[Paleopsych] What's the survival value of post traumaticstressdisorder?

HowlBloom at aol.com HowlBloom at aol.com
Wed Apr 27 05:26:26 UTC 2005


 
 
The need to tell the tale of the horrors you've seen and the relief you get  
when you tell the tale a hundred times tends to support the hypothesis that 
the  symptoms of post traumatic stress disorder are disabling to the victim but  
beneficial to society, beneficial to the social group.  This need to  blurt 
out the worst tends to support the idea that the post traumatic  stress 
disorder victim becomes a marker of danger, a "do not go here"  sign.
 
And Alice, I believe, is right.  Most adaptive things start out as  
accidents, as side effects of something else.  But once these traits prove  useful, 
evolution favors their retention.  Then they take on a life of  their own.
 
However if what I've said above is true and most adaptive things start out  
as accidents, how do we account for the smart evolution, the guided evolution,  
the evolution-that-has-intelligence-built-in that Eshel has chronicled in  
bacterial colonies?  Does an agglomeration of  cells in something as  simple as 
a volvox have a collective intelligence?  It must.  If I  remember my Lynn 
Margulis rightly, early multicellular organisms--Carchesium and Zoothamnium-- 
were wired together  via something that preceded a nervous system.  If a 
Carchesium or Zoothamnium has roughly the number of  cells in a volvox, that would 
make a community of roughly 65,536 interconnected individuals, far more than 
enough  microprocessors to make a supercomputer.  
 
Let's put it differently.   
 
A cell is a collective of  roughly  300 million macromolecules, smart 
molecules.  In it is a genome which Eshel  says is a sophisticated central processor. 
 That central processor,  like a supercomputer, is also set up as a parallel 
processor.  Between 400  and 35,000 genes work simultaneously to solve the 
problems of the cell.   One of the simplest multicellular organisms we know is 
the Volvox, which, as I  just mentioned, has 65,536 cells.  That gives even a 
volvox a total of  19,660,800,000 smart elements sharing their opinions. 
 
That could  make for quite a collective intelligence.  It could even make for 
what  Eshel sees in bacteria--a purposeful intelligence.  An intelligence 
wired  to overcome obstacles and survive.   An intelligence made from a  team 
that participates in larger teams.  An intelligence designed for  survival of the 
group and for survival of itself simultaneously.  An  intelligence smart 
enough to feel that in times of crisis, you have to  make a sacrifice.  If you 
want the traits of your tribe or of the organism  you're a part of to survive, 
sometimes you have to make small sacrifices,  sometimes you have to make big 
ones.  
 
An  intelligence smart enough to sense that when you've hit something 
dangerous  or something simply confusing, your job is to share it with the  group.  
Your job is to raise a warning even if you suffer from  becoming an ambulating 
signboard.  Your job is to alert the group to a new  problem.  By advertising 
the problem, you, in fact, become a vital  starting point to the solution. 
 
There's more.  Remember Jeff Hawkins nested hierarchies?  Nested  
hierarchies, by the way, showed up in E.O. Wilson's 1976 Sociobiology.   Knowing what a 
great idea-collector and synthesizer Wilson is, I'm sure he  got the term and 
the idea from a previous source.  Meaning Wilson and  Hawkins wors the way the 
cells in you and me or in a bacterial  colonies operate.  They operate the way 
Alice Andrews, Lynn Johnson,  and I operate in this dialog--as gatherers of 
threads of information  that we twiddle with, we knit with, we make new knots 
and stitches  with, and in the raggedy-ended new weave made with our sewing,  
knitting, and knotting, we pass a swatch of half-made fabric along to you  and 
back to me.
 
But I digress.  Hawkins' basic principle is that a group of things  work 
together to detect a tune and name it.  Then they pass that name  upward to the 
five cortical layers above them and to the cell  assemblies they gossip with 
horizontally in the brain.
 
Smart groups of cells work in a similar nesting of hierarchies.  400  genes 
laboring  together form something greater, a genome.   300 million 
macromolecules working together form a cell.   65,536  cells working together and 
competing with each other form a simple  organism.  A group of organisms working 
together and competing  with each other form a colony.  A group of colonies of 
different species  working together and warring with each other  form an 
ecosystem.  A  group of ecosystems working and warring together form a planetary 
system, a  Gaian system.
 
At every level the elements working and warring are likely to make a  
collective intellect.  
 
And the goal of that collective intellect is to survive.  How do we  know 
this?  Every form of organism, colony, and ecosystem on this planet  today has 
managed to make it through many a woe and many a difficulty, yet has  managed to 
reproduce itself successfully, whether it's done so for a  mere 100,000 
years, as in the case of Homo sapiens, or for 3.5 billion  years, as in the case of 
cyanobacteria.
 
How have life-forms pulled this off?  There's a good chance that  they've 
done it with purposive intelligence, one of nature's best survival  mechanisms.
 
Compare the idea that post traumatic stress disorder makes us modules in a  
collective intelligence, makes us warning signals on the dashboard of life, 
with  the following quote from Jeff Hawkins' On Intelligence.  Keep something  
interesting in mind--the way that the post traumatic stress disorder sufferer  
keeps rerunning his or her traumatic memories. The way he has to repeat  those 
memories to others to get relief.  On to the quote:
 

"Instead of only passing information forward...auto-associative memories  fed 
the output of each neuron back into the input....  When a pattern of  
activity was imposed on the artificial neurons, they formed a memory of this  
pattern. ...To retrieve a pattern stored in such a memory, you must provide  the 
pattern you want to retrieve. ....The most important property is that you  don't 
have to have the entire pattern you want to retrieve in order to  retrieve it.  
You might have only part of the pattern, or you might have  a somewhat 
messed-up pattern.  The auto-associative memory can retrieve  the correct pattern, 
as it was originally stored, even though you start with a  messy version of it. 
 It would be like going to the grocer with half  eaten brown bananas and 
getting whole green bananas in return. ...Second,  unlike mist neural networks, an 
auto-associative memory can be designed to  store sequences of patterns, or 
temporal patterns.  This feature is  accomplished by adding time delay to the 
feedback. ...I might feed in the  first few notes of 'Twinkle, Twinkle Little 
Star' and the memory returns the  whole song.  When presented with part of the 
sequence, the memory can  recall the rest." Jeff Hawkins, Sandra Blakeslee.  
On Intelligence.   New York: Times Books, 2004: pp 46-47

Give me a choir of post-traumatic stress disorder victims of different  
generations--Korean War Vets, Viet Nam War Vets, Desert Storm War Vets, and our  
current Iraq War Vets, and I bet you this.  It is very likely that we get a  
melody, a variation on a theme, a temporal sequence available to you and  me.  
Especially when many of these vets decide to write their novels and  those 
novels are turned into films.
 
What is the tune they are singing?  What is the sequence they're  alerting us 
to?  The horrible way in which war is cyclical.  The  horrible way in which 
war is endemic to our species.  The nightmare  that war makes, the living hell. 
 For some it means the call to glory in  the name of a great or a truly 
crappy cause.  But to others it is  a  call to do something new, something 
attempted many a time but never accomplished  before--to stop the bleeding and to 
bring an end to war.
 
Is this purposive memory made from the cries of modules holding their  
scarred and tortured memories and never letting go?  Is this the sign of a  
multi-generational community working on a problem, working toward a goal?   Is this an 
example of teleology--of the future drawing us forward rather than  mere 
prior cause pushing us to the present and stranding us there?  Is it a  sign that 
vision is the beckoning of futures yet to be?
 
Does it mean that some evolution is smart evolution? That some  evolution is 
evolution driven by a future-projecting intelligence, even  when that 
intelligence, as in the case of bacteria, doesn't have consciousness,  daydreams, or a 
brain?
 
Yes, I think the hints are there that the future hooks and beckons us, that  
it makes us chew on ways to triumph over problems and to turn them into  
opportunities, to triumph over losses and turn them into victories.
 
Eshel Ben-Jacob and Joel Isaacson have been hinting that they see this  
teleonomy in the worlds they study--in Joel's computer science and in Eshel's  
study of bacteria,  of self-assembling neurons, and of adaptive neural  chips.  
Are they right?  I suspect that they may be more on target  than we know.  Howard
 
 
 
Several  forms of cilia-powered protozoans_*_ 
(aoldb://mail/write/template.htm#_ftn1) _[i]_ (aoldb://mail/write/template.htm#_edn1)  produced a second  
generation which, unlike their unicellular parents, did not totally wall  
themselves off at birth.  Their  direct connection to each other allowed one cell to 
sense an obstacle or an  opening and to flash the data so fast that the 
multitude could react almost  instantly and in total coordination.  This "wiring" 
between cells prefigured neural components.  It was composed of remodeled 
spirochetic  microtubules_[ii]_ (aoldb://mail/write/template.htm#_edn2) --the same  
construction materials from which nerve cells would evolve.  The odds are 
good, then, that in the two  billion years_[iii]_ 
(aoldb://mail/write/template.htm#_edn3)  now blank to us,  numerous further elements of primal nervous systems 
evolved through trial,  error, and if the University of Tel Aviv's Eshel 
Ben-Jacob's suspicions are  correct, purposeful invention._[iv]_ 
(aoldb://mail/write/template.htm#_edn4)   

 
____________________________________

 (aoldb://mail/write/template.htm#_ftnref1) *  Carchesium and Zoothamnium


 
____________________________________

_[i]_ (aoldb://mail/write/template.htm#_ednref1) ..  For wonderful photos of 
carchesium, see: Ministry of Education, Science, Sports  and Culture of Japan. 
 Protist  Information Server. "Oligohymenophorea: Peritrichia: Sessilida: 
Vorticellidae:  Carchesium," 
http://taxa.soken.ac.jp/WWW/PDB/Images/Ciliophora/Carchesium  /index.html, February 1999.
 
_[ii]_ (aoldb://mail/write/template.htm#_ednref2) ..  The spirochetic legacy 
would prove vital to the elaboration of nervous system  components, eventually 
contributing to neurons, balance sensors, and the rods  and cones of eyes. 
(Lynn Margulis.  Symbiosis in Cell Evolution: Microbial Communities in the 
Archean and  Proterozoic Eons, Second Edition: 233, 260; Lynn Margulis and Michael 
F.  Dolan. "Swimming Against the Current." The Sciences, January/February  
1997: 20-25..)
 
_[iii]_ (aoldb://mail/write/template.htm#_ednref3) ..  Niles Eldredge. The 
Pattern of Evolution. New York: W.H. Freeman, 1998:  38; Graham Bell. "Model 
Metaorganism": 248.
 
_[iv]_ (aoldb://mail/write/template.htm#_ednref4) ..  Taken together, the 
following articles sketch an intriguing prehistory of the  nervous system.  Among 
other things,  they indicate that we inherited the progenitors of our 
neurotransmitters from  bacteria and the basics of our brain from multicellular 
creatures as primitive  as planarians: J.C. Venter, U. di Porzio, D.A. Robinson, 
S.M. Shreeve, J. Lai,  A.R. Kerlavage, S.P. Fracek Jr, K.U. Lentes, C.M. Fraser. 
"Evolution of  neurotransmitter receptor systems." Progress in Neurobiology, 
30:2-3  1988: 105-69; H.B. Sarnat, M.G. Netsky. "The brain of the planarian as 
the  ancestor of the human brain."  Canadian Journal of Neurological  
Sciences, November 1985: 296-302.


 
In a message dated 4/26/2005 7:48:57 P.M. Pacific Standard Time,  
andrewsa at newpaltz.edu writes:

 
I love this, too, Lynn! It fits so perfectly with my experience and  with 
some of what I know...
Telling and writing stories (the story)  can  be healing to those suffering 
the symptoms of PTSD 
(and other forms of mental unease)  and the stories can also  be useful to 
the group...
For the person suffering, the 'new knowledge' eventually gets  incorporated 
and the new way of being eventually 
happens, but perhaps it all happens sooner (and relief sooner, too) if  the 
sufferer's experience 
is encoded in the group's system/collective knowledge/culture. Hence yet  
another reason, maybe, 
why some intensely creative writers have such burning desire to be  read by 
'the group'. The validation closes the  circuit...  
 
Also, no question that an 'unprepared brain' with a 
particular neurochem profile deals with shock and terror and stress  less 
well 
than a prepared one....And aside from meditation, exercise, a happy,  
meaningful life 
with good relationships and not too many economic worries,  etc. (things  
that help keep brain 
prepared for major stressors), having the collective wisdom of the group,  
i.e., stories/narratives 
which take many forms, e.g., gossip, fiction, news, etc., can  also help 
prepare...
all the best!
Alice
 
PS I'm afraid I was not quite able to articulate what I was  getting at, but 
I'm sending anyway...
 
 
----- Original Message ----- 


From:  _Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D._ (mailto:ljohnson at solution-consulting.com)   
To: _The new improved paleopsych list_ (mailto:paleopsych at paleopsych.org)   
Sent: Monday, April 25, 2005 9:23  PM
Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] What's the  survival value of post 
traumaticstressdisorder?


As usual, Alice is a great resource. A further view: Who is  most / least 
disabled by PTSD?
- preparation reduces  PTSD. Special Forces troops in Viet Nam were exposed 
to worse violence (like  when the Cong cut off arms of children the SF medics 
vaccinated) than grunts  but had almost no PTSD. It was because of the 
extensive training, compared  with 16 weeks of Basic / AIT. 
- story telling: Edna  Foa found that repeatedly telling the story reduced 
PTSD in rape victims.  

So PTSD may be nature's way of telling us we aren't preparing  ourselves and 
we aren't telling / listening to the story. Imagine a village  in africa. To 
the beat of a drum, a hunter is telling his  story:
Hunter: Then as I approached the antelope, I  saw a lion!
Villagers in unison: Boom-chucka, boom  chucka boom chucka
Hunter: The lion  leaped!
V: Boom chucka!
H: It  missed me but it got Steve!
V: Aaargh!

The  youth are prepared (hunting is dangerous, lions are about) and by 
sharing,  in perhaps a ritualistic way, he masters the trauma.

My dad, late in  life, told his story of being a flight engineer on a B-17 
over Europe. While  he told the story (as my mother wrote it down) he cried for 
two days. It  puzzled him. "It's been 40 years, it shouldn't still bother me" 
but after  that he was as relaxed and peaceful as I had ever seen him. The 
storytelling  had a ritual quality (tell your story and I will write it down for 
the kids)  and he found some mastery.

Lynn


Alice Andrews wrote:

Howard, I really love this!  
I had some alternative--or actually,  additional thoughts--not ones I 
necessarily want to champion, but  nonetheless I feel like sharing: Perhaps PTSD is 
adaptive for the  individual and ultimately the group. A young hunter is out on 
the savannah  and his brother/kin is savagely destroyed by lions, say. He 
might  experience all sorts of emotions in response to witnessing this, perhaps  
the symptoms of PTSD. The emotions (as par Randy Nesse et al.) guide his  
behavior--i.e. staying at 'camp' not going on hunts, ruminating over and  over the 
scene, etc etc. The symptoms like memory loss are  maybe just 
"mind-spandrels." 
The hippocampus goes into  obsessive overdrive on the old memories at the 
expense of new ones.  The hippocampus is still "carrying" the event. So...maybe 
the memory loss  just represents a reorganization of the brain. A traumatic 
event, of  course, can be life-altering. It takes a lot of brain power/energy to  
restructure neuronal morphology. People literally change after such  events.  
Something new is being learned very quickly: a whole new way  of being. 
"Don't charge at lions. Don't trust men from the  neighboring tribe. Don't wear 
bones when hunting." *  For such a thing to happen, the hippocampus can't be  
bothered with forming new memories. So the symptoms are the means to, and  also 
the signs of, those changes. There's no doubt that a person suffering  from the 
symptoms of PTSD would have garnered support, fear, and elicited  a whole 
host of behavioral responses--as today. And that indeed an  individual with the 
symptoms of PTSD would have been a  marker--a reminding factor. Members of the 
group's  physiology wouldn't have gone thrrough such dramatic and intense  
changes like the individual, but they (and their physiology to some  degree) 
would be influenced in some fashion, surely.
Another thought. I don't actually  know the statistics or have any data on 
this stuff, I can only speak from  impressionistic observation and experience. 
But it seems to me that people  who suffer with the symptoms of PTSD eventually 
stop suffering.  ** The changes finally get wired--so they're no longer 
signposts for  the group in that way...Though the group will have experienced the 
person  in that state for a while and have their new state as reminding factor, 
 too. 
Anyway, to answer question:  tremendous survival value for individual and 
group if the symptoms lead to  're-education' and changes in personality, 
behavioral response, etc etc.  

*Magical thinking and OCD are related to these  things and also were quite 
adaptive.
 
** Meds, of course, are very  helpful...but I imagine that the change that 
mother nature has programmed  the suffering person to go through doesn't 
actually happen with meds. And,  I actually have no particular feeling on whether one 
way is better or  worse..I don't have a romantic view that suffering through 
the symtoms of  PTSD in today's world could be all that beneficial to the 
individual. I  would look at it on a case-by-case basis, I suppose. (I generally 
take the  view that people (unless they pose a  threat in some way to self or  
others) need to experience such emotions for a tiny little while without  
meds--even PTSD. (I suffered with such symptoms (and  then some!) for  about 4-5 
years without meds, btw. Not something I would advise everyone  to do!!!)
 
More to think about and to write,  but have to run! 
All best, 
Alice
 
 

-----  Original Message ----- 
From:  _HowlBloom at aol.com_ (mailto:HowlBloom at aol.com)  
To:  _paleopsych at paleopsych.org_ (mailto:paleopsych at paleopsych.org)   
Sent:  Monday, April 25, 2005 5:00 AM
Subject:  [Paleopsych] What's the survival value of post traumatic  
stressdisorder?



If you have PTSD (post  traumatic stress disorder), your hippocampus works 
poorly and you have a  lot of trouble storing new memories.  It’s your old  
memories that prevail, the memories of the horrid experience that  produced your 
trauma to begin with.  Is this fixation  with a danger in the past helpful to 
your personal survival? Or is it  helpful to something else—to the survival of 
society?   If you suffer from PTSD, does your brain and body inflict that  
suffering every day to turn you into a signboard--a walking warning of  danger to 
the rest of us? 
Ted Coons proposes that  us old folks lose our ability to remember recent 
events but still hang  on to memories of our distant past for a reason.  Not  a 
reason that helps us aging elders,  but a reason  that helps the collective 
mind, the mass intellect of  society.  We elders, Ted thinks, are storage jugs  
keeping antique memories alive not for the sake of our personal  survival, but 
for the sake of the younger folks who’ve had no  opportunity to experience or 
remember the days when we elders were young  and vigorous.  Those youngsters 
have had no chance to  remember the problems and solutions of our childhoods 
way back when, the  problems and solutions of an earlier generation or two or 
three. 
Can PTSD victims serve a  similar function, as danger markers for those of us 
who’ve never  experienced the horrors that the past-obsessed and 
present-challenged  PTSD patients  remember far, far better than they’d  like?  Are they 
walking warning signs to the rest of  us?  Are they, like all of us, disposable 
modules in  the mass learning machine of culture, in the parallel distributed 
 intelligence of the collective brain?
 
----------
Howard Bloom
Author of The Lucifer  Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of 
History and Global  Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind From The Big Bang to the 
21st  Century
Visiting Scholar-Graduate Psychology Department, New York  University; Core 
Faculty Member, The Graduate Institute
_www.howardbloom.net_ (http://www.howardbloom.net/) 
_www.bigbangtango.net_ (http://www.bigbangtango.net/) 
Founder:  International Paleopsychology Project; founding board member: Epic 
of  Evolution Society; founding board member, The Darwin Project; founder:  
The Big Bang Tango Media Lab; member: New York Academy of Sciences,  American 
Association for the Advancement of Science, American  Psychological Society, 
Academy of Political Science, Human Behavior and  Evolution Society, 
International Society for Human Ethology; advisory  board member: Youthactivism.org; 
executive editor -- New Paradigm book  series.
For information on The International Paleopsychology Project,  see: 
_www.paleopsych.org_ (http://www.paleopsych.org/) 
for two  chapters from 
The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into  the Forces of History, 
see _www.howardbloom.net/lucifer_ (http://www.howardbloom.net/lucifer) 
For  information on Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big  
Bang to the 21st Century, see _www.howardbloom.net_ 
(http://www.howardbloom.net/) 

 
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----------
Howard Bloom
Author of The Lucifer Principle: A  Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of 
History and Global Brain: The Evolution  of Mass Mind From The Big Bang to the 
21st Century
Visiting Scholar-Graduate  Psychology Department, New York University; Core 
Faculty Member, The Graduate  Institute
www.howardbloom.net
www.bigbangtango.net
Founder:  International Paleopsychology Project; founding board member: Epic 
of Evolution  Society; founding board member, The Darwin Project; founder: The 
Big Bang Tango  Media Lab; member: New York Academy of Sciences, American 
Association for the  Advancement of Science, American Psychological Society, 
Academy of Political  Science, Human Behavior and Evolution Society, International 
Society for Human  Ethology; advisory board member: Youthactivism.org; 
executive editor -- New  Paradigm book series.
For information on The International Paleopsychology Project, see: 
www.paleopsych.org
for two chapters from 
The Lucifer  Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History, 
see  www.howardbloom.net/lucifer
For information on Global Brain: The Evolution of  Mass Mind from the Big 
Bang to the 21st Century, see  www.howardbloom.net

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