Mind and body seem to be quite different things. We sometimes talk as though the mind gives orders and the body carries them out, or perhaps rebels against a one-sided sort of mind, producing neurotic symptoms. Sometimes we think that the mind (or soul) rides the body as a jockey a horse. Or we imagine that “the real me” occupies a seat in the brain, directly behind the eyes, collating data that stream in from the senses, and sending out orders to the muscles to duck, turn sharply to the left, and watch out for that pan of spattering grease. The “machine” of the body -- it has often been said -- harbors a “ghost” that has a free will, may be immortal, and is probably sullied by its association with matter, instinct, and the body's love of comfort.

          Some four centuries ago, René Descartes gave voice to this naïve body/mind dualism when he distinguished “corporeal substances” that are extended in space from “spiritual substances” that are capable of thinking. When he said, “I think, therefore I am,” he identified himself with his thinking soul, which he called “the principle of biological, sensitive, and intellectual life” (Copleston, 1960: 129). Along with the vast majority of his intellectual contemporaries, he stayed firmly in the tradition of Western theology, according to which I am a soul, which is my eternal identity, and I have a body, which is the temporal abode for my earthly sojourn far from my heavenly home with God. For Descartes, therefore, biology deals only with the machinery that comprises organisms and cannot approach the soul that moves them and makes them live. It misses the most important entity, the ghost in the machine. Even today, at the start of the twenty-first century, our folk psychology favors a soul like the one Descartes described, but conveniently forgets to worry about how a non-material substance can bring about physical changes. How does a ghost that is invisible to the eye and able to pass through walls, make itself solid enough to pull the neural cranks and chemical levers that move the muscles and steer the body? “Anything that can move a physical thing is itself a physical thing” (Dennett, 1991: 35).

          A matter/spirit dualism like Descartes' is very much with us today. There appears to be a world-wide efflorescence of fundamentalism in religion (Christian, Jewish, Islamic, even Hindu) trying desperately to reassure us that advances in science have not eliminated God and the soul from the world. The recent development of the pseudo-science of creationism or intelligent design is a symptom of our anxiety. Biology is learning some very threatening things, and people are afraid that the old theological certainties may become untenable. Above all, if there is no eternal, spiritual substance, no soul, perhaps we just die and cease to exist. Perhaps there is no eternal life, no transcendent meaning, no reward for following the rules or punishment for breaking them. Perhaps we stand at the brink of meaninglessness and chaos.

          If there is any solution to this problem, it certainly does not lie in denying the validity of scientific discovery. Ignorance, especially willful, bad-faith, head-in-the-sand ignoring of the evidence is no solution. Let science continue its work, testing its hypotheses, and refining its views. Theology is something else, operating at the level of faith rather than that of empirical evidence. It has nothing to add to the scientific project, for as soon as an immeasurable, ghostly factor such as an immortal soul or a divine creator enters the picture, testable hypotheses become impossible to make. If God can enter the evolutionary process at any moment with an original and unpredictable creative act (designing an eye, for instance), then all scientific investigation is pointless; there would be no regularities and laws on which to make scientific predictions and test their validity. Similarly, if our psychology depends upon a soul that is an immortal, spiritual, invisible substance, psychology's efforts to understand the laws that govern the mind, experience, and behavior are also stymied. In either instance the door has been left open for the unknowable and unpredictable to enter the picture at any moment.

          Science, itself, has no wish to refute theological notions, [1] but simply to construct its theories upon the very reasonable assumption that everything we need to know in order to describe the course of evolution or the functioning of the brain is in principle right here before us and can be measured. Indeed, much of what counts as progress in science is coming up with new instruments and techniques (electron microscopes, MRI machines) to make perceptible and measurable what was formerly invisible. The problem with a soul like the one Descartes describes is that it is in principle wholly imperceptible to any instrument that will ever be invented. It remains a superstitious wildcard in the search to understand both brain and psyche.

          Jung, too, was concerned about such questions, and often said that -- as a psychologist -- he could not consider the question of whether there is a God or what sort of being God might be. What a psychologist can investigate, however, is the experience people have had when they claim to have encountered God. Then it is the experience that is the datum to be studied. The image of God in such a case is a matter of “psychic fact,” a reality that has effects in an individual's life. Because of his interest in the phenomena of religion and their importance in the psychology of individuals, Jung had to clarify this issue again and again in his writings. Despite that, however, I am frequently asked to explain what Jung meant when he spoke of the dark side of God. Sometimes people come to me in panic, thinking that Jung has declared God to be a treacherous figure, not realizing that Jung was speaking of the image of a treacherous God, and not making metaphysical claims about some transcendent Godhead.

          When I have lectured on the ideas in the first four chapters of this book, I have had to answer many aficionados of Jung who are disturbed by the idea that the archetypes might have a foundation in our genes and neurons. They are afraid I have become far too “reductive” and eliminated the psyche from Jungian psychology. I am confident that Jung would not agree. As early as 1906, in a review of a book by Carl Wernicke, discoverer of the brain's language area that bears his name, Jung is enthusiastic about finding connections between brain and psyche (CW18: ¶ 891). In 1911/50, he says “the archaic basis of the mind” is related to “inherited brain structures” (CW5:¶38). In 1936/42, he says that the psyche is based on the evolution and anatomy of the brain (CW8: ¶234). And most explicitly of all, in 1957: “The collective unconscious is simply the psychic expression of the identity of brain structure irrespective of all racial differences” (CW13: ¶11).

          There were occasions, especially in the 1940's and 1950's, when behaviorism and the Standard Social Science Model were at their most influential, that Jung insisted on the uniqueness of the psyche vis-à-vis the brain. Possibly the most explicit statement is to be found in the first book he aimed at a general audience, The Undiscovered Self (1957), where he said, “The structure and physiology of the brain furnish no explanation of the psychic process. The psyche has a peculiar nature which cannot be reduced to anything else” (CW10: ¶528). Here, and elsewhere (e.g., CW11: ¶14), Jung was battling a notion that had been finding more and more adherents in those days, the idea that the psyche is a mere “epiphenomenon” of the brain -- a sort of illusory by-product that has no effects of its own. [2] He said epiphenomenalism makes the psyche “only semi-existent” (CW11: ¶769). Significantly, most of today's authorities agree with Jung and reject epiphenomenalism. Philosopher John R. Searle calls epiphenomenalism “the view that mental structures exist but are functionally inert . . . [that] consciousness is like the froth on the wave . . . it is there but it does not matter” (Searle, 2004: 30).

          For Jung, Searle and me, psyche exists, has effects and is functionally significant. But it is not a separate “spiritual substance” with a nature wholly different from that of the brain. There is only one substance, but two points of view. From one angle -- that of the scientist looking at the brain through highly refined instruments -- the brain is an immense variety of neural networks blinking on and off in blinding confusion; but according to the view from the inside, where we human subjects live, the mind is a great theater within which the world appears, and all manner of dreamscapes. Extended, solid matter makes thinking possible. Mentality emerges from those blinking neural networks. Nothing miraculous happens, and no new substance comes into being. Mentality is the subjective aspect of the inter-neuronal events our instruments can observe.

          Emergence, in this sense, is not unique to the mind, but found throughout nature. For example, subatomic particles that have been measured in specialized laboratories have given us an almost unimaginable picture of fundamental reality: “Space on the subatomic scale isn't empty but seething with elementary particles that pop in and out of existence on extremely short timescales” (Science News, 2/28/04: 132). Under the right conditions, enduring entities called atoms emerge as stable configurations of those ephemeral particles.

          If we ourselves lived in quantum-mechanical space -- rather like the two-dimensional people in “Flatland” who have no concept of three-dimensional space -- we would not be able to imagine the existence of atoms. But since we know that both they and subatomic particles exist, we can go on to investigate how it is that the properties of quarks, gluons, and the like make up atoms that are relatively enduring, retain their identities, and do not po in and out of existence. Under the right conditions -- such as an exploding supernova -- atoms emerge from subatomic space.

          Similarly, at the next higher level of complexity, gold atoms are not made of gold nor oxygen atom of oxygen. All atoms are made of the same all-purpose stuff: protons, neutrons, and electrons. It is the number and configuration of such ephemeral particles that give atoms their properties, and make it possible that the gaseous substances, oxygen and hydrogen, will unite explosively to produce water molecules. Having become quite familiar with water molecules, we can easily appreciate that water's liquidity at room temperature and the solidity of its less densely packed ice crystals [3] both derive from the way electrons are shared between two atoms of hydrogen and one of oxygen -- even though electrons are particles that pop in and out of existence on extremely short timescales.

          By analogy, the structure of the brain and its blinking neural networks form the substrate out of which mind emerges. Knowing that both exist and depend upon one another enables our investigation of the effects physiological events may have upon our conscious states.

Mind: An Emergent Phenomenon

          Francis Crick, who made his reputation in the early 1950's for his part in determining the structure of DNA, went on in the last stage of his career to tackle the question of how consciousness and mind arise from electrochemical events in the nervous system. He argues that the process is emergent, and calls it “The Astonishing Hypothesis,” the title of his 1995 book. In doing so, however, he is careful to point out that the notion of emergence has two quite different meanings. Both meanings agree that the whole (consciousness) is greater than the sum of its parts (interacting neural networks). Those inclined to see wonders take this to mean that a marvelous process occurs that “cannot in any way, even in principle, be understood.” They believe emergence is a sort of miracle that confounds our understanding, rather like the notions of a divine trinity or virgin birth. Crick rejects this “mystical” [4] tack and places his work within the scientific tradition: “Although the whole is more than the sum of its parts, it can be understood on the basis of the parts and how they interact” (Crick, 1995: 11). Philosopher Daniel Dennett agrees: “The challenge is to construct a theory of mental events using the data that scientific method permits” (Dennett, 1991: 71).

          To say that mind emerges from neural events, is to claim that “the mind is co-dimensional with the brain; it occupies all the brain's nooks and crannies” (Llinás, 2002: 2). Neural firings are not themselves conscious, and none can be singled out as solely responsible for consciousness; but all of them together cause the specific states of consciousness that we experience. Consciousness is, in this sense, a “system feature” of the brain, a higher order phenomenon which exists only because those neural networks are blinking on and off in their characteristic patterns (Searle, 2004: 149). Materialism is wrong for trying to reduce mentality to the neural events themselves; and dualism is wrong for claiming that something else exists over and above the physical substrate (Ibid., 126). Indeed, from what we have seen in the previous chapter, we can confidently say that mind emerges from neural activity in earliest infancy through a baby's emotional/gestural interactions with its mother and other caregivers. “Mind emerges at the interface of interpersonal experience and the structure and function of the brain” (Siegel, 1999: xi).

          To answer my critics in the Jungian world who fear that I have gone too far with biology and “reduced” the psyche to an epiphenomenon, I appeal to the very clear thinking of John R. Searle, Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, who distinguishes two radically different sorts of reduction: causal and ontological. A causal reduction of consciousness merely aims to show that what occurs in consciousness is caused by events in the neural substrate. Probably no one doubts this causal relation, for we all know that we cannot think without a brain and that damage to parts of our brain will likely result in disturbances in our thinking. Our thoughts and the images we entertain are indeed, as they seem, a different order of being from neural events; but thoughts depend upon those biological processes. An ontological reduction, on the other hand, denies the subjectively obvious fact that thoughts, images, and emotions are different sorts of things than the chemical reactions taking place between and within neurons. An ontological reduction claims that consciousness is a mere epiphenomenon of material processes, and only neural events are fully real. I agree with Searle: consciousness depends on neural chemistry but is a different order of being. Consciousness is what we experience it to be, a different mode of being and as real in its own way as the brain (Searle, 2004: 113-24).

          Rodolfo R. Llinás, Professor of Neuroscience and Department Chair at the New York University School of Medicine, makes a similar argument, but from a scientific, rather than a philosophical, point of view. He calls the brain “a wondrous biological machine' that is intrinsically capable of global oscillatory patterns [the composite effect of those blinking networks] that literally are our thoughts, perceptions, dreams -- the self and self-awareness (Llinás, 2002: 133). In his book, I of the Vortex: From Neurons to Self, a lucid and fairly detailed account of nervous system functioning and its relation to consciousness, he begins with the neural modules that control well-defined motor functions, such as the movements by which we walk or ride a bicycle -- what are called fixed action patterns. They operate pretty much outside of consciousness, but we can start them up consciously and tune them for specific problems, like keeping our balance while negotiating a rocky path, or one crisscrossed with tree roots.

          Such considerations as these lead Llinás to conclude that “what we call thinking is the evolutionary internalization of movement” (Ibid., 35). Thus, if fixed action patterns are “modules of fleeting, but well-defined motor function,” then consciousness consists of “modules of fleeting focus in the context of movement” (Ibid., 167). An organism as complex as that of a human being requires consciousness because there are so many different courses of action to choose among, and so many different possible states of our bodily organism. “A system with only one or two possible states would not require consciousness” (Ibid., 169). Humans are constantly required to make momentary judgments “which are re-entered into the system for the predictive needs of the organism.” Such re-entered judgments “are the `ghost' in the machine” (Ibid., 221). In this statement, the ghost has been stripped of its Cartesian nature, as a separate, non-bodily substance and has become the subjective aspect of objective neural events. Consciousness is no epiphenomenon, for it is effective and vitally necessary; but it is not a separate substance.

Psychic Image and Brain Image

          Our everyday experience is filled with images that we seem to watch in our heads, flickering by like pictures on a film strip, or store in memory banks, as though our brains were living photo albums. Such habits of thought may even seduce us into believing that traumatically repressed memories can be restored in all their original accuracy and clarity many years after the events to which they refer. Even scientists and philosophers have until relatively recently spoken of the “registration,” “storage,” and “retrieval” of memories, as though brains had the capacity to make, hold, temporarily lose, and finally recover cerebral snap shots.

          The ontological difference we have just established between brain events and conscious experience reveals the error lurking in such naïve assumptions. Mental images are a different order of being from brain images. Indeed, what scientists sometimes call images in the brain are not images at all, in the sense of pictures of people, objects, and situations. Rather, they are patterns of neural activation. “Blueness doesn't exist in the external world” (Llinás, 2002: 100). Blueness is a psychic experience, a universally human mental interpretation of the way certain neurons in the brain respond to wavelengths of light in the 420nm (nanometer [5]) range. Modern neuroscience has abandoned naïve realism -- the idea that we see or hear precisely what is out there in the world -- and agrees with Emmanuel Kant, just as Jung did: our experience of the world (the “phenomenon”) is determined by our human knowing apparatus, while the “thing itself” can never be known as it is, apart from our human brain and psyche.

          In this book, mind and psyche will sometimes be used interchangeably to represent phenomenal, experiential or conscious reality. In general, psyche will be preferred to mind because its connotations are much broader. Mind generally suggests rational, intellectual or conceptual activities, while psyche includes these things and just as readily suggests emotional, sensory and imaginary experiences -- all of which are just as real and important and just as dependent upon the functioning of the nervous system as is thinking. For the time being we do not need to ask what it is like to entertain a psychic image, for every image that has ever entered our consciousness is a psychic image. It is a matter of everyday experience. What we need to look at more closely, however, is what sorts of things are going on in the brain when we entertain a psychic image.

Having an image in the brain. An image in the brain is “not an objective entity functioning like a picture or other symbol” (Winkelman, 2000: 42), but rather is “a simplified representation of the external world written in a strange form” (Llinás, 2002: 108). One of the strangest things about that form is the fact that the brain's response to a single being in the external world -- say, a bull advancing toward us across an open meadow -- activates a multitude of circuits scattered all over the brain in separate regions. In the visual sphere, alone, dozens of separate areas immediately begin analyzing from a variety of aspects the ever-changing shape of the bull's body; and all of these things are being correlated with circuits recently active but now silent, and evaluated for their emotional value; alarms are being sent to the autonomic nervous system to prepare for an emergency requiring flight and to the fixed action potentials in the spinal cord to get our legs churning and headed for the nearest fence. There is no “image” of the bull anywhere in the brain, but the brain allows its energetic configuration to be shaped by the sensory stimuli that impinge upon it in order to mobilize all of the body's systems.

          This whole-body response is what it means to have the image of a threatening bull in the brain. Furthermore, essentially the same configuration results when we dream of a bull coming toward us across a field. In a dream, the motor response is inhibited by certain centers in the brain stem that control sleep/wake cycles, but otherwise the whole bodily “set” is the same (Hobson, 1988). This is why, when Jung -- or any psychologist -- speaks of psychic images, the entire bodily configuration is implied. An image in this sense is not merely a picture, but includes emotional valuation and the implications for one's survival, not to mention the meaning of one's existence. It is ultimately the reason Jung was not contradicting himself when he said that archetypes in the sense of “primordial images” were not simply images but far more than that, typical human situations.

          How the brain responds to a stimulus in the outer world is described vividly by Walter J. Freeman, Professor of Neurobiology at the University of California, Berkeley. He asks us to imagine what happens when we grab a coffee pot to fill a mug. The body responds to the sight of coffee pot and mug by shaping itself in a characteristic manner: “You do not transfer geometric shapes [of those objects] into your brain. Instead you incorporate your body to the forms of the objects by shaping your hands to them, so you can manipulate them. . . . The body . . . changes its own form to become similar to aspects of the stimuli that are relevant . . .” (Freeman, 2000: 27). In similar manner, but in accordance with the electrochemical nature of its cells, the brain shapes itself in response to the object. When it does so, there is not a single image of a coffee pot anywhere in the brain. Rather aspects of our sensory response to the coffee pot are fragmented and scattered all over the convoluted cerebral cortex. Psychoanalytically oriented neuropsychologists, Mark Solms and Oliver Turnbull, employ a related example. When I contemplate the coffee mug on my desk, some brain regions recognize the mug, some locate it on my desk, while others perceive its redness (Solms & Turnbull, 2002: 74).

          There are “up to thirty-three functionally segregated and widely distributed visual maps in the brain,” dealing with such separate issues as edges, orientations, color, and movement (Edelman, 2004: 44). Much of our cortex is comprised of tiny functional maps, some of the outer world and some of our own body; and everything is being constantly processed and reprocessed as the activity occurring in one map is relayed to other maps and regions and receives still further inputs itself.

Over hundreds of milliseconds, emendations and overwritings of content can occur, in various orders. These yield, over the course of time, something rather like a narrative stream or sequence, which can be thought of as subject to continuous editing by many processes distributed around the brain and continuing indefinitely into the future. . . . A few will even persist to the point of making their presence known through press releases issued in the form of verbal behavior (Dennett, 1991: 135).

          The scenario we have been considering of an image in the brain has been fairly static. We will not have a complete picture until we add the larger context, which is the history of the individual person. The pattern of reactions and mappings that feed into one another always occurs against a background which is the history and goals of the organism (Freeman, 2000: 82). Everything we encounter in our experience of the world activates patterns of similar events we have encountered in the past; and when this happens, “we retrieve not just sensory data but also accompanying motor and emotional data” (Damasio, 1999: 161). Every image with historical resonance reconstructs “a transient pattern” that has been mobilized again and again in the course of our lives (Damasio, 1994: 105). University of Iowa Professor of Neurology, Antonio Damasio, places autobiographical sensitivity at the heart of his theory of consciousness: “If our brains would simply generate fine topographically organized representations and do nothing with those representations, I doubt we would ever be conscious of them as images” (Ibid., 99). We never experience bare images, innocent of all emotional value. Rather, “We are wired to respond with an emotion” when we perceive certain features, such as the size of large animals, the type of motion of snakes, the sounds of aggression (growling), and such bodily states as angina. Each of these things triggers a typical emotional reaction (Ibid., 131). Jung would say they are archetypal.

The binding problem. In speaking vaguely of blinking networks and scattered maps, we have been skirting one of the major unresolved issues in brain research, the “binding” problem. What is it that combines all the disparate activities together so that we end up with a single, moving picture of the world -- and ourselves as a single subject acting within that world? The fragmentation of the brain's functioning is immense. The retina of the eye, for instance, sends “information to more than ten destinations besides the primary visual cortex (Zeman, 2002: 226). Meanwhile, the primary visual cortex is only one of many visual maps scattered about the brain, where information is separately analyzed and influenced by related information; and although we primates favor our visual connection with the world, there are four other senses also gathering and analyzing information. What binds all this activity together and unifies our impressions? What makes the chair across the room from me a single, distinct object? For Descartes the answer was simple, the “thinking substance,” the soul does it all, and does it mysteriously in a manner that, in principle, can never be investigated. If we can no longer accept the idea that there is a little person (a homunculus) sitting behind the controls of our brains -- if the brain does it all without a blueprint and without a central control -- what makes us work as a unit?

          At least three different hypotheses have been proposed to solve the binding problem. Damasio (1999) makes a very convincing argument that whatever we apprehend is grounded in the sensory/kinesthetic sense of our own body at the moment the binding takes place. Our body-sense itself is the binding element. Others have argued that the prefrontal lobes of the cortex, with their many connections across several modes of brain-processing, have a directing function. It is surely plausible that such a brain area that is so important to “final processing” would be crucial for the binding operation, but it is not favored by many researchers (Solms & Turnbull, 2002: 74-6). Perhaps the most popular class of theories favors synchrony, whereby everything that happens in a given moment is bound together as a single object or scene.

          The most frequently mentioned version of the synchrony hypothesis is the 40-hertz pattern. At a frequency of roughly forty pulses per second (40 Hz), a synchronized wave of neuronal firing sweeps across the brain from back to front, and whatever representational processes are “on” at the time of the sweep are bound together (Siegel, 1999: 134). Damasio (1999: 126) agrees that “core consciousness is generated in pulse-like fashion.” But others point out that there are many rhythms in the brain. The neurotransmitter acetylcholine, for instance, acts in a fraction of a millisecond, while a neuromodulator like luteinizing hormone-releasing hormone (LHRH) reaches a peak only after sixty seconds and its effects last over ten minutes (Quartz & Sejnowski, 2002: 25). Harvard dream specialist J. Allan Hobson agrees, “Binding via synchronicity occurs in milliseconds to seconds. Binding via chemical modulation occurs in minutes to hours. We need both, and we must make the best of both until we understand the mother of all questions: how does [all this] result in conscious experience in the first place?” (Hobson, 2002: 137).

The Emergence of Psyche: An Analogy

          This brief overview of the binding problem reveals a central divergence in theories about how the brain gives rise to consciousness. Some researchers have focused their attention on the chemical reactions that occur within and between neurons, often employing visualization tools such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) by which areas of the cortex and networks of neurons are seen to “light up,” in response to increased blood delivery to the most active neural populations. Those brain researchers who seek to determine how the brain processes information with such visualization techniques are criticized by their opponents for relying on static snap shots of the brain at work. Surely something is learned, but the brain's incessant activity is left out of the picture. Such critics agree that neural pathways and chemistry are essential, but there is a more energic and rarified form of activity going on simultaneously. Furthermore, this more energic sort of activity actually governs and shapes the course of cellular chemistry.

          According to this more comprehensive perspective, chemical activity at the level of cells generates electromagnetic waves, the same sorts of waves that are recorded by electro-encephalographs (EEGs). Refined techniques have enabled researchers to train their attention on several different levels of wave propagation: individual neurons, neural populations in small patches of cortex, and so on up to the whole brain. These provide a far more dynamic, “real time,” set of observations of the brain at work.

          Chemical reactions and wave generation are two aspects of the same process. In what follows, a material description of neural chemistry will be followed by an account of wave patterns. The waves (a) originate in the activity of the cellular, chemical substrate; but (b) they also exert control over that activity, unifying it, and giving it shape. These two levels of interrelated brain dynamics stand as a compelling analogy for the emergence of psyche from brain. For, as we have seen, emergence means that there are two entangled levels of being operating simultaneously. The chemistry of the brain's gray matter and the EEG waves represent one and the same phenomenon, as seen from two points of view. A second, more subtle and rarified, mode of being emerges from something dense and material. I do not mean to suggest that the EEG waves are the psyche, but only to support the argument for emergence by describing a highly suggestive analogy. Two processes studied with different sorts of instruments, are simply alternate aspects of one and the same functioning brain. Each is equally “true”; and neither is in itself sufficient for describing either the brain or the psyche.

Neurons talking to neurons. Conscious experience emerges as the highest order of meaning from a plethora of patterns nested within patterns that comprises the brain's activity. At the very bottom of these layers is the single nerve cell performing a variety of chemical reactions. It grows a bush of dendrites to receive impulses from other neurons at one end of its body; and at the other end, it extends a single long axon through which it transmits electrical impulses. A neuron “fires” when its many dendrites combine more-or-less simultaneous inputs to produce a large enough charge to cause channels arranged along the sides of its axon to open. Positive ions are pumped in through these channels, and negative ions out, in a wave of positive charge that moves down the axon to produce a similar excitation in down-stream neurons. The information carried by an axon depends upon the frequency of its firing as well as by the rate of change in that frequency (Rose, 2005: 158).

          The active pumping of ions all along its length shows us that neurons are much more active than a copper wire which conducts electricity from a wall outlet to a reading lamp; and the impulse travels more slowly. When the impulse reaches the synapse, where the axon of neuron number one connects with a dendrite on neuron number two, electrical transmission is converted into chemistry. At the end of the axon, vesicles filled with the neurotransmitter glutamate [6] release their contents into the synaptic space, and the glutamate molecules drift across to the dendrite of the post-synaptic neuron, where further chemical reactions are required before channels are opened and the pumping of ions can begin in the second neuron.

          Neurons are bound into networks according to the principle of Hebb's Law [7]: “neurons that fire together wire together.” Frequently employed pathways are strengthened when genes in the nucleus of post-synaptic neurons are induced to produce proteins that return to the synapse and alter its chemistry. Sometimes, too, “gap junctions” are formed where there is no synapse at all, but the ions in one axon feed directly into the axon of another neuron, by-passing the complex chemical interactions that occur at the synapse. Gap junctions allow “widely scattered and perhaps distantly located neurons [to achieve] a concise and synchronous signal pattern” (Llinás, 2002: 90).

          Because each neuron is connected with dozens to thousands of other neurons, networks are extremely complex, and must be so just to keep neurons active; for, “Only if the postsynaptic cell is bombarded with transmitter molecules from many different presynaptic terminals at about the same time -- within milliseconds -- will an action potential result” (LeDoux, 2002: 47). The brain's operation depends on populations of neurons, organized in networks: all firing with distinctive frequencies, all feeding into one another, sometimes exciting one another, sometimes inhibiting.

          The sensory information that enters the brain from the retina of the eye when we notice that bull advancing toward us, sets off some combination of neural signals that rapidly fire up networks that have fired many times before and that have been “wired” to fire as units. Small differences in the color, size, and speed of the bull result in different combinations of networks firing simultaneously than would have fired if the animal moving in our direction were a fawn or a kitten. Some of the most compelling theories of consciousness depend upon the simultaneity and inevitable differences between the multiple drafts of reality being entertained, compared, and contrasted within the brain by means of these networks (e.g., Dennett, 1991; Edelman & Tononi, 2000). We shall take up this topic at greater length in the next chapter, when we consider what an ego might be.

Electromagnetic waves. Discussions of neural networks leave much out of the picture, beginning at the most fundamental level -- the stuff of the brain, itself, neuropil. Neuropil (or “nerve felt”) is made up not only of matted axons and dendrites; but also of glial cells that form the brain's organizing skeleton, clean its debris, and assist at its synapses; and of the capillary networks of blood vessels that supply oxygen and nutrients; and finally of intercellular fluid. All of these together (neurons, glia, capillaries, and fluid) make up the “gray matter” of the brain (Freeman, 2000: 47). Neuropil is by no means inert. The path that current takes inside a neuron is only part of the electromagnetic picture of the neuropil's activity. For as ions pass into and out of the neuron, those charged particles are drawn out of and returned to the surrounding neuropil. When an axon becomes positively charged, the neighboring neuropil gains a negative charge, and vice versa. As a result, the neuropil is everywhere in a constant state of electromagnetic oscillation. Tiny potential differences, over microscopic distances dance everywhere on the brain's surface, and deep within it as well.

          As a component of the neuropil, every neuron -- even when it is not firing -- is in a constant state of oscillation, with frequencies between one and forty per second (Llinás, 2002: 9). In consequence, electromagnetic waves are generated over tiny millimeter-square patches of cortex -- just as electric wires generate a magnetic field about themselves which may influence the flow of electricity through a parallel wire. In similar fashion, the peaks and valleys of the brain's electromagnetic waves have an “entraining” effect upon the neurons below them, which tend to fire on the crests of the waves. Thus the activity of neural networks generates the first level of electromagnetic waves at a microscopic level. The sum of these waves, oscillating together in millimeter-square patches, brings about patterns at higher levels of organization.

          When a neuron begins to fire on the crests of a local oscillatory pattern, it ceases to act alone and goes through a “state transition.” This means it becomes a member of a “neuronal population” whose activity is governed by its collective oscillatory resonance. A group of non-synchronized neurons is called an “aggregate”; and the state transition effected when an aggregate begins to oscillate together turns them into an interacting “population” (Freeman, 2000: 53). In this way, electromagnetic resonance holds the brain together, organizes it, and enables its coherence (Llinás, 2002: 10). Neurons and their networks, however, are always able to switch into and out of oscillatory modes, changing frequency so as to oscillate with one population and then with another (Ibid., 12).

          The cumulative effect of electromagnetic resonance results in a far more holistic picture of the brain's activity than the more fragmentary view pursued by those who study neural networks. Freeman goes so far as to “propose that every neuron and every patch participates in every experience and behavior, even if its contribution is to silence its pulse train or stay dark in a brain image. What is important is the small fraction of semiautonomous activity in every part that is coordinated, not the small fraction of neurons or patches that is more active than the average” (Freeman, 2000: 109f). Freeman means that whose who study the minority of neurons that are more active than the average -- those that “light up” in fMRI “snapshots” -- are putting too much emphasis on too small a sample of the brain's activity. What the brain does involves all the neurons and networks in their various stages of activation, for it is the simultaneous patterns of greater and lesser activity that causes mentality.

          To discover the practical implications of these observations, Freeman studied the olfactory bulb of the rabbit, a relatively large and easy-to-observe brain structure with a clear sensory function in which moments of information input are simply defined: they occur each time the rabbit inhales. He found that the neuropil of the bulb was continuously active with irregular wave forms. With each inhalation, however, there was a burst of activity, instantaneously, all over the bulb. A cumulative wave emerged over the whole bulb, but with a different amplitude at each microscopic location -- an AM (amplitude modulation) pattern. [8] And this pattern, he found, was as unique for each rabbit as the individual history of the animal (Ibid., 71-4).

          Between inhalations, the neurons in the olfactory bulb are an aggregate in which each responds mostly to its nearest neighbors (Ibid., 76). Each inhalation, therefore, creates a “state transition” that turns the aggregate into a population. As long as odors in the environment remain unchanged, the common wave burst assumes a characteristic shape that is repeated every time. Such a regular wave form is said to have found (or to be governed by) a “basin of attraction.” Think of a landscape dominated by a broad hollow or dip. Everything that moves in response to gravity will flow, roll or tumble toward the lowest point in such a basin. That lowest point is called the “point attractor” that defines the “basin of attraction.” Every AM wave generated over the rabbit's olfactory bulb will assume a shape that gravitates to a favored “low point” -- which means that this is the shape it “prefers” to have. “This is how the neurons in the bulb make themselves similar to the form of the stimulus in the world” (Ibid., 81). As long as the odors of the environment do not change, every inhalation will produce a wave governed by this same basin of attraction.

          But when there is a new stimulus, a new odor, “the first event . . . is the failure of a burst to occur. . . . The new odor means that the background fails to occur as expected. . . . . This is a state of, `I don't know what it is, but it may be important'” (Ibid., 79). The steady state of the neural population is shocked out of its familiar basin of attraction when a new odor is inhaled. The new stimulus causes the AM pattern to “ring” at a new frequency -- one that is characteristically different for each odorant. Then, eventually, it “decays” back to the steady state of the usual basin of attraction -- a condition that corresponds to the experience of exhausting our ability to respond to a new stimulus (Ibid., 56).

The state space of the cortex can be said to comprise an attractor landscape with several adjoining basins of attraction, one for each class of learned stimulus. . . . The attractors are not shaped by the stimulus directly, but by previous experience with those stimuli including [emotional associations [9]] and neuromodulators, as well as sensory input. Together these modify the synaptic connections within the neuropil and thereby also the attractor landscape (Ibid., 62).

          This statement is a strong endorsement of the notion that brain function is in constant process, and furthermore that the criteria for making distinctions lie nowhere but in the individual brain's own history of responses. There is no “photo album” of memories. The present is always some variation on the past, and becomes, with the passage of a moment, part of the past against which the next stimulus in interpreted. The brain is its history. In the olfactory bulb of the rabbit, each AM pattern depends on the history of the rabbit's exposure, not merely to the odorant presently sensed, but to every odorant ever experienced. Each new one leads to a change in AM patterns; and it is the changes in these patterns which count, not some a priori constant like a photo in an album (Ibid., 80). Every brain region of every brain has its own idiosyncratic attractor landscape, always susceptible to change, and having the shape it has for no reason other than its history of “shaping itself to the form [of a life-long series] of stimuli from the world.”

An analogy for emergence. Two rather exciting conclusions can be drawn from Freeman's research. One, to be taken up in the next section of this chapter, is the picture of a brain -- and consequently of a psyche -- whose identity is its history. Process is everything. Psyche is not substance but process. A single stimulus (the smell of lettuce or of fox) does not result in an identical pattern in every rabbit brain, but rather a pattern idiosyncratic to each individual rabbit. Every brain responds against the history of its own variable patterning, and every emergent psyche is likewise defined by its own process.

          The second issue has to do with how the activity of the neural networks is “bound” via oscillatory resonance. Here we clearly have two views of the same brain activity: one as “material” and “mechanical” as neuropil and its chemistry, and the other as “immaterial” and “subtle” as radio waves that pass right through the bone of the skull like ghosts. Both undeniably are real. Each is a separate “take” upon brain activity; each employs its own favored instruments of investigation to build its separate picture of a single process. It stands as a lucid analogy for the way psyche emerges from brain -- and not only because waves follow upon chemical reactions, as though they were “epiphenomena.” The analogy is even more apt insofar as the wave patterns have an ordering (“binding”) effect upon the activity of the cells in the neuropil. Freeman has demonstrated that the cumulative patterning in the waves that emerge out of cellular chemistry entrains the networks themselves and gives them shape. Wave patterns result from but also govern cell behavior. This is precisely the relationship we have imagined between psyche and the brain from which it emerges.

          With this observation, I do not mean Freeman's AM patterns are the psyche, even though some of Freeman's statements almost seem to urge us to think so: “It seems to me that the global AM patterns we detect are the biological basis for awareness” (Ibid., 134). These patterns are still objective processes that register on oscilloscopes and are discussed and studied in third-person terms, while the psyche is always first-person experiential.

          Still, the analogy is compelling, for the layered nature of AM patterns corresponds to what we might expect of a psyche. For example, Freeman finds that the AM patterns of the sensory system are found at the microscopic level, while the motor patterns that mobilize us to respond to what our senses pick up in the environment are found at the macroscopic level (Ibid., 102). This is precisely what we would expect of a psyche. At bottom, functioning as the data to be interpreted, is the sensory information. This is subsequently woven into an environmental context requiring us to make some decisions about what course of action to undertake. The question of what to do with sensory information requires a larger and more comprehensive vision, than what is involved in merely collecting data. We would expect to find the overall meaning of our momentary situation in the world to be reflected in a single global AM pattern that organizes an entire hemisphere of the brain:

Just as an individual neuron is subject to continual bombardment at its synapses yet can only report out a pulse intermittently on its sole axon, and just as the population [of neurons] is built from the seemingly random activity of millions of neurons yet can form only one attractor pattern at a time, so the whole hemisphere, in achieving unity from its myriad shifting parts, can sustain only one global AM pattern at a time. . . .

Awareness, then, is a distributed event that integrates the component subsystems and minimizes the likelihood of renegade state transitions in them. Consciousness is the process that makes a sequence of global states of awareness. It is a state variable that constrains the chaotic activities of the parts by quenching fluctuations. . . . This is how consciousness facilitates the enrichment of meaning. It holds back premature action and, by giving time for maturation and closure, it increases the likelihood of the expression in considered behavior of the long-term promise of an intentional being (Ibid., 135f).

          Freeman's language may be a bit obscure, here. Let me summarize some of it with an eye to delineating the divide between psyche and brain. He says that “awareness,” an aspect of what we are calling “psyche,” has its roots widely distributed in a variety of “subsystems,” or neural networks -- networks that are up to divergent activities. When the bull approaches us, we may suddenly become intensely aware of the call of a chickadee and wonder whether the bird is as worried as we are. We do not want any “renegade state transitions,” where our fascination with the bird call and what it may mean distracts us from the matter at hand: the bull. There are a few “fluctuations” that must be “quenched.” What does the quenching and focusing for Freeman are the AM waves, specifically their organization into a single, global AM pattern. And this is precisely what we expect of psyche. Given the myriad blinking networks putting information into psyche, some sort of center must be found, and with the right emotional valuation. Freeman may be right. It might be that psyche's decisions amount to choosing among various possible basins of attraction in the AM pattern over a cerebral hemisphere. But even if they do not, Freeman has offered us a compelling analogy for the emergence of psyche from brain.

Psyche as Process, not Substance

          If evolution has taught us anything, it is that “nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of its own history” (Rose, 2005: 187). Freeman's study of the AM patterns generated by the rabbit's olfactory bulb makes it clear that what is happening in the present makes sense only as a variation on all the other things that have happened in the past. When a new stimulus arrives at the olfactory bulb, the rabbit does not rummage through a file box of signals stored somewhere else in its brain to find a recognizable pattern. There are no stored patterns. Rather the brain's activities find their shape only in the passing moment as complex AM waves that are constantly dissolving and reforming. There are no fixed representations filed away in storage like a photo album. Each new pattern is slightly different from every other. This is true not only at the level of AM waves, but also deeper, in the neuropil, where from day to day and hour to hour, “certain cells will have retracted their processes, others will have extended new ones, and certain others will have died (Edelman & Tononi, 2000: 47).

          The brain, like every living thing, is in constant flux. LeDoux says, “People don't come preassembled, but are glued together by life” (2000: 3). We saw something of this in the last chapter, where human and primate infants gradually learn a mode of communication and begin to become members of a whole socio-cultural world through their emotional/gestural interactions with their mothers. Learning means building new neural networks and establishing new basins of attraction. At the end of its first month, the infant's brain is quite a different entity from what it was when it emerged from the womb. The brain's changes, its history, are its identity. Experiments with adults reveal that this brain flexibility does not stop with infancy. Three months of regular practice at juggling three balls were demonstrated by fMRI to result in two brain areas becoming 3-4% larger. When the practice was stopped for another three weeks, those same areas had reduced by 1-2% (Science News 1/31/04: 78; Badcock, 2000: 23). Thus the brain is always changing, always growing in its capacities, so long as it is alive.

          On the other hand, if the brain has nothing to look back to, no history of experience in a certain area, its capacity to make sense of new stimuli may be severely limited. Thus people who have been blind from birth, but have had their sight surgically enabled after becoming adults, find that they cannot sort out “the chaos of shifting, unstable, evanescent appearances” that assault them through their newly functional eyes (Zeman, 2002: 200). Their sight cannot be “coordinated with their other senses” (Shore, 1996: 4) because a gestalt-recognizing function usually employed by sight has been taken over by another sense. The history of their brain has left no provision for late-appearing sight. Why this should be so is illustrated by people who read Braille a few hours every day with several fingers simultaneously. They develop a capacity for gestalt-recognition by touch, employing areas of the brain that sighted people use for vision. In the case of the Braille readers, the space is taken over by what seems to be one, giant, merged finger. The three or four fingers that are run over the page do not recognize letters and words separately, but as a unit, much as our two eyes see (Restak, 2003: 154).

          One man who had acquired sight for the first time as an adult was unable to appreciate the work of a lathe until he could run his hands over it, eyes shut. “Then he stood back a little and opened his eyes and said, `Now that I've felt it I can see'” (Zeman, 2002: 201). He recognizes form with his fingers, not his eyes; but having had the gestalt supplied by his fingers, his eyes begin to know what they are seeing. Such incidents tell us that our mode of being in the world, as meaning-grasping and meaning-manipulating organisms, is a function of our entire body-and-mind operating as a unit. Our physical organism allows itself to be shaped by the world: our fingers shape themselves to the coffee pot handle, our eyes convert the electromagnetic light radiation reflected from the coffee pot into nerve pulses that our brain turns into AM waves. The waves find a familiar basin of attraction that we subjectively experience as “coffee pot.” Recollections of past coffee pots and mugs of coffee enjoyed generate a desire for a fresh mug right now. The transition from body taking on the shape of the world, to psyche contemplating the heft and smell of a fresh mug of coffee has already taken place.

The biology of meaning includes the entire brain and body, with the history built by experience into bones, muscles, endocrine glands, and neural connections. A meaningful state is an activity pattern of the nervous system and body that has a particular focus in the state space of the organism, not in the physical space of the brain (Freeman, 2000: 115).

          The Braille readers and coffee-pot pourers give us an idea of how we operate by “focusing the state space” of our whole organism. For Freeman, “state space” refers to the sort of resonance made possible by state transitions, the move from aggregate to population. That the “whole organism” -- meaning at least “bones, muscles, endocrine glands, and neural connections” -- has a state space, takes us well out of a narrow world that is limited to the mechanics of brain function. The state space of the whole organism would be what we experience as our personhood. What unifies us in a single organic and meaningful history is what we generally mean by “psyche.” Psyche is surely the rich biographical process by which we have gotten to and come to understand the present moment -- both by its facts and in its implications -- and simultaneously as springboard for an imagined future. Psyche is both identity and possibility. Who we are, as psyche, is both the outcome of our entire history and the governance of ourselves whereby we carve out a future.

          We lead ourselves astray if we imagine the psyche to be some sort of spiritual substance as Descartes did. We begin to wonder what sort of substance this could be; how the existence of such a substance could be defended if there is no way to detect it; and finally, the main obsession of modern philosophy, how can the spiritual substance of the mind or soul act upon the material substance of the body? To change our perspective and see psyche as process eliminates such problems, rooted in the fallacy Whitehead called “misplaced concreteness” (Whitehead, 1967: 51). The brain is, indeed, a substance (neuropil), but a substance in constant activity. Registration of objects and events from the world appears as disturbances in the stream of that activity; and psyche is the subjective/experiential dimension of that constant process.

          Jung's thinking certainly supports the notion of psyche as process rather than substance. In a London lecture in 1924, he urged his audience “to regard the psyche . . . as a fluid stream of events which change kaleidoscopically under the alternating influence of different instincts” (CW 17: ¶156). Two years later, he wrote, “Psyche . . . would have to be understood as a purposive system, as an arrangement not merely of matter ready for life but of living matter or, more precisely of living processes.” In the next paragraph: “The psychic process [is] a phenomenon dependent on the nervous system” (CW 8: ¶606f). At the end of his life, in his autobiography, he said, “The psyche appears as a dynamic process” (Jung, 1961: 350). William James also argued that mind is “process not stuff” [10]; and Edelman agrees, “Consciousness is not an object but a process and . . . a fitting scientific subject” (Edelman & Tononi, 2000: 9).

          It would be difficult to specify when the process of psyche begins; but since two-month-old infants are capable of emotional/gestural interactions with their mothers -- and these are the most important and characteristic activities for developing the psyche itself -- we can say with some confidence that the rudiments of psychic process must surely have begun by then. Very likely, if we had a way to study it, we would find that the unborn are already manifesting a proto-psychic process some weeks or even months before they reach term. A story like that of Helen Keller also assures us that severe sensory incapacities, such as blindness and deafness, may well mask psychic process in some individuals. Ms. Keller's amazing leaps into communication and the life of the mind strongly indicate the extent to which psyche is an interpersonal, social, cultural process; but she could not have made so much progress so quickly unless a genuine psyche was already in process before she discovered the miracle of communication.

Psyche in Phylogenetic Perspective

          If psyche is subjectivity and process, and if having mental images is different from having images in the brain but at the same time made possible by blinking neural networks and AM waves finding basins of attraction, and if new-born infants already manifest many of the signs of psychic process, it cannot be that we humans are the only animals to have a psyche. We know that chimpanzees can figure out how to get bananas that are out of reach and that wolves can cooperate with one another while monitoring the movements of their prey and pursuing a communal dinner. But we are insulted to think they might be conscious or have a psyche that has any relation to our own. In his bemusement over the arrogance of our Western assumptions in this regard, Jung often told Anatole France's story from Penguin Island in which St. Catherine of Alexandria begs God to give the penguins “a human head and breast so that they can praise you worthily. And grant them also an immortal soul -- but only a little one!” [11] Our Western experience is unique in being innocent of other primate species living as naturally in our midst as squirrels. If squirrels squatted on their branches and pulled at their ears with opposable thumbs, we might have been more humble. Carel van Schaik, who has spend years studying Indonesian orangutans says, “Among the people that share their lands with apes, very few refer to themselves as the crown of creation” (van Schaik, 2004: 7). Our religions, too, sanctify our arrogance, which is why primatologist Frans de Waal says, “The human-animal dualism of the Judeo-Christian tradition . . . has no parallel in other religions or cultures” (de Waal, 2001: 69); for “without a religion that grants souls only to one species, neither anthropomorphism nor evolution stirs up controversy” (Ibid., 191).

The evolution of consciousness. An evolutionary theory of consciousness would show at least two things: (1) how the neural foundations of human awareness could have developed from extremely simple beginnings in as primitive an animal as amoeba or paramecium, and (2) how consciousness develops over the life-time of certain animals at diverse locations on the evolutionary tree.

          The first step in this project has frequently been sketched. Protozoa like amoeba and paramecium have cell walls studded with proteins that test the environment constantly for such things as light, temperature, possibility of nourishment, and salinity. These sensing proteins have their configurations altered by molecules, temperature, or light in the surrounding water, and convey information inside the cell walls, where other processes are set in motion to cause the single-cell animal to retreat, advance, or devour. Many of the same proteins found in the cell walls of protozoa are used by our nervous system to take stock of the world and for neurons to communicate with one another. Having neurons accomplish the same sensory and motor jobs in several steps allows for variation, choice, more nuanced reality testing, and a larger response repertoire. The huge extravagance of the human cerebral cortex is testimony to the lengths biology has gone over the course of evolution to supply precision, differentiation, and higher levels of consciousness.

          Few will be willing to grant subjectivity, a psyche, to the lowly amoeba. Perhaps the protozoan experiences comfort and discomfort in some way, but it is hard to imagine any sort of “process” or even what we would ordinarily call “experience.” At the other extreme, none will deny that humans enjoy a subjective psychic process. At some indefinable point, evolution made psychic process possible -- perhaps somewhere near the divergence of birds and then mammals from reptiles, maybe earlier. But aspects of mind are evident everywhere throughout the evolution of animals, if the most basic element of mind is “to represent the outside world in terms of the modifications it causes in the body proper” (Damasio, 1994: 230). Proteins in the amoeba's cell walls do this in a most rudimentary fashion, while brains are specialized to be “anticipation machines,” to “swiftly produce the future” (Dennett, 1991: 177, 144), “emulate reality” and “generate a predictive image of an event to come that causes the creature to react or behave accordingly” (Llinás, 2002: 55).

          The life course of the sea squirt illustrates a fundamental principle of nervous systems. The juvenile sea squirt is mobile and has a “brain” [12]; but upon reaching maturity, it fastens itself to a rock, becomes sessile like a plant, and immediately devours its own “brain” -- which now has more value as meat than as an anticipation machine (Llinás, 2002: 17; Dennett, 1991: 177). A mobile animal cruises through danger constantly and needs agility and cunning to capture prey and avoid enemies. Life on the move is very fast, highly complex, and largely impossible without a nervous system of some complexity.

          But many of the things that brains do, not only can, but must be done without consciousness. For instance, our brain will take note of an approaching gnat and calculate its flight path accurately enough to cause us to blink at just the right moment to prevent its entering our eye. If we become conscious at all of the danger thus averted, it will only be after the fact (Llinás, 2002: 22). Experiments reveal that our brain is able to recognize patterns long before we have any awareness of them. When subjected to what seem to be randomly flashing lights, our eyes will correctly anticipate the next flash, unriddling a hidden pattern long before our conscious minds have recognized that there is a problem to solve (Quartz & Sejnowski, 2002: 18f). Patients with prosopagnosia, the inability to recognize faces, can be very accurate at “guessing” the identity of photographed faces (Damasio, 1999: 162-6). Such findings seem to show the brain at work without the participation of consciousness. We look to different sorts of phenomena when we wish to discern psychic process.

Bonobos, again. Sue Savage-Rumbaugh has raised bonobos that show remarkable abilities to think and communicate in ways that we Westerners have long thought to be unique to ourselves, establishing without a doubt that “We are not alone among God's creatures to have been blessed with the gift of a mind” (Savage-Rumbaugh, et. al. 1998: 7) We are not alone in having a psyche, to be more precise.

          Savage-Rumbaugh did not set out to teach the young male named Kanzi. Rather she worked in vain to teach his mother, Matata, using a keyboard with icons, each of which was designed to indicate an object or action, in the hopes that some sort of inter-species dialogue might occur. Savage-Rumbaugh found the work frustrating, for when Matata finally seemed to get something right, the icons would be rearranged to make sure she understood the meaning of the icons themselves and had not merely memorized a location on the keyboard. Evidently the rearranging was too much for Matata, and months of work produced very few reliable results. Meanwhile Kanzi behaved disruptively, as though showing his distain for Savage-Rumbaugh and her associates, demonstrating repeatedly that his allegiance was with his mother and that she could be depended upon to defend him against outraged humans.

          The situation changed drastically when Matata was removed from the lab in the hope that she would again become pregnant. Suddenly the humans became the most important individuals in Kanzi's world, and he became “talkative.” In the first day, he used 120 separate utterances by pointing at the icons on the keyboard. No one had made an effort to teach him. He had simply observed, discretely, all the efforts Savage-Rumbaugh had been making to communicate with his mother. He had evidently understood those gestures, and perhaps also the spoken words, and understood as well how to use the keyboard system to initiate a dialogue with his care-giver/captors. And initiate he did, for he was the first to pick up the keyboard.

          Kanzi, it must be pointed out, is not unique. His younger siblings, Panbanisha and Mulika, learned to comprehend spoken and lexigram-based language as well as he did, and without observing Matata's lessons to start the process. “One is reminded of the manner in which children who learn a pidgin language develop it into a creole in one generation, even though they have no model for a creole: (Ibid., 199f). It generally takes human researchers, new to the lab, more than a year to become as proficient with the keyboard as Kanzi became.

          Such evidence makes it undeniable that Kanzi has responded to the social structure of the lab with the sort of easy grasp of power relations and means of communication that we are familiar with in human children. We cannot say whether Matata was too old to learn language, or just resistant to human ways. But Kanzi was at an age when the young of all primate species become socialized through emotional/gestural exchanges with their care-givers. He has shown himself to be not only ready for it, but remarkably competent, the very first day he found himself alone with the humans. We can deny psychic process in Kanzi only on the basis of some dogmatic notion that he cannot possibly have a “soul,” since he is not human.

          Perhaps even stronger evidence of psychic process in Kanzi is the fact that he was often found to be “talking” to himself. He would carry the keyboard away from the others and retreat still further if any of the researchers tried to look over his shoulder to see what he was up to (Ibid., 51f). Clearly, he saw language as more than a device for extracting treats from his handlers; it became a means of thinking things through, of having a private, internal life -- further evidence of the process we call psyche. Moreover, in the first day after his mother had been removed, he “spoke” not only of what he wanted in the present but also of what he planned to do in the future (Ibid., 25). He invented new expressions on the spot, using gestures, and combining them with vocalizations and lexigrams (Ibid., 28). He also loved to watch video tapes, remembering the sequence of events portrayed, and watching certain segments over and over again (Ibid., 45). Thus his comprehension of the passage of time is pretty much the same as ours. The narrative temporality that Marshack has highlighted in the life of Peking Man, the fire-keeper, is clearly within the range of a bonobo psyche, too.

          Kanzi and Panbanisha have not spoken words, and they have not learned language at the same rapid pace as human children, nor have they gone as far in their linguistic abilities. They have a smaller short-term memory. In these respects at least, the bonobo psyche appears to be notably less capable than a human psyche. But the young bonobos' capacity to differentiate phonemes, to extract information from rapidly spoken sentences, to recall and employ vocabulary, to comprehend syntax, and to follow the thread of conversations surely reveals them to be an animal species closely related to humans in psychic capacity and style (Ibid., 207).

Psychic process in other animals. It may be that bonobos are more adept at these psychic functions than other primates, for they do appear to employ a more elaborate system of gestures in the wild than chimpanzees and gorillas do (Ibid., 18). But it would be hard to draw a line between animals with a psyche and those without in such a way as to exclude any of the great apes. Indeed, the study of primates raises awkward issues for anyone who is willing to question our Western arrogance. For instance, anthropologists study human groups by learning their language, talking to them, even sharing their common life. But primatologists follow apes from a distance, stare at them, and never try to connect with them or to communicate in any way. Humans would take a sneaky observer like that to be some sort of crazy voyeur. Apes resent it, too (Ibid., 184). Those who bring apes into the laboratory for interaction and language lessons produce no less painful an issue. “Those apes that do learn to comprehend language remain, like retarded or autistic persons, locked in a body that cannot express what the mind can understand and conjure. By all observations and accounts, this appears to be a very frustrating affair for such apes” (Ibid., 190).

          Resentment, entrapment, and frustration are psychic states. So is the complex mental set required for tool-making. An animal will not make a tool unless it can imagine a future situation that is desirable and also see some object in its environment which inspires a second imaginative leap, a “seeing as”: this stick as an anthill probe, this stone as a nut-cracking anvil. The imagined tool is a pure fantasy object: it is the stick without its bark and after some expert trimming with the teeth. Only then can it serve its role as a bridge over the misery that could be caused by an inexhaustible colony of relentless, biting ants and a tasty meal. An implicit narrative of future events has to be constructed, and not just any stream of fantasy, but one that respects the limitations of the physical universe. It must be a pragmatic fantasy, one tailored to realize a future. To be capable of this implies a sophisticated psychic process.

          We Westerners have long wanted to believe that tool-making was impossible -- not only for the apes, but also for Australopithecus. It was only when we got to Homo habilus, we thought, “man the tool-maker,” that tool making appeared for the first time on the face of the earth -- and then only in the form of the same hunk of stone, the famous hand axe that remained unchanged for roughly two million years. Frans de Waal tells us that there are no wild chimpanzee populations that do not use tools, and gives us many examples (de Waal, 2001: 241-5). Carel van Schaik, who studies the Indonesian orangutan, has come to believe that the “red ape” stands on the threshold of human culture. He finds sociality in a primate that was formerly believed to be completely antisocial, and tool use in geographic patterns that suggest separate cultures. He shows us the psyche of the “old man of the forest” (van Schaik, 2004). A recent NOVA special on PBS television (10/18/05) showed a raven that carefully bent a piece of wire into the shape of a hook in order to fish some food out of a glass tube. The feat was no fluke, for the bird repeated it several times. In the national parks of the United States, bears have learned how to break into automobiles to get food. The windshields of some vans can be pulled out, and some compacts' doors will pop open when bears jump up and down on the roof. The bears thus become more adept at distinguishing models of cars than some of the humans who drive them, for these clever exploitations of structural flaws in automotive design “seem to spread like wildfire through the bear population in a way suggestive of cultural learning” (de Waal, 2001: 267).

          De Waal is also convinced that apes have an aesthetic sense, from the gorilla tracing the outline of its shadow on the zoo wall (Ibid., 161) to chimpanzees like Congo, who seem to know when they have completed a painting. If interrupted in his work, Congo will return to where he left off and show anger if a painting is taken away from him before he thinks it finished. Furthermore, he cannot be induced to return to a painting once he has laid down his brush (Ibid., 171ff). Such chimpanzee painters evidently “have a sense of both balance and completeness, enjoy the visual effect of what they do, and create regularities and patterns”; but when a painting is finished, they lose all interest in it, and it can be thrown away (Ibid, 173). Sensitive to our Western touchiness on the topic of our being superior to animals, de Waal tries to reassure: “Ape art, rather than insulting our ego, provides a glimpse of the wellspring of the universal human artistic impulse” (Ibid., 176).

          A similar trait has been found in dogs who spontaneously and repeatedly make large constructions of found objects, or sometimes regular patterns of holes dug in the ground. Vicki Mathison has collected the stories of a couple dozen such dogs and photographs of their artwork, each item of which shows a sense of balance and what we would surely call aesthetic judgment if they had been made by humans (Mathison, 2000). Such canine creations raise the question of advanced psychic processes in non-primates and encourages us to wonder whether all mammals may have it. De Waal adds the observation that rescue dogs become depressed if they find too many dead people and may even refuse to continue to do their jobs. They can be revitalized, however, when given a live volunteer to “find.” De Waal insists they are not “performing a cheap circus trick, they are emotionally involved” in their work (de Waal, 2001: 333).

          The activity of the male bower bird suggests that even birds may have a psyche somewhat similar to our own. The bower bird ought to have been one of Jung's favorite examples of archetypal behavior, [13] on account of the male's instinct for building elaborate nest-constructions (“bowers”) to entice a female to mate. De Waal discusses these elaborately and symmetrically decorated bowers as a possible case of art made by a species of animal quite distant from us in evolutionary process (Ibid., 151). Jung's argument would surely be that the bower bird is driven by an archetype to build elaborate nests of species-specific design. De Waal, however, emphasizes another characteristic that is possibly even more significant, the fact that each individual male builds in a distinctive style, making almost a personal statement. Personal variations on a universal pattern suggest, as does the artistic touchiness of Congo, the painting chimpanzee, something like a psyche -- the evolutionary beginnings of inner, subjective process.

*    *    *

          These examples, from bonobos to birds, only scratch the surface of the body of evidence now abundantly before us that animals, despite their lack of language, have psyches similar to our own. They appear to have been “granted a soul -- if only just a little one.” If we paraphrase Anatole France's St. Catherine on this point, we do not wish to go so far as to say that penguin or chimpanzee souls are immortal substances. It would exceed the bounds of both biology and psychology to make such a claim. But we are able to say with confidence that their behavior implies what, in the case of humans, we would have no problem identifying as psyche, soul-as-process. It would be unreasonable to draw any conclusion other than that a psychic process has emerged as surely in the great apes as it has in humans -- and on the same basis. Complex neural events in the brain, together with the AM waves they generate, can be objects of third-person, laboratory study. What they make possible, however -- what emerges from those neural events -- is an order of being that does not lay itself open to objectivizing experimentation and measurement. What emerges is a first-person subjective process.

          An adequate psychology, such as the one Jung endeavored to construct, must attend to psyche's mode of being as its proper field of investigation. Biology may support and accompany such a project and be helpful in many ways. For psyche depends upon the nervous system, the endocrine system, the skeletal system, and the like, not only for the parameters of its capabilities, but for its very existence. Consequently, the findings of the biological sciences are crucial for understanding the limitations inherent in psyche's foundation.

          On the other hand, what experience reports is real and cannot be ruled invalid on biological grounds. Experience is, in Jung's words, “psychic fact,” and it is real because it has discernible effects (“Ist wirklich weil es wirkt” [14]). If, for example, I sincerely believe I have been abducted by aliens, this is a psychic fact, part of the process that is my psyche. [15] My experience, in this regard, may bear little correspondence with events in the empirical world. But it is a reality within my experience; and regardless what a third-person observer may report, my improbable experience does correspond to a complex series of neural and hormonal events in my body.

 

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1. Richard Dawkins and others may delight in taunting believers and flirting with atheism; but when they do so, they are not practicing science, only prancing on an ideological stage.
   
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2. Epi-phenomenon: that what is “above” or “outside of” (epi) the thing that appears (phenomenon).
   
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3. It is because ice is less dense than water that it floats. Water is most dense at 4° Celsius, and freezes at 0°.
   
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4. As will become clear in Part III of this book, I resist the idea that mysticism is inherently superstitious and anti-rational -- not only because the term has been unjustly used against Jung's work for nearly a century, but also because our human capacities for mystical experience can not only be documented, but also investigated with the methods of neurobiology. Rightly understood, mysticism, is a real and universal human capacity that can be developed, refined, and used; it is not an irresponsible brand of philosophy.
   
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5. One nanometer = 1 X 10^-9 meter, one millionth of a millimeter.
   
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6. Glutamate is the excitatory neurotransmitter; neurons can also inhibit one another by releasing GABA (gamma-amino-butyric acid).
   
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7. Canadian psychologist, Donald O. Hebb, in his 1949 book, The Organization of Behavior (New York: John Wiley & Sons).
   
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8. The same principle used in AM radio.
   
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9. The text reads “preafferent signals” instead of “emotional associations”; but the meaning is the same.
   
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10. Edelman (1992: 6), citing an essay by William James, entitled, “Does Consciousness Exist?”
    
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11. CW 11: ¶835; CW 14: ¶227; CW 18: ¶795n, ¶1751.
    
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12. Although I have seen this argument in several books, it is strictly speaking not true that the juvenile sea squirt has a brain. It does have a central nervous system, however, in the form of a neural tube with a ganglion at the top of it. Dawkins, Dennett and others enjoy repeating the cliché that the sea squirt has now been granted “tenure.”
    
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13. Jung did like to cite the example of the weaver bird's elaborate and characteristic nests; but those nests have less the character of “artifacts” than bowers have (cf. CW 8: ¶435).
    
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14. For example, CW 7: ¶151.
    
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15. I have discussed this phenomenon at some length in Perils of the Soul (Haule, 1999: 145-98).