[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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