Fantasy places -- but they have been built in the Philippines
You don’t know what you think you know. In fact, you may not feel what you think you feel. Contemporary research is challenging your very identity. You may not be who you think you are or even what you are. After all, consider the dark brain, which psychoanalysts think they know all about and build amazing fantasy castles giving everything names and roles. Except they have no relationship to the parts and function of the brain and can only be partly reconciled.
Consider the “chimera,” named for the mythical beast that is a composite animal: part lion, part eagle, part goat, but in fact an artifact of gestation in which twins begin but then one is absorbed by the other but not completely integrated, so that the subsumed twin develops into part of the body and the consuming twin develops all the rest. When docs later go to establish inheritance, they are presented with two people crammed into one system. The resulting person depends on which became what.
Baby Chimera: lion, goat, snake
In fact, human genetics are the accumulations of many creatures over many years, snips and snails and puppy dog tails. A friend of mine had a lung infection that was very difficult to cure because the cells of the lungs are very much like the cells of the infecting fungus. A knife-edge separated cure from kill. In the end it turned out that the fungus came from feeding hay to his horses -- the fungus was in stored hay and was impossible to eliminate so his choice was his lungs or his horse.
Over the years in various ways I’ve come to prefer thinking about systems to thinking about unified mono-objects and to prefer thinking of them dynamically and in relationships. This results in looking at common things in a sometimes uncomfortably disconcerting way. Joe LeDoux is a scientist who sort of does this same thing. He looks at “fear.” Which we think of as an “emotion,” a “feeling”, a “cause” and so on. He redefines it. Now he calls it “defensive behavior,” something that is done, maybe reflexively and without any consciousness, that will tend to save your life. Sometimes it doesn’t work. But creatures who had faulty “defensive behaviors” -- like fungi who landed where they couldn't grow -- got pruned out early. The opportunists -- hey, nice warm damp lung tissue! -- did great. Human beings still have those mechanisms and behaviors.
Carhenge
By now they are complex and entwined to the point where we can hardly get insight into ordinary situations. The content and the means of untangling them are beyond most people. It’s not a matter of smarts or even degrees. I follow two groups who are supposed to be learned. One is people who are professional psychoanalysts and artists, highly certified and totally out of touch with reality. They have spent days arguing over whether Carhenge (the old cars half-buried in the desert with their ends sticking up, emplaced in the same pattern as the big monoliths at Stonehenge) is really phallic symbols or not and whether people in Nebraska are smart enough to know that.
The other one is a “Beta” exchange as an adjunct to Aeon.com, an excellent online magazine that is half print essays and half video essays. I’ve always like the essays much better than the essays. In this other Q and A mode, both the questions and the answers are blind clichés from Ph.D. academics, all sitting around with their fingertips together and failing to open the horse’s mouth to count it’s teeth. Very few women. Some “brown” people from India, very thoughtful. No one seems to have read any of the lively revisionist history, much less the momentous brain research that is completely changing our understanding of human beings.
Typewriter? Must be an old story.
I just posted about Gazzaniga, so now I’m quoting from his collaborator. (He was supposed to be a student but with G. they were all collaborators, esp. including the people who were being studied. This is about Joe LaDoux, a Louisiana musician as well as a scientist. “Gazzaniga developed his theory of consciousness as an interpreter of experience, a means by which we develop a self-story that we use to understand those motivations and actions that arise from non-conscious processes in our brain.” (My emphasis.) His main recent insight is that “fear” and “anxiety” as we consciously understand them are entirely separate brain systems from the kind of reflex emergency reaction that people have automatically when in immediate danger, without consciousness.
Talking about “working memory in consciousness” or the importance of attention being paid to achieve focus, may not sound all that different from psychoanalysis, but they can be demonstrated with experiments and instruments. Joe says he agrees with “the general view that emphasizes the role of working memory as a gateway into consciousness, and I remain neutral about what happens next. My goal is not to solve the consciousness problem, but to understand how consciousness–whatever it may be–makes feelings possible. In my view, once information about the presence of a threat is directed to working memory the stage is set for a conscious feeling–an emotion such as fear–to occur. Working memory is not the same thing as consciousness, but in my opinion most of the conscious experiences we have depend on working memory. (I began turning some of this print to red as a form of high-lighting. Technically it is called “rubrics,” ruby red, to indicate importance, so I think I’ll just keep it. But it’s strictly my idea of what’s important.)
Yow!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n8hpf4dC8H0 for Joe talking.
Three important concepts he mentions are:
“Reconsolidation:” It's possible to destabilize memories. You can “open” them, add new information, then stabilize them again.
“Exposure Theory or Extinction:” Getting used to snakes or heights, etc. by getting used to them. (But stress will make it come back.) Now we know how to dampen the bounce-back.
“Optigenetics:” Studying molecules that are tagged with lights. Studying de-polarization of cells instead of shocks to rat feet. Demonstrating learning plasticity -- old cells can learn new tricks under the right circumstances.
A "turned on" mouse.
Danger puts the nervous system of a creature into a “motive state” which means they learn deeply, unconsciously and almost ineradicably from what happens to them at that point. But it might not have anything to do with emotions, so that a child raped by a parent might continue to love that parent. The deeply hard-wired reaction is separate from the emotional feelings, which are in addition to the escape from terror.
My hypothesis . . . is that the motive state is the collective response of the brain to survival circuit activation. Defensive responses thus contribute to defensive motive states rather than the other way around. The second question is whether the motive state itself contributes to conscious feelings by entering working memory, or whether working memory instead only has access to the individual neural components that constitute the motive state. The answer is not known at this point.
Survival hut
A defining characteristic of science is that every answer raises more questions. But when it comes to Joe’s work (which is shared) there is no question that art and science can join. Why isn't this joining welcomed and shared by psychiatrists and philosophers?
No comments:
Post a Comment