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Book excerpts

What is the Patterning Instinct? Is it unique to humans?​

How culture sculpts our brains – before we even know it

Are we "ensnared in an inescapable web" of culture?

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Can We Disentangle Ourselves
​From Our Cultural Patterns? 

​To what extent has our culture shaped our minds so that we can only think in the patterns we've inherited from the past?

Cognitive anthropologist Merlin Donald warns that our cultural storage systems have "assumed a certain autonomy" and in many ways act like an organism with its own volition:
Our cultures invade us and set our agendas… Big Brother culture owns us because it gets to us early. As a result, we internalize its norms and habits at a very basic level. We have no choice in this. Culture influences what moves us, what we look for, and how we think for as long as we live.
​Like an alien force from a sci-fi movie, our culture maintains its existence outside any one of us, and yet at the same time pervades our minds. While its tangible expressions impact our daily lives, its ultimate power derives from the intangible conceptualizations that lie below, out of sight.

The abstract concepts of culture have shaped the course of world history more profoundly than any of its physical manifestations. Beliefs in God, Heaven and Hell, liberty and progress, communism and capitalism, have all profoundly affected the human experience over the millennia.

​In the words of anthropologist Terrence Deacon:
The symbolic universe has ensnared us in an inescapable web. Like a ‘mind virus’, the symbolic adaptation has infected us, and now by virtue of the irresistible urge it has instilled in us to turn everything we encounter and everyone we meet into symbols, we have become the means by which it unceremoniously propagates itself throughout the world.
This hidden force has real and tangible implications for the future of the human race and the planet on which we reside. Far more powerful than any individual or group, its abstractions engender the values that drive our collective behavior, leading our global civilization on a trajectory that may not be of our choosing.

Clearing a new path

When one realizes the immense power our culture has had in shaping the very structure of our minds, it's tempting to surrender to it and merely accept the network of meaning in which we’re enmeshed.

However, daunting as the task may be, it's not impossible to regain at least some autonomy. Even our brain’s neural network, sculpted from infancy by our cultural influences, can literally be reshaped to a certain degree. Modern neuroscience has demonstrated that the adult brain remains plastic, thus permitting us to consciously re-sculpt some of the structures of thought that our culture has instilled in us from infancy.  

Going back to the analogy of the brain's neural organization as a field of tall grass, even after the main thoroughfares have been laid down, it's still possible to find new ways through the bush. Finding a different pathway through the tall grass can be inconvenient, messy and even scary, so it's something you'd do only if you discover that the old paths lead you to places you don't want to go.

The rest of this book will identify some of the foundational structures of thought that have shaped our own cultural patterning, and examine how they may be taking our civilization to places we don't want to go.

​It is only through a clear identification of these underlying structures that we can perceive them in our own minds, thereby gaining some freedom to disentangle ourselves from the “inescapable web,” and ultimately, perhaps, to influence the shape of the culture that will sculpt the minds of future generations.


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Excerpted from The Patterning Instinct, Chapter 3, "The Rise of Mythic Consciousness"
References: 
Merlin Donald, A Mind So Rare: The Evolution of Human Consciousness (New York: Norton, 2001)
Terrence W. Deacon, The Symbolic Species: The Co-Evolution of Language and the Brain (New York: Norton, 1997)