EVOLUTION OF THE SENSES
The evolution of the senses begins with the microbe who knows the six directions (the compass points plus up and down, because of being suspended in water where it’s possible to move in all directions). Building on this and conserving what promotes survival (avoiding danger, approaching food) this basic sense has persisted until it is in humans today. It is one of the senses lost early in the case of dementia.
The brain manages two things: the state of everything inside the skin so that the creature stays alive, and what ever it can scope out about the world through the filter of the skin. Most of the inside information and responses are unconscious and persist even during sleep, because otherwise the creature dies.
Some of what comes in about the world is also unconscious. We know most of what the five senses convey — sound, sight, taste, smell, and contact — but very little about the single-cell awarenesses. There are so many, they are so distributed everywhere, and they are so tiny that they are still being discovered and named.
https://www.microscopemaster.com/sensory-cells.html
Our ability to pick up so much information, encode it and transmit it to the brain, where it might either consciously or unconsciously organize it and base action on it, is what makes us effective in the world. Much research and thought is devoted to our organic “machine” but we don’t devote enough energy to how we push against the world where we are embedded.
A third route between body and brain has been found by Dr. Stephen Porges. A subdivision of the autonomic nervous system, a third strand, connects the “portrait” flesh (head, voice, breath, skin-blood, and heart beat) directly with the brain, entering through the brain stem. Since responses here are apparent to other people — including through the voice and expressions — this means that the senses can enlarge awareness to other people, essentially extending the brain outside the body.
At first this is only expressed in the “magic circle” of the liminal play and caring between infant and mother. This expands as experience is acquired, through everyone encountered. Then through interaction this field of awareness increases through the family, the neighborhood, the school and other affiliations; and through reading and writing it extends across generations and through time to include history, reasoning, and alternative realities called fiction.
At the level of reading and writing, two branches have developed. One is through the metaphor system of matching the sounds of speaking with marks on a surface. An alphabet develops for this purpose and must be learned by heart — the master code for the system. Each sound matches a mark; when assembled they make words; words stand for things and what they do or are — which are nouns and verbs in a grammar that organizes them. This is complex and in stages, but it is the way literacy developed on the Atlantic-adjacent part of Eurasia, Europe.
The other way of writing is with ideograms, which is what the Asian part of the continent developed. The metaphor system goes directly from concept to a little “picture” that stands for the idea. Sound doesn’t enter into it until the person understands the concept and finds spoken words for it. A student must learn hundreds of ideograms which are far more complex than the 26 marks of the English alphabet.
The point of reviewing all this is that the brain when learning something makes a pattern of the information. This pattern is always based on the template learned about the world from the original caregiver in the course of the first three years or so — including the period of gestation when the embryo is learning through the body/brain of the mother. This is the very most basic element of existence guided by a brain. Through brains are constantly processing and modifying, adding and subtracting, the things recorded by this early template are extremely hard to change.
The early template controls the picture of the world that is half of identity — that which is contingent environment and pressing against the body. The template is in part determined by the pattern-making machinery provided by the DNA. Some people will be blind to what is around them — never register it — and others will perceive things so subtle and unique that people think they are hallucinating. Or maybe brilliant.
It appears that some perceptions and responses are so basic that we assume everyone has them, though possibly not to the same degree. Like sex, or food enjoyment, or internal machinery. Some of these elements can be augmented or modified in other ways and some — like sex or food enjoyment — are extremely plastic, capable of being shaped by the experience of the world either as individuals or in the expanded “mind” of cultures. They can be intense or pale; complex or simple; life-guiding or ignored.
At an early Canadian Unitarian Conference (the Universalists of Canada never merged in the UUA) decades ago we began to speak of the land as a language and tried to pull it up to the level of being a template with real intensity. Since metaphor was the main means, much of the work was poetic and experiential rather than logical, but scientifically produced knowledge was a big part of it.
My gimmick in those years was learning to make a line on a blackboard (no white boards yet) that was the shape of the edge of mountain horizon as seen from Browning. When I walked up and “wrote” this as though it were a cursive alphabet, the classes there could recognize it as though they were reading.
People who lived there could even point to my line and name the peaks represented. To people who knew mountains it was recognizable a skyline. What I did not expect was a fellow minister at this conference who eloquently took the view that this was nonsense. All that mattered to her was cities and she valued cement, the human built environment. But maybe surprisingly she was not that interested in money or food. Her life template was based on sex. This building meant a place to eat (restaurant), and this building (hotel) meant a place to fuck. I’m going to write a novel of buildings as ideograms.
I was always curious about her first three years: was it too much, too little, too unfinished? What was the grammar of her template? This is not the same as judging her morality. What was she moving away from or towards? Was she taking in something or throwing out something? How did it get displaced to religion?
