5-HT is the chemical name for the neurotransmitter [[serotonin]].
Neuromythopedia
Adolphe Quetelet was a French intellectual who introduced statistics to the social sciences. He is best known for creating the body-mass index (BMI), the first biometric, that is still used today. Quetelet inspires our neologism, Queteletan.
Quetelet’s methods ultimately inspired later researchers such as Francis Galton to extend biometrics to psychometrics (IQ), in order to measure more abstract mental processes. Galton, in turn, was the mentor of Karl Pearson, and his methods led to the modern research statistics practices established by Ronald Fisher. This line of research infamously led to late 19th century imperialist misadventures, eugenics programs, and racial generalizations invoking ‘reversions to the mean’.
Quetelet represents the kind of naive empiricism and correlations that plague modern science. BMI is a very poor predictive measure: 25% of people with an obese BMI have excellent cardiovascular health, while 50% of people with a normal BMI have poor cardiovascular health. Yet many doctors and researchers still represent it to patients as a valid metric. Wittgenstein’s ruler is a parable about this source of error.
Quetelet’s ‘social physics’ were contrasted with Auguste Comte’s ‘sociology’ by its focus on statistical analysis. Today, sociology encompasses both fields, but distinguishes between ‘theory’ that traces back to Comte and ’empirical’ analysis that traces back to Quetelet.
The Allen Brain Reference Atlases are published by the Allen Brain Institute.
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anagogy
Anagogy is the “reasoning upwards” (sursum ductio), when, from the visible, the invisible action is disclosed or revealed. In medieval theology, anagogy was the heaven-projecting complement to the earthly-projecting allegory. Anagogical reasoning has been deprecated in modernity; indeed, such reasoning is often derided as “woo” or “magical thinking”.
In the eastern mystical traditions, anagogical reasoning is only accessible from a state of enlightenment. In the Jewish Essene cult that was contemporaneous with conservative Sadducee and leftist Pharisee schools, the highest form of Scripture interpretation was called ‘inspired exegesis’.
Neuromythography revives anagogy as a first-class reasoning method, but instead of Scripture it is applied to the scientific literature and the brain. This may sound to some like madness, to which one can reply by invoking Emily Dickinson:
Much Madness is divinest Sense –
To a discerning Eye –
Much Sense – the starkest Madness –
’Tis the Majority
In this, as all, prevail –
Assent – and you are sane –
Demur – you’re straightway dangerous –
And handled with a Chain –
The anthropomorphic fallacy, as defined by philosophers and psychologists, is the tendency to assign human personality attributes to non-human objects.
In neuromythography, we embrace anthropomorphism as a valid method (“useful fiction”) for making sense of biological complexity.
Anthropomorphism (“human-shaping”) is the tendency of humans to imbue non-human objects with human-like personality properties. A haughty trope in Western thought says that man’s spirituality evolved from animism (multiple gods) to monotheism (a single abstract god) to rationalism, positivism, or perspectivism (depending on who you ask).
In neuromythography, we embrace anthropomorphism explicitly because it helps engage more parts of the brain. This useful fiction is no different than Emile Durkheim asking us to indulge in the notion that ‘social facts’ are real, or Ronald Fisher asserting that “we shall not often be astray if we draw a conventional line at [p <] .05”
Anthropomorphism is often criticized as the anthropomorphic fallacy.
Antoine Saint-Exupery was a French pilot during the early airmail days of aviation, and the author of The Little Prince. Saint-Exupery was famous for deeply contemplating “the why” of existence. In one anecdote, he woke up his fellow sleeping pilot friend in the barracks at 2AM to help him contemplate “But *why* do we deliver the mail?”
Saint-Exupery retained a beautiful child-like mind into his adulthood; an archetypal puer aeternus. T
Due to a lifetime of injuries and, at 43, being eight years older than the max, he became decertified as a pilot during WWII. Dwight D. Eisenhower personally granted Saint-Exupery an exception. However, he wrecked his P-38 during training and was grounded for eight months. He was granted another exemption to fly five final flights. On July 31, 1944, he took off in a Lockheed P-38 and plunged into the Mediterranean, never to be seen again.
Antonio Gramsci was a Marxist theorist best known for his theory of cultural hegemony, which describes how the state and ruling capitalist class – the bourgeoisie – use cultural institutions to maintain power in capitalist societies. The bourgeoisie, in Gramsci’s view, develops a hegemonic culture using ideology rather than violence, economic force, or coercion. Hegemonic culture propagates its own values and norms so that they become the “common sense” values of all and thus maintain the status quo. Cultural hegemony is therefore used to maintain consent to the capitalist order, rather than the use of force to maintain order.
From: Wikipedia
This is the theoretical origin of later culture wars, cultural Marxism, structural injustice, and so on. The neuromythography claim is that these norms are biological in origin, circumscribed by a gestalt spirit of the Infinite, and that social status elicits these behaviors due to neurological changes that occur concomitantly with “dominance”.
Auguste Comte was a French philosopher who founded positivism, sociology, and the Religion of Man. He was the secretary of French utopian socialist Henri de Saint-Simon, but became estranged when he felt that Saint-Simon was taking credit for his own ideas.
Much of what has transpired over the past two hundred years in philosophy and the social sciences can be traced to Comte. In neuromythography we refer to the Comtean world-view.
Comte can be contrasted with the later anti-positivists, who embraced subjectivity in sociology and led to critical theory, and with Adolphe Quetelet, who represents the empiricism that commandeered probability to yield modern scientific statistic and eugenics.
Interestingly, Comte originally called his new positivist study of society by the name of ‘social physics’, only to discover that Quetelet had started using this term to reveal social truths through biometrics and quantitative analysis. Comte disagreed with Quetelet’s notion that a theory of society could be derived from a collection of statistics, and coined the word ‘sociology’ to differentiate his own approach.