The Bull RIng: America's War on the Brain

On the practice fields of high schools and colleges across the country, players engage in exercises like the Cage, the Sleds and the Bull Ring.

The Bull Ring is an exercise in football practice where the entire team encircles one player who turns round and round in place in anticipation of a hit while the coach signals the team, one at a time and, usually behind the player, to rush in head first and try to violently knock him down. The effort is to teach awareness on the field.

Physicist Wolfgang Pauli and Psychologist Carl Jung believed that all things are interconnected. In their view, our lives are not simply experiences of random events, but operate by a principle of acausal connection which manifests itself in the form of meaningful coincidences Jung called ‘synchronicity’. They believed this was an expression of a deeper order in which we are all embedded and which they referred to as Unas Mundas.

Pauli was instrumental in the development of Quantum Mechanics and the winner of the Nobel Prize in 1945. He was nominated for it by Albert Einstein. Pauli began to consult with Jung after the suicide of his mother and then began to collaborate with him on the development of Jung’s theory of synchronicity. From Jung’s work also evolved the ideas of archetypes and the collective unconscious.

Modern theorists point to chaos theory or complexity science to explain the principle of synchronicity. The idea of chaos theory is that infinitely small occurrences can affect the outcome of a huge event like a hurricane, otherwise known as the ‘butterfly effect’. Complexity refers to the interconnectedness of agents and networks and how their relationships give rise to the collective behaviors of the combined system and how the system interacts and relates to its environment. This ‘collective behavior’ is referred to as ‘emergence’ and consists of behavior unique to the new system.

An elegant example is that of geese travelling in flocks. Always obeying the simple initial rule of remaining about a yard apart from each other when they fly, what emerges is the ‘V- formation’ which then becomes an efficient way of dealing with the environment.

When an orchestra comes together, the individual members are obeying simple rules, bringing individual information and talent with them, playing their instruments and what emerges is music which creates great emotion among its audience such as triumph, sadness, love, joy and even a sense of the divine.

When a high school football team plays well and scores, the home crowd can be raised to new heights of school spirit.

When our communities come together, individual members obey simple rules and bring information, basic assumptions and affect with them, talking and acting together. What emerges is the realization of

ii

the power of groups to mobilize action. At times this can take the form of civic improvement, the generation of new ideas, the provision of goods and services and, at other times, God help us, could even go so far as to take the form of mob violence- depending on the basic assumption prevailing upon the group.

We are all embedded in networks locally, nationally and even globally. We act in those networks and those networks act back upon us. Sometimes the networks in which we belong parallels the behavior of others and sometimes our networks act upon each other. We are all in this together as the idea of the classic ‘six degrees of separation’ attests. No one can act so individually as to not be affected by our interconnectedness. Even the neighborhoods where serial killers live can be located by using complexity science. What goes around, comes around, as they say.

The Bull Ring is a story about America’s war on the brain, our interconnectedness and what can happen when networks collide.