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<P class=MsoNormal style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt">If you have PTSD (post traumatic
stress disorder), your hippocampus works poorly and you have a lot of trouble
storing new memories.<SPAN style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>It’s your old
memories that prevail, the memories of the horrid experience that produced your
trauma to begin with.<SPAN style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>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?<SPAN
style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>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?</P>
<P class=MsoNormal style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt"> <o:p></o:p></P>
<P class=MsoNormal style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt">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.<SPAN style="mso-spacerun: yes">
</SPAN>Not a reason that helps us aging elders,<SPAN
style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>but a reason that helps the collective
mind, the mass intellect of society.<SPAN style="mso-spacerun: yes">
</SPAN>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.<SPAN style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>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.</P>
<P class=MsoNormal style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt"> <o:p></o:p></P>
<P class=MsoNormal style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt">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<SPAN
style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>remember far, far better than they’d
like?<SPAN style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>Are they walking warning
signs to the rest of us?<SPAN style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>Are they,
like all of us, disposable modules in the mass learning machine of culture, in
the parallel distributed intelligence of the collective brain?</P></DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT lang=0 size=2 FAMILY="SANSSERIF" PTSIZE="10">----------<BR>Howard
Bloom<BR>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<BR>Visiting Scholar-Graduate Psychology Department, New York
University; Core Faculty Member, The Graduate
Institute<BR>www.howardbloom.net<BR>www.bigbangtango.net<BR>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.<BR>For information on The International Paleopsychology
Project, see: www.paleopsych.org<BR>for two chapters from <BR>The Lucifer
Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History, see
www.howardbloom.net/lucifer<BR>For information on Global Brain: The Evolution of
Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century, see
www.howardbloom.net<BR></FONT></DIV></FONT></BODY></HTML>