Self file pg1 [pg2] [pg3] [Directory]


Epigrams read more

Summaries read more

Where previous books have landed us read more

The self as a display mechanism read more

Where is self in the brain? read more

The biopsychology of getting a grip: control and the mystery of self read more

Affiliaton and differentiation read more

Who am I? Just which narrow slot is me? read more

Growing a self-the development of self in adolescence and early life read more

The mapmaker in the chaos of the brain: the topographic theory of the self read more

Life-shifts and selfquakes-the pain of transition read more

The ring of consciousness read more


Exiles from the spotlight-projection and the selves we deny--oscillation read more

The arena of others within us read more

Goals--a map of the future read more


Ego as a gift-the value of self-deception-the truth of false hopes
read more

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Epigrams

"Beyond your thoughts and feelings, my brother, there stands a mighty ruler,
an unknown sage, whose name is Self. In your body He dwells -- He is your
body.
..
Your Self laughs at your ego, and its proud prancings. 'What are these
prancings and flights of thought unto me?' it says to itself. 'A by-way to
my purpose. I am the leading-string of the ego, and the prompter of its
notions.'"-Thus Spake Zarathustra Ch 4: The Despisers of the Body

"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,
I all alone beweep my outcast state
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries
And look upon myself and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featur'd like him, like him with friends possess'd,
Desiring this man's art and that man's scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least;
Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,
Haply I think on thee, and then my state,
Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven's gate;
For thy sweet love remember'd such wealth brings
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.

Insights...
Grasping the inner nature of things intuitively.

Would you like to have a 9" x 12" wood plaque with the text of "When, In Disgrace With
Fortune and Men's Eyes" to hang on your wall or to give as a gift?
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Galton's view of the relative insignificance of the conscious mind: "Its position appears to be that of a helpless spectator of but a minute fraction of a huge amount of automatic brain work". Here's the reference: 'Generic Images' in the journal Nineteenth Century (1879), p.433. I got it from Karl Pearson's 'The Life of Francis Galton' Vol.II p.236.

Subj: Re: Galton on Consciousness Date: 98?01?23 15:19:20 EST From: [email protected]
This is Thomas Huxley's "conscious automaton" theory, well discussed in the literature. It was adopted by quite a few in the late 19th century, including the extraordinary Douglas Spalding (tutor to Bertrand Russell; died rather young).


Summaries

"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.
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everyone has a self, everyone has confusion, everyone goes through moments in which she doesn't know who she is, in which her selves are in battle, one telling her to diet and another telling her to eat a chocolate cake. Which self is her--the dieter or the eater? Why do two selves squabble? What in the world is a self anyway? When we get upset why do we always have to call a friend? Why can't we figure out what's going on in our mind and in our life? Yet why do we see so easily just what a friend in trouble should do? Hb
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david theriault & hb 4/20/2003 dt:What it will also do is show, right away, the difference between the self and the soul. Many people walk unaware of this important discovery - that our soul is interwinted with our self - but is also a little different. People are becoming more and more detached from the soul because of the way culture is evolving.
hb: in my view, these two parts of self evolved separately and have difficulty reaching each other. 35,000 years of culture has slowly allowed the speaking self to reach the feeling passions a mere four inches behind them in the brain. That source of feeling passions is what I call the soul. Culture has built this narrow pathway between self and soul with religion, poetry, art, entertainment, games, and now, finally, science. Our task is to open the avenue of communication between self and soul much farther than it has ever been opened before. To pave new lanes between the two, Passion Points will use science and intuition, a sense of art combined with the tools of evolutionary science and neurobiology.

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Hb to paul werbos and david smith 5/2/2003 A joint paper that actually carried us forward in modeling that mystery of mysteries, consciousness, would be amazing--whether it's the consciousness of dream states or the consciousness of being awake. Enclosed is more of my take on the fact that consciousness can't be yanked out of a social context and still be consciousness. You can't even remove social context when you're dreaming--which is essentially what Paul's dreams and his observations based on them point out so vividly. ..\socio\books with collaborators\book proposals\Passion Points--the Extrasomatory Extensions of The Self--book sample 0501-03.doc
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Self and Soul might also be termed Ego and Unconscious. hb: there's some merit to this--but the word ego carries too much dead weight, too much old Freudian freight. We have to go outside our selves to find our selves. In fact, we have to go very far out indeed. Consciousness is, I believe, a social display device evolved biologically then enhanced generation-by-generation by the tools of culture. As a consequence it owes its existence and its current form to thousands or tens of thousands of culture-makers and culture-shapers. You and I are trying to be part of this 35,000 year-old, time-defying, culture-making team. We are trying to use what nature's given us to outwit her. One of the little savageries that we have to overcome is Nature's generation of the self and consiousness as exiles in the body and the brain. Self and culture evolved to interface with others on the basis of just a handful of cues from our insides. We're not aware of how our cells operate, of how our body generates new bone, of how our marrow generates new blood cells--and disposes of old ones--everyday. We can't see, feel or control the bronchioles of our lungs. We haven't a clue about the complex way in which the liver carries out its chemical escapades--grabbing molecules in the blood that could be dangerous and turning them into urine. Even a medical student only sees these things through his textbooks and through the dissection of a cadaver or two. His mind has to go way, way outside of the body to get even a clue as to how his innards, a mere two or three feet from his seat of consciousness, carry out their microsecond-by-microsecond tasks. He has to work like heck in high school, apply to medical schools all over the country, travel to a distant city, put down roots there, read the works of men and women who've lived in a myriad of ages and places, listen to lecturers who've been through this same travail and who have come from the corn-growing farms of Iowa or the high-tech centers of California, then put his mind through years of torment to get even the most indirect handle on what's going on a foot or two away in the air-exchange-and-fluid system that supplies oxygen to his brain. And even then he and we can't see things that move at the micro-second pace most of our body masters with ease. The biggest mystery of all isn't the body, it's something even more ironic. It's something a mere inch or two away from this stumbling consciousness, this self that breathes by taking in ideas from men and women far away. The biggest mystery is the non-conscious stuff that goes on in the brain. Including the swift twitch of the krebbs cycle in the very cells of which consciousness is made.

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.
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John--our statements are in total agreement. Here's an essay I wrote for Passion Points, one of my upcoming books, today that explains the synergy between these seeming opposites:
We have to go outside our selves to find our selves. In fact, we have to go very far out indeed. Consciousness is, I believe, a social display device evolved biologically then enhanced generation-by-generation by the tools of culture. As a consequence it owes its existence and its current form to thousands or tens of thousands of culture-makers and culture-shapers. You and I are trying to be part of this 35,000 year-old, time-defying, culture-making team. We are trying to use what nature's given us to outwit her. One of the little savageries that we have to overcome is Nature's generation of the self and consiousness as exiles in the body and the brain. Self and culture evolved to interface with others on the basis of just a handful of cues from our insides. We're not aware of how our cells operate, of how our body generates new bone, of how our marrow generates new blood cells--and disposes of old ones--everyday. We can't see, feel or control the bronchioles of our lungs. We haven't a clue about the complex way in which the liver carries out its chemical escapades--grabbing molecules in the blood that could be dangerous and turning them into urine. Even a medical student only sees these things through his textbooks and through the dissection of a cadaver or two. His mind has to go way, way outside of the body to get even a clue as to how his innards, a mere two or three feet from his seat of consciousness, carry out their microsecond-by-microsecond tasks. He has to work like heck in high school, apply to medical schools all over the country, travel to a distant city, put down roots there, read the works of men and women who've lived in a myriad of ages and places, listen to lecturers who've been through this same travail and who have come from the corn-growing farms of Iowa or the high-tech centers of California, then put his mind through years of torment to get even the most indirect handle on what's going on a foot or two away in the air-exchange-and-fluid system that supplies oxygen to his brain. And even then he and we can't see things that move at the micro-second pace most of our body masters with ease. The biggest mystery of all isn't the body, it's something even more ironic. It's something a mere inch or two away from this stumbling consciousness, this self that breathes by taking in ideas from men and women far away. The biggest mystery is the non-conscious stuff that goes on in the brain. Including the swift twitch of the krebbs cycle in the very cells of which consciousness is made.

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
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Imprinting points.
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With Steve Hovland 10/17/2002 I wanted to connect one story to each of the three interlocking theories. But there seem to be four theories, not three. Yes, they all interlock. They all tell us our most personal passions are permanent insertions in our brain and in our emotions of other pivotal human beings. We build generation by generation, ingesting role models and recreating them, then becoming role models for others. However I do not have the anecdotes with which to illustrate the theories. I was planning to search for them by doing a search on the word "self" in a cd-rom that contains 3,500 classic books and tell the tales through the plots of literature. But that is not necessarily the best way to get stories that make the concepts vivid. Contemporary tales from around the world, strange stories but ones reader can identify with, would be more appropriate. I haven't read the notes in a long time. I just keep adding to them. So there may be anecdotal hints there I've forgotten. The story of Schneider, the soldier with two bullets in the back of his brain, is vital to this story. But I'm not sure its best telling in in the self file. Meanwhile the title I'm working with now is Passion Points: A Scientific Journey Into the Mists of Self and Soul. sh: The first paragraph talks about "five new biosocial formations." Should the subtitle be "Five Scientific Journeys..." or should the first paragraph talk about "three new biosocial formations" or ? hb: count the theories as you go along and see. There's the hippocampal mapmaker of self. New scientific material supporting that theory just came in this week. There's the outboard extensions of the self. There's the theory of Passion Points--imprinting points and their importance to the fires of passion I call soul. And there's the theory of the self as a billboard of control. I may be forgetting something, but it looks like four to me. Howard
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4/14/2003 First, Steve Hovland, let me introduce you to David Theriault, who is constructing a sort of flowchart of the projects I'm working on. David, Steve Hovland has been working with me for the last year and a half or so to see if he can co-craft Passion Points: A Scientific Expedition Into the Mists of Self and Soul with me. Now to comment: In a message dated 4/11/2003 1:53:36 PM Eastern Daylight Time, shovland writes: It occurs to me that the neurobiology material, no matter how potentially fascinating, is likely to be dry. It should be in the book, but not in the front. hb: agreed. Especially since the neurobiological material on self is so very tenuous. sh: The extrasomatic extensions of self is a very powerful concept, but a little scarry. Perhaps we should work up to that. hb: all the principles in the book, the mapmaker in the brain, the self as a billboard of control, the inner stage on which we perform before an inner audience, and passion points, our imprinting points--these are all ways in which even the things most personal to us connect us to others, sew others inside of us, and sew us to those outside of us. sh: The material about imprints and epiphanies will be mostly about real people and what matters most to them in their lives. I think that the average reader will find this to be the most compelling section, because it will talk about things that go on inside them and that significantly effect the course of their lives. hb: we have to tell all of our core concepts through tales of real people and references to the research or ideas that make sense of what they're going through. Look at The Lucifer Principle. It's a tale told through vivid anecdotes. Some in science have criticized that (very few, actually). But anecdotes illustrate principles vividly to readers like you and me. Anecdotes hold our attention and fascinate us. Anecdotes are what we take away, what remains in our brain when the book is long gone. Stories are the best way to explain. Even a book of abstract concepts like Laszlo Barabasi's Links is made vivid by the anecdotal mini-bios of the mathematicians who first came up with the concept of the mathematics of links, and the tale of how the math of networks grew one generation after the next until it became what it is today. A story is a tale told in chronological order. If often starts at some surprising event in the present or near past, then goes back to the beginning and tells the story of how we got to that midpoint...and beyond it. The story of Schneider is a good place to start. In The Lucifer Principle there's a tale of the horrors of the near present--a long story of one kid's experience going through the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Then there are a series of questions that get us to perceive elements in that story, mysteries, we might not have normally seen. Later we go back to the beginning of Islam. The winding tale of Islam's growth runs like a backbone through the rest of the book. Then we get to Islam's current menace. And finally we have a section on the strange perceptual tricks played on our minds by the fact that we are a society at the top of the pecking order. The core theories of the book: Our self is created, in part, by a succession of emotionally charged experiences that we have from time to time in our lives. hb: and all of them are knots of other people. When Kevin Cronin of REO Speedwagon fixated on the sight of the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan Show when he was five, it made a deep and permanent imprint on him.

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
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I usually hate diagrams in books, but diagramming the set of relationships that make me me or that make Michael Jackson Michael Jackson and that made Albert Einstein's self might be an interesting way to get a handle on our material. It would also give us an interesting way of telling stories that illustrate our points. Thanks to the work of Janet Malcolm, Charles Darwin might be the most mappable celebrity around. John Mellencamp is a person I could map...and whose cooperation I might get to dig further than I already did in my work with him. Mahatma Gandhi might also be an interesting person to map. We need to map the extended self of a celebrity whose life story tantalizes people and will continue to tantalize them for years to come. I wonder if we could map Charles Dickens or someone from a strange and exotic culture--China. Is there enough material on Mao Tse Dung to make him mappable? His father was a wealthy rice merchant--technically a peasant but in actuality a man who ran his company with an iron hand, as Mao would do when he took over a slightly larger enterprise: all of China. Howard ps Actually I might have more star-power names in my life than just about anyone else we could find…from Galileo, van Leeuwenhoek, Isaac Asimov, Einstein, George Gamow, Margaret Mead, TS Eliot, and Edna St. Vincent Millay to Michael Jackson, Prince, Diana Ross, Billy Joel, the Village People, Run DMC, Grandmaster Flash & the Furious Five, Bette Midler, and many others who became extensions of me so that I could become an extension of them. In a message dated 3/21/2003 3:33:32 PM Eastern Standard Time, shovland writes: A possible tool is something that might be called a Soul Map. Graphically, this would be like a segmented wheel with spokes running from the hub to each segment. You would be the hub, and each segment would be labeled with one of your imprints or extensions: Mother, David Bowie, Time Magazine, whatever. You would use the tool by examining each one of your connections in terms of your thoughts and feelings about them.

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This is a provocative bit of thought. To see what it's provoked, scroll down below. In a message dated 4/14/2003 10:41:22 AM Eastern Daylight Time, shovland writes: The overstory may be: The Quest for Self Actualization (a possible subtitle) hb: that was Abraham Maslow's quest. It's not the quest of this book. The quest of this book is to figure out why we have a self and what a self is to begin with. It's to find the passions that can power our lives and to show how they relate. It's to see the self in the light of science--psychology, neurobiology, and evolution. And it's the quest I went through to find the roots of self by digging into psyches in the real world...the world of popular culture-makers. This is a book of insights,of new ways of looking at the experience of being human, a book of new theory. It's a new way to ask and answer the question, "Who am I?" It's a new way to deal with the pain and insecurity of not knowing who and what we are. Only secondarily is it a how-to book. I like the subtitle "A Scientific Journey Into the Mists of Self and Soul." However I must admit that while folks have grabbed hold of titles like The Big Bang Tango, Passion Points, and Reinventing Capitalism: Putting Soul In the Machine, no one has gone nuts with delight and anticipation over "A Scientific Journey Into the Mists of Self and Soul." There could be a subtitle--possibly buried in the prose of the book--that tantalizes the reader more effectively, that tells him or her more powerfully what the book promises to deliver. The ideal would be to write a subtitle that becomes a cultural catch phrase and still raises the reader's desire to buy and read the book. Self-Actualization has already been taken (and originated) by Maslow. It means something we can't promise in this book: " to become everything that one is capable of becoming ..." Passion Points and I do not agree with Maslow's premise. There's no way of becoming all the things that one can be. One is capable of becoming many, many things. Which of those possible selves will connect the most with other humans? Which will give them something they'll appreciate us for? And which will give it to them in a way that satisfies our need for passion, for admiration, for warmth, for intimacy, and for personal meaning? Those are some of the questions we address in Passion Points. Maslow deals with selves as if they're in a vacuum. A self is a knot of other humans. There are many selves within us. There are even more selves that we could be. And none of them are in a vacuum. All of them relate in some way to the riveted attention of other human beings. Howard I have an idea for a cover: At the top, Passion Points as the main title At the bottom: The Quest for Self Actualization as a subtitle In the middle, a mirrored area broken into sections like my photo "The Shattered Self." The browser picks up the book, reads the title and subtitle, and sees her/his face reflected in the cover as a broken up image of her/his self, seeking wholeness.
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In a message dated 2/11/2003 12:16:09 AM Eastern Standard Time, shovland writes: Sorry for the delay. I rejoined the working class last week, at least for a couple of months. I'm doing a project for www.cerus.com. It will be cool to work inside a biotech firm. hb: sounds good. sh: Interesting that I was hired as a contractor the same day they laid off 10% of their employees. Layoffs are the order of the day in biotech. hb: yikes. is this because of lack of venture capital? Or is biotech proving to be worth less than we thought it would be back in the early 1990s? sh: From what I've seen in self.doc, one major theme of passion points revolves around a handful of brain structures and a handful of brain chemicals- the ones that bear primarily on defining the self and the network of others in which it exists. hb: sounds accurate--the self is an intermesh of brain mechanisms that encapsulate and compress a network of others within us. The self is an interlocked complex of social inertial guidance systems, systems that keep us in touch with the social web when we're alone--a pre-cellphone, pre-GPS complex of social location devices. The self is a theory of other that goes far beyond what Daniel Dennett thought of when he first proposed the term. It positions us in terms of others we've never seen, some of them who are alive right now, some who died a long time ago, and, when we're at the height of idealism...or of sexuality, self positions us in terms of others who may not come alive for another 20 or 30 years. sh: It occurs to me that a way to get a handle on this is to start with an intra-cranial view, then go to an extra-cranial but intra-somatory viewpoint, which would include the enteric nervous system and possibly some science to back up what we "know in our hearts." After that we could work out to the extra-somatory extensions. hb: the extrasomatory extensions are so critical that I'd start with a gripping story--like the out of body experience I had when performing before an audience of 350 and taking the entire audience in, being taken in by them in turn, even though they hated my guts. And which self was the self on the ceiling? What self was doing the dancing that made me the center of a web of eyes that normally turned away when I appeared? What self in them took them over like frenzied ants and drove them to the foot of the stage and made me carry them off on their shoulders? How do we find an accidental self like the one that came alive that day and put it into practice deliberately? Can we use it to energize us and energize others without a stage? How do we find our deepest, truest self? And once we've found it, how do we cope with the surprise of discovering its a nugget-like compression of the attention of others' eyes? sh: c In the extrasomatory extensions we find the "normal" cast of the all the regular people we deal with and the "supernormal" cast of exceptional people- rock stars, movie stars, political and business leaders, and also the imprinting and group cohesion experiences. I think that following this pathway would be a discovery experience for the reader. I have found that the concept of extrasomatory extensions has grown on me as I worked through self.doc.

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
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I agree. But do you think you can actually cut and paste the material together in book form so I can then do a quick rewrite and get Passion Points into print? It is a necessary companion book to Reinventing Capitalism: Putting Soul in the Machine. Six heads of consulting, coaching, and training companies have joined the Reiventing Capitalism movement. So the book will be used as a bible. It will have a built in sales force. So will Passion Points if we can move it forward. How do we do that? Howard ps the essential message of the book is this: self is others. Passion points, the emotional anchors of self, are based on imprinting, a way in which we take a snapshot of others in a moment of brain readiness and insert it into the base of what will eventually be our personality, our sense of mission, our sense of what matters the most. Others as extracranial extensions--outboard pontoons-- of self says that we need others to feed us the attention that brings our selves to life. And we need others as our bouncing boards in our moments of confusion. By feeding confusion to others we spread knowledge of the human condition through the mass mind of the group. And we in turn are fed validation, hugs, comfort, and the cultural cliches we can use as tools to dig ourself out of our confusion, depression, and insecurity. The map of our reality and bonded connections with others within which the self resides is another social connection, a way of bringing other humans into our brain. The self as a billboard of control means that our self measures our unconscious stirrings of emotion, edits them, rewrites them, and dresses them up in such a way that we look like we've come out on top of nearly everything we've attempted or encountered.
Something that's not in the notes--the concept of grid and group--says that we have two selves, the vous self and the tu self--the public self and the intimate self. We mask our woes with outsiders. We express them only to those we're close to. And we are even careful with our closest friends not to reveal so many weaknesses that they will reject us. There are many other ways that self is others explined in the Bloom computer files. The really startling thing is this. Never abandon your passion points. They are the most intense you you have. They are the you that you are most afraid to expose, yet they are the you that will connect you with others and that will make you valuable to them more than anything else you possess in life. Abandon your passion points and you become a hollow man, head filled with straw. You become one of the many who lead lives of quiet desperation. In business your task is messianic--to save others, elevate them, empower them, anticipate their fantasies, comfort them, feed their basic needs, and give them a sense of warmth of social connection and of security. Whether you are a CEO or a receptionist, this is what capitalism, human decency, and your own need to be needed demands of you. You can only carry out this christ-like mission if you stick with your passion points and let them grow. Let them change as you change, let them gain new insights and realize your childhood dreams in the shifting realities of an aging body and of a changing society. Do this and you will understand others. You will understand them through tuned empathy. Use you passions. Go with them. And introduce them to your rational brain. The two together can do wonders, not only for you but for all you work with, all you serve, and all you know. The irony is that the deepest personal passions come from those imprinting moments in which you swallowed others whole. In which you swallowed a picture of others cheering and admiring someone, focusing their sexual energy, showing you the way to be the center of attention, a heroic figure, a rock star, a prophet, a fireman, a policeman, a computer whiz, or some other form of frenzy-provoking savior.

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
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Clementine malta-bey 1013-01--cmb: there are moments when i am so "there", in the moment, that i'm not there- that i touch something out of this world.

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.
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In a message dated 98?03?22 21:31:55 EST, checker writes:

<< 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
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describes the self as a necessary illusion, peeks into its neurobiology and endocrinology, then asks why this peculiar figment of our imagination has managed to triumph over the unforgiving evolutionary storms of time. Why do we even bother to imagine that we are the helmsman of the body and soul and that we are a single thing despite the fact that our consciousness has little power over our decisions and we are, in fact, a multitude, a crowd of internal wes not just a me. The answers are in biochemistry and in the workings of society. The phantasm of a self makes sense only in the context of the social group as a learning machine.
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Passion points is a book of breakthrough theory about self, one that sheds light on the emotional core we call the soul. In fact, Passion Points is the first book to bring soul squarely within the sites of science...and in the process to offer new forms of empowerment to the general reader. . The hypothalamic connection is speculative--and we have to do a thorough hunt of the literature on the mapping functions of the hippocampus and its relationship to consciousness--our goal: to find out whether existing research supports the Bloom Hypothalamic Topographic Theory of Self. There's strong evidence for a second theoretical pillar of the book--The Extrasomatory Extensions of Self Hypothesis. But we need to look for more--including evidence pertaining to the biopsychological mechanisms involved. Then there's the concept of multiple selves based on the competition and cooperation between separate cerebral and neural assemblies. This one is well-documented and is covered in the Global Brain chapter on perception you so kindly placed in You Are Being Lied To. And there's all the data on the loss or gain of control and its impact on the body and mind via the internally generated poisons known as glucocorticoids (when we've lost control) or the internally cranked out uplifters--serotonin being high on the list (though if my friend E.E. Krieckhaus is right, current neurobiology may have its understanding of serotonin backwards). Yes, I want to enlighten the reader as much as possible about the Biopsychology of Getting A Grip. But it's the personal experience of gaining a self, losing it, or being caught in the crossfire between battling selves that counts most. what I learned by working with the stars, finding their souls, then showing the voiceless passions of soul to the verbal babbler in the left brain, the muttering, soliloquizing portion of our anatomy that generates the illusion of self. And what I've learned from working with people whose self is laid siege by one of the greatest threats to self-love. Romantic love--how to navigate it, what to expect from it, and why it is so threatening, plays a key role in this book.
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Small letters=martha sherwood, CAPS=HB. In a message dated 98?03?24 16:48:17 EST, you write:

<< 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
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In a message dated 10/31/2002 12:42:04 AM Eastern Standard Time, shovland writes: http://shovland.home.mindspring.com I just went through the autism powerpoint presentation. tnx. to me autism is relevant only in that: 1) it shows us that we have brainworks that connect us to others and gives us a sense how those brainworks operate; 2) it shows us how incredibly deprived we are if we lack connection. Self needs at least two things--structure and connection. Knock out connection and you put the entire emotional burden on structure. Folks with autism tend to be structure fanatics. They cling to it fanatically. The skills of those who are virtuosos come from this structure-cling. But it is never enough to satisfy a need that demands connection too. Which, I suspect, leaves autistics in a cage of perpetual emotional pain. Howard
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The paper below says that the amygdala tends to be shrunken in patients with autism-patients who are withdrawn from normal social contact and who don't seem capable of processing social signals in the parts of the brain which volunteer eagerly for the job in the rest of us. The shrunken amygdala makes me suspect that the amygdala is a center of our social interface. It is one of those entry points through which others intrude deeply into our feelings and are able to send us into terror or delight. Jocelyne Bachevalier seems to be thinking along the same lines, according to the following quote from an article in Brain:

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


Brain, Vol. 124, No. 10, 2059-2073, October 2001 © 2001 Oxford University Press Face processing occurs outside the fusiform `face area' in autism: evidence from functional MRI Karen Pierce1, R.-A. Müller2,3, J. Ambrose3, G. Allen4 and E. Courchesne1,3 1 Departments of NeuroscienceN and 2 Cognitive Science, University of California, San Diego, 3 Laboratory for the Neurosciences of Autism, Children's Hospital Research Center, La Jolla, California and 4 Long Island Jewish Medical Center, Glen Oaks, New York, USA Correspondence to: Karen Pierce, 8110 La Jolla Shores Drive, La Jolla, CA 92037, USA Processing the human face is at the focal point of most social interactions, yet this simple perceptual task is difficult for individuals with autism, a population that spends limited amounts of time engaged in face-to-face eye contact or social interactions in general. Thus, the study of face processing in autism is not only important because it may be integral to understanding the social deficits of this disorder, but also, because it provides a unique opportunity to study experiential factors related to the functional specialization of normal face processing. In short, autism may be one of the only disorders where affected individuals spend reduced amounts of time engaged in face processing from birth. Using functional MRI, haemodynamic responses during a face perception task were compared between adults with autism and normal control subjects. Four regions of interest (ROIs), the fusiform gyrus (FG), inferior temporal gyrus, middle temporal gyrus and amygdala were manually traced on non-spatially normalized images and the percentage ROI active was calculated for each subject. Analyses in Talairach space were also performed. Overall results revealed either abnormally weak or no activation in FG [fusiform gyrus] in autistic patients, as well as significantly reduced activation in the inferior occipital gyrus, superior temporal sulcus and amygdala. Anatomical abnormalities, in contrast, were present only in the amygdala in autistic patients, whose mean volume was significantly reduced as compared with normals. Reaction time and accuracy measures were not different between groups. Thus, while autistic subjects could perform the face perception task, none of the regions supporting face processing in normals were found to be significantly active in the autistic subjects. Instead, in every autistic patient, faces maximally activated aberrant and individual-specific neural sites (e.g. frontal cortex, primary visual cortex, etc.), which was in contrast to the 100% consistency of maximal activation within the traditional fusiform face area (FFA) for every normal subject. It appears that, as compared with normal individuals, autistic individuals `see' faces utilizing different neural systems, with each patient doing so via a unique neural circuitry. Such a pattern of individual-specific, scattered activation seen in autistic patients in contrast to the highly consistent FG activation seen in normals, suggests that experiential factors do indeed play a role in the normal development of the FFA.
Could autistics jangled by emotion attempt to reconcile their agita with their consciousness via extracranial brainloops devoid of the input of other human beings?
Karen ellis 9/27/01--yes, it would be their best defense against feeling fearful. I think they are in a state of panic since they don't have rules to go by. my .02
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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.
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the basic thesis of Passion Points is that self is others, others are self. The most personal parts of our selves are bits of other people we've swallowed and turned into what we think of as us. Self is a social billboard and a social interface. This means that when you're told you need to be strong and learn to love your self before others can love you, the advice is dead wrong. You have to get others to at least listen with interest to you if you're going to successfully pep yourself up and haul your self out of depression or self-destruction. You need others. There's just no way around it. Yet there IS a genuine self--one so deeply passionate that it can allow you to do the impossible. It's a self so emotionally potent that I call it soul. Passion points explains how the soul is built, why it evolved, and some of the strange points of its neurobiology. Passion Points reveals where the self fits into the morass of internalized others and competing brain systems we think of as, well, us. Passion Points also explains how to find your "soul" and use it. Passion Points is an original book of theory by a reknowned evolutionary thinker--Howard Bloom--and a highly regarded journalist--Russell Kick. The theory in itself provides a fascinating tour through the mind and answers the question of who we are in startling ways. It also gives us a firmer emotional anchor than modern psychobabble and popular assumptions currently provide. Why? Because science is the pursuit of truth. And the truth about the self shall set you free.

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
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Hb and Russell Kick 3/16/01 rk: That could probably be a good marketing angle for the book--superstars used these techniques to find their true selves and achieve superstardom. hb: yes, and the same approach that kindled a flame in these superstars can bring passion, power, and sensitivity to anyone who chooses to use it. But to understand your self it is important to understand the insights that have made these techniques possible. Passion points is a book of breakthrough theory about self, one that sheds light on the emotional core we call the soul. In fact, Passion Points is the first book to bring soul squarely within the sites of science...and in the process to offer new forms of empowerment to the general reader. It seems that the original concept for the book (at least as I perceived it) was a look at all the physiological/neurological aspects of yourself that influence who you are, how you feel, how you act, etc. hb: actually, no. that's an area I get into in all my work, but it's by no means the central area of my expertise. The hypothalamic connection is speculative--and we have to do a thorough hunt of the literature on the mapping functions of the hippocampus and its relationship to consciousness--our goal: to find out whether existing research supports the Bloom Hypothalamic Topographic Theory of Self. There's strong evidence for a second theoretical pillar of the book--The Extrasomatory Extensions of Self Hypothesis. But we need to look for more--including evidence pertaining to the biopsychological mechanisms involved. Then there's the concept of multiple selves based on the competition and cooperation between separate cerebral and neural assemblies. This one is well-documented and is covered in the Global Brain chapter on perception you so kindly placed in You Are Being Lied To. And there's all the data on the loss or gain of control and its impact on the body and mind via the internally generated poisons known as glucocorticoids (when we've lost control) or the internally cranked out uplifters--serotonin being high on the list (though if my friend E.E. Krieckhaus is right, current neurobiology may have its understanding of serotonin backwards). Yes, I want to enlighten the reader as much as possible about the Biopsychology of Getting A Grip. But it's the personal experience of gaining a self, losing it, or being caught in the crossfire between battling selves that counts most. what I learned by working with the stars, finding their souls, then showing the voiceless passions of soul to the verbal babbler in the left brain, the muttering, soliloquizing portion of our anatomy that generates the illusion of self. And what I've learned from working with people whose self is laid siege by one of the greatest threats to self-love. Romantic love--how to navigate it, what to expect from it, and why it is so threatening, plays a key role in this book.
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As for theory--there are two of them. They need some research to support them, and we'll have to hunt it down. First there's the Bloom Hippocampal Topographic Theory Of Self, which says that humans have a four dimensional map of their social terrain, a map of their relationships with others, a map of the relationships in our past and the relationships we hope for in our future. When this map is intact we feel secure and able to work, associate with others, and to love. When that map is torn or shredded, we lose our ability to operate normally. Depression and inner torment can overwhelm us. We can feel like we're worth shit, and want to crawl into a hole and die. And, in fact, we do die a bit. Our body begins the process of self-destruction outlined in The Lucifer Principle. Our is torn, tattered, or slashed when we lose a job, when we unexpectedly lose a father, a mother, a lover, or a spouse. It is often in shreds all through our adolescence and our twenties--periods in which we've kicked lose from our old social anchors and entered a social chaos in which there seems not place for us, no coordinates and landmarks to generate the social map we need. Mapping of this sort is considered to be the role of the hippocampus. Recent research has challenged that notion, but nonetheless it's generally accepted that the hippocampus is our four-dimensional mapper. Why four dimensional? Because the social mapping mechanism that defines who we are extends not just in space but in time. (Actually space and time are inseperable, but that's an argument for The Big Bang Tango, not Passion Points.) So the self and the hippocampus are inextricably linked. Tear our social map apart and we lose our sense of self. Deprive us of a past or a future and our sense of self disappears in a miasma of pain. The source of that pain should be found in the hippocampus. The second theoretical foundation for Passion Points is the Extrasomatory Extensions of Self concept. Let's start with where this is in the brain. The brain is not what we've made it out to be. Much of the stuff of mind we think is located in the brain is actually spread all over the place. Our moods are shifted by our adrenal cortices--way down in the small of your back. They are tinged by the connection between those cortices, the hypothalamus, and the gonads (the hpa--hippothalamic pituitary adrenal axis). Our thinking and feeling involve our "gut brain"--the enteric nervous system. They rope in our muscular sense of things, which means our arms, legs, torso, and even the muscles in our stomach help us think or feel our way through the maze of life. And much of our thinking and feeling is tied to our relationships to other humans. To make the location of brainwork even more confusing, the brain is made up of many independent sub-assemblies, each of which has a mind and a style all its own. Getting these parts to agree is a difficult task. In fact, all too often we fail to achieve it. So the self is everywhere and nowhere. In a sense it may be like a center of gravity. The center of gravity in this solar system is an invisible and in a sense non existent point where the the mass of the nine planets, all the interplanetary junk, and the sun centers. Though this point has no physical existence, it's real as hell. Any passing batch of glunk--a comet, for example--will be grabbed by it and irresistably drawn to rotate around it--not around that great big ball of glowing stuff called the sun, but around the central point where the gravity of the whole system and all its parts come to an imaginary meeting point. The self is like the meeting point of an even more complex mob of elements. So, like the center of gravity, it exists somewhere and nowhere simultaneously. We'd find the most prominent element in the left prefrontal cortex, where the "narrator" resides. However that inner narratier is only a spokesman for a summation of the invisible meeting point of right cortex, limbic systyem, parietal lobes, stomach, arms and legs, and myriads of overlapping social systems that rotate like planets around us. When we lose our time/space map of those planets, we lose our self.
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The "supernatural" is the raw stuff, the new material, the next conundrum for material explanation by a leap forward in human ethology. An approach to it is evolving within the paleopsychology group. It says in essence that the supernatural is the whisper of the reptilian brain and the early mammalian brain echoing in our sometimes all?to?ignorant yet loftily empowered cerebral cortex. The buried gods of old are the humanly evolved animals in the soul??to wit in the limbic system, the amygdaloid system which contains unverbalized emotions, the forward hypothalamus which uses its valve of emotionality to sort the complex cerebral reconstructions of "reality" it allows to surface in our "conscious mind." We reach divinity when the limbic gods find new words with which to sing through the cortical loop called "human rationality." Exaltation and the great beyond are the cerebral parts which ring with experience our cultural evolution has not yet learned to verbalize. We release its resonances in our songs and poetry. Now it's time to pin it down in hard and fast brain imaging and neurobiology. To tease out its opioid, seretoninergic, and oxytocinergic components. To map the meshworks of cerebral activity in which these emotional experiences live. To find new words, new metaphors and conceptual tools, with which future generations will be able to articulate as natural that which still seems "supernatural" to us. The raw material of the new science *is* in comic books, religion, pop songs, jazz solos and the things under our very nose which we scientists have traditionally ignored. We are working our way toward understanding these things in the International Paleopsychology Project. Our upcoming anthology, _Mindfire_, covers the neurobiology and ontology behind such things as mystic experience, aesthetic exaltation, the throes into which a musical performer goes, and other previously untouchable ephemera. These are the very stuff of life and they are entering our scientific grasp. I believe we are about to break down the walls of Cartesian "dualism." Any takers on this challenge? Howard

 

The self as a display mechanism

bloom hypothesis: 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.

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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
Hb: 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

 

Where previous books have landed us
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Martha, a fascinating weave of data and ideas.

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


Where is self in the brain?
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In a message dated 10/23/2002 6:20:37 PM Eastern Daylight Time, DrBeck writes: Just returned from a three weeks trip to Europe. YOu would not believe Serbia..the effects of a double dose of Marxism and Fascism were stunning...and horrible. You recall we were to do a live wire interview with you on Oct 30 at 7 until 8 your time (5 to 6 Boulder time) hb: it is in bold letters on the calendar. db: We want you to focus on how the brain makes a mind..or what is in the physicality and physics and chemistry of the brain itself that impacts the formation of world view, value systems, vmemetic codes etc. etc. We want to show the relationship between the organic brain and the "evolution" of mindsets...survival sense, magical self, egocentric self, saintly self, strategic self, sensitive self, integral self etc etc. Most of the people in the session..about 70...come from the intangible, invisible, and so-called consciousness tradition. We are trying to show that both chemical and talk therapy will be useful.. hb; this is a wonderful mandate, one I will ponder mightily. Don, every chemical and neurobiological reaction in the brain is hooked deeply into sociality. No brain is an island. Even the private self is a mechanism that connects us to others--and to the superorganism, that vast cultural emergent thing. Pheremones, hormones, and synapses all make us part of a family and a team. Even the architecture of the brain is sculpted by our intercourse with others, a connectivity that begins while we are in the womb, continues when a newborn automatically focuses on its mothers eyes and the eyes of strangers, and procedes to make brain cells thrive when an infant detects smiles and makes them die when the baby senses frowns or worse, indifference. Memes begin to take hold in the womb. From roughly the sixth fetal month on, the infant lives in a world of memewebs and emotional connection. Those are the shapers of its brain.
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In a message dated 10/14/2002 3:56:19 PM Eastern Daylight Time, buck writes: It presents additional data regarding my speculation that the right hemisphere is specialized for individualistic emotions and the left for prosocial emotions. Hb: This is extremely intriguing idea. My impression is that the situation may be the opposite. The right hemisphere may be our social sensor and connector. Our left cortex specializes in spiffing us up for public consumption, ironically by focusing on that creative presentation we call a self. The left handles that most personal and allegedly private thing, our identity. You have evidence that I'm wrong. Please, by all means email it to me. Howard

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The biopsychology of getting a grip: control and the mystery of self

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)
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50 reasons the self cannot get hold of itself--and some
>ideas from the science of self on what you can do about it.
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why we've evolved with the strange urges that grip us
>and sometimes snap us around like wet gym towels in a high school locker
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The basic idea is that the self is a product of our need for an illusion of control (see The Lucifer Principle for more on illusions of control and how our pysiology forces us to have them; and see Global Brain for why evolution favors those who demonstrate control, then talk to me for the conceptual glue holding the material in these books together; much of our book on self will come from that as-yet-unpublished glue). To maintain that illusion, we need a personal map of our social terrain, a map complete with solid landmarks. Those landmarks are the people in our lives, the roles they play, the daily,
weekly, annual, and other structures with which we order our map and define
our social position, our role in the lives of others and of the greater
society, etc. The inner map projects not just in space but in time--it's
four dimensional at the very least, and may be five, six, or seven
dimensional. One excruciatingly important landmark is our sense of a future.
Rob us of it, and we cease to feel human. Which is why religion, politics,
and literature all emphasize the importance of hope in our lives.

As for the projections of past and future in our mental and emotional map,
the past is structured in narrative patterns--so perhaps I should send you my
file on narrative. The future is sketched out by what I call future
projectors--devices for seeing into the darkness of what's to come. We can
see future projectors developing at the very first stages of life--among
prokaryotes--single-celled creatures like bacteria. Which means I should
probably also send you my file on future projectors and their evolution.

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.
Another hypothesis on the self. The conscious self resides in short term memory. It is able to scan aspects of self in long-term memory, but that's another subject for another time. I suspect that Patricia Goldman-Rakic's work reveals a bit of the neurobiological roots of self. Goldman-Rakic places the short term memory in the prefrontal cortex, an area John Skoyles' synthesis have clarified quite a few of the workings of the prefrontal cortex, but that, again, is a subject for another time. Goldman Rakic has found that the areas of the prefrontal cortex are pre-structured-they are arranged in modules. This echoes the work of Eshel Ben-Jacob who has shown that neurons allowed to grow and multiply in what I believe is a petri dish use the basic Bloomean rule, to he who hath it shall be given and from he who hath not even what he hath shall be taken away. Those neurons self-generate a network. The newly spawned neurons that manage to make the most connections to their fellows thrive. The neurons that fail to make enough connections to their companions shrivel and die. But that's not the only rule at work. Eshel has found that some successful neurons manage to make many a connection and gain great potential influence among their sisters. Yet they die. Why? Because they do not fit the underlying pattern the self-generating neurons are genetically programmed to produce. These self-generating patterns kill those who defy their genetic imperatives. They insist on following the rules of self-assembly that produce preformed neural meshworks, meshworks with a preprogrammed structure. In other words, neurons are programmed to produce modules. Or, put another way, neurons are preprogrammed to produce the underlying perceptual and emotional patterns that underlie the process we call mind. Among these processes in humans is the self.

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. Photo Credits Copyright © 2001 Time Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without permission is prohibited. FAQ | Site Map | Privacy Policy | Terms of Use © 2001 Cable News Network. All Rights Reserved. Terms under which this service is provided to you. Read our privacy guidelines. click here Search the Archive
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http://info.med.yale.edu/neurobio/goldman-rakic/goldman-rakic.html, downloaded 8/21/01 Patricia Goldman-Rakic Professor of Neurobiology Research Interests Work in this laboratory is devoted to understanding the neural basis of learning and memory with particular emphasis on the contribution of the prefrontal cortex. Most studies are conducted in rhesus monkeys as the nonhuman primate brain is unexcelled as an animal model of human brain development and brain function. The objective of our studies is to elucidate the cellular and molecular basis of cognitive processes in the brain of non human primates and to relate the findings to human mentation and mental illness. A major segment of work is related to fundamental research relevant to schizophrenia, in which frontal lobe dysfunction is prominent. Current emphasis is on neurotransmitter receptors and monoamine modulation of glutamate [glutamate, whose action produces an excitatory postsynaptic potential. At low levels of activity the glutamate binds to the glutamate receptor and activates a relatively small conductance increase for sodium and potassium ions. Glutamate is believed to be the transmitter at many excitatory synapses throughout the central nervous system (Gordon M. Shepherd. Synaptic transmission. McGraw Hill Encyclopedia of Science and Technology, cd-rom)] transmission in cortical circuits engaged by the working memory function of the prefrontal cortex. Our research involves a variety of morphological and functional techniques designed to elucidate the intrinsic and extrinsic circuits and synaptic architecture of the prefrontal cortex and its connections with other cortical areas and subcortical structures. Anatomical studies are conducted at the light and electron microscopic levels and include methodologies for tracing long-distance and local connections, and combines this with immunocytochemistry and in situ hybridization for localizing neurotransmitter receptors in identified cortical circuits both in vivo and in fixed and living slice preparations. Physiological approaches include functional metabolic mapping, single cell recording in behaving primates, and lesions and drug manipulations of behavior in monkeys. The physiological and anatomical approaches are mutually supportive and promote a comprehensive integration across disciplines. The laboratory enjoys a number of fruitful collaborations with investigators in other departments, including the Departments of Neurology, Pharmacology, Psychiatry and Radiology. Among them are collaborative studies on functional metabolic imaging of normal and schizophrenic subje cts in cognitive protocols are also conducted. This activity in the laboratory is supplemented with postmortem analysis of schizophrenic cortex using various molecular and immunocytochemical markers. Figure Legend Schematic diagram illustrating the relationship between dopaminergic axons (left) and the cellular elements of the GFC (right). The triangles symbolize potential sites of DA synapses. Neuron E is a layer V pyramidal cell that could potentially receive D A inputs on the distal portion of its horizontally oriented dendrites and the distal branches of its apical dendrite in layers I and II. B and C are layer II and II pyramidal neurons, respectively, and may also have a dense DA input to their apical dendr itic arbors in the molecular layer. G represents a layer VI cell with an extensive horizontally oriented dendritic arbor capable of extensive DA modulation. A, D, and F are nonpyramidal neurons of layers II, IV, and VI, respectively, which may also be i nnervated by DA axons. Thus, the branches of the apical dendritic arbor of layer II, III, and V pyramidal cells and the distal horizontal dendrites of layer V and VI cells potentially receive the most dense DA input.


Recent Publications

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
prefrontal cortex. Science 260:1955-1958, 1993.

Friedman, H.R. and Goldman-Rakic, P.S. Coactivation of prefrontal cortex and inferior parietal cortex in working memory
tasks revealed by 2DG functional mapping in the rhesus monkey. J. Neurosci. 14:2775-2788, 1994.

Williams, G.V. and Goldman-Rakic, P.S. Modulation of memory fields by dopamine D1 receptors in prefrontal cortex. Nature
376:572-575, 1995.


Patricia Goldman-Rakic
Yale University School of Medicine
Section of Neurobiology
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I have a much better idea of the focus of the book now. Basically, it seems like an applied version of your first two books. In those books, you showed how the human race is divided into various superorganisms, and what that means on the large scale of human society, history, evolution. Now you're going to bring it down to a personal level, showing what your theory means in the day-to-day lives of each one of us. You showed how superorganisms affect the world, and now you're going to show how superorganisms affect each individual. Do I have the gist?

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.

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The book on self I want to write with you is extremely important to me, and I think will also be extremely important to each of its readers. It will validate innumerable strong feelings which skulk through the soul like dark ghosts, nameless and wordless. It will give a name to that which people feel but are afraid to reveal lest they seem like weaklings in a world where everyone else appears to be strong. All suffer from their mutual silence. All are put in solitary confinement by it. Our task is to break down the walls of isolation and allow our fellow humans to see the web, the nest, that holds them together when they're certain they are most alone.
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Why do we have a self? What is it for? How did it come to be? Research shows that the self doesn't kick off the decisions we make-in fact it's often the last one to know what we're doing. And the parts of the brain which actually make decisions seldom tell the self why they've made them. If the self isn't in the driver's seat of our will, then what the heck is self all about? What is it for? How did it evolve?

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?
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self and the creation of our emotional map of our world, our past, and our future are one and the same. Tear a piece of that map away and our sense of self goes into chaos...and pain. The illusion of self is our way of showing others and our selves that we are in control. In reality, we often aren't. But what we call our selves is often the last one to know.

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.
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3) its approach (will it be a theoretical work aimed at the intelligentsia or a more hands-on work aimed at giving people from all walks of life practical ideas on how to handle fear, anger, intimacy, etc.?)


hb: like The Lucifer Principle and Global Brain, it will present a new theory for scientists and others who are interested in science...or for those simply interested in making sense of their lives. It will be written for a mass audience. Unlike Lucifer and GB, it will also go into the practical implications of the theory--never toss a blessing away, the loss of a friend is an amputation--so never cut one off, add to your social landscape, don't prune it, establish an achievable goal--whether it seems like what you want the most or not--and go for it...merely being busy will bring you to life and help you find what you really do want to do; some tricks for finding your "soul"--the center of your passions--and using it at work and play; when things look worst, you're not alone; how to give structure to your day; how to handle the ultimate challenge to self: love and intimacy. Manage your map of self and it will help empower you.

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In a message dated 11/14/00 1:10:51 AM Eastern Standard Time, russ writes:


I read a fascinating article--"The Republic of Feelings" by Christina Hoff Sommers--in the secular humanist magazine Free Inquiry (Fall 2000). She shows that there is a small but impressive body of research suggesting that people who repress their emotions and act stoically are more balanced and psychologically healthy than those who follow the current common wisdom of always being emotionally open and sharing one's feelings.

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."


hb: Russell--I've read similar studies, all pertaining to grieving after a death. The heavy emoters did far worse in the long run than those who stressed the positives and pushed onward in life. Let's try to dig into this one from the point of view of the Bloom topographic/hippocampal theory of self, and see if it gets us anywhere. The theory says that we need a sound internal map of social relationships, future goals, past roots, and even such details as where the pencils and yesterday's mail are. This chart of our "reality" provides us with a sense of control--and often with control itself. A sense of control enhances our self confidence, boosts our ability to see the opportunities around us, makes us more socially attractive, and increases the benefits conferred on us by a healthy immune system. Loss of control does the opposite--it tosses us into depression, moves us to slump rather than to stand erect, and makes us grouchy, gray, gloomy, and morose--not the greatest social magnets. It also depresses the activity of our immune system and ups our likelihood of sniffles, gangrene, cancer, and other hot diseases of the day.

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.


The research bears closer examination, because Sommers doesn't say anything about causation. The correlation seems to be there, but maybe people who are *already* healthier and more balanced don't need to emote as much.

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
superorganism better.

hb: good point!!!!!!!!!

rk: Thus, they are "rewarded" with better psychological health. Sommers
even unknowingly hints at this--she uses phrases like "self-involved" and says that the current paradigm "may encourage a preoccupation with one's self, to the unhealthy exclusion of outside interests."

Does this seem like a fruitful avenue to explore?


hb: yup.
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Affiliaton and differentiation
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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)
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Steve Hovland suggests new subtitle: "The Science of Self." 4/20/2003 hb: yes, this is compelling. to follow up on its promise to the reader, we'd have to do a chapter giving an overview of the science of self as it stands today, with the views of folks like neurobiologist Jose Llinas and others in the field, show their inadequacies, and open up a wider vista with our proposals. My guess would be that many theories of self look at a single human isolated in a vacuum.

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.
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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.
------------------------------
In a message dated 4/18/00 11:20:23 AM Eastern Daylight Time, writes:
Patti Hausman
<< I
> would still view the modern female who is having too good a time to
consider
> "settling down and having a family" to be a very different entity to any
of
> her same sex predecessors. But perhaps, here too, I am focusing on an
> atypical minority. Is the norm more accurately represented by females
who
> have to continue in the job market because two incomes are essential if
w >>
sociologists have come to the rescue with a very evolutionary psych-friendly way of explaining the opposite phenomenon--adolescent girls living in poverty who have children out of wedlock and totally without the support of commitment from the gentlemen who got his jollies by inserting the relevant sperm. Life is short in the inner city, women age rapidly, they rely on their children to help support them, even if it's by picking up the mother's trade of drug dealing, and hence they need to get started procreating far earlier than the middle class women Patti describes. Those in the middle class can, as Patti indicates, look forward to a long and healthy life, one which enables them to put off having children until their 40s.

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
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Hb: >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

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.
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The point about each generation needing a way to kick the previous generation in the teeth so it can create its own perceptual stance has been passing through my mind as I've spent time with these kids. They hate the organizations they work for and hate the "empty institutions" which they feel the folks of the '60s have handed them. Yet they emulate the sixties generation, take its drugs, hang out with its shamans, read the authors who helped give it roots, etc. Hating what you take in and make a part of your self is one way of deluding yourself into a sense of rebellious independence even as you suckle and refuse to let go of the nipple of the generation nurturing your identity. Howard


In a message dated 11/22/1999 6:04:49 PM Eastern Standard Time, spiwiz writes:

On the matter of "conformity," it might help to think of multiple
systems in people rather than define them as either "conformist"
or "individualists."

hb: sounds like a good idea.

On some issues, I may be an "individualist"
such as a preference for economic freedom that comes from
a free market economy. On other matters, such as deep religious
faith, I may exhibit "conformist" behaviors on social matters.
So, what am I? a Conformist or an Elitist?

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.

db: All of the cultural studies indicate that the United States has
a much more "individualistic" strain in its culture, certainly
in contrast to Singapore, or many of the other Pacific Rim
cultures.

hb: well put. But as you imply, this is simply a matter of degree. Nonetheless on a personal level I have to admit that too much conformity deeply disturbs me. Howard
--------------------------------------------

In a message dated 1/29/00 2:30:01 PM Eastern Standard Time, John Skoyles writes:

The answer is that belong not to troops but bands. That is unlike most
monkeys our group is not always physically surrounding us in the noises,
sights and smells of cogroup members. No, we are like chimps, and live in
bands: groups that disperse into small parties that meet up again and
reform into new small parties. Such groups exist no in the surrounding
environment but in the brain. Bands are troops carried in the mind.

hb: beautifully put.

Technically, the term of fusion-fission group living: fusing together and
constantly fissioning apart. Human psychology is rooted in how we carry
around the other members of group in our head. How we internalise them.

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.

As for groups which promise to subvert the cliques which refused us entry, the following quote applies: "The way in which the man of genius rules is by persuading an efficient minority to coerce an indifferent and self-indulgent majority" (James Fitzjames Stephen).

js: Evolution did not fix that we did in one way allowing people in different
cultures to carry different kinds of group in their head. Some -- those
that are highly individualised carry many groups around -- we can be
father, professional worker, party worker, loyal tennis group member etc.
Others have their identy specified from outside: Prince Charles is never
allowed to act other than a Prince.

hb: Global Brain attempts to show how the neolithic growth of cities and the sixth century B.C. commercial explosion which knit together societies from France and Spain to Southern Russia via Mediterranean and Black Sea trade lanes increased individual autonomy dramatically, redefining the possiblities of self from those of a tribal identity to the plethora of simultaneous idea-based subcultures we can join today.
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Date: 98?01?11 15:49:28 EST From: knobloch (Ferdo Knobloch) To: HowlBloom
We just finished talking This hopefully will come through your e=mail: GROUP SCHEMA AUTHORITIES M F PEERS SEX PARTNERS M F M F SUBORDIANTES M F CIRCUMPLEX D+ F+ E+ A? A+ f? E? D? D+:dominance (orders, leads, teaches) D?: subdominance (submission) (yileds, follws... A+: afiliation (seeks contact, friendship, love) A?: Avodaince (avoids, takes distance EXHIBITION + (I am powerful, clver, rich,....) exhibition ?: (I kac..power, money, helath, I am sad...sympathy,care soliciting F+: Fight (fiht, aggression, asnger...) F?: Flight (escape, fear (Ferdinand explained in conversation that this graphic representation was developed by Timothy Leary before his lycergic acid experiments. hb)
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Who am I? Just which narrow slot is me?
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In a message dated 10/22/2002 11:10:44 AM Eastern Daylight Time, shovland writes: As I watch the coverage of the DC shootings I feel that our officials are having a little trouble taking terrorism seriously. They are still trying to jam this thing into a psycho-killer box while all the while saying it doesn't fit the pattern. hb: good observation You're noting how we search for patterns, prototypes, and scripts --for predefined formulae from the bag of indispensable cliches we call common sense. It's the 21st Century equivalent of "baker, taylor, tinker, thief, merchant, banker, injun chief." You have to fit into one of the few slots we use to define you or you aren't human, you don't exist. Finding a self or an identity means finding which slot you fit in. A new superstar, underground artist, rebel-hero, and subculture can even help you find a predefined slot as an outsider. It can give you that sense of immense relief that comes from having a label and a social place. It also tells others what they should do with you. Should I treat you like a terrorist, a sniper, or an innocent civilian? Each tells me how to feel toward you and how to handle you.

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Growing a self-the development of self in adolescence and early life
_________
The following article reports that teens from the beginning of puberty-roughly 12.5 years old-to the age of 18 lose their ability to see the emotions of the folks they're talking to, negotiating with, living with, and trying to succeed among. Here's a guess at some of the implications of this work. Back in the days of my fieldwork, when I exited the musical realm of Beethoven and Bartok and entered what to me was the foreign territory of mass culture and its emotions, I became editor of a national rock magazine. Blessed with many a handy no-cost tool for empirical research implanted in my own adolescence by Martin Gardner's Mathematical Games section in The Scientific American, I did empirical studies of my audience. Turns out the prime audience for my magazine was 12.5 to 18 years old with a spike at the magic age of sixteen. Using ethnographic techniques and something we scientists are often encouraged to suppress, the power of the emotional mirror of others within ourselves, I set out weekend after weekend to the suburbs of Connecticut. Loaded down with a new and still-bulky consumer gizmo, the portable cassette recorder, and with an ample supply of notebooks, I spent my days and evenings among groups of kids between the age of 12 and 18, trying to get a feel for their subcultures, their interests, and their emotions. The subcultures broke down into four.

--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
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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
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The mapmaker in the chaos of the brain: the topographic theory of the self-structure deprivation
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Cochran pointed out a couple of years ago that 3-D processing took up a huge proportion of the total volume of chips in high end PCs. Sophisticated 3-D processing isn't even included on the main Intel CPU chip. Computer video game enthusiasts who want fast 3-D buy video cards with huge specialized chips from nVidia and the like. You'll note that, adjusted for body size, men have bigger brains than women and East Asians have bigger brains than others. Both men and East Asians also tend to score well on tests of 3-D mental manipulation. Suggestive? Steve Sailer hb and that processing power may also be used to store memories and create a map of both our physical and our social world. Asian are more aware of their location in the social world than we are. They could have gained this capacity by self selecting for brains big enough to comprehend a 3-d social map. Howard
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Passion Points: Three Scientific Journeys Into the Mists of Self and Soul. The Passion Point files contain records of years of the sex lives--which means the bonding, emotional relationship lives--of several individuals as told in their own words. Why? Because love and intimacy challenge the self and fill folks with fear. And because people in romantic relationships squabble over things they can't define. They don't know what's making them irritable, angry, and argumentative. But Passion Points--the book--does know. Many of these fights are over one of the most potent and unseen terrains of all--the emotional maps of self.
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To stay alive, a culture, like an individual, needs a map of past and future. It needs its ancestors. It needs a strong connection to their values. And it needs its goals…future aspirations the spirit of the ancestors have blessed. When a culture runs out of goals to reach and roots from which to stretch toward them, the society in which that culture resides can die. howard
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The model of self i was proposing a month or two ago. This was based on john skoyles' observation that the hypothalamus initially evolved as part of the smell mechanism of early mammals forced to live a night life, and hence to sniff their way through their territory, using scent to build a mental map of its geography. Later this geographic mapping was borrowed for another purpose??categorizing input to be placed in memory, positioning emotional and sense data into a coherent mental map. When we lose the coherence of our mental map, the one which gives us a clear picture of where our future, our present, our desires, and our next moves fit into the landscape of our lives, we lose a sense of control and enter a violently uncomfortable chaotic state. This squares with the vast research on loss of control and learned helplessness. Ironically, one of the consequences of this state, if sustained indefinitely, is destruction of hippocampal cells by high internal doses of cortisol. This would help increase the probability of moving from momentary crisis to perpetual mental illness, since the mapmaker on which we depend for a sense of wellness is enfeebled. Because the hippocampus is capable of generating new cells and does so as a matter of course, i wonder if giving a patient a carefully graduated series of tasks whose construction nearly guarantees that he or she will triumph over all of them, thus regaining the sense of control, would reverse the hippocampal degeneration. It certainly would reverse the glucocorticoid flood and produce a better modulated return of amines and serotonin to the system, generating a phase shift of the kind you've mentioned. Greater calm, greater sense of mastery, increase of harmonic communication between cerebral nodes, and, according to research on emotions, behavior and perception, a return of a sense of an understandable and hope?filled personal landscape. howard

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the map of our reality extends not just in height, width, and depth, but it stretches forward and backward in time. We arrange the narrative of our past so it will form a terrain we can handle and which may give us tools with which to carve out our future or with which to undo ourselves. And we arrange our future goals and hopes. Studies show that when that future terrain disappears or grows cloudy, dark, or unpredictable, we disintegrate physically and mentally. The question is, what brain areas are responsible for this map? Does the hippocampus, our map-maker and map-caretaker, preside over this crosshatched chart of our life's meaning? Or when it comes to temporal terrain, is there teamwork from yet other parts of the brain?
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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.
Speaking in terms of evolution, the new generation is a restless probehead for the collective intelligence of the group. It can't use the environment of its parents as it becomes an adult. It can't encroach and become a competitor so it has to find a new home, a new niche. To do so it has to test a bunch of new realities. This causes topographical and hippocampal chaos--a loss of the old maps and a desperate need for a new one on which to anchor the sense of control which is central to "finding one's self." Finally, the new generation's members build a new topography and settle into it. Your sense of self is where you fit into that mental map which contains your remembered and perceived reality. It also places you in the latitudinal and longetudinal framework of a supportive group. Hippocampal topography, self-discovery, and adhesion to a sympathetic subculture in which one carves out a niche are all associated. Each helps you gain a
sense of a grip on life. If the map becomes chaotic, you begin to lose your sense of self and become quite depressed and desperate. Time to find refuge in a new mental geography--or, in the case of folks in their 40s and beyond, refuge in the old one of their parents, the ways from which they once fled, and which they now modify in terms of their experiences and their generational modes of perception. They reach back for a map which they developed so early that it's embedded in them strongly. However they see the old through their maturing generation's new behavioral repertoires and perceptual categories. At this point, they are likely to switch to a more conservative or nostalgiac subculture, one dedicated to bringing back the new vision of the "good old days." This maintains a continuity in the group structure, allowing it to grow from one developmental stage to another without disintegrating. Youngsters are probeheads. Mature adults are adhesion devices. But the search for a hippocampal map and the ways in which one clings to it are engines of social evolution--diversity generators in the young and conformity enforcers in their elders.
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hippocampus evolved before common ancestor of birds and men (Natural History, 9/97: 56)
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the right hippocampus builds an inner map of the exterior world and to play navigator as we try to get somewhere inside of it (allocentric). the left hippocampus may keep old memories of indirect routes available. the right inferior parietal cortex and both sides of medial parietal area help figure out how to turn the body to keep on track, mapping objects with an eye to what's where around me--what barriers do I have to move over or around, what doorways do I have to go through-- and right caudate nucleus speeds up getting to the correct spot. (egocentric) (McGuire, et. al., "Knowing Where and Getting There." Science may 8, 1998 p. 921
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john skoyles 12/14/2002 3:56:56 AM Eastern Standard Time Monty, Perhaps the account provided in Up from Dragons of the Hippocampus [Chapter 11] enables a link between the hippocampus (and the temporal lobe) and spirituality [like you I am disappointed with neural localization without explanation]. www.upfromdragons.com There are several stages to the story and argument. First, the hippocampus arose because early mammals needed to find their way around in the dark. That meant a smart neural cartographer. Smart because it had to recognize an area even when many of its sensory qualities changed. For example, a place might offer very different sounds, smells, colors at different times of the year, after a forest fire -- or if the animal needed to leave nocturnally and venture out in the day. The hippocampus allows us to create a spatial identity underneath superficial changeable aspects. Thanks to it, the world has continuity in spite of it lacking constant features. Second, evolved to give spatial identity, the hippocampus [in cooperation with other parts of the temporal lobe] enable the brain to experience other identities behind the flux of change. A person remains the same to us even if they have a new hair cut, new cloths or even bigger changes in their physical appearance -- for example, after major burns and limb amputation in an accident. It is an exquisite but easily ignored part of experience that we never start to experience two twins as other than two separate identities [except by confusion in which case we make a point of being more careful]. Our brains are built to be very concerned to hunt out the identities behind people that are continuous from the superficial that change. Neurally, we are always sniffing out the essences of things while seeking to avoid getting mislead by surface -- and misleading -- cues. Howard Bloom is Howard Bloom whether two weeks old or ninety years -- the physical reality is superficial to some deeper core "identity" in people that we not only readily pick up but actual find hard not to experience [except in certain brain injury conditions such as Capgras Syndrome). Neurologically, picking up this identify comes from the same processes that enabled early mammals to pick up the cartographical "essence" of an area that did not change, however much light, season or weather, altered its physical aspects. Third, what if this capacity to sense "essence" having moved from spatial reality to personal identity further went on to know the very "essence" of reality.

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

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In a message dated 98?03?26 02:28:34 EST, david klein writes: < Sixty years of psychological testing of all sorts shows robust perceptual > and cognitive differences between us and members of primitive societies. > > Much of this can be ranged along a concreteness?abstraction dimension. The > self cannot be constructed on a higher level of abstraction than that of the > mind that conceives it. >> Sorry to be so cryptic; I'm under ridiculous pressure at the moment. Do you know Kohlberg's moral stage theory, for example? It would be a good example of the sort of thing I'm talking about. J.M. Baldwin, the turn?of?the?century psychologist who influenced Piaget wrote a very complete stage theory about levels of mental representation and the forms of self that correspond to these; I have a copy before me, but not time to summarize it for now. In any case, the book is called Thought and Things: A Study of the Development and Meaning of Thought OR Genetic Logic. Titles were long?winded in 1906; so is the book, in fact. Luria and Vygotsky have much to say on this subject too; in fact they collaborated on a study of mental performance in Central Asian citizens of the USSR during the 30s, which was later suppressed because the Communists thought it racist.
<< Temporoparietal, anyway. I think some of this stuff gets mapped for ideational spaces, as mental blackboard, instead of purely sensory associations. I'VE BEEN WORKING OUT SOME THOUGHTS ALONG THE SAME LINE TODAY, ESPECIALLY AS RELATES TO THE SENSE OF SELF AND OF CONTROL. THE HIPPOCAMPUS, WHICH HAS A HIGHLY DEVELOPED BATCH OF SPACIAL MAPS, HAS APPARENTLY BEEN KIDNAPPED BY HUMANS DURING THE COURSE OF THEIR NEURAL AND SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT TO PROVIDE A MANNER OF ORDERING OUR WORLD. (SEE SKOYLES' _ODYSSEY_ FOR AN EXTREMELY WELL WORKED OUT EXPLICATION OF THIS COMPLETE WITH TONS OF RESEARCH REFERENCES). I'D SUSPECT IT IS KEY TO OUR WORLDVIEW, THE TOPOLOGY WITH WHICH WE CREATE ABSTRACTIONS, AND OUR SENSE OF PERSONAL BEING. WHEN WE HAVE EVERYTHING IN PLACE??IN OTHER WORDS PINNED DOWN TO ACCUSTOMED COORDINATES WITHIN THOSE HIPPOCAMPAL MAPS--WE FEEL IN CONTROL AND OUR SENSE OF SELF IS FIRM. WHEN ALL THE FAMILIAR ELEMENTS IN OUR LIFE ARE TORN FROM THEIR ACCUSTOMED COORDINATES, WE LOSE THE SENSE OF A COHERENT MAPPING, A SENSE OF SELF, AND A SENSE OF CONTROL. THE RESULT CAN BE DEPRESSION OF A RATHER PROFOUND VARIETY. THE NEUROENDOCRINOLOGICAL BASIS AND CONSEQUENCES OF CONTROL?LOSS DEPRESSION HAVE BEEN MAPPED OUT QUITE THOROUGHLY. So to a degree I think abstractness "subverts" structures that had a different function in less developed cultures. YES, IN RATS THE HIPPOCAMPUS IS USED FOR FINDING YOUR WAY AROUND A LANDSCAPE (IF YOU ARE A RAT, THAT IS) AND KNOWING THE EMOTIONAL SIGNIFICANCE OF EACH LOCATION??ITS DANGERS AND OPPORTUNITIES. OUR SPACIAL SENSE IS SO HIGHLY DEVELOPED AND FUNDAMENTAL TO US THAT THE ROMANS AND GREEKS USED SPATIAL MAPPING TO MEMORIZE ASTONISHING AMOUNTS OF DATA. THERE'S INTERESTING MATERIAL ON THIS IN J. ALLAN HOBSON'S _CHEMISTRY OF CONSCIOUS STATES_, NEW YORK: LITTLE BROWN & COMPANY, 1994. SO I'D SUSPECT THAT WHEN ANY OF US ARE WANDERING AROUND A LANDSCAPE??WILD, CULTIVATED OR URBAN, WE USE THE HIPPOCAMPAL POSITIONING SYSTEM. In the latter sense, I'm uneasy about theories that functionally stratify the brain/mind if they ignore the degree of top?down influence and the ability of cortical executive to remap and transform modules that had other functions phylogenetically. SEE SKOYLES' BOOK FOR AN EXTREMELY EYE?OPENING TOP?DOWN/BOTTOM?UP VIEW OF INTERACTIVE BRAIN, MIND AND CULTURAL EVOLUTION.>> david klein to IPP 3/26/98, hb in CAPS.

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Ian Pitchford, Department of Psychiatry University of Sheffield, UK 9/26/98 to hbe-l-- In the "Modularity of Mind" Fodor famously wrote: "There is simply no reason at all to believe that the ontogeny of the elaborate psychological organization that computational associationism contemplates can be explained by appeal to learning principles which do what principles of associative learning did - viz., create mental copies of environmental redundancies. In particular, the constructibility in logical principle of arbitrarily complicated processes from elementary ones doesn't begin to imply that such processes are constructible in ontogeny by the operation of any learning mechanism of a kind that associationists would be prepared to live with." During a recent correspondence on theory of mind in autism and schizophrenia the evolutionary theorist George C. Williams wrote to me: "Your first couple of pages reminded me of a problem I have with the way evolutionary psychologists postulate a module whenever they find it convenient, with little thought as to how many modules there can be and how they might relate to each other. Maybe I am waiting for someone to propose some kind of module hierarchy, analogous perhaps to Tinbergen's instinct hierarchy proposed a few decades ago (his 1952 book, I think). At the top would be a prioritizing module that would decide which others to activate and when." --------------------- Ian--in parallel, massively interconnected system, things can be a good deal messier than what Williams seems to seek. Modules can spill over each other in whatever sloppy way they please. The International Paleopsychogy Project's John Skoyles likens the brain to a computer which can be switched from one setting to another by its equivalents of software. In even a simple linear computer, the hardware elements can made to participate in such a way that they become a wordprocessor or a spread sheet within seconds. Many of the same bits of silicon within the computer's housing participate in both forms of virtual organization. In other words, the equivalent of two modular settings spill over each other haphazardly indifferent to the manner in which they coopt the same hardware. As for a master agent determining which setting is which, in any learning system there are many, shifting with circumstance. In the brain, Skoyles demonstrates that the prefrontal cortex plays many an executive role. The prefrontal cortex is especially involved with the executive functions which appear to us as consciousness and self. But there is no nice, neat military or mechanical hierarchy. One self wars with another within our consciousness for mastery. A self we don't know--or perhaps several--reside in the vagal nervous system. Many selves seize control from their seats in the amygdala, the hippocamus, and the striatum. There's competion for the power to puppeteer us between the right hippocampus and the left, between the right cerebral hemisphere and the left, between frontal and parietal lobes, between cholinergic, aminergic, dopaminergic, oxytocinergic, corticosteroidal, and endorphin systems. Each struggles to take over our circuitry. Each has the ability to reconfigure our virtual machinery. We have numerous internal masters and just as many on the outside, where imminent catastrophe vies for our attention with hints of possible triumph, where subcultures of all kinds vie to rearrange our cultural mindware with their ideologies, etc. Stuart Kauffman uses a marvelous diagram in which perhaps 20 elements are interconnected in hundreds of ways, making for a near plenitude of system- wide rearrangements and possibilities. Thinking systems from those of smart molecules to bacteria to brains and social systems work this way. Does this in any way help in solving the puzzlement? Howard
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Subj: Re: Modularity, cognitive science and biology Date: 98-09-27 03:20:02 EDT From: (Jeffrey Goldberg) It is a pretty safe bet that the mind/brain is a neural network at a fairly deep level. But not all neural nets are equal. If one is going to design a neural net that is going to learn human speech it gets designed differently (I believe) than a neural net designed to spot the difference between British and Soviet tanks[1]. The mere fact that there isn't a single neural net program out there that is used without reconfiguration for learning everything, is, I think evidence that even connectionist people, deep down, accept something like specialized modules. I doubt that they would agree with my analysis, however. (3) Even a stronger way of putting that is to point out that it is unlikely that one neural net has been trained successfully on two distinct and complex tasks.The mere fact that a neural nets get built for very specific functions is the best evidence that deep down, connectionist researchers are modularists
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Two more sermonettes on Kauffman. Note the way a common principle echoes at two radically disparate levels of order in the following quotes: First, from Kauffman, speaking of Boolean networks: "Imagine a network with 100,000 binary variables. Each has been assigned at random K=2 inputs. The wiring diagram is a mad scramble of interconnections with no discernible logic, indeed with no logic whatsoever. Each binary variable is assigned at random one of the 16 possible Boolean functions of two variables, AND, OR, IF, Exclusive OR, etc. The logic of the network itself is, therefore, entirely random. Yet order crystallizes. "The expected length of a state cycle in such networks is not the square root of the number of states, but on the order of the square root of the number of variables. Thus a system of the complexity of the human genome, with some 100,000 genes and 2(100,000) states, will meekly settle down and cycle among a mere 317 states. And 317 is an infinitesimal subset of the set of 2(100,000) possible states. The relative localization in state space is on the order of 2(99,998)." (p. 105) Sudden switch. We are moving from Boolean networks and genomes to the psyches of human beings. The following is from the Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology: "It is of note that there can be, in principle, an infinite number of ways to be a unique individual. Yet the contemporary American culture authenticates, authorizes, or provides legitimate blueprints for a rather limited number of ways to be a unique and distinct individual. Accordingly, to be unique in a way that is unspecified in cultural models, say, wearing a kimono in a psychology class, no longer meets the cultural definition of 'being a unique person,' it simply means 'being a weirdo.' Thus the person can be a unique person only by incorporating into himself or herself the very model of the person as independent that is available in the cultural context. A study by Stein, Markus, and Roeser (1997) found, for example, that the same 11 attribute terms (e.g. nice, friendly, etc.) accounted for more that 50% of all the self descriptive responses of a sample of 11-to 14-year-olds. In other words, each distinct, individualized, independent person is collectively constructed through his or her engagement in a cultural world that is organized by and made up of practices and meanings based on the model of the person as independent." (Hazel Rose Markus, Shinobu Kitayama. "The Cultural Psychology of Personality." Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, January 1998, pp. 74-75 in an article which runs from 63-87.) Then there's a concept of a few weeks ago whose origin escapes me: Though the number of conceivable social structures and strategies available would seem to be vast, the real world has a peculiarity.

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.
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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
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In a message dated 98-09-27 10:30:31 EDT, fentress writes:I have convinced myself, at least, that NEITHER the strict modularity nor its opposite, the mass action, views of brain operations (and behavior) work. Its that in between zone that we need to be alert to. If modules form, disolve, reform, etc. we have something that can link at least some aspects of modularity thinking with a dynamic sytems view. (The latter can sometimes go too far in the opposite direction - everything connected to everything.) Why not pursue the idea that systems form and dissolve, that their boundaries tighten and loosen, that their rules of autonomy increase and decrease, that operations can be more or less specific with time, and so forth? Its more work, but its the way the brain works, I'll bet. >>

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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

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The cosmos is filled with and formed by boundary-making functions--from those which make the massive rippling cosmic strings along whose lengths and junctions galaxies coagulate to the barrier between me and you and my group and yours. Are ALL barrier-makers instances of lateral inhibition? Howard
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Subj: Religion as adaptive Date: 98?05?31 15:24:39 EDT From: (irving wolfson)

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.
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>>
In a message dated 98-10-12 12:18:25 EDT, acheyne writes:

<<
Sorry to be so terse. I am struggling with this myself and I apologize if
the following merely adds to your puzzlement. I was suggesting that modes
of human understanding--everyday understanding (Verstehen)--are constrained
not only by obdurate external worldly facts, but also by internal
constraints.

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
are created equal, and from their deductions you will
know them." John Edser


ac: Phylogenic inertia is one such constraint, but there are
others even more fundamental and equally strict. It has been amply
demonstrated, for example, that we are limited-capacity information
processors. We need to economize in our thinking--heuristics are just the
tip of the iceberg.

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,
metonymy, and synechdoche--is that they reduce the novel to the familiar,
the complex array of stimuli to a few distinctive iconic features.

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
applying cultural roles and rituals to animal behavior, for example, the
!Kung reduced the novelty and complexity of alien species to the familiar
and routinized personal understanding of everyday life.

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
organic species too and our cultural existence is framed by the same basic
imperatives of reproduction, conflict of interest, material resources etc.,
so our cultural narratives work adequately. (This is what I meant in my
original note about constraint by "basic ground rules of action.") Our
narratives (like those of the !Kung) are not irrelevant fantasies, but
neither are precise theories.

hb: nicely said.

ac: Their criterion is not truth but utility.
Admittedly, as Peirce stresses, utility in the long run will tend to the
truth (maybe), but the proximal satisfaction in human understanding is in
clarity of understanding (compelling narratives)

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
with underlying reality. The notion of a strictly truth-based form of
understanding is quite recent, really becoming explicit only in the last
500 years. This is probably why this type of thinking is so difficult and
requires special training, and why, even among those of us who habitually
(try to) think in this way, there are frequent lapses and errors.

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
1997 Feb 28 275:5304 1293-5)

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.

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In a message dated 99?06?13 16:19:48 EDT, Chris McCulloch writes:

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
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ac: I think
also that this difference between Verstehen and Erklaren thinking lies at
the root of postmodern thinking which, as Lyotard points out, predates
modernism.

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,
indirectly, about human psychology as they do, directly, about the topics
they address. This what I meant about their being only an approximate guide
to scientific understanding.

hb: Verstehen easily maps onto the intuitive thinking of Bechara, et. al. and the learning techniques used by the limbic system, in particular the hippocampus and the amygdala. Sounds like it involves the right brain's integrative abilities and a bit of the left brain's verbal and metaphoric powers too. So it emerges as something akin to an idea built on Kent Bailey's phylogenetic progression/regression model--the concept of phylogenetic integration.

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.


Not only does it help, it provides an extremely interesting set of tools for prying into things. Many thanks for another good mental workout, Al. Cheers--Howard


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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.
Wish I'd had Val's perspectives when I was piecing it together (by stalking and tracking the observations of those who'd stalked and tracked, since these were things I'd never done).

hb: aha, we are converging.

To
get tracking, we use the TOM complex to make inferences about the signs and
"send" the "output" to the navigation complex, which moves us about the
world, situating the sign in the cogntive map.

The tricky part of this is using the TOM complex on the signs. What I have
in mind is using the inferential capacity of the TOM complex to operate on
different input to yield output not unlike its standard output, which is
about the state of a conspecific. Beyond that--just what is a sign,
anyhow? Footprints are obvious enough, but trackers surely have more to go
on than that. So, what qualifies as a sign? Surely one must understand an
animal's way of life in order to understand what things are signs that such
an animal has been here. So, we're now deep in the territory of Al
Cheyney's anthropomorphic animal tales. Perceiving, understanding, and
responding to the intentions and desires of one's fellows must be the most
sophisticated cognitive skill a primate has.


hb: As a spokesman for the lower animals, let me bring up the time my father in law was tracking a bear over the heavily wooded slopes of Mount Mombachus. As he followed the track, he noticed that the number of creatures he was following began to grow. Eventually a human seemed to join the parade, along with a second bear. Then a second human and a third bear, and so on. It took him a while to realize that the bear was now leading him around in a circle and was tracking "him." Animals are very good trackers. We primates don't have a monopoly on the skill.

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
apprehending criminals by following the clues. And so we find our way to
the world of mystery novels and spy novels (and there surely is some
classic literary essay arguing that the Oedipus story is the prototypical
mystery)--it is surely no accident that Sherlock Holms wore a deerstalker
cap.

hb: a neat one, Bill.

(anon) In these stories something happens to "rupture" the "fabric" of the
collective lives of some folks. The protagonist then looks for clues and
moves from one to the other to figure out the human intention behind this
anomalous event.

hb: the introduction of mystery novels is clever and brain-teasing. cheers--Howard

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In a message dated 99?06?25 12:11:15 EDT, skoyles writes:

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


Surface dependence: a balance control strategy in panic disorder with agoraphobia. Jacob RG, Furman JM, Durrant JD, Turner SM Psychosom Med 1997 May?Jun 59:3 323?30

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.
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In a message dated 99?06?27 06:10:39 EDT, skoyles writes:

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.
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Hb 2/15/2003 having confidence in a long-term future is a necessity in enjoying today. It's a lesson I learned from this illness. When my sense of a future disappeared, so did my sense of being human. It took three years to create a sense of a new future--one that would work given the new limitations illness imposed. But assembling the elements of that future-goal and the means to achieve it was an imperative. Without it I was in something a good deal worse than mere despair.

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Hb to John Fentress 9/12/00 re John's alcoholism--Thinking about your plight and mine when I was fighting a less insidious problem, compulsive eating, led to the following thought tonight, one which I'll try to post to the paleopsych group. Is there something we can call "structure deprivation"? Your situation is challenging you with a dearth of structure in a variety of areas. Your daily structures are torn apart by your moves between two coasts. Your social structures are wounded by the same thing. And, judging from the conversation we had yesterday, all the things impinging on you have torn apart the work routines which give productive work structure, including an accurate sense of how much time it takes to do tasks and the ability to allocate time so that you can achieve what you need without deadline stress. Now catch the parallel. Before I became a compulsive eater, I decided to seek Zen Enlightenment, Satori. Ya gotta forgive me, I was only 19. In the interests of reaching the pure, unsullied flame of spontaneity inside myself, I deliberately hunted down every element of my life which I felt was a "defense" or a "crutch," then crushed each one ruthlessly. I stopped eating at regular hours, knocked out regular sleep times, left the room in which I'd been living and slept on the floors of different public buildings at random times--in short, I deliberately shattered every routine in my life. The result was structure deprivation--a vacuum I needed to fill with something secure. What felt secure? Food. There was nothing to stop me from eating whenever there was food somewhere in the vicinity. And I needed something to fill the emptiness. The result--food became all I could think of all day long. I'd walk down a street and become acutely, guiltily, appallingly aware of every delicatessen, restaurant, bakery, gnoshery, and sloshery along the street. I may not have been eating every minute. In fact, I may not have really eaten all that much. But my mind was in the food trough and just about nowhere else. Structure deprivation. Steal our structure and a big vacuum opens into which oral gratification, stomach gratification, and the desire for self obliteration via anesthesia rushes. Does this make any sense, or have i gone off in the wrong direction? Jeesh, now I've made this so personal to you and me, there's no way I can share it with the group. I'd like to hear some other opinions. Well, mull the concept over and see what you think. For better or worse, we are gonna suck every conceivable meaning out of this thing called life.

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.


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A lack of dopamine receptors in the brain often leads to obesity. Ritalin, it's just been found, works its wonders by increasing dopamine levels. Take a child, diagnose him with that relatively new medical chimera called ADHD, and feed him Ritalin for ten years or more-years in which developmental processes radically resculpt the growing brain. When he hits adulthood, would that child have a brain so heavily deluged with artificially induced dopamine that his or her brain defended itself against a dopamine flood by decreasing dopamine receptors? Would that adult then be obese? Does the use of dopamine on millions of kids account for the recent American explosion of obesity? What other influences does dopamine have on the growing brain? Could it have a positive impact? Recent research has shown that long-term use of anti-depressants prevents destruction of brain cells. So some drugs can nudge the brain in positive direction. Is Ritalin one of them?

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

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Psychotherapists are learning that a daily schedule and regular sleep can go a long way in treating manic-depression. Their successes tend to bolster the concept of "structure deprivation"-the notion that when our lives are robbed of regularity, we compensate by filling in with drugs, alcohol, overeating, compulsive shopping…or, in the case of manic-depression-with moods that swing wildly out of control.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 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
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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
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This is extremely important data, Irving. Many thanks. I wonder what could cause this strange inability to focus. The standard evolutionary psychological interpretation is simply that we evolved to constantly scan the landscape for new possiblities--new plants to plunder, new animals worth hunting, etc. Another is that any collective intelligence--whether that of a beehive, an ant colony, or a human society, dedicates roughly 5% of its population to perpetual restlessnes. Malcontents, oddballs, eccentrics, and others who wander off in socially disapproved or uncharted directions feel out the possibilities the society may exploit in the future. As Ezra Pound said of artist, the restless an odd are society's antennae.

In a message dated 2/3/01 7:59:13 AM Eastern Standard Time, Inwmd5 writes:


Howard, I think ADD is very real. My daughter's previous husband was a typical case-unable to be relied on to apply himself to anything that smacks of routine, leaving such stuff to her despite promises, and a risktaker-many speeding tickets, white watwer canoing. She left him because of this. Their very attractive son inherited this,and though bright, couldn't apply himself to schoolwork unless he was particularly interested in the subject, when he was very good. His schoolwork and general demeanor improved markedly with ritalin and/or aldoril.. When the ritalin wore off, my daughter could see the change.

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
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Chris McCullogh and hb 4/04/01 I do, however, have a wonderful girlfriend with whom I'm moving in to a wonderful house on the Venice canals (Venice, California, that is) in a mere two weeks. hb: great news but it means that, alas, you're not in ny. the house and location sound to smurggle over. i mean the visions they conjure up are achingly good. She being a fairly well off actress has offered to support me through the writing of a screenplay, or whatever creative endeavor I decide to embark upon next. hb: more reason to meet Michael Sullivan--the best stop-motion animation and model maker you've ever met, but a man who can't write a plot. see his stuff and it'll give you ideas of new directions in which to take or with which to enhance your own. (Michael invented the fumetti technique that he, i, my magazine, and my art studio passed on to the national lampoon in the days when we were art-directing the thing.) Don't know if I'm comfortable being a kept man, so I'll probably at least look for freelance work here and there, but the temptation is great to take her up on it, especially in light of all the "if I only had a couple of months off, I'd..." daydreams that I've harbored for the last three and a half years of non-stop, vacationless work. Comics are appealing to me very much right now, hb: sounds neat. as is screenplay writing, as is short story writing or sketch comedy writing. hb: sounds terrific. A friend of mine just sold a novel, which is encouraging the way the kid who lived across the street from me when I was nine winning a bike from the back of a Cap'n Crunch box was encouraging, so I've been thinking of becoming a more literary man lately. Hence all the reading lately, desperately trying to play catch up with an ill-spent education and reinforce my intelligence and awareness. hb: I wonder if my literary agent might prove of value to you. he is strong on book publishing, but horribly weak on hollywood, film, and tv. This same friend is coming to live in L.A. soon, allegedly, having become sick of New York. Socially, he's a lunatic--so insecure that he overcompensates with the kind of insanity that allows him to say or do anything in public, which is a good person to have around, I think. He's also painfully sincere and is the guy who turned me on to J.D. Salinger, who I think is amazing but completely ignored in high school and college, when I should have been reading him. Anyway, it will be good to have some NY blood around me, especially such a strangely Neal Cassidy-like fellow.

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.
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baby the cat's personality changed when she got lost and was deprived of the social and geographic map that held her air of calm, cozy superiority in place.

Life-shifts and selfquakes-the pain of transition
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it's amazing how painful transitions are--and how often they come--everyday when we move from sleep to wake. Then there are the transitions in career. Did I ever tell you that Conrad Lorenz, the Nobel-Prize-Winning father of ethology, became depressed every time he sensed he was two months away from the end of a project?

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


The ring of consiousness

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.
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HB replies:
This brings us back to the old discussion of what a self is, something several of your recent contributions have put me in mind of. We seem to have a narrow ring of consciousness into which we accept a small part of our experience and from which we eject many of the other things integral to our external or emotional lives. This show-ring is the self.

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.
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The screams and taunts that schizophrenics hear in hallucination are the voices of the others inside our brains. They are the voices of the gods and devils, the murmurings and shouts of angels and of demons, of extra selves alive in all of us. These mobs and personalities, many with strange identities, are not outside, but within. They are the products of biology and psychology, the products of the way we're made, the products of the mists of self within the brain. Evolution has planted them, but how and why?

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
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David Smith In a message dated 5/8/2003 9:07:08 AM Eastern Daylight Time, dsmith06 writes: The screams and taunts are there to prepare us for a scary social world in which others may scream at us and taunt us. Our psychological immune system is prepared for anything the social world may throw at us. David
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In a message dated 5/8/2003 9:07:08 AM Eastern Daylight Time, dsmith06 writes: The screams and taunts are there to prepare us for a scary social world in which others may scream at us and taunt us. Our psychological immune system is prepared for anything the social world may throw at us. David hb: good thinking. vigorously agreed. But those screams and taunts do something else. They remind us of our position in the social network. They depress us if we haven't been doing well. They give us boosts of elation on those occasions when folks are applauding our every move. The inner mob models the neural net we're part of and calculates how needed or unwanted we are. Then this inner congregation of shouters sets us on self-destruct or power-charge. The inner mob of voices is a manifestation of the way the group uses us as a module--and a dispensable one at that. We use others as extrasomatory extensions of the self. And collectivities of others use us too. Howard
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Retrieved from the World Wide WebMay 07, 2003
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/06/health/psychology/06VOIC.html?pagewanted=print&position=
The New York Times Sponsored by Starbucks May 6, 2003 Experts See Mind's Voices in New Light By ERICA GOODE It was just one voice at first, loud and male, coming from the ceiling, saying, "Hi, John," calling him by name as if they were buddies. But after a while, the voice, which he came to know as the "evil genius," urged him to steal other people's brain cells and told him that he had a cancerous tumor in his head. Eventually, other voices joined in, maybe 50 of them, male and female, yelling "as loud as humans with megaphones," John recalled, from the moment he awoke in the morning until he fell asleep at night, cursing or ordering him to kill himself or, once, when he picked up a ringing telephone, screaming in chorus, "You're guilty! You're guilty!" "It was utter despair," John said. "I felt scared. They were always around." Auditory hallucinations are a hallmark of schizophrenia: 50 percent to 75 percent of the 2.8 million Americans who suffer from the illness hear voices that are not there. Like John, whose schizophrenia was diagnosed in 1981 and who spoke on the condition that he not be identified, many people with schizophrenia spend years pursued by verbal tormentors as relentless as the furies of Greek mythology. Suicide is sometimes the result, death seeming the only escape from unending harassment. Yet psychiatrists who study schizophrenia have traditionally shown little interest in the voices their patients hear, often dismissing them as simply a byproduct of the illness, "crazy talk" not worthy of study. Recently, however, a small group of scientists has begun studying auditory hallucinations more intensively. Aided by new brain imaging techniques, they have begun tracking such hallucinations back to abnormalities in the brain, finding that certain brain regions "light up" on brain scans when patients are actively hallucinating. And the experts are listening far more carefully to what patients say about their hallucinatory experiences. The research has led to new theories of what may cause such bizarre alterations in perception and has spawned at least one promising new treatment: the delivery of low-frequency magnetic pulses to areas identified by the brain scans seems to quiet, at least temporarily, the voices of patients who have not found relief through standard treatment with antipsychotic medications. Ultimately, the researchers say, knowing more about what causes auditory hallucinations may help them understand more broadly the mechanisms that underlie schizophrenia and other psychotic illness. "These are critical, core experiences that really constitute what having schizophrenia is all about," said Dr. Ralph Hoffman, a psychiatrist at Yale who is studying the magnetic stimulation treatment, called transcranial magnetic stimulation or T.M.S. In research described in a recent issue of Archives of General Psychiatry, Dr. Hoffman and his colleagues found that schizophrenic patients who received 132 minutes of the magnetic stimulation over 9 days showed a significant reduction in auditory hallucinations compared with control subjects given a dummy treatment. Half of the subjects in the study experienced a return of their symptoms within 12 weeks, though in some cases, the hallucinations remained at bay for up to a year.

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."

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see "schadenfreud" in \cnt\language
Subj: Re: Happy Thanksgiving--food and sociality Date: 98-11-29 19:38:58 EST From: (Chris Redenbach) To: HowlBloom

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
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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
American Indian tribes chronicled by Claude Levi-Strauss these elements--good
guys and bad guys, appear. Generally there's a pair of hero twins. Twins
because the tribes are split in half as moieties. These are up against evil
gods who attempt to undo them, severing their heads, disemboweling them, and
graphicly demonstrating the qualities of threat and enemy.
Then comes the play's challenge--its dilemma. How can the twins possibly get
out of the death-threatening vice the evil gods get them in. The brain works
through the battle of its dark, non-self side against its light, socially-
accepted facet. <<

 

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


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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:

You mean I'm like one of those poor self-anesthetized rats you talk about in
your Lucifer book? Open the hormonal faucets! Send the endorphins!

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.

Angry and hurt? Again, aren't we all?

hb: yup, but some more than others.

I can't imagine even investing in a
thirty-odd-year relationship, much less losing such an investment. That
much pain justifies going crazy.

hb: it not only justified it, but I did... go crazy, that is.

I respect people who face their own pain and fear. That's where heroes and
poets come from.

hb: yoiks, I've been doing it as a life quest since the age of thirteen. but now I've realized that it's important to chase joy as well, and to gather graces, unexpected moments of delight, as we go. the old task was to stare death in the face and to comprehend the pain of all the world's men and women (literally--it's a creed I adopted when I took "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" as a personal warning and Edna St. Vincent Millay's "Renaisance" as a prescription). But surely there's an art and an even greater gift to the cultural legacy in sculpting something which exhilirates--or even produces an hour or two of dumb escapes from pain, like Animal House and Star Wars (two films which actually aren't dumb at all).

ss: Yes, I fit your definition of wicked. I have genuinely hurt other people
for no good reason, and would again, were I not mindful.

hb: this is so much the opposite of your verbalized life goals. Are your rational mind and that much larger beast of the real emotional self diametrically opposed? The rational and conscious self is like the tatoo of tiny rose on a huge white whale. The emotional self, dark and often unseen, is the behemoth itself, moving through the deep. The rose tatoo may indicate it's pointed in one direction, but in fact it moves wherever the whale on whose skin it is a nothing goes.

"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
mask." Captain Ahab in Moby Dick, Herman Melville

ss: Didn't I tell you that I am the reincarnated soul of a murderer?

 

Exiles from the spotlight-projection and the selves we deny--oscillation
________
Your report from the underside of the normal is fascinating. Welcome back. More comments below--Howard In a message dated 6/25/02 5:25:27 AM Eastern Daylight Time, MBG writes: mbg: I am back from Suburbia. It was a very interesting adventure..."Skjoldhøjparken" is Denmarks biggest privately owned residential development area. It covers 230 acres, contains 1200 duplex-houses, which are hidden behind two meter tall privet-hedges (in Denmark we have the expression "privet-facism"..). Its a maze of enforced normality and fear of living. hb: yikes. mb: Every week a gardener drives around in the area in a german build tractor and collects 100 kilo of dogshit. Inside the public garbage cans he often finds pornmags, and its mostly what he calls "hospital-porno" - nurses and patients having fun. Most of the residents are old people who moved to the area in the 70ties, had children and now the children has left, and things are starting to slide. On the first day (!) we met a local mailman (he delivers the right-wing Danish newspaper "Jyllandsposten" to the people of "Skjoldhøjparken") who told us that "Skjoldhøjparken" contains a lot of transvestites...and to make things even more gooey, it turned that the mailman himself is a transexual who had changed his sex from female to male. hb: amazing!!!! the alien hides under the guise of normalcy. mb: I kid you not. The house we had rented contained a very disturbing past. The family who lived there before us left because of a divorce. The husband only had one leg (he lost it in a motorcycel-accident), and now he works at a factory which makes accesories for handicapped persons. His daughter was born without and arm, and his wife worked at a nursing-home nearby. The house contained bits and pieces from their life together. In one of the closets we found a leg-protesis, and in the children-room we found dried roses, teen-idol-posters and much more. It was downright scarry. In the night extremely drunk teenagers roamed around in the area, looking for some fun in this wasteland of solitude, hb: demonstrating that Freud was right--normalcy forces us to hide a great deal of what and who we really are. mb: constantly afraid of gangs om immigrant-boys who awaits them outside "Skjoldhøjparken". And so on...u know the drill, probably. Well, congratulations to u as well Howard. Then we both are cancers. Did you have a nice birthday? hb: we just had an impromptu party. A bunch of neighbors came over--a couple of gay female lawyers, young and very progressive politically (which I am not) but I adore them; a musician and his ad saleswoman wife, and a next door neighbor whose occupation I don't know, but whose five year old daughter drew a wonderful portrait of me. Oh, and the enclosed arrived last night as if it was a birthday present in advance. It's a chapter from Richard Metzger's next book. mb: Now I will plow throug all the mails from the last week, but please let me know if I miss anything. Its so good to be back. All the best, Mads -----Oprindelig meddelelse----- Fra: HowlBloom Sendt: 18. juni 2002 04:12 Til: MBG writes: ´ll return to the list on my 30 years birthday, the 24th of june hmmm, my birthday is the 25th. an unexpected confluence. congrats on your 30th. alex and i will continue copying you on our dialogs in the hope that you'll have the opportunity to make your way through our pile of postingsn once you return. alex, you are doing a splendid job. I am very impressed. howard
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I literally grieve for my friends (and separated wife) whose lives have been amputated by emotional dissociation. I grieve over your sexual dissociation too??only being able to come to climax with a fantasy, not with the man you're with??so climax isn't the ultimate act of fusion and communication, it is encapsulated and removed, a bubble in the void the existentialists used to babble about. A moment of satisfaction in an ocean of anomie.
_______
In a message dated 1/11/02 10:39:14 AM Eastern Standard Time, n.j.c.bannan writes:


We need, in this case, to investigate not only the features
I would associate with 'historical intelligence', nostalgia, ancestor
worship etc., but also the means by which these are opposed by functions of
rejection. How many of us shudder with embarrassment at the thought of
music, books, people we used to love and revere just as much as we retain
respect for housegold gods etc.? So some emotions can hook up to the
disgust reflex in retrospect which once tickled pleasure responses.

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
________


Another note: there was a profound irony to the arguments between our champions of spirituality and those who fought for rationality. The so-called "rationals" were strongly drawn to irrational material. The "spirituals" were equally attracted by rationality. This bring us back to the question of identity, projection and scapegoating. The spirituals, strongly rationalistic people, seem to have projected their own rational side onto those they accused of narrow rationalism and to have attacked a part of their own "selves" furiously. The rationals were equally aggressive in projecting their irrational fascination onto others and savaging it. Each group, I suspect, was attempting to achieve a self definition through a covert form of self attack--an effort to exclude a part of themselves from their self definition. I've referred to this as the Torquemada Syndrome, since projection and covert attack of self can result in inquisitions and ethnic wars.
Yet it's ironic that people of such intelligence should have so little comprehension of their own dynamic. Probably something we all suffer from. In fact, o'erleaping the boundaries of this elaborated ape behavior inside of us is one of the primary human tasks. As it says in _The Lucifer Principle_, "the tendency toward slaughter ... is not the product of agriculture, technology, television or materialism. It is not an invention of either western or eastern civilization. In fact, it is not a uniquely human proclivity at all. It comes from something both sub and superhuman, something we share with gorillas, apes, fish and ants--a brutality that speaks to us through the animals in our brain. If man has contributed anything of his own to the equation, it is this: he has learned to dream of peace. But to achieve that dream, he will have to overcome what nature has built into him." The first step in this transcendence, should we ever achieve it, will be an understanding of the ways our need for self-delusion turns us hostile when there is no need for hostility.
hb
________
I find myself these days strongly reverberating to the anti?semitism I pick up from the press and its projection of groups like the Christian Identity Movement, the current pro?Edward Said, anti?Iraqui war campus craze, and the general attitude toward Israel projected by CNN. Part of my brain is anti?semitic and views Israel as America's greatest enemy. Another part is very Jewish (though atheistic) and very Zionist. This has me wondering about the nature of identity (plus it's a bit distressing). Many identity theorists, including the International Paleopsychology Project's John Skoyles, seem to agree that identity is something which puts us in tune with the mainstream of our society. Hence such phenomena as Freud's "identification with the oppressor." Jews like Torquemada merge their identity so heavily with that of the majority that they persecute themselves feverishly, in the form of becoming Jewish anti?Semites. Torquemada was, through his Inquisition and expulsion of Jews from Spain, probably responsible for tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of Jewish deaths. This is a guesstimation based on the large Jewish population which had been a part of Islamic Spain's vibrancy, and the large percentage of that population (ironically set to sea on the same day Christopher Columbus left harbor on his hoped for westward passage to the Far East) which was dumped into the ocean by ship captains who'd been hired to carry the Jews of Iberia away from the country of their birth.

From the point of view of identity, being a member of a minority can be a weird experience. I wonder how and if this interior duality effects blacks, Hispanics, Asians, etc. Several black writers, come to think of it, have written about the puzzle of being a member of a white?ish middle class, being a BUPPY, yet feeling unfaithful to the blackness of street society. Another pull between two group memberships producing an identity split of a sort. Any ideas on these musings? 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
Howard

>John Naisbitt, Megatrends: Ten New Directions Transforming Our
>Lives, Warner Books, New York, 1984.
>
>Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World: A History of The
>Modern Sensibility, Pantheon Books, New York, 1983.

Tom Wolfe, Mau Mauing the Flack Catchers
>
>Tom Wolfe, From Bauhaus to Our House

 

The arena of others within us
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Yup. The process of moving, thinking, musing, emoting, and constantly feeling the eyes of an internal audience on these moves, seeing what we can hide, feeling the pain of what we can't, what we know will be despised, and the occasional elation of something we know will bring brightness to others eyes, that is the second-by-second process of self in private.

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
To see oursels as others see us
It wad frae monie a blunder free us
An' foolish notion
What airs in dress an' gait wad lea'e us
An' ev'n Devotion

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.
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John Skoyles has talked about mirror neurons for quite some time. However in the following article plucked by Alex Burns from the pages of The New Scientist, motor neurons become the centers of the empathy we use to read each others minds. They may also be responsible for the crowd of virtual others inside of us who help us judge our impulses and reshape them to make them socially acceptable before they emerge as actions actual others can see.

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."
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In a message dated 4/17/01 10:26:34 AM Eastern Daylight Time, Inwmd5 writes: In a message dated 4/16/01 8:40:21 PM, bloom writes: << The article below says that she has spotted a need for ritual in American society and has noted how tenaciously we cling to the rituals that mark out lives >> Well, not all of us. I have never cared for ritual and am bothered even by the lighting of a chalice, now done ritually in many UU churches. People tell me reading the NYTimes every day is my ritual-maybe so, but isn't there a differance between ritual and habit? hb: yes. ritual is a public, choreographed event. habit is private. or at least it gives the appearance of being private. under the surface, it may be deeply social. for example reading the new york times each day is a way of affirming your identification with a large subcultural mob--folks who are reasonably well off and regard their minds as something of relatively high significance. reading the times also attunes you to the things others in that group will be thinking about and gives you a language, a "knowledge of what's happening" that offers the subculture's paswords for the day. it tells you what you should and should not say to seem inthe know. habit is the lockstitch of which culture is made. culture inculcates invisible habits like the precise distance to stand to seem friendly but not crowding, dignified but not aloof. even private habits, like picking one's nose, carry social freight. we know better than to do them in public. we feel the disapproval of the multitudes when we perform these socially "gross" acts. Picking one's nose is one of those things never dignified by ceremony, never validated by ritual, and seldom admitted as a compulsion nearly universal among human beings. Howard

Where is consciousness? I suspect it resides in the frontal lobes of the brain. The famous case of Phineas Gage indicates that the frontal lobes are an inhibitory center. They keep us from performing socially outrageous deeds. They also maintain our continuity, keeping our actions fixed from day to day on a reliable goal. Experiments with fish who've had their frontal lobes removed show they lose their ability or interest in swimming in sychrony with the school. Mice deprived from birth of their cerebral cortex, in which the frontal lobes are situated, still play very actively, indicating that play and the loops for dominance, fighting, and food seeking are probably centered in the limbic system (see Burghardt, G.M. Play. In Comparative Pyschology: A Handbook (C. Greenberg & Haraway, eds.). Garland Press, New York (in press)p. 14; Pellis et al. (1992)[see Burghardt's biblio for details]). What these cerebrally deficient rats lack is a sense of limits. Sometimes the mittens which keep play harmless come off and these youngsters defend themselves viciously in what otherwise would be a game. Like Gage, they've lost a social rein. Meanwhile experiments like those which show we register fear in 4 milliseconds, but it takes 12 milliseconds to reach our consciousness (Interdisciplinary Talk-Fest Prompts Flurry of Questions, John Cohen, p 1294, Science, Nov 24 95.), indicate that consciousness is not so much an initiator as a follower of our actions. Something below consciousness decides to pick up a cup or turn around in a theater and ask a loudmouth to shut up. It takes 400 milliseconds from the time the brain flash which indicates that a decision has been made before the consciousness conceives the illusion that it, indeed, is the instigator of the act.(Daniel C. Dennett. Consciousness Explained. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 1991: 162-167.) So what then is consciousness? I propose it is the voice of the crowd within us, weighing our impulses, grooming them, holding some of them back, keeping others on track, putting them all into a narrative consistent with the tale we call our personality--our mask for public presentation. As I wrote in a previous, but unpublished book (How I Accidentally Started the Sixties): "just like all the mystics and Zenmasters had said, way down at the bottom of my brain was a small source of spontaneity, spitting out instant reactions to everything in sight. But those responses were strapped into a wheelchair and whisked through a massive hospital of spin doctors before they were spilled, after some delay, into my carefully tailored awareness. They were checked for social acceptability, plastic-surgeried to fit my notions of myself, given a haircut to appeal to the folks around me, sartorially inspected to make sure they wouldn't make me look like a fool or get anyone to hate me,(H' Ql DONG, GLENN WEISFELD, JILIANG SHEN. CORRELATES OF SOCIAL STATUS AMONG CHINESE ADOLESCENTS. JOURNAL OF CROSS-CULTURAL PSYCHOLOGY, Vol. 27 No. 4, July 1996 476-493. p. 478) then, only after a careful reworking in the makeup department and a final quality check, were they handed an official script and allowed to step out onto the stage of my mind to recite their reshaped tidings."
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Several questions about the following. But first, a statement. An earlier issue of _Scientific American_ reported on self?rewiring computer modules which sounded a bit more efficient than the ones below. That may have been my error in interpretation, however. Bill Benzon and David Porush are far more schooled in such matters than am I. The system described here coordinates via a "mother cell," [later hb-and an artificial chromosome] which keeps the remaining cells in synch. To what extent does consciousness act as a conformity enforcer of this kind. (The definition of a conformity enforcer states that it functions to maintain sufficient homogeneity within the group that the parts can communicate and work together. For example, over?fragmentation of language, whether it be chemical or verbal, would destroy communication. The conformity enforcers maintain a constancy within diversity.) To what extent is the self a conformity enforcer? (The self, after all, is a concentrated cluster of others-as are the passions and the genes.)To what extent do the biological clocks serve this function for the body's systems and cells? To what extent do the prevailing views which radiate throughout a group from its dominant subculture play this role? What other "mother cells," or central calibration points, are present in social organizations or in individual organisms? Or are the synchronization mechanisms in nature dispersed, the result of the "pulsation" of parallel processing? Perhaps both the centralized form and the dispersed form exist. Anyone have examples? Or is this technological model an irrelevant analog with which to examine biology and group psychology?

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.

 

Goals--a map of the future
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Hb 2/15/2003 having confidence in a long-term future is a necessity in enjoying today. It's a lesson I learned from this illness. When my sense of a future disappeared, so did my sense of being human. It took three years to create a sense of a new future--one that would work given the new limitations illness imposed. But assembling the elements of that future-goal and the means to achieve it was an imperative. Without it I was in something a good deal worse than mere despair.

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In a message dated 99?06?24 18:27:01 EDT, pithycus writes:

<< Now I suspect that most people have some such feelings, ("there' hope for me
yet!," people say), and this post asks if anyone else admits to them? >>

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


P.P.S. Which reminds me??a month or two ago David Berreby was over here and we were pondering a problem. Why, no matter what role humans assume and how well they pull it off, do they always feel that they don't quite belong behind the mask and costume, that they are aliens who have managed to perpetrate a charade and disguise their strangeness. There's a clear adaptive advantage once again to this intense discomfort. it keep us wriggling and testing new possibilities. It turns us into what De Landa calls probeheads, antennae of the social search engine. It keeps us hunting for new possibilities, ones which lie outside the boundaries of the conventional roles the current concepts of our society allow us to assume. It makes a lucky few of us inventors of new identities with which huge masses will feel momentarily relieved of their sense of strangeness, their sense that they too are only pretending to what others do so naturally??being normal human beings. When we validate the strangeness of others, we add to our culture's vocabulary. New words and phrases in the cultural repertoire, new guises and accepted ways to be, are what John Skoyles has demonstrated provide new mindworks, new software with which to grow our society's possibilities by rewiring the brain. Howard
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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
> helped improve social competency, and developing new buddies provided
> valuable support systems; but the PTSD symptoms themselves often got worse
> and worse! Within our local VA, we are shifting tx more towards "skills
> groups" that focus on coping with symptoms in the here and now and towards
> the future, helping vets learn to decatastrophize their sx, and build
> confidence in the here and now. I like this trend, and have been working
on
> ways to do therapy that maximally challenge patients' still-present but
> often-hidden competencies in their own behalf. Quite consistent with
Mike's
> thoughts, I believe.

Absolutely so, though it seems to me that there is a serious risk that
because the up front message I am giving seems so overwhelmingly negative,
few might have the insight to see that the means of coping with the
underlying biology, individual by individual, is very much to accentuate the
positive. Without this insight it is all too easy to remain, as our friends
may well have told us, our own worst enemies.
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Nancy--you wonderful person just seeing something from you makes me smile. by the way, I'm in love. strange, scary, wonderful. now on to see what you've imparted--

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
so that it's for Future Nancy; & when the moment comes, weeks or months later, that I need it, memory jogs & I find those secreted twenties; & I always mouth the words, "Thank you, Past Nancy."

hb: ")

I imagine it's terribly common a comfort ritual even if not always formalized in
language. An ability to project into the future, being able to see the present through the prism of the future past tense, is a fabulous escape hatch.

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
specific future, indeed any future.

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.

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Nancy--You've got an excellent point. I learned the extent to which we take a sense of a future for granted, yet rely on it for our motivation to live and even for our feeling of humanity, when I came down with CFS twelve years ago and felt for two years that my future had been stripped away. I no longer felt human. My identity was gone. I was as fragmentary and confused as if I'd become a mist sprayed from an atomizer and allowed to drift in innumerable independent fragments on the breeze.

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
-----------
(For the quotes from Lawrence's letter to Eric Kennington see Desmond Stewart, T.E. Lawrence, p. 292.)


In a message dated 11/6/00 9:57:27 PM Eastern Standard Time, Nancy Werd writes:


Now, I'm quite desperate for you to link your investigation into memory with your investigation into self. As I see my father sink into Alzheimer's, I'm reminded of the obsessive belief that led me to the adventures chronicled in The Life Swap: We tyrannize & limit ourselves & each other if we regard self as simply an aggregate of memories. Henry Miller wrote somewhere (I wish I remembered where) that it matters not if we forget the books we've loved in the past, for they have shaped what we are today. Maybe another way of thinking about it is that we excessively value conscious memory; there is also unconscious memory.... XO N
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The following is an egregious act of egocentrism but is directed to Don Beck's point about the nature of life as quest. Under the surface of this snippet of an unpublished Bloom book (gakkk!, don't tell me he's written more of them!) is a message: life is process. Many are the studies that demonstrate we need a goal in life or we shrivel. I'm wondering why.

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.
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Ego as a gift-the value of self-deception the truth of false hopes
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ego is a necessity if you commit your life to the achievement of the impossible. Howard
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Lord, Russ, I just spent 40 minutes having a rollicking good time replying to you and Mike, cheering you on, tossing in additional food for thought (for example, oxygen?exhaling cyanobacteria spewed so much "pollution" into the atmosphere that they killed off most forms of extant life; a feat we may equal but probably will not surpass; also how unimportant intergroup competition is among ant colonies is something on which one could defend a bumper crop of views, depending on one's choice of evidence; just as one can pick out any element in the meshwork of causality [atoms, genes, human beings] and make a case for their primacy. Every view would get us a little further. But allowing any *single* view to tyrannize would stop us in our tracks. I also made a case for humanity's ego. When we puff ourselves with specialness, imagining we have a destiny, then set out to fulfill it, all the while cagily assessing and outwitting the obstacles ahead of us, we can turn delusions into hard and fast realities. It's when we inhale illusion far past the point that marries exhilaration to sobriety that we blind ourselves to stones and snares and find ourselves dissolving in some wiser creature's soup. But why chain up our ego and toss ourselves into the acid vat of learned helplessness? And why weld ourselves to a single vantage point when even Richard Dawkins slyly uses seven simultaneously? That, plus praise for Mike's wondrousness as verbal brewmeister, was pretty much the gist of it. By all means, bartender, slide me the next round! Howard
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In a message dated 8/25/02 8:49:03 AM Eastern Daylight Time, john skoyles writes: Back on the savannah, hope was a killer -- those that survived underestimated not overestimated what they could do. hb: Ted Coons says that a friend of his bred two groups of rats--one that was bold and curious, and another that was timid. Then Ted's friend released the two forms of rats in a wild environment to see who'd do best at survival. Who won? I was rooting for the adventureres when Ted told the tale. I had a big disappointment coming. The timid did best. In fact, when the experiment was done there were no adventurous rats left. All had been pounnced on and gobbled when skittering from one intriguing find to another. But societies prosper best when they have both adventurers and the timid, or so the success of bees indicates. What would have happened if there'd been a third group bred for a variety of personalities? For timid, brave, curious, intellectual, skinny, and brawny mice? js: Dinner that managed to escape your dart, was not worth further attention, time or energy hb: true for adults, perhaps. Not true for kids. I've been watching our new kitten. She's obsessed with play. And play is all hunting and stalking practice, which you can see in her posture and eyes is make-believe great adventure. She fails over and over, but keeps practicing. Sheer joy impels her to do it. Adults who tried to figure out how to do better might have had an advantage. In fact, they probably have. The evidence? The Zygarnick Effect. We remember what we failed at, not what we completed successfully. If the Zygarnick Effect proves to be cross-cultural, it may well be a genetic endowment. Which would indicate that brooding over failures and trying to complete uncompleted projects paid off at some point in our biological evolution. The question, then, is this. Did the Zygarnick Effect evolve in some mythological hunter gatherer period? Did it evolve in the prehuman phases of evolution--in the days of the early mammals, or the days of their distant predecessors--the common ancestors of crustaceans, reptiles, and mammals? Or did it evolve in the days of instant evolution and Homo urbanis--during the last 10,000 years? js: -- better spend that stalking a new animal and use the advantage of fresh surprise. But in the modern world, persistence after failure is the best policy. Most rejection has nothing to do with us but is random. The same ms sent to a dozen publishers gets a dozen unrelated reactions. Rejection from one says nothing about the chances from another. Hb: The Lucifer Principle was turned down by 43 publishers. it's now in its fourteenth printing and is one of Grove/Atlantic's most important--and profitable--books. Fish out of water flop until they die. Each flip is an opportunity, a gamble on moving from dry land into a stream, into a puddle, or off a dock. Fish instincts demonstrate the power of hope. So do the frantic jumps and scrambles rats and dogs trying to escape a shock go through. It takes a long time before hope goes and the animals slump into resignation--learned hopelessness. In Dean Keith Simonton's Greatness: Who Makes History and Why, Simonton, a psychologist, tries to find the common element between a host of humans who've achieved greatness. The common factor he discovers is not talent or privilege, it's persistence. js: Success links not to us but the number of times we try. In other words, success to goes to the optimist that keeps trying, not the pessimist that takes rejection as judgment. hb: agreed.
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In a message dated 8/24/02 7:03:20 AM Eastern Daylight Time, john skoyles writes:


Howard, I have got another date, Chris, for Tuesday, of which I have great expectations. I know this is hope eternal.

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
ectomorph 6' 3", very skinny and nervous. Anyway this is a numbers game -- the more I meet, the greater chance one will be in the ball park of acceptability and not "yoiks" and "oi" -- to use your expressions. And if not him there are the guys on the Scotish gay retreat starting the 30th.


hb: hooray for the mirage of optimism. it works.

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".


hb: amen.
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Scholar of early Christianity Peter Brown made a penetrating comment on Simeon Stylite, who you recall stayed on the top of a pole for years to show just how much more self?abnegation he could accomplish than the other poor holy hermits merely schlepping through the misery of living in caves. "Spiritual athletes," Brown called the bunch of boys out there in the desert competing to see who could endure the most denial of basic needs. These guys sure as heck weren't out to deny the satisfaction of their egos, no matter what they said about pride being a sin.

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
(note the stamp of vanity V)
<< 12/7/97 1:30:06 AM >>
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Subj: Re: evolution of the self
Irwin-good observation. I've been calling LeBon's "metaphysical absolutes" the collective self, the group soul, the group identity. A group has a self, and when it loses it, all hell breaks loose in the disoriented minds of its members. Their selves, too, dissolve and dive. Until a new leader or a new idea-or more likely a new idea in the mouth of a new leader-reinvents and reinstantiates the group's sense of self, its centerpoint, its reason to be, its meaning, its goal, and its ideals. Then passions rise again-passions of pride, of exultation, of power, and sometimes of power and identity's companion, hatred of an enemy. Howard

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)
8/21/01 6:57:05 AM Eastern Daylight Time

On Sun, 19 Aug 2001, John Beahrs wrote:

> Sounds good to me, Howard. Compatible with my own hypothesis, that a lot of
> so-called "mental realities" are a product of shared self-deception: one's
> brain calculates how it wants to come across to others, and then talks
> itself into both believing it and also experiencing it and defending it as
> the real inner truth. Others, since they share the same kind of motives,
> reciprocate and "legitimize" one another's deceits, increasing the extent to
> which these become "really real" at a new psychosocial level. I've
> published the essence of this "shared self-deception model" within several
> different contexts, and am now working on tightening and developing it more
> fully to publish in both article and book form. It's also compatible with
> Goffman's 1950s' idea of "life (incl. selfhood) as theater".
> Thanks for sharing your thoughts. Let me hear more. John B.

LeBon, in the 19th century, called these "metaphysical absolutes,
though he lacked the adaptionist explanation.
They have a way of creeping into our human behavioral and social
sciences - the antithesis of evolutionary epistemology - suggesting, I
think, that self-deceptions on an individual and mass level are indeed
adaptive.
_______________________________

Learn from the mistakes of others You can't live long enough to make them all yourself ---Eleanor Roosevelt
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Mike Waller 3/27/01----- Original Message ----- From: <PEET6666> To: Nancy Werd; Sent: 27 March 2001 01:38 Subject: Re: telling the story (What can't be faked) > Nancy, > > I think you underestimate the power of denial and desire. There's a TV show called "Blind Date," (I usually catch the highlights on "Talk Soup") which sends strangers on a date. If you could watch without dying of embarassment, you'd see lots of men who believe, against all the evidence, that their dates had a good time. The men commonly predict a second date, with the woman in question a definite no go. > > This in no way disproves your assertion, though: the woman doesn't really fake a good time, at least to the impartial viewer. You're right about the determination to ignore the evidence. It's insidious. I think it inevitable, rather than insidious. Very few -perhaps no - egos can stand the realities of their true position in the general scheme of things i.e something having no consequence within a schema which has neither purpose nor direction. In such a context, self-delusion is not only adaptive, it's essential. The up-side limiter is the importance of not actually acting on notions such as a belief you can fly, beat Tyson to a pulp, or secure any mate of your choice. However, on this list, there are no doubt some to whom even these restrictions do not apply!!!!! [:-)]


In a message dated 8/23/01 4:57:51 AM Eastern Daylight Time, mroele writes: Subj: Re: evolution of the self Date: 8/23/01 4:57:51 AM Eastern Daylight Time From: (Marcel Roele) To: (Howard Bloom), mr: In the case of self-deception, one does not consciously deceive the other, so one does not lie and there's no risk of giving away non-verbal cues of deception. Being in love is a good example: she is a 7 in every department (looks, brains & humor) but he's in love, is convinced she's a 10 and she believes that he's sensere. Lots of copulations later he's in the opportunity to get an 8 as mate, and he stops deceiving himself about the quality of his 7 (he falls out of love with her). hb: terrific stuff, marcel. mr: Of course a good leader is in love with himself (and also with his people), so he's telling the truth even when he exaggerates his qualities. hb: agreed. mr: Clinton may have been so good at self-deception (redefining drug use and sex) that "I did not inhale" and "I did not have sex with that woman" were true in his book (after all, he did not impale). For a leader the boundaries between truth and fiction are much fuzzier than for paleopsychologists. Reagan was such a great communicator that he was able not to distinguish between depicting the war for the homefront and actually having been at the front. (When the last veterans are dead the war will only be remembered in the Hollywood-version, good idea of Reagan not to bother about a meme that's on its deathbed). King George IV had convinced himself that he charged with the British cavalry down the slope at Waterloo. "Very steep, your Majesty," commented the Duke of Wellington. hb: wonderful. It's a prime example of the making of one's own myth. Those who can build a self-deceptive ego need this myth-making power. The ability to conceive an autobiography that lifts them-either to greater achievement or to greater self-destruction. Self-destruction arises if one merely dreams the myth but never attemptst to live it. Marcel--are you sure you don't want to propose a book for the New Paradigm series. It would be great to build your career in the US. mr: But then for conscious lying and deception: I murder my wife and am interrogated.

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