Yeah, I’m a Star Trek fan. Particularly the Voyager series with all of its strong women characters. “Resistance is futile” is quintessential Borg. In the TV series, the Borg are a group of organisms that are united in their assimilation by technology. The technology invades the bodies of unwilling hosts, eventually turning self-directed, intelligent beings into motile pieces of a larger machine intelligence. The only goal of this machine intelligence is the acquisition and assimilation of more life forms.
I like this analogy for the part of our brain that doesn’t want to stand out from the crowd. It wants us to act just like everyone else, look like everyone else, BE just like everyone else. And it is really very good at making us conform to its wishes.
A more common term for what I’m calling Borg is the “lizard brain.” The lizard brain is an actual part of our brains, one of the oldest parts in terms of evolution and one that we share with all vertebrates, including reptiles. It consists of the the brain stem, cerebellum, and basal ganglia. Rich Presta describes part of this area in his article, The Evolution of Anxiety: “The amygdala is like a file cabinet of important memories. Not memories such as your favorite guacamole recipe or where you put your car keys, but memories the reptile in you considers important. You know, stuff that can hurt or kill you.”
Seth Godin in Success Magazine online says, “The lizard brain, that prehistoric brain stem that all of us must contend with, doesn’t like being laughed at. It’s the part of our brain that worries about safety and dishes out anger. Being laughed at is the lizard brain’s worst nightmare.”
Just like the captain and crew of the Starship Voyager when they are outwitting the Borg, we have to be crafty and diligent in order to overcome our inner Borg. Sonja Alarr recently posted a video documenting how she overcomes her inner lizard in order to accomplish her goals:
RESURRECTING CREATIVITY from Sonja Alarr on Vimeo.
What tricks do you use to get around your inner lizard?
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