FEAR v. ANXIETY (referring to LeDoux)

MY THOUGHTS ABOUT “ANXIOUS,” 

a book by Joseph LeDoux  

LeDoux feels that what we call “anxiety” and what we call “fear” are two different phenomena that are managed differently by the amygdala and brain connectome.  

He speaks of the “split brain” research he did with Gazzaniga, in which it was vividly demonstrated that if one side was shown something, it could name and identify it accurately.  If the other side was shown the same thing, they couldn’t name the images but derived a kind of feeling from them and explained it creatively.  Consistently, one side could say what something actually was and the other side would “explain” it by inventing a story.  This has been distorted by some theories, calling it female/male, etc. 

Our culture insists that only humans have consciousness, that consciousness is a matter of words, that consciousness (self-awareness) is “better” and “higher” and is the same as “thinking”, which to them is the management of relationships among words.  The sensorium is assigned “poetry,” which is a language of art, sometimes considered fantasy, invention.

It seems that the difference between anxiety and fear is that anxiety is a felt emotional concept, a state of being, and fear is focused on a legitimate threat to survival and suggests something to be done about it, according to the identity of the individual and the resources of the culture.  The object of fear can be named and addressed, but anxiety is a feeling that lacks a story but drives the person to look for one.  Maybe what psychotherapy does is resolve anxiety by finding a convincing object of the fear and suggest ways to resolve it.  

LeDoux feels that fear and anxiety are addressed by two different connectomes or systems: one that responds to internal felt emotion and one that responds to the sensorium, raw neural information.  Behavior can come out of either or both.

I relate this to “spirituality” which is a felt experience that is hard to name or describe (liminality, transcendence, numinous, sublime) versus “religion” which offers named entities to fear (God, the Devil, atheists, “Commies”) and a narrative in which to embed them.  Thus, I suspect that spirituality relates to the same connectomes as anxiety while religion is about named threats that a theological system can explain.

Today there are so many rational threats that religions should be booming, but the offered naming and abating are not working -- they are only effective for those who live in a world that has passed.  Some “religious” wars are about trying to restore that world.  Even in supposedly peaceful settings, there’s a craving for writing and relationship as a source of surrogate authority. There is also much felt anxiety that is going unnamed in relationships, economics, government.  We’re aware of how much is secret or not what we expected (the internet) and how many of the institutions of reassurance have been dispersed (unions, families, school).

It seems to me that spirituality is a creature of images (sensorium) we can feel, but that religion is verbal, often adversarial, and both narrative and logical but logic that takes introspection as a source rather than the sensorium.  This is at the heart of the “Western” religions.

These ideas generated by LeDoux and team seem to lead somewhere instead of shutting down discussion or new evidence.  Whatever the amygdala has to do with it (which seems hard to pin down), it would be a mistake to assume we already know.  The very long bibliography and discussion of various theories show how hard it is to resist closure.

A FIVE-STAGE ACCOUNT OF 

HOW HUMAN BEINGS DEVELOP

Keep in mind that as each new ability or understanding comes “on-line,” it then loops back to connect with everything previous and that creates new synergies that weren’t possible earlier.

I.

Human beings are self-unfolding, pulling in what they need from around them, and creating their own internal order.  The drive to do this is kindled at conception and guided by the genome, the epigenome, and the womb environment which connects to the mother’s molecular status and reactions.

So the first stage of fear/anxiety is in the mother, whether she is safe and peaceful, or aroused and frightened.  This affects not only the state of the baby -- when the fetus is old enough she will feel its movement and know how much it participates in her emotional state as expressed in the blood according to the secretions of her organs -- but also the development pathways as the baby’s organs are created and calibrated.  Adrenaline, cortisol and so on can influence gender, both whom to desire and gender identity, to say nothing of genital formation.

Once outside the womb, the baby begins develop its sensory systems, not just eyes, ears and so on, but awareness of gravity, nearness, velocity, and some estimate maybe several hundred other things related to what is outside the body/skin.  As soon as something is perceived, it is built into the “map of the world” of the baby.  At this early point the new entity forms an opinion of whether the world is trustworthy, but there are also genetic factors.  If some genes are missing, the baby has no fear.  This anomaly will not last long in an unprotective world.  The original genes were meant to promote survival by wariness.  It is also possible that an epigene might turn off this gene.  There is a named syndrome in females, who are more likely to be protected and even treasured for their fearlessness, NOT the kind that is learned, but rather innate, an innocence.

The development of emotions at this stage is unfocused and unnamed inside the person, but identified and treated differently by the care-giving persons.  Some feelings could lead to abuse, which can cause suppression of emotions with internal consequences.

II.

Once all the senses are in place and the skeletal and muscular body has developed, the adrenals activate puberty, a whole new system of hormones and organs that adds new capacities, but also new reasons for worry.  A changing body can be hard to manage and can evoke predatory attitudes from others.  Increased awareness of other people’s emotions means realizing the state of the marriage on which the family is based, the restrictions and requirements of school, and possibly larger forces like racism, or war.  

By now the impact of the world outside the skin is causing emotions the person is able to name and that the culture will treat according to its way of labeling and managing.  Suppression, soothing, rage, laughter or mocking -- these will teach the person about the world.  The autonomic nervous system, combined with hormonal signals, are felt but perhaps not named nor accurately understood.

III.

By this stage the brain is doing a lot of sorting and filtering.  The person can reflect on what they see, actively reject some things and fasten onto others.  Not until the early twenties are they able to get to the meta level of thought, understanding why things happen, what ought to be done, make introspective inquiries, consider revolution.

This is the most obvious stage, the one we are aware of and act on.  But I begin to realize how many people never step outside their cultural boundaries or even know there is anything out there.  If it intrudes or if they much leave the familiar, they are both anxious and fearful.

IV.

This level is meant to refer to the person’s ability to connect to others.  When there is a threat, to look to see whether the others take it seriously.  As personality dictates, to respond in concert or in defiance.  To assume a responsible role, like a teacher or soldier, and react according to what is one’s duty.  The body of learning from experience is enlarging all the time.  Mirror cells, empathy, bonding, team-building, there’s no way to evade being a social animal.

V.

Cosmic awareness  Transcendence.  Not everyone seems to have this direct experience of “being,” but for those who it can be “the mysterium tremendum and fascinans” that overwhelms with the power of the universe, or the “oceanic feeling” of belonging to everything reassuringly.  Not only is it a felt and emotional concept, trying to define it into a theological system will end it.

A DIASPORA CONGREGATION

This is an oxymoron -- two concepts that don’t fit together.  A diaspora refers to a scattered group of people with some common tie.  A congregation refers to an assembled group of people who are often physically together, though they may not share a history.  My life has been guided by two “realities” that express this oxymoron: the Blackfeet, who are almost equal halves people on the reservation together and people scattered separately around the planet; and then my ministry, which began as circuit-riding, moving from one small group to another with what I hoped was a unifying message.

Today we are presented with this oxymoron in every computer internet connection: both people gathered together by being in the same head-space at one time and people scattered around the planet, not just in terms of place but also in terms of social circumstances: wealth, education, politics and so on.

Brains are organized as rhizomes.

Deleuzeguattari (which is a compound name for two men who shared ideas) called this oxymoron pattern a rhizome.  Strawberries, sweetgrass, hops, and iris grow as thick vegetable clumps underground that send out connections to the next clump through a long stem called a stolon.  A journal formally called “Rhizomes: Cultural Studies in Emerging Knowledge” exists and I once sent them an article, but they were afraid to print it.  They were academic and academia neither approves nor recognizes -- except in a distant experience-proof way like studying bugs in a lab -- the people I was writing about as examples of social rhizomes.  I was writing about at-risk boys, a dispersed congregation.  So I write TO them.  Whether they read it or not and any hint of who they really are is invisible to me, so I'm actually writing to whom I imagine.  They're real to me.

When I reflect about subjects that society labels “religious,” I don’t look back at my academic classes (“seminary” is another plant-based term meaning a place where seeds grow) because they only thought about plants that are valuable and useful and beautiful.  Not weeds that have learned to survive on "waste lands."  What’s culture got to do with feral boys living like raccoons in the interstices of cities or the collapsed structures of broken industries, the rhizomatic warehouses connected by railroad track?  But they have been my marker for something for which I have no real name: the concepts and forces that either maintain or destroy life.  Survival concepts, both individual and culture-wide.  This is my idea of what the public culture calls religion.

This sweat lodge killed two.

Years ago, responding to a ministerial study group that was trying to understand the Seventies' challenges to traditional religious organizations -- a dilemma that is far from resolved -- I went to the most basic sources I could think of, but not the then popular New Age sorts of shamans which the rez had taught me were often empty.  I mean, shamans to me are white men who pretend they know how to run a sweat lodge but kill the participants because the modern materials of impermeable plastic tarps don't work and the book-recorded “ways” of doing it as well as assorted misfit clients seeking magic wouldn't work even with proper tarps.

Instead I went to the testimony of European “saints” who often lived alone and encouraged no one to follow them.  Only recently has neuro-research given me a framework that I find explanatory.  When a human seed begin to grow in the seminary of the womb, its brain begins to form concepts even as the structures create themselves to hold ideas. Felt concepts emerge in binary tensions:  dark/light, warm/cold, embraced/falling, fed/hungry, and a few others.  When the baby emerges from the mother, everything new it learns has to be fitted into these categories, so if you asked Saint Theresa what she knew from her orgasmic ecstatic experience of God, she would say that God was freezing her and scalding her, that his love was dark and empty at the same time that she was swept through by light, that she hungered and thirsted but was filled with satisfaction. 

That is, the experience of extreme holiness is an oxymoron -- it will not fit into definitions.  This is a very Manicheistic way of looking at things, but maybe that's where Manicheanism gets some of its power.  Maybe contradiction is the path to enlightenment -- thinking impossible thoughts in beautiful -- or terrifying -- koans.

What are the survival oxymorons of feral boys?  Hope/despair, intimacy/betrayal, creation/destruction . . .  How do I know this?  I listen.  I watch.  I do not avoid virtual places where these boys group to express themselves.  Not just drug shooting galleries, but also garage bands and graffiti tag-teams.  They learn skills, art vocabulary and media, and they grow up, carrying the energy into the rest of the culture.  Except the parts that are afraid of them and deny them. 

Manicheism. by Bolbitius-Vitelinius

The journal called “Rhizome” was afraid to print the article about these boys.  They were honest enough to say exactly that.  Because they had to have statistics, approval of the sources of their concepts IN WRITING, budgets that were partly grants and therefore had strings attached, and most of all, they were fragile themselves, dependent on approval for their careers.  Most of them were female and had come from poverty and struggle.  Curiously, the thing that the academic world was demanding was exactly what they secretly craved the most -- privileged contact and knowledge about at-risk boys (sons) -- even though they knew very well that the boys' names, habitats, and markers would allow the boys' destroyers to find them.  The boys' secrecy, their ability to confuse fact with myth, their underground stolons, their meshing with other undergrounds -- political, illegal, trafficking -- was what made them valuable to others -- those who were criminal, not academic and therefore oblivious to propriety or law.

An oxymoronic institutional understanding of religion.

Shooting creates targets.

You can make money from all underground and forbidden stuff.  You can’t make money from being respectable and just like everyone else, unless you want a low-pay obedience-based job.  That’s not survival.  At least not for me.

Survival-based groups are religious, spiritual, deeply ecological, complex and not inclined to follow leaders.  They pair-bond, they need intimacy, and they learn skills because they really use them, not because someone told them to.  Nor do they raise pots of money.  Their culture is emergent and desire-based.  Me, too.

Why do ministers/pastors -- in some places called “Dominee” (eeks!), pursue people who have no time, no money, no interest in the message?  Reread above.

Here’s a vid about people wrestling with theism -- not Christianity.  http://aeon.co/video/philosophy/suburban-god-a-pastors-quest-for-the-sacred-in-the-secular/?utm_source=Aeon+newsletter&utm_campaign=474317c99a-Weekly_newsletter_April_10_20154_10_2015&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_411a82e59d-474317c99a-68600437  These people are Dutch, famously independent, skeptical, and open to secular ideas.  BUT middle-class.  Aeon is a website explicitly interested in outlining a new religious understanding that reconciles and inspires.  They, too, have nothing to say to a boy abused, deserted, starving, sick, suspicious.  They’re not stupid or callous -- their metaphors don’t fit.

In the early days of encounter with whites, when the whites had the idea that education would make Native Americans become “like them,” the schools (which were often run by churches) employed “seizers” who would go out across the landscape and literally “seize” and take away children.  They were trafficking.  There are still seizers and they are still often connected to churches and schools.  They think "seizing" is not the same as trafficking, but it is. 

But I am not, nor do I want to "seize" anyone.  I think the street boys should not be too grouped in one place.  I think they should continue to find ways to be on the Internet while all the time remaining dark and setting their own terms.  They will find it hard to believe I say this.  It is a survival skill for them NOT to believe.  I could not say these things if I were writing for church, university, media, or publisher.  So this is another way that the internet and blogging supports a dispersed congregation.  

UNCONSCIOUS THOUGHT

Unconscious is like the filaments of mycelium under this moss: crucial.

Recently there is great fuss about consciousness -- not just “thinking” but also speech and objectivity (as opposed to subjectivity).  It has been demonstrated again and again that one’s point of view (what one has at stake; one’s idea of one’s identity; notably gender assignment, training and education) all affect what one sees, thinks, assumes is reality.  It is clear that the very grammar of our sentences as well as our vocabularies and their trailing veils of association, are constructed and “national.”  We know that even scientists making every effort to be objective, “real”, statistical or instrument-proven, are vulnerable to fooling themselves in subtle ways so that decades later the work is challenged.

There is concern that if we admit consciousness is produced by our brains, that means we are robots or denying that we have souls.  All of this produces talk, even though our vocabulary doesn’t include words for the concepts we’re encountering, which makes it very difficult to talk about with others or even think about privately.  But we no longer worry about whether consciousness is present in animals.  Except that a few people are still trying to get gorillas to speak and claim Lassie understands words or even that porpoises recognize themselves in mirrors.  Animal: somewhere between robot and angel.  They can count low numbers, but they can’t do math.

A cell that perceives time.

Not much thought is given to the UNconscious though it is what controls our bodies, maintains the homeostasis of life, weaves the substrate of our identity and awareness.  A moment of reflection and attention can make us aware of our body’s state: contented or irritated or in a rage.  Those who take drugs -- legal or illegal -- can tell us how undependable and phantasmagorical the so-called conscious mind can be.   Athletes and musicians can tell us that their muscles know what to do and playing is unconscious once they have installed the movements and associations with the desire for them.  Desire lives in the unconscious, not the spoken conscious mind which struggles to express it but never quite succeeds in any final sense.

The unconscious is in the whole body: gut feelings, the clues that a lie detector records, posture, tension, staying upright, heart and breath which are powerful symbols for the conscious mind.  In fact, until the prefrontal cortex evolved, the brain was probably unconscious in the sense of being aware of itself and reflecting on decisions.  But both the conscious and the unconscious are complex, informing and controlling each other.  

Our capacity for empathy is considered the crown of evolution so far, carried by specific cells and accessed often through sight, but it is not necessarily conscious.  One sign is that two people sitting across a table for conversation will often show by their body language whether they are attuned.  Those in agreement often assume the same pose.  Those against may throw up a physical guard, like crossed arms, but may not realize they have done it.

The neuron connectome makes a cat’s cradle back and forth through ALL the neuron cells, reaching from over the eyes clear back to the top of the spine, moving from the muscle-connected neurons to the hormone-excreting organs to the autonomic system in the viscera, possibly changing the code slightly as the message moves through nerve nodes that sort and edit.  Neuron activity that is anchored in the "limbic system" -- which is in all animals though possibly not very well developed -- constitutes thought as much as conscious words in sentences and might have more to do with identity than anything the person could name when asked.  

“Felt concepts” is a category that interests me greatly.  These are the elements of the unconscious that show up in dreams, that make "Freudian" associations, that come to the surface in art work, stories, music, dance -- whole body concepts that a dancer can express with no words at all.  Felt concepts are what led me into the “religious” context, though it trapped me in the institution.  Felt concepts are “spiritual.”

One category of felt concepts may be quite concrete, the “haptic” objects we handle in our lives: food, weapons, each other, our pets, furniture, clothing, ornaments, plants.  These things we put our hands on daily become the source of metaphors, some of them deep enough in our assumptions that we’ve forgotten where they came from.  (“Chairing” is quite different from “tabling” and lately people talk about “plating” food.)

Another category is about motion which is change in both the position of the body and its orientation in space.  It is suggested that when the symbolism of sounds (speech) developed in the brain, it formed on the left half.  In other mammals the “grid” of knowing spatial placement and orientation is on both sides, as so many brain parts are, but now in humans it’s mostly on the left side, which controls the right side of the body, the “handedness” primary, thus tilted to the concrete. The “haptic” side and maybe the old “gps” grid have persisted in our grammar and our assumptions.  Nouns for objects, things we could put our hands on, are strong.  Verbs, when we move around, describe what we do.  So then are keyboards “hyperhaptic”?

hyperhaptic or hyperoptic?

Perhaps the idea of math being on the left side of the brain comes from the grid cells remaining.  Once I had ocular migraines that were expressed in lines, “graphs.”  I notice that some people who are capable of dissociation make art that is similar.  But it is the right half of the brain that is metaphorical.

Research is now telling us that memory is controlled by indexing sensations: smell, sight, taste and so on, which is why past moments are sometimes vividly triggered by a scrap of music or drift of fragrance.  The moment of recording and the moment of remembering are somehow connected -- they are telling us now that's probably by re-assembling the markers (not necessarily accurately and sometimes including things that weren’t originally recorded or dropping out other parts).  Also, they feel they have found cells capable of recording the time.  Both moments of memory (original and recalled) are conscious but where are they when in between?  In what state?

More than any other aspect, human bodies are governed by rhythms, those wavy lines we see in every medical story with patient's “brain waves” being recorded and presented on instruments.  Mostly we are only conscious of brain and heart rhythms, which are unconscious until we think of them but not necessarily controllable unless one is a yoga adept.  One researcher suggests that there is something like the sweep arm on a radar screen that keeps all this stuff more or less in sync.  If something ultra-brief happens quickly enough that the arm never hits it, it will not be perceptible.  Pretty arcane.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?x-yt-cl=84411374&x-yt-ts=1421828030&v=j_OPQgPIdKg#t=557 

This TED talk by John Searle is a big fav in a certain crowd.  Here’s this old white man who cusses and he seems to be taking down the idea that the “problem” of consciousness can be solved.  He’s defending rationality, the uniqueness of humans, and the superiority of those who “think.”  But this old white woman is here to tell you that he’s way behind the research.  We are NOT robots, we are NOT angels, but we ARE animals with a few evolved abilities that keep us VERY busy.  I remind you that computers don’t have gut feelings.  They have no guts.

Except in the movies.