There are many theories and concepts about how the brain 🧠 works. Usually, these different concepts all make reference to the same functions, circuits, and understanding that research and studies have allowed psychologists, psychiatrists, and doctors to have.

These notes🗒️ are based on Professor Steve Peters’s work, a psychiatrist and author of several books on how the brain works and mind management. 📝In his work, Professor Peters talks about the Chimp Brain Paradox and Mind Management, which is what we’ll cover next.

Understanding How the Brain Works ➡️ If you think of the brain as an orchestra, as Professor Peters does, the Dorsolateral Prefrontal Cortex is the lead 🧠.

• This part of the brain is related to the executive function, if you put your oxygen supply in this area, you can think and work in a certain way 🤔: more rationally. Looking for solutions, working with rationality and thinking 💭. This is what Professor Peters calls being in “human mode”. 

Conversely, sometimes we are in “chimp mode,” 🙉 working with the Orbitofrontal Cortex.

• These are times in which we are no longer working with the facts; it becomes about feelings and intuition.
• This area of the brain pulls heavily on the amygdala and bases decisions on ➡️ feelings, past experiences, emotions, behaviors, and trigger points.

When we become irrational, this is the part of the brain we are working with. It is impulsive 💥, emotional, and catastrophic; it is a defense system. 

Different from the Dorsolateral Prefrontal Cortex or the executive function, the Orbitofrontal Cortex has a head start in its development and often in how we react. It’s easier to get angry in a difficult situation than to go straight to being rational. 

The chimp 🙉, or Orbitofrontal Cortex, communicates with emotions; it gives us information in an emotional way since that’s how it knows how to communicate 💭 with us and get our attention.

• What the chimp brain is doing is calling our attention so we can come up with a plan.
• The plan may be as simple as ➡️ What are we going to do about this, or are we going to wait and see?

How To Calm The Chimp Down

Once the chimp has communicated with us, it expects an answer, and sometimes an internal answer won’t suffice. This means that sometimes you won’t be able to calm yourself 😮‍💨 (or a feeling) down on your own; you will need external answers. People who, at that moment, can share their rational thinking with you because when the 🙉 chimp is not listening to you, it will listen 👂🏻 to external people, usually friends or family.

These are times in which we look for outside feedback or help from others.

• For example, if you get a negative review on your work, and your mind starts going off on a very negative path, you can rely on other people to bring you back to reality.

• We all know that one bad review, and maybe even 1/100 reviews, isn’t representative, but that one review may be enough to throw us down a negative path. To clarify, this does not mean that you can’t calm yourself down; you can and have.

What this means is, as we know, as humans, we are designed to need people around us; no one is designed to live or work in isolation or completely independently 🤍.

Levels

There are different types or levels of chimps 🙉🙈🙊, which means that when people are in chimp mode, they can react differently from others. We can differentiate them by looking at their reactions.

For example, we all know that one person can remain very calm in an urgent or catastrophic situation, whereas another one will be full-on panicking 🫨. The first is the calm chimp type, whereas the second one has a very reactive chimp. 

Usually, we would think that it’s better to be like people who are like the first person, those with a very calm chimp, and those who keep their “cool.” When really, this part of the brain 🧠 is designed to be highly reactive and meant to give us a warning of danger so we can respond to urgent situations. 

The Downside of The Chimp Brain 

Nevertheless, as we mentioned, working with this part of the brain also has its downsides. For example, we can become very irrational and start putting unhelpful things into our brain, which we should learn how to manage.

This part of the brain is always trying to be better, which means that something we consider good enough today ✔️, we can start pulling apart tomorrow🤦🏻‍♀️.

The Upside of The Chimp Brain

Having a highly reactive chimp can be favorable for some people, like athletes, who need to respond quickly.  Other positives from the chimp brain:

• This part of the brain thinks outside the 📦 box
• It can motivate and drive us 🏎️
• It works with intuition, which many times is more accurate than logic and facts 📊
• As it believes what it hears, it allows us to laugh, for example, at jokes

It keeps us human; we don’t want to be in human mode all the time because we would become robots 🤖. Both the Dorsolateral Prefrontal Cortex and Orbitofrontal Cortex use emotion and logic.

The difference is that the human brain (Dorsolateral Prefrontal Cortex) starts with logic and bases emotion on that, while the 🙉 chimp brain (Orbitofrontal Cortex) starts with emotion and bases logic on that. 

The Chimp and Human Brain work together. For example, when something catastrophic happens or when the chimp brain alerts us, it goes to the human brain for a plan. It’s like the chimp saying to the human brain this is happening; what are we going to do about it? What’s the plan?

Now, the human brain is coming up with a plan 👩🏻‍💻 that can calm the chimp down 😮‍💨. They also work together when the chimp brain hears and believes something, it goes to the human brain to challenge it 🙋🏻‍♀️.

Professor Peterson suggests that asking someone to “control” themselves may be unkind. And if you think about it, we usually hear adults asking children to control themselves, which really won’t happen, as children 👧🏻👦🏻 are working primarily with the emotional part of the brain and haven’t fully developed the rational part of the brain.

Other than that, it also doesn’t really happen… the reality is no one wants to fall apart in the middle of a meeting or in any public instance, but as there are no “control” circuits in the brain🧠, this idea of controlling 🎮 yourself is not really an option.

What is an option is managing your emotions. It’s, as an adult, using your intelligence and rationality to manage your emotions and responses. This is because, as Peterson states, there are no circuits of control; there are circuits of management. Now, not because there are circuits of management, it means that we are good at leaving them.

Managing your emotions is a skill, a skill we need to develop, and as with every other skill, there are people who are better at it than others. So, some people may not be so great at managing their emotions.

➡️ more on emotions, individuality, and important life stages at Turning Red Post.

Willpower suggests that there are circuits that you can control 🎮, which, as we just talked about, 🙅🏻‍♀️don’t exist. So, what you can do is shift your mindset from control to management. 

As we mentioned, the human brain is responsible for inspiration, while the chimp 🙉 brain is responsible for motivation. Professor Peterson makes a clear differentiation between the two.

Motivation is something emotional and exciting 😆. It may or may not result in something. So, as excited as you may be in the moment, it doesn’t necessarily precede action 👎🏻. This is why Professor Peterson talks about commitment, something that is much more reliable and predictable for results. Motivation looks at achievement, success 🏆, and possessions.

While inspiration is about a longer-term vision, it looks at fulfilling things. It is a driving force🏎️; it inspires action 🤸🏻‍♀️. 

In closing, here are some guiding questions to help you with the different aspects we covered. 

🤔 Emotionality: Questions for When Something Emotional Happens

• Will this matter in a couple of weeks 🗓️?
• Will I cope?
• Does this happen to other people?
• Ask yourself, what’s the plan? Remember that the plan can be something very simple.

✨ Inspiration: Questions for When you Want to Achieve Something

• What do I want to achieve?
• How can I make that happen?
• What do I think 🤔 is stopping me from achieving that?
• What works for me? Remember, not everything needs to be evidence-based.

If one of these questions resonates with you and is helpful at any given time, then you can keep using it. You don’t need all of them to work for you.