Challenge #02176-E347: What Were You Thinking?

Deep inside our consciousness is the Lizard Brain, primitive, and kept us going till we got much better, but every so often it has it's say in our lives.

And probably at the 3 F's stage of existence with an attraction to distraction. -- Anon Guest

[AN: The three F's are something I used in some slightly-raunchy fanfictions for The Adventure Zone. They stand for "Fight, F*ck, or Feed"]

Brains are funny things. We like to imagine an internal hierarchy because that's how we see the outside world and, as above, so below. This is something of a fallacy, since the brain operates as a conjunction of instincts without any one aspect in charge at any given time. The chief decision system, from an arbitrary, outside perspective[1] seems to be one of organisation by argument.

Primitive Instinct, or PI for short, sorts the world into allies or enemies. Specifically, that which can be fought, that which can be -er- mated with... and that which should be nurtured. To put succinctly, Fight, Fornicate, or Feed. Meanwhile, Memory and Learning, ML, uses past experience to build more rational responses to outside stimuli. How best to interact, how best to avoid, and so forth. This is where the steeper learning curves are expected to occur. Conscious Thought, CT, is the inner narrator. The voice in our heads. They read to us, they run a commentary when we need one, they sometimes even provide a perspective on what we're doing in the moment[2]. Emotion is deep into their feelings, Logic is there for a rational or near-rational explanation[3], and there's the usual assortment of directing forces involving the Autonomic, the Irrational, and the Reflex.

It's a lot more complicated than you might think, but let's envision them as a bridge crew anyway. The only difference is... there is no Captain of the SS You.

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