Robert Bly on The Three Brains

I would first like to sum up some of the conclusions and speculations made by the American neurologist, Paul MacLean. The gist of MacLean’s thought is that we do not have one brain, but three. His map of the head isn’t psychological, as Freud’s Ego, Id and Superego, but geographical – the three brains are actually in the head, and brain surgeons have known for a long time what they look like. MacLean’s contribution has been to suggest that each of these brains is to some extent independent. During evolution, the body often reshaped the body-fins, for example, in us, turned utterly into arms, but the forward momentum in evolution was apparently so great that the brain could not allow itself the time to reform – it simply added.

The reptile brain is still intact in the head. Known medically as the limbic node, it is a horseshoe shaped organ located in the base of the skull. The job of the reptile brain appears to be the physical survival of the organism in which it finds itself. Should danger or enemies come near, an alarm system comes into play, and the reptile brain takes over from the other brains – it takes what we might call “executive power.” In great danger it might hold that power exclusively. It’s been noticed, for example, that when mountain climbers are in danger of falling, the brain mood changes – the eyesight intensifies, and the feet “miraculously” take the right steps. Once down, the climber realizes he has been “blanked out.” This probably means that the reptile brain’s need for energy was so great that it withdrew energy even from the memory systems of the mammal and new brains. The presence of fear produces a higher energy input to the reptile brain. The increasing fear in this century means that more and more energy, as a result, is going to the reptile brain: that is the same thing as saying that the military budgets in all nations are increasing.

MacLean himself speculated, in a paper written recently for a philosophical conference, that the persistent trait of paranoia in human beings is due to the inability to shut off the energy source to the reptile brain. In a settle society, if there are no true enemies, the reptile brain will imagine enemies in order to preserve and use its share of the incoming energy. John Foster Dulles represented the reptile brain in the fifties.

When the change to mammal life occurred, a second brain was simply folded around the limbic node. This “cortex,” which I will call here the mammal brain, fills most of the skull. The mammal brain has quite different functions. When we come to the mammal brain we find for the first time a sense of community: love of women, of children, of the neighbor, the idea of brotherhood, care for the community, or for the country. “There is no greater love than that of a man who will lay down his life for a friend.” Evidently in the mammal brain there are two nodes of energy: sexual love and ferocity. (The reptile brain has no ferocity: if simply fights coldly for survival.) women, it would seem, have strong mammal brains, and probably a correspondingly smaller energy channel to the reptile brain. They are more interested in love than war. “Make love, not war” means “move from the reptile brain to the mammal brain.” Rock music is mammal music for the most part; long hair is mammal hair.

The Viking warrior who went “berserk” in battle may have experienced the temporary capture of himself by the mammal brain. Eye witnesses reported that the face of the “berserk” appeared to change, and his strength increased fantastically – when he “woke up,” he sometimes found he had killed twenty or thirty men. The facial expression is probably a union of the concerns of all three brains, so if one brain takes over, it is natural that the shape of the face would change.

What does the third brain, the “new brain,” do? In late mammal times, the body evidently added a third brain. Brain researchers are not sure why – perhaps the addition is connected to the invention of tools, and the energy explosion that followed that. In any case, this third brain, which I shall call here the new brain, takes the form of an outer eighth inch of brain tissue laid over the surface of the mammal brain. It is known medically as the neo-cortex. Brain tissue of the neo-cortex is incredibly complicated, more so than the other brains, having millions of neurons per square inch. Curiously, the third brain seems to have been created for problems more complicated than those it is now being used for. Some neurologists speculate that an intelligent person today uses 1/100 of its power. Einstein may have been using 1/50 of it.

The only good speculations I have seen on the new brain, and what it is like, are in Charles Fair’s book, The Dying Self, Wesleyan University Press. Fair suggests that what Freud meant by the “Id” was the reptile and mammal brain, and what the ancient Indian philosophers meant by the “self” was the new brain. His book is fascinating. He thinks that the new brain can grow and that its food is wild spiritual ideas. Christ said, “If a seed goes into the ground and dies, then it will grow.” The reptile and mammal brains don’t understand that sentence at all, both being naturalists, but the new brain understands it, and feels the excitement of it. Greek mystery religions, and the Essene cult that Christ was a member of, were clear attempts to feed the new brain. The “mysteries” were the religion of the new brain. In Europe it was at its highest energy point about 1500, after knowing the ecstatic spiritual ideas of the Near East for 700 years. Since then, “secularization” means that the other two brains have increased their power. Nevertheless a man may still live, if he wishes to, more in his new brain than his neighbors do. Many of the parables of Christ and the remarks of Buddha evidently involve instructions on how to transfer energy from the reptile brain to the mammal brain, and then to the new brain. A “saint” is someone who has managed to move away from the reptile and the mammal brains and is living primarily in the new brain. As the reptile brain power is symbolized by cold, and the mammal brain by warmth, the mark of the new brain is light. The gold light always around Buddha’s head in statues is an attempt to suggest that he is living in his new brain. Some Tibetan meditators of the 13^th century were able to read books in the dark by the light given off from their own bodies.

If there is no central organization to the brain, it is clear that the three brains must be competing for all the available energy at any moment. The brains are like legislative committees – competing for government grants. A separate decision on apportionment is made in each head, although the whole tone of the society has weight on that decision. Whichever brain receives the most energy, that brain will determine the tone of that personality, regardless of his intelligence or “reasoning power.” The United States, given the amount of fear it generates every day in its own citizens, as well as in the citizens of other nations, is a vast machine for throwing people into the reptile brain. The ecology workers, the poets, singers, meditators, rock musicians and many people in the younger generation in general, are trying desperately to reverse the contemporary energy flow in the brain. Military appropriations cannot be reduced until the flow of energy in the brain, which has been moving for four or five centuries from the new brain to the reptile brain, is reversed. The reptile and new brains are now trying to make themselves visible. The reptile brain has embodied itself in the outer world in the form of a tank which even moves like a reptile. Perhaps the computer is the new brain desperately throwing itself out into the world of objects so that we’ll see it. The new brain’s spirituality could not be projected, but at least its speed is apparent in the computer. The danger, of course, with the computer is that it may fall into the power of the reptile brain.

We do not spend the whole day “inside” one brain, but we flip perhaps a thousand times a day from one brain to the other. Moreover, we have been doing this flipping so long – since we were in the womb – that we no longer recognize the flips when they occur. If there is no central organization to the brain, and evidently there is not, it means that there is no “I.” If your name is John there is no “John” inside you – there is no “I” at all. Oddly, that is the fundamental idea that Buddha had twenty-six hundred years ago. “I have news for you,” he said, “there is no ‘I’ inside there. Therefore trying to find it is useless.” The West misunderstands meditation or sitting because, being obsessed with unity and “identity,” it assumes that the purpose of meditation is to achieve unity. On the contrary, the major value of sitting, particularly at the start, is to let the sitter experience the real chaos of the brain. Thoughts shoot in from all three brains in turn, and the sitter does not talk about, but experiences the lack of an “I.”

The lack of an “I” is a central truth of Buddhism. Taoism expresses it by talking of the presence of a “flow.” Christianity somehow never arrived at this idea. At any rate, it never developed practical methods, like sitting, to allow each person to experience the truth himself. Institutional Christianity is in trouble because it depends on a pre-Buddhist brain model.

Evidently spiritual growth for human beings depends on the ability to transfer energy. Energy that goes normally to the reptile brain can be transferred to the mammal brain, some of it at least; energy intended for the mammal brain can be transferred to the new brain.

The reptile brain thinks constantly of survival, of food, or security. When Christ says, “The lilies do not work, and yet they have better clothes than you do,” he is urging his students not to care so much for themselves. If the student wills “not-caring,” and that “not-caring” persists, the “not-caring” will eventually cause some transfer of energy away from the reptile brain. Voluntary poverty worked for St. Francis. He had so little reptile brain paranoia the birds came down to sit on his shoulders.

If energy has been diverted from the reptile brain, the student, if he is lucky, can then transfer some of it to the mammal, and then to the new brain. Christ once advised his students, “If someone slaps you on the left cheek, point to the right cheek.” The mammal brain loves to flare up and to strike back instantly. If you consistently refuse to allow the ferocity of the mammal brain to go forward into action, it will become discouraged, and some of its energy will be available for the transfer. Since the mammal brain commits a lot of its energy to sexual love, some students at this point on the “road” become ascetic and celibate. They do so precisely in order to increase the speed of energy transfer. The women saints also, such as Anna of Foligno, experience this same turn in the road, which usually involves an abrupt abandonment of husband and children. Christ remarks in the Gospel of St. Thomas that some men are born eunuchs; and some men make themselves eunuchs in order to get to the Kingdom of the Spirit. However, if a man is in the reptile brain at the time he begins his asceticism, then the result is a psychic disaster, as it has been for so many Catholic priests and monks.

The leap from the reptile to the new brain cannot be made directly; the student must go through the mammal brain. St. Theresa’s spiritual prose shows much sexual imagery, perhaps because the mammal brain gave its energy to the spiritual brain.

Meditation is a practical method for transferring energy from the reptile to the mammal brain, and then from the mammal to the new brain. It is slow, but a “wide” road, a road many can take, and many religious disciplines have adopted it. The Orientals do not call it meditation, but “sitting.” If the body sits in a room for an hour, quietly, doing nothing, the reptile brain becomes increasingly restless. It wants excitement, danger. In oriental meditation the body is sitting in the fetal position, and this further infuriates the reptile brain, since it is basically a mammalian position.

Of course if the sitter continues to sit, the mammal brain quickly becomes restless too. It wants excitement, confrontations, insults, sexual joy. It now starts to feed in spectacular erotic imagery, of the sort that St. Anthony’s sittings were famous for. Yet if the sitter persists in doing nothing, eventually energy has nowhere to go but to the new brain.

Because Christianity has no “sitting,” fewer men and women in Western culture than in oriental civilizations have been able to experience the ecstasy of the new brain. Thoreau managed to transfer a great deal of energy to the new brain without meditation, merely with the help of solitude. Solitude evidently helps the new brain. Thoreau willed his solitude and he was not in a reptile city, but in mammal or “mother” nature. Once more the truth holds that the road to the new brain passes through the mammal brain, through “the forest.” This truth is embodied in ancient literature by the tradition of spiritual men meditating first in the forest and only after that in the desert. For the final part of the road, the desert is useful, because it contains almost no mammal images. Even in the desert, however, the saints preferred to live in caves – perhaps to remind the reptile brain of the path taken.

To speak of poetry, it is clear that poets, like anyone else, can be dominated by one of the three brains. Chaucer is a great poet of the mammal brain; clearly St. John of the Cross and Kabir are great poets of the new brain. The reptile brain seems to have no poet of its own, although occasionally that brain will influence poets. Robinson Jeffers is a man with an extremely powerful mammal brain, in whom, nevertheless, the reptile brain had a slight edge. His magnificent poems are not warm towards human beings. On the contrary, he has curious love for the claw and the most ancient sea rocks. Every once in a while he says flatly that if all human beings died off, and a seal or two remained on earth, that would be all right with him.

Bach makes music of new brain emotions, Beethoven primarily out of mammal brain emotions. Blake is such an amazing poet because he talks of moving from one brain to another. His people in “the state of experience,” after all, have been pulled back into the reptile brain.

The invisible worm
That flies in the night,
In the howling storm,
Has found out thy bed
Of crimson joy,
And his dark secret love
Does thy life destroy.

            When we are in a state of “innocence,” Blake says we are feeling some of the spiritual ecstasy of the new brain. The industrialists, as Blake saw clearly, are in a state of “experience,” trapped by the reptile brain.

I think poetry ought to take account of these ideas. Some biological and neurological speculations are marvelous, and surely that speculation belongs in literary criticism as much as speculation about breath or images or meter. A person should try to feel what it is like to live in each of the three brains, and a poet could try to bring all three brains inside poems.

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Reprinted from Leaping Poetry by kind permission of Robert Bly and Beacon Press, Boston.

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