Episode Details

In one of my favorite movies, War Games, Matthew Broderick’s character almost triggers a global thermonuclear war by exploiting a backdoor: a vulnerability that was programmed into the core software running the NORAD computer system.

In real life, we each entered this world with a similar vulnerability; a backdoor programmed into our nervous system that allows the world to trigger some of our least useful behaviors. Some of us go apeshit mad; others retreat into timid avoidance; still others babble and blurt words we immediately wish we could take back.

The backdoor is this: your nervous system is deeply influenced by the nervous systems of others. When someone else acts as if they’re threatened, your threat response system comes online and takes over your body.

What does this look like?

Basically, your body prepares you to run away and hide, or conversely, to get big and fight, depending on how your mind reads the situation and what it predicts will give you the greatest odds of survival.

Your vision narrows to focus exclusively on the threat. Your heart beats faster and your breathing becomes shallow and rapid, to get more oxygenated blood into your big “run away or kick or bite or punch” muscles.

Your posture turtles to protect your soft, unarmored neck and belly.

Your bodily functions that aren’t urgent get shut down to save energy. These include growth, repair, healing, digestion, and reproduction.

And your mind shifts from creative, strategic, long-term thinking into a short-term focus on not getting killed in this moment.

This is all extremely useful if you’re a gazelle, say, hanging peacefully with your friends at the watering hole, and Sally, who has a slightly better sense of smell than the rest of you, lifts her head and registers “lion.” Suddenly her ears prick up, her tail twitches white, and she freezes while trying to determine the location of the feared predator.

The sooner you convey Sally’s threat detection to your own nervous system, the more likely you are to skip town and survive.

And if Sally’s wrong, or the scent is just a echo of a lion who was wandering this area a couple of days ago, then no harm done. You tremor a bit to release the tension and blissfully resume grazing and drinking as if nothing had happened.