Neuromythopedia Archive - Neuromythography

The eyes have it | University of Cambridge

British author Olaf Stapledon is not widely known but created much of the mythology behind 20th century science fiction. He was the first to imagine hiveminds, Dyson spheres, and genetic engineering, drew an eclectic fanclub including Virginia Woolf, Stanislaw Ulam, Winston Churchill, and H. G. Wells, drew the enmity of C. S. Lewis, and inspired Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, Gene Roddenberry (Star Trek) and even Freeman Dyson’s eponymous spheres.

In part of an ongoing friendly letter exchange with H. G. Wells, Stapledon distanced himself from the then-stylish utopian socialism of Wells in a cartoon he drew. He depicted Wells and his intellectual ilk as marching off in self-assured certainty towards an imagined progressive utopia, leaving behind the dogmatic bourgeoisie and lumpenproletariat. Stapledon identified himself as ‘I am the jackdaw. Free, but uncertain’.

Source: Famous Mythical Beasts: Olaf Stapledon and H. G. Wells, by Robert Crossley

I identify myself as the jackdaw hidden on the left side, only visible to those who can see with the heart.

Jacques Lacan developed his own brand of Freudian psychoanalysis. His formulation of mind proposed three domains: the Imaginary, the Symbolic, and the Real, which lends itself to a lot of linguistic analysis in the Symbolic domain.

He created an algebraic notation for his psychological constructs, known as Lacanian algebra. One of Lacan’s more amusing eccentric quips was that the role of the phallic function (i.e. the male sex organ) in the Imaginary domain is analogous to the square root of -1 in the imaginary plane of mathematics.

Lacan developed a pair of constructs he called the little other and the Big Other, that neuromythography claims have biological correlates in the social domains governed by vasopressin and oxytocin, respectively.