“Essentially, all models are wrong, but some are useful.” —George Box
Our “reptilian brain” is the deepest and most fundamental part of the brain used by all animals from reptiles on up the evolutionary ladder. It handles our automatic reactions—breathing, hormone and blood regulation, the startle response all initiate from the reptilian brain. There is no emotion here, only instinct, and it is out of our control. Reptiles and birds thrive with this brain.
More recent evolutionarily is the limbic brain, which mammals have used to their advantage. It does a fine job pairing the outside world with reproductive behavior and parenting. It’s the reason tigers and wolves are able to birth their offspring live and care for them. By contrast, alligators and fish lay eggs, and may often eat their offspring. There is an advantage to care for family, if only to perpetuate one’s DNA, and it stems from this brain center.
Finally we have the neocortex. Newest of the three but not necessarily the most advanced, it allows us fine motor-sensory-emotionally linked skills, as well as abstraction. It makes us human, all too human. This bastard is at the root of humans’ woes.
The neo-cortex is basically indistinguishable from plaque buildup.
Humans are not the logical conclusion of nature that inspirational quotes make us out to be. We are severely faulty. Elaine Morgan sums up many of our inherent physical faults in her book “The Scars of Evolution”: Goosebumps to fluff up fur that isn’t there; a spine that is horrible at being vertical; a pathetic sense of smell; a ridiculously placed larynx. There are a host of other ways we’re ill-equipped physically, and that may be why we’ve developed such a big brain—the brawn itself couldn’t cut it.
And our brain isn’t any diamond in the rough either. We are expected to reason, but our reasoning bends to our emotions, and emotions are things over which we have little control. The emotional brain is trained to respond to the external world in certain ways, and those ways become our habits well before adulthood. For a long time this worked well. Then we started to become self-aware, and aware of abstract notions—our neocortex came to dominate our skulls.
Genesis illustrates our evolution perfectly: Eden is the limbic/reptilian way of life, and the “tree of knowledge” is the dawning of the neocortex. That Adam and Eve bit the apple isn’t their fault. It was simply a natural result of their reptilian will to survive. I think it’s a stroke of genius that a snake guided them to the tree. Huzzah to the reptilian brain!: It’s efficient and effective at keeping any animal with it alive. Whether they are happy or not isn’t the reptilian brain’s problem.
That Adam and Eve were expelled from the garden elicits a stroke of compassion. Why? Because we’re social animals, and the thought of having only one other person to live with seems pretty harsh. Fortunately for our ancient ancestors this is a parable: as humans, we were always social, and it was to our advantage. As an aside, the rest of the Bible seems to illustrate what a hard time we’re having with our damn neocortexes.
"I wish we had like a board game or something."
We need people or we go nuts—literally. We don’t self-regulate, we co-regulate, even in matters as fundamentally important as breathing.
“Two studies, for instance, compared premature infants who slept with a standard teddy bear to those supplied with a ‘breathing’ bear—an ordinary stuffed animal connected to a ventilator and set to inflate and deflate at a rhythmic fraction of the baby’s own respiratory rate. The infants with the breathing bear later showed more quiet sleep and more regular respiration than those who slept with a static Winnie-the-Pooh. Regular sighs taught the preemies respiratory stability[.]“ —from A General Theory of Love
We need to be around breathers to breathe correctly! In the words of Drs. Lewis, Amini and Lannon, “[P]eople cannot be stable on their own—not should or shouldn’t be, but can’t be.”
So perhaps yoga’s sages weren’t the all-encompassing spiritual know-it-alls yoga publications will have you believe. Could it be that a select few of our ancestors had neocortexes advanced enough to be scared of their own acuity? Were these sages smart enough to enunciate their fears, yet be socially inept? And perhaps what we now call yoga was merely their retreat into isolation?
Jack Nicolson as Patañjali in "The (Skull) Shining"
Fight or flight cannot be decided upon: it is a reptilian instinct. Our neocortex bows to it. So if sages retreated into isolation as a fight or flight response, my guess is they had little reasoned choice in the matter. It was how their brain felt they could survive, given the fear of their own knowledge.
So here they are in isolation, with a brain designed to be around other humans. Did you ever try to use one tool to do another tool’s job? Everything goes as expected: A human will go insane, because a human cannot be stable on their own. Perhaps the yogis of their day spent so much time in isolation their physiological and psychological systems started to break down.
Here are some classical yoga techniques that show a will to be non-human:
-Khechari mudra involved literally sliding the tongue down throat, as if you were swallowing your ability to speak (and eventually your ability to breathe). Cutting the lingual frenulum and rubbing ghee on it is recommended for easier and further tongue sliding.
-Moorcha pranayama: The purpose of this breathwork was to induce fainting or swooning. You hyperventilate until you were light in the head. It was said to induce “a psychic state”. Here is what’s really happening: The decrease of CO2 in the blood ups the pH of the blood, which constricts the blood vessels leading to the brain. It’s like getting drunk, but cheaper. Escapism at it’s finest!
-Many poses listed in the Hatha Yoga Pradipika are named after plants and animals: There are poses attempting to emulate a cow’s face, a fish and a tortoise. Perhaps they were mimicking animals in an attempt to be as peaceful as the rest of nature seemed. The conclusions are more ominous with shavasana, which means corpse pose: Could a sage’s period of isolation result in thoughts like “I’d rather be dead”? Modern science has an answer for that: Yes.
"An otter...Maybe I'd like to be an otter."
Let’s look at Daoist interpretations of the world: The “no-self”, the void, the emptiness. It’s true you can logically deduce that nothing exists. We’re the only animals that would consider this proof significant. We’re the only animals with huge neo-cortexes walking around abstracting things, and allowing our reptilian brain and our mammilian brain to be at odds with one another.
Humans are social beings. Put anybody in isolation and eventually they will go insane. Yoga practices are becoming popular today because of the cubicle/car/paranoia-induced isolation modern humans are forced into.
Could this be the real reason pranayama (yogic breathwork) and other yogic techniques exist? Here’s a partial list of what happens in the body when people are isolated:
- Decreased REM sleep
- Immune competency decreases
- Increased anxiety
- Increased erratic aggression
Compare this list to what yoga has been proven to do: de-stress, help sleep, induce calm, boost immunity, and help with depression. Perhaps yoga’s legacy stems from those who were just doing their best to cope with the results of social isolation.
When yoga teachers teach breathing techniques, they might be teaching a classroom full of adults who are making up for years of lost breathing education, all because they slept alone in their infancy. We might be instructing someone with a desperate mammalian need to be around others. To spend a quiet moment in a room with other human beings may be the thing that keeps them sane. To have a common goal of spending another five breaths in a difficult pose with others doing the same thing, to feel accomplishment with others: This may be the most socially and psychologically meaningful part of their day.
So perhaps the sages were insane. But it doesn’t detract from their sagacity at all.
