Born to Love What We Do - Part I

Why do we do what we do?

There are so many variations of what people like to do, but we're not in the habit of questioning how this vast array of actions came into being.

This is especially so if something is enjoyable. Happiness doesn't provoke analysis the way sadness does.

Surviving required adapting. Over millions of years, our adaptions have become highly complex. They have been spread and blended all the way around the globe - as have the slight differences within our bodies.

Although loosely similar, our brains structure have an individual fingerprint. We are the same in one sense, but but one of a kind in another, just like plants in a field, or birds in a flock.

Our brains are all wired to receive information, store memories, sense, and store patterns, and rejuvenate memories into thoughts.

When those memories, our stored patterns, and reality triggers are recombined in the the neural wash, we are able to generate new and novel thoughts - a surreal mash-up of time and space that is usually only allowed to re-enter the cerebral cortex when it is closely resembling and reflecting the world around us. It is in fact, a micro-projection of the future, which the brain will then use if it seems to trigger our sense of 'doing the right thing'.

This is not the right thing, 'morally'. The brain doesn't know what a 'moral' is. It knows about it's event memories, and pattern memories, from social interaction. 'Doing the right thing', for everyone, is usually following a path to short or long term gain - in whatever area our survival centre deems able to be translated into modern culture.

Basic survival behaviour and sophisticated social interactions are one and the same thing. Our ability to operate in a group has not just been fundamental to survival, but a also product of it.

In out chaotic past the organisms that adapted for co-operating outlasted any non-socialising variations. This is not just for reproductive reasons, but also in conflict, or any other dangerous situation the group is always favoured over an individual.

You can think of the brain as a feedback mechanism. Each moment in reality is generating a 'sensory song' which floods the neural network and then causes our memory network to vibrate in sympathy.

We're not only remembering 'now', but constantly creating an electro-organic structure inside an organ.

Stunningly, contained in that same structure are recursive memories of what the structure used to look like. These 'memories of construction' form slices of time that allow us to travel back in time, at least in our minds. This awareness of change in a structure, over time, is the basis of this theory for why we have become the pre-eminent 'constructor' species on the planet.

So how did it happen?

Born to Love What We Do - Part II

How did we become 'us'?

Looking back into our evolutionary history, language classification gives a false impression that an organism like a human being exists as a discrete evolutionary unit. There must be large tracts of time spent between successive mutations, when we and other creatures were 'something else', suspended somewhere in-between the many species that Darwin described to the world in 1859.

And in that history of our physical changes, there's also an important history of 'sense' development.

Which sense came first?

Was it smell? Or touch?

Did each new sense alter the functioning of the other ones?

On Earth, the defining difference between the inorganic, and and the organic, is movement. That makes the it more likely that touch, or a sense of movement is close to the top of the list, or maybe a a variation on sound, because it also involves sensations of vibration.

Taste is also a good candidate, because it's about chemical attraction, which is how we came about and the represents the need to survive. In that way it's quite close to smell. Did we start with one taste/smell organ, and then it diverged into the mouth and nose at a later date? Is it in the process of recombining?

This is interesting because there is no reason to think that we have reached any sort of plateau. The world is changing as we are changing, and it's fascinating to think that we could be in a constant state of benevolent mutation between generations.

This is the connection with 'mental wellness' - the acknowledgement and care of the 'animal' component of us. To think of mental health in terms of the separated 'mind' model means loosing perspective on our physicality - is a very incomplete way of looking at mental health.

At the heart of all our basic functions are cycles. Whether its cellular reproduction, breathing or heartbeat rhythms, circadian rhythms, or the menstrual/hormonal cycle we are at every level, a beat, and a rhythm.

Taking away social pressures, the instinct to move. and to do, is innate.

And it is cyclical.

We all have days with a sense of 'flow', and some, without.

And at the extremes, we can look around in nature to see examples of hardwired behavioural extremes that occur at certain times of day, or at certain times of the year.

If you've ever seen lambs jumping in the spring sunshine - they are 'high' on the change of season and the coming of the light. If we're free of heavier emotions we too have an inner life which reacts with pleasure to to the sunnier mornings, and the lengthening of the day.

We know very basic changes in the seasons brings out quite different social behaviour in all animals.

We know what a bear likes to do in winter. It is 'depression' done right, because the bear is completing a physical process in synch with the seasons around them.

In some people the lower levels of sunlight trigger million-year-old adaptive processes to wish to stay put, and decrease activity until winter passes. In later years, older people feel a pull away from darker climates. In migrating for sunshine, they are creating a life based on mood and seasonal interaction.

In the same way 'mood' is our 'state of doing'

In a low mood, we want to do nothing.

In a high mood, we want to do everything.

If we accept this as a biological fact, we can see that it's related to survival and reproduction. On a basic level we are attracted to 'doing' (moving, breathing, expressing) and un-attracted by 'non-doing' (silence, stillness, death).

On a higher mental level, we are able to understand much of the world around us thanks to pattern recognition. Recognition requires knowledge, and our bodies are packed with hidden knowledge from the millions of years of developing our genetic makeup.

We do not just 'know' common sense.

We can 'feel' common sense.

At a biological level, in the structure of our brain, 'reason' is equivalent to 'resonance'.

Born to Love What We Do - Part III

We are a living biological signature.

We are not just having to remember a piece of memory from a storage place. Our memories are a unique organic structure, designed to resonate and reshape themselves over time, through gaining experience, and the input of our 'sensory song'.

Outside of what we think we know, is the 'unknown'.

Over time, out brain forms a very special relationship with this 'unknown', which I will come back to.

Our ability to associates thoughts across time, and create narratives is the driver behind human progression. We have evolved the desire to learn, or rather, we have been selected for out ability to learn.

Fundamental to this is the earliest moments of communication, between any species

Once upon a time, humans would have crossed a very specific communication barrier - the expression of 'good' and 'bad'. When we learned to communicate signs/sounds for 'agree', or 'disagree' we started a dialogue which has resulted in the most complex, widespread species on the planet.

This is also the moment when 'consent' came into being.

Initially it would have existed in just a single pair of our ancestors, and millions of years later it has the basis for a ethical guide to behaviour for all humans. Did it spread as a cultural idea? Or did it arrive as part of a mass evolutionary change.

What other psychological marker points can we detect in human history?

The answer lies in religion.

Leaving aside the idea of intervention by a deity, the introduction of the promotion of forgiveness must have been in sync with changing relationship culture. Unless the idea was brought into the minds of people by such a deity (which defies the point of the 'lesson' in the first place) there must have been a new social code beginning to appear prior to this point.

Through the era of pre-religion a system of resolving confrontations must have been starting to develop which relied on ever more complex language progression. As concepts surrounding time began to root themselves in the language structure, there must have been a growing awareness of consequences, and choices about those consequences.

This is important because it signals another change - a change in the ongoing evolution of the human brain. So are we creating our own culture, or is our culture being created by the structural changes in our brains?

On top of this complexity, we have the small variations in the shape and function of all our brains - just like any other plant species, or animal. We are far from carbon copies of each other, in any sense.

In this way, everyone on the planet is at a slightly different point in micro-evolutionary terms.

In a 2007 study, scientists at New York University and UCLA showed that political orientation is related to differences in how the brain processes information.

If our recent history is anything to go by, ending slavery, women's rights, civil rights, and gay rights are all indicators that brain evolution is pushing us politically leftward.

This way of looking at human beings can be applied at this large-scale level, but also in much more subtle ways that help identify causes for stress or illness.

This project was originally conceived as way a re-imagining the way we look at mental health conditions.

But the application of the idea reaches much further out into what we know about 'human nature'.

It brings with it a deeper look into 'free will' and the origins of religion.

And why we are born to love what we do.