THE BRAIN'S THRESHOLD

Teachers -- even special ed teachers -- agree that the threshold event when someone learns to read -- usually but not always in the primary grades -- is exciting and gratifying.   They can often describe the moment.  Some kids learn to do it before they even start school but no one reads before they can talk.  It is estimated that maybe ten per cent of human beings do not have the brain gizmos that would allow them to read, but almost everyone can speak.  Remembering the sensation of realizing I was reading English for the first time -- looking at the marks on the paper and hearing them in my head -- I tried to read French.  But they remained alphabet on the page that I could sound out, but that never became meaning.  I did not know anyone who spoke French -- had only heard sentences in movies.

Philosophy is more than words

When I read philosophical websites that are mostly occupied by males in their twenties and thirties, usually rather upscale but maybe not, they will insist that the ability to read and write is the definitive characteristic of human beings.  Probably none of them have ever taught anyone else to read and have themselves learned to read at an early age.  They will claim that it’s not possible to think without words and that consciousness is tightly linked to words.

Contemporary brain research is proving them wrong so they just ignore the work, figuring it will go away and is irrelevant anyway.  But it is not and as it unfolds, it becomes more and more meaningful.  When I began reading Suzanne Langer in the Eighties, it was brushed aside.  Now even Chomsky and Piaget need rethinking.  All who depend only on introspection and outward observation are having to reinterpret what they thought was obvious.  

What if there are more than two languages?

Right off for beginners, consciousness -- which in the case of introspection is itself a function of consciousness -- is no longer the key to identity.  “I think therefore I am” is no longer true because “I” am so much more than thinking and thinking is so much more than words.  

One must realize that “I am a composed cellular creature with a dashboard that is only fractionally conscious and entirely dependent on sensory information gathered from all over the body, even including microbes in my gut.”  That is, a person is a vessel of information dependent on instrumentation.  Those senses, the instruments, are developed from health, access, and the culture that teaches us one language but not another.  The world outside the skin is so much more than can be taken in by the senses that it must be edited, digested, transformed, and symbolized even before it gets to the main dashboard of the brain.

The brain operates on the pattern of the tree -- or maybe we should say “bush” since there is not one main trunk but many branches, mostly developed through gestation, birth and the immediately following years, and dependent on events over which no infant has control.  These are mostly provided by caretakers, generally the parents, who try to make sure of nutrition, protection, warmth, and so on, and who also interact with touch and voice to call out the formation of the whole body, but especially the brain.

Only luck in timing and circumstances can give parents the chance to do their best.  War, famine, disease, insanity, geo-catastrophe all interfere.  Variations in the parents’ and culture’s beliefs will cause variations in the kind of human being that develops through the experience of the growing creature, who forms his or her brain according to what happens -- not simply receiving, but interacting, which with luck will mean demand meets capacity, instinct triggers response, need is supplied, and space for expansion welcomes exploration.

In order to read, one must have already learned to speak, which happens during a “window” in learning ability.  It’s sensible to assume that speaking can’t happen without some level of maturity in the air management paraphernalia dependent on the bellows of the lungs.  Babies can make vowel sounds early, but consonants depend on delicate management of the interruption of the air stream to make sibilants (“s,z,ch”) and plosives (“k,t,b,p”) with tongue against teeth and palate.  Beyond that is the action of the larynx, the push of the diaphragm, the uplift of the ribcage, and mastery of the lilt of the particular language and its gender-indicating inflections.   None of this is available to someone looking at marks on a surface.

Between speaking and interpreting silent marks is a sequence of abilities that are probably handled by different parts of the brain.  One is the ability to recognize shapes, which some suggest derive from hunting, learning to recognize the ear of the rabbit in grass, the butt configuration of a deer in a confusion of leaves, or the print of a paw in mud.  Another is the ability to follow and retain a “trail” of varied marks from left to right, recognizing the line length, maintaining control of which tier of the lines one is looking at, so that the letters stay in words, the words stay in sentences, and the brain follows the stream of them in an orderly fashion.

At first this process is helped by “sounding” the marks out loud, but then one learns to just hear them in the head, and eventually they become transparently silent so that the reader is only conscious of the meanings and even later the meanings become a structure of understanding.  Religious performance in litanies may be community-shared out-loud words in unison, which have an emotional impact like that of music, particularly if the words are familiar and have been repeated often enough in history to have become associated with specific occasions, so that they call out the emotions of those times.

If the meaning of the words is too dissonant in terms of their application to the occasion or in terms of the context of the person at the moment, they will be jolted into awareness.  This has been happening lately when people recite the Pledge of Allegiance or quote the inscription at the foot of the Statue of Liberty.  Sometimes the words of songs are deeply meaningful and sometimes they are offensive.  (Perhaps meant to be.) Their meaning can change over the decades or even after some kind of life-rift that reconfigures one’s understanding of the world.

Humans originally came to consciousness in one place, one culture, one family configuration, but now people must be highly flexible as they accept new terms of life. Many cope by narrowing and rigidly limiting their experience to people like themselves, denying that anything outside a “compound” of familiarity is good or even exists at all.  But other people let themselves become mirrors, shadows, without a center, merely responding to what is around them.  The growth necessary to really understand a whole new terrain can be like trying to read French without ever having heard it spoken -- much less understanding nuances like what is inflected to be male or female, what shows public relationship or marks intimacy.  

The problem of translation between two contexts becomes the problem of a double-identity that generates a third, more universal, more experience-based.  Those who master this, which can include something like a religious conversion, are different.  To those who don’t know anything but their own lives, the difference can be threatening.  But, once felt, this threshold experience that invites one through a door into a broader world is the very definition of consciousness and “being human” in a human body.

WHAT'S UNDER THE SKULL

The human brain is capable of deep ceremonial feeling because of evolution, which created a cumulative set of subdivisions capable of supporting each other, as well as doubling back synergistically to create new abilities.  The physical structure of this sequence that reaches back to paleo dawn-time is based on the upright spine where at the top of the vertebrae is balanced a heavy head between two shoulders that enable the movement of arms to throw, to cradle, to lift.  (Under where shoulders meet arms is a furry place where human pheromones accumulate.  Smell as identity and emotion.  A product.  A sensorium loop.)

The top of the spine, the “BRAIN STEM” has three parts which go back to reptile days.  The three parts are the “Midbrain”  (basic vital life functions such as breathing, heartbeat, and blood pressure),  the “Pons” (sleep, hearing, posture, movement), and Medulla (breathing and heart rate).

The “LIMBIC SYSTEM” is the mammal part where the emotions are rooted and contains  four main parts: 

the Thalamus (Axons from every sensory system (except olfaction) synapse here as the last relay site before the information reaches the cerebral cortex)

Hypothalamus (homeostasis, emotion, thirst, hunger, circadian rhythms, and control of the autonomic nervous system. In addition, it controls the pituitary).  

Amygdala (involved in memory, emotion, and fear. This is a component of the limbic system.), and 

Hippocampus (converts short term memory to more permanent memory, and recalls spatial relationships in the world about us)

The CEREBRUM looks like a shelled walnut.  It is in halves.  Each half has four “lobes” which are named for location: front, back, top, sides, 

 Frontal Lobe- associated with reasoning, planning, parts of speech, movement, emotions, and problem solving

Parietal Lobe- associated with movement, orientation, recognition, perception of stimuli

Occipital Lobe- associated with visual processing

Temporal Lobe- associated with perception and recognition of auditory stimuli, memory, and speech

The NEOCORTEX is the “rind” of the cortex and has six layers, labelled from the outer layers in, I to VI. In humans, the neocortex is involved in higher functions such as sensory perception, generation of motor commands, spatial reasoning, conscious thought, and language.  These layers are the location of consciousness, both one’s ability to feel like oneself, to introspect, to know where you are, to remember consciously, to reflect and reason.

________

It now becomes clear that the prefrontal neocortex, behind and above the eyes, contains specialized cells.  We don’t know what they all do, but they most crucially enable empathy, which is our access to communication and community with other living beings.  Von Economo neurons are spindle shaped cells found only in humans, primates, dolphins and elephants.  There are not many but they are found in the anterior cingulate cortex (the part that wraps around the corpus callosum that connects the two brain lobes) and the frontal insula.   These cells monitor, edit, and respond to perception, motor control, self-awareness, cognitive functioning, interpersonal experience, pain, hunger, realizing a mistake, empathy, trust, guilt, embarrassment, love, responding to infants, recognizing and reading faces, “gut” feelings (intuitions), itching, temperature discomfort, “sense of humor,” and other human “feelings.”   This area has something to do with schizophrenia.

Allman, a researcher, says that it's the link between self-monitoring and awareness of others that makes it possible for us to understand the feelings of other people. "The basic proposition that I'm advancing is the notion that self-awareness and social awareness are part of the same functioning.”  These functions are the crux of what religious institutions try to touch and mold into the institution’s basic understanding of the culture.

But my understanding of the design of deep ceremony is not interested in an institutional point of view.  What this theory of deep experience revolves around is the use of the senses and the neocortex to affect the unconscious parts of the brain and body as it interacts with its surroundings, both taking in information and creating responses. When the conscious, the unconscious, and the entire body is in harmony, then the experience registers deeply.

The chief method of thought in the six layers of the neocortex is metaphorical.  There are two “maps” inscribed on the layers.  One is a simulacrum of the human body with the distortion being that areas that get the most use have acquired the most neurons, most thickly connected, and are represented by being much larger on this mental map.

The other is a kind of GPS system that monitors our orientation in space: up, down, moving forward, going sideways, tipping over, and so on.  It records connections between bits of information.  Most thought metaphors are geometrically organized.  People sketch out little diagrams of their ideas.  Metaphor study is separate from brain anatomy and it is metaphors that are most crucial in the organizing of a ceremony.  (See the work of Lakoff and Johnson).  To make good sense, metaphors depend upon the skillful handling of sense memory and spatial relationship.  

The Gungan Sacred Place on Naboo

The most common deep metaphor (unconscious) for ceremony in Western anthropological terms is that of the Space.  A ceremony is like a room, a place, where it is safe enough to be vulnerable, to share, and to change.  For Victor Turner, whatever is used to take the person’s consciousness into that “space” is a threshold (a limen).  When you go over it, the “space” or “sanctuary” is felt.  (See Eliade, “The Sacred and the Profane”)  Ideally, the physical enclosed space of a church, a temple, or other holy physical place would coincide with the “felt” sacrality of the person’s frame of mind (connectome among the responding neurons).  

If the person visits this “place” regularly -- either as a physical location or as a mental state -- the threshold will be helped by habit, which is a memory function.  Some people simply never manage to achieve this “frame of mind” and will not be able to understand those who do.  Whether this is an unlearned skill or some kind of anatomical defect cannot be known because it is so subtle and so dispersed throughout the brain structures.  But it can be achieved by surprise if the environment, including other people, evokes that “frame of mind.”  This is where the stream of consciousness flows, and it is almost hydraulic in its nature.  Sometimes sheer intensity, as in combat or other moments full of adrenaline (which is a very powerful drug) will push (or pull) people over the limen.  It is linked to intimacy.

Thresholds vary according to culture and also respond to individual experience and temperament.  The task of ceremonial design is to find the triggers that open the doors.  The “deeper” one can empathize with the people present, the more likely to find the assumed, unconscious, ingrained, sense and metaphor triggers that will take the group across the threshold.

Now we can talk about communion, it’s origin and enactment.  You’ll notice that it’s a word similar to community, and therefore depends upon a shared metaphor that is very basic, that of eating and drinking together.  What that shared metaphor means to the persons involved and what they are actually consuming will be linked by their daily lives.  The liturgist who can use that as a poet will be able to touch hearts.  No divine intervention is necessary.