The Limbic System Is Not Illogical — It’s a Mis-Trained Prediction Engine

The Limbic System Is Not Illogical — It’s a Mis-Trained Prediction Engine

For a long time, I assumed that my internal struggles were primarily emotional.
Grief. Anger. Betrayal. Fear.

And to be clear — those were real, and they needed processing.

But after doing a substantial amount of emotional work, something unexpected happened: the noise quietened, and what remained didn’t feel like emotion at all.

It felt structural.

Not like a feeling.
Not like a memory.
Not like a belief.

More like a system.

What I eventually realised is this:

The limbic system is not irrational. It’s not illogical. It’s not broken.
It’s a prediction engine that was trained on bad data.

The mistake we make about “emotional logic”

We often talk about emotions as though they should respond to reasoning:

  • “I know this isn’t happening now.”
  • “I understand why I feel this way.”
  • “It doesn’t make sense to be afraid.”

And yet the body doesn’t stand down.
The chest still tightens.
The dread still appears.
The freeze still happens.

That’s because the limbic system doesn’t run on reasons.

It runs on outcomes.

What the limbic system actually does

At its core, the limbic system is a self-training survival engine.

Its job is not truth.
Its job is not fairness.
Its job is not meaning.

Its job is to answer one question:

“When this pattern appears, what usually happens next — and how do I avoid harm?”

It learns the answer by experience.

Not by explanation.
Not by intention.

By repetition.

The basic internal structure

What the limbic system stores is not beliefs or rules.
It stores fused pattern bundles:

Cue → Outcome Expectation → Response Bias

Where:

  • Cue is a combination of sensation, context, authority, and internal state
  • Outcome expectation is a simple valence (danger, safety, punishment, abandonment)
  • Response bias is one of a small set of hard-wired actions (approach, avoid, freeze, appease)

This is why it can feel like logic — even though no explicit reasoning is happening.

The logic is emergent.

Why calm can become dangerous

One of the most counter-intuitive limbic patterns is this:

Calm can be experienced as unsafe.

Not because calm is inherently dangerous — but because of temporal association.

If calm repeatedly preceded harm, the system learns:

“Calm is the pre-impact state.”

From that point on:

  • Peace feels suspicious
  • Relaxation feels like a setup
  • Vigilance feels protective

This is not pessimism.
It’s learned threat forecasting.

Why reasoning doesn’t fix it

The limbic system does association, not causation.

It cannot represent:

  • “Calm didn’t cause harm.”
  • “That was coincidence.”
  • “This authority is different.”

It only knows:

“This configuration usually ends badly.”

So insight alone doesn’t update it.

Only new outcomes do.

The hard-wired response hierarchy

The action side of the system is fixed:

  1. Approach (if reward seems greater than threat)
  2. Avoid (if threat seems greater than reward)
  3. Freeze / appease (if threat is high and action has failed before)

What changes over time is not the structure — it’s the weights.

If action historically led to protection, mobilisation is favoured.
If action historically led to punishment, shutdown becomes logical.

Why a few early experiences can dominate

There’s no fixed limit on how many patterns the limbic system can store.

Instead, patterns are weighted by:

  • salience
  • authority involvement
  • perceived threat
  • repetition

A small number of high-impact experiences can outweigh thousands of neutral ones.

That’s not weakness.
That’s survival bias.

The reframe that changed everything for me

The most stabilising realisation was this:

My nervous system isn’t broken.
It was trained on distorted data in an unsafe environment.

Once I saw that, the work changed.

The task was no longer self-correction.

It became re-training.

​

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Validation vs. Valuation

Validation vs. Valuation I recently found myself reflecting on the difference between validation and valuation , and I realised that although the words are often used interchangeably, they point to very different things. Validation, at its simplest and most innocent, is a form of support in the moment. It says: you’re seen , you’re heard , you’re not alone right now . In practical terms, validation is important — we validate work to ensure it’s safe, correct, or fit for purpose. In relationships, it can be reassuring and kind. But validation has a shadow side. When validation becomes something I need in order to feel whole — when my sense of self depends on it — it quietly shifts from support into something corrosive. In its more sinister form, validation can become manipulation, or an inadvertent tapping into a core wound: without your approval, I don’t exist . At that point, validation no longer supports identity — it erodes it. Valuation is something else entirely. Valuation ...
Read more

AMS Guide Part 1 — Charter and Purpose

AMS Guide Part 1 — Charter and Purpose 1. What This Guide Is This document is a companion guide to the Aetheric Magnetic Substrate (AMS) Ontology . Its purpose is to: explain the ontology in plain but accurate language reduce cognitive load for readers encountering the ideas for the first time provide intuition, metaphors, and narrative scaffolding allow readers to grasp what the ontology is doing without needing to adopt its formal vocabulary immediately The guide is not the ontology itself. It does not replace formal definitions or axioms. It exists to make them understandable . 2. Intended Audience Primary Audience Readers with: a genuine interest in science and how the physical world works some familiarity with scientific ideas and language curiosity rather than professional obligation A good mental model is: A regular reader of a BBC science magazine, Scientific American–style articles, or long-form popular science writing. This reader: is not a practi...
Read more

Newton, Einstein, and Gravity Revisited Through the Aetheric Magnetic Substrate

Newton, Einstein, and Gravity Revisited Through the Aetheric Magnetic Substrate I recently watched a video titled “There Is Something Faster Than Light.” The specifics of the argument aren’t the point here. What caught my attention was the familiar framing that followed: Newton versus Einstein, non-local versus local gravity, classical intuition versus modern physics. This framing is common. It’s also misleading. What follows is not a critique of either Newton or Einstein, but an attempt to understand what they were actually observing , why their descriptions differed, and how those observations can be unified under a single, coherent ontology — the Aetheric Magnetic Substrate (AMS) . Newton: Gravity as Non-Local Action Newton’s law of gravitation is often caricatured as “action at a distance,” and historically, Newton himself was uneasy with that implication. From a modern perspective, Newtonian gravity is described as non-local : Two masses influence one another instantly N...
Read more