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"Beyond your
thoughts and feelings, my brother, there stands a mighty ruler, "the self exists between people, not inside them." David Berreby "Without you guys, to paraphrase Sandra Bernhardt (a quote that is circulating virus-like around the Internet), we wouldn't exist." Alex Burns When, In Disgrace With Fortune and Men's Eyes by William Shakespeare (1564-1616) When, in disgrace
with fortune and men's eyes, Insights... Would you like to
have a 9" x 12" wood plaque with the text of "When, In
Disgrace With "the self as a social positioning system" and "the mapmaker in the brain" instead of "the hippocampal/topographic model of self." the internal theater of others "the centers
of self outside the skull" instead of the extrasomatory extensions
of self. "outriggers beyond the brain--the circuits of self outside
the skull" "brainloops beyond the skull," "synapses
outside the skull," "synapses outside the brain." Long
distance circuits of self. Outboard circuits of self. Outboard circuitry
of self. Long distance circuitry of self. Brainloops outside the skull. _________ Despite 19th Century
Vienna's Sigmund Freud, 20th Century Switzerland's Karl Jung, and all
those who followed in their wake as explorers of the great interior
frontier, the most puzzling terra incognita of all isn't just right
under our very noses, it's behind them--in the non-conscious, unconscious,
and subconscious darkness that surrounds, nourishes, tweaks, twitches,
pulls, prods, and empowers consciousness. Consciousness' next task is
to come to know its most intimate companions. The irony is that to reach
inward we have to reach out and join others in a global enterprise.
As of now, that bold but ever-so-blind project is called consciousness
studies. We have to reach out to reach in. Our ancestors were social
and grew in colonies of trillions. Each individual was wired to be part
of a larger whole. Those were our bacterial foremothers 3.5 billion
years ago. We've evolved as social units too. We're just not smart enough
to know it. Consciousness is a social enterprise. No wonder we need
the illusion of self, the often false sense of individuality. We need
it to gain a sense of control and to wrest the attention of our family,
our friends, our neighbors, and of folks in our mindtribes--our communities-of-interest--thousands
of miles away. Working as attentional nodes is how we contribute to
the larger mind that we can't see, but that's the vital seedbed of self,
soul, and identity. Competing for attention is the way we help our culture,
our society, see. Competing for control is how we give that public vision
it's ability to grapple with reality. Despite 19th Century Vienna's Sigmund Freud, 20th Century Switzerland's Karl Jung, and all those who followed in their wake as explorers of the great interior frontier, the most puzzling terra incognita of all isn't just right under our very noses, it's behind them--in the non-conscious, unconscious, and subconscious darkness that surrounds, nourishes, tweaks, twitches, pulls, prods, and empowers consciousness. Consciousness' next task is to come to know its most intimate companions. The irony is that to reach inward we have to reach out and join others in a global enterprise. As of now, that bold but ever-so-blind project is called consciousness studies. We have to reach out to reach in. Our ancestors were social and grew in colonies of trillions. Each individual was wired to be part of a larger whole. Those were our bacterial foremothers 3.5 billion years ago. We've evolved as social units too. We're just not smart enough to know it. Consciousness is a social enterprise. No wonder we need the illusion of self, the often false sense of individuality. We need it to gain a sense of control and to wrest the attention of our family, our friends, our neighbors, and of folks in our mindtribes--our communities-of-interest--thousands of miles away. Working as attentional nodes is how we contribute to the larger mind that we can't see, but that's the vital seedbed of self, soul, and identity. Competing for attention is the way we help our culture, our society, see. Competing for control is how we give that public vision it's ability to grapple with reality. In a message dated
4/20/2003 8:33:07 PM Eastern Daylight Time, edser writes: HB:- The speed
with which the leucocytes in our body pounce on and digest enemies within
is 600,000 times faster than what the human eye can see. Meaning that
billions of cells that are a vital part of you and me carry out their
duties and perform critical tricks by which we-you and I--stay alive.
They do it in ways we don't understand. They do it without telling us
what they're up to. And they do it at a pace our mind, our self, can't
track, can't sense, and can't imitate. This is the adaptive unconscious
takent to the nth degree. The mind is a very limited thing. It knows
so little about what it really means to be a human being. JE:- The above
proves the opposite. To have any appreciation at all of what you do
not know proves such mind is _not_ limited. Inductive imagination has,
so far shown to be unlimited. Testable theory, built from the inductive
imagination has consistently replaced absolute assumptions within testable
theories of nature, increasing the size of the truth domains such theories
predict. Thus, we can look back at naive views of everything from perpetual
motion to fixed species and appreciate where we were then, where we
are now, and attempt to appreciate where we may be 10 million years
from now.. Regards, John Edser Independent Researcher Imprinting points. It created a passion point around which his most intense emotions, his real ambitions, would form for decades to come. But what made the experience so overwhelming? The sight of four human who'd bonded as a group. The sight of four human who, with the aid of an enormous team, had fought their way to the very peak of the attention pyramid. They were being seen by millions. Kevin could feel that. They were on TV--that mass-attention-center that every kid longed to appear on. And there was a mob of girls screaming hysterically...focusing white hot emotional attention, attention that went from their eyes down to their loins. Kids at the age of five are highly sexual. Sexuality is all about the desire for an extrasomatory extension of the self--or many of them--women or men we literally plug into. The sight of the Beatles on network TV told Kevin, this is where you will be the center of all eyes. This is where you will be the center of the desires of all sexual frenzies, of all mouths, of all nipples, and of all vaginas too. This is where anyone you want will look up to and desire you. Secret number two. Millions of other kids imprinted on that moment too. So when Kevin expressed the dreams that ten or 20 more years of living had built around that passion point of the Beatles, he expressed things waiting in the mass mind of his generation, things needing to be sung, danced, and said. A passion point had tuned a large slice of his generation--worldwide--to the visions that from that point on would dance in Kevin Cronin's head. sh: We can benefit from paying attention to these experiences. They can help us focus our lives and provide us with energy for doing things we want to do. hb: and they can help us liberate and empower our peers. sh: Other people play a huge role in defining our self. A few of those people pay a much larger role than most others. hb: superstars, role models, mothers, fathers, certain teachers, culture heros, heros and heroines from books. sh: We can benefit from paying attention to the influence of these significant others. Some parts of our physical structure and chemical and electrical processes are also important in creating and manifesting a Self. I think there are a lot of hungry hearts out there these days. Our nice life came to an abrupt halt awhile back, and we are looking for ways to move forward. The Baby Boomers are the dominant demographic in America, and it is to them that this book mght be primarily addressed. We are both Boomers and are personally acquainted with the stresses of this time of life. hb: but I also stay in touch with kids who are 20 years old on up to 33. And they need this book too. There's a generation of kids who have grown up (and are still growing up) on Nintendo games and Pokemon TV who need a sense of where they've come from and why. What I know best are the rock heroes--where their passions came from, how they were shaped, and how they in turn became the poster figures on which the next generation would imprint. I was a maker of Passion Points during the 1970s and 1980s--without entirely understanding my role...but trying to figure out it out as I adventured in the world of commercial art, film, disco, rap, r&b, and rock and roll. That was my voyage of the Beagle into the deep, deep heart of self and soul. sh: For lay people, there will be solid information that can help them tap the wellsprings of their own vitality. hb: yup. sh: Scientists may see some opportunities for further research. hb: that would sure be nice. The concepts we're posing are very different from those dominating psychology today. sh: Four Possible Major Sections, with chapters from the mini-proposal: Introduction Why Do We Have A Self? The Evolution Of Self-How Did The "Me" And "I" First Come To Be? 1. Imprints and Epiphanies The Detachable Self-Out Of Body Experiences Growing A Soul-Passion Points: Imprinting And Primal Fire 2. The Sea of Others The Curse Of Trying To Be Normal The Extrasomatory Extensions Of Self-Why We Can't Just Love Ourselves, Or Psychobabble's Bad Advice Othello's Insecurity-Love And The Ghost Of Disaster The Superstar As The Ultimate Outboard Self Maps And The Anchors Outside The Brain-How The Extrasomatory Cables Of Self Jerk And Waggle The Brain's Mapmaker (The Topographic Theory Of Self Meets The Extrasomatory Model) The Ring Of Consciousness The Arena Of Others Within Us The Tyrannical Mob Beneath The Floor Of Consciousness Why Cupid Is A Baby: The Self-Dissolver And Love-Shatterer--Commitment Phobias Couplehood-Unleashing The Hidden Selves Couplehood And The Anchoring Of Self 3. The Self in the Flesh The Mystery Of Identity Growing A Self-The Mutinous Teens And The Lonely Twenties The Mapmaker In The Chaos Of The Brain--The Topographic Theory Of The Self The Biopsychology Of Getting A Grip: Control And The Mystery Of Self So Where Does The Power Of Will Fit In? 4. Self Projection The Conscious Puppet We Call "Me"--Self, Libet And Gazzaniga Getting A Grip--Practical Applications Of The Theory Of Self Mandatory And Elective Selves-The Self As Suit And Tie Self As Social Interface And Billboard Of Control Ego As A Gift-The Value Of Self-Deception Goals--A Map Of The Future hb: sounds promising. Where do you see the over-story--the narrative that holds it all together? Howard Bloom Author
of The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of
History and Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind From The Big Bang
to the 21st Century www.howardbloom.net Visiting Scholar--Graduate Psychology
Department, New York University Founder: International Paleopsychology
Project; Founder: Science of the Soul Initiative; member: New York Academy
of Sciences, American Association for the Advancement of Science, American
Psychological Society, Academy of Political Science, Human Behavior
and Evolution Society, International Society of Human Ethology; founding
board member: Epic of Evolution Society; founding council member, The
Darwin Project; advisory board member: Youthactivism.org; executive
editor -- New Paradigm book series. For two chapters from The Lucifer
Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History, see www.howardbloom.net/lucifer
For information on Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the
Big Bang to the 21st Century, see www.howardbloom.net For Reinventing
Capitalism: Putting Soul In the Machine, see: http://howardbloom.net/reinventing_capitalism
or http://www.howardbloom.net/reinventing_capitalism.pdf _________ hb: neat. sh: What
I haven't seen so far is much detail on the imprinting experiences.
A lot of this may have to be in the form of personal anecdotes gained
via interviews (past or present). hb: both the anecdotes and the smattering
of evidence are in two files--soul.cnt and soul.txt. Human imprinting
is a VERY unresearched field. But I do have material that pertains.
I've been hunting it hither and thither over the last two or three years.
sh: It occurs to me that biographies might be a good source of imprinting
experiences. For instance, meeting Jack Kennedy as a young teenager
was probably a life-defining experience for Bill Clinton. hb: bullseye.
Remember, Kennedy had sexual magnetism, even though we didn't know about
his incessant philandering. Being at the certain of attention and riveting
the eyes of girls seems to be the flashpoint of many imprinting moments.
Look how Clinton continued to associate the limelight of politics with
sex. sh: Finally there could be some "exercises" that help
people discover and rediscover their own passion points. hb: agreed.
It involves going chronologically through your personal history from
the formation of your first memories to you mid-20s or later and finding,
one by one, the things that, as Jim Morrison said, really lit your fire.
Most of them are likely to be snapshots of idols or special contact
with fellow human beings. Though imprinting on the friendliness of dogs
via some words my father said when I was roughly three helped me keep
a sense of physical love that otherwise would have been stripped from
me. I must admit that my dad was human, not canine, so even imprinting
on dogs was imprinting on the love of a special human being, one who
towered over me. Seeing someone on high, seeing a person from below,
the way you see a person on a stage or elevated via a medium like TV
or a novel or magazine article is often another part of the snapshot
that becomes an imprinting point. the figures we imprint on are often
"bigger than life". Which brings us back to the Bloomian theories
about our hierarchical response to height. sh: I think that there is
a middle period of life from the 20's to the 40's when these often get
lost in the effort to fit into and succeed in the world. hb: precisely.
amen. and heartily agreed. sh: But now we have a large demographic,
the Baby Boomers, who are at that place in their life when taking a
look at their youthful passions may help them orient themselves for
the prime of their life. What kind of questions would you ask to bring
out the passion points? hb: if you could do anything at all you wanted
in life, what would it be? What was your biggest dream, your greatest
desire when you were five? When you were twelve? When you were sixteen?
When you were 22? What did you want to do and be and see? sh: If you
agree with some of this basic approach I will start pulling the references
together from the various documents- starting with the neurobiology.
I do have Soul.doc, rockCnt2.doc, rockCNT.doc, braiN(1).doc, braiN.doc.
I suppose you could sent the updated self.doc and I'll just clip on
the new stuff. And any other ones that seem particularly relevant. hb:
ok, tomorrow I'll try to put a package together. Howard Howard In a message
dated 2/5/2003 4:26:14 PM Eastern Standard Time, shovland writes: Subj:
The punchline to self.doc "But the trick is more than just understanding
where the inner gods come from (passion points), it is to invoke them.
The real goal is to make those gods come alive, to make them thrive,
and to help others achieve their own revelations and mystic ecstasies.
However one must do this while suppressing one of the most potent inner
gods of all-the god of violence, hatred, and war. One must unleash the
gods of wonder, of light in darkness, and of creativity. Howard "
As I watch events unfold, it seems to me that the market for both Reforming
the Corporation and Passion Points is expanding. Steve Hovland http://shovland.home.mindspring.com Hb: it's in those
moments that you find your soul, Clem. I've had them too, but only while
performing. never alone. they're the power of collective attention or
of inspiration pulsing through you. inspiration is a flame that comes
from the others buried inside of us, others we've reinvented to forge
our own passions and identity. << I'm an economist and for me it is often economists vs. lawyers, economists vs. accountants, vs. bureaucrats, political scientists, and what not. I have a tribal identification with my fellow economists. When I am with other economists, I'll come on as a specific kind of economist: free market as opposed to Keynesian. Within the group of free market economists, I'll be Austrian School vs. Chicago School. >> Here we have one of the paradoxes of self which has been puzzling me the most. When facing outsiders, Frank has a solid sense of us vs. them identity. When the threat from outsiders goes away, Frank's circle of identity retreats and he jumps into the adventure of defining a specific us vs. them *within* the group??Frank becomes a free marketeer so he can battle the Keynesians with might and main, thus gaining the righteous sense that he is not a part of some undifferentiated pablum, but still has a distinct "me." When Frank is among free marketeers, he needs to draw the circle of self tighter. Now it is "me vs. them." "Me, the one Austrian School adherent in the bunch taking on all these deluded Chicago School bozos." So self is a boundary line one draws which separates outside from inside. However it's extremely elastic, depending on circumstance. When self is a matter of identification with a large group??like economists, the circle is pretty big. When it's Frank against two other economists who agree with him on almost everything, the circle grows quite small indeed. But one way or the other, the inner feeling is "I must be me or die. I have to have a boundary or something in me will cease to be alive. And yet I have to be part of a group to breathe in social oxygen and thrive." I've spent much of the last six or seven months observing romantic relationships. Here the circle of self grows even smaller and more confusing. Self still involves setting up a boundary. What's inside this circular enclosure is "me." What's outside it is not. But the emotional volatility involved in these boundaries, and the phantasmagorical ways in which these outer lines of self dissolve and take new shapes can be hair?raising. All this drags one tantalizingly close to the secret of what a self is and why it has to be??why it evolved and what benefit we get from it. Close to the secret, but still locked in mystery. One of the things I've been tracking is something I call the attraction repulsion curve??a seemingly inescapable element of the courtship ritual. It's named for a phenomenon observed by Hullians back in the '50s when drive theory was all the rage. Here's a description from a previous posting of the classical drive experiment which provides a model for the romantic tangles of identity confusion. The details may be off here or there, since drive theory is now forgotten and the experimental data it produced has been expunged from current overviews of psychology, so is not easily available. In the old days, when Hull's concept of drives was big, experimental psychologists would attach a string to the tail of a lab rat and rig it to a meter measuring tension. They'd train the rat to run down a straight alleyway to a piece of food and carefully note how hard the rat strained to get to the goody via the tail?pull measurement device. Once the rat was used to a treat, they'd put an electrified grid in front of the food. Now, the theory went, the rat would have two conflicting drives: a drive of attraction (to the food) and a drive of repulsion (as it realized that the electrical grid was now permanently in place and hurt like blazes). Sure 'nuff, the rat would run toward the food with great enthusiasm, and as he grew closer, would begin to slow down. At a certain point he'd stop in confusion, not being able to "figure out" whether to go further or not. Now, if you took the measurements of the pull on the tail of the rat to avoid the electrical grid and graphed them, they went like this \. The closer to the grid, the greater the pull to get away. The further from the grid, the lower the aversive drive became. Similarly, if you plotted the rat's attraction to the food, the curve would go like this /. The further from the food, the stronger the attraction. The closer to the food the rat got the more it would take it easy and slow from a trot to a canter. Lay one curve over the other, and the point at which they intersected predicted very nicely where the rat would stop in seeming confusion when confronted with both the food and the grid. According to theory, this was the point at which the decreasing attraction precisely equalled the growing repulsion. Now for the snarl in romance, one with sometimes intoxicating and sometimes devastating results. I've been watching men and women who fall madly in love with each other. At least they do so while the other is a distant and somewhat difficult to attain prize. However the closer they get to winning the person who literally obsesses them, the more confused their enthusiasm becomes. Like the rat, they slow down, torn by a fear which stings them. When it becomes obvious that they've won the desired other and are growing ever more intimate, the fear becomes overwhelming and they run in terror. Before observing this carefully, my impression was that it was only men who fled from "commitment." But observing the cycle many times with seemingly very different people, it's become obvious that woman are as fearful and prone to run away in terror as are men. The only way to get to the heart of the matter seemed to be to worm oneself into the confidence of the people involved and to use every tool of intuition and empathy to help these tortured souls find the unnameable elements behind their inability to let themselves have what they thought they wanted. The goal was to help unravel the knotted string of the Hullian push?pull dilemma so that the folks with whom I was working would be freed of their repetitive agonies. Here's the sense which came from hundreds of hours of soul?diving sessions. While still at a distance, a person saw someone who seemed like he or she could provide a life??a complete shell of coziness, one with a future, open horizons, the ability to reach one's lifelong dreams, etc. Those were some of the exterior sugarplums dancing in the romantically intoxicated head. Equally important were the far less tangible *internal* seductions. There seemed a deep emotional pull which involved, at its very heart, being able to infantilize, to merge with the other person completely, in a sense, to be carried around like a baby, to never lose contact, to never be emotionally or physically alone again, to be able to *free* oneself of the onerous burden of self, the isolation in the circular palisade of identity. None of this was ever verbalized or realized. And I can't guarantee that I've got it right. Not one bit. But that, it seemed, was at the heart of the tiny Libetian flame which preceded what the conscious mind went through ridiculous contortions to explain. (Libet, for those who missed the thread on his work, demonstrated the rise of a neural flicker which apparently signals that a decision has been made just a tad before what Gazzaniga calls the conscious "narrator" comes up with what Gazzaniga seems to have shown is an arbitrary and often off?base after?the?fact explanation for what our non?verbal decision maker has concluded shall be done.) The intense, burning and inexpressible attraction flares unbearably as long as mr. or ms. right continues to elude our grasp. Then finally the god or goddess of our infatuated fantasies softens and begins turning toward us, perhaps beginning to show that he or she wants us as much as we want him or her. Now the panic sets in. The walls of the infinite horizons in our external fantasies close in claustrophobically. And there is a more terrifying prospect which we can't define. Instead of running, as the figures in movie parodies do, joyfully into each others arms, we tend to run away. But why? Analysis indicated that this seemed to be a matter of boundaries, a matter of identity. First off, we have a need to guard our territory, to have our space. Oxytocin lowers this need in both male and female animals when it's time to breed. Whether the endogenous chemical will smother our reflex to snarl enough to allow a permanent coupling is pretty chancy. That may account for the panic about being smothered externally. But it looks as if something far more potent is going on internally. The desire to be rid of the boundaries of self and meld into another, to be babied and held again, is scarifying to the nth degree. And as we approach true intimacy, possibly lifelong intimacy, those barriers show signs of melting away. Where do I start and end? Why do the boundaries of the envelope which defines me keep flickering so ephemerally? Why does it seem as if they will disappear and utterly disempower me? These seem to be the unspoken questions underlying romantic panic. Let's stop here and see what we've got so far. Self is a boundary marker. Self also seems to be something which empowers us. Take that boundary away, and we lose something beyond important, something indispensable. But indispensable in ways we do not know. Perhaps it is, as some have hypothesized, the illusion of control. (Loss of control produces physical and perceptual meltdown?? including: a shrinkage of the hippocampus due to a reversal of that organ's usual production of new brain cells; a shutdown of the immune system; a degradation of health caused by chronic stress hormone overdose; and a blurring of raw sensory capacity and the ability to project likely future outcomes and find solutions to dilemmas. If you can believe the data and explanatory theory proposed in _The Lucifer Principle_ and other Bloom works, loss of control signals the organism that it is no longer a useful node in the neural net of a collective intelligence. Nodes which prove useless abort activation. This is how a neural network exercises intelligence to begin with. By shuttling resources *away* from elements whose approach is counter?productive under the circumstances of the moment and toward those whose approach is proving useful. Utility can be measured very simply by control or lack of it. Those with no control aren't cutting the mustard, they aren't carrying their weight. External signals tell them they're unneeded. Internal signals lash them even harder. As modules in a collective brain we are built, or so says the Bloom corpus of work, to disconnect when we have stumbled into counter? productivity. Were we not, the groups of which our ancestors were a part would never have had the collective smarts to survive in the sharkpool of snarling and cannibalistic rival groups.) Hmmm, so if Bloom is right, our loss of control could literally threaten us with dissolution (an equivalent to the lysis, the self? disintegration, which an exploring bacterium which has made the wrong choice and discovered a desert rather than a dessert undergoes). Skoyles makes an interesting observation in his _Odyssey_. Not only does he speculate that our illusion of conscious mastery??that after?the?fact explanation of an impulse which did *not* arise in our "rational" self??is confabulated to provide us with the illusion of control, but he says: "If our behaviour is organized by internal cues then we might lose control over them. Could not the troop in our head hand over our freedom to those socially dominant over us?" In wanting to merge with the other, we want, perhaps, to merge with mother. Who could possibly be more dominant? The merger we wish would be the end of us. No wonder we run away. Now things get even more confusing. Jim Brody's grandfather observations have led some members of the group to confess how much they realize at a certain age that they *are* their fathers and their mothers. Yet look how hard we work to differentiate ourselves from our parents, the very people we carry within us, the people whose emotional ingestion informs our personality! Look how hard we fight to erect a boundary of self against a central portion of who we really are. I used to watch with amusement as one woman I knew fought her father every time she saw him. He was the founder of the Conservative Party in her hometown. She subscribed to the left?leaning newsletter put out at the time by Irving Stone. When the two were in the same living room, it was a miracle their political debates didn't cause the ceiling plaster to cave in. I watched these Punch and Judy performances for ten or twenty years...until her father died. Then she *became* her father. She switched her voter registration from Republican to Democratic, joined half a dozen far right organizations, took on her father's profession, and even put the painting her father had cherished and kept above his bed over hers. For decades she'd fought, scrapped and shouted with all the righteous indignation she could muster to differentiate herself from who she really was. Since then, I've run into many cases of the same thing. Child fights parent vehemently during his or her teens, twenties and thirties. Then in his or her forties and fifties, he becomes his parent. This, as John Cougar Mellencamp once pointed out when he was carrying on his favorite sport, vivisecting a film, was what the script of Larry McMurtry's classic _Hud_ was all about. If the theory postulated above is true, then the woman I was observing needed to fight her dad to give herself the illusion that she was able to make a unique contribution to the social web, the neural net of which we're all a part, the collective learning machine, group brain, complex adaptive system, or whatever you want to call it. (If you're an individual selectionist, you'll prefer to call it a delusion.) I suspect that's
part of selfhood. Now to try to comprehend some more. Howard << Subj: Individuality Date: 98?03?24 16:48:17 EST From: msherw (Martha Sherwood) Individuality The debate over whether a particular person is a single personality?space in which he moves more or less continuously, making small adjustments with changing circumstances, or a series of discrete personalities with rather sharp transitions between them, reminds me of an old debate in community ecology, which has implications for the study of speciation as well. In community ecology, there are two schools of thought. The Braun?Blanquet school, which was developed based on data from Europe, where natural plant and animal communities are few and far between, and tend to occupy marginal environments, holds that ecological communities are discrete discontinuous units which can be modelled like species. This view is quite prevalent among oldstyle ecologists and forestry people here in Oregon, where the rugged topography, dramatic changes in rainfall over short distances, and high level of dominance by single tree species produce marked boundary effects: 20 miles of driving east on highway 126 will take you from alpine spruce forest with a bryophyte understory, to a dense mesic douglas fir forest with ericaceous understory, to an open pine forest with grasses, to a xeric landscape with scattered juniper trees, and finally to a nearly treeless sagebrush steppe. Homo sapiens of the 20th century variety is about the only species of plants or animals that spans the full range. In contrast, R. H. Whittaker, working in the eastern deciduous forest of the Blue Ridge mountains, concluded that species assorted across an environmental gradient independently. His environmental gradients were much more gradual, and the number of tree species considerably higher, so his data fit his theory nicely, but be darned if us folks out in Oregon could make his theory (which became the guiding one in American community ecology) fit our data as accurately. So, to return to the personality debate. Say you grew up in the social equivalent of the eastern deciduous forest, an internally diverse community where selection pressures were not intense and the differences between "species" small. Say your environment was on the whole benevolent and predictable, and what forays you made west on US route 20, for hundreds of miles, still put you in environments where you could thrive. Add that the inevitable personality transitions which occur with ageing were not abrubt and did not coincide with dramatic changes in your physical and social environment. Whittaker's community theory of personality probably fits you pretty well. OK, THIS KIND OF ENVIRONMENTAL MODEL FITS WITH THALES' MILETUS, WHICH HAD 80 COLONIES FROM EGYPT TO RUSSIA, COLONIES WHOSE INHABITANTS WERE PASSING THROUGH ON BUSINESS ALL THE TIME. OR THE EVEN RICHER ENVIRONMENT OF SOCRATES' ATHENS, THE MOST DIVERSE CITY OF THE WORLD, IN ALL PROBABILITY, AT THE TIME. IF WE CAN BELIEVE PLATO (AND SOUND ARGUMENTS HAVE BEEN MADE FOR AT LEAST THE ACCURATE PORTRAYAL OF THE FOLKS WITH WHOM HE SAID SOCRATES CONVERSED), THEN THIS PHILOSOPHER OF A HIGHLY PORTABLE ETHICS AND SENSE OF SELF DIALOGUED ON A NORMAL BASIS WITH VISITORS FROM DISTANT CITIES (THE COLONIES ALLIED TO ATHENS NOT ONLY REACHED EGYPT AND RUSSIA BUT FRANCE, SPAIN AND NORTH AFRICA). HENCE A PORTABLE SENSE OF SELF. THE KIND OF SELF YOU COULD KNOW BEST THROUGH INTROSPECTION AND "REASON." TO DESCRIBE MILETUS IN 600 BC OR ATHENS IN ROUGHLY 440 B.C. IN A MANNER MORE AKIN TO YOUR CONTINUOUS BUT GENTLY CHANGING ENVIRONMENT, THE HUNDREDS OF COLONIES WHICH FORMED PART OF THE GREEK INTERURBAN SKEIN SHARED BOTH A COMMON CULTURE AND CULTURAL UNIQUENESS PRESUMABLY CREATED BY THEIR DIFFERENT WAYS OF MAKING A LIVING, THEIR DIFFERENT ENVIRONMENTS, AND THE DIFFERENT POOLS OF INDIGENOUS CULTURE SURROUNDING THEM. (SINCE THERE WERE A GREAT MANY TRIBES ON THE MOVE IN EUROPE AND WESTERN ASIA, IT MUST HAVE BEEN RATHER DIFFICULT TO TELL WHO WAS INDIGENOUS AND WHO WAS NOT.) IN OTHER WORDS, YOU COULD TRAVEL FROM THE NORTH SHORE OF THE BLACK SEA TO LANDS NEAR THE ATLANTIC AND STILL FIND YOURSELF IN TOWNS WHICH PROVIDED YOU WITH A HOSPITABLE ENVIRONMENT. Imagine, on the other hand, that you grew up in the social equivalent of my Oregon landscape, a landscape equivalently diverse, but made up of patchwork communities whose boundaries were quite clear, where selection pressures were intense and the boundaries between "species" painfully obvious. MARTHA, YOUR PHRASE ABOUT SELECTION PRESSURES IS INTERESTING, AND REMINDS ME OF THE CULTURES HERMAN MELVILLE ENCOUNTERED IN THE SOUTH SEA AND DESCRIBED FICTIONALLY IN _TYPEE_ AND _OMOO_. HERE, TO MOVE FROM ONE VALLEY TO THE VALLEYS BEYOND THE PEAKS A THOUSAND YARDS OR LESS ON EITHER SIDE AMOUNTED TO AN ACT OF SUICIDE. BOUNDARIES BETWEEN TRIBES WERE ABSOLUTE. CROSS 'EM AND THE FOLKS WHO CALLED THE SWATCH OF LAND INTO WHICH YOU'D TRESPASSED HOME WOULD SLICE YOU TO BITS. NEW GUINEA HAS STAYED THAT WAY UNTIL RECENTLY, WHICH IS WHY THE PLACE HAS MORE UNRELATED LANGUAGES THAN ANY OTHER SPOT ON EARTH. IF YOU CAN'T TALK TO THE FOLKS NEXT DOOR WITHOUT BEING EVISCERATED, YOUR LANGUAGE HAS LITTLE OPPORTUNITY TO OSMOSE. BUT NOTHING COMES TO ME FROM MY MEMORY OF _TYPEE_, _OMOO_ OR ANY OF THE NUMEROUS ANTHROPOLOGICAL ACCOUNTS OF NEW GUINEAN CULTURES WHICH GIVES ME A NOTION OF WHAT THE INTERNAL SENSE OF SELF MUST HAVE BEEN. ONE THING IS OBVIOUS FROM THE ACCOUNTS OF MELVILLE, MARGARET MEAD, AND NUMEROUS OTHERS: THE PEOPLE WITH WHOM MEAD AND MELVILLE LIVED HAD A VIGOROUS SENSE OF INDIVIDUAL PERSONALITY. THE EXISTENCE OF INITIATION RITES ALSO INDICATES THAT NEW GUINEANS MAY WELL HAVE HAD THE EASILY DISSOLVABLE SENSE OF SELF I MENTIONED IN AN EARLIER POSTING ABOUT ROMANTIC FEAR. THE THING WHICH APPARENTLY DRIVES FOLKS AWAY FROM THEIR ROMANTIC OBJECT WHEN CONSUMMATION OF PERMANENT INTIMACY SEEMS FRIGHTENINGLY CLOSE AND GIVES A SENSE OF BEING SMOTHERED, OF BEING TRAPPED, OF BEING ON THE VERGE OF LOSING ONE'S SELF BOUNDARIES AND BEING SWALLOWED INTO THE OTHER PERSON REFLECTS AN INSECURE QUEASINESS ABOUT LOSS OF CONTROL WHICH ALSO EXISTS AMONG THE NEW GUINEANS. INITIATION RITES HANDLE A SITUATION WHICH COULD PRODUCE INTENSE ANXIETY. MOVING FROM CHILDHOOD TO ADULTHOOD DURING ADOLESCENCE, FOR EXAMPLE, STRIPS ONE OF THE SELF ONE USED TO HAVE. IT PEELS AWAY THE SENSE OF A CERTAIN ENVIRONMENT WITHIN WHICH ONE KNOWS HOW TO RESPOND SOCIALLY AND IN WHICH ONE CAN EASILY FORESEE FUTURE OUTCOMES. IT PLONKS ONE INTO A NEW SOCIAL CIRCUMSTANCE WITH NEW RULES TO WHICH ONE IS BY NO MEANS ACCUSTOMED. THIS COULD PRODUCE A PROFOUND SENSE OF HELPLESSNESS AND LOSS OF CONTROL. THE INITIATION RITE TRAINS THE INITIATE FOR HIS OR HER NEW IDENTITY, PUTS HIM OR HER THROUGH RIGORS WHICH, ACCORDING TO THE FINDINGS OF GROUP PSYCHOLOGISTS, SHOULD INDUCE A SENSE OF INVESTMENT AND DOGGED BELONGING IN THE NEW GROUP. AND THEN INTRODUCES THE INITIATE INTO HIS OR HER NEW COMMUNITY AS SOMEONE WITH AN ALREADY DEFINED STATUS. A DEFINED STATUS MEANS THAT THE INITIATE AND THOSE WITH WHOM HE OR SHE ACTS KNOW HOW TO RELATE TO EACH OTHER. NONE OF THE UNEASY HOSTILITY WHICH COMES ABOUT WHEN ONE THROWS A STRANGE CHICKEN INTO AN ESTABLISHED HIERARCHICAL GROUP AND IT NOT ONLY HAS TO FIGHT TO ESTABLISH WHO IT IS AND WHERE IT BELONGS ON THE HIERARCHICAL CHAIN, BUT THREATENS THE STABILITY OF STATUS OF EVERY FOWL WHO'S MADE HERSELF AT HOME IN THE PLACE, THUS PRODUCING FIGHTS GALORE. AN INITIATION RITE IS BOTH A BOUNDARY CROSSING MECHANISM AND A METHOD OF REMOVING AN OLD ENVELOPE OF SELF IDENTITY AND REPLACING IT WITH ANOTHER. IF NEW GUINEANS, TRAPPED IN THEIR TINY MICRO?ENVIRONMENTS AND UNABLE TO MIX COLLEGIALLY WITH FOLKS FROM MORE THAN A MILE AWAY, STILL NEED INITIATION RITES TO DEFINE LIFE's TRANSITIONS, IT WOULD TEND TO INDICATE THAT THE LOSS OF IDENTITY CAN BE AS SCARY TO THEM AS IT IS TO US. WHICH BRINGS ME TO THE OLD BOTTOM LINE AGAIN. IDENTITY IS A TOOL FOR ESTABLISHING A SENSE OF CONTROL AND A SENSE THAT ONE CAN HAVE SOME CERTAINTY IN PREDICTING ONE'S FUTURE. IT IS A MARK OF THE EXTENT TO WHICH WE ARE MODULES IN A NEURAL NET, A COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENCE. SHOULD WE LOSE THAT SENSE OF CERTAINTY, OUR BIOLOGY WOULD BEGIN OUR DISSOLUTION. WE WOULD BE THE FAILING NODES IN THE GROUP INTELLECT, THE ONES WHOSE LACK OF SUCCESS WOULD DICTATE OUR DISCONNECT FROM THE SOCIAL WEB AND OUR RADICAL LESSENING OF RESOURCE DEMAND FROM THE COMMUNITY. OUR SELF?DESTRUCT
MECHANISMS WOULD AID IN THE GROUP'S HANDLE ON ITS GREATER DESTINY. WE'RE
BACK TO THE SIMILARITY BETWEEN HUMANS AND BACTERIA. EACH BACTERIUM IS
A TEST MECHANISM FOR STRATEGIES AND THE PROBE OF NEW ENVIRONMENTAL POSSIBILITIES.
IF SHE COMES OUT ON TOP DUE TO THE APPROACH SHE'S TAKEN (INCLUDING THAT
IN DEALING WITH HER SISTERS), SHE WILL THRIVE??HELPED BOTH BY THE STRUCTURE
OF HER SOCIETY AND BY HER INTERNAL BIOLOGY. IF THE CHOICE SHE REPRESENTS
GOES AWRY, SHE WILL EXPERIENCE THE OPPOSITE FATE. IN HER SELF?SACRIFICE,
SHE WILL TEACH A LESSON TO THE GROUP OF WHICH SHE'S PART. SELF IS ONE
OF OUR TOOLS FOR A SENSE OF MASTERY AND PREDICTION. SHOULD WE LOSE IT,
SHOULD OUR TOOL PROVE NOT TO FIT OUR SOCIAL OR SITUATIONAL ENVIRONMENT,
THERE GOES OUR SENSE OF CONFIDENCE, THERE GOES OUR IMMUNE SYSTEM, AND
WE ARE PRONE TO DISSOLVE IN THAT SELF?DAMAGING STATE WE KNOW AS DESPAIR.
What forays you made east on route 126, in the course of a mile or two,
put you in environments where survival required rapid adaptation. Your
life history has been marked by unavoidable disruption: at the age of
12, your parents moved to a foreign country; at the age of 40, your
husband unilaterally divorced you and you suddenly found yourself single?handedly
raising three young children on a third of your accustomed income. (This
is not personal, neither is it hypothetical). Whittaker's community
theory probably doesn't work very well for you when dealing with such
a discontinuous social environment. There has been some discussion on
this list about whether there is a meta?intelligence, either external
or innate, which controls the transition between personalities/selves.
Lorraine at least chose to fence with me on the Nestorian debate, suggesting
that if Jesus Christ were both fully human and fully divine, but unaware
of his divinity (a point fully arguable from the Gospel texts, by the
way, since the phrase "son of God" is applied to other biblical
figures, such as Elijah) then everyone is potentially divine. Is it
possible that our hypothesized meta?intelligence, and what our ancestors
called God, are overlapping concepts, and that we all have this higher
level of "Godlike" consciousness, which most people access
only briefly in moments of stress when switching of paradigms is necessary?
I personally believe that some important aspects of God reside, literally,
in the neurological apparatus of every human being. I realize this is
awfully metaphysical, but, on the other hand, it doesn't postulate any
forces which couldn't arise from the physiological matrix that scientists
insist is the right model. Martha Sherwood Jocelyne Bachevalier, professor of neurobiology and anatomy, University of Texas Health Science Center, found that 6-month-old monkeys, their amygdalas lesioned four months before,6 "will not initiate social approach as young babies normally do to play together. And they also seem to have ritualistic behavior, like rocking. These behaviors remained when they became adults," she says. Bachevalier believes that the damaged amygdala robs the young animals of their ability to interpret the social world around them. "I have the feeling that these animals have a hard time interpreting facial expressions or any type of gestures the monkeys can have. Thus they react as trying to avoid interactions," she says. (Harvey Black. Amygdala's Inner Workings. The Scientist 15[19]:20, Oct. 1, 2001. Retrieved September 27, 2001, from the World Wide Web http://www.the-scientist.com/yr2001/oct/research2_011001.html) All this may fit into the emerging concepts of self I've been working on for the last decade or so. When we last left off in the exciting tale of Bloom's attempt to twist the self by its tail and get it to confess its secrets, the picture went something like this. The self is our social interface, the billboard we present to others. The self is also a social positioning device, a mapmaker that shows where we are in the social scheme of things, where we've come from, and where we are likely to be. Which means that when we lose key landmarks in our map of our world-a parent, a spouse, a job-and hence a future-or when we lose our memory and are left with no past, we are plunged into many an unpleasant state. That inner tumult is accompanied by a smashing, bashing, jumbling, and tumbling of our sense of self. Our self is even dependent on the daily map we make of goals, tasks, and rituals (like eating breakfast, lunch and dinner, not to mention getting up, getting dressed, going to work, and coming back home again). Which helps explain why a day without a clear sense of purpose or a grid of ritual-a Saturday with no plans, for example--can toss us into an emotional fog. Or why when deprived of emotionally satisfying terrain, we compulsively grab at a phony set of goals with the pathways that reach them conveniently preplotted-like compulsive shopping, compulsive eating, compulsive gambling, and/or compulsive drinking. Then there are the circuits of self outside the brain-the strange ways in which a disturbance in the limbic system or the enteric brain (yes, the gut) does not simply move the few inches or feet it would take to reach the portion of the brain in which the conscious mind is housed. No, agita doesn't have the courtesy to hustle down the quickest route to awareness and explain itself. Instead emotional upsets send us off to find some friend or bartender who can interpret our discomforts. We may go miles-or even across oceans and continents-to find a Delphic oracle or high-school chum willing to act as long-way-round messenger, delivering bulletins from, say, the limbic system to the right frontal cortex a mere finger's length away. And finally there are the implants of others inside of us-the crowd in the amphitheater of our mind before which we rehearse our thoughts and judge which we should confess out loud and how; and the imprint of others from key points in our growth, the seared images of intensely significant heroes and demons who've changed us emotionally and made us who we are. Those bone-deep imprints of personal gods are the foundation of our passions and of our sense of what it is to be alive and to achieve. They provide the essence of our soul-what I've been calling our passion points. Now back to the shriveled amygdala in the autistic. If Bachevalier and the following article are right, the amygdala provides us with many of the social cables essential to the four roles of self-billboard, mapmaker, passion point container, and recruiter of brain reflectors far outside the compass of our skulls. Does this mean that-lacking a social interface--autistics fail to have a sense of self? Could autistics fling themselves into repetitive rituals and artificial structures like math and music to satisfy the mapmaker in the brain when it's missing all the normal landmarks of a social terrain-when it cannot read the faces and emotional input of others? Could autistics jangled by emotion attempt to reconcile their agita with their consciousness via extracranial brainloops devoid of the input of other human beings? Howard The basic theme,
though, is that none of us are islands. We need each other. We need
each other desperately. Our need is the greatest gift we have to give.
We should stop hiding that..for at heart others are us and we are them.
Our most private, personal, passionate self is a product of the others
within us. We are born in a sea of others. It is a sea to which we must
return constantly. Without that sea of others we cannot breathe. Others
are the answer to who we are. They are the answer to our most potent
passions and to our most sacred sources of uniqueness--the passion points,
the fonts of personal fire we must feed to awake fully to our unique
possibilities. Finding the passion points in your self and liberating
those hidden in others is what makes self come to a fullness of life
few humans achieve. Passion Points: the Scientific Theory of Self and
Soul is the first book to explain why. It also gives a radically fresh
vison of how. Howard Bloom has been called "the next Stephen Hawking" and "the Albert Einstein, Krishnamurti, Buckminster Fuller, and Isaac Newton of the 21st Century." He is a visiting scholar at NYU, the founder of the International Paleopsychology Project, and a member of The American Psychological Society, The American Academy for The Advancement of Science, and The Human Behavior and Evolution Society. Bloom's books include The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History and Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind From the Big Bang to the 21st Century. He has used his theories of self to aid the careers of Michael Jackson, Prince, John Mellencamp, Bette Midler, Paul Simon, and Billy Joel, among others. Russell Kick has
written for the Village Voice, is the founder of www.altlit.com, and
is editor of You Are Being Lied To: The Disinformation Guide To Media
Distortion, Historical Whitewashes & Cultural Myths. Howard
_______________________________
In a message dated 98?03?24 18:49:29 EST, msherw writes: << each pregnancy results in inhibition of the husband's testosterone level, which never quite recovers, so that eventually he becomes completely impotent. Depending on his world view, he may embark on sexual adventures, rationalizing that his impotence is due to some flaw in his wife, or conclude that he is gay, or conclude that he is worthless as a man and retreat into the den with a fifth of Jack Daniels. His alpha wife, unless she is puritanical, is likely to cheat on him, mostly with alpha males she's sexually attracted to but socially repelled by. >> This would be a classic instance of the phenomenon discovered over the last decade among "monogamous" birds. DNA testing indicates that when a female bonds with a low status male, a significant proportion of her offspring are the result of couplings with males other than her "mate," despite the superficial appearance of absolute fidelity. The female uses her mate as a resource gatherer and protector, but goes elsewhere to find sperm. In other words, she plays around with higher status males on the side, thus giving some of her chicks stronger genes and a greater shot at survival. In addition, "wimps" tend to become either followers or eccentrics. Society as a complex adaptive system or collective intelligence needs both. The followers are necessary to harvest the fruits of whatever resource base the group lives off of . This is true among humans and bees, where resource collection is a cooperative matter. The value of a bulk of follower males in resource gathering is less obvious in chimps, but it's there. Male chimps patrol the territory off of whose resources the group lives. The more patrollers, the better and larger territory the group can seize and protect. Followers add heft, the equivalent of artillery and cannon fodder. However it's the dominant males who get to reproduce more often, even among monogamous birds. It's also the dominants who control an extremely important resource in a collective intelligence??attention. Among chimps, all eyes focus on the dominant male, whose choices and "personality" determine the "personality" of the group as a collective culture. This tendency of all to watch carefully and follow the lead of the alpha male is called formally an "attention structure." The data indicating the manners in which the attention structure manifests itself among humans is rich and well?proven (to the extent anything can be said to be proven). We follow the lead of the males or females on top. The elite. Dominants exist in a bacterial colony (where the top microbes would be those who send out chemotactic signals of attraction; and the wimps would be those who send out chemotactic signals of repulsion). Dominants are also important foci in a chimpanzee band, any other social mammalian, reptilian or crustacean group, and every human herd you examine (including egalitarian bands, where leadership is exercised in very subtle ways). Most important, alpha creatures play a key role in collective information processing. Dominants are those who've managed to "succeed"??to optimize resource acquisition and social networking. Since the attention of the group is focused on those whose strategies best fit the social and external environment, the group as a whole moves in an adaptive direction. Its wimps give up making decisions on their own (saving themselves the stresses of indecision) and follow a direction which has been proven to work well. When circumstances change dramatically, the dominant may lose his or her grip. The strategies that have served him or her so well may now be obsolete. For example among the baboons observed by Shirley Strum, when a garbage dump becomes available those who follow the "unconventional" males who've learned to utilize this resource become far better nourished, healthier, and more reproductively successful than those who continue to follow leaders who stick to what they know best??the tricks of gathering wild plants in the "natural" environment. Those males who've both mastered the art of garbage picking and that of avoiding human baboon?haters with rifles will do better than those who simply have recognize the signs that a juicy goody is hidden beneath the rubble. But males who've become expert in these two skills and are also good at weaving together the social web by acting as conciliators, making friends with the greatest number of females and babies, and cooperating in a productive and peaceful manner with other males, will do the best. To resort to the vocabulary of the complex dynamic systems model of collective intelligence, these males will be blessed by "utility sorters"??the endogenous adjusters of hormonal and neural operation which boost or lower perceptual acuity, confidence, health (by upping the functioning of the immune system), etc. All of this will add significantly to the attractive powers of the males who've mastered social, survival and resource strategies. Among other things, by optimizing levels of such hormones as testosterone and serotonin, the utility sorters will increase both the sexual and general social appeal of those who've got a grip on current realities. The utility sorters will work endocrinologically and psychologically to cause piloerection in creatures with fur??like apes, monkeys and ungulates??making them seem more magnificent. It will straighten up their body posture, adding further to the "positive impression" they give off. (This is not an anthropomorphization. In species in which males compete for position, winners are often the the males that can show the most magisterial and confident presence. One male will measure itself against the grandeur of a rival pacing parallel to it. If it judges itself inferior, it'll back away without a fight. The male that measures itself as the equal or possible superior of a rival may decide to duke it out in battle.) Recalibrated by the utility sorter (a concept with a strong relationship to Mike Waller's comparator genes), hormonal level will also tweak the output of pheromones in a male who's achieved control on all the dimensions I've mentioned. Martha, Lorraine and Jim Kohl have been discussing the impact this has on females??it brings them into heat and draws them in other ways as well. The "utility sorters" operate via those mechanisms known to us through experiments on learned helplessness and control. Maximal neuroendocrinological bonuses are generated within those who feel they have control and are able to predict their "futures" with a high degree of accuracy. Neuroendocrinological penalties hit those who lose the sense of control and the ability to predict their destiny. This, as I've mentioned in earlier postings, is true of a wide variety of social mammals and crustaceans. I'm not sure how it works among reptiles. Perhaps Gordon Burghardt or Neil Greenberg, both of whom study dominance in reptiles, know more about this than I do. Those whose strategies fit current circumstance will also benefit from "resource shifters"??exogenous aspects of the social system. In other words, such instinctual patterns of others as wimpdom, followership, subservience in the attention structure, the tendency to yield food, space and sexual privileges, etc., will rain a bounty upon he or she who's got things right. By following the dominants of the moment, even wimps will contribute to an adaptive alteration of the "group mind." As for those who handle wimp status by taking the eccentric path, they become antennae for the group, feeling out fresh possibilities. These are the creatures most likely to discover an "unorthodox" resource like a previously unknown flower patch (among bees), a meaty carcass or leakage of tree sap (among ants), a garbage dump or farm (among baboons), or a way to maximize the social interplay that produces profits from the sale of software (among human beings). Though few may succeed in coming up with something useful *and* mastering the social skills to exploit it, those wimps who do may rapidly graduate from wimpdom to dominance as they become the center of the attention structure, the new shapers of the mass mind. When two groups go up against each other in an "intergroup tournament" (a frequent occurrence in nature, including human nature), that which has incorporated the best strategies from its most successful members will win. So it will pay, if one is a wanderer with choices to make, to join the group which has the best "collective intelligence." Male baboons are just such wanderers. So are human beings in urban communities, who are able to choose from a wide variety of subcultures (and to choose, if they are lucky, between a job at Ben & Jerrys or Microsoft). Which brings us back to the subject of self. The sense of self will be powerfully influenced by sense of control and ability to make future predictions. It will also be shaped strongly by the group or groups with which an individual is affiliated (some by choice, others by birth). A low sense of self?esteem means the individual is: a) not handling things in a manner that keys well into the situation of the moment; b) is gonna be hit by the endogenous, neuroendocrinological penalties inflicted by the utility sorter; c) will have its status and its access to basics, luxuries, and companionship downshifted by the resource shifters; and d) is destined to be a wimp, a follower. However if the group within which the individual abides is succeeding mightily in intergroup competition, this will help the otherwise hapless individual substantially, giving him or her some of the gifts proffered by the utility sorters and resource shifters. Being a wimp when you've got things wrong and a dominant when you're right pays off for everyone. Or at least that's what the complex adaptive system theory of collective intelligence says. Now to see just how intelligent that theory really is. My alpha or wimp status is hanging on its success or failure. I wonder how my hormone level is doing right now and what my immune system is up to. Howard
a sense of control
over one's life and of affiliation-wanting to be and capable of being
with others-are two of the factors most highly correlated with happiness.
However the correlation is not overwhelmingly strong-it's .29. (Current
Directions in Psychological Science, 10/99) As for the projections
of past and future in our mental and emotional map, One key to understanding is the power of evolution in all this. Contrary to Richard Dawkins' views in The Selfish Gene, the evolution of life was based from the very beginning on massive teams. These teams went for beyond the string of genes in a single organism's center. They encompassed the genes of an entire group of organisms working together as if they were a superorganism, a being made of many parts--a being like you and me. These socially knit individuals had to be rapid learners and swift innovators to survive in a world where other social groups were out to swallow, replace, or obliterate them. To the quickest social learning networks went the spoils. So those who survived were more than individuals, they were parts of the brightest and fastest collective learning devices. Learning machines of this sort work with the five elements outlined in Global Brain: conformity enforcers; diversity generators; inner-judges; resource shifters; and intergroup tournaments. The underlying rule of most importance is the one proposed by Jesus of Nazareth: "To he who hath it shall be given. From who hath not even what he hath shall be taken away." The neural net is our closest simulation of a social learning machine. Neural nets work by feeding riches (electricity) and influence (increased numbers of connections) to elements which prove useful in solving the collective problems of the moment. Neural nets also shunt wealth and influence away from those whose contributions seem to be leading the group astray. How does a social learning machine judge whether its modules--individuals like you and me--are offering up what's needed or trying to saddle the group with irrelevancies? If we have control over our daily situation and over the collective enterprises embodied in our work life, we are contributing to the group's mastery of its environment. If we lose control over the basics of daily existence and can't find a job--a niche in the mass projects of our society--the approach we offer is clearly counterproductive. Inner judges invigorate those who have a grip and sink those who don't like a torpedoed ship. Others eagerly kiss up to those who seem to be on top of things. But they kiss off those who've lost their mastery. Self is not inward directed. It's a link to society. It apparently did not evolve to help us understand the strange things happening inside of us--our emotions, our digestion, or our heartrate. Bizarre inner sensations send us scuttling to others for interpretation. Self on its own is insecure about the quiverings which coexists with it inside of us. We need others to reassure us and give a name to what the self has sensed pulsing from our personal core. Self is a display, our interface with society. It seems to have come to be as a way of convincing others and our selves that we have control, whether we actually do or not. Self is also our badge of identity. It helps us mark ourselves as members of the subgroups and overgroups to which we belong. It helps us gain a sense of power by telling us and our friends what we're against. It's simultaneously a passport which says we conform to our subgroup's expectations, and a signal flag which says to our fellow group members that we're unique and have something special to contribute. The need to conform and simultaneously differentiate begins in childhood, when we try to find our niche in our family. We take on many of the family traits in an effort to belong. Yet we look for a unique role to fill, one different from those which may be gaining our brothers and sisters attention. We need attention too, and to get it we have to be not only good members of the family, but unique. If the first brother is conventional and obedient, the second will carve out a niche as a rebel (or so says Frank Sulloway, and I think he's right.) When we're with our friends, we dress and talk like them and avoid with horror the things which would make them stare at us as freaks. Yet we take on a unique role in the group--that of the leader, his or her sidekick, the clown, the loyal follower, or the klutz (see Freeman's book on human sociobiology). The strangest aspects of self are those inside of us. If we have a mastery over our tasks and key social relationships our sense of self is strong. If we lose the feeling of control--even for just a day or two--our sense of self may well dissolve in various forms of psychic pain. This book will cover both the outside role of self as a tie and an advertisement to those around us, and the inner role of self in producing pain or a pleasant sense of warmth, exhilaration, and mastery. It will be heavy
on theory--but theory written to throw light into the darkness deep
inside of us, whether we're scientists or simply normal human beings.
It will touch more briefly on ways to help yourself once you know what
self is all about. Yet brief as the bits of guidance are, each will
hopefully prove important to its readers' lives. Part of that self, as I've been trying to say, is a substructure that evades consciousness. It is the emperor made of the other implanted in our brain. But I digress. Here's the nub. The conscious self, I suspect, resides in short term memory. Hence it works on a system whose vital neurotransmitters include glutamine and dopamine. Glutamine excites neurons. It gives the neurons in the short term memory the ability to turn non-conscious neurons on-to trigger them to wakefulness and get them to do their stuff. Dopamine is the neurotransmitter of control. My previous hypotheses about the self have said that the illusion of control is something it desperately seeks to achieve. The self must seem in control in order to put out attraction signals to others. It needs the illusion (and often the actuality of control) to draw the positive emotional attention of others. It needs the reality of control to gain influence over others, to bend them, if only in a small way, to our will. To guide them, to heal them, to make them want us, to make them even love us, and to make them want to serve our needs or our passions and our aspirations-our short and long-term dreams and plans. Or even to get others to remain in intimate connection with us. To talk to us. To look upon us with a gleam of pleasure in their eyes. And perhaps even to see us as guides and leaders. The attention of others is oxygen to our soul. With it we thrive. Without it we shrivel and in extremes of being ignored-isolated and alone--we wish to die. The dopaminergic connections of the self and the short term memory are vital to our survival and to our connections to those we wish to love and who we want desperately to love and admire us. Dopaminergic connections are also vital to our connections to the larger society. The dopaminergic and glutamatergic connections of that shifting mass of neuronal assemblies we call our self needs its hormones of exuberant vitality and control to stay alive and to experience its moments of joy in the nest of others, lovers, friends, and family, who provide the nourishment without which we cannot stay fully alive. http://europe.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2001/americasbest/science.medicine/pro.pgrakic.html,
downloaded 8/21/01 Neuroscientist searching for keys to memory (CNN)
-- Working memory is one of the essential components that makes us human.
Whether you are performing a complex task such as playing Beethoven
on the piano or just looking up a phone number or driving a car, you
are drawing on your working memory. "Almost everything you do probably
has a working memory component to it," said Patricia Goldman-Rakic.
The neuroscientist is credited with providing the first blueprint of
this critical area of the human mind, nestled in the prefrontal cortex
of the brain. Working memory is something that most people take for
granted until they start losing it, due to the gradual aging process
or something more acute. "You might have trouble remembering where
you left your keys, what is the name of that person. Those are the issues,
the problems that pop up when your working memory system is deficient,"
Goldman-Rakic said. Her courage to delve into what scientists say is
the most complex part of the brain is providing insight into what drives
normal behavior as well as what causes disorders such as schizophrenia,
Parkinson's disease and Alzheimer's disease. "She took a risk by
starting to study something that there wasn't already a really firm
foundation she could build on," said Stephen Kosslyn, a psychologist
at Harvard University. "Most science is incremental. It's building
on what's been done before. Every once in a while someone does something
new and opens it up, and that was her." After she became involved
in her research, Goldman-Rakic said it dawned on her that "everyone
else was over there and I am over here and I'm pretty lonely."
'My heart began to race' Her pivotal discovery came in 1977 when she
found that the prefrontal cortex was not a mush of neurons as many had
assumed but modules of organized cells. "My heart began to race,"
Goldman-Rakic said, recalling the moment when she looked through the
microscope and realized that she had discovered something big. "I
kind of thought it was cool," she added, smiling. Since 1977, Goldman-Rakic
has worked with laboratory monkeys to understand the function of the
cells and neurons stored within the prefontal cortex modules. She discovered
that groups of cells are dedicated to specific memory tasks and that
by recording the activity of a particular cell, the action of a monkey
could be predicted. Her Yale University laboratory is studying the role
of a critical molecule, dopamine, that influences a number of brain
disorders, and it is testing compounds to see if they can reverse cognitive
deficits. Susan Sesack, a neuroscientist at the University of Pittsburgh,
is among the admirers of Goldman-Rakic's work. "This is one of
the strongest scientists in my field and perhaps one of the strongest
female scientists, period," Sesack said. "She's very fierce;
she's very competitive. So my guess is that, personally, she's given
up a great deal in order to be such a prominent scientist and to be
so dedicated." Goldman-Rakic, a native of Massachusetts, is one
of three sisters who all became scientists. She is married to Pasko
Rakic, who is also a distinguished brain researcher at Yale. They have
no children. The couple consider the all-consuming nature of their work
more of a privilege than a sacrifice, said Goldman-Rakic. "We always
felt we were fortunate really that we could do this," she said.
At 64, Goldman-Rakic is as dedicated as she was when she started out,
hopeful that she can continue to make breakthroughs beneficial to science.
"If anything could lead to a therapy, make a difference in the
lives of individuals with disease and their families and have a widespread
effect, well, that's a holy grail for a neuroscientist," she said.
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Goldman-Rakic, P.S. Working memory and the mind. Scientific American 111-117, 1992. Wilson, F.A.W.,
O Scalaidhe, S.P., Goldman-Rakic, P.S. Dissociation of object and spatial
processing domains in primate Friedman, H.R. and
Goldman-Rakic, P.S. Coactivation of prefrontal cortex and inferior parietal
cortex in working memory Williams, G.V. and
Goldman-Rakic, P.S. Modulation of memory fields by dopamine D1 receptors
in prefrontal cortex. Nature
Patricia Goldman-Rakic hb: well, ummm, yes and no. Why we have a self is a huge mystery in its own right. When you put your self on a diet, yet sneak a candybar in spite of your self, which self is doing what to whom? Who's the self that's forcing you to go on the diet? Who's the self being bullied into going along with the regimen? Do you mean to tell me you have two selves? Is "you" another self? If 32 college freshmen can fit into a phone booth, how many selves can fit into the head of one college sophomore? The Bloom theory of self is part of the Bloom Grand Unified Theory of Everything But the Kitchen Sink and Maybe That Too (soon to be upgraded to a new version, the Bloom Grand Unified Theory of Everything But the Kitchen Sink and Maybe That Three). It uses the fact that (1) our health, mood, and mind wither when we're not proving of value to friends, relatives, neighbors, and society (2) we wilt when we lose our sense of control over our affairs; and (3) that these self-destruct impulses help make us components of a larger social learning machine--a neural net style apparatus which gives the superorganism abilities beyond those of the most elaborate supercomputer. So what is new in this book? The idea that we carry a crowd of others around in our head. We need to fool them--and our selves (oi, that word again) into the notion that we are in control. This is not easy when you consider that the impulses for which our "selves" take credit appear somewhere in us a good third to half a second before they are announced to consciousness. Yet consciousness continually deceives us into thinking it made the decision to do or not do whatever it is we were just about to do anyway. Then there's the map-making aspect of self. I was forced to call the Bloom theory the Hippocampal Topographic Theory of Self because--well, I couldn't think of any plain English words to get the idea across. What was the idea? That our sense of self depends on a map of our social relationships, of the things we can count on to help us, the dangers that await us, our sense of our past, and of our feel for our future. Rip out a chunk of that map and we can quickly lose our sense of self--not to mention our sense of self-worth. If a parent dies, if we lose a girlfriend, if we think a few of our best friends are about to shun us for the rest of our lives, or if we're simply clamped into the solitary confinement imposed by illness or by Turkish prison authorities, our sense of self can go whiffling away on the breeze. The problem is that once we get it together again (it being our map of friends, things going for us, things going against us, past, and future), the moments of confusion tend to disappear from memory, neatly erased by that old fraud and perpetual showman, the self itself. So it takes a whole lot of close watching to catch the self playing its games. Meanwhile, when we ask our selves who we are, we think we're asking a question about something deep inside of us. Gotcha again, says the self. Turns out we're trying to figure out what group we fit into, what group will have us, and where we can expect a safe perch within that group. Humans in adolescence have to toss them selves out of their old nest--the parental home--and establish a sense that they are independent creatures. This goes back to the animal need to avoid incest and its genetic damages. But it doesn't make life easy. We sometimes struggle like blazes to distinguish our selves from our parents and immediate family. Then we suffer the misery of outcasts. This sorry state of things tends to continue making trouble for us in our late teens and twenties, when we're still not sure of where we belong or whether we belong at all. Then we find that most personal of all things--our selves--when we get married, get a job, and start settling in as solid members of a bunch of criss-crossing communities. A little weird, this. We don't find our selves inside our selves at all. We find our identity by plugging ourselves into external things called social groups. Not that even this is easy. The most important of the relationships which help us "find our selves" are those that begin with romance. The film-and-novel version of love is nowhere near the real thing. Fact of the matter is that we can hanker after the beauty of our dreams from a distance and do everything in our power to get near her, him, or what have you. But once we get real close, we have a terrible tendency to panic and run screaming. In men it's called "commitment phobia." For reasons which escape me, the fact that women go through the same thing seems to have gone unnoticed. But they do. This is not a gender thing, it's a human dilemma. The Bloom theory and data give the following explanation. Oh, my. Russ--it's now considerably later, 4:02 am to be precise, so I'm going to have to leave off here. _______________________________ What does it mean
when we seek our "true selves" and ask "who am I"?
Why do we often panic and run when someone we've loved from a distance
actually says that yes, he or she loves us too? What does self have
to do with our fear of being smothered, trapped, and overcome by what
should be sheer heaven to us-warmth and intimacy? The book will demonstrate
the artificiality of the sense of self. It will show we develop this
illusion of independence in adolescence, how we take it further in our
twenties, how in our late 20s and early thirties we solidify it by making
setting down new social roots. And why losing this fragile sense that
there is an independent us tosses us into confusion and can even make
us feel as if "we" have been vaporized--turned from a solid
someone into an ephemeral confusion of fog, mist, and confusion.
_______________________________
She discusses studies of high school students, bereaved people, Holocaust survivors, and adolescent girls who has been sexually abused. As she writes: "The ones who repressed their grief turned out to be considerably healthier than the strong emoters."
Funerals are designed to reknit our social map as rapidly as possible. Relatives swarm into town from miles around reweaving the ties that bind. We're given an artificial purpose-of-the-moment--getting the grand event together, making sure that everyone who counts has been invited, that all the casseroles are tasty, and that the corpse ends up in the coffin and not in one of the baking pans. Then comes the job of telling ourselves that "Daddy wouldn't have wanted to see me moping around like this. He would have wanted me to get on with life." If we listen to the wishes of a departed pop, we shove ourselves from reverse or neutral into forward and drive out of darkness toward the next sunrise. Unless, of course, we are deep-sixed by the cults of perpetual weepery. By these I mean the various self-help/and/or therapeutic groups which make recalling trauma the be and end all of all life--the central font of one's identity. These groups measure the value of a session by how many instances of abuse and loss you've been able to haul from the depths of memory, by how many wounds you've found some way of reopening, and ultimately by how many pints of tears you've cried. For examples, look into any of the movements which pushed healing the child within (usually by liberally salting it in lachrymal leakage) and "recovering" memories of sexual abuse from the 1980s onwards. Positive rituals get you reconnected and in control as rapidly as possible. Negative rituals put a premium on loss of control. Each puts pressures on the sense of self. Groups which emphasize bucking up and going about one's business can make the moments in which we are genuinely shaken seem disdainful and make inescapable pain a source of self-attack and shame. Worse, they can force us to repress almost all emotion for the sake of hiding even the slightest hint of weakness. Cultures of the lachrymose we've pretty much covered above. But each culture asks us to warp our "self" to fit its ideals. And each pays us off for doing so by giving us some of the most important things in life--goals, meaning, and a sense that we belong. Which brings it down to this--groups which insist that one must wail and moan confer benefits along with their disadvantages. Groups which order that we tough it out do a bit of crippling even as they urge us on to strength. In a universe where opposites are usually different faces of the very same thing, the best approach is not to go too far in either direction. Know your feelings. But practice self-discipline. Know your weaknesses. But also exercise your strengths. Shoot for the best but be ready to dodge the worst. Spot the obstacles in your path to overcome them, not to help them overcome you.
hb: could be. Does she give the names of any of the researchers involved? it would pay to track the studies down via Medline, PsychInfo (if your local university library makes it available to you), and Google to see what the studies have and haven't indicated. Anyway, it seems to me this supports your theory. If individual needs are subservient to the needs of the superorganism, then all of this internal focus on our emotions and psychological states is counterproductive. hb: I've seen people who allow their introspection to overwhelm them. The more they turn inward, the further away from others they become. It doesn't take more than a day or two for someone seemingly self-possessed to burn up the small store of earlier companionship each of us carries. Once that stock of social warmth is gone, we become positively afraid to try to make contact with others. That's when "to he who hath it shall be given and from he who hath not even what he hath shall be taken away" piles its curses on us. The more isolated we get the more afraid of contact we become. The more afraid of contact we become, the more isolated we get. rK: Those who can
suck it up and trudge through the hardships serve the hb: good point!!!!!!!!! rk: Thus, they are
"rewarded" with better psychological health. Sommers Does this seem like a fruitful avenue to explore?
The self is used
for both affiliation and differentiation. (the terms affiliation and
differentiation were provided by Ted Coons and appear in The Self Across
Psychology) Self is all about
connection. Even the attempt to differentiate, to disconnect, is not
an attempt to get out of the social mesh. It's a way of vying for a
new form of attention. Attraction and repulsion
play themselves out in the relationships between humans and even in
the palavers we carry out within our selves. We need to nuzzle our way
into a group, to feel hugged by a circle of others, warmed by their
closeness and fueled by their attention and energized by their hunger
for more of who we are. Yet once we're solidly held, we need to set
ourselves apart again, to mark a boundary of a territory that is uniquely
ours, to declare the independence of our own identity. We need affiliation.
And we need differentiation. We need to bathe in the glow of closeness
and to be braced by the cool breeze of separation. It's dance of attraction
and repulsion we can see in the very first quarks of cosmic history.
It's the way the universe uses us as feelers, as the probes of possibility
space. Our need for others gifts us with the thrust of solidarity. Our
need to be different forces us to explore, to find strange niches where
others haven't gone before. In this dance of exploration and retreat
we carry on the rhythm of a search device's sweeping beat. What I've noticed with friends in their late 20s is something else--an inability to commit to a relationship. Forget marriage, these folks can't even hold a going-steady or living together situation together. We could discuss the fears both males and females show in romantic relationships--the terror of losing that delicate illusion we call the self and melting back into a parent-child emotional trap with the person one merges with. But haven't these been a part of male-female relationships for a long time? Or are they unique to a culture which has finally put males and females on an equal setting. When females were cattle (as in Classical Greece), chattel, intellectual inferiors, or delicate porcelain icons, the conceptual cages surrounding femininity may well have acted as a barrier protecting men from the fear of dissolution into little boy emotions. The separation may also have protected women in a similar manner. The membrane of
individual selfhood is very thin and easily dissolved by the uncontrollable
emotions of intimacy. Howard Margot Sheehan, hbe-l, 4/19/00: Is that it? Is that really it? Maybe in some cases it is. The rest of the time it's a case of people being perfectly willing in theory to commit to _a_ relationship, but they don't want to commit to _this_ one. Not when there's a likelihood of a better one coming down the pike. hb: how does one
distinguish between choosiness and commitment phobia? Fear can very
easily wrap itself in rational disguise.
hb: sounds like a good idea. On some issues,
I may be an "individualist" hb: all of us are
both simultaneously. Without conformity society would not cohere. Because
our biology has been tailored by evolution to make us components in
the social machinery, we cannot ditch the basic manners in which we
conform. We use the language of our tribe, even when we are allegedly
rebelling. In terms I've learned from paleopsych member Ted Coons, we
need both affiliation and differentiation to survive. Even the most
rugged individualist manages to show his or her difference only in tiny
degrees. But this is the way learning machines work, through the simultaneous
operation of opposites. Conformity and individuality both must be present
simultaneously. Without conformity society falls apart and so do we.
Without individuality society freezes in its tracks and loses its adaptability. In a message dated
1/29/00 2:30:01 PM Eastern Standard Time, John Skoyles writes: hb: beautifully put. Technically, the
term of fusion-fission group living: fusing together and hb: so is human
culture and our illusion of individuality. we piece together an authentic
us by nopscotching between virtual choruses of others in our minds,
moving from a ciricle which seems to smother us to another whose embrace,
paradoxically, promises to liberate us. Then eventually we swing back
to the band which we escaped when we search for reattachment to our
roots. We also establish our identities by moving from groups which
reject us to others which aim to subvert their power--either subtly
through tricks of intellect and politics, or violently through revolution
or through outright war. The more groups we can dance between, the greater
is our freedom, our all-important autonomy. But if no group gives us
intimacy, freedom can be lonely in the extreme. js: Evolution did
not fix that we did in one way allowing people in different Date: 98?01?11
15:49:28 EST From: knobloch (Ferdo Knobloch) To: HowlBloom
--The greasers were the kids from lower class families who tended to wear leather jackets and put most of their energies into souping up a specific form of display device-the engines of their automobiles and their motorcycles. The bigger the engine and the greater the horsepower, the bigger its owner became. --The heads were middle class and upper middle class kids who had taken to the Bohemianism of the age (1970-1971)-hippiedom. Here status and display came from what drugs you'd taken, how cool your attitude, philosophy, and adventures were, how much close those adventures carried you to the iconic, counting-coup touchpoints of counterculture heroism, meaning you adhered to the strictness of a vegan diet or a macrobiotic menu and knew fine details only an inner circle could recite-like all the evils of sugar and all the values of sprouts. --The heads gained status from the number of things they could do that would outrage their parents. Many of these activities elicited screams like the following from an irate mom or dad: "Turn that god-damned noise off before I come down and bash your brains out. I don't know how you kids can call that screaming music." The third subculture, the preppies, were upper middle class and upper class kids who won points in just the opposite manner, by being the perfect sons and daughters every parent prays for. They played tennis brilliantly-and when they did so-they're tennis whites were immaculately clean and pressed. The tennis courts often belonged to mom and dad and were out in the humongous swatch of land that some referred to as a yard, others as an estate. The sons were top athletes at the games that elevated or depressed the local public or private high-school's collective soul-baseball, football, basketball, hockey, and even a smidgeon of soccer, which at that time was still a British affectation. AND the kids consistently came home with report cards full of As. Their teachers loved them, but might have been appalled at the cruelty of their snobbish snootiness…had they but opened their eyes to it. And their guidance counselors jockeyed to get them into Harvard, Princeton, and Yale. The guidance counselors of the heads prayed for mercy and pointed these altered-consciousness addicts toward Antioch, Oberlin, Swarthmore, and, at the very worst, Bard. But here's the point. Each kid was seeking an identity, asking with agony "who am I"? What does the question, "Who am I?" mean? It means what group do I belong to? What pre-scripted path in life is mine? Who is the hero-the athlete, tough guy, rebel, scientist, or rock star-who will give me my sense of me? Who will give me a role model that defines me? What group and pre-defined role will give me a home? In other words, the brain was open and seeking attachment just as it does with baby goslings when they hit their imprinting moments and focus on the nearest moving object as mom…then follow it around for the next year or so and finally, when their hormones spout, want a mate that looks like mom or a mom-substitute, like Konrad Lorenz and a basketball. My job, as the editor of a rock magazine, was to give them the role models they needed, the ones whose lives, values, aspirations, attitude, and music fit the opening of a mind that's hit imprinting hunger-a brain needing to reshape itself around a social model, a celebrity or even a role model like the one I'd fixed on at roughly the age of 12.5-dear old Albert Einstein. Why would kids have trouble identifying the emotions of others? Because their brains are going through changes filled with emotions and the images of others more than others' reality. These are brains seeking what in French would be called their emotional point d'appui-their grappling point-which goes back to that word identity. Adolescence is an imprinting period, one of the three-to-five major brainshifts in life that give us what I call our Passion Points. Remember, this is just a guess. But another fact fits in. During adolescence the brain is creating unity from a jumble. It is connecting cerebral organs that previously operated with a good deal of autonomy. It's yoking them to a tamer, a restrainer, and a maker of what we call personality-the pre-frontal cortex, the executive center and perhaps the ultimate cerebral creator of identity. Howard http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99992925
Teen angst rooted in busy brain 19:00 16 October 02 Exclusive from New
Scientist Print Edition Scientists believe they have found a cause of
adolescent angst. Nerve activity in the teenaged brain is so intense
that they find it hard to process basic information, researchers say,
rendering the teenagers emotionally and socially inept. Teens can fail
to see the impact of their actions (Image: PHOTONICA) Teens can fail
to see the impact of their actions (Image: PHOTONICA) Robert McGivern
and his team of neuroscientists at San Diego State University, US, found
that as children enter puberty, their ability to quickly recognise other
people's emotions plummets. What is more, this ability does not return
to normal until they are around 18 years old. McGivern reckons this
goes some way towards explaining why teenagers tend to find life so
unfair, because they cannot read social situations as efficiently as
others. Previous studies have shown that puberty is marked by sudden
increases in the connectivity of nerves in parts of the brain. In particular,
there is a lot of nerve activity in the prefrontal cortex. "This
plays an important role in the assessment of social relationships, as
well as planning and control of our social behaviour," says McGivern.
Western turmoil He and his team devised a study specifically to see
whether the prefrontal cortex's ability to function altered with age.
Nearly 300 people aged between 10 and 22 were shown images containing
faces or words, or a combination of the two. The researchers asked them
to describe the emotion expressed, such as angry, happy, sad or neutral.
The team found the speed at which people could identify emotions dropped
by up to 20 per cent at the age of 11. Reaction time gradually improved
for each subsequent year, but only returned to normal at 18. During
adolescence, social interactions become the dominant influence on our
behaviour, says McGivern. But at just the time teenagers are being exposed
to a greater variety of social situations, their brains are going through
a temporary "remodelling", he says. As a result, they can
find emotional situations more confusing, leading to the petulant, huffy
behaviour for which adolescents are notorious. But this may only be
true for Western cultures. Adolescents often play a less significant
role in these societies, and many have priorities very different from
their parents', leading to antagonism between them. This creates more
opportunity for confusion. "One would expect to observe a great
deal more emotional turmoil in such kids," he says. Journal reference:
Brain and Cognition (vol 50, p 173) Duncan Graham-Rowe In a message dated
2/4/01 7:49:42 AM Eastern Standard Time, rgj999 writes: No problem with
the sending forth my message; just recall who had this idea of humans
having the "story-using brain" (HHTSUB). Kathryn Morton's
term was story-telling animal as she described feelingfully how the
young human begins by telling stories as s/he develops language. But
humans do much more than tell, they also use, in the form of cultural
storylines (mores), personal storylines (acting out one's personal drama),
and gathering data (leaders are sometimes very quiet as they listen
to subordinates present material, but of course ultimately make decisions
which can be done nonverbally, raising only a finger not the voice),
One needs to figure out the rules of the game (how the story is supposed
to play out), one enjoys reading the book which is story-telling whether
fiction or technical, one acts out the drama of one's life. Joe Weiss,
San Francisco psychoanalyst, tells that we make our personal plans for
life; when one is constrained to comply with another's plan beyond the
developmentally appropriate time, then one is in distress. The therapist
who understands this and works with the patient play out his/her own
storyline, makes "proplan" interventions; on the other hand,
the therapist who steps unwittingly into the role of parent or other
constrainer, makes antiplan comments that ultimately do not help and
more likely hinder the patient's progress. Euthymia is being in charge
of your storyline, of deploying your SUB, of making use of those four
8.5 x 11 inch sheets of paper that William Calvin tells us our isocortex
would cover is flattened (compared to the chimp's one such sheet) despite
98.4% congruence of genome. Humans have the unusual capacity to channel
the unruly subcortically located emotions into the most interesting
stories. We saw the movie, Melena, last night that portrays a good example
of an adolescent boy channeling his testosterone surges into wonderful
dramas and ultimately an adult caring love for the object of his libidinous
fantasies who was persecu! ted for her beauty in World War II ravaged
Sicily. A few additional thoughts on a Sunday morning. BEst wishes,
Russ
------------------------------ We are tied to geography
more then we realize. It has to do with the hippocampus which is central
to your sense of control, reality, and the coherence of the internal
geography on which you depend for sanity. The hippocampus developed
as a smell brain, then was used to map out territory by early nocturnal
mammals who used smell to create their mental maps. The hippocampus
then became the structure which categorizes and places the bits of perceptual
input which we register and store in memory. It stores data by creating
a kind of mental map, a topography, a grid, one which makes everything
make sense and gives you a sense of self and belonging. hippocampus evolved
before common ancestor of birds and men (Natural History, 9/97: 56) If the neural circuits of the hippocampus [in cooperation with those elsewhere in the temporal] are generate internally the experience of some hidden essence between a snow covered area and one in the mid of summer, or a child and the adult of the child, it might be also able to generate one between other apparently physically different external entities. For instance, [to use an example of Plato] between different chairs -- an essence of chairness [its Platonic form], or between a group of people [their Englishness or Jewishness]. Once the brain gains the ability to spot hidden identities, continuities and more generally "essences", it gains the ability to experience abstractnesses as real as actual sensory things. This provides it with the threshold of spirituality. The brain can begin to experience an "essence" that hides behind all different individual instances of life so that each individual is felt to reflect and be part of some greater reality or existence of "life". The temporal lobe [including the hippocampus] could therefore enable us to do a perceptual sloughing, so that our while our senses experience one level of external reality -- its superficial skin -- we (due to the experiences provided the hippocampus) can "know" its true and deeper reality and nature. Such perceptual sloughing off of the skin of superficial awareness is at the heart of spirituality. Due to internal hippocampus generated experiences, we can know there is another reality -- deeper, truer reality to that given by our visual and other sense organs. Thus, we can know that all the people out there are part of a greater reality, that all the events happy and unhappy are part of a greater deeper story, and that even ourselves and separateness from others is a merely skin which hides within a deeper actuality -- spirit, God, or the transcendent. Fourth, the hippocampus is only one of several parts of the temporal lobe -- the other components such as the amygdalae should not be ignored. They closely work with the hippocampus. Early mammals had to discover a sense of a place as being haven or refuge, or a place of fear and predication. The brain upgraded and evolved special abilities to enable it know stress and calm, fear and love [the safety of mother's presence]. This set the scene for the possibility of later brains transcending not only the skin of perceptual reality but anxiety. If the brain could find a transcendence such that all people are felt to reflect a deeper essence, then the brain could find behind all events what it found in only one or a few. There could be two hidden reality "essences" linked to the negative and positive experiences enabled by the amygdala -- an "evil" [the word originally comes from "adversity"] that pervades reality, and a conflicting and opposite one of love. A brain thus that can transcend and strip off the skin of superficial differences not only can experience a unity in the world, but profound emotions animating the world -- a sense of loving God behind all things, and a sense of wickedness and cruelty the work of the Devil. Fifth, the transcendence the hippocampus enables for place and personal identity that let us experience continuity in spite of surface changes catches something in the nature of things. What it experiences as hidden constancies in fact objectively reflect some traceable aspect of the world -- places that change in the senses are the same by GEO or cartographical positioning. People may physically change but their brains remain much the same, and in particular their neural memories and skills are yoked, locked and evolve in them and the same changeable body. BUT nothing restricts such processes to bona fide objective realities. The brain may be tricked by culture, or it may go into an overdrive and falsely blur what should be kept separate. And, of course, culture may get smart and find ways -- what we call religion is largely made up of them -- to take advantage of such overdrive so our brains readily experience transcendent "essences" that do not objectively exist. That we have brains capable of experiencing God does not mean that God exists. John PS I now am off to catch a train so any reflections or replies will be get responses only late Sunday or Monday. >On 12/5, Howard circulated an article from the Star Ledger of Santa Clara, >California reporting the theories of the spirituality phrenologists, Rhawn >Joseph, Matthew Halper, Andrew Newberg and Eugene D'Aquili. In >preparation for my book on Spirit, Mind and Brain, I have read the >writings of all of these with dismay. All they do is refer in general >terms to amygdala and hippocampus and speak of sources of religion in the >brain. Since one can refer to amygdala and hippocampus with respect to >any instinctual process or affective experience, that type of reference >really throws no light on the spiritual experience. They do not have a >lot to say about the psychodynamics of spirituality nor about its >relationship to basic instincts and basic emotions. I don't think this >type of approach leads us anywhere. > > >Morty Ostow ------------------------------ At any given moment, the number of social structures and strategies used throughout the world amounts to just three or four. We scientific types manage to conceive of vast quantities of chaos and randomness. Our thoughts are saturated with the sense of infinite possibilities. From that sense, we derive such philosophies as neo-Darwinism, which utilizes the notion of mutation, a concept based on a toss of formless dice with an infinity of faces, a google plex of permutations and combinations. But that infinity of possibilities, that tumble of the formless, is OUR conception, not nature's. In reality, nature rigidly restricts her flock of forms. The number of actual cell types in humans should be 2100,000. But in reality, it's a mere 256 (Kauffman: 111). The number of personality determinants among five billion humans should be in the trillions. But according to Kevin MacDonald, it is more like five. (Kevin MacDonald. "Evolution, Culture, and the Five-Factor Model." Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, January 1998: 119-149.) Many are the possibilities of our imaginings. But in a universe of extreme interconnection, few are the realities. We imagine closed systems, yet each real system is constrained, at the very least, by gravity. Gravity and the photon flow yokes even the merest dust mote in the void to a billion suns, planets, galaxies, fellow motes, and even to the residue of the greatest chaos we yet know, the background radiation left by the Big Bang. One more quote from Kauffman: "Since Darwin we have come to believe that selection is the sole source of order in biology. Organisms, we have come to believe, are tinkered together contraptions, ad hoc marriages of design principles, chance, and necessity. I think this view is inadequate. Darwin did not know the power of self-organization. Indeed, we hardly glimpse that power ourselves. Such self-organization, from the origin of life to its coherent dynamics, must play an essential role in this history of life...we must rethink evolutionary theory. The natural history of life is some form of marriage between self-organization and selection." (p. 111) Let me toss in an additional bit of Bloomeanism: the natural scientific study of the cosmos reveals the generation of a corollary skein from a handful of initial principles on up to our futurity. Where no mote is an island and all is sociality, there is no infinity. The system settles down to a relative handful of possibilities. In a universe which began with attraction and repulsion, conformity enforcement and diversity generation, sociability uber alles. Howard Stuart Kauffman.
"What is life?: was Schrodinger right?" in Michael P. Murphy
and Luke A.J. O'Neill, editors. What is Life? The Next Fifty Years:
Speculations on the Future of biology. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1995. For the study concluding that personality descriptors reduce
to eleven, see: K. Stein, H. Markus, and R. Roeser. "The consensual
self and self-esteem in American adolescent girls and boys." Unpublished
manuscript, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, 1997. in middle eastern
rats who live underground and haven't used their eyes for "40 CR
million years", evolutionary pressure on the eyes has been relaxed.
the result is that protein in their eyes has show a "disturbing
tendency towards chaos" amino acids in their eyes are changing
four times as fast as in relatives like gerbils who use their eyes constantly.
(9/89, p. 20?22) random changes constantly threaten the stability of
organisms, but those organisms have policing mechanisms to prevent change.
substances in the body patrol gene sequences to prevent alteration and
repair damage (Microcosmos). in the mole's eye, the patrol mechanisms
have grown sloppy, as the body apparently redeploys its efforts to more
essential locations. 80b ------------------------------ In a message dated 98-09-27 09:44:46 EDT, fentress writes: Here is a starter. We have been working on a model designed to test flexible boundaries in action/cognition. The basic notion is that at low levels of activation, the participating systems are broadly and loosely defined. At this stage, different systems can interpenetrate: modules and are not tightly defined. As the systems become more strongly activated, higher-threshold inhibitory processes both focus the activation "within" a developing module, and block invasive actions from "competing" modules. STILL A BIT HARD TO GROCK, BUT I LIKE THE DANCE OF INTERACTION BETWEEN INHIBITORY AND EXCITATORY. VERY SIMILAR TO ATTRACTION/REPULSION AND THE BOOLEAN SYSTEMS I JUST ALLUDED TO IN SOME WAY. ALSO THE MULTIPLE-LIGAND, PARALLEL PROCESSING MOLECULE. YOU MIGHT GET A BRAIN-JAG BY READING THE KAUFFMANA ESSAY I KEEP REFERRING TO THESE DAYS. The system thus tightens its focus, and becomes more autonomous. LOOK AT ESHEL'S PHOTOS OF BACTERIAL COLONIES AND THE ACCOMPANYING TEXT FOR AN ILLUSTRATION OF TIGHTENING AND LOOSENING TO FIT CIRCUMSTANCE. THESE PICTURES OF MASS MICROBIAL MIND DOING ITS THINKING OUT LOUD HAVE EVERYTHING IN THE WORLD TO DO WITH THE TIGHTENING OF AUTHORITARIANISM OR INTROVERSION (I CAN SHOW THE TWO ARE RELATED) AND THE LOOSENING OF PLURALISM AND EXTROVERSION. The time story is that early activation and post-activation effects have warm up and decay times, respectively. LIKE THE OBSERVATIONS OVER THE LAST TEN YEARS THAT NEURONS ARE MULTIPLEXED AND CAN CARRY SEVERAL SIGNALS SIMULTANEOUSLY, THE IDEA OF WARM UP AND DECAY TIMES IS A NIFTY COMPLEXITY. IT'S WHAT IS PRESENT IN NEIL GREENBERG'S OBSERVATIONS ON TESTOSTERONE AND IS MISSING FROM, SAY, DIXSONS. READING BETWEEN THE LINES, YOU POINT TO SOMETHING ROBERT MOOG DISCOVERED IN ATTEMPTING TO INVENT THE MUSICAL SYNTHESIZER--THAT THE SHAPE OF THE TEMPORAL ENVELOPE DETERMINES THE UNIQUE QUALITY OF AN OBOE'S SOUND AS OPPOSED TO THAT OF A GUITAR. IN OTHER WORDS, WE HAVE TO WORRY NOT JUST ABOUT TWO DIMINENSIONAL MEASUREMENTS LIKE DIXSON'S SIMPLISTIC TESTOSTERONE LEVEL, OR THREE DIMENSIONAL BOUNDARIES, BUT ABOUT FOUR DIMENSIONAL BOUNDARIES. ALL ARE VITAL TO ENTITY, IDENTITY, AND TO SELF. This means that during early activation systems are relatively diffuse, then they focus, and then they become relatively diffuse again. VERY SIMILAR TO THE ATTENTIONAL PATTERN OF A WEB OR RECEPTORS ON A CELL MEMBRANE--LOOK FOR NOVELTY, SEIZE ON IT, FOCUS, GROW 'BORED' BECOME UNFOCUSSED, USE THE UNFOCUS TO REACH OUT FOR NEW NOVELTY, FIND IT, FOCUS AND CONTRACT AGAIN. NOT HOW THESE PHASE OF PERCEPTUAL CONTRACTION AND EXPANSION CORRESPOND TO MAINTENANCE AND DISPERSAL MODES AMONG THOSE MASS MINDS KNOWN AS SOCIAL GROUPS. Note that such dynamics appear to link to your ideas of lateral inhibition. THEY SURE AS HECK DO.The two key "additions" are: a) inhibition is modeled as having a higher threshold than excitation, THE ABSTRACT I POSTED A FEW DAYS AGO OF A NEURAL SYSTEM POSITS THAT AT SOME PERIODS INHIBITION CAN BE DOMINANT OVER EXCITATION AND AT OTHER PERIODS EXCITATION CAN BE ON TOP. THERE ARE ALSO MODES IN WHICH THE TWO BALANCE. YOU CAN SEE THIS AT WORK IN BACTERIAL COLONIES, NEUROCRANIAL NETS, PSYCHOLOGY, ANIMAL BEHAVIOR, AND HUMAN HISTORY. HANG ON, I SAID "AT SOME PERIODS." AMEND THAT TO READ "AT SOME PERIODS AND/OR SIMULTANEOUSLY AT COMPETING POINTS IN THE SYSTEM. and b) activation/inhibition have both warm-up and decay properties that can be titrated in time. What I like about this general scheme is that it allows one to deal, in time, with both the relatively global and local (non-specific/specific) properties of integrated action, within a common framework. I think the model works well across levels of organization, as well. Indeed, it provides a different view about hierarchies, as the relative "level" of any given functions (defined, let's say, in terms of their breadth vs. narrow focus) can shift. Top dog in one time/space can become bottom/dog (cat?) in another time/space. Further, the same participating "elements" (e.g. neurons) can form different collectives, preserving a dynamic modularity that has invariances in its overall performance, even though the details of its consitution vary. [We have not yet modeled differential warm-up and decay times for excitatory and inhibitory pathways...a big gap.] Now I am not sure this brief splash of words helps at all, Howard, but I would be DELIGHTED to pursue the matters with you, or others on your site. I truly believe that the whole issues of modularity (compartmentalization) of nature is a HUGE conceptual issue. And, by the way, I agree with you that we can take this issue and apply it not only to brains, etc., but also to human endeavors of the "highest" (in one sense!!) human activities. That is such an important goal that I want to be part of the quest. Luckily, I do not have much ego involvement in the particular solution, and truly believe that it will take a team of brains, ones that work with different perspectives, to hammer out a satisfying story. Thus....your site is a source of inspiration. YIPPEEEE. (By the way.....given the above, you are more than welcome to share any part of our chats more generally, if you wish. I write this to you not to hide from the crowd, but to see if I should perhaps try to find a better way of articulating this early stage of my thinking before burdening others with it.) This help? YUP, LET'S KEEP CARRYING IT FORWARD UNTIL IT'S SO CLEAR IN YOUR MIND THAT YOU CAN SAVOR IT MIGHTILY. howard _______________________________ We have discussed this before, and generally, I think, agreed that religion was adaptive in the EEA for fairly obvious reasons. It is interesting that a recent study(I'm sure there are others) indicate that this adaptivity still exists. A group of Christian(Xian) college students who had undergone additional spiritual conversion were studied. "When compared to a group of religious believers who had not experienced a change in their religiousness,the convert group did report more preconversion perceived stress, a greater sense of personl inadequacy and limitation before the conversion, greater pre?post improvement in sense of adequacy and competence, and a greater increase in post?conversion spiritual experiences....spiritual converts reported positive life tranformation and significant improvements in their sense of self, self esteem, self confidence, and self identity following the conversion experience." Women benefited more than men from the experience, and we have discussed the greater importance of religion to women. I give my usual caveat?because it gives sustenance doesn't mean it is Truth?that would be what you guys call the "naturalistic fallacy", no? All subjects were students in elementary psychology?hey, does that matter:?) I have a feeling that a conversion experience to a non?supernaturally based religion would give equal benefits, but have only anecdotal evidence from some of the ex?Catholics in my UU church. However, I doubt this was a viable option in the pre?scientific age, although I can quote skeptics from Hindu and Moslem cultures a millenium ago. Cheers, Irving Ref:Spiritual Conversion:
A Study of Religious Change Among College Students. Journ. for the Scientific
Study of Religion Vol. 37 pp 161?180.
<< hb: Makes sense. Here we have everything from Kant's early equivalent of mental modules to just-plain instinct to the manner in which the sensory cells are structured so to create boundaries and to zero in on vertical lines, horizontal lines, and movement, the manner in which the brain processes verb-thoughts in motor centers and thing-thoughts in visual centers. You've also got the patterns of thought, feeling, action and perception imposed on us to our delight or chagrin by dopaminergic, cholinergic, adrenergic, oxytocinergic, and (a system I've just begun to Verstehe) the P-system. In the wheels within wheels of our perceptual system, you also have the basic patterns of attraction and repulsion mapped out in the Bloomian view of the universe. As an extra bonus, evolution, having run out of ginzu knives, has tossed in whatever self-organizing whirlwinds of form are set aswirl by the brain's network properties, by similar self-organizing properties of social groups, by the ideologies and unverbalized patterns of perception those groups hammer into the morphology of our developing brain (see _Global Brain_, "Tools of Perception--The Construction of "Reality:" 50 Million Years Ago to 35,000 b.p., and "Reality is a Shared Hallucination"). Then there are the passing patterns the twists of group fashions, ideologies, loves, and hatred chisel into our perceptual systems later in life. And the phylogenetic patterns which keep cropping up--the perceptual modes we go into involuntarily in response to growing or shrinking opportunity, a shift of position in the dominance hierarchy, loss or gain of control (more about that later), etc. Finally we have Plato's three mental modules--the reason of the left cerebral hemisphere, the animals of the limbic system, and, hmmm, I forget his third at the moment, perhaps the integrative capacity of the right cerebral hemisphere. Lots of internal constraints to perception. Yet they are determined by the same organizing principles as the matter they perceive. They've also been shaped by 3.5 billion years of no-holds-barred grappling with empirical reality. So they may map externalities fairly well. Then again, they may not. John Edser would say that the proof is in the pudding. Or to be more precise: "ANY assumption
can be made, but not all assumptions
hb: time for revelation of ignorance. after ten years of tracking heuristics in an attempt to get a grip on it, I'm still empty handed (or empty-headed). What does it mean aside from trial and error? ac: Part of the
power of analogistic thinking--of metaphor, hb: ah, you are taking a literary analysis approach while I'm accustomed to following neurobiological and endocrinological threads. Can you explain a bit how metaphor, metonymy and synecdoche are built into our brain or our sensory wiring? Metaphor is something I've been tracking for quite a few decades--this time successfully. Seems it's largely a property of the visual system. And it is very powerful stuff indeed, a can-opener of understandings, the lever with which we move worlds via a tap of the mind. ac: Thus, by hb: isn't it possible that the reverse happened simultaneously? that the !kung learned from the animals--expanded their behavioral and perceptual repertoire by modeling their instinctual reactions after those of species each of which operates with a different strategy, a different set of implicit hypotheses? and that learning to model each within the human brain produced new sets of what John Skoyles calls mindware--the cultural patterning which literally rewires the way our brains are connected? ac: Of course we
are hb: nicely said. ac: Their criterion
is not truth but utility. hb: aha, one of my favorite questions--what makes for a compelling narrative? what animal instincts and evolved patterns does a narrative have to pull into high gear in order to enthrall us? why do the five Aristotelian plot elements work? I can tell you on some other occasion element by element which instincts each of the five tug at. This partially explains plot structure in terms of the ethologist's supernormal cues, outsized patterns which trigger reflex emotional responses in us. Music uses these cues, according to Ferdinand Knoblock. So, apparently, does narrative. ac:--not in correspondence hb: sounds like
you're referring here to strict logical procedures for arrival at truth--the
stuff the Greeks classified as Reason (which would mean it's been with
us for 2,500 years), and which recent studies have shown is a severely
limited way of comprehending things. To be more precise, the research
on the subject pinpoints the brain areas responsible for intuition and
demonstrates that when the left brain's lofty reason attempts to take
over the helm from intuition, everything goes haywire. The left brain
has delusions of a grandeur which it can't live up to. (Deciding advantageously
before knowing the advantageous strategy. Bechara A, Damasio H, Tranel
D, Damasio AR Science Which leads to a quick note. One puzzlement which came up in group discussions a year ago was what the self is. It seems to be a brain module (for want of a better term) which is highly verbal, is narrative oriented (as in Gazzaniga's notion of self as an after-the fact story concocter), and needs desperately to feel in control, even though Libet has shown that decisions the self thinks it is making are conceived in other areas of the brain and conveyed to the conscious self only after their implementation is underway. Why does the self so desperately need this illusion of control? Why when we lose it does our sense of self begin to dissolve and do we go into an emotional tail spin of considerable proportions? One partial answer is that the brain is a set of modules in perpetual competition. In social competition, the winner is he or she who can demonstrate two factors--control and the accretion of surplus. (This is a property of complex adaptive systems in general and is not limited to human brains.) The conscious self has evolved largely as a mediator in the workings of a social system which has gone far beyond the limits of the 50 to 150 individuals favored by pre-human primates. It is one of those pre-frontal mechanisms which allows us to operate with a large symbol set. The symbols we shuffle in the virtual space of conscious self are significant others who are currently absent, whom we have never met, or whom we imagine (as in the creatures of fiction and mythology). All of these allow us to navigate in a vast social web which has the properties of a self-organizing Kauffmanesque net. That net is a social group of anywhere from a few hundred thousand to several billion people, depending on how plugged in you are to global happenings. Social competition in particular demands the illusion of control. Those who don't have it give off repulsion signals, are shunned, and are tortured by isolation, rejection, the attacks visited on those at the bottom of the totem pole, and a host of internal self destruct mechanisms (for these, see The Lucifer Principle) including serious damage to the perceptual and immune systems. Hence the conscious self must retain an illusion of control to bluff others, retain social standing, *and* to retain a sense of mastery in the internal hierarchical battle between brain elements. ------------------------------ Last night's plans fell completely apart after I spoke (wrote) with you. I think the girlfriend is upset with me, and I can't say I'm happy with her either. Haven't spoken to her yet today, so I don't know what the real deal is. I guess I'll let you know. >> hb: being human
is a weird experience, ain't it? Everyone pretends the norm is smooth,
easy, and predictable. the various Bloom theories explain why they do
it. But they'd be better off admitting how bumpy and filled with holes
and peaks it really is, how utterly martian in a strange way. Then they
wouldn't feel so lost when things fall apart. Maybe there should be
training in schools for dealing with weirdness and "abrnormality."
Actually, one of the unwritten Bloom books??The Biopsycholoyg of Getting
A Grip: Control and the Mystery of Self??could be on the recommended
reading list. Cheers??Howard ac: I think hb: more words I've tried to grasp but have willow-whisped me. Fill me in on post-modernism and modernism, if you get the time. The satisfying
accounts of Verstehen tell us at least as much, Erklaren sounds more like pure left brain thinking, that cocky if a=b and b=c, then a=c stuff which has been shown to have more holes than a wormy swiss cheese, yet is still an incredibly powerful tool once we keep our eyes peeled for its limitations. Verstehen is what used to be called grokking. And Erklaren is closer to reason. Yet because it has a specifically visual element (I'd guess that klaren is clarity, light, vision), it is something a bit more. ac: I hope this helps.
hb: a good one, bill. how here's a bit to chew on. Future-projection begins in cyanobacteria, and may even start among creative webs of "smart molecules." Future-projection is the ability to infer from a handful of present and past clues what will occur next. The more successfully self-sustaining net of any kind can do this, the longer it's able to thread its way through threats of dissolution and survive. This is where the learning of bacteria comes in. Bacteria are able to predict a predator's movements with sufficient skill to avoid being grappled by flagella and dissolved in hungry vacuoles. They are able to predict a prey's flips and gyrations with sufficient accuracy to have a meal now and then. Bacteria do this on at least two levels. One is that of the individual bacterium. The other is that of the bacterial colony, which anticipates grand events too massive for the coping skills of the individual. This is similar to humans, whose minds produce one kind of future-imagining (well, actually many) in the privacy of the brain pan, and another in the inter-human skein of future-projections which are part of our cultural machinery. Tracking is a fascinating form of future projection to contemplate, and Val's analysis splices the use of tracks as symbol into the development of reading and symbolic expression in amazing ways. But let us not forget our single-celled foremothers. By the way, on the subject of learning and its relationship to the hippocampus' sense of space, and the sense of time which, I suspect, comes from a chorus between hippocampus and motor centers, see the September 1997 issue of Natural History, which has a dozen amazing articles on the subject. hb: I don't know of any research on tracking per se. But for the development of similar inferential abilities as they unfold in distinct stages during the first two years of life, see the aforementioned Natural History issue, particularly the article on theory of mind, which illustrates wonderfully the unfolding of a child's ability to predict future movements from those it has just seen and to move from focusing its attention where the eyes of others are directed to directing the eyes of others, then to bringing objects to its mother and making those the subject of collective attention and so on until it develops the inference that there is a mind like that of its own in another human. Also see the article on autism. Autistics seem horribly fixated on maintaining their sense of control via hippocampal mapping of externalities. Hence, they fixate on repetition, ritual, and other ways of marking and recreating a mental landscape--that is giving their experience hippocampal coordinates and pinning it in such a way as to receive sufficient dopaminergic reward to go on. (This interpretation is mine, and its possible errors should not be attributed to the author of the Natural History article, whom they might well horrify.) However the author does show how the autistic child fails to hop the gate which leads to theory of mind--the notion of a mind like his own in another. The autistic is thus deprived of a powerful future-generating tool, one essential to swimming the social seas. hb: You will never
believe this. Heck, I scarcely believe it. But there is an extensive
chapter on stalking and tracking in the Boy Scout Manual. I know because
I wrote it. hb: aha, we are converging. To The tricky part
of this is using the TOM complex on the signs. What I have
hb: how do we account for the bear's tracking skill? does it have a theory of mnd? is tracking a clue that it is aware of others as selves and hence may be self-aware? How many other predatory animals are able to track? do they have theories of mind? is tracking a more accurate measure of theory of mind than the ability to recognize in a mirror that a spot of paint above the eyes of that creature staring at you is a dab of guk on your own forehead? how about wiring up humans and a few animals during tracking to see what is doing which in their brains? if there's sufficient correspondence in the coordination of motor and hippocampal areas, we may be able to see the more primitive forms of our abstracting abilities at work. (anonymous)Of course,
it's but a step from tracking animals by following the signs to hb: a neat one, Bill. (anon) In these
stories something happens to "rupture" the "fabric"
of the hb: the introduction of mystery novels is clever and brain-teasing. cheers--Howard ------------------------------ Subj: Socio?geographic orientation Date: 99?06?25 12:11:15 EDT Howard, you added a brilliant PS. We live a socio?geographic existence. hb: John, it was more collaborative than you imagine. After years of studying the hippocampus, your description of its function in _Odyssey_ finally gave me the hook for understanding how the sense of self shatters and comes together again. Without that constant rubbing against others our interpersonal longitudinal and latitudinal lines get out of gyro and we feel lost without a 'fix' and a 'plot'. No doubt the endorphins of our brain are set up forcing us to be social junkies for the orientation such rubs give. hb: hmmm, never thought of that, but grooming jet the endorphins into action in chimps. Our social contacts may well do the same for us. However I suspect that the mind's clutch, its way of connecting internal to external world and gaining control, has more to do with things than do the endorphins. That clutch is the operation of dopamine in the striatum. Or at least so thepapers of Neil Greenberg seem to indicate. Having a sense of control is essential to the integrity of the hippocampal map which makes for a solid self. So is the sense that we can predict a future. All this is in the literature on learned helplessnes. Actually, that literature needs to be renamed. It teaches us what we need to NOT be helpless??namely a sense of control and a sense that we can predict our future. This may be why Seligman, who did so many of the learned helplessness studies, segued into the study of ptimism. js: Stop and the hell of existential withdrawal symptoms overcome us. js: But interpersonal rubs are not born equal: we want to rub on the way up with those on the way up ?? once we have longitude and latitude, we seek altitude hence the importance of those mountaineering goals. hb: spectacular point. We also need a sense of upward mobility. Downward mobility tears our mental map, sense of self, sense of control, and sense of a worthwhile future to pieces. js: But this need makes us vulnerable. Some facts about agoraphobia. Stand on a precipice and we feel giddy. We waver unsteady on our legs. We are disorientated between trusting our feet and all those unfamiliar and far sights. We feel anxious as if about to fall. Most people can cope û most people have brains that can twitch off the confusing input coming from the distant visual cues and rely just upon the cues given by our vestibular organs (inner gyros) and the proprioceptive sense of ground we feel under our feet. But some û those with real agoraphobia cannot. Research finds that compared to ordinary people agoraphobic cannot process vestibular and toe and soul proprioception information as to their position hb: extremely interesting, though i must admit it took three readings to understand it. Often I'm not as bright as I'd like to be. js: û the result is that they are forced to rely on visual clues û and hence get disorientated when these cannot be used ?? as on the top of buildings. Agoraphobia exists not only for physical orientation û we process different sources of cues about our place in the social?geography û social agrophobics exist. hb: John, this is a hot concept. and one on which many experiments could be based. js: Our sense of social orientation can come from inside û our inner gyros and sense of the ground below us û or the orientation provided from without. Here is a little conjecture, some people are deficit in using inner proprioceptive inputû they are the people we call æauthoritarianÆ.hb: and the people we say have an external locus of control and are frame dependent. they need a frame provided by an authority to get their latitudinal and longitudinal fix. But what is it they are missing? What is the social equivalent to proprioception? The sense of being loved left lingeringly in us by positive childhoods? I get the sense from genetic research like that in David Cohen's _Stranger In the Nest_ that whether or not we emerge from childhood with that inner centering, that sense that we are essentially loved and loveable, has more to do with genes than it does with the way we're nurtured. Kagan's work also indicates that whether we perceive our childhoods as loving or alienating has more to do with the perceptual apparatus we've acquired through genes and the nine months in which we develop within the marinade of our mother's hormones than it does with the "reality" of the way our parents treated us. So we may be speaking of an inner compass, an internal set of surveyors tools, with which some of us emerge from the womb and others don't. The percentage of those who do emerge with it is low, judging from research on those hardy children who come out of abusive childhoods upright, intact, and beaming. As I recall the figures, only about ten percent of children have this internal hardiness. Meanwhile how do we account for the introverts who nonetheless shun the boundaries of authority? Why do some of us struggle so hard to avoid being trapped in the webs others build for us? This should hook into _Global Brain's_ concept of the Faustian Introvert somehow, but I'm missing the connection. Kagan's introvert kids grow up without social skills, so are shunned. They are beneath the bottom of the social pyramid. Their only way to move to the top is to escape conventional social grids and build one of their own, then seduce others into it. OK, there's the connection. js: People who score high on authoritarianism feel threatened û they agree with statements such as æI will the world is a rotten log about to fall apartÆ. Why? Modern society does not give them the clear boundaries and conventions to orientate themselves to replace those they cannot provide them from within. Deficient in inner social gyros and a sense of footing in the interpersonal world, they grave the orientation given by truths, absolutes, rigid customs and what is ænormalÆ. So what happens to these people in the modern world in which everyone does their own thing in their own way? They put on intellectual blinkers and take every word in the Bible, Korean or whatever as the word of God, fixed and unalterable and celebrate their fundamentalism. Not surprisingly, they seek out those like Hitler that offer a rigid story of the world, tell them what is right and wrong, normal and abnormal, and give them a place and a role. They love the army and think everyone needs a period of ænational serviceÆ in it û and that the world would be better place if organised like one. hb: intersting. this parallels the arguments in another Global Brain chapter, that on Fundamentalists of the left and right. However you've made the connection between Fundamentalists and Faustian introverts much clearer to me. js: Lacking an inner grounding in themselves of who they are, they cannot draw upon the inner emotions that enable us to feel empathy with others (something that depends upon our sensing the suffering of others in terms of our own capacity for pain). hb: this is an interesting notion. can you give any studies or personal anecdotes which would back it? Thus authoritarian can be aggressive uninhibited by common feeling with others, so if given the chance they bully, build concentration camps and mass murder. hb: to be a devil's advocate, what about Milgram's data indicating that if the structure of authority takes us over and makes mass murder our impersonal job we are all capable of doing it well? This has been a fabulous mental workout. All thanks, John??Howard
Abstract OBJECTIVE:
Previous studies have reported vestibular dysfunction and impaired balance
in patients with agoraphobia. Vestibular dysfunction may lead to an
information processing strategy focusing on spatial stimuli from two
nonvestibular sensory channels, vision and proprioception. This nonvestibular
balance control strategy may in turn lead to discomfort in situations
involving inadequate visual or proprioceptive spatial cues (space and
motion discomfort). The objective of this study was to examine sensory
integration of spatial information in agoraphobia. Because of previous
findings that space and motion discomfort and vestibular dysfunction
are common in agoraphobia, we hypothesized that agoraphobics would use
a nonvestibular balance control strategy. METHOD: Using computerized
dynamic posturography, we examined balance performance in patients with
panic disorder with agoraphobia, uncomplicated panic disorder, nonpanic
anxiety disorders, and depression without anxiety, as well as healthy
subjects for comparison. The posturography procedure included six sensory
conditions in which visual and proprioceptive balance information was
manipulated experimentally by permutations of sway?referencing the support
surface or the visual surround or by having patients close their eyes.
RESULTS: The agoraphobics had impaired balance when proprioceptive balance
information was minimized by sway?referencing the support surface (p
< 0.02). This pattern, called surface dependence, tended to be more
pronounced in agoraphobics who reported space and motion discomfort,
including fear of heights or boats. CONCLUSION: Agoraphobics rely on
proprioceptive cues for maintenance of upright balance. This strategy
may lead to intolerance of situations characterized by unstable support.
On the level of human happiness, there are few more important questions than understanding the origins of this internal 'robustness'. Given that such robustness should always be an advantage, why is it not more common? Or does it have some disadvantages ?? and what might they be? hb: the robustly confident attract followers easily, but it would be interesting to see whether or not they make good leaders. Fidel Castro was one of these unbeatably resilient children, judging from the massive biography about him by Tad Szulc. He was so incredibly indestructible emotionally, in fact, that the army he'd organized in Mexico and equipped with vessels to invade Cuba was bogged down in a series of Keystone Cop level errors??letting out the troops nearly a mile away from the beaches of cuba, forcing the troops to wade paintfully through a tangle of underwater mangrove roots to reach the shore, being spotted by Battista's army, pinned down in sugar cane fields from which Battista's men drove Castro's cronies by burning down the cane in which they were hidden. As night fell Fidel was laying between two rows of sugar cane with only one comrade still behind him and two rifles left to the entire Revolutionary Brigade. Fear of detection forced Fidel and his single comrade to whisper, but that fact and the outrageous losses of day didn't deter Castro a bit. He spent the entire night speechifying in a whisper to his lone listener about the fact that the possession of a pair of weapons meant that the Revolution had been won, then outlining the glories of the new utopia this victory would bring. The flip side was that once he actually did achieve power, Castro's confidence in the unending powers of his own intelligence??an intelligence of substantial proportions??was so overweening that he tried to run the country based entirely on his own decisions, and in the process ran it into the ground. The value to those of use who are frequently insecure may well be that we thrash around in an attempt to find solutions to personal and professional problems, often thrashing our way into solutions which wouldn't occur to the Castos of the world. This is particularly true for outsiders so thoroughly excluded from conventional society that they have to build a new worldview with its own rules and create a coalition of friends around it in order to create the sense of social belonging existing norms deny them. Prince (of "the artist formerly known as" fame) was a loner of this kind, who during his adolescence and adult life built societies around himself, since he didn't fit into those convention presented to him. Then there's the heap of works claiming that the great creators generally come from the ranks of depressives and neurotics. Even a solid scientist like Melvin Konner has written quite a bit on this subject. Apparently to function effectively, a society needs both those whose sense of satisfaction is near absolute and those whose dissatisfaction drives them mercilessly. My guess would be that the satisfied act as anchors, the insecure but sheepish provide a reliable group of the followers on which a society depends to carry out its day to day maintenance functions, and the insecure and troubled but brave generate alternatives which may come in handy in the day when the resources or niche around which a society's success is based dry up or disappear. The army of nerds behind the spectacular success of the U.S. in the computerized 90s is an example of a society saved by its outcasts and they paths they've explored. js: There is a related question to robustness against abuse with the effects of drugs in the womb: prenatal exposure to alcohol or cocaine devastates some children leaving them retarded, but other children seem to escape their effects. Why? hb: good question. Add to it the fact that many foetuses seem to die before their mothers even know that they're pregnant, and the question arises as to what the difference is between foetuses that make it through the rigors of a normal womb and those which don't. All of us are among the survivors of what appear to be some fairly intense womb?wars. >Meanwhile how do we account for the introverts who nonetheless shun the >boundaries of authority? Why do some of us struggle so hard to avoid being >trapped in the webs others build for us? JRS: Parallel to socioagrophobia is socio?claustrophobia. Socio?agrophobics feel disorientated without external boundaries [they lack the inner grounding when they are absent]; socio?claustrophobics feel trapped by external boundaries ?? they have an inner grounding but they sense it is going to be overwhelmed by external boundaries ?? that they will lose elbow space. We want to orientated but we do not want to be imprisoned. Social interactions can impose a rigid framework ?? not landmarks for orientation but walls and restrictions. We want our own space. It would be worthwhile having some discussion over this double edged nature of social geography. hb: good point.This should hook into _Global >Brain's_ concept of the Faustian Introvert somehow, but I'm missing the >connection. Kagan's introvert kids grow up without social skills, so are >shunned. They are beneath the bottom of the social pyramid. Their only way >to move to the top is to escape conventional social grids and build one of >their own, then seduce others into it. OK, there's the connection.JRS: Yes, one reason for feeling restricted by the social framework is that your own grounding can lead you to create a better one. Socio?geographies get out?of?date or over rigid. People that reject them can work on creating new ones that displace them ?? a very Bloomian story.>js: People who score high on authoritarianism feel threatened û they agree with > statements such as æI will the world is a rotten log about to fall apartÆ. > Why? Modern society does not give them the clear boundaries and conventions > to orientate themselves to replace those they cannot provide them from > within. Deficient in inner social gyros and a sense of footing in the > interpersonal world, they grave the orientation given by truths, absolutes, > rigid customs and what is ænormalÆ. They > put on intellectual blinkers and take every word in the Bible, Korean or > whatever as the word of God, fixed and unalterable and celebrate their > fundamentalism. snip >Lacking an inner > grounding in themselves of who they are, they cannot draw upon the inner > emotions that enable us to feel empathy with others (something that depends > upon our sensing the suffering of others in terms of our own capacity for > pain). > >hb: this is an interesting notion. can you give any studies or personal >anecdotes which would back it?JRS: This is an area I am working upon. It seems to me we can experience others in two ways: open or gated. A rabbit can be our 'best friend' when a family pet, or something to be skinned and roasted for Sunday lunch. In the former, we open ourselves to its capacity for suffering and enjoyment, in the latter, we block such experiences, and treat it as a means and a thing hb: darned good point, one amplified greatly in Keith Thomas' _Man and the Natural World: A History of the Modern Sensibility_ (New York: Pantheon, 1983). ?? as a few ounces of tasty flesh. In everyday life, we must divide the world up into those entities with which we are open and those with which we are not. Traveling on the tube, passing people in the street and in check out ques in shops, I cannot be open to all the experiences I witness. I have to be selective least I cannot be open with those of my friends and family. It is a problem we each face. Most people compromise and accept a degree of openness to everyone. We learn to have a series of 'grey scales' about our involvement with the experiences we see in others. Thus we may treat the people in the street as strangers most of the time but occasionally not as when they have an accident and need our help. I suggest that authoritarians lack such intermediate grey states of involvement and so readily fail to experience strangers as human for example when they belong to a different social group. hb: to create a successful film or novel, one must set up an opposition between the characters we, the audience, are supposed to identify with, and another collection of individuals to whom we must feel a strong opposition. The folks we are supposed to dislike are "the bad guys." The fact that the bad guy/good guy theme is so basic in everything from tribal myth to television shows would tend to indicate that all of us not only have the capacity to draw the line you are talking about, but that we need to draw it. We apparently need to draw a line between "us" and "them." My books indicate that the larger our society, the more folks we identify as "us" and the fewer we toss into the category of those who can be skinned and plucked??"them." I wonder what other factors are involved in diminishing the sense of a "them" it's permissible to oppose. What social and individual factors encourage pluralism instead of ultra?nationalsm or violent ethnicism? js: Nonauthoritarian people having a wide range of ways of experiencing the humanity of others can experience others as both not of their group AND still be open to their ability to suffer. Sorry if this is a bit confused but this is an area in which I am trying to work out ideas. > Thus authoritarian can be aggressive uninhibited by common feeling > with others, so if given the chance they bully, build concentration camps > and mass murder. > >hb: to be a devil's advocate, what about Milgram's data indicating that if >the structure of authority takes us over and makes mass murder our impersonal >job we are all capable of doing it well? JRS: Milgram only showed that we are vulnerable to authority when it manipulates us in a way which is not part of our ordinary experience ?? with which we lack 'immunity'. We must remember Milgram exploited many advantages over his subjects. [i] For a start, part of Milgram's success in doing this was due to his anchoring the social situation initially as `helping in a learning experiment'. People readily go along with tasks if you ask them to do `a small favour'. As noted, we are brought up to help and be polite. But in agreeing to help another, we consent not only to their request but to their, not our, cuing what we do. Once in that situation it can be hard to get out. We feel obliged and committed. hb: which illustrates just how easily we can be recruited as murderers. You've outlined the buttons one must push, the cues one has to offer, to turn a person murderous. Fact is, the Adolf Hitler's and Slobodan Milosevic's of the world push these button and a great many more. They are masters at manipulating the supernormal cues which rouse us to rage. By the way, the question of why martyrs rouse our personal and collective passions to such heights has come up quite a few times in this group. We used the martyrs among the Armenian Serbs to motivate our own society to take on Milosevic, and Milosevic used Serbian martyrs to mobilize his armies for ethnic cleansing. The martyr is apparently some sort of supernormal stimulus, a supercue triggering an instinct for retribution, revenge, and that form of disguised murder we occasionally mistake for justice. I still wonder why and how the martyr cue works so effectively. js: [ii] Outside
their situation, it is easy to feel annoyed that Milgram's subjects
didn't tell the experimenter to go to hell and walk off. But they were
in it, unprepared and with their normal reactions caught off guard.
Go back in your own mind to when you have been caught out by `just a
small favour'. It is quite difficult to get out of. It is easy to think
what we would do when outside a situation, but once trapped, it can
be hard to escape. To break out, you must assertively face the person
and challenge their control of the situation. `Yes, I will do your experiments
?? but only those I think are reasonable and ethical, of which this
is not one'. Milgram's subjects had to make a stand. But most people
do not like challenging others. We would rather not get into the situation
of having to assert ourselves and say no ?? particularly with a person
of apparent authority.[iii] Milgram's subjects were caught in another
way. It seemed OK to the person running things and in authority that
they were electrocuting someone. They were not surrounded by signs saying
this is a trick ?? BEWARE! Their brains had to internally create their
own warning signs. And the entrapment developed so gradually. They were
not asked to give `450?volt, XXX' life killing shocks to start with
?? something that might have forced them to make a decision. The first
ones were 15?volt; slightly painful but safe. The obeying situation
had been set up inside them and only then gradually shifted. They had
been manipulated in ways with which they were not familiar and so easily
caught. From the comments his subjects made, it is clear, most would
never let themselves be put in that situation again. They had been entrapped
knew it and were not going to allow that a second time. _______________________________ A few months ago I floated the notion of "structure deprivation." The concept went something like this. Humans need structure in their lives-a clear geographic layout around whose familiar buildings, trees, doorways, and windows they can navigate with ease; a social structure in which they know who their friends and enemies are-and in whose mesh they know lies a supportive network of folks who love them, turn to them for advice, and who make themselves available when the humans in question are in a pickle; and a clear daily structure so they are able to get up in the morning with a sense of purpose, end their labors with a sense of achievement, and relax under predictable and socially approved circumstances (even if the society is one of outlaws and the form of relaxation is forbidden outside the criminal subculture). Structure provides predictability and control. With predictability and control, humans and other animals can hum along in a more-or-less merry manner. Without predictability and control, mammals of all kinds go into a tail spin-diving into depression, hopelessness, immune system suppression, glucocorticoid poisoning, cell death in the brain (specifically in the amygdala), perceptual fuzzing, crankiness and moroseness (both potent social repulsion signals), and all the other symptoms of learned helplessness. A key chemical to a positive feeling of control is dopamine, which helps the brain translate its notions into actions. Rob a human, a lab rat, a dog, or a rhesus monkey of control and the level of dopamine apparently plunges. Which means if you remove the structure of a person's life, you've got a big dopamine deficit. Dopamine deficit translates emotionally into misery-not the most pleasant feeling on the planet. One way to restore dopamine levels is presumably to find a simple, highly predictable pattern of action that replaces the social, geographic, daily, and long-term goal-related structures with another patterned and predictable manner of carrying out an action and finding a reward. Addictive behaviors are like fast-food equivalents of more useful forms of control…let's call them control lite. Eating is easy-at least if you live in a society where food is abundant and cheap. So is shopping-if you have the money or the credit cards. Then there's drinking-which in a land of liquor stores is easy as pie. Shooting up heroine is a bit harder, but provides a network of friends, a geographic landscape (one of dealers and shady neighborhoods), and a daily routine, too. So remove the real world-structures of family, intimate companions, useful work, or-as in India this last week-the entire town in which you've lived all your life, from its buildings and streets to virtually all your neighbors-and you've tossed people into a need for structure-substitutes, phony dopamine-producers. The following study, in which obese folks were found to have fewer dopamine receptors than humans of average weight, tends to support the structure-deprivation hypothesis. See what you think. Howard Scientists link dopamine brain receptor to obesity By Patricia Reaney LONDON, Feb 2, 2001 (Reuters) - Obese people may binge on food just as alcoholics or addicts abuse drink or drugs because of dopamine, a brain chemical that produces feelings of satisfaction and pleasure, scientists in the United States said on Friday. Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York have shown that obese people have fewer brain receptors for dopamine and may eat more to stimulate the pleasure circuits in the brain. The findings, reported in The Lancet medical journal, could offer a completely new approach to treating obesity, which affects up to a third of Americans and a growing number of people around the world. Weight reduction programmes, appetite suppressants and fat-blocker drugs have been used to combat obesity, but the Brookhaven scientists think targeting dopamine could be another line of attack. "The results from this study suggest that strategies aimed at improving dopamine function might be beneficial in the treatment of obese individuals," said Gene-Jack Wang, the lead scientist in the study. HIGHER BMI - FEWER DOPAMINE RECEPTORS The researchers suspected that because eating, like using addictive drugs, is a reinforcing behaviour that brings on feelings of pleasure, obese people might also have abnormalities in brain dopamine. They tested their theory on 10 extremely obese people and 10 others with a normal weight. Using sophisticated brain imaging, the researchers injected into each volunteer a chemical tag that binds to a dopamine receptor and then measured the signal from the tags. Strong signals indicated a high number of receptors. "We found that obese subjects have fewer dopamine receptors than control subjects. This is one of the major findings," Wang said in a telephone interview. "The use of food is a way to compensate for the deficiency." In the obese group they also noted an inverse correlation between body mass index (BMI) and dopamine receptors that wasn't evident in people with normal weight. BMI is a measure of weight relative to height. It is calculated by dividing a person's weight in kilograms by the square of their height in metres. A BMI of 18-25 is normal, 25-30 is overweight and more than 30 is obese. The obese people with the highest BMI had the fewest receptors. "It's possible that obese people have fewer dopamine receptors because their brains are trying to compensate for having chronically high dopamine levels, which are triggered by chronic overeating," said Wang. Alternatively, they could have had fewer dopamine receptors initially which would make them vulnerable to overeating and other addictive behaviours. Wang and his colleagues said methods to regulate dopamine, either through drugs, exercise or behaviour modification could help obese people control their urge to overeat. 11:31 02-01-01 Copyright 2001 Reuters Limited.
Is the diagnosis of ADHD legitimate? Children have always acted up. As Randolph Nesse points out in his work on evolutionary medicine, kids did not evolve to sit at a school desk six hours a day then to return to an empty house-a house made vacant and lonely by the economic necessity driving both father and mother to sustain careers. Is ADHD a placebo for parents who feel guilty about their inability to stay home with the kids? Were the hooligans whose destructive and violent antics were decried in the late 19th and early 20th century actually kids with ADHD? Or are today's ADHD-dosed hooligans kids who need more love and attention than a society competing in a cut-throat worldwide economy can bestow? Howard _______________________________ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Return to article page To print: Select File and then Print from your browser's menu. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- This story was printed from FindArticles.com, located at http://www.findarticles.com. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Science News April 8, 2000 Pushing the Mood Swings.(causes and treatments of manic depression) Author/s: Bruce Bower Social and psychological forces sway the course of manic depression Manic depression, also known as bipolar disorder, has a well-deserved reputation as a biologically based condition. Wayward brain chemicals and genes gone bad seem to bully people back and forth between weeks of moderate-to-intense euphoria and comparable spells of soul-deadening depression. A few weeks of relative calm often separate these disparate moods. Manic depression, however, may nurse a more sensitive side. Its intense mood swings increasingly appear to reflect a variety of social and psychological influences. Research finding such relationships raises hopes that new forms of psychotherapy may improve the treatment of bipolar disorder. "This illness wreaks havoc with what makes us most human--our attitudes, our relationships, how we feel about ourselves, and our ability to trust our judgments about those closest to us," remarks Thomas A. Wehr, a psychiatrist at the National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, Md. "Even though it's tough to go through, psychotherapy makes sense as a way to understand this condition." Until recently, treatment hopes largely rested on biological investigations. When tools for genetic analysis emerged around 15 years ago, making it possible to link signature pieces of DNA to specific illnesses, researchers quickly took aim at manic depression. Its tendency to run in families makes it a promising target. Although investigations have yet to identify genes that contribute to this mental condition, the search area has narrowed considerably. Whatever its biological basis, manic depression shows remarkable tenacity. Only a small minority of bipolar patients who improve on psychiatric medications avoids a return of mania or depression in the ensuing 5 years. As many as one-fifth of the estimated 3 million people in the United States who develop bipolar disorder eventually find the emotional ride intolerable and kill themselves. Treatment with lithium chloride or any of several other drugs helps to even out the emotional peaks and valleys for about two-thirds of people with bipolar disorder. Ironically, the leavening of intense feelings causes up to one-half of these drug responders to stop taking medication at some point. None longs to plunge back into depression's cold waters. Yet many crave mania's intoxicating pleasures, such as heightened creativity and a sense of unbridled potential. Repeated forays into both mania and depression, however, lay waste to marriages, friendships, and other social ties. Moreover, people with bipolar disorder frequently observe that the quality of their close relationships affects their moods. In many cases, whether or not medication helps, bipolar sufferers seek psychotherapy in hopes of gaining insight into their volatile lives. "Lithium ... makes psychotherapy possible," says psychologist Kay Redfield Jamison of Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions in Baltimore in An Unquiet Mind (1995, Alfred A. Knopf). "But, ineffably, psychotherapy heals." Jamison speaks about manic depression from an insider's perspective. She has personally struggled with the condition since adolescence. Investigators are now beginning to explore the impact of intimate relationships, social stress, individual styles of thinking, and psychotherapy on the course of bipolar disorder. People who suffer from bipolar disorder have perhaps more frequently oted the sensitivity of their moods to social influences than have mental-health clinicians. Still, case reports published decades ago described how stressful events and disturbed relationships sometimes trigger episodes of mania and depression. Over the past decade, several studies have found that bipolar patients released from psychiatric hospitals more often climb back on the emotional roller coaster if they encounter a lot of daily stress. Living with a hostile, critical family ranks high among such strains. In contrast, social circumstances that contribute to healing have received scant attention from researchers. A new investigation finds that people treated for an episode of mania or depression recover within about 8 months if they have supportive families and friends, reports psychologist Sheri L. Johnson of the University of Miami in Coral Gables. Bipolar patients who lack these helping hands have a recovery time of more than a year. However, the benefits of positive personal relationships fade in the face of the death of a loved one, job loss, or other major setbacks. These can extend recovery time to more than a year, Johnson and her colleagues reported in the November 1999 JOURNAL OF ABNORMAL PSYCHOLOGY. The cruel slap of an unexpected loss or growing friction in a cherished relationship usually signaled the imminent return of depression, but not mania, according to the study. Any of a variety of social, psychological, and biological mechanisms may provoke depression, the scientists theorize, but only a single brain network inspires mania. That network, involved in positive emotion and striving for rewards, responds to a narrow spectrum of external influences, they suggest. Johnson's team studied 59 adults diagnosed with bipolar disorder, most of whom entered the study during an episode of either mania or depression. Of that total, 36 took lithium or other prescribed medications, as they had before the trial. The findings held regardless of whether participants received drug treatment. A related investigation, published in the same journal issue, indicates that some people with manic depression prove more psychologically vulnerable to stressful events than others do. Psychologist Noreen A. Reilly-Harrington of Harvard Medical School in Boston and her coworkers used questionnaires to probe the thinking styles of 49 people who had previously been diagnosed with bipolar disorder, 97 individuals who had suffered from major depression (which recurs without periods of mania), and 23 who had never been diagnosed with a psychiatric condition. Most participants in these three groups weren't receiving any mental-health treatment. Over a 4-month period, depression increased only among those individuals with either bipolar disorder or major depression who displayed negative thinking styles and reported a death in the family, divorce, or other stressful experience. Negative thinkers blame themselves for personal misfortunes and consider themselves incompetent. Such a mix of negative thinking and stressful events also heralded rises in manic symptoms for volunteers with bipolar disorder, the researchers say. It's possible that in bipolar disorder, manic episodes serve as a psychological defense or counterpunch against a relentless propensity for sinking into depression, Reilly-Harrington and her colleagues propose. Psychoanalytically inclined clinicians have long articulated this position. Reilly-Harrington's group suggests that along with negative thinking and personal misfortunes, disruptions of a person's daily routines or sleep-wake pattern appear to promote mania. This view is supported by a 1998 study directed by psychologist Susan Malkoff-Schwartz of the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. Her group found that bipolar patients tended to become manic within about 2 months of having their daily routines rearranged, even temporarily. These alterations included air travel across several time zones and losing a full-time job without immediately starting another. In fact, evidence is building that efforts to initiate a steady pulse of daily activities and sleep can tame manic depression. Using a treatment dubbed interpersonal-and-social-rhythm therapy, psychologist Ellen Frank of the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and her co-workers are trying to dampen bipolar extremes by stabilizing social routines. In this approach, psychotherapists help bipolar patients recognize the interplay between their moods and the inevitable ups and downs of everyday existence. Counseling sessions also focus on how emotional turmoil in relationships can disrupt a person's daily routines and bring on a bout of mania or depression. Bipolar patients then learn to plan and hold to a daily routine, adhere to prescribed medication doses, and work on relationship problems as they arise. At the halfway point of a 2-year study, Frank's team has observed that this form of psychotherapy helps prevent recurrences of bipolar-disorder symptoms. Unexpectedly, though, they found that patients benefited most from staying in the same treatment program throughout the first year of the program, even if it wasn't interpersonal-and-social-rhythm therapy. The researchers randomly assigned 82 people diagnosed with bipolar disorder to regular sessions of either interpersonal-and-social-rhythm therapy or clinical management (consisting of advice and support from a concerned therapist) or to a 1-month period with one of those therapies followed by a switch to the other method for the remainder of the year. Participants who changed therapies retained the same therapist. Most patients who stayed in either type of therapy for 1 year managed to avoid return episodes of mania and depression, Frank's group reported in the November 1999 JOURNAL OF ABNORMAL PSYCHOLOGY. Those who switched from one therapy to another fared considerably worse. The ongoing study may eventually reveal specific benefits attributed to the social-rhythm treatment, Frank predicts. Still, even modest changes in the nature of psychotherapy appear to throw bipolar patients seriously off-kilter, she says. For example, a person who improves with clinical management and then changes to interpersonal-and-social-rhythm therapy abruptly confronts instructions to explore sensitive areas of conflict with loved ones. This may undercut the sense of stability achieved in support-oriented discussions that didn't probe emotional sore spots. Moreover, Frank notes, 25 bipolar volunteers who changed therapists but not treatments during the study--due to a clinician's maternity leave or departure from the clinic--maintained their initial improvement after the switch. "It appears that the consistency of routines, including the routine of the patient's psychosocial treatment, is a protective factor in the course of [bipolar] disorder," remark David J. Mildowitz of the University of Colorado at Boulder and Lauren B. Alloy of Temple University in Philadelphia. The two psychologists
wrote a comment on Frank's, Johnson's, and Reilly-Harrington's studies
in the same issue of the JOURNAL OF ABNORMAL PSYCHOLOGY. A dose of stability--in
the form of extended nightly bed rest and sleep--may help prevent mania
as well as a particularly severe form of bipolar illness, according
to Wehr. He and his colleagues prescribed 10 hours of nightly bed rest
in the dark for a 51-year-old man diagnosed with bipolar disorder. The
man had begun to shift from full-blown depression to relatively severe
mania every 6 to 8 weeks, with no calm period in between. Psychiatrists
refer to this speedy mood turnaround as rapid cycling. Lithium and other
medications had provided no relief. The man's condition dramatically
improved after several weeks of enforced night rest. During nearly 4
years of adhering to this routine, his sleeping pattern and mood largely
stabilized, Wehr's team reported 2 years ago. Staying up late night
after night under the glare of artificial lights, an unheard-of activity
until quite recently (SN: 9/25/99, p. 205), may worsen some forms of
bipolar illness, Wehr theorizes. Under these circumstances, the timing
of the body's sleep-wake cycle appears to come unhinged from the outside
world's daily cycle of light and darkness, he suggests. Swiss researchers
led by Anna Wirz-Justice of the Psychiatric University Clinic in Basel
had similar success in treating a 70-year-old bipolar woman with 10
hours of nightly bed rest for several months. An extremely rapid cycler,
going from severe depression to mania within 1 week, the woman had been
hospitalized on and off for 24 years. Along with prescribing the lengthy
night rest, the scientists administered 30 minutes of bright light to
the woman each morning after she awoke. Wirz-Justice's case report appeared
in the April 1999 BIOLOGICAL PSYCHIATRY. Although Wehr suspects that
sleep critically influences bipolar disorder, other features of his
intervention may help corral wild moods. Increased activity during the
day and consistent timing of behaviors, as well as the quiet, isolation,
and darkness at night, represent possible agents of improvement. Whether
or not larger studies carve out a place for sleep therapy, people with
bipolar disorder will continue to clamor for psychotherapy, Wehr and
others hold. "If nothing else, psychotherapy has an important role
in helping people to accept that they have this illness and need ongoing
treatment," Frank says. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
COPYRIGHT 2000 Science Service, Inc. in association with The Gale Group
and LookSmart. COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group Source: Brookhaven National Laboratory (http://www.bnl.gov) Date: Posted 1/17/2001 New Brookhaven Lab Study Shows How Ritalin Works UPTON, NY - New research on Ritalin, a drug prescribed to millions of American children each year with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), shows for the first time how the drug acts in the human brain and why it is so effective. The findings are reported in the January 15 issue of the Journal of Neuroscience by researchers from the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory. The publication can be found on the Web at http://www.jneurosci.org/cgi/content/full/20014896. Although Ritalin has been used for more than 40 years as a successful treatment for ADHD, minimal information has been gathered to date on exactly how the drug works in the brain, outside of limited animal studies. This latest study, on humans, indicates that Ritalin significantly increases levels of dopamine in the brain, thereby stimulating attention and motivational circuits that enhance one's ability to focus and complete tasks. "For the first time, we are seeing that Ritalin given at doses commonly used to treat children with ADHD significantly increases levels of dopamine in the brain," said psychiatrist Nora Volkow, head of the research team and Associate Laboratory Director for Life Sciences at Brookhaven Lab. "This combination - the ability to increase motivation and also directly activate circuits of attention - is likely to be key to the beneficial effects of Ritalin." Earlier animal and limited human studies had indicated that Ritalin interferes with the recycling of dopamine within the brain by blocking dopamine transporters. However, since these earlier studies involved injection of much higher doses of Ritalin, it was unclear whether the drug would increase extracellular dopamine at doses used therapeutically for children. Using a technique called positron emission tomography, or PET, researchers at Brookhaven's Center for Imaging and Neurosciences studied dopamine levels in 11 male subjects. In two sessions, the volunteers were each given a dose of Ritalin, calculated using their body weight to correspond to the doses given to children with ADHD, or a placebo. While their brains were scanned to record dopamine levels, the subjects were asked to rate their feeling of restlessness and "high." Meanwhile, physicians monitored each subject's blood pressure and heart rate. The results showed that brain dopamine levels increased significantly approximately 60 minutes following ingestion of the drug as compared to the placebo. "We now know that by increasing the levels of extracellular dopamine, you can activate these motivational circuits and make the tasks that children are performing seem much more exciting," said Volkow. "By raising that level of interest, you can significantly increase the ability of the child to focus on the task." Volkow added that Ritalin also works to suppress "background" firing of neurons not associated with task performance, allowing the brain to transmit a clearer signal. "Random activation of other cells can distract you, and children with ADHD are easily distracted," she said. "Ritalin suppresses that background firing and accentuates the specific activation, basically increasing the signal-to-noise ratio and increasing a child's ability to focus." Volkow is now planning a follow-up study of subjects suffering from ADHD. "We hypothesize that we will find that ADHD sufferers have decreased function of dopamine circuits and are therefore easily distracted," she said. "The effect of Ritalin should be to normalize these levels, allowing them to focus and pay attention." The findings also
have important implications for another research area - understanding
why Ritalin, which is chemically quite similar to highly addictive cocaine,
is not addictive when taken in pill form. One thing in common with all
drugs of abuse is that they increase dopamine levels. Since oral doses
of Ritalin do not produce a "high," the Brookhaven researchers
did not expect to see a significant increase in dopamine levels. Since
they did see a significant increase, Volkow postulates that another
factor is at work. "We've found that for drugs of abuse to be effective,
they must get into the brain very quickly, and for that reason, when
injected, Ritalin can become addictive," she said. "However,
when Ritalin is given in pill form it takes at least 60 minutes to raise
dopamine levels in the brain. So, it is the speed at which you increase
dopamine that appears to be a key element in the addiction process."
The study's authors also included Gene-Jack Wang, Laurence Maynard,
Samuel Gatley, Andrew Gifford, and Dinko Franceschi of Brookhaven's
Medical Department, and Joanna Fowler, Jean Logan, Madina Gerasimov,
and Yu-Shin Ding of Brookhaven's Chemistry Department. The research
was funded by DOE's Office of Energy Research and by the National Institute
on Drug Abuse, part of the National Institutes of Health. The U.S. Department
of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory creates and operates major
facilities available to university, industrial and government personnel
for basic and applied research in the physical, biomedical and environmental
sciences, and in selected energy technologies. The Laboratory is operated
by Brookhaven Science Associates, a not-for -profit research management
company, under contract with the U.S. Department of Energy. Note: This
story has been adapted from a news release issued by Brookhaven National
Laboratory for journalists and other members of the public. If you wish
to quote from any part of this story, please credit Brookhaven National
Laboratory as the original source. You may also wish to include the
following link in any citation: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2001/01/010117075041.htm
In a message dated 2/3/01 7:59:13 AM Eastern Standard Time, Inwmd5 writes:
Her ex has a very good job as a troubleshooter for computers in a large hi-tech company. According to my psychologist son, this is an excellent job for ADD's-they get a new problem every time, fix it, and leave the cleaning up to others. Doctors with this make very good emergency room physicians for simuilar reasons-variety and excitement. Incidentally, there is no marked hyperacticve component in the ex son-in-law or grandson. Cheers, Irving hb: who is he? he
sounds intriguing. the friend, that is, not Neal Cassidy. Another friend
and I have already seperately and jointly attempted to imbibe a few
of our characters with this fellow's mannerisms and expressions. So
it looks like I'll be over here a little more permanently than before,
at least for now as an experiment. My woman loves New York, though,
and I suppose the ultimate goal would be to be bi-coastal, for both
of us. I was just in New York for a week and meant to call you, but
the Monkeysuit stuff took over, along with the errands and running around
that preparing to move create. My cat had some problems I had to take
care of at the last minute, too, hb: yoiks. so I hope I'll see you next
time I'm in town. hb: yes, yes, yes. I will say this much, though. I
find I'm a calmer, more productive person here in LA than in New York,
hb: amazing. however I'm a funnier person in NY. hb: bizarre but intriguing.
The interaction with my friends stimulated parts of my brain long unused
in la-la land, but I couldn't get a damn thing done while I was there
and all my nervous habits got more pronounced. I guess the secret is
to be out here and take trips there to recharge my batteries. Or get
all those friends to move out here or visit, at least. It was a bittersweet
trip in a lot of ways. Surpisingly depressing because I didn't miss
it there as much as I thought I would, and because I was somewhat uncomfortable
there. Also, a lot of my favorite places and pastimes just don't exist
there anymore.
Transition tears
our maps apart. It destroys our ties to anchors, goals, a past, and
others. Ritual is the bridge over transition quests. It reknits us to
others and solidifies new goals. Why don't we have a ritual for morning?
For the leap across the gulf between sleep and wake? hb DB to IPP 5/25/98 Marriages break
up, friendships shatter, allies who have shed blood together become
enemies. It's a facultative strategy, this teaming up, it seems to me.
Change conditions and the team assembled to deal with the old situation
starts to break up. What surprises me is that people are suprised. I
sometimes think maybe people have an innate predisposition to see their
connections as eternal and objectively real. We allow what is socially acceptable into this spotlighted circus-like display area, and exclude what is considered despicable. If custom demands we demonstrate loyalty at a time when we feel the need to make a break with someone who's been close to us, we handle the disposal problem out of the limelight. Our strategies may be elaborate, but they can't be accepted into the self. A woman whose relationship with her husband has been changed by circumstance may indeed find that, for reasons she can't verbalize, the alliance no longer fits. To confess to herself that raw self-interest drives her to discard a bond which custom holds must be emotional and permanent would be more than a bit distressing. It would seriously shred her sense of social acceptability. So she buries her feelings and acts them out in such a way as to force a break up. She keeps her actions thoroughly suppressed--out of the bright lights of the circle of consciousness. To "her," to her conscious self, her actions do not exist. Prod her, and she will either not remember them or will deny them vehemently. But the various blades she uses to drive her husband away finally serve their purpose. He makes a move to escape further mutilation. She registers the self-defensive maneuver with great avidity. In fact, it is the very thing she needs to justify what she was trying to achieve. Using the husband's action as excuse, she can now claim that *he* precipitated the breakup. Now she can move to end the relationship consciously. In fact, not just consciously but self righteously. I've seen this in a number of cases. The elements of delusion involved have been noted as clinical commonplaces in divorce. Plus, I've used the "she" example because studies have shown a rather chilling fact. It's wives who generally decide to end a relationship. And these women generally begin their machinations in a seemingly methodical way roughly two years before the actual split. This doesn't mean they proceed consciously. One friend was kicked out of his house by a wife he dearly loved. It's been three years now since the separation. He's been faithful to his wife and has worked to repair the relationship all that time. But he was a bit surprised six months after he'd been evicted to find out that his wife was convinced that he hadn't been shoved out of the door. In his wife's opinion, it was he who had up and left her. It's always conceivable that he, too, was doing things which he has excluded from his circle of awareness. But other experiences in helping others are making it increasingly seem to me as if the selves we keep in darkness are often far larger and more powerful than those we spotlight consciously as us. By the way, one factor in this is society's lexicon of what is acceptable and what is not. Not to mention the social vocabulary for what exists. For example, in German there is the word schadenfreude--a joy in someone else's grief, pain, or loss. We probably have the feeling, but not the word. Without that tool to grip this emotion, it remains in the unlit realm outside the circle of awareness, outside the tiny spotlit stage we call our self. Which indicates
that one task of us knowledge explorers is to haul as many things of
this sort from the darkness as we can and give them names and concepts
with which we can handle them. Ours is the task of expanding the ring
of awareness, so more and more of what we live and are each day becomes
a part of that still-evolutionarily-embronic entity we call our rationality. Religion and revelations express them. Poetry and the 30 characters of a single author's novel let them out to play. But I suspect they're with us-with all of us-day to day. Heavens and hells,
gods and devils, they are endogenous as endorphins, but why? Howard All the patients were also taking antipsychotic medication. Schizophrenic patients describe voices that not only talk to them but talk about them, haranguing, insulting and sometimes provoking them to hurt themselves or to perform other actions. In many cases, the hallucinations become more intense when the patient is under stress. In a study of 200 patients with schizophrenia and other psychotic illnesses, Dr. David L. Copolov, director of the Mental Health Research Institute of Victoria in Melbourne, Australia, and his colleagues found that 74 percent said they heard voices more than once a day. More than 80 percent described the voices as "very real," rather than "dreamlike" or "imaginary," and 34 percent experienced the voices as coming from outside their heads (38 percent said they came from both inside and outside their heads and 28 percent from inside only). A small minority of the patients said the voices they heard were always or almost always supportive and positive in tone. But more than 70 percent described them as always or almost always negative. Dr. Hoffman of Yale said some of his research subjects heard voices intermittently, but others heard them continuously, the only respite coming when they slept. One patient who committed suicide described her voices as "a constant state of mental rape," Dr. Hoffman said. Nicole Gilbert, 37, received a diagnosis of schizophrenia in 1985. For years, she said, she could not read anything because her voices "would tell me that it was about me." "They would say things to try to make me believe that I was Jesus," she recalled. "Then they would torture me and say: `We're just joking. You're so stupid, how could you believe this?' " Ms. Gilbert, who is much recovered and is now a case manager at a mental health agency in California, said the voices seemed so real that she could not believe it when her friends told her she was hallucinating. The findings of studies using brain scanning techniques like positron emission tomography (PET) or functional magnetic resonance imaging (M.R.I.) underscore how persuasive auditory hallucinations are to those who experience them. When patients are hallucinating, areas of the brain involved with auditory perception, speech, emotion and memory show increased blood flow, indicating greater nerve cell activity. "These people are not just crazy; they're telling you what their brains are telling them," said Dr. David Silbersweig, an associate professor of psychiatry at Weill Medical College of Cornell University who has studied hallucinations with brain-imaging. Still, studies so far have come up with differing patterns of brain activation. For example, both Dr. Hoffman's group and a team led by Dr. Philip McGuire, a professor at the Institute of Psychiatry in London, found heightened activity in Broca's area, a region of the frontal lobe involved with speech perception and processing. But Broca's area was not identified in Dr. Silbersweig's research or in a study by Dr. Copolov that will be published soon. The precise areas of the brain's temporal and parietal lobes that show activity during hallucinations also differ from study to study. The discrepancies are difficult to interpret and reflect the imprecision of even advanced technology in capturing highly complex brain processes. The data are further clouded because the high costs of scans limit the size of most studies. But the disparity in the findings has also led to different theories about how hallucinations arise. Schizophrenia typically strikes in adolescence or early adulthood. Extensive research over the last few decades has indicated that the brains of people with the illness differ in significant ways from those of healthy people. Experts agree that schizophrenia stems from a combination of genetic predisposition and unknown environmental influences. What everyone who studies hallucinations agrees on is that schizophrenic patients misperceive signals generated inside the brain. But scientists are still debating what is being misinterpreted and how this occurs. Dr. Copolov, for example, suggests that the "voices" patients hear are really fragments of auditory memories "that come to consciousness fused with emotional content" and are then incorrectly evaluated as originating from an outside source. The fact that in some studies the hippocampus and other brain structures known to be involved in memory retrieval are active during hallucinations is consistent with this theory, Dr. Copolov said. Other researchers, including Dr. McGuire of the London institute, have argued that what is misperceived is internal speech - the running dialogue most people engage in while thinking. In schizophrenia, in this view, a mechanism that normally distinguishes between internal and external speech breaks down. Dr. Judith Ford, an associate professor of psychiatry at Stanford, and Dr. Daniel Mathalon, an assistant professor of psychiatry at Yale, have proposed that the brain's auditory cortex may play a role in this failure to identify speech correctly as internal or external. In studies, they recorded electrical activity in the auditory cortices of schizophrenic patients and healthy control subjects. In the control group, the auditory cortex showed a dampening of activity in response to internal speech, they found. But this inhibition was lacking in schizophrenic patients. "When you and I have these thoughts," Dr. Ford said, "we are inhibiting the response of our auditory cortex, saying, `Don't pay attention to this; it's me, talking.' But the schizophrenic patients do not inhibit the response the way normal healthy people do." Dr. Hoffman has a slightly different theory. In schizophrenia, he suggests, a loss of gray matter may intensify the link between Broca's area, involved in speech production, and Wernicke's area, responsible for speech perception. In the normal course of affairs, Dr. Hoffman said, Wernicke's area receives information from a variety of nearby brain areas and distant structures like Broca's. But in schizophrenic patients, who in imaging studies show a loss of gray matter in the superior temporal lobe containing Wernicke's, the signals sent from more local regions may be knocked out or greatly decreased. If so, Dr. Hoffman suggests, the signals coming from Broca's may then become more salient, bombarding Wernicke's area with internally generated words and phrases that are in some way interpreted by Wernicke's as external speech. Dr. Hoffman noted that transcranial magnetic stimulation applied to Wernicke's area appeared to suppress hallucinations in some schizophrenics. "My view is that in schizophrenia it is not just inner speech or an acoustic memory that is misinterpreted," Dr. Hoffman said. Instead, he said, patients "are actually having perceptual experiences that have the same clarity and vividness of external speech." Dr. Hoffman's research team is now using M.R.I. scanning with each research subject to determine which brain regions are active when the subject is hallucinating, and then delivering stimulation to that area. But whatever the research on magnetic stimulation yields, it is already helping some of the 25 percent of hallucinating patients whose voices are not stopped by antipsychotic drugs. "Just stimulating in a single site appears to have a significant impact," Dr. Hoffman said. Other experts call the results impressive. In the treatment, an electromagnetic coil shaped like a Figure 8 is held to the patient's head. The coil produces a quarter-size magnetic field that is then rapidly turned on and off, inducing an electrical field in the cerebral cortex's gray matter. Scientists do not know exactly how the treatment works, but they believe it dampens the reactivity of neurons, an effect that is then passed on to other connected brain regions. Unlike electroshock therapy, long used for severe depression, transcranial magnetic stimulation does not induce seizures at the levels used in the studies and has a far more selective effect on the brain. Nor does the treatment appear to have the serious side effects, like memory loss, of electroshock therapy. The most common side effect, Dr. Hoffman said, is mild contractions of the scalp that some patients find uncomfortable. Also, in contrast to electroshock, patients receiving the magnetic stimulation remain awake, unsedated, through it. John, who participated in Dr. Hoffman's research last summer, said the procedure did not bother him. "This thing kind of taps on your head every second and it's not intrusive," John said. He said his voices got "smaller and not as loud" after treatment, but they did not go away entirely, and the improvement lasted only six months. Without a full cure in sight, John said he has developing his own tactics for fighting the hallucinations, which persist despite the medications he takes. He talks back to them in his head, he said, and criticizes them when they criticize him. Between his own efforts and the treatments, John has made much progress. He now attends school, has his own apartment, goes out with friends and has a girlfriend. "I wanted to try to make the voices my friends, but I found out later that that is not realistic," John said. "I was kicked around by them for a long time. Now, if they start bothering me, I just kick them around instead." ------------------------------ Language marking instead of scent marking for temporal and other territories, but with the twist that our bodies believe what we tell them and become it? I can see that other words could cause wars. There are also
words in each language which are not directly translatable into English
and undoubtedly some other languages. An example is "saudade"
in Portuguese. It is usually translated as "homesickness"
or "nostalgia for" or "longing for", but in the
context of Portuguese it conveys a lyrical passion that is so much more
than the translations. It is a pivotal concept in that language. One
can only feel "saudades" in that language's In a message dated 98?06?22 12:00:17 EDT, rcurtis writes: Phew! This is heavy.I'm
reading just?published Brahms biogaphy. If anyone was close to the heartbeat
at the very dead center of music it was Brahms.One of the interesting
things (not just from an artistic viewpoint but from a neuropsychological
one) is that people like Brahms, Clara Schumann, and Liszt were so prodigious
musically that they could actually conduct conversations, read books,
etc. while they were performing fiendishly difficult pieces. Liszt actually
played Brahms's impossible first piano sonata on first sight, and kept
up a running commentary on its virtues and shortcomings as he played.
I cannot imagine the wiring that would enable someone to do this. RC
>> Good observations. Watched a special on Alexander Calder today.
He functioned in the same damned way. Motor?limbic system working independently,
bending wire constantly, his amygaloid?striatal?non?verbal brain, the
one with the implicit memes, pouring out a symphony of form, while his
hippocampal?prefrontal?cortical brain was carrying on in its own way,
perhaps putting a silent comprehension of the world into his fingers
too. His gentleness and sense of play. The ever?living childhood I mentioned
in a posting as a source of creativity yesterday. All working through
his fingers and motor?emotional complex autonomously. Howard Howard sez: >>and enemies.
Even in the bizarrely plot-structured tales of the South
hb: very, very interesting. In the hatreds between ethnic groups we see those which are closest working the hardest to exterminate the dopplegangers who have the audacity to manifest the aspect of cerebro-emotive possibility which the other has chosen to repress. we see the same thing among lovers and friends--hatreds bubble when two people are very much alike but come to mirror the unwanted side of the other. Ruth Benedict says that each culture is a personality type writ large. A personality is a delineated boundary, a small circle spotlighted within the bumps and grinds of the night which constantly occur in the brain. That which falls outside the boundary would be tagged by Jung as the Shadow--a nice name considering the way our unacknowledged selves skulk in darkness. Entertainment is exercise not only for the animals in the brain, but also for the hordes of selves we will not permit to share our circle of identity. All come alive in plot, then are tucked away in a resolution which packs them in a demonic toy chest. After the packing, the plot allows us to restore our coherence as a singularity rather than the multiplicity which through drama we have become. Become? No. Plot has allowed out of hiding the selves we have always been, but have strained day by day to deny. I enjoyed the analysis which follows when you first wrote it up in your paper, and still consider it extremely interesting. One of its main points is that as we move through our passages (word courtesy of Gail Sheehy), our successive phenotypic manifestations, we shift the spotlight from one implicit self to another. I think I told you about John Mellencamp's major insight on this process. It's similar to what I imagine Jim Brody's concept of grandfathers and sons contains. John used Hud, the Paul Newman film written by Larry McMurtry to make his point. He narrated a commentary as the movie went on. Young Hud, a rake in his 20s, drives around half drunk in a cadillac most of the day seeking thrills and seducing married beauties while his father works with fierce moral integrity back on the family cattle ranch. When the two, father and son, are together, they fight ferociously. Hoof and mouth disease strike the herd. The local authorities say that the cattle--which represent almost all the family's wealth--will have to be shot, put in a pit, and burned to prevent other ranchers from being dragged under by a spread of the disease. Hud's father is being asked to sacrifice himself for his neighbors. Hud has no patience with his father's determinism to carry out this self sacrifice. He wants to sneak the cattle out by night, pretend they are healthy, and sell them before the buyers can become aware of the illness. This, of course, would spread the disease like wildfire. What's important is not who wins (the father), but Mellencamp's comment. The father, he said, IS Hud--just Hud 20 years older. The son is fighting the self implicit in him, the self he will inevitably become. The father is figthing the person he was, but doing it with patience because he has seen himself go through Hud's phase. How did John know this? During the two years in which he'd put together the album he wrote around these observations, he was moving from rebellion against his dad to becoming the father he'd fought. One song which had already hinted at this upcoming transformation: "I fight authority, authority always wins./I fight authority, and I always come out grinnin'." The message John appended implicitly when he gave me his Hud lecture in human development: "I fight authority and authority's really me." Cheers--Howards
Even among flies,
says an article called "Fascinating Flirting" (Psychology
Today, 2/99, roughly last page), the males who land the greatest number
of females are those who can take over the center position in their
habitat. My guess is that occupying center stage, being the focus of
all eyes, and commanding the spotlight are human and ape ways of showing
the same ability. But while male flies grab the territory in the group's
bullseye, it's more than just land and its benefits which humans and
other social animals battle toward. The social animals who are showered
with the most sex, the most influence, and the most power are those
who take over the center of the group's attention space-they maneuver
their way into the core of their tribe's consciousness. In a message dated
6/16/00 10:00:53 PM Eastern Daylight Time, KIPSIVELY writes: hb: no, but it's
delightful to see you grasping and using the concepts in Lucifer as
if they were fine-line chisels and you were an accomplished sculptress. hb: yup, but some more than others. I can't imagine
even investing in a hb: it not only
justified it, but I did... go crazy, that is. ss: Yes, I fit your
definition of wicked. I have genuinely hurt other people "All visible
objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event- in the
living act, the undoubted deed- there, some unknown but still reasoning
thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning
hb: this is extremely useful. It brings us back to attraction and repulsion--the basic behaviors we share with quarks, electrons and protons, bacteria, and beasts of all kinds--a fractal algorithm, a basic rule of this universe. we're also back to music, something that began with enormous oscillations in the plasma of this universe shortly after the big bang, and that has held the cosmos in its thrall ever since. What is music? Oscillation. What is oscillation? The pinging and ponging from attraction to repulsion, from condensation to dispersal, from high pressure to low, from amplitude to infinitude, from bonding to hostility. We define ourselves
by the groups to which we belong. Our groups define themselves by the
groups they oppose. The music, art, and clothing of the groups we oppose
can disgust us. They hit us with emotions of rejection with particular
power when we feel an affinity to the outsider group whose loathing
is required by the group to which we belong. When we feel the unacceptable
rising within us we fend it off with disgust. We feel an attraction
toward something that would get us rejected, despised, in our group.
We sense the opposing groups tastes within us. Then we wall those hungers
off as "not us" by wrinkiling up our nose and vomiting them
from what we acknowledge as self. Howard
In a message dated 98?04?08 04:03:20 EDT, DB writes: That American pop music was based on black music did not stop black people from being lynched. hb replies??I suspect the two are related. southerners of the late 19th and early 20th century were obsessed with blacks, read their own negative emotions and inadmissible desires into them, soaked up black cultural influence (along the lines of the theory that adhering to an enemy provides a memetic coupling and transfer device), and attempted to demonstrate that they did not, indeed, have the impulses they projected into blacks by lynching the blacks themselves. one account illustrates persuasively how whites traditionally cruised black neighborhoods on weekends to pick up and either seduce or rape black women, then accused blacks of doing what the whites actually did and hung the innocent to assuage any guilt they might have...they hung men who had become containers for their own emotions, mere symbols in their eyes, in order to restore their sense of righteousness. Ah, projection...how wonderfully we exclude parts of ourselves from our official self yet carry them around seething within us. Martha raised the question of what elements are used to stigmatize out?groups. Some of the most popular in ancient Greek and Roman, middle?age European, 18th century French, etc. society were cannabilism or ritual murder and performance of sexually prohibited acts. I suspect that the sexual part is motivated by an old chimp and pre?chimp instinct. Those on one rungs of a dominance hierarchy attempt to suppress the sexuality of those on lower rungs. One other point: Martha's posting implied that racism is a device the capitalists use to suppress the masses on the bottom whose juices they are extracting. Yet all the research indicates that the greatest conflict, as I've indicated before, is between groups closest to each other on the hierarchical scale and thus competing for similar environmental niches. Or, to put it differently, those who've ensonced themselves in a position slightly higher than members of another group want to seal the opening after they've squeezed through it and attempt to keep the barrier between their group and that below them airtight. When a Frick, working for Andrew Carnegie, puts down a steel strike using an army of Pinkerton agents trained in the Civil War, I'd suspect there's much more rational thinking and sheer defense of property involved than the dark mob emotion involved in hatreds between groups which are shoulder to shoulder. For example, it's my impression that while both lower class and upper class whites cruised for black women on weekends, the lower class whites performed the lynchings while the upper class whites stayed home and sipped mint juleps. This is NOT because the lower class whites were dupes for some sort of upper? class conspiracy. It's related to yet another factor. Shirley Strum's work with baboons indicated that brutality was NOT a device used by dominant males. These, in their state of serotonin serenity, resolved things rather peacefully. Marginal baboons, on the other hand, had a tendency to get into quite a few physical battles. Human equivalent: bar room brawls take place among the lower classes; the Rockefellers and such show their superiority through the refinement of their behavior. If there's a general rule here, it may be that to stigmatize a group means to prevent its members from entering into reciprocal relationships with ``good'' people. Proper people can't marry, or hire, or be friends with, one of Them. Interesting point. This would be an example of the intergroup walls cited above. Generally that's a bad deal for Them. But not entering into reciprocal relationships with the surrounding society means you are not bound by its obligations. If the stigma to which a group is subject does not have as a consequence a serious deprivation of resources, then not being bound by a society's obligations can seem a genuine freedom, I think. hmm, another point worth mulling. someone on the list pointed out the other day, however, that blacks tend to avoid admitting to mental illness while whites can afford to flaunt it. was it you, David? in my decades of work in the black community??one fact which emerged strongly was that the rules for black and white popular culture were the reverse of each other. white teens needed pop stars who made a show of shedding wealth. black teens were attracted to pop stars who made a show of possessing wealth. white teens needed pop idols who deliberately flashed symbolic signs of lower class association. black teens needed pop idols who flaunted upper class status symbols. in other words, displays of "freedom" from the standards of society were not big in the black community...unless they were displays of methods for achieving the society's goals while bypassing its racial roadblocks, as did the hero of _Shaft_ and its imitators. (However I found that this film had as much appeal to white middle class kids as it did to blacks.) Now we've got rap and its gangsta image. In my experience and that of others who've spent time in the rap culture, it's the kids of buppies, successful middle and upper middle class blacks, who have an inordinate tendency to make this music and to idolize the black lower class just as white middle class kids like John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Mick Jagger, Bob Dylan (nee Zimmerman) and so many others did in the sixities and like middle class white folks like Allen Ginsberg did in the previous decade. Russell Simmons, one of the most successful entrepreneurs in rap, is the son of two high school principles who raised him in what they must have thought was a lower?class?influence?proof neighborhood in Queens, NY. Russell's younger brother is "Run" in the multi? platinum rap group Run?DMC. The parents didn't quite succeed. the need to romanticize a class so far below you that you could show your superiority by identifying with it and trying to "help" it was too strong. after all, it's far easier to feel superior among people who can't reach your status level than it is competing among peers or against those higher in rank. Which, in a funny way, brings us back to the quote Lorraine Rice gave us from Robin Walker. Robin spoke of a homeostatic mechanism keeping organisms in balance between over?satiety and under?satiety. The implication seemed to be that organisms seek a static balance point??an old idea which didn't turn out to be right when it was tested in the fifties and sixties. Instead, animals seek stimulus and a form of change which stays sufficiently within the boundaries of the familiar to be "controllable" yet which pushes the bounds enough to produce a "thrill." Culture watchers John Naisbett (commercial trend?measurer) and Sir Keith Thomas (social historian, Oxford University) have both observed the same phenomenon which appeared in Iroquois and 19th century British burial customs: that societies swing one way trying to escape what has tired them; then when sated on the newness of what they've sought, lunge in the other direction again to find a fresh thrill, another newness. Tom Wolfe has illuminated how the new things sought by alpha groups often have the cultural cache of the seemingly unattainable, incomprehensible, or forbidden, that which now tickles the jaded palate, which rouses neural receptors turned off by habuation. Naisbett points this out when he claims that first society seeks the declasse techno/industrial style (as did the modernists and Bauhausians of the early 20th century and the Soho, NY artists of the '70s and '80s), then turns to something woody and natural in rebellion. When what's hot ceases its tang, the cool comes in. Thomas demonstrates how urban societies imagine their paradises to be rural. Rural societies idealize city life. Hedonism consists in going for novel twists within a familiar framework. A homeostatic midpoint has proven to be a bore, even to chimpanzees. There have been plenty of groups burdened with social stigma who weren't poor. Agrarian societies seem to simply despise people who move around ?? actors, musicians, tinkers, gypsies. Yet I'm not sure being a wandering troubadour in medieval Europe was a worse deal than being a serf. Many societies have despised trade. But many of the despised traders have been wealthy. Many societies restrict the access of women to a wider life. Yet despite the opprobrium heaped on actresses in Restoration England, for instance, these women had more exciting and interesting lives than respectable wives. Hetaerae in ancient Athens could discuss philosophy with Pericles while respectable women were looked down on as domesticated animals with no intellect or opinion and were stuck at their looms. Thomas Hardy agrees with you: 1866 THE RUINED MAID by Thomas Hardy THE RUINED MAID
? 'O 'Melia, my dear, this does everything crown! Who could have supposed
I should meet you in Town? And whence such fair garments, such prosperi?ty?'?
'O didn't you know I'd been ruined?' said she. ? ?'You left us in tatters,
without shoes or socks, Tired of digging potatoes, and spudding up docks;
And now you've gay bracelets and bright feathers three!'? 'Yes: that's
how we dress when we're ruined,' said she. ? ?'At home in the barton
you said "thee" and "thou", And "thik oon",
and "theas oon", and "t'other"; but now Your talking
quite fits 'ee for high compa?ny!'? 'A polish is gained with one's ruin,'
said she. ? ?'Your hands were like paws then, your face blue and bleak,
But now I'm bewitched by your delicate cheek, And your little gloves
fit as on any la?dy!'? 'We never do work when we're ruined,' said she.
? ?'You used to call home?life a hag?ridden dream, And you'd sigh, and
you'd sock; but at present you seem To know not of megrims or melancho?ly!'?
'True. One's pretty lively when ruined,' said she. ? ?'I wish I had
feathers, a fine sweeping gown, And a delicate face, and could strut
about Town!'? 'My dear? a raw country girl, such as you be, Cannot quite
expect that. You ain't ruined,' said she. ? Westbourne Park Villas,
1866 >John Naisbitt,
Megatrends: Ten New Directions Transforming Our Tom Wolfe, Mau Mauing
the Flack Catchers
The brain, for whatever reason, is in continual flux. A healthy brain follows a chaotic pattern. That restlessness shows up in a constant roil of feeling and imaginings. Without a deliberate discipline of mind-cessation like meditation, we can not stop trying new, and even unwanted things out. We can not stop performing. In public the phantom audience in the mind is occasionally blanked out by a real audience. Self is theater, actor, audience, and a continual play, theater, theater all the way. Howard Al Cheyne 1/3/02 John: I thought you might enjoy reflecting on Burns' statement of this hypothesis. O wad some Pow'r
the giftie gie us Burns clearly notes the advantages of such a cognitive mirror but clearly views it as a desirable rather than an achieved state. I wonder if the
specular metaphor is appropriate, though. Reflecting on how one is perceived
by others certainly does not seem very mirror-like. I wonder if a more
dramaturgical metaphor might be preferable. It has the advantage of
incorporating, indeed emphasizing, action, whereas the mirror metaphor
suggests something more passive - a mere observation. I am reminded
of Merlin Donald's notion of the Mimic culture and hence, mimetic selves.
It was a culture of pure and explicit display, that is, as I recall,
this was presented as a purely enactive sensory-motor display in real
time and space. What subsequently became internalized was the display.
What is presumably missing in this internalization is the gestural reactive
displays of others. This would call for some sort of imaginative construction
I should think, but this does not entail anything like a mirroring process.
I am wondering if the greater challenge is not the construction of the
other rather than the mirror of the self. After all, we are always present
to ourselves in the same way whether there are others or not. We do
not see ourselves when we are acting with others any more than we do
when we are alone. What we see and attend to are the others' reactions.
We must coordinate those observations with how we feel our bodily selves
to be - without mirrors. From: (Alex Burns) To: Howard, The text is below, if you didn't get it the first time. Gallina hen sends her bokkiest boks. :) Alex >http://www.newscientist.com/features/features_22751.html > >Imagine you had cells in your brain that could read other people's minds. Well, you do. And they could be the key to human language, empathy, even society, says Alison Motluk > > >A CHILD watches her mother pick up a toy. The child smiles: Mum wants to play. A husband watches his wife pluck car keys from a table. He shivers: she really is leaving this time. A nurse watches a needle being jabbed into an elderly patient. She flinches: it must have hurt. > >How do these people know what the other person is thinking? How do they judge intentions and feelings, or assign goals or beliefs to the other? It sounds simple, but the child could just as easily have decided that Mum was leaving or the husband that his wife wanted to play. Yet they didn't. They knew. > >"Reading" the minds of others is something we take for granted. Yet philosophers, psychologists and neuroscientists alike have been baffled by our ability to anticipate other people's behaviour and empathise with their feelings. Now a team of Italian neurophysiologists may have stumbled on the key to this mystery. > >Vittorio Gallese, Giacomo Rizzolatti and their colleagues at the University of Parma have identified an entirely new class of neurons. These neurons are active when their owners perform a certain task, and in this respect are wholly unremarkable. But, more interestingly, the same neurons fire when their owner watches someone else perform that same task. The team has dubbed the novel nerve cells "mirror" neurons, because they seem to be firing in sympathy, reflecting or perhaps simulating the actions of others. > > >Illustration: Charlie Ward/Photography: Bettina Salomon > >Many neuroscientists are starting to think that in higher primates, including humans, these neurons play a pivotal role in understanding the intentions of others. "Mirror neurons may be one important part of the mosaic that explains our social abilities," says Gallese. Vilayanur Ramachandran of the University of California at San Diego goes further. He believes that mirror neurons will answer important questions about human evolution, language and culture--and may take us to the heart of what it means to be human. "I predict that mirror neurons will do for psychology what DNA did for biology," he says. "They will provide a unifying framework and help explain a host of mental abilities that have hitherto remained mysterious." > >Gallese and his colleagues didn't set out to find anything so radical when, in the early 1990s, they started recording the activity of neurons in a macaque's brain. They were tapping into the signals emitted from nerve cells in a part of the monkey's brain known as F5. This is part of a larger region called the premotor cortex, whose activity is linked to planning and making movements. Some years earlier, the same researchers had discovered that neurons in F5 fired when an animal performed certain goal-oriented motor tasks using its hands or mouth, such as picking things up, holding or biting them. > >They wanted to learn more about F5 neurons--how they responded to different objects with different shapes and sizes, for example. So they presented monkeys with things like raisins, slices of apple, paper clips, cubes and spheres. It wasn't long before they noticed something odd. As the monkey watched the experimenter's hand pick up the object and bring it close, a group of the F5 neurons leaped into action. But when the monkey looked at the same object lying on the tray, nothing happened. When it picked up the object, the same neurons fired again. Clearly their job wasn't just to recognise a particular object. > > >All fired up > > >The neurons turned out to be quite fussy about what they reacted to. Those that responded to an experimenter plucking a raisin from a tray, for instance, failed to react when the experimenter dug the same raisin out of a small well with his finger. Some neurons fired when the experimenter held a few slices of apple, but not when he placed the apples on the tray--other neurons fired for that. > >Most importantly, the very same action that made a neuron fire when a monkey performed it would almost always make that neuron fire if the monkey saw the experimenter doing the same thing. It soon became clear that the motor system in the brain is not limited to controlling movements. In some way it is also reading the actions of others. > >In 1998, Gallese gave a talk about mirror neurons at a meeting on the "Science of Consciousness" in Tucson, Arizona. Alvin Goldman, a philosopher from the University of Arizona, listened with interest. Afterwards, he approached Gallese and they spoke about the potential of these cells for reading the minds of others. "He wasn't familiar with the mind-reading literature in philosophy," says Goldman. > >Mind-reading, or theory of mind, is an ability that all healthy humans possess. We are particularly good at representing the specific mental states of others. These can be basic, such as seeing someone crying and understanding that they are sad, or realising that when someone is yelling and gesticulating wildly at you they may be angry and might even mean to harm you. But we intuitively understand more complex mental states too. When a mother loses a baby, other parents get lumps in their throats. When you hear that a colleague has been cheating on their spouse, you share the hurt and shame. > >A debate rages over whether other primates, such as chimps, can understand other minds, even in the simplest ways. And even in humans, while almost everybody agrees that some measure of mind-reading goes on, there is little agreement on how it happens. One theory, sometimes called "theory theory", holds that people build up common-sense hypotheses to explain why other people do what they do. Like physicists using rules and laws to explain observable phenomena, we all use our experiences to develop a set of explanatory laws for others' behaviour. > >Another dominant theory, championed mainly by philosophers like Goldman, is known as simulation theory. It's based on the idea that people understand what is going through the minds of others by mentally mimicking what the other is thinking, feeling or doing--in essence, putting themselves in the other's shoes. The discovery of mirror neurons backs up this theory nicely. > > > > > >Monkey see, monkey do: the same cells that fire when an action is performed also spring into life when that action is observed. could this mutual understanding underlie empathy and language? > >As the suspicion grew that these neurons might have something to do with the complexities of mind-reading, the burning question became whether human brains had mirror neurons too. But finding out wasn't easy--humans aren't keen on having electrodes implanted into their brains, even for the lofty purposes of science. > >Luciano Fadiga, now at the University of Ferrara in Italy, was the first to find some evidence that humans may have a system analogous to that found in monkey brains, when he measured the excitability of particular muscles in the hand. He found that when the volunteers were watching grasping actions, the very muscles that would be needed to copy that movement seemed primed to act--as if they were preparing to make the same movement themselves. "The interesting thing was that the pattern of activated muscles changed according to the observed actions," says Fadiga. But while this suggested that a mirror system might exist in human brains too, it didn't yield any information about where it might reside. > >Several brain-imaging studies followed, the first led by Rizzolatti, and another by Scott Grafton, then at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. Both found that watching an experimenter pick up and handle objects activates two regions of the brain behind the temples on the left side: the superior temporal sulcus and, just above it, a part called Broca's area. An even more recent study by Marco Iacoboni at the Los Angeles School of Medicine confirmed that Broca's area was active while volunteers either watched images of someone drumming their fingers, and when they also tried to imitate the movement they saw (Science, vol 286, p 2526). > > >Finding the words > > >The finding that Broca's area was activated was doubly intriguing. For one thing, F5 in monkeys is considered an analogue for Broca's area in humans. But even more suggestive was the fact that, while F5 is associated mainly with hand movement, Broca's area is traditionally thought of as a speech-production area. This raised questions about what a mirroring system might have to do with language--and language with mind-reading. > >Rizzolatti and Arbib think that mirror neurons may have provided the bridge from "doing" to "communicating". The relationship between actor and observer may have developed into one involving the sending and receiving of a message. In all communication the sender and receiver have to have a common understanding about what's passing between them. Could mirror neurons explain how this is achieved? Rizzolatti and Arbib think the answer is yes. > >They suggest that it is probably no coincidence that the area which links action recognition and action production in the monkey brain is exactly the same area that in humans has been linked to speech production. They think that the development of human speech was made possible by the fact that F5, the precursor of Broca's area, was endowed with this mirroring mechanism for recognising actions made by others. This, they say, was a prerequisite for the development of communication and ultimately of speech. It made us "language-ready", says Arbib. > >Most of the time, a strong spinal cord inhibition prevents you from involving your own motor neurons in activity you are merely observing, according to work by Fadiga soon to be published in the European Journal of Neuroscience. But sometimes the premotor cortex allows a brief snippet of the movement--like the twitchy feeling you get when you're watching someone struggling to open a packet of crisps or untie a knot. > >This slight movement, says Arbib, tips off the person carrying out the action that the watcher knows what's going on, in a sort of primitive dialogue. "This dialogue forms the core of language," he says. "Perhaps we evolved some crude form of communication based in sign, then built speech," says Arbib. Imagine an early human chipping away at a stone, he says, and that this person wants to communicate something else while demonstrating this skill. Or perhaps he wants to communicate in the dark or at a distance. In both cases, using sign or gestures doesn't work so well. If the brain could allow the person to develop speech through the same neural apparatus earlier primates were already using to communicate manually or through lipsmacks, so much the better (New Scientist, 8 April 2000, p 30). The exciting news
is that mirror neurons may not be limited to these motor regions. Gallese,
for one, suspects that they are found in other areas. "My belief
is that this may apply also to other modalities, for instance sensory
modalities," he says. Gallese points to recent work by William
Hutchison, a physiologist at the University of Toronto. He and his colleagues
studied humans who were conscious while undergoing brain surgery. They
discovered neurons in the anterior cingulate cortex, a region thought
to be involved in perceiving pain, which fired both in response to a
finger being pricked and also when patients saw the experimenter prick
himself (New Scientist, 8 May 1999, p 17). > >Gallese sees this
as tantalising, preliminary evidence of a far-reaching neural mechanism.
Could this explain how we are able to "feel" what others feel?
Could it underpin the sensations behind empathy? > >Ramachandran
also believes that mirror neurons play a bigger role than is generally
appreciated. He thinks these exciting nerve cells don't just provide
a missing link between gesture and language, but they go a great way
towards explaining human learning, ingenuity, and culture in general.
"Their emergence and further development in hominids was a decisive
step," he says. > >He says mirror neurons and the way they
facilitate imitative learning help to explain why we only developed
things like tool use, art and mathematics about 40,000 years ago, despite
the fact that our brains had reached their full size some 150,000 years
earlier. These cultural inventions, he contends, probably popped up
accidentally, but they were disseminated quickly because of our amazing,
imitative, learning brains--made possible by a more sophisticated version
of the monkey mirror neuron system. > >He admits that mirror neurons
probably aren't the whole story--necessary, but perhaps not sufficient--but
insists they could be a big part of it. Language, imitative learning
and mind-reading, seemingly unrelated human developments, may all be
shown to be linked through these intriguing nerve cells. "These
are all human qualities. All mysterious qualities," he says. "Mirror
neurons may provide the key." Howard In a message dated 98?02?09 20:47:57 EST, checker writes: << Subj: Self?Replicators Date: 98?02?09 20:47:57 EST From: checker To: (Human Behavior and Evolution Society) ARTIFICIAL LIFE: After 50 Years, Self?Replicating Silicon by Gary Taubes _Science_ Volume 277, Number 5334 Issue of 26 September 1997, p 1936 The workings of living things are an inspiration to avant garde computer scientists, but so far the simple act of reproduction has them stymied. In fact, it's defeated them since the late 1940s, when the legendary computer scientist John Von Neumann first tried to see whether a computer could be made to reproduce. He managed to conceptualize a self?replicating computer using cellular automata??identical computing devices arranged in a checkerboard pattern that change their state based on the states of their nearest neighbors. But his scheme called for an enormously complicated device made of millions of 29?state cellular automata, if not more. "It was so big," says Stanford University's John Koza, "nobody has ever even done a simulation." Now researchers at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne are on the verge of achieving in practice what Von Neumann could only work out in theory??and they are doing so in a far smaller system. In the September issue of the journal Robotics and Autonomous Systems, Daniel Mange and his colleagues report that they have made a self?repairing, self?replicating version of a specialized computer. It's able to perform only one specific task, but they hope to do the same soon with a "universal" computer??a necessary step, says Koza, toward creating computers that truly mimic life by reproducing and evolving. Like Von Neumann's scheme, the Swiss system is based on cells of identical processors, which they call "biodules." Each cell contains a random?access memory and a single field programmable gate array, which is a collection of circuits that can be rewired by software, allowing it to assume new functions (see p. 1931). The biodules are
laid out in a two?dimensional array, with a "mother cell"
at one corner. Each one is programmed with an artificial chromosome??a
string of bits that encodes all the information necessary for all the
cells to function together as a computer. Mange explains that each cell
uses the mother cell as a reference point to calculate its position
in the array, extracts from the bit string the information that a cell
at that position needs to carry out its particular functions, and wires
itself accordingly. The resulting computer can perform just one task:
checking a string of parentheses to see if every left parenthesis belongs
to a closed pair. The system is able to repair itself by enlisting spare
cells that sit off to one side of the working array. When a cell is
identified as faulty, its entire column is deactivated. Then the functions
of each column are shifted one column over, so that a spare column takes
over the function of what used to be the last working column of the
computer. Mange suggests that such a system might have applications
in avionics, for instance, for computers that require extraordinary
fault tolerance, but he admits that there is a "rather high"
price to pay in efficiency: the need to store the complete "genome"
in every cell. "It's the same price biology agrees to pay with
every living being to have a very safe architecture," he says.
Self?replication is an extension of the same idea. Mange and his colleagues
have shown that with enough spare cells in the array, all of the working
cells of the computer can simply copy themselves into a new set of cells.
Moving on to a self?replicating universal machine should be relatively
easy, says Mange. "We should be able to realize the original dream
of Von Neumann in the very near future," he says.
------------------------------ << Now I suspect
that most people have some such feelings, ("there' hope for me I suspect we all do. I remember working with an Australian band whose album was a huge smash at the time. One evening the band leader was awed by running into Jack Nicholson, the actor. The band leader tried to get his larynx to function properly and frame a few words of coherent speech in the presence of this living legend only to discover that Jack Nicholson was equally discombobulated by having run into one of the great idols of the music world. Nicholson felt he was a mere mortal, a wriggling worm, in the presence of greatness, and the rock idol felt the same way. In sociobiology, it's the principle of the nested hierarchy??you get to the top of one hierarchical ladder only to discover that you are at the bottom of the next and have to start climbing all over again. There's a clear evolutionary value to this. It keeps us strving and unsatisfied. As long as the feeling of inadequacy drives us to new peaks, we'll keep discovering new resources, ideas, germs of poetry, etc. with which to nourish ourselves and society. It's interesting to see what happens when people actually achieve their goals. Several of the show business greats for whom I used to consult actually managed to pull off this feat. They reached the summit of all they'd ever dreamed of and discovered that to lose a thing to strive for is hell. One is a famous actress, the other a rock band leader. Both had nervous breakdowns when they felt there were no more worlds to conquer. Both also lost the creativity which had helped them survive and which had contributed to society's evolutionary advance. Losing your sense of inadequacy, that which impells you to measure yourself against something greater and to strive toward it, is a fate with which none of us should be cursed. Howard P.S. Glenn??Here's what makes me curious. Why are we so dependent on goals? Why do we need them to feel intact, motivated, exhilarated, and alive? I suspect it is because we need to feel we are of value to the social group. Like bacteria, bees, and ants, we have to rub up against others and know they need us to survive. A goal gives us a sense of purpose, a sense that we have a function to perform, a hidden sense that what we're aiming toward is something others want and need. The desire to be an Einstein is a disguised wish to offer something hundreds of thousands or even millions will want you for. It's a desire to have fame and glory??both manifestations of the manner in which a world of humans welcomes with enthusiasm what you have to offer. In addition, the completely unknown Bloom topographic hippocampal theory of self says that we feel intact as long as we can map our world socially and see our place in the longitudinal and latitudinal lines of our society. When that map falls apart through the loss of a job or a lover or a friend, we fall apart as well. However we are not just creatures of latitude and longitude, we are beings who live in a world of past, present, and future, inchworms on the great timeline of the universe. Hence to feel intact our map must include our past and that which we feel lays before us. Goals are our landmarks in the expanse of futurity. When our time map crumbles??when our past becomes incoherent and our future is stolen by illness or misfortune??our sense of self crumbles and we crumple into depression, wilting in a form of emotional and physiological mini?death. Our only recovery comes when we find a new goal and peg the grid of a new future to it, then turn around and reweave our past to fit the new personality our new future has wrought within us. This, by the way, is where narrative comes in. It gives us a set of convenient formats with which to frame our future and past, and a set of character roles into whch we can cast that fragile thing we call a self. Howard
This seems an extremely positive approach to trauma and to other negatives left over from the past. We have a limited amount of attention space, the mental parcel of real estate occupied by consciousness. Fill it with nightmares from the past, gradually grow those nightmares in size and importance, and torments will seize every bit of mental territory available to us. Fill that space with positive visions of a future and you landscape your attention space with positives--positives you can turn to realities with effort, creativity, and hope. Howard In a message dated 1/8/00 5:37:33 PM Eastern Standard Time, M.Waller writes, replying to a passage from John Bhears: << reprocessing
of the trauma was the long-standing "old" paradigm: this In a message dated 11/6/00 12:05:26 AM Eastern Standard Time, Nancy Werd (Nancy Weber, author of 22 books) writes: O, Howard--how delicious! I'm particularly stirred by your words about the centrality of a sense of future. I've never articulated this to another, & I'm oddly shy about doing so now--& really, it's quite small, but here it is. I think of myself at any given moment as one Nancy in a trio, Past Nancy & Future Nancy being the other two. hb: neat, Nancy. When I feel flush
with cash, I will tuck money into odd places, telling myself as I do
hb: ") I imagine it's
terribly common a comfort ritual even if not always formalized in hb: doubly neat. i've never tried this and it seems worth an attempt. Of course it can
play havoc as well, if one thinks such visions are a guarantee of a
hb: nance, we need to believe there are guarantees of a future whether there really are or not. there was a lesson in an old episode of kung fu, the tv show. at heart it was this. if you are preoccupied with disaster, you will tumble into troubles. if you set your sight on a positive goal, keep it steadily in focus, and take a step a day to reach it, you will achieve the impossible. _______________________________ T.E. Lawrence put a less severe sense of the same thing this way: "You wonder what I am doing? Well, so do I, in truth. Days seem to dawn, suns to shine, evenings to follow, and then I sleep. What I have done, what I am doing, what I am going to do, puzzle me and bewilder me. Have you ever been a leaf and fallen from your tree in autumn and been really puzzled about it? That's the feeling." Unlike me, Lawrence still had his mobility. What he'd lost was a sense of purpose. Ultimately that loss not only caused his sense of self and of control over his life to disintegrate, but led to his probable suicide. All this, plus the theory of self I've been developing, would give the impression that memory is critical to a sense of self. To have a sense of self, it would seem, we need an implicit sense of our past, an explicit bouquet of narratives about that past, an implicit sense of a future and/or goals, and an explicit sense of those goals. By explicit, I mean something we can put into words and recite to ourselves in our internal conversations with nobody but us or in our interior debates and explanations of ourselves to the ghostly others who live with us in our skulls. By implicit, I mean unspoken goals and sense of a future--a sense of upcoming possibilities which we may never be able to verbalize. Explicit, verbalizable things of this sort are generally dealt with by the amygdala working in tandem with the cerebral cortex. Implicit, unverbalizable projectionss and memories are the province of the amygdala and a cachement area much lower in the brain than the cortex--the striatum. The striatum, not-so-coincidentally I suspect, is also where most of our feelings of control are maintained and where we turn emotions and ideas into action. Dopamine is the striatum's major chemical of control. So these are the areas and the elements which I'd suspect participate most actively in our sense of coherence, identity, and self. The descriptions of amnesiacs in books by Michael Gazzaniga, Oliver Sachs, and many others give the impression that folks who've lost all or most memory lack an explicit recollection of much of their past, yet they still retain a sense of identity. Which would indicate that you're right--unconscious memory may be enough to hold a sense of self together. However the accounts, as I recall them, are too sketchy to say this for certain. I wonder to what extent amnesiacs suffer from the sense of confusion, meaninglessness, dissolution, alienation, and pain that Lawrence and I experienced. I also wonder what sense of future they may have. Group members like
Russell Gardner, Jim Brody, and Nando Pelusi are on the clinical end
of things and have dealt with quite a few patients--though not necessarily
amnesiacs and those with Alzheimers. I wonder if they have any answers
to these questions. Howard
David Barash, in his book _The Whispering Within_, cites quite a bit of research all with the same message: use it or lose it. The complex adaptive systems model says that an individual who is active, achieves a sense of control and ability to predict the future from his or her exertions, and receives feedback indicating that his or her achievements are valued by the social organism experiences a maximal hormonal and biological activation. On the other hand, individuals whose efforts lead to loss of control, loss of predictability, and loss of positive social feedback switch over to hormonal and biological self destruct mechanisms. In this manner, each individual becomes a module in the complex adaptive system. Resources, attention, and health are shuttled to the modules advancing the success of the system and away from those retarding or not contributing to that success. This is the manner in which neural nets, the immune system, and bacterial colonies "learn." It is the manner in which they function as successful adaptive systems. It is also, according to the complex adaptive systems model, the evolutionary shaper of human social behavior and of personal psychology. Presumably an individual without continued purpose, an individual whose quest seems over, goes into the self?destruct mode I refer to so often that your eyeballs must be bleeding: the neurobiologically self?damaging settings described in the work of Sapolsky, of researchers on locus of control, and of workers on learned helplessness. Hence the need for something always just out of reach, always just beyond the horizon, which Don's quote describes in somewhat despairing terms is our "salvation." All for very sound evolutionary and biological reasons. Which leads to another personal anecdote which may reveal something about the sense of identity. I've been housebound with chronic fatigue syndrome for ten years??not a particularly ghastly fate once one learns to overcome the obstacles. However the first three years were interesting from the point of view of identity. The immobility totally stripped me of any sense of identity I'd had and left me feeling non?human, like inanimate and meaningless detritus. The emotions accompanying this sense were painful beyond belief?? not a sort of pain one normally experiences or even imagines can exist. The missing element that yanked away my sense of a self was my utter and complete loss of a vision I didn't entirely realize I'd had-the picture of my future??something I did not realize had always rested unspoken inside of me and whose disappearance utterly disenfranchised, disempowered and dehumanized me. Several years of what I guess you'd call "mourning" ensued??sense of loss for the old identity. The turning point came when my psyche finally turned its attention from the now?gone vision of future possibilities and built a new sense of future based on what was achievable within the new set of conditions within which I was situated. This process took about a year, and I can't say that "I" did it, it was more something that redid me. By the end of that year, an invisible cosmos of future sat like a planetarium in my skull and I was once again humanized. Returned to me were a sense of control, of predictability, and of social values. Three years to overcome the loss of an old identity and to construct a new one??all because of the need for a silent vision of a complete futurity. Where does this fit into our collective formulations about our need for an identity as an interface between the multiplicity of mechanisms within us and a self?personalizing, narrative?based society? Why, again, do we need a *single* identity? Here's the quote from the unpublished book, the snippet which explains one reason why the never?ending nature of our quest can be not reason for despair but for celebration: Bloom explained what he'd been after. We circle, he said, some source of ultimate satisfaction like a planet going around the sun. But orbiting at arm's length never gets us any closer to what we want. The solution: dive straight for it??that ultimate and ever?satisfying whatever it is. The French teacher sat Bloom down and told him Camus' version of the myth of Sisyphus. You probably remember it. Sisyphus is condemned to roll a rock the size of a three?car garage up a mountain. Just as he almost reaches the top, the thing always slips from his fingers and bounces back to the bottom. Sisyphus is forced to clamber back down to the valley and start the task all over again. At first glance, the French teacher explained, it looks as if Sisyphus' life is meaningless. After all, meaning comes from achieving an end??getting that damned boulder to sit on the peak. But that's, she said, a misunderstanding. Real meaning comes not from the achievement of a task, but from the process of pursuing it. The satisfaction of Sisyphus comes from rolling the stone toward a goal, no matter how arbitrary, not from reaching the top. Sisyphus isn't condemned, he's blessed. So Bloom abandoned the quest for some primal center of permanent bliss, and sought satisfaction in the act of living. from: HOW I ACCIDENTALLY STARTED THE SIXTIES or The Case Of America's Missing Virginity by Howard Bloom "This is a monumental, epic, glorious literary achievement. "Every page, every paragraph, every sentence sparkles with captivating metaphors, delightful verbal concoctions, alchemical insights, philosophic whimsy, absurd illogicals, scientific comedy routines, relentless, non?stop waves of hilarity. "The comparisons to James Joyce are inevitable and undeniable. Finnegans's Wake wanders through the rock 'n roll sixties. "Wow! Whew! Wild! Wonderful!" Timothy Leary (no kidding) ???????? Robert M. Sapolsky. "Stress, Social Status, and Reproductive Physiology in Free?Living Baboons". In David Crews, ed. Psychobiology of Reproductive Behavior: An Evolutionary Perspective. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1987. Robert Sapolsky, "Lessons of the Serengeti," The Sciences, May/June 1988. Robert M. Sapolsky, "Stress in the Wild." Scientific American. January 1990, 116?123. I.G. Sarason, B.R. Sarason and G.R. Pierce, "Social Support, Personality, and Health," in S. Maes, C.D. Spielberger, P.B. H& Defares and I.G. Sarason, Topics In Health Psychology, John Wiley & Sons, New York, 1988, pp. 245?256. S. Scarr, "Theoretical Issues in Investigating Intellectual Plasticity"; in S.E. Brauth, W.S. Hall, & R.J. Dooling (Eds.), Plasticity of Development, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 1991, pp. 57? 71. Robert I. Scheinman, Patricia C. Cogswell, Alan K. Lofquist, Albert S. Baldwin Jr., "Role of Transciptional Activation of IB in Mediation of Immunosuppression by Glucocorticoids," Science, 13 October 1995, pp. 283?286. Klaus R. Scherer, Paul Ekman, eds. Approaches to Emotion. Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1984. David P. Barash, _The Whisperings Within: Evolution and the Origin of Human Nature_, Penguin Books, New York, 1979. Howard Bloom. The Lucifer Principle: a scientific expedition into the forces of history. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1995. M.J.C. Waller, "Darwinism and the Enemy Within," Journal of Social and Evolutionary Systems Vol 18 No 3 1995 pp 217?229. Howard Bloom. "GROUP SELECTION AND THE SOCIAL SCIENCES: a new evolutionary synthesis," European Sociobiological Society Annual Meeting, 1996. Howard Bloom and
Mike Waller. "THE GROUP MIND: GROUPS AS COMPLEX ADAPTIVE SYSTEMS."
Human Behavior and Evolution Society Annual Meeting, 1996.
hb: John, I develop outlandishly optimistic hopes for things--hopes so huge they border on delusional. And guess what? It saves me. It keeps me going. It keeps me moving until the next REAL opportunity arrives. False hopes, megalomania, and ego are all flotation devices that help us survive. The more we flail about, the more likely we are to grab hold of something that turns from fantasy to reality--like your finding me and my finding you and both of us working for four years to turn your first book into a published commodity. Both of our hopes when we first met would have seemed hallucinatory to more practical types. But some false and flagrantly overblown hopes DO materialize. js: Chris sounds
a lot more my type than Colin -- though I most admit he is a classic
js: Dating is a game in which hope writes the script in which the most common words to start with are "only", "perfect" and that ends with "no way" and "lots of fish in the sea".
My time stamps after
midnight remind me of Brown's observation. But I have a sheepish excuse.
Working on my book by day and spending most of the night trying to keep
up with the paleopsych threads is about the only way I can do both??or
at least the only way that's occurred to me. Ah, well, maybe a little
maraschino cherry of ego is a nice way to motivate oneself in doing
the difficult. What an effort to give myself a te absolvo, eh? Warmly??Howard
LOL
Ps here's an old thought that applies. Ego is a self deception. It is a vision not of what we are but of what we want to be. Those who have a healthy ego-an inflated and overblown sense of themselves-take their self-deception as an aspiration and work toward achieving it. Ego, to them, is the flotation device that keeps them going when they are less than they want to be. It buoys them up until they become what they aspire to. Others fail to work toward what they want. These are sad men who claim to be what they never will achieve. And somewhere deep down they know they are not what they say they are. That knowledge empties them emotionally. It makes them "hollow men, heads filled with straw," Prufocks who will discover someday that there is no longer time "to murder and create"-to do the great deeds that would make them worthy of their own ideals. When men and women fail to pursue the task of making their false ego real, they become those of the majority, the humans who "lead lives of quiet desperation." It is our task to awaken ourselves and to strive toward what we want to be-to turn our self-deceptions into realities. Only then can we reach out to those who are lost and help them out of their despond, turning their implicit goals into possibilities, helping them work toward what it is that gives them meaning, that which the illusion of the ego beckons them to achieve. (Irwin Silverman) On Sun, 19 Aug 2001, John Beahrs wrote: > Sounds good
to me, Howard. Compatible with my own hypothesis, that a lot of LeBon, in the 19th
century, called these "metaphysical absolutes, Learn from the mistakes
of others You can't live long enough to make them all yourself ---Eleanor
Roosevelt
According to Paul Ekman we're very poor at lying (on average), but we're even poorer at spotting the cues of deception. That's because we evolved in very small groups with no privacy and with no courts but with instant retribution. Lying and lie-detection weren't a booming business. As one was likely to be caught redhanded or be the only one on a shortlist of suspects, one could better show remorse and hope one's life is spared than have a poker face and deny everything. hb: which leads to a question. what is remorse? it's a submission gesture. a gesture of subservience to a higher power on the social totem pole. allegedly that higher power is god. in reality, it is the public. Eric Shinn, of the Toronto Star, asked me two days ago why Michael Jackson was torn down by the public--shunned as a sinner. And why now, a decade later, he is being re-embraced. Michael has shown no contrition, no remorse. He hasn't made a submission gesture to his public and reaffirmed its mastery over him. My guess is that the public, having humbled him for half a generation, has reasserted its supremacy over him. now that it is above him it feels it once again owns and controls his destiny. the issue of public supremacy has been settled, so the public is ready to lift Michael Jackson once again. it will continue to do so long as it feels Michael is under the power of his audience. Should he rise so high that his public loses its feeling of dominance and control, he may well be torn down again. Howard From: "Howard Bloom" Sent: Wednesday, August 22, 2001 9:02 AM Subject: RE: evolution of the self > John's words below are backed by studies that show that those who > attract others and become leaders are those who manage to lie the most > convincingly. That is, they present what they have to say not only with > the greatest conviction, but with a conviction that makes those tiny > muscles of facial expression and posture, the muscles that can give our > uncertainties away, radiate with nonverbal cues of absolute truth. > Howard > > Subj: RE:
evolution of the self > Date: 8/20/01 3:31:09 PM Eastern Daylight
Time > From: (Dr. John Skoyles) > To: ('Howard Bloom') > >
> > Howard's PR theory of consciousness is one of the great theories
of > science. > > hb: many thanks john. this is an astonishing
compliment. > > What we think as being ourselves, below the surface
is a > neurological public relations exercise. What people know about
us is > largely what we tell them: and success tries to associate
with success > thus successful people are those that spin in a positive
way the stories > > that others will recall about them. After
all, no one wants to > cooperate/marry with a failure, victim, or
nonentity. Cooperation and > marriage goes to those that present
themselves as being the determiners, > > makers and masters of
events not the opposites. Just as a conman must > believe the story
they tell, so the brain must believe the presentation > it gives
to the world -- making this presentation thus is central to > 'ourselves'.
Imagine a brain that did not present itself in these ways: > it might
be honest but it would never compete against a brain that > constantly
told others [because it believed it was true] that it was a > success
even when it was not. No body would want to associate with such >
a failure. > > John > > > see how this hypothesis sounds:
the self evolved as a > > competitive display device, a way of
showing off to look big > > among other men and to show off for
the ladies. It is the > > way a being capable of symbol and abstraction
erected his own > > equivalent to the guppy's coloration, the
peacock's tail, and > > the songbird's song. Females needed self
as well-to attract > > males and to compete for position in the
group hierarchy. > > Language, narrative, and other forms of braggadocio
evolved > > because of the evolution of self, in tandem with self,
or > > before self. We don't know. But all evolved, I propose,
as a > > package deal with the self tying the bow around the center.
Howard |
