One of the most awesome things about being human is that we have really incredible brains. At our best, we have tremendous capacity to organize complex social networks that coordinate thousands of people. We can do everything from feeding people on the other side of the globe, to peering into the depths of the atom, to air lifting a child across a continent for medical care. We feel empathy for each other, take each other’s perspectives, find creative ways to get win-win solutions, solve staggeringly complex problems, learn from each other, and feel good about helping each other. All these together are what I’m going to call our “Social Brain,” the set of capabilities that let us create and effectively manage very complex social interactions.
But while our social brains are powerful, our ability to access them is very fragile. Thinking deliberately about anything is incredibly slow and energy intensive. Brains are about 2% of our bodyweight, but they suck down about 20% of our calories to power them. And they’re terrible at multi-tasking.
So what human beings have evolved to do is take as much as possible in our daily lives and make it so we don’t have to think about it. And we do a pretty good job. If you think of situations where you’ve been exhausted or distracted by paying attention to too many things at once, you’ve noticed that you maintain the ability to do many things without thinking about them, like navigate your commute home or make dinner or ask your partner how their day was for a lot longer than you can do complex problem solving or learn new information or fully empathize with someone you’re listening to. This is because our brain has a backup system. If you’ve read Daniel Kahneman’s book Thinking, Fast and Slow, this is his “System 1” versus “System 2,” but it basically means that when we do the same thing repeatedly, the more automatic it becomes, the less conscious of it we become, and the less brain power it takes. This means that as we get tired and our cognitive resources decline, we can maintain access to behaviors that have become automatic for much longer than we can access those that have not. This is true whether the draining of resources comes from exhaustion, distraction, grief, aging, or whatever source.
In a way, you can think of this as the brain putting up one of those automated phone message systems. “Hello, So-and-So’s brain is not available right now. Please press 1 to walk home on autopilot. Please press 2 for, ‘I’m fine, how are you?’” And so on.
What people don’t realize is that something very similar happens when we feel like we’re under threat. This may be a physical threat, but it can also be a threat to our social status or our view of ourselves as a good person or anything else that’s important to us. What matters is that, rightly or wrongly, the part of our brain responsible for recognizing threat activates. When this happens, our body diverts energy away from organs like the stomach and the brain toward the heart and lungs and muscles to prepare us for immediate physical action, often referred to as fight or flight. Physically, this feels very different from being exhausted because it results in a heightened state of alertness and a rush of energy to the muscles. But for the brain whose energy is being diverted, it results in a similar loss of access to the energy our more intensive thinking processes need in order to function. Our social brain peaces out, and what we have left is the set of menu options in our message system that we’ve earmarked as being relevant to dealing with threats, what I call our “Survival Brain.”
What these menu options are will vary based on what individuals have practiced and the reception different menu options have gotten in the past. Strategies like fight, flight, and freeze are very simple and will tend to show up, though different people will have learned to gravitate more toward different ones. However, people can and do learn responses that are more subtle or more complex. Giving in and going along (known as a “fawn” or “appease” response) can be just as much of a reflexive, unthinking reaction as the more obvious fight or flight responses, but is often harder to spot. There are also more complex behaviors, like doing CPR, that can be “installed” with enough practice. The key is that when our more complex thought processes are out to lunch, our message system has access only to what has been pre-programmed into automaticity. We lose access to much of our memory, in particular our access to new skills that are not yet automatic. We have enormous difficulty learning, taking other people’s perspectives, being curious, being creative, thinking through problems, etc.
Dropping into our survival brain also changes our ability to perceive and interact with new information. One of the most defining characteristics of survival brain is tunnel vision, a hyperfocus on perceived threats and loss of peripheral awareness. This is accompanied by a sense of urgency and a catastrophizing sense that the stakes are life or death (even when they’re not). Our ability to accurately perceive what’s going on plummets as our brains start making split second decisions about what’s a threat. And the brain tends to classify any ambiguous situations as threats rather than taking the time to think them through just to be sure not to miss any danger. We end up like one of those voice based automated phone systems that is totally wrong about what it thinks you’re trying to say, but keeps jumping reflexively from menu option to menu option anyway.
Implications for working in groups
All of this has significant implications for anyone working in a group. The first thing to recognize is that just because you are talking to the same physical person does not mean you are always talking to their same brain. It can be incredibly disconcerting to get to know someone, to consider them a friend, and then to suddenly be confronted with someone going off on you about an incident they wildly misinterpreted and refusing to listen to word you say. Organizations can and do split over such incidents. What’s critical to realize is that when you are talking to someone’s message system/survival brain, you are not interacting with the creative and compassionate friend you know. Instead, you’re essentially talking to a recording of them. There is no point in arguing, because they cannot take in new information. Your only goal is to push the right sequence of buttons to get through to a live human being. This can involve having internalized a shared language that helps people come back to themselves. It can be any physical action, like taking a deep breath or looking at things behind oneself, that are not natural to do in a life-and-death situation and tell the threat sensing part of the brain that the danger is over. It can be taking a half-hour break to exercise and let the adrenaline fade. But whatever the problem is, it will be much more solvable when everyone is back in their social brain. And while people are still responsible for their actions regardless of what brain they’re in, recognizing when someone else is in their survival brain can make it easier to take what they say less personally. The job of the survival brain is to latch onto whatever sources of power it can to make a perceived threat go away right now, regardless of the damage that does. People often feel differently, or at least have a much more nuanced take, after they come back to themselves.
A word of caution, however, about weaponizing the distinction between survival and social brains. Everyone drops into their survival brain, sometimes multiple times a day. It shows up whenever you find yourself reflexively responding to a perceived threat, whether writing back a nasty email to someone who criticized your work (fight), whether it’s avoiding conflict with a friend (flight), or keeping your head down during a tense meeting (freeze). We can choose to compassionately support each other to come back to ourselves, but we can also choose to add “You’re in your survival brain, so I don’t have to listen to you!” to our list of verbal weapons to whip out in an argument. Needless to say, one of these is helpful, and the other is not. What we can do is use our own calm, relaxed nervous system to help draw the people we’re talking to to match the brain we’re in.
We can also train ourselves to have better menu options when we do get our social brains knocked off line, ones that are less destructive and that encourage us to slow down, take a breath, and get help to come back to ourselves. The key is to recognize that programming a new menu option is not at all like the cognitive learning most of us associate with school. What we pack into our memory does little good when our memory itself is not accessible. Instead, it is much more akin to the physical learning that we do when learning to ride a bike or play an instrument. It is repetition of tiny and simple pieces of actions until they have sunk in so deeply that they are automatic. It is very much possible to create new menu options for the survival brain, but it can be disconcertingly slow and fumbling.
Implications for safety and accountability
Understanding the survival brain also has significant implications for how we think about safety and accountability. In the U.S., the default response to harm is try to “teach the person a lesson” by implementing unpleasant consequences in hopes that it will deter them from doing it again. To the extent that this works, it works only when people are in their thinking, social brain. The survival brain is not aware of anything beyond the immediate threat. One of the biggest dangers in crisis situations near roadways is actually that people will step into oncoming traffic without looking, not because they don’t care about the consequences, but because the survival brain can’t process the very idea of consequences even when they are as immediate and devastating as getting hit by a car. Being deterred by fear of longer term consequences isn’t something the survival brain can even engage with.
What does work are things more along these lines: keeping/getting people out of their survival brain, retraining what is in the survival brain’s message system, distracting the person or otherwise diverting them from the situation, some sort of new stimuli that jolts them to a different and less destructive message option in their survival brain, or (more risky) physically blocking the harm. All of these have a substantial community component, since it is extremely difficult for someone who’s operating on reflex to do any of these things. The goal for all these interventions, however, is the same as in the preceding section: push the right sequence of buttons to get through to a real, live person – or at a minimum a less damaging survival brain response.
Once people are out of their survival brain and stabilized in their social brain, the immediate danger is generally over. The need then is to change the environment to reduce the prevalence of triggers that will knock someone back into their fight response (e.g. letting people know ahead of time if something is coming so they’re not caught off guard) and also to practice a different survival brain response than the one prone to cause harm (e.g. call a friend to come mediate a conflict if you know you’ll get into a fight if you try to handle it yourself). These are very doable, but they are interventions that work on building specific skills in the person and their community, not assuming that the just need to be motivated to try harder.
This is not to say no harm comes from people who are in their social brain. Property crimes do show a deterrent effect in part because they are more likely to be calculated than reflexive. Similarly, the social brain can be hijacked, particularly in situations where belonging to a group has been set up to require doing harm to an outsider. We do also see people who have been persuaded, through the best of intentions, that doing grievous harm is necessary for the greater good. All of these sources of harm can be just as, if not more, serious that the harm coming out of someone’s survival brain, but the mechanism for dealing with them is very different.
The survival brain and authoritarianism
As difficult and humbling as it may be to recognize and work with our survival brain responses, it is particularly critical to do during times of rising authoritarianism. When threats are real and scary, it will trigger people to drop into their survival brains more and more. Authoritarians rely on this because it makes opponents less effective by taking their most powerful problem solving tools off line. It also makes supporters and the general public easier to manipulate. Things that make absolutely no sense when people are thinking critically (e.g. driving out farm workers will lower grocery prices) do make sense to a reflexive survival brain for whom “immigrants bad, lash out” is about the level of complexity it can handle.
At its heart, the struggle against authoritarianism is the struggle to stay in our social brain rather than our survival brain. Authoritarian leaders gain power by telling a simple story: that people’s problems are the fault of a group of enemies, and if they lash out and destroy those people, then their problems will be solved. This isn’t true, and even a brief inquiry into how exactly lashing out is supposed to lead to better conditions makes it all fall apart. But that sort of simple story is what the survival brain wants to be true, and just as importantly, is what its reduced capacity is able to comprehend.
Counteracting this early is particularly critical because with enough repetition, these simplistic stories about the need to destroy enemies become internalized into a worldview and a set of assumptions that are just how we do things. Once this happens, the danger becomes much greater because they can be maintained even after the social brain comes back online. As discussed above, the social brain can be hijacked to do enormous harm if a person has come to believe that doing harm is actually doing good. Once that is the case, the incredibly powerful tools of problem solving and altruism and self-sacrifice become misdirected, and it’s much harder to persuade people to stop. All is not lost, however. The more that we challenge the underlying logic that safety requires hurting others, the more that we chip away at those foundational beliefs. The more that we practice other ways of staying safe, the more that collective lashing out stops making sense.
The problems we face – ensuring everyone has access to basic necessities, responding compassionately to migrants, reducing climate change, ending mass incarceration, etc. – can’t be solved by the simplistic reflexes that make sense to the survival brain. On the contrary, we need creativity, compassion, and curiosity. We need people to be willing to make long term changes to their consumption habits, act compassionately in conflict, share resources, and work together. All of these the social brain has in abundance – if only we can keep our personal and collective access to it.
Published by