The Snake Brain and the Sage Brain

We’ve spent some time talking about Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM); now we’re going to shift gears and talk a little bit about neuro-biology and the Triune Brain model (good thing one of us is an MD) and how Alarm Emotions are processed in our brains.

Some Basics on the Brain

For those of us who haven’t thought about the biology of brains since our school days, here’s the 30,000 foot picture: human brains are (arguably) the most highly evolved brains in the world, but evolutionarily, it took us a while to get here. We all started with something much simpler, something whose function was solely to keep us alive. This is sometimes referred to as the reptilian brain, the lizard brain, the primal brain; we like to call it the Snake Brain. 

If we look at the brains of reptiles, we learn that snakes and crocodiles are good at basic survival. To survive you need to do two things: first, you need to recognize your prey, or whatever you eat; and second, you need to be able to avoid becoming prey, which means you need to be able to recognize danger. Essentially, our snake brain is in charge of fight, flight, and feed. (It’s also in charge of one other “F” but that’s not important to our discussion.)

Interestingly, our Snake Brain also has some procedural memory and stores our habits, like how we might throw our keys in a bowl as soon as we enter the front door without consciously thinking about it. So our Snake Brain remembers and recognizes patterns (this is important).

The next part of the brain to evolve was the midbrain (or a larger midbrain, to be exact). As we move past reptiles and look at birds, we find they still have their reptilian brains for basic survival. But in addition, they have more brain tissue, and that brain tissue enables them to do some learning, some planning, and some ability to execute such plans (for example, some crows in Japan have learned to drop hard nuts in the street so that passing cars will crush the shells for them and they can grab the meat – that’s good planning and execution!).

Finally we arrive at mammals, who have developed a neocortex, or forebrain. The forebrain is in charge of things like voluntary actions, interpreting sensory input and making decisions based on those inputs. We like to use the term prefrontal cortex (PFC), which is a very specific part of the forebrain that intelligently regulates our thoughts, actions, and emotions through extensive connections with other brain regions (like the Snake Brain). Since we’re big fans of alliteration, we refer to this part of the brain as the Sage Brain.

Job Summaries for the Snake Brain and the Sage Brain

Let’s take a closer look at what the Snake Brain is in charge of: basic survival. Basic survival is the quick recognition of danger, specifically any danger that might end your life. The Snake Brain is also good at recognizing the opportunity to eat or to find shelter in a safe place. In both cases, in order to avoid danger, or to have an opportunity to sustain life, the Snake Brain immediately sounds an alarm, and it also immediately readies the body to deal with the situation.

The Sage Brain is in charge of executive function, which means that when the Snake Brain blares the alarm, the Sage Brain is able to give the alarm context in the situation. The Sage Brain processes these parameters, calculates the best reaction, and then executes these thought-through responses. Unlike the Snake Brain, which acts almost instantly based on what pattern it perceives, the Sage Brain takes its time in doing its job; the Sage Brain will give you an action plan when it’s good and ready.

We can also see it this way: basic survival reactions are more body-centered because it forces the body into an automatic reaction. The danger alarm makes the body tense in preparation for a reaction and gives us an intense feeling of impending doom. We call that urgency; the urgency comes from the Snake Brain giving us the feeling that we must act now. This is because the Snake Brain doesn’t understand time and therefore tells us we have NO time. On the flip side, if there is an opportunity at hand to sustain life, we get an intense push to use it. We act on impulse.

Executive function, on the other hand, is more mind-centered. Here we gain awareness, and being aware about what is going on helps us with the calm and orderly processing of the situation that we are currently in. That leaves space for rationality and creativity.

How the Snake Brain and the Sage Brain Work Together

As we talked about in our previous blog post, an alarm needs to make you aware that something is out of the ordinary – the perfect job for the Snake Brain (also known as the limbic system). The Snake Brain enables us to do all the things that reptiles have done successfully for millions of years, like recognize the patterns that alert us to danger; it is highly developed.

The prefrontal cortex, where awareness and consciousness are situated, came much later on the evolutionary timeline and is still developing. If it were developed here in Silicon Valley, it would still be in the beta stage because it’s so slow and glitchy, it’s definitely not ready for its big launch. And the prefrontal cortex is hard to engage, you practically have to start it like a Model T. Awareness needs work, it does not come automatically; same with rational thinking, it takes a tremendous amount of effort.

Whatever comes out of the Snake Brain seems easy, obvious, and leads to a very quick and intense automatic reaction. What it does very well – actually, the ONLY thing it can do – is to recognize patterns. If there is a long, wavy green thing in your lawn, it makes you immediately jump back because a long, wavy green thing in grass is obviously a snake. Your Sage Brain then needs to process that (much more slowly) and take the circumstances into consideration, like that the snake is connected to the faucet, and then report back to the Snake Brain: thank you for the warning, but in this case, it’s only the garden hose.

So the Snake Brain recognizes a pattern (long, wavy green thing in grass = snake) and the Sage Brain takes the circumstances into account and adjusts your reaction accordingly. This is called “situational adaptation” and gives us humans an advantage over other animals on the planet. This process of taking pattern recognition and applying it to the situation is an iterative and very dynamic process. Don’t pooh-pooh the Snake Brain, it keeps us alive! The Snake Brain and the Sage Brain must stay in constant communication with each other for us to have a good life.

Here’s the rub: as I mentioned, the Sage Brain is still under evolutionary development and hence it makes a lot of mistakes! What can happen because the Sage Brain is so unfinished and raw, is that the Sage Brain doesn’t catch on to all of the signals of danger that come from the Snake Brain. These danger signals are the Alarm Emotions we discussed in a previous blog post, the bad emotions that are so jarring because they need to get our attention right away. The Sage Brain just doesn’t get the message, fails to create any awareness about the circumstances that triggered the alarm, and as a consequence, doesn’t do anything to adapt to the current situation. Oh no! Now despite our nice, big brains, we’re stuck acting like stupid reptiles.

As an aside…

Some people equate the Snake Brain with emotions, and the Sage Brain with rationality. I do not subscribe to that. The emotions generated in the reptilian part of the brain are just very intense. Some emotions require awareness; they require a high grade of processing of complicated and logical data. One example is the emotion of awe. Let’s say you’re sitting at the beach with your pet snake, observing the glorious sunset, and you’re in awe of the beauty of the universe, and you feel like you’re in the presence of God. Your pet snake sees the same colors, but it feels nothing, because this gorgeous spectacle does not contain any queues of danger or food.