Neurology
(2019 Note: The 2019 version of this page has been made more rigorous and turned into a 85 page neurological paper with about 180 references that has been uploaded to researchgate. The original webpage was written in 2011. The book Natural Cognitive Theology written in 2015 contains an appendix with 70 pages of recent neurological evidence. The original 2011 webpage was expanded significantly in 2019 and most of that new information is more recent than what is contained in the appendix to Natural Cognitive Theology. I have not changed the original text of the essay that was written back in 2011. Instead, I have added extra sections as well as extra material to the ends of sections. The new material is all prefaced with a [2019].)
Table of Contents
Dorsolateral Prefrontal Cortex
Technical Thought versus Mental Networks
Finding the general relationship between the diagram of mental symmetry and brain regions is easy. Adding details to this is much more difficult. Therefore, we will look first at the big picture and then try to add some of the smaller pieces. I should warn that this section assumes that you know neurology and that you are familiar with the model of mental symmetry. But first, a bit of history.
I started my research in mental symmetry in about 1985 (I first encountered that specific model of cognitive styles in about 1980) when it grew out of a research project I was trying to do for a Master’s degree in Engineering. (That is when I first learned that the university system is not set up to handle interdisciplinary research, especially if it leads to a major paradigm shift.) To put a long story short, I taught myself neurology by reading about 200 tomes and going through a few thousand papers. (I did take one graduate class in neuropsychology which was quite basic compared to what I was doing on my own.)
As I mentioned, the big picture became apparent rather quickly. But, at that point the knowledge of the human brain was too limited to go that much further. Based upon the model of mental symmetry, I worked out some of the connections that had to be in place, and the neurological discoveries that have been made since then have been remarkably consistent with those predictions. This gives me confidence that neurology will not suddenly come up with some discovery that totally contradicts my model of the mind.
Every few years, I review the current findings in neurology in order to bring my knowledge up to date. Each time I discover a few more connections between the model of mental symmetry and the wiring of the brain, but each time I also find that uncertainties remain. So far, I have not found any contradictions, only uncertainties. Having said all of this, let us now look at the big picture.
The Big Picture
Here is the general mapping between cognitive styles and the brain:
The four simple styles (the ones in the corner of the diagram) appear to emphasize cortical thought, whereas the three composite styles (the ones in the middle of the diagram) use primarily subcortical processing. The diagram above looks at the four simple styles.
Neurology tells us that the back of the cortex interprets and stores sensory information, primarily from sight and sound. The frontal lobes, in contrast, are used to build an internal world of thought. Thus, the division between the internal and the external worlds is actually built into the human brain. MBTI® says that I/E, or Introverted/Extraverted is one of the four fundamental thinking categories, and reconciling the internal world of thought with the external world of sensation is one of the main dilemmas of philosophy. It is interesting to note that one of the main differences between human and monkey is the size of the frontal lobes. In the human, the frontal lobes are far larger than in the monkey.
The literature often talks about the frontal lobes having an inhibitory influence over behavior. I find this term rather annoying because it describes how the typical person treats his internal world. The ability to construct an internal world is what makes me human. It permits me to become an individual that is different and unique. It is part of what distinguishes me from an animal. But, instead of viewing the frontal lobes as our most precious possession, we tend to see the internal world as something that inhibits us from becoming totally immersed in the external world of physical sensation. Thankfully, this adjective is starting to fall into disfavor as we start to learn the function of the various aspects of the frontal lobes.
If you really want to find out what it means to lose your frontal lobes, then I suggest reading up on the frontal lobotomy. It makes for horrifying reading. The Wikipedia article is a good starting point.
For the four simple styles, it appears that:
Each of these four cognitive styles contains an automatic part in the posterior (or back) of the cortex that deals with sensory information. This part of the mind appears to develop automatically as information comes in from the senses and organizes itself.
Each of the four simple styles also uses part of the frontal lobes to construct an internal world of thought. It appears that this part of the mind does not develop automatically, but rather takes thought and effort.
Each of the four simple styles has a brain processor (like a computer CPU) that does the actual thinking. As the case of H.M. demonstrated, if a person loses all four of these brain processors, then he is incapable of learning any new information.
Posterior Cortex
Let us begin by looking at automatic thought in the back of the cortex.
Perceiver thought is very clearly connected with the right parietal lobe. Based upon lesion studies (looking at functions that are lost when specific brain regions are damaged), it is known that the right parietal lobe works with maps, object recognition, spatial construction, and awareness of body and space. All of these correspond precisely to the function of Perceiver strategy.
Server thought is very obviously related to the left parietal lobe. Damage here leads to various kinds of apraxia, in which a person is unable to carry out sequences of action. Lesions here can also cause dysgraphia, in which a person has difficulty writing, and dyscalculia, problems with arithmetic. All of these functions correspond to the thinking of Server thought.
Here is a page that gives more information about the parietal lobes.
Teacher strategy is related to the left temporal lobe through language. Many aspects of language, such as comprehension, naming, word recognition and verbal memory are carried out by the left temporal lobe. If we look at the Teacher person, we find that his thinking is heavily dominated by words. It is very difficult for him to move beyond words to include other aspects of thought. Wernicke was the first to relate part of the left temporal lobe with speech back in 1874 and Wernicke’s area is still named after him.
Mercy strategy appears related to the right temporal lobe. Damage here impairs the ability to recognize musical tones and recall faces. This area is also activated when listening to emotional music. There is also an interesting link between this region of the brain and Near Death Experiences and feelings of religious ecstasy. We know that the Mercy person is very sensitive to non-verbal language, is aware of faces and that personal identity appears to be located within Mercy thought. Finally, my postulate is that an image of God emerges as the universal understanding touches personal identity within Mercy thought.
Before we go on, notice the underlying symmetry. According to the diagram of mental symmetry, Teacher and Mercy are opposites, as are Server and Perceiver. If you take a Perceiver trait, for instance, and replace space with time, you end up with a corresponding Server trait. Similarly, even though the Teacher and Mercy persons are extremely different, every personality trait of the Mercy person seems to have a corresponding version in the Teacher person.
For instance, the Mercy person identifies with experiences, while the Teacher person identifies with theories. Both the immature Mercy person and the immature Teacher person can act as emotional dictators. The Mercy person will talk about love, but he is the one who defines love, and he gives or withholds love in order to make sure that his definition of love is accepted by others. Likewise, the Teacher person talks about universal understanding, but he is the one who defines this understanding, and he gives or withholds theoretical information in order to make sure that his version of universal understanding is accepted by others.
We see this same symmetry in the physical brain. Server uses left parietal cortex, while Perceiver uses right parietal cortex. Teacher uses left temporal lobe; Mercy uses right temporal lobe.
Brain Processors
Perceiver strategy processing appears to occur in the right hippocampus. The link between right hippocampus and spatial processing is quite strong. For instance, brain imaging was done on London taxicab drivers (who have to pass a difficult test on navigating through the streets of London in order to get a license) and their right hippocampus lights up when they are working with mental maps and working out paths to destinations.
Server processing uses the left hippocampus. The difference between left and right hippocampus is clearly illustrated by this paper. The left hippocampus works egocentrically: Turn left, go two blocks, then turn right and go 50 meters. This describes Server processing. The right hippocampus operates exocentrically: Here is the map; this is North; here is you; here is where you want to go. That is Perceiver thinking.
Teacher processing appears to occur within the left amygdala and Mercy processing within the right amygdala. We know that both the Teacher and the Mercy persons think emotionally. Neurology tells us that the two amygdalae are emotional processors. This is even mentioned clearly in the Wikipedia article.
Relating the left amygdala to the Teacher and the right amygdala to the Mercy is a little more difficult. The indirect evidence is quite strong: the left amygdala is within the left temporal lobe, which is related to Teacher thought, whereas the right amygdala is within the right temporal lobe, connected to Mercy thought.
In the past, papers such as this have basically connected the right amygdala with unpleasant feelings and the left amygdala with positive feelings. That is because Mercy feelings tend to be negative whereas Teacher emotion tends to be positive. However, papers are now appearing that specifically relate left amygdala to Teacher thought and right amygdala to Mercy thought (20 years after I discovered this connection from personality).
This paper says that the right amygdala is used for interpreting emotionally expressive faces, something that is definitely related to Mercy thought. This one says that the left amygdala is activated when talking about fearful situations, and this one specifically connects the left amygdala with verbal emotion. This paper goes beyond verbal emotion to suggest that the left amygdala is essential for ‘representing mental states’, definitely a theoretical type of emotion. And this paper says that there is left amygdala activity when a theory is being updated or violated.
I have suggested that emotion and confidence interact. This paper specifically states that the amygdala and hippocampus affect each other when emotion meets memory.
Let us summarize our conclusions so far:
Perceiver: Right parietal lobe and right hippocampus.
Server: Left parietal lobe and left hippocampus.
Mercy: Right temporal lobe and right amygdala.
Teacher: Left temporal lobe and left amygdala.
General Principles
Before we continue, I would like to mention two general principles. Obviously the brain is far more complicated than the diagram of mental symmetry would suggest. How does this all this complexity relate to the concept that the cortex contains only four different modules?
1) The cortex is arranged hierarchically. This is the general consensus of neurology. As you move from the back of the cortex to the front, you find a series of regions, like steps on a staircase. At the back, both memory and processing are very specific. For instance, there are areas in the visual cortex that respond when your eyes see lines at a certain orientation at a certain place in the visual field. However, this specific information is then fed to the next area, which looks for combination of lines. The results of this are then fed forward to the next region, and so on.
Saying this more clearly, as you move forward, the following things happen:
- Processing becomes more multi-modal. In other words, information from sight, sound, taste, and touch is combined.
- Processing becomes more integrated. Instead of just looking for specific links, mental processing looks for connections between connections between connections.
- Processing becomes more internalized. At the back, all information comes from the four senses. (Smell enters the orbital frontal lobes.) At the front, processing is almost entirely independent of sensory information, allowing the mind to think about other times and places than the present. In other words, there is a progression from the external world to the internal world.
My premise is that what remains the same is the type of processing. For instance, at the back of the brain, Perceiver processing may be looking for connections between one specific visual Mercy image and another, while at the front it will be searching for a connection between one imaginary visual concept and another. However, what remains constant is the fact that Perceiver thought is looking for connections between Mercy images.
Thus, much of mental development involves moving from the back to the front of the brain by developing increasingly internalized ways of thinking. What happens when the growing mind does not develop more frontal and internalized ways of thinking? ADHD. This study, for instance, found that ADHD children who act impulsively use less of their cortex in general, and less of their frontal cortex, in specific.
2) The cortex integrates various modes of thought. In the back of the cortex, this is clearly illustrated by the angular gyrus, which lies between the parietal lobe and the temporal lobe.
In the left hemisphere, I have suggested that Server thought uses the left parietal lobe and Teacher thought uses the left temporal lobe. The left angular gyrus appears to be acting as a bridge between Teacher and Server thought, functioning as the ‘arrow’ in the diagram of mental symmetry that leads from Teacher to Server strategy. This area is important for mental arithmetic, reading and writing, and operates abnormally in dyslexia, both functions that combine Teacher and Server processing. (Thus, the dyslexic uses Perceiver thought to try to make up for a deficiency in Server processing.)
In the right hemisphere, Perceiver strategy uses the right parietal lobe and Mercy strategy is associated with the right temporal lobe. I have suggested that the interaction between Perceiver and Mercy thought generates self-image. Stimulating this region of the brain can lead to feelings of depersonalization, and damage in this general area can cause a person to neglect parts of his body.
In summary:
- The left angular gyrus ties together Server and Teacher.
- The right angular gyrus ties together Perceiver and Mercy.
Frontal Lobes
We have looked at the regions in the back of the brain that are related to Mercy, Perceiver, Server and Teacher processing. I suggest that each of these four modes is also related to a region in the frontal lobes.
A lot of confusing terms are used to describe the frontal lobes. The frontal cortex refers to all of the frontal lobes, whereas the prefrontal cortex describe the part that is in front of the motor strip. There are four main regions: the dorsolateral, the part of the frontal lobe that you see when looking at a brain, the medial, the part where the two hemispheres touch one another, the orbital, the bottom of the frontal lobes, and the polar, which is at the very front. Going further, neurological papers do not use a single consistent terminology to refer to brain regions. Instead, many brain areas have two or three labels, and different specializations within neurology tend to use different terms to refer to similar brain regions. For instance, Zeki, whom we will examine later refers to ‘field A1 of the medial orbito-frontal cortex’. As far as I can tell, he is the only neurologist to use this precise term, and he uses only this term in all of his papers. (One also finds this same term in non-neurological papers who quote his research.)
Here are two diagrams from Wikimedia that map out the various brain regions fairly clearly:
This is a lateral view of the brain:
And here is a medial view:
Let us look first at the basic connections from back to front in the brain. There is a major neuronal pathway, called the superior fasciculus, leading from the parietal lobes forward to the dorsolateral and medial frontal lobes, strongly suggesting that these regions of the frontal lobes are related to Perceiver and Server thought. Studies in the monkey show that the amygdala connects to the ventral and medial frontal cortex, but not the dorsolateral frontal cortex.
Put these two simple facts together, and you conclude that the dorsolateral frontal cortex is related to Perceiver and Server thought, the orbital frontal is related to Teacher and Mercy, while medial frontal activity involves an interaction between these modes of thought. That basically summarizes my hypothesis:
- Left dorsolateral frontal cortex: Server internal world.
- Right dorsolateral frontal cortex: Perceiver internal world.
- Left frontopolar cortex: Server integration.
- Right frontopolar cortex: Perceiver integration.
- Left orbitofrontal cortex: Teacher internal world.
- Right orbitofrontal cortex: Mercy internal world.
- Left inferior frontal cortex: Teacher thought.
- Right inferior frontal cortex: Mercy thought.
- Left medial frontal cortex: Interaction between Teacher and Server
- Right medial frontal cortex: Interaction between Mercy and Perceiver.
It appears that, unlike the back of the cortex, the frontal lobes are not programmed automatically. Instead, information has to be permitted to enter the frontal lobes; it has to be placed within this area. As far as I can tell:
- Commitment places information into the internal Server world.
- Belief places information into the internal Perceiver world.
- Understanding places information into the internal Teacher world.
- Identification places information into the internal Mercy world.
Before we look at the details, I need to make a clarification. In the same way that research is only now beginning to distinguish between the left and the right amygdalae, so analysis of frontal cortex function is also only starting to differentiate between left and right regions. For instance, traditionally, most papers on the dorsolateral frontal cortex have treated it as a single system spanning both left and right hemispheres. However, with the advent of transcranial magnetic stimulation, papers are now starting to appear describing the difference between left and right dorsolateral regions. Unfortunately, some papers continue to ignore differences between left and right hemispheres even when one can see from the specific data and pictures in the paper that a difference exists. More generally, there is a detailed correspondence between the traits of the different cognitive modules and the functioning of different brain regions. But the evidence is less certain when it comes to distinguishing between the hemispheres. For instance, one can state with confidence that the Server and Perceiver internal worlds are connected with the dorsolateral frontal cortex. But the evidence connecting the Server internal world with the left dorsolateral frontal and the Perceiver internal world with the right dorsolateral frontal is less compelling.
This mixing of the hemispheres does make sense:
- As one travels further to the front of the brain, modules appear to interact more heavily.
- Contributor thought does tie together Perceiver and Server strategies.
- Exhorter strategy bridges Mercy and Teacher thought.
- A situation can often be approached from either a left or a right hemisphere approach. The conclusions may be similar, but the approach is totally different.
Orbital Frontal Cortex
Now let us look at the details, beginning with the orbital frontal (also known as the orbitofrontal), which I suggest is related to the Mercy and Teacher. This area is heavily interconnected with the amygdala and the front part (the frontal pole) of the temporal lobe (regions also related to Mercy and Teacher).
Neurology clearly relates this region to the internal world of emotional thought. This paper, for example, connects the region with emotional perspective taking. It lights up when a person sees a beautiful face. Individuals with brain damage here are impaired at judging social appropriateness and may be completely lacking in knowledge about moral and social convention. It is an important area for processing personal reward and punishment, with more abstract rewards and punishments processed in the front of the region and more concrete ones in the back. One author describes it as the brain region that links reward to hedonic experience, definitely referring to the internal world of emotions.
This paper suggests that autism may be related to a dysfunctional orbitofrontal—amgydala circuit. The autistic person has problems interacting socially with other individuals, suggesting a deficiency in Mercy processing and in the internal Mercy world. He also has difficulty constructing a general understanding of his environment, indicating a problem with Teacher thought. Lacking an overall understanding, the autistic person must build understanding through the use of repetitive behavior or restrict himself to a limited environment.
Looking specifically at one hemisphere, this paper suggests that the left orbital region is related to feelings of anxiety. Anxiety is the type of emotion that arises when understanding is inadequate, suggesting that the internal world of Teacher thought is sensing pain.
Patients with right orbitofrontal damage are especially crippled at recognizing emotions in others, consistent with a deficit in the internal world of personal Mercy identification.
[2019] Turning now to more recent research, Mercy thought adds emotional labels to experiences. Similarly, “Research has shown that pleasure is never merely a sensation nor a thought, but an additional hedonic gloss, which is the pleasure versus displeasure affect that is actively generated by the brain and attached to its sensory or cognitive object.” This emotional labeling happens within the orbitofrontal cortex: “The midanterior subregion of the orbitofrontal cortex has emerged as an apex of pleasure system, linking reward with hedonic experience. Within this region there is strong, consistent activity correlating with the hedonic experience of a range of pleasures.” This adding of an emotional label to an experience goes beyond physical sensation: “Hedonic evaluation of pleasure valence is anatomically distinguishable from earlier sensory computations, for example, how taste identification in the primary gustatory cortex in anterior insula is separate from valence processing in higher order areas such as orbitofrontal cortex” (Kringelbach, 2017).
Human and monkey brains distinguish between physical sensations and internally generated Mercy emotions. In contrast, physical sensation is the same as emotion in a rat brain: “Indeed there may be no cortical area in rodents that is homologous to most of the primate including human orbitofrontal cortex. The primate including human orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) implements reward value. Value is not represented at earlier stages of processing in primates including humans. Invariant visual object recognition is used for many functions including memory formation, so perception is kept separate from emotion. In contrast, in rodents, value is represented even in the first taste relay in the brain, the nucleus of the solitary tract: there is no clear separation between perception and emotion. In rodents, even the taste pathways are connected differently, with subcortical connections bypassing the cortex (including orbitofrontal cortex) and making connections via a pontine taste area directly to the hypothalamus and amygdala.” In humans, the level of neuron activity in the orbitofrontal cortex corresponds to the level of emotion that a person says that they are experiencing: “Orbitofrontal cortex activations in humans to these stimuli are linearly related to the subjectively reported pleasantness of stimuli (medially) or to their unpleasantness (laterally).” Mercy thought ‘lives’ within an internal world of emotional experiences, but Server thought performs the actions that are guided by these emotional experiences. Consistent with this, “in the orbitofrontal cortex, the representation is of the value of stimuli, and actions are not represented. The value of very many different types of stimuli, events, or goals is represented separately at the neuronal level, providing the basis for choice between stimuli and the selection at later stages of processing of an appropriate action to obtain the chosen goal” (Rolls, 2017).
Continuing with this paper, the emotional label that Mercy thought attaches to an experience depends upon the context. For instance, food tastes better when one is hungry: “In the human orbitofrontal cortex, we found a large decrease in the BOLD signal to a complex food (tomato juice vs. chocolate) fed to satiety... This sensory-specific decrease was related to the decrease in the subjective pleasantness of the food eaten to satiety.” The Mercy person is very aware of smell. Similarly, “The subjective pleasantness or reward or affective value of odour is represented in the orbitofrontal cortex, in that feeding humans to satiety decreases the activation found to the odour of that food, and this effect is relatively specific to the food eaten in the meal.” The Mercy person reads emotional clues from peoples’ faces. Similarly, “in humans, there is a part of the orbitofrontal cortex that responds selectively in relation to face expression specifically when it indicates that behaviour should change, and this activation is error-related and occurs when the error neurons in the orbitofrontal cortex become active.” Mercy persons can change their opinion about people and situations very quickly based upon emotional incidents: “In primates and humans, the orbitofrontal cortex implements one-trial rule-based reversal learning, and this is important in rapidly updating social behaviour. This is rapid updating of value-based representations.” Mercy thought functions associatively. Every experience brings to mind memories of related experiences, and the way that Mercy thought feels about the current experience will be influenced by the emotional labels assigned to these related memories. “The sight of chocolate produced more activation in chocolate cravers than non-cravers in the medial orbitofrontal cortex and ventral striatum. For cravers vs non-cravers, a combination of a picture of chocolate with chocolate in the mouth produced a greater effect than the sum of the components (i.e. supralinearity) in the medial orbitofrontal cortex and pregenual cingulate cortex. Furthermore, the pleasantness ratings of the chocolate and chocolate-related stimuli had higher positive correlations with the fMRI BOLD signals in the pregenual cingulate cortex and medial orbitofrontal cortex in the cravers than in the non-cravers.”
Finally, the immature Mercy person is emotionally dependent upon the environment, while the mature Mercy person becomes emotionally guided by an internal world that overrides the feelings of the present. Similarly, “in primates including humans the amygdala becomes overshadowed by the orbitofrontal cortex. The orbitofrontal cortex has a much more important role in the computation of reward and punishment value, as measured by effects of devaluation and goal-directed one-trial rule-based learning and reversal, and thereby in emotion, which shows major changes after damage to the orbitofrontal cortex.” In other words, the amygdala is an emotional processor that can be internally guided by emotional labels within the orbitofrontal cortex.
This means that the Mercy person can use emotional content within the internal world to read things into social situations which are not actually there, such as ascribing motivations to people which they did not actually mean. Consistent with this, one recent paper suggests that the orbitofrontal cortex uses emotional clues to come up with an internal model of the current state based upon partial information. “We describe a novel theory that posits that OFC’s specific role in decision-making is to provide an up-to-date representation of task-related information, called a state representation. This representation reflects a mapping between distinct task states and sensory as well as unobservable information. We summarize evidence supporting the existence of such state representations in rodent and human OFC and argue that forming these state representations provides a crucial scaffold that allows animals to efficiently perform decision making and reinforcement learning in high-dimensional and partially observable environments” ( Schuck, 2017). Looking at this in more detail, “This requirement for the state representation raises another problem: some variables do not have a one-to-one correspondence to the information the agent gets from its sensors. For example, the velocity related variables must be inferred by comparing past and current sensory inputs, and thus require memory. If states need to reflect information beyond what is accessible through current sensory input and there is uncertainty regarding their true underlying value, the states are called partially observable. Finally, not all aspects of the current sensory input are relevant. Lighting conditions, for instance, do not need to be included into the state as they are irrelevant for the policy even if they change the sensory signals.” Translating this into cognitive language, the Mercy person will come up with an internal emotional model of the current situation by focusing upon certain features and jumping to conclusions based upon partial information. This usually works well. It occasionally fails—often dramatically. Thus, emotions can be viewed as a shortcut for careful thought, a way of responding to a situation quickly and efficiently. Emotions are often viewed as the opposite of rational thought. But emotions can be trained to reflect rational thought, and this retraining of emotions lies at the heart of what mental symmetry refers to as the path of personal transformation.
The orbitofrontal cortex appears to be critical for internally representing some state with its emotional labels. However, most of the underlying calculations are being done elsewhere in the brain using a larger circuit that deals with what is known as theory of mind. Similarly, the Mercy person is keenly aware of the emotional state of a person or situation, but is much less talented when it comes to analyzing the details of some emotional state or working out how one gets from one emotional state to another. Finally, I should emphasize that everyone uses this kind of processing to some extent. But the Mercy person appears to be conscious in this form of processing. Thus, observing what comes naturally to a Mercy person provides a window into what is happening within the orbitofrontal cortex.
Teacher Emotion
[2019] The average person equates emotion with Mercy emotion, regarding emotion as a label that the mind attaches to experiences, people, and situations. We have seen that this kind of emotional labeling happens within the orbitofrontal cortex: “Activations in the orbitofrontal cortex correlate with the subjective emotional experience of affective stimuli, and damage to the orbitofrontal cortex impairs emotion-related learning, emotional behaviour, and subjective affective state” (Rolls, 2017). In contrast to this general awareness of Mercy emotion, I have found that most people instinctively reject the concept that Teacher thought functions emotionally. Therefore, I would like to examine the concept of Teacher emotion in more detail in the light of recent neurological research.
I mentioned in the introduction that scientific thought always evaluates information in the light of some paradigm. This leads to curious results when neurology attempts to study the part of the brain that evaluates paradigms. That is because a paradigm functions emotionally, and mental symmetry suggests that this emotion is Teacher emotion. Stated as clearly as possible, if the paradigm of the researcher does not include an explanation for paradigms, then the researcher will be emotionally driven by his paradigm to deny the existence of a brain region that evaluates paradigms. The fundamental dilemma is that the mind is studying itself; neurologists are using their minds to study how the mind functions. This is an obvious statement, but I do not know if I have ever seen it mentioned in any neurological paper. Science addresses the problem of Mercy emotions by remaining objective. But how does one eliminate Teacher emotions when these are the very emotions that are driving a researcher to perform his research? And what happens when one is being driven by Teacher emotions to study how the brain generates Teacher emotions?
Mercy emotions are easy to recognize but difficult to define. Teacher emotions, in contrast, can be defined quite simply. Teacher emotion is related to order-within-complexity; Teacher thought feels good when many items fit together in a simple manner; Teacher thought feels bad when there is an exception to the general rule. There are some recent papers which describe this kind of emotion.
A 2017 paper by Kringelbach and Berridge contrasts normal emotions with an emotion of well-being which they refer to as eudaimonia. “Since Aristotle, happiness has been thought of as consisting of the dual aspect of hedonia (pleasure) and eudaimonia (a life well-lived, embedded in meaningful values). Pleasure might be much easier to evoke but is often but a brief moment in happiness or in states of subjective well-being. Yet, it is clear that hedonia and eudaimonia empirically cohere together in happy people.” (Kringelbach, 2017). They suggest that eudaimonia may be related to metastability: “It has been shown that when metastability is optimal, the system is best able to explore the dynamic repertoire, that is, an optimal point is reached between the fast and slow processing characterizing human cognition. Given these important results, we hypothesize as one possibility that such optimal metastability could be linked to a state of eudaimonia. In this brain state, there would be optimal flow of information in the pleasure system and connected emotion processing networks, which could correspond to the feelings of subjective well-being and flow anecdotally reported after a deeply meaningful experience of positive emotion.” Metastability is related to Teacher order-within-complexity. On the one hand, there is order because everything fits together in a stable manner. But on the other hand, there is also complexity, because the order is continually changing. This combination describes order-within-complexity, a dynamic stability in which everything remains integrated while continuing to change.
Putting this together, mental symmetry suggests that physical experiences of pain and pleasure automatically program Mercy thought within the mind of the developing child. In contrast, a person learns how to recognize and appreciate Teacher emotions as order-within-complexity is encountered within various situations. This explains the distinction between pop culture and classic culture. Pop culture is guided primarily by Mercy emotions which the average person can appreciate, while classic culture is guided more heavily by Teacher feelings that have to be trained to be recognized. We will see later that this distinction is especially apparent with mathematics.
Beauty is another example of Teacher order-within-complexity, because many elements are fitting together in a harmonious manner. Research has recently discovered that the orbitofrontal cortex is sensitive to the emotion of beauty: “Brain imaging studies exploring the neurobiology of beauty have shown that the experience of visual, musical, and moral beauty all correlate with activity in a specific part of the emotional brain, field A1 of the medial orbito-frontal cortex, which probably includes segments of Brodmann Areas(BA)10,12 and 32” (Zeki, 2014). Zeki has published several papers on the various forms of beauty that activate this region of the orbitofrontal cortex.
Rolls describes this attribute of order-within-complexity in another paper on aesthetics: “A theory of the neurobiological foundations of aesthetics and art is described. This has its roots in emotion, in which what is pleasant or unpleasant, a reward or punisher, is the result of an evolutionary process in which genes define the (pleasant or unpleasant) goals for action. To this is added the operation of the reasoning, syntactic, brain system which evolved to help solve difficult, multistep, problems, and the use of which is encouraged by pleasant feelings when elegant, simple, and hence aesthetic solutions are found that are advantageous because they are parsimonious, and follow Occam’s Razor” (Rolls, 2017). Notice also that Rolls is presenting ‘a theory’ which ‘has its roots in emotion’. Thus, Rolls is using his mind to evaluate a theory about how minds evaluate theories.
As another neurological paper points out, beauty can be viewed either as something that is natural, or as a social construct: ‘According to aesthetic theories, a sense of beauty may be mainly affected by two factors. The first is objective parameters and external morphology of concrete objects, consistent with the perspectives of Plato’s objectivist view of aesthetic perception. Previous studies have found symmetrical human faces, geometrical shapes and websites designs, symmetrical sequences of apparent movements, representational artworks, sculptures obeying the canonical proportion of the golden ratio, and paintings and polygon patterns with intermediate complexity, typically elicit higher aesthetic appraisal and experience, providing support of this theory that beauty has corresponding morphological characteristics” (Zhang, 2017). Notice that all of these examples of beauty result from order-within-complexity that emerges in natural ways, such as symmetry or proportion.
Continuing with this paper, “An alternative theory argues that the perception of beauty is mainly based on the subjective construction of valence based on abstract social meaning and values. Prior studies have found smiling human faces with direct eye gaze, people with good inner character, and short sentences and scenes describing morally-positive actions can elicit a sense of beauty and produce enhanced activation of aesthetic reward systems due to the positive social meanings associated with these stimuli. These studies imply that aesthetic evaluation is a subjective construction and support the ‘what is good is beautiful’ theory.” I suggest that social beauty is also an example of Teacher order-within-complexity, because Teacher thought is attempting to come up with a simple explanation for social facts and it is feeling good when it succeeds.” But feelings of social beauty will vary between one person and another, because each person is using Teacher thought to try to bring order to the complexity of facts that exist within that person’s mind.
Looking more generally at these two kinds of beauty, everyone will tend to have similar concepts of objective beauty, because everyone is observing the same items. In contrast, concepts of social beauty will vary between one culture or person and another, because Teacher thought is trying to make sense of facts that reside within the mind of some person. Going the other way, when a person maintains that some facet of personality is ‘too complicated to be summarized by any simple explanation’, then this is really asserting that there is no Teacher order-within-complexity. And when a person states this as a general principle, then this is actually promoting the general Teacher theory that there is no general Teacher theory.
Mathematical beauty is unusual. It appears to be an example of social beauty, because mathematical beauty is only recognized and appreciated by people who have studied mathematics. Despite this, mathematical feelings of beauty are independent of culture: “The experience of mathematical beauty is perhaps the most extreme aesthetic experience that is dependent upon culture and learning; those not versed in the language of mathematics cannot experience the beauty of a mathematical formulation. And yet, once the language of mathematics is mastered, the same formulae can be experienced as beautiful by mathematicians belonging to different races and cultures” (Zeki, 2018). Zeki concludes that mathematical beauty is based in cognitive structure, and that people from different cultures have similar concepts of mathematical beauty because they have similar minds: “It is in this sense that mathematical beauty has its roots in a biologically inherited logical-deductive system that is similar for all brains. It is only by adhering to the rules of the brain’s logical deductive system that a formulation can gain universal assent and be found beautiful.” And yet, when it comes to making a Teacher theory about Teacher theories, Zeki steps back and defines Teacher emotion using circular reasoning: “Beauty is an experience that correlates quantitatively with neural activity in a specific part of the emotional brain, namely, in the field A1mOFC; the more intense the declared experience of beauty, the more intense the neural activity there(Zeki, 2019)” Zeki initially discovered that a specific region within the orbital frontal cortex appreciates all kinds of beauty, and he is now defining beauty as something that is appreciated by the orbital frontal cortex.
I suggest that one can decipher what is happening cognitively by looking at the theory that Zeki proposes. This is easy to do because his 2019 paper opens by describing this theory: “There have been many definitions of beauty, but none of them is wholly or even partially satisfactory. My favourite is the one given by Edmund Burke, partly because it says nothing and partly because it says everything.” Zeki then continues by saying that beauty “is not, according to him [Burke], to be sought in proportion or in perfection, regardless of whether one is considering artefactual beauty, as in buildings, or biological beauty, as in human bodies.” Zeki adds that “Nor is beauty to be found, according to Burke, in mathematically determined proportions because ‘we begin to feel that mathematical ideas are not the true measures of beauty.’” And he recognizes that “This dismissal of proportion and perfection would no doubt shock many today.” What empirical evidence does Zeki give for his dismissal of thousands of years of thought about beauty and aesthetics? None. He simply opens his paper by asserting that “There have been many definitions of beauty, but none of them is wholly or even partially satisfactory.” And then he proposes a definition of beauty that says both nothing and everything.
When one asserts a vague general theory and then dismisses all of the relevant facts, one is using a cognitive mechanism known as overgeneralization. Overgeneralization is the easiest way to construct a Teacher theory. It is especially apparent when children are learning rules of grammar—theories about speech. Children will first overextend rules of grammar, using phrases such as ‘I go-ed to the store’ before learning to restrict the domain of their rules (Ambridge, 2013). Overgeneralization relates to Teacher emotion, because Teacher thought uses words to construct general theories, and an overgeneralized theory feels better than a restricted one.
Looking at this further, the greatest Teacher emotion comes from a universal theory, and the easiest way to form a universal theory is through overgeneralization. One simply states that ‘All is One’ and then asserts that this theory of cosmic oneness transcends all facts of reality. I suggest that this describes the cognitive mechanism behind mysticism, which was described by William James in a series of lectures back in 1902. Merely stating that ‘All is One’ is not enough, because there is order, but not complexity. However, if one struggles with the complexities of life and then breaks through to the realization that ‘All is One’, then this will create strong Teacher feelings of order-within-complexity. This breakthrough from complexity to clarity can be seen especially clearly in the Zen koan.
Overgeneralization, by its very nature, cannot handle factual details. Zeki’s 2019 paper illustrates what naturally happens when a Teacher mindset of overgeneralization meets a rational analysis of Teacher thought and Teacher emotions. This may sound like a trivial effect, but the theory of mental symmetry has been used to develop an integrated Teacher theory of religious thought, and the primary opposition to this theory has come from the underlying assumption that Teacher theories about God and religion should be formed by using overgeneralization and not rational thought.
Looking at this more carefully, I suggest that mysticism combines overgeneralization in Teacher thought with identification in Mercy thought. In both cases, the boundaries that limit emotional pleasure are being eliminated. Similarly, a neurological paper on mysticism stated that “Mystical experiences are characterized by a sense of timelessness and union with a supernatural entity” and suggested that “Four main phenomenological features characterize mystical experiences (a breakdown in the usual sense of the passage of time; a breakdown in the usual sense of the extension of space; a breakdown in the differentiation between objects in the external world; and a breakdown in the differentiation between the self and the external world)” (Cristofori, 2016). The neurological data on mysticism is sparse but these authors found that patients with lesions in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex “presented markedly increased mysticism”. We will see later that the dorsolateral prefrontal is related to Perceiver and Server thought, the source of facts and sequences that restrict Teacher overgeneralization and limit Mercy identification.
Rolls also uses strange reasoning when discussing Teacher emotion. In his paper on aesthetics, he explicitly states that the mind finds emotional pleasure in order-within-complexity: “Solving difficult problems feels good, and we often speak about elegant (and beautiful) solutions. What is the origin of the pleasure we obtain from elegant ideas, what makes them aesthetically pleasing? It is suggested that solving problems should feel good to us, to make us keep trying, as being able to solve difficult problems that require syntactic operations may have survival value. But what is it that makes simple ideas and solutions (those with fewest premises, fewest steps to the solution, and fewest exceptions for a given level of complexity of a problem) particularly aesthetically pleasing, so much so that physicists may use this as a guide to their thinking? It is suggested that the human brain has become adapted to find simple solutions aesthetically pleasing because they are more likely to be correct.” (Rolls, 2017)
But instead of recognizing that Teacher emotion is being generated by Teacher thought, Rolls bases his explanation of Teacher emotion in the Teacher theory of evolution: “When we understand the underlying origins and bases of aesthetics, we see that the processes involved are elegant and beautiful, as part of a Darwinian theory. (The processes involved in Darwinian evolution are elegant and beautiful, in that an efficient way to search a high dimensional space with multiple peaks of optimality is to use recombination of gene complexes produced by sexual reproduction to implement local hill-climbing in the space, and occasional mutations to produce a jump to a random position in the space to search for local optima there.)” But why does Rolls find emotional pleasure in Darwinian theory? Because Teacher thought within his mind appreciates order-within-complexity. Again, one sees something strange happening when minds come up with general theories about how minds come up with general theories.
Inferior Frontal Cortex
[2019] I have suggested that Teacher emotion comes from order-within-complexity— when many items fit together in a simple manner. Teacher thought naturally generates order-within-complexity by using words to come up with a simple verbal theory. Teacher thought usually comes up with a simple theory by picking some single item within the current context and then treating that single item as if it is a general theory. One could compare this to taking a commoner off the street, crowning the commoner as monarch, and then seeing how well this ex-commoner functions as a monarch.
The localization of brain function began with the discovery of Broca’s area back in 1865. Paul Broca discovered that the left inferior frontal cortex was responsible for generating speech. Words and speech form the basic building blocks for Teacher thought. Thus, it makes sense to associate Teacher thought with left inferior frontal cortex.
Modern research has found that the left inferior frontal cortex performs Teacher thought, in which one specific item is pulled out from a context of similar items: “Multiple lines of evidence support the involvement of left vlPFC in the cognitive control of memory.” “According to the two-process model, mid-vlPFC is activated under conditions in which multiple items are retrieved from memory, but only a subset must be selected for further processing. As described above, automatic and controlled retrieval processes can result in the recovery of multiple representations. Thus, post-retrieval selection is needed to resolve competition among the multiple retrieved representations, and to permit selected representations to guide decision and action.” “In summary, there is evidence both across and within studies for dissociable functions between anterior vlPFC and mid -vlPFC during cognitive control of memory, and these functions can be characterized as controlled retrieval and post-retrieval selection respectively” (Nyhus, 2015). [vlPFC stands for ventral lateral prefrontal cortex and is another name for inferior frontal cortex.] In other words, the middle part of the left inferior frontal cortex creates a context by retrieving several related items. The front part of the left inferior frontal cortex then picks one of these items from the context.
This also explains how Teacher thought views a general theory. The Teacher person often claims to be searching for universal theories. But this is not entirely accurate. Instead, what the Teacher person really wants is to have a general theory and not be aware of any exceptions to this general theory. In other words, the general theory does not have to explain everything. Instead, it only has to explain everything within the context. Using an analogy, a general Teacher theory is like some tribal chief who proclaims that he is ruler over the entire world. The chief can maintain this claim as long as he is not aware of any other people living outside of the small valley over which he rules. Similarly, Teacher thought can maintain the illusion of a general theory by ‘pulling up mental drawbridges’ and ensuring that contradictory facts never enter into the ‘castle’ or domain of the theory.
This principle can be seen when comparing children who speak one language with those who speak several languages: “Children in a multilingual environment exhibited stronger functional connectivity between the left pars triangularis seed region and a large cluster spanning the bilateral superior parietal lobule (SPL), compared to children in the monolingual group. Children in a monolingual environment displayed stronger connectivity between the left pars triangularis and the inferior and middle temporal gyri” (Thieba 2018). [The pars triangularis is another name for the mid-vlPFC.] In other words, if one speaks only one language, then it is sufficient to use Teacher thought to retrieve the appropriate words from the verbal ‘storage area’ within the temporal lobes. But if one speaks several languages, then Perceiver and Server connections are required to connect one verbal context from another in order to ensure that the appropriate language context is being used.
Looking at this from a different perspective, Teacher thought plays a critical role in inductive reasoning, in which one comes up with a general explanation to explain many similar situations. The left inferior frontal cortex is connected with inductive reasoning: “Our data suggest that the left vlPFC contains populations of neurons specifically tuned to process domain-dependent information required to carry out inductive reasoning tasks, by creating domain-based rule representations that may dynamically change across sessions” (Furlan, 2018). Notice that this inductive reasoning can ‘dynamically change across sessions’, consistent with the idea that Teacher thought comes up with a general theory within the current context.
Mental symmetry suggests that Teacher thought emphasizes abstract reasoning rather than concrete experiences. This distinction is backed up by neurology: “Both abstract and concrete concepts, however, conjointly rely on perceptual, verbal and contextual knowledge, with abstract concepts characterized by low values of imageability (IMG) (low sensory-motor grounding) and low context availability (CA) (more difficult to contextualize). Imaging studies supporting differences between abstract and concrete concepts show a greater recruitment of the left inferior frontal gyrus (LIFG) for abstract concepts... The LIFG was significantly more activated for abstract than for concrete words, and a conjunction analysis showed a common activation for words with low IMG or low CA only in the LIFG, in the same area reported for abstract words” (Della Rosa, 2018).
Moving on, mental symmetry suggests that the right inferior frontal cortex is related to Mercy thought. This region has traditionally been associated with the non-verbal aspects of speech, and the Mercy person is often more sensitive to the way in which a person says something than to the actual words being spoken. However, recent research has come up with a more refined understanding. “More specifically, dysfunction of intrinsic (also called linguistic) features of prosody (such as stress, rhythm and pitch) seem to result from damage to left inferior frontal regions, whereas lesions to right inferior cortex often results in impaired processing of extrinsic features of speech like affective prosody – the tonal variation conveying emotions” (Kellmeyer 2016). Thus, both Teacher thought and Mercy thought function emotionally. But Teacher emotion is related to the structure of language, whereas Mercy emotion comes from the situation about which one is talking.
The right inferior frontal cortex carries out a concrete version of the kind of processing that is performed by the left inferior frontal cortex. For instance, the right inferior frontal cortex is sensitive to exceptions to a general rule of music: “A dependency is said to be local if it relates elements that directly follow one another in a sequence, and non-local if the dependency spans over multiple intervening elements.” “We found that violations to non-local dependencies in nested sequences of three-tone musical motifs in musicians elicited increased activity in the right IFG. This is in contrast to similar studies in language which typically report the left IFG in processing grammatical syntax.” This expresses itself as long-term structural changes: “The participants of our study were trained musicians – a group shown to exhibit increased grey-matter volume in the right IFG”(Cheung, 2018). Notice that this study is not examining large-scale musical structure that covers many contexts, but rather looking for a simple three-tone pattern within the current musical context.
The right inferior frontal cortex has traditionally been connected with ‘response inhibition’. And Mercy thought often functions in this manner within modern Western society, stepping in to inhibit responses when they violate the cultural and personal expectations of Mercy thought. More recent research divides this region into an area that inhibits responses and one that detects relevant information. There is “strong evidence that the ventral portion of the rIFC (i.e., rIFG) is substantially involved in response inhibition but does not primarily serve the purpose of attentional control, or the integration of attended stimulus features with task goals... In contrast, activity of the dorsal portion of the rIFC (i.e., rIFJ) was linked to attention as it was associated with the detection of salient stimuli” (Sebastian, 2016). [rIFC equals right inferior frontal cortex.] The authors explain that “The flexible and favorable adaptation of our behavior to changing situations or environments is an important factor of executive control. It is critically dependent on attention steering and motor control. In many circumstances, salient external signals capture our attention and indicate that our ongoing actions or response tendencies need to be stopped and updated. Response inhibition is required when the goals of our actions are no longer adequate or even harmful.” One can see this kind of processing in the Mercy person. Mercy thought will focus upon some external experience or internal wish and then interpret the environment in the light of this fixation. For instance, ‘The light just turned red, we need to stop.’ Or thinking of an example from my Mercy mother who recently passed away, “I want to write a book of low German poetry that will help the Mennonites in Bolivia.” In both cases, Mercy thought is fixating upon some experience and expecting concrete thought to be guided by this fixation. This is similar to the way that Teacher thought comes up with a general theory by treating some concept as a general theory that can be used to explain other concepts.
The Mercy person is very sensitive to the eyes. For instance, when I was a child my mother would repeatedly tell me that I should ‘Look into their eyes and say thank you with expression.’ The Mercy person also wants close friends with whom emotional bonding is possible. A recent study scanned the brain activity of two individuals who were looking at each other’s eyes (via cameras and video monitors). They found that “Eye contact and joint attention are tightly coupled to generate the state of shared attention across individuals. Hyperscanning fMRI conducted with pairs of adults during joint attention tasks showed interindividual neural synchronization in the right inferior frontal gyrus” (Sadato 2017). Looking at this cognitively, people who stare into each other’s eyes become mutually guided by a single focus of attention in Mercy thought, and this generates positive Mercy emotions.
Stating this more generally, the right inferior frontal cortex is related to feelings of empathy. One study describes “the significant activation of the right IFG, right INS and right amygdala in children during engagement in empathic behavior and showed that the activation of the right IFG is significantly associated with the Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI), a self-reported empathy questionnaire” [IFG is inferior frontal gyrus.] And this study found that electrically stimulating this region enhances measures of empathy while inhibiting it reduces measures of empathy. (Wu, 2018). (This is done by applying electrodes to the scalp which deliver a small direct current.)
Dorsolateral Prefrontal Cortex
The classic way of testing for damage in this part of the brain is the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test. The patient is given a set of playing cards, each of which contains a certain number of shapes with different color and shape. The patient is then told to sort the cards but not instructed whether to sort them by number, color, or shape. Instead, he is simply given a feedback of right or wrong. Without telling him, the tester will change the sorting method several times through the test. A person with dorsolateral frontal damage will continue with his sorting strategy and not change to a new one. He may say, “I know that you are now sorting the cards by shape,” and yet continue to sort them by color.
This describes the function of the Perceiver and Server internal worlds. Internal Perceiver thought works out the facts, holds on to them as truth, and then uses these facts to determine behavior. Similarly, internal Server thought works out what to do, holds on to it, and then carries out this action. Talking about a plan involves Teacher thought. Carrying it out requires Server thought.
Which brings me to a personal peeve. I am a stubborn, idealistic Perceiver person who has devoted half of my life to working on a theory of the mind simply because I believe that it is true and I insist that truth will guide my behavior, even over the l-o-n-g term. In other words, as far as I can tell, my behavior has been heavily guided by content within dorsolateral frontal cortex, the area of the mind which I propose contains the internal world of the Perceiver and Server. In terms of the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test, while others have been using ‘color’ to sort their life cards, I have looked at my surroundings, concluded that ‘shape’ is the important factor and have continued for decades to ‘sort by shape’ even though everyone else continues to ‘sort by color’. Therefore, I get rather annoyed when researchers talk about dorsolateral frontal cortex being the location for ‘working memory’. While others may be using this module to hold on to some information for a few seconds, I have been using it to hold on to information for a few decades.
Moving on, this paper says that the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex is active when learning about connections between items, but not when learning about individual items themselves. As we know, Perceiver and Server thinking looks for connections between items.
This paper states that disrupting the left, but not right, dorsolateral cortex causes a person to practice less self-control and to choose immediate short term rewards while ignoring longer term payback. That is definitely related to the internal world of Server thought, which uses internal generated sequence to guide behavior.
These researchers found that disrupting the right dorsolateral frontal cortex causes a person to gamble more with his choices and make riskier decisions. The Perceiver internal world contains that facts that are required to determine value. When these connections are disrupted, then you will ignore the facts and choose what feels good. In contrast, exciting the right dorsolateral frontal cortex while suppressing the left dorsolateral frontal causes a person to choose safe prospects even when the reward is fairly great. In other words, you know the Perceiver facts but you now lack the Server skills that are needed to reach the goal.
Which brings me to my second peave. It annoys me when inhibition is referred to as a trait that can be assigned to some region of the frontal lobes. As a stubborn Perceiver person, my behavior often appears inhibited to others. That is because they are practicing behavior that I regard as risky. As far as I am concerned, they are gambling their life away in order to obtain temporary benefits, and I refuse to do that. That is because I have programmed my frontal cortex with the theory of mental symmetry—it determines my Perceiver truths, my Server commitments, my Mercy loves, and my Teacher understanding. A person doesn’t refuse to play on the freeway because he is inhibited. Instead, he refuses because he has an internal world that guides his behavior. End of peave.
One curious paper says that the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex is less active in an obese person when he finishes eating than in a thin person. If this region is related to the internal world of Server thought, then this could be interpreted as the Server knowing in the thin person that the task of eating has been completed and that it is now time to move on to another task, whereas in the obese person, this mental step of moving on from the meal is not being taken.
[2019] Turning now to more recent papers, I mentioned earlier that the left inferior frontal cortex is associated with Teacher thought, because it retrieves some specific item from a context of similar items. I also mentioned that a theory will appear universal to Teacher thought as long as nothing within the current mental context contradicts that theory. Perceiver thought can expand the domain of a Teacher theory by building connections between one context and another. A recent paper examined this relationship between forming a general theory and connecting general theories: “Participants’ behavior suggested that they quickly discovered the most compact description of each sequence in a language comprising nested rules, and used these rules to compress the sequence in memory and predict the next items. Activity in dorsal inferior prefrontal cortex correlated with the amount of compression, while right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex encoded the presence of embedded structures” (Wang, 2019). In other words, Teacher thought in the inferior frontal cortex is coming up with a theory that provides a ‘compact description of each sequence’ while Perceiver thought in right dorsolateral frontal cortex is expanding this theory by applying it to many different contexts.
Recent research has also started to address the two peeves I mentioned above. The function of the dorsolateral frontal cortex is now recognized to extend far beyond ‘working memory’: “The dlPFC has been implicated in various aspects of domain-general reasoning: executive functioning, cognitive control, goal-directed planning, cost-benefit analysis, problem solving, counterfactual reasoning, [and] model-based control.” Summarizing, “there is convergent evidence from functional and structural MRI studies to implicate dlPFC in domain-general reasoning in both moral and non-moral domains” (Patil, 2018). These various functions all describe a mind being guided in a rational manner by Perceiver facts and Server sequences. Mental symmetry suggests that Perceiver facts and Server sequences can be overwhelmed by emotional pressure. This interplay between knowledge and emotions can be seen in the following quote from the same paper: “In the domain of moral judgment and decision-making, the dlPFC has been associated with the ability to- (i) facilitate abstract reasoning (e.g., cost-benefit analyses), and (ii) provide cognitive control to override strong social-emotional responses elicited by the aversive nature of moral dilemmas.” (Patil, 2018).
Another paper reviewed many studies of moral behavior and the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and came to the following conclusions: “Inhibition of the right DLPFC reduces the influence of harm on decision-making, both when deciding to perform a harmful action oneself, and when punishing harmful or unfair behaviors in others. This reduces decisions to punish or disapprove of potentially harmful personal moral violations in others. However, it also increased the likelihood of performing a harmful action oneself, such as lying or reacting aggressively. In contrast, excitatory brain stimulation to the right DLPFC reduced aggression and increased adherence to social norms. Taken together, these results suggest that the right DLPFC is important for representing aversion to harm, leading individuals to avoid harming others, but also to punish those who do cause harm” (Darby, 2017). Saying this more simply, Perceiver thought leads to the rule of law. On the one hand, this protects personal identity in Mercy thought. But on the other hand, this leads to punishment for those who violate the law.
Mental symmetry suggests that Western thought is characterized by a split between subjective Mercy emotions and rational thought guided by Teacher understanding. This split can be seen in the way that morality is typically studied by researchers. Quoting from the 2018 paper by Patil, “In many contexts, “utilitarianism” is operationalized exclusively as a willingness to engage in instrumental harm for the greater good. This is because “utilitarianism” has been studied principally in the context of sacrificial dilemmas (e.g., asking participants if they would push a man to his death in order to save five others from a runaway train). A second component of “utilitarianism” is impartial beneficence, which signifies that we should help others as much as we can from a completely impartial perspective, giving no special weight to ourselves or to our family or friends”. In other words, people are being asked to choose morally between following Teacher guided rational understanding in a manner that violates subjective Mercy feelings, or else follow Mercy feelings at the expense of rational understanding. However, as this paper points out, it is possible to be guided morally by both Teacher understanding and Mercy sensitivity.
Western society tends to separate between subjective Mercy feelings and Teacher-guided rational thought. Mysticism, in contrast, combines Teacher overgeneralization with Mercy identification, which becomes possible if Perceiver facts and Server sequences are suppressed. Saying this more clearly, objective rational thought uses Teacher generalization to come up with a general theory that explains Perceiver facts and Server sequences, while mysticism uses Teacher overgeneralization to come up with a universal theory by ignoring Perceiver facts and Server sequences. Consistent with this suggestion, mysticism is associated with the suppression of the dorsolateral frontal cortex. “Patients with focal lesions in the dlPFC had substantially higher mysticism scores compared to the controls. Collectively, these findings identify a homeostatic role of these brain regions with the dlPFC suppressing mystical experiences while regions within the temporal cortex, if unchecked, are more likely to produce mystical experience... we argue that the dlPFC has a critical role in regulating mystical experiences by binding context, deliberation, and rational experience to posterior cortices strongly affected by perceptual phenomena.” “Our findings support previous speculation linking executive brain functions to mystical experiences, and reveal that executive functioning (dlPFC) causally contributes to the downregulation of mystical experiences” (Cristofori, 2015). This paper also defines mysticism as a combination of overgeneralization and identification: “Mystical experiences are characterized by a sense of timelessness and union with a supernatural entity”. Society tends to equate religion with mysticism. In contrast, mental symmetry suggests that a concept of God emerges whenever a sufficiently general theory in Teacher thought applies to personal identity in Mercy thought. Mysticism generates the feeling of personally encountering God by suppressing the Perceiver facts and Server sequences of rational thought. In contrast, mental symmetry constructs a mental concept of God by placing Mercy identity within a general Teacher theory of cognition.
My second peeve above was to point out that Perceiver thought is not just inhibiting behavior but rather holding on to beliefs in a positive manner. Recent research has localized the evaluation of beliefs to the right dorsolateral frontal cortex: “According to the Two-Factor theory of delusional belief, there exists a cognitive system dedicated to the generation, evaluation, and acceptance or rejection of beliefs. Studies of the neuropsychology of delusion provide evidence that this system is neurally realized in right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (rDLPFC)” (Coltheart, 2018).
The right dorsolateral frontal does not just function morally but is also responsible for error-checking facts. One study “aimed to assess whether the application of tDCS over right DLPFC could modulate older adults’ awareness of their performance errors. In two separate experiments, we demonstrated a reliable increase in the number of errors that were signaled by older adults during anodal stimulation to right DLPFC... We additionally demonstrated that, although anodal tDCS stimulation was effective when applied to right DLFPC, no change in performance was observed when left DLPFC was targeted. Our study therefore provides novel evidence that DLPFC regions subserving error awareness are predominantly lateralized to the right hemisphere.” (Harty, 2014). (Anodal tDCS electrically stimulates a brain region.)
I have suggested that the left dorsolateral frontal cortex is related to Server thought. Server thought gives stability to sequences, including the verbal sequences of Teacher thought. Electrically suppressing this region makes it more difficult to comprehend ‘garden-path’ sentences that have ambiguous interpretations, such as ‘While the thief hid the jewelry sparkled brightly’ (Hussey, 2015). This suggests that Server thought is not needed to comprehend speech, but it is needed to guide Teacher comprehension of speech along a certain path.
At a more general level, the left dorsolateral frontal guides the sequence of thought: “Our study provides important evidence implicating left DLPFC in the process through which we appropriately prioritise the nature of ongoing thought in a context-dependent manner” (Turnbull, 2019).
Electrically suppressing the left dorsolateral frontal leads to action that is more spontaneous and less planned. One group “hypothesized that cathodal tDCS over the left DLPFC area during motor learning would suppress the use of working memory and reduce explicit verbal-analytical involvement in movement control, thereby promoting implicit motor learning.” And they found “that cathodal tDCS over the left DLPFC promoted performance that was more implicit and automatic” (Zhu, 2015). (Cathodal tDCS electrically suppresses a brain region.) Zen Buddhism follows a similar path by associating mysticism with spontaneous action. This is consistent with the statement made earlier that mysticism functions by shutting down Perceiver and Server thought, making it possible for a person to feel that ‘I am one with everything’.
looking at this topic more generally, mental symmetry suggests that it is possible to define morality in terms of mental wholeness: Whatever causes more of the mind to work in a more integrated fashion is morally good, while whatever shuts down part of the mind is morally bad. This principle may not apply to every region of the brain. For instance, people who are more fearful may have a larger amygdala, the part of the brain which does emotional processing, and this is probably not a good thing. However, I suggest that this principle definitely applies to the frontal cortex, and that any strategy which emphasizes the posterior of the brain at the expense of the frontal lobes is morally suspicious. Thus, one would conclude that mysticism is morally inferior because it shuts down the dorsolateral frontal cortex. This is an interesting conclusion because mysticism claims to come into direct contact with God, and the average religious person views God as the source of morality. Going further, every theologian and every system of religion that I have analyzed so far contains some core aspect of mysticism. The level of mysticism varies widely. Some religious systems are defined almost totally by mysticism, while other systems have a core of mysticism surrounded by a shell of personal transformation guided by rational thought. However, a core of mysticism always seems to be present. This implies that all existing religions are currently interacting with God in a manner that is morally deficient. The theory of mental symmetry has been used to analyze religion in great detail, especially biblically-based Christianity (and many essays have been posted to the website). After having analyzed 40% of the New Testament in the original Greek, I have come to the conclusion that it is possible to build a systematic, biblically consistent, theology of Christianity upon a rational cognitive theory of mental wholeness without having to appeal to mysticism.
Frontopolar Cortex
I have mentioned that the brain seems to be organized in a hierarchy of regions moving from back to front and from external to internal. There is a region in front of the dorsolateral frontal cortex called the frontal polar region. This area of the brain is used when thought is driven entirely by internal content. Thus, I suggest that this region is the highest and most abstract area for Perceiver and Server thought. When Perceiver facts and Server sequences are completely internally driven, then the frontal polar region is being used, whereas Perceiver and Server thought that manipulates external elements involves the dorsolateral frontal cortex.
[2019] A recent paper connects the functioning of frontopolar cortex with mental schema: “The most rostral zone includes RLPFC and represents a range of control signals that we term schematic control in order to convey its generality beyond only temporal or episodic signals. Bartlett coined the term schema as a knowledge structure that organizes many lower order features and their relationships. In essence, schemas are models of the world and ourselves in it..” The author summarizes that... [the] RLPFC is consistently engaged when control depends on an episodic or temporally structured context, integration and inference over multiple features, and when tracking hypothetical strategies, goals, and pending states. These types of control broadly depend on the structured information that schemas are proposed to hold” (Badre 2018). (RLPFC refers to rostral lateral prefrontal cortex, which is another name for frontopolar cortex.) Saying this cognitively, the frontopolar cortex is required when thought and behavior need to be guided by an internal framework of Perceiver facts and Server sequences.
This paper describes the standard model of viewing the frontal cortex as a series of increasingly abstract regions: “The cascade model proposed that hierarchical control is supported by a propagation of top-down control signals from rostral to caudal areas. RLPFC might form the apex of the frontal hierarchy and would influence mid-DLPFC, which would influence prePM, and so forth toward motor cortex.” This implies that “any area higher in the hierarchy might exert asymmetrical influence, with broader efferent connections to lower order (i.e., caudal) areas than the reverse. Thus, if it is the apex, RLPFC should show the highest connectional asymmetry. However, among lateral PFC regions, anterior mid-DLPFC (areas 45 and 46) showed the greatest asymmetry, while RLPFC (area 10) was average on this metric.” I am not certain if what he calls the mid-DLPFC includes aspects of the inferior frontal cortex, which relate to Mercy and Teacher thought. Whether this is the case or not, frontopolar cortex appears to provide the most general, cross-contextual, mental framework. But it does not seem to be the center of control. This may explain the way that a Perceiver person views truth. The Mercy person identifies with experiences and the Teacher person often identifies with his theories. In contrast, the Perceiver person seldom identifies with his truth, but rather views truth as something solid apart from conscious thought to which conscious thought submits.
Monkeys do not have a true frontopolar cortex: “Recordings in the most anterior part of the cortex in the macaque monkey have been sparse and have yielded results that differ substantially from what was predicted based on human neuroimaging studies, leading some authors to suggest that part of the human anterior prefrontal cortex might be uniquely human” (Hartogsveld, 2018). Saying this cognitively, it appears that only humans are capable of being guided by internal schema that represent general principles which transcend specific situations. In the words of this paper, “non-human primates have difficulty with the fast processing of relations between cognitive representations that humans are capable of. The finding that the lateral frontal pole might not have a clear homolog in the macaque monkey brain and the current confirmation that this area overlaps with the region that is activated during relational processing suggest it might be involved in this human ability.”
I have suggested that the right frontopolar cortex is related to Perceiver thought. The Perceiver person has a strong need to populate his mental map of knowledge with new facts. Consistent with this, electrically suppressing the right frontopolar cortex inhibits directed exploration: “Using transcranial magnetic stimulation to inhibit the right frontopolar cortex, we were able to selectively inhibit directed exploration while leaving random exploration intact. This suggests a causal role for right frontopolar cortex in directed, but not random, exploration” (Zajkowski, 2017). The Perceiver person builds a mental map upon truth—facts that are known with certainty. Activity in the right frontopolar cortex increases when facts are known with greater certainty: “We measured the brain activity by fMRI while healthy subjects performed a visual short-term recognition memory test and then rated their confidence in their answers as high, middle, or low... Among brain regions showing greater activity during rating their confidence relative to during a control, non-metamemory task (discriminating brightness of words), only a posterior-dorsal part of the right frontopolar cortex exhibited higher activity as the confidence level better correlated with actual recognition memory performance. These results suggest that activation in the right frontopolar cortex is key to a reliable, retrospective rating of confidence in short-term recognition memory performance.” (Yokoyama, 2010).
The left frontopolar cortex appears to be critical for analogical reasoning: “We examined analogical reasoning abilities in 27 patients with focal damage in the frontal lobes and performed voxel-based lesion-behaviour mapping and tractography analyses to investigate the structures critical for analogical reasoning. The findings revealed that damage to the left rostrolateral prefrontal region (or some of its long-range connections) specifically impaired the ability to reason by analogies” (Urbanski, 2016). And electrically stimulating this region enhances creativity: “Highdefinition tDCS-targeted frontopolar cortex activity [was] recently shown to predict state creativity augmentation. In a novel analogy finding task, participants under tDCS formulated substantially more creative analogical connections in a large matrix search space (creativity indexed via latent semantic analysis). Critically, increased analogical creativity was not due to diminished accuracy in discerning valid analogies, indicating “real” creativity rather than inappropriate divergence. A simpler relational creativity paradigm (modified verb generation) revealed a tDCS-by-cue interaction; tDCS further enhanced creativity cue-related increases in semantic distance” (Green, 2017). (The illustration in the paper makes it clear that the left frontopolar cortex is being stimulated.)
I have suggested that the left frontopolar cortex is related to Server thought. The average Server person is not creative, but rather tends to repeat sequences of actions without varying them creatively. Observation led my brother and I to conclude that the average Server person uses Server thought to perform concrete actions but seldom develops the abstract capabilities of Server thought. In contrast, I discovered as a Perceiver person that I was capable of using creative analogical reasoning when I stopped thinking in terms of static Perceiver facts and started thinking in terms of processes and temporal connections of cause-and-effect. Saying this cognitively, Perceiver thought gains access to Server thought as Contributor thought builds connections between Server and Perceiver. In fact, creative analogy is the primary form of thought that I use to expand the theory of mental symmetry. As Green points out in his paper, “creativity research indicates that new creative ideas often take the form [of] connections between concepts that had previously seemed far apart. Relational cognition that reveals distant connections, especially in the form of analogical reasoning, is frequently a mechanism for generating creative leaps in the sciences, arts, education, and industry.” The primary feature of the theory of mental symmetry is that it ‘forms connections between concepts that had previously seemed far apart.’
Medial Prefrontal Cortex
The two terms frontal and prefrontal are almost identical. ‘Frontal’ refers to the entire frontal lobes, while ‘prefrontal’ refers to the part of the frontal lobes which lies in front of the premotor cortex. Since we are not discussing primary sensory and control areas of the brain, these two terms can be treated as synonyms.
Interaction between Perceiver and Mercy, and between Teacher and Server, appears to occur within the medial prefrontal cortex. In the same way that Perceiver/Mercy interaction in the right angular gyrus leads to physical body image, so this interaction in medial prefrontal region leads to an internal image of self, as described in this paper. As a Perceiver person, I naturally think of self-image as something related to the internal world of Perceiver and Mercy, but interaction between internal Teacher and Server thought would also generate a form of self-image—my personal Server skills in relation to universal Teacher understanding.
Here is an excellent summary paper on the medial prefrontal cortex, from which I took the liberty of copying a picture. According to these authors, prMFC monitors actions to look for consistency and avoid errors; arMFC is activated by self-knowledge, person perception, morality and mentalizing; and oMFC is related to feelings of personal reward and punishment.
Unfortunately, this paper does not make any distinction between left and right medial prefrontal cortex. Therefore, we have to interpret this information both in terms of Mercy and Perceiver, and in terms of Teacher and Server.
prMFC appears to involve an interaction between Perceiver and Server content and Contributor planning. It activates when you notice you have a mistake and correct your error. The anterior cingulate, part of this region, is colloquially known as the ‘oh sh-t’ detector, the mental region that lights up when you realize that you just made a major mistake.
Mistakes can take one of two forms. One violates Perceiver truth and the other exceeds Server skills. For instance, suppose that I am flying an airplane. This is a Contributor plan being executed. If I suddenly see the ground appearing in front of my plane, then my plan is about to violate Perceiver truth. On the other hand, if my plane starts to fall apart because I am flying too fast or too high, then my plan is on the verge of exceeding Server skills. When such a situation arises, then there is a need to come up with a plan right now and to start implementing it ASAP.
arMFC is clearly related to self-image, both of me, and how I view others, as described in this paper. As I mentioned previously, in the right hemisphere, Perceiver thought works out facts about the Mercy experiences that involve me and other people. Likewise, in the left hemisphere, Server strategy knows what skills I can perform, along with the skills or others, and how they all fit in to the grand scheme of general Teacher order.
oMFC would be the main location for conscience. In the right hemisphere this would describe how Perceiver facts affect me, whereas in the left hemisphere, it would examine whether my personal actions and skills support universal Teacher order or contradict order.
Notice the difference between self-image and conscience. Both involve an interaction between Mercy and Perceiver (or between Teacher and Server), but self-image views this interaction from the angle of Perceiver (or Server) thought, whereas conscience sees it from the side of Mercy (or Teacher) thought.
Again, notice that both Teacher-Server interaction and Mercy-Perceiver interaction end up producing similar traits. Therefore, it does make some sense to treat both right and left frontal regions as having similar functions. However, the way in which these conclusions are being reached is quite different.
Summarizing:
- In the orbital medial prefrontal cortex, Mercy is being influenced by Perceiver, and Teacher is being influenced by Server. This produces conscience, and a feeling for reward and punishment.
- In the anterior medial prefrontal cortex, Perceiver is working with Mercy, and Server is working with Teacher. This produces self-image, and an ability to put myself ‘in other peoples’ shoes’.
- In the posterior medial prefrontal cortex, Perceiver and Server are interacting with Contributor. This indicates when an existing Contributor plan is in error and needs to be corrected with a new plan.
Perceiver strategy looks for similarities between individual situations. In the internal world, this would manifest itself as conscience, holding on to truths that apply equally to all people. It has been found that the right dorsolateral frontal cortex is crucial for maintaining an attitude of fairness—applying the same rules to everyone. Thus, right dorsolateral frontal cortex handles conscience at a more abstract, factual level, while the orbital medial prefrontal cortex generates the subjective feeling associated with conscience.
[2019] Turning now to more recent papers, the medial prefrontal cortex is critical for maintaining a factual model of the current situation: “Understanding movies and stories requires maintaining a high-level situation model that abstracts away from perceptual details to describe the location, characters, actions, and causal relationships of the currently unfolding event. These models are built not only from information present in the current narrative, but also from prior knowledge about schematic event scripts, which describe typical event sequences encountered throughout a lifetime.” This paper explains that “Numerous recent studies, in both humans and animals, have explored how schemas are stored in the brain and how they influence ongoing processing. A critical region implicated in many of these studies is the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC). This region shows encoding-related activity predictive of subsequent memory for schema-congruent stimuli, increased activity when remembering schematic knowledge, representations of temporal position within a schematic sequence, and upregulation of intermediate early gene expression when assimilating new information into a schema, with damage to the mPFC resulting in deficits for schema-related processing.” (Baldassano, 2018).
Schemas were mentioned previously when looking at the frontopolar cortex, which I suggested is also related to Perceiver (and Server) thought. Thus, there appears to be a hierarchy from orbitofrontal to medial frontal to frontopolar. The orbitofrontal maintains an emotional model of the current context, which is related to Mercy thought. The medial frontal constructs a schema that focuses upon the facts of the current situation, as represented by the arrow from Mercy to Perceiver. Finally, the frontopolar builds connections between various schema. Looking at this from the perspective of the Perceiver person, the Perceiver person feels as if he is pulling out factual information from Mercy experiences while being guided by a big picture that extends beyond the current context. Going further, a Perceiver fact can be defined as a connection that remains repeated over time. Baldassano explains that the “mPFC is one of the few regions that track past context over long enough timescales to support the long-term temporal dependencies encoded in full naturalistic scripts.” We saw earlier that Perceiver facts (and Server sequences) are determined by the dorsolateral frontal cortex. The medial frontal is then applying these facts to personal experiences.
Looking at this from a different perspective, a distinction can between made between self and self-image. The emotional self is related to Mercy thought and orbitofrontal cortex, while self-image adds Perceiver facts to Mercy thought and is related to medial frontal cortex. The emotional self can be defined simply as the emotional models which cannot be ignored. In other words, Mercy thought can practice emotional identification and pretend for a while that anything is self. However, physical ability, skill, knowledge, and expertise will all force Mercy thought to return to a limited set of emotional models, which then become defined as self. Self-image can then be defined as the schema of self—the Perceiver facts (and Server sequences) that are common to all the emotional models which keep being reimposed upon orbitofrontal cortex. This distinction between self and self-image can be seen in the Mercy person and Perceiver person. The Mercy person focuses upon the experiences and emotions of self, whereas the Perceiver person focuses more heavily upon self-image.
One paper suggests that the medial frontal cortex can be subdivided into a ventral part which deals with self-image in a more emotional manner, and a dorsal part which deals with self-image and images of other selves in a more factual manner: “ Although the human mPFC is neither uniquely nor solely devoted to social cognition, its central role in navigating the interpersonal space is probably one of the most often replicated findings in functional neuroimaging research... We comprehensively characterized both the vmPFC and dmPFC as relevant for self- and other- focused as well as social,emotional, and facial processing. More specifically, the vmPFC subserves predominantly nonambiguous subjective-value-related evaluative processes driven by bottom-up pathways, whereas the dmPFC subserves predominantly ambiguous amodal metacognitive processes driven by top-down pathways” (Bzdok, 2013).
A more recent paper summarizes the alternative interpretation, which is that the ventral part focuses upon self while the dorsal part thinks about others: “DMPFC/ BA 9 has been associated with social cognitive processes for both the self and others, whereas only MPFC/BA 10 preferentially supports self-reflection” (Meyer, 2018). (The DMPFC/BA 9 is the dorsal medial prefrontal while the MPFC/BA 10 is the ventral medial prefrontal. BA stands for Brodmann area.) These two interpretations are quite similar because Perceiver and Server thought look for facts and sequences that are common to both self and others. This paper describes the functions of the ventral medial frontal in more detail: “MPFC/BA 10 has been associated with multiple aspects of self-reflection, including considering one’s own traits and feelings, as well as imagining oneself in the past or future. This region also engages when we consider other people who are highly self-relevant, such as individuals we are similar to, close with, and/or know a great deal about. In fact, recent findings suggest MPFC/BA 10 may be a social information hub with organized, self-relevant person and trait knowledge.”
The purpose of the Meyer paper was to explore the connection between thinking about self and the ‘default network’: “MPFC/BA 10 is part of a brain system that generates disproportionate metabolic activity in the brain at rest. Neuroscientists have identified the “default network,” so named because these brain regions reliably engage by default, whenever our mind is free from external demands.” Going further, “Several theoretical papers and meta-analyses have discussed the overlap in MPFC/BA 10 during rest and self-referential processing, suggesting the concordance reflects that people engage in self-referential processing when they are not attending to the outside world.” This relates to the suggestion made earlier that self can be defined as the emotional models (or mental networks) that cannot be ignored. One can temporarily ignore self by focusing upon some task, but when the task is finished then attention will naturally return to self. For instance, one sees this mental shift when driving a vehicle. A person who is driving does not typically think about occupying a vehicle but instead acts temporarily as if the vehicle is personal identity. Self is initially defined by the limitations and abilities of the physical body, but over time this becomes expanded to include personal knowledge, skills, expertise, and character.
As was mentioned previously, self-image can be defined either from a Perceiver perspective or from a Server perspective. The Perceiver perspective views self as a sort of abstract object with certain features. But many of these features involve Server skills and Server actions: ‘I can do these actions and I have done those actions.’ Self can also be defined from a Server-Teacher perspective as a certain profession: ‘I can perform all of the actions and procedures that are summarized by the general Teacher theory of some name, such as dentist, or plumber.’ The Server perspective is usually more general than the Perceiver perspective. All professional dentists should be capable of carrying out similar skills. Therefore, one can go to see the dentist, and it does not really matter if one is dealing with Fred the dentist or Laura the dentist. In contrast, Perceiver thought works out the facts that distinguish me in Mercy thought from other individuals. These two perspectives can overlap. On the one hand, a professional can become more individual by specializing. On the other hand, an individual can become part of a culture that shares common skills and experiences.
Changing perspectives again, the diagram of mental symmetry shows a connection between Perceiver and Contributor. Cognitively speaking, this means that Perceiver thought and Contributor thought work with the same information but interpret this information in a different way. Perceiver thought looks for connections between facts, as demonstrated by the dorsolateral and frontopolar cortices. Contributor thought, in contrast, uses facts to guide plans.
Looking at this Contributor perspective, the anterior cingulate (which was referred to above as prMFC) calculates cost and benefit. There are “times when animals decide whether it is worth acting at all or evaluate whether it is worth continuing to engage in the current behaviour or to explore alternatives. This distinct pattern of decision-making is linked to ACC [anterior cingulate cortex]; ACC manipulations affect the ability of animals to initiate any action at all, weigh up the costs and benefits of actions, switch between actions as their values change, or explore alternative choices” (Kolling, 2016). Cost-benefit calculations are a fundamental aspect of Contributor thought, supporting the suggestion made earlier that the prMFC is related to Contributor thinking.
We quoted Rolls earlier when looking at Teacher emotion. Rolls has done extensive research on the role that the anterior cingulate cortex plays in calculating value for Contributor thought. (This suggests that Rolls himself is a Contributor person who is mentally sensitive to the concept of value.) He proposes “the framework that the value representations computed in the orbitofrontal cortex where there is little representation of action are transferred to the anterior cingulate cortex, where they can be used as the representation of reward vs non-reward or punishment outcome to be associated with representations of actions as part of goal-dependent action–outcome learning... In the same dorsal anterior cingulate area, neurons were more likely to take into account the costs of the actions needed to obtain rewards, as well as the probability of obtaining the reward, than were orbitofrontal cortex neurons” (Rolls, 2019). Costs and benefits are an expression of cause-and-effect, which is the primary building block for concrete Contributor thought. A cost measures the difficulty of some cause, while a benefit measures the positive results of some effect. Cause-and-effect combines Perceiver facts with Server sequences: Perceiver thought knows the fact that certain Mercy experiences are reliably connected by some Server sequence of actions. Contributor connects Perceiver and Server in the diagram of mental symmetry, and the fundamental Contributor building block of cause-and-effect emerges when specific Perceiver facts are connected with specific Server sequences. Cost and benefit adds an emotional component to cause-and-effect. Performing the Server action has some emotional cost, while achieving the Perceiver fact has some emotional benefit. Notice the appearance of the same combination of Perceiver facts and Mercy experiences that were discussed when looking at self-image, but they are being treated in a different manner. Thus, the medial frontal provides self-image for Perceiver thought and cost and benefit for Contributor thought.
When the Contributor person carries out a plan, then Contributor thought will impose some sort of mental grid upon reality. This mental grid appears to be coming from the posterior cingulate cortex. Rolls compares the posterior cingulate with the anterior cingulate in a 2019 paper: “The posterior cingulate cortex, receives information from the nearby neocortical areas such as the parietal cortex about spatial representations, and projects this onwards via the parahippocampal cortex to the hippocampus (which is allocortex), where it provides the spatial component for object–space episodic memories. This provides for a memory-related function of the cingulate cortex... The anterior cingulate cortex receives information from its topologically nearby neocortical area, the orbitofrontal cortex.” Putting this together, “The ACC [anterior cingulate cortex] receives reward and punishment outcome information from the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC). The posterior cingulate cortex receives information about actions from the parietal cortex. Then these two types of information are brought together towards the mid-part of the cingulate cortex including the cingulate premotor area, which with its connections to premotor neocortical areas can select the action that is most likely, given the action–outcome learning performed within this cingulate system, to obtain the goal, the desired outcome.” Saying this cognitively, Contributor thought chooses within the mid-cingulate by placing value from the anterior cingulate within a mental grid from the posterior cingulate. (This mental grid is calculated by the hippocampal region.)
Before we continue, we need to look briefly at relationship between concrete and abstract thought. Researchers such as Rolls have unraveled many of the details of how Contributor thought uses cause-and-effect to construct and follow concrete plans. However, there is also an abstract side to Contributor thought. The building block for concrete Contributor thought is cause-and-effect. The building block for abstract Contributor thought is the precise definition. Like cause-and-effect, precise definitions emerge when Contributor connects Server and Perceiver. But what is being connected is Server sequences of speech with Perceiver meanings. With concrete Contributor thought, the emotional bottom line comes from Mercy experiences. With abstract Contributor thought, the emotional bottom line comes from Teacher understanding; precise definitions are being manipulated to generate Teacher order-within-complexity. For instance, mathematics is based in precise definitions. These precise definitions are used to form mathematical equations, and the typical math problem involves some form of simplification. This may be stated explicitly: ‘Simplify the following mathematical expression.’ Or the simplification may be implied: ‘Solve the following mathematical problem.’ A solution is usually much simpler than the problem.
Putting this together, the mind can function rigorously in two ways, which I refer to as concrete technical thought and abstract technical thought. In both cases, the mind is functioning in a manner that is being controlled by Contributor thought. The mind enters concrete technical thought as connections of cause-and-effect become more precisely determined, while the mind enters abstract technical thought as words become defined more precisely. Science combines the concrete technical thinking of experimentation with the abstract technical thinking of mathematics.
The neurologist uses both abstract and concrete technical thought. But neurological research has focused upon concrete technical thought while largely ignoring abstract technical thought. Part of the reason is that animals are capable of concrete technical thought but they are not capable of abstract technical thought. Therefore, studying monkeys will lead to an understanding of concrete technical thought but not reveal abstract technical thought. In contrast, the relatively new technology of brain imaging allows one to study how the brain is functioning in living humans, making it possible to study abstract thought as well as concrete thought.
We saw another reason why neurology focuses upon concrete technical thought while tending to ignore abstract technical thought when looking at Teacher emotion. In brief, a researcher will find it emotionally difficult to recognize the existence of Teacher emotion if the research is being guided by a Teacher theory that does not explain Teacher thought. Saying this another way, the typical scientist uses abstract technical thought to analyze natural processes that have been observed using concrete technical thought. Similarly, the typical neurologist uses abstract technical thought to analyze how the mind carries out concrete technical thought. The problem arises when trying to use abstract technical thought to analyze how the mind carries out abstract technical thought, because one then needs a theory of cognition that is capable of explaining itself.
Hippocampus
[2019] My general hypothesis is that the left and right hippocampi are the processors for Server and Perceiver thought, in the sense that they determine the state of Server and Perceiver thought at the current moment. In the words of one researcher, “the hippocampus prominently exhibits activity reflecting the immediate experiences of the animal. This phenomenon has been robustly captured in the spatial domain within monkey hippocampal neurons, just as it has been often demonstrated in rodents” (Rueckemann, 2017).
There is evidence supporting a lateralization, with Server using the left hippocampus and Perceiver the right. For instance, “Individuals with larger posterior, relative to anterior, hippocampal volumes in the right hemisphere tended to rate their use of map-based navigational strategies more highly” (Brunec, 2019). Similarly, “London taxi drivers, have greater grey matter volume in the posterior hippocampus compared with control subjects, and for the right posterior hippocampus, grey matter volume varies positively with time taxi driving” (Maguire, 2003). Perceiver thought thinks naturally in terms of maps and spatial connections. Thus, a long-term focus upon maps causes the right posterior hippocampus to enlarge.
One paper points out the connection between the right hippocampus and Perceiver thought: “Several previous studies involving scene construction have noted the preferential engagement of the right hippocampus. We now extend this by showing that connectivity particularly with right anterior medial hippocampus was enhanced during scene construction. The right hippocampal involvement may be related to the visuospatial nature of the stimuli; such a preference for the right hippocampus has long been recognized” (Zeidman, 2014). Another paper specifically focused upon the distinction between left and right hippocampus: “Our findings support the hypothesis that the left hippocampus plays a critical role in episodic verbal memory, while right hippocampus might be more important for spatial memory processing among non-demented older adults” (Ezzati, 2016).
However, most papers do not distinguish between left and right hippocampi. This is partially because Contributor thought connects Perceiver facts with Server sequences, which means that the mind is seldom dealing with isolated Perceiver facts or Server sequences, but rather a combination of these two. Saying this another way, the hippocampi deal with a combination of space and time rather than just space or time.
Perceiver thought comes up with facts by looking for connections between Mercy experiences. This makes it possible to organize Mercy experiences into different categories. The most common Perceiver categorization is that of objects within spatial locations. For instance, ‘This is a rock. All the material in the rock is similar, and the rock is different than the ground below and the air above. The rock is sitting next to a tree.’ Server thought performs a similar organizing and dividing along the dimensions of time, arranging similar actions into routines and recipes. For instance, ‘This is how you bake a cake. That is how you write an essay. When I am finished baking a cake, then I will write my essay.’ Such organizing and dividing is happening within the hippocampus: “We propose that the hippocampus defines contexts as chunks of experience that have low variance across space and time.” A category changes when there is some kind of discontinuity: “Just as a large border (such as a wall) leads one to assume a boundary between two spatial contexts, large changes in the continuity of incoming information over time appear to trigger boundaries between events. Interestingly, both event boundaries and spatial boundaries modulate hippocampal activity” (Ekstrom, 2017).
Perceiver thought defines a context or category by looking for reference facts that do not change. Similarly, Ekstrom suggests that “we can expect the hippocampus to treat any cue that remains stable over a chunk of time spent in a given place as an indicator of the spatial context, and sufficient change in one of these cues can lead one to infer the existence of a new context.” The hippocampus initially looks for categories within Perceiver space and Server time, but it typically goes beyond this to look for other forms of categorizing: “The critical point is that the hippocampus uses regularities in the environment across time and space in order to define a context, and this initial representation must be established in order to learn what is behaviorally relevant in that context. Once the behaviorally relevant variables are determined, then these dimensions are added to the cognitive map.” All facts and sequences are placed within some context: “Just as place cells remap when an animal is moved to a new spatial context, hippocampal time cells ‘retime’ when the temporal structure of a task, or the current behavioral context is changed. These findings demonstrate that hippocampal time and place cells ‘map’ experiences in relation to a context that is bounded in time and space. Consistent with the data from rodents, our labs have repeatedly shown that activity patterns in the human hippocampus carry information about the spatiotemporal context in which an object was encountered.”
Summarizing, the hippocampus uses discontinuities to divide space and time into specific contexts, it uses fixed points within each context to define that context, and it then places more specific information within the appropriate context. This context-with-content can be referred to as a schema, a concept, or a scene. This accurately describes how Perceiver thought functions; I am a Perceiver person and this describes how I think. Presumably, it also describes how Server thought approaches sequences and actions. That is more difficult to ascertain, because we have discovered through personal experience that the Server persons typically find it very difficult to describe how they think. Thus, one has to observe how the Server person behaves, and then come up with conclusions about cognition.
The hippocampus is a long strip that extends from anterior to posterior in the human and monkey. (The rat hippocampus extends from ventral to dorsal.) The posterior hippocampus handles details while the anterior hippocampus constructs the context within which these details are placed. “The posterior hippocampus, connected to perceptual and spatial representational systems in posterior neocortex, supports fine, perceptually rich, local details of memories; the anterior hippocampus, connected to conceptual systems in anterior neocortex, supports coarse, global representations that constitute the gist of a memory” (Sekeres, 2019). A similar division can be seen when retrieving memories. “Initially locating a memory implicates the aPHC, whereas later elaboration of its details implicates the pHPC. Likewise, during navigation, the aHPC has been associated with initial global reinstatement of the environment and the pHPC with ongoing retrieval of local details” (Poppenk, 2013). (aHPC is anterior hippocampus and pHPC is posterior hippocampus.)
The anterior hippocampus builds general concepts: “The work reviewed here implicates anterior hippocampus in concept formation. Not only has this region been shown to form integrated neural codes that capture commonalities across individual experiences, it has also been associated with uncertainty during concept learning. Relatedly, more complex memory functions that rely on integrating and organizing prior experiences such as autobiographical memory, schematic representation, and imagining the future have been distinctly associated with anterior hippocampus” (Mack, 2018). A common form of general concept is the three-dimensional scene: “A circumscribed portion of the pre/parasubiculum in the anterior medial hippocampus was preferentially involved in scene construction. Importantly, our findings reveal for the first time that this region is preferentially recruited, not for mental construction per se, not for imagining a 3D space alone, but specifically for mental construction of scenes couched within a naturalistic 3D spatial framework (Dalton, 2018). (The subiculum is the primary output region of the hippocampus.)
General concepts in the anterior hippocampus build connections between many kinds of information. “Our finding accords well with the view and other reports that the anterior hippocampus is recruited for establishing links between conceptual information by combining multiple forms of information, such as semantic, spatial and emotional information or integrating distinct experiences on a conceptual or global scale” (Sheldon, 2016).
The hippocampus does not just create general concepts. It also uses memories of general concepts to evaluate situations. If some new situation is similar to an existing general concept, then the situation will be regarded as familiar and the existing general concept will be used to evaluate the new situation. This leads to a sense of reasonableness, in which facts, sequences, and situations are evaluated based upon how closely they conform to existing general concepts. In contrast, if some situation is different than existing general concepts, then it will be regarded as novel. The Perceiver person finds it disorienting and confusing when faced with situations that are truly novel. Similarly, the Server person finds it disorienting to be placed in a situation where one does not know what to do.
This process of organizing items into categories, looking for connections between categories, and evaluating new information based upon existing categories is described in the following quote: “Concepts define the relationships between similar objects; they represent combinations of features shared by objects of the same kind and allow us to recognize new instances of a concept when first encountered. Concepts also serve as the basis for inference about properties that have not or cannot be directly observed. To acquire a concept, we must experience multiple instances across unique episodes and learn both what features are common to concept exemplars and what features differentiate between concepts. Both of these operations, extracting commonalities across related experiences and distinctly representing similar experiences, are akin to episodic memory functions associated with the hippocampus. In particular, the hippocampus is thought to perform pattern separation to differentiate overlapping experiences into distinct memory representations. Pattern separation is complemented by memory integration, in which the hippocampus is thought to encode features of the current experience along with shared information from previously encoded experiences resulting in integrated memory representations that highlight commonalities across experiences” (Mack, 2018). Notice how confidence in a category increases with repetition. This is a fundamental aspect of Perceiver thought. Similarly, it is also possible to increase confidence in a Server sequence of actions through the repetition of practicing.
Mentally placing a situation within a general concept leads naturally to what is known as boundary extension (BE). “BE is a ubiquitous cognitive phenomenon where we erroneously remember seeing more of a scene than was present in the sensory input, and occurs because when we view a scene, we implicitly and automatically extrapolate beyond the borders to form an extended internal representation of that scene” (Maguire, 2016). Boundary extension depends upon the hippocampus: “Patients with bilateral hippocampal damage and scene construction deficits had attenuated BE on all of these tasks… the initial BE effect, where the view is extended at the point of scene perception, is associated with increased hippocampal activity in healthy subjects.” Boundary extension takes a partial experience and extends it mentally to fill the entire context. “One of the hallmarks of BE... is that BE is greatest for tight close-ups and decreases as more surrounding space is made visible (as in more wide-angle views) until with very wide-angle views, no BE is observed.” BE probably happens because the posterior hippocampus is adding detailed memories to the memory of a scene within anterior hippocampus. The “posterior hippocampus was engaged when healthy controls viewed simple scenes and experienced BE. Thus, posterior hippocampus may contribute predictions of what lies beyond the edges of the current view, to support the creation and updating of a scene model in anterior medial hippocampus” (Zeidman, 2014).
The anterior hippocampus provides a factual framework for imagination. First, mental scenes are constructed by pulling out common features from many similar situations. Second, these mental scenes are filled in with imaginary details instead of being populated by actual details from the posterior hippocampus. “When participants recalled episodic memories and imagined fictitious events set in the past or future (based on recombined elements from episodic memories) the amHipp was again the only part of the hippocampus significantly engaged for imagination and was part of a larger region activated during both imagination and recall whereas activation of posterior hippocampus was found specifically for vividly recalling real memories. Only amHipp was found to respond more strongly to imagining specific past or future events rather than general events” (Zeidman, 2016). (amHipp refers to the medial bank of the anterior hippocampus.) This describes the sort of imagination that I use to extend the theory of mental symmetry. Years of studying personality and analyzing systems has led within my mind to the development of many general concepts, and these general concepts now provide a framework for my imagination. Similarly, Richard Feynman, the famous physicist, said that “Science is imagination in a straitjacket.”
The anterior hippocampus connects with emotional regions of the brain including the amygdala. “Direct reciprocal links between the aHPC and the amygdala, insula, and vmPFC, as well as projections to the nucleus accumbens, offer the aHPC a privileged interface with motivational processing regions.” “Turning to human evidence, dissection has revealed direct connections between the aHPC and amygdalar nuclei.” (Poppenk, 2013). (aHPC is anterior hippocampus.)
This means that scenes or general contexts naturally acquire emotional overtones, because the amygdala is an emotional processor. This emotion can involve Mercy emotions of social interaction or personal experience: “Our main finding was that the autobiographical categories preferentially recruited the anterior hippocampus whereas the spatial categories preferentially recruited the posterior hippocampus” (Sheldon, 2016). Notice that the non-emotional specific details are related to posterior hippocampus while subjective experiences involve the anterior hippocampus.
Autobiographical memory is not just subjective, but it also views specific experiences from an integrated perspective. “These results further support the emerging view that the anterior, as opposed to posterior, hippocampus integrates distinct experiences, thereby providing a scaffold for encoding and retrieval of autobiographical memories on the scale of our lives” (Nielson, 2015).
The anterior hippocampus can also become associated with Teacher emotions of order-within-complexity. However, we saw earlier that neurology does not recognize the concept of Teacher emotion with its order-within-complexity. For instance, such order-within-complexity can be seen in autobiographical memory: “These results further support the emerging view that the anterior, as opposed to posterior, hippocampus integrates distinct experiences, thereby providing a scaffold for encoding and retrieval of autobiographical memories on the scale of our lives.” The left anterior hippocampus places biographical incidents within a more general framework of order-within-complexity. “The left anterior hippocampus represents space and time for a month of remembered events occurring over distances of up to 30 km” (Nielson, 2015). Nielson concludes “that the left anterior hippocampus represents space and time significantly better than the right anterior hippocampus.” This might suggest that the left hippocampus is associated with Perceiver thought and not with Server thought, but it could also mean that the left anterior hippocampus is being guided by the Teacher order-within-complexity of space-and-time.
Similarly, another paper examined hippocampal activity when moving through visual spaces portrayed on a computer. The researchers “found evidence of hierarchical encoding of this 3D spatial information, with the left anterior lateral hippocampus containing local corner information within a room, whereas RSC, parahippocampal cortex and posterior hippocampus contained information about the rooms within the building.” (Kim, 2018). (RSC is retrosplenial neocortex, which is connected to the posterior hippocampus.) But a few paragraphs later, the paper mentions “that fMRI responses in the left anterior lateral hippocampus were associated with local corner information that was generalized across multiple rooms.” In other words, all the corners of the computer-generated rooms looked the same and this similarity was leading to a Teacher concept of order-within-complexity. As far as the hippocampus was concerned, a corner of a room was not a specific detail, but rather a general feature. However, because Teacher emotion is unknown, the authors are forced to conclude that “our current results do not fit precisely with accounts that associate the posterior hippocampus with a finegrained spatial map. In fact, our findings could be interpreted as evidence in the opposite direction, namely that coarser-grained representations of the whole building engage the posterior hippocampus.”
Applying this to personality, it is possible to distinguish between Perceiver and Server persons who suppress emotions and those who acknowledge feelings. The Perceiver person can focus upon trivia, acquiring many specific, unemotional, disconnected facts that that have no relationship to personal identity. This describes a mindset that emphasizes the posterior hippocampus. In contrast, the Perceiver person who acknowledges personal emotions also acquires the ability to use Perceiver thought to build connections between various contexts. Saying this another way, using the anterior hippocampus requires accepting personal Mercy emotions but it also makes it possible to be guided by Teacher emotions. The Perceiver person who uses the anterior hippocampus looks for ‘the big picture’. Instead of merely collecting facts, the gist of a situation will be determined, and specific facts will be placed within the grid of some larger context.
A similar statement can be made about the Server person. The typical Server person focuses in a non-emotional manner upon performing specific actions in the present, presumably emphasizing the posterior hippocampus. Such a Server person becomes emotionally unstable when facing long-term uncertainties for which nothing can be done in the present. However, if the Server person can embrace this emotional instability, it then becomes possible to use Server thought at a higher cognitive level of being guided by an integrated Teacher understanding. Using religious language, Server action that is guided by Teacher understanding can be defined as righteousness.
We have seen that the hippocampus looks for features that are common to similar situations. The hippocampus can also do the opposite, separating different situations which appear on the surface to be similar. One experiment measured what happens when people have to distinguish routes that partially overlap. “Here we found that hippocampal representations of overlapping spatial routes dramatically diverged with learning—to the point that overlapping routes were coded as less similar than nonoverlapping routes” (Chanales, 2017). The hippocampus mentally represented physically overlapping routes as different precisely where they overlapped and had to be mentally distinguished. “In contrast to orthogonalization, where overlapping memories are represented as ‘unique,’ a repulsion account holds that overlapping memories are represented as ‘different from one another.’ A repulsion account is not only consistent with the observed reversal effect but also readily explains the striking and seemingly paradoxical finding that the hippocampal reversal effect ‘disappeared’ precisely once routes diverged.”
A similar trait can be seen in the Perceiver person who is trying to distinguish truth from error. Attention will not focus upon the ‘pagan’ who has a totally different concept of truth. Instead, the Perceiver person will tend to attack the ‘heretic’ who believes many of the same things but differs in certain key areas.
Researchers are not certain exactly how to reconcile these apparently contradictory traits of ‘looking for what is common’ and ‘emphasizing what is different’. One author describes this contrast: “There is now a growing body of evidence for pattern separation signals in the hippocampus during encoding and work showing that variability in neural patterns across repeated testing is related to long-term retention. In the present experiment, hippocampal similarity across encoding was lower for overlapping trials relative to non-overlapping trials, consistent with this theoretical and empirical work. On the other hand, Cohen and Eichenbaum’s relational memory theory hypothesizes that the hippocampus may support access to related memories through relational ‘nodes’ or neural ensembles that link overlapping memories” (Tompary, 2017).
How the hippocampus responds may depend upon whether one is looking for differences or looking for similarities. Tompary explains that “the difference in the necessity or expectation of integration at encoding may dictate whether stimuli are integrated or separated.” However, there will be a tendency towards integration if the categories are clearly defined, which implies that learning begins by defining the facts clearly before attempting to put these facts together. It was “found that neural patterns in a hippocampal cluster was biased toward integration only if the AB pairs were strongly learned in a separate block before participants were presented with BC pairs. Interestingly, in our study, encoding patterns in the hippocampus represented overlapping memories more distinctively than non-overlapping memories, but then after a week of consolidation, retrieval patterns came to reflect integration.” This implies that the Perceiver person who is ‘attacking the heretic’ is actually uncertain about his own beliefs and is attempting to clarify his own definition of truth.
Study of personality suggests that thought will become biased in the direction of the dominant emotion. If the mind contains a general theory within Teacher thought, then there will be a natural tendency to clarify Perceiver facts and Server sequences before placing them within some integrated understanding. In contrast, if the mind is guided by Mercy emotions of personal status, religion, or culture, then the primary focus will be upon distinguishing my person, my religion, and my culture from similar people, religions, or cultures. Thomas Kuhn described the transformation in thinking that occurs when a group of people becomes guided by a paradigm in Teacher thought. “No period between remote antiquity and the end of the seventeenth century exhibited a single generally accepted view about the nature of light. Instead, there were a number of competing schools and subschools, most of them espouse in one variant or another of Epicurean, Aristotelian, or Platonic theory... being able to take no common body of belief for granted, each writer on physical optics felt forced to build his field and knew from its foundations. In doing so, his choice of supporting observation experiment was relatively free, for there was no standard set of methods or a phenomenon that every optical writer felt forced to employ and explain. Under these circumstances, the dialogue of the resulting books was often directed as much to the members of other schools as it was to nature” (Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, p.12-13).
The medial prefrontal cortex is involved in forming an integrated understanding. Tompary says that “an entirely distinct line of work has implicated the mPFC in tasks that require or explicitly instruct the online integration of information with shared content. Activation of the mPFC and its connectivity with the hippocampus increases when encoding episodes containing stimuli that overlap with recently learned trials. Activation of mPFC is also related to retrieval-mediated integration and updating of existing memories both in humans and rodents. Furthermore, increased hippocampal mPFC connectivity has been observed during the retrieval of memories with regularities across episodes.”
This ties in with the comments made earlier about the medial frontal. I suggested that the medial frontal builds connections between mental networks that are stored within the orbitofrontal. We see here that the hippocampus provides facts and sequences that can be used to connect mental networks. (Longer-term integration would come from facts and sequences stored within the dorsolateral frontal cortex.) One pay-walled paper summarizes the relationship in the following way: “We propose that perceptually detailed, highly specific representations are mediated by the posterior hippocampus and neocortex, gist-like representations by the anterior hippocampus, and schematic representations by vmPFC” (Robin, 2017).
Another paper examined what happens when a person has ‘an insight’ and realizes which facts fit together and which facts do not: “Insight triggers the emergence of de novo mnemonic representations of the narratives and is associated with increased neural similarity between linked event representations in the posterior hippocampus, mPFC, and autobiographical-memory network. Simultaneously, events irrelevant to the newly established memory of the narrative were pruned out. This process was accompanied by increased neural dissimilarity between non-linked event representations in the posterior hippocampus and mPFC and was additionally signaled by a mismatch response in the anterior hippocampus” (Milivojevic, 2015). In other words, the general context becomes clarified in the anterior hippocampus guided by the medial prefrontal, while specific facts become rearranged in the posterior hippocampus.
Amygdala
[2019] The amygdala has traditionally been associated with fear, and one still occasionally finds papers describing fear as the primary function of the amygdala. However, it has become clear that the amygdala is an emotional processor that adds emotional labels to situations. “It has long been known that the amygdala, a bilateral structure from the medial temporal lobe, is related to emotion, particularly in processing of aversive information. However, accumulating evidence suggests that amygdala activation is also involved in processing pleasant information, as observed, for instance, in studies using reward-learning, episodic memory encoding, pleasant scene or face perception or mental imagery of pleasant experiences” (Weymar, 2016).
Similarly, a meta-analysis paper that examined 148 imaging studies on the amygdala concluded that “Our results confirm that the amygdala responds to both positive and negative stimuli, with a preference for faces depicting emotional expressions” (Sergerie, 2008).
I suggested in the previous section that the two hippocampi are the processors for Server and Perceiver thought. Similarly, I suggest that the two amygdalae are the processors for Teacher and Mercy thought. They calculate an emotional label for the current situation, with Teacher thought using the left amygdala and Mercy thought the right amygdala. We saw when looking at the hippocampus that there is strong evidence connecting Perceiver and Server thought with the two hippocampi, but only partial evidence for associating the left hippocampus with Server thought and the right hippocampus with Perceiver thought. However, at least the two dimensions are well defined: Server thought emphasizes time and sequences while Perceiver thought emphasizes space and objects. It also makes sense that there is significant overlap between these two because Contributor thought builds connections between Perceiver facts and Server sequences.
Similarly, the emotion that one feels is the sum of Teacher and Mercy emotion, and as far as I can tell, these two kinds of emotion feel the same. Finding evidence of laterality is somewhat difficult because neurology is not aware of the concept of Teacher emotion. But there is some evidence. The meta-analysis by Sergerie “compared the number of activations in left and right amygdala for block and event-related designs separately. Whereas no difference between hemispheres in the number of activations was observed for event-related studies (p>0.5), significantly more activations were reported in the left than in the right amygdala for experiments using a block design (p = 0.007).” If one examines what is meant by ‘block and event-related’, one notices that this is describing the presence or absence of Teacher order-within-complexity. On one hand, “block designs typically involve the repeated presentation of stimuli of the same category (e.g., positive, negative or neutral) for relatively long periods of time (the mean block duration for studies included in this meta-analysis was 107 s).” Presenting a series of similar stimuli will lead to Teacher feelings of order-within-complexity. On the other hand, “the pseudorandom stimulus presentation order used in event-related designs would prevent such a habituation from taking place.” Pseudo-random events lack Teacher order-within-complexity. Thus, one concludes that the left amygdala is responding preferably to Teacher order-within-complexity. Sergerie concluded that “This finding supports the often observed hemispheric differences in temporal dynamics and/or habituation rates, namely a short-duration response in the right amygdala and a more sustained one in the left.” This may be an accurate distinction, because order-within-complexity only emerges over time. Looking at this from a cognitive perspective, Mercy thought tends to focus on specific experiences while Teacher thought looks for general theories.
There is also other evidence supporting lateralization. For instance, “Partaking in meditation and yoga practices was associated with a significantly lower right amygdala volume” (Gotink, 2018). More specifically, “the right amygdala was smallest in the meditation group” as opposed to the breathing exercise participants and the yoga group. Meditation (and mysticism in general) can be explained cognitively as using overgeneralization to come up with a universal Teacher theory of cosmic unity. Overgeneralization generates a theory by ignoring specific experiences rather than building upon them. This was mentioned earlier when looking at Zeki’s definition of beauty. This would cause the right amygdala to be underemphasized. Looking at this from the other side, “The left amygdala GMV was larger in patients with later onset and smaller in cases of prolonged depression. In line with prior reports of depressed patients responding to antidepressant treatment, amygdala GMV was negatively related to illness duration, suggesting volume loss with disease progression” (Zavorotnyy, 2018). (GMV is gray matter volume.) Presumably, a major aspect of depression is the lack of a general understanding in Teacher thought—one cannot find any order or meaning in one’s personal experiences. The left amygdala would shrink as this lack of understanding continues. Stating this more generally, I suggest that one can define the emotion of joy as the Teacher feeling that one’s personal experiences are part of some general order or plan that gives meaning to these personal experiences.
Teacher emotion can also be seen in humor. “A dominant theory of humor comprehension suggests that people understand humor by first perceiving some incongruity in an expression and then resolving it. This is called ‘the incongruity-resolution theory’… incongruity resolution evoked positive emotion and activated the left amygdala” (Nakamura, 2017). In other words, the left amygdala generates positive Teacher emotion when verbal confusion is suddenly followed by order-within-complexity.
Laterality can also be seen in math anxiety, which is a negative emotional response to mathematics. “High math anxious children showed increased activity in the right amygdala while performing mathematical computations. The present work extends this finding beyond the scope of children doing arithmetic math computations, as these results illustrate that even the mere presentation of mathematical expressions, without ever asking these participants to solve the expressions, is sufficient to cause increased amygdala reactivity in HMA young adults.” “As math anxiety increases, activity in the right amygdala increases during trials where subjects are viewing mathematical expressions” (Pizzie, 2017). We saw earlier that math generates Teacher emotions of beauty, but a person has to learn to appreciate the beauty of mathematics. A person who lacks this understanding will experience math as a painful personal experience.
This negative emotional response can be reduced by giving a student an understanding of math in Teacher thought. “Eight weeks of one-to-one tutoring reduced math anxiety in HMA children and tutoring-induced reductions in right amygdala activity predicted individual reductions in math anxiety.” Going further, math anxiety involves excessive interaction between left and right amygdala. “differences in the effective connectivity of the amygdala during arithmetic problem solving between HMA and LMA groups that were evident before tutoring were entirely absent after tutoring. Before tutoring, during mathematical problem solving, children in the HMA group, compared with the LMA group, showed greater effective connectivity between the right and the left amygdala” (Supekar, 2015). What may be happening is that Teacher thought is experiencing a lack of understanding and this is being interpreted as a painful experience by Mercy thought. Study of personality indicates that it is common for one of these two strategies to interpret emotion generated by the other strategy from its own perspective. For instance, Mercy feelings of importance and social status are often interpreted by Teacher thought as generality; a statement will feel more general if it is made by an important person.
Moving on, the Mercy person is very sensitive to a person’s eyes. For instance, my mother was a Mercy person and when I was young, she would repeatedly tell me to “Look straight into their eyes and tell them ‘Thank You’”. Consistent with this, “the amygdala, at least in humans, appears to be remarkably specialized for processing a single feature within faces: the region around the eyes. For instance, lesions of the amygdala selectively impair processing information from the eye region in order to judge facial emotion, and BOLD-fMRI studies reveal amygdala activation during attention to the eyes in faces and to isolated presentation of the eye region” (Rutishauser, 2011). Looking at this in more detail, “The left amygdala activated only to fearful eyes. Contrasts confirmed that the left amygdala response to fear was significantly greater than the responses to any other condition. Somewhat unexpectedly, the right amygdala responded to all conditions. Contrasts between conditions indicated that there were no significant differences between fear and other conditions in the right amygdala” (Hardee, 2008). In other words, the right amygdala has a general sensitivity to the eyes, whereas the left amygdala is only activated when fear is noted in the eyes. Looking at this cognitively, the mind represents people as mental networks within Mercy thought. A person’s eyes can help Mercy thought to determine which mental networks are active within the mind. Saying this another way, the eyes provide useful clues for theory of mind.
Turning to the left amygdala, fear implies the possibility of personal harm. A person is not just being faced with an unpleasant experience. Instead, the integrity of the mind or body is being threatened; the order-within-complexity of the mind or body may fragment into chaos and complexity. This type of existential threat will involve Teacher emotion and presumably the left amygdala.
Eyes are psychologically related to what is known as the ‘uncanny valley’: “The unease induced by altering eyes may help to explain the uncanny valley, which is the eeriness of robots that are almost—but not quite—human” (Schein, 2015). This paper suggests that theory of mind can be divided into two components, one related to Teacher feelings of order-within-complexity, and the other to Mercy feelings of personal experience: “Research on mind perception reveals that we perceive minds along two broad dimensions of agency (intending, planning, doing) and experience (feeling, sensing, consciousness), and that we have fundamental expectations about who or what should have a mind. Adult humans are generally expected to have both agency and experience, children and animals are expected to have only experience, and robots are expected to have only agency. As they are unliving creations of metal, robots are fundamentally expected to lack abilities that are central to living creatures of flesh—the capacity to feel. Therefore, mind perception suggests that uncanniness arises not from humanlike appearances per se, but when these appearances lead people to ascribe experience to robots. In other words, robots are creepy when they seem to feel.” Using cognitive language, a machine—like a robot—is an example of Teacher order-within-complexity, because many parts are functioning together in an integrated manner. The mind uses MMNs (Mercy mental networks) to represent living beings, but an adult human also becomes characterized by some profession or area of expertise—which is an example of Teacher order-within-complexity. Uncanniness is the feeling that arises when a machine triggers MMNs that are used to represent living creatures, and this is related to the presence or absence of eyes: “Without eyes, humans are perceived to lack experience, violating a fundamental expectation of mind and inducing uncanniness.”
Looking at this from another context, autistic individuals find it difficult to look in people’s eyes: “Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) often report that looking in the eyes of others is uncomfortable for them, that it is terribly stressful, or even that ‘it burns’. Although traditional theoretical accounts of ASD have interpreted lack of eye contact and other social difficulties as indicators of interpersonal indifference to others, first hand reports from verbal people with ASD would rather suggest that the underlying problem may be one of socio-affective oversensitivity” (Hadjikhani, 2017). In contrast, autistic individuals typically find emotional comfort in order and structure. This implies that autistic individuals prefer TMNs to MMNs. A TMN can the constructed out of simple components; one simply needs to interact with some system of order-within-complexity long enough for a Teacher mental network to form. In contrast, MMNs form intuitively as one interacts with living beings.
Cognitive Development
[2019] Mental symmetry suggests that Mercy thought in the child acquires its initial content from physical experiences of pain and pleasure. In essence, this interprets Piaget’s stages of cognitive development in terms of cognitive modules. This emotional programming of the childish mind is driven by the amygdala: “The amygdala exhibits early functionality. Specifically, studies have revealed a robust functional responsiveness to emotional stimuli by early childhood, which is larger in magnitude than the responses of older individuals. Consistent with these findings, a rich animal and human literature examining the effect of both lesions and stress on the amygdala across the lifespan suggest that this region’s role in shaping emotion and social behavior is especially important during early postnatal development, with consequences for affective behavior lasting throughout life. These findings suggest a sensitive period for human amygdala development in the late infancy to childhood period when the amygdala is particularly receptive to environmental stimulation” (Tottenham, 2017).
The response of the amygdala in a young child is strongly influenced by the emotional response of parents. “A dysregulated parent (exhibiting fear) is highly effective in increasing amygdala engagement and aversive learning about environmental stimuli. Evidence from humans is strikingly consistent with the rodent work. As in the developing rodent, it has been shown that parental presence buffers against children’s elevations in stress hormones, parental stimuli attenuate amygdala activity in children, and fear expressed by the parent directly translates into fear related behaviors in the child. Thus the parent is a highly effective regulator during development, with the ability to potentiate or attenuate amygdala function.” Mental symmetry suggests the following explanation. The childish mind naturally integrates around MMNs that represent parents and other authority figures; there is evidence that emotional responses from the mother activate mental networks stored within the orbitofrontal cortex of the child: “It seems that the motherʼs smiling evokes the neural network involved in reward processing, especially the mesolimbic reward circuit, the front end of which is the OFC” (Takamura, 2016). This emotional dependence of children upon parents causes the amygdala of the child to be affected by the emotional responses of the parent.
This parental control over amygdala response in the child occurs primarily with the right amygdala, which I suggest is related to Mercy thought. This parental influence fades in adolescence: “Specifically, right amygdala activity (which is typically high in childhood) was suppressed when children were viewing pictures of their mother, relative to when viewing pictures of a stranger. Critically, there was no difference in right amygdala reactivity in adolescents viewing pictures of mothers and strangers” (Callaghan, 2016). Notice that right amygdala activity is ‘typically high in childhood’, consistent with the idea that Mercy thought is dominant in the childish mind.
In contrast, the amygdala of the adult mind becomes controlled by a network of mental networks within the medial prefrontal cortex. “In adulthood, the medial PFC sends projections to inhibitory cells within the amygdala that reduce amygdala reactivity and are thus fundamental to mature affect regulation. Unlike in the adult, these regulatory influences from the medial PFC are not available to the young child. Several studies have now shown that functional connections between the amygdala and the medial PFC are immature in childhood and switch to the adult-like state in adolescence. That is, during childhood the amygdala is less likely to be regulated by the mPFC than after childhood. Instead, during infancy and childhood, external agents (e.g., caregivers) can serve as social regulators of affect and amygdala activity during this time” (Tottenham, 2017).
Because the amygdala within the mind of the child is not regulated by the medial prefrontal cortex, the childish mind is emotionally volatile and will respond emotionally when separated from parents. “The strong early reactivity in the amygdala parallels the normatively high fear and emotionality that characterizes childhood; indeed, early childhood fears (ie, separation anxiety) are mediated by the excessively high amygdala activity observed during childhood” (Callaghan, 2016).
Separation from parents will cause the childish mind to shift from the medial prefrontal being programmed by the amygdala to the medial prefrontal regulating the amygdala. Callaghan notes that “Animal studies appear to converge on the finding that the developmental change from plastic to stable amygdala–mPFC circuitry is accelerated following chronic parental deprivation. Put another way, the data support the idea that early independence from the parent cues early termination of the sensitive period for environmental input into amygdala–mPFC circuitry.” Looking at this cognitively, a mental network will fragment if it continues to experience input that is inconsistent with its structure. Such fragmentation will happen to childish mental networks that represent parents if parents are not physically present. When core mental networks within the mind fragment, then the mind has to find integration in other mental networks. Thus, mental networks that represent parents will become replaced by a network of mental networks within medial frontal which include parents, authority figures, and social structures. This transition from childhood dependence to adolescent independence is least painful if the developing child regularly alternates between parents being present and absent: “Experiencing a balance with autonomy is an additional component for healthy development. We have hypothesized that the regular daily separations and reunions that occur between sensitive parents and children (e.g., parents can go to work, and children can go to school) may benefit emotional circuitry” (Tottenham, 2018).
Emotional outbursts of anger occur when the amygdala overwhelms the medial prefrontal cortex. There is “an early increase of bilateral amygdala activation during anger induction, which was then followed by increased left VMPFC activation during the anger imagery period… The amygdala’s early activation suggests that the amygdala might be more involved in the initial experience of anger while the VMPFC is more involved in the evaluation of that anger and in the inhibition of an impulsive response” (Dougherty, 2017). (VMPFC is ventral medial prefrontal cortex. This is a slightly imprecise term which includes most of the orbitofrontal as well as the medial frontal.) Similarly, a study of patients with brain lesions “found that vmPFC lesions were associated with increased right amygdala reactivity to aversive stimuli” (Motzkin, 2015). In other words, a lack of regulation from the vmFPC allowed the right amygdala to respond freely to emotional situations.
We have looked so far at the interaction between the amygdala and the medial prefrontal. The amygdala is dominant in the mind of the child, and emotional information from the amygdala programs the medial frontal. In contrast, the amygdala in the adult mind becomes regulated by a collection of mental networks coordinated by the medial frontal. This describes the development of Mercy thought within the mind of the child. The adult mind can go one step further and use Teacher thought to reprogram Mercy emotions. This is known psychologically as reappraisal. Using the language of Piaget, reappraisal becomes possible when cognitive development reaches the formal operational stage.
Reappraisal looks at an emotional situation from a different perspective, and it is widely used in psychology because it is effective: “The best-studied strategy is cognitive reappraisal, which targets the appraisal stage and involves changing one’s interpretations or appraisals of affective stimuli. One reason this strategy is so well studied is because reappraisal is highly effective at regulating affect and physiological arousal without the cognitive and physiological costs associated with response-focused strategies (e.g., expressive suppression), and with longer-lasting effects than attention-focused strategies (e.g., distraction). But it is also well studied because the core elements of reappraisal are central to many forms of therapy, including cognitive behavioral therapy, dialectical behavioral therapy, and psychodynamic therapy, all of which are effective for treating a variety of mood and anxiety disorders” (Buhle, 2013). Reappraisal works by changing the response of the amygdala: “We found strong evidence that reappraisal modulates activity in bilateral amygdala, but not other regions related to emotional responding”. But Buhle’s meta-analysis “found that the implementation of reappraisal in the current set of studies did not consistently recruit vmPFC.” Thus, reappraisal goes beyond the interaction between amygdala and ventromedial prefrontal that we have just discussed. Instead, “the implementation of reappraisal consistently activated domain-general cognitive control regions, including dmPFC, dlPFC, vlPFC, and posterior parietal lobe.”
Looking at this more specifically, “Cognitive reappraisal refers to deliberately viewing an emotionally evocative event from a different perspective and re-interpreting its meaning, thereby changing its emotional impact” (Papousek, 2017). The left inferior frontal (otherwise known as ventrolateral prefrontal) plays a major role in reappraisal: “During cognitive reappraisal efforts, individuals higher on the capacity for generating cognitive reappraisals showed more left-lateralized activity in lateral prefrontal cortex, specifically in ventrolateral prefrontal cortex extending toward the frontal pole.”
We saw earlier that Teacher thought uses the left inferior frontal gyrus. Looking at this more precisely, Teacher thought is related to Teacher emotion but not exactly the same. Teacher thought constructs general theories by looking for simple explanations that can summarize many related situations. This search for order-within-complexity is carried out by the left inferior frontal, and a discovery of order-within-complexity will lead to positive Teacher emotion. Language itself is an example of Teacher order-within-complexity because a word is a simple sequence of phonemes that summarizes many related elements. Thus, language brings order-within-complexity to the complexity of human experiences, and language itself can be used to achieve further order-within-complexity through the formulation of general theories.
A rational general theory uses Teacher thought to assemble the mental ‘bricks’ of Perceiver facts and Server sequences into the ‘building’ of a general theory. This is different than overgeneralization, which creates the feeling of a general theory by ignoring facts and sequences. The constructing of a general theory typically goes through the three stages of gathering Perceiver facts and Server sequences, coming up with a general Teacher theory that explains these facts and sequences, and then imposing this general theory upon facts and sequences. A similar sequence can be seen in the scientific method, where one gathers data, forms a hypothesis, and then makes a prediction. These three steps can be seen in reappraisal. First, the dorsolateral prefrontal gathers data for Teacher thought: “Our results suggest that during the emotion regulation process, first the DLPFC together with the SMG might be involved in directing attention to the emotional stimulus, and the DLPFC might then play a role in actively maintaining the content and the goals of one’s reappraisal in working memory… represented in positive connectivity between the DLPFC and the IFG” (Morawetz, 2016a). (SMG is supramarginal gyrus, which is between parietal and temporal lobes.) Second, Teacher thought comes up with a hypothesis: “When multiple representations of stimulus-appropriate reinterpretations are activated, a selection is needed to resolve competition among the various representations to drive goal-directed behavior. This selection process has been associated with IFG activity.” Third, Teacher thought asserts this hypothesis as a general theory: “The final selection of a stimulus-appropriate reappraisal could then trigger the inhibition of the DLPFC because this region is no longer required to support the monitoring and manipulation of representations in working memory for response modulation. This would explain why the inhibitory effect of the IFG on the DLPFC becomes stronger during emotion regulation.”
Emotions can be made less intense by coming up with a Teacher theory that downplays existing mental networks, while emotions can be made more intense by coming up with a theory that reinforces existing mental networks. “Our results show that the successful reframing of negative stimuli in a positive direction (i.e., decreasing emotions to feel less negative affect) was related to less effective coupling between IFG and VMPFC. In contrast, the successful reframing of aversive pictures in a negative direction (i.e., increasing emotions to feel more negative affect) was associated with enhanced effective connectivity between IFG and VMPFC” (Morawetz, 2016b).
Reappraisal has to be repeated in order to have a long-term impact, and this long-term impact will alter the way that the amygdala responds to emotional situations: “One week after successfully using cognitive reappraisal to diminish behavioral (negative affect) and neural (right amygdala) markers of emotional response, we found that the amygdala’s response remained attenuated for images that had been reappraised four times, but not for images that had been reappraised only once. Critically, we found no evidence that these enduring changes in amygdala response required on-going recruitment of prefrontal regions involved in top-down control” (Denny, 2015). (This experiment used unpleasant images which activated the right amygdala.)
Reappraisal is different than suppression: “Emotional perception can be regulated in different ways. Classic psychological models of emotion regulation mainly distinguish between a reappraisal strategy, which consists of reducing the emotional response by reinterpreting a situation, and suppression strategy, where expressive or bodily responses are inhibited by cognitive control” (Guex, 2019). Reappraisal changes the response of the amygdala, while suppression attempts to control the amygdala after it responds. “Here we record amygdala activity from six patients undergoing surgery for pharmaco-resistant epilepsy during both reappraisal and suppression. We find that emotion reappraisal strategy, but not suppression, modulates early neural responses to emotional scenes during an extended period of time, starting 130 ms post-stimulus onset.” Suppression is associated with Perceiver thought in the right dorsolateral frontal. For instance, when telling people not to think about pictures, “successful retrieval suppression was associated with a right DLPFC-mediated top-down inhibition of visual imagery” (Smith, 2018). Study of personality indicates that Perceiver thought can respond to unwanted Mercy mental networks in one of two ways. One way is to try to suppress the unwanted mental network. This typically works for a while, but often ends in some outburst of anger, usually triggered by some event. The other way is to use Perceiver facts to come up with a Teacher understanding of the experiences within Mercy thought. This second method of reappraisal takes more work, but it is also more effective in the long-term.
Turning now to the bigger picture, mental symmetry suggests that the childish mind needs to be transformed because it is built upon an inadequate set of mental networks acquired from the physical body. Mental symmetry subdivides the process of personal transformation into three stages, with the first stage corresponding to reappraisal. Saying this more carefully, personal transformation is mentally possible because there are two kinds of emotion. Constructing a general theory about personal identity creates positive Teacher emotions which make it emotionally possible to reprogram the Mercy mental networks of childish thought.
Reappraisal is similar to the scientific method. But reappraisal is not the same as scientific thought. That is because most scientific thought actually does not involve the scientific method. As Thomas Kuhn pointed out, “The scientific enterprise as a whole does from time to time prove useful, open up new territory, display order, and test long-accepted belief. Nevertheless, the individual engaged on a normal research problem is almost never doing any one of these things. Once engaged, his motivation is of a rather different sort. What then challenges him is the conviction that, if only he is skilful enough, he will succeed in solving a puzzle that no one before has solved or solved so well. Many of the greatest scientific minds have devoted all of their professional attention to demanding puzzles of this sort” (The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, p.38). Forming new theories in Teacher thought falls into what Thomas Kuhn referred to as revolutionary science. In contrast, normal science uses a form of thinking which mental symmetry refers to as technical thought. In brief, mental symmetry suggests that the mind can use both abstract and concrete thought in one of three primary ways: mental networks, normal thought, and technical thought. Mental networks involve Teacher and Mercy thought. Normal thought is guided by connections, analogies, and similarities from Perceiver and Server thought. Reappraisal uses the analogies of normal thought to reprogram mental networks. Technical thought, in contrast, emerges when Contributor thought restricts the mind to the ‘playing field’ of some limited set of well-defined rules. Kuhn described this as solving puzzles.
Mathematics and logic are two primary examples of abstract technical thought. Mathematics uses a different part of the brain than normal linguistics: “In mathematicians, we found essentially no overlap of the math-responsive network with the areas activated by sentence comprehension and general semantic knowledge.” (Amalric, 2016). Instead, “we observed the activation of a restricted and consistent network of brain areas whenever mathematicians engaged in high-level mathematical reflection. This network comprised bilateral intraparietal, inferior temporal, and dorsal prefrontal sites. It was activated by all domains of mathematics tested (analysis, algebra, topology, and geometry) and even, transiently, by meaningless mathematical statements.” Contributor thought combines Perceiver and Server and gathers its well-defined rules from a set of Perceiver facts and Server sequences. Perceiver thought and Server thought use the parietal and dorsal prefrontal. Thus, mathematical thought would emphasize bilateral intraparietal and dorsal prefrontal sites. The inferior temporal region is activated by the visual symbols that are used in mathematics: “In particular, bilateral ventral inferior temporal areas corresponding to the visual number form area were activated by high-level mathematics as well as by the mere sight of numbers and mathematical formulas.”
More generally, higher mathematics are an example of abstract technical thought: “The math-responsive circuit that we observed in professional mathematicians also appears to be involved in a broad range of cognitive processes. It activates in a variety of effortful problem-solving tasks akin to IQ tests, as well as in domain-general logical, inferential or relational reasoning” (Amalric, 2017).
Thus, higher mathematics are quite different cognitively than the math anxiety that was discussed earlier. Higher mathematics use technical thought guided by the TMN of some paradigm within Teacher thought. Math anxiety, in contrast, occurs when the mind lacks an understanding of mathematics in Teacher thought and approaches mathematics from a personal Mercy perspective.
Looking at this from the other side, mathematical ability is correlated with autism: “People with superior mathematical abilities turn out to have an autism spectrum disorder more often than others do. The empathising-systemising theory proposes that this link is mediated by these individuals’ stronger tendency to systemise (detect patterns, derive rules), along with the fact that mathematics is the perfect example of a rule-based, lawful system” (Bressan, 2018). A system of clearly defined rules such as mathematics exhibits Teacher order-within-complexity. Going further, abstract technical thought will naturally become emotionally driven by the TMN of some paradigm, leading to the puzzle solving of Kuhn’s normal science. This explains why the autistic individual finds the TMNs of abstract technical thought more attractive than MMNs of social interaction. Technical thought will be discussed further in the next section on the basal ganglia.
Basal Ganglia
(Note from September 2019: This section on the basal ganglia is quite long in the original essay. I think that it is useful to keep a record of how I used to think. Therefore, as I have done for the rest of the essay, I am leaving this section unchanged and will append the new information to the end. This new information adds a number of details and clarifies several uncertainties.)
The brain contains a loop that starts from the cortex, goes through the basal ganglia, and then returns through the thalamus on its way back to the cortex. Twenty years ago, when I first looked at the neurology, it seemed rather obvious that this loop corresponded to the ‘three stage pump’ of Exhorter to Contributor to Facilitator, with Exhorter and Contributor thought using the basal ganglia and the Facilitator using the thalamus. However, it did not make sense how two modes of thought could both share the basal ganglia, and not enough was known about the basal ganglia to tie things down.
Since then, incredible progress has been made. I still remember reading the paper by Schell and Strick in 1984 that first worked out what was happening to this loop as it traversed the thalamus. And then, I believe it was Ann Graybiel at MIT who discovered that the basal ganglia was divided into striosomes and matrix. Now, finally, it appears that the essential circuits have been worked out. And, they appear, thankfully, to be totally consistent with the diagram of mental symmetry. And, also thankfully, I managed to find most of the pertinent details summarized in this book.
‘Borrowing’ one of the illustrations from that book, notice that all of the complicated paths have now been boiled down to four basic paths: the direct and indirect paths, along with the striosomal and subthamalic or hyperdirect path.
My hypothesis is that Exhorter strategy uses the direct path and Contributor thought uses the indirect path.
The direct path enables activity in a general way; the indirect path narrows this down to decide precisely which option will be enabled. Similarly, when we look at the Exhorter and the Contributor, we find that the Exhorter comes up with a general idea, and then the Contributor narrows this down to a specific choice. If you observe the Contributor person, you see that he likes to be in control, but he often does not realize how limited his choices are. As with the typical communist election, one could choose between comrade A and comrade B, but all of the choices had to belong to the communist party.
Dopamine appears to be related to the activity of Exhorter thought. All addictive behavior appears to involve dopamine, and Exhorter strategy is the part of the mind that pushes and prods and fixates. Dopamine encourages the direct path with D1 type dopamine receptors stimulating the direct path and D2 type receptors inhibiting the indirect path.
Dopamine modulates this subcortical loop in order to promote learning. Whenever a step is taken which leads to an expected reward, extra dopamine will be released, encouraging that step to be taken again. In contrast, if the reward is not present, then the level of dopamine will temporarily drop, discouraging that specific step from being repeated. The Contributor person is highly driven by reward and punishment—they motivate him strongly. The Exhorter person lives within reward and punishment; he uses emotional approval and disapproval to motivate the responses of others. In simple terms, the Exhorter person makes a great animal trainer; the Contributor person can be trained by reward and punishment.
This paper says that dopamine plays a major role in the initial stages of learning, but is less active when learning turns into habit. Similarly, the Exhorter person is great at starting a project, but finds it rather difficult to finish something. Instead, he is apt to drop what he is doing and move on when something else comes up that is new and exciting.
Tying together the direct and indirect path is a set of local connections which use acetylcholine, the brain chemical which I suggest is related to concentration. (There are two other acelylcholine circuits in the brain that appear to be related to Teacher and Mercy concentration.) The Contributor person is capable of concentrating upon a plan, ignoring everything that lies outside of this plan as meaningless. Anyone who tries to be in the presence of a Contributor person and carry out a plan which is different than the plan of the Contributor knows what this means. The Contributor person will give off very strong ‘vibes’ that you, along with everything you do, are totally worthless because you are not part of his plan. The Contributor person excels at optimization, taking an existing plan and making it better. This probably involves acetylcholine and loops within the basal ganglia.
What drives all of this is the ‘bottom line’. In the right hemisphere, the bottom line is some Mercy object or experience that is supposed to be improved, such as money, fame, fortune, or some more specific goal. In the left hemisphere, the ‘bottom line’ expresses itself as a Teacher theory that needs to be improved, or some system of structure or order that needs optimizing.
This bottom line is obviously being provided by the striosomal path. It receives its major input from the amygdala and the orbital Frontal cortex—the Teacher and Mercy emotional processors and the Teacher and Mercy internal worlds. And, it sends dopamine back to the basal ganglia (from the substantia nigra pars compacta) with which it can reinforce behavior that enhances the bottom line. And if you place electric probes in the striosomal region of the basal ganglia of rats, then they like to press the button in order to get a small jolt of electricity delivered to their brains. Imagine the poor research assistant who has to observe the rats. One wonders how much his striosomal region is getting stimulated.
The hyperdirect path appears to be another aspect of Contributor thought. It has a fast direct path which is capable of quickly stopping or shutting down the basal ganglia. Damage here can lead to hemiballismus, in which arms or legs literally flail around. The behavior of the Contributor person suggests that he can operate in one of two radically different styles. He can emphasize either control or confidence. The controlling Contributor always has his mental foot on the brake. He is continually shutting down both himself and those around him. The confident Contributor, in contrast, allows his mind to flow and gives freedom to those who are around him. We would conclude that the controlling Contributor is emphasizing the hyperdirect path which uses the subthalamus, whereas the confident Contributor is permitting Exhorter strategy to come up with ideas and then using Contributor choice to choose between these alternatives.
Serotonin is the neuromodulator that appears to be related to Contributor thought. This chemical is used throughout the body, but in the brain it is related to pecking order. The dominant animal in a group will have higher levels of serotonin than his peers. Similarly, the most common way of treating depression and phobia is by increasing brain levels of serotonin. Both of these traits remind one of the confident Contributor, who feels that he is at the top of the pecking order and who decides easily and confidently as he faces situations which would drive other mere mortals into depression or fear.
It is also known that the basal ganglia contains a high level of serotonin receptors, that serotonin modulates motor behavior and that there is significant interaction between dopamine and serotonin, with one tending to inhibit the other. This interaction is hard to decipher because of the many subtypes of serotonin receptors. For instance, serotonin inhibits the activity of dopamine in the ‘striosomal path’. Dopamine release combined with amygdala activity can lead to aggression, which can be suppressed with serotonin. In other words, if you feel strongly about something and get motivated to do something about your feelings, then Contributor strategy can bring you back under control.
This paper contains a simple venn diagram, which I have reproduced here, summarizing current views of dopamine and serotonin. Exhorter strategy is the part of the mind that provides mental energy and emotional motivation. When dopamine is low, then this mental processing becomes inactive. Contributor strategy takes Exhorter energy and channels it and controls it. When serotonin is low, then Exhorter strategy is free to obsess about emotional fixations because Contributor thought is unable to rechannel Exhorter drive. And, without Contributor control, Exhorter drive will express itself through impulsive thought and action.
Summarizing:
- Exhorter strategy uses the basal ganglia direct path and is associated with dopamine.
- The bottom line comes from Teacher and Mercy via the striosomal path and affects behavior through dopamine.
- Contributor strategy uses the basal ganglia indirect path and is associated with serotonin.
- Contributor strategy uses the hyperdirect subthalamus path to control behavior.
And, here is a mathematical engineer who sums up the neuromodulators quite nicely. According to him, dopamine encodes the ‘reward learning signal’, consistent with Exhorter thought; Serotonin evaluates if a ‘given action is worth the expected reward’, definitely a main aspect of Contributor thought; acetycholine affects learning rate through memory updates, which could be related to concentration; and Noradrenaline ‘controls the width or randomness of exploration’, consistent with the Facilitator role of blending, balancing, and adjusting.
Two main loose ends remain:
1) The theory of mental symmetry says that Exhorter ties together Mercy and Teacher, whereas Contributor bridges Server and Perceiver. I have looked thoroughly on the internet and cannot find anything that says which part of the cortex projects to the direct path and which is connected with the indirect path. Therefore, it may be that my hypothesis about the functioning of the basal ganglia needs to be modified to the following form:
- Exhorter strategy uses the striosomal path, which comes from Teacher and Mercy regions of the brain, and uses dopamine to control the basal ganglia.
- Contributor strategy uses the indirect path along with the subthalamus.
- Exhorter and Contributor strategies interact through the direct path.
2) I am not sure how Exhorter and Contributor thought relate to the cortex. Let me elaborate. As a Perceiver person, I am consciously aware of the interaction between Perceiver and Contributor strategies. From observation, I conclude that the Perceiver and Contributor use the same information in different ways. As a Perceiver person, I am always looking for connections between facts, and relationships that tie information together. Most Contributor persons that I meet are not interested in all of these connections. If my information lies outside of their plan, then they ignore it as useless. If it falls within the plan, then they want just enough information to solve their current problem and no more.
Neurology tells us that the dorsolateral frontal cortex is the part of the brain that builds connections between one context and another. In contrast, the basal ganglia narrows down to focus upon one specific context. Thus, one concludes that Perceiver thought is located in the dorsolateral frontal whereas Contributor thought is located in the basal ganglia and is accessing memory that resides within the cortex. For instance, this paper says that dorsolateral frontal cortex is involved in the more abstract aspects of planning behavior, such as working out the rules, the goals, and the overall significance. It may be that Contributor and Perceiver strategies are connected with the same cortical region but are accessing different cortical layers.
Generalizing, I presume that Contributor and Server, Exhorter and Mercy, and Exhorter and Teacher interact in a similar fashion; Server, Teacher, and Mercy are located within the cortex, and Exhorter and Contributor access the cortex.
For the four simple styles of Teacher, Mercy, Perceiver and Server, I suggested that they have an automatic part in the back of the cortex and an internal world in the front. The input to the basal ganglia comes from both the back and the front, suggesting that Exhorter imagination and Contributor plans can involve either automatic thought, the internal world, or some combination of the two.
There is, however, a region of the cortex that appears to be related specifically to Contributor, and that is the SMA, or supplementary motor area. I have postulated that the region right in front of it—the anterior cingulate—appears to be where Contributor plans interact with Perceiver facts and Server skills. (I previously said nucleus accumbens, but that must be a typo.)
[2019] Turning now to more recent papers, as mentioned before, there is a direct path and an indirect path: “Basal ganglia circuitry comprises two major pathways linking input (striatum) and output (SNr and GPi): a monosynaptic GABAergic projection from dopamine D1 receptor-expressing striatal projection neurons (dSPNs) to the output nuclei including substantia nigra pars reticulata (SNr), called ‘direct pathway’; and a polysynaptic projection from dopamine D2 receptor-expressing striatal projection neurons (iSPNs) to the output nuclei through external globus pallidus (GP) via subthalamic nucleus (STN), called ‘indirect pathway’.” Choosing some option involves both of these paths: “These data suggest that direct pathway neurons could function to select the desired motor program, while indirect pathway neurons would inhibit the competing motor programs; co-activation of these pathways would allow the appropriate action selection” (Jin, 2015). This is consistent with the way that Contributor choice functions. Contributor persons often like to think that they are able to choose anything. But such libertarian free will does not exist. Instead, Contributor thought always chooses between a limited set of options. The direct path suggests some choice to Contributor thought while the indirect path provide some alternatives. Contributor thought then chooses between the recommended choice and the alternatives. This definition of choice can be seen in the behavior of the Contributor person, who often exercises free will by choosing not to follow the recommended option.
This concept of Contributor free will is described more clearly in another paper which looked at dopamine in the human brain: “D1 and D2 receptors are localized to striatonigral and striatopallidal neurons, respectively, with minimal colocalization. Dopamine regulates striatal activation and output via D1 receptor activation, which enhances the function of striatonigral neurons, and via D2-receptor activation, which suppresses the function of striatopallidal neurons.” “A new model of dopamine function in the basal ganglia posit that D1 receptor activation prepares a set of possible responses, then D2 receptor activation functions in selecting the final response. The present findings are consistent with such an integrated function” (Robertson, 2015). Dopamine activity is related to Exhorter thought. Thus, Exhorter thought pushes Contributor thought into choosing some option through D1, but Contributor thought can resist Exhorter pressure and choose some alternative instead. Consistent with this, another paper “dissected the contributions of each pathway and found that both the direct striatonigral pathway and the indirect striatopallidal pathway are necessary for smooth initiation and the execution of learned action sequences.” The authors conclude that “These observations are consistent with recent studies proposing that the direct pathway is more related to exploitative behavior, while the STN-GP complex is more involved in action shifting or exploration”Tecuapetla, 2016. (STN-GP stands for subthalamus and globus pallidus, which are part of the direct pathway.)
Another paper adds some details: “We show that negative feedback learning can be modulated through D2 receptor signaling and positive feedback learning through D1 receptor signaling in the ventral striatum. Furthermore, stimulation of D2 receptors in the ventral or dorsolateral (but not dorsomedial) striatum promoted explorative choice behavior, suggesting an additional function of dopamine in these areas in value-based decision making.”(Verharen, 2019). In other words, if everything is going as expected, then it makes sense for Contributor thought to follow the suggestion given by Exhorter thought. But if problems arise, then it makes sense to pursue alternative paths. This differential effect of D1 and D2 also happens within the frontal cortex: “risk/reward decision making is modulated differentially by these two receptors within the prefrontal cortex (PFC), with D2 receptors enabling flexible decision making and D1 receptors promoting persistence in choice biases” (Jenni, 2017). And this same conclusion is backed up by another paper: “These differential effects of DA D1 and D2 receptor antagonists on performance of a free choice task with probabilistic reward strongly suggest that direct pathway D1 receptor signaling promotes behavioral stability to attain high-value rewards while indirect pathway D2 receptor signaling facilitates switching away from smaller reward outcomes... Therefore, D1 and D2 signaling mechanisms in direct and indirect basal ganglia pathways appear to act cooperatively to optimize reward by regulating the balance between stable and flexible responses under conditions of probabilistic reward contingencies” (Ueda, 2017).
The immature Exhorter person can be a ‘party animal’, finding excitement in sensory gratification. In contrast, the mature Exhorter person develops hope, focusing upon long-term goals. These two alternatives can be seen in dopamine circuits: “We propose a model in which dopamine (DA) can favor NOW processes through phasic signaling in reward circuits or LATER processes through tonic signaling in control circuits. At the same time, through its modulation of the orbitofrontal cortex, which processes salience attribution, DA also enables shifting from NOW to LATER, while its modulation of the insula, which processes interoceptive information, influences the probability of selecting NOW vs LATER actions on the basis of an individual’s physiological state” (Volkow, 2016). Notice the balance between orbitofrontal and insula. Recent research has shown that the insula represents self from a physical perspective. In contrast, we have seen that the orbitofrontal contains an internal model of self based upon mental networks. Continuing with this paper, dopamine has both a short-term effect and a long-term impact: “NOW vs LATER processes are differentially modulated by DA: LATER processes require steady DA signaling in striatal and prefrontal regions to sustain effort as achieved by tonic DA firing, whereas NOW processes are predominantly driven by fast, sharp bursts of DA as achieved by phasic DA firing that drive attention to the salient stimulus. In humans, brain imaging studies have revealed that stimuli that result in fast DA increases in ventral and dorsal striatal regions are experienced as rewarding and generate the desire to attain the stimulus whereas stimuli that trigger slow and steady DA increases do not. By contrast, steady DA increases are associated with increases in the ability to exert sustained (i.e., cognitive) effort and to experience the task or stimulus as motivating and interesting.” Thus, immediate sensory gratification is related to the insula and produces a short burst of dopamine. In contrast, long-term effort is related to the orbital frontal cortex and long-term levels of dopamine. Both of these are characteristics of the Exhorter person, who can focus upon immediate excitement, but can also continue relentlessly with some project over the long-term.
Graybiel has done extensive work examining how habits are formed within the basal ganglia, and has discovered that forming a habit can be divided into three distinct stages which each emphasize a different brain region: “The ventral striatum is necessary for initial learning of motivated behaviors that could become habitual. The dorsal striatum then becomes critical. First, behaviors are driven largely by the anticipated outcome of the behavior itself; this process, according to rodent lesion studies, requires the dorsomedial striatum ([DMS] in rodents). But then, according to these lesion studies, as the behaviors are repeated and bring about a positive outcome, the DMS is no longer required, but the dorsolateral parts of the striatum ([DLS] in rodents) is required for habitual performance” (Graybiel, 2018). (The rat DMS is the equivalent of the human caudate, while the rat DLS corresponds to the human putamen.) Putting this into cognitive terms, the first stage of forming a habit uses Exhorter thought, the second stage is guided by the goal-oriented thinking of Contributor thought, while the third stage moves into habitual action. Looking at this further, the first stage involves dopamine, which is related to Exhorter thought: “Much evidence suggests that the midbrain dopamine system, particularly the VTA, is influential in the initial stages of generation of these behaviors, and that the striatal target of the VTA system, which largely lies in the ventral striatum, is essential for the neural changes, leading to addiction.” (VTA is ventral tegmental area, which is part of the ventral striatum.) The third stage is habitual and is no longer driven by goals: “There is a critical transition period during habit formation. Before this transition, a given behavior being learned remains sensitive to outcome (usually tested as sensitivity to reward value). But, after this period, the same behavior becomes independent of the reward value.” During this third stage of habit, dopamine becomes activated by the cues that trigger the habit: “Addicts experiencing craving to any one of a number of drugs can show a significant dopamine increase in striatum in response to drug-conditioned cues (such as thoughts leading to craving) with response levels that can be greater than those to the drug themselves. These cue-induced responses are particularly prominent in the dorsal striatum, including in the putamen.” This transition from Exhorter excitement to Exhorter craving may be similar to the transition from NOW to LATER mentioned earlier.
One critical aspect of learning a habit is a chunking of neuron activity: “As animals learn to run in maze tasks, the striatal activity, at first, marks the full run time, but later begins to bracket the entire run. Activity becomes more and more prominent at the beginning and end of the runs, or beginning and end of the action through the turns.” In other words, a habit is a series of steps that the mind treats as a single unit. Once the mental chunk of a habit has formed in the putamen, then it is very resistant to change: “The taskbracketing pattern in the DLS is extremely resistant to degradation—it takes wholesale removal of rewards to block it fully, and even then, the pattern is latent, but not gone, and is rapidly retrievable.” Tying this into the behavior of the Contributor person, on the one hand, the Contributor person is driven by some bottom line, but on the other hand, a Contributor person can perform habitual repetitive movements for years (such as making a hamburger), as long as this satisfies some financial bottom line.
The formation of a habit, as well as carrying out a habit, are ultimately under the control of the orbitomedial frontal cortex: “The medial prefrontal cortical region, called infralimbic (IL) cortex, in rodents, like the DLS, is necessary for habits to be performed. New optogenetic studies have shown that the IL exerts online control of the performance of well-ingrained habits and is necessary for their formation. This work is critical to any account of the role of the striatum in habit formation, as it suggests a form of cortical control that can, on amoment-by-moment basis, determine whether a behavior is performed habitually or not.” (The rat infralimbic cortex is probably the equivalent of area 25, which is at the bottom of the medial frontal near the orbitofrontal.)
Mental symmetry suggests that a mental network will impose its structure upon the mind when it is triggered. The role of the infra-limbic cortex shows how this probably takes place. The mental network itself is located within the orbitofrontal, but activating this mental network will trigger a habit which will then create a drive to carry out this habit. Rats are not capable of abstract thought and they equate action with imagination. Therefore, all habits in a rat would involve physical actions. Presumably, human habits would extend to mental habits involving both concrete and abstract thought. Graybiel suggest something similar: “Habits of thought, at least in humans, are probably as common as motor habits and, like motor habits, are vulnerable to pathologic distortion. Our view is that such habits of mind can be created by cognitive pattern generators much as habits of action are generated.” I think that habits play a major role in mental networks, but I think that a mental network is more than just an emotionally triggered habit.
A paradigm could be viewed as an abstract form of habit. Abstract technical thought is an abstract form of Contributor-controlled goal-oriented behavior, driven by the emotional goal of improving some Teacher theory. Study of personality shows that if a person continues to use a paradigm for a sufficient time, then this paradigm will turn into a Teacher mental network (TMN), which will then exert emotional pressure upon a person to continue using this paradigm and to defend this paradigm when it is threatened. (I use the word paradigm specifically to refer to a TMN that lies behind some technical specialization, consistent with Thomas Kuhn’s description of paradigms.)
These three stages of forming a habit are consistent with the concept of free will that is suggested by mental symmetry. The average person thinks that free will is being exercised when a person makes a choice in some major crisis. However, how a person responds in crisis is usually determined by the mental networks that are be triggered and the habits that they provoke. The actual free will is happening in the second stage when choices are being made to pursue goals and habits are being formed. Saying this more simply, free will does not usually occur in a crisis, but is rather exhibited primarily in the many little choices that one makes before crisis, which will determine how a person responds in a crisis. Thus, a crisis usually reveals a person’s character, by bringing core mental networks to light. Concluding, free will is real, but it is limited, and it usually happens before one thinks that it does.
Striosomes
[2019] Recent research has clarified the role played by the striosomes. I suggested previously that the striosomes are related to Exhorter thought. There are two primary reasons for this. First, “striosomes in the anterior striatum have strong inputs from regions related to the limbic system, including parts of the orbitofrontal and medial prefrontal cortex.” The limbic areas are related to Teacher and Mercy thought, and Exhorter connects Teacher and Mercy. Second, “striosomes are equally specialized in their outputs: they project directly to the dopamine-containing neurons of the substantia nigra” (Bloem, 2017). There is a relationship between Exhorter behavior and dopamine.
Graybiel’s lab examined how two regions in the rat medial frontal cortex treated value: “One, originating in the prefrontal region called prelimbic cortex in rodents (here called PFC-PL), projects preferentially to striosomes in the associative striatum. The second, originating in the prefrontal region called in rodents anterior cingulate cortex (here named PFC-ACC), projects preferentially to the matrix compartment of the associative striatum” (Friedman, 2015). The rat PFC-PL is probably the analog of the monkey and human perigenual anterior cingulate cortex. It is right above the rat infra-limbic frontal cortex mentioned earlier.
These two regions of the rat frontal cortex were inhibited one at a time: “The increased choice of the high-cost, high-reward option induced by inhibiting the PFC-PL pathway to striosomes thus appeared specific to the cost benefit conflict context, in which the animals had to accept substantial cost to gain reward and had to regulate their approach and avoidance behaviors. By contrast, inhibition of the predominantly matrix-targeting PFC-ACC pathway significantly affected the animals’ choices in all tasks except the cost-cost task.” In the high-cost, high reward option, the rat could get a sip of high quality chocolate milk, but had to undergo the cost of being shone on by a bright light. The striosomes come into play when dealing with such high value choices. The author concludes “that a medial prefronto-striosomal circuit is selectively active in and causally necessary for cost-benefit decision-making under approach avoidance conflict conditions known to evoke anxiety in humans.”
Looking at this from a cognitive perspective, Contributor thought performs cost-benefit analysis, and we have seen that this is related to the anterior cingulate. A different kind of value analysis comes into play when dealing with strongly emotional subjects which involves an area between the anterior cingulate and the orbitofrontal cortex. This can be seen in the Exhorter person, who is naturally drawn to emotional crisis and may create one if it does not exist. In contrast, the Exhorter person is not naturally good at cost-benefit analysis. The interaction between these two can be seen in the familiar question, “Will you sell your grandmother?” or the statement “Everyone has his price.” Selling involves Contributor cost-benefit. However, one’s grandmother is associated with strong mental networks. Similarly, at some point the price becomes too high for normal Contributor business because one is dealing with mental networks. Speaking from personal experience, I have found that my decision-making changes when the situation becomes sufficiently emotional. I stop trying to optimize the situation and start thinking in terms of protecting core mental networks. When such a transition happens, it feels as if something is stepping in within my mind and advising: “Caution. This is not a normal situation. Be careful how you respond because it will affect core mental networks.” This also provides a technical definition for the biblical concept of ‘spiritual prostitution’. One can define this as applying normal cost-benefit inappropriately to areas where mental networks need to be respected—selling one’s soul in order to gain peripheral wealth.
Friedman found that when Exhorter value is disabled, then Contributor value will be followed regardless of the cost to mental networks: “Intrastriatal inactivation of the striosome-targeting PFC-PL pathway strongly affected decision-making in the cost-benefit conflict task: the animals ran more toward the high-cost option.” “By contrast, inhibition of the predominantly matrix-targeting PFC-ACC pathway significantly affected the animals’ choices in all tasks except the cost-cost task: the animals shifted their choices toward the option with higher reward.” Thus, if Contributor value is disabled, then all that is left is Exhorter excitement: Go for broke. (In the cost-cost task, the benefit was the same, but the cost was different.)
A later paper from the same lab looked at the relationship between striosomes and stress: “The effect of chronic stress on decision-making was strikingly selective. The stressed animals were significantly more likely to choose high-cost/high-reward options than matched controls in the CBC task” (Friedman, 2017). (CBC is cost-benefit conflict.) In other words, stress puts the mind into crisis mode and leaves Exhorter thought in charge of decisions. The Exhorter person is not naturally subtle, but instead tends to make large movements and come up with major decisions. Saying this more carefully, Contributor thought performs cost-benefit analysis guided by mental networks. Exhorter thought performs major changes in which mental networks themselves are altered. Relating this to the striosomes, “a primary long-term effect of chronic stress is a shift in circuit dynamics, leading to a shift in the E-I balance of the cortico-striosomal circuit toward abnormal excitation of striosomes.” (E-I balance is excitation versus inhibition.) Contributor thought uses logic to evaluate choices. In contrast, “Chronic stress selectively affected choices in the CBC task. The utility functions of the animals were profoundly affected, so that the stressed rats and mice maintained approaches to high-cost/high-reward choices over a wide range of options, seemingly failing to make a normal, ‘rational’ transition away from approaching the normally avoided option.”
I should add that the 2015 and 2017 papers both examined striosomes within the rat DMS, the portion of the basal ganglia that is related to goal-oriented behavior.
Another author looked at this same pre-limbic frontal cortex in the rat: “Inspired by bandit tasks for humans, we trained rats to choose freely and without cue guidance between a certain-small reward on the ‘safe-arm’ of a Y-maze or a possible-big reward on the ‘gamble-arm’.” “Strikingly, a major proportion of recorded neurons in the prelimbic cortex significantly increased their firing during the experience of no-reward at the gamble-arm” (Passecker, 2019). Saying this in more detail, “The predictive firing-rate increase of choice-predicting cells precedes an upcoming change to the safe arm on the next trial by several seconds and is highly time restricted to the encounter of no-reward.” In other words, the rat decided to follow Exhorter value and go for the potential big reward. But the reward did not happen. A mental network will generate negative feelings when it experiences input that is inconsistent with its structure. This happened to the rat who experienced no-reward at the gamble-arm. When a mental network generates negative feelings, then this emotional pain can be eliminated by giving the mental network what it wants. For the rat, this meant getting a reward for certain, even if this reward was small.
Graybiel’s lab has recently extended this work to the monkey. The human and monkey analog to the pre-limbic rat frontal region is the perigenual anterior cingulate (pACC). “The presumed rodent homologue of the pACC has been implicated in circuits related to the striosome compartment of the striatum.” “These findings are the first to demonstrate that cortical sites in non-human primates behaviorally identified as modulating conflict decision-making send corticostriatal innervations favoring the striosome compartment over the surrounding matrix… Our results in non-human primates provide causal evidence that circumscribed, behaviorally identified zones in the pACC and cOFC participate in corticostriatal circuits that contribute critically to negative decision-making under challenging cost-benefit decision-making” (Amemori, 2019). In simple language, this region lights up and indicates “Do not sell your grandmother. She is too valuable.”
Kolling has looked at the role that the perigenual anterior cingulate plays in determining value in the human mind. He distinguishes between myopic and prospective value: “The overall value of the environment (sometimes called ‘search value’) can be decomposed into myopic and prospective components. The myopic component corresponds to the average benefits that might immediately follow a decision while prospective value corresponds to future benefits that might accrue over the longer term by taking a particular choice now” (Kolling, 2018). The authors “found that perigenual ACC (pgACC) was among the regions in which there was more activity during decision making (decision phase main effect) in participants who used prospective value more to guide their behavior.” In other words, overall decision activity in pgACC is predictive of the degree to which prospective value will drive participants’ behavior.” Myopic value can be calculated using Contributor knowledge of cost-benefit. Prospective value extends into the realm of mental networks, asking questions such as ‘Can I live with this choice?’ or ‘Is this choice a good fit with my personality?’ For instance, selling one’s grandmother may be profitable in the short term, but in the long term it will lead to significant suffering involving mental networks.
One of the characteristics of a mental network is that it will use emotional pressure to impose its structure upon the mind when it is triggered. Similarly, “One notable bias exhibited by participants was a tendency to over-persevere; participants tended to search more than was optimal given the model-derived estimate of search value (appropriately adapted for progress through the sequence as the search horizon shrunk). Specifically, participants were more likely to search yet again as a function of how often they had already searched earlier in the sequence. Again, we found further support for this effect in the debriefing questionnaire, with participants reporting that they were aware that they sometimes searched more than they should.”
Prospective value also involves Perceiver facts and Server sequences, because these describe long-term consequences: “Prospective value, unlike myopic value, was an important determinant of the strength of interactions between dACC and dlPFC. These interactions occurred at an early point in the decision process and peaked when the increase in prospective value (temporal derivative of prospective value) peaked.” Thus, the dorsal anterior cingulate, which calculates normal Contributor value, is also active when calculating prospective value. But it retrieves facts and sequences from the dorsolateral prefrontal in order to look beyond the immediate situation to long term consequences.
In addition, prospective value engages Exhorter effort. This relates to the distinction between NOW and LATER mentioned earlier: “PgACC, partly through its interactions with ventral striatum, is important for motivating effortful sequential search decisions over time. In contrast to dACC, which carried strong signals related to the planning of an extended behavioral sequence, pgACC activity was more closely related to the motivation to engage in the sequence.” This relates to another trait of the Exhorter person. I mentioned that the immature Exhorter person can be a party animal, going from one excitement to another. The mature Exhorter, in contrast, will encourage people to ‘stick with it’, and will tend to pursue the same option with increased force when encountering opposition. (The partially mature Exhorter will verbally exhort others to ‘hang in there’ while himself moving on to greener pastures.) This Exhorter component is associated with striosomes within the ventral striatum: “Experiments with both humans and rats, in tandem with the present results, suggest pgACC exerts its influence on behavioral motivation via interactions with striosomes, which are prominent in the ventral striatum, through a well-described anatomical circuit.”
Summarizing, we have just looked at how goals are evaluated in the rat dorsomedial striatum (DMS), the part of the basal ganglia that deals with goal-oriented behavior, focusing upon the paralimbic frontal cortex (FPC-PL) and the anterior cingulate. We looked previously at the infralimbic frontal (FPC-IL) and the dorsolateral striatum (DLS), the regions that deal with habits. The paralimbic frontal cortex projects primarily to the striosomes, which provide Exhorter value. Similarly, I found a paper which explicitly states that the infralimbic cortex also projects to the striosomes: “Although the role of the infralimbic–striosome system in habit formation is not clear, it may in fact be engaged in Pavlovian control of instrumental systems.” (Yin, 2006). These two systems do not function in isolation from one another. Instead, the mind mixes and matches between habits and goal-oriented behavior. “The computational processes underlying forward planning are expressed in the anterior caudate nucleus as values of individual branching steps in a decision tree. In contrast, values represented in the putamen pertain solely to values learnt during extensive training. During actual choice, both striatal areas show a functional coupling to ventromedial prefrontal cortex, consistent with this region acting as a value comparator. Our findings point towards an architecture of choice in which segregated value systems operate in parallel in the striatum for planning and extensively trained choices, with medial prefrontal cortex integrating their outputs” (Wunderlich, 2012.) Tying this in with previous papers, Wunderlich used brain imaging on humans. The caudate is the human equivalent of the rat DMS, which performs goal-oriented behavior, while the putamen is the human equivalent of the rat DLS, which carries out habits. This study had people perform tasks in which they could choose between goal-oriented steps and habitual actions. The corresponding part of the basal ganglia was activated depending upon whether a step was goal-oriented or habitual. These different kinds of steps are coordinated by the ventromedial prefrontal cortex. The ventromedial prefrontal is a somewhat vague term that would presumably include the human equivalent of the rat paralimbic and the infralimbic, as well as much of the orbitofrontal. Looking at this cognitively, mental networks are stored within the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, and this region appears to choose which mental networks will be activated. But a mental network can be composed of different kinds of elements, some of which are more habitual, while others are more goal-oriented.
I mentioned earlier that the rat is only capable of concrete thought and that the rat brain equates physical sensation with emotion. Thus, rat experiments are largely limited to physical tasks such as running mazes in order to gain food. However, rat data can be generalized to humans by going beyond purely physical goals to internally generated goals and by recognizing that mental networks can also be based in abstract Teacher thought—hence the discussion earlier about Teacher emotion.
Ventral Striatum
[2019] Our discussion of the basal ganglia so far has focused upon what is known as the dorsal striatum. The monkey and human dorsal striatum are composed of the caudate, which is related to goal-oriented behavior, and the putamen, which is responsible for habits. The ventral striatum is composed of the nucleus accumbens, together with a poorly defined region extending from the bottom of the caudate and putamen. (The basal ganglia is composed of the striatum, as well as the globus pallidus, substantia nigra, and subthalamus.) My general hypothesis is that dopamine and the ventral striatum are connected with Exhorter thought.
I have mentioned that Exhorter thought exerts emotional pressure to push the mind in a certain direction. Contributor thought then chooses either to follow this emotional pressure or else pick some alternative. This pushing and prodding of Exhorter thought is carried out by the nucleus accumbens: “A main function of the NAc is to bias the direction and/or intensity of behavior, thereby increasing the likelihood that certain actions are committed. This function is likely mediated through output pathways from the NAc that ultimately feed into motor systems and nudge behavior in certain directions” (Floresco, 2015). The diagram of mental symmetry shows Exhorter going from Teacher and Mercy to Contributor. This is reflected in the connections of the nucleus accumbens: “Owing in part to its neuroanatomical connectivity, the NAc has been proposed to integrate mnemonic and emotional signals from nodes within the limbic system residing in the frontal and temporal lobes that determine the response priorities of an organism. In turn, the NAc is thought to integrate these signals and turn them into action via output to pallidal and other subcortical motor effector sites through which signal outflow from this region may bias the direction and intensity of behavior.” Summarizing, the nucleus accumbens receives input from the limbic system, which refers to Teacher and Mercy thought with its emotional processing, and then emotionally biases Contributor thought within the dorsal basal ganglia in a certain direction.
Continuing with this paper, the nucleus accumbens can be subdivided into a ‘core’ and a ‘shell’. The core provides motivation, while the shell eliminates distraction: “Considerable evidence suggests the NAc core mediates a type of ‘go’ response toward motivationally relevant stimuli, accumulating evidence suggests that the shell suppresses certain patterns of behavior that may interfere with goal seeking.” Both of these traits are related to Exhorter thought. The Exhorter person will typically focus upon some goal to the exclusion of other alternatives, conveying the impression that the current focus is the most important thing in the world while every other focus is insignificant.
The Exhorter person has a natural tendency to exaggerate. As a result, the Perceiver and Exhorter persons often regarding such other with suspicion: The Perceiver person thinks that the Exhorter person is being loose with the facts, while the Exhorter person thinks that the Perceiver person is trying to squelch his vision. This kind of interaction occurs between the nucleus accumbens and the hippocampus: “When viewing these findings in light of those implicating the NAc shell in suppressing goal-irrelevant behaviors, one potential interpretation is that the shell may refine search behavior guided by the hippocampus by suppressing the tendency to approach locations known not to be associated with reward.” Using cognitive language, the left and right hippocampi perform Server and Perceiver processing. Perceiver facts (and presumably Server sequences) tell Exhorter thought which areas have already been explored. Thus, “disconnection of this circuit caused rats to enter the maze arms with equal frequency, regardless of whether the arm was paired with food.” In other words, Exhorter thought in the rat is excited by the prospect of food and Perceiver thought is responding, ‘Do not go here. You already explored this area and you know that there is no more food.’ One cognitive byproduct of this is that Exhorter thought will naturally be attracted to alternatives where Perceiver facts and Server sequences are weak. Applying this principle to abstract thought, when Exhorter thought is following some emotional vision or theory with limited Perceiver and Server expertise, then this will lead naturally to exaggeration.
This interaction between Exhorter drive and Perceiver knowledge occurs at a more general level as well: “RDLPFC activity mediated less risky decision-making while VST mediated more risky decision-making across drug users and controls.” More specifically, “stimulation of RDLPFC increased risk avoidance and reduced drug cravings in addicts while suppression of RDLPFC activity was associated with riskier decision-making.” In contrast, “VST activity was associated with decreased risk avoidance. Impulsive decisions have been associated with VST activity in healthy subjects” (Yamamato, 2015). (RDLPFC is right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, which is related to Perceiver thought, while VST means ventral striatum.)
Looking at this from a different perspective, the ventral striatum appears to be the core of a mental system motivated by discovery, which one paper refers to as ‘the seeking system’: “The SEEKING system is believed to function as an objectless appetitive system—a ‘goad without a goal’—until the exploratory disposition it produces leads to the discovery and learning of useful regularities… The core structures that comprise the SEEKING system in the rat are the ventral tegmental area (VTA), the nucleus accumbens (NAcc), the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPFC), and the dopaminergic projections originating from the VTA that innervate these areas” (Domenico, 2017). The authors suggest that this system is a ‘goad without a goal’. In contrast, I suggest that there is an emotional goal, which is the discovery of Teacher order-within-complexity.
For instance, the initial research on mental symmetry was done by me, a Perceiver person, helping my older brother, a Teacher person. What typically happened is that my brother would come up with some new theory in an area where my Perceiver facts were weakest, and I would respond by learning more facts in this area. Saying this more carefully, Teacher thought finds general theories emotionally appealing. A lack of Perceiver facts makes it possible for Teacher thought to make sweeping statements, prodded by Exhorter motivation. Perceiver thought wants factual certainty. Thus, I would respond to a new theory by learning Perceiver facts in this area. This would place factual limits upon my brother’s new theory, who would then respond by coming up with another theory in some other area where our factual knowledge was uncertain. The end result was to explore the territory of human thought, and come up with a general theory of order-within-complexity, consistent with the idea of a ‘seeking system’.
Domenico defines this drive to explore as intrinsic motivation and contrasts this with goal-oriented behavior: “Intrinsic motivation refers to the spontaneous tendency ‘to seek out novelty and challenges, to extend and exercise one’s capacity, to explore, and to learn’. When intrinsically motivated, people engage in an activity because they find it interesting and inherently satisfying. By contrast, when extrinsically motivated, people engage in an activity to obtain some instrumentally separable consequence, such as the attainment of a reward, the avoidance of a punishment, or the achievement of some valued outcome.”
Mental symmetry suggests that intrinsic motivation can emerge from Teacher emotion either directly or indirectly. The direct method was just discussed: One explores some topic or region in order to acquire a general understanding characterized by Teacher order-within-complexity. The indirect method functions through Platonic forms. Looking at this in more detail, Perceiver thought organizes Mercy experiences into categories, such as the category of round objects. This ‘complexity without order’ will motivate Teacher thought to come up with a general theory that explains these categories, such as the definition of a circle. This Teacher theory will then lead indirectly to an internal Mercy image that characterizes the simplified essence of the original Mercy experiences, such as the internal Mercy image of a perfect circle. This internal image of simplified perfection is a Platonic form. Goal-oriented behavior becomes intrinsically motivated when specific goals are placed within a framework of Platonic forms. For instance, instead of just developing a new car, one is coming up with a car that resembles more closely one’s internal concept of the ideal car.
The relationship between intrinsic motivation and exploration can be seen in monkeys. Harlow, examining monkeys back in the 1950s “coined the term intrinsic motivation to describe his observation that these primates would persist in playing with mechanical puzzles even in the absence of external rewards. Indeed, he observed that the introduction of rewards for playing led these primates to decrease their spontaneous manipulative explorations, relative to those not exposed to external rewards.”
Going further, the ventral striatum is related to meaningful novelty: “the magnitude of belief updates about task structure (meaningful information), but not pure sensory surprise (meaningless information), are encoded in midbrain and ventral striatum activity” (Nour, 2018). And this is related to dopamine: “Dopamine is thought to play a central role in processing the meaningful information content of observations, which motivates an agent to update their beliefs about the environment.” This can be seen in the Exhorter person. The Exhorter person usually ignores details, but the Exhorter person will focus upon details if they are important. Nour defines what it means for a detail to be important: “Meaningful information can be formally quantified as the degree to which a new observation changes an agent’s prior belief about the current state of the world, given previous observations, to a new (posterior) belief.” In other words, a detail is important if it changes the way I think.
Mental symmetry uses the word ‘belief’ to refer to fundamental facts within Perceiver thought. In contrast, Nour uses ‘belief’ to refer to an internal expectation of what will happen. This expectation is stored within the medial frontal cortex and updated by the ventral striatum: “We found that belief updates were encoded in the medial frontal cortex, including dorsal anterior cingulate. This observation is consistent with previous human and nonhuman primate studies as well as with suggestions that anterior cingulate cortex is active in novel or volatile environments wherein agents need to refine their internal models in light of new observations… The ventral striatum and SN/VTA are implicated in encoding signed reward prediction errors that update action and state values.” (SN/VTA means substantia nigra and ventral tegmental area, which are the primary sources of brain dopamine.) Noor relates this to schizophrenia: “The findings of our study are highly relevant for dopaminergic and neurocomputational theories of schizophrenia. The aberrant salience hypothesis proposes that symptoms such as paranoia arise when unwarranted meaning and behavioral salience is attributed to ambiguous, irrelevant, or unreliable stimuli.” Putting this together, mental networks are stored in the orbitofrontal cortex. The medial frontal cortex interconnects these mental networks. The ventral striatum decides when some mental network needs to be updated in the light of some significant detail. Paranoia happens when mental networks are being updated in the light of details which are not actually significant.
For instance, I have mentioned doing research together with one of my brothers. My other brother suffers from schizophrenia. My schizophrenic brother would make comments such as ‘That shirt is black. Black is evil. We need to get rid of that shirt.’ In other words, my brother was treating the color black as a significant detail and responding at the level of changing mental networks. His mental network of the current environment needed to be protected from being contaminated by the mental network of evil that was triggered by the color black.
We talked previously about Exhorter value. It appears that the ventral striatum is generating emotional urges guided by Exhorter value. This is discussed by a recent paper that tries to reconcile two different functions that have been ascribed to dopamine. The author poses the question, “Is dopamine a signal for learning, for motivation, or both?” “The point is that learning and motivation are conceptually, computationally, and behaviorally distinct - and yet dopamine seems to do both” (Berke, 2018). The author says that the latest evidence contradicts the standard interpretation that long-term levels of dopamine (tonic dopamine) are related to motivation. That is because “there is no direct evidence that tonic dopamine cell firing normally varies over slow time scales. Tonic firing rates do not change with changing motivation.” Instead, “using the finer temporal resolution still of voltammetry we observed a close relationship between sub-second dopamine fluctuations and motivation. As rats performed the sequence of actions needed to achieve rewards, dopamine rose higher and higher, reaching a peak just as they obtained the reward (and dropping rapidly as they consumed it).”
Berke suggests that dopamine is related to effort and resources: “Dopamine provides estimates of how worthwhile it is to expend a limited internal resource, with the particular resource differing between striatal subregions. For ‘motor’ striatum (~DLS) the resource is movement, which is limited because moving costs energy, and because many actions are incompatible with each other… For ‘cognitive’ striatum (~DMS) the resources are cognitive processes including attention (which is limited-capacity by definition) and working memory. Without dopamine, salient external cues that normally provoke orienting movements are neglected, as if considered less attention-worthy… For ‘motivational’ striatum (~NAc) one key limited resource may be the animal’s time. Mesolimbic dopamine is not required when animals perform a simple, fixed action to rapidly obtain rewards.”
Translating this into cognitive language, effort can be defined as the emotional cost involved in continuing with some mental network or else changing from one mental network to another. Motivation is an Exhorter drive to continue with the same mental network. Learning is an Exhorter drive to follow some alternative mental network, often prompted by some significant detail, some ‘salient external clue’. The relationship between these two can be seen in the behavior of the semi-mature Exhorter person. Such an individual will talk extensively about learning and encourage others to learn while himself remaining stubborn and unteachable. However, if such an Exhorter person experiences failure, then for a short time that person will become teachable and truly open to learning. This will typically be followed by the emergence of a new vision, which will then pursued with vigor, and will typically include prodding others to be teachable.
A general Teacher theory makes it possible to combine motivation and learning. That is because one is being motivated to increase the order-within complexity of the theory through learning. The more general the theory, the more it becomes possible to combine motivation with learning. For instance, the theory of mental symmetry is a meta-theory that motivates me to learn about other specific theories. Going further, the order-within-complexity of a theory can be increased by applying this theory within the real world. Thus, abstract learning becomes connected with concrete motivation, because concrete behavior becomes viewed as an illustration of the general theory.
Domenico relates the idea of intrinsic motivation to flow: “Like intrinsic motivation, when people experience flow, the satisfactions they experience are inherent to the activity itself and their behavior is ‘autotelic’ (auto = self, telos = goal) or performed for its own sake.” Using the language of mental symmetry, flow can be defined as Exhorter thought being guided by some mental network without being distracted by other mental networks. One of the characteristics of flow is that one is not aware of the passage of time. When one is in a state of flow, one will look up at the clock and realize that several hours have passed. This relates to the suggestion made by Berke that the limited resource managed by the ventral striatum is time. This would refer to subjective time, which could be defined as how often one is being interrupted by competing mental networks. The more frequent the emotional interruptions, or the more one’s mind wanders, the slower the sense of subjective time.
One aspect of flow is optimal challenge. Researchers “describe the flow state as the subjective experience of engaging ‘just-manageable challenges by tackling a series of goals, continuously processing feedback about progress, and adjusting action based on this feedback’.” This can be seen in the Exhorter person. On the one hand, the Exhorter person hates to be bored. Boredom means no change and no significant details. On the other hand, the Exhorter person hates to be frustrated. Frustration happens when following the current mental network reaches a dead end. Flow lies between these two extremes, in which there are a series of ‘just-manageable challenges’. (This is not an exaggeration. The Exhorter person HATES both boredom AND frustration.)
One study “examined the neural correlates of flow by asking participants to work on mental arithmetic task and comparing experimentally challenging levels with boredom and overload conditions. Results indicated that flow states were associated with increased activity in the left putamen and left IFG, again implicating core regions of both the dopaminergic system and the central executive network.” We saw earlier that the left inferior frontal gyrus is the cortical region that works out Teacher order-within-complexity. If the left IFG is active, then this indicates that flow is being guided by some general theory in Teacher thought. The left putamen would presumably be related to Server habits. The Exhorter person usually regards habits as boring; one Exhorter friend of my brother liked to say that ‘a rut is a grave with the ends kicked out’. However, Domenico adds “that people who are disposed to experience intrinsically motivated flow states in their daily activities have greater dopamine D2-receptor availability in striatal regions, particularly the putamen.” We saw earlier that D2 in the putamen encourages flexible habits, rather than continuing along in a rut with the same habits. When one has habits, then each step has a low emotional cost, but when these habits are flexible, then one is still able to move from one habit to another in a flowing manner.
I have mentioned that Exhorter thought exerts emotional pressure to push the mind in a certain direction and that Contributor thought then chooses either to follow this emotional pressure or else pick some alternative. This pushing and prodding of Exhorter thought is carried out by the nucleus accumbens: “A main function of the NAc is to bias the direction and/or intensity of behavior, thereby increasing the likelihood that certain actions are committed. This function is likely mediated through output pathways from the NAc that ultimately feed into motor systems and nudge behavior in certain directions” (Floresco, 2015). The diagram of mental symmetry shows Exhorter going from Teacher and Mercy to Contributor. This is reflected in the connections of the nucleus accumbens: “Owing in part to its neuroanatomical connectivity, the NAc has been proposed to integrate mnemonic and emotional signals from nodes within the limbic system residing in the frontal and temporal lobes that determine the response priorities of an organism. In turn, the NAc is thought to integrate these signals and turn them into action via output to pallidal and other subcortical motor effector sites through which signal outflow from this region may bias the direction and intensity of behavior.” Summarizing, the nucleus accumbens receives input from the limbic system, which refers to Teacher and Mercy thought with its emotional processing, and then emotionally biases Contributor thought within the dorsal basal ganglia in a certain direction.
Continuing with this paper, the nucleus accumbens can be subdivided into a ‘core’ and a ‘shell’. The core provides motivation, while the shell eliminates distraction: “Considerable evidence suggests the NAc core mediates a type of ‘go’ response toward motivationally relevant stimuli, accumulating evidence suggests that the shell suppresses certain patterns of behavior that may interfere with goal seeking.” Both of these traits are related to Exhorter thought. The Exhorter person will typically focus upon some goal to the exclusion of other alternatives, conveying the impression that the current focus is the most important thing in the world while every other focus is insignificant.
The Exhorter person has a natural tendency to exaggerate. As a result, the Perceiver and Exhorter persons often regard each other with suspicion: The Perceiver person thinks that the Exhorter person is being loose with the facts, while the Exhorter person thinks that the Perceiver person is trying to squelch his vision. This kind of interaction occurs at a specific level between the nucleus accumbens and the hippocampus: “When viewing these findings in light of those implicating the NAc shell in suppressing goal-irrelevant behaviors, one potential interpretation is that the shell may refine search behavior guided by the hippocampus by suppressing the tendency to approach locations known not to be associated with reward.” Using cognitive language, the left and right hippocampi perform Server and Perceiver processing. Perceiver facts (and presumably Server sequences) tell Exhorter thought which areas have already been explored. Thus, “disconnection of this circuit caused rats to enter the maze arms with equal frequency, regardless of whether the arm was paired with food.” In other words, Exhorter thought in the rat is excited by the prospect of food and Perceiver thought is responding, ‘Do not go here. You already explored this area and you know that there is no more food.’ One cognitive byproduct of this is that Exhorter thought will naturally be attracted to alternatives where Perceiver facts and Server sequences are weak. Applying this principle to abstract thought, when Exhorter thought is promoting some emotional vision or theory and there is limited Perceiver and Server expertise, then this will lead naturally to exaggeration.
This interaction between Exhorter drive and Perceiver knowledge occurs at a more general level as well: “RDLPFC activity mediated less risky decision-making while VST mediated more risky decision-making across drug users and controls.” More specifically, “stimulation of RDLPFC increased risk avoidance and reduced drug cravings in addicts while suppression of RDLPFC activity was associated with riskier decision-making.” In contrast, “VST activity was associated with decreased risk avoidance. Impulsive decisions have been associated with VST activity in healthy subjects” (Yamamato, 2015). (RDLPFC is right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, which is related to Perceiver thought, while VST means ventral striatum.)
Looking at this from a different perspective, the ventral striatum appears to be the core of a mental system motivated by discovery, which one paper refers to as ‘the seeking system’: “The SEEKING system is believed to function as an objectless appetitive system—a ‘goad without a goal’—until the exploratory disposition it produces leads to the discovery and learning of useful regularities… The core structures that comprise the SEEKING system in the rat are the ventral tegmental area (VTA), the nucleus accumbens (NAcc), the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPFC), and the dopaminergic projections originating from the VTA that innervate these areas” (Domenico, 2017). The authors suggest that this system is a ‘goad without a goal’. There may be no concrete goal in Mercy thought, but there is an emotional goal in Teacher thought, which is the discovery of Teacher order-within-complexity. (This means that building a general theory for a rat is largely limited to exploring the physical environment.)
Looking at a more abstract example, the initial research on mental symmetry was done by me, a Perceiver person, helping my older brother, a Teacher person. What typically happened is that my brother would come up with some new theory in an area where my Perceiver facts were weakest, and I would respond by learning more facts in this area. Saying this more carefully, Teacher thought finds general theories emotionally appealing. A lack of Perceiver facts makes it possible for Teacher thought to make sweeping statements, prodded by Exhorter motivation. Perceiver thought wants factual certainty. Applying this to our research, I would respond to a new theory by learning Perceiver facts in this area. This would place factual limits upon my brother’s new theory, who would then respond by coming up with another theory in some other area where our factual knowledge was uncertain. The end result was to explore the territory of human thought, and come up with a general theory of order-within-complexity, consistent with the idea of a ‘seeking system’.
Domenico defines this drive to explore as intrinsic motivation and contrasts this with goal-oriented behavior: “Intrinsic motivation refers to the spontaneous tendency ‘to seek out novelty and challenges, to extend and exercise one’s capacity, to explore, and to learn’. When intrinsically motivated, people engage in an activity because they find it interesting and inherently satisfying. By contrast, when extrinsically motivated, people engage in an activity to obtain some instrumentally separable consequence, such as the attainment of a reward, the avoidance of a punishment, or the achievement of some valued outcome.”
Mental symmetry suggests that intrinsic motivation can emerge from Teacher emotion either directly or indirectly. The direct method was just discussed: One explores some topic or region in order to acquire a general understanding characterized by Teacher order-within-complexity. The indirect method functions through Platonic forms. Looking at this in more detail, Perceiver thought organizes Mercy experiences into categories, such as the category of round objects. This ‘complexity without order’ will motivate Teacher thought to come up with a general theory that explains these categories, such as the definition of a circle. This Teacher theory will then lead indirectly to an internal Mercy image that characterizes the simplified essence of the original Mercy experiences, such as the internal Mercy image of a perfect circle. This internal image of simplified perfection is a Platonic form. Goal-oriented behavior becomes intrinsically motivated when specific goals are placed within a framework of Platonic forms. For instance, instead of just developing a new car, one is coming up with a car that resembles more closely one’s internal concept of the ideal car.
The relationship between intrinsic motivation and exploration can be seen in monkeys. Harlow, examining monkeys back in the 1950s “coined the term intrinsic motivation to describe his observation that these primates would persist in playing with mechanical puzzles even in the absence of external rewards. Indeed, he observed that the introduction of rewards for playing led these primates to decrease their spontaneous manipulative explorations, relative to those not exposed to external rewards.”
Going further, the ventral striatum is related to meaningful novelty: “the magnitude of belief updates about task structure (meaningful information), but not pure sensory surprise (meaningless information), are encoded in midbrain and ventral striatum activity” (Nour, 2018). And this is related to dopamine: “Dopamine is thought to play a central role in processing the meaningful information content of observations, which motivates an agent to update their beliefs about the environment.” This can be seen in the Exhorter person. The Exhorter person usually ignores details, but the Exhorter person will focus upon details if they are important. Nour defines what it means for a detail to be important: “Meaningful information can be formally quantified as the degree to which a new observation changes an agent’s prior belief about the current state of the world, given previous observations, to a new (posterior) belief.” In other words, a detail is important if it changes the way I think—if it impacts my mental networks.
Mental symmetry uses the word ‘belief’ to refer to fundamental facts within Perceiver thought. In contrast, Nour uses ‘belief’ to refer to an internal expectation of what will happen. This expectation is stored within the medial frontal cortex and updated by the ventral striatum: “We found that belief updates were encoded in the medial frontal cortex, including dorsal anterior cingulate. This observation is consistent with previous human and nonhuman primate studies as well as with suggestions that anterior cingulate cortex is active in novel or volatile environments wherein agents need to refine their internal models in light of new observations… The ventral striatum and SN/VTA are implicated in encoding signed reward prediction errors that update action and state values.” (SN/VTA means substantia nigra and ventral tegmental area, which are the primary sources of brain dopamine.) Noor relates this to schizophrenia: “The findings of our study are highly relevant for dopaminergic and neurocomputational theories of schizophrenia. The aberrant salience hypothesis proposes that symptoms such as paranoia arise when unwarranted meaning and behavioral salience is attributed to ambiguous, irrelevant, or unreliable stimuli.” Putting this together, mental networks are stored in the orbitofrontal cortex. The medial frontal cortex interconnects these mental networks. The ventral striatum decides when some mental network needs to be updated in the light of some significant detail. Paranoia happens when mental networks are being updated in the light of details which are not actually significant.
For instance, I have mentioned doing research together with one of my brothers. My other brother suffers from schizophrenia. My schizophrenic brother would make comments such as ‘That shirt is black. Black is evil. We need to get rid of that shirt.’ In other words, my brother was treating the color black as a significant detail and responding at the level of changing mental networks. His mental network of the current environment needed to be protected from being contaminated by the mental network of evil that was triggered by the color black.
We talked previously about Exhorter value. It appears that the ventral striatum is generating emotional urges guided by Exhorter value. This is discussed by a recent paper that tries to reconcile two different functions that have been ascribed to dopamine. The author poses the question, “Is dopamine a signal for learning, for motivation, or both?” “The point is that learning and motivation are conceptually, computationally, and behaviorally distinct - and yet dopamine seems to do both” (Berke, 2018). The author says that the latest evidence contradicts the standard interpretation that long-term levels of dopamine (tonic dopamine) are related to motivation. That is because “there is no direct evidence that tonic dopamine cell firing normally varies over slow time scales. Tonic firing rates do not change with changing motivation.” Instead, “using the finer temporal resolution still of voltammetry we observed a close relationship between sub-second dopamine fluctuations and motivation. As rats performed the sequence of actions needed to achieve rewards, dopamine rose higher and higher, reaching a peak just as they obtained the reward (and dropping rapidly as they consumed it).” In other words, dopamine levels are being constantly adjusted in order to provide the right level of motivation.
Berke suggests that dopamine is related to effort and resources: “Dopamine provides estimates of how worthwhile it is to expend a limited internal resource, with the particular resource differing between striatal subregions. For ‘motor’ striatum (~DLS) the resource is movement, which is limited because moving costs energy, and because many actions are incompatible with each other… For ‘cognitive’ striatum (~DMS) the resources are cognitive processes including attention (which is limited-capacity by definition) and working memory. Without dopamine, salient external cues that normally provoke orienting movements are neglected, as if considered less attention-worthy… For ‘motivational’ striatum (~NAc) one key limited resource may be the animal’s time. Mesolimbic dopamine is not required when animals perform a simple, fixed action to rapidly obtain rewards.”
Translating this into cognitive language, effort can be defined as the emotional cost involved either in continuing with some mental network or else in changing from one mental network to another. Motivation is an Exhorter drive to continue with the same mental network. Learning is an Exhorter drive to follow some alternative mental network, often prompted by some significant detail—some ‘salient external clue’. The relationship between these two can be seen in the behavior of the semi-mature Exhorter person. Such an individual excels at motivational talks, in which he emphasizes the need for learning and motivates others to learn from their emotional situations while himself fixates upon his current vision and avoid learning from them. However, if such an Exhorter person experiences failure, then for a short time he will become teachable and truly open to learning. This will typically be followed by the emergence of a new vision, which will then pursued with vigor, and will typically include prodding others to be teachable.
A general Teacher theory makes it possible to combine motivation and learning. That is because one is being motivated to increase the order-within complexity of the theory through learning. The more general the theory, the more it becomes possible to combine motivation with learning. For instance, the theory of mental symmetry is a meta-theory that motivates me to learn about other specific theories. Going further, the order-within-complexity of a theory can be increased by applying this theory within the real world. Thus, abstract learning becomes connected with concrete motivation, because concrete behavior becomes viewed as an illustration of the general theory.
Domenico relates the idea of intrinsic motivation to flow: “Like intrinsic motivation, when people experience flow, the satisfactions they experience are inherent to the activity itself and their behavior is ‘autotelic’ (auto = self, telos = goal) or performed for its own sake.” Using the language of mental symmetry, flow can be defined as Exhorter thought being guided by some mental network without being distracted by other mental networks. One of the characteristics of flow is that one is not aware of the passage of time. When one is in a state of flow, one will look up at the clock and realize that several hours have passed. This relates to the suggestion made by Berke that the limited resource managed by the ventral striatum is time. This would refer to subjective time, which could be defined as how often one is being interrupted by competing mental networks. The more frequent the emotional interruptions, or the more that one’s mind wanders, the slower the sense of subjective time.
One aspect of flow is optimal challenge. Researchers “describe the flow state as the subjective experience of engaging ‘just-manageable challenges by tackling a series of goals, continuously processing feedback about progress, and adjusting action based on this feedback’.” This can be seen in the Exhorter person. On the one hand, the Exhorter person hates to be bored. Boredom means no change and no significant details. On the other hand, the Exhorter person hates to be frustrated. Frustration happens when following the current mental network reaches a dead end. Flow lies between these two extremes, in which there are a series of ‘just-manageable challenges’. (This is not an exaggeration. The Exhorter person ABHORS boredom and HATES frustration.)
One study “examined the neural correlates of flow by asking participants to work on mental arithmetic task and comparing experimentally challenging levels with boredom and overload conditions. Results indicated that flow states were associated with increased activity in the left putamen and left IFG, again implicating core regions of both the dopaminergic system and the central executive network.” We saw earlier that the left inferior frontal gyrus is the cortical region that works out Teacher order-within-complexity. If the left IFG is active, then this indicates that flow is being guided by some general theory in Teacher thought. The left putamen would presumably be related to Server habits. The Exhorter person usually regards habits as boring; one Exhorter friend of my brother liked to say that ‘a rut is a grave with the ends kicked out’. However, Domenico adds “that people who are disposed to experience intrinsically motivated flow states in their daily activities have greater dopamine D2-receptor availability in striatal regions, particularly the putamen.” We saw earlier that D2 in the putamen encourages flexible habits, rather than continuing along in a rut with the same habits. When one has habits, then each step has a low emotional cost, but if these habits are flexible, then one is still able to move from one habit to another in a flowing manner.
Addiction
[2019] Addiction, in contrast, appears to be related to inflexible habits backed up by potent mental networks. Mental symmetry suggests that any theory or habit that continues to be used will eventually turn into a mental network, which will then use emotional pressure to impose its structure upon the mind whenever it is triggered. This transition from habit to habit-backed-up-by-mental-network is described by Graybiel. “Even though we saw the beginning-and-end pileup of activity in the habit striatum, during the initial learning period we saw very little change in the infralimbic cortex. It was not until the animals had been trained for a long time and the habit became fixed that the infralimbic activity changed. Strikingly, when it did, a chunking pattern then developed there, too. It was as though the infralimbic cortex was the wise one, waiting until the striatal evaluation system had fully decided that the behavior was a keeper before committing the larger brain to it” (Graybiel, 2014). Notice the progression. As the rat continues some behavior, it turns into a habit within the dorsolateral striatum and becomes treated as a single chunk of memorized activity. The infralimbic cortex then steps in and treats this habitual chunk of behavior as a mental network.
Going further, if the infralimbic cortex is temporarily inhibited (using the technique of optogenetics), then the habit will not express itself: “We experimented with turning off the infralimbic cortex in rats that had fully acquired the maze habit and had formed the chunking pattern. When we turned off the neocortex just for a few seconds while the rats were running, we totally blocked the habit.” Going still further, “The habit could be blocked rapidly, sometimes immediately, and the habit blockade endured even after the light was turned off. The rats did not stop running in the maze, however. It was just the habitual runs to the devalued reward that were gone. The animals still ran just fine to reach the good reward on the other side of the maze. In fact, as we repeated the test, the rats developed a new habit: running to the good-reward side of the maze no matter what cue they were given. When we then inhibited the same tiny piece of infralimbic cortex, we blocked the new habit—and the old habit instantly reappeared. This return of the old habit happened in a matter of seconds and lasted for as many runs as we tested, without our having to turn off the infralimbic cortex again.” Summarizing, temporarily suppressing the infralimbic cortex blocked the habit from being triggered, and made it possible for a new habit to develop. If this new habit was blocked by suppressing the infralimbic cortex, the old habit reemerged.
Putting this together, the dorsolateral striatum (putamen in the human) gives stability to habits, while the infralimbic cortex (Brodmann 25 or subgenual cingulate in the human) stores the mental networks that give emotional potency to habits. Contributor goal-oriented behavior becomes caught in the middle, driven to perform the activity by the mental network and then mentally dragged through the activity by the rigidity of the habit. This is like walking along a sidewalk and then suddenly being pulled into a car and being driven to some destination.
If one wishes to get rid of a habit, one must approach it at the level of mental networks. That is because the mental network decides whether or not a habit will be performed. Graybiel points this out: “Lesion studies show that the medial prefrontal cortical region, called infralimbic (IL) cortex, in rodents, like the DLS, is necessary for habits to be performed… This work is critical to any account of the role of the striatum in habit formation, as it suggests a form of cortical control that can, on a moment-by-moment basis, determine whether a behavior is performed habitually or not.” And this same principle applies in humans to both physical and mental habits. “Habits of thought, at least in humans, are probably as common as motor habits and, like motor habits, are vulnerable to pathologic distortion. Our view is that such habits of mind can be created by cognitive pattern generators much as habits of action are generated” (Graybiel, 2018).
Mental symmetry suggests that an entire mental network becomes triggered whenever some aspect of the mental network becomes triggered by the environment. Thus, addictive habits are dependent on the environment: “Early animal studies showed that giving drug in a test environment where it never before was experienced can completely prevent the expression of behavioral and neural sensitization, even when it clearly has been induced, whereas a previously drug-associated context enables the sensitized response to fully reappear again when drug is retaken. That is, sensitized ‘wanting’ urges are much more likely to occur in drug-associated contexts than in biomedical neuroimaging situations. Recent neuroimaging evidence indicates that drug-related contexts gate sensitized brain reactions in humans too” (Berridge, 2016). Among other things, this means that breaking a habit is often confused with avoiding the context that triggers the habit. For instance, conservative Islam tries to avoid ‘habits of lust’ from being triggered in male minds by covering up women from head to toe in a burqa and niqaab. However, this does not address mental networks of desire within the male mind, but simply prevents them from being triggered. Similar examples can be found in many religions and cultures.
Addictive habits can be effectively treated by triggering a mental network and then preventing it from expressing itself. This is commonly used for treating OCD: “The final treatment we will consider in the context of habit learning in compulsive disorders is Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP), which works best when used in conjunction with SSRIs in OCD. In ERP, the patient undergoes (I) symptom provocation via exposure to relevant stimuli or situations and (ii) must resist the urge to perform the compulsive act. This treatment does not only produce a reduction in compulsive responding, but also concurrently causes the urge to respond and obsessive thoughts to dissipate. So, for example, if the OCD patient had repetitive thoughts about contamination and compulsively handwashed, the patient would be exposed to dirt or requested to put their hands in toilet water and then prevented from immediately washing their hands” (Gillan, 2016). (An SSRI is a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor, which allows existing serotonin to be more effective. Serotonin appears to enhance Contributor thought, which would empower goal-oriented behavior, making it easier for a person to choose not to carry out a habit.) Looking at this cognitively, a mental network will eventually fall apart if it is repeatedly triggered and then exposed to content that is incompatible with its structure. Saying this another way, the motivation to continue using the mental network will eventually be driven by significant details to turn into learning about other mental networks.
Gillan add that this treatment is effective but unpleasant: “The major problem with both ERP and abstinence is that these therapeutic strategies are not tolerated well by patients.” (Abstinence ‘breaks habitual associations between queues and drug-taking behavior.) Saying this in a politically incorrect manner, ERP is politically incorrect, because it questions mental networks by forcing a person to remain in an ‘unsafe space’, while the guiding principle of political correctness is that people should be given ‘safe spaces’ where mental networks of habit, lifestyle, and culture will not be questioned.
The pushing and prodding of a habit comes from Exhorter thought, dopamine, and the ventral striatum. Berridge initially discovered and promoted the idea that dopamine is related to ‘wanting’ rather than ‘liking’: “Many studies have now accumulated supporting our original conclusion that dopamine mediates desire rather than pleasure, and it is now rather rare to find an affective neuroscientist studying reward who still asserts that dopamine mediates pleasure ‘liking’” (Berridge, 2017). The following quote describes the connection between wanting, dopamine, mental networks, and the ventral striatum: “‘Wanting’ is mediated largely by brain mesocorticolimbic systems involving midbrain dopamine projections to forebrain targets, such as the nucleus accumbens and other parts of striatum. The intensity of the triggered urge depends both on the cue’s reward association and on the current state of dopamine-related brain systems in an individual. This interaction allows ‘wanting’ peaks to be amplified by brain states that heighten dopamine reactivity, such as stress, emotional excitement, relevant appetites or intoxication.” Summarizing, emotional intensity moves the mind away from Contributor value to Exhorter value, making a person more prone to be driven by mental networks triggered by the environment, which are then turned into urges by Exhorter thought within the nucleus accumbens (part of the ventral striatum) through the help of dopamine.
The initial stages of addiction are characterized by goal-oriented behavior, in which Exhorter thought motivates Contributor thought to choose to pursue some desirable mental network. But addiction eventually turns into habits triggered by mental networks, in which cues from the environment trigger a mental network, causing an inflexible habit to be carried out independently of Contributor choice. “Ordinarily, cognitive wanting and incentive salience ‘wanting’ go together, so that incentive salience can give heightened urgency to feelings of cognitive desire. But the two forms of wanting vs. ‘wanting’ can sometimes dissociate, so that incentive salience can occur either in opposition to a cognitive desire or even unconsciously in absence of any cognitive desire. Incentive salience ‘wanting’ in opposition to cognitive wanting, for example, occurs when a recovering addict has a genuine cognitive desire to abstain from taking drugs, but still ‘wants’ drugs, so relapses anyway when exposed to drug cues or during vivid imagery about them.” Notice how cues from the environment are triggering an inflexible habit, emotionally driving the mind to carry out some chunk of habitual behavior. This effect is potent and can last for a long time: “Mesolimbic sensitization renders brain ‘wanting’ systems hyper-reactive to drug cues and contexts, thus conferring more intense incentive salience on those cues or contexts. Consequently, addicts have stronger cue-triggered urges and intensely ‘want’ to take drugs. ‘Liking’, by contrast, need not increase with sensitization, and may even decrease. Sensitized ‘wanting’ can persist for years, even if the person cognitively doesn’t want to take drugs, doesn’t expect the drugs to be very pleasant, and even long after withdrawal symptoms have subsided.” And it is dependent upon mental networks being triggered by the environment: “Surges of intense ‘wanting’ are most likely to be triggered when drug cues are encountered (or imagined) in contexts previously associated with taking drugs.”
Technical Thought versus Mental Networks
[2019] Before we look at OCD, we need to examine the relationship between technical thought and mental networks. We have discussed Contributor value and goal-oriented behavior. A study of personality indicates that both of these are aspects of what mental symmetry calls technical thought, a form of thinking in which Contributor thought controls the mind to function in a manner that is rigorous within some limited area. Concrete technical thought is based in principles of cause-and-effect and uses goal-oriented behavior to pursue some concrete bottom line in Mercy thought. Concrete technical thought is always guided by the rules of some game. This could be a real game, the ‘game’ of some business adventure, or a rat running a maze. Abstract technical thought is based in precise definitions and uses some form of logic to pursue a Teacher goal of elegance, beauty, or simplicity. Mathematics, computer programming, and logic are prime examples of abstract technical thought. Saying this more generally, professional work is based upon abstract technical thought. Thomas Kuhn’s book on paradigms and paradigm shifts describes scientific abstract technical thought, and he says that the typical scientist spends most of his time solving logical puzzles within some paradigm. A paradigm is a general teacher theory, and any Teacher theory that continues to be used will turn into a TMN or Teacher mental network. Summarizing, technical thought is controlled by Contributor thought, it uses the tools of a limited set of Perceiver facts and Server sequences, and it is guided by some mental network.
A dichotomy between technical thought and mental networks can be seen in autism: “People with superior mathematical abilities turn out to have an autism spectrum disorder more often than others do. The empathising-systemising theory proposes that this link is mediated by these individuals’ stronger tendency to systemise (detect patterns, derive rules), along with the fact that mathematics is the perfect example of a rule-based, lawful system” (Bressan, 2018). In contrast, it is well-known that autistic people have problems dealing with the mental networks of social interaction. &ldquoAnxiety and worry about social situations are common experiences for individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). Although the assessment of social anxiety (SA) can prove complex due to diagnostic overlapping and overshadowing, data obtained from epidemiological and clinical samples indicate that up to 50% of young people and adults with ASD have clinically significant SA symptoms” (Spain, 2017).
This dichotomy between technical thought and mental networks can also be seen in gender: “It is a well-known and widely lamented fact that men outnumber women in a number of fields in STEM, including physics, mathematics, and computer science. The most commonly discussed explanations for the gender gaps are discrimination and socialization, and the most common policy prescriptions are targeted at these ostensible causes” (Stewart-Williams, 2019). As the authors point out, it is common today to blame this gap upon social discrimination. However, a more careful examination of this gender gap indicates that is based in a distinction between technical thought and mental networks: “By far the largest sex difference was that for interest in ‘people jobs’ vs. ‘things jobs.’ People jobs are jobs that center on interacting with and helping other human beings; things jobs are jobs that center on working with objects, machines, or abstract rules. Members of both sexes can be found at every point on the people vs. things continuum; however, more men than women exhibit a preference for things jobs, whereas more women than men exhibit a preference for people jobs.” Saying this more simply, “men score somewhat higher than women on tests of systemizing, whereas women score somewhat higher than men on tests of empathizing.” In other words, males tend to emphasize technical thought while females tend to emphasize mental networks. And this is not just a social distinction because “the sex difference in interest in things vs. people seems stubbornly resistant to change.” In fact, the current female led assertion that ‘the gender gaps are discrimination and socialization’ is itself an illustration that female thought tends to emphasize socialization.
I should add that the female bias towards mental networks does not just involve Mercy mental networks of identity and culture. It also includes Teacher mental networks of integrated understanding and verbal skill. (This is important to point out, because Teacher thought and Teacher emotion are not widely recognized.) Female thought is naturally advantaged at empathy and it is also naturally superior at verbal skills. Quoting further from Stuart-Williams: “More males than females exhibit ‘math tilt’ (math > verbal), whereas more females than males exhibit ‘verbal tilt’ (verbal > math).” This distinction emerges very early in life: “The sex difference in mental rotation, for instance, can be detected by three months of age and the sex difference in language ability can be detected by seven months.”
The cognitive distinction between male and female thought appears to be partially independent of the physical distinction between male and female gender. That is because “gay men tend to have spatial and linguistic abilities comparable to those of straight women, whereas lesbians tend to have spatial abilities comparable to those of straight men.” this does not mean that discussions about male and female thought can ignore male and female gender. As the principle of embodiment points out, the structure of the physical body has a substantial impact upon the content of the mind.
Looking in more detail at technical thought, Contributor combines Perceiver and Server. This means that Perceiver and Server regions of the brain become activated when performing the technical thinking of mathematics. “We observed the activation of a restricted and consistent network of brain areas whenever mathematicians engaged in high-level mathematical reflection. This network comprised bilateral intraparietal, inferior temporal, and dorsal prefrontal sites. It was activated by all domains of mathematics tested (analysis, algebra, topology, and geometry) and even, transiently, by meaningless mathematical statements” (Amalric, 2016). Parietal and dorsal prefrontal regions are related to Perceiver and Server thought. Inferior temporal regions interpret the symbols used by mathematics: “Bilateral ventral inferior temporal areas corresponding to the visual number form area were activated by high-level mathematics as well as by the mere sight of numbers and mathematical formulas. The latter activations were enhanced in mathematicians.” Mathematics uses different brain regions than normal speech: “High-level mathematical reasoning rests on a set of brain areas that do not overlap with the classical left-hemisphere regions involved in language processing or verbal semantics. Instead, all domains of mathematics we tested (algebra, analysis, geometry, and topology) recruit a bilateral network, of prefrontal, parietal, and inferior temporal regions… Our results suggest that high-level mathematical thinking makes minimal use of language areas and instead recruits circuits initially involved in space and number.”
Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder
[2019] I suggest that obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) results from inadequate interaction between mental networks and technical thought.
OCD is related to stress: “Individuals with obsessive-compulsive disorder often identify psychosocial stress as a factor that exacerbates their symptoms, and many trace the onset of symptoms to a stressful period of life or a discrete traumatic incident” (Adams, 2018). I suggested earlier that Exhorter value within the striosomes overrides Contributor goal-oriented behavior when sufficiently emotional mental networks become involved. This switching of mental gears occurs when one encounters stress or trauma. Looking at this in more detail, “self-report studies indicate that 25–67% of OCD patients report significant life events (a majority of which are stressful) in relation to the onset of their OCD.”
The stress itself does not cause the OCD. Instead, what matters is the way that one responds to the stress. Adams explains that “a similar stressor can produce disparate effects on two individuals, producing pathology in one but minimal effects, or even enhanced resilience, in another.” Mental networks become hyperactive in OCD: “Hyperactivity has been reported in the medial frontal cortex (mFC) (especially the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) and orbitofrontal cortex (OFC)) and the striatum.” And the ventral striatum becomes more active in a narrow-minded fixated manner. There is “increased functional connectivity between the ventral striatum and mPFC, but decreased global brain connectivity in the ventral striatum/nucleus accumbens.” Finally, there is a shift from goal-oriented behavior to habits: “An overreliance on habitual behaviors has been proposed to be a core mechanism in the development of OCD symptomatology; individuals with OCD exhibit a bias toward inflexible habits, relative to more flexible, goal-directed behavioral control.”
Stated succinctly, I suggest that OCD is treating an unwanted mental network as a paradigm for technical thought rather than using Exhorter thought to change the mental network. “Individuals with OCD interpret their intrusions as more meaningful and distressing and, as such, habitually avoid situations or stimuli that may trigger the intrusions, or perform compulsive rituals in attempts to control obsessions and concomitant negative affect. OCD patients typically feel an urge to perform repetitive compulsions, often under strict, idiosyncratic guidelines; these behaviors are often irrational or performed to extreme excess” (Adams, 2018). The progression is as follows: Instead of addressing the unwanted mental network, is being mentally suppressed and prevented from being triggered by the environment. However, Exhorter thought is focusing upon this unwanted mental network by the presence of ‘significant details’. But Exhorter thought is not being used to change the mental network, but rather to perform technical thought in the light of this mental network. Instead of learning from the mental network, Exhorter thought is being motivated by it. And when the technical thought fails to eliminate the unwanted mental network, then the technical thought is being carried out more carefully, more precisely, and more repetitively. The end result of this repetitive technical behavior is to create a TMN which will then drive the OCD to perform the compulsive rituals.
Looking at this from another perspective, the mental networks in the orbitofrontal cortex that drive OCD are being followed in an isolated manner rather than being connected with other mental networks by the ventromedial prefrontal cortex: “These results point to a smaller inhibitory influence of the vmPFC, known to exert inhibitory effects on networks involved in mainly emotional processing on the OFC in patients relative to controls under positive feedback conditions (Alves-Pinto, 2019).
Saying this another way, OCD patients are deficient at using understanding to guide behavior: “While OCD patients (like controls) correctly updated their confidence according to changes in the environment, their actions (unlike those of controls) mostly disregarded this knowledge. Therefore, OCD patients develop an accurate, internal model of the environment but fail to use it to guide behavior” (Vaghi, 2017). Thus, rational understanding is being acquired, but this is not affecting the mental networks that drive behavior. Using cognitive language, the Perceiver facts and Server sequences of rational understanding are not known with sufficient confidence to be able to survive emotional pressure from the mental networks driving OCD. Another paper on OCD explicitly discusses this idea of placing confidence in knowledge. Using the example of predicting where a tennis ball will land, “if you are not confident that your belief is true, you should be very influenced by a surprising serve, while if you are already quite certain about your belief, it is more likely that a surprising outcome is due to chance and therefore you should update your belief less” (Scholl, 2017). OCD patients are deficient at using confidence to hold on to their beliefs. “OCD patients did not differ in their explicit confidence ratings from healthy controls. However, they did not adapt their behavioral learning rates in the same way. They made large behavioral adjustments even when their explicit reports had indicated high confidence.” Explaining the study more carefully, as the ball in the experiment continued to land in a certain area, the control subjects gained confidence in knowing where the ball would land and they used this knowledge to guide their behavior. In contrast, OCD patients could verbally predict where the ball would land, but this knowledge did not acquire sufficient confidence to guide behavior.
One can describe this cognitive disconnect using the two concepts of ‘myopic value’ and ‘prospective value’ that were mentioned earlier in this essay (Kolling, 2018). The OCD patient is following myopic value in order to carry out the compulsions in a technically proficient manner. Myopic value involves Contributor thought and the dorsal anterior cingulate. “The myopic average value of alternatives and value of the best alternative are reflected in the activity of dACC.” But the OCD patient is not using prospective value to question the value of the mental networks that are driving the obsessive-compulsive behavior. That is because prospective value requires factual input from the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex: “Prospective value, unlike myopic value, was an important determinant of the strength of interactions between dACC and dlPFC.” Consistent with this, electrical stimulation of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex can reduce obsessive-compulsive behavior (Ghaffari, 2018; Park, 2017). It is not clear from these papers precisely how the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex should be electrical stimulated, but these papers do demonstrate that dorsolateral prefrontal stimulation has an effect upon OCD behavior.
Looking at this psychologically, “A special kind of therapy called Cognitive Behavior Therapy (CBT) is the treatment of choice for OCD. CBT involves the use of two evidence-based techniques: Exposure and Response Prevention therapy (ERP) and Cognitive Therapy (CT).” We have already seen that ERP challenges the mental networks that are driving the behavior. CT examines and questions the implicit beliefs that lie behind these mental networks, helping the dorsolateral prefrontal to bring factual perspective to the emotional urges. Going further, initial evidence indicates that cognitive behavior therapy can improve social skills in autistic individuals. “Participants (three adults and one child) were diagnosed with ASD [autism spectrum disorder] and social anxiety disorder. There were commonalities in interventions and techniques used: participants were encouraged to identify and challenge negative thoughts, enter anxiety provoking social situations, and develop new ways of coping. Unlike CBT for SA in non-ASD individuals, treatment also included social skills interventions. Outcomes were assessed using self- or informant-reports. Improvements in social anxiety and depressive symptoms, social skills, and activity levels were noted” (Spain, 2017).
Serotonin
[2019] Mental symmetry suggests that dopamine is related to Exhorter, serotonin to Contributor, and noradrenaline to Facilitator. I noticed this relationship back in the 1980s. There has been good evidence connecting dopamine with Exhorter thought, but the evidence for the other two monoamines has been lacking. However, recent papers support the idea of connecting serotonin with Contributor thought and noradrenaline with Facilitator thought. This section will look at serotonin and the next section will look at noradrenaline.
The three composite styles of Exhorter, Contributor, and Facilitator all use information that is generated by the four simple styles of Teacher, Server, Mercy, and Perceiver. Studying personality indicates that the composite styles handle the same information as the simple styles but process this information in a different manner. The simple styles emphasize the information itself while the composite styles focus upon using information to drive thought and behavior. The three monoamines clarify what is meant by this distinction. The four simple styles appear to be consciously aware of processing within the cortex. In contrast, the three composite styles use subcortical processing to manipulate cortical information from a distance while using the three monoamines of dopamine, serotonin, and noradrenalin to modify the way that the cortex handles information.
Serotonin is referred to as 5-HT. There are many different serotonin receptors, but the two primary varieties are 5-HT1A and 5-HT2A. These two have quite different effects. A recent paper suggests “that serotonin neurotransmission enhances two distinct adaptive responses to adversity, mediated in large part by its two most prevalent and researched brain receptors: the 5-HT1A and 5-HT2A receptors. We propose that passive coping (i.e. tolerating a source of stress) is mediated by postsynaptic 5-HT1AR signalling and characterised by stress moderation. Conversely, we argue that active coping (i.e. actively addressing a source of stress is mediated by 5-HT2AR signalling and characterised by enhanced plasticity (defined as capacity for change). We propose that 5-HT1AR-mediated stress moderation may be the brain’s default response to adversity but that an improved ability to change one’s situation and/or relationship to it via 5-HT2AR-mediated plasticity may also be important – and increasingly so as the level of adversity reaches a critical point. We propose that the 5-HT1AR pathway is enhanced by conventional 5-HT reuptake blocking antidepressants such as the selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), whereas the 5-HT2AR pathway is enhanced by 5-HT2AR-agonist psychedelics” (Carhart-Harris, 2017).
These two responses can both be seen in the Contributor person. We looked at the relationship between Contributor thought and technical thought. Technical thought is based upon a limited collection of well defined Perceiver facts and Server sequences—the ‘rules of the game’, and technical thought is always limited to some restricted playing field where these rules apply. Technical thought is emotionally guided by the mental network of some Mercy goal or Teacher paradigm, and Contributor thought chooses between the alternatives suggested by Exhorter thought. 5-HT1A enhances the ability of Contributor thought to keep the mind within the confines of the current ‘game’ without losing control to emotions; it prevents the mind from succumbing to stress. One could refer to this as Contributor confidence—the ability to pursue some plan without losing control to the rest of the mind.
There is also the creative Contributor who does not limit the mind to rigorous technical thought but rather functions in a manner that is out-of-control, allowing Exhorter thought to come up with ideas that lie ‘outside of the box’ of the current ‘game’. This creative mode of Contributor thought appears to be enhanced by 5-HT2A.
The paper by Carhart-Harris describes the function of these two varieties of serotonin in more detail. Looking first at the trait of confidence, if serotonin is reduced, then this gives Exhorter thought freedom to be driven by strong mental networks: “One of the most reliable behavioural effects of reducing 5-HT transmission in the brain is to increase impulsive and aggressive behaviours.” This aspect of Contributor control is related to 5-HT1A: “There are solid grounds to believe that the anti-aggression and impulsivity effects of 5-HT are mediated by postsynaptic 5-HT1A receptor signalling.” Contributor control is necessary when one must make choices to avoid unpleasant consequences: “Punishment is one of the most effective means of stimulating 5-HT release. Several studies have demonstrated that anxiety and stress can profoundly increase synaptic 5-HT. Consistent with previous theories, it seems reasonable to suppose that brain 5-HT functions to alleviate psychological distress under adverse conditions – thereby improving coping and resilience.” Saying this more generally, “there is a wealth of evidence that 5-HT is involved in the regulation of mood.”
5-HT2A has quite a different effect. As another author points out, “There is extensive evidence that the 5-HT2A receptor is responsible for the neuropsychological effects of serotonergic hallucinogens in animal models used for experimentation as well as in human subjects… Although hallucinogens do not bind exclusively to 5-HT2A receptors (LSD binds to most 5-HT receptor sub-types as well as to dopaminergic and adrenergic receptors), it has been evidenced in both humans and experimental animals that the activation of 5-HT2A receptors is necessary to generate hallucinogenesis and a related behavioral response in animals” (López-Giménez, 2018).
Carhart-Harris suggests that 5-HT2A puts the mind in a more flexible state: “One may think of 5-HT2AR signalling as functioning to induce an entropic state characterised by enhanced flexibility and malleability during which work can be done that, upon cooling, may leave a lasting change.” This makes it possible for the mind to think ‘outside of the box’: “Reports of ‘over-view’ type insights, i.e. an improved ability to see the ‘bigger picture’ under psychedelics, are relatively common among user, participant and patient reports and ‘aha’ type insights have been described.” Saying this another way, “psychedelics are strongly associated with unconventional thinking, vivid imagery and imagination and suggestibility.”
The cognitive effect of 5-HT2A is highly dependent upon the context: “The main hypothesis of this article is that the therapeutic action of psychedelics is fundamentally reliant on context – both in the psychological and environmental sense. It is argued that neglect of context could render a psychedelic experience not only clinically ineffective but also potentially harmful – accounting, in part, for the negative stigma that still shackles these drugs” (Carhart-Harris, 2018). In other words, 5-HT2A can be compared to government giving freedom to citizens. The results will be dependent upon what the citizens want to do. Similarly, 5-HT2A has no direct impact upon either mental networks or Exhorter drives. Instead, it steps back in Contributor thought, giving Exhorter thought freedom to pursue mental networks.
This indirectly increases the level of dopamine: “In the mesolimbic system, 5-HT2AR activation facilitates DA cell activity and DA release… 5-HT2AR may also indirectly influence DA release through modulation of excitatory inputs from the PFC. Both systemic and direct administration of DOI into the PFC resulted in increased firing rates and DA release in the VTA” (Howell, 2014). (DOI is another psychedelic drug that enhances brain serotonin). I searched for a paper that connects the activity of 5-HT2A with the striosomes and all I could find was the following phrase in the abstract of an older pay-walled paper: “These results confirm the presence of 5-HT2A receptors in human striosomes” (López-Giménez, 1999). Thus, 5-HT2A could be interpreted as Contributor thought requesting Exhorter thought to focus upon mental networks.
Carhart-Harris seems to be advocating the use of LSD. Similarly, a 2019 article in Scientific American reports micro-dosing on LSD as “the ‘productivity hack’ popular among Silicon Valley engineers and business leaders. Microdosers take regular small doses of LSD or magic mushrooms. At these doses, they don’t experience mind-bending, hallucinatory trips, but they say they get a jolt in creativity and focus that can elevate work performance, help relationships, and generally improve a stressful and demanding daily life.” Notice that this micro-dosing is occurring among engineers and leaders who use technical thought. Likewise, Wikipedia describes engineers on LSD coming up with more creative solutions.
Mental symmetry suggests that micro-dosing LSD is dealing with the symptom rather than addressing the cause. The fundamental problem is that Western scientific thought emphasizes technical thought in a specialized, objective manner which ignores Teacher emotions and suppresses Mercy feelings. The solution is to extend rational thought to the emotional realm, which describes the path being followed by mental symmetry. This will naturally cause a person to become more creative and emotionally open. Micro-dosing LSD artificially encourages technical thinkers to use technical thought in a more open-minded manner. Using an analogy, technical thought imprisons the mind within the walls of some ‘game’. Micro-dosing on LSD cracks open the door to the prison and allows the prisoners to run outside for a while. Personal transformation, in contrast, builds bridges between the various prisons of technical thought and focuses upon the task of building a home for personal identity.
We have looked at Contributor confidence and Contributor creativity. The Contributor person can also function in a rigid manner which could be described as Contributor control. This is under the control of the subthalamus, which is an aspect of the indirect path through the basal ganglia. The subthalamus carries out two related functions, which are “first that the subthalamic nucleus plays a role in adjusting response thresholds and speed-accuracy trade-offs and second that it is involved in reactive and proactive inhibition and conflict resolution” (Obeso, 2014).
The second role can be stated more simply as “a ‘no go’ or ‘hold your horses’ signal” and is controlled by what is referred to as the hyperdirect pathway: “The hyperdirect pathway connects the cortex with the subthalamic nucleus (STN) providing the quickest route for the cortex to influence the inhibitory output from the basal ganglia and to, in turn, regulate and fine-tune cortical activity.” The term ‘hyperdirect’ refers to the speed of this pathway; it could be compared to a hotline through which the cortex can call up the basic ganglia and order ‘hold your horses’. The hyperdirect pathway is actually an aspect of the indirect pathway, because “subthalamotomy disrupts the hyperdirect and indirect, but not the direct pathway”.
The first role involves a trade-off between speed and accuracy. One treatment for Parkinson’s disease is to damage the subthalamus. This is known as a subthalamotomy. “Patients with right subthalamotomy had significantly faster ‘critical’ Go reaction times with their contralesional hand than unoperated patients and did not differ from controls, suggesting that their speed of response initiation was ‘normalized’ to the level of controls. However, accuracy was compromised as patients with either right or left-sided subthalamotomy made significantly more discrimination errors than unoperated patients and controls. This profile of enhanced speed coupled with greater discrimination errors suggests subthalamotomy had an impact on speed-accuracy tradeoffs.”
The subthalamus is also related to speech fluency, consistent with the idea that the basal ganglia are also involved in abstract thought (Lipski, 2018). The precise role carried out by the subthalamus in speech is still uncertain and the effect of DBS (deep brain stimulation) depends upon the frequency at which the subthalamus is electrically stimulated (Grover, 2019).
Summarizing, the subthalamus makes it possible to function in a manner that is slower but also more careful. This is an important function which makes it possible to vary one’s behavior between emphasizing speed or accuracy. Study of personality indicates that there is a subset of controlling Contributor person who continually functions in a manner that is slow, deliberate, and pedantic, which could be compared to driving a car with one’s foot on the brake.
Thalamus
The final stage of the ‘three stage mental pump’ of Exhorter to Contributor to Facilitator involves the thalamus. Information from the basal ganglia, where Exhorter and Contributor processing occurs, passes through the thalamus on its way back to the cortex. In addition, the thalamus sends and receives information from most of the cortex. As well, four of the five senses (not smell) pass through the thalamus on their way to the cortex.
The most studied area of the thalamus is the lateral geniculate nucleus, through which visual information passes on its way from the eyes to the visual cortex at the very back of the brain. Research has shown that this area can change the relative levels of the visual signal, allowing the mind to focus upon something in the visual field and selectively enhance it. It is thought that the rest of the thalamus operates in a similar manner.
All of this matches precisely the behavior of the Facilitator person. He is conscious in the mental module that is the observer of the mind. He can see everything that is happening in the mind and can adjust the relative levels of all of this activity. While his mental awareness appears to be very broad, it is not very deep. In other words, he seems to be mentally ‘standing on the sidelines’, watching and adjusting everything but unable to tune in closely on any specific activity.
The Facilitator person is also more aware of his physical senses than the other cognitive styles. But, this is not a deep emotional awareness. Instead, it is as if he is watching himself experience physical sensation. In addition, the Facilitator person is able, to some extent, to control his sensation of physical pain, and it is known that the thalamus has some control over the intensity of pain.
Finally, the Facilitator person excels as an executive secretary to the Contributor person, taking the plans of the Contributor person and adjusting them to suit circumstances and people.
Surrounding the thalamus lies the thalamic reticular nucleus, which intercepts and modulates all traffic heading between cortex and thalamus. This is the most likely candidate for the Facilitator processor, for it appears to do precisely what the Facilitator person does. As this paper quotes, “if the thalamus is the gateway to cortex, then the thalamic reticular nucleus is the guardian of the gateway.”
The reticular thalamus appears to be most sensitive to change, responding more strongly to information that is new. Similarly, the Facilitator person demands continual, incremental change. He is continually making small adjustments, and when change is no longer possible, then he moves on to something else.
And what controls the ‘guardian of the gateway’? Research has shown that the reticular thalamus appears to be under the control of the dorsolateral frontal cortex. In other words, Facilitator thought is guided by the internal world of the Perceiver and Server.
This explains a major aspect of Facilitator behavior. The Facilitator person blends and balances. But, he can only do this if his mind is anchored by fixed reference points. He wants freedom within structure. When there is chaos, he calls for structure; when there is rigidity, he calls for freedom. The core of mental structure comes from dorsolateral frontal cortex, the location for the internal world of Perceiver belief and Server skill.
This faces the developing Facilitator person with a paradox. On the one hand, he needs solid structure to guide his thinking. On the other hand, this solid structure can only enter his mind by successfully passing through the thalamic Facilitator filter, which naturally looks for consensus and tends to block out all information that is ‘too extreme’. So, the Facilitator person needs extreme information to think clearly, but his natural tendency is to exclude any extreme information from entering his mind.
[2019] Turning now to more recent papers, the thalamus plays the role of ‘facilitating’ the cortex: “The thalamus regulates functional connectivity within and between cortical regions, determining how a cognitive process is implemented across distributed cortical microcircuits. Within this framework, thalamic circuits do not necessarily determine the categorical content of a cognitive process (e.g., sensory details in feature-based attention), but rather provide a route by which task-relevant cortical representations are sustained and coordinated” (Nakajima, 2017). Notice that the thalamus is not processing information, but rather balancing and coordinating the way that the cortex processes information. In a similar manner, Facilitator thought mixes and balances processing that is happening within other cognitive modules.
The Facilitator person is good at connecting one person with another, and is naturally talented at managing people and projects. Likewise, Nakajima says that “this newly recognized thalamic role, as a master regulator of functional cortical connectivity, places this subcortical structure closer to the center of cognitive control.”
Facilitator thought becomes prominent in a group or society when one must mediate between many different viewpoints. A similar role can be seen in the medial dorsal thalamus (MD), the part of the thalamus that connects with the frontal lobes: “Current evidence suggests the MD is particularly important during rapid trial-by-trial associative learning and decision-making paradigms that involve multiple cognitive processes” “The cognitive deficits shown in animals with loss of MD, and specifically MDmc in primates, seem to be associated with tasks that require information from multiple cognitive processes to be linked together for successful, optimal performance” (Mitchell, 2015).
Stated more generally, Facilitator thought has a wide awareness, but this awareness is limited to the current context. Thus, Facilitator thought notices when something does not fit into the current context. This can be seen in another part of thalamus, known as CM-Pf (central median and parafascicular): “CM-Pf neurons are strongly activated at sudden changes in behavioral context, such as switches in action-outcome contingency or sequence of behavioral requirements, suggesting that their activity may represent change of context operationalized as associability” (Yamanaka, 2018).
Exhorter thought notices significant details. Facilitator thought, in contrast, recognizes the unexpected, whether it is significant or not: “The activity of CM-Pf neurons, however, is different from that of dopamine neurons, because it is similar whether or not the unexpected stimuli are associated with reward… The CM-Pf receives information about environmental events coming through multimodal sensory channels, is sensitive to unexpectedness and surprise, and has no specific sensitivity to reward.”
Facilitator thought also recognizes unexpected changes in the rules or in social norms: “Neurons in the CM-Pf are strongly activated at changes in behavioral situations such as altered action-outcome contingencies and transitions in behavioral requirements, suggesting the encoding of the associability of behavioral context, an average of prediction errors generated across the past few trials.” The Facilitator person is often attracted to a bureaucracy, in which rules are followed in a consistent manner, regardless of whether these rules are significant or not. Similarly, the Facilitator person naturally becomes an enforcer of social norms.
Facilitator thought mixes and balances, emphasizing certain aspects of thought, while downplaying others. This type of processing involves an interplay between the thalamus, noradrenaline, and the locus coeruleus (LC), which is the primary source of brain noradrenaline. (NA is short for noradrenaline, which is also referred to as norepinephrine, or NE). “Through direct activation of the LC-NE system, we found that elevated LC-NE activity causes a dramatic increase in thalamic feature selectivity and improvement in information transmission. Our results strongly suggest that LC-activation-induced improvement of thalamocortical information transmission is primarily mediated by NE regulation of intrathalamic circuit dynamics via the direct action of NE on α-adrenergic receptors in both the VPm and TRN. LC activation improved thalamic information transmission in both anesthetized and awake animals, suggesting LC-NE improvement of thalamic information transmission is a general phenomenon” (Rodenkirch, 2019). (TRN is the reticular thalamus, while VPm refers to the ventral posteromedial nucleus of the thalamus, which encodes whisker movement in the rodent.)
We saw earlier that Contributor thought is guided by value within the anterior cingulate. In contrast, the Facilitator person often uses experimentation, in which random changes are made and the results are evaluated. For instance, Thomas Edison was a Facilitator person. When developing the light bulb, Edison “tested the carbonized filaments of every plant imaginable, including baywood, boxwood, hickory, cedar, flax, and bamboo. He even contacted biologists who sent him plant fibers from places in the tropics. Edison acknowledged that the work was tedious and very demanding, especially on his workers helping with the experiments.” This switch from goal-oriented behavior to random experimentation is governed by noradrenaline from the locus coeruleus. Rats “can switch to a ‘stochastic’ mode when challenged with a competitor that they cannot defeat by counterprediction. In this mode, outcomes associated with an animal’s actions are ignored, and normal engagement of anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) is suppressed. Using circuit perturbations in transgenic rats, we demonstrate that switching between strategic and stochastic behavioral modes is controlled by locus coeruleus input into ACC” (Tervo, 2014). This same kind of transition occurs within the human mind: “Studies measuring pupillary responses in humans—a known consequence of LC activation—suggest that levels of noradrenergic signaling reflect the degree of uncertainty about the accuracy of one’s internal model, with high levels associated with the discarding of an unreliable model and low levels linked to stabilization of an accurate model.”
We also saw earlier that the frontopolar cortex uses patterns and analogies to build connections between different contexts. Exploration can be guided by a meta-theory within the frontopolar cortex. For instance, this describes the approach taken by mental symmetry. If the right frontopolar cortex is electrically suppressed, then random exploration will take over. “We used continuous theta-burst TMS to selectively inhibit right frontopolar cortex (RFPC) in participants performing the ‘Horizon Task’, an explore-exploit task specifically designed to separate directed and random exploration. Using this task we find evidence that inhibition of RFPC selectively inhibits directed exploration while leaving random exploration intact” (Zajkowski, 2017).
Exhorter thought provides motivation to reach some goal. Facilitator thought, in contrast, makes the best of the existing situation, optimizing within the current context. This distinction can be seen with dopamine and noradrenaline: “Dopaminergic neurons compute outcome value by combining reward and effort-cost information, whereas the activity of noradrenergic neurons increase when monkeys mobilize resources to meet a physical challenge and overcome a difficulty.” “Monkeys decided to forgo trials requiring high effort costs and small rewards. Our neuronal data indicate a specific implication of SNc neurons in coding such value-based decision making. Conversely, when monkeys committed to perform the trial, they faced the imposed difficulty by producing the required amount of force in conjunction with an activation of both LC neurons and the autonomic system. This suggests a specific implication of NA neurons in mobilizing resources to energize behavior and face the challenge at hand.”(Varazzani, 2015). (SNc is substantia nigra pars compacta, which is the source of dopamine for the caudate and putamen.)
The Facilitator person who is in a physical crisis typically finds that thinking clarifies and decisions become obvious. This mental clarifying is related to noradrenaline: “Our results provide the first empirical support for the idea that a momentary increase in arousal engages the LC to selectively process and store prioritized information regardless of its intrinsic emotionality. Our behavioral results revealed that threat-induced arousal amplified the effects of top-down priority such that memory for goal-relevant stimuli was selectively enhanced” (Clewett, 2018). Saying this more generally, Facilitator thought is enabled by a physical crisis, whereas Exhorter thought becomes enabled by an emotional crisis: “The notion that our pupil and LC activity results reflect increased attentional modulation rather than emotional arousal, per se, aligns with extant neurobiological models of emotional memory. Specifically, converging theoretical and empirical work demonstrate that the immediate benefit of attention on emotional memory are dissociable from longer-term emotional memory enhancements.”
The dopamine system no longer functions in Parkinsonian patients. However, movement can still be enabled temporarily by a physical crisis. This is known as paradoxical kinesia. “Although slowness of movement is a typical feature of Parkinson’s disease (PD), it has been suggested that severely disabled patients remained able to produce normal motor responses under particular circumstances. For instance, we have all heard the stories of these wheelchair-confined patients who, upon hearing someone shout ‘fire’ in a building, run out as rapidly as all the other nonparkinsonian occupants, only to ‘freeze’ again once in a safe area. During the past decades, such anecdotal reports of normal motor behavior in PD patients have been echoed by more controlled experimental findings” (Ballanger, 2006). Paradoxical kinesia is not just a feature of Parkinson’s disease but rather enabling a brain circuit that is present in all individuals: “These observations show that paradoxical kineses are not a hallmark of PD or a byproduct of basal ganglia dysfunctions, but a general property of the motor system.”