Ecological Intelligence

by Ian Mccallum

  Another view of a mindfield is that of the scientist Richard Dawkins, author of The Selfish Gene. He considers the possibility that we have given birth to a new and more rapid kind of evolution involving culture rather than chemicals. Genetics has genes, so culture, he believes, must have its own units of transmission. He calls these cultural units memes. Memes, he says, are thought processes—ideas, notions, images, fantasies, symbols, tunes, fashions, methodologies, strategies, philosophies that become part of a meme pool, infiltrating the thought processes of individuals who are either sensitive to or ready for them. They can be understood as projections of consciousness striving to continue their existence in a new creature. In Dawkins’s words, “they leap from brain to brain,” or as Sheldrake suggests, they are passed on not only from ancestors to their descendants, but move sideways from one group of organisms to another across gaps of space and time.

  Lyall Watson, drawing on the principles of natural selection, sees memes as living structures capable of implanting themselves in another mind, like viruses that parasitize the genetic mechanism of a host cell. He adds that they are then forced, as viruses are, to compete with one another in a truly Darwinian fashion. In other words, they compete for access to minds that will ensure their survival.

  If natural selection does operate at the level of thought processes, then it is clear that fashions and philosophies, particularly those that come and go, are good examples of evolutionary cul-de-sacs. In a sense, we are porous to thought processes that are both conscious and unconscious, and the memes that survive and that are successful are the ones that are in the right place at the right time—the ones that fulfill our immediate as well as our long-term needs. They stand the test of time.

  THE BRAIN-ENVIRONMENT INTERPLAY

  Deep in the left and right temporal lobes of our brains is a constellation or nucleus of highly sensitive nerve cells known as the amygdala, the Latin name for almond—a description of the shape of this constellation of cells. Thanks to the work of neurobiologist Paul Whalen and his colleagues, we now know that the amygdalae are able to detect emotionally charged situations, even if we are not aware that we are in that situation. What is more, if the situation or activity is one of fear or anger, the right-side amygdala is particularly active. The sensitivity of these nuclei, then, do not depend on selective attention to what is going on. Could this unconscious sensitivity to what is happening around us be the basis for what we often refer to as intuition or a gut feeling? To me, the following clinical findings point in this direction.

  In medical terminology, there is a condition known as functional blindness. In these patients, the eyes as well as the optic pathways are intact. They are blind as a result of damage to the occipital region of the brain—the area responsible for the reception and interpretation of visual images. Although blind, these patients nevertheless pick up on the ambience or emotional state of their immediate surroundings. In these patients, not only do the amygdalae remain sensitive to emotion-charged images and situations, but so does another region—situated low and toward the middle of the frontal lobe—the ventromedial pre-frontal cortex. Unlike the amygdalae, this area appears to be crucial for discerning the emotional significance of the prevailing stimulus or situation—clearly, a more complex form of discernment. This is the key brain region for experiencing empathy, sympathy, and compassion, i.e., the sharing of feelings: the pain, the joy, and the circumstance of another. So, this is where our evolutionary antennae are hidden.

  What is really important in these clinical findings is that, as neurologist Antonio Damasio puts it, “the barrier of blindness has been broken through.” In other words, in terms of our survival and of the power of the all-seeing eye, the retina is a secondary, more recent phenomenon than our internal antennae. Seeing, on its own, is not the precondition for believing. Feeling is.

  But what about long-distance interactions? How can one explain the following story, told to me by one of my patients, a young woman in her midtwenties? Which parts of her brain were active in the unfolding of these events? The year before coming to see me she was living in England, thousands of miles from her home in South Africa. She began to experience frontal headaches and with them an increasing fear that her father was suffering from a malignant brain tumor. Repeated telephone calls to her home were met with the assurance that her father was in good health. Several weeks after the onset of the headaches and while her fears for her father were still present, her mother phoned her in London to tell her that her father was to undergo emergency surgery for a brain tumor. “My mother’s words, when she phoned to tell me,” she said, “could have been mine.”

  What was I to say, for I was well aware that an important part of this young woman’s grieving process was to come to terms not only with her premonition, but with a deep-seated guilt that her father’s death may have had something to do with her own thought processes. “Every time I had these thoughts about him, I had to keep pushing them away. I didn’t want to tempt fate,” she said. But fate had already dealt its hand. The tumor, albeit asymptomatic, was already established when it was picked up by the daughter all those weeks before the diagnosis was made. Pablo Neruda touches on this mystery in the lines of his poem “And I Watch My Words”:

  And I watch my words from a long way off.

  They are more yours than mine.

  They climb on my old suffering like ivy.

  From children to adults, we all have death thoughts about siblings, spouses, and parents for which we often feel guilty, and we all, even the most hardened of us, have those uneasy moments when we believe that we are tempting fate. I don’t think that we need too much convincing to acknowledge that old biblical admonition that what we fear will come upon us. As irrational as it may seem, it is as if our negative thoughts and fears magnetize the field around us. But it works the other way too. We can put positive thoughts, images, and feelings into the field as well. What happens to these products of the mind? If the brain, the mind, and the environment are a continuum, then the logical answer is that they become part of an extended field of influence. Is it too much to imagine that they enter the mindfield where they are then picked up or rejected by other minds? Do we not attract like-mindedness?

  An excellent example of an extended field of influence comes from the astonishing observations of macaque monkeys by Japanese scientists in the 1950s. What they observed was equivalent, in monkey terms, to the harnessing of fire. A young female macaque, a resident on one of a group of islands, was seen taking soil-covered plant bulbs to nearby seawater pools to clean them before eating them. As the human observers watched, this idea took root and spread, slowly at first but with gathering momentum until it became general practice not only throughout the entire island colony but on the surrounding islands as well. Lyall Watson calls this the hundredth-monkey phenomenon, meaning that it takes only a certain number of like-minded individuals to create an idea or an image that will find its way through the world.

  Finally, can we share the field of another species? The answer to this question might not be that far off and the animal that could show us the way is our traditional best friend—the dog. In his research on epileptic patients who own dogs, Stephen Brown, a British neuropsychiatrist and specialist in epilepsy, has found that a significant percentage of the dogs in his study were able to detect an impending seizure in their owners anywhere between fifteen and forty-five minutes prior to the event. To communicate the impending event, the dogs would approach the owner and begin pawing or barking, or both. Another of his findings is that no particular breed is found to be better at sensing an oncoming seizure than any other. In all cases, however, probably because the dog owners were able to prepare themselves, the frequency of seizures were reduced. It is reported that many were able to abort the event altogether.

  Considering the quality of life of patients suffering from epilepsy, these findings are hugely significant. The important question of course is how do they do it? Do they pick up cues from
their human companions such as a change in body language, mood, or behavior? So far, we don’t know. What we know, however, is that patients suffering from temporal lobe epilepsy often experience what is medically referred to as an aura. This is a peculiar sensation or phenomenon that precedes and marks the onset of the seizure. For some, the aura could be one of entering a dream-like state or of becoming disoriented. Others may experience alterations in their sense of taste, hearing, or body movements. Then there are those patients who don’t experience an aura at all and yet the dogs still respond to the impending event. Could it be that the electrochemical event pre-ceding a seizure is not restricted to the brain but extends beyond it into a field to which our canine companions are sensitive?

  In his fascinating book Dogs Who Know When Their Masters Are Coming Home, Sheldrake has convincingly shown that certain dogs, through distinctive and timely changes in their behavior and over considerable distances (nine to fifteen miles away) become instantly aware of the homecoming intentions of their owners. How else could this be possible if not through a field, which at present we may suspect, but which we know little about? And what intentions do we unwittingly communicate to animals, to plants, and to our human companions? I will address this question in chapter eight.

  QUANTUM FIELDS

  Modern physics reminds us that the interaction and influence of particles occurs in a quantum field that exists throughout space and where the speed or the timing of the influence of particles, one upon another, is instantaneous. According to Einstein’s 1905 special theory of relativity, the notion of separate particles having an instantaneous influence on each other was inconceivable. Also known as the law of local causes, this theory proposed that events in the universe happened at speeds that did not exceed the speed of light. However, after some exquisite mathematical reasoning, Einstein eventually challenged his own theory, and in 1935 he and his colleagues came up with a new proposal: “the change in the spin of one particle in a two-particle system would affect its twin simultaneously.” Absurd? No. In 1964, physicist John S. Bell proposed that there is an elemental oneness to the universe, a proposal that would become known as Bell’s theorem. He theorized that particles operate and influence each other within a field. His theory put a restraint on the belief that the influence of particles, one upon the other, is limited to the speed of light. But how could it be proved? In 1972, in an experiment involving photons, calcite crystals, and photomultiplier tubes, John Clauser of Berkeley University validated Bell’s theory. It was true—the quantum field was for real. Particles, over distances, do influence each other instantaneously, a validation of astrophysicist Arthur Eddington’s quip “When the electron vibrates, the universe shakes.” And what about that ancient poetic notion “Pick a flower, disturb a star?”

  In his delightful book The Tao Of Physics, Fritjof Capra describes this field as “a continuous medium that is present everywhere in space.” He adds that “particles are merely condensations of the field; concentrations which come and go, thereby losing their individual character and dissolving into the underlying field.” We are living in a mindfield, and if this sounds ecological, then say yes quickly.

  SYNCHRONICITY

  If thoughts, secrets, intuitions, and intent are indeed mobile, then synchronicity, the meaningful coincidences in our lives, will begin to make sense. Synchronicity describes events that do not appear to have any causal link, but because of the so-called coincidences of these events, they are linked, instead, by meaning. We all have experiences of such coincidences: we may be thinking of someone we haven’t heard from for a while and then the telephone rings; we pick it up to hear that person’s voice on the line. Or perhaps, somewhere in the wild, while thinking about a particular elephant, it suddenly appears from out of a thicket. We sometimes need a particular item, wondering where or how we might find it and then, inexplicably, it presents itself—exactly what was needed. We all have stories, incidents, and co-incidents when we say we just happened to have been in the right place at the right time. It is as if, however briefly, there is a palpable meeting between psyche and substance. The feeling is one of being immersed in a field of actions, interactions, and feedback. It is as if we have touched a potential that has been lost and if not, a gift of Nature that we are beginning to unwrap. It is an implacable sensing that everything in the universe is connected.

  To illustrate what could be a link between the mobility of ideas and synchronicity, analytical psychologist Marie-Louis von Franz, in her essay “Science and the Unconscious,” draws attention to Darwin and his theory of the origin of the species:

  Darwin had developed his theory in a lengthy essay, and in 1844 was busy expanding this into a major treatise when he received a manuscript from a young biologist unknown to him. The man was A. R. Wallace whose manuscript was a shorter but otherwise parallel exposition of Darwin’s theory. At the time, Wallace was in the Molucca Islands of the Malay Archipelago. He knew of Darwin as a naturalist, but had not the slightest idea of the kind of theoretical work on which Darwin was at the time engaged. In each case, a creative scientist had independently arrived at a hypothesis that was to change the entire development of biological science. Backed up later by documentary evidence, each had initially conceived of the hypothesis in an intuitive “flash.”

  The logic of cause-and-effect thinking tells us that synchronicity is statistically improbable, and yet it happens time and again. What is striking is the way it promotes a sense of continuity, how it narrows the gap between our inner and our outer lives, and how it links subject and object. It can’t be pinned down or called upon at will, a reminder that it is not an ego skill such as memory or intellect, something to be measured or worked at. Rather, it is mercurial, experienced as something that happens to us unexpectedly, dramatically, and, sometimes, poetically.

  But why should we be interested in this? Well, if we are interested in the human factor in Nature, then we need to be interested in everyday life and everyday people also. Meaning and the quest for it, as suggested, is a defining characteristic of the human animal. It is central to the goal of psychotherapy also—the task of trying to derive and to establish meaning out of our situations, our personal suffering, and our discontent.

  In addition to living in a world of cause and effect, ours, by virtue of the importance of meaning, is also a world of correlation and affect. This is to say that the logical connections we make about our world are often incomplete until there has been an emotional connection as well. We are born patternmakers, linking the whirling patterns of fingerprints to the spiraling shapes of galaxies, and we do it because it feels right. We find elephant footprints and other animal images in cloud patterns and we are all experts at reading the signs of the times. We are superstitious even when we try not to be. Predictability and control are sides of the same coin. We say things come in threes, what goes around, comes around, and we warm to the alchemical admonition: as above, so below.

  As irrational as it may seem, symbol formation and pattern making are part of our survival. We can’t help it. If we can’t find the connecting patterns, we tend to create them, and it does not matter that they do not obey the laws of cause and effect. We correlate because it is intrinsic to our search for meaning. “Whatever else the unconscious may be,” said Jung, “it is a natural phenomena which produces symbols and these symbols prove to be meaningful.” And then there is synchronicity—that occasional yet deep sense of being part of a field of meaning. What follows is a true story.

  A friend of mine, a retired architect and long-distance runner, began feeling tired and short of breath during a sequence of early morning runs. At first he ignored the symptoms, putting them down to the summer heat and a lack of physical fitness. At the same time, the pump at the borehole on his property began to malfunction. Upon closer examination, he concluded that the water pipes leading from the pump had become corroded and clogged, increasing the pumping pres-sure on the machine. Instead of replacing the pipes, he made intermittent a
ttempts to unclog them, providing temporary benefit to the pump and to the flow of water into a reservoir near the homestead.

  He then began to notice that each time he went down to investigate the borehole, he would experience the strange shortness of breath that he had experienced while running. Two seemingly unconnected actions followed. Firstly, he had the pipes replaced with new ones, and secondly, he consulted his doctor about his symptoms. The visit to his doctor resulted in triple bypass surgery for advanced occlusion of his major coronary arteries. Upon returning home from the hospital, he took a walk through his garden. What he saw—the strong clear flow of water pumping out of the borehole into the reservoir—had a huge impact on him. In an instant, this highly educated, mechanically minded man ventured into the realms of the absurd—he linked the blocked pipes of the water system with his blocked arteries. Were the clogged pipes a reflection or a forewarning of his own cardiovascular condition? he asked of himself. I don’t have to tell you the answer to his question other than to say that for him, correlating the two seemingly separate events was inescapable, or at least necessary. It is likely that we would have done the same.

  Another facet to this story, seen from a depth psychology perspecttive, addresses the difference between healing and fixing. This man, by virtue of the cause-and-effect nature of the surgical procedure, had every reason to regard himself as fixed. His sense of healing, on the other hand, came through the powerful synchronistic correlation between the conditions at the borehole and his own cardiovascular condition. To try and convince this rational man otherwise would be to waste one’s breath. Neither you nor I could have stopped him from adding depth to what was superficially an irrational association. He knows about irrationality, but he will never forget the profound sense of connection and meaning he gained from that man-machine interaction. It was as if they had spoken to each other. Sometimes irrationality has its own rationale.