Symbolic spaces have high survival value. The brain physiologist J. Z. Young claimed that the artist’s ‘work … is closer than that of any other labourer to meeting the continuing long-term needs of man … [because] the most important functional activities of the human brain are symbolic (his emphasis, 1978, p. 250). I believe we should be building interest in how and why the history of human community is the story of the symbolic ordering of experience—through play, custom, ritual and arts—to produce safe spaces in which to increase each member’s hold on consciousness. This period of rapid blending of cultures in globalization is the moment to be making sure that our education system helps people realize that the survival of either a local or a global community depends on its ability to juggle with symbols—its ability to engage in aesthetic activity at every level of performance.
Nancy Munn coined the term symbolic space. In her 1969 study of the Australian myth of the Wawilak sisters and the Rainbow Serpent, she suggested that symbolic spaces ‘provide the means for adjusting interior experience through external, societal forms’ (Spencer, ed., p. 200). In saying this, she is placing symbolic spaces at the centre of the experience as being human, as the container that transforms symbols into experience, behaviour, or knowledge.
Brains work on electrical impulses. Thought itself, as Geoffrey Bateson realized when he was studying cybernetics, is like a circuit flowing to the negative pole of not-knowing. Our not-knowing initiates the need to know. Primary perception takes place in the senses, such as the eye, ear, or body itself; the second step is the making of a neuronal contact (which we would recognize as the formation of a word or conceptualization) that represents the sense-perception in the brain itself (Torey, 1999, p. 39). We seek to bridge the gap: the gap is between the external world and the symbol by which it is lodged in the brain as meaning: ‘meaning, like play, resides in the space between “/” of the statement and analogue we supply’ (Berman, 1981, pp. 150-151).
The gap is probably of great importance to mind function and creativity. Symbolic space seems to depend on a tension set up between two kinds of perception (Turner, 1969). And as Munn notes of another kind of gap: we should be paying particular attention to ‘symbols as mechanisms which regulate the orientations of actors to each other and to common situations’ (1969, p. 200). Symbolic spaces, as mental structures of one kind or another, are what she calls ‘transformers’ that help group members share a conceptualized meaning.
The god-like joy we experience from our sparks of creativity is achieved through taking cognitive control of a relationship between bits of brain-code in a performance that can be repeated, whether in our own mind or by passing it on to someone else’s. We have told and retold of this magical process since the time of Archimedes, whose triumphant eureka of insight has echoed down through the generations from the moment he shouted it as he raced from his bath—one of the first Westerners to know that their thoughts were generated by them not by the gods (Jaynes, 1976). As far as we know, these early thinkers were the heroes of conscious knowing in the Western tradition, the first to recognize what it feels like to gain some ground from not-knowing.