Right wing fear monger, genus glennusbekasaurus
Anger is like a stone thrown into a hornet’s nest. —The Urantia Book
Anger interrupts the functioning of your frontal lobes. Not only do you lose the ability to be rational, you lose the awareness that you’re acting in an irrational way. When your frontal lobes shut down, it’s impossible to listen to another person, let alone feel empathy or compassion. Instead, you are likely to feel self-justified and self-righteous, and when that happens the communication process falls apart. Anger also releases a cascade of neurochemicals that actually destroy those parts of the brain that control emotional reactivity.” – How God Changes Your Brain
Anger is the defining behavioral symptom of the wingnut crazies these days. Leading the charge is Fux News’ Glenn Beck, described in a feature story in the NY Times last week as:
…suddenly one of the most powerful media voices for the nation’s conservative populist anger…In an interview, Mr. Beck, who recently rewatched the 1976 film “Network,” said he identified with the character of Howard Beale, the unhinged TV news anchorman who declares on the air that he is “mad as hell.”
“I think that’s the way people feel,” Mr. Beck said. “That’s the way I feel.”
Whipped into an neurological frenzy by other professional propagandists like Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Michael Savage, Mark Levine, and guest crazies like the always quotable Michelle “Re-education Camps” Bachmann, and gun lobbyists like Second Amendment Foundation founder Alan “They’re Coming to Take Your Guns Away” Gottlieb, one can hardly tune into the right wing echo chamber these days without hearing subtle if not explicit calls for violent revolution against our Marxist/socialist/fascist/secret Muslim, concentration camp commandant in chief, President Barak Hussein Obama.
Competing in the marketplace of ideas with the crazies is harder than it might seem, even accounting for the corporatist establishment media’s bias against change. (Some 90% of talk radio programming is radically right wing despite successful progressive radio intrusion into some major urban media markets, replaced in some cases by sports talk shows in already saturated sports talk media markets.)
Rather, the main difficulty is the structure of the human brain itself. For the vast majority of its 150 million year long evolution, it’s main function has been survival and ‘wired’ accordingly. The legacy of our repto-mammal ancestors, victors in the eons long war with their cold blooded dinosaur/reptile competitors, the limbic system is one bad-assed, neurochemically fueled threat assessment computer. Responsible for engaging our sensorimotor systems to fight, flee, or freeze depending on incoming stimuli, it uses emotions like fear and anger to catalyze us into action.
Conversely, the seat of our higher cortical functions like rationality and judgment (located in the brain’s frontal lobes) have only evolved over the last million years or so. Conflicts between these two centers are thus heavily weighted towards the limbic. Civilization is very much the product of bringing these two cognitive systems into delicate balance. Beck and his cohorts are doing their damnest to shift that balance back towards the limbic. As neuroscientist Andrew Newberg, M.D. and his co-author Mark Robert Waldman put it in their new book How God Changes Your Brain (2009):
Neuroscience tells us that the moment we see an angry face, or hear angry words, our brains kick into overdrive generating stress chemicals to make us fight or run. Anger generates anger, and the angrier a group of people get, the greater the possibility that violence will erupt.
Emotional reactions derived from negative speech and memories, such as those elicited by historical imagery showing Nazis and other oppressors as Beck did this week, are encoded into the brain via the amygdala (plural amygdalae), and are the most difficult to eradicate. The Wikipedia entry for the amygdala includes the following:
Research indicates that, during fear conditioning, sensory stimuli reach the basolateral complexes of the amygdalae, particularly the lateral nuclei, where they form associations with memories of the stimuli. The association between stimuli and the aversive events they predict may be mediated by long-term potentiation, a lingering potential for affected synapses to react more readily.[3]
Memories of emotional experiences imprinted in reactions of synapses in the lateral nuclei elicit fear behavior through connections with the central nucleus of the amygdalae. The central nuclei are involved in the genesis of many fear responses, including freezing (immobility), tachycardia (rapid heartbeat), increased respiration, and stress-hormone release. Damage to the amygdalae impairs both the acquisition and expression of Pavlovian fear conditioning, a form of classical conditioning of responses. [3]
Via what is sometimes termed the brain’s “mirror neuron circuit,” emotions in other creatures can activate a resonant response in our own brains. Remember that the next time Beck gets all teary-eyed and emotional about how much he loves his country and wants to save us from “tyrants” like Obama. It’s all part of the propaganda encoding process.
Some other excerpts from Newberg and Waldman’s book worth contemplating:
The more we immerse ourselves in a specific ideology, the more the brain responds to that belief as if it were objectively true.
In fact, simply being around negative people will make you more prejudiced, because listening to negative opinions can easily undermine your positive opinions about virtually anything.
[Image credits: T-Rex; Beck Photo: Nicholas Roberts, NY Times]
Brain Identity
What if we have all been misled by language invented by our predecessors and the simple truth turns out to be that we are not “human beings” or “persons” but rather human brains that are intimately connected to all the organs and other parts of the particular human body in which we reside? What if the word “person” and the “personal pronouns” we commonly use such as “I”, “me”, “we”, “you”, etc. are only linguistic inventions of human brains that for one reason or another were unable to identify themselves correctly as actually being human brains?
It can be shown that a human brain has the ability to create and use spoken and written language through the use of certain areas of cerebral cortex located usually its left hemisphere. Strokes or other damage in these areas cause impairment or loss of a human brain’s ability to produce and understand spoken and written language. Precisely which linguistic abilities are impaired or lost in any given instance and to what degree depends upon the exact location and extent of the brain damage.
We know that every human brain and body has been built by a new combination of parental DNA that resulted from the union of a particular egg and a particular sperm which formed a single new cell; and over about a nine month period the information stored in the DNA inside that first new cell allowed it to divide and grow into trillions of new cells of various types, all of which were organized into what we linguistically describe in just two words: “newborn baby”.
We also know that having been built by DNA, each brain and body – beginning even during the building process and continuing ever after – has been continually modified by an enormous amount of environmental variables and experience up to and including the present moment.
Suppose for the sake of argument that my assumption is correct and I actually am a human brain that is continuous with a spinal cord and connected through nerves to all the organs and other parts of the body in which I reside. If that is true, does that fact automatically mean that it is impossible for anything else to exist that is not made of atoms and molecules like I am? Is it impossible for something to exist that may be orders of magnitude more intelligent and powerful than I am? Something that may in some way be related to the incredible and awesome complexity of what can be seen in the cosmos and in the living world on our planet? Something human brains might choose to call a “Supreme Being”, or a “Supernatural Force”, or perhaps “God”?
How does knowing what I am and how I came into existence – however desirable that may be – automatically inform me about everything else that may or may not exist, and what its nature may be?
If I am only linguistically a “human being” or a “person” – a fictional entity invented by my predecessors that exists only in language and that can be thought of as “owning” a brain and a body – but in reality I am actually a particular human brain that is intimately connected to and living within a human body, that brain cannot appropriately be called “my brain”, because it is, in fact, “me”.
The brain inside my head thinks what I think and feels what I feel, it remembers everything I remember and knows everything I know. I am that brain.
Hi Nonnie:
My first screenplay, The Trial of Lucifer (2000), inspired by a meditation I did in the cave on the island of Patmos where the apostle John is believed to have written The Book of Revelation, begins with a scene where the protagonist, an attorney, is arguing a death sentence appeal to the US Supreme Court. His client is a Timothy McVeigh like domestic terrorist.
Last year I was asked for a copy (by a 3x Oscar winner) and thought about revising that opening scene to reflect the current obsession with Muslim terrorists. But anticipating an Obama victory later that year, I decided not to, based on my intuition that the Black Helicopter set would emerge from their redoubts in Idaho, Montana and other places to take up the cause of violent revolution should he be elected.
Beck and his ilk are lending credence to that decision.
this assumes that those listening to beck et al actually have brains.
but seriously, they are really going over the line. people hated chimpy, but you didn’t have liberal talking heads encouraging violence. scary.