I'm walking out on a limb here. I wonder if our modern tendency to specialize ultimately means that the left hemisphere is not just more in control, but also is a determining factor in our social relations. Based on Kenneth Mikkelsen and Richard Martin's book The Neo-Generalist, my perception (BTW, I'm one of the neo-generalists that they write about in the book.) is that people who are generalists are more right brain. I certainly am. My perception of the world is broad and highly integrated. I wonder about this.
Yes, I believe this is correct, McGilchrist often cites ultra-specialism as part of the reason the west is becoming more and more left brain over-activated... narrow, sustained focus is the left's way of attending, whereas open, vigiliant awareness is the rights.
As a large generalist, I agree. I couldn't study much because of this, as I was always bringing elements from other branches of knowledge, and it wasn't understood.
I define a generalist as being the only person in the world having studied AT THE SAME TIME this and this and also that.
Try to search somebody who's a dog behaviorist and who both studied Somatic Experiencing and Transformational Social Therapy, and akdo anthropology... There's at least me!
Somewhere here in the reading or comments, I followed up on one of your links to McGilchest's latest post 'Can we unmake the world we have made?'. Just thought I'd share my comments to his podcast here ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YgW61bu4qsY
''Got the heads up about this from Gary Sharpe's substack.
At about :30, I just about clapped on hearing who I now call Steven 'Pangloss' Pinker being called out for his bubble-gated-community vision of the world.
Living in Japan for 40 years (applied linguist, though my undergrad was in biology), among the information I've read about the birth of the modern Japanese Corporate Nation-State is how Victorian-era (Meiji-era) industrialists were sucking the lifeblood from long sustainable rural communities by enticing the youth into coming to the large-scale, industrial cities for 'success'. What the ambitious sociopathic industrialists did not know or care about is that the nurturing and sustaining culture of small communities is a naturally emergent quality from humans as 'social' primates (maybe Dunbar's number or less) ... not 'herded' primates.
The top-down, imposed, and patronizing 'faux-communities' of the Japanese factory 'towns' were, and are not now, nurturing and sustainable ... hence one corporate scandal after another, with the same, predictable promise of 'structural reform', made by those same sociopaths. I grew up in semi-rural North Carolina, where my dad's family came from a similar cotton mill town, and saw some of the same dysfunctions of anomie. In contrast, while doing some volunteer-educational work in rural Cambodia, though the villagers were 'poor' by consumer standards, I've never felt more at home or had such good times.
1:25 ... Am I a fan of of civilization? Maybe. This is a catch-all conversational term, and if one tries to pin down a definition of the word among 100 people, you will eventually get a hundred qualitatively different meanings. Parsing the difference between 'culture' and 'civilization' alone is worthy of a book or three. Stealing from the logical positivists ... the clarification of a proposition is its verification. I suspect going down the rabbit hole of defining these broad terms will be an 'all roads lead to Rome' thingy.
(Western) civilization as The source of 'justice, liberty, and equality'? Hmm ... I don't know. Here, I am drawing on primatologist Frans de Waal as one counterargument. His TED talk alone, is a hilarious but perceptive argument that there are quite a few other social animals, including some non-mammalian (crows) who have a pretty good grasp of 'equality' and 'justice'. 'Liberty' might not be at the same level of abstraction because other than human intervention, I see nothing imposing on an animal's natural liberty.
2:40 ... A wonderful educational system? Hmm. Again, 40 years in Japan, and I wonder. Some years back, while I was an Associate Prof. of English Communication at Jissen Women's College, I took several open courses at rival (and more highly ranked) Sagami Women's College, one of which was the history of public education in Japan. It was taught by a prof. who had also worked for MEXT (the central Ministry of Education) and I had also worked a few years as one of two native speakers of English in the country as a cultural advisor and textbook editor. The prof. and I had brief exchanges after class, one of which was the factoid of how the public education system in Japan was pretty much a copy-paste of the structure and heuristics of public education in Victorian England ... which shared the organizational structure and heuristics of two other institutions at the time — the military and the penal system. Charles Dickens, other than Shakespeare, arguably the 2nd most influential writer in the English language, had a lot to say about that.
I am now working as an Assistant Language Teacher for a small township in West Tokyo, and not much has changed. Despite having conducted, published, and presented my own research in an Event-Driven Curriculum — drawing on what I had learned in teaching and grad school about the importance of group dynamics, realia, intrinsic motivation, immediacy and involvement, humanistics and values clarification, Total Physical Response, game theory, jazz chants, etc. — the default structure and heuristics of the school system is pretty much what I have come to term 'Chain of Command'. And as the town I work for is Kunitachi, I am pretty much at the bottom of the COCK. 🤣
3:40 ... EXCELLENT educational technique, and one I had occasionally used while teaching Public Speaking at Temple University Japan. Just last week, I attended a demonstration class at one of the Jr. Highs I work at, and a peer review-discussion in which three head English teachers at the three Jr. Highs, and several elementary school teachers attended, maybe 50 or so attendees. The keynote speaker was a Japanese prof. a bit younger than myself who is an English as a Foreign Language specialist, and he presented three main themes that the Ministry of Education was pushing ... though I suspect only a portion of his talk can pass through the 'great filter' the public school teachers' own self-awareness.
Those three areas he spoke about include 1) English as a communicative tool as opposed to a sorting tool on standardized tests, 2) the value of 'realia' (material meant to interest native speakers, but simplified for the language classroom) for motivation, and 3) the capacity and willingness to communicate with a high tolerance of ambiguity ('aimai' in Japanese). That last one requires negotiating skills that few Japanese teachers are willing to exercise with either myself or their students because 'Chain of Command' is so much easier for them, and the teachers are not held accountable for unsuccessful learning outcomes. I don't think things have changed in the last 150 years, and technology is only going to augment a top-down Chain of Command. This is not necessarily due to a character fault by the teachers, but the Ministry of Education imposes so much demands of time and energy by the teachers, Chain of Command is the only way to react, and still have time for themselves and their own families. I think this is by malicious design.
4:15 ... Age of Puritanism. Another EXCELLENT summary of Chain of Command. Just a few days ago, one day after the demonstration class and discussion, I had some students exercise negotiation of meaning through playing a simple joke on them. They were interviewing me with simple questions to practice changing pronouns, and included the question ... 'What animal do you like?' I gave them a straight faced answer of 'Spicy Chicken. Sometimes pork cutlets, or Kobe beef.' At the very least, after some initial confusion and laughter, 'living' and 'wild' are now part of their vocabulary.
But there are some teachers I work with who will absolutely not tolerate such 'nonsense' and accuse me of subverting a textbook exercise. If it is not in the book and on schedule, it is not permitted. So among the pedagogic tools I noticed 'Chain of Command' will not tolerate includes, humor, individuation, music, ambiguity, error, or even 'communicative activities'. The Japanese public education system has always promoted compliance to authority as its highest value. No wonder most Japanese will not become 'affectively' communicative even in their own language (look at plummeting marriage rates), much less a foreign tongue. The result of Chain of Command on the workforce? Rather than whole-hearted compliance, what emerges is a culture of 'Quiet Quitting' and the closely related 'Quiet Hiring' and 'Quiet Firing' ... all behind a kabuki-show facade of meritocracy.
5:30 ... Loss of vitality. Yes. I also teach at 8 elementary schools in Kunitachi, and one school for students with special needs. The 5th and 6th graders at elementary schools (roughly between 10 and 12 years old), still exercise a wild and free joy to communicate with me before, during, and after class. But by the time they finish 3 years of Jr. High 'juken senso' (exam wars), most spontaneity and curiosity they once had has been drilled out of them. Socialization has become conflated with institutionalization. My guess is this is both by design and the human psychological default of dependent and infantilized 'adults'. What those at the top of the corporate nation state have always wanted is compliant and disposable human capital. Anyone more educated than that, and not part of the ruling class, is a threat to the status quo.
6:00 ... Yep. Technology is no better than our capacity to use it. Do a Google search for 'Asian Century Institute — Japan Dumbs Down Its Universities'. It links to a longer Bloomberg article, but other searches on the net with similar key words can come up with similar opinion pieces on the gist of the former Prime Minister Abe's mandate in 2015 — ''Japan’s government just ordered all of the country’s public universities to end education in the social sciences, the humanities and law.'' Without these generalists, we are fully dependent on politically ambitious micro-managers and their questionable conflicts of interest. Malicious design.
Excellent short video clip!
This passes my beer test ... yeah, I'd love to chat over a beer or three with Dr. McGilchrist.
My life has been through so many ups and downs lately, I haven't been able to keep up with Gary and other favorites such as Mathew Crawford. Just returned from an emergency health trip to the U.S. (Tucson) to say my farewells to a rapidly fading mother. To the states and back to Japan in about a week, and now into the unemployment line at age 67 ... but still exchanging chats about educational psychology and processes with an art teacher in one of the Jr. Highs.
Reading your comment a couple of times now, I can only sigh with recognition of what appears to be a long-running, conscious sabotage of educational ideals ... most likely by a predatory ruling class who pamper their kids with private schools and tutors to maintain their place at the top of social caste. Caste is not meritocratic, and so they deliberate try to hamstring we mere hoi polloi ... not unlike the Tanya Harding approach to Olympic ice skating.
3 books immediately come to mind in triangulating the above, but of course my personal experiences have colored my takes on the books. One is Michael Sandel's "The Tyranny of Merit" ... and though I've read it only once, my big take-away (or guessing between the lines) is that actual merit is one of the least salient variables determining social standing. Even when there is merit, it is easily stolen, corrupts into credentialism, then cronyism and nepotism, and then violence or the fear of it.
Another book that was a bit of a slog, but enlightening, is A. Lobaczewski's "Political Ponerology: The Science of Evil, Psychopathy, and the Origins of the Totalitarian State". I am a bit more pessimistic than Lobaczewski about our long term chances of sustainability as a species, and I disagree with the fundamental assumption that there can even be a 'science of evil' any more than a 'science of good' (different, though overlapping domains) ... but I see the truth of how the family skeletons-in-the-closet are a fractal of the sociopaths that scramble to the tops of large, and therefore necessarily hierarchical populations. Reminds me of an earlier psychological analysis of the temperaments that make up movements, Eric Hoffer's "The True Believer", but more process oriented. I tried out GPT4 by asking for a summary of Lobaczewski's book, and was pleasantly surprised with the speed and comprehensive summary ... though nothing from a critical or dissenting point of view.
And the third book, I have just now started, is "Caste" by Isobel Wilkerson. Well written, she uses the power (and weakness) of metaphors and analogies to compare the racially defined caste system of America with the traditional caste system of India. As I have just now begun reading, I can't say much yet, but it was recommended to me by a Japanese friend who read the Japanese translation, and came away depressed at man's inhumanity to man.
I have my ups and downs, but I am leaning towards Ernst Mayr's point of view in his debate with Carl Sagan about the Fermi Paradox. Chomsky summed it up in the first 3 paragraphs of his 2011 Chapel Hill Speech, "Human Intelligence and the Environment" (https://chomsky.info/20100930/).
In short, the evolutionary record indicates human intelligence might be nothing more than the fatal mutation of a social primate. I would further clarify that by saying we are not social (small, empathy-driven communities) primates at all. We are nature's first, only, and probably last experiment with herd primates, with our populations of scale exceeding our capacity to empathize with each other as individuals (Dunbar's number).
From both my personal experiences and other academic domains (big fan of Joseph Campbell's "Power of Myth" interviews with Bill Moyers), I believe in the extreme version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (linguistic relativity). I suspect Logic and language may have evolved as a proxy for empathy. While language and logic are provisionally powerful, and can be somewhat predictive ... as systems, ideologies, paradigms, or models ... logic and language are ultimately limited, for example — Wittgenstein's Ladder, Gödel's incompleteness theorems, mystic traditions, etc. ... not to mention the huge gap between what is moral and what is legal, which is created and exploited by the predatory class.
On second thought, don't take any of the above too seriously.
It is late at night, except for a couple of close friends ... I am alone, and can neither see nor control my fate from one week to the next. If we were to chat over a beer, it might all turn to rainbows and unicorns. 😂
Oh wow. We are VERY much in the same camp. (sorry about the typos above, I just woke up, aghast as usual).
I have been a big fan of Dr. Ramani for a couple of years now. I had not seen that particular video, but one that I recommend to those who have not heard of her is her Medcircle Masterclass interview on the the difference between sociopaths and psychopaths ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gpjYtAB9i2w&t=3386s
What an enlightening article I have recently discovered McGilchrist’s book “The Master and His Emissary” and I love how you used this knowledge to intertwine with Dr Joaquin Farias, Bonnie Badenoch and Porges, definitely a right brain function, creating a whole picture. It explains a lot about what happened in the last 2 years with people under stress, trauma and fear losing empathy and compassion. Also might explain some of the increase in non covid illness we are now seeing.
Thank you. I didn't make that connection - yes definitely an excerise in right brain activation for me in writing this. Yes, I am certain that all the fear mongering we have been under is responsible for a lot of the harms we are now seeing. Fear and anger will shutdown the right hemisphere like nothing else, but chronic fear also downregulates the immune system, so it is a double whammy.
I'm curious how you think this information can be actioned against? I can't feel the hemispheres of my brain separately, nor do I know how to address any dysfunction that might be occurring with one of them. So how can I use this information to my advantage or improved functionality?
Fair point, I was going to include something like this, but felt the article was getting too long, However, I have now added the following at the end:
"Practical Application
One of the major pragmatic reasons for sharing this information is to help us all to be more understanding and forgiving of how the people in our lives are affected by chronic conditions, stress and trauma. Hopefully, this knowledge allows us to have more compassion when others necessarily disconnect from us, or behave in seemingly hurtful ways, due solely to involuntary physiological shifts that occur when they are under stress and duress. Furthermore, it instructive that, if we wish to help, we need to engage folks who are suffering in ways which will activate and stimulate their right hemispheres, and Vagus Nerves, and to avoid causing these to shutdown even harder. In other words, I hope it reveals something important about the human condition.
Moving on to how this information helps us to help ourselves. Firstly, it allows us to recognize when we are stressed, or not in a healthy state, based on how disconnected or dissociated we are from our own body and how disconnected we are feeling from people in our lives. Secondly, it allows us to recognize that chronic stress is a root cause of many physiological symptoms, and that stress reduction and trauma healing is therefore key and vital to physical symptom reduction.
It also informs us that we can benefit through practices which activate and strengthen the right hemisphere and the Vagus Nerve, so as to build resilience against them shutting down. These systems tend to atrophy with lack of use, and hence one can get in to viscous circles of them become weaker and shutting off more easily, so it is vital to exercise to them. Dancing and tai chi are particularly beneficial for increasing proprioception and interception. Singing is particularly beneficial for exercising the social engagement circuits.
Basically, we need to engage in “neural exercises”, and also make changes in our lives, which activate and bolster the right hemisphere’s way of attending to the world. Similarly, engaging in practices which increase “Vagal Tone”, as measured through heart rate variability, through Vagus Nerve stimulating activities, will also help.
For example, Dr Farias has created a “Dystonia Recovery Programme”, where he offers a wide variety of neural exercises based on these concepts. I also keep and provide a master list of suggestions of things we can do to improve matters here: <link>
As I've come to expect, an extraordinarily good post, and the comments are right up there with the same quality. Just thought I'd mention that upon discovering Jill Bolte Taylor's TED talk, I got all excited about having my seminar class of Japanese college kids translate the talk for a project because it matches the more Taoist aspects of zen (though I've come to learn how little of this part of their own culture Japanese are consciously aware of). I exchanged a few e-mails with Jill before finding out how famous she was, and that the talk and her book had already been translated into Japanese. But during the course of my sharing a laugh and apologies, we started talking about music. I am a terminal beginner at jazz guitar, and lean on paint-by-numbers bossa nova to get me through the night — and Jill has been referred to as the 'singing scientist' for now dragging her guitar along with her to academic conferences. Too busy just trying to survive Japan Inc., I haven't kept up much with her since then, but yeah — no music, no life.
Yes, I have seen some of Jill's work and Ted talk - definitely a living of examplar of the divided brain hypothesis! On the japanese angle, I wonder if you know or have experienced the Japanese "hikikomori" phenomenon? This came up in a vagus nerve related discussion. I think this also may be a manifestation of the right hemisphere getting shutdown at societal level...
If not for my age, I would have been a good example of 'hikkikomori'. After I resigned in protest from a tenured position (actually, closer to 'quiet firing'), I cut most of my social ties and activities for several years.
But as the subject of analysis, I was in no position and had no voice or opportunity to explore proximal or distal correlations at the morpholoical level. Even now, I will have to go back and re-read your post a few times for the biological mechanisms. My self analysis and observations of the more age appropriate definition of 'hikkikomori' was more in terms of group dynamics. Some of that can be seen in general human nature ... marginalization and isolation is as close to the death penalty as one can impose on a social species. But some of it is in the unique spin the Japanese ruling class have put on the working class culture ... the culture of unquestioned compliance to authority, the tightness of the in-group at the expense of deviations from norms, etc.
Even now, I can't help but to laugh at the cognitive dissonance I see in the classroom. For example, one teacher who has long since become comfortable with a teacher-centered, Chain of Command classroom, asked for 'volunteers' to demonstrate the diaglogue which was the subject of the day's lesson. When, predictably, none were forthcoming, she opened the role book and 'chose volunteers' ... distorting the term as much as mayor Koike did when asking Universities to grant course credits to any student 'volunteers' for the recent Olympics.
If I begin deconstructing the reasons for hikkikomori now, I would be entering a book length rabbit hole. But a couple of good clues as to some of the warped group dynamics behind the phenomenon can be found in the following two books, the titles of which alone are enough to give a hint ...
JMHO, but hikkikomori is just one of many pathologies emerging as a direct result of a society modeled after military boot-camp. Hmmm ... come to think of it, comparing Japan with ancient Sparta might lead to some interesting insights into human nature, and some guesses as to how and why Spartan culture inevitably fell into decay.
The demographics here are so bad (young people unable or unwilling to marry and raise kids, a rapidly aging population), that the economy is depending on short term (5 years or less) migrant workers to run the convenience stores and nursing homes ... taxing their salaries for retirement and health benefits they will never receive, and then replacing them with a fresh crop of foreigners on 5 year contracts. Seems to me a rough parallel between disposable wage-slave foreigners and Sparta's Helot-Slaves who were culled every now and then just to keep 'em in check.
My longer comment to your link to Ian McGilchrist's YouTube podcast dovetails with the direction I've taken my understanding of human nature. But to really dig into hikkikomori would take a lot of filling in the gaps and connecting the dots. From the point of view of Chain of Command as the default structure and heuristics of Japanese society, hikkikomori might be thought of as a pathology similar to U.S. military PTSD.
So many ways to think of it, but for now, I'd rather not revisit that dark place, and just try to have fun with the kids — even if if means sometimes playing a shuckin' and jivin' token foreigner role. The kids are cool. I just wish they were not expected to have to adjust to the permanent institutionalization / infantilization of modern Japanese society. Those that survive and thrive, tend to do so despite the system. Not because of it. But what do I know? After 40 years here, I'm still struggling to learn my place ... sometimes as a Steppin Fetchit, occasionally as a colleague.
Woke up with a dim memory of an even better book for prying open the pathology of 'hikkikomori' ... Doi Takeo's 'Amae no Kozo' (The Anatomy of Dependence). I remember being particularly impressed because Doi had a good grasp of the provisionality of language as a social construct ... but also the only lens through which we can view self and other (Sapir-Whorf).
I have a paper back floating around here, and it is still available on Amazon. On reading the reviews and remembering what I had read decades again, thought it was even more relevant now than when it first came out. Try as I might, I can not find a pdf or e-book version of it, but thought you might find this riff off the book useful ... https://theholeinfaraswall-2.nethouse.ru/static/doc/0000/0000/0232/232351.513drrkiyo.pdf.
Thanks Gary this is good stuff. And to be clear there's nothing wrong with information that's just interesting. But as you know, most chronic illness sufferers are desperate for solutions. So the more actionable info can be, the better. I'm still not sure there is any value to knowing that something is tied to left or right brain outside of it being interesting though.
If you delve into McGilchrist's work it has enormous explanatory power and helps to make sense of what is going in the world, and hence points to solutions. Here is a 5 minute clip he put up on youtube today https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YgW61bu4qsY
Hi Chris. Gary’s information is great for information’s sake, but his reference to Dr. Farias’ dystonia recovery program is worth it’s weight in gold. I had severe left leg dystonia in 2019, and was able to go to a clinic with Dr. Farias in Toronto. He also came out with his online program around that time, and I have been using it ever since. I no longer have dystonia and it keeps my Parkinson’s symptoms at bay. It’s an amazingly comprehensive program and a great value at $35 a month. He is constantly adding new material. I think it would be great for anybody who wants to improve their body/ brain balance.
My thoughts exactly. As husband to a wife suffering lifelong chronic illness (which is what first drew my interest to Mr. Sharpe's substack), I don't know how this information is of any practical use. I hope Mr. Sharpe offers a follow-up.
The main thing seems to be trauma-induced Vagus incapacity manifesting as various chronic physical or mental symptoms. This implies trauma treatment as a potential modality of relief.
I'm walking out on a limb here. I wonder if our modern tendency to specialize ultimately means that the left hemisphere is not just more in control, but also is a determining factor in our social relations. Based on Kenneth Mikkelsen and Richard Martin's book The Neo-Generalist, my perception (BTW, I'm one of the neo-generalists that they write about in the book.) is that people who are generalists are more right brain. I certainly am. My perception of the world is broad and highly integrated. I wonder about this.
Yes, I believe this is correct, McGilchrist often cites ultra-specialism as part of the reason the west is becoming more and more left brain over-activated... narrow, sustained focus is the left's way of attending, whereas open, vigiliant awareness is the rights.
As a large generalist, I agree. I couldn't study much because of this, as I was always bringing elements from other branches of knowledge, and it wasn't understood.
I define a generalist as being the only person in the world having studied AT THE SAME TIME this and this and also that.
Try to search somebody who's a dog behaviorist and who both studied Somatic Experiencing and Transformational Social Therapy, and akdo anthropology... There's at least me!
Hi again Gary,
Somewhere here in the reading or comments, I followed up on one of your links to McGilchest's latest post 'Can we unmake the world we have made?'. Just thought I'd share my comments to his podcast here ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YgW61bu4qsY
''Got the heads up about this from Gary Sharpe's substack.
At about :30, I just about clapped on hearing who I now call Steven 'Pangloss' Pinker being called out for his bubble-gated-community vision of the world.
Living in Japan for 40 years (applied linguist, though my undergrad was in biology), among the information I've read about the birth of the modern Japanese Corporate Nation-State is how Victorian-era (Meiji-era) industrialists were sucking the lifeblood from long sustainable rural communities by enticing the youth into coming to the large-scale, industrial cities for 'success'. What the ambitious sociopathic industrialists did not know or care about is that the nurturing and sustaining culture of small communities is a naturally emergent quality from humans as 'social' primates (maybe Dunbar's number or less) ... not 'herded' primates.
The top-down, imposed, and patronizing 'faux-communities' of the Japanese factory 'towns' were, and are not now, nurturing and sustainable ... hence one corporate scandal after another, with the same, predictable promise of 'structural reform', made by those same sociopaths. I grew up in semi-rural North Carolina, where my dad's family came from a similar cotton mill town, and saw some of the same dysfunctions of anomie. In contrast, while doing some volunteer-educational work in rural Cambodia, though the villagers were 'poor' by consumer standards, I've never felt more at home or had such good times.
1:25 ... Am I a fan of of civilization? Maybe. This is a catch-all conversational term, and if one tries to pin down a definition of the word among 100 people, you will eventually get a hundred qualitatively different meanings. Parsing the difference between 'culture' and 'civilization' alone is worthy of a book or three. Stealing from the logical positivists ... the clarification of a proposition is its verification. I suspect going down the rabbit hole of defining these broad terms will be an 'all roads lead to Rome' thingy.
(Western) civilization as The source of 'justice, liberty, and equality'? Hmm ... I don't know. Here, I am drawing on primatologist Frans de Waal as one counterargument. His TED talk alone, is a hilarious but perceptive argument that there are quite a few other social animals, including some non-mammalian (crows) who have a pretty good grasp of 'equality' and 'justice'. 'Liberty' might not be at the same level of abstraction because other than human intervention, I see nothing imposing on an animal's natural liberty.
2:40 ... A wonderful educational system? Hmm. Again, 40 years in Japan, and I wonder. Some years back, while I was an Associate Prof. of English Communication at Jissen Women's College, I took several open courses at rival (and more highly ranked) Sagami Women's College, one of which was the history of public education in Japan. It was taught by a prof. who had also worked for MEXT (the central Ministry of Education) and I had also worked a few years as one of two native speakers of English in the country as a cultural advisor and textbook editor. The prof. and I had brief exchanges after class, one of which was the factoid of how the public education system in Japan was pretty much a copy-paste of the structure and heuristics of public education in Victorian England ... which shared the organizational structure and heuristics of two other institutions at the time — the military and the penal system. Charles Dickens, other than Shakespeare, arguably the 2nd most influential writer in the English language, had a lot to say about that.
I am now working as an Assistant Language Teacher for a small township in West Tokyo, and not much has changed. Despite having conducted, published, and presented my own research in an Event-Driven Curriculum — drawing on what I had learned in teaching and grad school about the importance of group dynamics, realia, intrinsic motivation, immediacy and involvement, humanistics and values clarification, Total Physical Response, game theory, jazz chants, etc. — the default structure and heuristics of the school system is pretty much what I have come to term 'Chain of Command'. And as the town I work for is Kunitachi, I am pretty much at the bottom of the COCK. 🤣
3:40 ... EXCELLENT educational technique, and one I had occasionally used while teaching Public Speaking at Temple University Japan. Just last week, I attended a demonstration class at one of the Jr. Highs I work at, and a peer review-discussion in which three head English teachers at the three Jr. Highs, and several elementary school teachers attended, maybe 50 or so attendees. The keynote speaker was a Japanese prof. a bit younger than myself who is an English as a Foreign Language specialist, and he presented three main themes that the Ministry of Education was pushing ... though I suspect only a portion of his talk can pass through the 'great filter' the public school teachers' own self-awareness.
Those three areas he spoke about include 1) English as a communicative tool as opposed to a sorting tool on standardized tests, 2) the value of 'realia' (material meant to interest native speakers, but simplified for the language classroom) for motivation, and 3) the capacity and willingness to communicate with a high tolerance of ambiguity ('aimai' in Japanese). That last one requires negotiating skills that few Japanese teachers are willing to exercise with either myself or their students because 'Chain of Command' is so much easier for them, and the teachers are not held accountable for unsuccessful learning outcomes. I don't think things have changed in the last 150 years, and technology is only going to augment a top-down Chain of Command. This is not necessarily due to a character fault by the teachers, but the Ministry of Education imposes so much demands of time and energy by the teachers, Chain of Command is the only way to react, and still have time for themselves and their own families. I think this is by malicious design.
4:15 ... Age of Puritanism. Another EXCELLENT summary of Chain of Command. Just a few days ago, one day after the demonstration class and discussion, I had some students exercise negotiation of meaning through playing a simple joke on them. They were interviewing me with simple questions to practice changing pronouns, and included the question ... 'What animal do you like?' I gave them a straight faced answer of 'Spicy Chicken. Sometimes pork cutlets, or Kobe beef.' At the very least, after some initial confusion and laughter, 'living' and 'wild' are now part of their vocabulary.
But there are some teachers I work with who will absolutely not tolerate such 'nonsense' and accuse me of subverting a textbook exercise. If it is not in the book and on schedule, it is not permitted. So among the pedagogic tools I noticed 'Chain of Command' will not tolerate includes, humor, individuation, music, ambiguity, error, or even 'communicative activities'. The Japanese public education system has always promoted compliance to authority as its highest value. No wonder most Japanese will not become 'affectively' communicative even in their own language (look at plummeting marriage rates), much less a foreign tongue. The result of Chain of Command on the workforce? Rather than whole-hearted compliance, what emerges is a culture of 'Quiet Quitting' and the closely related 'Quiet Hiring' and 'Quiet Firing' ... all behind a kabuki-show facade of meritocracy.
5:30 ... Loss of vitality. Yes. I also teach at 8 elementary schools in Kunitachi, and one school for students with special needs. The 5th and 6th graders at elementary schools (roughly between 10 and 12 years old), still exercise a wild and free joy to communicate with me before, during, and after class. But by the time they finish 3 years of Jr. High 'juken senso' (exam wars), most spontaneity and curiosity they once had has been drilled out of them. Socialization has become conflated with institutionalization. My guess is this is both by design and the human psychological default of dependent and infantilized 'adults'. What those at the top of the corporate nation state have always wanted is compliant and disposable human capital. Anyone more educated than that, and not part of the ruling class, is a threat to the status quo.
6:00 ... Yep. Technology is no better than our capacity to use it. Do a Google search for 'Asian Century Institute — Japan Dumbs Down Its Universities'. It links to a longer Bloomberg article, but other searches on the net with similar key words can come up with similar opinion pieces on the gist of the former Prime Minister Abe's mandate in 2015 — ''Japan’s government just ordered all of the country’s public universities to end education in the social sciences, the humanities and law.'' Without these generalists, we are fully dependent on politically ambitious micro-managers and their questionable conflicts of interest. Malicious design.
Excellent short video clip!
This passes my beer test ... yeah, I'd love to chat over a beer or three with Dr. McGilchrist.
Upvoted, followed, notifications turned on.''
Hi Jaine,
My life has been through so many ups and downs lately, I haven't been able to keep up with Gary and other favorites such as Mathew Crawford. Just returned from an emergency health trip to the U.S. (Tucson) to say my farewells to a rapidly fading mother. To the states and back to Japan in about a week, and now into the unemployment line at age 67 ... but still exchanging chats about educational psychology and processes with an art teacher in one of the Jr. Highs.
Reading your comment a couple of times now, I can only sigh with recognition of what appears to be a long-running, conscious sabotage of educational ideals ... most likely by a predatory ruling class who pamper their kids with private schools and tutors to maintain their place at the top of social caste. Caste is not meritocratic, and so they deliberate try to hamstring we mere hoi polloi ... not unlike the Tanya Harding approach to Olympic ice skating.
3 books immediately come to mind in triangulating the above, but of course my personal experiences have colored my takes on the books. One is Michael Sandel's "The Tyranny of Merit" ... and though I've read it only once, my big take-away (or guessing between the lines) is that actual merit is one of the least salient variables determining social standing. Even when there is merit, it is easily stolen, corrupts into credentialism, then cronyism and nepotism, and then violence or the fear of it.
Another book that was a bit of a slog, but enlightening, is A. Lobaczewski's "Political Ponerology: The Science of Evil, Psychopathy, and the Origins of the Totalitarian State". I am a bit more pessimistic than Lobaczewski about our long term chances of sustainability as a species, and I disagree with the fundamental assumption that there can even be a 'science of evil' any more than a 'science of good' (different, though overlapping domains) ... but I see the truth of how the family skeletons-in-the-closet are a fractal of the sociopaths that scramble to the tops of large, and therefore necessarily hierarchical populations. Reminds me of an earlier psychological analysis of the temperaments that make up movements, Eric Hoffer's "The True Believer", but more process oriented. I tried out GPT4 by asking for a summary of Lobaczewski's book, and was pleasantly surprised with the speed and comprehensive summary ... though nothing from a critical or dissenting point of view.
And the third book, I have just now started, is "Caste" by Isobel Wilkerson. Well written, she uses the power (and weakness) of metaphors and analogies to compare the racially defined caste system of America with the traditional caste system of India. As I have just now begun reading, I can't say much yet, but it was recommended to me by a Japanese friend who read the Japanese translation, and came away depressed at man's inhumanity to man.
I have my ups and downs, but I am leaning towards Ernst Mayr's point of view in his debate with Carl Sagan about the Fermi Paradox. Chomsky summed it up in the first 3 paragraphs of his 2011 Chapel Hill Speech, "Human Intelligence and the Environment" (https://chomsky.info/20100930/).
In short, the evolutionary record indicates human intelligence might be nothing more than the fatal mutation of a social primate. I would further clarify that by saying we are not social (small, empathy-driven communities) primates at all. We are nature's first, only, and probably last experiment with herd primates, with our populations of scale exceeding our capacity to empathize with each other as individuals (Dunbar's number).
From both my personal experiences and other academic domains (big fan of Joseph Campbell's "Power of Myth" interviews with Bill Moyers), I believe in the extreme version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (linguistic relativity). I suspect Logic and language may have evolved as a proxy for empathy. While language and logic are provisionally powerful, and can be somewhat predictive ... as systems, ideologies, paradigms, or models ... logic and language are ultimately limited, for example — Wittgenstein's Ladder, Gödel's incompleteness theorems, mystic traditions, etc. ... not to mention the huge gap between what is moral and what is legal, which is created and exploited by the predatory class.
On second thought, don't take any of the above too seriously.
It is late at night, except for a couple of close friends ... I am alone, and can neither see nor control my fate from one week to the next. If we were to chat over a beer, it might all turn to rainbows and unicorns. 😂
Cheers from Japan, Jaine.
Looking forward to reading you.
steve
Oh wow. We are VERY much in the same camp. (sorry about the typos above, I just woke up, aghast as usual).
I have been a big fan of Dr. Ramani for a couple of years now. I had not seen that particular video, but one that I recommend to those who have not heard of her is her Medcircle Masterclass interview on the the difference between sociopaths and psychopaths ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gpjYtAB9i2w&t=3386s
Another VERY good summary I found only within the last few weeks is a 'flashback video' from James Corbett ... https://odysee.com/@corbettreport:0/flashback-psychopathy:d
Charlotte Isebyt is a new name for me. Thanks for the heads up!
Looking forward to longer talks with you, and planning on how we can move forward ... or make a courageous last stand.
Cheers Jaine.
steve
What an enlightening article I have recently discovered McGilchrist’s book “The Master and His Emissary” and I love how you used this knowledge to intertwine with Dr Joaquin Farias, Bonnie Badenoch and Porges, definitely a right brain function, creating a whole picture. It explains a lot about what happened in the last 2 years with people under stress, trauma and fear losing empathy and compassion. Also might explain some of the increase in non covid illness we are now seeing.
Thank you. I didn't make that connection - yes definitely an excerise in right brain activation for me in writing this. Yes, I am certain that all the fear mongering we have been under is responsible for a lot of the harms we are now seeing. Fear and anger will shutdown the right hemisphere like nothing else, but chronic fear also downregulates the immune system, so it is a double whammy.
Interesting connections!
Are these "prism" glasses?
I'm curious how you think this information can be actioned against? I can't feel the hemispheres of my brain separately, nor do I know how to address any dysfunction that might be occurring with one of them. So how can I use this information to my advantage or improved functionality?
Fair point, I was going to include something like this, but felt the article was getting too long, However, I have now added the following at the end:
"Practical Application
One of the major pragmatic reasons for sharing this information is to help us all to be more understanding and forgiving of how the people in our lives are affected by chronic conditions, stress and trauma. Hopefully, this knowledge allows us to have more compassion when others necessarily disconnect from us, or behave in seemingly hurtful ways, due solely to involuntary physiological shifts that occur when they are under stress and duress. Furthermore, it instructive that, if we wish to help, we need to engage folks who are suffering in ways which will activate and stimulate their right hemispheres, and Vagus Nerves, and to avoid causing these to shutdown even harder. In other words, I hope it reveals something important about the human condition.
Moving on to how this information helps us to help ourselves. Firstly, it allows us to recognize when we are stressed, or not in a healthy state, based on how disconnected or dissociated we are from our own body and how disconnected we are feeling from people in our lives. Secondly, it allows us to recognize that chronic stress is a root cause of many physiological symptoms, and that stress reduction and trauma healing is therefore key and vital to physical symptom reduction.
It also informs us that we can benefit through practices which activate and strengthen the right hemisphere and the Vagus Nerve, so as to build resilience against them shutting down. These systems tend to atrophy with lack of use, and hence one can get in to viscous circles of them become weaker and shutting off more easily, so it is vital to exercise to them. Dancing and tai chi are particularly beneficial for increasing proprioception and interception. Singing is particularly beneficial for exercising the social engagement circuits.
Basically, we need to engage in “neural exercises”, and also make changes in our lives, which activate and bolster the right hemisphere’s way of attending to the world. Similarly, engaging in practices which increase “Vagal Tone”, as measured through heart rate variability, through Vagus Nerve stimulating activities, will also help.
For example, Dr Farias has created a “Dystonia Recovery Programme”, where he offers a wide variety of neural exercises based on these concepts. I also keep and provide a master list of suggestions of things we can do to improve matters here: <link>
Hi Gary,
As I've come to expect, an extraordinarily good post, and the comments are right up there with the same quality. Just thought I'd mention that upon discovering Jill Bolte Taylor's TED talk, I got all excited about having my seminar class of Japanese college kids translate the talk for a project because it matches the more Taoist aspects of zen (though I've come to learn how little of this part of their own culture Japanese are consciously aware of). I exchanged a few e-mails with Jill before finding out how famous she was, and that the talk and her book had already been translated into Japanese. But during the course of my sharing a laugh and apologies, we started talking about music. I am a terminal beginner at jazz guitar, and lean on paint-by-numbers bossa nova to get me through the night — and Jill has been referred to as the 'singing scientist' for now dragging her guitar along with her to academic conferences. Too busy just trying to survive Japan Inc., I haven't kept up much with her since then, but yeah — no music, no life.
Cheers Gary!
steve
Yes, I have seen some of Jill's work and Ted talk - definitely a living of examplar of the divided brain hypothesis! On the japanese angle, I wonder if you know or have experienced the Japanese "hikikomori" phenomenon? This came up in a vagus nerve related discussion. I think this also may be a manifestation of the right hemisphere getting shutdown at societal level...
Hi Gary,
If not for my age, I would have been a good example of 'hikkikomori'. After I resigned in protest from a tenured position (actually, closer to 'quiet firing'), I cut most of my social ties and activities for several years.
But as the subject of analysis, I was in no position and had no voice or opportunity to explore proximal or distal correlations at the morpholoical level. Even now, I will have to go back and re-read your post a few times for the biological mechanisms. My self analysis and observations of the more age appropriate definition of 'hikkikomori' was more in terms of group dynamics. Some of that can be seen in general human nature ... marginalization and isolation is as close to the death penalty as one can impose on a social species. But some of it is in the unique spin the Japanese ruling class have put on the working class culture ... the culture of unquestioned compliance to authority, the tightness of the in-group at the expense of deviations from norms, etc.
Even now, I can't help but to laugh at the cognitive dissonance I see in the classroom. For example, one teacher who has long since become comfortable with a teacher-centered, Chain of Command classroom, asked for 'volunteers' to demonstrate the diaglogue which was the subject of the day's lesson. When, predictably, none were forthcoming, she opened the role book and 'chose volunteers' ... distorting the term as much as mayor Koike did when asking Universities to grant course credits to any student 'volunteers' for the recent Olympics.
If I begin deconstructing the reasons for hikkikomori now, I would be entering a book length rabbit hole. But a couple of good clues as to some of the warped group dynamics behind the phenomenon can be found in the following two books, the titles of which alone are enough to give a hint ...
1) Juzo Itami's 'Straitjacket Society: An Insider's Irreverent View of Bureaucratic Japan' — https://www.amazon.com/Straitjacket-Society-Insiders-Irreverent-Bureaucratic/dp/4770018487
2) Stephen Vlastos's ''Mirror of Modernity: Invented Traditions of Modern Japan'' — https://www.amazon.co.jp/-/en/Stephen-Vlastos/dp/0520206371
3) Takeo Doi's 'The Anatomy of Dependence' — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Anatomy_of_Dependence
JMHO, but hikkikomori is just one of many pathologies emerging as a direct result of a society modeled after military boot-camp. Hmmm ... come to think of it, comparing Japan with ancient Sparta might lead to some interesting insights into human nature, and some guesses as to how and why Spartan culture inevitably fell into decay.
The demographics here are so bad (young people unable or unwilling to marry and raise kids, a rapidly aging population), that the economy is depending on short term (5 years or less) migrant workers to run the convenience stores and nursing homes ... taxing their salaries for retirement and health benefits they will never receive, and then replacing them with a fresh crop of foreigners on 5 year contracts. Seems to me a rough parallel between disposable wage-slave foreigners and Sparta's Helot-Slaves who were culled every now and then just to keep 'em in check.
My longer comment to your link to Ian McGilchrist's YouTube podcast dovetails with the direction I've taken my understanding of human nature. But to really dig into hikkikomori would take a lot of filling in the gaps and connecting the dots. From the point of view of Chain of Command as the default structure and heuristics of Japanese society, hikkikomori might be thought of as a pathology similar to U.S. military PTSD.
So many ways to think of it, but for now, I'd rather not revisit that dark place, and just try to have fun with the kids — even if if means sometimes playing a shuckin' and jivin' token foreigner role. The kids are cool. I just wish they were not expected to have to adjust to the permanent institutionalization / infantilization of modern Japanese society. Those that survive and thrive, tend to do so despite the system. Not because of it. But what do I know? After 40 years here, I'm still struggling to learn my place ... sometimes as a Steppin Fetchit, occasionally as a colleague.
Cheers Gary,
steve
Thank you so much for the detailed reply. I will have to re-read it several times to grasp it all. Will check out the suggested books too.
Hi again Gary,
Woke up with a dim memory of an even better book for prying open the pathology of 'hikkikomori' ... Doi Takeo's 'Amae no Kozo' (The Anatomy of Dependence). I remember being particularly impressed because Doi had a good grasp of the provisionality of language as a social construct ... but also the only lens through which we can view self and other (Sapir-Whorf).
I have a paper back floating around here, and it is still available on Amazon. On reading the reviews and remembering what I had read decades again, thought it was even more relevant now than when it first came out. Try as I might, I can not find a pdf or e-book version of it, but thought you might find this riff off the book useful ... https://theholeinfaraswall-2.nethouse.ru/static/doc/0000/0000/0232/232351.513drrkiyo.pdf.
Cheers!
steve
Thanks Gary this is good stuff. And to be clear there's nothing wrong with information that's just interesting. But as you know, most chronic illness sufferers are desperate for solutions. So the more actionable info can be, the better. I'm still not sure there is any value to knowing that something is tied to left or right brain outside of it being interesting though.
If you delve into McGilchrist's work it has enormous explanatory power and helps to make sense of what is going in the world, and hence points to solutions. Here is a 5 minute clip he put up on youtube today https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YgW61bu4qsY
Hi Chris. Gary’s information is great for information’s sake, but his reference to Dr. Farias’ dystonia recovery program is worth it’s weight in gold. I had severe left leg dystonia in 2019, and was able to go to a clinic with Dr. Farias in Toronto. He also came out with his online program around that time, and I have been using it ever since. I no longer have dystonia and it keeps my Parkinson’s symptoms at bay. It’s an amazingly comprehensive program and a great value at $35 a month. He is constantly adding new material. I think it would be great for anybody who wants to improve their body/ brain balance.
Yes good reference. I know Dr Delahooke.
My thoughts exactly. As husband to a wife suffering lifelong chronic illness (which is what first drew my interest to Mr. Sharpe's substack), I don't know how this information is of any practical use. I hope Mr. Sharpe offers a follow-up.
The main thing seems to be trauma-induced Vagus incapacity manifesting as various chronic physical or mental symptoms. This implies trauma treatment as a potential modality of relief.
Thanks for this feedback, I have added a "Practical Applications" section to the end, which I hope offers something more definite...