Jingle Jangle on the use of the human brain

The witty glossary in Jim Rix's fine book about the wrongful convictions of his cousin Ray Krone, Jingle Jangle: The Perfect Crime Turned Inside Out, was developed with the criminal justice system in mind. But its entries about the use of the brain are equally applicable to politics and religion (both of which played crucial roles in Krone's convictions):

cerebral cortex—that part of the human brain where thinking occurs. When dominant over its counterpart, the reptilian-complex, truth prevails. When dominated, bullshit prevails.

reptilian-complex—that part of the human brain in common with snakes and programmed primarily for survival which when stuck where the sun doesn't shine dominates the cerebral cortex.

denial—a delusion of the reptilian-complex whose major symptom is bullshit, such as "The system works" and "We don't convict and execute innocent people."

Jingle Jangle's primary chapter about the reptilian-complex is "Catch-22: The Gila." Here's the chapter's haunting, poetic opening:

From southwestern New Mexico, a river born of the waters of mountain tributaries enters Arizona and travels westward across the state. The first part of its journey is mostly through mountain valleys. At Florence, its halfway point, it passes so close to Arizona State Prison that Ray would have had a view of the Gila—if his cell had had any view at all. Then it moves northwest, passing through Maricopa County south of Phoenix before turning southwest toward Yuma, where the waters that survive the Sonoran Desert join the Colorado River and eventually return to the Pacific Ocean through the Sea of Cortez.
    The Gila River shares its name with a monster of sorts, a poisonous lizard indigenous to the desert southwest. When the Gila Monster bites its prey it rolls onto its back to allow the venom stored in glands in its lower jaw to trickle down grooves in its teeth into the wound. Unlike its cousin the snake it does not have the ability to inject its poison. The Gila Monster must hang on tenaciously until its victim dies. Its reptilian brain is programmed only for survival. Should the Gila Monster bite off more than it can chew it has no intelligence to tell it to let go. So when it bites a human being it doesn’t know any better than to hang on until its own death. Fatalities among humans are rare, although it does take a pair of pliers to release the reptile’s jaws.
    The brains of the great dinosaurs that dominated the earth for hundreds of millions of years were ill-equipped to deal with the climate changes that were triggered by the impact of a huge meteorite on the Yucatan peninsula around 65 million years ago. As a result, the dinosaurs became extinct. Among the survivors were birds—the only direct descendants of the dinosaurs—and budding mammals from which humans evolved. [p. 257; drawing, by New Yorker cartoonist Rob Esmay, appears on p. 274]