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Your Stone Age Brain

Your Stone Age Brain is an information handout that describes he evolutionary origins of the freeze-flight-fight response.

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Psychology Tools resource: Your Stone Age Brain

Your Stone Age Brain

The Your Stone Age Brain tool helps you understand why your body responds to danger in certain ways. It explains how our freeze–flight–fight system comes from ancient survival needs. However, these natural reactions can cause problems in our modern lives.

Overview

Your Stone Age Brain is an information handout which describes the freeze-flight-fight response: a set of evolutionary adaptations that increase the chances of survival in threatening situations. The ‘hardware’ underlying these responses in modern humans is thought to be unchanged in the last 200,000 years, and psychologists often use a ‘caveman metaphor’ to explain the purpose and function of these responses. Learning about some of the evolutionary pressures exerted on early modern humans helps clients to understand the consequences of living in the present day in a body that has the same ‘programming’.

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