comrades comes before even your own life.” The conflict between the old reptilian and the new mammalian brain furnishes the answer to such riddles as “Why does pain have to be so damn painful?” What, after all, is pain for? Pain is a proxy for death. It is a warning to the brain, “Don’t do that again: don’t tease a snake, pick up a hot ember, jump from a great height. This time it only hurt; next time it might kill you.” But now a designing engineer might say what we need here is the equivalent of a painless flag in the brain. When the flag shoots up, don’t repeat whatever you just did. But
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