In our previous article, How to Live Healthy in an Unhealthy World, we likened your primitive brain to a turtle—blindly following the whims of a consumer society.
You also have a prefrontal cortex (your thinking brain), which keeps tabs on your turtle while helping you figure things out.
What we haven’t talked about is your emotions.
Your emotional brain is more sophisticated than your primitive brain—somewhere along the lines of a 2-year-old who might give you a big hug that turns into a tantrum for no apparent reason.
Your emotional brain bridges your primitive and modern brains. Thus, you have primitive emotions (anger or fear) as well as higher emotions (gratitude, joy, nostalgia).
When your fight-or-flight response is at DEFCON-1, your primitive brain is driving the bus.
Most of the time, you’re not in a life-or-death struggle. So, to get through everyday life, your thinking brain has to create structure from the world.
That structure relies on your memories.
And it is emotion that helps you remember.
