It is clear that all conflicts are perceived by the senses, manifested through body language and kinesthetic sensations, embodied and given meaning by thoughts and ideas, steeped in intense emotions, made conscious through awareness, and then resolved by conversations and experiences and developed into character, expanding our capacity for openness and trust, and contributing to our learning and ability to change, and that all of these transpire or are processed inside the brain.

To explain the etiology of conflict, therefore, requires us to gain a deeper understanding of how the brain responds to conflict. This should include the ways distrusting personalities are formed, even among primates; the sources of aggressive character traits and the “fight or flight” reflex and how it dissipates; the wellsprings of emotional or spiritual malaise and hostile “gut” reactions; and the neurological foundations of collaboration, trust, forgiveness, open-heartedness, empathy, insight, intuition, learning, wisdom, and the willingness to change.

While conflict and resolution have yet to be reduced to a simple set of deterministic biochemical events taking place exclusively within the brain, research demonstrates that basic neurological processes provide all of us with alternative sets of instructions that can lead us either toward impasse or resolution, stasis or transformation, isolation or collaboration. For these reasons, it will serve us well as mediators to understand more about the neurophysiology of conflict.

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