Is there compelling evidence that our neural and perceptual systems are in serious trouble?

The theory outlined on this website points to a progressive structural failure in the micro-architecture of our "new brain," or neocortex — a failure that has had an extremely detrimental impact on our collective state of mind.
Proposed cause: a relatively recent reversal in the unique evolutionary developmental trajectory (slowing maturation) that defined our species, grew our huge neocortex, and sculpted its neuronal micro-architecture.
Why did the slowing-maturation trajectory reverse? A breakdown in the highly unusual symbiotic relationship that dominated our evolution for tens of millions of years resulted in the loss of a complex cocktail of endocrine-disrupting and developmentally juvenilising compounds.

Bit of History

During the 1990s, I became interested in the mysteries of the human mind — particularly the idea that we once experienced ourselves, and reality, very differently than we do now.
I spent the next thirty years looking for a way to account for the core themes in our ancestral mythology and religious traditions — themes that allude to a lost state of being, and that might also shed light on our current propensity for self-destruction.
During the last few years, I finally found what I was looking for: a chain of causal mechanisms that are increasingly well documented in the modern library of scientific literature, but which, as yet, remain unconnected.
The primary mechanism is the highly unusual evolutionary developmental trajectory of slowing maturation — a defining characteristic of our species. This trajectory has already been cited as a candidate explanation for another unusual human trait: our disproportionately large "new brain."
Taken together, this developmental trajectory and the raft of unusual traits associated with it fall under the academic umbrella of "heterochrony" — typically defined as "a change in the timing of developmental events that alters the course of evolution." Heterochrony is already cited as the causal driver behind a whole complex of unusual human traits, so extending its influence to account for others is not a huge leap.
The question I have been pondering for some while is whether our unusual heterochronic trajectory also plays a role in our state of mind.
This website explores what happens when you marry the human evolutionary trajectory of slowed maturation with emerging neural resonance theories of self.
Here's the mechanism. The trajectory of slowed maturation acts on the sub-cellular architecture of our neocortical neurons — and I think it can be read as a proxy for increasing sentience and increasing perceptual resolution.
Slowed maturation is also a trajectory of increasing structural uniformity at the cellular and sub-cellular level. That matters for theories of self based on neural resonance, because the properties of a resonance field — its scale, frequency, coherence — are a function of the micro-architecture of whatever substrate is resonating, in the same way the structure of a musical instrument dictates the sound it produces.
Slow the rate and degree of maturation, and structural differentiation in the neural substrate decreases; the resonance field becomes more coherent and unified — what we experience as a "sense of self." An increasingly pronounced trajectory of slowed maturation, in other words, drives a parallel trajectory of increasing structural integrity in this "neural resonance lens," and with it a greater degree of sentience and perceptual resolution.
That's a simple enough explanation for the emergence of our unique experience of self. But it's only half the story. If slowed maturation explains the expansion of our perception through increasing structural integrity at the neural resonant level, then a reversal of that trajectory should produce the opposite: a contraction of perception through decreasing structural integrity at the same level.
Resolving some of the enigmas around the emergence of human consciousness would be a fascinating proposal. But the real story is far more intriguing than that. Rearranging the existing data doesn't just give us a plausible account of how our sense of self emerged — it simultaneously gives us an account of a relatively recent loss in our neocortical structural integrity, and with it, a loss of coherence in our neural resonance fields: a loss, in other words, of our sentience.

Longer Summary

This is the fundamental question this website raises and attempts to address: is our "advanced" new brain, or neocortex, suffering from a catastrophic structural and perceptual failure?

Specifically, a progressive, neocortically asymmetric loss of structural integrity in the sub-cellular neuronal architecture, due to relative over-maturation and excessive structural differentiation.
A claim this radical demands a mountain of contextually unrecognised evidence, including a powerful causal mechanism — without both, the idea is dead in the water.
A causal mechanism is proposed and discussed in detail: a reversal in the powerful and highly unusual evolutionary developmental trajectory — slowing maturation — that is a defining characteristic of our species.
It's the very same trajectory already considered a likely causal driver for the extremely anomalous, accelerating expansion of our new brain.


Heterochrony as a predictive proxy for the emergence of sentience

If the precise molecular architecture of our neural system is a factor in the emergence of perception, cognition and the quality of selfhood, then developmental trajectory — the rate and degree of maturation — is the master variable governing that architecture. This is basic developmental biology. Typical mammalian maturation drives progressive structural differentiation at the cellular and sub-cellular level. Unusually, our own evolutionary trajectory ran in the opposite direction: an ever-slowing, increasingly juvenilised maturation (heterochrony) that instead preserved — and steadily increased — structural integrity across that same scale.
For computational theories of consciousness, this shift in neural architecture may carry little weight. But for neural resonance field theories of self, a trajectory of increasing structural integrity is a strong predictor of increasing coherence in the resonance fields that architecture supports. More intriguing still is the proposal that our evolutionary developmental trajectory has in fact reversed — and that, if so, this would have a detrimental impact on our neural architecture and, by extension, our experience of self…
If this proposed "neurodegenerative condition" is real, it can be framed as a form of "evolutionary senile dementia."
Given that dementia-like symptomatology appears — intriguingly — to be endemic, to varying degrees, across the majority of the human population, bringing the diagnostic evidence, and the condition itself, into perceptual relief may well require a significant shift in mindset, or even a psychological jolt.
 

Clues would be staring us in the face in every aspect of our existence:
 

• Our individual state of mind and collective behaviour, together with the cultures and "civilisations" we create, would be symptomatic of a late-stage, dementia-like condition — including a complex of perceptual and behavioural symptoms, among them a history of serial self-harming so familiar we fail to recognise its significance.

• Our "mythological" history would inevitably allude to the onset, progression and nature of the condition as experienced by our ancestors, who were by definition less afflicted than we are now — and would include evidence of their significant efforts to treat what would have been an existential threat to their existence. Reverse-engineered and contextually extrapolated, the treatment protocols they developed would offer insight into the nature of the condition itself.

• We would exhibit a vestigial spectrum of our ancestors' more advanced perceptual and cognitive capacity, one that would emerge most consistently when engaging in specific practices.

Perhaps most importantly of all, because it's something we can put to use immediately: our collective effort to address age-old questions about who or what we are, and the nature of the world we inhabit, has created a vast digital library of data — one that would almost certainly include a diagnostic account of this condition, in modern language, if we knew where to look. The questions raised on this site can be put to that test by anyone with online access; AI can be of some help, provided you apply strict "critical assessment" parameters. If the results aren't a decisive rejection of the outline proposal, it may be worth giving serious thought to what that implies. The established explanations for the evidence presented here will not, of course, accord with the conclusions drawn here — but it isn't difficult to set those explanations aside and simply ask whether the existing evidence would, at least in principle, support the headline diagnosis.

Finally: the notion that we carry an evolutionary form of brain damage might feel challenging, even preposterous. But if it is in fact the case, it turns out to reduce the scale of the challenges we face — from a rising tsunami of "culturally complex threats" down to a neuro-perceptual condition that can be addressed at the human scale. It also appears that the condition can be treated with immediate effect, and likely prevented within a generation or two, if we choose to do so.

Introduction. PDF Version
Overview. PDF Version
Headline Data In A Bit More Detail. PDF Version
Headline Data In A Lot More Detail. PDF Version
Graphs Of Key Developmental Trajectories. PDF Version
The Ancient Science Of Resurrection. PDF Version
Location, Location, Location! PDF Version
More Summaries To Create Perspective. PDF Version
Audio-Visual. PDF Version
Project Overview And Bio. PDF Version
A.I. Landing Page and References. PDF Version
Preprint Paper Links. PDF Version
Comprehensive References. PDF Version