14. The Horizon of Experience

The horizon of potential existence broadens in parallel with the addition of internal superimposed loops of the neural building with each extra level associated with increased autonomy. Comparative studies of the organisation of the nervous system in vertebrates indicate that as animals became more complex and their environment more enriched, new superimposed internal loops emerged. As animals evolved from aquatic to terrestrial lifestyles, their locomotory systems retained fundamental organisational features but with increasing segregation of groups of neurons to separately control the limbs. During vertebrate evolution, other patterns of behaviour became possible by new architectures of neural circuits enabling different combinations of muscle activities. These organisms endowed with multiple layers of sensory-motor loops became increasingly independent from the environmental constraints on behaviour. Indeed, the philosopher Daniel Dennett has suggested that ‘freedom evolves’.¹  

These evolutionary advances underpinned the ultimate appearance of the extraordinary richness of the mental life we experience internally, compared with much smaller number of options we can enact in the external world! As the superimposed neural loops in the cortex become more numerous, the ‘horizon of reality’ becomes broader. Such freedom to go beyond the bottleneck of the experience of the immediate present with internal mental processes (thought, imagination, memory) gives rise to practically endless possibilities of exploring the ‘unknown’ world.

Such a degree of expansion of the horizons of experience is a unique human feature and involves all human activities. These include not only the development of the creative arts, scientific views of the world, and cooperative endeavours at all scales, but also cosmologies based on religions and absolute ideologies.

One of the paradoxes is how modern science and more civil society could have emerged from absolute monotheisms. There has been a slow shift from everything being considered transcendent to an more naturalised world. It is the history of an increasingly secular society.

14.1 The Tests of Reality of Collective Cosmologies

Our links with the world involve constructing experiences at all levels of the multi-story building. The sharing of such experiences is a critical part of the construction of new cosmologies. 

All human cultures have developed views of the world in the form of cosmologies. From Greco-Roman culture to modern industrial culture, cosmologies based on scientific principles developed rapidly and continue to do so. Just like the test of reality for individual experiences involve a ‘closing of the loop’ between individual minds and the world, so collective cosmologies also need to close their loops. This is equivalent to applying the principles of experimental science to key elements of any cosmology, with proofs being made available at every step. Valid knowledge arises from a process of selecting which of the imaginary views developed in society are consistent with a given model of the universe and validated by documented tests of reality. 

The process of looking for new structures as components of novel cosmologies is equivalent to detecting similarities and common elements, outlines, clusters, and patterns. The search for patterns appears well embedded in the human brain². Seeing patterns that do not correspond to any ‘real’ structures’ is the price we pay for this capacity. For example, constellations of stars are patterns which do not correspond to any real structure. Indeed, different cultures identify different patterns of constellations in the night sky. Nevertheless, they can still be used to identify times of the year reliably enough to predict events related agriculture, travels, and anniversaries, for example. 

Quantitation is fundamental to experimental science as a test of the validity of a cosmology. This starts at a very low level with counting objects (calculus = stone), progressively building up to become complete systems of mathematics. At higher levels, significant abstraction takes place. This process of abstraction underlies our ability to detect similarities between what may seem to be unrelated phenomena.

Careful quantitation and mathematical analysis can detect even weak links between physical phenomena which then can be rendered explicitly. Thus such phenomena can be represented independently of any direct sensory experience. Nevertheless, there is always a path back to an immediate experience of reality. So, the reality of the planetary orbits expressed as mathematical rules becomes a testable and verifiable test of truth performed in scientific way.

The issue of whether mathematics exists independently of humans or has a solid basis in the biological nature of human experience has been discussed from the beginning of our culture. Thus, the extremely good correspondence between mathematics and physical reality has been a source of wonder from the ancient Greeks to the present, as explored in astrophysicist Mario Livio’s book Is God a Mathematician? Such a strong correspondence suggests the mind and external world are part of a common unity.

The Pythagorean School of thought in Ancient Greece believed that reality is fundamentally mathematical and agreed with Plato that mathematics describes a world of objects. Thus, mathematics is an essential component of nature that gives structure to the physical world. But, unlike Plato, the Pythagoreans did not think mathematical objects exist beyond space and time. Instead, they believed physical reality is made of mathematical objects in the same way matter is made of atoms. If reality is made of mathematical objects, it is easy to see how mathematics might play a role in explaining the world around us. Furthermore, mathematics itself is most likely to have a strong biological basis.³

A question then arises as to the degree of reality of some human activities, namely ‘social objects’,  which can appear in any culture.

Social Objects

The first examples of social objects I will discuss are languages.  

The assembly of people who think in a given language and whatever external physical structures linked to it forms the physical basis of that language.  At the risk of sounding banal, it is important to state that language is a collective phenomenon of the physical world that depends on humans functioning as thinking beings. It is an emergent phenomenon of human societies. To this ensemble of people, we must add all external objects of language such as books, newspapers, radio, television, etc. They can be symbols of language in that, despite of being external structures, they are part of the chain of communication between humans: they are physical objects that, in order to function, need to be decoded by human brains. 

Now we can describe the Spanish language, for example, as a four-dimensional physical object.

The existence of Spanish language began in a particular period in time and space  around 600-700 AD in some part of the Iberian peninsula. But where exactly is the language located? As a product of multiple functions at specific levels of the brain, it becomes ‘real’ every time somebody has the experience of thinking, reading, listening, writing, singing or speaking in Spanish. It is a phenomenon distributed in space (in the brains of people) and in time (whenever they have an experience of Spanish). Accordingly, we could represent Spanish as a structure in a four-dimensional map. 

Let us imagine a series of stacked maps of the earth’s continents, every map corresponding to a particular time point, eg, every 10 years. Now let us trace a vertical line that may cross several maps and which represents the duration of a person’s experiencing Spanish language. Such line would be discontinuous, since the person will not always be speaking, reading or hearing Spanish (eg, when asleep). The line will be thus made of short segments but nevertheless will be a 4-dimensional map of a specific 4-dimensional object. Let us plot now all the similar lines of different people in the map. We could condense the growing information with lines of thicknesses proportional to the number of peoples they represent. We will follow these lines in time to find that around 1492, some lines bend towards Central America where Columbus first sailed. Then from there branches to South America appear, followed even later by lines to the Philippines and elsewhere.

This symbolic spatio-temporal tree becomes an accurate scientific representation in 4 dimensions of the physical object we call ‘Spanish language’. This way of representing an object with apparently so little source ‘material, enables us to extend scientific methods of representation to sociological objects without abandoning the principles of physics I have outlined above.

A surprising implication of this approach is that if at some moment nobody is speaking, singing, writing, reading and even dreaming in Spanish, at that time, the Spanish language ceases to be in the four-dimensional world, i.e. the language ceases to ‘exist’. 

Transient Existence

The problem of what ‘existence’ is, even for humans, becomes part of the physics of complex stratified structures. The degree of transience of objects such as languages depends on how many people ‘live’ the Spanish language. Furthermore, if all of these people were to die, the recovery of Spanish and its continued existence would depend on how easy it would be to translate into other living languages.  This in turn depends on those symbolic external structures such as books, records, tapes, movies, etc, which would enable reconstituting the experience of Spanish even after a period of disappearance. The terms ‘living’ and ‘dead’ languages⁴ reflect these states and highlight the absolute dependence of languages on living humans experiencing them.

In a similar way, we can describe a piece of music as a four-dimensional physical object. Let us take the 5^th Symphony of Beethoven as an example. This music clearly depends on having been conceived and composed by Beethoven, since it exists and we can listen to it. It has a beginning with a date and location in Beethoven’s brain. Its on-going existence comes to depend on other brains, when they play, listen or remember the symphony. Yet its extension both in space and time is discontinuous as is the case for every human experience. If no one lived to listen, play or remember this symphony, it would cease to ‘exist’. It would not belong to the fabric of the universe. Even more reason to listen, play and remember this music! The close coupling between human experience and cultural activities such as dance, music, painting, sculpture, economy, morality, poetry, narrative, etc, makes them legitimate fields of study for ‘social’ neuroscience.  

The cultural structures of human societies are part of this class of social objects whose existence depends totally upon existence of individual persons. Amongst these are villages, town, cities, governments, clubs, social groups, political parties, nations, and empires. The science of these structures is at its infancy but already it is based on principles of stratified structures distributed in space and time.  

Cosmologies which are based only on imagination with no chance or intention to be tested with scientific principles in the real world are most often dangerous for human survival. These include religious cosmologies, absolute ideologies, and absolute nationalism. One of the worse examples of how a religion can be tragically violent and cruel beyond belief are the nine Asian countries – Afghanistan, Iran, Yemen, United Arab Emirates, Maldives, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Malaysia, and Qatar – which impose the death penalty on residents who claim to be atheists. The African nations of Mauritania, Somalia, Sudan, and Nigeria are four more countries that use capital punishment to discourage atheism. The history of the Judaeo-Christian civilisation is also marred by examples of extreme violence and intolerance⁵.

The election of Mussolini, of Franco, of Hitler and, now, the many democracies falling toward autocracies suffice to make my point: all the so-called values of these modern dictatorships are founded upon principles that punish individuals who resist those intolerant values. We are indebted to the courage of many people through history who resisted intolerance for the more civilised state that many of us live in.

14.2 Human Creative Pleasures

Since the origin of human cultures, a vast range of activities have been developed for the pure pleasure of performing, either alone or in a group such as social celebrations and sports. Sport, for example, encapsulates well many human inner drives but in a peaceful way. Even war-like games with varying degrees of bodily contact, such as rugby, soccer, boxing, judo, and other martial arts, all have become constrained by clear rules and are judged impartially according to those rules. Competitive non-contact sports such as athletics and different forms of racing allow the peaceful recognition of winners and superior levels of performance. Other performative sports, such as gymnastics, show off individual skills to judges in a search for perfection with harm to no one.

Beyond sport, individual creativity in the arts strives to reach the pinnacle in the human search for perfection.

14.3 Visual Art

Probably more than any other creative practice, visual art is linked to the cultural development of human cultures. The visual representation of the world started with cave art as a powerful way to maintain shared memories. Visual art is part of the process of recording sharing experiences and almost certainly led to the development of written language. Together written language and visual representation underlie the scientific description and representation of geometric space, and the physical objects it contains, ultimately allowing us to understand more of the brain as this essay testifies.

For more on this subject, see the videos of my 8 lectures on music and the brain at this link.

14.4 Music as Human Creative Pleasure

Why is music regarded as one of the pinnacles of human culture? I think there is a surprisingly simple reason which does not detract from the many anthropological and sociological explanations.

Evolutionarily speaking, all animals including humans have to survive and procreate. It is well accepted that behaviors which enhance survival and adaptability are associated with an internal feeling of elation, satisfaction, happiness, including a sense of control, of agency⁶. Music clearly is one of these behaviours.

Music may have started in proto-humans when they gathered around an anvil to make tools, butcher meat, and to eat. This activity would involve rhythmic striking and pounding associated to quasi-musical vocalizations, gestures, and dance moves⁷. A core element of music is rhythm which is deeply rooted in movements of the body⁸. Most early cultures have developed ceremonies of marching to a beat, dancing, playing instruments and singing, all of which are underpinned by rhythmic structures. These group activities, constructed around music, generate the sense of trust and predictability, on which social interactions are based, in each member of the community. The other key element of music, melody, is associated with some of the brain areas involved with language perception and production⁹. As the cognitive psychologist and linguist Steven Pinker puts it, “Music may borrow some of the mental software for language” further enhancing the ability of music to foster social bonding¹⁰.

In this essay, I have made it clear that many human capabilities and skills involve different parts of the nervous system working together, by connecting oscillating neural activities from different regions to ensure a high level of sensory-motor coordination. Music is all about walking, marching to a beat, dancing, playing instruments, singing in company. It represents the expression of all the interconnected neural activities at once, even when no specific survival tasks are involved. Indeed, when individuals are making music with one another, their nervous systems are physically coupled with one another via vision and sound. ‘Interactional synchrony’ between brains is the essence of music and constitutes its greatest evolutionary advantage. When such connections between many parts of the nervous system are active at the same time, the experience of inner pleasure is also high¹¹. 

Labbé and Grandjean¹² summarised this concept well when they described the mechanisms underlying ‘rhythmic entrainment’ and ’emotional contagion’ associated with musical experience: a listener’s movements and physiological rhythms synchronise (or ‘entrain’) with the periodicity of the music (the pulse or the beat); this, in turn, increases arousal and engagement with the music and may induce mood shifts and feelings of pleasure. 

The tremendous social bonding capability of music has also some darker sides. By engendering a sense of total communal bonding, it has also been used for supporting militaristic, nationalistic, or religious feelings of supremacy and superiority. This dangerous side of music must be resisted. On the contrary, we must foster musical activities that aim for the peak of pure personal and social pleasure in a positive way. 

14.5 What social structure best allows all the best of our creative freedoms, educating humans from the very beginning to become freer individuals?

Having proposed a daring idea of how we can be considered fundamentally as a multi-storey neural building, living in a real universe, we can learn to become more free by reducing the impact of negative inner and outer drives and increasingly acquiring a practical sense of being in control.

Being part of history allows us to identify those social principles which have already given us some of the social structures which facilitate creative independence. 

Governments should not have absolute executive power. They should represent the will of the majority but maintain full respect for the minorities. Their powers should be limited in time. Their other powers – judicial, legislative – should be independent. There should freedom of thought, speech and publication of ideas. In the written rules of society, there should no reference to any religious principle nor any absolute ideology.

Such a system, even if it is inevitably imperfect, will continue to foster all that we are learning about the human brain, in concert with a deeper sense of humanity, that speck in the Universe which is nothing and all at the same time.

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1. Daniel Dennett (2003): Freedom Evolves. Allen Lane, London / Viking Books, New York. ↩︎
2. For example, see Gestalt psychology: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gestalt_psychology; http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Gestalt_principles ↩︎
3. For example, see John D. Barrow (1993): Pi in the Sky – Counting, Thinking, and Being. Hatchette; Stanislas Dehaene (1997): The Number Sense. Oxford University Press. ↩︎
4. See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_death ↩︎
5. For example, see Michel Onfray (2011): Atheist Manifesto – The case against Christianity, Judaism and Islam, Arcade Publishing. ↩︎
6. See KC Berridge & ML Kringelbach (2015) Pleasure systems in the brain. Neuron 6: 646-664. Click here to download a PDF file; ML Kringelbach & KC Berridge (2009) Towards a functional neuroanatomy of pleasure and happiness. Trends in Cognitive Science 13: 479-487. Click here to download a PDF file. ↩︎
7. See Steven Mithen (2005): The Singing Neanderthals –The Origins of Music, Language, Mind and Body. Harvard University Press / Weidenfeld & Nicolson; Nils L Wallin, Björn Merker & Stephen Brown (eds, 2001): The Origins of Music. MIT Press. ↩︎
8. Anthony Storr (1992): Music and the Mind. Harper and Collins. ↩︎
9. Aniruddh D Patel (2008): Music, Language and the Brain. Oxford University Press; Philip Ball (2010): The Music Instinct – How Music Works and Why We Can’t Do Without It. Oxford University Press; Daniel J Levitin (2006) This Is Your Mind On Music – The Science of a Human Obsession. Dutton; Stefan Koelsch (2011): Toward a neural basis of music perception – a review and updated model. Frontiers in Psychology 2(110). Click here to download the PDF file. ↩︎
10. Stephen Pinker (1997): How the Mind Works. Norton. ↩︎
11. See footnotes 7-9 above. ↩︎
12. Carolina Labbé & Didier Grandjean (2014): Musical Emotions Predicted by Feelings of Entrainment. Music Perception 32(2). ↩︎

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