Brand Brain: Dancing With The 2-Million Year-Old Man

For brand communities to be sustainable, purpose-driven and authentic, they must ping million-years-old receptors responsible for instinct and rational thinking. (Photograph: Federico Jordan)

Scientists tell us that our modern-day human brain is the result of 20 million years of evolution. It is a jungle of stimulus-response training, the result of hundreds of thousands of millions of billions of inputs and outputs, Beta testing, fight or flee responses, not to mention the building of sounds and symbols necessary for one human being to communicate with another — language and the written word. We have even developed other abstract symbols to help communicate other abstract thoughts. (Math? Go figure.)

The human brain weighs approximately three pounds. We use all of our brain at different times (not the fictional Lucy ten percent). Our brains contain a neural forest that contains a billion neurons. The brain is mostly water (70%) and needs water to think efficiently. Working tirelessly may make you a working-class hero, but sleep is brain candy. Your brain uses sleep as run time to process the day’s events. About 80% of our thoughts are negative. Don’t. (Which perhaps makes an intentionally positive mindset a good counterbalance.)

Our brain is built in three layers, beginning with the so-called reptile brain which consists of the brainstem and cerebellum. Essentially, it is the brain of a fish. The cerebellum is responsible for breathing, heartbeat, balance and for maintaining body temperature. Science estimates that…