Think You Have A Lizard Brain? Stop Spreading Lies

It’s much easier to start a business than to finish it.

Starting Daruma, my money management firm, took no time: registering with the SEC, getting incorporated, obtaining a tax ID and  bank account was easy. 24 years later in 2019, I closed the business. 

Two years later and Daruma is still not officially dead. 

We’re still waiting on New York State to process one last form, which would allow Delaware to issue a corporate death certificate. Once something is set in motion, is it hard to reverse course. The universe hates U-turns.

The things we are taught and believe are also sticky. Institutions, processes and systems are slow to change as we can see in medicine -- a field littered with stories of antiquated treatments persisting.

Take our model of the brain as a three-layer cake, with a lizard brain overlaid with an emotional brain topped by the rational neocortex. Not a day goes by that I don’t read some passing reference to this model of the brain.

But this is flat-out wrong, and it refuses to die. “And the evidence has been around for more than 50 years and yet hasn’t managed to percolate its way into, not just into the public sphere, but into psychology textbooks” says professor Lisa Feldman Barrett, Ph.D.

“Anytime you read that the amygdala or limbic system is being regulated by the prefrontal cortex, that is a phrasing which rests on this old really mistaken idea that you have this inner beast lurking inside your brain, which is constantly in battle with your more sensible rational self.”

So let’s ditch the easy but incorrect analogies and stop perpetuating this myth, once and for all. Let’s do our part to nudge the universe into making a U-turn from falsehood towards truth.

Credit: Feldman Barrett, Ph. D., Lisa. “Your Brain Is Not What You Think It Is.” American Psychological Association podcast episode 139

Photo credit: Selin Şahin on Unsplash