In a kind of “by the by” capacity, because of something that crossed my path recently, I find it enduringly fascinating that science headlines keep recalling Stan Gooch, the late British psychologist, paranormal theorist, and proponent of the “hybrid origin” theory of the human race.

What brought this up was an article published last week in New Scientist that reports on a study at Stanford:

Headline: “Our brain evolved from two primitive nervous systems that merged.”

Subheadline: “The front and back parts of our brain come from different progenitor cells in embryos, which suggests they evolved as separate entities.”

The study concerns separate developmental origins for the forebrain and midbrain on the one hand and the hindbrain on the other, with an evolutionary history that may stretch back some 550 million years. This is vastly older than humanity, and the finding doesn’t offer any confirmation of Gooch’s larger psychological and paranormal theory (regarding which, read on). But for those of us familiar with his work, the resemblance is striking.

In this Goochian context, the story also recalls the studies and accompanying popular journalism from the aughts that culminated in the landmark Neanderthal genome findings of 2010, which established that Neanderthals and modern humans interbred. This complicated the old story of simple replacement, which said Neanderthals disappeared as a distinct population. According to the new understanding, some of their ancestry is still with us, living inside people today.

Both themes—human interbreeding and the distinct roles of the front and back brains—were Gooch’s territory for decades. Beginning with 1972’s Total Man: Notes Toward an Evolutionary Theory of Personality, he developed a dazzling and comprehensive theory that spanned many books. According to Gooch, modern humans are a hybrid of Cro-Magnons and Neanderthals, and this accounts for both the massive duality in our psyches and cultures and the persistence of paranormal phenomena in human experience.

There’s an intriguing parallel here with Iain McGilchrist’s later “master and emissary” model. McGilchrist writes about a bifurcation in the human psyche and sensibility that presents as two total, and vastly divergent, ways of experiencing the world. Moreover, he connects this to a sweeping interpretation of human culture and civilization. Gooch did exactly the same. Both anchored their theory in the human brain, though their neurological maps differ, with McGilchrist focusing on the left and right cerebral hemispheres and Gooch on the cerebrum and cerebellum.

Gooch located the conscious, rational, egoic view of the world in the cerebrum, and the unconscious, intuitive one in the cerebellum. He said we are each actually two distinct persons, with the cerebrum being our Cro-Magnon self and the cerebellum being our Neanderthal self. In his speculative reconstruction of prehistory, Cro-Magnons were technological and patriarchal, while Neanderthals were moon-oriented mystics with a matriarchal orientation. These two internally complete and consistent worldviews, he said, have coalesced within us, leaving us divided in our sense of self and our ways of relating to nature and each other. Those who are familiar with McGilchrist’s work will immediately sense the similarities with his left brain/right brain model.

Gooch also theorized at length about the cerebellum and its functions, arguing that it is the seat of dreams, creativity, and apparently supernatural phenomena like poltergeist disturbances. The latter, he said, are not the action of spirit beings but externalizations of our cerebellar Neanderthal self, as are myths of monstrous beings like troglodytes, vampires, and demons.

What’s especially fascinating about Gooch himself, and what adds resonance to all these things, is that his career encompassed both mainstream psychological research and a lifelong exploration of the paranormal, informed by personal experiences. He began his career as an academic researcher for the British government, authoring a respected textbook on child psychology, before an experience of spontaneous trance mediumship at a seance that he had reluctantly and skeptically attended rattled his worldview and sent him in a new direction. The Daily Telegraph carried a full obituary when he died in 2010. Fifteen years before that, Colin Wilson praised Gooch’s work as “one of the most impressive and exciting intellectual structures of the second half of the twentieth century.”

I was fortunate enough to enlist Gary Lachman to write the entry on Gooch for my paranormal encyclopedia, 2015’s Ghosts, Spirits, and Psychics. Along with summarizing Gooch’s work and legacy, Gary pointed out his sad end: “Although receiving high acclaim from readers such as Colin Wilson and Stanley Krippner, Gooch spent his last years in isolation, living in poverty in a run-down trailer camp in Swansea, Wales, embittered by the lack of recognition his work received.”

Although headlines like the current one in New Scientist obviously don’t go any distance toward “proving” Gooch’s account of human origins, they do provide another opportunity to think of him, for those of us who know his work. And they motivate me personally to call attention to him once more, just as I'm doing here, and also to send out well wishes into the ether for the memory of his life and work.

For more on Gooch, here’s something I wrote about him, in much more detail, in 2024: “Haunted by Ourselves: The Muse in the Cerebellum.” I’ll close this brief, spontaneous post by quoting my own words from that essay about the implications of Gooch’s perspective for creativity and creative work, which are of special interest to me, and also, I know, to you:

Thanks to Gooch, we have the theory of the cerebellar muse as one model for understanding this experience [of creative inspiration], a theory that, if nothing else, and regardless of its literal truth value, sharpens our understanding of what is really involved in the claim of an intra-psychic division between our conscious self and its unconscious daemon, and of the strange sense of self-transcendence and simultaneous mystery and knowledge that such an interior relationship infuses into our creative work.

A brief note about what’s coming: Tomorrow I’ll be returning to the question of creative inspiration from another angle in “AI Is Not the Muse,” which will appear here and arrive by email as the next newsletter issue.

This Gooch piece is also an example of something I’ll be doing here alongside those regular emails. I will publish occasional posts just on the website, following something I’ve read, remembered, or found myself thinking about. And I’ll point you toward these additional pieces in the newsletter from time to time.