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The Triune Brain (Reptilian / Limbic / Neocortical)

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Anonymous

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... "The mind is but a plaything of the body." by Nietschze... (sorry if I've misspelled his name)

I think what he said is very true... after all, the more I think about it... our mind is made up of three speific brains - reptilian brain (the dark side of us, full of physical urges and the such) mammalian brain (the nuturing side, the need to socialise with others and "Breed"!) and the logical brain.. the primate brain, where we learn and absorb information. ...

This thread is being established to consolidate discussion of the "triune brain" model or meme - i.e., the notion that our human brains are a sort of three-level operational structure with a "reptilian" base handling instinctive behaviors, a "paleomammalian" / limbic portion handling emotions, and a "neomammalian" / higher-cognitive portion supporting (e.g.) language and thinking. For an overview see:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triune_brain
 
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Isn't the oldest part of the human brain ostensibly a reptilian brain? Perhaps that has something to do with it?
 
beakboo said:
Isn't the oldest part of the human brain ostensibly a reptilian brain?
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So the lizards are running things - with a bit of help from evolution....
 
The Reptile Brain...

The Reptile brain is the part of us that is responsible for our aggressive and ritualistic behaivour.
 
No seriously - what makes you say that
The Reptile brain is the part of us that is responsible for our aggressive and ritualistic behaivour
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... is it a joke?
 
The Reptile Brain is the part of us responsible for.. "aggresive behaivour, terrortorialism, ritualism and establishment of social hierachys".
 
Tut, tut, tut, adam do your research properly and impartiall

The brain stem is the oldest and smallest region in the evolving human brain. It evolved hundreds of millions of years ago and is more like the entire brain of present-day reptiles. For this reason, it is often called the 'reptilian brain'. Various clumps of cells in the brain stem determine the brain's general level of alertness and regulate the vegetative processes of the body such as breathing and heartbeat.

It's similar to the brain possessed by the hardy reptiles that preceded mammals, roughly 200 million years ago. It's 'preverbal', but controls life functions such as autonomic brain, breathing, heart rate and the fight or flight mechanism. Lacking language, its impulses are instinctual and ritualistic. It's concerned with fundamental needs such as survival, physical maintenance, hoarding, dominance, preening and mating. It is also found in lower life forms such as lizards, crocodiles and birds. It is at the base of your skull emerging from your spinal column.

The basic ruling emotions of love, hate, fear, lust, and contentment emanate from this first stage of the brain. Over millions of years of evolution, layers of more sophisticated reasoning have been added upon this foundation.

Our intellectual capacity for complex rational thought which has made us theoretically smarter than the rest of the animal kingdom.

When we are out of control with rage, it is our reptilian brain overriding our rational brain components. If someone says that they reacted with their heart instead of their head. What they really mean is that they conceded to their primative emotions (the reptilian brain based) as opposed to the calculations of the rational part of the brain.
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Hmmmm similar but not quite.

The Reptile Brain is the part of us responsible for.. "aggresive behaivour, terrortorialism, ritualism and establishment of social hierachys".
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Adam Rang said:
The Reptile Brain is the part of us responsible for.. "aggresive behaivour, terrortorialism, ritualism and establishment of social hierachys".
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This statement is true based on the research of various anthropoloists. The above quote i got from ABC News and was written by Paul MacLean.
 
Post the link Adam and let us make our minds up for ourselves.

This is where i got my info http://www.crystalinks.com/reptilianbrain.html

Show me a media agency that doesn't 'spin' facts for their own purpose and i'll eat my hat. Everyone has an agenda.

This is from Ikes site:

At least five human behaviors originate in the reptilian brain. These have been denoted as isopraxic, preservative, re-enactment, tropistic, and deceptive. Without defining them, I shall simply say that in human activities they find expression in: --- obsessive-compulsive behavior; ---personal day-to-day rituals and superstitious acts; ---slavish conformance to old ways of doing things; ---ceremonial re-enactments; ---obeisance to precedent, as in legal, religious, cultural, and other matters; ---responding to partial representations (coloration,"strangeness," etc.), whether alive or inanimate; ---and all manner of deception.

(If I had to do a quick summary of Illuminati behaviour, it would be something like the above - the traits of the reptilian brain. Look at The Biggest Secret, my talk videos, and this website. They expose all of the consequences of this behavior - obsessively, compulsively, advancing their agenda at all costs; the obsession with rituals, ceremony, and symbolism; and…yes, yes…all manner of deception!)
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http://www.davidicke.com/icke/articles2/reptbrain.html

What? We ALL as humans have this as part of the brian. And the rest of the "facts" on that page are the ravings of a lunatic.
 
Adam, as a good Fortean, and not a puppet of Icke, proove that he said that quote as I imagine even if he did say those words they are taken out of context!!

I have done a quick search about Mr Maclean and he is a brain scientist who came up with the theory that the brain is really three brains, the oldest of which is SIMILAR to reptiles and is resposible for our most primative reactions i.e. fight or flight.

The second is a mammillian brain and the third is what distinctively makes us human and CONTROLS ALL the other brains elements.
 
Edward said:
Adam, as a good Fortean, and not a puppet of Icke, proove that he said that quote as I imagine even if he did say those words they are taken out of context!!
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He said the R-complex plays a major part in our characteristics of "aggresive behaivour, terrortorialism, ritualism and establishment of social hierachys".
 
My immediate thoughts on this were that reptiles aren't known for 'ritualism and social hierarchies'. However, running 'reptile social hierarchies' through Google soon proved me wrong.

As far as I can make out, the quote is accurate, and represents a fairly mainstream point of view.
 
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Baggini is putting himself about a bit - here he is in New Scientist (does he have a book to plug? - Oh yes!):

The self: why science is not enough
15 March 2011 by Julian Baggini

Can science explain the self, or is that just neuro-scientific hubris? There's no need to take sides

THE nature of the self, identity, and human values used to be the preserve of philosophers, but over recent decades psychologists and neuroscientists seem to have thoroughly colonised the territory.

For instance, in the 1960s Roger Sperry and Michael Gazzaniga famously severed the corpus callosum in several people with epilepsy and found that the left hemisphere of the brain could be aware of things the right was not aware of, and vice versa. Then in the 1970s, Benjamin Libet discovered that certain bodily movements were activated in the brain before the person consciously decided to do them, challenging conventional notions of free will.

A decade on, and Michael Persinger brought religious experiences into the domain of neuroscience by inducing them in subjects using transcranial magnetic stimulation. Moving into the 21st century, and neuroscientists such as Todd E. Feinberg and Antonio Damasio continue to use research into the brain to shed light on how our sense of self is created and sustained. ...

... As long ago as 1664, Thomas Willis published Cerebri Anatome, a detailed attempt to explain how different parts of the brain produced the different "animal spirits" that were believed to power thought and action. More importantly, even before the brain's role in consciousness was fully appreciated, philosophers such as the British empiricists John Locke and David Hume had already worked out that what you are isn't a question of the stuff you are made out of anyway, be it spirit or matter. What makes you the same person over time is, broadly, the continuity of your mental life. The continuity of the same brain in the same body matters only in so far as it makes this possible. As cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter memorably put it, "it ain't the meat, it's the motion". We knew this before neuroscience peered into the brain and discovered what makes that motion happen.

But what about the much finer-grained work of recent years, pinpointing exactly which parts of the brain are responsible for the various aspects of consciousness? This is clearly extremely interesting and clinically useful, but philosophically speaking it really only filled in the details and hammered the last nails into the coffins of antiquated views of soul and self. Neuroscientists, for example, agree there is no place in the brain where "it all comes together", no locus of the self in one part of the cerebrum. A sense of self turns out to be something that emerges as the result of most parts of the brain working together.

Using Feinberg's model, the self is a "nested hierarchy". This means that the higher functions of self - self-consciousness, for example - are not independent of the lower functions, like the basic awareness of one's environment, but incorporate and depend on them. So the higher functions of the evolutionarily newest part of the brain, the cerebral cortex, require the more primitive instinctive and emotional functions of the limbic system (amygdala, hippocampus and hypothalamus) and the automatic bodily regulation functions of our "reptilian brains" (the brain stem and cerebellum).

While the detail Feinberg adds to our understanding is scientifically invaluable, in philosophical terms this is no astonishing discovery, just a confirmation of what Hume thought over 200 years ago: there is no thing which is you at all. ...

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg2 ... ?full=true
 
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(RE: David Icke and his reptilians conspiracy theory ...)

... I don't see David Icke freaking out about the infiltration of our society by piscine or avian humanoid shapechangers, but they are at least as plentiful in mythology as reptilians.

If there is any truth to what Icke says, it is this... When he was supposedly introduced to the revelation of the "reptiles among us" by his psychic friend, I don't think he really understood what he was experiencing. What if, rather than actual reptiles, what he was discovering were humans whose brain patterns aren't very mammalian, and are driven primarily by the reptilian parts of the human brain as a result? That reptilian brain, known as the triune brain

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triune_brain

governs some bad behavior such as aggression, dominance, territoriality, and ritual displays. ... So what if what Icke experienced were the brain signatures of the psychopaths among us? We can be certain that due to a lack of empathy and conscience, there are plenty of psychopaths who are engaged in pretty heinous activities, and who rise to power. One might even say that this is pretty alpha-human behavior, that is visible in politics, warfare, and commerce, as well as office politics. Now if Icke had said that humanity needs to do more to keep psychopaths out of power, I would have agreed, but instead he tells us that reptilian humanoids walk among us, which is idiotic.
 
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AlchoPwn said:
(RE: David Icke and his reptilians conspiracy theory ...) ...
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... And while I think your "reptilian brain" argument is an interesting and sound one, I also think it's incredibly charitable towards Icke - the far more likely explanation being that he's talking cobblers. ...
 
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Newly published research indicates MacLean's triune brain model is inaccurate and misleading. The interconnections and interactivity presumed for the three layered functionalities don't correlate with specific regions of the vertebrate brain (at least for reptiles versus mammals).
You Don't Actually Have A 'Lizard Brain', Evolutionary Study Reveals

A new study has shown that the concept of the mammalian 'lizard brain' can be well and truly put to bed.

Based on a study that examined brains of bearded dragons (Pogona vitticeps), large lizards from the Australian desert, scientists have shown that mammal and reptile brains evolved separately from a common ancestor. It's another nail in the coffin of the notion of the so-called triune brain.

The idea of the lizard brain first emerged and rose to popularity in the 1960s and 1970s, based on comparative anatomical studies. Parts of the mammalian brain, neuroscientist Paul MacLean noticed, were very similar to parts of the reptilian brain. This led him to the conclusion that the brain had evolved in stages, after life moved to land.

First, according to MacLean's model, came the reptilian brain, defined as the basal ganglia. Then came the limbic system – the hippocampus, the amygdala, and the hypothalamus. Finally, the neocortex arose in primates.

Under the triune brain model, each of these sections is responsible for different functions; the more basal parts of the brain, for example, were supposedly more concerned with primal responses – like basic instincts for survival.

However, neuroscientists have been decrying the model for decades. The brain just doesn't work like that, in discrete sections that each play a separate part. Brain regions, anatomically distinct as they are, are highly interconnected, a web of humming neural networks. And with the advent of new techniques, we can start to better understand how brains evolved.

In a new study, a team of researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research turned to actual lizard brains to investigate, publishing their findings in a paper led by neuroscience graduate students David Hain and Tatiana Gallego-Flores.

By comparing molecular features of neurons in modern lizards and mice, the researchers hoped to unpick the evolutionary histories written into reptilian and mammalian brains. ...

There are structures in the brain established during the embryonic development of all tetrapods: a shared ancestral architecture in the subcortical regions.

But, because traditional anatomical comparisons of developmental regions might not be sufficient to fully detail all the differences and similarities between reptile and mammal brains, the researchers took a different approach.

They sequenced the RNA – a messenger molecule used as a template to form proteins – in individual cells from the brains of bearded dragons to determine the transcriptomes – the full range of RNA molecules in the cell – present, and thus generate a cell-type atlas of the lizard's brain. This atlas was then compared to existing datasets on mouse brains. ...

"We profiled over 280,000 cells from the brain of Pogona and identified 233 distinct types of neurons," Hain says.

"Computational integration of our data with mouse data revealed that these neurons can be grouped transcriptomically in common families, that probably represent ancestral neuron types." ...

But these neurons aren't restricted to a specific 'reptilian' region of the brain. Most regions of the brain, the analysis revealed, have a mix of ancestral and newer types of neurons within them, challenging the notion that some brain regions are more ancient than others. ...
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FULL STORY: https://www.sciencealert.com/you-dont-actually-have-a-lizard-brain-evolutionary-study-reveals
 
Here are the bibliographic details and abstract for the published research report.

Molecular diversity and evolution of neuron types in the amniote brain
DAVID HAIN, TATIANA GALLEGO-FLORES, MICHAELA KLINKMANN, ANGELES MACIAS, et al.
SCIENCE 2 Sep 2022 Vol 377, Issue 6610
DOI: 10.1126/science.abp8202

Abstract
The existence of evolutionarily conserved regions in the vertebrate brain is well established. The rules and constraints underlying the evolution of neuron types, however, remain poorly understood. To compare neuron types across brain regions and species, we generated a cell type atlas of the brain of a bearded dragon and compared it with mouse datasets. Conserved classes of neurons could be identified from the expression of hundreds of genes, including homeodomain-type transcription factors and genes involved in connectivity. Within these classes, however, there are both conserved and divergent neuron types, precluding a simple categorization of the brain into ancestral and novel areas. In the thalamus, neuronal diversification correlates with the evolution of the cortex, suggesting that developmental origin and circuit allocation are drivers of neuronal identity and evolution.

SOURCE: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abp8202
 
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