Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
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You, like everyone else,
have a warm, soft, rather moist, body, needing regular intakes of
usable energy. You are here because your parents had the will and
opportunity to reproduce. But you live in tough
world. Food, water and essential minerals like salt
are not easily available in the environment for which you originally
evolved. You have to want them and to know where to look to find them.
You have to keep warm in the cold, or keep cool if the weather gets
hot. You have to find a mate, if you are to pass on something of
yourself to succeeding generations. Your ancestors will have had to
avoid being eaten by another species, whilst making sure that they
themselves were effective predators. You are in competition for many of
the things you need, including a mate, with others of your own
kind. To survive you have to adapt.
That is, you need the means to mould your behaviour to take account of
how your world is, and to change your behaviour when it changes.
Some of these changes may be sudden, others slow. 
Some
arrive without warning, others are more predictable. Adaptation
means not only changing your behaviour. Your body needs to adapt
as well, making sure that it tells you what it needs to keep you
going, and that it is resilient at moments of difficulty or shortage.
So you survive into better times. No matter that you now
live in a world we think of as technologically advanced. No
matter that there are some
who think that the modern world has removed some of the selection
pressures on humans to which other animals are customarily exposed - true, if true at all, for only a small segment
of humanity. You still carry with you many of the features that made
your ancestors such a success. Otherwise, you would not be around
today. The very fact that these qualities are now used in
circumstances hardly imaginable even a few centuries ago is a tribute
to your adaptive capacity……….
…there is a brain system which has, as its main function, our preservation and that of our species. This part of the brain is particularly concerned with making sure that we do the things that maximise our health, keep us in good condition, and reproduce. As part of all these functions, it detects threats to our survival, recognises what they are, and devises the strategy by which we will overcome or compensate for these demands. It’s clear that such an adaptation system can’t work on its own. No good being hungry or thirsty if you can’t move to where there is food or water, or recognise it when you see it. That means there must be co-operation between different parts of the brain: obvious enough. But none of these other systems has survival and adaptation and procreation as its major concern. We need a brain system that recognises our needs, and how to go about meeting them. A brain system that also keeps us out of trouble as well as continuously assessing threats to our wellbeing. A system that enables the right adaptive response, whether this means a particular sort of behaviour, or an appropriate pattern of hormone secretion, or alterations in the response of the ‘emergency’ nervous system - the process of coping, as some would call it. We have one: it’s a part of the brain called the limbic system. It’s a very special part of the brain, and it’s the focus of this book.
Scientific and literary quotes.