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Somewhere in England they are now programming smoke alarms with your mother's voice instead of an ear piercing siren, because it gets you out of bed quicker. The precious seconds saved could also save lives.
The reason the sound of your mother's voice can turn on
your inner alarm faster than a fog horn, has a lot to do with our nature as
social creatures, and of course, our limbic systems.
The limbic system is the part of us that takes flight in
a dangerous situation. It is a brain inside our brain, and if it had a brain
inside it, that would probably be the amygdala; I'm sure you've heard of it. It
also holds the hippocampus, also known as the memory bank.
The limbic system operates beyond our conscious control.
It has to, because it's a big part of what keeps us alive before we even become
"conscious." It learns from its environment, and responds
accordingly. A major part of that environment is the people around us.
Our status as social animals makes us very sensitive to
the people around us, and especially those who take care of us, and especially
even more those who take care of us when we're young.
This is because our limbic system is, shall we say, very
open to suggestion when we're young. It's kind of like a blank slate of a book,
or an instruction manual, where every word that's written starts out really
big, and gets smaller and smaller as we age.
And who is one of the first people to write in this book?
Your mother. She codes her voice so deep into your autonomic nervous system
that the sound of it can activate your limbs faster than flash of lightning.
So it only makes sense that if we are looking for a
shortcut to the body-control-system, this would be it.
Notes
Oct 2018, BBC
Robet Sapolski's Stanford lectures in
Human Behavioral Genetics are a great place to learn about this kind of thing;
he is a skilled and engaging lecturer.
Post Script
Consider this idea in light of the developments we see
today in robotics, or in any instance of digitally-mediated human assistance.
Robots that take care of the elderly in the absence of their progeny, or who
take care of people of reproductive age in the absence of a mate. The limbic
system is a powerful thing, and it will certainly be exploited.
Post Post Script
Elon Musk did a surprisingly interesting job of
describing all ^this in his infamous interview on the Joe
Rogan show.
Post Post Post
Amygdalic is a word, but it doesn't do what you want it
to in this context. It comes from chemistry and it means made of almonds, or
rather the amygdalin contained therein. And now you got me started, almonds do
also contain cyanide, but not enough to kill you, you robust biological specimen!
If you ever had a rotten almond, you can pretend that's the cyanide in your
mouth. Not totally sure about that, but there is another species of almond,
actually called the bitter almond, that has more cyanide in it, and is also the
almond used to make almond fragrance. The amygdala got its name because it is
shaped like an almond.
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