Review of Nicole Walker, “Lizard Brains” from Don’t Look Now: Things We Wish We Hadn’t Seen.  Ed. Kristen Iversen and David Lazar, 63-67.  Columbus, OH: Mad Creek Press, 2020. 

During my hiatus over the last couple months, I have been reading a lot of literary non-fiction.  So I thought I would share some of my thoughts on what I have been reading in this space.  This is the first in a series of reviews.

I know that some people find the brain fascinating, but I’ve never been too much interested in it.  I’ve always figured it’s just there and either it works or it doesn’t, and knowing that this part of the brain does that particular job isn’t going to help me figure anything out any better than I already do.  I tend to tune out when people begin talking about the neocortex and hippocampus and the rest of the brain’s anatomy.  So I wasn’t sure what I was getting into with the essay “Lizard Brains” by Nicole Walker.  At first I suspected it might be about seeing a lizard’s brain given the subtitle and subject of the book – Things We Wish We Hadn’t Seen.  The essay is not about that, thankfully.  No lizards are hurt in the essay.

Walker’s short essay alternates between information about the brain, how it remembers, and memories, that is to say that there was not a narrative arc to the essay; it wasn’t a story.  The essay includes lists of memories from different ages, most of which are traumatic memories, which Walker seems to suggest embed themselves in our brains more easily than good memories.  The narrator asks their brain, “can you, brain, build some receptors that lock down the good memories as hard and tight as you do the bad ones?”  And the request is granted to the narrator and the reader, as the essay closes with a litany of good memories.    I found this reassuring; I wanted to know that the narrator had locked away more than just memories of burnt steaks, parents falling off ladders, and funerals.  The narrator is sympathetic, and I don’t like reading about sympathetic people suffering, or at least not only suffering.

I appreciated Walker’s writing, particularly the ability to write with some mystery.  Each of the memories are just little snippets, leaving the reader wanting to know what happened after the steaks were burnt or how old Chad was when he died.  These are interspersed throughout the essay, and not just in the bullet-point memories.  Although the essay is only about five pages, there is an entire world beyond those pages.

Since Walker writes about the amygdala a lot, I thought amygdala might mean lizard or even Lizard Brain, but amygdala means almond.  Lizard Brain, however, does refer to a small part of our brain, the limbic cortex, which is equal to the totality of a lizard’s brain, and it is this part of the brain which directs our flight, fight, or freeze response.  This is the oldest part of the brain; the prefrontal cortex doesn’t fully develop until the late twenties.  Regardless of these anatomical and linguistic matters, I understand the narrator as wanting to grasp hold of those moments in life that go beyond those many moments of flight, fight, and freeze (which I might rhythmically rename – flight, fight, and fright), which seem to fill up so many of our days any more, or at least my days.