2007 – Microcosmos: Body, Brain & Behavior

Closing Remarks: A Voyage Through the Human Microcosmos

We’ve now completed our weekend’s voyage through the human microcosmos.

I’d like to thank everyone who helped make our weekend so enjoyable and our conference so memorable. This extends from our thought-provoking speakers to the fantastic cuisine crew headed by Margret Augustine, Judy Hawes, and Molly Rimondi, along with all the friends who worked beside them; Robert Hahn and his team, who kept the audiovisual systems and digital documentation running; Marie Harding and the Synergia Ranch hospitality team, who made us all feel so welcome; Deborah Snyder, our conference manager, and her team; and the Brainstorm Bar crew, headed by Gregg Dugan. Thanks also to all our friends, new and old, who added their energy and insight to this stimulating weekend.

I made the following notes at various stops along our voyage. They may help remind you of the mandala you were creating as the weekend progressed—a mandala of the world of the human microcosmos.

Jeff Schwartz opened our conference by examining what the bones tell us: what makes us human, and how we differ from animals and other hominids. He reviewed the traits that have been proposed in the past and examined some of our most distinctive anatomy—for example, our surprisingly telltale chin, divided brow, the incisive foramen of our palate, and our prolonged neoteny—comparing them with extant and fossil primate and hominid species. His talk demonstrated that we are still at an early stage in deciphering our family tree. It will require a critical reexamination of much that has too readily been claimed to lie in our line of descent before we can begin to evaluate just how unique humans are and to whom, exactly, we are related.

Terry Deacon placed human evolution in a dramatically new light, using biological logic to make the case that emergent, synergetic properties can arise from a relaxation of Darwinian selection. He advanced the “lazy gene hypothesis,” in which the duplication of homeotic, or regulatory, genes and modular body parts allows a “random walk” and “play” to develop new connections and capabilities. He illustrated this through the profusion of song in a domesticated bird species. He suggested that humans may, in a sense, be self-domesticated “degraded apes.” This, coupled with our rapid expansion around the world, may have triggered reduced Darwinian selection and the creation of our adaptations for language and symbolic culture.

Bob Turner took us into the new world of magnetic resonance imaging, which makes our brains transparent to detailed, real-time study. He reviewed the importance of collective representations as a foundation of human culture and examined how these representations are instilled and organized within the human brain. Neurons that fire together, wire together. Culture provides repeated experiences, often through conscious training and initiation. Bob concluded that culture shapes how we perform perceptual and cognitive processes, and that the organ of culture is the human brain. The human brain possesses extraordinary plasticity, and a large portion of it may be called our cultural brain.

Helen Fisher took us on a fascinating voyage of self-discovery through the funnel of love and into the heart of the human heart. She reviewed her work on sex drive, romantic love, and attachment, demonstrating their universality across gender, age, and sexual preference. She shared her hypotheses about their biochemical foundations—the molecules of love. Love is more than a cluster of emotions; it is a primary human drive. Her most recent work is unraveling the factors that influence mate selection, including genetic complementarity and genetic similarity, as well as the mate preferences of four basic human types: the explorer, builder, negotiator, and director.

Sandy Blakeslee took us to the homunculus in the brain, sharing cutting-edge discoveries in neuroscience. We humans are prodigious makers of body maps. These include proprioceptive and social maps, body images, mirror neurons, interoception, and maps of peripersonal space, all of which are crucial to our becoming fully functioning human beings. She reviewed evidence showing that these maps possess great plasticity as we develop and change, and demonstrated why motor visualization can be so effective in expanding our capabilities. Many phenomena—including out-of-body experiences, phantom limbs, and auras—can now be explained. She also showed the importance of culture in shaping our body maps and, therefore, our body-mind.

Tom Joyce took us into the elemental world of the power and history of iron. He traced its importance throughout the evolution of Earth—from the release of oxygen by cyanobacteria, to landscapes colored by the earth tones of iron, to the iron-based hemoglobin that enables our blood to carry life-giving oxygen. We journeyed with him through African blacksmithing traditions, where the making of iron is both revered and essential: making iron as a generative act, as an act of lovemaking. Tom shared with us his own love affair with iron—his journey from a young blacksmithing apprentice in El Rito to becoming a master artist in iron. He dazzled us with images of his creations and the stories behind them: iron sculptures that respect and transform the embodied life force and history carried within the material.

Judy Norsigian shared her passionate involvement in the fight for women’s health and described how the group she helped found launched a revolution in women’s healthcare in the United States and around the world. They empowered women by valuing their experiences, giving them a voice in the healthcare process, and making sensible medical advice readily accessible. She took us from the movement’s earliest days to the urgent issues of the present: violence against women, stereotyping, misogynistic imagery, Big Pharma’s campaign for the quick fix—“a pill for every ill”—the medicalization of childbirth, the marginalization of midwives, and medical misinformation affecting women and men alike. Our Bodies, Ourselves is preparing to pass the torch to a new generation, and Judy emphasized the importance of applying the precautionary principle to public health.

Paul Ekman took us into the world of human emotion, sharing his work decoding the human face and demonstrating the universality of human facial expressions. From the isolated peoples of the highlands of Papua New Guinea to the urbanized West, facial expressions and their associated emotions can be equally read, with similar triggers, functions, postures, sensations, and vocal signals. He also shared his more recent work on the development of emotional skills: cultivating awareness of impulses and behavior; recognizing the emotions of others; using emotional information constructively; and identifying one’s own emotional profile.

John Rockwell transported us into the realm of music. He demonstrated how music has always been a vital part of the human microcosmos: part of community, a vehicle for social ritual, and a pathway toward inner realization. His examples ranged from Handel, Gregorian chant, and Indian raga to the rock-and-roll classic “Louie Louie,” The Who, Linda Ronstadt singing traditional Mexican songs, and Ornette Coleman’s harmolodics. New musical idioms are arising through the creative meeting and fusion of musical traditions from around the world. John concluded that music has always created its own realities, reflecting the culture and time in which it appears. Its universality reflects the common ground shared by human cultures, despite their differences in outward manifestation.

Lewis Mehl-Madrona shared with us the song and message that the spirits wished to impart to our gathering. In Indigenous traditions, story is everything: we are all the stories we tell about ourselves and all the stories that will ever be told about us. Through several examples, he illustrated the power of changing one’s story—one’s history—as a way of healing. The traditional healer, in contrast to the purely biochemical approach, must first learn the story of the person and the story of the disease before understanding how healing may be effected.

Since everybody is different, every story is different, and every treatment or cure must also be different. There is no single prescription or remedy that fits everyone. For many people, the beginning lies in abandoning the story of the victim and finding a new story of survival—a story that both the individual and the people around them can believe. Indigenous medicine looks at what works rather than attempting first to explain how it works. It takes a community; you cannot do it alone. The rewards can include regaining one’s sense of humor and experiencing a transformed and deepened quality of life.

Joseph Houseal took us on a deeply personal and emotional journey through the history and present condition of the world of dance—from the origins of dance, closing the circle and creating the magical mandala recorded in ancient petroglyphs, to the challenges dance traditions face today. In the West, we have lost our connection to the roots of our dance traditions. Suffering from the mind-body split, Western dance has become secular and is often conceived from the outside in, whereas Asian dance begins within and radiates outward.

He shared rare footage of the ancient calisthenics practiced by Buddhist monks, offering us a glimpse of the possibilities of true embodied transformation. During the 20th century, through contact with the still-living dance traditions of Asia, Western dancers paradoxically revitalized their own art and created vibrant new forms of modern dance. Many Asian dance traditions are now in crisis, however, and the wheel has come full circle. It is now dancers in the West who must help document and preserve these endangered traditions. Dance is the apotheosis of the human soul—the shared Intangible Cultural Heritage of humanity.

Antonino Saggio took us into the emerging world where architecture meets the digital and information age. He explored how architecture might fulfill its social responsibilities and regain its place as a healing art. He led us on an intellectual adventure through ten conceptual landscapes, each reflecting new possibilities that digital culture and architecture may manifest at this historical moment. New architecture can reincorporate nature into the city and create buildings that harmonize with and enhance their landscapes. By using prostheses that extend the human senses, architecture can manifest itself in more dimensions, reflecting our changing understandings of time and space. As an illustration of what digital architecture can achieve, we were transported to the Technoprimitive installation, where each human movement generates individual projections of sound and space within a natural setting.

Irv DeVore shared nuggets from his treasure trove of insights into human nature, gained through a lifetime of studying primates, hunter-gatherer societies, and the resulting sociobiological perspectives. He cautioned us that correlation is not causation and that we must be wary of extrapolation and facile conclusions. Contradictory pressures of natural selection arose from our large brains and bipedalism, which also made it necessary for mothers to have male assistance in raising children.

He pointed toward several perhaps painful realities: the constancy of warfare throughout human cultures and history, and the deliberate male-on-male violence that we share with chimpanzees and gorillas. He considered the transformation, within only a few thousand years, from a humanity composed of hunter-gatherers to one grappling with vastly enhanced technological power. Through examples that included the paradoxes of male jealousy in animals and humans, modern society’s reliance upon the fragile sexual bonds of marriage rather than kinship for raising children, and the dynamics of mating and hunting among lions and lionesses, Irv reminded us that we must remain cognizant of our underlying sociobiological realities as we confront the challenges of being modern humans.

Joel Garreau took us to “the curve”—the dizzying rate of technological advancement epitomized by Moore’s Law and its prediction of the doubling of information capabilities. He illustrated some of the astonishing technologies that are already here and are no longer science fiction: telekinetic monkeys, email sent by thought, and computer-enhanced sight and hearing. He examined the scenarios that may unfold as a result of unprecedented advances in genetics, robotics, information, and nanotechnology. These developments offer the prospect of creating “enhanced humans” or even transcending the human condition altogether through the emergence of “transhumans.”

The visions of technological determinists may lead to heaven or hell, depending upon whether all goes well or veers completely out of control. The middle path is one in which human beings continue to prevail, finding ways to incorporate useful technologies without losing our core humanity. Joel underscored the vital importance of creating new storylines and narratives if humanity is to retain perspective and direction—and avoid failing our evolutionary final examination—amid these unprecedented opportunities and risks.

Institute of Ecotechnics conferences often possess the character of voyages of discovery. From the arrival of the participants to the worlds opened by each of our speakers, every day of the weekend contains such a breadth of experience that it seems like far more than a single day’s journey of the Earth around the Sun.

This year, our journey and exploration have focused on the human realm—the human microcosmos, whose body, brain, and behavior reflect the macrocosmos. We have traveled inward to the mysteries of how our bodies and brains operate; backward through time to our origins; forward toward glimpses of scenarios that may unfold in our future; and outward into our behavior, through which we connect with the world.

If it is true, as some of our speakers have suggested, that we are not merely players upon life’s stage but co-creators of our world, then we have done more than share this weekend. Through our interactions, we have reshaped our human story and our shared and individual histories and herstories.

Thank you for being part of this wonderful process: the adventure, the art, and the science of becoming human.

Mark Nelson
Chairman, Institute of Ecotechnics