My son and I once rode an elephant at the Denver Zoo. What started as a light-hearted adventure became a scary challenge as we climbed the stairway to reach the elephant’s back. An elephant is huge! I remembered this experience when I encountered Dr. Jonathan Haidt’s description of the human mind. Attempting to make sense of his own disparate experiences, he imagined his mind being like a rider on an elephant. Small rider. Enormous animal. Get the picture? The rider is conscious, controlled thought; the elephant is everything else, all the essential automatic mental processes which are beyond our awareness. This image helped Dr. Haidt understand why, when his rider wanted to lose a few pounds, it didn’t stop his elephant from walking into an ice cream parlor. Let me explain their complicated relationship.
The elephant includes the lower regions of the brain which regulate our body systems and keep them operating efficiently. The elephant is our excellent motor system that allows us to move smoothly from one activity to another. It includes our emotions and the fight-flight-or-freeze response to danger. The elephant is processing hundreds of thousands of signals from the environment each second, categorizing and prioritizing each one for relevance to our current situation, an amazing feat!
The rider, unaware of the elephant’s phenomenal multi-tasking, has developed from the newer, outer parts of the brain. Acting like the CEO of the mind, the rider communicates with language and has the ability to analyze, reason, plan ahead and make conscious choices. We like to believe that our riders are in charge of our elephants, and most of the time the two operate in harmonious cooperation. But elephants have their own agendas. If the elephant perceives a threat or identifies an opportunity, it takes off, leaving the rider to interpret and be responsible for its actions. This explains some embarrassing moments in our lives. It also accounts for times we’ve narrowly escaped danger. I appreciate my elephant whenever I do familiar tasks because sometimes my rider is preoccupied. Occasionally I get into my car, then with no recollection of the trip, I’m startled to see that I’ve safely arrived at my destination!
The rider on the elephant is a useful metaphor for the complex, multidimensional and interrelated aspects of our amazing minds. The elephant, whose workload is monumental, deserves our understanding and respect. Throughout our lifetime we continue to develop the skills and capabilities of the rider so it is an effective and intentional partner to the elephant. Think of them as a team because together they are spectacular.
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