Brain composition and how this affects communication

People give away their true positions to me, these days, with the smallest of indications. I can tell if someone's of the mind that they would consider robust enquiry to be a precursor to destruction. The ability to quickly recognise this tendency assists me, as it makes a change from having to endure the miscommunications of the past. In the old days, I struggled to learn a different language, at least as it seemed to me. Contemporary neuropsychology suggests that having a different brain structure may have had something to do with it:

Scientists have found that people with conservative views have brains with larger amygdalas, almond shaped areas in the centre of the brain often associated with anxiety and emotions.

On the otherhand, they have a smaller anterior cingulate, an area at the front of the brain associated with courage and looking on the bright side of life.

I'm not a conservative, but many of my interlocutors were. The above set of differences in the brains of conservatives meant that our conversations were doomed from the start.

In retrospect, it is much easier for me to understand how the profound levels of miscommunication could have come about. If one's way of thinking is prone towards generating anxiety and uncomfortable emotions, one avoids exploring ideas that could have a negative component. There is mortal danger in wallowing too much in negativity when one cannot depend on the anterior cingulate to pull one out of trouble with a positive perspective. These structural differences may be behind a totally different way of conceptualising the self than the one that I habitually use.

To me, the negative components of life do not represent a threat, as they may well do to my erstwhile conservative pals. The outcome is that my neurological structure has not taught me not to dwell only on positivity and self-affirmation as a means to assure my mental health. Contrarily, I have found that I am able to interrogate the negative aspects of existence and even tarry with them for a while, without being mentally damaged in the long term.

The difference seems to have been that when I have stated something negative about myself, I have never believed that I was stuck with it for good. The "area at the front of the brain associated with courage and looking on the bright side of life" always embroils me in its intrinsic dialectic. Sometimes I have stated the negative because I was so sure (far from being in a state of doubt) of the lurking presence of the positive -- that if I stated the negative clearly enough to my own mind, my force of courage would come to the fore in a realistic assessment of what was possible.

Dialectical thinking undergirds an attitude that almost any situation is life is intrinsically interesting and has redemptive qualities. To make a public declaration that an aspect of life seems very bad indeed is not a public declaration that all is lost. To the contrary. It's an admission that I've come to terms with something negative. It's unfortunate that a conservative who reads my notw would have a very different idea as to its meaning. This is no doubt because his personal experiences (influenced by brain structure) cause him to feel that if the world at any time comes to appear in a negative light, that world is now irredeemably lost. Lacking capacity of courage and an ability to look on the bright side, he sees no way of restoring what had existed before things had turned out badly: so, he experiences another's acknowledgement of the negative dimensions of existence as if this were a public declaration of defeat.

The conservative's life-saving remedy, to maintain a narrow focus on the positive, no matter how dire things actually become, is something I have not implicitly, that is to say experientially, understood. The imperative to maintain only one attitude, the attitude of positive affirmation, is why I do not like the corporate world -- I find this overall approach to be mentally repressive rather than life-saving. This is because my inner life is not so easily threatened that I need this level of psychological self-discipline to keep me on the straight and narrow. I'd rather roam, within the realms of possibility, as widely as humanly possible.

I now accept that I can seem, to certain types, as if I'm dwelling happily within a space of negativity. To such people, I no doubt must seem to have been inviting my imminent destruction in the way I have managed to live my life. That is not true.

As an interesting aside:

[I]n male brains it seems that the reaction to stress is more severe than female brains. [..T]here seems to be an inbuilt resilience that comes with oestrogen.