Category: Philosophy

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.

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.