The human brain and rhytmus in the history of cultur.

Man’s mental life differs from the spontaneous life of animals mainly in that man is capable of free creation. Culture consists of the creative acts of genius in science, art, and religion. However, the sources of creativity are still a great mystery to psychologists and anthropologists.

The Romans already asked why outstanding personalities do not appear one by one and randomly scattered on the timeline, but in creative waves. Star personalities are made up of constellations. Let’s mention, for example, the constellation of great music composers around 1800, great astronomers around 1600, and painters around 1500.

Such tides of creativity return periodically and often occur simultaneously in several places on Earth. For example, the flourishing of medicine took place periodically and synchronously in both the West and the Far East (Fig. 1). Similarly, the flourishing of history (Fig. 2). Great doctors or historians created at the same time in distant civilizations, even if they did not know about each other and their works are original.

Why does creativity flourish at some time, in some place, in some creative field – and not elsewhere, at another time or in another direction? Cultural anthropology does not have a hypothesis that would systematically clarify this. Waves of creativity cannot be explained by heredity, because the human genome does not undergo substantial changes in a short time horizon. But they cannot be fully explained by any local social conditions that would favor the development of talents. Synchronous and periodic creativity must be conditioned by some global and long-lasting factor.

What nature could this factor be? Cultural epochs seem to arise from the emphasis of different mental faculties/traits in the collective consciousness. For example, the baroque emphasized perception; its imagery was reminiscent of a child’s psyche and had an approach to a hysterical structure. Absolutism sought certainty, stability and order; it resembled an old man’s psyche and an obsessive-compulsive type. Romances, which return regularly in history, reflect all the characteristics typical of puberty: from falling in love to resistance to authority.

What could be causing such a periodic re-configuration of the collective consciousness? Mathematical genius and self-taught Srinivasa Ramanujan surprised the scientific world at the beginning of the 20th century. He discovered a large number of highly original mathematical identities. When asked where he gets his discoveries from, he replied that the goddess Námagiri reveals them to him in a dream. Princeton psychologist Julian Jaynes believes that the human brain was wired differently in the days before Homer. And such revelatory experiences were part of ordinary consciousness. One part of the brain worked out a solution, an answer to a new situation – and in another part of the brain, a person realized it as a living hallucination, a vision or the voice of God.

The Middle Ages basically attributed all creative innovations to the inspiration of higher beings. The doctrine of angels primarily described seven classical deities or archangels who alternate cyclically as spirits of time. Each of them rules for a certain number of years and inspires its own type of sciences, arts and moral virtues. Michael, Archangel of the Sun inspires philosophers. Raphael, Archangel Mercury is the patron saint of doctors. Anael, the archangel of Venus, is the muse of poets and musical composers. Etc. Angelology can be understood as a pre-scientific personality typology. And demonology as a typology of personality disorders.

Although we stopped believing in seven heavenly intelligences. But we found out that the brain is built in a modular way and a person has multiple intelligences. According to Howard Gardner, there are seven or eight of them: 1. logical, mathematical (abstract) intelligence; 2. verbal (linguistic); 3. spatial (visual); 4. kinesthetic (body, movement); 5. interpersonal (social, emotional); 6. intrapersonal (introspective); 7. natural (perceptive, observational); 8. musical (musical). These intelligences work together but are relatively independent: they can individually break down or develop at different rates. Their content corresponds very well to the classical seven deities of antiquity.

Indeed, the curves of creativity in the history of culture match what the old doctrine of angels predicted. Here, for example, there is philosophical creativity in the history of the West – it correlates with the traditional periods of the archangel Michael (Fig. 3). It means that angelology was not just a speculative theory. She captured the empirical regularities of the transformations of the collective psyche. These were intersubjective experiences – people reported similar apparitions independently of each other in different places on Earth and in a regular rhythm.

What could harmonize the creative activity of minds around the world into one rhythm? It requires some kind of external synchronizer. Together with our distinguished chronobiologist, Professor Miroslav Mikulecký, we tried to find some periodic cosmophysical factor that could be responsible for this. We did not find it in the solar wind, geomagnetism fluctuations or climate cycles.

In some cases, however, we have determined in more detail the range of organs that participate in those rhythms. Periodic romances are a picture of the psyche, which is typical for an increased level of sex hormones. Sex hormones stop bone growth and would show in shorter height. Indeed, a German study of ten thousand skeletons from the past two thousand years confirmed that humans were at their smallest exactly when I predicted it, roughly every 500 years (Fig. 4).

Other rhythms could be associated with the alternating activity of the brain hemispheres. In an individual, the cerebral hemispheres are alternately active in a 90-minute cycle. Human culture as a whole goes through a similar cycle every 500 years. This is the history of mathematics (Fig. 5). A preference for geometry regularly alternated with a preference for arithmetic and algebra. Geometric, spatial tasks are solved in the right hemisphere of the brain. On the contrary, Broca’s speech center is located in the left hemisphere and near it the center that processes algebraic expressions.

Roger Sperry received the Nobel Prize for the discovery of the functional lateralization of the cerebral hemispheres. But already two thousand years before him, priests and sages described the function of both hemispheres and their rhythmic alternation, only expressing it in figurative language: they spoke of deities and heavenly fluids, of the Sun and the Moon, of mental gold and silver. They also predicted the most important conclusion of Sperry’s research: that the most successful people are those who can connect and balance both hemispheres. Historical research has led us from another side to the same knowledge: that creativity culminates in the transition from one type of culture to another, when opposing mental principles are valued as equal and balance each other. One-sidedly marked epochs tend towards stagnation.

An important stimulus for pedagogy follows from this: The key to creativity is versatility. Harmonious development of all abilities nurtures a free personality with independent judgment. Our children will be more human if they do not specialize prematurely.