A question from a visitor…

“If it’s the split brain, smaller corpus callosum and left hemisphere dominance that make us self-conscious and able to exercise imagination (pretending to be someone else, somewhere else, some other time), then how come imagination is associated with those leaning towards ancestral brain wiring, that is, less split brain and a better integrated right hemisphere?”

Let me start off by saying I’ve wondered about this in connection with two very different kinds of male left-handers that I come in contact with. Then there is the third group of left-handed males, who are autistic. One group is filled with social, talkative, articulate, focused, smart, imaginative males. The second group tends to be easily annoyed, gruff, focused, somewhat obsessed, smart and imaginative. Imagination seems to be closely associated with left-handedness in males. I don’t know why there are two kinds of nonautistic males (if my observations are at all useful). Perhaps one is high in estrogen and the other low, with both low in testosterone.

With females, it’s a bit different. Offering attention to left-handed females over the last ten years, I have noticed a very strong clustering of the classic matrifocal archetype, with many brilliant, commanding, discerning, focused females being left-handed. Creativity seems not necessarily related.

So where am I going with this? Marian Annett discussed the balanced polymorphism that makes up a society in the context of the UK, where she is a practicing neuropsychologist. Those in the center are the right-handed, but not the extremely right-handed. These people, Annett believes, retain a language facility advantage yet avoid physical and mental maladies by not being at the right extreme. The extremely right-handed, she believes, retain several disadvantages with few natural talents. Those at the left end–the left-handed and extremely left-handed–experience a different variety of disadvantages. Yet, Annett noted an astonishing number of extremely talented people appearing at the extreme left end, out there where a number of unique physical and mental conditions plague those people. Those conditions include autism, dyslexia, stuttering, allergies, Asperger’s and perhaps obsessive-compulsive personality disorder, narcissistic personality disorder, borderline personality disorder and bi-polar personality disorder.

Side note. Annett discovered that dyslexia actually comes in two forms, a phonetic version mostly retained by lefties and a visual dyslexia that mostly affects extreme right-handers. It is possible that several conditions that are assigned one name actually have two separate etiologies composed of these two very different neurologies. For example, schizophrenia may come in both nonlateralized and highly cerebral-lateralized versions with additional narrow and wide corpus callosum variations. OCD may also come in these two very different variations.

With the current neurodiversity movement and the writing of Dr. Michael Fitzgerald, there is now a focus on a number of historical figures who offered world-changing paradigms and who seemed to feature traits of those with autism. Astonishingly creative imaginations with an ability to tease out interconnected wholes and brains with difficulty integrating the thoughts of other humans seem paradoxically closely related.

I think the answer to the question “How come imagination is associated with those leaning towards ancestral brain wiring, that is, less split brain and a better integrated right hemisphere?” has to do with two very different types of imagination engaged in by the two kinds of brains. The old, less split, more integrated, left-handed, autistic-leaning brain has a more direct access to holistic, interconnected, simultaneous, multilayered understanding, except with less grasp of the relationship between those connections and a self. On the other hand, the right-handed, split-brained person with a smaller corpus callosum, who is a narrative thinker, can far easier imagine what is not, and estimate, step by step, how exactly to manipulate time and space to arrive there.

Whereas the lefty with relative ease grasps what is, the righty can fairly effortlessly make up what is not.

Both exercise imagination. One has less self awareness in the context of a self’s relationship with others, but nevertheless he or she has a relative easier access to the existing, supporting, interconnected infrastructure, in no small part because of there being less distraction from a self. The other, with heightened sensitivity to self and self’s relationship with others, is acutely aware of differing perspectives, able to estimate much that does not exist, often failing to understand what is real.

Some male left-handers seem to travel in both worlds. This results in an almost separate class of individuals with abilities both to integrate and separate. Four of the last five presidents were perhaps these kinds of lefties. I believe part of what society is wrestling with today is some kind of synthesis or integration of the two paradigms leading to these kinds of individuals. We need both an ability to imagine what does not exist and the power to perceive and adjust to what does exist. These two usually separate forms of imagination merge, at the societal level, in the societal balanced polymorphism hypothesized by Annett.

I hypothesize these two imaginations are starting to merge in the neurologies of certain individuals, particularly in the matrifocal/patrifocal hybrid society that is developing. Another way of saying this is that the balanced polymorphism intuited by Annett is shifting leftward, exhibiting a different kind of center. A net result may be a wiser, more grounded, less ambitious, less competitive culture with an ability to integrate into its multiplace, multitime, creation-of-opposites imagination an understanding of how exactly we are interconnected with the world as it really is.

I just noted a paper, Multiple ancient origins of neoteny in Lycidae (Coleoptera): consequences for ecology and macroevolution, that observes instances of neoteny compelling jumps in evolution.  One of the riddles of the career of Stephen J. Gould was how he seemed to rarely discuss how his deep insights focusing on neoteny explained his theory of punctuated equilibrium.  Gould did not believe in gradual evolution.  Yet, he seemed to only occasionally discuss the specifics of his saltationist conjectures, particularly when it came to heterochronic theory, or the study of the rate and timing of maturation and development, the source of neoteny.

The work just noted, Multiple ancient origins…, doesn’t just not note the influence of neoteny on humans, but it goes back many millions of years to discuss its subject.  My work has focused almost exclusively on neoteny in humans and makes the following statement….

If heterochrony is the study of the rates and timing of maturation with testosterone levels impacting rate and estrogen levels controlling timing, then those environmental or social structure adjustments that influence levels of testosterone and estrogen determine the speed, timing, features and direction of evolution.

Contemporary research on neoteny and heterochronic theory,…

Bill Wallauer is a videographer, a colleague of Jane Goodall.  Click here to read Bill’s observations of chimpanzees behaving in ways that are fascinating to consider.  Bill observes males displaying at waterfalls and in thunderstorms as individuals and groups transition into the sexual-display mode of communication.  Jane Goodall wrote a famous passage describing these events.

“All at once Evered charged forward, leapt up to seize one of the hanging vines, and swung out over the stream in the spray-drenched wind.  A moment later Freud joined him.  The two leapt from one liana to the next, swinging into space, until it seemed the slender stems must snap or be torn from their lofty moorings.  Frodo charged along the edge of the stream, hurling rock after rock now ahead, now to the side, his coat glistening with spray.  For ten minutes the three performed their wild displays while Fifi and her younger offspring watched from one of the tall fig trees by the stream.  Were the chimpanzees expressing feelings of awe such as those which, in early man, surely gave rise to primitive religions, worship of the elements?”  (Jane Goodall Through a Window (Boston:  Houghlin…

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…

“I have found the midsagittal area of the corpus callosum to be larger in mixed and left handers, referred to as non-consistent-right-handers (nonCRH), than among CRH subjects (Witelson, 1985).  Hand preference is a rough index of the pattern of brain organization.  Left handers (by various definitions) have a higher prevalence of atypical right-hemisphere representation of speech and language functions than do right handers and, in general, show a greater degree of bihemispheric representation of verbal and spatial skills (for review, see Bryden, 1988).”  (Witelson, S. F. (1991) Neural sexual mosaicism:  Sexual differentiation of the human temporo-parietal region for functional asymmetry.  Psychoneuroendocrinology 16: 139)

There seems to me to be tantalizing answers to riddles in human evolution in the various papers discussing corpus callosum structure in different kinds of human beings.  There are papers that support the conclusion that larger corpus callosums, or corpus callosums with larger sections, appear in left-handed people, women, those with two cerebral hemispheres that are the same size, musicians, the autistic and those that stutter.

“Theoretical speculation in humans (S. F Witelson,  Psychoneuroendocrinology 16 (1991) 131-153) and empirical findings in animals (R. H. Fitch, P. E. Cowell, L. M. Schrott, V. H. Denenberg, Int. J. Dev.…

“…primary hypogonadism, a condition resulting from the lack of increased production of androgen (testosterone) hormones in the interstitial Leydig cells in the testes at puberty.  Because of this condition, emasculated singers may have been blessed with voices sweeter than a woman’s, but burdened by an infantile penis, an underdeveloped prostate, “eunuchoid” (disproportionately long) arms and legs, beardlessness, pubic hair distributed in the female opposed to the male pattern, and fat deposits on the hips, buttocks, and breast area.”  (Margulis, L. & Sagan, D. (1991) Mystery Dance, On the Evolution of Human Sexuality:  Summit Books, New York, p. 67.)

This may seem somewhat arcane, but in my explorations of the patterns and dynamics of neoteny there is a feature that does not appear in the literature on the subject.  This is the elongated legs and arms that appear in people displaying neotenous features.

I first came across a connection in a text that noted low testosterone in males was connected with longer legs.  Bonobo vs. chimpanzee comparisons suggest bonobos have lankier builds and are more neotenous than chimpanzees.  I’ve noted anecdotally that autistic and Asperger’s males seem to display an unusually high proportion of the tall.  Scandinavians are more neotenous in…

Like most people I know, I had a somewhat odd childhood.  I started talking when I was three.  I remember spending a lot of time confused by adult communication.  Speech therapy accompanied my schooling until college.

I recall struggling to understand what made people laugh.  I could be amused, but I was often uncertain what it was that people were finding funny.

Sometime around sixth grade it’s as if my brain achieved traction and stuff started to make sense.  My closest friend was Paul Jean.  Paul died last year.  It was only recently I realized Paul had Asperger’s.

As a child, the peculiarity of Paul’s communication felt familiar and somehow consoling.  Paul was brilliant at mathematics and an effortless musician.  His affect was affable yet often strange.  I liked strange.  It was a communication style not unlike my mother’s.

I have friends and relatives with Asperger’s.  There are the obvious, unique aspects to their characters that are outlined by the diagnostic tools.  There is another facet of the Asperger’s personality which interests me as I think back to my early childhood when I exhibited some Asperger’s-like features.  Of course, all of us when moving through early stages of development displayed…

Ten years ago, I was exploring the possible origin of human culture in tribal societies driven by rhythmic dance and music. Tribal societies are on rare occasions characterized by paternal anonymity, or children who are unaware of the identity of their biological father. Observing that human brain size began to diminish about 25,000 years ago, I hypothesized that this reflected an emerging patrifocal emphasis on speech instead of gesture and a movement away from a selection for big-brained males. If this was the case, I suspected that there might be remnants of the old matrifocal paradigm that still exist within contemporary society. In the neurological literature, I sought humans with unusually large brains, difficulty with language, but who were also ambidextrous or left-handed. I came to find that autistic individuals commonly display these features; in addition, I discovered that individuals with autism are often obsessed with pattern replication and have perfect pitch (Brenton, Devries, Barton, Minnich & Sokol, 2008).

It appeared that hidden beneath the just-so story was a theory, which, if brought to light, could help make useful predictions and illuminate unrecognized relationships. From the beginning, the theory drew information from three different disciplines: anthropology, evolutionary biology…

A superb 25-year study in the UK by Marian Annett ending in the 1990s seemed to prove that in that part of the UK, left-handedness was not increasing over time. It’s been a difficult issue to parse out, what with left-handedness being repressed before WW II. When conventional wisdom declared that forcing children to switch hands would encourage stuttering, schools withdrew from demanding all children use the right hand. A result has been that though it looks like the number of left-handers has been increasing over the decades, it is obvious that institutions stopping the repression of left-handers has skewed the numbers.

A similar effect is seen in Asia. Society has strongly encouraged that the left hand not be used. The rates of left-handedness in many parts of Asia are 2% and lower. It’s difficult to determine the true handedness percentages.

The same effect comes into play with autism. Though it seems there have been dramatic rises in autism over the last twenty years, many believe we just have more refined evaluation protocols with more attention being placed upon those individuals exhibiting unconventional behaviors.

The thesis presented in this work makes several predictions regarding handedness and autism, two issues that…

“Musical composers, instrumentalists, and painters were compared with nonmusicians from a student and from a nonstudent population on testosterone levels in saliva. This steroid served as a marker for physiological androgyny. The ANOVA showed a significant group by sex interaction. Male composers attained significantly lower mean testosterone values than male instrumentalists and male nonmusicians; female composers had significantly higher mean testosterone values than female instrumentalists and female nonmusicians. Painters of both sexes did not differ significantly from controls. Spatial ability was assessed in the five groups. Significant differences on spatial test performance were not reflected in differences on salivary testosterone. Our results showed that musical composers of both sexes were physiologically highly androgynous. Creative musical behavior was associated with testosterone levels that minimized sex differences.” (Hassler M (1991) Testosterone and artistic talents. Int J Neurosci 56 (1-4): 25)

Surveying papers that either directly relate to my studies or tangentially connect to what I play with, I come across paragraphs that jump out as supporting my ideas or that flail me with a totally dissonant perspective. I track both, though I store the latter with less enthusiasm. Some of the contradicting studies show in their study techniques a rather lax attention…

When I was a cartoonist, a comic artist seeking to come up with a new piece every day, I used a variety of techniques to generate useful ideas. One technique I often used was that in my mind’s eye I’d create a column of words representing or associated with something specific and sit that column next to another column of words representing or associated with another concept. Then I would run the columns up and down like a slide rule. I was looking for complementing concepts or associations with patterns that mirrored each other. Goofy incongruities would emerge. Showing how things seemingly unrelated had connections, with the connections seeming arbitrary, led to humor.

Gary Larson, who created The Far Side, was a master of this technique. For example, placing a clown in one column with various associations, such as using a cream pie as a weapon, compared to a criminal in the other column creates a panel with a clown in an alley with a cream pie about to mug a citizen. The caption “When clowns go bad” completed the bridge. This kind of humor is all about connections.

How, you might ask, would this technique have anything to do…

Hypothesizing that humans evolved in a meandering fashion oscillating between high testosterone (T) females and low T males in matrifocal societies and high T males and low T females in patrifocal societies we might estimate that the skeletons of our ancestors would reveal those tendencies with gracile (matrifocal) vs. robust (patrifocal) remains.

I’ve referred to the feedback loop. Mother’s testosterone level > maturation speed > social structure > mother’s testosterone level. The environment intervenes at all three levels of the loop, influencing maturation rates and timing, modifying the trajectory of human evolution, creating a pendulum that swings back and forth between the two social structure paradigms.

Females picking males most adept at dance select those males with the most neotenous characteristics. Particularly important are those males with big, neotenous brains. Just as a predator needs more synapses than its prey, a dancer that needs to capture a mate has no ceiling in the synapses required to manifest the most astonishing moves. Brains grew bigger exponentially to achieve mating opportunities while males were competing with other high-stepping, big-brained fellows.

Big brain growth was not a seamless, single line of exponential increase. Different ancestral species, such as Homo erectus, exhibited different speeds…

A conundrum frequently reveals itself during my observations of left-handed people. An answer to this riddle seems to be connected to an understanding of how bridges, brain bridges, are made.

Lefties are often the most articulate folks I know. Many creative people, folks that drift toward the left end of this arc of maturational delay, are unusually articulate. These are the older-genotype, matrifocal-social-structure naturals, who are high testosterone females and low testosterone males. Obama and three of our last four presidents were left-handed. Bush W. is right handed. Articulateness seems to often accompany the left-handed.

There are major exceptions.

There are those that are left-handed because of trauma to the left hemisphere, which controls the right side of the body. I don’t know the studies that estimate the percentage of trauma-induced lefties, but a marker is if a left-handed person has no left-handers in the family, and another one is if the right hand is extremely nondextrous, in which case the likelihood increases. These folks don’t normally exhibit the skill/talent structures of the maturational delayed, which can include unusual verbal facility.

Then, there are those that are autistic.

The autistic are extremely maturational delayed, often left-handed, sometimes even ambidextrous and…

Autism researchers such as Simon Baron-Cohen have noted a pattern. The mother’s testosterone levels influence the likelihood of a child having autism. The higher the mother’s testosterone level, the more possible the child will be autistic. The work of the late Norman Geschwin in the early 1980s paved the way for this understanding. Still, the context in which the mother’s testosterone level makes sense is still not pursued by researchers seeking to understand the origins of autism. Neither Baron-Cohen nor Geschwin have backgrounds in evolutionary biology, which might have provided them an introduction to arcane nineteenth century alternative theories of evolution. We all suffer the effects of a century of obsession with Darwin’s theory of natural selection.

One of the patterns that a commitment to natural selection masks is that evolution can happen extremely quickly, in a single lifetime. Darwin was aware of single-generational change and struggled for an explanatory principle. He called his theory pangenesis. According to pangenesis, the body manufactures gemmules that can carry information informing the body of environmental change, which the body responds to, modifying progeny in response.

We call them hormones.

We live in a post-Mendelian age. When a cloned sheep emerges from the mother…

Georges Cuvier was an early French biologist, a contemporary of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck. Lamarck, unfortunately, died before Cuvier and ended up vilified in a famous eulogy by his younger, very influential peer. That speech is attributed to having marginalized Lamarck’s influence on evolutionary theory. Cuvier didn’t believe in evolution. That was almost 200 years ago. Only now is Lamarck’s name emerging with respect in the discussions of biologists.

Lamarck hypothesized that the environment can influence evolution in a single generation, compelling the emergence of nonrandom characteristics and environment-influenced features. Darwin shared this view, devoting the last years of his life in search of an explanation for the process that Lamarck proposed. How despised was Lamarck? Darwin rarely mentioned in his writings Lamarck’s name or even the names of Darwin’s contemporaries that shared Lamarck’s positions. Darwin felt he could explore their ideas if he did not cite them.

Darwin and Wallace’s theory of natural selection emerged as a paper in 1858. Darwin’s Origin of Species appeared a year later, and “survival of the fittest” was embraced with astonishing speed. It was a theory that complemented and enhanced the principles behind the industrial revolution. The natural world looked to mirror the world of…

There is a tribe of males more than a little infatuated with themselves and their own ideas. We’re often described as narcissists. Upon discovering I fit into this group, I was appalled, and predictably I obsessed that I was too obsessed with my own behavior.

I now look at myself as a recovering narcissist. I observe how frequently I engage in being a legend in my own mind. Sometimes I’m amused. Sometimes I’m not.

My wife is tolerant but not particularly amused. Interestingly, I come across few women narcissists.

Narcissism often gets relegated to an example of an early developmental stage that gets carried into adulthood as a result of trauma or a peculiar environment that caused a freezing of psychological resources in the past. This effect is not unlike following a recipe while making a cake. If at an early stage something goes awry, you may end up with a less than delightful outcome. Accidentally add salt instead of sugar early in the process and the results will be unique but not particularly edible.

I’m playing with the idea that there is healthy narcissism characterized by the person feeling accompanied while they feel they are the center of the…

When I was exploring the possibility of a human genetic precursor that was random-handed with a larger brain encouraged by a song-and-dance-based matrifocal culture, I hypothesized that if representatives of our ancestors were around today, they would have larger brains and difficulty with language.

The premise is that the exponential growth in brain size through the history of Homo erectus and before was driven by the selection for mates talented in dance. An established biological pattern is that predators have larger brains than their prey. More demanding physicality (it’s more difficult to be a predator than to run away) creates a requirement for increased neurological support. Dance may have been a sexually selected physical demand with no upward threshold in satisfactory results. Rampant brain growth may have been the result of males competing for the attention of females in matrifocal societies where males that exhibited neotenous characteristics (creative, playful, cooperative) were the most likely males to procreate.

The best dancers had bigger brains. The best way to select for bigger brains over time was to choose males exhibiting neotenous characteristics. Neotenous males are cooperative males supporting a matrifocal social structure.

When I was first monkeying around with these ideas, noting…

It crossed my mind yesterday that individuals with autism are not likely to be superstitious. This conclusion would also suggest that autistics are not magical thinkers. If this generalization has some truth, then this characteristic would not only make them unique in today’s society, but unique going back through multiple societal transformations past bands and tribes.

There are those folks that exhibit obsessive-compulsive disorder behavior as they seek to exert some degree of control over the world by performing personal rituals. OCD is not uncommon with people that are autistic. But OCD that features an obsession with pattern and a compulsion to participate in pattern replication is not the same as OCD linked to event control. The latter, which is more a robust expression of a superstitious frame of mind, suggests someone deeply fatigued by magical thinking. I am estimating that autistics are not magical thinkers. Autistics don’t easily intuit how they might change the world.

In the 1960s, I had two friends, brothers, who exhibited unique behavior. One had, at the time, undiagnosed Tourette’s syndrome, and he exhibited bizarre ritualistic behaviors, astonishing physical strength and a powerful intelligence. His brother retained unique thinking processes characterized by his seeing himself…