Lapidarium notes

The Self Illusion: How the Brain Creates Identity

‘The Self’

“For the majority of us the self is a very compulsive experience. I happen to think it’s an illusion and certainly the neuroscience seems to support that contention. Simply from the logical positions that it’s very difficult to, without avoiding some degree of infinite regress, to say a starting point, the trail of thought, just the fractionation of the mind, when we see this happening in neurological conditions. The famous split-brain studies showing that actually we’re not integrated entities inside our head, rather we’re the output of a multitude of unconscious processes.

I happen to think the self is a narrative, and I use the self and the division that was drawn by William James, which is the “I” (the experience of conscious self) and the “me” (which is personal identity, how you would describe yourself in terms of where are you from and everything that makes you up in your predilections and your wishes for the future). Both the “I”, who is sentient of the “me”, and the “me”, which is a story of who you are, I think are stories. They’re constructs and narratives. I mean that in a sense that a story is a reduction or at least it’s a coherent framework that has some causal kind of coherence.

When I go out and give public lectures I like to illustrate the weaknesses of the “I” by using visual illusions of the most common examples. But there are other kinds of illusions that you can introduce which just reveal to people how their conscious experience is actually really just a fraction of what’s really going on. It certainly is not a true reflection of all mechanisms that are generating. Visual illusions are very obvious in that. The thing about the visual illusion effects is that even when they’re explained to you, you can’t but help see them, so that’s interesting. You can’t divorce yourself from the mechanisms that are creating the illusion and the mind that’s experienced in the illusion.

The sense of personal identity, this is where we’ve been doing experimental work showing the importance that we place upon episodic memories, autobiographical memories. In our duplication studies for example, children are quite willing to accept that you could copy a hamster with all its physical properties that you can’t necessarily see, but what you can’t copy very easily are the episodic memories that one hamster has had.

This actually resonates with the ideas of John Locke, the philosopher, who also argued that personal identity was really dependent on the autobiographical or episodic memories, and you are the sum of your memories, which, of course, is something that fractionates and fragments in various forms of dementia. As the person loses the capacity to retrieve memories, or these memoires become distorted, then the identity of the person, the personality, can be changed, amongst other things. But certainly the memories are very important.

As we all know, memory is notoriously fallible. It’s not cast in stone. It’s not something that is stable. It’s constantly reshaping itself. So the fact that we have a multitude of unconscious processes which are generating this coherence of consciousness, which is the I experience, and the truth that our memories are very selective and ultimately corruptible, we tend to remember things which fit with our general characterization of what our self is. We tend to ignore all the information that is inconsistent. We have all these attribution biases. We have cognitive dissonance. The very thing psychology keeps telling us, that we have all these unconscious mechanisms that reframe information, to fit with a coherent story, then both the “I” and the “me”, to all intents and purposes, are generated narratives.

The illusions I talk about often are this sense that there is an integrated individual, with a veridical notion of past. And there’s nothing at the center. We’re the product of the emergent property, I would argue, of the multitude of these processes that generate us.       

I use the word illusion as opposed to delusion. Delusion implies mental illness, to some extent, and illusion, we’re quite happy to accept that we’re experiencing illusions, and for me the word illusion really does mean that it’s an experience that is not what it seems. I’m not denying that there is an experience. We all have this experience, and what’s more, you can’t escape it easily. I think it’s more acceptable to call it an illusion whereas there’s a derogatory nature of calling something a delusion. I suspect there’s probably a technical difference which ought to do with mental illness, but no, I think we’re all perfectly normally, experience this illusion.      

Oliver Sacks has famously written about various case studies of patients which seem so bizarre, people who have various forms of perceptual anomalies, they mistake their wife for a hat, or there are patients who can’t help but copy everything they see. I think that in many instances, because the self is so core to our normal behavior having an understanding that self is this constructive process, I think if this was something that clinicians were familiar with, then I think that would make a lot of sense.

Neuroethics

In fact, it’s not only in clinical practice, I think in a lot of things. I think neuroethics is a very interesting field. I’ve got another colleague, David Eagleman, he’s very interested in these ideas. The culpability, responsibility. We premise our legal systems on this notion there is an individual who is to be held accountable. Now, I’m not suggesting that we abandon that, and I’m not sure what you would put in its place, but I think we can all recognize that there are certain situations where we find it very difficult to attribute blame to someone. For example, famously, Charles Whitman, the Texan sniper, when they had the autopsy, they discovered a very sizeable tumor in a region of the brain which could have very much influenced his ability to control his rage. I’m not suggesting every mass murder has inoperable tumors in their brain, but it’s conceivable that there will be, with our increasing knowledge of how the brain operates, and our ability to understand it, it’s conceivable there will be more situations where the lawyers will be looking to put the blame on some biological abnormality.

Where is the line to be drawn? I think that’s a very tough one to deal with. It’s a problem that’s not going to go away. It’s something that we’re going to continually face as we start to learn more about the genetics of aggression.

There’s a lot of interest in this thing called the warrior gene. To what extent is this a gene which predisposes you to violence? Or do you need the interaction between the gene and the abusive childhood in order to get this kind of profile? So it’s not just clinicians, it’s actually just about every realm of human activity where you posit the existence of a self and individuals, and responsibility. Then it will reframe the way you think about things. Just the way that we heap blame and praise, the flip side of blaming people is that we praise individuals. But it could be, in a sense, a multitude of factors that have led them to be successful. I think that it’s a pervasive notion. Whether or not we actually change the way we do anything, I’m not so sure, because I think it would be really hard to live our lives dealing with non-individuals, trying to deal with multitude and the history that everyone brings to the table. There’s a good reason why we have this experience of the self. It’s a very sort of succinct and economical way of interacting with each other. We deal with individuals. We fall in love with individuals, not multitudes of past experiences and aspects of hidden agendas, we just pick them out. (…)

The objects are part of the extended sense of self

I keep tying this back to my issues about why certain objects are overvalued, and I happen to believe, like James again, that objects are part of the extended sense of self. We surround ourselves with objects. We place a lot of value on objects that we think are representative of our self.  (…)

We’re the only species on this planet that invests a lot of time and evaluation through our objects, and this has been something that has been with us for a very, very long time.

Think of some of the early artifacts. The difficulty would have been to make these artifacts, the time invested in these things, means that from a very early point in our civilization, or before civilization, I think the earliest pieces are probably about 90,000 years old. There are certainly older things that are tools, but pieces of artwork, about 90,000 years old. So it’s been with us a long time. And yes, some of them are obviously sacred objects, power of religious purposes and so forth. But outside of that, there’s still this sense of having materials or things that we value, and that intrigues me in so many ways. And I don’t think it’s necessarily universal as well. It’s been around a lot, but the endowment effect, for example, is not found everywhere. There’s some intriguing work coming out of Africa. 

The endowment effect is this rather intriguing idea that we will spontaneously overvalue an object as soon as we believe it’s in our possession, we don’t actually have to have it physically, just bidding on something, as soon as you make your connection to an object, then you value it more, you’ll actually remember more about it, you’ll remember objects which you think are in your possession in comparison to someone else. It gets a whole sense of attribution and value associated with it, which is one of the reasons why people never get the asking price for the things that they’re trying to sell, they always think their objects are worth more than other people are willing to pay for them.

There was the first experimental demonstration by Richard Thaler and Danny Kahneman, and the early behavioral economics, was this demonstration that if you just give people coffee cups, students, coffee cups, and then you ask them to sell it, they always ask more than what someone’s willing to pay for it. It turns out it’s not just coffee cups, it’s wine, it’s chocolate, it’s anything, basically. There’s been quite a bit of work done on the endowment effect now. As I say, it’s been looked at in different species, and the brain mechanisms of having to sell something at a lower price, like loss aversion, it’s seen as quite painful, triggers the same pain centers, if you think you’re going to lose out on a deal. 

What is it about the objects that give us this self-evaluated sense? Well, I think James spoke of this, again, William James commented on the way that we use objects to extend our self. Russell Belk is a marketing psychologist. He has also talked about the extended self in terms of objects. As I say, this is something that I think marketers know in that they create certain quality brands that are perceived to signal to others how good your social status is.

It’s something in us, but it may not be universal because there are tribes, there are some recent reports from nomadic tribes in central Africa, who don’t seem to have this sense of ownership. It might be a reflection more of the fact that a lot of this work has been done in the West where we’re very individualistic, and of course individualism almost creates a lot of endowment ideas and certainly supports the endowment, materialism that we see. But this is an area I’d like to do more work with because we have not found any evidence of the endowment effect in children below five, six years of age. I’m interested: is this something that just emerges spontaneously? I suspect not. I suspect this is something that culture is definitely shaping. That’s my hunch, so that’s an empirical question I need to pick apart.

The irrational superstitious behaviors

Another line of research I’ve been working on in the past five years … this was a little bit like putting the cart before the horse, so I put forward an idea, it wasn’t entirely original. It was a combination of ideas of others, most notably Pascal Boyer. Paul Bloom, to some extent, had been thinking something similar. A bunch of us were interested in why religion was around. I didn’t want to specifically focus on religion. I wanted to get to the more general point about belief because it was my hunch that even a lot of atheists or self-stated atheists or agnostics, still nevertheless entertained beliefs which were pretty irrational. I wasn’t meaning irrational in a kind of behavioral economics type of way. I meant irrational in that there were these implicit views that would violate the natural laws as we thought about them. Violations of the natural laws I see as being supernatural. That’s what makes them supernatural. I felt that this was an area worth looking at. They’d been looked at 50, 60 years ago very much in the behaviorist association tradition.

BF Skinner famously wrote a paper on the superstitious behavior of pigeons, and he argued if you simply set up a reinforcement schedule at a random kind of interval, pigeons will adopt typical patterns that they think are somehow related to the reward, and then you could shape irrational superstitious behaviors. Now that work has turned out to be a bit dubious and I’m not sure that stood the test of time. But in terms of people’s rituals and routines, it’s quite clear and I know them in myself. There are these things that we do which are familiar, and we get a little bit irritated we don’t get to do them, so we do, most of us, entertain some degree of superstitious behavior.

At the time there was a lot of interest in religion and a lot of the hoo-ha about The God Delusion, and I felt that maybe we just need to redress this idea that it’s all to do with indoctrination, because I couldn’t believe the whole edifice of this kind of belief system was purely indoctrination. I’m not saying there’s not indoctrination, and clearly, religions are culturally transmitted. You’re not born to be Jewish or born to be Christian. But what I think religions do is they capitalize on a lot of inclinations that children have. Then I entered into a series of work, and my particular interest was this idea of essentialism and sacred objects and moral contamination.

We took a lot of the work that Paul Rozin had done, talking about things like killers’ cardigans, and we started to see if there was any empirical measures of transfer. For example, would you find yourself wanting to wash your hands more? Would you find priming effects for words which were related to good and evil, based on whether you had touched the object or not? For me there had to be this issue of physical contact. It struck me as this was why it wasn’t a pure association mechanism. It was actually something to do with the belief, a naïve belief there was some biological entity that can somehow, moral contamination can transfer.

We started to look at, actually not children now, but looking at adults because doing this sort of work with children is very difficult and probably somewhat controversial. But the whole area of research is premised on this idea that there are intuitive ways of seeing the world. Sometimes this is referred to as System One and System Two, or automatic and control. It reappears in a variety of psychological contexts. I just think about it as these unconscious, rapid systems which are triggered automatically. I think their origins are in children. Whilst you can educate people with a kind of slower System Two, if you like, you never eradicate the intuitive ways of seeing the world because they were never taught in the first place. They’re always there. I suppose if you want to ask me if there any kind of thing that you can have as a theory that you haven’t yet proven, it’s the idea is, I don’t think you ever throw away any belief system or any ideas that have been derived through these unconscious intuitive processes. You can supersede them, you can overwrite them, but they never go away, and they will reemerge under the right contexts. If you put people through stressful situations or you overload it, you can see the reemergence of these kinds of ways of thinking. The empirical evidence seems to be supporting that. They’ve got wrinkles in their brains. They’re never going to go away. You can try and override them, but they’re always there and they will reappear under the right circumstances, which is why you see the reemergence under stress of a lot of irrational thinking.

For example, teleological explanations, the idea that everything is made for a purpose or a function, is a natural way to see the world. This is Deb Kelemen’s work. You will find that people who considered themselves fairly rational and well educated will, nevertheless, default back to teleological explanations if you put them under a stressful timed kind of situation. So it’s a way of seeing the world that is never eradicated. I think that’s going to be a general principle, in the same way that a reflex, if you think about reflexes, that’s an unlearned behavioral response. You’re born with a whole set of reflexes. Many of them disappear, but they never entirely go away. They become typically reintegrated into more complex behaviors, but if someone goes into a coma, you can see the reflexes reemerging.

What we think is going on is that in the course of development, these very automatic behaviors become controlled by top-down processes from the cortex, all these higher order systems which are regulating and controlling and suppressing, trying to keep these things under wraps. But when the cortex is put out of action through a coma or head injury, then you can see many of these things reemerging again. I don’t see why there should be any point of departure from a motor system to a perceptual system, to a cognitive system, because they’re all basically patterns of neural firing in the brain, and so I don’t see why it can’t be the case that if concepts are derived through these processes, they could remain dormant and latent as well.

The hierarchy of representations in the brain

One of the things that has been fascinating me is the extent to which we can talk about the hierarchy of representations in the brain. Representations are literally re-presentations. That’s the language of the brain, that’s the mode of thinking in the brain, it’s representation. It’s more than likely, in fact, it’s most likely that there is already representation wired into the brain. If you think about the sensory systems, the array of the eye, for example, is already laid out in a topographical representation of the external world, to which it has not yet been exposed. What happens is that this is general layout, arrangements that become fine-tuned. We know of a lot of work to show that the arrangements of the sensory mechanisms do have a spatial arrangement, so that’s not learned in any sense. But these can become changed through experiences, and that’s why the early work of Hubel and Weisel, about the effects of abnormal environments showed that the general pattern could be distorted, but the pattern was already in place in the first place.

When you start to move beyond sensory into perceptual systems and then into cognitive systems, that’s when you get into theoretical arguments and the gloves come off. There are some people who argue that it has to be the case that there are certain primitives built into the conceptual systems. I’m talking about the work of, most notably, Elizabeth Spelke.  

There certainly seems to be a lot of perceptual ability in newborns in terms of constancies, noticing invariant aspects of the physical world. I don’t think I have a problem with any of that, but I suppose this is where the debates go. (…)

Shame in the East is something that is at least recognized as a major factor of identity

I’ve been to Japan a couple of time. I’m not an expert in the cultural variation of cognition, but clearly shame is a major factor in motivation, or avoidance of shame, in eastern cultures. I think it reflects the sense of self worth and value in eastern culture. It is very much a collective notion that they place a lot of emphasis on not letting the team down. I believe they even have a special word for that aspect or experience of shame that we don’t have. That doesn’t mean that it’s a concept that we can never entertain, but it does suggest that in the East this is something that is at least recognized as a major factor of identity.

Children don’t necessarily feel shame. I don’t think they’ve got a sense of self until well into their second year. They have the “I”, they have the notion of being, of having control. They will experience the willingness to move their arms, and I’m sure they make that connection very quickly, so they have this sense of self, in that “I” notion, but I don’t think they’ve got personal identity, and that’s one of the reasons that they don’t have much, or very few of us have much memory of our earlier times. Our episodic memories are very fragmented, sensory events. But from about two to three years on they start to get a sense of who they are. Knowing who you are means becoming integrated into your social environment, and part of becoming integrated into your social environment means acquiring a sense of shame. Below two, three years of age, I don’t think many children have a notion of shame. But from then on, as they have to become members of the social tribe, then they have to be made aware of the consequences of being antisocial or doing things not what’s expected of them. I think that’s probably late in the acquisition.”

— Bruce Hood, Canadian-born experimental psychologist who specialises in developmental cognitive neuroscience, Director of the Bristol Cognitive Development Centre, based at the University of Bristol, Essentialism, Edge, May, 17, 2012. (Illustration source)

The Illusion of the Self

“For me, an illusion is a subjective experience that is not what it seems. Illusions are experiences in the mind, but they are not out there in nature. Rather, they are events generated by the brain. Most of us have an experience of a self. I certainly have one, and I do not doubt that others do as well – an autonomous individual with a coherent identity and sense of free will. But that experience is an illusion – it does not exist independently of the person having the experience, and it is certainly not what it seems. That’s not to say that the illusion is pointless. Experiencing a self illusion may have tangible functional benefits in the way we think and act, but that does not mean that it exists as an entity. (…)

For most of us, the sense of our self is as an integrated individual inhabiting a body. I think it is helpful to distinguish between the two ways of thinking about the self that William James talked about. There is conscious awareness of the present moment that he called the “I,” but there is also a self that reflects upon who we are in terms of our history, our current activities and our future plans. James called this aspect of the self, “me” which most of us would recognize as our personal identity—who we think we are. However, I think that both the “I” and the “me” are actually ever-changing narratives generated by our brain to provide a coherent framework to organize the output of all the factors that contribute to our thoughts and behaviors.

I think it helps to compare the experience of self to subjective contours – illusions such as the Kanizsa pattern where you see an invisible shape that is really defined entirely by the surrounding context. People understand that it is a trick of the mind but what they may not appreciate is that the brain is actually generating the neural activation as if the illusory shape was really there. In other words, the brain is hallucinating the experience. There are now many studies revealing that illusions generate brain activity as if they existed. They are not real but the brain treats them as if they were.

Now that line of reasoning could be applied to all perception except that not all perception is an illusion. There are real shapes out there in the world and other physical regularities that generate reliable states in the minds of others. The reason that the status of reality cannot be applied to the self, is that it does not exist independently of my brain alone that is having the experience. It may appear to have a consistency of regularity and stability that makes it seem real, but those properties alone do not make it so.

Similar ideas about the self can be found in Buddhism and the writings of Hume and Spinoza. The difference is that there is now good psychological and physiological evidence to support these ideas that I cover in the book. (…)

There are many cognitive scientists who would doubt that the experience of I is constructed from a multitude of unconscious mechanisms and processes. Me is similarly constructed, though we may be more aware of the events that have shaped it over our lifetime. But neither is cast in stone and both are open to all manner of reinterpretation. As artists, illusionists, movie makers, and more recently experimental psychologists have repeatedly shown, conscious experience is highly manipulatable and context dependent. Our memories are also largely abstracted reinterpretations of events – we all hold distorted memories of past experiences. (…)

The developmental processes that shape our brains from infancy onwards to create our identities as well as the systematic biases that distort the content of our identity to form a consistent narrative. I believe much of that distortion and bias is socially relevant in terms of how we would like to be seen by others. We all think we would act and behave in a certain way, but the reality is that we are often mistaken. (…)

Q: What role do you think childhood plays in shaping the self?

Just about everything we value in life has something to do with other people. Much of that influence occurs early in our development, which is one reason why human childhoods are so prolonged in comparison to other species. We invest so much effort and time into our children to pass on as much knowledge and experience as possible. It is worth noting that other species that have long periods of rearing also tend to be more social and intelligent in terms of flexible, adaptive behaviors. Babies are born social from the start but they develop their sense of self throughout childhood as they move to become independent adults that eventually reproduce. I would contend that the self continues to develop throughout a lifetime, especially as our roles change to accommodate others. (…)

The role of social networking in the way we portray our self

There are some interesting phenomena emerging. There is evidence of homophily – the grouping together of individuals who share a common perspective, which is not too surprising. More interesting is evidence of polarization. Rather than opening up and exposing us to different perspectives, social networking on the Internet can foster more radicalization as we seek out others who share our positions. The more others validate our opinions, the more extreme we become. I don’t think we need to be fearful, and I am less concerned than the prophets of doom who predict the downfall of human civilization, but I believe it is true that the way we create the narrative of the self is changing.

Q: If the self is an illusion, what is your position on free will?

Free will is certainly a major component of the self illusion, but it is not synonymous. Both are illusions, but the self illusion extends beyond the issues of choice and culpability to other realms of human experience. From what I understand, I think you and I share the same basic position about the logical impossibility of free will. I also think that compatibilism (that determinism and free will can co-exist) is incoherent. We certainly have more choices today to do things that are not in accord with our biology, and it may be true that we should talk about free will in a meaningful way, as Dennett has argued, but that seems irrelevant to the central problem of positing an entity that can make choices independently of the multitude of factors that control a decision. To me, the problem of free will is a logical impasse – we cannot choose the factors that ultimately influence what we do and think. That does not mean that we throw away the social, moral, and legal rulebooks, but we need to be vigilant about the way our attitudes about individuals will be challenged as we come to understand the factors (both material and psychological) that control our behaviors when it comes to attributing praise and blame. I believe this is somewhat akin to your position. (…)

The self illusion explains so many aspects of human behavior as well as our attitudes toward others. When we judge others, we consider them responsible for their actions. But was Mary Bale, the bank worker from Coventry who was caught on video dropping a cat into a garbage can, being true to her self? Or was Mel Gibson’s drunken anti-Semitic rant being himself or under the influence of someone else? What motivated Senator Weiner to text naked pictures of himself to women he did not know? In the book, I consider some of the extremes of human behavior from mass murderers with brain tumors that may have made them kill, to rising politicians who self-destruct. By rejecting the notion of a core self and considering how we are a multitude of competing urges and impulses, I think it is easier to understand why we suddenly go off the rails. It explains why we act, often unconsciously, in a way that is inconsistent with our self image – or the image of our self as we believe others see us.

That said, the self illusion is probably an inescapable experience we need for interacting with others and the world, and indeed we cannot readily abandon or ignore its influence, but we should be skeptical that each of us is the coherent, integrated entity we assume we are.”

— Bruce Hood Canadian-born experimental psychologist who specialises in developmental cognitive neuroscience, Director of the Bristol Cognitive Development Centre, based at the University of Bristol, interviewed by Sam Harris, The Illusion of the Self, Sam Harris blog, May 22, 2012.

See also:

☞ Existence: What is the self?, Lapidarium notes
☞ Paul King on what is the best explanation for identity
☞ David Eagleman on how we constructs reality, time perception, and The Secret Lives of the Brain
☞ Professor George Lakoff: Reason is 98% Subconscious Metaphor in Frames & Cultural Narratives
☞ Daniel Kahneman: The Marvels and the Flaws of Intuitive Thinking

The time machine in our mind. The imagistic mental machinery that allows us to travel through time

“Our ability to close our eyes and imagine the pleasures of Super Bowl Sunday or remember the excesses of New Year’s Eve is a fairly recent evolutionary development, and our talent for doing this is unparalleled in the animal kingdom. We are a race of time travelers, unfettered by chronology and capable of visiting the future or revisiting the past whenever we wish. If our neural time machines are damaged by illness, age or accident, we may become trapped in the present. (…)

Why did evolution design our brains to go wandering in time? Perhaps it’s because an experience is a terrible thing to waste. Moving around in the world exposes organisms to danger, so as a rule they should have as few experiences as possible and learn as much from each as they can. (…)

Time travel allows us to pay for an experience once and then have it again and again at no additional charge, learning new lessons with each repetition. When we are busy having experiences—herding children, signing checks, battling traffic—the dark network is silent, but as soon as those experiences are over, the network is awakened, and we begin moving across the landscape of our history to see what we can learn—for free.

                                            
                                          (Click image to open research paper in pdf)

Abstract:

“This article provides the first comprehensive conceptual account for the imagistic mental machinery that allows us to travel through time—for the time machine in our mind. It is argued that language reveals this imagistic machine and how we use it. Findings from a range of cognitive fields are theoretically unified and a recent proposal about spatialized mental time travel is elaborated on. The following novel distinctions are offered: external vs. internal viewing of time; “watching” time vs. projective “travel” through time; optional vs. obligatory mental time travel; mental time travel into anteriority or posteriority vs. mental time travel into the past or future; single mental time travel vs. nested dual mental time travel; mental time travel in episodic memory vs. mental time travel in semantic memory; and “seeing” vs. “sensing” mental imagery. Theoretical, empirical, and applied implications are discussed.”

“The theoretical strategy I adopt is to use language as an entree to a conceptual level that seems deeper than language itself (Pinker, 2007; Talmy, 2000). The logic of this strategy is in accordance with recent findings that many conceptualizations observed in language have also been found to exist in mental representations that are more basic than language itself. (…)

It is proposed that this strategy helps to uncover an imagistic mental machinery that allows us to travel through time—that this strategy helps us to uncover the time machine in our mind.

A central term used in this article is “the imagery structuring of time.” By this I refer to an invisible spatial scaffolding in our mental imagery across which temporal material can be splayed, the existence of which will be proposed in this article. At times it will be quite natural to assume that a space-to-time mapping in the sense of conceptual metaphor theory is involved in the structuring of this invisible scaffolding. (…)

It is thus for the present investigation more coherent to assume that mental time is basically constructed out of “spatialized” mental imagery—“spatialized” is another central term that I use in this article. I use it in the sense that it is neutral as to whether some of the imagery might be transferred via space-to-time mappings or whether some of the imagery might relate to space-to-time mappings only in an etymological sense. An example of temporal constructions that are readily characterized in terms of spatialized temporal imagery structuring are the conceptualizations underlying the use of before and after, conceptualizations that are often treated as having autonomous temporal status and as relating only etymologically to space.

The current investigation can refine this view somewhat, by postulating that spatialized temporal structures still play a very vital role in the imagery structuring underlying before and after. (…)

The theoretical strategy, to use linguistic expressions about time as an entree to conceptual structures about time that seem deeper than language itself, has been applied quite fruitfully, since it has allowed for the development of a rather comprehensive and precise conceptual account of the time machine in our mind. The theory is not an ad-hoc theory, since linguistic conceptualizations cannot be interpreted in a totally arbitrary way—for example language does not allow us to assume that a sentence such as I shopped at the store before I went home means that first the going home took place and then the shopping. In this respect the theory is to some degree already a data-guided theory, since linguistic expressions are data. However, the proposal of the theory that language has helped us to uncover a specific system of spatialized imagery structuring of time can only be evaluated by carrying out corresponding psychological (cognitive and neurocognitive) experiments and some ideas for such experiments have been presented. Since the time machine in our mind is a deeply fascinating apparatus, I am confident that theoretical and empirical investigations will continue to explore it.”

— Kurt Stocker, The time machine in our mind (pdf), Institute of Cognitive and Brain Sciences, University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA, 2012

See also:

☞ T. Suddendorf, D. Rose Addis and M C. Corballis, Mental time travel and the shaping of the human mind (pdf), The Royal Society, 2009.

Abstract: “Episodic memory, enabling conscious recollection of past episodes, can be distinguished from semantic memory, which stores enduring facts about the world. Episodic memory shares a core neural network with the simulation of future episodes, enabling mental time travel into both the past and the future. The notion that there might be something distinctly human about mental time travel has provoked ingenious attempts to demonstrate episodic memory or future simulation in nonhuman animals, but we argue that they have not yet established a capacity comparable to the human faculty. The evolution of the capacity to simulate possible future events, based on episodic memory, enhanced fitness by enabling action in preparation of different possible scenarios that increased present or future survival and reproduction chances. Human language may have evolved in the first instance for the sharing of past and planned future events, and, indeed, fictional ones, further enhancing fitness in social settings.”

☞ George Lakoff, Mark Johnson, Conceptual Metaphor in Everyday Language (pdf), The Journal of Philosophy, Vol 77, 1980.
☞ Our sense of time is deeply entangled with memory
☞ Time tag on Lapidarium notes

How liberal and conservative brains are wired differently. Liberals and conservatives don’t just vote differently, they think differently

“There’s now a large body of evidence showing that those who opt for the political left and those who opt for the political right tend to process information in divergent ways and to differ on any number of psychological traits.

Perhaps most important, liberals consistently score higher on a personality measure called “openness to experience,” one of the “Big Five” personality traits, which are easily assessed through standard questionnaires. That means liberals tend to be the kind of people who want to try new things, including new music, books, restaurants and vacation spots — and new ideas.

“Open people everywhere tend to have more liberal values,” said psychologist Robert McCrae, who conducted voluminous studies on personality while at the National Institute on Aging at the National Institutes of Health.

Conservatives, in contrast, tend to be less open — less exploratory, less in need of change — and more “conscientious,” a trait that indicates they appreciate order and structure in their lives. This gels nicely with the standard definition of conservatism as resistance to change — in the famous words of William F. Buckley Jr., a desire to stand “athwart history, yelling ‘Stop!’ ” (…)

We see the consequences of liberal openness and conservative conscientiousness everywhere — and especially in the political battle over facts. (…)

Compare this with a different irrationality: refusing to admit that humans are a product of evolution, a chief point of denial for the religious right. In a recent poll, just 43 percent of tea party adherents accepted the established science here. Yet unlike the vaccine issue, this denial is anything but new and trendy; it is well over 100 years old. The state of Tennessee is even hearkening back to the days of the Scopes “Monkey” Trial, more than 85 years ago. It just passed a bill that will weaken the teaching of evolution.

Such are some of the probable consequences of openness, or the lack thereof. (…)

Now consider another related trait implicated in our divide over reality: the “need for cognitive closure.” This describes discomfort with uncertainty and a desire to resolve it into a firm belief. Someone with a high need for closure tends to seize on a piece of information that dispels doubt or ambiguity, and then freeze, refusing to consider new information. Those who have this trait can also be expected to spend less time processing information than those who are driven by different motivations, such as achieving accuracy.

A number of studies show that conservatives tend to have a greater need for closure than do liberals, which is precisely what you would expect in light of the strong relationship between liberalism and openness. “The finding is very robust,” explained Arie Kruglanski, a University of Maryland psychologist who has pioneered research in this area and worked to develop a scale for measuring the need for closure.

The trait is assessed based on responses to survey statements such as “I dislike questions which could be answered in many different ways” and “In most social conflicts, I can easily see which side is right and which is wrong.” (…)

Anti-evolutionists have been found to score higher on the need for closure. And in the global-warming debate, tea party followers not only strongly deny the science but also tend to say that they “do not need any more information” about the issue.

I’m not saying that liberals have a monopoly on truth. Of course not. They aren’t always right; but when they’re wrong, they are wrong differently.

When you combine key psychological traits with divergent streams of information from the left and the right, you get a world where there is no truth that we all agree upon. We wield different facts, and hold them close, because we truly experience things differently. (…)”

— Chris Mooney, science and political journalist, author of four books, including the New York Times bestselling The Republican War on Science and the forthcoming The Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Deny Science and Reality (April 2012), Liberals and conservatives don’t just vote differently. They think differently, The Washington Post, April 13, 2012. (Illustration: Koren Shadmi for The Washington Post)

See also:

☞ Political science: why rejecting expertise has become a campaign strategy, Lapidarium notes
☞ Cognitive and Social Consequences of the Need for Cognitive Closure, European Review of Social Psychology
☞ Antonio Chirumbolo, The relationship between need for cognitiveclosure and political orientation: the mediating role of authoritarianism, Department of Social and Developmental Psychology, University of Rome ‘La Sapienza’
☞ Paul Nurse, Stamp out anti-science in US politics, New Scientist, 14 Sept 2011
☞ Chris Mooney, Why Republicans Deny Science: The Quest for a Scientific Explanation, The Huffington Post, Jan 11, 2012
☞ John Allen Paulos, Why Don’t Americans Elect Scientists?, NYTimes, Feb 13, 2012.
☞ Study: Conservatives’ Trust in Science Has Fallen Dramatically Since Mid-1970s, American Sociological Association, March 29, 2012.
☞ Why people believe in strange things, Lapidarium notes

Richard Doyle on Creativity, evolution of mind and the rhetorical membrane between humans and an informational universe

Q [Jason Silva]: The Jesuit Priest and scientist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin spoke of the Noosphere very early on. A profile in WIRED Magazine article said, 

“Teilhard imagined a stage of evolution characterized by a complex membrane of information enveloping the globe and fueled by human consciousness”.. Teilhard saw the Net coming more than half a century before it arrived. He believed this vast thinking membrane would ultimately coalesce into “the living unity of a single tissue” containing our collective thoughts and experiences.”  Teilhard wrote, “The living world is constituted by consciousness clothed in flesh and bone.“ 

He argued that the primary vehicle for increasing complexity consciousness among living organisms was the nervous system. The informational wiring of a being, he argued - whether of neurons or electronics - gives birth to consciousness. As the diversification of nervous connections increases, evolution is led toward greater consciousness… thoughts?

Richard Doyle: Yes, he also called it this process of the evolution of consciousness “Omega Point”. The noosphere imagined here relied on a change in our relationship to  consciousness as much to any technological change and was part of evolution’s epic quest for self awareness. Here Teilhard is in accord with Julian Huxley (Aldous’ brother, a biologist) and Carl Sagan when they observed that “we are a way for the cosmos to know itself.” Sri Aurobindo’s The Life Divine traces out this evolution of consciousness as well through the greek and Sanskrit traditions as well as Darwinism and (relatively) modern philosophy. All are describing evolution’s slow and dynamic quest towards understanding itself.

“I honestly think we are still grappling with the fact that our minds are distributed across a network by technology, and have been in a feedback loop between our brains and technologies at least since the invention of writing. As each new “mutation” occurs in the history of evolution of information technology, the very character of our minds shifts. McLuhan’s Understanding Media is instructive here as well (he parsed it as the Global Village), and of course McLuhan was the bard who advised Leary on “Tune in, Turn on, Drop Out” and very influential on Terence McKenna.

One difference between now and Plato’s time is the infoquake through which we are all living. This radical increase in quantity no doubt has qualitative effects - it changes what it feels like to think and remember. Plato was working through the effect of one new information technology – writing – whereas today we “upgrade” every six months or so…Teilhard observes the correlative of this evolutionary increase in information - and the sudden thresholds it crosses - in the evolution of complexity and nervous systems. The noosphere is a way of helping us deal with this “phase transition” of consciousness that may well be akin to the phase transition between liquid water and water vapor - a change in degree that effects a change in kind.

Darwin’s Pharmacy suggests that ecodelics were precisely such a mutation in information technology that increased sexually selective fitness through the capacity to process greater amounts of information, and that they are “extraordinarily sensitive to initial rhetorical traditions.” What this means is that because ecodelic experiences are so sensitive to the context in which we experience them, they can help make us aware of the effect of language and music etc on our consciousness, and thereby offer an awareness of our ability to effect our own consciousness through our linguistic and creative choices. This can be helpful when trying to browse the infoquake. Many other practices do so as well - meditation is the most well established practice for noticing the effects we can have on our own consciousness, and Sufi dervishes demonstrate this same outcome for dancing. I do the same on my bicycle, riding up a hill and chanting.

One problem I have with much of the discourse of “memes” is that it is often highly reductionistic - it often forgets that ideas have an ecology too, they must be “cultured.” Here I would argue that drawing on Lawrence Lessig’s work on the commons, the “brain” is a necessary but insufficient “spawning” ground for ideas that becomes actual. The commons is the spawning ground of ideas; brains are pretty obviously social as well as individual. Harvard biologist Richard Lewontin notes that there is no such thing as “self replicating” molecules, since they always require a context to be replicated. This problem goes back at last to computer scientist John Von Neumann’s 1947 paper on Self reproducing automata.

I think Terence McKenna described the condition as “language is loose on planet three”, and its modern version probably occurs first in the work of writer William S. Burroughs, whose notion of the “word virus” predates the “meme” by at least a decade. Then again this notion of “ideas are real” goes back to cosmologies that begin with the priority of consciousness over matter, as in “In the beginning was the word, and the word was god, and the word was with god.” So even Burroughs could get a late pass for his idea. (…)

Q: Richard Dawkin’s definition of a meme is quite powerful: 

“I think that a new kind of replicator has recently emerged on this very planet, […] already achieving evolutionary change at a rate that leaves the old gene panting far behind.” [the replicator is] human culture; the vector of transmission is language, and the spawning ground is the brain.”  

This notion that the ”the vector of transmission is language“ is very compelling.. It seems to suggest that just as in biological evolution the vector of transmission has been the DNA molecule, in the noosphere, the next stage up, it is LANGUAGE that has become a major player in the transfer of information towards achieving evolutionary change.. Kind of affects how you think about the phrase “words have power”. This insight reminds me of a quote that describes, in words, the subjective ecstasy that a mind feels when upon having a transcendent realization that feels as if it advances evolution: 

“A universe of possibilities,

Grey infused by color,

The invisible revealed,

The mundane blown away

by awe” 

Is this what you mean by ‘the ecstasy of language’?

Richard Doyle: Above, I noted that ecodelics can make us aware of the feedback loops between our creative choices – should I eat mushrooms in a box? - Should I eat them with a fox? - and our consciousness. In other words, they can make us aware of the tremendous freedom we have in creating our own experience. Leary called this “internal freedom.” Becoming aware of the practically infinite choices we have to compose our lives, including the words we use to map them, can be overwhelming – we feel in these instances the “vertigo of freedom.” What to do? In ecodelic experience we can perceive the power of our maps. That moment in which we can learn to abide the tremendous creative choice we have, and take responsibility for it, is what I mean by the “ecstasy of language.” 

I would point out, though, that for those words you quote to do their work, they have to be read. The language does not do it “on its own” but as a result of the highly focused attention of readers. This may seem trivial but it is often left out, with some serious consequences. And “reading” can mean “follow up with interpretation”. I cracked up when I googled those lines above and found them in a corporate blog about TED, for example. Who knew that neo-romantic poetry was the emerging interface of the global corporate noosphere? (…)

Q: Buckminster Fuller described humans as “pattern integrities”, Ray Kurzweil says we are ”patterns of information”. James Gleick’s new book, The Information, says that “information may be more primary than matter”..  what do you make of this? And if we indeed are complex patterns, how can we hack the limitations of biology and entropy to preserve our pattern integrity indefinitely? 

Richard Doyle: First: It is important to remember that the history of the concept and tools of “information” is full of blindspots – we seem to be constantly tempted to underestimate the complexity of any given system needed to make any bit of information meaningful or useful. Caitlin, Kolmogorov Stephan Wolfram and John Von Neumann each came independently to the conclusion that information is only meaningful when it is “run” - you can’t predict the outcome of even many trivial programs without running the program. So to say that “information may be more primary than matter” we have to remember that “information” does not mean “free from constraints.” Thermodynamics – including entropy – remains.

Molecular and informatic reductionism – the view that you can best understand the nature of a biological system by cutting it up into the most significant bits, e.g. DNA – is a powerful model that enables us to do things with biological systems that we never could before. Artist Eduardo Kac collaborated with a French scientist to make a bioluminescent bunny. That’s new! But sometimes it is so powerful that we forget its limitations. The history of the human genome project illustrates this well. AND the human genome is incredibly interesting. It’s just not the immortality hack many thought it would be.

In this sense biology is not a limitation to be “transcended” (Kurzweil), but a medium of exploration whose constraints are interesting and sublime. On this scale of ecosystems, “death” is not a “limitation” but an attribute of a highly dynamic interactive system. Death is an attribute of life. Viewing biology as a “limitation” may not be the best way to become healthy and thriving beings.

Now, that said, looking at our characteristics as “patterns of information” can be immensely powerful, and I work with it at the level of consciousness as well as life. Thinking of ourselves as “dynamic patterns of multiply layered and interconnected self transforming information” is just as accurate of a description of human beings as “meaningless noisy monkeys who think they see god”, and is likely to have much better effects. A nice emphasis on this “pattern” rather than the bits that make it up can be found in Carl Sagan’s “The beauty of a living thing is not the atoms that go into it, but the way those atoms are put together.”

Q: Richard Dawkins declared in 1986 that ”What lies at the heart of every living thing is not a fire, not warm breath, not a ‘spark of life.’ It is information, words, instructions, […] If you want to understand life,” Dawkins wrote, “don’t think about vibrant, throbbing gels and oozes, think about information technology.” How would you explain the relationship between information technology and the reality of the physical world?

Richard Doyle: Again, information is indeed physical. We can treat a sequence of information as abstraction and take it out of its context – like a quotation or a jellyfish gene spliced into a rabbit to enable it to glow. We can compress information, dwindling the resources it takes to store or process it. But “Information, words, instructions” all require physical instantiation to even be “information, words, instructions.” Researcher Rolf Landauer showed back in the 1960s that even erasure is physical. So I actually think throbbing gels and oozes and slime mold and bacteria eating away at the garbage gyre are very important when we wish to “understand” life. I actually think Dawkins gets it wrong here – he is talking about “modeling” life, not “understanding” it. Erwin Schrödinger, the originator of the idea of the genetic code and therefore the beginning of the “informatic” tradition of biology that Dawkins speaks in here, knew this very well and insisted on the importance of first person experience for understanding.

So while I find these metaphors useful, that is exactly what they are: metaphors. There is a very long history to the attempt to model words and action together: Again, John 1:1 is closer to Dawkin’s position here than he may be comfortable with: “In the Beginning was the word, and the word was god, and the word was with god” is a way of working with this capacity of language to bring phenomena into being. It is really only because we habitually think of language as “mere words” that we continually forget that they are a manifestation of a physical system and that they have very actual effects not limited to the physics of their utterance – the words “I love you” can have an effect much greater than the amount of energy necessary to utter them. Our experiences are highly tuneable by the language we use to describe them.

Q: Talk about the mycelial archetype. Author Paul Stamet compares the pattern of the mushroom mycelium with the overlapping information-sharing systems that comprise the Internet, with the networked neurons in the brain, and with a computer model of dark matter in the universe. All share this densely intertwingled filamental structure…. what is the connection? what is the pattern that connects here? 

Richard Doyle: First things first: Paul Stamets is a genius and we should listen to his world view carefully and learn from it. Along with Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan, whose work I borrow from extensively in Darwin’s Pharmacy (as well as many others), Stamets is asking us to contemplate and act on the massive interconnection between all forms of life. This is a shift in worldview that is comparable to the Copernican shift from a geocentric cosmos – it is a shift toward interconnection and consciousness of interconnection. And I like how you weave in Gregory Bateson’s phrase “the pattern that connects” here, because Bateson (whose father, William Bateson, was one of the founders of modern genetics) continuously pointed toward the need to develop ways of perceiving the whole. The “mycelial archetype”, as you call it, is a reliable and rather exciting way to recall the whole: What we call “mushrooms” are really the fruiting bodies of an extensive network of cross connection.

That fuzz growing in an open can of tomato paste in your fridge – mycelium. So even opening our refrigerator – should we be lucky enough to have one, with food in it - can remind us that what we take to be reality is is an actuality only appearance – a sliver, albeit a significant one for our world, of the whole. That fuzz can remind us that (1) appearance and reality or not the same thing at all and (2) beyond appearance there is a massive interconnection in unity. This can help remind us who and what we really are. 

With the word ‘archetype”, you of course invoke the psychologist Carl Jung who saw archetypes as templates for understanding, ways of organizing our story of the world. There are many archetypes – the Hero, the Mother, the Trickster, the sage. They are very powerful because they help stitch together what can seem to be a chaotic world – that is both their strength and their weakness. It is a weakness because most of the time we are operating within an archetype and we don’t even know it, and we don’t know therefore that we can change our archetype. 

By experimenting with a different archetype – imagining, for example, the world through the lens of a 2400 year old organism that is mostly invisible to a very short lived and recent species becoming aware of its creative responsibility in altering the planet – is incredibly powerful, and in Darwin’s Pharmacy I am trying to offer a way to experiment with the idea of plant planet as well as “mycelium” archetype. One powerful aspect of the treating the mycelium as our archetype as humanity is that it is “distributed” - it does not operate via a center of control but through cross connection “distributed” over a space.

Anything we can do to remember both our individuation and our interconnection is timely – we experience the world as individuals, and our task is to discover our nature within the larger scale reality of our dense ecological interconnection. In the book I point to the Upanishad’s “Tat Tvam Asi” as a way of comprehending how we can both be totally individual and an aspect of the whole.

Q: You’ve talked about the ecstasy of language and the role of rhetoric in shaping reality.. These notions echo some of Terence McKenna’s ideas about language… He calls language an “ecstatic activity of signification”… and says that for the “inspired one, it is almost as if existence is uttering itself through him”… Can you expand on this? How does language create reality?? 

Richard Doyle: It’s incredibly fun and insightful to echo Terence McKenna. He’s really in this shamanic bard tradition that goes all the back to Empedocles at least, and is distributed widely across the planet. He’s got a bit of Whitman in him with his affirmation of the erotic aspects of enlightenment. He was Emerson speaking to a Lyceum crowd remixed through rave culture. Leary and McKenna were resonating with the irish bard archetype. And Terrence was echoing Henry Munn, who was echoing Maria Sabina, whose chants and poetics can make her seem like Echo herself – a mythological story teller and poet (literally “sound”) who so transfixes Hera (Zeus’s wife) that Zeus can consort with nymphs. Everywhere we look there are allegories of sexual selection’s role in the evolution of poetic & shamanic language! 

And Terrence embodies the spirit of eloquence, helping translate our new technological realities (e.g. virtual reality, a fractal view of nature, radical ecology) and the states of mind that were likely to accompany them. Merlin Donald writes of the effects of “external symbolic storage” on human culture – as a onetime student of McLuhan’s, Donald was following up on Plato’s insights I mentioned above that writing changes how we think, and therefore, who we are. 

Human culture is going through a fantastic “reality crisis” wherein we discover the creative role we play in nature. Our role in global climate change – not to mention our role in dwindling biodiversity – is the “shadow” side of our increasing awareness that humans have a radical creative responsibility for their individual and collective lives. And our lives are inseparable from the ecosystems with which we are enmeshed. THAT is reality. To the extent that we can gather and focus our attention on retuning our relation towards ecosystems in crisis, language can indeed shape reality. We’ll get the future we imagine, not necessarily the one we deserve.

Q: Robert Anton Wilson spoke about “reality tunnels”…. These ‘constructs’ can limit our perspectives and perception of reality, they can trap us, belittle us, enslave us, make us miserable or set us free… How can we hack our reality tunnel?  Is it possible to use rhetoric and/or psychedelics to “reprogram” our reality tunnel? 

Richard Doyle: We do nothing but program and reprogram our reality tunnels! Seriously, the Japanese reactor crisis follows on the BP oil spill as a reminder that we are deeply interconnected on the level of infrastructure – technology is now planetary in scale, so what happens here effects somebody, sometimes Everybody, there. These infrastructures – our food sheds, our energy grid, our global media - run on networks, protocols, global standards, agreements: language, software, images, databases and their mycelial networks.

The historian Michel Foucault called these “discourses”, but we need to connect these discourses to the nonhuman networks with which they are enmeshed, and globalization has been in part about connecting discourses to each other across the planet. Ebola ends up in Virginia, Starbucks in Hong Kong. This has been true for a long time, of course – Mutual Assured Destruction was planetary in scale and required a communication and control structure linking, for example, a Trident submarine under the arctic ice sheet – remember that? - to a putatively civilian political structure Eisenhower rightly warned us about: the military industrial complex. The moon missions illustrate this principle as well – we remember what was said as much as what else was done, and what was said, for a while, seem to induce a sense of truly radical and planetary possibility.

So if we think of words as a description of reality rather than part of the infrastructure of reality, we miss out on the way different linguistic patterns act as catalysts for different realities. I call these “rhetorical softwares”. In my first two books, before I really knew about Wilson’s work or had worked through Korzybski with any intensity, I called these “rhetorical softwares.”

Now the first layer of our reality tunnel is our implicit sense of self – this is the only empirical reality any of us experiences – what we subjectively experience. RAW was a brilliant analyst of the ways experience is shaped by the language we use to describe it. One of my favorite examples from his work is his observation that in English, “reality” is a noun, so we start to treat it as a “thing”, when in fact reality, this cosmos, is also quite well mapped as an action – a dynamic unfolding for 13.7 billion years. That is a pretty big mismatch between language and reality, and can give us a sense that reality is inert, dead, lifeless, “concrete”, and thus not subject to change. By experimenting with what Wilson, following scientist John Lilly, called “metaprograms”, we can change the maps that shape the reality we inhabit. (…)

Q: The film Inception explored the notion that our inner world can be a vivid, experiential dimension, and that we can hack it, and change our reality… what do you make of this? 

Richard Doyle: The whole contemplative tradition insists on this dynamic nature of consciousness. “Inner” and “outer” are models for aspects of reality – words that map the world only imperfectly. Our “inner world” - subjective experience – is all we ever experience, so if we change it obviously we will see a change in what we label “external” reality it is of course part of and not separable from. One of the maps we should experiment with, in my view, is this “inner” and “outer” one – this is why one of my aliases is “mobius.” A mobius strip helps makes clear that “inside” and “outside” are… labels. As you run your finger along a mobius strip, the “inside” becomes “outside” and the “outside” becomes “inside.”.

Q: Can we give put inceptions out into the world?

Richard Doyle: We do nothing but! And, it is crucial to add, so too does the rest of our ecosystem. Bacteria engage in quorum sensing, begin to glow, and induce other bacteria to glow – this puts their inceptions into the world. Thanks to the work of scientists like Anthony Trewavas, we know that plants engage in signaling behavior between and across species and even kingdoms: orchids “throw” images of female wasps into the world, attracting male wasps, root cells map the best path through the soil. The whole blooming confusion of life is signaling, mapping and informing itself into the world. The etymology of “inception” is “to begin, take in hand” - our models and maps are like imagined handholds on a dynamic reality.

Q: What is the relationship between psychedelics and information technology? How are ipods, computers and the internet related to LSD? 

Richard Doyle: This book is part of a trilogy on the history of information in the life sciences. So, first: psychedelics and biology. It turns out that molecular biology and psychedelics were important contexts for each other. I first started noticing this when I found that many people who had taken LSD were talking about their experiences in the language of molecular biology – accessing their DNA and so forth. When I learned that psychedelic experience was very sensitive to “set and setting” - the mindset and context of their use - I wanted to find out how this language of molecular biology was effecting people’s experiences of the compounds. In other words, how did the language affect something supposedly caused by chemistry? 

Tracking the language through thousands of pages, I found that both the discourse of psychedelics and molecular biology were part of the “informatic vision” that was restructuring the life sciences as well as the world, and found common patterns of language in the work of Timothy Leary (the Harvard psychologist) and Francis Crick (who won the Nobel prize with James Watson and Maurice Wilkins for determining the structure of DNA in 1954), so in 2002 I published an article describing the common “language of information” spoken by Leary and Crick. I had no idea that Crick had apparently been using LSD when he was figuring out the structure of DNA. Yes, that blew my mind when it came out in 2004. I feel like I read that between the lines of Crick’s papers, which gave me confidence to write the rest of the book about the feedback between psychedelics and the world we inhabit.

The paper did hone in on the role that LSD played in the invention of PCR (polymerase chain reaction) – Kary Mullis, who won the Nobel prize for the invention of this method of making copies of a sequence of DNA, talked openly of the role that LSD played in the process of invention. Chapter 4 of the book looks to use of LSD in “creative problem solving” studies of the 1960s. These studies – hard to imagine now, 39 years into the War on Drugs, but we can Change the Archetype - suggest that used with care, psychedelics can be part of effective training in remembering how to discern the difference between words and things, maps and territories.

In short, this research suggested that psychedelics were useful for seeing the limitations of words as well as their power, perhaps occasioned by the experience of the linguistic feedback loops between language and psychedelic experiences that themselves could never be satisfactorily described in language. I argue that Mullis had a different conception of information than mainstream molecular biology – a pragmatic concept steeped in what you can do with words rather than in what they mean. Mullis seems to have thought of information as “algorithms” - recipes of code, while the mainsteam view was thinking of it as implicitly semantically, as “words with meaning.”

Ipods, Internet, etc: Well, in some cases there are direct connections. Perhaps Bill Joy said it best when he said that there was a reason that LSD and Unix were both from Berkeley. What the Doormouse Said by John Markoff came out after I wrote my first paper on Mullis and I was working on the book, and it was really confirmation of a lot of what I seeing indicated by my conceptual model of what is going on, which is as follows: Sexual selection is a good way to model the evolution of information technology. It yields bioluminescence – the most common communication strategy on the planet – chirping insects, singing birds, Peacocks fanning their feathers, singing whales, speaking humans, and humans with internet access. These are all techniques of information production, transformation or evaluation. I am persuaded by Geoffrey Miller’s update of Charles Darwin’s argument that language and mind are sexually selected traits, selected not simply for survival or even the representation of fitness, but for their sexiness. Leary: “Intelligence is the greatest aphrodisiac.”

I offer the hypothesis that psychedelics enter the human toolkit as “eloquence adjuncts” - tools and techniques for increasing the efficacy of language to seemingly create reality – different patterns of language ( and other attributes of set and setting) literally causes different experiences. The informatic revolution is about applying this ability to create reality with different “codes” to the machine interface. Perhaps this is one of the reason people like Mitch Kapor (a pioneer of computer spreadsheets), Stewart Brand (founder of a pre-internet computer commons known as the Well) and Bob Wallace (one of the original Microsoft seven and an early proponent of shareware), Mark Pesce were or are all psychonauts.

Q: Cyborg Anthropologist Amber Case has written about Techno-social wormholes.. the instant compression of time and space created every time we make a telephone call…  What do you make of this compression of time and space made possible by the engineering “magic” of technology? 

Richard Doyle:  It’s funny the role that the telephone call plays as an example in the history of our attempts to model the effects of information technologies. William Gibson famously defined cyberspace as the place where a telephone call takes place. (Gibson’s coinage of the term “cyberspace” is a good example of an “inception”) Avital Ronell wrote about Nietzsche’s telephone call to the beyond and interprets the history of philosophy according to a “telephonic logic”. When I was a child my father once threw our telephone into the atlantic ocean – that was what he made of the magic of that technology, at least in one moment of anger. This was back in the day when Bell owned your phone and there was some explaining to do. This magic of compression has other effects – my dad got phone calls all day at work, so when was at home he wanted to turn it off. The only way he knew to turn it off was to rip it out of the wall – there was no modular plug, just a wire into the wall - and throw it into the ocean.

So there is more than compression going on here: Deleuze and Guattari, along with the computer scientist Pierre Levy after them, call it “deterritorialization”. The differences between “here” and “there” are being constantly renegotiated as our technologies of interaction develop. Globalization is the collective effect of these deterritorializations and reterritorializations at any given moment.

And the wormhole example is instructive: the forces that enable such collapse of space and time as the possibility of time travel would likely tear us to smithereens. The tensions and torsions of this deterritorialization at part of what is at play in the Wikileaks revolutions, this compression of time and space offers promise for distributed governance as well as turbulence. Time travel through wormholes, by the way, is another example of an inception – Carl Sagan was looking for a reasonable way to transport his fictional aliens in Contact, called Cal Tech physicist Skip Thorne for help, and Thorne came up with the idea.

Q: The film Vanilla Sky explored the notion of a scientifically-induced “lucid dream” where we can live forever and our world is built out of our memories and ”sculpted moment to moment and lived with the romantic abandon of a summer day or the feeling of a great movie or a pop song you always loved”. Can we sculpt ‘real’ reality as if it were a “lucid dream”? 

Richard Doyle:Some traditions model reality as a lucid dream. The Diamond Sutra tells us that to be enlightened we must view reality as “a phantom, a dew drop, a bubble.”  This does not mean, of course, that reality does not exist, only that appearance has no more persistence than a dream and that what we call “reality” is our map of reality. When we wake up, the dream that had been so compelling is seen to be what it was: a dream, nothing more or less. Dreams do not lack reality – they are real patterns of information. They just aren’t what we usually think they are. Ditto for “ordinary” reality. Lucid dreaming has been practiced by multiple traditions for a long time – we can no doubt learn new ways of doing so. In the meantime, by recognizing and acting according to the practice of looking beyond appearances, we can find perhaps a smidgeon more creative freedom to manifest our intentions in reality.

Q: Paola Antonelli, design curator of MoMa, has written about Existenz Maximum, the ability of portable music devices like the ipod to create”customized realities”, imposing a soundtrack on the movie of our own life. This sounds empowering and godlike- can you expand on this notion? How is technology helping us design every aspect of both our external reality as well as our internal, psychological reality?

Richard Doyle: Well, the Upanishads and the Book of Luke both suggest that we “get our inner Creator on”, the former by suggesting that “Tat Tvam Asi” - there is an aspect of you that is connected to Everything, and the latter by recommending that we look not here or there for the Kingdom of God, but “within.” So if this sounds “god like”, it is part of a long and persistent tradition. I personally find the phrase “customized realities” redundant given the role of our always unique programs and metaprograms. So what we need to focus on his: to which aspect of ourselves do we wish to give this creative power? These customized realities could be enpowering and god like for corporations that own the material, or they could enpower our planetary aspect that unites all of us, and everything in between. It is, as always, the challenge of the magus and the artist to decide how we want to customize reality once we know that we can.

Q: The Imaginary Foundation says that “to understand is to perceive patterns”… Some advocates of psychedelic therapy have said that certain chemicals heighten our perception of patterns..They help! us “see more”.  What exactly are they helping us understand? 

Richard Doyle: Understanding! One of the interesting bits of knowledge that I found in my research was some evidence that psychonauts scored better on the Witkin Embedded Figure test, a putative measure of a human subject’s ability to “distinguish a simple geometrical figure embedded in a complex colored figure.” When we perceive the part within the whole, we can suddenly get context, understanding.

Q: An article pointing to the use of psychedelics as catalysts for breakthrough innovation in silicon valley says that users …

“employ these cognitive catalysts, de-condition their thinking periodically and come up with the really big connectivity ideas arrived at wholly outside the linear steps of argument. These are the gestalt-perceiving, asterism-forming “aha’s!” that connect the dots and light up the sky with a new archetypal pattern.”

This seems to echo what other intellectuals have been saying for ages.  You referred to Cannabis as “an assassin of referentiality, inducing a butterfly effect in thought. Cannabis induces a parataxis wherein sentences resonate together and summon coherence in the bardos between one statement and another.”

Baudelaire also wrote about cannabis as inducing an artificial paradise of thought:  

“…It sometimes happens that people completely unsuited for word-play will improvise an endless string of puns and wholly improbable idea relationships fit to outdo the ablest masters of this preposterous craft. […and eventually]… Every philosophical problem is resolved. Every contradiction is reconciled. Man has surpassed the gods.”

Anthropologist Henry Munn wrote that:

“Intoxicated by the mushrooms, the fluency, the ease, the aptness of expression one becomes capable of are such that one is astounded by the words that issue forth… At times… the words leap to mind, one after another, of themselves without having to be searched for: a phenomenon similar to the automatic dictation of the surrealists except that here the flow of consciousness, rather than being disconnected, tends to be coherent: a rational enunciation of meanings.  The spontaneity they liberate is not only perceptual, but linguistic, the spontaneity of speech, of fervent, lucid discourse, astonishing. […] For the inspired one, it is as if existence were uttering itself through him […]

Can you expand a bit on how certain ecodelics (as well as marijuana) can help us de-condition our thinking, have creative breakthroughs as well as intellectual catharsis? How is it that “intoxication” could, under certain conditions, actually improve our cognition and creativity and contribute to the collective intelligence of the species?

Richard Doyle: I would point, again, to Pahnke’s description of ego death. This is by definition an experience when our maps of the world are humbled. In the breakdown of our ordinary worldview - such as when a (now formerly)  secular being such as myself finds himself  feeling unmistakably sacred - we get a glimpse of reality without our usual filters. It is just not possible to use the old maps, so we get even an involuntary glimpse of reality. This is very close to the Buddhist practice of exhausting linguistic reference through chanting or Koans - suddenly we see the world through something besides our verbal mind.

Ramana Maharshi says that in the silence of the ego we perceive reality - reality IS the breakdown of the ego. Aldous Huxley, who was an extraordinarily adroit and eloquent writer with knowledge of increasingly rare breadth and depth, pointed to a quote by William Blake when trying to sum up his experience: the doors of perception were cleansed. This is a humble act, if you think about it: Huxley, faced with the beauty and grandeur of his mescaline experience, offers the equivalent of ‘What he said!”. Huxley also said that psychedelics offered a respite from “the throttling embrace of the self”, suggesting that we see the world without the usual filters of our egoic self. (…)

And if you look carefully at the studies by pioneers such as Myron Stolaroff and Willis Harman that you reference, as I do in the book, you will see that great care was taken to compose the best contexts for their studies. Subjects, for example, were told not to think about personal problems but to focus on their work at hand, and, astonishingly enough, it seems to have worked. These are very sensitive technologies and we really need much more research to explore their best use. This means more than studying their chemical function - it means studying the complex experiences human beings have with them. Step one has to be accepting that ecodelics are and always have been an integral part of human culture for some subset of the population. (…)

Q: Kevin Kelly refers to technological evolution as following the momentum begun at the big bang - he has stated:

“…there is a continuum, a connection back all the way to the Big Bang with these self-organizing systems that make the galaxies, stars, and life, and now is producing technology in the same way. The energies flowing through these things are, interestingly, becoming more and more dense. If you take the amount of energy that flows through one gram per second in a galaxy, it is increased when it goes through a star, and it is actually increased in life…We don’t realize this. We think of the sun as being a hugely immense amount of energy. Yet the amount of energy running through a sunflower per gram per second of the livelihood, is actually greater than in the sun. Actually, it’s so dense that when it’s multiplied out, the sunflower actually has a higher amount of energy flowing through it. “..

Animals have even higher energy usage than the plant, and a jet engine has even higher than an animal. The most energy-dense thing that we know about in the entire universe is the computer chip in your computer. It is sending more energy per gram per second through that than anything we know. In fact, if it was to send it through any faster, it would melt or explode. It is so energy-dense that it is actually at the edge of explosion.”…  

Can you comment on the implications of what he’s saying here?

Richard Doyle: I think maps of “continuity” are crucial and urgently needed. We can model the world as either “discrete” - made up of parts - or “continuous” - composing a whole - to powerful effect. Both are in this sense true. This is not “relativism” but a corollary of that creative freedom to choose our models that seems to be an attribute of consciousness. The mechanistic worldview extracts, separates and reconnects raw materials, labor and energy in ways that produce astonishing order as well as disorder (entropy).

By mapping the world as discrete – such as the difference between one second and another – and uniform – to a clock, there is no difference between one second and another – we have transformed the planet. Consciousness informed by discrete maps of reality has been an actual geological force in a tiny sliver of time. In so doing, we have have transformed the biosphere. So you can see just how actual this relation between consciousness, its maps, and earthly reality is. This is why Vernadsky, a geophysicist, thought we needed a new term for the way consciousness functions as a geological force: noosphere.

These discrete maps of reality are so powerful that we forget that they are maps. Now if the world can be cut up into parts, it is only because it forms a unity. A Sufi author commented that the unity of the world was both the most obvious and obscure fact. It is obvious because our own lives and the world we inhabit can be seen to continue without any experienced interruption – neither the world nor our lives truly stops and starts. This unity can be obscure because in a literal sense we can’t perceive it with our senses – this unity can only be “perceived” by our minds. We are so effective as separate beings that we forget the whole for the part.

The world is more than a collection of parts, and we can quote Carl Sagan: “The beauty of a living thing is not the atoms that go into it, but the way those atoms are put together.” Equally beautiful is what Sagan follows up with: “The cosmos is also within us. We are made of star stuff.” Perhaps this is why models such as Kelly’s feel so powerful: reminding ourselves that there is a continuity between the Big Bang and ourselves means we are an aspect of something unfathomably grand, beautiful, complex and unbroken. This is perhaps the “grandeur” Darwin was discussing. And when we experience that grandeur it can help us think and act in aways appropriate to a geological force.

I am not sure about the claims for energy that Kelly is making – I would have to see the context and the source of his data – but I do know that when it comes to thermodynamics, what he is saying rings true. We are dissipative structures far from equilibrium, meaning that we fulfill the laws of thermodynamics. Even though biological systems such as ourselves are incredibly orderly – and we export that order through our maps onto and into the world – we also yield more entropy than our absence. Living systems, according to an emerging paradigm of Stanley Salthe, Rob Swenson, the aforementioned Margulis and Sagan, Eric Schneider, James J. kay and others, maximize entropy, and the universe is seeking to dissipate ever greater amounts of entropy.

Order is a way to dissipate yet more energy. We’re thermodynamic beings, so we are always on the prowl for new ways to dissipate energy as heat and create uncertainty (entropy), and consciousness helps us find ever new ways to do so. (In case you are wondering, Consciousness is the organized effort to model reality that yields ever increasing spirals of uncertainty in Deep Time. But you knew that.) It is perhaps in this sense that, again following Carl Sagan, “ We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.” That is pretty great map of continuity.

What I don’t understand in Kelly’s work, and I need to look at with more attention, is the discontinuity he posits between biology and technology. In my view our maps have made us think of technology as different in kind from biology, but the global mycelial web of fungi suggests otherwise, and our current view of technology seems to intensify this sense of separation even as we get interconnected through technology. I prefer Noosphere to what Kelly calls the Technium because it reminds us of the ways we are biologically interconnected with our technosocial realities. Noosphere sprouts from biosphere.

Q: There is this notion of increasing complexity… Yet in a universe where entropy destroys almost everything, here we are, the cutting edge of evolution, taking the reigns and accelerating this emergent complexity.. Kurzweil says that this makes us “very important”: 

“…It turns out that we are central, after all.  Our ability to create models—virtual realities—in our brains, combined with ou modest-looking thumbs, has been sufficient to usher in another form of evolution: technology. That development enabled the persistence of the accelerating pace that started with biological evolution. It will continue until the entire universe is at our fingertips.”   

What do you think?

Richard Doyle: Well, I think from my remarks already you can see that I agree with Kurzweil here and can only suggest that it is for this very reason that we must be very creative, careful and cunning with our models. Do we model the technologies that we are developing according to the effects they will have on the planetary whole? Only rarely, though this is what we are trying to do at the Penn State Center for Nanofutures, as are lots of people involved in Science, Technology and Society as well as engineering education. When we develop technologies - and that is the way psychedelics arrived in modern culture, as technologies -  we must model their effects not only on the individuals who use them, but on the whole of our ecosystem and planetary society.

If our technological models are based on the premise that this is a dead planet – and most of them very much are, one is called all kinds of names if you suggest otherwise - animist, vitalist, Gaian intelligence agent, names I wear with glee – then we will end up with a asymptotically dead planet. Consciousness will, of course, like the Terminator, “Be Back” should we perish, but let us hope that it learns to experiment better with its maps and learns to notice reality just a little bit more. I am actually an optimist on this front and think that a widespread “aha” moment is occurring where there is a collective recognition of the feedback loops that make up our technological & biological evolution.

Again, I don’t know why Kurzweil seems to think that technological evolution is discontinuous with biological evolution – technology is nested within the network of “wetwares” that make it work, and our wetwares are increasingly interconnected with our technological infrastructure, as the meltdowns in Japan demonstrate along with the dependence of many of us – we who are more bacterial than human by dry weight - upon a network of pharmaceuticals and electricity for continued life. The E. coli outbreak in Europe is another case in point – our biological reality is linked with the technological reality of supply chain management. Technological evolution is biological evolution enabled by the maps of reality forged by consciousness. (…)

Whereas technology for many promised the “disenchantment” of the world –the rationalization of this world of the contemplative spirit as everything became a Machine – here was mystical contemplative experience manifesting itself directly within what sociologist Max Weber called the “iron cage of modernity”, Gaia bubbling up through technological “Babylon.”

Now many contemplatives have sought to share their experiences through writing – pages and pages of it. As we interconnect through information technology, we perhaps have the opportunity to repeat this enchanted contemplative experience of radical interconnection on another scale, and through other means. Just say Yes to the Noosphere!”

— Richard Doyle, Professor of English Affiliate Faculty, Information Science and Technology at Pennsylvania State University, in conversation with Jason Silva, Creativity, evolution of mind and the “vertigo of freedom”, Big Think, June 21, 2011. (Illustrations: 1) Randy Mora, Artífices del sonido, 2) Noosphere)

See also:

☞ RoseRose, Google and the Myceliation of Consciousness
☞ Kevin Kelly on Why the Impossible Happens More Often
☞ Luciano Floridi on the future development of the information society
☞ Luciano Floridi on The Digital Revolution as a Fourth Revolution: “P2P does’t mean Pirate to Pirate but Platonist to Platonist”
☞ The Rise of the Conversation Society: information, communication and collaboration
☞ Keen On… James Gleick: Why Cyberspace, As a Mode of Being, Will Never Go Away (TCTV), (video) TechCrunch, Jun 23, 2011
☞ Timothy Leary on cybernetics and a new global culture
☞ Mark Changizi on Humans, Version 3.0.
☞ Cyberspace tag on Lapidarium

Is The World An Idea?

                              
                                                  Plato, Hulton Archive/Getty Images

“Plato was one that made the divide between the world of ideas and the world of the senses explicit. In his famous Allegory of the Cave, he imagined a group of prisoners who had been chained to a cave all their lives; all they could see were shadows projected on a wall, which they conceived as their reality. Unbeknownst to them, a fire behind them illuminated objects and created the shadows they saw, which could be manipulated to deceive them. In contrast, the philosopher could see reality as it truly is, a manifestation of ideas freed from the deception of the senses. In other words, if we want to understand the true nature of reality, we shouldn’t rely on our senses; only ideas are truly pure, freed from the distortions caused by our limited perception of reality.

Plato thus elevated the human mind to a god-like status, given that it can find truth through reason, in particular through the rational construction of ideal “Forms,” which are the essence of all objects we see in reality. For example, all tables share the Form of “tableness,” even if every table is different. The Form is an ideal and, thus, a blueprint of perfection. If I ask you to imagine a circle, the image of a circle you hold in your head is the only perfect circle: any representation of that circle, on paper or on a blackboard, will be imperfect. To Plato, intelligence was the ability to grasp the world of Forms and thus come closer to truth.

Due to its connection with the search for truth, it’s no surprise that Plato’s ideas influenced both scientists and theologians. If the world is made out of Forms, say geometrical forms, reality may be described mathematically, combining the essential forms and their relations to describe the change we see in the world. Thus, by focusing on the essential elements of reality as mathematical objects and their relations we could, perhaps, grasp the ultimate nature of reality and so come closer to timeless truths.

The notion that mathematics is a portal to final truths holds tremendous intellectual appeal and has influenced some of the greatest names in the history of science, from Copernicus, Kepler, Newton, and Einstein to many present-day physicists searching for a final theory of nature based upon a geometrical scaffolding, such as superstring theories. (…)

Taken in context, we can see where modern scientific ideas that relate the ultimate nature of reality to geometry come from. If it’s not God the Geometer anymore, Man the Geometer persists. That this vision offers a major drive to human creativity is undeniable.

We do imagine the universe in our minds, with our minds, and many scientific successes are a byproduct of this vision. Perhaps we should take Nicholas of Cusa,’s advice to heart and remember that whatever we achieve with our minds will be an expression of our own creativity, having little or nothing to do with ultimate truths.”

— Marcelo Gleiser, Brazilian Professor of Natural Philosophy, Physics and Astronomy at Dartmouth College, USA, Is The World An Idea?, NPR, March 7, 2012.

See also:

☞ Cognition, perception, relativity tag on Lapidarium notes

What are memories made of?


“There appears to be no single memory store, but instead a diverse taxonomy of memory systems, each with its own special circuitry evolved to package and retrieve that type of memory. Memories are not static entities; over time they shift and migrate between different territories of the brain.

At the top of the taxonomical tree, a split occurs between declarative and non-declarative memories. Declarative memories are those you can state as true or false, such as remembering whether you rode a bicycle to work. Non-declarative memories are those that cannot be described as true or false, such as knowing how to ride a bicycle. A central hub in the declarative memory system is a brain region called the hippocampus. This undulating, twisted structure gets its name from its resemblance to a sea horse. Destruction of the hippocampus, through injury, neurosurgery or the ravages of Alzheimer’s disease, can result in an amnesia so severe that no events experienced after the damage can be remembered. (…)

A popular view is that during sleep your hippocampus “broadcasts” its recently captured memories to the neocortex, which updates your long-term store of past experience and knowledge. Eventually the neocortex is sufficient to support recall without relying on the hippocampus. However, there is evidence that if you need to vividly picture a scene in your mind, this appears to require the hippocampus, no matter how old the memory. We have recently discovered that the hippocampus is not only needed to reimagine the past, but also to imagine the future.

Pattern completion

Studying patients has taught us where memories might be stored, but not what physically constitutes a memory. The answer lies in the multitude of tiny modifiable connections between neuronal cells, the information-processing units of the brain. These cells, with their wispy tree-like protrusions, hang like stars in miniature galaxies and pulse with electrical charge. Thus, your memories are patterns inscribed in the connections between the millions of neurons in your brain. Each memory has its unique pattern of activity, logged in the vast cellular network every time a memory is formed.

It is thought that during recall of past events the original activity pattern in the hippocampus is re-established via a process that is known as “pattern completion”. During this process, the initial activity of the cells is incoherent, but via repeated reactivation the activity pattern is pieced together until the original pattern is complete. Memory retention is helped by the presence of two important molecules in our brain: dopamine and acetylcholine. Both help the neurons improve their ability to lay down memories in their connections. Sometimes, however, the system fails, leaving us unable to bring elements of the past to mind.

Of all the things we need to remember, one of the most essential is where we are. Becoming lost is debilitating and potentially terrifying. Within the hippocampus, and neighbouring brain structures, neurons exist that allow us to map space and find our way through it. “Place cells” provide an internal map of space; “head-direction cell” signal the direction we are facing, similar to an internal compass; and “grid cells” chart out space in a manner akin to latitude and longitude.

For licensed London taxi drivers, it appears that navigating the labyrinth of London’s streets on a daily basis causes the density of grey matter in their posterior hippocampus to increase. Thus, the physical structure of your brain is malleable, depending on what you learn.

With impressive technical advances such as optogenetics, in which light beams excite or silence targeted groups of neurons, scientists are beginning to control memories at an unprecedented level.”

— Hugo Spiers is a neuroscientist and lecturer at the institute of behavioural neuroscience at University College London, What are memories made of?, The Guardian, Jan 14, 2012 (Illustration: Polly Becker)

How and why memories change

“Since the time of the ancient Greeks, people have imagined memories to be a stable form of information that persists reliably. The metaphors for this persistence have changed over time—Plato compared our recollections to impressions in a wax tablet, and the idea of a biological hard drive is popular today—but the basic model has not. Once a memory is formed, we assume that it will stay the same. This, in fact, is why we trust our recollections. They feel like indelible portraits of the past.

None of this is true. In the past decade, scientists have come to realize that our memories are not inert packets of data and they don’t remain constant. Even though every memory feels like an honest representation, that sense of authenticity is the biggest lie of all. (…)

New research is showing that every time we recall an event, the structure of that memory in the brain is altered in light of the present moment, warped by our current feelings and knowledge. (…)

This new model of memory isn’t just a theory—neuroscientists actually have a molecular explanation of how and why memories change. In fact, their definition of memory has broadened to encompass not only the cliché cinematic scenes from childhood but also the persisting mental loops of illnesses like PTSD and addiction—and even pain disorders like neuropathy. Unlike most brain research, the field of memory has actually developed simpler explanations. Whenever the brain wants to retain something, it relies on just a handful of chemicals. Even more startling, an equally small family of compounds could turn out to be a universal eraser of history, a pill that we could take whenever we wanted to forget anything. (…)

How memory is formed

Every memory begins as a changed set of connections among cells in the brain. If you happen to remember this moment—the content of this sentence—it’s because a network of neurons has been altered, woven more tightly together within a vast electrical fabric. This linkage is literal: For a memory to exist, these scattered cells must become more sensitive to the activity of the others, so that if one cell fires, the rest of the circuit lights up as well.

Scientists refer to this process as long-term potentiation, and it involves an intricate cascade of gene activations and protein synthesis that makes it easier for these neurons to pass along their electrical excitement. Sometimes this requires the addition of new receptors at the dendritic end of a neuron, or an increase in the release of the chemical neurotransmitters that nerve cells use to communicate. Neurons will actually sprout new ion channels along their length, allowing them to generate more voltage. Collectively this creation of long-term potentiation is called the consolidation phase, when the circuit of cells representing a memory is first linked together. Regardless of the molecular details, it’s clear that even minor memories require major work. The past has to be wired into your hardware. (…)

What happens after a memory is formed, when we attempt to access it?

The secret was the timing: If new proteins couldn’t be created during the act of remembering, then the original memory ceased to exist. The erasure was also exceedingly specific. (…) They forgot only what they’d been forced to remember while under the influence of the protein inhibitor.

The disappearance of the fear memory suggested that every time we think about the past we are delicately transforming its cellular representation in the brain, changing its underlying neural circuitry. It was a stunning discovery: Memories are not formed and then pristinely maintained, as neuroscientists thought; they are formed and then rebuilt every time they’re accessed. “The brain isn’t interested in having a perfect set of memories about the past,” LeDoux says. “Instead, memory comes with a natural updating mechanism, which is how we make sure that the information taking up valuable space inside our head is still useful. That might make our memories less accurate, but it probably also makes them more relevant to the future.” (…)

[Donald] Lewis had discovered what came to be called memory reconsolidation, the brain’s practice of re-creating memories over and over again. (…)

The science of reconsolidation suggests that the memory is less stable and trustworthy than it appears. Whenever I remember the party, I re-create the memory and alter its map of neural connections. Some details are reinforced—my current hunger makes me focus on the ice cream—while others get erased, like the face of a friend whose name I can no longer conjure. The memory is less like a movie, a permanent emulsion of chemicals on celluloid, and more like a play—subtly different each time it’s performed. In my brain, a network of cells is constantly being reconsolidated, rewritten, remade. That two-letter prefix changes everything. (…)

Once you start questioning the reality of memory, things fall apart pretty quickly. So many of our assumptions about the human mind—what it is, why it breaks, and how it can be healed—are rooted in a mistaken belief about how experience is stored in the brain. (According to a recent survey, 63 percent of Americans believe that human memory “works like a video camera, accurately recording the events we see and hear so that we can review and inspect them later.”) We want the past to persist, because the past gives us permanence. It tells us who we are and where we belong. But what if your most cherished recollections are also the most ephemeral thing in your head? (…)

Reconsolidation provides a mechanistic explanation for these errors. It’s why eyewitness testimony shouldn’t be trusted (even though it’s central to our justice system), why every memoir should be classified as fiction, and why it’s so disturbingly easy to implant false recollections. (The psychologist Elizabeth Loftus has repeatedly demonstrated that nearly a third of subjects can be tricked into claiming a made-up memory as their own. It takes only a single exposure to a new fiction for it to be reconsolidated as fact.) (…)

When we experience a traumatic event, it gets remembered in two separate ways. The first memory is the event itself, that cinematic scene we can replay at will. The second memory, however, consists entirely of the emotion, the negative feelings triggered by what happened. Every memory is actually kept in many different parts of the brain. Memories of negative emotions, for instance, are stored in the amygdala, an almond-shaped area in the center of the brain. (Patients who have suffered damage to the amygdala are incapable of remembering fear.) By contrast, all the relevant details that comprise the scene are kept in various sensory areas—visual elements in the visual cortex, auditory elements in the auditory cortex, and so on. That filing system means that different aspects can be influenced independently by reconsolidation.

The larger lesson is that because our memories are formed by the act of remembering them, controlling the conditions under which they are recalled can actually change their content. (…)

The chemistry of the brain is in constant flux, with the typical neural protein lasting anywhere from two weeks to a few months before it breaks down or gets reabsorbed. How then do some of our memories seem to last forever? It’s as if they are sturdier than the mind itself. Scientists have narrowed down the list of molecules that seem essential to the creation of long-term memory—sea slugs and mice without these compounds are total amnesiacs—but until recently nobody knew how they worked. (…)

A form of protein kinase C called PKMzeta hangs around synapses, the junctions where neurons connect, for an unusually long time. (…) What does PKMzeta do? The molecule’s crucial trick is that it increases the density of a particular type of sensor called an AMPA receptor on the outside of a neuron. It’s an ion channel, a gateway to the interior of a cell that, when opened, makes it easier for adjacent cells to excite one another. (While neurons are normally shy strangers, struggling to interact, PKMzeta turns them into intimate friends, happy to exchange all sorts of incidental information.) This process requires constant upkeep—every long-term memory is always on the verge of vanishing. As a result, even a brief interruption of PKMzeta activity can dismantle the function of a steadfast circuit. (…)

Because of the compartmentalization of memory in the brain—the storage of different aspects of a memory in different areas—the careful application of PKMzeta synthesis inhibitors and other chemicals that interfere with reconsolidation should allow scientists to selectively delete aspects of a memory. (…)

The astonishing power of PKMzeta forces us to redefine human memory. While we typically think of memories as those facts and events from the past that stick in the brain, Sacktor’s research suggests that memory is actually much bigger and stranger than that. (…)

Being able to control memory doesn’t simply give us admin access to our brains. It gives us the power to shape nearly every aspect of our lives. There’s something terrifying about this. Long ago, humans accepted the uncontrollable nature of memory; we can’t choose what to remember or forget. But now it appears that we’ll soon gain the ability to alter our sense of the past. (…)

The fact is we already tweak our memories—we just do it badly. Reconsolidation constantly alters our recollections, as we rehearse nostalgias and suppress pain. We repeat stories until they’re stale, rewrite history in favor of the winners, and tamp down our sorrows with whiskey. “Once people realize how memory actually works, a lot of these beliefs that memory shouldn’t be changed will seem a little ridiculous,” Nader says. “Anything can change memory. This technology isn’t new. It’s just a better version of an existing biological process.” (…)

— Jonah Lehrer, American author and journalist, The Forgetting Pill Erases Painful Memories Forever, Wired Magazine, Feb 17, 2012. (Third illustration: Dwight Eschliman)

“You could double the number of synaptic connections in a very simple neurocircuit as a result of experience and learning. The reason for that was that long-term memory alters the expression of genes in nerve cells, which is the cause of the growth of new synaptic connections. When you see that at the cellular level, you realize that the brain can change because of experience. It gives you a different feeling about how nature and nurture interact. They are not separate processes.”

— Eric R. Kandel, American neuropsychiatrist, Nobel Prize laureate, A Quest to Understand How Memory Works, NYT, March 5, 2012

Prof. Eric Kandel: We Are What We Remember - Memory and Biology

— Eric R. Kandel, American neuropsychiatrist, Nobel Prize laureate, We Are What We Remember: Memory and Biology, FORA.tv, Prohansky Auditorium New York, NY, Mar 28.2011

See also:

☞ Eric R. Kandel, The Biology of Memory: A Forty-Year Perspective (pdf), Department of Neuroscience, Columbia University, New York, 2009
☞ Eric R. Kandel, A Biological Basis for the Unconscious?, Eric Kandel: “I want to know where the id, the ego, and the super-ego are located in the brain” | Big Think video Apr 1, 2012.
☞ Memory tag on Lapidarium notes

A risk-perception: What You Don’t Know Can Kill You

“Humans have a perplexing 
tendency to fear rare threats such as shark attacks while blithely 
ignoring far greater risks like 
unsafe sex and an unhealthy diet. Those illusions are not just 
silly—they make the world a more dangerous place. (…)

We like to think that humans are supremely logical, making decisions on the basis of hard data and not on whim. For a good part of the 19th and 20th centuries, economists and social scientists assumed this was true too. The public, they believed, would make rational decisions if only it had the right pie chart or statistical table. But in the late 1960s and early 1970s, that vision of homo economicus—a person who acts in his or her best interest when given accurate information—was knee­capped by researchers investigating the emerging field of risk perception. What they found, and what they have continued teasing out since the early 1970s, is that humans have a hell of a time accurately gauging risk. Not only do we have two different systems—logic and instinct, or the head and the gut—that sometimes give us conflicting advice, but we are also at the mercy of deep-seated emotional associations and mental shortcuts. (…)

Our hardwired gut reactions developed in a world full of hungry beasts and warring clans, where they served important functions. Letting the amygdala (part of the brain’s emotional core) take over at the first sign of danger, milliseconds before the neocortex (the thinking part of the brain) was aware a spear was headed for our chest, was probably a very useful adaptation. Even today those nano-pauses and gut responses save us from getting flattened by buses or dropping a brick on our toes. But in a world where risks are presented in parts-per-billion statistics or as clicks on a Geiger counter, our amygdala is out of its depth.

A risk-perception apparatus permanently tuned for avoiding mountain lions makes it unlikely that we will ever run screaming from a plate of fatty mac ’n’ cheese. “People are likely to react with little fear to certain types of objectively dangerous risk that evolution has not prepared them for, such as guns, hamburgers, automobiles, smoking, and unsafe sex, even when they recognize the threat at a cognitive level,” says Carnegie Mellon University researcher George Loewenstein, whose seminal 2001 paper, “Risk as Feelings,” debunked theories that decision making in the face of risk or uncertainty relies largely on reason. “Types of stimuli that people are evolutionarily prepared to fear, such as caged spiders, snakes, or heights, evoke a visceral response even when, at a cognitive level, they are recognized to be harmless,” he says. Even Charles Darwin failed to break the amygdala’s iron grip on risk perception. As an experiment, he placed his face up against the puff adder enclosure at the London Zoo and tried to keep himself from flinching when the snake struck the plate glass. He failed.

The result is that we focus on the one-in-a-million bogeyman while virtually ignoring the true risks that inhabit our world. News coverage of a shark attack can clear beaches all over the country, even though sharks kill a grand total of about one American annually, on average. That is less than the death count from cattle, which gore or stomp 20 Americans per year. Drowning, on the other hand, takes 3,400 lives a year, without a single frenzied call for mandatory life vests to stop the carnage. A whole industry has boomed around conquering the fear of flying, but while we down beta-blockers in coach, praying not to be one of the 48 average annual airline casualties, we typically give little thought to driving to the grocery store, even though there are more than 30,000 automobile fatalities each year.

In short, our risk perception is often at direct odds with reality. All those people bidding up the cost of iodide? They would have been better off spending $10 on a radon testing kit. The colorless, odorless, radioactive gas, which forms as a by-product of natural uranium decay in rocks, builds up in homes, causing lung cancer. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, radon exposure kills 21,000 Americans annually.

David Ropeik, a consultant in risk communication and the author of How Risky Is It, Really? Why Our Fears Don’t Always Match the Facts, has dubbed this disconnect the perception gap. “Even perfect information perfectly provided that addresses people’s concerns will not convince everyone that vaccines don’t cause autism, or that global warming is real, or that fluoride in the drinking water is not a Commie plot,” he says. “Risk communication can’t totally close the perception gap, the difference between our fears and the facts.”

In the early 1970s, psychologists Daniel Kahneman, now at Princeton University, and Amos Tversky, who passed away in 1996, began investigating the way people make decisions, identifying a number of biases and mental shortcuts, or heuristics, on which the brain relies to make choices. Later, Paul Slovic and his colleagues Baruch Fischhoff, now a professor of social sciences at Carnegie Mellon University, and psychologist Sarah Lichtenstein began investigating how these leaps of logic come into play when people face risk. They developed a tool, called the psychometric paradigm, that describes all the little tricks our brain uses when staring down a bear or deciding to finish the 18th hole in a lighting storm.

Many of our personal biases are unsurprising. For instance, the optimism bias gives us a rosier view of the future than current facts might suggest. We assume we will be richer 10 years from now, so it is fine to blow our savings on a boat—we’ll pay it off then. Confirmation bias leads us to prefer information that backs up our current opinions and feelings and to discount information contradictory to those opinions. We also have tendencies to conform our opinions to those of the groups we identify with, to fear man-made risks more than we fear natural ones, and to believe that events causing dread—the technical term for risks that could result in particularly painful or gruesome deaths, like plane crashes and radiation burns—are inherently more risky than other events.

But it is heuristics—the subtle mental strategies that often give rise to such biases—that do much of the heavy lifting in risk perception. The “availability” heuristic says that the easier a scenario is to conjure, the more common it must be. It is easy to imagine a tornado ripping through a house; that is a scene we see every spring on the news, and all the time on reality TV and in movies. Now try imagining someone dying of heart disease. You probably cannot conjure many breaking-news images for that one, and the drawn-out process of athero­sclerosis will most likely never be the subject of a summer thriller. The effect? Twisters feel like an immediate threat, although we have only a 1-in-46,000 chance of being killed by a cataclysmic storm. Even a terrible tornado season like the one last spring typically yields fewer than 500 tornado fatalities. Heart disease, on the other hand, which eventually kills 1 in every 6 people in this country, and 800,000 annually, hardly even rates with our gut. (…)

All the mental rules of thumb and biases banging around in our brain, the most influential in assessing risk is the “affect” heuristic. Slovic calls affect a “faint whisper of emotion” that creeps into our decisions. Simply put, positive feelings associated with a choice tend to make us think it has more benefits. Negative correlations make us think an action is riskier. One study by Slovic showed that when people decide to start smoking despite years of exposure to antismoking campaigns, they hardly ever think about the risks. Instead, it’s all about the short-term “hedonic” pleasure. The good outweighs the bad, which they never fully expect to experience.

Our fixation on illusory threats at the expense of real ones influences more than just our personal lifestyle choices. Public policy and mass action are also at stake. The Office of National Drug Control Policy reports that prescription drug overdoses have killed more people than crack and heroin combined did in the 1970s and 1980s. Law enforcement and the media were obsessed with crack, yet it was only recently that prescription drug abuse merited even an after-school special.

Despite the many obviously irrational ways we behave, social scientists have only just begun to systematically document and understand this central aspect of our nature. In the 1960s and 1970s, many still clung to the homo economicus model. They argued that releasing detailed information about nuclear power and pesticides would convince the public that these industries were safe. But the information drop was an epic backfire and helped spawn opposition groups that exist to this day. Part of the resistance stemmed from a reasonable mistrust of industry spin. Horrific incidents like those at Love Canal and Three Mile Island did not help. Yet one of the biggest obstacles was that industry tried to frame risk purely in terms of data, without addressing the fear that is an instinctual reaction to their technologies.

The strategy persists even today. In the aftermath of Japan’s nuclear crisis, many nuclear-energy boosters were quick to cite a study commissioned by the Boston-based nonprofit Clean Air Task Force. The study showed that pollution from coal plants is responsible for 13,000 premature deaths and 20,000 heart attacks in the United States each year, while nuclear power has never been implicated in a single death in this country. True as that may be, numbers alone cannot explain away the cold dread caused by the specter of radiation. Just think of all those alarming images of workers clad in radiation suits waving Geiger counters over the anxious citizens 
of Japan. Seaweed, anyone? (…)

All that media created a sort of feedback loop. Because people were seeing so many sharks on television and reading about them, the “availability” heuristic was screaming at them that sharks were an imminent threat.

“Certainly anytime we have a situation like that where there’s such overwhelming media attention, it’s going to leave a memory in the population,” says George Burgess, curator of the International Shark Attack File at the Florida Museum of Natural History, who fielded 30 to 40 media calls a day that summer. “Perception problems have always been there with sharks, and there’s a continued media interest in vilifying them. It makes a situation where the risk perceptions of the populace have to be continually worked on to break down stereotypes. Anytime there’s a big shark event, you take a couple steps backward, which requires scientists and conservationists to get the real word out.”

Then again, getting out the real word comes with its own risks—like the risk of getting the real word wrong. Misinformation is especially toxic to risk perception because it can reinforce generalized confirmation biases and erode public trust in scientific data. As scientists studying the societal impact of the Chernobyl meltdown have learned, doubt is difficult to undo. In 2006, 20 years after reactor number 4 at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant was encased in cement, the World Health Organization (WHO) and the International Atomic Energy Agency released a report compiled by a panel of 100 scientists on the long-term health effects of the level 7 nuclear disaster and future risks for those exposed. Among the 600,000 recovery workers and local residents who received a significant dose of radiation, the WHO estimates that up to 4,000 of them, or 0.7 percent, will develop a fatal cancer related to Chernobyl. For the 5 million people living in less contaminated areas of Ukraine, Russia, and Belarus, radiation from the meltdown is expected to increase cancer rates less than 1 percent. (…)

During the year following the September 11 attacks, millions of Americans opted out of air travel and slipped behind the wheel instead. While they crisscrossed the country, listening to breathless news coverage of anthrax attacks, extremists, and Homeland Security, they faced a much more concrete risk. All those extra cars on the road increased traffic fatalities by nearly 1,600. Airlines, on the other hand, recorded no fatalities.

It is unlikely that our intellect can ever paper over our gut reactions to risk. But a fuller understanding of the science is beginning to percolate into society. Earlier this year, David Ropeik and others hosted a conference on risk in Washington, D.C., bringing together scientists, policy makers, and others to discuss how risk perception and communication impact society. “Risk perception is not emotion and reason, or facts and feelings. It’s both, inescapably, down at the very wiring of our brain,” says Ropeik. “We can’t undo this. What I heard at that meeting was people beginning to accept this and to realize that society needs to think more holistically about what risk means.”

Ropeik says policy makers need to stop issuing reams of statistics and start making policies that manipulate our risk perception system instead of trying to reason with it. Cass Sunstein, a Harvard law professor who is now the administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, suggests a few ways to do this in his book Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness, published in 2008. He points to the organ donor crisis in which thousands of people die each year because others are too fearful or uncertain to donate organs. People tend to believe that doctors won’t work as hard to save them, or that they won’t be able to have an open-
casket funeral (both false). And the gory mental images of organs being harvested from a body give a definite negative affect to the exchange. As a result, too few people focus on the lives that could be saved. Sunstein suggests—controversially—“mandated choice,” in which people must check “yes” or “no” to organ donation on their driver’s license application. Those with strong feelings can decline. Some lawmakers propose going one step further and presuming that people want to donate their organs unless they opt out.

In the end, Sunstein argues, by normalizing organ donation as a routine medical practice instead of a rare, important, and gruesome event, the policy would short-circuit our fear reactions and nudge us toward a positive societal goal. It is this type of policy that Ropeik is trying to get the administration to think about, and that is the next step in risk perception and risk communication. “Our risk perception is flawed enough to create harm,” he says, “but it’s something society can do something about.””

— Jason Daley, What You Don’t Know Can Kill You, Discover Magazine, Oct 3, 2011. (Illustration: SteveCarroll, The Economist)

See also:

☞ Daniel Kahneman on thinking ‘Fast And Slow’: How We Aren’t Made For Making Decisions
☞ Daniel Kahneman: The Marvels and the Flaws of Intuitive Thinking
☞ Dean Buonomano on ‘Brain Bugs’ - Cognitive Flaws That ‘Shape Our Lives’
☞ Daniel Kahneman: How cognitive illusions blind us to reason, The Observer, 30 October 2011 
☞ Daniel Kahneman on the riddle of experience vs. memory
☞ The irrational mind - David Brooks on the role of emotions in politics, policy, and life

Do thoughts have a language of their own? The language of thought hypothesis

            
                                      The language of thought drawing by Robert Horvitz

“We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native languages. The categories and types that we isolate from the world of phenomena we do not find there because they stare the observer in the face; on the contrary, the world is presented in a kaleidoscopic flux of impressions which has to be organized by our minds-and this means largely by the linguistic systems of our minds.”

— Benjamin Lee Whorf, American linguist (1897-1941), 1956, p. 213, cited in Does language determine thought? Boroditsky’s (2001) research on Chinese speakers’ conception of time (pdf)

“The mind thinks its thoughts in ‘Mentalese,’ codes them in the localnatural language, and then transmits them (say, by speaking them out loud) to the hearer. The hearer has a Cryptographer in his head too, of course, who thereupon proceeds to decode the ‘message.’ In this picture, natural language, far from being essential to thought, is merely a vehicle for the communication of thought.”

— Hilary Putnam, American philosopher, mathematician and computer scientist, Representation and reality, A Bradford Book, 1991, p. 10-11.

“According to one school of philosophy, our thoughts have a language-like structure that is independent of natural language: this is what students of language call the language of thought (LOT) hypothesis. According to the LOT hypothesis, it is because human thoughts already have a linguistic structure that the emergence of common, natural languages was possible in the first place. (…)

Many - perhaps most - psychologists end up concluding that ordinary people do not use the rules of logic in everyday life.

There is an alternative way of seeing this: that there is a language of thought, and that it has a more logical form than ordinary natural language. This view has an added bonus: it tells us that, if you want to express yourself more clearly and more effectively in natural language, then you should express yourself in a form that is closer to computational logic - and therefore closer to the language of thought. Dry legalese never looked so good.”

— Robert Kowalski, British logician and computer scientist, Do thoughts have a language of their own?, New Scientist, 8 Dec 2011

“In philosophy of mind, the language of thought hypothesis (LOTH) put forward by American philosopher Jerry Fodor describes thoughts as represented in a “language” (sometimes known as mentalese) that allows complex thoughts to be built up by combining simpler thoughts in various ways. In its most basic form the theory states that thought follows the same rules as language: thought has syntax.

Using empirical data drawn from linguistics and cognitive science to describe mental representation from a philosophical vantage-point, the hypothesis states that thinking takes place in a language of thought (LOT): cognition and cognitive processes are only ‘remotely plausible’ when expressed as a system of representations that is “tokened” by a linguistic or semantic structure and operated upon by means of a combinatorial syntax. Linguistic tokens used in mental language describe elementary concepts which are operated upon by logical rules establishing causal connections to allow for complex thought. Syntax as well as semantics have a causal effect on the properties of this system of mental representations.

These mental representations are not present in the brain in the same way as symbols are present on paper; rather, the LOT is supposed to exist at the cognitive level, the level of thoughts and concepts. LOTH has wide-ranging significance for a number of domains in cognitive science. It relies on a version of functionalist materialism, which holds that mental representations are actualized and modified by the individual holding the propositional attitude, and it challenges eliminative materialism and connectionism. It implies a strongly rationalist model of cognition in which many of the fundamentals of cognition are innate. (…)

Some philosophers have argued that our public language is our mental language, that a person who speaks English thinks in English. Others contend that people who do not know a public language (e.g. babies, aphasics) can think, and that therefore some form of mentalese must be present innately. (…)

Tim Crane, in his book The Mechanical Mind, states that, while he agrees with Fodor, his reason is very different. A logical objection challenges LOTH’s explanation of how sentences in natural languages get their meaning. That is the view that “Snow is white” is TRUE if and only if P is TRUE in the LOT, where P means the same thing in LOT as “Snow is white” means in the natural language. Any symbol manipulation is in need of some way of deriving what those symbols mean. If the meaning of sentences is explained in terms of sentences in the LOT, then the meaning of sentences in LOT must get their meaning from somewhere else. There seems to be an infinite regress of sentences getting their meaning. Sentences in natural languages get their meaning from their users (speakers, writers).  Therefore sentences in mentalese must get their meaning from the way in which they are used by thinkers and so on ad infinitum. This regress is often called the homunculus regress.

Daniel Dennett accepts that homunculi may be explained by other homunculi and denies that this would yield an infinite regress of homunculi. Each explanatory homunculus is “stupider” or more basic than the homunculus it explains but this regress is not infinite but bottoms out at a basic level that is so simple that it does not need interpretation. John Searle points out that it still follows that the bottom-level homunculi are manipulating some sorts of symbols.

LOTH implies that the mind has some tacit knowledge of the logical rules of inference and the linguistic rules of syntax (sentence structure) and semantics (concept or word meaning). If LOTH cannot show that the mind knows that it is following the particular set of rules in question then the mind is not computational because it is not governed by computational rules. Also, the apparent incompleteness of this set of rules in explaining behavior is pointed out. Many conscious beings behave in ways that are contrary to the rules of logic. Yet this irrational behavior is not accounted for by any rules, showing that there is at least some behavior that does not act in accordance with this set of rules.”

— Wiki

Inner Speech as a Language

“A definition of language is always, implicitly or explicitly, a definition of human beings in the world.”

— Raymond Williams, Welsh academic, novelist and critic (1921-1988)

“A set (finite or infinite) of sentences, each finite in length and constructed out of a finite set of elements.”

— Noam Chomsky, American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist

“People often talk silently to themselves, engaging in what is called inner speech, internal conversation, inner dialogue, self talk and so on. This seems to be an inherent characteristic of human beings, commented on as early as Plato, who regarded thought as inner speech. The American pragmatists thought the inner dialogue was the defining feature of the self. For them the self is an internal community or network, communicating within itself in a field of meaning.

The idea that ordinary language is the language of thought however is not the only linquistic theory of thought. Since Saint Augustine there has been the idea that thought is itself a language of pure abstractions. This “mental language” as it was called differs from ordinary language by consisting solely of meanings, i.e. as signifieds without signifiers to use Saussure’s language (Ashworth 2003). This hypothesis peaked in the writings of William of Occam and declined when Hobbes introduced a purely computational, hedonistic theory of thought (Normore 2005).

A second competitor to the ordinary language theory of thought is the “mentalese” hypothesis of Noam Chomsky (1968) and Jerry Fodor (1975). This approach, which sometimes uses the computer as a metaphor for the mind, resembles the Scholastic’s theory in envisioning a purely abstract language of thought. Whatever processes of ordinary language might accompany it are viewed as epiphenomenal, gloss or what might be called “fluff.” Ordinary language, according to this view, is a pale shadow of the actual language of thought. In addition mentalese is regarded as both innate and unconscious. It is a faculty that is claimed to be present at birth and one which operates below the awareness of the mind.

There are then three language of thought hypotheses, the ordinary language or inner speech version, the now marginalized Augustine-Occam mental language and the computer-based, Chomsky-Fodor theory of mentalese. There seem to be no comparisons of the Scholastic and the mentalese theories except in Panaccio (1992, pp. 267–272). However there is a vigorous debate between the ordinary language theory and that of mentalese (for two collections see Carruthers and Boucher 1998 and Preston 1997). A major weak spot of mentalese is that, being unconscious, there is no empirical way of verifying it. The weak spot of the inner speech approach is that there are several examples of non-linguistic thought, e.g. in infants, animals, brain damaged people and ordinary people under conditions of high speed thought.

Still, all three of these language of thought hypotheses are alive and under
discussion in contemporary thought. (…) [p.319]

I will argue that inner speech is even more referential than outer speech in some respects, but also even more differential in other respects. In other words its semantic system is polarized between the differential and the referential.

Considering the peculiarities of inner speech, I think its vocabulary would be more differentially defined, i.e. more “structural”, than outer speech. First let me recall the special qualities of inner speech as silent, elliptical, embedded and egocentric. These qualities make it relatively private, both in the words and their meanings. And these privacy walls push things together, creating links and dependencies among the words.

Let us take the analogy of an intimate relationship, one that has some degree of deviance, with consequent secrecy. The mini culture of the relationship tends, due to secrecy, to be cut off from society at large. This culture gets isolated. There is the relationship time, the place, the transportation, the talk, the rituals, etc. The relationship elements are cut off from the outside world, and they inevitably share in that “relationship” feeling. They also imply each other, causally, sequentially, symbolically, etc. The relationship meanings are defined more differentially than, perhaps, items in a less deviant relationship. It is the privacy that melds things
together.

This internal language though is not only solitary and private, it is also much more self styled than outer language. Ordinary language has a smoothed over or idealized version, which Saussure refered to as language or “langue.” And it also has a more stylized, idiosyncratic version. This is its spoken variety, which Saussure referred to as parole or speech. Parole is more heterogeneous than langue, given that the speaking process reflects the unique mentalities of individuals and sub-cultures.

But by the same logic inner speech is even more individualized and heterogeneous than outer speech. Your spoken or outer speech is somewhat different from mine, and both are different from purified or formalized language. But your inner speech, given its elliptical, embedded and egocentric qualities, is even more different from mine, and both are quite different from the outer langue. In other words the gap between outer langue and inner speech is greater than that between outer langue and outer speech.

The peculiarities of inner speech are so stitched into the psyche, so personalitydependent, that they differ considerably from person to person. This does not seem to be primarily a reference-driven variation, for everyone’s inner speech has roughly the same, generic world of reference. The variation in the internal dialogue is largely due to the personal qualities of the speaker, to that person’s particular ego needs and short cuts.

We are little gods in the world of inner speech. We are the only ones, we run the show, we are the boss. This world is almost a little insane, for it lacks the usual social controls, and we can be as bad or as goofy as we want. On the other hand inner speech does have a job to do, it has to steer us through the world. That function sets up outer limits, even though within those limits we have a free rein to construct this language as we like.

There are similarities to the idealist world view in inner speech. The philosophical idealists, especially Berkeley, reduced the outer world to some version of an inner world. They internalized the external, each doing it somewhat differently, as though it were all a dream. For them all speech would be inner, since there is no outer. And since everything would be radiating from the self, everything would be connected via the self.

The Saussurean theory of linguistic differences [pdf], whether Saussure actually held it or not, is very much like idealistic metaphysics. In both cases everything is dangling from the same string. And some kind of self is pulling the string. The late l9th century British idealists thought all of reality was in relationship, and given that they had only an inner world, they referred to these as “internal relations.”

Saussure used this same phrase, internal relations, to refer to the differences among signifiers and signifieds. And whether he was aligning himself with the idealists or not, there is a similarity between his self-enclosed linguistic world and that of the idealists. It is the denial of reference, of an external world, that underlies this similarity. For Saussure this denial is merely a theoretical move, an “as if ” assumption, and not an assertion about the real world. The idealists said there actually was no external world, and Saussure said he would pretend, for methodological reasons, that there was no external world. But regardless of how they get there, they end up in the same place.

If there is no reference, no external world, then the only way language can be defined is internally, by a system of differences. Saussure’s purely differential theory of meaning follows from the loss of the referential. But if there is an external world, even for inner speech, then we are back to the dualistic semantic theory, i.e. to some sort of balance between referential and differential streams.

Although inner speech is not idealism, in some ways it seems to be a more differentially defined universe than outer speech. Linguistic context is even more important than in outer speech. One reason is that meaning is so condensed on the two axes. But a second is that inner language is so pervaded with emotion. We censor our emotions in ordinary interpersonal speech, hiding our fear, our shame, our jealousy, our gloating. It takes a while for little children to learn this, but when they grow up they are all, men and women alike, pretty good at it. Inner speech is another matter, for it is brutally honest. And its emotional life is anything goes. We can scream, whoop and holler to ourselves. Or we can sob on a wailing wall. In fact we probably emote more in inner speech to compensate for the restrictions on outer speech. Emotions pervade large stretches of inner speech, and they heighten the importance of internal relations.

The determinants of meaning in inner speech seem much more stark and unarguable than in outer speech. Inner speech is enclosed within us, and this seems to make it a more dense set of internal relations, both because of the intense privacy and the more spontaneous emotions. In these respects inner speech gives a rich example of Saussure’s differential meaning system.

On the other hand inner speech is also more obviously referential than outer speech. Ordinary speech is quite conventional or arbitrary, and when we say dog or apple pie, the sign has no resemblance to its object. In inner speech, though, the signs are often images of their objects, bearing an iconic or mirroring relation to them. In other words, as mentioned before, there can be a heavy dependency on sensory imagery in forming an internal sentence. (…)

In conclusion Saussure’s theory of semantics works well for some aspects of inner speech and quite poorly for others, i.e. the more referential ones. [signs of external objects, color coordination] (…) On the other hand inner speech is quite different from outer speech, and the Saussurean issues must be handled in special ways. Inner speech is only partially fitting to Saussure’s theories. And new ideas are needed to resolve Saussure’s questions. (…)

Saussure’s binaries were meant to simplify the study of language. The paradigmatic-syntagmatic distinction showed two axes of meaning, and it prepared the way for his differential theory of meaning. The history-systematics distinction was meant to justify the exclusion of history. The speech-language distinction was meant to get rid of speech. And the differential-referential distinction was meant to exclude reference. Saussure’s approach then is largely a pruning device which chopped off many traditional parts of linguistics.

My analysis suggests that this pruning apparatus does not work for inner speech. The two axes are useful but they do not prepare the way for the differential theory of meaning. History cannot be excluded, for it is too important for inner speech. Speech should be restored, and in fact langue applies only weakly to inner speech. And that capstone of Saussure and cultural studies, the differential theory of meaning, does not seem adequate for inner speech. Referential theory is also needed to make sense of its meaning system.

Ethnomethodology

Inner speech then is a distinct variation or dialect of ordinary language, and the characteristics I have pointed out seem to be central to its structure. (…)

Inner speech is quite similar to ethnomethodology in its use of short cuts and normalizing practices. Garfinkel (1967) and Cicourel (1974) discovered ethnomethodology by examining interpersonal or intersubjective communication. A great many economies and condensations of interpersonal conversation are similar to ones we use when we talk to ourselves. If I say to myself “shop on the way home,” this is a condensation of the fairly elaborate shopping list I mentioned earlier, but if I say to my wife “I’ll shop on the way home” she may understand something much like that same, implicit shopping list. In other words we are constantly using “etcetera clauses” to speed up our internal conversations. And, being both communicator and communicatee, we may understand these references even more accurately than we do in social conversations. (…)

The self is also a sort of family gathering with similar problems of maintaining and restoring solidarity. Much inner speech is a kind of Durkheimian self soothing ritual where we try to convince ourselves that everything’s fine, even when it is not. In this way we can comfort ourselves when we are frightened, restore some pride when we are ashamed, or find a silver lining when we are disappointed. Such expressions as “you can do it,” “you’re doing great,” and “this looks harder than it is” give us confidence and energy when the going is tough.

In sum inner speech helps one see the importance of ethnomethods. The fact that we engage in these practices in our deepest privacy shows they are rooted in our psychology as well as in our social life. And the fact that they run parallel in intra- and inter-subjective communication shows them to be a feature of communication as such.

Privacy

In philosophy Wittgenstein provoked a widespread and complex discussion of private language. By this he meant a language that is not only de facto but also inherently private. No one but the private language user would be able to fully understand it, even if the meanings were publically available. To constitute a private language such a tongue would not need to be completely private. If only a single word or sentence were inherently private, it would qualify as a private language in Wittgenstein’s sense.

It seems to me inner speech is clearly a private language, at least in some of its utterances. This language is so rooted in the unique self that an eavesdropper, could there be one, would not fully understand it. It has so much of one’s person in it, a listener would have to be another you to follow it. And if someone invented a window into consciousness, a mind-reading machine, that could invade one’s privacy, would they be able to understand the, now revealed, inner speech? I think not. They might be able to understand most of the words, but the non-linguistic or imagistic elements would be too much a personal script to follow. If this eavesdropper watched you, including your consciousness, for your whole life, had access to your memory and knew your way of combining non-linguistic representations with words, they might have your code, but this is another way of saying they would be another you. In practical terms inner speech would be inaccessible in its meaning even if it were accessible in its signifying forms.

Of course this semantic privacy does not prevent one from describing one’s own inner speech to another, at least to a substantial extent. Something is lost all right in the translation from first to third person representations. When, in footnote 2, I talked about the inner speech cluster I called “Tom,” I obviously left out some of the affect and all of the sensory imagery. But I was still able to communicate the gist of it, in other words to transform first to third person meanings. So even though this is a private language it can to some extent be made public and used for research purposes.

The importance of private language is that it sheds light on what a human being is. We are inherently private animals, and we become more so the more self-aware and internally communicative we are. This zone of privacy may well be the foundation for the moral (and legal) need people have for privacy. In any case the hidden individuality or uniqueness of each human being is closely related to the what the person says to him or her self.

Agency

One of the thorniest problems of the humanities and social sciences is human agency. Humans are the authors of their actions to a great extent, but the way this process works is difficult to understand. I would suggest that inner speech is both the locus and platform for agency.

Charles Sanders Peirce was under the impression that we guide our lives with inner speech. We choose internally in the zone of inner speech, and then we choose externally in the zone of practical action and the outer world. The first choice leads to the second choice. Peirce even thought we could make and break habits by first modelling them in our internal theater. Here we could visualize the performance of a particular action and also choose to perform this action. The visualization and the choice could give the energy for designing and moulding one’s life. (…)

More generally the self directing process, including planning, anticipating, rehearsing, etc. seems to be largely a product of inner speech. This includes both what one will do and how one will do it. Picturing one’s preferred action as the lesser evil or greater good, even if one fudges a bit on the facts, is probably also a powerful way of producing a given action, and possibly even a new habit. (…)

I showed that inner speech does not qualify as a public language, though it has a distinct structural profile as a semi-private language or perhaps as a dialect. This structure suggests the access points or research approaches that this language is amenable to. As examples of how this research might proceed I took a quick look at three issues: ethnomethodology, privacy and agency.”

— Norbert Wiley, professor emeritus of Sociology at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Illinois, Visiting Scholar at the University of California, Berkley. He is a prize-winning sociologist who has published on both the history and systematics of theory, to read full essay click ☞ Inner Speech as a Language: A Saussurean Inquiry (pdf), Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 36:3 0021–8308, 2006.

See also:

☞ The Language of Thought Hypothesis, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
☞ Private language argument, Wiki
☞ Private Language, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
☞ Jerry A. Fodor, Why there still has to be a language of thought?
☞ Robert Kowalski, British logician and computer scientist, Do thoughts have a language of their own?, New Scientist, 8 Dec 2011
☞ Jerry A. Fodor, The language of thought, Harvard University Press, 1975
☞ Ned Block, The Mind as the Software of the Brain, New York University 
☞ Antony, Louise M, What are you thinking? Character and content in the language of thought (pdf)
☞ Ansgar Beckermann, Can there be a language of thought? (pdf) In G. White, B. Smith & R. Casati (eds.), Philosophy and the Cognitive Sciences. Proceedings of the 16th International Wittgenstein Symposium. Hölder-Pichler-Tempsky.
☞ Edouard Machery, You don’t know how you think: Introspection and language of thought, British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 56 (3): 469-485, (2005)
☞ Christopher Bartel, Musical Thought and Compositionality (pdf), King’s College London
☞ Psycholinguistics/Language and Thought, Wikiversity
☞ MindPapers: The Language of Thought - A Bibliography of the Philosophy of Mind and the Science of Consciousness, links Compiled by David Chalmers (Editor) & David Bourget (Assistant Editor), Australian National University
☞ Sue Savage-Rumbaugh on Human Language—Human Consciousness. A personal narrative arises through the vehicle of language, Lapidarium notes
☞ The time machine in our mind. The imagistic mental machinery that allows us to travel through time, Lapidarium notes

The Human Brain Project ☞ reconstructing the brain piece by piece and building a virtual brain in a supercomputer

       
                                 (Click image to go to the The Human Brain Project)

“The brain, with its billions of interconnected neurons, is without any doubt the most complex organ in the body and it will be a long time before we understand all its mysteries. The Human Brain Project proposes a completely new approach. The project is integrating everything we know about the brain into computer models and using these models to simulate the actual working of the brain. Ultimately, it will attempt to simulate the complete human brain. The models built by the project will cover all the different levels of brain organisation – from individual neurons through to the complete cortex. The goal is to bring about a revolution in neuroscience and medicine and to derive new information technologies directly from the architecture of the brain.” — Human Brain Project - Introduction

The Blue Brain Project is an attempt to create a synthetic brain by reverse-engineering the mammalian brain down to the molecular level.

The aim of the project, founded in May 2005 by the Brain and Mind Institute of the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (Switzerland) is to study the brain’s architectural and functional principles. The project is headed by the Institute’s director, Henry Markram. Using a Blue Gene supercomputer running Michael Hines’s NEURON software, the simulation does not consist simply of an artificial neural network, but involves a biologically realistic model of neurons. It is hoped that it will eventually shed light on the nature of consciousness. (Wiki)

Henry Markram: Supercomputing the brain’s secrets



Henry Markram, Ph.D., Director of the Blue Brain Project at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, says the mysteries of the mind can be solved — soon. Mental illness, memory, perception: they’re made of neurons and electric signals, and he plans to find them with a supercomputer that models all the brain’s 100,000,000,000,000 synapses.

— Henry Markram builds a brain in a supercomputer, TED.com, July 2009

Henry Markram: Simulating the Brain — The Next Decisive Years

Henry Markram speaks at the International Supercomputing Conference 26.06.2011.

10 Year Documentary To Follow Bluebrain Project

Bluebrain | Year One from Couple 3 Films.

Noah Hutton (…) has recently released a mini-documentary on the first year of IBM’s Bluebrain Project. (…) There are reasons to be hopeful that Markram and others in the field will make reasonable progress in modelling the brain by 2020. As he points out in the video, modeling a single neuron used to be a PhD thesis in and of itself. Now, he can create thousands at the push of a button.  As Markram mentions, we don’t have a complete understanding of how many drugs or diseases affect the brain. Nor do we fully understand the nature of memories. A brain simulator could be profoundly helpful as we care for our aging minds. Those minds have at least a decade to wait before we know if Markram and the BBP will be successful in transforming the field of neurology into a computer problem.”

— Aaron Saenz, 10 Year Documentary To Follow Bluebrain Project, Singularity Hub, Feb 12, 2011

See also:

☞ Human Connectome Project ☞ understanding how different parts of the brain communicate to each other
☞ New evidence for innate knowledge. Neurons make connections independently of a subject’s experience, Ecole Polytechnique
☞ Henry Markram and the Human Brain Project are in talks with EU for $1.61 billion to build a human brain within decade, May 18, 2011
☞ Mark Changizi, Later Terminator: We’re Nowhere Near Artificial Brains, Discover Magazine, Nov 16, 2011
☞ David Eagleman, Henry Markram, Will We Ever Understand the Brain?, California Academy of Sciences San Francisco, CA, Fora.tv video, Nov 2, 2011
☞ Allan Jones: A map of the brain, TED.com, July 2011.
☞ Neuroscience tag on Lapidarium notes

Galileo and the relationship between the humanities and the sciences

“Ever since Galileo, science has been strongly committed to the unification of theories from different disciplines. It cannot accept that the right explanations of human activities must be logically incompatible with the rest of science, or even just independent of it. If science were prepared to settle for less than unification, the difficulty of reconciling quantum mechanics and general relativity wouldn’t be the biggest problem in physics. Biology would not accept the gene as real until it was shown to have a physical structure — DNA — that could do the work geneticists assigned to the gene. For exactly the same reason science can’t accept interpretation as providing knowledge of human affairs if it can’t at least in principle be absorbed into, perhaps even reduced to, neuroscience.

That’s the job of neurophilosophy.

This problem, that thoughts about ourselves or anything else for that matters couldn’t be physical, was for a long time purely academic. Scientists had enough on their plates for 400 years just showing how physical processes bring about chemical processes, and through them biological ones. But now neuroscientists are learning how chemical and biological events bring about the brain processes that actually produce everything the body does, including speech and all other actions.

Research — including Nobel-prize winning neurogenomics and fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) — has revealed how bad interpretation’s explanations of our actions are. And there are clever psychophysical experiences that show us that introspection’s insistence that interpretation really does explain our actions is not to be trusted.

These findings cannot be reconciled with explanation by interpretation. The problem they raise for the humanities can no longer be postponed. Must science write off interpretation the way it wrote off phlogiston theory — a nice try but wrong? Increasingly, the answer that neuroscience gives to this question is “afraid so.”

Few people are prepared to treat history, (auto-) biography and the human sciences like folklore. The reason is obvious. The narratives of history, the humanities and literature provide us with the feeling that we understand what they seek to explain. At their best they also trigger emotions we prize as marks of great art.

But that feeling of understanding, that psychological relief from the itch of curiosity, is not the same thing as knowledge. It is not even a mark of it, as children’s bedtime stories reveal. If the humanities and history provide only feeling (ones explained by neuroscience), that will not be enough to defend their claims to knowledge.

The only solution to the problem faced by the humanities, history and (auto) biography, is to show that interpretation can somehow be grounded in neuroscience. That is job No. 1 for neurophilosophy. And the odds are against it. If this project doesn’t work out, science will have to face plan B: treating the humanities the way we treat the arts, indispensable parts of human experience but not to be mistaken for contributions to knowledge.”

— Alex Rosenberg, American philosopher, and the R. Taylor Cole Professor of Philosophy at Duke University, Bodies in Motion: An Exchange, NYT, Nov 6, 2011.

Do the humanities need to be defended from hard science?

“As the mathematician and physicist Mark A. Peterson has shown in his new book, “Galileo’s Muse: Renaissance Arts and Mathematics,” Galileo’s love for the arts profoundly shaped his thinking, and in many ways helped paved the way for his scientific discoveries. An early biography of Galileo by his contemporary Niccolò Gherardini points out that, “He was most expert in all the sciences and arts, as if he were professor of them. He took extraordinary delights in music, painting, and poetry.” For its part, Peterson takes great delight in demonstrating how his immersion in these arts informed his scientific discoveries, and how art and literature prior to Galileo often planted the seeds of scientific progress to come. (…)

Clearly Galileo was an extraordinary man, and a crucial aspect of what made him that man was the intellectual world he was immersed in. This world included mathematics, of course, but it was also full of arts and literature, of philosophy and theology. Peterson argues forcefully, for instance, that Galileo’s mastery of the techniques involved in creating and thinking about perspective in painting could well have influenced his thinking about the relativity of motion, since both require comprehending the importance of multiple points of view. (…)

The idea that the perception of movement depends on one’s point of view also has forebears in proto-scientific thinkers who are far less suitable candidates for the appealing story of how common sense suddenly toppled a 2000-year old tradition to usher modern science into the world. Take the poet, philosopher and theologian Giordano Bruno, who seldom engaged in experimentation and who, 30 years before Galileo’s own trial, refused to recant the beliefs that led him to be burned at the stake, beliefs that included the infinity of the universe and the multiplicity of worlds. (…)

Galileo’s insight into the nature of motion was not merely the epiphany of everyday experience that brushed away the fog of scholastic dogma; it was a logical consequence of a long history of engagements with an intellectual tradition that encompassed a multitude of forms of knowledge. That force is not required for an object to stay in motion goes hand in hand with the realization that motion and rest are not absolute terms, but can only be defined relative to what would later be called inertial frames. And this realization owes as much to a literary, philosophical and theological inquiry as it does to pure observation.

Professor Rosenberg uses his brief history of science to ground the argument that neuroscience threatens the humanities, and the only thing that can save them is a neurophilosophy that reconciles brain processes and interpretation. “If this project doesn’t work out,” he writes, “science and the humanities will have to face plan B: treating the humanities the way we treat the arts, indispensable parts of human experience but not to be mistaken for contributions to knowledge.”

But if this is true, should we not then ask what neuroscience could possible contribute to the very debate we are engaged in at this moment? What would we learn about the truth-value of Professor Rosenberg’s claims or mine if we had even the very best neurological data at our disposal? That our respective pleasure centers light up as we each strike blows for our preferred position? That might well be of interest, but it hardly bears on the issue at hand, namely, the evaluation of evidence — historical or experimental — underlying a claim about knowledge. That evaluation must be interpretative. The only way to dispense with interpretation is to dispense with evidence, and with it knowledge altogether.”

— William Egginton is the Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities and Chair of the Department of German and Romance Languages and Literatures at the John Hopkins University, Bodies in Motion: An Exchange, NYT, Nov 6, 2011.

Concentration. When Our Neurons Remain Silent So That Our Performances May Improve

(Whenever we look carefully for an object around us, the parts of the brain that are coloured in red are activated; but, at the same time, those in blue must deactivate themselves. (Credit: Image courtesy of INSERM (Institut national de la santé et de la recherche médicale)

“To be able to focus on the world, we need to turn a part of ourselves off for a short while, and this is precisely what our brain does. (…) A team of researchers from Inserm, led by Jean Philippe Lachaux and Karim Jerbi (Lyon Neuroscience Research Centre), has just demonstrated that a network of specific neurons, referred to as “default-mode network” works on a permanent basis even when we are doing nothing. (…)

They demonstrate more specifically that when we need to concentrate, this network disrupts the activation of other specialized neurons when it is not deactivated enough. (…)

When we focus on the things around us, certain parts of the brain are activated: this network, well known to neurobiologists, is called the attention network. Other parts of the brain, however, cease their activity at the same time, as if they generally prevented our attention from being focused on the outside world. These parts of the brain form a network that is extensively studied in neurobiology, and commonly known as the “default-mode network,” because, for a long time, it was believed that it activated itself when the brain had nothing in particular to do. This interpretation was refined through ten years of neuroimaging research that concluded by associating this mysterious network (“the brain’s dark energy” as it was called by one of its discoverers, Marcus Raichle) with a host of intimate and private phenomena of our mental life: self-perception, recollections, imagination, thoughts… (…)

[Researchers] has just revealed how this network interferes with our ability to pay attention, by assessing the activity of the human brain’s default-mode network neurons on a millisecond scale for the first time ever. (…)

The results unambiguously illustrate that whenever we look for an object in the area around us, the neurons of this default-mode network stop their activity. Yet, this interruption only lasts for the amount of time required to find the object: in less than a tenth of a second, after the object has been found, the default-mode network resumes its activity as before. And if our default-mode network is not sufficiently deactivated, then we will need more time to find the object.

These results show that there is fierce competition for our attentional resources inside our brain which, when they are not used to actively analyse our sensorial environment, are instantaneously redirected towards more internal mental processes. The brain hates emptiness and never stays idle, even for a tenth of a second.”

— When Our Neurons Remain Silent So That Our Performances May Improve, ScienceDaily, Nov. 3, 2011.

See also:

☞ Transient Suppression of Broadband Gamma Power in the Default-Mode Network Is Correlated with Task Complexity and Subject Performance, The Journal of Neuroscience, 12 Oct 2011.

“Task performance is associated with increased brain metabolism but also with prominent deactivation in specific brain structures known as default-mode network (DMN). (…)

We found that all DMN areas displayed transient suppressions of broadband gamma (60–140 Hz) power during performance of a visual search task and, critically, we show for the first time that the millisecond range duration and extent of the transient gamma suppressions are correlated with task complexity and subject performance. In addition, trial-by-trial correlations revealed that spatially distributed gamma power increases and decreases formed distinct anticorrelated large-scale networks.

Beyond unraveling the electrophysiological basis of DMN dynamics, our results suggest that, rather than indicating a mere switch to a global exteroceptive mode, DMN deactivation encodes the extent and efficiency of our engagement with the external world. (…)”

The ‘rich club’ that rules your brain

        
The connectome with its 12 “rich club” hubs. Green means fewer connections, red means more connections (Image: Martijn van den Heuvel/University Medical Center in Utrecht)

“Not all brain regions are created equal – instead, a “rich club” of 12 well-connected hubs orchestrates everything that goes on between your ears. This elite cabal could be what gives us consciousness, and might be involved in disorders such as schizophrenia and Alzheimer’s disease.

As part of an ongoing effort to map the human “connectome” – the full network of connections in the brain – Martijn van den Heuvel of the University Medical Center in Utrecht, the Netherlands, and Olaf Sporns of Indiana University Bloomington scanned the brains of 21 people as they rested for 30 minutes.

The researchers used a technique called diffusion tensor imaging to track the movements of water through 82 separate areas of the brain and their interconnecting neurons. They found 12 areas of the brain had significantly more connections than all the others, both to other regions and among themselves.

“These 12 regions have twice the connections of other brain regions, and they’re more strongly connected to each other than to other regions,” says Van den Heuvel. “If we wanted to look for consciousness in the brain, I would bet on it turning out to be this rich club,” he adds.

Members of the elite

The elite group consists of six pairs of identical regions, with one of each pair in each hemisphere of the brain. Each member is known to accept only preprocessed, high-order information, rather than raw incoming sensory data.

Best connected of all is the precuneus, an area at the back of the brain. Van den Heuvel says its function is not well understood, but thinks that it acts as an “integrator region” collating high-level information from all over the brain.

Another prominent hub is the superior frontal cortex, which plans actions in response to events and governs where you should focus your attention. The superior parietal cortex – the third hub – is linked to the visual cortex and registers where different objects in your immediate vicinity are.

To bring memory into the equation, the hippocampus is another hub – that’s where memories are processed, stored and consolidated. The fifth member of the club is the thalamus, which, among other things, interlinks visual processes; the last member, the putamen, coordinates movement.

Together the hubs enable the brain to constantly assess, prioritise and filter incoming information, and then puts it all together to make decisions about what to do next.

This network makes the way the brain functions more robust overall, but it could also leave the entire system vulnerable to breakdown if key hubs are damaged or disabled, says Van den Heuvel.

Downfall of the rich

After mapping the connections, Van den Heuvel’s team manipulated the data to see what might happen if parts of the rich club were damaged. The simulated brain lost three times as much function if the elite hubs were taken out than if random parts of the brain were lost.

“If [one of these] regions goes down, it can take the others down too, just like when banks failed in the global economic crisis,” says Van den Heuvel. (…)

“The human brain is extraordinarily complex, yet it works efficiently, and a major challenge has been to discover principles of brain wiring and organisation that explain this,” says Randy Buckner, a neuroscientist at Harvard University.

“What Van den Heuvel and Sporns show is that some regions of the brain are embedded in densely connected networks – so-called rich clubs – that may act together as a functional unit,” says Buckner. “Such an organisation might help explain how complex networks of brain regions can work together efficiently.”“

— Andy Coghlan, The ‘rich club’ that rules your brain, New Scientist, 2 Nov 2011

See also:

☞ Human Connectome Project - understanding how different parts of the brain communicate to each other
☞ Revealed – the capitalist network that runs the world, New Scientist, Oct 19, 2011

Daniel Kahneman on thinking ‘Fast And Slow’: How We Aren’t Made For Making Decisions

“We’re not in control because our preferences come from a lot of places that we don’t know about and, second, there are really some characteristics of the way a mind works that are incompatible with perfect decision-making. In particular, we have a very narrow view of what is going on and that narrow view - we take decisions as if that were the only decision that we’re facing. We don’t see very far in the future. We are very focused on one idea at a time, one problem at a time and all these are incompatible with full rationality as economic theory assumes it.”

— Fast And Slow’: Pondering The Speed Of Thought, October 27, 2011 (transcript)

“Take for example the study out of the National Academy of Sciences, which found that Israeli parole judges — known for turning down parole applications — were more likely to award parole in cases they heard immediately after taking a meal break.

“Presumably they are hungry, but certainly they are tired, they’re depleted,” Kahneman says of the judges’ state when they are a few hours away from a meal. “When you’re depleted, you tend to fall back on default actions, and the default action in that case is apparently to deny parole. So yes, people are strongly influenced by the level of glucose in the brain.”

The implications of such a study are tremendous: If democratic society is based on people making decisions, what does it mean when all it takes to influence those decisions is a little bit of glucose?”

— Robert Siegel interview with Daniel Kahneman, ‘Fast And Slow’: Pondering The Speed Of Thought, NPR, October 27, 2011

“Crucial policy decisions are often based on statistical inferences, but as Mr. Kahneman notes, we “pay more attention to the content of messages than to information about their reliability.” The effect is “a view of the world around us that is simpler and more coherent than the data justify.”

One major effect of the work of Messrs. Kahneman and Tversky has been to overturn the assumption that human beings are rational decision-makers who weigh all the relevant factors logically before making choices. When the two men began their research, it was understood that, as a finite device with finite time, the brain had trouble calculating the costs and benefits of every possible course of action and that, separately, it was not very good at applying rules of logical inference to abstract situations. What Messrs. Kahneman and Tversky showed went far beyond this, however. They argued that, even when we have all the information that we need to arrive at a correct decision, and even when the logic is simple, we often get it drastically wrong. (…)

This “conjunction fallacy” (like the focusing illusion) illustrates a broader pattern—of human reasoning being distorted by systematic biases. To understand one source of such errors, Mr. Kahneman divides the mind into two broad components. “System 1” makes rapid, intuitive decisions based on associative memory, vivid images and emotional reactions. “System 2” monitors the output of System 1 and overrides it when the result conflicts with logic, probability or some other decision-making rule. Alas, the second system is a bit lazy—we must make a special effort to pay attention, and such effort consumes time and energy.

You can get an idea of the two-system distinction by trying to solve this simple problem, from the work of the psychologist Shane Frederick: “If it takes 5 machines 5 minutes to make 5 widgets, how many minutes does it take 100 machines to make 100 widgets?” The answer “100 minutes” leaps to mind (System 1 at work), but it is wrong. But a bit of reflective thought (by System 2) leads to “five minutes,” the right answer.

The divided mind is evident in other situations where we are not as “rational” as we might assume. Most people require a larger expected outcome to take a risk when a sure thing is available as an alternative (risk aversion), and they dislike losses much more than they like gains of equivalent size (loss aversion). These now-commonplace concepts are central to prospect theory, perhaps the most influential legacy of Messrs. Kahneman and Tversky.

Mr. Kahneman notes that we harbor two selves when it comes to happiness, too: one self that experiences pain and pleasure from moment to moment and another that remembers the emotions associated with complete events and episodes. The remembering self does not seem to care how long an experience was if it was getting better toward the end—so a longer colonoscopy that ended with decreasing pain will be seen later as preferable to a shorter procedure that involved less total pain but happened to end at a very painful point. Complications like this should make us wary of letting simplistic measures of happiness determine national policy and social goals.

Mr. Kahneman stresses that he is just as susceptible as the rest of us to the cognitive illusions he has discovered. He tries to recognize situations when mistakes are especially likely to occur—such as when he is starting a big project or making a forecast—and then act to rethink his System 1 inclinations. The tendency to underestimate the costs of future projects, he notes, is susceptible to taking an “outside view”: looking at your own project as an outsider would. To avoid overconfidence, Mr. Kahneman recommends an exercise called the “premortem,” developed by the psychologist Gary Klein: Before finalizing a decision, imagine that, a year after it has been made, it has turned out horribly, then write a history of how it went wrong and why. (…)

Mr. Kahneman’s stated goals are minimalist: to “enrich the vocabulary that people use” when they talk about decisions, so that his readers benefit from his work at the “proverbial watercooler, where opinions are shared and gossip is exchanged.”

— Christopher F. Chabris, Why the Grass Seems Greener, WSJ.com, Oct 22, 2011 (Illustration source)

Daniel Kahneman is Israeli-American psychologist and Nobel laureate, notable for his work on the psychology of judgment, decision-making, behavioral economics and hedonic psychology.

See also:

☞ Daniel Kahneman: The Marvels and the Flaws of Intuitive Thinking
☞ Dean Buonomano on ‘Brain Bugs’ - Cognitive Flaws That ‘Shape Our Lives’
☞ Daniel Kahneman: How cognitive illusions blind us to reason, The Observer, 30 October 2011 
☞ Daniel Kahneman on the riddle of experience vs. memory
☞ The irrational mind - David Brooks on the role of emotions in politics, policy, and life
☞ The Argumentative Theory: ‘Reason evolved to win arguments, not seek truth’
☞ A risk-perception: What You Don’t Know Can Kill You

How walking through a doorway increases forgetting      

“Like information in a book, unfolding events are stored in human memory in successive chapters or episodes. One consequence is that information in the current episode is easier to recall than information in a previous episode. An obvious question then is how the mind divides experience up into these discrete episodes? A new study led by Gabriel Radvansky shows that the simple act of walking through a doorway creates a new memory episode, thereby making it more difficult to recall information pertaining to an experience in the room that’s just been left behind. (…)

The key finding is that memory performance was poorer after travelling through an open doorway, compared with covering the same distance within the same room. “Walking through doorways serves as an event boundary, thereby initiating the updating of one’s event model [i.e. the creation of a new episode in memory]” the researchers said. (…)

Participants were more likely to make memory errors after they’d passed through a doorway than after they’d travelled the same distance in a single room.

Performance was worst of all when in the third, unfamiliar room, supporting the account based on new memory episodes being created on entering each new area.

These findings show how a physical feature of the environment can trigger a new memory episode. They concur with a study published earlier this year which focused on episode markers in memories for stories. Presented with a passage of narrative text, participants later found it more difficult to remember which sentence followed a target sentence, if the two were separated by an implied temporal boundary, such as “a while later …”. It’s as if information within a temporal episode was somehow bound together, whereas a memory divide was placed between information spanning two episodes.”

— Christian Jarrett, How walking through a doorway increases forgetting, BPS Research Digest, 2 November 2011

How is autobiographical memory divided into chapters?

“Autobiographical or ‘episodic’ memory describes our ability to recall past experiences and is distinct from semantic memory, which is our factual knowledge about the world. So far so good, but according to Youssef Ezzyat and Lila Davachi, psychology until now has largely neglected to investigate exactly how the brain organises the continuity of lived experience into a filing system of discrete episodes. (…)

Crucially, a minority of sentences began: ‘A while later …’, thereby conveying a temporal boundary in the narrative; the end of one episode and start of another. For comparison, a small number of control sentences began: ‘A moment later …’, indicating that the ensuing sentence was part of the same episode, not a new one.

After a ten minute break, the participants were given a surprise memory test. Presented with one sentence from the earlier narratives, their task was to recall the sentence that had followed. The key finding here was that the participants were poorer at recalling a sentence that came after a temporal boundary. It’s as if information within an episode was somehow bound together, whereas a memory divide was placed between information spanning two episodes.

A second study was similar to the first except that nineteen participants had their brains scanned during the initial read-through of the sentences. Ezzyat and Davachi identified patterns of neural activity in distinct regions of the prefrontal cortex and the middle-temporal gyrus that either correlated with within-event processing or with forming boundaries between events. These neural activity patterns were more distinct in those participants who showed larger behavioural effects of episode boundaries in their memory performance.

‘Our experiments are an important step toward understanding how event perception and segmentation influence the structure of long-term memory,’ the researchers concluded. ‘The behavioural results support the hypothesis that event segmentation shapes the organisation of long-term memory; the fMRI [brain scanning] results link these memory effects to brain activity consistent with information maintenance and integration within events.’”

— Christian Jarrett, How is autobiographical memory divided into chapters?, BPS Research Digest, 19 January 2011

See also:

☞ G. A. Radvansky, S. A. Krawietz & A. K. Tamplin, Walking through doorways causes forgetting: Further explorations, The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, Volume 64, Issue 8, 2011
☞ Ezzyat, Y., and Davachi, L. What Constitutes an Episode in Episodic Memory?, Psychological Science, 2010
☞ How Does the Brain Retain Information? (infographic)
☞ Daniel Kahneman on the riddle of experience vs. memory
☞ Memory tag on Lapidarium notes

Iain McGilchrist on The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World

“Just as the human body represents a whole museum of organs, with a long evolutionary history behind them, so we should expect the mind to be organized in a similar way. (…) We receive along with our body a highly differentiated brain which brings with it its entire history, and when it becomes creative it creates out of this history – out of the history of mankind (…) that age-old natural history which has been transmitted in living form since the remotest times, namely the history of the brain structure.”

— Carl Jung cited in The Master and His Emissary, Yale University Press, 2009, p.8.

Renowned psychiatrist and writer Iain McGilchrist explains how the ‘divided brain’ has profoundly altered human behaviour, culture and society. He draws on a vast body of recent experimental brain research to reveal that the differences between the brain’s two hemispheres are profound.

The left hemisphere is detail-oriented, prefers mechanisms to living things, and is inclined to self-interest. It misunderstands whatever is not explicit, lacks empathy and is unreasonably certain of itself, whereas the right hemisphere has greater breadth, flexibility and generosity, but lacks certainty.

It is vital that the two hemispheres work together, but McGilchrist argues that the left hemisphere is increasingly taking precedence in the modern world, resulting in a society where a rigid and bureaucratic obsession with structure and self-interest hold sway.

— RSA, 17th Nov 2010

“Iain McGilchrist points out that the idea that “reason [is] in the left hemisphere and something like creativity and emotion [are] in the right hemisphere” is an unhelpful misconception. He states that “every single brain function is carried out by both hemispheres. Reason and emotion and imagination depend on the coming together of what both hemispheres contribute.” Nevertheless he does see an obvious dichotomy, and asks himself: “if the brain is all about making connections, why is it that it’s evolved with this whopping divide down the middle?”

— Natasha Mitchell, “The Master and his Emissary: the divided brain and the reshaping of Western civilisation”, 19 June 2010

“The author holds instead that each of the hemispheres of the brain has a different “take” on the world or produces a different “version” of the world, though under normal circumstances these work together. This, he says, is basically to do with attention. He illustrates this with the case of chicks which use the eye connected to the left hemisphere to attend to the fine detail of picking seeds from amongst grit, whilst the other eye attends to the broader threat from predators. According to the author, “The left hemisphere has its own agenda, to manipulate and use the world”; its world view is essentially that of a mechanism. The right has a broader outlook, “has no preconceptions, and simply looks out to the world for whatever might be. In other words it does not have any allegiance to any particular set of values.”

— Staff, “Two worlds of the left and right brain (audio podcast)”, BBC Radio 4, 14 November 2009

McGilchrist explains this more fully in a later interview for ABC Radio National’s All in the Mind programme, stating: “The right hemisphere sees a great deal, but in order to refine it, and to make sense of it in certain ways—-in order to be able to use what it understands of the world and to be able to manipulate the world—-it needs to delegate the job of simplifying it and turning it into a usable form to another part of the brain” [the left hemisphere]. Though he sees this as an essential “double act”, McGilchrist points to the problem that the left hemisphere has a “narrow, decontextualised and theoretically based model of the world which is self consistent and is therefore quite powerful” and to the problem of the left hemisphere’s lack of awareness of its own shortcomings; whilst in contrast, the right hemisphere is aware that it is in a symbiotic relationship.”

How the brain has shaped our world

“The author describes the evolution of Western culture, as influenced by hemispheric brain functioning, from the ancient world, through the Renaissance and Reformation; the Enlightenment; Romanticism and Industrial Revolution; to the modern and postmodern worlds which, to our detriment, are becoming increasingly dominated by the left brain. According to McGilchrist, interviewed for ABC Radio National’s All in the Mind programme, rather than seeking to explain the social and cultural changes and structure of civilisation in terms of the brain — which would be reductionist — he is pointing to a wider, more inclusive perspective and greater reality in which there are two competing ways of thinking and being, and that in modern Western society we appear increasingly to be able to only entertain one viewpoint: that of the left hemisphere.

The author argues that the brain and the mind do not simply experience the world, but that the world we experience is a product or meeting of that which is outside us with our mind. The outcome, the nature of this world, is thus dependent upon “which mode of attention we bring to bear on the world”

McGilchrist sees an occasional flowering of “the best of the right hemisphere and the best of the left hemisphere working together” in our history: as witnessed in Athens in the 6th century by activity in the humanities and in science and in ancient Rome during the Augustan era. However, he also sees that as time passes, the left hemisphere once again comes to dominate affairs and things slide back into “a more theoretical and conceptualised abstracted bureaucratic sort of view of the world.” According to McGilchrist, the cooperative use of both left and right hemispheres diminished and became imbalanced in favour of the left in the time of the classical Greek philosophers Parmenides and Plato and in the late classical Roman era. This cooperation and openness were regained during the Renaissance 1,000 years later which brought “sudden efflorescence of creative life in the sciences and the arts”. However, with the Reformation, the early Enlightenment, and what has followed as rationalism has arisen, our world has once again become increasingly rigid, simplified and rule-bound.

Looking at more recent Western history, McGilchrist sees in the Industrial Revolution that for the first time artefacts were being made “very much to the way the left hemisphere sees the world — simple solids that are regular, repeated, not individual in the way that things that are made by hand are” and that a transformation of the environment in a similar vein followed on from that; that what was perceived inwardly was projected outwardly on a mass scale. The author argues that the scientific materialism which developed in the 19th century is still with us, at least in the biological sciences, though he sees physics as having moved on.

McGilchrist does not see modernism and postmodernism as being in opposition to this, but also “symptomatic of a shift towards the left hemisphere’s conception of the world”, taking the idea that there is no absolute truth and turning that into “there is no truth at all”, and he finds some of the movements’ works of art “symptomatic of people whose right hemisphere is not working very well.” McGilchrist cites the American psychologist Louis Sass, author of Madness and Modernism, pointing out that Sass “draws extensive parallels between the phenomena of modernism and postmodernism and of schizophrenia”, with things taken out of context and fragmented.”

— The Master and His Emissary, Wiki

The Master and His Emissary

“Whatever the relationship between consciousness and the brain – unless the brain plays no role in bringing the world as we experience it into being, a position that must have few adherents – its structure has to be significant. It might even give us clues to understanding the structure of the world it mediates, the world we know. So, to ask a very simple question, why is the brain so clearly and profoundly divided? Why, for that matter, are the two cerebral hemispheres asymmetrical? Do they really differ in any important sense? If so, in what way? (…)

Enthusiasm for finding the key to hemisphere differences has waned, and it is no longer respectable for a neuroscientist to hypothesise on the subject. (…)

These beliefs could, without much violence to the facts, be characterised as versions of the idea that the left hemisphere is somehow gritty, rational, realistic but dull, and the right hemisphere airy-fairy and impressionistic, but creative and exciting; a formulation reminiscent of Sellar and Yeatman’s immortal distinction (in their parody of English history teaching, 1066 and All That) between the Roundheads – ‘Right and Repulsive’ – and the Cavaliers – ‘Wrong but Wromantic’. In reality, both hemispheres are crucially involved in reason, just as they are in language; both hemispheres play their part in creativity. Perhaps the most absurd of these popular misconceptions is that the left hemisphere, hard-nosed and logical, is somehow male, and the right hemisphere, dreamy and sensitive, is somehow female. (…)

V. S. Ramachandran, another well-known and highly regarded neuroscientist, accepts that the issue of hemisphere difference has been traduced, but concludes: ‘The existence of such a pop culture shouldn’t cloud the main issue – the notion that the two hemispheres may indeed be specialised for different functions. (…)

I believe there is, literally, a world of difference between the hemispheres. Understanding quite what that is has involved a journey through many apparently unrelated areas: not just neurology and psychology, but philosophy, literature and the arts, and even, to some extent, archaeology and anthropology. (…)

I have come to believe that the cerebral hemispheres differ in ways that have meaning. There is a plethora of well-substantiated findings that indicate that there are consistent differences – neuropsychological, anatomical, physiological and chemical, amongst others – between the hemispheres. But when I talk of ‘meaning’, it is not just that I believe there to be a coherent pattern to these differences. That is a necessary first step. I would go further, however, and suggest that such a coherent pattern of differences helps to explain aspects of human experience, and therefore means something in terms of our lives, and even helps explain the trajectory of our common lives in the Western world.

My thesis is that for us as human beings there are two fundamentally opposed realities, two different modes of experience; that each is of ultimate importance in bringing about the recognisably human world; and that their difference is rooted in the bihemispheric structure of the brain. It follows that the hemispheres need to co-operate, but I believe they are in fact involved in a sort of power struggle, and that this explains many aspects of contemporary Western culture. (…)

The brain has evolved, like the body in which it sits, and is in the process of evolving. But the evolution of the brain is different from the evolution of the body. In the brain, unlike in most other human organs, later developments do not so much replace earlier ones as add to, and build on top of, them. Thus the cortex, the outer shell that mediates most so-called higher functions of the brain, and certainly those of which we are conscious, arose out of the underlying subcortical structures which are concerned with biological regulation at an unconscious level; and the frontal lobes, the most recently evolved part of the neocortex, which occupy a much bigger part of the brain in humans than in our animal relatives, and which grow forwards from and ‘on top of ’ the rest of the cortex, mediate most of the sophisticated activities that mark us out as human – planning, decision making, perspective taking, self-control, and so on. In other words, the structure of the brain reflects its history: as an evolving dynamic system, in which one part evolves out of, and in response to, another. (…)

There is after all coherence to the way in which the correlates of our experience are grouped and organised in the brain, and we can see these ‘functions’ forming intelligible wholes, corresponding to areas of experience, and see how they relate to one another at the brain level, this casts some light on the structure and experience of our mental world. In this sense the brain is – in fact it has to be – a metaphor of the world. (…)

I believe that there are two fundamentally opposed realities rooted in the bihemispheric structure of the brain. But the relationship between them is no more symmetrical than that of the chambers of the heart – in fact, less so; more like that of the artist to the critic, or a king to his counsellor.

There is a story in Nietzsche that goes something like this. There was once a wise spiritual master, who was the ruler of a small but prosperous domain, and who was known for his selfless devotion to his people. As his people flourished and grew in number, the bounds of this small domain spread; and with it the need to trust implicitly the emissaries he sent to ensure the safety of its ever more distant parts. It was not just that it was impossible for him personally to order all that needed to be dealt with: as he wisely saw, he needed to keep his distance from, and remain ignorant of, such concerns. And so he nurtured and trained carefully his emissaries, in order that they could be trusted. Eventually, however, his cleverest and most ambitious vizier, the one he most trusted to do his work, began to see himself as the master, and used his position to advance his own wealth and influence. He saw his master’s temperance and forbearance as weakness, not wisdom, and on his missions on the master’s behalf, adopted his mantle as his own – the emissary became contemptuous of his master. And so it came about that the master was usurped, the people were duped, the domain became a tyranny; and eventually it collapsed in ruins.

The meaning of this story is as old as humanity, and resonates far from the sphere of political history. I believe, in fact, that it helps us understand something taking place inside ourselves, inside our very brains, and played out in the cultural history of the West, particularly over the last 500 years or so. (…)

I hold that, like the Master and his emissary in the story, though the cerebral hemispheres should co-operate, they have for some time been in a state of conflict. The subsequent battles between them are recorded in the history of philosophy, and played out in the seismic shifts that characterise the history of Western culture. At present the domain – our civilisation – finds itself in the hands of the vizier, who, however gifted, is effectively an ambitious regional bureaucrat with his own interests at heart. Meanwhile the Master, the one whose wisdom gave the people peace and security, is led away in chains. The Master is betrayed by his emissary.”

— Iain McGilchrist, psychiatrist and writer, The Master and His Emissary, Yale University Press, 2009 Illustrations: 1), 2) Shalmor Avnon Amichay/Y&R Interactive

Iain McGilchrist: The Divided Brain | RSA animated

— RSA, 17th Nov 2010

See also:

☞ Iain McGilchrist, The Battle Between the Brain’s Left and Right Hemispheres, WSJ.com, Jan 2, 2010
☞ David Eagleman on how we constructs reality, time perception, and The Secret Lives of the Brain
☞ Dean Buonomano on ‘Brain Bugs’ - Cognitive Flaws That ‘Shape Our Lives’
☞ Timothy D. Wilson on The Social Psychological Narrative: ‘It’s not the objective environment that influences people, but their constructs of the world’
☞ Mind and Brain tag on Lapidarium notes