Controlling Your Limbic Brain’s Controls on What You Can Do
by Win Wenger, Ph.D.
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Abstract
Is “exceptional giftedness” exceptional? Standard I.Q. testing is based on the assumption that only a tiny fraction of a population will be gifted. Here we explore the limbic brain as a key to locked cortical memory and changes in education that might lead to profound improvements in educational and personal performance. Based on the author’s experience with seminar students’ recollections of “squelched precocity,” as many as two-thirds in one group were able to recall precocious episodes in their own experience before the age of three. He proposes that exceptionality may be more normal than commonly believed and that squelching creates a limbic “distaste” for learning and discovery. Methods that tap into limbic channels and extend those experiences into verbal description may offer a pathway to hidden genius.
Physical structure of the brain
Please hold one hand as a clenched fist. Wrap your open other hand over top of your fist. Your open hand represents the cerebral cortex in your brain; your clenched fist represents your limbic brain. Your cortex crowns your limbic.
The limbic is not a single organ but a cluster of distinct organs, each with specific and diverse functions. The three organs that generate and control our emotions — the thalamus, hypothalamus, and the amygdala — are part of the region and aggregate of organs we call the limbic brain. So are the physical appetite-controlling structures of the brain, located in the limbic region.
Functional Role
The limbic brain is our main “computer.” The cortex in effect operates as supplementary memory chips supporting the main computer. The conscious mind is associated with only a tiny part of the cortex, but the brain operates as an interactive system.
From Ordovician swamp days if not earlier, the limbic brain maintained balance in our lives and in our bodies, as complex homeostatic equilibrium. In the body, as a master thermostat in a multi-story building, the limbic brain regulates not only temperature but fluid levels (thirst), energy levels and intake (hunger), endocrine and hormone levels, in the trillion-and-one complex systems that comprise a living physical body.
Fascinatingly, the limbic brain also regulates our lives, not only our physical bodies. One small example: What if alcohol, nicotine, an opiate or other psychoactive drug pushes the “thermostat” setting out of position? Equilibrium is then redefined and a drug dependency set up which is tough to lick. It can be very difficult to get the thermostat restored to its proper setting, once the limbic brain accommodates to the presence of that new substance.
Another example: People with poor self-image may meet unexpected success and then do all sorts of things ostensibly to improve their performance, but in effect “blowing” their situation, to return to comfortably familiar failure. Such behavior doesn’t make rational sense to onlookers, but it makes sense from the perspective of the limbic brain.
A sensori-motor example: A normal person, in a car accident, goes through his windshield and suffers severe brain damage. Equilibrium (rest position) for the body gets thereby redefined. A month later he is so physically distorted that the palm of his hand is twisted flat against his wrist, a kind of distortion seen with long-term brain-damage sufferers. Proprioception has found a new and grotesque equilibrium.
An example involving the eyes: Near-sightedness, far-sightedness, and astigmatism are regarded as problems with the shape of the eyeballs. Yet, what controls the shape of the eyeballs? Muscles surrounding the eyes. What controls those muscles? The brain. Near-, far- or astigmatic-sightedness is a function of how the brain defines resting-point or equilibrium for the eyes. Correct the brain’s definition of equilibrium and correct your eyesight.
The Key Issue is Balance
Our limbic brain, master equilibriator of complexity and homeostasis in living systems, performs as an athletic virtuoso balancing act. Attempting to restore balance, to prevent a fall, elicits from each of us a swifter, surer and more agile response than we normally are able to manifest. Even someone crippled and arthritic, if starting to fall, will, usually, by reflex, suddenly reach out in an effort to restore balance. We can’t always succeed in preventing a fall, but an off-balance condition elicits more response than we’re normally capable of.
Emotion is the added energy and response the limbic pulls into play in its effort to restore balance in an unbalanced situation. Emotion mobilizes the system to its best efforts.
Living has gotten more complicated since the Jurassic. The limbic now has auxiliary memory cells in the cortex. They expand the frame of reference and the span of awareness in which our limbic mainframe works.
Although the cortex works much more slowly than the limbic, it brings to bear far more perception upon given stimuli and frames of reference. It processes more detail, it recognizes patterns and it anticipates the unfolding of events within those patterns. It provides a focusing system which allows extra resources to respond to stimuli. The focusing usually takes place in the left temporal lobe, the main area from which we are “conscious.” Pattern-recognition occurs in the opposite, right, temporal lobe; anticipation of pattern and outcome is mainly in the frontal cortex.
“Pattern and balance” — Moiré by Jacob Yerex
Usually portrayed as opposites, the two temporal lobes are actually much more alike than they are different. They are organs specialized for making sense of things, though they follow different methods for doing so. Consistency is important to both. The left seeks consistency with linear logic and rationalizes things; the right is driven to align other perceptions with recognized patterns. In this regard it has a special relationship to the limbic brain. As we shall see below in terms of amygdala functions, “reading” the body in relation to ongoing contexts determines the readiness of the system to act in those contexts.
Relating to the Intellect
The last several decades of research have shown us that the limbic brain directs the operations of the cortex, governing not only learning but all intellectual behavior. This was already suspected as early as the 1930s. In that era, general semanticists instituted the practice of a “cortico-thalamic pause,” in the midst of crisis, where one aimed to remain consciously aware that his every thought and perception was traveling not only through his cortex but through the thalamus (seat of emotions and indeed a center for nearly all the traffic in the brain). Taking that process into account and taking one’s emotional color into account, he slows the process to optimize clarity of thought and to optimize awareness of choices for how to act.
Most brain specialists until the 1970s assumed that intellectual functions, including teaching and learning, were largely or entirely a matter of cerebral cortex and not of more “primitive” levels of the brain, which were viewed as enemies to effective learning. It became increasingly apparent that the actual process of intellect was governed in the limbic, with the cortex merely carrying out its instructions.
It works like this: On any given stimulus, the limbic (notably the amygdala as part of the limbic) reads the readiness attitudes of the body. Similarly, a desktop computer, while loading up, sends “readiness check” signals throughout its system and reads feedback before starting operation. The amygdala reads a reflexive “felt” readiness of the body to go, in that context, before it tells the cortex what to do and how to do it. The limbic can thus be said to “use the body like a brain” in reading feedback from physical attitudes before telling the cortex what to do after any given stimulus. Where do such physical attitudes come from?
How does verbal description relate to limbic/cortical, etc.?
The writer’s own experience with workshop participants from 1974 to 1976 illustrates a predominant role of the limbic brain in human intellectual behavior, especially with regard to the phenomenon of giftedness. Verbal description imprints and extends the process into consciousness.
In those early weekend public workshops, the writer had recently discovered that to describe in some detail an object of current perception generated considerably further perception of that object and of related contexts. By formatting the contexts, and by encouraging such description toward sensory detail as distinct from abstractions, he was beginning to apply this “Principle of Description” to a wide range of objectives. An announced objective of those early workshops was “self-discovery,” thus, he allotted an hour in each to having participants search through early memories for “important, formative experiences.”
Through the descriptive process plus appropriate formatting (similar to the formatting of some of the step-by-step problem-solving procedures now free in the CPS Techniques section), participants routinely reached past their earliest conscious memories into significantly earlier memories, some of which were verifiable and several of which were informally verified. (This experiment could be repeated using formal procedures.)
With no more instruction than to search the earliest available memories for important early formative experiences, two-thirds of participants in these early workshops were discovering “episodes of genius.” They were reporting that, in infancy or early childhood, they had experienced perceptions or performed acts normally regarded as extremely precociously gifted — and that the acts were at best overlooked, at worst painfully squelched, and long since forgotten. We were immediately reminded of the notorious “instability” of intelligence scores of young children before the age of three years, in which measured intelligence fluctuates over a range of 30 or more points.
Participants in these workshops, as in most of the writer’s current workshops, were largely self-selected, and probably on the whole brighter than norms — but they were drawn from the general public. For two-thirds of these participants, in hundreds of instances, in just an hour of “search and describe,” with no further instructions than that, episodes of genius as “important formative experience,” squelched episodes of precocious acts and perhaps genius surfaced in the activity. This merits further thought and investigation, since it suggests that a large portion of the general public, indeed, may have had similar experiences.
Transforming our perspective on “exceptional giftedness”
Most people would not expect two-thirds of participants in a self-discovery group to have had childhood episodes of “exceptional giftedness.” The generally held view of exceptional giftedness as a rarity grew out of the definition and redefinition of “I.Q. tests.” The developers of those tests worked with them until participant scores matched a “bell-shaped” distribution curve.
I.Q. tests compare rather than quantify. A wrong answer at one level of performance means a much greater difference in score than a wrong answer at another level of performance. “Norming” these tests has meant extraordinary distortion of data to force it to meet bell-shaped distribution standards. Prevailing professional disdain for assessing even the comparative intellectual development of children until they’ve “stabilized” past age three years has sheltered the public from appreciating the nature and degree of this distortion. It is from these remarkable professional practices that we assume that only a few individuals in any population exhibit “exceptional giftedness.” Yet, a closer look at prevalent professional approaches to such matters reveals the characteristics of “self-fulfilling prophecy” in its most extreme form.
Part of the reason for this distorted standard model is the confusion of “average” with “normal.” “Average” is a profoundly different quantity from the intact, whole nature of “normality.” If our tests oriented toward measuring intactness (or some actual quantity representing intelligence), we should see distributions very, very different from that of the bell curve. As it is, by confusing “normal” and “average” we kept redefining our tests for intelligence until, no matter how the actual quantities measured might come out, their results could be made to conform to “average” as “the norm.”
How does “squelched precocity” relate to the limbic?
It has “re-set the thermostat.”
We concluded from experiences in those workshops that “giftedness” and “genius” are not matters of ability. They are likely matters of (limbic) drive.
Only where the need to look further, to make sense of things, to hold things in relation to one another, to be exhilarated by discovering meaningful relationships, etc., is inextricably linked to the physical appetite structures of the brain does giftedness survive that first squelching episode or so. In everyone else, such behavior is likely to have been extinguished early on.
The high-ability base appears from this author’s experience not only more wide-spread than was generally believed, but readily retrievable.
His results with mentally retarded teenagers and adults, in a class in Windsor, Ontario, in 1979 illustrated underlying potential. Given appropriately formatted, inner perceptual, “search and describe” instructions, 17 of the 29 mentally retarded members of that class on first try came up with original, workable inventions. (Format was a simplified version of the Beachhead procedure. The writer was left with the impression, however unscientific, that if he had been able to get the attention of the other 12 members so they also could follow the instructions, they would have performed similarly.) These were all people in the community being taught through St. Clair Community College, before and after this experience, to comb their hair, brush their teeth and (for only some) to tie their shoes. Presumably they are still being taught such basics.
What our workshop attendees often reported from very early childhood
It is safest to “run behind and not ahead,” was the most common refrain among general public workshop attendees, two-thirds of whom reported discovery of early episodes of genius. They anticipated support and comfort for dragging behind, but punishment and alarm for running ahead.
Appropriate feedback is basic human nutrition for one’s expressed perceptions, one’s interests, excitements, and initiatives. If one relates to one’s own actual intelligence, he is soon into some areas unfamiliar to his parents, unfamiliar to his teachers, and more often than not that unfamiliarity is made into an uncomfortable situation for the child.
What this means in terms of “exceptional giftedness” and the limbic brain
Only where intellectual drives are inextricably part of physical appetite structures, and/or those appetite structures themselves show some unusual characteristics, does giftedness survive to late childhood and adulthood. Virtually everywhere else, it is extinguished. Genius is more drive than ability.
- Sometimes an unusual problem with physical appetite structures marks genius. Bulimics and anorexics, for example, are reportedly bright on average; also a high incidence of the very bright are obese. Surveys of some gifted populations, such as Mensa gatherings, display a remarkably high proportion of obese individuals. Alternatively, squelching may suppress appetites for learning and exaggerate appetites for comfort through eating.
- The relationship between (limbic) physical appetite structures and giftedness shows also in other ways. The descriptions of “gifted” or “genius” behavior found in the literature, certainly correspond to what psychologists refer to as “drive reduction behavior” — i.e., efforts to satisfy physical drives like hunger, thirst, etc.
From a bio-evolutionary standpoint, it make enormous sense to link intellect to physical appetite in another regard. In more physically challenging prehistoric times, ancestors who didn’t get smarter when hunting and pickings were lean didn’t survive to become our ancestors. Even today, many mental and spiritual disciplines practice fasting, usually for announced reasons of establishing self-discipline, but almost always in conjunction with efforts to reach for unusually special or “high” mental or perceptual effects.
Likely times in life when gifted persons become ungifted, merely intelligent and well-informed but no longer inspired geniuses, are the teens and the forties. These are also times of major change in the physical appetite structures of the brain and of the physical appetites themselves.
Considerations
One wonders, then, how the increasingly widespread use of appetite-suppressant drugs might affect giftedness.
If the occurrence of gifted behavior were not widely suppressed or extinguished, perhaps a substantial portion or even a majority of humans could be “exceptionally gifted.”
The proportion of us who are not, then, might be viewed as a casualty list.
Overview
We have approached genius and giftedness as functions of the physical appetite structures of the limbic brain. That ability is widely distributed in the human population, but genius and giftedness may also be viewed as matters of drive more than ability. We cited workshop training experiences where seemingly ordinary people, examining their own early childhoods, recalled episodes of suppressed genius or precocity, squelched and forgotten. They had learned it was safer to run behind than to run ahead.
Would most of us be gifted, had such early episodes not extinguished our appetites for discovery? How do societies so predictably extinguish their own brightest lights?
Institutions, formal and informal at all levels, like any other complex homeostatic (self-stabilizing) system, seek to conserve energy by reducing the range of variables with which they must contend. Nearly always, this takes the form of requiring people to behave predictably. In some sectors such predictability — such as driving on a designated side of the road — is essential.
In many other sectors, little justification can be found beyond mere convenience for the institution itself — whether the institution is a government agency, a school, a firm, a group of friends, or a family. Yet, by definition, creativity and giftedness and genius behave unpredictably (so far as the institution is concerned); moreover, they generate unpredictable conditions. The pain of that inconvenience, in turn, is visited upon the perpetrator of that inconvenience — even when, as is sometimes the case, the institution’s own survival depended upon that gifted but unpredicted act.
At best, then, gifted behavior usually goes unreinforced. At worst it becomes painfully punished. Such phenomena may be so widespread that without such extinctions nearly everyone reading this report would be “exceptionally gifted.”
The very institutions we form to mutualize our gains may inadvertently extinguish our gains beyond a boundary point.
The extreme form of this extinction of genius, in our schools
We can see further elaborations of this theme in schools. For some decades, we have lived with the consequences of a peculiar provision of Federal and state aid to education. No teacher or administrator gets more money or power (except at graduate school levels, where different dynamics apply) if Junior learns better than others. If Junior learns worse, however, more money and power are allocated into the system for compensatory efforts. This, of course, constitutes a reward for poor teaching, poor curriculum content, and poor methods. While heroic individuals are motivated by other, more intrinsic concerns, the system as a whole moves in the directions set by incentive.
The European Renaissance enjoyed the Socratic method as a principal feature of schools and education. In the mid- to late-19th century, most countries, including the USA, adopted the Prussian school model, mass-educating large numbers of citizens to perform as cogs in the early industrial machine and to serve as cannon fodder. Both of these values were seen as bases for national power.
Under the Socratic method, the teacher would ask a pupil such acute thought-provoking questions that the student would be forced, in seeking to answer them, to examine his internal and external perceptions and to describe what he discovered there. Thus, the exercise of the Socratic method reinforced a richness within each student’s mind. This approach consistently produced genius in the populations where it was used.
When schools abandoned “educating” and went to didactic teaching in the Prussian model instead, they adopted a model of pouring information and skills into tabula rasa, the virtually “empty slates” of students’ minds and assessing progress in terms of the degree of failure of students to retain this poured-in information.
In Socratic method, human learners were cultivated around their strengths and became, so to speak, Sequoia trees. In the tabula rasa Prussian model prevailing today, educators’ attention trains on where the student “doesn’t measure up.” Instead of proceeding from strengths, students are mainly attuned to their shortfalls. We have nearly all become convinced, coming through such experiences, that we’re not really all that good. We’ve been cultivated around our weaknesses and perceived shortcomings, instead of around our strengths, enroute to becoming little privet hedges instead of Sequoias.
“Verification” of learning methods
All human learning arrives in context. Something has meaning only in context of how it relates to other things, and/or how a change in the one thing bears upon what happens in the other things. Virtually all current educationally approved practices were validated by procedures devoid of context. Measures of effectiveness of given educative techniques were generally taken in terms of the effect on rate of (temporary) memorization of nonsense syllables and other meaningless fragments, easily quantified. Empty schooling has no relevance to human learning!
We certainly do not lack ways to account for an apparent extinction of genius and giftedness in our society, especially when examining schools as institutions. Could it be that without extinguishing factors, most people might emerge “exceptionally gifted”?
More on the role of the limbic brain
The limbic brain, assessing the readiness of the system to handle a given stimulus, tells the cortex how to handle that stimulus — whether to run with and explore it in some manner (“there’s gold in them thar hills — go for it!”), or whether to just “bury it under a rug somewhere and forget about it.” Some of that context is the individual’s own physical attitude within the body. Some of it is the “second plane of awareness” context of classroom, teacher manner, etc., in ways well addressed by Dr. Georgi Lozanov and his Suggestopedic method.
Mini-demonstration:
An example, Dear Reader, of the power of the physical attitudes of the body in determining what the limbic tells the cortex to do with a stimulus, is this simple demonstration. Please stand now, with feet about two feet apart, slump-shouldered. Gaze slack-jawed at the ceiling, and say (or try to say) crisply, “I’m a brilliant genius!!!”Now pull your feet together, straighten into a much more alert and crisp physical posture, and say that again.
That gives you a small demonstration of the power of context working against you and for you. In that first instance, you could feel the commands relayed by the limbic, from the physical attitudes of the body, fighting even your ability to say a simple sentence! Far subtler perceptions, intellectualizations and behaviors are infinitely more susceptible to the physical attitudes of the body (especially habituated “body language”), to say nothing of Lozanov’s “second plane contexts,” which also operate as controlling factors.
These, then, are some main elements of the emerging model in which the limbic brain dominates human learning and teaching, intellect and giftedness. In turn, we can let these few elements suggest points where the model indicates that intervention — as changes in methods of educating and cultivating personal growth — open new frontiers in desirable outcomes.
Ways to Improve
In no particular order, we can list a few possible intervention points:
- Improved posture while learning; improved posture in the classroom. Modify furniture to induce more appropriate physical attitudes. Research, discover, and explore contrast between the physical attitudes of genius and one’s own physical attitudes, as in the Borrowed Genius procedure.
- Use contexts from which you — or students — may “search and describe” inner and outer perceptions, without the direction of Socratically acute questions. (Half of the methods given in this Project Renaissance website introduce such design contexts.)
- Reintroduce emotion, the language of the limbic, into lesson content. (Emotion and controversy have been stripped from education by competing public pressures.)
- Adopt procedures and programs that lead students (and teachers) to discover or rediscover their own genius. Address the feelings experienced when their/our prior precocities were being extinguished. Cultivate appetites and gusto for learning.
- Determine ways to relate, or even to sublimate-in, intellectual and aesthetic drives to the physical appetite structures of the brain, to an even greater extent than now. How? Possibly, as with thousands of various “disciplines,” using fasting or other manipulations of physical appetite to heighten mental performance. At the very least, to defend instances of high intellectual endowment from such threats as appetite suppressants and against times of physiological appetite change.
- Carefully realign contexts, classrooms, students, teachers, administrators, or parents (!) in ways that elicit extra efforts and challenges to recover intellectual balance. Let ample and free discussion follow.
- Restore Socratic or at least perceptual search-and-describe procedures as a preferred method of “education” — working with, rather than despite, individual, societal, and group contexts.
- Amygdalal and hippocanthal functions, not addressed in this article, suggest among other things a careful positive reinforcement of some of the component behaviors which come together to express giftedness in relation to physical-appetite brain structures. This is not so much learning behavior a la behaviorism as extrinsic reward systems.
- Establish a learning context in which selected spontaneous behaviors of the learner are reinforced for persistence, rather than interrupted and squelched. Much of the original Montessori Method was based upon this. That method successfully taught “unteachable” poverty-class children for decades before being transplanted to America as an affluent-class phenomenon. That takes on added meaning in relation to the common finding that highly gifted adults and commonly regarded “creative geniuses” generally reflect high levels of “compulsiveness” in their psychological profiles, and that their high contributions historically come mostly through utter persistence in the face of discouragement and punishment.
- We should develop and enrich a vocabulary and language of feelings. Feelings are a primary processing language of the limbic. This can bring into better reach of our conscious mind and intent the true core of where our actual choices and decisions are made, in contrast to our conscious choices and decisions, which are usually overridden by those made in our limbic, unawares. Note in this connection the above principle of formulating contexts, within which one may “search-and-describe” perceptions, through “focusing” or some of the Project Renaissance procedures. This aspect has enormous implications for self-improvement, career-building, education, and control of addictions, among other issues.
These are but a few of the points where intervention could lead to greatly improved outcome, in education and career and also in general. As we understand more of the role of the limbic brain in its equilibriating and directing of the intellect, and as we grasp the implications of understandings at which we have already arrived, other key points of positive transformation should follow.
It is also clear that our understandings of the cortex now must address and include the limbic, which directs that cortex. The limbic brain’s seeking of homeostasis through more and more complex living circumstances created that cortex. Already, the similarities and differences between the remarkably specialized left and right temporal lobes of the cortex begin to make greater sense than before the limbic model emerged.
Many more researchers are needed to explore this field. Opportunities abound for original discovery and for major improvements to educational practice. Such discoveries can be productive for professional and career advancement. The opportunities for such discoveries are so numerous, they are easy to find. We urge further attention, whether by researchers or laymen, to what the limbic brain means and can mean to what’s important in your experience.
P.S. — Now that you’ve read this article, you are cordially invited to discover ten times more meaning and content from it than you are aware of right now. Please turn to keyboard, pen and paper, or a tape recorder, and, following the procedures of either Freenoting or Windtunnel, for some sustained rapid-flow torrential minutes record absolutely everything that comes to mind in this context, faster than you can think about or judge. Be willing to discard (afterward) a first few nonsense paragraphs to get through to some insights which will surprise you greatly.