This is your brain ...

The human brain is a rather anachronistic mechanism. Imagine a small family living in a small house. They have few needs and everything they require for their daily life is contained therein. Now the family grows. With children of different ages, the needs grow in variety as well as quantity. So they add another room and equip it with the new facilities. And then it grows further. Perhaps grandchildren show up. Now they add a few more rooms and the grandchildren inherit their parents' toys. The parents now need exercise equipment, and the grandparents possibly need to add a ramp to the entrance for their wheelchair.

The house looks haphazard. The exercise room is far from the parents' room and the play room on a different level than the children's rooms. It still fulfills the needs of the family, and is sufficiently functional. It's just not that efficient. It may take more time and effort to do the laundry, for instance, because the people are living in various parts of the house rather than in close proximity to the service facilities.

The most primitive parts of our brain are at least ten million (10,000,000) years old. They were designed to manage simple functions for animals with simple lives, and are collectively referred to as the reptilian brain (see Triune Brain model for details.) Those creatures did not have to go to the mall and select a pair of shoes, so their brains never created the facility to be attracted by the latest designs from Prada. The younger part of our brain, called the mammalian brain, is perhaps a few million years old. Since early primates began working and living together in groups, their brains developed the functionality needed for social interaction. For even earlier mammals, the critical faculty required was the response to danger, without which survival would be impossible.

And the most recent part of our brain matured only tens of thousands of years ago. This infant organ, called the neo-cortex, enables the uniquely human ability to "think about thinking." Although other primates possess a small neo-cortex as well, no animal has the fully developed conscious ability to reason, discriminate between choices and strongly resist behavior that would gratify the other (lower) parts of the brain.

It is this unique ability to overwhelm our desires with our reason that differentiates us humans from the other animals. That is the foundation of our spiritual framework.