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.