In Part I, I posited that most of us have not reached full Adulthood due to a failure in the final development of the brain’s prefrontal lobes from the ages of 15-21. While a dramatic growth spurt should occur during this time, development is arrested if, like most of us, we operate from unresolved childhood and adolescent traumas and their corresponding limited belief systems.
What follows is a description of the “fourfold brain” and the consequences resulting from its “Arrested Development.”
Generally speaking our brain is composed of three main parts, the hindbrain or reptilian brain, the midbrain, or limbic/old mammalian brain, and the neocortex/new mammalian brain. Developmentally, the prefrontal lobes are the newest addition to the neocortex, making up the “fourfold brain.”
The reptilian brain, the oldest, most basic and primal part of our human functioning and deals with habits, learned skills, rituals, survival strategies, and reflexive or reactive behaviors. Our tendencies for being territorial, competitive, fear based survival – fight or flight, is the domain of this part of the brain. Its basic approach is, “Is it something to eat, mate with, or be eaten by?”(1)
The Limbic or old mammalian brain contains our inherent desire to nurture our young, our senses of smell and hearing, the foundations for all relationships, and the cognizance of the world as somehow “other.” It helps to”…give us awareness of an interior, subjective world and our feelings concerning that outer world and our relationship to it.” (2)
The Neocortex/new mammalian brain the wrinkled area you see in pictures, occupies the largest portion (five times the skull space of the other two combined). The prefrontal lobes are located in the foremost part of the neocortex. It introduces language and thinking, abstract thinking, intuition, “objectivity,” awareness of past, present, and future, and thus the ability to imagine “What if?,” creative imagination, the drive for novelty, and so on.
Here’s how Pearce describes the body’s method of maturation in “The Biology of Transcendence”:
“Nature’s development is itself threefold. First, each new neural structure is built on the foundation of neural structures that have come before it. Second, as each new brain develops, it incorporates into its own functions the more primitive foundations upon which it is built and changes the nature of that foundation into one that is compatible with the new system. And third, the newly integrated system serves, in turn, as a foundation for higher evolutionary developments, which is transcendence in action.” (3)
As long as the stages of development of all four brains proceed on schedule and are not interfered with, then the prefrontal lobes oversee the integration process that offers “…open-ended potential, an ability to rise and go beyond all constraint or limitation.” (4) However, the ability of the prefrontal lobes to offer this transcendent capacity is dependent upon the proper development of its foundation, the reptilian and limbic brains.
For instance one, of the crucial elements in both the toddler and in the mid adolescent stages of development is the emotional nurturing of the mother or primary caregiver. It’s no longer a question of “nature or nurture” but that both are an integral part of human development. And it’s not just that the emotional nurturing helps to develop proper “emotional intelligence” but that it actually shapes the kind of child that is born.
“…If a pregnant animal is subjected to a hostile, competitive, anxiety producing environment, she will give birth to an infant with an enlarged hindbrain, an enlarged body and musculature, and a reduced forebrain. The opposite is equally true. If the mother is in a secure harmonious, stress free, nurturing environment during gestation, she will produce an infant with an enlarged forebrain, reduced hindbrain, and a smaller body.” (5)
So, at any time, we are designed to move towards growth and transcendence of what has come before, or if threatened, to direct our resources to defend ourselves. The body can’t do both at the same time, so our environment, both from outside sources and our self generated internal environment, determine which direction we’re going.
When subjected to a threat of any kind, whether real or a perceived, our brain shifts to the more reactive hindbrain “fight or flight” responses. If these threats become more frequent, then the pathways for this kind of survival responses become “grooved” in the neural net. According to Neuroscientist Carla Shatz: “neurons that fire together wire together”) and violence becomes more and more the “normal” way of life.
For me, “violence” includes not only physical harm, but emotional abuse and judgments, toward ourselves or others. If you have “monkey mind” responses full of recriminations, worries, and judgments against yourself going on inside your head, these are acts of violence toward you, and your body is responding in kind. As William Blake put it oh so bluntly,
“All evil consists of self restraint or restraint of others.
All evil acts are murderous.”
Being subjected to the cultural violence of one kind or another through all the developmental stages, our brain (and the rest of our body) is constantly shifting from growth to defense. It’s no wonder then that so very few, in Western culture at least, have ever succeeded in making the developmental jump in consciousness to full Adulthood.
It’s like punching tiny holes in a hose. Each time a trauma occurs, another hole appears, the water pressure drops as it leaks out the holes. If there are enough holes, eventually the amount of water coming out the nozzle is hardly anything at all.
In my own case, I remember feeling like my life came to a grinding halt around the age of 14 or 15. I could feel it in a fuzzy sort of way. I certainly wasn’t very much in touch with my “emotional intelligence”, living mostly in my head at that time. I had this sense that the future wasn’t looking very golden, exciting, and certainly not at all transcendent! Overall I felt lost about the direction of my life, and what “growing up” was going to be.
I certainly wasn’t a “happy camper” that’s for sure. I was definitely in “Arrested Development” but didn’t even know it. Looking back there was no way I could have ever known because everyone else around me was also pretty much in the same boat. No one had reached true Adulthood to model or show me what that was supposed to be like.
Fortunately, all is not lost! It is possible to “rewrite the story” and complete these stages of development. One of my blogs, “Completing the Circuit of Experience” covers the basic principles of how I learned to do this.
Then in Part III, I will be sharing parts of my own “hero’s journey” of what’s it been like for me as I have been growing up into an Integrated Adult.
May you live a completed path!
“The Biology of Transcendence” by Joseph Chilton Pearce
1. pg. 25
2. pg. 26
3. pg. 28
4. pg. 23
5. pg. 115
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