Carl Sagan

Carl Sagan in his orange anarak

There is now a tab at the top of this page that offers youtube links to Carl Sagan's 13 programmes about the Cosmos.

I still find them inspiring after all these years.

neuroscience for dummies

In 1971 I was at a scientific cutting edge with a B.Sc (Hons) in Zoology and personal leanings towards neurology and Primate (including human) Social Behavior. That was 43 years ago. Much has changed in Zoology since then. It has now gone more holistic and shown a marked enthusiasm for multidisciplinary consilience (ref E O Wilson).

My personal interests these days are with how neurology and evolutionary psychology can illuminate the age old existential theme – why are we here? My thinking is that if I can get a handle on the new way of understanding intelligence and consciousness then I can perhaps help to find better ways to be human.

I am particularly impressed by Frank Amthor (2012) “Neuroscience for Dummies”. I find it hard to lay it down. It is accessibly written and presented in five parts:

1. Introducing Your Nervous System
2. Translating the Internal and External World through Your Senses
3. Moving Right Along: Motor Systems
4. Intelligence: The Thinking Brain and Consciousness
5. The Part of Tens

Part 4 is particularly breathtaking. Much developed since the late 60s!

Frank Amthor is a professor of Psychology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, where he also holds secondary appointments in the UAB Medical School Department of Neurobiology, the School of Optometry, and the Dept. of Biomedical Engineering.

Thanks Frank

Origin of I

There is a temptation to herd the cows of other people. In this case neuroscience as expounded by Humphrey (1992) and by Amthor (2012). But, rather than accurately summarise their ideas as a set of one-pagers, I hereby (a) acknowledge their influence on the related stuff that is appearing in the attention centre, and (b) record the emergent stuff as it flows in from the unconscious.

Why are there mindbrains?

Ultimately to plan movement towards what is desirable and away from what is undesirable. In simpler living things the stimulus response link is automatic and everything is concrete and practical. In more complex living things (ie multicellular animals) there is a black box between the stimulus and the response. The black box is the mindbrain and it allows some flexibility in the response. Woolly speculation enters the scene – is this where free-will becomes possible?

The human one is the most highly evolved example of a mindbrain. By mammalian and primate standards it has a hugely expanded cortex which serves to coordinate and integrate the activities of the ancestral reptilian and amphibian parts.

Evolution has also provided the human mindbrain with a unique capacity for language. This promotes the woolly and speculative activities inside the black box to a much  higher level. The physics and chemistry of the sensory systems remain much the same as in other mammals but the manner in which their inputs are coded, interpreted, and integrated is on a higher order of magnitude.

In nature there is no doer and no doing but nothing is left undone. “Sitting quietly doing nothing, Spring comes, and the grass grows by itself.”

In the unconscious part of the human mindbrain there is a huge amount of activity geared towards controlling the various life processes – nutrition, respiration, excretion, irritability, reproduction etc. Food is digested and absorbed, oxygen is inhaled and carbon dioxide is exhaled, the body temperature is kept at a steady 36 degrees, minor wounds are repaired etc. And ‘I’ have no control over these involuntary processes. There is no self-conscious doer but nothing important is left undone.

Organic beings with a human mindbrain, a community and a language tend to ‘believe’ that ‘they’ are discreet entities that they call ‘me’ or ‘I’. This is the ‘self’ that is part of the idea of being ‘self conscious’. We are not born with it fully formed. The graph shows a 3+1 development process through time.

1. Zygote, embryo, new born
2. Infancy, childhood, adolescence
3. Maturity
4. (optional) transcend the self

From sub to super

The diagram below shows three pathways for psychological growth in time. Normal growth is normal but sometimes things go wrong and sub-normal individuals result. In extreme cases there is neurosis and psychosis while in milder cases there is anxiety, panic and depression. Traditional psychology studied the various sub-normal conditions and developed various forms of psychotherapy to make patients normal again. The super-normal states were largely ignored.

Abraham Maslow (1908-1970) developed the idea of a Hierarchy of Needs. At the top of the hierarchy was self-actualization and the idea of peak experiences. It is mainly the super-normal people who experience these mental states. The field of positive psychology has evolved to study these healthy people who are marked by ‘well-being’ and by what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (1934-ongoing) calls ‘flow’, and by what Martin Seligman (1942-ongoing) calls ‘flourishing’. Note that there is a lot in common between this western notion and the eastern views of enlightenment (eg nirvana and moksha).

An individual’s nature and nurture will influence their pattern of growth through time. It is generally felt that the potential for being sub-normal or super-normal is in all of us to some extent and that a wide range of factors are responsible for turning them on or off.

The three lines in the diagram present an ideal situation. In reality the lines will zig zag – sometimes from super to sub and sometimes from sub to super. Existential experiences, especially feelings and moods, cause the shifts and they can be very short term.

It is generally felt that the super-normal mind states are peaceful, beautific, and generally aiming for the greatest good of the greatest number. In terms of evolutionary psychology why should this be?

And what are we to make of the powerful minds that reaped despair, destruction and death at international level – Gengis Khan, Pol Pot, Mao tse Tung, Hitler, Stalin, Margaret Thatcher, George W Bush and Tony Blair. These are ab-normal minds. But are they super or sub?

It seems reasonable to suppose that the hard wired potential for developing this way rather than that is present in all of us although perhaps more in some than in others. The potentials might be switched on or off by external factors operating at multiple and interacting levels – genetic, individual, family, group, tribe, environment. Many present patterns would have been adaptive in ancestral times.

conundrum of canalization

Maslow has a new word for enculturation – canalization. He gives it a negative spin. When a person gets canalized they become limited and fail to live up to their potential. They tend to support the status quo and thus prevent social and cultural progress. They thus become biddable, salt of the earth, cannon fodder. (ref WW1)

What kind of potential do they fail to live up to? Howard Gardner famously listed nine frames of mind that might be highlighted in a formal education system (see below).

nine frames of mind

Individuals would have different patterns of potential and therefore have different career pathways. Schools should support more than Reading, wRiting and aRithmatic. But schools cannot do it alone. The family, community and employers would have to be involved and this would involve changing minds at the level of subculture and culture.

The idea is that there should be progress which involves change for the better. But what constitutes better and who decides when, where and how?

The state education system acts as a sieve which sorts those who are to be the middle managers from those who are to be (a) the administrators and grunt workers and (b) the self employed.

The overall cultural goal is to canalize citizens into being biddable workers, malleable consumers, and willing cannon fodder when wars are declared and the military industrial complex rubs its hands with glee.

As the rich get richer crumbs fall from their tables and some of the wealth trickles down to the huddled masses (the poor will be with us always?) A rising tide floats all boats - except those with holes. It can also be argued that as the rich get richer the poor get poorer and race to the bottom to work in dangerous sweatshops.

And then, on the bright side, with major inputs from the Internet, there might be a flourishing of the bottom four frames of mind in the above table. Are we beginning to see a critical mass of people able to deal calmly with (a) emotions in themselves and in others, (b) physical environmental issues and (c) the ongoing existential conundrum of canalization for our global age.

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http://www.srds.co.uk/begin/frames.htm

Abraham Maslow

Abraham Maslow

I am presently re-reading Maslow’s 1962, “Towards a Psychology of Being”.

His writing verges on the timeless and resulted in the growth of positive psychology and the human potential movement. He has influenced the work of more recent luminaries such as Martin Seligman (Flourishing) and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (Flow).

Abraham Maslow (1908-1970) was an American psychologist best known for his ‘hierarchy of needs’. This was a theory of psychological health based on meeting human needs in sequence beginning with physiological needs and culminating in ‘peak experiences’ and ‘self-actualization’.

Maslow's hierarchy of needs

In his “Towards a psychology of Being” Maslow deals in detail with the structure and functions of peak experiences and self actualisation. In his research he covered the literature on mysticism and also some of the Eastern classics. He is therefore good on the limitations of language to deal with the ineffable. But he remains a creature of his woolly, intellectual times and his Weltenschaaung is not informed by neurology and evolutionary psychology. If he was still alive I am sure that he would love the way that the world view is going.

He is still worth reading

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Maslow, Abraham H. (2013-07-18). Toward a Psychology of Being (Kindle). Start Publishing LLC.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham_Maslow