Brain Basics
Broadly speaking, we have three layers of our brain. Each one speaks its own language, and only ONE of the three layers speaks in words. That's important because it helps us understand why we can't always logic our way forward.
There is no quiz at the end of this article, so the names of the layers aren't as important as getting to know them. I like to think of them as characters in a fun graphic novel, but since I don't have rockin' drawing skills, I'll use pictures of my hand to help us get to know these "characters". This is based on Dan Siegel's hand model of the brain:
Brainstem
aka: Bella Brainstem
Subcortical System
aka: Sadie Subcortical
Neocortex
aka: Nora Neocortex
Let's look at these in a little more detail, starting with our top layer, the neocortex, and working our way down to the brainstem.
Nora Neocortex
- Speaks in words
- This is the part many of us identify with as "being in charge"
- Organizes information and figures out what to do based on the data she has
- Comparatively much slower*
Sadie Subcortical
- Speaks emotion; Listens to tone of voice (including the tone of our self-talk)
- Communicates in images and metaphors
- This layer is in charge of psychological safety and regulation
- Fastest processor of all!
- She listens to your belly and your heart with avid attention
- and, Sadie Subcortical probably really likes that the brain layers are being spoken about like characters in a graphic novel 😉
Bella Brainstem
- Speaks in sensation and movement
- If we feel sensations or movements in our muscles, joints, or center (ie: our viscera), we can think of that as our brainstem communicating with us
- This layer is in charge of our physical safety and regulation
- Fast too, almost as fast as the subcortical system. If there was a race between Bella and Sadie, they'd be neck and neck
*What do I mean by slow vs fast? Get ready for your mind to be 🤯. I learned this astonishing piece of information in an interview Jules did with one of her own mentors, Bonnie Badenoch. When I heard it, it stopped me in my tracks. Ready for it? Our brains encode 11 million bits of sensory information per second implicitly (unconsciously). Here's the punchline: our conscious minds can only work with somewhere between 6-50 bits of that 11,000,000 (meaning at any given time, we are only working consciously with a tiny fraction of the information that our systems know).
Connecting the Dots
Connecting the dots here: since the brainstem and subcortical system are faster, they don't send all of the data up to the neocortex, which makes internal collaboration all the more important!
There are great gifts in being slow. Being slow offers the ability to be intentional. The challenge is that being intentional requires a pause between what we feel and what we do. Where does the pause come from? Hint, it's not the neocortex....