Lizard brain

I fell down from the bicycle, like a creepy crawling lizard today but what fascinated me was it did not kicked me in a heightened response…I was calm..

For the past year and some months, I have been cycling my days around Cayman Islands and had close calls but today and an incident before the lockdowns happen showed an improvement in my ability to fall from the bicycle and able to protect my body by either falling properly or making a maneuver that would let the bicycle destroy itself while I stay unharmed. This happens in just less than a second.

The only explanation that I can explore now is my adamant approach to making my brain develop properly - like how our ancestors did it. Maintaining an excellent ketogenic diet, exercising and sleeping well are foundational. But more importantly, allowing the brain stem or more famously known as the lizard brain develop fully is key to my increased adaptation to danger responsiveness as this part provides autononomous otor control and fight or flight response is governed by this part. We can’t target the development of this part of the brain but through habitual repetition of key activities like cycling, meditation and learning the guitar we can record information little by little that can flow as a faster response when SHTF situations (shit hits the fan) occur which happens a lot of times.

Most of our ancestors used the lizard brain in their daily lives that require tremendous quickness in response. Us in the modern world now is incapable of harnessing its help unless we intentionally develop it. Exercising and mindfulness practices I believe have been helping me develop this ancient data store. Neurons in our muscles are recording tiny bits of information that is derived everytime we engage in continous practice of mobility and acceptance of body pain. The intertwine that our subconcious mind can become calmer through meditation helps a lot in making subtle adjustments to optimize my responses.

There is so much still untapped in my cognitive ability yet tapping into some of the lizard brain’s my bicycle failures gives me enough evidence that most of what I’m learning and applying to improve myself are working to my favor. Each intentional and unintentional errors keeps me awake and listening more to my self talk and effects to the body. Hope to write more about this topics in the future!