weaving together

Recent authors have driven my thought trains along tracks which weave together. The weaving is increasingly multidisciplinary. E O Wilson named the phenomenon – consilience. The idea is that when flaky, cutting edge thinkers from different disciplines agree with each other then we may be on to something holistic.

I have been noticing developments in neurology for almost fifty years. The mind and the brain are modular and there are neural correlates of consciousness (NCC). Neural plasticity is now recognised – what fires together wires together. The brains of experienced meditators are different from ordinary punter's. The mind can change the brain can change the mind so I call it the mindbrain - and 90% of its activity is unconscious.

Evolutionary psychology snuck up on me. The idea is that the mindbrain modules evolved as adaptations in the same way as hearts, muscles and guts. We now get bye with a Stone Age mindbrain in a computer age culture. There are many modules hard wired into the ancestral parts of the mindbrain but in modern humans there is plenty scope for novelty in the newer cortex which deals with language and executive functions. It is never too late to change a mindbrain.

Daniel Kahneman wrote about “Thinking, fast and slow”. The fast stuff is rooted in hardwiring which uses pragmatic rather than true intuitions, schemas, biases (eg negativity and confirmation) reflexes and instincts. He demonstrated that we rarely think rationally but rather there is an ongoing unconscious churn comparing new inputs with memories and thus generating reactions to stimuli. Kahneman called his work behavioural economics and won a Nobel prize.

Richard Nisbett developed social psychology which involves detailed observation of verbal and non-verbal communication. Matthew D Lieberman invented Social Cognitive Neuroscience which he describes in “Social: Why our brains are wired to connect.” The detailed implications of man being a social animal both by nature and by nurture are being worked out.

The neuroplasticity thought train links easily to the flourishing topic of mindfulness aimed at changing minds so as to make the world a better place. We are increasingly conscious of our consciousness with or without the exotic eastern thought trains. By just sitting and dropping off body and mind we can appreciate the holistic oneness. This follows from the work of Jon Kabat-Zinn on mindfulness based stress reduction (MBSR). Being free of eastern exotica the approach is sometimes called Buddhism lite but anyway it is now a runaway thought train.

We used to study the thinking and feeling of individuals. Now we study the social dynamics of in-groups. I have not seen much written about out-group interactions. A case can be made for the peaceful and pretty in-group systems. Something else might be said about the war-like and ugly out-group systems of rape, pillage and genocide.