The work by Nobel laureate Herbert Simon and others has shown that pattern recognition is among the most powerful, perhaps the foremost mechanism of successful problem-solving. … Research has shown that even the most elementary pattern-recognition brain machinery requires some “finishing touches” to be provided by the environment in order to become fully functional. —Elkhonon Goldberg
Probably in all normal people [attachment] continues in one form or another throughout life and, although in many ways transformed, underlies many of our attachments to country, sovereign, or church. —John Bowlby
Introduction: A Clarification —
In my last post I suggested that society could be looked at as being Freud’s superego. Interestingly, Goldberg in his book The Wisdom Paradox suggests that the frontal lobes of the human brain comprise the superego. Describing the brain centers involved in one’s morning routine, Goldberg writes, “And your frontal lobes, the superego of the brain, tell you that [a ringing alarm clock] is important and you must get up.” Where exactly is the superego then? Well, what if I tell you that it exists on a continuum that allows the individual to map his or her experience to the societal milieu. This is where cultural cognitive maps come in, a topic I looked at in some detail in a blog post entitled Do We Have Bats in Our Belfry.
As I read books by the political theorist and activist Jacques Ellul (e.g., Propaganda and The Technological Society), I was struck by his overarching message: propaganda is constructed so that the individual is able to place him or herself on a continuum that maps individual experience to social experience. In this way, a person is both an individual and a person defined by the mass, a mass person. Ellul, writing back in the 1960s mind you, warned how effective technology was at defining the individual-mass continuum. Ellul of course was talking about the emergence of the technology cultural cognitive map. Superego then depends on where one finds his or herself on the individual-mass continuum. If a person in essence turns themselves over to the process of being “massified” then for them superego resides in the mass. However, if one is lucky enough to develop their Executive Function then superego can move along the individual-mass continuum as need be. Clearly you need your individual superego to tell you that the alarm clock is important and it’s time to get up. However you may well need a mass superego to motivate you to defend your country or support your church (see the Bowlby quote above). This is where morale fits in.
Returning to Ellul’s propaganda, leaders will often exploit the individual-mass map or prevailing cultural cognitive model in such a way that the individual feels compelled to give up individual EF and accept the EF of society. This may well be a definition of authoritarianism. This may be why authoritarian regimes tend to attack those with well-developed EF: many doctors, lawyers, scientists, political activists (like Ellul), and artists. The best defense against authoritarianism is to develop EF and take personal control of the individual-mass continuum. Heck, Goldberg, in the introductory pages of his book The New Executive Brain, describes how he had to use every bit of EF he possessed to escape the oppression of Soviet Russia. This story reads like a spy novel because in many ways it is a spy novel but in real life. It really is an extraordinary story. I get the impression that Goldberg thanks himself and those who helped him develop his EF for the amazing gift that it is. His EF saved him from life under oppressive rule. As Goldberg tells us in The Wisdom Paradox, “[P]eople with a lifelong history of complex executive decision-making are more likely to preserve the neural integrity of their frontal lobes well into old age than passive ‘follower’ types with relatively modest exertion of their executive function earlier in life.” Traditional education—the kind of education my Boomer generation grew up with—was designed to encourage the development of Executive Function. Sadly, many forms of progressive education have seen fit to erode the development of EF and, in turn, relegate future generations to the status of “follower.” As a result, progressive educators undermine the very thing they purport to value: critical thinking.
The lesson here is simple: Any country or state that wishes to “inoculate” its citizenry against propaganda attacks from without (or, heck, from within) should endeavor to develop EF in its citizenry, to develop a “lifelong history of complex executive decision-making” quoting Goldberg from above. I have talked about easy ways of doing this such as encouraging reading whole books; teaching financial literacy and planning for the future; early safe and secure attachment relationships with attachment figures; and adults monitoring young people and their access to technology and the Internet.[1] For more on this last item I would recommend the recently released book by social commentator and science writer Nicholas Carr entitled Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart.
Sidebar: Fake Cognition —
Writing in his book The Wisdom Paradox, Goldberg talks about “fake cognition.” Goldberg alerts, “A lazy, untrained, and ‘unpatterned’ mind is sometimes seduced by the apparent ease and effortless nature of ‘postanalytic’ decision-making and is tempted to emulate it.” Let’s unpack this statement a bit. Goldberg suggests that such things as “intuition” and so-called “gut reactions” by experts are not quick, unprocessed responses to inputs from the environment. To the contrary, Goldberg suggests that intuitions are the product of what he calls “mental economy.” Mental economy results when repeated experiences with some aspect of the real world, or even the conceptual world, lead to what Goldberg calls “generic memories” or generalized patterns. “The intuitive decision-making of an expert bypasses overly, logical steps precisely because it is a condensation of extensive use of such logical steps in the past,” reveals Goldberg. These generic memories have the ability to imply things not previously learned or experienced. In the movie Oppenheimer there’s a scene where Einstein is shown a page containing a number of mathematical formulas drawn from quantum physics. He scans the page and is somewhat astonished by what it was telling him. I thought this was a flight of movie fancy, that someone could scan a page with complicated mathematical formulas and deduce any relevance in mere moments. Turns out I was dead wrong. As Goldberg tells it, “The great physicist Richard Feynman was reportedly able to scan several pages densely covered with arcane mathematical formulas and casually conclude: ‘Looks about right.’ Effortlessly postanalytic!” So, where does fake cognition come in?
As mentioned above, Goldberg notices a troubling trend. Postanalytic decision-making on the part of an expert looks so easy and, well, intuitive, that people are easily seduced into thinking that it is in fact easy and anyone can do it. This is the theme in the old Disney movie The Sorcerer’s Apprentice where Mickey (an apprentice) thinks that what the sorcerer does is easy and anyone can do it. As if writing about this Disney movie Goldberg tells us that “[f]ar from being postanalytic, such a pathetic display will most assuredly be ‘fake analytic.’ ” Goldberg continues,
A recently fashionable educational trend teaching grade school and high school mathematics through impressionistic quantitative “estimates” rather than explicit computations is the worst example of such a cognitive fake.
Sadly, the rapid embrace of online learning by progressive educators has led to much fake cognition. Equally sad, many DEI-informed educational programs deemphasize academic rigor resulting in the development of fake cognition as pointed out in the quote by Goldberg above. In my opinion, one of the best ways to encourage and develop EF is to encourage and develop academic rigor. To this end our Foundation recently supported a research paper by social work professor Ken Corvo entitled Prometheus On the Quad. In his paper Corvo looks at attacks against science coming from both the right and the left. Corvo writes,
So, the recent “war on science” may actually be a manifestation of the contemporary “culture war” where the academy is the battleground. Neither the political Left (postmodern-informed) nor Right (reactionary) truly support an open, orderly empiricism that may undercut their bedrock assumptions about what is right, true, or desirable. Each sees their efforts to control faculty as necessary to counter the efforts of the other.
As the culture war rages on, students and academic rigor suffer. As a result, students do not receive the type of education that leads to a “patterned mind” capable of “effortless postanalytic decision-making.” You can read an op-ed by Corvo in support of Prometheus over at LerningWell Magazine, which contains a link to the full text of Prometheus, at the following link:
https://learningwellmag.org/article/reclaiming-the-flame
Back to the Post —
In his book The New Executive Brain, Goldberg writes the following:
[I] do believe that proper development of the frontal lobes at early stages of ontogenesis benefits from immersion into an environment characterized by predictable and consistently replicable sequences of events, and it suffers from immersion into chaotic, unpredictable environments. Since the prefrontal cortex is critical for making predictions, its development will be fostered by environments where predictions are readily possible and hindered by environments where predictions cannot be readily made.
I hate to say it but this is at the heart of Bowlbian attachment theory. Heck, it is Bowlbian attachment theory. It’s at the heart of developing EF: predictability and consistency. Equally, if you wish to disrupt the development of EF, then chaos and unpredictability is the road to take, like the chaos and unpredictability one encounters on the Internet (again, see Carr’s book Superbloom). The hallmark of well developed, well executed, and well monitored cultural cognitive maps and models is predictability and consistency. When well functioning cultural cognitive maps and models breakdown (as they are currently), then, yes, you get chaos and unpredictability.
The Ecology of Executive Function —
In my blog posts I often talk about ADHD expert Russell Barkley’s book entitled Executive Functions: What They Are, How They Work, and Why They Evolved. Barkley effectively suggests that if it had not been for the development of EF in humans, we would not have such higher order conceptual systems like ethics, and morality, and rules of law. In essence, Barkley suggests that the development of EF in humans very nicely tracks the rise of advanced civilizations and culture. As Goldberg puts it in The Wisdom Paradox, “Today, there are many reasons to believe that the development of the prefrontal cortex has played a central role in the emergence [emphasis added] of many (and possibly of most) traits that we recognize as defining our humanity as a species.” I have often said that Bowlby’s theory of attachment is a theory that surrounds the development of empathy. Quoting Goldberg again, “[W]isdom implies the ability to integrate pragmatic ‘actor-centered’ and ethical ‘empathy-driven’ considerations….” Again, Bowlby and Goldberg are speaking the same language, providing a similar take on psychological and cognitive development. Interestingly, as I read the Goldberg-edited book Executive Functions in Health and Disease I did not get any sense for the connection between Executive Function and advanced civilization. This may in part show us the limitation of scientific studies that look at individuals in isolation. At the risk of being glib, you cannot put society into a brain scanner let alone a town or even a family (at least not yet). And Goldberg gets this. He talks about the “ecology of Executive Function” in his book The New Executive Brain. Pointing to Goldberg’s work and the work of others, Suchy et al., writing in their book chapter entitled Assessment of Executive Functions in Clinical Settings (which appears in the Goldberg-edited volume), make the following observation:
A number of reasons for poor ecological validity of EF tests have been extensively discussed in the literature, including low correspondence with real-world tasks, narrow definition of the EF construct, and the inherently structured environment of the assessment contexts that does not allow functional difficulties to emerge. … In other words, the structured testing environment is a far cry from the real-world scenarios in which EF is needed.
This is where I will throw a flag on the field. I see a huge disconnect here. As readers of my blog well know, I have written extensively about the AAI or adult attachment interview. In my opinion[2], the AAI tests several different EF skills including mental time travel, focusing attention, creating mental models, empathy, and ToM or theory of mind. I would submit that the AAI does in fact assess for EF in an ecological manner. In addition, it assesses for what EF researchers call “hot EF.”[3] After a brief period of “getting to know each other,” the interviewer will ask the interviewee to talk about what the interviewee did as a child when he or she was hurt—maybe fell off a bike—or became sick. This line of questioning is specifically designed to trigger the attachment behavioral system. With the attachment behavioral system in a “hot emotional state,” the interviewee must maintain a sense of proper timeframe as he or she provides answers to a listener, the interviewer. By design, AAI narratives must follow Grice’s maxims of conversation in order to be coded as being “securely attached.” Typically if narratives violate Grice’s maxims, they are then coded as being some form of “insecurely attached.” And Goldberg gets this when he writes in The Wisdom Paradox, “[The] generative latitude of language makes it an extremely adaptive and powerful device for modeling not only what is, but also what will be, what could be, and what we want and do not want to be” (italics in original). Here’s a showstopper by Goldberg:
The capacity for creating symbolic models not of the world as it is, but of the world as you want it to be, interplays with the so-called executive functions of the brain’s frontal lobes to create truly goal-driven behavior.
Again, quotes like that bring a tear to my eye, a tear of joy. Bowlby often talked about inner working cognitive models born of early attachment relationships. Bowlby put forward the idea that these inner working cognitive models or maps or “patterns” help us not only navigate the real world but also the world of social relationships. And, yes, you can find hints in his writings that Bowlby had executive functioning in mind when he talked about navigating real and social environments. But here we have Goldberg come right out and make the EF connection. In The Wisdom Paradox, Goldberg provides a definition of “pattern recognition” or what I would call “mapping” when he tells us that “[b]y ‘pattern recognition’ we mean the organism’s ability to recognize a new object or a new problem as a member of an already familiar class of objects or problems.” This ties nicely with Piaget’s ideas concerning assimilation—new ideas added to an existing schema—and accomodation—new ideas updating an existing schema. Let’s return to the AAI.
Goldberg, still writing in The Wisdom Paradox, states: “We often reject certain statements as violating the rules of language not because they are intelligible, but because their content violates some of the fundamental natural laws. For instance, the statement ‘I will go to the movies yesterday’ is not intelligible; it would be a perfectly legitimate statement in a world with a bidirectional flow of time, as the statement ‘I tripped and fell up’ would be perfectly meaningful in a world with an opposite, or random, directionality of gravity.” Again, AAI narratives are coded using “rules of language” as put forward by Grice’s maxims. When an interviewee begins railing against an attachment figure he or she had as a child as if that attachment figure is in the room at that moment, this is a violation of a “fundamental natural law.” In addition, it is clear that the mind of the interviewer has been forgotten by the interviewee, that is to say, theory of mind no longer operates. These violations taken together tend to indicate that thinking and language are now being controlled by lower subcortical areas of the brain and not EF. In extreme cases where narratives become largely incoherent and ramble on interminably, they may be coded as “disorganized attachment.” For an example of this type of narrative, see the case Goldberg describes in The New Executive Brain at about page 144. Goldberg describes this rambling narrative thus: “My good patient clearly failed to form an accurate theory of mind, or else he would have spared me (and himself) all the details that have no relevance whatsoever to anything I need to know as a neuropsychologist about his problem.” All this to say that the AAI could potentially be used as an assessment of EF using an ecological framework. We need to build bridges between Bowlbian attachment theory and the work being done in the area of Executive Functioning. Maybe such bridges exist. So far I do not seem capable of finding them. They certainly are not represented in a book that takes an extensive look at EF, namely Executive Functions in Health and Disease. There’s a great PhD project here if anyone is interested (hint, hint).
Reframing McGilchrist’s Take On Left vs Right Cultural Patterns —
Allow me to end by (finally) coming back to the topic of reframing McGilchrist’s take on cultural patterns that reflect the dichotomy of left brain, with its focus on the linear and literal, vs right brain with its focus on holism and abstraction. I am of course referring to McGilchrist’s book The Master and His Emissary—The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World. Let’s review by considering this quote by Goldberg from Wisdom Paradox:
The right hemisphere is the novelty hemisphere, the daring hemisphere, the explorer of the unknown and the uncharted. The left hemisphere is the repository of compressed knowledge, of stable pattern-recognition devices that enable the organism to deal efficiently and effectively with familiar situations of mental routines.
A bit further along Goldberg gives us a couple of metaphors by which we can better understand the role each hemisphere plays. “The connectivity of the left hemisphere is more like a fleet of taxicabs. You use them to go from one end of town to the other.” Goldberg continues, “The connectivity of the right hemisphere is more like a fleet of airplanes. You use them to go from one end of the continent to the other.” Simply, the left brain is Uber while the right brain is United Airlines. In terms of cognitive development, Goldberg points out that, early on, the left brain has no store of generic memories: distillations of repeated encounters with the world. As such, the right brain has to fill-in for the left brain during these early years of development. My guess is the right brain avails itself of the store of generic memories that have developed over millions of years, the innate behavioral systems like food, water, shelter, and attachment. Again, this is why Allan Schore has spent his entire career studying the early development of the right brain through right-brain to right-brain interactions between mother and her infant. The mother’s brain provides the proper environment in which development of the right brain can take place. In addition, she provides a surrogate store of generic memories that are more localized in time and place. As depth psychologists will often point out, archetypes tend to transcend space and time and are realized locally within time and space.
So, rather than see the dichotomy of left brain vs right brain as linguistic and literal vs abstract and vague, as McGilchrist tends to, how about safe and certain (local) vs risky and vague (vast). This would be Bowlby’s risk of risk talked about earlier: going out into the vastness while at the same time knowing how to return to the safe and certain. During WWII, the U.S. government sent boatloads of Coca-Cola soda and pinup posters to soldiers thousands of miles away from home fighting in the vast unknown of war. Why? The risk of risk: to be able to confront vastness while at the same time be reminded of home. So, maybe the patterns that McGilchrist writes about could be better understood as periods when stores of information were built up and when periods of exploration prevailed. And of course, as McGilchrist correctly points out, there are time when the brain attacks itself. As an example, the Dark Ages (c. 5th–10th centuries) represent a retreat from the accumulated knowledge built up during Greek and Roman times. Fortunately a lot of that knowledge was later resurrected during the Renaissance. As McGilchrist writes:
Though we have been focusing on a return to the right hemisphere in the flowering of the Renaissance, with an almost magnetic attraction towards the newly discovered history, writings, arts, and monuments of the ancient world, which opened eyes to the vibrancy of a living world beyond the mediaeval “world picture” [perhaps cultural cognitive model], the decline of the Middle Ages yields an example of both [left and right] processes at work.
Sure, much of McGilchrist’s analysis comports with Goldberg’s model, however, I find that making Goldberg’s model explicit adds a new explanatory dimension to the idea that the left brain vs right brain dichotomy could explain cultural vacillations throughout time. Now, I know what you are thinking: Isn’t the digital age about creating huge stores of accumulated knowledge? Yes. However, it seems to be taking place at the expense of right brain processes. When Katherine Hayles talks about how information scientists working at the close of WWII wished to disembody information—release it from the confines of the body—I take this to mean doing away with right brain processes. As Goldberg talks about (see Pt 2), socially-oriented right brain processes are “too diverse, too fluid, and too nuanced” and as such do not lend themselves to “codification through a finite number of [left brain] templates.” The solution: get rid of the right brain. In my mind, getting rid of the right brain is part and parcel of dissociation. So maybe the cultural vacillations that McGilchrist looks at could be better understood as trauma leading to dissociation and a desire to suppress the right brain, followed by a swing toward healing and “the vibrancy of a living world” quoting McGilchrist from above. Interestingly, McGilchrist (that I could see) never brings in the role of dissociation as a driver of cultural swings. I find this odd as there has been astronomically high levels of trauma throughout history. I think this is why trauma expert Robert Pynoos points to the Icarus myth and calls it a trauma narrative, one designed to both warn against trauma and to bring about healing. So, maybe cultural swings, along with shifting cultural cognitive models, could be looked at as times the two hemispheres are dissociated, and times when they are working together. Today I would suggest we are in a period of dissociation characterized by a desire to do away with not only the right brain but also the body as a whole.
One closing thought. Goldberg’s model leads to an obvious framing of left brain vs right brain: the conservative brain as represented by stable stores of information, and the progressive brain as represented by exploration of new and novel worlds. Here’s an interesting twist that Goldberg delivers in Wisdom Paradox. The left brain tends to be associated with positive emotion. In contrast, the right brain is associated with negative emotion. Goldberg tells us, “Any quest for radical innovation, any voyage into the unknown, is driven by a feeling of dissatisfaction with the status quo.“ He continues, “The quest for exploration, for novelty, for what ought to be, goes hand in hand with the brooding dissatisfaction with what is” (emphasis in original). Maybe left vs right is more about contentment vs brooding dissatisfaction. Hopefully there’s room for a happy balance. To confuse matters, in the world of politics we typically find contentment on the right and brooding dissatisfaction on the left. As Dr. Corvo’s work points out, both left and right are now attacking scientific stores of information. Maybe both sides are in a state of brooding dissatisfaction.
Notes —
[1] – These are areas where our Foundation has made grants. As examples, we currently fund The Taft School and their summer program that includes classes on financial literacy. We support reading programs such as local chapters of Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library, and Reading Quest’s Reading Is Magic Summer Camp. The Foundation has a long history of funding research and programs that embrace Bowlbian attachment theory. As one example, we funded a research project by Ken Corvo designed to frame domestic violence behavior using both Bowlbian attachment theory as well as Executive Function.
[2] – My opinion is based on completing the two-week training course I received in administering and coding the AAI.
[3] – See the chapter by Hovik entitled Executive Control and Emerging Behavior in Youth With Tourette’s Syndrome for more on hot EF. This chapter appears in the Goldberg-edited volume mentioned in the text.
