Sublime

No matter how much insight and understanding we develop, the rational brain is basically impotent to talk the emotional brain out of its own reality.

Our self-experience is the product of the balance between our rational and our emotional brains. When these two systems are in balance, we “feel like ourselves.” However, when our survival is at stake, these systems can function relatively independently.

As many neuroscientists have affirmed, this evolution has led to the higher mammalian brain being composed of three parts. The oldest is the reptilian part of the brain, which controls all automatic responses that regulate the body. This is the instinctive part. Above that is the old mammalian or limbic brain, governing feeling and emotion. And on

Frontal areas like the prefrontal cortex regulate the ability to organize, plan, and handle change. Another area of brain machinery important for control of behavior that we introduced in Chapter 2, a forward region called the anterior cingulate cortex, may be particularly relevant for determining what the brain engages in at a given moment.

When the alarm bell of the emotional brain keeps signaling that you are in danger, no amount of insight will silence it.

The right is intuitive, emotional, visual, spatial, and tactual, and the left is linguistic, sequential, and analytical.

The automatic reactions that control our emotions come from neural associations within our memory networks that are independent of our higher reasoning power.