. In effect, the higher-level cognitive function that occurs in the frontal cortex of the human brain is operating on the computing equivalent of pre-historic DOS 1.0. Additional functioning capacity did not rewrite the underlying human operating system, but instead learned how to leverage it into higher-order thinking.

The limbic system – the brain structures that govern emotions and judgment -evolved next. The human brain stem and the limbic system – the fear and pleasure centers that are immediately adjacent to it in your brain – play a crucial role in human decision-making. And like much of the “early” technology created to power our computers, the underlying operating system that supports what we believe to be our higher order thinking, is not particularly accurate, has limited processing capability and, if you’ll forgive the computing pun, is rather basic in spite of its elegant complexity.