11 Reasons Why Your Brain Is A Total Dick

You're (hopefully) not leaping out of bed each morning, looking forwards to a bowl of cornflakes and some good old racial oppression, but we're afraid that Avenue Q was right: Everyone's a little bit racist.

...Or sexist or homophobic or any other horrible prejudice that we strive so hard to avoid in our modern, enlightened lives.

You can try as hard as you like but, unfortunately, your brain just isn't playing the game. Part of the reason these deep-seated prejudices took hold in the first place is due to the brain's natural tendency to categorise everything and anything.

We are constantly scanning the world around us to try and identify threats and the most efficient way of doing this is by sorting everything into rough categories. Early on in our evolution, we would rarely have come into contact with other humans who looked or acted radically different to ourselves. 

Our protective instinct will be more likely to categorise something that we're not familiar with as dangerous, just to be on the safe side. The driving force behind this is that it's much better to be wrong and alive than open-minded and dead.

Obviously we can override this instinct with our social and logical reasoning, ensuring that we don't immediately attack or flee those who are different to us (this can make business meetings awkward), but the actual knee-jerk reaction takes place in one of the deepest, most primal parts of our brains: The amygdala. This makes it very difficult to resist or suppress altogether.

This is probably why you spend a lot of your time telling yourself that you're awful for thinking the first thought that popped into your head. Obviously you don't actually think those things and the fact that you can spot them and stop them is a good thing. You're doing fine.