We spend much of our lives chasing higher ideals, the perfect body, social status, or financial abundance, and berating ourselves when we inevitably fall short, for our lack of ambition, discipline, or intelligence. Many of these ideals arise from what has been socially adaptive within a certain cultural environment, while some drives are more ancient and primal. This struggle often feels like it’s tearing us two, between seemingly natural animal urges which we did not create, and a version of ourselves that is ideal for collective social environments . The reason why we ultimately experience such a cleaving between our social aspirations and our behavior is because our experience is essentially comprised of different brain regions struggling for influence over the actions of the organism.
As humans, it's natural to have ambitions and goals aimed towards improving our social status and self perception. We spend much of our time dreaming and striving towards optimal physical wellness, control over our psychological state, and a prosperous financial situation. The reasons for this, not surprisingly, is because those who were driven towards these types of rewards, faired better from an evolutionary perspective, out competing their less ambitious contemporaries for resources. This placed the ambitious in a better evolutionary position, allowing them to enjoy enhanced axis to potential reproductive partners, effectively breeding these predisposition into our species overtime.
Environmental factors such as culture, play a vital role in our conceptualization of the ideal collection of behavioral responses. Various brain regions are shaped by cultural information within ones environment. In this manner, stimulus becomes encoded in the brain and associated with various bodily and neurological perceptions attributing meaning and cultural value. This is the process by which we learn our philosophical ideals, or sets of behavioral patterns, which the body and mind reward the organism for, due to their beneficial nature.
We often find ourselves torn between the cultural morals and ideals that have shaped our social cortical mechanics, as well as our more anciently entrenched, primal nature. With one collection of primarily social behaviors rewarded with pleasant sensations, while the other is rewarded by satisfying more ancient desires like hunger, sex and safety. When a type of homeostasis between these two dynamic systems is thrown off imbalance, we create a mental state conducive to suffering. This lopsided shift within the Psyche triggers pain on the losing side, manifesting it self as cultural failure, or by the strain of having to resist strong inner urges not of your own creation.
The reason for this division between our aspirations for a particular self perception and our more animal nature is because different brain structures influence our animal urges and social behavior in different ways. The limbic system, or mammalian brain, excluding the cortex, is comprised of various structures which regulate and organize various feeling states, such as the amygdala and hypothalamus. The reptilian brain, comprised of the mid brain , the Medulla, Pons, including the spinal cord, regulates much of our autonomic functions and basic bodily responses. The cortex, believed to be the seat of the mind, and simulator of consciousness, heavily influences our social behavior. When human needs fail to be met, the limbic system influences the body to generate a state which creates a self perception of suffering within the cortex, whether these needs be ancient drives, or for social status.
Theis view of the world can offer us peace in a number of important ways. The first being that it serves as a reminder to be a little kinder to one another and ones self. It offers a path to peace and understanding for the behavior of others and ourselves. It offers an explanation for much of our behavior, more specifically our struggle for culturally ideal responses, an explanation that is impersonal, indifferent, and consistent with not only modern science but eastern philosophy as well.
The reason why struggle to decide, to commit, to exercise discipline and to live up to our cultural ideals may ultimately remain undetermined. However new science and technologies are showing us more and more each day the important role of biology in our behavior. When brain science eventually cracks all the puzzles riddling human behavior, we will usher in an age allowing greater knowledge and control over our behavioral responses then ever before. Simply knowing the processes by which the body regulates itself is soothing.
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By,
Jesse Ochoa
