This interview by John Zada with Joe Griffin and Ivan Tyrrell on their latest book
Godhead, the brain's big bang, is re published from the
The Planisphere and was first published as “The Brain’s Big Bang – And Why it Won’t Be the Last” in the journal
Human Givens, Vol. 18, No. 4, 2011.
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| Ivan Tyrrell and Joe Griffin |
ZADA: Some people reading this interview will be familiar with your work: the human givens approach to psychotherapy and your book of the same name. But your most recent book,
Godhead: the brain’s big bang, is packed with new knowledge. By building upon the organising ideas in
human givens psychology and bringing in knowledge and discoveries from areas as diverse as archaeology, anthropology, ancient history, philosophy, physics, religion and spirituality, it offers an explanatory framework for how the entire universe operates. It is a deep exploration of both the human and the universal condition and begins with one of the most important events in collective human evolution, which took place about 40,000 years ago – something which you call the ‘brain’s big bang’. Could you say why this is central to your book?
TYRRELL: First, we should say that the expression ‘the brain’s big bang’ is not ours. Archaeologists have used it for a long while.
GRIFFIN: Yes, we don’t claim to have originated the phrase. It arose when it became clear from archaeological research that there was massive evidence for the sudden appearance of a new level of human consciousness from about 40,000 years ago. Tools and other artefacts of extraordinary subtlety were created from then on, including wonderful works of art, deep down in caves. This provided cogent evidence that something remarkable had occurred to the human mind by around that time. It is arguable that this evidence is not confined to that period and there may well have been an evolutionary process going on in Africa for 60,000 years prior to then, although the actual evidence for this is pretty minimal. But it is possible that individuals and small groups may have accessed the brain state we describe in the book for thousands of years before it became sufficiently widespread in the genome for a major legacy of cultural artefacts to be left behind.
ZADA: What was the brain’s big bang?
TYRRELL: Our view of it has developed from human givens psychology and all that we have been teaching to mental health and other professionals about effective ways to help those with emotional and behavioural difficulties. One of the things they learn from us is that the brains of mammals, including early humans, had always been accessing what we call an internal reality simulator: the rapid eye movement state, known as REM, in which dreaming takes place. Somehow, by about 40,000 years ago, people had become able to access this reality simulator consciously – outside of the sleep state – and could daydream. In other words, we had evolved the ability to imagine. This was the turning point, the ‘big bang’ that changed everything.
Once you have imagination, you can mentally imagine solutions to problems, become creative, think about people who have died, instead of just those who are in front of you, and start questioning in abstract terms, “What is the meaning of this?” In other words, we could properly think about things in ways that we couldn’t do before, such as wondering what other people might feel if we took a certain course of action. For example, what would the people of another tribe think if we started to hunt in their valley?
GRIFFIN: When you access the REM state, you can envisage a future; you can talk about things that might or might not happen – animals that have not arrived at a watering hole yet, for example. New descriptive words would have been needed for things not immediately in front of people, such as they might need for planning journeys – hunting or foraging trips. So it is because we could envisage a future and also review the past that we developed the language of complexity, the language of tenses, etc. It was imagination that made this possible.
TYRRELL: Whereas animals only have a present tense; their language is all about signalling in the moment – mating calls, warning cries, joyous sounds when food is discovered, etc. All the higher apes communicate like this. But, once we could access the reality simulator consciously and imagine consequences, we needed a more complex language to express our newly developed orientation concerning the past and future. At this point storytelling would have flourished and more complex cultural changes could be passed on through the generations. All this seems to have spread quickly throughout the human race. So the big bang came about because we could access the dreaming brain while we were awake.
ZADA: And, of course, alongside this accessing of the REM state in the waking brain, a reasoning faculty also developed to keep that REM state in check. You describe the explosion of mental potentiality, this parallel track of REM state and reason, as coming with a price for those who were not endowed with the right balance of both. And this leads you into the area of mental health.
TYRRELL: That’s right. All these ideas we have developed came from our thinking about what makes a person healthy. Very obviously, once you have imagination, you can worry because worrying means thinking about what might go wrong in the future. And it is worrying that produces all the consequences of anxiety and depression.
GRIFFIN: It became obvious to us that, once you have conscious access to the REM state, you can overload it. The REM state evolved in mammals to perform the biological function of programming in instinctive behaviours and keeping them in a state of good repair. But, through the conscious use of the REM state, you can overload it, which risks triggering anxiety disorders and depression and, in certain people with latent potential, psychotic experiences. So the price we paid for accessing imagination, creativity and language was mental illness – on a scale not experienced before.
ZADA: Yet you describe, amazingly, that even some of the individuals that had to pay that high price, either through autistic spectrum disorder or psychosis, still benefited in ways that allowed them as individuals to serve civilisation as a whole.
GRIFFIN: Yes. What makes the human race so extraordinarily successful is that, although individually we may all be pretty unbalanced, and have a limited spectrum of abilities, collectively we can combine our abilities so that not all of us are insane at the same time! So there are always some sane-thinking people about and a whole range of abilities that can be drawn upon. That is the genius of the human species. But nonetheless it is true that, in having to develop our left neocortex so as to hold our imaginations and emotions in check, some people reached a point of overdevelopment where they lost touch with their emotions and more subtle instincts. These people would now be described as being on the autistic spectrum. Although that was disadvantageous in many respects, it did have one advantage that we now see clearly: some of those on the high-performing end of the autistic spectrum are able to focus on tasks for long periods of time. They are also inclined to ask questions that others would not bother asking and doing so has led them to make huge contributions to philosophy and science. There are outstanding individuals in the world of information technology, for example, who have made extraordinary contributions to our culture, and they couldn’t have done it if they didn’t have some of the Asperger’s traits that enable them to maintain an intensity of focus for long periods of time, so as to solve difficult problems and bring about innovations.
ZADA: In your previous books, you explain the important part that the REM state plays in brain functions such as dreaming, the programming of innate patterns and instincts and in trance states, and you also explore its use as a psychotherapeutic tool, in the form of guided imagery. But it seems, from reading this new book, that the REM state has an even more central role, not just in terms of how humans access the REM state while awake but also as a gateway through which humans can gain access to another realm, where greater knowledge exists.
TYRRELL: We noticed, as many others have, that when people go into trance states you see rapid eye movements. You see these when people daydream, access emotional memories, hear voices, or willingly enter induced trance states through meditation and dancing. Since, as Michael Jouvet, a pioneering sleep researcher, first noted, our genetic instincts are implanted into us in the REM state before we are born, it seems possible that the REM state is the natural portal for accessing higher knowledge from other realms. Many people can sense that knowledge can somehow come to us through certain types of dream. There are descriptions of this going back 4,500 years to the Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh– one of the oldest and most moving stories rooted in the ancient wisdom tradition of humankind.
GRIFFIN: And, if the REM state is indeed the portal through which our genetic inheritance is programmed, it may well be that, as Plato speculated, there is a world of forms – a greater world of patterns and more complete knowledge – which can also be accessed. If such a world were to exist, it would be tenable that the portal to that world could be the REM state. We give lots of examples in the book of people who have received incredible inspirations whilst in REM trance states.
ZADA: So, in a sense, can we say that the brain’s big bang was not a meaningless occurrence but that it arose as a necessary next step towards humans being able to access higher knowledge?
GRIFFIN: Yes! Spiritual traditions maintain this too. Take someone like Rumi, the great 13th century Persian poet who is also recognised as a great exponent of mysticism. He said, many hundreds of years before Darwin, that evolutionary developments take place in response to necessity. Evolution is not just a random process; there has to be a pressure for evolutionary events to take place. So, when imagination was triggered off in human beings, it wasn’t just a random mutation; there was a great pressure upon the very limited imagination people had up to that time – a huge pressure on the genome, so that gradually people started being born with a genetic potential to extend the REM state. We are not saying that Darwin was wrong but that a mutation happens not randomly but in response to a pressure that would facilitate a particular development. Mutations are selected from a field of forms that already potentially exists—
TYRRELL: —a field of higher patterns. These ideas connect back so well to human givens psychology because of its understanding that everything that manifests does so through a pattern-matching process. All good therapists, for example, know that the brain is a pattern-matching organism and that this has great relevance for treating psychological trauma. The universe consists of patterns of possibilities and, when you are in the REM state and achieve certain mental states where you can connect up to these higher patterns, they will flood into you. We give descriptions in the new book of how that happens and give examples. Patterns of knowledge flood into certain individuals, those who have mastered their ego and thereby gained enough spare capacity to receive it.
GRIFFIN: We are not postulating any extra metaphysical elements in this hypothesis. It is a completely naturalistic one. Later in the book we do account for and explain that, within the laws of physics and the parameters of science as currently established, it is possible to create a hypothesis that permits information patterns to exist and potentially to be accessible, without in any way contravening normal scientific laws.
ZADA: This process, then, I guess, would fly in the face of reductionist scientists, such as Richard Dawkins, who attempt to break the universe down to its smallest components and thereby rob it of its meaning.
GRIFFIN: Dawkins’ approach to science is, of course, essentially a religious one. He holds on to a reductionist philosophy with a degree of commitment that any Christian or Muslim fundamentalist would be proud of. And the problem with fundamentalism of any kind is that it excludes subtlety and complexity. By that I mean that its assumption that causality is unidirectional, ie from the bottom up, prevents it from seeing that it is really multidirectional. This multidirectionality is now well established in physics and increasingly so in biology. Dawkins attempted to simulate evolution with a computer programme. He tried to show that complex patterns can evolve, but it is very easy to see that the complex pattern that he tried to show evolving by random mutation already existed in the programme. So what he actually showed – inadvertently – was that complex patterns have to exist at a certain level of reality before they manifest on planet Earth in organic form.
ZADA: A number of your professional colleagues that work from a human givens perspective might see some of the ideas that are included in your book as being outside of your traditional field. What would your response be to those that say that you are going a step or two too far into what they might regard as unrelated areas like mysticism?
TYRRELL: There will be some human givens therapists who will not be comfortable going along with what we are saying and that doesn’t detract from what they are achieving, using the human givens approach. Everyone takes from human givens ideas what they can. What we are saying in this new book is that the ideas and skills we have been teaching for the last 15 years relate to larger, richer concepts and, for those who want to expand their understanding, there is a step further they can take. People always have the option of refining their thinking and transforming themselves in such a way that they become better able to recognise truths about the nature of reality – and they also have the option of choosing not to do so.
GRIFFIN: The ideas that are unfolded in our new book actually existed in the first formulating principles of human givens: the understandings about pattern matching, and consciousness arising from pattern matching, and the importance of the REM state. So this is an organic flowering of ideas that have already proved their worth. But nonetheless there are people who will not want to take the journey with us as far as we have now gone and that is a perfectly legitimate response. And the way we can address them is to say that human givens has proven itself to be an incredibly powerful way of helping people achieve better health quickly in all kinds of realms, from mental health to education, and in making all kinds of organisations more effective. It has proved its worth and none of what has been achieved is invalidated by the ideas put forward in this book.
It’s no different from how we use our ability to read. Some people might use their literacy to better themselves at work, to study, to entertain themselves or to improve their social life. Others might use it by becoming interested in poetry and finding it intensely meaningful. There are many literate people who have no interest in poetry but it would be a very sorry person indeed who would gainsay others’ rights to enjoy it, just because they didn’t themselves. It would be very narrow minded to say that poetry is not a valuable source of meaning for other people. We feel confident that the breadth of people involved in the human givens approach, even if they choose not to take this journey with us, will fully appreciate and show tolerance towards those who find meaning in exploring human givens ideas in their richer psychological, cosmological and metaphysical expression.
ZADA: One of the underlying themes of your book is that all knowledge is connected; mental illness, learning, consciousness and enlightenment are connected at a fundamental level, and physics and psychotherapy are linked. How would you say that your work with the human givens approach to mental health connects to the biggest questions facing science?
