“Brain, I have a question for you.”
“What is it, Karen?”
“Are you the self or am I the self?”
“Karen, as your brain I find that question amusing and irrelevant. You could not figure out how to ask that question if not for me, and you could not come up with an answer if not for me. Without me you would be completely unresponsive or dead. You are me and I am you. You refer to me, your brain, as if I were a separate entity from you, but you can only refer to me if I allow you to, so no matter how you slice it, we are one.”
“Ha. Ironically, well not really ironically, that is exactly what I think! I am fine that we are one, Brain. But Brain, I am troubled by all the psychologists and self-help ‘experts’ who demand we should all get out of our heads, code for getting out of our brains, and think with our hearts. Just yesterday I was having trouble deciding to purchase a lime green scarf or a pale pink one.”
My therapist friend shopping with me said I was too much in my head. My therapist friend said, “What does your heart say? Your heart can tell you which color scarf to choose.”
“My friend is a scientist supposedly. Why would she use this confusing kind of directive? After my therapist friend told me to think with my heart to choose a scarf color, I thought, my heart is a lumpy blob of muscular goo that pumps blood to my brain so my brain can think. My heart is not an organ that can think any more than my pancreas or liver can think. Why do people constantly tell me to think with my heart? Why do people ‘think’ thinking with our heads, our brains, is so distasteful? This makes no sense.”
If I grabbed a human heart and handed it to someone they would likely scream or pass out. Imagine squishing a real live lumpy, mushy, human heart. We see a sweet pinkish-red valentine heart in our ‘heads’ when we hear the word heart, not the pulsing lump of muscular goo it really is.
The poetic, metaphorical references to the human heart have been so frequent throughout history that many people actually think our heart does our ‘best’ thinking. Some theorists have even tried to prove our hearts can think and they have come up with odd explanations for why our hearts think like our brains. As is the case with many questionable scientific studies, these theorists arbitrarily pasted facts together in such a way to prove their point. The biological fact is our organ the heart is important solely because it pumps blood through our bodies so our brains can run the show.
Our heart does indeed have many neurons within its specialized nerve tissue to allow it to connect to our nervous system, like all other organs. Neurons, however, do not a brain make.
Only a brain can be a brain. Our heart is a part of our autonomic nervous system and truly is a biological tour de force. Yet the poetic idea of ‘the human heart’ is not at all like the actual organ called the human heart or the organ called the brain. Mixing up metaphors with reality does not serve us. Replacing scientifically accurate language with poetic, abstract metaphorical language does not serve us because we end up using this metaphorical language to demean and criticize. Inaccurate language usually ends up doing more harm than good and leads to confusing contradictions, especially among our children.
Here is an example of how my therapist friend contradicted herself with me. After scarf shopping we went to my house for dinner. Not being a stellar cook, I rustled us up some frozen burritos. As luck would have it I burnt our microwave burritos to a crisp by misreading the directions. My therapist friend and I go way back. We have that brutal kind of honesty childhood friends have.
She said, “Karen, how dumb can you be? Use your head for a change. No thinking person would microwave a frozen burrito for 20 minutes. What were you thinking??”
I said, “I didn’t have my glasses on and the directions were teeny tiny. I can’t help it if I saw the number 20.”
She said, “Well, if you used your head you would have double checked that number. How many frozen foods do you heat up in the microwave for more than 5 minutes? Most frozen foods you heat for only 1 to 2 minutes. I know you know this because you are the queen of frozen food.”
I resisted the temptation to tell her it was her fault because she told me earlier to get out of my head and think with my heart.
That evening I went with the same therapist friend out dancing. My husband was suppose to accompany us but backed out at the last minute. I got mad at him and my therapist friend shot me a look.
“Karen, you are too emotional about your husband. Just let it go already.”
At the dance hall I was pretty reserved and stiff. My therapist friend said to me, “Karen, you are back in your head again. Don’t think with your logical brain while you dance. Dance with your heart, dance with your emotions, be more emotional.”
My friend told me to get out of my head while shopping then she told me to use my head at dinner. She told me to stop being too emotional before the dance and then told me I wasn’t being emotional enough during the dance. She told me I wasn’t using enough logic at dinner and too much logic while dancing. This contradictory kind of language happens all day every day by us and to us because so many inaccuracies have been perpetuated about what our heart, emotions, and brain actually do.
My brain and I have been simultaneously studying up on how we humans actually think. Our emotions are in us to help us think, not the other way around. Our brain is not in us to help us manage or control our emotions. In fact, our emotions were not meant to be managed at all because our emotions do not DO anything apart from autonomically cueing the brain so the brain can make the most informed decision possible in any given context.
Every single time we evaluate an item of information, that information will be accompanied by an emotional cue to help us with our final interpretation and assessment of that piece of information. If we have a strong emotional accompaniment to an item of information, it does not mean the emotion made the final assessment or our heart made the final assessment. Our brain makes all final assessments.
Accusing a woman of being “too emotional,” or accusing a man of not thinking with his emotions are both passive aggressive and inaccurate accusations that make no biological sense. Inaccurate language about our human physiology, whether we are talking about our brains, hearts, or emotions does not serve us. Here is a recent news story showing the dangers of inaccurate language.
NPR did a story on May, 11, 2014 called “Easy On The Ears: GOP Ads Adapt To Reach Women Voters.” This story reported on political ads trying to win women’s votes by appealing to their hearts because they do not believe women do their actual thinking with their logical minds. They believe women actually think with their emotions.
The story reported that both political parties try to draw women over to its side by “appealing to their emotions and connecting with their hearts instead of their brains.” Here is what a GOP party representative said about one of their commercials.
“”This is a 60-second ad and it’s not particularly issue-driven,” O’Connor says of the spot. “It sort of goes to this point that when talking to women, I don’t think you necessarily have to be delivering factual information to move them. I think connecting with their heart and really trying to build emotion is more effective.”
I think most women would agree this trivializes us. Our imprecise use of the words heart, brain, emotions, feelings and logic ends up trivializing men and women equally. Refreshing as it is to share equally in something, I would rather it be something constructive.
To identify our human body parts arbitrarily and incorrectly and then assign more value to some organs and physiological processes over others for the main purpose of demeaning and trivializing one category of people for how they make decisions makes no sense. The biological fact is, our emotions cannot think for us. Our hearts cannot think for us.
Our brains do our thinking. We are our brains. Telling people to get out of their heads is the same as saying, get out of yourself, stop being you. The directive to get out of one’s head serves no-one but the person giving the directive. Telling someone to get out of their head and think with their heart really means stop thinking like you and think like me. If we accept our brains and the fact that every single decision we make comes out of our brains in our heads, whether a decision about which valentine to buy our cat or which receipt to save for taxes, we will be practicing self acceptance. And self acceptance is very much in vogue right now.
Self acceptance means brain acceptance. Our “hearts” get all the credit when we make a popular decision. Our brains take all the blame when we make an unpopular decisions. Our brains, however, make all of our decisions. Our brains make decisions about who to love, how to figure out taxes, what smart phone to buy, where to park, and what to eat for breakfast. Emotions provide cues to our brain autonomically; they do not make the decisions for us. Emotions are in us to provide us with much needed information with which to make optimal decisions, not to be a nuisance, an idea popularized by Freud and still popular today.
Interestingly, the only role not tied to our autonomic nervous system is that of decision making. Making decisions is the only active role we play in our existence and our brains guide every single step of our decisions making process. Our brain allows us to take in information through our senses. Our brain directs that information for exactly where to go in the brain to be processed. The appropriated area of our brain initiates and organizes the processing. Once the information is processed, our brain assesses, forms a conclusion, and finally makes a decision for what to do with that information.
Our brains need some serious PR help so we can ditch the heart metaphors and start practicing brain love. We humans unquestioningly like anything with the word love or light in it. I would refer to the brain as a stately orb of love and light, a pastel gray maze of memory and prediction, but as a rule I believe we should stay away from using metaphor and poetic abstractions to discuss concrete anatomical facts, so I won’t. I will just say our brains are totally amazing in every way.
“And by the way, brain, thanks for your help with this essay.”
“Oh no, thank you, Karen.”
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