Self Comes to Mind

important, art became a way to explore one’s own mind and the minds of others, a means to rehearse specific aspects of life, and a means to exercise moral judgment and moral action. Ultimately, because the arts have deep roots in biology and the human body but can elevate humans to the greatest heights of thought and feeling, they became a way into the homeostatic refinement that humans eventually idealized and longed to achieve, the biological counterpart of a spiritual dimension in human affairs.
    In brief, the arts prevailed in evolution because they had survival value and contributed to the development of the notion of well-being. They helped cement social groups and promote social organization; they assisted with communication; they compensated for emotional imbalances caused by fear, anger, desire, and grief; and they probably inaugurated the long process of establishing external records of cultural life, as suggested by Chauvet and Lascaux.
    It has been suggested that art survived because it made artists more successful at attracting mates; we need only to think of Picasso and smile in agreement. But the arts would have probably prevailed on the basis of their therapeutic value alone.
    The arts were an inadequate compensation for human suffering, for unattained happiness, for lost innocence, but they were and are compensation nonetheless, an offset to natural calamities and to the evil that men do. They are one of the remarkable gifts of consciousness to humans.
    And what is the ultimate gift of consciousness to humanity? Perhaps the ability to navigate the future in the seas of our imagination, guiding the self craft into a safe and productive harbor. This greatest of all gifts depends, once again, on the intersection of the self and memory. Memory, tempered by personal feeling, is what allows humans to imagine both individual well-being and the compounded well-being of a whole society, and to invent the ways and means of achieving and magnifying that well-being. Memory is responsible for ceaselessly placing the self in an evanescent here and now, between a thoroughly lived past and an anticipated future, perpetually buffeted between the spent yesterdays and the tomorrows that are nothing but possibilities. The future pulls us forward, from a distant vanishing point, and gives us the will to continue the voyage in the present . This may be what T. S. Eliot meant when he wrote: “Time past and time future / What might have been and what has been / Point to one end, which is always present.” 17

APPENDIX
     
BRAIN ARCHITECTURE
    When you look at three-dimensional views of the human brain, there is an obvious architectural arrangement that you grasp with the naked eye. The overall pattern is similar from brain to brain, and certain components show up in every brain in the same position. Their relationship is like that of the components of our faces—eyes, mouth, nose. Their exact shape and size are somewhat different in each individual, but the range of variation is limited. There are no human faces in which the eyes are square or in which an eye is larger than the nose or mouth, and symmetry is by and large respected. Comparable restrictions apply to the relative positions of the elements. Like our faces, our brains are extremely similar in terms of the grammatical rules according to which the parts are arranged in space. And yet brains are quite individual. Each brain is unique.
    Another aspect of the architecture that is relevant to the ideas in this book, however, is invisible to the naked eye. Lying beneath the surface, it consists of a massive cable work made up of axons —the fibers that interconnect neurons. The brain has billions of neurons (about 1011), and those neurons make trillions of connections among themselves (about 1015). Nonetheless, the connections are made according to patterns , and not every neuron connects to every other neuron. On the contrary, their meshwork is highly selective. Seen from afar it constitutes a wiring diagram, or many wiring diagrams, depending on the sector of the brain.
    Understanding the wiring diagrams is one road to understanding what the brain does and how. But it is not easy because the wiring diagrams undergo considerable changes during development and beyond. We are born with certain connection patterns, put into place under the instruction of our genes. These connections were already influenced by several environmental factors in the womb. After birth