When you see a lizard basking in the sun, you might think it’s the picture of serenity. But in truth, that lizard is just trying to avoid death. Cold-blooded reptiles die of hypothermia unless they sun themselves often, but when they’re out in the sun, they risk being eaten alive by a predator. So a lizard shuttles constantly between the lethal threats of sun and shade. He makes these decisions by literally running from bad feelings.
He runs to the sun when a drop in body temperature caused his cortisol to surge. Once he’s exposed and vulnerable in the sun, he scans constantly for predators and runs at the slightest whiff of harm. He is not having fun. But he survives because his brain is skilled at weighing one threat against another.
The human brain stem and cerebellum are eerily similar to a reptile’s brain. Nature adapts old parts rather than starting over. We still use the reptile brain for the jobs it is good at, like metabolic balance and alerting to potential harm. Mammals added a layer onto the reptile brain that makes social life possible, and humans added on a layer that matches patterns among the past, present, and future. Your reptile brain lies where these higher layers and your body intersect, so it’s not surprising that you find patterns in the social world that give your body a threatened feeling. Many people end up feeling threatened more than they’d like to, so it helps to know how your threat detector works.
Cortisol is your body’s emergency broadcast system. Corticoid hormones are produced by reptiles, amphibians, fish, and even worms, when they encounter survival threats. It creates the feeling humans call “pain.” Pain gets your attention. It feels bad because that works—it focuses your attention on whatever it takes to make it stop. The brain strives to avoid pain by storing details of the experience so you know what to look out for in the future. When you see things associated with past pain, your cortisol starts flowing so you can act in time to avoid future pain. A big brain can generate many associations, so it can anticipate many possible sources of pain.
When cortisol surges, we call it “fear,” but when cortisol dribbles, we call it “anxiety” or “stress.” These bad feelings tell you that pain will come if you don’t act fast. Your reptile brain can’t say why it released the cortisol. Electricity just flowed down a pathway. When you understand how this happens, you can distinguish more easily between internal alarms and external threats.
You might think you’d be free from cortisol if the world were in better shape. But your brain sees every disappointment as a threat, and this response has value. It alerts you in time to prevent further setbacks and disappointments. For example, if you’ve walked miles to get water and realize you’re on the wrong trail, a surge of bad feeling protects you from walking any farther on the wrong trail. You cannot make perfect predictions all the time, so your cortisol will always have a job to do. Understanding your cortisol helps you make peace with the world around you.
The sensory inputs you experience just before a moment of pain are essential information from a survival perspective. They enable you to recognize trouble before it happens. The brain stores such information without conscious effort or intent because sensory inputs remain electrically active for a moment before they extinguish. This “buffer memory” allows pain circuits to include the events that preceded the pain. They enable creatures to detect probable threats without need for rational analysis.
Sometimes, the brain wires in quirky associations between pain and the moments before pain. For example, there was a girl who panicked when she heard laughter. The girl had been in a car crash that killed some of her friends. She awoke from a coma without remembering the accident, and began having panic attacks at the sound of laughter. A therapist helped her remember that she was laughing and partying in the back of the car at the moment of impact. Her reptile brain connected the pain of the accident to the laughter she heard at that moment. Of course, her cortex knew that laughter didn’t cause the accident. But large amounts of pain create large cortisol circuits before the cortex can filter and sculpt them. When the girl hears laughter, her cortisol circuit triggers an urgent drive to do something to avoid pain, but she doesn’t know what to do.
This quirky sense of danger promotes survival in an amazing way. Imagine a lizard being seized by an eagle. The claws digging into his sides trigger cortisol, which fuses all the neurons active at that moment. That includes everything going on before the pain, because electrical activity lasts for a few moments. A precise early-warning detector is thus built effortlessly. The smell of an eagle as it swoops in and the sudden darkness caused by an eagle blocking out the sun are now linked to the lizard’s cortisol. If he manages to free himself and survive, he will have a very effective new circuit. Thus, cortisol circuits enable a reptile to avoid death without actually “knowing” what death is, or even what an eagle is.
Pain wires us with warning signs. When it’s big pain, we may build big warning circuits that get labeled phobias or posttraumatic stress. Smaller pain builds smaller warning circuits that we’re less aware of. We end up with alarmed feelings that don’t always make sense. It would be nice if we could just delete a circuit that made bad predictions. But there’s a good survival reason why we can’t. Imagine your ancestor watching someone die from eating a poison berry. His cortisol would surge and he would remember that berry forever. Years later, on a day when he was very hungry, he would be able to resist eating that berry. Your ancestor survived because his cortisol circuits endured.
Your cortisol circuits endure and create life-or-death feelings that are hard to make sense of. You know you won’t actually die if you fail to get that hoped-for promotion, or if someone pulls your hair on the playground. You know you won’t die if there’s a long line at the post office and you end up getting a parking ticket. But your neurochemicals evolved to give you a sense of life-threatening urgency when you face a setback.
Modern life is often blamed for this feeling, though our ancestors lived with harsher survival challenges. If you had lived in the past, vermin would have infested your home, your food, and your drinking water. You would have felt sores irritating your skin most of the time. You would have watched siblings die. Your neighbors would invade, rape, and pillage. You would not have been free to choose your sex partner. Cortisol would have given you that “do something” feeling often, and you wouldn’t always have had a way to make it stop.
Cortisol creates the belief that life is worse today. When you worry about the SATs or looking fat, cortisol creates the physical sense of imminent annihilation. When you think about threats your ancestors faced, no cortisol doom is triggered because direct experience is what builds cortisol circuits, and you share little direct experience with your ancestors.
People who tell you life is awful these days are trying to validate your threatened feelings to win your support. You may find it hard to believe your threatened feelings could be caused by mere small annoyances. You keep scanning for evidence of bigger threats, and many people will offer you such evidence. If you watch the news or listen to political speeches, you will feel sure that the world is on the verge of collapse. The world does not collapse, but you don’t celebrate because they immediately capture your attention with a new sign of cataclysm. It leaves you feeling worse, but you’re afraid to stop watching because that leaves you alone with your threatened feelings.
We like to challenge the fears of our elders, of course. You probably imagine your ancestor heroically eating that berry and proving it was harmless all along. Life would be easy if old warnings were always false, and your friends’ warnings were always true. The world is more complex, alas, and a person who ignored poison-berry warnings whenever he got hungry would have died and his genes would be gone. Our genes come from people who held on to their stored experience. This mechanism may seem flawed, but it’s much more efficient than being hard-wired for dangers at birth. We learn from experience instead of being born to fear whatever threatened our ancestors. Each generation of humans can learn about danger from its own cortisol surges. We learn about danger from our elders as well, but each generation tends to sneer at the fears of its elders and build fears of its own.
I learned this in a painful way. My mother once told me she was up all night fearing the milk would spoil because she forgot it on the counter. I sneered at her anxiety. But after she died, I realized that when she was a child, she would have gone hungry if she left the milk out. Her three sisters would have gone hungry too, because she was responsible for feeding them when she was only a child herself. Real pain built connections in her brain that were always there.
I wish I had understood this when she was alive. The best I can do is celebrate my brain’s ability to learn from my own experience. Her fears were part of my experience thanks to mirror neurons. I didn’t have to learn by playing in traffic and eating poison berries, thanks to her fears. I built my own threat detector, and it may have quirks of its own.
The human brain generalizes from past pain. Sometimes we overreact, but we’d be worse off if we didn’t learn from pain. Jellyfish don’t generalize the way humans do, so if they burn one tentacle on a hot stove, the other tentacles will still touch it. Your brain is a central clearing-house that links past pain to potential future pain. We anticipate threats so efficiently that we agonize over statistical projections that 1 person per 10 million will be harmed twenty years from now. We feel threatened when the boss lifts one eyebrow by a millimeter. It’s hard to be so good at anticipating pain.
Whatever triggered cortisol in your past built neural pathways that alert you to avoid harm today. You can call it stress, anxiety, fear, or panic depending on the intensity, but cortisol makes you feel like something awful will happen if you don’t do something now. It’s hard to know what turns it on because it’s just electricity flowing down a well-developed chain of neurons. But if you pay careful attention to your bad feelings, you can find patterns. That helps you make new decisions about avoiding harm instead of just flowing with old information. Bad feelings may still come because the pathways are still there. But when you know it’s an old response to an old threat, you stop seeking evidence to feed it, so the feeling just passes. Explore your threatened feelings and find examples of:
Mammals alleviate the feeling of imminent threat by congregating in groups. Herds make it easier to relax while remaining alert for danger. Herd behavior has a bad ring to it today, but the math proves that safety in numbers promotes survival better than the every-reptile-for-himself lifestyle. Mammals have a higher life expectancy than most earlier species, and their babies have higher survival rates too. But all is not warm and fuzzy in the mammal world. Social groups trigger bad feelings as well as good feelings. When the brain adapted to group life, a new kind of unhappiness evolved: social pain.
Social isolation is a survival threat in the state of nature. Natural selection created social pain to warn you of a threat to your social bonds the same way that physical pain warns you of a threat to your body. When you see images of herd animals, you may think they are enjoying a nice sense of solidarity. But if you look close, you find that each individual brain struggles to find a safe place.
Imagine you’re a wildebeest seeking greener pastures with your herd. When you reach a river, you fear pain from a crocodile if you jump in alone, so you stop to watch what others do. While you’re analyzing this, the herd builds up behind you and you fear they’ll push you in. That would be even more dangerous, so you decide to do something fast. When you jump, others quickly jump with you because crocodiles eat stragglers. You feel pain from hooves and horns tumbling around you.
These social complications are not obvious when you see a video of wildebeest leaping majestically into a river. It looks like they fit in effortlessly. We humans value our individuality and don’t just follow the crowd. But when you move away from a group, huge cortisol spikes often take you by surprise. Your brain is inherited from creatures that monitored their group mates to survive. Critters indifferent to the group got weeded out of the gene pool, and a brain that monitors social dynamics was selected for.
Animals with bigger brains have bigger social ups and downs. Small-brained mammals tend to size each other up once and build a lasting circuit. Primates have enough neurons to keep updating their feelings about each other.
Primates have special neurons that facilitate social bonds. These mirror neurons activate when an individual watches the behavior of others. Scientists discovered mirror neurons by accident. They were studying the electrical activity in a monkey’s brain while it grasped a peanut. When the experiment was over, a researcher picked up the peanut to put it away. To his amazement, the monkey’s brain lit up with the same electrical pattern observed when it picked up the peanut itself. Watching an action stimulates the same neural trail as executing the action.
We do not mirror everything we see in others. Mirror neurons only fire when you watch someone get a reward or face a threat. The firing is much weaker than executing an action yourself. But if you repeatedly watch another person get a reward or face a threat, connections build. You wire yourself to get the reward or avoid the threat in the way that you’ve seen. This research is in its infancy, but it has been learned that songbirds have mirror neurons, and they learn their songs by listening to others.
Mirror neurons allow us to feel other people’s pain. This has a benefit, as often suggested by empathy researchers, but it also has a cost. You can get wired to suffer just by being around people who suffer. Even if your life is fine, mirroring builds a pathway to your cortisol. Once your physical sense of threat is turned on, your cortex looks for evidence of threat. It will find evidence because that eases the “do something” feeling.
Social groups build a shared sense of threat. When your social group feels threatened, you notice. You are free to dismiss the alarm in your own mind. But your group mates may expect you to empathize with their pain pattern. If you don’t, your social bonds may be threatened. Your group mates may decide you are not “one of us.” They may even see you as the threat. It’s not easy being a primate.
We all face a constant choice between striking out alone and doing what it takes to stick with a group. You don’t consciously believe you will die without social support, but the neurochemical response to this prospect is surprisingly strong. For example, if your work is criticized at a performance review, you know your survival is not literally threatened, but cortisol makes it feel that way. The alarm tells your cortex to search for threats, and your cortex cooperates by finding some.
Animals sometimes eject an individual from the group. The most common examples are deposed alphas and adolescent males. Cortisol spikes in an ostracized animal, and indeed they often perish. Animals fear exclusion so intensely that they typically do what it takes to stay with the group, even when dominated harshly. A mammal will leave the group when it promotes reproduction because the big cortisol surge is offset by a big happy-chemicals surge.
Social pain is an inevitable part of growing up. You start out with a degree of social support, but at some point you learn that your parents cannot protect you forever. This is poignantly clear among monkeys marked as juveniles by a tuft of white fur. The troop cuts you slack until the white fur is gone at three months of age. Then you’re fair game and adult monkeys will snatch food from your mouth. It may feel like something is wrong with the world when childhood ends and you face threats for yourself. Yet this is the way of nature. No species could survive unless its young learned survival skills before its parents died. Cortisol surges when you face threats without the protection of your elders. So every brain wires itself with the pain of losing social support.
This social pain circuit is a useful tool. It helps you choose between social rewards and other rewards. Imagine you’re offered a great promotion in another state. You feel bad at the thought of losing the life you have, but the idea of passing up the career advancement feels bad too. Bad feelings help the brain weigh one risk against others. Cortisol helps you interpret information, even when you have two good choices. Daily life is filled with choices between the bad feeling of lost opportunity when you stick with the herd and the bad feeling of being isolated and ignored. These bad feelings do not mean the world is bad. They are just a tool.
Social pain is not new to the world, but your brain gives it less attention when you’re experiencing hunger, violence, hard labor, and disease. Once you’re free from physical pain, as many of us are on a daily basis, social pain grabs your attention. Every possible threat to your social bonds looms large. Anything resembling the social pain of your past will light up your well-paved pathway and turn on your cortisol. Warning signs are wired in, so the slightest hint of that old familiar pain can quickly trigger a big surge.
You have power over which information you focus on. But the choice is not simple. On the one hand, you want to avoid false alarms. On the other hand, you want to respect the alarm calls of your herd mates to avoid losing that social support. To make matters worse, just belonging to the herd doesn’t make your mammal brain happy. It wants to be noticed.
Exclusion makes you unhappy, but inclusion does not necessarily make you happy. Once you’re in a group, you see others getting what you are not getting. You feel bad, though you hate to admit it. There’s a good physical reason for this pervasive source of unhappiness. The first experience in your brain, the circuit at the foundation of your neural network, is the sense that you will die if you don’t get attention.
The fragility of a newborn human is unparalleled in nature. No other creature is born so far from being able to survive on his own. Consider:
We humans are born with an unfinished nervous system for a good reason. If we developed fully in utero, our heads would be too big to fit through the birth canal. Instead, we get born premature, with a nervous system that isn’t hooked up. This was learned by comparing human infants to premature chimpanzees. A premature chimp is not capable of holding on to its mother as she swings through the trees the way a full-term baby chimp can. A newborn human is like a premature chimp with a much bigger brain. Our brains kept growing bigger as our ancestors succeeded at getting more protein and fat. They thrived on bone marrow from scavenged bones even before they excelled at hunting. Bigger brains led to better hunting methods, more nutrition, and even bigger brains. So our species got born at ever earlier stages of development, with a lot of neurons, but fewer connections between them.
A chimpanzee is born with eyes and limbs that are ready to go. Humans link up their sensory organs and musculoskeletal system after birth, from direct experience. When a newborn human sees a hand flying in front of her face, she does not know she’s attached to that hand, no less that she can control it. We are born helpless and we hook up our brains gradually during a long period of dependency. This gives us the advantage of adapting our nervous system to the environment we’re born into, but it also means we start life with an extreme sense of vulnerability.
Fortunately, the vulnerability of the human baby sparked communication. A baby that could call attention to its needs was more likely to survive. Mothers good at interpreting their babies’ signals had more surviving DNA. Thus, the ability to communicate was naturally selected for. When we succeed, our needs are met and happy chemicals flow. When we fail, cortisol flows and we look for a way to do something. Eventually, we develop complex communication circuits, but they rest on the core sense that you will die if you are not heard. You don’t think this in words, but you think it with neurochemicals.
When you were born, you experienced pain that you couldn’t do anything about. The resulting cortisol made you cry. That worked! It got your needs met. A newborn doesn’t cry as a conscious act of communication. It doesn’t cry because it knows what milk is. It cries because that’s one of our few prewired circuits. A baby soon learns to stop crying because it recognizes signs of relief from its past. It stops crying before its needs are actually met because it has linked attention to relief.
But a baby learns that attention can vanish as quickly as it came. Social support disappears for reasons a baby doesn’t understand. When a baby feels safe, it ventures out to explore, and pain strikes again in some unexpected way. We must explore beyond the cocoon of social support to wire up our brains, so we experience threat and learn to manage it. No amount of nurturing can protect us from the reality of human vulnerability.
Your early vulnerability circuits are still there. When your poetry is ignored by the one you love, or your views are ignored at a meeting, these circuits send electricity to your cortisol. We don’t consciously think it’s a matter of life and death to be seen and heard, but old circuits make it feel that way.
The bad feeling of being ignored is compounded when you see others getting attention. In every troop of primates, some individuals get more attention than others. Field researchers have documented the way baboons give their attention to some troop mates more than others. Laboratory researchers find that chimpanzees will exchange food for a chance to look at photos of the alpha chimp in their group. Your brain seeks attention as if your life depended on it because in the state of nature, it does. When the expectation is disappointed, cortisol flows.
It’s hard to stop your cortisol because your brain is designed to protect you from threats. Your ancestors conquered hunger, cold, and predators because cortisol made them feel bad until they found a way to make it stop. Once your physical needs are met, social threats get your attention. That’s why you feel like your survival is threatened when anything reminds you of social frustrations you experienced in youth. It’s hard to “do something” about this cortisol because the source of the threat is not clear. It helps to focus your attention elsewhere, which is why we develop habits that distract us from cortisol. Some of these “happy habits” are good for you in the long run, and others are not. Pulling your hair out when you feel bad is not sustainable, but weaving a basket is. Hopping on a plane to Vegas is not sustainable in the long run, but chatting with your Aunt Millie is. Notice the habits you use to shift out of distressing thoughts. Consider the consequences of each habit, and decide whether it serves your long-term well-being:
Most people find it hard to believe that their cortisol is caused by status concerns. It’s easy to say “I don’t care about status,” though you can easily see that others care. You may not care about one particular status marker, like the latest gadget or clothing brand. But your mammal brain is always comparing you to others and deciding who’s on top. When it’s the other guy, your cortisol is released. In the state of nature, that would warn you to hold back and avoid harmful conflict. Today, you get a vague feeling that you’re threatened by anyone you see in the one-up position. You don’t think that consciously, but your mammal brain wants to avoid the one-down position as if your life depended on it. And thus it drives you to seek the one-up position, though you’d never consider yourself a one-upper.
These nagging impulses are hard to make sense of because you don’t think this in words. Many people make peace with their mammal brain by deciding that the world is forcing this on them. But it doesn’t work. Your one-down feelings are intensified when you feel judged by the world. You are better off knowing that you are participating in the judging. When you know you are creating the “do something” feeling yourself, you have power over it.
It helps to know how animals one-up each other. One simple example is the quest to look bigger. Mammals stand their hair on end without conscious intent because cortisol tightens hair follicles. (That’s the equivalent of human goose bumps.) When your hair stands out, adversaries think you’re bigger than you are. Bigger animals seize food, mates, and even babies from smaller group mates, so looking big promotes survival. Bad feelings make it happen. (Oft-repeated disclaimer: I’m not saying you should do this; I’m saying you have more power over your impulses when you understand them.)
Animal status-consciousness is easy to understand when you know how it happens. When a cow reaches puberty or joins a new herd, she fights each other cow once. If she loses, she associates that cow’s smell with pain. If she wins, she feels safe around that cow. Her brain links each herd mate to either her cortisol or her serotonin. That guides her social interactions, as she either submits to avoid pain or dominates to meet her needs. A herd is typically led by an “alpha” cow, who is the unchallenged queen for life. When she dies, the more dominant cows will challenge each other for her spot. Then things go back to normal. Cows don’t have enough neural plasticity to keep updating their circuits.
Primates do, however. While small-brained mammals typically keep one status ranking for life, big-brained primates challenge the status hierarchy when they think they can win. Monkeys and apes quickly notice when a troop mate shows weakness, and they challenge them over food, mates, or just who gets the good seat. That doesn’t mean they fight all the time—they still avoid fighting when they anticipate pain. They use their big brains to build social alliances that threaten rivals with pain. Research shows that each primate in a group is aware of its own status in relation to each other troop mate, and the relative status of any two third parties. When conflict changes those rankings, each brain rewires itself to reflect the new status hierarchy. The rewards for status are often quite small, but they get the brain’s attention when it’s not busy meeting a more urgent need. Brains good at status-seeking made more copies of themselves, and the rest is history.
Animals care intensely about the status of their mating partners. Each species has its own strategies for judging potential mates, and they always focus on traits that are uncannily relevant to the survival potential of offspring. For example:
You may say you don’t care about status, but when a high-status person notices you, your happy chemicals soar. Raising your children’s status thrills your mammal brain even more. When your specialness is overlooked, your unhappy chemicals spike, and if your children’s specialness is overlooked, it’s much worse.
You may blame these ups and downs on “our society” without recognizing the universality of these impulses. If every mammal in the room has eyes for the same beauty, we end up with many unhappy mammals. If all parents want their children to get into the same high-status institution, a lot of cortisol will flow. If everyone wants to be chief, unhappiness will reign. Such impulses are found in every culture and in our animal ancestors, so it’s futile to blame “our culture.”
Your feelings about your status are independent of your socioeconomic circumstances. Imagine you’re a high-priced lawyer with a lot of formal status trappings. Every minute of your waking life is spent kowtowing to clients and senior partners and anyone who can help your career. Everywhere you look, you see threats that could destroy your career. You do not feel dominant. You might actually be happier if you were a bus driver who rules the bus all day and then rules the roost at home. Status does not come from fixed labels and abstract words. It’s the feeling you get when you interact with others. Those feelings change from moment to moment as we go through our day, but they depend heavily on the circuits we’ve already built.
We tell ourselves that status doesn’t matter and everyone is equal, but each brain keeps monitoring how it stacks up against others. Expectations build from experience. When your expectations are exceeded, happy chemicals flow. When your expectations are disappointed, it feels like a survival threat, even if you consciously know better. Everyone is sensitive to slights because everyone wants to be special. The urge for specialness might seem annoying in others, but in yourself, it just feels like fairness.
Being special promotes survival in the state of nature. Your mammal brain seeks specialness as if your life depended on it. Whatever made you feel special when you were young triggered happy chemicals that connected neurons. These connections trigger expectations about how to survive. When your expectations about specialness are disappointed, it feels like a survival threat. It’s easy to see this in others, but hard to see in yourself. We imagine ourselves having “good reasons” for our motivations, but a quest for specialness does not sound like a “good reason.” This leaves us confused about the reasons for our neurochemical ups and downs. Small social disappointments can give you the feeling of grave danger without knowing why. These surges have less power if you know where they come from. Make a habit of noticing the urge to be special, in yourself and in others. Instead of denying this urge, notice your expectations and the unhappiness you feel when your expectations are disappointed. Although it’s tempting to condemn yourself for these feelings, you can honor the mammalian energy that kept your ancestors alive. Notice examples of:
Your brain compares itself to others even if you wish it didn’t. In the state of nature, comparing yourself to others promotes survival. It protects you from getting into fights that you are likely to lose. When your brain sees you are weaker than another individual, it releases cortisol to remind you of the risk. This helps you hold back, despite your urge to promote your survival interests. Unhappy chemicals help us inhibit our urge for dominance and thus get along with group mates. We need unhappy chemicals, as much as we’d rather live without them.
The human cortex creates abstractions that feel real. We can terrorize ourselves with our own thoughts because of our ability to activate circuits internally instead of just relying on inputs reaching the senses. For example, you can begin to sweat just thinking about an upcoming work presentation, even though you’re not actually in the room, ready to begin talking. This allows us to imagine future threats and take action to avoid them. We can even imagine our own mortality: We know something will kill us, even though we don’t know what. This motivates us to keep seeking potential threats instead of just waiting for our senses to report what’s there.
Identifying a potential threat feels curiously good. You’re like a gazelle that smells a lion and can’t relax until it sees where the lion is. Seeing a lion feels good when the alternative is worse. We seek evidence of threats to feel safe, and we get a dopamine boost when we find what we seek. You can also get a serotonin boost from the feeling of being right, and an oxytocin boost from bonding with those who sense the same threat. This is why people seem oddly pleased to find evidence of doom and gloom. But the pleasure doesn’t last because the “do something” feeling commands your attention again. You can end up feeling bad a lot even if you’re successful in your survival efforts.
A small cortex scans for threats it has actually experienced, but a big cortex like a human’s can build chains of associations from bits and parts of actual experience. You can think about a future that you can’t smell or touch. You can imagine disaster scenarios quite distant from your physical reality. And you can imagine what the world will be when you are gone. Knowing the world will go on without you someday is more distressing than we realize. It’s so upsetting that you’re tempted to imagine the world ending when you end. Then you won’t be missing anything.
I noticed this conundrum at a lecture on future energy reserves. When the speaker presented a chart projecting world energy reserves a hundred years from now, everyone in the audience had to imagine a world they would not be part of. The threat of collapse found a receptive audience—indeed, it was almost a relief, because the thought of living at the important time in history feels better than the thought of being gone without a trace. Feeling important helps relieve distress, even when we imagine we are only interested in facts. The cortex looks for facts that make you feel good.
Your cortex promotes survival by looking for logical explanations of what your mammal brain feels is true. If you feel that things are falling apart, for example, you will find evidence that things are falling apart and overlook evidence of things going well. A big cortex attached to a mammal brain can easily conclude that the world is going to hell in a handbasket. (More on this in my book Beyond Cynical: Transcend Your Mammalian Negativity.)
You may feel sure that you’re focused on facts and couldn’t possibly be so biased. But your brain actually has ten times more neurons telling your eyes what to look for than it has to take things in randomly. That is, ten times more neurons send information from the cortex to the eyes than from the eyes to the cortex. We are designed to scan for inputs we’ve already experienced as important rather than wasting our attention on whatever comes along.
It helps to know how the cortex finds facts that fit expectations. A clear example is the way your cortex reads this page. It does not just take in details passively. It generates expectations about the chunk of detail that will come next, based on past experience. Dopamine is released when you see a chunk that matches your expectations. You extract meaning and move on to generate an expectation about the next chunk. If a chunk fails to match your expectations, cortisol is released, which prompts you to take a closer look before you create meaning and move on. You’re not conscious of generating expectations before you read a word, but you’d never be able to read if you didn’t.
Your expectations are neural pathways that light up in anticipation of sensory inputs. This makes a smooth flow of meaning possible. Which expectations you activate depend on your stock of life experience and the neurochemicals you are experiencing at the moment.
Your cortex is always making predictions about future pain and future rewards. But anticipated rewards don’t always materialize, which is another source of cortisol. Your cortex can imagine a better world that makes you happy all the time, but you fail to find this utopia. Reality is often a disappointment, and it’s hard to understand the role of your expectations because your cortex generates them so effortlessly.
A lizard never thinks something is wrong with the world, even as it watches its young get eaten alive. It doesn’t tell itself “something is wrong with the world,” because it doesn’t have enough neurons to imagine the world being other than what it is. It doesn’t expect a world in which there are no predators, so it doesn’t condemn the world for falling short of expectations. It doesn’t condemn itself for failing to keep its offspring alive. Humans expect more, and we do something about it. That’s why we end up focused on our disappointments instead of saluting our accomplishments.
Life feels good when it exceeds your expectations, and bad when it falls short of your expectations. Your ups and downs depend heavily on your expectations, so it’s important to understand them. Expectations are neural pathways that you electrically activate in anticipation of incoming information. You activate them without conscious intent because your electricity flows where it has flowed before. Your brain is always comparing the neurons activated by your senses to the neurons you’ve preactivated. When it finds a pattern that matches, you “know” what you are experiencing and whether it is good or bad for you. Your emotions are easier to make sense of when you learn to notice your expectations. Notice examples of:
Once you do this with big expectations, start noticing the smaller expectations you generate many times an hour.
When a monkey loses a banana to a rival, he feels bad, but he doesn’t expand the problem by thinking about it over and over. He looks for another banana. He ends up feeling rewarded rather than harmed. Humans use their extra neurons to construct theories about bananas and end up constructing pain. For example, imagine that a bully steals your parking spot once a year. By the time you are thirty-six years old, your brain has stored twenty chunks of evidence that the world is full of bullies. This template in your brain can divert your electricity from the abundant evidence of people being good to you. To complicate matters further, you may have misperceived those parking lot incidents in the first place. Haven’t you ever been accused of taking someone’s spot when you are sure you were there first? It’s easy to misjudge a situation when your eyes are busy driving. Yet it’s hard to notice your own misjudgments because electricity flows so easily along your well-worn pathways. A brain can construct an image of a bad world despite abundant evidence of good.
When a pattern-seeking human cortex is hooked up to a dominance-seeking mammal brain and a danger-avoiding reptile brain, it’s not surprising that we end up with a lot of cortisol alarms. It’s useful to remember that cortisol prevents pain as well as causing it.
For example, lizards run from me the moment I step outside my door. Most of this alarmism is for nothing, because I do not step on lizards. But reptiles don’t fault themselves for excessive caution. False positives are part of the reptilian survival system.
We humans hate false positives. We want to duck bullets, but we don’t want to duck when there’s no bullet. We expect our alarm system to call the shots perfectly every time. I think about this when I watch the meerkats at the zoo. They run for cover when a plane flies overhead, though no plane has ever tried to eat them. Meerkats did not evolve to live in zoos near airports, but they did evolve in places where birds of prey could grab them in an instant. They survived because of their alertness for a particular pattern of cues—in this case, flying predators. I am not saying we should fear everything our ancestors feared. I am simply appreciating the meerkats’ self-acceptance. They don’t castigate themselves for their timidity after the plane passes. They don’t berate each other for those bad calls. They just go back to what they were doing before the plane passed: scanning for threats and opportunities.
Excess caution often helps us humans survive. I wash my hands before every meal even though my world is quite sanitary. I look in my rearview mirror every time I change lanes even though no car is there much of the time. A person could wear seat belts her whole life without ever being in an accident. Anticipating threats helps us prevent unhappiness in the long run. But over-reliance on this strategy can leave you with endless hand-washing and mirror-checking habits. Sometimes the best strategy is to approach a potential threat and gather information. Cortisol helps you do that, too. It frees you to try new things and still have an effective warning light when you’ve gone too far. Accepting the bad feelings cortisol creates sounds harsh, but the alternative is worse. You can end up unhappy about being unhappy. Instead, you can accept your own warning system, though it sometimes overreacts to patterns that resemble past threats.
When I wish my cortisol would stop, I think about feral pigs. (These are pigs that have escaped from farms and returned to the wild.) They fascinate me because feral pigs start developing the features of wild boars once they start meeting their own survival needs. Their snouts grow bigger when they use those snouts to root for food. Their fur grows longer when they need it for shelter from the cold. In short: the bad feeling of hunger and cold triggers the strengths the pigs were meant to have. You can trigger the strengths you were meant to have when you understand your threat responses.