Four Brained

Pay attention! Can’t you see the danger here? All the perils are right before your eyes! I am the only one who keeps us safe. No one else is on the lookout for Our Body. Where are the three of you when I need you to pay attention?

Solita, you try to organize and manage your way out of any situation, but sometimes you’ve just gotta run! Now! Especially since Andy and Nameless live in LaLa Land, blissed out and googley-eyed all the time. All of you need to turn around! Look left! You expect me to have your back, and I try. I ramp up the cortisol and the adrenaline, I dial up your heartrate. I make you sweat and I try to make you swear. We have to take care of Our Body. So, you need to be ready to run! Can’t you see that?

My name is Amy, short for Amygdala, and I live here on the left side, downstairs below Solita. She’s up there, all high and mighty, tapping away on her tappy-tap keys, making lists and marking the days off on her calendar. She always plans ahead, that bitch. She never sweats unless I ramp things up really good. Sometimes I wish I could kick her out of this skull altogether, but I can’t do that. I just have to dial up the hormones so she’ll shut down, like a computer offline. Then I can take control.

Like I said, I live downstairs, which is considered the low-rent district. They all call me Chicken Little, after that famous hen who yelled, “The sky is falling!” Our Body calls me that, and, well, it’s my job to keep us safe, the four of us, which also means keeping her, Our Body safe. She’s really at our mercy, especially mine. Ol’ Solita up there tries to keep Our Body organized and on time. She has to work against Our Body’s tendency to procrastinate, and when Solita fails I get to rush in and yell, “Hurry up! You’re gonna be late!” It’s kindof fun, but I get worried, and scared, too. I really do.

Across the hall, some call it the corpus collosum, my downstairs neighbor is such a loser. He never gets worried. He just wants to have fun and revel in beauty. He always assumes Our Body will get places on time, or that it just won’t matter. Even when she’s driving like a bat outta hell and I’m screaming, “Look out,” ole Andy will spy something beautiful, like a tree or a flower. He’ll tell her, “Look at that!” He’s saying, “Isn’t it beautiful?” and I’m screaming, “We’re all gonna die!” Our Body always looks, and so far she hasn’t killed us. But it could happen.

Most people think they just have two brains, the left, executive type, all separate and ego bound, and the right brain, the one that the famous brain scientist gave that Ted Talk about. She told us that the right brain, by itself, can’t tell where the body ends and the rest of the world begins. “It’s beYOUtiful,” she said, just like that. But its not beautiful. It’s dangerous and scary to think like that. My job in Our Body’s brain is to remind her where her edges are and to protect them. It’s a big job.

People think they know all about the Amygdala and mostly consider it a bad thing. They call me reptilian, primitive, and imagine me as scaly and green. But I swear I am not scary nor am I stupid. I am not a lizard! I have a big job and I take it seriously. Very seriously. And the damned thing is that I have to work against those three other brain parts, like Solita, who tells Our Body that she has control over things and just needs to plan better, leave earlier, get her act together, basically. And our neighbors across the hall tell her that she doesn’t even NEED control at all. “Just ride the waves, they say.” Focus on your breath. What a joke.

I’ve told you about Solita, upstairs, and a little about Andy, my downstairs neighbor. He thinks Our Body is invincible, and that we all just needs to lighten up, do that old “smell the roses” thing. Ha. Still, Solita and Andy aren’t the biggest problem. Wait until you climb the stairs on the right side of the hallway and meet Nameless. She is called that because she is too big to be contained by a name or by any other word. She lives inside this bony head, or seems to, but then again, she doesn’t.

She’s can’t be named, so they say, because she isn’t a thing. She isn’t a noun, but a verb. They say she is Be-ing --a diffusion of energy that, get this, contains all-that-is. Phew. What hooey. Our Body might have a big head sometimes, in the metaphorical sense of the phrase (see, I know some big words!), but Nameless? Being? Sheesh. I scoff at it all, but really it scares me. It makes my job seem so much harder.

Our Body likes to sit and meditate, or pray in the mornings and boy, do I have to work hard to distract her. She tries to “let go” of me, wishing I would drift on by and not be the bother I am intended to be. She tries to turn the messages I send her into little mental “leaves that float away on a gentle stream.” So I send more leaves, and try to make them more urgent. Red leaves! The color of danger! But ol’ Andy just tells her how beautiful they are, and thus they drift by, unheeded. Sometimes Our Body gets all upstairs in Nameless and, like that scientist, her edges blur. She becomes deaf to my warnings. I am really scared then, because it’s like the line is cut to my voice. I have no signal. I am officially offline, if just for a terrifying moment.

But occasionally she does listen, I’ll give her that. She has even said that she understands I am trying to help. When she calms me down I can speak a little more coherently, and she listens better. Sometimes she realizes that what I am screaming about DOES need attention, and she’ll take it up with all the others. Sometimes.

When she brings the four of us together, she calls that her “Brain Huddle.” She learned that from the scientist I’ve mentioned, who is a big mucketymuck Neuroanatomist. Now that’s a big word! That woman had a stroke, a brain bleed, which can be fatal. When that happened the whole left side of her mind went AWOL, upstairs and downstairs, too. So, her Chicken Little couldn’t warn her! I am sure it tried. She lost her Solita, too, so there was no one home to organize things. The scientist couldn’t talk. She couldn’t understand speech, but apparently she came to understand whole a lot of new stuff.

And, actually, she loved life in that right hemisphere, or LaLa Land as she called it. It was beYOUtiful, she kept saying. She rested there for a while, but then she wanted her speech and understanding to come back. And they did, after many years. But they came with the price of feeling alone again, with a renewed sense of scarcity and urgency about everything. She got her version of me back, and her Solita, too.

So now that the scientist’s left brain is online again, she chooses to abandon it from time to time. I guess all of her left-brain warnings and endless urgings (“Do this! Watch out!”) do get tiring. I think that can happen for Any Body. The scientist chooses to sit and rest in that peaceful place over there on the right, and she has taught Our Body how do to that, too.

When I can’t reach Our Body to warn her, I step back and line up my arsenal of chemicals. Cortisol is the biggie, and I keep it close at hand. Adrenaline comes close, along with norepinephrine and even insulin. That’s what makes our Body crave sweets, which fattens her up, and that makes me happy because I know she will survive longer when the supply of food gives out. The others in the Brain Huddle laugh at me, as does Our Body, but look, it could happen! Solita tells me to calm down, that Our Body has a stash in the basement for emergencies. “But the basement could flood,” I tell them all! They just laugh again, and I shut up and reach for the “big C” Cortisol button.

Besides her morning meditation and the Brain Huddle, Our Body does this evening thing, called “The Examen.” I think she does it to diss me, because that’s what almost always happens. “What events of my day were life-giving?” she asks herself, and she’ll write in her journal about the flowers Andy showed her, the accomplishments Solita helped her make, which are mostly about helping others and creating her own beauty. Then she’ll describe the peaceful, restful, connected-to-all-that-is moments she got to spend with Nameless. I usually end up on the part of the page that she labels “Life Draining.” These are her worries, her fears, her rushing around at my insistence that she’s gonna be late. These “drains” are the results of the drugs I send coursing through her body.  

It's like Amy is nothing but a bother to her, a real Chicken Little who screams and screams when the sky simply isn’t falling. And I am Amy Amygdala. I am the cause of all that is life draining. I can get really put out with all of this. I know how to do pouty. Heck, I thrive in the land of fearful and pouty.

But wait, tonight Our Body is calling a Brain Huddle. I drag my ass getting there, but I have to go. Our Body says this huddle is something new…about a gratitude she’s been missing. She tells us that one of her worries saved her today. It literally saved her! She said that “something” told her not to take a certain train. Solita had planned it all out for her, and Andy was all in for the fun. But “something” told her to wait and go later. That earlier train crashed.

By now my hand is waving and I am jumping up and down. “That was me!” I am screaming. “That was me! I knew it! I just new it! Trains are dangerous. They go really fast and our system is so old and worn out.”

Solita and Andy looked at me and smirked. Nameless just smiled.

“OK, so I know I say that about every train ride,” I replied, “but today it worked. It saved her. It saved all of us!”

“It did,” said Our Body. I heeded your warning today, and it saved us. And I realized, because of that, that I appreciate your warnings, and that I need to tell you so. I listen more than you know,” she said. “Sometimes I change direction because of your warnings. What I have failed to do is understand your hard work that keeps us safe.”

Solita and Andy nodded. Quietly Nameless cast a net of sparkly energy over all of us here in the brain huddle. For a few moments we just sat in silence under that beautiful net of Nameless energy. We savored the connections among the five of us, and we felt thanks for the work that we all do.

But then I had to speak up, and I broke the spell. “Aren’t you going to be late?” I asked.