Your Brain is an Untrained Dog
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Photo Credit: Vidar Nordli-Mathisen @vidarnm
Hello Sobertown,
Your brain is an untrained dog. As with a dog your brain will be one of three things when it comes to impulse control depending on how well you have trained it.
1: A well tamed and well restrained canine who sits patiently and understands the human food is not their food and who knows they will be fed soon enough.
2: A poorly trained mutt who whines and jumps up and cry’s for food they know they are not supposed to have it but can not beat the impulse to whinge and moan in the slight chance it means they get a morsel of food.
3: A savage beast who not only whines and moans about food but at any given opportunity will gladly snatch a biscuit from a young child’s hand even if it means a risk of harming the child, a totally untrained mongrel who would bite the hand that feeds it for one tiny fleeting chance a satiating the internal drive to consume at any and all opportunities as though they would never be fed again and today was their last day on Earth.
Your brain is an untrained dog.
To repeat Dr. Huberman “the human brain is not optimised for making good decisions”.
Knowledge of this fact is very helpful in knowing how to train and control it’s irrational thoughts before they lead to unwanted actions.
Let’s look briefly at taste.
Our sense of taste serves two main functions, it enables us to evaluate foods for toxicity and nutrient content and it prepares our body for metabolising the foods coming in. To rephrase that a quote from an article by Breslin 2014: “Taste drives a primal sense of ‘acceptable’ or ‘unacceptable’ for what is sampled. Taste combines with smell and tactile sensations to form flavours, which allows us to identify and recognize food items as familiar or novel. If familiar, we can anticipate the metabolic consequences of ingesting the food. If novel, we can use these sensory cues to learn about the physiological outcomes of ingestion. If the outcome is positive, taste will signal pleasure and reward — both directly from the pleasurable quality of the taste itself, as well as from associated metabolic consequences.”
Why is your brain an untrained dog?
Quote: “Those who live in an environment of very low food security forage using taste to identify nutritious foods to eat. While those who live in an environment of abundant, palatable foods are guided by taste to over consume calorically dense foods, which too often results in diabetes and obesity.” Breslin 2014.
Sobertown, we are those people, we are those who live in an environment of abundant, palatable foods. We are those who follow our ancestral instincts and senses toward the overconsumption of calorically dense foods, it is not our fault we seek these foods, this is just how we are wired and so, our brain is an untrained dog, jittering and salivating, ready to jump out of it’s skin to maul 5 times the daily caloric requirements in one single meal.
We think we are at an advantage, farming practices being what they are we are able to supply our own with EVERYTHING in ABSOLUTE ABUNDANCE, no longer are seasons relevant, by and large no longer are monetary restrictions relevant and the foods most incredibly dense in refined and compressed calories are often the CHEAPEST available and available to us often without even leaving our vehicles. The truth is that we are not at an advantage, when we provide the ability to consume in the manner our surroundings do it is in direct opposition the whole notion of our evolutionary traits. As we evolved over long periods of time we developed the ability to taste and figure out the safest and most calorie rich foods to SURVIVE. Now this ability is causing the directly OPPOSITE EFFECT.
If you find it difficult to restrain yourself when consuming high sugar, high salt, high calorie foods then your brain is working EXACTLY as it was designed to and it THINKS it is doing so as a means of enabling your best chances at survival and stocking up for hard times.
What your primitive brain neglected to realise is this, THERE IS NO HARD TIMES anymore, we live in a never ending abundance. THERE IS NO HARD TIME. The only hard time is now coming from chasing this primitive response so far we create disease which would never have plagued us when we were foraging and hunting for food as our ancestors did.
Your attraction to bad food, sugar and fat and most importantly to ALCOHOL is not your fault. Your brain is an untrained dog.
Neurons that fire together wire together. Meaning with work and repetition you can close those loops driving you to consume and consume and open circuits leading you to consume for health and for balance. Your ancestry and drive to seek pleasurable and calorie dense foods and substances will always be there but it can be dialled down to an idle with work.
You can train that mutt in your skull, truly.
You need to train that beast, that beast is wired to fuck your body up by thinking its helping, that beast is wired to sniff out and consume and consume and consume, you can train that dog.
“Our unique history has shaped us to carry taste preferences for sugars and acids that provide energy and vitamin C, as well as newly developed preferences for higher intakes of salt and starch. In addition, we have developed a taste for umami tasting fermented foods, which have the benefit of introducing more digestible nutrients and probiotic bacteria to our diet.”
Alcohol is the epitome of fulfilling the desires of our untrained brain.
Enter the “drunken Monkey” Hypothesis.
According to the drunken monkey hypothesis our ancestors routinely ingested ethanol naturally produced in overripe fruit through the interaction of yeast and sugars. This consumption of ethanol in rotting fruit served multiple benefits to the creatures who consumed them, aside from the likelihood of rotting fruit being more available while other animals passed on them, the ethanol provides close to double the calories as compared to the same weight in other carbohydrates. You want more? Alcohol not only provides additional calories itself, it also induces hunger as you may have experienced, and so the monkey with the ethanol laden fruit is at a further advantage in that it consumes more than it otherwise may due to the effects of the ethanol. The final benefit to the monkey is that fermenting fruit gives a notable smell and so is easier to hunt out and forage through smell.
Many other drugs, yes alcohol is a drug have a more recent history in human use and addiction but alcohol seems to go way back, potentially tens of millions of years back before we even branched out.
Protein and carbohydrates both contain roughly 4 calories per gram, while ethanol contains 7 calories per gram. Questioning why the attraction? Drunken monkey aside, it is a highly calorie dense substance and that is the ethanol alone without the introduction of additional calories to make it seem palatable to a human being.
What seems like a complicated topic is actually fairly simple.
1: We evolve to seek calorie rich foods for survival purposes millions of years ago.
2: We recently rapidly alter our environment to supply ourselves with abundant food sources. A great move when done right.
3: Some smart fuckwits capitalise on natural human desires and build outlets providing insanely calorie dense and nutrient poor foods for cheap as well as tasty flavoured ethanol at high concentrations with no limit on quantity as long as one can afford the product.
4: We neglect to inform people where we came from, what our natural tendencies are and how to manage this in a healthy manner.
5: We overconsume, we get fat, we get diseased, heart disease, many types of cancers, diabetes and more all due not to genetics but to our lifestyles which technically is due to our ancestral genes and attractions.
ATTRACTIONS TO COME
6: Sobertown, we train, we build will and grit, we overcome alcohol and we learn to tame the beast over a long and difficult period of time, we train our brain, we ingest nutrient rich and calorie logical foods, we live healthier, we live happier, we live better.
The marketers will always be there to capitalise on our instincts.
The governments will not tell you the unpopular truth.
Our ancestral attraction to that which makes us sick will not go away.
So we train our dog.
We train our brain.
We build new circuits.
We live.
When we perceive a craving for anything, be it alcohol, be it sugar or otherwise we can be fairly sure under normal circumstances this is not your body and mind asking you to provide it what it actually needs for health and good function it is your brain requesting that which it THINKS is necessary for survival which is NOT the case anymore.
So when your untrained dog zags left to go smell a big pile of shit, only you can redirect it where YOU know you are going and away from the turd sniffing extravaganza. To simplify this, when your dog brain tells you to ingest bad food, or to ingest alcohol, just know it thinks it knows what is best, but due to a mental wormhole back to our ancestry IT, IS, WRONG. When we know it is wrong and that what we feel we want is not what we need then we can better overcome the dogs desire to pull of course and spend some time with it’s nose in the big pile of crap to your left.
Sobertown, it was never our fault, but you are not a monkey.
You do not need to gorge on rotting fruit anymore.
You do not live in a world of scarcity.
You have been tricked by your own millions of years old ancestral drive for survival.
You Sobertown, do not need alcohol and are being fooled into thinking you actually do.
You Sobertown, do not need alcohol.
Your brain is an untrained dog, neurons that fire together, wire together, train that dog to know that it will be fed, that it is ok to wait, that it does not need to gorge on anything and everything within reach, that it can sit and wait and it will be happy and it will be ok. THAT is accelerated evolution Sobertown, that is growth and accelerated evolution through tapping into our minds sturdy ability to change and evolve pathways.
Pour the poison down the sink, walk past the rotting fruit.
Thanks Sobertown.
Todd Crafter (Sobertown Resident)
AHPRA Registered Chiropractor/FA Registered Trainer
BAppSc(human movement), BHSc(chiro), MClinChiro
To contact the author please email soberaustralia@gmail.com
The Sobertown Blog articles and recordings are created as a means of assisting others in achieving and maintaining sobriety and freedom from alcohol. Experiences, entries, research and article content are that of the author and should be applied in a safe manner deemed best by the reader and applied safely, if relevant, with medical oversight. This is not medical advice and the author is not a medical doctor. No advice within is based on or crosses over with the authors profession or professional opinion as an AHPRA registered allied health practitioner or FA registered exercise professional.
REFERENCE
(1): Breslin P. 2014: An Evolutionary Perspective on Food Review and Human Taste. Curr Biol. 2013 May 6, 23(9): R409-R41. Taken from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3680351/ on 30/09/2021.
(2): Discover Magazine: ‘Drunken Monkey’ Hypothesis: Was Booze an Advantage For Our Ancestors? Taken from https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/drunken-monkey-hypothesis-was-booze-an-advantage-for-our-ancestors on 30/09/2021
