DeAnna Woolston

As (non) scientists like myself like to say, we are in the Age of the Amygdala (the “a” is silent and it is pronounced “Middle Ages” in French or “We are F*cked” in Latin). From my advanced degree in Google Search, the Amygdala is a small almond-shaped structure in your brain that is unfortunately not salted, roasted and dusted with rosemary like I prefer (and you definitely can’t get it a Trader Joe’s). The Amygdala IS part of your limbic system and it’s super great at all of our favorite activities, including: fighting, flight(ing), feeding, fear, freezing up and fornication.  I can confidently say that I understand brain function as well as we Americans collectively understand the funding of the US government. Which is to say, I don’t understand it at all and neither do you. But not understanding something has never stopped us from consuming hours of people shouting unhinged things on TV/YouTube/wherever you get your garbage information from that’s heavy on accusations with a sprinkle of facts. Our Amygdala is liking and sharing social media posts with abandon with absolutely zero time taken to see if those posts are actually true. Our little amygdala almond is in charge and it’s not even very large. Respond and react and f*ck critical thinking. Fact checking is for nerds and it is too cumbersome anyway when there is an onslaught of new things we don’t understand to be pissed about on an hourly basis. Plus it feels so good to feel superior to other people who disagree with us. It’s like a bitchy birthday party in an 80s teen movie where we are the mean girls against everyone else. We are part of something and everyone else is, “Like, is so totally lame!” I do it and you do it too. 

This isn’t the Age of the Prefrontal Cortex (more commonly referred to as a Renaissance)—it’s all lizard brain, all the time. You know we are not at our evolutionary best when creativity and ingenuity isn’t flowing and when the mullet can safely return in an unironic way. We are evolutionarily back to amoeba when such a large swath of the U.S. population is completely comfortable with butchering Medicare, Medicaid, education, farmers, medical research, foreign aid, the FAA, NIH during a pending epidemic, National Parks and Forests, veterans, Etc. (with a capital “E”), while simultaneously going into further debt making billionaires more billionairey through tax policy. (I am just hazarding a guess that SpaceX isn’t having its government funding sliced and diced.) Yay for you if you don’t know anyone personally being affected. May you give the very strong neural pathways toward your limbic system a little break and have a prefrontal cortex moment of empathy for the people who are suffering. May your prefrontal cortex let you see the long-term implications of these cuts for all of us. May you switch off the swill you are drinking and fact check with a variety of credible sources for once. 

(P.S. if you do understand brain function, I am sorry if my inaccuracies made you cringe.)