Why We Get Defensive, in Neuroscientific Terms

We are still in the early days of understanding how our brains work. Neuroscience adds to our bank of knowledge at a steady clip, but there is so much we don’t understand — and that contradicts our common-sense guesswork on how the brain might work — that we do well to recognize that we are only beginners in this long journey to understanding ourselves and our minds.

For example, commonsense tells us that we hear sounds, in stereo, thanks to our ears. But actually, what happens (and this is a quick summary layperson’s version) is that plucking a string on a musical instrument, say, begins a sound wave that the brain turns into electro-chemical impulses at our synapses in order to create an image of the sound that our brains can manage to analyze in a way that sounds like music to our ears. So, we don’t actually hear sounds at all. What we ‘hear’ is an echo, a construction, in our minds.

It’s an example of how powerful our brains are, on the one hand, and how they mediate between us and the outside world, on the other hand. Almost everything we think of as direct experience is in fact a construct in the brain.

The brain is an extraordinarily powerful instrument that is primarily preoccupied with keeping us alive. To do so, it creates shortcuts, images, and constructs that it compares with incoming data, to say, for…