Appealing to Our Lizard Brains

By Arianna Huffington, AlterNet. Posted October 13, 2004.

Since the president's meltdown in the first debate – followed in quick succession by Paul Bremer's confession, the CIA's no-al Qaeda/Saddam link report, the Duelfer no-WMD-since '91 report, and the woeful September job numbers – I have been racking my brain trying to figure out why George W. Bush is still standing.

The answer arrived via my friend Ed Solomon, the brilliant writer and filmmaker, who explained that the conundrum could be solved by looking at the very organ I'd been racking.

Ed introduced me to the work of Dr. Daniel Siegel, a Harvard-trained psychiatrist and author of the forthcoming book Mindsight, which explores the physiological workings of the brain.

Turns out, when it comes to campaign 2004, it's the neuroscience, stupid!

Or, as Dr. Siegel told me: "Voters are shrouded in a 'fog of fear' that is impacting the way our brains respond to the two candidates."

Thanks to the Bush campaign's unremitting fear-mongering, millions of voters are reacting not with their linear and logical left brain but with their lizard brain and their more emotional right brain.

What's more, people in a fog of fear are more likely to respond to someone whose primary means of communication is in the non-verbal realm, neither logical nor language-based. (Sound like any presidential candidate you know?)

And that's why Bush is still standing. It's not about left wing versus right wing; it's about left brain versus right brain.

Deep in the brain lies the amygdala, an almond-sized region that generates fear. When this fear state is activated, the amygdala springs into action. Before you are even consciously aware that you are afraid, your lizard brain responds by clicking into survival mode. Fight, flight, or freeze.

And, boy, have the Bushies been giving our collective amygdala a workout. Especially Dick Cheney, who has proven himself an unmatched master of the dark arts of fear mongering. For an object lesson in how to get those lizard brains leaping look no further than the vice presidential debate.

"The biggest threat we face today," said Cheney in his very first answer "is the possibility of terrorists smuggling a nuclear weapon or a biological agent into one of our own cities and threatening the lives of hundreds of thousands of Americans."

Just in case we didn't get the point, he repeated the ominous assertion, practically word for word, another two times – throwing in the fact that he was "absolutely convinced" that the threat "is very real." It was "be afraid, be very afraid" to the third power.

And when we are afraid, we are biologically programmed to pay less attention to left-brain signals – indeed, our logical mind actually shuts itself down. Fear paralyzes our reasoning and literally makes it impossible to think straight. Instead, we search for emotional, nonverbal cues from others that will make us feel safe and secure.

Find more Arianna at Ariannaonline.com.

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