"NEUROLOGICAL FOUNDATIONS OF MULTIPLE REALITIES"

The theoretical basis of all my work on Psycho-synthesis is that we all consist of a number of separate selves. These we have developed or discarded in response to environmental pressure, but they remain a part of us, affecting our responses to certain situations. Central to our being is an observer self which is potentially a powerful controller of our emotions and of our physical and mental efficiency. To the extent to which we are aware of these aspects of ourselves we can choose who we are, what we feel and how we will react to challenges.

To repress awareness of our multiple personalities is to lock up valuable emotional energy and to potentiate apparently random and uncontrollable responses.

One young child who had been abused and terrified into silence would not speak because of the trauma associated with speech pathways. After weeks of patient effort a foster parent realised that the boy had begun to sing with her. Not only did he sing what she sang, but he poured out all his repressed communications in song. He was forbidden to speak of many things, but singing was a different skill, learned at a later period. Words in that context were permitted. He did not connect the spoken word with the sung. The lack of crossover between the abusive environment in which he kept silent and the happy one in which he sang allowed him to use the words he needed as long as they were pronounced musically. He still found it impossible to speak.

A woman who had apparently recovered remarkably well from the trauma of desertion by a beloved husband found herself instantly weeping uncontrollably as she stepped from the track into the dim, heavily scented recesses of the New Forest. She had often walked there with her husband in happier days and was determined to reclaim the pleasure of her forest walks. On the gravel track she was able to reconcile past images and present reality but as soon as she stepped into the damp, resin-scented woodland, the olfactory experience by-passed her associative cortex, punched straight into her limbic, more primitive nervous system and stimulated her emotional responses without the intervention of conscious thought.

A successful businessman acquired a reputation for studied rudeness whenever he was approached socially. He himself could not understand why people began to make overtures to him and then drifted away.

He was actually a very shy man although eager to be liked. Whenever he felt threatened he examined his hands closely. People who attempted to engage him in conversation took this as a signal that he was indifferent to them. But in fact he had been bullied by an older cousin when he was a small boy and only when he fell and hurt himself did the cousin become solicitous, afraid that his mother might blame him for the accident.

So when the small boy looked at his bleeding hands, the cousin put his arm around his shoulders.The man looked at his hands when approached by strangers because of the unconscious association he made between anxiety, injury to his hands and a pleasant, companionable outcome to a threatening situation.

In each of these scenarios an obvious reality is contradicted by a more primitive set of neural linkages which are not normally associated with reason and therefore cannot be moderated.

Physical justification for these assertions is found in an emerging awareness of how we form memories, associate data and react to stimuli.

Nativists, of whom Michael Gazzaniga is my favourite, aver that all the possible responses to any given situation are already laid down by evolution as neural pathways in the developing brain. Experience simply directs us to potentiate the most appropriate network.

As we use a particular associative path, so we strengthen rehearsed connections and invalidate paths which are unused.

In neurological terms, each time an electrical potential builds in a neural path the effect accumulates until it reaches critical threshold level and is discharged by triggering a further potential in a neighbouring circuit. Unused neurons die whilst well-used ones form more and stronger links. So the likelihood of forming novel links diminishes as a network becomes more established.

In this way patterns of response and behaviour are potentiated. In the same way, sub-personalities are developed which have diminishing possibilities of interconnection and communication.

Each sub-personality exists as a neural network or module carrying linked information in a discrete situation. In other words, each is located in a separate reference system determined by time, place and attitudinal response: each exists within its own version of reality.

Apart from innate genetically hard-wired modules selected to deal with environmental challenge we have an extremely flexible system of responses stimulated by feed-back loops cross-referenced to certain situations in which they occur.

Thus it is possible to hold two totally contradictory beliefs without realising their impossibility until the two separate belief systems collide. One can be aware that it is Thursday, aware that guests are arriving on Friday, yet not appreciate the error of expecting them at any moment. The network on which one encounters day-to-day routine is not closely linked to that by which one keeps track of novel events projected into the future.

Memory loss often occurs when one transfers concepts formed in one locality to another. Who has not gone from one room to another only to wonder what they went for? On returning to point of origin it has been easy to remember what would not come to mind in the other setting.

Who has not performed a task like driving, playing the piano or or solving a crossword puzzle without any awareness of the processes involved?

Drivers have no recollection of the last miles of their journey. Pianists stumble if they actually think about the movements of their hands. Clues and solutions emerge as if by magic from the jumbled associative pathways of the subconscious.

We know that indivuduals are ripe to develop new neural pathways at critical periods in their growth. Newly hatched goslings form an association between survival and the first moving object they see. Conrad Lorenz demonstrated the formation of such an attachment which he called "imprinting", when he induced a brood to follow him rather than their biological parent. Kittens kept in the dark during crucial periods of their growth fail to acquire the ability to see horizontal or vertical features. Young children are equipped with the ability to hear linguistic variations during the period when they are learning their native tongue, but can later be demonstrated to have lost these abilities. Thus any child can hear the fine nuances of a range of languages, but having once chosen a path from the range available, their acuity fades as other links become redundant and atrophy.

These "zones of proximal development" are in many cases genetically and socially predetermined to enable the individual to learn techniques of survival from a given situation. Memories and responses are linked to particular stimuli in discrete versions of reality and may have no practical validity in others.

Thus our responses to certain situations are often mediated through the dominant sub-personality at the time we first learned a coping strategy, rather than than the more mature "observer self".

If we are unaware of these aspects of ourselves we can fail to react most appropriately to current challenges.

Once we can accept a valid, physical reason (a pre-formed, disassociated neural module) for the apparently random behaviour of the psyche, we can allow ourselves to recognise, assimilate and begin to use the various perspectives these afford on the multiple realities within which we must inevitably function.

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