Please click on the following link to read recent posts for the blog:
"Tyranny of the Prefrontal Cortex" blog.
Also, you may be interested in the companion blog, Finding the Li, which explores how we can overcome the "tyranny" of the prefrontal cortex to move towards a "democracy of consciousness."
Thanks for you interest.
Monday, December 7, 2009
Tuesday, October 20, 2009
The Rise of Dualism
In some earlier posts, I’ve looked back into prehistory to see how the pfc’s influence within human consciousness gradually began to increase through the development of language, agriculture and writing. Writing, in particular, as a particularly powerful form of what Merlin Donald calls “external symbolic storage”[1], began to create a force external to the individual human brain but one that was increasingly influential in directing the development of those brains: what I call an “external pfc”.
But it was in the world of ancient Greece in the 4th century BCE that the external pfc began to take a bizarre, new form that has remained with us ever since.
It didn’t happen at the outset of Greek classical civilization. As classical historian Kitto describes it:
The sharp distinction which the Christian and the Oriental world has normally drawn between the body and the soul, the physical and the spiritual, was foreign to the Greek – at least until the time of Socrates and Plato.
For a couple of hundred years during what’s known as the Attic Period of classical Greece (around 600-400 BCE), speculative philosophers began to think in new ways about the world around them. But their speculations, unique as they were in world history, still rose from a shared shamanistic and animistic background from which other early cultures took their own traditions. There are elements in the ever-changing cosmos of Heraclitus that can be found in early Buddhist thought, and the expansion and contraction of Empedocles’ cosmos finds echoes in Chinese theories of yin and yang.[2]However, with the works of Plato in the early 4th century BCE, something truly astounding occurred: Plato’s cosmology constructed the world in the image of the pfc’s capability for abstraction. Plato devised a strange new dualism dividing body from soul, with the immortal soul linked inextricably with universality and abstraction – the hallmark of the pfc’s unique form of conceptual thought.
Plato’s ideas have been so influential in Western thought that the European philosophical tradition has been famously described as “a series of footnotes to Plato”.[3] The fundamental element of Plato’s philosophy was a division between an abstract world of Ideas and the ever-changing, material world in which we live. In Plato’s view, there are countless chairs in this world, but there is only one Idea of a chair, existing in an immutable dimension, of which every material chair is an imperfect replica. The same is true for concepts such as Beauty or Goodness. And the way in which we humans can try to make contact with this immutable, perfect world of Ideas is through our faculty of reason, the purest aspect of our mind.[4]
And for Plato, humans were constructed just like the rest of the universe, with an ideal and a material dimension. The material aspect was our body. The ideal part, containing our immortal soul, was the mind. And not the whole mind. Not the part that feels or thinks about what to do next. The part of the mind that comprehends the ideal rather than the material, that lives in the world of abstraction.
This part of the mind is one of the defining characteristics of the pfc. Plato had separated the pfc’s capability for abstraction from all other aspects of our human consciousness and called it immortal. In the words of the great Greek scholar Francis Cornford: “The world of the body is a prison, or a tomb; that other world of the soul and of Ideas is the realm of true life and reality, in which all worth resides… the intellect had become a deity.”[5]
For Philo, “’there are no two things so utterly opposed as knowledge and pleasure of the flesh.’ The great impediment to the good is ‘passions pricking and wounding the soul’”.[6] Plotinus, meanwhile, “could hardly bear the thought that his soul was trapped in so base a thing as his body, which he sometimes called a ‘detestable vessel’, one which acted as an obstacle to spiritual development. He insisted that ‘to rise up to very truth is altogether to depart from bodies. Corporeality is contrary to soul and essentially opposed to soul’”.[7]
Most importantly, Plato’s body/soul dualism was picked up by the early fathers of Christianity, and became deeply embedded in the fundamental forms of thought we’ve all inherited. Perhaps most of us “no longer ‘think the soul’, we no longer argue about it,” states French philosopher François Jullien, “but we inevitably… still think along the lines it laid down long ago. It belongs to an older, ‘archaeological’ stratum of our mental landscape, and acts as a controlling idea that defines our epistemic axioms.”[8]
And this elevation of the pfc’s capacity for abstraction to an eternal status separate from the changing, feeling world of our bodies, has had profound implications for our view of ourselves. In the words of philosopher Chad Hansen:
Ancient Greek humanism took the … road of elevating humans out of nature into the intellectual realm. It placed us in a hybrid tension between the physical world of common sense and experience and an intellectual, rational world of meaning, knowledge, and value. We are neither of this world nor free from it (until we die). The identification of human worth with the impulse to transcendence has a flip side, since we accordingly devalue the physical, the material.
To be free is for our reasoning faculty to control us. We detach ourselves from mere bodily, physical determination…
In my next post, I’ll look more closely at how – in the form of monotheism - the pfc performed the coup which gave it nearly unfettered power over our consciousness.
[1] Donald, M. (1991). Origins of the Modern Mind: Three Stages in the Evolution of Culture and Cognition, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
[2] Marlow, A. N. (1954). "Hinduism and Buddhism in Greek Philosophy." Philosophy East and West, 4(1:April 1954), 35-45.
[5] Cornford, F.M., (1912/2004). From Religion to Philosophy: A Study in the Origins of Western Speculation. New York: Dover Publications.
Monday, October 19, 2009
Ascendancy to Power: Agriculture
In my previous post, I discussed the stirrings of the pfc’s power during human prehistory in the form of language and myth. As noted in that post, we see mythic symbols first appearing in the archeological record by around 30-40,000 years ago.
But it was about 10,000 years ago that an equally important revolution occurred in the pfc’s transformation of our human experience: the rise of agriculture. Many anthropologists view the domestication of animals and plants as inextricably linked with what they call “a revolution of symbols” creating the “alienated sense of self … necessary for agriculture.” [1] Humans began to see themselves as agents separate from nature, who could plan, control and transform the plants and animals around them for their own purpose. This was the beginning of the “domination and exploitation of the environment… the very foundations of our culture and mentality.” [2]
An important pfc function – long-term planning – became a key characteristic of agricultural society. No longer could you just take what Nature offered. You had to plan for the future, store seeds away for next year’s planting even if your family was hungry now. And along with this new structure of society arose a whole host of pfc-mediated concepts that have become an integral part of our human consciousness: ownership, complex hierarchies and specialization of labor.
The gains from our transition to agriculture are self-evident: reliability of housing, food and clothing … the list goes on and on. But something else we gained – something less beneficial - may be gleaned by Captain Cook’s description of the hunter-gatherer Tasmanian islanders he came across on his travels:
They live in a Tranquillity which is not disturb’d by the Inequality of Condition: The Earth and sea of their own accord furnishes them with all things necessary for life, they covet not Magnificent Houses, Household-stuff etc… In short they seem’d to set no value upon any thing we gave them… they think themselves provided with all the necessarys of Life and that they have no superfluities.[3]
Now, there’s a highly politicized ongoing debate about hunter-gatherer culture: were they in fact “happier” and “more affluent” than humans became once we got “trapped” by the requirements of agriculture? This debate usually tells us more about the political biases of the debaters than the realities of hunter-gatherer societies (i.e. “hunter-gatherers were happy because they had no possessions” versus “hunter-gatherers were warlike because they lacked civilization”).
In another post, I plan to explore that issue further, but for now there’s something important (and non-political) that I’d like to focus on: something the Tasmanian islanders and other forager cultures didn’t have that we do have in plenty. It’s summed up by the Buddhist term dukkha – the suffering that arises from clinging to things, possessions, desires, plans. In short, I suggest that the pfc-mediated concepts that accompanied the rise of agriculture gave dukkha to human society in addition to its other gifts.
Perhaps even more important than agriculture in the pfc’s ascendancy to power was the rise of what Merlin Donald calls “external symbolic storage” – the complete set of symbols created by society on walls, papyrus, stone or clay and passed down from one generation to another.[4]
The rise of “external symbolic storage” began as early as Upper Paleolithic times, attested to most recently by the spectacular finds at Hohle Fels cave in Germany. Now, the pfc had a means of transmitting its concepts that was even more powerful than language. Ideas could be fixed and instilled into the pfcs of each new generation, automatically shaping each developing mind to view the world based on a previously created construct.
But following the rise of agriculture, and the resultant specialization of human activities, came a new, potent form of external symbolic storage: writing. The advent of writing made symbol transmission even more powerful, creating what we might think of as an “external pfc” – a detailed symbolic construct of the world built up over millennia, outliving its human creators, shaping the mind of each new generation. (Image: early external pfc: writing tablet from Uruk, Mesopotamia, c. 3000 BCE)
In my next post, I’m going to look at a strange, new development in human thought that began in the first millennium BCE and has profoundly affected our Western way of thinking ever since: the rise of dualism.
[1] Hodder, I.: Cauvin, J., (2001 11:1). 'Review Feature: The Birth of the Gods and the Origins of Agriculture'. Cambridge Archaeological Journal:105-121.
[2] Cauvin, J., (1994/2000). The Birth of the Gods and the Origins of Agriculture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
[3] Quoted in: Bellwood, P., (2005). First Farmers: The Origins of Agricultural Societies. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.
[4] Donald, M., (1991). Origins of the Modern Mind: Three Stages in the Evolution of Culture and Cognition. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Friday, October 16, 2009
The Stirrings of Power: Language and Myth
In my last blog post, I introduced the idea that our modern human consciousness is under the tyranny of the prefrontal cortex (“pfc”). In this post, I’m going to discuss the first stirrings of the pfc’s power, in the form of language and myth.
The experts disagree widely as to when language first developed, ranging from fifty thousand to a million years ago. They disagree whether it’s a human instinct or a learned capability. But no-one questions that it’s a hallmark of human beings. Chimpanzees and bonobos can string a few words together, but not even their greatest supporters would argue that they speak like humans. In the words of noted anthropologists Noble & Davidson, “language… underpins all modern human behavior.” [1]
But it’s not language itself that characterizes us. It’s the capability underlying language: the ability to see things in terms of symbols and – most importantly – to string those different symbols together to create meaning. Although language processing is centered in two areas in the brain’s left hemisphere[2], the ability to comprehend individual words as symbols and link these together so that each symbol has meaning within a complex web of other symbols – that’s the pfc’s first major step in establishing control, both in a two-year old infant and in the infancy of our human race.
However, this gift of meaning wasn’t free. It came at a terrible cost. The pfc’s ability to see ourselves as separate beings and to project out into the future caused perhaps the greatest ever trauma to our human consciousness: the knowledge and fear of death. All animals instinctively fear harm. But as far as we know, only humans can use the pfc’s powers of self-awareness and future scenarios to see a dead body and realize that they themselves will one day turn into a lifeless corpse.[3] “The eternal silence of these infinite spaces terrifies me” said scientist/theologian Blaise Pascal,[4] giving voice to the fear that all of us have felt since the pfc first evolved in our early ancestors.
To alleviate the pain arising from this metaphysical terror, the pfc came up with one of its most important instruments: mythology. The pfc had already mastered the function of assigning meaning to symbols: an animal footprint in the earth meant dinner was close by; a sound from a fellow tribesman meant “go hunting”. Now it began to link all the different aspects of existence - birth and death; animals and weather; food and shelter – and structure a pattern of myth around them to make meaning of the whole thing; what psychologist Merlin Donald calls a “comprehensive modeling of the entire human universe”[5]. As biological anthropologist Terrence Deacon puts it: “We are not just applying symbolic interpretations to human words and events; all the universe has become a symbol.” [6]
Although the rise of myth probably happened earlier, we see its first expressions most clearly in the archaeological record in the Upper Paleolithic Aurignacian culture. Two recent dramatic findings of a female figurine and a flute date from at least 35,000 years ago, and offer evidence that by this time our ancestors were fully embedded in mythological and symbolic thinking. (Conard et. al., Hohle Fels Cave, Southwestern Germany).
Check out my next post, where I’ll be talking about the pfc’s ascendancy to power… along with agriculture.
[1] Noble, W. and Davidson, I., (1991). 'The Evolutionary Emergence of Modern Human Behaviour: Language and its Archaeology'. Man, 26 (2):223-253.
[3] Elephants are the only other mammals known to be apparently aware of the dead bones of their herd and to spend hours passing these bones to each other in what we humans would think of as a respectful ritual.
[6] Deacon, T.W., (1997). The Symbolic Species: The Co-evolution of Language and the Brain. New York: Norton.
Thursday, October 15, 2009
The Tyranny of the Prefrontal Cortex
Our civilization is changing the climate of our planet. People kill themselves and others in the name of God. Species are going extinct at a rate not seen for 65 million years. A billion wretched people go hungry each day though their ancestors lived fulfilling lives. Our society makes astonishing advances in technology - yet our world seems to be careening out of control at an ever faster pace. You and I feel strangely disconnected from it all and from ourselves. We all agree that we spend most of our time under constant stress - but for the most part, we adapt to it all and continue living our lives as though everything’s normal.
What connects all of these seemingly unrelated phenomena of our modern world? This blog suggests there is an overriding dynamic driving all these imbalances in our lives. It’s so all-encompassing, so fundamental to how we think and conduct our lives that we don’t even recognize its existence. And yet it’s responsible for making each of us, and our world, what we are today. It’s what I call the tyranny of the prefrontal cortex over all other aspects of our consciousness. Acknowledging this tyranny and understanding its dynamic is the first necessary step toward achieving re-harmonization within our individual and collective consciousness.
The prefrontal cortex (or “pfc”) is that part of our brain that’s primarily responsible for our thinking and acting in ways that differentiate us from all other animals. It mediates our ability to plan, conceptualize, symbolize, make rules, abstract ideas, and impose meaning on things. It controls our physiological drives and turns our basic feelings into complex emotions. It enables us to be aware of ourselves and others as separately existing, and to turn the past and the future into one flowing narrative.
| Figure 1: Pfc as % of total cortex in different mammals[1] | |
| Mammal | Pfc as % of total cortex |
| Human | 29% |
| Chimpanzee | 17% |
| Gibbon | 11% |
| Lemur | 8% |
| Dog | 7% |
| Cat | 3% |
Think of whatever we do that animals don’t do. That’s the pfc functioning – what may be called our conceptual consciousness. Then think of what we share with other creatures: hunger, sexual urges, pain, aggression, desire for warmth, caring for our offspring –let’s call that our animate consciousness. While many of the pfc capabilities exist to some degree in other creatures – chimpanzees, dolphins and parrots, for example – their predominance in humans is overwhelmingly different in scope and magnitude, accounting largely for our current domination of the natural world. (See Figure 1).
The pfc is the most connected part of the brain, linking directly or indirectly to all parts of our animate consciousness – those areas responsible for our sensations, memories, internal metabolism. For this reason, many neuroscientists refer to the pfc as our “executive function”. Like the CEO of a corporation or president of a nation, the pfc is seen as getting information, processing it and sending out commands.
The pfc is an essential part – perhaps the essential part – of what makes us human. But I’m suggesting that, over the last few thousand years, the pfc has staged a coup in our collective (and individual) consciousness. It’s no longer like a democratically elected president. Instead, it’s become a tyrant within our own minds, taking such control of our consciousness that we’re hardly even aware that there are other ways to be.
The pfc has barely, if at all, changed from an evolutionary perspective since at least Upper Paleolithic times, forty thousand years ago. The coup that I’m referring to came about from the impact of human culture on the developing mind of each individual. To understand this coup, we need to trace the growth in the pfc’s power through history - all the way back to our prehistory.
In future postings on this blog, I’m going to ask you to join me on a brief tour of the archaeology of the human mind. We’re going to see how the pfc has created a conception of the universe in its own image and has even caused us to identify our own existence with it, thinking of other parts of our mind and body as separate from us, owned by us and managed by us.
We’ll see how this has led to an individual and a societal imbalance, and in a sister-blog entitled Finding the Li, we’ll explore some possible ways to fight back against the pfc’s tyranny - to attempt to re-harmonize our consciousness.
[1] Deacon, T.W., (1997). The Symbolic Species: The Co-evolution of Language and the Brain. New York: Norton.
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