Consciousness linked to Maslow’s Hierarchy
I recently posted part 4 of my series The Collapse of the First Global Civilization: The A3 Brain, Human Consciousness and the Crisis of Psychology. The entire article was listed as a 46 min read. There are subsections that stand on their own that I’m sure will interest special audiences in a smaller format. Here is one of them.
This post discusses how Maslow’s hierarchy of needs integrates with the new A3 theory of consciousness. This theory presents a functional model for consciousness in both animals and humans which is consistent with new discoveries in brain physiology. The consciousness model was developed along with a new 3-brain physiological model that is discussed in a third article.
Maslow’s Hierarchy
In 1954, Maslow published his book, Motivation and Personality. In this book he suggested that basic human needs could be arranged in an order or “hierarchy”. The order was based on observations that, in animals, some needs had to be satisfied first, before psychological drives pushed the animal to satisfy other needs:
“… the average desires that we have in daily life… are usually means to an end rather than ends in themselves… If we investigate what is causing the desires, we will find other causes or desires beneath them.”
But, if we keep searching, Maslow tells us:
“…it will always lead to certain goals or needs behind which we cannot go; that is to certain need-satisfactions that seem to be ends in themselves… these needs have the particular quality in the average person of not being seen … ends in themselves are far more universal than the roads to achieve those ends, for these roads are determined locally in the specific culture…
Man is a wanting animal and RARELY reaches a state of complete satisfaction except for a short time. As one desire is satisfied, another pops up to take its place… “
Freud had made similar observations 25 years earlier. Both of these men made important statements about their “models” of human drives: even though humans tended to follow patterns, the drives were intertwined in a very complex web:
“(Maslow) …The appearance [of a drive] practically always depends on the state of satisfaction or dissatisfaction of all other motivations… [but, it appeared that the appearance depended most strongly] ….on the fact that such and such other prepotent desires have attained states of relative satisfaction.”
The A3 consciousness model created a new brain organization that aligns directly with Maslow’s list of drives and allows them to be more precisely linked to brain function. The A3 hierarchy of brain physiology (3-brain types) and three levels of consciousness provide a new framework to understand the interactions of the drives and simplify their relationships. This is important because it greatly improves the explanation of human behavior in the modern world.
Maslow’s hierarchy is shown in the table below spread across the A3 hierarchy showing a strong match to the A3 functions.
While a lot of research is now needed to precisely pinpoint where these drives occur in the hierarchy and in the brain, what the order generally shows is the following:
- At lower levels, the intensity of the drive and its speed of occurrence is related to the amount of time a life form can endure lack of “satisfaction” before the life of the organism is threatened. For example, air and shelter are so critical that if a person is deprived of air for a few minutes, or subject to extreme cold or heat for even a few seconds, they could die. Hulk brain evolved to deal with these needs very quickly and directly.
- Food, water and sleep are of course critical for survival. These are also time critical over a day or week.
- Maslow also categorized the need for sex as a primary drive. While its critical evolutionary role of passing environmental adaptation forward is clear, at first thought, it does not seem to be time sensitive like the other primary needs. Yet observations of this drive clearly put it in the hour or day time criticality range for Hulk. Hulk brain obviously treats it similar to the most vital survival drives. I believe the explanation for this is that no where in the Hulk brain structure do we see mechanisms for long term planning or complex pattern recognition. And given two life forms, one that delays sexual activity for social reasons, and a second that pursues it continuously, the second approach, especially in males, appears to be more reliable, and more capable of higher reproduction rates. So for the bulk of evolution’s time scale, Hulk brain would easily optimize adaptability with a short-interval time-critical strategy.
This is a VERY IMPORTANT OBSERVATION! Modern society, primarily through religious teaching existing over only the last 6000 years, has attempted to control sexual activity based on “social” principles. One of those principles is to deny the role of primary brain dominance in controlling the behaviors it has evolved to interpret as “life critical”. A corollary to this denial is the belief that human consciousness can dominate over primary biology. That denial has and is causing catastrophic consequences in our world.
The Hulk brain dominance test
Anyone who wants to test the dominance relationship between Hulk and Thinker in themselves can do the following breathing test. It is known medically that a typical brain can go without oxygen replenishment for about 5 minutes with no long term brain damage. Let’s do a short experiment lasting only 1 ½ minutes to be on the very safe side. It’s simple:
Take two deep breaths: in — — out — — in — — out. Now take a third DEEP breath and hold it. Using your conscious mind, tell your self “mind over matter”, “will over emotion”, or whatever you think will put your conscious mind in CONTROL. Your goal is to simply hold your breath for 1 ½ minutes. (Greek sponge divers and Everest Sherpas are excluded from the test ;-) .
I have NEVER found anyone who could do it. So, if you are one, you are in a very small minority (Try the 3 minute test ;-) Pay attention to your body. You are about to find out why I named our primitive brain HULK!
Hulk doesn’t communicate to the other brains by email or text messages. He communicates by issuing PAIN signals. Notice where the pains occur. In your feet? In your fingers? Probably not. Chest? Stomach — diaphragm area? This is not a coincidence. Are you still holding? And don’t worry, you can’t overdo the test. If you prove to have some outstanding (still unknown to science) mind control ability, when Hulk decides “enough is enough”, he will just black you out. Your “conscious mind” — i.e. Thinker — will just be shut down. You’ll fall down if you aren’t already lying down, AND HULK will take over your breathing.
The reason I’m bringing this example up at this point is to make the point that Hulk has the same dominance ability with regard to sex. And while not controlled as directly — because the needed external partner is not under Hulk’s direct control — Hulk will surely impair the higher level brains to drive the body systems it controls to behaviors it has learned through evolution that sometime achieve its goal. This is not unlike the mind alteration seen with people who are starving, during which most of the “higher” level Maslow drives (including sex) are shut down so full concentration can be focused on finding food. And, of course, like Hulk responds in comics and movies, when he is cornered and FEAR arises in him due to a perceived threat, he also takes control away from the higher level brains!
Maslow’s SAFETY NEEDS become more complex because they start to be “enforced” by both Hulk and Middle brain. A fear of snakes, rodents, insects, dogs etc. in many people, have been shown to be inherited. So, for these people, danger signals are generated by Hulk directly in sensory processing. A person’s behavioral response quickly becomes complicated as Middle brain stores streaming patterns that link the primary DANGER messages sent by Hulk with other sensual observations. So, an encounter with a snake and a certain wood pile would be stored by Middle brain. A later visit to that wood pile would result in Middle brain playing the snake visualization to Hulk. Hulk would then generate the same danger message as well as race the heart, speed up breathing, start sweating, lock up the stomach etc. This would cause Middle brain, once again, to store this entire experience. If the snake was there again, the earlier pattern would be reinforced. If not, another contradicting pattern is stored. Both patterns are checked on future visits to the wood pile.
What’s the relationship of these psychology observations to the coming collapse of civilization?
These three discoveries (3-brain organization; 3 levels of consciousness; Maslow’s list of needs) are important observations. In short, human psychology did not evolve to live in resource rich, highly populated, very technically and socially complex societies. Humans evolved to survive in harsh conditions as sparsely populated hunter-gatherers. Their environment was simple, and mostly knowable. When humans are brought into a complex new environment, our Stone Age brains fall back into behaviors that fit a primitive small clan mentality, which is all it knows. If this is denied by idealistic religious, academic, medical and political teaching, which put forward “wishful thinking” mental and social models, attempts to explain human behavior using those “wishful” models will totally fail. Not willing to admit the mismatch, the observations are matched to pieces of the model. I call this behavior SINGLE SENTENCE LOGIC. The media calls it “sound bites”. Religions call it sermons. The result, however, is that our world has essentially become filled with inconsistent “knowledge”. People, trying to follow such leadership, act in illogical and inconsistent ways. The result is, modern life has become indistinguishable from an insane asylum. People in such a situation not only go into mental distress, they do a lot of stupid things. And when those stupid things include using weapons of mass destruction, destroying many of the cities people need to live in, depleting the earth of resources vital to our survival, and massively polluting critical resources, bad things are going to happen as I described in Part 2.
As long as: (a.) resources are still easy to get, and (b.) they are “pretty” evenly distributed, people will construct a world of lies and denial around themselves to find mental peace. They will pretend things are going “pretty well”. BUT, as soon as either the direct (a.) or perceived (b.) fail, the deprivation they feel will turn into ANGER, which is a Stone Age brain’s primitive behavioral response to FEAR. Fear, as an “emotion”, is one of the ways Middle brain and Thinker experience a message sent from Hulk. It is a way Middle brain sends a message to Thinker. The consequences of fear and anger are the human animal treating others very badly.
A longer discussion of psychology and social collapse can be found in Part 4 of the Collapse series.
Other short excerpts from article 4 related to psychology are:
Sigmund Freud Vindicated ! — a New 3 Brain Model
Consciousness — the New A3 Model
The Seven Deadly Sins
Why modern psychotherapy doesn’t work — Truth, Values and Freedom
Additional discussions of this issue can be found on the A3 Society web page under the following tabs: Brain Theory ; Human Species ; Psychology
Images courtesy of flickr — ascriptions with photos
