Philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche once wrote:
What is originality? To see something that has no name as yet and hence cannot be mentioned although it stares us all in the face. The way men usually are it takes a name to make something visible for them. Those with originality have for the most part also assigned names [...]
The first inspiration for neuromythography came from listening to a spiritually-sensitive person describe the interior of their mind as a kind of "inner pantheon". They had nicknames for these characters, like White Rabbit the fearful, Saturn the stern judge, and so on. These resonated a certain familiarity to me in my then-basic understanding of the brain anatomy. For example, I vaguely recalled that the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex was rather "judgy".
I reasoned, what if certain people have insight into the subdivisions of the brain, and that this is why many people find deity pantheons, personality systems, tarot cards, Kabbalah, and the like so interesting? And if so, might we use these systems as a kind of fuzzy heritage map for the brain? I became irrationally enthralled with the idea, and began bootstrapping my neuroscience knowledge.
The problem that stares us all in the face is that psychology, cognitive science, and philosophy words have failed to find homes in the brain. "Memory" had a lucky break early on when patients with hippocampus lesions displayed dramatic memory impairments, but this luck did not last as time went by (and the hippocampus is far richer than a memory store). So a fresh approach using ancient resources and unreasonable perseverance might open up new insights.
Eventually, I came to invert my starting approach. Instead of seeking to find neural correlates for deities, I used the neuroscience literature to find the best allegorical archetypes. This freed me from trying to force, say, the Greek pantheon structure onto the brain, and instead I began to eclectically draw metaphors from any domain of human experience that seemed to interpolate what the best researchers were trying to generalize about a given brain area, neurotransmitter, or receptor.
For a few years, I did not have a name for what I was doing. I was cryptic about it when I explained it to other people. I knew why I was doing it, and felt compelled to pursue it, as I was perhaps the only person in the world with the right skill stack and determination at the present time. But I could see something nobody else did.
I called my database a 'neuromythograph', reflecting the combination of neuroinformatics and mythological archetypes in a graph database. Eventually, the word 'neuromythography' came to me as a handle for the field and method I had invented. When I read Vannevar Bush's vision of a 'memex' in which he described a personalized research database, collections of data and ideas that the researcher found salient, I adopted that as the noun for the graph database I was compiling.
I share Nietzsche's observation that most people need a word to bring forth an idea. The rise of large language model AI demonstrates what creativity can be generated by combining words together, but also demonstrates what early Wittgenstein meant by "the limits of my language are the limits of my world". There is a large contingent of intellectuals who seem to really believe that language determines our reality, the medium through which the Societal Spaghetti Monster governs our very essences. My own study of the neuroscience literature indicates that language is an expressive skill, beneath which a great mass of wordless psyche constantly churns.
