Higher Human Capacities And Virtues

Let’s say we have this wonderful mom and she’s nurtured and feels safe during pregnancy.  She had a rather ideal experience inutero but then the nurturing environment collapsed after birth.

This has a tremendous impact on the fourth neural structure in the human being, which is the pre-frontal cortices right behind our forehead.  That’s the largest part of the whole brain.  Larger than any other structure.  But this grows, not inutereo where the fore-brain, what we think of as the ordinary fore-brain and hind-brain grew, which is determined by the mother’s emotional state, but the growth of the pre-frontal cortices, which is what makes us unique humans over all the other mammal species, the pre-frontal cortices grow primarily after birth because otherwise the head would be so huge you’d have real troubles with birth.

If that nurturing environment is broken at birth and does not carry through in the post birth period, the pre-frontal cortices will be seriously malformed.  They will not receive the appropriate nurturing needed for their own development.  Above all the mother could be the larger fore brain but that still doesn’t guarantee the appearance of the pre-frontal lobes which occur after birth.  The pre-frontals grow during the first nine to twelve months after birth and that’s what really determines the highest levels of human experience rather than just sort of another human animal.

The pre-frontals were considered silent areas of brain and we didn’t know if anything was really happening there until the late eighties.  That’s largely because again, their development is experience dependent and so many people don’t have much going on in the pre-frontal cortices.  All of the recent research, I think of Patricia Goldman, Antonio DiMaggio, and Eric Goldberg and you could just keep naming these astonishing new Neural Scientists, all point to the pre-frontal cortices contributing to all the higher human virtues of what it means to be civilized and human. 

We’ve got intellect, the verbal capacities, intellect and even creativity in the general fore-brain area itself, what we call the left and right hemispheres of the brain.  But the higher human virtues of compassion, love, understanding, empathy, as well as the really high forms of creativity like you find in your highest scientific or philosophical and religious and so on.  Those all seem to generate through or are dependent on, the pre-frontal cortices. 

So you discover that our capacity to modify and moderate  the behavior of the lower brain structures, our survival brain, the brain dealing with sexuality, appetites, physical survival itself - our emotional brain, our relationship with others and even the intellectual verbal brain - all of those procedures are under the jurisdiction you might say of these pre-frontal cortices.  They can modify and moderate, modulate the behaviors of all of the lower brain systems under them if they’re developed.  If they’re not developed then the individual themselves have little control over their lower impulses. When they itch, they scratch.  When they’re lower survival brain feels threatened, they defend themselves at all costs and they can get to be very dangerous.  So the job of the pre-frontal cortices is to modulate and moderate the impulse behaviors of the lower animal brains.  And so the civilized mind, as Eric Goldberg calls it, the higher human virtues, the civilized mind is one that can modify the animal brain structures in this and lift them up to a higher level of functioning.