Categories
Psychology Sociology Politics

Right-wing and Left-wing Are Mere Reflections of Our Brain Architecture, Part I

You must see with eyes unclouded by hate. See the good in that which is evil, and the evil in that which is good. Pledge yourself to neither side, but vow instead to preserve the balance that exists between the two.

— Hayao Miyazaki, Princess Mononoke

This post is part of a series. Advance to Part II.

Introduction

The terms ‘right-wing’ and ‘left-wing’ originated in the National Assembly of France during the French Revolution in 1789, when supporters of the king migrated to the right side of the legislative chamber, and supporters of the revolution seated themselves to the left side. When we study history, we can find that this dichotomy long predates the French Revolution: in ancient Greece (Sparta vs. Athens), in Rome (Optimates vs. Populares), in ancient Judaism (Sadducees vs. Pharisees), in Vedic India (the caste system, i.e. Sudra vs. the higher castes), and even in the social classes of the Qin Dynasty in China (landlord/merchant vs. craftsman/peasant). Philosophers have created their own descriptions: Marx’s famous bourgeoisie/proletariat dialectic, Nietzsche’s master morality and slave morality, and Crenshaw’s intersectionality all recapitulate the same polarized dichotomy.

There exists an entrenched academic view that politics is primarily a story about collective group power–the oppressor classes vs. the oppressed classes. This originated in the historical dialectic method of Karl Marx–“a ruthless criticism of everything existing”. Today, thousands of scholars are employed to critically read texts, recontextualize them in terms of a class power dialectic critical interpretation, and extract hidden class power subtexts from in between the author’s original words.

But this Durkheimian theory of social facts has never withstood the confounding evidence omnipresent in our discourse. For example, consider the prevalence of wealthy heirs amongst the most radical leftists globally, starting with Marx’s own benefactor Friedrich Engels. Or the wealthy patrons that supported Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s odyssey across Europe as he progressively wore out his hosts’ welcome. Consider the unironic use of the term ‘populism’, when the working poor inexplicably align behind a brazenly elite strongman who promises to restore righteousness. Marx contemptuously portrayed the ‘lumpenproletariat’ as fools unaware of what their opinions ought to be, anesthetized by the ‘opiate’ of religion designed by the elite classes. Something more sophisticated is going on than social theorists can explain.

History is littered with epochs in which humans are swept up into the madness of revolutionary and reactionary camps, and make uncivil war upon each other. Jesus Christ sidestepped and redirected an attempt to make him choose a side with his retort, ‘Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s; and to God the things that are God’s.’, yet comically strained attempts are still made today to retrospectively recruit Him into the fracas. J. Michael Straczynski’s underrated TV series Babylon 5 mythologized this conflict by imagining human history under the secret influence of two conflicting alien races, the Vorlons (who asked the question, “who are you?”) and the Shadows (who asked the question, “what do you want?”). He poked fun at it in one episode involving a race called the Drazi, who divided up into two warring ‘purple’ and ‘green’ factions every five years:

A failed attempt at mediation between the Drazi purple and green factions. From: Babylon 5

But where does this human impulse to divide up into honor and justice factions come from?

NYU social psychologist Jonathan Haidt and collaborators have investigated moral values and political ideologies, and proposed a model where the left-wing is oriented around broad social connections, the right-wing is oriented around tight social connections, and libertarians are instead oriented around individualism. This feels like a fuzzy glimpse at truth, but the investigative tools available to the psychologist pretty much stop at these abstract nouns.

I propose that the real truth is this: these group perceptions only exist as emergent phenomena due to the common architecture of vertebrate brain, and the life experiences that leave their imprints upon that brain ‘wetware’. There exist no imaginary mass social constructs or historical forces, revealed by reason or the ritual torture and sacrifice of data. Political phenomena are emergent phenomena, not ersatz gods whose worship needs to be indoctrinated. If you can master this truth, you actually can choose your own reality, just as ceramic-jar-housed Diogenes earned the peerage of Alexander the Great. Wary of the dark creatures that await us, let us take a deep, dispassionate dive into the politiques and their critiques.

The Two Spirits

Oxytocin, and its lesser-known sibling vasopressin, are popularly associated with social bonding. They are far more subtle and sophisticated than that.

If there is an overarching claim that I am presenting, it is this:

Oxytocin is the energy of species progress and the Spirit of Community. Vasopressin is the energy of self-actualization, and submission to and rising up towards the Spirit of Dominion.

Let’s elaborate upon this.

Spirit of Community

  • Oxytocin
  • Species preservation
  • Promote parasympathetic nervous system
  • Left hemisphere
  • Feminine
  • Communion
  • Humanity
  • Affection
  • Verbal
  • Bottom up and detailed

Spirit of Dominion

  • Vasopressin
  • Species evolution
  • Control sympathetic nervous system
  • Right hemisphere
  • Masculine
  • Dominion
  • Family
  • Growth
  • Visual
  • Top-down and laterally-connected

Summary of the properties of the two spirits

Parasympathetic/Sympathetic

Oxytocin promotes the parasympathetic nervous system, while vasopressin controls the sympathetic nervous system. These autonomic nervous systems, that tend to oppose each other, have long carried the epithets of ‘feed and breed’ and ‘fight or flight’, respectively. Note that promote and control are not symmetrical operations.

Left Brain/Right Brain

Similarly, the left hemisphere promotes the parasympathetic nervous system, while the right hemisphere controls the sympathetic nervous system. This is similar to oxytocin and vasopressin, respectively, and each hemisphere tends to be more influenced by each energy.

Feminine/Masculine

Oxytocin plays a more prominent behavioral role in females, while vasopressin plays a more prominent behavioral role in males. However, oxytocin plays a critical supporting role in men in sexual attraction and parenting, while vasopressin plays a critical role in bonding and parenting in women. Everything here is shades and balance.

The left hemisphere is more critical to female behavior, while the right hemisphere is more critical to male behavior. Damage to the left hemisphere in females and right hemisphere in males is impairing, while the opposite is less noticeable. As this study of the relative performance on a psychological instrument called the Iowa Gambling Test concluded:

Men with right‐side lesions and women with left‐side lesions displayed moderate to severe impairments in social conduct, emotion, and decision making. Women with right‐side lesions and men with left‐side lesions showed mild or no impairments in all three domains.

Communion/Dominion

Oxytocin motivates reaching out into the world for sexual partners, while vasopressin motivates parental care and defense of the home territory and children. This is partly why we associate sexual liberalization and ‘family values’ with left- and right-wing; the other part, as we shall see later, involves the left and right amygdala.

Affection/Growth

Oxytocin and vasopressin modulate how we view child education. In a fascinating study, high oxytocin parents showered their children with validating affection, while high vasopressin parents showed their children new objects to learn about. Mothers tended to display the oxytocin parenting style, while fathers tended to display the vasopressin parenting style, but within-sex variations showed that the hormones, not sex per se, promoted the parenting behaviors. We see disagreements about these educational priorities play out in divisive school board meetings.

Oxytocin and Vasopressin Side-by-Side

Oxytocin promotes desire for communion with our ingroup, but importantly it also increases our resentment of outgroups, particularly those outgroup members who we believe are harming ingroup members. Oxytocin motivates us to reach out to people, and to wish to be a part of something greater than ourselves. Oxytocin makes us want to have families. Oxytocin output is increased when we are under chronic social stress. This is one of the sources of political polarization for both right and left. It is the foundation of patriotism, of internationalism, of ingroups and outgroups, and the Lacanian big Other.

Oxytocin is a feminine energy.

Shadow: Oxytocin is the mob hormone.

Vasopressin promotes remembering individual people we meet and how we relate to them. It inspires territoriality, pair bonding, loyalty, self-defense, relative social dominance, and risky mission commitments (think of the ‘Fellowship of the Ring’ in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, or the military espirit de corps). Vasopressin makes us want to protect our families. Vasopressin output is increased when we are under acute social stress. Vasopressin closes us off from strangers, but promotes the entanglement of self and close others as in family and friendship. Vasopressin mediates social hierarchies and the Lacanian little other.

Vasopressin is a masculine energy.

Shadow: Vasopressin is the gang hormone.

Men Are From Vasopressin, Women Are From Oxytocin

This ingroup vs. personal bond mediated by oxytocin and vasopressin, respectively, shows up in the perennial miscommunications between women and men. To a woman, the romantic ‘relationship’ is a distinct group entity that encompasses herself and her partner, the seed of a potential new little society of her own, that a woman is loyal to (vasopressin) and is concerned with nurturing (oxytocin), that is indestructible unless broken by emotional betrayal of the relationship (a female-specific oxytocin-mediated temporoparietal junction response). But for men, the romantic ‘relation’ is an individual bond (vasopressin), the primary source of spiritual healing and soul connection that a man reciprocates out of honor, that is indestructible unless broken by acts of sexual betrayal (a male-specific vasopressin-mediated hypothalamic response).

This will be covered in more detail in future articles.

Crowding is the Cause of Urban Left and Rural Right

Solitude increases vasopressin expression, especially in males. Overcrowding increases stress and oxytocin production, which helps organisms tolerate and even enjoy being part of a crowd. This is why urban areas are more left-wing, while suburbs and rural areas are more right-wing.

The balance of oxytocin and vasopressin also relate to young adults’ typical progression from expanding their social circles in their 20s (oxytocin) to withdrawing themselves into nuclear families (vasopressin) in their 30s and beyond. This is also part of why people tend to become “more conservative” as they age–high oxytocin is replaced by increasing vasopressin. Recognition of this shifting tendency as a phenomenon is why some more radically progressive leftists target the nuclear family for dismantlement.

Guanyin vs. Sancus

In neuromythography, oxytocin is assigned to Guanyin, the Chinese Buddhist goddess of affective empathy. Guanyin’s name means “Observing the Sounds of the World,” indicating her compassionate ability to listen for pleas of help so she can come to the aid of the needy. This represents oxytocin’s role in empathy and as the Spirit of Community.

Vasopressin is assigned to Sancus, the Roman god of trust, truths, sanctity, and oaths. This represents vasopressin’s role in self-actualization and rising up towards the Spirit of Dominion.

It should be obvious by now that neither of these complementary spirits is the correct one.

OTR, V1a and V1b Receptors

Neurotransmitters are only half of the story. Each neurotransmitter is received into a cell via receptors expressed on the cell surface. The type of receptor changes how the cell processes the neurotransmitter “message”, and the differences between these receptor types ultimately shows up in behavior.

There exist three cell receptors for oxytocin and vasopressin: the oxytocin receptor OTR, and two vasopressin receptors v1a and v1b. It is important to know that the two neurotransmitters oxytocin and vasopressin bind with all three of these receptors, so there are a total of six different potential effects.

Oxytocin receptors (OTR) are increased in alpha males and females, both as a result of parenthood and increasing social rank.

Vasopressin v1a receptors are increased in male rodents with each successive victory over an intruder. v1a receptors are increased in pair-bonded females, reducing their interest in finding new mates.

Vasopressin v1b receptors are increased in male rodents with each successive submission to an intruder. v1b receptors are increased in nursing females, and are necessary for normal maternal childrearing behaviors.

The Bruce effect is a phenomenon that occurs in rodents in which a pregnant female will spontaneously abort her pregnancy when exposed to the scent of a novel male. This effect is mediated through her v1b receptors, suggesting an instinctive response to the presence of a change in the local male hierarchy, or to a threat that lessens the likelihood of successful young-raising. This shines a new light upon male territorial defense against male intruders. The Bruce effect has been proposed, but is not universally accepted, in other mammals including humans.

v1a and v1b thus form an oppositional pair, with OTR standing on its own. Importantly, these receptors have fundamentally different behavioral properties in males and females.

Tara, Morrigan, and Mordred

OTR

The OTR is assigned to Tara, a complex Hindu/Buddhist goddess. The Buddhist version is known as the “mother of liberation”. The Hindu Tara has a taste for demon blood, but is maternal and breathes life into the world. She responds to the energies of Guanyin and Sancus.

v1a

The v1a receptor is assigned to Morrigan, the Celtic “phantom queen”. The Morrígan is mainly associated with war and fate, especially with foretelling doom, death or victory in battle. She incites warriors to battle and can help bring about victory over their enemies. The Morrígan encourages warriors to do brave deeds, strikes fear into their enemies. She responds to the energies of Guanyin and Sancus.

v1b

The v1B receptor is assigned to Mordred, the disrespected and rebellious son of King Arthur in the Arthurian legend. This represents submission, seething rebellion, and defense of the downtrodden. He responds to the energies of Guanyin and Sancus.

It should be apparent that v1a is the ‘oppression’ and v1b is the ‘oppressed’ motif. Or v1a is the ‘righteous’ and v1b is the ‘weak degenerate’. The interpretation may depend upon the current v1a/v1b balance of the interpreter. OTR is the group identification amplifier, that bonds us into ingroups, and calls forth Ares in the extreme.

A Simple Receiver Biopolitical Model

  • The international socialist is the amplification of v1b (Mordred) and OTR (Tara).
  • The nationalist is the amplification of v1a (Morrigan) and OTR (Tara).
  • The libertarian is the amplification of v1a (Morrigan) and v1b (Mordred).
  • The national socialist is the amplification of v1a, v1b, and OTR together.

This is of course a vast oversimplification, as it ignores the difference brain areas involved, and can be criticized as veering into a bad kind of biological essentialism. The key takeaway here is that these forces are to be balanced, not unbalanced.

This post is part of a series. Advance to Part II.

Categories
Sociology

Urbanization, Domestication, and p32d

It has long been observed that that getting away from civilization and into the countryside is a healing act. Henry Thoreau famously wrote of his self-observations while living upon Walden Pond, in between his stints in political activism. What does this mean in the brain?

Living in overcrowded conditions increases stress and oxytocin levels. Living in isolation, in males especially, increases vasopressin levels. Exposure to nature increases serotonin levels. Certainly these are major monoaminergic effects that partially explain the divide between liberal urban and conservative rural groupings as previously discussed. But I’m going to explore a different cavern now.

Social scientists have studied an abstract noun called urbanicity, which is an essential property related to living in urban areas. Two independent studies have both pinpointed a grey matter increase in area p32d in people who live in urban areas vs. those who live in rural areas. Other studies have found that p32d is activated in social norm violations (left p32d) and cultural norm violations (right p32d).

p32d is the dorsal part of the highlighted p32 region.

Left p32d (Parsons) is an archetypal assignment for Talcott Parsons, the sociologist who coined (or at least popularized) the term, ‘social norms’.

Right p32d (Sumner) is an archetypal assignment for William Graham Sumner, the sociologist who coined ‘mores’ and ‘folkways’.

The distinction I am making between Parsons and Sumner is that left p32d seems to be more concerned with manners, and right p32d seems to be more concerned with customs. For example, manners are what proscribes you from taking the last bagel, but customs are what proscribes you from cutting a bagel across St. Louis style.

A bagel cut St. Louis style–a horrific taboo violation for people outside of St. Louis.

The crowded urban area–and the crowded college campus–is a minefield of social faux pas that an individual has to navigate. Basting one’s self in these environments gives us the illusion that social norms are all there is. In this caged reality, a hyperdeveloped p32d may be what gives us this illusion.

References:

Effects of city living on the mesolimbic reward system,

Brain Structure Correlates of Urban Upbringing, an Environmental Risk Factor for Schizophrenia

Categories
Intermediate Psychology Sociology Politics

What Do You Mean ‘We’, Partner?

We all take notice when someone starts a sentence with the word ‘we’. This implies that the speaker thinks they are speaking for everybody. Where does this come from?

In a study entitled, Neural Correlates of the False Consensus Effect: Evidence for Motivated Projection and Regulatory Restraint, researchers found that people who projected their own opinions onto a group consensus had greater functional connectivity between the ventral striatum and the ventromedial PFC. Here’s a graphical summary:

One of the key takeaways of neuromythography is that the ventral striatum is the locus of the world’s evil. I say this mostly seriously, but with a slight wink lest fools start contacting neurosurgeons for ventral striatum removal.

Terminology note: the nucleus accumbens (Nacc or NAc) is the principal nucleus of the ventral striatum. The ventral striatum definition typically also encompasses the ventral putamen and olfactory tubercle (OT).

Neuromythographic interpretation of panels A and B:

The ventral striatum is assigned Lilith/Lucifer.

s32 (Dharma): s32 tracks value across domains. This includes deontological value. Dharma is the Hindu/Buddhist concept of personal values.

The study also found that right rostral VLPFC activation was inversely-related to projecting your own opinion as a group consensus, i.e. the act of controlling the ventral striatum-s32 activation above. The mapping of panel C is:

Right a47r (Magellan): tracking of paths explored, rejecting paths already deemed unsuccessful, and finding new promising paths

Right p47r (Strachey): Strachey invented the programming language concept of polymorphism, which involves using the same programming verb to mean different things in different contexts.

When this right VLPFC area is damaged, people are unable to imagine that other people could have different opinions from themselves.

This is just the latest in a long line of evidence tying the ventral striatum to political madness. No one ever achieves nirvana without controlling it.

Categories
Parenting

The (Sexually Dimorphic) Importance of Motherly Love

In previous posts, we have introduced the idea of a feminine Spirit of Community and a masculine Spirit of Dominion, and associated them with oxytocin and vasopressin, respectively. We further proposed the archetypal role of two of their receptors:

OTR (Tara, the Buddhist goddess of compassion)

V1a (Morrigan, the Celtic goddess of kingship)

I don’t come up with this stuff without harvesting and distilling many research studies. For example, let us examine this rat study Naturally Occurring Differences in Maternal Care are Associated with the Expression of Oxytocin and Vasopressin (V1a) Receptors: Gender Differences.

Variations in maternal care have been associated with long‐term changes in neurochemistry and behaviour in adult rats. Rats receiving high levels of licking and grooming as pups are less fearful and more maternal than rats receiving low levels of maternal licking and grooming. Central pathways for oxytocin and vasopressin have been implicated in the neurobiology of anxiety and social behaviours. We assessed whether variations in maternal care were associated with differences in oxytocin receptors (OTR) or vasopressin (V1a) receptors in the brains of adult offspring. In the central nucleus of the amygdala and bed nucleus of the stria terminalis, OTR binding was increased in adult females, but not adult males, that had received high levels of maternal licking and grooming as pups. Conversely, amygdala V1a receptor binding was increased in males, but not females, that had received high levels of maternal licking and grooming. These findings suggest that variations in maternal care may influence the expression of oxytocin and vasopressin receptors in a gender‐specific manner.

Here we see that maternal affection upregulates OTR (Tara) receptors in female rats, but upregulates v1a (Morrigan) receptors in male rats. This is because these distinct effects in females and males advantages them socially in their respective gender roles, and attaches their offspring to their mother in the mode appropriate for their sex.

Categories
Intelligence Spirituality Psychology

The Poison of Caged Intelligence

In my travels I have met people of great intelligence. Many congregate in academia, but not as many as academics are wont to think. Sadly, I am often reminded after such encounters of a passage in Olaf Stapledon’s book Odd John. Odd John is “a story between jest and earnest” about a mutant boy of superior intelligence, how he made his way in the world, and how he went in search of his own kind and self-determined his own end. In one episode of his searches for fellow comrades, John stumbled upon a handicapped boy stewing a wicked brew of resentment…

Within the first five minutes of my visit he spotted me as different from the others. He got me telepathically. I got him too, but he shut his mind up immediately. Now you’d think that finding a kindred spirit for the first time ever would be an occasion for thanksgiving. But he didn’t take it that way at all. He evidently felt at once there wasn’t room for him and me together on the same planet. 

Presently I began to ask myself what sort of a devil this baby Satan really was. Was he one of ‘us,’ or something quite different? But there was very little doubt in my mind, actually. Of course he was one of us, and probably a much mightier one than either J. J. or myself. But everything had gone wrong with him, from conception onwards. His body had failed him, and was tormenting him, and his mind was as crippled as his body, and his parents were quite unable to give him a fair chance. So the only self-expression possible to him was hate. And he had specialized in hate pretty thoroughly. But the oddest thing about it all was this. The further I got away from the experience, the more clearly it was borne in on me that his ecstasy of hate was really quite self-detached. He wasn’t hating for himself. He hated himself as much as me. He hated everything, including hate. And he hated it all with a sort of sacred fervour. And why? Because, as I begin to discover, there’s a sort of minute, blazing star of worship right down in the pit of his hell. He sees everything from the side of eternity just as clearly as I do, perhaps more clearly; but–how shall I put it?–he conceives his part in the picture to be the devil’s part, and he’s playing it with a combination of passion and detachment like a great artist, and for the glory of God, if you understand what I mean. And he’s right. It’s the only thing he can do, and he does it with style. I take off my hat to him, in spite of everything. But it’s pretty ghastly, really. Think of the life he’s living; just like an infant’s, and with his powers!

The Shadow of Oxytocin

The stereotypical pencil-necked ‘nerd’, who grew up in soft, comfortable environs, enviously living in the shadow of more socially-successful people, often fits this description. No self-authored person ever exhibits this attitude.

In the Middle Ages, clerics recognized a depression-related phenomenon called scrupulosity, suffered by Martin Luther and perhaps best exemplified by Jesuit founder St. Ignatius of Loyola:

After I have trodden upon a cross formed by two straws … there comes to me from without a thought that I have sinned … this is probably a scruple and temptation suggested by the enemy.

St. Ignatius of Loyola

It is not a coincidence that both the founder of Protestantism and the founder of the Jesuits suffered from scrupulosity and founded movements that became “left-wing”. This will be explored in a future article.

Such people in these times, thanks to the ample arsenal of rhetoric developed over the past hundred years, restyle their resentment as a perverse kind of altruism. This type of preacher situates themselves as selfless allies fighting oppressive systemic structures on behalf of fetishized oppressed communities. Alternating between self-loathing, envy, and inviting others to cathartically join in denunciations, the crybully goads retaliation and then plays the victim. Such people project their darkness as justice, embracing the role of the Hebrew satan (the accuser), whom the God of the Old Testament sent to test the worthiness of the supposedly faithful.

This is part of the shadow of oxytocin, the Spirit of Community.

The Shadow of Vasopressin

At another end is a smaller group tends to embrace some combination of an eschatological streetcorner preacher persona urging the repenting of sin before the end times, a late-19th century brand of evolutionary psychology, or various anti-establishment conspiracy theories. These people are known for their emotional unavailability and distaste for displays of vulnerability. These tend to flame out of academia and become lonely cranks, crying out in the desert, frustrated by their impotence in the world. Sometimes, they snap and go out in a blaze of glory, tragically often taking innocent others with them.

This is part of the shadow of vasopressin, the Spirit of Dominion.

These are both dark holes to avoid falling into. Basic healthy disciplines–exercise, diet, sleep hygiene, constructive creative activity, engaging with constructive people, and becoming galvanized to the acidic vapors of unhealthy people–go a long way towards keeping their own spirit clear of these tarpits.

Categories
Neuromythography

Why People See Different Movies While Watching the Same Movie

A new study has come out that uses the Glasser parcellation! In the study entitled, Brain connectivity at rest predicts individual differences in normative activity during movie watching, the researchers examined how people’s resting-state functional connectivity between brain areas compared to the mean of the test subject population, and how this related to activations during the watching of movies. This study is interesting because it peers inside the brain of the audience members during the movie, analyzes how they interpret the movie scenes, and then how these interpretative brain patterns compare between audience members.

The researchers open up their introduction with a hat-tip to neurotypical groupthink that the Borg collective would approve of:

The ability to interpret information from the outside world in a manner similar to one’s conspecifics is critical to healthy human behavior.

As iconoclastic neuromythographers, we pass over this assertion about the sweet homogenizing nectar of normativity and get on with our subversive reinterpretation work. Principal component analysis found two main components that were centered on areas left FEF (frontal eye field) and left TPOJ2 (temporoparietaloccipital junction area 2).

FEF (frontal eye field) is assigned the archetype Cantor, named after Georg Cantor, the founder of set theory in mathematics. FEF has a pretty general role in scene tracking of objects in a scene, sentence, or mathematical expression.

TPOJ2 (VERB-OBJECT-SCHEMAS) is an unarchetyped area responsible for breaking down sentences and scenes in terms of what is happening to what or whom. With respect to sentence structure, TPOJ2 is focused on verb-predicates; I think that this corresponds to the participle form of verb conjugations (in English, verbs that end in -ing). (If this inspires just the right archetype, please do respond in the comments!)

Further analysis of the inputs and outputs of these regions found two networks centered in TPOJ2 and its neighbor PHT, and IFJa and its neighbor area 44:

Left IFJa and left 44.

Left Area 44 (Vac): area 44 mediates the smooth interpretation of speech. Vac is the Hindu personification of speech.

Left Area 44d (Orwell): area 44d is the neural correlate of rote language learning, preferred phrases, and, at its most concerning extreme, indoctrination. Education makes a significant impression upon the phrasing preferences of this area. 44d is assigned Orwell as a cautionary archetype of closed-minded indoctrination.

Left Area 44v (Wittgenstein (early)): area 44v is the neural correlate of fluid hierarchical sentence construction. Damage to this area causes stuttering. Early Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote Tractatus, a philosophy masterpiece with an extensive hierarchical proposition structure.

Left IFJa: (Kenny Rogers): left IFJa is central to switching to the appropriate response when a cue presents itself. This area has been assigned Kenny Rogers, in tribute to his famous song recording, The Gambler, about switching responses based on the situation:

You've got to know when to hold 'em
Know when to fold 'em
Know when to walk away
And know when to run...

In the present movie-watching study, left area 44 shows up because of the semantic parsing of dialog. Left IFJa centrality may reflect anticipation of movie plot points, and empathic experience of vicarious choices one might make on behalf of the characters.

Left TPOJ2 and left PHT

TPOJ2 was discussed earlier. Left PHT (Ptolemy) stores knowledge of geography. Ptolemy was the first geographer. The coactivation of TPOJ2 (what happened to what) and PHT (in what places) feels like a natural interpretation of what happens in the mind during the course of watching a movie.

Conclusion

The most interesting interpretation of this study (to me) is that the common experience of a movie across moviegoers may be related to the common linguistic education that moviegoers have received; an education imprinted upon area 44 and IFJa. This has implications for why certain audiences receive movies differently than others. More generally, it may explain why people do not share the same facts after watching the same video. Examining the evidence from this perspective, however, requires one to disagree with the researchers’ opening statement that “the ability to interpret information from the outside world in a manner similar to one’s conspecifics is critical to healthy human behavior.”

Categories
Psychology Gender

Men Are From Cerebellum, Women Are From Cingulate

Dr. Daniel Amen is a controversial psychiatrist who runs a successful chain of brain health and treatment centers. During the course of his work, his labs have accumulated perhaps the world’s largest collection of brain single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) scans. In 2017, Amen and team published an analysis of this data set that explored the difference between men and women.

Amen study of more than 46,034 brain scans: women are red, men are blue.

These SPECT images reflect regional blood flow in the brain, which serves as a proxy for overall brain activity. The study’s overall finding was that women have more active brains.

Here are some specific observations:

  1. Women have more activity in the cingulate cortex and precuneus (the red areas in the above). This large group of zones includes brain areas associated with joy, sadness, concentration, shame, guilt, criticism, autobiographical stories, 3rd-party perspectives, character acting, self-history, self-reflection, and deciding that it is time to change strategies. This is a larger manifest of brain areas than I am willing to elaborate upon in this post.
  2. Men have more activity in the anterior temporal lobes. The anterior temporal lobe zone includes areas
    1. TGd (Pheme/Aesop) associated with knowledge of famous people/allegories
    2. PeEC (OBJECT RECOGNITION/RECENCY/FREQUENCY) an area involved in object familiarity
    3. TGv (Kandinsky/Alex Grey) associated with local and global properties, respectively, and represented by painters whose art exemplifies these concepts
    4. TE2a (Pliny/al Kindi) Pliny wrote the first encyclopedia, al-Kindi was the polymath founder of Arab philosophy
    5. TE1a (Tenjin/Aja) Tenjin, the Japanese god of scholarship, and Aja, the Yoruba goddess of zoology, botany, potions, and healing herbs.
  3. Men have significantly more activity in Crus I and Crus II. These are the main parts of the cognitive cerebellum, and have functional connectivity with the main cortical associative networks. Crus II is assigned Chronos, the Greek deity of cyclic time, and left and right Crus I are assigned Postvorta and Antevorta, after the Roman goddesses of history and the future, respectively. This reflects the hypothesized roles of Crus I and Crus II in projecting thoughts and actions into the past and future, for error correction purposes, before validating a thought back to the cortex via the thalamus.

This maps rather easily to the psychology adage “women empathize, men systematize”. I have given the cingulate and precuneus a brief description here, and will elaborate in a future post.

As far as the question of innate behavioral sexual dimorphisms vs. socially-constructed gender roles, this one study cannot address this. I am interpreting the image based on its neuromythographic archetypes–archetypes that have been honed across thousands of neuroscience studies, and not fitted to this particular study.

Categories
Neuromythography

Introduction to Neuromythography For Seekers

And now here is my secret, a very simple secret: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.

The Little Prince by Antoine Saint-Exupery is, for millions of people worldwide, their favorite book. In the book, the narrator is a pilot who crashes in the desert (which actually happened to Saint-Exupery). He meets a strange, distant boy whom he called ‘the little prince’, who represents his own child-like personality. The little prince comes from an asteroid that has two volcanos with an inconsolably unhappy rose (mirroring his own relationship with Consuelo de Saint Exupéry, who came from a town in El Salvador flanked by two volcanos). He is looking for a sheep to eat the baobab trees that keep overrunning his own little planet.

Together, the pilot and the prince explore several other asteroids. They meet a king, a vain man, a drunkard, a businessman, a lamplighter, and a geographer, who all represent archetypal characters that everyone has met.

These fictional characters are not merely allegorical; they are archetypal representations of every known area of the human brain.

Starting in 2015, I have invested a great deal of effort over the past five years to bring to life a massively expanded version of The Little Prince. My version is so large that it does not fit on a little planet or even a book; it requires a graph database structure that I have named the Neuromythograph.

These fictional characters are not merely allegorical; they are archetypal representations every known area of the human brain. Instead of creating my own characters, I have borrowed mythological characters eclectically from every domain, including ancient mythology, scriptures, historical figures, computer scientists, painters, and even Disney characters. This is in order to try to connect to universal archetype meanings as already ‘crowdsourced’ in mythology.

This has led to a catalog of more than 925 brain areas, along with more than 125 neurotransmitters and 160 neurotransmitter receptors. Instead of asteroids, I imagine all of these areas as caverns in which the characters live, with tunnels leading to near and distant areas that are connected by long-range axonal projections. The 925 brain areas are connected by more than 19,000 physiological and functional connections, as hand-extracted from the literature during my research. On top of this is a concept ontology index representing real-world concepts, and how they are related to each of these biological entities, according to more than 4,800 neuroscience studies that I have curated and connected into the Neuromythograph.

The idea is that this Neuromythograph is a navigable space for everyone to explore, and see how abstract words that we use like ‘altruism’ and ‘cognitive dissonance’ actually sit in the brain, and how they interact with other characters, and what sorts of energies and energy receptors they are under the influence of. There is incredible complexity there, but also great beauty, and a-ha! insights daily.

All of this work was done now because 2016 was the first time in history that a reference map of the brain was available, along with a huge treasure trove of neuroscience studies, instantly searchable thanks to modern technology. Through a series of synchronicities, I was called to do it, and so I did. The work is continually refined: archetypes are reassigned as new research comes out, the behaviors of various brain areas are revealed, and new neuroscience gives us new food for thought.

The larger motivation for my work is to open up the brain to mystical-minded people such as Jungian analysts. I also offer an alternative set of scientific interpretations to the social constructionist scientism that keeps spilling out from its university hosts periodically like HSV-1 seasonally erupts from the trigeminal ganglion. I can not foresee all the applications that this work will spawn, but I hope to be exploring the neuromythographic universe together with you in the near future.

Categories
Nutrition Spirituality

The Neural Correlates of Spiritual Fasting

It has often been observed that fasting brings on a tranquil, contemplative state of mind. Prophets famously entered the desert to fast for days. In modern times, fasting is known to bring on a ketogenic energy cycle, and many people attest to the power of fasting to alter their mind state.

A recent study caught my eye that provides an intriguing connection. The title is Phase-locking of resting-state brain networks with the gastric basal electrical rhythm.

The enteric nervous system is a separate nervous system in the lining of the gut. It originates from parasympathetic and sympathetic neurons that colonize it from the neural crest during embryogenesis. The neurons there oscillate at a rhythm of 0.05 Hz, a lower frequency than any rhythm found regularly in the brain. The brain and the enteric nervous system communicate bidirectionally through the vagus nerve. Interestingly, the right and left vague nerve are not symmetric, and stimulating one side or the other has different effects.

It has recently been discovered that there is a gastric network in the brain itself that responds to the enteric nervous system. The study above identified three functional networks that are phase-locked to the gut rhythm:

The precuneus-centered network is in the left-most column.

In the network marked DMN_b, the area of highest activation appears to map to the following Neuromythograph areas:

  • 7m (OBJECTIVE POV) (specifically a subarea 7md (ACTOR)
  • 7PM (Herodotus, the Greek epic historian)
  • PCV (Left: OTHER-PERSPECTIVE / Right: MIND’S EYE AUTOBIO RECALL)
7m

7m is a large precuneus area that has an epithet OBJECTIVE POV. It seems to be related to third-party and the mythical ‘objective’ point of view.

7PM

7PM is engaged when recording and recounting historical experience. Herodotus of ancient Greece was considered the first historian.

PCV, as best I can tell, corresponds to a certain imaginary visual perspective. On the left it is responsible for imagining a scene from another perspective. Thus the epithet OTHER-PERSPECTIVE. On the right it manages autobiographical recall of ‘the mind’s eye’.

Side note: the 1st-person/3rd-person pronoun-confusion symptom of autism relates to underactivation in this same precuneus area.

Here is the interesting part. The rhythm of the gut brain entrains the rhythms of a specific cognitive brain region–the historian, the perspective-taker, and visualization of the past and others’ perspectives. This is really interesting physical connection between fasting and the spiritual experience of fasting that awaits further scientific exploration.

Categories
Philosophy of Science

Biological Essentialism, Social Constructionism, and Me

Pretty much anyone who accuses people of the crime of ‘biological essentialism’:

  • is not opposed to essentialism, but is opposed to any sort of essentialism that relocates essences away from abstract social construct nouns, and towards metaphorical interpretations of actual biology
  • is expressing a specific beef with evolutionary biology, that works in pairs of verbally-defined phenotypes and hypothetical genotypes that form speculative Darwinian propositions of the form, “Hypothetical genotype X for phenotype essence Y was caused by imagined evolutionary selection mechanism Z”. This is particularly the case with evolutionary psychology.

Very few phenotypes, and no complex behavioral phenotypes, have a clear monogenic genetic basis. What we have are statistical signals of correlations, but this sidesteps the fundamental issue that we decoded the genome, and we realized that the complexity of its execution is beyond our ability to comprehend it. Evolutionary biologists keep carrying on as if this never happened.

The evolutionary biologist steelman position is to say that most phenotypes are polygenic (i.e. gene networks), and that phenotypes follow some sort of Gaussian distribution that prevents us from directly testing causality. A lot of these theories wind up as unfalsifiable conjectures that have become a sort of clerical canon embedded inside biology.

I don’t believe in magical Hegelian social constructs, and I don’t believe in evolutionary causal claims just because they are posited in the Darwinian propositional form, and I don’t believe in claims made from spurious correlations discovered in datasets whose properties are not properly understood. I do believe that the ancient archetypes were telling us something about the brain.

Categories
Neuromythography

Breaking Through the Logical Chains of 9-46d

I started blogging partly in order to share my progress as it happens. Today I am reporting a new archetypal assignment, for brain area left 9-46d.

I often mark a set of impressions for an area and then return to it later when some new piece of information shows up. In the case of 9-46d, I had written the epithet ‘DEEP LOGIC CHAINS’. It had previously shown up in ‘legal reasoning’ and certain other functional paradigms that involved deep, branching logic chains.

Psychology needs to stop trying to fit old constructs to the brain, and start using the brain to rebuild constructs from the ground up.

The study that provided this morning’s insight is a BioRxiv preprint entitled The Dorsolateral Prefrontal Cortex Presents Structural Variations Associated with Empathic Capacity in Psychotherapists. The investigators identified that psychotherapists had increased grey matter in an area left A9/46d compared to non-therapists.

The study identified A9/46d gray matter enhancement in psychotherapists.

Jargon Juggling

The first thing you run into when you are doing this kind of work is you have to constantly translate between different nomenclatures. There is a significant amount of neuroscience literature devoted to just trying to translate the terminology used in different papers. This is all frictional barriers with zero knowledge creation. In the psychotherapist study, the research team used the Human Brainnetome Atlas, which is a map constructed by researchers using automated methods. It is similar to the Glasser parcellation used in neuromythography, but is generally not as detailed as the human-crafted methods used in the latter.

Here is A9/46d as it appears in Brainnetome:

Brainnetome A9/46d

Meanwhile, the Glasser parcellation divides this DLPFC area into 9-46d, 46, a9-46v, and p9-46v. No A9-46d. However, we can map it to plain old 9-46d.

9-46d in the Glasser parcellation

Thinking in Labels Is Bad

The researchers looking for evidence that psychotherapists have a higher ’empathic capacity’. There are two problems with this:

1. Hunting for support for your desired outcome instead of letting the evidence lead you where it leads you, is how you fool yourself.

2. ‘Empathy capacity’ is not a very solid concept, and testing it requires you to perform some kind of procedure that you believe is related to this concept. The problem of whether a hypotheses is actually tested by an experiment is known as ‘validity’ in philosophy of science discussions.

Here is part of the researchers’ discussion of their findings:

The fact that the left middle frontal gyrus, in the A9/46d region was thicker in psychotherapists’ brains is conceptually significant. This region, related to executive control, not only is strongly associated with perspective-taking skills (De Waal & Preston 2017; Völlm et al. 20016), but it is also deeply implicated in top-down emotion regulation processes (Enzi et al. 2016; Ochsner & Gross 2005). Moreover, activation in this region seems to negatively correlate to activity in limbic structures—including the
amygdala—during the presentation of emotionally charged stimuli (Sang & Hamman 2007; Smoski et al. 2014; Urry et al. 2006). Thus, we speculate that the greater thickness of this region could reflect a greater tendency to regulate one’s affective states. […]

However, there seemed to be no correlation between the ERQ scores [a psychological questionnaire about the use of mindfulness techniques] and left A9/46d cortical thickness. This suggests either that the psychotherapists engage in other cognitive emotion regulation mechanisms not measured here, or that the ERQ could not capture their higher tendency to engage in cognitive reappraisal to regulate their affective state. Any of these alternatives is supported by the fact that they scored significantly lower on the ERQ Expressive Suppression scale with respect to nontherapsits [sic]. Forthcoming research will be able to shed light on this issue.

Here is the ERQ (Emotional Regulation Questionaire) referenced in the above:

What the ERQ (Emotional Regulation Questionaire) looks like

The researchers were perplexed by the result that the ERQ did not relate to the A9-46d finding. They then used a lot of psychology terms like ‘executive control’, ‘perspective-taking’, ’emotional regulation’, ‘cognitive reappraisal’, and ’empathy’ and related them to each other, which is the psychology version of writing mythographies.

One alternative interpretation is that psychotherapists simply do not need to use explicit emotional regulation techniques as described in the ERQ because they regulate automatically. This automatic regulation seems to be mediated by vmPFC areas (in women and dmPFC areas (9m and 8BM) in men. These areas were not considered in the present study.

The abstract noun labels that psychologists created before we had modern access to the brain are showing their age. This is why when psychologists attempt to find the neural correlates of psychology constructs, things get muddled.

Thinking in Archetypes is Good

Earlier I had mentioned that I had long ago assigned the epithet of 9-46d of DEEP LOGICAL CHAINS, because that was the overall impression I had received from the neuroscience literature. The question that this psychotherapist study triggered in me was ‘what do lawyers and psychotherapists have in common?’ The answer is they both engage in deep logical chains.

Lawyer: …according to the Bailey Act, a dog must be kept on a leash, but this was distinguished in Johnson vs. Evans if the dog is less than 20 pounds, and the liability implications were further established in Willis vs. City of Alhambra…

Psychotherapist: You told me about your mother, and the trip to the fair, and how that affected your future romantic relationships. Do you think that your fear of clowns might be connected to this?

We can retrospectively infer then that from this defined capability–deep logical chains–emerges some facets of psychology constructs like emotional regulation, rationalization, cognitive empathy, but unlike those constructs this one is derived from actually studying brain area 9-46d in order to infer what its role is. Psychology needs to stop mapping old constructs to the brain, and start using the brain to rebuild constructs from the ground up.

The Naming of the New

And Adam gave names to all cattle, and to the fowl of the air, and to every beast of the field.

— Bible, Genesis 2:20

This leads to the creative process of assigning an archetype with a catchy allegory. Clearly left 9-46d is one of the substrates of sophistry, and I like to add some kind of cautionary tale in my allegories. What immediately came to me was a scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, where the knight Bevidere the Wise walked the angry witch-burning crowd through a logical thought process by which one could justly test whether a woman was a witch–by comparing her weight to a duck. Thus, I have named left 9-46d Bevidere.

9-46d is assigned Bevidere the Wise

Many of the archetypal assignments have this sort of playful spin, emphasizing the pitfalls of the functional area instead of its putative function in terms of abstract nouns. This is partly to make it memorable, and partly to force us to think of the brain area’s personality role instead of its connection to some fuzzy abstract noun ensconced in a circular chain of tautologies.

In the future, references and brain areas will be automatically linked to the Neuromythograph so that you can see them in context of all the connections and archetypes. I am still working through the details of making this technically manageable, and would be grateful for WordPress technical assistance.

Categories
Neuromythography

Standing On the Shoulders of Giants

If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants

— Isaac Newton

If I have seen further than others, it is because I am surrounded by dwarfs.

— Murray Gell-Mann

The dwarf sees farther than the giant, when he has the giant’s shoulder to mount on.

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

There is a historical revisionism movement in academia today to minimize the impact of the individual rogue, to deny any possibility of poesis, and to replace it with a transcendental consensus-driven knowledge production process into which the personality must be subordinated. “If you hadn’t discovered it, someone else would have,” they say. It is claimed that the polymath died out in the 19th century due to the vast expansion of human knowledge, and modern educational theory says that gifted children are to be guided towards ’eminence’ in an ever-expanding collection of increasingly obscure academic specialties.

This article is about public people who influenced me. I don’t know if they would all like seeing their names together on a list, but it is through no fault of their own.

I separately review the history of brain mapping, and my debts to the great body of neuroscience here.

Carl Jung

I am indebted to Carl Jung for the inspiration of using archetypal patterns to explore the mind, and generating the interest in archetypal psychology that in turn drew my own interest in such people’s interest (hopefully that made sense). Jung is of course situated at a nexus of a long history of esoteric, Eastern, and Western traditions, and followers such as James Hillman and Joseph Campbell. Despite being quite self-conscious that people would think he was a loon, Jung boldly “let himself go” in plunging into the deep waters of the psyche, the esoteric, and the Collective Unconscious. I took my own plunge over the past few years, tethered to a rock for safety, and I am grateful to Jung for showing the way. I am fortunate to have resources at my disposal that Jung did not have: the world’s research at my fingertips, informatics knowledge, and a hundred years of neuroscience work to draw inspiration to complement the mystical literature.

Olaf Stapledon

Olaf Stapledon is an undeservedly obscure British writer from the first half of the 20th century. He was the one who first imagined much of the later science fiction genre: planetary terraforming, genetic engineering, collective hive minds, and Dyson spheres that . His works stand out as mythology set at a universal level, and he spends much of his efforts at expressing his allegience to something he called the “spirit” of man. Stapledon’s spirit is related to Hegel’s geist but elaborated in his own aesthetic way.

Olaf Stapledon used a metaphor of the jackdaw to describe himself. A jackdaw steals shiny bits of treasure from across the landscape and fashions it into a nest that meets his own aesthetic preferences. His philosophy drew eclectically from Western and Eastern sources. I have adopted Stapledon’s jackdaw as my own avatar.

Stapledon was a man of superior intellect and erudition. His works are semi-autobiographical but he was quite self-conscious about sounding conceited and pretentious. Odd John was a book about a super-intelligent mutant and how he grew up; Stapledon’s narrator was a journalist who befriended the boy. Last and First Men was written from the standpoint of an Englishman whose mind was in direct telepathic contact with a man millions of years in the future, who in turn narrated future historical events. Star Maker was similarly written as an everyman, but his testimony was through the experience of joining a Cosmic Mind. My character Hermes Phimegistus is a hat-tip to this mode of authorship, and the sweep of Stapledon’s mythology inspires me to strive for the grandeur of his visions.

Stephen Wolfram

I think a lot about Stephen Wolfram, the founder of Mathematica. While working for Richard Feynman as a young wunderkind at CalTech, Feynman advised him to pursue his research without undue interference from others. So he started his own company, created a peerless tool for mathematical exploration, and studies in whatever way he feels like in whatever manner he wants. His magnum opus book, A New Kind of Science, is a work of wide-ranging erudition in search of deep principles with which to simplify complexity, and connect this to the universe at large. People who try to stretch boundaries like this earn the envious scorn of young grad students who try to knock them down. While I am nowhere near his caliber of genius, I am inspired by his attitude and accomplishment. Where others hear arrogance into his delivery, I hear child-like enthusiasm from a man in his 60s.

Antoine Saint-Exupery

Antoine Saint-Exupery was a tragic puer aeternus who spent his life in search of ‘the why’. His classic The Little Prince is the beloved favorite book of many. The trip through allegorical little planets, each representing an archetypal personality that we all meet in life, directly inspires the Neuromythograph, with its connected caverns, each housing a single archetype. Whereas the Little Prince had eight planets, the fully-elaborated Neuromythograph has about 700 of approximately 1200 entities populated as of this writing. Indeed, neuromythography is a brain-inspired sequel to The Little Prince gone terribly awry!

Sextus Empiricus

Sextus Empiricus was a Roman physician from whom we have learned the most about a Greek philosopher called Pyrrho, the eponymous founder of Pyrrhonism. Pyrrho allegedly accompanied Alexander the Great during his conquest of India, where he encountered the gymnophilosophers (“naked philosophers”), who were early Hindu mystics. Pyrrho emphasized a form of skepticism that held that maintaining strong convictions about truths is the cause of suffering, and that one ought to try to be at peace with leaving issues undecided. Sextus Empiricus applied this to three school of medicine that were dominant in his time: the Rationalists (who relied upon top-down reason), the Empiricists (who relied upon bottom-up evidence collection) and the Methodists (who relied upon intuition in the moment). Confusingly, Sextus was a leader of the Empiricist school, but his writing takes a strongly Pyrrhonist and Methodist stance.

I find myself sympathetic to Sextus Empiricus’ skeptical Pyrrhonism and his opposition to what he called the ‘Dogmatists’.

Randell Mills

Randell Mills is the founder and CEO of Brilliant Light Power. He derived a grand unified theory of physics, and set about pursuing the energy applications of one of its implications: the existence of fractional energy states below the putative ground state of the bound hydrogen atom electron. I studied his book intently as a twenty-something, unlike most fringe researchers his work hangs together. He is able to talk extemporaneously about a broad set of topics and retains a vast trove of detail. Much like Stephen Wolfram’s A New Kind of Science, Mill’s GUT-CQM is heavily cross-referenced, forming an interconnected rubric. The Neuromythograph takes this one step further, by dispensing with the book altogether and focusing on modeling a dense semantic network.

Mills also described and patented an artificial intelligence scheme that coded information as “Fourier strings”–ensembles of Fourier components convoluted together to store and retrieve information. The general idea that the brain uses the Fourier transform has independently come up in neuroscience many times since. Mills’ particular scheme still influences me.

Most importantly, Mills has doggedly climbed a wall of skepticism over thirty years, and I am convinced that he will be proven right in the end. Why? Because I read his book, I read quantum theory books, I read all the criticisms of Mills’ detractors, and I see what Mills sees that very few others can see.

Jordan Peterson

The demand for and defamation campaign against Jordan Peterson made an impression upon me. There is clearly demand for spiritual information centered in something besides critical theory, but the price to be paid in the current vicious public discourse environment in the United States is high.

What made the biggest impression on me is how some neuroscientists, who ought to know better, derided Peterson’s musings about the ubiquity of male dominance levels being correlated with brain serotonin levels throughout the animal kingdom (“the lobsters”). There is massive experimental evidence for this pattern across species, including humans. But the very notion that a sex-based social hierarchy might have pre-built mechanisms in biology violates a deep-seated tenet of faith in the social constructionism pantheon. An irrational religious reaction against such blasphemy occurred. It reminds me of people who reject overwhelming evidence of human evolution from primates on the visceral basis ‘Well I didn’t evolve from no godd*mned ape’.

In neuromythography we elaborate the meaning of tonic serotonin (Nirvana) from the dorsal raphe nucleus (Aeternitas) as a ‘faith/confidence/perseverance’ amplitude signal, and phasic serotonin pulses from the median raphe nucleus (Erebus) as a ‘surprise’ signal telling us that we do not in fact have situational understanding. This provides an intuitive picture tying a hierarchy of male unflappability to serotonin levels.

An interesting footnote: Peterson’s magnum opus, Maps of Meaning, featured the Tiamat archetype. We situate this Tiamat chaos-and-confusion archetype in the midcingulate cortex, area p32pr, a brain area consistently activated in cognitive dissonance.

I think that Jordan Peterson fans and non-fans alike will find another level of depth in neuromythography.

Jiddu Krishnamurti

Jiddu Krishnamurti was identified from an early age to be a special mystic, and was groomed out of India by the esoteric Theosophy group to become World Teacher. Krishnamurti had other ideas, and became a sort of independent spiritual guru (though he would reject the term).

Krishnamurti suffered from epilepsy, and I believe specifically left temporal lobe epilepsy. I believe that this explains his slow, deliberate speaking delivery, and also how each of his words has a carefully-considered meaning behind them.

Krishnamurti often railed against “thought”, which sounds odd. If you listen more, it becomes clear that he is practicing an extreme form of mindfulness that includes not only identification of emotions, but also words and constructs and contexts and everything associated with the maelstrom of thought. When you can silence this, then truth emerges. I cannot explain this to you, you simply have to experience a quiet mind to understand.

Krishnamurti said that he sought to help people discover freedom, in themselves. I think this is a worthy goal, and I adopt it as one of my own.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Bertrand Russell described Ludwig Wittgenstein as “perhaps the most perfect example I have ever known of genius as traditionally conceived; passionate, profound, intense, and dominating.”

One of the things I admire about Wittgenstein is his appetite for conflict, to the point of carrying around a poker and waving it around. We now know that adding a bit of stress perks up noradrenaline signaling from the locus coeruleus, which in turn makes people more open to alternative ways of thinking. Wittgenstein couldn’t have known this, yet carried around a poker in order to activate philosopher locus coerulei.

Another amusing fact is that Wittgenstein dropped out of the sky with his book Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, which caused philosophy fanboys throughout Europe to swoon, as it was a progressive chain of pithy logic statements, along the lines of Euclid’s Elements. This is known as ‘early Wittgenstein’. In his middle age, Wittgenstein had the conviction that most problems in philosophy are simply semantic ‘language-games’, and therefore are not really problems at all. He advocated a more sublime view of truth, to include aesthetics, humor, and experience. This is known as ‘late Wittgenstein’, and I feel more aligned to this figure.

Wittgenstein had a familial inheritance of depression and schizophrenia. Two of his brothers committed suicide. He is an example of the connection between genius and schizophrenia.


Don’t, for heaven’s sake, be afraid of talking nonsense! But you must pay attention to your nonsense.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

I am troubled that I do not have any women in this list. I certainly have many women influences, past and present. But women tend to be more balanced, circumspect, and less likely to go to war over an abstract intellectual cause. This means that there are fewer public women that you can hold them out as a canonical representative of a particular school of thought, other than generically, feminism. Perhaps this is another face of the greater male variability hypothesis, or perhaps I am under the influence of some demon whose name ends in -ism.

My neuroscience and mythography education is self-taught, and therefore I mispronounce big words in unfamiliar and proprietary ways, and have indulged in some neologisms whose meanings I try to make clear to the reader via Neuromythopedia. I make lengthy intuitive leaps and lateral connections across disciplines that can be hard to follow (we have Neuromythopedia to help with this). I have a preference for brevity and aphorisms, which can come across as arrogance, and exposition does not flow for me easily like water like it does for more productive writers. There are holes in my neuroscience knowledge, because I skipped vast areas that I was not interested in, or am not ready for yet.

My work is not intended to be good scholarship, it is at once artallegory, and information engineering. I am mindful of the John Baez Crackpot Index, but my spirit identifies with John Conway.

Categories
Politics

Right-wing and Left-wing Are Mere Reflections of Our Brain Architecture, Part IV

This post is Part IV (final) of a series. Go back to Part III, or start over at Part I.

Retrospective

Neuromythography In Context

Mathematicians think in proofs, lawyers in constructs, logicians in operators, dancers in movement, artists in impressions, and idiots in labels.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Neuromythography offers an hybrid alternative to constructs and labels: archetypes representing artistic impressions that interpret neuroscience. This is something new, that was not possible until the past five years. We are explorers of a new frontier, endowed with a past heritage that could not understand the biological significance of their own prior explorations of the mythological world.

I have shown a series of archetypal personifications of real biological entities that exist in everyone. Yet left and right partisans each portray the other side as insincere. Academic scholarship has coined words such as “performativity”, “signifiers”, and “speech violence” to describe right-wing attitudes. Social psychologists claim to have proven that ‘conservative people’ are ‘authoritarian’, and at the same time resist submission to authority, without questioning the inconsistency of the constructs. Conservative pundits have coined words like “propaganda” and “virtue signaling” to describe left-wing attitudes, and persist in pathologizing the Other as unnatural or devil-inspired. Each of these denies the sincerity of the other side, perhaps as a rejection of the part of themselves that also holds these perspectives.

Meme Warfare and Propaganda

The right and left hemispheres prefer visual and verbal information, respectively. This is why you tend to see more creative right-wing memes and more elaborate left-wing manifestos, rather than vice-versa.

Conclusion

The duality that we perceive as “right vs. left” reflects dichotomies in our brains. These divisions include complementary neurotransmitters (oxytocin vs. vasopressin), complementary receptors (v1a vs. v1b), hemisphere lateralization (right amygdala vs. left amygdala), and vertical complements (dmPFC vs vmPFC). Each member of these dualities tend to vary together, resulting in the averaged appearance of a single right-left generalization. Within the interaction networks of these biological entities lie the various political ‘-isms’.

These potentialities exist in all of us, but at any time many people are lopsided towards one side or the other. Our upbringing, experiences, sex, and (to a lesser extent) genetic heritage tend to lean us towards one side or the other. Political rhetoric attempts to trigger us to become outraged at one side, and thereby join “the enemy of my enemy”. When one achieves mastery and balance, those who are enthralled with both sides become angered at them, accusing them of being ‘arrogant centrists who act above it all’. This is the price to be paid for awareness.

Earlier in this essay, I made the following claim:

Oxytocin is the energy of species progress and the Spirit of Community. Vasopressin is the energy of self-actualization, and submission to and rising up towards the Spirit of Dominion.

The erudite may observe parallels to this world vs. the next, species preservation vs. self-preservation, yin/yang, left and right, and so on. What I have done is show where the roots of these intuitive generalizations meander through the soil of of the brain, from neurotransmitters to receptors to the primitive brain nuclei to right/left hemispheres to the highest cortical areas, in all their organic messiness. But at the end of the day, awareness of these two fundamental energies as things to be balanced is the first step towards mastering them.

This post is Part IV (final) of a series. Go back to Part III, or start over at Part I.

Categories
Politics

Right-wing and Left-wing Are Mere Reflections of Our Brain Architecture, Part III

This post is Part III of a series. Advance to Part IV, or go back to Part II.

More Stories

Conservatism, Johnathan Haidt, and the right DLPFC

The dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) is the second-most expanded part of the human cortex due to evolution, next to the inferior parietal lobe. It is the part of the brain that may be most closely characterized as the center of ‘skeptical, logical reasoning’. Stimulation of the right dlPFC makes people more conservative, no matter what their usual political orientation is. The right dlPFC is skeptical, and pauses the rest of the brain to deliberate the future consequences of choices.

Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt is known for his moral foundation theory, in which he articulated four additional dimensions to morality besides the usual utilitarian care/harm dimension that historically has been the fixation point of philosophers for the past couple of centuries:

  1. Care/harm
  2. Fairness/cheating
  3. Loyalty/betrayal
  4. Authority/subversion
  5. Sanctity/degradation

Haidt’s own views were significantly modified by his research, as he found that the liberal point of view that divides morality into ‘utilitarian’ and lumps everything else into a deprecated ‘deontological’ category missed out on these nuances.

The deliberation and balancing of all of these moral dimensions is one of the many roles of the right dlPFC, whereas the left dlPFC seems to be more exclusively focused on utilitarian care/harm.

Risk Avoidance

A conservative archetype would be expected to avoid taking dumb risks. In fact, disabling the right dlPFC with targeted magnetic stimulation increases preference for risky choices.

A Contrast With Moral Neuropsychology

It is interesting to contrast my interpretation with that of academic philosophers who have come to a completely different conclusion. In a future article, I am going to contrast my interpretation of the neuroscience literature with that of social psychologists such as Joshua Greene of Harvard, who not surprisingly look for and find evidence for a ‘dual process theory’ of brutish, primitive deontological moral judgments and sophisticated utilitarian moral reasoning. Interestingly, Greene centers his utilitarian center in the left dlPFC and vmPFC, which is precisely where neuromythography centers utilitarian reasoning, but he simply attributes deontological reasoning to the amygdala, whereas the neuromythographic approach elaborates on the right-sided network that implements higher deontological reasoning.

The modern pathologizing of deontological morality is like historical attribution of manipulative care/harm moral claims to the devil. We ought to stop doing those things, and try to see things as they are.

The Radical Visionary: 10d and PCC

31a identifies that it is time for a change, and 10vd envisions possible communal futures.

The Orwellian Left 44d

The phenomenon of indoctrination is well-known. There is a particular language-related area in the left ventrolateral prefrontal cortex, left 44d, that shows up across militant Jihadists, blatant dehumanization, and other sorts of indoctrination. This area is particularly trained by education. This is why control of education is an object of political conquest. 44d is assigned Orwell, to represent its role in receiving and internalizing propaganda.

The Problematizing Anterior Midcingulate

The ancient Jews described the satan (Hebrew: the accuser), who relentlessly accuses people of sins, and God uses as a prosecutor to test the faithful. The neural center of this problematizer is to be found in the anterior midcingulate part of the brain:

p32pr

Area p32pr is the center of cognitive dissonance and chaos. This is assigned the archetype Tiamat, the chaos snake. It lies above a24pr and p24pr, and spreads confusion to other areas of the cortex to make sense of. A distinction between right and left p32pr archetypes has not yet been made.

a24pr

Area a24pr has a right and left hemisphere archetype. The left a24pr is assigned Dike, the Greek goddess of justice. The right a24pr is assigned Phthonus, the Greek god of envy. a24pr also shows up in self-criticism, loathing, and scrupulosity. These assignments are made due to many fMRI studies that show activations in these areas under conditions of observations of norms violations and others receiving awards.

p24pr

Area p24pr is concerned with expectations of others and the violation of those expectations. It has not yet been personified as of this writing. It complements a24pr in modeling expectations of others while a24pr reacts to outcomes that differ from expectations.

This midcingulate area of the brain is active in shame, and in outrage at violations of social norms. It has been found to be more active in liberals than conservatives. It should be noted that these areas are critical of both others and the self.

The Partisan Instigator: a Partnership Between Zeus and Lucifer

nucleus accumbens (NAc)

To conclude our mythography, let us now look at the culprit at the bottom of all of this: the ventral striatum. The ventral striatum—particularly its primary component, the nucleus accumbens–is regarded as the reward center in neuroscience, but it is the root of “evil” in neuromythography. The ventral striatum is assigned to Lucifer, because in virtually every test of behaviors and attitudes regarded by religions as maladaptive, the ventral striatum figures prominently in the experimental outcomes.

9m

In the most extreme political partisans, area 9mdp in the dmPFC displays an average pattern representative of all members of a political orientation. An extreme partisan is not extraordinary, they are extraordinarily average with respect to their chosen groupthink allegiance. Area 9mdp is assigned to Zeus, the blustery, self-assured king of gods who threw lightning bolts at everyone who annoyed him.

This 9mdp-ventral striatum functional connectivity occurs in both left- and right-wing partisans. Is it any surprise that Lucifer loves stirring up both sides?

Many More Stories

There are many more stories to tell: the left and right insula, the left and right inferior parietal lobes, serotonin and dopamine, the parental hormone galanin, the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis and the lateral septum, all of which have bimodal profiles that generalize into the right and left spectrum. But let us now take a break here and wrap up in Part IV.

This post is Part III of a series. Advance to Part IV, or go back to Part II.

Categories
Politics

Right-wing and Left-wing Are Mere Reflections of Our Brain Architecture, Part II

This post is Part II of a series. Advance to Part III, or go back to Part I.

Flidais vs. Cernnunos: Left Amygdala vs. Right Amygdala

So far we have only talked about two neurotransmitters, oxytocin and vasopressin, and their receptors. These components are embedded in certain brain areas, that have roles of their own, whose behaviors the energies and receivers modify. Let’s now talk about the amygdala.

Flidais, the Left Amygdala

The left amygdala is assigned to Flidais, the Celtic deer goddess, protector and caretaker of innocents. The left amygdala is associated with the experience of predation fear, affective empathy, enjoyment of horror movies, openness to experience, sexual variety, vicarious emotions, reading others’ eyes, and fear biting.

In a celebrated case, a woman whose right amygdala was damaged (and therefore only had a functional left amygdala) was gifted with hyperempathy.

Her empathy seemed to transcend her body — the woman reported feeling physical effects along with her emotions, such as a “spin at the heart” or an “esophageal unpleasant feeling” when experiencing empathic sadness or anger. She reported these feelings when seeing people on TV, meeting people in person, or reading about characters in novels, the researchers said.

She also described an increased ability to decode others’ mental states, including their emotions, the researchers said. Her newly acquired ability to empathize was confirmed by her family, and she performed exceptionally well in psychological tests of empathy, the researchers said.

Live Science

The left amygdala is the locale of the “High Priestess” type of mystic who can reach into people’s souls by staring deeply into their eyes.

Cernnunos, the Right Amygdala

The right amygdala, is conservative, righteous, contemptuous, suspicious, visual, brooding, but emotionally-restrained. To the right amgydala we assign the archetype Cernnunos, the wild horned Celtic nature deity who tamed beasts and protected them.

The right amygdala tends to develop over the course of one’s life and suppress the left amygdala’s tendency to lose its composure. Early life stress tends to accelerate this development; perhaps this is a correlate of ‘toughening up’.

The right amygdala appears to play a central role in the ‘conservative’ political orientation. The neuroscience literature often characterizes the right amygdala as being sensitive to ‘threat’ and ‘disgust’, and this has been used to portray the ‘conservative mind’ as primitive, irrationally fearful of threats, and sensitive to disgust. This is an unfortunate consequence of the political bias in the academic research community. A more careful reading of the literature establishes the right amygdala as being oriented towards pre-emptively acting against a threat (vs. the left amygdala’s inclination to experience threat), and that the right amygdala is a substrate for contempt rather than disgust (a subtle distinction that this study explored).

Male emotional experience is right amygdala-biased, while female emotional experience is left amygdala-biased (Canli et al., 2002Cahill et al., 2004). Testosterone amplifies the right amygdala shift in males, while estrogen amplifies a right amygdala shift in females.

The right amygdala makes fast assessments of fear in others’ faces, while the left amygdala more thoroughly analyzes others’ faces to identify emotions.

The Energies and Receivers of the Amygdala

The right amygdala (Cernnunos) is more heavily innervated by vasopressin (Sancus) fibers, while the left amygdala (Flidais) is more heavily innervated by oxytocin (Guanyin) fibers. The right amygdala is also higher in v1a (Morrigan) receptors, while the left amygdala is higher in OTRs (Tara).

So although these three-and-a-half dimensions (left/right amygdala, oxytocin/vasopressin, v1b/v1a x OTR) are independent, they tend to cluster together. The average person observes this clustering as left/right and female/male average attitudes.

8BM vs. vmPFC: Control of Right and Left Amygdala

Another interesting story is that the medial frontal lobe has right amygdala- and left amygdala-aligned areas. These areas are not simply oriented towards the same right/left sides, but rather the lower part (vmPFC) controls the left amygdala, while the upper part (dmPFC) controls the right amygdala.

Activation of right 8BM with right amygdala seed during contempt

In this study of the neural correlates of contempt, seeding the right amygdala identified a functionally-connected region within the dmPFC called 8BM. In the Neuromythograph, left 8BM is assigned Aedos, the Greek god of reverence, modesty, honor, and respect. Right 8BM is assigned Diomedes, the Greek warrior from the Illiad who demonstrated the greatest honor and independence of mind. Right 8BM appears to be a seat of ‘free will’, and is engaged when an individual goes against the consensus view. 8BM highly expresses androgen (testosterone) receptors, indicating that testosterone ‘amplifies its voice’.

Aedos/Diomedes (8BM) complements Cernnunos (right amygdala), by holding him to honor codes, but activating him when honor demands it.

The Inner Child vs. The Base

The Inner Child

The striatum is a zone of the brain that neuromythography calls the Inner Child. It has several main subdivisions:

  • Caudate nucleus, head
    • Left: Zelus, the Greek god that personifies dedication, emulation, eager rivalry, envy, jealousy, and zeal
    • Right: Entheos, a Greek term meaning “the God within”, and the root word of ‘enthusiasm’. Deified for neuromythography.
  • Putamen
    • Left: Hestia, the Greek goddess of the hearth, comfort, habit
      • Left ventral: Menoitios, the Greek god of rashness
    • Right: Hephaestus, the Greek god of smithing and mechanical construction
      • Right ventral: Thrasos, the Greek god of boldness
  • Ventral striatum

The Base

The pallidum is a zone of the brain that neuromythography calls The Base. It has several components:

  • Globus pallidus external: Horme, the Greek god personifying energetic activity, impulse or effort (to do a thing), eagerness, setting oneself in motion, and starting an action
  • Globus pallidus internal: Atlas, the Greek Titan who tirelessly holds up the world
  • Ventral pallidum: Tanha, the Buddhist term for desires and wants
    • VPr: Erysichthon, a mythical Greek king whose addictive behaviors resulted in him eating himself in hunger
    • VPp: Nectar, the mythical sweet drink of the Greek gods
    • VPdl: Oya, the Yoruban goddess of changing desires
    • VPvm: Jugatinus, the Roman god who yokes couples in marriage

Striatum vs. Pallidum

The globus pallidus internal (GPi) gates the initiation of actions, sustains continuing actions and shows up in “conservative” resistance to risky actions. The GPi is assigned the archetype of Atlas, the Greek Titan who tirelessly holds up the world. Left/right distinctions for GPi have not been made yet, so Atlas is assigned both sides until they can be differentiated.

The striatum (Inner Child) and the GPi (Atlas) play out in the lifespan of all people. The Inner Child is enthusiastic, stubborn, idealistic, impulsive, and creative. It mediates early romantic love and enthusiasm for new lovers. Atlas is downstream of the Inner Child, and ultimately chooses what actions to take and stick with them. Atlas, in conjunction with vasopressin, has been found to be the key player in promoting pair-bonding for life in prairie voles and other species.

In the context of this essay, the head of caudate nucleus is aligned with the Spirit of Community, while the globus pallidus (including Atlas and the external component, Horme) is aligned to the Spirit of Dominion. This is because the “idealistic” caudate nucleus dominates the mind of the young, while the habitual putamen and the globus pallidus are more dominant by adulthood. This dichotomy shows up in the public space as intergenerational conflict.

This post is Part II of a series. Advance to Part III, or go back to Part I.

Categories
Neuroscience

Fluffy Terminology in Neuroscience

I have read tens of thousands of neuroscience papers. There is certain jargon used to make cautious statements that I find to be low-informational, too general to be meaningful, or unfalsifiable. They are used to soften claims to reduce the attack surface area for peer reviewers. Here is a list of frequently used neuroscience publication terms that have low ‘nutritional value’.

Affective
Aggression
Association
Associative
Aversive
Cognition
Consciousness
Context
Correlates
Dynamic
Empathy
Emotional
Evidence
Flexible
Function
Goal
Inhibitory
Involved
Learning
Limbic
Memory
Mentalizing
Modulate
Multimodal
Regulate
Related
Reward
Salience
Self
Semantic
Spatial
State-dependent
Theory of Mind
Valence
Value

Statements that use these words don’t illuminate. Am I missing any terms?

Categories
Linguistics

The Copula Is the Devil

In linguistics, the copula is a word that binds subjects and predicates together, to assert a property or state. In English, this is the verb to be. Spanish makes a distinction between properties and states using two different verbs, ser and estar, respectively.

Polish-American philosopher Alfred Korzybski was famous for his war against the copula:

The map is not the territory.

— Alfred Korzybski

Whatever you say a thing is, it isn’t.

— Alfred Korzybski

Korzybski named his skeptical school of linguistic philosophy general semantics. He observed that the unconsidered use of the copula leads to many logical errors, and that such language does not reliably express thought or meaning.

An amusing Korzybski anecdote from Wikipedia:

One day, Korzybski was giving a lecture to a group of students, and he interrupted the lesson suddenly in order to retrieve a packet of biscuits, wrapped in white paper, from his briefcase. He muttered that he just had to eat something, and he asked the students on the seats in the front row if they would also like a biscuit. A few students took a biscuit. “Nice biscuit, don’t you think,” said Korzybski, while he took a second one. The students were chewing vigorously. Then he tore the white paper from the biscuits, in order to reveal the original packaging. On it was a big picture of a dog’s head and the words “Dog Cookies.” The students looked at the package, and were shocked. Two of them wanted to vomit, put their hands in front of their mouths, and ran out of the lecture hall to the toilet. “You see,” Korzybski remarked, “I have just demonstrated that people don’t just eat food, but also words, and that the taste of the former is often outdone by the taste of the latter.

Categories
Relationships Math

Ramanujan Craved a Friendship Like 220 and 284 Have

About the mystical mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan, fellow mathematician John Littlewood is reputed to have said, “every positive integer is one of Ramanujan’s personal friends.” Inspired by this characterization, I like to claim that I have made the brain areas and neurotransmitters and receptors my friends. I recently found the following Ramanujan anecdote at https://www.speakingtree.in/blog/a-man-of-few-friends


Mathematician Ramanujam was a man of very few friends and was not known to have a close friendship with anyone. A friend pointed out this to him and asked him the reason for his hesitation in developing a close friendship with anyone.

Ramanujam replied “I do wish to have someone with whom I can share a close friendship. But the problem is I am yet to find a person who possesses the qualities I expect from a close friend”.

The friend was eager to know what were the special qualities expected by Ramanujam.

Ramanujar replied “The numbers 220 and 284 are symbolic of an exemplary friendship and my wish is to have that kind of friendship with someone”

The friend was confused “What is the connection between my question and these two numbers?”

Ramanujam proceeded to clarify …..he asked the friend to first find the Divisors of these two numbers.

After a little difficulty, the person listed the divisors:-

220–>

1,2,4,5,10,11- ,20,22,44,55,110,220

284–>

1,2- ,4,71,142,284

Ramanujar asked him to remove the integers, 220 and 284 from both the lists and calculate the total of the remaining divisors for each number.

The friend did that and was surprised at what he got :-

220–>

1 2 4 5 10 11 20 22 44 55 110 = 284

284–>

1 2 4 71 142 = 220

When the divisors of these two numbers are totalled leaving out the integer, one gives out the other as the total. In other words, the number 220 represented the number 284 in its absence and vice versa….both the numbers contained within themselves the other one.

Ramanujar explained in his own inimitable style how just as these two numbers represented a mutual connection at a deeper level, he too expected to have such a connection and rapport with someone whom he could call a close friend. The friend looked in awe at the man, the greatest mathematician of the century.

Ramanujam’s theory for a close friendship:- If two people can have ingrained in them the same set of qualities and if one can mirror the qualities of the other even in the other’s absence, then such two people can symbolize and represent a true friendship.

Categories
Intelligence Psychology

The Dangers of Ignoring Nature AND Nurture

When we torture the data until it confesses, we should be wary of the stories it is telling us.

Dangerous Questions

My son introduced me to an article by nom-de-plume Wael Taji in Quillette entitled, “The Dangers of Ignoring Cognitive Inequality”.

“Dad,” he asked me. “Do you believe people’s intelligence is determined by nature or nurture?”


The politically-charged war over the heritability of intelligence by both “anti-hereditarians” and “hereditarian” social scientists — who each reject each others’ strawman labels for the other — is acrimonious and confusing. It is filled with seething polemics barely concealed by academic decorum. Reaching common ground is frustrated by a plethora of thought experiments, pedantic arguments over word definitions, soft prejudices, motivated reasoning, and rhetorical mathiness. As University of Virginia psychologist Eric Turkheimer succinctly describes the dispute:

“The hereditarians want to be seen as scientific so they aren’t seen as racists; the anti-hereditarians want to be scientific so they aren’t seen as frightened by socially difficult scientific findings.”

In this essay, I seek to abolish the nature OR nurture question of intelligence altogether. I will try to show both nature AND nurture are part of a complex interconnected system that determines what people commonly mean by intelligence. I will contrast this with both the Taji position and also the position of social psychologists like Eric Turkheimer. I will take a scorched earth approach to IQ as a purported measure of a measurable construct called intelligence. Along the way, I will challenge the methods of field experts that purport to possess insight into the nature vs. nurture question about intelligence, methods that I call Queteletan.

The Dangers of Politicized Science

Turkheimer is a social psychologist and one of the willing proxy instruments of Vox editor Ezra Klein’s orbital bombardment of the reputation of author and podcaster Sam Harris. In a recent blog post, Turkheimer laments the lack of progress on the nature vs. nurture issue over the course of his career:

“…everyone is stubborn. One thing I actually have in common with Charles Murray is that (as he notes about himself in the podcast) I haven’t changed my mind about much on this topic over a thirty-year career.”

What one should draw from this is that the underlying substrate of intelligence is unlikely to be found by social scientists, who too often devolve into opposing factions engaging in what anti-philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein indicted as “language-games”. Opposed to mainstream social scientists are activists in evolutionary biology and evolutionary psychology. Many of these practitioners muse about the nature of humanity in an allegorical format that pays homage to natural and sexual selection principles, as if the use of the narrative style of appealing to evolutionary mechanisms by itself raises their meditations’ empirical stature to the level of scientific experiment.

The Dangers of Queteletan Biometrics

Intelligence is inevitably the result of a highly-interconnected mosaic of nature and nurture. This seems to be agreed by all sides. I am concerned that Taji’s article handed some undeserved ammunition to those who call themselves “race realists”, who cherry-pick data as justifications for what they believe are innate “average” differences between members of the socially-constructed concepts of ethnicity. This is received by many people as unhelpful to social progress, and perniciously conflates biological ancestry with socially-constructed ethnic groups. This error, consciously or not, gives unearned credence to oppressor narratives as part of the “natural order” ordaining their power over oppressed groups.

Initially, Taji sets up his piece with the story of the worst mass-killing in Australian history, concluding “the most notable and concrete fact of Bryant’s psychological condition was his extremely low IQ of 66 — well within the range for mental disability”. This is no different than any of the other polemics that scapegoat the entire class of people when one member commits a crime: Muslims, immigrants, blacks, whites, gays, men, and right-wing zealots. The reader is now vulnerable to believing that this class of “low IQ” people are the problem behind this outrage. Scott Adams might muse that this is “good persuasion” but as intelligent adults we should have the presence of mind to be immune to obvious rhetorical manipulations like this. Besides, we know some of the most frightening serial killers have been highly intelligent: Rodney Alcala, Ted Bundy, Kristen Gilbert, Andrew Cunanan, and Ted Kaczinsky were all measurably brilliant people. Intelligence is not an antidote to madness; indeed, they often seem to go hand-in-hand.

Taji goes on to describe the methods of IQ tests. Defining intelligence is exceedingly hard. IQ was originally an attempt to empirically measure intelligence independent from education, but studies have shown that education improves IQ. Humans from primitive tribes usually perform poorly on Western-designed IQ tests, but this is because such tests are almost invariably biased by hidden educational requirements they have not been exposed to. There is no reason to believe that humans from primitive tribes are cognitively handicapped, as their IQ test scores would otherwise indicate. This is a defect in the IQ testing of psychometrics, not evidence for the trope of Darwinian selection for intelligence in “civilized” ancestry lines.

On the other hand, the impact of education may mainly be realized in a specific area of the brain that is a hub for semantics (left anterior temporal lobe), which may explain the stereotype of the pedantic scholar who clings to sophistry that has no support in the real world. Perhaps this is a neural correlate of the IYI (Idiot Yet Intellectual) epithet wielded by Nicholas Nassim Taleb. Indeed, damage to this brain area has been observed to unlock latent creative genius. We are able to locate other cognitive competencies to particular areas of the brain, such as musical knowledgepoker skillmathematics, and humor creativity. Education, or more accurately our pedagogical methods, may have counterproductive downsides — as widely-observed by teachers and sagely observed by Pink Floyd. These neuroscience studies are largely unexplored in the cloistered realms of intelligence and education research.

Quantitative genetics searches for genes that might be selected for IQ (or acadamia’s favorite hubristic IQ proxy, “educational attainment”) have come up null. That is not to say that many genes ultimately contribute to performance on IQ tests and life achievement, because they certainly do. We simply do not have an understanding of the higher-order interactions between nature and nurture. IQ psychometric testing is seductive because it provides the illusion of empirical objectivity, but underneath things are far too muddled to be using it to divide people into Brave New World castes. Surely this was the cautionary message that Aldous Huxley intended to convey in his most famous book.

IQ is a score on a test, an attempt to summarize the “quality” of a mind in one neat number, and it is only as good as the test design. Psychology has long recognized the “confound” issues with IQ psychometric as a valid measure of nature vs. nurture. Psychologist Charles Spearman imagined a new number, called the g factor (general intelligence factor), to represent the “true, innate” intelligence that lurks obscured inside the nominal IQ test measurement. People who do well on one type of mental task, such as vocabulary, tend to do well on other tests, such as memorizing digits, within a certain variance. By combining a number of separate cognitive tests together, and using a statistical technique called factor analysis to try to extract meaningful correlations, we can get a number that has been demonstrated to be more predictive in the real world than IQ.

Spearman’s student, Raymond Catell, rejected the unified g in favor of two variables, fluid intelligence (Gf) and crystalized intelligence (Gc) (later expanded with quantitative reasoning (Gq) and visual-spatial reasoning (Gv)). Later still, John B. Carroll created a hierarchical structure with a master g factor at the top, eight subcategories, and myriad tertiary categories.

All of this psychometric numerology provides a certain illusive feeling of rigor and symmetry, as with the Noble Eightfold Path of Buddhism, but the derived g factor does not escape the fundamental problem of intelligence: we cannot tie it to any observable except performance on behavioral tests designed by researchers; tests that introduce various uncertainties. As Matthew Panizzon and Eero Vuoksimaa of UCSD put it:

“Although we provide evidence in favor of g being a valid latent construct, it is still the case that we do not know if g is a causal individual differences construct with respect to specific cognitive abilities. If one interprets the higher-order common pathway model from a top-down perspective, it would seem to imply that g is indeed a causal individual differences construct. However, this model is not directional, and it can also be explained by models that do not include a g factor, such as the mutualism model (van der Maas et al 2006). In the mutualism model, g is an emergent property of the positive manifold among specific cognitive abilities rather than a construct that causes the relationships among cognitive abilities. “

In other words, g seems to be a good heuristic indicator of intelligence. However, it is not a real attribute that is causally-related to any discernible characteristic differences between individuals. Reifying IQ or g factor into something real is a logical fallacy. We are left no closer to resolving the nature OR nurture question, but I hope this makes the reader smarter about our ignorance of intelligence.

The Dangers of Jeff Foxworthy Medicine

Taji identifies Conduct Disorder (CD) and Antisocial Personality Disorder (APD) as being associated with low IQ. I do not buy Taji’s putative causal relationship between a reified IQ and mental disorders. Low IQ is not the “intrinsic” property that causes mental disorders; both personality disorders and low IQ are common symptoms of brain abnormalities. These may be due to poor nutrition, an unenriching environment, chronic stress — all factors very much impacted by socioeconomic stratification. At the same time, there are also strong genetic heritability for particular types of conditions. But the correlation between low IQ and CD/APD is not causation.

It is helpful to remember that these personality disorders are defined by a list of behavioral symptoms agreed to by a consensus of psychiatry committees. While psychiatrists have long attempted to classify the many patients the field has treated over its history, the categories shift over time as the field and committee members change. At the risk of drawing ire from the psychiatry community, the modern pantheon of personality disorders are rather analogous to comedian Jeff Foxworthy’s diagnostic method, “You May Be a Redneck If”. They are not diseases in the physiological sense, but another set of abstract concepts that have been reified into medical conditions (in many cases, to the financial benefit of the pharmaceutical industry). In summary, linking a highly summarized empirical measure (IQ) to consensus-defined behavioral diseases (personality disorders) weakly supports Taji’s case for setting policy around the IQ disadvantaged.

With that caveat established, neurological studies have identified personality disorder associations with particular brain phenotypes, early childhood experience, and in some cases, genes. For example, murderous psychosis seems to often result from damage to a part of the brain called the gyrus rectus, or its inputs. Early childhood trauma has been shown to have physical effects in the brain and the epigenetic expression of genes. Here the inseparability of nature and nurture is clear.

Mental disorders have increasingly been found to have medical causes. The gut bacteria flora, which are heavily controlled by diet and environmental stress, have recently been found to have myriad effects upon the body and brain. Diet is very much impacted by socioeconomic stratification. Exercise has major benefits for the brain, including stimulating neurogenesis, and there is a discrepancy in sports availability along income and gender lines. Long-term stress has many mental health effects, and teachers who teach in underprivileged communities universally attest that children are ill-prepared to learn in school when they are stressed at home. Both IQ and mental health are linked to body health, and ultimately healthy environments, which are clearly related to socioeconomic status.

Psychiatry grapples with some very difficult problems involving the human mind. The grand conjectures of Freud and Jung have been superseded by committee consensus conventions. However, we must remember that diagnostic personality disorders, as with IQ and g factor, are based upon conventions and subjective clinical assessments, not physiology. Psychiatry cannot successfully tease apart nature and nurture.

The Dangers of Gene Myths

In genetics, the MAOA gene, which is passed down on the mother’s X chromosome, has variants (R2 and R3 alleles) that show up disproportionately in violent male criminals. It’s the closest story we have to a “bad seed”. The wounds of childhood trauma can now be observed physiologically in the brain, and some people may be genetically vulnerable to this.

However, MAOA R2/R3 does not explain most violent criminals, and the vast majority of people carrying MAOA R2/R3 are fully-functioning people. But this inconclusive discovery was sensationalized in the media, and “the warrior gene” unjustly became a race realism story in precisely the manner that frustrates Turkheimer. In reality, MAOA does not provide a convenient story to justify racial stereotypes:

“MAOA-3R — the “original warrior gene” — was the first gene linked with antisocial characteristics. But Maori were not the only ethnic group with a high frequency of this variant. It turned out that while 3R was found in 56% of Maori males, it occurred in 58% of African American males and 34% of European males [2]. Misinterpreted by the media, the 3R variant quickly became a lead character in a pop science narrative intended to explain why certain racial groups appear to have increased tendencies toward violence. When a disproportionately high number of males of an ethnic group carries a less common gene linked with aggressive behaviors, the discussion about that gene immediately takes on racial overtones [3, 14]. (Interestingly, the press ignored studies indicating that the 3R variant occurred in 61% of Taiwanese males [15] and 56% of Chinese males [16]).”

The key takeaway here is the neophyte level of knowledge that we have about genes does not warrant any sort of Darwinist social policy framework based around optimizing the human genetic code — we would not know what genetic alleles to select for even if we wanted to. We know of no genetic differences between the popular conception of “races” that explain any racial behavioral stereotypes. Media writers should take care to neither foment race realism, nor portray an unscientific blank-slate position that genes contribute nothing to intelligence as a scientific view.

The Dangers of Statistical Inferencing

Let us identify what is contemptuously called “scientific racism”. The Pioneer Fund is an organization that was headed by J. Phillippe Rushton until his death in 2012, and now appears to be headed by Richard Lynn. Its charter dedicates the fund to “race betterment”. It funds heritability research, and has been accused of being sympathetic to “white supremacy”. I am going to briefly review just one paper by Richard Lynn.

In evolutionary biology, r/K selection theory proposes that organisms tend to adopt reproductive strategies that either emphasize having many offspring with low parental involvement in rearing (r) or fewer offspring with high parental involvement in rearing (K). Lynn describes Rushton’s application of r/K selection as follows:

“…Rushton has proposed that Mongoloids have evolved the strongest K strategy, Negroids are stronger r strategists, while Caucasoids fall intermediate but are closer to Mongoloids. Rushton uses this general theory to explain a large number of differences between the three races including brain size, intelligence, sexuality and numbers of children.”

This speculation is unsubstantiated, offensive, and plainly presumes dubious racial generalizations in the thinking of Rushton and Lynn. However, it illustrates a broader problem with evolutionary biology, which is that its rhetorical style can be adapted to lend scientific-sounding credibility to just about any specious political argument. Lynn further reports:

“The relation between skin color and intelligence was examined in a representative sample of 430 adult African Americans. A statistically significant positive correlation of 0.17 was obtained between light skin color and intelligence. It is proposed that the result supports the hypothesis that the level of intelligence in African Americans is significantly determined by the proportion of Caucasian genes.”

This conclusion, that because skin color is genetically determined, then the same genes somehow affect intelligence, is absurd. There are no “Caucasian genes” rigidly defining whiteness boundaries — there are merely genetic variants that appear more frequently in different populations. There is no scientific reason to believe that skin color genes are even indirectly related to intelligence as a result of “admixture” of socially-constructed white and black groups. Occam’s Razor demands that we first consider racial bias to explain any correlations between IQ and skin color. But through the magic of what is known derisively as p-hacking, Lynn finds them to be correlated in a statistically significant way.

This is another example where quantitative methods, especially those that purport to compute the probability that the author’s conclusions are wrong, should be eyed suspiciously. Methods that seem to provide validation of “politically correct” social sciences narratives create outrage when co-opted to support abhorrent narratives. Some of that outrage ought to be channeled towards questioning the methods themselves.

When we torture the data until it confesses, we should be wary of the stories it is telling us.

The Dangers of Politicized Science

Both Galileo and Darwin were persecuted by the religious establishments of their times because their ideas were thought to threaten extant social beliefs. There is a current teaching among activist progressives that long-suffering oppressed classes can take power if only the oppressor classes did not actively maintain their systemic power dominion. These progressives seem to eye genetic studies of ancestry suspiciously, pointing to historical prejudiced race science and eugenics programs as cautionary slippery slopes leading to the oppressors maintaining unjust power. Although I am not devoting much space in this article to Eric Turkheimer, whose objections to the Pioneer Fund circle are well-founded, I wish to dissent on a specific theme of his:

“Now have a look at the Rushton and Jensen paper making the case for the partial genetic determination of racial differences, or listen to Murray and Harris, or read any of the replies to our piece in Vox. Where are the percentages? Where is the equivalent of the ACE model? Where are the structural equation models with parameters quantifying the “partly genetic and partly environmental” hypothesis the hereditarians keep repeating? For all the hereditarians’ idle intuitions about differences being part genetic and part environmental, where is the empirical or quantitative theory that describes how this apportioning is supposed to work? There is no such thing as a “group heritability coefficient,” no way to put any meat on the speculative bones about partial genetic determination. In the absence of an actual empirical theory, the discussion is all about your intuitions against my intuitions.”

Let us now talk about a gene highly conserved across mammals, FOXP2. This gene created a big stir in 2001. Mutations in FOXP2 can cause human language disorders. Replacing the mouse FOXP2 gene with the human equivalent dramatically changed their cognitive and vocal behavior, in an experiment reminiscent of Daniel Keyes’ short story Flowers for Algernon. FOXP2 is heavily expressed in the left inferior frontal gyrus, a brain area central to language articulation. On the other hand, few connections between particular FOXP2 alleles and high verbal intelligence have been found. What we can say is FOXP2 is that it appears to contribute to verbal intelligence. Many other genes have intriguing connections to intelligence. We do not understand all of this, but have tantalizing glimpses of insight.

Returning to the social sciences, Turkheimer is correct that there is no model linking the social construct of race to particular gene variants that are better or worse. However, it is not unreasonable to suppose that as science untangles the genetic milieu, we may find gene variations involved in cognition that are distributed differently amongst populations with different ancestries. No one can presently meet the Turkheimer Legitimacy Criterion — a mathematical theory that models genes-to-g — because biology appears to be computationally irreducible, and g or any “group heritability coefficient” are highly reified concepts disconnected from this underlying biology. But surely the extreme Turkheimer Legitimacy Criterion does not delegitimize free inquiry into ancestry and intelligence, due to the fear that someone may derive false myths from its results!

This was the central point that Sam Harris felt needed to be made in the case of Charles Murray, whose Bell Curve work drew partly from the aforementioned Richard Lynn’s research. Harris made this principled stand at great personal reputational cost. He tried to justify his defense of the spirit of free inquiry into truth in an appeal to Ezra Klein for two hours on his podcast. This appeal was in vain, as Klein could not be moved from his rhetorical talking points about the historical injustices of bad racial theories past, and postmodernist counseling of Sam Harris to reflect upon his inherent unconscious biases that stem from his white privilege.

Wokeness is a peculiar kind of sonambulance.

The Dangers of Ignoring Divergent Brain Morphology

Genetic studies indicate that the Australian Aboriginal people have been isolated from the rest of humanity for the past 50,000 years. Both anecdotally and in studies, indigenous Australians on average have superior eyesight to Australians of European origin. There are indications that Australian Aborigines on average have a larger occipital lobe of the brain, which is the primary location where visual perception is processed. There is an evolutionary hypothesis that the harsh Australian outback environment with flat, wide open spaces selected for increased visual acuity to find food and water. If indeed we were to find genetic factors behind these adaptations, what would this mean for the popular political science conflict theory doctrine that posits the only differences between “socially-constructed” human ethnic groups is organized political power? We have to be ready for this conversation, which I believe was the central point of both Taji’s article and why Sam Harris waded into the debate on principle.

Dangerous Conclusions

If you made it through this article, you may have found that I evaded your labels. Do I believe in IQ or don’t I? Perhaps you wanted me to come out as a race realist, or as a evolutionary biologist-philosopher who believes that genes mean nothing and group political power is everything? We have to make sense of all of these views, and be able to discuss them no matter where the science leads, even at the risk of calling into question our religious and political beliefs. With all due respect to Ezra Klein and Eric Turkheimer, it is possible to examine issues sincerely and dispassionately as critical thinking individuals without being tainted by the Original Sin of group identity neologisms. We also must take care not to speculatively misuse genetics to explain outcomes where socioeconomic issues loom first and foremost, which is the central issue I have with Taji’s article. We should hear out and earnestly critique the eugenics-era holdovers of the Pioneer Fund, who comb through statistical data as if they were chicken entrails, hoping we might purify the human genome of contaminants — an erroneous framing of the genome long-disproven by the Human Genome Project of the 1990s.

USC electrical engineering professor Bart Kosko wrote a book called Fuzzy Thinking in which he described Western thought as being obsessed with P OR NOT P, whereas Eastern thought is more interested in harmonizing P AND NOT P. It has turned out that nature OR nurture is not even a valid question with respect to shaping individual intelligence; we must instead learn to look dispassionately at nature AND nurture together as a living system.


My son peered at me quizzically. “So do you believe in nature or nurture?”

“No. And neither should you.”

Categories
Archetypes

Hecate the Triple Goddess Symbolizes the Three Estrogens

One of the cross-cultural archetypes observed by mythographers is the motif of the Triple Goddess. In the Greek pantheon, the Triple Goddess is called Hecate. Hecate is often depicted in art with three faces. The most common interpretation is that the first face of Hecate is the Maiden, the second face is the Mother, and the third face is the Crone. What is the neuromythographic interpretation of this this universal human myth?

Estrogen is the main female sex hormone. However, there are three main types of estrogens: estradiol, estriol, and estrone.

Hecate the Maiden: Estradiol (E2)

Estradiol is secreted by the ovaries, and is responsible for the development of secondary sexual characteristics in young females, including the breasts, the widening of the hips, and the onset of menstruation. It is the most powerful of the three estrogens. Estradiol is Hecate the Maiden.

Estradiol also has a significant effect in males. Applying estradiol to certain brain areas triggers aggression towards other males (but not towards females). Estradiol does not function this way in females.

Hecate the Mother: Estriol (E3)

Estriol is mainly present in women during pregnancy, when it increases by a thousand-fold. It is synthesized by the placenta, spiking up around week 12 of pregnancy. Estriol remodels the brain in preparation for motherhood, reducing emotional stress, reducing the gray matter areas associated with past autobiography, and preparing the brain for bonding with infants. Estriol also elevates maternal aggression towards dangers to her children. Estriol is Hecate the Mother.

Hecate the Crone: Estrone (E1)

Estrone is the predominant estrogen in post-menopausal women. Estrone is the basic estrogen that is converted to either estradiol or estriol. After menopause, this conversion takes place at lower levels. Estrone is Hecate the Crone.

Inanna (ER-A) and Cybele (ER-B): The Estrogen Receptors

The three estrogens described earlier act upon two cell receptors, known as estrogen receptor-alpha (ER-A) and estrogen receptor-beta (ER-B).

ER-A is associated with the lively and dark sides of femininity, and is represented in neuromythography by the archetype Inanna. Inanna is an ancient Mesopotamian goddess associated with love, beauty, sex, war, justice and political power. 

ER-B is associated with the calmer, contemplative side of femininity, and is represented by the Anatolian goddess Cybele. Cybele was known as the Mountain Mother, and became known as the Magna Mater (“Great Mother”) when adopted by the ancient Romans.

Together, ER-A and ER-B represent the contradiction to be balanced by all women between these two sides of femininity. The three faces of Hecate (estrone, estradiol, and estriol) bind with both of these receptors, regulating behavior and mood. The expression of ER-A (Inanna) and ER-B (Cybele) changes dynamically across different brain areas, depending upon health, experience, and other conditions.

Going Deeper

A 2020 study found that the measured levels of E2 (Maiden) and E1 (Crone) in a study cohort of women affected the functional connectivity of the brain when recalling verbal memories:

E1 was positively associated with connectivity between the hippocampus and

rostral anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), mid cingulate, dorsal ACC, and left insula

during verbal encoding. E2 was positively associated with connectivity with rostral

ACC/medial PFC and left orbital inferior frontal cortex during encoding and connectivity with rostral ACC, bilateral orbital PFC, bilateral middle temporal cortex, precuneus

and posterior cingulate cortex during retrieval.

The three faces of Hecate (the three estrogens) that are dominant at different times during women’s lives affect how the rest of the brain views memories and choices.

Synthesis

Hecate is often associated with the phases of the moon, which are connected to the monthly menstrual cycle. The above diagram depicts the synthesis pathways for estriol (left), estrone (center), and estradiol (right). We can see that the two phases of the menstrual cycle (follicular and luteal) ultimately lead to a ‘crossroads’ intermediate called androstenedione.

In males, androstenedione is related to Jungian anima. In healthy young males, it is mostly converted to testosterone and related androgens. As men age, more androstenedione goes down the estrogen pathway, which is part of why men and women appear to converge emotionally as they age. Testosterone is also converted to estradiol, which in males triggers aggression towards others. This is the vengeful side of Hecate.

In females, androstenedione is converted to estrone, and from there into estradiol in younger women (or estriol during pregnancy). Aging causes less estrone to be converted into estradiol.

Consider now this classic image of Hecate. Three faces–Maiden, Mother, and Crone representing estrone, estradiol, and estrone. Two torches, representing ER-A and ER-B. A blade, representing the violent aspect of estradiol.

The ancient myths that cross cultures have already pre-explored biology. We just have to understand the meaning of what the ancients already intuited.

Categories
Philosophy of Science

An Example of Comtean and Queteletan Social Science

One of the themes you will hear over and over in neuromythography is that far too much of social science performatively mimics the language of science without meeting the objectivity standards of science. Social scientists often observe that this criticism ‘is not new’, and then ignore it from the security of the ingroup. Hayek and Popper described this as ‘scientism’, a word that has since been co-opted by others to mean the opposite of what Hayek meant. I have coined a couple of new words–Comtean and Queteletan–to describe reified social constructs and naive empiricism, respectively. These are named after Auguste Comte and Adolphe Quetelet, respectively. Here is a particularly illustrative example in psychology:

A Comtean social construct is proposed– ‘fake news’. The experimental paradigm suggests to the test subjects that intelligent people tap faster, cueing the subjects that the experiment is about measuring their intelligence via their tapping performance. People who receive the cue are, obviously, more motivated to tap faster in order to perform for the experimenters, but this confound is ignored. These Queteletan numerical results are then presented as ’empirical evidence’ for the generalization that fake news has subconscious effects upon ‘people’.

This is only persuasive if your prior is aligned with the political imperative that fake news is something to be suppressed. It is therefore rhetoric, not science. One does not need to be educated to see the common sense objection that the experiment did not validly measure the hypothetical proposition. Before lamenting critics as ‘anti-science’ dullards, one should reflect on whether they are really doing science or not.

Categories
Psychology

The Bad Brain: A Neuromythographic Interpretation of Antisocial Behavior

The most exciting part of neuromythography is when the model explains brand new neuroscience studies. Every experimental validation adds to our confidence in the value of the neuromythographic method.

A State-of-the-Art Neuropsychology Study

A study was published in Lancelet in February 2020 entitled, Associations between life-course-persistent antisocial behaviour and brain structure in a population-representative longitudinal birth cohort. What is particularly exciting about this study is they used the same Glasser cortical parcellation pipeline that neuromythography is based upon. This allows us to easily append neuromythographic labels and interpretations on top of the experimental work that is otherwise difficult for anyone (including neuroscientists) to interpret.

The researchers used a long-term psychology cohort known as the Dunedin Study, a population in New Zealand who were first assessed at three years old and re-assessed every few years through age 45. 672 of these participants underwent fMRI scanning, and these brain scans were compared to questionnaire data about their behavior between ages 7 and 26. Based on these responses, the population was separated into ‘persistent antisocial behavior’, ‘adolescent-limited anti-social behavior’ (i.e. they ‘grew out of it’), and ‘normal’ groups. The goal of the study was to identify brain areas associated with persistent anti-social behavior, compared to adolescent-limited and normal groups.

Here are the imaging results for the two antisocial groups of interest. The top is for the persistent antisocial group, while the bottom is for the adolescent-limited antisocial group.

A) shows cortical parcels with significantly lower cortical thickness in the persistent antisocial group. B) shows lower cortical thickness in the adolescent-limited antisocial group compared to the normal behavior group.

Both the adolescent-limited and persistent antisocial groups had a distinct, small group of brain areas identified by the study.

The researchers concluded:

First, we found that smaller surface area and thinner cortex in brain regions associated with executive function, motivation, and affect regulation previously implicated in studies of antisocial behaviour were, as hypothesised, specific to the life-course-persistent group. Second, the observed pattern of smaller surface area specific to the life-course-persistent group was much broader than previously reported in cross-sectional studies of antisocial behaviour. Third, both antisocial behaviour trajectory groups had features of reduced cortical thickness compared with the low group without antisocial behaviour, but in different areas of the brain.

The researchers then speculate about genetics, environment, and genetic-environment interactions, and relate these findings to prior findings. That is all we can get out of this if we are using a neuropsychology framework. Now, let us apply the neuromythographic method.

Enter the Neuromythograph

The Unruly Child

The adolescent-limited antisocial behavior group contrast revealed two brain areas, both in the right hemisphere: TE1m and TE2a. The archetypes for these are Bentham and al-Kindi, respectively.

Bentham

Jeremy Bentham was an English philosopher who first articulated utilitarianism and consequentialist ethics. Right TE1m is represented as Bentham because of its role in contemplating the consequences of actions upon other people. TE1m – Bentham has a left hemisphere complement in TE1m – Protagoras, the Greek sophist founder who represents linguistic understanding of agents performing actions upon things. The complementarity between left hemisphere Protagoras, that models agent-object interaction models, and right hemisphere Bentham, that models consequentialist ethics models, is intuitive.

al-Kindi

al-Kindi is known as ‘the father of Arab philosophy’. He was a polymath, whose wrote hundreds of treatises on a myriad of topics across physical and spiritual domains. Right TE2a is assigned to al-Kindi, representing holistic knowledge knitted together into wisdom. Right TE2a – al-Kindi has a left hemisphere complement in TE2a – Pliny the Elder, the Roman philosopher who constructed the first encyclopedia. The complementarity between left hemisphere Pliny, that is the library of knowledge about the physical world, and al-Kindi, who stiches together knowledge into wisdom, is intuitive.

The Antisocial Adult

The persistent antisocial group had a larger set of grey matter thickness deficits identified. In both hemispheres, areas TGd and AAIC were flagged. The neuromythographic archetypes are as follows.

Pheme

Pheme was the Greek spirit of spirit of fame and good repute in a positive sense and infamy and scandal in the bad. Left TGd is assigned to Pheme, because of its multi-faceted role in assigning attributes to types of people, including processing of proper nouns and pop culture.

Aesop

Aesop was a Greek storytelling who wrote some of the most famous tales, most of which have a moral lesson. Right TGd is assigned to Aesop, because of its role in understanding stereotypes, archetypes, poetry, and storytelling.

The complementarity between left hemisphere Pheme, the goddess of fame and reputation, and right hemisphere Aesop, a store of archetypal stories, is intuitive.

Fortuna

Fortuna was the Roman goddess of luck and misfortune. Left AAIC is assigned to Fortuna because of its role in the general emotional sentiment of whether we are currently in a lucky streak or not. The grey matter deficit here is interesting because of how the perception of whether one is lucky might play a role in overall life outlook and the prospects of getting away with a crime.

In the left hemisphere only, areas TPOJ1 and PEF in antisocial adults had less cortical thickness.

Pistis

Pistis was the Greek goddess of trust and good faith. Right AAIC is assigned to Pistis because of its role in assessing trustworthiness, both of oneself and others. The complementarity between left hemisphere Fortuna, that judges luckiness, and right hemisphere Pistis, that judges trustworthiness, is intuitive.

TOPIC-ACTOR-SCHEMA

[INCOMPLETE] Left TPOJ has a general role in understanding the TOPIC-ACTOR-SCHEMA context of a sentence. Left TPOJ1 is activated when someone invokes ‘sacred values’. The reduction in grey matter in left TPOJ in the persistent antisocial group is consistent with reduced experience of sacred values.

Codd

The appearance of a grey matter deficit in left PEF – Codd in the persistent antisocial group is obviously not usefully explained by the neuromythographic interpretation. Either this is an experimental artifact, or PEF awaits a better archetypal interpretation that can explain this experimental result.

Neuromythography Adds Missing Insight to Neuroscience and Psychology

When we consider the neuromythographic interpretation of the grey matter deficits of the adolescent-limited antisocial group, we can start to get a picture of the problem and what the remedies might be. A troublesome teenager may not consider the consequences of their actions in the utilitarian sense mediated by left TE2a – Bentham, and has not yet synthesized experience and knowledge into wisdom. Right TE2a – al-Kindi is a center of wisdom across spiritual and physical realms. It is interesting to speculate that a lack of spiritual guidance might be at fault, in part.

As with the case of the teenage miscreant, the persistent antisocial behavior group’s cortical thickness deficits provide an intuitive picture. Reduced thickness in left TGd – Pheme and right TGd – Aesop may result in a deficit in caring about reputation and self-image of one’s moral character. Deficits in AAIC – Fortuna and AAIC – Pistis may result in under- or over-estimation of one’s ability to succeed, and an impaired judgement of what constitutes trustworthy behavior. A reduction in TPOJ1 may result in impairment of judgment with respect to appropriate behaviors in social situations, and result in a loosened grasp of personal sacred values.

Importantly, the neuromythographic interpretation indicates that the label ‘antisocial’ isn’t a valid construct to apply across the two groups. The adolescent group grey matter profile is very different from the persistent group. Broad psychology categories, ‘validated’ by circuitous psychometrics, fail when put to the test in neuroscience bolstered by neuromythography.

We have just scratched the surface of the additional value that can be extracted from a neuroscience study by applying neuromythographic archetypes to the raw findings. The neighbors, entrances, and exits of these brain areas inform how the networked ensemble of brain areas work together. The neurotransmitter and receptor profiles and their archetypes add additional light into the subtle nature of these brain areas.

Thousands of people have written millions of words about crime, evil, despair, nature vs. nurture, psychology, sociology, religion, and so on. In the above-referenced study, correlations between antisocial behavior and grey matter reductions in certain brain areas were found, but neuroscience and psychology lack a cohesive framework for interpreting them. Neuromythography provides the missing cohesive interpretive framework.

We hope that this interpretation of a recent neuroscience study piques your interest in neuromythography, and cordially invite you to explore more with us.

Categories
Spirituality

Neuromythography for Atheists

A recent Aeon essay by biologist Michael Levin and philosopher Daniel Dennett caught my eye:

https://aeon.co/essays/how-to-understand-cells-tissues-and-organisms-as-agents-with-agendas

I greatly relish the opportunity to attest that neuromythography is inspired by the same spiritual yearning expressed by well-known outspoken atheist, Daniel Dennett, even if he would chafe at the word ‘spiritual’.

What Dennett calls an ‘intentional stance’ is very similar to the personification stance of neuromythography, as we shall see. Anyway, after Levin and Dennett completes a fairly technical exposition of planarians, developmental programs, and bioelectric epigenetics, they offer an apologia:

[…] isn’t all the talk of memory, decision-making, preferences and goal-driven behaviour just anthropomorphism? Many will want to maintain that real cognition is what brains do, and what happens in biochemistry only seems like it’s doing similar things. We propose an inversion of this familiar idea; the point is not to anthropomorphise morphogenesis – the point is to naturalise cognition. There is nothing magic that humans (or other smart animals) do that doesn’t have a phylogenetic history. Taking evolution seriously means asking what cognition looked like all the way back. Modern data in the field of basal cognition makes it impossible to maintain an artificial dichotomy of ‘real’ and ‘as-if’ cognition. There is one continuum along which all living systems (and many nonliving ones) can be placed, with respect to how much thinking they can do.

Neuromythography naturalizes cognition by blatantly and flamboyantly anthropomorphizing morphogenesis. Exciting things happen when you embrace this ‘useful fiction’. Levin, and especially Dennett, are wont to defend themselves against the ‘mortal sin’ of anthropomorphism as established by modern academic norms. Within the framework of neuromythography, we create a ‘safe space’ for anthropomorphism as a mental tool for comprehending and reasoning with such a large concept interaction network (thousands of entities, tens of thousands of connections), and simply do not worry about discourse police handing us a card from their fallacy collectible card game deck. Such people are like critics who attend a theater performance and scoff at the audience for believing that the fake blood was real while engaging the performance. They don’t get what we are doing, because they are too busy puffing themselves up to be open to introspecting and contemplating.

Levin expresses a form of ‘As Above, So Below’:

Agents can combine into networks, scaling their tiny, local goals into more grandiose ones belonging to a larger, unified self. And of course, any cognitive agent can be made up of smaller agents, each with their own limits on the size and complexity of what they’re working towards.

The idea of the body, and specifically the brain, as a hierarchical colonial organism is a central concept within neuromythography. Each character has a role to play, interacting with its neighbors local and remote. Neuromythography also posits that brain nuclei generally have a restricted behavioral function, and that heterogeneity in brain area behavior across experiments is a hint that there exist further cell groups to be distinguished inside of the brain area in question.

Levin and Bennett conclude:

From this perspective, we can visualise the tiny cognitive contribution of a single cell to the cognitive projects and talents of a lone human scout exploring new territory, but also to the scout’s tribe, which provided much education and support, thanks to language, and eventually to a team of scientists and other thinkers who pool their knowhow to explore, thanks to new tools, the whole cosmos and even the abstract spaces of mathematics, poetry and music. Instead of treating human ‘genius’ as a sort of black box made of magical smartstuff, we can reinterpret it as an explosive expansion of the bag of mechanical-but-cognitive tricks discovered by natural selection over billions of years. By distributing the intelligence over time – aeons of evolution, and years of learning and development, and milliseconds of computation – and space – not just smart brains and smart neurons but smart tissues and cells and proofreading enzymes and ribosomes – the mysteries of life can be unified in a single breathtaking vision.

Neuromythography takes up the banner of this spiritual sentiment–a search for meaning within evolution–and assembles the contents of the bag of mechanical tricks into pleasing motifs that (hopefully) reveal the mind of the Creator. By Creator we mean the universalist god of Einstein and Spinoza. As Einstein described it:

Scientific research can reduce superstition by encouraging people to think and view things in terms of cause and effect. Certain it is that a conviction, akin to religious feeling, of the rationality and intelligibility of the world lies behind all scientific work of a higher order. […] This firm belief, a belief bound up with a deep feeling, in a superior mind that reveals itself in the world of experience, represents my conception of God. In common parlance this may be described as “pantheistic” (Spinoza).

Neuromythography is a pantheistic reinterpretation in the metaphorical form of ‘magical smartstuff’ as Levin and Dennett put it, but with anthropomorphisms held loosely so that they can be cast away in favor of aesthetically better ones as new scientific evidence emerges. Importantly, we agree with Levin and Bennett that the life of the mind and of society must ultimately reflect the physical wetware that lies inside of our heads, and the programmed biochemical milieu from which those ensemble effects emerge. Social theorists often handwave away biological facts they do not like as ‘biological essentialism’, but it is heartening to see a rather strident atheist such as Daniel Dennett embrace modern biology’s richer view of epigenetics and evolution. Many science journalists see themselves as defending against an ignorant creationist menace, and are resistant to any sort of inquiry that is not structured in the form of an imagined selection mechanism for random DNA copying errors. A more informed view of the deep motifs within biology is, ironically, required to be open to embracing neuromythography.

There will be those that label neuromythography as ‘crypto-creationist’ or somesuch. I think that this is like labeling a modern microprocessor as an ‘Arithometer‘–defensible in the most general and reductive sense, but far from descriptive. For the neuromythographer is as far evolved from the creationist as man is from the lancelet.

Categories
Philosophy of Science Linguistics

Characters, Not Constructs

In spite of language, in spite of intelligence and intuition and sympathy, one can never really communicate anything to anybody.

— Aldous Huxley

One of the main ideas of neuromythography is that abstract nouns are inferior to personifications, especially in regards to understanding the brain. This is contrary to what you learned in school–that personifications were an early stage of human social development that has been transcended by the Age of Reason and subsequent developments. However, it is consistent with the natural propensity of humans to create gods and myth and art, and the uncanny ability of art to communicate what words cannot. Rather than fight our nature in a futile attempt to build a knowledge rubric made of abstract nouns, accepting your mind the way it is architected leads to a greater appreciation of intuition.

Let’s take an example. The English words ‘fear’ and ‘anxiety’ describe related but distinct visceral sensations we all experience. Through experimentation, a scientific consensus emerged that there is a ‘double dissociation’–a clear division into two categories–between two areas of the brain with respect to fear and anxiety. The amygdala is said to be the center of ‘fear’, and the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis is said to be the center of ‘anxiety’.

As you can learn in neuromythography, the amygdala and bed nucleus of the stria terminalis (BNST) don’t actually exist as homogenous entities, except as anatomical conventions that were laid out early in neuroscience. Modern techniques have revealed that there are multiple developmental domains that populate the areas of the amygdala and BNST, forming distinct subnuclei of very different origins. Furthermore, it has been observed that there is a contiguous ‘extended amygdala’ that spans across the amygdala to the BNST, forming a continuous developmental domain. Biology, the great taffy mixing machine, is always defying our attempts to classify it. But old conventions die hard, because to be considered an achiever in an academic field you must use the jargon that becomes embedded in the field.

This brings us to the point of this post, which is about a recent study that tested the commonly-held notion that fear is seated in the amgydala while anxiety is situated in the BNST. The money quote:

Although there is widespread agreement that the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis and dorsal amygdala—the two major subdivisions of the extended amygdala—play a critical role in orchestrating adaptive responses to potential danger, their precise contributions to human anxiety have remained contentious. Follow-up analyses demonstrated that these regions show statistically indistinguishable responses to temporally uncertain and certain threat anticipation.

Anxiety and the neurobiology of temporally uncertain threat anticipation, Hur et al, Journal of Neuroscience Sept 2020

Note: Anxiety is generally posited to involve ‘temporally uncertain’ threats, while fear involves ‘certain’ threats. Thus, the amygdala and BNST were found to be equally active in both situations.

The knowledge that we thought we had inducted from prior studies–that ‘fear’ is in the amygdala, and ‘anxiety’ is in the BNST–turns out to be baseless when a study is conducted that is designed to be indifferent to the hypothesis outcome instead of finding support for it.

In neuromythography, we assume that clusters of neurons represent biological entities that have some sort of of personality, identified by gene expression fingerprints, living within a connected community. We are colonial organisms, scaled up from colonies of single-celled creatures called choanoflagellates. We give these biological entities (zones, nuclei, neurotransmitters, receptors) names that attempt to characterize their influence upon the social (neural) network within which they interact. This is analogous to naming species and their interactions within an ecosystem, except in this case the ecosystem is the brain itself.

For instance, a black snake comes in a dream, a great big black snake, and you can spend a whole hour with this black snake talking about the devouring mother, talking about anxiety, talking about the repressed sexuality, talking about the natural mind, all those interpretive moves that people make, and what is left, what is vitally important, is what this snake is doing, this crawling huge black snake that’s walking into your life…and the moment you’ve defined the snake, you’ve interpreted it, you’ve lost the snake, you’ve stopped it.… The task of analysis is to keep the snake there.

— James Hillman

As archetypal psychology luminary James Hillman warned, when we start breaking down archetypal personalities into flaccid abstract psychological properties, we lose a lot of the essence of what understanding an archetype means. The suspension of disbelief required in neuromythography is to suppose that these mental archetypes are aggregated from atomic archetypes situated in the wetware of the brain. This is really no more of a leap than Emile Durkheim made when he urged pretending to believe in the concrete existence of social facts as a central feature of his sociological method, or the various ‘useful fictions’ entertained in other fields of research. We choose mythology instead of coining neologisms because it has stood the test of time as a way of collectively working with the subtle notions that Jung described as the Collective Unconscious.

The amygdala in neuromythography is differentiated between left and right: Flidais and Cernnunos, who are Celtic deer and forest deities, respectively. The right-left lateralization of the BNST is not yet well-understood enough to assign differences, and so both sides are named Alke, after the Greek spirit of courage and battle morale. Within these archetypes lie other subnuclei associated with comfort, anxiety, sexual attraction, anger.

  • Alke evokes resistance, righteous anger, anxiety, masculine gender attributes, hunger, thirst–all of which are to be found in studies involving the BNST.
  • Flidais evokes fright, maternal care, empathy, and other properties that have been associated with the left amygdala.
  • Cernnunos evokes righteous anger, brooding, guardianship and other properties that have been associated with the right amygdala.

Each of these characters is capable of encompassing a far richer set of behaviors than a reductionist abstract noun like ‘fear’ or ‘anxiety’, and yet are flexible so as not to overfit and be too reductionist. (While we are fans of Popper’s falsifiability criterion for science, surely he would recognize that we are being honestly artful with our interpretations rather than using science language as a rhetorical cudgel as he lamented about ‘scientism’.) Treating brain areas as personifications allows us to consider them as they are in themselves, not in relation to a linguistic construct such as an abstract noun, function, or purpose. Each new study can result in a new epiteth for an entity, much as the ancient mythographers did for their gods.

Alke, Flidais, and Cernnunos are archetypes that predict the results of experiments. That is, when these areas are aroused by experimental conditions, they behave as one would expect from their archetypal characterizations. Alke the battle courage spirit is aroused in those resilient to stressors, Flidais the deer goddess is frightened by terror and attuned to empathic empathy, Cernnunos is outraged by transgressions and attends to potential threats with action. These are all consistent properties of the BNST, left amygdala, and right amygdala, respectively.

A study that shows a brain area responding in a way that is inconsistent with its assigned archetype is a sign that we have an error in need of correction. I have found through experience that an unexpected study result usually signals the presence of differentiated subnuclei that need to be distinguished and archetypally characterized. Thus, the neuromythographic model is extensible to incorporate new information in a consistent way.

All of our social properties that we label with words, whether common ones like emotions, social constructions, or technical psychology phenomena are poor labels for the intricately complex network of biological characters that exist in our brains. Neuromythography proposes that these are necessarily the characters that implement these behavioral phenomena; a ‘biological essentialist’ view. Thanks to scientific advances in recent years, we are now able to directly peer into the underlying architecture of mind and name things that we know actually exist instead of introspecting, speculating, and correlating as the philosophers and social scientists had to. By repurposing mythology for this naming exercise, we avoid chronic errors of reduction, reification, and relativism characteristic of the rationalist theoreticians of today. Because the neuromythographer holds onto their biological deifications of cell clusters and proteins loosely, we can play with them aesthetically, extract further meaning and insight, and cheerfully discard the archetypal construct when we find a better one that suits our aesthetic intuition.

May neuromythographers replace all the -ism, -tion, and -ity jargon with the mosaic of neuromythographic archetypes that create the soul.

Categories
Neuromythography

Neuromythography Intro For Technologists

Two lights for guidance. The first, our little glowing atom of community, with all that it signifies. The second, the cold light of the stars, symbol of the hypercosmical reality, with its crystal ecstasy. Strange that in this light, in which even the dearest love is frostily assessed, and even the possible defeat of our half-waking world is contemplated without remission of praise, the human crisis does not lose but gains significance. Strange that it seems more, not less, urgent to play some part in this struggle, this brief effort of animalcules striving to win for their race some increase of lucidity before the ultimate darkness.

What is neuromythography? Neuromythography is a portmanteau neologism for a method and practice connecting the biological and spiritual worlds. I realize that this did not answer the question, so let us dissect the word.

  • ‘Neuro-‘ implies the brain.
  • ‘Mythography’ is an ancient practice of compiling pantheons of gods and myths to express spiritual and psychological concepts.
  • Nested inside ‘mythography’ is ‘graph’, representing the evolving data graph structure of this work.

The word neuromythography also embodies its deepest secret: the connection between mathematics, biology, the brain, its receptor architecture, and the Creator (in the Spinozan sense). But to taste that moment of delicious harmony between science and the infinite, you have a journey to walk.

Neuromythography is centered around a semantic data structure called the Neuromythograph. The Neuromythograph eschews the linear structure of the written book in favor of presenting a navigable space that one can explore without the rigid narrative guidance of an author. There are many applications:

  • Declarative metadata to define a biologically-plausible upper architecture for AI applications implemented on recurrent neural networks and the like.
  • A more meaningful set of parcellation labels for fMRI studies to extract more informative interpretations
  • Archetypal resource for artists, writers, and researchers

Neuromythograph, explained

This Neuromythograph connects the physical world of brain anatomy and neurochemistry with the hidden spiritual world of myth and spirit. In contrast to traditional prescriptive pedagogy, you teach yourself and discover by directly exploring the graph content and draw your own insights from it. Whereas a lecture, course, or narrative is a model kit, the Neuromythograph provides a vast set of unique interconnected building blocks for the explorer to interpret and create with.

This word–neuromythography–knowingly teeters on the edge of what is sardonically called neuromythology–the dressing up of vapid spirituality blather with labels like ‘dopamine’ and ‘limbic system’. Neuromythography is distinguished from neuromythology as follows:

  • Neuromythography starts with the hypothesis that the dissolution of mind that occurs in diverse conditions such as schizophrenia, temporal lobe epilepsy, psilocybin dosing, psychotic breaks, and claustrum dysfunction hints at an underlying fragmented consciousness. This underlying fragmented consciousness ordinarily maintains an illusory seamless unity for neurotypicals, but this veil can be pierced through medical conditions, stress, drugs, or mental training.
  • Consciousness, then, is an underlying ‘society of mind‘ consisting of multiple ‘personalities’, each communicating in a marvelous multiplexed network of Fourier analyzers across neural network layers, that communicate via signals that are nested in frequencies separated by the golden ratio, phi. (It should be noted that the canonical brain rhythms (delta, theta, alpha, beta, gamma) are in fact separated in frequency space by the golden ratio, and tend to be nested hierarchically, for those who had hoped that my mention of the golden ratio would reassure their presumption of crackpottery.)
  • Neuromythography proposes that each community of neurons, designated by development origin, location, connectivity, and genetic expression profile, is itself a ‘citizen’ in this society of mind.
  • Furthermore, the various neurotransmitters and receptors themselves represent primordial spirits that imbue these citizens with certain essential qualities, analogous to how graph nodes and edges can be ‘colored’.
  • Each of these clusters of neurons assembles itself during development using a conjunctive set of chemical gradients (for migration) and chemical markers (for wiring) known by names like Wnt and Otx2. Whether this model is sufficient or predictive in all cases is beside the point, for as statisticians like to say, all models are wrong, and some models are useful.
  • Neuromythography is based on a massive private study of the neuroscience literature, enabled by modern accessibility and conceptual exploration through Google. The graph structure is anchored by the Human Connectome Project cortical parcellation (180 parcels per hemisphere), the derived Connectomic Surgical Atlas of Sugrue et al, the Allen Brain Institute atlases, animal homologues, and the evolving prosomeric ontogenic model proposed by Puelles. By using these resources and research methods I developed, I have been able to consolidate a good deal of fMRI and animal research into a coherent, aesthetically-pleasing model that is rigorously-faithful to underlying anatomy. I call this model, which is a large graph data structure, the Neuromythograph.
  • The Neuromythograph consists of more than 900 anatomical brain regions organized into a modern prosomeric model, more than 125 neurotransmitters and 175 receptors, and connected to supporting ontology.
  • Each node in the graph is connected to a scholarly references. Currently, there are more than 4800 unique references in the mode, and each are linked to relevant concepts, brain areas, neurotransmitters, and receptors in a custom tagging system.
  • Finally, a conceptual upper ontology that connects the biological entities to spiritual, social, literary, and scientific concepts.

This project is of course not the kind of thing that a PhD advisor, an institutional review board, a government agency, or a venture capitalist would support. It smacks of indulgent youthful ambition, and unserious scholarship. Had I been constrained by such I would have been guided towards making focused contributions to the scholarly literature, as Charles Darwin was advised by early previewers of Origin of Species to start with the evolution of pigeons, “because everyone is interested in pigeons”. But, as Antoine Saint-Exupery observed, children can see things that adults cannot. My hope is that I have laid a solid rational foundation for future mythographers and the spiritually-aware to drive out the sophists again, as the Greeks and Romans did for brief golden ages during their respective cultural careers.

Mythography

Ancient mythographers such as Homer and Hesiod are crediting with compiling the Greek pantheons. Hindu mythographers passed down the Shrutis and Smritis that make up Hindu beliefs. The authors of the Bible were mythographers that carefully curated the books of the Torah, the New Testament, the Talmud. Believers in the divinity of particular texts may object to the use of the word ‘mythography’ as applied to their own, but I beg you not to take offense. The word ‘myth’ has taken on a pejorative colloquial sense that strips it of its connection to the essential spiritual hunger that is embedded into the human heart. My intent is in fact to renew faith in the strands of truth that connect all religions, by situating them in the very wetware of our brains.

What I have said so far can also be read in innumerable theology and philosophy texts. Neuromythography applies exegesis, or anagogical thinking, the the neuroscience literature, and cross-references it with spiritual literature. One is not supposed to do this. Therein lies the opportunity.

Categories
Philosophy

Seeing Is Not Believing – Believing is Seeing

Logical positivist philosophers have long claimed that the only thing worth believing is what we perceive through the senses. Neuroscience has conclusively shown that what we perceive is largely a projection of what we believe.

Always Explaining Things to Grown-ups

The following passage is the introductory chapter of Antoine Saint-Exupery’s classic, The Little Prince, in which he laments that so few can “see with the heart”.

Once when I was six years old I saw a magnificent picture in a book, called True Stories from Nature, about the primeval forest. It was a picture of a boa constrictor in the act of swallowing an animal. Here is a copy of the drawing.

In the book it said: “Boa constrictors swallow their prey whole, without chewing it. After that they are not able to move, and they sleep through the six months that they need for digestion.”

I pondered deeply, then, over the adventures of the jungle. And after some work with a colored pencil I succeeded in making my first drawing. My Drawing Number One. It looked something like this:

a hat

I showed my masterpiece to the grown-ups, and asked them whether the drawing frightened them.

But they answered: “Frighten? Why should any one be frightened by a hat?”

My drawing was not a picture of a hat. It was a picture of a boa constrictor digesting an elephant. But since the grown-ups were not able to understand it, I made another drawing: I drew the inside of a boa constrictor, so that the grown-ups could see it clearly. They always need to have things explained. My Drawing Number Two looked like this:

a boa constrictor that has swallowed an elephant

The grown-ups’ response, this time, was to advise me to lay aside my drawings of boa constrictors, whether from the inside or the outside, and devote myself instead to geography, history, arithmetic, and grammar. That is why, at the age of six, I gave up what might have been a magnificent career as a painter. I had been disheartened by the failure of my Drawing Number One and my Drawing Number Two. Grown-ups never understand anything by themselves, and it is tiresome for children to be always and forever explaining things to them.


Wittgenstein’s Duckrabbit

The logical positivist says that what exists is only what we can experience with the senses. But the senses must always be interpreted to make sense. Empiricism is hopeless, because its claim to objectivity is self-delusion.

Wittgenstein (and by Wittgenstein, I mean late Wittgenstein) presented the duckrabbit as a paradox of philosophical inquiry as a means of truthfinding. In philosophy of mathematics, the law of the excluded middle declares that all propositions must be either true or false. Consider the following statements:

  • The above image is a duck.
  • The above image is a rabbit.
  • The above image is a duck and a rabbit.
  • The above image is neither a duck nor a rabbit.

When our rigid logical constructs fail, we have to seek more sublime forms of reasoning. The duckrabbit is the one of the emblems of Neuromythography. The brain is a duckrabbit of sublime complexity that defies language-games.


Sensation Is Not Separable From Interpretation

It is known that the senses are projected from sensory organs upwards towards the neocortex of the brain. What is less appreciated is that there are projections downwards from higher levels that are at least as extensive as those that project upwards. Let us take the eyes, for example.

Traditional Visual System View

The visual region of the occipital cortex is portrayed in textbooks like a layered movie screen, with they eye projecting to the lateral geniculate nucleus of the thalamus to V1 of the cortex

Images are then processed through a progressive pipeline from V1 to V8.

These processed visual images are then further processed via two pipelines, the dorsal stream ‘what pathway’ and the ventral stream ‘where pathway’.

The what pathway progresses through the inferior temporal lobe, classifying images by color, object composition, scene, category, symbolic interpretation, and so on, with progressively more general classification from the back to the temporal pole.

The where pathway progresses through the superior parietal lobe, inventorying the images by location, distance, quantity, handle points, and so on, to prepare for the selection and manipulation of objects.

It should be noted that even researchers get confused. Consider this example published in a paper by a neuroscience researcher who has more than 2,600 citations, where he mistakenly reversed the what and where pathways.

Or take for example this image from a neuroscience textbook, that looks like a cross between an English grammarian and a Paris street map. Ironically, the nature of brain vision itself is an interpretable duckrabbit even for those who have been through neuroscience education.

PERCEPTIONPOSSIBILITYCONTRASTHIDDENOBJECT INDEXPROPERTY INDEXOBJECT TRACKINGSELF-MOTIONTARGET RECKONINGVISUAL SEARCHCOLOR
SCV1V2V3V3aV3bV4MT (V5)V6V6aV7V8
TFBINDINGBINDINGBINDINGBINDINGBINDINGBINDINGBINDING
8BMREVERENCEREVERENCEREVERENCE
8BLCOULDCOULDCOULDCOULDCOULD
a10pALTERNATIVESALTERNATIVESALTERNATIVESALTERNATIVES
p10pGOAL SEQUENCESGOAL SEQUENCES
a47rNAVIGATIONNAVIGATIONNAVIGATIONNAVIGATIONNAVIGATIONNAVIGATION
9aSELF-EVAL: WHYSELF-EVAL: WHYSELF-EVAL: WHYSELF-EVAL: WHYSELF-EVAL: WHY
9pSELF-EVAL: PERFSELF-EVAL: PERFSELF-EVAL: PERFSELF-EVAL: PERFSELF-EVAL: PERF
FOP5COMPASSIONCOMPASSIONCOMPASSION
TGvPROPERTIESPROPERTIESPROPERTIESPROPERTIES
TGdGESTALTGESTALTGESTALTGESTALT
TE1aSTEREOTYPESSTEREOTYPESSTEREOTYPES
IPS1OBJECT CONSTANCYOBJECT CONSTANCYOBJECT CONSTANCY
IP0MEASURINGMEASURINGMEASURING
45RECALL
TPOJ3SUBJECT-VERB-SCHEMA
Categories
Philosophy of Science

Everybody Is Interested In Pigeons

Don’t get involved in partial problems, but always take flight to where there is a free view over the whole single great problem, even if this view is still not a clear one.

It is often suggested to me that I should scale back the ambitions of neuromythography. Focus on a particular idea in order not to overwhelm people, so that my ideas might be more widely disseminated. Dumb down the vocabulary, so that I might better appeal to a broader audience. I am often reminded that as Charles Darwin circulated his Origin of Species manuscript, one highly-educated reviewer wrote to another:

It seemed to me that to put forth the theory without the evidence would do grievous injustice to his views, & to his twenty years of observation & experiment. At every page I was tantalised by the absence of the proofs. All kinds of objections, & possibilities rose up in the mind, & it was fretting to think that the author had a whole array of facts, & inferences from the facts, absolutely essential to the decision of the question which were not before the reader. It is to ask the jury for a verdict without putting the witnesses into the box. One part of the public I suspect, under these circumstances, will reject the theory from recalling some obvious facts apparently at variance with it, & to which Mr. Darwin may nevertheless have a complete answer, while another part of the public will feel how unsatisfactory it is to go into the theory when only a fragment of the subject is before them, & will postpone the consideration of it till they can study it with more advantage. The more original the view, the more elaborate the researches on which it rests, the more extensive the series of facts in Natural History which bear upon it, the more it is prejudiced by a partial survey of the field which keeps out of sight the larger part of the materials.

Charles urged the publication of Mr. D’s [Darwin’s] observations upon pigeons, which he informs me are curious, ingenious, & valuable in the highest degree, accompanied with a brief statement of his general principles.4 He might then remark that of these principles the phenomena respecting the pigeons were one illustration, & that a larger work would shortly appear in which the same conclusions would be demonstrated by examples drawn from the wide world of nature.

This appears to me to be an admirable suggestion. Even if the larger work were ready it would be the best mode of preparing the way for it. Every body is interested in pigeons. The book would be reviewed in every journal in the kingdom, & would soon be on every table. The public at large can better understand a question when it is narrowed to a single case of this kind than when the whole varied kingdom of nature is brought under discussion at the outset. Interest in the larger work would be roused, & good-will would be conciliated to the subsequent development of the theory in all its bearings. It would be approached with impartiality,—not to say favour, & would appeal to the large public which had been interested by the previous book upon pigeons.

Darwin published Origin of Species anyway, and I am publishing my work on this site anyway. Go big or go home.

References:

Letter From Whitwell Elwin to John Murray, 3 May 1859, https://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/letter/DCP-LETT-2457A.xml