Imagine the human brain as General Motors. Regulating stress and maintaining balance would be GM’s mission statement. The cortex, or new thinking part of the brain, would be GM’s corporate headquarters. Down River Detroit’s rusty factories would be the old mammal brain.
Your actions would be the vehicles rolling off the various assembly lines.
The thalamus, which serves as the brain’s clearinghouse for sensory information, would be Detroit Harbor Terminal (DHT) where the raw materials arrive; the raw materials would be visual, auditory, gustatory and tactile stimuli.
Smell, unlike the other senses, does not go through the thalamus. So it would be the clouds drifting in and out.
The operational mechanism of the thalamus dispenses the sensory information to the appropriate brain regions for processing, like DHT dispatch containers of raw materials to River Rouge.
This sorted sensory information then travels back from the various brain regions to the hippocampus and amygdala, which are like GM’s Central Foundry.
The hippocampus, the seat of learning and memory, then compares this information from the outside world with its perception of how the world should be, like quality control checking the numbers to make sure it meets “Dee-troit steel” standards. The hippocampus reports problems to the amygdala, which sends and receives information from every part of the brain and body, like the company troubleshooter who has every GM division chief on speed dial.
Think of the bloodstream as freeways and hormones (which are informational substances released by endocrine glands into the bloodstream) as trucking companies carrying housings from GM's Central Foundry to GM River Street for heat-treat, and from there to the Mound Truck and Tank Plant for assembly.
Whereas neurotransmitters, which are chemical releases that signal between nerve cells, are more like forklifts moving pallets around Cadillac Yard, or emails between corporate executives. Like trucking, and inter-company communication affects GM’s operations, hormones and neurotransmitters affect interoceptive awareness—how you feel what you feel, which determines why and how you do what you do.
Any intrusion on the homeostasis or balance of the organism is stress. So not all stress is distress, but all distress is stress. Thus, anything that impedes production and sales of the GM workforce would be stress in this analogy.
The factory workforce, the UAW, and the Teamsters are your body’s protective mechanisms. When the workers are over-worked, they become inefficient and if it escalates to an intolerable level the unions strike. These scenarios are comparable to the dynamics that cause blood pressure and serum glucose levels that prepare us for the eventuality of fight-or-flight, become hypertension, cardiac disease, and diabetes. As these conditions persist, they disrupt the quality of life the same way an extended strike can affect GM’s cash flow and threaten its solvency.
To understand the mind’s influence over the brain, picture the GM boardroom. The executives gather to direct corporate strategy. They represent both sexes, various ethnicities, ages, educational backgrounds, sexual orientations, and marital statuses. And they’re there because of multifarious reasons: nepotism, ambition, luck, whatever. They have the propensity for gender, race, class, age hatred and are not immune to self-hatred. Comprehensively all of the external factors that each person brings to the table, i.e., where they come from, what is going on in their life at the moment, how they treat others in the room, and how others treat them affects the global functionality of the GM Board.
In essence, every unforeseen intangible variable the people in the boardroom collectively bring to that table is the mind. The way domestic and other distractions affect their work is how the mind affects the brain.
The dopamine released from the Ventral tegmental area VTA into the reward center of the brain, which measures life satisfaction is comparable to GM’s executive memo measuring corporate performance. This dispatch should reflect the corporate mission of William Durant and Charles Mott (GM ‘s founders), which distinguishes it from other car manufacturers. However, the mission statement was written in 1908 this is 2017 and GM, like everybody else, measures success by monetary gain, Facebook likes and Twitter followers. The former is the mind and the latter is brain.
The mind is a global economy and the brain is just a bunch of factories doing business with each other. The brain is about getting the dopamine, and because it does not have the panoramic vision of the mind, it makes mistakes like eating compulsively, doing narcotics, getting sucked into Internet pornados, hatred, violence, and other self-destructive behavioral dependencies. Without consulting the mind, the brain cannot understand that you can never get enough of something that is almost satisfying. Simply working for pay is not satisfying enough for you, or anybody, no matter what your brain tells you, your mind knows better.
If you are not making this world kinder and more salubrious, you are not satisfying your mind. If you are separating yourself from everybody else, you are not getting enough.
Overfeeding your brain will not prevent your mind from starving. Satisfying your mind sustains your brain.
We cannot separate ourselves from each other, the animals, the plants or the planet. We live within the biosphere, not on the earth, the way GM thrives within the global economy, as opposed to just being headquartered in Detroit. The mind connects all of us and everything.
We have to be empathetic and accept all things, even those that must change - the same way GM has to reconcile employee satisfaction with competing in the global market. The harder it is to love someone or something, the more we have to do it because giving and receiving love is neurotransmission in the mind.
Remain fabulous and phenomenal!
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