
Mythology, Literature, and Mind Mapping
I keep a statue similar to this one on my desk. I keep it not because I think Odin was a deity and worship him, but because of the symbolism in the statue. It is Odin and his two ravens, Huginn and Muninn. The ravens names are roughly translated as memory/mind and thought. The two ravens traversed the world to bring him news. Now news means little if the recipient cannot put it into context and analyze it. This is roughly the process of turning data (the raw news) into information (putting the data into context) and actionable knowledge (analyzing it and assessing it).
The other dimension of the statue is Odin’s eye patch. In the myths, Odin sacrificed his eye and hung from the tree Yggdrasil, the Norse sacred tree that connects the nine worlds, for nine days to gain the knowledge of the runes. There are two key aspects to this story. First, actionable knowledge is of little value if it cannot be recorded and transmitted to others. Second, virtually everything worth having has a price. Are you willing to pay the price?
My love of mythology started in the eighth grade, when we studied it in our Core class. I still remember Mrs. Jenson, one of two Core teachers, telling that mythology is important because it is the basis of western literature. We cannot understand many of the references in western literature if we do not understand mythology, but it is deeper than that. I have come to think that mythology, and by extension much of literature, is a map if the mind.
The book, Who Wrote Shakespeare? Help solidify that thought in my mind. In the book, John Michell makes a case that someone other than William Shakespeare wrote the plays and poems attributed to Shakespeare. He analyzes several likely candidates, one of whom was Francis Bacon. Bacon stated he wanted to write a compendium of literature that provides a map of human psychology. Michell makes the case that Shakespeare’s works are that compendium. Even the NIH’s Library of Medicine references Bacon’s interest in psychology. So whether Bacon wrote Shakespeare is less important than are Shakespeare’s works a compendium of human psychology and a map of the mind or not.
I suppose we will never definitively prove whether Shakespeare’s works are a psychological compendium or not. There is a reasonable amount of literature on Shakespeare and psychology. For example, Oxford Academic has an article in the library entitled ‘Perfect mind’: on Shakespeare and the brain. The author, Robert McCrum, wrote:
“The magic that Shakespeare works with words and phrases is a commonplace of literary commentary, which turns out to have a measurable cerebral outcome. Professor Philip Davis, of Liverpool University, has discovered that the poet’s style also answers to neurological analysis. Since 2006, Davis has been studying the effects of Shakespeare on the human brain.”
So there are potentially two aspects to the compendium. First, are the works designed to be a compendium of human psychology? Second, do reading them actually affect the brain? Can they establish new neural pathways, which are a key part of learning? See, for example, Educating Citizens versus Sheep, Part 8: Path Dependency and Punctuated Equilibriums in Scenario Design.
I rather suspect that regardless of whether we read mythology, Shakespeare, science fiction or any other literature, the brain change through neural pathway development is as much about how we read and think about what we are reading as what we read. If we just read on the surface level for fun, I suspect there will be little or no neural pathway growth. But if we read the “right stuff” with a questioning mind that seeks connections and meaning, then we may well develop these pathways. It is a matter of both how and what.
And mythology, be it the ancient Sumerian myths, Egyptian and Greek myths, or Nordic myths, are cool when you read with a probing mind.