Immediately above this complex (depending a little, again, on who you read) the forebrain begins. There is a collection of anatomically and functionally distinct, but closely related, structures crouching deep within the brain which we are only just beginning to understand. These spooky structures make up the complex known as the limbic system in which I will include the basal ganglia, the caudate nucleus, the thalamus, the hippocampus, the amygdala and the putamen. They are each intimately and extensively associated with, and very copiously connected to, structures all over the ‘thinking’ cerebral cortex which wraps around them. They fundamentally, if as yet mysteriously, affect (perhaps even control) the activities in our cerebral cortex, at least in general terms. It’s scary stuff. They seem to be, among other things, the anatomical seat of our emotions and they have a profound influence on memory and recall. They matter in the context of literacy as they may be the anatomical explanation for the profound influence that affect (emotion, mood, attitude) seems to have on the learning and performance of literacy. As a result of their extensive connections to the cerebral cortex they may be important to success or failure where these are mediated by affect, as they so often are. They are, therefore, implicated in the genesis of learned helplessness. They may also be important to, and may even control, the degree of arousal of the cortex and thus our motivation. These ancient structures have early access to information coming in from outside the brain, from sight and hearing for example but from other senses as well. In the light of this privileged knowledge they appear to mediate emotion and mood, appetites, drives and states of arousal across the entire cortex. They seem to oversee perception, especially perhaps emotional perception, and they seem to oversee general brain activity in response to these perceptions. All ‘higher’ cortical activity feeds back in some detail to these structures which monitor and regulate this activity as a result. Indeed information constantly reverberates from our cortex to these structures (particularly to the thalamus) and back again to the cortex, so that we are perhaps taking second (or multiple?) looks at many things. It is even possible that the origin of that final mystery, our consciousness, is exactly this reverberation or amplification of cortical activity (and see notes to chapter six).

Things were neurologically simpler yesterday. Particular mental activities were, we thought, simply managed there, or there, or there. We imagined discrete areas of the brain doing discrete mental things in isolation, only needing to communicate with the rest of the brain in order to report in the results of their efforts. Today we increasingly recognise the more complex, holistic nature of the brain, the way in which everything seems to affect, or at the very least inform, everything else. We increasingly understand that many apparently barely related influences, particularly rather general, unconscious or emotional influences, bear on almost all mental activities, even apparently austere or intellectual, apparently conscious activities. We now realise that the intimate fingers of these ‘lower’ forebrain structures are to be found in mental pies all over the brain and at many different mental ‘levels’. We need to remember this when we talk about the cortex as if it were where everything ‘intelligent’ goes on – it probably isn’t as simple as that. Conscious thought is probably largely the province of the cortex but it is also probably heavily mediated, monitored and perhaps even actually controlled, by these ‘lower’ forebrain structures, especially the thalamus. There may be very specific mental organs all about the cortex but they probably don’t function in such isolation as we used to imagine and they are probably very much more affected by other areas of the brain, higher or lower than themselves. Indeed, in chapter seven I will be suggesting that we still do not grasp the real extent of these influences and their resulting importance to the educational process.

In much the same vein, we have also to beware of our strongly over-simplifying, dualistic tendencies – our splitting of one function of the mind (consciousness, thought perhaps) from another (feeling, emotion, the body itself maybe). There is probably no such mind/body separation in the brain – there is probably only a mind/body whole (and, for some writers, there is only a mind/body/environment whole – eg Gibson 1986). We can, at any rate, readily see that we tend carelessly to elevate our conscious intellect to the status of all-powerful, central director of life, the universe and everything; the can-do mind to which all else is subordinate and from which all else is separate. We hugely exaggerate our conscious abilities thereby. Much more importantly for our educational purposes I believe, we shamefully underestimate our unconscious ones. (In my notes to chapter six I discuss the enigma of consciousness - possibly deeply important to literacy teaching. I offer some tentative words on ecological psychology in the notes to this one.)