FoundationalConceptsNeuroscience

so much of our daily lives. Without these distractions, darkness can
become a catalyst to enter the inner recesses of the mind, to wander
in the richness of internal mental experience. In contemporary prein-
dustrial societies, great value is often placed on the capacity to explore
the inner world of the mind. Some individuals are said to be particu-
larly skilled in accessing states of mind that are sources of knowledge
and power, which may then be used in the service of others in the
community. These folks are the shamans, the healers in their com-
munities, who are believed by some to communicate with animals,
plants, and other elements of nature in ways not explicable within the
worldview of contemporary science. Much of modern society has lost
connection with these traditions, considering them ill-informed and
primitive, inconsistent with the latest science-based knowledge about
our world. Nonetheless, shamans are respected members of societies
all over the world, and have been throughout recorded history.
Animals are the prominent images in these cave paintings (Fig.
1.1): individual beasts, groups of animals, even figures that appear to
be fusions of animal and human forms. Because present-day shamans
often speak of connecting with animals as sources of knowledge and
power, it has been proposed that at least some of these ancient cave
paintings may represent shamanic connections between the ancient
humans and the local animals. Moreover, contemporary shamans
sometimes use darkness, including the darkness of caves, as an aid
to their shamanic journeying. Caves have an otherworldly quality
about them—evoking magic, archetypal descent into an underworld,
weirdness, and connection to other realms. Of course, we don’t know
what the cave painters of thirty thousand years ago were experiencing
—what they may have been thinking and feeling as they made their
drawings. But given the sophistication of their drawings, it is reason-
able to hypothesize that these folks had internal mental worlds of sig-