Unfortunately, I still need JS for some things to work properly. You're welcome to keep it disabled, but the onus is on you if some things don't work (I promise I'll get around to fixing it)...

2018-02-01 | Three Brains etc.

Ah! Look at what my friend is making! I'm very excited for him because he's going to go places. I would not be surprised to see him giving TED talks or being in future textbooks; he's definitely one of the smartest people I know.

It's interesting to note as well that he comes from a family that, for the most part, doesn't really understand him or support him, specifically the maternal side, and you can see that struggle come out in the comics and his work ethic/perfectionism. I feel like (in the way that I think that) often these types of intellectuals come from backgrounds where there is an emotionally manipulative person in their immediate family; I have other friends who are like this as well (and perhaps myself too). From what I can tell, logic is the next reasonable outlet to turn to because you cannot trust emotions due to them being persistantly corrupted by that person.

So what else seems to be the case, again merely from my perspective, is that these people who turn to logic then become socially distant because they're generally afraid of how emotions work and how dangerous of a weapon they can be.

As I've said before, I like to think about the human brain as consisting of three main parts: the "Man Brain" which handles logical thinking, the "Dog Brain" which handles emotional thinking, and the "Lizard Brain" which controls the instincts.

We're gonna stay on a general case here and just look at the basic patterns, I'm no neuroscientist, so everything here is totally just observation on my part. Notice the correlation between the evolutionary chain and the complexity of the task at hand. I often refer to emotions as "old thought" because if you think about it (using your Man Brain), all emotions held are very useful for survival in our original habitat, those being a strong attachment to a partner, stress making us lose sleep (to keep from being eaten by predators), anger for making sure we are the alpha/top of the food chain, and even grief for solidifying our appreciation and fear of dying.

The Lizard Brain is the simplest brain but oldest and deepest engrained in us. It's used to give us a gut feeling, a very basic understanding of our situation such as first impressions, a flinch before a hit, the hairs raised on the back of your neck, racism, object recognition, or the feeling of dread. That type of stuff. Now before you get your panties in a bunch, yes, racism is an inherit thing, BUT it's not a good thing, do NOT act on the Lizard Brain things, they are not to be trusted because while they may make sense for making sense of situations, their reactions don't make sense, especially in today's world. I would say racism is the same mechanism that causes the Uncanny Valley, hence why object recognition is in this brain as well.

The Dog Brain, as described above, controls emotions like how dogs are generally known for being extremely verbose about their emotional state. This is more complicated than the Lizard Brain because it deals with intuition rather than strict observation with the senses. In order to have effective emotions, it's vital to understand that something happens, and that there is a reason that that something happened. For example: this thing died, therefore it I can no longer interact with it anymore, therefore I will be unable to gain new experiences with it, therefore I am disappointed that my (unconsious) plans to interact with this thing in the future will no longer work (that last one is how I would define sad in a logical sense). As you can see, the fact that you are able to observe that something is no longer alive and implies that future experiences are no longer possible builds on the lizard brain of observation and interaction; the fact that the thing no longer responds as it had in the past indicates that it will continue to not respond in the same way. That may be confusing to follow, but reread it once or twice and it should be okay; emotions are not a logical logic. The Dog Brain deals with general emotional things, it's easier to control with some practice than the Lizard Brain.

And Finally, the Man Brain (which does not relate to men, simply as reference to huMan) which deals with higher order logic. This includes purely abstract ideas such as time, object perminance, visualization, language, zero, infinity, money, rhythm, and so forth. The range of this brain is exponentially higher than the others because it can handle more complex patterns than the others (which they all do by the way, a brain is simply a pattern recongition machine).

Keep in mind that these brains are not isolated from one another, and their subjective levels vary a lot between individuals (inter and intra species), so a dog won't have the Dog Brain, but the Dog Brain may be the dominate brain in the dog.

Coming back from that brief trip down Philosophy Alley, we return to my great friend. From what it seems to be is that his Dog Brain was corrupted, and so he turned to the Man Brain (as it's more interesting and useful than the Lizard Brain) and from there has become an insanely smart person, but because the Dog Brain cannot be removed (as another friend of mine has been trying to her whole life), it is vital to come to terms with it eventually so that balance can be restored, and that your inner human can come to terms with life.

That went a lot farther than intended, but hey, I guess we learned something today... maybe.

Previous Posts

2024-03-23 | Build Up or Break Down?

2024-02-16 | Almost A Year Later

2023-03-13 | Another Move!

2023-01-24 | It's Been a Minute

2022-03-21 | Remodeling

2022-02-10 | Modern Nazi-ism

2022-01-07 | 2057

2021-12-21 | New Website!

2021-10-06 | How Internet Advertisements are Destroying Society (Tin Foil Hat Time)

2021-03-12 | Success

2021-03-02 | Freedom

2021-01-11 | The Next Step

2020-12-29 | Year in Review

2020-11-14 | Happiness (and Other Emotions)

2020-10-15 | Passage

2020-10-12 | Taking Care of Mom

2020-10-07 | Alternative Way to Fund the Internet

2020-10-06 | A Taste of Insanity

2020-07-05 | Efficiency of Cooling Water

2020-06-07 | Personality

2020-06-05 | Eat Your Money

2020-05-27 | Nudges

2020-05-22 | Resources

2020-04-17 | Giraffes

2020-04-10 | A Year Later

2020-04-03 | Quarantine

2020-03-06 | Cancer Sucks

2020-02-16 | The Ball

2020-01-05 | A New Year

2019-12-10 | Enough

2019-12-09 | Buying a House

2019-11-26 | Money is Like Fire

2019-10-03 | Personal Sites

2019-09-17 | Soft Skills

2019-09-07 | Senior Year

2019-05-27 | Control

2019-05-11 | Living with Constraints

2018-09-21 | New Senses

2018-06-10 | Ramblings

2018-05-23 | Minimalism

2018-05-20 | Pass It On

2018-04-16 | Changes

2018-02-26 | Logic and Emotions

2018-02-09 | Forgiveness

2018-02-01 | Three Brains etc.

2017-06-28 | Rock Climbing

2017-06-19 | Living Cities

2017-06-11 | Roll and Go

2017-04-18 | School and Education

2017-04-10 | Maturity

2017-04-09 | Imagine a Business

2017-03-05 | What Do You Value?

2017-02-17 | Imagination

2016-12-11 | Black Box Theory

2016-12-05 | The Language of the Gods

2016-11-27 | Future of the Internet

2016-11-20 | EM Drive

2016-11-13 | Predicable Emotions

2016-11-07 | First Post