Revenge of the lizard brain

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/2012/09/07/revenge-of-the-lizard-brain/

by biggfoot • 13 years ago

69 22 13 years ago

blogs.scientificamerican.com

webhat• 13 years ago

Thanks for the information, I was guilty of perpetuating this myth too.

biggfoot7• 13 years ago

You're not alone! The most upvoted answer on Quora did this too. http://www.quora.com/Procrastination/How-do-I-get-over-my-ba...

Credit to the author, he wrote an (equally well received) apology after he was corrected in this.

kristofferR• 13 years ago

I disagree actually. It's obviously not a legitimate scientific hypothesis, and shouldn't be presented as such, but it's still a really useful way to think about procrastination.

larsonf2• 13 years ago

No matter someone's stance on this, it seems a bit forward to discredit a relatively widely-held theory as something that is weakly argued by providing a few bullet points and then an outright assertion of another competing theory. This kind of thing has no place on Hacker News.

biggfoot7• 13 years ago

How is it a widely-held theory? It hasn't stood up to scrutiny, at least any well documented tests.

It is sorta misleading, in fact, because a lot of good authors and speakers assume it as a well known fact and add their leaps of imagination to it. It is OK at best as a pop culture thing, maybe a poetic spin off.

Why does it have no place on Hacker ... oh, you know what, scratch that. No point entering that debate. Thanks.

larsonf2• 13 years ago

I think you're right on this.

It's not so much about whether the stance is true or not and whether we should debate that. It's that articles that discredit something as trivially untrue by way of a trivially small statement. In the extreme it would be like discrediting [insert pseudoscience topic] by simply mentioning a copy of Nature. There's some degree here, sure. But tabloid-style takedowns, regardless of whether they are right, seem almost out of place.

I am wrong to say this has no place, though, which is in itself a pretty big claim with no substance behind it.

InclinedPlane• 13 years ago

It's not a scientific theory, at best it's folk wisdom. This article is pointing out that there is no scientific basis for it.

The onus is not on anyone to disprove the theory, the onus is on the theory's proponents to prove it, they haven't done so, not to the slightest degree.

Reallynow2• 13 years ago

Yes. As a PhD neuroscientist, I use reference to the triune brain as a sort of shibboleth: If someone mentions it, I can tell they don't know any neuroscience.

Daniel_Newby• 13 years ago

The bullet points are objective and contain links to the scientific literature. The triune brain theory is rather more subjective.

guard-of-terra3• 13 years ago

How can you have a lizard brain when lizards are an unrelated evolutionary branch? It should be a frog brain perhaps.

biggfoot7• 13 years ago

Well a reptilian brain is what he means :) Aren't reptiles common ancestors?

guard-of-terra3• 13 years ago

They absolutely aren't! Mammals are Synapsids, reptiles and birds are Sauropsida. They branched before most of brain development in both groups took place and since then we don't share ancestors.

Sharlin• 13 years ago

Surely the concept itself is sound if you forget the misleading names and the idea of three independent modules? The more ancient parts of the brain certainly are located nearer the brainstem, and the most recent ones near the surface.

Also, even though the brain appears on a high level to function as a coordinated whole, there are certainly situations where, for instance, the ancient FFFF[1] responses compete with whatever the neocortex wants to do. Indeed, there's even a plausible-sounding hypothesis[2] that subjective experience itself arises from conflicts between the different modules.

[1] Fight, flee, feed, reproduce

[2] http://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=791

ExpiredLink• 13 years ago

"Brain science" is ripe for debunking. Why do people still accept this humbug? http://www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/2012/09/your-brain...

linuxhansl• 13 years ago

Having spent some time in meditation practice, I have come to the conclusion that this is true (maybe not literally, but at least in effect).

We all spend most (all?) of our time being driven by impulses and habits without realizing that we're doing so and without any choice in that matter.

Moments of mindfulness are the exception, typically caused by some "unusual" event - like somebody you know dying.

It's quite a sad state of affairs (IMHO anyway). More like living the live of an extremely sophisticated robot, rather than a conscious, living being.

Everybody should spend a few minutes every day reflecting on exactly how decisions throughout the day were made.

biggfoot7• 13 years ago

Eh? Markov chain? Just asking.

Revenge of the lizard brain

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