Evolving Brains, Emerging Gods
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Very often in dreams one sees dead relatives. The soul has gone to the underworld and paid them a visit. Sometimes the dead return by night to the houses of the living who then dream of the departed. (Alfred Métraux, Myths and Tales of the Matako Indians (The Gran Chaco, Argentina), Ethnological Studies [Gothenburg, Sweden: Walter Kaudern, 1939], http://ehrafworldcultures.yale.edu/document?id=si07–003.)
CANELA INDIANS OF BRAZIL
Ghosts visit some youths who are seriously trying to become shamans but not others. They may visit a person unexpectedly when he is sick to make him a shaman. They travel in the other world in dreams, or in their belief, and often go to the land of the dead to bring a wandering soul back to its body, saving its life. (William H. [William Henry] Crocker and John Beierle, Culture Summary: Canela [New Haven, CT: Human Relations Area Files, 2012], http://ehrafworldcultures.yale.edu/document?id=so08–000.)
MBUTI PYGMIES OF CENTRAL AFRICA
Hallucinations and dreams are primarily the result of accidentally slipping from the one world into the other.… Dreams, then, do not convey authority as being divine portents but, being real experience of a mirror world, they are, like all experiences, to be learned from. (Colin M. Turnbull, Wayward Servants: The Two Worlds of the African Pygmies [Garden City, NY: Natural History Press, 1965], http://ehrafworldcultures.yale.edu/document?id=fo04–002.)
KALAHARI SAN OF SOUTHERN AFRICA
These states, whether dreams, trances, or day-time confrontation with the spirits, are regarded as reliable channels for the transfer of new meaning from the other world into this one. (Megan Biesele, Women Like Meat: The Folklore and Foraging Ideology of the Kalahari Ju/’Hoan [Johannesburg, South Africa: Witwatersrand University Press; Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993], http://ehrafworldcultures.yale.edu/document?id=fx10–067.)
VEDDAHS OF CEYLON
Every near relative becomes a spirit after death, who watches over the welfare of those who are left behind. These, which include their ancestors and their children, they term their “néhya yakoon,” kindred spirits. They describe them as “ever watchful, coming to them in sickness, visiting them in dreams, giving them flesh when hunting.” (John Bailey, “An Account of the Wild Tribes of the Veddahs of Ceylon: Their Habits, Customs, and Superstitions,” Transactions 2 [1863]: 278–320, http://ehrafworldcultures.yale.edu/document?id=ax05–002.)
ANDAMAN ISLANDERS
In his dreams he can communicate with the spirits of the dead. (A. R. [Alfred Reginald] Radcliffe-Brown, The Andaman Islanders: A Study in Social Anthropology [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1922], http://ehrafworldcultures.yale.edu/document?id=az02–001.)
MANUS ISLANDERS
At one stage, a few of the men even planned to go to Baluan, but then something unexpected happened. Suddenly some of the islanders became stricken by an attack of guria, or violent shaking. The phenomena of guria was accompanied by dreams through which the villagers received messages, that the ancestors were to return with large quantities of cargo, and to help them build a new society. (Berit Gustafsson, Houses and Ancestors: Continuities and Discontinuities in Leadership Among the Manus [Göteborg: IASSA, 1992], http://ehrafworldcultures.yale.edu/document?id=om06–010.)
BATEK OF MALAYSIA
Generally speaking, the Lebir Batek Dè’ emphasize the similarities between humans and the hala’ ‘asal rather than the differences. They see human beings as becoming virtually identical to the hala’ ‘asal after death, when the shadow-souls of the dead acquire young bodies and water life-souls. The rejuvenated dead also live with the hala’ on top of the firmament. Like the hala’, they spend much of their time singing and decorating themselves with flowers, and they come to earth from time to time where they are seen by the living in dreams. (Kirk M. Endicott, Batek Negrito Religion: The World-View and Rituals of a Hunting and Gathering People of Peninsular Malaysia [Oxford: Clarendon; Oxford University Press, 1979], http://ehrafworldcultures.yale.edu/document?id=an07–004.)
KORYAK OF EASTERN RUSSIA
I would like to point out that Koryak vampires are known as a kind of shaman. They interact with autochthonous spirits to cure or divine, travel to the land of the dead in trance or dreams. (Alexander D. King, “Soul Suckers: Vampiric Shamans in Northern Kamchatka, Russia,” Anthropology of Consciousness 10, no. 4 [1999]: 57–68, http://ehrafworldcultures.yale.edu/document?id=ry04–032.)
AINU OF SAKHALIN ISLAND IN RUSSIA
When people dream, their soul frees itself from its sleeping owner’s body and travels to places distant in time and space. This is why in our dreams we visit places where we have never been. By the same token, a deceased person may appear in our dreams, because the soul can travel from the world of the dead to visit us during our dreams. (Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney, Illness and Healing Among the Sakhalin Ainu: A Symbolic Interpretation [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981], http://ehrafworldcultures.yale.edu/document?id=ab06–013.)
NOTES
PREFACE
1. Carl Zimmer, Soul Made Flesh: The Discovery of the Brain—and How It Changed the World (New York: Free, 2005), 174. Zimmer’s account of Willis’s work is superb, including the fact that Christopher Wren was doing Willis’s drawings for him.
2. The Upper Paleolithic period is commonly divided into four subperiods based on the cultural artifacts that have been found dating to that time. These are the Aurignacian (45,000–28,000 years ago), Gravettian (28,000–21,000 years ago), Solutrean (21,000–18,000 years ago), and Magdalenian (18,000–11,000 years ago). Some authors also refer to the period from 14,000 to 12,000 years ago as the Epipaleolithic period. The Upper Paleolithic period was then followed by the Neolithic period, beginning about 11,000 years ago.
3. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (New York: Random House, 1929), 31–34.
INTRODUCTION
1. Carl Jung, The Integration of the Personality (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1950), 72; Patrick McNamara, The Neuroscience of Religious Experience (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), ix.
2. Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, “Nones” on the Rise: One-in-Five Adults Have No Religious Affiliation (Washington, DC: Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, 2012), www.pewforum.org/unaffiliated/nones-on-the-rise.aspx; Harris Poll #90, The Religious and Other Beliefs of Americans, 2005, Harris Interactive, December 14, 2005, www.harrisinteractive.com/harris_poll/index.asp?PID=618; M. Lilla, “The Politics of God,” New York Times Magazine, August 19, 2007, 28–35, 50, 54–55, quoting Rousseau; Francis Collins, The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief (New York: Free, 2006), 38, 149; S. Begley, “In Our Messy, Reptilian Brains,” Newsweek, April 9, 2007, 53, quoting Homer.
3. Ahura Mazda is a god of ancient Persia; Biema, of the Tiv in Nigeria; Chwezi, of the Banyoro in Uganda; Dakgipa, of the Garo in Bangladesh; Enuunap, of the Chuuk in Truk; Fundongthing, of the Lepcha in Sikkim; Great Spirit, of the Iroquois in the United States; Hokshi Togab, of the Assiniboine in Canada; Ijwala, of the Mataco in Argentina; Jehovah, of the ancient Hebrews; Kah-shu-goon-yah, of the Tlingit in the United States; Lata, of the Santa Cruz Indians in Polynesia; Mbori, of the Zande in the Central African Republic; Nkai, of the Maasai in Kenya; Osunduw, of the Rungus in Malaysia; Pab Dummat, of the Kuna in Panama; Quetzalcoatl, of the Toltecs in Mexico; Ra, of ancient Egypt; Sengalang Burong, of the Iban in Malaysia; Tirawa, of the Pawnee in the United States; Ugatame, of the Kapauku of Indonesia; Vodu, of the Ndyuka of French Guiana; Wiraqocha, of the Inca of Peru; Xi-He, of ancient China; Yurupari, of the Tupinamba of Brazil; and Zeus, of ancient Greece. A very useful resource for studying the gods is the online Human Relations Area Files at Yale University (www.yale.edu.hraf). Montaigne’s Essays, book 2, chapter 12, is quoted in Robert J. Wenke and Deborah I. Olszewski, Patterns in Prehistory (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 315.
4. Annemarie De Waal Malefijt, Religion and Culture (New
York: Macmillan, 1968), 153.
5. Nora Barlow, The Autobiography of Charles Darwin, 1809–1882 (New York: Norton, 1958), 85; David Quammen, The Reluctant Mr. Darwin (New York: Norton, 2006), 42, 49; Paul H. Barrett, Peter J. Gautrey, Sandra Herbert et al., eds., Charles Darwin’s Notebooks, 1836–1844 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 291.
6. Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (London: John Murray, 1871), pt. 1, pp. 67, 68, and pt. 2, pp. 394–395, http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?viewtype=text&itemID=F937.2&pageseq=1.
7. Barlow, The Autobiography of Charles Darwin, 87, 90; Quammen, The Reluctant Mr. Darwin, 120. Darwin called himself an agnostic, but that was almost certainly to avoid offending his wife, who was a devout believer.
8. David J. Linden, The Accidental Mind: How Brain Evolution Has Given Us Love, Memory, Dreams, and God (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007), 28; Macdonald Critchley, The Divine Banquet of the Brain, and Other Essays (New York: Raven, 1979), 267. The claim that the human brain has ten times more glia than neurons has been questioned. That may be true for some brain areas but not others; see F. A. C. Azevedo, L. R. B. Carvalho, L. T. Grinberg et al., “Equal Numbers of Neuronal and Nonneuronal Cells Make the Human Brain an Isometrically Scaled-Up Primate Brain,” Journal of Comparative Neurology 513 (2009): 532–541.
9. It should be noted that the Brodmann areas, which were originally defined on the basis of cellular differences seen under the microscope, do not necessarily correspond to functional areas. A few do, such as BA 3, the postcentral gyrus, which is the main sensory receptive area for the sense of touch. However, most Brodmann areas are involved with multiple, different functions, especially those in areas known as being association cortices. In 2016 a new and more detailed system for numbering brain areas was introduced. It is based on images obtained using functional MRI, not on what the brain looks like under the microscope, as the Brodmann system does. Thus, the new numbering system will become standard for MRI, functional MRI, and other imaging studies, but it will not replace the Brodmann system, at least not in the near future.
10. M.-M. Mesulam, “Large-Scale Neurocognitive Networks and Distributed Processing for Attention, Language, and Memory,” Annals of Neurology 28 (1990): 597–613; M.-M. Mesulam, “A Cortical Network for Directed Attention and Unilateral Neglect,” Annals of Neurology 10 (1981): 309–325; M.-M. Mesulam, “From Sensation to Cognition,” Brain 121 (1998): 1013–1052; J. K. Rilling, “Neuroscientific Approaches and Applications Within Anthropology,” Yearbook of Physical Anthropology 51 (2008): 2–32. See also M. D. Fox, A. Z. Snyder, J. L. Vincent et al., “The Human Brain Is Intrinsically Organized Into Dynamic, Anticorrelated Functional Networks,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 102 (2005): 9673–9678. The additional areas in the language network include the basal ganglia, inferior parietal lobule, middle temporal gyrus, inferior insula, and frontal cortex (Brodmann areas 6, 9, 45, and 47).
11. N. Gogtay, J. N. Giedd, L. Lusk et al., “Dynamic Mapping of Human Cortical Development During Childhood Through Early Adulthood,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 101 (2004): 8174–8179.
12. Harry J. Jerison, Evolution of the Brain and Intelligence (New York: Academic, 1973), 9. Anthropologist Thomas Schoenemann has stated this principal as follows: “It is generally assumed … that more tissue translates into greater sophistication in neural processing in some way, which in turn suggests increased complexity of the behaviors mediated by that particular area (or areas).”
13. Gogtay et al., “Dynamic Mapping.”
14. S. Wakana, H. Jiang, L. M. Nagae-Poetscher et al., “Fiber Track-Based Atlas of White Matter Human Anatomy,” Radiology 230 (2004): 77–87; C. Lebel, L. Walker, A. Leemans et al., “Microstructural Maturation of the Human Brain from Childhood to Adulthood,” NeuroImage 40 (2008): 1044–1055; W. Men, D. Falk, T. Sun et al., “The Corpus Callosum of Albert Einstein’s Brain: Another Clue to His High Intelligence?” Brain 137 (2014): pt. 4, p. e268 (letter).
15. Stephen Jay Gould, Ontogeny and Phylogeny (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977), 6; John C. Eccles, Evolution of the Brain: Creation of the Self (New York: Routledge, 1989), 203; D. Povinelli, “Reconstructing the Evolution of the Mind,” American Psychologist 48 (1993): 493–509; S. T. Parker, “Comparative Developmental Evolutionary Biology, Anthropology, and Psychology,” in Biology, Brains, and Behavior, ed. Sue Taylor Parker, Jonas Langer, and Michael L. McKinney (Santa Fe: School of American Research Press, 2000), 1–24, at 22.
16. J. W. Lichtman and Winfried Denk, “The Big and Small: Challenges of Imaging the Brain’s Circuits,” Science 334 (2011): 618–623. The Human Connectome Project, initiated by the National Institutes of Health in 2010, is currently mapping the brain’s white matter connections and should markedly improve our understanding of these.
17. Charles Darwin, Origin of Species (New York: Collier, 1902), 126.
18. R. W. Scotland, “What Is Parallelism?,” Evolution and Development 13 (2011): 214–227; David L. Smail, On Deep History and the Brain (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 199. Parallel evolution differs from convergent evolution, which does not assume a common genetic ancestry, although the difference between the two has become obscured by the discovery of “deep homologies.” For a discussion of this, see Gerhard Roth, The Long Evolution of Brains and Minds (New York: Springer, 2013), 37; and Stephen Jay Gould, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), 1061–1089.
19. M. R. Leary and N. R. Buttermore, “The Evolution of the Human Self: Tracing the Natural History of Self-Awareness,” Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 33 (2003): 365–404. See also Steven Mithen, The Prehistory of the Mind: The Cognitive Origins of Art, Religion and Science (London: Thames and Hudson, 1996) for a similar formulation.
20. M. Mesulam, “Brain, Mind, and the Evolution of Connectivity,” Brain and Cognition 42 (2000): 4–6.
1. HOMO HABILIS
1. Stephen J. Gould, Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History (New York: Norton, 1989), 318. The forebrain gave rise to the diencephalon (thalamus and hypothalamus) and telencephalon (olfactory bulbs, hippocampus, amygdala, cingulate, basal ganglia, and cortex). The midbrain gave rise to the cerebral penducies and colliculi. The hindbrain gave rise to the medulla, pons, and cerebellum. A detailed analysis of the early brain development is found in Georg F. Striedter, Principles of Brain Evolution (Sunderland, MA: Sinauer, 2005).
2. Gould, Wonderful Life, 318, 44.
3. D. C. Van Essen and D. L. Dierker, “Surface-Based and Probabilistic Atlases of Primate Cerebral Cortex,” Neuron 56 (2007): 209–225; Striedter, Principles of Brain Evolution, 287.
4. C. Zimmer, “A Twist on Our Ancestry,” New York Times, October 29, 2013.
5. John S. Allen, The Lives of the Brain: Human Evolution and the Organ of Mind (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009), 59–61; “Three of a Kind,” Economist, September 10, 2005, 77.
6. Frederick L. Coolidge and Thomas Wynn, The Rise of Homo sapiens: The Evolution of Modern Thinking (New York: Wiley Blackwell, 2009), 87–90; R. L. Holloway, “The Casts of Fossil Hominid Brains,” Scientific American 231 (1974): 106–115. Arguments about the endocasts of Australopithecus fossils have been going on for more than 30 years. A good summary of the data is in D. Falk, J. C. Redmond, J. Guyer et al., “Early Hominid Brain Evolution: A New Look at Old Endocasts,” Journal of Human Evolution 38 (2000): 695–717; M. M. Skinner, N. B. Stephens, Z. J. Tsegai et al., “Human-Like Hand Use in Australopithecus Africanus,” Science 347 (2015): 395–399; M. Dominguez-Rodrigo, R. R. Pickering, and H. T. Bunn, “Configurational Approach to Identifying the Earliest Hominin Butchers,” Proceedings of the Na
tional Academy of Sciences USA 107 (2010): 20929–20934; Coolidge and Wynn, Rise of Homo sapiens, 106.
7. Lewis Wolpert, Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast: The Evolutionary Origins of Belief (New York: Norton, 2006), 57; Michael C. Corballis, From Hand to Mouth: The Origins of Language (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 83–84; Jane Goodall, The Chimpanzees of Gombe: Patterns of Behavior (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986), 535–545; Steven Mithen, The Prehistory of the Mind: The Cognitive Origins of Art and Science (London: Thames and Hudson, 1996), 96; Gerhard Roth, The Long Evolution of Brains and Minds (New York: Springer, 2013), 199.
8. Richard G. Klein and Blake Edgar, The Dawn of Human Culture: A Bold New Theory on What Sparked the “Big Bang” of Human Consciousness (New York: Wiley, 2002), 73–74; Mithen, The Prehistory of the Mind, 96–98.
9. Kenneth L. Feder, The Past in Perspective: An Introduction to Human History (Mountain View, CA: Mayfield, 2000), 81; D. Brown, “Arsenal Confirms Chimp’s Ability to Plan, Study Says,” Washington Post, March 10, 2009.
10. Nicholas Humphrey, Consciousness Regained: Chapters in the Development of the Mind (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 5, 48–49.
11. T. M. Preuss, “The Human Brain: Rewired and Running Hot,” Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 1225, supplement 1 (2011): E182–191; Richard Passingham, What Is Special About the Human Brain? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 33; P. V. Tobias, “The Brain of Homo habilis: A New Level of Organization in Cerebral Evolution,” Journal of Human Evolution 16 (1987): 741–761; Michael R. Rose, Darwin’s Spectre: Evolutionary Biology in the Modern World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 165.
12. Tobias, “The Brain of Homo habilis”; Holloway, “The Casts of Fossil Hominid Brains”; S. F. Witelson, D. L. Kigar, and T. Harvey, “The Exceptional Brain of Albert Einstein,” Lancet 353 (1999): 2149–2153. In the brain collection of the Stanley Medical Research Institute, which is used for research on severe psychiatric disorders, there are 117 normal control brains (91 males and 26 females). The average weight is 1,472 grams, but they vary from 1,060 to 1,980 grams. It is assumed that 1 cubic centimeter of brain tissue weighs about 1 gram, so cubic centimeters and grams are roughly equivalent. R. E. Passingham, “The Origins of Human Intelligence,” in Human Origins, ed. John R. Durant (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989), 123–136. Humans, however, do not have the largest brains for body size. The mouse lemur, a small primate, has a brain that is 3 percent of its body weight, whereas human brains are less than 2 percent of our body weight. Steve Jones, Robert Martin, David Pilbeam, eds., The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Human Evolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 107.