Understanding Your Brain and the Human Brain Part Two. How the Reptilian Part of the Brain Drives Your Behaviours in Business, Economics and Society.

I am writing as a neurobiologist and this article is a part of a series I call the neuroemothoughtopsychobiology for everyday life. In my previous article, I gave you a perspective that the human brain is not one homogenous but is actually made of three stacked brains. At the base of this stack is the reptilian brain. Above it is the mammalian brain and then at the very top is the neomammalian brain. Within this stack, intelligence and reasoning and thinking capacity improves upwards. Now, the reptilian brain is responsible for all the simple, automatic, unconscious and sometimes very primitive behaviours that we exhibit that are mentioned in my previous article including establishing and defending territories, automatic responses to colour and rhythm, spontaneous mass migrations, mating, routinisation or establishing routines, re-enactments such as remembering birthdays and key events and lack of empathy and sense of care. This reptilian part of the brain is the main part that drives our need for physical survival. I am going to give you some typical examples of these behaviours in our every day lives.

Examples of Establishing and Defending Territories

When I run seminars or facilitate strategic planning sessions, participants get into the seminar room or workshop room and seat somewhere. They automatically establish their seats as their territories. One the pranks that I often play on the first session of the second day is look for the territory of someone senior among the participants and ask some junior to seat on the senior’s seat. When the senior enters the room, the senior is surprised to see her seat or his seat taken. In many cases, I have observed the surprise and how often some of the seniors get agitated that someone has sat on his chair. Now the fact is that all these chairs are the same and proximity to the speaker is the same and there is absolutely no advantage that chair gives in terms of participating in the seminar. Some of these senior people will command the junior to vacate their seat, while other negotiate for it while still others then fill the next vacant seat but with some agitation and reluctance.

Offices, Chairs, Parking Spaces, Cars and Desks at Work

At you workplace, you will notice just how much the whole place, assets, resources and spaces are “marked” in into territories and how many get upset if their territories are violated. I have seen at some place in Zimbabwe where there is a parking space marked’

“Board Chairmain”

Consider that the board chairman is not part of the establishment and visits the place less than 12 times a year and there is a parking space for him! Labelling the space is not for helping the chairman to notice the place, but to defend the territory from non-board chairmans. Remember my argument is not judgmental and castigating the practice but to illustrate the reptilian behaviour of marking and defending territories.

Courting and Relationships

In courting and mate selection, reptilianism is live and evident. Males will kill each other for mates and regard their mates as their territory that no other male must enter. The word sharing of territory does not exist in the reptilian world. Humans try to reason logically on these issues but these matters are automatic and driven by our brain design. Sharing of mates is not a natural phenomena even then we socialise.

Physical Fights

If you have strong emotional or spiritual or physical values that you strongly believe in, you defend them to death and you react very strongly, if not even violently, to any attack on those values. Those values become your territory and you defend them by all means necessary unless you engage the mammalian and neomammalian parts of the brain in processing information relating to those values. Without consciously controlling the reptilian responses; which are almost always the first responses to any “threat”, you can kill a person for reasons that are completely out of order. The reptilian part cannot reason, it is just response and does so automatically. So when two humans engage in a fight, they are fighting for some territory which can be physical or nonphysical

Marketing

I have a whole marketing and sales training program based on the triune brain in which I help companies and entrepreneurs use the brain dynamics in their marketing and branding decisions. When you look at different companies, you can see which part of their brain they used to come up with their branding positioning and posturing. You will decode this from their messages including their visions, missions and values and positioning statements.

Two companies that illustrate reprtilian branding are Toyota and TM Supermarkets.

Countries, Regional Blocks and Continental Goupings

On a macro scale, you see the reptilian behaviour of marking and defending territories in the establishment of countries. Logically, dividing the world into countries may not be a bad idea for administration purposes, but it is the turning the boundaries into red lines for other humans to cross without permission that marks the reptilianism. This is followed up with an aggressive response to violation of the boundaries even when such violation does no harm to anybody physically, materially or financially. If you innocently swim in a crocodile-infested pool which they deem their territory, the crocodiles will respond with aggression to take you out for no other reason than that you have entered their space.

Wars and Reptilianism

If you notice, most wars are fought either for the purposes of gaining territory or defending territory. I this case, territory is not just physical but it can also be ideological territory or economic territory or social territory.

Conclusion

Now I have given you some more detailed explanation of one example of?how the reptilian part of our brain drives certain of our behaviours. It is important to notice that these behaviours are in their own neither good nor bad. Their impact on our behaviours depends on how we deal with them. Put to good use, reptilian behaviours have positive results in our lives; unchecked they have a severe negative consequences of our lives. This probably then links with the subject of emotional intelligence and that of understanding and managing emotions including sub domains such as consciousness, self-awareness, emotional self-control, emotional self-regulation and modifying our emotional responses.

How can you use the information in this article to improve your success, happiness, achievement and wellbeing

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?Simon Bere, 2022