In terms of time and space, life as experienced from the old mammalian brain
bereft, for the most part, of the neocortex, is the way the animals live,
but few of us realize that we 'carry' the brains of animals around inside
of us. We carry with us and live within the
context of our own evolutionary heritage. Evolution works by a process
of layering changes upon one another. Successful changes are passed on to
new generations. Unsuccessful changes fail to replicate.
When changes are passed on to new generations,
evolution has no way to delete outdated biology and start fresh. It cannot
undo or rewrite our history. It adds the new to the old, and that process
is clearly visible in our anatomy and biochemistry. We have tails and
gill-slits as embryos. What were once gills in the human body even
continue to regulate calcium as do gills in fish. We had an appendix at
one time to digest cellulose courtesy of symbiotic bacteria, and some are
still born with tails and faces covered in hair. There are those with
physical handicaps who can tie shoes with the toes of one foot. Babies
born in water will hold their breaths and swim effortlessly to the
surface, but other primate species will drown under the same
circumstance. We must have come very close to becoming an aquatic species
of primate at one time in the distant past, birthing our young in the warm
waters of an African lake.
The human brain consists of three distinct parts and is
called a triune brain for that reason. At its core lies a two hundred
million year-old reptilian brain, or the R-complex, a region dominated by
hard-wired instinct, reflex, and primal emotion. Overlaid upon our
reptilian brain, which serves largely the same functions in us as it does
in the reptiles, is the human version of the limbic system, or the old
mammalian brain. Here, emotional reactivity is refined to a far greater
effectiveness and monitored with a greater intensity of conscious
discernment.
Adult mammals are masterpieces of emotional reactivity,
as with the chimpanzee observed mourning to death over the loss of his
mother. We may see smoothly operating, unconscious habit, reflex, and
instinct at work during the adulthood of a lesser mammal, but with the
young, we can clearly see the conscious presence of those same species
initially explore their world with visible intensities of deliberate
intention, programming as they go the behavioral habits that will serve
the animal well when survival demands graceful responses far too swift for
conscious intervention. Put simply, children of any species play for good
reason.
And then we have the neocortex, an information
processing structure that can, so to speak, remove events from time and
space and, within the arena of the imagination, extrapolate potential
future probabilities from an understanding of any given current situation.
(At this point, we can take notice that some species of birds show clear signs of reasoning, but without the kind of
brain structure mammals have developed).
As a crude analogy, think of the neocortex in any
animal as providing a 'time out' to sort out possibilities far beyond the
capacity of any hard-wired, conventional computer. We rant and rave from
the perspective of our reptilian and mammalian brain. We change
spark-plugs, blow dry our hair, and drive our cars from the vantage point
of the neocortex.
Behavior born in the neocortex may become reactive
habit, like driving a car, but we had to consciously discern, dissect and
organize the choices of movements available to us to establish those
habits, and what is true of our species is true of all species to the
degree they share our neurology. Humans have the most sophisticated brain
on this planet, but we stood upon the shoulders of the entire biosphere to
acquire it. We have no reason to take pride in what we are. Such pride
would be misplaced. It belongs to those creatures we routinely eat for
dinner.
Our highly developed ability to extrapolate evolved in
the lower primates as a social tool, a means of anticipating the behavior
of others in the constant struggle to gain favor, intimidate adversaries,
and to evade trouble within the confines of a tribe. Extending the
resources of the neocortex from social interactions to a creative
manipulation of the environment has proven a boon, and the
boon is not ours alone. Some species of birds will bend wire into hooks
with which to extract bugs from bark once introduced to wire and food that
can only be acquired with a hook. They hold the wire down with one foot
and do the bending with their beak.
Evolution is a blind, trial-and-error exploration.
Planning ahead is extrapolation and, as mentioned, only works with the
resource of past experience. Workable, survival-oriented complexity
accumulates as it is encountered and recognized as useful, or if it
facilitates survival. All of life is like the amoeba in that regard,
mindlessly reaching out in search of food and new ways of acquiring food,
a little bit less mindless once it has learned a new trick, but never any
less aware when it again reaches out for more, because the future harbors
the unknown. The unknown is infinite in scope, and there's always more to
be had.
Apes and monkeys use their powers of extrapolation to
complement ancient and emotionally reactive ways of life. Humans,
genetically all but identical, do the same. Not only can chimps grieve to
the death over the loss of a mother, if taught beyond their own native
resources by humans, they can communicate effectively through sign
language and name pet kittens given to them for companionship. The
connection works both ways. Monkeys throw excrement at each other, but
humans worldwide throw the word about as an expression of anger and
exasperation. Male monkeys mount other male monkeys as gestures of
humiliation, but humans worldwide say, “fuck you,” to accomplish the same
end, always careful to leave out the confrontational subject of the
sentence, “I…”.
The first intimations that our more refined human
neocortex has taken us into a new kind of reality involves behavior that
transcends the eat-or-be-eaten sensory world. Abstract thought is that new
kind of reality, the ability to think and communicate in associative and
representational terms free of emotional reactivity. Motivation and goals
involve emotion, but the information processing in itself is a mere tool.
The limbic system has no means of processing
information that is patently non-sensory in nature. The concept of the
square root of forty-four has no clear or immediate sensory image or
sensation to accompany it. 'Forty-four' and 'square roots' only make sense
to the neocortex, and only the neocortex can then apply it to the
sensorium as with the construction of our technology.
To a large degree, the limbic system is oblivious to
the operation of the neocortex, and vice versa, because the neocortex
cannot turn emotion on or off except by blocking or encouraging thoughts
and imaginings fueling an emotional reaction. When we are 'going with the
flow' and dancing in a dimly lit auditorium saturated with the beat of a
trance number and filled with thundering, wildly gyrating bodies excreting
the most provocative of hormones, we may be totally immersed in the
sensory and entirely emotionally reactive. In the middle of performing a
brain operation in which a human life is at stake, we may be as cold and
calculating and sharply focused on abstract detail as is possible for the
human mind to be, even though the neurosurgeon will be motivated by
emotion arising from the limbic system, a desire to heal a sick patient,
or to make next month's payment on his Lexus.
Animals and many humans live primarily through the
limbic system and the neocortex supplements its powers. These individuals
are emotional in nature and will leap before they think. Some humans live
through the neocortex, supplemented by the emotional reactivity of the
limbic brain. They are rational in nature and will think before they leap.
It was inevitable that as levels of intelligence rose,
the intellectual or abstract perception of the nature of reality would
begin to compete with direct sensory perception and automatic emotional
reactivity as a means of survival. Instead of fighting over water, we
engineer modern water treatment and dissemination technologies. Emotional reactivity loses out to thoughtful scrutiny
of and solutions to problems existing both within and
outside the social context, problems lesser primates would simply not see,
ignore or avoid.
Still, most humans living in the modern world live
largely through the limbic system and its emotional reactivity. Social
situations push our buttons and out pops canned behavior. The danger to
humanity arises with the extraordinary power of the neocortex in creating
tools. Angry monkeys may bite one another, or hit with sticks. Angry humans behaving like
monkeys lob hand grenades and launch thermonuclear warheads at one
another.
If we choose to live the old emotionally reactive ways,
our powers of clear thought and of extrapolation can too easily be
hijacked to rationalize, intellectualize, and justify irrational behavior.
Problems are worked out in endless scenarios in the imagination, but if
the solution entails an unpleasant sacrifice, we sometimes refuse to act
and instead continue the search, endlessly generating a constant stream of
self-defensive daydreaming and self-talk in the process. The end result?
We fantasize solutions to problems instead of acting to resolve them. We do this continually, and it is quite harmful.
Problems that generate emotional and physical tension
without resolution breed serious trouble because emotional reactivity is
dangerously inflexible. After all, how do we catch a monkey? We put a hole
in a hollow coconut large enough for a monkey to slip a hand through. We
place inside the coconut a treat the monkey values highly. The monkey
slips his hand into the hole to retrieve the morsel of food and makes a
fist around it. We then leap from hiding yelling and screaming. The monkey
reactively tries to escape. He reactively holds to his valuable food at
the same time and as a consequence, drags the coconut along with him. Try
climbing a tree holding to a coconut. The
monkey winds up in a cage, or on a dinner plate.
We are proud of our ability to reason, but we often
behave like monkeys when we become emotionally riled and refuse to let go
of our coconuts. Common-sense is left abandoned in the unused neocortex.
We’re monkeys to the degree we fall back on our limbic system to function
and to survive in times of stress, just bigger and less hairy, and better
looking from our own point of view.
And yet the old mammalian brain’s reliance upon
emotional reactivity has always contained the seeds of its own evolution.
Emotional reactivity requires conscious presence for the organism to
function. Emotional reactivity evolved in the presence of conscious
presence as a goad, or helpmate, to the decision-making process. A human
being without a conscious presence is like a sleepwalker driving his car
in his pajamas down darkened highways at high speeds without headlights.
This analogy is based upon an incident that actually happened. Police
chased the man through three states before finding him parked along the
side of the road, gazing out into the darkness mindlessly. Reactively, the
man functioned with absolute perfection. Without a clear conscious focus,
was he going anywhere, or for any specific reason?
Emotional reactivity evolved as a crutch to what must
eventually become a dominant and dynamic conscious presence, but as this
transformation takes place at our stage of development, we ponder death
and value ourselves accordingly as ephemeral and ultimately without
meaning in the overall expanse of lifeless physical reality. It is as if
our greatest asset in life denigrates us if we cannot quickly see beyond
old fallacies.
This happens because the sensory meme of the
pleasure/pain principle no longer works once we become conscious of the
nature of our own personal existence. Avoid pain. Seek pleasure. Animals
blindly react to this primal programming and its systems of reward and
punishment, but in the end, we know that we all suffer pain, cannot avoid
it, and we die. Our mates and our children die. Our species dies. Our
world dies. It’s not enough that we may die peacefully. We may die
screaming in unspeakable agony. Regardless of the intensity of the
pleasure we may experience along the way, we know we are programmed for
death and that nothing lasts forever.
But the beginning of the countless erroneous
assumptions of the nature of reality was the confusion between thought and
thinker that gives birth to self and other, mind and body, spirit and
physicality, an illusion that would continue to holds us in a firm grip
had we not noticed the fuzzy edges around that iron-clad reality. It's
becoming increasingly easy to show where and how we have gone astray in
our understanding of reality. Things aren't the way they seem to be. Pointing out these items of
interest in detail opens to the way to a startling and refreshing alternate view of
reality that works far better than the old.
