Impulse

While wait­ing for my pre­vi­ous post, Constitutional demo­li­tions experts, to upload, I was forced to stare at another of my posts enti­tled, Finding hap­pi­ness. It’s just such syn­chro­nized that get the ger­bils in my head (we’ll call them Earl and Larry) run­ning in their lit­tle rodent wheels. I won­dered how much of my grumpi­ness is due to my pre-frontal cortex’s extrap­o­la­tion of the world from cur­rent events. Dan Gilbert implies that the pre-frontal cor­tex often exag­ger­ates a bit or is out­right wrong and that peo­ple shouldn’t dwell too much on its prog­nos­ti­ca­tions. Was I just get­ting worked up based on a prob­a­bly false pre­dic­tion (or more likely, get­ting worked up over a very real sit­u­a­tion, but overly so)???
This made me real­ize that the pre-frontal cor­tex is the prize mod­ern pol­i­tics seeks. If you can take hold of people’s pre-frontal cor­tex, you con­trol their sat­is­fac­tion and their fear. You can cre­ate polar­iza­tion, thus sim­pli­fi­ca­tion, thus con­trol.
They’re not after the hearts of men — they’re after that squishy bit of grey mat­ter right there at the front of your head. Right about where you smack your­self when you say, “What was I thinking???”

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1. Heroes: addic­tion meets politics