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Order, chaos, or something inbetween

Posted in from the reading room, neuroscience, science, tagged on April 27, 2009| 1 Comment »

I came across an excellent article about epilepsy recently. There’s a common belief that a seizure is a kind of chaos of the brain. In fact, it’s the opposite. A seizure is where the complex patterns of electrical activity in the brain break down and are replaced temporarily with a single big co-ordinated pattern.

A normal brain is governed by chaos; neurons fire unpredictably, following laws no computer, let alone neurologist, could hope to understand, even if they can recognize it on an EEG. It is what we call consciousness, perhaps the most mathematically complex phenomenon in the universe. The definition of a seizure is the absence of chaos, supplanted by a simple rhythmic pattern that carries almost no information.

I was especially struck by that last phrase – “a simple rhythmic pattern that carries almost no information”. We have a strong tendency to think it’s the ordered, clear patterns which convey information, and that when there is no clear pattern, that there’s no clear information. Interesting how it’s the opposite!

I then came across this interesting study of the zone between order and chaos. There’s a place between order and chaos which scientists describe as “edge of chaos” (otherwise known as “far from equilibrium”). It’s a difficult place to hold, easily tipping into some form of order, or some form of chaos, but it’s found everywhere in complex systems.

Self-organized criticality (where systems spontaneously organize themselves to operate at a critical point between order and randomness), can emerge from complex interactions in many different physical systems, including avalanches, forest fires, earthquakes, and heartbeat rhythms.

Well it turns out this is exactly how the brain performs best – and here’s why –

Due to these characteristics, self-organized criticality is intuitively attractive as a model for brain functions such as perception and action, because it would allow us to switch quickly between mental states in order to respond to changing environmental conditions

If you are too structured, too ordered, too stuck in your ways, it’s harder to adapt when things change.

Interesting……complexity means it’s hard to predict what will happen, but this fine balance between order and chaos turns out to not only Nature’s favourite, it’s a great survival strategy. I suspect one of our biggest challenges in the world now is to learn how to be more adaptable and not so reliant on rigid structures and patterns.

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Supersizing the Mind. Andy Clark

Posted in books, from the living room, from the reading room, life, neuroscience, personal growth, philosophy, science on April 10, 2009| 6 Comments »

Where does your mind exist? There’s a longstanding “common sense” view that it’s inside your skull. But, it’s becoming apparent, that is far from the whole story. Yes, of course a lot of what we call the mind is related to brain activity and the brain is indeed inside the skull, but many researchers are discovering that just as the brain does not exist in isolation, neither can cognition, behaviour, a sense of self, for example, be understood solely on the basis of brain processes. If we want to understand the mind we have to consider the body in which the brain is embedded. Phrases such as “embedded mind” and “embodied mind” capture the essence of this view, and the more you think about it, the more your realise the importance of the incredible network of connections between the brain and the rest of the body.
I get frustrated by doctors and scientists who act as if we can divide a human being into two components – a body and a mind. Especially when they then use this arbitrary and false dichotomy to actually recommend treatments for people’s illnesses. The “embodied mind” concept binds the body and the mind inextricably. That makes a lot of sense to me. I’ve never met a mind without a body, and the only bodies I’ve met without minds have been in the mortuary.
However, some thinkers, scientists and researchers have pushed the idea of “embedded minds” a stage further. (the difference being that “embodied” is exactly what it says – “in the body”; whereas “embedded” argues for a broad contextual understanding which situates the mind in it’s multiple environments). Andy Clark, who promotes the concept of the “extended mind” is one of the writers who has taken this furthest.

I have three of Andy Clark’s books. The first one I read was “Being There” (ISBN 0-262-53156-9), which was given as a key reference in “Smart World” by Richard Ogle . That book deals with the concept of the “embodied mind”.

Might it not be more fruitful to think of brains as controllers for embodied activity? That small shift in perspective has large implications for how we construct a science of the mind. It demands, in fact, a sweeping reform in our whole way of thinking about intelligent behaviour. It requires us to abandon the idea (common since Descartes) of the mental as a realm distinct from the realm of the body; to abandon the idea of neat dividing lines between perception, cognition, and action.

Being There describes how this concept evolved and lays out the implications of the model. Six years later he published “Natural-born Cyborgs” (ISBN 0-19-517751-7). Here he challenges us to consider just how we, as human beings, extend ourselves outwith the bounds of our physical biology.

For what is special about human brains, and what best explains the distictinctive features of human intelligence, is precisely their ability to enter into deep and complex relationships with nonbiological constructs, props and aids. This ability, however, does not depend on physical wire-and-implant mergers, so much as on our openness to information-processing mergers.

He tracks the evolution of these interactions

….from speech and counting, morphs first into written text and numerals, then into early printing, and on to the revolutions of moveable typefaces and the printing press, and most recently to the digital encodings that bring text, sound and image into a uniform and widely transmissible format…..they constitute, I want to say, a cascade of “mindware upgrades”
What matters most is our obsessive, endless weaving of biotechnological webs: the constant two-way traffic between biological wetware and tools, media, props, and technologies. The very best of these resources are not so much used as incorporated into the user herself. They have the power to transform our sense of self, of location, of embodiment, and our own mental capacities. They impact who, what and where we are. In embracing our hybrid natures, we give up the idea of the mind and the self as a kind of wafer-thin inner essence, the human person emerges as a shifting matrix of biological and nonbiological parts. The self, the mind, and the person are no more to be extracted from that complex matrix than the smile from the Cheshire Cat.

I particularly like this phrase from his concluding chapter in that book –

Our most significant technologies are those that allow our thoughts to go where no animal thoughts have gone before. It is our shape-shifter minds, not our space-roving bodies, that will most fully express our deep cyborg nature.

In his most recent book, “Supersizing the Mind” (ISBN 978-0-19-533321-3), he reproduces the original article which he wrote with David Chalmers, where they both laid out this concept of an “extended mind”. That article alone is worth reading, and, in fact, he recommends you read it first before reading the rest of the book. He juxtaposes the concept “BRAINBOUND” with “EXTENDED”.

According to BRAINBOUND, the (nonneural) body is just the sensor and effector system of the brain, and the rest of the world is just the arena in which adaptive problems get posed and in which the brain-body system must sense and act.
Maximally opposed to BRAINBOUND is a view according to which thinking and cognizing may (at times) depend directly and noninstrumentally upon the ongoing work of the body and/or the extraorganismic environment. Call this model EXTENDED. According to EXTENDED, the actual local operations that realise certain forms of human cognizing include inextricable tangles of feedback, feed-forward, and feed-around loops; loops that promiscuously criss-cross the boundaries of brain, body and world. The local mechanisms of mind, if this is correct, are not all in the head. Cognition leaks out into body and world.

Why is all this important? Well, I think Andy Clark puts it well himself –

This matters because it drives home the degree to which environmental engineering is also self-engineering. In building our physical and social worlds, we build (or rather massively reconfigure) our minds and our capacities of thought and reason.

This is the why this way of thinking so exciting. How does our physical environment shape not just our patterns of thought, but our whole sense of personhood? How does it limit, or potentially expand, what we think we are and what we think we can be? Our social world is a fundamentally narrative one. So what are the stories we are told in our societies? And what stories do we choose to tell each other? How does this narratively-constructed world both shape our sense of personhood, and stimulate our imaginations to become something more than we are now?
If all this seems a little esoteric for you, read David Chalmers foreword to “Supersizing the Mind”. You’ll immediately grasp the everyday-ness of all this as he talks about how getting an iphone has changed his life, and, further, how the use of notebooks, and visual cues, can maintain independent living in patients with Alzheimer’s way beyond what would be possible were they to rely on the minds inside their skulls!

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Storytelling and the science of the mind

Posted in from the reading room, life, narrative, neuroscience, psychology, tagged on August 11, 2008| 3 Comments »

Because I deal with stories every day, I decided to learn more about the place of narrative in human experience, but coming from a medical perspective I couldn’t find much about narrative, even though there are emerging disciplines of “narrative-based medicine” and “narrative-based research”. Instead, I found the best thinking on storytelling lay in the world of the Humanities. In fact, Richard Kearney’s “On Stories” gave me more insights than any other single work.

It was interesting, therefore, to read this perspective, from Scientific American, which describes how researchers are beginning to study the use of narrative in order to gain insights into the workings of the mind. “Why does our brain seem to be wired to enjoy stories? And how do the emotional and cognitive effects of a narrative influence our beliefs and real-world decisions?”

The first problem scientists face, however, is defining a story! What exactly constitutes a story?

Exposition contrasts with narrative by being a simple, straightforward explanation, such as a list of facts or an encyclopedia entry. Another standard approach defines narrative as a series of causally linked events that unfold over time. A third definition hinges on the typical narrative’s subject matter: the interactions of intentional agents—characters with minds—who possess various motivations.

I loved the conclusion they reached –

However narrative is defined, people know it when they feel it. Whether fiction or nonfiction, a narrative engages its audience through psychological realism—recognizable emotions and believable interactions among characters. “Everyone has a natural detector for psychological realism,” says Raymond A. Mar, assistant professor of psychology at York University in Toronto. “We can tell when something rings false.”

In other words……you just know! How often this applies in life! How do you know when you are well? How do you know when your energy levels are good? Guess it’s the same when it comes to recognising a story. It’s a function of human intuition.

Do you become immersed in stories? Completely absorbed by them? Well, it turns out that if you have prior experience which is similar to that of the characters in the stories then you are more likely to become immersed in those stories. This is kind of obvious. It means that you are more likely to become absorbed by a story if you identify with the characters. One step beyond this conclusion is interesting though…..those who become more easily immersed in a wider range of stories have been shown to be those who have the greatest capacity to empathise. Interestingly, this can work the other way too…….you can increase somebody’s ability to empathise by teaching them literature! The ability to empathise is the ability to imagine what’s going on in someone else’s mind – scientists call this “theory of mind”. Theory of mind develops in children around the age of 5 and is a key part of the human ability to live in communities. So, storytelling also has the possibility of improving our skills in living together.

Other scientists have studied stories to see what they reveal about human motivations and goals –

As many as two thirds of the most respected stories in narrative traditions seem to be variations on three narrative patterns, or prototypes, according to Hogan. The two more common prototypes are romantic and heroic scenarios—the former focuses on the trials and travails of love, whereas the latter deals with power struggles. The third prototype, dubbed “sacrificial” by Hogan, focuses on agrarian plenty versus famine as well as on societal redemption. These themes appear over and over again as humans create narrative records of their most basic needs: food, reproduction and social status.

Are these the basic, common themes we find in stories? Do you agree that stories reveal the common human patterns of motivation and desire?

Let me finish this post with the final point made in this interesting article – the power of stories to influence us. This is well understood by advertisers and PR companies, but this point really struck me –

…..labeling information as “fact” increased critical analysis, whereas labeling information as “fiction” had the opposite effect. Studies such as these suggest people accept ideas more readily when their minds are in story mode as opposed to when they are in an analytical mind-set.

Now isn’t that interesting! Stories are more likely to convince people than “facts”!

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Is reality a series of events?

Posted in neuroscience, philosophy, psychology on July 4, 2008| Leave a Comment »

16 in 1

I’ve just embarked upon a study of the Abhidamma – it’s a Buddhist text which is referred to as THE main text on Buddhist psychology. Buddhist psychology is becoming more prominent in recent times because those who write about neuroscientific approaches to the Mind, researchers and philosophers interested in phenomena like consciousness and perception are discovering that many of the Buddhist insights help them with their more biomedical approaches.

This concept suddenly stopped me in my tracks – we tend to perceive reality as being like a series of events. We divide time into the past, the present and the future, and the present is the time period which is the hardest to pin down because as soon as you think about it, it’s slipped into the past! One way of modelling this concept of reality is the movie. We know that a movie is made up from a long series of still photos. When we run the film past our eyes quickly we don’t actually see any of the single frames. Instead, we see movement. So maybe the way to understand reality is to break down the flow of experience into events….like the individual frames of the movie. I’ve wondered about this a few times but the author of the text I’m reading suddenly turned it on its head and that’s what stopped me in my tracks.

He said, what if we think about it in quite the opposite way? What if reality is the flow, and the individual frames, or events are artificial? In other words, there are no events, there is only flow. Slicing the flow into pieces is artificial and gives us the impression that we can understand reality by considering disconnected small segments of it.

This is exactly the problem we have with materialistic, reductionist science. We are told that science can describe complete phenomena as entities, things, or “facts”. But that’s artificial. Reality is flow, is connection and process and cannot be reduced to fixed units. Fortunately, the new developments in science have taken this on board. The new ways include thinking about complexity, chaos, networks and systems. They have a dynamic focus, not a fixed one.

Oh, what’s that photo above? My camera has a function called “16 shot” – you press the shutter release and it takes 16 photos in rapid succession and shows you the results as a single image. This is a photo of a wave. Not only does the phenomenon of a wave act as an interesting example of how see “entitities”, of things, by slicing up the flow of reality, but it reminds us of the impermanence of everything and of the constancy of change.

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Mind-bending Movies

Posted in from the viewing room, movies, neuroscience, psychology on June 10, 2008| 1 Comment »

I love movies. I’m an addict. I think it’s my insatiable thirst for stories which hooks me. I’m not a fan of the blockbuster kind of movie that’s all special effects though. I like a movie which draws me in and absorbs me in the characters and the story. Of course, that fits with my other great addiction – books. I’m really never without a book and I’m often reading more than one book at a time.

I think movies are called movies, not just because they are “moving pictures” but because they can be so “moving” – they can stir our emotions so strongly. How do they do that? Well, here’s a slightly disturbing piece of research. Using the fMRI technique (the brain scan that shows which areas of the brain are active at any given moment) researchers observed which parts of the brain became active at particular moments in different movies and they used an interesting tool called “ISC” (Inter-subject Correlation) to see if different people had the same parts of the brain lighting up at the same moments. They picked a Hitchcock movie, “Bang! You’re Dead!”, “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly”, an episode of “Curb your Enthusiasm”, and an unedited video clip of a concert. The results were very different –

  • The Hitchcock episode evoked similar responses across all viewers in over 65 percent of the neocortex, indicating a high level of control on viewers’ minds;
  • High ISC was also extensive (45 percent) for “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly”;
  • Lower ISC was recorded for “Curb Your Enthusiasm” (18 percent) and for the Washington Square Park, or unstructured reality, clip (less than 5 percent)

In other words, Hitchcock really was the master. His movie evoked the most similar responses in peoples’ brains.

“Our data suggest that achieving a tight control over viewers’ brains during a movie requires, in most cases, intentional construction of the film’s sequence through aesthetic means,” the researchers wrote. “The fact that Hitchcock was able to orchestrate the responses of so many different brain regions, turning them on and off at the same time across all viewers, may provide neuroscientific evidence for his notoriously famous ability to master and manipulate viewers’ minds. Hitchcock often liked to tell interviewers that for him ‘creation is based on an exact science of audience reactions.’ “

The researchers claim that these techniques pave the way for the development of “neurocinematic studies” – oh my!

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Figuring out how your brain handles the meanings of words

Posted in neuroscience, perception, psychology on June 2, 2008| 8 Comments »

fMRI is definitely the “in” tool in neuroscience. It allows a scientist to see what areas of the brain light up while a person is doing something. A study I recently came across is using this technique to work out how the brain deals with words. More specifically they are mapping the areas of the brain that light up when someone here’s a word associated with a “concrete noun” – a noun related to something experienced with one of the five senses.

Hmm, not quite sure how interesting that is, but then I read this –

“We are fundamentally perceivers and actors,” he said. “So the brain represents the meaning of a concrete noun in areas of the brain associated with how people sense it or manipulate it. The meaning of an apple, for instance, is represented in brain areas responsible for tasting, for smelling, for chewing. An apple is what you do with it. Our work is a small but important step in breaking the brain’s code.”

This is SUCH an important point in understanding how human beings function. Our nervous systems involve a whole network involved in sensing stimuli from the environment and a whole network involved in carrying out actions. These two networks are intensely and complexly (is there such a word?) linked up to each other. At a simple level, that implies we sense things then we act in response. In fact, it’s more complicated. Some neuroscientists and philosophers have suggested that sensing and acting are actually two aspects of the exact same thing – that sensing is a kind of an act. That seems right at some level, but it’s also quite challenging. This particular insight from these researchers makes that idea a little clearer I think. We can see that the brain actually represents what it perceives by using the areas that are involved in carrying out the actions normally associated with the object being perceived. In other words, perception and understanding are fundamentally entangled with acting.

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4 verbs which make us human?

Posted in life, narrative, neuroscience, perception, personal growth, philosophy, psychology, science on May 20, 2008| 3 Comments »

Let’s consider four verbs which highlight essential characteristics of human beings.

SENSING

All living creatures are sensate. All have sensory organs to pick up stimuli from the environment – light, sound, odours, temperature and so on. As human beings we have a particularly elaborate sensory system, possibly THE most elaborate of all creatures, however, being sensate is a characteristic we share with all animate beings.

FEELING

I have a large hardback copy of Gray’s Anatomy on my bookshelf. I bought it when I was studying anatomy at Medical School back in 1973. I still find it fascinating. The section on the nervous system and the brain shows something incredibly striking. All the nerves which carry the signals from the sensory organs travel first of all to what is termed “the old brain”, the “limbic system” more or less. That always amazed me. Why do all the sensory signals go there? This particular area of the brain is the main emotion generating and processing centre. It’s responsible for those feelings you get of fear, of arousal, of anger, and so on. Modern techniques of brain imaging are helping us to understand this better. It seems that we have developed in a way which allows signals from our sensory equipment to first of all create emotional states. This has a survival advantage. For example, we can quickly develop the “fight or flight” response to successfully deal with any threats around us. Obviously emotions are considerably more elaborate than this. Anthony Damasio is really interesting to read about this subject. “Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain” is a good starting point. But I can also recommend his “The Feeling of What Happens” and “Looking for Spinoza”. You might also like “Consciousness Explained” by Daniel C Dennett and “Emotional Intelligence” by Daniel Goleman. What all of these authors show us is how this particular function of the brain allows us to respond to stimuli from the environment far, far more quickly than we could if we had to become aware of everything consciously first, then figure out what to do about it. That thinking thing comes next! Although it’s not possible to really know the emotional content of another creature’s mind, from observing behaviour patterns it would seem that other animals also have emotions.

THINKING

Those two great parts of the brain known as the cerebral hemispheres are responsible for what we term “cognition”…….thinking. In its entirety, the human brain is THE most complex structure in the known universe. Amazing, huh? And it’s inside your head! There’s way too much involved in thinking for me to explain here but it involves memory, imagination, awareness, concentration and systems of assessment. Once signals have been processed in the old brain (and acted upon!), this “new brain” picks up the trail and processes what’s going on. It’s thinking that let’s us make choices. Some other creatures think too, but, as far as we know, not to nearly the same extent as human beings do. One of the things we’ve done with these capacities is to develop language which gives us the ability to handle and manipulate symbols and to think both abstractly and synthetically. And that leads to the fourth verb – the one which seems to be uniquely human –

MEANING-SEEKING

We don’t just pick up signals, we don’t just generate feelings, we don’t just think about the signals and the feelings to make choices, we do something else. We try to make sense of things. We are always asking the questions “Why?” and “How come?” We are insatiably curious but we are also insatiably trying to understand the world and our experiences. The way we do this is by telling stories. We put everything together and attribute values and meanings to weave narratives which enable us to make sense of the world and of ourselves. We do this in a host of complex ways. Viktor Frankl showed how this is one of our most fundamental drives. See his “Man’s Search for Meaning”. Richard Kearney shows how we use storytelling for this purpose, and Owen Flanagan shows how we inhabit “spaces of meaning” to create our distinct worldviews and narratives.

So, there you have it. Four verbs which make us human – sensing, feeling, thinking and meaning-seeking.  Let me just add one further level of complexity. I’ve presented this is a logical, step-wise way – inspired by those evolutionary biologists – but on a moment to moment basis, these activities of the human being are continuously active and interactive. What sense we make of something influences what we sense and vice versa. Feelings influence thoughts and vice versa. And so on.

What do you think? Do you agree that these four verbs capture what it is to be human? Have you any others you think I should add?

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How we figure out what other people think

Posted in from the reading room, neuroscience, psychology on March 18, 2008| 2 Comments »

How we figure out what other people think or how they are likely to act is a complex phenomenon, but here’s one interesting aspect of it. There’s a technique being used quite a lot these days to try and understand how our brains work. It’s called fMRI – which stands for functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging. This is a scanning technique which allows us to see which parts of the brain kick into action when we are thinking or doing certain things. A Harvard team have used this technique while getting volunteers to answer questions about how strangers might think on the basis of having been given short descriptions of the strangers before hand. The interesting thing is that there was a clear difference in which part of the brain was used to answer the questions depending on whether or not the volunteer thought the stranger was similar to themselves or not. When the volunteer thought the stranger was similar to themselves they used the same part of the brain to answer questions about what the stranger might think, that we all use for thinking about ourselves (the areas we use for introspection, the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vMPFC)).

In summary, we are more likely to refer to our own experience and ideas of ourselves when trying to guess how another person will think or act, only if we consider that person to be like us. If we don’t think they are like us, we have to use other cues – and those other cues, most psychologists think, come from observations and society’s rules, not from personal reflection.

This isn’t a huge breakthrough in understanding but I’m sure it does say something about why we are able to be more empathic with some people than we are with others, and probably also why communities are wary of strangers. It’s the basis of that old “you’re not from round here are you?” question which indicates the stranger is thought to be, well, strange!

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Are we born empathic?

Posted in from the consulting room, from the reading room, neuroscience on December 10, 2007| Leave a Comment »

A colleague at work read my post on mirroring.

She said, if it’s true that different people have different scan findings in the areas of the brain associated with mirroring neurones (which, it is hypothesised, are responsible for empathic ability), then does that mean that some people are born with greater empathic potential than others? And can the potential be developed?

This is a common question in neuroscience – when we identify either physical structures within the brain responsible for certain behaviours and qualities, or differences in function in those areas as highlighted by functional scans, then are we saying that people are born with these brain differences which then determine their characteristics? Some people might make that claim but from my reading I’d say almost every scientist thinks that the physical characteristics of the brain, originating in genetic makeup and embryonic development, are important, and may even set the limits of possibility. However, the nervous system is more “plastic” (the specific meaning of this is nothing artificial, it means it can change), than a simple one-off scan will ever show. Neuronal pathways develop, grow or shrink, depending on demand. What this means is that while we are probably born with different potentials, everyone’s potential can be developed or suppressed by experience.

She asked the question because she was wondering why some doctors are more empathic than others. Specifically, she wondered if empathy could be learned. I’m pretty sure empathy can be learned. I’ve seen medical students and qualified doctors become more empathic as they train in homeopathy which emphasises the patient’s narrative and a clear understanding of the patients’ experience.

But the question got me thinking about the place of empathy in the consultation. How much is it a quality developed from “mirroring”? Difficult to answer, but I think there’s an even more important element – being interested.

If a doctor is not truly interested in what a patient has to say, then they won’t listen, won’t understand and won’t be empathic. Can being interested be faked? No, I don’t think so. You’re either genuinely interested in somebody or something, or you’re not. Pretending to be doesn’t work. I’ve often said, when discussing the art of medicine, that if I ever need to see a doctor because I’m not well, then I’ll want one who frankly gives a damn! I want a doctor who, at least for the duration of the consultation, is genuinely interested in me. In fact, I’d recommend that anyone who doesn’t find people totally, compellingly interesting, shouldn’t study medicine in the first place!

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Being There

Posted in books, from the reading room, life, neuroscience, philosophy on November 6, 2007| 2 Comments »

Being There, by Andy Clark (ISBN 0-262-53156-9) is one of the most interestingly challenging books I’ve read for a long time. Let me say first that it’s taken me longer to read than I’d have expected it to. There are whole swathes of it which just didn’t engage me easily. In fact, a few times I thought I’d pack it in, then I’d come across a few sentences or a paragraph that not only would grab me and turn my thinking upside down, but it’d be exciting, visionary and, yes, down right thrilling.

I really enjoyed Robert Solomon’s, The Joy of Philosophy, not least because I feel he gave me a new vocabulary. His one word/concept of “thin” really expanded my thought. You can read more about it here, but what really excited me about this word was the way it captured the inadequacy of logical/analytical/reductionist thought.

I then read Barabasi’s Linked, which homed in on the key concepts of connections and nodes. I especially liked the way he demonstrated that the world, though a complex and at times chaotic system, is not random. Randomness turns out not to be the explanation for the phenomena we experience daily. That changed the way I thought about the world – there are patterns to be discovered, and phenomena to be understood. Sure, there is such a thing as chance, and life is often extremely unpredictable, but we can begin to unravel the connections between things and events, and in the process we can improve our understanding of the world.

Now I’ve just read Andy Clark’s Being There and he puts forward concepts that similarly change the way I understand the world and uses language in some novel ways which open the doors to other ways to explore life.  His main thesis is that to understand the mind we have to step outside of the study of the brain – not that the brain is not important of course – but we need to understand the environments in which brains exist. He draws the connections between the brain and the physical, social and symbolic environments in which we live and shows that to fully understand how the mind works we need to explore the interactions between brains and the world. He calls this concept of the mind, the “extended mind” and in the process he nicely shows how we use our brains primarily for pattern recognition and for creating change in the world. In particular how we create the structures in the world that we can then use to extend the functions of our minds.

Let me highlight one simple example – doing a jigsaw. To do a jigsaw we don’t work it all out in our heads but we use our hands to literally manipulate the pieces, turning them around to view each piece from different angles, so stimulating our pattern-recognising brains, and moving the pieces towards and away from different sections of the puzzle. In other words we manipulate the physical environment to help our pattern-spotting brains do what they do best, and to do that more quickly. Andy Clark nicely shows how we do exactly the same thing with our social environment and, crucially, with our ability to handle symbols and signs, which has reached its highest point in our development of language.

What does public language do for us? There is a common, easy answer, which, though not incorrect, is subtly misleading. The easy answer is that language helps us to communicate ideas. It lets other human beings profit from what we know, and it enables us to profit from what they know. This is surely true, and it locates one major wellspring of our rather unique kind of cognitive success. However, the emphasis on language as a medium of communication tends to blind us to a subtler but equally potent role: the role of language as a tool that alters the nature of the computational tasks involved in various kinds of problem solving.

I’ve never read this idea anywhere else – it highlights language as not only being a tool of communication but also being a tool we use to reshape the world to enable our brains to more effectively use their capacities.

This whole thrust can feel a little vertiginous. Look at this for example –

Every thought is had by a brain. But the flow of thoughts and the adaptive successes of reason are now seen to depend on repeated and crucial interactions with external resources. The role of such interactions, in the cases I have highlighted, is clearly computational and informational: it is to transform inputs, to simplify search, to aid recognition, to prompt associative recall, to offload memory, and so on…

and this –

Our brains are the cogs in larger social and cultural machines – machines that bear the mark of vast bodies of previous search and effort, both individual and collective. This machinery is, quite literally, the persisting embodiment of the wealth of achieved knowledge. It is this leviathan of diffused reason that presses maximal benefits from our own simple efforts….

Well, I don’t know about you but this embedding of the brain in the web of relationships, stretching backwards, sideways and forwards in time, makes my head spin! It turns the mind into an even more dynamic phenomenon than I had previously realised and at the same time it turns it into a much less isolated phenomenon too.

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