The Animal Brain

Humans are born with animal brains. These are mostly automatic. This brain allows them, like dogs, to gain resources and protect themselves from nature. In short, it can keep them alive. This brain allows humans the same amount of protection that a dog's brain allows. This protection is a basic interaction with the natural world. It tells you that you are hungry and it provides a very rudimentary mental structure that facilitates survival. It does not provide much in the way of happiness or success above survival.

What humans also have that dogs do not is a process brain. This brain, contrary to the animal brain, is not automatic. It will not become complex and useful over time without training. While it uses the animal brain for basic survival, it seems content to be latent and useless in humans unless it is encouraged. This is in no way a new idea.

What does the process brain do? If you haven't already guessed, it invents things. It creates something new where before there was nothing except maybe basic material. A dog can escape a predator by relying on his instincts, by observing and reacting automatically if threatened. A human can do this also. But a human can also pull out a gun and shoot a predator instantly - and this is why there are no longer human predators. There were some. They got shot. End of story.

What does this all mean? It means that a process brain can circumvent basic survival methods and "invent" things that protect and enhance human life. The unfortunate thing that we have learned over the past three-hundred years is that this process brain can also destroy human life as effectively as it can protect it. But that is not what we are here to discuss. Ayn Rand did an infamously good job of discussing this.

Another interesting benefit of a process brain is happiness. This is not what is generally referred to as contentedness. Contentedness is what is gained by the animal brain. Generally being content or satisfied is what we see when we say, "Hey look at those old people, they seem happy." It is also what we say, in our confusion, when we see old people that have been married sixty years. They are not happy, they are content. Their animal needs have been met. Good for them.

So what is happiness as it is different from satisfaction? Happiness is the activity and productions of the process brain. When this superior brain state is trained and when it creates things in the real world, it has the peculiar result of what we call real happiness. When a process human invents something, happiness CAN result. It doesn't always result. This essay does not have the room to consider the moral implications of the inventions from the process brain. We are here to attempt to draw a simple distinction in a simple way. Animal brain from Process brain.

Why am I not happy? is a common human question. It can only be asked at the beginning stages of process development. An animal brain cannot consider this question. The answer, however, is that you are not happy because you or those around you are not operating from the process brain. You are not happy because you confuse rote and process, or basic and complex. You have no idea that you cannot be happy until you have started to use your process brain. The unfortunate part is that you don't know what it looks like because it requires a process brain to see one. This occurs in young humans fairly easily if they are educated into the system. If they are not, the entire sequence is short-circuited and the result is a kind of stagnation. And unhappiness. And addiction and children. The irony is that those with the most potential for creative success are the ones most vulnerable to the confusion and decline.

The answer? Educate humans into process thought early on. The reality? We are educating less and less humans into process thought and educators, as a whole, cannot see process thinking and don't know they aren't teaching it. We have created an insolvent social model where humans have become more and more, to a one, self-destructive. What often happens is that young humans who are most effected by this loss are attracted and distracted by addictive behaviors, aberrant behaviors, that manifest as addictions to drugs, alcohol, religion, food, love and children.

Without an education system that identifies this problem, no good can result.

The products of this education vacuum will be, at best, rote thinkers. The most complex product of an entirely rote system is the computer. Whether it be a series of microchips or an incomplete human, the computer is the best the rote animal brain can do. This product is boring and, even more importantly, it is secretly miserable. And that misery is seen in it's inventions.

And the process thinkers, if they are out there, suffer this.