Psychoeducation Series: Your Three Layered Brain

You might have heard of the “lizard brain” or the “monkey brain”, but what do those names actually mean? It’s an easy way to think about your amazing three-layered brain and what each layer does to help keep you safe, connected, and making good decisions as you move through the world.

Your “lizard brain” is the deepest part of the brain, the cerebellum and brainstem. This part of your brain manages automatic systems in your body such as breathing and digestion, maintains balance and stability inside your body, and monitors the outside world for danger. This is where your fight, flight, or freeze response lives. Your lizard brain is responsible for keeping you alive, and it takes its job very seriously.

Your “monkey brain” is the middle part of your brain, above the cerebellum and brainstem but below the neocortex. This is the part of your brain that encourages you to move toward pleasant things and away from unpleasant things. It forms emotion-flavored memories and deep, subconscious associations that will help you streamline future attempts to get your needs met. This part of the brain also processes the raw input from your five senses (actually, there are more than five… look for a future blog post on your three internal senses!), manages your subjective awareness of time, and helps you form trusting connections with other people.

Of course, all of this is your human brain (it’s inside your body and you are a human!), but the neocortex is sometimes referred to as the “human brain” when compared to the two lower layers. The neocortex is the topmost layer of the brain—the wrinkled part that you picture when imagining a brain. It holds conscious knowledge, and helps you combine knowledge about past events with your experience of the current situation to make rational decisions and plan for the future. The neocortex also regulates your emotions, using conscious thought to soothe inflamed feelings. 

In future blog posts, we will dive into each layer more deeply to understand how each layer might hold unique challenges that can be worked with in the therapy room using specialized techniques. Follow along with our Psychoeducation Series to learn how to create dialogue with deeper parts of your brain—hint: they don’t all speak English!