Your Brain Didn't Hijack Anything

I need to talk to you about your reptile brain. Specifically, I need to tell you that you don't have one.

I know. I'm sorry. I realize this is like telling a kid there's no Santa Claus, except in this case Santa is a lizard that lives in your brainstem and makes you yell at your partner about the dishes. But it's time.

Here's what happened. Somewhere in the last twenty years, a handful of genuinely interesting neuroscience findings escaped the lab, got picked up by pop psychology, got simplified, got simplified again, got turned into an Instagram infographic, and are now being presented to you as settled science by your therapist, your life coach, your yoga teacher, and that guy at the dinner party who just read a book. And some of what they're telling you is — how do I put this — not true. Or more precisely, it's true-adjacent. It's got a true feeling to it. It maps onto your experience in a satisfying way. And it is, at best, a massive oversimplification of what the neuroscience actually says.

These are called neuromyths. I want to walk through the biggest ones — not to be a jerk about it, but because I think these myths are doing something specific and I think it matters.

They're giving people a scientific-sounding vocabulary for not knowing themselves.

Neuromyth one: the triune brain

This is the big one. The load-bearing wall.

Paul MacLean proposed this model in the sixties, and the basic idea is that your brain evolved in three layers — like a geological formation. At the bottom, the reptilian brain: brainstem, survival instincts, fight or flight. On top of that, the limbic system: your mammalian brain, emotions, attachment. And on top of that, the neocortex: the rational human brain, language, planning, the part that does your taxes.

It's a beautiful model. It's intuitive. It makes evolution feel like a story with a beginning, middle, and end. And it is, by modern neuroscience standards, wrong.

Not wrong in a nitpicky way. Wrong in a "the brain didn't actually evolve like that" way. The brain didn't add layers the way you add floors to a building. It evolved as an integrated system that was continuously modified. The structures MacLean called "reptilian" exist in modified form in every vertebrate — they're not leftover dinosaur hardware running underneath your feelings. Lisa Feldman Barrett is particularly good on this. She points out that the whole model imports a hierarchy — reason on top, emotion in the middle, instinct on the bottom — that maps suspiciously well onto Western philosophical biases about what makes humans special. We didn't discover that the rational brain sits on top. We assumed it, and then found anatomy that seemed to confirm what we already believed.

But here's why this matters beyond getting the science right. When someone in a therapy office says "my reptilian brain took over," what they're actually saying is: I did something I don't want to own. It's a very sophisticated way of splitting. I'm the neocortex — reasonable, thoughtful, trying my best. That other thing? The thing that screamed at my kid or froze during the conversation or ate an entire sleeve of Oreos at midnight? That was the lizard. Not me. The lizard.

I get it. It's a much more comfortable story than the alternative, which is: that was you. All of you. The screaming and the shame about the screaming. The freezing and the wish that you hadn't frozen. Those aren't two different brains in conflict. That's one person having an experience they don't yet understand.

Neuromyth two: the amygdala hijack

Daniel Goleman popularized this in the nineties and it has become, I think, the single most repeated piece of neuroscience in therapy offices. The idea is that the amygdala — this almond-shaped structure in the temporal lobe — can bypass your prefrontal cortex and "hijack" your rational brain, flooding you with fear or rage before you have a chance to think.

There is a real finding underneath this. The amygdala does process certain kinds of information very quickly, and there are pathways that allow rapid responding before full cortical processing. That's real.

But "hijack" is a metaphor, not a mechanism. The amygdala doesn't stage a coup. It doesn't override your cortex the way a carjacker takes the wheel. It's one node in a distributed network that is always, always, always in communication with the rest of the brain. The processing is fast. The story we tell about it — that some rogue structure seized control — is a narrative choice, not a neurobiological description.

And again, the reason I care about this isn't scientific accuracy for its own sake. It's that "my amygdala hijacked me" does the same work as "my reptile brain took over." It takes an experience that belongs to you — your rage, your fear, your reactivity — and gives it to an organ. As if the amygdala has its own agenda. As if you are a reasonable person who got mugged by your own brain.

You didn't get mugged. You got scared. Or you got hurt. Or something from a very long time ago showed up in the present and you didn't have the tools to deal with it yet. That's a much more interesting — and much more useful — place to start.

Neuromyth three: trauma is stored in the body

This one is going to ruffle some feathers. Let me be careful here, because the clinical intuition behind it is real and important.

People do carry unprocessed experience somatically. Chronic tension, pain without clear medical origin, that feeling of something living in your chest that you can't name — these are real phenomena that deserve serious clinical attention. The body is always involved in emotional experience. Always.

But "stored in the body" has become, in a lot of circles, a literal claim. As in: the memory is sitting in your hip flexor. The grief is in your shoulders. If you just do the right stretch or the right breathwork, the trauma will "release." This is — I'm trying to be generous — a metaphor that has forgotten it's a metaphor.

Memories are not objects in physical locations. They are patterns of activation across neural networks that involve the whole brain and yes, the body, always in concert. The idea that you can release a trauma the way you release a muscle knot turns an extraordinarily complex process of meaning-making into a mechanical procedure. And mechanical procedures are appealing because they bypass the thing that's actually hard, which is understanding what happened to you and what it meant and what it cost you and what you organized your entire personality around in order to survive it.

The body matters. I'm not anti-body. I'm anti-bypassing-the-person-who-lives-in-it.

Neuromyth four: neurons that fire together wire together

This is Donald Hebb's rule — or rather, a bumper-sticker version of it. The actual principle of Hebbian learning is important and well-supported. Neural connections are strengthened through correlated activation. Real finding. Real science.

But the way it gets deployed in pop psychology is: you can rewire your brain by thinking new thoughts. Just practice the positive thought enough and the old neural pathway will weaken and the new one will strengthen and — voilà — you're healed. It's cognitive behavioral therapy meets home renovation. Just knock out that wall of negative thinking and install some new fixtures.

The problem is that the "wiring" people most want to change isn't a thought. It's an emotional conviction, laid down in the context of a relationship, usually before you had language, and reinforced by every subsequent experience that confirmed it. People leave. I'm too much. If I need things, I'll be punished. These aren't thoughts you can overwrite by repeating a better thought. They're ways of being organized in the world. And they were adaptive once — they kept you safe, or sane, or connected to people who needed you to be a certain way.

Changing that kind of wiring — and I'll use the word loosely — requires more than repetition. It requires grief. You have to mourn the old organization before the new one can take hold. That's not a neural pathway problem. That's a human problem.

Neuromyth five: mirror neurons explain empathy

In the early 2000s, this was everywhere. Rizzolatti's team found neurons in macaque monkeys that fired both when the monkey performed an action and when it observed someone else performing the same action. This was genuinely fascinating. And within about eighteen months, people were claiming that mirror neurons were the neural basis of empathy, theory of mind, therapeutic attunement, and probably love itself.

The extrapolation was enormous and the evidence was thin. Mirror neurons in humans are still not well characterized. The system may play some role in action understanding, but the leap from "motor neurons fire during observation" to "this is why your therapist can feel your feelings" skipped about fifteen steps of scientific rigor. It was irresistible because it seemed to give a neurobiological stamp of approval to something clinicians already believed — that we feel each other. That something happens between two people in a room that is real and measurable and not just metaphor.

I believe that too. I do. I sit with people every day and I feel things that I am fairly certain are not mine — or not entirely mine. But attributing that to mirror neurons is like attributing love to oxytocin. It's not wrong, exactly. It's just so reductive that it stops being useful. It takes the most profound dimension of human connection and hands it to a firing pattern.

So why does this matter?

All of these myths share a single function, and it's the same function: they give people a way to explain their experience without understanding it.

"My amygdala hijacked me" is an explanation. "I got so scared that I couldn't think straight because something about that conversation reminded me of every time my father's tone shifted right before things got bad" — that's understanding. The first one closes the inquiry. The second one opens it.

This is the move I see over and over in the therapy-adjacent world. The neuroscience vocabulary becomes a replacement for self-knowledge. People say "my nervous system is dysregulated" when they mean I'm overwhelmed and I don't know why. They say "I need to regulate my cortisol" when they mean I'm anxious and I haven't stopped to ask myself what I'm anxious about. The language of mechanism replaces the language of meaning. And the mechanism is always a step removed from the self — it's something happening to you, not something you're living through.

I'm not anti-neuroscience. I love neuroscience. I think the brain is the most interesting thing in the known universe. But neuroscience, by design, brackets subjectivity. That's what makes it science. It describes the machinery of experience. It doesn't — it can't — tell you what your experience means to you. What it felt like to be the child in that room. Why you chose that person. What you're afraid of when you say you're afraid of nothing.

Those are human questions. They require a human vocabulary. Not because the science is wrong, but because the science is incomplete. It gives you the plumbing. You still have to live in the house.

The brain is involved in everything you do. Of course it is. You don't feel feelings without a brain. But "your brain does this" is not an explanation of your experience any more than "your legs do this" is an explanation of why you're running. The question is always: running from what? Running toward what? And who taught you to run in the first place?

That's the question therapy exists to ask. Not what your neurons are doing. What you are doing, and why, and what it costs, and what it would mean to do something different.