Neuromythopedia

5 A B C D E F G H J K L M N O P Q R S T V W

Ayn Rand

Ayn Rand was an extreme individualist, in reaction to the Soviet collectivism she experienced in her childhood. Her novel Atlas Shrugged is an allegorical story that tends to polarize people into those who see corrupt parasitical collectivists creeping into influential positions everywhere, and those who see it as an ode to childish selfishness without zero regard for their fellow man.

Rand went off the deep end in beaming admiration for William Hickman, a serial killer who dismembered a young girl named Marion Parker:

Rand saw in Hickman the perfect Nietzschean “superman” — “a man with no regard whatever for all that society holds sacred, with a consciousness all his own.” When she read this quote by him in the newspaper — “I am like the state: what is good for me is right,” — she wrote in her journals that this was “the best and strongest expression of a real man’s psychology I ever heard.”

This serial killer-admiring Ayn Rand is a mirror you can use to reflect yourself in. You are missing out on the Collective Consciousness if you do cannot separate yourself from her on this. On the other hand if you do not see the Shadow side that she embraces here, then you are repressing that shadow instead of holding it out in front of you and studying it.

basal plate

bauplan

A German word used in biology to describe a common body plan or morphology shared by many different animals. As science has progressed, it is evident that common bauplan motifs go as far back as single cells, and are shared across animal phyla. This permits us to contemplate how evolution shapes a design-constrained body morphology space, syncretizing the creationist vs. evolution debate.

Bed of Procrustes

An colorful aphorism coined by Nassim Nicholas Taleb based on the Greek myth of Procrustes, who kidnapped travelers and cut off limbs from their bodies in order to resize them to fit onto an iron bed of predetermined length. The metaphor refers to how we crudely cut the world into oversimplified constructs, categories and concepts, and in the process often miss critical nuance and details. This is related to other Taleb quips such as “Life happens in the tails” and the difference between Mediocristan and Extremistan. This is also related to Einstein’s quip,

Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.

— Albert Einstein

As the skill of deciding whether something is “close enough” is useful, we have a brain area that performs this function (TE1p – Procrustes).

big Other

A social domain described by Jacques Lacan as:

The big Other designates radical alterity, an other-ness which transcends the illusory otherness of the imaginary because it cannot be assimilated through identification. Lacan equates this radical alterity with language and the law, and hence the big Other is inscribed in the order of the symbolic. Indeed, the big Other is the symbolic insofar as it is particularized for each subject. The Other is thus both another subject, in his radical alterity and unassimilable uniqueness, and also the symbolic order which mediates the relationship with that other subject.

This domain of group identity, that ‘cannot be assimilated through identification [with the individual self], but is mediated through the various things in the symbolic domain (i.e. -isms like communism, fascism, or vegetarianism), is the social domain governed by oxytocin.

biological essentialism

The Oxford Media and Communication dictionary defines biological essentialism as

The belief that ‘human nature’, an individual’s personality, or some specific quality (such as intelligence, creativity, homosexuality, masculinity, femininity, or a male propensity to aggression) is an innate and natural ‘essence’ (rather than a product of circumstances, upbringing, and culture).

This definition reveals its common use by believers in social constructionism to condemn heretics. The neuromythography response to this is:

  1. Essences–abstract nouns like creativity, masculinity, etc.–do not exist at all outside the confines of the anterior temporal cortex, so attributing them to biology or social constructs is academic at best.
  2. Much human nature is connected to innate biological entities, that shape and are shaped by environment. This is experimentally demonstrable, and social experiments with animals almost always demonstrate homology with humans.
  3. The same behavioral sexual dimorphisms are demonstrable in both environmentally-controlled lab animals and humans. That is not to say that cultural forces play no role.
  4. The biological essentialism critique is usually really a criticism of the genetic determinism presumption of evolutionary psychology. Specifically, that any abstract essence that we can imagine is a phenotype that must have a corresponding genotype, that can be revealed by analyzing statistical distributions of biometrics. Genetic determinism was the founding application for statistical inferencing. If you reject statistical inferencing and biometrics for genetic determinism, then you ought to question its validity in the overall social sciences project for theories that you are biased to support.

Neuromythography is a kind of biological essentialism, but one that replaces essences with old-school allegorical personifications, while rejecting both social constructs and phenotypes as the bad kind of philosophical essentialism.

Brain Architecture Management System

The Brain Architecture Management System (BAMS) was designed and implemented by Dr. Mihail Bota under the supervision of Dr. Larry W. Swanson at the University of Southern California around 2002. At that time, the Semantic Web, RDF, and OWL ontologies were popular, and the BAMS team created a collaborative neuroinformatics database around these technologies. The researchers called for other researchers to contribute to the knowledgebase, but the academic incentive structure encourages h-index-boosting contributions to the journal literature rather than the collaborative construction of knowledgebases. Perhaps neuromythography will realize the collaboration vision that the BAMS team hoped for.

BAMS was used as a supplemental reference for entrance and exit projections in the Neuromythograph.

BAMS can be found here.

Brodmann

Brodmann areas refers to a map of the human brain created by Korbinian Brodmann in 1909.

Here is a primer: https://www.kenhub.com/en/library/anatomy/brodmann-areas

Carl Jung

Carl Jung was the father of archetypal psychoanalysis. His work is one of the inspirations for neuromythography.

Jungian psychology features concepts such as the Self, Shadow, anima, animus, and the Collective Unconscious.

Jung’s Collective Unconscious and the Collective Consciousness of Emile Durkheim form a complementary dyad, whose roots are partially in right- and left hemispheres, respectively.

Collective Consciousness

The Collective Consciousness is a term coined by sociologist Emile Durkheim to describe social facts and social constructs that appear to emerge in the collective organism we call society. In Durkheim’s words,  it represents ‘the body of beliefs and sentiments common to the average of members of a society’. It is a Persona-based complement to Jung’s Collective Unconscious, and is primarily represented in the left hemisphere orbitofrontal, anterior cingulate, middle cingulate, and anterior superior and posterior temporal areas.