The Monkey Brain Strikes Again

My upcoming book, Mastering Thought, has a subtitle, Loquacious Simianus. Many of us know what loquacious means. It means talkative. But Simianus may be a bit of a mystery. It is a Latin word that means monkey. This is what I call the Limbic System. It is the part of the brain that we share with other mammals like dogs and cats and primates. Since it is all about fight or flight, anger/fear, and survival, and since it is in charge of all emotions in the brain, I call it the monkey.

Now the missing piece that ties together the monkey and “talkative” is that the Limbic System is the driver of the voice in your head that sounds like you talking to you. Therefore we all have a loquacious simianus in our heads! Yuk!

But this particular monkey has some specialties; namely rationalization, regurgitation, and recapitulation. Rationalization is the process of constructing a logical justification for a behavior that was originally arrived at through a different emotional process. In other words, it is a story we tell ourselves to make us feel okay about something we did that we probably shouldn’t have.

Regurgitation is the rehashing of something said or done that we simply cannot digest in its original form usually because to digest it in that form would make us sick!

Recapitulation is a brief summary of what we did. The beauty of recapitulation is that is allows us to leave out key facts from our summary thus making us look better.

You notice that the three “R”s of the monkey are about the past.

There is another specialty the monkey has about the future; anticipation. Anticipation is the building of a scenario of what will happen in the future. Anticipation is almost totally useless since the future can never be predicted, but it gives the monkey a sense of control over what we cannot control!

As long as we believe we are the voice in our heads, the monkey has its way with us, and we have lost our way. This is where Witness Thought Transformation™ comes in. It frees us from the monkey. To be sure, the primitive primate doesn’t necessarily die, it just becomes irrelevant and we go free of its influence. Oh loquacious simianus – take a hike!