Understanding how brain functions

Understanding the brain is key to living a good life, once you know how you and other people operate you are better equipped to deal with life. Now let’s imagine our brain as a car. This car has 4 drivers. Only one driver can drive the car at a time while other drivers can influence the driving. At any point, any of the 4 drivers can pick up the steering wheel and start driving the car.

Meet your 4 drivers: Survival, Trust, Motivation & Imagination. Survival: Your survival driver is responsible for 3 key tasks: Fight, Flight, Freeze. Survival driver is activated in life threatening situations (ex: car about to hit you) and in modern times, stress can activate it; then what we have is: Fight: Aggressiveness. Flight: Anxiety. Freeze: Helplessness. What does this mean? When you see someone who gets angry easily or anxious or feeling down, their survival brain is now driving them. There is no use trying to reason with people being driven by their survival brain, everything is a threat to them at that point.

We need to bring the person out of the survival: If aggressive, go with the flow while remaining calm. If anxious, offer options. If helpless, give support. Your survival driver usually needs to go through logic before activating but if it gets activated often (ex: constant stress from work) then it's constantly active. At this point the person affected will easily get aggressive, anxious or helpless without a real threat. The solution to this is to calm down your survival driver by constant meditation and being in a soothing environment - do not use drugs to calm yourself down as that will only make things worse in the long run.

Trust: Your trust driver is interesting because it defines your position within a social group and works on 2 main areas within 4 axis: Areas: Self confidence (Trust in yourself) Trust in others. Axis: Human brain has various parts and each part has a specific role to play in the activities of controlling body and mind activities. Brainstem. Includes the pons and medulla oblongata. Regulates heart rate and breathing. Cerebellum. Mainly involved in movement control and coordination. Diencephalon. Includes the thalamus, which relays sensory input through the brain, and the hypothalamus, which regulates metabolic functions by secreting hormones.

The brain is divided into three parts:- Forebrain, Midbrain & Hindbrain. Forebrain or Prosencephalon - It is further divided into Rhinencephalon or olfactory lobe; Telencephalon or cerebrum and Thalmencephalon or diencephalon. Midbrain or Mesencephalon - It contains optic lobes.These lobes are two in case of frog and are called as corpora bigemina where as in humans they are four in number and is known as corpora quadrigeminal which consists of two pairs known as superior and inferior colliculus and their functions are under the control of crura cerebrae; a part of cerebrum which thus relays impulses back and forth between the cerebrum, cerebellum, pons and medulla. Hindbrain- It consists of pons varolli, medulla oblongata and cerebellum.

Starting with cerebellum, Cerebellum : It maintains balance of body and posture,coordination of voluntary movements, functions associated with language. The cerebellum has following components: Arbor vitae - present in the internal region of cerebellum. Externally it contains gyri and sulci Cerebellar peduncles - they contain bundle of fibres connecting the cerebellum with the underlying brainstem (which i am going to discuss below …) Cerebellar cortex - grey matter of cerebellum which contains three types of cells - Purkinje cells,granule cells and basket cells. Pons varolli - It is present below the midbrain and above medulla oblongata .it is a link between upper portion of brain and spinal cord through medulla oblongata. Its function is to regulate breathing movements .

Medulla oblongata - Its function is to receive signals from spinal cord and send it to cerebellum and thalamus;to regulate heartbeat,swallowing ,vomiting and other involuntary movements. Cerebrum, i.e. the left and right cerebral hemispheres, consisting of the cortex and subcortical structures, responsible for information processing and intelligence. The Cerebrum is the largest part of the brain. It manages decision making and thinking.

The Corpus Callosum is a thick band of nerves, which connects the right and left hemisphere of the brain. It allows both sides to communicate to each other and allows the eyes to move The ventricles is a set of cavities in the center of the brain and aids in removing cerebrospinal fluid (brain juice). The Thalamus is a small structure, which regulates consciousness and sleep. It manages sensory and motor signals. The Hypothalamus is the chemical factory of the brain. It creates hormones responsible for thirst, hunger, sleep, sex drives, and moods. The Midbrain is a small central part of the brainstem, which is responsible for eye movement, and visual and auditory processing

The Pituitary gland is the “master gland” and manages other glands in the body. The Pons is part of the brainstem and relays signals from the forebrain to the cerebellum. It also manages eye movement, and visual and auditory responses. The Cerebellum is the hindbrain and is responsible for movement coordination, and balance. The Medulla is part of the brainstem and manages involuntary functions such as breathing, sneezing, and swallowing. X axis for self confidence (trust in yourself) and Y axis for trust in others. You want to be in the centre - assertive, confident and not worried about your actions. We usually shift around the graph depending on where we are and who we are with. Each axis has 5 levels or stages we go through, 1 being the first and least hurtful stage and 5 being the last and worst.

Levels 1–3 are treatable by yourself or with a close friend or family, if you reach levels 4-5 then it’s recommended you seek professional help. When you have too much self confidence, you become dominant and it goes through the following stages: Flattery and seduction, Manipulation, Mockery, Intimidation, Sadism and cruelty, When things go well for the dominant, they believe it’s their doing. When things go wrong, it’s someone else's fault. If you know anyone that acts super charming and nice to people while they use them as a utility to obtain what they want, they have reached the top of dominance and need help.When you have too little self confidence, you become submissive and it goes through the following stages:

Perfectionism and tendency to want to believe people too easily. Excessive willingness to serve or please others. Fear of breaking rules. Panic attacks and guilt. Hurting yourself and suicide. When things go well for the submissive, they believe they got lucky. When things go wrong, they believe it’s their fault. If you know anyone that cuts themselves, they have reached the bottom of self confidence and need help - extreme submissiveness will lead to depression and suicide. Now we will talk about going left/right in the trust in others axis.

If you have too much trust in others, you reach axiality and it goes through the following stages: You are okay with sharing information with others and strangers. You see hidden meanings. You communicate without words. You communicate with things. You become gullible. In extreme case, the person gets used by people regularly and needs help. If you have too little trust in others, you reach marginality and it goes through the following stages:Uneasiness at sharing. Loss of contact. Loss of connection. Sense of exclusion. Conspiracy - you believe people are plotting against you. In an extreme case, this turns into paranoia and the person needs help.

Some things to note about the trust driver: It takes a lot of time to grow, you cannot get more confident easily. While you can easily lose your confidence and trust when you have a traumatic event. When active, we can see territorial or power plays and the person does not question their own behaviour and so never learns - they need guidance. The good part, it only lasts for a short time each time it’s activated. So if someone is acting intimidating, give them a bit of time and firm resistance and they will back off on their own.

Motivation. Your motivation driver stores your deepest motivations and raw emotions as well as your memories (the good, the bad and the ugly). Most of the time motivation driver is what’s driving you around by running on autopilot by recognising situations you have been in and uses the standard operating procedure you teach it. Your motivation driver knows everything you have ever learnt! This driver is super efficient because it uses the minimum attention span to carry out tasks, allowing us to do more than 2 things at once. For example when you are driving a car and talking to your friend passenger at the same time, your motivation driver is in control.

This driver has 3 layers of motivation: Intrinsic: This is your fixed motivations that will never change and is partly formed by genetics and partly by your environment as a baby. This is why some things you do gives you energy and makes you happy even if you are not exactly good at it (ex: drawing) because it’s an intrinsic motivation of yours. This is also why some people can get extremely good at certain things (ex: drawing) since it’s an intrinsic motivation that keeps them happy and working on until they master it. The sweet spot is finding your intrinsic motivations and making a career out of it, then you are getting paid to do what you truly love to do and which actually makes you happy.

2. Extrinsic: This is dynamic and keeps changing depending on your environment and trends, it stores what you currently like and dislike. Everything that influences your decision and opinion is stored here (ex: why do you like certain music, food or fashion) The interesting part is this motivation usually does not last more than 3–6 months. 3. Obsessions: When things you like stay in your extrinsic long enough, they become deeply rooted in the 3rd layer and become obsessions. This stores your passions but also your addictions such as being a workaholic, drugs, shopaholic and chasing stuff. When it’s on, you are not free to choose what you want anymore and will go after the obsession.

Imagination: This is the marvel of evolution, it’s what makes us human. Your imagination driver gives you creativity and adaptation. It should take control when dealing with new and complex situations that require you to think out of the box. People usually don’t let imagination driver take control and stick to their motivation driver instead, which leads them to lose out on big innovations. Examples: Atari and HP turning down Steve Job’s ideas. IBM believing there is no market for PCs. These mistakes happened because the people in charge relied on their motivation driver which only thinks from what it already knows - if they had used their imagination driver, they can see a future that Steve Jobs saw.

When your imagination driver is taking control, you feel calm and in full control. How to activate it on command? think for yourself these questions: Why am I feeling like this? What am I basing this decision on? How can we do this differently? how can we do it better? Making yourself answer these questions in your head activates the imagination driver. In conclusion we can say that even though our brain is too complex to summarise in a social media post, this framework gives us a better idea on how we go about our daily lives and how we can use this knowledge to live a better life. Cheers!.