When Gordimer explains insurmountable mental conditions, she uses medical expressions to resolve the problem. Mental arteriosclerosis or a narrow and rigid mentality pollutes the living quarters of the white people. As a result, all the people of South Africa are subject to the vagaries of such an attitude. The output of the reading brain named “space and time” to express an infinite state bounded by the politics and laws of South Africa of that time interacts with the combination of the writing brain consisting of the motivation for a new regime and the adaptive ability to prevent mental arteriosclerosis.
Max tried avoiding risk in order to prevent mental arteriosclerosis. When he made the speech at his sister’s wedding ceremony, a hedonic neurotransmitter dopamine was secreted into the frontal cortex of his brain and the signal was introduced into the brain stem through the interbrain. In this scene, the working memory to forecast the future is stronger than the long-term memory of his sister, therefore the writing brain of Gordimer uses the frontal cortex.
The decision-making that can be seen as the function of the frontal cortex divides into the type of determinism for truth and the adaptive kind based on the data. Both Gordimer’s and Max’s motivation is the latter form (anti-apartheid). If the adaptive decision-making process has a favorable balance of situations of dependent and independent types, there is no problem. But this does not necessarily occur. In terms of groups, women like the independent type and men like the dependent type of woman. If there is not much variation, the independent type is better. If the situation is unstable, the dependent type is better. The endless situation does not have much change, therefore the independent type is better. But there is some distinction between the sexes in the function of frontal cortex.
Hanamura（2018）”How to make a synergic metaphor”より translated by Yoshihisa Hanamura