Making Peace with Conflict: Using Neuroscience to Ease Difficult Relationships

By Jeanine Hull

Based on six years of intensive research, Making Peace with Conflict walks readers, in easily understood prose, through the evolution of the human threat response and educates us about how fear, anger, and trauma contribute to the regular appearance of conflict in our lives. A scientif

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jeanine Hull
• Release date: Sep 1, 2020
• ISBN: 9781649990457

Jeanine Hull

Recently retired as a prominent energy attorney, Jeanine Hull is a certified Conflict Transformation mediator, conflict engagement coach, and public speaker.

Book preview

Introduction

It was a thoroughly humiliating professional experience. And it led me to start living my life.

There I was, a lawyer in a room full of lawyers, convened to discuss, over hors d’oeuvres and cappuccino, a recent Supreme Court decision with radical social implications.1 ¹ The panel was headed by the dean of a prestigious law school, and the distinguished speakers each gave their viewpoints. Then questions were invited, and my hand was in the air. One of the speakers was wrong, dead wrong, morally and legally wrong, and my question, cleverly conceived, would force her to admit it. I was ready for battle. I got my chance, and began my question. The panel member interrupted me. Three times. I was calm the first two times; but at the third interruption my response to this disrespect was volcanic. My voice rose and I snapped I don’t care what you think, shut up and let me ask my question.

And then I realized I had forgotten my question. My instinctive defensive anger, aimed at shutting down the other person, was so fierce that it had crowded out everything else and shut me down. The room went silent. People stared at me, or averted their eyes. I had gone from rational questioner to screaming whack job in less than a minute. It seemed to me everyone could hear my heart thumping inside my chest, magnified through the microphone in my hand, and I could feel the sweat trickling down my neck and forehead. What in the world was going on with me? Had I lost my mind?

If you’ve ever found yourself facing someone else, paralyzed with fury and utterly at a loss for what to do next, you understand my question. I had thought of myself as a rational, kind person who respects that of God in all beings. How could I have gone so wrong, so quickly? But it didn’t take long for me to realize that my life had been building up to this. There were other times and other reactions that were all out of proportion, just nothing quite this public. I have dealt since earliest childhood with the knowledge that I was inherently defective, unlovable and worthless, because those I loved and looked to for protection kept telling me that. My life was organized around proving them wrong. I had a yoga and meditation practice to help me deal with my hyper-vigilance, but I knew that my entire body was just one big trigger. I finally had to admit to myself: I was not in control of my behavior, I was not the person I wanted to be, I did not treat people the way I wanted to, and—worse—I had no idea how to change the situation.

Now, I can now look back on this event as the unlikely springboard to discovering the value of conflict. I do not mean physical conflict, which is focused on damaging bodies, but the conflicts of mind and emotion that occur within us and within our fellow human beings, conflicts that can become so strong they paralyze us or lead us to act in ways completely contrary to our own expectations. Conflicts do not occur because either party is inherently unreasonable, though we often assume that’s the case. They happen for a reason, and each conflict presents an opportunity to learn more about ourselves. We learn very early in life how uncomfortable it is to be in conflict and the obvious potential of intemperate behavior during conflicts to cause harm to our bodies and to our relationships. Very few of us learn to see conflicts as opportunities for deeper connection with ourselves and others.

Since that awful afternoon, I have found that there are abundant gifts that come from engaging with what conflict has to teach us, from learning not to fear the intense emotions that are experienced during conflict, and to develop curiosity to discover what has inflamed those emotions. Conflicts reveal where passions lie and energy resides, conflicts show where change can be beneficial. I hope, with this book, to share with you this other face of conflict and to encourage you to approach your own conflicts as opportunities instead of roadblocks.

This is the first book, I believe, to apply the mountains of new data recently added to the neuroscience of trauma, generated through revolutionary new technologies such as functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRIs), Computerized Tomography and Positron Emission Tomography scans (CT and PET scans, respectively) to the causes and effects of conflict. These technologies have proven trauma is as much physiological as psychological. In a highly simplified sense, unresolved trauma results in the threat response system’s getting stuck in the on position which results in the familiar symptoms of heightened vigilance and less ability to manage one’s emotions. Conflict is one consequence of such enhanced defensive behavior and reactive state. In addition, when we are in conflict, which I define as an emotionally-engaged disagreement, we experience the same physiological threat response system that is engaged during and after traumatic events. Thus, there is a lot to be learned about conflict from studying the neuroscience of trauma as I have done for the past six years.

Until recently, due to my own unresolved traumatic experiences, I almost believed that other people received a rulebook when they were growing up that taught them what was expected of them, how to manage anger, and what boundaries were appropriate and how to enforce them. It didn’t seem to me that other people made the same kind of mistakes that I made in social interactions. When I started leading seminars on Conflict and Trauma, I was stunned when almost 100 percent of my seminar participants felt the same way—that there was a rulebook that they didn’t get either. I was so relieved that I wasn’t the only one, but also astonished that so many of us think that we are alone in being left off the distribution list.

The good news is that if you are looking for a guidebook on how to understand and engage productively in conflict, you’ve come to the right place. This is it! This book will tell you how humans react physiologically to conflict, how we came to have these responses, and most importantly, how you can actually benefit from conflict. We will explore some possible rules for conflict engagement. We will also examine some of the well-known rules, such as counting to 10, why they exist and why they work.

Conflict among humans is as inevitable as breathing and nearly as frequent. It is impossible to escape, so we might as well learn to deal with it, right?

My bona fides in this area have been earned by years of not doing conflict right. I was a practicing attorney who negotiated state and federal legislation, thousands of commercial transactions, and an infinite variety of disputes and conflicts. I have worked as a mediator whose job was to help the parties figure out how to deal with their disputes. Like most other people who have achieved a similar chronological age (66 as I write this), I have served on boards, in volunteer capacities (coordinating the activities of over 700 other volunteers), and as a recreation league soccer referee. I thought I knew conflict. One boss called me an adrenaline junkie and brought me in on the toughest, most high profile cases. My opponents would routinely compliment me on my ability to listen to them with respect and understanding and account for their interests. I was known to be tough but fair.

But despite over 40 years of experience professionally dealing with conflict, even I didn’t know how to mine the benefits of conflict, such as increased communication, understanding and, if desired, connection with others. I didn’t really understand the gifts of conflict.

My goal for this book is to make some of the mountains of new research and knowledge accessible to people who, like me, felt they never got the rulebook for life, or who may be dealing with the after-effects of trauma, or who know or love someone else who is, or who work with/live/love people who appear to behave irrationally at times. In short, this book is written for two audiences: the people who work or live with others who are walking powder kegs, and those people who are themselves the walking powder kegs. There is, in fact, a way to engage productively and compassionately with people who have hair-triggers.

My working thesis is that every person has at least one trigger or a specific stimulus which results in behavior that seems to others to be an overreaction. I have yet to meet anyone who does not have a trigger, even if that person does not frequently overreact. I believe triggers are the vestigial remains of an unresolved trauma. Each of us has a least one because life is full of trauma-producing events; not all traumas are war- induced or visible to others.

Triggers shift us out of our rational responsive modes, and into the world of reactive, unthinking behavior.

But blaming and shaming people who have hair-trigger tempers, who may be dealing with the aftereffects of trauma whether or not they know it, or who can’t seem to get along with others is not productive because it doesn’t change behavior. This book is about productive engagement with these folks, and productive engagement with yourself if you’re dealing with these behaviors.

Conflicts are second only to breathing in how many times they naturally occur. Not all conflicts are acknowledged or engaged, but each is accompanied with a definite feeling of disconnection with other humans. This book will first explore the physical bases of connection—and therefore of disconnection—including the neural circuitry wired into us all, the evolution of connectedness as a survival strategy among mammals, and the heritage of behaviors and emotions we all share. We will consider how these traits shape and impact our social and legal cultures. We will explore some possible ways to foster resilience and restore connection when it has been broken, as well as how to engage with people who have become disconnected and stuck. We will delve into ways to build resilience and explore the gifts available from conflict and even from trauma.

For me, the gift from my trauma and on-going recovery is the ability to feel deep gratitude for the window it opened onto the profound web of interdependence that connects all life. I can now see and feel connection with others through not only their joy and happiness, but also through their pain. It has been said that a person can bear almost anything once she knows the why. I think that’s true.

Diagnosis is not the cure-but it is the first

step to finding the cure!

I don’t want to suggest that this book has all the answers to how to stop being triggered and how to engage flawlessly in conflicts. There is no shortcut for doing the hard work of getting to know and accept all aspects of yourself. With relief I can tell you that you do not have to be perfect, you don’t have to be highly skilled, you just have to try. Please be assured that any improvement in your skills (and these are skills which can be learned) will be such a surprise to you that you will want to continue!

However, if you are like me—if you believe, because it was drummed into your head from birth, that you are defective—then you never try to fix it because you don’t believe there is a fix for inherent defectiveness. I have learned that diagnosis is not the cure, but it is the first step of the cure. I had to learn, and more importantly believe that something had happened to me to make me the way I was. My diagnosis of developmental trauma was necessary for me to accept that there was indeed a reason for my behavior and to launch my search for the cure. Before the diagnosis, I believed such a search was a waste of time.

I hope this book will help you identify paths you can use to speed and deepen your wholeness, resiliency and connection with yourself and others. One of the easiest ways to do this is by changing the way you look at (and feel about) conflict. Begin to think of conflict as your sage guide and teacher! I offer this book in hopes that it will be used to expand our human capacity for connection and peace.

THE LABYRINTH OF CONFLICT

Two years after 9/11, after I had processed as much of my trauma as I could and after the succession of memorial services finally ended, I still had trouble working. I had a gut sense that the universe was telling me to slow down and rethink my life. I found a wonderful place in the high desert of Arizona for a 10 day silent retreat. There, I discovered a huge stone labyrinth on the top of a hill. I spent those 10 days walking the labyrinth and just being in its center. After I left, I realized that the labyrinth had reset my body’s nervous system.

I had never walked a labyrinth before and didn’t know the difference between a maze and a labyrinth. [FYI—a maze has dead ends and you can get lost; a labyrinth has one path to the center and the same path to return.] In a labyrinth, you don’t have to know where you are going, you are not able to see the path ahead. You just put one foot in front of the other, stay on the path, and you will get to the center.

I trusted the land, the labyrinth and its process, and my own body to help me find what I needed in the center of the labyrinth. I chose the labyrinth to symbolize the process I share with you in this book.

DEFINITIONS

Before we start, I want to be very clear on the three concepts and a few words. I’m defining them here because they are crucial to understanding human responses to conflict, and I have woven them throughout this book.

Concepts

1. Responsive Space

The first concept is Responsive Space. Not in the sense of the stuff that lies beyond Earth’s atmosphere, but in the sense Victor Frankl used it in his famous aphorism: "Between the stimulus and response, there is a space. ² In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our I found Frankl’s quote in my early 40s, and was immediately struck by its simplicity and obvious veracity. It stated that the space existed, apparently in everyone, to consciously determine our reactions. That meant that if I paid close enough attention, I would be able to find it in myself. It gave me hope. I tried my darndest to find my own Responsive Space. I began a regular meditation practice, I took up yoga, I rejoined a faith community, and I tried very hard to be aware of my emotions. It took me almost 25 years to finally admit to myself that I did not have Responsive Space between the stimulus and my response—I was often, almost always, far into my reaction before I even knew I had been stimulated. Certainly that was true during the Shelby discussion when I blew my top! Simply, I thought, more proof of my defectiveness.

What I uncovered in my research is that many people who have endured childhood and/or shock trauma do not have much Responsive Space. Their threat response system has so often been hijacked by the constant danger they endured, that the pathway which carries the signal from their frontal lobes to their bodies to relax has atrophied because there was a constant threat. The relax signal wasn’t being sent, so the body repurposed that pathway for another use. When the neural connection which allows signals to run from the prefrontal cortex (the decision-making part of the brain) to the limbic portion of the brain (which evaluates safety and processes emotions) becomes withered from disuse, there is little to no pathway for a message of no threat to get back to the brain’s fear center.The atrophied neural pathway was visible on fMRIs. ³ There were other people like me, who from a survival standpoint, simply could not afford to have Responsive Space which would leave us, as children, vulnerable to actual threats. The pathway was just taking up energy and was not useful—in fact, it was dangerous.

However, I also discovered that Responsive Space can be created even in people like me who didn’t even know it existed until they were well into adulthood. My only wish is that I had discovered it earlier. I needed more than yoga, more than meditation, and more than awareness I could achieve by myself to find it. For me, it took neuroplastic rewiring of my brain through focused therapy. Fortunately, trauma therapists who use techniques based on neuroplasticity are now much more numerous and skilled than even five years ago. I will talk a lot about Responsive Space because without it, awareness and intention are essentially powerless in competition with the automatic responses that our brains have developed to ensure our survival.

It may be easier to think of Responsive Space as distance or separation between action and reaction. When we do not identify with, or can separate ourselves from, the emotion and recognize that the emotion is simply an ephemeral physical and psychological sensation in response to our environment, we are more able to respond as we choose, rather than falling into habitualized reactions that were developed years before in response to entirely different environments. This space, distance, or separation is the Responsive Space that Frankl was talking about. This is the Responsive Space that I didn’t even know I didn’t have.

The fire hydrant of neuroscience discoveries that have occurred in the past 20 years means that there are now effective treatments not only for trauma but also for many actions and behaviors that have their origins in our unconscious brains. Neuroscientists have uncovered how the mechanism of rewiring works and can translate that into effective exercises. Many of the automatic survival-based behaviors cause us to be hyper-vigilant to clues of disrespect, disengagement and other signs of a lack of connection with others, which in turn can easily lead to conflict. Traumas do not have to be catastrophic, like war, car wrecks and rape, to leave their traces behind in these kinds of behaviors.

2. The Human Survival Formula

As we will discuss in the first chapter, the mandate for all life forms is survival—happiness is optional. In evolution, Mother Nature only cares about passing on genes—by any means necessary. She doesn’t care if we happen to suffer along the way—from subtle worries to intense feelings of sorrow, worthlessness, or anger—or create suffering for others. ⁴ Every cell that exists in our bodies today is descended from the earliest self-replicating molecules that formed around 4.1 billion years ago on Earth. Maximized for survival, our cells contain a massive repository of information, even if that wisdom is not accessible to our cognitive awareness. In mammals, survival is heavily dependent upon safety in numbers. As animals who live in groups, we have to be aware of internal threats as well as external ones.

As we delve into this new understanding of our body’s threat responses, we can more deeply appreciate the truism that safety is not the absence of threat, but the presence of community.

Recognizing the power of groups to provide safety against outsiders and of boundaries to provide safety against internal predators, my formula for mammalian survival is:

SAFETY = CONNECTION + BOUNDARIES

This book will explain this formula and demonstrate both how it works and how central it is to our lives.

3. Conflict’s Role in Creating and Deepening Connection

The belief that conflict is a tool, not a state, can be employed for various purposes. All of us are familiar with one purpose of conflict which is to win by force of strength or logic. We learned about conflict very young and daily can see its effects. All conflicts, from those which are centuries old and involve whole nations, to those we descend into in a flash when a car cuts us off, follow very specific paths with respect to stimulus (trigger), with our survival-based reaction leading to survival-based reaction in the other party. When we understand this structure, it becomes easier to understand how to interrupt the process to address the actual survival threat or to recognize that there is, in fact, no survival threat. The incredible thing about doing this is, when we understand what is going on in ourselves and in the other person, and can acknowledge it, there is an opportunity to form a bond that may look a lot like trust or appreciation or even gratitude.If formed, this bond can be the foundation for a deeper connection. This is the promise and gift of whole-heartedly embracing conflict!

The keys to positive conflict engagement are realizing that the other party has a reason for her reaction, and caring enough to find out what it is.

WORDS

I’m a corporate and litigating lawyer, so words are very important to me. What makes words important is that each one of them has a specific meaning that every party agrees to. The Definitions section of a contract is usually right up front in the document. Its goal is to remove as much ambiguity in interpretation of the agreement as possible and to guide an impartial judge’s review if things go south between the parties. I often have drafted agreements which defined such seemingly well understood terms as day or year. If you don’t want a day to mean any 24-hour period, you must explicitly state something like: ‘day,’ for purposes of this agreement, refers to any calendar day, excepting all federal holidays and weekends, and begins at 9am prevailing time and ends at 6pm prevailing time. Now everyone dealing with that contract knows exactly what is meant by a day.

1. Conflict

There are many words in the English language which imply what we generally think of as conflict: war, disagreement, dispute, discord, clash, battle, and many more. I do not use the word in that sense. I use conflict to refer specifically to any of the above only when at least one of the parties is emotionally hooked by the dispute. For example, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a conflict under my definition because both parties are fighting for a highly emotional purpose—their homeland, their integrity as a people and their safety. That’s a lot of emotional investment in the dispute. Likewise if someone were to insult my son, I would respond quite emotionally because I have a huge emotional investment in him, his safety and peace of mind. On the other hand, I have disputed a traffic ticket without being emotionally hooked. Yes, I may have been irritated and may have even had a passing sense of unfairness that I got caught while others didn’t, yet I was not emotionally hooked. An emotional hook implies a significant emotional investment, not a momentary irritation or discomfiture.

2. Mind, brain, body

There are three words that I am going to use which have given philosophers and theologians fits for centuries, with psychologists and neuroscientists joining them more recently. These words are body, brain and mind. The father of psychology, American philosopher and psychologist William James, and Hippocrates equated the brain to the mind and vice versa. The brain is obviously part of the body, but is the body part of the mind? Indeed, there is no bright line which distinguishes among them. To deal with this, words like bodybrain and mindbody have been developed by poets, philosophers and others. The Hindus and Buddhists, over 2,500 years ago, believed that there was no duality between the mind and the body, that the body affects the mind and the mind affects the body.

Things started getting complicated during the Renaissance and Enlightenment, represented starkly in Rene Descartes’ famous saying Cogito ergo sum or I think, therefore I am. The brain came to be revered as the center of all knowing, and conscious thought became the only real thought.

The reverse happened to the body, which came to be seen as an impure vessel, needed only to perform base physical functions but irrelevant to the life of the mind. Later, support for the supremacy of the brain was found in the belief that the brain had its own special cells, called neurons, which could only do brainy things. Later, when neurons were found in the spinal cord, the belief remained intact because the spinal cord was part of the central nervous system which fed information into the brain. More recently, neurons were found in the gut, leading to the concept of the gut- brain. Then they popped up in the heart and lungs, and even in skin cells. We now know that there is very little physically to distinguish between the brain’s neurons and the body’s neurons. With over 100 billion neurons in the brain itself and about 40 billion more spread throughout the body, the brain wins in terms of total number and density of neurons. However, the brain is, in fact, an integral part of the body.

The one thing we now know for sure is that the mind and the brain are indeed different. The mind emerges in relationship with other beings and with experience. The mind is much broader than the physical brain. For Buddhists, who believe that the concept of an individual as a being separate and apart from nature is a misperception of reality, the mind is the way our physical bodies are integrated into the whole, while our brains are trapped into the illusion of the individual. Christian and Jewish sacred texts instruct that the body is the temple of the Holy Spirit, which could have been a way of referring to that which connects our individual existence to God or what may be called universal consciousness. The brain and the body are physical, real, tangible items. I have actually touched a brain, and all of us inhabit our bodies. (But who is the us doing the inhabiting? Our minds?)

The understanding that emotional experience is shaped through the body’s internal physiology was recognized by William James in 1892. He argued that the mental aspects of emotion, the feeling states, are a product of physiology. He reversed our intuitive causality, arguing that the physiological changes themselves give rise to the emotional state: our heart does not pound because we are afraid; fear arises from our pounding heart. The same area of the brain, the anterior insula, processes both emotions and internal visceral signals, supporting the idea that this area is key in processing internal bodily sensations as a means to inform emotional experience. ⁵

Further, the brain used to be thought of as an electrical communication system, but this metaphor was buried by Candace Pert, whose trail-blazing research in the 1970s and ‘80s explained the ways hormones work to connect all aspects of body and mind in a network of shared information. She showed that only two percent of neuronal communications are electrical, across a synapse. In fact, she writes, the brain is a bag of hormones. And those hormones affect not only the brain, but every aspect of body and mind; many memories are stored throughout the body, as changes in the structure of receptors at the cellular level. The body, Pert concludes, is the unconscious mind!

Pert’s discoveries led to a revolution in neuroscience, helping open the door to the information-based model of the brain which is now replacing the old structuralist model. These hormones are the molecules of emotion, and emotions, long ignored within the traditional confines of science and medicine, are actually the key to understanding the emerging picture of how body and mind affect each other. ⁶

I use the term ‘mindbody’ to remind myself and readers that, although we still think in terms of distinctions between the body and the mind and the brain, these distinctions are rapidly dissolving. It is more useful if we think of ourselves as unified, undivided and whole people, knowing that these pieces are interactive, and each affects the others.

3. Sensations, Feelings, and Emotions

Three terms, sensation, feeling and emotion are often used interchangeably in academic and scholarly papers as well as in books written for the general public, leading to much confusion. Although many people, from social scientists and psychologists to neuroscientists and philosophers, have addressed these concepts, as of yet there is no universally agreed-upon definition for any of the three. So with a sense of great trepidation, I will attempt to use these words throughout this book to mean the following:

Sensation: One or more physiological changes in the mindbody that has not been consciously recognized as occurring. These include information from the digestive system, blood flow, neuronal firing, and muscle and organ feedback. Sensations are a type of sensory input, but not all sensory inputs are unconscious sensations.

Feelings: One or more physiological changes occurring in the mindbody of which the conscious mind is aware. A feeling can include the heart beating faster and harder, heavy breathing, sweating, a constricted throat, pressure in the chest, etc.

Emotion: The label the conscious mind applies to a group of specific sensations and feelings it is experiencing, such as fear, happiness, disgust, etc.

When I feel my throat constricting, my heart beating rapidly, my breathing becoming more shallow, and my palms getting damp, I will most likely call that constellation of sensations and feelings by the name of the emotion that I associate them with, in this case fear. However, I could experience those same sensations and feelings and label them pride or nervousness if my name were about to be announced as the new president of my industry’s trade association. The emotion is the interpretation we give to the feeling or set of feelings and sensations, not the feeling or sensation itself. It may be that I experience the sensations without being aware of them, and thus I am not consciously experiencing an emotion or even a feeling, but my body can be nevertheless reacting to the unconsciously-recognized stimulus.

I realize these definitions are abstract at this point, but I will attempt to show why the distinctions are critical to understanding behavior, especially conflictual behavior.

1 Shelby County v Holder, 570 U.S. 529 (June 25, 2013), regarding the constitutionality of certain provisions of the Voting Rights Act.

2 Victor Frankl, Man’s Search For Meaning , (Boston, Beacon Press, 1959).

3 Ryan J. Herringa et al., Childhood maltreatment is associated with altered fear circuitry and increased internalizing symptoms by late adolescence, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences , vol. 110, No. 47 (Nov. 19, 2013), pp 19119–19124; https://doi.org/10.1073/ pnas.1310766110.

4 Do Positive Experiences Stick to Your Ribs?" Rick Hanson, accessed February 11, 2019, https://www.rickhanson.net/take-in-the-good/ .

5 How the Body and Mind Talk to One Another to Understand the World, Sarah Garfinkel, Aeon (February 18, 2019), https://aeon.co/ideas/how-the-body-and-mind-talk-to-one-another-to - understand-theworldutm_source=Aeon+Newsletter&utm_campaign=6efc0af0ecEMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2019_02_18_03_17&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_411a82e59d-6ec0af0ec- 69013077

6 Candace B. Pert, Molecules of Emotion: The Science Behind Mind-Body Medicine (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997).

1

Evolutionary Context

We are stardust

Billion-year-old carbon

We are golden

Caught in the devil’s bargain

And we’ve got to get ourselves

Back to the garden

-Joni Mitchell, Woodstock, 1969

Scientists think that life began on this planet, probably as a single cell of proto-RNA (ribonucleic acid), about 4.1 billion years ago. At that time, Earth was a roiling, boiling blob of magma. There were no continents, there was probably no water and definitely no seas; all was primordial steaming ooze. Everything alive today descends from that earliest life form, which has combined, mutated, specialized and replicated to create the complex life forms we know.

Those ancestral life forms had to survive in hostile environments— bombardments by asteroids, comets and meteors, massive tectonic plates slamming into each other and drifting apart, periods of extremely high and extremely low oxygen concentrations, intense glaciation and intense heat, and at least five mass extinction events, each of which erased 50 percent or more of the life forms then extant. If a few lucky species had not made it through, mammals might have gone the way of the dinosaurs and none of us would be here. ¹

Stephen Jay Gould, the late Harvard paleontologist, noted that evolution has been shaped as much by decimation as by innovation. Those extinctions provided the opportunity for evolution by opening ecological niches that surviving animal groups could diversify into, thereby providing the opportunity for innovation.

The cells that make up our bodies today are the accumulation of information passed down over eons of survival under these extreme scenarios. Some call this wealth of life-preserving knowledge body wisdom, others use the terms gut feelings, intuition, the unconscious/subconscious—or my favorite—cellular wisdom.

Science has recently enabled us to see inside the blueprint of other animals and ourselves by mapping our DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid). DNA stores the information in our genes and is the hereditary material in all living cells. A gene consists of enough DNA to code for one protein, and our genome is the sum total of our DNA.

It turns out that DNA demonstrates how similar we are to other creatures and fleshes out the evolutionary table below. For example, chimpanzee (and bonobo) DNA is 98.8 percent the same as human DNA. Chimpanzees and humans parted evolutionary ways almost 7 million years ago. The chimpanzee/human ancestors parted from gorilla ancestors almost 10 million years ago, and humans share 98.4 percent of our DNA with gorillas. We are more closely related to mice than to