INTRODUCTION

Graham Gynn

One evening, about halfway through writing this book, I had a game of table tennis with my teenage daughter. We were both feeling a little stressed from our respective days. We wanted to talk, and table tennis often helps the two-way communication. Something about hitting the ball to each other enhances communication. On this occasion it wasn’t quite working so on a whim we both swapped hands. We began to play left-handed. The change was immediate and very apparent. We both became calm, the tension dropped away, and the peaceful atmosphere that ensued was quite palpable. We looked at each other and were amazed at the difference. I knew at that moment that Tony and I were on to something that was not a mere scientific or intellectual curiosity but something real and profound.

Tony has been working on the issue of brain organization and perception for over fifteen years, and we have been collaborating since 2000. His role is inspiration and research, mine translation and scribe. The theory presented in this book has grown and developed during this time, and it is heartening that, every week it seems, research is appearing that not only fits but also supports this new paradigm. We are in contact with many of these researchers, who have offered help and encouragement, and we are especially grateful to those who have added their comments here.

The pivotal moment for the thesis came in 1995 after Tony spent three days and nights awake. The overstretched left hemisphere of his brain fell asleep, leaving his right awake, functional, and free of the left’s influence. The next twenty minutes were not only euphoric but also deeply intriguing. During this brief window he investigated the capabilities of his unhindered right hemisphere and found its perceptual abilities superior to those of his normal self. This experiential research confirmed Tony’s initial ideas of laterality and brain function, the implications of which are far-reaching. We could all be suffering from an evolutionary glitch that has affected how we perceive, think, and behave.

If we look at our global society, it is apparent that all is not well. Despite good intentions and attempts at cooperation, we live in a very fragmented and violent world. There is war and genocide, we are inflicting havoc on the only planet that sustains us, and we are having increasing problems with interpersonal relationships. It seems we are incapable of behaving at anywhere near the ideal we would like to maintain. These problems are becoming more intense in our present era as an increasing population and dwindling resources exert more and more pressure.

THE GOLDEN AGE

It was not always so. The earliest of times, according to the classical writer Hesiod, were a “golden age.” Men lived as gods, with their hearts free from sorrow, in a land abundant in fruit and rich in flocks. The Greek philosopher Dicaearchus, of the late fourth century BCE, tells us more, that godlike men lived a life of leisure, health, peace, and friendship, without care or toil or the desires that lead to feuds and wars. “Their life was easy for their food and all things grew spontaneously” (Heinberg 1995). But these halcyon days came to an end; there was progressive degeneration through the ages of silver, brass, heroes, and iron.

This step-by-step decline is a universal theme. The Hindu tradition identifies four epochs, and each one was marked by a decline in moral and physical standards. The Kriti Yuga was the perfect age. Man had no worldly desires, diseases, sorrows, or fears. There was supreme happiness, continual delight, and the ability to move about at will. “The things the people needed spontaneously sprang from the earth everywhere and always whenever the mind desired it, and there was no need for houses either.” The Treta, Dvapara, and Kali Yugas followed this wonderful Kriti Yuga. With each age man’s virtue lessened by a quarter, so in the Kali Yuga, our present age, only one-quarter of man’s virtue remains. Now, as is very apparent, we are afflicted by disease and suffering. Men have turned to wickedness, decadence, and materialism. There is pain, sorrow, continual dissatisfaction, and craving.

THE FALL OF MANKIND

Nearly every culture has a tradition about this fall of mankind. In almost every one it came about because man strayed from the way of the gods. Adam disobeyed God’s instructions and ate the forbidden fruit. In a Zambian myth, the first man, Kamonu, started to kill the animals created by the god Nyambi and was then forced from his garden. And the Hopi say that when the people began to depart from the instruction of the Great Spirit:

There came among them a handsome one . . . in the form of a snake with a big head. He led the people still further away from one another and their pristine wisdom. They became suspicious of one another and accused one another wrongfully until they became fierce and warlike and began to fight one another. (Heinberg 1995)

Richard Heinberg, in Memories and Visions of Paradise, says, “Nearly every tradition ascribes the loss of Paradise to the appearance of some tragic aberration in the attitude or behaviour of human beings. While in the Golden Age they had been ‘truth-speaking’ and ‘self-subdued,’ living with ‘no evil desires, without guilt or crime,’ they now succumbed to suspicion, fear, greed, mistrust and violence” (Heinberg 1995). Something happened that resulted in the loss of a former state of divine beingness. In its place arose the state of fear, mistrust, and craving that has led to all the woes that we are experiencing today. Indeed, the myths and religious scriptures over time could be said to form a “dementia diary” cataloging the emergence and progression of this serious and continuing slide into mental delusion and disconnection. Paradise has been transformed by our machinations into our present materialist, fear-based age of plastic and Prozac.

Could these myths actually be a cultural remembrance of a time when we really were perceptually more complete, to a time in which there was less fear, less violence, less craving, and more contentment? If so, today, in an age characterized by so much distraction, we have truly forgotten what we were and who we are.

TWO PERSPECTIVES

The mythic traditions of paradise allude to our naked, forest-dwelling, fruit-eating past. Various cataclysmic disasters, portrayed in tales of floods, volcanic activity, and meteor impact, brought the days of perfection to an end. These disruptive, Earth-shattering events initiated a change in man. A single, divine self was split into two, and the more fallen, delusional self assumed overall control. The impetus to treat this condition and the ingenious techniques devised to access the suppressed “god side” of man gave rise to religions.

These ancient traditions are mirrored by our scientific view of the past and present. Anthropologists tell us that our direct ancestors lived in the tropical rain forest, and our closest relatives, the fruit-eating apes, still do. Various disciplines, including climatology and paleontology, have found that the evolution of many forms of life has been profoundly affected by repeated ecological catastrophes. And from the sciences of neurology and psychology, we know that we have two distinct selves. The latest research in these fields is now revealing that the dominant side is perceptually limited and continually makes up confabulated tales to cover its fractures of reality. The dormant side, in contrast, has exceptional latent abilities; even its capacity for pleasure is more encompassing.

It is a deeply held scientific assumption not only that humans represent the pinnacle of evolution but also that advance proceeds apace. This view, however, is in conflict with observed behavior; our inability to harmoniously coexist with each other and the increasingly rapid exploitation of the Earth suggest we really are suffering from a psychological malady.

The two versions of human history—one poetic, contextual, and right-brained, the other analytical, rational, and left-brained—are remarkably similar. The only significant point of disagreement is degeneration versus advancement. Currently the advancement argument holds sway; yet evidence from both versions suggests that this interpretation is flawed. If the side that has reached this conclusion has been negatively modified in some way, can we trust its judgment?

The eminent psychologist Dr. Iain McGilchrist spent more than twenty years researching the distinct ways in which the right and left hemispheres perceive reality. In his excellent account of this work, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, he presents a halfway house between the ancient traditions of degeneration and the modern assumption of advancement. Drawing on a huge body of work in orthodox neurology and psychology, he makes a powerful case for each hemisphere having significantly different perceptual, cognitive, and psychological traits. His conclusions support the basic proposal of functional asymmetry, reversing the recent trend to downplay what has been erroneously seen as an overly simplistic dichotomy. He convincingly argues that the perceptually dominant left hemisphere has become too dominant, resulting in a world of its own creation that reflects its so-called specialized abilities. As he states, “An increasingly mechanistic, fragmented, decontextualised world marked by unwarranted optimism, mixed with paranoia and a feeling of emptiness has come about, reflecting, I believe, the unopposed action of a dysfunctional left hemisphere” (McGilchrist 2009).

Perhaps we really have been “left in the dark.” What follows is a detailed investigation into the conundrum of our fallen state and the possibility that solutions may be found. The subject matter covers three areas—theory, function of the body, and function of the brain—though these subjects are by their very natures entwined and interlinked. To begin with we propose an audacious new theory of man’s evolution. From this opening we move on to finding clues and enlightening support within the function, dysfunction, and occasional superfunction of the body and the brain.

The theory stresses the evolutionary importance of our unique symbiotic relationship with the plant kingdom: ingesting the hormonally active and biochemically rich reproductive organs of angiosperms (fruit) had a marked effect, particularly on our chemically and hormonally sensitive neural system. Changes included the proliferation of relatively undifferentiated neural brain tissue and structures that retained the plasticity of the juvenile period, elements of which extended (neotonously) throughout our lives. This led to a complex of rare traits including increased longevity and, who knows, perhaps continual delight too. Maybe it was indeed a golden age when we lived as gods in a land abundant with fruit, consuming our cocktails of perpetual juvenility juice!

Unfortunately circumstances led to the breakdown of this halcyon plant-animal relationship, and the change exposed the new neural structures to our own internal, unmediated hormone regime. The rapid brain expansion stalled, and the neocortex began to revert to its primitive type, with the usual mammalian traits of rapid maturation and reproduction as part of the life cycle. Furthermore, due to an archaic genetic asymmetry, the left side of the brain was more sensitive to this second wave of change than the right; it reverted more quickly. This has left us today, in the age of Kali Yuga, imprisoned by our retrogressive left hemisphere, with a shrinking window of juvenility, a lifespan that is less than that of our distant ancestors, and a mind that is a danger to us all. The consequences are inestimable.