Category: Neuromythography

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 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.

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.”

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.

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.

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:

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.

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:

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

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.

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.

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.

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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 art, allegory, and information engineering. I am mindful of the John Baez Crackpot Index, but my spirit identifies with John Conway.

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

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.