Pinker’s argument is that we only think things are worse now because we’ve become so sensitive to violence. In earlier times, people were used to it and so didn’t think about it much. In fact, they went to see torture or hangings or beheadings for entertainment! But we’re so unused to such things, we react with horror and think it means things are going very very wrong. And it’s that reaction, Pinker says, that is actually making us safer. As a culture, we’re becoming more and more gentle with each other. And now when we fight, we do it at a distance; we shoot each other in “drive-bys” from the safety of a moving car and fight our wars through computers and drones. Even the spectacle of “wrestling” where huge men posture and beat their chests and pretend to hurt each other is obviously fake. The days of mano a mano fighting are, for most of us, long gone. 

But that’s not what we see in the movies or on TV. Violence is front and center in most of them, particularly the big blockbusters: people fight each other constantly and are killed in every way possible (with impalement being a favorite method), there’s tons of gore, buildings if not entire neighborhoods are destroyed, cars crash, and oh lordy, the explosions! Everything blows up, including people – usually in the most messy way possible, so that everyone around gets spattered liberally with their remains.

What is up with this in-your-face violence and blood, if we’re so squeamish about it in real life? What is it accomplishing?

We know that the human forebrain – the part that reasons – is still evolving. But the older parts of the brain, the “animal” (or even “reptilian”) parts of us, aren’t keeping up. Those older parts still operate from instinct, and their responses are limited to “is it safe, or should I run away? Should I fight it? Can I eat it? Can I have sex with it? Do I need to protect it?”

Yet we’re living in a world where most of the time, none of those instincts apply. It’s the forebrain that’s squeamish about violence, because it’s thinking “first of all, I could get hurt, and second, it’s illegal and I’d go to jail, and also, my moral code forbids it and people will judge me for it, and after all, I don’t really want to be that kind of person.” Right now there’s a lot of attention being (rightly) paid to the idea that a person can’t always have sex with someone else even if the animal brain thinks they can; hopefully the social pressure against rape will soon be as strong as the social pressure against murder.

Still, the animal brain isn’t going to go away. And it does have its purpose. We do encounter danger, even if it’s not frequent. There was a time in my life where the animal brain served me well: I woke up in my dorm room to find a man standing over my bed, pulling the covers off of me. Without hesitation I sat up and socked him in the face as hard as I could – hard enough to knock him down – and then leapt up, screaming at the top of my voice, and chased him out of the room. I was so pumped up on adrenalin I was ready to beat the crap out of him. I weighed all of 118 pounds at the time, but the fighting instinct gave me the edge in that moment, right when I needed it.

Fear and anger serve us. The problem is, it’s easy to trigger those reactions, but often either there’s no actual threat to fight, or we’re forbidden to fight. Our forebrains may tell us that’s okay, but they can’t make us not have those reactions. (Unless you are a highly trained Buddhist monk, apparently.) Our reactions require that we do something, but most of the time, we can’t!

Which is why anxiety is such a problem for many today. Fear is supposed to trigger an immediate action (either fight or flight) that then relieves the fear. Anxiety is fear that either has no apparent cause or about which nothing can be done. It’s fear with no relief.

So what do we do, if real life doesn’t give us a chance to use or relieve those instinctive reactions? We do what the psychologists call “project” – we let others act it out for us. And where better to “project” our instincts than onto a movie or TV screen? (We also “project” our changing ideas there – you can tell a lot more about where a society is headed by watching TV than by listening to politicians and demagogues – but that’s a separate issue.) So we go to the movies to see the violence that we have willfully denied ourselves and that our instinctive natures cannot relinquish, so we can experience both arousal and relief. (And yes, this also explains why internet porn is so popular and not going away any time soon.)

There are those who argue that violence on screen leads to violence in real life. That may be true in a few cases, but for most of us, I suspect the opposite is true.

Personally I find the violence and explosions and gore are overdone. A little bit goes a long way for me, and I find it more effective if the violence, and also the sex and the scary monsters, are mostly left up to my own imagination instead of done as graphically as possible on the screen. Imagination is a trait of the forebrain; animals don’t have it. And our forebrains keep growing.

Here’s what I hope: more and more people will, in time, find movies that speak to the projections of the forebrain or stimulate the imagination do more for them than movies that satisfy the animal part of our natures.

May 10, 2013

Researchers at Weill Cornell Medical College have successfully tested their novel anti-cocaine vaccine in primates, bringing them closer to launching human clinical trials.

Their study, published online by the journal Neuropsychopharmacology, used a radiological technique to demonstrate that the anti-cocaine vaccine prevented the drug from reaching the brain and producing a dopamine-induced high.
“The vaccine eats up the cocaine in the blood like a little Pac-man before it can reach the brain,” says the study’s lead investigator, Dr. Ronald G. Crystal, chairman of the Department of Genetic Medicine at Weill Cornell Medical College.

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“We believe this strategy is a win-win for those individuals, among the estimated 1.4 million cocaine users in the United States, who are committed to breaking their addiction to the drug,” he says. “Even if a person who receives the anti-cocaine vaccine falls off the wagon, cocaine will have no effect.” Dr. Crystal says he expects to begin human testing of the anti-cocaine vaccine within a year. Cocaine, a tiny molecule drug, works to produce feelings of pleasure because it blocks the recycling of dopamine—the so-called “pleasure” neurotransmitter—in two areas of the brain, the putamen in the forebrain and the caudate nucleus in the brain’s center.

When dopamine accumulates at the nerve endings, “you get this massive flooding of dopamine and that is the feel good part of the cocaine high,” says Dr. Crystal. The novel vaccine Dr. Crystal and his colleagues developed combines bits of the common cold virus with a particle that mimics the structure of cocaine. When the vaccine is injected into an animal, its body “sees” the cold virus and mounts an immune response against both the virus and the cocaine impersonator that is hooked to it. “The immune system learns to see cocaine as an intruder,” says Dr. Crystal. “Once immune cells are educated to regard cocaine as the enemy, it produces antibodies, from that moment on, against cocaine the moment the drug enters the body.”

In their first study in animals, the researchers injected billions of their viral concoction into laboratory mice, and found a strong immune response was generated against the vaccine. Also, when the scientists extracted the antibodies produced by the mice and put them in test tubes, it gobbled up cocaine. They also saw that mice that received both the vaccine and cocaine were much less hyperactive than untreated mice given cocaine. Booster Shots to Dampen the Cocaine High In this study, the researchers sought to precisely define how effective the anti-cocaine vaccine is in non-human primates, who are closer in biology to humans than mice.

They developed a tool to measure how much cocaine attached to the dopamine transporter, which picks up dopamine in the synapse between neurons and brings it out to be recycled. If cocaine is in the brain, it binds on to the transporter, effectively blocking the transporter from ferrying dopamine out of the synapse, keeping the neurotransmitter active to produce a drug high. In the study, the researchers attached a short-lived isotope tracer to the dopamine transporter.

The activity of the tracer could be seen using positron emission tomography (PET). The tool measured how much of the tracer attached to the dopamine receptor in the presence or absence of cocaine. The PET studies showed no difference in the binding of the tracer to the dopamine transporter in vaccinated compared to unvaccinated animals if these two groups were not given cocaine. But when cocaine was given to the primates, there was a significant drop in activity of the tracer in non-vaccinated animals. That meant that without the vaccine, cocaine displaced the tracer in binding to the dopamine receptor. Previous research had shown in humans that at least 47 percent of the dopamine transporter had to be occupied by cocaine in order to produce a drug high.

The researchers found, in vaccinated primates, that cocaine occupancy of the dopamine receptor was reduced to levels of less than 20 percent. “This is a direct demonstration in a large animal, using nuclear medicine technology, that we can reduce the amount of cocaine that reaches the brain sufficiently so that it is below the threshold by which you get the high,” says Dr. Crystal.

When the vaccine is studied in humans, the non-toxic dopamine transporter tracer can be used to help study its effectiveness as well, he adds. The researchers do not know how often the vaccine needs to be administered in humans to maintain its anti-cocaine effect. One vaccine lasted 13 weeks in mice and seven weeks in non-human primates. “An anti-cocaine vaccination will require booster shots in humans, but we don’t know yet how often these booster shots will be needed,” says Dr. Crystal. “I believe that for those people who desperately want to break their addiction, a series of vaccinations will help.”

Journal reference:Provided by Weill Cornell Medical College

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Read more at:
http://medicalxpress.com/news/2013-05-cocaine-vaccine-key-hurdle.html#jCp

Dear Mellon Bank action centers,

This is a friendly intrusion, with no malicious intent. I live in Ukiah, California.

Please check this message during some free moments, just print it out and check its questions at some free moment – it does not immediately concern practical planning for the major upcoming action but I feel it has relevance for all of us as individuals going forward, while the scope of the Occupy movement expands exponentially.

Just some thoughts for introspection, not action

The entire movement is in danger of descending into the realm of human “meme”, that quasi symbolic place that is more defined by its viral nature, its “vertical and horizontal” spread, than its clear definition. And that will be despite on the ground successes or failures that would seem to be energizing our own historical momentum. 

Not that “definition” is possible in a linear sense, any more than would be the mythos of Michael Jackson, for example. Regarding “clarity”, it is true that the ideological components of our activist movement itself have been discussed in many venues. Rather, what is being suggested here, however sketchily, are some “obvious” semantic considerations towards adding dimensional depth to the “meme” we “occupy” (not necessarily meant as irony).

Is “occupy”, in any situation, going to “displace” a previous “occupant”? Or is “occupy” an activity in the moment, invading and transforming the inertial force of “what has gone before”? The former is political, the latter is, as suggested, transformational. Seems easy and obvious enough! Who is this guy (your correspondent), anyhow?

But, in a next step, have we occupied our own minds, displacing the swarming cultural “memes” that condition our every experience? Have we transformed the dominant “motivators” of our daily lives, so that we can claim the entitlements of our birth? Do we, in fact, own the language we speak, the words we choose? Or has the momentum of the “obvious” swept us all along?

If these questions can be experienced as liberators, then we shall have plumbed the depths of our own “99%”, and thrown off the shackles, the limitations, of that 1% forebrain “social media” self that keeps us enthralled to the culture we swim in. The culture of  the Abrahamic religions  {not to exclude all the others), the styles and gestures and very postures of our daily life, the identities (national, racial, sexual, etc.).

The “culture”? You can define it from the freedom of your own liberated mind, whenever that occurs if it hasn’t. But throw it off we must! I will cease and desist at this point. I have imposed on your busy lives by taking advantage of someone’s software glitch, where an “undisclosed recipient list” spilled out all over my received email. I am, however, not repentant, but happy to have had this “opportunistic” opportunity to introduce some deviant thinking, or alternative thinking, or “creative” thinking (your choice) to all of you among the undisclosed-recipients.

Ah, and now, I hit the irrevocable send button!

A 2008 study refers to the link between prolonged and unabated grief (“complicated grief” or CG) and activity in the nucleus accumbens, a forebrain area associated with reward, pleasure, fear, and addiction. Research subjects showed marked brain activity in response to reminders of traumatic loss “which may interfere with adapting to the loss in the present.” 

A 2010 review of the literature posits complicated grief as an attachment disorder and suggests that “personal factors, in particular insults to a sense of security caused by weak parental bonding in childhood, present a vulnerability to the onset of CG later in life” (p. 690). 

These and related investigations* shed light on my father’s prolonged grief. I understand that losses in childhood and adulthood are interconnected, cumulative, and probably inter-generational. I’m relieved to learn that grief resides in the forebrain and not necessarily indicate a flawed personality of someone who’s unable to ‘get over it.’

sources: O’Connor, M-F., et al. (2008). Craving love? Enduring grief activates brain’s reward center. NeuroImage, 42(2), 969-972. Lobb, E.A., et al. (2010). Predictors of complicated grief: A systematic review of empirical studies. Death Studies, 34(8), 673-698. *I apologize for my naive sherry-picking from the literature; it’s new territory for me.

I’ll mull over your response a good while. In the interim, just to answer your concluding question:
 
” Is this evidence that, on the collective level, the lack of coherence is a real limit that needs to be respected (and even reflected, to the careful reader, in the Bible itself?)  In that case, “And you never will” is a bit of shared wisdom.”
 
I believe the answer is “yes”.
 
I think Nietzsche was trying to convey the message, in so many words: “Don’t fear the old brain, it’s here to stay, so willfully join your conscious ‘self’ to this old brain’s faultless instinctual capacity to bring joy to the experience of what being a human truly is.”
 
As an “act of will” he believed warfare was the surest route to effect this experience- where in many senses the “pain” engendered by a life spent largely in the fore-brain and its painful sense of being an isolated individual would be transcended by direct experiences of communal “glory”. -That these experiences would be of undeniable power to effect one’s stepping into ones full coat of humanity.
 
Though I believe he is correct in this, we cannot want or ask for the battles of the Greek city states  in the world of today, precisely because there are far too many people, and there is no nobility in mass killing, the slaughter of civilians, and on and on. There is no nobility in conscription. It would have to be voluntary.  Not to mention that wars on such scales today would destroy the natural world as well, not just a competing army of some ten or hundred individuals. Because it has to be “for real”: it cannot be pared down with controls or become in any way a game.
 
So there must be other solutions to a primorial species-based “joy”: and the fact is that perhaps we are so far away from our instincts (Nietzsche believed this even in the late 1800s) and “into” our artificial civilization (and fore-brain), that perhaps just learning to “meditate” (as if for the first time) on the direct experiences that our instincts can provide us is a first step.
 
And were one to attempt this, focusing on words would not be the way to make it happen, unless one *really is able* to live at that level with which John starts out: ” … the Word was God“.
 
It does not have to be all violence and Apocalypse. The primal brain can react to the glints of sunlight on leaves in the wind with such power as to completely transport one in a moment to authentic resolution, peace, and joy.
 
In the next moment one falls back into the lack of coherence. But the lack of coherence is absolutely inevitable if one lives past the age of 50- due to aging itself: there is less and less active “control” of “joining things up”, but instead more and more of “experience at all levels just seeming to ‘happen’ to one” after midlife.
 
“Willfully” hitching oneself not to a star, but to the “old” brain may bring more peace in the second half of life. It’s just a hunch. Oh yes, letting oneself experience the elevating power of thought, of course, but with a smile and a wink every time the sentences start circulating.

Interesting that the “old” brain can keep the heart beating long after all those circuits are all gone. This is a direct aspect of reality that one must face and consider at the most personal level.

With this in mind (getting much older with the presumption of missing circuits), I would direct you sometime to listen to the ROLLING STONES’ track off of EXILE ON MAIN STREET - the track “Loving Cup”. Follow that up with a viewing of the same song from the 2008 film of the NYC STONES concert: SHINE A LIIGHT. Now something most wonderful and, ahem, “mind-boggling” is going on in this song. On the MAIN STREET version there is a ‘crying out for joy’ aspect of the performance that goes right down your spine, and back, and up, and across the “old brain” with a delicious, sweet, sexual joy that contains “all that it takes” to be a celebrant of one’s “residence” in a full coat of humanity. This is as primal as it gets. And make no mistake that Jagger is a master at “channeling” primal energy at a mass level: he directs the audience at a theater just as surely as the Dalai Lama “directs” the energies at a Kalachakra Initiation. And Jagger, like the Dalai Lama, knows precisely what he is doing. He may not have known at Altamont in 1969. He was just a green kid then. But as an old man he does now know just what he is doing.

My wife said of Jagger in SHINE A LIGHT: “My God, look at him: he has an old witch face!” She was aghast. But that is precisely the point! He now is acting as a shaman in full possession of his powers, gained over many years. He is glorying, on stage, in his dreadful aspect that he ‘shatters’ instantaneously back into the force of life and living. What is he showing us? : the pure joy of the old brain. This is the same “joy” that rocked the world when the Beatles first hit the stage in 1964. (And of course provided the antidote to the Kennedy assassination.) Conservatives were not afraid of the sexual display. No, they actually must have feared the unleashing of joy at such a direct level. Society at large had to ship the kids to Vietname to ‘tone it down’. The later horrific outcome: the bodiless, stoned silent Vets, and mindless disco sound washes.

After seeing SHINE A LIGHT I was almost convinced that if your “big screened” this movie to a unit of soldiers ready to deploy, they would all balk at going out and decide to sing and dance instead for the rest of their days. All nations would see this as a better route to glory than battle in the mud. Well- the movie is that good, at any rate. I watched it a second time, on a much smaller screen, several weeks later, to confirm my reaction. It was the same. I physically felt myself rising way out of my chair. (And believe me, at age 52 I must report that just does not happen to me anymore when I “take in” the media.)
 
The aged deployments of these ROLLING STONES aside, it seems after 50 years of living the wonders of thinking become less like elevation and more like artificial levitation. It no longer makes one feel infallible, cocksure, and filled with self-esteem the way it did when Philosophy class just let out at the age of 22.

Whereas, while aging, sinking into experiences that the instincts provide offer what are felt as emergent, mysterious, rich coats of experience that younger people are not privy to with their too-strong faith in where the mind can take one.
 
Can the mind partake of infinity all by itself? Maybe not. Perhaps only the will itself can. Perhaps “will” really is our greatest treasure- but certainly not in the pessimistic sense of what Schopenhauer regarded as “will”.

Perhaps this “will” is a kind of communal (to humanity) holy treasure, the arms and legs of what Plotinus regarded as the World Soul that ‘boils all things’ in the cauldron of this realm.

In its final (canonical) form, the written Biblical tradition is coded (or confusingly layered over time) such that people (particularly in community) will not experience it as real or conveying joy, if they delve deeply enough into the implications to confront the contradictions.

So one could say that it has its own circuit breaker (or warning) for the overzealous cortex that gets out of touch with the experience.

Paul invites some to “become a ‘fool’ so that he may become wise” in 1 Cor. 3:18-23, where he seems to devolve all knowledge (as subservient?) to God.

Most of the conclusions and insights I expressed were reached decades ago; even if I felt no need to express them in traditional or Biblical terms (and are best left there, actually).

The dynamism of the Bart D. Erhman ”Lost Christianities” course texts (in connection with my experience of the tradition) prompted me to explore the word-based dimension of the movement; largely to better understand the limitations of the written medium. I was very aware of those limitations; and curious about whether their exploitation was indictable, or simply reflected the larger boundaries of human aspiration.

I suppose that is where the “And you never will”  line holds some mystery.  Its principal significance for me, is as a frank admission that there is no intention or expectation that any release from emotional or intellectual limbo fueled by panacean hope, is forthcoming. If a Panacea were to arrive, there would of course be no problem with this.  But as one realizes that an apocalyptic fulfillment of that concept is beyond hope (if it ever was “hopeful”); the advice to do nothing, know nothing, beyond what you “hear from me” or “what is written“, sounds disturbingly dystopian.

[ Think: Invasion of the Body Snatchers ] 

Do the limitations of a written tradition preclude a salvific experience for the individual?

My comments on the gospel of John were intended to show that it purports to keep alive the hope of that promise, once apocalypticism has failed.  It certainly does not work for everyone (explained as a function of judgement, unfortunately); but for a few, who can say?  I doubt whether that can be willed to happen, but it would say that choice (God, Jesus, supplicant, or some combination thereof) plays a big part.

The role of choice (as mediated by the forebrain) strikes me as one of the more beneficial concepts, if only for societies’ sake.

As a subjugated people, I think these Jewish Christians were rejecting the nobility of war and the use of terrorism to maintain order; although the apocalyptic tradition indulges those very convictions.  That is one reason why it was central to my analysis:  its presence in the gospels picture the lack of coherence you speak of.

If there is anything beyond this, any meaningful redemption; the (conventionally understood) Apocalypse must be excised; and some of the contributors to the gospel of John clearly meant to do that.
 Equally interesting to me:  in the real world the church did not (could not?) make that clean break.  Is this evidence that, on the collective level, the lack of coherence is a real limit that needs to be respected (and even reflected, to the careful reader, in the Bible itself?)

In that case, “And you never will” is a bit of shared wisdom. 

I think it is unwise to repudiate the animal nature; to dishonor the life-giving properties of the old-brain.  But I am slow to trust it; since population density does exacerbate a proliferation of inhumanity; and the old-brain does not know this (or care).

The traditional Apocalypse kills off lots of people; resembling Robinson Jeffers’ thought, but in terms the old-brain would understand.

A Clarification:
 
When I mentioned, at the end of the last communication of 15 September, that humans might in be a more or less hopeless condition (due to the “old brain” vs. “new brain” conflict), I ought to provide more clarity:
 
I meant to imply that, along with Robinson Jeffers, I have reached my own conclusion -as of age 52- that the “human animal” is likely helplessly botched until further physical evolution takes place.

If this be so, better that the planet not have too many of our kind of animals running amok: and for those that do exist, better that each have a wide aspect of landscape. There be the best chance for peace, when peace can occur.
 
I should have said that I think it quite possible / likely that there is something other than the “human animal” that is resident in a body, namely: a human “being” – which might well be a “soul” or “soul-like ” component along the order of what Plotinus was identifying in the Enneads.
 
So one could say, in a religious sense, that what we need is to foster “the renewed faith of humans (re: animals) in humanity (re: beings)”. This being the very concept that is at the heart of the ritually performed puja of the particular Buddhist lineage that was given to me, entrusted to me now so many years ago.
 
Now the human “being”, with either exceptional (and I do mean the exception not the rule) courage, or unusual insight, or both, might well be capable of a “morality” abridging good and evil. And so forth.
 
The implications of this line of thinking are riddled with complexity, but I do think this is likely what is going on.
 
If there is an inherent inner “terrorism” in what it means to be human, I think it comes down to the inability of the “old brain” to reside in the same ‘system’ as the “new brain” that only relatively recently came into existence. This I believe is key.
 
As for “despising evil”, we ought to no more hate ourselves for our inability to adhere (or “inhere”) to “moral” systems, in the general long course of a life, than we should embark on a personal project to walk about the planet crushing every living worm. The “old brain” precedes anything and everything that “we” self-reflective creatures can imagine or be, really. We must respect it- what it is, what it does, its operations, the fact that it is the agency that causes our hearts to beat.
 
I do agree with Nietzsche that we have with self-reflective consciousness usually “degraded” the animal part of our nature, to our detriment in our ability to experience a ‘pure‘ kind of joy- if we look at the state of humankind for the past 2,000 years. Very little extended and ongoing joy. Very little. Perhaps a bit in the Renaissance, before the spirit of that era was crushed by the advent of Luther.

Hmm. Interesting that Da Vinci was so absorbed by the very animal body itself.

It all makes sense to think of the lyrics with the other concerns, yes. But I confess that I am mystified by the line: “And you never will.”
 
The greatest “mind” oriented “shock” of my own mid-life is the growing -and perhaps irrevocable- suspicion now that words and word play -any and all human coded ‘messages’ if you will- are so far from reality as to constitute a personal world of living with far more pain and suffering than would otherwise would be the humanity’s lot.
 
Some of this has been influenced by my readings in Nietzsche. He strongly believed in a “fast in / fast out” approach to any analysis involving the use of words. Keep it as quick and clean as possible. This is totally opposed to nearly all other professional philosophers’ approach who have ever lived (except for Lao Tze).
Thus Nietzsche reasoned results would also be the most honest, and stand the strongest chance at provoking clarity in others’ readings.
 
Of late, walking out at Yaquina Head (a spit of land that extends a mile out into the Pacific Ocean on the central Oregon Coast), I try and see how much of what I am able to learn in one session (about how perception functions in its search for a noetic “truth”) is happening on a level beneath or beyond words.
For example: how does the mind learn how to identify things (say: the shape and movement of a seagoing Cormorant) both at a vast distance (“far as the eye can see”) and within a few feet all in the same 10 minute period of observation with utter surety that will last one the rest of one’s life when this living object is seen in the future regardless of the perceptual distances or particular seascapes involved? And does the increasing familiarity with that object (which becomes “compassion” / “love“) have anything to do with word-based reflection?
 
As for the sea of pain that humankind finds itself in, I have come to believe I now know why: could it all be due to the reality that the brain does not “cohere” properly with the total sphere of its own comprising physical elements.
 
One finds oneself in possession of an ancient, primordial brainstem with its impulses and emotions- but one lives with this possession in association with a pre-frontal cortex which exploded in growth way beyond its means in “recent” times.

How can these different parts of the brain be considered to work well together? And thus the madness of human behavior, and the instability of humans together, and humans with the natural world?

And would there exist no cure for it whatsoever, except further evolution, whose results, were the human race to survive, would of course be most uncertain?

Until such a crucial juncture in evolution is reached, would not the best possible existence for man be what California bio-mythic poet Robinson Jeffers called for in the mid 1920s: fewer humans? To keep the population very small and give each human being acres of land to range in- for we can be a very dangerous animal, both to ourselves and others, and ever shall be. We are happiest when there is a chance for nature’s power to “overtake” and, in some sense, humble the madness in our own minds. As Jeffers’ long narrative poems attempt to convey.
 
In this view, “morality” could never save us – it is a creation of the cortex- and it cannot save us from ourselves because the brain stem and its environs know nothing of morality. To the brainstem, morality is the most ephemeral cartoon imaginable. It is not and never will be real.
 
Nietzsche’s solution was to say: “morality” indeed, does not exist. If you be human, you must needs live as close as possible to your instinct to fully “achieve” your own existence. He believed, in a sense, in the operations of the brainstem. Trust it, he said. Its wants and needs are ancient and practically infallible. He actually believed this to be the most noble existence.
 
Robinson Jeffers also believed as Nietzsche. I need to once again find that publication that lists the books that Jeffers held in his own private library at Tor House to see how many -if any- Nietzsche volumes he cared for at the ‘personal shelf’ level. Jeffers words are thus:

“His mind forebodes his own destruction;
Actaeon who saw the goddess naked among leaves
      and his hounds tore him.
A little knowledge, a pebble from the shingle,
A drop from the oceans: who would have believed this
      infinitely little too much?”
 
So the ultimate question for humans becomes this: What is the “cleanest” message that the mind can offer up to itself (and to its own fellows and to share in/with other creatures) in an infallible vision- or at least a vision that “feels” infallible such that life can proceed -day in and out- with experiences akin to joy?
 
Such are some of the things I’ve been pondering of late.

“The yogis have said for ages that spiritual practice changes the brain, and they have a very systematic method for doing so… The Yoga Sutra is a manual for how to do this”.       Joan Shivarpita Harrigan, director of Patanjali Kundalini Yoga Care(How to Boost Brain Power, Yoga Journal, October 2008)

According to Yogic tradition, a tree to enlightenment grows within us. By directing our life force energy or consciousness (the sacred serpent Kundalini) upwards from the root of our spine, to ascend the tree trunk (spinal cord), into the highest branches of our brain (the Ajna Chakra or third eye), we blossom into cosmic consciousness and realize our true nature as divine beings.

Does this yogic metaphor of ascension have a basis in our biology ? Today there is a great deal of evidence to suggest that yoga directs cerebral energy and blood flow upwards from its oldest and most primitive roots, into its highest neural branches, the most highly evolved area of our brain, the pre-frontal lobes.

Can this be seen as “climbing the tree” of our brain’s reptilian and limbic systems? I believe so. In this series, I will explore how, by teaching us to harness the power of the pre-frontal cortex (or Ajna chakra), yoga trains us to overrule the stimulus response, action-reaction parts of the brain and initiates a “ biology of transcendence” that is our full evolutionary potential.

The Tree of Evolution

Only this newest system can organize the entire brain into a smoothly synchronous intention, linking all our lower instincts, as well as thinking and feeling, with higher fields of intelligence and translate all the higher human attributes such as love, empathy and creativity into daily action.                            Joseph Chilton Pearce, ”The Biology of Transcendence”

In order to understand yoga’s potential to evolve the brain, we must first understand that nature never abandons a system, but builds upon the old. Each epoch of animal life is still literally contained within our brain and develops in utero in the order of appearance in evolutionary history. Each of these structural regions corresponds to particular behaviours.

The reptilian brain or brainstem appeared with the dinosaurs approximately 500 million years ago. It takes shape in the first trimester of gestation, and is concerned with survival and reproduction. The reptile brain cannot think or feel; only react and becomes dominant when threatened by fear or anxiety.

The second brain is the mammalian brain or limbic system (approximately 200 years old), and it branches out of the brain stem in the second trimester. Our emotional mammalian brain gives us the ability to nurture and bond, as well as the herd instincts that create our social worlds. It is responsible for the body’s ability to heal itself. Hormonal function, the immune system, and even allergic responses are handled by our mammalian brain.

The neo-cortex (the human brain) first appeared 50 million years ago and it develops in the third trimester. This is where we lift ourselves out of our ancient animal instincts into a higher order of functioning. It is the source of our intellectual capacities to think, compute, reason, analyse, imagine and so on.

Sprouting up from the neo-cortex only a mere 100,000 years ago, the pre-frontal cortex makes its debut after birth. Considered the command center of the brain, it is the seat of concentration and focus. It grants us freewill, the ability to create intent, look at situations objectively, organize our thoughts, make a plan of action and follow through.

Neuroscientists have found that when we concentrate, the brain circuits associated with time, space, and feelings, and sensory perceptions of the body literally quiet down. In other words, when we focus on what we want, the pre-frontal can regulate the emotions of the mammalian brain and the survival reflexes of our ancient reptilian system, to stop our biology from distracting us.

The pre-frontals are considered a largely latent, fourth evolutionary system. Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, points out that for most of us, the pre-frontal cortex remains largely silent, meaning little activity can be recorded there. Neuroscientist Marian Diamond states that because our older brains require far less energy to function, the prefrontal cortex is ”the laziest muscle in our body”.

Most often our attention in everyday life is divided among the three older brains (each with its own agenda) so we are thinking one thing, feeling something else and acting from impulses below our conscious awareness. In this distracted or conflicted state, the lower brain will hijack the emotional or higher brain whenever it deems necessary, usually when fear, feeding, sex or threats to social status are involved.

Even negative thoughts have been demonstrated to shift cerebral energy down from our thinking forebrain to the survival oriented hindbrain (and do so completely beneath our conscious awareness).

According to the pre-eminent neuroscientist Dr. Paul MacLean reptilian behaviours are identified with an obsession with sex, food, control, domination, aggressiveness, territoriality, greed, hoarding, conformity, deception, habitual repetition of the same patterns and never learning from error.

This shift into the reptilian brain can also throw our limbic system into the “flight or fight response”, drawing energy away from the healing systems of the body, and depressing the immune system for up to six hours. Studies also show that poor or low function in the pre-frontal cortex is linked to depression, addiction, anxiety disorders, and criminal behaviour.

It seems clear that when we are in the grip of the hindbrain we do not have access to evolutions highest intelligence and react on a primitive impulsive level. This is where yoga comes in. In Part Two, we explore how by exercising self-awareness and self-control, yoga grants us the freedom to transcend our lower instincts and harness the power of the pre-frontal cortex.