> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.alexandraragalie.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # a mini trip through our brain - URL: https://www.alexandraragalie.com/blog/a-mini-trip-through-our-brain-2/ - Published: 2026-07-21T17:05:27.000Z - Updated: 2026-07-22T07:35:11.000Z - Author: Alexandra Ragalie and debunking a few brain myths along the way You skip lunch to power through a deadline. By 3pm you're snapping at people over nothing and you can't quite explain why. That's not just a mood swing. That's your brain running out of budget. That idea comes from a small book by neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett, *Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain*. It's short, research-backed, and it changed a few things in my understanding of the brain. Here's what stuck with me - and what it actually means day to day. ## Your brain's real job isn't thinking, it's running your body's budget We like to think the brain's main job is reasoning - the thing that makes us different from animals. It isn't. Underneath all the thinking, the brain has one core task: keep the body alive. That means managing the raw materials it runs on - water, salt, glucose, and the rest - and spending or saving energy at the right moments - like a budgeting app that adjusts your spending before the paycheck lands, instead of waiting for you to overdraft and dealing with the fees after. Scientists call this allostasis - predicting what your body will need before it needs it, rather than scrambling to react once you're already depleted. Your brain's most important job is to control your body - to manage allostasis - by predicting energy needs before they arise so you can efficiently make worthwhile movements and survive. Of course, your brain does think, feel, imagine, and create hundreds of other experiences, but all of these mental capacities are consequences of a central mission to keep you alive and well by managing your body budget. Lisa Feldman Barrett, *Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain* That single idea reframes something I see a lot in my work and training. There's a popular story that says the brain has three layers stacked on top of each other: a "lizard brain" for instinct, a mammal brain for emotion, and a human brain for reason - with the reason part standing guard over the other two, like a manager keeping the animal side in check (if you wanna geek out on the term - it's called the triune brain model). If you're a parent, you've probably met a version of this in parenting books too - the idea that a meltdown means your child is 'stuck in their lizard brain' until their 'thinking brain' comes back online. It's a tidy story. It's also not accurate. The idea got started when the physician Paul MacLean compared brain slices under a microscope and saw that human brains had structures mammal brains didn't, and mammal brains had structures reptile brains didn't. Later research at the genetic level told a different story: the same neurons and genetic material show up across species. No new kind of part was bolted on top of an older one. What changed was how much of what was already there got built out. Your brain isn't three brains stacked up. It's one system, scaled differently. That distinction is important to know. If someone in front of you is shaking with anxiety, they're not fighting off an inner animal with a thin layer of logic. Their brain - all of it, together - is making an economic call based on what it's learned and what it currently expects to happen. And it changes what you'd say to them and how you hold the space around the conversation. Next time a colleague snaps at you in a meeting, or a friend overreacts to something that seems minor, that's not their rational brain losing a fight to an animal one. *It's their whole brain making an economic call based on what it's learned to expect.* Next time your kid melts down over the wrong-colored cup, the same thing is happening - just with far less data to work from, *and a body budget that runs out a lot faster than yours.* Metaphors like this stick because they're useful - they give you a fast way to talk about something real. But they're also simplifications, and simplifications stop working once you push past the context they were built for. The three-layer story is a useful shorthand for something you've actually felt: reacting before you've had a chance to think. What's not accurate is the explanation underneath it - there's no separate animal brain overriding a rational one. It's one brain, running the same prediction-based math you just read about, just faster than conscious thought can keep up with. ## Perception is prediction Your brain never gets clean information. It gets fragments - light, sound, pressure - and has to guess what they mean, using memory of the past to fill in the rest. Most of the time the guess is close enough. Sometimes it's badly wrong. Barrett tells the story of a soldier in a forest who saw a line of armed fighters closing in and raised his rifle - until a hand on his shoulder stopped him. What was actually there: a boy, a herding stick, and a line of cattle. His brain hadn't malfunctioned. It had done exactly what brains do: searched memory, built the most survival-relevant guess it could, and nearly acted on it as fact. Quoting Barrett in an article she published - neuroscientists have a phrase for this. "Your day-to-day experience is a carefully controlled hallucination, constrained by the world and your body, but ultimately constructed by your brain." This is the same mechanism behind a lot of what shows up in therapy, just quieter. A nervous system that reads danger into a raised voice because a raised voice once meant danger. A body that tenses before anything has actually happened. None of that is a malfunction. It's a prediction, still running on old data. Here's the practical part: you can't always talk yourself out of a prediction in the moment it's firing. But you can change what it's based on, by giving yourself new experiences on purpose, so next time there's better data to draw from. ## You're not wired alone - other people help build your wiring The brain likes to think of itself as sovereign - one skull, one mind, working out its own survival. It isn't. The same body budget it's managing gets managed by other people too, whether you asked them to or not. There's a growing body of research on physiological synchrony between people - heart rate and breathing shifting in response to another person, stress hormones too seemingly react to their words. The methods vary and the effect sizes are still being argued over, but the direction is consistent enough to take seriously: other people are not neutral to your body's budget. It starts before anyone can ask for it. A newborn's brain doesn't arrive with a spotlight of attention - it starts with a lantern, lighting up everything at once, with no sense of what matters yet. A caregiver builds that spotlight by hand: pointing at something, naming it, looking from the object to the baby's face and back again, over and over, until the baby's brain learns what's worth narrowing in on. Where that input is missing - children who were fed and changed but rarely held or spoken to - the wiring that lets a child focus, learn to speak, and settle themselves often doesn't form the way it should. You don't outgrow this need. You have the kind of nature that requires nurture throughout your life span. Lisa Feldman Barrett, *Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain* ## What this means for you Barrett's book ends on something close to an irony: the brain that built civilizations still consistently misunderstands itself. It mistakes its own wiring for fixed, unchangeable nature. The book doesn't dwell on this, but it's the part I keep coming back to: the wiring isn't actually fixed, even in adults. For most of the twentieth century, the assumption in neuroscience was that the adult brain was basically finished - whatever wiring you had, you kept. That assumption didn't hold up. Studies going back to the 1960s show synapses strengthening or weakening with use across an entire lifetime. That's encouraging because it changes how we think about difficult situations. When something feels overwhelmingly hard, your brain isn't necessarily telling you an objective truth. It's making a prediction based on previous experience. If past experiences taught your nervous system that a certain situation was costly, painful, or dangerous, your brain may automatically estimate that it's not worth the effort - even if today's circumstances are different. "It's metabolically costly for a brain to deal with things that are hard to predict" - and that's true of a hard conversation, a new relationship, an unfamiliar person, or even an unfamiliar version of yourself. That feeling of "I don't want to" can sometimes be less about conscious choice and more about your brain trying to conserve resources. The important question becomes: Is this prediction still accurate? One practical approach is to notice those moments when something immediately feels too difficult, pause before accepting that feeling as fact, and gently test it in a small, manageable way. By creating new experiences, you give your brain updated information that can gradually reshape future predictions. If you're a high achiever, this isn't encouragement to push harder or be more productive. It's the opposite - listen for where "too hard" is actually showing up, in the gaps, not the tasks. More often than not, it's not about doing more. It's about a person, a conversation, or a relationship you're having challenges with. The wiring moves slower than we'd like, and rarely without trade-offs. But it moves. ### if you only remember four things - Your brain's main job isn't thinking - it's running your body's energy budget (allostasis). - The "lizard brain vs. rational brain" story (the triune brain model) is a popular myth - it's one brain, not three. - You don't perceive reality directly - your brain predicts it from past experience, then checks. Many times it also acts *before it checks.* - The brain keeps rewiring through adulthood - "too hard" is often an old prediction, not a fact. And if this is the kind of work you'd rather not do alone - that's the point. It usually goes better with company. Until next time, Alexandra ### reach out Whether you're going through a hard stretch - burnout, a persistent low, or the after-effects of something overwhelming - or you simply want more energy, more room to move, and a clearer view of your own patterns, one-on-one sessions are a place to work on it, at your own pace and with real support. A free discovery call is a no-pressure first step. [free discovery call →](https://calendly.com/alexandraragalie/free-discovery-call?ref=alexandraragalie.com) --- If you want to stay in touch, I write regularly about the nervous system, stress, and trauma. [stay updated →](https://www.alexandraragalie.com/#/portal/signup)