Neoteny, sexual selection, cause of autism, human evolution, social transformation, left organizing and internet activism - how they all connect

Thoughts on Thoughts

It is April 5th today. This evening Marcia and I see the neurosurgeon to discuss the operation. Normally I write a piece, it goes to editor Roger for review, and then I post it around 90 days after the piece was written. The last three days I posted without Roger’s editing, within three days of a piece being composed. I write, and then a day or two later it posts.

With it likely I will have the aneurysm operation soon, and with my writing about events leading to the operation without the 90 day delay, the time scales of my writing and then posting have gone awry. Life of late has become so peculiar that a time shift almost fits right in.

The book came out on April 1st. I emailed friends yesterday, on Easter. Many came by the site and many have sent me touching comments. The juxtaposition of the book release and the aneurysm reemergence has created an environment difficult to describe. I wake most mornings with an upset stomach. Fear feels familiar.

I’m still muddling through the neurologist evaluation of my asymmetrical temporal lobe brain structure that explains the occasional passing outs, and now the spontaneous…

Neurologist

Marcia and I sat down with the neurologist yesterday, April 2nd. Evidently the several events of fading from normal consciousness preceded by a strong smell might be connected to the two times I briefly passed out after eating a meal while in a restaurant. There are people that easily experience unconscious content while in a waking state, people that sometimes pass out. The neurologist said this is likely unrelated to the cerebral aneurysm in it’s origin, but might be being encouraged by the aneurysm.

The doctor behaved excited and delighted to have a patient that fit into this unique category. He was clearly grateful for the opportunity to work with me further. He gave me his email address expressed a desire to maintain an email connection.

The neurologist said I exhibit an unusual highly asymmetric brain structure in sections of my temporal lobe, a particular structure featured by other people that exhibit unusually close connections to their unconscious, with unconscious content emerging in waking states, sometimes leading to a grand mall seizure or passing out. The doctor said that sometimes people with this condition value so highly the interactions with the hallucinations (many are fully functional people) that they choose…

Aneurysm Again

The doctor ran tests. The aneurysm is growing. It’s twice the size it was a year ago.

I see the neurologist this afternoon to get details. From there, I connect again with the surgeon that explored my brain from inside my veins last summer. After those explorations he suggested I have direct surgery from the side of my head, as opposed to the planting of channeling devices through my blood vessels.

It looks like the question will be when will the operation happen.

Today is April 2. My book, Evolution, Autism and Social Change, posted for download and purchase yesterday. I’m a little confused about the timing of the online marketing schemes I’ve been designing. It is deeply odd that the book released yesterday, the same day I discovered the aneurysm was growing requiring intervention.

This week of book release and aneurysm Marcia has been in St. Louis taking care of grandson Nils while the usually day care person, his other grandmother, is gone this week. Marcia is leaving St. Louis early, coming back up to Evanston today (Friday) to accompany me to the neurologist appointment. This is good. This has been a deeply weird week. Accompanied by Marcia…

Altered States

I shared with my therapy group on Tuesday the half dozen odd altered consciousness experience I had over a 2 day period about three weeks ago. They remind me of an extremely abbreviated version of the Dostoyevsky novel, The Idiot, where the main character, if I remember right, experiences a powerful smell, feels elation, and then disappears into an epileptic seizure. In my case, while sitting at my desk, I smell a powerful, sweet smell, experience a very brief 5-8 second dreamlike consciousness that also feels powerfully like a remembered experience, followed by powerful tingles or vibrations coursing up my left side bridging over into my whole body tingling. The dreamlike piece happens while my eyes are open simultaneously to what is occurring around the room. The whole thing, smell, unconscious experience and tingles, takes about thirty seconds. No one in the office noticed anything unusual. At one point I was asked a question while the tingles were going on and I was able to hear, focus and respond.

After the two first times this happened where I was feeling some anxiety, the other times I just let myself relax. The tingling then was powerfully experienced as my feeling accompanied…

Signs of a Rising Paradigm

“The most common form of social organization for group-living monkeys is the multigenerational matrilineal group (Silk, 1987). In this type of system, males, and females have very different life histories. Females stay in the natal group and their mothers and female kin for life, while males leave at adolescence and transfer to neighboring groups for breeding.” (Lynn Fairbanks, “Influences on Aggression in Group-Living Monkeys,” in Endocrinology of Social Relationships, eds. Ellison and Gray, pp. 160-161.)

“In spite of abundant evidence documenting intergroup conflict over the past 10,000 to 15,000 years, there is no evidence of warfare in the Pleistocene. Such absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, but it helps to explain why many of those who actually study hunter-gatherers are skeptical about projecting the bellicose behavior of post-Neolithic peoples back onto roaming kin-based bands of hunter-gatherers, and why anthropologists refer to the Pleistocene as the ‘period of Paleolithic warlessness.’” (Hrdy, Mothers and Others, pp. 19-20.)

For the last few years, I’ve reveled in the indulgence of reading several books at the same time, and often they were books seemingly unrelated. Sometimes synergies result. Exploring details regarding the endocrinology of relationship in primates in one book and the power…

Alloparents and Evolution

“Comparing the rates of violence in chimpanzees and humans gives support to the idea that male-male physical competition over females within the social group is vastly less important in humans. Wrangham and his associates compared the rates of lethal violence between chimpanzees and human subsistence societies and found them similar….In sharp contrast, chimpanzees had rates of within-group nonlethal physical aggression between two or three orders of magnitude higher than humans. Although preliminary data, these results indicate a major reduction in male-male violence within human groups and supports Boehm’s hypothesis on the evolution of human egalitarianism…” (Lancaster and Kaplan, “The Endocrinology of the Human Adaptive Complex,” in Endocrinology of Social Relationships, eds. Ellison and Gray, p. 113.)

I received an email from Elaine Morgan, popularizer of the aquatic ape theory of human evolution and the author of several books on human evolution, including The Descent of Woman. Morgan recommended that I read the work of Sarah Blaffer Hrdy. She suggested I read Mother and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding.

“The paradigm shift away from thinking of our Pleistocene ancestors as reared by all-nurturing chimpanzee-like mothers, and toward thinking of them as apes with species-typical shared care, has been slow…

Hidden Integrations

Western society’s reverence for art seems to have revolved around good stories. Individuals achieving entrance to the pantheon of great artists often had childhoods and adult lives characterized by extreme stress. In the West, this may be partly because the artist represents an individual struggling to integrate nearly impossible polarities: community sensibilities with the cult of individuality. An artist seeks to portray what unites us, walking a path seeking unities, while alone. The stories of an artist’s struggle are also a description of how each individual seeks both an allegiance to community and self. It can be argued that the great Western artist finds a way to integrate the two, at least in his or her work.

I’ve described two neurological archetypes in my work on human evolution, autism and current social transformations. There is the male, maturationally delayed, and the female, accelerated, and both are matrifocal, often left-handed, leaning toward autism, inclined toward primary process and inclined toward being simultaneous thinkers. The other neurological archetype includes the familiar male who is maturationally accelerated and the female who is delayed (neotenous), and both are patrifocal, narrative-thinking, split-brained, normal right-handers. I’ve recently been playing with the idea that each displays a…

Evolution Happens

Some passages from Endocrinology of Social Relationships, edited by Ellison and Gray.

“Not surprisingly, males of pair-bonding bird species have been shown to undergo an endocrinological shift to lower testosterone levels in parallel with the behavioral shift from territorial defense and mate attraction to parental behavior. Manipulations that evoke territorial responses in nesting males, such as playing the song of an invading male, both undermine parental behavior and lead to an increase in testosterone….Recently evidence has even begun to accumulate suggesting that lower testosterone levels may be typical of human males in stable mating relationships and perhaps even lower levels in men who are fathers of infant children.” (p. 70)

“…This led to the ‘challenge hypothesis,’ which states: high plasma levels of testosterone occur during periods of social instability in the breeding season (resulting from male-male competition for territories and mates) but are at a lower breeding baseline in stable social conditions thus allowing paternal care to be expressed.” (p. 83)

“Furthermore, there is growing evidence that patterns of testosterone in tropical species that may have long breeding seasons are very different from northern species (Goymann et al., 2004). Tropical species with long breeding seasons tend to have extremely low…

Understanding Imagination

If, indeed, there are two different kinds of imagination (primary process and split brain) with two different neurological foundations in the two social structures, then I expect there are ways to evaluate the kinds of imagination a person displays. And, no doubt, once a particular kind of imagination is established in a particular person, exercises could be created to guide him or her into growing his or her ability to use the form of imagination he or she is less familiar with.

Thirty years ago I studied with John Grinder and his colleagues, becoming a licensed practitioner of Neuro-linguistic Programming (NLP). We integrated the insights of language theorist Noam Chomsky, hypnotherapist Milton H. Erickson and family therapist Virginia Santir to be able to understand how exactly people exercise imagination. We explored the exact sequence of senses that people used when processing information or using their imaginations. Specifically, we explored when and how internal senses of feeling, hearing and sight were engaged while either remembering or creating content while integrating old with new experiences.

Sixty of us went through the licensing program in a western Chicago suburb in 1981 and 1982. Learning how exactly people processed information, we learned a lot…

Question

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,…