Business
You're downtown late at night, you've just said goodbye to someone after a great first date. When you're walking to your car, you somehow find yourself walking down a dark alley alone. You hear footsteps behind you, your heart starts racing. The footsteps are getting closer. That fight or flight feeling that you're having is part of our innate programming in the reptilian part of the human brain. It's one of the reasons that we've survived as a species so long, so why is it so detrimental to us? First let me address what is the reptilian brain? I've always been fascinated with human psychology and just how our brain works as a whole and there's three main layers of the brain. The reptilian part of the brain being the oldest, which is responsible for basic survival instincts. Our limbic system, or the limbic part of the brain, is responsible for emotions and then the neo-cortex which is more thinking. The brain stem is one of the oldest and smallest regions of the human brain and it evolved long ago. One of the reasons people refer to it as reptilian brain is it actually is very similar to the current, present day brains of reptiles. So this part of our brain controls vital body functions such as heart rate, breathing, balance, as well as our fight or flight responses. The limbic brain actually first evolved in mammals and it records a lot of our memories and behaviors that were either positive or negative, so it's responsible in large part for our emotions. Whereas the neo-cortex is responsible for much more of the critical thinking and the development of human language, imagination and abstract thought and our consciousness as we call it. So one of the things ... I've been in marketing for many years, so we've referred to the reptilian brain quite often. It's one of the reasons you see a lot of ads and content that targets fear, or sex, or scarcity, things like that, because we have our base survival instincts that we often refer to these as the four F's. So the four F's are fight, flight, food, and fornication. Fight, flight, food and fornication. Those are the base survival instincts that we have. If you go way back in time where we're foraging for food and hunting for animals and things like that and we hear someone, footsteps, behind us, that additional adrenaline, that heart pumping, was there to help us survive those, to make us aware that there's fear and we should be fearful and maybe give us a little more energy if we need to run and, "Do I need to run or do I need to fight?" Those are the base survival instincts there but then I also need to eat food to survive and then of course to keep the species alive you need to fornicate. So those are a lot of the reasons and when you talk about ... hear marketers talking about, they're really thing to get into some of our base thinking that a lot of the times, we don't necessarily like to talk about but those are some of the base thought processes that go on for us. It is what it is. So obviously it's been useful, it's kept us alive for a long time. As a species it helped us continue and it's responsible for keeping us alive in multiple ways, one is via the base survival instincts. Making sure we procreated and eat food and the other is ... one of the reasons is why we stay alive when we go to sleep. We don't have to keep thinking to keep our heart rate going or breathing. The reptilian brain is the natural process of heart rate and breathing and things like that is all controlled under that reptilian brain, so it's just your overall survival. So, but why is it detrimental? So a lot of the times ... So if you think about it, it's actually a large part of the reason that we as humans tend to look for the negative and it tends to impact us and we remember it much more vividly than the positive. And if you ... It's one of those things that you think common knowledge, but if you're not sure, look online, you can get all the information on it. Naturally as people,