The Two Faces of Our Three Brains

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The Two Faces of Our Three Brains
by Robert Campbell
2014, 1977
Abstract

The Papez-MacLean Theory of Emotions is reviewed from the perspective of Arthur Koestler's holon, a Janus-faced characteristic of hierarchical levels that pervade the natural order. MacLean researched the schizophysiology of the split between the ancient emotional limbic brain and the new brain or neocortex to account for humanity's tragic history. The self transcending face of the holon identifies with an integrating ideal entertained by the conscious intellect that is easily subverted to the emotional desires of the crocodile and the horse wired into our limbic brain. This allows our self-assertive face to act without human conscience thus accounting for the tragic mess we have made of our history. The "flatland" vision of cause and effect has ruled the development of the psychological, social, physical and biological sciences while ignoring hierarchies implicit in the cosmic order that pervade all phenomena. The holon is shown to derive from Universal and Particular active interfaces that are requirements of universal wholeness implicit in the cosmic order. It is called System 2.

The hierarchically nested Systems 3 and 4 require that there are three mutually closed active interfaces essential to physical reality, and to the mental integration of phenomenal experience, respectively. Sperry's work on split-brain patients confirms that the right and left hemispheres function independently, the holistic right brain acting as a self-transcending face with respect to the self assertive left brain. Together they can be conscripted into the service of our primitive limbic brain. Polar relationships between the sensory and motor topologies of the neocortex explored by Penfield and Woolsey act as two of the three polarities essential to the integration of human experience, the third being the ancient limbic system that reflects autonomic emotional experience in conscious awareness. The mind is shown to transcend and subsume the physical brain by regulating archetypal patterns behind the scenes that direct brain chemistry.

Keywords: Koestler, Papez, MacLean, Sperry, Penfield, Woolsey, limbic system. split brains, universal wholeness, universal and particular, holon, cosmic order, brain and mind, three brains, hierarchies, active interfaces, triune brain, schizophysiology, causality

The Unsolicited Gift

In Arthur Koestler's landmark book The Ghost in the Machine (1) he tells an interesting parable which he calls the paradox of the unsolicited gift: (Since the book is out of print I will quote at some length from it.)

There was once an illiterate shopkeeper in an Arab bazaar, called Ali, who, not being very good at doing sums, was always cheated by his customers; instead of cheating them, as it should be. So he prayed every night to Allah for the present of an abacus; that venerable contraption for adding and subtracting by pushing beads along wires. But some malicious djin forwarded his prayers to the wrong branch of the heavenly Mail Order Department, and so one morning, arriving at the bazaar, Ali found his stall transformed into a multi-storey, steel framed building, housing the latest IBM computer with instrument panels covering all the walls, with thousands of fluorescent oscillators, dials, magic eyes, etc., and an instruction book of several hundred pages; which, being illiterate, he could not read. However after days of useless fiddling with this or that dial, he flew into a rage and started kicking a shiny, delicate panel. The shocks disturbed one of the machine’s millions of electronic circuits, and after a while Ali discovered to his delight that if he kicked that panel, say, three times and afterwards five times, one of the dials showed the figure eight! He thanked Allah for having sent him such a pretty abacus, and continued to use the machine to add up two and three happily unaware that it was capable of deriving Einstein's equations in a jiffy, or predicting the orbits of planets and stars thousands of years ahead. Ali's children, then his grandchildren, inherited the machine and the secret of kicking that same panel; but it took hundreds of generations until they learned to use it even for the purpose of simple multiplication. We ourselves are Ali's descendants, and though we have discovered many other ways of putting the machine to work, we have still only learned to utilize a very small fraction of the potential of its estimated hundred thousand million circuits. For the unsolicited gift is of course the human brain. As for the instruction booklet, it is lost, if it ever existed. Plato maintains that it did once, but that is hearsay.

Koestler goes on to say:

It is entirely unprecedented that evolution should provide a species with an organ which it does not know how to use; a luxury organ, like Ali's computer, far exceeding its owner's immediate, primitive needs; an organ which will take the species millennia to learn to put to proper use, if it ever does.

The Poverty of Psychology and the Need for a New Paradigm

Our tragic human history attests to the fact that despite all of our scientific efforts, no one knows how the human nervous system works in terms that can allow us to master the operation of our most important instrument in constructively balanced ways. As proprietors of our unsolicited gift we are left groping in the dark. There are various systems with certain vague verbal guidelines, which have a degree of validity in limited circumstances, but invariably these have serious shortcomings. This includes the whole range of psychological and philosophical systems of understanding as well as our physical and biological sciences. All of these may catch some particular glimpse of truth from a certain angle, but all are deficient to varying degrees. Language is not up to the task.

Koestler takes particular aim at Behavioural Psychology founded before the outbreak of the First World War by Professor John Broadus Watson(2). He published a book, Behaviourism (3), in which he proclaimed:

The time has come when psychology must discard all reference to consciousness... Its sole task is the prediction and control of behaviour; and introspection can form no part of its method. (1913 pp 158-67)... The Behaviourist...must exclude from his scientific vocabulary all subjective terms such as sensation, perception, image, desire, purpose, and even thinking and emotion as they were subjectively defined. (1928. p 6)

The absurdities of behavioural psychology were further advanced notably by Professor B.F. Skinner (4) at Harvard into the 1980s. His many colleagues still exert their influence today including on other disciplines such as psychiatry, physics, evolution theory, biology and social sciences. Experiments on rats and pigeons have been extrapolated to human behaviour. The mechanical linkage of Cause and Effect has been translated into Stimulus and Response as in the Pavlovian conditioning of dogs. Koestler points out that Pavlov went so far as to count the drops of dog salivation to quantify the degree of conditioning. We generally acknowledge that a degree of social conditioning is essential to the development of a child but to reduce us all to mindless totally conditioned robots no better than rats is ludicrous. As Koestler puts it:

It is impossible to arrive at a diagnosis of man's predicament - and by implication a therapy - by starting from a psychology that denies the existence of mind...

It may be argued that behaviourism is dead, but the corpse still stalks the corridors of the psychologist's mind. There has been a resurgence in recent years and the general populace is on the band wagon analysing who out there caused their every psychological hiccup. There is such a thing as taking personal responsibility for one's life.

...affluent society makes everybody happy, conditioning him in a strictly scientific manner, by the mass media into the perfect consumer. Hypothetical mechanisms, intervening variables, auxiliary hypotheses have been introduced - without changing the basic concepts or general outlook. But what we need are not some hypothetical mechanisms better to explain some aberrations of the behaviour of the laboratory rat; What we need is a new conception of man. ( v. Bertalanffy 1967) Nothing has changed since 1967.

The Paradigm must be Universal

To be valid any attempt to understand how the human nervous system works must be universal. It must embrace all possible varieties of human behaviour. This requirement implicitly rules out studies in behavioural psychology that are invariably dependent upon the accepted use of language restricted to Aristotle's Efficient Cause. That renders it useless at bridging deep rooted cultural differences in the global social meltdown that is currently taking place. To bridge our cultural differences implicitly requires a capacity for direct intuitive insight into the workings of the cosmic order by which we have all evolved. By its nature the cosmic order must be universal. It must encompass all creation, all manner of phenomenal behaviour both in the private and public realms. Nothing short of this can hope to mend the sadly tattered fabric of human civilization.

This is a tall order but a start has been made that is not itself dependent on language. The System of delineating the cosmic order facilitates intuitive insight into the roots of meaning implicit in all languages (5). The cosmic order cannot be reinvented in language. It can not be contrived intellectually. It can only reveal itself in response to a persistent intuitive quest into the hierarchical structure of how phenomena are presented to us. We need to understand how we meaningfully integrate sensory input and organize it into appropriate responses according to circumstance.

This means that the System of delineating the cosmic order introduced on this website is structural in nature as distinct from behavioural. All thought, feeling, and behaviour derive from how it works, not vice versa. We are cosmic beings that have taken a couple billion years to evolve to the point where we can realize this. Our unsolicited gift has become a very sophisticated instrument over the last million years or so, especially since the development of structured languages. Later, we shall see that this has polarized the functions of Ali's abacus.

Koestler Draws on the Work of Dr. Paul MacLean

Professor MacLean was a leading researcher on the relationship of our primitive reptilian and lower mammalian brains with respect to our neocortex or new brain that expanded over them when the higher mammals evolved. The cortex is the outer rind of grey matter, about a tenth of an inch thick. It contains many billions of neurons over an area of about three square feet crammed into the convolutions of the brain. Inside it white matter nerve fibres interconnect areas of the cortex in a complex maze of patterns. In humans the expansion of the neocortex has been so great as to fold the two primitive brains that occupy the limb or edge of the cerebral cortex inward around the top of the brain stem. The structure (6) and function of the Limbic brain is very similar throughout the mammalian lineage from mouse to man. Its human structure is simply illustrated in the website article Inside our Three Brains (7). It is also shown in Figure 14 below. Later we will come to Arthur Koestler's concept of the "holon" which draws heavily on MacLean's work during the 1950s and 1960s.

Building on the work of Papez (1937)(8), MacLean's pioneering work (9), covering the last half of the 20th century (10) established that the two primitive limbic brains in conjunction with related brain stem structures form a functionally integrated apparatus called the Limbic System. It is intimately associated with our emotional apparatus - the autonomic nervous system. The latter is an emotional vehicle rather than a cause. In 1929 Walter Canon (11) showed that emotions persist even after autonomic connections of the visceral organs with the brain are severed, indicating the emotional limbic brain can function independently on emotional patterns established prior. "Visceral response is important for the establishment, but not for the maintenance, of emotional behavior." (MacLean 1958)

The Limbic Brain is fundamental to the recall process and memory. It can learn in itself and is also employed in the learning of the new brain. We know that memories are emotionally coloured. We have a conscious capacity to observe them. They arise according to circumstance. We can tailor them to behavioural responses as we deem appropriate in any given situation. Nevertheless, this primitive brain has a capacity to think independently of the neocortex albeit in crude and often confused emotionally coloured patterns. Its cortex is relatively coarse, like the brains of our reptilian and lower mammalian ancestors, while the new brain is finer in texture and more highly organized. The Limbic brain has no capacity to express its impressions in language. Rather it associates them with situations symbolically. The colour red may be associated with blood, or fighting, or flowers, or fire, for example.

MacLean points out that Limbic epilepsy, electrically induced in animal studies, is confined to the Limbic System, quote: "Seldom do the discharges, analogous to a stampeding bull, burst out of this coral and jump the fence into the neo-mammalian brain." (MacLean 1964 pp10-11) There is thus a clear dichotomy of function between the old and new brains that he calls schizophysiology. This built-in condition accounts for a fundamental human dilemma associated with Koestler's parable of the unsolicited gift. MacLean describes it as follows:

Man finds himself in the predicament that Nature has endowed him essentially with three brains which, despite great differences in structure, must function together and communicate with one another. The oldest of these brains is basically reptilian. The second has been inherited from lower mammals, and the third is a late mammalian development, which in its culmination in primates, has made man peculiarly man.

Speaking allegorically of these three brains within a brain, we might imagine that when the psychiatrist bids the patient to lie on the couch, he is asking him to stretch out alongside a horse and a crocodile. The crocodile may be willing and ready to shed a tear and the horse to neigh and whinny, but when they are encouraged to express their troubles in words, it soon becomes evident that their inability is beyond the help of language training. Little wonder that the patient who has personal responsibility for these animals and who must serve as their mouthpieces is sometimes accused of being full of resistances and reluctant to talk. The reptilian brain is filled with ancestral lore and ancestral memories and is faithful in doing what its ancestors say, but it is not a very good brain for facing up to new situations. It is as though it were neurosis-bound to an ancestral superego.

In evolution one sees the beginning of emancipation from the ancestral superego, with the appearance of the lower mammalian brain, which Nature builds on top of the reptilian brain... Investigations have shown that the lower mammalian brain plays a fundamental role in emotional behavior... It has a greater capacity than the reptilian brain for learning new approaches...on the basis of immediate experience. But like the reptilian brain ...it does not have the ability to put its feelings into words.” MacLean 1964 p 2; Koestler p 277.

Note: Page references to Koestler's book The Ghost in the Machine refer to the Picador edition 1975.

A Drama Spanning Our Evolutionary History

MacLean compares:

…the cortex of the Limbic system to a primitive TV screen which combines and often confuses projections from the internal visceral environment with the external environment. Such a cortex must have offered some of the confusion of a twice exposed film. In any event it could not have been altogether satisfactory, because when Nature decided to develop the neo-mammalian brain, she constructed progressively a bigger and finer type of screen, which gave predominantly a picture of the outside world made up of impressions from the eye, the ear, and the surface of the body... But Nature in her frugality did not discard the old screen. Since it seemed adequate for smelling, tasting and feeling what is going on inside the body she kept the filaments in the (TV) tube of the old screen glowing night and day. (MacLean 1958)

In summary, MacLean's three brains resolve into two brains because the reptilian and lower mammalian brains together constitute the Limbic Brain, which is distinct from the new brain or neocortical brain of the higher mammals such as dogs, chimpanzees and humans. Although the growth of the new brain continued with the early hominid species an unprecedented explosive growth is especially evident in the enlarged cranial capacity of humans over the past half million years. (p. 272). Koestler suggests that this tumultuous overgrowth was unprecedented in evolutionary history and was an evolutionary mistake.

There has been little change in the last 35,000 years or so as modern humans consolidated. This dichotomous schism between the old and new brains accounts for the schizophrenic-paranoid streak so deeply evident in human history from our bipedal origins to the present. MacLean elaborates on this built-in schizo-physiology in many of his articles on the subject. Our new brain easily gets conscripted into the service of our old brain often with exaggerated negative results.

In short: "We have the intellectual capacity to build atomic bombs and send rockets to the moon, harnessed to the emotional capacity of a crocodile and a horse."