2016 Lecture 05 Maps of Meaning: Part II: The brain, continued

Okay, so we divided up the brain one way. Now we’re going to divide it up another way, so this is the brain from the top down. You know you have two hemispheres and you might think, “well, why do you need two hemispheres?” Do know that Gazzaniga, who’s a relatively famous neuropsychologist, studied split-brain patients. You know that your cortical hemispheres – your brain is united down in the sub-cortical areas. It’s sort of stuck together, although you have twins of many of the sub-cortical structures. You have two hippocampi and two amygdala for example – one on each side.

At the top, the hemispheres are quite separate, but they’re connected by the corpus callosum, which makes them communicate. It’s kind of interesting because you wonder why they aren’t all glued together. What it seems to indicate is that there’s some utility of functional independence, combined with some utility of communication. So it might be like, “do you really want to be networked at the same time to everyone in the world?” No, you don’t; you want some narrow pathway so that only the important information comes through. So it’s sort of like, maybe the right hemisphere’s the one kind of computational device, and the left hemisphere is another kind of computational device – of course they’re not computational devices, but you get the point. Only the important information – the processed information from the right hemisphere goes across. And only the processed information from the left hemisphere goes across. Something like that, whatever.

If you have someone who’s epileptic or that has a brain illness of some sort, it’s usually epilepsy but not always, and you do surgery on them and cut the corpus callosum; what you find, weirdly enough, is that each hemisphere develops its own personality. This is other evidence, I would say, for the idea that what the brain does is produce personalities. You can keep paring the brain down, and what it’s going to do is produce lower and lower resolution personalities all the way down to the bottom – they’re just not as detailed. If you lost, say, eighty percent of your cortex randomly, you’d sort of be like a thumbnail of yourself. So, you’d still be you, just not at the same detail.

Here’s an interesting idea from the Catholics, it kind of goes along with the avatar idea. So the Catholics had been wrestling for a long time with the question of how God could have fit himself in a human body– because you could imagine that could obsess Christians – this great, big God in an itty-bitty body, but God in there just bursts the boundaries. They have this idea called Kenosis, which means emptying. The idea is that God had to empty himself out before he could inhabit a human body, and it’s very much like a thumbnail idea. Jung would have of course thought exactly, that the self was a thumbnail of God. He wouldn’t put it that way, but definitely that’s where his thinking was leading. So that’s a pretty damn cool idea.

Anyways, so I developed this before I read what I’m going to tell you, but it doesn’t matter. I’m going to talk about it from another theorist’s point of view. The guy I’m going to tell you about, his name is Elkhonon Goldberg. He’s a neuropsychologist, and he was one of Luria’s students who ended up in New York. Goldberg was obviously influenced by Luria and all the unknown, Grey, and all those people that I’ve already talked to you about. He was interested in why you have two hemispheres. Well, there’s a bunch of things you can say, broadly speaking about the hemispheres, and I’ve written some of them down there.

The right hemisphere – this is an idealized representation of a relatively highly lateralized right-handed male. The reason I’m saying that is men seem to be more lateralized than women, and the right-handed lateralization is the standard kind. The brain can be lateralized all sorts of ways. What you might say is that – there’s a bunch of ways of looking at it. One way you can look at it is that your cortex gets colonized by underlying structures. Each underlying structure is likely to colonize a particular area. For example, when you are born and you wake up and you see, your eyes are going to colonize your visual cortex most likely. It’s sort of adapted for that. If you don’t have a visual cortex then your eyes will colonize something else.

So the brain has proclivities towards a certain kind of structure, especially early in development, it’s unbelievably plastic, and so brains can be organized and lateralized in a bunch of different ways. To simplify it, what you do is you kind of take, well let’s take the most straight-forward and typical brain and talk about it as if it’s the canonical brain. I think what you can say is, regardless of where these systems are localized, they exist. So it’s an oversimplification – whatever, doesn’t matter. What you’ve got with regards to your cortices is a quick and dirty cortex, that’s the right hemisphere, and then you’ve got a long-term detailed cortex and that’s the left hemisphere.

The left hemisphere is specialized for language. Language cuts things up into little, tiny, bitty pieces. That’s really useful if you’re doing little, tiny, bitty things. You should be – precision, right? Pinpoint accuracy; but that takes a lot of time and a lot of computation. Whereas the right hemisphere says, “yeah, yeah, let’s get to the bloody point.” So it captures the thing in an image. So like the monster I showed you from the hippie cartoon, that’s a right hemisphere thing. It’s an image that represents a class of entities; which, of course, images do.

There’s this woman named - can’t remember - autistic woman. She’s developed paddle-handling facilities all across – “what’s her name?”

Student: “Temple Grandin.”

Yes, Temple Grandin, yes, a very cool person. Yes, I saw Temple Grandin speak at the University of Arizona at the Consciousness Conference, and it was the funniest speech I’ve ever seen in my life. Not because it wasn’t perfect – it was bloody perfect. She’s a tough woman – she looks like a cowboy, and she spent a lot of time with animals. She comes out on the stage in her cowboy outfit and she’s unbelievably straightforward and without nuance – she’s autistic, she’s severely autistic. You know, her mother helped her a lot, she developed this thing that she would go inside to compress her and hold her – like a little machine and that would comfort her.

Anyways, she turned herself into quite the person and she thinks, she thinks like an animal. This is why she can design cattle handling facilities, which are often slaughterhouses, so that the cattle don’t get all freaked out as they’re on their way to their eventual demise. So one of the things she does is she walks through where the cattle are going, and anything that bothers her, she assumes will bother a cow. So, for example, if the cows are walking through this spiral as they’re on their way to the slaughterhouse and there’s a coke can lying on the ground, all the cows will stop and look at the coke can – it’s anomalous.

Now, she talked a lot about how she thought and what she said was that she could not devise abstract representations. So she said, okay, imagine how a child draws a house. What is in that child’s house? There’s a triangle and a square on the left, and then there’s another rectangle, and another parallelogram, and there’s a door and two windows, right? Then there’s a chimney with smoke coming out – which is quite cool, it’s like why is that? Where’s the smoke? You don’t see that in modern houses, but kids still do that. And then there’s a tree, and usually there’s a sun, and then - house. You think, oh, isn’t that cute, a simple drawing.

That drawing is not simple. You’ve never seen a house that looks like that in your life. It looks nothing like a house. It’s not a house, it’s not a picture, it’s a hieroglyph. It’s a pre-linguistic representation. It’s like the essential elements of “house.” So you might say what the child has done is extracted out all those things that are common across all houses, and then represented that. It’s not a drawing. Now if you take autistic people, sometimes, and you get them to draw, they’ll start in one corner of the house, and what they’ll draw is that house – with every damn brick in place.

So there are autistic people, for example, who – they can look at a building and they can count every single window at one glance. Then, there’s another guy in England who’s really famous, and this guy is unbelievable. You take him up in a helicopter and show him a city that he’s never seen, then he goes home and has a piece of paper, like as big as a wall, and he starts in one corner and he draws the entire city. He doesn’t sketch it out – it’s from the bottom up. That’s autistic savant drawing. Often what happens is, it’s very realistic looking. What happens if the autistic drawings of blank language is they stop being able to draw. That’s because the abstraction interferes with the realism.

It’s really hard to draw a hand. The reason for that is if you draw a hand, you draw a hieroglyph of hand. This is what a hand looks like. You try to draw your hand and it’s really strange. One of the really strange things about trying to draw your hand is that in order to draw it, you have to stop seeing it as if it’s a hand. Then it pops out and you think, my God, that’s the weirdest looking thing. It’s like a tree root, you know, it’s like a claw. You know if you look at your hand like that, it looks nothing like a hand. That’s how a hand looks. What the hell’s that? It’s like some sort of spider, but you have to see it that way before you can draw it.

So partly what happens is, is that your capacity for abstraction interferes with your ability to see detail, that’s probably good – it’s one of the ways that you simplify the world. Anyways, the right hemisphere looks like it’s specialized for anomaly. The way I look at it is this: Okay, so you’ve got your hippocampus down there, and it’s keeping track of the comparison between what you want and what you think is happening. “Bang!” Something emerges, and it’s anomalous. You don’t know what the hell’s going on. So you freeze, that’s the notoric representation. Then you start to feel anxious.

Then the right hemisphere comes up with some pictures – what might this be? You can experience this at home, for your own enjoyment. Let’s say you’re home at two in the morning, it’s dark and you’re alone. Maybe you’ve watched a horror movie, so you’re all nicely blank. You know, and then you hear a noise in another room and that noise shouldn’t be there. So you’re going to go investigate, right? So let’s say the door’s just a little bit open and it’s dark in the room, and you have to put your hand in to turn on the light. You just watch what your imagination populates that room with when you do that.

You know, it’s like – guy with axe, snake, alligator, like whatever! You’re right hemisphere is going: there may be one of this class of dangerous thing in there. What it’s doing is it’s basically coming up with a hypothesis: what sort of monster might be in there. You’re all freaked out about that, even though you know – who knows what happened; nothing but something creaked, but you’re all on edge because your brain doesn’t work at night like it does during the day. Everyone knows that – wake up in the middle of the night, a manner of horrors go through your imagination, and that usually happens when you’re asleep.

You’re asleep for that most of the time, but sometimes you wake up and you worry about everything. Anyways, so that’s the right hemisphere – it’s coming up with pictures of what might be there. They’re generally monstrous pictures and the reason for that is, well it’s obvious, what the reason for that is. You’ll probably turn the light on and look anyways, even though you might sort of peer around the corner, and then when there’s nothing you’ll be embarrassed about how foolish you are. But you can see the instinctual behavior right there, and it’s wise. You know, there’s a low probability that something terrible is there. Low probability times infinitely equals large danger.

So if there’s a two percent chance that there’s a killer in there, it pays to be a little on the tense side, because being killed really sucks. So you’re primed to feel negative emotion more intensely because you’re so vulnerable. Anyways, that’s kind of what the right hemisphere is up to – it does quick and dirty representations. It also does categorization, so it’s not – it doesn’t give you exactly realistic representations of what’s there. What it does instead, is it gives you categorical representations. So you might say, “how should you represent an unknown danger?” You should use an amalgam of all known dangers to represent it. That is what it is in a sense, you know?

That’s why I talked to you about the category of “all dangerous things.” So the Aboriginals in Australia have this category which is, “women, fire, and dangerous things.” Well you think, well why are all of those things in that category? It’s not that hard to figure out if you think about it, but it’s also a category that you very frequently see, say in Disney cartoons. So the Wicked Queen, for example, in Sleeping Beauty – she’s constantly bursting into flames and turning into a dragon and no one seems to object to that – it makes perfect sense that the Wicked Queen would turn into a fire-breathing dragon. It doesn’t make any sense at all, although it does, but it’s not a rational transformation.

But because it’s in keeping with an archetypal structure, everybody goes, “yeah, of course that’s what she’s going to do.” It happens all of the time in Disney movies – like Ursula, remember her from the Little Mermaid? She’s trying to keep her daughter from becoming conscious. Yeah, nice Mother doing that. She traps old Zeus – she squeezes his soul to death and traps him in the underworld. He’s also – well, we won’t get into that.

Anyways, what happens to Ursula is when you finally get her irritated enough she grows into this huge, ship-destroying, storm monster that’s part octopus – a giant octopus. You think, “well, that makes sense.” Okay, it doesn’t make a lot of sense, but it’s a kind of hypothesis. Now that’s a representation of Mother Nature – red and tooth and claw, and there’s also a reason that’s female – it’s not female, it’s feminine – it’s actually a different thing. We’ll get to that. So the right hemisphere, well it’s specialized for anomaly – it does quick and dirty analysis under the influence of the limbic system.

It’s not linguistic, so I would say that it’s still dominated by the sub-cortical systems. My suspicion is that animals are still dominated by the sub-cortical systems. Their brains work from the bottom up. We have a top-down module. That’s at least in part of the left hemisphere linguistic system. It’s a new thing that people have, and it’s based on our capacity to abstract, so that would partly be visual, like hieroglyphic, and then also to transform things into linguistic form. It seems to me that that’s the part that we really identify as ourselves, right?

It’s weird – let’s say you’re home alone, and you get freaked out and all these images come to mind; do you think of those images as part of you? You think of them more as these things that appeared to you. That’s what you think about your dreams. They’re things that appeared to you - they’re not you. Why would you think that? I mean, they’re in your experiential space, so why is there that separation between you and your dream? “I had a dream.” Not, “I thought up a dream.” Or, “look what I created,” it’s like there you are, the observer, and up comes a dream. It’s very, very weird.

It shows you that there are forces operating in your psyche that are impersonal, genuinely impersonal. That’s part of what you call the collective unconscious. It’s the thing that generates these weird images and protects you. It’s nature, that’s for sure. It can be absolutely terrifying. People can have dreams that are so terrible – well like the one my little nephew had, that’s pretty damn nasty; little greasy dwarf things with big beaks, that’s a very ugly representation, and if that wasn’t bad enough there had to be a fire-breathing dragon behind them, creating them endlessly.

There’s no bloody-wonder he was waking up screaming. It’s like, “Oh no, I figured out what life is like.” At four, that’s pretty traumatic. So, okay, now the left hemisphere. This is Elkonon Goldberg’s hypothesis. You get one hemisphere or system that operates when you know what you’re doing and when what you want is happening. That’s the happy-talky part that thinks it knows what-the-hell is going on. Then you have another part that only turns on when you don’t know what’s going on. It’s full of anxiety and negative emotion.

The right hemisphere, by the way, is specialized for negative emotion. If you sustain right, pre-frontal damage, you become inappropriately happy. You’re full of positive illusions. You think, “well, that’s an excellent thing.” It’s not – you make really impulsive risky decisions and your life goes directly to hell. You need the negative emotion, obviously. The reason you suffer with negative emotion is because if you didn’t suffer with negative emotion, you’d suffer from being destroyed. Those are your options.

There are people, by the way, who are born without pain. You think, “hey, that’s a good deal.” They never last past twenty, and part of the reason for that is – you don’t notice this – but while you’re sitting there, you’re going like this all the time. The reason for that is that if you sit for any length of time on one part of your body, then it doesn’t get much blood and it doesn’t get oxygenated. You do that, it bitches a little bit, a little pain, so you shift. You shift and you shift, so you’re just doing this all of the time. Otherwise, you wear out your damn body and you get bed sores, or that sort of thing.

These people that don’t have any pain, they just wear themselves out. So you need the negative emotion, it keeps you going. It can get out of hand and have its own pathologies, but it’s definitely necessary. So the right hemisphere does negative emotion. Inhibition of behavior – that’s the freezing that’s attended on anxiety. It does image processing, holistic thinking – so it’s the quick and dirty hemisphere - pattern recognition, pattern generation and gross motor action. That’s interesting too, because the gross motor action is, again, the quick and dirty stuff.

If you need to slap something away, it doesn’t really matter that it’s a gross-motor gesture. You don’t have to go like this, and be precise; it can just be fast and sloppy, and it will still work. Now the left hemisphere is specialized for when you know what-the-hell’s going on and you can concentrate on the details. So then you can think about it in terms of the hierarchy that we discussed, right? So what it implies is that at the level of specific, fine, detailed motor output, the left hemisphere is operating. That’s kind of associated with positive affect – I know exactly what I’m doing and I’m making minor adjustments and everything’s going well.

If you go up the hierarchy towards more and more abstracted representations then increasingly, that’s moving over to right hemisphere space. So that’s also partly why, when you disrupt those higher-order structures, literally all hell breaks loose. So, left hemispheres. Operation in explored territory – positive emotion, activation of behavior, so that’s also exploration. Word processing, linear thinking, detail recognition, detail generation, and fine motor action. So you need one system that works when you don’t know what’s going on and you need another system that works when you do. Sometimes you’re where you don’t know what you’re doing and sometimes you’re where you do know what you’re doing.

Now Ramachandran, who’s a fairly famous neurologist, who operates out of LA, he associated the totalitarian ego with hyper domination of the left hemisphere. The reason he did that is very cool. So he’s got these patients that have – what’s it called, is it agnosia? It isn’t, we’ll call it neglect. Okay so this is what happens. You have a stroke and the stroke affects the back part of the right hemisphere, alright? So what happens? Your left side is paralyzed; you can’t do anything with it.

Okay, so, however, you also don’t notice that it’s not working, so one of the things you might do if you do become aware – you’re laying in bed, you’ve had a stroke and for some reason you notice that there’s an arm lying in there with you. Then what you do is you try to pick it up with your other hand and you try to throw it out of the bed. When you find out that it’s attached to you, because it’s not your arm, you’re not very happy – or maybe you throw yourself right out of bed.

Then if someone gets you to draw a clock you draw half a clock and if you eat a plateful of food you eat half the plate, unless someone turns it – and then you eat half of that. So half the world is gone – it’s hard to imagine what that would be like. I think what it’s sort of like is – you know how there’s a whole world behind you? You don’t detect it as not there – it’s not black or anything, like when your eyes are closed – it’s just not there. I think what happens with people with neglect is that the “not there” becomes three quarters instead of just half. It’s something like that anyways.

You don’t know what’s going on and there you are like this and someone says to you, “I notice that you can’t move your left arm today.” What do you say? You say, “that’s because I’m tired.” Or, “I don’t feel like moving it.” And so forth, so you have this reason that you’re not going to move it. You might say the same thing about the left foot, “yeah well I don’t feel like moving it. “ You’ll have some story about why you’re not going to move it. Okay so that’s fine. Freudian’s thought about that is traumatic denial.

It was so overwhelming to you that you lost the left part of your body. You couldn’t face it and you just denied it happened. It’s not a bad theory, it’s not quite right, but it’s not a bad theory. I’ll tell you a couple of related stories. Let’s say you’re on dialysis. That sucks. You have to have this big thing in your arm, it’s like a shunt, and you have to go get hooked up to a dialysis machine like all the time. Your kidneys are failing and who wants that? Nobody, so everybody thinks: time for a kidney transplant, and then they’re on a long waiting list and they get one kidney.

That’s not very many kidneys. Then they say, “okay, you got your kidney and everyone’s thrilled about that, here’s your anti-rejection medication, make sure you take it. Then a year later you lose your kidney, why? You don’t take your damn anti-rejection medication, that’s the most common reason. You might think, well why in the world would you not take your anti-rejection medication? The Freudians would say denial. Here’s a different hypothesis: Your whole map of you is person with kidney. Then you lose your kidneys and it’s like you’re a whole, weird thing that you have no idea about. It’s virtually impossible for you to update your model.

You think, does that make any sense? Have you ever lost a tooth? Right. What does your tongue do for six months? You’re sitting there and your tongue is fiddling away there like a mad dog investigating every teensy nook and cranny like it’s an obsessive exploratory device. It does it even when you don’t want it to. Then six months later you get your mouth remapped. That’s just a tooth, man; lose a kidney and see what happens. Or lose the whole left side of your body, it’s like, what are you going to do about that?

Well, okay, then Ramachandran, he’s testing these people for balance. What he does is he checks out this phenomena called nystagmus, and so if you pour cold water in someone’s ear their eyes will move back and forth because it screws up the – you know you have a balance system in you, in your ear – and if you pour cold water in there it screws it up and then your eyes move back and forth. You know, it’s not very pleasant. What he found was that if he poured cold water in the left ear, then all of a sudden the people would wake up and go, “Oh my God, I don’t have the left side of my body,” and then they’d have a catastrophic emotional experience and they’d be all upset about it crying away; which is of course what they should do.

Twenty minutes later it would wear off and you’d say is there anything wrong with your left side and they’d say well yeah, I just don’t feel like moving it. So what seems to have happened is something – so there’s a body representation center in the back of the right hemisphere. You blow that sucker out with a stroke, and that means that you can’t represent that part of your body anymore. Maybe there are tatters of it left; it’s like a network that’s damaged and under some conditions you can more or less get it to operate so you pour some cold water in the ear and you shock the whole system.

Then there’s enough neurological activity so the network kicks in, even though it’s damaged for ten minutes, and then you get this tremendous burst of negative emotion - which is what the right hemisphere should be doing when you lose half of your body. You experience that when your left hemisphere is flapping away trying to account for this – which it can’t, because it’s such a massive, utter catastrophe. Then you know, the shock wears off and “bang!” the system shuts back down, and “poof!” you’re back in denial. That’s a good example of the relationship between the left hemisphere and the right hemisphere.

The left hemisphere has a fixed idea about the world. So in some sense you might think about it as the instantiation of your latest avatar; you can certainly see that with people who are ideologically possessed. They’ve got this verbal system that accounts for the whole world and there’s just no damn way that thing’s going anywhere. It’s got this totalitarian aspect because it wants to explain every last thing; it doesn’t like anomaly at all. It hasn’t come to terms with anomaly at all. There’s no sense of transformation within the system, which is partly why totalitarian systems die.

The Red Queen said to Alice in Wonderland when she was in the underworld, “in my kingdom you have to run as fast as you can just to stay in the same place.” That’s why totalitarian systems don’t work. The damn environment keeps shifting around on them. If they’re fixed in place, the gap between their theory and reality gets larger and larger and larger and larger until finally they fall into a pit; and that’s the end of it. That’s what happens to people too, if they don’t stay updated. They let things get away on them; eventually the ignored reality comes flooding back, and we’ll see that represented in mythology because it’s represented very nicely in mythology.

It’s why often dragons in fairy tales, for example, in the Saint George story, and in the Hobbit for that matter – the dragon is an eternal thing: it lives underneath the earth and most of the time it leaves you the hell alone. Now and then it comes back and it tries to destroy the city, and then you have to zip out there and fight the thing so you can get it to go back in its hole. Maybe you get the treasure that it’s carrying, and then it’s back in the hole for a while; but that thing’s coming back. It’s always coming back, and so you build the walls and all that, that’s fine. A dragon can destroy any walls.

Walls aren’t enough – you have to be prepared to go out there and fight the damn thing, and that’s how you keep it at bay. That basically means you have to maintain everything that you build, it’s something like that, right? Otherwise it falls apart with increasing entropy. Alright, so Goldberg thought about this as an anomaly system, a novelty system and a routinization system. I intended to think about it from more of an anthropological or an ethological perspective; thinking about an animal (us) in our natural environment.

It’s not so much novelty versus routinization, as it’s explored versus unexplored territory. That’s what the world’s made out of – it’s made out of explored versus unexplored territory. So there’s a domain that you inhabit, which is the center of the universe, from a mythological perspective, with you right in the middle of it. Around you is this circle, which is your place, which you move around with you, and in that circle you know what-the-hell’s going on. That’s partly because you’ve mapped it, but it’s also partly because you don’t go outside of it.

You have your friends and you have your routine and that’s nested inside your culture, and you try and keep that thing from flipping upside down. You do that all sorts of way: partly by doing the same thing all the time, but also partly by refusing to go anywhere that might seriously challenge your beliefs. Fair enough, you can understand that, although it makes you weak to do that, because you’re not as prepared as you might be. So you could say human beings are tribal, social animals that have a territory.

Then you think, “well what’s the territory?” Well let’s say tree-dwelling chimp ancestors; the territory’s the jungle. No, it’s not. That’s not the territory. The territory is a little bit of the jungle, plus the things that come in from the outside, plus the primate dominance hierarchy that exists in that area. So that’s the territory, that’s the environment. For mythological reasons we tend to make a separation between the environment and culture. Yes, it makes sense at one level of analysis, but at another level of analysis all it does is screw you up.

Your territory, fundamentally, isn’t the world; not the natural, objective world. You want to stay as far away from that thing as you possibly can. Your territory is that circle of people with whom you spend ninety percent of your time. If you’re a chimp, for example, or some other kind of monkey, highly social, what do you do all day? You sleep, you eat, you chew leaves if you’re a chimp, and you groom other chimps. It’s constant social interaction, and you’re jockeying for a position in the dominance hierarchy like mean girls in that movie, you know.

You’re mapping out the social territory knowing who’s who, and what’s what, and then trying to get up somewhere near the top. That’s your environment, that’s your environment, and so your world is that social, natural circle, which is a four-dimensional territory, because it’s got length, width and height – plus it stretches across time. So it’s this transforming natural entity. Inside that there’s a pyramid. The pyramid is made out of all the primates that you interact with. That’s the world; circle with a pyramid on it.

Now I’ll give you a vision, this is a vision I had once when I was trying to figure this stuff out. Now what is the world? So imagine that there’s a field in front of you that stretches as far as you can see. You’re flying above it. What you see everywhere are these pyramids. Let’s say for the sake of argument, that they’re skyscrapers made out of glass. There are tears in them. You fly down and one’s here and one’s here, and some of them are really big and some of them are really small. They’re just everywhere.

You’re flying around above them, and you fly close enough to look inside and what you see inside them are people all packed together, trying to scramble up to the top. That’s the world, that’s reality. The funny thing is, is that you can be in one of those pyramids clambering away to the top, or you can be flying above it – those are your options. If you have to choose, you should be flying above it. So the relationship between the self and the ego avatar is the same as the relationship between the thing that’s flying above, and the thing that’s within one of those pyramids trying to scramble to the top.

You know, well you say well I’m going to get to the top. “Top of what?” There’s a hundred tops, there’s two hundred tops. Then you might say, “well is there anything above the top?” There is, there’s the part of you that isn’t entrapped within that particular system and that can move from place to place. If you look at Egyptian mythology: so you know you’ll see if you look at the back of the American dollar bill, that’s a symbol of value, right? Okay, so what’s the pyramid? There’s a pyramid on it, right? What’s the top of a pyramid? It’s a triangle, it’s separate from the pyramid.

There’s an eye inside of it. That’s because the top of the pyramid is an eye, and it’s separate from the pyramid. What that means, fundamentally, is that the thing that transcends the structure is attention, voluntary attention. Now the Egyptians worshiped voluntary attention in the form of Horus, because he was a God. I’ll tell you about Horus in detail. One of Horus’ avatars was the falcon. The reason for that is falcons can really, really, really see. They fly around, and so they’re like the king’s eyes. Like the little bird Zazu in the Lion King. He was the king’s eyes, the thing that flies around above. He was a particular enemy of Scar, remember Scar eats him at the beginning and then spits him out.

The reason that the King’s eyes is an enemy of scar is because the King’s eyes can see what he is, right? He’s the eternal force that works to disrupt the kingdom and bring everything into ruins. Classic myth, classic myth, partly accounting for why it was the largest selling, highest grossing cartoon in Disney history. They got the mythology pretty right.

So you might say, “what’s a human being like?” Remember I told you that when Penfield was mapping the brain he was poking people. You can either poke them along the sensory strip, which is – if the motor strip is here, the sensory strip is just behind it. The motor strip is where the motor systems of your body are represented in so far as you can control them. The sensory strip is where the sensory systems are represented in so far as you can feel them. So what this is, is a – the body is laid out weirdly on the motor cortex.

One of the things that’s pretty funny is that the genitalia area in the sensory cortex is right beside the feet. So I think that’s why people have foot fetishes and love foot massages, is because they’re spreading activation from the foot area to the genital area, and God only knows why that is. Maybe because you had to have had really sensitive feet to stomp around without stepping on really horrible things. So you can put this weird, stretched-out, body representation together in a representational form like this, they call that the homunculus, which is like a little man that exists inside your brain.

So what you see, that’s the motor-homunculus, not the sensory-homunculus. So what do you see? Well what is a person as far as its brain is concerned? Well, hand – that’s for sure. Thumb, that’s for sure – your thumb is as representative of your whole body. It’s because your torso is hardly represented at all. Why is that? How many things do you manipulate with your chest? None. You don’t have motor control over it, so it’s not represented. So, the hands man, those things, they’re represented like mad. So are the face, and the lips and the tongue.

There’s a bunch of reasons for that: One is when you’re an infant, you explore like mad with your mouth – but you do that your whole life because when you eat- you know what it’s like. If you’re eating something and there’s a bit of sand in it, you find it and you take it out. You can detect this teeny, little thing that’s not supposed to be in your mouth. Well, that’s a good thing because lots of things aren’t supposed to be in your mouth. That’s part of the reason.

The other part of the reason is, well think about what you do with your tongue? There are a lot of things you do with your tongue: Some of them are eating, some of them are talking. Some of them are all sorts of intimate behaviors, that thing is wired up; and it’s wired up right at birth. Then it’s the same with your lips and the rest of your mouth, you use that to communicate. Your hands wander around, taking the world apart, and putting it back together, which is exactly what your brain does, and then you blab about what you’re doing to everyone.

That’s basically a human being. I like to think of this thing as it’s a comical representation of the hero that goes out to confront the world, right? The hero has two elements. One is explore, and that’s where the west is powerful. We have a really well developed mythology of the exploratory hero. Where we’re not so well developed is the second part. In the second part of the classic hero story, you’re supposed to come back and communicate about what you’ve found.

So if there’s an individual exploration element, and then there’s a communicate and update the culture element. Both of those are equally important and it’s something we don’t do well, we don’t have much respect for tradition in the west, and it’s a really, really big problem. The ethical responsibility of a human being is to take the dead culture, so that’s the dead father, or the dead God, and to revivify it with attention and communication. If you fail to do that then everything disappears.

We’re failing to do that – we’re leaving it all behind instead. It’s not a good idea. You know if the old Gods die as Nietzsche said they had, new Gods swoop in very rapidly and if you thought the old God was bad, you wait until the new God gets a hold of you. So, well we saw what happened in the twentieth century, with all of the ideologies that sprang up in the absence of classical religious belief. Okay, you’re not so thrilled with Catholicism, if you think about that as the fundamental tradition of the West.

You know, with the witch burnings and the inquisition and all that. It’s like yeah, yeah, get a load of the Nazis and then see what you think; or the Communists for that matter - from bad to worse in an unimaginable way. You know, and it’s partly because those archaic systems, those archaic, religious systems, they weren’t ideologies, they were a whole different class of thing. We don’t understand them very well, and it’s not good because you cannot live without understanding them. You don’t know who you are.

Then you fall prey to weird mental diseases, like Nihilism, that’s one. The other one is ideological possession – so you become a Totalitarian or a Nihilist. That’s a bad outcome. You might think, “well, what’s the alternative?” Well, you know what happens in Pinocchio, right? You’ve watched Pinocchio? Okay, I often show Pinocchio to this class, but I don’t know if I’m going to do that this year.

Anyways, Pinocchio, he’s a puppet, a marionette. Someone else is pulling his strings. He has a wooden head. He’s not very bright. He hasn’t banged the world at all. He’s got a good father, the old Geppetto, who would really rather that he was a real boy, a real person. So he’s the kind of father that wants to produce an individual, not a slave. That’s why in his workshop it’s all friendly and there’s a nice fire, and he’s making toys and there’s lots of music, it’s like “Go Geppetto!” he’s a good guy.

He makes this little puppet and he sends him out in the world. He says, “go be a real boy.” Well, Pinocchio runs into a whole class of different obstacles; one is evil, that’s the Coachman, and the Italian stereotype guy who makes him a dancing puppet celebrity. I think that’s pretty funny, that’s really prescient. You might think well what’s the goal of your typical bone-headed, mid-adolescent in North America – unearned celebrity. Well that’s exactly what Pinocchio goes for first.

That doesn’t work out so well because he ends up a slave and then the next thing that happens is he capitalizes on the fact that he’s vulnerable, and pretends he’s sick and goes off for a vacation, under the direction of the Coachman (who’s basically Satan in disguise). Then he goes out to treasure island and meets all of the delinquents who are just like Nazis, and it turns out in fact the whole ploy is to enslave everyone, to deprive them of their voice – that’s the donkey’s breying – and to make them into slaves. Pretty damn horrifying and that movie came out around the time that the Nazis were really grasping power in central Europe.

They got it exactly right. Here’s what’s really going on behind the scenes. Then what happens is Pinocchio turns halfway into a braying donkey. He’s gone off the path and in order to get back on it he tries to go home. It’s too late, he can’t go home, because he’s not a kid anymore. He goes home and Dad isn’t there, surprise, surprise. Once you grow up and you go home, Dad isn’t there – it’s just another human being.

So then what happens is he has to go into the ocean. Well that’s particularly weird, right? There he is, half donkey, he’s a puppet, the dove comes down and drops him a message from God. It’s like the Holy Spirit descending, except it’s from the blue fairy, weirdly enough. The message says you have to go to the deepest part of the ocean and rescue your father. Yeah that is what you have to do if you don’t want to be a bloody, puppet donkey.

You have to go down into the depths and find your dead Father and you have to revivify him. That’s what happens. So Pinocchio goes way down there into the deepest depths and finds Monstro, who’s a monster so terrible that the fish swim away at the sound of his voice. Just like, “he who shall not be named – Voldemort.” You can’t even say his damn name. Same with Monstro. Pinocchio goes down there, he goes into the whale, what happens? Geppetto says there’s no getting out of this, there’s no getting out of this.

We just have to sit here and cook fish and Pinocchio thinks, “cook!” He starts breaking up all the chairs and everything and his Father is freaking out, “what are you doing breaking all of these chairs? What are we going to sit on?” Pinocchio lights them on fire. He’s a master of fire. It’s a shamanic ritual. He is a master of fire and that’s what a human being is. He gets everything burning, of course Geppetto’s all freaked out about that because what are they going to sit on, and Pinocchio thinks, “who cares about sitting? We’re going to solve the problem once and for all.”

Then the whale turns into a fire-breathing dragon, which is pretty damn weird thing for a whale to do. He half-kills Pinocchio, he washes up on shore dead, but he saves his father. Then at the very end of the movie he’s lying on his bed, all drowned. So he’s a dead puppet now. Do you want to be a live puppet or a dead puppet? Well maybe the dead puppet is better than the live puppet, it depends on where you’re going.

Then he’s on the bed, and the blue fairy comes down and says well you’ve been honest and courageous, “bang!” now you’re real. Then they have a little part, and that’s just exactly right, they got that exactly right. That’s part of the hero mythology, it’s the rescuing of the father.

Student: Why do you have to rescue the father?

Otherwise you’re a corpse. You’re a historical creature, you’re a cultural creature. You cannot live without your culture. You think you can, but you can’t. It disappears, and look, I’ll give an example. In the Mesopotamian creation myth, which I’m going to tell you about next week, one of the things that happens is that the first round of Gods, so they’re like primordial forces, they’re pretty damn careless, and they kill their father. They make this place to live on his corpse.

That’s where we live, we live on the corpse of our ancestors. We live in the society, it’s dead, it’s the product of dead people. It’s got this dead element, but we’re living on it. They’re very careless, they kill it, so they render it completely dead. Well what happens is Tiamat, who’s the Mother of Chaos, she comes flooding back and she thinks, “oh you killed the thing that protects you. You just wait to see what happens.” That’s exactly it, if you kill the thing that structures you, you won’t know it – it’s like Nietzsche’s prediction from the death of God.

You killed this, think it doesn’t make any difference, - wrong. It’s like the Striders protecting the Hobbits. If you get rid of the thing that protects you then chaos comes flooding in and you have no idea what’s possible. We do, though, because we lived through the twentieth century. We know exactly what’s possible. Hundreds of millions of unnecessary deaths, that’s what’s possible. We’re lucky we didn’t blow the whole damn thing up, and we still could. People pursuing their dead ideologies – you don’t rescue the dead Father, than you’re the puppet of death, that’s what you are.

Okay, on that cheery note.