Expansion of the Framework

Expansion of the Theory

I wish to expand slowly the ramifications of this simple model. Our tendency is to think of being awake and conscious as "intelligent", and the unconscious as rather simple and dumb. This could not be farther from the truth - in fact quite the reverse. The unconscious or subconscious brain is incredibly intelligent, indeed in my opinion (and that of other researchers) far more so than our conscious brain. Sure, our conscious brain copes with complex social interaction which moderate our behaviour over the purely instinctual (so as not to hurt the "feelings" of another), or abstract analytical problems. Our unconscious brain is constantly receiving, processing and filtering sensory stimuli, digesting food and distributing it throughout the body, handling nutrition, balancing pH and electrolytes, water, hormones, fighting disease, replacing old cells, etc etc etc.

We think it "just happens", but it doesn't "just happen"; it happens according to a set of instructions and control from a very intelligent and highly complex apparatus. When things go wrong, for example, and cancer takes hold it isn't easy to work out what has gone wrong and correct it. We have yet to solve asthma, allergies, digestive ailments and many other things that some bodies do well and other bodies have problems with.

Memories are stored in the unconscious brain, and accessed through an interface to the conscious brain. We normally have limited access to memory, but the abilities of Savants demonstrate show us that there are brain functions that we all may possess but not have conscious access to control.

Point #1 - the unconscious brain is highly intelligent

The next concept I wish to introduce is as follows:

Point #2 - people are different

I don't expect much disagreement on this point! Aside from the physical differences, there is variation in the brain structure.

Brain structure

According to Wikipedia, the neocortex of the brain is composed of approximately half a million columns, each of which contains approximately 60,000 neurons. As we develop we learn to use these neurons, and each person develops use of these neural pathways slightly differently. This is a very important point. We know that kids require adult guidance to develop "normally". For example, wild kids (such as those unfortunate cases where a kid has been locked in a basement under the house from birth and fed through a small hole) develop like animals, with limited speech and social skills from which they never fully recover. Definiciences in early childhood development cannot be made up for in later life. These neural pathways develop in certain ways and form preferred pathways which has a great deal of bearing on the functioning of the adult. Some develop with more intelligence (IQ) or creative abilities than others.

The development of social skills affects individuals, and also results in cultural differences between races across the planet. For example, we notice that when non-English speaking races learn English, they have distinctive characteristics - Indians speak English differently to Chinese who learn to speak English, and when we hear one speak we can quickly tell that they are Chinese or Indian by race by their distinctive accent. Their vocal tract isn't any different, it is the way it is being controlled by the brain. We all know this, it is very simple, and highly significant to my developing argument.

To recap:

Point #3 - there are variations in the development of the neural pathways in the neocortex, which largely forms the "conscious" part of our brains
Point #4 - There are variations between individuals. However, there are also common traits which serve to identify races or groups of individuals as distinct from another.
Point #5 - the development of neural pathways can be affected and altered by external conditions, and/or conscious thought. We can learn new things. If we stop doing something we gradually lose the ability (eg playing the piano). Science knows that we make use of only a few "preferred" neural pathways out of the countless billions of possible neural interconnections in the brain.
Point #6 - there is also variation in the development of the unconscious brain structures between individuals. This is harder to tell because we aren't aware of the unconscious stuctures. However, it can manifest itself in various guises, such as phobias - a person may enter a distressed condition inside enclosed spaces, or when flying in an aeroplane, or if entering deep water. Because phobias are below the level of normal awareness they are much harder to deal with.

We look outwards

I am going to continue expanding the argument into new territory and introduce some of my own theories. First it should be noted that:

Point #7 - we focus most of our attention on the external world. Looking outward and processing external stimuli. This is primarily exercising the neocortex, the outer brain. Activating the social and language skills and perhaps motor co-ordination.

Of greater interest to me is the inner world, the subconscious. This area of the brain becomes pre-programmed with emotions. How exactly this happens nobody is quite sure. Perhaps tendencies picked up during the first few years of life when the brain is developing. Eastern beliefs of reincarnation state that some of these tendencies may come from past lives - but I won't delve into that further here. Suffice to say that we have a set of deep inner beliefs that have a huge bearing on how we live our lives. We are largely unaware of their affect on our daily lives because they lie in the "subconscious" - below the level of conscious awareness. Our preferences, phobias, attitudes to all sorts of things, how we judge others, tendencies to drugs, vegetarianism, interests, how we form friendships, sexual preferences, etc. Our upbringing has an influence, as does our culture, friends, family, but we also display individualism. A person born to a good Christian church-going family can still become a thief or murderer for no obvious reason. The problem behind all this is that we don't spend any effort trying to understand what is going on inside, or how we are individually programmed.

Point #8 - the degree to which individuals are aware of their inner world depends on their own level of self-awareness. More self-aware people have greater understanding and control over their emotions and inner feelings. This is generally an advantage, and people that are more self-aware generally do better in life.

Worldly conflict

We have many problems in the world today, one being that we have many different groups of people with different belief systems and cultures that clash with others. This results in unrest, wars and terrorism. Fundamentally this comes down to the set of beliefs that some individuals and groups subscribe to, being at odds with the beliefs of other groups. These "groups" can be small minorities, or comprise hundreds of millions of people. This is quite subtle but with far reaching affects. At the common mediocre levels of self-awareness, the cultural beliefs of these groups is very useful for providing direction, maintaining law and order, and giving purpose to life. There are lots of ritual and ceremony and I'm not talking about religion and marriage. How people meet, greet, spend their free time socialising, earn a living, how the aged are respected. All these are examples of ritual.

With "globalisation" there are now fewer differences in the way that people live all over the world. We work for 5 days, then have 2 days off. We work 8 hours a day, we eat three times a day. These common behavioural practices are not some type of universal law, and this is certainly not how human beings used to live, work and eat since the dawn of creation! These conventions are very recent, and in general they work very well for us at this time on the planet. But problems can arise which suddenly force someone to confront these cultural conventions and wonder what is going on. Some familiar ones - Muslim girls being forbidden to wear headgear in French schools; white woman falls in love and wants to marry a black man; gay couple wants to get married; laws against smoking in certain places. In America it is okay to preach that the world is flat, but in Austria you can be jailed for denying the holocaust. I don't wish to debate any of these, just simply draw attention to how breaking social norms can have serious consequences.

All this is fine if the laws and conventions work for you, but if they don't you can have a big problem. The religious ones are particularly strong as the moral codes can restrain individuals more successfully than legal penalties. One group believes that you should eat before midday, another that you should not eat until after midday - and these differences will cause them to fight with each other. In my country if an unmarried woman gives birth to a child the government pays her a living allowance - in a Muslim country she could be stoned to death. If a man in most western countries today marries more than one woman he commits a serious crime, yet 4,000 years ago in India if a man only had one wife and did not take 3 or 4 as was the custom, his wife would be very concerned and think there was something wrong with him. All these cultural values are irrelevant to my developing argument. What is important is that they have evolved in society at large as useful guidelines for society at large.

Point #9 - the cultural rules work because they are not at odds with our internal programming. The values and ideals we have buried inside our subconscious.

This is a significant point. Consider when you have been asked to do something that is against what your "conscience" tells you. Everyone can be manipulated to some degree, but how far would you go to lie or steal or kill for another? Why don't you break into your neighbours house and take their possessions? Why is it wrong? It is not necessarily the penalty of law that restrains you - to most people this action would simply be "wrong".

Inner values

There are inner values to which we ascribe to greater or lesser extents. In Plato's dialogues there was frequent reference to moral values such as justice, truth, courage, temperance, piety, etc. Some people dedicate a lot of time to voluntary work and charities, to other people such work is irrelevant. Without any judgement as to what is good or bad, suffice to say that real differences exist and they don't necessarily seem result from our upbringing. Sometimes things go a little awry, as for example the obsessive compulsives who never feel clean and need to wash themselves frequently during the day. In such cases it is clear that they are responding to an inner set of rules that is not easily reasoned with.

The point of all this rambling is to drive home the point that we are not all the same and that we are driven in fundamental ways by values and desires that exist in our unconscious brain, and when we try and think about it we don't really know why we do things or believe the things that we do.

Point #10 - the degree to which we are affected by these inner desires is modifiable depending on our level of self-awareness. We can grow in self-awareness, and as we do we can rise above some of the negative tendencies. A person with a phobia of heights or spiders, for example, can learn to "get over it" - perhaps by undertaking a course of hypnosis or Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP).
Point #11 - we can change our level of self-awareness.
Point #12 - the degree of self-awareness is determined by the neural pathways between the different parts of the brain.

I'm not saying that it is a matter of how many pathways are active (remember the neocortex has half a million columns each containing 60,000 neurons). Scientists did some dissection work and determined that there was nothing inherently different between Einstein's brain and that of anyone else. Scientists also know that of the billions of possible pathways between neurons in the brain, we only use a small number of preferred pathways. The abilities that some people have over others is determined by their ability to activate and use certain pathways. Whether it is the number of pathways, or a particular pathway, or the length (long or short) of a pathway - I don't know. Perhaps "narrow thinking" is the result of a small number of highly used neural pathways, whilst thinking "outside the square" is the result of using alternate routes.

Programming the neural pathways

The pathways we use are preprogrammed to a large degree by the hormones and receptor sites in the brain. It is well known that the action of Oxytocin and Vasopressin are key to the formation of a long-term relationship. The sexual act floods the brain with these hormones which are picked up at receptor sites in reward areas of the brain, where the image of the mate is imprinted into memory with pleasant associations. Studies suggest that those individuals with a greater number of receptor sites form longer-lasting relationships. On the other hand autistics who have receptor sites in other areas of the brain have great difficulty in forming any sort of relationship.

We learn from an early age and are encouraged to repeat behaviour based on the complex inter-play of inner hormone release and the reaction of people around us. During the first few years of life this training selects preferred neural pathways in the brain, and educates a human being for a life suited to the culture into which they are born. The programming plays a part, but there is also genetic variation between each of us.

In his teachings, Ouspensky made a statement that we are all robots, and that the human body was a chemical factory. I first came across these statement about 20 years ago and at the time did not understand what he meant. He was right on. Most people are not aware of the degree to which they have been programmed. In general the social programming from an early age creates a society of good and happy people.

Problems arise when your inner tendencies cause you to clash with society or indeed yourself. When changes in the world living conditions cause different cultures to come together all sorts of difficulties can arise. Unfortunately one universal pre-programmed response is to fear and hate anyone who is different from you. You believe that should should eat before midday and you neighbour believes that you should only eat after midday, and the next thing is you are both locked in mortal combat. To me it all seems pretty weird.

Point #13 - there is a solution: an increase in self-awareness. As you become more aware of your own inner self (the stuff buried in the subconscious parts of the brain) you can become more controlled and more tolerant. Unfortunately, it requires more than just one person developing self-awareness. Everyone needs to grow in awareness.
Point #14 - an increase in self-awareness is accomplished by changing the neural pathways in the brain. The connections between the neocortex and the inner limbic brain. This is not easy, because we spend nearly 100% of our lives looking outward - developing the pathways and structures for social interaction and external stimuli.

Quote from Albert Einstein:
"No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it. We must learn to see the world anew."