Of the seemingly infinite number of paradoxes that go with being human, there is the one where we find ourselves experiencing experience as an individual, a separate being, often alone while seeking to use those tools which make us a separate being to leverage ourselves back into an experience of self that does not feel separate.

It is like using an ice cream scoop to go on a diet or reducing greenhouse gases by flying jets.

Language and storytelling are central to who and what we are as split-consciousness human beings.  We are compulsive mythmakers lining up words in fashions that evoke emotions, images and songs.

We have this ability to be two places at once by using this weird thing called imagination that makes it possible to estimate what it would be like to be in a separate time, separate place or in another person’s body or experience.

Language and imagination are so closely linked as to be almost inseparable.  Still, a person can have experiences of imagination without language.  Note that these experiences are often characterized by a nonseparate experience of self.

We intuit that language is somehow closely connected to how we keep our self identified with that which is separate.  So, to encourage an experience of nonseparate self, we seek to discover what life is like without language, story or myth.

Paradoxically, we almost always begin this process by using language, story or myth to guide us to where they don’t exist.  This is not unlike getting surfing lessons from a mountain sherpa followed by a dive into the deep.

We humans revere a vast literature that describes experience without words.  We’re famous for engaging in violent struggles over which literature lineage best describes experience without words.  The paradox of using words as guides to nonword experiences is perhaps no less paradoxical as our evident belief that the guides themselves are more important than that which the guides seek to represent.

I suspect a way to begin the process of using language, story and myth to find a doorway and pass through the doorway to an experience characterized by little or no language, story or myth is to offer attention to the stories we are engaged in.  That part of us which seems established in both realms is our attention, our perception, our ability to be conscious.  We can be conscious without being lost in story.  We do it all the time while we’re asleep.  It’s just not easy to remember.

So, in addition to using language to tell ourselves stories about how we can transcend the limitations of myth, we can just pay attention.

With time, we can learn to not read while between the lines.

Mysticism is largely about shifting identity. There are techniques–strategies and tactics–that encourage opportunities to identify at levels alternative to what occurs within one person’s body or one’s imagination. When the opportunities appear, an individual can choose to identify with something different from himself or herself.

People are engaging in such opportunities across society. Mysticism could not be further from their minds.

There was a time in our species’ past, perhaps not so very long ago, maybe as few as 3,000 generations ago, when our experience was not characterized by individuality. One of the several profound differences between then and now was that then we had a far less concise idea of the passing of time. This was true socially and biologically. Socially things just did not change much. There were no fads or fashions. Progress as a concept is barely 250 years old, let alone tens of thousands.

Biologically our brains were not sorting in a narrative, sequential path. When narrative reality emerged and spoken language acquired the ability to parse out past from present and present from future, we acquired individuality at the same evolutionary moment. With our ability to disassociate in time we were also able to imagine disassociation in space or being a different person. Empathy, envy and the other theory of mind emotions are evident in our great ape cousins. Yet, with the emergence of language and time, a depth was added to our ability to identify with the other that has a lot to do with our relationship with the future, our survival as a species and an exploration of what it means to have identity.

We started out with little language, no sense of time, no identity. We grew to become adept at speech, with a powerful sense of time, with identity. Nevertheless, without making the choice to at least on occasion not have identity, or shift identity to experience consciousness on an expanded scale, our powerful sense of time is hobbled by difficulties viewing the future as a commons, a group holding, a possession of something-larger-than-the-self.

Consider time as a territory with the future as the commons. To survive, it is necessary that we pay close attention to where our resources are stored. Paradoxically, they are stored in the future. That is where our descendants live.

This alternative path toward understanding time suggests an emerging new, third way of experiencing self. The commons is sacred space. The future is our commons. To know this we need an expanded sense of self, a shift in identity.

Whereas we started with little or no sense of self before language, with language and culture we’ve acquired a clear sense of self, of time and of that which is within our personal control. The third place, the synthesis of the first two in a sense, involves an expanded sense of self, which is very different from the no sense of self, yet they are related. We’re going from no time, to time, to yes time. We’re evolving to a place where the future can feel familiar as we intuit our connection with people and an earth that does not yet exist.

This is more than an exercise of imagination.

The opportunity we are creating to make that transition has an enormous amount to do with the new online and cell phone communications technologies. We are shifting identity. We are tying together narcissism and mass cooperation, two distinctly different identity levels, expanding our personal boundaries to include the information received from countless others.

Our defined self is being redefined to include self and others.

The next step is to cross the boundary of time.

When tens of millions of people buy SUVs because they see friends buying SUVs and they see SUV commercials telling them to do so, they are responding to one-to-many communications media commands within a consumer economy that congregates profits in the hands of those that control the communications. We are encouraged to be selfish and not think of the future. Exercising a sense of time only insofar as it offers immediate or delayed results to be experienced by the self gets us only part way to where we have to go.

New communications technologies are expanding our sense of self. Along with that our sense of time is changing. The future is ceasing to be a place that we steal from to satisfy a limited self. The future is becoming our vastest commons, offering literally infinite resources to integrate into our expanded sense of self.

While doing so we are redefining mysticism. Spirituality is acquiring another name. Spirituality now has nothing to do with mythology. Shifting identity is the name of what is now a social game.

Maybe fifteen years ago, Natalie Cole recorded a vocal track on top of one of her father’s productions, resulting in a duet between a dead Nat King Cole and his daughter.  Drew Friedman, the cartoonist, inked a panel with a skeleton performing with Natalie, suggesting an incongruence in the production.  For some, the duet felt contrived.

A unique video emerged on the web several months ago.  In the video, street musicians from cities across Europe, Africa, South America and the U.S. perform where they live, in the street, with headphones on.  They contribute both to the tracks of the performance and to the video that was recording the series of integrated performances.  The song is Stand By Me.

As in the Susan Boyle video, several story lines come together to create a powerful presentation.

When I was a boy in the 1950s, there was a TV show called Tales of the Texas Rangers.  What I loved was the beginning.  A single lawman is walking down the street.  Over the course of the growing intro music, he is joined and followed by others until by the end there are maybe 30 earnest lawmen walking in a triangle with the original guy in the forward point.  He never looks behind him.  He just knows they’re there.

In the street musicians’ video, we have a similar but less contrived production.  It begins with a single vocalist and over the course of maybe three minutes blossoms into maybe a 30-piece performance.  We get to watch each performer join one at a time, with the music growing in depth and nuance.  We are watching street musicians performing in the street.  We pay nothing for the opportunity to listen and observe this literally world class production.

Frank Rich on May 9 wrote a piece describing the void that journalism is disappearing into.  We are having trouble imagining where our news will come from when there is no income engine powering the present model.  Rich cites Clay Shirky, who goes into more detail, comparing the present transition to the switch from long hand to the printing press.

A new source of news is suggested by this street musician video, and it reveals the new direction art is taking.

With the ability of musicians to go global with a Mac and a microphone, we have the separation of art from money.  It’s about time.  I received an art degree with the assumption being that if I wanted to succeed, I would have to appeal to the educated and the affluent.  No longer.

We are in the midst of a major reframing of what success is.

We are observing an integration of almost 200 national economies, the abyss of environmental destruction forcing cooperation between all manner of differences, the surge in the Internet and communications technologies and now the horizontalization and destratification of societies across the world.  As classic capitalism continues to fall, we are heading at breakneck speed into a world where success is measured not by how many things we own or how many assets we control, but by our contribution to the relationships we are a part of.

The street musicians’ video is about making a unique contribution, no matter where we are in the world.  That contribution might be a journalistic representation of our experience or observations, an art or music production or an educational piece.  What we receive in payment may be miniscule by today’s standards.  Think of Wikipedia.  We have begun experimenting with a noncapitalist economy based upon the exchange of creative acts.

The Natalie Cole recording explored crossing the barrier of time to evoke an emotion.  We have begun piercing the barriers of both space and time with powerful and unpredictable results.  Integral to this crossing is the realization that capitalism is not the only way to achieve success.  This is particularly true when you redefine what success means.

Perhaps a particular product representing manifestations of one or more technologies could be regarded as an individual in a model that explores how heterochronic theory may apply to technological evolution.  There are far more ideas than there are actual products that are conceived when their design process begins in earnest.  An idea would be the equivalent of an egg or sperm.  As the idea becomes refined enough to begin the step-by-step procedures that involve development, we might say the idea has been conceived and is growing embryonically.  Upon production, and the introduction of the new technology or technological variation, the idea is born.

No matter how many of the products are manufactured and distributed, reproduction would not be said to occur until one of the many ideas suggested by the product begins the process of new product development.

That would be the life of an individual.  The death of a product, according to Kevin Kelly, is often greatly exaggerated.  Once produced, a product tends to linger though its production may fall off dramatically.

A technological species might be equivalent to an automobile.  A related species might be motorcycles.  Propeller airplanes more distant yet.  Propeller-driven wind turbines start to cross over into a different genus.

Whereas Darwin’s theory of natural selection is usually used to explain not only biological evolution but the evolution of technology, with the devices with the most useful features surviving, consider applying evolution’s heterochronic theory to these transformations.  Noting the ontogeny of technological devices, let’s apply the science of tracing the effects of the changing rate and timing of maturation to technology.  I would expect there to be patterns, patterns that might offer a structure to technological evolution, a structure that underlies the proliferation of new features.

In other words, in evolutionary developmental biology and the many discussions over the last 150 years around how random is random variation, there is an awareness that the features assigned to new individuals in a species congregate around those specific features that are useful in a changing environment.  Emerging features often are not random.  The environment cues epigenetic embryonic processes to encourage changes in the rate and timing of maturation.  A modified or adjusted individual can emerge when environmental information is provided that prepares that individual for what that individual will discover.

For example, let’s say a mother in a third world homeland on a low-fat diet has a child that matures relatively slowly, reaching puberty at age 17.  There are fewer resources, so species proliferation is kept relatively slow.  Upon moving to a big, industrial city, the mother transitions to a high-fat diet.  Her second embryo receives the information that resources are escalating, modifies maturation rates and emerges to reach puberty at 15, making possible, over generations, a dramatic increase in the number of individuals with her mother’s genes.

This is a modification in the timing of maturation rates, with puberty coming sooner.  It might also be a change in the rate of maturation, with maturation accelerated so that pubertal onset is accordioned to arrive at an earlier time.

Stephen J. Gould goes into detail regarding the six derivations of changes in maturation rates and timing.  For our purposes, regarding the application of these principles to technological development, we might watch for some of the following patterns…

Ongoing application of product development techniques to actual products so that the product’s creative process becomes more and more characteristic of how products are actually used.  This would be technological neoteny or paedomorphosis.  For example, computer-aided design (CAD) software used to design houses becomes over time itself used by adults as a recreational, creative experience.

Another, less abstract aspect of this would be if products used by adults today look not unlike the toys of children in the past (for example, my Mac dock looks somewhat like a 1950s toddler’s toy shelf).  I notice that the all-plastic interiors of many automobiles have the sculpted, hard plastic look of the toddler push vehicles of 40 years ago.

Consider an invention like the light bulb utilized to light cities and integrated into product and development laboratories to make it possible to work on inventions deep into the night, with the light bulb itself becoming part of new devices being invented.  This would be an example of acceleration or the withdrawal of a new feature backward into earlier stages of ontogeny, over generations.

Or, consider that the CAD software used to design houses becomes over time used by adults as a recreational creative experience and then withdraws to an earlier human ontogenetic stage to end up as a child’s toy.  This would suggest technological neoteny followed by the human use of that technology in the opposite heterochronic direction.

The trick here is discerning if these two opposite trending evolutionary forces manifest similar repercussions in technology as occurs in biology and society.  Does technological neoteny tend to encourage egalitarian, horizontal, transparent solutions contrasted with technological acceleration that might segregate information, encourage secrecy and hierarchy and congregate assets in fewer hands?  Things, of course, do not have hormones that compel drifts in particular social structure directions.  But the people that use those things are moved by their hormones and might be attracted to particular looks or functions in their technologies.

Might those processes characteristic of basic design or of design in its earliest phases of production, when carried forward over the course of product generations to appear eventually in products themselves, be a process featured by societies that are becoming more horizontal, more egalitarian, more transparent and diverse?  If the foundation of a design ontogeny is manifesting in products providing aspects of creativity and product creation to those that want it, then it seems that people are being empowered in the process.

Edison and Tesla famously fought over how electricity should be generated and distributed.  Edison sought central generation with utility control.  Tesla strived toward a form of distribution that would allow for decentralized production with inexpensive distribution.  Edison won.  How would the evolution of technology have been affected if each person had been part of his or her own local electricity collective, with the collective deciding how electricity would be generated and used?

In other words, if the electrical source was so flexible as to be influenced by consumers, design control having traveled forward down a technology ontological lineage of electrical production products, perhaps the products using electricity would have been uniquely enhanced.  We might have already been living in a world of self-powered electric cars.

Watching Technology, Entertainment, Design Lectures (TED Lectures) just now, I took in a couple of Kevin Kelly presentations.  Then I visited his blog.

Kelly is writing a book and inviting feedback from visitors for his emerging ideas.  I remember a similar process engaged in by Orson Scott Card for a book he was writing ten years ago or so.  Card was writing fiction.  The end result was disappointing.  Kelly is exploring the nature and ramifications of technology.  I expect the results will be profound.

In one of the TED Lectures of Kelly discussing the ideas he’s playing with as he writes his book, he describes technology as a seventh earth biota emerging from human machinations.  While looking at Kelly’s blog, it hit me that the principles I work with might apply to technology.

I left the following message on Kelly’s blog…

“I study the effects of neoteny and acceleration on human evolution and societal transformation.  This was called heterochronic theory over 100 years ago.  It is a biological evolutionary principle popularized for a time by Stephen Gould in his 1977 book, Ontogeny and Phylogeny.

Heterochronic theory traces the effects of changes in the rate and timing of maturation.  These effects can be profound.  Gould and others estimated that the effects of neoteny or the prolongation of ancestor infant features into the adults of descendants (modern humans) have an enormous amount to do with how we became human.

My own work explores these patterns as they influence the evolution of society.  (See neoteny.org)  Reading your work I am stunned by the possible application of these same principles to the evolution of technology with possibly predictable trajectories.  In other words, the ancestor stages of technological development may be influencing the manifestation of new technologies, as brand new discoveries are incorporated at earlier and earlier stages of our societal ontogeny.

Ontogeny may not only recapitulate phylogeny, but technology may recapitulate ontogeny.”

Consider the possibility that the speed and direction of technological innovation may have a structure isomorphic to biological evolution.  In biology, changes in maturation rates and timing influence the allometric shape, size, behavior, reproductive strategies, neurologies, physiologies and psychologies of individuals and species.  Exploring the history of technology might reveal a similar kind of mutability.

Most obviously, a product developed for use by adults, once accepted and assimilated, will work its way backward to be used by younger and younger members of our species.  Consider the reverse.  Toys, possibly having started as an adult technology at an earlier time and worked their way down to early childhood, may be carried forward by its young proponents to manifest later in adult ontogeny in another form.  An example of this might be sewing machines making possible the game of dress-up turning into avatars in virtual realities.

This still presumes a correspondence and inevitable integration between various iterations of technology and human ontogenetic stages.  Consider that technological forms themselves may manifest heterochronic tendencies independent of what stage of humans are using the devices.  In other words, ancient technologies hypothetically can be observed to prolong themselves into eventual modern forms.  This would assume that technologies manifest themselves in cycles equivalent to a single human lifespan, with beginnings, middles and ends.  Let’s say between the year 1500 and the year 2000 there were 10 product cycles in a particular technological succession.  Over that time the cycles may have grown shorter and shorter, starting at 75 years, ending up around 4 years.  Let’s say each cycle matured around halfway through the cycle.  If an aspect of the technology in the year 1505, early in the ontogeny of cycle one, appeared later in cycle 3, even later in cycle 5, emerging halfway through the cycle in cycle 8, then we could conclude that early aspects of cycle 1 were prolonging their way into later aspects of cycle 15 if those aspects were manifesting in the fourth year of cycle 15’s four-year cycle lifespan.

Do technologies have cycles?  Indeed.  In the gift industry, there are repeating trends with increasingly more sophisticated derivations.  Tracing evolutions of technologies or how technologies inspire new technologies is one thing.  Observing the prolongation of early cycle features into the later stages of descendant cycles seems as daunting as following how the later stages of ancestor technologies manifest earlier and earlier over time in later cycles of descendant technologies.

Obviously, a few examples at this point would go a long way toward making clear the potential patterns we are exploring.  Maybe readers at this juncture could jump in?

Just finished a quick read, A Short History of Progress, by Ronald Wright.  At first, I found the work annoying.  An approximately 70-page overview of human history discussed none of the competing paradigms but stuck with the conventional default view of history.  An overview observing competing theories would be interesting, but that was not Wright’s goal.  After the ~70-page set-up, he started talking about environmental destruction.

What Wright did is set up a playing field to discuss various ways we may choose to destroy ourselves.  It is a sort of CliffsNotes version of Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel plus Collapse without the erudition, insight or sense of doom.

One of the more interesting parts of the book is Wright’s comparison of Sumer and the Easter Islands with the ancient Greeks and Romans.  In Sumer and the Easter Islands, they destroyed themselves, possibly without the knowledge of how they were doing so or without a civic structure to stop the process, but the ancient Greeks and Romans observed how specifically they were agriculturally compromising their future.  The Greeks and Romans did not act to stop the self destruction.

The drama that we, more than six billion people, are in the midst of now is one where our natural inclination to act like our present behaviors have no future repercussions competes with a proliferation of communications technologies that place high quality knowledge in the hands of those that can most use that knowledge to moderate our tendency to ignore the future.

From my perspective, we are engaged in a race to produce hybrid human beings.

I’ve hypothesized that humans 4,000 generations or so ago were matrifocal, mostly anomalously dominant (both cerebral hemispheres were the same size) and largely primary process thinkers.  As primary process thinkers we were not so much engaged in ruminations on the past or imagining the future.  We did not tend to devour resources because we were not dividing the world into narrative interpretations that could be easily broken down into cause and effect.  We were in the present.  Life was very horizontal.  We were associative thinkers.  We were vulnerable.

Along came cerebral lateralization, early childhood synapse-pruning of the left hemisphere and a diminution of the corpus callosum.  Right-handedness proliferated.  We became facile with time, emerging from the dreamlike world of primary process to be able to easily estimate the effects of our actions.  We became narrative thinkers.  Observing the patterns of our surroundings, we developed an ability to predict those patterns, store what we learned and use that information to accomplish personal goals, with an emphasis on the word “personal.”  With the new patrifocal paradigm individuality emerged.  Even with an ability to predict the future, there was little attention provided to repercussions of present actions because the people in the future affected by present action had no relationship, no connection with the people in the now.

Thesis:  People living in cooperative communities with relatively few negative effects upon their environment, associative thinkers with little sense of individuality, little hierarchy, everything is transparent, what you see is what you get.

Antithesis:  People living in competitive mass societies with widespread environmental degradation, narrative thinkers reveling in cults of individuality, stratification, secrecy, the congregation of information into protected professions, the segregation of ethnicities, information and resource access.

Synthesis:  The merging of a sensitivity to time with an ability to experience the now.  A collapsing of hierarchies that feature secrecy and segregation by transforming information distribution from a pyramid model to a horizontal web or grid with no single source of information storage or control.  Instead of associational or narrative frames of reference, you integrate both together in a context where one can both imagine the future and experience the repercussions, feeling the estimated repercussions as useful information informing present behavior.  Instead of viewing the commons as a place where the individual acquires assets, the individual becomes respected for his or her contribution to the commons.

The problem I had reading Wright’s book is that it was all narrative, no association.  Without an understanding of what we humans are outside what we sequentially have been engaged in, there is little ability for us to feel our way into the future.  Paradoxically, we modern humans, with all our narrative strengths, spend little time exploring our past, back when we were not narrative thinkers, or the future when we may learn how to integrate the two thinking paradigms.

We have imaginations.  It’s time to brainstorm what we will be like when we’ve learned how to live within our world.

When I was a young child, I was terrified by death.  As a boy in my room in the dark with the night-light and my dog, I’d make sure all doors and drawers were closed and that my hands did not stray too far away and be grasped by monsters.  Anxiety, and often terror, was familiar.

The experience of feeling frightened so frequently over such a long period of time generates a kind of intimacy that itself creates an unexpected product.  The world acquires a vast presence that feels accompanying.  It’s not a pleasant feeling of an attendant familiar.  The variations of fear that include nervousness, anxiety, fear and terror began to inform who I was and how I experienced my self.  A hypersensitive theory of mind resulted, preceded at first by my having little idea of what another person might be thinking or feeling and then evolving to a certainty that what another person might be thinking and feeling had to do with me.  I see strangers.  I see them look at me.  I assume they are thinking something negative about me.

How I felt, informed how I believed the world to be.  Frightened of so much, the world acquired a constant, palpable presence.

Fear propelled me into an alternative world of imagination.  The “real” world, not as real as the fear that I was filling it with, became accompanied by a second world manufactured by my imagination.  Comic books created the basic format.  From comics I acquired morals, ethics, ambitions and story lines.  If it was good enough for Superman, it was good enough for me.  My compulsive truth-telling was a compliment to the reality of the professional, compulsive, costumed do-gooder.  Superman’s constant battles with bad guys evoked my struggles with constant fear.  Superman was rewarded with universal love.  I assigned myself approving millions.

Literally almost every school day for many years, I’d find a small stone four blocks from school, and I would see how far I could kick it down the sidewalk.  My goal was to get the rock all the way to school.  I was Arnold Palmer.  The stone had to stay on the sidewalk.  It had to cross streets.  It had to not get mixed up with other stones.  With each swing of my tennis-shoed foot there would be a hush and then the wild cheering of crowds observing my mythical golfing talents.  Crowds that loved me would follow me to school every day.  Seasons passed.  I didn’t notice.  My eyes were always on the sidewalk.

On one occasion, a rock made it the whole four blocks without getting lost or entangled in the grass.

What most powerfully informed my budding ability to manufacture attention was my father’s difficulty in noticing who I was.  Dad was a former athlete, the state high school champion in the 50-yard crawl.  Both men and women naturally liked Dad.  He was a relaxed competitor who enjoyed being with people, but he also looked forward to spending time on his own.  He loved me, but as time went on, I felt confusion about what it was about me that he was feeling affection toward.  I had almost none of the same skills or talents that he did.  What Dad noticed in me felt to be almost exclusively those things that he was good at, like athletic pursuits and mathematics.  So, it seemed like I could get him to respect me if I could do good at things I sucked at.

Getting better at those things I was good at, like art, or wanted to be good at, like writing, became about the production of a make-believe audience to take the place of the one-man audience I deeply craved.  As I grew out of childhood, I carried with me the scaffolding of the vast, frightening other that stalked me when I was little, except that, as an adult, there was now an audience that was at my disposal. This audience was not unlike the anonymous masses that watched me golf.

I seem to have traveled through large swaths of my life surrounded by my own feeling projections.  Replacing bit by bit the unreal with the real, allowing the presence of the actual, is a challenge.  One of the surprising things I’m discovering on this long walk down the sidewalk fairway is that letting there be no audience sometimes results in feeling accompanied in a completely satisfactory fashion.

Shutting down the attention manufacturing facilities can result in a proliferation of feeling loved.

Listening to the radio yesterday, I heard a Terry Gross interview with a woman author.  I don’t recall her name or the books she wrote, but she described the experience of being a bipolar author and finding herself frequently saying things she wished she hadn’t.  The author noted that the condition in its manic stage is characterized by the sharing of inappropriate words and behaviors and a difficulty identifying conventional boundaries.

I grew up with a bipolar mother, yet I’d never made the connection between the manic phase of the condition and Asperger’s, where individuals often can’t easily intuit appropriate words and behavior.  The connection suggests several questions.

Is a bipolar person having this difficulty identifying social convention boundaries during the manic stage having this same difficulty in the depression stage?  During the depression stage, is the difficulty just not obvious because of the diminution in engagement?  Or, is there an endocrinological foundation to this difficulty, with swings in hormone levels mirroring these changes in behavior?

Many women experience radical swings in mood before, during and after menstruation.  If I remember right, progesterone levels can plummet, resulting in mood changes, and in some women, migraines.  My mother was bipolar, and she had frequent migraines.  Might there be a connection between the hormone changes in a woman’s cycle and the mood swing changes in bipolar personality disorder that suggest an understanding of the hormonal underpinnings of Asperger’s and autism?

Again, going off memory, I believe bipolar disorder in women is often characterized by early puberty.  What might the relationship be between the timing of pubertal onset and these conditions?

Are the bipolar more likely to be from families with left-handers, as is the case with autism and Asperger’s?

Might there be a different etiology for male and female bipolar persons based on the rate and timing of maturation, as I hypothesize is the case for autism and Asperger’s?  The onset of schizophrenia is very different for men and women, coming later with women.

Might there be different forms of bipolar disorder, depending on pubertal onset?

OK, I have way more questions here than I have information to suggest patterns.

I have barked up a lot of trees as I have been trotting blindfolded through the forest of possibilities that have had me so captivated the last twelve years.  I seem to have a natural inclination to shut myself off to conventional interpretations.  Instead of using my eyes, I’m feeling, smelling and listening to what’s around me until I get a taste of what it is I seek.

Finding powerful ways of explaining what I’ve found becomes as important as what I’ve discovered in these forests.  Sometimes the metaphor itself feels as significant as the process the metaphor seeks to represent.

Alford Korzybski famously noted, “A map is not the territory it represents, but if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory, which accounts for its usefulness.”  From my Zen evolutionary perspective, the territory is constantly in flux, representing an infinite number of constantly shifting relationships.  My art seeks to be part of a process that creates theories that can usefully represent these constantly changing relationships, and then I want to devise metaphors to make the theories feel accessible.

The proofs part is a challenge.

So, while I develop a repertoire of metaphors, proofs elude me.

I use the Internet as a metaphor for biology, society and evolution.  I use water, waves, rivers and oceans to suggest evolutionary processes.  Music, dance and symphonies evoke interconnected transformation dynamics.  Toys, games and play evoke an understanding of processes in evolution.  I use experiences in my own life to suggest the structure of evolutionary theory.

At the same time, I search for patterns so tight, so obvious, so elegant and indisputable that the observation would qualify as a proof.  For example, if most matrifocal aboriginal tribes had the same blood type as most autistics, then a connection between the two could be surmised.  This is not the case.  You get the idea.

So, noting that the map is not the territory, I spend time blindfolded as I am looking for connections while seeking ways to represent what I have found.  I realize I am really operating on two dissociative levels, never really having experienced the “territory.”  For an artist, the trick is to somehow invest the metaphor with enough of the nature of that which is being represented that the feeling of the source material is transmitted.  Tasting truth is nourishing beyond description.  Somehow description is required to provide that taste.

So I imagine patterns, develop “as if” frames, form hypotheses and play.

I imagined that because we had larger brains 4,000 generations ago, about when culture showed evidence of emerging, and that we quite possibly had larger brains before we started using speech to communicate (we were instead dedicated to gesture, dance and song), then maybe there are larger-brained people around today that have difficulty speaking and/or are deeply committed to music.  I discovered that the autistic often have very large brains, musicians often have larger brains, and that the autistic are obsessed with pattern replication.

I had not developed a proof but an evocative hypothesis.  Though I predicted and found that the autistic have larger brains, this does not prove anything.  I predict that there would be a reduction in autism if children of high-testosterone, left-handed-family mothers were raised with features of society characteristic of our experience 4,000 generations ago.  Diets should be low in gluten and low in casein, and there should be nonstop music with lots of rhythm, increased gestural communication featuring touch, more physical activity and tons of dance.

Because a mother with one autistic child has a one in five chance of having another (as opposed to 1 in 150), then this might be the group of women to try this out.  Convincing people to follow such a protocol seems unlikely.

So, I sniff, feel and listen for connections that call out to be recognized.  Only, when I describe the connections, I find I’m making art, not science.

Beauty feels deeply present and familiar.  Usefulness lingers just beyond my reach.

People can be so vain that they believe that being thought vain would be an assault to their persona.  So, they compensate by making sure that they appear unkempt in both the way they look and how much they seem to care when others regard them.

People who are aware that they are deeply narcissistic, ashamed that this is the case, might be appalled that someone thinks they are narcissistic, and so they pay close attention to their behavior, encouraging the exhibition of sensitivity and compassion.

I’ve noticed in my male friends and in myself varying degrees of obsession/compulsion as we now begin the process of winding down our lives.  We are stalked by a deep desire for sex and/or immortality.  I’m not even exactly sure how the two are different.  At a younger age, the craving for sexual union was far stronger, but there were undertones of desire for immortality.  But when one is growing older, the desire for immortality, if anything, seems to have intensified.  And, now that I think of it, sexual fantasies now often culminate with the making of a baby.  This was never the case when I was young, though when young I engaged in sexual fantasies maybe 100 times more than I do now.  I felt like an ambulatory yearning machine.

When I was young, I was obsessed with union, motivated in no small part by a deep disrespect for myself that verged on self loathing.  Now, I desire union while retaining some positive self regard, aware that union means an inevitable loss of self.

So, I seek immortality while at the same time yearning for a nimble abandonment of self.  I would guess that this is peculiarly male, with many exceptions, of course.

The point I’m making is that as a male I observe a deep desire to make an impression.  This impression I seek to make takes the form of effecting change and influencing events long after I am gone.

I see the same dynamic engaged in my 50s friends, often with startling intensity.  Clearly, fear is a variable in this equation.  Perhaps as we come closer to dying there is, for a time, more resources available to make sure life has not been in vain.

Again, there is a vanity here that is not shared by the women that I know.

I notice that when even my closest friends sometimes exhibit successes in their lives, I am jealous.  These envies emerge with less frequency as I grow older.  For example, I am now rarely jealous of love in others’ lives.  I feel loved in mine.  I do not now reflexively pine when I see close sharing.  Nevertheless, when it comes to success, I find myself frequently interpreting another person’s gain as my loss.  It’s like the way I used to drive.  Every car going my direction was competing to get someplace before me.  I drove like a maniac.  Everywhere I journeyed, I arrived stressed.

My driving habits changed when I struck a girl. (I broke her ankle.)

My feeling of jealousy of love evolved when I let myself feel loved by a woman.

My envy of others’ success is still engaged.  I respond to this by often hiding my successes from my friends.  I estimate that they will feel as I do, feeling jealous of me, if I reveal that something particularly good has happened in my life.  So, while feeling comfortable with sharing miseries and failures, I am loath to show what has happened that is good.

Seeking immortality, I only care about the regard of strangers.  I would prefer that my friends not know of my success.

Narcissism, when combined with fear, shame, jealousy and desire can manufacture some unique life orientations.  Vanity can run so deep that it seeks to make sure it isn’t seen.  Growing older does not mean we are withdrawing from the competition.  Sometimes growing older just means we know exactly where we’ve been.

OK, let’s take the garden hose analogy a little further.  B = brain, CC = corpus callosum.  (See yesterday’s entry for what’s going on here.)

Fat Hose with Small Nozzle        Big B/Little CC     late puberty         Schizo Paranoid
Fat Hose with Fat Nozzle            Big B/Big CC        late puberty         Autism
Small Hose with Small Nozzle    Little B/Little CC  early puberty       Normal
Small Hose with Fat Nozzle        Little B/Big CC     early puberty       Schizo Depressed

Here puberty further exaggerates a tendency to exhibit a nonuseful condition.  A question is to what degree gender influences this paradigm.  In schizophrenia, males often contract the disorder several years before a female does.  It’s not as if a woman’s brain grows smaller over the intervening time, but her brain continues to grow while a male’s brain does not.  Why would a larger brain increase the likelihood of a female contracting the disorder but not increase the likelihood of a male contracting the disorder?

I seem to vaguely remember that manic depression in females is often accompanied by early puberty.

In my autism hypothesis based on a heterochronic interpretation of recent human evolution, males and females exhibit autism in complementary opposite ways.  Pubertal onset is not a factor because autism is an early childhood condition.  Still, while autistic males are hypothesized to have brains larger than the conventional male, autistic females are estimated to have brains about the same size as the conventional female.  This is because autism, as an evolutionary condition, emerges as a child moves back in evolutionary time.  I hypothesize that 100,000 years ago males had bigger brains.

How exactly this juxtaposes with the garden hose analogy is not clear to me, but it seems that the timing of schizophrenia and bipolar onset is a major clue.

I’ve been reading a paper by Bernard Crespi, Psychosis and Autism as Diametrical Disorders of the Social Brain.  Crespi places ASD, or autistic trending conditions, at one end of a continuum opposite schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and depression at the other end.  One of the features of the theory is that the autistic display little theory of mind, but the schizophrenic show an enhanced theory of mind and easily estimate that others are thinking things they aren’t.

It looks to me like he’s sometimes cherry picking his supporting studies to congregate patterns around an elegant hypothesis.  I must admit I do the same myself.  Suggesting that this wide range of conditions can be cooked down to a single etiological dynamic is not likely.  It is likely, for example, that autism is actually several conditions.  When I go to the dentist with pain, it might be an abscess, a cavity or a bruise.  The dentist doesn’t call all three tooth pain.  He discovers the cause and names the pain based on what he concludes caused the pain.  Someday autism will have several names.

In the meantime, Crespi explores genetic hypotheses for explanations that might explain the patterns that he sees.  I study the rates and timing of maturation and their juxtaposition with social structure.  We both seem to be focused on the possibility that the influence of sexual issues on the mother is integral to understanding these conditions.

One thing that strikes me is his estimation that schizophrenics display too much theory of mind, assigning intention or deliberation to contexts where they do not sit.  Consider a person not considering that someone else can manifest deliberative tendencies.  This may be because the first individual is not self aware.  There is also the possibility that he or she is very self aware, but still not aware of awareness in others.  Then there is the third of four polarities where the individual is not self aware and is hyper alert to motivations of other people.  Last, there are those that are self aware and sensitive to others’ awareness.  All four poles may exhibit more or less of an extreme.

Like I do in my work, Crespi pays attention to brain size, corpus callosum size and even to degrees of lateralization.  What I am wondering at this particular moment is if the four awareness paradigms just noted could be explained by variations in two variables exhibiting four results.  One variable would be fluctuations in cerebral lateralization with right hemispheres more or less pruned by childhood synapse pruning.  The other variable would be corpus callosum size.

Large brain with both hemispheres the same size (no right hemisphere synapse pruning with large corpus callosum).

Large brain with both hemispheres the same size (no right hemisphere synapse pruning with small corpus callosum).

Smaller brain with the right hemisphere synapses pruned with large corpus callosum.

Smaller brain with the right hemisphere synapses pruned with small corpus callosum.

An additional effect is the timing of pubertal onset, which sets off the second cascade of synapse pruning that accompanies puberty.  So, you have early and later puberty impacting the four neurological prototypes just mentioned for a total of eight etiological paradigms.

There seems a suggestion of this perspective by theorists T. J. Crow and other European theorists.  I’ve seen brain size estimations compared to different types of alcoholism and season-of-birth effects compared with schizophrenia and autism.  (There may be correlations between season of birth and brain size.)  Still, this particular eight-paradigm breakdown seems unfamiliar.

Big Brain/Big Corpus Callosum/Early Puberty
Big Brain/Big Corpus Callosum/Later Puberty
Little Brain/Little Corpus Callosum/Early Puberty
Little Brain/Little Corpus Callosum/Late Puberty
Big Brain/Little Corpus Callosum/Early Puberty
Big Brain/Little Corpus Callosum/Later Puberty
Little Brain/Big Corpus Callosum/Early Puberty
Little Brain/Big Corpus Callosum/Later Puberty

Now, consider the four-pole awareness paradigm….

Self Unaware/Others Unaware
Self Aware/Others Unaware
Self Unaware/Others Aware
Self Aware/Others Aware

…and how it integrates with the eight pole cerebral paradigm….

Big Brain/Big Corpus Callosum/Early Puberty            Self Unaware/Others Aware?
Big Brain/Big Corpus Callosum/Later Puberty            Self Unaware/Others Unaware?
Little Brain/Little Corpus Callosum/Early Puberty
Little Brain/Little Corpus Callosum//Late Puberty
Big Brain/Little Corpus Callosum/Early Puberty
Big Brain/Little Corpus Callosum/Later Puberty          Self Aware/Others Aware?
Little Brain/Big Corpus Callosum/Early Puberty          Self Aware/Others Unaware?
Little Brain/Big Corpus Callosum/Later Puberty

I’m playing here, not feeling like I’m uncovering anything significant.  Nevertheless, I suspect if this emerging model has predictive power, males and females will appear in different places on this grid, with their positions influenced by their evolutionary histories (see “Introduction to the Theory of Waves“).

Let me try a garden hose analogy to make this make sense.  Consciousness is the water that squirts out the end.

Fat Hose with Small Nozzle        Big Brain/Little Corpus Callosum        Schizo Paranoid
Fat Hose with Fat Nozzle            Big Brain/Big Corpus Callosum           Autism
Small Hose with Small Nozzle    Little Brain/Little Corpus Callosum     Normal
Small Hose with Fat Nozzle        Little Brain/Big Corpus Callosum        Schizo Withdrawn

I’m going to have to come back to this another time.  It seems there are potentially useful patterns here, but a problem is that I know so little about schizophrenia.  Also, I’m having a hard time wrapping my head around the female and male versions of the above.  I suspect the debilitating outcomes of these brain architectures will vary between male and female subjects.

There is the possibility that while seeking to parse out narrative and associational frames of reference a sort of nature/nurture fictitious struggle will ensue.

It’s not a question of one or the other.  For example, nature and nurture are two sides of the same hand, different perspectives on the same process.  It depends on where you place your identification.  The more you identify with exchange of information, the more integrated the two processes become.

Whether something is a matter of free will or fate is an issue of scale.  It depends on where you place your identification.  The lower down you identify, the less control you will estimate you have.

We humans have five conscious senses with varying degrees of narrative and associational emphasis.  Sound has a deeply narrative quality revealing depth with time.  Feeling trends toward the associational, providing an ability to integrate massive numbers of different stimuli simultaneously.  The visual sense has features of both, but excels at the ability to represent a number of different pieces of information in a single, integrated, simultaneous whole.

We live life in both narrative and associational frames, leaning one way or the other, depending on perceptual emphasis, hereditary predispositions, environmental effects and how we choose to live our lives.

There is no need to choose between the compulsion to interpret and experience life through narrative stories and associational living in the now.  We can do both.

There is no need to choose between heredity and environment.  Again, the lower down you identify, the less control you will estimate you have.  Shift identity and embrace both.

There is no need to choose between free will and fate.  Both are true.

Narrative and associational processing of experience are two ways we choose to move through time.  It seems like either we stand in the river as the river runs by us or we choose to float downstream.

Being the river, there is no confusion.

It helps if you have no you to be confused.

For several months now, the Republicans have been seeking to find a way to demonize the Obama Administration, experimenting with the words “socialist” and “fascist” to see which word seems more powerful at evoking fear.

“Fascist” suggests a one-party government controlled by a small elite, often with close ties to specific corporations.  Fascism is often characterized by an atmosphere composed of fear and reprisal.

“Socialist” seems to imply a government focused on the group instead of the individual, denying individuals their desire to do as they please while seeking ways to make the less economically advantaged individuals within the group more secure.  Implied is the denigration of individual rights.

In both cases, there is the implied “in” group and “out” group.  Republicans are seeking ways to have people who identify with being the out group identify with Republicans, who identify themselves as the out group.  Regarding fascism, Republicans work the meme that Democrats are in total control.  Declaring socialism, they imply that the individual has lost all ability to achieve success.

Republicans and Democrats are mirror images of each other in many ways, particularly as regards the military, military contracts, lobbying-based government, foreign relations and both parties agreeing on how the majority of government assets are dispersed.  There is a drift left in hard times that reflects an assignment of government assets to those with the least ability to influence government policy.  In severe downturns, there tends to be less an emphasis on making it easy for the wealthy to become wealthier.  At this time, the Republicans represent those so wealthy that even a moderate turn left represents a potential decrease in an ability to increase assets.  Hence the words “fascist” and “socialist” seem to be emerging easily from their lips.

Both fascism and socialism seem “un-American” and so are used to generate feelings that support an entitled Right status quo that has deeply stratified the nation.  The Right is focusing on the wrong place entirely.  The Right is behaving like the Democrats are their enemy.  They think they are targeting the meme that opposes their interests.

What is changing is the way that humans view themselves, communicate and prioritize.  The massive wave of horizontalization that is underway represented by Internet communication, cell technologies, massive online gaming communities, virtual worlds, interactive entertainment and the destruction of traditional news distribution vehicles is resulting in the democratization of society.

People are feeling empowered.

This is not in the Right Wing’s interest.  It’s not particularly in the interest of mainstream Democrats.  It is in the interest of destratification and lives not consumed with want.

Republicans can continue to call the Obama Administration fascist or socialist.  It’s not unlike yelling at the pitcher in a baseball game, not even from the stands, but through the TV.  Screaming at the actual medium carrying the information might be addressing the changes more directly. Except, in this case, it’s not coming through the TV.

The shift occurring is not represented by differences between the two political parties. The words “socialist” and “fascist” fail to marshal the associations that make clear where we could be headed. Republicans need new epithets. They need to be hurling their slurs in new directions.

Only the transformation, the evolution is so deep, so pervasive, so subtle and sophisticated that so far, we’ve few words that have been able to describe it. Clay Shirkey comes close. Howard Reingold intuits the direction. Ken Wilber describes where he believes we end up. None have coined the word that grasps it.

“Fascist” or “Socialist” don’t do the trick. We’re talking evolution, not revolution. Republicans are locked in a political paradigm. This is a social transformation.

It was the amateur linguist Benjamin Whorf that noted that without a word, we often fail to notice a thing’s existence.

We are noticing. It’s clear that many of us don’t know what to say.

More and more work is emerging that is noting the influence of the Internet on society as regards the web as a communications media informing how we view the world.

This is a process rather than language version of the Sapir/Whorf hypothesis that the structure of the process through which information is disseminated deeply influences the content that is shared.

Marshall McLuhan understood and communicated that different media suggested different solutions to the problems that society wrestles with.  One-to-many media in a hierarchical society limit an ability to consider horizontal, many-to-many solutions.  There are specific problems created by allegiance to specific media, problems particularly difficult to deconstruct in an environment committed to those specific media.

One-to-many media encourage apathy and a belief that we as individuals can only have a limited effect.  This helplessness keeps hierarchical societies stratified.

The Internet encourages an experience of personal empowerment by offering individuals an ability to achieve goals and communicate in fashions that result in change.  There is a not so subtle realignment of orientation to identifying with a group as a means to specific ends.  On the web, becoming a member of a group is quick and seamless.  Achieving ends becomes quick and seamless.  The deification of the individual that accompanies one-to-many communications (note the incredible number of TV ads hawking individuality) becomes unnecessary in an Internet environment where the individual actually feels empowered by associations with conglomerations.  It’s all about the commons.

The Internet is fostering what the Republicans call socialism.  The media transformation is changing the political landscape along with how we process information and interpret content.

My guess is that the future will look somewhat like how Scandinavia is embracing the new media.  It is a society with a politic prepared to understand and utilize a horizontal, transparent and diverse media.  Look there first for where we’re going.  An Icelandic lesbian female head of state seems a reasonable direction to be headed as barriers come down and anything that is possible can be discussed.  There are few barriers in many-to-many communications.

There are many books and blogs out there on the seismic media/social/political shift that we are experiencing.  Too much attention can’t be provided to how the structure of the new media changes the structure of society and the way that an individual experiences self.  The medium is the message.

I wrestle with ways to communicate my theory of human evolution.  It is necessary I translate a non-narrative paradigm into a narrative format.  Human beings happen to experience the world narratively.  This seems a result of two related developments.  The first is our having developed language as a function of the narrative art forms dance and song (part of my hypothesis).  The second is a result of our having evolved split consciousness, which allows an ability to manifest imagination, which is an exercise involving being two places at once, two times at once, with an ability to consider what does not exist.

Narrative is essential when communicating with humans.  If a species from another planet only communicated in fashions characterized by simultaneity and sent us a string of signals designed to be aggregated into a single piece, we’d probably have no idea how to begin to interpret the communication.  For example, maybe Martians communicate in a form like an abstract painting, embedding deep and thoughtful messages in color variation, location, contrast, intensity, size, framing conventions and context.  We’d be clueless.

Narrative communication is a human convention.  We are a species obsessed with time.  It is difficult considering language without time.

Consider that theorists usually don’t receive all in one piece the theory they seek to share.  The concept evolves over time, gathering momentum as pieces fit together, acquiring character as various bits of information accumulate to support the possibilities.  Sometimes the stories behind theories are presented along with the theory itself, but usually that is only when the theory has become well known.

Consider that the story of how a theory comes together may hold a deeper power to evoke an understanding of the theory structure than the final abbreviation most of us are exposed to.  In other words, perhaps it would be easier to understand and intuit a theory if we were familiar with the details of how it came to be.

In art there is often an obsession with the artist. Those with a passion for art often seek insight into the product by becoming intimate with the processes of the creator.  Regarding science, consider that the creation of the theorist reflects an observable and recordable personal experience that offers a deeper underlying understanding of the theory.

Of course, there is a thriving science biographer business, but I am talking about something slightly different.  Consider that science theories be presented in a context that offers insight into the process that made the theory.

There is a cottage industry of Darwin biographers that seek to understand how exactly it was that that particular man at that unique time exposed to specific influences resulted in his theory of natural selection.  Adam Smith, Malthus, the Galapagos finches, Lyell’s geology and other factors all combined to evoke the theory.  Fascinated by evolution and evolution theories, I am also drawn to the contexts that create the theories.

Familiar with a detailed step-by-step narrative of how a theory came about, we might be able to anticipate results.  Exposed to numerous examples of these personal evolutions of understanding, perhaps we could be taught the structure of insight along with the structure of the discipline being explored.

I carry with me the belief that portions of the theory communicated on this website will, at some point, be considered useful.  If that proves to be the case, as an amateur with a training and background in art, I am curious to know if the context of the theory’s formation offers an ability to inform how a theory can be created.  Over the last year my conjectures have unfolded narratively, insights emerging on screen as they form, informed by the conditions of my life.  I want to know how process informs production.

Consider that the blog format or journal, like narrative communication, offers visitors context potentially revealing process integral to insight.  Noting that though this is a narrative format, it is deeply integrated into a vast associational web or network allowing an ability to influence and be influenced efficiently over great distances.

It is possible that an ability to utilize narrative forms to discover the underlying dynamics of an idea can only become possible with an associational matrix to provide perspective.  Not unlike the Martian painting, the web offers an ability to intuit a massive amount of information in something like an associational simultaneous medium.  The web is not only a narrative medium.  Yes, it moves through time.  Yet, the web offers a simultaneous experience characterized by massive associational interaction.

Perhaps that simultaneity will offer us the leverage to experience and revere the power of the story behind a theory to really reveal what a theory is all about.

My laptop is down.  It sits at the left side of my desk.  At the right side of my desk is the older unit I used until three years ago.  That is where I sit until Bob arrives and figures out what’s wrong.  When that’s fixed, I’ll have access to all current projects and I’ll be able to start my day.

Just now, sitting in my chair three feet to the left of its usual location, leaned back in the chair with my head cocked to the side, I was startled into noticing a particularly powerful combination of visual elements outside the window of the office.  The way that the oak tree, banister, stop sign, distant foliage and apartment building across the street arranged themselves was a uniquely powerful congregation of composition, color, contrast and depth.  When I untilted my head, the arrangement was still there, but I’d never noticed it before.  All it took was an unexpected adjustment in my viewing angle from an unusual position behind my desk to recognize beauty that had always been there.

It’s all about the frame.  The window “frames” the world to allow a particular point of view.  A framed painting cues the viewer that there is a communication occurring within a nonarbitrary boundary.  Art is about nonarbitrary boundaries allowing a settling of perception into deliberate perspectives.  Whereas life is rife with attempts to communicate particular points of view, art allows a context where this can occur while the observer is aware that this is the case.  Perhaps artists take themselves too seriously, believing the content of their communication is the point.  For me, what art is about is the awareness that we are aware.  By continually adjusting our perception to different frames, we can become aware of the relativity of experience and perception.

The primary way that humans fashion or frame experience is through language.  We take language very seriously and so often forget it is only a frame, a system that suggests where we put our attention.  The relativity of words are forgotten, their associational properties neglected as we instead embrace the concepts they seek to only represent.  We take words very seriously.  We forget we are practicing art in every moment.

Chomsky hypothesized that language emerged as a selected cluster of grammatical structures that showed evolutionary fitness and survived.  Consider that language, a framing mechanism that seems to somehow accompany split awareness (split because one is aware, and one is aware that one is aware), is a direct reflection of embryonic epigenetic relationships between an ontogenetically growing individual and an environment supplying information regarding particular ways to grow.

There are two shifts in understanding how we grow and evolve that contribute to this alternative way of understanding how language may have emerged.  First, consciousness always existed.  There is the big consciousness that characterizes the whole, and there is the consciousness featured by every individual.  Individual consciousness is not self aware.  Life is not lived in frames.  A dog is not aware of its dogness in the context of a larger world.  The dog is just aware.

When we become aware that we are aware we embrace the frames.  We are choosing our perspectives, our world views.  Our minds are split with a characteristic sensitivity to different time, place and personhood.  We can experience empathy because we can understand a time and place different from the time and place we occupy right now.

The first of the two shifts in understanding is characterized by split consciousness as opposed to consciousness.  Pure consciousness or nonsplit consciousness is where we mostly spent our time perhaps as recently as 50,000 years ago, when in the womb, or when last dreaming.

The second of the two shifts in understanding has to do with a reappraisal of what we think our boundaries are.  Classic evolutionary theory has us slowly adjusting over generations to environmental contingencies that prune those of us with less talent for achieving procreation opportunities.  Consider that as only a fraction of the story.  Arguments among theorists for over a century have revolved around understanding how exactly the features of individuals are generated for an environment that then determines who survives.

Variation is not random.

A place to look to discover nonrandom feature proliferation is in the human womb, where the environment is having a profound effect upon the individuals that emerge.  Consider that language, the way the split consciousnesses have found to communicate with each other, is a direct reflection of the epigenetic conversation between heredity and environment in the womb.  Seeking the structure of language, we need go no further than discovering the particular ways that environment and heredity converse.

Consider that the language of language is deeply similar to how an individual listens and responds to the world while in the womb.  We prolonged the womb experience into the post-birth world, introducing society to our ability to converse.

Split consciousness emerged with humans acting out the role of both heredity and environment, having learned to both speak and listen.  Having carried the womb experience into adulthood, we have brought with us the language of the womb.

In other words, human society with its constant shifting of frames is acting out an ancient womb environment of infinite growth contingencies.  Every looking out a window is a natal balancing of incoming information in preparation for another ontogenetic shift.  Who we are as human adults is deeply informed by our experience in the womb.

It requires a shift in position to view split consciousness as integrally tying together natal epigenetic (womb environment/heredity) conversations and language.  Viewing things in different ways is what being human is all about.

At a gathering of a group of seven friends in April, folks in their 40s to 60s, someone mentioned the Susan Boyle video.  Everyone had seen it after being directed to it by other friends.  On that particular day, over 35 million people had viewed the most popular version of the video.

I was deeply moved by the piece as had been the other people in the discussion.  There seemed numerous layers to the production.  We began parsing out some of those layers as have millions since Susan Boyle appeared that night.

There was a lifting of veils on several levels, usually characterized by a reversal of expectations.

Most obviously there was the ugly duckling story.  Expectations were flipped completely as an expectation of the mundane was replaced by an experience of the exceptional.

There was the participation in a sadistic ritual of expecting to observe the destruction of someone’s dear dream to instead becoming aware that we had been participating in a sadistic ritual.  The power of Boyle’s art ripped away the very context that had created the opportunity for her performance to occur.

A deep congruence emerged in her performance that is perhaps so rare as to be almost unfathomable.  The song she chose was a presentation of the moment she was in, lyrics perfectly pacing the context of the execution of her talent.  I’ve never seen American Idol or the other variations of this show.  For me, it was a new experience to view and hear someone so vulnerable with a particular dream singing about being vulnerable with that dream.  She seemed to be singing about the very moment she was in.

We were not just observing a talented performance; we were observing an artfully produced video portraying a community engaged in unanimous consent.  The video piece I saw was highly produced with cutaway views of judges and other participants offering several variations of astonishment, from exuberance to epiphany.  The audience erupted in approbation before Boyle had finished a single line.  Contributing to Boyle’s talent was the skill of the producers of the short piece along with the universal adoration expressed by those present at the event.  For example, after Boyle’s performance the background music guided us on what to feel.

As an online video, it allowed us to listen/watch multiple times.  The piece was short, allowing easy entrance from our daily routine.  It was easy to share with folks we know, creating millions of bridges among friends in the middle of the day.

The Susan Boyle video was an obvious next step in the transformation of modern culture as we have now moved from one-to-many television media creations of shared societal experiences to many-to-many online sharings.  Starting with the Kennedy assassination, last occurring with the Obama inauguration speech, media has been encouraging mass experience, nurturing large shared contexts that attract us.  We are now crossing a line where what is created in a media/art hybrid is distributed not by corporations but through the actions of individuals.  Individuals have created video that has acquired followings of millions.  The Boyle piece is a harbinger of things to come.  It will not be long before a video garners a billion viewers.  That video will not be made by a corporation.

In a very real way, American Idol and other shows allowing voting by the viewer from their home are shows making significant contributions to the empowerment of the population.  People are becoming used to feeling good as part of a community that is having an effect.  What we influence as part of a corporate media entertainment vehicle is insignificant.  What we are learning about what feels good as part of a larger group is compelling.  Combine the spontaneous sharing of what makes us feel good with an expectation that we can have a positive influence and you achieve something that looks very much like Susan Boyle looked before she stepped out on that stage.

Susan Boyle manifested the optimism, exuberance, creativity and confidence of the very young, a stage in our development usually quashed by life and circumstance.  The rituals of American Idol and its variations are built around a sadism born of deep disappointment.  We experience sadistic satisfaction while observing the loss of innocence, the violation of trust that we all experienced when we transitioned out of the Susan Boyle space.  It is a sadistic satisfaction with roots in rage and grief.  We carry this loss throughout our lives.  Sometimes it manifests as compassion.  Sometimes as sadism.  Observing Susan Boyle before her performance, we had a direct window into the soul of the child that expects success because he or she feels the success within her.

It is a feeling we are beginning to experience across society.  It is an experience we are learning to share.

The experience of younger children living life within a world that embraces and respects them is becoming a social and political reality of adults when vehicles like the Internet and social networking allow an exponential increase in our idea of community while permitting a sharing of our experiences online.  The Susan Boyle video offered a lifting of veils on several levels, not the least of which is an opportunity to view our child self as healed, revered adult performer along with an inkling of what our future society holds.

Rummaging around some old papers stacked behind my desk, I found a 1987 Neuropsychologia piece titled “Associations of Handedness with Hair Color and Learning Disabilities” by Schachter, Ransil and Geschwind.

The researchers puzzle over the seeming connection between increased left-handedness and blond hair.  I would additionally consider left-handedness as a marker for male maturational delay and possible increases in autism and Asperger’s.

What has me muddling over the various connections at this moment is the profound difference between rates of left-handedness in countries where blond hair is common, like Scandinavia, vs. Asia, where left-handedness is about 2%.  This would suggest that autism rates in Asia would be lower.  Of course, percentage totals are profoundly complicated by differing diagnostic protocols and social support systems.  There does not even seem to be consensus that Asian rates of handedness are really lower than in the West, with many academics suggesting that prejudice is so strong against sinistralality in the East that the low numbers reflect only that strong bias.

So, it’s not the case that we’re exploring patterns with clear conventions regarding even basic agreements on the percentages of autism and handedness.

Nevertheless, the following is what is bothering me right now.  As discussed in earlier pieces, there are two neoteny paradigms in modern human society.  Scandinavians exhibit the blond hair and blue eyes with lanky builds that we might hypothesize have higher rates of left-handedness and autism, with mothers exhibiting higher testosterone, while Asians exhibit dark hair, dark eyes and short statures that we would suggest is associated with low rates of left-handedness and low rates of autism.  The cluster of neotenous features that Asians exhibit is a different variety of features than Scandinavians exhibit, characteristics that include the more fragile childlike features, flatter faces, epicanthic folds and relatively large head-to-body proportion.

In earlier pieces, I’ve concluded that specific hormone distributions, guided by social structure proclivities, inform differing physiological trait manifestations.  I’m still trying to wrap my head around the two different neoteny prototypes and what specifically might cause those specific differences.  Why dark hair and eyes in Asians?

Staff is starting to show up, it being past 9:00 a.m.  Got to start my day.

In Nicaragua in the 1980s, deaf children were collected in schools where they could be taught together in one location.  They had developed individually various sign conventions, and a language spontaneously emerged where they were gathered in one place.  The oldest children learned this language slowest.  The youngest developed lightning fast sign fluency in this brand new nonverbal creole lingo.

One of the things that makes humans unique is this ability to play with time.  Language, by prying apart the present into a future and past, offers an ability to imagine being in two places at once.  Language lets you realize that the person you are communicating with is a different person, with the rather astonishing insight that the world is not just here and now.

There was a time when we were animals, experiencing the world through an infinitely lingering present, unclear on the boundaries between self and others, where dream was not only night but the every day.

Animals may not have developed humor exactly, but they have fun.  Animals don’t generate and participate in symbolic language, but they play.  Animals that have fun and play are mostly young animals.  Consider that human humor and language, two things characterized by abstract thinking that involves deep intuitions for variations in time and place, have their origin in the play behavior of the very young.

Think of those tiny Nicaraguan children effortlessly synthesizing and systemizing a wholly new language from the behaviors of the children that surrounded them.  You can bet that they were having fun.

Play is symbolic.  Play is the precursor to the symbolic behaviors that follow that include humor, language and abstract thinking.  Play has its origins with the young.  Perhaps play is the foundation of what it is to be human.

Where does play come from?

I would like to suggest that in the womb we are not just growing larger following a genetic template to only revel in the fun after being born.  Consider that while in the womb, we are engaged in deep play as genetics interact with the environment, constructing unique growth pathways while weighing the varying options made available.  Play in a sense is to practice, being here and now while being either far away, older, having a different emotion, being a different person….play is to be both what is and what might be.  In the womb we are engaged in an unfathomable play that is exploring an almost infinite number of ways to be grown-up.

Again, consider those Nicaraguan toddlers outgesturing every other child in the school.  How is it that the youngest have the deepest intuition for possibility?

Perhaps because the younger we are, the closer we are to creation.

As a member of the board of directors of the old and respected print publication In These Times (ITT), I have a front row seat observing media and social transformation.  As our society changes, so does its institutions.  In These Times, like many print businesses, is facing change.

Perhaps unique to this situation is that ITT is itself a publication that represents the forces of change, having represented a Left/Progressive perspective for several decades.

In These Times is transitioning to a board-of-editors format from a traditional paid-staff paradigm, forced into this alternative organizational and production structure by an unforgiving economic environment.  There is no irony here.  As a harbinger of change, ITT is changing.

Across the country, there is much talk of the 1930s both because our economy feels informed by what happened last time things were this bad, but also because it was in the 1930s that there was a powerful societal shift from corporate interests to the commons.  In the 1930s, that shift was characterized by hierarchical institutions championing positions that empowered those with almost no ability to help themselves.  The unions exhibited strength and vision.  The Democratic Party sometimes reflected this grass roots, “common man” perspective.

Eighty years later, institutions like In These Times, inspired by the struggle that characterized the 1930s, are facing a wholly new transition environment characterized not by hierarchies carrying banners of revolution but by a massive collapsing of hierarchies as a wave of horizontal, transparent and diverse forces transform the landscape.

How do our institutions that are dedicated to social and political transformation both survive and embrace this new egalitarian/interconnected/interdependent world?

In These Times is seeking to stay centered on print, supplemented by the web.  ITT has older print subscribers and large contributors expecting to receive their news and insights on a printed page.  This is a transitional solution.  Print is embraced by an older demographic.  Yet the web offers few income engines, little opportunity to garner capital to pay expenses.  Web traffic numbers that offer robust remuneration are intimidating.

Those sites breaking news and drawing numbers are often encouraging controversy.  In addition, they are entertaining while educating by pushing video.  For a publication like ITT that seeks to calmly offer deep perspective by fleshing out the unexamined darker corners of the world, the carnival atmosphere of the web seems like a violation of mission.  Erudite and rambunctious are a challenging mix.

Rambunctious is where we are headed, and headed fast.

This new horizontal world is a world of amateurs.  Tumultuous, rude and noisy, the Internet and the new media environment are filled with creative, narcissistic, intelligent, impatient and entitled youth.  The world population is gaining confidence in the amateur perspective, viewpoints both less informed by conservative media conventional wisdom and less manipulable by the elites.

In These Times is getting its feet wet in a river of rage/exuberance/fear/grief but hesitates to fully commit to where the torrent takes us.  As in an epiphany, ITT would not be the same if it let go.

So, how would I characterize ITT as it moves forward?  What would be the descriptive tag of this transformed rag?

Chronicling and championing the integration of American political and economic democracy into a new horizontal, transparent, diverse and interconnected world.

I’ve been a search engine optimization professional since 1999.  I get paid more for this than anything else I specifically know how to do.  It requires no tech savvy (I am technologically impaired) but primarily an awareness of pattern, the implication of those patterns as regards to strategy, and flexibility of behavior.

Muddling through how Google works for a decade, I’ve made discoveries, changed my behavior and watched the results.  Google responds to changes that optimizers make.  Optimizers modify their behaviors.  Over the years what I do to make possible high rankings for my clients, and my own sites, becomes more and more limited to what I believe Google will not penalize in the future.  Often, behavior that Google rewarded at one point in this evolution Google turned around and penalized at a later time.  Though I am very good at what I do, much continues to confuse me.  I have concluded that Google uses random variables in its algorithm to make its behavior less predictable.  That’s what I would do.  I continue to make discoveries regarding what works best, often by accident.  I notice a site doing particularly well, a site subject to some particular linking strategy, traffic pattern, coding anomaly or other effect.

It fascinates me how this process influences search, this process involving two very large groups of people competing to achieve complementary, yet often competing, goals.

We are only at the beginning of search technology.  The process unfolds in the larger context of the horizontalization of society and the amateurization of a number of professions.  As barriers collapse across society, search offers us access to information formerly available to select groups of individuals.

Consider all academic text, all papers and journal contributions available for anyone to browse.  Optimizers like myself might be hired to make available to the public at large, amateurs everywhere, information formerly available only to an academic subdiscipline.  How a web page is coded and linked may influence the following a particular theory might accumulate.  Battles for academic supremacy might spill out into the Internet instead of taking place exclusively on journal pages, at conferences and in departmental political debates.

In other words, I am hired by firms seeking to make money by having their websites achieve high rankings.  In this new world we are entering, consumers may be joined by human beings with particular ideas and aesthetics with specific goals. Those creative individuals that are able to use search to promote new ideas and works of art may find that their ability to achieve rankings for their productions may deeply influence the acceptance of what they produce.

Whereas at this time Google seeks to mitigate the impact of optimizers that make adjustments to achieve a particular client-based goal, how does Google adjust to the disappearance of all search barriers, opening up the Internet to intense competition in art and ideas?

At this time, Google is deciding to place heavy emphasis on widely accepted, large corporations when weighing which of several sites to rank highest.  Regarding the world of ideas, to engage in that same process would serve to stifle the new life and new ideas that will emerge.

What can Google do to encourage innovation?  Right now it seems to be leaning toward protecting established conventions.

I don’t have an answer to this.  But, if Google stays in the business of tearing down barriers, then perhaps it will learn how to encourage the emergence of the wholly new.

I don’t watch much TV.  Maybe an hour a month at most.  On rare occasions, I watch a TV program on a rented CD, and then buy the year.  I watched the first three seasons of Lost on tape before losing interest.  I watched one season of Heroes before being turned off.  That’s pretty much all I’ve seen since the cancelling of Star Trek, A New Generation.

These days I check in on the blogs in the early morning, noting a number of TV excerpts on mostly political subjects.  So, I’m watching TV more now that the blogs are posting snatches of Fox at its extremes, John Stewart, various speeches, etc.

So, I’m getting a view of the Right via Left blogs that often post TV of Right Wing television and radio, Right media going after the Left and Left blogs.

I used to check in on the Right blogs directly, but now I visit only my brother-in-law’s site, streetwiseprofessor.com, that takes Right economic/finance positions.  Craig is the chair of a university department in Economics and Finance, and he travels around the world to consult with corporations and trading institutions.  Craig’s specialty is derivatives.  He offers no apologies for the condition of the American economy, a proud neoliberal.

My point is that I have only one direct connection to the conversation that seems to be going on through varying media as Left and Right battle to make sense.  Craig is a high-level theoretician for the Right.  I organize nationally for the Left.  At family events when discussion begins, we both wear gracious smiles, knowing that minds are not going to be changed by what words we use.

From my perspective, Craig’s logic is faultless but his presuppositions are incorrect.  I guess if we can agree on the nature of each other’s presuppositions, we can agree.

We might also agree on some aspects of the interpretive media.

Reading the various Left blogs that specialize in opinion as opposed to erudition, for example, DailyKos, I am struck by how driven they are by tone.  When Craig has characterized some Left commentators as incendiary with a penchant for exaggeration, I would have to agree.  Of course, the Right exaggerates, behaves in ways to rile supporters and outright lies.  I’ll grant that one person’s lies are another person’s exaggeration.

Still, I expect the Right to behave in a disrespectful fashion.  For the Right, political discourse seems like a sports event characterized by winning being more important than how the game is played.  The Left often behaves like process is integral to performance.  The Right offers homage to process so long as the ends receive priority before the game is over.

Of course, there are exceptions to the generalizations that I am making.

In other words, the Right operates on classic Neo-Darwinism or Social Darwinism principles.  The Left does not yet have an evolutionary paradigm name for its cooperation/interdependence frame.

Observing some Left blogs, I find that they seem influenced by Right Wing Social Darwinism behavioral techniques.  Artful communication characterized by powerful metaphors is often replaced by incendiary rhetoric and name calling.  So there are some things that Craig has said that I agree with.  Still, whereas Craig is involved in a process not unlike a game, I feel I am committed to a process, a process integral to the game.  Whereas the Right plays for keeps, I play that play be honored, not the winner.

Watching the blogs watching the blogs watching the blogs, there is a tendency for the performers to exaggerate their positions.  The opposition only exhibits your opinion if it’s so extreme that it warrants derision.  It becomes less about process and more about scoring points in a fashion that deeply pisses off opponents.  It’s feeling more and more like Left discourse is acquiring a Right Wing flavor.  Cooperation and interdependence seem far from the process.

What does it take for a relevant, savvy and evocative exposition of the power and usefulness of cooperation and interdependence?  How do you make compassion sexy?

Asking the question is how you begin.

Still, I am muddling through the implications of mother and infant estrogen levels influencing the timing of testosterone surges similar to how a teenaged girl’s fat levels influence the timing of her reaching puberty.  I sometimes hear distant melodies of sense, not quite able to figure out the song.

My step-daughter Gwyn contracted juvenile diabetes when she was about 11.  She couldn’t keep fat on, and puberty was delayed.  Finally, she seemed to have achieved enough weight and her first menses arrived.  The whole family went out for supper in celebration.

All that time while she was trying to gain weight, she kept on growing taller.

I sometimes wonder if Gwyn’s effortless intelligence and astonishing facility with language is directly related to her delayed puberty and diabetes.  The brain continues to grow until puberty’s testosterone surges prune that growth.  Might a eunuch have a larger brain than a male with both testicles?  Would a male with one testicle have a larger brain than a male with two?

I had a childhood friend with a single testicle.  It descended only after he was born.  David had several Asperger’s features in his personality and a strangely large head.  He tested brilliant.  He came from a family of brilliant, passionate scholars.  He hated school.  He worked for the Post Office for a while.  I think he ended up in library science.

Relating this to that first pruning of cerebral hemispheres that occurs in early childhood, might we suppose that the fat levels of the mother with a child in the womb and the fat or estrogen levels of her infant and toddler influence the timing of those early testosterone surges, influencing brain size, determining relative sizes of the left and right hemisphere and the character of the corpus callosum brain bridge?

I’m thinking that it would have been nice if Baron-Cohen, while conducting those brilliant tests of thousands of placentas, had also sampled their estrogen levels.  (Baron-Cohen and colleagues discovered that testosterone levels were relatively high for many mothers that later had autistic children.)

Big heads, undescended testicles, Asperger’s personalities, juvenile diabetes, delayed puberty, fat and estrogen levels, testosterone, slim builds, cerebral hemisphere synapse pruning…..all these things seem related.  Listening for the music through the noise.

There are days when I feel deeply out of touch with conventional wisdom and have to console myself that what I am engaged in is more art than science.  Right now is one of those times that I am experiencing a deep hole in my stomach that feels a lot like grief.  Regarding business and organizing for social change, I feel integrated into a larger network and feel supported for the work I do.  When it comes to evolutionary theorizing and my conjectures around the cause of autism, I have so few discussions with academics on specifics that the occasional positive regards that I am provided by an academic are difficult to connect to any particular insight or hypothesis that I’ve formed.  A problem is that the network of hypothesized relationships that I am calling “The Theory of Waves” involves many moving pieces built on several unorthodox assumptions.  It is difficult to have discussion around specifics.

I am feeling insecure.

A deep premise of my work is that heterochronic theory (which includes neoteny and its opposite, acceleration) informs both human conditions characterized by maturational delay (autism and Asperger’s) and contemporary social transformation (democratic horizontalization and the Internet).  The influence of the environment on a woman’s womb combines with social structure/sexual selection societal tendencies to inform both the features of the individual and society.  Testosterone and estrogen mediate these changes.  Testosterone manages the rate, estrogen the timing.

This is classic, century-old heterochronic theory integrated with the new epigenetic view of how the environment and individual interact, fused with an understanding of how societies transform.

In my mind’s eyes, the theory has acquired an Internet-like hub and node structure with a number of interlocking theories connecting to one another, depending on one another.  Yet, if sections are shown to exhibit faulty reasoning or defective conjectural foundations, the larger structure stands.  Sections exhibit independent integrity.

Still, I am entranced by, in love with, certain aspects of the theory.  I don’t imagine this is a good thing if you are a scientist.  Regardless, scientists with careers committed to specific outcomes behave as if the practitioner is entranced by or in love with particular results.  I don’t imagine it is easy to avoid adoration of specific patterns.

I’m feeling now like I need to get clearer on the hormonal mechanics of human maturation rate and timing.  I’m afraid that the words “testosterone” and “estrogen” may be grossly simplifying a process that involves a number of gonadal steroids that may be executing this dance of change in ways beyond my ability to describe or understand.  The outcome or result of this black box of endocrine activity may support the dynamics I have been describing, but the description of the process may be a story I cannot tell.

Or, I might just be wrong.

I’m lucky theorizing is not my career.  The safe paths continue to hold no appeal.