Humans are a social species – pack animals, if you like. We’re all born with pretty much the same genetic package – or a range of genetic packages that doesn’t vary much from culture to culture. Yet a brief course in Anthropology reveals an astonishing variety of customs and beliefs from continent to continent, nation to nation, tribe to tribe, individual to individual. All cultures understand that a new-born baby, or even a teenager, hasn’t the mental capacity or mature judgement of a full-grown adult, and that to gain that mature judgement requires years of experience in that culture. To me the old nature-nurture debate is settled in favor of nurture.
Given that the vast majority of us would rather live in the company of others than live alone, and that even those who live alone need to know how to get along with others, our chief preoccupations as humans, beyond mere survival, are figuring out how to get along with others, and what does it all mean. Why are we here? Who is my mentor/leader? Why should I do this and not that?. In their fascinating book “When They Severed Earth from Sky: How the Human Mind Shapes Myth” https://www.goodreads.com/book/show authors Elizabeth Wayland Barber and Paul Barber, both university professors whose disciplines include anthropology, linguistics, mythology, brain processes, textile history, AND folk dancing, pooled their varied interests to deduce how the human mind in times before writing came to grips with the chaotic world around them. For instance, it’s VERY impressive when I experience a flood, earthquake, or volcano. What does it mean? Will it happen again soon? What or who caused it? What can I do about it?
We moderns like to think of ourselves as the top of a mountain of accumulated knowledge, and therefore wisdom – the peak of hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of years of steady cultural advance. We also like to think of our prehistoric ancestors as rather dull types, with irrational beliefs, (due to their ignorance of science). They appear to lack concepts that to us seem perfectly self-evident, (but in fact are the product of that mountain of knowledge.) We’re half right – we have way more knowledge, but no more wisdom. Our ancestors lacked information, but they were no more irrational than we are.
What the Barbers achieve in their book is to show how the human brain has certain limitations – not because we’re stupid, but because our brain’s wiring has its limitations. Only over time and with the development of tools we weren’t born with, have we to some extent overcome some of those limitations – through external data storage and learned behavior; the understanding and application of which varies from culture to culture, time to time. Our ancient ancestors weren’t dumber, they just hadn’t yet figured out better external tool kits for processing information.
Our brain’s limited capacity
Our brain’s most basic limitation is capacity – our memory bank has only so much room. Throughout most of our time on earth, that capacity was adequate enough for us to learn to provide for our basic necessities, and to evolve a code of conduct adequate for small family or tribal units. A lot of this information was being used every day and thus was easy to remember – hunting skills, animal behavior, plant lore, food preparation, clothing and housing, kin relationships, social etiquette, dispute resolution, medicine.
But what about those things that don’t happen very often- maybe not for decades, or even generations, and yet are important, even vital to survival – like floods, earthquakes or volcanoes? How do our limited memories find room for that information, information in a form we can remember and want to repeat, and that others want to hear? One thing we know about humans is we all love stories and always have. We love stories that have a timeline, central characters, drama, a clear resolution and lessons to be learned. Information wrapped in a story is easier to remember. That in a nutshell is the meaning and purpose of myth. The Barbers demonstrate that myths are not merely fairy tales, or epics of rascally gods, they contain vital information as well – explaining natural phenomena or cultural values rarely used but important anyway.
Myths – stories with a purpose
Why do we love stories so much? It’s the way we’re wired.
Our brains don’t like random bits of information – it needs to file them somewhere, because they might come in handy some day. Every minute brings new bits to file, and our brains are constantly making decisions about which bits are important enough to file at all, and if so, where to file them so they can be retrieved. Our brains are a maze of electrical circuits, and each bit of information has to travel through that maze to get to a final storage place. If there are no existing files to put the new bit in, the brain has to create a new one, or re-purpose an old one. It’s easier to stick it in an existing file, so the brain tries to find similarities between the new bit and existing bits.
Here’s another of our brain’s limitations – we’re too eager to find a match for that new bit of information. It’s understandable – we’re constantly bombarded with information needing filing, a backlog builds up, the input portals get clogged – clearance time! So to our brains, any match is better than no match.
By filing two bits of information together, we enlarge that part of the neuronal maze – it gets a bit bigger and easier to find. So the brain goes there sooner to see if the next bit of information can be filed there. Let’s say that early in our life we hear that God created us. Later we see a plant. We remember that God created us, so we figure maybe God created this plant, too, so we file the plant under ‘God’s creations’. Later, it’s easier to file every plant we see under ‘God’s creations’, so that pathway gets very large – one of the first pathways we take. But there are LOTS of plants, so we have sub-pathways, like one for plants that we deem good for us, and another one for plants that we deem bad for us. Those paths are still pretty large. Still more sub-paths – green plants, spiky plants, woody plants, plants with spots on their leaves.
Now say at this point we happen to come across a ghastly sight – a human has had a terrible accident and they’re lying there with their innards exposed – their lungs, in fact. We notice that their lungs have spots on them – about the same size and shape as the spots on that plant we often see. Our brain doesn’t have a file for exposed innards and how to help them, but it does have one for spots similar to those, and it’s under God’s creations>plants>plants that help>plant with spots on leaves. Brain puts spotted lungs there. Because we love a story, because stringing information together in a story is an easier way to remember it, because we hate the idea that things happen randomly, (hard to file) we create a story for this information. God created both us and the spotted plant. God created all for our benefit. Therefore God created this plant, which resembles lungs, to benefit lungs. We’ll call the plant lungwort (pulmonaria), and use it to treat ailments of the lungs.
We now know that the story has faulty logic, but how and when did we come to know that? Until about 10,000 years ago, people were wanderers – staying somewhere until the food supply they could gather was exhausted, then moving on. After the development of agriculture – raising grains that can be dried, stored, then reconstituted into food during lean times – it behooved people to hang around where it was easiest to grow those grains. One also needed a place to store grains, and needed to stick around to see they stayed properly dry, and that no one else took them. All this made travel less desirable – unnecessary, even.
For the first time in human history, it was better to stay in one place than to constantly travel. The proof that it was better was the fact that the same amount of land could support more people, and without the bother of carrying all your stuff around. The proof of there being more people is the remains of layers of human-made buildings – villages, later cities, later large cities with buildings whose purpose was other than housing – each built on the same spot, layer after layer.
Writing – External aid to memory.
In cities, life became more complex – more information for our limited brain capacity to store. Surplus food meant food could be traded. People began specializing into farmers, craftsmen, merchants, soldiers, each with their own code of conduct. Merchants began trading away from home, with people they barely knew, on credit. How to remember all this information? Stories about lists of numerical transactions were boring and hard to remember.
So, about 5000 years ago, people started making marks in soft clay that later dried and became ‘permanent”. Marks representing amounts of goods – transaction records – numerical stuff. That worked pretty well for awhile. But how do you indicate the future? How do you tell an agent in another town to buy this but not that, and only if the price is right? Also, people had been noticing that stars moved in particular cycles that corresponded to seasonal changes on earth. This was important information for the success of crops. People who could predict the weather became powerful, but needed complex mathematical computations based on years of observations to have any accuracy. So people began developing written languages because writing could convey more ideas than mere numbers, and store more than the unaided human memory could achieve. Writing became power.
Not only that, people could learn about something from someone they had never met, and could compare that information with something written by someone else they had never met, and see which information was most accurate. Two lifetimes of accumulated knowledge could be compared in a few hours. Yet because most of our accumulated knowledge was (and still is) riddled with faulty logic, it took thousands of years of comparing competing pieces of information for us to develop a set of rules whereby most of us could agree on what constitutes proper ways of storing and analyzing information. Proper ‘thinking’. Philosophers call it Logic. Scientists call it the Scientific Method.
Determining the quality of information – logic and science
The Barbers in their book outline several instances of faulty logic that our brains like to use to jump to conclusions that have no ‘logical’ or ‘scientific’ basis. One is called causation. The sun goes down, then we see the moon. Therefore the sun going down stimulates the moon to rise. How about one of my favorite childhood jokes 1.”Why are you snapping your fingers all the time?” 2.”To keep the elephants away.” 1.”But there isn’t an elephant within hundreds of miles from here!” 2.”See, it works!” How about something more current? “Elect me or something terrible will happen”. Then something terrible happens. “Aha, it happened because you didn’t elect me.”
So even though we have tons of information, and methods to separate the wheat from the chaff, we also have brains wired to make a hash of that information and those methods. This applies equally to the simple stuff – ‘scientific,’ easily proved or disproved information – and to the harder stuff, like meaning, which is subjective, not necessarily logical, and can’t be ‘proved’. What is the purpose of all this scientific innovation? Why are we doing it? Is it making us any happier? Is it fulfilling some divine plan? Is there some divine plan?
Each brain files the same information differently
So each new experience or bit of information enters the brain and the brain starts processing it, trying to file it. But each brain is different, shaped a little by different genetic makeup, but mostly by different experiences, starting when we’re growing in the womb. Some developing brains are affected by alcohol, others by lack of nutrition or the emotional state of the mother. Some newborns are isolated, possibly abused; others are surrounded by love. Some children are schooled in a religious community, others in a secular society. Each stage of the brain’s development happens in an environment that encourages some patterns of thought and discourages others. And all of those patterns of thought are simultaneously dependent on and have influence over how information is filed and retrieved.
Each person’s brain starts processing an experience with a few large categories; important or unimportant, information or emotion, job or family, religion or science, serious or fun, legal or forbidden. Each person’s categories will be different and have different values. As the categories branch into smaller divisions the possibilities for differing interpretations of the experience become greater.
Take a current, highly contentious example, vaccination. Many years ago when I was a child, vaccination wasn’t so controversial a subject. We’d all been given the polio vaccine and it had worked – polio went from being a prevalent nightmare to a rare footnote. So most of us have the concept of vaccine stored deeply in a part of the brain which might go something like
- duty>civic duty>good pain>few childhood illnesses>childhood memories of getting vaccinated =I ‘m willing to take another vaccine
- pain>bad pain>a broken wrist>painful physiotherapy>good pain>disease prevention>hypodermic needle = I’m willing to take another vaccine
- health>I remember the time I got very sick>my mother was very kind and gave me special treats>I got special treats at a doctor’s office, then he got this big needle and said this won’t hurt> it hurt a lot!>I vowed I’d never let that happen again>later I got a bad flu because I wasn’t vaccinated = so I guess I need to get vaccinated even though it may hurt a lot
Others may begin thinking about vaccine from a very different perspective. Merely talking about vaccines does not address
- fear>things I’m afraid of>snakes, spiders, lions, cops, heights, hypodermic needles, death>things whose fear of I have to deal with>snakes, spiders, lions, cops, heights, hypodermic needles, death>things whose fear of I’m willing to deal with>snakes, cops>things I’m too afraid of to deal with>spiders, lions, heights, hypodermic needles, death = I’m not taking the vaccine
- God>God has a plan for everything>the purpose of life is to test our worthiness to get into Heaven>my preacher says he knows God’s plan and I believe him>my preacher says science contradicts the Bible and will not get us into heaven> my preacher says vaccines are against the will of God = I can’t take the vaccine and still get into heaven
- trust>what I trust>my mother, the Constitution, freedom of choice, the power of owning guns, my ability to look after myself>what I don’t trust> my father>big government, intellectuals, big business, scientists>vaccines are recommended by people I don’t trust = I’m not taking vaccines
Talk of vaccines is difficult when the subject in one person’s brain is retrieved from the science file and another person’s from the pain file and another from the fear file and another from the God file. You may think you’re talking only about vaccines, when you’re really talking from the perspective of something further up the file chain.
I’ve just described a greatly simplified version of how the brain works. In fact, we process information in a multitude of ways. ‘Vaccine’ may be stored in several files – words that begin with “V,” events that happened when I lived in a particular house, events that happened when so-and-so was my friend, or was President, or won a big game, an influential book I read, a scene from a horror movie. Some information may be filed under “this doesn’t make any sense to me”, or “lies I was told wen I was a child” or “stuff that asshole said that really bugs me”. Many of these files will be cross-referenced with other files. Some may lie dormant, forgotten until a crisis jolts them back to prominence.
Folk dancing as a brain file
How does the brain’s filing system relate to folk dancing, you may ask? Just like it relates to everything else. It’s hard enough to understand ourselves, our family members, our neighbours. Consider someone born into another time and place. A person who was illiterate, had never read a book or newspaper, heard a radio, let alone seen a TV or movie or the internet, someone who had spent their whole life within a 20-mile radius of where they were born, someone who knew almost everyone within that radius, and almost no one outside of it. Someone, in short, who had never known of an alternative to their life, to their value system, to their way of seeing and understanding the world and what it means.
Do we, who have been presented with an ever-growing variety of ideas, of gadgets, of career paths, of philosophies, religions, of heroes, even of gender roles; who consider growth and change a constant, inevitable way of life; do we think we can understand a culture that hasn’t experienced those things? Certainly we can understand what they DON’T have, and believe them impoverished for that lack, but can we imagine what they DID have that we don’t? Can we understand that their way of life was not better or worse than ours, only different? Can we see our own poverty, our own backwardness?
Now consider the dances that came from such a ‘folk’ culture – the Living and 1st Generation dances. We recreational folk dancers like to think that by learning the footwork to a dance called, say, Pravo, that we are ‘dancing’ the way they did (and do). However, unlike the ‘folk’ dancers, who were content to do the same simple footwork pattern for half an hour or more, we can barely dance a simple pravo for 3 minutes without getting bored. No wonder we dance ‘folk’ dances differently from the ‘folk’.
I liken it to a child who imagines it’s driving a car when it imitates holding a steering wheel and rocking it back and forth. Yes, the motion looks the same as an adult driver, but the child has no idea of the many kinds of mental processes that are going on simultaneously in an adult driver’s mind – the awareness of the car’s speed and its relation to posted speed limits; the actions of other cars in the vicinity, the comparing of landmarks in relation to a mental map of the destination – all of which are compared to a memorized mental catalogue of driving laws. Due to this lack of awareness in the child, it frequently moves the steering wheel, makes braking and accelerating sounds and motions to make up for the monotony of just holding the wheel in place with only slight adjustments, depending on the road, the way adult drivers do.
Similarly, we recreational dancers know only what a folk dance looks like, from the outside. We are not content to “keep it simple” because we’re not aware of all the mental processes a dancer at, say a village wedding, is going through while dancing a ‘simple’ step. To us, a dance is a particular set of steps that fits with a particular piece of music – nothing more.
Folkdance Footnotes 