‘Mind at Play’ Workshop

April 25th, 2006 Fred McVittie

This is the description of a workshop that I am thinking of attending, (although a date hasn’t actually been given of when it will be held). If it happens, and if I hear about it in time, and if I decide to go along, and if I can find the room it is being held in, I’ll report back.

There has long been a tradition in arts training, particularly training in the performing arts, of physical and mental exercises designed not to lead to any particular outcome but to produce a certain desired state in the performer or artist. These ‘warm-up’ exercises often take the form of games and play-like activity. In fact it is occasionally overtly stated that to be an artist one needs to learn to ‘play’ like a child. This suggests that there is a particular mental state found in play behaviour which is desirable for the creative process to be fully engaged in. Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi has identified and written extensively on a mode of cognition which he refers to as ‘flow’, again associated with certain types of focussed play, but also found in individuals who are able to fully absorb themselves into an activity of any kind. As with the above terms, the flow state corresponds to a loss of ego boundaries, a complete identification with the action, and often an unproblematic sense of mastery or control. Research has also been carried out on a similar condition found in athletes during certain peak experiences of sport activity. This subjective state, which is known colloquially amongst athletes as being ‘in the zone’ seems to correlate closely to a state in which the brainwave patterns become much simpler than at other times and adopt what is called the alpha wave state. There seems to be a further correlation in athletes between the adoption of this alpha wave state and the achievement of maximum potential. This cluster of terms and activities; play, flow, the alpha-wave state, and being ‘in the zone’, clearly refer to a family of closely related states which have particular relevance for the achievement of optimal performance in all areas, including theatre and creative arts. This workshop will introduce a range of techniques which will allow participants to experience these states.

Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1997). Creativity: flow and the psychology of discovery and invention. New York, HarperPerennial.

Posted in Csikszentmihalyi, Mihalyi, Exercises, Neuroscience, Play, Story | No Comments »

More on Mirror Neurons

April 26th, 2006 Fred McVittie

This abstract was given to me at dinner last night (hand written!) and the presentation is apparently some time today. I will try to get to it and report back.

It has been shown that the areas of the brain which are activated when we carry out an action, say ‘grasping’, are also activated when we imagine the activity. This is sometimes referred to as a ’simulation’. Furthermore, these same areas are activated when we read about or witness someone else carrying out the action of ‘grasping’. This simulation, or mirroring of the action seems to be a key component in understanding the action or the meaning of the word (Feldman & Narayanan 2004), and the process is occasionally referred to as the action of ‘mirror neurons’.

The significance of these findings for metaphor studies is that these same areas of the brain are also activated when we read about or hear an utterance which makes metaphorical use of the term ‘to grasp’, for example; ‘to grasp and idea’; ‘to grasp an opportunity’. This implies that the metaphorical mapping of concrete, body-based concepts onto abstract concepts is not only a function of the minds cognitive processes, but is also taking place at a neural level. The patterns of neuronal firings which occur during metaphor usage are, in effect, the neural correlates of concepts.

Feldman, J. and S. Narayanan (2004). “Embodied Meaning in a Neural Theory of Language.” Brain and Language(89): 385.

Posted in Conference Abstract, Feldman, J. and Narayanan, S., Grasp, Metaphor, Mirror neurons, Neuroscience, Story | No Comments »

Synaptic Connectivity and the Creative Cycle

June 13th, 2006 Fred McVittie

Neurological maturity consists not only of the forging of new neuronal associations but also, significantly, of the ‘pruning’ of existing connections within the brain. Between early childhood and adolescence up to 50% of synapses are lost. This developmental period is also one in which forms of thinking change. Early childhood is characterised by thinking styles which incorporate plurality, intuition, play, and ‘magic’. After adolescence these styles cease to dominate and are largely replaced by the cognitive habits of linearity, causality, deduction, and logic.

These different thinking styles are also characteristic of different phases in the typical creative process. At the beginning of a process (or cycle within a process), when there is a need to identify a particular problem, construct criteria, locate resources, etc. linear logical styles are most appropriate. This mode of cognition is also most appropriate at the end of a process or cycle, when the onus is on verification, organisation (of data, of expression etc), and elaboration. During the interim phases, usually referred to as the ‘incubation’ and ‘illumination’ stages, another style of thinking is more conducive in which intuition, play, and ‘magic’ are available. This corresponds to a mode of thought particularly available prior to the ‘pruning’ of synaptic connections, a mode in which connectivity between ideas is maximised, along with a hightened and distributed sense of significance or meaningfulness across this maximal synaptic network.

Posted in Creativity, Cycle, Illumination, Neuroscience | No Comments »

Mind, Performance, Creativity, Attention

July 30th, 2006 Fred McVittie

There is a high level of correlation between the following phenomena and concepts:

• experienced states of mind
• brainwave patterns
• use of attentional resources (energy)
• phases in creative processes
• phases in the performance of a task (including theatrical or art tasks)

These correlations suggest the functioning of a common process which, in all likelihood, in partly material and partly metaphorical. A greater awareness of this process should allow for the development of techniques for greater control over the process, and a consequent enhancement or optimisation of the performance of a range of tasks (including theatrical tasks) and enhanced creativity.

Posted in Creativity, Energy, Metaphor, Mind, Neuroscience, Performance, Theatre | No Comments »

Education, Metaphors, and Mirror Neurons

August 19th, 2006 Fred McVittie

It has been shown that the areas of the brain which are activated when we carry out an action, say grasping, are also activated when we imagine the activity. This is sometimes referred to as a simulation. Furthermore, these same areas are activated when we read about or witness someone else carrying out the action of grasping. This simulation, or mirroring of the action seems to be a key component in understanding the action or the meaning of the word (Feldman and Narayanan 2004), and the process is occasionally referred to as the action of ‘mirror neurons’.

The significance of these findings for metaphor studies is that these same areas of the brain are also activated when we read about or hear an utterance which makes metaphorical use of the term ‘to grasp’, for example; to grasp and idea; to grasp an opportunity. This implies that the metaphorical mapping of concrete, body-based concepts onto abstract concepts is not only a function of the minds cognitive processes, but is also taking place at a neural level. The patterns of neuronal firings which occur during metaphor usage are, in effect, the neural correlates of concepts.

The implication of these findings for educators and students will be discussed, particularly in relation to the teaching and learning of abstract or metaphysical concepts.

Posted in Grasp, Metaphor, Mirror neurons, Neuroscience | No Comments »

Embodied Meaning in a Neural Theory of Language.

September 12th, 2006 Fred McVittie

Feldman, J. and S. Narayanan (2004). “Embodied Meaning in a Neural Theory of Language.” Brain and Language(89): 385.

This paper puts forward a theory of cognitive meaning in which terms such as ‘grasp’ are understood through an activation of the same neural circuitry that would be employed in actually carrying out the action of grasping. These are the so-called ‘mirror neurons’ identified by Ramachandran and others. Narayanan and Feldman go on to suggest how these same circuits are used in the understanding of these same terms used metaphorically, as when we ‘grasp’ and idea etc. It is further suggested that this same system is in place with other modes of communication and comprehension, particularly the use of gesture.

Posted in Embodiment, Grasp, Language, Metaphor, Neuroscience | No Comments »

Neurological Interdisciplinarity

February 8th, 2007 Fred McVittie

Different artforms tend to be categorised by either the sensory mode through which they are conveyed, (music is a sonic art), through a similarity in the method of their production (writing), or through their placement within a particular historical or social context (theatre, dance). At the level of the reception of these arts however, these categorial differences are not easily maintained. The neurological processes which allow us to hear a piece of music, see a painting, or read a poem, are distributed across numerous sites within the brain and no single site, or isolated set of sites, is responsible for the processing of each separate category of art experience. This ‘neurological interdisciplinarity’ also inevitably extends to the effects these artworks produce in us. These is no single area of the brain which responds to the aesthetics of a piece of music and a completely different area responding to the aesthetics of a dance or poem. It is more likely that ‘aesthetics’ is a set of emotionally tagged responses which transcends the categories noted above, although it is also likely that the origins of these interdisciplinary synaesthetic responses lie in an embodied adaptivity.

Posted in Aesthetics, Neuroscience, Synaesthesia | No Comments »

Induced Spirituality

June 1st, 2007 Fred McVittie

Work carried out by Michael Persinger at Laurentia University (reviewed at http://home.comcast.net/~neardeath/religion/001_pages/04.html) suggests that some of the feelings associated with spirituality: union with a greater power, the presence of a divine being etc, can be induced by the application of Trans-cranial Magnetic Signals (TMS). This work is complemented by that of Andrew Newberg who, working with Buddhist monks and nuns, discovered that the meditative practices they engaged in, and which induced feelings of divine union, seemed to produce particular patterns of activation in the brain similar to those produced by TMS. Whilst this work does not dismiss or disprove the concept of the divine, or erase God from the equation (completely), it does clearly indicate that some of the experiences and feelings which we associate with ’spiritual practice’ are not evidence of the validity of whatever beliefs we may hold, but are part of our cognitive operation.

Posted in Buddhism, Neuroscience, Newberg, Andrew, Persinger, Michael, Spirituality | No Comments »

Body Mind Consciousness

June 1st, 2007 Fred McVittie

We are used to considering the world of experience as intuitively divided into two parts. We are, as Paul Bloom notes, ‘natural born dualists’, an observation given some neurological support in the idea/mechanism of the ‘binary operator’ of Newberg and D’Aquili, one of the automatic world-ordering processes which are responsible for the cognitive sense we make of the world. In the case of the binary operator, the sense-making is that of a division into the various binaries of this/that, figure/ground, self/other etc. One of the primary divisions, perhaps the primary division, associated with Descartes is the binary distinction between matter and spirit, res extensa and res cogitans, which in more modern parlance we might express as a distinction between body and mind, or possibly even brain and mind, cognition and consciousness.

In many ways this distinction is institutionalised in the separation of science and religion, rational atheism and intuitive spirituality. These two areas of thought are often radically separate and often incompatible, an incompatibility which too often manifests as conflict, denial, or distancing, as in the conceiving of these realms as ‘non-overlapping magisteria’ (Gould, 1997). Even when the incompatability between science and religion is minimised, as in the moves by the Dalai Lama toward neuroscience and by the Templeton Foundation to support religiously oriented scientific research, there is always a sense that this hand-holding is tentative and could be withdrawn at any point.

One possible shift that has taken place recently is the construction of areas of knowledge which are as inaccessible to science as ’spiritual’ matters but do not have the religious trappings or the cultural and institutional baggage. Consciousness studies is probably the best example of this domain. Although some may deny it, Consciousness Studies contains at its heart a ‘hard problem’ (Chalmers) whcih is that we simply cannot imagine what a satisfactory explanation of consciousness might be. Whatever it is, a description of it will always fall short of our experience of it. Whilst it is clearly evident that the study of consciousness has relationships to material science, particularly neuroscience and psychology, there is no evidence that science will empty the concept and unweave that particular rainbow. The relationships between (some areas of) Consciousness Studies and the other physical sciences is multivalent and parallels those developed between religion and science. As with religion, some scientists would deny that consciousness exists at all, while others would deny that the ‘hard problem’ exists (which amounts to the same thing). Conversely, some who study consciousness would point to the role of cognition and awareness in the construction of reality, questioning the objectivity of the science. Still other go for the hand-holding approach and look to the fringes of science for areas o overlap: to quantum physics, chaos, complexity, feeling a similar sense of wierdness emanating from these theories as they feel when thinking about consciousness and assuming a connection where there is only correspondence. A kind of awe-struck doctrine of signatures.

The development of Consciousness Studies as a domain of the unknowable is an interesting and significant development. It may be the first area of study, outside of religious practices, in which the object of study is truly ineffable and is, by some at least, acknowledged to be ineffable from the outset. In breaking the binary of matter/spirit by introducing itself as a third term, consciousness opens up the possibility of other areas of the unknowable becoming available, and also of a redefinition of some existing areas of practice as unknowable but still credible areas of study. I anticipate that much contemporary science, political thought, linguistics, and philosophy could easily make this shift.

Posted in Bloom, Paul, Chalmers, David, Consciousness, D'Aquili, Eugene, Descartes, Rene, Neuroscience | No Comments »

Eyes Open, Mind Shut

June 5th, 2007 Fred McVittie

Recent neurological studies of hospital patients who are in the Persistant Vegetative State (PVS), either as a result of brain injury or oxygen deprivation, has provided interesting information related to the study of consciousness (Laurys, 2007). In PVS and related states the patients are often apparently ‘awake’, with eyes open, yet do not show any signs of a conscious awareness of their surroundings. In other words, while there seems to be an ‘awareness’ present, this awareness does not have any contents; the consciousness of these people is illuminated but its light is not falling on anything, it is simply an empty light. This finding gives support to theories which propose a distinction between consciousness and the contents of that consciousness, contradicting models of the mind which propose that to be conscious is to be conscious of something. If these neurological studies are confirmed, then consciousness begins to acquire scientifically supported structure. It consists of at least two components, consciousness, which is the undirected metaphorical light, and what we might call awareness, which is the sense of that light falling on the objects of the world, or on the objects of thought. We might consider how these two components relate to various states of being when they are combined in different ways.

Posted in Consciousness, Illumination, Laureys, Steven, Metaphor, Neuroscience | No Comments »

The Impossible Blog of Borges

September 15th, 2007 Fred McVittie

There is a blog somewhere on the web in which the entries vary enormously in length, but regardless of the number of words each posting is carefully labelled with keywords; search terms that unite the smallest with the largest. One entry, concerning the nature of presence, has over 1000 words and is captured by the three search terms evolution, neuroscience, metaphor. Here is another entry, consisting only of the quotation from Hermes Trismegistus ‘All is One’, yet the number of search terms which lead to these words, the number of ideas which require this phrase to be included in their orbit, is much greater, numbering over 100.

People say (usually those who have read too much Borges) that there are two entries on the blog which no-one should read; which should never have been written, which should not have been possible to write. The first consists of all possible words in all the languages of the planet, arranged in all the orders which could ever be grammatically correct. It is perfectly coherent, perfectly self-contained. The number of labels attached to this entry is zero; there are no ways into the infinite entry because there is nothing outside it. The other impossible entry consists of no words at all. No concepts, ideas, perceptions, sounds, thoughts, feelings, or attitudes mar the perfect surface of this empty space on the screen, and to read it is to be dissolved. The search terms which lead to this space exceed the limits of the spell-checker, and to collate this list would take longer that there are moments left in history.

These two imaginary and unimaginable entries are the pillars between which all the writing is strung. One pillar is labelled ‘Carbon’, and the other is marked ‘Mathematics’.

Posted in Blog, Borges, Jorge Louis, Mathematics, Metaphor, Neuroscience, Writing | No Comments »

Brainwave Synchronisation

October 27th, 2007 Fred McVittie

Emmanuelle Tognoli and J.A. Scott Kelso at Florida Atlantic University have found that there is a pattern of brainwave activity only emerges when ones activities are synchronised with those of another person. Apparently related to the effect of ‘neuronal mirroring’, the newly found pattern has been dubbed phi.

Abstract
Many social interactions rely upon mutual information exchange: one member of a pair changes in response to the other while at the same time producing actions that alter the behavior of the other. However, little is known about how such social processes are integrated in the brain. Here, we used a specially designed dual-electroencephalogram system and the conceptual framework of coordination dynamics to identify neural signatures of effective, real-time coordination between people and its breakdown or absence. High-resolution spectral analysis of electrical brain activity before and during visually mediated social coordination revealed a marked depression in occipital alpha and rolandic mu rhythms during social interaction that was independent of whether behavior was coordinated or not. In contrast, a pair of oscillatory components (phi1 and phi2) located above right centro-parietal cortex distinguished effective from ineffective coordination: increase of phi1 favored independent behavior and increase of phi2 favored coordinated behavior. The topography of the phi complex is consistent with neuroanatomical sources within the human mirror neuron system. A plausible mechanism is that the phi complex reflects the influence of the other on a person’s ongoing behavior, with phi1 expressing the inhibition of the human mirror neuron system and phi2 its enhancement.

TOGNOLI, E., LAGARDE, J., DEGUZMAN, G. C. & KELSO, J. A. S. (2007) The phi complex as a neuromarker of human social coordination. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 104, 8190-8195.

Posted in Mirror neurons, Neuroscience, Tognoli, E., Lagarde, J., Deguzman, G. C. & Kelso, | No Comments »

All in the Brain

October 27th, 2007 Fred McVittie

For many of us, when we read about the neurological evidence for the existence of states of being that are experienced as transcendent, it is very tempting to interpret this correlation as a reduction in the status and value of the experience. The fact that the subjective feeling of enlightenment is accompanied by changes in the electro-chemical organisation of the brain, or of the patterns of activation across networks of neurons, seems to suggest that because such experiences are ‘all in the mind’ they are therefore delusional, having something of the status of hallucinations or tricks of the light. The probing of the fMRI scanner become the pin which bursts god’s bubble and inevitably we ourselves feel deflated as a result.

There are two aspects to this deflation which bear closer examination; there is the apparent explaining away of the experience itself such that it is no longer valid as a real event, then there is the biochemical rationalisation of our subjective responses to that experience, the feelings and emotions which we have at these times which often stay with us for years afterwards and significantly transform our lives.

The first of these effects, in which for example we come to realise that the god that we felt to be in the room with us is nothing but an overstimulation of the left temporal lobe, can, at first pass, seem to be incontrovertible evident for the god delusion, as Dawkins puts it. And places this delusion firmly in the fairyland of our own wacko imagination. After all, what kind of god turns up on demand in the laboratory every time a large magnet is waved near the side of a person’s head, and yet is conspicuously absent from those place that could really benefit from his presence: the cancer wards, AIDS clinics,and torture chambers of the world? What kind of omniscient, all-powerful superbeing can be turned on and off like a cheap flashlight?

Posted in Consciousness, Enlightenment, God, Neuroscience | No Comments »

Eyes Touching in the Light

October 30th, 2007 Fred McVittie

When we were a baby of only a few hours old, before any light of consciousness has been lit in that little box of bone, when our mother smiled at us, we smiled back at our mothers. Before we had any idea of what a smile means, or what a mother is, or what seeing is, or what a mouth is, before any of that and before any of anything, we smiled back. How did we achieve this miracle? Certainly not by any rational intention on our part. What we are told happens, and we have no reason to discount this explanation, is that some of the light bouncing around the delivery room reflected off the lips of the woman who had recently given birth. This light flew across the room at an incomprehensible speed and entered the eye of the baby, our selves, where it impacted on sensitive cells at the back of the eye. These impacts were then converted into electrochemical signals that travelled up the optic nerve to our baby brain where they exploded in a storm of frenetic activity. Some of this activity took place within special neurons in our tiny, barely-formed brains which somehow translated this maelstrom into instructions to the muscles of our baby face, particularly our mouth, and as if by magic, we smiled back. This neuronal mirroring, as it is called, caused us to reflect with our bodies what we had seen with our eyes, not by ‘copying’ what Mummy did, for such a sophisticated concept would have been way beyond us, but by the simple and direct touching of our eyes and minds across space and in light.

Posted in Consciousness, Light, Mirror neurons, Neuroscience | No Comments »

Mind Brain Physics

February 16th, 2008 Fred McVittie

The account provided by neuroscience for how the brain performs the many functions it does are complex to an incredible degree. What’s more, many of the processes and mechanisms that are cited in these explanations are not only difficult to understand but are effectively impossible to understand in a literal embodied way. For example, it is distinctly possible that quantum mechanical processes are involved, if Penrose and Hammeroff are to be believed, in which case this part of the cognitive process is beyond our intuitive grasp.

The likelihood of the brain’s functioning being non-comprehensible in this literal way is not routinely regarded as a problem for science, as we have strategies for gaining knowledge about even the most non-intuitive systems. Confirmation of this can be found in the success of quantum physics more generally, which provides enormous explanatory power despite its reliance on mathematics for the conveyance of these explanations, rather than the flesh and blood language of intuitive common sense. Investigation of the brain therefore uses all of the tools of modern science, and is not restricted by the limitations of our embodied understanding.

Explanations of the mind, however, seem unable to transcend this limitation. All models of the mind seem locked into a requirement that explanations for mental function (as opposed to brain function) be intuitively evident and available to routine comprehension. This is perhaps inevitable since, given that the (conscious) mind is a product of evolutionary forces aimed at maximising the survival potential of medium-sized social mammals moving at medium speed (to paraphrase Dawkins), the ability of that mind to represent the world, including itself, would only need to address those concerns. Since our ability to intuitively apprehend anything is constrained by this precondition, any model of mind we feel intuitively satisfied with would be similarly constrained. We should expect that models of mind be easily visualisable, and probably follow laws of physics which correspond to Naive or Folk Physics or some version of the Newtonian. What’s more, it is likely that the mind itself, again for good evolutionary reasons, functions in a way which corresponds to this embodied paradigm. If the mind is an organ (or set of organs) produced by evolution which represents and allows for an effective engagement with a largely Newtonian world, then that mind, as part of the world, would need to be similarly Newtonian in structure.

Posted in Brain, Cognition, Consciousness, Embodiment, Evolution, Mind, Naive Physics, Neuroscience | No Comments »