We decided to release this Monday patron bonus episode publicly after receiving a great response on Patreon. Julian draws heavily on the work of neurologist and author V.S. Ramachandran in an attempt to explore Conspirituality after the Capitol insurrection. How might an understanding of synesthesia, epilepsy, super-stimuli, hyper-reality, and fascism help us make sense of the overlap between the QAnon fantasy timeline and real world blood and guts?
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Hi there, Conspirituality supporters.
This is called Hearing Voices, Seeing Sounds, and Fighting Phantoms.
As you know, central to our podcasts are questions like, how do spiritual people get sucked into QAnon?
And why does anyone actually love Trump?
And why do followers listen to influencers who claim to be channeling aliens from other dimensions, who frame not wearing masks and rejecting vaccines as part of being on the side of the lightworkers during these cosmically significant times?
We'll get to that.
But first, I want to talk to you about Hindu goddess sculptures, hearing colors, and super-stimulated seagulls.
All of these topics, that is, as they apply to the work of Professor V.S.
Ramachandran at UCSD.
The professor has a unique theory about human language and abstract thought itself, as originating in what we think of today as synesthesia.
His observations about seagulls, religious art, the brain, conceptual language and metaphors, all combine to create an interesting lens through which to perhaps interpret conspirituality and the cult of Trump.
Let's start with hearing colors.
In most people, sight, touch, and hearing exist in relatively isolated form.
But as you might know, synesthesia, which literally means union of the senses, is an experience of senses crossing over.
Synesthetes, those who consistently experience synesthesia, are more common than scientists used to think.
Incidents may be as high as 4% of the population, with 9 different types identified so far.
One of the most common types of synesthesia involves the experience that letters and numbers have specific colors.
Another type involves sounds or musical pitches as having colors.
This crossing over is thought to be an innate function of neuronal proximity and cross-wiring in the very young brain which gradually gets pruned away in most of us as we move out of infancy to make way for all the new pathways and connections necessary as the developing brain learns more and more.
Synesthetes, then, are those among us for whom some specific area of overlapping information processing like, say, letters of the alphabet and colors, or colors and musical notes, numbers and spatial position, or, less commonly, words or other sounds and bodily sensations, is not pruned away in brain development but still remains.
For the synesthete, relationships between sensory channels create an experience of reality that for others may be reminiscent of altered states, such as those associated with psychedelic drugs like LSD.
If each of the notes you're hearing right now also triggers a specific consistent color, you have chromesthesia, which for many of you may be familiar with.
For some people can also be associated with ordinary non-musical sounds too.
Pythagoras penned the first known description of synesthesia in about 500 BCE and today scientists believe it has a genetic basis that therefore runs in families and has existed throughout human history.
Novelist Vladimir Nabokov experienced letters of the alphabet with different hues.
Composer and musician Duke Ellington saw notes as colors.
And there have been many other famous synesthetes like painter David Hockney, the musician Lord, and inventor Nikola Tesla.
Incidentally, synesthesia is found to be seven times more prevalent in creatives, including writers, artists, and musicians.
There's a fascinating reason for this, which we will get to soon.
But back to Professor Ramachandran.
Sometimes referred to as the Sherlock Holmes of neurology, he runs two research labs, one working on behavioral neurology and cognitive neuroscience, and the other working on the neurology of human visual perception.
When doctors from around the world cannot make sense of their brain-injured patients, they often refer them to him.
His case histories, as reported in his books The Telltale Brain and Phantoms in the Brain, and in a video documentary made about the latter book, as well as his TED Talks, online lectures, and interviews, were my first exposure to him.
Especially to his fascinating insights into both copgrass delusion In which someone believes that close personal relations have been replaced with impostors and temporal lobe epilepsy.
a strong candidate for biologically explaining certain types of very intense religious experiences.
In the latter condition, seizures in the temporal lobe may occur without the physically visible motor symptoms most of us associate with epilepsy, but the powerful surges of electrical impulses that define the seizure can bounce back and forth indirectly.
Internally, between sensory and emotional centers, creating an overwhelmingly intense experience of sounds, colors, shapes and textures, again much like a psychedelic trip.
This super-heightened sensory quality then combines with the powerful implication of emotional meaning or importance.
Imagine everyday reality as like a simple song with straightforward lyrics played on an acoustic guitar.
And the temporal lobe seizure state as then perhaps being like reality suddenly coming at you like an electric guitar with the amplifier cranked up all the way, overlaid with a virtuoso singer constructing elaborate poetic imagery dripping with a universal and profound emotional significance.
For some people with this condition, the only possible interpretation they can find for their seizure experiences is that an all-powerful intelligence must be communicating with them directly.
Geschwind's syndrome is a variant of temporal lobe epilepsy that usually combines the symptoms of hypergraphia, which is the urge to write voluminously, Hyper-religiosity.
Atypical sexuality, usually reduced sexual drive or finding a reduction in finding sex appealing.
Circumstantiality, which is a tendency toward drifting away from the topic of conversation only to eventually come back around.
And an intensified mental life.
These sound to me like fairly good general descriptions of the old world prophets who wrote the books upon which our main religions are based.
Like, God is talking to me very intensely, I feel compelled to write and write and write about it, and part of my hyper-religiosity is a lack of interest in sex or even finding sexuality at odds with the sacred.
On a different note, or color, Professor Ramachandran tells a fascinating case study involving copgrass delusion associated with brain injury.
Now, this condition can also occur in schizophrenics, but the story we are told involves someone with a brain injury and no other symptoms that would indicate schizophrenia, though he is convinced that both of his parents are imposters.
Ramachandran eventually discovers that although the patient becomes extremely upset in the presence of the parents he is convinced cannot be who they claim to be, crying out, what have you done with my real parents?
When he talks with his parents on the phone, he realizes that they really are who they say they are.
The brain injury in this case had severed the connection between the sensory centers that process the visual information and the emotional centers that provide the essential feeling of recognition that would ordinarily arise when seeing his parents.
But the link between those feeling centers And the auditory centers was still intact.
when only hearing either of his parents' voices without any visual impressions, the reassuring and familiar emotional qualities of recognition would put him at ease and remove the distress he only knew how to explain when looking at them by saying that they must be imposters.
Derek and I frequently mention this professor on the podcast with an air of affectionate reverence.
He has a deep-voiced Indian accent, complete with hard rolling R's, an extremely agile mind, and a matter-of-fact conversational lecturing and writing style.
I got to meet him a few years ago and found out that he invites people to call him simply Rama.
The examples I just gave you are perhaps somewhat tangential to my topic, but I hope they evoke some kind of awe or fascination regarding how central the three pounds of jelly in our skull and its functioning is to how we experience reality, relationships, and meaning.
One visual aid Rama uses in his lectures is a pair of images which he asks his audience to look at.
He tells them one of these images is named Bubba and the other is named Kiki and that they are invited to tell him which is which.
Have a guess.
Now both images are just simple line drawings.
One is jagged and angular, the other rounded and amoeboid.
Almost everyone who participates in this little experiment will deliver the same response.
The angular, jagged shape is named Kiki.
And the rounded, amoeboid shape is named Booba.
This association between rounded lines and smoother sounds versus angular lines and staccato sounds may even seem intuitively obvious, right?
Of course.
But why?
Rama suggests that we all have an innate set of associations that are very much like synesthesia.
Associations between the way sounds like these two made-up names are processed, and visual shapes like the corresponding line drawings, as well as the sensations made by the tongue and the mouth, Being either rounded or angular when saying words or making sounds come naturally to us.
Now following on from this observation, here is Rama theorizing about how multimodal synesthesia may be at the root of the development of language, conceptual thought, and metaphorical abstraction in the human brain.
99 out of 100 people in the audience will pick the undulating shape, they'll say that's Booba, and the sharp jagged thing they'll say is Kiki.
Although you never taught them.
Now how do they know that?
This proves in my mind that we're all synesthetes, we're all closet synesthetes, but we don't know it, we're in denial.
The reason is the gentle visual undulation of the contour in the amoeba mimics the auditory representation.
Nice rounded.
Yeah.
Whereas the sharp jagged edges, visual sudden inflection, mimics the sharp key of the sound.
- Sawtooth, wavelength. - Exactly.
Not to mention the tongue hitting the palate sharp versus boo-bah, the undulation of the tongue and lips mimicking the visual appearance.
So there is a non-arbitrary mappings Synesthetic mapping between visual form and auditory phonemic representation.
This is very important in the evolution of language.
How did the first words evolve?
Did people get together and say, oh, let's call that a microphone.
Let's call that a, let's all say together, microphone.
Of course not, right?
What happened was, there's a little bias in certain directions of production of sound for certain object shapes.
Now, it's a very tiny bias, but that's all you need in evolution, because once you have that, you get the bootstrapping.
Now, there's also a mapping between auditory cortex, so this is between vision and hearing, but hearing and mouth-lip movements in the Broca's area, which are represented as motor maps.
That's why you say, Teeny weeny oomph.
Okay?
Your lips, tongue and mouth mimic the miniature size of what you're looking at.
So there's a synesthetic correspondence between what your lips, tongue are literally doing and what you're looking at.
Versus enormous, large.
Okay?
Now, all this sounds comical, but It's amazing how a tiny bias of that kind can get amplified across generations.
Now comes the best part.
If you look at the mortar map in the brain, the Penfield map, the tongue, lips and mouth are right next to the hands.
Now why is that interesting?
It's interesting because Darwin pointed out that when you cut with a pair of scissors, you do this.
You clench and unclench unconsciously.
In other words, there is what I call a synkinesia, like synesthesia, that the motor activity in the tongue and mouth regions unconsciously mimics the hand movements.
And why that happens is a whole other question, but clearly there's some spillover.
Given that that's true, imagine our ancestral hominids trying to describe something small, and they do this, a pincer.
The lips and tongue do exactly the same thing, mimicking this.
And then your ancestral primate makes some grunt or howl or groan, using its right hemisphere for emotional vocalization, which is very easy to evolve, through the cingulate gyrus, and that's going to go through your lips and tongue, which now are mimicking your hand gesture.
So already there's a built-in translation of your gestural language into the language of vocalization.
Which in turn, combined with the guttural utterances, emotional cries of the right hemisphere, produces the first proto-words.
So now you've got a four-way bootstrapping.
Giving rise to the early evolution of language, then you somehow link that to aspects of semantics, and you have the final emergence of language.
Now, think of what we've just done.
This is typical of our strategy in our lab.
You take a spooky phenomenon, Which has been regarded as a curiosity, an anomaly, people saying 5 is red, and people have ignored it for a hundred years.
You bring it to the laboratory, show it's a real phenomenon, and then guess what?
It has vast implications for almost every aspect of human nature, like what is metaphor, what is thought, how did language evolve?
If you get a large enough family, you can even clone the gene, Go from the gene, which I call the hyperconnectivity gene, to the specific brain area, fusiform gyrus for lower synesthetes, angular gyrus for higher synesthetes.
Do the visual psychophysics, perceptual experiments, like the pop-out experiment.
Then point out its link.
You can do functional brain imaging.
Okay.
And then point out its relevance to metaphor, Shakespeare, evolution of language, the whole spectrum, all in one preparation.
I have a question for you then.
Could you reverse engineer this entire concept and go for the Dr. Dolittle effect where you can look at a wolf howling at the moon and basically interpret its language?
You could, especially now that you have this framework, this novel framework.
By the way, I want to say that many of the fragments of this puzzle have been lying around.
What we've tried to do is to simply connect them and create a coherent framework for understanding language and evolution of language.
We can now look at aphasias, for example, from this perspective.
So, for example, you have damage to angular gyrus in the left hemisphere.
What we find is that some of these people can't do boobakiki.
Anymore.
Okay?
So the anglo-jitis is playing a critical role in this type of cross-modal synesthesia.
And think about this.
The anglo-jitis of the left hemisphere, if it's really doing this buba kiki thing, think about what that entails.
You've got visual undulation versus auditory undulation, and they have nothing in common.
Here's a pattern of sounds, and here's a visual thing.
If you're a mathematician, you say immediately, no, no, no, they obviously have a great deal in common, if you look at Fourier space.
I mean, you know, there's the same undulation, the same sound undulation.
But in reality, they have very little in common, out there in the physical world.
So this cross-modal synesthesia is the beginning of what we call abstraction.
So what I'm arguing is synesthesia is the basis of all abstraction.
That's how it got started in human evolution.
And once that was achieved, and the Anglogytus was specialized for this, then you could start using it for all sorts of other types of metaphor and thinking and that sort of thing.
Okay?
And this often happens in evolution where one structure evolved for one purpose and becomes an exaptation for a totally novel function.
Predicting forward, I mean, the only thing I can say is that it obviously This is almost, I don't want to sound like a new age guru type thing, but training people with metaphors, basically poetry and visual art, at a very early age is extremely important and very neglected in the modern curriculum, in education at a very early age is extremely important and very neglected in the modern curriculum, in education and both elementary
So in that clip, Rama is saying that metaphor, poetry, mythic symbols, in fact, our very capacity for conceptual abstract thought may all have their origins in synesthesia.
I I love his advice to educate kids to be fluent in the language of metaphor.
It reminds me of something I have long thought about how perhaps having greater fluency in metaphors is the antidote to religious fundamentalism as well as the more superficial forms of mythic literalism, magical thinking, and charlatanism in New Age spirituality.
In a way, I would argue that the more dangerous and delusional aspects of the religious and spiritual impulse are so powerful because they hijack pathways that have an evolutionary basis and an instinctive emotional significance.
In doing so, they convince us that certain types of metaphorical language must have a literal basis and meaning in the everyday world.
In New Age terms, this is where we cue the God-Man-Guru, the Prophet-Channeler-Receiving-Messages-From-Another-Dimension, or the Healer-Who-Claims-To-Be-Able-To-Literally-Manipulate-Quantum-Physics-With-The-Power-Of-His-Mind.
In all of these cases, something surely has gone wrong in the relationship between metaphor or as-if language and reality.
Which may seem relatively harmless until it doesn't.
The power, beauty, and emotional import of metaphorical and archetypal language and imagery is lost and distorted when taken as literally describing the world outside our minds.
In fact, if we think about it, a truly mythopoetic landscape transposed into everyday life would be absolutely terrifying and unsustainable, surreal, even nightmarish.
But this collision is the yearning of fundamentalist cults.
The Great Awakening of our conspiritualists, QAnon, and Trump cult members is just like the rapture of the evangelicals, the caliphate of the Islamists, and being beamed up to the UFO for the self-castrated black Nike-wearing Heaven's Gate devotees who believed they would leave their earth suits courtesy of poisoned yogurt.
Remember them?
This is a longing for an intrusion into mundane reality by a destined, prophesied, magical, divine presence and power that transforms, sacralizes, and redeems the world and validates the believer's deepest intuitions and commitments.
the transgression of worldly laws, the rejection of earthly concerns, and the enactment of ritualized violence or suicide is then the ultimate expression of faith that their unseen reality is more important and indeed more and the enactment of ritualized violence or suicide is then the ultimate expression of faith that their unseen reality is more important and indeed more
The End
of the End The grisly tools of kidnapping and perhaps even murder.
How did they not consider the consequences that would surely follow?
One answer is that they truly believed their actions on that day would overturn the election.
They would succeed in disrupting what they see as the real unlawful transgression, the stealing of the election.
And in fact, they would become the heroes of this historic moment.
Many reportedly thought that the Capitol Police would join them when the moment came.
For those on the front lines of that domestic terror mission who were QAnon true believers, this was to be not only their response to the call of their President Trump, but their participation in the fulfillment of the prophesied storm and the Great Awakening at this moment in the Q timeline.
I imagine that, for them, this was an ecstatic trance state, in which their alternate reality game arrived at its climax.
And in that state, any thoughts of protecting oneself from potential jail time in the mundane future would have been overridden by the certainty of faith based on the image created by a connect-the-dots pattern puzzle they and their friends had any thoughts of protecting oneself from potential jail time in the mundane future would have been overridden by the certainty of faith based on the image created by
Let's talk briefly about another concept from evolutionary neurology, the super stimulus, sometimes also called the supernormal stimulus.
I first heard about this, again, from Professor Ramachandran, but it was Mikko Tinbergen who first discovered that the chicks of herring gulls are instinctively triggered to peck at a red spot on their parent's beak when they see it in order to receive food.
The contrast of the red color of that spot against the rest of the beak drew the chicks' attention and pecking activity.
In seeking to understand exactly what was going on, Tinbergen and colleagues experimented with presenting the chicks with models of the entire gull head and beak, or just the beak, and also with a red stick with yellow markings on it.
They found that the heightened color contrast of the red stick with the yellow markings elicited a stronger pecking response even though it was not a beak and not attached to a head.
In other words, an artificial stimuli was preferred over the naturally occurring ones.
It had It elicited an even more intense reaction of pecking and expectation of receiving perhaps even better food or more food.
They did similar experiments involving dummy eggs that were larger and had more exaggerated markings and saturated colors than the real ones that various types of birds had laid themselves.
The birds preferred the fake eggs and tried to nurture those instead of the real ones.
Also, highly territorial stickleback fish with red bellies attacked invading artificial fish with brighter red bellies more aggressively than their real fish rivals.
So these modifications in behavior in response to a super stimulus that amplifies instinctive reactions has been shown in insects as well.
And Harvard psychologist Deirdre Bell argues that in humans, supernormal stimulation governs our behavior equally powerfully.
In her book, Supernormal Stimuli, How Primal Urges Overran Their Evolutionary Purpose, Bell explains junk food In terms of the perfect, exaggerated alchemy of salt, sugar, and fats that hijacks survival-based cravings.
She talks about television as an exaggeration of social cues like laughter, smiles, and attention-grabbing action that is equally appealing to us.
Other researchers have shown surgically augmented breasts and other kinds of plastic surgery are designed to exploit our perception of how certain attractive features or ratios become even more so when amplified further, so much so that we prefer the fake to the real.
Which brings us back to Rama.
One of his enduring topics is how sacred art elicits a response of awe, reverence, and associations of sublime divinity by utilizing super-stimuli.
What is an archetypal image but a strong presentation of amplified characteristics?
Think of the Venus of Willendorf, if you've ever seen that, with her enormous hips and breasts.
It's a great example.
Rama points out, too, that Hindu goddesses have highly exaggerated hip-to-waist ratios and rounded breasts representing fertility and femininity and youth.
They may also have unusually large eyes and lips, also present, as you may know, in Disney characters.
He says, goddess paintings and sculptures like this, in India, will often be presented in natural settings with fruits like mangoes nearby to echo the sense of fecundity.
Now on the flip side, we know that the supernormal stimuli of pornography also exploit archetypal associations and physical acts in ways that can feel more intense and more alluring than the real life experiences of sexuality.
All of this makes me think of postmodern philosopher Jean Baudrillard and his concept of hyper-reality, which is a condition he describes, sort of culturally, psychologically, in which what is real and what is fiction are seamlessly blended together without any clear distinction.
Further, he defines hyper-reality as a representation or sign without any original reference point.
He says it involves creating a symbol or a set of signifiers which represents something that does not actually exist.
Baudrillard uses a phrase that will later be echoed by Morpheus talking to Neo about the Matrix.
He calls it the Desert of the Real.
In an excellent article called A Game Designer's Analysis of QAnon, Reid Berkowitz talks about something called apophenia, which is the tendency to perceive a connection or meaningful pattern between unrelated or random things, such as objects or ideas.
And how those who spread the conspiracy theory online exploited the drive to find these patterns and solve puzzles in ways that blur the lines between alternate reality games and the real world.
He says they used guided apophenia to lead people via breadcrumbs or clues toward conclusions they would feel like they were discovering for themselves, all within the community of their fellow red-pilled seekers.
Berkowitz also describes how the almost Darwinian nature of the message boards, like 8chan, on which QAnon emerged meant that only the most engaging and effective versions of the story made it off the boards and out into the wild.
Thus, a far-right pastiche of conspiracy theory propaganda could go viral and infiltrate new circles of people who wanted to do their own research and follow the clues to solve the puzzle that would reveal a set of hidden truths about our momentous and tumultuous times.
It turns out that a mysterious stranger gradually dropping clues is more effective at flipping some people's political allegiances than a direct conversation involving boring old facts and evidence from qualified authorities.
QAnon hijacked the dopamine hits that come from the process of solving puzzles and figuring out riddles for social approval and reinforcement while providing both a way to make sense of a disorienting and confusing global crisis
And a way to feel like a heroic participant in a quasi-religious battle between good and evil that is categorically different than what the uninitiated naively perceive.
This is catnip for conspiritualists.
What then of Trump?
Most liberals and intellectuals, and indeed many conservatives, have a hard time making sense of what could be so appealing about him as a person, as a leader, as the figurehead of a movement so cultish that it has led to the first violent insurrection at our nation's capitol building in 200 years.
A willingness to subvert democracy and a complete poisoning of the Republican Party and indeed our political and cultural discourse in general.
Now it's not as cut and dried as Trump being an out-and-out fascist.
But he too is exploiting something very effectively that his messaging has in common with fascist figures of the past and the present.
It's the longing for a fabled past.
The nostalgia for a supposed time of greatness and strength that has somehow slipped away or been stolen.
The assertion that we have been made weak as a people by immigrants and been taken advantage of by foreign powers.
And that the way back to pride in our culture, heritage, and identity
is by supporting a strong and uncompromising male leader who won't take it anymore, who won't abide the elites, the intellectuals, the progressives, and those who don't exhibit fierce and unquestioning patriotic and nationalistic loyalty to a set of abstract values that evoke intense emotional allegiance.
This form of right-wing populism invites an intense projection onto the leader as a savior figure, its political religion, and it creates a simulacra of the leader as a larger-than-life archetypal hero.
who is not only disconnected from and immune to any of the real person's actual human failings, incompetencies, lies and failures, but transcends all of that to become the living symbol of a triumphant movement toward reclaiming pride and purity, power and control.
This archetypal projection of the leader could perhaps be thought of as a type of super-stimulus that hijacks our survival instincts around loyalty to the group and its alpha male, as well as a quasi-religious sense of destiny, prophecy, and the political stage as a primordial battleground between forces of good and evil.
Pride and shame, strength and weakness.
A banner I saw in the crowd at the Capitol captures this, with Trump reimagined as Rambo, hyper-muscular, in a tank top and headband, ripped, shiny, bulging arms, holding an automatic assault rifle, with the American flag behind him.
Meanwhile, lightworker influencers, both at the scene and supporting remotely, can gaze on with gleaming eyes at what they believe represents the great awakening and universal shift in consciousness their guides have been preparing them and their hundreds of thousands of attentive followers to experience.
I want to leave you today with two verses of poetry from one of my favorite poems by Antonio Machado.
I want to suggest as well that the language of metaphor works best when conveying emotional truths and plugging us into something humble, vulnerable, and tender.
These types of revelatory moments, perhaps by definition, cannot be weaponized or manipulated, but speak instead to a sobering A coming to oneself that I would wish for anyone currently swept up in the fever dreams, the false hopes, and the dangerous actions of conspirituality.
So here's the poetry.
Last night, as I was sleeping, I dreamt, what a marvelous creation, that there was a beehive here in my heart.
The golden bees were making white combs and sweet honey out of all my old failures.
Last night, as I lay sleeping, I dreamt, What a marvelous creation that there was a spring breaking out in my heart and I asked, along which secret aqueduct are you coming to me?
