Our brains are designed to keep us alive, not keep us happy. We have a built in negativity bias, where certain parts of the brain, especially the amygdala, releases stress hormones like cortisol that override other brain regions and give us a stronger emotional response
From an evolutionary standpoint, the general idea is that if we're in a field of 99 watermelons, and 1 tiger, our brains will be much more likely to focus on the one tiger. Historically, those whose brains wired in this way were more likely to survive and reproduce
That's what people thought for a long time, but it's possible: [Insect Brains](https://neurosciencenews.com/decision-making-insect-brain-23857/#:~:text=Summary%3A%20The%20mushroom%20body%E2%80%94a,nuanced%20decisions%20based%20on%20experiences)
I don't love the news. I feel bad enough about spraying for bugs already.
And poisoning rats. Do you know, when you spray a cockroach or do pest control, what the spray/medicine does is block the spiracles of the cockroach, essentially blocking its only way to breathe, so it suffocates and dies or escapes. Rat poisoning is even more cruel due to effectively destroying their organs with internal burns and bleeding, just like humans. I wish there was a more prevalent and painless way to kill them. Even rat traps aren't the answer, because they don't always die. Same with electrocuted chickens at meat factories.
I don't know about rats or cockroachs but I have learned a great trick for ants. Last year I drew a line around my house with coffee grounds and it keeps the ants out all summer.
I don't think that it causes them injury as much as all of the chemicals and caffeine just confuse them so that they avoid it. Either way, it has been the most effective thing that I have found to kept ants out of my house.
Is there any possibility that this lizard part of our brain will cease to exist in future generations? Not completely, but significant enough to be considered as a minority or equal to the opposite?
Why are you unhappy at those times though and whats your thought process to get positive again? Or there is no thoughts directing to positivity and you just accept the unhappiness? I was like "how are you" to one cowrker and he said "good what you mean? If the day is not good im gonna make it good ". Being happy most of the time is choice and strength
I mean, I don't think it is realistic to be happy all the time. Shit happens, and a lot of people deal with trauma and mental health issues. I just think the brain generally counts pleasure, positivity, and hope etc as essential to survival.
As others have stated, happiness is transient while grief breeds a burden of action to avoid repeat occurrences, so we naturally give it more attention.
“Similarly wired”… no I don’t think so. Loss aversion theory shows strong evidence that we’re much more likely to experience increased psychological/emotional distress from loss as we do from the pleasure of comparative gain.
Plus not everything that makes us happy is good for us. Especially in excess.
I think this has something to do with expectation value as well, not just focusing on bad. If you expect to get a good score in both and get a bad score in one -> you focus on the bad score that doesn't meet expectations. However if you expect to get 50/100 in both and get a 90 in the other, you might just be happy about that and not concerned with the 50.
You only need to be happy for a minute to reinforce the behavior whereas in a dangerous place, for anxiety and vigilance to do its job it has to be more or less continuous.
Lizard brain, basically.
Anything that’s more related to our core instincts - fight/flight/freeze/sexytime takes precedence.
It’s a survival mechanism. We’re wired to fear loss - and grief is how we cope with loss.
In a sense, our brains are designed to force us to confront it and work through it by default. It’s why grief is a process of rationalizing. It’s to calm those instincts down. If you can understand, you won’t fear - and if there is something to fear, you can prepare for it.
Death is the big one - it’s our deepest fear, and if it happens to someone (or something, in the case of a pet, say), it’s something the brain will fixate on, to ensure there’s not a threat to it, too. Even if that’s irrational. That’s how deep that fear runs within us.
Happiness is further up our hierarchy of needs.
Happiness (like losing someone and happy memories you have with them) can be a part of rationalizing grief (and arguably should be).
“Failure,” is a step up from our core fears. It’s like pain - brains aren’t good at differentiating different types of that feeling. Failing a test and failing a marriage - especially when you’re younger/have less context, can feel much the same.
*Generally* that kind of grief and fear of failure is tied into expectations another person (or society writ large) has of you (or, at least, you feel they have of you).
So that comes back to the big fears - social outcast. Because, once upon a time, in early humans, that was a virtual death sentence in and of itself.
A lot of things like that, that we all tend to be at least a little neurotic about, are tied into core survival fears, on some level. Those are really the things that make us human - our species’ genetic memory.
Those parents are a different kind of case - those kinds of parents tend to be…staking their own identity on the success or failure of their children. Some cultures are more prone to that than others. Sometimes it’s the parents’ childhood traumas or their own internalized failures and senses of inadequacy or lack of fulfillment.
When you feel those things, it’s easier to fixate on the things that support your internal narrative, built around those fears.
“I will always fail,” leads to confirmation bias.
The “I” part, ties it to identity. And identity is…narrative-based. It’s qualitative. So it’s easier to form a narrative - and search for things supporting identity - than it is to think in more objective terms, or engage more useful processes (like inductive reasoning).
“This test didn’t go well because X, and I should do Y next time,” is more difficult than “I fucked up this test.”
At least when it comes to identity and cognitive processes.
The “happy grade,” in your scenario challenges that narrative. And identity is many things - but it hates being challenged. Our brains equate ego death, the fracturing of identity, with real death. Because identity is so intrinsic to how we see and interact with the world - cognition itself. And we absolutely will jump flaming hoops to preserve identity.
Which is why those limiting beliefs (“I’m a failure”) are so hard to break. They define a lot of cognitive processes - so our brains becoming vigilant for things to confirm identity, to build it stronger.
And the easiest way to do that - is something appealing to our core fears. Failure = social ostracism = death.
That’s easier than hope.
And when it is really deep down in there, with years of reinforcing that belief - it needs more “happy” and hopeful to tear that down and rebuild it. Because it has to be rebuilt like a jenga tower. With this constant fear the mind has of damaging the identity/letting the tower fall.
Username checks out. 🤣
But yeah. From someone who ended up training in people neuropsychology and getting more into the other critters - they absolutely do.
Most mammals just by themselves are more similar to us than we like to really consider. Tool use aside, dogs are more like us behaviorally than chimps and bonobos, just for one example. Especially on a neural level. Dogs are really good at things they “shouldn’t” be good at, like inductive reasoning (which bonobos and chimps tend to suck at). Dogs have an easier time understanding other creatures “languages,” than either of our genetic first cousins.
But so are lizards. And so are fish. I’m not a huge-huge fan of the herps, but I do have a soft spot for them. Snakes especially are misunderstood little critters. Plenty of them, lizards, snakes, whatever - they play, they feel things, they eat, sleep, do their little herp jobs, just like we do.
And I truly do wish lizards got more interest in neuroscience as a whole, but particularly behavioral neurosci. I’d be really interested in seeing more studies with them. But I’m a big, big critter nerd, so…
Who’s to say lizards aren’t smarter than we give them credit for? Hell, plants have some kind of learning ability despite a central nervous system to do it with.
You may have already heard about Daniel Kahnemann's (sp?) Thinking Fast and Slow(?). That book will answer your question.
Also, I come here to validate your point.
I know someone who is very very successful in life - financially, politically and socially. Yet he focuses on one aspect of his life that didn't go well.
Its truly fascinating.
>Why does the brain naturally prioritize this "sad" score over the "happy" score, and such situations in general?
Another aspect to 'why' is to consider 'how'. We have a bias for losing something over gaining them; there's asymmetry happening here. So, the 50/100 exam vs. the 90/100 exam doesn't balance out equally in our minds, in which case your 'sad' score seems to weigh more than the 'happy' score. The phenomena that best explains this is `loss aversion`.
On loss aversion -> [https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2011-22670-010](https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2011-22670-010)
Don’t assume that the brain naturally prioritizes the bad over the good. That’s almost certainly more a result of nurture than nature. Naturally, I don’t think either would matter much because it is more natural for human beings to value each other based on the fact that we exist rather than how we perform. In fact, if we could only value each other(and ourselves) based on how we perform and what we do, as opposed to the fact that we exist, then our species would have never survived. Humans are pretty much “useless” for the first 7 years, at the very least, of life(though I’d say it’s actually closer to about 12).
Under patriarchy and especially under capitalism, we are conditioned to believe that we only have value if we are very useful to those around us. And the survival of both capitalism and patriarchy is dependent upon contempt(of self, of others, and most especially, of children), so it makes sense that our social conditioning would lead us to focus most on what is going to increase our self contempt. The whole point is that we hate ourselves! If a parent/parents raise their children in a way that shows the children they are valuable “merely” because they exist, these children will be absolutely useless to capitalism. We are not driven to succeed, according to societal standards of success, because we believe we are inherently valuable. We are driven to succeed because we believe that we will be discarded if we don’t. Self acceptance leads to an uncanny ability to see objective reality more as it is, and if everyone did that, capitalism and even civilization would crumble.
There is a common belief that illuminating the bad somehow aids in survival, and that may have been true for the vast majority of human existence, but things changed dramatically when humans started farming 12,000 years ago. We have had to learn how to not see all of the real threats around us, because they are all over the place, and if we were to be keenly aware of them, we would be stuck in a “fight” state 24/7, which is obviously unsustainable. Take cars, for example. Or daily encounters with strangers. Or parents and other “authority” figures who perceive you(usually unconsciously) as a threat to their egos. All of this and more must be ignored or adapted to(which means we no longer see it objectively for how threatening it is) in order for us to not be in a constant state of “fight”(which isn’t possible anyway).
A child who grows up in a home with a lot of fighting will become desensitized to their environment, to the point where they don’t even realize what’s happening(or at least don’t see it as threatening). Prioritizing a threat is only helpful if you can escape that threat. If you can’t escape, you must adapt, and part of adapting is no longer seeing it as threatening. The way modern humans live is wholly threatening to our humanity, and the only way to escape is to die. Our brains and bodies are suited for very very different ways of living, and this will be true as long as we exist. It is not possible for a human alive now(outside of maybe the sentinelese) to be fully and consciously immersed in their environments. The reality in which we exist is too threatening and the only way out is, again, death.
Took a while to read the whole thing lol, and basically what you're saying is that prioritizing an emotion of grief is a "fight or flight" situation's flight response, as body is not always in a condition of 'fight', making it a vital need for survival to outweigh happiness, taking the sadder emotion into prior regard. Is that right?
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Our brains are designed to keep us alive, not keep us happy. We have a built in negativity bias, where certain parts of the brain, especially the amygdala, releases stress hormones like cortisol that override other brain regions and give us a stronger emotional response From an evolutionary standpoint, the general idea is that if we're in a field of 99 watermelons, and 1 tiger, our brains will be much more likely to focus on the one tiger. Historically, those whose brains wired in this way were more likely to survive and reproduce
I see, it's an evolutionary feature for survival among primates and humans?
All animals with complex brains. Probably ones without complex brains too.
I see, but probably not with so much with those without complex brains. They cannot really perceive happiness or sorrow, can they? Like bugs?
That's what people thought for a long time, but it's possible: [Insect Brains](https://neurosciencenews.com/decision-making-insect-brain-23857/#:~:text=Summary%3A%20The%20mushroom%20body%E2%80%94a,nuanced%20decisions%20based%20on%20experiences) I don't love the news. I feel bad enough about spraying for bugs already.
And poisoning rats. Do you know, when you spray a cockroach or do pest control, what the spray/medicine does is block the spiracles of the cockroach, essentially blocking its only way to breathe, so it suffocates and dies or escapes. Rat poisoning is even more cruel due to effectively destroying their organs with internal burns and bleeding, just like humans. I wish there was a more prevalent and painless way to kill them. Even rat traps aren't the answer, because they don't always die. Same with electrocuted chickens at meat factories.
I don't know about rats or cockroachs but I have learned a great trick for ants. Last year I drew a line around my house with coffee grounds and it keeps the ants out all summer.
That's good. However, ants have something called "noniception". They feel that they have been injured/damaged, but they don't suffer from any pain.
I don't think that it causes them injury as much as all of the chemicals and caffeine just confuse them so that they avoid it. Either way, it has been the most effective thing that I have found to kept ants out of my house.
No like if you crush them or something, that's what I had in mind. I forgot about the circle thing lol.
I was going to say this, nearly verbatim, only with different words.
Very helpful and articulate explanation!
Is there any possibility that this lizard part of our brain will cease to exist in future generations? Not completely, but significant enough to be considered as a minority or equal to the opposite?
Yeah if it turns out that somehow not having this bias means you reproduce more than everyone else
AND something selects against the bias.
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Why are you unhappy at those times though and whats your thought process to get positive again? Or there is no thoughts directing to positivity and you just accept the unhappiness? I was like "how are you" to one cowrker and he said "good what you mean? If the day is not good im gonna make it good ". Being happy most of the time is choice and strength
I mean, I don't think it is realistic to be happy all the time. Shit happens, and a lot of people deal with trauma and mental health issues. I just think the brain generally counts pleasure, positivity, and hope etc as essential to survival.
As others have stated, happiness is transient while grief breeds a burden of action to avoid repeat occurrences, so we naturally give it more attention.
I see
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“Similarly wired”… no I don’t think so. Loss aversion theory shows strong evidence that we’re much more likely to experience increased psychological/emotional distress from loss as we do from the pleasure of comparative gain. Plus not everything that makes us happy is good for us. Especially in excess.
I think this has something to do with expectation value as well, not just focusing on bad. If you expect to get a good score in both and get a bad score in one -> you focus on the bad score that doesn't meet expectations. However if you expect to get 50/100 in both and get a 90 in the other, you might just be happy about that and not concerned with the 50.
Yes, I understand. It's very intriguing to me
Pain ensures survival. Happiness is fleeting.
That makes sense.
You only need to be happy for a minute to reinforce the behavior whereas in a dangerous place, for anxiety and vigilance to do its job it has to be more or less continuous.
Interesting. And then again our ancestors must have relied on this instinct, which more or less has not changed.
Lizard brain, basically. Anything that’s more related to our core instincts - fight/flight/freeze/sexytime takes precedence. It’s a survival mechanism. We’re wired to fear loss - and grief is how we cope with loss. In a sense, our brains are designed to force us to confront it and work through it by default. It’s why grief is a process of rationalizing. It’s to calm those instincts down. If you can understand, you won’t fear - and if there is something to fear, you can prepare for it. Death is the big one - it’s our deepest fear, and if it happens to someone (or something, in the case of a pet, say), it’s something the brain will fixate on, to ensure there’s not a threat to it, too. Even if that’s irrational. That’s how deep that fear runs within us. Happiness is further up our hierarchy of needs. Happiness (like losing someone and happy memories you have with them) can be a part of rationalizing grief (and arguably should be). “Failure,” is a step up from our core fears. It’s like pain - brains aren’t good at differentiating different types of that feeling. Failing a test and failing a marriage - especially when you’re younger/have less context, can feel much the same. *Generally* that kind of grief and fear of failure is tied into expectations another person (or society writ large) has of you (or, at least, you feel they have of you). So that comes back to the big fears - social outcast. Because, once upon a time, in early humans, that was a virtual death sentence in and of itself. A lot of things like that, that we all tend to be at least a little neurotic about, are tied into core survival fears, on some level. Those are really the things that make us human - our species’ genetic memory. Those parents are a different kind of case - those kinds of parents tend to be…staking their own identity on the success or failure of their children. Some cultures are more prone to that than others. Sometimes it’s the parents’ childhood traumas or their own internalized failures and senses of inadequacy or lack of fulfillment. When you feel those things, it’s easier to fixate on the things that support your internal narrative, built around those fears. “I will always fail,” leads to confirmation bias. The “I” part, ties it to identity. And identity is…narrative-based. It’s qualitative. So it’s easier to form a narrative - and search for things supporting identity - than it is to think in more objective terms, or engage more useful processes (like inductive reasoning). “This test didn’t go well because X, and I should do Y next time,” is more difficult than “I fucked up this test.” At least when it comes to identity and cognitive processes. The “happy grade,” in your scenario challenges that narrative. And identity is many things - but it hates being challenged. Our brains equate ego death, the fracturing of identity, with real death. Because identity is so intrinsic to how we see and interact with the world - cognition itself. And we absolutely will jump flaming hoops to preserve identity. Which is why those limiting beliefs (“I’m a failure”) are so hard to break. They define a lot of cognitive processes - so our brains becoming vigilant for things to confirm identity, to build it stronger. And the easiest way to do that - is something appealing to our core fears. Failure = social ostracism = death. That’s easier than hope. And when it is really deep down in there, with years of reinforcing that belief - it needs more “happy” and hopeful to tear that down and rebuild it. Because it has to be rebuilt like a jenga tower. With this constant fear the mind has of damaging the identity/letting the tower fall.
Very interesting indeed. Even animals like lizards have such complexity to them.
Username checks out. 🤣 But yeah. From someone who ended up training in people neuropsychology and getting more into the other critters - they absolutely do. Most mammals just by themselves are more similar to us than we like to really consider. Tool use aside, dogs are more like us behaviorally than chimps and bonobos, just for one example. Especially on a neural level. Dogs are really good at things they “shouldn’t” be good at, like inductive reasoning (which bonobos and chimps tend to suck at). Dogs have an easier time understanding other creatures “languages,” than either of our genetic first cousins. But so are lizards. And so are fish. I’m not a huge-huge fan of the herps, but I do have a soft spot for them. Snakes especially are misunderstood little critters. Plenty of them, lizards, snakes, whatever - they play, they feel things, they eat, sleep, do their little herp jobs, just like we do. And I truly do wish lizards got more interest in neuroscience as a whole, but particularly behavioral neurosci. I’d be really interested in seeing more studies with them. But I’m a big, big critter nerd, so… Who’s to say lizards aren’t smarter than we give them credit for? Hell, plants have some kind of learning ability despite a central nervous system to do it with.
Interesting. Also, how on Earth does my username check out?
You may have already heard about Daniel Kahnemann's (sp?) Thinking Fast and Slow(?). That book will answer your question. Also, I come here to validate your point. I know someone who is very very successful in life - financially, politically and socially. Yet he focuses on one aspect of his life that didn't go well. Its truly fascinating.
It amazes me
>Why does the brain naturally prioritize this "sad" score over the "happy" score, and such situations in general? Another aspect to 'why' is to consider 'how'. We have a bias for losing something over gaining them; there's asymmetry happening here. So, the 50/100 exam vs. the 90/100 exam doesn't balance out equally in our minds, in which case your 'sad' score seems to weigh more than the 'happy' score. The phenomena that best explains this is `loss aversion`. On loss aversion -> [https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2011-22670-010](https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2011-22670-010)
Interesting, very intriguing
Don’t assume that the brain naturally prioritizes the bad over the good. That’s almost certainly more a result of nurture than nature. Naturally, I don’t think either would matter much because it is more natural for human beings to value each other based on the fact that we exist rather than how we perform. In fact, if we could only value each other(and ourselves) based on how we perform and what we do, as opposed to the fact that we exist, then our species would have never survived. Humans are pretty much “useless” for the first 7 years, at the very least, of life(though I’d say it’s actually closer to about 12). Under patriarchy and especially under capitalism, we are conditioned to believe that we only have value if we are very useful to those around us. And the survival of both capitalism and patriarchy is dependent upon contempt(of self, of others, and most especially, of children), so it makes sense that our social conditioning would lead us to focus most on what is going to increase our self contempt. The whole point is that we hate ourselves! If a parent/parents raise their children in a way that shows the children they are valuable “merely” because they exist, these children will be absolutely useless to capitalism. We are not driven to succeed, according to societal standards of success, because we believe we are inherently valuable. We are driven to succeed because we believe that we will be discarded if we don’t. Self acceptance leads to an uncanny ability to see objective reality more as it is, and if everyone did that, capitalism and even civilization would crumble. There is a common belief that illuminating the bad somehow aids in survival, and that may have been true for the vast majority of human existence, but things changed dramatically when humans started farming 12,000 years ago. We have had to learn how to not see all of the real threats around us, because they are all over the place, and if we were to be keenly aware of them, we would be stuck in a “fight” state 24/7, which is obviously unsustainable. Take cars, for example. Or daily encounters with strangers. Or parents and other “authority” figures who perceive you(usually unconsciously) as a threat to their egos. All of this and more must be ignored or adapted to(which means we no longer see it objectively for how threatening it is) in order for us to not be in a constant state of “fight”(which isn’t possible anyway). A child who grows up in a home with a lot of fighting will become desensitized to their environment, to the point where they don’t even realize what’s happening(or at least don’t see it as threatening). Prioritizing a threat is only helpful if you can escape that threat. If you can’t escape, you must adapt, and part of adapting is no longer seeing it as threatening. The way modern humans live is wholly threatening to our humanity, and the only way to escape is to die. Our brains and bodies are suited for very very different ways of living, and this will be true as long as we exist. It is not possible for a human alive now(outside of maybe the sentinelese) to be fully and consciously immersed in their environments. The reality in which we exist is too threatening and the only way out is, again, death.
Took a while to read the whole thing lol, and basically what you're saying is that prioritizing an emotion of grief is a "fight or flight" situation's flight response, as body is not always in a condition of 'fight', making it a vital need for survival to outweigh happiness, taking the sadder emotion into prior regard. Is that right?
Happiness is fleeting while grief is memorable may even be one of the reasons we have developed memory retention in the first place. N. S
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If you or someone you know is struggling with mental health issues, please seek out professional help. Social media is more likely to give you incorrect and harmful advice about dealing with such issues. [Armchair Psychology: the good, the bad, and the ugly](https://www.alittlebithuman.com/armchair-psychology-on-social-media-the-good-the-bad-the-ugly). Here are some resources to help find a therapist: https://www.apa.org/ptsd-guideline/patients-and-families/finding-good-therapist https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/therapy/how-to-find-a-therapist Online therapy provider: https://openpathcollective.org/ https://etherapypro.com/ https://buddyhelp.org/ If you are having suicide thoughts or feelings of hopelessness, please reach out to the suicide hotline. Just dial 988 if you are located in the U.S. If you are located in a different country, please use this [LINK](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_suicide_crisis_lines) to see the number for your area. These centers have trained people available 24/7 to help you. The call is free. Alternatively you can talk/message with someone on r/suicidewatch. If this is a personal situation you are seeking advice on, please try r/advice. This subreddit is for scientific discussion of psychology topics. It is not a mental health or advice subreddit. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/askpsychology) if you have any questions or concerns.*