Our prefrontal cortices are where the higher human values of love, compassion and empathy are created and held. This newer brain, only 40,000 years old, has been designed by Nature to regulate and modify the older, ancient structures of the animal brain, some of which are millions of years old. However, without the full development of the prefrontal cortices through a nurturing and safe environment for the mother and child, the prefrontal cortices cannot fully develop. This lack of development of the newer brain is how violence is passed down from generation to generation. The newer brain has yet to be stabilized through evolution and Nature as yet.

The prefrontals were considered just the silent areas of brain and they didn’t know if anything was really happening until the late 80’s actually, and they paid attention to the prefrontal lobes.  And that’s larger because their development is experience dependent so many people don’t have much going on in the prefrontal cortices.  But all the recent research, I think of Patricia Goldman-Rakic, and Antonio Di Marzio and Elkhonon Goldberg and you could just keep naming these astonishing new Neural Scientists, all of whom attribute all the higher human virtues of what it means to be civilized and human to the prefrontal cortices.  Now you’ve got intellect, the verbal capacities and intellect and even creativity in the general forebrain area itself in what we call the left and right vertical areas of the hemispheres of the brain, but the higher human virtues of compassion, love, understanding, empathy, as well as the really highly forms of creativity like you would find in your highest scientific or philosophical and religious and so on, those all seem to generate through or dependent on the prefrontal cortices and so the discovery that our capacity to modify and moderate the behavior of the lower brain structures; our survival brain, the brain dealing with sexuality, appetites, physical survival itself, our emotional brain, our relationship with others, and even the intellectual verbal brain, all of those procedures are under the jurisdiction you might say of these prefrontal cortices.  They can modify and moderate modulate, the behaviors of all of the lower brain systems if they’re developed.  If they’re not developed then the individual themselves have no control over their lower impulses.

That is, when they itch, they scratch.  When their lower survival brain feels threatened they defend themselves at all costs and they can get to be very dangerous in effect.  So the job of the prefrontal cortices is to modulate and moderate the impulse behaviors of the lower animal brains.  So the civilized mind, as Patricia Goldman-Rakic, calls it, the higher human virtues, the civilized mind is one that can modify the animal brain structures in this and lift them up to a higher level of functioning.  They referred to the ancient animal brain structures in us that we inherited from all the rest of the mammals as reflexive, they’re instinctual.  If you throw something toward my eyes I’m automatically going to blink my eyes and try to defend my eyes.  If a dog leaps toward my leg with its barred fangs I’m automatically going to go into a fight/flight kind of a scenario. That’s built into the animal brain systems.  Now the higher systems are reflective.  The prefrontal cortexes give the chance to reflect and pause before we react.  And so if you come up and threaten me and I have no prefrontal cortexes I’m going to respond exactly with that threat.  This is where you get your eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.  You step on me and I’m going to bite you.  That’s a part of our natural animal heritage.  But the prefrontal cortexes are given to do what, to lift that up to a much higher order.

So the lower reflexive structures are designed by nature to come under the jurisdiction or the governorship you could say, come under the dominion of a higher civilized mind.  But that higher mind is dependent on being nurtured by a corresponding type of mind.  That’s one of the great tragedies.  If the mother was not in a nurturing environment, it’s very difficult for her to provide the same nurturing or an appropriate nurturing environment for her infant.  So if she feels threatened, she’s not going to provide the kinds of nurturing that the infant must have or the infant feels threatened and reflects that.  It’s just the whole business of the tree growing according to the way it’s bent in the very beginning.  So this is handed down from generation to generation, a series of violence and more violence year after year simply because of the system responding the way it has to, to that environment.  The prefrontal cortexes, nature’s newest edition, brought about to try to moderate the behaviors of those animal brain systems.  They’re brand new in evolutionary history.  That is to say probably not much more than 40,000 years old in their present state.  Whereas the old what we call the animal brain structures in us that move truly for survival, reflexive, some of those structures, the oldest are hundreds of millions of years old and they’re very firm, they’re very strong, they’re powerfully built up over vast millennia.  Whereas the prefrontal cortexes are so new in evolutionary history they are as yet unstable.  And so what nature has been trying to do is to stabilize this because in the prefrontals is where our true survival lies.  Our true survival as human beings lies in the prefrontal cortexes.  Our apparent survival as animals lie in the very ancient cortical structures and between the two there’s a real tussle been going on in evolutionary history.  Evolution’s been trying to establish this new type of intelligence and just hasn’t been able to do it yet.