21st Centruy Technology--Paleolithic Brain: The Dangers of

I know I promised my next post would be a tale of how Tom Waits dispelled some old ghosts.  But there is a goblin of more recent vintage I must dispel. Recently I was guilty of emailing without brain fully engaged.  I do that a little too often in speaking but this is the first time in awhile that I did it with email. 

A friend sent an email to a group of friends about a mutual friend’s good fortune.  Her family member was safe after being in a dangerous circumstance. My first reaction, a most primitive one, was an enormous sigh of relief.  But in truth, not for my friend but for me.  I did not want to have the pain, however attenuated, compared to what hers would surely be, of sharing in a friend’s enormous loss.  My own fears were foremost in my mind, rather than the enormous celebration and joy my dear friend and her family must be feeling.  And in my response, with laptop open as I half watched a baseball game, I let my visceral reaction of relief shape my hastily-written response. I then hit “reply all” without noticing my dear friend, who was in the midst of joy and relief I can only imagine, was on the distribution list.

I have been reading renowned neuroscientist David Eagleman’s book “Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain” about the many layers of unconscious neural circuitry we carry with us.  How so much of what we do every day really is “hard wired” into our circuitry, instinctual behaviors chosen by evolution for their properties of survival of our species.  I realize the best, and sometimes the worst, of what I do often arise from some place within my brain of which I am not conscious.  How many times my brain comes up with an answer before I even know there is a question.  In this case, my primitive brain was concerned first and foremost with my own avoidance of pain.  I was happy I had avoided the potential pain of having a friend suffering.  Not, by any means, the emotion appropriate for a home-coming celebration.

In a moment, the impact of my email hit me when other friends covered my response with their own good wishes of joy to our mutual friend.  By then it was too late to undo my hastily sent message.  I sent a more thought out note to my dear friend.  And I spent the night hoping I had not caused her pain.

If we are an instinctual species in many respects we also can be a species that cares and learns from its mistakes.  In the future before I use my twenty-first century devices to communicate with others of my kind I am going to make sure I have used the higher functioning part of my brain to check  my primitive gut reactions before hitting “send.”