THE CAVE MIND OPERATING SYSTEM 2.0 - "THE BUSINESS SHAMAN"

Who is thinking you? It may seem like a queer question given that most of us believe that we are the masters of our own brains and actions. But, neuroscience, the teachings of ancient wisdom traditions, and perspectives from shamanism would advise us otherwise. Scientific studies have demonstrated that there are actually three brains. The oldest, which we share with reptiles, is where most of actions come from. Ancient wisdom streams, especially those that include meditation, tie human thought, will forces, and our drives, in no small part, to sources beyond our own mental apparatus and gifts. 

Part of the answer may be that—not only do we share the most “primitive” part of our brains with our animal ancestors—but it appears from cognitiveapproaches to archeology (represented by the like James L. Pearson, Colin Renfrew, Ezra B.W. Zubrow, and Steven Mithin), that we haven’t changed that much as a species for the last 100,000 years. Anthropologist, Jared Diamond, author of “The World Until Yesterday”: What We Can Learn From Traditional Societies” says that one of the reasons we are interested in so-called “tribal”, traditional, non-Western societies or as he calls us WEIRD (Western Educated Industrial Rich Democratic), is that we are closer to them than we can imagine, even dressed up as we are in our business attire and wearable technology.

In fact, we often accept all too willingly the advantages of modern technology without a fuller understanding of what may be lost in the process. Diamond goes on to assert that social bonds are an advantage that traditional societies have which is being lost by technology-dominated cultures. In a previous post, social media was cited as creating a loss of intimacy that would make personal contact worth more in the future than gold. John A. Livingston, a professor of environmental studies, goes further to say that dependence on technology “has made us not merely the servants of our own technology, but one of its products.” Anyone who has not checked his or her social media profile settings on Facebook or their other favorite social network should be aware that if you’re opting in, you are the data. That said, there is data and then, there is data—as anyone who has meditated has experienced.

One of the first things that occur in meditative states is the flurry of incoming and ongoing thoughts. In Zen and other Eastern traditions, this has been called the “monkey mind” because thought seems to be produced randomly, sometimes in a ramble that appears as if out of nowhere without effort—like a brain swinging from treetop to treetop in the jungle of mind. Shamanic techniques as well as meditative ones represent time-tested technologies that help us attempt to saddle this runaway horse of thought, so that we, the riders, can better direct their course and as a result, our intention, and action. As mystic teacher, Gurdjieff, once prompted—we must ask ourselves: “Who is the horse and who is the rider?” Unfortunately, for anyone who has tried, it doesn’t come easily. One reason we’ve now learned from neuroscience is that most decision-making—estimated at an incredible 95%—occurs below the surface of conscious thought.

Neuromarketing, a relatively recent field that is an offshoot of applied “neuroscience meets sales”, points to the target being the oldest vestige of our connection with all animals that have a spine—the so-called “reptilian” brain that sits atop the brainstem. This seat of the classic “fight or flight response,” is a kind of binary switch, which identifies whether outside stimuli are dangerous or safe. It also helps identify whether sensory input represents the possibilities of food or sex. A later development, the second part of the brain system is the mid brain, which controls emotional response. The latest addition, and the one which truly sets us apart from the animal pack, is the frontal cortex, which introduced into the system what might be called in the language of the HAL 9000 computer, our “logic center”. Among other things, it’s responsible for scenario planning, which differentiates us from other animals both in the hunt as well as availing itself to business strategy.

Graphic courtesy of salesbrain.com

Here, science has mapped what ancient tradition has known for a very long time. Gurdjieff, who represented age-old wisdom streams from the Sufi and Tibetan to the Siberian and Ancient Egyptian, referred to humans as “three-brained beings” in his magnum opus, “All and Everything.” It leads one to believe that the ancients were onto something that might be put to good use today in the modern world and to elevate the business game. In fact, neuromarketing labs already exist and are using technology like fMRI scanners to locate specific brain functions for brands to use in marketing to us.  Companies like Coca Cola, Disney, and the CBS Television Network, have them and CBS’ is interestingly located close to the Las Vegas Strip where they recruit their subjects who are hopefully not too drunk a sample.

In their classic text on the subject, “Neuromarketing: Understanding the ‘Buy Button’ in Your Customer’s Brain”, Patrick Renvoise and Christophe Morin provide a helpful analogy as to how these three brains all fit together: You’re out hiking and come across something on the ground that looks like a snake. Your reptilian brain immediately kicks into gear and you jump back. Your logic center takes a closer look from afar and sees that it’s not a snake at all, but a broken stick that isn’t moving. The midbrain then directs you to wipe your brow, “Phew, that ‘snake’ was only a stick. Man, am I lucky!”

What does this mean specifically for marketing and sales? Quite simply, that in order to sell, you need to appeal to what Renvoise and Morin call the “Salesbrain.” In other words, you need to appeal to the “reptilian” part of the brain and make it easy for your customer to say “yes.” There are many sales books about “getting to ‘yes’”, but not as many about the power of its opposite. Again, an ancient practice from India that goes back at least 8000 years—the art of chanting mantras or power words in meditation—links the idea of belief to sound.

Dr. Andrew Newberg and Mark Robert Waldman in “Words Can Change Your Brain”, point out that the most dangerous we use is the word “no”, which literally causes the brain to go into stress mode when it is heard. So, Norman Vincent Peale had a point when he dedicated his classic volume to “The Power of Positive Thinking.” Newberg and Waldman founded the field of Compassionate Communication techniques for leadership based on their findings in neurology and offer practical techniques for using language to rewire the brain and more effectively communicate.

In “Rogue Primate”, John A. Livingston, goes further to suggest that we invent technology to get us closer to those things we have lost during the course of becoming civilized, specifically the world of nature. Gretel Erlich, who has dedicated her life to writing poetically about the natural world says, “Nature is the only true artist, and we are its apprentices.”

Yossi Ghinsberg’s account of his “apprenticeship” at the hand of the jungle, itself, and survival after being lost for weeks in the Amazonian rainforest provides even more foundation for the wisdom in having access to our “tribal mind”. At least, he suggests, we should sense our inner GPS based on knowing where we are and not just in relation to maps—which may be as erroneous as Apple’s attempt at navigation—but with respect to natural celestial events and nature’s compass. He codified the principles which helped him survive in “Laws of the Jungle: Jaguars Don’t Need Self-help Books—Profound Lessons Inspired by an Extraordinary Story of Survival”.

In a previous post, “The Cave Mind Operating System”, I drew some conclusions and hopefully offered a few practical lessons drawn from the study of prehistoric rock art, its discovery in modern times, and contemporary theories relating paintings that can be as old as 30,000 years ago to shamanism and hunting magic.

What other lessons can we learn from studies of cognitive archeology, neuromarketing, and behavioral science?

1)   SEEING IS USUALLY CLOSER TO BELIEVING, BUT WHAT YOU SEE IS NOT NECESSARILY WHAT YOU GET

“Creating ways to keep us connected is…the central problem of mammalian evolution,” according to neuroscientist, Dr. Mathew D. Lieberman. The ability of the reptilian brain to determine threat is based on our being social animals. But, social media doesn’t always do the job of keeping us connected; despite how many “connections” you might have on LinkedIn, Facebook “friends” or “followers” on Twitter. Sociological and anthropological studies of modern cultures and tribal societies have shown that the maximum number of acquaintances that it is possible for most normal brains to handle is 150, which is also the average maximum size of a tribal unit.

“Face Time” is not just a Mac application. Social media and technology have made in-person meetings more essential than ever and the human face is definitely our social mask for those who have the ability to read it. Any good salesman will also tell you that one of the goals of a retail shopping experience is to get the product in the hands of a potential buyer. Possession is a psychological state and ownership often starts with the feeling of touching the merchandise. The bottom line is that social media aside, we still trust face-to-face interactions more than virtual ones in our decision making, whether we recognize it or not.

A Wall Street Journal study showed that from job interviews to dating, humans make a decision as to whether they like another person within a mere 20 seconds. Traditional business wisdom about smiling, firm handshakes, eye contact, and proper attire hold water for the subconscious mind. Developing a working knowledge of body language was popularized by negotiation experts like Gerard Nierenberg and Henry H. Calero in late 1960’s and early 1970’s and is still relevant. Emotions from friendliness to lying, flirtation to boredom, are written all over the face, gestures, postures, and other forms of physical expression that can be read like a book. It should be no surprise that Dan Zarella’s research of over a million Facebook interactions show that over 60% of what is shared on the social network are photos. His outstanding work is essential to understanding the science behind marketing.

Rudolf Steiner said that one could tell more about a man by the way that he walked, than by any other method. The lesson is that we should be wary that snap judgments are made both in person, and on a shared screen, and it’s easier to workaround an initially unfavorable impression in person than it is when the average amount of time that a user spends on a web page is 3-8 seconds and a face is blown up outsized in terms of its effect, the smaller the screen gets. Given that there are now over two billion mobile phones globally, the best practice is probably to use those initial seconds favorably to “get the meeting.”

2) THE TRIBE ISN’T ALWAYS RIGHT

Much has been written about the creative power of collaboration in this era of the “open organization” exemplified by the tech startup with its common spaces, non-hierarchal structures and relaxed management styles. It is also the foundation for the rule of democratic law in contrast with dispute resolution in tribal societies where individuals involved do not have representation, but usually know each other and resolve their differences face-to-face.

It may then, seem counterintuitive, but the so-called “wisdom of the crowd” isn’t always so wise at all times. Anyone who has run a focus group has seen the lemming effect that often takes place when an “alpha” participant becomes the effective group leader and sways opinion while silencing outliers who might otherwise speak differently.

Despite Seth Godin’s popularization of the word “tribes” to refer to market segments in the digital world, and the name of my blog, “Tribal Media”, sometimes we need to avoid the cliff of groupthink and say, “Take me to your leader”—which may, in fact, be you.

3)   SMOKE SIGNALS TAKE A LONG TIME TO GET THERE

One of the challenges that social media and digital marketers often face is the question: “Where is the ROI.” Despite the many digital marketing companies promising “virality”, the first rule of thumb is that organic social marketing is usually slow growing, especially if it’s organic. Also, there is a difference between ROI and “reach”.

Even in the television business, it’s never been proven—except on infomercials—that commercial spots are responsible for unit sales. It’s still all about awareness.

So, when you see a commercial about a detergent that makes a family both clean and “happy” (as Don Draper would say), one is apt to remember the product when you are walking down the supermarket aisle and spotting the same colors and branding. The same is true for social media, except that the CPM or standard metric for success has yet to be agreed on.

While clicks, uniques, social reach, and other terms have been applied to mirror the conventions of offline mediametrics, "social" by nature is a totally different animal because it is ideally a circle of conversation that establishes value first prior to conversion to a sale.

A look at the chart above shows that Starbucks is sending out more "smoke signals" via Twitter than Coca Cola or Pepsi, and may be the reason why it represents a lifestyle brand as the beverage companies aspire to be. It doesn't take a brain scientist to see that Pepsi or Coke could up the ante by sending out more smoke signals or tweets to differentiate itself from its competitor.

4)   SOCIAL MEDIA AND TEXTING ARE THE NEW CAVE PAINTINGS

Emoticons and social media network profiles can tell us a lot about their owners. Emoticons arose not only as shortcuts, but because images can convey emotion better than language. The rise and art of successful infographics demonstrates the need to present the noise of data in a highly visual, shrink-wrapped format. Brand logos are symbol systems that convey emotion, value, and engender aspiration as well as create lifestyle clans of belonging. The popularity of graffiti, with some of its practitioners considered artists in their own right, is another indication of the need humans have to make marks in time to define both establish identity and territory. Urban walls are a constant reminder of this common thread binding prehistoric and modern societies.

Text is a similarly abbreviated language with its acronyms and shortcuts. The desire to be in constant communication seems to be a mania that requires the ability to encompass as much information in as short bursts as possible. Where once the half hour sitcom and hour drama once ruled, short form video is now a parallel universe that contributes to the 8+ hours a day the average American spends on a screen of some kind.

But, texts and email fall short when compared with the lost art of letter writing and epic poetry and are often subject to having their meaning and/or tone misunderstood—and many times in unfavorable ways. Corporations are learning this the hard way and as a result of mis-steps in handling crisis communications, have enabled an expansive, digital reputation management industry.

The result is going to be that long form writing will stand out as a practice much in the same way that scribes were the only literate people in Ancient cultures in Egypt and Mesopotamia, where the original oral traditions predominated. If we do a deep dive into deep time, it’s easy to forget that writing as such was only invented approximately 5200 years ago. 

Slang wars and urban dictionaries aside, we’re going back to the future with the written word. The right word, spoken at the right time is still the most powerful medicine. Muscogee poet, Joy Harjo, wrote: “The sound of a voice will often reveal a map of destiny.” One only has to remember the wartime speeches of Winston Churchill, to know what she meant. Conversely, Marshall McLuhan pointed out that the rise of Hitler was due to his command of the radio broadcast as a propaganda tool and that had television been invented at the time, he would have been seen as the madman he was through the visual medium--and not risen to power.

On learning about the invention of the alphabet, Aristotle was purported to have said, “There goes the neighborhood!” referring to the inevitable loss of memory due to the faltering of oral tradition. What happens when memory becomes storage in “the cloud” and messages like Vine videos are 6 seconds long, Snapchats disappear in 10 seconds, and the average YouTube video is watched for 2:46?

McLuhan also reports that St. Augustine was the only person in medieval Europe who was capable of reading silently. When he recited texts from memory, he was regarded as a magician. Those who have a command of the written word will become a new future knowledge class and will have more power than those who send the thousands of messages that trap us every day.

5)    MUSIC IS CREATED IN THE SILENCE BETWEEN THE DRUM BEATS (AND NOTES)

If pictures are more effective than words to convey emotion, then music trumps them both. Why then would we ask: “Where can we find the silence?” A sage once said that before you speak, you should ask yourself, “Are my words going to improve the silence?” How do we find the place where creative energy comes from? With the proliferation of management books on innovation and creativity that emphasize systems and methodologies, it’s always helpful to ask a musician. No less an expert than Keith Richards cites that: “The silence is your canvas.” Famously, when he was asked for a definition of jazz, Dizzy Gillespie said, “It’s the silence between the notes.”

We exist in a media environment where the average American receives over 3000 messages a day. Increasingly, this makes the pursuit of silence next to impossible--and silence affords the moments where the creative mind can kick in and allow for intuition and ideas to flow uninterrupted. We also live in a time when the accidental nature of discovery and invention—in dreams, for example—is not the goal.

“In daily life, because triumph is made more visible than failure, you systematically overestimate your chances of succeeding,” observes Rolf Dobelli. He sees much thinking about personal and professional success suffering from what he calls “survival bias”. He reminds us that we should look at the nature of how we overestimate the chances of our achievements by “visiting the graves of once-promising projects, investments, and careers.” For every best-selling book, he points out that we should count the thousands of unpublished authors littering the publishing battlefield.

When creating, we need to always ask ourselves, “Are we ‘Man the Toolmaker’?” as anthropologists have characterized our species. Or are we more subject than ever to the idea that technology will save us time, and offer other efficiencies, which actually make us more “Tool the Man maker”? In many respects, we need look no further than nature or the world of ongoing creation, adaptation, and renewal for the answer.

Feedback is the way that nature learns, according to Tachi Kiuchi former Chairman and CEO Emeritus of Mitsubishi Electric America and Bill Shireman, in their 2002 book, “What We Learned In The Rainforest: Business Lessons from Nature.” Ethnologists are taught to listen rather than engage in conversation and one of the most effective words to use in marketing messages for social media engagement is “you.” The social web is dominated by self-interest and in order to survive, thrive, and generate virality, it is critical to serve the interest of the other first. The art of listening is connected to the discipline of finding that inner silence where one’s inner voice and agenda can be controlled in order to have a better understanding of most business situations.

According to science writer and filmmaker, Jonnie Hughes, “Highly social, brainy primates with time on their hands are able to watch the actions of others and copy them…” The ability to imitate, therefore, is hardwired—it’s actually called “the art of aping”, but it requires time—afforded when the mind is disciplined and calm with the open-ness to be able to mirror the other. Jeffrey Hazlitt, former CMO of Kodak, takes the notion a step further for organizations as a whole in his now classic management book, “The Mirror Test”.

The search for silence will become an expanding effort especially with generations that are input oriented rather than on output. At a conference on the future of television, singer/actor/activist, Ruben Blades once observed: “We will be the best informed generation to die of ignorance.” While meditation and shamanism offer a variety of techniques for the seeker of the kind of creative answers to be found in silence, we need to also be aware that no matter how proficient sentient or sentiment savvy search engines become at filtering data—or even the current trend of human curated search—there is a cost and ultimately, you are being searched as well.

6)   THE DIGITAL WORLD IS LIKE A JUNGLE AND A RADIAL CLOSED WEB ECO SYSTEM OF INTEGRATED NETWORKS

“What can business learn from nature?” pose Kiuchi and Shireman. For starters, we have moved from an online world where destination sites once ruled and cost marketers dearly in terms of the budgets necessary to drive traffic and eyeballs to URLS, having now arrived at a web network, radial model. This model is actually a mirror of how things work in nature. “The global integration of networks creates a network ecology—literally, a place in which people can gather, conduct business, share ideas, and build relationships. People will be able to conduct their activities increasingly in the global network ecology—the Infosphere,” says Michael Vlahos.

Diagrams based on and courtesy of Kiuchi and Shireman

The irony is that limits are also a key positive force that force adaptation and innovation in the rainforest. The lesson is that one should create more than one consumes. Kiuchi and Shireman suggest that profitability is linked to companies that are disciplined enough to use limits to “force (and) channel action toward the creation of value. Today, the notion of a value chain should be updated to be more of the “closed value web loop” that drives natural cycles of the seasons in the forest and in life. The true business “plan” starts when we ask ourselves what we value most.

It may be helpful to keep in mind a perspective from the world's leading expert on ants, E.O. Wilson: "In a purely technical sense, each species of higher organism—beetle, moss, and so forth, is richer in information than a Caravaggio painting, Mozart symphony, or any other great work of art."

7)   THE BUSINESS WORLD IS A HUNT WHERE CHANCE AND LUCK ARE MORE PREVALENT THAN THE BEST TRACKER

Thanks to original thinker, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the term “black swan” is now well known in the world of finance. A trader by profession, he originated the phrase to describe unexpected events and the role of chance that more often than not are responsible for the behavior of the markets despite the best-intentioned, most persuasive predictions, analytics, and trading systems. In his collection of aphorisms, "The Bed of Procrustes", Taleb further states: "In science you need to understand the world; in business you need others to misunderstand it."

According to Jared Diamond, Harvard would have avoided the crash of its endowment and income during the 2008-9 worldwide financial meltdown if its “financial managers…followed the risk management strategy of peasant farmers, who maximize long-term time-averaged yields only insofar as that is compatible with maintaining yields above a certain critical level.” Tell that to former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan.

In addition, Diamond points out that both traditional societies and Western cultures “have a tendency to resort to rituals in situations whose outcomes are hard to predict.” Whether it’s the superstitious behaviors of athletes, dowsers looking for water or the mad graphs of systems traders, the unexpected seems to be the only thing we can expect from a world designed for change. Being open to the opportunities potentially offered through chance and uncertainty in addition to being able to exercise our unique ability as thinking animals to create scenarios, seems to be the best workable, hybrid strategy.

“The fact is that we’re actually living permanently in the future and that’s what really worries me,” says Terry Gilliam, whose forthcoming movie, “The Zero Theorem”, is a dystopia about a coder drowning in data. Seems to be an emergent theme as a recent spate of movies may be trying to tell us. Whether or not you think that traditional societal knowledge or ancient wisdom is relevant, there’s a wave of films about survival—among them “Gravity”, “12 Years a Slave”, “American Hustle”, and “The Hobbit.” “Gravity” director, Alfonso Cuaron, pointed this recent theme out on a recent episode of the “Charlie Rose Show”. Despite the advantages of modern life, perhaps survival is more imperative than ever if it is being expressed in so many mass dreams.

The idea of connecting ancient traditions and mysticism with the business world may strike some as bad mojo or as controversial. Others like Jared Lanier, who coined the phrase “virtual reality”, have become Neo-Luddites and are warning us about the perils of accepting technology without knowing its potentially unfavorable consequences. We are not romanticizing tribal peoples who have their own problems and have all but succumbed to modern ways. Certain practices of extant traditional societies are brutal, especially with regard to women. But, Terence McKenna had a point when he spoke of our times as an “Archaic Revival” where, to discover the cultural riches of techniques that have worked well enough to survive thousands of years in our shared past, has the potential to save us from repeating the future.

I'll be speaking about "The Business Shaman" and the Cave Mind Operating System at The British Museum on January 28th.

THE CAVE MIND OPERATING SYSTEM

Notorious, fabled “Beat” writer and author of “Naked Lunch”, William S. Burroughs, once defined “paranoia” as “just the state of having all the facts.” Now maybe I’m suffering a little bit from being overwhelmed by facts, but the smiley face has always made me suspicious that it can’t be all that good. At first, Evolutionary biology may not be the most likely refuge of the paranoid, but in the case of the smiley face, it’s brought me nothing less than religion.

The next time your better half, best friend, boss, helpful sales person or gleaming white toothed celebrity smiles at you, think on this—according to Evolutionary biology, the origin of the smile is the reflex that predators make when bearing their teeth at the sight of prospective food. Clearly, there is something we can learn from considering our animal ancestry and in particular, a lot it can teach us about behaviors that we either take for granted, assume we know all about or don’t even question at all. It doesn’t require lifting the veil of time and scrying into the mists of history—it only takes a glimpse at the new gods of sex, drugs, and rock and roll to recognize that we are creatures of biology, first and foremost. Maybe it’s time to use this fact to our advantage once again, given that there are predators like religious fanatics, evil bankers, credit card, and loan sharks on the loose.

I’ve always believed that there’s a lot we can learn from the Upper Paleolithic, a time period when many of our ancestors were retreating from the ice and snow into the solace of fire lit caves. “What can we learn from The Flintstones?” you might ask, besides the fact that all animated shows of yesteryear will at one time or another suffer from being turned into live action features as Hollywood studios trawl the depths of television for recycling purposes. Consider also a trend that Faith Popcorn described in her 1991 book, “The Popcorn Report” which she labeled “cocooning,” whereupon Yuppies are seen as retreating into the new cave of their media centric homes as a way to find relief from the modern rat race. There’s a reason that the root of the word “hearth” is easily found by dropping its final letter “h”. The fireside was once the “heart” of the home and may be again in the form of the postmodern, Green kitchen, if Kevin Henry is right in his latest post on his blog, “The Connected Kitchen”.

My bias is that art usually holds the key to human consciousness at any given time in history and looking at so-called “Prehistoric Art” probably possesses the veritable Keys to the Kingdom. Take for example, the 1879 discovery of the famous cave at Altamira in Spain, which has been called “the Sistine Chapel of Paleolithic Art.” One summer day, a Spanish nobleman and amateur archeologist named Don Marcelino de Sautuola was joined by his young daughter, Maria, in a cave on his estate which he had explored for artifacts many times before. Called by John E. Pfeiffer in his book, "The Creative Explosion: An Inquiry Into the Origins of Art and Religion," “one of the great tales in the annals of prehistory,” this episode can be seen as having something to teach us almost like an Upper Paleolithic OS about the powers of common sense and seeing to through the obvious.

Now the stuff of legend, his daughter (whose age varies according the particular account from five and seven to twelve), had wandered into a small, side chamber that was three-to-five feet high in most places. Don Marcelino had traversed it numerous times without noticing what made his daughter cry out loud, “Toros, toros, toros!” Interesting was that in his search for stone artifacts, he was always scouring the floor of the cave and had never actually looked up at the ceiling. As Pfeiffer describes it, “Nothing had prepared Sautuola for the shock of such a discovery. He had explored the chamber and thought he knew what was in it.” While he had used his lantern to avoid being bumped on the head by the protuberances that were covered with vivid paintings in black, red, pinks, and browns, it was by the lantern light that his child made the discovery simply by looking up. Little did she realize that in doing so and revealing the hidden prehistoric art that it would turn her father into an advocate tied to evolutionary theory and to his grave be much maligned as a crank and charlatan by the then protectionist, doubting world of traditional archeology.

An inspiration for his courage in facing harsh criticism that saw the cave paintings as forgeries, his story provides us with OS Principle Number One from the Upper Paleolithic:

1. SOMETIMES A BUMP ON THE HEAD IS A GOOD THING

In other words, always Look Up in addition to staring at your feet! This is also known as OVER, UNDER, SIDEWAYS, DOWN or the Yardbirds’ Principle since it’s named after their 1965 hit.

Many of the famous caves in Western Europe from the Upper Paleolithic were discovered by children. This includes the most celebrated one of all, France’s Lascaux Cave, discovered in 1940 by four youths who were chasing a pet dog named Robot, who had disappeared into a hole in the ground that turned out to lead to the great subterranean galleries below. Some are even named after their youthful discoverers like “Les Trois Freres” after the three young brothers who first crawled its lengths.

As Pfeiffer says about Maria, the discoverer of the Altamira cave, “…she was too young to have acquired a bias against looking up rather than looking down.” He continues that her father, “…had no real interest in the walls or ceiling of the cave. He was an excavator interested above all in what he could find at his feet, on the floor, such things as flint artifacts and bones and remains of hearths. The low ceiling of the side chamber was only a hazard to him, something to avoid.” The point is that life is at the very least, three-dimensional and we need to see ourselves both inside and out of the box in order to be creative and truly “think outside the box”.

This leads us inevitably to OS Principle Number Two from the Upper Paleolithic:

2. WHEN IN DOUBT, ASK A CHILD

When in doubt, don’t let age or experience be a factor. I remember once when my daughter was four and she asked me, “Daddy, why does infinity never stop?” For the first time as a parent, I had the survival instinct to ask her instead of trying to come up with any sort of reasonable answer. “What do you think, honey?” I asked her. Without losing a beat she replied, “Because they ran out of numbers!” You might be astounded by the insights offered by the unbiased eyes of the culturally agnostic and the brains of young souls who are closer to the tabula rasa.

Pfeiffer says, “Archeological records include many cases of art overlooked. The eye never comes innocent to its subject. Everything seen is a blend of what actually exists out there, the “real” object, and the viewer’s expectations, upbringing, and current state of mind. It is amazing what you can miss when you do not expect to see anything or, given a strong enough motive, what you can see that is not there. Unless the mind is properly adjusted or set, anticipating a revelation of a particular sort, nothing happens.”

Principle three, therefore, follows this theme of perception:

3. YOU CAN’T BELIEVE EVERYTHING YOU SEE AND HEAR, CAN YOU?

Otherwise known as the “Up From The Skies” Principle after the lyrics from Jimi Hendrix. Or better yet, it could be called “Anticipate Revelation.”

Why do the Aboriginal people of Australia believe that our world is the dream and that the true world is the Dreamtime beyond our consensus reality? With 40,000 to 50,000 years of experience to draw upon, one has to ask the question. Like the San people of South Africa, the Aborigines are one of the only cultures who still have an ongoing tradition of painting caves.

You don’t have to get tribal to appreciate the Other Side of the Sky. There is a story about visionary English poet, William Blake, that is a case in point. Upon hearing a knock on the door, his wife once answered the caller’s inquiry as to whether Mr. Blake was at home, by responding: “No. He spends most of his time in heaven.”

Shamanic cultures tend not to throw out anything that works. In other words, if you are bent on survival, why dispose of the practical. This is just one factor that supports the efficacy of shamanism as an alternative medical practice as well as a way of seeing that there are many more worlds than ordinary “9 to 5” reality. Chief Seattle took this to its logical conclusion when he said, “There is no death, only a change of worlds.”

Like quantum physicists, cave dwellers and modern tribal peoples believe that the stone walls of caves are more like membranes between this world and that of the ancestors. So, placing a painting of one’s own handprint on top of an ancestor’s creates a link where one is able to touch and pass through to a kind of historic continuum to the ancestral chain of being. Drawing an animal is believed to have been an appeal on the part of hunters to ask permission of their quarry’s spirit prior to hunting for food.

The representations of animals in the Upper Paleolithic caves are so realistic that they seem to breathe, especially in torchlight and placed as they often are on outcrops that enhance their shape—the artists were obviously very familiar at close range to their subject and their depictions are in many cases without peer in the millennia that have transpired since. No less than the like of Picasso testified to this when, after seeing the extinct Altamira bison created 15,000 thousand years previously, remarked: “ None of us could paint like that.”

This raises how art enters the picture, which brings us to principle number four:

4. WHAT IS WORK TO ONE CAVEMAN IS ANOTHER MAN’S ART

In his illuminating book on cognitive archeology, “Shamanism and the Ancient Mind”, James L. Pearson says: “From the first discovery of prehistoric painting at Altamira to the stunning finds at Grotte Cosquer and Chauvet Cave in the 1990’s, researchers have tried to uncover the meaning of this Ice Age art and the function of the painted caves.” The field of study that undertakes to explore the caves and other sites associated with such decoration is called “Rock Art,” a label that, while helpful for academics, presents some semantic problems when looked at with the tribal eye.

The basic issue is not only how to define art—a challenge we’ll leave to the experts for now—but according to Steven Mithen in “The Prehistory of the Mind: The Cognitive Origins of Art and Science”: “…the definition of art is culturally specific. Indeed many societies who create splendid rock paintings do not have a word for art in their language.”

Is “rock art” art if the producers didn’t think so? For most of the 20th century, prevailing wisdom associated cave art with hunting magic. Others scholars and researchers like Mircea Eliade, Joan Halifax, Weston La Barre, Andreas Lommel, and David Whitley suggested that Lascaux, Les Trois Freres and other rock art sites depicted shamans and supernatural helpers.

World-renowned authorities Jean Clottes and David Lewis-Williams expanded on a preceding neuropsychological model and combined it with ethnography in their 1998 book “The Shamans of Prehistory: Trance and Magic in the Painted Caves”: “The way in which each individual cave was structured and decorated was a unique result of the interaction of four elements: the topography of the cave, its passages, and chambers; the universal functioning of the human nervous system and in particular, how it behaves in altered states; the social conditions, cosmologies, and religious beliefs of the different times at which a cave was used; and lastly, the catalyst—the ways in which individual people and groups of people exploited and manipulated all of these elements for their own purposes.”

The most fascinating connection that is made in the neuropsychological model is between the actual symbolic elements in rock art and phosphene action that takes place in the human eye, whether during altered or natural states. Just rub your eyes and you’ll see these shapes and signs that are created by the firing of the optic nerve. Many are universal forms like jigsaws, dots, rakes, and spirals that appear throughout rock art sites across millennia and all over the world. The question then becomes how much of what we see is conscious and how much is not?

In this view, what is considered as representational art has a connection to the ability to create symbols with intention, and turns creative expression into an index as to the level of consciousness of a specific culture at a particular time and space. Cognitive archeology says that the production of representational art requires a certain brain capacity that sees outside itself. When I’ve taken tribal people from different cultures to see the rock art sites in the local Santa Monica Mountains, they are always careful to offer interpretations circumscribed by their own culture. “To us,” they start with a disclaimer, “these paintings represent clan symbols.” But, they are always deferential about the meaning, intent or purpose for the tribe who created them. This perspective leads to our next principle:

5. SOMETIMES A CIGAR IS JUST A CIGAR

As Freud famously said. The bottom line in terms of my own experience at rock art sites is that you can’t dismiss that some of paintings and petroglyphs were just doodling and a sort of tribal version of “Kilroy Was Here” message. Maybe it was just a fine day around the water hole where hunter-gatherers had the luxury of some extra time on their hands and thought to memorialize their afternoon with their mark. So, we have to consider that some of the “art” may have not been conceived of as representational or symbolic at all, but just as either functional—as with hunting magic—or doodles that were pleasing to the eye but meant nothing more. But, one of the manias of our scientific age is to attempt to find a rational way to explain everything.

One of the difficulties in rock art research is that there is no Rosetta Stone handy to decipher pictographs and petroglyphs. Outside of cultures with living traditions of rock art like the Aborigine and San people, it is not straight forward to interpret what they mean. Instead, we are often left with the beautiful problem of confronting meaning ourselves as a primary experience without interpretation—with nothing between us and the original maker of the markings—and a rare occurrence that we should treasure in this media immersive world that interprets our experience of the world to death for us in over three thousand advertisements, logos, and consumer messages a day.

So, what may be art to us with historical distance from the circumstances and cultural context in which cave paintings were created, they may have had quite a functional purpose to those who originally produced it, whether it was to evoke the ancestors, supernatural or animal powers or clan territory. My take is that even though the scientific method and was born out of the Age of Reason and out of rejection of religious belief, it still is based in part on fear of the Unknown. The search for meaning is one way to moderate fear, leading naturally to our next precept:

6. DON’T BE AFRAID OF THE DARK

Sometimes the light at the end of the tunnel is not a train. One of the most impressive thing about caves is the kind of absolute darkness that we ordinarily never experience. To enter one, you often have to deal with fear. On some primordial level, you feel as if you are leaving the lighted world to say nothing of carrying along the cultural baggage of the collective unconscious associated with the netherworld.

Imagine what it must have been like to descend into one of these places as a twelve-year-old initiate in Upper Paleolithic society, led by the most frightening person in the tribe—the shaman—and making your way by hook and by crook, on your hands and knees, in the mud and underground streams, listening to the drip-drip-drip of water seeping from the land above mixed with the strange sounds of nether dwelling life forms and suddenly seeing forms of animals and other strange shapes come alive with lighting of the shaman’s lamp. It probably was an experience that would give religion to any one of us.

A recent book by Martin Lindstrom called “Buyology: Truth and Lies About Why We Buy” features excellent material relating to the use of fMRI technology, but one finding, in particular, is quite surprising. The results of fMRI scans have demonstrated a connection between religion and consumer behavior. Apparently, experiments showed that the part of the brain activated during religious ceremonies and experiences is the same as the region which is active during shopping, watching commercials, and gazing at corporate logos.

Ad Age reported on April 6 about findings from the New York Buyology Symposium that presented brain scanning data making correlations between “cult-like brands” such as Harley Davidson and Ferrari and the emotional drivers associated with believers in the world’s largest religion, Christianity.

Dr. Gregory Berns is a psychiatrist who is also a leading authority on neuroeconomics, and biomedical engineering. Neuroeconomics is a study that combines neurology, psychology and economics and looks at understanding how individuals and groups make decisions, take risks, and experience rewards. One of the primary tools that they use is fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) which studies brain response by correlating specific neuron firing in the brain with the decision making process.

Berns’ new book, "Iconoclast: A Neuroscientist Reveals How To Think Differently," reveals the limitations that the fear response places on creativity and innovation. In an extended interview in the current edition of Super Consciousness magazine, he says, “The importance of the distinctions in how each of us sees the world cannot be underestimated…perception is not something that is immutably hardwired into the brain.” He profiles recent findings that show how we are capable of transforming the way we perceive life and can redirect neurological firing. It’s not an easy feat, requiring extraordinary mental training and energy, but the idea stands as one of the fundamental principles of neuroeconomics.

According to Berns: “…one of the brain’s primary survival mechanisms is conserving energy. The brain does this by limiting energy expenditure during normal everyday awareness…for most people, though, breaking out of the comfort zone of their energy conservative perceptions is often a fearful proposition.”

He goes on to say that fear limits our ability to be creative and is a huge impediment to innovation. Similar to Malcolm Gladwell’s recent treatment in “Outliers”, Berns sees the great innovators as outsiders and iconoclasts who are able to face risk, “but cognitively reframe (such situations) so as to estimate some kind of likelihood of success or failure to make a decision.” He calls it “the optimism bias,” which allows them to “downplay negative scenarios” as opposed to buy into the uncertainty or ambiguity that are at the root of primal fear. It’s interesting that structural ambiguity is a feature of many video game design as described, for example, by Jim Gasperini in “Structural Ambiguity: An Emerging Interactive Aesthetic” in “Information Design” edited by Robert Jacobsen.

Economists call one kind of uncertainty risk where there is a possibility of success or failure, but one can estimate the odds and determine some likelihood of the outcome. Neuroscience indicates that the fear response is generated when we don’t have a complete picture or a state of ambiguity. The current financial crisis has inspired fear, according to Berns, because we don’t have all the facts about how deep it is and how far it’s going to go.

In a May Atlantic article about the financial crisis, Cody Lundin says, “Risk-taking went over the edge. We are inventing something new. We’re very afraid. We know from the Depression that people who lived through it didn’t change their mentality for the rest of their lives. They were sewing socks. They refused to take a lot of chances. My sense is that it will take 10 or 20 years to find that spark of risk-taking in people again.”

The way that we approach risk is at the basis of strategy. One of the things that our hunter-gatherer ancestors learned from animals is low risk behavior. Berns describes it as, “…head in the sand, everyone in the bunker, cut back spending, hoard what I have, and wait for the storm to pass. That is a very instinctual response and again, goes back to the survival instinct. When you are afraid, you tend to retreat and hoard what you have. Animals that have the capacity to think through the situation just wait it out. That is a low risk strategy and will probably work to maintain your status quo, which is fine if that is what you want. The innovator sees everyone else doing that, and it is precisely in those circumstances that it makes the most sense for them to take risks.”

Fear is, therefore, not the optimal operating system. In “The Science of Fear”, Daniel Gardner demonstrates how many irrational fears are based on the way that humans miscalculate risks. To be creative, perhaps innovate, and ultimately, to succeed, we need to transcend fear of the cave of the mind. In one of his notebooks, Leonardo Da Vinci wrote: “Drawn by my eager wish, desirous of seeing the great confusion of the various strange forms created by ingenious nature, I wandered for some time among the shadowed cliffs and came to the entrance of a great cavern. I remained before it for a while stupefied and ignorant of the existence of such a thing. With my back bent and my left hand resting on my knee, and shading my eyes with my right, with lids lowered and closed, and often bending this way and that to see whether I could discern anything within. But this was denied me by the great darkness inside and after I stayed a while, there arose in me two things: fear and desire. Fear, because of the menacing dark cave, and desire to see whether there were any miraculous thing within.”

Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending argue in their new book, “The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution” that recent genetic change has been far more expansive than the traditional “great leap forward” that scientists believed defined human beings some 40,000 to 50,000 years ago. This was the period which also gave us the birth of artistic expression with examples of the so-called Venus sculptures appearing 40,000 to 60,000 years ago and a flute dated at some 54,000 years. The actual beginnings of art are the subject of much debate and estimates can range up to 100,000 years ago. What is agreed on is that a creative explosion took place around 30,000 years ago, the date of the Chauvet Cave and amazingly, in full development. Whether Cochran and Harpending’s theory has validity or not, I still think that the invention of fire is pretty hard to top with language and art a close second and third. The nature of images, whether art or otherwise, leads to our final principle:

7. THINK BEYOND WORDS

Maybe it all comes down to what Fred Barnard once said in 1921 when he coined the expression, “a picture is worth a thousand words.” He was speaking about the signs on the sides of streetcars. No matter, if the cave mind operating system has a purpose for us today, it’s because it drives us with mysterious images to think beyond words, to face our fears, and find consciousness in the stars that light up our brains.