Paranthropology: Journal of Anthropological Approaches to the Paranormal
The Experiencing Brain Charles D. Laughlin
Sociocultural
anthropologists typically ignore the brain. Whole books on anthropological theory are still written, many dealing with psychological issues, but which make no mention of the neurosciences, or neuroanthropology for that matter (e.g., Moberg 2013). This is a curious form of neglect considering that everything anthropologists talk about with respect to culture, enculturation and acculturation pertains to activities of neurophysiological systems. As a consequence of this neglect, anthropology fails to utilize the rich body of research that could inform them about their scope of inquiry. Among other things, any act of consciousness cannot be any more complex, any more intelligent, any more creative or insightful than the neurophysiology mediating the act. We cannot perceive anything that our senses cannot detect. We cannot understand more than our brain can model. We cannot experience anything that our brain cannot structure and comprehend. We cannot process information that our brain is not designed and prepared to process. The preparedness to experience is fundamentally ‘wired-in.’ Indeed, every moment of our stream of experience is being mediated by the cells in our brain that originate as inherited neural structures (neurognosis, or neurognostic structures; see Laughlin, McManus and d’Aquili 1990) which become altered and conditioned ‘socially’ in such a way that the experience or physical act can be produced and understood in local cultural terms. The Brain World In short, we experience between our ears. Our world of experience is constituted by and occurs entirely within our brain. Hence, our world of experience might as well be called our brain world. The extramental world – the world as it exists apart from our experience or knowledge of it – we may call the real world. Our brain world consists of neural models of the real world that mediate experiences we project out upon the real world by way of our feed-forward cog-
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nitions and actions. Interaction with the real world results in a feedback loop which our brain uses to correct its models. Models are made up of neural circuits by the tens of thousands that organize themselves in such a way that they mediate a percept, an image, a thought, a feeling to the ‘mind’s eye.’ The brain is both the producer and audience of the mindmovie that is our ongoing stream of experience – the producer and audience of our brain world. Why didn’t I simply call the brain world the ‘internal world’ and the real world the ‘external world?’ The reason is because our brain and our body (apart from our modeling of them), are part of the real world. We are both beings in the real world and minds that experience and model both our inner selves, and happenings in the external world. We are, empirically speaking, a special object in the real world in that we may experience ourselves both from the outside in (I see my fingers moving over this keyboard) and from the inside out (I feel the pressure inside my fingers as they press against the keys). Only conscious beings can do that. Moreover I can only do it for myself. I do not have access to you from the inside out. The closest I can get to this is the experience of empathy. When we think about things, reach conclusions, make judgments, have insights, feel things – the experiences and their mediating neural structures exist only within the confines of our bodies. The repercussions of these experiences occur in the real world, but are limited in their effects to that part of reality that is our self – our being. If I fantasize having a gourmet meal with Sharon Stone, the effects of this internal process remain internal to my body. But if I act upon it – say, I pick up the phone and make reservations for me and Sharon at Le Bec Fin, and then whip off an invitation by email to Sharon at www.hollywoodcelebrities.com, then the effects of my brain world activity transcend my body and have implications in external reality. Perhaps a while later several beefy men in white coats show up to escort me to a nice, quiet sanitarium. This was not my intended outcome, obviously. I had imagined that
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