Physicist and poet Dr, Jacob Bronowski once asked “What
goes on in the mind when we imagine?”
To a large degree Daniel Khaneman,
answers Bronowski’s question when he writes, in his bestselling book, “Thinking, Fast and Slow”,
“The world in our heads is not a
precise replica of reality; our expectations about the frequency of events are
distorted by the prevalence and emotional intensity of the messages to which we are exposed.”
Dr. Bronowski went on to conclude that “imagination
is a specifically human gift”. He describes the experiments of Walter Hunter in which Hunter taught a
group of dogs that when a light came on over one of ab arrangement of tunnels
they would be rewarded with food. However, when Hunter added the dimension of
time and made the dogs wait until after the light went out. The dogs forgot
which tunnel had the light within a matter of seconds. The results of Hunter’s
experiment demonstrated an animal cannot recall a signal from the past for even
a short fraction of the time that a human being can. Animals do not depend, as
human memory does, on the calling to mind of absent things.
According to Dr. Bronowski, “to imagine” is to make images and to move them about in one’s head
in new arrangements. Following is a painting by Suling Wang, an internationally
recognized painter, which she calls “Cryptic
Butterfly”, inspired by Taiwanese oral
tradition. Ms. Wang’s work is composed of meticulously created layers of
painted calligraphy and cartoon-like forms overlaid atop other shapes that
suggest trees, stems, and mountains all imagined and felt by the artist
Human beings, unlike other animals, fix memories in
images or other substitute symbols. With a symbolic vocabulary we spell out the future and not just one but
many futures which we can weigh one against the other.
The most important symbols for humans are words, which
are abstract symbols other animals do not have. Dr. Bronowski writes “of all
the distinctions between man and animal, the characteristic gift which makes us
human is the power to work with symbolic images; the gift of imagination.” Both poetry, literature that
uses aesthetic and
rhythmic qualities of language, and songs, just poetry set to music, are examples of
man’s gift of imagination and
there may be no more powerful example of man’s gift of imagination and
the use of words than W.B.Yeats’ poem, “The Second Coming”.
“Turning and turning in the widening
gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot
hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and
everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while
the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those
words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands
of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of
a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all
about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert
birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I
know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking
cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come
round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be
born?”
According to Yeats “Spiritus
Mundi”, a Latin term that literally means, ‘world spirit’, is ‘a
universal memory and a ‘muse’ of sorts that provides inspiration to the poet or
writer’. Yeats used the term to describe the collective soul of the universe
containing the memories of all time. From ‘Spiritus Mundi,’ Yeats believed,
came all poets’ inspiration.
To Yeats, Spiritus Mundi is the source of all ‘images’
and ‘symbols,’ a ‘collective unconscious.’ Dr. Bronowski’s believed “the
characteristic act of the mind of man is “to imagine” which means that
Spiritus Mundi is not just available to poets but to all human beings. We can
all find comfort in a ‘collective
unconscious’ or source of all ‘images’ and ‘symbols.
While Khaneman found “our expectations about the
frequency of events are distorted by the prevalence and emotional intensity
of the messages to which we are
exposed” he would likely add “the emotional intensity of
messages to which we are exposed” includes the emotions of both the sender
and receiver of “the messages”.
Furthermore, none of this is to say that the sender and
receiver cannot be one and the same person, as when we send messages to
ourselves with our feelings, recalled from the amygdala of our brain as thoughts
described by Dr. Antonio Damasio.
In Descartes’ Error Dr. Damásio presents his
“somatic marker hypothesis“,
a proposed mechanism by which emotions guide (or bias) behavior and
decision-making, and explains how rationality requires emotional input. When
making subsequent decisions, these somatic markers and their evoked emotions
are consciously or unconsciously associated with their past outcomes, and
influence decision-making in favor of some behaviors instead of others.
Dr. Damasio argues that René
Descartes‘ “error” was the dualist separation of mind and body,
rationality and emotion. According to Dr. Damasio “Somatic markers” are feelings in the body that are associated with
emotions, such as the association of rapid heartbeat with anxiety or
of nausea with disgust.
According to the hypothesis, somatic markers strongly influence subsequent
decision-making. Within the brain, somatic markers are thought to be processed
in the ventromedial prefrontal
cortex (VMPFC) and the amygdala. The hypothesis has been tested in
experiments using the Iowa gambling
task.
According to Dr. Damasio, joy or sorrow can emerge only after the brain registers physical
changes in the body. The mind is not separate from the body but rather
is an integral part of the biological entity we call a human being. This is why
we need to be on guard of the environment (mental as well as physical) into
which we go or are sometimes taken.
Perhaps nothing “registers ‘more’ physical change in the
body” than real rock ’n’ roll, registered through the human auditory system and there’s no more real
rock n roll than Led Zppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven”.
“There’s a lady who’s sure
All that glitters is gold
And she’s buying a stairway to heaven
When she gets there she knows
If the stores are all closed
With a word she can get what she came
for”
This is how one reviewer described it.
“Led Zeppelin‘s riff-tastic anthem
‘Stairway to Heaven,’isn’t just a great rock song; it’s the great rock song!
The centerpiece of Zeppelin’s 1971
untitled fourth album, (‘Zoso’ or ‘Led Zeppelin IV,’ ), ‘Stairway’ set the
blueprint for all multi-suite hard-rock epics to follow, though none have come
even remotely close to matching its greatness. Even on the 12,000th listen, the
track’s ethereal magic never wears thin, and that timeless build from Jimmy Page‘s shimmering, fingerpicked
guitar intro to the riff-driven full-band attack is one of the most visceral moments in
the history of recorded music.”
Poetry, which is nothing more than
music without the sound, can be equally evocative in terms of it’s bodily
effect. Examples of physical change in the body” evoked with poetry is the
work of poet/song writer Leonard Cohen, who Nobel Laureate Bob Dylan, perhaps the greatest poet/song
writer, called “his nearest rival”. That should be understandable when
listening to Cohen’s “So Long Marianne”.
“For six decades, Leonard Cohen revealed his soul to the
world through poetry and song — his deep and timeless humanity touching our
very core. Simply brilliant. His music and words will resonate forever.” — Rock
& Roll Hall of Fame, 2008
Visceral means “relating
to deep inward feelings rather than to the intellect”. So if “the
characteristic act of the mind of man is “to imagine” and Spiritus
Mundi is not just available to poets but to all human beings then we can all
find comfort in a ‘collective unconscious’ or source of all ‘images’ and
‘symbols, a source of a visceral collective unconscious that can bring all
people together with poetry and music.
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