Reid Thompson, MD, is a brain surgeon. Actually, he’s not just a brain surgeon. He’s the long time Chair of Neurosurgery at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. He has saved countless lives, as well as restoring sight and hearing to many grateful people, by doing delicate brain surgery to remove tumors. He’s trained surgeons all over the world. For the past several years, he has been going to Tanzania to help their healthcare system build its neurosurgery resources.
We had been talking about how our society marginalizes various groups – women, people of color, people who have different sexual orientations, people with “different” religions, and the list goes on and on. He said, “When you get into the brain, you can’t tell the person’s skin color or gender. The brain is the brain.” Then he showed me this picture taken of an operation he had performed during his trip last fall. He was illustrating his point.
He wanted me to see that the brain inside of our skulls looks the same regardless of skin color, gender, religion, and so on. It is your brain, not your skin color or your gender, that determines the talents you have and the skills you can develop. His picture is a dramatic illustration of the old proverb, “Don’t judge a book by its cover.”
When we marginalize people, putting them down and devaluing their opinions, we risk losing the contributions that they could have made to solving the complex problems modern society faces. Here we are, trying to figure out how to stop going to war with each other, how to raise our children in ways that help them all be successful, how to design an educational system that meets the demands of an evolving society, and what in the world to do about AI. We need all the help we can get! People who have had experiences different from the ones we have had often come at problems in novel ways that add to the chances of success.
Readers of this blog, or of A Little Book to Save Humanity, know that the primitive part of the human brain, the amygdala, encourages us to marginalize groups. Here’s how it does that: The amygdala is brilliant at recognizing threats to our physical safety. It does so in a heartbeat. Unfortunately, it makes rash judgments about people just as fast, using minimal and irrelevant data, such as race and gender. The amygdala is easily frightened.
Conflict entrepreneurs take advantage of the tendency for the amygdala to ride roughshod over the more advanced parts of our brain, the parts that bring judgment to decision making. Those entrepreneurs know that they can get our attention by scaring us into believing that various groups threaten us. They do so to get elected (they’ll save us!), to monetize eyeballs (they’ll shock us!), or to “show off” on social media, and get money for clicks.
It’s time to make room for the talent in all of us, regardless of the package it comes wrapped in.
Going Beyond Fine Words: This is not the first time you’ve heard such sentiments. Wise people have been sharing these ideas for a long time. We need to find ways to put them into action, ways to wrest power away from conflict entrepreneurs and put it in the hands of the vast majority of good and decent people. Two tools are key – critical thought and emotional intelligence (EQ). They go hand in hand.
Critical Thought: You can’t fight primitive emotions with primitive thinking, the kind you might see on a bumper sticker. Unfortunately, like critical thinking and critical thought, primitive emotions and primitive thinking also go hand in hand. Critical thought allows us to evaluate inflammatory messages, based on primitive thinking, in sophisticated ways. Here are some ideas for putting critical thinking into action:
- Assess the emotion: When you notice yourself getting angry or scared, literally take a breath or two so that the sophisticated part of your brain has a chance to think. It needs a little more time to work, because it has to handle more information.
- Assess the message: Messages that hint/imply/state that a whole class of people presents a threat send a strong signal that we need to be careful. Not of the class of people, but of the scare message. Don’t ignore that signal. Think. Are you being played? Conflict entrepreneurs seek to scare us, and then offer simple solutions to the threat. Their strategy works because the world is complex. It can feel overwhelming. When we think we have a simple solution, our anxiety goes down, because we think we know what to do. Unfortunately, simple thinking gets the results it deserves.
- Assess the source: What do these messengers have to gain from getting you to believe their message? Are they seeking your vote? Are they trying to sell you something? Are friends or acquaintances trying to convince themselves of something by getting you to believe it too?
- Assess the language: Complex problems come with lots of nuance. Sure, it takes effort and can be uncomfortable to spend the time thinking through an issue instead of just accepting the simple solution. Doing so means giving up that immediate sense of anxiety relief. But we can and should question messages that encourage thinking that can be characterized as black and white, either/or, or binary.
- Assess for partial truth: Many destructive messages have just enough truth in them to sneak into our thinking. Dangerous people come in all races and genders. Conflict entrepreneurs can always find an example of something you should be afraid of, and then paint an entire group with a broad brush. Don’t let them play you that way.
EQ: There are a number of EQ skills that can help you engage in critical thought.
- Emotional Self Awareness: Just recognizing that you are experiencing a high level of anger or fear can alert you to the possibility that you are having an amygdala attack. This realization can be the first step toward engaging in critical thought. (Even if there is real danger, thinking clearly about how to respond is a good idea.)
- Stress Tolerance: Excess anxiety can turn your thinking to mush, leaving you vulnerable to simple, binary, either/or thinking. Learning to tolerate anxiety for a moment will give you a chance to think more critically. Remember: Everyone with a working brain has anxiety. The only question is how we manage it.
- Impulse Control: Emotions prompt us to act. Without an emotion prompting us to do something, we would do nothing at all. But impulsive acts, unedited by critical thought, can be foolish. Learning to refrain from acting until we have assessed the situation properly keeps us from doing dumb things.
- Empathy: In this case, Empathy helps us recognize the fact that people with skin colors, or genders, or cultures, customs, nationalities,
and languages different from ours are people too, with many of the same goals and needs that we have. We may not have lived their lives and experienced what it’s like to be them, but that’s what Empathy is for. To let us walk a mile in their shoes. Remember, under our skin and skull, we are all the same. Just ask Dr. Thompson.
In summary, we can advance our world’s well being by remembering that talent comes from people of different races, genders, religions, sexual orientations, and political points of view. How much further along could we have come toward solving the many life-threatening problems we face if we hadn’t been marginalizing whole groups of people?
Dana Ackley, Ph.D. is the author of A Little Book to Save Humanity, available at https://theeqpress.com
