Two Different "Triune" Brain Theories But the Same Crucial Conclusion: We Are Makeshift Entities Still Under Development, and That Can Creates Serious Problems for Us

I do not remember exactly the first time that I heard about pioneering neuroscientist Paul MacLean’s concept of the triune brain. The idea of a neocortex sitting atop a primordial cortex sitting atop the brain stem. The brain of a human sitting atop the brain of a horse sitting atop the brain of a reptile, all three brains located inside each of our heads. I do remember being electrified by the idea. Instantly struck by what a gorgeous, evocative, instructive, illuminating insight this was.

But like so many other gorgeous, evocative, instructive, illuminating discoveries, the idea of the triune brain has not always stood the test of further, better scientific inquiry all that well. The problem mainly is that the roles of the trio of brains are not nearly as independent as Dr. MacLean had thought. What is going on in the general neighborhood of one of Paul MacLean’s trio of brains is often having an outsized influence over what is going on in other brain areas.

But the idea that the brain has separate “processing” areas that don’t cooperate well—that’s a MacLean idea that has stood the test of time.

For example, the region where MacLean located his middle (primordial) brain contains a little almond-shaped organ called the amygdala. It turns out that the amygdala has a mind of its own. That is, it can learn—reason?— independent of the (higher) cortex. Moreover, the means that the amygdala and the cortex have for communicating what each “is thinking” are imperfect at this point in our evolving capabilities, and that creates endless trouble for us.

For non-brain-scientists (me, for one), no one whom I know about has offered better, clearer explanations of all this than Joseph LeDoux at New York University’s Center for Neural Science. In Synaptic Self: How Our Brains Become Who We Are, Dr. LeDoux suggests that the reason why the all-important amygdala can’t “talk” well with its higher-up synapses is because the wires leading there aren’t well enough developed. And the reason for that is because the development of language by humans required so much space and so many connections to pull off. Consequently, the cognitive systems in our heads have inordinate trouble communicating with the emotional and motivational systems, and vice versa.

Writes Dr. LeDoux, “This is why a brilliant mathematician or artist, or a successful entrepreneur, can like anyone else fall victim to sexual seduction, road rage, or jealousy, or be a child abuser or rapist, or have crippling depression or anxiety….Doing the right thing doesn’t always flow naturally from knowing what the right thing to do is.”

The trilogy of brain functions that LeDoux finds most compelling are indeed those governing thoughts, emotions and motivations. If this triune grouping breaks down, he writes, “the self is likely to begin to disintegrate and mental health to deteriorate. When thoughts are radically dissociated from emotions and motivations, as in schizophrenia, personality can, in fact, change drastically. When emotions run wild, as in anxiety disorders or depression, a person is no longer the person he or she once was. And when motivations are subjugated by drug addiction, the emotional and intellectual aspects of life suffer.”

In short, Dr. LeDoux says that the self is synaptic: “You are your synapses.” Meaning that what happens between key parts of the brain—or doesn't happen—can be all-important and all-defining. On this point, Dr. MacLean would most likely have been in full agreement.

See here for order info for Dr. LeDoux’s book: "Synaptic Self: How Our Brains Become Who We Are”

Posted on June 23, 2006

As Our Understanding of Our Human Nature Changes and Our Abilities to Employ Such Understandings Grow, It Stands to Reason That Our Ethics Are Evolutionary, Too

I’m prepared to argue that ethics evolve—and are evolving. The reason, of course, is that how we think about human nature and about ethics is evolving.

I'll admit that this notion is off-putting to more than a few philosophers, most notably those who seem to think, or so it appears to me, that philosophical and ethical truths are “out there,” and that it is the philosopher’s task to sniff them out, sort them out and then weigh the merits of it all, not to get caught up in the messy task of explaining how they have evolved and are evolving.

British philosopher Charlie Broad comes to mind. He was of the opinion that what goes around “out there” eventually comes around. He once wrote, “[We] can amuse ourselves, if our tastes lie in that direction, by noticing which well-worn fallacy or old familiar inadequacy is characteristic of the latest gospel, and whether it is well or ill-disguised in its new dress.”

Philosophers of such a mind strike me as being more historians of science and philosophy than philosophers. (In fact, the quote above is from a larger Broad quote at the front of Oregon State U. historian of science Paul Farber’s little book, “The Temptation of Evolutionary Ethics.” Just from that title, you can tell that Farber doesn’t have a strong regard for the idea that as human thinking systems evolve, human ethics are also evolving as, in fact, “evolutionary ethics.”)

The whole idea of evolving is to get somewhere. One philosopher who takes a charming approach to this issue is D.Z. Phillips of the University of Wales and Claremont Graduate School. In his book, Philosophy’s Cool Place, Phillips says that he’s spent the whole of his career as a philosopher seeking to get exactly nowhere. He prefers to see philosophy as contemplative, not “destructively creative” in a Joseph Schumpeter sense. He thinks philosophy is on stronger moral footing being contemplative as opposed to, say, competitive. (His book—again, a little one—is quite readable and often instructively amusing. At one point, he tells about the monastic order that, desperate to be known for something noteworthy, said, “Well, at least we’re tops in humility.”).

Personally, though, I’m much more comfortable in the hands (and with the minds) of philosophers like Tufts University’s Daniel Dennett, who just refuses to see idols or icons in much of anything, including views of ethics. In books like his Freedom Evolves, Dennett, an expert on the cognitive sciences, finds the heart of the human story anchored in an ever-evolving drama.

He writes, “[It] has taken thousands of years of communication for us to begin to find the keys to our own identities. It has been only a few hundred years that we’ve known that we are mammals, and only a few decades that we’ve understand in considerable detail how we have evolved, along with all other living things, from those simple beginnings [perhaps four billion years ago, when the first simple life-forms emerged].”

Dennis argues that it is human culture, exercising choices, that has made possible the evolution of cooperation and ethical norms of free will and freedom itself. It is an ongoing process, he says.

“My aim,” he says in the closing pages of Freedom Evolves, “has been to demonstrate that if we accept Darwin’s ‘strange inversion of reasoning’ we can build all the way up to the best and deepest human thought on questions of morality and meaning, ethics and freedom. Far from being an enemy of these traditional explorations, the evolutionary perspective is an indispensable ally. I have not sought to replace the voluminous work in ethics with some Darwinian alternative but rather to place that work on the foundation it deserves: a realistic, naturalistic, potentially unified vision of our place in nature….We are in the best position to decide what to do next, because we have the broadest knowledge and hence the best perspective [because we are the planet’s nervous system] on the future. What that future holds in store for our planet is up to all of us, reasoning together.”

May that vision, in the best sense of both words, continue to evolve, along with our ethics.

The three books mentioned above can be ordered here: "The Temptation of Evolutionary Ethics”. "Philosophy’s Cool Place”. "Freedom Evolves”

Posted on June 14, 2006

If You've Got a Moment, I've Got a Vivid, Articulate Account of One Mind Seeking to Set Itself Aright to Share With You

When the theme of your lifework is “changing things by changing thinking,” you have the opportunity to take ringside seats to a lot of people’s personal odysseys. Nothing is more fascinating. When you can, and where you can, you provide an idea, a caution, a suggestion. Usually, though, they’ve already thought of it or received it from somewhere else, because, as I’ve often noted, the kinds of things that interest me and the kinds of personal development activities that I study and write and talk about aren’t usually of interest to dull, unobservant people.

It’s not at all unheard of for the individuals who permit me an unusual degree of access to what they are thinking and feeling and doing to be articulate and introspective—and very good writers. And write they often do. What follows is excerpted from a long e-mail (one of many I’ve received from this person over the years) that narrates the travails of an individual I’d judge as “stuck in Mind Level 6.” Level 6, for any of my readers not conversant with the Clare-Gravesian-based model I’ve explored in a number of books, is the Big Kahuna of Healing stages, where one gets one’s psychological act together, or one doesn’t. I have the writer’s permission to invite you to my ringside seat, believing that there is much in what she’s experienced and experiencing that will strike a familiar chord to many. And that her travelogue will be as fascinating to others as it was to me.

I've been on the most interesting adventure. I wrote you some of it, midstream, the processing of the end of that disastrous [love] affair. But that was a component of a larger search for the answer to the question: what's wrong with me?

Years ago, when I came to the training, you looked at some of my scores and said, "If some of you could just get your left brain working as well as your right brain, you could change the world." And that statement, as well as so many other of your writings and comments, has stayed with me. When I started the company, I had to learn how to protect it so I could pay all my salaries, and that was a left-brain stimulating experience. In fact, in owning the company, I became more comfortable with the whole idea of ruthlessness, taking responsibilities for risks, for what you might cost other people in getting something accomplished, for taking responsibility for action on the material plane in general.

But this love affair challenged me on a different level. It surfaced all my identity weakness, my need to obtain outside validation to know I exist, my uncertainty about my own value on so many levels. I think he was a sociopath. That's a tough thing to say about someone else. But with everything I've read, I think it's true. And he targeted me because I had money, was nurturing, trusting, and almost pathologically without defenses. And I got what you get from people like that -- the big charming seduction and then, when you're locked in, the relentless denegation and remorseless exploitation. The thing is, I couldn't get out of it. I had some kind of addictive connection with him.

Well, when I finally found the wherewithal to get him away from me after five years, I was a kind of husk. No trust in myself anymore. No self-esteem left at all. I'd been listening to all the reasons I was unlovable for five years. And the truth is -- I don't even know if he was as bad as I remember, because something about just completely whacked out my perspectives. There was some element I desperately needed from a relationship that I wasn't getting, and something in me just dropped down into the red zone and stayed there.

So when he left, I just made up my mind to figure out what's wrong with me. I'm two years into it. One year I did on my own, the second with a therapist. In just the last few months, we've finally gotten down into the incest stuff, where it becomes clear that this guy was just a kind of molded plastic wrapper around my father. And I'm facing the reality that something happened to me, someone did it to me, and that person didn't care about how it came out for me or how much of my life was being destroyed.

It sounds awful, and it is. But from the first time in my life, I'm standing in my own shoes and seeing what's outside me as clearly outside me. Things happened that are not about me. They affected me but I didn't cause them. There are people who, whatever they are when they're not monsters, are monsters sometimes. And if I'm dealing with a monster, it doesn't who matter who they are otherwise. It's not my job to fix them or understand them or do anything at all but protect myself and get away. Does all this makes sense?

My boundaries were so blown that I didn't know the difference between outside and inside. It made me incredibly open and interactive and intuitive and perceptive. It made me a kind of saint. (And I might have been just fine as a saint, if I'd never owned anything.) But I had no grounded sense of being inside myself. No firm identity as separate from everything else.

I was reading your questions in the first chapter [of The Mother of All Minds]. I'm learning all the left-brain levels at once. Survival, Fastest Gun, Entrepreneur. It's so weird to have all of this emerge at my age (57). I'm learning anger. Resistance. I'm tossing people away. Sometimes I'm so self-centered in my viewpoints that I don't know if I should be celebrating or trying to shrink myself back to size. And I fear that I'm losing some of that lovely New Age airiness of mind I used to have, in favor of something a lot harder and more grounded. I feel the loss, but hope that it will all settle down eventually.

The really peculiar part of this, Dudley, is that I read my old journals and letters, and I discover that there is nothing I'm learning that I didn't know. Nothing new in me. It's just that it's moving from words to belief to action. I'm still in the interstice between belief and action, emerging slowly from two years of solitude and relative inaction. I even quit working for six months from last spring until shortly after Christmas. Now I'm just gradually re-entering the marketplace.

It's very hard starting over again. I knew when I began this that I had to excavate my way down to where it began with my father, when I was 13. And I suspected that when I got there, I would uncover a part of myself that had been deeply buried. That I would have to pick up from there, as a teenager, and somehow grow it up to work in my life now. I had faith that it would grow up quickly, because I have so much experience to feed it. I also thought it might be hard. And it is much harder than I thought it would be. There's an adolescent quality in my thinking, a rigidity to my idealism combined with a social awkwardness. It may always have been there, but I feel it now very sharply.

In all of this, there is a odd sense of not becoming anything new, but becoming myself. That in the end, there will be nothing that wasn't there before, but I will not be constantly stumbling over the knots in myself. I didn't realize how much of a presence depression and anxiety were in my life. And how much of my life was dedicated to managing around them.

I'm trying to write a book about it. I've written reams of letters to people during the process. Sometimes I thought that I wouldn't live through it, and would just die of sadness. But at least I would leave the letters behind. I think what I'm writing about is recovering from what incest does. But I'm also writing about a journey that started with the realization that, if I didn't change my life, I was going to die never having owned it or done what I really wanted.

I think I've gotten pretty well along in the process of taking my life back, owning it finally. Now, I have to figure out what I really want. And that's a process in itself.

I am surrounded by the material environment of the way I was. I own so much stuff, bought to make myself feel better. At least I've learned now that pain is just a messenger, and what needs to be cured is the source of the pain. I live in a house with a $2200 a month mortgage payment that I bought to house my various human appendages, now all gone. I love the house, but the mortgage is an albatross. My work in PR is intrinsically dysfunctional, if I can put it that way, dealing with massive egos who barely understand what I do and regard the attention I bring them as merely their just due. Just clearing it all away is a task like Hercules cleaning the stables.
Overwhelming, and I sometimes think of just burning it all down and beginning life again with whatever I could stuff in the back of my car.

I wish, I wish, I wish I could find a way to just teach people to think and speak and write, aligned with who they are and what they want. People who really want to learn, to accomplish something in their lives. I watch for clues about the direction I should go. And I keep working on this project of mine, because I'm still not quite ready for prime time. Still too easy to anger, too defensive and untrusting. It will settle down.

Posted on June 09, 2006

A Medical Expert on Healing, Meaning and Purpose Tells Us More About How Valuable Reading Plans and Celebratory Notes Can Be to Mentally Ill Persons

From Dr. Richard Petty in Atlanta:

I have enjoyed your books and blog, and was particularly heartened to read your sensitive blog item: "For a Seller of Books and Music Products, It Seemed Like the Mother Lode, and Still Does. But It Has Also Turned Out to Be a Remarkable Window on a Gifted and Disturbed Mind” [see item for May 27, 2006].

You probably know this already, but it is common for people with some types of major mental illness to use external anchors to try and keep some semblance of mental cohesion as they feel their world collapsing. Many succeed to a remarkable degree.

I would never presume to diagnose someone whom I have not examined myself, but having seen many thousands of psychotic individuals around the world, the use of reading plans and celebratory notes can not only be a help in diagnosis, but also in therapy. In others, art and music have helped provide oases of solace.

The incredible creativity of people struggling with psychosis, both to make sense of their unusual experiences, and to find safe havens is utterly remarkable. Some psychotic illnesses produce profound cognitive impairments, yet many are still able to show extraordinary creativity and resilience. The trouble comes, I think, when they are projected into the second tier (Beta?) without having stabilized all the earlier developmental levels.

Dr. Petty was for many years on the Faculty of the University of Pennsylvania, and served as the Director of Clinical Research of the Mental Health Clinical Research Center, one of the largest schizophrenia research programs in the world, and also Director of the Inpatient Neuropsychiatry Program at the University of Pennsylvania. He was Founder and the first Director of the Integrated Medicine Program within the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania. In addition to his medical credentials, he has had extensive training in acupuncture, including advanced work in China, as well as hypnotherapy, homeopathy, and Reiki. He is currently Scientific Director of the Promedica Research Center in Atlanta, and Adjunct Professor at Georgia State University College of Health Sciences. I appreciate his kind words and additional insights into the workings of the mind. For more, go here: "Dr. Richard Petty”.

Posted on June 02, 2006

This Reader Is Struggling with Fears About the Environment and Her Frustration at Not Finding Anyone to Talk About Them

Received from a person whose identity we will keep confidential:

I would like to know of a safe place to move to.

If you go on www.city-data.com you will find that there are many cities that are in danger of air and water pollution, San Antonio is one, Branson, MO, for water, and then Holladay, UT for air. It is a force within the US that I sense is trying to destroy us.

I know metaphysics is being used now by many churches: Mormon, Roman Catholic, Jews and Muslims. I live in Tempe, AZ which has the most eclectic culture on this planet and we as a state are the worst in almost everything!! I want to move but have only $140,000 to do so.

God has given me many insights and I believe I could be a healing agent for many people, such as telling them what grocery stores to avoid, what churches and why, etc. The list goes on and on.

I myself am now having neurological problems in my legs and I believe it is because my floors are black and brown in color and I now believe that does something to the nervous systems as well as I have a wall in my bedroom painted blue, one green and blue and one purple, in the den a blue wall and in the living room a pink wall.

I feel tension on my brain so know something is not right and to heal I need a change in my environment, I refuse to see neurologists or medical doctors, they only treat symptoms and NEVER NEVER look into the causes and drug people to death!!

I really really hope to get a response from you, most people just say figure it out for yourself and don’t want to discuss such things with me!!

Dear Arizonian: I think "most people" are wrong. You aren't going to be able to figure these things out for yourself. You do need someone to talk to about them who is willing to listen and take your concerns seriously. I'd like to suggest that you seek a qualified counselor, therapist, psychologist or psychiatrist in the Tempe/Mesa/Phoenix area and tell them about your views and feelings. The reason I suggest this is because these kinds of professionals are trained to talk to people about about their fears and concerns. They won't put you down, and I can confidentally predict that they will have some very good ideas about where you might want to live next. Best of luck to you and thanks for writing!

Posted on June 01, 2006