The Inability to Apprehend and Comprehend

Defensive Nervous System States and the Breakdown in Public Discourse

Introduction

This is a continuation on the themes of breakdown in civil public discourse in the UK and USA, which we began in

Decline in Public and Scientific Discourse

and continued in

A Tower of Babel

Recall that our interest in these themes arises due to the effect of the breakdown is having on people with chronic conditions and trauma histories, and how, in turn, the rising levels of chronic fear and stress feedback in to the cultural milieu.

The Inability to Listen

A very interesting thing I learned through my studies of the Nervous System is that folks in states of chronic stress or chronic fear may lose the ability to listen or hear what other people are saying. Not just losing the art of listening, but also that stress literally results in physiological and neurological changes which prevent the brain from being able to hear and process words and speech!

Indeed, in

The Ears as a Portal into the Nervous System

we learned that, when entering a defensive Nervous System state, the muscles of the ear literally flips a switch, from emphasising and tuning in to the frequencies of normal human speech in the calm and connected state, to being tuned to low frequency sounds associated with predators and danger, and being sensitive to high frequencies associated with stressed human voices. We literally tune out calm human voices when we are afraid!

It thus becomes energetic demanding to really hear what someone is actually saying, or to even assess correctly the Nervous System state of another person through their tone of voice, when we ourselves are in such stressed states. Fearful people therefore may be highly prone to not being able to heed other people, and also to grossly misinterpreting what others are seeking to communicate.

Delusional Defensive States

In

The Divided Brain and The Asymmetric Body

we learned that another thing which happens when we are fearful or stressed, is that access to the right brain hemisphere's way of attending to the world tends to get lost. Indeed, when the nervous system is sufficiently dysregulated, the right pre-frontal cortex can literally go into shock and shutdown. This leaves a rampant and unbalanced left hemisphere way of attending, which can radically skew perspectives, and alter sense of reality.

To understand just how deep this goes, it is of interest to study what can happen when someone has a right hemisphere stroke, or sustains damage to the right hemisphere, and hence exists with a totally unchallenged left hemisphere take on the world. This can result in profound changes in perceptions of reality and extreme states of denial. Folks with left arms which have been totally paralysed by the stroke can be utterly convinced that the arm belongs to another person, and there is nothing anyone can do or say to convince them otherwise!

Dr Iain McGilchrist delves much deeper into this in his book “The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World”, from which the above image is taken. In the first part of the book, he covers hundreds of studies that demonstrate how extraordinarily far the left brain hemisphere's way of attending gets things wrong, and how stunningly bizarre what the left hemisphere thinks and believes is, when the right hemisphere is switched off or down-regulated, whether due to physical damage, or to a fear or stress induced cortical shock.

“The left hemisphere’s limited appreciation of depth in space and time is in keeping with its tendency towards stasis. It seems to lack appreciation, not just of motion, but of e motion; it relatively lacks appropriate emotional depth, or concern, tending to be irritable or facetious, especially when challenged. It tends to disown problems, and pass the responsibility to others; is overconfident about what it cannot in the nature of things know much about; fabricates (often improbable) stories to cover its ignorance; sees parts at the expense of wholes; tends to see ‘from the outside’, rather than experience ‘from the inside’; and has an affinity for the inanimate, and for tools and machines in particular.”

“It is also quite confident it is right.”

Conclusion

When we are fearful or stressed, we lose the ability to make sense of what other people are saying, and of the world in general. The muscles of the middle ear change the physical form of our ear drum to focus on danger sounds, making it very hard for us to tune in and listen to calm human voices, and our right prefrontal cortex gets downregulated or shutdown, making it difficult to apprehend the world correctly, and becoming prone to delusions.

Thus it is perhaps unsurprising when chronic fear and chronic stress are endemic to a culture, as in ours currently, the inability to listen and apprehend scales to institutional levels, and civil discourse breaks down, with people then finding it hard to reach any common ground, and unable to hear other perspectives, due to the resulting “Tower of Babel” effect.

I think this also readily explains why those of us a more hopeful, healing and humane message find it so hard to get that message across in a culture where so very many folks have succumbed to the politics of fear, been seduced by disaster capitalism, consume and are consumed by the “if they are not afraid, we are not doing our job” news media, or have subscribed to a culture of victimhood. Penetrating the cloud of chronic fear is a difficult task, due to the profound neuro-physical changes it induces in people.