The idea that muscular stuff runs across the upper back of the brain while verbal stuff is handled on the brain's belly shows up in Neural Correlates of Consciousness. At first it seemed a bit paradoxical to me. Why would a literally higher part of the brain handle what we humans would think of as a lower function?

Ted Coons tossed in an answer one evening--"Because topologically the brain is a single surface." That would imply that the belly and back of the brain
are simply separate sections of a sheet of cells bent over on itself like a folded napkin. Ted also said that in this view, the front of the brain is really the back and the back is really the front. Meanwhile, I finally got to see John Cleese's four-part BBC/Discovery Channel TV series on the human face a few nights ago. Cleese's
scriptwriters inserted a fact that makes for interesting mastication. Cleese was trying to account for our bouts of road rage when we cut each other off on a highway and for our lack of sidewalk fury when we jostle each other's shoulders in a crowd.

He screened footage of crowds in motion and pointed out the tiny, almost unconscious apologies we make when we bang against each other accidentally.
These infinitesimal submission gestures, he explained, pacify us. However it's impossible to perform miniaturized bowing and scraping routines when one is turtled up in the hull of a car. No handflaps or muttered apologies, no calming of the social waters.

Which led me to wonder whether one can measure the civility and democracy of a society by its inhabitants' unconscious conciliatory cues. Presumably a society in which it's considered a necessity to bristle against every hint of collision, to treat a winging of one's elbow by a fellow pedestrian as a personal outrage, and to respond by reasserting one's dignity or manhood through combat, presumably such an honor-driven society is not set up to handle differences of opinion with a mere barrage of words. Duels to the death or clan warfare seem more appropriate.

Which, in turn, has another implication. If we could inculcate the micro gestures of
peacemaking--the body language of conciliation--into social groups, could we upgrade the parent cultures' tendencies toward internal peace?

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