What follows is notes from an article in the New York Review of Books, Vol. 55, Numnber 11, June 26, 2008. [Don’t ask ME how they time-travel!] called “How the Mind Works: Revelations” by Israel Rosenfield and Edward Ziff. It integrates information from six recent books about brain function. I’ve stopped buying these books because they are almost instantly outdated and because there are a great many of them, so I welcome this overview.
Revelation 1: The basic protein interactions of the brain were first found and studied in bacteria by Jean-Pierre Changeux.
Revelation 2: The nerve cell uses BOTH electrical charges inside cells and floating molecules -- chemical messengers -- between cells. Changeux said, “the human brain therefore does not make optimal use of the resources of the physical world [like wired electricity or emitted light]: it makes do instead with components inherited from simpler organisms.” Within the nerve cell, which is shaped like a tree, the code moves electrically but to cross the synaptic cleft [aren’t you grateful for a little female imagery?] it relies on acetylcholine and other molecules.
Revelation 3: For every part, there are a zillion little sub-parts. The electron microscopes can now see that the ends of the branches and roots on the neurons are packed with tiny sacs or vesicles, each with five thousand molecules of neurotransmitter.
Revelation 4: Open your pores. When a chemical neurotransmitter binds to a receptor, it holds the ion pore open, which means it keeps working. This is good!
Revelation 5: Nicotine acts on the same receptor as acetylcholine, which is both good and bad since it has some of the same effects, but not exactly.
Revelation 6: The brain, using all its cells, creates a mental “prerepresentation -- preliminary sketches, schemas, models.” These guide all future “thinking.” Anything that doesn’t fit is likely to get dumped. That means loss of the ability to keep it in mind.
Revelation 7: Another powerful molecule is dopamine, which is generated with pleasure. (Robin Williams/Ollie Sacks fans will know that if it goes down too far, mental paralysis ensues.) Many popular drugs gum up this system of rewards for successes like good food, good sex, friendship and, say, artistic achievement. Drugs can permanently “rewire” the brain to become literally irresistible, crowding out humanly constructive perceptions.
Revelation 8: Everything outside our bodies that is perceived by our brains is coded in molecules, evidently co-operating in at least large areas, maybe the whole brain. Changeux says, “memories can be modified by the addition of new information, or ‘by preexisting knowledge or by the emotional resonance of actual memories of past experience.” Edelman says “memory is not a ‘small scale model of external reality,’ but a dynamic process that enables us to repeat a mental or physical act.” [This validates the Cuts Wood School technique of learning Blackfeet by acting out the word, creating a muscle memory.] Memory is a RE-creation and thus variable in comparison to the original. [Cops know this.]
Revelation 9: There are no colors in the world. What we “see” is our brain’s translation of wavelengths. A finely trained artist “sees” more colors because of more attentively receiving and more subtly sorting what he or she sees. [This suggests that a person can improve perception by improving thinking.]
Revelation 10: Pain is the result of dissonance between what the brain thinks it should be receiving and what it is actually receiving. The brain insists on the body it has always known, as a way of establishing identity. [The article addresses phantom limbs. After I have lost weight, I still allow a little more distance when I go around corners.] At the same time, conscious life is a constant flow, accepting and integrating the present with the past. Bergson called this “le souvenir du present” and Edelman says “the remembered present.” [I always like the French version!] Thus, what we think varies all the time, though we think not.
Revelation 11: “Mirror neurons” mean that when we see a certain action or emotion in another, we tend to make a faint version of it in our own brains. [Actors know this -- so do con artists. If someone is arguing with you, assume their same posture -- maybe fist to chin, head tilted, leaning forward -- and they will tend to get into sync with you in spite of themselves.] This faint imitation in your brain will promote understanding. Even a cartoon of “Mr. Yuck” on a medicine bottle will make a child imitate the expression of the face and turn away.
That doesn’t come out to twelve revelations, so I’ll add my own because something in our brains wants “number magic:” ten or twelve or a hundred. The twelfth revelation is the relevance of all this to liturgy. No one wants Mr. Yuck as a celebrant. And we have seen the idiocy of taking drugs to produce ecstasy. I’ve always kept “in mind” a little committee on worship meeting where the former Baptists complained that there was no emotion expressed and no happy songs; the former Quakers complained that there was no chance to just sit and meditate; the former Episcopalians complained that there were not enough candles or incense. (I’m drawing a cartoon here. The actual expressions were a little more subtle.) They wanted what they had consciously left.
Our brains want familiarity and yet the flow of reality demands that we make way for new perceptions. This, it seems to me, is the ground of religion and specifically liturgy or worship: to provide the safety and guidance to accept new ideas by putting them into the context of the familiar. To reduce the chaos by allowing a true opening of consciousness to new sorting. To maintain identity while supporting growth. And to be in community, using one’s mirror cells, feeling with others.
I’m reviewing The Abraxas Reader, which was compiled by an organization within the UU movement called “Abraxas” because of some reference to a Greek god somewhere. These guys (ALL guys) found great satisfaction in classical references. Their movement was in response to the Fellowship phenomenon of the UUA in which small groups of people in sympathy with each other formed congregations without ministers -- often because of bad experiences with Mr. Yuck ministers. They were nervous about anything “religious” and not aware enough to go outside the Christian context. The result was that on Sunday morning they tended to either call in a “social justice” speaker from the community, which could devolve to “City Sewer Syndrome” where some hard-pressed committee member engaged whomever they could get, or ended up with a “hymn sandwich” of songs and readings that had no particular theme or accumulation of significance. A bricolage approach to worship.
Now I’m attempting, in good UU fashion, to pull in this VERY new and lively scientific insight about brain function to the poetics of liturgy. I’m not even inside the UU movement anymore, at least institutionally, but I think that’s an advantage.
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