Our Reptilian Brain
I love to find correlations between widely different sources that explain bits and pieces of human behavior. This week I found something from cutting edge neuroscience that explains behavior written about by a Mexican Toltec shaman! This behavior causes all sorts of problems and has a big effect on your life so it's important to understand what's going on.First the neuroscience. Recent research is finding how old parts of our reptilian brain show up in strange ways in our more recent higher cognitive thinking. For example, when our eyes move across a field of view they don't move smoothly, they make tiny jumps, like frames in a movie film. The space in between the jumps is blurry, so the old reptilian visual system fills it in and what we think we see is smooth and continuous.
This "filling in the gaps" program from the visual system seems to have gotten applied to higher thinking processes, too. Research with people with amnesia reveals that they will take scraps of memories and construct a complete story out of it, believing it to be true, even though large parts of it came from "filling in the gaps."
Here's how that shows up for most of us. We make assumptions. When confronted by some other person's behavior that we don't understand, we fill in the gaps and make up a story about why they acted the way they did. Miguel Ruiz wote about this in his wonderful book, "The Four Agreements" in which he details the problems that these assumptions can cause. You see, we not only make assumptions, we often assume that whatever they did was about us. We take it personally. Then we believe the story that we made up! Can you see how this creates a whole host of useless problems for us?
Ruiz says that we do not like questions with no answer. so we make one up. "It is not important if the answer is correct; just the answer itself makes us feel safe. We make assumptions to fulfill our need to know and to replace the need to communicate."
So how should we deal with this? Be aware when you are making an assumption. Be aware when you are taking it personally. If you can, ask. If you can't ask, live in the mystery. Ruiz says, "We make all sorts of assumptions because we don't have the courage to ask questions."
And that's the reptilian brain at work!
