Stages of the Lizard Brain Feedback Loop

If we take a closer look at the lizard brain feedback loop, we can see how each stage feeds into the next, resulting in a vicious and unending circle of extremism.

The Lizard Brain Feedback Loop

Stage 1: Extreme Ideation

Humans may be the most intellectually advanced species on earth, but we still have our primitive tendencies. The brain stem, colloquially known as the lizard brain, is the part of the brain that governs our most base instincts: hunger; fear; anger; sex; survival; etc. To adopt a more expansive definition, we might describe the lizard brain as the part of ourselves that refuses to acknowledge nuance and logic. It wants what it wants — period. In truth, most of us are prone to occasionally turning over command of our thoughts to the lizard brain. And that’s OK. It’s natural. Problems only arise when the lizard brain refuses to give command back.

Imagine that an extreme idea enters your head and swims around for a bit. An idea that you know to be pernicious and illogical, but which you entertain now and then because it appeals to your lizard brain and provides temporary satisfaction. Upon further reflection though, you might see the idea to be cruel, or based on falsehoods, or simply misaligned with your fundamental values. And so, you dismiss the idea and return control of your thoughts to your higher-order self — the part that knows how to practice empathy and to approach conflict rationally.

But what if something interrupted this process of reflection? What if a delicious morsel of outrage was offered to you? Would not your lizard brain beg for you to snatch it up and feast upon it for just a little while?

Stage 2: Attention

The thing about the lizard brain is that it excels in driving impulses. Rationality and selflessness aren’t nearly as good at commanding immediate action (they are, after all, deliberative processes.) But when the lizard brain sees something primitive (sex and anger come to mind), it seizes control and sets your body in motion. It is for this reason that click-baity, outrage-inducing, all-caps headlines are so great at driving you to take a closer look.

Let’s go back to that inkling of extremist thought from stage 1. It has come and gone from your head, leaving behind perhaps just some faint traces. Now, imagine that you’re clicking around social media, or watching one of the 24-hour news networks, and something comes on that reminds you of that extreme idea. In no time, your lizard brain is leaping into action, demanding further investigation. Maybe you were too quick to dismiss the thought as unpalatable extremism. Maybe there is something to it after all. The Internet says there might be! Click! Click now!

Before you know it, your brain is neck deep in a buffet of outrage, anger, vengeance, and all other manner of cuisine that your lizard brain loves. You indulge, unable to help yourself, even as the rest of your brain is yelling “Stop! This does does nothing to nourish us!”

Stage 3: Validation

As with the body, the mind requires a healthy diet of intellectual sustenance. Sure, the occasional indulgence is fine, just as you might enjoy a bag of potato chips or a super-sized soda now and then. But what happens to your values when you sustain yourself exclusively on quick, easy, nourishment-free lizard food?

The validation phase of the lizard brain feedback loop is perhaps the most sinister. The extreme thought that you once pushed aside has grown — not with conscious intent, but through the manipulation of bad actors who have hijacked your attention. The more you subject yourself to extremism, be it in the form of a hateful social media post or an outraged newscast, the harder it becomes to differentiate between extremist thought and rational thought. Ideas that you might once have dismissed out of hand all of the sudden seem, somehow, legitimate. It’s an incremental process — validating extreme ideas bit by bit until they cease to seem extreme at all and start to appear downright rational.

Step 4: Production

Unhealthy habits are hard to break, and that includes in the realm of information consumption. Once you start down the path of outrage, pulling back and reassessing what it is doing to you is incredibly difficult. In many cases, you might not even recognize the need to reassess — your lizard brain has been so continually validated that it no longer bothers to return control to rationality. And here we enter the final stage of the lizard brain feedback loop: production.

Extreme actors, who desperately want your attention and validation, are also very good at seeing when something is working. Whether it is for ideological or financial purposes, they will always work to maximize return on their information investments. If a particular kind of article, or news segment, or social media post gets lots of attention, then you can be sure that the producers will double down. More clicks means more advertising revenue. More likes, and more shares, and more retweets means more attention. And so on, and so forth.

Once an extreme idea has gained your attention, and validated the thoughts in your head that you once pushed away, it will naturally aim to grow. Extremism is, by its nature, insatiable, and it grows one click at a time. And because our modern information ecosystem survives on attention, the more attention we give to extremism the more extreme ideas bad actors create for us. It’s a never-ending nightmare that benefits the few at the expense of the many — particularly in a democratic society that demands cooperation to function properly.