MONKEY BRAIN

One of my more interesting feeds is from the National Institute of Mental Health, though they often seem sort of overwhelmed, esp. in the midst of this giant revolution in how to think about human beings and their mental health.  I mean, we are shifting from brilliant schemes invented by thoughtful people who were only partly right, to evidence-based electro-chemical reactions in the brain, observable in screen data.

http://www.nimh.nih.gov/news/science-news/2016/schizophrenia-autism-risk-gene-trajectories-point-to-shared-causes.shtml

Today’s post was about monkey brain, not the metaphor of a jabbering pack of primates babbling in one’s head — which can either be healthy ideas competing with each other or just a lot of trash fermenting.  This research was about the risk genes for schizophrenia and autism, which are located close to each other in the brain’s cortex.  A hundred scientists collaborated on the project.

“Their study, which pinpointed the developmental trajectories of the suspect genes in the monkey brain, also identified divergent timing of risk gene activation that might help to explain the differing courses of the illnesses. Autism-related genes first switched on in newborn neurons during prenatal development, while schizophrenia risk genes didn’t activate until infancy.  

“This suggests that genetic risk for autism may have more to do with prenatal processes, such as the birth of new neurons, while schizophrenia risk genes may impact processes underway during infancy, such as refinement of neuronal circuitry. The delay is consistent with schizophrenia’s much later onset of symptoms in late adolescence/early adulthood, the researchers note.”

I don’t know how much of a problem is presented to monkeys by schizophrenia and autism unless it makes them fall out of trees.  Both are devastating for human beings and demand major effort to compensate for the malfunctions.  Among the many things that people don’t know they don’t know — and therefore never try to find out about — are the complexities of brain function and the huge importance of gestation and earliest childhood.  If high schools taught these crucial things to know, it would help a lot of adolescents think more clearly about their sex lives.  Sex not as falling in love but sex as creation of new life.

For a while there I was buying a lot of books about troubled children and technical things like dissociation.  I’d read them, try to think about how they would help with kids I’ve known, explain what I thought to Tim, and discover what the books were saying didn’t really fit.  Now I’m glancing back through them and seeing that politics and Dunning-Kruger (not seeing what you don’t know exists) were distorting conclusions, but — more importantly — just leaving a lot of kids out without realizing that they were doing it.  

The mayor’s wife said indignantly that her neighbor was feeding feral cats, but that if “feral” means wild, that’s not what they were.  I suggested the category of “satellite” cats which are like barn cats, not cuddly but fed regularly while still hunting rodents.  She works with rez kids; I wonder whether she has a category for “satellite children.”  I do.

When I was doing animal control education, I saw that people had only two categories for dogs:  owned pets and unowned pets, strays.  In fact, research suggested at least five categories: feral dogs (totally wild), pye or pariah dogs (living off human garbage, feces, and corpses), child surrogate pets, working dogs, dogs “owned” by other dogs.  Pye dogs, which are mostly a Third World category, are the ones that are dangerous enough to require taboos.  For one thing, they carry rabies.  Dogs “owned” by other dogs will never quite understand humans.  There are probably other categories that need to be invented in order to have “handles” for recognizing and dealing with dogs. 

The same for human children, who are shaped by genetics, gestation, earliest care, trauma, education and experience.  My first superintendent, Phil Ward, used to say that HIS father (also an educator), would say that the best teachers were the ones with as many strategies for teaching as there were kids in the classroom, plus a couple of extras just in case.  This is pretty idealistic, but at least it acknowledges that humans are different at every stage and in every life path.  He would have made a good teacher of me if I hadn’t gotten involved with Bob Scriver.

So now I’ll get personal.  I hardly relate to my family in the “now.”  I’m so politically and sociologically different that we have trouble communicating. The parent generation is all dead.  Three aunts, two maternal and one paternal, died after years of dementia.  The two paternal uncles died of strokes, like my father, and showed vascular impaired personalities before death.  (I agree with Michael Moore that Trump should be medically screened for these things.)  

My father and brother both had personality changing head trauma to the pre-frontal cortex.  Of my maternal cousins, several have mal-developed digits (too many or missing fingers or toes) corrected by surgery.  This is a well-known English gene that runs in families: Anne Boleyn had an extra finger.  One cousin, whose mother was an army nurse in WWII, was constantly suspected of some kind of brain malfunction, seizure sorts of things.  Her son is probably the most brilliant among that generation.  He had a strong stable father, but the marriage ended in divorce.  And so on.

The next generation, which now has school-aged children themselves, are a mystery.  I don’t know their names, have never met them.  Two are adopted Chinese girls.  Even my mother, who monitored family, never knew these descendants.  She died in 1999, so anyone born after that went unrecorded in her book.  No one sends birth announcements anymore.

I’m not very tempted to see what my genome shows.  Mostly Scots immigrants with a dose of Irish.  I used to beg for a Native American in the family tree, but we never found any.  By accident I discovered that Tim has one, an early and honorable person on the East Coast. 

I’m slightly more interested in what my epigenome might show.  And the actions of what I suppose is called the “microgenome.”  I’ve read that lovers and intimate pairs like nurses/patients or mothering/infants soon share tiny migrating life-forms almost entirely.  So what does it mean that — unlike today’s youngsters — I was first intimate with an older man who had had many partners, living on a reservation and more briefly in Edmonton and Chicago.  I know he had herpes because it nearly took his eyesight, but I was vaccinated.  Now they speak of one’s “mineralome” or “metalome,” which would have been much affected by our development of the bronze foundry.  Since I did the patinas for years, I breathed in many compounds, mostly iron, sulphur, and copper.  

Frankly, I think I either inherited or developed schizo and autistic glitches and channeled them through Victorian/Edwardian reading of novels, which made me think of teaching and, more grandiosely, ministry.  I wasn’t good at either; they weren’t what I thought they would be.  Worse, one of my character flaws is a reluctance to compromise.  I see that people are back to reading my posts on Oppositional Defiance Disorder.  I better check out the recent research.

I’ve sometimes been perilously close to living on the street.  My youngest brother did, the one with brain trauma that made him oppositional and defiant.  Education has at least taught me how to present myself in a good light, but “retirement” frees me to be myself, at least in writing.  I’m grateful.  But sometimes it gives me monkey brain.

REFLECTING AT LEISURE

I’m formally taking the position that spirituality is physical, biological, the most basic of concepts and entirely felt -- no theological content.  No organizations. No moral content  Can happen anyplace, can be culturally defined as evil or blessed, and is not felt by everyone.  (Not missing -- just not activated.)  From one time and place to another it is defined differently and offered different places in the culture.  Often it is displaced or reduced or expanded because of other ideas about what human is.  The concept grows when times are tough.  It diminishes when "rationality" dominates.

Right now both are the case.  We are still in growing “enlightenment” times based on science, which is growing in part because of expanding technology that allows us access to so much more.  Science claims a dimension that offers a supra-cultural mathematical strategy for avoiding some kinds of conflict: the scientific method.  Science is, of course, accompanied by a lot of clutter -- bad claims, counter-claims, corrupt results.  “Spirituality,” defined as an individual pre-conscious biological response to the world, is a way of escaping all that by going to meaning of a different kind, farther back in the head, closer to the spine.  I am defining it as awareness of the meaning offered by participation, wovenness, continuousness with the galaxies. 

The Wiki entry about spirituality is an extensive checklist that’s helpful, but I wish I knew who wrote it and who altered it or edited it, since I’m finding that point of view is crucial.  For instance, they didn’t get Unitarian Universalism quite right.  Still, if a person wanted to really study spirituality, this might be a good place to start.  It would not give you a spiritual experience (a Wiki entry is just anonymous words) nor would it tell you where you fit but you’d have some vocabulary to throw around.

I hope it's not a butterfly.

These overviews always surprise me in two ways:  the first is how many versions there are and the second is how far back the historical discussion can reach -- in this case, mostly to the Greek/Roman foundation of Euro-thought.  Contemporary understandings are always intriguing.  Can we reach into pre-history?

“During the twentieth century the relationship between science and spirituality has been influenced both by Freudian psychology, which has accentuated the boundaries between the two areas by accentuating individualism and secularism, and by developments in particle physics, which reopened the debate about complementarity between scientific and religious discourse and rekindled for many an interest in holistic conceptions of reality. These holistic conceptions were championed by New Age spiritualists in a type of quantum mysticism that they claim justifies their spiritual beliefs, though quantum physicists themselves on the whole reject such attempts as being pseudoscientific.

Reflections and refractions

My view is that core spirituality cannot be discussed, programmed, owned, sold or acquired at workshops and seminars.  It’s possible to trigger some related experiences by exposing parts of the brain to magnets or ingesting what are now called “entheogens”, drugs that offer a blissful experience.  In my view it’s like that exercise called “bicycling” in which one holds one’s feet in the air and imitates pedaling.  It’s supposedly good for the body, but when you stop, you actually had gone nowhere.

Nevertheless, sometimes the spirit can be called and I’ve always been curious about what the effective trigger or “bait” might be.  After reading a bunch of saints’ accounts of their beatific or horrendous experiences, it appeared that binaries of experience that were internally contradictory had something to do with it.  Current research suggests that sensory experience (not the five senses but the constant hurricane of electrochemical information tracking the world both outside and inside the skin in hundreds of ways) is what the brain sorts and acts upon.  If that great clamor of particles falls into a relatively resolved state, then the experience might be what we call “spiritual.”

Most thinking about spirituality/religion is confined to the English-speaking world, esp. in Europe and Asia.  It simply ignores African, American, or indigenous Australian notions.  Australia is particularly intriguing since the culture (like the geology) is extremely old and pretty much self-contained, characteristics that seem to relate to spirituality.  Except for the Americas and Mediterranean Africa, there have not been the bureaucratic, hierophantic, city-like, empire-craving organizations of “religion.”  Religion is always wanting to combine with government and power.  

 Today spirituality as a characteristic of the individual is often considered a marker of superiority, as a kind of intelligence in a world that thinks “smart people” are better than others, but this has to be covert and unspoken because the consensus through the ages has been that spirituality is a force for unity, the reconciliation of differences.  People who try to make spirituality trump science are playing with superstition and magic.

Art is spirituality in drag.  --Jennifer Yane

Another humanities realm that interacts with spirituality is arts that can capture the unspoken, the felt meaning of life.  Probably one of the most powerful of the arts today is photography, since that’s what gives us visual access to both the star nurseries of space and the busy mitochondrias of the cells, plus startling face-to-face confrontations of so many other creatures and their vegetal world.  Even minerals photographed can be stunning.  It is good to be stunned, esp. if it results in humility, a key to spirituality.

It is not good to use spirituality as a scourge to punish organized religion or secular government.  That’s the work of rationality and justice.  

Compassion is often seen as an element of spirituality, but my severe (Scots?) temperament and experience in the world -- possibly out of arrogance -- sees deep spirituality as ignoring that dimension, though it is a key to the meaning and value of human beings.  Suffering cannot touch the depths of spirituality.  For a while there was an understanding of God as that great power and meaning that comes to suffer WITH humans in the most literal way, so that if one is tortured, God is right there also being suffered.  This is one element of the idea of Jesus, to show that a deity cannot really care about us if they are so exalted that they never feel anything.  But it never struck me as very comforting.

Modern physics is about sharing, but not about feeling.  It is not about God the Creator but about existence as co-creating itself, unfolding and unfolding in complexity that has only one meaning: survival.  Not of the individual, but of the cosmos itself.  All the emotion is on the part of the witnesses, which are us.  It’s our specialty, more important than just talking about spirituality or even admiring it.

When we calm down enough to really pay attention, what we see is that everything is connected, everything is moving, and we can’t stop it, so we might as well join it.

POPULATION HYDRAULICS

When Europeans finally landed on the SE coast of the North American continent and saw that there were people, but people quite different from themselves, they thought they had found a new species.  A species is a biologically defined category based on whether two kinds of animal can mate and produce children.  If they can, they are not separate species.  It took about nine months to find out that these people were NOT a new species, but human beings.  Still, the Euros hung onto the idea.  

In fact, the idea still haunts us.  People even suggest that male and female human beings are separate "species", but clearly that’s not the case since they produce children all the time.  Some people play with the idea that humans and one of the more human-seeming apes might have a child, but it can’t happen.  They ARE separate species.  They don’t even have the same number of chromosomes, so there could not be a zipper-like match-up of genes as is necessary to make a new being.

The Euros would continue to war against each other for the next few hundred years, struggling to establish nations, which to them meant control of territories defined by borders and signified with flags and kings.  They brought these ideas to the New World and imposed them on people who might push each other back and forth but never fought gunpowder-horseback-armor wars with horrific death rates.  They also brought their deadliest weapon: microbes.  This emptied the villages and sent a wave of depopulation across the land, which persuaded the Euros that there was nobody out there.  So they grabbed the land.  As an educated white woman told me not long ago, “the Indians weren’t using the land anyway.”  Meaning they hadn’t plowed it.

The whites also brought an old Egyptian concept of establishing borders to show where one person’s set of rights ended and another’s began.  This went back to the flooding of the Nile which annually erased all markers of fields but renewed the fertility necessary for the crops of the time.  Geometry was invented to re-establish boundaries.  By the time the 15^th and 16^th centuries came along, the Euros had forgotten that part but remembered that Kings (as in King Tut) and God (the ultimate SunKing who authorized all the other ones) had the power.  Kings meant nations.  So they looked for them in America.

Instead of kings and nations, they found chiefs and tribes.  They never got their heads around the idea that these were fluid entities that responded to circumstances, as did the survival-based occupation of territories.  In brief, the People went where they had to in order to eat and defended their movement however they had to, and they followed whomever they trusted at the time for whatever the situation was.  The people who were related, who observed the same customs, told the same stories, and MOST of all spoke the same language, formed into bands who occasionally gathered as a whole in a unified ceremonial time.  This appears to be a universal human practice.  

At the core was a small intensely related group of people and then the farther people thinned out until at the fringes were folks who might have split allegiances, or who were immigrants from somewhere else, or were captives or were just antisocial.  There was no real boundary, but only a moving migration of people in and out, closer to the center of identity or farther away.  My guess is that in their minds even their dead relations were therebutnotthere, just a little farther away on the edge as though they were hunting in the Sand Hills. 

The Sand Hills of Alberta

Most Euros couldn’t get their heads around this.  But some people had always been like this, especially once the big sailing ships were devised and the sailors realized that there were people in very pleasant places who would accept them so long as they behaved.  They left their former identities.  And then there were the gypsies.

Once the Industrial Revolution put paid to the old life everywhere and Native Americans were confined on reservations (though some always walked off), the government ended up stranded in their assumptions between Indian ways and Euro ways, so they just drew a boundary like roommates, one messy and one neat.  Secretly they figured the NA’s would eventually die out anyway, either by assimilation or attrition.  But they didn’t.

Since the relationship between government and People was forced into the equating of tribe with nation (The Blackfeet Nation) so that this relationship between them had to be by treaty until they realized their mistake and started calling the treaties “agreements”, they were vulnerable to international law.  The United States does not like international law.  Now they are trying to UNdefine tribes as nations and UNdefine the reservation as a nation with boundaries because then they can go to a lower internal level of law.  But the Blackfeet “treaty” was never even signed by the government.  To regularize the present, it is necessary to call for “do-overs” of the past, some of them legal and others practical.

Cunningly, the US killed all the buffalo and sent all the children to schools to learn to be white.  But they couldn’t kill the culture.  They made lists of the original people and called that “blood” though it was only provenance, meaning descent.  No one even knew what blood types were until 1901.  They didn't mean blood -- they meant sperm and ovum.  The genome is much more recent than blood types, and it cannot guarantee that a person belongs to one tribe or another because of that moving edge of the population.  Naturally, as soon as the provenance lists were being drawn up, all sorts of folks showed up claiming to be Blackfeet because it meant survival.

Nevertheless, there some direct descendants of people on that original list and they were likely to be more intensely and culturally Blackfeet than others.  We speak of them as “full-bloods,” meaning that all their known ancestors were named on that list.  Few are left.  Few Blackfeet speakers are left, but some of them are children, which is a new phenomenon.

Darrell Kipp at Nitzipuwahsin School with a star pupil.

Fractionation of people’s ancestry as well as their land allotments on the reservation tend to undefine them, but the real definition of the Blackfeet has got to be something in the heart.  To demonstrate it by living on the reservation, learning the language and the ceremonies, knowing one’s ancestors, and claiming this identity is basic.  Some tribes will not accept membership from people who don’t live on their reservation.  The movement to claim membership without “being here” takes people away from the land that made them who they are.  But sometimes the only way to earn a living or get higher education is to leave.

There is also another movement already underway and strong enough to be named:  reconquista after the recapture of the European Iberian peninsula.  The brown people are coming back this way -- no wonder the Euros are scared!  Their secret is the same as the Nile: fertility.  Their motive is the same as all species: survival.  The industrial revolution has led us into a desert.  Now the People have the advantage, esp. the ones who have the culture and the land in their hearts.  They are in favor of education -- on their terms -- and they are creating a new culture that combines many old ones.  The fringe is coming to the middle and the old boundaries are breached to let in the waters.