Paul MacLean, the Triune Brain, and the Necessity of Metaphor “Thus, we’ve got the brain divided into three functional buckets, with the usual advantages and disadvantages of categorizing a continuum. The biggest disadvantage is how simplistic this is…. Despite these drawbacks, which MacLean himself emphasized, this model will be a good organizing metaphor for us.” –Behave, Robert M. […]
Introduction If you were to ask a human being and a bat, “What is it like to have a mind?,” you would expect to get unimaginably different answers. What is less expected is that if you asked four different people the same question, you could receive four unimaginably different answers. In 1974, philosopher Thomas Nagel famously asked […]
Introduction The quadrune mind model of consciousness describes four levels of consciousness, or minds, which can emerge from the human brain. Each level of consciousness, when it is the dominant mind, will produce a distinct pattern of behaviors in our adulthood. These levels of consciousness are associated with different groups of our pre-human ancestors and stages of […]
As discussed in my blog on Temple Grandin, quadrune mind is a brain-based model of spiritual consciousness. One of its basic ideas is that our human brain lies on a progressive continuum of brains across the evolutionary history of species, which is tied to the developmental growth of individuals and cultures. This progression of brains […]