Neuromythography

The Architecture of the Soul

Frequently-Asked Questions (FAQ)

Neuromythography is a reimagination of biology and neuroscience as mythological archetypes woven together into a grand allegory. It is artfully derived from a variety of recent scientific sources.

Neuromythography is a bottom-up reinterpretation of biology and neuroscience within a novel system of mythological archetypes. The story starts with the evolution of eukaryotes through multicellular life, the embryological development of primordial developmental zones of the brain, and then fully elaborated in the neurotransmitters, receptors, and anatomical brain areas that have been characterized by neuroscience.

These biological entities are then matched to mythological personifications that best represent what role each entity plays in the mind and body. The mythological pantheon of neuromythography draws from an eclectic array of domains, including world religions, philosophy, computer science, painters, and even Disney characters, each designed to best capture the essential personality of each brain area, neurotransmitter, or receptor as can be best distilled from the experimental neuroscience literature.

Expecting the brain to conform to the abstract nouns of human language (in English, words that end in -ism, -ion, -ness, and the like) is a form of the anthropomorphic fallacy peculiar to humanism.

The neuromythography approach emphasizes the social and mythological personalities that each brain area, neurotransmitter, and receptor exhibits as members of a internal Society of Mind. This contrasts with the predominant approach of treating the body as a stimulus-response machine with parts that have functions. Thinking in terms of personalities in an ecosystem instead of functions in a machine gets us out of certain self-inflicted philosophical problems, such as locating the ‘fear center’ of the brain–a center we know does not exist. Instead, neuromythography understands fear as a gross label for a family of emotions elicited from reactions by characters such as

  • Moros (lateral habenula)
  • Flidais (left amygdala)
  • Nemain (left lateral central amygdala)
  • Polyphemus (bed nucleus of the stria terminalis, anteromedial division)

These personifications respectively represent

  • sense of impending doom
  • the experience of fright
  • mortal danger
  • stranger suspicion

which are characterizations of the personalities of these brain nuclei as revealed by human and animal experimentation. This archetypal personification further extends to neurotransmitters such as CCK (Deimos) and its receptors CCK1 (Wormwood, bitterness) and CCK2 (Phobos). Neuroscientists ask what the semantic meaning of neurotransmitters are all the time (e.g. What Does Dopamine Mean?)

Working at this level of abstraction makes detailed neuroscience more accessible to a wider audience, and provides students with a nomenclature reflective of a more modern understanding of neuroscience than legacy terminology such as the diagonal band of Broca, red nucleus, nucleus incertus, zona incerta, locus coeruleus, substantia nigra, and substantia innominata. This terminology was created back when all neuroscientists had to go on were visual dissection impressions, but the nomenclature confusion represents a both barrier to greater understanding and a source of useless taxonomy cross-referencing activity. In the Neuromythograph, a canonical name is assigned to each brain area, and all other names are listed as synonyms.

By personifying the entities, and carefully matching archetypes to entities to create biological allegories, the mind can wrap around a greater amount of complexity. For example, the nucleus incertus (Merlin) projects the neurotransmitter relaxin-3 (Galahad) fibers to the septohippocampal nucleus (Lancelot), and to the septofimbrial nucleus (Raijin, Japanese god of thunderous bluster), which inhibits the lateral habenula (Moros, the Greek god of doom). This represents a pathway by which relaxin-3’s proposed role in motivating ‘questing’ behavior–dogged pursuit of long-term missions–and the indirect path by which it suppresses feelings of doom mediated by the lateral habenula. Inhibitory projections from the lateral habenula back to the nucleus incertus complete the circuit, representing gnawing doubts that threaten the morale of a quest.

For instance, a black snake comes in a dream, a great big black snake, and you can spend a whole hour with this black snake talking about the devouring mother, talking about anxiety, talking about the repressed sexuality, talking about the natural mind, all those interpretive moves that people make, and what is left, what is vitally important, is what this snake is doing, this crawling huge black snake that’s walking into your life…and the moment you’ve defined the snake, you’ve interpreted it, you’ve lost the snake, you’ve stopped it.… The task of analysis is to keep the snake there.

— James Hillman

Expecting the brain to conform to the abstract nouns of human language (in English, words that end in -ism, -ion, -ness, and the like) is a form of the anthropomorphic fallacy peculiar to humanism. Neuromythography simply embraces anthropomorphism as a useful technique, without pretense.

Neuromythography stands astride what convention says ought to be a bright line between art and science. The mythologizing is art. The archetypal assignments represent a self-reinforcing network of microtheories that generate testable scientific hypotheses. In the long run, neuromythography opens up neuroscience knowledge to the curious learner by stripping away the formidable jargon and replacing overgeneralized abstract nouns with artful, vibrant allegories.

The Neuromythograph is a graph data structure that combines a hierarchical ontology of brain areas, their interconnectivity, their receptor and neurotransmitter expression, and archetypal assignments for each. This database is further overlaid with Neuromythopedia, to provide a topical index to the brain components related to various social, spiritual, and other concepts.

The Neuromythograph intellectual property is available under non-profit and commercial licenses.

The Neuromythopedia is a library of human knowledge cross-referenced with related brain areas, neurotransmitters, and receptor archetypes. This opens up a deeper exploration of these topics and their implementation in the brain than has been previously possible.

It also provides a reference for technical words and idiosyncratic references, definitions, and neologisms we use, so that the reader can bootstrap their knowledge to understand what we’re talking about.

Neuromythopedia is a topically-indexed portal that sits atop the Neuromythograph.

Primarily, neuromythography is a resource for spiritualists, philosophers, social scientists, mythographers, artists, business consultant and software engineers to draw creative inspiration from, knowing that it is based in a very thoroughly-researched model of biology.

Neuromythography is a resource for neuroscientists, as a library of curated intriguing neuroscience studies, microtheories, and a novel way of engaging the architecture of the brain.

Neuromythography is harmonious with spiritual traditions and humanism and represents a biological elaboration of the Collective Unconscious described by analytical psychology founder Carl Jung.

There are no plans to start a cult at this time. However, we are in need for contributors and financial support.

Don’t get involved in partial problems, but always take flight to where there is a free view over the whole single great problem, even if this view is still not a clear one.

Neuromythography does have an agenda: to situate spiritual concepts in the brain, and offer an alternative form of truth-finding to the social science disciplines that have become institutionalized in universities over the past two hundred years. With respect to neurological entities, we say: deities, not reities.

Neuromythography is the result of extensive cross-disciplinary homework, grounded in an exhaustive study of modern neuroscience. But most importantly, neuromythography is about the freedom to explore: creativity, play, and liberation in all aspects of the human condition. Ever since Gödel showed we cannot find truth in mathematics, and Wittgenstein showed we cannot find truth in language, we should have long ago lightened up about proselytizing our Truths (with a capital “T”) to each other.

My primary nom de plume, Hermes Phimegistus, is a golden ratio pun on Hermes Trismegistus, the esoteric founder of the Hermetic traditions whose rediscovery led to the European scientific revolution.

The spiritual guide, nom de plume, Μnemosynē is the ying to my yang, the airy -fairy to my serious scientist, whose muse like inspiration and form of “translating” to the masses, I value highly. Μnemosynē, in Greek mythology, the goddess of memory. A Titaness, she was the daughter of Uranus (Heaven) and Gaea (Earth), and, according to Hesiod, the mother (by Zeus) of the nine Muses. She gave birth to the Muses after Zeus went to Pieria and stayed with her nine consecutive nights.

At the same time, I view the work with a certain reverence, as I am consciously applying ‘inspired exegesis’ to the neuroscience literature in the same sense that prior generations performed exegesis upon the scriptures. Paul Saffo’s quasi-Pyrrhonist mantra about “strong convictions loosely held” for entrepreneurs seems to also be appropriate for the neuromythographer.

The Toilet Paper Roll of Knowledge

This video contains the essence of my corporate consulting philosophy, describing how I have approached change management in organizations entrenched in current ways of doing things:

Neuromythography is the toilet paper roll, a mysterious new object wielded by an outsider that triggers outraged frustration in people who self-identify as knowledge-havers and givers. The frustration in being up against something unfamiliar, that has too much weight to simply swat away, containing eclectic eccentricities drawn from extravagant erudition, and might be a dangerous threat. Every encounter with genuine expertise results in new learning, and renewed confidence that we are on the right track.

Neuromythography isn’t for everybody. It’s for people who are alienated from those swept up by the modern parallels of the squabbles between the Big-Endians and the Little-Endians in Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (what Hegel reverently called ‘historical dialectics’). It’s for those who can see with the heart, in the words of The Little Prince. It provides suggestive evidence for a mathematically-inclined Spinozan god, but is not pushing any dogmatic view of this. It has helped me answer the question, “Why Not Be You?” I wish you silence of mind, and invite you to explore the neuromythographic universe together. Perhaps we can change the world for the better.