Chapter 1
Body Agenda
True Love…?
At some point in your marriage, you’re going to look over at your wife and wonder what you got yourself into. Marriage which seemed so very traditional and conservative will suddenly seem as risky as skydiving when someone else packed your chute. Why would you, a perfectly rational man subject yourself to getting married?
The answer is that we aren’t nearly as rational as we like to think we are. When we find that special someone our own body can release hormones and neurochemicals that make us almost uncontrollably romantically fixated on the beloved.
For myself, I have no idea why I married Jennifer. Oh sure I could rattle off a dozen good points about her, but many of those same points were true about other women I knew. In fact before I met Jennifer, I had a friend called Penny who is very similar in looks and personality to my wife, just she’s taller. I distinctly remember looking at her one day and trying to figure out why I felt absolutely no romantic interest in her. Everything about her checked off on my secret list of wife material points, I just had no interest in her beyond friendship. I even felt stupid for that lack of interest seeing objectively, she was a real catch.
Then I met Jennifer and it was like discovering cocaine. More Jennifer please. More. MORE! With the exception of what I carried in one suitcase I literally left everything behind in New Zealand to come be with her and that didn’t even happen until we had survived a three year long distance relationship. Getting married was just a required task to getting more Jennifer, so I jumped through all the hoops needed to marry her.
So why are we so helplessly foolish in the face of love? Well the answer is our bodies may really be the ones running the show…
You Are Not Your Brain
Our large human brain very much sets us apart from the animals. It’s our greatest strength as a species and supplies us with the raw cunning to vault us to the head of the class in the domination of the planet. Because of that tremendous strength, most people have the idea that the “real them” is housed in their mind and that their body is just a vehicle to transport them around.
Whether or not it is believed that we are a spirit, a higher being, a soul, a reincarnation or simply a very bright biological computer doesn’t matter - all these approaches to thinking about what makes up “the real you” believe that the body is a tool for that intelligence. In short, it’s believed that we are all self-aware and experience reality as a set of sensations that gets relayed to our brains. Based on those sensations we make choices and are in complete control about what we do.
However, we also know that this really isn’t the whole picture. We have plenty of control over our bodies, but we all know there are limits to that control. We can learn to control bowel and bladder and be toilet trained, but we’ve all experienced some acute moments in our lives where despite our toilet training and express desire to hold something in, our express desire was completely irrelevant and something very much exploded out.
The same thing happens with vomiting. We may even rationally figure out that we just ate something, or drank many somethings, that the body would be better off moving rapidly to somewhere outside of the body. We may rationally think to ourselves “I really should puke this up”, but once the vomiting itself starts “you” (meaning your brain) basically become a passenger in the experience of clutching at the toilet bowl and intense stomach contractions.
Likewise with members of the opposite sex, you may meet someone who quite objectively is attractive and sociable and interested in you, but you have no sexual interest in them. And of course there is the maddening attraction to members of the opposite sex you may even actively dislike, who you know are no good for you.
Much of your body just runs on auto-pilot 24/7 and your rational higher thinking brain isn’t even required for almost all of it. In fact sometimes thinking about our automatic body functions can interfere with their natural rhythm. One of the first tricks of the trade you learn in the medical field is to pretend to still be taking the patients pulse while you are in fact counting their respiration rate. The reason being that once a person knows you are watching their breathing, they tend to hold their breath or start to hyperventilate. When you take someone’s pulse they tend to mentally focus on the fact that your hand is on their wrist and their breathing remains normal.
In a very real sense humans are no different than animals who all quite happily have all their bodily functions work quite nicely without a high school diploma or Internet connection. We are a truly gifted species intellectually, but even that is a result of DNA hardwiring intelligence into our bodies.
The Rational Brain is a Late Adaptation
Riding roughshod over evolutionary science for a moment, the key understanding is that the uniquely human highly rational brain is in fact a late adaptation to the human animal from perhaps only a few millions years ago. It’s something that evolved as an advantageous tool for the human animal to use. Somewhere back in “The Time Before Writing” humans with bigger brains started out performing whatever was around at the time and slowly the big brains started taking over and running the show.
Perhaps the human animal could have evolved to have poisonous spit, or razor sharp tusks or night vision as a means of trying to grab a bigger piece of the pie. We didn’t, instead we evolved our superior brain to do the same job. So in this sense your brain, what you may think of as “you” - is a tool for your body, rather than your body being a biological machine to allow “you” to walk around and get places. So in a very real sense “you”, are your body and “you” are not nearly as fully in charge of yourself as you may think you are.
When it comes to sex, we have a multitude of biological programming hard-wired into us that very much sets our interest in the opposite sex. What we find sexually attractive in others...
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