POETICKS

The Cerebral-Satisfaction Drive

BACKGROUND

As part of my attempt during the past 47 years to construct a total theory of psychology, I’ve posited all sorts of brain-mechanisms and cerebral operations. It is only now that I’ve begun to think in terms of the drives that most psychologists believe in, some of which most certainly exist—the reproductive and hunger-satisfaction drives, for instance. Drives have always been part of my theory, but I’ve been mostly interested in details of their functioning rather than with what they are as wholes—for instance, in what poems are, and how the brain makes them, rather than in some drive behind them (a communicative drive, say, or some sort of creativity drive—actually almost certainly a mixture of various drives).

It was in trying (very recently) to write about the attraction of human beings to beauty, that got me involved with drives, for I eventually attributed it to what I called “the sensory-satisfaction drive.” At length I found that to be a sub-drive of what I am temporarily calling the “cerebral-satisfaction drive. Since I have long thought in terms of taxonomies, I connected that to what may be a final drive for human beings and, possibly, all living organisms, “the pleasure-maximization drive.” While I had always been a sort of Benthamite (as I not very deeply understand the philosophy of Jeremy Bentham), and thus believed all of life comes down to a being’s attempt to maximize its pleasure (which, of course, includes minimizing its pain), I had never proposed a drive to carry out the process of maximization.

The best part about thinking of human thought and behavior in terms of drives is how helpfully it simplifies exposition of one’s ideas about said thought and behavior into a followable orderliness. Or so I found it to be. (And if the rest of this essay doesn’t convince you it is, that will only be due to your not having read the essay I wrote before this one, without bringing in drives till the very end.)

In any case, the drive I like the best is the cerebral-satisfaction drive, which I’m making the subject of this essay. Before getting to it, though, I need to tell you about the evaluceptual awareness. And before getting to that, I need to introduce you to my theory of multiple awarenesses.

Much of my theorizing about the brain goes far from the borders of certified science, but not my multiple awarenesses theory, which has much in common with Howard Gardner’s “multiple intelligences,” and he’s a prize-winning certified Harvard scientist. It may well have been from him that I got my idea for my awarenesses. Be that as it may, I long ago proposed that the brain consists of a number of separate (but complexly inter-related) divisions of brain function, each concerned with constructing a different major understanding of existence. I distinguished them from Gardner’s intelligences by name because of they seem more different than similar to his.

So far, I posit ten awarenesses. I’m not sure whether I have too many or too few. In any case, “the evaluceptual awareness,” is one of them. Perhaps the first awareness (or proto-awareness) that evolved after what I call “the fundaceptual awareness,” it has to do with pleasure—and its opposite, pain. The evaluceptual awareness is at the core of what this essay is about, but I need first to give you an idea of the fundaceptual awareness to be able to describe its workings.

THE FUNDACEPTUAL AWARENESS

My idea of the fundaceptual awareness is boringly uncontroversial: it’s the awareness that has to do with the perception of self and other—with fundamental glandular and sensual perceptual data of the entire material world. It employs a huge number of sensory-receptors to gather “percepts.” I believe I use that term much as most others involved with neurophysiology (or whatever my subject is) do, but to avoid confusion, I need to emphasize that I define it simply as the kind of neurocept that is transmitted (in one guise or another) by a fundaceptual sensory-receptor to the fundaceptual awareness when the receptor is activated by the presence of a given stimulus in a person’s outer or inner environment—a particular photon in a particular locus in the person’s field of vision, say.

A neurocept is my coinage for “smallest unit of data the brain deals with.” There are many of these in my theory besides the percept, several of which I will be introducing you to.

The fundaceptual awareness has a second function which is close to as important as its first: the storage and retrieval of memories—which brings us to the essential organ of the fundaceptual awareness—and of the cerebrum as a whole: a mechanism I call the mnemoduct.

The mnemoduct consists of a tube of units called mnemo-dots, or m-dots, for short. One such cell, or organelle (I have no idea what they really are but feel confident something like them must exist), becomes active during every instacon (i.e., instant of consciousness) of a person’s lifetime, remaining active only until that instacon ends, never to become active again. During its period of activity, it records all the percepts then delivered to the fundaceptual awareness. When the instacon ends, the m-dot right after it on the mnemoduct becomes active and records another group of percepts. Ergo, the mnemoduct records a person’s interaction with his inverionments in chronological order.

Pretty simple, right? Actually, I’ve already ridiculously over-simplified my theory: I hypothesize many mnemoducts, for instance, one of many complications I will ignore on the grounds that my theory, while possibly simplistic to an extreme, is also impossible to describe in any kind of accessible way in less than an essay ten times the length of this one—at least by me.
So, we will go with one mnemoduct instead of many, and ignore all kinds of associated cells.

Now, then, while a given m-dot is active, the m-dot active during the prior instacon will attempt to activate previously stored percepts as units of memory which I term retrocepts. Let’s call this m-dot, the “remembering-dot.” The m-dot active just after it I will term the “outcome-dot.” Any retrocept that the remembering-dot succeeds in activating will be recorded in the outcome-dot along with the percepts it is simultaneously recording. So each m-dot will end its period of activation with a clump of percepts indicating what it is going on in the person’s inner and outer environments, and a clump of contextually-appropriate retrocepts.

To be contextually-appropriate, a retrocept must have followed one or more neurocepts in the remembering-dot a significant number of times—and other neurocepts in most or all of a number of the m-dots strung out behind the remembering-dot. A simple example should clarify this. Let remembering-dot X contain neurocept I (which could have come to it as either a percept or a retrocept). Let the eight m-dots just before X contain, in order, neurocepts A, B, C, D, E, F, G, and H.

If, say, there is a string of three m-dots somewhere, the first of which contains P; the second, I; and the third Q, I in m-dot X would send some energy to Q, because it once followed it, but very little because of how little appropriate Q is contextually. It would send much more energy to an m-dot holding J that immediately follows a string of m-dots containing, in order, retrocepts A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I and J—probably enough to activate J, with substantial contextual appropriateness. In short, remembering-dot X will be using memory-string A through I to activate J.

THE EVALUCEPTUAL AWARENESS

We are now ready, finally, to consider the evaluceptual awareness. To provide a little direct, scientifically-responsible background on it, here’s a few small smears of information from Wikipedia concerning certified neurophysiology’s equivalent of the evaluceptual awareness: “the perception of pain starts with the nociceptors . . . commonly found in the skin, membranes, deep fascias, mucosa, connective tissues of visceral organs, ligaments and articular capsules, muscles, tendons, periosteum, and arterial vessels . . . (which send) signal(s) to the brain when activated.”

Note: I don’t like “nociceptors,” so my name for pain-receptors is . . . “owceptors.”
Elsewhere in the Wikipedia entry I’m citing, all kinds of things are done with pain “in the spinal cord; midbrain; brainstem sites such as the parabrachial nucleus, the dorsal raphe (where facilitation or inhibition of neuron-activity takes place), locus coeruleus, and the medullary reticular formation involving . . . noradrenaline, serotonin, dopamine, histamine, and acetylcholine”—neurotransmitters many of which my theory is concerned with, acting pretty much as the experts say—but under different, made-up names, because of my use of them with almost no biochemical vocabulary, at all.

Wikipedia is curiously sparse about pleasure: “Pleasure can be considered from many different perspectives, from physiological (such as the hedonic hotspots that are activated during the experience) to psychological (such as the study of behavioral responses towards reward). Pleasure has also often been compared to, or even defined by many neuroscientists as, a form of alleviation of pain.”
The Wikipedia article goes on to indicate areas in the brain having to do with pleasure, but says nothing more about them. One of these areas (I guess it’s an area rather than a mechanism) is the “dorsal raphe.” I’m wrong. I just looked it up in Wikipedia and found that it’s part of a group of nuclei called the “raphe nuclei” whose main function is the release of serotonin to the rest of the brain—that is, according to my theory, it is (or acts with) the evaluceptual awareness to carry out the functions of a mechanism I call “the evaluplex,” and will soon be telling you about.

Actually, the Wikipedia article has very little connection to my theory except for its list of a few neurotransmitters undoubtedly important (by other names) in my theory, and for vaguely mentioning mechanisms I hypothesize but misname, or their likely loci in the brain. Whether any of my mechanisms, or mechanisms like them, actually exist, is unknown (so far as I know). I don’t believe they are known not to exist . . . ‘cause I can always say they are just too teeny weeny to be seen using the instruments available now! In truth, I think one or more of them could be found if looked for. One thing is sure, I claim they are material entities that do exist and carry out operations that break no known laws of nature, so my theory is definitely falsifiable.

Little in my theory of evaluceptuality seems to me particularly revolutionary. Like, I’m sure, almost all other accounts of pleasure and pain, it deals with a wide variety of specific kinds of them such as the auditory pleasure of a theme in a musical composition or the tactile pain of a bee-sting. Where it becomes unconventional is in its division of pain and pleasure into two importantly different general kinds: physical, like the pain of the bee-sting mentioned, and cerebral, like the pleasure of the musical theme. The two kinds could also be termed “reflexive” and “learned,” or, even, “direct” and “indirect,” but I prefer “physical” and “cerebral.”

The evaluceptual awareness’s frontline mechanism is the reptiliplex, so-named because we share it with reptiles. Its concern is physical pleasure and pain. Just to the rear of the awareness’s frontlines, the predictiplex, so-named for reasons which will become clear in due course, deals with cerebral pleasure and pain. The only other major evaluceptual mechanism is the afore-mentioned evaluplex—so named because it is where the brain’s final “evaluation” is made of how good or bad each moment in our lives feels, and various reactions to that evaluation are initiated.

At this point, I need to introduce two more terms: “owcept” for what neurophysiologists mean by “nociocept” (or pain percept) but I think inferior to my term for obvious reasons, and “ahcept” for “pleasure percept,” for which orthodox neurophysiologists have no term I’m aware of. Note: each owcept and ahcept indicates not only pain or pleasure but the unique site of the pain or pleasure—e.g., “cold at locus 16 on the left index finger.”

The Reptiliplex

Our vocabulary should now be sufficient for what’s to come, so I can say a little more about the reptiliplex. By far the simplest of the evaluceptual awareness’s three major mechanisms, it is entirely concerned with the input of evaluceptual sensory receptors sensitive to various stimuli in the inner and outer environments that the receptors automatically take as either physical pleasure or pain: the scent of lilacs, for instance, or a warm fire on a cold day; a twisted ankle or the smell of excrement.

All the reptiliplex does is act as a port of entry for all the ahcepts and owcepts (or evalucepts) it is notified of by the evaluceptual sensory receptors during each instacon, which it passes on to the outcome-dot to be enter the consciousness of the person involved with all the other neurocepts there, and stored.

The Predictiplex

The mnemoduct is to the predictiplex what the inner and outer environments are to the reptiliplex: the source of signals from sensory receptors that the predictiplex is responsible for dealing with. At bottom, what the predictiplex does is simple:

(1) it learns which of the memories the m-dot becoming the outcome-dot during a given instacon tries to activate it succeeds in activating, and which of them it fails to activate;

(2) then, based on this information, it formulates the value of a number of evaluceptual ratios, each such ratio indicating some group of inter-related neurocepts’ pleasure to pain ratio;

(3) each such value will be somewhere from negative 1.0 up to positive one. The predictiplex converts whatever it is to a number of cerebral owcepts to the degree that the value is low up to a value of . . . negative 0.5, say.

It performs no conversion of any value between negative 0.5 and . . . positive 0.5, say, to either owcepts or ahcepts (although it may convert it to “nullcepts” but I consider that possibility too unimportant to get into here).

Any value higher than positive 0.5 it converts to a number of cerebral ahcepts to the degree that the value is high. Unless the value goes beyond . . . positive 0.7, say, whereupon it gradually reduces the number of ahcepts it converts the value to until it reaches positive 0.8, say. Values between that number and 0.9 it either ignores or converts to nullcepts.

Here I bring in something most psychologists, in my view, seriously neglect: boredom. According to my psychology, the more the ratio rises above positive 0.9, the more it indicates not pleasure, but boredom—painful boredom, possibly comparable to the pain of a kidney stone, or the like. Ergo, an evaluceptual ratio above positive 0.8 will be converted to a number of cerebral owcepts to the degree that the value is high.

Note: the only original ideas I’m presenting in this essay are what cerebral evaluceptuality is and the evaluceptual importance of boredom;

(4) The predictiplex will then multiply each ratio by the number of evalucepts that were involved in its determination, and transmit them to the outcome-dot, which will now be in the process of activation.

(5) There the physical evalucepts the m-dot has just gotten will be experienced as a mixture of specific pleasures and pains, such as a kiss or painful ankle (but most likely not many because of the generally focused nature of the flow of instacons through the conscious mind, and the cerebral evalucepts will be experienced as a mixture of cerebral pleasure or pain, such as the pleasure of a fraction of a song, or the annoyance of having to cough.

Important Note: Almost every physical evaluceptual experience will include some portion of cerebral evaluceptuality and vice versa. For instance, a tasty meal will be mostly physically pleasant, but have elements of cerebral pleasure mixed in, such as the unfamiliarity of a special meat sauce; and a delightful piece of music will mostly convey cerebral pleasure, but may add the pleasure of various physical pleasure, as well, such as the innately physical pleasure of a certain chord, and other elements pleasurable for other reasons than their being neither too familiar nor too unfamiliar. In this introductory text, however, I tend to suggest any evaluceptual experience is either all physical or all cerebral to, again, make my ideas easier to follow.

EVALUCEPTUAL ENHANCEMENT AND INHIBITION

It is at this point that the evaluceptual cycle begun by the activation of the remembering-dot and continued by the outcome-dot’s activation ends with the evaluplex’s activities:

(1) Like both the reptiliplex and the predictiplex, the evaluplex is connected to sensory receptors; its will tell it how many more ahcepts than owcepts the outcome-dot ends with, if it has more ahcepts than owcepts, or how many more owcepts than ahcepts it has if the contrary is the case.

Note: I suspect the situation is more complex than that, perhaps much more complex, but what I’m describing is possible, too, and close enough to what I’m sure actually occurs if my theory is anywhere near correct, at all, so I feel free to consider it here as I’ve just described it.

(2) It will facilitate the ability of all the neurocepts in the outcome-dot to activate memories (to go from J to K, after getting to J from I, for instance) in proportion to how many ahcepts it is reacting to, or inhibit the ability of all the evalucepts in the outcome-dot to activate memories in proportion to how many owcepts it is reacting to:

(3) Ergo, the evaluplex will make us repeat whatever we do or think in a given situation that leads to pleasure and avoid repetition of whatever we do that leads to pain. Simple. Freudian repression. And the opposite. (I don’t recall if Freud hypothesized a mirror image of repression; if not, he should have.) The over-all goal is the satisfaction of the pleasure-maximization drive.
(4) My theory also assumes the evaluplex will activate various reactions to increase the pleasure of anything that leads to pleasure, and decrease the pain of anything that leads to pain. Note: these will be relatively slow, cerebrum-based responses. The cerebellum and pre-cerebellar reflexes will already have caused animal responses like fight or flight, and carried out appropriate facilitation or inhibition of future physical responses. Among the cerebral reactions I’m speaking of will be heightened attention where appropriate, increased ability to think of effective responses, appropriate anger or happiness . . .

I think the neurophysiological establishment already agrees with me at least loosely with the effects of physical pleasure and pain since all I’m positing is that a person will be less likely to repeat actions that lead to physical pain, many of them biological harmful, and more likely to repeat actions that led to physical pleasure, many of them biologically beneficial.

Since I first came up with my theory of cerebral evaluceptuality almost fifty years ago, inspired by a paperback called Precious Rubbish by someone named Shaw (Theodore L., not George Bernard), which made me realize how important avoidance of boredom is in art—and everything else, and the central importance of familiarity, I’ve been bemused by how little familiarity and boredom seem to have been discussed by the experts in the relevant fields. Perhaps because taken for granted? Or because so many vested interests rely on other value determinants in art and life as a whole? In any event, I am now ready to discuss the main subject of my essay:

THE CEREBRAL-SATISFACTION DRIVE

Among the many drives various levels beneath The Pleasure-Maximization Drive are the Cerebral-Satisfaction Drive and the Reptilian-Satisfaction Drive. Each of these has numerous sub-sub-drives like the auditory-satisfaction drive, the reproduction-drive and the warm bath drive. Needless to say, there are sundry lower-level drives, like the mathematics drive, and—under it, the algebra drive—or the dessert drive down to the green-gumdrop drive. The nature of each depends on what awareness or sub-awareness its home is.

First, I want to review what most exactly happens during any instance of cerebral evaluceptual . . . analysis, let’s call it. A person experiences a mental event, then his brain predicts what it will experience next based on the supposition that what he has experienced in similar circumstances before will be repeated. If its prediction is wrong, the person will experience pain due to unfamiliarity (in context). If the prediction is right, but not too right, he will experience the pleasure of the expected, or familiarity. If the prediction is too right, he will experience pain due to boredom, or excessive familiarity. With fairly large expanses of neutral, or blah, evaluceptual experience, which I’ll ignore here on out, as not relevant. Very simple.

The cerebral-satisfaction drive I’ve chosen as my primary illustrating specimen of all cerebral-satisfaction drives is auditory-satisfaction. One reason for this is that I agree with Nietzsche that without music, life would be a mistake (although most of the time I would say that without music, life would be more of a mistake). A better is that it’s the drive that most readily reveals how cerebral evaluceptuality works to provide maximal cerebral satisfaction and how important this is biologically in spite of the fact that music is the purest of the arts, since it has minimal (or possibly no) utility. It is just about only capable, horror of horrors, of giving us pleasure.

Take a simple song. If it’s original at all, it will strike a hearer as unfamiliar. Mental pain will be the result. But once one hears it enough times, it will start seeming at least somewhat predictable, and one will become neutral about it. Soon one will have heard it enough for it to be just familiar enough for it to seem nice. The melody and the orchestration are friends now, but not yet old friends. We are now ever-so-slightly surprised when they appear, but instantly find them welcomely familiar.

Eventually, though, most of us will become so well-acquainted with the piece that, rather than recognize what it does as we hear it, we will know what it does as it does it. We will then lose interest in it. If we keep hearing it, however, we will come to know in advance everything it will do so absolutely, it will irk us, perhaps even anger us. But . . .

A gifted jazzman who can provide us with variations on the piece will be able to give it again the ability to surprise us. Those previously annoyed with it will like it again, unless they find it at first too defamiliarized and have to learn their way back to enjoyment of it; those not out of enjoyment of it in its original form may find the jazzed-up version of it a crime. Sensitivity to music, you see, varies from individual to individual. Some can be too slow ever to appreciate a song, or ever to appreciate a variation on a song. Others may be faster but not fast enough on the uptake ever to tire of a song, once able to appreciate it.

It should be said that rewriting a song, or the equivalent—performing it with a band instead of a single singer, or with a symphonic orchestra, etc.—isn’t the only way to revive a song. A listener may learn things about its composer or about music in general, that changes him and not the song, and in that way makes the combination of what the song brings to him and he brings to the song new enough to make it or keep it enjoyable for him.

One more point: when a jazzman or the equivalent re-renders a song, it will make parts of the original unexpected enough to give pleasure. The listener will not be sure which of the two versions will be next, although he will recognize each when he hears it. Which reminds me that (1) simply hiding from the song once it becomes too familiar will give one time to lose his memory’s grip on it sufficiently to make it seem fresh again and (2) listening to other music, particularly music much different from it, may well do the same thing—the listener will hear a short sequence of notes that he’s later heard in a different piece of music, and thus be momentarily uncertain what comes next, with enjoyment.

While on the subject, I might as well add that performing the song oneself, as singer or instrumentalist, adds a great deal to one’s appreciation of it because one then accompanies the song with a muscular accompaniment of it—one that can be quite varied. For instance, a singer can change the way he sings a song once it starts turning dull for him. Ditto dancing to the song. Or giving it dancers on a stage for one to watch as it is performed. The simple act of following a piece in score will do the same thing—double it into two expressive modalities, conceptual symbols as well as heard sounds.

Here’s another way of putting all this: each new song begins as an addition to reality, and is difficult to accept. Eventually it is accepted. It is now just short of being full-scale quotidian reality—that with which we are totally familiar—which it soon becomes. Boredom. So an artist must replace it with another addition to reality, or make it new.

Actually, every new song is a variation on reality that acts as an intruder on reality; it is a distortion of some portion of familiar reality that takes time to undistort into the happily known-but-not-entirely-known. An original song (by which I mean sufficiently different from every other song to seem new to almost all who hear it) is a variation, to a greater or lesser extent, on all the music prior to it; a representational painting is a variation on the visually real that differs from it in being immobile, probably slightly different in color, arrangement, etc., and context; a misrepresentational painting—impressionistic paintings are a good example—shows us reality as it isn’t, but becomes in art (children almost automatically like representational paintings but take time to appreciate impressionism—I was 17 or 18 when I finally connected to it); then there is nonrepresentational painting that has little to do with the real world, all to do with painting (the way music even at its simplest has little to do with the real world, all to do with music).

Normal prose is the equivalent of representational painting: it is not part of the material world but as close to it as symbols can be: it denotes it so well at its clearest, it disappears. The result would be narrative art if it told a story, but not linguistic art. The words would be utilitarian—just devices used to create the story.

High rhetoric uses words just “unrepresentationally” enough to give linguistic pleasure, and thus an artistic accompaniment to a text that, as a whole, is not art—a political speech, for instance. Poetry is the form of linguistic expression in which linguistic misrepresentationality is a central element, the intention of its words being to not be prose due to its many artificialities, even when seeming cut-up prose (when it evades prose through the use of lineation, which—to those most sensitive to what poetry can do—can be potently misrepresentatively enjoyable.

What I’m saying, if I’ve lost you, is that poetry’s words distort reality by ever-so-slightly misnaming or misrepresenting parts of it. Consider a simple metaphor, for example: Romeo calling Juliet the morning sun. Meter is another way of misrepresenting reality—by giving it a regular beat, which neither it nor prose generally has. Even free verse distorts the reality that is its subject by breaking it into irregular pieces by making its lines end in unexpected places instead of more or less at the same place every time unlike prose (except in the special case of paragraph ends).

I think I’ve digressed enough. I hope that my idea of the goldilocksian way the cerebral-satisfaction drive works is clear, makes sense, and has brought you cerebral satisfaction of the highest order.