Controlling Your Limbic Brain’s Controls on What You Can Do
by Win Wenger, Ph.D.
published in The Stream, April/May 2003
<< The Stream Index
ABSTRACT: The limbic brain directs the cortex, and directs human intellectual and learning experience and performance in various ways – ways consistent with the limbic’s biological and bio- evolutionary role in complex homeostasis (described here in Part One). In this context, we have discovered why “exceptional gifted- ness” is “exceptional,” and how to make it far more frequent. In Part Two (May 2003 issue) we will examine a number of intervention points where changes in educative procedure, relating to limbic brain functions, can lead to profound educational and personal improvements.
Part One: How the Limbic System Works
PHYSICAL STRUCTURE OF THE BRAIN:
Please hold one hand as a clenched fist. Wrap your open other hand over top of your fist. Your open hand represents the cerebral cortex in your brain; your clenched fist represents your limbic brain. Your cortex crowns your limbic.
The limbic is not a single organ but a cluster of distinct organs, each with specific and diverse functions. The three organs that generate and control emotions – the thalamus, hypothalamus, and the amygdala – are part of the region and aggregate of organs we call the limbic brain. So are the physical appetite-controlling structures of the brain, located in the limbic region.
FUNCTIONAL ROLE:
The limbic brain is our main “computer.” The cortex in effect operates as supplementary memory chips supporting the main computer. The conscious mind is associated with only a tiny part of the cortex, but the brain operates as an interactive system.
From Ordovician swamp days if not earlier, the limbic brain maintained balance in our lives, and in our bodies, as complex homeostatic equilibrium. In the body, as a master thermostat in a multi-story building, the limbic brain regulates not only temperature but fluid levels (thirst), energy levels and intake (hunger), endocrine and hormone levels, in the trillion-and-one complex systems that comprise a living physical body.
It’s fascinating that the limbic brain also regulates our lives, not only our physical bodies. One small example: what if alcohol, nicotine, an opiate or other psychoactive drug, pushes the “thermostat” setting out of position? Equilibrium is then redefined and a drug dependency set up which is tough to lick. It can be very difficult to get the thermostat restored to its proper setting, once the limbic brain accommodates to the presence of that new substance.
Another example: People with poor self-image may meet unexpected success and then do all sorts of things ostensibly to improve their performance but in effect “blowing” their situation, to return to comfortably familiar failure. Such behavior doesn’t make rational sense to onlookers, but it makes sense from the perspective of the limbic brain.
A sensori-motor example: A normal person, in a car accident, goes through his windshield and suffers severe brain damage. Equilibrium (rest position) for the body gets thereby redefined. A month later he is so physically distorted that the palm of his hand is twisted flat against his wrist, a kind of distortion seen with long-term brain-damage sufferers. Proprioception has found a new and grotesque equilibrium.
An example involving the eyes: near-sightedness, far- sightedness, and astigmatism are regarded as problems with the shape of the eyeballs. It isn’t. What controls the shape of the eyeballs? – Muscles surrounding the eyes. What controls those muscles? The brain. Near-, far- or astigmatic-sightedness is a function of how the brain defines resting-point or equilibrium for the eyes. Correct the brain’s definition of equilibrium and correct your eyesight.
THE KEY ISSUE IS BALANCE:
Our limbic brain, master equilibriator of complexity and homeostasis in living systems, performs as an athletic virtuoso balancing act. Attempting to restore balance, to prevent a fall, elicits from each of us a swifter, surer and more agile response than we normally are able to manifest. Even someone crippled and arthritic, if starting to fall, will usually by reflex suddenly reach out in an effort to restore balance. We can’t always succeed in preventing a fall, but an off-balance condition elicits more response than our normal capacity.
Emotion is the added energy and response the limbic pulls into play in its effort to restore balance in an unbalanced situation. Emotion mobilizes the system to its best efforts.
Living has gotten more complicated since the Jurassic. The limbic now has auxiliary memory cells in the cortex. They expand the frame of reference and the span of awareness in which our limbic mainframe works.
Although the cortex works much slower than the limbic, it brings to bear far more perception upon given stimuli and frames of reference. It processes more detail, it recognizes patterns, and it anticipates the unfolding of events within those patterns. It provides a focusing system which allows extra resources to respond to stimuli. The focusing usually takes place in the left temporal lobe, the main area from which we are “conscious.” Pattern-recognition occurs in the opposite, right, temporal lobe; anticipation of pattern and outcome are mainly in the frontal cortex.
Usually portrayed as opposites, the two temporal lobes are actually much more alike than they are different. They are organs specialized for making sense of things, though they follow different methods for doing so. Consistency is important to both. The left seeks consistency with linear logic and rationalizes things; the right is driven to align other perceptions with recognized patterns. In this regard it has a special relationship to the limbic brain. As we shall see later in terms of amygdala functions, “reading” the body in relation to ongoing contexts determines the readiness of the system to act in those contexts.
Part Two: Some Intervention Points
Institutions at all levels, like any other complex homeostatic (self-stabilizing) system, seek to conserve energy by reducing the range of variables with which they must contend. Nearly always, this requires people to behave predictably. In some sectors such predictability – as in driving on a designated side of the road – aids survival. But in many other sectors little justifies it beyond convenience for the institution itself.
Conversely, creativity, giftedness and genius behave unpredict-ably, and they generate unpredictable conditions. The pain of that inconvenience, in turn, is visited upon the perpetrator, even when the institution’s own survival may depend upon that gifted but unpredicted act.
At best, then, gifted behavior usually goes unreinforced. At worst it becomes painfully punished. Such phenomena may be so wide- spread that without such extinctions nearly everyone reading this report would rank among the “exceptionally gifted.”
THE EXTREME FORM OF EXTINCTION OF GENIUS:
IN OUR SCHOOLS
For decades, a peculiar provision of U.S. Federal and state aid to education has rewarded no teacher or administrator with money or power if Junior learns BETTER than others (except at graduate school levels, where different dynamics apply). However, if Junior learns worse, the system supplies more money and power for compensatory efforts. This system inadvertently rewards poor teaching, poor curriculum content, and poor methods.
During the European Renaissance the Socratic method was a principal feature of schools and education. Under the Socratic method, the teacher asked a pupil acutely thought-provoking questions. The student was forced, in seeking to answer them, to examine his internal and external perceptions and to describe what he discovered. Exercising the Socratic method enriched each student’s mind. This approach consistently produced genius in the populations where it was used.
In the mid- to late-19th century, most countries, including the USA, adopted the Prussian school model for mass education. They aimed to produce national power by training citizens to perform as cogs in the early industrial machine and as obedient soldiers for cannon fodder.
Schools abandoned “educating” when they substituted the didactic teaching of the Prussian model. They adopted a model of pouring information and skills into “tabula rasa,” the virtually “empty slates” of students’ minds. Their system assessed progress in terms of the degree of failure of students to retain this poured-in information.
In Socratic method, human learners were cultivated around their strengths. They became, so to speak, Sequoia trees. In the “tabula rasa” Prussian model prevailing today, educators’ attention trains on where the student “doesn’t measure up.” Instead of proceeding from strengths, students are mainly attuned to their shortfalls. We have nearly all been convinced, coming through such experiences, that we’re not really all that good. We’ve been cultivated around our weaknesses and perceived shortcomings, instead of around our strengths, enroute to becoming little privet hedges instead of Sequoias.
“VERIFICATION” OF LEARNING METHODS
All human learning arrives in context. Something has meaning only in context of how it relates to other things, and/or how a change in one bears upon what happens in the other. Virtually all current educationally approved practices were validated by procedures devoid of context. Empty schooling has no relevance to human learning!
MORE ON THE ROLE OF THE LIMBIC BRAIN
The limbic brain, assessing the readiness of the system to handle a given stimulus, tells the cortex how to handle that stimulus – whether to run with and explore it in some manner (“there’s gold in them thar hills – go for it!”), or whether to just “bury it under a rug somewhere and forget about it.” Some of that context is the individual’s own physical attitude within the body. Some of it is the “second plane of awareness” context of classroom, teacher manner, etc., in ways well addressed by Dr. Georgi Lozanov and his Suggestopedic method.
(Mini-demonstration:)
An example, Dear Reader, of the power of the physical attitudes of the body in determining what the limbic tells the cortex to do with a stimulus, is this simple demonstration. Please stand now, with feet about two feet apart, slump-shouldered. Gaze slack-jawed at the ceiling, and say (or try to say) crisply, “I’m a brilliant genius!!!”
Now pull your feet together, straighten into a much more alert and crisp physical posture, and say that again.
(End of demo.)
Now let us examine, from that small demonstration, the power of context working against you and for you. In that first instance, you could FEEL the commands relayed by the limbic, from the physical attitudes of the body, fighting even your ability to say a simple sentence! Far subtler perceptions, intellectualizations and behaviors are infinitely more susceptible to physical attitudes of the body (especially habituated “body language”), to say nothing of Lozanov’s “second plane contexts,” which also operate as controlling factors in the process.
These, then, are main elements of the emerging model in which the limbic brain dominates human learning and teaching, intellect and giftedness. In turn, we can expand on these few elements where the model indicates that intervention. There, changes in methods of educating and cultivating personal growth can open new frontiers in desirable outcomes.
WAYS TO IMPROVE
In no particular order, we list a few possible intervention points:
- Improve POSTURE while learning; improve posture in the classroom. Modify furniture to induce more appropriate physical attitudes. Research, discover, and explore contrast between the physical attitudes of genius and one’s own physical attitudes, as in Borrowed Genius.
- Use contexts from which you – or students – may “search and describe” inner and outer perceptions, without the direction of Socratically acute questions.
- Reintroduce EMOTION, the language of the limbic, into lesson content. (Emotion and controversy have been stripped from education by competing public pressures.)
- Adopt procedures and programs that lead students (and teachers) to discover or rediscover their own genius. Address the feelings experienced when their/our prior precocities were being extinguished. Cultivate appetites and gusto for learning.
- Determine ways to relate, or even to sublimate-in, intellectual and aesthetic drives to the physical appetite structures of the brain, to an even greater extent than now. How? Possibly, as with thousands of various “disciplines,” using fasting or other manipulations of physical appetite to heighten mental performance.
At the very least, to defend instances of high intellectual endowment from such threats as appetite suppressants and against times of physiological appetite change.
- Carefully destabilize contexts, classrooms, students, teachers, administrators, or parents (!) in ways that elicit extra efforts and challenges to recover intellectual balance. Let ample and free discussion follow.
- Restore Socratic, or at least perceptual “search-and- describe”, procedures as a preferred method of “education”, working with – rather than despite – individual, societal, and group contexts.
- Amygdalal and hippocanthal functions, not addressed here, suggest among other things a careful positive reinforcement of some of the component behaviors which come together to express gifted behavior and/or giftedness in relating to physical appetite brain structures. This is not so much learning behavior per behaviorism as extrinsic reward systems.
- Establish a learning context in which selected spontaneous behaviors of the learner are reinforced for persistence, rather than interrupted and squelched. Much of the original Montessori Method was based upon this. That takes on added meaning in relation to the common finding that highly gifted adults and commonly regarded “creative geniuses” generally reflect high levels of “compulsiveness” in their psychological profiles. And that their high contributions historically come mostly through persistence in the face of discouragement and punishment.
- Develop and enrich a vocabulary and language of feelings. Feelings are a primary processing language of the limbic. This can bring into better reach of our conscious mind and intent the true core of where our actual choices and decisions are made. In con- trast, our conscious choices and decisions are usually overridden, unawares, by those made in our limbic.
These are but a few of the points where intervention could lead to greatly improved outcome, in education and career and also in general. As we understand more of the role of the limbic brain in its equilibriating and directing of the intellect, and as we grasp the implications of understandings at which we have already arrived, other key points of positive transformation should follow.
It is also clear that our understandings of the CORTEX now must address and include the limbic which directs that cortex. The limbic brain’s seeking of homeostasis through more and more complex living circumstances created that cortex. Already, the similarities and differences between the remarkably specialized left and right temporal lobes of the cortex begin to make greater sense than before the limbic model emerged.
Many more researchers are needed to explore this field. Opportunities abound for original discovery and for major improve- ments to educational practice. Such discoveries can be productive for professional and career advancement. The opportunities for such discoveries are so numerous that they are easy to find. We urge further attention, whether by researchers or laymen, to what the limbic brain means and can mean to what’s important in your experience. Educational implications follow.
POSTSCRIPT
Now that you’ve read this article, you are cordially invited to discover ten times more meaning and content from it than you are aware of right now. Please turn to keyboard, pen and paper, or a tape recorder, and, following the procedures either of Freenoting or of Windtunnel, for some sustained rapid- flow torrential minutes record absolutely everything that comes to mind in this context, faster than you can think about or judge. Be willing to discard (afterward) a first few nonsense paragraphs to get through to some insights which will surprise you greatly.