The Indian subcontinent with its rich cultural heritage has long fascinated people in the West. This is especially true for Ayurveda with its holistic body-mind-food approach to health. Recently neuroscientists Frederick T. Travis and Robert Keith Wallace investigated the brain pattern underlying the different dosha types in Dosha brain‑types: A neural model of individual differences. What they found was a high correspondence with the traditional dosha traits:
Vata dosha, which is highly variable in behavior and in response to the environment, would be associated with a greater range of functioning of the brain and nervous system. Pitta dosha, which is characterized by dynamism, would be associated with fast, passionate responses of the brain and nervous system to challenges in the environment. Kapha dosha, which is characterized by steadiness, would be associated with stable activity patterns of the brain and nervous system.
What we see are nervous systems that react very differently over a wide range of behaviours, including learning, potential danger, activity levels and food intake. This wide range points to adaptations to different evolutionary environments. The most obvious environments would be our ancestral modes of subsistence: foraging, farming and pastoralism. People of these different types came together during the Bronze Age when nomadic pastoralist tribes came to dominate sedentary farmers.
Together with admixture of foragers they would come to form Indian society with its castes that were initially based on ethnic origin (including skin color) and subsistence types and later on occupation.
Egalitarian foragers would have tried to resist being part of a hierarchical society as long as possible and retreated to areas more hostile to farming, e.g mountainous areas. Also, due to later occupation by farmers and herders, forager admixture is higher in Southern India. In fact, the ethnonym for the indigenous Sri Lankan Vedda people means “hunter”. If remaining hunter-gatherers are anything to go by, foragers would have made up the lowest socioeconomic class (or outcastes) of Indian society. Foragers are not “programmed” to accumulate wealth. However, the presence of forager admixture would have a strong effect on the economy, society and culture. Forager types would contribute to a prosperous society in at least two ways:
- Innovation (creativity)
- Mediation (substituting tribalistic tendencies with egalitarian universalism)
As the map below shows the presence of Dalit (scheduled castes) does have an overall mitigating effect on poverty, even though the Dalit are among the poorest people themselves.
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