Transcendental Medication

The Evolution of Mind, Culture, and Healing

Christopher D. Lynn

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN:
  9780367472641
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000568592
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Cognitive Neuroscience & Neuropsychology
• Index: Psychology

Transcendental Medication considers why human brains evolved to have consciousness, yet we spend much of our time trying to reduce our awareness. It outlines how limiting consciousness—rather than expanding it—is more functional and satisfying for most people, most of the time.

The suggestion is that our brains evolved mechanisms to deal with the stress of awareness in concert with awareness itself—otherwise it is too costly to handle. Defining dissociation as "partitioning of awareness," Lynn touches on disparate cultural and psychological practices such as religion, drug use, 12-step programs, and dancing. The chapters draw on biological and cultural studies of Pentecostal speaking in tongues and stress, the results of our 800,000+ years watching hearth and campfires, and unconscious uses of self-deception as mating strategy.

Written in a highly engaging style, Transcendental Medication will appeal to students and scholars interested in mind, altered states of consciousness, and evolution. It is particularly suitable for those approaching the issue from cultural, biological, psychological, and cognitive anthropology, as well as evolutionary psychology, cognitive neuroscience, and religious studies.

1 Consciousness as a By-Product

DOI: 10.4324/9781003034483-1

“D’jeet?” and Other Culturally Relative Patterns of Consciousness

My wife and I divide up cooking dinner during the workweek, both hoping the other person will cook on the unclaimed nights. I usually step up because I enjoy cooking, and she decidedly does not. As our kids are teenagers now, with complicated work, sports, school, and social schedules, we are often not all home at the same time. On weekends, the dinner plan is frequently “fend for yourselves.” It’s not unusual for our kids to sit at their computers gaming for hours on end. Around 9 or 10 p.m., I might ask them, “d’jeet sum’n?”, “d’jeet yet?”, or merely “d’jeet?”

In context, most Americans would know what this means, despite the fact that none of these phrases is recognizable as grammatically correct English in any country. As linguists like John McWhorter and my undergrad mentor John Beatty point out, our brains rapidly understand and translate these queries as “did you eat something?”, “did you eat yet?”, and “did you eat?”, respectively.¹ The reason we recognize these non-English utterances as words is that they are familiar patterns that trigger motifs in our consciousness. Most of the time, humans can take in multiple sensory sensations and think at the same time, though our consciousness or awareness may be primarily focused on one or a few things. Right now, I hear the sounds of a video game, a buzzing smartphone, a dehumidifier, and the clicking of my son’s fingers on his keyboard behind me. At the same time, I am aware of the discomfort of the cheap desk chair I sit in and of the semi-coldness of my feet. I can make sense of all these noises and sensations because I am in a context of maximum familiarity, my own home. “D’jeet?” makes perfect sense in this context in the evening on a weekend. Yet consciousness is relative. In a less familiar environment, I would have to concentrate harder to make sense of the sounds around me and to interpret any words spoken to me.

If something as simple as asking in one’s own native tongue if someone has eaten requires such varying degrees of focus on the part of the person being questioned, how can we explain multiple levels of awareness? What happens when our brains are engaged in two or more things simultaneously or in rapid succession, as when an elite American football quarterback calculates where to throw the ball within a field of constantly shifting receivers on his team and opposing players chasing them while scrambling to avoid being tackled? How do I stay focused on writing these words and not attune to the sound of the dryer door that is now opening or my dog stirring behind me? Neuroscientist Nikos Logothetis suggests we can begin to understand the mechanisms of consciousness by breaking it up into sensory parts and examining them independently. In his studies of visual perception in human and non-human primates, he finds that human sensory receptors respond vigorously to preferred or familiar patterns but are physically inhibited when not exposed to preferred stimuli. The more receptors that are stimulated, the greater our awareness of whatever is activating them.²

What happens if two stimuli are equally familiar or trigger an equal number of receptors? Probably a bit of chaos. I borrow an experiment from Logothetis to illustrate this idea with regard to visual awareness. Take the cardboard tube from a roll of paper towels and another from a roll of toilet paper. Tape them together to form a pair of binoculars. Place them to your eyes and put a hand over the toilet paper tube opening and look at another object through the paper towel tube. Be sure to keep both eyes open. What generally happens is that your hand is too close to focus on, though you are seeing through both eyes. You are technically seeing two things at once, but since you cannot focus on your hand, the perception from your other eye will dominate. It will appear that you have a hole through your hand. Now, take two paper towel tubes and tape different images at the end of each one. Make sure some light gets through so you can focus on the images. Now you have two different images, one going to each eye. What do you see?

Ordinarily, our visual field is an integration of what our two eyes see. Visual receptors in each eye are connected to nerves that go directly through the eye’s respective brain hemisphere to the primary visual cortex at the back of the brain, but also to nerves that cross the corpus callosum (the large bundle of nerves connecting the brain hemispheres), and then proceed to the primary visual cortex. Integration of visual perception then takes place in the brain’s secondary association area near the primary visual cortex in conjunction with the raw reception of incoming signals. There are no visual receptors at the spot in our eyes where optic nerves leave the eyeball, but we don’t perceive this blind spot. The secondary visual perception areas seamlessly accommodate these gaps by integrating the separate but overlapping fields of vision coming into each eye.

This binocular experiment undermines normal visual integration, an aspect of perception that is common in all primates. The tubes prevent the overlap of what each eye is seeing, regardless of the neural integration that comes afterward. How does our brain make sense of two different simultaneous visual inputs? If you’ve done this experiment properly—and sometimes it takes playing with things a bit to get the effect just right—you experience a visual toggling. Your brain does not blur them together as one might expect, but switches back and forth, over and over.

Now imagine you are that football quarterback. How do you attune to the stimuli that are important and tune out those that are not? Certainly, the crowd noise is not relevant, and neither is the smack-talking from the players on the other team, though they are trying to get in your head. If you have practiced enough, you automatically weigh your options. For a pass play, you quickly scan your receivers in a specific order to see who is open, being careful not to look at them directly because the defense is watching your eyes to anticipate your throw. For a “run-pass option,” you prepare to hand the ball off to a running back, unless it appears the defense is coming for him, in which case you pull the ball back and step around in a pocket created by blockers and then look to throw. Your running back now becomes a blocker, and you scan your receivers for a small window you can throw the ball through. If that option is not available, you tuck it yourself and run through a hole in the offensive and defensive lines of players or to the “edge,” toward the sideline. Throughout all of this, you maintain proprioceptive awareness (i.e., of your body in space) of what is around you so that you can avoid tackles. A small step one way or another can change the outcome of the play. We may not see a person getting ready to tackle us, but if our “Spidey-sense” begins tingling, we know it may be time to move.

Human consciousness is optimized specifically for such decision-making. Or, to put it another way, our proprioceptive awareness is the preadaptation we have for consciousness. This awareness of our bodies in relation to our environment is a sort of self-recognition that has also been observed in some other hominid species, though cognitive scientist Daniel Povinelli, who conducted hundreds of experiments on great ape intelligence, working primarily with captive chimpanzees in his University of Louisiana at Lafayette facility during the 1990s and early 2000s, concluded that great apes other than humans possess neither consciousness nor awareness of others the way we think of those capacities.³

Interestingly, chimpanzees and orangutans, which are both large-bodied great apes that travel through trees, seem to recognize themselves in mirrors, whereas gorillas, their fellow hominids, do not. (I will return to this topic in more detail in Chapter 3 when I discuss the work of Gordon Gallup Jr. and mirror tests for self-recognition.) This is surprising, as humans are much more closely related to gorillas and chimps—and gorillas and chimps are more closely related to each other—than gorillas, chimps, or humans are to orangutans. Orangutans split off first from a shared common ancestor, then gorillas, then the chimp species (common chimps and bonobos are in the same genus and equally distantly related to us). Thus, from a phylogenetic (or family tree for species) point of view, the ability of orangutans to recognize themselves should have been in the common ancestor and appeared in gorillas too. It would be highly unusual for a trait to disappear and reappear like that, with some exceptions (penile spines, for instance, have evolved and disappeared approximately nine times in primates, but genitals are the nexus of sexual selection and evolve faster than other features).⁴

Human-raised gorillas with substantial enrichment—like the late Koko, a captivity-raised lowland gorilla taught by developmental psychologist Penny Patterson to use American Sign Language as an infant and who reportedly understood as many as 2000 spoken English words—seem to pass modifications of the mirror test for self-recognition. These exceptions suggest that self-recognition of this sort may be a dormant trait in gorillas. Povinelli extends this by suggesting that self-recognition is neurologically expensive and shouldn’t manifest unless it is useful.

Gorillas largely stay on the ground and are big enough and live in groups of multiple large males, females, and their offspring and thus do not have to worry about predators. Orangutans are large as well, but the males live alone and females with their offspring, so remain in the trees, likely for protection from each other as much as from potential predation. Most arboreal (tree-living) primates use all four limbs and walk on top of tree branches or swing from branch to branch like the much smaller “lesser” apes called gibbons and siamangs. Orangutans are so big they must distribute their weight among branches. If orangutans fall, the likelihood of getting seriously injured is far greater than for smaller-bodied apes and monkeys. When is it more useful to have a sense and recognition of oneself relative to the environment than when one is a big-bodied furball lumbering through the treetops? Thus, what the mirror test seems to elicit is higher-order proprioceptive awareness or a sense of oneself in space.

Consciousness as a By-Product

The idea that human consciousness is a by-product of biology is not new. Carl Sagan advanced it in his book Dragons of Eden, drawing in part on the late neuroscientist Paul Maclean’s concept of the triune brain. Maclean hypothesized that the modern vertebrate forebrain evolved by building on the reptilian complex of the basal ganglia, the paleomammalian complex of the limbic system, and the neomammalian complex of the neocortex. The notion of humans exhibiting primitive behavior because of our “reptilian” or “animal” brains seeped into culture throughout the 1970s and 1980s. It is common to hear people refer to our “reptilian brain” when explaining or forgiving behavior that it seems humans should be able to rise above. My kids’ principal once dismissed some questionable behavior as typical of “boys’ reptilian brains.” The principal made a mess of the science, but the ideas underlying the triune brain are part of our culture.⁵

There is little agreement on what human consciousness is or how to define it, but most definitions depend in some way on being aware of internal and external states. The consciousness model outlined in this book can be generalized as constituting three simple but complex related capacities: self-awareness, theory of mind, and dissociation. Self-awareness is the ability to distinguish the self from others and to be able to reflect about oneself vis-à-vis others, while theory of mind is the use of self-awareness to be able to infer the probable mental state of another based on personal experience or knowledge of a similar situation. Therefore, theory of mind presupposes self-awareness. However, no one is either totally self-aware or completely attuned to the minds of those around them, and this is because awareness is a burden with high costs. In fact, research on deception-detection suggests that people may not be particularly good at sensing the minds of others, but merely demonstrating empathetic efforts—trying to care about what others think—is often all that is expected of us.⁶ Just trying to understand another’s perspective goes a long way in social situations, however imperfect we may be at actually understanding another’s perspective. Signaling our willingness to cooperate or our attempts to be empathetic, may be more necessary from an evolutionary perspective than our accuracy in guessing another’s mind. Dissociation is the capacity that reduces the stress of all this higher-order insight and enables humans to manage those costs.

Dissociation Facilitates Transcendence

My wife is a dance-movement therapist and was training for a master’s degree at Pratt Institute while I was finishing my undergraduate degree and first became interested in anthropology. Dance-Movement Therapy is a psychoanalytic approach to therapy that focuses on movement integration, and the Pratt program she attended is based in Freudian and Jungian psychoanalysis. The ability of therapists to “read” clients’ movements and to help get them moving in rhythmic and group-oriented ways resonated strongly with my anthropological readings, particularly those including cross-cultural Indigenous medical systems revolving around shamanism and possession. My wife’s master’s project involved interpreting video of her clinical work with patients at Woodhull Medical Center in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, in the inpatient psychiatric ward. Bed-Stuy is the fourth poorest neighborhood in the US and has a large immigrant population. Many of the patients were mentally ill, did not speak English as a first language (if at all), and were homeless. Therefore, there were numerous barriers to verbal therapy with these patients.

Watching videos of her sessions with patients in which they would gather around a parachute and use it as a pivot to facilitate group movement led me to two epiphanies: first, the social skills and movement integration that she was facilitating with her patients were the same type of behavior depicted in ethnographic films like Maya Deren’s Divine Horsemen (about Haitian Vodou, or voodoo, by its common name) or John Marshall’s N/um Tchai: The Ceremonial Dance of the !Kung Bushmen. These films depict shamanic spirit possession and possession trance or what might be more generally called “dissociative trance” or simply “dissociation.” Whereas the fulcrum for the activities in the ritual settings of Vodou or !Kung trance dancing is often a fire or something similar, the non-linguistic approach to social integration in these cases is similar to some aspects of dance-movement therapy. And, second, the crucial component to facilitating better functioning is not self-reflection or awareness—it is social skills, which can be learned through repetition and imitation without much in the way of personal insight. These therapeutic interventions help people function better by helping them become interactive. Even low-functioning individuals with considerable mental or emotional challenges won’t be institutionalized unless they are social problems. Similarly, one can go to see a Vodou mambo or priest for personal issues, but the cure or the therapy is inevitably social—one that will make the person tolerable to live with.

Dissociation is the main focus of this book and has been the central thread of my research since I returned to college as a 30-something undergraduate. It is a basic function of how our human brain works. Dissociation is a filtering, compartmentalizing, or apportioning of con...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 Consciousness as a By-Product
• 2 Thinking Too Much
• 3 The Monkey in the Mirror
• 4 Cognitive Evolution and Fireside Relaxation
• 5 Rules and Ritual in Curbing Cognitive Dissonance
• 6 The Biological Imperative to Belong
• 7 The Big Umbrella of Dissociation
• 8 Dissociation, Deafferentation, and Trance
• 9 Incentive Salience of Drinking and Drugging
• 10 Adaptive and Maladaptive at the Same Time
• 11 Conclusion
• Index