![]() When a child sits stunned in an ambulance having watched his home and family destroyed by deliberate attack. When millions flee across the globe from their homes in Syria bombed into a manmade hell on Earth. When houses of worship become slaughterhouses of hate. When skyscrapers are scraped up, as airplanes are mutated into missiles. When children don’t build sand castles on the beach, but wash up lifeless like dead seaweed and broken bottles. When sun and glitz cease to be French Nice. One wonders when Orlando is no longer Disney. So it seems when miles on the road are marked in incidents of rage-clocked at one every 20 minutes on average. Perhaps this species would be more aptly named Homo nudus, the naked ape, not sapiens. The nomenclature, sapiens, seems an Escher-like ambiguity shifting freely between science and sarcasm. Everyone should learn the LIFEMORTS especially in an election year. Circuits from the forebrain to the brain’s threat detection circuits can squelch sudden aggression and violence if there is even a split second to think, be it on the road, in domestic life, within societies, or nations at war. Learning about these biologically and genetically embedded triggers of violence can enable us to engage the part of the human brain that distinguishes it from all other mammalian brains-the forebrain. Each of these triggers of rage activates different neural circuits in the brain’s threat-detection mechanism. Territoriality and social interactions are the “E” for environment, and “T” for tribe, triggers of sudden aggression in the mnemonic “LIFEMORTS,” which is a convenient way to learn to recognize the 9 triggers of rage. Understanding this neurocircuitry is vital. The frontal lobes of the brain can squelch these circuits of rage that we share with other violent mammals, but this “top-down” conscious control of our violent impulses is slower to act than the circuits of explosive violence deep in our brain. We are evolutionarily and genetically predisposed to snap in deadly violence, but in comparison to other animals, biology has indeed endowed our species with extraordinary “ sapiens.” The problem is that the neural circuits of violence that cause us to explode in rage and violence are deep in the brain beneath the cerebral cortex where consciousness arises. Grandparents, parents, fathers, mothers-all kill and all of them are the targets of killing…” - R. ![]() Children kill children, in school and on the playground. We kill friends, rivals, coworkers, and classmates. We kill for advantage and for revenge, we kill for entertainment: the Roman Coliseum, drive-by shootings, bullfights, hunting and fishing, animal roadkill in an instantaneous reflex for sport. We kill people who are different from us, in appearance, beliefs, race, and social status. Carnivores kill for food we kill our family members, our children, our parents, our spouses, our brothers and sisters, our cousins and in-laws. Violence exists in the animal world, of course, but on a far different scale. The enormous industry of print and broadcast journalism serves predominantly to document our killing. We kill all other creatures, and we kill our own. Slaughter is a defining behavior of our species. “Our violence operates far outside the bounds of any other species. ![]()
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