I remember reading this really cool thing about the levels of the brain. The old brain, the first one we got when we just had crawled out of the primordial swamp, the reptilian brain, controls the heartbeat and breathing and essential stuff that if we didn't have we wouldn't be here. As we evolved we got the second layer, the emotional brain, or the Limbic system which was essential to forming relationships with other people and places, etc. If we didn't have it we might still be here but we would be a bug. Then we got the neocortex which is the thinking brain, which gave us reason and language. It gave us the "BOMB" too which might make us extinct or at the very best go back to phase one. I think E.O. Wilson said it best (anyway I think it was him) when describing the levels of the brain:
1. heartbeat
2. heartstrings
3. heartless
Anyway that is how I memorized the different functions. I memorized the planets by saying, "My very educated mother just serves us nine pickles." Get it? Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto. I guess I need a new one for the new planet they discovered just beyond the Kiper belt and then there is the controversy about Pluto being a real planet. Oh well. It worked for high school. Just about the only thing that did.
1. heartbeat
2. heartstrings
3. heartless
Anyway that is how I memorized the different functions. I memorized the planets by saying, "My very educated mother just serves us nine pickles." Get it? Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto. I guess I need a new one for the new planet they discovered just beyond the Kiper belt and then there is the controversy about Pluto being a real planet. Oh well. It worked for high school. Just about the only thing that did.
posted by Anne Coe | 6:50 AM
15 Comments:
I don't know that I accept the heartless part, as the implication is that logic and rationality necessarily lead us in that heartless direction. Perhaps in men it does, as they needed to outsmart other men with evil intent, but it is hard to imagine that mothers and aunts used their brains for anything other than building stronger relationships, and inventing art, music, dance, in sum, culture, to do so.
Heartless just means that the true emotions are in the other part. There is a man with brain damage that severed the connection from his eyes to the limbic system but left the connection to his cortex. He recognises his parents as looking exactly like his real parents but does not acknowledge them as parents bcause the emotional part of his visual response is missing.
Mary Virginia eats many jelly sandwiches under Ned's porch.
My point was that while rationality can be heartless, it is not necessarily heartless, just as emotions can lead us to nurture or to commit many heartless acts. Fundamentally, it is not a very good metaphor.
I don't think E O saw it as a metaphor just as a way to help his students remember the various functions. Women have more connections from the speech centers to the limbic system ergo they can communicate emotions better than men. Men are very emotional its just that too often it involves the use of a gun. I often wonder about the mythic women, like the aztec snake skirts who is goddess of both life and death. It's males that deserve the latter honor, don't you think?
The whole question of consciousness freaks me out. Your right Geode, where will it reside when 90% or our functions are handled outside the brain? Where does it reside now? As far as I know there isn't even a good working definition for it. Diane Ackerman says, "Consciousness is the great poem of matter. But consciousness isn't really a response to the world, it's more of an opinion about it." Which is nice but says nothing about where it is and what it is. How does one even observe it? Is it the soul? I have to have some answers here.
E. O. Wilson is a smart guy. He knew it was a metaphor. What do you think a metaphor is, if it is not some way to explain something?
Youu seem to have struck a nerve here.
This blog discusses their views of the E.O. Wilson argument.
Ok, Ok, it's a metaphor in the strict sense but metaphors are not meant to be fact, truth maybe but not fact. So we see the TRUTH in what E.O. says here. Heartless might be a bit hard but it works doesn't' it? Maybe we can create a better one, Heartbeat (that works) Heartfelt (I think is better) and Heart trouble? As in when you start thinking about things to much as in the neo cortex and become a type A you get heart trouble. Well I tried.
The difference, my dear, between a simile and a metaphor is that in a simile you say X is Y (the man is a rat). The meaning of a simile is that the man is like a rat, in that he has certain ratlike characteristics. A metaphor is like a simile except the claim is made that is it not like Y, but it is actually a Y. Religious metaphors are of this sort. Probably E. O. was not thinking about this when he made his claim, but as it was science, he should have qualified his statement to be a statement saying that the areas of the brain were sort of like heartless, etc. Then he would have made it a simile. So, your words are probably better than his, especially if you would say, they are sort of like.....
The next problem E. O. made is that he should never have associated the areas of the brain with human values--e.g., heartless--that is a big no no in science.
Actually I could find nothing that associated him with that staement.
Did he really make it?
Are we starting a new urban myth here?
I remember studying the difference between smilies and metaphors but had forgotten it. Its like lay and lie. I won't forget now but I will have to figure out a word game to remember it.
I have no support that EO really said this but let me assure you it was someone like him.i.e. scientist, scholar, well published. I wouldn't have rememebered it if it were just some regular person. I wish I could remember where I read it. In one of my myriad brain books. The irony is not lost on me here. That I read brain books and only remember little pieces of them. There is something here. Learning about something doesn't necessarly help you with something.
Anne,
Do you have any extra land trust petitions? I couldn't find them on the Nature Conservancy website. If you have extra, I'd like one for Pinal and one for Maricopa county and will try to get some signatures too. Please bring to Drawing class on Tuesday. Kathy Morell (sorry to get off the ongoing conversations here!).
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