An email from a colleague came with this quotation by Frantz Fanon:
I ascribe a basic importance to the phenomenon of language. To speak means to be in a position to use a certain syntax, to grasp the morphology of this or that language, but it means above all to assume a culture, to support the weight of a civilization.
I told mom that Tommy is a keeper. (Not that my opinion really matters, but it is nice to meet him and discover that I like his sense of humor and appreciate his integrity.)
He's got an amazing mental focus, evident in his stories and daily interactions. He credits his mom (who "never thought no harm of no one") and Jesus Christ. Tommy is blessed with great health and has had incredible good luck (as well as plenty of horrible experiences that might have more deeply wounded a lesser person). He loves his work - forty-five years as a teacher and still going strong! Tommy is walking testimony to the positive effects of following one's passions.
He built a house, by himself, when he first started teaching in New York during the 1960s. Seven thousand square feet, mind you, with no prior experience. As I listened to him recount various anecdotes about buying the land (a killer deal), refusing shoddy or haphazard assistance (nothing beats one's own craftsmanship), resisting the collective jealousy of many who wanted him to fail, and connecting with children despite adult animosity...I thought to myself, we are rather alike, he and I. Not because of these particular experiences; mine have been different, less extreme and/or targeted in alternative ways. Rather, I think Tommy and I both have some kind of internal drive that anchors a conviction in our own perception of the world. I am not claiming that my views are more right or better than others, but that believing and adhering to them has been an effective strategy for me to arrive in (at least some of the) places I want to be.
I woke up this morning thinking about conflict: why it happens between individuals and what "it" is that occurs, the phenomena itself that we label "conflict." I know a bunch of analytical theories about why conflict happens, and plenty of communicative strategies for avoiding or resolving interactions that involve conflict. I believe conflict is an irreducible element of life. The challenge of conflict is balancing the tasks of managing oneself and respecting others. The mechanism of conflict is the meeting of two (or more) different interpretations of "reality" - the struggle is which version will take primacy. Collaborative relations have no assumption that one or the other viewpoint is more/less important or real than one's own.
I am such a slow learner. :-/
Anyway, I related to Tommy's story of building a house, both because I miss having a home to fiddle with, but moreso because the metaphor is suitable for my ambition. I want to build a house of ideas, a mental/social construction of possibility, a framework for interaction that enables collaboration as an equal alternative to hierarchy: a home of power with, rather than power over.
“I learned something new about you!” The Ever-Smiling Evil Indian gloated after I whined (!) about having never been claimed. “Your friends claim you.” (She really did say this, obviously a weak moment.) I know, but this doesn’t mean I believe! That’s the fundamental part – not exactly hard-wired into my brain – but the synaptic patterns I cognize as “not belongingness” (electrical stimulation among dendrites and axons in my limbic system) are encoded in neuronal firing patterns that can (only?) be changed by engraining long-term memory through “changes in the strength of the synapses between the nerve cells” (p. 8, Who do you think you are? A Survey of the Brain, The Economist, December 23, 2006).
The trick then, is manipulating the strength of those synaptic patterns, “changing the way that information flows through the neuronal network” (p. 8). One time when neuroscientists have found that synaptic strength change is accomplished is, believe it or not, during sleep! They don’t actually know how: one has to accept a comparison with sea slugs and worms to follow the argument Geoffrey Carr lays forth. :-) He presents the relationship among “sleep, dreaming and the establishment of long-term memories [as] known about for awhile” (p. 8), citing in particular studies of the hippocampus by Dr. Eleanor Maguire on the Knowledge of London taxi cab drivers (p. 7) and Dr. Matthew Wilson on electrical activity - dreams! - in the brains of rats “as it learnt something about the environment, such as how to run around a particular maze” (p. 8).
Identity, extrapolating from the above and other findings of modern neuroscience, is generated from (by, through) the subtle interactions of emotion and reason. Emotions are processed through the limbic system, particularly the amygdala and hypothalamus. Particular emotions (fear, anger, disgust, sadness) are conducted by the amygdala, and others (e.g., joy) with the hypothalamus. Memory is orchestrated by the hippocampus. Organizing all of these neurochemical and neuroelectrical processes is a function of language – Carr says “many … think the evolutionary pressure that drove the enlargement of the human brain was not a need to survive the natural environment but a need to negotiate the social one” (p. 9). Intriguingly, even categories of objects are associated with certain physical locations in the brain: for instance face recognition (always and only in the fusiform face area), images of places (parahippocampal place area) and writing (left fusiform gyrus) are always processed in the same place:
Somehow, all healthy developing brains not only work out that written words are a category to which it is worth allocatings its own piece of neural anatomy, but find it easiest to accommodate that category in the same piece of wetware. (p. 9)
The how of all these layers are being worked on at the level of genetics, with researchers aiming to pinpoint which genes are responsible for which synaptic connections, and theorizing about language and the mind. “Though no one has yet proved the case, it looks as though the evolution of language and the evolution of theory of mind might not only be two sides of the same coin, but might actually be different specializations of the same basic structure” (p. 10). Carr comes down strongly in support of Steven Pinker’s language instinct (and, hence, Noam Chomsky), citing an array of behavioral evidence, the existence of a speech production area in the brain (Broca’s area), a speech-recognition area (Wernicke’s), and parallels between auditory and visual languages:
Nor is language processing merely a matter of decrypting and encrypting sound. Deaf people who communicate using sign languages (which have all the grammatical and syntactic features of spoken language) also do their processing in Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas. If they suffer damage to these areas, it shows up in exactly the same way that it does in those who can hear. (p. 10)
What do humans, apes, elephants, and dolphins have in common? Awareness of self. This is a feature of consciousness that sets us apart from other animals. Reflecting upon the fact of self-awareness invokes theory of mind: “the ability not only to hypothesize what other minds are thinking, but to hypothesize what they are thinking about what you are thinking” (p 10).
The evolutionary value of this is that people can anticipate the actions of others in a way that helps them. But with language, they can not only anticipate the actions of others, they can try to manipulate them. (p. 10)
Enter interpreting – oh alright, it has been here all along! :-) – and mirror neurons. “A mirror neuron is one that is active both during the execution of a particular action or the production of a feeling by the individual concerned, and also when that individual observes the same action or feeling in another individual. In other words, it mirrors the actions and thoughts of others” (p. 10). But not exactly. Mirroring, based on a visual metaphor, is flawed from the start, since “visual experience…is a complete fabrication. What is consciously perceived is not a simple mapping of the images that fall on the retina. Instead, the signals from the optic nerves are deconstructed and re-formed in a process so demanding that it involves about a third of the cerebral cortex” (p. 12). Now, let me infer beyond what Carr explicitly states.
What is “mirrored” by mirror neurons are qualia – “consciously experienced feelings” (p. 11), but these are not necessarily the same, they are dialectical. We may both feel fear, or shame, or joy simultaneously, or your joy might elicit my grief, my anger your guilt, etcetera. This is because of the mutual reinforcement of a theory called neural Darwinism, which “combines two ideas. The first, as [Dr. Gerald Edelman] charmingly puts it, is that ‘neurons which fire together, wire together’ … provid[ing] the selective pressure that is the prerequisite for any Darwinian-based theory: to those neuronal networks that have shall be given, from those that have not, even what little they have shall be taken away.
The resulting changes are the physical basis of learning. (p. 11)
While Dr. Edelman restricts his claim to the internal neurochemistry of the brain, I am suggesting that such isolationism reduces the problem of consciousness to a false basis. Perhaps an opening to extend beyond the false autonomy of an individual is provided by the second idea in Edelman’s theory: re-entrant mapping. Here, Carr’s explanation reads like a communication textbook:
The process of learning can be viewed as one by which reality (as perceived by the senses) is transformed into a representation of reality. (p. 11)
These transformations, Carr continues, are described mathematically as mapping. “In Dr Edelman’s model of the brain…the maps themselves are mapped by other groups of neurons. It is the phenomenon of different groups of neurons watching each other that he refers to as re-entrant mapping” (emphasis added, p. 11). [Tangent: see this piece re William James on the Emotions, Mimicry, and the Social Self]
The anthropocentrism of neurons “watching” each other returns us to the problems of vision and the fact that even the perceptions of our senses differ. This variability of input/reception results in diverse – sometimes even contradictory – meanings, assertions of value, or evaluations of meaningfulness. Hence, the dilemmas of communication as we labor to create systems that enable survival and improve the human condition. If the key to learning lies in changing the basic neural firing patterns of daily experience, then the ways people talk about the experiences of living provides a powerful source of information about the phenomena of consciousness. Examining discourses enables framing to become apparent as a structure of knowledge: our own as well as others. The extent and depth to which the knowledge of how our own consciousnesses are structured can be transformed into changes at individual, societal, and institutional levels is an open question. [For instance, to what extent can we manipulate fractal geometry?]
Carr describes a particular mechanism of change as the “recapitulation of experience” (p. 8). (One must be amused by this proposed definition: "What usually happens after eating a parrot sandwich.") Time and repetition are crucial components – both in terms of what has been documented with powerful technologies such as the fMRI (functional magnetic-resonance imaging – which has its critics, btw), and in securing (what I will call) the meaningfulness of memory. Taking time first, two absolutely fascinating details: rats in the experiments by Dr. Matthew Wilson “replay their experiences in their hippocampuses even when they are just resting, although, intriguingly, the pattern of electrical signals runs backward at this time” (emphasis added, p. 8). One could infer that memories are stored in chains of electrical impulses stemming from the most recent (closest in timespace) to oldest (most distant in spacetime). One can even imagine that links in this chain are not necessarily continuous through each-and-every-related experience, as what would matter is the strength and repetition of the neuronal firing pattern itself. The details of experiences that reinforce a synapse could easily be lost as dendrite firing to a specific/particular axon of another nerve fades without reinforcement.
The other totally compelling time detail involves the relationship between action and decision-making. Dr Benjamin Libet has shown (via electroencephalography) “that the process which leads to the act starts about three-tenths of a second before an individual is consciously aware of it” (emphasis added, p. 12). In other words, our synapses initiate action prior to what we imagine is our own intellectual, conscious, and deliberate choice: the mind is always playing catch-up with the brain. Does this temporal fact of physical reality seal the coffin on free will? I do not think so. Language is a mechanism for redirecting experience: not just for (attempting to) manipulate others but for reconstructing the structure of mirror neurons in our very own brains. The challenge, hidden like a seed in Carr’s prose, is not to merely repeat the spontaneous neuronal firing of new experience, but to recapitulate that pattern.
I may always be in the process of arriving just-after-the-fact of a neural firing of not-belongingness due to whatever obscure trigger sets off the conditioned synapses, but I can delay and interfere with its knee-jerk imposition of past reality. What comes out in terms of behavior may itself be warped, but at least it represents the evidence of learning, the desire for change. (See explanation of Vipasana, Camping in the Dawn Land.) Indeed, although inconsistent, I am aware of the establishment of new patterns - different responses than I've had in the past to certain stimuli. Acting in such a way as to continually reinforce these new ways of being is an effort that becomes easier with practice.
Weirdness.
I woke up this morning freaking out that I've shared my current work with someone who may actually "steal" my ideas. I've sent the paper I wrote for Critical Link 5 to four people (one academic, two interpreters from the European Parliament, and a fellow graduate student). It is the academic I'm worried about - only because weeks have passed, and a few emails from me, and no acknowledgement (yet).
My first wave of concern occurred within a few days of sending my article (per request of this academic) on July 25. I had just officially submitted it by the CL5 deadline of July 20, 2007.
Much has been happening in certain areas of my personal life that may incline me toward more suspiciousness than usual: I actually hope this is a case of paranoid transference! Then, this morning's headline story from The New York Times gave me more reason to consider external influences:
“Trust was shaken today,” said Thomas Mayer, the chief European economist at Deutsche Bank in Frankfurt. “Credit depends on trust. If trust disappears, then credit disappears, and you have a systemic issue.”
I know it seems like quite a stretch, but I can imagine my whiff of fearfulness as an example of social metonymy. Here I am in my own private little bubble of "steph-ness", dealing with the current challenges and changes washing through my life, and sensing amorphous "things".... am I picking up on a general gestalt (such as the worldwide grief - that I was surprised to share so intensely - when Princess Di was killed) and importing it into the particular performance of my own being?
I witnessed a clear instance of social metonymy the other day, observing a group during a staff meeting. The newest member of the business happened to be the last person to have a turn during the warm-up/check-in activity. I was amazed at how leisurely the group was at filling each other in on their family lives, personal successes, and rewarding experiences from the office. No one seemed bored! There was a palpable sense of caring and acceptance, indicated mostly through humor and teasing, but also through thoughtful follow-up questions and visible signs of affirmation (the nonverbals of eye contact, body posture, and nodding). The last person spoke of the warm welcome and supportive environment, sharing their decision to use this workplace as a site where (my paraphrase) "I can be me." The accumulation of individual performances of "self" in this workgroup have created a collective culture that this newcomer was able not only to say (as in describe) but to actually embody, to enact with heartfelt sentiment. The clarity of integration between intention, action, and language about the intentions and actions shows how well this person will fit into the group (a confirmation of the interview/hiring process).
Dang neat stuff, if you ask me. :-)
Posted in my other blog - either my backup or an alternative? Perhaps I will begin to segregate certain categories . . . (maybe, maybe not, but it is an idea).
Also posted in my other blog, A Place in Space, since this one was unavailable due to maxxed out storage capacity.
