Who Are You Meant to Be? (9 page)

Left Emotional Brain
(Adventurer, Stabilizer)

The only source of knowledge is experience.

—Albert Einstein

The left emotional brain is the most mechanistic of the four brain quadrants. This means that it does things in a fashion that is both impersonal and automatic. Its primary purpose is to experience physical sensations. It doesn’t mind doing the same thing over and over again, if the action produces the desired sensations. It is oriented to the present, focusing on what has to be done now and following instructions to the letter. Precise and procedural, it doesn’t reflect on the “why” of things, only on the “how.”

This quadrant is connected to the processing of positive emotions and relatively complex emotions. It is more objective in its emotional processing than the right emotional brain is because its goal is to produce sensations, not feelings. It is more black-and-white when deliberating and tends to quickly filter out experiences that it labels “bad.” It seeks to determine how an object or person we encounter might create the type of sensations we want to feel. It wants to experience what is known or has been experienced before so it can cause us to keep repeating or tolerating unpleasant sensations when we have experienced them in the past. For example, a hockey player will skate despite having a sprained ankle because he has been experiencing pain from the time he was young. Experiencing sensations in the moment is the goal of this quadrant, and it doesn’t consider the emotional consequences of the chosen activity. It seeks to re-create experiences, often with increased or prolonged intensity.

This quadrant also sequences activities so that things are done in a specific fashion. Like the athlete who practices the same activity over and over again to achieve a predictable result, the left emotional brain strives to re-create conditions that will bring familiar sensations. It is planful, linear, and deliberate, and it can follow activity to the letter with no need to know the final outcome. Like the soldier following orders, it is comfortable with its role in performing the specific task without knowing the big picture.

The following are the activities that the left emotional brain is most efficient and least efficient at. They illustrate the function of the brain and what this looks like in the outer world, being acted out by the Adventurer, and in the inner world, by the Stabilizer.

Adventurer

Stabilizer

How the Four Quadrants Work Together

The power of one, if fearless and focused, is formidable, but the power of many working together is better.

—Gloria Macapagal Arroyo

The information on the quadrants of the brain can help us think about our development and ourselves in a new way. In the past, some brain theorists referred to the quadrants as thinking styles, which has helped make them more objective and therefore more palatable to those who automatically reject or discount emotions as important. By thinking about the four quadrants as a Squad made up of individual avatars, each with its own need, behavior, and way of approaching the world, we can immediately see how we can put our Squad to good use in our personality.

After we learn about our Predominant Style, we need to also understand the function of the three other Squad members and whether or not we are using them on a regular basis. While it’s easier to use our Predominant Style, we have to start thinking about it in the context of our Squad. It needs to learn how to be a team player rather than a one person show and to delegate the activities that are not it’s unique ability or role to perform because of the quadrant it resides in. Using all four Styles on your Squad in an integrated fashion requires that you consciously focus your attention on the activities and behaviors of the Style you wish to use. It will take more energy and effort to do so, but over time new neural pathways will form, giving you more automatic access to all quadrants of your brain.

The brain is on a physiological mission to function as a whole, but it needs attention and focus to use the four Styles on the Squad together. Living our life as the person we are meant to be becomes a reality when we use more than just one quadrant of our brain. Our potential for dealing with the demands of any situation becomes unlimited. Once we begin integrating all four of our Striving Styles, we are no longer limited to seeing ourselves and our world through a single lens.

Now that you know about the functions of each of the quadrants of the brain, let’s move on to another important component of the SSPS and the biology of becoming our best self.

C
HAPTER
F
OUR

THE BIOLOGY OF BECOMING OUR BEST SELVES

At birth, the brain is the most undifferentiated organ in the body—with a plasticity that enables it to create new circuitry throughout life.

—Dr. Daniel J. Siegel

T
HE MYSTERIES OF THE
mind are no longer as mysterious as they were twenty years ago, thanks to brain-scanning technologies. We are now able to see what is going on in our brain instead of just theorizing about it. Similarly, understanding how the personality works is no longer a speculative activity, as we can view it functioning in real time. We can see how different areas of the brain light up when we are performing activities, how our emotions and behavior interact with our thoughts, and where these activities reside in the brain.

This chapter is about the how the brain has evolved and how it develops. In a simple and useful fashion, it describes the functions of the different brain areas and the ways they affect the personality. You will learn about neuroplasticity, the brain’s natural ability for growth and change that lets us keep growing and developing despite negative conditioning and habits of mind. You will see that the brain can change long-standing patterns of behavior that impede our fulfillment as human beings. You will be able to understand how pathways of communication between the different brain areas develop, which makes it possible to use your whole brain to achieve your potential.

This chapter is organized in two sections: the first is about how the brain has evolved and how it develops, and the second provides the theory behind the Self-Protective and Self-Actualizing Systems of the brain, a key component of the Striving Styles Personality System (SSPS), and how these systems affect our emotions and behavior.

Our Evolutionary Brain

We are the product of 4.5 billion years of fortuitous, slow biological evolution. There is no reason to think that the evolutionary process has stopped. Man is a transitional animal. He is not the climax of creation.

—Carl Sagan

Until the middle of the last century, it was widely believed that we had one unitary brain. During the 1960s, following years of research, American physician and neuroscientist Paul MacLean proposed that we have three brains: the reptilian (instinctual), the limbic (emotional), and the neocortical (rational). He determined that each of the three brains has its own purpose, function, and intelligence. He called this three-brain system the triune brain. MacLean reported that the reptilian brain developed first, and each subsequently developing brain represented a new evolutionary layer that formed over the previous one. He demonstrated how each of the brains is connected to the layer above and/or below via neural pathways, and how they communicate with each other in computer-like fashion.

The following are descriptions of the three brains and the role they play in our thinking, feeling, and behavior.

Instinctual Brain

The instinctual or reptilian brain, located in the brain stem, was the first to evolve. This brain is concerned primarily with ensuring our physical survival and has the most primitive level of awareness. It reacts, in an automatic, knee-jerk fashion, to whatever is going on in the present moment with no concern for the past or future. It doesn’t have the ability to think about itself, nor does it have any memory. This means that it doesn’t learn from its mistakes and will react to a situation in the same way it did before, despite a negative outcome. For example, a primitive person who came upon a snake might have ventured close enough to be bitten because of the animal’s small size and lack of obvious threat. The next time a snake appeared—provided the first one hadn’t delivered a fatal bite—the person would probably approach it again.

The instinctual brain reacts directly to what it encounters in the environment on the basis of four simple questions that relate to the most basic animal instincts: Can I kill it, or can it kill me (instinct to live)? Can I eat it (instinct to use, hoard, and store)? Can I mate with it (instinct to ensure survival of the species)? Can I have dominance over it (instinct to compete and beat, which helps ensure survival of the fittest)? In other words, the instinctual brain contains primitive processes that cause us to explore and gain mastery over the world around us, to seek food, to display aggression for the purpose of dominance, and to reproduce and use our sexuality to attract a mate. It is responsible for all of our basic instinctual reactions and behaviors related to primitive survival concerns.

At various times, each of us is affected by impulses from our instinctual brain, although some people seem more beholden to them than others do!

Emotional Brain

The limbic or emotional brain evolved next, as humans realized that safety and survival were best accomplished in groups. This brain contains the mechanism to form bonds with others, providing us with a sense of psychological security and belonging. It has a regulatory system to mediate emotions that arise from our bonds to others, such as pleasure arising from being with friends and loved ones, separation distress when someone leaves us or we leave them, playfulness and touch, and the desire to nurture and care for others (i.e., maternal nurturance).

As its name suggests, the emotional brain is concerned with producing emotions—pleasure, rage, fear, and joy—that we feel and experience physically. This brain produces the desire to relate to others as well as to recognize the positive or negative quality of emotions (also known as “emotional valence”). The emotional brain makes a value judgment about the emotions that we have with an experience and then categorizes them as positive or negative, pleasurable or uncomfortable. It then stores negative emotional memories for future reference, using them to judge new situations and decide whether to enter them or avoid them. This means that our primitive person, if bitten by the snake, would have stored the experience of the bite as “bad.” Should our friend come upon that snake a second time, the recall of negative emotions (pain and fear) produced by the first bite would lead to evasive action, which most of us would consider a more intelligent response! He would then go and tell all his friends.

But it’s not only physical threats like snakes that cause our emotional brain to send us messages that a situation is likely to create unpleasant feelings. Here is another example of how this part of the brain works:
Dennis’s wife Kate recently took a new job. Her employer is holding a holiday party to which spouses are invited. Dennis hears the words “office party” and feels immediately uneasy. His heart beats faster and his mouth feels a little dry. A shy man who hates small talk, he would much rather stay at home while Kate goes to the party. However, Kate insists that he go, and Dennis gives in. At the party, he tries to be pleasant but quickly becomes embarrassed when his attempts at conversations with strangers turn to awkward silences, just before the partygoers abandon him to find someone more interesting to talk to. For Dennis, the evening can’t end soon enough.

The reactions of discomfort that Dennis feels when the party is mentioned come from his emotional brain dredging up a negative association it had made in the past between office parties and unpleasantness. Although Dennis may believe that he just doesn’t enjoy office parties, his emotional brain knows something deeper than this: Dennis has suffered embarrassment in this situation before, and he is now afraid of feeling embarrassment again; he therefore attempts to avoid the situation rather than face his fear. Because he is afraid that he is going to be socially awkward, he ends up working himself into a tizzy and ultimately creating exactly the experience he dreads.