The Reptilian Brain

I seem to be driven to try to explain this curious human behaviour of dominance and submission. Initially I was doing it to make sense of something that seemed incompatible with the rest of my personality, but as I've dug deeper it has become more and more fascinating as a subject of study in its own right. I'm curious as to what might turn up next, and I get the feeling that there are important insights to be discovered here.

It can be a frustrating search, and sometimes I feel I'd be better off just enjoying the fun rather than trying to analyse it. Then flashes of insight come where disconnected parts of the jigsaw suddenly slot together, setting me off in some new direction with fresh enthusiasm. I find I can easily get lost in the minutiae of the scientific literature, as I try to uncover the research that will back up the ideas with solid fact. As a consequence I have several promising threads which have been partially written up for this blog but are too incomplete to post.

One area which I have been interested in for a long while and seems to make a lot of sense is evolutionary psychology. It addresses how our brains and minds have evolved, and I'm convinced it has some useful things to say that could shed light on the origins of dominance and submission in humans, and lots more besides. As the name suggests it is based on the theory of evolution, so if you don’t like Darwin you won’t like what follows. Personally I have a lurking suspicion that evolution isn’t the whole story and that in time other mechanisms will be discovered that are passing information down the generations, but I’m convinced enough to accept that there’s a lot of truth in it.

The idea behind evolutionary psychology is that it is not just our physical bodies that have developed through evolutionary processes, but our mental functions too. So, for example, mental problems such as depression, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder or OCD must confer some benefit to the species, otherwise evolutionary pressures would have eliminated them. That doesn't mean that they are necessarily beneficial in our current world, as evolution is a slow process, so an adaptation which was beneficial to a society of hunters or primitive farmers may not be so helpful today, but may take many generations to disappear.

Evolutionary psychologists compare the mental life of humans with other animal species to develop theories about why we do what we do. It appears that evolution has created the human brain in layers, like the strata in a rock formation. If we dig down through our minds we can find the fossil remains of our evolutionary past, except that these are not dead fossils, but ones that are very much alive and kicking.

One ancient part of our brain that seems relevant to D/s is called the "reptilian brain". This refers to part of the brain attached to the top of the spinal cord where it enters the skull, which in evolutionary terms is 300 million years old. Forget about “inner child”, this is our “inner dinosaur”! The concept of a reptilian brain can conjure up images of a cold, emotionless, ruthless predator. While it is capable of these things we have to remember that it does many things we should be grateful for, as it tirelessly controls the basic processes that keep us alive.

First of all what is the reptilian brain? It consists of a number of areas in the brain stem which lies at the top of the spinal cord where it enters the skull. I'm not going to go into technical details just yet, and anyone who is interested can look them up elsewhere, but let me list some of the things the reptilian brain does:

· It controls automatic body functions such as breathing, heart rate, blood pressure, body temperature, blood sugar level and so on.

· It controls consciousness - an area of the reptilian brain called the "reticular activating system" is involved with controlling sleeping and waking. It wakes us up, either at a specific time, or if our senses detect that something significant is happening. It sends us to sleep when we need to, and controls the patterns of dreaming and non-dreaming sleep.

· It manages out appetites and hungers - makes us feel thirsty when our bodies need water, hungry when they need food, eliminates wastes.

· It manages many of the basic behaviour patterns, such as the fight or flight reflex, seeking out mates for reproduction, defending mates, offspring and territory against aggressors, hunting for food and so on.

· It exercises a strong influence on sexual behaviour, including our choice of sexual partners, how we attract them and persuade them to have sexual relations with us. As far as I can tell at the reptilian level love doesn't have much to do with it - those feelings emerge from higher levels of the brain.

· It influences our social behaviours - in particular the reptilian brain is attuned to living in a dominance hierarchy and is highly sensitive to cues of dominance and submission.

· It manages pain, in particular filtering out short-term pain by secreting endorphins and other opiates

· It secretes serotonin, dopamine and noradrenalin (norepinephrine) which have a major impact on all other parts of the brain, affecting characteristics such as alertness and arousal, learning, memory and mood.

It is important also to note what it doesn't do:

· It doesn't have language - that is a much more recent evolutionary development, so it doesn't think or communicate in words.

· It doesn't have much in the way of memory, at least not for the sort of details of events that we normally take for memory.

· Because of the lack of language and memory it doesn't dwell on the past or worry about the future - it effectively lives in the present.

· It doesn't have emotions in the sense that we normally think of them. Not that it's completely unfeeling, but I imagine that the subtle shades of emotion are missing. With the reptilian brain you have to think more in terms of arousal than specific emotions - so fear, anger, and sexual arousal are all linked in that they shift it from passivity to alertness, into a higher gear.

Putting all these features together I've been trying to imagine what it would be like living entirely in the reptilian brain with the higher levels closed down. This is largely guesswork, since not much has been written about this, and most of what I have found gets it wrong. The reptilian brain is not the cold unthinking automaton that some writers imagine. Although there would be no thoughts as we know them, I imagine reptilian consciousness to be a dreamlike state. There would be no language, no memories of the past and no looking forward to the future, which means living completely in the present. There would not be emotions as such, although we would be aware of arousal in our bodies, relating to states that we describe as fear, aggression, and lust. Without the higher centres to inhibit, I imagine the experience of reptilian brain life to be one of simplicity, intensity and vitality. With no thoughts to distract and no future to worry about, the focus would be on the world "out there" and the purpose would be survival.

What is the connection between the reptilian brain and D/s?

The reptilian brain concept explains a lot of things that don’t otherwise make sense. Looking at the lists of attributes I have given above, it seems to me that it brings together many of the characteristics that are needed to create an explanation for D/s behaviour. Pleasure and pain, reward and punishment, appetites and arousal, sexual behaviour and reproduction, submissive and dominant behaviour patterns, it has the lot.

I have come to the conclusion that many of the activities that happen in a D/s relationship have the effect of simulating and awakening the reptilian brain. This brain is normally kept in a state of inhibition by the higher centres such as the cortex, and by stimulating it we switch the balance between them. Any intense stimulus, such as pain or discomfort will create an alerting signal to the reptile brain indicating that the organism is under threat. This creates arousal and awakens the system to a higher state of alertness. So spankings and other painful stimuli will obviously do this, but so will being tied up, put in an uncomfortable or unusual body position or posture will all have the same effect. For Doms the mere fact of being given permission to carry out some of the actions that normally have to be kept inhibited will tend to arouse the reptilian brain.

The end result of this arousal will be feeling more intensely alive and experiencing stronger sexual feelings. This will eclipse the activities of the higher mind - thinking, worrying, ruminating, having negative thoughts and feelings. The normal constraints of our society and upbringing have less effect.

The dreamlike consciousness that I envisage for the reptilian brain may correspond to the "subspace" that submissives can go to during a scene. It may also be linked to sexual fantasies - the fantasy world seems to be a different state of consciousness which is outside of time and the worries of the mundane world, where we can be in touch more intensely with sexual feelings.

There are more connections I could make, but these involve going more deeply into the neuroscience of this part of the brain. I am currently working on this, but it takes a lot of research to get to the details I'm looking for, so I hope to be posting more about this subject when I've got something to report. In the meantime please let me have your comments and questions, as your feedback helps to keep me going.