Neuro-Enemies to the Left of Me

I want to try to wrap up our review of emotional & social intelligence before moving on to cognitive intelligence. 

One interesting finding is that the RH is responsible for a sense of flow and temporal interconnectedness, so damage there can result in literally losing the plot: "when it tries to re-tell a narrative," the isolated LH

lacks concreteness and specificity in its relation to the story, and becomes abstract and generic; and it gets time sequences wrong, conflating episodes in the story because they look similar.... In place of narrative, it produces a highly abstract and disjointed meta-narrative. 

Like our gaslighting state run media-academic complex.  

In reading this stuff, it is indeed a temptation to reach for the low-hanging fruitcakes and immediately apply it to our enemies. But just because progressives have lost the plot, it doesn't mean they all have RH brain damage.

Geez, don't take me so literally. Makes you sound like you had an RH stroke this morning.

I'm trying to think back on what was going on in my brain when I was an adultolescent man of the left. Granted, the left wasn't as crazy back then as it is now, but I still believed in some wacky precursors to today's fractured plot lines -- for example, I read the odious Howard Zinn with approval, and you can draw a straight crooked line between him and, say, the 1619 Project, CRT, White Privilege, et al.

It's not as if I suffered an RH stroke in the 1980s from which I've since recovered. But I think I'll hold off on the speculative auto-proctology for the moment. We'll have plenty of time for reflection once we get the neurology out of the way. 

In any event, the LH does have "difficulty in telling fantasy from reality, theory from fact," and when it "doesn't understand, it doesn't seem aware of the fact."

More generally,

the RH becomes involved as complexity of contextual understanding increases; indeed, the harder it is, in general, to interpret a sentence, the more the RH homologues of the LH language areas are recruited.

Lots of stuff in here about how music "is the primordial form of expression in the RH," and once again I can't help thinking about how awful contemporary popular music has become, and whether this has something to do with a mass suppression and underdevelopment of the RH. Do they even teach music in school anymore, or is it all LH indoctrination all the time?

It's the same with poetry, BTW: it's an RH speciality. Which then makes me think of that embarrassingly awful -- but confident -- young poet Brandon trotted out at his inauguration. 

You get the point. On to Cognitive Intelligence, another reality denied by the academic left. Indeed, the first thing that struck me about this chapter is that McGilchrist fearlessly cites intelligence researchers such as Linda Gottfredson and Arthur Jensen that is sufficient to get oneself cancelled. 

Just look at the hysterical SPLC page on Gottfredson (https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/individual/linda-gottfredson):

Following a long tradition of scientific racism, Gottfredson argues that racial inequality, especially in employment, is the direct result of genetic racial differences in intelligence. Relying heavily on money obtained from the white nationalist Pioneer Fund, Gottfredson has worked tirelessly to oppose any and all efforts to reduce racial inequality in both in the workplace and in society as a whole.

Since the science is settled that genetic differences exist, it is racist to believe in the science. Perhaps it's not this way over in the UK, where McGilchrist lives, since he cites these Forbidden Names as if he doesn't know they're radioactive.

As usual, I think I'll begin at the end, with the chapter summary: 

Evidence from a number of sources suggests that the RH contributes the majority, not just of emotional and social intelligence, but of what is ordinarily meant by [IQ] -- cognitive power, or g. This appears to be particularly true among children and adults of the highest intelligence.

Now, the more people who attend college, the more the population of the highly intelligent is diluted, which makes me think this isn't a bug but a feature. Heather MacDonald has an excellent new book called When Race Trumps Merit: How the Pursuit of Equity Sacrifices Excellence, Destroys Beauty, and Threatens Lives, and I wonder what the low IQ hysterics at the SPLC say about her?

McGilchrist discusses the vast differences between "crystalized" and "fluid" intelligence, and as you can probably guess by now, the latter is more of an RH specialty, and indeed, has more to do with what we think of as intelligence per se: "Clearly, people with high scores on fluid intelligence will tend to do better, and to work faster..." It is less culture-bound because more adaptive to novelty.

We all know people who are quick on the uptake. And we all know people who radiate stupidity, even if they are in positions of authority. It's not hard to tell the difference. For us at any rate. 

But imagine what it must be like to be unable to instantaneously discern the intellectual difference between, say, Tucker Carlson and Anderson Cooper, or Dennis Prager and Rachel Maddow, or Don Lemon and Ben Shapiro. Most people genuinely can't tell. They are enclosed in Dunning-Kruger.

"Human intelligence is not like machine intelligence," for it "is essentially Gestalt and not digital." Obviously it's always both. For example, my airline pilot friend has a lot of "digital" intelligence about flying, which he would be able to draw on in a novel situation, in an emergency. I might have good fluid intelligence, but with nothing for it to draw on, the plane is going down.

following familiar procedures is something that requires no intelligence and can be done by a machine. It is the novel problem solving, involving a combination of analogic thinking and going beyond learnt procedures, that should be measured.

You get the point. McGilchrist does highight a seeming cultural drift in a direction that rewards decontextualized thinking and a scientistic worldview. A Note to Bobself in the margin says "loss of religious comprehension," but you folks are so quick on the uptake that there's no need for me to spell it out to you. I don't want to insult your fluid RH intelligence. You're not Rachel Maddow.

A Joke You're Not Allowed to Laugh At is a Lie

Next up is Emotional and Social Intelligence in the left and right hemispheres, another fascinating subject. In fact, the whole book is a page-turner so far, which you probably can't say of too many 1,500 page books.

Like the previous chapter on Judgment, this one will be difficult to summarize, so maybe I'll just start with the summary at the end of the chapter, and then toss in some intriguing examples:

Social and emotional understanding are central to understanding all human situations. The evidence is that the RH is of critical importance for this, including the sense of reality itself.... The RH is superior at emotional expression and receptivity. It is important for understanding implicit meaning in all forms, including metaphor, and for reading faces and body language. It understands how context changes meaning.

Conversely, not only is the LH not very good at these things, it doesn't seem to know or care much about them. After all, if you don't notice something, it might as well not exist for you. 

Remember, the LH gives us a representation of reality, not reality itself. It is reality once removed, which is not unimportant: just because a map isn't the territory, it doesn't mean maps are worthless. But just as you can't live in a map, you can't eat the menu or substitute a college diploma for a brain. 

The whole point of the Wizard of Oz is that the scarecrow actually possessed the thing itself which the diploma only signified. Nowadays we confer the symbol as if it signifies the thing itself, with the result that there are millions upon millions of credentialed idiots in charge of our lives.

Every day I meditate for half an hour. What am I actually doing during this verticalisthenic? Among other things, it looks like I'm suppressing the LH so the RH can come to the fore. I can't give myself a stroke in the LH, but McGilchrist describes cases in which excitation of the RH resulted in "illusions of greater awareness" or a "heightened sense of reality." 

In any event, "damage to the LH is markedly less likely to cause distortions of reality than damage to the RH." Conversely, a sense of unreality is more likely to follow RH lesions. 

But importantly, "it is absolutely not the case that the RH is 'emotional' and the LH 'cool' and rational," which is what I might have assumed before reading this book. Anger and irritability in particular strongly lateralise to the left. Sadness and melancholy are more associated with the RH, but these can be wholly appropriate:

A capacity for sadness is highly correlated with a capacity for empathy; and those who lack empathy, such as psychopaths, have difficulty recognizing expressions of sadness in face or voice.... a capacity for sadness and empathy together is necessary in order to experience the socially vital feelings of guilt, shame and responsibility.

Makes you wonder about politicians, who are so conspicuously lacking in guilt, shame, and responsibility. 

McGilchrist saddles up on one of my favorite bobbyhorses, intersubjectivity, citing research that it is "largely dependent" on "RH resources." 

As I've written before, it doesn't matter how big our brains are if we aren't intersubjective, which is to say, members of one another, so to speak. Absent this there is no way for culture to exist, or anything beyond the atomistic individual. Intersubjectivity is the interior-to-interior linking and interpenetration of subjects. Without it we'd all be politicians.

What else... As somewhat of an aside, it is noteworthy that a photograph of a Rachel Levine or a Lia Thomas fools no one, in that the right brain knows instantaneously that 

In order to believe otherwise, the LH must deny the experience of the RH and superimpose its delusional ideology on the RH -- backed up, not coincidentally, with a great deal of LH anger.

Also conspicuously absent is a sense of humor, even though what's funnier than some dude pretending to be a woman dressed up as an admiral? Why hasn't Corporal Klinger been cancelled? In my day, we used to laugh at female East German Olympic athletes with hairy backs and fists the size of mature hams. 

It is the RH that understands the emotional or the humorous aspect of a narrative; it is also better able to understand irony and sarcasm.... There is a large literature showing that the RH is crucial for appreciation of cartoons, jokes and humour of every kind, and that damage to the RH impairs all forms of humour comprehension and generation.  

Reminds me of how the left cannot tell when Trump is joking, and then freaks out over its own misunderstandings. Indeed, "RH-damaged patients find it hard to tell the difference between jokes and lies."

And they have no idea how to deal with an Admiral Levine, who is both a joke and a lie.   

There’s a lot more to this chapter, so we may need a part 2 tomorrow.

Metastatic Cancer of the Logos

I think a good way to summarize yesterday's post on judgment is that the RH is a BS detector -- even in the case of LH damage -- whereas the LH is a BS generator, which only becomes heightened in the presence of RH damage. 

Again, although the hemispheres are obviously complementary and mutually self-regulating, it seems the LH needs the RH more than the RH needs the LH. 

Before reading this book I might have guessed otherwise, since RH connoted "creativity," so LH damage would presumably result in an unhinged imagination. Doesn't work that way at all. Schizophrenics, for example, have a hyperactive LH and hypoactive RH, the latter being the one that anchors us in the real world.

I probably would have imagined that gender delusions are rooted in the RH, but this too must be the other way around: an LH insistence that reality isn't real. 

That's just a guess, of course, nor do I know if McGilchrist delves into the subject, since no one want to get cancelled by a delusional mob of LH brainiacs. Unlike me, he has a career to think about. But 

My model, says the LH, is better than your reality...

And

The LH is more likely to act on its theory as though it represented reality.

Now, that first sentence in particular makes me think the RH must specialize in transcendence: certainly it is able to view LH antics from "above" and put the kibosh on them. 

But at the same time, it is more "immanent" in the world than the LH, the latter specializing in abstractions and maps of the world. Just a thought. We still have 1,300 pages to go, and McGilchrist may well touch on this later.

Another example comes to mind: when I was being tested in the hospital, I told the nurse exactly how much insulin I needed, and how my body would react to food, fasting, and exercise. 

But they had to ignore my real world experience and utilize their own strict algorithm. Which, of course, proved incorrect. But they had to yield to their abstract algorithm despite every nurse and doctor commenting that they had never encountered a type I diabetic with better glucose control.

I'm not blaming them for having guidelines, only making the point that this is analogous to LH abstractions overruling RH comprehension of the real world. 

The next chapter, on Apprehension, is a short one, but this is my short morning. 

Basically, if the LH is good at apprehending, the RH is better at comprehending, the former having more to do with carrying out actions in the world, the latter with understanding the world. 

Recall that the LH controls the right hand. In cases of LH damage, the right hand can take on a life of its own, grabbing things and even people at random. One wonders: was Brandon's stroke in the LH?

On the other hand, RH damage results in the sort of dead and flat speech uttered by Brandon, so lacking in musical qualities such as prosody, rhythm, and intonation. Siri sounds more alive. You've also noticed the inappropriate bursts of emotionality he randomly injects in his speeches, as if he is trying to imitate a functioning RH.

So, is Brandon's brain damage more on the right or left?

The power of and.

Set myself up for that one. 

Later in the chapter McGilchrist touches on the insanity of deconstruction, although he's far more polite about it than we are. But it sure looks to me like it's a kind of cancer of the LH -- not a physical cancer, but worse, an immaterial one. Cancer of the logos?

In the LH's world words are seen as arbitrary signs: in the RH's world they are seen as to some extent fused with the aspect of the world they represent. 

No one with a functioning RH could insist that we are confined to a closed system of linguistic symbols that have no anchor in the real world -- or even deny there is a real world. Nevertheless,

According to a view which has been much promulgated in recent years, language is just a system of signs, in which words refer endlessly to one another (a typical LH view).

But in reality -- in a metaphor I myself have used in the past -- language is analogous to money, which is also a symbol for an underlying reality. Or at least it was before Brandon got here. Both language and money must ultimately be fungible to the First Bank of Reality.

Coincidentally, I've been reading this other book by David Berlinski called Human Nature, which contains an epic and highly insultaining takedown of deconstruction. Maybe I have time to pull out some choice extracts before this crock runs dry.

Berlinski describes what happens in the case of a consistent denial of essentialism (and affirmation of relativism). You would think literally nothing could happen, and you would be correct, except this doesn't stop them. 

I suppose it would stop them if they were in a room of intelligent people, but they are of course in room of arrested adolescents with skulls full of mush. And not just in the faculty lounge.

A curious fact: why is it that the same people who insist words are just arbitrary symbols are the same people who want to deny our freedom of speech, and will punish us if we use them in the wrong way -- say, "misgendering" someone, or saying "colored people" instead of "people of color"? 

Between a career and its cancelation is that little preposition, of, which seems pretty real to me.

The power of of.

Eliminate Bullshit From Your Life With This One Weird Trick

This next chapter on Judgment is so fascinating, it would be worth the price of admission if the price weren't so steep. I don't know if I can give a metaview from my telocopter, but I'll try. 

Before reading this, I probably would have assumed delusions and misbeliefs must be located in the RH. But as a working psychologist, you don't really deal with questions of neurophysiology, rather, only on the phenomenological level of the delusions themselves. 

Nor can you help the patient by informing him that his delusions are just the result of a hyperactive LH or hypoactive RH, the latter due to some kind of damage or dysfunction. Indeed, if this were the case, there would be no progressives.

if the [LH] is not frankly deluded, it is clearly at sea, and the RH is its reliable anchor in reality (McGilchrist).

Again, a week ago I might have imagined otherwise, since I thought of the LH as rather Spock-like, i.e., objective and detached. Was I deluded? No, because it was just ignorance easily rectified by new information. I had no irrational investment in my assumptions. I'm not a progressive.

A summary at the end of the chapter says that

Virtually all delusional syndromes are more commonly the result of [RH] than [LH] dysfunction; the degree to which this is the case is broadly proportional to the bizarre nature of the delusion involved....

Overall, in general it is the judgments on reality made by the right hemisphere that are more reliable.  

Now, we joke about our separated brethren -- i.e., separated from reality -- but what is the source of progressive delusions? Is a delusion a delusion if all the elites believe it, and you're just imitating them for reasons of social status and financial interest? 

Granted, progressives are herd animals, but just because you're more bovine than properly human, it doesn't make you delusional, rather, just an underachiever. 

On the other hand, what to make of people who insist they were "born in the wrong body" and are not the sex which they self-evidently are? 

The chapter has no section on this particular delusion, but surely it must be anchored in the LH. Perhaps we can shed some light on this as we proceed, but having only learned about LH delusions yesterday, I've only been an expert for 24 hours. 

I'm going to paraphrase here, but it is very much as if the RH is grounded in a more primordial reality, whereas the LH spins out abstract models of this reality. McGilchrist cites a paper arguing that

the [LH] is an "interpreter," that misuses reason to confabulate -- make things up -- rather than admit it does not know what it is talking about, whereas the more tentative [RH] sticks to what it knows, and is closer to the truth. 

Moreover, "one of the [RH's] roles in logic seems to be the active searching out of counter-examples," which makes me wonder about those afflicted with climate delusions, since they totally ignore the fact that their LH models do not predict or conform to reality. 

And when the model eclipses empirical reality, it is because the LH is ignoring or bullying the RH. "My model, says the [LH], is better than your reality": 

the [LH] adopts a theory, and then actually denies what doesn't fit the theory. The evidence that this is the case is so extraordinary and compelling that we would not believe it if we had not already seen it. It will swear black is white. 

There's not enough space or time to detail all of the strange ways the LH swears black is white. But these are mostly bizarre clinical syndromes. What about in everyday reality, i.e., in politics, academia, journalism, or in ideology more generally?

Yesterday Z Man's post (https://thezman.com/wordpress/?p=29840) was on the Narrative Industrial Complex, and although I've only been an expert since yesterday, I'm now thinking that this "industrial bullshit machine that exists only to crank out new narratives in support of the regime or new tales to promote existing regime narratives" must be an LH phenomenon.

To put it crudely, is there any evidence that the LH is an industrial strength bullshit generator, or is that just Gagdad being Gagdad? 

To put it crudely, the [RH] is our bullshit detector. It is better at avoiding nonsense when asked to believe it...

Conversely, "the [LH's] job is to create a model and maintain it at all costs." 

The [LH] says "you shouldn't be able to see that" -- and, as a result, you actually can't: the [RH] says, "but it is there" -- and so you can. The point is that, despite your being perfectly able to see something, you can't see it because of a theory that the [LH] has about it. 

Right there, he has described the pathologies of political correctness, wokeness, narrative enforcement, and progressive intolerance in general.

"Ah, but what about your delusional belief in imaginary sky gods and flying spaghetti monsters and resurrected bodies? Gotcha!" 

Not so fast. I'm guessing that McGilchrist will have much more to say on the question of religion, but this chapter has a section on Magical Thinking, which seems to cut both ways, and just because there is delusional religiosity, it hardly means all religiosity is delusional. Moreover, 

the layman's grounds for accepting the models propounded by the scientist are often no different from the young African villager's grounds for accepting the models propounded by one of his elders.  

Clearly, it is possible to accept science in an unscientifc way, just as it is possible to be religious in a superstitious way, even if you are practicing an otherwise sound religion. McGilchrist also cites numerous examples of sober, scientistic types who readily fall for magical bullshit.

He says that what we call magical thinking may simply be a version of our innate ability to spot patterns and make connections; and

Living at either extreme means being duped. Too little means you are not only unimaginative and uncreative, but at risk of failing to spot the obvious... too much means you are at risk of delusion.... to be totally "unmagical" is very unhealthy, and reduces one's capacity to appreciate value and to take enjoyment in life. 

That's about it for today. 

In the Leftorium

Let's get back to our review of The Matter With Things, which we can say without fear of contradiction is the longest book we'll ever read on LH / RH differences. 

And while I wouldn't want to be one, I am certainly grateful that there are specialists in this world, from neuroscientific researchers to cardiologists to... to any human being who knows his stuff about anything -- electricians, plumbers, mechanics, you name it. They always make me feel a bit unmanly. I don't think it's any coincidence that most psychologists are girls, both literally and figuratively. 

Thank God my cardiologist doesn't have the attitude to cardiology that I do to psychology, which ranges all the way from Borrr-ring to Get over it.  

Can one specialize in generality? Asked the right brain.

It seems that, just as this world is not built for lefthanders, nor is our culture built for rightbrainers. It sounds like a generalization, and it is, but our job as we grow up is to identify some niche in the vast leftorium and pretend we're happy with it.

Again, I wouldn't want to live in a world without LH brainiacs, even though I could never be happy being one. Sunday I had a conversation with a tech in the hospital, and even the word tech connotes the leftorium.  

We were talking about the new canard that one should Dream Big and Follow Your Passion, and all that, but I said that this is generally impractical advice, since those types of careers are few and far between. Tell some kid to follow his dream of being a successful actor, athlete, or artist, and you're just setting him up for disappointment. It is how you end up a frustrated tech in a big hospital.

Rather, I suggested that for most people it makes sense to turn it around, and work in order to make it possible to pursue one's passions away from work. This is what I've always done, and indeed, am doing right now.

When I told him I was a psychologist, he said -- as most people do -- something to the effect that it must have been great, or cool, or interesting. They're always surprised to hear, Nah, not really. I just sorta fell into it, but at least it freed me to focus on my real and abiding interests away from work.

Now, at the other end of the spectrum, I was pacing back and forth in my room, waiting for the leftorium to cut me loose, when in wandered the hospital chaplain, who turned out to be a well-informed Orthodox Christian. We had the most wide-ranging conversation, in which he was able to keep up with my most far-out meanderings. It must have been due to an RH <--> RH harmonization.

And what, of all things, is an RH generalist doing in the leftorium? Why is he even there? 

The question answers itself: he's there because you're surrounded by LH brainiacs, and there's no one else there for the RH to talk to. I would guess that even a Jewish or Protestant RH will have much more to say to an Orthodox RH chaplain than it will to an LH x-ray tech or phlebotomist.  

And now that I'm thinking about it, this is pretty much what I did as a psychologist: lure people via empathy into an RH <---> RH harmonization, and then put their vague RH thoughts and feelings into LH words. Frankly, it worked almost every time. I was pretty good at it, but I was just built that way: an RH misfit in an LH world.

We all need this translating service. It is why -- among other reasons -- religion is here. For me, the church is an RH hospital, just as the hospital is an LH church.  

Now this post is getting way out there, because last night I had a dream in which someone came to my house who was fascinated with all things Gagdad -- some kind of super fan who had just recently found the blog.

I asked him how much he had actually read, and he said 10,000 posts! But that wasn't enough. This slightly creepy guy was flipping through family photo albums, playing with my dog, and wanting to know everything about my life.

What could it mean?

That you have an unhealthy fascination with yourself, and you need to get outside yourself a bit more often?

Shut up!

On Seeing the Forest for the Tree of Life

Just a short one because I woke up late, if you call this "awake." 

Chapter 2 of The Matter With Things (discussed yesterday) was about attention, while chapter 3 moves on to perception. 

The chapters highlight the very different ways which LH and RH attend to and perceive the world, differences that vividly come to the fore when one side becomes dysfunctional and the other tries to compensate. 

Interestingly, the LH simply cannot do most of what the RH does, whereas the RH can better compensate for a dysfunctional LH. 

For one thing, as alluded to in yesterday's post, the LH seems to have a kind of arrogant, constitutional Dunning-Krugery that makes it not know or care about the perceptions (both internal and external) and layers of meaning it is missing out on. 

There's a circularity involved, in that we perceive what is external to us, but at the same time, project concepts onto to the world which shape what we perceive.

You could even say the former are Realists, the latter Kantians, but it seems to me that these are always complementary, and even why we have the two hemispheres. The trick is to maintain openness to the world and not end up confined to one's map or model of the world.

On the one hand,

Perception is the act whereby we reach out from our cage of mental constructs to taste, smell, touch, hear and see the living world.

A strict realist would eliminate the cage part, and simply say that the senses register sensations from the external world. Thomistic psychology affirms that an entirely different part of the mind ("common sense") synthesizes them into an object that is, while another extracts the intelligible concept from the object and makes a judgment on what it is.

Of note, that last act of the mind is completely abstract and immaterial. For example, the concept of a circle or tree or dog is completely independent of any particular circle or tree or dog that we can perceive. This is sufficient proof of the immateriality of the soul, since material objects cannot extract essences from themselves, one part observing and seeing into the essence of the other.

Thus far there has been no mention of common sense realism in the book, but he properly notes that

strange as it may sound, nothing that we think, nothing that we name, nothing that we find in our dictionary, can ever be heard, or perceived (Müller, in McGilchrist).  

That's a bingo, but how and why is it a bingo? We won't find the answer in neurology qua neurology, being that it can only assume but never account for the immateriality of the human subject. 

Here's an equally consequential bingo, one that slips right past the continuity of natural selection. 

McGilchrist notes that "something new" emerges with human beings, an "ability to use symbols" that "is advanced out of all recognition by language" and "which gives us a virtually inexhaustible way of mapping the world, to which perception is, to all extents and purposes, irrelevant" -- for example, vis a vis mathematics. 

I would eliminate the qualifier "virtually" and just say inexhaustible, full stop. In my view, this is mirror of the divine principle of Infinitude or All Possibility, a leap which no amount of genetic shuffling could make, because the leap is at once from material to immaterial, immanence to transcendence, existence to essence, finitude to infinitude, etc. It would be a rudimentary category error to say that the former terms could somehow become the latter.

Of course, this is no problem at all if we turn the cosmos bright-side up, then the bottom-up discontinuity of the world is a function of the top down continuity, which is very much an RH view of the cosmos, maybe even the ultimate RH view. 

Come to think of it, there's a passage back in the introduction that touches on this, in response to the notion that his focus on the LH/RH distinction artificially dichotomizes the world. He points out that there are valid and invalid dichotomies, or some "that have no basis," others that "it would be a mistake to pretend don't exist," and some that are in between.

Me, I like the RH idea that reality is a tree with its roots aloft, it's branches and leaves below. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that the unity of the tree is real, but that the limb I'm sitting on is also real, in that a limb is not a root or a flower. 

The LH is good at noticing leaves, and even aphids living on the leaves, while the RH is better at seeing the tree, and neither party is wrong so long as it stays in its lane and the traffic flows in both directions. In this cosmos there's more than enough room for the concrete trees, the abstract forest, and the real Tree of Life.