I trust everyone had a great holiday season. Here’s hoping everyone has a prosperous and joyous 2016!
One of my guilty pleasures is watching the reality program Alaskan Bush People on the Discovery Channel. On last night’s episode, the Brown clan of nine had to move a felled tree. They used a block and tackle to move the tree to the beach where it could then be dragged by boat to a sawmill. As the family struggled to move the tree, a factoid pop-up window appeared informing viewers that the industrial revolution (of which the use of block and tackle was a part) began in 1770 and continued for about 70 years. The industrial revolution ushered in the modern age. The Age of Enlightenment also started in the eighteenth century. According to Wikipedia, “The principal goals of Enlightenment thinkers were liberty, progress, reason, tolerance, fraternity, and ending the abuses of the church and state.” Sounds good right? Who doesn’t want to be enlightened and industrious? Unfortunately the Age of Enlightenment brought along with it a rather pernicious paradigm shift that could be labeled “top down thinking.”
The development of top down thinking is investigated in detail in art critic and historian Bram Dijkstra’s 1988 book entitled Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siècle Culture. The idea is fairly straight forward. The cultural model of top down thinking holds that the rational mind should lord over the emotional body. In other words, the emotional body—if left unchecked—will overpower the rational mind. In this worldview the emotions and (by extension) the body are seen as being animalistic—driven by animal instincts especially sex. (The rationalist mindset was well in place before Freud “discovered” it.) As revealed by the art of the time, Dijkstra tells us that women were often depicted as being fully body or fully emotional with little capacity for being rational. Women were often depicted as dancing fairies or nymphs displaying childlike qualities. According to Dijksta the two main messages were clear: only grown (white) males can be rational, and it is the duty of rational men to lord over or control the animalistic tendencies of both children and women. These messages make for a simple equation: rational = human.
So much for enlightenment. Again pulling from Dijkstra, the modern women’s movement has focused a lot of its attention on doing away with the top down paradigm. But does it make sense to do away with top down thinking altogether? Well, turns out that Daniel Levitin’s 2014 book entitled The Organized Mind—Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload helps us to answer this question. Welcome back to what will be the final installment of my multi-part blog series wherein I briefly discuss bullet points taken from Levitin’s book. In this installment we will look at Levitin’s take on top down versus bottom up thinking. Let’s dig in.
As I mentioned before, Levitin’s The Organized Mind has a lot to say about EF or Executive Function. Let’s listen in as Levitin talks about research designed to investigate what effect (if any) watching fast moving cartoons (i.e., SpongeBob SquarePants) has on children’s developing executive functions:
They [the researchers] found that … faced-paced cartoons had an immediate negative impact on children’s executive function, a collection of prefrontal cortical processes including goal-directed behavior, attentional focus, working memory, problem solving, impulse control, self-regulation, and delay of gratification. The researchers point not just to the fast pace itself, but to the “onslaught of fantastical events” which are, by definition, novel and unfamiliar. Encoding such events is likely taxing on cognitive resources, and the fast pace of programs like SpongeBob don’t give children time to assimilate the new information. This can reinforce a cognitive style of not thinking things through or following new ideas to their logical conclusion.
As mentioned in the first part of this series, “reading high-quality fiction and literary nonfiction, and perhaps listening to music, looking at art, and watching dance, may lead to two desirable outcomes: increased interpersonal empathy and better executive attentional control” (quoting Levitin). Fast paced, novel inputs do not allow the brain to properly encode information, distribute information parcels to the appropriate brain center or network, and build associations between information parcels. As Levitin points out, all three storage processes must occur in order for robust recall processes to take place at a later time. It’s these very same information storage processes—especially building associations—that later allow for such creative processes as running “what if” scenarios or playing with reality. Hopefully the reader can see how important play is to the encoding–parsing–associating suite.
According to Levitin’s research, the brain is an overall system that uses both top down and bottom up processes. The executive functions (which sit in the “upper” part of the brain) could not perform their magic without the help of such brain centers as the amygdala (the brain’s fear center, which sits in the mid brain). How does the EF skill of “reflectivity” work with the brain’s fear center? Let’s listen in as Levitin talks about the work of psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in the area of flow states:
During flow, two key regions of the brain deactivate [emphasis in original]: the portion of the prefrontal cortex responsible for self-criticism, and the amygdala, the brain’s fear center. This is why creative artists often report feeling fearless and as though they are taking creative risks they hadn’t taken before—it’s because the two parts of the brain that would otherwise prevent them from doing so have significantly reduced activity.
Without realizing it, Levitin is talking about system theory (a full treatment of which is beyond the scope of this post). Operating in relative isolation, the amygdala senses and conveys fear while the Executive Function centers criticize the self. Integrate these two centers (e.g., create a flow state) and you convert fear sensing to emotion regulation, and self criticism to reflectivity. What’s the model for all of this? Yup, you guessed it: a safe and secure early attachment relationship between a child and his or her mother. As attachment researcher Allan Schore points out in his work on affect regulation, the safe and secure early attachment relationship is an externalized model of how the brain develops and integrates its various brain centers into a coherent brain system able to later engage in such things as flow states, problem solving, and creativity. In essence, top down must be integrated with bottom up.
Returning to The Enlightenment, this phase of human development could then be looked at as an attempt to live out of just the top part of the brain. But when you live out of the top part of your brain you have no choice but to suppress emotional functioning. As neurologist Antonio Damasio tells us in his 2010 book entitled Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain, it is the lower and mid brain centers that are in large part responsible for providing the upper brain with what Damasio calls “body images” or “body maps” (similar in some ways to Bowlby’s Inner Working Models). Damasio argues that becoming conscious is about becoming aware of the images arising from the body. Cognitive scientist George Lakoff argues that thinking is embodied, that is to say, we use body metaphors to make sense of the world. As an example, we use the experience of being a bounded entity to understand the boundedness parenthetically expressed in the following mathematical equation: (2+3)x5=25.
To sum up, when the rational brain lords over the emotional body, the emotional body has no choice but to make conscious images and feelings of oppression. Sadly, within the rationalist paradigm, these images and feelings of oppression are then projected onto women, children, and people of color (Jung’s shadow archetypes perhaps). To their credit, the modern women’s movement has tried to counter top down thinking by trying to bring body and earth back into the picture. I applaud these efforts. However, I find it surprising that certain feminist groups still find Bowlby’s theory threatening because of its focus on the so-called maternal instinct. I think that this fear points out how much psychological damage the rationalist top down paradigm has caused with respect to the psyches or souls of women. Any talk of an innate instinct like attachment brings up memories of how the body has been vilified by the top-down, rational brain of white men (predominantly). It is too bad that the rationalist myth (as Lakoff calls it) has so polluted the top down – bottom up connection. I’d like to think that there is some chance for true top down – bottom up healing, but as researchers such as Levitin and Nicholas Carr caution us, the digital age, with its desire for greater levels of fastness and novelty, leads us into The Shallows (the title to Carr’s 2011 book) of top down divorced from bottom up. May the flow be with you.
