On Deep History and the Brain, Daniel Lord Smail, 2008.
Does culture evolve and if so, how? This is a big question, for if culture evolves and we can change its course, then perhaps we can change our future. We tend to see cultural history as showing a progression, a direction, and that the accumulation of knowledge is increasing in complexity and power, and is ‘passed on’ in such a manner as to influence successive cultures, for good or ill.
In On Deep History and the Brain, Danial Lord Smail suggests that the engine and logic of cultural evolution lies in the neurology of the human brain. In his thinking, biologic evolution is about genes getting what they want, and cultural evolution is about neuron’s getting what they want. Genes and neurons, however, don’t want the same things, and this may not be good. It has been said that our future would either be like 1984, byGeorge Orwell, or like Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley. Daniel Lord Smail thinks it will be like Brave New World. Genes, he suggests, want to proliferate, but neurons want soma.
Mr. Smail notes that the ideas and knowledge that ‘take hold’ in the neurons of minds the most avidly, and therefore get passed-on the most powerfully, are those that stimulate body sensations, particularly pleasure, but also fear, excitement, enhanced perception, and feelings of solidarity. These create mental energy and a sense of virtual experience. We crave, after all, experience, because we crave learning, and we particularly crave experience and learning that are low cost in energy. Vivid brain stimulation and virtual experience can seem like living and learning “for free” – at low energy cost.
And so, for Mr. Smail, History with a capital H can be seen as a story of seeking, obtaining, and manipulating increasing intensities of mental sensation. Wars are fought for access to sugar, caffeine, alcohol, and hallucinogenic drugs, and religious rituals are developed for shared ecstatic mood, body excitement, and feelings of unity. Greater masses of collective organization are sustained. Dominant elites achieve influence and control and maintain hierarchy, using both the positives of excited ideology and the negatives of threatened and uncertain physical and emotional abuse. History becomes a story of excitement, propaganda, group enthusiasm, and the control of the many by the few.
Not unlike mass societies, our brain neurons seem to have a heirarchical structure, with reward neurons at the top. Mental stimulations which activate most effectively the most reward neurons will have the most acceptance and proliferation, and these reward neurons, like pharaoh’s and kings, will drive the lessor neurons to serve their needs. Think rock concerts, multi-media experiance, drugs and alcohol, the passion of political rallies, movies, television, and “Amusing Ourselves to Death“, Neil Postman, 1985.
The direction of culture evolution may not be progress, but intoxication.
https://thinkagainonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/ThinkAgain-nsq.jpg00Think Againhttps://thinkagainonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/ThinkAgain-nsq.jpgThink Again2010-04-05 18:03:442010-04-05 18:03:44Neuron History
“. . . Look around you, son. . . . What do you see?”
There is the abyss, the secret that life is ultimately empty and meaningless, that none of us really matter. It is that existential horror of being. We could dwell on it, but that would make it very hard for us to live. Life is tragic, it is full of loss, it ends in death, it can be unspeakably cruel. Yet most of us seem to rather easily avoid thinking about it. Somehow, we keep up optimism, and have a trust that horrible things won’t happen to us.
Some people simply can’t ignore this horror of being, and when they are also exceptionally perceptive and insightful, they can live with a deep and puzzling loneliness of being different, a gnawing sense of being unable to have validation. They often try, sometimes in charming and creative ways, to reach ‘normal’ people, but they fail and have despair.
Spalding Gray comes to mind. He invented the creative monologue. He gave us lively, theatrical expositions of mental journeys, musings, perplexity. Over and over he portrays deep experience, combined with a sense of missing attachment. He has some kind of inability to feel comfortable the way everyone else seems to feel comfortable, some kind of disconnection with himself. He recounts life episodes of failing to act in his own best interests, like when he can’t bring himself to be on the Johnny Carson show. He is not sure why he is who he is. “Why don’t I have children? Was it a decision I made or did it just happen?” He feels lost, and is puzzled that others don’t feel lost also.
Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, presents a retrospective of his work, Spalding Gray: Stories to Tell. Actors read poignantly and theatrically from his journal notes. Spalding is delightfully animated with wonder, doubt, and chagrin. We learn that he was annoyed, indeed obsessed, by his step daughter’s repetitive playing of the bouncy song “I get knocked down, but I get up again da da da da da da da da da”. Spalding mocks this. He derides it. It is funny, but he is emphatic. He wants us to know about this. He wants us to know that his song really, really gets to him.
Having children is an element of reprieve for him, but ultimately he can’t go on.
The program ends with a large screen photo of Spalding. In full view he is there – his puzzled, glint-eyed, emphatic, dramatic, funny, bemused expression. He makes sense. There is a sense of relief for him, gratitude, and even joy. He can be known after all, he is seen. It is all the more precious as we know he was never sure.
https://thinkagainonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/ThinkAgain-nsq.jpg00Think Againhttps://thinkagainonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/ThinkAgain-nsq.jpgThink Again2010-03-27 21:57:312010-03-27 21:57:31Hoping for Spalding Gray
Jeff Bridges gives a great portrayal, not just of a failing country music artist, but of an alcoholic.
Alcohol chiefly blocks emotional intelligence, not intellectual intelligence. The alcoholic over time doesn’t know what makes him sad, what makes him happy, what makes him anxious. We have these emotions for a reason, they teach us what matters to us, what frightens us, what brings satisfaction. The neurologist, Antonio Damasio, in his book Descartes’ Error, descirbes how loss of emotional processing leads to profound dysfunction. The alcoholic, without reliable emotional processing, becomes a baffling mixture of preserved intellectual intelligence but increasing emotional stupidity. This is Bad Blake, a man of talent and creativity who abandons a son and a wife, can’t write music anymore, and doesn’t know why.
We can explain alcoholism as a charming by-product of creative genius. We think of it as enhancing creative powers. We can be fooled into seeing it as a movingly tragic antidote for gifted peoples’ special pain. This movie, though, gives us none of that. Bad Blake was bad because he was a alcoholic, and he became sensible, and talented, when he stopped drinking. His new woman interest didn’t waver when she saw it clearly. Somehow, she had learned, perhaps the hard way, and she wasn’t going to risk the welfare of her son.
In American Prometheus, The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, we find the clearly portrayed – but little acknowledged – martini alcoholism of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the creator of the atom bomb. We see that his wife was an alcoholic also, her’s more severe, he an enabler. Oppenheimer became a frustrating, puzzling mix of mental genius and emotional failure. The man who built the atom bomb eventually lost his security clearance, and his family. His son went off to live in seclusion in the mountains of New Mexico, working as contractor and carpenter, twice married and divorced.
When his daughter Toni was born, her mother suffered postpartum depression, and was drinking, “a lot”, so she left Toni with a nanny friend, and went away for a number of months. Robert Oppenheimer would periodically visit the child.
“It was all very strange. He would come and sit and chat with me, but he wouldn’t ask to see the baby. She might as well have been God knows where, but he never asked to see her.”
“Would you like to adopt her?”
No, she reassured him . . . over time he would become “attached” to the baby.
“No, I’m not an attached kind of person”.
After failed marriages, no children, and recurrent unhappiness, Toni hanged herself in the family beach house of Hawksnest Bay, in the Virgin Islands, overlooking where her father’s ashes and urn are submerged.
Many consider Franklin Delano Roosevelt to be our third greatest president. In books such as The New Dealers’s War, by Thomas Fleming, 2001, and The Forgotten man, by Amity Shlaes, 2007, FDR receives re-evaluation.
Not all went as well with FDR as has been taught. Unemployment was still 20% in 1939. There was a severe recession in 1937, Europe had recovered much faster. Eight years into his presidency, we were not prepared for war, a war easily foreseeable, and building the military would have greatly aided the economic recovery. Churchill was left to oppose Hitler largely alone for a year, and eventually the US had to side with and arm Stalin to beat Hitler. We were unable to influence the immense slaughter in Poland and Ukraine by Germans and Russians alike. FDR placed Japanese American citizens in detention camps, he prevented Jews from emigrating from Europe. Ships with fleeing Jews were actually sent back into the clutches of Hitler.
FDR shelved Einstein’s famous warning about the possibility of an atom bomb, and the English had to urge on the Manhattan Project. FDR did not move to support anti-lynching legislation, or oppose the segregationist southern democrats. His National Recovery Board supported monopoly price fixing and collusion in markets, favoring big business, placing small businesses at great disadvantage. This was eventually ruled unconstitutional, unanimously, which led FDR to try to ‘pack’ the Supreme Court. He taxed the ‘little guy’ with excise taxes, and raised taxes overall, and enormously increased government regulation. The NRA in 2 years created more federal law that all the previous years of the nation since 1789.
The Great Depression turned out to be the one exception of the US ‘boom and busts’ that didn’t quickly resolve, the only one in which government didn’t act to increase the incentives of investment and the small business economy. The hampered economic recovery served to justify increasing federal power. And increasing federal power is what he did. He targeted political enemies with IRS investigations, and muscled the elections of congressional leaders. Far from having a ‘first class temperment’, he manipulated, frustrated, and infuriated his appointees, and staff. Many abandoned him. He was the first to break George Washington’s honor code of serving only two consecutive terms.
But he was a political success. The New Deal was a political deal. FDR personally directed New Deal funds for political gain, lavishing his supporters with government funds, denying those that opposed him. He was a charming public speaker, he cultivated and pressured the press to support him and to gloss over his contradictions. He spoke a strong populist theme, but he bought elections with New Deal money. In his great electoral victory of 1936, federal spending outpaced all local and state spending for the first time. He didn’t hesitate to say opposing things to opposing audiences.
FDR died in office, galvanizing his image of victorious service to the nation, but he brought Tamany Hall to Washington, D. C.
https://thinkagainonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/ThinkAgain-nsq.jpg00Think Againhttps://thinkagainonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/ThinkAgain-nsq.jpgThink Again2010-02-24 16:56:042010-02-24 16:56:04New Deal, Political Deal
In the movie “I’m not there“, creative Hollywood artists who know Bob Dylan, and know of his singular importance in our time, want to give tribute to him. There has been no sign of his acknowledgment, of course.
It is curious, and very to the point, that the chosen title song for this movie may be the most personally significant song Mr. Dylan has ever written, and also the very one song of all of his repertoire that has not been placed on any of his albums, or posted on any of his lyric anthologies. Indeed, people cannot agree on what the lyrics actually say. The recorded version of the song very likely is an unfinished song, with filler words and phrases, to be refined later, which seems never to have happened.
Yet, it is an truly compelling and emblematic song. Written in the basement tapes sessions during his life in Woodstock, as his attempt to be a normal person, a normal husband, a normal father is slipping. He seems to be fighting and grasping with the cost of his incessant, unshakeable artistic being. The song just may be too raw, too painfully emotional for him to finish, or acknowledge, or publish.
“I’m not there” is dirge-like, with anger, blaming of others, and blaming himself. It does not resolve. There is a grinding, plodding anguish. He has five young children and a lovely wife, but he knows he can’t maintain it, knows he is going to bow out, not at all sure it will be wonderful, sensing that it will be painful, sure that others will be disappointed, and, worse, that it will be selfish. . . but he can’t help it.
Now I’ll cry tonight like I cried the night before
And I’ll feast on her eyes
But I’ll dream about the door.
I was born to love her
But she knows that the kingdom waits so high above her
I wish I were there to help her
But I’m not there I’m gone.
https://thinkagainonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/ThinkAgain-nsq.jpg00Think Againhttps://thinkagainonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/ThinkAgain-nsq.jpgThink Again2010-02-21 14:21:422010-02-21 14:21:42He’s not there, he’s gone.
Neuron History
/in All, BooksOn Deep History and the Brain, Daniel Lord Smail, 2008.
Does culture evolve and if so, how? This is a big question, for if culture evolves and we can change its course, then perhaps we can change our future. We tend to see cultural history as showing a progression, a direction, and that the accumulation of knowledge is increasing in complexity and power, and is ‘passed on’ in such a manner as to influence successive cultures, for good or ill.
In On Deep History and the Brain, Danial Lord Smail suggests that the engine and logic of cultural evolution lies in the neurology of the human brain. In his thinking, biologic evolution is about genes getting what they want, and cultural evolution is about neuron’s getting what they want. Genes and neurons, however, don’t want the same things, and this may not be good. It has been said that our future would either be like 1984, by George Orwell, or like Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley. Daniel Lord Smail thinks it will be like Brave New World. Genes, he suggests, want to proliferate, but neurons want soma.
Mr. Smail notes that the ideas and knowledge that ‘take hold’ in the neurons of minds the most avidly, and therefore get passed-on the most powerfully, are those that stimulate body sensations, particularly pleasure, but also fear, excitement, enhanced perception, and feelings of solidarity. These create mental energy and a sense of virtual experience. We crave, after all, experience, because we crave learning, and we particularly crave experience and learning that are low cost in energy. Vivid brain stimulation and virtual experience can seem like living and learning “for free” – at low energy cost.
And so, for Mr. Smail, History with a capital H can be seen as a story of seeking, obtaining, and manipulating increasing intensities of mental sensation. Wars are fought for access to sugar, caffeine, alcohol, and hallucinogenic drugs, and religious rituals are developed for shared ecstatic mood, body excitement, and feelings of unity. Greater masses of collective organization are sustained. Dominant elites achieve influence and control and maintain hierarchy, using both the positives of excited ideology and the negatives of threatened and uncertain physical and emotional abuse. History becomes a story of excitement, propaganda, group enthusiasm, and the control of the many by the few.
Not unlike mass societies, our brain neurons seem to have a heirarchical structure, with reward neurons at the top. Mental stimulations which activate most effectively the most reward neurons will have the most acceptance and proliferation, and these reward neurons, like pharaoh’s and kings, will drive the lessor neurons to serve their needs. Think rock concerts, multi-media experiance, drugs and alcohol, the passion of political rallies, movies, television, and “Amusing Ourselves to Death“, Neil Postman, 1985.
The direction of culture evolution may not be progress, but intoxication.
Hoping for Spalding Gray
/in All, art“Tell me a horror story, Daddy”.
“. . . Look around you, son. . . . What do you see?”
There is the abyss, the secret that life is ultimately empty and meaningless, that none of us really matter. It is that existential horror of being. We could dwell on it, but that would make it very hard for us to live. Life is tragic, it is full of loss, it ends in death, it can be unspeakably cruel. Yet most of us seem to rather easily avoid thinking about it. Somehow, we keep up optimism, and have a trust that horrible things won’t happen to us.
Some people simply can’t ignore this horror of being, and when they are also exceptionally perceptive and insightful, they can live with a deep and puzzling loneliness of being different, a gnawing sense of being unable to have validation. They often try, sometimes in charming and creative ways, to reach ‘normal’ people, but they fail and have despair.
Spalding Gray comes to mind. He invented the creative monologue. He gave us lively, theatrical expositions of mental journeys, musings, perplexity. Over and over he portrays deep experience, combined with a sense of missing attachment. He has some kind of inability to feel comfortable the way everyone else seems to feel comfortable, some kind of disconnection with himself. He recounts life episodes of failing to act in his own best interests, like when he can’t bring himself to be on the Johnny Carson show. He is not sure why he is who he is. “Why don’t I have children? Was it a decision I made or did it just happen?” He feels lost, and is puzzled that others don’t feel lost also.
Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, presents a retrospective of his work, Spalding Gray: Stories to Tell. Actors read poignantly and theatrically from his journal notes. Spalding is delightfully animated with wonder, doubt, and chagrin. We learn that he was annoyed, indeed obsessed, by his step daughter’s repetitive playing of the bouncy song “I get knocked down, but I get up again da da da da da da da da da”. Spalding mocks this. He derides it. It is funny, but he is emphatic. He wants us to know about this. He wants us to know that his song really, really gets to him.
Having children is an element of reprieve for him, but ultimately he can’t go on.
The program ends with a large screen photo of Spalding. In full view he is there – his puzzled, glint-eyed, emphatic, dramatic, funny, bemused expression. He makes sense. There is a sense of relief for him, gratitude, and even joy. He can be known after all, he is seen. It is all the more precious as we know he was never sure.
Crazy Heart
/in All, MoviesJeff Bridges gives a great portrayal, not just of a failing country music artist, but of an alcoholic.
Alcohol chiefly blocks emotional intelligence, not intellectual intelligence. The alcoholic over time doesn’t know what makes him sad, what makes him happy, what makes him anxious. We have these emotions for a reason, they teach us what matters to us, what frightens us, what brings satisfaction. The neurologist, Antonio Damasio, in his book Descartes’ Error, descirbes how loss of emotional processing leads to profound dysfunction. The alcoholic, without reliable emotional processing, becomes a baffling mixture of preserved intellectual intelligence but increasing emotional stupidity. This is Bad Blake, a man of talent and creativity who abandons a son and a wife, can’t write music anymore, and doesn’t know why.
We can explain alcoholism as a charming by-product of creative genius. We think of it as enhancing creative powers. We can be fooled into seeing it as a movingly tragic antidote for gifted peoples’ special pain. This movie, though, gives us none of that. Bad Blake was bad because he was a alcoholic, and he became sensible, and talented, when he stopped drinking. His new woman interest didn’t waver when she saw it clearly. Somehow, she had learned, perhaps the hard way, and she wasn’t going to risk the welfare of her son.
In American Prometheus, The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, we find the clearly portrayed – but little acknowledged – martini alcoholism of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the creator of the atom bomb. We see that his wife was an alcoholic also, her’s more severe, he an enabler. Oppenheimer became a frustrating, puzzling mix of mental genius and emotional failure. The man who built the atom bomb eventually lost his security clearance, and his family. His son went off to live in seclusion in the mountains of New Mexico, working as contractor and carpenter, twice married and divorced.
When his daughter Toni was born, her mother suffered postpartum depression, and was drinking, “a lot”, so she left Toni with a nanny friend, and went away for a number of months. Robert Oppenheimer would periodically visit the child.
“It was all very strange. He would come and sit and chat with me, but he wouldn’t ask to see the baby. She might as well have been God knows where, but he never asked to see her.”
“Would you like to adopt her?”
No, she reassured him . . . over time he would become “attached” to the baby.
“No, I’m not an attached kind of person”.
After failed marriages, no children, and recurrent unhappiness, Toni hanged herself in the family beach house of Hawksnest Bay, in the Virgin Islands, overlooking where her father’s ashes and urn are submerged.
New Deal, Political Deal
/in All, PoliticsMany consider Franklin Delano Roosevelt to be our third greatest president. In books such as The New Dealers’s War, by Thomas Fleming, 2001, and The Forgotten man, by Amity Shlaes, 2007, FDR receives re-evaluation.
Not all went as well with FDR as has been taught. Unemployment was still 20% in 1939. There was a severe recession in 1937, Europe had recovered much faster. Eight years into his presidency, we were not prepared for war, a war easily foreseeable, and building the military would have greatly aided the economic recovery. Churchill was left to oppose Hitler largely alone for a year, and eventually the US had to side with and arm Stalin to beat Hitler. We were unable to influence the immense slaughter in Poland and Ukraine by Germans and Russians alike. FDR placed Japanese American citizens in detention camps, he prevented Jews from emigrating from Europe. Ships with fleeing Jews were actually sent back into the clutches of Hitler.
FDR shelved Einstein’s famous warning about the possibility of an atom bomb, and the English had to urge on the Manhattan Project. FDR did not move to support anti-lynching legislation, or oppose the segregationist southern democrats. His National Recovery Board supported monopoly price fixing and collusion in markets, favoring big business, placing small businesses at great disadvantage. This was eventually ruled unconstitutional, unanimously, which led FDR to try to ‘pack’ the Supreme Court. He taxed the ‘little guy’ with excise taxes, and raised taxes overall, and enormously increased government regulation. The NRA in 2 years created more federal law that all the previous years of the nation since 1789.
The Great Depression turned out to be the one exception of the US ‘boom and busts’ that didn’t quickly resolve, the only one in which government didn’t act to increase the incentives of investment and the small business economy. The hampered economic recovery served to justify increasing federal power. And increasing federal power is what he did. He targeted political enemies with IRS investigations, and muscled the elections of congressional leaders. Far from having a ‘first class temperment’, he manipulated, frustrated, and infuriated his appointees, and staff. Many abandoned him. He was the first to break George Washington’s honor code of serving only two consecutive terms.
But he was a political success. The New Deal was a political deal. FDR personally directed New Deal funds for political gain, lavishing his supporters with government funds, denying those that opposed him. He was a charming public speaker, he cultivated and pressured the press to support him and to gloss over his contradictions. He spoke a strong populist theme, but he bought elections with New Deal money. In his great electoral victory of 1936, federal spending outpaced all local and state spending for the first time. He didn’t hesitate to say opposing things to opposing audiences.
FDR died in office, galvanizing his image of victorious service to the nation, but he brought Tamany Hall to Washington, D. C.
He’s not there, he’s gone.
/in All, MoviesIn the movie “I’m not there“, creative Hollywood artists who know Bob Dylan, and know of his singular importance in our time, want to give tribute to him. There has been no sign of his acknowledgment, of course.
It is curious, and very to the point, that the chosen title song for this movie may be the most personally significant song Mr. Dylan has ever written, and also the very one song of all of his repertoire that has not been placed on any of his albums, or posted on any of his lyric anthologies. Indeed, people cannot agree on what the lyrics actually say. The recorded version of the song very likely is an unfinished song, with filler words and phrases, to be refined later, which seems never to have happened.
Yet, it is an truly compelling and emblematic song. Written in the basement tapes sessions during his life in Woodstock, as his attempt to be a normal person, a normal husband, a normal father is slipping. He seems to be fighting and grasping with the cost of his incessant, unshakeable artistic being. The song just may be too raw, too painfully emotional for him to finish, or acknowledge, or publish.
“I’m not there” is dirge-like, with anger, blaming of others, and blaming himself. It does not resolve. There is a grinding, plodding anguish. He has five young children and a lovely wife, but he knows he can’t maintain it, knows he is going to bow out, not at all sure it will be wonderful, sensing that it will be painful, sure that others will be disappointed, and, worse, that it will be selfish. . . but he can’t help it.
Now I’ll cry tonight like I cried the night before
And I’ll feast on her eyes
But I’ll dream about the door.
I was born to love her
But she knows that the kingdom waits so high above her
I wish I were there to help her
But I’m not there I’m gone.