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Self file pg3 [pg1] [pg2] [Directory] Faces aren't faces 'til they move-what the face says about the self read moreIdentification with the enemy-becoming the bully who controls you read more The curse of trying to be normal read more The detachable self-out of body experiences read more How an audience calls forth the self read more Self as the signboard for a center of gravity read more Why do we have a self? read more The mutinous teens and the lonely twenties-development of a sense of self read more The fear of dissolution-commitment panic, etc. read more Yes, there is a child within read more The hormones of self-the self is a matter of chemistry read more Changing one's mind versus changing one's self read more Boosting your self image read more Do animals have selves? read more Practical applications of the theory of self read more The evolution of the self read more Instinct--the self as a puppet of our animal past read more The extrasomatory extensions of self-why we can't just love ourselves, or psychobabble's bad advice-extracranial extensions of self read more The superstar as the ultimate outboard self read more From fandom to fanaticism-selves and in search of themselves make mind-gangs--subcultures read more The group as an outboard extension of the self read more 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) read more Couplehood and the anchoring of self read more Couplehood-unleashing the hidden selves read more Getting a grip--practical applications of the theory of self read more How to become an empath read more The secrets of loving (or hating) your self read more Mandatory and elective selves-the self as suit and tie read more Passion points-imprinting and the primal self read more The buried others beneath your will read more The mystery of identity read more =========================================================================================
Faces are not things photos can capture. They move, Marie, and in the process they reveal more than just skin tone and bone structure, they reveal the real secret of a face--your personality. -------------------------------------------- In a message dated 11/05/1999 7:28:51 PM Eastern Standard Time, fentress writes: << Subj: Re: [h-bd]
Re: Philosopher Rorty sneers--personal hb: it sounds like the
humor which sometimes accidentally oozes out of high-stress situations,
when things go so totally awry that one is takne to a different level
of distance and suddenly sees the whole thing as a cosmic joke. Interesting
phenomenon, and one which could prove a fruitful subject for analysis.
I suspect it's the self's way of divorcing it's self from a situation
which has bone wildly out of control. Since the self is a story-telling
deceiver which falsely claims control over a myriad of internal and
external events, there comes a time when its only way to assert control
is to pretend that it is separate from the us which the fates have gripped
and tossed about intolerably. It's like the various forms of identification
with the enemy, in which we, the victim, are so utterly trounced by
circumstance that our only way to trick our conscious storyteller into
a sense of power is to pretend that we are not the helplessly stomped
ragdolls we really are, but that we are among the folks with power who
are kicking the bejeezus out of us. Or that we are among the abstract
forces booting us about. Hence the identification with the bullying
gods and destinies. We ally our sense of self with the forces of a sadistic
universe. It's that identification with transcendent tormentors which
allows us to see the cosmic joke implicit in our plight.
_______________________________ _______________________________ two very genuine out?of?body experiences. One came when I was still in high school. Though no girl ever agreed to go to any of the Park School dances with me (and, in fact, my schoolmates were horrified at the idea that I might one day show up anyway), the dance committee actually had the audacity to ask me to compose and act out a skit at a school assembly to advertise their upcoming Howard?less event. So I wrote a satirical piece of doggerel, made up a piece of music to go with it, and improvised a dance. I'd done a lot of acting back then, and usually had the lead in things (Creon in Sophocles' Antigone, Androcles in George Bernard Shaw, and stuff like that), but this was going to be very different, since most of it would be made up as I went along. As I was out in front of the audience dancing my head off (a pretty ridiculous spectacle, in case you've never seen it), an incredibly strange thing happened. I began to feel the energy of the audience focusing on me. Then I felt it coalescing into a single force and pulsing THROUGH me. Then came the out of body experience. Some sort of force far greater than I was seemed to take me over. I was no longer inhabiting my own body. I was merely watching, as if from the vantage point of a fly on the ceiling. I literally saw my own body jerking around below me. I saw the audience. I was particularly astonished to notice one girl who absolutely loathed the very air I breathed become utterly spellbound, her face overcome with some very strange form of awe, almost like a beatitude. As you probably know, I may have been elected to all kinds of committee chairmanships in high school, but I was definitely not popular. In four years, I was never invited to a single party or informal social gathering. But when the dance was over, the strangest thing happened. The audience, a mob of over 350 people, rose to its feet like a single mass and rushed to the stage. These people who hated
me lifted me to their shoulders and literally carried me out of the
auditorium and up the stairs to the building housing the classrooms.
Nothing like it had ever happened at Park School before during my years
there??not even to the captains of winning football teams. And in my
remaining years, nothing like it would ever happen again. By the way,
once they finally got me lofted into the air, my "self" had
mercifully abandoned its perch on the ceiling and returned to my brain
pan where it belonged. The second out?of?body exerience happened when
I was 20, living in New Brunswick, New Jersey, doing research at Rutgers'
Graduate School of Education (yes, I know I'd never bothered to finish
my freshman year of college yet, but the professor who took me in was
kind enough to overlook technicalities) and writing foundation grant
proposals for the Middlesex County Mental Health Clinic. One morning
I got up and had a pain in my back. By the time I started brushing my
teeth, the pain had gotten sharper. Then it became more intense than
anything I'd ever experienced before in my life. Suddenly, I was down
on the floor, thrashing uncontrollably. My body, without asking my permission,
was whipping around in a horizontal position, as if someone with a giant
needle were trying to stab me from above, and all my reflexes were working
on their own to get me out of the way before the point could hit home.
Meanwhile, my conscious self pulled the old trick again. It abandoned
its earthly home. Once again, I took up my position on the ceiling and
simply watched what was going on with the thrashing body??MY body??
down below. The woman from whom I'd rented a room called a doctor, followed
his advice, dragged my contorting bundle of flesh into her car, and
rushed me to a hospital. I was going into shock. It was the attack of
a killer kidney stone. If she'd landed me in that hospital roughly a
half hour later, my chances of being alive today would have been close
to nil. So what was going on here? Some sort of compensatory reaction
in which the conscious mind moves over to let the unconscious take over
the driving wheel? A reaction which keeps the old consciousness busy
by generating the illusion that the familiar "I" of everyday
experience has been parked in some out of the way place, like the upper
corner of the room? I suspect so. << Subj: Re: the
"detachable self" hb: I've been mulling over what Denis said as well. There are many ways in which the self can become detached. In fact, very often it is an enormous struggle to attach it at all. That is, it is very difficult to get the self to see and genuinely feel the mass of our emotions. Though the self sees a world through our eyes, it tends to be quite blind to the feelings inside of us. It looks out the windows at the view but is imprisoned in its small apartment, often unable to go down the corridor a few inches and visit the neighbors next door. Out of body experiences, which is where we began, are something rare and strange. Denis seems to have far more experiene than most of us in dealing with those who detach in order to flee feelings which are all to ready to barge into the self's quarters. He seems to be working with those who've had traumatic experiences, and have been forced to set up barriers to block the memory. Sometimes this means fleeing into the strangeness of multiple selves. The mere existence of a coven of distinct selves in the same brain, each able to take over the body and impose its own mental, emotional, and physical settings, makes the question of what a self is all the more perplexing. It also demonstrates that a self has enormous power. Walter Freeman, in his Socieities of Brains (pp. 147-148) points out that each self is actually able to manifest a different disease. One personality will have asthma, while the others do not. Another self will have psoriasis, and a third shingles. When the self with asthma appears, the psoriasis and shingles disappear. What strange form of self-organized something is this which can manipulate aspects of the body using methods which it does not consciously know--in fact, methods which even the multi-generational mass mind of culture has not figured out? And how does it pull off such astonishing things when it can't even get a handle on such seemingly simple things as the moods which toss it about? Is it a mere a bit of exterior decor for these moods and body-settings--like the dorsal fin poking above the water, each fin different because the unseen shark beneath it is a very different being? But I digress. Denis is talking about a form of detachable self which dodges awareness of something all-too-ready to make itself obvious. Val and I are talking about out-of-body experiences in which awareness soars and we see things emerging from us which amaze us. Each is the opposite of the other. Each is a reality. And like most opposites, the two are joined at the hip--the hip of self. The trick here is to figure out what the coexistence of these contradictory truths tells us about the uses and evolutionary raison d'etres of the self. Val gives an extroardinary sense of the self which moves aside to let something else take over in his anecdotes. I suspect that underlying Denis' words is an equally vivid portrait of selves which are dodging something which they will not, under any conditions, allow near the controls. Or, to put it differently, one self steps aside to let something deeper and more certain emerge. Another frantically bobs and weaves in an attempt to block something whose emergence would be shattering. hb Vg: As to function, adaptation
& evolution I lean towards what Howard posted in response to your
letter. We appear to be dealing in the "detached self" with
a fundamental, extremely old, psychological adaptation, possibly an
ingrained mechanism that insures the smooth, uninterrupted application
of ancient pre-programmed motor patterns - when time is of the essence.
Zen in the art of sword play and archery is probably a deliberate way
to take advantage of this disassociation in order to gain a split second
advantage on the adversary. The disassociation allows for "regression"
to very basic probably innate motor patterns (instincts). However, what
gives me pause is what happened to my friend - there were two of us
involved in the bear episode I posted. My friend acted in an irrational,
and yet quite logical fashion - provided you knew something of his background.
At pains of boring you, let me tell the episode as it makes a number
of points. hb: which raises another question--why does cheating death exhilarate us so? I enjoy it immensely, and apparently so do quite a few others--bungee jumpers, paragliders, superstunting skateboarders, motorcycle racers, and a host of others. In these experiences we court the dissociation which removes our consciousness and brings that infinitely more assured motor operator to the fore. And, Lord, does it feel good. Among other things, it removes all the petty worries which normally plague us from one second to another, worries which can become as savage as piranhas. She - it was young female grizzly - rounded the tree, with great interest in it all, standing on her hind legs ever so often, but she made no attempt to climb (She could have! The tree was, unfortunately, such that small-bodied grizzlies can climb). At that point the question flashed through my mind "Where is Frank?" (here my disassociation ended). I look about, but could see nothing for a few long seconds. But then it hit me. I see Frank's head bobbing in the beaver pond. Frank cannot swim a stroke! Clearly, I had to hold the interest of the grizzly, and so I continued doing noisy antics. I think I descended somewhat to insure the bear would remain interested. She was, but then her interest faded and she turned and walked towards the next close by beaver bond and fiddled about on its shores. Well before that, however, I noticed that Frank, miraculously, had not drowned. In fact he had crossed one arm of the pond and his head was now bobbing in the next, deeper arm. When I looked towards him next, he had emerged from the pond and was running through the two foot high dwarf birches and willows - but not on two legs! he galloped on hands and feet, like a quadruped, albeit a rather clumsy one. hb: Here's another reaction which puzzles me. In my youth, I used peyote twice. Each time I felt I was receding back to an earlier primate state. And each time I discovered the advantages of walking on all fours. Doing this on a city sidewalk in Berkeley didn't in any way increase my mobility. But reverting to four-legged walking on and in the cracks under and between the rock formations jutting from the cliffs and beaches of Big Sug into the sea was another matter. Here, having one hand test the next bit of stone to see if it would hold my weight, then, if the probe indicated that it was safe to do so, following with my other three limbs, was a lifesaver. A single false mood would landed me in a sea whose fifteen-foot-high waves smashed mercilessly against the granite formations, and would have dismembered me on the razor juttings of the rocks. It felt as if the four-legged approach was a regression to a set of normally unused instincts. But was it? Or was it just something I'd picked up from an overdose of illustrations showing man evolving from the ape? Frank's use of the technique to escape the bear would tend to indicate something innate. vg: When I looked next
Frank had reached alone pine with a straight trunk that had no branches
for about 12-15 feet up. Frank tried to climb this tree with little
success. I shouted to him"Get your gun!" (Frank's truck was
parked about 300 yds off on the fire road). Eventually, Frank quit his
climbing attempts, and moving from tree to tree, glancing back at the
grizzly he ran to his truck, where he un-scabbard the rifle. By that
time I had come down, picked up our rods and fish and was approaching
the truck, from where Frank unleashed a fusillade towards the distant
grizzly. (His bullets landed short in the beaver pond, and did not spook,
let alone hurt the bear). hb: amazing. his self got out of the way, then blocked what had happened. Yours stood aside and watched in amazement, then recorded the experience. Is this an example of the opposition between Denis' form of detachment and its opposite? vg: When I pointed to
his wet clothing he accepted my explanation. When questioned why he
did not climb the spruce (the tree I climbed and for which he had priority),
He said that the tree was too small. In a message dated 11/14/1999 1:40:55 AM Eastern Standard Time, geistvr writes: << We appear to be dealing in the "detached self" with a fundamental, extremely old, psychological adaptation, possibly an ingrained mechanism that insures the smooth, uninterrupted application of ancient pre-programmed motor patterns - when time is of the essence. >> Here's one reason Val's
conscious self was wise to step aside when he was being chased by a
bear. Benjamin Libet's research shows that our unconcsious picks up
cues on what's going on a full half a second before the conscious mind
is able to wise up. Half a second in a life-and-death situation can
make the difference between giving after-dinner speeches about one's
adventures or attending an al fresco picnic as the main course. Howard Abstract A 'time-on'
theory to explain the cerebral distinction between conscious and unconscious
mental functions proposes that a substantial minimum duration ('time-on')
of appropriate neuronal activations up to about 0.5 s is required to
elicit conscious sensory experience, but that durations distinctly below
that minimum can mediate sensory detection without awareness. A direct
experimental test of this proposal is reported here. Stimuli (72 pulses/s)
above and below such minimum train durations (0-750 ms) were delivered
to the ventrobasal thalamus via electrodes chronically implanted for
the therapeutic control of intractable pain. Detection was measured
by the subject's forced choice as to stimulus delivery in one of two
intervals, regardless of any presence or absence of sensory awareness.
Subjects also indicated their awareness level of any stimulus-induced
sensation in each and every trial. The results show (1) that detection
(correct greater than 50%) occurred even with stimulus durations too
brief to elicit awareness, and (2) that to move from mere detection
to even an uncertain and often questionable sensory awareness required
a significantly larger additional duration of pulses. Thus simply increasing
duration ('time-on') of the same repetitive inputs to cerebral cortex
can convert an unconscious cognitive mental function (detection without
awareness) to a conscious one (detection with awareness). << GC hb: Glenn, I think you've hit on a critical word for this discussion--training. Basketball players, like Val's mountain goats and your horse, also make split-second tactical decisions, often decisions of enormous sophistication. But they are able to do it in large part because of years and years of practice. Practice builds a motor repertoire with which one can instantly improvise responses. The trick here is the difference between motor memes and verbal memes. Each resides in a diffeent portion of the brain. What's more, motor memes apparently have a far faster reaction time than verbal memes. This would imply that Val's response to the bear was based not just an instinct left over from the pleistocene or, more likely, the Cambrian and Jurassic. It also has learned components. Figuring out which are which would be quite some trick. It would also imply that under some conditions the verbal brain is muscled out of the picture so that the motor brain can take over without the obstacles thrown up by the verbal brain's quibbling and indecision. As for the separate cerebral
systems which handle motor and verbal memories, here's a squib from
Global Brain: Human and animal bodies pick up information from pressure gauges in the bottoms of the feet, from nerves which wrap the base of fur and body hairs, from sensors registering the vibrations of bristles in the ear, from the tips of neural fibers groping molecules in the nasal cavity's air, and from light detectors in the eye. All is funneled through the brain's emotional center--the limbic system--a leftover from reptilian and early mammalian days. There, instinct and personal memory set off elation, devastation, fear, anger, and frustration as internal signal flares. Should a batch of input spark emotional ignition, the limbic system routes the hot arrival to the storage lockers of cognition--the cooling vaults of memory. But not all storage lockers are the same. As I just implied, there are two radically different sorts of memory storerooms in the human brain. The first are antique caches inherited from the animals who came before mankind. They handle visceral memories, things we can't express and yet remain after they're through--the potent feeling of a joy or agony, or our learning to perform a feat of derring-do--doing a triple twirl during a leap, riding a bicycle, hammering a recalcitrant nut into giving up its fruit. These muscle-and-emotion memories are slid to the amygdala and slung under the canopy of the cortex where they are snagged in a curve of axons called the striatum. Extra information is packed away in the motor and sensory corridors, the cerebellum, and a widespread nervous system so out of our control that its very name--"autonomic"--comes from its autonomy, its stubborn independence from our sense of a conscious "me." A wide variety of animals practice wordless habit-stashing. It's the core of imitative learning and of body-memory. The result is the behavioral meme, a skill or a strong inkling well beyond the realm of human thought. Yes, we know how to ride a bike. But the finest rally racer can't explain the symphony of neural cues he uses to sustain a simple thing like balance. If we focus consciously on the angle to which we must adjust each of our vertebrae while slaloming through traffic at top speed, we are likely to lose the hang and scrape our head on hard concrete. Broca's area, the brain
enhancement possessed two million years ago by the Homo habilis known
as KNM-ER 1470, helped create entirely new forms of data cabinets, those
which house verbal memories. Verbal memes, the kind we can convey by
speech, the kind that our storytelling consciousness can spin into debates,
myths, tall-tales, complaints, or the instructions with which we teach,
take a very different route to memory. They slide back to the curved
prongs of the hippocampus, which flip them forward to the cortexes of
the temporal lobes, accessible to manipulators like Broca's area and
to two other verbal twiddlers which emerged in early Homo habilis--the
supramarginal and angular gyri. These are some of the processors which
piece together data for our inner voices and our blathering tongues.
They are the brain devices from which verbal memes are wrung. . Richard Dawkins. The
Selfish Gene. New York: 206. -------------------------------------------- In a message dated 11/15/1999 2:31:36 PM Eastern Standard Time, pithycus writes: << As I have always
understood the phenomenon, the out-of-body experience that Glenn--This may provide the key to another puzzle of the out of body experience. During my two rather unexpected incidents, I was on the ceiling looking down at my own body. To those who believe that the soul actually leaves the body, this is proof positive. To an atheist fascinated by the emotional reality, importance, and misleading nature of "spiritual" experiences, the consciousness or soul or whatever you want to call it by no means departs the cranium and flitters up to the acoustic tile. So how is the illusion of this vision--the clear sight of ourselves down below and our sense that we are above--produced? Probably by whatever mechanism gives us the same sort of clear visions accompanied by other convincing sensations in vivid dreams. By the way, this would indicate that you may be on to something when you suggest that out of body experiences may have played an important role in the early shaping of men's worldviews. When they are generalizing, anthropologists often say that the separation from our body and our seemingly free ability to fly over landscapes in dreams helped convince us that we had souls to begin with. The dream illusions of roaming gave us the impression that the soul could cepart the body and go off a wandering. Howard In a message dated 11/15/1999 10:48:40 AM Eastern Standard Time, he@ writes: hb: amazing, Hannes. However this thread has been creating the impression that we experience many forms of detachable self. Inescapable trauma may cause one form, danger escaped another, and high excitement yet a third. The auction would fall into category number three--excitement. Which leads to further guesswork based on Denis Donovan's evocation of the consequences of trauma. Inescapable trauma probably triggers the multiple personality style of self dissociation, a mechanism for evading awareness of a horrid memory or continuing fact. Danger escaped--as in the case of Val and the bear--leads to exhiliration and a good story. Excitement leads to--well--a stranger story. Now how does my out of body experience when the kidney stone pain was stabbing me fit into all of this? It was inescapable pain. But it didn't carry the social stigma associated with things like childhood sexual abuse. This would add yet another variable to the determination of which form of self detachment one might experience. The four would include: controllability, uncontrollability, social acceptability, danger, and excitement. Strangely, these factors are almost identical with the ones which lead societies and their members to undergo phenotypic changes. Val Geist proposed that animal groups swing from maintenance mode to dispersal mode and back--a pattern which recurs at every level of life from the bacterial to the mammalian Looking at human societies, I proposed something considerably more confusing, a quintet of phenotypic modes--fleeing, fasting, feeding, questing, and conquering. Unconrollable threat led to fleeing, the state in which a society's members abandon their social cohesion and become refugees. Uncontrollable threat accompanied by social unacceptability leads to something similar in individual psychology. The self shatters into several personalities, each trying to flee a core danger The relationship between individual psychology and mass psychology may not be as tenuous as af first it seems. Self is a social interface. The larger self of a society is a pointilist product of the individual selves it shapes and which shape it. When fleeing their core social group, individuals are undergoing a split of individual from social self. But individual and social self are so completely interwoven that the process has got to be traumatic. Or, to put it differently, a split in personality among numerous individuals simulltaneouslly can accompany a shattering of a society and the resulting flight of refugees, displaced from all they formerly identified with them-selves. On the other hand, controllable threat leads to fasting--the conservation of resources to weather the storm as a coherent social group. No splitting of self is necessary here. And so on up the ladder. Feeding occurs when a society has hit a jackpot of resources and its members to settle down and mine them for all they're worth. What effect this would have on the sense of self I'm not sure. Questing occurs when a socond generation is born into the rich feeding grounds. The new cohort of youngsters attempts to establish its own identity by challenging its parents' generation, questioning its values, rejecting its ways of doing things, etc. This is definitely a process which involves the self. Having plenty of resources but a need to set one's self off from one's parents is entirely a matter of self definition. And, as in 1968, it can redefine a culture. Conquering occurs when a society is besotted with power and attempts to augment its sense of control (and validate its personal and shared sense of self-grandeur) by swallowing other societies. The sense of self is involved here as well, though it will take a bit of thought to work out the implications more fully. To paraphrase David Berreby, the personal sense of self is a stitch in the social tapestry which stretches across continents, seas, and time, weaving thousnds of generations past together with those alive today and those not yet born. When the tapestry is tugged, all the threads move. When a single thread is snipped, its loss of strength threatens all the stictches to which it is attached. Self is the weave of society within us. Inner self is the weaver of society's exterior. Howard Ferdo--these are all good points. Self needs to be understood from as many perpectives as we, with our mere end-of-the-20th-century science, can muster. The harder we work at the problem, the easier it will be for following generations to get a handle on the process of self, a center-maker which is part of many groups, a rider of many squabbling neural structures, a creator of illusory unity in the chaos of diversity and change, a maker of internal dialog with the host of humans whose voices we carry within us, a creator of narrative with which we attempt to gain attention from those around us and ascend the social scale, a stitch in the weave of culture, and sometimes a weaver of new cultural embroidery. Howard P.S. On the subject of center-makers, we seem to carry a great many within us. As David Berreby's ponderings remind us, we are able to create ceategories which unite a bewildering variety of entities or actions into an archetypal commonality. Is the self merely one of our category makers and archetype creators? Is it just one more of the mechanisms with which the mind averages the scraps in a whirlwind of chaos, finds their common characteristics, and from the resulting heap of overlaps derives a fanciful quintessence?
hb: It's Howard butting in here. And the answer is yes. I've described my out of body experiences, which were alive with awareness, taught me new things about life, and stamped themselves luminously into my memory. I also dissociate when I'm hit with something emotional distressing. That is, my mind or emotional machinery tucks sn rmotionally painful stimulus out of sight within minutes of its occurrence. I feel the pain but can't figure out why. Recovering the msssing trigger is often impossible. And when I was young, I displaced the resulting emotions terribly. So this form of dissociation is the very opposite of the bright and vivid awareness highlighted by an out of body experience. Instead of heightened awarness, awareness is erased. My former wife of 32 years dissociated in remarkable ways, probably because of the trauma of being "knocked up" at the age of 19 (by her previous husband--who she was forced to marry due to the pregnancy), the humiliation of being a subject of what she felt was universal opprobrium in her hometown of 50,000 people in upstate NY, angering and upsetting her parents, being forced to drop out of Skidmore College and take waitressing jobs to support her baby and her new husband, all because of a bit of sexual experimention which didn't even involve penetration. The result was that few of her feelings ever reached the level of awareness. In fact, on those rare occasions when they came near the surface, she was terrified and did everything in her power to keep them from entering her conscious sense of self. The result was that on occasion she could be two people. One was the genuinely good and charitable person of whom she was aware, the person who controlled her words and self image. The other was an individual of enormous greed, shrewd tactics, and calculating cruelty, a personality only manifested in her actions, actions for which she unconsciously erected elaborate schemes which would guarantee her an excuse for carrying out her fairly ghastly intentions in a manner which, to her, seemed righteously justified and necessary. These observations are
consistent with those reported by Al Cheyne below. Both I and my wife
repress traumas to which we react in ways we imagine to be socially
unacceptable. However my two out of body experiences both took place
when my body was controlled by non-conscious forces within me, but forces
which I welcomed and which were in no way socially objectionable. Our
audience of internal significant others seems to make the difference
between erasure and enhancement of awareness. If it gives a thumbs up,
we allow the experience into our awareness. If it is so pleasing to
our internal audience that it will make a juicy story afterword, we
are doubly aware of it. However if it will cause the audience in our
heads to spurn and loathe us, our response is tucked under the carpet
of consciousness and hidden from our sight. hb: Al, your data is extremly interesting. My ignorance of terminology which comes easily to you must wear you out. But the Merram Webster Medical Dictionary does not give a definition for the term "hypnopompic." Could you explain what it means? experiences (HHEs) generally.
On the other hand, This is an extremely interesting approach. But how does it prove out in reality? The seriously traumatized, I suspect, detach themselves when something like their old trauma repeats. I'd imagine that their body freezes while their mind goes off into its own hiding hole, which means that they've not practiced for survival, but have reenacted and perfected an apoptotic mechanism--a self-destruct device. The adaptive value of such devices is to render those who have no power to deal with a situation socially ineffective, thus eliminating individuals who might lead the larger group astray. In other words, self-destruct mechanisms do not save the individual, but they do benefit the collective intelligence of the group. As Irwin Silverman very cleverly pointed out in one of his papers, "Inclusive Fitness and Ethnocentrism"--"though it may not sufficiently serve one's fitness to sacrifice for another who is perceived as sharing a coefficient of relationship of 1/1000, the gains from helping 500 such individuals may begin to approximate those achieved by nepotism." (Irwin Silverman. "Inclusive Fitness and Ethnocentrism." In The Sociobiology of Ethnocentrism: Evolutionary Dimensions of Xenophobia, Discrimination, Racism and Nationalism, edited by Vernon Reynolds, Vincent Falger, and Ian Vine. London: Croom Helm, 1987: 112.) Howard In a message dated 12/26/99 12:04:54 PM Pacific Standard Time, intarts writes: << Agree that play
need not be fun. An example par excellence that is P.S. If indeed individuals with post-traumatic dissociation disconnect when a crisis of the kind seared into their brains by past experience arrives, it would indicate that the amygdala is disengaging of the action-enabling clutch of the dopaminergic striatal system. Any brain experts in the audience with clues as to the validity of this supposition? Howard
However being forced to
display in front of those to whom one is subordinate and who resist
one's attempt to get to their level is another matter. This is what
one must do in parading before a peer-review panel, unless one has already
fought one's way into their club or, through nobel prizes and other
crowbars of fame, put the the peer-reviewers into a submissive position.
The hormonal setup into which subordinates are strapped leads to intimidation
and caution. Here we've got stress hormones inhibiting mental activity. hb: studies indicating the influence of an authority figure's pre-judgement on behavior would support you here. In one experiment, for example, aging subjects shown stereotypes of wise elders improved in memory, but those given visions of senility became more forgetful. In another, some African American subjects had to fill out a form indicating their race and others didn't. Those who'd been forced to pigeon-hole themselves as black did worse on tests than those who had not been reminded about their skin color. (Both studies are described in Wendi A. Walsh and Mahazarin R. Banati, "The Collective Self," In The Self Across Psychology: Self-Recognition, Self-Awareness, and the Self Concept, edited by Joan Gay Snodgrass and Robert L. Thompson. New York: New York Academy of Sciences: 1997: 206-207.). _______________________________
<<<<I am sympathetic
to the notion that my self may well be a spandrel. I am I'm puzzled by this. Everyone
seems to agree that primates are social David--this is a brilliant reason for a self--a representation of an invisible centering point, sort of like a signboard for the center of gravity of the zillion fragments which make up a galaxy. The center of gravity of a galaxy is extremely real, but may be dangling unseen and unseeable in empty space. Though it may seem an abstraction conjured up by physicists, it is, in fact, the pivot around which the entire ten million light years or more of galactic matter revolves. Is there a similar abstract pivot of the organism? And if a self is useful in representing it, how many organisms have selves? You've mentioned that having some sort of symbol for the coherence at the heart of the multi-trillion-celled, constantly changing cellular agglomeration we call a human is a necessity in dealing with other humans. It's a handle on the unhandlable which social creatures in particular need in order to keep track of where they are, where they're going, and with whose aid they are most likely to get there. However nearly every species on the planet is social--from bacteria to seemingly solitary cats. So which of us have conscious selves and which of us don't? Which of us have group selves and which don't? (Humans definitely have group selves--I am a New Yorker, a scientist, an American, a Jew, an atheist, etc., etc.) Is there some sort of self even in creatures which do not enjoy the luxury of consciousness? And if so, what sort might that be? Howard
What adaptive role, if
any, has kept evolution from pruning this >expensive parlor trick
from our repertoire. Even if it has no role, how the >heck did it
get there? Remember, when I say expensive, I mean expensive. The >brain
occupies 5% of our body mass but uses 20% of our energy. hb
<< >What I cannot
understand, as I say in the poem I posted yesterday, is why am hb: hmmm. I think you've
hit on something which could be tested experimentally. Val Geist managed
to scramble up a tree and outwit a grizzly while his self was parked
on a distant branch and left to merely watch. Our bodies drive us to
work while our minds--and hence our selves--wander off into the realms
of reverie, often seeming to leave the car altogether. But if we were
to remove the sense of self, what activities would we ELIMINATE? Which
of the daily deeds we take for granted would become impossible to us?
Presenting ourselves to others verbally might be one of them. Yes, I
suspect we could utter the usual mmm-hmmms during a conversation with
a mate which follows a well-known path and to which we don't have to
devote much attention. But what about giving a presentation to an in-house
committee, shepherding it through the internal approval process, then
altering the presentation to fit the psychological nooks and crannies
of an outside evaluating committee? Or meeting a new person of the opposite
sex and working like blazes to sense her character (or his) so we can
make a good impression? Would we be able to handle such things with
no careful shepherding of our squabble-prone brain-parts, no conscious
calculation mixed in with intuitive feel? Or, to use the words of Goffman's
title, would we be able to manage "the presentation of self in
everyday life?" Howard
Russell Kick and hb 2/22/01-rk: I considered myself a loner up until my mid- 20s, but since then I feel empty if I'm not in a committed, (hopefully) long-term love relationship. hb: me too. I'm sure your theory of self will shed light on this. hb: it's the extrasomatory extensions of the self theory. the thing about the twenties has to do with what "who am I?" and "finding your self" are all about. Rk: It seems to be a common part of getting older. As John Lennon sang, "When I was younger, so much younger than today, I never needed anybody's help in any way, but now those days are gone..."
It felt to me like a toxic
mental sludge had flowed like magma around the hb: wonderfully written. however I suspect that some of the toxic sludge was in you. in other words, i'm a very powerful and controlling personality. i tend to be like too much of a good thing, i overwhelm some people. maintaining the membrane-envelope of self is a difficult thing. when someone comes along who threatens to dissolve it, we panic and have to run like hell. this is what happens in romantic relationships which reach the stage where intimacy turns to terror and we withdraw. there's not phrase for this when women are the ones who pull away. but there is a name for it when men do the same damned thing--"commitment phobia." This need to defend our ultra-fragile sense of self also shows up when we return to our parents' homes and melt back into infantile torpidity. most folks have to get out of the hellhole of their parents' home in a couple of days in order to save themselves from utter disappearance as an adult. The place strips them of their sense of power and of individual identity. Susan Sively 6/15/00--As for my self-membrane, nothing gets through. I am a dedicated commitment-phobic. I dare to call it freedom. hb: it's a trade off.
you give up intimacy and gain a thick armor which frees you to a certain
extent from the awareness of pain. but usually the pain one tries to
hold back when one builds an interior container of steel is less than
one imagines it to be. like a demon tempted into the light, by day it
loses its ferocity. John??This is very meaty indeed. How did you receive my posting? Would you like to be added to our list? Below some comments. In a message dated 98?03?24
20:01:52 EST, intarts writes: Good observations. Further observations from psychiatry: many disorders that follow psychological trauma (PTSD, borderline personality d/o, dissociative disorders etc.) manifest both with (1) self?other boundary confusions, e.g. trying to get another to do what only oneself can do, and if the others accept the invite, then rebelling against the perceived intrusion by that other against one's one autonomy; FIRST OFF, THIS IS AN EXTREMELY COMMON MECHANISM IN ROMANTIC PANIC. I'M OBSERVING A CASE NOW IN WHICH A MALE WHO WOULD RATE PERFECTLY NORMAL ON ANY STANDARD PSYCHOLOGICAL SCALE (THOUGH HIS INTELLIGENCE LEVEL, I SUSPECT, WOULD BE HIGHER THAN MOST) FORCES ANY WOMAN WITH WHOM HE BECOMES ROMANTICALLY INVOLVED TO BECOME THE DECISION MAKER AND RULE OVER HIM LIKE A MOTHER. THEN HE RESENTS HER DOMINANCE OVER HIM AND ALL HELL BREAKS LOOSE. IN HIS MID?FORTIES, HE HASN'T BEEN ABLE TO SUSTAIN A RELATIONSHIP FOR MORE THAN THREE OR FOUR YEARS AND WONDERS WHY ALL HIS WIVES AND GIRLFRIENDS HAVE TURNED INTO "ANGRY WITCHES." HE, OF COURSE, HAS FORCED THEM INTO THE ROLE. I SUSPECT HIS EVENTUAL WITHDRAWAL AND RESENTMENT UPSET HIS MATES AND SLOWLY MADE THEM ANGRY. TURNING TO SUCH PROBLEMS AS POST TRAUMATIC STRESS DISORDERS, TWO MINOR OBSERVATIONS: THE AMYGDALA PLAYS A STRONG ROLE IN THIS DAMAGE; AND THE DAMAGE INVOLVED AFTER A SEVERE FAILURE OF CONTROL (ONE WAY OF CHARACTERIZING TRAUMA) IS A MANIFESTATION OF THE "UTILITY SORTER" MENTIONED AS A PART OF THE COMPLEX ADAPTIVE SYSTEM MODEL OF COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENCE IN AN EARLIER POSTING. and (2) very intense intimacy?distance conflicts. The pain of traumatic affect seems to lead one to seek support over and beyond uncomplicated seeking of love and romance, but at the same time, to develop a demand for autonomy that's virtually inviolable as an antithesis to traumatic helplessness. LOSS OF CONTROL INVARIABLY PRODUCES AVOIDANCE SIGNALS. THESE ARE TRIGGERED IN HUMANS BY EMOTIONAL (HENCE neuroendocrinological) STATE. AVOIDANCE CUES??MANIFESTED IN HUMANS IN SPEECH, BODY LANGUAGE, AND MANY OTHER FORMS OF VERBAL AND NON?VERBAL COMMUNICATION??SERVE THE SAME ROLE AS CHEMOTACTIC AVOIDANCE SIGNALS IN THE "CREATIVE WEB" OR COMPLEX ADAPTIVE SYSTEM OF A BACTERIAL COLONY. THEY TURN AN INDIVIDUAL INTO A MODULE OF A LARGER CALCULATING MECHANISM. Traumatized couples do better when they maintain a greater?than?normal optimum distance, so that the attractive pulls outweigh the distancing pushes. MY LORD, BUT YOU ARE PUTTING YOUR FINGER EXTREMELY WELL ON A BUNCH OF THE MANIFESTATIONS I'VE OBSERVED. THOSE WHO NEED DISTANCE AND FEAR BEING "SWALLOWED" OR "SMOTHERED" FEEL THEY ARE LOOKING FOR HIGH INTIMACY, BUT GENERALLY SOLVE THE PARADOX OF THE ROMANTIC ATTRACTION/REPULSION PROBLEM BY PICKING AN EMOTIONALLY DISTANT MATE, ONE WHO IS VIRTUALLY UNATTAINABLE, EVEN WITHIN THE CONTEXT OF MARRIAGE. I WONDER IF THE PEOPLE IN WHOM I'VE BEEN OBSERVING THIS HAVE HAD SOME TRAUMATIC LOSS OF CONTROL IN THEIR PAST AND BEEN SCARRED BY THE ENDOGENOUS PENALTIES EXACTED BY THE UTILITY SORTER. I'VE SUSPECTED IN WORKING WITH THESE PEOPLE THAT THEY CARRY SOME INFANTILE OR OTHER EARLY EXPERIENCE OF LOSS OF CONTROL THAT MAKES THEIR FEAR OF HAVING THEIR ENVELOPE OF SELF DISSOLVED BY CLOSENESS TO ANOTHER FAR GREATER THAN IN NORMAL INDIVIDUALS. I've hypothesized in a 1990 article on "the evolution of posttraumatic behavior...", that one of several evolved effects of the trauma response is to strengthen in?group enmeshment in defense vs. outgroups: HMM, SO WE ARE BOTH ON A SIMILAR TRACK, USING A GROUP SELECTIONIST APPROACH TO SOLVE THE QUESTION OF HOW AND WHY THESE MALADAPTIVE INDIVIDUAL BEHAVIORS EVOLVED. THEY EVOLVED, WE BOTH HYPOTHESIZE, TO INCREASE THE SUCCESS OF THE GROUP IN ITS COMPETITION WITH OTHER GROUPS. COULD YOU SEND A COPY OF YOUR PAPER? this is adaptive in stable but dangerous milieus, but dysfunctional if not frankly maladaptive in rapidly changing ones. In the latter, because of rapidly shifting alliances, greater selective pressure is given to the need for autonomy, making enmeshment now more of a threat, and increasing the likelihood of people acting out against it. I'VE COLLECTED A VAST BODY OF MATERIAL ON HOW STRESSFUL ENVIRONMENTAL PRESSURES, RANGING FROM HEAT TO NOISE AND CROWDING??THE KINDS OF THINGS WHICH WOULD INDICATE THAT A GROUP HAS EITHER CHOSEN A POOR ENVIRONMENT, OVERCROWDED AND OVERUSED A FORMERLY FRUITFUL ENVIRONMENT, ETC.-- PRODUCES THESE REPULSION SIGNALS. I'M ALSO WORKING ON A MODEL OF GROUP PHENOTYPES WHICH ADJUST TO DIFFERENT ENVIRONMENTAL CONDITIONS. THE FIVE POINTS ON THE CONTINUUM INCLUDE FLEEING (WHEN THE ENVIRONMENT IS EKED OUT AND THE GROUP MEMBERS SENSE NO POSSIBILITY OF CONTROL OVER THE CRISIS), FASTING (WHEN THE GROUP ENVIRONMENT IS IMPOVERISHED, YET THE GROUP RETAINS ITS COHESION AND GOES INTO A RESOURCE?CONSERVING MODE??THE MODE GENERALLY ASSOCIATED WITH THE k?STATE OR WITH WHAT VALERIUS GEIST CALLS THE MAINTENANCE PHASE); FEEDING (WHEN A GROUP HAS FOUND A PRODUCTIVE ENVIRONMENT AND SETTLES IN STUBBORNLY TO EXPLOIT THE BOUNTY TO THE MAX); QUESTING (WHEN A GROUP HAS BEEN SETTLED IN A HIGH?CONTROL, HIGH?INTERGROUP?STATUS, HIGH SURPLUS ENVIRONMENT FOR SOME TIME AND NEW GENERATIONS PRODUCE AN ABNORMAL NUMBER OF QUESTIONERS OF THE SYSTEM, OUTRIGHT REBELS, AND EXPLORERS OF NEW OPPORTUNITIES??THIS CORRESPONDS WITH THE R?STATE AND WITH DR. GEIST'S DISPERSAL MODE); AND CONQUERING (WHEN GOBBLING UP ADDITIONAL TERRITORY AND FRESH OPPORTUNITIES GOES FROM BEING THE BUSINESS OF REBELS TO THE BUSINESS OF THE ESTABLISHMENT). YOU CAN SEE THESE PHASES AT WORK IN BEE COLONIES, HUMAN GROUPS, AND MANY OTHERS. I'M CURRENTLY STUDYING HOW THEY WORKED OUT IN THE RISE AND FALL OF ATHENS FROM ROUGHLY 2,000 BC TO ROUGHLY 146 BC. Many thanks for your observations. They've helped me greatly in clarifying some of the points of the model on which I'm working. Cheers, Howa
gm: l will call my kid and tell her about getting in touch with Di. She is not doing well at all at my moms. lt annoys me because as much as my mom says she loves to have her there and that she lets her do whatever she wants and doesnt understand why the kid wants to move on her own, she is constantly complaining to me about her and Adria is going nuts. Why is it Howard, that my mom promises so much, opens her house and heart to us and then takes it back ? l dont get it. Do you think she is suffering from schysophrenia ? ( l know l didnt spell that right at all ). She says she loves to have my kids there and is always inviting people to eat over.But..........when its all over she says people have no heart and they dont understansd how she feels and that she is old....she is definitely psychotic ? Why is it Howard, that my mom promises so much, opens her house and heart to us and then takes it back ? l dont get it. Do you think she is suffering from schysophrenia ? hb: because we all carry all the stages of our life inside of us. your mother is reverting to the status of a baby. she is crying out for attention and love. the answer: retirement community where she can make friends and be surrounded by them. Howard
This outward turn of the self may be why we have an easy time figuring out the problems of others, but an insanely difficult time making our own choices and sorting out our own delights or woes. Our self, says the theory, evolved to send us into the arms of others, to turn us into data-sharers and antennae for the social group. Social groups that pooled brains this way, says the theory, would have outcomputed and outcompeted others. So those individuals would have survived whose selves best plugged them into the group mesh of minds, the parallel-distributed processing network of the gang. Selves that did the most to increase the collective IQ would have had the edge because their groups would have triumphed. The challenge has been to come up with research that would back this evolutionary hypothesis. Chances are that the study reported on below provides one microbit of supporting data. Studies on mice have shown that if you knock out the oxytocin gene, the de-oxytocinated rodents lose their ability to remember who's who. They lose a key networking ability. More important, to quote the Emory University press release about the study, it "demonstrates that social memory has a neural basis distinct from other forms of memory." Social memory has a separate neural swatch? This is a strong clue that the mind we've evolved to mesh with others may have evolved separately from the braintwists that handle food, follow familiar pathways, avoid the pounce of a cat, and handle the memories that fuel other basic survival tricks. One key to sociality is the self--the billboard with which we advertise to and influence others. Ergo, self may well have evolved in its own peculiar way, as a plug for engaging others, but not as a switchpoint giving us direct access to our own interior events. In other words, self may well have evolved to prod us into scurrying to others when we run into something exciting or confusing, not to help us dig a few inches back into the synaptic and biochemical tangle that makes emotions pop and figure them out on our own. Which, in turn, would mean that self, of all the absurdities, is an outsider in the skull-it may be among the first to feel the pain but it's often the last to be told why. The self may well be an exile living in the cranium, one that needs other selves-other exiles-to survive. Does anyone else know of work that would support or negate these ideas? Howard p.s. Oxytocin is the big-time
social glue-it's the hormone most involved in bonding us to each other.
Other aspects of the theory of self I've been working on boil down to
one thing-self is others. Oxytocin is what ropes us to others. So the
connections all make sense. Or the sense all makes connections. Social
connections, that is. ________
To be sure the problem
didn't lie with generally impaired olfactory functioning, Winslow's
team tested the animals' all-important sense of smell with various food-foraging
tasks. The normal and transgenic mice both were able to find buried
food as quickly as food placed clearly in view -- suggesting they could
find the hidden food through their sense of smell. Both rapidly became
"familiar" with scented foods, such as lemon and chocolate,
and recognized when a scent was changed, showing that olfactory function
was not measurably influenced by the lack of oxytocin. In addition,
the scientists tested the spatial memory of the mice using a water maze
task, to see if other forms of memory were also impaired due to the
lack of oxytocin. Transgenic mice were every bit as adept at finding
their way around the maze as were normal mice, demonstrating that spatial
memory was intact. Dr. Winslow was successful in restoring social memory
formation by treating the knockout mice with oxytocin. In these mice,
social amnesia disappeared. Like the normal mice, they again showed
the characteristic decline in time spent investigating familiar females,
and recovered interest when a new female entered the cage. Virtually
all forms of psychopathology, which include some of man's most debilitating
clinical disorders, are characterized by abnormal social attachments.
Yet very little is known about the normal process of bond formation.
This work helps lay the groundwork for defining the neural basis of
attachment and identifying potential pharmacological targets in the
brain for future therapies. ### This study was funded by grants from
Emory University, the National Institutes of Health and the National
Alliance for Autism Research. Yerkes Primate Research Center is the
oldest scientific institution dedicated to primate research. Its programs
cover a wide range of biomedical and behavioral sciences. [ Print This
Article | Close This Window ] hb: a very good idea, but a very complex subject. It has a lot to do with the human-imprinting-produces-the-seat-of-the-soul research I'm doing. In other words, you fall in love with a person similar to the one your emotional brain locked onto when you were a child or teenager. For teenage imprinting, see Fons' relationship in Israel when he was 15 and the impact it's had on his life. I ran into an unexpected treasure trove on human imprinting this morning--a story in the New Yorker (see C:\teXT\soul.doc) about folks who have a burning need to get a limb or two amputated. This is a serious syndrome. It hits people who imprinted on an amputee when they were between the age of three and nine. The sexual aspect--being sexually aroused by amputees--surfaces when the hormones kick in and kids have had a few years to sort out what does and doesnt attract them. This means the age of 15 in 75% of the cases surveyed. mr: instead (with Bill Jankowiak in Las Vegas). The PEA hb: is this Pea-SK--the sulfakinin in insects? Or the HPA--the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis? Wait, I found it--phenylethylamine. Whoops--it's two hours later, and you've piqued my curiosity into researching PEA. Interesting hormone/neurotransmitter. By the way, in the process of hunting for the PEA data, I ran into an intersting tidbit. Octopamine is the hormone that charges up winning lobsters after a show down with a rival who slinks away (yes, lobsters do stand tall when they win and slump as if they're trying to bury themselves in the sea bottom when they lose). Octopamine is also present in all mammals. Though its role in mammals seems as yet unclear, the fact that this hormone of hierarchy courses through the circulatory system of both crustaceans and humans hints that hierarchical battles and their chemical after-effects may well have come to us from a common ancestor. This would throw the date for the origins of hierarchical competition back to roughly 550 million years ago. No wonder humans who try to set up egalitarian societies have a very hard time. They're bucking something deep in our biology. This may explain why the kibbutz movement in Israel has failed. It produced wonderful, egalitarian societies that sparkled with small and large pleasures. I know, I lived on one for a year. But the kibbutzim haven't been able to hold on to their young people and are disappearing with an unfortunate whimper. Meanwhile the large scale attempts at egalitarianism--Marxism in China, Russia, and Cuba--have gone radically hierarchical right from the beginning. Fidel, Mao, and Lenin used the language of equality to perpetrate the opposite--dictatorship accompanied by the creation of a new aristocracy--the high-ranking members of the party, the nomenklatura. The hormones that bind us together indicate how much our biology has evolved to quilt us into a larger social fabric--the fabric of family in the case of romance and the fabric of the tribe, the nation, the empire, or the ummah, in the case of dominance hierarchies. mr: , norepinephrine and dopamine at 1st stage and oxytocine and vasopressine at 2nd. hb: great summary. mr: Interesting stuff about prolactin in your recent postings. I don't know anything about cholycystokinin, which was also mentioned - have to check that out. hb: I can send you the Bloomian hypothesis about its evolutionary role, if you want. mr: But is falling in love different for a highly social animal like man than for prairie voles and Siberian hamsters? hb: good question. I think
we have to have belief systems that match--something the monogamous
voles of the prairie don't have to worry about. We're also much more
mobile than voles, and tend to imprint not just on people, but on places.
If two folks who've been married for a while develop an intractable
urge to go back to a place that reminds them of home or offers them
a better future, and the places they want to live don't match up, the
result is often divorce. Humans also have to have goals that match.
It's not enough for mating humans to share lifestyle and career goals
when they're young. As they grow older new goals emerge. Those have
to match, too, or the relationship is likely to go down the tubes. hb: this is a remarkable quote. As another person whose spent 20 years studying charismatic movements by helping to engender them, I need to ponder this. I'm not sure it's true. mr: What role would the temporal lobe play in this I wonder (which is probably involved in religious revelations). hb: a big one, I suspect. Sexuality, says my wife, Diane Starr Petryk-Bloom, is all in the brain. It's another two hours later, and here's what I've come up with on the topic: Note these two articles on music. Music is another social glue. It's not only involved in romance, but it helps subcultures find an indentity and cohere, it helps military units sychronize both emotionally and pysically, it brings tribes, nations, or congregations together, and it's at the heart of many a social ritual. Musical ecstasies involve the orbitofrontal region of the brain-part of the prefrontal cortex. The orbitofrontal cortex is responsible for some very important functions, functions that overlap in a telling manner. It's a key to social perception-to our sense of the social landscape. It's also a major decision maker. However it makes its decisions in direct consultation with the amygdala…a potent part of the emotional brain-the limbic system. Curiously, the amygdala is the alarm system of the brain-the part that stores memories of fear and rouses new terrors. Which would indicate that before we make a decision, we evaluate the social landscape, the social consequences, the ways in which what we do may be harshly judged by others, the ways in which our next act may make us look gauche, idiotic, or downright disgusting. It's curious that the orbitofrontal region is also involved in musical ecstasies. I've hypothesized for quite a long time now that ecstatic or transcendent experiences are those that take us into the seemingly infinite ocean of the the group's identity. They dissolve our individual envelope of self for a minute or two. They banish the amygdala's wariness of making fools of ourselves. Transcendent feelings carry us into the soul of the group-its emergent identity, the group self that hovers over a cluster of humans like a flame does over charcoal. Transcendent experiences make us feel a vital part of something larger than our selves. Which might mean thar for an instant, transcendent experiences like falling in love, having chills go down your spine when you listen to music, or participating in a torch-light parade that carries you into the ecstatic realm of the volkgeist cut the ties with which the amygdala normally holds the orbitofrontal social decision maker in a thrall of insecurity. They let the orbitofrontal cortex experience the group without the fear of blowing it, of doing something foolish. This is sheer guesswork. But if it's true, it also tells us a tale about the self. The self is that conjunction of oritofrontal cortex and amygdala that weighs how each action will be judged by those around us… how each nod of our head or word from our mouth could subject us to ridicule and rejection. The self is a product of social fear. By the way, the amygdala and the orbitofrontal region work hand in hand-or synapse in synapse-with a vigilant sentinel that stands guard over the social signals given off by the face, hands, and body and also keeps the senses peeled for the social signals given off by others. This watchman is the superior temporal sulcus. Here are some references: Intensely pleasurable
responses to music correlate with activity in brain regions implicated
in reward and emotion. Blood AJ, Zatorre RJ. Montreal Neurological Institute,
McGill University, Montreal, QC, Canada H3A 2B4. We used positron emission
tomography to study neural mechanisms underlying intensely pleasant
emotional responses to music. Cerebral blood flow changes were measured
in response to subject-selected music that elicited the highly pleasurable
experience of "shivers-down-the-spine" or "chills."
Subjective reports of chills were accompanied by changes in heart rate,
electromyogram, and respiration. As intensity of these chills increased,
cerebral blood flow increases and decreases were observed in brain regions
thought to be involved in reward/motivation, emotion, and arousal, including
ventral striatum, midbrain, amygdala, orbitofrontal cortex, and ventral
medial prefrontal cortex. These brain structures are known to be active
in response to other euphoria-inducing stimuli, such as food, sex, and
drugs of abuse. This finding links music with biologically relevant,
survival-related stimuli via their common recruitment of brain circuitry
involved in pleasure and reward. Intensely Pleasant Emotional Responses
to Music Correlate with CBF modulations in Paralimbic and Other Subcortical
Brain Regions Anne J. Blood, Robert J. Zatorre Montreal Neurological
Institute, McGill University, Montreal, QC, Canada We have previously
demonstrated activity in paralimbic brain regions during unpleasant
emotional responses to musical dissonance. In the present study, we
investigated neural correlates of intensely pleasant emotional responses
to music. We hypothesized that activity in paralimbic, limbic and/or
arousal systems was likely to correlate with emotional Reponses. Ten
normal, right-handed musicians underwent PET scans while listening to
self-selected, non-verbal music which they reported to consistently
produce a highly pleasurable 'shivers-down-the-spine' or 'chills' response.
Each subject also listened to a control music selection from one of
the other nine subjects, which produced minimal emotional responses.
Physiological measures (heart rate, electrodermal response, respiration,
EMG, skin temperature) were also taken during scans. Subjective ratings
of emotional intensity and intensity of 'chills' were obtained following
each scan. Regression and subtraction analyses demonstrate increased
activity (t>3.5) nucleus accumbens, midbrain, insula, thalamus, supplementary
motor area, anterior cingulate, and orbitofrontal regions during subject-selected
music. Significant CBF decreases were observed in right amygdala, left
hippocampus/amygdala, ventral medial prefrontal regions, and diffuse
regions of visual and parietal cortices. Heart rate, respiration, and
EMG increased during subject-selected relative to control music. These
findings indicate activity in reward, limbic, and arousal systems correlating
with intensely pleasant responses to music. "analysis of socially
relevant stimuli is carried out in the amygdala and orbitofrontal cortex"
Trends in Cognitive Sciences Vol. 4, No. 7, July 2000Full Text Record
Social perception from visual cues: role of the STS region Truett Allison
"The orbitofrontal cortex is implicated in the decision-making
process. There is reason to suspect that it employs the emotional memory
of the amygdala, with its significance weighting, to influence its decisions."
Retrieved December 11, 2001, from the World Wide Web http://www.personal.dundee.ac.uk/~sxbrown/phd/neuro/orbito.htm
Sam Brown. The Nerve Centre. Last updated August 21, 1997. At 3:14 AM 1/23/98 ?0500, H Bloom wrote: Hb: >and more predictable. Another is the brain, which constantly shifts through >different settings of the kind that you have written about. In this way, the >brain acts as a kind of random possibilities generator, scanning potential >future and past scenarios in a never?ending generation of corollaries. You >can feel this at work in your own mind if you're isolated from normal social >intercourse at, let's say, a boring concert and are stuck watching the >flickering visual, motor, and emotional scenarios, many of them disturbing, >some of them tantalizing, cranked out by your ever?active brain. Most of the >scenarios generated are discarded rapidly from memory. Some stick. Bb: Of course, there has been some well?known work on sensory deprivation and its hallucinatory effects. And, if you think of the brain as a very active and very sensitive servo?mechanical physical system (as does Powers), then you get a sense that it requires sufficiently rich and structured external input in order to remain stable. If it lacks such input, its finely?tuned physical mechanisms start going out of control. So, why is it that a standard feature of meditative disciplines is to reduce sensory input to nothing or to some very stylized input (e.g. a mandala, a chant)? Clearly the objective is to achieve rock?solid stability in this circumstance. And when you do....WHAM! In a message dated 98?01?23 07:02:21 EST, You've zapped in on yet another mystery. The meditative state involves concentrating on a rhythmic pulsation, or several of them at once??a mantra and slow, ritualized breathing (see _The Relaxation Response_ for meditation's basics boiled down to a simple, universal formula). So I'd assume that meditative placidity is akin to another neural mode brought on by concentration on rhythmic entrainment??hypnosis. But what the heck IS hypnosis? [hb: 12/17/01 hypnosis is the ultimate portal through which others can enter and take over your mind. Other powerful doors for the entry of others are music, rhythm, and ritual. Meditation opens all of these entryways. It may produce peace by giving us a supreme sense of merger into the ultimate other-the secure womb of the group, of humanity, or of the cosmos. In the process, meditation may exempt us from the harsh judgement of others meted out to us by the amygdala's input to the orbitofrontal cortex. If we are one with all that is, how can anything judge us? Nothing is outside of us anymore! By the way, the rhythm of the relaxations response and of meditation is that of slow and even breathing. I suspect this is a beat of roughly 60bpm. Sixty beats per minute is also the beat of a calm heart we would sense during our most relaxed periods in the womb. And it's the beat of relaxing music.) How did it evolve evolutionarily? Why is it so different psychologically from any other brain setting we know? What is it neurologically? As for the corollary generator, yer darned right??meditation involves turning most of it off (except perhaps for some previews of one corollary we generate fairly frequently in our cultures??Nirvana). Anyone got answers to this mind?stumper? Howard P.S. For those of us following
the ways in which music and rhythm play both a social and an inter?cranial
role, the rhythmic entrainment which induces meditation and hypnosis
may provide a clue. Subj: Black Bernstein Date: 97?10?31 19:37:17 EST p. 5 of notes (CD version), Bernstein: I know when I have achieved a really good statement of a work: that is when I have the feeling throughout that I am composing it on stage, at the event. If I think at the end, "What a fine piece I wrote," then I can be reasonably certain that I have achieved a true and good document. Perhaps the fact of being myself a composer, who works very hard (and in various styles), gives me the advantageous opportunity to identify more closely with the Mozarts, Beethovens, Mahlers and Stravinskys of this world, so that I can at certain points (usually of intense solitary study) feel that I have become whoever is my alter ego that day or week. At least I can occasionally reach one or the other on our private "Hot Line", and with luck be given the solution to a problematic passage. Those are ecstatic times, those moments, and inform the entire Gestalt with new life. A new difficulty arises after giving such a "true" performance of what seems my own music, and then, suddenly, amidst applause and similar noises, having to become merely Leonard Bernstein again. * * * * * Helen Epstein. Music Talks: Conversations with Musicians. McGraw?Hill Book Company, 1987. p. 10, Horowitz talking: "The moment that I feel that cutaway ?? the moment I am in uniform ?? it's like a horse before the races. You start to perspire. You feel already in you some electricity to do something." p. 52, Leonard Bernstein talking to conducting students at Tanglewood about how he had to learn to bring himself under control. As a young conductor he once got so wrapped up in conducting ?? I think it was a Tchaikovsky symphony ?? that we was afraid he was having a heart attack. So, he's had to restrain himself. Then he gets to ego loss: "I don't know whether any of you have experienced that but it's what everyone in the world is always searching for. When it happens in conducting, it happens because you identify so completely with the composer, you've studied him so intently, that it's as though you've written the piece yourself. You completely forget who you are or where you are and you write the piece right there. You just make it up as though you never heard it before. Because you become that composer. "I always know when such a thing has happened because it takes me so long to come back. It takes four or five minutes to know what city I'm in, who the orchestra is, who are the people making all that noise behind me, who am I? It's a very great experience and it doesn't happen often enough. Ideally it should happen every time, but it happens about as often in conducting as in any other department where you lose ego. Schopenhauer said that music was the only art in which this could happen and that art was the only area of life in which it could happen. Schopenhauer was wrong. It can happen in religious ecstasy or meditation. It can happen in orgasm when you are with someone you love." The students received all this in silence. Then someone in the back of the room raised his hand. "How do you train yourself to lose your ego?" Bernstein had nothing to say about training, but made a comment about relaxed concentration. p. 73, Dorothy DeLay (violin teacher at Julliard), on teaching: "People come in with ideas about themselves ?? I'm this kind of person, I can do this, I can never do that ?? and they're unhappy with their self?concept. If you find a way to bypass that kind of thinking, they find they're better than they thought they were. I've always felt we only use a small part of ourselves." ________ ac: What if you found your way home, recognized everyone, but didn't care? hb: superb question. Where does the emotional drive that sends us into the arms of others come from. I've sketched out why it would evolve, but that's only part of the answer. What are the unasked questions implicit in your probing? a.c. Thus, it seems possible to have a concept of self and of the other - independent of the feeling state. hb: neurobiolgically, do we have any conscious or perceptual activity independent of emotion? It seems to me that emotion is the fabric on which the pattern of our thoughts is imprinted. Emotion changes the shape of the imprint. But, unless I'm wrong, all that we perceive passes through the gates of the emotional corridors the of brain--the limbic system. Everything is weiged. If it is hellish, it gets in. If it is heavenly it gets in. If it is neutral--emotionally irrelevant, it never gets past the gates and into the loops of brainwork that make for perception, consciousness, and action. There is no perception without emotion. There is no reason without feeling. Reason is a rider on the steed of feeling. Without feeling it would cease to be. ac: It might be helpful to consider also the double dissociation of facial recognition and facial affect in prospagnotic patients versus patients with orbitofrontal lesions. The mice could function quite well as former but not at all as the latter. Perhaps the behavioral responsiveness engendered by oxytocin has no necessary cognitive correlate. Conversely, we do not appear to gain much comfort from the mere recognition. Capgras syndrome might be interpreted in terms of a failure of a gut-level (i.e., implicit) social memory prior to explicit recognition. Self and other are explicitly recognized (That is my mother.) but the implicit recognition is missing (But it does not feel like my mother). The upshot is that I am not sure that the mouse study cited is particularly relevant here. hb: it's relevant if my basic proposition that self and other are inextricably intertwined. We can't have self without others. Others actually implant the substance of what we call self. We imprint on others and those imprints fix the form of the most essential self within us, the most personal private core. In the music business I worked with people who had fixated on the pictures of Ronnie Spector they'd masturbated to as teens. I worked with others who in their adolescence had found their self and their salvation in the lyrics, music, and attitude of the Who. Those music fans became major figures in the music business. But their roots made them who they were. And those roots came from fixation on the looming personalities of other human beings. Self is others, others are self. ac: More generally, the debate between a sociocentric/sociogenic and an egocentric/egogenic self goes back at least to Peirce's complaint about what he saw as the excessively internalist views of James. hb: Pierce? Could you explain more of who he was and what his views were. ac: Of course, even James - not to be easily boxed into a consistent stance - said we have as many selves as we have social situations. It is true that the sociocentric views of Baldwin and later Mead (i.e., the that self is of, by, and for the other) tended to lay fallow for the better part of the 20th century until picked up by social psychologists in the 1980s and 1990s. Perhaps, of greatest interest to Howard's speculations, however, is Vygotsky's early developmental argument that the first inking of the meaning of one's own action is in the observation of the reactions of others to our actions. (Your recoiling from my threat becomes the meaning of my threat.) hb: interesting. ac: What this most fundamentally
means is the self-consciousness is an other-centered perspective on
one's own actions and experiences and is consistent with the fundamental
insights of Baldwin and Vygotsky. Noticing others noticing us literally
makes us self-conscious. hb: also interesting. ac: This conjecture is
powerfully amplified, indeed takes a new direction, if, as Arbib and
Rizolatti argue re: mirror neurons that these actions of the other are
incipient (i.e., I notice your tendency to move in ways consistent with
your recognizing what I just did). Self-consciousness is thus a very
limited outsider's view hb: that's only part of it. Einstein was one
of those I imprinted on. He exists permanently in me, but not as an
audience, as an ally and an aspiration, a goal. Yes, I perform internally
for an audience of others, but Einstein is in my performance, not outside
deploring or appauding me. Which means that others twist themselves
into the tissue of self in at least two forms, as audience and as, what,
allies? inspirations? people we indentify with? A part of the inner
core, the heart of us, the stage and spotlight, not the gallery and
bleachers. ac: of our internal states. The self emerges as a surrogate
other. (Yet it is not quite the view of the other. The other cannot
see his or her own reaction to our actions. Only we can. It seems something
new has emerged.) ac: For Peirce, what is specifically human about human consciousness is just that which is shared. For Peirce the self was a sign and as such took its meaning from its place in a network of signs. The Jamesian notion of the isolated self Peirce took to be crude and self-defeating notion. To be a self is to be a member of, and play a role in, a community. If there are parts of the self that are not communicable or play no role in the community they are superfluous and temporary. In this sense, Peirce seems to me to be at the opposite pole of the romanticism. hb: yes and no, not when you consider that a romantic tends to his personal, emotional fires until they blaze. A romantic becomes inebriated by the burst of his internal passion's flames. But the sparks from which these innner fires rise are the passion points, the imprints left by humans whose examples shaped us powerfully as we grew. Our obsessions are traces of others we once felt with full emotion. Even the animal instincts we rouse in our romantic phase are traces of others left not merely in our brain but in the genome from which the brain is formed. ac: Peirce also argued that our sense of our own personality is essentially the same as our sense of the other's personality. In the language of later schools of thought, he is saying we have no privileged access to ourselves. The positive corollary of this is that, far from being isolated from others, we can have greater insights into their personalities they themselves have. hb: the essence of the extrasomatic extensions theory of self--that we often need to go to others to complete the passage of data from the limbic system to the frontal cortex merely inches away. ac: Peirce's writing on the self are scattered through his writings, mainly on semiotics, but have been collected together in a book by Vincent Colapietro: Peirce's approach to the self, 1989, SUNY. hb: sounds very useful. Many thanks, Al.
<< Strenuous physical exercise can be used to break down individual resistance to ideas, reinforce conformity, and create a controlled milieu. >> Absolutely, Alex. William McNeill has demonstrated this brilliantly in his book Keeping Together in Time: Dance and Drill in Human History. Cambridge, MA: 1995. Howard Rachlin has also made the same observation, presenting evidence for what I call functional bonding--bonding by participating in a deed, an act, or an extended enterprise. Functional bonding means that humans are tightly knit by more than common genes. They can be fused emotionally by working together on some element of civilization-building, something we might call--not genes or memes--but seams, the building blocks of culture and society. We bond with those who are our buddies in the goal-directed act of war, with those who help us battle to build a commercial company, and even with those we dance with at the disco on a Friday night. Disco dancing brings us into synchrony of mood and rhythm, practice for the coordination we will need when Monday comes around and we have to hold together not only our work projects but the mesh of relationships in our private lives. Now for the question. People are bonded when they eat together. When meat hits our intestines, our bowels flood us with cholecystokinin, a hormone which serves several purpose simultaneously. It signals the brain that we've managed to get the proteins and fats we need to survive. And it tells the social brain that the people we've just broken bread with are folks we should remain attached to for the rest of our lives. There's another bonding hormone of equal power, oxytocin. This opens up our sense of boundaries and allows us to feel intimate with others. Vasopressin is oxytocin's opposite. It builds barriers and makes us territorial, actively shooing others away. So far the only form of oxytocin-driven bonding which has been studied seems to be that of childbirth. When a new mother first feels her baby sucking at her nipple, her system is swamped with oxytocin. She bonds to the baby and lets her vasopressin guard down, allowing others to come close whom she would normally shoo away. What's more, she goes into a state of joy beyond imagining, one which some women I've interviewed have compared to orgasm--another hormonal weaver of intense social ties. We know that aerobic exercises, if done with sufficient stick-to-itiveness, can release endorphins in the body. But are there bonding hormones released by other shared activities? Oxytocin is one candidate. Oxytocinergic sites are planted at a great many spots within us. Evolution would not allow us to invest in such a widespread, costly physiological network if it weren't serving a critical purpose. Usually if evolution produces a system of this sort, it manages to coopt if for six or seven roles simultaneously. Is oxytocin a likely candidate as the hormone of functional bonding? Is it the torch which welds us together when we participate in creating those civilizational building blocks I've just called seams? Or is there another hormone at work here, another internal chemical whose social purposes have not yet been researched? I strongly suspect that many of the hormones which have been tracked down since Solomon Snyder and Candace Pert first discovered the receptor sites for endorphins hook us together in endeavors which build and service our societies. These hormones and the systems they control might be among the products of the genes which code for urban living and civilization--the post-Neolithic genes of sociality. Genes, hormones, shared activities, and seams--all mean that doing our share to build and maintain social structure is an imperative built into our physiology. Howard PS Let's not forget that we are not the only ones to knit in large scale societies. Bats gather in groups of 20 million. Vampire bats, less ambitious beasts, congregate in clutches of 200 or so, then trade blood for baby-sitting services and keep track of who owes a bit of blood to whom. This means they have the genes and skills it takes to manage not only social solidarity (and information sharing--for more on that see Global Brain), but also to handle complex accounting and their own form of extended trade--an intricate commerce in goods and services. Since bats are mammals, they probably share our social hormones. Prairie voles sure do. Prairie voles and mountain voles have provided us with much of what we know about the bonding hormone oxytocin and the barrier creator vasopressin--our internal equivalent of bacteria's repulsion and attraction cues. Then there are the large scale societies of spiny lobsters--10,000 marching in single file to a common destination. These 300-million year old crustaceans share social hormones which empower us--among them that vital chemical of hierarchical success, serotonin, along with GABA and opioids which produce subservience in those who lose the battle for top spot. It is conceivable that we, the mammals, and those alien looking creatures from the deep, the crustaceans, shared a common ancestor which gave us both the hormones that make us cells in a larger superorganism--a complex society. If so, the predecessor most probable arose 550 million years ago, when, in a brief burst of creativity, the DNA system which had been elaborating itself on this planet went into overdrive and created the predecessors of almost every species known today. That period of genetic profusion was the Cambrian era. The most amazing megasocieties of all are those of the bacteria, whose colonies coordinate trillions of individuals in chemically mediated choreography. Is there a relationship between the attraction and repulsion liquids these minibeasts used to communicate 3.5 billion years ago and those we use today? Could these ancestors of you and me have been the first to employ an early form of our bonding cues? Is there a relationship between N-acyl homoserine--a prime chemical coordinator in the bacterial vocabulary--and cholecystokinin, oxytocin, vasopressin, serotonin, norepinephrine, dopamine and our other chemicals of sociality? A reprise: Cholecystokinin and oxytocin bond us. Serotonin calms us when we hit the top of the social ladder. Vasopressin builds our boundaries and controls our personal space. (This makes it a prime hormone of another mystery--the self.) Norepinephrine and glucocorticoids rouse us for a fight, then cripple us when we lose. Dopamine tranquilizes us and makes us accept our fate as mere followers in a crustacean, a mammalian, or a human state. These are the chemical building blocks of social structures--the internal triggers of our "seams." They build our civilizations and help us to quite literally achieve our dreams. Howard First, a note on why this posting is addressed to Eshel Ben-Jacob. In addition to his work in physics and microbiology, Eshel has been researching the self-assembly processes carried out by multiplying groups of neurons isolated in a petri dish. Surprisingly, these neurons go on about their task of tying themselves into potentially useful bundles of circuitry despite the fact that they are isolated from a body...and from its intricate construction signals. Even more surprisingly, these self-assembling neuronal circuits not only increase their number of cells and continue splicing together neuronal junctions, but also pare away connections which don't seem to fit the pattern implicit in-well, in whatever gives them their blueprints. (I suspect it's more than just genes). Now we move from the explanation of the title of this posting to…ummm…this posting… Apparently the elements of the immune system which give our interior leukocytic army a sense of who is friend and who is foe, of what is self and what is not, play a role in laying the foundations for our psyche-they help shape and reshape the developing and perpetually plastic brain. Not only does the immune system help us find our way to a true love via MHCs and their sublet perfumes, but immune system MHCs literally shape the neural illusion of identity we think of as us and the illusion of reality which envelopes us like the membrane of a cell-coloring our identity even more strongly than the apparent self of selfness Howard. Source: Harvard Medical School (http://www.hms.harvard.edu/) Date: Posted 12/18/2000 Immune Proteins Play Role In Brain Development And Remodeling; Discovery Suggests New Theory For Dyslexia, Parkinson's Disease And Multiple Sclerosis Boston, MA - December 15, 2000 - Two immune proteins found in the brains of mice help the brain develop and may play key roles in triggering developmental disorders like dyslexia and neurodegenerative disorders like Parkinson's Disease, according to a Harvard Medical School study reported in today's issue of Science. Although neuroscientists have recently found evidence that the brain is subject to immune surveillance, the Harvard researchers were surprised to discover the mouse brain also produces its own immune molecules, the proteins Class I MHC and CD3-zeta. In the immune system, the two proteins act as part of a lock and key system to recognize and rid the body of foreign invaders. In the brain, they may be part of a signaling system that recognizes and eliminates inappropriate neural connections. "What we find surprising and important about the results is that we found a novel use by neurons for molecules previously thought only to be the domain of the immune system," said Carla Shatz, Nathan Marsh Pusey professor of neurobiology at HMS and lead author of the study. "What are these immune molecules doing in the brain? The results of the studies imply they are being used by neurons to accomplish the normal business of neurons during development and synaptic plasticity." While the brain's early neural connections are determined by genetic instructions, the refashioning that occurs during development - and in learning - is a product of both genes and the brain's own activity. The research by Shatz and her team suggests the two immune proteins play a role in the activity-dependent remodeling of the brain. The immune proteins have been found not only in the hippocampus, the region of the brain associated with learning, and the lateral geniculate nucleus, the visual area of the brain, but also in many other regions of the brain in mice. The researchers found that mutant mice lacking either of the two immune proteins failed to undergo normal development in the geniculate nucleus. Normally, projections from the eye form a small tidy patch in the region, but in the mutants, the connections created a larger and fuzzier profile, presumably because cells in the area lacked the molecular mechanism for getting rid of the unneeded connections. "We think Class I MHC acts like an anti-glue," said Shatz. The mutant mice also experienced abnormal functioning in the hippocampus, the region of the brain associated with learning. In normal mice, production of Class I MHC is especially high in primary sensory areas of the brain - those areas that are thought to function abnormally in people with dyslexia. Further studies are expected to show if the mutant mice also have problems processing sensory information. Though the evidence is still preliminary, the research could help clarify the neurobiological dimensions of dyslexia. Preliminary studies by British researchers of families with dyslexia suggest that some of them carry genetic defects on chromosome 6 - in the same region of the chromosome that carries the Class I MHC genes. "It's very speculative at this point, but it remains certainly a possibility that this could in some way be related to their dyslexia," Shatz said. The widespread presence of MHC Class I in the brain prompts another speculation: that neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson's and multiple sclerosis may be the result of a misguided attack by immune cells on Class I MHC-bearing neurons. "The idea that neurons would normally be expressing Class I MHC might help explain why certain neurons die or are attacked," Shatz said. "MHC Class I-bearing neurons could be the target for an abnormal immune response. I think that people need to start thinking about that." Note: This story has been adapted from a news release issued by Harvard Medical School for journalists and other members of the public. If you wish to quote from any part of this story, please credit Harvard Medical School as the original source. You may also wish to include the following link in any citation: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2000/12/001218073628.htm _______________________________ _______________________________ _______________________________ It is the mid summer hb: aha--this hits two subjects of our mutual contemplation for the price of one--1) what is information? and 2) are bacterial colonies conscious? As you know Buber himself
never provided defenition. hb: excellent!!! This is a rich concept. Either tandu ( meaning hb: self is an emergent property, no question about it. One mystery is how self remains the same though its constituents (cells, in the case of a bacterial colony or of a human being) change. Another question is what changes the constituents and their relationships so thoroughly that we perceive a switch from one self to another. In a multiple personality, we have shifts of the same brain and body to produce radically different selves. In a novel or a genuine life experience, we can have many situations (the catachreses, in the novel or play) which change the self without making a new self. In King Lear, Lear undergoes massive changes. Yet his "self" is still that of King Lear. In The Three Faces of Eve, on the other hand, Eve changes personalities and complete selves without changing cells. When a spritz of neurotransmitters crosses a synaptic gulf and hooks into the receptiors of another neuron, the receiving neuron is changed. It carries a sodium/potassium generated electrical charge toward its center. Yet the receiving cell's "self" remains the same. In learning, that cell can become a part of a larger group to which it did not formerly belong. But once again the "identity" of the cell doesn't alter. In most Buberian dialogs, the goal is to change the existing self, not to change from one self to another. In a seance, on the other hand, the medium attempts a temporary yet total change of self. He or she is "taken over" by the voice and personality of a person who is dead. Going back to a dialog you and I began over a year ago, one which has changed my thinking and altered my self (without changing my identity, thank goodness), information is any sort of output emitted by one source and interpreted by another. No interpretation, no information. Interpretation changes the being in which it takes place. A receiving cell shifts into an electrically active state when its receptors interpret the signals of an outside sender. I change the subject of my thinking when you send me an email like this. Then there are far larger changes in self. These are of the sort Jerome Frank discussed in his book on religious conversion and brainwashing. To achieve their goals, brainwashers and religious proselytizers used far more than dialog. They isolated their from everyone they had ever known, subjected them to overwhelming stress, and interrogated or "educated" them over a long period of time. Their targets finally succumbed by "changing their minds" in just about the most complete manner possible. Most important, the converts and subjects of brainwashing altered their worldview and vocabulary so they could leave one social group and enter another. All this, and they didn't change identity. They usually still went by the same names, among other things. To create a Buberian dialog, there has to be a major change in emergent properties. But what's the difference in a dialog which changes the emergent properties of self while leaving that self with the same identity and a dialog which alters identity? And what's the difference between "reeducating" a self and replacing it? And what, if anything, do my meandering thoughts tell us about self awareness?
In a message dated 9/1/00
10:44:54 AM Eastern Daylight Time, (Michael Parker) writes: I was good
seeing you last night, I had a good time as always. hb: I enjoyed it
mightily, but I had the feeling we were sort of picking on you. We were
all the older, wiser guys. problem is, the oldest and wisest guys in
the world are still neophytes under the skin. mp: Here's my latest approach
to recalibrating my utility sorter (I'm planning to discontinue the
anti-anxiety medication I'm taking because it makes me feel very spacey)
hb: I was wondering after everyone left if the expectation of numerous
sexual liaisons is a bit much to live up to and misguides folks about
the sources of happiness in life. it's not quantity but quality that
counts, or so it seems to me. Richard is mated to Heather. Jeff is mated
to his new wife. yet both talk about being footloose and fancy free.
does the obligatory sexual freedom of male banter really exist? or does
it cover up the fact that men are happiest in the nest of a secure relationship?
does this mean you'd be better off putting all you have into making
one relationship really work? it sure did wonders for me. mp: Recently
thinking about why I find it difficult to take action and why my utility
sorter seems tends to stay on low, I realized that in my subjective
internal experience I have a voice of doubt and pessimism operating
much of the time - "you could screw this up" "you never
get things done on time" "why do you always do this"
"she's not going to like you" "she's probably unpleasant"
hb: sounds very familiar. i supsect it's the human condition for 85%
of us or so. we just don't admit it to each other. still, there is merit
to listing all your strong points and memorizing them so you can repeat
them like a parrot, even to your self.
Elephants Recognize 'Self' By Deborah Blum Aug. 28, 2000 -- Just as a person looking into a mirror and seeing a dirty face will try to clean up, an elephant studying its reflection will try to rub smudges off its forehand with its trunk. The basic finding that elephants recognize themselves in the mirror is a startling one for scientists who had long assumed that only humans and a few higher apes were smart enough to achieve "self-recognition." Many behavioral researchers consider that ability to be a hallmark of complex intelligence. "Actually, one of the reasons I did the study was that I got tired of hearing people say that only humans and chimps do this, only humans and chimps do that," said Patricia Simonet, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Nevada in Reno. "Elephants are so smart -- I was sure they could do it." Full text:
_______________________________ In a message dated 9/18/00
8:52:56 AM Eastern Daylight Time, fentress writes: Damned if I did not
do it again. hb: I knew. I went and hit a few golf balls Saturday, then
impulsively went into that gd liquor store. I talked with an AA friend
last night, and poured it out (wasn't too much left to pour out, unfortunately).
I nearly called you, hb: please, please, John ALWAYS call me when such
things happen. you have no idea of how badly it hurt to know you were
in trouble again and that you weren't in touch. I needed you to call.
Sounds perverse, but reality is one loopy bundle of irrational paradoxes.
jf: then felt that would just be stupid. You could ask if I was drinking,
and I would be tempted to cover up (try to cover up). Not the way to
go. hb: It would have been impossible. I knew you'd been drinking from
the one sentence we had together on the phone. I am so disappointed
about this grant thing as well. But I am the one who dug the hole. I
am scheduled to go out to Oregon on Friday, to see my daughters and
a lady friend I met through a course called Landmark. I have told her
the whole story, and probably scared the hell out of her. I shall see
my Doctor tomorrow, and TRY to level with him. He is a recovering alcoholic,
so obviously he understands. I guess I am just afraid of what his advice
might be. hb: the big trick is going to be to get structure into your
life one strut at a time--to make it a bunch of small, easily handleable
steps. And, of course, to get on the path of self-control, a humongous
task. but I want to help in breaking down the momentous into easy-to-achieve
daily goals, not to mention structuring such basics as a daily routine,
a weekly routine, etc. Once the habits of routine are in place, they
give the sort of strength which bones give to the jellyfish of unsupported
muscle. Let me stop here. I know this stuff can be a burden for you.
I thank you. hb: the burden is a blessing. silence is what hurts. Howard
The Tarzan syndrome; Wright, Karen; Discover, Chicago; Nov 1996; Vol. 17, Iss. 11; pg. 88, 9 pgs THE TARZAN SYNDROME BY KAREN WRIGHT I'm the king of the swingers The jumgle VIP I've reached the top and had to stop and That's what's bothering me.... THUS BEGINS THE SYNCOPATED lament of an orangutan named King Louie in the animated film The Jungle Book. Louie is confiding his envy of the human race to the man-cub Mowgli, whom he has recently, if forcibly, befriended. Ooh be dooh, he explains. I wanna be like you/I wan ia walk like you/Talk like you, too.... At the New Iberia Research Center in southwestern Louisiana, relations between humans and apes are far less flattering. Rather than serenade a visiting hominid, certain adolescent chimpanzees are likely to fill their mouths with water and then send the fluid out between their front teeth with a faucetlike force aimed at the visitor's face, chest, or notebook. Along with the water comes a generous helping of half-chewed food and saliva. Ooh be dooh. Here's what we think of you. "Brandy, no. No; Stop that. Stop it. Kara, you too. C'mon guys. Cut it out." The demands come from Daniel Povinelli, director of the center's laboratory of comparative behavioral biology, who is wearing a smartly pressed white shirt and standing well within spitting range of the chimps' chain-link compound. He and a small crew of caretakers raised these seven apes from toddlerhood, but the animals ignore him and continue their spirited greeting. "Between the ages of four and five they start to figure out that they can control people's behavior at a distance," says Povinelli, dodging another aqueous salvo. "I used to be able to get them to stop. Now I can't even intimidate them." It is hard to imagine Povinelli intimidating anyone. The lanky, towheaded 32-year-old seems barely removed from adolescence himself as he describes or, more often, acts out the behavior he has observed in a decade of research on ape cognition. Povinelli isn't interested in the behavior as such, but he is always on the lookout for clues to the mental lives of his charges. He has carried out dozens of experiments with the New Iberia chimps to explore the way their minds represent the world. In doing so, he has discovered differences between human and chimpanzee mentalities that defy expectations and even common sense. Povinelli's work addresses the question of how-or whether-apes think about themselves and other being. Researchers of animal behavior have long suspected that certain nonhuman primates may share with humans a trait as fundamental to our species as walking and talking: self-awareness, the quality of mind that recognizes its own existence. It is self-awareness that allows enlightened individuals like Mowgli and Louie to comprehend abstract notions such as "I" and "wanna"; in the human psyche, self-awareness is coupled with an awareness of the mental lives of others, giving rise to abstract notions such as compassion, pride, embarrassment, guilt, envy, and deceit. Researchers have also assumed that apes, like humans, possess some awareness of the mental lives of others-that they have an inkling of what it means "to be like you." This assumption has shaped prevailing models of primate intelligence, which hold that complex social interactions, informed by an awareness of self and others, drove the evolution of mental acuity in human beings and their nearest phylogenetic relatives. The sociality theory has dominated studies of primate cognition for more than ten years. But Povinelli's investigations have led him to challenge that model and to propose a radical new theory of the evolutionary origins of self-awareness-one that would make King Louie proud. Povinelli believes that the key to the origins of self-awareness lies not in the social behavior of the much-celebrated chimpanzee but in the locomotive behavior of the solitary and elusive orangutan. He glimpses the dawning of self-conception not in the stresses of communal living but in the perils of traversing treetops. In 1995, Povinelli and physical anthropologist John Cant of the University of Puerto Rico School of Medicine elaborated this vision in an idea they call the clambering hypothesis. Their argument is subtle and recondite, combining elements of philosophy, psychology, evolutionary biology, and physical anthropology. Its principal tenet rests, however, on the observation that the orangutan truly is, in some sense, the king of the swingers. ON A STEAMY SATURDAY IN APRIL, Povinelli lugs a three-by-three-foot mirror into the chimp compound and gives his apes a chance to eyeball themselves for the first time in about a year. Reactions vary. All the chimps are excited by the new arrivals, but some seem to understand better than others just who it is that has arrived. Apollo hoots and feints in an attempt to engage his reflection in play. Brandy fixes her gaze on the mirror while repeating a series of unusual gestures, apparently mesmerized by the simian mimic who can anticipate her every move. It is Megan, the Einstein of the cohort, who performs an eerily familiar repertoire of activities before the looking glass. She opens her mouth wide and picks food from her teeth, tugs at a lower lid to inspect a spot on her eye, tries out a series of exaggerated facial expressions. Then, assuming a not-so-familiar posture that in another primate might be considered obscene, Megan uses the mirror to draw a bead on her privates. She pokes at them with one finger and proceeds to sniff the digit with enthusiasm. "That's classic self-exploratory behavior-getting the butt right up against the mirror, where they can see, well, parts of themselves they can't ordinarily see," says Povinelli. "They never do that-get in that bizarre posture, pick at the genitals-unless there's a mirror there." Povinelli and other researchers maintain that self-exploratory behavior in front of mirrors shows that the ape recognizes the self therein. And for an animal to recognize itself, they reason, it must have a sense of self-some form, however rudimentary, of self-awareness. Thus self-recognition in mirrors, they argue, can serve as an index of selfawareness in species other than our own. The architect of this line of reasoning is psychologist Gordon Gallup of the State University of New York at Albany, who in the late 1960s devised a standard measure of self-recognition called the mark test. In the test, marks of bright red dye are applied to a chimpanzee's eyebrow ridge and opposite ear while the animal is anesthetized. The dye is odorless and nonirritating, so the chimp can't smell or feel it; nor can the chimp see the marks without the aid of a mirror. After the ape comes to, it is given a chance to check out its new look. "When they see themselves in the mirror, they do a double take," says Gallup. "Then they touch the dyed areas, then smell and look at the fingers that have contacted the marks. That's the basic test of self-recognition." The fact that chimpanzees touch the marks and then inspect their fingers is the clincher, says Gallup, for it demonstrates that the animals know the blood red spots they see in the mirror are not "out there" on some unfortunate conspecific but on their own hairy selves. Since Gallup originated this procedure, researchers have subjected dozens of animal species-including cats, dogs, elephants, and more than 20 species of monkeys-to the mark test. So far, the only subjects that have passed are the great apes: chimpanzees, orangutans, and one gorilla (the celebrated Koko). Even for members of this elite group, selfrecognition is no instant achievement. They require prolonged exposure to mirrors-from minutes to days, depending on the individual-before they begin to display self-exploratory behavior. WHEN THEY FIRST ENCOUNTER their reflections, chimps act very much as if they were confronting another chimp. Apollo's playful outbursts are typical of these social responses. Most chimps, though, soon abandon such tactics and, like Brandy, begin to perform simple, repetitive movements, such as swaying from side to side, while watching their mirrored doubles intently. At this stage, Povinelli believes, the animals may be apprehending the connection between their actions and those of the stranger in the glass; they may understand that they are causing or controlling the other's behavior. When they finally grasp the equivalence between their mirror images and themselves, they turn their attention on their own bodies, as Megan did. In some sense, says Povinelli, these chimps may be recapitulating the evolutionary drama that produced self-awareness in some ape-human ancestor. In that drama, other species never get beyond the first act. Monkeys, like many animals, seem to "understand" how mirrors work; yet they cannot solve the riddle of their own reflections. In 1978, for example, Gallup introduced a pair of macaques to a mirror, and it's been in their cage ever since. If the monkeys espy a human image in the mirror, they immediately turn to confront the person directly. But each monkey still threatens its mirror image as it would a macaque intruder. "It's not that they're incapable of responding to mirrored information-they can clearly detect the dualism as it applies to objects other than themselves," says Gallup. "But when they see themselves, they're at a complete loss." Povinelli discovered Gallup's work as a teenager while photocopying an article in American Scientist magazine for a high school debate. Along with the last page of that article, he copied the first page of an article by Gallup; he read the beginning of Gallup's paper at home and then went back to the library to finish it. "I was, I don't know, 15 or 16, and I started reading this stuff about chimps," says Povinelli. "The ape language experiments were really hot and heavy then, and I got caught up in the chimps-ashairy-human-children zeitgeist." The attitude of the time placed the cognitive faculties of monkeys, apes, and humans on a continuum, with differences between the species portrayed as matters of degree rather than kind. Koko, the captive gorilla, had done much to reinforce this view by learning American Sign Language in the early 1970s. And in the early 1980s, when young Povinelli began devouring the literature on chimp cognition, primate researchers began to document social interactions among monkeys and apes that rivaled aspects of complex human behavior. The most compelling of these interactions involve apparent deceptions-hiding food from a compatriot, for example, "crying wolf" to distract an aggressor, and concealing illicit sexual encounters. The treachery, pettiness, and politicking seems to reach an apex, as it were, in societies of chimpanzees, our closest relatives. Gallup's self-recognition studies provided a conceptual framework for these observations. It was easy to see how a keen awareness of self-including the ability to plan your actions and anticipate their effects-might come in handy if you're bent on making a chump of your fellow chimp. Furthermore, many primate researchers argued that the elaborate deceptions practiced in chimpanzee social groups offered clear evidence that the animals appreciate one another's motives and intentions as well as their own. Gallup had speculated that self-recognition implied not only self-awareness but insight into the mental states of others, a capacity known as empathy. Can tests be devised to measure empathy in primates in the same way the mark test plumbs self-awareness? That question has long preoccupied Povinelli. It became the topic of his dissertation at Yale and the principal focus of his subsequent work at the New Iberia center. The University of Southwestern Louisiana, which administers the primate center, hired the fledgling Ph.D. to set up a research program in 1991; Povinelli also established the university's Center for Child Studies, where he runs experiments that parallel his primate researchmatching the wits, in effect, of apes and children. By comparing the performances of the two species on cognitive tasks, Povinelli hopes to clarify the features of mind that distinguish people from pongids. In human beings, self-awareness and other-awareness are inextricably linked in a cognitive feature that psychologists call theory of mind. That lofty term describes the tendency to assume that other people-and also pets and even, sometimes, inanimate objects-experience desires, intentions, and beliefs just as they do. We use our assumptions about these subjective experiences to interpret behavior (as in, the dog is barking at the door because it wants to go out), to predict behavior (as in, he won't call because he's angry with me), and to judge behavior (as in, the killing was self-defense, not murder). And yes, human beings also use their theories about the minds of others to manipulate and deceive. In toddlers, these conceptions of self and other as conscious, mental agents seem to develop in tandem. "We think that theory-of-mind skills are emerging in kids right around 18 to 24 months of age," says Povinelli. "That's where you see their first understanding of desire, reference, and attention. And that's also the age at which kids first recognize themselves in mirrors." Children who can pass the mark test, for example, clearly understand conventions of nonverbal communication that require a concept of other. They understand pointing as a referential gesturea gesture meant to connect, intangibly, two or more subjects with an object in space. And they recognize that the direction of a person's gaze indicates where that person's attention is directed as well. Povinelli decided that such hallmarks of human cognitive development could serve as models for tests of empathy in primates. Could chimps understand, say, the intentions that underlie pointing and gazing in humans? He designed a series of experiments that yielded intriguing results. In one such test, a chimp has to choose between two overturned cups to find a treat underneath. An experimenter offers a hint by pointing at one cup. At first, it looked as though the apes could learn how to interpret the gesture; after several dozen trials, they picked the right cup almost every time. But additional experiments showed that the chimps were not taking their cue from the direction of the pointing finger. Instead they were choosing the cup closest to the experimenter's hand. If the experimenter held her pointing hand equidistant from the two cups, the chimps chose randomly. They seemed unable to learn the significance of pointing alone. In another experiment, Povinelli tried to ascertain whether chimpanzees' ability to track another's gaze reflects a conscious understanding of another's point of view. This time the chimps had to choose which of two boxes contained a hidden treat. An experimenter gazed at a spot midway between the receptacles. A wooden partition blocked one box from the experimenter's view, and the chimp's task was to figure out which box he could be gazing at. Children know to pick the box in front of the partition. But chimps, while they clearly register the direction of the experimenter's gaze, tend to pick the box behind the barrier almost as often as the one in front of it. "They'll follow your gaze, but there's no evidence that they understand your vision as a mental state of attention," says Povinelli. Another experiment confirmed this: given a choice between two experimenters, chimpanzees will beg for food from someone wearing a bucket over his head-someone who not only looks foolish but clearly cannot see their entreaties-as often as they will solicit a person carrying a bucket on his shoulder. Why would an animal so adept at learning in the lab fail to respond to the cues in these experiments? Povinelli acknowledges the difficulty of probing the mind of another species. With such unorthodox experimental designs, it is not always clear who is testing whom. So far, though, the results of his experiments suggest that chimpanzees don't comprehend the intentions or points of view of others-though an anthropomorphic reading of their social behavior may suggest that they do. Contrary to what Gallup believed about empathy among apes, chimpanzees may inhabit a cognitive realm that includes a subjective notion of "me" but not "you." Anecdotal accounts of chimpanzee deception, says Povinelli, can be explained without invoking the capacity for empathy-and should be, in light of his research. Chimpanzees are hardwired to be ultrasensitive to social contexts and cues, he adds; they are expert at manipulating behavior-"just like spitting at you in the compound." But while deception and manipulation indicate a powerful, specialized intelligence, they do not necessarily implicate a theory of mind. A chimpanzee can get a cheap thrill from watching a human being evade a projectile of water without knowing (or caring) why the human responds that way-without appreciating the embarrassment, annoyance, and discomfort of conducting an interview in a spit-spattered blouse with a handful of soggy pulp for a notepad. As Povinelli sees it, chimps may be self-centered in the purest sense of the word. POVINELLI'S PORTRAIT OF THE SELFcentered chimp recasts the question of how primate intelligence evolved. If his data accurately represent simian sensibilities-and he is not excluding the possibility that they don't-there is a deep cognitive chasm separating apes from humans. "It's possible that there's a disjunction, evolutionarily speaking, between self-conception on the one hand and a general theory of mind on the other," he says. "In other words, there was an understanding of self before there was an understanding of other. "Maybe chimps have a pretty good theory of their own minds, in the sense that they can contemplate what their attention is focused on, what they want, that kind of thing. But maybe they simply don't have any understanding of that quality in others. And maybe humans, for some reason, have fused an understanding of self and other." Povinelli's findings don't exactly refute the sociality theory; instead they render it somewhat less relevant. It is easy to imagine that the pressures of navigating primate social hierarchies-dodging the wrath of the dominant male, for example-may have advanced some aspects of intelligence in certain primates. Yet there is nothing about social pressures that would have driven the dawning of selfawareness per se, notes Povinelli. After all, monkeys have fairly complex social lives, and they fail the mark test. Orangutans, on the other hand, are among the most solitary of primates, yet they pass with flying colors. "No one has ever explained why on earth sociality would have anything to do with this phylogenetic break in the selfconcept," says Povinelli. In fact, there were no explanations at all for how a primitive sense of self may have evolved in the common ancestor of great apes and humans-until Povinelli went into the Indonesian jungle. In 1989 and again in 1991, Povinelli spent a field season with John Cant documenting the movements of arboreal primates in the rain forests of northern Sumatra. Cant was studying the locomotion of monkeys, gibbons, and orangutans for his research on the evolution of the primate musculoskeletal system. Though such studies are outside his own area of interest, Povinelli was eager for field experience; in particular, he looked forward to watching orangutans, which are scarce in captivity. Primatology lore holds that these large, solitary, and slow-moving apes are as smart as, if not smarter than, their phylogenetic cousins, the chummy chimpanzees. Yet if the orangutan's social life isn't responsible for its perspicacity, Povinelli began to wonder, what forces are responsible? Braving scorpions, leeches, and warm Bintang beer, he and Cant struck upon a way to explain not only the intelligence of orangutans but also the self-awareness of chimps and human beings. The clambering hypothesis was born. The idea's ungainly name derives from an equally ungainly activity unique to orangutan locomotion. As Cant defines it, clambering is the slow, deliberate navigation by which an orangutan manages to move from tree to tree. In no way, Cant contends, does clambering resemble the more automatic and repetitive movements, such as running, leaping, and swinging, that are typical of other primates. And according to his observations, clambering is the method orangutans prefer for traveling through the treetops. "When an orangutan is moving around up there," says Cant, "it sounds like a small tornado is going through the canopy-branches swaying back and forth, brushing against each other, some breaking. And if you look, quite often you see what you think is the animal stopping and making up its mind. It starts doing something, stops, pauses, andwhether or not it looks around in some befuddled human way-it then does something different." There is much in navigating treetops to give an orangutan pause. Adult males of the species can weigh upwards of 180 pounds; tree trunks and branches bow mightily under their weight, and falls can be fatal. In spite of these risks, Sumatran orangutans rarely, if ever, travel on the ground. They climb from tree to tree like sluggish acrobats, using the exceptional mobility of their hip and shoulder joints to distribute their mass among multiple supports. It is not unusual to see an orangutan grasping a woody vine with one hand, holding a branch with the other, and bracing one foot against a tree trunk while the other reaches for a nearby limb. By shifting their weight back and forth, orangutans can bend a tree to their will, making it sway closer to its neighbors and thus aid passage. None of these maneuvers were lost on Povinelli. While becoming acquainted with orangutan locomotion, he was also boning up on the work of Jean Piaget. The Swiss psychologist had described the dawning of self-conception in children as arising from the inadequacy, or "failure," as he put it, of the sensorimotor system. In Piaget's theory, this system governs the repetitive and seemingly instinctual movements of infants younger than 18 months or so. Before that age, Piaget argued, children are not conscious of causing their own actions. But as a child's mental life becomes more complex, those actions become more ambitious, and some will inevitably fail to provide the intended outcome. Confronted with such failures, children become conscious of both their actions and their intentionsthey become, in a word, self-aware. Somewhere around the age of two they also enter a new stage of development, in which they learn to control and plan the outcome of their actions. "When we got to the field and started talking about clambering," says Povinelli, "it suddenly struck me that that, in a way, may be the same damn thing. Clambering is the failure of the sensorimotor system, in an evolutionary sense." In Povinelli and Cant's hypothesis, clambering represents the self-aware locomotive style of a common ancestor of humans, chimps, orangutans, and gorillas. Like orangutans, this ancestor probably lived in the trees and weighed at least three times as much as the most massive tree-dwelling monkey. Climbing procedures scripted by the sensorimotor system-exemplified by the limited repertoire of repetitive movements that characterize monkey locomotion-would most likely have failed the ancestor, much as they would fail present-day orangutans. And in this context, failure meant an express trip of 30 feet or more to the forest floor. Fall flat: on your face from a height of a few dozen feet for a few million years, say Povinelli and Cant, and sooner or later you will evolve the capacity to figure out what went wrong. Figuring that out means conceiving of the self as a causal agent: understanding that the breaking of boughs and subsequent plummeting action is caused by one's own heft, inexpertly deployed. "Once this sense of personal identity and agency emerges," the coauthors have written, "an understanding of that object (the self) can be elaborated and expanded upon almost indefinitely." It is this budding awareness of the self as a causal agent that Povinelli sees in his chimpanzees' antics in front of mirrors. Reflections give the apes an opportunity to observe the direct consequences of their actions: "I caused that." Self-recognition occurs when an ape understands that it causes everything about its mirror double: "I am that." For monkeys, it seems, there is no "I." Povinelli and Cant assert that tree-to-tree travel was never hazardous enough for monkey ancestors to warrant the evolution of a specialized cognitive coping mechanism. Because of these ancestors' low body weight, falls would have been infrequent and not particularly harmful. "Monkeys jump onto the end of the branch, and when it bends on them they just hold on," says Povinelli. "It's the difference between assimilating the reaction of the environment into your behavior and actively using your behavior to plan how to change the environment in order to solve a particular problem. You don't need to have a sense of self to do what you have to do to be a monkey." Having elaborated this distinction between monkeys and apes, however, Povinelli emphasizes that his claims for ape self-awareness are still quite modest. "It's nothing like, `My God, I'm an orangutan. I'm an orangutan, and gosh, I was born 17 years ago, and here I am, still up in the trees, climbing. I wonder what my fate is?"' says Povinelli. "We're just arguing that a combination of factors drove the evolution of an ability to objectify the self-the first step," he says, "along the road to self-discovery." Qualifiers aside, Povinelli and Cant are well aware that they are out on a rather fragile limb themselves. The clambering hypothesis is by far Povinelli's most speculative piece of work to date, and it has garnered more than a few hoots from other naked apes. "We hardly know what self-awareness is, let alone how it came about," says ethologist Frans de Waal, research scientist at the Yerkes Primate Center in Atlanta. "I am personally not convinced by the argument." De Waal believes that the climbing behaviors of several species of South American spider monkeys may be as complex and premeditated as the clambering of orangutans. "I don't think orangutans are doing anything that these monkeys don't do." De Waal also objects to defining self-awareness so narrowly "I look at self-awareness as a kind of continuum that probably runs from fish to humans," he says. "The mirror test somehow taps into a higher level of it. But I cannot imagine that this is an allor-nothing phenomenon." "This is what I say to people who are extremely skeptical about the clambering hypothesis," says Povinelli. "I say, well, okay, fine. But there's a real problem here. Self-recognition in mirrors is restricted to the great ape-human clade. There's no other proposal on the table that explains why. "That doesn't mean," he adds, "that the clambering hypothesis is right." Indeed, even claims of mirror selfrecognition in apes have come under fire of late. Using a modified version of the mark test, cognitive neuroscientist Marc Hauser of Harvard has prompted unusual behavior in tamarins that he says could be taken as a sign of self-recognition. "I want to remain kind of agnostic about what's actually going on," says Hauser. But he says his observations cast doubt on the long-standing notion that mirror self-recognition is a reliable marker for self-awareness. Povinelli says he and Gallup have tried to replicate Hauser's work in marmosets, so far with no success. But he is the first to admit that he doesn't have the final word on either self-recognition studies or primates' concept of self. "The problem. seems so simple, you know? A mirror, a monkey. . . a mirror, a chimp.... But there's three decades' worth of work to be done in figuring out what the heck's going on. "Anybody who thinks that they've got the final word on this"-Povinelli pauses to engage his own theory of mind-"I think they're stark raving mad." Reproduced with permission
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_________ Howard In a message dated 12/13/2002 1:29:20 PM Eastern Standard Time, buck writes: I suspect that the road from consciousness to the immune system proceeds through emotion, and particularly, emotional communication. Emotional communication has bioregulatory functions in both animals and human beings that can influence health in great part via the immune system. It is clear that the immune system can be altered by events, but the life events literature indicates that "good" as well as "bad" events can be disruptive. The strongest and most consistent finding is that social support enhances health. I suggest that emotional communication plays a critical role: social support usually enhances emotional communication, while even "good" events (a promotion, a move) can disrupt emotional communication, and therefore the immune system. Recognizing the influence of emotional communication can also answer discrepancies in the Type-A behavior pattern (TABP) literature. Although Type A's in general are at increased risk from CV disease, some Type-As are actually quite healthy. Also, therapy programs aimed at changing the TABP are usually pretty effective in altering physiological responding in positive ways. I suggest that the expressed hostiliy associated with the TABP usually disrupts the formation of close relationships, but if the Type-A person is in fact able to form strong social ties, he/she is OK (the partner may be another question!). And, the therapy programs (indeed, virtually ALL therapy programs of whatever theoretical orientation) have as their essence enhanced emotional communication. One of the compelling findings in this area is that war actually leads to fewer pre-term and low-weight births: war is, presumably, "stressful," but the social solidarity, and therefore emotional communication associated with war may overcome negative effects. References: Bovard, E. (1959). The effects of social stimuli on the response to stress. Psychological Review, 66, 267-277. Buck, R. (1984). The Communication of Emotion. New York: Guilford Press. Korean Edition published by NANAM Publishing House, Seoul, 2000. Buck, R. (1993). Emotional communication, emotional competence, and physical illness: A developmental-interactionist view. In H. Traue and J. W. Pennebaker (Eds.), Emotional expressiveness, inhibition, and health. (pp. 32-56). Seattle, WA: Hogrefe and Huber. Ross Buck Ph.D. Professor of Communication Sciences and Psychology Communication Sciences U-1085 University of Connecticut At 12:57 AM 12/13/2002
EST, HBloom wrote: >In a message dated 12/12/2002 10:06:14 PM Eastern
Standard Time, >shovland@mindspring.com writes: > >How far
can we go in injecting consciousness into that loop? > > >
> Anti-depressants may aid that end too. > >Group therapy,
church-going, volunteer work in a hospital, in a school, in >a mentoring
program, or in an elderly care facility, and any other activity >that
ties us into a social loop can do wonders. > > Howard Meanwhile our emotions
ebb and flow roughly seven times a day. When we're on the depressive
end, which things and people do we dwell on? When we're up to normal
and happy, who means what to us? The meanings of figures should change
depending on our moods. Do the figures in our minds change as well?
Is there a switch of the cast, the stage, and of the play when we swing
from insecurity to confidence? Howard In a message dated 3/22/2003 10:56:57
AM Eastern Standard Time, shovland writes: I would expect that a lot
of the "information" zipping around this network would be
emotional, ranging from intense admiration for a source of imprinting
to intense loathing for a toxic authority figure. Some of this would
come into consciousness when people do the "Soul Map" exercise. This is a theory I've spent four years developing and haven't published yet. But our need to rush to others when we're in turmoil is a manifestation of our connection to a mass IQ. Even in our moments of confusion we are feeding data into a collective intellect, a global maintenance, change, upgrade, and innovation skein. We could discuss this if you like. I can explain it doing a visual demonstration and connecting it with the collective brainwork of bacteria, ants, and chimps. ep: What about the relevance of senses then. Are we really moving from a nasal mammiferes towards a visual minded society. hb: we're discovering that we are guided by smell much more than we think. We're also discovering that we have senses we're not aware of. We have blind sight, a sight that presents no panorama, no flash of light, no movie to the conscious self but can guide us around barriers nonetheless. We have two forms of skin touch receptors. One set goes to the conscious brain and tells us that our arm is being stroked gently. Another set goes straight to the limbic system and makes us feel good emotionally without bothering to "explain" why to our conscious brain. Our "smell" of pheromones is one of these unconscious sensory modalities. It works through a part of the nose that's separate from our smell receptors--the vomeronasal membrane. We're totally unaware of smelling pheromones, but their influence is potent. They can drastically alter our moods and reset such basic things as menstrual cycles. We are just discovering a whole new realm of the unconscious--one far beyond that Freud ever conceived. It's a dark, deep pool of processes that have never been revealed to us consciousnessly. We've never even had the chance to suppress or repress them. Our culture, a 35,000 year enterprise, is now putting them on the map of human possibility for the very first time. There's a new frontier inside us we're just beginning to describe. By the way, I just started a new scientific group called The Science of the Soul Inititiative. Below is a desription and a brief list of members and their credits. My goal is to bring the passionate aspects of the human psyche from the periphery to the center of scientific attention. ep: What about the role of AI and robots. hb: robots are demonstrating that distributed intelligence--cas--complex adaptive systems--work far better than linear, traditional computers. AI is linear, and it's largely failed to live up to its promise. It's been a 20 year demonstration that the "rational choice" model of the mind is radically off base. The irrational model is now one we have to pursue. This is true of robots too. You can build a mind by putting millions or billions of agents with micro-intelligence together and letting them duke it out in a Darwinian way. In my estimation, they'll solve far more problems that the qubits of quantum computing any day of the week. This, in fact, is the secret to survival of the brightest nanacomputer of them all--a bacterial colony. Modern humans have been here for a mere 100,000 years. Bacteria have been with us for 3.5 billion years. We've been here roughly 5,000 generations. They've been around for 97 trillion generations--longer than any other form of life on earth. Why? Their research and development system outpaces that of the most microchipped and lab-equipped human beings. They outrace us because they out-innovate us. Their collective cleverness surpasses our vaunted creativity. ep: Why do bacteria with hardly anysenses at all survive longer than we do with so many hb: the answer is what Osama bin Laden's been using--paralled distributed nets. ep: And I am still worried at not finding an answer to Newtons question Through which modes does a perception of the Universe in the brain, become the magnificent glory of colours. O r sensations. hb: in technical terms, why do some senses have qualia and others have no qualia at all? Why do we have unsensed senses like the blind sight and blind touch I mentioned above? Hb: We're still too ignorant to be able to answer that question. I act as a kind of switchboard for many who are doing disparate, cutting-edge research within the scientfic community. I've been putting the pieces of the unconscious sensory self together in the course of the last year and funneling my overviews back to those who are hidden in their own corners of research. It's knowing how much of our brainwork we DON'T perceive that's making the mystery of conscious perception glow a little bit brighter and show a little bit more hope of a solution. ep: Howard, can we do anything without incentives. hb: without the incentives we normally think of as economic? Hb: Yes. Do we even understand the incentives we work for economically? No. We could if we wanted to, but until now very few have attempted the task. It's one of the subjects I'm working on...the hidden motivators behind what we call capitalism and economics. It isn't hard to motivate us. What's hard is to DEmotivate us. We have built-in motivators in our brain...built-in incentive generators. Stop us dead in our tracks, take us out of the loop, wrap us up and put us in an immersion tank, seal us off quietly, temperature control us, coddle us and cradle us, strip us of contact with the outside world, and we go nuts. Our incentive generators are dying for something to grab hold of, something to turn into a puzzle or a goal. We have centers like the nucleus accumbens that ache for novelty and for the pleasure of a gamble, of a fling, a far-out bet, a risk, a thrill. Lock three humans in a jail cell and they'll start betting on the cockroaches climbing up their walls. We're obsessive incentive makers. We can't help it. No risk, no excitement. No goal, no purpose, no meaning, no life. ep: And are senses the way for incentives to work. hb: no. the senses are part of it, though. They're part of a 100-billion-cell parallel-distributed-processing center whose engines are the limbic system--the emotions, the passion points. I've been mapping the development of those passion points, those primal self-motivators out for roughly 20 years now. The senses are embedded in a rich context. We're nodes of the vast processing mesh of a society. We're nodes of a multigenerational mass rumination called culture. Culture tells us how to touch, to feel, to see. Then we get it emotionally. A single sensor in the skin or retina is part of a mesh that extends not just globally, but goes back 3.5 billion years in time. ep: If people were not fond of making love would there be reproduction, hb: you've hit it. Pleasure and pain are the great motivators. But they are the primary emotions on which other key feelings, like insecurity, fear of rejection, and the desire to impress, are based. Apparently pain evolved before pleasure. So pleasure is a recent evolutionary gift. But insecurity, the fear of rejection, and the desire to impress are emotions with deep implications, emotions we scientists usually fail to address. ep: or for that matter survival if the food had not been tasty. Being so close to other animals, and knowing that a snake perception of the universe, or that of a bee is so different from ours can we realy generalise about senses. hb: we need, as you imply, to learn a good deal more about how our cousins in the clan of dna perceive their world. You've seen the online simulations of a bee's-eye view of the world. It's primitive, but it's a start. Does a bee get startled by what it sees? Does it find aesthetic thrills in the sight of a new flower? Does it get the blues and blaahs when it acts depressed? How does it feel about what it sees? Or is its sight like our blindsight...a sense that doesn't bother to wear the trappings of consciousness? ep: Please keep the appointment despite the elucubrations above hb: you've made me more eager than before. These are challenging questions, Eduardo. All my thanks for stimulating me. Howard The Science of the Soul Initiative The Science of the Human Soul--the neuroscientific, endocrinological, and evolutionary understanding of ecstatic experiences, transcendent experiences, artistic raptures, revelatory moments, muses, passion, creativity, religion, spirit, misery, music, dance, love, laughter, tears, and poetry. founding members: Dr. Munawar A. Anees-Nobel Prize nominee, Former Education Minister of Malaysia, Founding Editor of Periodica Islamica, Founding Editor of The International Journal of Islamic and Arabic Studies, member of the Royal Academy of Jordan for Islamic Civilization Research, member of the UNESCO Group of Intellectuals of the World; author of "Islam and Biological Futures: Ethics, Gender and Technology", "Guide to Sira and Hadith Literature in Western Languages", "Christian-Muslim Relations: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow", "Health Sciences in Early Islam: Collected Papers of Sami K. Hamarneh", "The Kiss of Judas: Affairs of a Brown Sahib", "Mawdudi and the Making of Islamic Revivalism", and "Computers Don't Byte" Ross Buck--Professor of Communication Sciences and Psychology, University of Connecticut. Author of: Human Motivation and Emotion. New York: John Wiley & Sons; The Communication of Emotion. New York: Guilford Press. William Benzon--Cognitive scientist, Associate Editor of The Journal of Social and Evolutionary Systems. Former consultant to NASA. Author of Beethoven's Anvil: Music in Mind and Society--executive edited by Howard Bloom. Howard Bloom--Visiting Scholar--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 Walter Freeman--Walter J. Freeman Neurophysiology Lab, UC Berkeley, author How Brains Make Up Their Minds and Neurodynamics: An Exploration in Mesoscopic Brain Dynamics and Society of Brains Valerius Geist--Professor Emeritus of Environmental Science, University of Calgary; President Wildlife Heritage Ltd.; Author or editor of thirteen books, including: Mountain Sheep (1971, U. Chicago Press); Life Strategies, Human Evolution, Environmental Design. Towards A Biological Theory Of Health (1978, Springer-Verlag, New York); Pronghorns-The Last Americans; Moose: Behavior, Ecology, Conservation; Buffalo Nation: History and Legend of the North American Bison; author: 115 technical & professional papers; over 160 popular articles & book chapters; 40 encyclopedia entries in 16 encyclopedias; 7 documentary films Russell Gardner- Professor Emeritus in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Science at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston. President of the Across-Species Comparisons and Psychopathology Society. Co-editor, The Neuroethology of Paul MacLean: Frontiers and Convergences (Praeger). Neil Greenberg--Director, Howard Hughes Medical Institute/University of Tennessee, Division of Biology Threshold Honors Program in Biology. Faculty and Chair, University Studies Transdisciplinary Program. Deputy Chair University Focus Area for Intellectual and Cultural Expression, Fellow, American Association for the Advancement of Science. Founder of the Art and Organism program. Ziad Nahas--Medical Director, Brain Stimulation Laboratory Institute of Psychiatry, Medical University of South Carolina, Researcher on fMRI and transcranial magnetic stimulation Mortimer Ostow, M.D.--Member, The American Psychoanalytic Association. Visiting Professor Emeritus of Pastoral Psychiatry at the Jewish Theological Seminary. Author: Need to Believe; Myth and Madness; and Ultimate Intimacy; co-author, Jewish Mystical Leaders and Leadership in the Thirteenth Century Jaak Panksepp-- Distinguished Research Professor Emeritus of Psychology Bowling Green State University. Author of Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions (Series in Affective Science); editor of Advances in Biological Psychiatry; co-editor (with Manfred Clynes) of Emotions and Psychopathology David Pincus, Ph.D., Assistant Clinical Professor, School of Medicine, Psychiatry, Case Western Reserve University. Founder: Visions Of Mind And Brain. Peter J. Richerson-- Department of Environmental Science and Policy, UC Davis; co-author (with Robert Boyd), Culture and the Evolutionary Process, co-editor, Human by Nature: Between Biology and the Social Sciences John Skoyles--Neurobiologist, co-author with Dorion Sagan of Up From Dragons, the Evolution Of Human Intelligence, executive edited by Howard Bloom Jordan Peterson--Department of Psychology University of Toronto, author of Maps Of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief, Routledge, 1999 David Smith-Director, The New England Institute David Sloan Wilson--Professor of Biological Science, Binghamton University (SUNY), author of The Natural Selection of Populations and Communities, co-author with Elliott Sober of Unto Others: the evolution of altruism (Harvard University Press, 1997), and author of Darwin's Cathedral: Evolution, Religion, and the Nature of Society (University of Chicago Press, 2002). Nicholas Bannan--University of Reading, England. Developing a research group/project whose function is to illustrate that language evolved in partnership with musical responses the 'hardware for which had already adapted in response to selective pressures. A voice researcher, composer and educationist. The team also includes Steven Mithen, an archaeologist; Paul Robertson, a violinist and music psychologist; Jonathan Dunsby, a music analyst; Rolf Gehlhaar, a composer who is developing AI instrumentation for performing and music therapy work; Daniel Schneck, bio-engineer, at Virginia Tech; and Ian Cross, a music technologist who is very much into cognitive psycho-acoustics. We are also setting out to develop links with the Institute for Biomusicology in Sweden. Warmest regards Eduardo ---------- Retrieved From the Worldwide WebNovember 23, 2002 http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2002/11/021122073858.htm Source: Queen's University Date: 11/22/2002 "Here's Looking At You" Has New Meaning: Eye Contact Shown To Affect Conversation Patterns, Group Problem-Solving Ability Noting that the eyes have long been described as mirrors of the soul, a Queen's computer scientist is studying the effect of eye gaze on conversation and the implications for new-age technologies, ranging from video conferencing to speech recognition systems. Dr. Roel Vertegaal, who is presenting a paper on eye gaze at an international conference in New Orleans this week, has found evidence to suggest a strong link between the amount of eye contact people receive and their degree of participation in group communications. Eye contact is known to increase the number of turns a person will take when part of a group conversation. The goal of this study was to determine what type of "gaze" (looking at a person's eyes and face) is required to have this effect. Two conditions were studied: synchronized (where eye contact is made while the subject is speaking) and random contact, received at any time in the conversation. The Queen's study showed that the total amount of gaze received during a group conversation is more important than when the eye contact occurs. The findings have important implications for the design of future communication devices, including more user-friendly and sensitive video conferencing systems - a technology increasingly chosen in business for economic and time-saving reasons - and Collaborative Virtual Environments (CVEs) which support communication between people and machines. Dr. Vertegaal's group is also implementing these findings to facilitate user interactions with large groups of computers such as personal digital assistants and cellular phones. The eye contact experiment used computer-generated images from actors who conveyed different levels of attention (gazing at the subject, gazing at the other actor, looking away, and looking down). These images were presented to the subjects, who believed they were in an actual three-way video conferencing situation, attempting to solve language puzzles. The researchers concluded that people in group discussions will speak up more if they receive a greater amount of eye contact from other group members. There was no relationship between the impact of the eye contact and when it occurred. "The effect of eye gaze has literally fascinated people throughout the ages," says Dr. Vertegaal, whose paper, Explaining Effects of Eye Gaze on Mediated Group Conversations: Amount or Synchronization? was presented this week at the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work. "Sumerian clay tablets dating back to 3000 BC already tell the story of Ereshkigal, goddess of the underworld, who had the power to kill Inanna, goddess of love, with a deadly eye," says Dr. Vertegaal. "Now that we are attempting to build more sophisticated conversational interfaces that mirror the communicative capabilities of their users, it has become clear we need to learn more about communicative functions of gaze behaviours." Editor's Note: The original news release can be found here. Note: This story has been adapted from a news release issued for journalists and other members of the public. If you wish to quote any part of this story, please credit Queen's University as the original source. You may also wish to include the following link in any citation: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2002/11/021122073858.htm Copyright © 1995-2002 ScienceDaily Magazine | Email: editor@sciencedaily.com In a message dated 11/25/2002 5:03:50 AM Eastern Standard Time, n.j.c.bannan writes: The act of singing, when entered into such as to capture most efficiently the flow of breath and the resulting resonances perceived both aurally and as sensations in the hard tissue able to respond, also 're-sets the face'. hb: very intriguing. nb: This is why I have found it so extraordinary that the proposals as to musical origins of human communication, especially language, which one finds in nineteenth century authors such as Darwin, Helmholtz and Nietzsche, were barely carried on in, for instance, post-Saussure linguistics, yet remain alive and well throughout twentieth century voice teaching from the final publication of Garcia through to the synthesis of science and practice one encounters in Sundberg and Thurman. I would urge anyone wanting to develop their understanding of this phenomenon to talk to an effective, scientifically-informed singing teacher. Linguistics and social psychologists seem, by comparison, barely interested in the means by which language is physically produced. So 100 years of research has been inhibited by a prevailing orthodoxy which Science of the Soul should prove to be a cul-de-sac. Nicholas ----- Original Message ----- From: HBloom Subject: extrasomatory extensions of the self Bill--This is wonderful material. We make a face to meet the faces that we meet, said TS Eliot. Ekman says that the face we make resets our moods. You've just added a new dimension to something I've been working on for several years, a little thing called The Extrasomatory Extensions of the Self. Here's a precis of the concept: 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--hypothalamic 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 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 irresistibly 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 narrator is only a spokesman for a summation of the invisible meeting point of right cortex, limbic system, 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. The essence of the extrasomatic extensions theory of self--that we often need to go to others to complete the passage of data from the limbic system to the frontal cortex merely inches away. Crises of confusion and stress drive humans to seek out others with whom they can talk out their problems and get a sense of comfort-plus, if they're lucky, a way of solving the catastrophe du jour. The balance between the amygdala and the hippocampus produce the phenomenon of the extrasomatory extensions of self-going to others to interpret the uproar going on just a few inches behind the verbal brain. That, in turn, drives us into the web of the collective intelligence. In looking for a shoulder we can cry on, we contribute our confusion as a new bit of data the group can ponder and from which it can learn. Groups that learn this way out-survive groups that don't. And groups that learn this way succeed in building the most adaptive culture, the most adaptive system of overarching beliefs and the most adaptive kit of the micro-sayings that help empower the members of a society…phrases like "now we're operating on the same page," "he's not with the program," "I've got to get my act together," "shit or get off the pot," "she blindsided me," "he's jerking me around," "stop fucking with my head," and "out of the frying pan into the fire." Come up with the clichés that fit your situation and you may well be able to get the hippocampus off it's ass and put it back to work gagging that pain in the touchas torture-master, the amygdala. Lederman, Regina P., Relationship of anxiety, stress, and psychosocial development to reproductive health Vol. 21, Behavioral Medicine, 09-01-1996, pp 101-112
Hannes--first off, it's a pleasure to hear from you. Too much time has passed since we last tossed ideas and gemutlichkeite around. he: As usual, I attempt to be a Spielverderber. I think both Thackeray, Alice, and a few others (among them Rilke, who claimed having written his "Kornett .." during one night in Prague) are mystifying their achievements. I used to teach a course in "How to write scientific papers" and had the students suggest reasons for doing so. Only a few came up with the notion of clarifying their ideas. Writing trims one's ideas, weeding out absurdities, repetitions, oxymorons, ridiculous formulations (if not intended), lets arguments stand out, etc. Particularly if you follow one of the slogans I taught my students: "Write for morons!" hb: a heartily agreed yes. writing clearly and with gusto forces you to clarify your thoughts--and to toss out those that are mere tangles of jargon, sound and fury signifying nothing. yet there's also a flush of new ideas that come popping out when you know you have an audience for your words--especially an encouraging or infuriating reader or listener. The notions and concepts that emerge are thoughts you didn't know you had. In fact, there's a good chance these are insights that would never have passed your mind if the magic an audience supplies had not snapped their elements together on the tip of your tongue or pen. Howard
Crises of confusion and stress drive humans to seek out others with whom they can talk out their problems and get a sense of comfort-plus, if they're lucky, a way of solving the catastrophe du jour. The balance between the amygdala and the hippocampus produce the phenomenon of the extrasomatory extensions of self-going to others to interpret the uproar going on just a few inches behind the verbal brain. That, in turn, drives us into the web of the collective intelligence. In looking for a shoulder we can cry on, we contribute our confusion as a new bit of data the group can ponder and from which it can learn. Groups that learn this way out-survive groups that don't. And groups that learn this way succeed in building the most adaptive culture, the most adaptive system of overarching beliefs and the most adaptive kit of the micro-sayings that help empower the members of a society…phrases like "now we're operating on the same page," "he's not with the program," "I've got to get my act together," "shit or get off the pot," "she blindsided me," "he's jerking me around," "stop fucking with my head," and "out of the frying pan into the fire." Come up with the cliches that fit your situation and you may well be able to get the hippocampus off it's ass and put it back to work gagging that pain in the touchas torture-master, the amygdala. Does this sound accurate
to those of you who specialize in neurobiology? Howard ________ At 10:14 PM 12/6/2001, Howard Bloom wrote: According to Regina Lederman, "The hippocampus appears to modulate or play an inhibitory role in the activity of the amygdala." My guess would be that the logical, verbal, conscious brain can quiet the amygdala's alarm signals if it gets a handle on the problem of the moment and says things are under control. The amygdala's sense of control has a lot to do with the cultural cliches in the mental tookit of the amygdala-owner. If those cliches provide an easy way to solve a problem, no sweat (sweat is produced by stress). If the problem at hand isn't covered by the cliché-kit of the culture, the verbal brain has no instant way of grappling with the dilemma. The dilemma becomes a crisis. The amygdala doesn't have the ammunition it needs to shut up the amygdala. Stress hits big time. Or one could say that the hippocampus is just the amygdala's way of modulating its own activity. What really gets the amygdala going is ambiguity. The amygdala cannot tolerate ambiguity. hb: yup. there's quite a bit of evidence supporting your view, Al. ac: And what really sets the amygdala off are ambiguous threats. One view is that the amygdala is ultimately an ambiguity detector. hb: neat. and it's ambiguity that drives us into the arms of others. in the heyday of the Roman Empire, citizens would travel from Britain to Delphi to get an inescapable ambiguity resolved. They'd hope that the Delphic Oracle would clear the things nagging them up. The amygdala's ambiguity alarm and the emotional ouch it produced drove humans to travel roughly 2,000 miles back and forth to clear up something the frontal lobes couldn't figure out...or things the frontal lobes had figured out an answer to, but needed a seal of approval from others, especially authoritative others, the others with the biggest "attention surplus." 2,000 miles to get an itch in the amygdala scratched by satisfying the frontal lobes and their verbal, cultural centers. That's a considerable stretch outside the skull to put one brain part in harmony with another that's just four to five inches away. Al, this makes the amygdala a potent social knitting needle, a gadfly that drives us into the arms of others and puts another stitch or two in the social lace and adds another dendrite to the collective brain. ac: The extended amygdala, including such structures as the Nucleus Basalis of Meynert, once activated, constitute a threat activated vigilance system lowering and biasing thresholds for further threat cues, evolved and learned. These can be further honed to greater precision through context sensitivity - enter the hippocampus. Actually, the bias probably works in a dual fashion also lowering thresholds for safely cues as well, which would fit your cultural scenarios. Cultures to be effective would need to provide reliable safety cues and be contexts in which the cues are effective. Having others who can resonate to the fear-exorcising platitudes might be sufficient or, at least, ameliatorive. Even "Wilson" in Castaway seemed to have this effect despite being rather nonresponsive.(1) Perhaps, what Wilson had going for him, despite his evident lack of social skills, were his obvious links to the native culture of the castaway. You might enjoy:. Whalen, P. J. (1998). Fear, vigilance, and ambiguity: Initial neuroimaging studies of the human amygdala, Current Directions in Psychological Science, 7, 1797, 188. hb: alas, none of my online resources will give me this article. It sounds intriguing. Meanwhile, please tell me the story of Wilson. Thanks, Al. Howard the theory of the extrasomatory
extensions of the self and how it applies to intimate relationships--particularly
to the joys and terrors of falling in love--and to the manner in which
one forms an enduring relationship. John Skoyles 12/03/01 wrties: Before we link aspects of mind such as 'self' to biological and cultural components, we must be more reductive - at least from a brain point of view. Put yourself in the shoes of the brain. Its problem is discovering what it is yoked to Hb: so even the brain is an exile in the body. How could that be? Brains presumably evolved from gaglions cells generated as coordinators, as in the long line of individual micorpocesssing center at each pair of legs along a lobster's neural spine. The brain is rather different from these distributed processing offices in that most of its wiring goes from one brain cell to another and has no direct contact with the sensors that pump us what we think of as "the outside world." Another way of saying this is that what we think of as the outside world is a construction modeled somehow in neuronal groupings and their interchanges. But the brain puts a premium on internal communication, isolating it more than sub-brains like the enteric gut-brain. Is this what we're talking about when we say the brain has to try out various hypotheses to comprehend the body it resides in? Js: and so can shape behaviourally. The body is an obvious one - the brain does not wake up each day with a different one Hb: actually a considerable number of cells the brain wakes up with each day are newcomers to the body, born overnight and allowed to grow into their space. Aging also changes the body, but quite a bit more slowly. Js: - but if we think about it not the body is not its only yoked continuity. Reputation - the perceptions of others also create a continuity it has to happen [Bloom's PR theory of the brain's embodiment]. Virtual reality shows that the brain can experience continuities that exist purely in a computer algorithm. Flocks, shoals, jazz jams and team games that the brain is yoked to a place or role in a larger continutity. Hb: good point. My kid spends hours on a computer playing games. The pixels, software, mouse, keyboard and monitor become extensions of his self. They are new realities his brain must model, then incrorporate. Our tools rapidly become extensions of us. When we use a hammer enough to get used to it, we feel where its heft and head are as surely as we feel another extension, our arm and hand. When we get used to a keyboard, it becomes an extension of our self. Put us at a keyboard whose feel is different and we struggle to get the brain to adjust to this new and uncomfortable extension, to get used to it until we make it a part of us. Js: Though the continuity is these things might be mediated proximally through that of the body, distally at the level information processing, the continuity that the brain works upon exists apart and beyond it. Hb: more good points.
Howard hb: and even more wheels than at first it seems. the genome is also a model of the world, a compressed set of models that over evolutionary time have proven their ability to survive in the changing environments of this planet for roughly 3.85 billion years. the cell is another external world modeler whose models have allowed it to predict and outwit the vicissitudes of ecosystems that have altered beyond belief over the last 3.5 billion years. The multicellular organism is a future-modeler that's proven its stuff and has improved its external world modelling capabilties for roughly 1.2 billion years. there's a lot of history condensed within us in a form that enables us to model the future and survive whatever cream pies or acid splashes it tosses into our face. by the time we rise all the way to the brain, the number of models within models within models is uncountable. > John Skoyles 12/03/01 wrties: Before we link aspects of mind > such as 'self' to biological and cultural components, we must > be more reductive > - at least from a brain point of view. Put yourself in the > shoes of the brain. Its problem is discovering what it is yoked to > > Hb: so even the brain is an exile in the body. How could > that be? Brains presumably evolved from gaglions cells > generated as coordinators, as in the long line of individual > micorpocesssing center at each pair of legs along a lobster's > neural spine. The brain is rather different from these > distributed processing offices in that most of its wiring > goes from one brain cell to another and has no direct contact > with the sensors that pump us what we think of as "the > outside world." Another way of saying this is that what we > think of as the outside world is a construction modeled > somehow in neuronal groupings and their interchanges. But > the brain puts a premium on internal communication, isolating > it more than sub-brains like the enteric gut-brain. Is this > what we're talking about when we say the brain has to try out > various hypotheses to comprehend the body it resides in? > JS Howard, good analogy - the brain is an exile. There are computers in Australia that operate the air conditioning of buildings in Shanghai - they sense transcontentially the temp and humidity of their rooms and transcontentially activator the motors and pumps of the air conditioning plant. The brain may be physically in the body but informationally that is unimportant (like the whether the computers controlling airconditioning in China are the same buidling or Australia). What matters if having the input to control output to desired ends via a model. And you are right about sub-brains. What do the neurons in the motor cortex know of the body - their sensory-motor loop extension into the world is really that of motor neurons in the spine. Likewise the cerebrellum and basal ganglia. Their extention loop is via other neurons in the brain. Wheels within wheels or rather maps within maps. > Js: and so can shape behaviourally. The body is an obvious > one - the brain does not wake up each day with a different one > > Hb: actually a considerable number of cells the brain wakes > up with each day are newcomers to the body, born overnight > and allowed to grow into their space. Aging also changes the > body, but quite a bit more slowly. JS So true. We shrink a little during the day upon gravity and expand back during the night. But the body remains much the same - it is not as if John Skoyles awoke with the body of Howard Bloom or Howard Bloom that of John Skoyles. I think both our brains would have shock if that happened! > Js: - but if we think about it not the body is not its only > yoked continuity. Reputation - the perceptions of others also > create a continuity it has to happen [Bloom's PR theory of > the brain's embodiment]. Virtual reality shows that the brain > can experience continuities that exist purely in a computer > algorithm. Flocks, shoals, jazz jams and team games that the > brain is yoked to a place or role in a larger continutity. > > Hb: good point. My kid spends hours on a computer playing > games. The pixels, software, mouse, keyboard and monitor > become extensions of his self. They are new realities his > brain must model, then incrorporate. Our tools rapidly become > extensions of us. When we use a hammer enough to get used to > it, we feel where its heft and head are as surely as we feel > another extension, our arm and hand. When we get used to a > keyboard, it becomes an extension of our self. Put us at a > keyboard whose feel is different and we struggle to get the > brain to adjust to this new and uncomfortable extension, to > get used to it until we make it a part of us. > JS Absolutely. My hands are speaking these words as they hit the keyboard. hb: and mine, as I've mentioned before, frequently type words I did not intend--and spell those words correctly. which indicates that the motor brain working my fingers does not always listen carefully to my verbal brain. it also indicates that my motor brain has more than independence, it has its own vocabulary. Howard
Floys are not entirely relevant, but they're fun. Slow the demonstration down about two pecks to get the effect I sent them for. And what, pray tell, is that effect? Humans and innumerable other animals, from bacteria on up, operate as if they were recruits in a massive search party--a drag net. State troopers looking for a kid lost in the woods fan out across the landscape, but stay within hailing distance of one another. Imagine that you and have jjoined a search party of ten people spreading out to find a little girl named Goldilocks who we suspect disappeared in a dense, dark woods with lots of bushes and the occasional little-girl-and-porridge-eating bear. On our own, each of us could cover a swath of territory about five feet to our right and five feet to our left. The gang decides that we'll all walk ten-feet apart, but we'll shout if we run across something promising. You're on the far left, and I'm on the far-right. If my perpetually shoddy arithmetic is right, that puts us 90 feet apart. For all practical purposes, I've now got you and eight others contributing to what I can cover. I can only see a bit further than my arms can reach. But you provide and the others provide me with 18 extra eyes and spread my senses out enormously. When I run into tough sledding with an editor and need to talk to someone and you give me a sympathetic ear, we both become parts of a drag net. Our emotional search party includes lots of the folks I know and from whom I've derived experience and lots of the folks you know who've been expanding your input on things. To get from my emotional center, my limbic system, to my conscious brain, presumably in the left frontal or prefrontal cortex, my spew of emotional confusion has made a rather peculiar detour. Instead of moving the three or four inches from one brain center to another, my tales of woe have traveled 2,000 miles down to Tennessee and back. They've forced me to lace myself into a social search party of very hefty size. When you get off the phone with me, you might just talk to a friend in San Diego and tell him the strange story of my writing snafus (disguising things a bit to protect my privacy, of course). He may take the tale into account when giving advice to a buddy based in England who's having similar problems. Meaning my difficulty will make it half way round the world and---and that the advice you gave me probably benefitted from tales passed this way half way around the world as well. Floys are computerized
carniverous birds that operate on the dragnet principle. If you're a
floy flying shotgun on the far left and you spot food (food is the red
thing that bumbles across the screen when you push the "stranger"
button), you dive for it. The other floys have orders to stay as close
as possible to the group's center of social gravity, but to leave each
other a bit of wingroom. So when you veer off to attack the food, all
the other birds are pulled in your direction, including the birds furthest
from you, birds that were much too far away to spot the food on their
own. As one or two of the birds next to you is dragged closer to the
food by the need to stick with you, they spot the food and dive for
it too. It doesn't take long before even the birds furthest from you
have followed their neighbors and been dragged to the food, too. Howard In real life we're often hit by a powerful emotion, disturbed or elated by it, and run off to others to discuss it, get reassurance about it, and find out how to interpret it. So strong emotions which roil us often send us running to others. Which means that emotions of this sort call us to use the social system as an extra-cranial extension of mind. The limbic/visceral emotions hit us with various forms of uncertainty or needs to share and to get the equivalent of the hugs an agitated chimp seeks out. We take the feedback we get and use it to formulate an explanation for our emotion in the verbal brain. Which means that in many cases the limbic system uses conversations with friends to feed its signals back into the left brain interpreter--our logical, verbal self. This is reminiscent of Kurt Goldstein's patient Scheider, who had taken a bullet to the back of the head, suffered damage to parietal lobes apparently responsible for passing information from the right to the left brain, and whose non-conscious mind compensated by setting up an elaborate hand signalling system of which Schneider himself was virtually unaware. Goldstein discovered this outer path from one brain area to another by tying Schneider's hands to his sides. When his hands were free, Schneider could read a document out loud. With his hands tied, he couldn't. The material his right brain was reading couldn't make it to the left brain where it would have been turned into spoken words. Again, Schneider was totally unaware of the hand signals worked out by parts of his brain which hadn't bother announcing their innovations to his consciousness. The number of outside loops one part of the brain uses to communicate with another is amazing. And it's equally amazing how these extracranial trunk lines of the mind plug us into the larger information processing apparatus of the group. Howard _______________________________ Scientists discover 'second
brain' in the stomach Now this is very peculiar. Very peculiar indeed. The talking self in the left cerebral cortex may be mere inches from the "seat of feeling"--the place (or upper traces of a far-flung hurricane) where the basic emotions are doing their thing. Why can't our thinking self see what's happening right under its nose--or mere millimeters from its dendritic threads? The answer may lie in the evolution of emotion and the self--or so the theory of the extrasomatory extensions of the self says. We evolved not just as individuals, but as members of groups whose competition was often a matter of life and death. Those of us who acted as productive plug-ins to a group's machinery were likely to survive--and to produce lots of offspring. Rugged individualists who refused to become components in a group's IQ would have had it rough when pitted against a horde of the well-organized. Some of them would have literally been eaten (given the recent evidence on early hominid cannibalism). At the very least, they would have lost their wives. No mating, no procreating. So the line of loners would have soon ceased to be. In ants, a worker's nervous system is wired as a strand in a hive-wide circuitry. The need to connect shows up in the worker's equivalents of gregariousness and uncertainty. She wanders a small distance from the pack, then grows uneasy and feels the need to hurry back. Once she's gotten reassurance from her "friends" she wanders off and explores a bit of far flung territory again. Each time she does a bit of sightseeing she spreads the group's search web--the net of eyes and antennae the hive sends out to hunt for food. Each time the wandering worker returns for the hymenopteran equivalent of tea and sympathy she inadvertently brings back a report on a bit of previously uncharted territory. (see Deborah Gordon's book, and her article in \text\ants) We humans seem to be rigged in similar ways--our psyche drives us to be neurons of a collective brain. To the group it's often less important that we understand our innards than that our innards drive us to synapse with others, and to make our contribution to the data pool of society. So when we encounter something that troubles or uplifts us, we are driven both to introspection and to the comfort we can find in sharing our fears, our furies, and our joys with the company of friends. To them we give reports on the strange territories we've explored--realms which range from romance to finance, from madness to meaning, from pathos to punch lines, and a good deal in between. In return our friends give us the words and concepts with which to interpret our moods. Every time we're driven back to others for a "reality check," we're tuned to interpret our experience using the acceptable forms of expression of the moment. We're plugged into our group's zeitgeist. And every time we return to babble our half-digested angsts or triumphs, we expand, even if by only the slightest bit, the ambit of the group's understanding of its circumstance--its view of its internal and external realities. Self didn't, in all probability evolve as just a way of navigating the private paths of solitary life. It seems to be a social billboard and a social interface. Ted Coons, one of our group members, pictures it as a model human inside of us standing in an arena where his or her every actions are observed by an audience of significant others, the inner representations of our friends and family. The self is also judged by an observer of even greater importance, ourselves, our basic "me." With this model human, this puppet "us" homunculus, we try out the various ways in which we should dress in the morning, the speeches we could use to present an idea, a feeling, a demand, or a request. We see how the model audience would react to each form of presentation, and most of all how we'd respond to it. If it seems witty, delicious, or appropriate to circumstance it's sent out for implementation by the body and the tongue. If it seems obnoxious it simply disappears. Which means the self may not have evolved as a bridge to our interior. It probably evolved as a causeway to the folks with whom we live. A pathway which connects us even to those with whom we interact but whom we'll never see--the bosses far above our head, the farmers who produce our food, the construction crews who built our home and the carpenters who built our bed. These ruminations spring from a bit of reading in George Stephanopoulos' "All Too Human: A Political Education." I've reached that part of the book in which Stephanopoulos gets the job of key political adviser to Bill Clinton. Clinton, at this point, is governor of Arkansas and one of many candidates about to run the gauntlet of the primary elections for president. Bill walks through his bedroom and his hallways, taking off his pants, changing into others, picking up papers from his night table, constantly spurting ideas, and looking insistently for new solutions and new ways to bathe in the feedback of those around him. Stephanopoulos follows him through his soliloquies in mid-pants-change and the moment a bit later when Hilary enters the room and both Bill and Hil are dialoging at full speed, bouncing Bills concepts and Hilary's analyses off of Stephanopoulos, looking for his feedback. But Stephanopoulos is not Bill and Hilary's only extracranial extension of the self. Bill frequently asks, "What ideas do our friends in New York have on this? Are there any new ways of handling this coming in from that group in California we've been talking to? What do the polls say ithe public mood thinks about this issue right now?" From the mix of incoming signals, Bill Clinton arrives at a conclusion which he can say with full conviction is his. In fact, his self-confidence and the passion with which he conveys his beliefs, says Stephanopoulos, puts him head and shoulders above any other candidates whom this well-placed political operative has ever met. Equally important, Clinton absorbs each audience to which he speaks and adjusts the way he puts things to make his stump speech intimately personal. He is compelling because he believes in what he says but says it in a way that shows how quickly he's plugged into his audience. So the number of contributors to Clinton's "self" is immense. Stephanopoulos is just one of many advisors. He and those like him are considered staff--and that staff is large. Then there are the old and trusted friends, the ones with whom the bonds go back in time. These are the FOB, the Friends of Bill. Clinton grills these people constantly, not only for their opinions, but for input they've gleaned from sources spread in nearly every state. If a key FOB like Webster Hubble nixes an idea then it's understood the idea is kaput. This form of reliance on others is occasionally derided as an overdependence on polls. And it can clearly get that way when the candidate is a pale puppet who parrots the popular thoughts of the day. But in a representative government, the self of a candidate is SUPPOSED to represent that of the populace he is elected to serve. In that sense, there is a justification to Louis XIV's pronouncement that "L'etat cest moi." "The state is me." Or, to put it in democratic terms, "I, the candidate, am my constituency." Who in this case, is an extrasomatory extension of whom? Bill Clinton is a walking summation of those around him--much more so than the average man in the street who doesn't have the team of social input purveyors available to a politician. He is an extrasomatory extension of the public personality. Those from whom he sucks opinions are, in turn, extrasomatory extensions of him--vital feelers feeding his identity. What, under these circumstances, gives a public figure the appearance of having a strong sense of self--the kind of thing McCain had in spades? Is it sheer self-confidence, despite the contributions from others of which the self is made? Is charisma a matter of postural and facial cues--those of an alpha leader, a silverback--an upright walk and masterful talk? Is it then the flimsiest of masks, but one of great persuasive strength? Where do others stop and we begin? Why is the self so calmed by the others and so often jolted by the incoherent feelings from within? Howard _______________________________ sThese "supernormal" skills were Marco-van-Basten-style insta-maneuvers based on huge amounts of study. I'd spent years taking rock careers apart, applying correlational studies to extract the secrets of success, learning to predict four months in advance what albums would be on top of the charts, then finding out why the albums showed the patterns of sales I'd absorbed, and finally befriending booking agents, taking those with the most eager minds out to dinner so we could analyze the strategic errors of rockers who were almost-making-it-but-not-quite and so we could reverse engineer the tricks that had taken other artists to greatness. On top of that, I learned lessons on touring strategy from managers who were wizards at it. By the time Joan walked into my office, I was ripe, trained, practiced, and pre-rehearsed for an instant vision. As for the alleged mind reading--I'd been studying my own emotions and those of others since the age of thirteen, had begun to take courses in psychology at sixteen, had learned a lot of practical lessons in human nuance from the seven therapists who'd tried to help me out, had turned down four fellowships in clinical psych, had spent my hitchhiking-and-riding-the-rails years learning to extract the life story from every driver who picked me up and every hobo I met, then had honed the skill of life-story grabbing and of applying empathy to fill in the blanks during years as a journalist. When I sat down with Kenny Loggins at his home in Santa Barbara and told him he was terrified of a woman and wanted to rocket away from her at 200 miles an hour, preferably in a Lamborghini, he was startled as hell and blurted, "Who told you about the problems I'm having with my wife." But it wasn't telepathy. It came from applying a great deal of training--including empathetic calisthenics--to his body of work. It came from a month of studying his lyrics, being utterly baffled by them, returning to them over and over again, then finally rearranging the stanzas like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Feeling out the things that Maurice White, founder of Earth, Wind, & Fire, never told his managers was a matter of reading the meaning of the graphics on his album covers. Getting what Styx' vocalist and songwriter Dennis de Young was really trying to say in his albums also involved a month of puzzling out the lyrics and the album graphics...then interviewing him for three days straight. By the way, I was not able to read Prince's mind in a vacuum. His managers would usually send (in great secrecy) a sheet of his upcoming lyrics, or let me visit the set where Purple Rain was being made (a trip on which I never got to talk to Prince--but the details were all there to read), or even to see a semi-finished video of Under The Cherry Moon before I'd give them the Swami act. I'm posting this to paleopsych because our ability to tune ourselves to the frequencies of others has a lot of scientific meanings. It's an example of the way we integrate socially. It's the equivalent of the electrons I was talking about last night--electrons that probably participate in a wave by simply ooching back and forth a tiny bit and passing their movement on to the unstable electrons circling atoms adjacent to them. We do that as humans. Watching news reports last night on the violence in Israel and Macedonia it became obvious that we humans easily pass anger to one another--the sort of righteous anger over martyred fellow-members of our group that leads to mass violence and a breakdown of society. We do it in ways that
very much mirror the passage of a sea wave's motion from one gently
rolling molecule to the next one down the line. We can easily ignite
with a shared rage because we have common instincts, common brains,
common genes, common emotional capacities, and we resonate easily to
our neighbors' frequencies. Music synchronizes us. So do rituals, propaganda,
and news reports. A deep empathic core causes us to congeal, to come
together in large scale social enterprises as automatically as termites
do when building a mound of enormous size and complexity. When you tap
that core consciously, what you achieve can look like outright telepathy.
These rulers of what's socially acceptable in science and what's not may have been intelliigent men, but when they ceased acting on curiosity and began drawing up social "Thou shalt nots" they were idiots. They acted as makers of group cohesion, as social wave surfers and social wave directors, but they also acted as mass-mind lobotomizers. They put one of the great mysteries of the human mind off limits. They did it by orchestrating the cues that coordinate us as parts of a coherent wave--rejection cues. For nearly 150 years we've dreaded the mockery of others, mockery that would surely greet us if we probed the reason hypnotism works. Hypnotism offers important evidence for a theory I've been forcing down the throat of this group for some time now--The Extrasomatory Extensions of Self concept. I've put a summary below for those who aren't tired of reading the darned thing. What did Ted do when he hynotized Fons de Poel? He inserted himself into Fons' brain. Not into Fons' consciousness, but into some hidden self that wants so badly to please that it practically ingests another human whole, it takes that person's directives and plants them so deeply that: a) we can't see them; and b:) we have to act on them. They are as much "us" as our consciousness--perhaps even more "us." Why? Because these introjections of another person, these commands planted in us by the hypnotizer, have a power few of us can resist. They battle our self-conscious will...and they win. The others in us are more powerful than the thing we think of as "me." Entire animal species seldom hold on to a trait, pack it into the expensive memory storage device we call a gene,then pass it on to their daughters and sons if it has not proven its adaptive value. Most human are hypnotizable. Why? What does the self-beneath-the-floor-of-self do in normal life? Want a wild guess? It entrains us to others. It stores the thou shalts and thou shalt nots of our neighbors, our family, our friends, those whom we would like to rise high enough to know in the future, and of our culture. And it does more than just store, it warps and drives our will in ways we do not know. The others inside of us are more powerful than the thing we think of as "me." It would be extremely interesting to know where this dictator programmed by others--this kernel of hypnotizability--resides in the brain. My guess is the limbic system. If that's true, then this tyrranical module of social integration and social conformity probably goes back at least 250 million years ago, to the days of our reptilian ancestors, the ancestors who evolved much of our current limbic system and handed it down to us. Past postings by John Skoyles indicate that the what John calls the mirror neurons of the motor area may also be involved. Here's a snippet of an old paleopsych conversation between John and myself: "you know far more about motor neurons than most of us. However what it seems to come down to is that motor neurons link us like molecules of water swaying together in a quiet swatch of shallow sea. And in many ways we do seem linked this way. Hundreds of millions of us speak a common language, convey meanings with the same vocabulary of postures, gesticulations, and facial expressions, share many a common attitude, and are moved one way or the other by the public mood. Which raises once again the mystery of why we need to create an illusion of differentiation, a sense of self and separateness. " Does anyone out there have an idea of how this social despot in the brain evolved? Neil Greenberg and Gordon Burhardt, have you seen signs of it in lizards? Jim Grau, you've written about "Learning Without A Brain." Could some of these introjections of others, these highly suggestible, rapid learning centers, be located outside the cranium? Howard ------- summary of the extrasomatory extensions of self concept: The basic idea runs something like this. When we get wonked, bonked, roiled, and boiled by powerful feelings--whether they are delightful or nightmarish--a strange thing happens. We often don't know what to make of them. Our logical mind has a hard time seeing into the swirl of our visceral passions and making sense of them. When we probe the whirl within us we can posit numerous possibilities. But this guessing is often the best that we can do. What's more, our internal monsoons often pelt us with unbearable gales of emotionality. So how do we solve our confusion? We look for someone else to talk to. We babble out our situation to a friend, a relative, a mentor, a bartender, or a shrink and beg him or her to tell us what s/he makes of it. Then, through the words of someone outside our self what's going on inside of us gains a little clarity. Now this is very peculiar. Very peculiar indeed. The talking self in the left cerebral cortex may be mere inches from the "seat of feeling"--the place (or upper traces of a far-flung hurricane) where the basic emotions are doing their thing. Why can't our thinking self see what's happening right under its nose--or mere millimeters from its dendritic threads? The answer may lie in the evolution of emotion and the self--or so the theory of the extrasomatory extensions of the self says. We evolved not just as individuals, but as members of groups whose competition was often a matter of life and death. Those of us who acted as productive plug-ins to a group's machinery were likely to survive--and to produce lots of offspring. Rugged individualists who refused to become components in a group's IQ would have had it rough when pitted against a horde of the well-organized. Some of them would have literally been eaten (given the recent evidence on early hominid cannibalism). At the very least, they would have lost their wives. No mating, no procreating. So the line of loners would have soon ceased to be. In ants, a worker's nervous system is wired as a strand in a hive-wide circuitry. The need to connect shows up in the worker's equivalents of gregariousness and uncertainty. She wanders a small distance from the pack, then grows uneasy and feels the need to hurry back. Once she's gotten reassurance from her "friends" she wanders off and explores a bit of far flung territory again. Each time she does a bit of sightseeing she spreads the group's search web--the net of eyes and antennae the hive sends out to hunt for food. Each time the wandering worker returns for the hymenopteran equivalent of tea and sympathy she inadvertently brings back a report on a bit of previously uncharted territory. (see Deborah Gordon's book, and her article in \text\ants) We humans seem to be rigged in similar ways--our psyche drives us to be neurons of a collective brain. To the group it's often less important that we understand our innards than that our innards drive us to synapse with others, and to make our contribution to the data pool of society. So when we encounter something that troubles or uplifts us, we are driven both to introspection and to the comfort we can find in sharing our fears, our furies, and our joys with the company of friends. To them we give reports on the strange territories we've explored--realms which range from romance to finance, from madness to meaning, from pathos to punch lines, and a good deal in between. In return our friends give us the words and concepts with which to interpret our moods. Every time we're driven back to others for a "reality check," we're tuned to interpret our experience using the acceptable forms of expression of the moment. We're plugged into our group's zeitgeist. And every time we return to babble our half-digested angsts or triumphs, we expand, even if by only the slightest bit, the ambit of the group's understanding of its circumstance--its view of its internal and external realities. Self didn't, in all probability evolve as just a way of navigating the private paths of solitary life. It seems to be a social billboard and a social interface. Ted Coons, one of our group members, pictures it as a model human inside of us standing in an arena where his or her every actions are observed by an audience of significant others, the inner representations of our friends and family. The self is also judged by an observer of even greater importance, ourselves, our basic "me." With this model human, this puppet "us" homunculus, we try out the various ways in which we should dress in the morning, the speeches we could use to present an idea, a feeling, a demand, or a request. We see how the model audience would react to each form of presentation, and most of all how we'd respond to it. If it seems witty, delicious, or appropriate to circumstance it's sent out for implementation by the body and the tongue. If it seems obnoxious it simply disappears. Which means the self may not have evolved as a bridge to our interior. It probably evolved as a causeway to the folks with whom we live. A pathway which connects us even to those with whom we interact but whom we'll never see--the bosses far above our head, the farmers who produce our food, the construction crews who built our home and the carpenters who built our bed. These ruminations spring from a bit of reading in George Stephanopoulos' "All Too Human: A Political Education." I've reached that part of the book in which Stephanopoulos gets the job of key political adviser to Bill Clinton. Clinton, at this point, is governor of Arkansas and one of many candidates about to run the gauntlet of the primary elections for president. Bill walks through his bedroom and his hallways, taking off his pants, changing into others, picking up papers from his night table, constantly spurting ideas, and looking insistently for new solutions and new ways to bathe in the feedback of those around him. Stephanopoulos follows him through his soliloquies in mid-pants-change and the moment a bit later when Hilary enters the room and both Bill and Hil are dialoging at full speed, bouncing Bills concepts and Hilary's analyses off of Stephanopoulos, looking for his feedback. But Stephanopoulos is not Bill and Hilary's only extracranial extension of the self. Bill frequently asks, "What ideas do our friends in New York have on this? Are there any new ways of handling this coming in from that group in California we've been talking to? What do the polls say ithe public mood thinks about this issue right now?" From the mix of incoming signals, Bill Clinton arrives at a conclusion which he can say with full conviction is his. In fact, his self-confidence and the passion with which he conveys his beliefs, says Stephanopoulos, puts him head and shoulders above any other candidates whom this well-placed political operative has ever met. Equally important, Clinton absorbs each audience to which he speaks and adjusts the way he puts things to make his stump speech intimately personal. He is compelling because he believes in what he says but says it in a way that shows how quickly he's plugged into his audience. So the number of contributors to Clinton's "self" is immense. Stephanopoulos is just one of many advisors. He and those like him are considered staff--and that staff is large. Then there are the old and trusted friends, the ones with whom the bonds go back in time. These are the FOB, the Friends of Bill. Clinton grills these people constantly, not only for their opinions, but for input they've gleaned from sources spread in nearly every state. If a key FOB like Webster Hubble nixes an idea then it's understood the idea is kaput. This form of reliance on others is occasionally derided as an overdependence on polls. And it can clearly get that way when the candidate is a pale puppet who parrots the popular thoughts of the day. But in a representative government, the self of a candidate is SUPPOSED to represent that of the populace he is elected to serve. In that sense, there is a justification to Louis XIV's pronouncement that "L'etat cest moi." "The state is me." Or, to put it in democratic terms, "I, the candidate, am my constituency." Who in this case, is an extrasomatory extension of whom? Bill Clinton is a walking summation of those around him--much more so than the average man in the street who doesn't have the team of social input purveyors available to a politician. Clinton is an extrasomatory extension of the public personality. Those from whom he sucks opinions are, in turn, extrasomatory extensions of him--vital feelers feeding his identity. What, under these circumstances, gives a public figure the appearance of having a strong sense of self--the kind of thing McCain had in spades? Is it sheer self-confidence, despite the contributions from others of which the self is made? Is charisma a matter of postural and facial cues--those of an alpha leader, a silverback--an upright walk and masterful talk? Is it then the flimsiest of masks, but one of great persuasive strength? Where do others stop and we begin? Why is the self so calmed by the others and so often jolted by the incoherent feelings from within? when we become anxious, upset, or excited we have to go to others to figure out what our excitement is about. the emotional brain is trying to communicate something to the verbal brain, but instead of taking the short route and traveling through three inches of brain tissue, it takes the long route and loops out through another human. Why? Because we've evolved to be interacting parts of a search web, a collective intelligence. Agita is the cue that tells us to spill our guts to a friend--to share our disturbance with others who, if what we have to say is sufficiently interesting, will pass its lessons or its warnings on to others. In fact, whenever we talk of our self, we are talking of other people. The self is our social interface. Connecting us to other humans is its job. Turbulent emotion tends to be something that confuses us a great deal. We are not sure how to interpret it, as the experiments of Schachter, and Singer (Cognitive, social and physiological determinants of emotional state. Psychological review, 1962, 69, 379-99) indicated. In this classic study, Schachter and Singer injected their subjects with adrenaline. Up went heart rates and alertness, sweaty palms, and other indications that the adrenaline was doing its thing. But it took social input for the subjects to interpret what they were feeling. If a shill in the group got angry and stomped out of the room, many of the others excited by adrenaline took his cue and interpreted their chemically-caused arousal as anger. If there was no shill throwing a tantrum, the sujects stayed calm. How confused they might have been by their symptoms wasn't reported. In real life we're often hit by a powerful emotion, disturbed or elated by it, and run off to others to discuss it, get reassurance about it, and find out how to interpret it. So strong emotions which roil us often send us running to others. Which means that emotions of this sort call us to use the social system as an extra-cranial extension of mind. The limbic/visceral emotions hit us with various forms of uncertainty or needs to share and to get the equivalent of the hugs an agitated chimp seeks out. We take the feedback we get and use it to formulate an explanation for our emotion in the verbal brain. Which means that in many cases the limbic system uses conversations with friends to feed its signals back into the left brain interpreter--our logical, verbal self. This is reminiscent of Kurt Goldstein's patient Scheider, who had taken a bullet to the back of the head, suffered damage to parietal lobes apparently responsible for passing information from the right to the left brain, and whose non-conscious mind compensated by setting up an elaborate hand signalling system of which Schneider himself was virtually unaware. Goldstein discovered this outer path from one brain area to another by tying Schneider's hands to his sides. When his hands were free, Schneider could read a document out loud. With his hands tied, he couldn't. The material his right brain was reading couldn't make it to the left brain where it would have been turned into spoken words. Again, Schneider was totally unaware of the hand signals worked out by parts of his brain which hadn't bother announcing their innovations to his consciousness. The number of outside loops one part of the brain uses to communicate with another is amazing. And it's equally amazing how these extracranial trunk lines of the mind plug us into the larger information processing apparatus of the group. howard
Ted Coons, who runs the program, and I discussed this briefly a few days ago. Nothing enters the mind without passing through the limbic system first. Down there it's judged for its positive or negative emotional implications. If it has no emotional significance, it simply doesn't make it into the process we call mind. And once a perception IS in mind, where it goes and how it's combined with what's there or reshaped is dictated far more by emotion than by "reason." In fact, what is "reason"? How does it differ neurobiologically from other forms of brain activity? Is it less connected to motor centers or sensory processors than other systems? Why and how did it evolve? What's its evolutionary history and its adaptive value? My suspicion is that it acts as a large scale social integrator. One group can synapse with another via the abstract, "rational" rules of fairness and justice. One group can clip itself to another using rational "moral" rules of this sort. The more groups clip themselves together, the larger, more powerful, more creative, and more potentially rich the society becomes. The larger the group, the more new emergent properties blossom and burgeon in its midst. Large groups manage to reinvent life with techno-ubiquities like language, metal, printing, and electricity. These techno foundations reinvent society and alter human nature as dramatically as the growth of new limbs and extra brains. They change our phenotype while totally bypassing genes. Reason is pretty darned helpless when it comes to understanding the rest of the brainstuff a few inches beneath or behind it. It has a very hard time getting a handle on the emotions, intuitions, instincts, and the other gods and monsters below the floorboards of consciousness. But reason is in touch with something at least as vast---the social fabric. And it contributes to and interfaces with that fabric on a very big scale indeed. The trick for folks like us is to turn this outward-facing but ignorant (and arrogant) thing, our reason, around and get it to understand the innards it sits next to--the emotional and involuntary us. And the irony is this: when reason turns around and tries to grok its neighbors in the brain…its passionate and wordlessly persuasive neighbors…what does it find? The introjection of others. Reason turns away from the crowd to reflect on the depths of self and finds that the self is a collection of knotted power centers in which the crowd is captured...and in which thecrowd rules our actions and shapes our thoughts. Is reason humbled? It should be. Is reason able to see the forces of brain it can't control as a challenge and a chance for enrichment? Is it able to bring the unseen forces within the brain to the surface, to let them roar with passion, and to use them for good? It is if you and I work to make it so. Bringing fire from the peak of Olympus to mankind may turn out to be a process of turning around and facing the selves beneath self-the selves that until now have successfully hidden themselves from the limited, ignorant, but willing-to-learn thing we call mind. Howard _______________________________ _______________________________ A final question. If a tree falls in the cyberforest and goes unheard, does it cease to be a tree? If a self grows dependent on cyber extensions and its cyberlinks go dead, does that self cease to have an identity? hb _______________________________ In a message dated 12/19/00 3:30:59 PM Eastern Standard Time, russ writes: Your note about ghosts got me thinking about how people seldom like to be truly alone. It made me wonder about people who always have a TV (or radio) on as "background" and about how most of us talk to ourselves. My dad *always* has to have a TV on, even when he's doing his most demanding mental work (he's a university professor). He doesn't really pay attention to it--I think he just likes the "presence" it provides. Similarly, my grandmother couldn't go to sleep unless she was listening to talk radio. hb: I suspect this comes from a need to feel we're rubbing shoulders with our fellow human beings. Overdoses of isolation can literally be fatal--they can kill off cells in the hippocampus, cripple the immune system, sabotage our ability to put two and two together, and a great many more equally lethal ceteras. Feeling that we're part of a warm and cozy crowd, on the other hand, does wonders for our minds and bodies, not to mention for our moods. If the crowd won't come into your bedroom or study and give you a back rub while you work or while you try to sleep, then why not get the next best thing--an electronic box that puts out the sounds, shapes, and other supercues normally flashed by aggregations of humanity? I was about to say that this doesn't really have much to do with the extrasomatory extensions of self theory, then it hit me. We need other humans just to remain healthy and alive. What could prove that we rely on those around us to provide the missing pieces of our selves more than that? rk: I'm constantly talking to myself, hb: this one's a classic. by talking to our selves not only do we provide our selves with company, but we seem to open up an extra processing and memory channel. I know that when I'm involved in something ultra-complex--like hooking up a gizmo that involves keeping track of what seem like six dozen separate wires at once, or doing some computer niggling that demands testing a hundred permatations and combinations and knowing where I stand with each, talking to myself makes it far easier to keep the whole kit and kaboodle of data dancing in short-term memory. This is a form of what Karl Sagan used to call "extracranial memory." But it shares something important with the extrasomatory extensions of the self. It's one batch of brain parts taking a detour outside the head to get to another batch of brain parts. You'd think they'd take the short route and simply hop the two or three inches between them across the synaptic gaps. But, no, the brain seems to get a kick out of transmitting messages to itself via channels far outside the skull. rk: and I can't count the number of people who will admit to doing the same thing, even though they're usually embarrassed about it. So I wonder if these aren't ways of trying to artificially invoke the feeling that others are around, that we're interacting with or in the presence of at least one other person. hb: Here's a take on this from The Lucifer Principle: "Our need for each other is not only built into the foundation of our biological structure, it is also the cornerstone of our psyche. Humans are so uncontrollably social that when we're wandering around at home where no one can see us, we talk to ourselves. When we smash our thumb with a hammer we curse to no one in particular. In a universe whose heavens seem devoid of living matter, we address ourselves skyward to gods, angels and the occasional extra-terrestrial." Also, this morning I woke up thinking about the famous "Stockholm syndrome" in which hostages sympathize with their captors. It seems like this fits in to your theory, but I'm not sure exactly how. hb: it seems to me like it fits, too, and I'm not sure why. When the North Koreans were perfecting the art of brainwashing, they discovered that the secret was to take American POWs out of their peer group, put them in extreme isolation, then give them one and only one form of companionship--the presence of the team of alternatively friendly and menacing Korean interrogator/torturers responsible for their "reeducation." Because we rely on others so heavily for daily reinforcement of our sense of reality, the reality in the heads of many of the captives shifted until it matched the worldview of their jailers. The Koreans were trying to alter the stuff inside the skull by tinkering with the extrasomatory extensions we need to communicate between our emotions, our perceptions, and our verbal self. Roughly the same thing happens in the Stockholm Syndrome. There are common elements in the case of Korean brainwashing and the experience of being a hostage. A while back, Val Geist and I were dialoging heavily about the manner in which circumstance can actually have an impact on the biological underpinnings of our psche. In fact, we didn't limit ourselves to the human sense of self, we were talking about the biopsychology of beasts from bacteria to bovines and from waterfleas to wolves. Val has shown that in large mammals there are two alternative settings a body can assume. One is the maintenance mode, the other the dispersal mode. Creatures who've found a niche that's rich in food and shelter will hunker down and stay a while. They'll not only stick around, but their bodies will adapt to make them efficient feeders but inefficient long-distance travelers. For example, among bacteria, those in maintenance mode will develop stalks that root them to the spot and, in all probability, a body type which maximizes their ability to gobble things up. But when food runs out in the old homestead, a dramatic change takes place. Bacteria abandon the old body plan, forget the stalk, and instead develop outboard propellors (flagella) which allow them to skoot off across the landscape looking for real estate where fresh food is ripe for the taking. The body-form equipped for scouting and exploration is the dispersal mode. I took this a step further and said that among humans, there are five different variations on the maintenance/dispersal scheme--fleeing, fasting, feasting, questing, and conquering. Fleeing is the phenotype relevant to the Stockholm Syndrome. A group that has run low on food or is being threatened by more successful gangs will stick together as long as it has a sense that its leaders and its group-structure still have a chance to overcome adversity. Sure, the members will go into a sort-of crouch. They'll frown on anything that can use up the meager resources still at hand. If they're humans, they'll grow anti-sexual, will put the sort of kibbosh on stuffing your face that the Christians of the middle ages and early renaissance did (gluttony in Dante's day was considered the deadliest of the seven deadly sins) and will grow highly intolerant of another resource drainer--disagreement. Groups under threat tend to come down hard on anyone who dares to be unconventional or, even worse, rebellious. This is the fasting phase--a variation on Val Geist's maintenance mode. But things get very strange when the group loses its sense that loyalty to the old ways and to the leaders of the day can pull it out of the muck. Once that feeling of potential control goes, the members of the group shift dramatically and go into a dispersal mode. It's called the fleeing phase. Folks abandon the social group and strike out on their own, travelling at top speed. In human terms, they give up on the old home territory and its way of life and become refugees. Low resources WITH a sense of potential control and you get a maintenance mode. Low resources and NO sense of potential control and you get a dispersal mode. Here's where the connection to the Stockholm Syndrome comes in. Refugees abandon their old position in the middle tiers of their old social group and head for a new group in which they will be on the very bottom. As the lowest on the totem pole, they'll be required to reorient themselves to fit the lifestyle of those above them. They'll have to change group loyalties, their world view, their name, their language, and even the ways in which they perceive things. Folks who've been scattered by adversity are low in self-esteem, low in mood (they tend to be depressed), low in health, and very ready to cling to new and more promising ways. They are ripe to heed the cues which come from their hierarchical "superiors." Kidnappers and hostage takers take advantage of all these factors. They tend to isolate their
victims. Patti Hearst, for example, was kept alone in a closet by her
Symbionese Liberation Army captors. Hostage takers make those they've
snagged very aware of their lack of control and of the inability of
the old social system to save them. And they spoonfeed their own view
of things to those they've nabbed. In other words, they use the cues
that trigger the fleeing mode. In addition, they clearly rank way over
the heads of their prisoners in the hierarchy of power. So they can
use the cues of dominance and the instincts of submission to turn the
heads of their victims considerably. How exactly this pertains to the
extrasomatory extensions of self I'm not quite sure. The Stockholm Syndrome
definitely takes advantage of the ability of those outside of us to
"mess with our heads." The fact that we rely on others for
so much of what we think of as our individuality and our private psyche
is one of the things that makes this mental scrambling so possible.
rk: Perhaps the need to identify with a superorganism is so great that
we'll even identify with those people who are holding us against our
will. hb: well put. rk: When someone is taken hostage, he's violently
cut off from whatever superorganisms he had been a part of. Realizing
this at some level, he quickly shifts allegiances to the only available
superorganism, the one which also currently holds life and death power
over him. hb: very economically expressed, not to mention perceptive.
Howard ----------- At 10:04 PM 12/18/00 -0500, you wrote: A quick thought
after speaking with a friend about the ghosts of old friends--essential
people in her life--whom she swears visit her. These visitations may
well be manifestations of the extrasomatory extensions of self. We need
the key others in our lives to complete our identity. We need them as
add ons without whom we cannot perform the functions of which they were
formerly a part. We need them so badly that when they disappear from
our lives our brains must summon them just as the brain automatically
summons phantom limbs. It's merely a hypothesis, but one worth testing.
Howard
1) the extrasomatory extensions
of the self concept I've been trying to work out within the confines
of the paleopsych group; See what you think: "Group level ideas also play a role in contemporary interpretations of the behavior of some cetaceans. Jerison (1986: 163-164) noted that 'information from echolocation can be sensed at the same time by several individuals,' which led him to suggest that dolphins may experience 'communal cognition,' something akin to 'an extended self…constructed (and experienced) by a group of several animals.' A long-term study of Hawaiian spinner dolphins led Ken Norris (1991b: 13) to conclude that, as with colonial ants, 'a spinner dolphin alone is very much less than a whole animal.' Norris (1991b:13-14) elaborated: "It was only after much looking that we began to understand another key feature of [the spinner dolphins'] lives: they are so thoroughly creatures of their schools that they have surrendered some aspects of normal mammalian individuality to the group…. [Spinner dolphins] live locked in the geometry of their schools, playing out a life-long cat-and-mouse game with their predators…. [The dolphins'] ultimate defense is to behave like schooling fish. In doing so, their individuality is suppressed in favor of the school.' "At other times,
with echolocation providing an early warning system to detect predators,
these dolphins can 'afford to express all the complexity and individuality
of their mammalian heritage…. But should the predator swim close,
they then must revert to the fish's strategy, the school, in which they
become faceless ciphers, obeying without question a group strategy.'
(Norris 1991b: 180-181). Is this something more than Hamilton's (1971)
"selfish herd"? This intriguing but controversial proposal,
put forward by a scientist well known for provocative ideas that have
inspired the careers of innumerable cetacean biologists, awaits its
turn for further scientific scrutiny." _______________________________ Howl Bloom: look at Bily Joel, Paul Simon Howl Bloom: Stephen Spielberg Blessed Corvus: Spielberg is famous largely because of his money, not by himself. Howl Bloom: Jews are excluded from a lot of things--unofficially kept out of the boardrooms of major corporations Blessed Corvus: That's news to me Howl Bloom: excluded from George Bush's cabinet Howl Bloom: but we flourish in the areas the gentiles don't care about Howl Bloom: entertainment Howl Bloom: intellectual stuff--Noam Chomsky is a big name Blessed Corvus: Who is he Howl Bloom: and has more than a small share of adulation and fame Howl Bloom: a linguist whose political stance had made him famous for about three decades Blessed Corvus: What was he about? Howl Bloom: and whose theories of language are basic--stuff every intellectual--which means you, Corv Howl Bloom: has to know Howl Bloom: start by going to the Encyclopedia Britannica and looking him up when we finish, ok? Blessed Corvus: I've his name down Howl Bloom: Chomsky says that language is built into our brains Howl Bloom: good girl, Corv, I like you a great deal Howl Bloom: built in in what he calls "deep structures" Howl Bloom: which is why every language there is is built on an identical structural pattern Howl Bloom: because that pattern has been hammered into our brain Howl Bloom: now we go beyond Chomsky Howl Bloom: Chomsky never says how the deep structures got there Howl Bloom: Evolution held the hammer and tap tap tapped them into us Howl Bloom: over eons of time Blessed Corvus: mmhmmm ::still here:: Howl Bloom: because language was a tool which helped those who had it survive Howl Bloom: so those who had it stuck around long enough to have kids and take care of them Howl Bloom: they flourished not just because language helped them eat well, make good housing, and cooperate in ways Howl Bloom: those without language could not Howl Bloom: cooperate to overlap their strengths and fill in each others weaknesses Howl Bloom: and make of a multitud a public brain Howl Bloom: a mass learning machine Howl Bloom: just like the many you and I are parts of Blessed Corvus: <found his bio> Howl Bloom: a HA Howl Bloom: good girl, excellent pupil Howl Bloom: how in the world did you find me? Blessed Corvus: My luck, I s'pose Howl Bloom: this is a bit beyond serendiptity, don't you think? Blessed Corvus: You've taught me things that I liked. Howl Bloom: and you've asked questions and given me aphorism of great strength and....Corv...wisdom Blessed Corvus: You learn as you teach Howl Bloom: I enjoy the questions enormously Howl Bloom: yes Howl Bloom: you help me express things I wouldn't otherwise take the time to write down Howl Bloom: ok, Corv, you and I have a project I want you to take on with me Howl Bloom: spinner dolphins act as a mass mind Blessed Corvus: Hmm what manner of project ::suspicious:: Howl Bloom: hang on while i get you the quote I plucked the other day Howl Bloom: don't be suspicious, Corv, you know me well enought to realize i am well intentioned Howl Bloom: lemme get the quote Howl Bloom: hang on, ok? Blessed Corvus: Hanging, swinging. Howl Bloom: I just sent you an email with a posting I sent to my group a few days ago Howl Bloom: it's on the fact that spinner dolphins are a part of something much larger than themselves Howl Bloom: they are modules in a mass mind Howl Bloom: with its own mass identity Howl Bloom: just as you and I are, which is why people are so dumb Blessed Corvus: What sparks your interest in the mass mind Howl Bloom: because each has a bit of knowledge others don't Howl Bloom: but add up our stupidities Howl Bloom: jigsaw them together in a social structure of the right kind Howl Bloom: and voila Howl Bloom: you have got yourself more than just stupidity Howl Bloom: you have the wisdom the invisible hand, of the mass mind Howl Bloom: my interest in the mass mind, a long story Howl Bloom: very long Howl Bloom: with lots of adventures along the way Howl Bloom: which means I either must find something I've written in the past which explains it Howl Bloom: or save the answer for another day Blessed Corvus: I read this, but I will reread it a few times later on, to fully understand. Howl Bloom: Lord, Corv, my girlfiend didn't call before she went to sleep, I love Howl Bloom: to put her to sleep by just talking to her Blessed Corvus: A pleasant feeling, if you can do that Howl Bloom: apparently I am very good at it Blessed Corvus: She must like you, then. Howl Bloom: her parents couldn't understand why I don't have a radio show because Howl Bloom: apparently I have a rich voice Howl Bloom: it sounds nasal to me Howl Bloom: but not to others it would seem Howl Bloom: Corv, thanks for saying that, it warms me Howl Bloom: that the fact that my voice makes her feel good means she likes me Howl Bloom: she let me talk her into babiness for 45 minutes tonight Howl Bloom: to talk her into softness and warmth Howl Bloom: to talk her into coziness Howl Bloom: it felt SOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO good Howl Bloom: I love her Corv Howl Bloom: what would you define as the difference between love and lust? Blessed Corvus: Hm. Howl Bloom: you differentiated the two last night...hmmm...I'm Blessed Corvus: Lust is animalistic, love is human because it's calculatingly selfish. Howl Bloom: about to lose the train of thought on spinner dolphins Blessed Corvus: spinner dolphins swam away =P Howl Bloom: Corv, you are remarkable, you literally amaze me and I love to be amazed Blessed Corvus: I smile at your words. Howl Bloom: tell me more about calculating selfishness Howl Bloom: then I will see if you'd like to help me with something Blessed Corvus: Love is selfish because it makes you feel noble and hence superior. Howl Bloom: hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm, try this Blessed Corvus: You're noble because you're a protector - which also makes you strong, in your eyes. Blessed Corvus: Try what? Howl Bloom: in every solid and lasting love relationship Howl Bloom: each partner must be able to be two people Howl Bloom: a child Howl Bloom: and a parent Howl Bloom: if you and I were in love you would have to have the ability to mother me and Howl Bloom: to soften and let the child in you out so I could protect and love and father it Blessed Corvus: Hm. Alright. That's our given. Blessed Corvus: Eh, I meant that I follow you so far =) Howl Bloom: you would have to have the comfort of knowing that I was strong and could nest you, as I nest Casey, my cherished and beloved (I'm not kidding) girlfriend Howl Bloom: and when I grew weak, which would happen several times a day Howl Bloom: I would have to know that you could do the same for me Howl Bloom: eventually a fifth entity would grow up between us Howl Bloom: a joint personality Howl Bloom: a small mass mind of a very intimate kind Howl Bloom: a personality which was neither you nor me, but an intersect, an overlap, a linkage of what we make together Howl Bloom: like separate notes making a chord Howl Bloom: of music Howl Bloom: like separate musicians playing together in a dixieland band Howl Bloom: who give that band a character all its own if the musicians are creative Blessed Corvus: Mmhm. Still following. Howl Bloom: or who give the band a dull and shopworn identity if the musicians are hackneyed and cliched Howl Bloom: but an group identity which transcends the individuals who make up its corpuscles Howl Bloom: one of those would grow up in a year or two or three Howl Bloom: between you the mother, you the child, and me the father and the me of infancy Howl Bloom: so there would be five of us in this joint mind Howl Bloom: father, mother, girlchild, manchild, extended self or joint identity Howl Bloom: a superorganismic entity Blessed Corvus: a pentagram Howl Bloom: that is the group self the dolphins also create through the way Howl Bloom: in which they inter relate Howl Bloom: I call it a quinity Howl Bloom: like a trinity, but with five members instead of three Blessed Corvus: I follow, I follow =) Howl Bloom: god the father, god the son, god the holy mother, god the girlchild Miriam Howl Bloom: and the holy spirit which flickers from them like a flame whisking transcendally over a burning quartet of charcoal briquets Howl Bloom: transcendentally Howl Bloom: now want to hear what I propose we do? Blessed Corvus: Mmhmm, let's hear it Howl Bloom: that quote on the dolphins, it has several names associated with it--cited in it Howl Bloom: of the researchers who arrived at this notion of an extended or group identity Howl Bloom: I want to find their email addresses and whatever papers they have online Howl Bloom: and learn more about their findings Howl Bloom: but I haven't had the time to slake my curiosity, I've been incredibly swamped and busy Blessed Corvus: Mmhmm....? Howl Bloom: so I wonder if you'd like to help me prowl the web and find out more about these guys and their ideas of dolphin holy ghosts, dolphin extended entity Howl Bloom: the flame of group soul among the mammals of the sea Blessed Corvus: I haven't much free time that isn't used somehow. Blessed Corvus: allotted, rather. Howl Bloom: any interest or time to paricipate? Howl Bloom: moi aussi, chere mademoiselle Howl Bloom: it was just a thought, it might be exciting or it might be frustrating because Howl Bloom: I'd have a hard time finding the spare minutes in which to read what you might turn up Howl Bloom: well then Howl Bloom: let's just stick to questions, answers, and interchange of ideas, ok? Blessed Corvus: That seems fair, friend Howl =) Blessed Corvus: And seems to have worked Howl Bloom: yes, very well, dear Corvus Howl Bloom: ok, let me go for the night and wish me well as I will wish you pleasant dreams, a good sleep, Howl Bloom: and the exhilaration which helps a seeker of knowledge soar Howl Bloom: quothe that corvid bird the raven, may your brain find wisdom evernore Howl Bloom: evermore Blessed Corvus: I hope I'll never lose that exhiliration. It's been responsible for a good deal of my accomplishments =) Blessed Corvus: You're going back to the emails and research, then, hm? Howl Bloom: you shall tell me of them some day, ok? Howl Bloom: and of your romances, those are important learning experiences, Corv Howl Bloom: I like to help people overcome romantic difficulties, it teaches me huge amounts of things Blessed Corvus: Of the dreams? I will. Last night, for instance, I dreamt of a house with someone hostile, and I descended into the basement, and there were some frightened people there, and I found melee weapons, and I was sporting them as I explored it. It seemed to havebeen carved of stone. Howl Bloom: about the basic nature we share as human beings Howl Bloom: wow Howl Bloom: I wnat to hear of your accomplishments and your romances, but what are melee weapons, this is a vivid dream, I Howl Bloom: can see it, Corv, I can see it literally Blessed Corvus: You know what's melee.. In partifular, I had a.. like a curved quarterstaff, but I dont know why it was curved, and I had two sabers on me. The general hue was light gray. Howl Bloom: wow this is weird, I 've been seeing the dreams of my girlfriend more vividly than my own and now I see that basement, I see that upper story, I see that menace in the shadows of the upstairs hallway Howl Bloom: amazing Howl Bloom: there is an article I've wanted to recommend to you on the origins of war Blessed Corvus: Oooh! Howl Bloom: go to my website's page on Jericho Blessed Corvus: Gimme! Howl Bloom: if I recall correctly, at the bottom of the page is a list of other resources on Jericho Howl Bloom: which was not only the first city to exist Howl Bloom: but the first to be protected by a wall...by fortifications of stone Howl Bloom: you'll see a history of war there Howl Bloom: though that might not be what it's called Blessed Corvus: Hmm.. lemme find it again.. Howl Bloom: use the hyperlink and it will take ou wher you need to go Howl Bloom: howardbloom.net Blessed Corvus: Eh, this is a different page from the black background page. Blessed Corvus: oic Howl Bloom: yes, there are 25 pages on the website Blessed Corvus: there we go Howl Bloom: and hundreds of hyperlinks...GREAT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Howl Bloom: see? I am not such a ghastly guru, am I? (he says, needing reassurance, as we all do but are taught not to confess) Blessed Corvus: between 11,000 and 10,0000 years ago. Blessed Corvus: fix that up Howl Bloom: yes Blessed Corvus: Not too ghastly =) Howl Bloom: hmmmm, I can't do it now, my registers have overflowed, I'm running close to 20 programs simultaneously Blessed Corvus: That bas relief was in Jericho? Cant be! Howl Bloom: my computer's in danger of blowing its brains out and losing tons of stuff I haven't had time to store Blessed Corvus: This is bronze-age work! Howl Bloom: yes, but it's an artist's imagining the scene Howl Bloom: nope not bronze age Howl Bloom: roughly 1450 ad Italy Blessed Corvus: Ahh huh Howl Bloom: from a church door Blessed Corvus: See, I read that later on Blessed Corvus: 15th century about Jericho. Not originating there.. I was gonna say =P Howl Bloom: one panel depicting Joshua crossing the Jordan river to storm Jericho Howl Bloom: yup, you got it, wise one Blessed Corvus: Funny thing.. Blessed Corvus: I printed that textfile before Blessed Corvus: a few days back. yesterday? two days? Howl Bloom: which file? Howl Bloom: the history of war? Blessed Corvus: the neolithic warfare one Howl Bloom: it's broadly disseminated on the web Howl Bloom: appears in about five locations full and intact Blessed Corvus: Mmhmm.. It's.. it's good. I had an index of history of warfare, pre-bronze age Howl Bloom: a HA Blessed Corvus: I have it somewhere, still Blessed Corvus: I've too many saved pages, in my 'favorites'. Blessed Corvus: I never clean it.. Howl Bloom: well if you find any info on paleolithc or pre-paleolithic warfare, by all means let me know Howl Bloom: hmmmmmm, Corv Blessed Corvus: Hmmm, friend Howl? Howl Bloom: you can categorize your bookmarks Blessed Corvus: I know =) Howl Bloom: and turn them into a functioning library Blessed Corvus: But it's time-consuming. Howl Bloom: it's worth it Howl Bloom: I wonder if I should, or even could, send you my bookmark file Blessed Corvus: I should invest twenty minutes into it. Howl Bloom: it has thousands of things all categorized Blessed Corvus: For real! Howl Bloom: yes, please do Blessed Corvus: Lemme see how to do that Howl Bloom: ok, I will try, no guarantees, but I will do it right now Howl Bloom: then I have to eat and sleep Blessed Corvus: windows\favorites Blessed Corvus: That folder Howl Bloom: see you tomorrow in all probability, ok? Howl Bloom: no Blessed Corvus: Most likely. Howl Bloom: use a browser Howl Bloom: use Netscape if you can Blessed Corvus: No, Im saying that that's where the favorites are stored, for MS. Blessed Corvus: err for MSIE Blessed Corvus: Do you use netscape or IE Howl Bloom: Netscape 4.7 Howl Bloom: it's easier to organize the bookmarks, which are useless if not categorized Howl Bloom: and it's much faster than IE Howl Bloom: much Howl Bloom: hugely much Howl Bloom: dear Corv, please toss me a smile and send me off to shut down the day's work or I shan't get to bed until three am Howl Bloom: ok? _______________________________ In a message dated 97?07?17 16:10:46 EDT, Peter Frost writes: << Would you, however,
have put up Peter??If the billboard is a gaudy tail or beak, numerous studies indicate that it decreases your: 1) ability to access food; and 2) your possibility of eluding predators. Your personal payoff may be that you get to reproduce far more than others do. On the downside, you've upped your odds that you'll never get to reproduce at all. Studies also indicate that detail work on glitzy features are good indicators of low parasitism, high intelligence and vigor. But does the slim possibility of hitting a jackpot really compensate for all the risks? Remember, the contending show?offs generally belong to highly polygynous species. The chances are (I am guesstimating here) that roughly 80% of males will never get to mate. I suspect that Amot Zahavi's handicap principle indicates the personal liability outweighs the benefit. Try this on for size. Members of a group are extended phenotypes of each other. The group itself, with its numerous advantages, is an extended phenotype. Males are extensions females use to test out genes. The more rigorous the obstacle course through which the males are forced, the greater the advantage to the female. Genes unlikely to generate reproducing progeny will be weeded out. The advantage to the males is questionable indeed. The male fulfills his role through his expendability. Gaudy birds are common in the equatorial zone, but far less so in the colder north. Here females can't afford to sort their males in such a destructive way. They need a male to help provide their brood with food. Hence as an instrument of the female, the best male is one who is not only smart, strong, and parasite free, but who is sufficiently camouflaged to live out the season and consistently bring home the groceries. Though the tropical male's neon eat?me sign is advertising indeed, it is an aid not to its possessor, but to the opposite gender. Howard _______________________________ a social superorganism or social group is what Richard Dawkins calls an "extended phenotype." (for extended phenotype see The ant and the peacock : altruism and sexual selection from Darwin to today / Helena Cronin; Richard Dawkins, The Extended Phenotype, 1982). Those genes do best which code for the greatest agility of the social group or of its most potent defense. Agility to take advantage of opportunity. Defense to fend off attacking animals, insidious plants (there are quite a few), and disasters like parched or frozen earth which whisk all source of food away. Hence those genes have the edge which build their immediate phenotypes--the individuals with whom they reside--to function as components of the most powerful forms of coordinated group activity. For example, Helena Cronin
(roughly p. 63?) goes to great length to trot out the tortuous explanations
proposed by individual selectionists for a snail the members of whose
species live within the same micro-environment, yet which vary in tiny
details of exterior decor--a yellow stripe on one, a black stripe on
another, many stripes on a few, almost no streaks on their counterparts,
colors ranging from pinks to grays. She settles on the idea that within
the seemingly uniform evironment there are micro-niches too subtle for
most naturalists, with their human size, to notice, but whose shifts
make all the difference to the snails themselves ("Put yourself
in the shell of the snail" to see these alterations, said Alfred
Wallace, to whom Cronin gives more credit for his evolutionary contributions
that most others do). Indeed, snails whose patterns are drab and uniform
do far better on smooth turf at evading birds who enjoy a good escargot.
Snails more garish in their "paint jobs" outdo than their
plainer conspecifics in brush and tangled foliage. Snails with light
coloring do better in the sun. Those who are dark do better in the shade.
However, could there be a group-oriented explanation for this variation,
as well as those which Cronin has ennumerated? Fish swim in a school
and change direction in synchrony with amazing rapidity to present the
illusion of a shimmering mylar sheet, a shifting surface of reflective
confusion woven from many swimmers of small size. Cronin mentions that
the birds who feed on snails have more problems recognizing an object
of their prey if each morsel is done up very differently. In which case,
each snail may be an extended phenotype of its neighbors. The more variation,
the later in life a bird might learn to sort its way through the profusion.
As a multitude, the snails offer a hard-to-comprehend commotion of form
and color to potential diners who would prefer to find their catch with
far greater ease. Raucous aberration may be a way for a group of snails
to overload their enemy's food-locating brains. To what extent do those who subject themselves to such a dangerous gamble contribute to "kin selection"? To what extent are they serving genes as close as possible to their own? Less than modern theory insists. But more than not at all. To mate with a nearly identical relative would court disaster for the larger genotype, producing qrotesqueries which would doom the entire genetic team further down the line. No gene can afford to be totally selfish under these circumstances. (Unless we except the "junk genes" which theory proposes tentatively are inconspicuous free riders.) The animals we know use odor--MHCs--to assure that they are NOT choosing a mate who is close to being their genetic twin. The genome chain behind this piece of clockwork in which individuals are merely gears and pinions is more than prepared to sacrifice individual links, individual genes. Genes which contrive to survive despite the rigors of the larger system are the cheaters who will sink the team entirely. They cannot survive if they take down the genomic crew which sustains them. They must be "willing" to undergo their sacrifice to achieve the haven of a home. No gene can live alone. So the competition between genomes is a never ending tournament between troops of interconnected genes. These genetic squadrons, in turn, create competing phenotypic social ensembles in which individual members play interlocking roles, some of them occasionally suicidal. Genomes do watch out for similarity. They will mate only with genomes within their own species. But the near identicality which Hamilton and the individual selectionists postulate simply isn't found even in the infamous archetypal example--the hive of sister bees. Even in this communistic group, the female contesting for procreation leaves her relatives at mating time, risks her life (very few would-be queens survive), consorts with unrelated males who've travelled quite a distance for a sexual ritual which will end their lives completely, gathers the sperm of six or seven frantically competing lovers, and, if she is lucky--for she's a genomic gamble too--survives to give birth to a group of offspring who carry a wild mixture of genes. The concepts of the selfish
gene and its cousin, kin selection, are extremely useful. But they are
necessary stepping stones to something which must be far broader if
it hopes to fit reality. They set a necessary stage. But now let's have
the play. _______________________________ IF If you can keep your
head when all If you can dream--and
not make If you can make one heap
of all your If you can talk with
crowds and keep Stirring, eh? Kipling has hit many of our hierarchical instincts smack on the head. he's put in words the displays of magnificence, calm, control, strength, and confidence male chimps use when facing off against each other for dominance. However once the display is over, the chimps amble ever so majestically out of the chimp equivalent of an arena into the bush, hide themselves behind a rock, look to make sure that no one, but absolutely no one, can see them, then allow their faces to show all the emotions they'd suppressed while strutting regally before their rival and their audience. their lips fly up in a grimace of sheer terror. Frans de Waal has actually seen these hidden masters of all circumstance try to tug their lips down to regain some semblance of normalcy. but the terror is too great. fingers aren't strong enough to overcome cheek muscles powered by the need to express fear. OK, that's the mask. It is based on showing utter self sufficiency. Now for Shakespeare's words about the innermost reality: When, In Disgrace With Fortune and Men's Eyes by William Shakespeare (1564-1616) When, in disgrace with
fortune and men's eyes, Shakespeare's hero is
utterly dependent on the way he's seen in other men's eyes. In fact,
he lives and breathes the necessity of being seen, and of being regarded
positively. The chimp, too, accidentally revealed how much he relies
on the judgement of others when he went behind the rock and triple-checked
to make sure not a soul would see his outburst of emotionality. His
self-sufficient demeanor of a moment ago was a sham aimed, ironically,
to give him the fuel of others' admiration. How can a beast be self-sufficient
if he needs the respect of others so badly? Nando nailed it magnificently.
_______________________________ Aa: To me, that poem is
about knowing what matters. I have a friend (sort of an adopted <<
dad) who's 76, and he finally, finally understands what's important
in life. It's a beautiful thing to see. He gave me the most profound
hug I've ever had. His life has been so full and he is so feeling and
so in intimate touch with himself that he can really connect with other
people in a way most people can't. (I digress...as usual.) >>
hb: it's not a digression--an empathic understanding of others via a
deep, emotional and intuitive understanding of oneself is key to having
a life that makes a contribution to others. and contributing to others
in a way they recognize gives us confidence and energy. It does so by
telling us we are truly needed. That need is the social food on which
we live. aa: ..maybe not in the
moment...but eventually. Probably. This isn't the reason to behave in
a certain way...but there usually a "reward" of some kind
that comes from it -- although one that shouldn't be strived for. hb:
here's where the irony, and perhaps a refutation of my theory, comes
in. experiments have shown that when you ask kids to draw something
creative they often will. on the other hand, if you offer them a dollar
to draw something creative, they will, indeed, draw something. but it
won't be the least bit creative. it will be as conventional as can be.
let me propose an interpretation of this finding derived from the "Bloom
Extrasomatory Extensions of the Self Hypothesis." we will work
our tails off, and even soar imaginatively when we are performing not
only for the audience inside our selves, but for a muse we know will
see our work. without the muse--a person who wants what we have to offer--I
can tell you as a writer, the words simply do not flow. i can also tell
you as a graphic artist that when no one is excited about my surrealistic
photography, I'll go for months without shooting one picture. when there
IS someone with enthusiasm out there begging for my work, i will literally
shoot 30 photos a day. I need the muse, the person outside of myself
who guarantees me attention, to make whatever's inside me come to life.
aa: The point is to live well (by that, I mean being a good person,
making a difference, etc) not to live for the reward, which is the by-product.
hb: I agree with you whole heartedly. However if my interpretions is
right, living to be a good person for its own sake is actually living,
as you said, to win the praise and riveted gaze of others somewhere
down the line. Or, better yet, to get the powerful blaze of attention
and gratitude that comes when we are working like hell--preferably for
no money--to save someone from pain...or even to carry them over an
insuperable obstacle, like the snow that trapped my friend's elderly
woman's car. hb: friggin' MARVELOUS.
Their children were raised by the whole band, so it didn't much matter
who went behind the bushes with whom. But, once people turned agricultural,
there were carrot patches and SUMC's (Sport Utility Mule Carts) to pass
down. "[Upon] the chastity of women," observed Samuel Johnson
in the 1700's, "all property in the world depends." In support
of the (soup) stock market, religion and culture became chastity cheerleaders,
and eventually, men also got swept up in all the un-fun. The economic
reasons for virginity crumbled with the invention of reliable birth
control and DNA testing, but religion and culture refuse to uncross
their legs. Unfortunately, with marriage happening later and later these
days, some find themselves clinging by their fingernails to the virginity
bandwagon well into their thirties. Not a good thing. Frankly, if more
people had more sex, there would probably be less road rage. hb: Amy,
have you ever thought of writing a book? Have you already written a
book? If you want, we could try to develop something for the New Paradigm
book series I executive edit (it's a part of the International Paleopsychology
Project). Or we might simply work on getting it published without the
New Paradigm imprimatur--since that's reserved for highly accessible,
terrifically written (you qualify on both those counts hands down) books
presenting very new ways of looking at things. One way or the other,
let's talk Alkon books! Getting back to your hands-free friend: I'm
no virginity expert (please, no hooting), but it's unlikely that this
guy is simply waiting 'til the "I do's" are done to start
swinging naked from the chandelier. Express interest in hearing his
views, listen, then tell him how you feel. You might squeeze the occasional
handshake out of him...in the privacy of his home. Just don't count
on staying up all night thumb-wrestling. The most important question
is one you should ask yourself: As a woman who considers herself "very
sexual," how compatible are you, ultimately, with a guy who considers
his palm one of his "privates"? hb: this is terrific. but
here's where the bloom theory of attention as the oxygen of the soul
comes in. it sounds like this guy is avoiding more than sex. i'd bet
he's averting his gaze far too often and turning his back when the two
are in bed. the real deal is not the interpenetration of private parts,
it's the intepernetration of powerful, warm, emotional attention. how
about hugs? those are important too. remember Harry Harlow's experiments?
baby monkeys preferred a terry-cloth-covered articial mother to one
who fed them milk, but wasn't the least bit fuzzy (she was made of chicken
wire). We need not just the attention of the eyes, but the attention
of the hands and arms and skin. Body warmth pressed against us fills
our empty attentional fuel tanks magnificently. AA: I think you can love yourself without being loved by others -- it isn't easy. But if you rely on the approbation of others, it isn't "self" worth -- it's "other people like me" worth. What's hardest is doing what you think is right when nobody else agrees with you. You can't do this without a strong self. HB<<is there ever such a thing as a person without a self?>> AA: There is a person with an extremely diminished self. Or maybe the self includes crumb-sized self-worth. AA: re: bootstraps -- I do think we're designed to be cooperative creatures. We lack perspective on our own. Is this "design"? hb: bloom sez yes--or it's evolution. let me see if I can quickly haul something out of the hard drive on this...unless, of course, I've done this in a previous letter--I have the memory of vaporized mothball. Well, here comes, raw notes complete with misspellings and all kinds of embarrassing slips-- When we get wonked, bonked, roiled, and boiled by powerfulfeelings--whether they are delightful or nightmarish--a strange thinghappens. We often don't know what tomake of them. Our logical mind has ahard time seeing into the swirl of our visceral passions and making sense ofthem. When we probe the whirl within uswe can posit numerous possibilities. But this guessing is often the best that we can do. What's more, our internal monsoons oftenpelt us with unbearable gales of emotionality. So how do we solve our confusion? We look for someone else to talk to. We babble out our situation to a friend, a relative, a mentor, abartender, or a shrink and beg him or her to tell us what s/he makes ofit. Then, through the words of someoneoutside our self what's going on inside of us gains a little clarity. Now this is very peculiar. Very peculiar indeed. Thetalking self in the left cerebral cortex may be mere inches from the "seatof feeling"--the place (or upper traces of a far-flung hurricane) wherethe basic emotions are doing their thing. Why can't our thinking self see what's happening right under itsnose--or mere millimeters from its dendritic threads? The answer may lie in the evolution of emotion and theself--or so the theory of the extrasomatory extensions of the self says. We evolved not just as individuals, but asmembers of groups whose competition was often a matter of life and death. Those of us who acted as productive plug-insto a group's machinery were likely to survive--and to produce lots ofoffspring. Rugged individualists who refused to become components in a group'sIQ would have had it rough when pitted against a horde of thewell-organized. Some of them would haveliterally been eaten (given the recent evidence on early hominidcannibalism). At the very least, theywould have lost their wives. No mating,no procreating. So the line of lonerswould have soon ceased to be. In ants, a worker's nervous system is wired as a strand in ahive-wide circuitry. The need to connectshows up in the worker's equivalents of gregariousness and uncertainty. She wanders a small distance from the pack,then grows uneasy and feels the need to hurry back. Once she's gotten reassurance from her "friends" shewanders off and explores a bit of far flung territory again. Each time she does a bit of sightseeing shespreads the group's search web--the net of eyes and antennae the hive sends outto hunt for food. Each time thewandering worker returns for the hymenopteran equivalent of tea and sympathyshe inadvertently brings back a report on a bit of previously unchartedterritory. We humans seem to be rigged in similar ways--our psychedrives us to be neurons of a collective brain. To the group it's often less important that we understand our innardsthan that our innards drive us to synapse with others, and to make ourcontribution to the data pool of society. So when we encounter something that troubles or uplifts us, we aredriven both to introspection and to the comfort we can find in sharing ourfears, our furies, and our joys with the company of friends. To them we give reports on the strangeterritories we've explored--realms which range from romance to finance, frommadness to meaning, from pathos to punch lines, and a good deal inbetween. In return our friends give usthe words and concepts with which to interpret our moods. Every time we're driven back to others for a "realitycheck"; we're tuned to interpret our experience using the acceptable formsof expression of the moment. We'replugged into our group's zeitgeist. Andevery time we return to babble our half-digested angsts or triumphs, we expand,even if by only the slightest bit, the ambit of the group's understanding ofits circumstance--its view of its internal and external realities. Self didn't, in all probability evolve as just a way ofnavigating the private paths of solitary life. It seems to be a social billboard and a social interface. Ted Coons, one of our group members,pictures it as a model human inside of us standing in an arena where his or herevery actions are observed by an audience of significant others, the innerrepresentations of our friends and family. The self is also judged by an observer of even greater importance,ourselves, our basic "me." With this model human, this puppet "us" homunculus, we try outthe various ways in which we should dress in the morning, the speeches we coulduse to present an idea, a feeling, a demand, or a request. We see how the model audience would react toeach form of presentation, and most of all how we'd respond to it. If it seems witty, delicious, or appropriateto circumstance it's sent out for implementation by the body and the tongue. If it seems obnoxious it simply disappears. Which means the self may not have evolved as a bridge to ourinterior. It probably evolved as acauseway to the folks with whom we live. A pathway which connects us even tothose with whom we interact but whom we'll never see--the bosses far above ourhead, the farmers who produce our food, the construction crews who built ourhome and the carpenters who built our bed. These ruminations spring from a bit of reading in GeorgeStephanopoulos' "All Too Human: A Political Education." I've reached that part of the book in whichStephanopoulos gets the job of key political adviser to Bill Clinton. Clinton, at this point, is governor ofArkansas and one of many candidates about to run the gauntlet of the primaryelections for president. Bill walksthrough his bedroom and his hallways, taking off his pants, changing intoothers, picking up papers from his night table, constantly spurting ideas, andlooking insistently for new solutions and new ways to bathe in the feedback ofthose around him. Stephanopoulosfollows him through his soliloquies in mid-pants-change and the moment a bitlater when Hilary enters the room and both Bill and Hil are dialoging at fullspeed, bouncing Bills concepts and Hilary's analyses off of Stephanopoulos,looking for his feedback. ButStephanopoulos is not Bill and Hilary's only extracranial extension of theself. Bill frequently asks, "Whatideas do our friends in New York have on this? Are there any new ways of handling this coming in from that group inCalifornia we've been talking to? Whatdo the polls say ithe public mood thinks about this issue right now?" From the mix of incoming signals, BillClinton arrives at a conclusion which he can say with full conviction is his. In fact, his self-confidence and the passionwith which he conveys his beliefs, says Stephanopoulos, puts him head andshoulders above any other candidates whom this well-placed political operativehas ever met. Equally important,Clinton absorbs each audience to which he speaks and adjusts the way he putsthings to make his stump speech intimately personal. He is compelling because he believes in what he says but says itin a way that shows how quickly he's plugged into his audience. So the number of contributors to Clinton's "self"is immense. Stephanopoulos is just oneof many advisors. He and those like himare considered staff--and that staff is large. Then there are the old and trusted friends, the ones with whom the bondsgo back in time. These are the FOB, theFriends of Bill. Clinton grills thesepeople constantly, not only for their opinions, but for input they've gleanedfrom sources spread in nearly every state. If a key FOB like Webster Hubble nixes an idea then it's understood theidea is kaput. This form of reliance on others is occasionally derided asan overdependence on polls. And it canclearly get that way when the candidate is a pale puppet who parrots thepopular thoughts of the day. But in arepresentative government, the self of a candidate is SUPPOSED to representthat of the populace he is elected to serve. In that sense, there is a justification to Louis XIV's pronouncementthat "L'etat cest moi." "The state is me." Or,to put it in democratic terms, "I, the candidate, am myconstituency." Who in this case, is an extrasomatory extension of whom? Bill Clinton is a walking summation of thosearound him--much more so than the average man in the street who doesn't havethe team of social input purveyors available to a politician. He is an extrasomatory extension of thepublic personality. Those from whom hesucks opinions are, in turn, extrasomatory extensions of him--vital feelersfeeding his identity. What, under thesecircumstances, gives a public figure the appearance of having a strong sense ofself--the kind of thing McCain had in spades? Is it sheer self-confidence, despite the contributions from othersof which the self is made? Ischarisma a matter of postural and facial cues--those of an alpha leader, a silverback--anupright walk and masterful talk? Is itthen the flimsiest of masks, but one of great persuasive strength? Where do others stop and we begin? Why is the self so calmed by the others and so often jolted bythe incoherent feelings from within? Howard _______________________________ . Turbulent emotion tends to be something that confuses us a greatdeal. We are not sure how to interpretit, as the experiments of Schachter, and Singer (Cognitive, social andphysiological determinants of emotional state. Psychologicalreview, 1962, 69, 379-99) indicated. In this classicstudy, Schachter and Singer injected their subjects with adrenaline. Up went heart rates and alertness, sweatypalms, and other indications that the adrenaline was doing its thing. But it took social input for the subjects tointerpret what they were feeling. If ashill in the group got angry and stomped out of the room, many of the othersexcited by adrenaline took his cue and interpreted their chemically-causedarousal as anger. If there was no shillthrowing a tantrum, the sujects stayed calm. How confused they might have been by their symptoms wasn'treported. In real life we're often hit by a powerful emotion,disturbed or elated by it, and run off to others to discuss it, get reassuranceabout it, and find out how to interpret it. So strong emotions which roil us often send us running to others. Which means that emotions of this sort callus to use the social system as an extra-cranial extension of mind. The limbic/visceral emotions hit us withvarious forms of uncertainty or needs to share and to get the equivalent of thehugs an agitated chimp seeks out. Wetake the feedback we get and use it to formulate an explanation for our emotionin the verbal brain. Which means thatin many cases the limbic system uses conversations with friends to feed itssignals back into the left brain interpreter--our logical, verbal self. This is reminiscent of Kurt Goldstein's patient Scheider,who had taken a bullet to the back of the head, suffered damage to parietallobes apparently responsible for passing information from the right to the leftbrain, and whose non-conscious mind compensated by setting up an elaborate hand signalling system of whichSchneider himself was virtually unaware. Goldstein discovered this outer path from one brain area to another bytying Schneider's hands to his sides. When his hands were free, Schneider could read a document out loud. With his hands tied, he couldn't. The material his right brain was readingcouldn't make it to the left brain where it would have been turned into spokenwords. Again, Schneider was totallyunaware of the hand signals worked out by parts of his brain which hadn'tbother announcing their innovations to his consciousness. The number of outside loops one part of the brain uses to communicate with another isamazing. And it's equally amazing howthese extracranial trunk lines of the mind plug us into the larger informationprocessing apparatus of the group. Howard aa: Perhaps. Whenever you're too close to anything, it's hard to see. The thing you are closest to -- yourself -- is sometimes impossible to see. This is why I have perspective on other people's lives, but it's harder to have it on my own -- sometimes impossible. Maybe you feel the same. hb: absolutely. or did I say that? HB <<To be "the master of my fate" and the "captain of my soul" we DO need to hide most of our pain. Why? So we don't give off social repulsion cues and drive others away. Cries of despair are very unattractive. In fact, most find them impossible to bear. >> AA: Agree. Full disclosure has a high price. I think people look at exposed pain as something they could "catch," like a disease. They run from it. hb: I have theories about why they do--why the need to flee a person in pain and confusion has triumphed as an evolutionary strategy. HB: <<Validation from others is an irreplaceable necessity. Which leads to something else I've been working on, the manner in which attention is our oxygen, the mothers' milk of daily life. With it we thrive. >> I think love is the greatest form of validation. Also the highest form of attention. hb: very well put. HB: <<When we help others, we know more profoundly than in most other ways that they need us. >> AA: Yet another way of being connected. But also, I think helping someone is a way of spreading your values -- almost like spreading your genes, except that there's no biology involved. It's an extension of self...in passing along what the spreader finds good and beautiful...essentially recreating the world in your image in a small way. hb: three cheers, a few dozen huzzahs and a hip hip hooray. my sediments exactly. aa: I think there's love of self to be gained as the reward for behaving well. So there is an audience, but maybe the audience is just you. hb: just you turns out to be a crowd you've swallowed whole at key points in your life. finding your soul--your most passionate self--is a matter of finding those key moments in which the crowd took root in you. aa: That's why people do good works that nobody knows about -- it's assertion of self for self. Knowledge that you made the world a better place...in your own image (that being the compilation of what you think is good and right). Doing what you can to diminish or eliminate someone else's suffering is part of this. hb: no question--replication began at the beginning of this universe and has been going on ever since. Gene teams ain't the only selfish replicators. We humans do want to remake the world in our own image--and in the process get everyone we know to parrot our opinions and feel the ways we feel. Or maybe we want them to feel the way we idealize our selves as feeling. One way or the other, we want to put our stamp on others indelibly--to rivet their attention by holding it eternally in a form that apes us. the irony is we've ingested this self from others. us is them and they are we and we are one and we are not together. HB: <<Virtue is anything but its own reward. It is a way of persuading others to admire us.>> AA: Concur. But virtue isn't always immediately admired...and by not immediately, I mean sometimes not in one's lifetime. So I think the above is a big part of it too. hb: i cry internally for Van Gogh, whose visions weren't recognized until after he'd died. an audience of internal others called the self was not enough to keep the man alive. HB: <<how about hugs? those are important too. remember Harry Harlow's experiments? baby monkeys preferred a terry-cloth-covered articial mother to one who fed them milk, but wasn't the least bit fuzzy (she was made of chicken wire). We need not just the attention of the eyes, but the attention of the hands and arms and skin. Body warmth pressed against us fills our empty attentional fuel tanks magnificently.>> aa: It seems to me that humans have a biological need -- a physical yearning to be touched. hb: agreed. there's a magic to a skin-like surface heated to 98.6 degrees. aa: The evolutionary reasons behind this are pretty easy to leap to -- first, protection against the elements, but also promotion of procreation |
