Scientists Confirm Your Brain Is Not a Reptile Onion

The tiny reptile supposedly living inside your brain has been served an eviction notice, along with the onion it apparently occupied.

A psychology paper has rejected the idea that the human brain is essentially an onion with a small reptile tucked away inside it. This is excellent news for anyone who had been picturing thought as a series of mental vegetable layers surrounding an unusually influential lizard.

The claim being dismissed is not that people literally have salad ingredients and wildlife inside their skulls. It is an idea about how the brain should be understood: as something onion-like, with a tiny reptile within. The paper’s conclusion is that this is not an accurate account of the brain.

That clarification may come as a relief to humans, who can now consider their decisions without wondering whether they were made by reason, emotion or a gecko sitting behind a layer of shallot. It is equally reassuring for onions, which need no longer bear responsibility for the architecture of human consciousness.

Reptiles, meanwhile, have been cleared of the suggestion that they spend their time operating people from a cramped internal control room. Whatever else reptiles may be doing, the paper rejects the idea that a miniature one is embedded in the brain as part of an onion-based arrangement.

The important point is simple, even if the image being corrected is gloriously complicated: the brain is not an onion containing a tiny reptile. It should not be treated as though its workings can be explained by peeling away mental layers until one reaches a compact ancestral creature in the middle.

No onions were reported as being peeled, and no reptiles had to be removed. The matter was handled in the less dramatic form of a psychology paper, which is probably preferable to attempting neurological pest control.

The immediate outcome is that this particular picture of the brain has been rejected. What happens next is largely up to the people discussing brains: they can stop relying on the onion-and-reptile idea as though it were an accurate description.

For everyone else, daily life may continue much as before. Human beings still have brains, onions remain onions, and reptiles remain outside them. The three have simply been released from one of psychology’s more crowded metaphors.