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Going to third brain images, these are even more interesting because with us, with three brain beings or with human beings, we come to the elaboration of a capacity which is truly astonishing. Man’s ability to abstract, and I put abstraction as the kind of fundamental entry into true neocortical images. In the case of mathematical developments like in language each successive develoment is completely dependent on what came before. You can’t have a paragraph structure without words.

It is important to mention that we have one brain. We don’t have three brains in the separated off sense at all because, from the very, very earliest appearance of a brain the other two aspects, those that deal with the inner world and with the abstract world are present. They are simply very, very in a reptile they are very diminished. They are barely representative, although they’re there. If they were not there the reptile would do nothing from itself.  So, all self-initiation requires this higher level of this one brain.  So we can say that predominantly we have a great variety of life forms that are essentially one brained but that’s not really true.  They have the same brain that we do in the sense there are three aspects to it, the thinking or intellectual aspect, the feeling aspect which has to do with the inner world, and then the sensory motor which has to do with the interface with the outside world.  So I think it’s always important, because there can be much misunderstanding around the first brain, second brain and third brain if people think that we’re trying to maintain that somehow or other we grew the second brain on top of the first brain.  Well, it grew but it grew integrated in every single evolutionary step.  It grew in a very tightly integrated fashion with the first brain.  So you can’t ever get a separated circumstance here. 

Going to third brain images, these are even more interesting because with us, with three brain beings or with human beings, we come to the elaboration of a capacity which is truly astonishing. Man’s ability to abstract, and I put abstraction as the kind of fundamental entry into true neocortical images.  For instance, these lead to the use of sounds that stand for - motions in the outside world, things, objects in the outside world. Ultimately, although it happens in a backwards fashion, since we begin to use language for sound-sequences that stand for it before we invent vocabulary, before we invent an alphabet even. There is no evidence that an alphabet had to be formed first and then you put it together into words and then you put it together into sentences and then you put it together into paragraphs or syntactical operations and so forth.  All of that, each of those does however represent a separate level of abstraction. You cannot have words in the written or spoken sentence unless you have vowels and consonants. You must have an alphabet of soundings that stand for.  Well the standing for is the resident representation, that’s why we can say the images of the first brain, the second brain and the third brain are all resident representations.  In this case, in the case of the neo-cortex, the images are all abstract.  They don’t refer to a motion or a thing.  They don’t refer to an emotional state. It is abstract. It is neither and yet it can deal variably with both of those other worlds. In some instances like in modern science it deals very powerfully with emotions and forms of the outside world because then we can go from language into mathematics for instance, and we see it counting and then the elaborations again by levels of abstraction we go from arithmetic to algebra to geometry to calculus.  All of those are levels of abstraction, each of which has its own arena of resident representations.  In the case of mathematical developments like in language each successive development is completely dependent on what came before.   You can’t have a paragraph structure without words.  So, in our brain, and we forget this often and it’s only brought out when careful studies made of people with certain injuries, then we see the abstraction process, we see that some words are un-formable, some vowels are unpronounceable with certain localized injuries in the brain.  And so we see the edge of this abstraction process very clearly.