Neuropsychology and Philosophy of Mind in Process: Essays in Honor of Jason W. Brown 9783110329438, 9783110329322

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Maria Pachalska and Michel Weber (Eds.) Neuropsychology and Philosophy of Mind in Process

PROCESS THOUGHT Edited by Nicholas Rescher • Johanna Seibt • Michel Weber Advisory Board Mark Bickhard • Jaime Nubiola • Roberto Poli

Volume 18

Maria Pachalska and Michel Weber (Eds.)

Neuropsychology and Philosophy of Mind in Process Essays in Honor of Jason W. Brown

Bibliographic information published by Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nastionalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliographie; detailed bibliographic data is available in the Internet at http://dnb.ddb.de

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2008 ontos verlag P.O. Box 15 41, D-63133 Heusenstamm www.ontosverlag.com ISBN 978-3-86838-010-1 2008 No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in retrieval systems or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming, recording or otherwise without written permission from the Publisher, with the exception of any material supplied specifically for the purpose of being entered and executed on a computer system, for exclusive use of the purchaser of the work Printed on acid-free paper ISO-Norm 970-6 FSC-certified (Forest Stewardship Council) This hardcover binding meets the International Library standard Printed in Germany by buch bücher dd ag

Camerado, this is no book... Who touches this touches a man. Walt Whitman

Contents Foreword Maria Pachalska & Michel Weber Preface Jason W. Brown Part I. Papers in honor of Jason W. Brown Chapter 1. An authentic life for process thinking

Harold Atmanspacher & Jack Martin Chapter 2. How does microgenetic theory square with evidence from cognitive neuroscience?

Talis Bachmann Chapter 3. Microgenesis of mystical awareness

David T. Bradford Chapter 4. Sublexical phonological processing and paraphasia: Recent topics in the neurolinguistics of production in aphasia

Hugh W. Buckingham & Sarah Christman Chapter 5. The scope of relevance of process thought

John B. Cobb, Jr. Chapter 6. The microgenesis of antisociality: A process-relational perspective

Mark Germine Chapter 7. The brain and the mind

Bożydar L.J. Kaczmarek & Katarzyna Markiewicz Chapter 8. Moral values in focus: knowledge and values in the embodied mind

George Kurian Chapter 9. Identity, autobiography, and the microgenesis of the self

Bruce Duncan MacQueen

Chapter 10. Neuropsychology of creativity

Nikolay N. Nikolaenko Chapter 11. Re-membering: the recovery of artistic vision after righthemisphere stroke

Maria Pachalska Chapter 12. Let’s face it! Phonagnosia happens, and voice recognition is finally familiar

Diana Sidtis & Jody Kreiman Chapter 13. Process unveiled in the laboratory

Gudmund Smith Chapter 14. Reality: outside there or inside here?

Kobi Tiberg & Avraham Schweiger Chapter 15. On microgenesis and psychoanalysis

Michael Trupp Chapter 16. Self-organizing ontogenesis on the phyletic frame

Don M.Tucker Chapter 17. Process and individuality

Michel Weber Part II. Biography Chapter 18. Jason Walter Brown: an authentic life

Maria Pachalska Author index Subject index

Foreword Jason’s Brown contribution to neuropsychology and philosophy of Mind MARIA PACHALSKA, MICHEL WEBER The present volume both is and is not a Festschrift for Jason Brown – a paradox which Jason himself will surely appreciate. Like any Festschrift, it is a look back: a group of authors who in one way or another have known Jason personally, or at least have known his work and been influenced by it, have been invited to contribute essays in his honor. Several of the authors have stated (either expressly in their papers, or in correspondence with the editors) that they have written for him in a very particular way, knowing that he will read the paper, and thus addressing some or all of their remarks to him as the consummate Reader. Many have also included personal tributes to Jason, commenting on how his work and (not at all infrequently) his personality have influenced their own thinking. Some have undertaken the somewhat grander task of assessing his role in the development of contemporary thinking about what we may call very generally the brain/mind problem. To paraphrase Lincoln at Gettysburg, this is “altogether fitting and proper.” In another and perhaps more fundamental way, however, the intention of this book is to look forward. To begin with, Jason Brown’s career is far from over: we all await with a feeling of anticipation the next essay, the next paper, the next book. Unlike the recipient of a more typical academic Festschrift, Jason Brown is not and never has been the holder of an endowed chair at a major research university, surrounded by fawning doctoral students and collecting large research grants. To be sure, he is Clinical Professor of Neurology at the New York University Medical Center, which is no small distinction, and he has promoted several important doctorates in his career. But the model of “Herr Professor” does not suit him; indeed, he often unwittingly grimaces when the honorific title is used in his presence. His is rather the model of the Romantic poets he so much admires: consumed by an overarching idea, he sits in the park or in a concert hall and writes, writes, writes, continually pushing the Idea yet a little further. After each successful book, he proclaims himself exhausted and the work finally completed, the Idea fulfilled – until his restless mind takes

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him back to his favorite Central Park bench to start the next one. The Idea is far from exhausted, the story is far from over, and it would be premature to try to sum it all up now. Even more fundamentally, however, Jason Brown’s microgenetic theory is the yeast in a dough that has only just begun to rise. What began as a dissenting voice in behavioral neurology, a protest against what was then (and, alas, largely remains) an orthodoxy dominated by a connectionist, modularist, reductionist, strictly materialist and substantialist theory of brain work, has slowly but surely become a Grand Theory in its own right. For decades, to be sure, Jason Brown has been recognized in several different fields as a brilliant and original thinker, invited to important conferences, published in the best journals, appointed to editorial boards and program committees. What has only just begun to happen, however, is for larger numbers of working neurologists, psychiatrists, psychologists, and neuroscientists to take his theory seriously. Perhaps they simply did not understand it; or perhaps (and this seems more likely) taking microgenetic theory seriously means doing neuroscience very differently, which is always a highly unwelcome thought for those who may have spent their careers doing the wrong things. Not surprisingly, then, the impact of Jason Brown’s work has sometimes been felt sooner and more deeply in a variety of disciplines that may be more or less remote from behavioral neurology or neuropsychology. This includes in a very particular way the philosophy of mind, where the fundamental issues of cognition, its mechanisms and objects, are as old as ancient Greece and as contemporary as the latest publications. There are obvious and acknowledged analogies between Jason Brown's microgenetic theory (which, as he often and insistently reminds us, was born in clinical work) and process thinking in the tradition of Peirce, Bergson, and above all Whitehead. At the same time, cracks are beginning to appear in the once imposing facade of cognitivism, so that now, finally, there is an opening for microgenetic theory and Jason Brown’s work in the fields where it all began: neurology, psychiatry, neuropsychology. Is there a good way out of the mind/brain conundrum that does justice to neuroscience without falling into the “mindless” materialism touted by those who criticize Descartes’s putative “errors” without really having much an idea of what he actually said? Perhaps there is, after all. It is becoming increasingly apparent that Jason Brown's dissent was not really heresy at all, but rather a Grand Idea that appeared just a little before its time. And that time has now finally come.

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The fact that the present volume is co-edited by a neuropsychologist (MP) and a philosopher (MW) is itself an indication of the breadth and diversity of Jason Brown’s writing and interests. This is even more clearly indicated – even before one begins to read – by the list of authors (with their varied institutional affiliations or lack thereof) and the titles. Even a cursory glance at the papers themselves will only support the impression that Jason Brown’s influence has been both surprisingly wide (across many disciplinary boundaries) and surprisingly deep. Perhaps Jason himself is the only reader who will be able to read every one of these papers without feeling at certain moments intimidated by some of the terms, concepts, and methods that belong to “foreign” fields. That is the inherent danger of truly interdisciplinary work. There is a temptation to water things down, making the material palatable for the non-specialist – but at the cost of oversimplifying and trivializing. A safe course must be steered between the Scylla of obscure jargon and the Charybis of making scientific music into muzak. The authors have been encouraged to bear in mind a reader who is interested, intelligent, welleducated – but not necessarily in the writer’s own field. Our fondest hope is that this approach (Bildung in von Humboldt’s sense) has borne good fruit, that most readers will get something out of most of the papers, if they are willing to make the effort. The greatest rewards may be found there where they are least expected. The editors’ original intention was to group the papers in sections along disciplinary or thematic lines, and indeed many of the authors were originally recruited with this division in mind. In the end result, however, this proved to be a Gordian knot. On the one hand, there is so much diversity in this collection that a reader who is not well acquainted with the richness and complexity of Jason Brown’s thought may wonder how one person could have inspired such disparate kinds of work. Some authors quote ancient Greek philosophers in the original, others produce results from laboratory tests or clinical research, and some manage to do a bit of both. Apart from this great diversity, however, which seems to call for some scheme of organization that would group together papers of interest or not of interest to particular groups of potential readers, there are deep threads of unity that would be threatened by any such division. Perhaps it is just too easy, too comfortable, to gravitate at once to the familiar company of those we know, those who use the professional jargon we are used to using and hearing, who take up a discourse that we have already followed for some time. This would be fundamentally false, however, to the

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thought of Jason Brown – and, it must be said, to his personality as well. Jason is not the kind of person who habitually seeks the company of those who make him feel good; if anything, he is somewhat more inclined to search for a worthy opponent. Finally, then, we made the decision to use Alexander the Great’s legendary solution to the problem of the Gordian knot, where our metaphorical “sword” is that bane of all systematic thinkers, so roundly (and perhaps rightly) condemned by Mortimer Adler: alphabetical order. Let the reader think of this as one of those pragmatic devices sometimes used by hapless hosts at a dinner party in a desperate effort to break up the little clusters of the same old friends huddled in the corners, and force their guests to actually meet someone new. Thus no implicit or explicit claim is made here that the juxtaposition of papers in this collection points to or somehow creates intertextual bonds between them. At sometimes surprising moments the bonds appear by themselves, of various kinds and in various directions. Some creative bonds will of course be more apparent to certain readers than to others, but that, after all, is the nature of theory. The reader is invited, then, to take the papers as they come, and see what happens, especially when in this way one “accidentally” ventures into some area of thought that was previously hostile territory, or no-man's land, or at best terra incognita. *** Harald Atmanspacher, from the Institut für Grenzgebiete der Psychologie und Psychohygiene at the University of Freiburg (Germany), and Jack Martin, from the Department of Psychology at Simon Fraser University (Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada) have contributed a paper whose title (“An authentic life for process thinking“) and content are inspired by Jason Brown's latest book, Process and the Authentic Life. The accident of alphabetical order places this paper first, but, as Shakespeare put it, “there is a destiny that shapes our ends [and beginnings, addition ours], rough hew them how we will.” Atmanspacher and Martin begin their paper with a summary and appreciation of Jason Brown's intellectual odyssey from clinician to philosopher, before introducing four main lines of argument that emerge directly from his recent work. The first of these involves the nature of time and its essential significance for any kind of serious process thinking; the authors stress irreversibility and temporal holism. Inherent in the very existence of a fourth dimension of objects is the next problem, that of instability and transiency: how do account for the fact that things change, and yet there is a continuity, without which nothing would make

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any sense at all? If we reject a mechanical determinism, what are the truly viable alternatives? This leads in turn to the problem of personhood, the existence of an object endowed with consciousness, in which the paradox of stability and instability becomes particularly acute. The authors insist in this context on combining two aspects of personhood, biological and cultural, that are typically subordinated one to the other, depending on the disciplinary affiliations and loyalties of particular authors. Atmanspacher and Martin finally argue for what they call a “domain-relative ontology,” which avoids currently fashionable tendencies to reduce all domains of reality to one, as Thales wanted to claim that all things are water. This has always been an essential point in microgenetic theory: that exploring the evolutionary and developmental aspects, the prehistory and history of mental states, should not be approached as an attempt to bypass the higher realms of thought in order to reduce art, philosophy, and science to the grunts of animals. It is not easy to maintain the dialectic between the biological and the cultural, the primitive and the civilized, but if the tension is relieved by unstringing one end or the other, we have lost the most important point. The next contribution, by David Bradford (Austin, Texas), admirably illustrates many of the points made by Atmanspacher and Martin. Mysticism and neuropsychology would not seem to be a good or obvious mix. Mysticism often serves as an alternative to (or escape from) the kind of scientific, empirical and materialistic thinking that characterizes the neurosciences generally. What Bradford does is to search for a way, inspired by the example of Jason Brown, to explore the possibilities of both while transgressing the boundaries they both implicitly observe. There are six sections. The first, fittingly enough, is an overview of mysticism, and is followed by a section that reviews what Brown has written on this topic. The third section deals with the (neuro)psychological phenomenology of asceticism, without either patronizing or bracketing the serious issues involved. In the fourth section the discussion turns to creativity, described and discussed in light of the foregoing. The next section takes up Brown’s distinction between the mysticism of nature and the mysticism of god, and argues that despite the differences the goal is the same. The final section applies what has been learned so far to the search for a “perennial philosophy,” the philosophical analogue of the unified field theory in physics. All of this is followed by two Addenda, the first of which includes critiques of two currently fashionable neuropsychological explanations of mystical experiences. The second is a kind of mini-glossary of microgenetic terminology with suggestions for further reading.

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Hugh W. Buckingham, from the Department of Communication Sciences & Disorders at Louisiana State University (Baton Rouge, Louisiana) and Sarah S. Christman, from the Department of Communication Sciences at the University of Oklahoma (Oklahoma City, Oklahoma), need no introduction to those familiar with neurolinguistics. Their paper, entitled “Sublexical phonological processing and paraphasia: Recent topics in the neurolinguistics of production in aphasia,” reminds us that microgenetic theory essentially began with aphasia, and the problem of language remains a central one. Of all the aspects of language, however, perhaps the least attention in process thinking has been devoted to phonology, which to the uninitiated often seems a purely mechanical, and thus rather trivial problem. Buckingham and Christman begin by discussing some recent developments in neurolinguistics on the phonemic level, or more precisely: tonemes. This last concept has made it possible to consider prosody in a more systematic manner than previously. The interesting conclusion reached from this work is that prosody is not specific to left or right hemispheres, but requires their interaction. This in turn leads to the problem of paraphasias, i.e. the pathological substitution of phonemes or lexemes. The paper suggests what many neurolinguists have long suspected, that the taxonomy of paraphasias in general use is faulty and confusing, once we properly understand the complex relationship between sound and meaning in language. The problem is particularly vexing in the so-called “fluent” aphasias, where the old disconnection hypothesis (that there is a mechanical problem in connecting what Wernicke called the Wortbegriff to a specific sound string that symbolizes it) does not very well explain what actually occurs. In this way Buckingham and Christman approach from a different direction the problem of the “Freudian slip,” which once again shows that phonology is not after all so easily divorced from semantics. The paper concludes with some important remarks on aphasic neologisms (i.e. the use of non-existent words that the speaker uses as though they were endowed with meaning). The paper by John B. Cobb (Claremont Graduate University), among the central figures of contemporary process theology, is in itself a lucid and very useful overview of process thought, which places microgenetic theory in a larger context. It is often remarked in process thought, sometimes rather ruefully, that thanks to such figures as Hartshorne and Cobb, the legacy of Alfred North Whitehead has had more impact in theology than in philosophy. This observation is more a judgment on philosophy, however, than on the value of either process thinking generally or theology in par-

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ticular. It may perhaps be possible to reconcile a certain kind of theology with the revolt against metaphysics that characterized Western philosophy through the 20th century, but it seems on the face of it an odd theology indeed, which would have to make of God either a material entity or a play on words. At the same time, however, process thinking is likewise a challenge for more traditional theologies in either the Thomist or Calvinist tradition. Cobb's paper explains how microgenetic theory, based as it is on evolutionary theory and brain studies, may indeed be difficult to reconcile with fundamentalist pieties of various sorts, but enriches process theology in unexpected ways. Mark Germine, a practicing psychotherapist from Mt. Shasta, California, takes the discussion in yet another direction, writing on “The microgenesis of antisociality: a process-relational perspective.” The problem of whether antisocial (including criminal) behavior is a symptom of a disease or indicative of a character defect is an old one, but no less pressing today than ever. Existing theories tend to explain the undesirable behavior away without addressing the more fundamental issues, which seem to lie beyond the competence of specialists. Germine argues that acquired sociopathy or antisociality is caused by damage to the orbitofrontal cortex (not in itself a new idea, of course), leading to reactive aggression manifested at an early stage in the microgenesis of behavior, which includes social behavior, i.e. the application of socially generated norms to private behavior. Genetic factors seem to play a role in the hypoactivity of the prefrontal cortex, but abuse and neglect in early childhood are mediating or triggering factors. Germine goes beyond the familiar studies of frontal lobe involvement in antisocial behavior, however, to argue for a relational view of intersubjectivity that develops in ontogeny and microgeny, with the caregiver/infant relationship as a background and model for an expanding web of social relationships, the root from which the tree grows. The next author, Bozydar L.J. Kaczmarek, professor of psychology at the Marie Curie-Sklodowska University in Lublin, Poland, is a well-known neurolinguist and neuropsychologist, most of whose work to date has focused on the frontal lobes (including some important studies of the relationship between criminal behavior and frontal lobe damage). In the present paper, however, entitled “The brain and the mind,” Kaczmarek broadens his scope considerably, to reflect on one of the basic problems of neuropsychology, the philosophy of mind – and microgenetic theory. The paper begins with the important observation that recent advances in neuroimaging technology have actually weakened, rather than strengthened, the

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modularist-connectionist paradigm that underlies most contemporary neuroscience. The difficulty lies in the fact that many researchers are unable to distance themselves from their paradigm enough to see that the data they are reporting is not consistent with the theory they are explicitly or implicitly using to interpret that data. It is necessary, in other words, to start over, beginning with issues that most contemporary neuropsychologists and neurolinguists tend to regard as long since settled, obsolete, or unimportant. Kaczmarek then goes on to develop models of brain work based on perception and on the subject-predicate relationship of language, pointing out that the way the brain builds images of self and world and represents them in words reflects similar patterns that cannot be fully understood without reference to each other. At the same time, however, the human mind can conceive of objects and think in ways (e.g. formal logic, mathematics) that are not in any obvious way fully dependent either on sense perception or linguistic structures. In conclusion, he suggests a non-reductionist, microgenetic concept of mind as something that emerges from the brain but is not coterminous with it. The late George Kurian was a professor in the School of Management and Social Sciences at the Thapar Institute of Engineering & Technology in Patiala, India. His wife has graciously consented for this paper to be reprinted in the present volume, with the kind permission of the publisher of Acta Neuropsychologica, where the paper was first published in a truncated form. Kurian’s essay, entitled “Moral values in focus: knowledge and values in the embodied mind,” well exemplifies the creative potential of microgenetic theory, when its application leads to lines of argument that do not stop when they approach traditional disciplinary boundaries. Since Kurian was a thinker of broad philosophical interests who worked at a technical institute in a rapidly developing country with enormous potential and equally enormous problems, the pragmatics of his situation did not allow him the luxury of treating thought as a pleasant pastime, an elaborate game to be played for the pleasure it provides. His paper thus begins with a penetrating analysis of the crisis in higher education then raging in his native India. Despite the particularities of that situation, however, the dilemma he vividly portrays occurs in many other countries as well. The minds of both students and their teachers are confronted with a dichotomy between a literally soulless technocracy on the one hand, and a mindless fundamentalism on the other, as though these were the only choices. Kurian then shows how a microgenetic, process-oriented model of education provides a via tertia, in which moral values are neither bracketed as extraneous to knowl-

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edge (a matter of mere taste or “personal,” i.e. non-critical choice) nor enshrined as eternal and unfixed canons which it is sacrilege to examine. The next chapter, entitled “Identity, autobiography, and the microgenesis of the self,” is likewise an interdisciplinary exploration of problems which, if they are addressed at all within particular disciplines, are usually dropped as soon as the discussion approaches the boundaries. The highly eclectic nature of this essay is a reflection not only of microgenetic theory itself, but also of the background and personality of the author, Bruce Duncan MacQueen, an American permanently resident in Poland, the holder of a doctorate in classics who now divides his lecturing time between comparative literature and neurolinguistics. Not surprisingly, then, the paper ranges from a close reading of two frequently misunderstood fragments of Heraclitus, through an analysis of metaphor and analogy, to the fundamental argument: that personal identity, which guarantees and embodies both the sameness of the person over time and the uniqueness of the individual, is rooted in autobiography, and can thus be conceived as a text. This idea resonates in both directions: towards a process-oriented, microgenetic theory of text, and towards a psychological theory that reveals the inherent paradox of identity (the tension between sameness and uniqueness) without succumbing to the temptation to resolve them by sacrificing one to the other. At the same time, the paper sketches a way out of the widely accepted but poorly construed dichotomy between metaphysics and language. The next paper, by Nikolay N. Nikolaenko, from the I. M. Sechenov Institute of Evolutionary Physiology and Biochemistry at the Russian Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg, Russia, is entitled “The neuropsychology of creativity.” The problem is addressed here primarily from the perspective of hemispheric asymmetry, i.e. the fact (by now generally known) that the two hemispheres of the brain, though organized more or less symmetrically in respect to their gross anatomy, seem to perform different functions, as evidenced by the differing effects of right and left hemisphere lesions. The human brain is demonstrably far more asymmetrical than that of other animals (though there are traces of “handedness,” a motor expression of asymmetry, in the anthropoid apes), which means that this is a specifically human trait. The Russian school of neuropsychology, inspired by the work of Alexander Luria, has also done important work on this field. Unfortunately, much of the enthusiasm for “left-brain rightbrain” study, which became very popular in the 1980s and 90s, proved to be ephemeral, and the conclusions misleading. There has been a general

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tendency to oversimplify the issues: the right hemisphere is emotional, image-oriented, more primitive in its organization, and “female,” while the left hemisphere is logical, verbal, organized into highly specialized processors, and “male.” As usually happens, there is a grain of truth to each of these assertions, but the arguments are grossly oversimplified, often tendentious and in the final analysis a priori. Few studies have provided the kind of clear-headed phenomenological analysis of what actually happens after left and right hemisphere lesions, on the basis of which a more nuanced theory of hemispherical asymmetry could be advanced. Of particular interest are studies of exceptional individuals, those cases that are generally excluded from statistical studies precisely because they are “outliers,” whose data only muddy the waters of empirical reasoning based on clinical data. Nikolaenko's paper, by contrast, is inspired by close observations of changes in the artistic productions of talented individuals who have suffered focal lesions. Numerous illustrations of pre- and post-injury art works enable us to make meaningful, conceptually useful comparisons and draw important conclusions, without falling into the trap of hasty generalizations. The blind randomness of alphabetical order notwithstanding, it so happens that Nikolaenko’s paper on artistic creativity after brain damage is followed by a case study on the same subject. The author, co-editor Maria Pachalska (from the Institute of Psychology at the University of Gdańsk), here describes the case of Krystyna Habura, a prominent Polish painter from Cracow, who suffered a right hemisphere stroke. She was ambidextrous, which remarkably complicated the pattern of neurological and neuropsychological deficits occurring after her stroke. After most of the clinical symptoms had resolved or been adequately compensated in rehabilitation, Habura was considered a therapeutic success, which might have been the end of the story. She continued to complain, however, that she could not paint, not because her semi-paralyzed hand was unable to move the brush (this difficulty she learned to overcome), but because she had no vision of what to paint. She expressed this concretely as “a hole in my brain,” from which all the ideas had somehow leaked out. Standard rehabilitation protocols make no provision for such problems, but the decision was made to find ways to help Habura overcome the problem. The results described in this paper not only reflect on many of the issues raised in the previous paper by Nikolaenko, but also make an important point which process thinkers may better understand than others: that the effect of a brain lesion is not to produce a change in the state of the mind, but rather

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to deflect the trajectory by which the mind realizes itself. That is why similar lesions in different patients can produce such different results, though the “least common denominator” thinking characteristic of standard psychology tries to erase these differences. There is a common adage among lawyers, that “hard cases make bad law.” Whether or not this is true in jurisprudence, an analogous principle has held sway in medicine and psychology since at least the mid-20th century. In the 19th century and early 20th century, the great advances in the understanding of mental and nervous diseases were largely made by case studies, based on careful and thorough description of the symptoms occurring in a single patient; by the 1950s and 60s, however, this methodology had largely been replaced by group studies, which seemed the only “scientific” basis for the kind of inductive reasoning that in the natural sciences had long since replaced deductive, “Aristotelian” reasoning. Group studies based on experimental and statistical methods have their limitations, however, and the attempt to factor out individual differences which lies at the very heart of this method is especially destructive to process thought. Microgenetic theory lends itself particularly well to case studies, which seem to be returning to favor as we gradually understand that statistical significance is not after all the moral equivalent of truth. The next paper, provocatively entitled “Let’s face it! Phonagnosia happens, and voice recognition is finally familiar,” also takes hemispheric asymmetry as its point of departure. This contribution, written by Diana Sidtis (from the Department of Speech Pathology, New York University, and the Nathan Kline Institute for Psychiatric Research in New York), and Jody Kreiman (from the Division of Head and Neck Surgery at the UCLA School of Medicine in Los Angeles), has a catchy title, begins with a personal anecdote, and maintains an engaging, personal style throughout. Nevertheless, it is an impressive work, a masterful survey of an area of research (the recognition of familiar voices) in which the authors themselves are arguably pioneers, and which Jason Brown originally suggested to them. The basic idea he teased them with – which seems simple and obvious to the uninitiated, but rank heresy to orthodox neuropsychology – is that the brain mechanisms responsible for the recognition of familiar voices should be the same as those responsible for the recognition of familiar faces. Modular approaches assign each of the sense modalities (vision and hearing) to entirely separate brain systems, which would preclude the idea that the mechanisms involved could be anything more than roughly analogous. The operative term “familiar” is (mistakenly) taken to mean

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nothing more than “already known,” in effect making it non-operative, an illustration of the difficulties traditional brain theory has in explaining subjectivity and first-personness, and the maneuvers used to dodge the issue. Sidtis and Kreiman had to overcome many obstacles, including institutional ones, even to undertake their work, which shows a marked lack of respect for an entire herd of sacred cows. When compared to the study by Buckingham and Christman, on the other hand, the present study makes it clear that microgenetic theory not only allows, but in fact demands the thorough re-evaluation of such issues as phonology and prosody, which have been marginalized and trivialized for many years, reduced to a “purely” motor function or a matter of personal whim. The separation of objects into that which is familiar and that which is unfamiliar depends on and thus requires a coherent theory of subjectivity. Gudmund Smith, from Lund University in Sweden, has contributed an essay entitled “Process unveiled in the laboratory.” As the title suggests, the main point of departure is the fact (to which we have already alluded several times) that contemporary research technology is providing much new data that supports the microgenetic account of how the brain constructs reality, even when many of those who publish these results do not appear to be aware of the implications. Smith begins his paper with a kind of “pre-history” of microgenetic theory, which first emerged before the Second World War, briefly re-appeared in the 1950s, but vanished from view until Jason Brown began developing the theory from a different (and ultimately more fruitful) perspective. For Smith, the key is “perceptgenesis,” i.e. the microgenetic process by which the brain/mind begins with a drive and an affective state and then sculpts the object into a cognition in the final stages. He points to numerous laboratory results that tend to confirm the predictions made by microgenetic theory as to the sequence of events in the process that leads to cognition. At the same time, Smith argues that the theory of perception should be the beginning of microgenetic thinking, rather than the end, and suggests a broad range of areas, from the diagnosis of psychosis and neurosis to the problem of racial and ethnic bias, where the microgenetic approach to percept genesis may serve as the key that finally unlocks some old and persistent problems. The next chapter in the present volume, entitled “Reality: outside there or inside here?”, is an example of how a microgenetic case study should look. The authors, Kobi Tiberg (Loewenstein Rehabilitation Center, Raanana, Israel) and Avraham Schweiger (Academic College of Tel-Aviv), begin with a brief but cogent exposition of a problem that is central to mi-

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crogenetic theory: the essential ontological difference between real objects (“die Dinge an sich”) and the brain state that constitutes its perception (Kant and Husserl would recognize the point being made here). That state in turn emerges momentarily through a “bottom-up” movement, from the diffuse and generalized content of “middle-sized solids” to increasing specification as the object derives through successive phases in the microgenesis of cognition. Having made clear the premises, the authors then proceed to apply this theory to a specific case: a 53-year-old accountant who suffered a right-hemisphere stroke. In addition to a battery of standard neuropsychological tests, Tiberg and Schweiger describe in great detail their patient’s responses to a simple test that involves describing what is happening in a line drawing presented on a card. The usual approach to such tests involves assigning a point value for correct, partially correct, or incorrect answers, and then comparing the averaged score from a group of comparable patients to published norms, a control group, or a baseline test (in a “before” and “after” clinical model). In microgenetic theory, however, a symptom is not understood merely as a deficit, a “wrong” answer (as though the clinical test were an examination, and the patient a student), but rather as a window onto an earlier stage in the microgenesis of the measured process, which under normal conditions lies buried under the surface. By analyzing what their patient did and did not say, Tiberg and Schweiger show us in a very significant way what the patient is thinking, and how the right-hemisphere lesion has affected cognition and perception. For neurology, for “mainstream” psychology, and even for much of contemporary psychiatry, Freudian psychoanalysis is a kind of museum artifact, best put under glass somewhere and forgotten. At best it is a straw man, as psychology handbooks use Popperian arguments to demonstrate that psychoanalysis is not falsifiable and therefore does not deserve to be regarded as a scientific theory, as compared to whatever behaviorist or post-behaviorist paradigm the textbook in question is touting. Jason Brown is not a psychoanalyst, to be sure, in either a strict or a broad sense, but he has always treated Freudian thought with much more respect than is currently fashionable, as witness his status as a designated scholar in the New York Psychoanalytic Institute. Michael Trupp takes this as the starting point for his fascinating comparative study of the relations between psychoanalysis and microgenetic theory. Both similarities and differences are highly revealing, beginning with the similar background and the general direction of both men’s intellectual odyssey. Some of the obvious differences (e.g. the universal claims of psychoanalysis, in its effort to take in

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the patient's whole life, vs. the particularity of microgenetic theory, which finds the key in the single passing moment) are upon closer examination not differences at all, or at least not important ones. The paper includes some fascinating samples of therapeutic conversation, in which the microgenetic perspective proves to be complementary to classical psychoanalysis. The penultimate paper in the present volume, “Self-organizing ontogenesis on the phyletic frame,” was contributed by Don M. Tucker (Electrical Geodesics, Inc., and the University of Oregon). Tucker elaborates an important point for microgenetic theory, often alluded to (as though already well known) but seldom explored in depth, which is the precise way in which ontogeny replicates phylogeny. This cannot be understood in a deterministic way, nor is it merely a temporal sequence of events: first evolution, then development, then the microgenesis of the mental state. Rather, all three of these processes unfold together. Yet more significant is the way in which the unfolding processes organize themselves heuristically. Ontogeny is not merely the realization of a blueprint, though it is obviously constrained by the genetic code, but is rather a process of adjustment in growth that is called “adaptation” on the evolutionary scale and “learning” on the individual scale. The genome is a kind of record of what has been learned to this point, but it is not a closed record and is not sufficient to produce a mind. Jason Brown often speaks of microgenesis in terms of a metaphor of sculpting; what Tucker has done for us is to show what the chisel is, how it is used, and finally, perhaps most importantly, who is wielding it. It would appear that in this case the marble seems to be sculpting itself. This challenging paper develops the importance of that insight for philosophy and psychology, demonstrating once again (contrary to commonly held prejudices inherited from the 20th century) that these two fields need each other more than either of them cares to admit. The importance of microgenetic theory, as Tucker expounds it here, is that it forces them into mutual recognition. The rigors of alphabetical order place the contribution by co-editor Michel Weber (Director of the Centre for Practical Philosophy “Chromatiques whiteheadiennes”, Brussels) in last place. It is perhaps fitting, however, that the collection ends with a focus on the central figure of process thought, Alfred North Whitehead. Weber begins by pointing out the central issue of individuality, which, though often evaded by both philosophers and psychologists, must be resolved before the discussion of mind and cognition can continue. Whitehead – who, as Weber reminds us, al-

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ways preferred the term “organic” for his philosophy – saw in process a way of explaining how individuals can be at once unique and the same (cf. MacQueen’s paper in this same volume). Individuality is neither a given nor a product, but something that emerges at two levels of becoming: that of the epochal (atomic, if you like) event, and that of concatenations of these events, bringing forth psychological as well as social identities. This occurs in the dialectic of what Whitehead called “the spirit of change” and “the spirit of conservation.” By explaining how both of these principles cooperate in the formation of the individual, Whitehead could do justice both to the demands of philosophical rigor and those of common sense. *** Jason Brown is fond of saying, with Bergson, that throughout his work he has really had only one idea. All the papers, articles and books have but elaborated on that one idea. That is true, however, only if by “one idea” we mean a comprehensive, internally self-consistent theory in the making, something that makes sense of everything, like the “unified field theory” in physics (if such a thing ever proves to be possible). It is, of course, too much to ask of a thinker or a theory that with a single sweep of the hand all possible questions are posed and answered. The possibility that such a theory might begin with an epistemology originally derived from a careful study of the clinical symptoms of aphasia, apraxia and agnosia may seem at first outlandish. Since antiquity, however, philosophers (or at least some of them) have realized that no theory of mind is complete (or even truly possible) if it cannot account for what was once called “madness.” Microgenetic theory takes us back to this problem from a new perspective, informed by the advances of the neurosciences but not coerced by their methodological strictures and dogma into ignoring the philosophical issues inevitably raised by such study. The present volume gives only a small and early sample of what can be done when the implications and ramifications of Jason Brown’s microgenetic theory are allowed to develop. Process thinking since Peirce and Whitehead has tended to be the domain of a relatively small group of impassioned zealots, swimming together against the tide of 20th century philosophy. Perhaps microgenetic theory, coming as it does from outside philosophy per se, and at the same time from outside traditional psychology and neuropsychology, will change the course of thinking in the 21st century. The present volume suggests that this hope is not, after all, idle. Maria Pachalska, Michelle Weber

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Preface JASON W. BROWN I am deeply moved and honored by such an exceptional collection of essays by so many close friends and colleagues working in so many countries and a wide array of fields. The range reflects my friendships and interests, as well as my progression from clinical neurology and neuropsychology, where the microgenetic theory was developed, to psychoanalysis and speculative psychology and, finally, to process thought, where the theory found its philosophical home. I want to express my deep appreciation to all those who contributed and especially to Maria Pachalska and Michel Weber for seeing it through to completion. The suggestion for the volume came from Michel, who has kindly included it in his Ontos series, and the biography by Maria is more than one could reasonably expect even from a treasured friend. Let me say a few words about some of the individual chapters and attempt to draw some further connections to microgenetic theory. Harald Atmanspacher and Jack Martin take up the problem of time in process theory, a topic that has haunted me for 20 years. The turn to process thinking entails a shift to an alternative theory of time and change; the topics are profound and inseparable. An effort to understand the nature of time, Whitehead wrote, exposes the limits of human intelligence. Is time a succession of instants or a continuous flow? I would agree with Bergson that time should be conceived not as a line, but a point that is replaced, more like a fountain than a river. Every entity becomes what it is, arising over the duration of its existence, and persists in the recurrence of its becoming with a minimal degree of novelty. Persistence is self-similar replication. On this view, change is in the actualization of epochs, not the transition from one epoch to another, while continuity is in their overlap. It is likely, as these authors seem to imply, that an acceptance of process theory in neuroscience and behavior will have an impact on the notion of time in physics and philosophy. Whitehead wrote that the philosophy of organism is closely tied to some strains in Indian and Chinese thought. I would add, there is also a mystical impulse that may, at times, need to be released, perhaps some would say suppressed, but an ever-present lure to those who seek an everdeeper source. In his beautiful and authoritative essay, David Bradford explores mystical and religious sensibilities in process thinking and vastly

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extends my own slight efforts in this area. The secret of the mystic is that the birth of mind in nature is a path to metaphysics rooted in the first awakenings of the subjective. There is great beauty in the intuition that a fundamental order underlies the multiplicity and diversity of the world. An insight to this order is attained in the withdrawal from the world to the underpinnings of the self. Mystical regression discloses a pattern and an order in mind and, presumably, in nature as well, that is missed precisely because of its uniformity. There is a temptation, which should probably be resisted, to go a bit further and align the theory and its mystical undertones with the fusion of nature and spirit in the German Romantics. I would simply point out that in agreement with some remarks by Charles Hartshorne and William James, the concept of individuation by constraints in the partition of earlier to later in the microgeny entails that consciousness is not a construction but a limitation, that is, a restriction of variability, so it is not implausible that a lifting of constraints at brain death could release finite individual mind to the universality of all mind. This is not a foray into the world of spirit, merely an opening for those who are seeking a path. At least, one should not argue the liberation of reason from theology on the basis of artificial taxonomies. Beneath convention, dogma and mass delusion, another world is waiting. The paper by Hugh Buckingham and Sarah Christman on neurolinguistics and phonology provides an account of their own clinical research, and is a state of the art review of this topic in relation to aphasia and imaging studies. While contradictory localizations of phonology suggest to some its multi-componential nature rather than the limits of the methodology, these authors provide an informed and critical overview that is an important addition to this debate. I have long thought the critical step in the evolution of language was not the acquisition of syntax but the appearance of phonological processing in anterior and posterior zones, phonetic in one, phonemic in the other, with syntax in some way – embedding is the example – arising in the succession of whole-part or context-item shifts in the individuation of phases. I am delighted to have the paper by John Cobb, reviewing his own experience in this field. John is a highly respected philosopher with a strong interest in psychology and neuroscience, who has personally helped me to better understand some of the intricacies of Whitehead’s thought, especially the distinction, in Whitehead, of change within and across actualities, or of intrinsic and extrinsic change, what I have referred to as genuine and apparent change.

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With training in psychiatry, physics and process philosophy, Mark Germine is uniquely qualified to deal with the vexing problem of intersubjectivity, a topic that all modes of subjectivism must confront. Like Freud’s psychoanalysis, microgenesis is strongly intra-psychic, with the relation of self to other – the perception and valuation of the other – an extension to extra-personal space of the observer’s mind. This dilemma in a manifold of ways is at the core of idealism. It was also the theme of my Authentic Life, which sought to develop a concept of moral feeling, value and responsibility based on the transition from character to conduct rather than, as in most approaches, the relation of conduct to external norms, rules or consensual judgments. Darek Kaczmarek describes various studies on brain and language, including some important work in his own country, emphasizing the need for an organic theory of mind and brain grounded in evolutionary concepts. The dynamic approach to mind/brain focuses on internal process and the micro-temporal transition to psychic content. This approach differs from cognitivism, which is a mode of externalism, in which mental contents are logical solids uncoupled from their momentary development and disconnected from a concept of the mind/brain state. In externalism, there is no mental thread, much less a qualitative transformation, from self to content, e.g. proposition, nor from the latter to object or fact, or if there is, it is inconsequential. The psychic antecedents of surface contents have no bearing on their interpretation. The content is distinct from its formative history. Perceptions are “out there” in the real world and reality is distinct from the propositions that describe it. While truth turns on the adequacy of this correspondence, mental contents have already taken on the properties of external entities, uprooted from the psyche, displaced to an abstract theater in external space and then re-inserted in mind as functional components. In microgenetic theory, the actualization and iteration of the mental state is from the core self to conscious mental content and external objects. Ideas, images, objects and feelings are individuations of the self that perish, and/or are revived, as momentary endpoints in a single mind/brain state. Contents expose phases, they do not lead to future acts but are replaced by ensuing ones. The relation of image to object, or of thought to fact, is of an intermediate to a distal phase in the same state, with both arising from the self. A fact is an outcome of conceptual-feeling, an irreducible value, as Dewey put it. Contents in the mental state are not themselves states. The mental state is the full process of actualization from core self (through image) to external object.

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The late George Kurian, an experimental psychologist, worked in bitter isolation in Patiala, yet managed to write some fine articles on microgenesis. In his chapter, he seeks, as I have in recent years, to extend that work to a concept of ethics and the good life. There are several approaches a process thinker might employ to this end. These include the pan-psychic or pan-experientialist implications of the philosophy that infuse all things with an interior quality, the expansion into theology that, though not obligated by internalism – indeed, in part responsible for its decline – does create opportunities for religious justifications, and the subjectivism and inwardness of an occasion of mind – the mind/brain state – that import a psychology of value into moral philosophy. Duncan MacQueen has contributed an elegant history of the problem of identity (and its converse, novelty), which is at the heart of microgenetic theory, and alludes to the categorical nature of sameness. The difference between process and substance theory in the account of change stems from such foundational issues as how objects as segments of events precipitate in the mind (images, ideas) and in the world (objects), how content is carved out of flux, how we perceive objects, not the change that lays them down, including the transition from the self to its objects and how, in substance theory, change occurs across the sharp edges of object demarcations. We see objects that change, not the change that deposits them. Objects are everywhere and motion is seamless, but change is invisible. The concepts of atomic or irreducible substance, instantaneous time and external relations, postulate change in the causal connectivity from one perceptual or logical solid to another. In process thought, objects arise in the replacement of epochs, with change in the transition from potential to actual. Quantities are the currency of a philosophy of being. The philosophy of becoming posits qualities. The accounts depend on competing theories of time and space. Are they irreconcilable or can a substance ontology of being and external change be resolved with an event-ontology of becoming and intrinsic change? Duncan MacQueen provides clues to this resolution in the concept of categories that persist even as they are changing. The paper by Nikolae Nikolaenko on various forms of creative activity and their relation to the brain, and that by Maria Pachalska on art and brain injury, open a window to the creative life in relation to brain activity. The reports of preserved if somewhat altered musical composition, and painting seemingly liberated from verbal inhibition with aphasic stroke, are of great interest and in contrast to the devastating effects of brain damage on writing and other art-forms. With regard to painting, there have not

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been many influential studies of this topic since the 1969 paper by Zaimov and his colleagues on a well-known Bulgarian artist with global aphasia, whose pre- and post-stroke canvases can be seen at the museum in Sofia. The comparison of his pre-stroke Social Realism with the (?superior) dream-like paintings of his post-stroke years is striking. We learn from such observations, so beautifully described in these two papers, that the unexpected that is exposed in pathology is an uncovering of the creative that is concealed beneath the surface. Nikolaenko has also researched creative ability and hemisphere relations through ingenious studies of unitlateral electro-shock, while Maria Pachalska is one of very few neuropsychologists to explore changes in self-identity and personality in cases with organic pathology. The chapter by Diana Sidtis and Jody Kreiman reviews their fundamental contributions to neurolinguistics and psychology, and as in all stimulating papers, raises as many questions as it resolves. How does familiarity for voices or faces relate to familiarity and recognition more generally, to the common experience that one can often identify a non-native speaker just by a hello or good-day, or to the mistaken familiarity of deja vu – which I believe demonstrates, as does its temporal lag – that a perception is a memory that adapts to world experience? The holistic-analytic distinction seems to me one of super- to sub-ordinate category. The former is bilaterally-represented, the latter, depending on the material, biased to the left. The analysis of a gestalt or whole leaves behind the antecedent category as a virtual phase in the left hemisphere. This creates, especially in split-brain cases, a fictitious ceiling in configural development in righthemisphere. It also explains why characteristics of “right-hemisphere cognition” can, with appropriate techniques, be accessed in the left brain. Finally, let me add that in her charming way, Diana Sidtis has left me wondering if, in the future, fecundity may bring me as much notoriety as did titillation in the past. The many visits to the laboratory of Gudmund Smith in Lund, and the warm hospitality of friends at the University, remain a precious souvenir. Gudmund has faced similar difficulties as I have over the years in departing from the standard view of perception and in the reaction, as he writes, to the findings of his own experimental studies that document bottom-up processing. The percept- and micro-genetic model of perception is the linchpin of the theory. It is encouraging that current studies tend to support this account, those in this volume as well as blindsight, and research on semantic priming and masking. The idea is now circulating that the final

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modeling in perception sculpts and so exteriorizes the dream image, i.e. that the image points to a transitional phase in the perception. There is also evidence that the reciprocal cortical connectivity is stronger in the V-4 to V-1 direction than the reverse. This problem is taken up from a different standpoint by Kobi Tiberg and Avraham Schweiger, who provide evidence from neuropsychological disorders for the concept that perception develops outward from brainstem to primary cortices, from the holistic to the analytic, from past to present, from self to other, and from mind to world. Avraham Schweiger’s work on deep dyslexia documents the extraction of word meaning prior to phonology that was an early prediction of the theory. Regarding evolution, Don Tucker explores, with erudition and imagination, the relation of microgenesis to both evolutionary and morphogenetic process. This critical gap in the early exposition of the theory was resolved when the pattern of morphogenetic growth was seen as fundamental rather than, as in regression theory, the stages laid down in maturation. This pattern, the pruning of the maladaptive in the specification of form, first by elimination, than inhibition, continues into mature cognition in the constraints on whole-to-part transitions as configurations struggle to actuality from core to world surface. The whole-to-part transition characterizes the shift from one phase to another at successive points, and can be considered a fundamental law of mental process. The shift from potential to actual, or from generality to definiteness, covers the overall process from inception to termination. Among the many topics addressed by Michel Weber in his stimulating paper are the nature of becoming and being, substance, process and individuality. Process theory evokes becoming, intrinsic relations and continuity; substance theory entails being, external relations and atomicity. As noted above, there need not be a choice between competing metaphysics. Substance can be conceived in terms of categories that embrace intrinsic becoming, while the latter is feeling that specifies an epoch of being. Put differently, becoming is the process that lays down being; being is the category that enfolds becoming. Individualities are overlapping, recurrent actualizations carved out of flux. The mind/brain state is such a momentary actuality, an atomic unit of process over the epoch of its existence, in which an act of cognition is a trajectory of conceptual-feeling from drive through inner feeling to object value.

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*** In closing, I would add that those working in the various domains of process thought have no doubt often felt outside the mainstream of their fields. To a differing extent, we all share the fellowship of the marginalized. This is not surprising, since process theory is counter-intuitive, even jarring in its refutation of the pragmatics of common sense; certainly it is out of synch with current trends in empirical psychology. Cycles and recurrences are less felt than conceptualized, whether the momentary recurrence of the mind/brain state, the heartbeat, the oscillations of respiration, circadian rhythms such as sleep and wakefulness, the lifespan of birth and death, or the “eternal return” of nature and psyche, whereas everyday life seems linear and progressive, from past to present to future, with an accretion of change “over time”. The tendency to dichotomize penetrates the most basic problems of time, space and causality. Still, I believe an ontology of becoming, to which this volume is a signal contribution, can be reconciled with an ontology of being, but this will be a task for future generations. Jason Brown 66 E. 79th Street New York, NY 10075

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Part I. Papers in honor of Jason W. Brown

Chapter 1 An authentic life for process thinking HARALD ATMANSPACHER Institut für Grenzgebiete der Psychologie und Psychohygiene, Freiburg, Germany JACK MARTIN Department of Psychology, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada Introduction Jason Brown started his career as a neurologist specializing in language disorders, perceptive illusions, and impaired action. But beyond his activity as a physician he is a man of genuinely theoretical appetite. As satisfying as it is to help improve the situation of sick fellow humans, this alone does not characterize him well. Those who know him closer know his insistent urge to find a philosophical framework for his clinical practice and research, together with his desire for a more humane society. Those who do not know him will see this immediately when they read his most recent book Process and the authentic life (Brown 2006). This is, in a nutshell, how and why Brown came to look into process philosophy, as an alternative to philosophical systems focusing on substances such as the Cartesian res cogitans and res extensa, on which science and technology are essentially based. Process philosophy holds some radical deviations from these systems, and may be regarded as complementary to them (Roemer 2006), although any such convergence is hotly contested (e.g., Bickhard 2004). Best known among adherents of a process worldview is Whitehead with his opus magnum Process and Reality. Brown’s approach is clearly in the spirit of Whitehead’s. However, due to his medical and psychological background it differs in motivation, and consequently it differs in the way it is carried out. While Whitehead, originally a mathematician, tried to be as precise and detailed as possible in his definitions, arguments and conclusions, Brown strives for his humanistic goal more directly. His accounts are based on examples rather than formal inferences, everyday experiences rather than abstract constructions.

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Ultimately, the project of process philosophy will need both components in the right balance to be successfully developed further. Because there are so many notions of process, covering the range from a natural-language term to sophisticated formulations in mathematical physics, our contribution begins with an attempt to clarify some general points concerning process and time, innovation and creativity. First, a brief analysis of the relation between process and time is presented, emphasizing irreversibility and temporal holism as crucial for a processual worldview. Following this, in section three, we emphasize the notions of instability and transience as two of the key concepts of a truly processual worldview. In addition we sketch some ideas for developing concepts such as creativity and freedom in terms of stability arguments. In sections four and five, the concept of personhood, central for an understanding of an “authentic life” (Brown 2006), is discussed under the perspective of how it is conditioned both biophysically and socioculturally. In addition to much present work concerning the emergence of personhood from the body and brain of an individual, we argue that future work also must explicitly address the role of the sociocultural domain in the constitution of persons. An important condition making this possible is a domain-relative ontology, i.e. an ontology defined relative to particular domains of reality, allowing us to take different domains equally seriously. This implies a rejection of reductionist points of view in favor of emergent states and properties within the domains considered. The traditional unidirectional hierarchy from biophysical to psychological and finally sociocultural levels is replaced by non-hierarchically organized domains with multidirectional emergence relations among them. Process and time, process and innovation From a contemporary point of view, the concept of a process cannot be discussed without the concept of time. In a first approximation, and from a somewhat naive point of view, one might say that processes develop over time. It remains to be clarified, though, which of the two is to be considered logically prior with respect to the other. The radical process view ascribes priority to process and introduces time as a derived notion. An early well-known example of such a position is Aristotle. On the other hand, the usual way to define processes in current science is based on functions of time t, t -> f(t), where f usually represents the state of a system or (one or many of) its properties. In this view, the con-

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cept of time is a precondition to describe a process as a function of time. Time in this framework is a so-called parameter time, universally preset and independent of the particular process which it parametrizes. Time in this sense is defined by clocks of different degrees of sophistication, from sundials and hourglasses to quartz clocks and atomic clocks. Physics distinguishes two classes of processes depending on whether or not the time-reversal invariance of fundamental laws is broken. Roughly speaking, a process is time-reversal invariant if f(t) = f(-t): watching a movie of such a process does not allow one to distinguish a particular temporal direction in it. Processes of this kind are time-symmetric or reversible and rigorously apply only to isolated systems. Reversible processes do not provide true novelty. Novel facts, which cannot be undone once they have happened, require the time-inversion invariance of the process to be broken. These important limitations raise the question of how realistic reversible processes are. Any system interacting with its environment cannot be isolated but needs to treated as open. Interactions of a system with its environment are known to break the time-reversal symmetry of reversible processes. As a consequence, two directions of time arise, one from past to future (forward) and another from future to past (backward). The emergence of two temporal directions due to the breaking of temporal symmetry is a rigorous mathematical result which is free from additional ancillary arguments. In remarkable contrast, the selection of one of those two directions of time as relevant cannot be justified by purely mathematical or physical arguments alone. A typical non-physical, epistemological criterion for selecting the forward arrow of time is causality: causes precede their effects (see, e.g., Primas 1992). This type of causality corresponds to Aristotle’s causa efficiens. Backward causation, alluding to teleological aspects of goaloriented processes (as in Aristotle’s causa finalis), would violate physical causality and is usually disregarded. The irreversibility of temporal evolution is a crucial feature of many situations in everyday life (hot coffee cools down rather than spontaneously heating up) and of our psychological experience of time. Tenses like past, present, and future structure our experience in such a way that we distinguish between memories of the past, anticipation of the future, and the transition between them at present. Future, contingent events become irreversible, past facts when they happen. Without this irreversibility there is

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no innovation (or novelty). Both contingency and innovation (among others) are crucial categories for an appropriate understanding of process. Causal or functional connectedness of some kind is often assumed to characterize the concept of a process in a broad sense. “The successive stages of a natural process are not a mere juxtaposition of arbitrary, unconnected factors ... They are united by a systemic causal or functional agency under the aegis of a lawful regularity” (Rescher 1996:39). However, random (Markov) processes, consisting of sequences of just such uncorrelated events, are very useful tools to describe processes as well. Moreover, it is now well established that the distinction between random and lawful processes is a matter of description rather than a feature of reality (Gustafson 1997). Systems exhibiting deterministic chaos are an important case in point. After all, the criterion of causal or functional connectedness is not so simple and may be very subtle in complex systems. A more relevant, and at the same time more sophisticated, candidate to characterize processes is the concept of temporal holism, sometimes also called temporal nonlocality, which has been studied in the physics of quantum systems (Mahler 1999) and chaotic systems (Misra & Prigogine 1983, Atmanspacher 1997). This concept is in the spirit of the radical process view and goes beyond the idea of a connectedness of successive stages of a process in a decisive way. Its essence is that successive stages cannot even be distinguished (within some system-specific time interval). Such temporal holism is a challenging candidate to serve as a significant feature of and viable criterion for a truly processual world view. If processes are considered as temporal wholes without successive stages then it becomes inadmissible to speak about causal or functional connections between such stages. This is highly relevant to understanding temporal patterns (such as rhythms or melodies) as wholes rather than sequences of stages. From a psychological point of view, the concept of temporal holism provides the possibility to conceptualize the notion of an experienced now with non-vanishing, finite duration (Pöppel 1997). In the neurosciences, ideas like this are currently discussed as possible solutions for the problem of intermodal binding, i.e. the capability to merge perceptions of one and the same object across different sensory modalities. Limited time intervals of presence, within which temporal wholes persist, are a key to James’s “specious present” and to Whitehead’s “actual occasions” or (later) “actual entities”. The idea of discrete portions of time does not contradict neurocognitive mechanisms generating the impression

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of continuity. For instance, Pöppel (1997) proposed semantic content as a crucial connecting factor between otherwise separated lumps of now. The Swiss novelist Max Frisch offers a speculative, though highly inspiring perspective on our understanding of time and process. In his diaries, Frisch (1950:15, quotation translated by HA) writes: Time? It would be just a magic tool unfolding and making visible our essence by disentangling life, the omnipresence of all possibilities, into successive stages; only therefore it seems like a transformation to us, and therefore it urges us to assume that time, the successive, is not essential but apparent, an ancillary tool, an unwind that shows us in succession what actually is interleaved, a simultaneity which we cannot perceive as such, as we cannot perceive the colors of light when its rays are not refracted and spectrally decomposed.

From transience to freedom It is generally difficult to avoid non-processual, substance-oriented concepts to describe processes, but this can be severely misleading. Considering a process as a sequence of states is an example insofar as a state of a system is a distinctly substantive denotation. On the other hand, there is a very basic problem if one wants to go without any substantive connotations. The core of this problem is the inevitable concreteness of processual experience. Any intention to abstractly conceptualize it is dangerously close to Whitehead’s “fallacy of misplaced concreteness.” In this sense, terms such as stability and transience become highly significant. James’s famous chapter 9 on the “stream of thought” in his Principles of psychology employs these and related concepts extensively. In his particular terms, James refersto stable categories as “substantive parts” of the stream of thought, or “nuclei of perception,” and to processes connecting stable categories as “transitive parts” or “fringes of perception.” In a non-processual world view, the latter are often regarded as unavoidable by-products of the former, but neither as significant nor as desirable features in themselves. James (1950:243-244) has some very illustrative remarks addressing this problem: Now it is very difficult, introspectively, to see the transitive parts as what they really are. If they are but flights to a conclusion, stopping them to look at them before the conclusion is reached is really annihilating them. Whilst if we wait till the conclusion be reached, it so exceeds them in vigor and stability that it quite eclipses and swallows them up in its glare. Let anyone try to cut a thought across in the middle and get a look at its section, and he

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will see how difficult the introspective observation of the transitive acts is. ... The results of this introspective difficulty are baleful. If to hold fast and observe the transitive parts of thought’s stream be so hard, then the great blunder to which all schools are liable must be the failure to register them, and the undue emphasizing of the more substantive parts of the stream.

So what does process philosophy offer to avoid this “undue emphasizing”? In one understanding, transience eventually means loss, since that which is left behind is usually not left behind light-heartedly. However, transience is also a major and mandatory requirement for anything like emergent novelty or creative work, fundamental cornerstones of process philosophy. Not even the simplest act of understanding is conceivable without the ephemeral instant of a so-called aha-experience -- the hallmark of insight. In terms of a stability analysis of the corresponding process, it is straightforward to identify the mental state at this instant as unstable (Atmanspacher 1992). Remarkably, scientific approaches dealing with unstable states and transient processes have recently received increasing attention in the study of complex systems. These approaches are successfully applied to describe neural and cognitive processes. But they also figure prominently in highly interdisciplinary approaches to address meditative states (Atmanspacher & Fach 2005) or studies in literature and philosophy (Feil 2007). From this perspective, instability becomes a concept which needs to be welcomed together with transience and change. If value is confused with permanency, and importance with endurance, creativity is blocked. Under circumstances in which everything is done to stabilize against change and insure against loss, novelty is impossible. The dilemma here, of course, is a deeply innate psychological tendency to respond to instability with resistance and anxiety. Could it ever be possible to re-educate human reactions to instabilities? A fascinating move would be to consider unstable states not as hazardous departures from a stable world view, but rather as states enabling liberation from immobile and inflexible categorial schemes. Creativity has a lot to do with liberation. A corresponding conception of freedom is very attractive: it does not contradict any scientific determinism because the fundamental laws of nature are inapplicable to transient behavior. This point is largely unexplored in the vast literature on free will as it is conceived in Western civilization. In this regard, Eastern philosophical and spiritual traditions offer a variety of alternatives which await critical discussion.

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But we do not necessarily have to look into other cultures to find this issue addressed. The Danish philosopher Kierkegaard refers to the tension between anxiety and freedom with particularly deep and dense words (Kierkegaard 1844): One can compare anxiety with some kind of dizziness. He who must look down into a deep abyss will feel dizzy. But what is the reason for this? It is both his eye and the abyss – because what would be had he not stared down? In this sense, anxiety is that dizziness of freedom which occurs if the spirit [Geist] is about to set the synthesis. Freedom now looks down into its own possibility and, then, seizes finiteness in order to stick to it. In this dizziness, freedom sinks down. This is as far as psychology can reach out, and it does not want to reach out further. In this instant everything is changed, and when freedom rises again, it recognizes that it is guilty. Between these two moments lies the leap which science neither has explained nor will be able to explain.

A person is more than a conscious individual over time There is no doubt that the process approach offers great potential to new vistas in philosophical psychology. Yet there is more to it, and the influence and significance of sociocultural issues for the formation and definition of personhood and authenticity are as widely overlooked (or underestimated) as the role of biophysical issues is overstated in many approaches. Of particular relevance within the area of sociocultural factors is the context of interpersonal interactions. This has occasionally been related to the topic of second-person perspectives in addition to the much discussed firstand third-person accounts. But what about us, the first person plural? It is typical for Western science and philosophy that all these issues are usually, without further justification, addressed in terms of first, second, and third persons singular. This reflects an implicit bias toward a basically indivualistic viewpoint as opposed to ideas of togetherness, collective or community. In many approaches, even in process thinking, this bias is not sufficiently reflected. For this reason, individualist accounts are not in proper balance with the sociocultural dimensions of the problem. If our understandings, experiences, and values are considered purely individual, their holistic embedding within a larger whole will always be treated as derivative, as subordinated, and their thoroughly ontological dependence upon an encompassing reality will go largely ignored. A certain kind of holism, processual or otherwise, has much to recommend it with respect to the irreducibility of persons to their obvious

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physical, chemical, and biological requirements. Recently, Bennett and Hacker (2003) introduced the notion of “mereological fallacy” to characterize cases in the neuroscience literature in which properties of wholes (i.e., selves, persons) are erroneously deduced from or even identified with properties of their parts (i.e., brain areas, neuronal assemblies). They insist that a system as a whole typically exhibits features that are unique to its corresponding universe of discourse. It would be ridiculous (but obviously not impossible) to believe that issues such as the authenticity of a person’s life can be successfully addressed without considering the ontological status of the sociocultural domain of reality and its relation to psychology. In this context, one can observe that mereological fallacies abound in discussions of the relation between communities and individuals as well. If one extends the criteria for what is real to include discernable influence in addition to some acceptable method of “observation” (e.g., Bhaskar 1989), room is created at the ontological table for both interactive and constitutive sociocultural-psychological relations. Interactive relations include processes of learning in which the social consequences of actions hold important consequences for one’s sense of and beliefs about self. Constitutive relations include those linguistic practices in a particular sociocultural context that are indispensable for meanings and assumptions concerning personhood. Vygotsky (1986) or Harré (1998) provide ways in which the sociocultural constitution of personhood can be treated seriously and in detail. Tiered ontology and emergent personhood One possible option is to understand both the sociocultural and the biophysical as ontologically real and interacting within a tiered system of domains of reality. Such a conception can be traced back to the 19th century philosopher Hartmann (1935). Quine (1969) and, more recently, Putnam (1987) have proposed similar approaches in terms of an ontological relativity which allows us to think about different domains of reality as “equally ontological.” This approach rejects any strong reductionist scheme of thinking in which only one (basic) domain (or level) of reality can be of ontological relevance, while all others are reducible to it. As was demonstrated for physical examples by Atmanspacher and Kronz (1998), a particular kind of emergence is a significant feature of an ontology relative to particular domains of reality. In this framework it is assumed that emergent states and properties of a system cannot be strictly derived from “lower level” states and properties.

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“Lower level” states and properties provide necessary but not sufficient conditions for “higher level” states and properties. Concerning the processual emergence of persons, corresponding arguments have recently been proposed by Emmeche et al. (1997, 2000) and Martin and Sugarman (1999, 2002). They treat persons as biophysical individuals whose active immersion and participation in the sociocultural world (from birth) allows them to develop as persons equipped with selfunderstanding, agentic capability, and personal identities that give a psychological connectedness to their lives. Although there is much to be worked out in these models of emergent personhood, they seem to make useful distinctions between sociocultural and biophysical relations and processes with respect to the emergence of personhood in ontogenesis, without falling into substance forms of dualism. In such alternative processual systems, processes and relations of meaning at sociocultural and psychological domains of reality are not ontologically subordinated to those natural and evolving processes and relations that form their undisputed biophysical requirements. And yet, there is no mysterious mind outside of these sociocultural and natural, physical processes, and both sociocultural and psychological domains of reality are clearly embedded within, yet not reducible to, the biophysical domains of reality. Such theorizing, and the very possibility of the kind of ontologically real real emergence it assumes, clearly requires a process metaphysics. Returning to the important matter of time, many theorists of personhood have considered psychological continuity or connectedness as the central criterion of personhood. The basic idea in such Lockean approaches is the notion of “person stage,” defined as a momentary slice of time in the history of a person (e.g., Parfit 1984). A series of person stages is psychologically continuous if later psychological states of the series develop, in certain characteristic ways, from earlier states of the series. This form of psychological continuity has been held to occur across memory, agency, reason, intentionality, self-consciousness, reflection, and experience, amongst others. Of course, the obvious critique of continuity theories of personhood is that they are overly simplified, and seem to assume the exact kind of temporal-experiential unifier they are intended to clarify. For many, this problem has been seen to arise because of the assumption in continuity (process) theories that the locus of personhood is intrapersonal. Alternatively, both biophysical and sociocultural extensions to the basic notion of psychological continuity have been proposed. For example, Strawson (1959) argued that persons, as basic particulars of the

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human world, are bearers of both physical and psychological properties. For Strawson, personal concepts like identity and self require the embodiment of a biophysical human being active in the physical and social world arrayed in time and space. Others, like Taylor (1989) and Harré (1998) have extended the sociocultural bases of personhood to include historical, cultural, and moral requirements that are to be added to the criteria of psychological continuity or connectedness and physical embodiment. For these theorists, persons are unique embodied beings, with distinctive life experiences, agentic capability, and self-understanding who may be called to moral account as responsible actors. In such formulations the emergence of persons requires a co-constituting emergence of social and psychological reality within an unfolding cultural history. More recently, Martin et al. (2003) have defined persons as embodied beings with social and personal identity, self, and agency, and provided additional definitions for the various aspects of persons thus defined that emphasize the historical, sociocultural, and moral constitution of persons. Such persons are capable of extending backward (memory) and forward (anticipation/purpose) in psychological and physical time, possessing commitments and pursuing projects that give a rich continuity to their lives. It is this kind of personhood that is truly worth having, and it is this kind of personhood that process theorists should have in sight as a complex whole to which their talk about processes somehow must aspire. Most importantly, when such a view is taken, it seems to require that human history, society, and culture be granted a constitutive reality that physicalist accounts of personhood cannot sanction. An important challenge for future work on the emergence of personhood, both ontogenetically and phylogenetically, is to comprehend processes of interactivity that enable the sociocultural constitution of persons as social and psychological beings within, and with the support of, biophysical bases and processes. In conclusion, should we want to maintain the traditional distinction between the life and the work of a person, then this person’s being in the world cannot be appreciated in its entirety. However, we are in the lucky situation that we can point to an alternative: Jason Brown’s work about “the authentic life” mirrors his work as intrinsically tied to his life. References Atmanspacher, H. (1992). Categoreal and acategoreal representation of knowledge. Cognitive Systems, 3, 259-288.

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Atmanspacher, H. (1997). Dynamical entropy in dynamical systems. In: H. Atmanspacher & E. Ruhnau (Eds.), Time, temporality, now (327-346). Berlin: Springer. Atmanspacher, H. & Fach, W. (2005). Acategoriality and mental instability. Journal of Mind and Behavior, 26, 181-206. Atmanspacher, H. & Kronz, F. (1998). Many realisms. Acta Polytechnica Scandinavica, Ma-91, 31-43. Bennett, M.R. & Hacker, P.M.S. (2003). Philosophical foundations of neuroscience. Oxford: Blackwell. Bhaskar, R. (1989). Reclaiming reality: a critical introduction to contemporary philosophy. London: Verso. Bickhard, M. H. (2004). Process and emergence: normative function and representation. Axiomathes -- An International Journal of Ontology & Cognitive Systems, 14, 135-169. Brown, J. (2006). Process and the authentic life: toward a psychology of value. Heusenstamm: Ontos. Emmeche, C., Koppe, S. & Stjernfelt, F. (1997). Explaining emergence – towards an ontology of levels. Journal for General Philosophy of Science, 28, 83-119. Emmeche, C., Koppe, S. & Stjernfelt, F. (2000). Levels, emergence, and three versions of downward causation. In P. B. Andersen, C. Emmeche, N. O. Finnemann & P. V. Christiansen (Eds.), Downward causation: minds, bodies, and matter (pp. 1334). Aarhus, Denmark: Aarhus University Press. Feil, D. (2007). Acategoriality and the unity of being in Hölderlin’s novel Hyperion. Mind & Matter, 5(2), 167-200. Frisch, M. (1997). Tagebuch 1946-1949. Frankfurt, Suhrkamp. Gustafson, K. (1997). Lectures on computational fluid dynamics, mathematical physics, and linear algebra (pp. 61-68). Singapore: World Scientific. Harré, R. (1998). The singular self: an introduction to the psychology of personhood. Thousand Oaks, California, USA: Sage. Hartmann, N. (1935). Zur Grundlegung der Ontologie. Berlin: deGruyter. James, W. (1950). Principles of psychology. New York: Dover. Kierkegaard, S. (1844). The concept of anxiety. Quotation translated from the German version Der Begriff Angst (Reclam, Stuttgart, p.72) by HA. Mahler, G. (1999). Temporal nonlocality. In H. Atmanspacher, U. Müller-Herold & A. Amann (Eds.). On quanta, mind, and matter (83-101). Dordrecht: Kluwer. Martin, J. & Sugarman, J. (1999). The psychology of human possibility and constraint. Albany, NY: SUNY Press.

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Martin, J. & Sugarman, J. (2002). Agency and soft determinism. In H. Atmanspacher & R. Bishop (Eds.). Between chance and choice (407-424). Thorverton: Imprint Academic. Martin, J., Sugarman, J. & Thompson, J. (2003). Psychology and the question of agency. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Misra, B. & Prigogine, I. (1983). Irreversibility and nonlocality. Letters in Mathematical Physics 7, 421-429. Parfit, D. (1984). Reasons and persons. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pöppel, E. (1997). A hierarchical model of temporal perception. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 1, 56-61. Primas, H. (1992). Time-asymmetric phenomena in biology. Open Systems & Information Dynamics, 1, 3-34. Putnam, H. (1987). The many faces of realism. LaSalle, Illinois, USA: Open Court. Quine, W.V.O. (1969). Ontological relativity. In Ontological relativity and other essays (pp. 26-68). New York: Columbia University Press. Rescher, N. (1996). Process metaphysics: an introduction to process philosophy. New York: SUNY Press. Roemer, H. (2006). Complementarity of process and substance. Mind and Matter, 4(1), 69-89. Strawson, P. (1959). Individuals. Routledge: New York. Taylor, C. (1989). Sources of the self. Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA: Harvard University Press. Vygotski, L. (1986). Thought and language. Translated by A. Kozulin. Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA: MIT Press.

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Chapter 2 How does microgenetic theory square with evidence from cognitive neuroscience? TALIS BACHMANN University of Tartu, Estonia Some key principles of microgenetic theory In several ways, the microgenetic approach to perception and mind corresponds to standard scientific psychology and cognitive neuroscience. The mental processes that arise when a subject encounters objects and events in the world include several sub-components as stages; the representational activity is a function of hierarchically organized brain structures; global systems can be decomposed down to more elementary sub-components, just as represented scenes include objects and objects include features. Some activities in this representational system use analog format encoding, others are symbolic. Although the ways in which modularity is treated may be different in mainstream cognitive sciences and in the microgenetic approach, noone denies that there is specialization of particular brain regions and loci for certain functions of cognition and action. Nevertheless, the concept of process is understood differently in mainstream neuroscience and psychophysiology compared to the microgenetic approach, in that the nature of process as such is not entirely overlooked. For instance, consider the extensive recent research on brain neural activity, both by means of single-cell recordings and at the global level (EEG, MEG) (e.g., Laureys, 2005; Martinez-Conde, 2006; Neuper & Klimesch, 2006). Yet there are differences in emphasis, and sometimes even deep disagreements about how to understand what the brain-mind does when humans adapt, react and act. Now, an intriguing possibility has emerged: we can have a look at the empirical results and rich data on the cerebral signatures of mental activity (e.g., the genesis of perception and awareness) as found in mainstream cognitive neuroscience and psychophysiology, and compare them to some of the main principles of the microgenetic approach. In order to do this, first we need to outline them.

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Microgenetic theory has its roots, inter alia, in evolutionary theory, neuropsychology and developmental science. Currently, links with philosophical process thinking can easily be noticed as well. Over many years, Jason Brown has been one of the leading advocates of the microgenetic approach, and also a fine systematizer of its characteristic principles (e.g., Brown, 1977, 1988, 2005). He has shown how and why the standard theoretical description of perception and action in terms of the general rule, “complete the previous stage of processing and then go to the next,” should be replaced by an understanding showing that the processes of perception and action are a nested dynamic structure, where different levels are active at the same time, and where unfolding would be a better term for describing the actual genesis of a perceptual or motoric act. Let us call this the principle of temporal overlap (principle 1). As a result, it can be said that the essence or core of a process (of representing some object of perception) is already there before the end-stages have had enough time to unfold up to the final, explicated format, and at the same time the early stages of a new content-process may have already commenced. This includes two additional principles: the principle of unitary content-processes (2) and the principle of revelation of the already existing core entity (3). These principles appear instead of the principle where each process of cognizing an object or acting upon it is a new one, as if ab ovo. Jason Brown has beautifully characterized this by an apt quotation from Goethe: “The leaf does not see that the root is everywhere” (Brown, unpublished). This principle also echoes the views of Jackson, von Baer, Nikolai Lange, and Heinz Werner about process recapitulation, stressing especially the microgenetic aspect in this universal process principle. In addition to the analysis of process as such, this set of principles also means that the segment of mental process that is unfolding at the conscious level is impossible without the preceding segments (phylogenetic, ontogenetic and microgenetic), and simultaneously structurally present process foundations, which are not part of conscious mentation in a direct mode of explicit experience, but which nevertheless influence explicit manifestations. The fourth principle suggests that the traditional view of perception and action processes described as a stimulus-response linkage (object as causally first and subject’s reaction as effect) should be replaced by the view of an endogenous process of object formation, where the subject’s exploratory activity comes as the situational cause and the cognized object is a means of constraining the core set activity. A term for this process, better suitable for characterizing its essence, is “sculpting.” That which al-

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ready exists is shaped by removal of the extraneous, so the object does not “enter” as a new, independent entity evoking a response to a stimulus. Let me call this the principle of continuously active core (4). The subject relates to the external objects and bodily states (including by consciously apprehending them), but is not an agent whose mental states are caused by the objects. In the microgenetic process of actualization, the subject always actualizes before the object. For brevity of notation, let me name the principles described above as follows: (1) temporal overlap; (2) unitary content; (3) core revelation; (4) core precedence. Let me now turn to the main analytical part of this article. I will list some data and conclusions from cognitive neuroscience and neurophysiological research (including EEG and MEG) on perception and awareness, and draw some inferences as to whether these data fit better with the traditional view of perceptual processing, or with the microgenetic approach developed by Jason Brown and colleagues. Brain-process signatures of perception and awareness Brain-process: interactions correlating with awareness

It has been shown that for sensory data encoded in sensory and perceptual cortex to become represented in awareness, a dual process is necessary. First, the specific afferent activity itself must communicate the signals of the specific contents of stimuli to feature-sensitive cortical neurons. Although this process is necessary for providing the contents of conscious perception, it is insufficient for consciousness, unless the activity of specific cortical (most typically pyramidal) neurons is modulated by activity from the subcortical units that send their efferents pre-synaptically onto apical dendrites and/or soma of the specific units. (For the evidence and arguments for this understanding, see Magoun, 1958; Purpura, 1970; Brooks & Jung, 1973; Scheibel, 1980; Bachmann, 1994; Steriade, 1996, 2000; Bogen, 1995; Newman, 1995; Munk et al., 1996; Llinás 2001; Llinás & Ribary, 2001; Rees et al., 2002; Schiff & Purpura 2002; Crick & Koch 2003; John, 2005.) The modulating effect necessary for awareness has often been termed “non-specific,” because the corresponding up-stream activity does not communicate any contents of the sensory stimulation in

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terms of its physical properties. The main brain structures implicated here are the brainstem reticular formation, parts of the thalamus other than the classical relay nuclei, the basal ganglia, and several other structures. A very special role in supporting awareness is sometimes ascribed to the thalamic intralaminar nuclei, which are the evolutionarily later developments of the brainstem activating system, having widespread and reciprocally innervated connections to most parts of the cortex (Bogen, 1995; Purpura & Schiff, 1997; Llinás, 2001; Llinás & Ribary, 2001; Llinás et al., 2005; John, 2005). The known operating properties of this dual system are as follows. First, it is accepted that quite specific information about the physical properties, meanings, emotiogenic qualities, numerical characteristics, and action-guiding alternatives can be processed, represented and stored by the brain preconsciously and even before awareness (Dixon, 1981; Marcel, 1983; Morris et al., 1998; de Gelder et al., 2001; Dehaene & Naccache, 2001; Jaśkowski et al., 2002; Moutoussis & Zeki, 2002; Kinoshita & Lupker, 2003; Carretie et al., 2005). This, by definition, means representation without sufficient participation of the proper non-specific reticulo-thalamic modulation in perceptual data processing. Secondly, it has been shown that when the first manifestation of the change of cortical activity after input of sensory stimulation appears (and when ultimately conscious perception is the outcome), these first instances of brain reactivity do not lead to awareness. The modulation effects, apparent at the cortical level, lag behind the early specific signaling by about 50-150 ms, and only after this time has lapsed does awareness of these stimuli arise (Purpura, 1970; Brooks & Jung, 1973; Hassler, 1978; Bachmann, 1994; John, 2005; Ribary, 2005). Third, the receptive fields of the specific neurons are smaller than the receptive fields of the modulating non-specific units (Brooks & Jung, 1973; Bachmann, 1994). Fourth, evoked responses apparent within the specific brain system are cortically more localized, whereas the responses (both evoked and induced) of the modulation activity are widespread (Magoun, 1958; Steriade et al., 1990; Ward, 2003; John, 2005). All this means that for object perception in awareness (and consciousness?) the actual object data has to interact with the endogenous process that is there already before the sensory perturbation, but which, after some time, will become actualized in an interaction which will have “sculpted” the continually present awareness-generating process. As a result, it now includes also the new sensory object as an aspect of microgenetic formation. Thus the principles of core revelation and core precedence are sup-

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ported by neurobiological data on the necessary conditions for arriving at perceptual object-awareness. Also, the principles of unitary content and temporal overlap are not at odds with the facts about pre-conscious mentation, given that there are perceptual objects. Microgenesis need not always and necessarily conclude with objects explicated at the level of awareness. Recently, research findings have given support for the understanding that both pre-conscious specific cortical activity (for assigning the matching brain-process to the actual perceptual stimuli) and the non-specific modulation necessary for conscious-level representation of the specific contents may be based on gamma band oscillatory activity (Singer, 1998; Llinás 2001; Llinás & Ribary, 2001; Ward, 2003; Llinás et al., 2005; John, 2005). Gamma band activity is generated by neural units in the brain, so that periodic increases and decreases in the firing frequency of neurons forms a kind of oscillatory function with a cycle frequency higher than about 30 Hz. More specifically, oscillations in the 40-Hz gamma band range are likely to be the mechanisms for binding sensory features into coherent perceptual objects, as well as for binding the integrated sensory sets as objects into more widespread cortico-subcortical oscillatory activity; the latter is interpreted as a correlate of pertinent consciousness of the impinging sensory stimulation (Munk et al., 1996; Singer, 1998; Llinás 2001; Llinás & Ribary, 2001; Bachmann, 2007). Coincidence detection microcircuits are a good means for building up the synchrony between oscillations within the specific system and between oscillations in both the specific system and the non-specific thalamically modulated system (Llinás & Ribary, 2001; Llinás et al., 2002, 2005; Börgers et al., 2005). Thus, when we encounter short-latency, cortically more narrowly localized gamma oscillations, this may be regarded as an indication of pre-conscious sensory coding of features and possibly figure-ground segregation of object boundaries. When we encounter intermediate latency, more wide-spread gamma oscillations, this may be regarded as an indication of consciousness-related perceptual representation. In both cases gamma band oscillations may also mean comparison of the incoming activity with stored memory representations (see e.g. Herrmann & Mecklinger, 2001.) Several conclusions can be drawn out of the evidence about oscillatory activities as correlates of conscious perception. Because at least two oscillatory processes (specific and non-specific) have to be simultaneously present for sculpting actual object awareness, and because several different features and form-nodes can be invoked to the active dynamic oscillatory ensemble, the principle of temporal overlap is satisfied. Because one of the

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oscillatory modalities is related to the phylogenetically older, subcortical, subjective-core related brain structures, and because exactly this counterpart of the interacting oscillatory “symphony” is the sine qua non condition for object formation in conscious-level perception, the principles of core revelation and core precedence are satisfied. Indeed, everyone who has studied the brain’s EEG or MEG oscillatory activity knows that different frequency bands (each putatively related to a different mental function) are present in the same recording simultaneously. Only some specific perceptual occasions that happen to be the current focus of attention and/or are taking part in conscious awareness are associated with emphasised exposition of some spectral components in brain-process oscillations. The latter can be regarded as objective signatures of transient subjective mental states. The typical EEG or MEG recording is a very well-fit, nested structure, in order to allow perception to be interpreted as an unfolding phenomenon supported by multilayered representational structures that are simultaneously active. In this multi-aspect, parallel system, the actualized percepts evolve as a tidal ebb-and-flow, prepared by the preceding pre-conscious events and subsiding down to the subsequent post-conscious mental events (compare Brown, 1988). But in addition to this highly abstract description, we need some concrete examples from research data that would show how the signatures of veridical peception or awareness-level perception are disclosed in EEG or MEG recordings. Let me provide a few examples. Conscious perception experiments

Microgenetic theory is basically different from behavioristic stimulusresponse theory in that the re-active, effect-level role of the perceiving subject is replaced by the active, exploring agent role of the subject. Mental states and contents in the microgenetic approach are not a passive function of the stimulus, but are determined by a process where the core subject “moves out” towards ambient and pertinent physical objects, which may then influence sculpting of the already launched cognitive process. This kind of interpretation predicts occasions of variability in the mental (including conscious) contents of perceptual objects with invariant physical objects as stimuli. If the layers from core to self to image-space bias activity according to their inherent predispositions, the object space represented in subjective format may vary, even if the physical entity remains invariant. Consequently, it should be possible to find oscillatory brain-process signatures that vary hand-in-hand with the conscious contents of percep-

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tion, given an invariant physical object as stimulus. Alternatively, it should be possible to find varying brain-process signatures echoing the subjective, consciously aware contents of perception, regardless of whether this perception is veridical or not. One experimental method for obtaining variable awareness of a perceptual object is masking (for a review see, e.g., Breitmeyer & Öğmen, 2006). In the study by Summerfield et al. (2002) it was found that brain activity in the gamma frequency EEG response increased with reported awareness of the masked words, regardless of whether they were correctly reported or not. The authors concluded that gamma power is related to awareness-dependent processing, even if awareness contents are not necessarily veridical. An important methodological point in that study was that clarity of awareness was used as a dependent measure. Thus the subjective perceptual state appeared as a variable linked with varying brain-process signatures independently of behavioral measures. This result is not at odds with the principle of core revelation, showing the autonomy of core awareness mechanisms from stimulation. Sometimes “sculpting” originates not from the physical entity as stimulus, but from some endogenous influence. The search for meaning sometimes generates illusory awareness experiences. These are illusions of physical entities actually not present. But these illusions are not illusions of brain processes, precisely because brainprocess signatures correlate with awareness level. Four alternative letter identification in a masking procedure was used by Hanslmayr et al. (2007). They found that high phase coupling in the beta and gamma range brain oscillations was a signature of brain responses in good perceivers. This finding of better coupling of oscillatory activities when the cognitive process reaches higher levels of unfolding corresponds to the principle of temporal overlap (i.e. the nested structure of brain oscillations with different frequency spectrum unfolding simultaneously). More importantly, Hanslmayr and colleagues (2007) found correlation between the level of perception and pre-stimulus oscillations. This fits with the principles of core revelation and core precedence (although it does not prove them). If the core-driven processes are set optimally before a stimulus is presented, stimulus perception will be also more authentic and veridical. Before any physical entity as a stimulus has appeared to the senses, the process originating from the core of the subject’s mind-brain sets the conditions for veridical (or non-veridical) perception (see also Ohla et al., 2007).

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In another study based on registering brain oscillatory responses, Melloni et al. (2007) showed that local gamma-band response was enhanced both for effectively masked words and correctly perceived words, but only correctly perceived words were associated with the trials, which formed the basis for demonstrating long range gamma synchronization (meaning that there was phase coherence between the oscillatory activity of several spatially distant brain regions). Notably, synchronization predicted correct perceptual discrimination even without increase in gamma power. Moreover, induced responses (as opposed to evoked responses, which show phase-locking to the stimulus) were adequate predictors of conscious recognition, supporting the global cortical space as the “theatre” where the long-range synchrony of oscillatory activity takes place when correct conscious-level perception occurs. These facts are also consistent with microgenetic theory. First, induced activity, which is not phase-locked to the physical stimulus, refers more to endogenous processes as the basic mechanism of conscious perception. Secondly, the global connectivity, implementing coherence of oscillatory processes, corresponds to what Jason Brown (e.g., 1977, 1988) regards as the basic feature of microgenetic theory explaining the symptoms of brain pathology. (Globality of processes and global coherence helps us to understand why localized injuries usually do not eliminate one or another process as such, but simply arrest it at some stage of microgenesis or modify its qualities.) In my lab we recently carried out experiments where we compared brain-process oscillatory signatures of aware versus unaware trials in a vernier-acuity target masking (Aru & Bachmann, 2008). Invariant stimulus conditions allowed for comparison of correctly reported target trials when subjects were confident in having seen targets distinctly and correctly reported target trials when they were subjectively uncertain. (CorrectA versus correctB behavioral contrasting is methodologically important because there are many data proving the reality of correct response selection and response biasing by pre-conscious and even unconscious processes.) Induced gamma-band EEG components that differentiated aware and unaware trials were found at 50 Hz (with 20-30 ms post-stimulus delay of the burst) and 35 Hz (100 ms delay), recorded from V1. The likely interpretation says that (1) if the brain happens to be in a state beneficial for fast local gamma-response in the visual cortex when a stimulus is presented and (2) if the endogenous modulation directed at specific sensory cortex is well expressed about 100 ms after stimulus presentation, then awareness of the stimulus emerges. Microgenesis then must have reached higher levels,

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where conscious awareness accompanies mental processing of the correctly responded physical object. Both pre-conscious emphasis by active dynamic oscillatory activity and longer latency-induced dynamic oscillatory activity predict directly experienced representation of the stimulus. My belief is that the slower part of the oscillatory bursts at about 100 ms post-stimulus corresponds to the process where “non-specific” subcortical modulation synchronizes with specific, localized cortical oscillatory signatures of specific content processing. Conclusions In this brief article I have taken data from mainstream cognitive neuroscience concerning conscious perception of physical objects and juxtaposed it with theoretical insights from the microgenetic approach. Although microgenetic theory is not often referred to in the “Establishment” of cognitive research, this situation may change sooner or later. Other things aside, this may happen because the accumulating data on conscious perception and the concomitant brain processes involved in it very well support the microgenetic view. Consider, for instance, the back propagation theory of visual awareness (Lamme, 2004) or the neurobiological framework for consciousness introduced by Crick and Koch (2003). These new developments have reversed the conventional view about how perception evolves (but many do not realize that similar views have been around since a rather earlier date, see Brown 1988). Now more and more specialists understand that the perceptual essence of the object typically precedes the perceptual details in conscious-perception formation. But in microgenetic theory, this has been understood and substantiated already by Nikolai Lange, Felix Krueger, Friedrich Sander, Heinz Werner – and of course Jason Brown. Although attempts to link microgenesis to cognitive neuroscience, experimental psychology and psychophysics have been made (e.g., Bachmann, 2000), there seems to be a persisting need to do so more actively and with a more extended empirical basis for it. Otherwise, the microgenetic school may acquire a status somewhat similar to psychoanalysis: finding a home in philosophy, clinical practice and fine arts, but not much in mainstream empirical research-based science. I think Jason Brown in his writings, conference papers, and scientific correspondence has been one of the key figures in making it clear why microgenesis can no longer be taken as an intellectual field remote from science. A merger of scientific data, philosophical

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vision and the art of thinking is in the making, and the maestro conducting this complex orchestra is Jason Brown. References Aru, J. & Bachmann, T. (2008). Occipital EEG correlates of conscious awareness. (submitted). Bachmann, T. (1994). Psychophysiology of Visual Masking: The Fine Structure of Conscious Experience. Commack, NY: Nova Science Publishers. Bachmann, T. (2000). Microgenetic Approach to the Conscious Mind. Amsterdam / Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Bachmann, T. (2007). Binding binding: departure points for a different version of the perceptual retouch theory. Advances in Cognitive Psychology, 3, 41-55. Bogen, J. E. (1995). On the neurophysiology of consciousness: I. An overview. Consciousness and Cognition, 4, 52-62. Börgers, C., Epstein, S. & Kopell, N.J. (2005). Background gamma rhythmicity and attention in cortical local circuits: A computational study. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, 102, 7002-7007. Breitmeyer, B.G. & Öğmen, H. (2006). Visual Masking: Time Slices Through Conscious and Unconscious Vision.. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Brooks, B. & Jung, R. (1973). Neuronal physiology of the visual cortex. In R. Jung, ed., Handbook of Sensory Physiology. Vol. VII/3. (pp. 325-440). New York: Springer-Verlag. Brown, J. (1977). Mind, Brain, and Consciousness. New York: Academic Press. Brown, J. W. (1988). The Life of the Mind. Hillsdale, New Jersey: Erlbaum. Brown, J.W. (2005). Process and the authentic life: Toward a psychology of value. Frankfurt & Lancaster: Ontos Verlag Brown, J.W. (2008). Consciousness: some microgenetic principles (unpublished manuscript). Carretie, L., Hinojosa, J.A., Mercado, F. & Tapia, M. (2005). Cortical response to subjectively unconscious danger. NeuroImage, 24, 615-623. Crick, F. & Koch, C. (2003). A framework for consciousness. Nature Neuroscience, 6, 119-126. de Gelder, B., de Haan, E. & Heywood, C. (2001). Out of mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dehaene, S. & Naccache, L. (2001). Towards a cognitive neuroscience of consciousness. Cognition, 79, 1-37. Dixon, N.F. (1981). Pre-conscious processing. Chichester: Wiley.

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Hanslmayr, S., Aslan, A., Staudigl, T., Klimesch, W., Herrmann, C.S. & Bäuml, K.-H. (2007). Prestimulus oscillations predict visual perception performance between and within subjects. Neuroimage, 37, 1465-1473. Hassler, R. (1978). Interaction of reticular activating system for vigilance and the truncothalamic and pallidal systems for directing awareness and attention under striatal control. In P.A. Buser and A. Rougeul-Buser (Eds.), Cerebral correlates of conscious experience (pp. 111-129). Amsterdam: North-Holland. Herrmann, C.S. & Mecklinger, A. (2001). Gamma activity in human EEG is related to high-speed memory comparisons during object selective attention. Visual Cognition, 8, 593-608. Jaśkowski, P., van der Lubbe, R., Schlotterbeck, E. & Verleger, R. (2002). Traces left on visual selective attention by stimuli that are not consciously identified. Psychological Science, 13, 48-54. John, E.R. (2005). From synchronous neuronal discharges to subjective awareness? In S. Laureys, ed., Progress in Brain Research. Vol. 150. 143-171. Kinoshita, S. & Lupker, S. J., eds. (2003). Masked Priming: The State of the Art. New York: Psychology Press. Lamme, V. A. F. (2003). Why visual attention and awareness are different. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 7, 12-18. Lamme, V.A.F., Supèr, H., Landman, R., Roelfsema, P.R. & Spekreijse, H. (2000). The role of primary visual cortex (V1) in visual awareness. Vision Research, 40, 1507-1521. Laureys, S. (Ed.) (2005). The boundaries of consciousness: neurobiology and neuropathology. Amsterdam: Elsevier. Llinás, R. (2001). I of the vortex: from neurons to self. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Llinás, R. & Ribary, U. (2001). Consciousness and the brain. The thalamocortical dialogue in health and disease. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 929, 166-175. Llinás, R., Urbano, F.J., Leznik, E., Ramirez, R.R. & van Merle, H.J.F. (2005). Rhythmic and dysrhythmic thalamocortical dynamics: GABA systems and the edge effect. Trends in Neurosciences, 28, 325-333. Magoun, H. W. (1958). The Waking Brain. Springfield, Illinois: C. C. Thomas. Marcel, A. (1983). Conscious and unconscious perception: An approach to the relations between phenomenal expeerience and perceptual processes. Cognitive Psychology, 15, 238-300. Martinez-Conde, S., Macknick, S.L., Martinez, L.M., Alonso, J.-M. & Tse, P.U. (Eds.) (2006). Visual perception. Part 2: Fundamentals of awareness, multi-sensory integration and higher-order perception. Amsterdam: Elsevier.

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Melloni, L., Molina, C., Pena, M., Torres, D., Singer, W. & Rodriguez, E. (2007). Synchronization of neural activity across cortical areas correlates with conscious perception. Journal of Neuroscience, 27, 2858-2865. Morris, J. S., Öhman, A. & Dolan, R. J. (1998). Conscious and unconscious emotional learning in the human amygdala. Nature, 393, 467-470. Moutoussis, K. & Zeki, S. (2002). The relationship between cortical activation and perception investigated with invisible stimuli. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, 99, 9527-9532. Munk, M.H.J., Roelfsema, P.R., König, P., Engel, A.K. & Singer, W. (1996). Role of reticular activation in the modulation of intracortical synchronization. Science, 272, 271-274. Neuper, C. & Klimesch, W. (Eds.) (2006). Event-related dynamics of brain oscillations. Amsterdam: Elsevier. Newman, J. (1995). Thalamic contributions to attention and consciousness. Consciousness and Cognition, 4, 172-193. Ohla, K., Busch, N.A. & Herrmann, C.S. (2007). Early electrophysiological markers of visual awareness in the human brain. Neuroimage, 37, 1329-1337. Purpura, D. (1970). Operations and processes in thalamic and synaptically related neural subsystems. In F.O. Schmitt, The Neurosciences. Second Study Program (pp. 458-470). New York: Rockefeller University Press. Rees, G., Kreiman, G. & Koch, C. (2002). Neural correlates of consciousness in humans. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 3, 261-270. Scheibel, A. (1980). Anatomical and physiological substrates of arousal: a view from the bridge. In J.A. Hobson & M.A.B. Brazier, eds., The Reticular Formation Revisited: Specifying Function for a Nonspecific System (pp. 55-66). New York: Raven. Schiff, N.D. & Purpura, K.P. (2002). Towards a neurophysiological foundation for cognitive neuromodulation through deep brain stimulation. Thalamus and Related Systems, 2, 55-69. Singer, W. (1998). Consciousness and the structure of neuronal representations. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London: B, 353, 1829-1840. Steriade, M. (1996). Awakening the brain. Nature, 383, 24-25. Steriade, M. (2000). Corticothalamic resonance, states of vigilance and mentation. Neuroscience, 101, 243-276. Steriade, M., Jones, E.G. & Llinás, R.R. (1990). Thalamic Oscillations and Signalling. New York: Wiley. Summerfield, C., Jack, A.I. & Burgess, A.P. (2002). Induced gamma activity is associated with conscious awareness of pattern masked nouns. International Journal of Psychophysiology, 44, 93-100.

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Ward, L. M. (2003). Synchronous neural oscillations and cognitive processes. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 7, 553-559.

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Chapter 3 Microgenesis of mystical awareness DAVID T. BRADFORD Austin, Texas The first sustained application of microgenetic theory to mysticism is found in Jason Brown’s (in press) essay “The Inward Path: Mysticism and Creativity.” The present response has six sections. The first includes introductory remarks about mysticism (“Introduction”). The second summarizes Brown’s principle insight about the nature of ascetical and mystical experience (“The Downward Passage”). The third describes psychological and neuropsychological changes associated with ascetical practices (“Loss of Objects”). The fourth section addresses Brown’s view of the relationship of mysticism and creativity (“Mysticism and Creativity”). The fifth discusses his distinction between nature- and god-mysticism, and his view of their common goal (“Two Approaches, One Goal”). The final section situates his essay in the tradition of the “perennial philosophy” and includes an archetypal interpretation of the perennialists’ hope for a wholly encompassing theory (“The Perennial Philosophy”). Critiques and extensions of Brown’s views are sought throughout. Numerous examples from the Christian, Jewish, and Buddhist ascetico-mystical traditions are introduced and discussed. Two Addendums are included. The first critiques two prominent neuropsychological explanations of mystical experience. The second outlines pertinent microgenetic terms and suggested readings in the theory. A primary intent of this essay is to illustrate an historically-informed neuropsychology of mystical experience that attends closely to phenomenological description and psychological analysis. Introduction Biologists have observed a company of African baboons that “barked themselves into ecstasy at the sinking sun. At such times they seldom busied themselves with anything, but remained in a sort of rapt watching attitude until the sun had gone” (Wulff, 1991, p. 142). Similarly, “in the mornings the rising of the sun was nearly always greeted with the same chorus of barking, and its movement over the rim of the horizon watched with the

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same peculiar raptness” (p. 142). The baboons’ behavior is likely the sole instance of organized “religious” practice in creatures other than humans. It seems a solar tropism, aligned perhaps with endocrine-mediated rewards such that parahuman “religion” is patterned motor activity aimed at the elicitation of pleasure. Religion otherwise is strictly human and the ascetico-mystical tradition is its most extreme expression. The apparent strangeness of the tradition derives from its contranatural features. Examples include social withdrawal and vows of silence, extended disruptions of the sleep-wake cycle, treatment of the body that appears masochistic, and extreme dietary restriction. Celibacy could be viewed as promoting group selection, but this seems a tenuous position. The celibate and once-thriving Shakers have all but disappeared, leaving songs, household items, and finely constructed buildings (Andrews, 1963). Brown (in press) emphasizes the passivity required for mystical experience and highlights the irony of the mystic’s actively seeking a role so passive as to invite the experience’s commanding arrival: “The mystic is an active seeker who pursues detachment with vigor and determination.... Mystical union requires resolute commitment and absolute submission. The union that is actively sought-after is realized in self-abandon.” This could also be viewed as strange: the avid pursuit of self-dissolution and the consequent falling into states whose practical value is less than clear. Animals do not behave in this fashion and would not survive were they so inclined. The dissipation of post-coital relaxation and comparable means of inducing self-dissolution are marginally adequate analogies. Mind-bending intoxication and piercing bouts of love are vaguely analogous to the mystic’s desire for self-abandon during the mystical pursuit’s initial stages. This is the specific emotion of religious fervor, whose satiation opens to what Symeon the New Theologian described as “ever deepening desire” (McGuckin, 1982, p. 34). The prevalence of mystical experience in the adult population is 2-3% (Thomas & Cooper, 1978). “Lesser” forms of religious experience are more common, occurring in about 30% of individuals (Hay, 1990; Spilka, Brown & Cassidy, 1992). Virtuoso mystics who innovate and carry forward the tradition are rare, a fraction of the already small percentage. In speaking of the highest state of contemplation (te’orya, after Evagrius’s theoria [Bamberger, 1973]), Isaac of Ninevah said, “It is not possible that even a thousand righteous men should be accounted worthy of this lofty noetic perception” (Alfeyev, 2000b, p. 225). Sufficient “data” to bring to

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completion an informed and systematic neuropsychology of mystical awareness may not be obtainable. These observations imply the sparseness of selection pressures conducive to sustaining the tradition, which seems unusual in light of the historical fact that mystics have been honored for centuries as the religious elite, as the ideal type of humanity, as a vanguard announcing a radically new future. This recalls the fascination that draws crowds to carnival tents, but could as well be a bright flare focusing attention on extraordinary forms of awareness that reveal the fundamental emotional and cognitive features of human experience. The downward passage This is the leading insight of Brown’s essay: By means of ascetical training and extraordinary states of awareness, the mystic presses downward, abandoning the empirical ego and its proliferating objects arrayed in extracorporeal space. The marginally differentiated feeling-concepts that inform the self-concept and dictate the ego’s extroversive aims are surpassed as the mystic settles into a unitary state aligned with the base categories and drives of the core. The inward path is a downward passage promoted by ascetically-imposed impediments to the cognitive epoch’s normal upward flow. The epoch closes short of differentiating the potential available in the moment that marks its passage. Activity within archaic structures aligned with the core supersedes the potential psychological effects of subsequent transitions that would normally have come to realization. The insight is highly discerning, an organizing principle with wide application in the study of ascetico-mystical phenomena. It probably also has predictive power. For example: An experimental technique was designed to elicit mystical experience in religious persons as they meditated on particular sacramental objects in highly structured group settings (Bradford, 1989a, 1989b). Over seventeen trials, with different groups, the subjects underwent the sequence and certain of the perceptional and emotional changes Brown’s insight would have predicted. The group-process element hastened transformations of awareness that might otherwise have required longer periods and possibly a sustained withdrawal from ordinary life. Mystical experiences are extraordinary events which tend to occur in a complex milieu of ascetical practice. Extrapolations from ordinary experience are not consistently valid points of comparison, particularly when the events of interest are framed in mythological terms. Similarly, customary forms of reasoning are not reliable guides since mystical writings tend to

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contravene principles of logic often considered basic criteria for sound conclusions (e.g., non-contradiction, excluded middle; cf. Sells, 1994; Staal, 1975, pp. 17-59). A general theory of ascetico-mystical experience with tightly reciprocal psychological and neuropsychological strands is needed. Neuropsychological accounts generally tend toward the obtuse and narrow, or else the indiscriminately global. For example, the diversity of methods and content in Neurotheology give the impression of incoherence. One edited volume contains chapters on the extraterrestrial origin of viruses responsible for life on earth; another chapter includes a neuropsychological case study of Moses, of whom virtually nothing is actually known (Joseph, 2002; cf. Bradford, 2006a). A field unable to delineate its subject matter or expanding it beyond reasonable limits indulges presumptions of conclusiveness associated with the few checks and balances provided by historical and comparative studies. “The Inward Path” contains few historical illustrations. Its religious reference sources are generally secondary texts. There is little attention to particular ascetical techniques despite the recognition of their essential role. Apart from some familiar distinctions, such as meditation versus contemplation, theological and religious terminology is sparsely represented. The experiences associated with theistic and non-theistic traditions, respectively, are distinctive and not as easily merged as the argument implies. Is the Buddha-nature not different than a divine Person whose proximity instills surpassing love (cf. Brown, in press; for theistic vs. non-theistic mysticism, Zaehner, 1957)? Microgenetic theory assumes underlying unity and explains the differentiation of an inchoate core such that forms and feelings surface in mind and action. Details may go wanting when the theory is directed to mystical claims, which are of the most general kind. Such projects can be run in reverse with phenomenological analysis disclosing points of overlap which are then brought to philosophical focus (Spiegelberg, 1972). If the coreoriented perspective tends to minimize pertinent details, the alternative approach risks becoming mired in minor distinctions, corresponding with difficulty assigning due emphasis to points of unity. But an historical lens, refined by phenomenological description, is the necessary foundation of accurate philosophical and neuropsychological interpretations. The essay’s weaknesses are a reflection of its theoretical perspective and compensated by the insight that guides its composition: that the mystical pursuit is a turning away from objects, the consequent downward pas-

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sage against the epoch’s normal upward flow, followed by realization of the base categories and drive-related emotional potentials of the core. Additional insights are derived from this one, with illustrations and extrapolations to follow. The essay returns to questions implied in the final paragraphs of Brown’s (1991) Self and Process: “A theory that is deeply true achieves its depth as part of a truth that is fundamental. The generality of the theory is one sign of this depth. The range of microgenesis extends beyond the neurology of behavior to problems of a mystical and metaphysical nature” (p. 193). Brown remains throughout a naturalist of neural process in its subjective expressions. He has turned microgenetic theory on what some religious persons reserve for pious lingering, and some philosophers and scientists for interpretations that lack the faintest trace of an existential aura. His essay grasps the emotional urgency of the mystical pursuit and the importance of ascetical training. He avoids the lingering and resists desiccated accounts that ignore the living of the mystical pursuit. Loss of objects The passage downward follows an orderly sequence characterized as a “loss of objects” (Bradford, 2008). Objects degrade in a predictable fashion coordinated with abnormal changes in cognition, feeling, and action. Passivity reigns as aims dissolve and motoric interventions lose their salient motivations. The normal succession of transitions by which the world assumes particular forms is impeded and stalled, in some instances ceasing, due to ascetical and meditative practices. In pursuing the downward passage the mystic is buffeted by feelings embodied previously in objects of desire, affection, and fear. Ideation likewise runs forward with increasing independence of conscious intention. Inner-speech may surface in conscious awareness as auditory hallucinations (Brown, 2004). Early Christianity borrowed from its Greco-Roman milieu the figure of the athlete as the model for its own religious struggles. The martyr competed with pagan beliefs and values in the same arenas where slaves and gladiators fought with animals and one another (Bradford, 1990; Musurillo, 1972). Similarly, the ascetic was viewed as an athlete in competition with decaying objects, a witness to their value and interest dissipating, and their rising subsequently as distracting and dangerous temptations. Asian paintings of meditating ascetics whose surrounding mandorlas protect them from demonic figures convey similar struggles. Evagrius Ponti-

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cus, the fourth-century theoretician of the ascetico-mystical tradition, developed complex introspective routines for help in battling these damaging thoughts (logismoi) and for promoting moral reasoning and continuous prayer, all in preparation for an extraordinary awareness (gnostike) in which one “will see the mind appear similar to sapphire or to the color of the sky” (Harmless & Fitzgerald, 2001, p. 513; Sinkewicz, 2003). This is the essay’s most detailed description of object-loss as the downward passage nears its goal: Before the final oneness, there are often visions and hallucinations. There is a kind of twilight consciousness with an erosion of autonomy but not to the point where the self is obliterated. The withdrawal from objects to precursor images creates a “dreamy” state not unlike that of hypnogogy, epileptic aura, or hypnotic trance. The outer world has all but vanished, replaced by something resembling a “lucid” dream. The agentive self that initiated the adventure has given way to the passive self of dreams as an observer of its own imagery. (Brown, 2007) Brown’s interpretation appeals to pathological, liminal, and oneiric forms of experience. In this sense, the psychological events of the downward passage are unlike normal waking consciousness and resemble experiences of a pathological nature. Indeed, many such events are indistinguishable from symptoms. Surely this applies to preliminary conditions penultimate to mystical states of awareness; whether it applies to mystical states themselves is a different matter. There is no surprise in finding some mystics are disturbed as a consequence of their work, or that others may have been disturbed beforehand and thus predisposed to mystical experience. Their attaining the goal is a different matter, and its prospective healing function is yet another. Mystical experience may be the remedy that compensates the personal losses entailed in ascetical practice and the panacea for such existential ills as original sin, the illusory character of appearances (maya), and the uneasiness and unsatisfactory nature of existence (dukkha). It has also saved individuals from suicide (Boisen, 1960; Horton, 1973). Passivity

Brown (in press) emphasizes a passivity to mental phenomena as a necessary means of opening preliminary transitions to conscious awareness. Object-development tracks the epoch’s normal upward flow while passivity promotes a falling toward “the floor of the mind-brain state” (Bradford, 2008). Mental content surfaces in conscious awareness subsequent to a

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succession of qualitative transformations that constitute the fully elaborated mind-brain state. Following is a list of types of imagery resulting from such transitions: The many forms of imagery, dreams, memory and thought images, hallucinations and illusions, eidetic and afterimages are markers of successive phases in the object-development, and each mode of imagery has a different feeling of activity or passivity. (Brown, in press) The list may be rearranged and expanded based on clinical studies, providing a fuller account of the microgenesis of visual objects: dreams, hallucinations, and imaginal images, followed by memory and thought images; then illusions, eidetic and after-imagery, and finally the physical objects whose veridical perception entails the conviction of their being real (Brown, 1988). Notice the sequence, which runs from objects associated with preliminary transitions to those generated subsequently. The downward passage runs the sequence approximately in reverse. For example, physical objects may feel unreal, or the power of mnemonic objects may supercede the emotional salience of physical objects, before the downward-trending mystic is immersed in imaginal imagery or perceives hallucinations. The active and the passive attitudes, respectively, are subject to reversals in the course of deep meditative training: The relation of an image to passive and active undergoes a change in mystical descent. The meditation that initiates the process, and the concentration on an object, are active processes that become passive in visionary thinking with the appearance of images or hallucinations.... Receptivity and openness transform to agency when a mystic receives instructions from an angel or hears the voice of God. The volitional quality of the imaginary voice is normally a property of the self, i.e., inner speech, and the relation of self to image or objects. (Brown, in press) Normally, passivity is diminished coincidentally with objects assuming more highly differentiated form until, released into extracorporeal space, they stand over and against the subject who then takes action, subverting their power through overt manipulations. Truncated late transitions over sustained periods result in the voices and visions, what have been called “locutions” that distract from prayer and meditation. What for the normal disposition is unreal, may reflect a completed epoch during prolonged training and special forms of meditation. These observations bear on the question of the chronic neural effects of the cultivation of preliminary transitions to the end of securing a sus-

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tained base of altered cognition. A grasp of the enduring transformative effects of the ascetico-mystical pursuit turns on this question. Loss of objects: the example of St. Anthony

The founder of Christian monasticism was St. Anthony, an educated and affluent man who sold his possessions around 271 and moved outside his village where he lived as a desert ascetic for about fifteen years (Rubenson, 1995). Toward the end of this period he departed to the tombs, which happened to be at a distance from the village; and having bid one of his acquaintances to bring him bread at odd intervals of many days, he entered one of the tombs, and the other having shut the door on him, he remained within alone. (Schaff & Wace, 1976, p. 198). He then moved to an abandoned fort where “he built up the entrance completely, having stored up loaves for six months.... And so for nearly twenty years he continued training himself in solitude, never going forth, and but seldom seen by any” (Schaff & Wace, 1976, pp. 199f.; cf. P. Brown, 1988, p. 214). He emerged around 305, gathered disciples, and retreated to the eastern desert across the Nile, near the Red Sea. His health was intact after he emerged from his self-imposed spiritual initiation. His followers and the tradition attest to his subsequent leadership skills and wise council. As early as the 320’s he was regarded as an abba or charismatic leader. He lived for possibly one hundred years. His Vita was written about 362, probably by Athanasius, Bishop of Alexandria (Schaff & Wace, 1976). His “withdrawal” (anachoresis) from secular society and entry into the desert would be recapitulated time and again by monks and nuns during the coming centuries (P. Brown, 1988). In contrast with the spiritual aridity of secular society, the desert was to become like a new city in anticipation of the heavenly kingdom (Chitty, 1966). His retreat to the dark tomb and the isolated fort for self-examination was not unique. Pachomius, who began the eremetical (communal) style of Christian monasticism in the fourth century, would occasionally “go down [to an underground place]” where he prayed throughout the night (Veilleux, 1980, pp. 42, 270). These are images of self-immolation, and were so understood in their day (Elliot, 1987). Psychological death was prerequisite to attaining new life. Other traditions have advocated comparable practices, such as the “dark retreat” of Dzogchen, as found in the Buddhist and Bon religions of Tibet (Norbu, 1999).

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Upon entering the tomb Anthony mounted the struggle of battling the demons and subjecting his thoughts and feelings to morally-focused introspective analysis. The demons were understood as creatures of a passionate and subjective nature, what would be viewed in microgenetic theory as drive-related psychological factors whose depth of origin is preliminary to the empirical self and marginally deeper self-concept. This is clear, for example, from Abba Poemen’s response to his disciple’s question, “How do the demons fight against me?”: The demons fight against you? They do no fight against us as long as we are doing our own will. For our own wills become the demons, and it is these which attack us in order that we may fulfill them. (Ward, 1975, p. 148). Aside from contending with demonically imposed thoughts, impulses, and images, Anthony perceived musical hallucinations (“the music of harp and voices”); a luminous scotoma (described as a “great silver dish”); solid objects as porous and metamorphopsic; auditory-verbal hallucinations; and echo de la pensee (“while ... reading they [the demons] repeat many times, like an echo, what is read”) (Schaff & Wace, 1976, pp. 203, 199, 203). This was certainly a loss of objects, which he and subsequent followers viewed as the necessary preliminary to the formation of a new self in alliance with the then-embattled Christian God. About one-third of persons with untreated schizophrenia recover somewhat fully (e.g., Wiersma, Nienhuis, Sloof & Giel, 1998). The odds are against Anthony’s having been schizophrenic, particularly after accounting for cultural factors. The historical record, including his personal letters, does not suggest problems of mood, neurological disease, associative and related disorders of thinking, nor the “negative” symptoms of chronic schizophrenia. His reported health accords with expectations for prolonged application of the ascetico-meditational regimen (Bushell, 1998). The meditative aspect of the regimen was the effective agent eliciting his perceptual symptoms. Clinical analogs include release symptoms associated with sensory-deprived environments and mental exercises that promote functional deafferentiation (Zuback, 1969). Normal subjects will experience both simple and complex visual hallucination within one day of starting to wear a blindfold (Merabet, Maguire, Warde, Alterescu, Stickgold & Pascual-Leone, 2004).

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The mystical pursuit as solipsistic

In referring to its introversive, ineffable, and passive character, Brown (in press) says the mystical pursuit is solipsistic: The mystical ascent to heavenly planes of thought and elevated consciousness and the exultation of god-union begins with personal needs and self-sacrifice, and follows an ingoing path. The profundity of the descent, the self-denial needed for union, the frequent failure of explication, the sustained and energetic passivity, make the experience inherently solipsistic. Meditation and contemplation are self-enclosed and asocial as judged by extroversive aims. The associated religious states pass invisibly with the occasional exception of objective effects. Examples include: (a) decreased skin resistance, higher theta power, and respiratory acceleration during Krya yoga (Corby, Roth, Zarcone & Kopell, 1978); (b) lowered breath rate and skin conductance, and higher alpha anterior-posterior and frontal EEG coherence, during TM meditation (Travis & Wallace, 1999); (c) high amplitude blocking and hypoalgesia in Indian yogis (Anand, Chhina & Singh, 1961); and (d) increased frontal and decreased posterior-parietal activity during Buddhist meditation (Newberg, Alavi, Baime, Pourdehnad, Santanna & d’Aquili, 2001; cf. Newberg, Pourdehnad, Alavi & d’Aquili, 2003). Are these effects residue and downstream expressions, or causal agents responsible for the reported psychological changes? The question is misguided; the objective and subjective streams of interpretation are confluent and inextricable, and either can serve as the primary perspective from which the other is judged as solipsistic. The noted effects do not reveal the intrinsic meaning detected by the individuals on whom the measurements were made. They acquire objective meaning based on agreement among the observing parties, just as their intrinsic meaning is determined by those whose tradition dictates their adopting similar practices and teachings. Core properties are general and biological, universals of human nature. An encounter with the core opens to the world and to others at levels preliminary to extroversive aims. Those for whom the core is remote and hidden, perhaps blindly obeyed or mediated strictly by instruments, find such encounters solipsistic since their objective perspective conduces to their obtuseness with respect to the mystic’s subjective aims. Cultural biases exacerbate strains of temperament, which guide attention to corresponding aims. Instruments extend the reach of observation and elicit a romance few scientists can resist.

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Consider the Buddha’s early career as a scientific project with subjective aims. He conferred with other ascetics about certain special states, and both tested their claims and drew comparative judgments. He performed inter-state comparisons, one state serving as a control for another. This was a subtle matter that pertained to the relationships among varied states, for example, the “formless meditations” (Govinda, 1974). Tradition provided external criteria in the form of philosophical schools, and also instruments, or ascetical and meditative procedures, to advance the inquiry into mystical states. Operational definitions of states were derived from the procedures that opened them to exploration. The null hypothesis the Buddha sought to disprove was that a newly discovered state (nibbana) was no different than those reported by his ascetic colleagues and described by their traditions. His experiments were conducted to secure the end of ill and thus open the path to freedom. Concurrent cultural biases were favorable with respect to a science of subjective aims. His upbringing as nobility, and his subsequently exiting his old life for one dedicated to the inward passage, suggest a temperament suited to the task. Consider the spontaneous emergence of a pervasive charity toward creatures subsequent to mystical experience, or the breadth of kindness entailed in the bodhisattva’s vow to donate her merits and to postpone release until others have attained the goal. Such feeling spins itself toward others, a web of kindness that intends the upholding of all. Such feeling is quite general, as follows from its depth of origin, and is not solipsistic. Notice that observable changes are not regularly esteemed by the tradition. For example: In responding to those impressed by one or another mystic who, “arriving at the vision of God ... spent so or so many days and nights in this condition, remembering nothing earthly at all but forgetting even his own body along with everything else,” Symeon the New Theologian said, “They are completely ignorant ... of the fact that the rapture of the mind does not apply to the perfect, but to beginners” (Golitzin, 1995, pp. 74f.). Mystical experience need not be dramatic in its objective manifestations, a circus of unusual physical manifestations. This bodes poorly for studies whose only instruments are determined by objective aims. Mental changes determine the meanings that matters, or else there would be no reason to conduct a study. Methods are needed to inquire of the events that pass invisibly to those whose instruments are tuned to objective aims. This requires first a certain level of historical learning that resists settling for observable residue and causes. Such learning opens to

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styles of phenomenological inquiry that set objective aims on par with the subjective science of the mystical endeavor. Mystical states are implicit in normal cognition

Brown (in press) develops a point analogous to the religious claim that mystical states reveal universal factors operative throughout mind and nature. Ontological inferences follow naturally in the wake of mystical states. The experience may reveal, for example, the “ground of being,” or in theistic traditions, the divine creator who has established principles common to mind and nature. Consider St. Augustine’s psychological theory in which the three-part structure of human cognition replicates the internal relations of the Holy Trinity (Schaff, 2004). In Brown’s (in press) view, mystical experience manifests the properties of the core; and since these properties are biological, reflecting phyletic trends, so the experience manifests the base (core-related) properties of all experience. Basically, mystical states are implicit in normal cognition. He approaches the topic by way of microgenetic theory. Thus, mystical experience is “an outcome of phyletic trends ... [and] an extreme of normal cognition.” Specifically, “there is a transition in every act of cognition from the phase of intuition or the pre-verbal categories that discharge in mystical experience[,] to a conceptual richness of greater specificity ... [as found in] an artwork or the domain of scientific inquiry.” Similarly: “Concepts of the widest scope [as occur in mystical theology] are fundamental categories that spill into increasingly more definite spheres of value. The immense joy of god-union that is recaptured in descent is an early, unrecognized phase in an ordinary act of cognition. This phase partitions to scientific or artistic concepts that still have a high grade of intrinsic feeling. Feeling is diminished as it distributes to concepts that point outward to the world” (Brown, in press). Finally: “The drives and the base categories of the unconscious or core self are ingredient in a plane of cognition that discharges internally in mystical states. This phase gives rise to the empirical or conscious self and its conceptual feelings” (Brown, in press). On the other hand, mystical states differ from ordinary waking experience by merit of (a) the intensity and generalization of their accompanying feeling; (b) the paucity or absence of distinct objects whether mental or extracorporeal; (c) the limited “extent to which concepts are partitioned,” as reflected in corresponding claims of underlying unity at the expense of the evident multiplicity of worldly phenomena; and (d) the deeper transition of

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the mind-brain state responsible for the event in question (Brown, in press). The fourth feature concerns the “depth of origin” of mystical experience compared with ordinary cognition (Brown, in press). This is not the tired metaphor for which “superficial” is trivial and “deep” is better, but refers to neural structure and its sculpting and channeling of oncoming states in predictable ways. Process evolves over structures which instigate corresponding qualitative changes. Brown (1999) would likely hold that limbic transitions are most decisive in mystical experience, in keeping with his remarks about the neural origins of the sense of self; and while some mystical states are so disposed, I would say that others originate at deeper (midbrain) levels. Ascetical practices

The mystic adopts a patterned regression sanctioned by tradition, which establishes ascetical routines through which the desired experience is sought, described, and explained. Prayer itself is viewed as mental ascesis, a purifying action that raises personal identity from its ordinary preoccupations and mundane needs. Ascetical routines grade into mystical experience, forming an integral process in which the experience is but a single aspect. Following are four examples of ascetical routines that promote a loss of objects and, for practitioners, promise personal transformation. A particular prayer technique is discussed first, followed by consideration of moral introspection, the psychosomatic condition of dispassion, and religious weeping. Hesychastic prayer

John Climacus, the seventh-century bishop of St. Catherine’s monastery at the base of Mt. Sinai, identified stillness (hesychia) as the goal of ascetical practice and the desired medium of effective prayer (Moore, 1978). Continuous prayer was most desirable, in keeping with the scriptural advice to “pray without ceasing” (1 Thes.5:17). Prayer’s highest form was a subjective quietude conducive to mystical experience. Climacus: “Stillness is unceasing worship and waiting upon God”; “He who has attained to stillness does not give a thought to the flesh”; and, “A discerning hesychast will have no need of words” (Moore, 1978, pp. 207, 206, 198). Certain of his sayings describe psychological risks entailed in stillness: “Do not fear the noises of prankish demons, for mourning [penitence] does not know cowardice and is not scared by them”; and, “He who is still troubled by bad temper or conceit, by hypocrisy and the remembrance of

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wrongs, should never set foot on the way to stillness lest he become deranged and nothing else” (Moore, 1978, pp. 200, 203). Other sayings of Climacus implicate the anticipated goal: “The hesychast is an earthly image of an angel”; and, “A hesychast is he who strives to confine his incorporeal being within his bodily house” (Moore, 1978, pp. 199, 198). Angels shine, as does the soul or spirit. An advanced goal of prayer, as developed over coming centuries in the Eastern tradition, was deification (theosis; Lossky, 1957). Its possible features included an hallucination of Christ as the Taboric light recounted in scripture (Lk.9:18-36), or of one’s own body as luminous. Such visions were not images with fine internal details but rather simple hallucinations. They would provide empirical support for the doctrine of divine “energies” developed by Gregory Palamas during the fourteenth century (Meyendorff, 1974). This is an instance of the direct influence of mystical experience on the formation of theological doctrine. Another of Climacus’s sayings suggests the practice of what was later known as the “Jesus prayer,” or the “prayer of the heart,” whose eventual and full form was, “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me” (Hausherr, 1978; Ware, 1996). Minor abbreviations and additions also developed. Climacus: “Let the remembrance of Jesus [as an evident presence rather than a memory] be present with each breath, and then you will know the value of stillness” (Moore, 1978, p. 207). Hagiographic writings identify Gregory of Sinai as carrying the “prayer of the heart” to Mt. Athos, probably in the fourteenth century, where it became a central exercise of the Hesychastic movement. The monk is to sit low to the ground with his head inclined toward his knees (for an early painting, Meyendorff, 1974, p. 90). Gregory of Sinai advised using a stool about nine inches in height (Ware, 1996); others spoke of a “low stool” (Kadloubovsky & Palmer, 1979, p. 195); others specifically recommended that the monk place his head between the knees. A comparable posture was found among biblical prophets (1 Kgs.:18:24). Recitation of the prayer was to be slowly paced and coordinated with a regular, slowed respiratory rate over extended periods. Nicephorous, a monk of Mt. Athos in the fourteenth century, recommended breathing only through the nose (Kadloubovsky & Palmer, 1979). The eyes were closed or else the monk prayed in darkened surroundings, for example, in a “quiet and dimly lit cell” (p. 195). The hesychast was to situate his mental faculties within his “heart,” that is, the locus of control for mental activity was displaced from the head

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to the thoracic area where conceptual, emotional, and physical motions were closely monitored and coordinated with the words of the prayer. In time, the prayer would pass involuntarily. Its effects would supposedly influence sleep such that passionate or sinful imagery would not occur during dreams. The practice was intended explicitly to alter the quality and activities of attention. One-pointed meditation on semantic content was a goal; another was the maintenance of vigilance (nepsis) for distracting and sinful ideas, feelings, and images. Imaginal and discursive intellectual activity were to be suppressed and eventually to cease. The monk anticipated a “warming,” a transcendence of somatic awareness, and deepening contemplation of the prayer’s theological meaning. Fourteenth-century advocates of the prayer, Callistus and Ignatius, speaking of the love of God inspired by the prayer, refer to its “sensible signs”: The monk’s “face becomes joyous and aflame and his body is warmed” (Kadloubovsky & Palmer, 1979, p, 258). The practice engages multiple neuropsychological effects with changes in blood oxygen setting them in motion. Meditative practices of this kind, at least in their initial stages, “decrease muscle tone and induce a hypometabolic state of decreased oxygen consumption, carbon dioxide production, and respiratory rate” (Fischer, 1986, p. 20). Mechanical factors associated with the hesychastic posture are conducive to a reduction in venous flow, which in combination with the consistently slowed respiratory rate would lead to a sustained, mildly hypoxic condition. Compensatory peripheral vasodilatation and associated autonomic effects would likely occur, thus the sense of bodily “warming” (Groer & Shekleton, 1979). Structures most sensitive to oxygen deprivation, specifically hippocampus, would function erratically, contributing hallucinatory potential (Mandell, 1980; cf. Arzy, Idel, Landis & Blanke, 2005). A second chain of events is likely begun with the spreading depression of Leao, initiated by prolonged hypoxia (Do Carmo, 1992; Somjen, Aitken, Czeh, Herreras, Jing & Young, 1992). The transient wave of depolarization and reduced cerebral blood flow, effecting posterior areas, would establish conditions conducive to release hallucinations, thus the visions of light. A clinical analog is simple visual hallucinations associated with the migrainous aura. The hypoxic condition would alter the experience of self-embodiment, in some instances leading to autoscopic phenomena such as reduced somatic awareness, a sense of bodily levitation, and the spatial perception of

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a “presence” that felt highly meaningful, perhaps ghostly or supernatural (Bradford, 2005). Granted a fitting religious ambiance and culture, the presence would constitute an heirophany, a manifestation of God. The proposed neuropsychological mechanisms provide one perspective on the practice; another is the ascetic’s expertise in turning them to the desired use. Years of effort may be required before the prayer can be fully and expertly accomplished. The mechanisms provide a two-dimensional snapshot of the desired effects; a full portrait must resort to individual differences and the personal expertise of single practitioners. The expertise in question pertains to attentional control developed over long periods of practice. The attentional demands of hesychastic prayer are threefold: first, vigilance for distracting ideas, feelings, and images; second, their suppression; and third, one-pointed attention to the prayer’s semantic content. The first entails scanning for undesirable content. The second is analogous to attentional disengagement in spatial tasks, an aspect of the orienting system of the attentional network for which parietal (especially right-parietal) areas are particularly important (Posner & Petersen, 1990). One-pointed focus is an executive task involving sustained attention to the prayer in a strategic, morally-attuned, semanticallycued manner. Its strategic and especially its moral aspect should be emphasized, since the prayer is felt to disclose religious truths to which the hesychast would have all aspects of his life conform. The relevant process entails particularly medial-frontal (including anterior cingulate) activity (cf. Moll et al., 2002). Anterior cingulate influences semantic processing via dorsolateral-frontal connections, and the orienting system via connections with the posterior parietal area (Posner, 1996). Its emotional dimensions are considerable, for example, in “assigning emotional valence to internal and external stimuli” (Devinsky, Morrell & Vogt, 1995, p. 289). Of particular interest is a study demonstrating that maintenance of vigilance is associated with decreased activity within the anterior cingulate (Cohen, Semple, Gross, Holcomb, Dowling & Nordahl, 1988). This suggests that the vigilance aspect of hesychastic prayer, at extreme and sustained levels of application, inhibits the “assignment” of emotion to passing mental content, encouraging its dissipation and eventual cessation. This enables the hesychast to engage more fully the prayer’s executive aspects independently of distractions and passionate feelings, which would enhance focus on the religious truths he intends to assimilate. Expertise in the prayer is the mounting of attention to the end of controlling mental content in the service of religious intentions.

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Moral introspection and the practice of virtue

The practice of virtue entails a level of introspection that exceeds worrying over a guilty conscience. The relevant moral standards are ascetic and demanding. In question are sustained feats of moral introspection that welcome all manner of emotions and ideas as subject matter for analysis, to the end of vanquishing self-serving distractions and blunting, if not erasing, the affective and instinctual impediments to the practice of virtue. Virtuous action flows from such effects. Sin, guilt, and their expiation are serious religious concerns, and not only for the Christian tradition. Driverelated matters involving, for example, sex, anger, hatred, and pride are dominant concerns of self-analysis. The related struggles are not ancillary to the mystical pursuit but rather integral. Some relevant data are available. For example, fear, disgust, guilt, and sadness can be measured (e.g., George, Ketter, Parekh, Horowitz, Herscovitch & Post, 1995; Lane, Reiman, Ahern, Schwartz & Davidson, 1997; Takahashi, Yahata, Koeda, Matsuda, Asai & Okubo, 2004). But these are early challenges to moral appraisal, to be combated with the prescribed mental and physical routines. Nothing is known, for example, of the potential fruition of these routines in humility, contrition, and awe. A weak proposal is to count such specifically religious feelings as composites of elementary (non-religious) feelings in the service of social demands. For example, humility is basically fear, but tailored to a passive attitude that serves social cohesion and the power interests of the humble person. An analysis of this type may apply to secular persons whose religiosity amounts to sentimentality, but fails to address the specifically religious nature of the feelings in question. One starting point is the distinction between the passive and the active attitudes, as developed by Brown (in press) in the contexts of drives and cognition. He follows Schneirla (1965), who investigated approach and withdrawal in unicellular organisms and inferred their developing over phylogenesis into analogous sets of opposing tendencies, such as grasping and withdrawal, extroversion and introversion, and personality types favoring either aggression or dependency. It seems a fair appraisal to say that aggression, overt displays of force, self-aggrandizement at the expense of peers, and comparable behavior have been viewed unfavorably in asceticomystical traditions. Examples include the beatitudes in Christianity, the altruism of the Boddhisattva vow in the Northern schools of Buddhism, and the primary virtue of non-harm (ahimsa) in the Jain religion (Lk.6:27-38, et al.; Kalupahana, 1992; Zimmer, 1971, p. 250). It also seems reasonable

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to conclude that ascetical practices aimed at the cultivation of virtue bias action, emotion, and ideation toward the pole marked by passivity, an introversive focus, and analogous cognitive and behavioral tendencies. Specifically religious feelings, such as awe and humility, may reflect basic core-related emotional tendencies aligned with this pole and poised tensely against their opposites. Dispassion

Evagrius developed in the Christian tradition the ascetical goal of the psychosomatic condition of dispassion (apatheia; Bamberger, 1973). Its roots probably extend to the Stoic ataraxia, the road to hedone; through Evagrius it acquired Platonic, psychologically complex, and specifically Christian meanings (Long, 1986). Much of his writing outlines mental and physical practices to aid its promotion, and subsequent ascetico-mystical theologians dwelled on the topic (Sinkewicz, 2003). A lifetime may be required for the acquisition of dispassion; its accomplishment was likened to the status of angels. The passions were no longer troubling; as a consequence “the world” was not an impediment to an experience of the stable proximity of God. Symeon the New Theologian’s spiritual father, Symeon the Pious, may have been an example (Turner, 1990). The New Theologian described this man, at times in ways that avoided hagiography. The picture emerges of a gentle, ascetical, presumably charismatic “holy fool” whose behavior outside the monastery was highly discrepant from societal norms (Maloney, 1976; Golitzin, 1997). Symeon the Pious’s own writings reveal a spiritual director of psychological discernment who was not adverse to the “white lie” in the case it promoted his followers’ interests (Palmer, Sherrard & Ware, 1995, pp. 50-62). The psychological disposition of dispassion recalls the kind of awareness cultivated in the Buddhist practice of mindfulness (sati), which discloses the sources and composition of feelings and ideas that would otherwise disturb, distract, and also support the false belief in the substantial nature of the self. Mindfulness promotes discernment of the “dependent arising” of phenomena (paticcasamuppada; Kalupahana, 1992). The analysis of the arising of mental phenomena according to this principle is similar in form and content to the chaining of attention, perception, passion, and habit outlined by the fourteenth-century patriarch Philotheus of Sinai as a means of detecting and breaking down the ordinary composition and momentum of mental life to the end of attaining stillness (Kadloubovsky & Palmer, 1979, p. 338f.). Philotheus’s analysis promoted the “guarding of 70

the heart”; the Buddhist is concerned with the “establishment of mindfulness” (satipatthana; Kalupahana, 1987, p. 73). Traditions and centuries apart, certain ascetics appear to have thought and trained in similar ways. Dispassion has been accorded the highest value, more so in the Eastern than the Western Christian tradition. It calls for neuropsychological study, surely needed to overcome trivial secular interpretations for which dispassion is simply a dulled state of denial and repression. In the Buddhist context, it might be asked, are the “outflows” (asrava) – the desires, false views, and ignorance that compel further becoming – cut down at their roots, as with the Hinayana saint (arhan), or do they linger (Conze, 1973)? Consider the possibility of the ascetic, whether Christian or Buddhist, in whom the passions linger but never blaze while the body remains vital and healthy. Hearing of dispassion, the psychologist assumes its analog is dissociation. But dissociation has assorted forms and meanings. One interpretive strategy is to distinguish, by means of clinical and historical analysis, pathological and ascetical forms of dissociation. The determination of common elements would probably not be difficult; to understand what is added by the ascetic that yields so different an outcome would be the challenge. Religious weeping

Religious weeping bears considerable importance in the Christian tradition. Parallels with other traditions are evident, reflecting the religious nature of this phenomenon apart from specific cultural and historical influences (Patton & Hawley, 2005). An important Indian bhakti sutra speaks of “primary devotees, who have one-pointed love of God for His own sake, conversing ... with choking voices, tearful eyes, and thrilled body” (Tyagisananda, 1983, p. 19). A contemporary technique has yielded comparable effects (Noyes, 1998). Religious weeping is traceable “through all the major stages of Jewish mysticism over a period of more than two millennia,” where its occasions, meanings, purposes, and results overlap what is found in the ascetico-mystical tradition of Orthodox Christianity (Idel, 1988a, p. 75). Notably, the posture recommended for hesychastic prayer is mentioned in the Talmud, also in the context of religious weeping. What in the Orthodox tradition is called “the gift of tears,” or simply “tears,” is a phasic phenomenon, an expression of heightened autonomic activity, variably related to the type and the intensity of concurrent emotion, and embedded with theological interpretations. Tears has been viewed as immediate, loving proximity to God; a way-station to hallucinations of 71

the divine light; a substitute for the misery of post-mortem punishment; and as an eschatological event in which the “mind has left the prison of this world and has set its foot on the roadway of the new age, and has begun to breathe that other air, new and wonderful” (Alfeyev, 2000b, p. 137; Hausherr, 1982). Tears, as a wholly engaging experience of penitence, was this phenomenon’s earliest meaning. In the fourth century, both Evagrius and Pachomius characterized tears in this manner (Sinkewicz, 2003; Veilleux, 1980). The raft of penitence rides streams of tears to the waters’ origin in God. Current studies of weeping tend to emphasize the signaling or display function of tears and the associated indications of physiological arousal (Frey, 1985; Gross, Fredrickson & Levenson, 1994; Levenson, 2003). In comparison, the gift of tears is asocial in the sense that God alone is the audience and also its benefactor. Indeed, its public display would suggest the sins of pride and vainglory. But weeping did occur in social settings, though not intended as an interpersonal communication. Isaac the Syrian said “the majority of right-minded brethren ... may receive the gift of tears during the office” (Alfeyev, 2000b, p. 140). Also, were God to bestow the gift of tears, this would likely be shared with one’s spiritual director. Evagrius wrote and advised his followers: “At the beginning of your prayer[,] force yourself to shed tears and to feel compunction so that all your prayer may be more fruitful” (Ware, 2005, p. 224). His disciple Cassian, who returned from Egypt to southern France to establish Western monasticism, held a more moderate view: Though forced tears “squeezed by a hardened heart from dry eyes” has some value, “an outpouring of tears should never be forced in this way” (p. 244; cf. Stewart, 1998). Here is an early divide between the exigencies and extremity of Eastern practices compared with the relatively modulated asceticism of Western Christianity. A sophisticated analysis of tears was developed in the seventh century by the hermit and former abbot, Isaac the Syrian, who evaluated religious weeping in terms of its duration and temporal pattern, its emotional content, and certain observable indications of autonomic arousal (Alfeyev, 2000b). Three stages were identified: recurrent, constant, and moderate tears. In the first stage, “bitter” tears “dry up and burn the body, and often even the governing faculty feels the injury caused by their outflow” (p. 137, 138). The “governing faculty” is intellect, approximating nous in the Platonic tradition; its injury recalls the irrational, unsettling effect of ordi-

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nary crying, or in Isaac’s case, the bitter emotional consequences of recognizing and grieving one’s sins. Unceasing, spontaneous tears of compunction flow during the second stage. Such tears signal the reception of God’s mercy, may flow uninterruptedly “for two years’ time or even more,” and could be “sweet” (Alfeyev, 2000b, p. 137). The monk’s physiognomy is subject to change: “gladness is imprinted upon his face,” which may “glow” due to capillary dilation associated with autonomic arousal (p. 138). Such tears are imbued with one or another of three feelings: first, “amazement” at the “insights ... [and] mysteries” revealed to the intellect, in which case tears may flow without accompanying feelings of sorrow; second, “sweetness and delight” born of “fervent love of God”; and third, “lowliness of heart,” or humility (pp. 139-140). Spiritual insights and visual hallucinations, “while tears are still wet in his eyes,” are expected during this stage (p. 139). The third stage signaled the monk’s attaining the psychosomatic condition of dispassion, perfect love of God, and the capacity for an imageless cognitive state characterized as “peace of thought” (Alfeyev, 2000b, p. 136). In this stage, “tears come ... in due measure and at the appropriate time” (p. 137). Every remembrance of God brings forth tears, which could also occur during sleep. Such tears are not invariably sweet and may also be associated with amazement or contrition. The gift of tears is a process rather than a set of isolated episodes of weeping. This is a staged ascetical practice whose material form, timing, emotional content, and cognitive and autonomic implications change over the course of years. An historical development is also evident. Tears was viewed initially as primarily the feeling and expression of penitence. This position was solidly established by the fourth century and is illustrated in Isaac’s first stage. By the seventh century, tears was viewed as a complex, evolving process that implicated hallucinations and possibly eventuated in the psychosomatic condition of dispassion and the capacity for imageless meditation. Here is a psychohistorical development with clear neuropsychological implications. Affective (as opposed to reflex) lacrimation is in question, an exclusively human phenomenon (Haeringen, 2002). The competing hypotheses of dacrystic epilepsy, and weeping during non-epileptic seizures, are relevant in few or none of the historical cases reviewed (e.g., Luciano, Devinsky & Perrine, 1993; Walczak & Bogolioubov, 1996). Briefly, onset of affective lacrimation is stimulated in frontal cortex and anterior limbic regions, with fibers passing directly to the brainstem lacrimal nucleus, which

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is also subject to basal-gangliar, thalamic, and hypothalamic effects (Haeringen, 2002). Parasympathetic fibers pass from the lacrimal nucleus to the main lacrimal gland via one additional ganglion. Parasympathetic stimulation yields “an evident increase in tear secretion.... Stimulation of the sympathetic fibers appears to have little effect on tear secretion but does act through the regulation of the blood supply on the main lacrimal gland” (Haeringen, 2002, p. 24). Fischer (1971, 1975), drawing on Hess (1925) and Gellhorn (1967), outlined a general theory of altered states, both pathological and religious, based on patterns of autonomic arousal. Certain practices are conducive to ergotropic (sympathetic; noradrenergic) arousal; others tend in the opposite direction, toward increasing trophotropic (parasympathetic; serotonergic) arousal. Either tendency, in extremis, may lead to rebound, an expression of the “tuning” capacity of the autonomic nervous system. For example, states of ecstasy or rapture, reflecting exceeding sympathetic arousal, may evolve into states of samadhi-like quietude, and vice versa. The process of tears, when fully developed, terminates in a condition of moderately intense, chronic parasympathetic dominance. Trophotropic effects predominate. This is subjective quietude, unruffled by the passions, that avails a meditative focus undisturbed by imagery and discursive thought. Calming meditative practices that invite imageless awareness are analogs. Personal sensitivity to feeling is not quenched; tears occur in due proportion, and in ways fitting the object of concern. Sensitivity to religious content is exceptional; the remembrance of God is enough to elicit tears. Great turmoil is the normative passage to this final stage. A prolonged period of sympathetic dominance is evident. Isaac’s description of the ascetic’s “glowing” face is telling, as is the “thrilled body” mentioned in the bhakti sutra (Alfeyev, 2000b; Tyagisananda, 1983). Hallucinations occur during this stage as they do in such hyperaroused (ergotropic) conditions as acute schizophrenia. Transient and incomplete instances of “tuning” occur, for example, in mild feelings of “sweetness and delight.” This is the stage of potential shipwreck when perseverance, reliable direction, and sound “premorbid” mental status may establish a safe course toward a new autonomic status quo.

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Mystical experience and creativity “An aesthetic lived in the flesh”

Brown (in press) writes that “mystical and creative experiences depend on access to early cognition in both artistic and religious domains.” In this sense, both the artist and the mystic access preliminary transitions that provide rudimentary content which is further refined according to the aesthetic or the religious criteria of their respective domains. He also says the mystic plumbs deeper, seeking content more nearly inchoate and impersonal in nature. The aims of the artist and the mystic also differ. The artist creates an artwork; the mystic pursues “an aesthetic lived in the flesh” (Brown, in press). Brown (in press) says that “mystical union is not creative ... has no content to divulge other than what it is.” This implies a narrow definition for which creativity excludes “works” intended to end in mind and behavior. He apparently sets production as one criterion of creativity such that the originating concepts and feelings must be brought to material fruition. A new idea may require its being written, perhaps entering the public domain, before counting as creative. Performance artists have planned and executed actions which, when stored on video, are said to constitute works of art. Creativity is a difficult internal oscillation which tends in early stages to mental activity and later to production. Surely production is essential in order to count the idea or the feeling as a work of art. Absent the video recording, the performance artist’s activities are simply play. The sculptor who has not produced a concrete work has not proved himself as an artist; his creativity amounts to an oscillation biased in one direction. The poet who drinks and talks but writes little is probably not creative. His failure to produce is not the only clue. Language is the medium of both his talking and would-be writing; if he were truly creative, he would slide into production more easily than the sculptor who lacks the money needed to enlist a foundry’s assistance. The mystic intends a radical change of mind and behavior, an enduring personal transformation. She differs from the casual explorer of altered states whose hallucinogenic experiences amount to entertainment. A closer analogy is the psychotherapy patient, although the patient, like the artist, seeks changes of a more personal or idiosyncratic nature than those for which the mystic struggles. The mystic intends her re-creation, including enduring somatic changes, of which the condition of dispassion is one example.

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Does creativity require its subject to execute the angle of attack that shapes the product, or to direct assistants who wield the tools? Not so for mystical experience, to which the mystic is subjected. Does this mean that the divine agent is creative with respect to the mystic’s personal changes? Granted such changes, the responsible agent is creative, and its product is the “work” identified as mystic A, B, or C. This is the case with a personal agent judged responsible for the mystic’s transformation. Examples include Christ, Allah, and Amida Buddha of the Shin school of Pure Land teaching. Creativity of this kind does not require the mystic to command the means by which she is changed. The situation is different with changes that result from encountering an absolute principle experienced as impersonal and devoid of qualities that might otherwise be attributed to a divine agent. Examples include sunyata, and nous as the pure and elevated One. The creativity of such events differs from that of a personal agent, specifically by quickening into awareness what is pervasively present in mind and nature, though usually subliminal to ordinary awareness. Two means of mystical transformation are in question, characterized as an absolute principle and a divine (personal) agent. Their modes of creativity differ, also the problems they solve. Problems that motivate the search for an agent include, for example, original sin, guilt, and collective shame, compared with the principle whose activation enlightens, clarifies, or elevates mind from the prakrti of benighted worldly existence. The former problems arise in feeling, the latter in the conceiving aspect of mentation. The comparison leads to this distinction: Theistic traditions pursue a personal agent whose presence resolves an emotional problem of existential proportions, compared with non-theistic traditions, whose principles’ activation substitutes clarity for human nescience. Notice that individual mystics may dissolve the distinction and both feel and know the goal. Certain Buddhist meditations yield happiness, and Buddha’s immediate follows were described as happy when hearing him teach (Kalupahana, 1992). The personal agent of mystical transformation intervenes. This compares with the blossoming into awareness of the absolute principle whose nature is ever-present. Neither event is play. The resulting works amount to personal transformation. The mystic is the product of a creativity that exceeds his personality and powers.

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The ascetic is materially creative

As the artist shapes raw material, so the ascetic’s body is subject to change through disciplined training. It would be superficial to assume that the ascetic simply adjusts his body-image rather than addressing selfembodiment at multiple levels. Tools of the trade include, for example, dietary restriction, set activity patterns, and alterations of the sleep-wake cycle. Such routines render the body a work of art, like an icon, which for believers is a focused materialization of spiritual power (Lossky, 1976). Like an artwork, the ascetic’s body is artificial, bracketed from the “fallen” world of nature by means of ascetical routines. The early Christian ascetic intended to restore his body to its primal condition as “an ‘autarkic’ system.... running on its own ‘heat’.... like a finely tuned machine, capable of ‘idling’ indefinitely” (P. Brown, 1988, p. 223). This was the human state before the ontological deviation introduced by sin. The physical consequences of asceticism are not only symbolic. Elevated levels of endogenous opioids, enhanced immune functioning, and access to prolonged hypometabolic states that apparently grade into mystical experiences, are among the potential consequences of the asceticomeditational regimen (Bushell, 1998). The spells of languor, wandering thoughts, and diminished fervor known as acedia constitute a difficult and predictable phase of adaptation to ascetical routines (Bamberger, 1973). Such spells were inflicted by the “noonday demon,” whose timing would understandably coincide with ultradian phases characterized, for example, by hypoglycemia, decreased vigilance, and spontaneous imaginal activity (Broughton, 1975). Certain routines had unintended consequences that would have intensified the problems they were meant to solve. For example, the fourthcentury spokesman for monasticism in Asia Minor, Basil of Caesaria, advised that the hours of sleep be reduced to avoid sinful, arousing, or demonic dreams (Elm, 1996). Over time this would promote REM rebound, dream-like activity in liminal states, and possibly the breakthrough of REM-related dreaming during wakefulness (Nielsen, 2000; Takeuchi, Miyasita, Inugami & Yamamoto, 2001; for rebound, Jouvet, 1999). The altered sleep-wake cycle advised by Basil, which was intended as a spiritual weapon serving purification, could instead provoke the conditions it was meant to control. The ascetic who sought to vanquish disturbing dreams by sleeping less would be subject to more frequent and stranger attacks, which would confirm belief in his or her sinfulness and thus intensify the ascetical struggle. This is a vicious circle.

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The bearing of the Incarnation – for that matter, of most any monotheistic theology in which God fully inhabits a person – merits attention. Since God acted directly in the embodied Jesus, so humans are to act on their own bodies, forming them according to the model of Jesus Christ. An inhuman burden follows on such teachings since bodies most evidently do run down. The effort of emulation is strengthened by a category error which collapses the dispositions of a living organism with the mythological imagery that guides the teachings. Asceticism is usually a losing game when established by belief systems set on the Incarnation. The ascetic’s body is also like an artwork in its effect on viewers. This is not discursive teaching but direct persuasion, as with artworks that elicit gasps. Moral beauty is in question, the nexus of the good and the beautiful. An artistic analogy is not painting or static works of art, but theater. Asceticism is a mystery play of mind and heart in which the ascetic acts upon a stage set by his tradition. One example is “the holy fool” of the Orthodox tradition whose dress, words, and code of conduct were meant to expose the moral blight of secular culture and the fool’s humble obedience to the highest possible director (Ivanov, 2006). A mundane analogy is the bodybuilder whose physique is a moral reminder of others’ failure of will in not shaping their bodies according to the ideal he embodies. The “holy fool” is living social commentary, a moral aesthetic in the flesh. His similarity with the bodhisattva-candala, who lives as an outcast, holds interest (Conze, 1973). Both pass through the world signaling another, better path. Liturgy

The ascetico-mystical pursuit is an aesthetic in its liturgical tradition. Monks pray the Office many times per day. Icons and other sacred objects invite genuflection, prostrations, or certain other characteristic patterns of movement. In Gregorian chant, breath is coordinated with specified mental content, and the music may be beautiful. Liturgical forms that pattern time and cultivate altered states in the religious are important elements of all traditions. These are instances of ascetical practice with mental effects and examples of a religious aesthetic lived in the flesh. Not all asceticism is masochism, nor is all liturgy easy on the body. Pain may become a mode of holiness; and the “pain” of some ascetical practices is different than ordinarily expected due to changes in endogenous analgesia systems (Glucklich, 2001; Bushell, 1998).

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Certain liturgies require hours or days for completion, disrupt circadian rhythms, and engage complex and physically demanding action patterns. The liturgical cycle is a sacred calendar whose time course may occupy a year, perhaps centuries in the case of the Mayans and Aztecs, if not eons in the case of mythologies that trace countless divine creations (LeonPortilla, 1963, 1988). The calendar subsumes secular time, indeed, subsumes the sun and moon and stars in its sacramental effects. The great liturgies are based in cosmology, as outlined in scripture and oral tradition, and are intended to invigorate the present through the restoration of a primal past (Eliade, 1958, 1974). Liturgy is a conclusive respite from worldly affairs, an erasure of the unraveling daily round and its substitution with a sterling world freshly minted. The creativity of liturgy differs from the simply new. Liturgy recreates a primal past; the simply new is invented. The first appeals to mythological conceptions of cyclical time; the second, to history. An instance of mystical experience may engage both temporal perspectives through constituting primal conditions and meanwhile refreshing feeling and perception such that present phenomena shine uniquely. Strange that liturgy should usurp ordinary time and situate a participant in a primal past; stranger yet is that both temporal frameworks might be lived in the moment. History may fall victim to mythological thinking such that biography is played on a mythological stage. A potential effect of mythological narratives is the transformation of direct experience, recalling Morton Smith’s (1978) remark that “one terrible trait of mythological thought is its power to produce corresponding experience” (p. 100). Ascetico-mystical traditions tend to trade the unraveling dispersion of historical events for recurrent renewals of a primal state as portrayed in dominant myths. Theological concepts such as predestination and prevenient grace implicate the shaping of personal history in accordance with mythological readings of God’s hidden and overt intentions (Harvey, 1964). Augustine’s Confessions provides examples (Chadwick, 1998). Liturgy cultivates imagination by means of homologies that merge worldly affairs with another world higher, better, more enlightening than the present. Sacraments effect the merger. Liturgy elicits this other world’s presence in the moment. Followers of the Ghost Dance religion envisioned the green pastures filled with buffalo, their visions preceded by a harsh ascetical regimen (Mooney, 1991). Eucharist is a participation in the suffering and rising, and the rising is the immediate crest of the coming king-

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dom. Liturgy, in sacramental imagination, is not memorial. Liturgy engages an aesthetic of the world in the process of cosmological transformation. The newly restored is a primal condition. This could be considered creative, or “creativity” could be reserved for the simply new. Generally irreconcilable notions of time are in question, which may intersect in the experience of the mystic. Two approaches, one goal Two approaches

Brown (in press) distinguishes a mysticism of nature from one focused on God, then merges the two since both lead to a single type of unitary state, in the first instance designated as “absorption in nature” and in the second as “oneness in god’s love.” In both cases, “the unio mystica is achieved by a descent through the personal unconscious as the particulars of conscious experience are abdicated for a dream of holistic unity” (for unio mystica, Idel & McGinn, 1999). The mystic in pursuit of God seeks “the Other, the great companion or lover” to the end that her “individuality can be immersed in the totality of the divine” (Brown, in press). By this means her “engagement devolves to antecedent oneness with the Other.” Indian bhakti has many examples; Richard Rolle, singing and dancing, was cast in the same mold (Ranade, 1983; Wolters, 1972). The relatively high frequency of “god-union” in the Christian tradition is noted, “but accounts resemble those of the Asian mystic who seeks communion with nature. In the latter, oneness is with the ultimately real or ground of existence.... If the One of union is personal it is god, if impersonal, the absolute. In the former, god is creator, in the latter, the universe is emanation.... The central idea in nature mysticism is that mind and nature are manifestations of the absolute” (Brown, in press). Brown (in press) draws additional distinctions that highlight the assumptions that shape the two approaches: “god-union does not uncover an underlying oneness, but achieves unity by allowing god to enter one’s being. This contrasts with the nature mystic, for whom a common process would seem to be necessitated by the continuum of psychic individuality with the physical absolute. Individual mind is a distal manifestation of the ultimate data of reality.” Stace (1960) would liken “god-union” to “introvertive” mysticism, and the nature mystic’s approach to “extrovertive” mysticism. The two ap-

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proaches apply to a common basic experience. Similarly, Otto (1970) distinguished a mysticism of introspection from one leading to a unifying vision. For Brown, god-union is a desire-laden interpersonal encounter, and nature mysticism is deeply tranquil. The former is an emotional condition of superlative intimacy; the latter is pacific, an identification with the absolute principle running through mind and nature. Brown (2005, p. 147) has occasionally quoted Wordsworth (1998), surely a nature mystic whose sublimely tranquil identification with the anima mundi circulating throughout nature, as recorded in “Tintern Abbey,” supports his case. Brown’s categories overlap the traditional distinction between “affective” and “noetic” forms of mystical experience (Underhill, 1974). The first pertains to devotion and feeling, the second to mental operations informed by higher reasoning and intuition. Bhakti or jnana: contact through feeling, or through higher forms of intuition and reasoning. Nature mysticism is seen to follow the noetic current when its subject writes in philosophical terms of a timeless truth or absolute principle. The noetic inclines toward the impersonal, the backlit stage on which life is played. Does the noetic style dissipate feeling, or instead does feeling cohere as dissociated affect kept at bay by abstract thinking, only to break through in ecstatic moments that confirm the great idea that is felt to capture the truth? The psychological principle of compensation suggests the latter (Jung, 1971, pars. 693 ff., 708f.). A likely example is Plotinus, who said “every soul is an Aphrodite” and characterized “proximity to the One” as “a rapture such as that of a lover who sees the beloved object and rests within it” (Katz, 1950, pp. 144, 155). He also wrote that “our knowledge of the One comes to us ... by a presence” (p. 144). This is “a beauty wonderfully great” to which he spoke of “awakening” (Dillon, 1999, p. 609). Turns may be taken between ideation and feeling. For individual mystics, expect one, the other, and also sudden reversals. Ideation and feeling have yet to part at preliminary transitions. Of the two approaches, nature mysticism is more fully elaborated in “The Inward Path,” understandably, since contact with the coherently arranged multiplicity of natural forms would seem conceptually richer than an overwhelming and diffusely articulated encounter with divine love. But the nuances can be intense and varied when a devotional mystic has literary talent. Consider the turtledove described in poetry written by John of the Cross, its flickering nightly pathos and ghostly calls while awaiting its mate (Peers, 1959). Some mystical theology doubles as erotic poetry;

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erotic poetry has been employed to articulate mystical exclamations. Song of Songs has been an enduring literary model for Judeo-Christian devotional mysticism. Its Shulammite is “a lily of the valley” whose thighs, neck, breasts, navel, and lips are all noted (Songs 2:1). Nature versus God

Is Brown’s distinction between god- and nature-centered mysticism specific to the mystic or to the goal? Personal psychology surely influences ascetical and meditative training. Your (sexual) demons are worse than mine; my demons (of pride and gluttony) are worse than yours. My (emotionally refined) meditation is better than yours; your meditation (in its analytical precision) is better than mine. Mystics are not the same psychologically, nor necessarily are their approaches, and both the psychology and the approach influence their respective experiences of the goal. Religious doctrine and institutional hierarchies, also the demand characteristics of social cohesion, may mask personal characteristics that determine differing goals which nonetheless are assigned the same name. Our respective encounters with God may be quite different while our religious lexicons are the same. In the extreme, these observations lead to constructivist interpretations for which language, social structure, or some other penultimate factor not only shapes but fully determines the mystical experience (e.g., Katz, 1978). Brown (in press) rejects this position, as well as he might since mystical cognition reflects phyletic trends more basic and determinative than, say, the exercise of language: “To claim that mysticism is a construction of social, linguistic and religious traditions does a disservice to the universality of the experience, the commonality of its precursors, the decent into self and the pattern of expression that are found in all forms of mystical union” (Brown, in press). For these reasons he would also oppose interpretations for which cortex assigns religious “attributions” to “pre-conceptual” experiences without intrinsic religious meaning (e.g., Azeri et al., 2001). The “limbic-marker hypothesis” would be more nearly acceptable; in this theory “the perceptual and cognitive contents of numinous experience are seen as similar to those of ordinary experience, except that they are tagged by the limbic system as of profound importance,” with their intensity increased accordingly (Saver & Rabin, 1997, p. 204). Merging of god/affective and nature/noetic mysticism

Microgenetic theory dictates that the two forms of mysticism be merged for two reasons. First, both devolve to the core as the ascetical pursuit follows the downward path, inhibiting the psychological consequences of late

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transitions. This is to follow the diachronic course of the mind-brain state in reverse of its normal upward flow. The second reason concerns the reciprocity of categorization and the process of feeling throughout microgenesis. Category stabilizes process in momentary frames. Absent the embrace, awareness is null, motivation absent, and action stifled; objects do not arise, oneself included. In this sense, category-and-process ensures creation. The point is conveyed in the great dictum of Hindu Tantra: “Siva without Sakti is a corpse” (Bahraini, 1965, p. 202). Sakti drives a steady rhythm of creation with her pounding feet while the prone Siva contributes its specific forms. Their separation would terminate creation, as would the parting of process and categorization. Affective mysticism, focused on god, and nature mysticism, focused on an animating principle active in mind and nature, reflect the mutually obligated relationship of feeling and categorization. That the two kinds of mysticism should devolve to the same experience follows from their locked embrace across the transitions of the mind-brain state. Excurses: Via negativa

Another traditional distinction is between two styles of mystical theology designated as the via negativa and the via affirmativa (Louth, 1983). The first yields apophatic theology and holds that ordinary concepts, images, and qualities are inadequate to the truth sought and known. The second yields cataphatic theology and finds that such characteristics are meaningful expressions of the goal. In practice, virtuoso mystics select and combine styles as circumstances warrant. Symeon the New Theologian was a devotional mystic given to cataphatic descriptions who also wrote fine apophatic theology (e.g., Golitzin, 1996). Via negativa

Perfect diction in conveying the via negativa is silence, but theologians of this type tend to write and write. Thus the irony of apophatic theology, that many words are required to say that words fail the task. At times this seems a shell game with much shuffling of husks and never the prize appearing. Feeling drives the writing, compelling the articulation of silence. The prefix “super-“ signals a zone of cognition that transcends language. For example, God in His deepest stratum is “super-essential,” exceeding being in His self-sustaining and creative abundance. He is complete, bearing the theological attribute of aseity, while His creatures are wholly contingent (Harvey, 1964). The elaboration of apophatic theology based in classical

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theism follows such lines. Process theology adopts a different course, less indebted to bolstering the inviolate, all-powerful nature of deity (e.g., Hartshorne, 1983). Classical theism has been a burden to mystical theology in monotheistic traditions, with mystics’ self-reports constrained by ideas to which their experiences may not conform. The rare individual dwells on divine process, observing patterns of self- and world-creation within the absolute. Ruusbroec is an example (Wiseman, 1985). Apophatic reasoning calls forth special forms of logic, or illogic as the case may be. Philosophical traditions with characteristic terms and tone have been developed. Such forms of discourse are intellectual instruments with established intentions. Apophatic theology is not a Dada poem. A Christian example is Pseudo-Dionysius; and from Islam, Ibn ‘Arabi (Rolt, 1972; Sells, 1994). Consider Nagarjuna, whose arguments engage intellect in ways that open intuitions of empty vistas where common (secular) forms of semantic intention collapse (Staal, 1975, pp. 17-58). This is apophatic reasoning in action, whispering of an opening to sunyata. Silence

An involuntary enforcement of silence is associated with early “recovery” from mystical experience. This is to gaze on the world with giant eyeballs, a vast canyon to one’s back, and timpani resounding. Boehme’s (Erb, 1978) phrase, “the time of the lilies,” conveys this stage, as does the parable of the lilies which in their glory neither toil nor spin (Luke 12:27). “Recovery” is a refractory period with neuropsychological implications; surely it varies across types of mystical encounter. Mandell (1980; cf. 1978) proposed a kindling-like effect characterized by “prolonged afterdischarge of the hippocampal-septal circuit” to account for enduring changes of personality following mystical experience (p. 435). One false assumption is that the noted silence is voluntary, perhaps an intended means of protecting esoterica from mundane suspicions or prying eyes. The silence is a neuropsychological consequence of unformed potential which remains inarticulate with respect to the discursive application of words. The experience of ineffability is the natural consequence of accessing transitions preliminary to process engaging the language axis. Silence may be followed by secrecy, a second stage of recovery. Shall one reveal what cannot be said clearly, an exhibitionist of the soul awaiting arrows of alienation or perhaps diagnoses? Secrecy is presumably a more intense problem for secular mystics compared with those imbedded in a tradition, whose silence is reinforced as the virtue of humility.

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Mystics who pass into seclusion or into the noisy matrices of secular life after rejecting lexicons and diction may not leave a record. Consider Lao Tzu, accompanied by the girl, riding their ox over the mountain and disappearing into the forest. Consider Chuang Tzu, who wrote, Comes recognition, comes fame, Comes bale and woe. (Waley, 1939, p. 76)

Introversive aims guide the ox and turn social venues into bale and woe. Mystical experience does not necessitate subsequent teaching. The form of recovery depends on tradition and personal psychology, particularly on biases of temperament that modulate social cravings. Presumably, many neither write nor teach, and pass without a trace. Surely there is an indiscernible “tradition” of silence to match knowledge of the Tao or contact with an unnamed god so abysmal as to deflect all ideas and images. One goal (the unitary state)

In Brown’s (in press) view, the goal is entirely subjective, a derivation of neural process in subjective states of awareness: “The goal of union, the absolute, the real, the Buddha-nature, is not found ‘out there’ in the world of nature or God’s creation but in the mind of the seeker, in a pre-verbal field of inchoate thought and primitive emotion” (emphasis added). Similarly: “The central idea in nature mysticism is that mind and nature are manifestations of the absolute. In both forms of mysticism, the unio mystica is achieved by a descent through the personal unconscious as the particulars of conscious experience are abdicated for a dream of unity” (Brown, in press). Brown (in press) takes issue with mystical claims of an absolute ground or an eternal substance as contrary to process thinking: For the nature mystic, the absolute has certain of the non-moral, impersonal, and ideal qualities of the philosopher’s god, such as timelessness, permanence, and indivisibility. Process thought is inconsistent with [respect to] permanence and wavers on the existence of timeless objects. For this reason, more powerful arguments are needed to support the belief in a rock-bottom ground of a substantial nature. The stillness of nibanna

The absolute state of nibanna, as reported in an early collection of Pali suttas, is difficult to grasp on the basis of process concepts and is surely lacking “a rock-bottom ground of a substantial nature” (Brown, in press).

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The Buddha’s discourse is introduced with this description: “Now on that occasion, the exalted one was teaching, establishing, rousing, and making the monks happy with the discourse concerning the Dhamma that was centered on nibbana” (Woodward, 1948, p. 97). Notice in the following passage that nibanna is distinguished from ordinary perceptual experience (to which the elements “earth ... water ... fire ... air” contribute); the formless states of meditative awareness (“infinite space ... infinite consciousness ... nothingness ... neither-consciousness-nor-unconsciousness”); and from existence in worlds other than our own (“neither this world nor a world beyond”): Monks, there exists that condition wherein is neither earth nor water, nor fire nor air: wherein is neither the sphere of infinite space nor infinite consciousness[,] nor of nothingness nor of neither-consciousness-norunconsciousness; where there is neither this world nor a world beyond, not both together[,] nor moon-and-sun. Thence, monks, I declare is no coming to birth; that there is no going [from existence]; therein is no duration[,] thence is no falling; there is no rising. It is not something fixed, it moves not on, it is not based on anything. That indeed is the end of Ill (Woodward, 1948, p. 97).

Consider the stillness of a condition in which there is “no coming ... no going ... no duration ... no falling ... no arising ... it moves not on” (Woodward, 1948, p. 97). From the same address: “a not-born, a notbecome, a not-made, a not-compounded” (p. 98). In question is the “cooling” that ends ill, a condition with neither “duration” nor “moving on.” Processes personal and otherwise do continue past the point of realizing nibanna, yet these processes adopt a different color and meaning in that attaining the goal has made one free. Unlike process, the condition neither comes nor goes, neither falls not rises. “Stillness” characterizes a freedom in which processes spin and spin without creating commotion. A living buddha “retains his five senses, through which ... he experiences pleasant and unpleasant sensations and feels pleasure and pain. His cessation of craving, hatred, and confusion is called freedom with substrate [sopadisesa-nibanna]” (Kalupahana, 1992, p. 99). The monks’ happiness holds interest. Literary embellishment is not an adequate explanation. The monks have been “earnestly paying attention, mentally taking it all in, were listening to dhamma with ready ears” (Woodward, 1948, p. 97). Mere unconsciousness would not have been announced, nor would it encourage happiness unless one were suicidal, intensely melancholic, in terrible chronic pain, or sociopathic and sadistic.

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To hear correctly of the end of ill in nibbana elicits happiness. In this manner, one enters the path, analogous in Protestant theology to “hearing” the kerygma (the inner saving message) of the Gospel (Harvey, 1964). Ideas, percepts, and actions are driven toward differentiation by the process intrinsic to their matching feelings. Highly abstract ideas are also imbued with a trace of feeling, which is present in greater proportion in the mental activity from which the ideas derive. In this sense, a given idea may be described as happy, apart from expressed or consciously felt emotion, just as certain other ideas may be sad or angry. The idea of nibbana, heard correctly, is a happy idea. “A pre-verbal field of inchoate thought”

The nature of the unitary state, as outlined by Brown (in press), requires further resolution. Its ineffability is clear since late transitions that engage the language axis have been impeded. Its unitive quality is implicit in such characterizations as “the final oneness.” Certainly its designation as “a preverbal field of inchoate thought” refers to a special activity different from what is commonly understood as thinking. How have the forms of thinking intrinsic to this state been formally elaborated in the mystical traditions, and to what degree are they pre-verbal and inchoate? Would God think for the mystic during an experience in which she felt herself a participant in His mind? Would the mystic’s “soul” or “spirit” involuntarily follow paths of ideation that conformed with an absolute principle’s creative activity? A Christian mystic might say that in joining with Christ she participated in the Logos, the “Word” of God and the principle responsible for the creation of natural and mental forms. In continuity with Stoicism, Philo, and the Christian Justin Martyr, the logoi spermatikoi were said to be disseminated throughout creation, each instance a mirror of its originating principle (Horowitz, 1974). An ally of the Logos, the mystic would participate in the multiple forms resulting from the ongoing activity of divine creation. Hers would be a fractal-like thinking and entail an empathic reach into natural forms. Points of identity linking God, mind, and nature would be evident to imagination and feeling. Evagrius (Bamberger, 1973; Sinkewicz, 2003) described one stage of the ascetico-mystical pursuit as theoria physike in which natural forms are perceived and understood as evidence of divine creation. In practice, aspects of this experience were allegorical, based on scriptural explanations of natural forms. Its subjective medium is difficult to ascertain, though “empathic identification” is probably a close modern understanding. Par-

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ticipation mystique, as developed by Levy-Bruhl, conveys the experience in question (Cazeneuve, 1963). Jung (1971) employed this term in similar ways. A psychologist might speak of “projection,” which entails the derivation of meaning and feeling from purely subjective sources, and thus falls short of capturing the immediate features of the phenomenon of interest. To think with God or an absolute principle is to engage natural forms through empathic identification. That such forms might be accessible to this manner of contact is a point that could be developed philosophically through the perspective of panpsychism (Freeman, 2006). Gematria

One type of thinking with specifically mystical intent is gematria, an ideational practice meant to provide access to God through verbal paths He predetermined. Gematria involves a set of hermeneutical rules for interpreting the Torah and “consists in explaining a word or group of words according to the numerical value of the letters, or of substituting other letters of the alphabet for them in accordance with a set system” (Scholem, 1974, p. 336; cf. Idel, 1988a, p. 53; 1988b). The kabbalist’s ciphers are letters, words, names, and numbers arranged in patterns that replicate actions within the internal structure of the divine creator. The application of gematria is orderly and precise rather than inchoate; its endpoint in prophetic Kabbalah is a state preliminary to verbal process and inchoate in its emotional features. The technique is not without risks: “There is a danger involved in embarking upon the wisdom of Kabbalah, lest it happen to one what happened to Ben Zoma, who ‘gazed’ and was stricken with madness” (Idel, 1998a, p. 139). Hallucinations of light, of the divine “glory,” were known to occur. In discerning and subjecting to permutations the divine names, the adept “unites His names with joy and trembling ... and is completely silent, in a brilliant flame, alone, fearful and trembling, and the light which is above your head, make always into your teacher” (Idel, 1988b, pp. 132f; cf. 1988a, p. 67, 106). Some practitioners encouraged visual images of the divine names (“visualizing the letters in the mind”), and recognized that these mental and pseudohallucinatory forms could grade into visual hallucinations (1988b, p. 133). For example: “Imagine the letters of the names ... to imagine more than the letters is tantamount [to arriving] at a corporeal conception” (p. 133). The pace of mental activity was also to be increased, suggesting the analog of racing thoughts (for mystical experience in mania, Bradford, 1985; Lukoff, 1988).

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Auditory-visual synesthesia and simple hallucinations of colors were reported (Idel, 1988a, p 106; 1988b, p. 134; Wolfson, 2004, pp. 150, 160). The Zohar and later writings mention a technique for eliciting the colors that entailed rotating one’s closed eyes in a circular fashion (Wolfson, 1994). This was also paired with recitation of certain divine names to promote the vision of three sefirot. The technique engages the vestibular system; over extended periods its use would promote vestibular and related autoscopic effects, such as illusory sensations of elevation and impulsion, and hallucinations of a supernatural “presence” (Bradford, 2005). Vestibular activity influences extrastriate visual cortex, a posterior area responsible for color perception (Berthoz, 2000; Zeki, 1980). The eye-rotation technique would presumably enhance the potential for color hallucinations on this basis. The goal of gematria in prophetic Kabbalah is a complex ecstatic state initiated through verbal-conceptual operations with visual imagery and simple hallucinations sometimes added. This involves a graduated intensification of activity throughout the language axis, its range increasing once extra-lexical visual aspects were incorporated. Notably, verbal forms are read and visualized and, in some instances, hallucinated, bridging lexical, phonetic, and visuospatial aspects. Previously independent semantic networks would coalesce as gematria reduced multiple divine names to their coinciding meanings. This is to introduce disarray into the ordinary cognitive expression of cortical synaptic organization, with the goal of attaining higher levels of abstraction. Words, numbers, their material and spiritual referents, fall into alignment like cards shuffled into a fiery deck. In question is an evolving process initiated by increasingly intense activity within a circumcised, linguistically-dedicated region of cortex. Over extended periods, attention is allocated solely and prayerfully to verbal operations, inhibiting the concurrent influence of extra-linguistic activity. Breakthrough, or release, of posterior-cortical and mesial-temporal (limbic) activity would follow, promoting, respectively, extra-lexical visual imagery, such as visions of the divine glory, and ecstatic emotion. The eyerotation technique, if it too were applied, would complicate such release phenomena with the addition of acute somatic changes associated with vestibular activity. In these ways, gematria affects brain activity by increasing its intensity, depth, and lateral extent. Gematria is a form of noetic mysticism based on lexical symbols and their auditory-verbal correlates. A new term is helpful, lexical-noetic mysticism, of which prophetic Kabbalah is a sophisticated example. The appeal

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to inhibition and release, as engaged by this form of thinking, recalls the earlier example of St. Anthony, whose perceptual symptoms were interpreted as release phenomena associated with extended exposure to the sensory-deprived environment of his dark retreats. A clinical analog is found in the psychotic patient who “discovers” a system of numerical and lexical calculations that reveal higher truths he enthusiastically embraces (e.g., Bradford, 1984, pp. 281-285). This is a “madness for explanation,” a mental slavery to paranoia (Sass, 1994, p. 107). Such systems encourage the patient’s discovery of his exalted status and his verbal manipulation of material objects and “spiritual” forces, recalling the kabbalist whose gematria allows him to see and feel into God and the spiritual structure of the material world. Lexical-noetic mysticism employs a sanctioned text and language (e.g., Hebrew scripture), which provide the letters, words, names, and numbers to which predetermined abstract operations (e.g., gematria) are applied. The patient’s “texts” are more varied, at times chosen at random, and may include the newspaper and television programs as well as the bible. He lacks the structure needed to reign in his profuse ideation and proceeds in the free-rolling conceptualization of his paranoia. The use of a sanctioned text is one defining difference, providing conceptual structure and shaping the emotion that engages the kabbalist. A second difference is that the kabbalist does not necessarily perceive auditory hallucinations, which in the patient encourage his paranoid studies (for exceptions, Wolfson, 2004, p. 150). A certain narrow band of linguistic process is in question, and here they are the same. They both attribute language with special powers beyond its mundane referential functions. The kabbalistic procedure operates within divinity and its corollary lineaments in the material world. Its internal milieu is one of prayer and meditation. The patient’s application of language yields an inflated sense of self and magical powers. For both, words are wands. They engage language in ways that are either clinically significant, or developmentally delayed, or archaic and mythological (cf. Cassirer, 1946; Kasanin, 1946). In making these distinctions in practice, much depends on accounting for ambient cultural influences. Both the patient and the kabbalist differ from the obsessivecompulsive individual who dwells on counting, computing, and sidewalk cracks to be avoided. The latter behavior is anxiety-driven compared with a lexical-noetic mysticism that seeks the verbal codes of an infinite regress that terminates in the deepest gnosis.

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Lexical-noetic mysticism differs from the fundamentalist reading of scripture which stifles metaphor and polysemous interpretation and abandons the abstract attitude in favor of concrete reasoning. In rejecting geological time and evolutionary theory, for example, the fundamentalist studies dates and years found in scripture and thus arrives at fantastic religious fulfillments read right off the page. This is popular numerology, also a socially-sanctioned paranoia that passes as gospel. In contrast, the kabbalist is deeply involved in polysemous interpretation and assumes that God dictated scripture in such a way that this interpretive style could discern His hidden intentions. “A pre-verbal field of primitive emotion”

Brown (in press) also describes the unitary state as “a pre-verbal field of ... primitive emotion.” Primitive, yes, since the feelings in question are keyed to structurally deep transitions aligned with largely undifferentiated selfpreserving drives. Images of hunger, feeding, sexual congress, of fighting and fleeing and related expressions of a general and dominating will to live are to be expected (for “will,” Brown, 1996, 2005). Here is the core, in will, that differentiates along rostral-tending phases. The question, then, concerns the category, or categories, that frame this biologically-imposed factor. Does will itself succumb to a fleeting stability imposed by a rudimentary category that encompasses the undifferentiated composite of drive potentials, or instead do multiple categories congregate in capturing momentarily the initial drive-directed dispersion of will? The former state would be ultimate and simple; the latter, penultimate and complex. Brown’s essay is not clear on the distinction. In “Process and the Authentic Life,” core and core Self are not clearly distinguished and at times appear interchangeable, as may have been intended (Brown, 2005). They clearly differ from the empirical self and the marginally deeper self-concept. A sharp distinction may prove helpful: core versus Self. The core, then, is will, the matrix of drive potentials whose imminent differentiation has yet to awaken; and Self is the foundational category. In these terms, the mystic settles into the Self, the instantaneous “frame” of an absolute, silent, homogeneous potential. The base category, unless stirred by feeling, would be pacific, transparent, an enlivened field of Self-awareness preliminary to its differentiation across subsequent transitions. But Brown (2005) would say that a category, independent of feeling, is unreal on any terms, their association extending even to inorganic (atomic) matter. The presence of feeling, in the

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form of rudimentary will, clouds the water by instilling restless urges. Will is intrinsically embattled, composed of roughly organized tensions evolving toward the release of new objects. Peace at the center is impossible for a drive-oriented theory. What peace could it possibly avail? A dark circle is in question, a low rung. Dreamless sleep and the shaman’s catalepsy retain threads of vitality, unlike the “peaceful” center of a drive-oriented theory where bleached skeletons dance across fresh graves and Kali’s blue-black feet render vermillion tissue into atoms. The perennial philosophy “The Inward Path” is a unique contribution to the perennial philosophy, a tradition named by the sixteenth-century scholastic Steuco, mentioned by Leibnitz, promoted in the twentieth century by Guenon and Schuon, and popularized by Aldous Huxley (2004; Schmitt, 1966). Mystics have been considered its important advocates (Wilber, 1975; Shear, 1994). The purported conformity of their claims is said to support the idea of an underlying and wholly encompassing unity; and the truths disclosed in their experiences are said to recur among varied religious traditions and to find philosophical expression in certain idealistic systems. Philosophical endeavors focused on mystical experience tend toward conclusions that approximate ideas developed centuries ago in the Vedantic schools of India (Raju, 1985). For example, contemporary perennialists identify the base reality of the mystical traditions as “pure consciousness,” recalling Atman as “pure, undifferentiated, self-consciousness” (Deutsch, 1969, p. 48; Foreman, 1990, 1998). The perennial hope

Variations among perennialists are noted, though a certain hope is discerned throughout: that the complicated and refractory problems posed by the proliferation of forms will be resolved in an all-encompassing whole in which the multifarious elements of mind and nature coalesce in unity. This would be the prime fulfillment, a boon to intellect and heart, an absolute start and a new beginning. Analogous hopes, in comparable thematic domains, motivate the physicist’s search for a theory rooted at the base of all causal chains, and Anselm’s proofs for the existence of God. In microgenetic terms, both bhakti and jnana, their surface differences aside, point to a sea of potential framed by an inclusive category that differentiates along instinctual vectors, passing upward until dissipating in self-aware thoughts, feelings, perceptions, and actions.

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The complexity and shifting emphases of the history of the perennial philosophy are paired with the matchless and simple appeal of the hope that guides its varied formulations. Personal psychology shapes higher thinking, and archetypal factors will be subtly displayed despite inclinations toward abstract concepts and pristine intuitions. The perennialist’s hope is for a kind of mother whose absorptive embrace will resolve the discordant trials of multiplicity. She would more nearly provide satisfaction compared with the fatherly authority of a remotely situated god of the sky. The archetypal dominant of the perennial hope is Athena, a virgin born from her father’s head. In some accounts Zeus swallowed her pregnant mother, Metis; in others, the underworld smithy, Hephaestus, splits Zeus’s skull with an ax, allowing Athena’s escape (Burkert, 1985). Zeus was a pregnant father with a cerebral daughter whose birth entailed an act of violence: in the first instance, inflicted on the mother; in the second, by means of an ax. A split skull means death; Athena’s birth implicates patricide. Zeus was an erratic, impulsive, autocratic god, and possessive of his children. The weary and dangerous round of fatherly authority collides with Athena’s birth and creativity. Athena’s presence effects insight and inspiration, possibly “a hairraising shudder” (Burkert, 1996, p. 66). She is the check-and-balance against impulsivity that favors self-control and strategic planning. Achilles had grasped his sword, preparing to fight Agamemnon, when he recognized the shining eyes of Athena, who compels him to blunt his rage (Burkert, 1985, p. 142). Lost Odysseus exclaimed, “Where on earth am I?,” before Athena, her “gray eyes gleaming,” prompted his recognition of home (Fagels, 1996, 13:265, 326). She is a subliminal structure, potentially a felt presence and muse, that compensates the rigors, the emotional droughts, the gradations of harshness that attend the ascetical pursuit whether lived through the body or intense intellectual effort. Monks, nuns, and yogis are not the only individuals with ascetical inclinations. Important secular philosophers have been ascetics. Plotinus is an example; another is Wittgenstein, whose claims on behalf of silence recall the apophatic theologian composing at the limits of language. The perennial philosophy is paired with its advocates’ ascetical inclinations and detachment from the ordinary round, whose trivia, distractions, and aversive appearances prompt the hope for sterling instances of reasoning and intuition in which all is contained and clear, passing under the shining eyes of Athena.

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Idea versus image

That one might participate in the great concert where distinctions shimmer and merge is a understandable hope. No less interesting are the degree of abstraction required for admission and the particular cognitive processes that formulate the hope and deliver its satisfaction. How does the thinking that gives the idea that captures the perennial truth differ from an imaginally enriched meditation on the image of a composed, open-palmed Virgin? The related cognitive processes differ: ideation versus feeling; language versus visuospatial perception; verbaldeclarative versus visual-episodic memory. Elevated Verbal IQ biases preference toward higher thinking, favoring the idea over the image. Language, ideation, and IQ drive toward high levels of abstraction such that the idea may eventually substitute for the personal identity of the thinker in search of the ultimate answer. This is to become one’s idea. In certain circumstances the better choice may be the image. She adapts to the ambient culture and conforms with her followers’ closest wishes. For example, the Virgin of Guadalupe is both Catholic and indigenous. Her cathedral in Mexico City is built on Tonantzin’s pyramid, and many believe she is this Aztec mother-goddess’s manifestation (Miller & Taube, 1997). Others say she is Coatlicue, “lady of the serpents,” god of birth, death, and rebirth whose necklace is strung with human hands, hearts, and skulls. Archetypal images layered one atop another, the descending strata of the psyche coming into view. The image runs deeply, rivaling the depth of the idea that captures the perennial truth. Which is more easily conceived in illness, the image or the idea, and which rises with greater spontaneity, raising the pulse, catching the breath? Imagination is dampened by illness as alertness dissipates, but higher thinking collapses more easily when concentration cannot be sustained. Cartoon modeling, gaudy colors, the redundancy and occasional horrific qualities of indigenous imagery, can be stunning, surreal, and eerie, and so better enhance imaginal process as aesthetic sensibility fails. Anxiety and the uncanny attend archetypal appearances. This is the sphere of primitive religious expressions, of spectral lacustrine figures and strange visitations in the night, of unheard knocks at empty portals whose emotional afterglow stains memory. Thinking of a certain kind can also generate fear; the highest degrees of abstraction can open a menacing internal gulf, whereupon Athena becomes her double, that is, Pallas Athena whom Hesiod described as “dread ... she loves deeds of war, the sack of cities and the shouting and the battle” (Evelyn-White, 1998, p. 437). Now

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she is a valkyrie who strikes back in jealousy of truly big ideas. Nietzsche is an example. Even scientific thinking, raised to philosophical heights, may yield “an evanescent chill of falling through the limits of what is knowable” (Brown, 1991, p. xii). Is the idea that captures the perennial truth directed toward the image, or is the image a station passed on the way to the idea? Cognitive process provides the image that it subsequently transforms into the idea. This is a sliding across levels of manifestation as archetypal momentum defines increasingly definite objects of awareness. The differentiation of the hope that provides the image leads to the idea. The idea is a late arrival, the result of transitions subsequent to those generating the image. But neither the idea nor the image proves satisfactory content for mystical awareness. Some traditions have despised the seductions of imagination and doubted the utility and moral propriety of exercising intellect. “Do not admit any sensory fantasies during prayer, lest you become subject to derangement,” said John Climacus (Moore, 1978, p. 218). Demons follow in the wake of idle and spontaneous imaginings. Climacus also said that “obedience is the tomb of the will and the resurrection of humility. A corpse does not argue or reason as to what is good or what seems to be bad” (p. 21). Mystical states exceed normal forms of mentation, including imagination and higher reasoning. Some are dire events, shaking mind and body. Others, also profound, are superlatively genial, like gardenias and petit beurres melting into sweetness. All surpass ideas and images. References Alfeyev, H. (2000b). The spiritual world of Isaac the Syrian. Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications. Anand, B.K., Chhina, G.S., & Singh, B. (1961). Some aspects of electroencephalographic studies on yogis. Electroencephalography and Clinical Neurophysiology. 13, 452-456. Andrews, E.D. (1963). The people called Shakers. A search for the perfect society. New York: Dover. Arzy, S., Idel, M., Landis, T., & Blanke, O. (2005). Why revelations have occurred on mountains? Linking mystical experiences and cognitive neuroscience. Medical Hypotheses, 65, 841-845. Azari, N.P., Nickel, J., Wunderlich, G., Niedegger, M., Hefter, H., Talman, L., et al. (2001). Neural correlates of religious experience. European Journal of Neuroscience, 13, 1649-1652.

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Addendum: Perennialism in Neuropsychology Perennialists shift their domain of inquiry depending on the ambient culture and available technology. Rather than relying on introspection, religious contemplation, participation in liturgy, or the disciplined application of philosophical reasoning, some now look to neuroimaging procedures and the brain. A new category is required, of neuropsychological perennialism, whose advocates are materialists who believe that all mystical experiences are alike and similarly derive from a particular neurochemical system or anatomical structure. Two examples will be reviewed. Epilepsy, seizures, and mysticism

Consider the studies in which the temporal lobes function as priests discharging their sacrament through irregular electrophysiological activity (e.g., Persinger, 1987). The conclusion that temporo-limbic structures are the exclusive determinants of mystical experience was developed in the context of epilepsy (e.g., Dewhurst & Beard, 1970; Waxman & Geschwind, 1975). Credence is warranted, for example, in the case of ecstatic seizures, but the picture is more complex than perennialists allow (e.g., Cirignotta, Todesco & Lugaressi, 1980; Landsborough, 1987; Naito & Matsui, 1988). Seizure-related events with specifically religious content are fairly uncommon. Of 1,325 patients with epilepsy, a religious aura was reported in 53 (4%; Spratling, 1905). Religious experience did not occur at a higher rate among 46 temporal-lobe epileptics compared with control subjects (Sensky, 1983). Three of 234 epileptic patients (1.3%), all with temporallobe epilepsy, had ictus-related religious experience and both post- and interictal hyperreligiosity (Ogata & Miyakawam, 1998). In general, hyperreligiosity coincided with post-ictal psychosis in 27% of patients, all with a prior history of religious belief and practice. This figure approximates the percentage of inpatient schizophrenics who have experienced God (30%) and the percentage of normal persons who report an experience of God or a powerful spiritual force (33%; Bradford, 1984; Prince, 1979-1980). “Religious content” was present in about the same proportion in groups of hospitalized bipolar manics, schizophrenics with an abnormal EEG, and epileptics with complex-partial seizure disorder (Brewerton, 1994, p. 303; cf. Bear, Levin, Blumer, Chetha & Ryder, 1982). The bearing of these studies on religious and more specifically mystical experience may be summarized as follows: Psychosis is a general factor conducive to religious experience, which is further elicited and shaped by

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preexisting and concurrent religious beliefs. Temporo-limbic changes may be viewed as one of several material causes of religious experience, probably to comparable degrees in both normal and pathological groups. The experience itself is often little more than a germinal center which subsequent conceptual and emotional elaboration expands beyond its original meaning and power. This applies to both normal and pathological groups. Importantly, religious experience is an exceedingly broad category of which mystical experience is a minor subcategory. Much depends on definition, which itself depends on historical comparisons and phenomenological analysis of individual cases. For example, an hallucination of an angel or the voice or Jesus would have been regarded as an undesirable and probably demonic distraction by Evagrius and those who adopted his teachings over coming centuries (Sinkewicz, 2003). Imageless contact with deity was their desired goal (Stewart, 1998). The hallucination may count as “religious” but would not satisfy Evagrius’s criteria for contemplation, or what modern scholarship would characterize as “mystical” experience. Absolute unitary being

d’Aquili and Newberg (1999) are neuropsychological perennialists who identify all mystical experiences as instances of Absolute Unitary Being, which is said to result from the sequential activity of about two dozen inhibitory and excitatory connections spanning about one dozen neural structures, functionally organized regions, and “cognitive operators” (e.g., pp. 111, 115). The names, roles, and number of the operators have varied somewhat; later work describes eight (Newberg, d’Aquili & Rause, 2001). These are basically “modules,” as understood in cognitive psychology and neuropsychology. The operators “are not ... structures in the brain,” although some are assigned structures in the brain (p. 47). This entails the category error of identifying a hypothetical cognitive “faculty” with this or that neural structure or process, as required by the authors’ stance of “strict materialistic reductionism” (d’Aquili & Newberg, 1993, p. 5). Some operators are familiar, in part for overlapping Luria’s (1966) functional systems. The “emotional value” operator reprises Damasio’s (1999) “somatic marker hypothesis.” Others are highly abstract, uncommon in ordinary neuropsychological discourse, and resemble philosophical concepts. The “existential operator,” for example, “assigns a sense of existence or reality to sensory information” (Newberg et al., 2001, p. 51). Similarly, the “causal operator enables the mind to interpret all of reality as a sequence of specific causes and effects” and provides “the compulsion

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behind all the attempts by science, philosophy, and especially religion to explain the mysteries of the universe” (p. 50). Establishing reality and compelling the basic trends of human knowledge amount to heavy work for two modules with an indeterminate neural base. Reification is one of this theory’s chief risks. Preconceived cognitive and emotional activities, without specifiable relationships with structure and function, illustrate a kind of idealism. The problem is common in cognitive neuropsychology and particularly unhelpful in addressing a topic as subtle, varied, and intrinsically abstract as mystical experience. A different strategy, pursued in this essay, is based on elaborating the neuropsychology of mystical experience in terms of experimental and especially clinical analogs. This allows for concrete interpretations and helps to prevent theoretical overreaching. The principle strengths of the d’Aquili and Newberg neurotheology are, first, its emphasis on subcortical and autonomic activity and, second, its highlighting the role of functional deafferentiation, resulting from meditative practices, and subsequent release, which has varied religious expressions along what the authors call the “unitary continuum” (d’Aquili & Newberg, 1999). Oddly, Fischer’s (1971, 1975) important interpretations of mystical experience, based on patterns of autonomic arousal and quiescence, recur throughout the d’Aquili and Newberg neurotheology, although Fischer is not acknowledged. Functional deafferentiation resulting from meditative practices, with subsequent release, are the key mechanisms of this theory. The posteriorsuperior parietal lobe of the right cerebral hemisphere (the “orientation association area”) is particularly important since “its total deafferentiation can only result in an absolute subjective sensation of pure space.... [which is] experienced as absolute unity or wholeness” (d’Aquili & Newberg, 1999, pp. 33, 112). This is the experience d’Aquili and Newberg term Absolute Unitary Being. Ordinary somatic experience will have been eradicated; the unlimited spatial extension of awareness is said to coincide with the experience of “absolute unity.” Is this space spherical or disk-like? is it dense and homogeneous or spare and thinly composed? is its “purity” a direct awareness, or derived from the absence of local objects? Importantly, does this space have a discernible margin or is it infinitely extensive?; and if the latter, how could it possibly be known since the absence of contrast would prevent its entering awareness. Questions of this nature, which are not addressed, are important since the authors’ neurotheology

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rests on the claim of Absolute Unitary Being and the proposed neuropsychology of the spatial perception that provides for its realization. Notably, the yogic and later the Buddhist Abhidhamma traditions investigated these matters empirically through the four “formless meditations” (Govinda, 1974; Guenther, 1976; Kalupahana, 1987). d’Aquili and Newberg do not mention this literature, although their Absolute Unitary Being is, in fact, a penultimate state of awareness and the outcome of the second and third of the formless meditations, which disclose consecutively the “infinitude of space” and the “infinitude of consciousness” (akasanancayatana, vinnanancayatana; cf. Bradford, 2005, pp. 164-166, for spatial perception in mystical experience). These authors equate Absolute Unitary Being with, in their words, God, Christ, Jesus, Truth, nothingness, rapture, ecstasy, pure consciousness, pure awareness, absolute reality, One Mind, the absolute ground of being, ultimate oneness, the absolute unitary state, absolute union, sunyata, the unio mystica (Christian and otherwise), the ultimate trance state, the primary epistemic/ontological state, void consciousness, Buddhist void consciousness, nirvana, Brahman-atman, not to mention the Tao (d’Aquili & Newberg 1999; Newberg, d’Aquili & Fause, 2001). Varied ascetical routines and styles of reasoning are also equated; for example, the kabbalist’s gematria, the Sufi’s ‘fana, the via negativa and positiva, all result in the experience of Absolute Unitary Being. With one stroke, religious pluralism is made to disappear. A Taoist would be surprised to learn his true goal was Jesus, though the Pope would surely agree. A Buddhist practitioner would be surprised to learn her goal was Atman, since the Buddha specifically said otherwise. Many Christian mystics would be surprised to learn their goal was “One Mind” or “ultimate oneness,” since the internal dynamism of the Holy Trinity is their stated destination. A Buddhist seeking prajna would be surprised to learn that sunyata is trance, rapture, or ecstasy, since these tend to activate the sympathetic nervous system and lower or annihilate consciousness rather than introduce a clear, pacific state of exceedingly fine attention. An apophatic theologian, in pursuing the via negativa, would be surprised to learn his exercise was really gematria, since he presses language past the point of meaningful reference rather than employing it as a veridical procedure for naming and contacting the properties of God. Most mystics from the three major monotheistic traditions would be surprised to learn their goal was “absolute union” with God, since this contravenes their respective theologies and is contrary to modulated forms of union in which

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properties may be shared, but not the divine essence. Jewish mystics, the kabbalist included, would be surprised to learn their goal was Jesus Christ, unless they were Marranos or Sabbatians seeking the disguise of Christianity in order to pass safely through pogroms or circumvent interrogation. Similarly, the Sufi would be surprised to learn his goal was Jesus Christ, unless he were a heretic who believed that Jesus was something more than just another prophet. A neuropsychology of mystical experience that can stand the test of science will be multidisciplinary, attending to its topics on their own historical and phenomenological terms before appealing to objective procedures. The neurotheology developed by d’Aquili and Newberg (1999) is meant to promote the development of a megatheology which will explain the overall principles underlying any and all religious or ultimate belief systems and their theologies.... [and] serve as a basis for a new and more universal specific theology by which human beings may guide their lives. Or, because of its generality, it may serve as a fundamental elaboration of most, if not all, of the existing specific theologies of the world’s great religions. (p. 177)

Thus one arrives at the neuroscientific “monotheism” of Absolute Unitary Being which will provide a universal code of behavior and resolve the existential questions that religious traditions have addressed in their respective and local ways for thousands of years. This is an Icarian ascent on the spidery wings of a Wright brothers’ flying machine. Addendum: Micogenetic Terms In the following, microgenetic terms that figure in the present response are outlined briefly. Suggested readings in microgenetic theory are mentioned in conclusion. The cognitive epoch (epoch), or mind-brain state (state), is a central feature of the theory. Brown favors “state”; the present response usually adopts “epoch” to prevent its confusion with “mystical state of awareness.” The terms bear distinct connotations. “Epoch” conveys the temporal character of the event in question; “state” conveys its encapsulated nature. For present purposes, they are considered synonymous. Microgenesis designates both the internal and expressive features of the epoch. The epoch is an iterative neural event which is initiated by brainstorm “pacemaker” neurons and passes along the rostral-caudal axis, occupying ~100-200 msec. Its passage is marked by a succession of phase transitions

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(phases, transitions). Brown lately favors “transition,” as does the present response. Transitions are aligned with neuroevolutionary growth planes which in individuals correspond with levels of neural structure. Transitions mark the diachronic course of an epoch’s passage. Early transitions are preliminary to those following. For example, a limbic transition is preliminary compared with activity within the neocortical language axis. A completed epoch establishes a moment, the basic temporal unit. Multiple completed epochs in succession create felt duration. Temporal disorientation, as in toxic delirium, reflects global disruption of microgenesis. Mechanically determined intervals, as measured by a clock, differ from moments constituted by completed epochs. Presumably the clock continues to run, though any chance of its being read and acquiring meaning depends on increments of time created by completed epochs. Microgenesis effects the qualitative transformation of oncoming content as successive transitions engage higher structures. For example, a particular action requiring fine distal motor performance is the transformation of gross, axial, own-body patterns of movement effected in the moment and further refined over serial epochs. A category stabilizes process on a momentary basis, allowing for experience. Categories aligned with deeper structures are more general. Whole-to-part specification is one principle of a category’s differentiation. For example, “furniture” anticipates “chair,” which anticipates the red chair on which one is sitting. A lesion resulting in aphasia slows the epoch’s passage or terminates it prematurely, disclosing a preliminary expression, which in clinical contexts is identified as a symptom. Thus, asked to describe the red chair, the patient says “furniture,” resorting to the more general conceptual category. Similarly, axial movements anticipate fine distal manipulations and may emerge under pathological conditions that impede transitions that would otherwise engage sensory-motor cortex. The conformity of an epoch with concurrent stimuli yields an immediate memory, which serves as an embedded influence on the oncoming epoch. In this way, memory sustains the concurrent category and subtends the illusion of continuity. Remote memory shapes preliminary transitions, channeling the oncoming epoch in habitual ways. Sensory stimuli constrain (sculpt) late transitions, bringing some pertinent core potentials to realization meanwhile attenuating or terminating the realization of others. In this way, an epoch stands in approximate concordance with the present stimulus configuration. Stimuli select for certain neural responses and the corresponding psychological and perceptual-

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motor disposition. Veridicality is related to fitness in the moment, which is an immediate expression of adaptations prepared by individual development and anticipated more remotely by phylogenesis. The core self (core, self) is the base category of which the self-concept and the empirical ego are successive and more highly differentiated forms. The core is informed by self-preserving drives (which in later works are characterized collectively as will). In humans, a drive eventuates in feelingconcepts (primitive categories) which inform and link the subject and the intended object. Following are suggested readings in microgenetic theory and its process-oriented philosophical elaboration. Only Brown’s book-length words are considered. (For reviews, Bradford, 2006b, 2006c; MacQueen, 2004; Pachalska, 2003, 2002; Pachalska & MacQueen, 2005, in press; Riffert, 2004. For microgenetic theory generally, Hanlon, 1991.) For persons with professional interests spanning neuropsychology and philosophy, especially process philosophy, basic readings include Life of the Mind (1988), Self and Process (1991), and Time, Will, and Mental Process (1996). The first is a classic clinical text, portions of which may be read depending on clinical interests. The second sums the neuropsychology and opens its philosophical implications. The third book appeals to the neuropsychology in deepening the philosophical perspective and serves as prolegomena for subsequent works in process philosophy. Readers with specifically philosophical interests may read selected chapters from Self and Process (1991) and Mind and Nature (2000), then focus on Time, Will, and Mental Process (1996) and Process and the Authentic Life (2005). Professional persons from neuropsychology-related fields with little or no interest in philosophy may read chapters of specific interest from Aphasia, Apraxia and Agnosia (1974) and Life of the Mind, then focus on Self and Process (1991). A non-specialist reader with interests in brain, emotion and pathology, or a clinical professional without neuroscientific training, may read Mind, Brain, and Consciousness (1977). If allowed two of these books in packing for an extended stay on a desert island, take Self and Process (1991) and Process and the Authentic Life (2005).

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Chapter 4 Sublexical phonological processing and paraphasia: recent topics in the neurolinguistics of production in aphasia HUGH W. BUCKINGHAM Department of Communication Sciences & Disorders Louisiana State University Baton Rouge, Louisiana, USA SARAH S. CHRISTMAN Department of Communication Sciences Keys Speech and Hearing Center University of Oklahoma Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, USA Introduction In the present contribution to this volume, we will briefly discuss some recent work in neurolinguistic modeling that once again considers the human language cerebral system as a functional mosaic, more diffuse in its overall functional operation and slightly more parallel in its chronometry. Here, we will pay specific attention to phoneme structure and prosody – namely the units commonly referred to as tonemes. This allows us explore prosody in a very digital/analytical way, where fundamental frequency control looks to be a property of the left hemisphere. Prosody is a multifunctional dynamic, not fully right nor left hemisphere specific. We will then present some analysis of recent sublexical studies of paraphasia, and point to some inconsistencies and weaknesses of each, concentrating on syllable structure complexity and how that complexity and its linguistic control is extremely important in drawing finer distinctions among aphasic deficits – among error types as well as among aphasic types. As we will argue, it is most often the case that differently categorized aphasics (especially those who are clearly in the posterior/sensory fluent groups of Wernicke’s and conductions – and subgroupings of these) will likely produce from time to time, and certainly in differing numbers, most sub-lexical error types. The challenge, therefore, is to find instances of significantly differing quantitative

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groupings among the error types for different subject groupings. There is ample evidence that most studies demonstrate precisely this kind of dissociation. To this, we will simply reiterate the obvious: these statistically differing groupings within error types are qualitative in the sense of statistics, but quantitative, still, in the sense of the error types themselves. We will subsequently point out that this, in turn, is why Freud’s “continuity thesis” continues to crop up in the study of paraphasia in brain damage and why investigators continue to allude to the slips-of-the-tongue in nonpathologically involved speakers. Lastly, we will consider some recent work in the aphasic production of neologisms, how and where they may be generated, by whom, under what circumstances, whether they involve anomia or not, and how they resolve to more recognizable language. We will pay close attention to whether or not the appearance of the neologism adumbrates a lexical block, or whether it adumbrates something which is actually quite different - the strictly phonological transformation or deformation of a form which by definition must have been retrieved at some higher level of production. Lastly, we will follow the logical predictions of neology recovery from these two accounts. Functional metabolic mosaics To begin with, we would emphasize that many of the recent findings from positron emission tomography as well as from functional magnetic resonance imaging and magnetoencephalography have provided support for theories developed long before these advances in the technology of cerebral observation: theories such as motor-sensory reverberatory circuitry and function in ongoing speech production with interconnective physiology and a left hemisphere specificity. The origins of these theories date as far back as the monograph of Karl Wernicke (1874). There is much evidence from imaging work that John Hughlings-Jackson (1866) was quite correct in his assumption that the non-dominant hemisphere was actively involved in many aspects of language comprehension and that its role was increasingly observed in the resolution of aphasia. Furthermore, there exists now incontrovertible evidence from imaging for earlier motor theories of speech perception as well as for other theories that postulate leading role that acoustic memory of one sort or another has in speech production. One can go even further into history (Hartley, 1749) for the establishment of strong motor-sensory associations in terms of “muscle sense.” Such strong associative connections and the theories they stemmed from would certainly accord with parallel cerebral metabolic mosaics so often revealed

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during the production of phonological segments and during the perception of the same. Two modern neurolinguistic investigators, David Poeppel and Greg Hickok (e.g. Hickok, 2000), have designed a model based on their own imaging work and that of others that is bilateral for comprehension, thereby bringing the non-dominant hemisphere into the total picture for language production, including more than simply prosody and pragmatics – both of which also play important roles in the overall picture of on-line language processing, which for them begins with the introduction of an auditory signal that very importantly spreads to both hemispheres initially and only then gets parceled out in terms of what processing of that auditory signal can remain in the right and what processing is forced to dominant hemisphere analysis – and why. In fact, it may very well be that what is being seen in the metabolism of the right hemisphere during comprehension are precisely those computations of intonation and schematic knowledge access from memory stores so crucial in our understanding of spoken language. Poeppel and Hickok are careful to chart all relevant studies that demonstrate a clear role for the non-dominant hemisphere for comprehension: the Wada test, split brain studies and single cell recordings. Before going on, we want to emphasize that in these imaging studies what we actually see is metabolism, and only metabolism. In order to infer what may have been the work task, intricate statistical subtractions must be performed on the signal to ferret out the clutter, so to speak. The timing of events must be closely controlled as well so that we can be sure that the biochemically marked nutrients are introduced and arrive at the cerebral zones so their magnetic fields can be scanned radiographically, etc (see Uttal, 2001, for a sober evaluation of recent scanning technology and about some of the limitations of the paradigm). Hickok (2000) focuses upon the functional neuroanatomy of conduction aphasia and, uses the right hemisphere for comprehension and the left temporal zones for the strictly phonological (with emphasis on sublexical processing) auditory element, which in turn fits into the acoustic-motor reverberatory system. Holding to previous models scaffolded on techniques other than imaging, he suggests two types of physiological interconnectionistic routes – in short, the insula or the arcuate fasciculus, which as we have known for over 100 years courses through the opercular regions of the temporal, parietal, and frontal lobes. This, in turn, allows the Poeppel/Hickok model to again reach into pre-imaging models and suggest that there are two kinds of conduction aphasias, one perhaps involving lesions

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in and around the supramarginal gyrus (SMG) in such a way that the lesion would extend to the operculum, thereby interfering in one way or another with smooth acoustic/motor cooperation between Wernicke’s area and Broca’s area. An old notion, to be sure. Lesions to the left posterior supratemporal plane (location of sound based representations), including Heschl’s gyrus (BA 41) and the planum temporale (PT), slightly inferior to the SMG may produce a more anterior type of conduction aphasia. In any event, Hickok and Poeppel do point out that activation levels of the auditory signal, although bilateral, tend to be somewhat stronger in the left. Other recent significant studies of the perception of phonemic elements, called tonemes, have been carried out by Jack Gandour and his colleagues. In one (Gandour, et al., 2000), the investigators looked at the perception of tone in speakers of three languages: Thai, Chinese and English. Tonemes are very short stretches of fast fluctuating fundamental frequencies over the range of a vowel production. As a simple example, the segmental stretch of a CV, such as /ma/, may have a number of differing tone patterns over the /a/, such that a “hi-falling” fundamental frequency (Fo) pattern shift will give you one word, while the /a/ with a tone pattern of “low-rising” will give you quite another. These represent minimal phonemic pair distinctions and like minimal pair distinctions call for close, digital and highly analytical processing skills upon the acoustic spectrum. In these kinds of studies, success on the part of the subjects depends upon the ability to LINK those analytical analyses of the perceptual system WITH WORDS in their language. Each “tone language” has its own set of parameters that fit to the lexicon. Linguists frequently define pitch as Fo, and therefore what is involved physically is a set of fast changing pitches. Pitch, however, tends to avoid mention of something so communicative that it would serve as the sole element to distinguish one word from another in some language. The term “toneme” is therefore applied to a rapid pitch change that calls up in the minds of the listener different words. Thai and Chinese are “tone languages,” English is not. The method of study was PET, and there were three to four subjects for each language. The subjects were asked to simply listen to the prosodic, fast fluctuations of Fo and to press a “same” or “different” button if they thought they heard the same pitch pattern or not. For tonemes, only Thai patterns were chosen for this study. Several earlier imaging studies have shown activation in the left opercular regions of the frontal lobe, very near Broca’s area, during phonemic perception. Recall that most consider both areas 44 and 45 en toto to be

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Broca’s area (see A. Foundas, et al., 1998, for an extremely close and detailed neuroanatomical study of Pars Triangularis (45) and Pars Opercularis (44), using volumetric MRI). The Gandour, et al (2000) study now shows this for the perception of the toneme – if you will, a phoneme of prosody. All subjects showed similar metabolic mosaics for the perception of rapidly changing pitch patterns that were NON-linguistic. However, only the Thai speakers revealed a significantly added component to the mosaic of metabolism when the pitch changes matched the tonemes of Thai. They were not only perceiving the rapid pitch changes, and therefore able to press same or different buttons, they were “hearing” words. That is to say, the perception was linguistic. And, crucially, that added metabolic zone was in the left frontal operculum. Both the Chinese speakers and the English speakers revealed similar patters of metabolism, but no added left Broca’s area metabolism. Another equally sophisticated and significant study along somewhat similar lines is found in Hseih, et al. (2001). Here, however, there were 10 Chinese speakers and 10 English speakers, and all were analyzed as they perceived consonants and vowels, as well as pitches (non-speech but physically similar to tones) and tones. The general metabolic mosaic patterns were similar with each group of speakers, thus providing evidence that the cerebral metabolic patterns were largely reflective of the fact that Chinese and English involve different linguistic experiences. Subjects both listened passively or were instructed to do “same-different” responding by clicking mousse, same vs. different. Subjects still had to click mousse in the passive condition, but they simply had to alternate from one to the other for each presentation – a mindless task involving similar digit movements. The findings here show a task dependent mosaic of metabolic functioning that reflects how acoustic, segmental and suprasegmental signals may or may not directly tap into linguistic significance, with non-dominant hemisphere mechanisms activated for cues that eventually work themselves into dominant hemisphere activation. Broca’s area on the left was activated for the Chinese speaking group for consonants, vowels, tones and pitches, while the right Broca’s area was activated for English speakers on the pitch task. Since pitch is non-linguistic on all views for English, this finding makes sense and again shows the role of the non-dominant hemisphere in processing auditory stimuli at the beginning. Those pitches are extremely rapid as well, but can be processed by the right as long as they do not tap into anything linguistically meaningful. Chinese speakers on the

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other hand appear to process temporal and spectral signals in the left – not the right. Lateral effects are not predictable for very complex processing of rapid temporal and spectral change. Pitch patterns, then, along with temporal/spectral signals for consonants and vowels are as likely to be in right or left hemisphere for this or that language. Hsieh, et al. (2001, p. 240) write, “Pitch processing is lateralized to the left hemisphere only when the pitch patterns are phonologically significant to the listener; otherwise to the right hemisphere when the pitch patterns are linguistically irrelevant.” Recall that in the previous study, only the Thai speaking group showed left activation (also in and around Broca’s area) for the pitches that fit to the Thai tonemic system. Chinese speakers in that study showed absolutely no left Broca’s area effect. Again, Chinese IS a tone language, but the substrate of pitches is not the same as with Thai. One further finding (among the many others that we cannot go into here) was that the Chinese group showed increased metabolism in left pre-motor cortex as well as the gyral zones of Broca’s area (44 and 45) on the four tasks, while only the vowel condition activated left Broca’s area significantly for English speakers. The pitch condition for English speakers in this study gave rise to increased metabolism in the right Broca’s homologue. Again, we see a picture of right and left processing for auditory input, but where that auditory processing directly connects with linguistic significance for some language, that processing will drift leftwards or otherwise be attracted to the dominant hemisphere by the strength and dominance of the language processor. Now, therefore, we have growing evidence that the left Broca’s area is involved in linguistic perception. In addition to this, there is increasing evidence as well that left posterior regions are involved in linguistic production. We witness several lines of evidence in modern neurolinguistics that strengthen the classical aphasia notion that posterior sensory auditory cortex is in many ways directly involved in speaking. Buckingham and Yule (1987) have related the architectonic findings of Galaburda of giant Betz cells under the planum temporale in level III. Not only does this system connect with the arcuate fibers in the operculum, but these regions as well show large concentrations of Acetylcholine in the left temporal lobe. Since that neurotransmitter is found as well in large concentrations in left basal ganglia in right handed people, it is assumed that it plays a motor role as well for articulation, and thus would be well situated for such a function in the left planum. In addition, Square, et al. (1997) speak increasingly of a “posterior” apraxia of speech (AOS), which would agree with older theories of Liepmann (1905) and with more recent models such as the one pre-

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sented by Doreen Kimura (1982). There has always been a certain amount of tension in theories of AOS as to just how much of its nature is phonetic and how much is phonological. This question would only make sense, of course, if there were a certain metric that would keep the two apart, with clearly demarcated domains that would allow for an “interface” of the two. We have already seen complex array of interactions between the sensory and the motor for production and perception – both functionally and neuroanatomically. The brain may very well turn out to be unable to enforce a strict compartmentalization between the two, and this would in turn lend support to the claims of certain phonologists such a John Ohala (1990) that in fact there is no such thing as a phonetics/phonology “interface,” since the two are fully intertwined. The whole issue may turn out to be mooted more than originally thought. Finally, stemming from the recent evidence for old functional notions of the arcuate fasciculus, that tract’s motor/sensory mediation capacity has led to its establishment as part and parcel of a sub-vocal rehearsal mechanism that is crucially involved in shortterm operational verbal memory. Recent linguistic aphasiological studies of sublexical units Most studies of segmental paraphasias in modern terms include reference to syllable structure as well as syllable complexity. Phonotactic patterns are closely scrutinized, but the interaction between phonotactics and the sonority scale are often only loosely defined and only marginally used as a comparative analytic metric. For example, many investigators (e.g. Nickels and Howard, 2004) measure syllable complexity largely by canonical form and nothing else. An aphasic who reduced complexity of syllable structure would simply change a CCVCC to perhaps a CVC, a CV or a VC. A simple assumption would be that a CV is lest complex than a CCV. The sonority hierarchy, however, provides the aphasiologist with a more powerful way to measure syllable complexity that goes beyond phonotactics. Universal (not absolute) sonority ranking, going from least to most sonorous, is: Obstruent Nasal Liquid Glide Vowel. Onset structures have a crescendo architecture, while coda structures have a decrescendo architecture – the vowel being the nucleus of the syllable with maximum sonority. Sonority relates to amplitude, resonance, vocalicness and vocal tract opening. Sharp or even spread discontinuities in these features is what is preferred – maximum contrast (see Ohala, 1992, where he stresses maximum discontinuity, which to him renders the sonority principle totally redundant, or, at best, derivative).

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The most powerful complexity metric is the “dispersion” principle embedded in this theory. The dispersion value is, “… the sum of the inverses of the squared values of the sonority distances between the members of each pair of segments within it” (Clements, 1990, p. 304). Going from O to V would be a maximal dispersion distance of 4 in that the distance from the obstruent to the vowel would stretch 4 sonority categories: N, L, G, and V. The use of this formula allows for a mathematical metric of measure for each disttance. Where the CV is O V, the value is 1/16, etc. Clements points out that the dispersion equation is used in physics to compute forces in potential fields and in acoustic theory to characterize the perceptual distance between vowels in different linguistic vowel systems. In initial demisyllables, the dispersion value is lower to the extent that sonority distances are maximal or evenly distributed, and higher if they are less maximal or less evenly distributed. Final demisyllables work in the opposite fashion, but we concentrate on initial demisyllables for our purposes here. The dispersion value for an initial demisyllable, such as the /pli/ (a CCV of the sonority type OLV) of the word /pliz/, would be the sum of the inverses of the squares of each distance. From O to L has a distance value of 2; from O to V has a distance of 4, while the distance from L to V is 2. The dispersion value here would be: 1/ 4 + 1/16 + 1/4 = .25 + .06 + .25 = .56 Now note, very importantly, that if you measure the dispersion of the CV /yu/ of the sonority type GV, you get 1/1 = 1.00, a higher value than calculated for the CCV /pli/. There is a smoother and more steady crescendo going from O, then to L, then to V. This is not the case for the /yu/. And therefore, in this instance, a CV would be more complex than a CCV, thus demonstrating the danger of measuring syllable complexity solely in terms of cannonical form. There is very little contrast between a glide and a vowel; they are contiguous on the sonority hierarchy. Even more non-preferred would be a sequence of two segments of the same sonority value, a “flat” sequence – flat meaning that there is no crescendo nor descrescendo. Other than /s/ plus another obstruent in English, which are numerous (/s/ is often considered “extra-syllabic” by some phonologists ,and thus that problem would vanish), stabilizing processes often intervene to shift the syllable structure to a more preferred situation. For instance, when two vowels end up together, a glottal stop will often intervenes to break up that undesirable sequence. Epenthetic schwa will at times intervene between consonants for the sake of ease, for instance in certain motor aphasias.

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In a recent study, Nickels and Howard (2004), the authors used a powerful statistic to discover the crucial factor correlating with word production errors (phonemic paraphasia). They could dissociate the effects of number of segments in a word, number of syllables in a word and the syllable complexity of the word. Admittedly, the three are often conflated in studies of paraphasia that simply put the onus on “word length” for degree of paraphasia. Number of segments and number of syllables often intercorrelated, for instance. A greater number of syllables would allow for the possibility of more complex syllables. The authors’ statistic was such that it leveled out syllable complexity, showing ultimately that only # of syllables correlated with degree of accuracy in lexical realization. The problem, of course, is that without considering sonority and its dispersion measurement, the simple use of canonical forms to measure syllable complexity is weak at best, and as we saw above, actually wrong in many of its predictions of complexity – a CV in some cases being more complex that a CCV. Furthermore, note that not all CV’s are if equal complexity: − − − −

a /pa/ (OV) = .06; a /na/ (NV) = .11; a /ra/ (LV) = .25, a /ya/ (GV) = 1.

In two recent studies by Romani and Calabrese (1998) and Romani, et al. (2002), the principle of sonority and dispersion were closely charted in the analysis of a non-fluent patient (Romani and Calabrese (1998)) and then in the 2002 study that patient contrasted with a typical fluent paraphasic speaker, with a CT scan demonstrating a two year old CVA in the left temporo-parietal. The previous 1998 study had clearly shown that the non fluent errors simplified structures clearly along the lines of predictions from sonority: more segmental transformations creating less complexity in terms of sonority and syllable simplications that followed sonority predictions as well. Romani and Calabrese in that study importantly emphasize that since this patient was non-fluent with great articulatory difficulty, there is reason to believe that sonority patterns are grounded in motor speech execution. Christman (1992, 1994) on the other hand has shown that neologisms in a fluent aphasic also tend to follow the patterns of sonority. Neologistic structures abide quite rigidly to the architecture of sonority, and consequently they demonstrate that the principle filters up into the phonology, or otherwise becomes phonologized. In this way, sonority in the big picture can be at work in both fluent and non-fluent aphasic pro-

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duction. Romani, et al’s (2002) fluent subject did not show such simplification tendencies and to that effect did not reveal as much influence from sonority. In general, the comparison study of 2002 reported the following main differences between the non-fluent DB and the fluent MM: − [1] the majority of DB’s errors, but not MM’s errors, gave rise to simpler syllables; − [2] most of DB’s errors involved consonants, MM’s did not; − [3] DB’s substitutions were closer to the target and were influenced by frequency; − [4] DB’s errors were largely paradigmatic substitutions, while MM’s were more involved with linear sequencing of segments; − [5] MM showed no specific tendencies toward differential errors among vowels. DB however made the fewest errors on /a/. /a/ is the most sonorous of the vowels, since it has the most aperture. In addition to sonority patterns, there are metrical patterns as well, and they, too, have distinct complexity levels. The trochee pattern of StrongWeak is the most frequent meter for two syllable words in English and is likely a very frequent rhythmic template in all human languages. Iambs are somewhat more complex, since the initial syllables are unstressed, initiation thereby being more difficult. Note that many children’s deletions as well as aphasics’ are focused on unstressed – and most often reduced – syllables. Goodglass (1978) was one of the first aphasia researchers to point out that utterance initial weak stresses are abnormally difficult for many types of patients – especially the non-fluent Broca’s aphasics. He extended this observation to sentence initial unstressed function words, such as “the” in a phrase “the book is on the table.” Here he noted the extreme difficulties many Broca’s aphasics had with producing the initial “the,” and thus initiating the sentence. He pointed out, however, that the patient could much more easily produce non-initial, unstressed “the”, internal to the sentence. It turns out that there is a metrical account for the differential deletability of the two “the” function words, and that the same account works as well for explaining why children who delete unstressed schwas, most often delete the initial ones in words such as “banana.” Metrical feet are assigned in algorithmic fashion to a stretch of syllables or words from right to left. Details aside, “nana” gets a trochaic foot (SW), but the first syllable is not assigned a foot, and is therefore referred to as an “unfooted” schwa. The theory now says that the second schwa is “protected” by being within the domain of a foot unit. Of the two unstressed schwas, therefore, the un-

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footed one is more vulnerable to syncope. At the sentential level, a similar situation arises. Going from right to left, “table” is a trochee; “on the” is a trochee; “book is” a trochee as well. There is no foot that can be assigned to the initial “the,” so that it is “unfooted.” An unfooted function word such as the first article “the” in the sentence, is therefore more vulnerable than the internal “the”, which is protected by the trochaic foot domain “on the.” In the final tally, these new findings from the phonology of the syllable, of metrics, and of the suprasegmental constraints on rhythm and cadence have allowed us to better appreciate that AOS has as much to do with loss of rhythm and cadence of speech, which in turn causes many of the articulatory derailments seen in that syndrome. It also allows us to appreciate even further that the phonemic paraphasias of Wernicke’s and conduction aphasics take place at levels much higher in the linguistic production system. Metrical and syllabic phonology have led to the postulation of frames or templates into which contents may be inserted – phonemes or words. The picture is one of empty slots within these templatic frames and the access of the contents to fill those slots. Finally, each element, structure or unit may be may be dissociated from any other. The syllable, itself, is typically considered as an encasement with slots labeled as onset, rime, nucleus and coda and groups of segments placed there as segments in production. It is stressed that syllables themselves are not subject to productive sequencing in the way their contents are. Levelt, et al. (1999) constructs both phonological/syllabic frames and metrical frames. There has been a long-standing article of faith held by many psycholinguists, which claims that when phonemes move in linear ordering errors they move from and to the same syllabic constituent slots: onsets move to onset positions, nuclei move to nuclei positions and codas move to coda positions. This has been variously called “the syllable constraint condition.” For Levelt, this constraint is overly lopsided in that according to his numbers 80% English language slips of the tongue involve syllable onsets, but these are crucially word onsets as well. According to Levelt’s numbers, slips not involving word onsets, “…are too rare to be analyzed for adherence to a positional constraint” (p. 21). He rules out the positional constraint for the nucleus to nucleus observation, claiming that phonotactics are at work here, since a vowel Æ consonant will not likely result in a pronounceable string. In addition, Levelt feels that vowels and coda consonants operate under more tighter controls whereby, “…segments interact with similar segments.” Phonologists have observed that for many languages, there are often far fewer coda consonants than onset consonants –

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especially true for a language like Spanish. The number of vowels in a language is always smaller than the total number of consonants. In any event, there is ample evidence (also see Shattuck-Hufnagel, 1987) that onsets are much less “tied” to the syllable than are codas. The coda is a sister node of the nucleus, both dominated by the rime, and as such codas are much more tightly “glued” to the vowel of the syllable. Further support for a qualitatively different status for word onsets, is that they are significantly more involved in the phonemic carryover errors in recurrent perseveration (e.g. Buckingham and Christman, 2004). Two new notions of the nature of segmental targets have been introduced recently. On is seen in Square (1997) with her “movement formulae.” These are stored in posterior left temporo-parietal cortex and seem very much like the centuries old memories of articulatory procedures of Jean-Baptiste Bouillaud (1825). Targets are now understood by some as idealized gestures for sound production and that voluntary speech would involve the access of these stored gestural engrams for articulation. Both of these conjure up theories of embodiment and both are forms of representative memory (see Glenberg, 1997, for a cogent treatment of memory and embodiment). Goldman, et al. (2001) have analyzed the effect of the phonetic surround in the production of phonemic paraphasias in the spontaneous speech of a Wernicke’s aphasic. Through the use of a powerful statistic, the authors were able to control for “chance” occurrence of a “copy” of the error phoneme either in the past context or in the future context. The idea was that there could be a context effect that caused the phonemic paraphasia to occur. Chance baselines were established, and it was found that relative to this baseline, the “error-source” distances were shorter than expected for anticipatory transpositions but not for perseverative transpositions. That could be taken to mean that anticipatory errors are more indicative of an aphasia than perseveratory errors in that this patient seemed more unable to inhibit a copy of an element in line to be produced a few milliseconds ahead. Thus, this could be taken to support the claim that anticipatory bias in phonemic paraphasia correlates with severity. The authors also observed that many but not all anticipatory errors involved word onsets – mentioned earlier in this review as vulnerable to movement or substitution. The much larger distances between “error and source” for perseverations could have been due to slower decay rates of activated units whereby they return to their “resting states.” The patient’s anterior/perseveration ratios measured intermediate between a non-aphasic er-

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ror corpus and that of a more severe aphasic speaker. One troubling aspect of this study was that a “source” was counted in the context whether or not it shared the same word or syllable position as the error. This may represent a slight stumbling block in interpreting the findings, since, Levelt notwithstanding, it would imply that syllable position had no necessary effect. The authors, however, presented their findings with caution, especially so because some recent work (Martin and Dell, 2004) has demonstrated a strong correlation between anticipatory errors and normality vs. perseveratory errors and abnormality. It is a long noted fact that slips-ofthe-tongue in normals have far more anticipatory slips than perseverative. Perseveration is furthermore felt by many to be indicative of brain damage. Martin and Dell (2004) set up an “anticipation ratio” which is obviously higher in normality through slips. They also find that more severe aphasics produce more perseverative paraphasias than anticipations, but that the ratio increases throughout recovery such that in the later stages of recovery patients produce less and less perseverations as opposed to anticipations – the anticipatory effect grows as the patients approach normality. On the logic that the improving aphasic should move in the direction of the normal, the anticipatory ration should increase. It may very well turn out that the anticipatory error will ultimately serve as a metric to measure recovery over time in aphasia. Recovery from the production of neologisms The question may be, and has been, asked: Neologisms: From whence? From the beginning, it was simply thought that they stemmed from a complex array of literal or phonemic paraphasias. That is, it had originally been taken as an of article of faith that neologisms originated from words that had been phonemically transformed to the extent that any transparency between error and target word was obliterated. There has never been any doubt that this account is not a logical one, especially given the prevalence of phonemic paraphasia in fluent aphasia. Since the days of Wernicke (1874), M. Allen Starr (1889), the late XIX century linguists, through Arnold Pick (1931/1973) and up to the present (see Buckingham, 1989) error typologies have included: anticipatory errors, perseverative errors, exchanges, and substitutions of phonemes – in both normals (slips-of-thetongue) and aphasics. The phonemic paraphasia theory of neology was dubbed by Buckingham (1977) as “the conduction theory,” since conduction aphasics are marked by their phonemic paraphasias. This was the theory implied in the Boston Aphasia Exam and specifically invoked in

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Kertesz and Benson (1970) for the neologism. Note very importantly that this account for the production of neologisms implies, if it does not say so outright, that the problem is not with the retrieval of the word but rather with the phonological realization of that word. For this theory to go through, the target word would presumably have to have been retrieved from the lexicon, because it must serve as the input to the component that transforms it. Another possible account of neologisms would be to claim that straight away the patient had a word block whereby no target word would be forthcoming, and that despite that, the patient continued talking or stopped responding. The question then becomes, how in this circumstance could the patient produce what would then be a surrogate for or a “masker” of the unaccessed word. By what aspects of phonetic production could the speaker produce the surrogate. The issue was introduced in modern neurolinguistic studies in Alajouinine (1956/1972), Kertesz and Benson (1970), (Buckingham and Kertesz, 1976), and Butterworth (1979). Butterworth called this second account of neology “the anomia theory,” and suggested the metaphor of a “random generator” as a principle device that could produce a phonetic form in light of retrieval failure. Butterworth had studied with Freida Goldmann-Eisler (1968), who had analyzed large stretches of spontaneous speech and had looked closely at the on going lexical selection processes on-line. She had noted time delays before the production of nouns of high information (i.e. low redundancy) in the speech of normals. Time delays for her indicated the action of word search, and that search would obviously be a bit more automatic and fast to the extent that the word sought was highly redundant – therefore carrying less information. Butterworth very cleverly extended his mentor’s methods to the analysis of neologistic jargon stretches of spontaneous speech in Wernicke’s aphasia. What he found was extremely interesting. Before neologisms that were totally opaque as to any possible target (subsequently termed “abstruse” neologisms by A. R. Lecours (1982)), Butterworth noted clear delays of up to 400 msec before their production. Crucially, he did not notice this delay before phonemic paraphasias, where targets could nevertheless be clearly discerned, nor before semantic substitutions, related to the target. This indicated failed retrieval for Butterworth and he went on to suggest that perseverative processes and nonce word production capabilities could play a role in this “random generator.” It was “random” for Butterworth, since his analysis of the actual phonemic makeup of neologisms did not follow the typically patterns of phoneme

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frequency in English. He never implied that “random” meant helter skelter; he knew enough about phonotactic constraints in aphasic speech. Neither did he imply that the patient actually, with premeditated intentionality, produced the surrogate. The whole issue was subsequently treated in Buckingham (1981, 1985, 1990). Each of these accounts of neology makes different predictions concerning recovery. The conduction theory predicts that as the patient recovers, target words will slowly but surely begin to reappear. Paraphasic infiltration will lessen throughout the months and ultimately the word forms will be less and less opaque. In the endstage of recovery, there should be no anomia. The theory also predicts that the error distributions in the acute stage will reveal some errors with mild phonemic transformation, others with more, others with a bit more, etc., up to the completely opaque ones, i.e. a non-bi-modal distribution. The anomia theory, on the other hand, predicts a bi-modal distribution with neologisms on one end and more or less simple phonemic paraphasia on the other - few in the middle that were more severe but not enough to render word recognizability opaque. The anomia theory predicts that during recovery patients with that underlying problem will generally show fewer and fewer neologisms, gaining better monitoring capacity to take note of the neologisms, perhaps ultimately holding back the surrogate productions as a mark of improvement in the aphasia. It is also highly likely that as the patient improves, the perseverations will lessen (e.g., Martin and Dell, 2004). What is clearly predicted at the endstage however is that the anomia may very well remain, but now with more stammering, pausing, halting. This, then, would be more in the line with what a normal speaker might do when faced with word finding difficulties. Unhampered with additional sequalae, this is more or less what the “pure” anomic will do. These predictions remained untested in the clinic until Kohn & Smith (1994) and Kohn et al. (1996). Essentially, and more specifically in 1996, Kohn and colleagues observed and described patients who in the acute stages of their aphasia produced neologisms. One group recovered to mild phonemic paraphasia with no noted anomia, while the other group no longer produced neologisms in the later recovery stages, but nevertheless was left with the word retrieval blocks. This patient, when producing the neology initially, appeared to Kohn and colleagues (1996, p. 132) to be invoking some kind of, “…backup mechanism for ‘reconstructing’ a phonological representation when either partial or no stored phonological information about a word is made available to the production system.”

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Most connectionists have an easier time with the conduction theory of neologisms and in general only provide this one account of their generation. They generally weaken in varying degrees the connection strengths between the lexical and the phoneme levels in their models, while keeping decay rates at normal levels. They can thus quite easily simulate a gamut of phonemic errors (and also they can simulate segmental slips-of-thetongue), the more severe bordering on the opaque. Their paradox, however, would be that the simple paraphasias would not render target words opaque and thus inter-level transparency would be maintained between word and phoneme. On the other hand with a bit more connection weight reduction, opaque forms may begin to be produced, and to the extent they are opaque, inter-level transparency will disappear. Connectionists often make the claim that inter-level transparency reveals qualitatively different kinds of errors – or even different kinds of patients. Some have called errors that do not show between- level communication “stupid,” while those that nevertheless reveal inter-level connectivity have been called “smart.” Note that both kinds of patients in Kohn and colleagues study would start out with “stupid” errors. Neologisms have no transparency concerning some target. But, by the anomia account, the errors would remain “stupid” even into recovery, as long as the anomia was there – unless some semantically related errors began to appear; some probably did. On the other hand, by the conduction account, the errors would start off “stupid” but end up “smart.” Connectionists will have to tell us whether this scenario is a puzzle for them or not. Again, most connectionist modelers opt for the conduction theory of neologisms (e.g. Gagnon and Schwartz, 1996; Hillis, et al. 1999). As an example of the conduction theory for neologisms in connectionist modeling, Hillis, et al. (1999, p. 1820) write, “This proposal would account for her phonemic paraphasias (when few nontarget subword units are activated) and neologisms (when many nontarget subword units are activated).” That is to say, few phonemic errors result in simple paraphasia – where the target is not rendered opaque, while many phonemic errors result in a neologism – where the target is, indeed, rendered opaque. The problem of the neologism, however, is still with us, and especially so if we do not admit of at least two error routes. Conclusions We have considered a vast array of findings on sub-lexical linguistic elements, their brain locations and tight sensory-motor links. We have claimed that many new imaging studies have vindicated several earlier

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theories laid down long before the modern technology before us in the neurosciences. We have seen the motor-sensory interface in the functional linguistic descriptions of phoneme level production and perception. There has been a spate of new studies with highly sophisticated imaging and computer technology that has sharpened our understanding at somewhat closer levels, but nonetheless has vindicated much previous thinking – back to the Haskins Labs’ motor theory of speech perception and even further back to the classic aphasia models of the late 19th Century. The focus upon the peri-sylvian region in the left hemisphere has not changed, and in fact there is even more growing interest in charting the anatomy and function of the arcuate fasciculus, the opercular regions and the insula. At a slight remove from the physical system, we have discussed and compared various new findings and principles in the phonetics and phonology of segments, syllables, and meter and how they impact on sublexical processing in aphasia. Finally we considered the enigma of the neologism and provided evidence that there are at least two quite reasonable accounts of how they may be produced and under what conditions they may appear. This led to a consideration of how recovery from neology may take different paths as patients gain increased control of their language. Many questions remain. References Alajouanine, T. (1956). Verbal realization in aphasia. Brain, 79, 1-28. Bouillaud, J. B. (1825). Recherches cliniques propes a demontrer que la perte de la parole corresponds a la lesion des lobales anterieures du cerveau, et a confirmer l’opinion de M. Gall, sur le siege de l’organe du langage articule. Archives Généraux de la Médicine, 8, 25-45. Buckingham, H. W. (1977). The conduction theory and neologistic jargon. Language and Speech, 20, 174-184. Buckingham, H. W. (1981). Where do neologisms come from? In J.W. Brown (ed.), Jargonaphasia (39-62). New York: Academic Press. Buckingham, H. W. (1985). Perseveration in aphasia. In S. Newman & R. Epstein (eds.), Current perspectives in dysphasia (113-154). Edinburgh: Churchill Livingstone. Buckingham, H. W. (1989). Phonological paraphasia. In Code, C. (ed.) The characteristics of aphasia (89-110). London: Taylor & Francis. Buckingham, H. W. (1990). Abstruse neologisms, retrieval deficits and the random generator. Journal of Neurolinguistics, 5, 215-235. Buckingham, H. W. & Christman, S. S. (2004). Phonemic carryover perseveration: Word blends. Seminars in Speech and Language, 25, 363-373.

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Buckingham, H. W. & Kertesz, A. (1976). Neologistic jargonaphasia. Amsterdam:Swets & Zeitlinger. Buckingham, H. W. & Yule, G. (1987). Phonemic false evaluation: Theoretical and clinical aspects. Clinical Linguistics and Phonetics, 1, 113-125. Butterworth, B. (1979). Hesitation and the production of verbal paraphasias and neologisms in jargon aphasia. Brain and Language, 18, 133-161. Christman, S. S. (1992). Abstruse neologism formation: Parallel processing revisited. Clinical Linguistics and Phonetics, 6, 65-76. Christman, S. S. (1994). Target-related neologism formation in jargon aphasia. Brain and Language, 46, 109-128. Clements, G. N. (1990). The role of the sonority cycle in core syllabification. In J. Kingston & M. E. Beckman (eds), Papers in laboratory phonology I: Between the grammar and the physics of speech (283-333). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Foundas, A. L., Eure, K. F., Luevano, L. F. & Weinberger, D. R. (1998). MRI asymmetries of Broca’s area: The pars triangularis and pars opercularis. Brain and Language, 64, 282-296. Gagnon, D. & Schwartz, M. F. (1996). The origins of neologisms in picture naming by fluent aphasics. Brain and Cognition, 32, 118-120. Gandour, J., Wong, D., Hsieh, L., Weinzapfel, B., Van Lancker, D. & Hutchins, G. D. (2000). A cross-linguistic PET study of tone perception. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 12, 207-222. Glenberg, A. M. (1997). What memory is for. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 20, 155. Goldmann, R. E., Schwartz, M. F. & Wilshire, C. E. (2001). The influence of phonological context in the sound errors of a speaker with Wernicke’s aphasia. Brain and Language, 78, 279-307. Goldman-Eisler, F. (1968). Psycholinguistics: Experiments in spontaneous speech. London: Academic Press. Goodglass, H. (1978). Selected papers in neurolinguistics. Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag. Hartley, D. (1749). Observations on man: His frame, his duty and his expectations. Reprinted in Delmar, NY: Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints, 1976. Hickok, G. (2000). Speech perception, conduction aphasia, and the functional neuroanatomy of language. In Y. Grodzinsky, L.P. Shapiro & D. Swinney (eds.), Language and the brain: Representation and processing. Multidisciplinary studies presented to Edgar Zurif on his 60th birthday (87-104). San Diego: Academic Press.

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Hillis, A., Boatman, D., Hart, J. & Gordon, B. (1999). Making sense out of jargon: A neurolinguistic and computational account of jargon aphasia. Neurology, 53, 1813-1824. Hsieh, L., Gandour, J., Wong, D. & Hutchins, G. (2001). Functional heterogeneity of inferior frontal gyrus is shaped by linguistic experience. Brain and Language, 76, 227-252. Hughlings-Jackson, J. (1866). Notes on the physiology and pathology of language: Remarks on those cases of disease of the nervous system, in which defect of expression is the most striking symptom. Medical Times and Gazette 1. Reprinted in Brain 38. Also, in J. Taylor (ed.), (1958). Selected writings of John HughlingsJackson, Vol. II. London: Hodder & Stoughton. Kertesz, A. & Benson, D. F. (1970). Neologistic jargon: A clinicopathological study. Cortex, 6, 362-386. Kimura, D. (1982). Left-hemisphere control of oral and brachial movements and their relation to communication. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, B298, 135-149. Kohn, S. & Smith, K. (1994). Distinctions between two phonological output disorders. Applied Psycholinguistics, 15, 75-95. Kohn, S., Smith, K. & Alexander, M. (1996). Differential recovery from impairment to the phonological lexicon. Brain and Language, 52, 129-149. Lecours, A. R. (1982). On neologisms. In J. Mehler, E. Walker & M. Garrett (eds.), Perspectives on mental representation: Experimental and theoretical studies of cognitive processes and capacities (217-247). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. Levelt, W. J. M., Roelofs, A. & Meyer, A. S. (1999). A theory of lexical access in speech production. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 22, 1-75. Liepmann, H. (1905). Die linke Hemisphare und das Handeln. Munchener Medizinische Wochenschrift 49, 2322-2326, 2375-2378. Translated into English by Doreen Kimura in Translations from Liepmann’s essays on apraxia. Research Bulletin #506. London, Ontario: Dept. of Psychology, University of Western Ontario. May 1980. Martin, N. & Dell, G. (2004). Perseverations and anticipations in aphasia: Primed intrusions from the past and future. Seminars in Speech and Language, 25, 349362. Nickels, L. & Howard, D. (2004). Dissociating effects of number of phonemes, number of syllables, and syllabic complexity on word production in aphasia: It’s the number of phonemes that counts. Cognitive Neuropsychology, 21, 57-78. Ohala, J. (1990). There is no interface between phonology and phonetics: A personal view. Journal of Phonetics, 18, 153-171. Ohala, J. (1992). Alternatives to the sonority hierarchy for explaining segmental sequential constraints. In M. Ziolkowski, M. Noske & K. Deaton (eds.), Papers

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from the 26th Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society. Vol. 2. The parasession on the syllable in phonetics and phonology (319-338). Chicago: Chicago Linguistic Society. Pick, A. (1931) Aphasia. In Handbuch der normalen und pathologischen 15. Heidelberg: Springer-Verlag. Translated into English and edited by Jason W. Brown (1973). Aphasia. Springfield, Illinois, USA: Charles C. Thomas. Romani, C. & Calabrese, A. (1998). Syllable constraints on the phonological errors of an aphasic patient. Brain and Language, 64, 83-121. Romani, C., Olson, A., Semenza, C. & Grana, A. (2002). Patterns of phonological errors as a function of a phonological versus an articulatory locus of impairment. Cortex, 38, 541-567. Starr, M. Allen (1889). The pathology of sensory aphasia, with an analysis of fifty cases in which Broca’s center was not diseased. Brain, 12, 82-102. Shattuck-Hufnagel, S. (1987). The role of word-onset consonants in speech production planning: New evidence from speech error patterns. In E. Keller & M. Gopnik (eds.), Motor and sensory processes of language (17-51). Hillsdale, New Jersey, USA: Erlbaum. Square, P. A., Roy, E. A. & Martin, R. E. (1997). Apraxia of speech: Another form of praxis disruption. In L. J. G. Rothi & K. M. Heilman (eds.), Apraxia: The neuropsychology of action (173-206). Hove: East Sussex, UK: Psychology Press. Uttal, W. R. (2001). The new phrenology: The limits of localizing cognitive processes in the brain. Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA: MIT Press. Wernicke, K. (1874). The aphasia symptom complex: A psychological study on an anatomic basis. Breslau: Cohn & Weigert. Translated into English by Gertrude H. Eggert (1977). Wernicke’s works on aphasia: A sourcebook and review (91145). The Hague: Mouton.

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Chapter 5 The scope of relevance of process thought JOHN B. COBB, JR. Claremont School of Theology, Claremont, California I was attracted to process thought in my student days at the University of Chicago. I encountered it in both the philosophy department and the Divinity School. A brief account of the latter will help to explain what formed me. The Chicago Divinity School was closely connected with the “sociohistorical method” from the end of the nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth, and its influence lingered on after World War II when I attended it as a veteran. It was understood that the way people thought and constructed their worlds was shaped by their life experience in society. So the history of religions was seen as closely bound up with the development of cultures. Christianity was viewed as a socio-historical movement initiated by the Jewish rabbi, Jesus. Its task was to reinterpret the meaning of his life and teaching in changing cultural circumstances. Influential professors, such as Shailer Mathews and Shirley Jackson Case, wrote much about the “social process.” They were deeply involved with the “social gospel” that played an important role in Protestant churches during the period. In the twentieth century the two dominant factors in terms of which the meaning of Jesus for our time should be reinterpreted were often said to be democracy and science. However, the prevalence of the word “process” in their rhetoric, and even in the titles of their books did not identify a metaphysical position or refer to the world studies by science. It referred almost exclusively to history. During the early twentieth century, their interest in science led to special attention to the new developments there. These justified speaking of a “new naturalism.” We understood that the old naturalism was reductionistic, deterministic, mechanistic, and materialistic. It was harshly inhospitable to religious, or even humanistic, concerns. The new naturalism, on the contrary, recognized that nature is far richer than had been supposed. Since human beings have been shown by evolutionary theory to be part of nature, nature must be understood as including the qualities that characterize human experience.

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The emphasis in the Divinity School was on a “radical empirical” approach. Whereas traditional empiricism dealt only with sense experience and its data, radical empiricism dealt with every aspect of experience: memory, anticipation, evaluation, emotion, thought, decision, compassion, and concern were understood to be just as real as sense experience and its data. They all belonged together, and in this rich mix one could locate a religious dimension and find meaning in life. The theological faculty looked for the writings of scientists and philosophers who could help them develop this style of thinking. They were attracted by some of the early writings of Alfred North Whitehead, such as The Concept of Nature. When Whitehead lectured specifically on religion and published his lectures as Religion in the Making, they were keenly interested. But the metaphysical elements in the book and the personalistic language about God puzzled them. They invited Henry Nelson Wieman to help them understand the book, and Wieman subsequently joined the faculty. As far as possible he interpreted Whitehead in an empiricist direction, and later, when he fully realized the centrality of metaphysical thinking for Whitehead, he turned against him. But Whitehead, understood as a radical empiricist advocate of the new naturalism was a dominant influence in the Divinity School when I attended. In the philosophy department views of this kind were rare, but one professor had worked closely with Whitehead at Harvard. He was Charles Hartshorne. Hartshorne highlighted just the rationalistic and metaphysical side of Whitehead that was downplayed in the Divinity School. He had developed these interests long before he encountered Whitehead, and he found in Whitehead’s conceptuality a way to expound more fully and rigorously the beliefs to which he had come. I and other students who studied with him often had difficulty distinguishing between the views of the two philosophers, although today the differences are quite clear. I now have much appreciation for the points of view developed in the Divinity School, but at the time it was Hartshorne who spoke more directly to my questions. My encounter with the dominant forms of modern thought was having a highly negative effect on my self understanding as a human being and as a Christian. In my classes with Charles Hartshorne I found a way of thinking that seemed deeper and truer than the reductionism and dualism so characteristic of the modern world and also far more open to what were for me the realities of personal experience. Hartshorne sometimes called his position “neo-classical.” He believed that much traditional theological thought could be supported if it were

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transposed onto a new metaphysics. However, this also required polemic against traditional teaching. So far as I was concerned, he expounded his metaphysics convincingly. Although what I got in courses from Hartshorne was very different from what I got in my classes in the Divinity School, their common connection with Whitehead gave them a measure of coherence. I became convinced that Whitehead’s own philosophy was richer and deeper than either of the extrapolations to which I was exposed. I began my career, thus, with the conviction that Whitehead’ philosophy could ground a transformed Christian faith. A central role for me as a professional theologian was to show that much of that faith could make sense today if it were freed from supernaturalistic and historically inaccurate accretions, as well as its integration with outgrown philosophies. This required also arguing against the dominant philosophies, which excluded almost by definition the questions of meaning and truth and value that are so central to Christianity as well as denying any reality to God. Just by itself, that was a large task. However, from the first the “religion” about which I was concerned had a wider meaning. The broad sense of religion has to do with “binding together.” A religious understanding is one that sees all things in their interconnection. It is destroyed by the fragmentation of thought into selfcontained departments or disciplines. “Religion” as one segmented and separated aspect of life is no longer genuine religion. Thus the dominant forms of modern thought and the very structure of the university were antireligious. The philosophy I learned from Hartshorne offered a vision of an interconnected world that could be truly understood only through a system of thought that was uniting rather than fragmenting. The possibility of developing this unifying understanding has been as central to my life work as my narrower theological commitments. Indeed, the two are for me inseparable. There can be no healthy Christianity that is not interconnected with everything else. There can be no truly unifying vision that does not contain history with all its struggle for religious insight and human meaning. In the years after I left Chicago, I discovered that I was a “process” theologian. The labels “neo-naturalism” and “neo-classical” both faded, and “process” took their place. I had no objection. Accordingly, when Lewis Ford and I founded a journal for this kind of thinking in 1970, we called it Process Studies. In the first issue we announced that it had a double purpose. First, it would provide a place for philosophers and theologians in this tradition to publish and interact. Second, it would invite thinkers in many fields and those concerned with the issues of the day to test the

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usefulness of process conceptuality. The journal has been more successful in fulfilling the first purpose than the second, although we have made sure that the latter was not left out. In 1973 David Griffin and I organized the Center for Process Studies in connection with the Claremont School of Theology. The Center aimed to build a scholarly library and invite scholars to make use of it. But its primary purpose was the one that the journal was failing to realize. We believed that process thought, especially in the form given it in the philosophy of Whitehead, had enormous potential for reforming both individual disciplines and the university as a whole. In the late sixties we had been awakened to the ecological crisis, and we believed then (as we do now) that the fragmentation of thought along with the dominant worldviews expressed in most of the academic disciplines bore considerable responsibility. Even more important, they hindered wise responses to this crisis, and to the globally growing economic and social crises as well. We saw that very little of this potential of Whitehead’s thought had been actualized. We knew that we were not in position to do much about this, but we hoped that we could keep these possibilities alive and visible for those who shared our concerns and, perhaps, thereby influence a future generation. The Center has sponsored conferences on numerous topics in the natural and social sciences, education, law, religion, philosophy, and the humanities. We are always testing our conviction that Whitehead’s conceptuality can be illuminating. The results have encouraged us to keep trying. Numerous publications have developed directly and indirectly from our work, including the extensive series of volumes in the “SUNY Series in Constructive Postmodernism,” edited by Griffin. We have developed a library of writings that are influenced by process thought. These are found in numerous fields, and the Center has prepared scores of specialized bibliographies for people interested in learning what has been done in particular areas. I have indicated my conviction that Christian theology can benefit in many ways from the use of process conceptuality. This conceptuality is closer to that of the Bible than are the Aristotelian, Platonic, Cartesian, and Kantian conceptualities that have thus far been employed for theological purposes. I have undertaken to show these advantages in many writings. This is not the place to elaborate these narrowly theological questions. Process thought has also proved helpful for dialogue with the nonAbrahamic traditions. It has far more contact with indigenous religions than does the thinking of the Greeks and the modern West. It is remarkably

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similar to classical Chinese thought and, most of all, to Mahayana Buddhism. It makes it possible to formulate the quite different religious visions of diverse traditions in a single conceptuality, showing their complementarity. This, I believe, is an advance over both of the earlier dominant approaches – that of treating differences as contradictions and that of obscuring differences and emphasizing only similarities. I have ventured into other fields chiefly through collaboration with those who specialize in them. My two major forays of this sort were into biology and economics. With the Australian ecologist, Charles Birch, I wrote The Liberation of Life, proposing that life can be understood better in process terms than in the mechanistic ones that have dominated the field. We understand ecological thinking to be congruent with process thought, although the interrelatedness for which it argues is sometimes presented only in terms of external relations. To empower ecological thought to overthrow the substantialist-materialist assumptions that shape most formulations in biology requires the understanding and articulation of Whitehead’s doctrine of “prehensions” or internal relations. A reformulation of the understanding of life based on this conceptuality also has different consequences for ethics and public policy. With the American economist, Herman Daly, I wrote For the Common Good. We argued in detail that economic theory is based on erroneous views of human beings and the natural world and that from these views destructive consequences follow. We proposed alternative views based on process thought and presented numerous suggestions of the kinds of policies that are more appropriate to these more accurate assumptions. Of course, what we there offered was little more than a prolegomenon to a new economics. In relation to economics as to biology, we undertook to show that the distortions at the root of current theory stem from metaphysical commitments. Homo economicus is viewed as a substance with only external relations to others. This leads to an extreme individualism. Economic theory has no place for community. It is not surprising, therefore, the application of economic theory consistently destroys human communities. It can conceive of improving the situation only by increasing individual consumption. Similarly the natural world appears in economic theory only under the heading of resources, and these are given short shrift. Accordingly, it is not surprising that the application of economic theory leads everywhere to the degradation of the natural world.

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Based on our understanding of reality, derived from such process thinkers as Whitehead, we proposed that we should view individuals as persons-in-community. We are what we are largely according to the communities in which we live. The health of the community contributes to our well being. Accordingly, community development is far more beneficial than community-destroying development. Further, we should either extend the notion of community to include the natural environment or affirm in some other way the intimate interconnection of people with the land in which they live. Regenerative development benefits people far more than that which degrades the environment. I need hardly say that the guilds of biologists and economists have not switched to process thinking as a result of these books! I suspect that few members of these guilds communities have even heard of them. Deeply entrenched habits continue to control what happens in these disciplines. The consequences continue to be destructive. This is discouraging, but it may not mean that these efforts are useless. They do make some difference. The respective fates of Birch and Daly are of some interest. The work of Charles Birch as a biologist has been little affected by his process views, and his fellow biologists tend to humor him with respect to philosophical and theological matters. He has, therefore, retained his standing in the scientific community. This has strengthened his role among those who care about the relation of science and religion. His contributions to that discussion have been rewarded by a Templeton Prize. There are other indications that process thought is playing a significant role in that field. . Herman Daly, on the other hand, has paid a high price within the guild for his nonstandard views. Much of economic theory is shaped by the assumption that the healthy economy is one that grows. He challenged the desirability of focusing efforts on growth when the physical context is finite and already severely stressed by the quantity of economic activity. In churchly language, this led to his being “excommunicated” from the economic guild. That is, he is not recognized as an economist by members of the guild, and his work as a whole is systematically ignored. To whatever extent his career has been dependent on acceptance by other economists, he has been blocked. Fortunately, there are other communities in which he is appreciated. These include the ecological and religious communities. Those who resist the current global economic regime also often look to him for guidance and

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leadership. An International Society for Ecological Economics has come into being, and some of its members have described our book as its “Bible.” Daly has received the Heineken Prize and recognition by the Nobel committee through the “right livelihood” award, although certainly not the Nobel Prize in economics! I cite these events to indicate both the failure and the success of efforts to reform the sciences through process thought. The effort has thus far failed, in that there is little interest in such change within the established disciplines. However, from those who are interested in dealing with public problems such as those connected with tensions between the religious and scientific communities or between economic and ecological concerns, there has been some positive response. In general the positive response has been by particular groups to the elements in the project most relevant to them. There has been little response to the broader goal of challenging the fragmented structure of received thought in general and reconstituting it as a coherent whole based on process concepts. Nevertheless, there is now some response to that as well. Building up of a large body of literature showing that this goal is not merely fanciful has been worthwhile. I am glad to have contributed to it. Out of my interest in showing the breadth of implications for change offered by process thought, I have written more briefly on a variety of other topics. These essays are far less scholarly and responsible, but I hope they are suggestive. These topics include science and religion, politics and international affairs, and education. Recently I ventured to discuss sex, gender, and race in process perspective. All of this is background to expressing my delight in having come into contact with the work of Jason Brown. His field of study is quite removed from any that I would ever be able to address. I cannot judge his work as a scientist. But I can judge that he is remarkably perceptive with regard to the philosophical questions related to his scientific work. I rejoice that he has recognized the value of process thinking in his specialized studies. The fact that he came to process thinking through different channels and employs a somewhat different form from that of Whitehead only adds to the interest. Of special importance is the fact that he has been working internally to a scientific community rather than on its fringes. As far as I understand, his views and findings are given credence in that community. In other words, unlike Birch, his process perspective fully informs his science, and unlike Daly, he remains a significant player within the discipline. In the past this

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has been possible in philosophy, theology, and professional fields such as education and management, but it has been more difficult in the social and natural sciences. The possible exception has been physics. In the twentieth century physicists were more open than scientists in other fields to reopen fundamental questions. A number of leading physicists have recognized the congeniality of process thought with new developments in their field. But even in physics systematic employment of process categories has been rare. A particularly interesting case, potential parallel to that of Brown, is that of the Australian physicist, Reginald Cahill. He came to an emphasis on process quite independently of Whitehead, but has come to recognize that Whitehead may be helpful to him. He applied his process approach rigorously to his science and came up with conclusions that are quite revolutionary. Whereas earlier her work was routinely recognized, he has difficulty publishing his more radical conclusions. This indicates that even a physicist may have to pay a considerable price in acceptability to develop a radically processive approach to basic questions. On the other hand, it may be that his current work is not fully responsible or that, if it proves to be good science, his partial “excommunication” will prove temporary. In the latter case, Cahill will join Brown in providing a particularly promising model of what we may hope for in the future in other sciences. Psychology is a vast field with many sub-branches. Before encountering Brown’s work, I had been involved with psychology only in quite different forms. Teaching in a theological seminary, my contacts were especially with pastoral counselors. I was involved with a dissertation that made use of Whitehead’s conceptuality to interpret and advance Gestalt theory. I wrote a little book on pastoral counseling and recently edited a focus section for Process Studies. I have no doubt about the fruitfulness of process thought for the understanding of psychology as it is applied in counseling. We at CPS have long been interested in physiological psychology as it impinged on the mind-body problem. We believe that process thought overcomes this dualism without reducing subjective experience to a function of the physiological situation. We are troubled that so much of the work in this field is reductionistic. Human experience is taken to be epiphenomenal or “supervenient” in relation to the brain. These are technical ways of explaining that human feelings, thoughts, and decisions play no role in determining what happens. We believe this to be contrary to empirical evidence and also highly destructive in its implications. It reflects

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the metaphysics that has been bound up with most scientific development rather than the empirical evidence. Fortunately, in practice, no one lives as if it were true, but we believe it is very unhealthy to teach people that they should hold to beliefs for theoretical reasons that, in practice, they cannot take seriously. Unfortunately, most people still assume that the alternative to denying any role to human experience is a Cartesian dualism. John Eccles, an earlier Noble prize winner in physiological psychology, explicitly adopted dualism on the basis of the evidence. Process thinkers appreciate his honesty and courage in insisting on the full reality of conscious experience, and his effort to affirm interaction between mind and body, but from our perspective dualism is also in conflict with the evidence and with practical life. Its consequences are also negative. We think it is important to understand human experience as one type of event among others, interacting with the others on the same basis that they interact with one another. Some years ago we held a series of conversations with Roger Sperry of the California Institute of Technology. He won a Nobel Prize for his work on the split brain. That work had led him to break with the dominant community of physiological psychologists and to conclude that conscious experience does play a causal role in what happens in the brain. Happily, he did not want to fall back on a dualistic interpretation. Our conversations were fruitful in that he found in process thought a better way of expressing his views. We published his conclusions in Process Studies. But to the best of my knowledge, Sperry’s views have not affected the dominant reductionistic approach of physiological psychology as a discipline. We also worked with Karl Pribram. We found his views congenial for a different reason. Like the philosophical physicist, David Bohm, Pribram found evidence that brain cells do not function in way that one would expect of little lumps of matter. In the occipital lobe, individual cells do not correspond with particular loci in the visual field. On the contrary, each contains dimly and vaguely the whole picture. Like Bohm, he appealed to the model of the hologram. Since Whitehead taught that every occasion is influenced by all past events, however vaguely, the fit is apparent. This point may have had some acceptance and influence in the discipline of physiological psychology, but clearly it has not affected its basic worldview. More recently we held a larger conference on the mind/brain topic. David Griffin was the organizer. He approached this with his usual thor-

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oughness. He wanted to bring together those persons in philosophy and physiological psychology whose writing showed most openness. Our goal was to see whether they would recognize the potential contribution of process thought to their discussion. Griffin thought that an account of the process view should be circulated in advance, and he set out to write it. Again, because of his typical thoroughness, this account ended up being several hundred pages long. This worked against its usefulness for the conference, since the participants did not read it. But Griffin’s account was published by the University of California Press as Unsnarling the World Knot. It is a major contribution to this discussion. But, alas, both the philosophical and the scientific discussions continue much as if the process alternative did not exist. I have long hoped that Europeans would take up the Whiteheadian legacy. This seemed hopeful for two reasons. First, I have the impression that the fragmentation of thought is not as fully and finally accepted on the continent of Europe as in the academy in the English-speaking world. European education still produces persons of broader interest and competence. Second, Europeans tend to be more open to considering fundamental questions and to analyze them with greater rigor. In the past few years, there is a beginning of the fulfillment of this promise. Interest in Whitehead in Europe has grown remarkably, and new types of publications are appearing. They are of a sort that creates more bridges to the existing situation in the relevant disciplines, having, therefore, a greater chance of evoking response there. The possibility of process thought playing a role internal to the disciplines seems greater in Europe than in the United States. Relevant to the present project is Searching for New Contrasts, edited by Franz Riffert and Michel Weber. The subtitle is “Whiteheadian Contributions to Contemporary Challenges in Neurophysiology, Psychology, Psychotherapy and the Philosophy of Mind.” Notable is the fact that the lead essay is by Jason Brown. There is little doubt that he receives a better hearing in Europe than in the United States. For these and other reasons, I appreciate the invitation to contribute, as an outsider to his scientific field, to a volume in his honor.

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Chapter 6 The microgenesis of antisociality: a processrelational perspective MARK GERMINE Psychoscience Mount Shasta, California, USA Concepts are not inductions of facts, but generate facts as realization of value. Jason Brown (2005:524)

Introduction The intention of this paper is to open up a dialogue on the wider implications of microgenesis, particularly as it applies to the process-relational view of intersubjectivity. It seems fitting, in keeping with Jason Brown’s (2005) extension of microgenesis to the problem of social values, to take a look at the microgenesis of defects or deficits in the apprehension of social values, as well as to behavior that violates such values. This brings us squarely to the phenomenon of antisociality. In psychology and psychiatry antisociality is viewed as an aberration of personality that, when meeting certain criteria of psychopathology, warrants the diagnosis of Antisocial Personality Disorder (APD). The individual with APD is termed a sociopath, and the syndrome is referred to as developmental sociopathy or antisociality. Violation of social norms, criminal actions, deceitfulness, impulsivity, aggression, recklessness, disregard of the rights and safety of others, irresponsibility, and lack of remorse are criteria for the diagnosis. To meet the diagnosis the individual must exhibit at least three of these criteria, must be at least 18 years old, and must have exhibited a pervasive disregard and violation of the rights of others since an age of 15 years (American Psychiatric Association, 2000). APD has a prevalence of about 3% in males and about 1% in females, and seems to have a higher prevalence in urban areas and in low socioeconomic groups (American Psychiatric Association, 2000). Adoption studies indicate that both genetic and environmental factors contribute to the de-

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velopment of the disorder, and children of both adopted and biological parents with APD are at increased risk of developing the disorder, with children of biological parents with APD being at greatest risk. Biological relatives of females with the disorder are at higher risk of developing the disorder than relatives of male probands, and biological relatives of both male and female probands are at relatively high risk of developing substance-use disorders (American Psychiatric Association, 2000). Psychopathy is generally considered a subtype of sociopathy characterized by lack conscience and empathy, and manifested by callous disregard of the rights and safety of others and predatory behavior. About one third of individuals with APD can also be considered psychopaths (Blair, 2003). The psychopath may be charming and affable, but generally enters into relationships with the object of manipulation for self gain. In a sense, a psychopath is a pathologically narcissistic sociopath. The constructs of sociopathy and psychopathy, which can be grouped together as antisociality, are sometimes applied in a broader sense than that of psychiatric or mental illness. In the broader sense, the antisocial individual may function quite well in society, often assuming positions of leadership (Babiak and Hare, 2006). Moreover, antisociality may be best viewed in a dimensional rather than a categorical sense, with the frank sociopath being an individual exhibiting a pervasive pattern of behaviors outside of the norms of society, and other members of society exhibiting traits of the disorder. In the latter case, individuals can be categorized under the rubric of Child or Adolescent Antisocial Behavior or Adult Antisocial Behavior (American Psychiatric Association, 2000). Regarding terminology, we must preface our discussion by calling attention to the inconsistent and somewhat subjective uses and constructs of sociopathy and psychopathy in the literature. Where the literature specifically refers to sociopathy or psychopathy, these terms will be used. Elsewhere, the wider term of antisociality will be used. It should be noted that, in standard American nomenclature (American Psychiatry Association, 2000), psychopathy is not recognized as a separate disorder or even as a variant of antisociality. Generally sociopathy is synonymous with antisociality. We will begin our discourse with a discussion of the syndrome of acquired sociopathy, which results from injury of the brain, and which is viewed as a neurological deficit syndrome. The microgeny of this deficit syndrome has, to our knowledge, not been previously elaborated. We will then discuss the microgeny of antisociality in individuals without brain

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damage, which has been termed developmental sociopathy. It is not the purpose of this paper to fully reiterate Jason Brown’s theory of microgenesis, but to elaborate and expand upon it, test its validity, and utilize it to draw some possible conclusions and generate some practical applications. The approach to the subject matter is an exegesis of the microgenetic principle of the deficit symptom of Jason Brown (2005, 2): “A symptom is a piece of preliminary mentation that stands for a phase in the mind of an observer-patient.” In process philosophy, the concept of the deficit symptom was clearly elaborated by Bergson (1919/2003), who held that the symptom is a product of the absence of framework for mental function, bringing about a loss of a transmissive function that involves the human spirit. A similar view regarding the transmissive function of the brain was entertained by William James (1898). While we will not be delving into this area of metapsychology, but neither will we be presupposing a strict mind/brain identity or a substantialist doctrine of morals and values. Jason Brown’s microgenetic theory of mental process involves a theory of time (1996, 3): “Microgenesis is the time-creating pattern of a single instantiation.” Brown’s concept of instantiation involves a reiteration of phylogeny (evolutionary history) and ontogeny (developmental history), or phylo-ontogeny (1996, p. 3): “Phylo-ontogeny describes individual of group patterns that seem to be extended over time. From a microgenetic standpoint, these patterns reflect the reiteration of a single instance of becoming over different (evolutionary, lifespan) durations. Put differently, every organism is in a constant process of becoming that reinstantiates itself over some duration.” There is a parallel here with respect to process philosophy. Whiteheadean process, with respect to the creative advance, has been described by Michel Weber (2006, 202) in a similar way: “The essence of manifestation is an experiential togetherness in which the past, fully determinated, becomes re-enacted, exerting ‘on that occasion’ a causal influence which is efficient as well as emotional, purposive, and valuational. The subjective auto-creation proceeds from an objective allocreation - hence the concept of ‘transcendent creativity.’” One must posit freedom and self-determination if we are to arrive at a true theory of values. The neurobiology and developmental biology of antisocial behavior and values is, in a sense, a challenge to the process concept of valuation to the extent that deficits in moral valuation and action are viewed as determined and therefore not free. In this paper we hope to meet this challenge by introducing intersubjectivity into the equation. The person is defined, in a process sense, as an organism that develops through

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a set of relations, primarily with other people and the wider society. There is freedom of becoming, not only in personal choices, but in the way we chose to order our societies. Justice serves, in a Kantian sense, not as a system aimed at punishing the transgressions of valuation by the individual, but as a way of preserving the moral balance of the wider society. The value of justice and morals also involves aesthetics, in that what is true or correct has a beauty that makes it appealing. Although we will be making little direct reference to the philosophical principles of process theory, we do hope to apply some of these principles to the subject matter, particularly as they apply to intersubjectivity. There are many parallels here to the work of Alfred North Whitehead, Henri Bergson, and William James. The philosophy of social relations, as it relates to microgenesis, has been discussed in detail by Jason Brown (2005). This article, fundamentally, is a recursion from this philosophy of social relations to its foundations in neuropsychology and neurobiology. In the spirit of process theory, we also hope to extend the meaning of the symptom into the arena of the maladies and dysfunctions of social systems. Orbitofrontal acquired sociopathy The syndrome of acquired sociopathy is extremely important to the area of social neurobiology. The syndrome can be seen from a substantialist perspective, as it has been treated, to my knowledge, in all of the neurobiological literature. It involves damage to the substance of the brain, particularly the orbitofrontal cortex, and seems to be accompanied by a loss of social feeling, morals, and values. We will first frame the syndrome as it has been framed in the literature, and then reframe it from a microgenetic and process-relational perspective. Aggression has deep seated roots in our evolutionary history. The human brain is built upon the animal brain, and it is a principle of microgenesis that earlier stages in the evolution or phylogeny of the brain are part of a sequence that recapitulates within the discontinuous becoming of each mental state. When the more recent evolutionary structures or phases of microgeny are lost or impaired, the underlying evolutionary phase is expressed. This is a basic principle of microgeny of the symptom (Brown, 1988; 1991; 1996; 2005). In the higher order, social sense, emotional regulation is thought to critically involve the orbitofrontal cortex of the brain (Knight, 2002). Bilaterally damage to the orbitofrontal cortex occurs commonly as a result of closed head trauma. Patients with bilateral orbitofrontal damage have defi-

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cits in social behavior, often exhibiting what is called the “acquired sociopathy syndrome.” Children with early bilateral orbitofrontal damage exhibit deficits in learning and conforming to social norms, and commonly exhibit features of psychopathy (Knight, 2002). Kringelbach and Rolls (2004) reported on two cases of damage to the orbitofrontal cortices very early in life. They exhibited recklessness and life-long antisocial behaviors that were poorly-responsive to corrective measures. They reportedly showed a complete lack of knowledge with regard to moral conventions. The authors contrasted the childhood-onset syndrome with the adult-onset syndrome, noting that individuals with adult orbitofrontal damage retained knowledge of moral and society conventions, but often acted as if they did not. The authors concluded that (352): “The implication would seem to be that the orbitofrontal cortex is necessary for the development of personal moral-based knowledge based on the processing of rewards and punishments.” In another cohort of patients with orbitofrontal damage, Kringlebach (2005) reported problems making decisions, social inappropriateness, lack of emotional expression or affect, and irresponsibility. He opined that that the orbitofrontal cortex is the best candidate for linking reward to hedonic experience, and that hedonic experience may be the core of our humanity. He linked the association of the orbitofrontal cortex with hedonic experience on the basis of neuroimaging studies showing the activation of the region in the presence of reinforcers such as reward value and the expectation of reward value. These reinforcers include concrete rewards such as the pleasantness of taste, odor, and texture of foods, as well as for more abstract rewards such as social approval and the pleasantness of music. Learning, processing, and memory of hedonic reinforcers in the orbitofrontal cortex were proposed, leading one to seek these reinforcers. The hedonic functions of the orbitofrontal cortex were proposed to provide an important mechanism for subjective experience (Kringelbach, 2005). A well documented case of acquired sociopathy due to excision of an orbitofrontal meningioma was reviewed by Blair and Cipolotti (2000). Prior to surgery, the subject was happily married and successful professionally. He was later divorced twice, and became involved with illadvised business ventures, leading to his bankruptcy. This particular case led to the coining of the term “acquired sociopathy,” features of which included reckless disregard for the safety of others, lack of remorse, and faulty planning. This led to a general theory of involvement of the orbitofrontal cortex in antisociality.

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Blair (2001), after a careful examination of case histories and findings regarding the syndrome of orbitofrontal acquired sociopathy, identified a number of cognitive factors which involved the misinterpretation of social cues and social situations as threatening or frustrating, with impairment of social response reversal, leading to an autonomic reaction, followed by reactive aggression. This reactive aggression, Blair (2001) proposed, was related to the inappropriate autonomic response and the consequent somatic arousal. Moreover, he did not find similar misinterpretations and autonomic arousal in individuals with developmental antisociality. Frontotemporal dementia frequently damages the orbitofrontal cortex, and has been noted to be associated with an acquired sociopathy syndrome. In a study of 22 patients with frontotemporal dementia and antisocial behaviors, relative to 76 age- matched normal controls, correlation of regional blood flow in the cerebral cortex showed an association of antisocial behaviors among the demented patients with reduced blood flow to the orbitofrontal cortex (Nakano et al., 2006). This was interpreted as indicating that damage to the orbitofrontal cortex results in the antisocial behaviors among these patients. The microgeny of acquired sociopathy The syndrome of acquired sociopathy must be contextualized with respect to pre-morbid function, development and personality, history of social relations, current social milieu, and changes in social milieu. As has been discussed in detail be Kurt Goldstein (1996), one must always look at the organism and its environment. Severe brain damage is a catastrophic event, and there are a variety of ways that an individual has of coping with such an event. As Whitehead noted (1929/1978, 119): “The enduring personality is the historic route of living occasions which are severally dominant in the body at successive instants.” A severe brain injury profoundly alters this route of occasions. The vast nexus that is the organism is profoundly disturbed, and the reaction can be catastrophic (Goldstein, 1996). As stated by Brown (2005; 669): “…personal existence comes to an end when the replication of personality ceases, or the self is replaced by one that is quite different. We see this in coma, severe brain damage, addiction, and other altered states…Annihilation requires a cessation of the near self-identical recurrence of personality.” In the schema of a relational metaphysics and a relational personality theory, there is much more to a brain injury than can be localized in any one area of the brain.

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What seems to be clear from our narrative is that the orbitofrontal syndrome is heterogeneous. Moreover, there is likely to be a tendency to report cases of dramatic changes in social behavior due to orbitofrontal damage, and there may be many cases of less dramatic and qualitatively different presentations which have been unreported. In the published reports, reactive aggression is a frequent feature. The aggression seems to be fear-based, in keeping with Goldstein’s (1996) description of the catastrophic reaction in brain injury cases. The aggression is typically impulsive, and is not generally instrumental or predatory, as it often is in developmental antisociality. Acquired sociopathy does, however, have many of the features meeting criteria for Antisocial Personality Disorder. The microgeny of sociopathy, as it relates to the orbitofrontal cortex, is based in part on evolutionary development. The limbic system, which subserves functions of emotion, precedes the development in evolution of the cerebral neocortex, which is involved in thought processes. The orbitofrontal cortex is described as paralimbic, embracing both the limbic system and the neocortex, and can be said to exert “executive control” over much of the limbic system (Shore, 2001). The orbitofrontal cortex is poorly developed in rodents, and develops progressively in primate evolution (Rolls, 2004). The orbitofrontal cortex developed in a progression from a three-layered paleocortex through a six layered neocortex, evolving through its earlier functions of olfaction and taste, through secondary, tertiary, and supratertiary cortical areas, integrating all of the major exteroceptive sensory modalities, including the senses of sight and sound, as well various somatosensory modalities such as pain. The orbitofrontal cortex is also a locus for perceptions such as recognition of facial expressions, and is involved in complex functions of language, images, and symbols. The orbitofrontal cortex, perhaps most importantly, mediates perception of interoceptive sensory modalities, including nausea and other autonomic responses, which are thought to be transformed into feelings such as attraction, aversion, pleasure, and disgust (Kringelbach & Rolls, 2004). The orbitofrontal cortex is thought to have had its immediate progenitor in the amygdala (Tucker, Luu & Pribram, 1995), an organ of the limbic system or “emotional brain.” The function of the amygdala would then, in the upward expression of phylogenetic and developmental microgenesis, be expressed or attenuated in the instantiation of the mental state if the orbitofrontal cortex were damaged or impaired. The function of the amygdala involves the recognition of social stimuli, odor and food consumption, motivation, and self-preservation (Joseph, 2000). Fear is a very prominent

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emotion that is expressed in the amygdala. After prolonged stimulation of the amygdala, animals and humans will react with irritation, then rage, which builds up to directed violence. This anger is sustained, and appears to persist as memory long after the stimulation and object of aggression are gone (Joseph, 2000). The theory of microgenesis would give us two essential evolutionary predicates with respect to the orbitofrontal cortices: 1) that damage or loss of function of the orbitofrontal cortices would allow the direct expression of more primitive perceptions and behaviors associated with the amygdala, and 2) that damage to the amygdala would lead the expression of behaviors associated with more primitive levels of the brain. These evolutionary predicates are contextualized by the fact that the amygdala assumes a more dominant social role in early development, and much of this function appears to be taken on by the orbitofrontal cortices in later life. The evolutionary progression is thus also a developmental progression, consistent with microgenesis. The emotional responses of the amygdala, in comparision to the orbitofrontal cortex, are rapid, crude, and impulsive. The amygdala responds emotionally to direct perceptual contingencies, with little relevance to the contextual meaning of such stimuli. In contrast to the higher order cognitive emotional responses of the orbitofrontal cortex, the amygdala does not seem to “think about” its emotional responses (Shore, 2001). The relatively rapid and non-specific response of the amygdala can elicit impulsive aggression (Joseph, 2000). There may be a benefit to such rapid, relatively impulsive, and unconsidered aggression in the face of immediate danger, when there may not be time for a considered response. This particular mode of aggressive response may have been more adaptive in our Paleolithic past, but can be problematic in the context of aggressive, impulsive children and adolescents, where it is a major feature of social maladjustment (Henley and Long, 1999). The orbitofrontal cortex is not fully myelinated and therefore not fully integrated in the brain until relatively late in development (Kringlebach and Rolls, 2004). Imaging studies indicate that, when presented with an emotional facial expression, the relative activation of the amygdala is greater in adolescents than in adults. The negative emotions associated with the response of the amygdala’s response to facial expressions, especially the fearful and angry responses, are tempered by the more considered orbitofrontal responses. Attenuation or persistence of the relatively reflexive negative emotions elicited at the level of the amygdala in the course of development is associated with lack secure

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attachments early in life and on the occurrence of traumatic experiences (Shore, 2001). In terms of microgenesis, the aggression, impulsiveness, and unreasoned decisions of the orbitofrontal syndrome is consistent with the expression of an earlier phase of brain development in evolution, with the activity of amygdala being brought to the surface of the microgeny of emotion. The syndrome of acquired sociopathy is consistent with microgenetic theory when we view the amygdala’s response in the context of the development of emotional and rational decision making of the higher centers in the brain, as well as in the context of the social setting in which the individual is embedded. Such contextualization may account for much of the variability of the syndrome. The developmental process and evolution of social behavior, during which the orbitofrontal cortex assumes increasing importance, is, according to microgenetic theory, repeated in the genesis of the mental state. Bilateral destruction or removal of the amygdala has been noted to result in loss of emotional speech and the ability to respond appropriately to social situations. It impairs the ability in humans to discern the emotional significance of external events, social cues, and to respond appropriately to social situations (Joseph, 2000). It would thus appear that loss of the function of the amygdala attenuates a variety of emotional and social functions, consistent with microgenetic theory. Developmental antisociality Blair (2001) entertained a variety of explanations for developmental antisociality, one of which is the “theory of mind” interpretation. Theory of mind relates to one’s conceptual representation of his or her own mind and the mind of others. Deficiencies in the theory of mind, which have also been invoked in the orbitofrontal acquired sociopathy syndrome, were dismissed due to the fact that children with autism, who have clear deficits in theory of mind, none-the-less exhibit autonomic and empathic responses to the suffering of others. Socialization of empathy appears to be a key factor in the genesis of the developmental sociopath (Blair, 2001). Raine and Yang (2006, 204) conclude: “Impairments to the emotional component that comprises the feeling of what is moral is viewed as the primary deficit in antisocials…” The literature on brain abnormalities or deficiencies in Antisocial Personality Disorder is not entirely consistent, perhaps reflecting differences in the populations tested or in methodology, and other complicating factors

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such as substance abuse and addiction. In general, deficiencies in the function or the orbitofrontal cortex are most widely implicated in the genesis of the disorder, although these functional deficiencies are generally far less marked than observed in individuals with the syndrome of acquired orbitofrontal sociopathy. In a psychometric study of 29 subjects with Antisosocial Personality Disorder, relative to 29 age and IQ matched normal controls, it was found that there was a broad range of deficits in the antisocial subjects involving the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, which includes the orbitofrontal cortex, as well as the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, thought to be involved primarily in executive function (Dolan and Park, 2002). In another psychometric study of subjects with Antisocial Personality Disorder, relative to matched controls, the antisocial subjects showed relative deficits in orbitofrontal functioning but not in frontal executive function. It was also found that the antisocial subjects had a diminished increase in electrodermal conductivity in response to aversive stimuli compared to the control subjects (Dinn & Harris, 2000). The latter finding is consistent with diminished autonomic arousal among antisocial individuals when presented with aversive stimuli. In a study of 25 psychopathic individuals relative to 30 matched controls, psychometric testing sensitive to function of the orbitofrontal cortex, dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, and anterior cingulated cortex was conducted. Impairment of the antisocial subjects relative to controls was found only in the measures of orbitofrontal functioning (Blair et al., 2006). Functional magnetic resonance imaging has been conducted on subjects with criminal psychopathy, social phobia, and matched controls using painful stimuli as the unconditioned stimulus, paired with neutral faces as the conditioned stimulus. The psychopathic patients showed brief activation of the amygdala in response to the conditioned stimulus. The normal controls showed activation of the orbitofrontal cortex, insula, anterior cingulated cortex, and amygdala, which together were characterized as the frontolimbic circuit. The social phobics showed a hyperactive frontolimbic circuit relative to normal controls. The authors concluded that an underactive frontolimbic circuit might be the neural substrate of psychopathy, while on overactive frontolimbic circuit might underlie social fear (Velt et al., 2002). It is very difficult to separate the relative role of genetics of sociopathy from the wider context of societal sociopathy. Twin-adoption studies, although informative (Mealey, 1995), generally involve adoption within

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the same society, so that expression of the genotype is not controlled for cultural factors. The human species is marked by a relatively narrow range of genetic diversity, and it is therefore appropriate to contextualize the overwhelming genetic similarity among humans using the construct of a human “phylotype,” which is contingent on genetic similarities and manifest within a range or individual types or phenotypes. Environmental factors have a compounding rather than additive effect in the expression of the phenotype. It has been argued that some degree of sociopathy confers an evolutionary advantage, at least in a portion of the population, and has thus conferred some genetic propensity for sociopathy in the human population by natural selection (Mealey, 1995). Individuals with developmental antisociality may be grouped as primary and secondary. Primary sociopaths seem to have major deficits in the experience of social emotions as well as reduced levels of anxiety and autonomic response under aversive conditions. Primary sociopathy is more heritable and less responsive to corrective measures than secondary sociopathy. Secondary sociopaths appear to have normal responses to punishment and normal levels of anxiety, but are excessively driven by rewards (Mealey, 1995). There is a vast literature relating abuse and neglect in infancy and early childhood to the incidence of antisocial personality and to the syndrome of secondary or “developmental acquired sociopathy” (Solomon and Siegel, Eds, 2003; Shore, 2003a). With respect to this period of life, Shore (2003b), Based on review of the literature, Shore (2003b) concluded that severe relational trauma, including abuse and neglect, in infancy and early childhood, causes emotional dysregulation that overrides genetic resilience in the genesis of developmental sociopathy. Aggression and violence in later years often reflects emotional dysregulation, which is intricately connected to attachment in infancy. The ontogeny of emotional self regulation is essential to development (Shore, 2003b). Applying the microgenetic principle that ontogeny is repeated in mental process, one can postulate that deficits in self regulation persist despite subsequent emotional growth, and can be activated if there is a disruption in the development of personality, such as occurs in damage to the orbitofrontal cortices. In this case, there may be a fundamental reversion of personality in the area of social functioning to its juvenile stages. The personality, as a route of occasions of self-replication, is attenuated at an earlier stage of development, as brain function is attenuated at a more

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primitive stage of development. These two phenomena go together, and cannot be torn apart. Societal factors seem to be involved in the development of secondary developmental antisociality, which was reported to be increasing recently and rapidly in the mid-1990s (Mealey, 1995). In a more recent study (Orlans and Levy, 2004), it has been noted (18): “There is a severe and rapidly escalating problem throughout our society. More and more children are failing to develop secure attachments to loving and protective caregivers…Children with a history of severe attachment disorder develop aggressive, controlling, and conduct related behaviors that contribute to the development of antisocial personality.” The majority of these children with reactive attachment disorders are undiagnosed, have been abused and neglected, and have been raised in single-parent households. They are most frequently born to young, highly-stressed mothers, and are frequently involved in violent crimes in childhood and adolescence (Orlans and Levy, 2004). Orlans and Levy (2004, 19) conclude: “These young offenders will become the superpredators of tomorrow…” The orbitofrontal cortex is thought go through a critical phase of development from the last quarter of the first year of life to the middle of the second year, during the earliest phase of human socialization (Shore, 2001). There is evidence that relational trauma has deleterious effects on the development of the orbitofrontal cortex during this period of life (Shore, 2001). Shore (2001) argued that the principle locus of dysfunction that gives rise to attachment disorders occurs during this period in the integration of the medial and lateral orbitofrontal cortex, particularly in the right hemisphere. It is interesting to note that, in functional imagining of the brains of mothers when presented with pictures of their own infants, as compared to other infants, the orbitofrontal cortex was the primary areas of selective activation during the experience of positive emotions such as love (Nitchke et al., 2004). The involvement of the infant orbitofrontal cortex in attachment, together with the selective maternal activation of the orbitofrontal cortex in a positive emotional relationship towards their infants, can be viewed as a kind of dyadic interaction in which the social function of the orbitofrontal cortex of the infant is essentially modeled in response to that of the mother or other primary caregiver. It has been shown that infants have an innate “intersubjective sympathy,” or empathy, and at around the second year of life toddlers generally exhibit prosocial behaviors such as sharing, concern, and comforting. Em-

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pathy has its basis in self-awareness, which implies the awareness of others, both of which seem to be present from birth (Decety and Jackson, 2004). Exhaustive review of the neurobiological literature involving the higher order portion of the brain or telencephalon, common to all mammals, seems to indicate that self-awareness cannot be localized to any region or set of regions in this area of the brain (Decety and Jackson, 2004). The core of self seems most strongly associated with the lower order centers of the brain, the brainstem and diencephalon (Brown, 1996), common to reptiles and mammals. These more primitive areas of the brain may thus be associated with empathy and intersubjectivity. Brown noted (1996, 170): “Moreover, self-awareness and awareness of subjectivity are different modes of awareness. The subjective is within the instinctive or automatic. The subjective is not the agent in a state of agency but the field from which the agentive state develops.” Development is the operative process here, and the development of a moral agency is the basis of moral behavior. Awareness of subjectivity, or reflection, seems to be fundamental process that is deficient, or, in some cases, quite literally deranged in the antisocial individual. Reflection gives rise to awareness of the subjectivity of others. This capacity seems to precede the earliest expression of overt prosocial behavior. Intraspecies aggression in the lower animals is circumscribed and generally adaptive. Animal societies, beginning at the dyadic level, are the locus of prosocial animal behavior. Intersubjectivity, the relational context of the group, in social animals, supercedes the subjectivity of the individual. It is with the development of the ego, around the ages of four to six years, that individual subjectivity comes to the fore. This stage of development is beyond the development of any non-human primate. It is only with the development of the ego that antisocial behavior becomes manifest, and it is generally inappropriate to characterize animal behavior of the behavior of young children as antisocial. Wrongful actions presuppose the ability to distinguish right from wrong, generally considered a function of the observing ego, and the freedom to choose that which is right or wrong. Personality is framed psychologically in terms of the unconscious adaptive functions or defense mechanisms of the ego, which undergo a microgeny from the more primitive defenses, such as denial and reaction formation and rationalization, to more mature defenses such as sublimation and altruism (Vaillant, 1971). The more primitive functions of the ego are operant in the antisocial individual. At an unconscious level, there is a denial and rationalization of the wrong-

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ful nature of immoral actions, and a reaction formation which involves the commission of wrongful behaviors. The reaction involves an external projection of internal conflict, which is often between one’s own interests or urges and the interests, rights, and safety of others. The emotionally mature personality will, most often, sublimate the reaction. Regression to the more primitive modes of emotional response is a microgenetic reversion that may occur at times of stress, of emotional instability, or in social situations that facilitate the primitive reaction. There is a plasticity in personality development in childhood and adolescence, which diminishes with stable maturation. Children and adolescents are not generally held legally responsible for their actions in the same way that adults are, reflecting allowances for the developmental process, or, otherwise stated, for the microgeny of agency. A similar allowance is apparent in the fact that Antisocial Personality Disorder cannot be diagnosed prior to the age of 18 years (American Psychiatric Association, 2000). Discussion The localization of antisocial morals, values, and behaviors to specific areas of the brain must be approached with caution. The person is an integral whole who stands in relation to other people and to the social context in which he or she is embedded. With specific reference to the social functions of the orbitofrontal cortex and the consequences of orbitofrontal damage, the conclusions in the literature are skewed by a cognitivist approach which is fundamentally non-relational. There seems to be a paucity of data in the literature on acquired sociopathy on the pre-morbid personality structure of the individual, particularly in the area of social development and the internalization of moral feelings, as well as history of covert sociopathy. It seems to be true, in a microgenetic sense, that severe damage to the orbitofrontal cortex leads to the phylogenetic neoteny or reversion to the social mode of functioning of the amygdala, and that the amygdala has relative dominance over the process in children and adolescents as compared to adults. The literature stresses the amydala’s role with respect to threatening stimuli, eliciting the emotions or anger and fear. The reactive aggression which is associated with severe orbitofrontal lesions seems to reflect the response of the amygdala, and thus attenuation at an earlier phase in the microgeny of emotional expression.

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Relative social dominance or submission in the animal kingdom is a function of the primitive social brain. In humans there is frequently a drive towards dominance, and a resignation to submission, and the properly functioning social order tends to reflect a homeostasis of these functions. Where there is a struggle for dominance, there is a relative recursion to the more primitive mode of social functioning. The sublimation of this drive occurs in healthy competitive activities. When the drive for dominance is inflated, and when the ego is immature, it can lead to immoral behavior, both on the individual and social levels. Groups of people, identified by social association with regard to territory, resources, cultures, and religions, engage, in our world, in a constant struggle for relative dominance, leading to exploitation and conflict. In most current human cultures, the social structure is not dominated by an intensity of moral feeling, but rather by a drive for acquisition. Moral feeling is a social phenomenon, and can only be fostered by the moral structure and activity of the group. A social group may possess moral feeling among its members, yet show an almost complete absence of moral feeling towards another group of individuals. There is a higher order mental process involved in this social selectivity, and the boundaries of the social group demand conformity to these boundaries. A process-relational view of the person must always involve such social contexts. The person fundamentally unfolds through development from within social contexts, where earlier phases of development become the initial conditions for later stages of development. Microgenesis is not only an unfolding of the brain’s evolutionary history in every moment of experience, but also an unfolding of the development of the individual throughout the course of his or her life. The early years of life, particularly infancy, are extraordinarily important in developmental microgenesis. The routes of the microgeny of personality, to a large extent, parallel phylogenetic microgeny. We see this parallel in the relative development of the functions of the amygdala and orbitofrontal cortex. The growth of the social individual, above all else, demands secure attachments in early life, particularly with the parents or parental figures. Empathy is not a product of the contingencies of reward and punishment. It is innate and is nurtured in the nurturing of the infant. Moral feeling demands empathy. Empathy is what flows between individuals. A processrelational view of mind must place the individual mind in internal connection with that of other individuals. Physics has long ago abandoned the concept of isolated systems, but psychology has yet to do so. Cognitivism

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has fostered the view that the brain is a kind of prison for the separate ego, lacking internal connection with others or true intersubjectivity. In the absence of intersubjectivity, people are experienced as objects, not subjects, and are thus to be manipulated like objects. Many of the features of antisociality, such as impulsiveness, irresponsibility, and reactive aggression, are within normative ranges during early stages of human development. Social settings that foster the arrested or delayed development of moral maturity, such as the lack of appropriate role models, will tend to foster the expression of the juvenile phase of development in the adult. Although antisociality is conceived of a discrete entity, it is actually a dimension of personality, which is expressed to varying degrees in different people and in different cultures. In my own experience as a child and adolescent psychiatrist, I have also observed that the antisociality of the male partner is a common predicate for abuse and neglect, and that such abuse and neglect often is associated with drug and alcohol addictions, which are frequently shared by both the male and female partner. I have observed that violent and/or antisocial children and adolescents have, very frequently, been abused or neglected, and that such children and adolescents seem to respond poorly to the contingencies of reward an punishment. Among such abused and/or neglected children, anger and the inability of modulate anger are consistent features. It has also been my observation that male sociopaths frequently father a disproportionate number of children, with multiple females, and that, if involved in the rearing of the children at all, they are often involved in the abuse and neglect of these children, or of the children of other fathers, frequently in the context of drug and alcohol addictions. Thus the developing sociopath may carry the genetics that predispose towards antisociality, as well as developmental burden of abuse and neglect. These factors, together with the deficiency in moral values brought to bear in the rearing of children by antisocial parental figures, fosters a growing intergenerational pattern of antisocial behavior. Hedonic rewards, as previously discussed, seem to involve the orbitofrontal cortex. This may make a negative impact on development of correct moral behavior. For example, in the context of drug and alcohol addiction, the salience and intensity of other rewards and satisfactions are trivialized, and the drug and its acquisition become the principle locus of social behavior, which is, in general, antisocial. There is thus a kind of acquired antisociality that occurs in the context of drug and alcohol addictions. Again, there is a familial pattern involved. It is not uncommon, in my ex-

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perience, for drug and/or alcohol addicted parents to condone or facilitate the elicit use of drugs and alcohol in the children and adolescents under their care. The acquired antisociality of drug and alcohol addictions can compound the other factors of intergenerational antisociality. The view that moral behavior is driven by hedonism, as we have formerly cited, implies a rather primitive view of morality. As we have already noted, an excessive drive for rewards fosters secondary developmental antisociality. The contingencies of reward and punishment do not characterize a true moral sense (Brown, 2005). The cognitivist approach fails to recognize the dimensions of morality that are not based on contingencies, assigning moral value to instrumental behavior, which is, in fact, a hallmark of antisociality. Instrumental behavior fosters covert antisociality, involving behaviors ranging from cheating and lying to immoral social actions committed for revenge, acquisition, or status, or in order to conform to the social expectations of an antisocial milieu. Moreover, the characterization of pleasure as hedonic and the attribution correct social actions to hedonistic pleasure has the connotation of covert antisocial and narcissistic elements. Seeking pleasure for its own sake, without the modulation of moral feeling (Brown, 2005), is the hallmark of hedonism. Absent an intrinsic moral sense and a moral and proactive social milieu, socialization in dysfunctional families and communities fosters covert and often overt antisocial behaviors, which leads to condoned social violence within subcultures such as gangs. The reductionist approaches to social behavior, which involves circumscribed brain function, give us only one dimension of antisociality. Criminal antisociality is just the tip of the iceberg of societal antisociality. Societal antisociality is the medium in which individual antisociality grows. To some degree, the antisocial individual can be viewed within a normative continuum of relatively prosocial to antisocial types, expressing the genetic “phylotype” in its developmental and social setting. Differential penetrance, or the degree of expression of the genotype in the antisocial phenotype, is a phenomenon which has yet to be fully elaborated. Conclusion The neurobiology of antisociality, to the extent that it can be localized neurologically, is consistent with microgenetic theory. There are certainly many areas of the brain involved, although we have focused here on the orbitofrontal cortex and amygdala, which seem to be particularly important. Neurobiology needs to be contextualized, in microgenesis, by neuro-

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development, which involves emotional development and growth. A process view of social and emotional relations must be further contextualized by the internal relations that apply to societies of individuals. Empathy is an innate intersubjective phenomenon, and it cannot be accounted for neurobiologically on the basis of the cognitive or behavioral models of reward and punishment. Empathy is the feeling of others that, in terms of process-relational theory, is a kind of prehension (Whitehead, 1929/1978), and constitutes the human organism in society. The person does not exist in isolation from his or her intersubjective context, and, with regard to correct and moral behavior, we must always examine the intersubjective relations of the person, as they have occurred from the beginning of life. There is a deficiency in the literature in the social contextualization of antisociality, which reflects an overall tendency to focus on the individual as the locus of illness and to reduce all mental phenomena to brain phenomena attributable only to the individual. History is replete with accounts of the moral demise of great cultures. We have recently seen the advent of infant television and other audiovisual media. Television is not an appropriate surrogate parent, family, or community, and raising a child on television is a prescription for social inadequacy and social deviance. Many children and adolescents are now obsessively absorbed in video games, many of which have antisocial themes. Family and community groups are frequently inadequate and dysfunctional. We are engaging in a social experiment. The subjects are our children and adolescents. The outcome is unknown. However, at least in a portion of the population, there is a disturbing trend toward juvenile criminality and other antisocial behaviors, which are predicates for adult antisociality. Here we have attempted to draw some reasonable conclusions regarding the practical implications of microgenesis to social neuropsychology. These conclusions are tentative, and open to discussion, as well as to empirical testing. Human culture is not, however, an experiment. As a psychiatrist, my job is to treat the individual. I cannot reach back into infancy, and change the conditions of development. I cannot reach into the family or into society and alter the dysfunctions which are involved in the genesis and progression of the patient’s illness. What I can do is make an effort to identify some of these conditions. Primary prevention, alteration of the primary conditions of development that can lead to antisocial behavior, is the ideal. In the medical model, such primary prevention lies in the rubric of epidemiology and public health. From a public health standpoint, our

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treatment of the epidemic of antisocial behavior is largely reactive. We attempt to remediate the problem after its microgenetic roots have been established. Correction of antisocial behavior, once developed, is notoriously difficult, and often counter-productive. Microgenetic theory integrates human experience in a manner that is useful and practical in the sense that it gives us a framework for understanding how the past, both evolutionarily and developmentally, manifests in the present and the future. In doing so, it has the capacity to elaborate some of the conditions of primary prevention. Beyond this, it gives us a formal structure for the understanding of maladies of the mind, allowing us to intervene with a better understanding of the conditions we are treating, potentially leading to more effective and compassionate therapies. References American Psychiatric Association. (2000). Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Fourth Edition, Text Revision. Washington, D.C.: American Psychiatric Association. Babiak, P. & Hare, R.D. (2006). Snakes in suits: when psychopaths go to work. New York: Harper Collins. Bergson, H. (1919/2003). L’énergie spirituelle. Paris: Quadrige/Puf. Blair, K.S., Newman, C., Mitchell, D.G., Richell, R.A., Leonard, A., Morton, J. & Blair, R.J.R. (2006). Differentiating among prefrontal substrates in psychopathy: Neuropsychological test findings. Neuropsychology, 20, 153-65. Blair, R.J.R. (2001). Neurocognitive models of aggression, the antisocial personality disorders, and psychopathy. Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery, and Psychiatry, 71, 727-731. Blair, R.J.R. (2003). Neurobiological basis of psychopathy. The British Journal of Psychiatry, 182, 5-7. Blair, R.J.R. & Cipolotti, L. (2000). Impaired social response reversal: A case of ‘acquired sociopathy.’ Brain, 123, 1122-1141. Brown, J.W. (1988). The life of the mind: selected papers. Hillsdale, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Brown, J.W. (1991). Self and process. New York: Springer. Brown, J.W. (1996). Time, will and mental process. New York: Plenum. Brown, J.W. (2000). Mind and nature: essays on time and subjectivity. London: Whurr Publishers. Brown, J.W. (2005). Process and the authentic life: toward a psychology of value. Heusenstamm, Germany: Ontos Verlag.

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Decety, J. & Jackson, P.L. (2004). The functional architecture of human empathy. Behavioral and Cognitive Science Reviews, 3, 71-100. Dinn, W.M. & Harris, C.L. (2000). Neurocognitive function in antisocial personality Disorder. Psychiatry Research, 27, 173-90. Dolan, M. & Park, I. (2002). The neuropsychology of antisocial personality disorder. Psychological Medicine, 32, 417-427. Goldstein, K. (1995). The organism: a holistic approach to biology derived from pathological data in man. New York: Zone Books. Henley, M. & Long, N. (1999). Teaching emotional intelligence to impulsiveaggressive youth. Reclaiming Children and Youth, 7, 224-229. James, W. (1898). Human immortality: two supposed objections to the doctrine. Second Edition. Boston & New York: Houghton, Mifflin & Co. Joseph, R. (2000). Neuropsychiatry, neuropsychology, and clinical neuroscience. New York: Academic Press. Knight, R.T. (2002). Prefrontal cortex: The present and the future. In: D.T. Stuss & R.T. Knight, (eds.), Principles of frontal lobe function. New York: Oxford University Press. Kringlebach, M.L. (2005). The human orbitofrontal cortex: Linking reward to hedonic experience. Nature Reviews/Neuroscience, 6, 691-702. Kringelbach, M.L. & Rolls, E.T. (2004). The functional neuroanatomy of the human orbitofrontal cortex: evidence from neuroimaging and neuropsychology. Progress in Neurobiology, 72, 341-372. Mealey, L. (1995). The sociobiology of sociopathy: An integrated evolutionary model. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 18, 523-599. Nakano, S., Asada, T., Yamashita, F., Kitamura, N., Matsuda, H., Hirai, S. & Yamada, T. (2006). Relationship between antisocial behavior and regional cerebral blood flow in frontotemporal dementia. NeuroImage, 32, 301-6. Nitshe, J.B., Nelson, E.E., Rusch, B.D., Fox, A.S., Oakes, T.R. & Davidson, R.J. (2004). Orbitofrontal cortex tracks positive mood in mothers viewing pictures of their newborn infants. NeuroImage, 21, 583-592. Orlans, M. & Levy, T. (2004). Attachment disorder, antisocial personality, and violence. Annals of the American Psychotherapy Association, 7, 18-23. Raine, A. & Yang, Y. (2006). Neural foundations to moral reasoning and antisocial behavior. Social Cognition and Affective Neuroscience, 1, 203-213. Rolls, E.T. (2004). Convergence of sensory systems in orbitofrontal cortex in primates and brain design for emotion. The Anatomical Record, 281A, 1212-1225. Shore, A,N. (2001). The effects of a secure attachment relationship on right brain development, affect regulation, and infant mental health. Infant Mental Health Journal, 22, 7-66.

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Shore, A.N. (2003a). Affect regulation and disorders of the self. New York: W.W. Norton & Company. Shore, A.N. (2003b). Early relational trauma, disorganized attachment, and development. In: M.F. Solomon & D. Siegel (eds.), Healing trauma: attachment, mind, body, and brain. New York: W.W. Norton and Company. Solomon, M.F. & Siegel, D., Eds. (2003). Healing trauma: attachment, mind, body, and brain. New York: W.W. Norton and Company. Tucker, D.M., Luu, P. & Pribram, K. H. (1995). Social and emotional self-regulation. Annals of the New York Academy of Science, 769, 213. Vaillant, G. (1971). Theoretical hierarchy of adaptive ego mechanisms. Psychiatry, 24, 107-118. Velt, R., Flor, M., Erb, M., Hermann, C., Lotze, M., Grodd, W. & Birbaumer, N. (2002). Brain circuits involved in emotional learning in antisocial behavior and social phobia in humans. Neuroscience Letters, 328, 233-6. Weber, M. (2006). Whitehead’s pancreatism: the basics. Frankfurt: Ontos Verlag. Whitehead, A.N. (1929/1978). Process and reality. Corrected Edition, edited by D.R. Griffin & D.W. Sherburne. New York: Macmillan Publishing Company.

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Chapter 7 The brain and the mind BOŻYDAR L. J. KACZMAREK Maria Curie-Skłodowska University, Lublin, Poland KATARZYNA MARKIEWICZ Maria Curie-Skłodowska University, Lublin, Poland The brain is an enchanted loom, where millions of flashing shuttles weave a dissolving pattern, though never an abiding one. Charles Sherrington

Introduction Recent years have witnessed the rapid development of brain imagining techniques, such as computerized axial tomography (CAT), positron emission tomography (PET), regional cerebral blood flow (fCBF), and magnetoencephalography (MEG). These techniques make it possible to observe and evaluate the activity of the brain while it is performing various tasks, which gives us a fairly precise picture of brain work, but does not tell us much about the mind, which still remains a mystery. And it is the mind that remains the main focus of interest of scholars trying to come to an understanding of the rules guiding our mental life. As we have elsewhere argued (Kaczmarek, 2005), language still remains the main window through which we can view cerebral life. Language and its disorders were in fact the very first clinical observations which contributed to the development of the idea of localization of psychological functions in the brain. Accordingly, Broca’s description of a patient with motor aphasia opened the way for the development of localizationist-connectionist theories (cf. Deacon, 1989). It might be worthwhile to recall at this point that Broca had found just what he was looking for, since his work was under the influence of Franz Gall, one of the founders of phrenology. And it was Gall’s conviction that language and intellect re-

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sided in the frontal lobes; thus Broca concentrated upon the lesion in that area, and overlooked the fact that the lesion in the brain of his patient included also parts of the parietal and occipital lobes, as well as subcortical structures. A tendency to concentrate on facts of interests and to pass over those that contradict our beliefs is a characteristic feature of our mind. This has a significant impact upon our perception of the surrounding world. And this refers not only to cognitive dissonance when things do not look like we used to see them, but it is due mainly to the fact that, contrary to general beliefs, we do not receive information, but only sensations. We then transform these into information if and only if these sensations form a recognizable pattern. The best example of this phenomenon is an utterance spoken in an unknown language. Not only are we unable to understand them, but they are perceived as a stream of indistinguishable sounds, not divisible into words. This is connected with the selectivity of our brain work, which provides for good orientation in this very complicated world. If we lose the ability to select the received sensations, we become confused and lose the feeling of security. Recent neurophysiological findings reveal that our experience molds the brain organization of particular functions. In other words, the “brain maps” responsible for individual functions undergo continuous changes due to our present activities. This has been termed neuroplasticity, and has significant theoretical and practical implications (cf. Doige, 2007). Moreover, the refinement of action is connected with the loss of some neural connections, which takes place especially in two important developmental periods of life: in childhood and in puberty. These are also the periods when two serious psychiatric syndromes tend to appear, namely, autism and schizophrenia. And it is highly probable that they result from an inability to select incoming sensations and organize them into meaningful information. Impairment of communication is one of the basic symptoms in both cases, while a healthy person is able to concentrate upon a particular speaker even when many people are talking at the same time (Brown & Pachalska 2003). As a rule we do not remember the content of background talk, and we are not able to tell what language was being used. Moreover, we are much better at comprehending conventional greetings than the name of a person we are being introduced to. We are able to fill in the lacking elements in conventional phrases, since models of such words (lexemes) have been coded in our minds.

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The rules of visual perception The rules of visual perception described by Gestalt psychology prove to be valid also in the case of auditory perception, as pointed out by Kwiatkowska (1997). We tend to group sounds in accordance with the following principles: 1. Similarity – The identity of prefixes and suffixes is used for grouping grammatical categories in inflected languages, so that one need not memorize separately the inflection of every word. This is also reflected in a strong tendency to use rhyme for better memorizing, as in the case of nursery rhymes or many proverbs. 2. Continuity – This plays a significant role in distinguishing intonation contours and melody lines that persist over time, marking the beginning and ending of words, phrases, sentences. In longer narrative units, the task of managing continuity is taken over by formulae: “Once upon a time” tells us that a fairly tale is beginning, and when we hear “And they all lived happily ever after,” we know that it is over. Whatever falls between these two formulae either belongs to the tale, or markedly interrupts it.) 3. Proximity – sounds that occur close together in time tend to be grouped into clusters. Shorter words tend to be better perceived. Hence emotionally charged utterances, such as exclamations (including profanities), are relatively short, as they draw more attention to themselves as figures against a (verbal) background. In languages with highly inflected verb forms (for example, Latin and Polish), the second person singular imperative is usually the shortest and simplest form of the verb. 4. Symmetry. This principle is reflected in repetitions and parallel constructions, for example in proverbs: “out of sight, out of mind”, “no news is good news”, “more haste, less speed.” This is another strategy for creating speech units, with a clearly marked beginning and end. Rhythmic structures play an important role in this, as in the metrical poetry of the classical languages. 5. Closure – This refers to the ability to fill in elements that are lacking (not perceived or not perceptible) in an utterance. This is called the “phonetic restoration effect,” which makes communication in a noisy surrounding possible. When a gap appears in the phonetic structure of an utterance, we are often able to provide the missing elements in our minds, sometimes quite unconsciously (and of course not always accurately). This depends on the context of the

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utterance, the familiarity of the parties to the exchange, and the nature and character of non-verbal signals (for example, gestures). In general these rules may be characterized as the principle of simple or good structure (Prägnanzprinzip). As mentioned earlier, this plays a significant role in our ability to abstract the voice of a particular person from background noise. In brain-damaged individuals, however, this ability can be disrupted. The tendency to simplify information in order to make the world easier to comprehend is also reflected in another rule described by gestalt psychology – the principle of good figure. We tend to use such expressions as “square jaw,” “round shoulders,” or “triangular face,” though these parts of the body are to a great extent less regular than the geometrical figures we refer to. This also reflects the common experience of both speaker and listener, which is another factor important for mutual understanding. It is convention that tells us that people of Nordic complexion are “white” and people of African complexion are “black,” even though the actual hue of the skin is never either white nor black, but rather shades of the same basic hue. A very significant role in this respect is played by the body image, which makes proper orientation in the surrounding world possible. Cortical maps of body parts are well known due to the experiments of Wilder and Penfield (1959). It has been observed that the somatosensory cortex is characterized by somatotopic organization, which means that those parts of the body that are functionally more important, such as face and hands, occupy a larger area. However, the matter proved to be much more complicated than formerly believed. First of all, the “cortical maps” have turned out to be much less stable than previously assumed. They change in accordance with the experience and activities of a lifetime. In case of the loss of a limb, the “freed-up” cortical area is taken over by another part. In a way, this explains the riddle of phantom limbs. For example, it was found that the cortical map of the lost hand was occupied by the cheek. Moreover, the cortical maps proved to be dynamic, undergoing constant changes (cf. Doige, 2007; Schwartz and Bergley, 2003). The matter is further complicated by recent findings on interoception. It has been stated that homeostatic signals from the body surface as well as sensations arising from the internal organs are mapped to the insula. At the same time, these areas of the brain have rich connections with the amygdala and anterior cingulate cortex, as well as the orbitofrontal cortex, the structures involved in controlling our emotions (Blakeslee & Blakeslee,

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2007). These findings confirm the assumption that there are no separate centers for particular functions in the brain. They are also in line with microgenetic theory, which emphasizes both the complicated nature of psychological processes as well as their unfolding (Pachalska & MacQueen 2005). Also, the executive functions of the frontal lobes are made possible by the fact that they ensure intellectual and emotional control of both sensory and motor functions, which according to Brown (1988, 1990, 1999) are not separate, mirror-image processes, but rather different facets of the same process. As shown in figure 1, the prefrontal cortex works as a set of specific filters that let our internal knowledge blend with and absorb external sensations to form meaningful information. Clinical findings indicate that the dorsolateral parts of the frontal lobes act mainly as an intellectual filter, while the orbitofrontal parts are concerned with emotional control. In cases when these filters fail, the person is not able to cope with highly complicated surroundings, as may be observed in schizophrenia and frontal syndrome. This results not only in distortions of the world image, but also in the inability to perform actions in accordance with the requirements of social rules.

Fig. 1.

The arrows show that there is a continuous flow between the information stored in our mind and that originating in the outside world. The emotional and intellectual filters (concerned with the activity of the prefrontal cortex) keep it in balance, and make it possible to undertake actions in accordance with the requirements of the circumstances. 169

In other words, the world image created by each person is simplified to a large degree, and that means that it is different for each of us. A better term would be “model” of the world, as it is not only simplified, but also abstract in nature. In fact, it is a characteristic feature of our minds to create and use models. As I have elsewhere argued, the phoneme is a model of a sound and the lexeme is a model of a word, and these models enable us to communicate in a noisy surrounding since they enable us to fill in the missing elements of the utterances. Thus the models make our lives easier, but at the same time they sometimes create problems, due to the fact that they are more or less schematized: a finite number of objects connected by neural networks of relation, which are more inferred than observed. This means that each person has her own world, and consequently her own truth. That is why it is so difficult for people from different cultures to understand each other, especially if they do not share common beliefs and attitudes: the objects may be nearly the same, but the webs of inference are likely to be very different. After all, the emotional filter, which also includes subcortical structures, is based on a neuroanatomical structure whose shape, both structurally and dynamically, is shaped by experience from moment to moment, including the experience of learning the value system of the culture in which one is raised. This makes all of us see matters from a perspective that seems roughly similar only in gross outline, and becomes more individual, like fingerprints, the more closely it is examined. It should be borne in mind that the image of the world is also dependent upon the body image. Already at the beginning of the 20th century, Arnold Pick (1915), a prominent Prague neurologist, introduced a distinction between the body scheme (connected with the subconscious feeling of a particular part of the body) and corporeal awareness (Bewußtsein der Körperlichkeit). Today, we would use the terms “body scheme” and “body image.” The body scheme is formed in early childhood due to sensations coming from the skin, internal organs, and muscles, while the formation of a body image also requires the use of the visual analyzer, as well as naming particular parts of the body. It is therefore connected with the development of language. The traditional view of the relationship between language and perception gives language the leading role (cf. the so-called Sapir-Whorf thesis). There are arguments, however, that point in the opposite direction, as a number of linguistic structures reflect the way we perceive the world that surrounds us. This is particularly true of the visuo-

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spatial relations based on the body image. At the same time, we describe our emotional states in reference to haptic, taste and olfactory senses. The interrelation between perception and thinking was stressed already by ancient philosophers. Plato pointed out that astonishment is a source of philosophy, and astonishment is the result of observation and admiration for the harmony and order that occur among the observed phenomena. Another important factor influencing thinking was attributed to language (after Arendt, 1978). This idea was most clearly expressed by Whorf (1956), who believed that language has a direct influence upon thought. According to his theory, people using different languages differ in their thinking. The idea of linguistic determinism is still quite popular among those linguists who assume that thinking without language is simply impossible. It may be observed that the defining of a particular phenomenon provokes people to notice its existence. This is particularly true in the case of social awareness. For example, pedophilia began to be regarded a serious problem in Poland only after it was named, described, and publicized in the media, though it seems unlikely that the problem never occurred before Kraft-Ebbing. Yet the question remains open whether this is also true in relation to the individual person: that is, if a pedophile does not know what a pedophile is, is he really a pedophile? It is also highly probable that it is language that is influenced by our cognitive abilities and perception in particular (see Kwiatkowska, 1997). Pöppel (1985) points out that body image gives a basis for proper orientation, and it is due to the structure of our bodies that we distinguish left and right, as well as front and back. Thus we speak of the left or right side of a mountain, without realizing that this is strictly conventional. We also state that a person is standing in front of a round building, which is literally absurd, but takes on some kind of sense when we take into account the main entrance of the building. As pointed out earlier, the creation of body image is related to the model of the world and to visuo-spatial orientation in particular. No wonder small children have problems with defining spatial and temporal relations. They tend to mix up the prepositions behind, in front of, under as well as the adverbs yesterday and tomorrow. If this is observed in older children, it is considered an indication of developmental disorders (Kaczmarek, 1986); in an adult, a pathology, likely a symptom of a mental disorder of some kind. It should be remembered that the creation of body image also requires, beside perception, motor activity.

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The subject – verb – object structure It comes as no surprise, then, that the structure subject – verb– object (commonly abbreviated SVO) is common in various languages, since all children experience this type of situation. At first they are being cared for, and then they themselves manipulate various objects. And all this is in accordance with a scheme: performer - action - object. It is also due to experience in performing actions that we consider some linguistic constructions to be more natural than others. Therefore we are inclined to say The book is on the table and not The table is under the book or The vase stands near the bookcase instead of The bookcase stands near the vase. Our perceptual models of space incline us to describe the situation of smaller and/or moving objects with reference to larger, immobile ones. Those models or schemas are a result of the experience of most people, therefore we should speak rather of cultural, rather than linguistic universals. Wierzbicka (1997) assumes that only basic linguistic units have universal character, while complex notions are created by the culture of a given nation. Hence seemingly equivalent words have a different semantic range in different languages. Thus in Polish the word free has mainly moral and political connotations, while in English it may also relate to the free access or free lunch, expressions that would make no sense in Polish if translated by the same word as in free elections. Many linguistic phrases indicate that our senses also play a significant role in the mental organization of our surroundings. We say: I see clearly that you are not willing to do it. We also feel that something is wrong and we may remain deaf to the arguments presented to us by our interlocutor. In order to stay calm we play it cool, while a hot potato means an issue that is embarrassing to deal with, and hot water means trouble. As a rule we use the evolutionary older olfactory sense, as well taste and smell, to describe our emotional states. Hence, adjectives describing odors and flavors are used in phrases relating to emotional states. A person who is not happy about a given situation makes a sour face, and if the situation is prolonged he may grow embittered. On the other hand, we usually like a person who has a sweet voice, and we tell somebody we like to have sweet dreams. These senses are related to the oldest limbic parts of the brain, which play a significant role in controlling emotions, hence they are used to denote “higher order” feelings. The significance of older limbic structures in the unfolding of action (with the inclusion of perception) is emphasized by Brown (1998,1990, 1991). He also states that there is a continuous process of unfolding one

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action into another, therefore it is impossible to clearly separate motor and perceptive functions. The unfolding is a process of continual flux, in which the environment has a shaping effect upon the final outcome. This finds exemplification in the process of language acquisition. In babbling, the baby uses all possible sounds of a human language (but not the non-human sounds), while after mastering the language only the sounds of the mother tongue remain. This is true analogously of other skills, as well as of the neuronal processes underlying them, since those neuronal connections that are not used wither away, and those that are used become stronger. As Schwartz and Begley put it, “The brain is literally wired by experience…” (2003, p. 119). This process has been aptly described by Brown as sculpting. The metaphor relates not only to acquiring new skills, but also to the refinement of old ones, which is closely connected with brain plasticity (MacQueen et al. 2004). Conclusions The main premise here is that the human brain works in a multidimensional, polymodal, creative, and emotional manner, in contradistinction to a computer. It is not a pre-programmed machine, but a living dynamic organism undergoing continuous changes in accordance with the requirements of the environment. In other words, our brain is not hardwired, but prewired in a very basic way, and then shaped by our experience throughout life, not only in childhood. Consequently, the mind also does not operate in a manner consistent with the principles of formal logic (cf. Kaczmarek, 2006). In our estimation of the world that surrounds us, we rely upon a probability of occurrence of particular events, which finds its reflection in language. The information is not perceived, but created in the brain, and in consequence the image (or rather model) of the world that is formed in our mind is simplified and falsified. This means that each person has her own model and her own truth, which leads to many misunderstandings. Moreover, the Gestalt principles developed to characterize visual perception are valid also for auditory perception; hence they play a significant role in understanding verbal utterances. From this it follows that description of the outer world is closely related to the models we bear in our minds. To be exact, this relates to the way our mind processes sensations in accordance with these models, which enable thought to move from the general and diffuse to the specific and concrete. The best examples of this process are phonemes and lexemes, which enable us to discriminate words

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in the stream of sounds produced by the speaker. Yet words remain inferred entities, which often leads to mistaken interpretations of the speaker’s real intentions. Appropriate relations with other people are also of significance, as they are the “mirror” in which we confront the image of our ideal self with the real one. If both images show close correspondence, we feel happy and secure; if not, our self esteem may be seriously lowered. It should be also borne in mind that our sense of self is determined by our body image to a considerable degree, and that image is also a model, influencing our perception of ourselves and other people, especially their attitude towards us. It is of importance, therefore, to keep balance between the two worlds, outside and inside, and that balance is upset in psychoses, when consciousness of the difference between the exterior world and our internal ideas and desires has been lost. This shows that the models of outside phenomena, as well as of ourselves, play a significant role in creating and maintaining our conscious Self. It has been also stressed that our brain undergoes continuous changes through our lifetime. Those changes, however, do have some limitations resulting from the structure of the brain. And this structure is a result of both phylogenetic and ontogenetic processes, which find their reflection in the microseconds of mental states. It follows from this that the brain is not a machine, but a living organism, and hence it “is integrally bound to its own past, its origins, the physical substance from which it assumed its present form” (Pachalska, 2002, p. 112). According to microgenetic theory, mental processes are viewed rather as states of becoming than being stable conditions of the brain. Still, there remains the question of the nature of mind: Is it only a state of the brain, or perhaps something beyond it? It seems that the mind cannot be reduced to the electric activity of neurons. It appears to be irreducible in a way similar to space and time. It might be worth recalling here the observations of Konrad Lorenz (1973), who proposed the term fulguration to describe a state when something entirely new appears (evolves) as result of connecting two or more until now independent systems. He recalls one of the basic principles of Gestalt psychology: that the whole is more than the sum of its constituent parts. This is true not only with regard to technical systems, but also – or perhaps above all – to biological ones. It seems plausible, therefore, that the mind is such a new phenomenon, which is “fulgurated” by the activity of subsystems of our brain. We may treat the mind, then, as a kind of electromagnetic field that becomes independent of its material substratum, i.e.

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the brain. In effect, the mind is able to have an influence upon the activity of the brain. Another consequence of accepting such a view of brain and mind relationships is that both our minds and our brains are open to continuous and endless changing. On the one hand this is what makes it possible to acquire entirely new skills that we could not even think of before. The constantly increasing possibilities of using cell phones might be an example here. On the other hand, it means that we shall never be able to give a precise description of the way the human mind works, which is the nightmare of scientifically oriented scholars (cf. Sampson, 1980). References Arendt, H. (1978). The life of the mind: 1. Thinking. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Blakeslee, S. & Blakeslee, M. (2007). Where mind and body meet. Scientific American Mind, 18(4), 44-51. Brown, J.W. (1988). The life of the mind. Hillsdale, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Brown, J.W. (1990). Preliminaries for the theory of mind. In E. Goldberg (ed.), Contemporary neuropsychology and the legacy of Luria (195 – 210). Hillsdale, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Brown, J.W. (1991). Self and process. New York: Springer-Verlag. Brown, J.W. & Pachalska, M. (2003). The symptom and its significance in neuropsychology. Acta Neuropsychologica, 1(1), 1-11. Deacon, T. (1989). Holism and associationism in neuropsychology: An anatomical synthesis. In E. Perecman (ed.), Integrating theory and practice in clinical neuropsychology (1- 47). Hillsdale, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Doige, N. (2007). The brain that changes itself. New York: Viking. Kaczmarek, B.L.J. (1986). Neuropsychological examination of a language deficient child. Folia Phoniatrica, 38(1), 31-35. Kaczmarek, B.L.J. (2005). The life of the brain. Acta Neuropsychologica, 1(1), 12-21. Kaczmarek B.L.J. (2006). Illogical logic. In M. Pąchalska, B.D. MacQueen (eds.), Root metaphors: selected essays on social thinking (169-192). Wrocław: Continuo Publishing House. Kwiatkowska, A. (1997). The visuo-spatial determinants of natural language. Łódź: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego. Lorenz, K. (1973). Die Rückseite des Spiegels. Versuch einer Naturgeschichte menschlichen Erkennes. Munich: Peiper & Co.

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MacQueen, B.D., Pąchalska, M., Tłokiński, W., Pufal, A. & Jastrzębowska, G. (2004). Disturbances in the use of metaphors in patients with traumatic brain injury. Acta Neuropsychologica, 2(4), 351-370. Pachalska, M. (2003). The microgenetic revolution: reflections on a recent essay by Jason Brown. Journal of Neuropsychoanalysis, 4(1), 109–117. Pachalska, M. & MacQueen, B.D. (2005). Microgenetic theory. A new paradigm for contemporary neuropsychology and neurolinguistics. Acta Neuropsychologica, 3(3), 89-106 Penfield, W. & Jasper, H. (1959). Epilepsy and the functional anatomy of the human brain. Boston: Little-Brown. Pick, A. (1915). Zur Pathologie des Bewuβtsein vom eigenen Körper. Neurologisches Centralblatt, 34, 257 – 265. Pöppel, E. (1985) Grenzen des Bewuβtseins. Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt GmbH. Sampson, G. (1980). Making sense. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Schwarz, J.M. & Begley, S. (2003). The mind and the brain. New York: Harper Collins. Whorf, B.L. (1956). Language, thought, and reality. New York: Wiley. Wierzbicka, A. (1997). Understanding cultures through their key words: English, Russian, Polish, German, Japanese. New York – Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Chapter 8 Moral values in focus: knowledge and values in the embodied mind GEORGE KURIAN School of Management & Social Sciences, Thapar Institute of Engineering & Technology, Patiala, India Introduction Higher education in India is currently undergoing severe turmoil, as indicated by the elaboration of a series of retrogressive and counter-intuitive measures developed at the apex centers of higher education in this country. The crisis, so to say, has created a vacuum of values and goals in the educational process itself. This can be visualized as occurring at two distinct levels. At one level, there is severe delimiting of those domains of knowledge considered worthy objects of enquiry and pursuit. Recent utterances and policy statements by the administrators at the pinnacle of university administration have lent credence to the belief that insidious attempts are being made to smother academic freedom, and to regiment the way knowledge is purveyed. Three carefully crafted reactionary policies aimed at furthering partisan political ends have been promulgated: 1. The Ministry of Human Resource Development and its subordinate bodies have spewed venom at socio-historical sciences, and questioned the merit of such disciplines as sociology, history and others. 2. The University Grants Commission (UGC) has officially sanctified and raised the status of superstitions or pseudo-doctrines, such as Vastu and astrology, to the level of academic disciplines, whereby they have attempted to dilute the value of scientific enquiry and questioned the spirit of reason, notwithstanding the passionate and considered pleadings against such steps by practicing scientists, social workers and all socially concerned academics and citizens. 3. There are reports of an official move, as in Andhra Pradesh under the dictates of its Chief Minister, to dismantle the social sciences and humanities in the universities and colleges, purportedly to pave the way for joboriented technical instruction in the commercially viable information technology sector. All this has been made easier for the governing elite by the prevailing loss of values in a socio-cultural system driven by a sheer con-

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sumerist orientation, unleashed by market forces from within and abroad, in the name of globalization and economic reforms. State funding for humanistic and socio-historical education and research has been reduced to a trickle, in the name of financial non-viability and the need to cater to the masses crying hungrily for education. However, this has not prevented the Ministry of Human Resources Development from apportioning generous public funding to Sanskriti and Consciousness education and research. Also, private providers have been encouraged to open their "teaching shops" all across the country, so that they can pervert the system at their will, and that too in a country where state intervention in the provisioning of basic services, such as food, health, education, and transportation, is a crying need. By abandoning the system of social support and welfare of the underprivileged, the state has become increasingly irrelevant to the solution of societal problems. There is open encouragement to overly consumerist tendencies and a move away from humanizing tendencies. There is little concern for the development of the essential academic skills that constitute the backbone of any civilization worth its name. At another level, the state and its machinery of education has of late shown symptoms of bewilderment and poverty of ideas, by enlisting in their rolls the likes of Vastu and astrology, and other forms of "rich" wisdom acclaimed as part and parcel of our rich "cultural heritage." The tragedies at these twin levels are now being played out in the corridors of power, and they are directly linked to a deeper malady afflicting the Indian mind-set today. It is evident that there exists a total disdain for humanistic and socio-historical studies, and a penchant for a technologically sophisticated life-style, all set in place together with a fascination for fads like Vastu, astrology, and overt religiosity, with a heavy doze of westernized consumerist mannerisms sprinkled with shades of patriarchal family values. All this purportedly constitutes the prototype of the resurgent, modern Indian youth movement. Naturalistic approach

Recently there have been attempts to bring in a new content of moral values by subversion, by appealing to the glorious traditions and heritage of the race. However, education, conceived as a process of discovery, has at its core the emphasis on self-directed learning and discovery, and not mere pedagogy, the imparting of knowledge viewed as a commodity to be transferred from one party to the other. A naturalistic approach to the study of moral and ethical values would suppose the existence of domains of

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knowledge in the natural order, in humans and other species of animals. The study of altruistic behavior in subhuman species tells us much about the biological underpinnings of such programmed pro-social behaviors. Sociobiologists and psychobiologists have extensively studied both reciprocal and kin altruism. In addition, recent developments in the sciences of cognition, especially neuropsychological and cognitive psychological investigations into the origin and representation of categories of knowledge, have taught us that knowledge systems have an origin in the embodied mind. Yet the objectivist enterprise would have us believe that knowledge systems exist independent of the act of knowing, and they occupy a privileged, pristine position untouched by the inadequacies of the apparatus of knowing – the mind. In the present study, the focus will be on the role of the organism in actively constructing forms of knowledge from highly impoverished sense data. Precursors to the modern construal of the embodied mind can be found in both the Indian systems and the ancient Greek medicophilosophical thinking of ancient times. The Samkhya system in particular is heavily laden with materialistic conceptions of consciousness (Nararajan 2001). This dualist, non-vedic system captured in its core the essential unity of body and mind, as can be seen in the following passage: Materiality performs its task, as it were, so that consciousness may have content, and consciousness performs its task by revealing itself as radically distinct and isolated from all subjective and objective transformations. Because of this association, the manifest and experiential world has come into being (Nararajan 2001: 1399).

By emphasizing the primacy of the prakriti (matter) as the root cause of the universe, this ancient system embarked upon an exploration of mind that is comparable to the new vistas thrown open by the present day cognitive sciences. In the Samkhya system, the following can be found as evidence of its materialistic underpinnings, as elucidated by Natarajan (2001) in his scholarly essay on gendering in early Indian philosophy: − the non-Vedic implications, reflective of the negation of the supernatural and embracing the naturalistic approach, − the evolutionary primacy of the matter, or the mother in the building of bodies and civilizations, − the primacy of the feminine in creation (agriculture or life forms), − the decentering of the feminine consequent to the establishment of pastoral, patriarchal communities,

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− Vedic remedies seen as antithetical to life, or prescribing false remedies for suffering. In the Greek medico-philosophical system, Hippocrates (fl. ca. 400 BC) in particular stands out as an exponent of monism, who traces the mental to the one and only brain as its seat. He asserted: Men ought to know that from nothing else but the brain come joys, delights, laughter and sports, and sorrows, griefs, despondency and lamentation. And by this, in an especial manner we acquire wisdom and knowledge, and see and hear, (…) And by the same organ we become mad and delirious, and fears and terrors assail us, some by night, and some by day, and dreams and untimely wanderings, and cares that are not suitable, and ignorance of present circumstances, desuetude, and unskilfulness. All these things we endure from the brain when it is not healthy (Marshall 1982).

However, some movements within the ancient Indian and Greek systems had always shown a penchant for transcendental thoughts, which somehow permitted the status quo of the priestly class and its hegemony over the community. The divine or the sacred was construed as the repository of wisdom in its "true" manifestation, denying humans the capacity to partake in its glory except through the mediation of the priests. For instance, the Vedic techniques of asceticism are aimed at obtaining sustained pleasures on earth as well as in later life in heaven. This can be contrasted with the Samkhya ideal of liberation from Karma and the cycle of birth and death. The latter at least allows the possibility of the unity of living forms, and is couched in terms of the evolutionary continuity of all things in nature, which can potentially exist in harmony. In contrast to this is the highly individualistic doctrine of Vedic asceticism with the goal of a heavenly abode after life on this planet. By denying the material basis of the human condition, women's position in the family and community was also brought down to lowly levels. The social organization this engendered permitted masculine supremacy and all that goes along with it, including the denial of sex itself as a noble human capacity. The construal of the sacred, or the pure divine, as a sanctified object independent of human existential concerns, was a pretext to smother the spirit of freedom of thought and action, and elevated the idea of causality to inscrutable cosmic mysteries, beyond the reach and rationality of humans. Similar attempts at smothering human freedoms can be found in Greek mythology, too, as exemplified in the legend of Prometheus.

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Objectivist categories of knowledge

If categories are posited to exist independent of the human act of knowing, then a metaphysical reality is somehow constructed and ascribed a privileged position. Even in relatively recent times there have been such attempts to construct a disembodied realm of knowledge, as for instance in the works of Roger Penrose, the renowned mathematician (Penrose 1995, 1998). Crucial to Penrose's thesis on consciousness is the idea that the realm of mathematics is pure and somehow disembodied, not a construction of the mind. Mathematics with its privileged capacity to predict and model the physical universe is attributed a domain independent of the mind, which in the first place gives rise to it. Penrose asserts: Yet its existence rests on the profound, timeless, and universal nature of these concepts, and on the fact that their laws are independent of those who discover them (…) The natural numbers were there before there were human beings, or indeed any other creature here on earth, and they will remain after all life has perished (Penrose 1998:413).

The mathematician is still troubled by the origins of this category in the mind; hence this perplexing question is again posed: Finally, there is the mystery of how it is that mentality is able seemingly to "create" mathematical concepts out of some kind of mental model. These apparently vague, unreliable, and often inappropriate mental tools, with which our mental world seems to come equipped, appear nevertheless mysteriously (at least when they are at their best) to conjure up abstract mathematical forms, and thereby enable our minds to gain entry, by understanding, into the Platonic mathematical realm (Penrose 1998:414).

This is Pythagorean mysticism at its best. Having eaten the wondrous fruit of mathematical wisdom, and feeling elation at the elegance and beauty of the knowledge system he has thus created, the earthy man redeems his pledge with the Creator and accedes the creative power to Him. This harking back to a pastoral paradise in which man had existed with all that the Creator provided for, at peace and symbiosis with nature, is reminiscent of religious themes, but now reframed within the mystic cult of mathematical truths. This originates from the belief that the imperfect mind could not in any way have produced the large-scale foundations of mathematics, with its privileged "truths" and access to the Platonic ideal forms. The latter is in marked contrast to the existential, which at best constitute approximations of the perceptual apparatus. Nevertheless the fear that it is man's own construction – like the Tower of Babel – that he is worshipping

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is disquieting. In another part, Penrose talks about mind thinking up the eternal truths, and then, as if it will sound blasphemous, he says: … the apparent way in which, through mental contemplation, we seem to be able to "conjure up" those very Platonic forms. It is as though the perfect forms might be merely shadows of our imperfect thoughts. To view the Platonic world in this way – as only a product of our mentality – would be very much at variance with Plato's own conceptions (Penrose 1998:417).

A critique

One of the curious ways in which Penrose tries to bring in the lofty realm of mathematics as the ideal to probe and solve the mystery surrounding consciousness is by making a hard-to-accept distinction between passive and active aspects of consciousness. Passive consciousness is concerned with sensations and mere awareness that may be found in other animals as well as humans, whereas active consciousness involves willed action and a sense of free will. In current analysis this distinction appears to have little basis. On the basis of Libet's experimental studies on the temporal course in consciousness (Libet 1985, 1987), various process models of cognition, such as the microgenetic account (Brown 1977, 1988, 1991, 2000) and Edelman's account (1987, 1992) of the neuropsychology of consciousness, we are better equipped to view free will as an illusion (Piaget 1961), and the sense of agency as a kind of 'afterthought' – to borrow a term from Harnad (1982). Consciousness accompanying mental events is the end result of a long traversal in the microgenesis of a mental function (language, perception or action). The genesis of representations from a gestalt, pregnant with meaning to its realization in the extrapersonal space, is the culmination of a traversal across a series of structural levels and over a period of time (in microand milliseconds). It is the feature-analytic processing in the higher cortical centers that exudes an aura of free will and agency. The mental content and its realization have been already selected and are given to the conscious mind at the terminal stages of representational processing (Penrose 1998). Edelman's account of neural Darwinism and the microgenetic account of cognitive processing come in handy here to resolve the apparent paradox of agency and freewill. The linkage of these theories early psychoanalytic thinking is too obvious to be missed. The rich heritage of process models and the organism approach have been overlooked in recent times during the paradigm shift that monopolized psychological theories in the form of functionalist-computational metaphors.

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Categories of knowledge cannot be ascribed such privileged status, at least today, given our current understanding of the genetic epistemological designs underlying knowledge systems. Piaget (1961), theorizing on the origins of intelligence in the child, argued that logic does not model the actual functioning of intelligence in the human mind. Logic is what the mind has refined after the thought processes have traversed a certain length of discourse, but the goal of the psychology of intelligence is to capture the ongoing process of the genesis of knowledge, in ontogenesis and also in real-time in the living organism. That is, logic, being itself the end product of a refined system of thought produced by human mentation, cannot in itself capture the rich and varied processes that gave rise to it. Today, thanks to developments in neuropsychological and cognitive psychological studies and the great strides made in neuroimaging, investigators can successfully chart the micro-temporal and structural levels along which the human mind constructs categories in thought, perception and action. Lakoff (1987) has focused on the embodied nature of concepts, taking inspiration from the earlier work of Berlin and Kay (1969) on the universality of color categories. According to Lakoff, views such as Penrose's have considerable emotional appeal for the professionals who find much satisfaction and joy in their logical discoveries. He says: From this point of view, part of the glory of being a mathematician is to be able to transcend one's humanness, to plug in to the transcendent rationality of the universe and discover some of its ultimate truths (Lakoff 1987:356). Dehaene and his colleagues have been trying to work out the cognitive and neural substrates of mathematical understanding by studying the developmental course of mathematical reasoning using brain imaging techniques (Dehaene 1999). The insights gained in this way are startling. There is a cerebral substrate, and the very architecture of this gives rise to the possible forms of mathematics that humans can create. This capacity is also found in other animals, and is just as adaptive as in humans for purposes of survival. Dehaene says: Because we live in a world full of discrete and movable objects, it is very useful for us to be able to extract number. This can help us to track predators or to select the best foraging grounds, to mention only very obvious examples (Dehaene 2000).

Jean Piaget had earlier implicated sensory-motor activations as precursors to such aspects of language as syntax, despite Chomsky's argu-

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ments to the contrary (Piattelli-Palmarinin 1979). Lakoff places the origin of mathematical forms in the bodily experience of functioning in space, where …kinesthetic image schemas are structured in such a way that they have a basic logic, and it is that structuring that is used in reasoning and that gives rise to mathematics (Lakoff 1987:355).

Now there appear to be sufficient grounds to argue along these lines. Paul MacLean has implicated a motor center – the cerebellum – in the mediation of fractals, which in the organic world resembles the branching seen in treelike appearances (MacLean 1991). MacLean hypothesizes (quoting Vandervert) that the brain has inherent algorithms that can be conceived as "selforganizing, optimizing fractal generators of experience". Giving an illustration, he says that when a mathematician discovers an equation, it is not the discovery of something which exists outside of his body, rather an awareness of something that surfaces due to the preexisting mechanisms of algorithm generation which gives rise to the solution. This is not to deny the existence of a world "out there," but that our experience is a function of the neural structures that have the potential to give rise to them. Like number, color categorization is yet another example of human construction of categories of knowledge. Color is experienced by the brain's visual system from the wavelengths in an array. In the real world there is no color, which is an abstraction constructed by the visual system. The same is the case with numbers. Animal brains are equipped with systems that can conserve dynamically arrayed quantities. Perceiving and using numbers is as natural as vision or reflecting size, color, and shape in the ever-changing visual scenario. Just as perceptual constancies of this kind have adaptive significance, reflecting properties such as number also have their evolutionary-adaptive significance. If a highly refined and versatile system such as mathematics has such humble phylo-onto-genetic beginnings, it is not surprising that neuropsychologists have unearthed the biological roots of moral and ethical values. Moral values Something similar is happening in other categories or knowledge systems. Invoking the richness of "ancient wisdom" and a "cultural heritage" that is immutable and pristine in its form, transcendentalists view human moral values as also preordained in scriptures, such as the Vedas or other religiousspiritual treatises. The faithful and the patriotic are also often tested for

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their loyalty and genuine regard for these. If such missionary zeal is reminiscent of the erstwhile propaganda of totalitarianism and hero-worship, it is because the present attempt is to indoctrinate and infect a whole generation with xenophobia in the guise of the cultural nationalism once prevalent under fascist regimes. A similar instance in the United States of America some time ago evoked the following reaction from the well-known humanistic psychologist Abraham Maslow: …I had allowed these intellectual primitives to capture a good word and to put their peculiar meaning to it, just as they had taken the fine word "patriotic" and contaminated and destroyed it. I had let them redefine these words and had then accepted their definitions. And now I want to take them back. I want to demonstrate that spiritual values have materialistic meaning, that they are not the exclusive possession of organized churches, that they do not need supernatural concepts to validate them, that they are well within the jurisdiction of a suitably enlarged science, and that, therefore, they are the general responsibility of all mankind. If all of this is so, then we shall have to reevaluate the possible place of spiritual and moral values in education (Maslow 1970).

Maslow was disputing the privileged status claimed by some Church groups in imparting religious doctrines as moral values in schools across the USA. Fact and value

At one level the positivist construal makes a sharp demarcation between facts and values, and at another level it tacitly subscribes to the subjectivist doctrine of moral values. Facts of nature are not open to disputation and quarrel. Trained scientists can survey, study, and analyze them using rational-scientific methods. Values, on the other hand, are open to disputation because they are expressed as preferences. That is, there is a tacit assumption that values are by choice, hence they can be regulated by fiat, propaganda or even by regimentation, whereas facts of nature are by necessity. Humans are somehow compelled to perceive the world in a particular manner. That is, there can be only one kind of visual perception, color perception or for that matter one kind of mathematics. This is the position taken by objectivism in the case of knowledge categories. That is, there are true categories of knowledge existing independent of human thought as "ideal forms" or Platonic truths. Humans come to know these truths lying hidden from the senses as a spirit or some divine form. On the other hand, since values are non-rational and non-scientific, they belong to the legitimate domain of religious-spiritual creed by default. Hence reli-

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gious masters, scriptures, Shankaracharyas, priests and imams are considered the authorities on moral values. Since the sources of moral values are assumed to be ordained by divine wisdom or unknown to humans at present, we have to take them for granted as codified in the scriptures, which are revelations of the divine and the sacred, the pure truth. Therefore, instead of discovery principles, commandments are the source of knowledge. The fallacy of this kind of dualism is too obvious to be missed by anyone. Moral values are as much a product of human construction as mathematics itself. Both have their origin in the biological realm and are contingent on the mechanisms of cognitive processing that mediate both thought and affect. But the positivists would argue that humans have a natural propensity to correctly "know" the facts of nature, but in the case of moral values they need to be guided by gurus, acharyas and commandments. This is where the classical distinction between facts and values arise. Facts are assumed to be immutable, while values are mutable and relativistic. Often this boils down to a choice between objectivism and relativism. This is an artificial dichotomy, as if one could choose only between the one or the other. As far as concepts and categories of knowledge are concerned, there is a possibility of plurality, because conceptualization is a function of the embodied nature of human experience. But this does not rule out the possibility of universal moral experiences, because all humans have minds and brains, and the structuring that they entail will have correspondences. As Lakoff aptly pointed out, '… a refusal to recognize conceptual relativism where it exists does have ethical consequences. It leads directly to conceptual elitism and imperialism – to the assumption that our behavior is rational and that of other people is not, and attempts to impose our ways of thinking on others (Lakoff 1987:337).

The fact-value dichotomy falsely assumes the distinctiveness of humanistic and social scientific knowledge as opposed to knowledge of the physical systems. The latter is assigned a primary position in a society wedded to the creed of consumerism approaching monstrous proportions. This dualism explains the ease with which they embrace modern technology without subscribing to the worldview that sustains such technological marvels. Evidence to the effect that science alone can impart unbridled freedom in the pursuit of knowledge comes from the trail-blazing insights accrued in the study of the psychology of the arts and the intuitive in the cognitive sciences in recent times. The possibility of analyzing and accommodating

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alternate intimations and intuitions developed in the Eastern and mystic traditions and bring them in harmony with what cognitive sciences have yielded in the context of mental faculties has emerged forcefully, especially in the work of Eleanor Rosch (2000). The interpersonal-self has long been a subject matter of intense study and research in psychology. On the other hand, the intrapersonal-self, which is manifested in the contemplative and sacred traditions, has been now captured within the framework provided by the cognitive sciences. For instance, the exploration of the limits, nature, and structure of imagination, and self-experience (as in creation) has opened up new vistas which can accommodate even those that so far have been hidden behind the rubric of the religious and spiritual. Rosch aptly remarked: Humans as a part of the inexpressible, unthinkable openness and "sacredness." That is the gist of it all. (…) You'd think this domain would be the special province of religion, but in fact the world's religions have been mostly otherwise engaged – for good sociological and psychological reasons. All the meditative traditions have a lot to say about this may be too much (Rosch 2000).

The implication is that even the intuitive is a domain of knowledge that the sciences can attempt to understand without allocating it to the whims and fancies of the obscurantist and the dogmatically religious. Cognitive microgenesis

Recent developments in the sciences of cognition inform us that the facts of the world / nature are concepts that have been objectified. Most or parts of a concept remain unobjectified even after the specification of the fact. That is why we feel that words are insufficient to express our meanings and actions always fall short of our intentions. Conversely, meanings survive even after the words have perished in the objectified world of utterances, and actions continue to have a cascading or ripple effect. In process theories of mind, sensations act to constrain the development of veridical objects. Objects do not act bottom-up in the mind. Mind constructs objects, and hence objects are only expressions of concepts. That is, a concept is richer than the fact. The sense of reality with which a fact is imbued is due to the enriching of the fact with feeling. Conversely, when the feelings are withdrawn from objects and facts, they take on the appearance of automatisms or mechanical entities. Abstract moral values evolve out of a concrete whole embedded in the body with feeling states. The world of facts is experienced affect-less due to the valuations that have been defused or left behind in the exteriorization 187

of percepts, acts and thoughts. This appearance gives rise to the mistaken notion that there are neutral objects and facts to which values are assigned. The fact-value dichotomy is the best example of such a mistake. Love is one important affect-laden value that humans as a species cherish and nurture constantly, from birth to death. Harry Harlow and colleagues in wide ranging studies have attested the importance of instinctual attachment in the development of the affective states. Initially, the newborn infant loves the tactile-somesthetic warmth and closeness afforded by the mother. It is the need for comforting physical contact provided by a warm body that is being satisfied, not food alone. All affective states tinged with love and attachment spread and differentiate from this base. Love and attachment as values have adaptive functions. MacLean (1987) in his work with chimpanzees has documented the adaptive significance of the separation cry, the pain of separation, and its origin in mammals. Genesis of mind and knowledge

Process models of mind provide a far more realistic description of the evolution of mind in nature and the categories of knowledge it constructs. Within this framework, concepts and values are intrinsically linked in the functioning mind. None are ascribed an out-of-the-world, disembodied or Platonic existence. Within the current models of mind, mind is a process – an outcome of phylo-onto-genetic history. Mental events – language, concepts, emotions and actions – are processes realized over a period of time (in milliseconds or micro milliseconds) and across a series of structural levels that recapture the evolutionary gradients in brain evolution. The origin of mentation is at the core, where the core concept – self – and the primordial affect – will to survive – are embedded in an organic whole. Meaning is captured within these early levels of mentation before the final feature analytic representational unfolds at later levels of the microgenesis of a mental function. The process of unfolding in the direction of external objectification of mental content carries with it a feeling of self that is gradually pruned when the object is realized in the extrapersonal space – as a word, a percept or an act. The sense of self is not a higher-level achievement, as erroneously thought in popular literature. Self is at the source of cognition and is gradually detached from the object it actualizes. The sense of volition or agency in an act or perception is an illusion that is created when the content is given over to consciousness. Consciousness and the sense of free-will are products of the microgenetic processes that take place below the level of conscious awareness. The micro-temporal course eluci-

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dated by Libet and his coworkers in the conscious awareness of a peripheral stimulation and the intent to act attests to this phenomenon. Microgenesis of moral values

There is a general assumption that the self is an agent in making decisions, and a feeling of possessing a self that can scan a menu of competing options or choices. Humans are deemed active agents when it comes to making moral and ethical choices. This gives rise to a sense of volition or agency which permeates the sense of morality, beliefs, intentions, and an idea of self that is autonomous. But this is untenable and inconsistent with our present day understanding of the neuropsychological and cognitive psychological intuitions regarding the genesis of mental states and events. Now it is known that the conscious self is not the agent in moral choices. On the other hand, the conscious self is informed of the choices after the fact, in the form of a behavior, is preset by conceptual processes, which take place beneath the threshold of conscious awareness. Moral choices are exercised in the context of values. Values are embodied in nature. Within Edelman's system of neural Darwinism, these values (which at birth are expressed as instincts) take on such characteristics as desirability and worth, and generate behaviors and receive in return feedback from the environment, which in turn "selects" the neural configurations that will ensure survival. This is tantamount to saying that needs give rise to those values which in phylo-onto-genetic development are selected as a function of mapping between continuing needs and those that are satisfied within the context of the milieu (Edelman 1992). It is the primary consciousness and the early perceptual categorization systems which underlie the formation of early value systems, upon which moral values are subsequently built. In concept development the first to evolve is a sense of self-other differentiation, which is then woven into other aspects of mind embedded in temporal and spatial order. The stability of concepts contributes to the organism's ability to adapt in the midst of a world in flux. It is now known that the phylogenetically primitive parts of the nervous system, such as the central core and the limbic system, sustain such preliminary, value-laden categorization processes, while the higher cortical centers that evolved later in evolution define the self in relation to the external world. Choice and value

In the realm of everyday reality, the right to free choice is important to moral values, because only then the individual has the right to assume responsibility for his choices, which can be safeguarded. Moral behaviors

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derive from values, and values are feelings invested in concepts that have worth for the self. In other words, as Brown puts it, "I am the objects (or ideas) that I need and love" (Brown 1991:110). Moral values enlarge a concept of self that can include a variety of objects to which the self is directed. The selfconcept and the will to survive (the core concept and core affect) have to be distributed over large number of diverse concepts. In an immature state, the self is a unitary affect-idea charged intensely with the will to survive. There is a very primitive self-other segregation and all the affective charges are distributed over the few biological drives that ensure survival. In Edelman's system they correspond to the evolutionarily derived constraints favoring behavior that fulfills homeostatic requirements. On the other hand, in a mature self, this core concept encapsulates other diverse concepts, leading to the richness of intellectual life and refinements in conceptualization. In the affective domain, the developments parallel those in conceptual development, with the will differentiating into refined emotions with a consequent decrease in intensity. This can be seen in the degree of pain at loss or bereavement experienced. The amount of grief that accompanies loss of objects or ideas depend on how large a share of the self that object or idea consumes. Values then develop when part of the self is charged with feeling. Brown cites the instance of a sociopath, whose self development is crippled because there is no place for other selves. Moral choices indicate the enrichment of self with a multiplicity of potential objects or candidates to be chosen. Greater indecisiveness denotes the possibility of no object or choice gaining ascendancy in the selection, accompanied by anxiety, and it is also suggestive of the diversity of concepts guiding an action. Indecisiveness points to a preliminary, unresolved stage in cognitive unfolding. The process of choice enhances the feeling of agency, not because a true conscious choice has been exercised, but because of the intermediate stages that are traversed in the exteriorization of cognition (a concept or action). As Brown explains, The final zeroing-in on a target choice or the value chosen points not to a conscious selection, but selection into consciousness (Brown 1991:108).

Therefore, according to microgenetic theory, the reasons we give for our actions, choices and values are not the true motives, but mere justifications of an unconscious valuation. This is because the consciousness that accompanies the feature-analytic processing of mental representations appears at the terminal stages of cognitive unfolding after traversing several structural levels and across a period of time, all of which takes place be-

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neath the threshold of conscious awareness and is thus hidden from the organism. In brief, in the microgenetic account of genesis of knowledge, the feeling of volition and agency is a deception created by: − The ordering of cognitive forms in temporal succession, giving rise to time awareness; − The self, as the center of an undifferentiated whole, from which the varied cognitive forms in a domain are sculpted in microgenesis; − The self as content in contrast to other external contents; − The unfolding of cognition in a direction parallel to the evolution of higher forms of mentation; − The sense of autonomy that arise as affective charges decrease, when the cognitive representations achieve actualization in the extrapersonal space, from the mental space constrained within the somatic level to the objectified, veridical. That is, when cognitive unfolding proceeds from body-centered schema to the abstract representational schema, there is a reduction of automatisms and urgency, accompanied by an illusion of agency due to the separation of concept and feeling. Voluntary moral choices exercised in the world of actions are only one form of volition the self is capable of. Thought and mental imagery are all volitional in that sense, though this is a deceptive feeling. In sum, the sense of volition and the sense of self-agency in making choices depend on the degree of objectification in the unfolding of concepts. Lower levels of objectification (early stages of mentation, dream imagery, hypnogogic imagery, hallucination, even psychotic states) carry little sense of agency compared to the heightened sense of agency experienced as cognitive processing attains higher levels of clarification and progressive analytical specification. Implications for education Moral behavior is actualized when the values internally assigned to concepts match with those of the summum bonum acknowledged by the community. Here there is a true two-way interaction. Personal concepts with their affective charges exteriorize as shared values and become consolidated in the morality of the culture. Similarly, the prevailing set of values in a given milieu penetrates the maturing self-concept and articulates the self with concepts independent of those motivated by the innate will to

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survive. The task of education in general is to reduce the insularity of the self and make it more open and aware of the richness of the world that surrounds it. To accomplish this, truly educative societal mechanisms are required, which can promote choices, not dogmas and scriptural prescriptions. An educational system, by virtue of its very democratic and humanizing nature, should not promote competing outcomes, but enrich the self with claims other than those of self-interest. Growth in this sense is progressive differentiation of concepts and refinement of emotions. The fate of constructs, and of the affect that fills them with feeling, is determined by the conditions in which the self develops. In other words, "The child is shaped by these conditions to an adult value" (Brown 1991:108). The good life, in this scheme, is thus the quality of happiness that accompanies contentment, which in turn is proportional to the completeness of self-expression. The self that is crippled, as in emotional stupor, or in a psychotic state, such as severe depression, has bogged down with the centering upon the self of all drives and the will to survive. There is no outward flow of energies. The self has not flowed and filled into the crevices of the experiential landscape, encapsulating manifold concepts in its folds, or refined its affects. It is likely to remain a hotbed of conflicts and incompatible pursuits, torn between irresoluble choices – a composite without clarification. The high-strung, tense go-getter afflicted with today's cyberphilia is a prototype of the warehouse of unresolved appetites and schemas. References Berlin, B. & Kay, P. (1969). Basic color terms: Their universality and evolution. Berkeley: University of California Press. Brown, J.W. (1977). Mind, brain, and consciousness. New York: Academic Press Brown, J.W. (1988). The life of the mind. Hillsdale, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Brown, J.W. (1991). Self and process. New York: Springer-Verlag. Brown, J.W. (2000). Mind and nature. London: Whurr Publishers. Dehaene, S. (2000). What are numbers, really? A cerebral basis for number sense. Available on-line at: http://www.edge.org/3rdculture//dehaene p.2htm Dehaene, S., Spelke, E., Pinel, P., Stanescu, R. & Tsivkin, S. (1999). Sources of mathematical thinking: Behavioral and brain-imaging evidence. Science, 284, 970-974. Edelman, G.M. (1987). The remembered present. New York: Basic Books.

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Edelman, G.M. (1992). Bright air, brilliant fire. London: Penguin Books. Harnad, S. (1982). Consciousness: An afterthought. Cognition and Brain Theory, 5, 29-47. Kay, P., Berlin, B., Mafi, L. & Merrifield, W. (1997). Color naming across languages. In: C.L. Hardin & L. Maffi (eds.), Color categories in thought and language (2156). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lakoff, G. (1987). Women, fire, and dangerous things. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Libet, B. (1985). Unconscious cerebral initiative and the role of conscious will in voluntary action. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 8, 529-560. Libet, B. (1987). Consciousness: Conscious, subjective experience. In: G. Adelman (ed.), Encyclopedia of neurosciences (vol. I, 271-275). Boston: Berkhauser. MacLean, P.D. (1987). The midline frontolimbic cortex and the evolution of crying and laughter. In E. Perecman (ed.), The frontal lobes revisited (121-140). New York: IRBN Press. MacLean, P.D. (1991). Neurofrontal cerebellar evolution in regard to computation and prediction: Some fractal aspects of microgenesis. In: R.E. Hanlon (ed.), Cognitive microgenesis: A neuropsychological perspective (3-31). New York: Springer-Verlag. Marshall, J.C. (1982). Models of the mind in health and disease. In: A.W. Ellis (ed.), Normality and pathology in cognitive functions (1-18). New York: Academic Press. Maslow, A.H. (1970). Religions, values, and peak experiences. London: Penguin Books. Available on-line at: http://mir.drugtext.org/druglibrary/schaffer/Lsd/maslowl.htm. Natarajan, K. (2001). Gendering of early Indian philosophy. A study of Samkhyakarika. Economic and Political Weekly, 28, 1398-1404. Pachalska, M. (2003). The microgenetic revolution: reflections on a recent essay by Jason Brown. Journal of Neuropsychoanalysis, 4(1), 109-117. Penrose, R. (1995). Shadows of the mind: An approach to the missing science of consciousness. New York: Vintage Books. Penrose, R. (1998). The large, the small and the human mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Piaget, J. (1961). The psychology of intelligence. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Piattelli-Palmarini, M, ed. (1979). Language and learning: The debate between Jean Piaget and Noam Chomsky. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Rosch, E. (2000). "If you depict a bird, give it space to fly": Eastern psychologies, the arts, and self-knowledge. Available on-line at: http://www.anth.ucsb.edu/projects/esm/IAM/ERosch. html.

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Chapter 9 Identity, autobiography, and the microgenesis of the self BRUCE DUNCAN MACQUEEN Institute of Psychology, Gdańsk University, Gdańsk, Poland and Department of Comparative Literature, University of Silesia, Katowice, Poland

Ἐν ἀρχῇ ἦν ὁ λόγος In the beginning was discourse … Jn 1.1 (translation mine)

Introduction The philosophical problem of identity, understood here as the sameness and specificity of an object over time, is central to any systematic ontology, and has been since the dawn of philosophy in late archaic Greece. But the general rejection of metaphysics that began in modern philosophy at least as early as Nietzsche’s revaluation of pre-Socratic philosophy in the 1870s, and later became a canon of positivism in the 20th century, made identity less problematical: the identity of objects is simply given a priori (hence the name, “positivism”). To be sure, existentialism made the issue of identity again central, but here it was the identity of the subject that was questioned, not the object, and the emphasis was shifted from identity as the sameness of an object over time to (personal) identity as being “oneself.” Thus the concept of identity seems to have assumed much of the meaning once assigned to “essence” in (now unfashionable) metaphysical thinking based on Aristotle’s familiar vocabulary. For most of the 20th century, however, the so-called “linguistic turn” on the one hand, and the socio-political thinking directly or indirectly inspired by Marx on the other (i.e. a nearly exclusive emphasis on extrapersonal relations), made this whole problem either too simple to be interesting or too diffuse to be man-

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ageable. In the current climate, we either speak ideologically about the “identity” of various groups that are either part or not part of the power structure in society, or we worry about identity in quasi-psychological terms, as a synonym for the “feeling of self.” This latter, however, leads quickly to an accusation of “Cartesian dualism,” which for all practical purposes has much the same chilling effect in contemporary philosophy as a charge of heresy in the heyday of the Inquisition. Better to leave the whole problem alone. By the same token, however, identity is perhaps the single issue that makes process thinking, from Heraclitus to Jason Brown’s microgenetic theory, most unsettling. If an object is always becoming until the moment it perishes, then what allows us to say that it continues to be itself, which still seems to be the precondition for its being cognizable? But if an object remains itself over time, what accounts for change? The essential problem here, the paradox of identity and change, goes back at least as far as to Heraclitus’s perhaps overly familiar problem of flux, and so this may be as good a starting point as any. For Heraclitus, the sole and sufficient guarantor of the continuity and sameness of things, and thus their identity, is the omnipresent logos, a word which of course has so many possible meanings that it has haunted the dreams of translators since antiquity. Heraclitus’s well-known delight in aphorism and paradox (affirming the possible, denying the self-evident, deliberately violating the principle of non-contradiction) makes it inordinately difficult for us to extract from the extant fragments a consistent doctrine of what the logos is and how it works. Nevertheless, it is possible to extract from all these often baffling aphorisms some fairly consistent teaching about the logos. For the present purposes, suffice it to observe that the word logos can hardly be understood in this context as a “word” (in the usual linguistic sense, a “lexeme”), still less as an image. The Heraclitean logos is rather a metaphysical principle, indeed the sole and sufficient metaphysical principle, subsuming all others; one who knows the logos understands all things, while without that knowledge we understand nothing. We would seem to be talking about logos as reason, then, rather than as a phenomenon of language. But it is hard to say that the Heraclitean logos is rational in any ordinary, contemporary sense of the word, especially since Heraclitus continually appeals to paradox and even contradiction to demonstrate its nature. The underlying principle of the logos seems to be that of opposition, symbolized by the bow and the lyre, whose effective strength comes from the resonance caused by the tension on a string held

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between two precisely opposite and precisely countervailing forces. Despite the vast array of possible meanings, however, logos in some sense always means a verbal account of something. Thus the facile conclusion that the Heraclitean logos as a metaphysical construct is by the same token not a linguistic construct has little to support it. The implicit assumption that the metaphysical and the linguistic are somehow mutually exclusive categories is a peculiar prejudice of the 20th century, which has combined the “linguistic turn” with the rejection of metaphysics, as though the two were mutually exclusive or even repugnant. Heraclitus’s famous paradoxes are impossible to understand philosophically, however, unless we make the opposite assumption, one which the use of the word logos in the fragments all but forces on us: that language and metaphysics are the same thing, are grounded in each other. Compared to this claim, the so-called Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (that the limits of our thinking are set by the limits of our language) is child’s play. There are two teachings of Heraclitus that are almost universally known. The first of these is that “all is in flux” (most of my Polish students even know the Greek original, πάντα ῥεῖ, even if they do not know another word of classical Greek), and the other, that “you cannot step into the same river twice.” Insofar as Heraclitus seems to have held that all things pertain to the logos, then it would be safe to assume that both of these maxims should also have something to do with the nature of the logos. The problem is that neither of these oft-quoted sentences can be demonstrated to have been spoken or written by Heraclitus, and they are not to be found in the fragments, at least not in the form or context in which they are usually quoted. Indeed, the phrase πάντα ῥεῖ does not occur at all in the extant fragments, and is probably attributable to one of Heraclitus’s students or epigonoi. As for the river, however, the problem is more complicated. There are two different fragments which address the issue of “entering the same river,” but neither of them actually reads precisely that one “cannot step into the same river twice,” as the popular version would have it. Fragment 12 (Diels-Kranz 1951-52)), which is usually cited as the source of the paradox, actually reads as follows: ποταμοῖσιν τοῖσιν αὐτοῖσιν ἐμβαίνουσιν ἕτερα καὶ ἕτερα ὕδατα ἐπιρρεῖ. (1) Very literally translated, this would read: Upon those going into the same rivers, different and different waters are flowing. (2) 196

Burnet’s familiar translation of this fragment (1957) reads: You cannot step twice into the same river; for fresh waters are flowing in upon you. (3) This constitutes at best a loose paraphrase, at worst an egregious mistranslation of the Greek text. To begin with, the original does not contain any Greek words justifying Burnet’s English words “cannot” and “twice”; rather, the reference to “those going into the same rivers,” far from stating that this cannot be done, implies that such persons do exist. It is hard to justify the insertion of a negative in translation when the original does not contain one. Secondly, Burnet has interpreted the emphatically repeated ἕτερα ‘other, different’ as ‘fresh,’ which admittedly reads better in English, but weakens Heraclitus’s emphasis on change and otherness. And finally, Burnet has made a statement of fact, i.e. what happens to people who enter the same rivers, into a logical argument. Burnet reads into the original an inferential relationship (“for”) between going into the same river (mis-stated as an impossibility) and the flowing of constantly changing water, whereas Heraclitus rather obviously says no such thing. To be sure, it is often difficult and not infrequently impossible to reproduce exactly the syntax of the original, especially in ancient Greek, but to make a simple statement of fact into a complex sentence with an inferential clause is certainly going much too far. What fragment 12 actually presents us is a play on words, involving the contrast between ποταμοῖσιν τοῖσιν αὐτοῖσιν ‘the same rivers’ in the first part of the sentence, and ἕτερα ὕδατα ‘other, different waters’ in the latter. The point is not that rivers can never be the same, but rather that their being “the same” cannot consist in being impervious to any change, since a river by its very nature is continually flowing, and this can only mean that the waters are not the same. If we state that a certain river is the Mississippi, the Thames, the Tiber, the Vistula, or what have you, then its identity, its persistence in being precisely the Mississippi, the Thames, the Tiber, or the Vistula, obviously cannot consist in the unchanging nature of the water that fills it. Heraclitus, alas, does not tell us here what the identity of rivers does consist in, if not in the waters.1 What actually makes a river “the same” is not even the flowing itself: rivers can freeze or dry up during 1

The provenance of this fragment is inordinately complicated: Eusebius (AD?263-?3339) in his Praeparatio evangelica is quoting Arius Didymus, who is quoting Zeno, who is quoting Heraclitus in support of a rather obscure argument about the soul. However, the use of the archaic Ionian dialect in that part of the text which has been given here suggests that the quotation is probably accurate. In this situation, however, it remains unclear whether or how Heraclitus may have developed the thought.

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a drought, but we do not say that they then cease to exist – unless the water never returns. The sameness of a river is guaranteed by the banks, i.e. by something that does not constitute part of the river as we conceive it, but is rather the boundary between that which is the river and that which is not the river. The second “same river” fragment is Diels-Kranz (1951-52) fr. 49a, which reads as follows: ποταμοῖς τοῖς αὐτοῖς ἐμβαίνομέν τε καὶ οὐκ ἐμβαίνομεν, εἶμέν τε καὶ οὐκ εἶμεν. (4) Literally, this reads as follows: Into the same rivers we both enter and do not enter, we both are and are not. (5) Heraclitus’s wording in (4), though it repeats the noun phrase “the same rivers” and the verb “enter,” is not at all a re-write of (1). What needs to be explained is the blatant contradiction, “both enter and not enter,” and the problem of what “the same” means here can and should be set aside until that problem is resolved. The second member of sentence (4) – “we both are and are not” – suggests that the problem lies in the law of contradiction itself, since a sentence of the form used here, “both A and ~A” is by definition a contradiction. One suspects that the paradox of the river is intended to support the more fundamental paradox of being and not being: one can be something, whatever that may be, only by virtue of not being something else. The sameness of the rivers likewise is and is not: sameness can be predicated of something only when there already exists, ab initio, the inherent separation of subject and predicate, which in itself denies sameness. Again, is this a problem of language, or metaphysics? Sentence (4), like (1), seems to be drawing metaphysical conclusions from linguistic premises, and that, as I have already suggested, is implicit in the word logos itself. The conclusion from (4) would seem to be that the problem of identity is inherently a paradox. On the one hand, identity sensu stricto is sameness, which is to say, that an object has the relationship of identity with itself and nothing else. This is, however, a very limiting definition that confines the range of possible statements about identity to tautologies. In ordinary language, identity is often broadened to a general or particular similarity – and this is a slippery slope indeed. It is easier, conceptually at least, to take a “Sherlock Holmes” approach to identity: the task is to assemble information confirming that one and only one of the possible suspects is 198

the murderer, where information that the suspect is similar but not identical to the murderer is likely to be misleading for lesser intellects, like Dr. Watson, but not for a mind trained to think logically. In reality, however, there is no Sherlock Holmes and never has been, so that most of us most of the time are in that fuzzy area between strict, logical identity (the sameness of an object) and mere similarity. Thus two twenty-five-cent American coins are said to be identical to each other, having the same appearance and the same monetary value (unless one of them happens to be a collector’s item, but then it becomes so only when in some measurable way it is not the same as any other twenty-five-cent coin). The Polish idiom for two persons or things that are very similar is that they are “as alike as two drops of water.” It certainly seems difficult enough to distinguish two drops of water from each other, and yet under a microscope or even a good magnifying glass it would actually be far more difficult to find two that were indeed identical. All this is not to say, of course, that two coins or two drops of water may not be interchangeable in most situations, but they remain two objects and not one, so the strict logical relation of identity does not apply. The philosophical problems lurking here are daunting indeed. For the present purposes, let us assume that the entire problem of identity can and should be divided into several separate questions, at least in order to make a beginning. Provisionally, at least, the problem of identity can be approached from at least three general directions: − philosophical or logical identity, which is to say, the problem of sameness, and perhaps somewhat more broadly, the “whatness” of objects, i.e. that which makes an object what it is, Aristotle’s essential properties; − sociological or political identity, that is, the way in which belonging to a particular social group endows its members qua members with a particular identity; − psychological or subjective identity, perhaps more accurately (though more awkwardly) the feeling of identity, the sense of being oneself, or not oneself, as the case may be. It is exceedingly difficult to say anything sensible or useful about identity that would equally true or equally relevant in all three areas, if only for methodological reasons. There are two central issues, however, that recur in a very particular dialectic within all three of these general divisions:

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− Identity would seem to be dependent on some kind of continuity, that is, sameness across time. When the sense of continuity between past and present is lost, as in dementia or amnesia, then subjective identity is also lost, even when the other two kinds of identity are not challenged. − At the same time, identity is dependent on the possession of boundaries (the banks of the rivers in Heraclitus’s metaphor), clearly delimiting that which belongs from that which does not belong to the entity whose identity is being defined. This can become a social pathology, of course, as when a nation is held together primarily by its collective hatred for the Other; still, it is hard to imagine any sense of identity which would not be dependent at some crucial moment on exclusion. The psychological paradox of identity as a feeling consists in a desire to be and not to be the same as others. Without a sense that we are the same as others in this or that respect we do not know where we belong, and that in turn seems to mean that we do not know who we are. Most of us consciously choose at least some attributes precisely because they serve to identify us as belonging to a group to which we belong or aspire to belong. At the same time, nothing can be more threatening to the feeling of personal identity than an absence of differentiating characteristics. In short, we long to be unique individuals, and at the same time we fear notbelonging like death itself, so the search for a personal identity is caught in a fundamental contradiction from the very beginning. We need the boundaries that separate each of us from all others in order to feel an identity, and at the same time we transgress or even erase those boundaries in order to assert an identity. Rebellious teenagers, anxious to draw a boundary between their own identities and those they feel their parents are imposing on them, do so by adopting a code of dress and behavior that is as rigorous and as unalterable as any uniform, making themselves as like each other as any soldiers in any army (Grochmal-Bach & Pachalska 2004). How many of us can actually tell two skinheads apart? And yet the shaving of the head, the black clothing and combat boots – all of this is part of a deliberate and conscious effort not to look just like any other teenager or young adult. In microgenetic theory it is the continual re-actualization of the past in each passing moment, the advancing wave of the present moment (Brown 2005), that guarantees the continuity of existence. What prevents this process from being purely deterministic is of course novelty, and novelty in

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turn results, not from an Epicurean atomic swerve, but from the constraints that sculpt this continual (re)actualization into shaped “chunks” of experience that are never completely new, and yet never exactly the same as any another. The greatest problem posed by this approach is, again, a contradiction: if we explain continuity by appealing to the re-actualization of the past in each present moment, then it is no easy task to explain when and why novelty is possible, why things do not simply recur eternally. If we solve that problem by focusing on the uniqueness of the moment in epochal time, we are equally hard pressed to explain why there is any continuity at all. The foregoing is of course the merest sketch of the surface of an enormous problem. The purpose of the present study is to approach the problem of identity (or more specifically the feeling of identity) from the particular perspective of language. The problems of identity cursorily sketched to this point – i.e. the difficult dialectic of continuity and constraint – are familiar enough to linguists, though they are couched in very different terms, thus obscuring some essential points of contact. The sentence is a specious continuity made up of chunks called words, which give the illusion of being atomic units of meaning, each distinct from the other. The problem of the primacy of syntax over semantics, or semantics over syntax, has proven so very difficult to resolve over the last century perhaps precisely for this reason, that its inherent difficulty, the paradox upon which it is based, is not stated plainly, baldly, frankly. The identity of a given statement consists in its uniqueness: most of what we say or write has never been said before in exactly this way, word for word, and in all likelihood will not be said or written again word for word unless it is being intentionally copied. And yet the lexicon and the grammar we use to do this, like DNA, consists of a finite number of possible elements and rules for their combination. Noam Chomsky has spent much of his long and fruitful career trying to explain how this is possible. In what follows I shall attempt to elucidate a psychological phenomenon, the feeling of personal identity, by comparing it to a linguistic phenomenon, the text, understood (at least for the moment) as a unit of discourse, whether spoken, written, or merely thought. This is hardly a facile comparison, and may even raise some serious objections, especially since many psychologists are inclined to believe (or act as though they believed) that words are more likely to conceal than to reveal our thoughts and feelings, especially when we are dealing with a construct as deep and complex as identity. In most schools of psychotherapy, despite many and serious

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divergences of theory and practice, the therapist is instructed to get around and through the words the patient actually uses, in order to get down to the core of her identity, to her “real” feelings and “real” self, which all the verbiage is only hiding (cf. Grochmal-Bach & Pąchalska 2004). As classic Freudian psychoanalysis has come to be marginalized, roundly criticized for being too “talky,” the psychotherapist listens to what the patient says only in order to get to what the patient is not saying, because she cannot or dare not or will not say it. On the other hand, Foucault, though hardly sympathetic to Freudian theory and method, also emphasized the need to uncover and analyze that which is not said in a given discourse, either because it seems too obvious to need saying, or because it is forbidden or inexpedient to say such things, or because that which remains unsaid lies beyond our means to grasp it and convey it in words. In the present study, which will try to move through the at least speciously discontinuous space marked out by the metaphor “identity as text,” I shall attempt to demonstrate that personal identity is “text-like”: that is, it has the structure and function of a text, and is composed of words, sentences, and especially stories. Both the sense of identity and a verbal text are products of the brain, or rather, products of mental processes mediated by the brain, mental objects. As a result the structural and functional principles are the same: not analogical or similar principles, but the same principles. Thus “identity as text” is not so much as a metaphor, at least in the usual sense of the word, as an analogy sensu stricto: identity and text are analogues, the same thing happening on different planes or in different realms of existence. At about the same time that Lakoff and Johnson (1984) were calling the attention of linguists to the way metaphors pervade language, indeed make language possible, the eminent American sociologist Richard Harvey Brown (younger brother of Jason Brown) wrote a book entitled Society as text (Brown 1987), in which he argued that society is constructed analogously to a text: that is, a society is a complex whole woven of diverse and not infrequently contrary discourses, which collectively more than singly define the character of that society. The concrete realization of a given discourse at a given point in time in a given context (an “actual occasion,” to borrow a term from Whitehead), is a text, a specific statement made at a certain time and place by a participant in one or more of the discourses that constitute the social fabric. This leads to Richard Brown’s radical claim that social structures are rhetorical structures. Power in such a society does not result, then, from the force of will, as Nietzsche would have it, or from

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control over the means of production, as Marx argued, or even from knowledge, according to Foucault’s formula, savoir-pouvoir, but rather from rhetoric. It is the ability to persuade that causes some texts in the social discourse to be more generally accepted, and thus privileged, which elevates their authors to a position of power. In other words, control of the direction and character of a discourse is possible only by the formation and deployment of convincing texts (especially but by no means exclusively in the context of a democracy), and this in turn is both a necessary and sufficient condition for the acquisition and exercise of power over society – which is, as Brown argues, itself a kind of meta-text. What is more, Brown (following and expanding upon Burke) points out that one of the basic tools of rhetoric, thus understood, is the mastery of metaphor. In every age there exists a dominant metaphor, the “root metaphor,” which informs the discourse of that age. In the Middle Ages, for example, society and the cosmos were an organism; in the Enlightenment, the organism had become a mechanism, often a watch; by the nineteenth century, a vast machine or engine; in the early twentieth century, a factory. In our own times, we have come to think of the universe as a network, the Internet writ large. In 1987, however, when the “information revolution” was only just beginning in earnest and the Internet was only an idea, Richard Brown suggested that the basic metaphor of the new, post-modern age is the text. The texts produced by the individual emerge from the private space of the mind/brain into the public space, where they accumulate and interact with other texts to form discourses, which in turn determine the character and texture, so to speak, of society. Just as in the individual text there is a set of rules, the grammar of a language, so there is a “social grammar,” a set of rules (not infrequently closely bound up with the ordinary rules of grammar) that determine what is permissible and impermissible in social transactions, what is “well-formed” and what is not. As in the case of the grammar of language, much of the social grammar is known by most of those who use it only intuitively: the rules are implicitly obeyed by persons who cannot, if directly asked, give an account of them, or even confirm that such rules exist. The operative phrase “identity as text,” then, inspired by Richard Brown’s provocative title, can be analyzed in an analogous manner, though in the opposite direction: while “society as text” involves a move from the scale of verbal communication (text) outward to society, “identity as text” moves from the text inward, to personal identity. What makes such a move possible is the use of metaphor, literally “carrying over,” which consists in

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using language that refers at once to two different planes of meaning (MacQueen et al. 2004). Since texts are the instruments by which we use language to do things (Austin, Searle), it seems necessary at this point to come to grips with the devices by which language compares things, events, persons, and concepts. Simile, metaphor, analogy

The first problem to be resolved is whether the phrase “identity as text” is properly a simile or a metaphor. The formal, handbook distinction between these two figures of speech will be familiar to most readers educated in English or American schools. A simile is an explicit comparison of two different things, according to the general formula x is like y,

(6)

where x is traditionally called the “tenor” and y is the “vehicle.” The operative word, which marks a sentence or phrase as a simile, is like (sometimes as), the removal of which would change (6) into a statement of equality or equivalence, that is: x is y.

(7)

The claim made by (7) is not, of course, the same claim made by (6). but rather a much stronger one. The general impression that the word like serves to soften (7) into (6) is undoubtedly the reason why the casual speech of many American youth is so sprinkled with the otherwise inexplicable interjection, like, which thus allows the speaker to avoid taking full responsibility for making an explicit statement of the form (7). Oddly enough, in recent years the reverse strategy has become popular: i.e., the overuse of “literally” to suggest that a metaphorical or hyperbolical expression is actually neither of those (the problem being that “literally” is so seldom used literally). If we posit as inherently true the tautology x = x, then it would be absurd to state that x is like x. A thing cannot be like itself: if x is like y, then it is implied that x is not y, that x and y are two different things which may resemble each other in some particular way. The simile as such thus precludes identity in the strict sense. Similes are ordinarily used to illustrate or clarify, and almost always involve a shift from something difficult to something easy (otherwise it would be hard to say what the purpose of using a simile would be). If we say that x is like y, and if y is something known and familiar, then its characteristics can be predicated of x in such a way that x becomes, if not fully

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known, at least less unfamiliar. When small children have difficulty grasping the mystery of death, we often tell them that Dying is like falling asleep, only you don’t wake up.

(8)

Sentence (8), though couched as a metaphor, is in fact a nearly perfect Aristotelian definition, genus (being unresponsive, lying still, eyes closed) et differentia (no possibility of return to a waking state). If “identity as text” is a simile, then ex hypothesi a likeness is being used to illustrate the structure or function of identity by comparing it to that of a text. Such a move makes sense pragmatically if the structure of a text is simpler or more obvious than that of personal identity, since the simile by its nature moves from the concrete to the abstract, from the empirical to the rational, from the exoteric to the esoteric. And since the phrase in question contains the operative word as, it would be tempting to conclude, without going any farther, that “identity as text” is a simile, comparable to (6), i.e. a phrase whose meaning could be expressed as a sentence: An identity is like a text.

(9)

It is not at all clear, however, that (9) is a legitimate re-write of the phrase “identity as text.” The word “as” has many meanings in English, and not all of them, or even many of them, are easily classified with “like” as a simile marker. Since sentence (9) seems unclear or even absurd, it seems to follow that “identity as text” is not a simile. A metaphor differs from a simile in being an implicit (rather than explicit) comparison between x and y, made without the use of the simile markers like or as. This formalistic distinction is quite convenient but hardly satisfying. Either there is a more than purely verbal distinction between these two figures of speech, in which case the use of “like” or “as” is not unmotivated and reflects some deeper distinction, or the distinction is a purely trivial or stylistic one that can safely be ignored for purposes of analysis. If every metaphor can be reduced to the formula in (6) or the equivalent, then a metaphor is a species of simile, distinguished by a certain compression that eliminates (“gaps”) the formula of comparison, allowing x to be compared to y by inference. On the other hand, it is equally possible to conceive of the simile as a particular type of metaphor, if the latter is assumed to be a certain kind of semeiosis. Perhaps, then, the metaphor can be explained by the formula: x can be compared to y,

(10)

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which at first glance may seem to be the same thing as a simile. Comparison, however, need not be based solely on similarity, especially when it involves analogy. Analogy is a more complex relationship than similarity: a cloud can be similar to a lion, can “look like” a lion, but it would be absurd to say that a cloud is analogous to a lion. Analogy and simile share the common feature that two categorically distinct objects are compared to each other, but in analogies a stronger claim is at least implicitly made for the nature of that similarity. If a cloud looks like a lion, we may delight in the play of imagination involved in the simile, but we will not learn much about either clouds or lions by taking the comparison seriously or pursuing it for more than a moment. It pertains only to a purely subjective impression of surface: the same cloud if viewed at a different moment, or at the same moment from a different perspective, no longer resembles a lion, so the simile loses all sense. Such similes underlie the identification of constellations in the night sky: the Big Dipper looks like a dipper (or a bear, or an oxcart), which is to say, that it looks like something, like an object that can be named, where in reality this group of stars is no group at all. The stars that compose it only look to be somehow connected to one another, to compose a unit or group, from the perspective of earth, at night, whereas in reality they are light-years apart, unconnected by any real, physical relation. Thus there is no depth to the simile, and by the same token the Big Dipper is not properly the name of anything, nor an analogy from which anything of value can be learned, but a superficial simile that enables us to find a given star in the night sky. Astronomy replaced astrology when this fact was realized. If “identity as text” is an analogy, in the stronger sense of that word, then it could be rewritten as Identity is conceived as a text.

(11)

This is not a rewrite of either (6) or (9). What (11) does is to connect the problem of what identity is, and what a text is, on a conceptual, i.e. mental level. Metaphors are often useful precisely because they illuminate something that may be very difficult to grasp, by bringing to mind something that is already known, but in such case, again, to compare x and y is to imply that x and y are not the same, but merely similar. Metaphor and simile would then seem to preclude identity. If a poet compares the blush on the lover’s face to a rose, no one supposes that a blush is a flower, or that a rose blushes. Analogy is a separate problem. If one states that x and y are analogous, then it is at least possible that a more ambitious claim is being made:

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essentially, that x and y are derived from the same thing, which gives them an identity that is perhaps more important than any specious differences. This is implied by the derivation of the word “analogy” itself, from the Greek ana ‘up’ and logos ‘word, discourse, thought’ (see the previous section). There are significant analogies between the structure of an atom, a cell in a living organism, a solar system, and certain kinds of social organizations – “significant,” because the resemblances may be more than superficial likenesses of the “cloud-lion” or “Big Dipper” variety. Regardless of what particular theory we advance to account for these analogies, the essential point is that there seems to be something to be learned from making them, that there seems to be a relation worth thinking about. In the same way, then, the claim that there is an analogy between identity and text may well lead to a stronger claim, essentially a metaphysical one, that textuality and identity are in some important sense related to each other, expressions of the same underlying reality. This is, of course, a metaphysical claim. In book II of the Republic, Socrates undertakes the project of constructing an ideal city λόγῳ οὐκ ἔργῳ ‘in words, not in fact,’ not because he means to demonstrate how a constitution should be constructed, but rather because he has been asked to define justice and to explain why it is better to be just than to be unjust. In order to do so, he must examine the soul to find justice and determine the essential differences between a just and unjust soul; but this, he claims, cannot be done, since the soul is inside a body and cannot be seen, so that a quality that lies within the soul is doubly hidden from view. The only recourse, Socrates decides, is to consider justice in the city, assuming that whatever is discovered from such an examination will equally apply to the soul. In short, Socrates posits an analogy (in the stronger sense suggested here) between the political and the psychological, since only then can the nature of the just soul be inferred from the nature of the just city. Over the millennia that have elapsed since Plato wrote the Republic in the 4th century BCE, it has proven a great temptation to forget about this analogy and read the dialogue as a political treatise, rather than a psychological one. But Socrates (and Plato, presumably) is not really interested in how cities are governed, but rather what the soul is and how it is governed and organized, which makes the Republic a psychological treatise, not a political one. The city is an analogy for the soul. If Richard Brown is correct in claiming that society is analogous to a text, and if I am correct (which of course remains to be seen) in claiming that identity is analogous to a text, then it would seem that the concept of text is a mediation between society and identity, or, to use Plato’s simpler

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and more elegant vocabulary, between the city and the soul. What, then, is a text? How texts are woven

The metaphor as a figure of speech ordinarily pertains to phrases, sentences, propositions, or concepts, as in the example of the “ideal city” in Plato’s Republic. The problem of metaphor becomes more complicated, however, when we realize that the majority of words in a given language are themselves products of a long process of metaphorization, of which only traces remain. We use the word complicated, for example, without much awareness of its derivation from a Latin verb that means to “thoroughly tangle” something, literally string, thread, or rope. The word complicated took on its contemporary English meaning when “tangling” was applied metaphorically to more abstract situations containing numerous elements that are difficult to separate and analyze. We are seldom if ever aware of such a metaphor qua metaphor, which in one sense is “dead,” precisely because the metaphorical meaning of the word has become its literal, ordinary meaning; only one plane of meaning is actually intended, so there is no “carrying over” and no metaphor (MacQueen et al. 2004). The secondary reference has become primary, while the original primary reference lies below the surface, available only to a kind of verbal archeology. From this perspective it becomes clear that the phrase “identity as text” contains not one, but two metaphors: one obvious, the other latent. The latent metaphor is the word text itself, derived from the Latin noun textus, which in turn is a nominalization of the verb texo ‘to weave’ (cf. English textile, texture). This verb in turn bears a fairly obvious etymological relation to the verb tego ‘to cover,’ from which we have such English words as protect and toga. There is an underlying metaphor here, and a very ancient one, that implicitly defines a text as a verbal covering, a verbal fabric or garment. This “text-garment” metaphor in turn informs and justifies the “text-identity” analogy with which this discussion began, because a comparison of both the structure and the function of texts and garments reveals something essential about both of them, especially in relation to the problem of identity. A garment is a complex object, sewn from cloth, which is woven from threads, which are spun from fibers (see fig. 1).

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Fig. 1.

The MacQueen family tartan

Most readers will at once recognize the pattern in fig. 1 as a Scottish plaid. The pattern consists in alternating black, red, and yellow stripes, some thicker and some thinner, running perpendicular to each other. Each stripe is made up of several colored threads woven together at right angles, warp and woof, so tightly that no space can be seen between them. Each thread in turn is composed of numerous small fibers (wool, in the case of a traditional Highland tartan) that have been spun together to make a thread, which only under the most minute examination reveals its composite structure. At the same time, the pattern of alternation is not only purposeful, but also meaningful – which is precisely why this particular plaid has been chosen as an example. For anyone who knows well the “language” of Highland tartans, the Scottish wearer of a kilt made of this cloth, with this particular pattern of stripes, is identified as a MacQueen. Though this “semantic” function of cloth and clothing may seem at first peculiar to the Highland tartan or analogues in other cultures, the fact remains that clothing is used to send a variety of signals regarding identity. Vestis virum reddit, ran the old Latin proverb, misleadingly translated into English as “Clothes make the man”: the original reads “The garment reflects [lit. ‘gives back’] the man.” The point need hardly be belabored: what we wear is among the clearest indicators of who we are, or at least who we wish to be. The irony of all this, of course, is that the basic purpose of clothing is to cover, or even to conceal. This is partly a practical matter: as a species we lack fur, so in cold weather we require insulation. At the same time, we are told in the Book of Genesis that the first clothing, the proverbial fig leaf, was put on, not for warmth, but to cover nakedness, to conceal that which is shameful. To make matters even more confusing, we are often at

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cross purposes even on this level: we not infrequently cover our nakedness, more or less consciously, in such a way as to suggest that the body we are supposedly trying to conceal would be worth looking at. Without clothing, it is immediately apparent who is female, who is male, who is fat, who is thin, and so forth, but it is not apparent who is king and who is beggar. We have little to say about how our nude bodies look, but we can choose to dress them within the limits of our means and our imaginations, so as to assume (or conceal) a particular identity. Personality plays a role in this, but identity is the key. A teenage boy who wears a sweatshirt with a hood and baggy pants with many pockets is more or less consciously saying by his dress, not so much that he possesses particular character traits, as that he is a member of a certain group, that he “identifies” with that group, i.e. draws his sense of personal identity from belonging to that group. Whether or not his own appearance in such a costume appeals to him esthetically is rather beside the point in such cases. A garment, then, per analogiam, is also a relatively stable, but highly malleable object, whose fundamental purpose is simultaneously to “cover” meaning in such a way as to reveal it selectively, not infrequently mendaciously. Like a garment, a text is a fabric composed of many elements so tightly bound to each other by the weaving that only a close examination reveals their separate existence. If we tease apart the words in a sentence, we risk losing the sense of the sentence, and the same applies to the syllables of which the words are composed. The complex system of references in a text are in many respects similar to the warp and woof of a fabric (as witness the common metaphor of “spinning a yarn” in the sense of “telling a story”), where the dialectic of repetition and variation across time and across planes of meaning holds the text together, giving it sense, as the repetition and variation of varicolored stripes of different widths makes the tartan of fig. 1 “sensible.” Like a garment, also, a text reveals and conceals, consciously or unconsciously. Whatever its failings and inadequacies in other respects, postmodern thinking (Foucault, Derrida, Leman) has demonstrated certain facts about texts beyond a reasonable doubt: that much of what is truly essential in a text remains unsaid, that a text always contains elements of contradiction that enable it to be “teased apart,” as the threads in a fabric, that we are seldom fully aware of the “warp and woof” structure of what we say and do not say. Thus far the structure of text and identity has been shown to be analogous. What, then, can we say of function? What is the relation between text

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and identity on the level of experience? In order to answer that question (or at least to begin answering it, to suggest how it might be answered), I propose to follow Plato’s example: to look at the problem first “writ large,” at the level of a nation or society, and only then to consider by analogy what happens in the individual psyche. History and national identity

According to Foucault (1966), history is made up of documents, i.e. texts that provide evidence or testimony for practices of a given place and time (cf. Lemert & Gillan 1982). We need not accept Foucault’s philosophy of history in whole or even in part, but it is difficult to argue with the conclusion that the history of a nation is indeed a composite of texts, a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. It is not a single, authoritative account of the past, nor is it the sum of all that has happened in a given place over a given period of time. It is rather a fabric woven of many narrative threads, or a patchwork quilt, formed according to a pattern that is constantly adjusted and often reinterpreted, but preserves a core concept which gives sense to all the parts, the patches, or the warp and woof of the fabric. When the core concept dissolves or disintegrates, the history of the nation loses its sense, which in turn undermines the sense of national identity. The word history is ultimately derived from the Greek verb ἱστορεύω ‘to inquire, to ask questions.’ Herodotus, the “Father of History,” rather than repeat tales he had heard from childhood, or read in books, or heard in the theater, traveled around Greece and the near Orient asking questions of living witnesses, who had seen events that occurred during the time when the Persian Empire tried two times to conquer Greece. His history is not, however, a simple record or transcript of the answers he received to his questions, but rather a narrative constructed from them. No one source, divine or human, gave him the story as a whole; rather, its narrative unity, its sense, comes from the way he selected and arranged the bits and pieces of information he acquired. If he made written records of what he heard in his travels, they must have filled many more volumes than the Histories we possess, but Herodotus chose only that information which fit his conception, discarding the rest. Nowadays we often call such histories tendentious, but it is hard to imagine how history could be written in any other way. The raw data of history, that which is called in Latin res gestae, the “things done,” or in German wie es eigentlich gewesen ist, ‘as it really happened,’ is an inchoate mass of events, facts, artifacts. History can only

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be made sensible when a sensible narrative is constructed by discarding information that seems (for whatever reason) irrelevant. When we say, then, that we know the history of a nation, a city, a place, an institution, or even an individual, this is not a claim that we know everything there is to know about that object of knowledge, nor is it a verbatim knowledge of a particular text pertaining to that object, but rather an overall concept composed of many actual and potential texts pertaining to the object, from which is derived the sense of what the object has been. An event makes sense, in turn, when it fits within this overall narrative structure: in other words, what happens at a given moment is either congruent with what is already known to have happened, or not, and that is the measure of whether sense can be made of the event. If an event does not seem to be congruent with the sense of history, then it must be reinterpreted until it does make sense, or the narrative must be altered so as to encompass it, or the event must be discarded as extraneous, irrelevant, unimportant. When in November of 1963 President John F. Kennedy was shot dead in Dallas, it seemed to many that no sense could be made of his death if it resulted from the unmotivated act of a misfit ne’er-do-well named Oswald. The result of the search for sense is that an entire library could be filled with books claiming to make sense of the event in terms of history. We are unwilling to believe that there is no “historical” reason why Kennedy died that day. Thus there exists a complex relationship, Heraclitus’s “back-bending harmony” (παλίντροπος ἁρμονίη) between events and meaning: meaning emerges from the relations between events, but events become cognizable through meaning, without which they are chaotic. Of the multiple discourses which inform a society at a given moment (synchronically), the particular discourse called “history,” which weaves together facts from the past, provides continuity of sense across time (diachronically). As such, it is a shared history that gives a nation its sense of identity more than any other factor. A nation wears its history as a Scot wears a kilt in his family tartan. The “textile” metaphor, then, binds together history, society, and text in a single, though complex concept. The autobiography

The role of history as a determiner of national identity is played in the life of the individual by the life story, or autobiography. Like history, the life story is a selective narrative, which at once creates and is created by sense. Like history, also, the life story is very seldom a particular text, an autobi-

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ography in the ordinary sense, a book about oneself, but rather a sense of the continuity and sense of one’s existence from birth to the present, in the form of a continuous narrative. Like Herodotus’s “inquiries,” it is not a passive record of all that has transpired (human memory is not, after all, a hard disk), but rather a narrative, generating a certain forward momentum, as every good story does. As the historians of our own lives, we gather, sort and filter events in our long-term memory, according in large measure to their relation to the autobiography. When events occur that do not fit within the autobiography – a catastrophic accident or illness, an act of random violence, a betrayal, or a sudden, unexpected stroke of good luck – we are forced to either make sense of the event, or change the autobiography to encompass the event, or discard it from memory. In trivial matters this last alternative is the one most often chosen; when the “nonsense” event is more significant, the result of discarding it from the autobiography can be pathological, as in the case of “multiple identity disorder,” once mistakenly called “multiple personality.” The autobiography, as here understood, is a mental construct with the nature and functions of a text, which, in turn, as previously suggested, has many of the features and functions of a garment, woven of fabric. There is always a warp and a woof. There are various threads that merge into a whole and only reveal their individual nature when examined very closely; teasing them apart from the whole fabric makes them easier to analyze one by one, but in the process the fabric is torn and cannot be repaired. In any event there are always holes, tears, loose threads, spots and stains. Like a garment, and like a text, identity at once reveals and conceals, hides and displays, all at once and often at the same point in time and space. Unlike a garment, however, which is at least speciously a stable object, a text unfolds over time, not only in its creation, but in its reception as well. We can gaze at a garment and see it as a whole, synchronically, but a text must be read or heard diachronically. We cannot see the autobiography at a glance, our own or that of others, but in hearing fragments of it we gain a sense of the movement that informs the whole. This difference cannot be pushed to extremes, of course: a garment has a history over time, a beginning, a duration, and an end, while a text (if written, recorded, or even remembered) can endure over time, even many years or centuries or millennia, seemingly unchanged, Horace’s monumentum aere perennius, “a monument more lasting than bronze.” Identity, also, is both synchronic and diachronic: it appears stable over the lifespan, but this stability should not be mistaken for unchangeableness. Identity is a process that repeats itself, as a

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text (say, a literary text, Shakespeare’s Hamlet) is read over and over. The autobiography as the textual determinant of identity is in this respect much like a book that we read over and over, even though we already know what it contains, in part because, although the words remain the same, the meaning seems to change. New events make old words (old stories) take on new meaning. Needless to say, by this point the problem of identity has become in some sense confused with the problem of self. This is, however, a necessary, even pregnant confusion. The sense of being oneself is inherent in and dependent on the sense of being the same over time. The self can be identified from a third person perspective as being an individual, acting agent, an element in a system, but its first-person nature, the self as ego, cannot be explained in this way (Pachalska & MacQueen 2002). Having an identity (continuity and sameness) is thus a precondition for the existence of a conscious self, while the claim has been advanced here that the possession of an autobiography is a precondition for the existence of an identity. The autobiography, in turn, is not merely something analogous to a text, it is a text, in a significant, though expanded sense of the word. Quod erat demonstrandum. The microgenesis of the self In microgenetic theory the self emerges in phylo-ontogenetic stages. The process by which this happens has been better and more thoroughly described by Jason Brown himself (1996, 2000, 2005), so for the present purposes it will suffice to make only a few general remarks pertaining specifically to identity. At the lowest levels of the central nervous system, language as such does not exist. The organism perceives and reacts to stimuli in broad, primitive categories, which it would be misleading to name. The perceived object is encoded with its response, which makes behavior on this level scarcely more than reflex, controlled by instinct. What defines a category at this stage in the microgenesis of behavior is thus a stimulus that evokes a given behavior and directs it towards itself. There are essentially four possible categories: − − − −

eat it; drive it away, run away from it, couple with it.

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Objects have only such an identity as emerges from their being possible antecedents of the pronoun it in one of these four sentences; objects which cannot be “it” are indifferentia or simply non-existent. There is a dyad of action-object, and the only possible subject is the biological self, the center of instinct, of which in essence nothing can or need be said; it is simply assumed to be the doer of every conceivable (re)action. Theories of language since antiquity have tended to focus on nouns as the basic parts of the speech, treating languages as naming systems, but the microgenetic perspective gives primacy in microgenesis to verbs, and more specifically, to a small set of transitive verbs whose objects are the stimuli that evoke the action. There are operative phrases, then, but there are no sentences, and, a fortiori, no texts. The stimulus appears in the perceptual field, there is an immediate reaction (or not), which ends in success or failure in a few moments, and then the entire event is finished, one way or another. The only thing worth remembering is the appearance of the stimulus: when a stimulus with the same features appears again (it is really unimportant whether it is the same stimulus or another which is similar to it), the process of assigning it to the appropriate reaction category is much facilitated by the learning that has taken place. Fear, loathing, or desire for some objects seems to be genetically coded; for others, learned. At the limbic level, the operative self is the dream self, the essentially and naturally hedonistic ego, the center of feeling. From the microgenetic perspective, it is essential to bear constantly in mind that this limbic self does not sleep when we are awake: in other words, dream (limbic) consciousness is subsumed in, not replaced by, waking consciousness. For that matter, the same holds true in the microgenesis of the limbic self emerging out of the biological core self described above. The subjective, feeling self, which scarcely exists at the earlier stage, becomes all-in-all at the limbic stage, which is, as Jason Brown has argued (1996, 2000, 2005) more inward than either the stage which precedes it (the brainstem) or that which follows it (the neocortex). It does not come into being ex nihilo, however, but rather emerges with the quantum leap that occurs between brainstem (core) self and limbic self. As in quantum mechanics, then, there is both continuity and discontinuity, the tension or paradox between them being the essence of the entire system. In dreams (i.e. in the limbic world), there are events, there is language, but the rules are very different. Identity is particularly troublesome: in dreams we feel ourselves to be ourselves, but we are often someone rather different from the waking self, and what is more, during the dream we may

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switch identities several times, as may those around us. There is a great fluidity of self, which involves somehow “knowing” things about ourselves that in waking life are not true. There is, in fact, no truth in dreams at all: we challenge the dream reality only when we are awake, or about to awake. Within the dream all is accepted at face value, without skepticism, no matter how absurd. There is always, however, a certain context: when we dream of being in a certain situation, we somehow know where we are and how we came to be there, even when later, upon awakening, we can give no coherent account of it. Talk in dreams consists of sentences, rarely more. Upon awakening we may remember a phrase or (at most) a sentence that seems to resonate, whether it seems sensible upon awakening or not. The fluidity of identity in dream is both cause and effect of this absence of longer fragments of discourse at the limbic level: experience is a string of pleasant or unpleasant sensations, loosely or not at all associated with each other. The context within which dream events occur is felt but not developed or analyzed. It is in the neocortex, of course, that language achieves its full development, through differentiation and articulation. The warp and woof of brainstem and limbic self are woven into the fabric of identity in the fully conscious self. This is the first-person brain that forms and remembers texts, consciously entering into discourse: − with the other, the “Thou”, the second person; − with the concretely present third person, the objective world; − with non-present others, i.e. with history, literature, works of art, tradition, the past, especially when the non-present becomes more second person than third person; − with oneself. The neocortex sees subtle differences and equally subtle similarities; it lives in and through the Heraclitean logos. The brainstem “now” is measured in seconds or even milliseconds, and the limbic “now” in moments of feeling, brief episodes or experiences that may or may not be loosely strung together. The neocortex, however, can expand “now” indefinitely in the imagination. This is made possible not so much by memory alone, but rather by the various discourses for which long-term memory is a necessary but not sufficient condition. In particular, those discourses in which the first-person-singular is one of the interlocutors are the texts that, in my view, do not so much clarify identity as define it. “I” am the first-person narrator of my autobiography, that story unfolding in my head, in which I

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am also an actor, often, though not always, playing the leading role. This self-aware ego emerges from yet another quantum leap; it is quantitatively and qualitatively different from the brainstem and limbic selves, and yet inextricable from them and subsuming them in various essential ways. It follows from the logic of the theory that disturbances at a lower level do not necessarily preclude the formation of a conscious self (Brown & Pachalska 2003), but the progress and result of that formation will be different, perhaps radically so, when the brain becomes dysfunctional for any reason. Disturbances at a higher level, on the other hand, do not have much significance for what happens earlier in microgenesis. This can be seen in clinical work with patients who have suffered brain damage of various kinds (Brown & Pachalska 2003). As previously suggested, any catastrophic illness can have the effect of disrupting the autobiography so much that it seems to lose sense. An injury to the brain, however, compounds this effect by directly violating the structural integrity of the theater (the brain) in which the autobiographical text-identity is produced and performed. Global amnesia is only the most dramatic consequence, well known in the imagination of the general public but exceedingly rare in actual clinical practice. More commonly we see various degrees and forms of disorganization of the autobiography, which in many cases takes on a limbic character, or may even lose its first-person character completely, as the patient becomes “childish” or utterly apathetic. Such patients remember facts and events from their own lives with the same objectivity (and relative lack of engagement) with which they recall historical facts remembered from their school days: yes, I finished college in 1974, and yes, George Washington was the first President of the United States. It is all the same (Grochmal-Bach & Pachalska 2004). Conventional theories of brain process based on information theory cannot explain this phenomenon, the difference between the first-person and third-person character of one’s own recollections; indeed, they cannot even frame the question properly. All this is to say nothing of the second person, on which subject traditional theory is, again, completely silent. These “philosophical” problems most often remain outside the purview of clinical work, where physicians and therapists are trained to think in terms of symptoms, understood as deficits, and solutions, which make good the deficits (Brown & Pachalska 2003). This approach means that the patient whose autobiography is disorganized or disintegrated in the way here described will not find many clinicians who can even see the symptom, let alone name it or provide some kind of remedy. Neither neurological ex-

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amination or psychometric tests will reveal a deficit, so what is the problem? And yet the patient and her immediate environment are living a nightmare (in many cases, I suspect, rather more literally than this rather trite metaphor usually suggests). At best, the patient may be referred for psychotherapy, but in most cases the psychologist or psychiatrist has no more idea than the physician what the problem is, or what can be done to help the patient cope with it. This problem cannot be solved, in my opinion, until a theory is developed that enables these and similar kinds of symptoms to be viewed as central, rather than marginal, so that therapeutic strategies can be developed to deal with them. How these strategies might look in practice is of course far beyond my own competence or the purview of the present study. The power and potential of Jason Brown’s microgenetic theory, as in the case of any theory qua theory, is not so much that it provides new data about the brain, as that it asks new and different questions, and in many cases re-opens old questions that had been marginalized by the dominant locationist, connectionist, modularist theories. The foregoing is only the merest sketch of how the problem might be approached from a microgenetic perspective. Conclusion The historical mission of neurolinguistics has always been to build bridges between two bodies of knowledge, linguistics and neurology, that in theory have many common interests, but in practice seldom have much contact with each other, to say nothing of mutual understanding. Attempts to build academic programs in neurolinguistics have largely failed, at least to this point, due at least in some measure to the nature of the demands that would have to be placed on students: mastery of basic knowledge in two disparate fields, with different scientific methodologies and often fundamentally conflicting views of human nature. Perhaps more importantly, however, both of these fields largely cut themselves off, as the 20th century progressed, from their philosophical roots, often as an explicit item in an ideological-scientific agenda. The “linguistic turn” in 20th century philosophy, far from solving this problem, has rather exacerbated it. The general tendency of our time, inherited from the 19th century, is to create selfcontained, independent and autonomous realms of knowledge, each with its own language, customs, religion, and structure of authority. Neither neurology nor linguistics has been free from this tendency, and the result is that the neurolinguist is likely to be received as a transgressor of boundaries, and thus at best as an unexpected guest, at worst as an intruder, a spy

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or a traitor, subject to the usual penalties. This may seem overly dramatic – until one actually makes the attempt to introduce neurolinguistics into the academic curriculum, find a place for it in the structure of departments and faculties, and recruit prospective students. The present study, written in honor of Jason W. Brown at the kind invitation of the editors, serves as a modest sample of what might be done with neurolinguistics, if the limitations imposed on it by the structures of thought that have dominated most of the contributing fields for most of the last century or so can finally be transcended. Since my first contact with Jason Brown’s work, when over ten years ago Maria Pachalska loaned me her own copy of The life of the mind (1988), I have become increasingly convinced that microgenetic theory finally gives us a way out of the trap (Pachalska 2003). For the inadequacies of this essay I am solely responsible; for any insight it may contain, Jason Brown can rightly claim most of the credit. I can only hope that he will be pleased. References Brown, J.W. (1988). The life of the mind. Selected papers. Hillsdale, New Jersey, Hove and London: Lawrence Erlbaum. Brown, J. W. (1996). Time, will and mental process. New York: Plenum. Brown, J.W. (2000). Mind and nature: essays on time and subjectivity. London: Whurr Publishers. Brown, J.W. (2005). Process and the authentic life: toward a psychology of value. Heusenstamm, Germany: Ontos Verlag. Brown, J.W. & Pąchalska, M. (2003). The meaning of the symptom and its significance for neuropsychology. Acta Neuropsychologica, 1(1), 1-11. Brown, R.H. (1987). Society as text. Essays on rhetoric, reason, and reality. Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press. Burnet, J. (1957). Early Greek philosophy (4th edition). New York: Meridian Books. Diels, H. & Kranz, W. (1951-52). Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, griechisch und deutsch (in 3 vols.). Berlin: Weidmann. Foucault, M. (1966). Les mots et les choses. Une archéologie des sciences humaines. Paris: Gallimard. Grochmal-Bach, B. & Pąchalska M. (2004). Tożsamość człowiek a teoria mikrogenetyczna. Kraków: WAM. Lakoff, G. & Johnson, M. (1980). Metaphors we live by. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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Lemert, C.C. & Gillan, G. (1982). Michel Foucault: Social theory as transgression. New York: Columbia University Press. MacQueen, B. D., Pąchalska, M., Tłokiński, W., Pufal, A. & Jastrzębowska, G. (2004). Disturbances in the use of metaphors in patients with traumatic brain injury. Acta Neuropsychologica, 2(4), 351-370. Pachalska, M. (2003). The microgenetic revolution: reflections on a recent essay by Jason Brown. Journal of Neuropsychoanalysis, 4(1), 109-117. Pachalska, M. (2006) Neuropsychologia tożsamości. In: M. Pąchalska, B. GrochmalBach & B.D. MacQueen (eds.), Tożsamość człowieka z perspektywy interdyscyplinarnej. Kraków: WAM [in Polish]. Pachalska, M. & MacQueen, B.D. (2002). The collapse of the US -THEM structure in aphasia: a neuropsychological and neurolinguistic perspective. In: A. Duszak (ed.), Us & others (481-503). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

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Chapter 10 Neuropsychology of creativity NIKOLAY N. NIKOLAENKO I. M. Sechenov Institute of Evolutionary Physiology and Biochemistry, Russian Academy of Sciences, St. Petersburg, Russia Over the centuries, artists who have had a stroke to the right or left cerebral hemisphere have been the object of considerable research, and extensive data have been obtained. One of the more interesting observations is that not only do left hemispheric lesions not diminish creative abilities (which are affected when the right hemisphere is damaged), but they can even enhance them. Thus Alajouanine (1948) in his work “Aphasia and realization of creative abilities” thoroughly described the cases of three outstanding artists (a poet, a musician, and a painter) who suffered from aphasia caused by left-hemispheric damage. This was the first published work in which the question was raised of how an inhibited left hemisphere can affect productive activity in literature, music, and drawing. Comparing the works by these famous masters before and after the brain damage began to progress, Alajouanine made a detailed case study. The case of Charles Baudelaire, an outstanding French poet of the 19th century (1821 - 1876), is among these cases. When he was in his prime, Baudelaire had a severe vascular lesion of the left hemisphere, which induced aphasia. As a result, he was able to utter only one short phrase – the curse Cré nom! (roughly equivalent to the English “God damn it!”). This expressive, self-contained utterance (which is characteristic of independent right-hemispheric activity) helped him to convey a variety of soul states, with one leading word changing its meaning. Another writer, the author’s contemporary (which is why his name is not mentioned), who has suffered left hemisphere damage resulting in an inability to speak and write, is still able to read his favorite books in foreign languages: English, Italian and Spanish. Moreover, his memory, mind and sense of beauty have not been affected. Thus, reviewing the typescript of his book for publication, he noticed a passage which did not satisfy him, and forced himself to utter: “It is not good.” At the age of 57 the famous musician, Maurice Ravel, suffered a more complicated case of aphasia (Wernicke’s aphasia caused by injury to the posterior lobe of the left hemisphere, first temporal convolution). In this 221

case the ability to understand speech, to read, and to write was affected; nonsense words (paraphasias) would be produced when he attempted to speak fluently. He could not compose any longer, i.e., he could not read musical notation, nor could he use it to write down his compositions. He did not manage to resume his ability to play the piano, either. At the same time, he could remember his own compositions perfectly, as well as the works of other composers; his musical thinking, emotional reactions and sense of beauty had not been affected. He was able to critically assess the music he was listening to, picking out rhythmic failures and false notes, and describe the pleasure he had from the music he had heard. In the cases of left hemisphere damage, the peculiarity of the creative process, the necessity to use symbolic signs, made it impossible to display creative abilities. However, the creative capacity did not seem to have been diminished: Ravel continued to display his great talent as a composer, though he was not able to play or conduct. The fact that the talent remained intact reminds one strikingly of the life of John Milton, who completed his wonderful poetic work, which he was not able to read, or the life of the deaf Ludwig von Beethoven, who kept on working over his compositions without any hope ever to hear them. According to Beethoven’s biographer, Jan Ehrenwald, Beethoven was held to be illiterate: he could not add up a column of figures or remember facts. In Ehrenwald’s opinion, “Beethoven’s genius was presided over by the preponderant right hemisphere, while his short-comings in the three R’s were due to the left side of his brain lagging behind the right side in his intellectual functions... Paradoxically, this state of affairs might have earned one of the greatest minds of his century a disconcertingly low IQ” (Ornstein, 1997). There are, however, more optimistic data. A patient suffering from speech disorders induced by left hemisphere damage was able to conduct an orchestra, to sing steadily holding the rhythm and keeping in tune with the melody, produce correct judgments on the way the music was performed, and remember notes (Head & Creachly, 1926; Pachalska, 2003). Luria, Tsvetkova and Futer (1968) described the case of the composer V. Shebalin, who endured a hemorrhage of the left hemisphere that resulted in right hand paralysis and Wernicke’s (sensory) aphasia, i.e., the same as Ravel’s. Later, speech functions were partly recovered: he could express himself in short phrases. He could understand the meaning of words only when he had a picture in front of him. But he could not recover his ability to write. Composing vocal music was difficult for him because the sound of speech is one of the main components of such compositions. At the

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same time he was meticulous in writing down music, and demonstrated a perfect ability to create musical compositions. In spite of his severe aphasia, Shebalin continued composing music, and created a series of new works. Dmitrii Shostakovich highly appreciated Shebalin’s Fifth Symphony as “a brilliant work of art, emotionally intense, optimistic and full of life.” Having such recorded medical observations at hand, one can more easily believe in some cases of much more doubtful authenticity, such as the theory of Mozart’s death put forward by an American scientist, Michael Dreik, a neurologist at the University Hospital in Columbus, Ohio. Using the latest research techniques he found a crack in the left temporal zone in a skull purported to be that of Mozart. During the composer’s lifetime it had only partially knitted. Dreik suggests that Mozart could have suffered a TBI when he struck his head against something hard and heavy, and the resulting hematoma applied pressure on the left hemisphere. In spite of this fact, not only did he manage to survive, but also in 1791 he created his greatest opera, “The Magic Flute.” However, in the letters of his relatives we can read that Mozart could not dress himself: his right hand was motionless, and he needed help. In the doctors’ notes Dreik came across, there was a record of some “deposits” in the brain, which in the language of the 18th century could refer to what we now call a hematoma or abscess. But when Mozart contracted an infectious disease, the doctors recommended the most popular 18th century remedy for curing all diseases: bloodletting. The sudden drop in arterial pressure may have caused a CVA: the difference in the pressure inside and outside the hematoma could have resulted in a hemorrhage. Thus the “Requiem” was not finished. An observation by Alajouanine (1948) concerning an anonymous painter, a typical representative of the modern French school of painting (we avoid mentioning his name here for ethical reasons), is of special interest. His works were distinguished by ingenious conception, perfect technique and unique character. He was not only a painter, but also a poet and a lover of symphonic music. Unlike other cases of left hemisphere damage, his illness did not result in right hemiparesis. Moreover, despite some verbal dysfunction, he was able to understand speech quite well, grasping the main idea of the conversation. His high emotional instability had been aggravated by his disease: he became easily agitated, sullen and withdrawn, characteristics to which he had always been inclined. Nevertheless, he kept all his creative abilities. What is more, his creations became even more expressive and poignant. His memory, creative ingenuity and

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individuality, and his sense of beauty had not been impaired. Any critic could recognize any of his works by the master’s hand. A careful analysis revealed that he had become more precise in his choice of artistic form and expressive means, as well as in his use of colors, despite the verbal deterioration. Thus not only did the left hemisphere verbal dysfunction fail to diminish his creative thinking, the manner and rhythm of his painting, but quite the opposite: it even enhanced the expressiveness of this painter’s works. At the same time, when he was praised, he used to say: “I have two people living inside me - the one who paints is normal, while he is working, and the other, who is lost in the darkness, who hasn’t managed to withstand life ... I can hardly put in words what I think ... Inside me there is the one who grasps the reality, the life; the other one has lost what pertains to abstract thinking. When I’m painting, I’m out of my true life; my vision of things is even sharper than before; I learn everything anew; I am whole. I even don’t take any notice of my right hand, which seems so strange to me, when I’m working. These two people, the one knows how to paint with the help of reality, the other is a fool, who cannot manage with words”. (Speech discrepancies were not corrected in the quotation.)

The author who recounted this case exclaims, “Who can describe this disparity inside him between his verbal abilities and the ability to express himself through his painting better than the painter suffering from speech dysfunction?” (Alajouanine, 1948). In his opinion, in a case where the left hemisphere is damaged while the right one continues to function normally, creative ability remains intact with musicians or painters, who use nonverbal means in their work. This expressive enhancement of creative abilities against the background of verbal dysfunction is of special interest in the context of the reciprocal (interrelated) relationships between speech and perception, and, in particular, can be used to prove the idea that the process of sense perception is suppressed by verbal functions (Dobrokhotova & Braghina, 1977). Artistic style: right and left hemispheres of the brain

There is definite evidence that artistic style clearly changes as a result of brain damage. A Bulgarian painter, Z.B., whose case has been extensively described in the literature, endured a left hemisphere hemorrhage that resulted in aphasia, which made his style much more simplistic, close to the art of the Primitivists. He started painting symmetrical pictures in traditional style (Zaimov, Kitov & Kolev, 1969). This change in style made him professionally successful and helped him to attain his fame. This does not mean that the disease brought about an improvement of style, but rather

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that the artistic tastes of the audience and art critics had been more fully satisfied by his postmorbid works. It can be supposed that before the disease, left hemisphere verbal functions had been hampering the visuospatial abilities and artistic skills of the right hemisphere. After the stroke, Z.B.’s “right hemisphere” abilities were “liberated” from the hampering influence of the left hemisphere, which caused the change in style (Brown 1988). Another, much earlier case of the Spanish painter, Daniel Vierge (Gardner, 1976), should also be briefly mentioned here. He achieved success when he was still very young, and was considered to be an extraordinarily talented artist. In 1882, when he was only 31, he had a left hemisphere hemorrhage that resulted in a severe right-handed paralysis. He was unable to utter anything except for some unintelligible sounds. He found the courage and will to recover, and learned to paint anew with his left hand; and like the painter Z.B. he managed to regain the skill level he had had before the illness. And, last but not least, we can consider a literary description concerning the creative work and illness of an outstanding 18th - and 19th -century Spanish artist, Francisco Goya (1746-1828), and the flowering of his artistic gift in particular. According to the description, Goya was enduring transient bouts of deafness accompanied by occasional deficits in understanding speech sounds. Such attacks of deafness may have been symptomatic of left hemisphere damage (in particular, of the area connecting the Wernicke’s speech area with auditory input). In his novel “Goya, or the vicissitudes of cognition,” Leon Feihtvanger gave the following account of these bouts: He could see the abbot moving his lips but did not hear a word;(these words) were the last that Goya heard... Then he was swept over by the blood-red wave of rage, which hit him in the ears and head.

It is interesting to notice that he had developed his genuine style in painting only in the last months after the disease ... before that he had been just a house-painter. He saw in man only what was obviously visible, plain and lucid; but what eluded him was that something vague, many-faced and deceptive, something threatening that anyone has in him. It was not until he became forty and a bit that he realized what it was to paint.

Deafness and depression made him lonely and suspicious. Towards the end of his life his neighbors used to call him “the deaf man in the garden,” and his house - “The Villa of the Deaf.”

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On the other hand, right hemisphere lesions can cause a diminishing of creative abilities and a competitive increase in speech activity. Thus it is well known that as a result of a right hemisphere infarct in the temporalvertex-occipital area, a famous Swiss painter experienced a rapid increase in writing activity, i.e. hyperverbalization (Schnider, Regard, Benson & Landis, 1993). Here is a rough outline of the case: A few days after his second stroke, the painter asked for paper and a pencil. He was persistently drawing only on the right-hand side of the sheet of paper, making legends in most of his drawings. A part of the extensive hatching on half of his drawings was filled with text (Fig. 1A). The artist explained that he had always wanted to introduce text in his works, but it was only then that it freely “flooded” into the picture. It was not until four weeks had passed that he stopped making legends in his drawings. Compared to his works before the disease, his drawings had become more sketch-like and logically disconnected after the two strokes. However, in the opinion of the critics, the specific character of the lines and compositional structure remained unchanged. At the same time, there is a telling difference in how the painter explores the right and left planes of space: he obviously prefers the right-hand part of the sheet and completely ignores the left-hand plane, or abandons the left part of the picture (Fig. 2). The phenomenon of ignoring the left spatial plane may not show itself in abandoning the left-hand part of the sheet, but can be observed in representing only the left side of the face in the right-hand part of the sheet (Fig. 3). Similar observations were made by Pachalska (1999, 2003). The famous Polish painter Habura she described also manifested a marked increase in writing activity. Parts of her drawings were also filled with text (Fig. 1B, see also Pachalska in this volume, Fig. 13A).

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A)

Fig. 1.

B)

Intervention of writing in a drawing A) by a Swiss painter (Schnider et al., 1993), B) by a Polish painter (Pachalska, 1999, 2003).

An inability to create symmetrical compositions is another example of the partial loss of visuo- spatial ability in the case of right hemisphere damage. The painter was asked to draw a mirror image of a figure in such a way that in the end the figure looked symmetrical. The painter failed to draw the full face picture or the picture of a face in profile, or geometrical figures of increasing complexity. In most cases he tried copying the figure shown, and only managed to succeed in representing a mirror image of the simplest figure.

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Fig. 2.

Ignoring the left part of the sheet in a drawing by a Swiss painter (Schnider et al., 1993).

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Fig. 3.

Ignoring the left side of the face in the right part of the sheet in a drawing by a Swiss painter (Schnider et al., 1993).

Talent and Drawing Pictures and calligraphy in Dostoyevsky’s and Gogol’s manuscripts

Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s (1821-1881) persistent use of drawings, covering the sheets of his manuscripts in abundance, with no obvious relation to the contents, as well as his ardent love for calligraphy, can be of particular interest here (Fig. 4).

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Fig. 4.

Samples of calligraphy by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Barsht and Torop (1983) counted more than a thousand “calligraphic” notes (calligraphic means handwriting-like, cursive, free-running, and not interrupted or particularly angular), more than five hundred architectural (“Gothic”) sketches and more than a hundred face representations in 5500 Dostoyevsky manuscript pages. These graphic representations do not correlate, they co-exist independently from each other: − calligraphy comprises 61% of the total number of pictures; − architectural (Gothic) sketches account for 26% (Fig. 5 and 7); − oak leaves (crucifers), which Barsht considers to be a part of the Gothic representations, make up another 4%; − pictures of adult and children’s faces comprise 7%.

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Fig. 5.

Sample of Gothic sketches by Dostoyevsky

Sometimes facial representations, for example, of Ivan Turghenev, a friend of Dostoyevsky and “the first man of letters” in Russia, create whole compositions (Fig. 6). Thinking of Turghenev’s life story, of which he had been a witness, Dostoyevsky drew with rigid and distinct lines a clear profile of Turghenev’s face with an expression of gloomy pensiveness, or even sullenness. Around it there are four full face sketches drawn with delicate and airy lines. It is supposed that the arrangement of these drawings, which is not exactly vertical, makes the same face when it was young, as it appeared about twenty years earlier (Barsht, 1996). The left-side profile representation and frontal arrangement of the faces is demonstrative of different display models, characteristic of right and left hemisphere activity. Left-side profile representation is likely to be associated with the “absolute” knowledge of the image, and is distinguished by the visually perceptible clearness, almost naturalistic materiality, based on the right hemisphere experience of perception of this particular face (Pachalska et al. 2001). The frontal arrangement of faces, on the contrary, displays a lefthemispheric type of image reconstruction, and is associated with vague and uncertain recollections of a child’s face in general. Barsht points out that the contemporary image of a “sullen” Turghenev given in profile was wellknown and absolutely clear to Dostoyevsky, but, as for the portrait of

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Turghenev as a young man, Dostoyevsky took great pains and cannot be said to have succeeded in his recreating the image.

Fig. 6.

Drawings of Ivan Turghenev by Dostoyevsky.

It is interesting to notice that the writer turned to drawing faces most often when he set out to work on a new novel, and we almost never encounter them in his works in the period when he was working as a journalist. Such comparative analysis brings out the suggestion that the face representations should be related to the early stage of working out the writer’s conception, i.e. when his visuo-spatial thinking might be looking for some vague, shapeless and wordless images. It is also surprising that Gothic pictures and calligraphic notes are found most often in the final period of his work on “The Idiot.“ It is not a mere coincidence that the writer presents here a certain “philosophy of calligraphy” (see Dostoyevsky, 1989). Dostoyevsky endows Prince Myshkin, who had learned calligraphic handwriting when he was taking treatment for his epilepsy in Switzerland, with love for the very process of writing. According to Barsht (1983, 1996), who studied the calligraphic rough notes, Dostoyevsky put amazing and doubtless autobiographical words in

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Myshkin’s mouth, when the latter was speculating on the nature and essential significance of calligraphy: “I think I have a talent for that; that is why I am the calligrapher,” said Prince Myshkin. “And here I’ve written in a different script: it’s the large round French script of the last century; some letters were written quite differently; it’s the writing of the market-place, the writing of public scribes, faithfully copied from their samples (I had one myself). You will admit that it is not without its good points. Look at these round a’s and d’s. I have adapted the French characters to Russian lettering, which is very difficult, but it turned out very satisfactorily. ... it is the same as the English lettering, but the thick strokes are a trifle thicker than in the English, with the result that the relationship between light and shade is destroyed. And observe that, too: the oval has been changed, it is a tiny bit rounder and, furthermore, the flourish is allowed, and a flourish is a most dangerous thing! A flourish requires extraordinary taste, but if it is successful, if the right relationship is found, such lettering is quite incomparable, so much so that one could fall in love with it.” “Oho!” the general laughed. “So that’s the kind of refinements you go in for, is it? Why, my dear fellow, you’re not just a calligraphist - you’re an artist.” (“The Idiot”, translated by David Magarshack, 1955).

The researchers consider these calligraphic exercises, these “tests of pen,” as a display of verbal - autobiographical bookish memory, as merging “the word of world” with ”the word of self-confession” (Bakhtin, 1979). Such an approach may consider a calligraphically written word as a means of condensation and compression of verbal memory. Such techniques allow us to re-code and compress a long-lasting impression in the form of a laconic label, a single code word, which can be later deciphered and unfolded as far as it is stored in memory and thus can be called back out of the verbal memory (Slobin, 1976). This approach was effectively used to explain Dostoyevsky’s graphic signs, which was demonstrated by Barsht and Torop (1983). They analyzed a page from a notebook, where in the center there was depicted a portrait of Cervantes with multiple calligraphic notes around it: “Semipola, Semipolatinsk, Petersburg, Literature.” The authors think that here one can read the whole story: Dostoyevsky’s past - Semipolatinsk, exile; his present and future - Petersburg, his literary activity, the writer’s glorious future, his dreams. Thus, all three periods of the writer’s life, his whole life was compressed by just three words. The central picture of an outstanding writer, his favorite, Cervantes, may bear the symbolic meaning of a prophet against this autobiographical background. Their lives run parallel to a cer-

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tain extent. Cervantes and Dostoyevsky both were of noble origin, coming from old but impoverished families, both of them had to do military service, survived slavery or hard labor and exile; they both created their main literary works relatively late. Let us take another example of such analysis (Barsht, 1993). Working over the character of Svidrigailov Dostoyevsky calligraphically writes down: “Notes on Svidrigailov.” Then he repeatedly puts in calligraphic writing: “Napoleon,” “Bonaparte.” He places the picture of Svidrigailov’s face, reminiscent of the portrait of Napoleon III, in the center of the page. The correlation between these names and the picture can be deciphered as follows: Svidrigailov is something of a Russian “Napoleon III,” whom Dostoyevsky considered a personification of the ideal French bourgeois. In both cases such an interpretation helps to reconstruct the inner links between various graphic elements in the rough notes. Barsht sees Dostoyevsky’s calligraphy as his attempt to represent the whole series of associations and conception words, as well as his craving to find an absolute expressive form for the idea. “The writer had an image of some ideal, perfect word which can absolutely exactly express an idea without evoking excessive or scanty associations... The heroes of Dostoyevsky are eagerly searching for “the main word,” as was the writer himself. The perfect calligraphic handwriting might have given an idea of how to achieve this aim or draw it as near as possible... What is important for us is the shape of the letters written, a certain imprint of an invariant. But if you take an attempt to read these samples of writing, you will be struck by the solemnity, wholeness and harmony of common, familiar words. Dostoyevsky could have also felt that: an ideal conception should be placed in an ideal form. Genuine, true and important thought is presented in calligraphic writing.”

This extraordinary love for perfect representation of letters, which is characteristic of the fact that consciousness is dominated by symbols, suggests that there may be a certain state of excessively high left hemisphere activation. To verify this suggestion, let us look over the case of Dostoyevsky’s disease (see Life Chronicle, 1993). When he was fourteen, Dostoyevsky had epileptic (grand mal) convulsive seizure. Here is the description of one of them: “…repeated screaming, loss of consciousness, convulsions of limbs and the face, foaming mouth, wheezing, the pulse is weak, collapsing and jerky. The attack lasted for 15 minutes (apparently accompanied by transient disturbances of consciousness, N.N.). It was followed by complete weakness and the return of consciousness” (Chronicle, 1993).

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Dostoyevsky commented that he was able to recover from these “falling sickness” attacks on the spot. At these recovering moments, the face and the eyes, in particular, became contorted to the point of his losing his identity. An incredible, horrifying yowl, like nothing on earth, is extorted from the chest; everything human is drowning in this scream; and it is absolutely impossible ... to think that it is the same man who is howling. It may even seem that there is someone else, hiding inside this man, who is yowling (“Idiot”).

Moreover, epilepsy can influence the personality of the patient to a certain extent. Dostoyevsky was egocentric, which was intensified by his disease; “he was annoyingly hypochondriac and suspicious of having all diseases” (as he described himself). Thus his closest friend, Nikolai Strakhov, wrote that “...the further I know him the more I realize how difficult he is to get on with; Fyodor is impossibly conceited and selfish” (Chronicle, 1993). Many of those who knew him well noticed that he was prone to emotional outbursts, spells of sullenness, anger and emotional instability. There was a period when Dostoyevsky started avoiding anybody who frequented Belinsky’s circle, became withdrawn and impossibly sullen. When he then met Turghenev ... he could not keep control over himself and gave way to his seething indignation, which he had been trying to restrain: he said he was not afraid of anyone of them and time would come when he could drag them all through the mud; they seemed to be talking about Gogol (Memoirs of Dostoyevsky, 1964).

From time to time he grew painfully suspicious Dostoyevsky has become utterly mistrustful after what has been said at the circle meeting about him and his “Poor people.” When he came to see us he was already out of himself with rage, picked on the words just to have a chance to give vent to all the bile which was flooding him. “Dostoyevsky has just gone insane!” Nekrasov said in a voice trembling with agitation, “He has driven himself wild” (Panaeva, 1972).

In all probability there is a certain connection between Dostoyevsky’s epilepsy and his literary creativity. This is how Thomas Mann put it: There is no doubt that however threatening to Dostoyevsky’s spirit was his disease, his genius is utterly dependent on it and has a certain touch of it; there is no doubt that his psychological clairvoyance, his knowledge of a criminal’s inner world, his apprehension of what the Apocalypse calls “the abysses of Devil,” and in the first place his ability to arise the feeling of some obscure guilt, which is sort of a background for his sometimes mon-

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strous characters, - all that virtually goes along with his illness (Mann, 1961).

Dostoyevsky’s illness had its distinctive features which has made it possible to specify the localization of his seizure focus today, more than century after his death. Fyodor Dostoyevsky, apart from convulsive seizures, endured transitional states of psychic disorders typical of patients having an epileptic focus in the temporal area. Thus, in his novel “The Idiot” the author describes how the main hero is suddenly captured by forced remembrances, arising as palpably bright visual images: I saw your portrait the other day, and it was as if I recognized in the face someone familiar. At once it struck on me that you could have called for me some other day...,

or: The prince, who could not have imagined such a possibility even yesterday, then ... was looking and listening with the feeling that he might have anticipated all that a long time ago,

or: he got stuck with his remembrances and his mind to any external object: ... his sordid thought, which he was striving so much to get rid of, was appearing to him again and again should he only cast a glance around him” (“The Idiot”).

This effect of deja vu is close to “the insights of the past” described by W. Penfield (1966). Transitional bouts characterized by the loss of time and space perception are considered to be typical symptoms of psychotic disorders with such lesion localization: He had been tramping around the park for a long time, when he finally “found himself” strolling along one of the alleys... He would not have been able to recall what he had been thinking about during that, at least, hour, he had spent in the park, even if he wished to ... He gave a scrutinizing look around him and it stunned him how could he have been brought there (“The Idiot”).

Besides, pathologically depressed mood accompanied by distressing gloomy thoughts is very characteristic of epileptic paroxysms of the right temporal lobe: He seemed sad and lost in his thoughts as it was, and looked as if there was something worrying him… He was painfully strained and anxious ... A new powerful burst overwhelmed his heart, and the darkness, where his longing soul was suffering in confinement, was instantly lit up by a brilliant flash of light” (“The Idiot”).

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There are many more examples similar to those listed above. The most important thing, however, is that they correspond to the emotional experience of patients with diagnosed brain lesions of the right temporal area (Dobrokhotova & Braghina, 1977). Consequently, the descriptions of specific seizure symptoms and personality changes lead to the conclusion that Dostoyevsky was suffering from a right temporal epilepsy. The period right before the seizure would be characterized by excessive activity of the right hemisphere. After the seizure was over there was a decrease in the activity of the right hemisphere and a reciprocal increase in the activity of the left, which intensifies the ability to combine and deform images stored in the memory. In addition, in order to practice calligraphic handwriting one must be punctilious, overly meticulous and assiduous, i.e. exhibit personality features which are morbidly exaggerated with epileptic patients. Moreover, this is more characteristic of patients having a right hemispheric epilepsy focus (when left hemisphere activation predominates), which is the case of a relatively benign course of the disease. It is also interesting to notice that in his pictures, showing a repeatedly reproduced stereotype, Dostoyevsky obviously gave preference to extended proportions, which is demonstrative of an overactivated state of the left hemisphere, the right being functionally suppressed. The representations of Gothic windows, which can be encountered in Dostoyevsky’s manuscripts, most likely serve as some sort of subconscious signals of such left hemisphere activity. However, it is possible that the process of alternating hemisphere overactivity, which, in the case of Dostoyevsky, was aggravated by his disease, may be typical of any creative activity.

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Fig. 7.

Samples of architectural (Gothic) sketches by Dostoyevsky.

Dmitrii Likhachyev (1987) gives several logically consistent arguments when explaining Dostoyevsky’s “Gothic” windows (Fig. 7). One of them, in particular, is his study of the history of architecture and drawing at the Engineers’ College. These subconscious reminiscences of his architecture studies could have had an impact on his search for the proper form and his endeavor for structural organization of his particular “literary work space.” There is another justification: the Gothic style was Dostoyevsky’s favorite style in architecture, and in this “adoration” there was some element of a religious feeling. Drawing the windows of the Koln Cathedral was something of an act of contrition for Dostoyevsky for his inability to perceive its beauty on the spot. Finally, Likhachyev makes an attempt to answer the question why there are so many pictures of Gothic windows drawn by Dostoyevsky in his manuscripts. To his mind, the tendency to the vertical line in Gothic style is somehow a replica of the vertical in the writer’s world outlook.

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Top and bottom of life, God and Devil, good and evil, his heroes striving to soar upwards..., hell and heaven in his heroes’ souls - all that is arranged along the vertical and may remind of the Gothic structure of the world which was depicted by Dostoyevsky (Likhachyev, 1987).

This explanation seems most significant: what is underlying both Dostoyevsky’s thinking and the Gothic vertical organization as its predominant feature is the duality of thinking represented by the opposition “top – bottom,” with a tendency upwards. Nikolai Gogol in his article “On architecture today” wrote that architectural, particularly Gothic, images conveyed the idea of structuring upwards, raising and rising upwards: from earth to heaven, from body to soul, from matter to idea. Gogol, like Dostoyevsky, was deeply interested in the “annals” of world architecture. He wrote: ... the belief, fervent and ardent belief, guided all thoughts, all minds, all deeds to one single craving - the craving of an artist to raise his creation higher and higher up to heaven, which he was so strenuously striving for, which he adored at the only sight of it, and up to which he reverently stretched his praying hand. The building of his creation was soaring up to heaven; narrow windows, pillars, vaults were rising up in an endless line” (cit. Gogol, 1951).

It is not a mere coincidence that Gogol was no less skilled in calligraphic handwriting either; three days before his death he masterfully wrote a phrase, suddenly cut short (Fig. 8).

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Fig. 8.

Sample of calligraphy and drawing by Nikolai Gogol.

Thus both calligraphy and the representations of Gothic architecture are interrelated in the creative works of Gogol and Dostoyevsky. It is quite possible that calligraphy may have some relation to other spatial graphic characteristics. There is a hint of such association in Gogol’s calligraphically written phrase, rounded off with a sketch. The profile, reminiscent of Gogol’s, patterned to the right, is looking out of the raised bonnet of a carriage, which has something in common with a half-open book (Fig. 8). One spontaneously begins thinking of some word for the legend to the picture; something like “to leave,” “to disappear” (Pictorial Souvenirs of Russian Writers, 1988). What acquires significance here is the combination of “an ideal form” of writing (as denoting the peculiarity of the logical left hemisphere) with the profile drawn to the right (which is characteristic of the predominant activity of the left hemisphere). Thus, in calligraphic writing as well as in depicting the elements of Gothic architecture, we can observe some tendency to symbolic representation of the ideal form for a thought and notion, to finding the most exact imprint of a word which denotes not so much a visual image as a notion arising as the result of an excessively high left hemisphere activity.

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Vrubel’s unusual space

The art of Michael Vrubel (1856-1910) has evoked such contradictory responses (from praising to cursing) as no other painter could hardly ever claim. The famous painter Valentine Serov sincerely confessed that he “did not understand the anatomy of Demon.” When Vrubel traced the figure of Demon, it was astoundingly perfect and anatomically precise. Looking at the copy Serov asked, “Why is it not the same in the picture?” Vrubel answered, “Because I feel it in a different way.” The story has it that an exhibition in Paris was frequented by a stumpy man who was spending hours in front of Vrubel’s paintings. This was Pablo Picasso. By that time Michael Vrubel was already seriously ill, and had been placed in a lunatic asylum for the third time. He wanted “to teach how to see the fantastic in the real world, as Dostoyevsky did. He managed to glimpse something that was hidden from the eyes of most of the people, and went blind, as Rembrandt. It is a well-known fact that at the age of 27, being a student of the Academy of Fine Arts, Vrubel started taking lessons at Repin’s studio. His picture “The Romans at feast” belongs to that period. According to his words, its subject is more than vulgar and trite - two young creatures are winking at each other at the bed of a fat bon vivant fallen asleep from too much wine... Repin saw a detailed water-color version of this subject in the size of the final version, and he liked it” (see Vrubel, 1976).

The picture became the focus of much attention and interest due to the fact that the painter had to overcome certain difficulties in solving the problem of spatial organization of the picture. It can be well seen that the two figures in the picture are evidently moved to the right and upwards, and to accomplish his work over them the painter had to extend the canvas in the upper right-hand corner. This surprising composition shift can be explained by the preference to the upper right-hand part of space. Here, it is worth recalling that a preference for this segment of the visual field is characteristic of predominant left-hemisphere activity. In his portraits Vrubel obviously shifted the depicted figure to the right-hand side of the picture space, e.g. his sketch “Mourning at the sepulcher” (1887), or the picture of Demon’s head (an illustration to the poem by Michael Lermontov “Demon” 1890-1891). Moreover, in a period of severe psychotic relapse he persistently stuck to the right-hand side of the spatial field, e.g. his portrait of N.I. Zabela-Vrubel (1904). He quite often represented the rightward movement in his pictures (e.g. “The riding horseman,” An illustration to the poem by Lermontov “Demon.” 1890-

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1891), as well as profiles turned to the right, e.g. in the picture “Male portrait” (1903-1904). Besides the preference to the right-hand side of the field, in his notebook sketches one can find some rough drawings of selfportraits in which the left-hand side – the cheek and nose – is not contoured... what is drawn with clear-cut lines is the pressed thin lips and the right eye, looking upward. The left eyelid is just slightly marked (the detail is not filled in, Vrubel, 1976). In another self-portrait the right side of the face is well-formed, while the left eye is drawn with slightly visible strokes, as if deliberately tentatively (op.cit.). Thus we can see here a willful disregard for the lefthand part of the space caused by an interhemispheric imbalance with an obvious decline in right hemisphere activity (see chapter II). This phenomenon is associated with a collapse of an integral space structure. And it is quite possible that here is the reason why Vrubel so fatally failed to create “a self-sufficient finished harmony of the whole” (Dmitrieva, 1987).

Finally, Vrubel’s paintings are extremely elongated along the vertical, e.g. his picture “Spain” (1894) with proportions 2.88; the portrait of Zabela-Vrubel against the background of birch-trees (1904), proportioned 2.17; or horizontal lines, as in the picture “The fallen Demon” (1902), proportioned 2.86, which is yet another typical spatial characteristic of his manner of painting. Naturally, these elongated proportions could be the result of the painter’s search for a solution to his artistic problems. But a willful disregard for the proportions of “the golden section” has too much in common with other peculiarities of spatial organization in Vrubel’s pictures, showing the lack of balance in hemisphere activity, with excessive activity of the left hemisphere. Such deviations usually accompany schizophrenic psychosis. It is hard to believe that his intolerance, gradually growing to almost aggressive criticism towards his friends, an obvious overestimation of his own personality (once he burst out at Repin, “And you, Ilya Yefimovych, can’t paint at all”), and later his confused thoughts and acoustic hallucinations (he “heard the voice of Robespierre“) could not be biologically conditioned, as pathologically excessive activity of the left hemisphere. But what makes this story a tragedy is the fact that Vrubel’s creative work, despite his own insanity, was absolutely sane and normal (though this was not appreciated by the public). The silent “Cry” by Munk

Tuberculosis and mental diseases ran in the family of the outstanding Norwegian painter Edward Munk (1863-1944). One of his sisters died in

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an asylum (Stenersen, 1972). Edward himself often fell ill, suffering from severe relapses of rheumatism. He was bedridden for so much time that he did not even manage to finish school. He was not well educated, and did not possess a great deal of common knowledge. It is amazing that he could see the moon only as a full moon: he painted it so many times, and he always painted it round. He could hardly believe in something that was contrary to his image of the world, and at the same time he believed in spirits, and that there was a time when the Earth had two moons. He was amazingly taciturn and retiring. He lost his temper as soon as he heard something that was not to his liking. He was very suspicious, and was predisposed to see traitors in the people who were close to him. It seemed to him that people around him wanted to do him harm, he saw enemies everywhere, thinking that ill-wishers were chasing him. He was afraid of being hurt. If he caught sight of people speaking in low voices, he would exclaim, “When on earth will this riffraff stop gossiping about me?” He was so much withdrawn from any contact with others, so hopelessly lost in his own thoughts, that he looked as if he were daydreaming all the time. He could paint by memory what he had seen only in a flash. He often worked outside, but his eyes were glued to the canvas. He retreated into himself even in the open air. When he was 45, he had a serious case of a mental disease accompanied by exacerbated delusions of persecution. He could approach and hit strangers who, he thought, had been “backbiting” him. He spent seven months in a private mental hospital; he created many pictures and one absolutely delusional and despairingly gloomy poem supplied with drawings. Nevertheless, the pictures that he painted while in the state of acute psychosis were neither better nor worse than the pictures he had painted before he fell ill, or would paint after he recovered. Later he would say: “As soon as I got down to work, all the evil was coming off me.” Principally, his life, his fate, his disease, some traits of his personality and some of his habits, have surprisingly much in common with Vrubel’s story. His first paintings, like Vrubel’s, were violently and fiercely attacked by the critics. For instance, his picture “The sick girl” (painted when he was 23) was thought to be “a failure,” “a spoiled, partly erased sketch.” His cousin, the painter Gustav Ventzel, declared: “You paint like a swine. How on earth did you paint the hands, they look like stumps.” Art critics wrote: “It is not even the matter of the personality, but the ravings of the almost insane, the mood which one falls into when being in delirium tremens, or having hallucinations.”

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He had lived most of his life in mountainous Norway, yet he never painted mountain views. Landscapes would have oppressed him. He felt dizzy at the sight of a mountain. He generally had a fear of open space: he could hardly cross the street, he did not like looking around. “The Cry,” the most characteristic of Munk’s pictures, is overwhelmed by fear (Fig. 9). A young man is standing on a bridge clasping his head with his hands. He is looking at the viewers with disproportionately large round eyes. His mouth is open as if to stop a cry ready to burst out.

Fig. 9.

“The Cry” by Munk

The specific spatial organization of the picture enhances the feeling of despair. Although the figure is depicted full face, there is an impression of the man “moving” towards “the most hopeless dead end” of the picture space - the bottom right-hand corner of the picture. It should be recalled that the perspective lines in a picture are usually directed from the bottom left-hand corner to the top right-hand corner of the picture. It was Wolflin who took notice of the fact that the diagonal picture space from the bottom left to the top right-hand part could be perceived as ascending; while the converse diagonal is taken as descending. In its bottom right-hand part, the picture seems to be closed up, and, consequently, hinders “the movement” of the figure. The man finds himself in a confined space where there is no

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way out. The blood-red sky and landscape lines are mounting up around him in petrifying curves. Landscape colors and lines are rising up against a weak and supersensitive man. As a matter of fact, this is Munk himself, having felt one evening how the landscape was paralyzing him. Landscape lines and colors had been approaching him to smother him. The fear made him try to cry out, but he could not mutter a sound. He realized that something had happened to him, his nerves being overstrained. And still he did not go to see a doctor, considering (as many other painters) that such unusual states of mind could help him paint, while as a result of the course of treatment he would be deprived of his independent, unique nature. In the lithograph “The Cry” there is Munk’s legend in German: “I have felt the cry of nature.” Legends were rare in his pictures. But in this case it was very important for him that the viewers understand the picture. We can consider this as his desire to add symbolic signs to the image, i.e. to merge a “left-hemispheric” sign system into the creative process in its final stage. Zhukovsky’s landscape shorthand

One could hardly draw a distinct line between Vasilii Zhukovsky (17831877) the famous Russian poet, and Vasilii Zhukovsky the artist. He started drawing as well as writing verses when he was a child, and had a persistent passion for both these pursuits (Pictorial Souvenirs of Russian Writers, 1988). “The enchanting beauty of his verses,” as Alexander Pushkin put it, is more widely known than his drawings; he used to say that “art is poetry taking different forms” (Zhukovsky, 1985). His poetic work was highly appreciated by his contemporaries. Thus Vissarion Belinsky wrote: “Pushkin would be impossible and could never be appreciated, if it were not for Zhukovsky.” Nikolai Gogol said wonderful things about Zhukovsky: “Among our other poets Zhukovsky is like a jeweler in the circle of apprentices, that is, the master completing the finishing of their work...”. There was another gift that Zhukovsky was distinguished for: he undoubtedly had a heart of gold and was the kindest man of letters in Russian literature. To be kind, gentle and responsive is a talent, and Zhukovsky displayed the talent to a full extent (Lotman, 1981). After his first trip abroad Zhukovsky wrote: “Traveling has made me a painter. I have drawn au trait about 80 scenes, which I have engraved myself au trait as well.” Landscape is almost the only subject for his drawings, and here he displayed an accomplished mastery. It is noteworthy that

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he tried to convey “the human soul in the soul of nature” with the help of a pencil and a pen (Zhukovsky, cit. 1985). Later, when he was traveling, he used to keep a sort of graphic diary, “making sketches of the best sights.” Moreover, according to Gogol, “he could draw them in dozens in a flash, and they were precise and perfectly well-done.” His hand seemed to be catching up with the eye watching the passing landscape; and the spontaneous, almost automatically done notes add to the peculiar charm of his “landscape shorthand,” as it was called by M.Y. Libman. Zhukovsky’s drawings are very likely to be an example of a rare and absolutely harmonious merger of the word and the picture: his diary is illustrated by drawings, while everything that is missing in his drawings is put in words. “What makes the feeling of the great and beautiful so utterly torturous is that you are overwhelmed by the strong desire to form one whole with this beauty and grandeur: thirst - at the sight of the Rhine, aspiration - at the sight of the Alps - all that is music, poetry” (5 September 1832). The unfolding landscape in the picture is developed by the running lines, creating a sort of music of handwriting, an arabesque, turning round its internal swirl (which F. Schlegel considered to be one of the most ancient forms of human fantasy). And in this respect Zhukovsky’s drawings have much in common with the melodious harmony of his verse (Pictorial Souvenirs of Russian Writers, 1988). Pushkin’s profiles

It is interesting to note that in Alexander Pushkin’s (1799-1837) drawings we most often encounter profile representations. The great poet most strikingly and eloquently render this distinctive personal look in his profile drawings, with great mastery. Thus, in Pushkin’s profile sketch Evgeny Baratynsky has the look of a thinker. And the most difficult task in portrait painting is to render the look, which is even harder when the person is represented in profile, and even more arduous when graphics are concerned. Moreover, the amazing preference to left-sided profile representation immediately catches the eye. It has been proved that such preference is associated with predominant right hemisphere activity. This gives greater stimulation to get to know this part of Pushkin’s creative work better. Efros (1945), who studied Pushkin’s self-portraits, noticed that out of nearly 1500 drawings by Pushkin, portraits and self-portraits make up almost 50%. By now over a hundred people depicted in the drawings have been identified: relatives, friends, Decembrists, women who Pushkin fell in love with (Pictorial Souvenirs of Russian Writers, 1988).

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Hundreds of people’s profiles encountered on the margins of Pushkin’s manuscripts show his great passion for people. It can be said that he lived a crowded life...” (Efros, 1945).

His firm hand and visual memory is what strikes the viewer in the sketches of faces. Pushkin could instantly work out an individual and unique “formula of the face” for everyone. Reproducing it time and again (there are, for example, about 30 sketches of Elizaveta Vorontzova), he enriched it with new half-tones. We know what Pushkin looked like mostly judging by his selfportraits: he made more than fifty sketches of himself (Zyavlovskaya, 1980) (Fig. 10). Such reliable evidence as his deathmask confirms the accuracy of his profile representations. His intently meticulous selfrepresentation can be compared to that of a great painter, and, as for the writing graphics, to one of the greatest poets in the world history of art. This was the way the great Rembrandt painted himself, and the great Charles Baudelaire drew. It is well-known that Pushkin often used drawing as a means of non-verbal communication: finding his friends out, he sketched his self-portrait instead of dropping a line. In the self-portrait of 1827-1830 “the real features of Pushkin’s lively face are rendered with firm, laconic and magnificently impetuous strokes, breathing life into the whole picture, which you will not feel in any of the portraits of Pushkin painted by professional artists, even in the best of them painted by Tropinin” (Efros, 1945).

Fig. 10. Alexander Pushkin’s self-portraits. A) with Onegin; B) selfportrait from 1829; C) self-portrait from the 1820s.

According to Zyavlovskaya, Pushkin’s drawings were, as a rule, a strict reproduction of something previously seen, and revived the images of those who occupied the poet’s thoughts. Time determined the most important and essential, sorting out everything insignificant and irrelevant. The 247

author takes notice of the fact that Pushkin’s drawings are laconic, precise, expressive and surprisingly plastic. (Plastic here means, primarily, suggestive of three dimensions by means of two, of convexity, motion, or space.) Profiles are spontaneously drawn in a firm hand. The drawings visually fix the images emerging in the poet’s consciousness, sometimes not even shaped yet into words. The drawings are the illustration of the poet’s ability to pierce deeply into the heart of things and phenomena, to perceive palpably even a vague allegorical image. It is most likely that in this case the visual image is preceding the verbalization of thought. Even the experts studying Pushkin’s creative work find some of his drawings obscure, so remote are they from the verbal image. We can rightly suppose that intuitive visuospatial thinking (or the ability to create by spontaneous visual images) serves as a source of his creativity. The poet describes the condition of that special spiritual uplift, of ever-growing insight which directly precedes the act of creation (Blagoy, 1982). Thoughts flock to me in droves; they dance about and caper; Swift rhymes to meet them rush, my fingers restive grow, They boldly seek a pen; the pen, a sheet of paper.. A moment, and the verse will smoothly, freely flow. So does a vessel doze till on her deck the dapper, Quick-moving hands appear; up, down they creep, and lo!‘Tis done: the sails fill out; upon her travels leaving, The ship begins to move, the swelling waters cleaving. ( “Autumn,” Pushkin, translated by Irina Zheleznova)

Art critics are convinced that Pushkin’s poetry is distinguished by very precise, almost documentary descriptions. One can easily visualize the landscape described in his poetry. His verses sound as though they were written to evoke a subject for genre and landscape painting, which was to come at one of the exhibitions of “traveling artists” (Peredvizhniks) some forty years later. Stepanov (1959) justly noticed that Pushkin described everything as realistically as it would be later depicted in the pictures by Perov. A study of the relation between Pushkin’s graphics and poetry suggests that his creative work essentially consists of two inseparable parts. As the poet-painter, who has always one in two in the graphic genre, which still remained on the outskirts of his creative work, Pushkin managed to show to the world something theoretically impossible - he managed to imprint (though subconsciously, or it could hardly be done at all) in tangibly concrete graphic images the most guarded secret of an artist - to imprint, to

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fix the process, the mechanism of artistic thinking itself (Kertzelli, 1983). These words suggest that Pushkin’s genius can be associated with his specific bilinguality - his ability to use simultaneously two languages (discrete and analogue, figurative) - and with his ability “to translate what can not be translated,” as Yurii Lotman puts it (see chapter I), when translation from the one language to another and vice versa is still possible though inexact, and when both of the languages are involved in a most creative interaction, fully complementing each other. It is most likely that poetic graphics goes back to pictograms, which associated a picture integrally with a written word. Efros (1933) thinks that Pushkin’s autographs appeal mostly to aesthetic feelings ... They do not look like separate letters formally attached to one another to shape a word. They stretch out in one single continuous graphic line constituting sound symbols within itself... The language of strokes is where Pushkin’s drawing originates from. This is a bridge connecting his word graphics and image graphics. Strokes and tails are rounded up with an arabesque (this is how some of the autographs are completed); the arabesque is winding up like a bird; the bird lines are entwined with an outline of women’s legs, etc. That was a traditional and basic artifice, typical of shorthand technique in the days when it was considered a form of art rather than a speech-recording technique.

Pushkin’s drawings suggest that his graphic images can be associated with the following general principles and tendencies: − i/ full attention, focus on a ripening thought (not yet put into words), plunging into the heart of his work; − ii/ emotional reaction accompanied by catharsis, freeing him from the burden of onerous thoughts. Alexander Blok mentioned once that what was important in Pushkin’s drawing was “some sort of liberation.” Pushkin most often sketched portraits in his manuscripts when he was obsessed by the subject of the picture. It appears as if he were trying to set his consciousness free. − iii/ parallel thinking resulted in a forbidden subject being forced out into the subconscious. Pushkin’s pictures of the Decembrists could be a relevant example. It was forbidden to mention the subject openly. But drawing their profiles helped suppress any thoughts associated with them. However, these thoughts, though suppressed, could have caused a serious depressive feeling. Many times Pushkin drew the gallows with the five hanged Decembrists. To secure his friends from of-

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ficial pursuit, Pushkin burnt the manuscript of his “Notebook” (which he had been working on for a year!). − iv/ testing by a picture how precisely a word expressed the idea of his verse. He demanded exact images. As a poet of reality, Pushkin was able to express any shade of thought or feeling with few words. Gogol was the first who noticed this: “Few words, but they are so precise that they tell everything. In each word there is an abyss of space...”. (On the contrary, the romantic poets complained about the impotence of words, sign-symbols. “How can the heart express itself!” asked the famous Russian poet Tyutchev bitterly. “If only the soul could say things without words,” said another Russian poet, Fet). Emotionally, Pushkin was endowed with enormous vital and creative energy. His increased sensitivity was probably the result of an illness. It is known that twice - in 1817 and 1820 - Pushkin fell gravely ill with an unspecified “fever,” and the doctors were unable to do anything for his recovery (Zyavlovsky, 1951). But even before the first attacks of the disease, when he was still very young, the idea of suicide occasionally came to him. Pushkin did not keep these thoughts to himself, neither did he tell them openly to others. In the poem “My will. To my friends “(1815), published in the poet’s life-time, you can read the following lines: Tomorrow I will want to die...

Valedictory feelings, put into verse, seem to have lost their power over him; in other words, the feeling of sadness has vanished in the poetic word. In 1819, in the rough notes for a poem addressed to his sister, the poet gave vent to the despondent feelings wholly flooding his heart and soul. In these notes there is a drawing of a pistol. Many times Pushkin challenged or was called out to a duel on various occasions (sometimes very silly ones); he managed to reconcile with many of his opponents, and the pictures of the pistols, which can be seen in abundance in the manuscripts of 1820-1828, reflected the feelings from which the poet could not at once free himself. These pictures helped him discharge his nervousness after a duel was cancelled. As a matter of fact, these pictures profoundly display the low-spirited state typical of depression. His relatives knew about the blues that overwhelmed him each spring. On the 16th of February 1825 Lev Pushkin wrote to Polina Osipova:

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...I am getting more and more worried about my brother. The spring is coming; this time of the year fosters a strong melancholy in him; I have to admit that I am much concerned about the sequels it could cause.

Three of six pictures of pistols were drawn in 1828-1829. It seems that with the passing of time Pushkin’s striving for duels was getting more and more persistent. It is quite possible that this urge to duel was the result of his suicidal mentation. Two years before his death he bought a book on the history of duels. In February of 1836, Pushkin got himself into duels three times. Within a year his life was taken by a bullet. To evaluate the poet’s emotional state let us try to analyze independent associations with visual, e.g. color, images. For this purpose the earliest verses, written in 1813-1819, and relatively late ones, dated after 1825, and mainly 1835-1836, were taken for analysis. It turned out that bright color images are more typical for Pushkin’s earlier works, and, what is more important, they are very tangible, having positive emotional connotation. The color white, for instance, has the following associations: ...lustful breathing White chest fluctuation By whiteness overlapping snow “To Natalia” (1813).

Or: White petticoat... “The Monk” (1813).

Or: White day “Autumn morning” (1816).

The associations which appeared in his verses in the last years of his life, preceding his premature death, have acquired a negative coloring: To put on a white chasuble “Rodrik” (1835).

Or: As pale as dead... A melancholy moon is floating over the skies (1825)

These examples show that in the early verses, written before the depression started to progress, positively colored associations prevail (white = life, progress, love), while associations touched with sadness are much more typical for the more mature verses (white = death, weakness, fear).

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There can be more such examples. In his early verses Pushkin associated black with life, man and love (“black hair,” “the curls of black swiftly running to the shoulders, tender voice, loving glance”), while soon before his death he also related black to death (“Black crowd of crows,” “in the darkness of the tomb”). What attracts attention is the fact that the color palette was becoming less diverse, with richly colored images vanishing from his verses and colored associations being replaced by achromatic ones (with the accent on the purity of the tone), having a mystic character. It is interesting to notice that the evolution of these color associations was to a certain extent similar to the change in the color palette in painting. Many great colorists of the 17th to 19th centuries had come to decrease the intensity of their color scheme and polychromy from a more colorful scheme in the beginning of their creative work, limiting themselves to a more reduced and monotonous coloring. This can be noticed with Titian, Rembrandt, Velasquez, the latter being addicted to the extensive use of all the hues of grey. In contrast to his colorful early portraits - “The girl with peaches,” “The girl lit by the sun” - Valentine Serov had turned to a more scanty color scheme in his late portraits (Dmitrieva, 1962). The change of emotionally colored color associations in poetic works has much in common with the cases described above. This proves that there is a relation between a color image and emotional state. It is likely that the bright colorful palette, or intense and tangible color images encountered in the early works of both painters and poets, can be explained by the predominate activity of the right hemisphere. There is a gradual diminishing in the volume of color associations in poetic works, and a decrease in the intensity of the color scheme and polychromy in the works by the great masters (with an obvious preference for grey), which may be associated with the increasing predominance of left hemisphere activity in the creative process in the later periods of their work. An obvious preference for grey under the predominant activity of the left hemisphere can be indirect evidence for this phenomenon (Nikolaenko & Ostrovskaya, 1989). The process can be partly referred to old age (with the passing of years most people gain a definitely reasonable “left-hemisphere” wisdom), but it can also be the result of the tragic decrease in their creative energy, accompanied by the rapid exhaustion of the resources of the right hemisphere for creative thinking, by their “burning themselves out” by the age of forty. This conclusion, which may seem so simple, can be justified by one more fact: with the passing of years intense creative work in poetry, as

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a rule, gives way inch by inch to the expanding power of journalistic and prosaic genres. References Alajouanine, T. (1948). Aphasia and artistic realization. Brain, 71, 229-241. Brown, J.W. (1988). The life of the mind. Selected papers. Hillsdale, New Jersey, Hove and London: Lawrence Erlbaum. Critchly, M. (1955). Verbal symbols in thought. Journal of Neurological Science, 1, 274-290. Dobrokhotova, T.A. & Braghina, N.N. (1977). Functional Asymmetry and Psychopathology of Focal Cerebral Lesions. Moscow: Medicine (in Russian). Gardner, H. (1976). The shattered mind. The person after brain damage. New York: A. A. Knopf. Lotman, Y.M. (1978). Phenomenon of culture. In: Y. Lotman, ed., Semiotics of Culture , 10 (3-17) Acta et Commentationes Universitatis Tartu, N 463 (in Russian). Luria, A.R., Tsvetkova, L.S. & Futer, D.S. (1968). Composer aphasia. In: Problems of Diagnostic Localization of Brain Functions (328-333). Moscow: Medicine (in Russian). Nikolaenko, N.N. (1983). Functional asymmetry of the brain and human's creative abilities. In: Y. Lotman, ed., Text and Culture , 16 (84-98), Acta et Commentationes Universitatis Tartu, N 635 (in Russian). Nikolaenko, N.N. (1985). Interaction of the brain hemispheres in process of color perception and designation. In: V.D. Glezer, ed., Sensory Systems. Sensory Processes and Asymmetry of Hemispheres (47-57). Leningrad: Nauka (in Russian). Nikolaenko, N.N. & Ostrovskaya, M. I. (1989). Color preference as an indicator of emotional and personal characteristics (study under suppression of the right or left brain hemisphere). Human Physiology, 15, 11-15 (in Russian). Nikolaenko, N.N. (1998). Interaction of Cerebral Hemispheres and Artistic Thinking. In: B.E. Rogowitz & T. Pappas, eds., Human Vision and Electronic Imaging, III, Proceedings of SPIE, Vol. 3299, pp. 439-446. Nikolaenko, N.N. (1998). Brain Pictures. Osaka: Kansai University. Nikolaenko, N.N. (2003). Representation activity of the right and left hemispheres of the brain. Acta Neuropsychologica, 1(1), 34-47. Pachalska, M. (1999). Afazjologia. Cracow & Warsaw: PWN Publishers. Pachalska, M. (2003). Imagination lost and found in an aphasic artist. A case study. Acta Neuropsychologica, 1(1), 56-86.

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Pachalska, M., Talar, J., Brodziak, A. & MacQueen, B.D. (2001). Disturbances of mental image processing in post-stroke patients with left and right hemisphere damage. Medical Sciences Monitor, 7(4), 716-724. Schnider, A., Regard, M., Benson, D.F. & Landis, T. (1993). Effects of a righthemisphere stroke on an artist’s performance. Neuropsychiatry, Neuropsychology & Behavioral Neurology, 6, 249-255. Zaimov, K., Kitov, D. & Kolev, N. (1969). Aphasie chez un peintre: essai d’analyse des certains elements de l’oeuvre du peintre bulgare Z.B., avant et apres une hemiplegie aphasique. Quelques confrontations avec le cas Vierge. Encephale, 58, 377-417.

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Chapter 11 Re-membering: the recovery of artistic vision after right-hemisphere stroke MARIA PACHALSKA Institute of Psychology, University of Gdansk, Gdansk, Poland Introduction Imagination has seldom been a topic of particular interest in neuropsychology (Brown 1988, MacQueen 2001), even though it is arguably a specific modality of cognition and as such must be mediated by some kind of brain mechanism. The functions of sensory perception, memory and attention – i.e., the cognition of what is or seems to be happening right now and what has happened or seems to have happened in the past – account for the vast majority of research projects and publications in the field, while only a handful of works have been devoted to mental images of what will be, might be, or might have been (Pachalska et al. 2001, Brodziak 2001, Pachalska 1991, Brown 1988, Brodziak et al. 1986). In many somewhat older handbooks of neuropsychology (Martin 1998, Walsh 1994, Benton et al. 1983) the word “imagination” does not even occur in the subject index. In Moore and Fine’s lexicon of psychoanalysis (1990) there is no such entry. Even Eysenck’s excellent introductory handbook to cognitive psychology (1993) contains no discussion of imagination, and the word does not even appear in the index. More recently, David Andrewes (2001:79-80) devotes 2 pages to a brief discussion of a particular type of disturbance in the way a movement is imagined prior to its being performed. A slightly more extended discussion of what are there called “imaginal deficits,” visual and spatial, can be found in the Oxford handbook edited by Halligan, Kishka, and Marshall (2003), in a chapter on visuospatial disorders contributed by Lilianne Manning (2003), but even this is just slightly over 2 pages (179-181). It is only under the heading “mental imagery” (and not “imagination”) that Kolb and Whishaw (2003) finally raise some of the pertinent issues, though even here imagination is not conceived as a modality of cognition, but rather as a special problem on the frontier between perception and movement. The problem most often discussed under this heading is thus the one that Andrewes raises: the way in which the brain

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“imagines” a movement before it is performed, as a tennis player waiting to return a serve imagines what is about to happen and prepares her body to react accordingly (this being precisely the example used by Kolb & Whishaw in their most complete discussion of “mental imagery”). Oddly enough, even in the psychological literature associated with art and creativity (Sołowiej 1997, Solso 2003, cf. Pachalska 2006) the subject at hand is not treated systematically. There seems to be a general recognition that imagination is a central feature of artistic creativity, and perhaps the relation between art and imagination seems so obvious that it does not require elaboration or even comment. We no longer believe in divine Muses who literally or figuratively breathe ideas into the soul of the artist (or poet, or musician), but we may have replaced them with a concept, “imagination,” that is scarcely or at all better understood, and may be just as mystical. This may be one reason why even the most recent neuropsychological literature seems to prefer talking about “imagery” and “imaginal disorders,” rather than imagination, while psychological studies of creativity use “imagination” without defining it. In everyday language, imagination is most often associated with fantasy and creativity, with the mental activity of children, while the adjective imaginary means “fantastic, unreal.” Imagination, when thus understood as the ability to “transport oneself to or live in an unreal world” is a faculty which flourishes in the child until the process of maturation and/or the inhibiting influence of social expectations extinguishes it (the classical example here is Barrow's Peter Pan). In Polish, on the other hand, the expression “to have no imagination” does not mean to be dull, literal minded, devoid of fantasy, but rather to be foolish and reckless, i.e. unable to foresee the consequences of one’s actions or decisions. The child who runs out into the street heedless of traffic is scolded by his parents: “What, don’t you have any imagination?”, which is understood to mean, “Don’t you realize that you could be hit by a car?” This leads to a certain paradox, if not contradiction, that the concept of “imagination” in this usage often serves precisely to counteract the effects of “imagination” in the earlier sense of fantasy: the child imagines that he is flying instead of walking and is then scolded for having no imagination because he jumped out of the tree without foreseeing that he would fall and break his arm. On further reflection, however, it becomes possible to see a certain common ground in the child’s ability to live in an imaginary world and the adult’s ability to foresee the consequences of actions and decisions, and this in turn is precisely what situates imagination as a cognitive function.

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Perception provides us with mental representations of ongoing reality, inner and outer, in the dynamic present, filtered by attention; memory, then, records, stores, and retrieves these representations. Yet in addition to mental representations of the past and the present, we also have mental representations of the future. This does not refer primarily to parapsychological phenomena or prophetic visions, but rather to very mundane and yet very necessary mental operations. On the level of speech, for example, the speaker who is not simply reciting a memorized text must have a conception of what she is going to say before beginning to say it. All the mental activities involved in planning, mediated by the frontal lobes, require the possession of some sort of mental image of a desired state of affairs that is different from the existing state, and of the actions that would be necessary to make the current state of affairs look more like the desideratum. Indeed, all intentional action by definition requires an intention, which in turn requires at least a rudimentary ability to conceive of something that might be, but at present is not. The implicit decision to limit the scope of cognition to perception, attention, and memory does not give us any theory by which to understand how the brain does such things. Very often, too, there is a mental representation of that which could have been said, but was not, or what might be said, but should not. In the same way we can imagine a unicorn, though none of us have ever actually seen one. Imagining a unicorn, in turn, is not the same thing as remembering a picture of a unicorn drawn from someone else's imagination, nor can it be adequately explained by assuming that the memory of a horse and the memory of a horn combine to create the mental image of a unicorn. Generally speaking, in fact, a great deal of mental activity is focused upon objects of thought, i.e. representations, that do not lie within or emerge from the realm of either perception or memory. For the present purposes, then, the term “imagination” will be used to denote this realm of cognition, the objects of which are things that are not and have never been the object of direct sensory experience. This faculty is not limited to foreseeing the future consequences of the unfolding present, as described above, but also includes the ability to produce a mental representation of, for example, historical events which one did not witness oneself, or the inner workings of a mechanism whose outer shell is opaque and closed, too large or too small to be seen, as an atom or a solar system. Imagination as here conceived of course has many points of contact with memory. When we remember or imagine something, we “see” objects without the use of our eyes, hear them without the use of our ears, feel

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them without touching them, and so forth. Thus both imagination and memory generate mental representations without the direct participation of the sense organs, i.e. the central nervous system produces representations without engaging the peripheral nervous system. These representations are of course typically experienced as weaker than the representations produced by direct sensory experience. Flashbacks and hallucinations, then, result from a pathological reversal of this relative strength relationship between perception and memory or imagination respectively. The difference between imagination and memory consists in the fact that memory traces are records of sense perception, i.e. mental representations of some fragment of a present that now lies in the past, while imagination involves representations that are projected, interpolated or extrapolated to objects that lie spatially or temporally beyond the here-and-now of perception. I remember what happened during a meeting at which I was present; I imagine what happened at a meeting at which I was not present, or what is happening somewhere else while I am at the meeting, or what might have happened at a meeting which was canceled, or what will happen at meeting scheduled for tomorrow. There is of course no guarantee that reality will be consistent with what I imagine, but then again, there is no guarantee that reality is consistent with what I perceive or remember, either. The role of imagination in art takes on a different aspect in this context. The roles and relative importance of tradition and intuition may well be disputed, but it seems clear enough that is precisely the cognitive aspect of imagination that distinguishes the artist from the connoisseur or critic. An artist must first conceive a work before beginning to execute it, and this would appear to be the domain of imagination, as here defined and described. A painter “sees” something in the private space of her imagination, and then uses her painterly skills to make that something appear in the public space of the canvas, where it can be seen by others. The purpose of the present study is to examine the case of a patient, a prominent Cracow painter and sculptor, Krystyna Habura.* At the age of 61, she suffered a right-hemisphere stroke that left her with mild aphasia and hemiparesis, as well as a creative block which she herself termed “creative aphasia.” This latter condition, which she described in her own words as an inability to “imagine anything whatsoever” associated with a *

Krystyna Habura not only gave her permission to use her name for purposes of scientific publication, but in fact insisted upon it She herself almost never used her first name, signed all paintings “Habura,” and preferred to be addressed in that way.

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“hole” in her brain, persisted even after the aphasia had resolved and the barrier of hemiparesis was largely overcome. Ultimately, however, after intensive rehabilitation, she regained the creative gift she had lost. The case provides a valuable opportunity, then, to examine some of the issues involved in developing a neuropsychological theory of imagination (Pachalska 2003). There is a certain tradition of case literature involving artists who have incurred brain damage and found themselves unable to create works of art (Alajouanine 1948, Zaimov et al. 1969, Gardner and Winner 1981, Reinvang 1987, Kaczmarek 1991). In most of these reports the patient’s underlying problem is explained as a secondary consequence of aphasia or as a result of the destruction of the ability to think symbolically (“asymbolia,” see below, Discussion). Thus the ability to paint a picture, for example, is understood to be a factor of graphic abilities that are somehow dependent on the verbal mechanisms disrupted by aphasia, or, alternatively, both the verbal and the graphic mechanisms are thought to be disrupted by brain damage in analogous ways on parallel pathways. Such explanations assume that the ability to execute a work of art is an expressive, executive function that is theoretically and practically separable from the ability to conceive a work, just as most theories of aphasia treat the language system as a module that is presumably situated as a whole downstream from the cognitive and emotional functions that produce the substantive contents of a speech act and the motivation to produce it, respectively. Case history* Habura was born on 18 September 1928, in Warsaw. She had two daughters, both artists, but the marriage ended in divorce and she never remarried. After graduating from the Cracow Academy of Fine Arts, she quickly earned a reputation as a brilliant artist in both painting and sculpture. Her resume contains an impressive list of individual and group exhibitions, in Poland and abroad, as well as a number of national and international awards, including First Prize at an International Exhibition in New York in 1972 for her “Last Supper.” Her works can be seen today in private collections and museums in Europe and the United States; an example of her expressive style, with vivid colors and a unique mixture of the abstract and the figurative, is given in fig. 1. *

Some of what follows in this section was originally published in an earlier article by the present author (Pachalska 2003), and is reproduced here by permission of the publisher. Some of the figures have been changed.

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Fig. 1.

A premorbid painting by Habura entitled “Struggle” (1984)

Habura's painting style was characterized by constant exploration, as she searched for new artistic solutions and experimented with new forms and ideas. She was particularly interested in portraiture, where her work displayed an extraordinary range of style, ranging from realistic portraits done in a kind of “engraving” style (see Fig. 2), to highly stylized, almost surrealistic portraiture. Often, she included commentaries and legends of various kinds in her works, writing labels or comments on, above, or underneath the figures. Her working style was notoriously Bohemian. She often painted in periods of “creative frenzy” lasting for days or even weeks, during which she ate almost nothing, smoked and drank heavily, napped more than slept, and left her studio only for a few moments at a time to attend to basic physiological needs. The exhausting lifestyle and poor diet, combined with overuse of tobacco and alcohol, soon brought the expected effects. For 9 years preceding her stroke Habura was under treatment for hypertension, but she was not a disciplined patient, took her medication only sporadically, and did not even pretend to curtail her smoking and drinking. However, she formed a deep emotional attachment with her physician, who, to her great frustration, did not return her affections. His portrait (as “Elfik,” a diminutive of “Elf” in Polish), often highly stylized, appears in numerous portraits from the last decade of her pre-morbid work (cf. Fig. 2).

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Fig. 2.

Premorbid drawing of “Elfik,” a physician for whom Habura felt a deep, long-lasting, but unrequited love

Habura had an almost stereotypically artistic personality: she was impetuous, often tactless and quarrelsome, egocentric, resentful of any and all attempts to control or restrain her behavior. In personal relations, including her relationships with her two daughters, she was capable of great warmth and devotion, but could also be petty and mean. She enjoyed being the center of attention, not excluding scandal, and sometimes embroidered stories of her own past to make them more “colorful,” though at the same time she appreciated the wit and intelligence of those who were not taken in by her tall tales. In the course of her artistic career she gathered around herself a small circle of close friends who tolerated her extravagances, but there was also a much larger circle of persons in the artistic community whom she had offended. This in turn hampered the development of her career, as it proved increasingly difficult for her to organize exhibits. On July 3, 1990, at the age of 61, Habura had a CVA that left her with a left hemiparesis and mild non-fluent aphasia. Neuroimaging showed a large focal lesion in the right hemisphere, involving the frontal, parietal, and temporal lobes, in the zone supplied by the central cerebral artery. This unusual picture requires some explanation. Her handedness is extraordinarily difficult to ascertain at this remove in time. She herself proudly claimed to be ambidextrous, and regarded this as an essential part of her artistic personality. She painted with both hands, drawing the main figures with her left hand and adding the details with the right. Various tests of handedness, along with family interviews and a thorough inspection of old photographs, have given contradictory and inconclusive results. The fact that she

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painted finer details by preference with the right hand suggests left hemisphere dominance. She normally wrote with the right hand (writing with the left hand was not tolerated in Polish schools in her generation), but her handwriting was also clear when she wrote with the left hand, which (according to her daughter) she often did when she spoke on the telephone. She ate and drank with the left hand, and many photographs show her gesticulating with the left hand. Undoubtedly the pattern of cerebral dominance was highly atypical. In the two-year period following her stroke Habura was three times hospitalized in the Department of Medical Rehabilitation at the Cracow Rehabilitation Center, where she was treated under the present author’s Comprehensive Aphasia Rehabilitation Model (Pachalska 1987, 1993). The outcome was satisfactory: she learned to walk with an elbow crutch, to perform most activities of daily living, and to make simple drawings on an assigned topic. Her speech and writing symptoms resolved to vestigial levels, mostly slowing of speech tempo and occasional word-finding difficulties. However, the most severe consequence of the stroke was a syndrome she herself termed “creative aphasia,” which in turn led to profound reactive depression. She found herself unable to paint, even when after rehabilitation her healthy right hand was perfectly capable of drawing objects placed before her (Pachalska et al. 1998). She complained of having a “hole in my brain,” and on one occasion explained to the present author, “I just sit in front of the canvas and stare at it. My head is empty. I can’t imagine one damned thing.” Although she was clearly in the plateau stage by this time, and according to the usual criteria she could have been regarded as a success and sent home, the decision was made to treat her complaints seriously and continue neuropsychological therapy at the Cracow Aphasia Rehabilitation Center, known as “Afa-Klub”. A summary of the results of selected standard neuropsychological tests is shown in table 1:

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Table 1. Summary of results from standard psychometric tests Score on test date: Measure

Scale

4/1991

9/1991

1/1992

4/1992

WAIS – R I.I. – Full scale

100

94

97

105

115

I.I. – Verbal

100

86

95

101

109

I.I. – Non-verbal

100

78

93

97

103

WMS – R Logical memory – immediate recall

24

12

15

18

23

Logical memory – delayed recall

24

9

13

16

21

Visual reproduction - immediate recall

41

15

33

26

39

Visual reproduction - delayed recall

41

27

29

32

38

Visuospatial functions Line orientation

30

14

19

23

25

Recognition of faces

54

17

23

25

48

Self-Evaluating Scales Depression

10

10

9

8

7

Anxiety

10

10

7

7

6

Irritability

10

10

5

4

3

When she began this therapy, she had a mild disorder of spontaneous speech (slow speech tempo, difficulty in initiating utterances not prompted by a direct question, and slight anomia) generally consistent with Luria’s “dynamic aphasia.” She had no difficulty in comprehending the speech of others and showed no signs of dementia. There were, however, some difficulties in spatial orientation, in writing, and in drawings, which did not result from the left hemiparesis. In art therapy, she first learned to sketch with the unaffected (and at least partially dominant) right hand, but continued to feel the need to make larger figures with the paretic left hand. This problem was solved by teaching her to hold the brush in the left hand, then guide the left hand with the right hand; after several months the left hand regained enough dexterity to draw without the additional support, though the hemiparesis was still very evident and never resolved. At this point she had no limb or facial apraxia, and no hemispatial neglect.

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Art therapy

A 5-stage Art Therapy Program, lasting 8 weeks, was specially developed for Habura’s needs, involving aspects of the present author’s Reconstruction of Symbolic Thinking Program (Pachalska 1987) and the Creative Problem-Solving Model of Parnes et al. (1977), adapted to the particular needs of this patient. Some aspects of these programs were administered individually, while others were part of group therapy, in which an artist from Lublin, Poland, described by Kaczmarek (1991), also participated. In the first stage (“fuzzy finding”), Habura’s creative skills were stimulated by encouraging free association with a set of 500 words associated semantically with art and painting. The purpose of this step was to break down her defense mechanisms and encourage her to think more about what she could do, rather than focus on what she could not do. The second stage (“fact and problem finding”) was oriented towards searching for and collecting information about painting, and using this information to formulate artistic problems; this included examining and interpreting works of art found in albums, museums, and galleries. One hundred works by famous artists were selected from albums, on the basis of their informational contents, force of symbolic expression, and level of innovation. The patient was also instructed to begin compiling her own notebook of technical terms used in painting and to formulate some artistic problems she was interested in trying to solve. The purpose here was to reorganize her system of values and judgments, based on her own experience and perception rather than the authority of the therapist. In the third stage (“idea and solution finding”) the patient’s own activity was incorporated in two subprograms, known as logos (direct representation of objective reality) and mythos (representation of reality through analogy and metaphor, broadly understood). The logos aspect of therapy was based on the VARE program (Vocational Activity Re-Entry, Pachalska 1987, 1999), oriented towards helping Habura recover the technical skills and resources associated with painting, by assigning her symbolic drawings, “painted letters” (see below), and drawings intended to convey specific information. The mythos aspect of therapy was built around the Neurolinguistic Reprogramming of Images Program (NRI), which was intended to rebuild associations between images and meaning by identifying the narrative content and other symbols used in Habura’s own works and those of other artists. The purpose of this stage in therapy was to help the patient improve her ability to manipulate and transform imagined mental representations, using various painting techniques, from simple imitation,

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through works containing some original elements in a learned scheme, to genuinely innovative works; later, Habura began to use symbols of her own choice, as had been her artistic practice throughout her career. Here, also, the painted letters technique proved to be useful (see below). The emphasis at this stage was on heterogeneous, polymodal associations, with toleration of ambiguity. “Telling the story” of a painting helped her to realize that a picture is a moment frozen in time, with an unexpressed past and future: what happened before, what happened after. The fourth stage (“acceptance finding”) involved the evaluation of artistic works. Habura learned to formulate a judgment of the results of her own work and that of her fellow patients. Later, her works were evaluated by a prominent professor from the Cracow Academy of Fine Arts, in order to rebuild her mental image of her own capabilities. In this stage, she was able to correct works she had done at an earlier stage, adding shapes and colors, removing mistakes. Humor played an important role in promoting creativity: Habura, who had been known since childhood for her mischievous sense of humor, was encouraged to play with various elements, ideas, and concepts, draw caricatures and parodies, etc. This required patience on the part of the therapist, since the course of therapy required nonintervention even (or rather, especially) when she began laughing and teasing, rather than making “serious” suggestions. In the fifth and final stage (“performance”), the patient was required to make a public presentation of the works she had completed in the course of art therapy. Later, she organized an auction of her works and made postcards for sale in Denmark (where one of her two daughters lived); some 10,000 of these postcards were printed, and almost immediately sold. Painted letters

In the preceding sketch of the art therapy program, mention was made several times of “painted letters,” a subject which requires separate treatment. When for family reasons Habura had to interrupt therapy for several months to be with her daughter in Denmark, she expressed some concern about losing contact with her therapist. When it was suggested that she write letters once a week, she protested, “I can’t write everything I want to say!” The response was, “When you come to something you can’t write, draw it, and if you can’t draw it, write it.” Habura was happy with this solution and immediately applied it. Gradually, the simple drawings used as illustrations or even pictograms in the first letters slowly evolved into fullfledged works of art. In this way, she was able to freely choose the com-

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munication channel that was open to her at any given moment, evading the blocks caused by damage to the respective representation systems. Throughout her stay in Denmark, and even after her return to Cracow, Habura wrote “painted letters” (her own term) with great engagement and persistence, showing for the first time some trace of the “creative frenzy” that had been a trademark of her premorbid working style. In the early letters, the main theme was her fear that she would not be able to overcome her “painter’s block.” In one such letter, she wrote: I’m writing you a letter. A painted letter. Maybe the last? You know, creative aphasia is such a terrible ordeal. Darkness and emptiness surround me. Everything around me is so awful. Distorted human faces. Walls that won’t stand still. I can’t paint anything. Help me. Please, help me!

In a “painted letter” dated November 11, 1991 (cf. Fig. 3), Habura drew a portrait of her therapist, which she presents as “the first concept that has formed in my ‘hole-y’ brain for your portrait in a white lab coat, as you wanted.”

Fig. 3.

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Painted letter by Krystyna Habura. The text on the open book reads, “Aphasia is curable. Is creative aphasia curable, too?” The text behind the picture is a letter to the therapist.

As can be seen, the text was almost certainly written after the drawing, since the words are written around most – though not all – of the elements of the drawing. Habura seems to have drawn the thumb on the therapist’s left hand, and the fingers on the upper of the two clasped hands drawn on the open book, with the characteristic contractures of paresis, similar to her own left hand. The ink and quill on the table constitute an allusion to Habura’s often-repeated wish and expectation that the therapist would describe her case for the world. In subsequent letters Habura presented her problems more concretely. “How can I paint your nose,” she asks in one such letter, “if I can’t imagine what your nose looks like? It’s aquiline, isn’t it? Is that the right word? I can’t remember any more all those exotic names for different kinds of noses, and I can’t think how a nose looks. Everything time I try to draw one, all that comes out is Elfik’s nose.” In this context it may be worth noting that the likeness of the therapist in Fig. 3 is indeed quite good with the exception of the nose, which is similar to that of “Elfik” on many premorbid portraits (cf. Fig. 2). The painted letters, in which the drawings became more and more elaborate and the text written on the page dwindled to the level of titles, proved to be the major breakthrough in Habura’s artistic rehabilitation. Later, she returned to painting with great passion and enthusiasm, culminating in an individual exhibition in Denmark, which was very well received. Her later painting technique was in no way inferior to that of her premorbid paintings, but her artistic style changed considerably, as did her choice of themes. She also designed the cover for her therapist’s forthcoming book (cf. Fig. 4).

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Fig. 4.

Cover of Afazjologia (Pachalska 1999), designed by Habura; in the final publication, the publisher accepted Habura’s design almost without alteration

Tests of fluency and creative thinking

The Cracow Battery of Fluency and Creative Thinking (CBFCT, Pachalska 1988) consists of a number of specific sub-tests, including especially fluency tests assembled from other standard neuropsychological instruments, but interpreted qualitatively. The motivation for creating such a battery emerged from the frequent observation in clinical practice that the way in which a patient sets out to solve a problem can be more revealing and interesting than the degree of success or failure measured in terms of purely quantitative parameters. Among the tasks included in the Battery are the Design Fluency Test, in which the subject is asked to produce in one minute as many different figures that do not resemble anything as she can, and the Figure Completion Test (Susułowska 1985), in which the subject receives half a figure and is asked to complete it. In the course of rehabilitation Habura was tested on many occasions with various tests from the CBFCT. In the early stages she was reluctant to even attempt the task, and sometimes became belligerent. For example, on one occasion she was given the Torrance Test (1991), in which the subject is asked to draw additional elements onto a color paper figure; test A is a droplet and test B is a bean. Habura threw the test prompts on the ground, claiming that the therapist had stolen the idea from her paintings, since both these elements were always part of her symbolic repertoire and appeared in many pre-morbid works.

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A significant breakthrough occurred several weeks later in therapy, on the Figure Completion exercise, when she was given a piece of paper containing only a black spiral. She looked at the figure for a moment, and once again started to say that she could think of nothing. Just as she was about to hand the paper to the therapist, however, she suddenly grabbed it back and exclaimed, “Oh! I know!” She then drew a portrait of a woman, turning the spiral into the left eye; the right eye is represented by a “rake” figure, and the mouth is a bean (the first recurrence of this favorite premorbid motif in her postmorbid drawings). The right side of the frame is a pussy willow with a leaf at the base, a frequent motif in her earlier painting (cf. Fig. 5). As a last touch she wrote a title, “Pain,” and signed the drawing in her traditional manner, using her characteristic artistic signature for the first time since her stroke.

Fig. 5.

Portrait entitled “Pain,” drawn by Habura during the Figure Completion test (the prompt was the spiral used as the left eye)

During a later session, she was given a sheet of drawing paper with a simple bean figure along the lower edge, just to the right of center. On this occasion, she looked at the paper for a moment, then started laughing and drew another bean in the lower right corner. When the therapist came to see what she was doing, attracted by the laughter, she drew a semicircle around each bean and asked the therapist if she knew what it was. When the therapist responded negatively, Habura began drawing the rest of the figure, turning the beans into the nipples of a voluptuous nude (see Fig. 6).

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Fig. 6.

Semi-nude female figure, drawn by Habura during the Figure Completion test (the prompt was the bean used as the right nipple)

Simple Neurolinguistic Test

The Simple Neurolinguistic Test (SNT) enables an analysis of the patient’s facility and tendencies in forming associations and working with complex notions (Pachalska 1991, Pachalska et al. 2001). Habura was read a series of 10 nouns (5 polymodal complex notions and 5 abstractions), and was then asked to give her first associations with each word. The responses were evaluated by three competent judges, who assigned each utterance to one of several specified semantic categories. Habura was tested twice by the SNT, once before commencement of art therapy and again after its completion. In the first examination, before the commencement of art therapy, most of Habura’s utterances were in the categories “purely verbal associations” or “personal example.” For example, her only response to the prompt “wedding” was “marital union.” In response to the prompt “journey,” she answered, “I’m going to the hospital...to the Rehab Center... to Witkowice [the district of Cracow where the Center was located at that time]... well, a trip by car, oh damn! by ambulance. If you want I can paint an ambulance.” In the second examination, two months later, she replied to the same prompt, “A journey can be in time or in space. For example, I could paint ‘My own fascinating life journey,’ full of roses and thorns...”.

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Analysis of pictures

In the immediate aftermath of the stroke Habura was unable to draw even simple geometrical figures and wrote with great difficulty. Her signature (produced during her first admission to the Cracow Rehabilitation Center, cf. Fig. 7) shows the level of disturbance, including the omission of the letter “u” from “Habura.” The evident dysgraphia is all the more remarkable in that this signature was done with the unaffected right hand; though she was fully capable of writing with her left hand, she most often wrote with the right hand even before the stroke.

Fig. 7.

Habura’s signature (from her hospital admission form, September 1990)

In one of the first art therapy sessions, Habura was asked to draw her impressions of the therapy she was receiving. The result was a drawing that shows at one and the same time traces of her exceptional artistic talent and vision, and even more visible signs of brain dysfunction (cf. Fig. 8).

Fig. 8.

Drawing made by Habura in an early art therapy session

The therapist is shown in the center with an oversized, triangular head, sitting with his hands on his knees and surrounded by patients; Habura herself appears on his right side, recognizable, as she explained, by the cane. Interestingly enough, she has shown herself in mirror reflection, i.e. with paresis on the right side. In a manner characteristic of right-handed patients with right hemisphere damage (RHD), the figures are incompletely and

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sometimes very ambiguously articulated, lacking features (cf. Nikolaenko 2003). Again, this is all the more interesting in view of the fact that Habura’s premorbid painting technique involved use of the left hand to draw the outlines of figures and the right hand to draw details, so the clumsiness of the drawing can hardly be attributed to the use of a non-dominant hand, as in the case of many patients with aphasia. Unlike many RHD patients, however, Habura has obviously retained a sense of composition in the picture as a whole, which is symmetrical in a manner reminiscent of traditional Last Supper compositions (of which she herself painted several in her career, before and after the stroke, cf. Fig. 9).

Fig. 9.

Post-morbid “Last Supper,” painted by Habura after two years of therapy

On her next attempt to perform the same tasks, after two weeks of therapy, considerable progress can be seen (cf. Fig. 10).

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Fig. 10. Therapeutic drawing by Habura, two weeks after Fig. 8 The picture shows many point of resemblance to the previous attempt, including the triangular shape of the therapist’s head. At least rudimentary features are now present on the faces. Interestingly enough, however, the RHD-type disturbances in the articulation of figures seem if anything more pronounced. Even the central therapist figure is far less complete than in the first drawing, and in fact only by reference to the earlier drawing do we understand that he should likewise be interpreted as seated with his hands on his knees. On the other hand, the composition is much more sophisticated. The tree on the left edge, with its branches and leaves, serves as a framing device. The three figures to the therapist’s left are clearly intended to be the same as on the previous drawing, though the bond between the two figures on the far right has been made much more explicit. Significantly, Habura has moved herself from a somewhat isolated position on the left edge of the picture (in Fig. 8) into a highly symbolic position in Fig. 10, happy within the therapist’s protective, essentially paternal embrace, and the presence of the cane is more suggested than delineated. Moreover, she and the therapist are smiling, while the other figures seem dejected or indifferent. The introduction of symbolic elements in the second drawing is particularly noteworthy. In a number of drawings done by Habura at this stage motifs of urban architecture are used, as she herself explained, to symbolize society, and the therapeutic group is shown as seeking or achieving integration with society, often, as here, through the mediation of the therapist. It may be of interest to note here that the skyscraper as a symbol of urban architecture must be understood as a convention and not a reflection 273

of Polish reality, since such buildings have only recently appeared on the skylines of some major Polish cities, and were unknown in the early 1990s. From the extensive sketch books examined by the present author, it emerges clearly that a tendency to return to an already completed work and produce a new, improved version was a characteristic feature of her artistic work from the beginning. She herself often spoke of artistic work as a problem-solving process, so that her successive treatments of the same theme constitute a series of possible solutions to a problem she has posed herself. There is no discernible consistency, however, in how these artistic problems are formulated in terms of their substantive content; sometimes the central issue seems to be a matter of artistic technique, sometimes the artist’s own inner conflicts and problems, sometimes social and political issues. One particular example of a “problem” that recurred in many of Habura’s works before and after her stroke is “Elfik,” the great, unrequited love of her life. Fig. 11, for example, shows a profile of Elfik done in charcoal after art therapy.

Fig. 11. Profile of “Elfik”, charcoal, 1992 When this sketch is compared to the premorbid charcoal portrait in Fig. 2, the resemblance between the two is apparent; there can be little doubt that both are portraits of the same person. The post-morbid portrait is done with somewhat less technical precision and attention to detail, as witness the hair and the application of shading. At the same time, it is distinctly less “elf-ish” than the premorbid portrait, and by the same token a

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somewhat better likeness of the subject. In fact, however, the Elfik figure in all its various transformations bears only a passing resemblance to its model. For Habura, Elfik was indeed a legendary creature, boyish but not entirely human, attractive but elusive, charming but cruel. The real person is a witty and charming man, who enjoys joking and teasing, but in reality bears little physical resemblance to Habura’s portrait, other than his somewhat pointed nose and slight stature. It is hard to escape the conclusion that he became in fact a kind of screen for the artist’s projections; his evasion of her increasingly more obvious attempts to seduce him (which he mostly dealt with by joking and then leaving the room) led her to endow him with the epithet “Little Elf,” which in turn produced a series of associations that seemed to her to be apt. In time the Elfik of her art had less and less in common with the man himself, though she never ceased to refer to him as “Elfik.” Elfik was of course by no means the only leitmotiv in Habura’s painting, befsore and after the stroke. Her sketch books are filled with studies of horses, though they almost never appear in her finished works. Fig. 12, for example, is an undated horse study which occurs in her notebooks along with other drawings and sketches indicating a date several years before the stroke. It is typical of these studies, which she included in her sketchbooks but never exhibited or included in a painting. She seems to have done these studies for practice or for her own entertainment; they are highly naturalistic, demonstrating that despite the almost cubist style of most of her paintings, she was capable of almost photographic representation when she chose to do so.

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Fig. 12. A premorbid horse study (from Habura’s sketchpad, undated – 1986) Compared to her premorbid works, her drawings in therapy after the stroke became more sketch-like and logically disconnected. However, in the opinion of art critics, the specific character of the lines and compositional structure remained unchanged. At the same time there is a telling difference in how she explored the right and left planes of space: she obviously prefered the right-hand part of the sheet and sometimes completely ignores the left-hand sheet plane, or abandons the left part of the picture (Pachalska 1999, 2003). Fig. 13 shows how the horse motif gained (rather than lost) symbolic significance after the stroke and the therapy. Habura was fond of allusions to classical myths in her paintings, though her treatment of them was often highly unconventional. In Fig. 13a, the horse on the left is the mythical Pegasus, drawn accurately but without the detail characteristic of the premorbid horse studies in the sketchbook; on the right, another horse seems to be peering out from behind a rock or cliff. It is not clear whether the two horses are to be associated, and they are drawn in entirely different scales. The right one-third of the canvas is filled with an inscription. Even more interesting is Fig. 13b, where a common religious motif, Madonna and Child, appears with a twist: a horse in the place where we would expect the infant Jesus. This deliberate “tweaking” of convention was a constant feature of Habura’s premorbid style, and its re-appearance at this point in art therapy was very encouraging for both patient and therapist.

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The inscription in Fig. 13A bears further comment. The letters are written awkwardly with many strike-outs, odd colometry, and no punctuation. The text reads as follows: “This is my desire or Elfik sleeping, Sick Habura.” It is not entirely clear what is meant by all this: below “or” (Polish albo) there are two indecipherable strike-outs, and the word “eye” (Polish oko) intrudes as a label for the horse’s eye. Pegasus as a symbol for sexual desire is easy enough to accept, but what the horse’s head has to do with “Elfik sleeping” is very hard to say. Above all, however, it is interesting that Habura at this stage felt a need to write something on her paintings and drawings, even though this was difficult for her. The phenomenon is not unknown. As a result of a right-hemispheric temporal-vertex-occipital infarct a famous Swiss painter experienced a marked increase in writing activity, called “hypergraphia” (Schnider et al. 1993). Habura’s case is roughly similar. A few days after her stroke she was persistently drawing only on the right-hand side of the sheet of paper, making legends in most of her drawings, as with the single word “eye” in fig. 13A (cf. Nikolaenko in this volume, Fig. 1B). The right half of many of her drawings were also filled with text, whose content varied. Habura explained then that she had always wanted to introduce text in her works, but it was only after her stroke that the writing freely “flooded” the picture. After a year of drawings similar to Fig. 13A she stopped making legends in her drawings.

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Fig. 13. Two horse drawings made during art therapy. A) “Pegasus” (half of drawing filled with text) ; B) “Madonna and Child” with a horse instead of a child

Discussion In the course of therapy Habura was able to overcome the “hole” in her brain and resume an active artistic career. This was made possible in large part by the art therapy program; as she herself frequently stated, “An artist must be healed by art.” The success that was finally achieved was also made possible by the heuristic approach, which depends upon the use of multiple probes, the ability to take advantage of failure as well as success, and the readiness to exploit a moment of opportunity whenever and wherever it may appear. Two elements of this therapy require particular attention: − the need to dismantle defense mechanisms; − the introduction of humor. The oft-repeated slogan “I have a hole in my brain” had come to be for Habura at one and the same time a destructive mantra and a means of evading responsibility. With her active imagination, the medical fact that

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she had a brain lesion was translated in her mind into a frightening image of a dark empty space inside her head, and her thoughts revolved around that space in such a way that it was nearly impossible for her to think about anything else. At the same time, the slogan “hole in my brain” served as a useful excuse to extend indefinitely the periods of indolence and selfneglect to which she had always been prone between spells of intensive creative work. In fact, the periodic inability to create was not something that appeared in her life only after the stroke; the main difference was that the “dry spell” lasted for years instead of weeks and showed no signs of ending without therapeutic intervention. There can be little doubt that this patient’s artistic block had a very strong emotional-motivational component, though upon closer examination of the evidence it becomes clear that this was by no means the only problem. In this case, one of the keys to unblocking creativity proved to be humor and laughter. Habura had always been known for her earthy wit and sometimes caustic sense of humor, and her art often contained elements of play, evident both in her behavior while she was painting and in the works themselves. This in turn was surely connected with the rebelliousness and dislike of authority that was one of her most characteristic traits. Even within the community of Cracow artists, who are to say the least not known for their conformism, she was always by choice a rebel, an outsider, a status which she often expressed by sarcastic humor directed at representatives of the artistic establishment. This behavior was an impediment to her career more than once, and it also made her a very difficult patient in therapy and rehabilitation. When she did not immediately see the purpose of a given exercise she typically labeled it with an unrepeatable expletive and refused to even discuss it further. An example of how humor could be used to overcome therapeutic obstacles can be seen in the way the problem of resistance was finally solved in physiotherapy. As may be imagined, Habura was not eager to submit to the discipline of kinesitherapeutic exercises and could hardly be induced to sit still for physicotherapy procedures. At one point she accused her physiotherapists of torturing her, and then began to develop the theme into an elaborate metaphor, in which the rehabilitation center became an Indian village where she was being held captive and subjected to various tortures of highly refined cruelty. Initially some of the therapists tried to argue with her and convince her of the salutary effects of these procedures, as with any recalcitrant patient, but this only increased her resistance. Only when the decision was made to “play along” with her and join in the joke did her

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resistance abate. The Head of the Center became Gray Hawk, Chief of the Witkowice Indian tribe, and many of the therapists received similar names. Then, in art therapy, Habura painted one of her first successful post-stroke portraits, which she signed “Sick Habura” (cf. Fig. 14).

Fig. 14. “Grey Hawk, Chief of the Witkowice Tribe,” oil portrait of the Head of the Department of Medical Rehabilitation at the Cracow Rehabilitation Center, made by Habura during art therapy, signed “Sick Habura” This success inspired further attempts in art therapy to utilize the patient’s sense of humor to overcome her obsession with the “hole” in her brain. Her tendency to laugh and joke during art therapy, sometimes making silly sketches and caricatures instead of attending to the task assigned by the therapist, was not suppressed. Gradually the jokes and sketches began to absorb more and more of her attention, until they began to serve as the sort of “artistic problem” that had always served as her primary motivation to create. Intent on working out a solution, she forgot about the hole in her brain. How and to what extent can the experience with using humor in Habura’s therapy be generalized? Exceptional cases do not usually provide a good basis for the kinds of generalizations to which research work in neuropsychology ordinarily aspires. The point in this case is not that humor can and should be systematically exploited in the therapy of stroke patients, or even in the therapy of artists with brain damage. It is difficult to imagine how a structured pro-

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gram of “humor therapy” could be constructed or executed, since humor by its very nature is situational and most often results from improvising at unexpected moments. Moreover, even if therapists could learn to become comedians and elicit laughs from their patients “on command,” it is unlikely that such therapy would be successful in many cases, especially in view of the fact that in the case here presented it was not the therapist’s jokes and sense of humor that made the difference, but rather the patient’s. What can and should be generalized, however, is the heuristic approach to therapy. As the present author has elsewhere argued (Pachalska & MacQueen 2002), therapeutic success in practice seldom results from the flawless execution of a conceptually perfect rehabilitation program, but rather from the therapist’s ability to improvise, to see a developing opportunity and take advantage of it in the course of therapy. In heuristic therapy, the initial stage consists of a series of quick probes, searching for the patient’s strength and weaknesses, and in particular observing the changes that take place from day to day, and even from minute to minute. The mutability of symptoms and the patient’s condition is extremely troublesome and often destructive for algorithmic approaches to therapy (cf. Brown & Pachalska 2003, Brown 2002), since one must either ignore the changes or constantly shift the algorithm to keep up with them. It is also essential to bear in mind, as Jason Brown continually reminds us (1988), that the symptom we are attempting to eliminate or mitigate in neuropsychological therapy is not simply a deviation from a particular norm caused by brain damage, but rather the result of the impact of that damage on the way the individual’s brain functions. Thus the premorbid personality of the patient is as much a factor in the symptomatology as the lesion, and in many cases more so. Habura’s “creative aphasia” was not caused in some direct and simple way by the fact that the right hemisphere lesion destroyed or disconnected a neuroanatomical structure responsible for forming artistic conceptions. Rather, it changed the way her brain functioned, so that the complicated and deeply intertwined emotional and cognitive processes involved in her creative activity were disorganized, and for some period of time ineffective. The fact that she was ultimately able to return to an active artistic career is eloquent evidence against any argument that something essential to artistic creation was destroyed in her brain. At the same time, it could hardly be argued that the “hole in her brain” simply healed over. This is not to say that the effects of the stroke on Habura’s art were trivial, transient, or reversible. The post-stroke, post-rehabilitation works

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are different. Technically she recovered most of what she lost, but not all: the line in the later works is somewhat less strong, sure, crisp, and the details are not always worked out with the same precision as before. Although she returned to some of the themes that had interested her before the stroke, her thematic range after rehabilitation included much greater interest in suffering and despair, while most of the social and political commentary characteristic of some earlier work disappeared. By her own account, she became “a better human being,” and spent many hours working as a volunteer in the Art Therapy program she herself had completed. She was very effective in this work and had several major therapeutic successes with aphasic patients. It should be emphasized in this context that one of the reasons for her success with patients was precisely her earthy humor and occasionally salty language, which sometimes broke down barriers against which ordinary therapy was helpless. Asymbolia

In previous attempts to describe and measure the impact of brain damage on artistic creativity (Kaczmarek 1991), the usual strategy has been to reduce creativity to a particular function, usually manipulation of symbols, and explain disturbances of creativity subsequent to brain damage as an analogue of aphasia or apraxia: hence asymbolia, a concept proposed by Liepmann in the early 20th century as an explanation for both aphasia and apraxia (Liepmann 1908). The difficulty with this line of interpretation is that when symbolism is seen as coextensive with artistic creation it becomes necessary to either extend the meaning of the concept “symbol” so far that it has no real content, or to narrow the sphere of artistic creation so far that a great deal of what we now consider “art” no longer fits the definition. The disturbances seen in many artists with brain damage are not limited to the sphere of symbolic thinking, but rather reach the brain’s multilayered systems of mental representations of inner and outer reality (Brown 1988, Pachalska & MacQueen 2000). Symbolism is only one of many aspects of this much larger conceptual problem, along with language and other systems of representation: imagination, perception, memory, etc. A symbol, like a word, can very rarely be created by a single willful act of a single individual. To be sure, it may be possible to posit certain kinds of symbolic references, in the style of and by analogy to the assignment of values to symbols in mathematics. This is, however, a process of limited scope. In general, symbols are more like words, in that the association between signifier and signified depends upon a certain history, form-

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ing conventional associations that are to a large extent the common property of the members of a given culture or community. Originality consists in the way the symbols are used, and not in the symbols themselves, just as originality in a written text is in the sentences, and not in the words, which can be original only at the cost of being unintelligible. Symbols differ from words in that the structure of the signifier is often (though by no means always) in some way motivated by the structure of the signified. Thus, for example, in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel, The Great Gatsby, the green light shining from the dock is so frequently mentioned, and with such emphasis, that the reader becomes aware that it is a symbol of something. The range of things which could be symbolized by a green light, in turn, is constrained by the associations of the color green mapped against the associations of light, especially a solitary light shining far away in the darkness. To some extent, then, the symbolism of the green light is Fitzgerald’s invention, but its interpretation is conditioned and constrained by the conventional associations of green and light, which are not under Fitzgerald’s control. The color green has a rather different set of associations and is used in a completely different way in, say, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. The green grass in 17th-century pastoral landscapes has different connotations than the green stripes in a painting by Picasso, though in both cases the color is arguably used by the painter to signify something and is thus by definition symbolic. The point of this discussion for the present purposes is that the use of symbols may be an important aspect of art in particular works by particular artists in particular media, but it can hardly be argued that it is a unified concept or function, or that art can be reduced to symbolism in any convincing way. Some paintings and sculptures are clearly “symbolic,” others just as clearly not. Many artists, particularly in contemporary art, heatedly reject any efforts to find “meaning” in their works. One may argue about whether or not they are correct in so arguing, or whether art deprived of any sort of meaning is still art, or still good art, but regardless of the conclusions it is difficult in light of the whole discussion to placidly maintain that art is symbolism expressed in different media, or that disturbances of artistic creativity caused by brain damage are reducible to something called asymbolia. The work of art as a communicative act

Habura herself coined the term “creative aphasia” to describe her affliction. Though her terminology is hardly scientific, there is an insight here that is

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worth exploring. We have come to think of aphasia as a disorder of communication caused a dysfunction in linguistic processing that results from organic brain damage. In the case of a painter who cannot paint after a stroke, we seem to be dealing with a disorder of communication caused by a dysfunction of graphic processing. A work of art, whether verbal or non-verbal, constitutes in a rather obvious way a transfer of certain contents from the artist to the viewer (Amabile 1983). In this sense it is a communicative, even discursive act, since all the essential elements are present: a sender (the artist), a receiver (the viewer), and a text (the work), where the word “text” is being used in its broadest sense, as the substance of that which is being communicated. As in the case of a literary text, a work of plastic art differs from an ordinary object or artifact, in that it possesses a fixed form, referred to by theoreticians of both art and literature as “monumentality.” The work as such is not a private communication between the artist and a particular addressee, but rather in the very fact of its monumentalization becomes a text addressed to humanity as a whole and to every human being individually. It is also characteristic of a work of art qua art that it conveys information simultaneously on different planes of meaning, of which the literal plane (which in the case of the plastic arts means the concrete plane, i.e. what a picture is of) is often the least important, subordinated to a symbolic or metaphorical meaning. The fact that a work of art is by assumption and in theory universally accessible does not mean that it is universally comprehensible. As in any act of communication, the contents to be conveyed by sender to receiver must be in some particular way encoded in a way that is more or less common to both parties, this being the defining feature of any code. In the case of literature, the code in question is language, or rather, the language (English, Polish, French, Latin, Russian, etc.), the system of conventional symbols used in a given community to build sentences and other linguistic structures. In the case of the plastic arts, it is not as easy to identify the equivalent of language, but this difficulty should not be taken to mean that no such thing exists. Even though the symbols used in art can be less conventional and arbitrary, more natural and personal, than the words of a spoken language, nevertheless there exists in a given culture, a given epoch, a given artistic circle, a specific language of art, in which the role of the lexicon is played by images. Despite the impression made by shortlived and entirely unsuccessful attempts to deprive the plastic arts of any kind of referentiality, the fact remains that a picture is by definition a pic-

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ture of something, that is, it contains a reference to something, which from this perspective can be seen as the equivalent of semantics. From this it is a relatively short step to the existence in art of a lexicon, morphology and syntax, discourse, pragmatics: in short, a structure for encoding and transmitting meaning, analogous to language and to some extent entangled with it. As in the case of language, also, individuality of expression does not depend on the newness of the elements of which the text is composed. Complete newness in this sense, the somewhat naive understanding of originality, is in fact destructive of the communicative power of the text (Mednick 1973). The same applies to music: neither composers nor performers invent the notes that compose the work. On the contrary, the existence of a convention of scales, rhythms, and so forth is a prerequisite for the music to be composed, performed, and ultimately enjoyed. The poet’s words and sentences, the painter’s colors and shapes, the sculptor’s contours and textures: all these follow analogous rules and patterns, the same “deep structure.” The existence of a “deep structure” of course implies the concomitant existence of a “surface structure,” where the implicit assumption is that the deep structure is somehow rooted in the nature of things, in the brain and in the world it perceives, while the surface structure is shaped by convention, rendering the inner world accessible to the world outside (Chomsky 1965). The fact that there exists something called grammar, which performs particular associative functions, seems to be an inherent part of human nature, and may well be associated after all with particular brain structures and their functions. On the other hand, the rules of a particular grammar, English or Polish or Japanese, do not seem to be biologically or genetically conditioned. They are essentially arbitrary, owing their existence to the fact that the members of a given community observe them as a precondition for being able to speak to one another. The consequence of this is the existence of multiple languages, all serving to facilitate communication within the group and prevent it outside the group. The brain programs needed to reach out and grasp an object do not differ from one country to another, but the brain programs needed to parse a sentence clearly do. What is true of language is also true of art, including especially the plastic arts. There is deep structure, the application of color and shape to a background, which defines the constitutive rules (Searle 1969) of painting: failure to observe such rules means simply that one is not painting, but

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rather doing something else. There is also surface structure, the particular language of painting in a given period and culture, likewise shaped by conventional, regulatory rules, which serve to discriminate good painting from bad. Moreover, and perhaps more importantly, the “grammar” and “lexicon” of painting enable the work to serve as a text, communicating something from artist to viewer, regardless of whether or not that something can be reduced to a verbal text. The attempts by some avant-garde artists to set aside not only the regulative rules of art, but also the constitutive rules, have resulted mostly in the marginalization of art and artists in the modern world. The language of art, then, consists not only in the combination of colors and forms into a work bounded by a frame, but also in the way the artist endows the work with meaning, a point of reference, and in the way the viewer receives and interprets that meaning or reference. As in any act of communication, at least a rudimentary knowledge of the same “language” is a prerequisite to success, assuming that communicative success consists in the transfer of content from the mind of the sender to the mind of the receiver without undue distortion. Of course, knowledge of a given “language” of painting does not require knowledge of the same language in the literal sense, but even so cultural boundaries exist in both space and time. A European looking at a Japanese painting may be delighted by its aesthetic qualities, but needs an interpreter in order to understand and fully appreciate it. When we gaze at the cave paintings made by our distant ancestors tens of thousands of years ago, we may be fascinated by them, but we do not understand them, and the speculations of anthropologists remain just that: speculations. If it is true, then, even in gross approximation, that the act of creating a painting and the act of understanding involve processes that are analogous to linguistic processes, and perhaps at some deeper level identical with them, then it stands to reason that brain damage can disrupt and distort these processes, just as brain damage can produce aphasia. Our artist’s own term for her affliction, “creative aphasia,” may seem unscientific, but it reveals an important truth. To be sure, at the outset of therapy Habura showed problems in the understanding of symbols, while one of the sure signs of recovery was the reappearance of symbolic elements in her paintings (cf. Kaczmarek 1991). The inability to deal with symbols should be understood as an effect, however, rather than a cause of “creative aphasia.” It would be tempting to deal with this problem by associating the symptoms described in this case with the classic symptomatology of right

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hemisphere damage, assuming that the right hemisphere deals with “pictures” as the left hemisphere deals with “words.” It seems clear, however, that the division of labor between the hemispheres is in reality much more complex and subtle than simply “verbal / non-verbal,” and complex behaviors of both kinds seem to require the close cooperation of both hemispheres (Tompkins et al. 2000, Brownell 2000, Brown 1988, Nikolaenko 2003). Classic left-hemisphere aphasia in an unambiguously right-handed artist is not without effect on the artist’s creativity (regardless of the absence or presence of hemiparesis), while much recent research has shown that patients with right hemisphere damage are not, as once thought, free of speech and language disturbances of a higher order than dysarthria. The more information becomes available from PET scans and fMRI technology, the more apparent it becomes that neither the strict locationist theories in the Wernicke-Lichtheim tradition nor the whole-brain theories in the Jackson-Goldstein tradition were completely correct (Brown 2002). In the case described here, both the inordinately complicated issue of her handedness and the subtlety of her “creative aphasia” essentially rule out a solution of the problem based on the size and location of the lesion. She shows a distinctly odd mixture of left- and right-hemisphere, cortical and subcortical symptoms, caused by the size and location of the lesion on the one hand, and the atypical organization of her brain on the other. It does not seem possible in these circumstances to advance the thesis that the “hole” in her brain that prevented her from being able to imagine anything resulted from the destruction or disconnection of a particular cluster of neurons. The very fact that rehabilitation was essentially successful, that she returned to painting after all, argues against any such conclusion, since it is highly unlikely that the recovery from “creative aphasia” could reasonably be attributed to some sort of “repair” of the alleged center that has been destroyed or disconnected. It seems clear that we must look elsewhere for that which Luria called the “basic defect.” As previously suggested, both the poet’s words and the painter’s colors represent the elements of a language, organized on analogous though not identical principles. A language, in turn, constitutes both a system of communication and a system of representation, providing at once both the substance of the information that is being communicated and the means by which it is conveyed. Thus the relationship between the mental representation and its object is not a simple one, based on reproduction in the brain of sensory images derived directly from phenomena. As Brown points out (1988, 2002), representations come into being and exist in the mind, not

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out in the world, and as such they are more a reflection of what is inside than of what is outside. We are inclined to treat such “projection” as a pathology, but it is the nature of all perception, which is based on mental representations, since we can have no direct experience of nature other than the representations formed in the mind/brain on the basis of the information that reaches the sense organs (Brown 2002). It is a common assumption, both in neuropsychology and in philosophy (e.g. Wittgenstein) that the process of perceiving reality (the “facts”) can be separated out from the process of interpreting it and assigning it values, but in the light of what we learn from brain pathology there is reason to doubt this. The values we assign to perceived objects are part of the perception and part of the object from the beginning, not the result of a “second-pass” process (Brown 2005). The work, as previously mentioned, must come into being and exist in the imagination of the artist before it emerges as a concrete artistic product. This is not to say, however, that the finished work is simply the realization of a vision in the artist’s brain; rather, there begins a complex dialectic between the work itself as it emerges, the vision with which the artist began the act of creation, and the artistic traditions and conventions creating the context for the act of artistic communication. In the course of this dialectic both the work and the vision undergo evolution and change. Once the work is finished, however, its role as the realization of an image in the artist’s imagination comes to an end, and the work becomes part of another dialectic, this time between the work and the viewer, again in the context of a certain tradition. The representation formed in the viewer’s mind, in turn, is likewise as much a product of that mind as it is of the work, which in turn is only to some rather limited extent the product of the representation in the artist’s mind. From the present author’s many conversations with artists it becomes clear that the communicative effectiveness of the “message” inherent in their works is of little interest to most of them. For the artist, the work is created in order to satisfy an inner need; indeed, the language of “problem solving” used by Habura is by no means unique to her. To be sure, affected indifference to the reception of the work is often a pose, concealing a very typical sensitivity to criticism, but even so the fact that such a pose is common, almost de rigeur, is not without significance. Thus the ability to paint the likeness of a person or object is one thing, and the need to create a work of art is quite another, though the ability may be a precondition to the satisfaction of the need. Habura rather quickly regained the ability to draw

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or paint things that were placed in front of her, but this had rather little to do with her “creative aphasia,” the darkness and emptiness she felt sitting in front of the easel with no concept for a new work of art. On the other hand, this emptiness did not result from the lack of a felt need to paint, since in that case the patient would be untroubled by the absence of artistic vision and would not seek therapy. The foregoing observations pertain, mutatis mutandis, to any and all forms of creative art, not just painting. On the level of mental representations, the goal and the basic mechanisms of expression and reception of mental representations in art remain the same for the plastic arts, music, or literature. Apart from the obvious differences in medium, however, the art forms differ in other ways, which are of particular importance from the perspective of brain function and its possible pathologies. In the case of both music and literature, the work has a distinct temporal dimension (even more prominent in music than in literature), where a work of plastic art exists sub specie aeternitatis. To be sure, the reception of the work has its time course, but that emerges more from the intention and capability of the viewer than of the artist. The viewer can look at the work for a longer or shorter time, can look at particular parts of the work and the whole in any order and proportion, more or less regardless of the artist’s intention. To be sure, some artists have attempted in various ways to get around this problem, but the fact remains that a poem or a symphony has a beginning, a middle, and an end, while a painting has a top and a bottom, left side and right side; otherwise, it is not a painting. Sculpture adds the dimensions of front and back, but the relation between the temporal and spatial dimensions remain the same. It should be borne in mind in this context that every mental representation has both a synchronic and diachronic dimension, mediated in a general way by the right and left hemispheres of the brain respectively (Pachalska et al. 2000). Synchronicity here refers to collecting, sorting, arranging, and synthesizing information arriving at various centers in the brain at a given moment from both the interior and exterior environment. The diachronic dimension results from the flow of time, which subjectively means that the mental representations experienced as here-and-now continually decay and are replaced by new ones in a succession not unlike the frames in a videotape. It is the nature of the plastic arts as such that the work “freezes” such a frame, a single moment in time, as though the object of perception were extracted from the flow of time. Indeed, one of Habura’s most interesting artistic experiments was her “Flaming Art”:

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sculptures and paintings which incorporated candles that were lit when the work was exhibited, so that over the course of several hours the work itself was consumed and reduced to a mass of wax. Thus the artist gave her works a diachronic dimension, at the cost of their monumentality: nothing remains of them today except for newspaper clippings from the exhibition. In microgenetic theory (Brown 1988), a representation takes shape in the mind as the result of a process of “unfolding.” Our perception of a given object begins on a primitive layer and develops in successive but individually complete perception-action cycles, as it travels through the nervous system from peripheral to central, reproducing in a matter of milliseconds the whole history of the evolution of life from single-cell organisms to the human being, and at the same time the growth of the human individual from a single cell to a thinking adult person. Language, then, consists in a process of realizing (in a literal sense of the word) representations, the visible surface of a process that takes place within the brain. Thus it serves both as a means of expressing mental representations and as the end product of a mental process that emerges from representations. The same can be said of a work of plastic art, which is at once both a means of expression and an end-product of expression. Due to limitations of space these issues can only be sketched here in general outline. It should be clear from the foregoing, however, that both the creation and reception of a work of art, whether or not we are speaking of the plastic arts, requires complex cooperation between the two hemispheres of the brain, both the diachronic left and the synchronic right, with interwoven temporal and spatial representations. In this context, in fact, the traditional division between word and image, i.e. verbal and non-verbal, become at a certain point insupportable. It is simply not the case that a word is an element of one system of mental representation, and a picture is an element of another system, where the systems are distinct, at best parallel or roughly analogous to each other. “Creative aphasia” seems a naive misnomer, used by a layperson who does not realize that aphasia is a disturbance of language and not of imagery. It would be well to remember, however, that this patient had struggled with aphasia in the classical sense (and to some extent continued to struggle with it for the rest of her life), and did not use the word lightly. For the artist, creativity is self-realization, or rather, is a necessary condition for self-realization (Barron 1969). Most artists are convinced that it is a sufficient condition, but the fact that they continue to create itself signifies that it is not. The work arises from an unmet need, a dissatisfac-

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tion with the imperfectness of what already exists. The world seems to be needing something, and precisely what it needs, what it lacks, is the work, patching or filling in a hole in existence. This requires, then, first the perception that something is missing in the world; secondly, the artist's confidence that she can (and should, and must) provide that something; and thirdly, the ability to conceive and execute a work that will embody the concept. The analogy to the prerequisites for a successful, effective speech act is so clear that one begins to suspect that it is not an analogy at all, but an identity. The need to speak, the ability to formulate a speech act, and the ability to realize it reflect the same inner structure as the need to paint something, the imagination necessary to develop a concept, and the technical skill required to realize the concept in the form of a concrete work of art. Although for many artists the process of creating a work is inextricably tied up with the artist’s self, or more strictly speaking the artist’s ego, in fact the mature work of art becomes a work of art in the fullest sense only when it is detached from the artist and begins to live its own life. The work, after all, is by definition an object, something which is projected out into the world by a process that begins in the artist’s imagination and emerges as a result of the process of creation. As the work takes shape, the process of creating is increasingly exteriorized: the role of the artist’s imagination diminishes and the needs of the work itself, increasingly articulated and technical in nature, take the forefront. In many cases one has the suspicion that for the artist the work of creation is a substitute for or a distraction from the work of creating an autonomous self. This is given expression even in the stereotypical portrait of the temperamental artist, a stereotype which, like most stereotypes, has both feet firmly planted in reality. The eminent Polish psychologist Kazimierz Obuchowski writes in his most recent works of a concept he calls “self-authoring,” something which in turn emerged from his earlier concept of the “creative personality” (Obuchowski 2000). What happens, for good or ill, if a person becomes himself his own work? Rather than create an object, a work, one creates a subject, oneself. The person who is a “selfauthor” in Obuchowski’s terms may or may not be creative in the ordinary sense. This is rather beside the point. On subjectivity and objectivity in art

If our knowledge is based on a world that actually exists out there, independently of how we perceive it and what we think about it, and our senses

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are capable of providing reliable knowledge about that world, then it is possible to verify statements by comparing them to the state of the world. This is the epistemology of the empirical sciences (perhaps excluding mathematics), and also the epistemology of common sense, the only real difference being the degree of sophistication involved in criticism. Truth in this model is communicable insofar as the sender is capable of conveying information about the state of the world and the receiver is capable of understanding what the sender is trying to communicate. A scientist who ceases to believe this ceases to be a scientist. In such an epistemology the artist is clearly caught in a dilemma, since the truth of an image will be analogous to the truth of a proposition, i.e. a function of its approximation to the object it represents out there in the world. Such a project would make a kind of sense in a situation where, as in the more remote past, a picture could serve to give the viewer some idea of a reality that would otherwise not be accessible: events, people, and places remote in time and space. The invention of photography has long since rendered this kind of art obsolete, however, since even the best executed drawing or painting can only in the most limited circumstances compete with a good photograph, if the measure of success is accurate representation of surface features. In this context the whole problem boils down to technology. If, on the other hand, our knowledge of the world is simply a projection of the contents of our mind/brain, i.e. the world can be known only in terms of mental images that may or may not be related to what is actually out there, if indeed anything is out there, there does not appear to be a way to ground the truth of any proposition as opposed to any other, nor does there appear to be any real possibility of communication: I live in the world my mind creates, you live in the world your mind creates, and what does the one have to do with the other? We are still left with the lingering feeling that a painting or sculpture should be a picture of something, just as a poem or novel should be about something. The work, in other words, needs a point of reference in the objective world – which ex hypothesi from the solipsistic point of view is either unknowable or does not exist. Purely subjective utterances, and purely subjective works of art, however, are not readable, not comprehensible. Art, then, once again appears to be something problematical, a grain of sand in the oyster of either purely objectivist or purely subjectivist epistemologies.

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It is clear, then, that the problem of artistic creation cannot be solved without at least provisionally answering some fundamental problems associated with the subject-object relationship, the more so, if our project is to examine the problem in the context of brain function. The task is considerably complicated, however, especially in the English language, where both the words “subject” and “object” have acquired a range of collateral meanings that are often confusing and sometimes simply contradictory. An example here is the use of the word “subject” to mean the topic of a discourse or conversation, or to mean the persons who participate in a scientific experiment. Logically “object” would be more appropriate in both cases, but its use is ruled out in the latter case by the connotations of “object” as “thing,” i.e. non-person. The word “subject” is derived from the Latin subiectum, literally “that which is cast up.” It is interesting to compare this with the Greek term hypothesis, literally “[a process of] putting [something] up.” A hypothesis, of course, is a proposition which is provisionally assumed to be true in order to test the results of such an assumption, so that if the results prove to be absurd, contradictory, unacceptable, the hypothesis is assumed to be unsound. Is this also true of a subject: that is, is it something whose existence is simply posited in order to proceed with various kinds of investigation (cf. the famous cogito, ergo sum)? Many artists make statement that could easily be reduced to creo, ergo sum – I create, therefore I am. The absorption of great artists in their work is legendary. The problem raised here may seem to us to be an aesthetic one, since art qua art would seem to be an aesthetic, rather than psychological or moral endeavor. Nevertheless, the case presented here gives some concrete reasons to support the thesis recently advanced by Brown (2005), that at a deeper level of analysis aesthetic problems spill over into psychological, epistemological, and moral problems. For most artists, if not all, the need to create is something existential, as necessary as eating and breathing, and the cessation of creation is tantamount to the end of life. This was clearly the case with Habura, who stated very simply that “If I can’t paint, I’ll die,” i.e. non creo, ergo non sum. The leap from cogito, ergo sum to creo, ergo sum is superficially easy, but in fact there is an enormous gap here which has not been systematically explored. The psychoanalytic approach to art has made progress, but it has raised more questions than it can answer. The case of Krystyna Habura also raises questions of an ethical nature. When her classical deficit-type symptoms had resolved or significantly

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improved, she was at one point pronounced “cured” and dismissed from further rehabilitation. Since she was unable to paint, she was desperately unhappy and felt that her life had indeed ended, but the specialists she consulted either shrugged their shoulders at her complaints or suggested treatment for depression (neither medication nor psychotherapy produced any results). Her continued treatment at the Cracow Aphasia Rehabilitation Center was carried out on a purely volunteer, outpatient basis. Indeed, the Art Therapy Program in which she participated, first as a patient, and then as a volunteer, no longer receives public funding, and can be offered only on an ad-hoc basis. It seems important to ask, then, where the limits of therapy should actually be drawn, and who decides when the patient is cured. In this case, progress at the beginning was very slow, and there were numerous “opportunities” for either the patient or the therapist, or both, to simply give up. It should be clear from the foregoing that there exists a need to explore the neuropsychology of creativity. The present study is offered here as a tentative first step in that direction. References Alajouanine, T. (1948). Aphasia and artistic realization. Brain, 71, 229-241. Amabile, T. (1983). The social psychology of creativity. London: Springer Verlag. Andrewes, D. (2001). Neuropsychology: From theory to practice. Hove and New York: Psychology Press. Barron, F. (1969). Creative person and creative process. New York: Holt, Reinhart and Winston. Benton, A.L., Hamsher, K., Varney, N.R. & Spreen, O. (1983). Neuropsychological assessment: A clinical manual. New York: Oxford University Press. Bonvicini, G. (1926). Die Aphasie des Malers Vierge. Wiener medizinischer Wochenschrift, 76, 88-91. Brodziak, A., Amanowicz, K. & Pasternak, R. (1986). Pamięć neuronalna i istota wyobrażeń. Polski Tygodnik Lekarski, 41(24), 771-776 [in Polish]. Brodziak, A. (2001). Neurophysiology of the mental image. Medical Science Monitor, 3(2), 534-538. Brown, J.W. (1988). The life of the mind. Selected papers. Hillsdale, New Jersey, Hove and London: Lawrence Erlbaum. Brown, J.W. (2002). The self-embodying mind. Process, brain dynamics and the conscious present. Barrytown, NY: Station Hill.

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Brownell, H.H. (2000). Right hemisphere contributions to understanding lexical connotation and metaphor. In: Y. Grodzinsky, L. Shapiro, D. Swinney (eds.), Language and the brain. Representation and processing (185-201). Foundations of Neuropsychology Series. London: Academic Press. Chomsky, N. (1965). Aspects of the theory of syntax. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Eysenck, M.W. (1993). Principles of cognitive psychology. Hillsdale, New Jersey, USA; Hove and London, UK: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Goodglass, H. (1993). Understanding aphasia. Foundations of Neuropsychology. San Diego: Academic Press. Halligan, P.W., Kischka, U. & Marshall, J.C. (2003). Handbook of clinical neuropsychology. Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press. Kaczmarek, B.L.J. (1991) A.phasia in an artist: a disorder of symbolic processing. Aphasiology, 5(4-5), 361-371. Kolb, B. & Whishaw, I. (2003). Fundamentals of human neuropsychology (5th edition). New York: Worth Publishers. Liepmann, H. (1908). Drei Aufsatze aus dem Apraxiegebiet. Berlin: Karger. MacQueen, B.D. (2001). Imagining the brain. Medical Science Monitor, 7(4), 564566. Manning, L. (2003). Assessment and treatment of disorders of visuospatial, imaginal, and constructional processes. In: P.W. Halligan, U. Kischka & J.C. Marshall (eds.), Handbook of clinical neuropsychology (181-194). Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press. Martin, G.N. (1998). Human neuropsychology. London: Prentice Hall. Mednick, S.A. (1973). The associative basis of the creative process. In: M. Bloomberg (ed.), Creativity. New Haven: Yale University Press. Moore B.E. & Fine B.D. (1990). Psychoanalytic terms and concepts. New Haven: American Psychoanalytic Association and Yale University Press. Obuchowski, K. (2000). Od przedmiotu do podmiotu. Bydgoszcz: Wydawnictwo Uczelniane Akademii Bydgoskiej. Parnes, S., Noller, R. & Biondi, A. (1977). A guide to creative action. New York: Scribner. Pachalska, M. (1986). Kompleksowy Model Rehabilitacji Chorych z Afazją. Wydawnictwo Monograficzne Nr 28. Cracow: AWF. Pachalska, M. (1992). A neurocybernetic model of image processing. Aphasiology, 5(4-5), 447- 450. Pachalska, M. (1993). The concept of holistic rehabilitation of persons with aphasia. In: A.L. Holland, M.M. Forbes (eds.), Aphasia treatment: world perspectives (145-174). San Diego: Singular Publishing Group.

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Pachalska, M. (1999). Afazjologia. Cracow & Warsaw: PWN Publishers. Pachalska, M. (2003). Imagination lost and found in an aphasic artist: A case study. Acta Neuropsychologica, 1(1), 56-86. Pachalska, M. (2006): Review: Robert L. Solso, The psychology of art and the evolution of the conscious brain. Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, 194(8), 632634. Pachalska, M., Kaczmarek, B.L.J. & Knapik, H. (1995). Cracow Neurolinguistic Battery of Aphasia Examination. Aphasiology, 9, 193-206. Pachalska, M. & MacQueen, B.D. (2002) Heurystyczne podejście do diagnozy i terapii chorych z afazją. In: Z. Tarkowski & G. Jastrzębowski (eds.), Człowiek wobec ograniczeń. Niepełnosprawność, komunikowanie, diagnoza, terapia (209-239). Lublin: Orator [in Polish with English summary]. Pachalska, M., MacQueen, B.D. & Knapik, H. (1998). The rehabilitation of creative aphasia: a case study. Paper delivered at the 8th International Aphasia Rehabilitation Congress, Johannesburg, South Africa, 26-28 August 1998. Pachalska, M., Talar, J., Brodziak, A. & MacQueen, B.D. (2001). Disturbances of mental image processing in post-stroke patients with left and right hemisphere damage. Medical Sciences Monitor, 7(4), 716-724. Raven, J.C., Court, J.H. & Raven, J. (1984). Coloured progressive matrices. London: H.K. Lewis. Reinvang, J. (1987). Crossed aphasia and apraxia in an artist. Aphasiology, 1, 423-434. Schnider, A., Regard, M., Benson, D.F. & Landis, T. (1993). Effects of a righthemisphere stroke on an artist’s performance. Neuropsychiatry, Neuropsychology & Behavioral Neurology, 6, 249-255. Searle, J. (1969). Speech acts: An essay in the philosophy of language. London: Cambridge University Press. Sołowiej, J. (1997). Psychologia twórczości. Gdańsk: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Gdańskiego. Solso, R.L. (2003). The psychology of art and the evolution of the conscious brain. Cambridge, Massachusetts & London: MIT Press. Susułowska, M. (1985). Treść lęku w przebiegu życia ludzkiego. Przegląd Psychologiczny, 28, 1065-1085 [in Polish]. Tompkins, C.A., Baumgaertner, A., Lehman, M.T. & Fassbinder, W. (2000). Mechanisms of discourse comprehension impairment after right hemisphere brain damage: suppression in lexical ambiguity resolution. Journal of Speech, Language & Hearing Research, 43, 62-78. Torrance, E.P. (1991). The nature of creativity as manifested in its testing. In: R.J. Sternberg (ed.), The nature of creativity. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

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Walsh, K. (1994). Neuropsychology: a clinical approach. New York: Churchill Livingstone. Zaimov, K., Kitov, D. & Kolev, N. (1969) Aphasie chez un peintre. Encephale, 68, 377-417.

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Chapter 12 Let’s face it! Phonagnosia2 happens, and voice recognition is finally familiar DIANA SIDTIS Department of Speech Pathology, New York University, New York, NY, USA and Nathan Kline Institute for Psychiatric Research, New York, NY, USA JODY KREIMAN Division of Head and Neck Surgery, UCLA School of Medicine, Los Angeles, CA, USA Although an adult, and nothing like a duck, one of us (DS) underwent imprinting in the Lorenzian sense, during a particular event some 30 years ago, not by a visual stimulus but by an Idea, and the day and time remain as vivid as a flashbulb memory. On an unexceptionally beautiful, sunny afternoon in Los Angeles, California, Jason Brown and DS were chatting over coffee in the UCLA Medical School Cafeteria, exchanging talk about work, interests, and friends. The mysteries of Tourette’s disease, Capgras syndrome, and variously newly discovered neurobehavioral disorders were popular themes of the day, as were provocative presentations of aphasia reflecting left hemisphere specialization for speech and language. Like everyone else, we were doing dichotic listening studies. We must have strayed into talk about the new kid on the block3, right cerebral hemisphere function. In the neuropsychology of the time, the “non-dominant” hemisphere was just emerging from its second-tier status, now receiving laud and honor for attentional and visual-spatial abilities, especially face recognition. Jason suddenly and pointedly announced the Idea: it seemed to him that voice information constituting personal identity is similar to visual information signaling facial recognition, and therefore, that voice recogni2 3

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Deficit in voice perception ability. This may involve familiar and/or unfamiliar voices. E.g., Kinsbourne, 1970, 1974.

tion, like face recognition, might well be a right hemisphere function. The notion was revolutionary. Notwithstanding the gleam in his eye, he stated that he, himself, did not plan to pursue such studies. He suggested that someone with an interest in phonetics might want to investigate this question. He encouraged this. We discussed how faces and voices are indeed patterns, by then thought to be the essence of right hemisphere specialization. Given the fixed belief of the time that speech and language resided exclusively in the left hemisphere, this was truly a radical idea, for it proposed that part of the speech signal is shunted off to the traditionally “nonverbal” hemisphere for routine processing. In 1977, a few years after this day, having completed the doctoral degree and gone on to postdoctoral studies at Northwestern University, one author (DS) remembered the intriguing Idea, and, with the help of a strong mentor in the Department of Communicative Disorders, Jerry Canter, took up the study of brain substrates underlying familiar voice recognition. Jerry liked the idea immediately. We coined the term “phonagnosia” and joked about how it was about to become a household word. From his clinical experience, Jerry was highly sensitive to the latent abilities and overt disabilities of stroke patients, and he was expert in experimental design. These qualities guided us in setting up the first study (Van Lancker & Canter, 19824). On returning to Los Angeles, the other author, JK, then an escapee doctoral student (that is, in absentia) from the Linguistics Department at the University of Chicago, was ready to pursue her doctoral research, and together, with benefit of a New Investigator Award from NIH, we proceeded to study perception and recognition of familiar and unfamiliar voices in normal and unilaterally brain-damaged subjects through the early 1980s at the UCLA Phonetics Laboratory. After the first few years of intriguing findings, we tried repeatedly to obtain funding to continue the work, but were unsuccessful. At the time there was no field of familiar voice recognition, and the approach appeared alien to the prevailing perspective. In fact, there was very little familiarity research at all (some practical reasons for which are offered below). We designed spectacular projects such as voice recognition by members within a university fraternity compared with listeners from two different fraternities, and dichotic listening of famous voices compared with recognition of the words spoken in those voices. At one point we teamed up with Immanuel Schegloff (1979), prominent sociolinguist, with an elaborate plan to record incoming phone calls to a hospital stroke ward, which would allow 4

We acknowledged Jason’s contribution by thanking him for “titillating us” into voice research.

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us to document the process of familiar-intimate voice recognition in comparison to our familiar-famous protocols. But addressing personally familiar stimuli appeared to excite loathing bewilderment in serious scientists. What prevailed was, as Brown has noted, an “anti-subjectivism,” such that the consideration of personal familiarity, emanating necessarily from the first person perspective, was not “a respectable starting point for scientific study” (2002, p. xlii). While our luck with familiar voice recognition grant proposals never clicked, JK joined Bruce Gerratt to study voice quality in normal and disordered voices in great depth and detail (Kreiman, 1987; Kreiman & Gerratt, 1998), while DS turned to affective prosody for consolation (Van Lancker, 1980). We’ve seen an increase in familiar voice recognition studies in the past several years, in part due to the rise of functional brain imaging, but undoubtedly also because internet and digital computer technology make auditory stimulus preparation much easier. We like to think that our earlier work belatedly inspired some of these current studies (Belin & Zatorre, 2003; Kriegstein & Giraud, 2004, Schweinberger, 2001) Recently we have revisited it all to produce a book entitled Voices and Listeners (Kreiman & D. Sidtis, in preparation). This chapter presents a birds’eye overview of these historical and current studies, along with our emergent model of human processing of familiar and unfamiliar voices. Background That differences in function of the two cerebral hemispheres in humans “cannot be accounted for readily in terms of the manner in which sense organs project to, and motor organs receive innervation from contralateral and ipsilateral hemispheres” has long been known (Neff, 1962, p. 196). One must consider both the functional and physical characteristics of the sound stimulus when considering hemispheric specialization. Physiological studies have shown that the basic auditory elements, frequency, intensity, timing, and quality (timbre) are processed by a symmetrically crossed and uncrossed auditory pathway in animals and humans transversing through subcortical nuclei, leading and contributing actively the formation of auditory “percepts” at the level of the cortex. Intensity is does not appear to be lateralized in any form. Complexity plays a role in specialization of the other sound elements. While pure tones (fundamental frequencies free of overtones) are not lateralized, complex tones, which include overtones providing pitch information as well as voice quality or “timbre,” are lateralized to the right hemisphere (J. Sidtis, 1980; Zatorre, 1988; Zatorre &

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Samson, 1991) and timing, made up of complex relationships of short and longer elements, is specialized in the left hemisphere in humans (Schirmer, 2004; Zatorre & Belin, 2001), supporting the left hemisphere specialization for language. A question arises about brain processing of pitch contrasts in tone languages such as Thai or Standard Chinese. Where are these linguistically structured pitch patterns processed? In the “language” hemisphere or in the “pitch pattern” hemisphere? Early dichotic listening studies suggested that, although pitch patterns are generally processed at the right temporal cortex, such patterns could be functionally “allocated” for use in the linguistic system, which is lateralized to the left hemisphere (Van Lancker & Fromkin, 1973). The linguistic use of pitch, forming a discrete number of contrastive elements that do not require the high-resolution pitch information used in music, governs the laterality effect, and left hemisphere specialization for tonal contrasts is seen in speakers of tone languages (Van Lancker, 1980). This finding has been corroborated by subsequent lesion studies for Thai, (Gandour & Dardarananda, 1983), Chinese (Naeser & Chan, 1980; Liang, 2006; Liang & van Heuven, 2004), Norwegian (Ryalls & Reinvang, 1986), and in English noun phrase level contrasts such as “green house,” “green house” (Blumstein & Goodglass, 1972). Left hemisphere linguistic use of pitch has been seen normal subjects using functional brain imaging techniques (Gandour, Wong, Hsieh, Weinzapfel, Van Lancker & Hutchens, 2000; Klein, Zatorre, Milner & Zhao, 2001). The permutability, or systematic nature of prosodic elements, and their function in a contrastive linguistic system, are qualities that determine lateralization to the left hemisphere. Tones in a tone language are discrete and linguistically structured and take a position at one side of a left-right continuum, while familiar voice patterns, having no capacity for decompositionality or permutability of elemental features, appear toward the other side, are associated with right hemisphere specialization. (Figure 1)

Fig. 1.

Prosodic functions associated with left or right hemisphere

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Other facts about functionality of the hemispheres contribute to the model of voice recognition. The right hemisphere more efficiently mediates emotional experiences (Van Lancker, 2000; Borod, 1993; Bowers, Bauer & Heilman, 1993; Brown, 2002; Myers, 1998; Young, 1983). This supports processing of emotional associations in the voice pattern and facilitates voice recognition. It is specialized in processing configurational patterns (Benowitz, Finkelstein, Levine & Moya, 1990), and we will see that the voice is best viewed as an auditory pattern of the Gestalt variety. While patterns can be discerned in any auditory-acoustic signal, our use of “Gestalt” entails that the perceived entity cannot be decomposed into aggregate elements and retain its identity as the perceptual object. In this view, as expressed in the microgenetic model, “wholes are not sums and parts are not mere constituents,” as their relations must be taken into consideration (Brown, 2002, p. xli). Our perspective on familiar voices is particularly resonant with the process model of brain function in that configurations play a major role as original status of the content (Brown, 1998b). The content is “not constructed like a building,” but unfolds from “preliminary configurations [that] are implicit in the final object” (Brown, 2002, p. 8). The right hemisphere also modulates the acquisition and maintenance of personally relevant phenomena (Van Lancker, 1991), further supporting the acquisition and retention of a large repertory of personally known voices. The attribution of the familiarity sense itself is a specialized neuropsychological process, affecting cognitive processing of faces, voices, surroundings, pets and handwriting (Bradshaw & Nettleton, 1983; Heckmann, Lang & Neudörfer, 2001); it is associated with right hemisphere function. A “pure” failure of the recognition sense, often present in right hemisphere damage,presents as a striking condition called Capgras syndrome, in which patients insist that family member, or sometimes a pet, has been replaced by an imposter (Cutting,1990; Young, Reid, Wright & Hellawell, 1993). There is an obvious interplay between emotional and familiarity processing. Personally familiar phenomena carry packets of associations – history, images, facts, impressions, experiences, as well as thoughts and feelings about them. This has been demonstrated in studies of biographical memory (Cimino, Verfaelie, Bowers & Heilman, 1991). Deficient emotional associations and impoverished report of personally familiar phenomena are seen following right hemisphere damage. When culturally known (personally familiar) persons and landmarks were rated on familiarity and emotionality, these two parameters were correlated but not identical for the

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items rated (Van Lancker & Ohnesorge, 2002). A related finding showed higher familiarity ratings for rapidly presented familiar and unfamiliar faces when the faces were smiling (Baudouin, Gilibert, Sansone & Tiberghien, 2000). These known specialties of the right hemisphere: enhanced emotional experiencing, and acquisition and maintenance of personal familiarity, in tandem with superior pattern processing, are mutually cooperative competences that serve to support familiar voice recognition. We must emphasize the pervasive role of affect in familiarity perception. Here, again, process theory as articulated by Brown (2002; 1998b) provides a foundation in maintaining that affect is universally generated through conceptual systems, and that affect arises through cerebral regions other than the limbic system. These perspectives, formerly brilliantly exploreed by Zajonc (1968, 1980), were otherwise seriously neglected in earlier years, but have been recently resumed (Panskepp, 2008; Shanahan, 2007). In voice recognition performance, we see a strong relationship between familiarity and affect, which themselves form the essence of familiar voices. In summary, sounds are processed in the brain according to their acoustic-physiologic properties on a scale from simple to complex and according to the preferred functionality of the cerebral hemispheres. These streams of influence – physiologic and functional – converge differently for different sounds and different uses of sounds. Within the sequentialanalytical properties of speech, using high-granular temporal information, the left hemisphere rises to the task. Complex pitch, given its virtues as an auditory pattern (less reliant on temporal cues), receives superior processing at the right hemisphere auditory areas. However, when complex pitch information is linguistically structured into permutable units, as in language, a left hemisphere specialization is imposed. 5 Personal vocal signatures, forming a huge repertory of unique, complex patterns, are consigned to right hemisphere function. We must confess that we are handicapped in our desire, however intense, to characterize the voice pattern in a truly revealing way. This caveat is represented in Figure 1, where it is noted that tones, tonemes, speech can be transcribed and written down. Voice patterns, as dynamic, intricately interwoven perceptual objects, cannot be written down. Of course, anything can be deconstructed and decomposed. Phonetics descriptions for voices have been developed (Laver, 1980; Nolan, 1983). These are a very large set of physical parameters applicable to many voices, but they fail to 5

Tonal tokens in tone languages also contain temporal, intensity, and voice quality cues.

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provide a unifying system for distinguishing different voices. Proper study of brain processing of familiar voice patterns demands a “vigorous defense of the primacy of the subjective” (Brown, 2002, xliii). The process model, which emphasizes the contribution of mental life to perceptual experience, provides a compatible context for describing familiar voice recognition. According to Brown, in the “microgenetic view…sensations do not provide the ‘raw material’ of percepts or cognitions, but constrain or ‘sculpt’ mind to represent sensory events” (Brown, 1988, p. 15). Any other account of human ability to process a large repertory of unique familiar voice patterns that attempts to utilize acoustic building blocks in the explanation is likely to fall short of satisfaction. A quote adapted from Brown fits well here: Trying to characterize a single voice pattern, or the repertory of voices known to someone, and/or the process of recognizing a familiar voice “would be like trying to illustrate the flow of a river with a set of bricks” (2002, p. xxxvi). Neuropsychology of face and voice processing Jason’s original observation was that voices are like faces, and since this insight, the human voice has indeed been described in recent work as an “auditory face” (Belin, Fecteau & Bédard, 2004). Although voice identity information occurs within the speech signal, arising from the acousticauditory energy that is speech, we foster the view in this paper that voices are more like faces than they are like speech. Voice identity information and speech information, although interwoven in the same signal, have radically different characteristics.6 How do speech and voice information differ? Speech is sequential, having a regular correspondence to discrete units (Sawusch, 1986); crucial contrasts, such as stop consonants, occur within very small units of time, on the order of tens of milliseconds. Speech can be decomposed into a small, finite set of elements (phonetic units and phonemes); it has describable structure (syllable shapes, consonants and vowels, regularly occurring voiced and voiceless portions, and so on). In the acoustic material cueing vocal identity, longer portions (1-3 seconds) (identification can occur in shorter periods) form the basis for identification. This corresponds to Pöp6

These extreme perspectives on voices compared with speech are breaking down. We are aware that the phonological segmentation tradition as representing “recurrent sames” in spoken language is being challenged (Port & Leary, 2005; Port, 2007; Pisoni, 1993; Palmeri, Goldinger & Pisoni, 1993), in favor of a dynamic process (Goldinger & Azuma, 2003;) called “adaptive resonance theory.” At the PisoniFest in Bloomington, Indiana, in May, 2006, a conference on speech perception, we intended to argue that voices are more like faces than they are like speech, until we heard the new story in speech perception that speech is a great deal like voices.

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pel’s notion of the “specious present” of about two seconds, cited by Brown (2002). The pertinent elements are not usefully decomposable in the search to understand voice recognition; the characteristics “sequential” or “regularly analyzable into component parts” do not usefully pertain to the vocal pattern. While many acoustic correspondences in speech are known (but see Footnote 5), efforts to isolate and identify parametric elements constituting the voice pattern, in ways that explain our prodigious perceptual competence, have not been successful. Faces also constitute a nondecomposible pattern. For identification, different and idiosyncratic aspects (relation of eyes to nose, mouth shape, closeness of eyes) in thousands of possible combinations come into play. In these ways, voices and faces are more similar to each other than are voices and speech. Besides both forming patterns that lose their unique quality when decomposed, a further laundry list of similarities between voices and faces can be easily enumerated. Both are used to communicate personal, affective, and social information. They both surround us in familiar and unfamiliar guise. They are “indexical,” in that they signal personal information, such as age, gender and mood, and a very large number can be instantly recognized. Both can be intentionally altered through disguise techniques. Voices and faces are similarly important in ontogenetic and phylogenetic survival: the offspring and the species learn to rely on vocal and facial signals to discern friend from foe and to recognize family members. A main difference between vocal and facial phenomena, beyond the dimensional (temporal versus spatial) one, is that voices can be heard by the fetus, suggesting deep evolutionary origins of this behavior, another perspective which is compatible with microgenetic theories of brain function, in which behaviors unfold as part of a long, whole brain evolutionary process (Brown, 1988, 1998a, 2002). Given the characteristics shared by faces and voices, riding tandem through the social world with so many matching properties and functionalities, it was surprising to observe the asymmetry in neuroscience research, with many, many studies published for faces, and very few for voices (see Kreiman & D. Sidtis, to appear). To our minds, the explanation lies in relative convenience; facial stimuli, visuospatial entities, can be photocopied, carried in a briefcase, and displayed across a table for scientific inquiry, while voices, ephemeral, invisible, and transient, have a less accessible physical existence, and require electrical equipment throughout stimulus preparation and delivery.

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Examination of personally familiar material introduces an additional set of challenges, as it brings in precisely those features that scientists previously avoided: subjective judgments, personal biases, idiosyncratic performance, and a demand for specialized stimuli for individual subjects (Van Lancker, 1991). Thus it is understandable, given the perspective, why many studies of facial perception, and later, studies on voices, utilized unfamiliar voices in discrimination tasks7. Construct validity in stimulus selection is severely threatened if the test materials are variably – not uniformly – familiar to the subjects; the difficulty of achieving such uniformity in personal familiarity across any number of subjects is obvious. We labored to overcome these hindrances with a number methodological inventions, including using stimuli generated by a cohort of our test subjects and posttest surveys to establish endorsement of known voices. The comparison of familiar-intimate with familiar-famous materials – a topic of neuropsychological interest – presents an additional special challenge, because two sets of familiar exemplars must be accumulated, each having comparable levels of familiarity to the subjects. We have not attempted this in voices, although a correspondence in auditory recognition of names corresponding to familiar-famous as well as familiar-intimate faces in globally aphasic patients, who were unable to recognize spoken or written common nouns, was found (Van Lancker & Nicklay, 1992). These differences have barely been addressed in face research, and have only begun to be touched upon in the realm of voices. It is curious that such aspects of human life that we especially care about – recognizing those individuals close to us – are avoided in scientific research. The prevailing “componential accounts” of behavior associated with localization models of the brain have contributed to the dearth of familiarity research (Brown, 2002). In these accounts, behaviors common across persons are decomposed into components or modules that are supposed to be correlated to localized areas of the brain. In contrast, the process model of brain function describing microgenetic unfolding of perceptual experience, involving the whole brain, lends itself to a coherent discussion of personally familiar phenomena. Brown advocates “a theory of a mind sensitive to physical constraints but centered in the subjective” (2002, p. 20). This approach is essential for an authentic characterization of the intimate listener-speaker dyad inherent in familiar voice processing. 7

To complicate the matter, the term “recognition” was applied where non-familiar faces or voices were used in the study. In a number of studies of “proposagnosia” (poor performance on facial stimuli) it is not clear whether familiar or unfamiliar faces are the object of the study.

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Familiar face and voice recognition

Considering the number of family, friends, colleagues and famous persons in our physical midst and calling us up on the telephone, it is clear that we potentially recognize many voices, but how well do we recognize them? How many, and under what conditions? Design problems abound for this type of study. Little information has been available for voices, although some such questions have been asked and answered for faces. Something about the extent of this ability, despite changes in age, facial hair, expression, and other local details was first demonstrated for faces in 1975 (Bahrick, Bahrick & Wittlinger, l975), using high school yearbooks going back as far as 50 years. Subjects recognized familiar persons (in arrays including nonfamiliar faces) at very high rates. Studies identified no upper limit to the number of faces individuals can accurately recognize as “familiar” throughout their lives (Bruck, Cavanaugh & Ceci, 1991). Aging does not noticeably affect face recognition competence (Baeckman, 1991), although some decrement for more recent faces may occur (Wahlin, Backman, Mantylea, Herlitz, Viitanen & Winblad, 1993). The case for lifelong retention of a repertory of familiar voices is likely similar, but more difficult to demonstrate formally (due to the “inconvenience” factor mentioned above). It is daunting to consider assembling a test set of past familiar-intimate voices. Therefore, although everyone has a large repertory of voices that they recognize as familiar, actual recognition rates are difficult to come by. Yet casual observation suggests that when they recognize and (less often) name the person who produced a voice sample, humans perform extremely well compared to the recognition abilities demonstrated, for example, by penguins, monkeys, or bats, who, at most, recognize a small set of individual familiar members (see Kreiman & D. Sidtis, in preparation). As can be imagined, there are two approaches to the topic. In the first, researchers study speakers and listeners who are familiar with each other through daily contact (familiar/intimate voices), including an individual’s friends and family members. This has been attempted only rarely. Ladefoged and Ladefoged (1980) examined the ability of a single highly expert listener (Peter Ladefoged) to recognize the voices of 53 speakers (29 familiar, 13 somewhat familiar, and 11 unfamiliar). In a difficult “open set” task, the expert correctly named 31% of the speakers from a single word ('hello’), compared to 66% when the stimulus was a sentence. The overall false identification rate equaled 11%. A small number of other studies (Schmidt-Nielsen & Stern, 1985; Rose & Duncan, 1995; Wagner & Köster, 1999; Lavner, Gath & Rosenhouse, 2000), using

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single words or sentences as challenge stimuli spoken by persons of varying degrees of personal familiarity, report success rates for listeners of from 4% to 100%, depending on task and voice samples. Another approach to evaluating the extent of human recognition abilities uses familiar/famous voices. Thanks to the mass media, this approach is much simpler to implement, because many listeners are familiar with the voices of similar sets of actors, politicians, newscasters, and other celebrities. The examiner can enhance uniformity of the known voices in listeners by pre- and posttesting: first, a survey can be used asking a demographically matched cohort to generate names of famous persons whose voices they know, and/or by, following testing, having the listeners themselves rate the voices in the listening set for familiarity. In studies, listeners perform decently when asked to identify a famous voice in an open-set task (where the speaker could be anyone, living or dead): 27% of the speakers presented with a 4-second voice sample without context were named (Van Lancker, Kreiman & Wickens, 1985), and 48% from a 20-second sample, even when voices were recorded across 5 decades (Meudell, Northern, Snowden & Neary, 1980;). Recognition rates increased when speakers were provided with a closed set of choices, with pictures, and/or with a list of speakers’ names. More recently, Schweinberger et al. (1997) played listeners samples of famous voices varying in duration from 250 ms to 2 sec. Listeners heard longer and longer samples until they categorized the voice as “famous” or “unfamiliar.” Accuracy was very close to 0 at 250 ms, but increased rapidly with duration up to 1 sec. For the longest durations, listeners correctly responded “famous” 68% of the time, with a false alarm rate of 33%. These limited data give some idea of range of competences across listeners and listening environments, but more studies of human voice recognition competence are needed. Effects of brain damage on face and voice recognition

Prosopagnosia was first described by Joachim Bodamer in l947 as agnosia (loss of meaning) for the recognition of faces and expressions, without disturbance of perception of the parts of the face8. Viewing a photograph of his wife, the victim of prosopagnosia can report that he is seeing a face and he can describe the face in detail, but he cannot “recognize” or identify it (Benton, l980). In real life, the prosopagnosic patient must rely on known 8

Later studies uncovered separate cognitive processes for familiar face recognition, unfamiliar face discrimination, and recognition of facial expression. Failure to define and distinguish between these different neuropsychological functions has often led to confusion in the scholarly literature.

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items of clothing, the sound of his wife's voice9 or other extraneous props, to recognize her (Damasio, Damasio & Van Hoesen, 1982).). Viewing the face does not evoke a feeling of familiarity. A failure to recognize familiar faces is associated with a lesion in the right hemisphere, often a parietal-occipital lesion (Whitely and Warrington, l977; Yin, l970; Vilkki & Laitinen, l976). Many studies report that a left hemisphere lesion is also present, and that bilateral damage is required for prosopagnosia (Meadows, l974; Damasio, Damasio & Van Hoesen, l982; Hamsher, Levine & Benton, 1979). From the beginning, predominant side of lesion was not clear (Brown, 1972). Some of these observations may be explained by the notion, as mentioned previously, that both hemispheres are able to perceive and identify faces, but they do so using different processes (Gazzaniga & Smylie, 1983). Cases of prosopagnosia have been associated with single right hemisphere lesions based on CT-scan evidence (Landis, Cummings, Benson & Palmer, l986; DeRenzi, l986) and PET results showing hypometabolism (less than normal metabolism) in the right temporal lobe (Evans, Heggs, Antoun & Hodges, 1995). While a lesion in the left hemisphere may enhance the disability, reports of familiar face recognition deficits following unilateral right hemisphere damage suffice to suggest an important role of that hemisphere in familiar face recognition. Both hemispheres perceptually process familiar and unfamiliar faces and names, according to different procedures (Damasio, Damasio & Van Hoesen, 1982), but only the left hemisphere is proficient in famous name production (Semenza & Zettin, 1988). This was dramatically illustrated in a study of callosal-sectioned (“split-brain”) subjects, who identified pictures of familiar persons and landmarks presented to either hemisphere. As expected, subjects verbally named only the stimuli presented to the left hemisphere. The especially interesting finding is that right hemisphere presentation yielded nonverbally accurate responses that were more intense than left hemisphere (Sperry, Zaidel & Zaidel, 1979). A reasonable proposal is that both hemispheres can identify visual stimuli; the right hemisphere has a more emotional, personally familiar response, while the left hemisphere makes the identification and can produce a verbal response. A study using split-visual techniques combined with evoked response meas9

We have noted such comments several times in the neuropsychological literature on prosopagnosia, anecdotally and indirectly implying a dissociability of voice and face in the recognition repertory, but also indicating a failure to acknowledge a status of voices as a comparable neurocognitive category. This neglect has persisted in neuropsychology (cf Bauer & Rubens, 1985; Duchaine, 2006). This also reflects the dominance of the visual modality in neurobehavioral thought.

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ures over left and right hemispheres, whereby faces and names were presented, produced a sustained negative wave in the hemisphere contralateral to the stimulated visual hemi-field (Schweinberger, Sommer & Stiller, 1994). This indicated that hemisphere resources are allocated to both tasks. Yet the clinical data indicate hemispheric differences in quality of processing. Recognition versus discrimination of voices and faces

The term “recognition” has various meanings in psychological studies. One sense of the term is categorize, so that a subject “recognizes” that an object is (or is not) a member of a category, such as the category of faces, animals, and so on. Another version of familiarity studies, the “train-tofamiliarity” technique, also differs from studies of personally familiar, or personally relevant items, such as family members, politicians, and movie stars. These approaches train subjects to acquire into memory a set of faces or voices, and then test how well they recognize these trained stimuli in a larger set including untrained items. In personally familiar voice and face recognition, two variants are familiar-famous (culturally known persons and places) and familiar-intimate (family, friends, neighborhood places). Discrimination tasks are generally understood to involve new or unfamiliar objects or material, although personally familiar voices can be mounted in an ABX-type matching-to-sample discrimination task. This has been performed in trained-to-familiar studies, but we know of no such studies using personally familiar voices. Generally, for discrimination tasks, people discriminate between two or more objects, judging them as same, different, or having certain features in common. Early studies examining brain-injured subjects suggested that discriminating between unfamiliar faces and recognizing familiar faces engage different cerebral mechanisms (Young, Newcombe, de Haan, Small & Hay, 1993; Benton & Van Allen, 1972; Benton, 1980). Malone, Morris, Kay and Levin (l982) reported a double dissociation between discrimination and recognition of faces in two patients who could achieve one but not the other task, and they mention four cases of prosopagnosia in whom unfamiliar face discrimination was preserved. These differences once were identified as apperceptive (unfamiliar-discrimination) and associative (familiarrecognition) forms of prosopagnosia (De Renzi, Faglioni, Grossi & Michelli, 1991). Warrington and James (l967) claimed that a right parietooccipital lesion corresponded to a recognition deficit, while a right hemi-

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sphere temporal lobe lesion was associated with face discrimination deficits Studies comparing familiar and unfamiliar face recognition tasks in a large group of unilaterally brain damaged subjects reported that although right sided damage affected all tasks, performance on familiar faces was independent of other perceptual disorders (Carlesimo & Caltagirone, 1995). In contrast, 39 subjects performed at a 22% decrement (compared to normal subjects) on a facial discrimination task following temporal or frontal lobectomy on either side (Brown, Denault, Cohen & Rouleau, 1994). Nachson (1995) proposed a specific, “domain specific” mechanism in the brain for processing of faces. Studies of brain electrical activity using surface and depth electrodes also reported different responses to familiar and novel faces (Seeck, Mainwaring, Ives, Blume, Dubuisson, Cosgrove, Mesulam & Schomer, 1993). Grafman, Salazar, Weingartner & Amin (l986) found a similar double dissociation between performance on familiar and unfamiliar faces in persons with penetrating brain wounds. Electrophysiological correlates of face discrimination and other visual tasks, in the form of early and middle evoked responses, suggested the presence of category-specific streams of processing in bilateral, inferior extrastriate and temporal cortex (Allison, McCarthy, Nobre, Puce & Belger, 1994). In studying a range of percepts, including numbers and colors, as processed in secondary visual cortex, discrete regions for face stimuli were found (Allison, Ginter, McCarthy, Nobre, Puce, Luby & Spencer, 1994). Separate chronically implanted electrode placements across subjects, during evaluation for surgery as treatment for epilepsy, suggested that discrete regions for face recognition may differ between individuals. Several approaches to face and voice processing in the brain refer to the notion of two distinct cortical streams: a medial stream (for object recognition) and a lateral stream (for perceptual processing) (Elgar & Campbell, 2001). For auditory input, dorsal and ventral streams are described, said to process the “what” and “where” of the stimuli. Functional imaging studies proposing to examine networks within the brain utilize these notions for both left and right hemispheres. So, for example, Knösche, Lattner, Maess, Schauer & Friederici (2002) show separate processing streams for phonemic and voice identity information. Other brain imaging studies attempt to identify cortical areas forvoice recognition. As many as three distinct voice areas have been proposed to exist for familiar stimuli in right temporal lobe. The authors attempt to accommodate this observation to the

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standard two-stream hypothesis, by claiming that the anterior ventral (toward the underside) stream originating in the superior temporal sulcus identifies a specific person, while the posterior dorsal (toward the upper side) stream processes voices as acoustic targets (Kriegstein & Giraud, 2004). This is not in full agreement with Belin, Zatorre, Lafaille, Ahad & Pike (2000), who identify the midanterior superior temporal sulcus as responsible for spectral analysis, while both posterior and anterior areas emphasize voice processing over linguistic analysis of speech. But functional connections to adjacent temporal areas during voice recognition are proposed. Lattner, Meyer & Friederici (2005) using magnetic field studies of the brain found that voice information was processed bilaterally, but that pitch and voice analysis formed a Gestalt-like function in the right temporal lobe. While we are pleased that brain function underlying voice recognition – especially subjectively, personally familiar voices – has finally become a topic of serious scientific study, we suspect that the localizationist model, especially as utilized in brain activation paradigms, is inadequate. This shortcoming is compounded by the uncertainties of the meaning of activation signals in functional imaging (J. Sidtis, 2007). The elementary and primordial nature of the ability, arising out of deep evolutionary processing, as revealed in the ubiquitous and varying versions of familiar voice recognition instinctual behaviors in animals, suggests a whole-brain participation in the process, which is better described as a brain state beginning with a configuration, possibly, as Brown (2002) describes, in the brain stem, and resonating through limbic and basal ganglia systems to neocortical areas. A recent finding of brain stem processing of linguistic pitch contrasts makes a small beginning in supporting the view of multiple brain processes underlying these complex auditory behaviors (Krishnan, Xu, Gandour & Cariani, 2005). Studies reviewed in this chapter implicate the right parietal lobe as end-station processing area for the unfolding of personally familiar voice recognition (see Figure 2).

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Fig. 2.

Brain areas involved in acquiring and processing familiar voices. The whole brain participates.

How instinctual, or inborn, are these processes that help us recognize faces and voices? In reviewing learning and recognition studies of face processing, Farah (1996) concluded that face discrimination and recognition are “special” in cognition, in that humans are uniquely adapted to processing facial stimuli. This view was supported by observations in an individual with prosopagnosia (meaning, here, failure to recognize known, familiar faces), who performed disproportionately poorly on other face processing tasks, in comparison with perception of objects (Farah, Levinson & Klein, 1995). A single case of developmental prosopagnosia suggested that face recognition is domain specific (and not a general visuospatial competence), in that the deficit occurred only for upright facial stimuli (Duchaine, Yovel, Butterworth & Nakayama, 2006). More evidence that neural tissue is innately dedicated to face recognition arose from studies of a child with a severe, acquired face recognition deficit without object perception problems, who sustained brain damage shortly after birth (Farah, Rabinowitz, Quinn & Liu, 2000). The common observation that inverted faces elicit better discrimination performance in some persons with prosagnosia has been brought forth to support the notion of modularity in that ability (Farah, Wilson, Drain & Tanaka, 1995). These authors have provided evidence that proposagnosia occurs as a genetic disorder in familial groups. The demonstrated inborn status of human voice recognition certainly supports a genetic origin of this ability. Recently the notion of “face blindness” has caught the popular imagination, with internet surveys available for people to fill out, intending to earmark people with deficient familiar facial recognition in everyday life.

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The budding analog is “voice blindness,” revealing individuals who are deficient in recognizing the voices of their conspecifics. This disability is less noticeable than face blindness. We received a letter from an adult male who acknowledged a failure, through his earlier life, to appreciate that human voices are distinguishable. He described being agnostic to differences between voice patterns. He eventually became aware only because of complaints from friends and family, when he consistently identified himself to them on the telephone, and by his inability to know, by the voice itself, who was calling him. Such individuals likely use verbal strategies on the telephone to identify callers, and in social situations, focus on visual cues to identify acquaintances. Face and voice processing are both likely genetic endowments, but with different maturational schedules in the developing child. Infants learn to recognize their mothers’ voice before birth, and respond significantly more to her than other maternal voices immediately after birth (de Casper & Fifer, 1980), implying acquisition in utero. This finding has been amply supported by later findings. In contrast, while infants preferentially track face-like shapes and faces more often than other visual stimuli, they do not recognize their mothers’ faces until several months after birth (Fantz, 1961; Johnson, Dziurawiec, Ellis & Morton, 1991). For voice perception, a dissociated, specialized, domain-specific cognitive ability has also been proposed. In their review of recent neuroimaging studies, Belin, Fecteau and Bedard (2004) claim that vocal identity information is processed in cortical pathways partially segregated from linguistic and affective information in speech. They draw on the lessons of face research, and suggest that the analogy for voices as specialized is justified. However, the emphasis on modularity for such cognitive functions fails to take into account the pervasive contribution of several brain areas. The notion of modules renders static structure to conceptual objects and events that are better viewed as dynamic processes (Brown, 1998a, b). A historical view of phonagnosia studies The earliest published studies of voice perception in brain-damaged patients used unfamiliar voices, but the purpose, to understand abilities to discern different voice patterns, approached the bona fide recognition question10. Judgments of male, female, or child, and detection of foreign ac10

We don’t know if Jason Brown was familiar with Assal’s work when he proposed the Idea. In Brown, 1972, he outlined a battery of tests 314

cents in a set of unfamiliar female voices were used, resulting in a greater tendency for right sided damage (compared to left sided damage) to interfere with successful discrimination (Assal, Zander, Kremin & Buttet, l976). These authors inferred from patients' performance on a same/different voice discrimination task that “the right temporal/parietal region seems to play a key role in vocal recognition” (Assal, Aubert & Buttet, l981, p. 256). This early statement strikingly foretells the story of voices that unfolded. At Northwestern University in 1977, examination of recognition of personally familiar (famous) voices in brain-damaged subjects began (Van Lancker & Canter, l982). At the time, most famous people were male, so we opted to stay with that gender for the stimulus array. We explored how best to obtain target voices. As one proposed strategy, we wrote to Rich Little, well known impressionist, and asked whether he would cooperate with the study. A spokesperson declined our request. As an alternative, we recorded voices of famous male media persons and entertainers from various sources (e.g., radio and television interviews and shows, audiocassettes of old radio programs, phonograph recordings of comedians), and edited the material to eliminate background noise and revealing content. Using the same multiple choice format adopted for the voice recognition test, we designed a pretest with written samples. Any test item significantly often “guessed” from the written text was removed or altered. This was to ensure that correct identification could be made from voice alone with no benefit of linguistic content. Seven samples of 9-14 seconds in length were played to 30 unilaterally brain damaged subjects (21 left brain damaged and 9 right brain damaged) who had sustained single lesions from stroke. Responses were made by pointing to one of four photographs. Response options for each choice included the written and spoken name, so that selective deficits in face recognition, auditory comprehension, or reading would not interfere with the results. As an incidental finding from observing our normal control subjects, we saw that recognition was accomplished in less than 3 seconds of presentation of the voice samples11. for auditory agnosia, which included these stimuli: male vs female voice, young vs old voice, foreign languages, and English with nonnative accents. 11

This informal observation was later supported by evoked response potential (ERP) studies. Effects of priming on familiar voices were observed within 200 milliseconds (Schweinberger, 2001). In studies monitoring brain electrical activity through scalp and implanted electrodes, brain responses on the familiarity judgment occurred from 50-90 milliseconds (Seeck, Michel, Mainwaring, Cosgrove, Blume, Ives, Landis & Schomer, 1997). When stimuli presented in increasing durational steps from 0.25 seconds up to a maximum of 2 seconds, famous voice recognition improved with duration (Schweinberger, Herholz & Sommer, 1997).

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Most exciting were the findings that right hemisphere damage significantly interfered with recognizing familiar voices, whereas left hemisphere damaged patients recognized voices, in many cases, as well as normal listeners. Even severely aphasic patients, who could neither speak nor understand what was being said, recognized with ease who was saying it. One person diagnosed with global aphasia, a complete disability in language function affecting all modalities, recognized all the voices, and when she heard the voice of Jack Benny, she performed a gesture that was his signature (leaning chin on hand, other hand cupping elbow). Her family members, accustomed to her severe communication deficit and seeing this gesture, were heartened and impressed to see her cognitive response to a cultural icon. In retrospect, the finding of a right hemisphere specialization for familiar voice recognition might have been expected, insofar as recognizing voices is much like recognizing faces: both are complex patterns (one auditory, one visual) and the right hemisphere is superior at some forms of pattern recognition. From another point of view, however, the early right hemisphere finding for voice recognition was surprising, because voice quality is carried in the speech signal, previously believed to be processed exclusively in the left hemisphere. Later, in Los Angeles, with the advent to the UCLA Phonetics Laboratory of a coauthor of this article (JK), the studies continued. We seized an opportunity to describe our voice studies to Freda Newcombe12, a prominent British neuropsychologist, who visited the UCLA Department of Linguistics somewhere around this time. She reminded us that brain processing underlying voice perception might differ for familiar and unfamiliar voices. We are grateful for her suggestion, drawn from her studies on prosopagnosia. A new and improved protocol was designed to test clinical subjects with damage to either the left or the right cerebral hemisphere on two kinds of voices: personally-familiar and unfamiliar (Van Lancker & Kreiman, l986; l987). Using the knowledge gained from the previous study, shorter voice signals (four-second samples) of 25 familiar voices were prepared, along with 4 choices vertically aligned on response sheets. To compare familiar voice recognition with discrimination of unfamiliar voices, JK adapted a listening test from her dissertation research. Unfamiliar voices were 26 pairs of 4-second samples of 10 age- and dialectmatched male college students. These were prepared for a same/different discrimination paradigm. (Kreiman, 1987). Forty-five normal-control lis12

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Freda Gladys Newcombe died in Holton, Oxfordshire on April 6, 2001.

teners, matched in age and education to the clinical population, were tested, and 40 clinical patients received both discrimination and recognition protocols. Results for familiar voices replicated the previous study: right brain damage interfered with voice recognition performance, while left brain damaged subjects, even those with severe aphasia, performed as well as normal listeners. However, unfamiliar voices brought different findings. No unilateral side of lesion was exclusively associated with poor performance. Damage to either hemisphere lowered performance on discrimination between unfamiliar voices (Van Lancker, Kreiman & Cummings, 1989). Review of individual patients’ performance led to the conclusion that voice recognition and voice discrimination are separate and unordered abilities: we saw that brain lesions can interfere with one competence, but not the other. In addition, these selected disabilities were unordered, in that they occurred in either “direction”: Some patients could recognize familiar voices, but could not discriminate between unfamiliar voices, and others showed the opposite pattern. At first glance, it might appear that familiar voice recognition is more complex or occurs at a higher cognitive level than unfamiliar voice discrimination, and that therefore, if performance on familiar voices is good, one can expect good performance on unfamiliar voices. However, this was not the case. Voice recognition and discrimination are not dependent on each other, and do not form an implicational series, but are functionally independent, and have different neuroanatomic substrates (Van Lancker, Cummings, Kreiman & Dobkin, 1988). With the help of behavioral neurologist Jeffrey Cummings, radiographic data were used to determine sites of damage associated with familiar and unfamiliar voice perception difficulties. Patients were considered deficienton either task if they scored more that 1.5 SD below the mean of the normal-control group. All patients with familiar-recognition deficits had right parietal lobe lesions; two others had additional right frontal or occipital damage. Patients with unfamiliar-discrimination deficits had lesions involving either the right or left temporal lobe, with the lesions extending beyond the temporal lobe in two thirds of the cases. These differences were significant using a Chi square analysis. Areas in the inferior and anterior parietal lobes have been identified as “heteromodel” or crossmodal association areas (Benson, 1994). The voice as perceptual object is a constellation of auditory, visual, and tactile features along with elements of declarative and procedural memory. This implies that successful identification of a personally familiar voice involves cross modal associations.

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Later studies using patients with unilateral brain lesions lent support to the earlier studies of the 1980s and carried them a step further (Neuner & Schweinberger, 2000). Patients’ performance indicated that neuropsychological impairments in face, voice, and name recognition, following discretely located brain damage, are dissociable from one another. In four patients, a selective impairment of voice recognition was seen; voice recognition scores were at chance levels, while face, name, and sound recognition were preserved. A number of patients with impairment of familiar voice recognition were able to discriminate unfamiliar voices, supporting the view that familiar recognition and unfamiliar voice discrimination are dissociated neuropsychological abilities; of these, two had unilateral right hemisphere damage, lending support to an important role of the right hemisphere in familiar voice recognition. Person recognition deficit was associated with bilateral or right hemisphere damage in 9 of the 10 subjects having this difficulty, further supporting the notion of personal relevance as residing in the human right hemisphere (Van Lancker, 1991). A model of brain processing for voice perception All the structures of the brain identified in voice and face discrimination and recognition exist bilaterally. The temporal lobes, which contain the auditory receiving areas, the hippocampi, which are crucial to learning and memory of auditory events, the amygdala, which, as part of the encircling limbic system, react to emotionally laden stimuli, are all nearly identical in size and shape in each cerebral hemisphere. The small interhemispheric morphological differences identified for a few structures have not been shown to have consistent functional implications (Geschwind & Galaburda, 1985). Yet the convergence of findings from different scientific paradigms leads to the conclusion that the acoustic material of speech is processed preferentially in the left hemisphere, while the acoustic material for voice recognition is preferentially processed in the right hemisphere. Some exceptions to these general outcomes arise from functional imaging studies, where considerable bilateral activation for many language and cognitive tasks is reported. The reasons for activation signals in the right hemisphere for language tasks, for example, are not well understood (J. Sidtis, 2007; Van Lancker Sidtis, 2007). They may be attributable to a large set of possible explanations including tandem blood flow, passive responses, and so on. Since many of these signals are difficult to explain, caution in interpretation is indicated.

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A convergence of findings from neuropsychological studies leads to a model of the brain which describes the right hemisphere as a superior Gestalt pattern recognizer, whereas the left hemisphere excels at detailed, analytic tasks. For voices, this model accommodates the notion that voices are processed by the interplay of two processes, Gestalt-recognition and feature analysis. It further specifies that bilateral temporal lobes specialize in detailed auditory processing, whereas the parietal lobe, as association cortex, performs cross-modal matches and higher integration of sensory input. Finally, the right hemisphere has a key role in personal relevance processing by storing “packets” of associated information for a very large repertory of unique, known persons, places, objects, and events; this information includes faces and voices. The packets include biographical information and emotional associations. Familiar voices are recognized as Gestalt-like patterns, not as an additive list of specifiable parameters or features. In the microgenetic approach. we can say that configural properties of the content are actualized (Brown, 2002, p. xxxiv). As mentioned previously, processing a voice sample involves an interplay between the holistic, synthetic Gestalt process (whereby a pattern is apperceived and the compositional elements are not systematically attended to), and perception of vocal parameters. In this view, familiar voice recognition depends both on the idiosyncratic, distinctive salience of a cue or set of cues and on the context of the other cues present in a voice. To characterize listeners’ recognition of known voices in general, it is not useful to specify a single set of parameters that universally underlie voice quality judgments. We agree with Brown that: it is “failed logic [to assume] that a behavior is explained when it is fractionated into constituent operations that are separately interpreted and then reunited” (2002, p. 16). The cues to a particular speaker’s identity logically depend on both the listener and on the complete vocal pattern in which the individual cues operate. Recognition depends on the particular listener, because familiarity is a function of both the voice and the listener (what is known and the person who knows it). Without subjectivity in this formula, the point is lost, or in Brown’s words “Subjectivity is the inner dynamic of any object…the entity into which it actualizes” (2002, p. xlix). Support for this view comes from behavioral studies of normal listeners. When 45 famous voices were played to listeners backward or with the speaking rate altered, some voices were easily recognized despite the alteration but others could not be identified (Van Lancker, Kreiman & Em-

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morey, 1985; Van Lancker, Kreiman & Wickens,1985). Intuitively, it seemed likely that voices of speakers who were notable as fast or slow talkers would be most affected by rate alterations, and that recognition of the voices of speakers with strong foreign accents would be most impaired by backwards presentation. However, this was not the case. No matter how extreme a voice was on some dimension, the importance of that dimension as a cue was determined by the other characteristics that the voice had, not just on that cue alone. For example, actor Maurice Chevalier had a strong French accent when speaking English, but also a rather low pitched, breathy voice, distinctive syllable rates and “different sounding” vowel qualities; his voice was easily recognized backwards. Other actors with similarly salient accents were not recognizable when their voices were played backwards. These data suggest that recognition depends both on the relative salience of a cue or set of cues, and on the context of the other cues present in a voice. The simple feature-based model of familiar voice recognition assumed by most research cannot accommodate these findings, because the values of individual cues, as if forming part of a fixed repertory of cues, are not adequate to predict whether or not a voice will be recognized. These data suggest that familiar voices are recognized as complex, Gestalt-like patterns, not as additive lists of a known, finite set of features. Data from priming experiments (Schweinberger, Herholz & Sommer, 1997) also point to this conclusion. In one of these studies, listeners heard famous and unfamiliar voices, and were asked to respond ‘famous’ or ‘not famous’ as quickly as possible. Reaction times to famous voices were significantly faster when listeners had previously heard a different exemplar of a famous voice, but no similar advantage was observed for unfamiliar voices. Because the priming effect was produced by a different sample of each voice, it appears that the benefit derives from the complete voice pattern, not from the specific details of a given sample, consistent with the view that familiar voices are processed as patterns, and not as bundles of features. Gestalt doctrine – the notion that much of perception involves establishment of schemata or patterns – (Corcoran, 1971; Reed, 1972; Neisser, 1976) is generally accepted. This ability is held to be “wired-in” or innate (Pomerantz, 1986). It remains a problem how to define this process. Patterns and aggregates of features differ essentially. Features can be notated and written down. But patterns are best represented in toto, or as unique caricatures, and notational systems have not proven adequate or useful.

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Structure can be imposed on voice patterns, and features can be listed, but this is a case of imposing stasis on the dynamic of process (Brown, 2002, p. 25), during which the essence of the object is distorted. We are aware that parameters can be listed for certain vocal attributes, such as fundamental frequency, breathiness, and foreign accent, but these do not adequately account for the huge repertory of known voices even in a single individual. Both featural-analytic and holistic-configurational approaches have been demonstrated in studies face perception (Farah, Hammond & Mehta, 1989; Farah, Levinson & Klein, 1995; Schwaninger, Lobmaier, Collishaw, 2002), indicating that task demands can elicit both perceptual approaches. Equal performance on tasks emphasizing partanalysis and holistic recognition is not achieved until adolescence (Davidoff & Roberson, 2002). Gestalt and microgenetic theory each offer a vocabulary and a context for describing voice perception. It is said for pattern recognition that an emergent feature or features serve to identify the pattern; this, then, constitutes the salient property (Pomerantz, 1986), but it is obvious that both the configurational pattern and the idiosyncratically identifying feature coexist. Somewhat similarly, in microgenesis, the recognition process can be conceived as occurring in phases from whole-to-parts specification leading to an “independent existence” as the “becoming terminates” in the actuality, the recognized voice (Brown, 1998a, p. 82). The voice object arises as “a process of momentary actualization” –the known voice--with progressive specification of parts arising from it. The temporal dimension is retained in this description of voice perception. The voice pattern arises as a “concrete image in the mental space” of the listener, even though “change is intrinsic to the actualization.” For voices, in is intensely useful to acknowledge that “the replication is never exact” as described in microgeny (Brown, 1998a, p. 85). And further, as specified by microgenic perspectives, the stability of objects, such as our vast repertory of known voices, has been achieved through a long evolutionary processes, which is easy to support by surveying the prevalence and variety of familiar voice recognition capacities across species. This phenomenological view of voice patterns implies, for voices familiar to the listener, that the individual voice pattern alone provides the appropriate cue to itself. Applicable here is Brown’s notion of patterns externalizing into their featural elements. This microgenetic view represents our model better than any compositional approach, in which the voice pattern is “built up” out of additive, elemental ingredients. In our view, the

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configural properties of the voice are reproduced as part of the interactional process of talker and listener. It follows that different instantiations of the voice pattern, affected by background noise, aging, or mood, to mention a few, suffice to represent the voice phenomenon. Each occurrence of the familiar voice object, in a sense, is novel, as described for mental states in microgenesis. Each entity in thought is novel in view of its temporality and its change across micromoments (Brown, 1998b). Yet the brain forms categories, leading to an allusion of stability. This conceptualization of mental processes accommodates the very large number of known voice objects, each of which occurs in changing, “novel,” and dynamic form, and yet each belongs to a single, unique category (her voice or his voice). This dynamic, process approach to familiar voice perception offers an accounting that is lacking in compositional analysis of a static entity. A view of microgenetic processing for voice, where the pattern is newly and instantaneously actualized in a dynamic unfolding, also provides a context for understanding the acquisition of familiar voices. We have argued elsewhere (Kreiman & D. Sidtis, in preparation) that inducting a voice pattern into one’s pantheon of personally familiar voices does not enjoy a learning curve. Acquiring a personally relevant voice pattern is the result of a whole brain response that involves the auditory processing of the temporal lobes, short-to-long term memory shunting by hippocampi, the emotional valences of the limbic system, executive oversight of the frontal lobes, and coordination across parietal lobe association cortices (see Figure 2). This is best viewed as a phasic process. The voice perception model proposed here makes the basic assumption that all voices constitute auditory patterns. The voice is not usefully reducible to componential constituents; like any pattern, no list of ingredients or parameters can reasonably thought of to “add up,” in space or time, to the total voice pattern. In the case of familiar voices, very little predictable featural analysis may enter into the recognition process; rather, a few idiosyncratic, salient cues, occurring within a unique context, provide adequate information for identification. As previously described, studies of normal listeners' recognition of acoustically altered (backwards presentation, slowing rate, and increasing rate) familiar voices showed that a large variety of salient characteristics (e.g., breathiness, nasality, clipped consonants, rate) are important to different voices, suggesting that listeners do indeed recognize each familiar voice as a unique pattern; they do not extract a constant set of auditory features (Van Lancker, Kreiman & Emmorey, l985; Van Lancker, Kreiman & Wickens, l985).

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In matching or evaluation tasks for discrimination of unfamiliar voices, use of elemental feature analysis and comparison plays a greater role. Matching unfamiliar voices engages featural analysis. In addition to perceiving the unfamiliar voice as an overall auditory pattern, the listener “extracts” elementary acoustic features such as pitch, vocal quality, and rate, and perceptual features such as masculinity, and uses them for comparison. In fact, normal listeners' performance on unfamiliar voices, in discrimination and long-term memory studies, suggests that both general characteristics and distinct features are utilized to compare and remember unfamiliar voice patterns (Kreiman, l987). The clinical findings for voice perception reviewed above indicates that an intact right hemisphere was needed for voice recognition, and that both hemispheres were needed to successfully discriminate between unfamiliar voices. The voice perception model proposes that pattern recognition abilities of the right hemisphere are required for both kinds of voice perception, but the analytic abilities of the left hemisphere are needed for successful performance on unfamiliar voices. Furthermore, familiar recognition is a cross-association pattern matching involving information packets, utilizing parietal lobe association areas. In the right cortical hemisphere, cognitive functions are believed to be diffusely represented. Voice recognition involves a vertical and systemic process from brain stem through limbic structures and temporal lobes to an end station at the right parietal lobes. Unfamiliar voice discrimination is more “purely” an auditory skill involving primarily auditory receiving areas of temporal lobes on either left or right hemisphere. Despite the discrepant backgrounds in research on voices and faces, tentative generalizations about the comparative neuroanatomical substrates for discrimination and recognition are possible. First, for both faces and voices, it is clear that discrimination and recognition are separate abilities. Secondly, a predominance, overall, of the right hemisphere for all these abilities has been reported, but some left hemisphere involvement for both face and voice processing has been observed. For faces, the left hemisphere has also been implicated in recognition, especially when names are involved; for voices, the left hemisphere has been implicated in discrimination. Naming may be less strongly associated with recognition of voices. For faces, a verbal component has been invoked to account the left hemisphere participation in familiar face recognition, while an analytic substrategy has been invoked to account for evidence of left hemisphere involvement in unfamiliar voice discrimination.

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The model of voice perception presented here is in harmony with other known attributes of the right hemisphere: processing of social context, emotional meanings, complex patterns, and personal relevance (Bradshaw & Mattingly, 1995; Myers, 1998; Van Lancker, 1991, 1997). This model of voice processing in the brain fits well with other discoveries about the role of the right hemisphere in prosodic function. Information about the speaker revealed in the speaker's voice includes emotional state, personality, socioeconomic status, geographic history, mood, attitude toward the listener, and, of course, personal identity. All of this is interwoven in the speech signal, in a complex auditory pattern, the prosodic pattern. Much is automatically processed by the listener. Judgments about the speaker and about the importance of his/her message are inferred from the voice information. This information is, in a way, “more elemental” than the verbal content (Bolinger, l964, 1972), probably because subcortical limbic systems are engaged more directly. Brown’s view of emotion being present at all levels of processing is particularly pertinent here (1972). As he later states, “There is an affective element in every act and object [forming]…part of their structure and their description” (2002, p. 149). It is impossible to describe familiar voice recognition without accommodating affect to the description. This perspective is compatible with recent shifts in language study to social and pragmatic communication, which must be viewed subjectively (Shanahan, 2007). Panskepp (2008) argues that human language development is crucially dependent on emotional processes arising throughout the basal ganglia. This is even more pertinent in considering acquisition and processing of personally familiar voices. In neuroscience, a similar shift to the role of affect and emotion in evolutionary development and in all of cognitive processing is underway. Given that voice perception utilizes both featural and configuration modes of processing; considering the large array of potential vocal parameters available for each voice; and taking into account the psychological differences inherent in familiar compared with unfamiliar voices, we propose a model of brain processing of voice patterns that accommodates all these facts. A set of familiar voices, each with unique, distinctive cues to identify (and these vary with listener), is likely to be more heterogeneous than a set of unfamiliar voices, which are not yet established as unique memorable patterns. The more homogeneous and unfamiliar the voice set, the more likely featural comparison will be used; the more heterogeneous and familiar the voice set, the more likely Gestalt-closure processes will be engaged. Distinctive cues and ad hoc combinations of cues will suffice to identify

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the familiar voice; this process is the idiosyncratic emergence of features in patterns (Pomerantz, 1986). The two modes, featural and configurational, are associated with left and right hemisphere processes respectively. In this model, similarity (homogeneity) and dissimilarity (heterogeneity) are psychological properties of the listener, correlating roughly with a (high or low) familiarity factor (Figure 3).

Fig. 3.

Stimulus parameters determining preferential processing of left and right hemisphere. Unfamiliar voices are perceived as more homogeneous and are processed by feature comparison processes of the left hemisphere. Familiar voices are perceived as a more heterogeneous set and are preferentially processed by the right hemisphere.

For over a century, it was held that the left hemisphere was the sole arbiter of communication through the medium of speech and language. In its strictest interpretation, this fact has been borne out by continuing studies. However, much more is known about right hemisphere involvement in communication, especially in the realm of pragmatic function. This review of voice and face perception and recognition studies has shown that persons with aphasia, having intact right hemispheres, are likely well aware of the identity of the familiar-intimate and familiar-famous voices and faces around them, along with much of the attitudinal, affective, personal, and pragmatic patterns provided by intonation and facial expression. Results from studies of familiar voice recognition and prosody suggest that the left hemisphere knows what is being said, and at the same time, the right hemisphere is considering how, and by whom, the message is expressed. We close this excursion through the wonderland of voices and listeners with a nod of thanks to Jason Brown, who shared his creative Idea with us during a coffee break thirty years ago. As is obvious, it left quite an impression, and it continues to provide satisfaction and enchantment, reflecting, as do the other papers in this volume, Jason’s great fecundity of thought and generosity of spirit.

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Chapter 13 Process unveiled in the laboratory GUDMUND SMITH Lund University, Sweden When Jason Brown’s Self and Process (1991; see Brown, 2002) had reached our shores I lent it to a colleague, one not overly sold on the current trend to transform psychological problems into neurobiological ones, just to get his reaction to Brown’s treatment of such matters. In a few days time he had formulated his verdict: this was one of the best new textbooks in psychology, certainly very advanced and arduous but a stimulating provocation for all who had eagerly awaited an upheaval of stagnant psychological theorizing. The bottom-up approach presented by Brown appeared to be the answer. Process theory in the eyes of sceptics This was not, indeed, the general reaction to Brown’s texts among ordinary psychologists. Some saw it as an intrusion by an outsider into the uncorrupted heart of psychology, particularly a neurologist whose main aim was indubitably to reduce classical psychological explanations to neurophysiological ones. It is true that Brown’s microgenetic convictions were reinforced by his experience with patients suffering from aphasia. But his main sources of inspiration were to be found among experimental psychologists of the Leipzig school tradition and philosophers with a subjective outlook of sorts like H. Bergson and, above all, A.N. Whitehead. More persistent objections, however, came from the same quarters as had once attacked the notion of subliminal stimulation and perception. These were the people who adhered to a common-sense picture of psychological functioning. In that picture the subject was positioned in the middle of a world of stimulation impinging on the sensory surfaces. It was not claimed that the machinery of stimulus processing was yet known in detail. But the gross arrangement was no deep mystery. The Brownian upsidedown arrangement could thus be dismissed as a superfluous luxury, to put it kindly. The most violent resisters were, however, the professional perception people. A theory about micro-processing beyond the rim of awareness ap-

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peared to push their obvious accomplishments to the outskirts of perceptual operations. Instead of being the vanguard in completing the classical theory about information processing in the visual world they feared to be isolated as auxiliaries fordoomed to deal with left-overs from more important subconscious events. This travesty was a product of their initial indignance. But just like the anti-subliminal lobby in the fifties they tried hard to make our research life miserable. A historical perspective The process approach was not entirely new. The Aktualgenese people tried hard to make themselves visible already in the 1920s. But they marginalized themselves by clinging to a General Psychology paradigm and avoiding all possible associations with personality theories and shunning, above all, psychodynamic ideas. There was a rejuvenation of micro-genetic thinking, as attached to developmental theory, orchestrated by Heinz Werner (1956) in the middle of the last century. But Werner did not follow up this theme. Even such eloquent followers as Juris Draguns (1986) were unjustly ignored. Laboratory applications The endeavours to reconstruct micro-processes in the laboratory have been summarized elsewhere (recently in Smith, 2001). One important testimony to the success of these laboratory methods has been their usefulness as diagnostic tools. The processes mirrored by a variety of instruments obviously touch, not only the surface of our perceived world but its antecedents rooted in emotion and memory. Even very early memories may actualize in the laboratory. Indeed, perceptgeneses reconstructed in the laboratory corroborate Brown’s proposal of how reality is being constructed. Given a relatively novel situation, the micropulses sustaining the perception of it have obvious subjective beginnings, often emotionally tinged with diverse, condensed significations. As the reiterated influence of outside stimulation tempers the subjective excrescences, the micropulse culminates in a reasonably correct percept. It should, however, be kept in mind that the subjective beginnings often resist reconstruction, above all in subjects for whom the apparent chaos of the subthreshold world seems threatening. And so the metaphoric logic, so crucial for creativity, will be beyond reach of the anxiously rational person.

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In addition to the reconstructed micro-geneses, processes of palpable length have also proved fruitful as diagnostic keys. They have been labelled serial or adaptive processes and do not differ, in principle, from the micro-process variety. In micro-process experiments the test subject is unaware of the terminal point of the process; in many serial experiments the goal (mastery of an intricate situation) is made obvious from the beginning. But in both situations the practical conditions are set by the experimenter. And these conditions necessarily affect the outcome. Comparisons of micro-geneses and adaptive serials taken from the same subjects show very obvious formal similarities, as, e.g., abrupt breaks in the flow of process in subjects with signs of grave anxiety. Limitations But the success of the experimental approach is yet limited to vision. Attempts have been made to include audition. But these have met with obvious difficulties. The worlds of vision and audition are very different and do not lend themselves to the same kind of experimentation. While the meaning of the visual world may be frozen in on-the-spot accounts the meaning of speech or music is associated with a temporal course of events. Acoustic experiments have to be arranged in round-about ways, e.g., by using masking techniques to make bits of language gradually more audible. More formidable obstacles meet the ambition to test some of the theoretical assumptions naturally attendant to micro-genetic research. One such assumption has been actualized by Brown himself (Brown, 2005) and concerns how causation should be understood, for instance causation in the course of a micro-process, as distinct from ordinary ”billiard-ball” causation.. Many other parties have over the years tried to suggest how their pet ideas might be tested in ingeneous experimental arrangements. But numerous attempts have merely demonstrated how difficult it is to convert abstractions to concrete experiments. However, nothing is really impossible, as shown by Westerlundh´s ( 2004) testing of psychoanalytic propositions. It is also important to ask in what way the methods of process reconstruction may influence fundamental micro-genetic data. This is not a new question and is well known from particle physics. The lessons from physics should not, of course, be directly translated to the field of micro-process research. But it may still be important to bring a certain measure of caution to bear upon the application of experimental experiences on process theorizing. One relevant lesson has to do with attempts to repeat micro-process experiments.

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Reiteration of process Process-oriented experiments cannot be repeated with identical results. This does not mean lack of reliability; the change from one occasion to the following is not haphazard. What happens can most easily be followed in studies using serial techniques. One such kind of study exploits visual afterimages. The point of such an arrangement is that afterimages are not phenomena fixed once and for all in the visual world of normal viewers but are relatively unfamiliar and regarded as occasional disturbances, appearing, for instance, when the subject has happened to stare at a strong source of light. Accordingly, there is scope for adaptation to the phenomenon revealed in the experiment, scope to accept step by step a subjective product appearing within the objective physical world. The dependence of the afterimage on the viewer´s ”afterimage theory” has been most dramatically illustrated in experiments with children. who believe afterimages to be part of the real outside world.. Similar influences by ”afterimage theory” on afterimage appearance have been demonstrated using adult subjects (cf. Smith, 2001). Most viewers need a series of repeated afterimage productions to really appreciate their special character. The adaptive course of events from the first trial onwards has been defined by three dimensions: size, brightness, and color. In one study the course of adaptation appeared to cease after about 15 trials, i.e., after that directed change in, for instance, size was replaced by random variation. When administering an extraneous acoustic signal in the middle of the series, the adaptive process started from the beginning again, but this time in an abbreviated version. If the signal was delayed until the end of the serial there was no longer any clear regressive reaction. It was concluded that late in the series adaptive behavior had become more or less mechanized (this and several other experiments presented in Smith, 2001). A complete retake of an afterimage experiment would produce analogously truncated serials, lacking most of the introductory phases. Similar effects could be demonstrated in micro-genetic experiments. The number of phases from the first impression to final correct report diminished. It was as if they were shoved into each other like a folding device. This abbreviation was seen as continuing automatization of the adaptive processing, a simplification of the handling of reality, and ultimately smoothing out the road to its construction. Automatization could be seen as a way to economize on energy, to reserve it for new encounters. But the process pattern was not totally obliterated by repetition. Some of its salient features

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were preserved. Thus process, to paraphrase Rapaport (1967), was transformed to a more or less permanent structure. Structure building in process theory Reiteration of process may thus lead to structure building. In a process context structure should not be mixed up with trait or substance. ”Structure building means that one process limits the degree of freedom of subsequent processes by forcing them to follow certain twists and turns, particularly in the beginning of their course” (Smith, 1991, p. 204). The consequence of far-reaching structure building or automatization of reaction is obviously stagnation or arrested renewal. The more positive term ”habit-formation” may emphasize the benefits of such a course of events. But the inevitable transition from renewal to automatization, from rejuvenation to conservation, should perhaps be a more visible part of micro-process theory. The inferences drawn from laboratory experiments are not unobjectionable, however. While the laboratory reiterations have been as identical as practically possible real life situations are never exactly the same. And the experiments themselves offered the important exception just described, when an extraneous signal occasioned the micro-process to start again from the beginning. But the prerequisite was that the disorienting stimulation occurred relatively early in the process, before it had congealed into a pattern of subdued, more or less random variation. Even if micro-process theory does not offer a super-optimistic promise of continuing renewal, there are still consolations. New lines of inquiry There is no doubt that micro-genetic research, or percept-genesis as we term it in Lund, touches crucial problems in human life. The usefulness of its instruments as diagnostic tools and as elucidators in studies of development attest to such a claim. It is therefore important to dwell, not onesidedly on the results of previous research but on the omissions that, if possible, should be attended to in the future. In his writings on micro-genesis Brown has always been particular to deal with both sides of the coin: experience and action. Understandably, percept-genetic experimenters have made experience their main topic, i.e., the gradual construction of a world defined by carefully chosen pictorial themes. But it is not impossible, using such themes, to engage the viewer in action, action in an imagined world. In experiments dealing with ag-

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gression, Smith and Carlsson (1990) used as stimulus a picture of an aggressor and his victim standing facing each other. By means of the word ”I”, subliminally presented on either of these figures, the experimenter tried to manipulate the viewer´s choice of identification. Studies in creativity proved that the arrangement could be successful. Creative people, as defined by a specially constructed percept-genetic test (Smith & Carlsson, 2001) were more inclined to identify with the aggressor than the victim, i.e., to accept the commanding role instead of the pinioned role of the victim. In studies of women suffering from breast cancer it could likewise be demonstrated that those who identified with the aggressor were more likely to recover than those accepting the opposite role, a result in agreement with previous clinical observations (see, e.g., Lilja et al, 2003). Obviously, the subject in laboratory micro-process experiments need not be a passive observer but can be transformed into an active participant in the turmoil of a representational world. Previous successful diagnostic studies should also be resumed. The main focus has been on defensive strategies as attested by a recent comprehensive publication (Hentschel et al., 2004). A careful mapping of the defensive arsenal can very likely prove useful, e.g., when a therapist is pondering over what kind of treatment to recommend, or when to assess fitness for demanding tasks. Process-oriented instruments do not only distinguish between the classical categories of defense mechanisms but also between different degrees of maturity and range of dominance in the micro-process. One irremissible requirement of continued diagnostic research would be to strengthen the phenomenological analysis of criteria, an undertaking not particularly encouraged in present-day psychiatry. New conquests in this field have already been made by means of refined statistical techniques. Sundbom, Henningsson and associates at Umeå university have been able, using the Defense Mechanism Test (DMT, Kragh, 1985), to separate borderline patients hidden in a confused universe of neurotic and psychotic symptoms and to identify the psychological symptom profile of patients suffering from chronic fatigue, etc (Sundbom, 1992; for fresh data, see Smith & Carlsson, in press). Another way to broaden the spectre of empirical data is to introduce new stimulus themes, an undertaking often more intricate and tiresome than anticipated but often also immensely rewarding. Another line of research may deal with differences between ethnic groups. We are constantly told about how attitudes to religion, Westerntype rationality, gender relations, etc., define one subgroup in contradis-

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tinction to others, and ourselves in particular. But it is yet a matter of subjective opinion if we consider these differences to be superficial or fundamental, i.e., actualizing relatively late in life or very early. Percept-genetic research allows us to state, with relative certainty, that fundamental differences will appear early in the micro-process, given that the stimulus themes chosen for such a study are actually relevant to the problems in question. Such a choice may, however, turn out to be more tricky than anticipated. Conclusions A more urgent task for continued micro-process research would be extension of the basic theory of these phenomena. The pioneering work by Brown has already erected a useful frame for such an undertaking. What seems most essential in his writings is the coverage of both sides of process actualization, subjective experience and objective verification. One side cannot be excluded for the benefit of the other without crippling the true understanding of how reality is constructed. Cortical reactions are not more real than emotions and perceptual impressions. Experimental applications are always fundamental for theory testing. Brown (2005) himself has pointed to several important contributors to his theoretical work, Jean Piaget and Heinz Werner among them, both coached in advanced experimental laboratory work. One important step could be to involve recent research on the interface between consciousness and unconsciousness (Hassin, Uleman & Bargh, 2005), not to revive psychoanalysis but to utilize both adopted and recent knowledge about the vast hidden domain of information processing which a theory of micro-process cannot do without. References Brown, J.W. (2002). The self-embodying mind. New York: Barrytown. Brown, J.W. (2005). Genetic psychology and process philosophy. Process Studies, 34, 33-34. Draguns, J.G. (1986). Subliminal perception as the first stage of the perceptual process: Can personality be revealed so early? In U. Hentschel, G. Smith & J.G. Draguns (eds.), The roots of perception (331-349). Amsterdam: North-Holland. Hassin, R.R., Uleman, J.S. & Bargh, J.A. (eds)(2005). The new unconscious. New York: Oxford University Press.

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Hentschel, U., Smith, G.J.W., Draguns, J.G. & Ehlers, W. (eds.)(2004). Defense mechanisms: theoretical, research, and clinical perspectives. Amsterdam: Elsevier. Kragh, U. (1985). Defence mechanism test. Stockholm: Persona. Lilja, Å., Smith, G., Malmström, P., Salford, L.G., Idvall, I. & Horstman, V. (2003). Psychological profile in patients with stages I and II breast cancer: Associations of psychological profile with tumor biological prognosticators. Psychological Reports, 92, 1187-1198. Rapaport, D. (1967). The theory of attention cathexis. In M.M. Gill (ed.), The collected papers of David Rapaport (778-784). New York: Basic Books. Smith, G.J.W. (1991). Percept-genesis: A frame of reference for neuropsychological research. In R. Hanlon (ed.), Cognitive microgenesis: A neuropsychological perspective (199-211). New York: Springer-Verlag. Smith, G.J.W. (2001). The process approach to personality. New York: Kluwer/Plenum. Smith, G.J.W. & Carlsson, I. (1990). The creative process: A functional model based on empirical studies from early childhood to middle age. Psychological Issues, 57. New York: International Universities Press. Smith, G.J.W. & Carlsson, I. (2001). CFT: The Creative Functioning Test - Manual. Lund: Department of Psychology. Smith, G.J.W. & Carlsson, I. (eds.)(in press). Actualization of the personal world by means of process-oriented techniques. Frankfurt: Ontos. Smith, G.J.W., Sjöholm, L. & Andersson, A. (1971). Effects of extraneous stimulation on afterimage adaptation. Acta Psychologica, 35, 138-150. Sundbom, E. (1992). Borderline psychopathology and the Defence Mechanism Test. Umeå: Department of Applied Psychology. Werner, H. (1956). Micro-genesis in aphasia. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 52, 347-353. Westerlundh, B. (2004). A psychodynamic activation study of female Oedipal fantasies using subliminal and percept-genetic techniques. In U. Hentschel, G. Smith, J.G. Draguns & W. Ehlers (eds.), Defense mechanisms: Theoretical, research, and clinical perspectives (285-301). Amsterdam: Elsevier.

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Chapter 14 Reality: outside there or inside here? KOBI TIBERG Loewenstein Rehabilitation Center, Raanana, Israel AVRAHAM SCHWEIGER Loewenstein Rehabilitation Center, Raanana, Israel and The Academic College of Tel-Aviv, Israel An object in perception is not an actual object, it is an event in a brain in a perceptual state. The physical object corresponding with the perceptual object is the brain state that generates the perception, not the physical presentation of the object that is actually seen. In other words the true referent of the perception is not the physical object “out there,” but the more proximate brain state correlated with that perception. (Brown, 1990).

In line with Brown’s view, the generation of the object perception through the “brain state” is obviously dependent upon the “state of the brain” – its anatomy and physiology. Moreover, since internal states depend crucially on the particular history of the individual brain, the percept will reflect a momentary creation which embodies the history of the brain conjointly with its present state. More specifically, Brown (e.g., 2001) described a mental process, such as perceiving an object, as an unfolding process, always moving from diffuse content towards further specification, with its ultimate stage in the conscious experience of object concretization: the object is experienced as “out there” in the world, separated from the self. This process is normally constrained by interactions with the external environment, so the final product of perception has something to do with the “world out there.” Brown distinguishes in this unfolding process four phases (Brown 2001): 1. Pure wakefulness: a state of arousal without focus or intent, a global undifferentiated pre-object awareness without any sense of self, image and object. It is a state that presumably relates to functioning of the upper brain stem.

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2. Dream consciousness: the forming object undergoes selection through a system of personal memory and “dream work mentation” to constitute an image space. This space is a plastic and changing one that lacks depth. Dreams and hallucinations are the objects at this mental level. Prior sensory information at the upper brain stem constrains the development of the object, but the content of the image tends to represent the personal meaning of the object. The self in this state is passive, charged with affect and shares affect with objects around it (i.e. incomplete detachment of self and objects). This stage relates presumably to the functioning of the limbic system and temporal lobe. 3. Object awareness: the developing object is refined by distant memory of categories of things and events encountered before; not only meaning but the broader context of life experience enters the process. The sensations derived from the direct contact with the evolving object further sculpt the affective meaning into specific shape, size, texture, and so on. The image becomes more like an object, space becomes more like object space and an immediate action space is formed. As images resolve into objects, sense of self awareness also begins to form. This stage may relate to functioning of the frontal neocortex. 4. Analytic perception and the separation of self and the world: the transition here is from a proximate space of objects in the reach of the senses into a fully developed space of fully externalized and public objects, with detailed features and seemingly independent life of their own. At this stage the “mind” brings forth a sense of agency that is not embedded in the world: the independent self. This is our everyday conscious experience. When strategic regions of the brain are damaged, the resulting percepts/objects will reflect novel brain states. Brown regards symptoms of brain pathology as the exposed stages in the microgenetic progression from diffuse meaning to individuated entities as described above. For instance, a brain damaged patient may read the word “TABLE” but say aloud “CHAIR.” For Brown, this “symptom” does not represent an “error” or distortion, but rather the derailment of the process prior to its phonological completion, or its ultimate realization. That is, after constructing the seen word’s meaning, the brain damage prevents the full unfolding of the proc-

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ess into a “real” object. Thus, the symptom reflects the stage in this process of specification of meaning into the correctly differentiated item, just prior to its final completion. The result is a response which reveals the formation of meaning (a common household furniture) without its final differentiation (individuation) into the correct item (“table”). Many examples exist in the clinical literature describing this kind of derailment, typically outside the patient’s awareness. For instance, patients with the syndrome of dyslexia without agraphia (“Pure Alexia” or “Letterby-Letter” dyslexia) can demonstrate behaviorally appreciation for the meaning of words exposed briefly on a screen (say, by pointing to the right objects corresponding to the flashed words), all the while vehemently denying they have “read” these words (see also in Schweiger, Frost & Keren, in press). This syndrome therefore demonstrates that whereas meaning has been achieved, the failure of surface aspects to materialize prevents the patient from being conscious of having read actual words. In this chapter we present a case study of a patient with a right hemisphere lesion, which demonstrates the basic microgenetic notion that perceived objects do not result from the projections of external images of the “real object” onto the retina. Rather, they are the product of successive, momentary actualizations of brain states. The patient, who sustained a cerebrovascular accident to the right medial cerebral artery was asked to tell a story to three different pictures taken from the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT). First we briefly present the patient’s history and then discuss his responses to the three cards and their implications for a theory of perception and the nature of reality. Case Study Background

Our patient, JO, is a 53 year old, right handed married man, who worked as a senior accountant in a large firm. In September, 2004, he was admitted to a general hospital with a sudden onset of left sided hemiparesis. A computed tomography scan at that time showed a large infarct in the territory of the right middle cerebral artery (MCA), with a lesion extending from the right basal ganglia to the right temporal, frontal and parietal lobes. Two weeks later, JO was admitted to a rehabilitation hospital for rehabilitative treatment, and during that period he was tested there by the authors. JO’s performance profile on a battery of neuropsychological tests ranged from the low-average to the average range compared with the per-

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formance of age matched normative group (see table 1). Considering JO’s reported premorbid level of functioning, such performance probably reflects a relative decline in processing speed, executive functioning and in visual-spatial ability. An average ability was observed in the other cognitive domains tested. No signs of neglect were noted on formal testing on the Behavioral Inattention Battery (Wilson, Cockburn & Halligan, 1987), but JO was reported by the hospital staff to “attend less” to the left side of his world. Visual fields were reported as intact, and a gross examination of his visual fields demonstrated full visual fields. JO’s language was fluent and coherent, free of any aphasic symptoms.

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Table 1.

Cognitive assessment using the Mindstreams software (Neurotrax, N.Y.) software Cognitive Function

Index Score

Memory

110.1

Executive Function

87.7

Visual Spatial

89.7

Verbal Function

97.8

Attention

95.6

Information Processing Speed

88.9

Motor Skills

101.6

Index Scores are normalized to an IQ-style scale (mean=100, SD=15)

Whereas JO himself denied experiencing any emotional or cognitive difficulties, his family noticed that his behavior had become more “egocentric.” Overall, his behavior was characterized by flat affect and monotonous prosody; he was noted to be polite and very cooperative with the staff. However, against the strong recommendation of the staff to cease, JO had continued to carry on with his job from the hospital via telephone with unknown proficiency. When confronted with the staff’s opinion he reiterated that his cognitive abilities were not impaired by the stroke. Thus he may have been somewhat anosognosic of his demonstrated cognitive deficit. Method and results

Items 3GF, 18GF and 8BM of the TAT (Murray, 1943) were presented to JO in one session. The following are the card’s general descriptions and JO’s response to them: 3GF

Picture description: A young woman is standing with downcast head, her face covered with her right hand. Her left arm is stretched forward against a wooden door. JO’s responses: “It can be someone like me, after a stroke. He also doesn’t know what’s going on… I fell to the left side and he falls to the right side…” here the examiner interjected: “he???” to which JO replied: “yeah, he and not she because I don’t see any salient signs… well, you might also assume, maybe, that it is a woman and not a man, because of

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the skirt ...although this could also be a night gown for a man or something like that…” 18GF

Picture description: A woman has her hands squeezed around the throat of another woman whom she appears to be pushing backwards across the banister of a stairway. J’s responses: “This one fits my story. The patient’s wife woke up and tried to help him. That’s what happened in my case, anyway. You can see the sorrow in her face.” 8BM

Picture description: An adolescent boy looks straight out of the picture. The barrel of a rifle is visible at one side, and in the background is a dim scene of a surgical operation. J’s responses: “Here the story continues: First the man got sick, then the woman woke up and tried to help him, and now he arrives at the hospital. Here it looks like the two doctors are checking him up… This one (pointing to the figure of the boy) I believe, is his wife, although she doesn’t look like the one in the previous picture. She is waiting to hear the results. Now, if the pictures really continue one another- you can see that the patient (from the first picture) was really a man and not a woman…” Discussion

When JO sees the cards he perceives the pictures as reflections of himself and his own story of getting a stroke. The gender of the figures in the pictures does not always match that of the characters in his personal story. In such cases it seems as if JO “imposes” the characters of his personal story on what he “perceives” in the cards. Thus, for example, in cards 1 and 2 he sees male figures where there are obviously female ones to the normal observer. All his responses to the three cards reflect his preoccupation with his recent history and present physical condition. Are these simply “perceptual distortions” related to the right hemisphere lesion? That does not seem likely, since on testing of his visual/spatial skills (as measured by a test requiring mental rotations in judging perspectives) he performed in the low average, but considerably above chance. Likewise, any explanation adducing serious distortion due to deteriorating contact with reality, as in a psychotic breakdown, is also far fetched. There were no symptoms, observed or reported, of a psychotic process in JO’s behavior or thinking. As noted above, the microgenetic theory claims that perception of an

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object begins at a diffuse and global state and unfolds through progressive differentiation, until the object becomes a distinct configuration in consciousness: a concrete, fully individuated and externalized object. Clinical symptoms of brain pathology reflect, or expose, stages in this progression from diffuse meaning to individuated entities. Again, focal brain damage exposes preliminary phases that are ordinarily just stages and are transformed in the course of normal cognition (Brown, 2004). It seems that JO provides us with the opportunity of looking into such a preliminary stage of perception. What characterizes this early stage? What characterizes JO’s responses is that his figures do not have lives of their own, independent of the self. It is as if they must be kept as “selfobjects” even at the price of distorting their gender identity. These responses suggest that for JO the unfolding perceptual process is derailed, and that the final stage of the perceptual differentiation process, involving the separation of self from the world, is never reached. It is perhaps more concordant with what Brown describes as the early “Dream Consciousness” phase on the way to the “Object Awareness” phase. At this stage of the unfolding – in which objects are usually dreams - inner and outer spaces are poorly differentiated, and the content of the image tends to represent the personal meaning of the object (Schweiger et al., in press). As we could see, JO’s TAT objects are always actors in the scenes of his personal story. Along the lines above, a curious feature of the perceived figure in the first card is the fact that for a long time, certainly longer than the typical microgenetic timeframe (on the order of less than a second), its details are not fully differentiated. Although JO correctly identifies the figure as a human being, yet inside this semantic category there is a kind of “fluid morphing” between sub-categories. JO first perceives the figure as a man. Then he raises the possibility that it could be a woman, and finally he gets back to the male option. It is as if the perceptual resolution is limited to the level of the super-ordinate category of a “human” and not beyond that. This pattern corresponds, again, with Brown’s Dream Consciousness phase, in which the image space is a plastic and changing one (Brown, 2001), with undefined categories. JO is occupied with the dilemma of the gender of the first figure until the end of the test, in which he finally rationalizes that since the figure of the patient in the final picture is a male then the figure in the first picture must have also been a male. The dilemma is unsurprisingly resolved in fa-

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vor of the choice around which JO can construct his own personal story of sustaining a stroke (a male figure). In the second picture JO perceives another female figure as a male. Once again, he perceives the “wrong” exemplar within the semantic category of humans, but the one which enables him to continue his own story. In both cards there is what seems as a flexible interpretation of the figures and the picture as representations of the self and its objects. Looking into deep dyslexia, an acquired reading disorder alluded to above, might illustrate and even elucidate JO’s perceptual processes described above. Patients with deep dyslexia seem to have lost their ability to perform phonological analysis in reading (Schweiger, 1989). This can be demonstrated by the fact that a deep dyslexic cannot read aloud pronounceable non-words or match words that rhyme with each other. More interesting is the fact that deep dyslexics will make many semantic errors while reading aloud. While attempting to read the word “cat,” for example, the deep dyslexic may say “dog”; while trying to read the word “ambulance,” the word “emergency” may be pronounced. These two pairs of words cannot be said to resemble visually, nor do they share many common letters or sounds. Obviously, the deep dyslexic has grasped something about the meaning of the word s/he was trying to read, and so the reference to the errors as semantic errors. The supposedly initial level of perception (of letters and phonology) does not seem to help the deep dyslexic to “decipher” the words. He exhibits, instead, access to the meaning of the words only, so that very often he produces a semantically related word instead of the one he reads. As we saw, this word may be very different in terms of its letters and sounds from the original printed word. Schweiger (1999) argued that in the process of normal reading it is the meaning we evoke first and foremost, only later to arrive at the phonology and letter stage. As a consequence of brain damage, deep dyslexics’ ability to construct the final, surface feature of words is impaired. Therefore they can no longer have words that are specifically individuated. For the deep dyslexic who cannot complete the perceptual process to the point of phonological specification of words, “cat” and “dog” are equivalent. In our present case, JO can also be said to have reached the general “meaning” of the percept, to have identified its general category (a person), without accurately defining its distinct, individual identity (gender). This is similar to reading “cat” instead of “dog,” only that the final “choice,” or realization, is always made consonant with the internal narrative of the pa-

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tient. This is not surprising, considering that stages 2 and 3 of the unfolding process emerge from the depth of personal meaning unto the “outside” world. Thus JO’s case supports the idea of perceiving as a construction of discrete objects out of diffuse background meaning (Schweiger, 1999). As in the case of reading, it seems that in the unfolding of object perception there is a very brief process – of which only final product we can consciously know - along which a specific meaning is carved out of a diffuse one. JO’s object perception seems to expose an earlier phase in this usually encapsulated, non-accessed process; a phase in which perceptual objects lack the immediate, clear definition characteristic of our normal object perception. Brown suggested that the image at the “dream consciousness” phase tends to represent the meaning of the object rather than its form (Brown, 2001). He elaborates by referring to dream images, which are used as metaphors for the main objects of this stage: The content of those images, he suggests, is determined by conceptual, symbolic, or experiential relations between the object-to-be, only some physical parameters of which have influenced the object formation at this point, and the preparatory image of that object passing through the dream work (Brown, 2001). Such symbolic relations obviously dictate different rules of perception than the ones we are used to in our waking life. JO is not “generating” the TAT images in the sense of dreaming, but his object perception seems to obey similar rules. He symbolically generates the personal meaning out of the pictures, or their self-relevant ideas, while remaining “oblivious” to their figurative nuances. Under these dreamy conditions a female figure can easily turn into a male, with whom JO can identify as his own self. JO’s case raises questions about objectivity vs. subjectivity in the perceptual process. The veracity of perception is a question with a long history in philosophy, which occupied many students of perception, such as W. James, Piaget and J.J. Gibson. Contemporary mainstream neuroscience seems to take for granted the veracity of perception, since it helps solving certain methodological problems in designing and interpreting experimental results. The subjectivity the perceiver brings to the perceived is recognized and typically considered “noise” in the system. An example of this recognition can be seen in Kosslyn and Susman’s (1995) statement that there is no such thing as “immaculate perception.” But despite the acknowledgement of the perceiver’s contribution, most present day neuroscientists eschew the ultimate bold step taken by Brown (and some others) of regarding the perception and the very existence of an object as reflecting a

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brain state, not the registration of the object upon the nervous system. So it seems that the present case, in which an intelligent person with relatively reserved cognitive abilities perceives objects in such a fundamentally different way than our common and shared sense of reality, embodies the microgenetic unfolding of perception. Brown (1990), from his refreshing point of view, further challenges the objectivity of what we perceive to be the external world. He argues that in some manner the “projection” of an object into the world entails a contrast between Self and object that is so compelling, that we have great difficulty maintaining the thought that the objective world is not quite as it appears. We are drawn irresistibly to the idea of two separate domains of existence, a private world of mental states, imagery, inner speech and awareness, and an independent physical world that is scrutinized and “taken in,” as it were, in perception. But the world that is scrutinized in perception is simply the extra-personal extension of mind into a constructed world out there. Despite the strong sense that we perceive objects which are out there, we understand that we construct them. Objects are pieces of the mind of the perceiver (Brown, 1990). The present case seems to lend support to that very same idea: our patient’s mind/brain is damaged, and therefore the unfolding cannot reach the ultimate end point, the one which corresponds to our everyday conscious experience of a world populated with solid objects. It is “stuck” at a lower level, in which objects seem to be perceived in a much more personal, even egocentric manner. They appear to be saturated with personal, “projected” meanings, more fluid and in a space of categories with quite permeable boundaries. Considering the quality of JO’s way of perceiving post-stroke, it is not surprising that family members described his behavior as egocentric. His “object-thinking” reflects a self-centric view, in which external objects are thought mostly as functions of the self. The foregoing discussion has direct implications to what reality may be. Brown (2004) suggests that the concept of the real is itself a category of presumably real things. But real things, according to Brown, are hardly what they seem to be. This is not because they are misperceived, but because our observations of objects are inferred entities modeled on our experience with inner states, which are different than external events. The external world is not the real world, but the final segment of the mind/brain state that objectifies as “reality” (Brown, 2004). Another interesting feature of JO’s behavior was his anosognosic denial of any cognitive difficulties. When JO’s cognitive therapist called his

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attention to the fact that he was making errors on different tasks, due to impaired planning and monitoring abilities, JO insisted that he did the tasks as well as he would have done them before the stroke. He became irritated by his therapist’s attempts to convince him that things are probably not the way they used to be. It seems as if he lacks the ability of recalling/imagining himself having different, intact cognitive abilities; as if the only state that is available for conscious consideration is the current, impaired one. Brown (2004) refers to a category of brain damages, in which a neurological deficit (cortical blindness, language impairment, paralysis etc.) is accompanied by unawareness of the deficit. He maintains that knowledge about the deficit in such cases requires some recollection or “representation” of the previously normal capacity for comparison. This is not merely a recollection, a retrieval of material stored somewhere in the brain, that one could once see or walk, but a revival of visual or kinaesthetic imagery so that seeing and walking are re-experienced as memory. A person will not know he is blind or amnesic unless a “standard” of the intact state is present in cognition, in the affective domain or in a neighboring capacity, since all that can be known at a given moment are the (defective) experiences of that moment (Brown, 2004). A person with cortical blindness does not have a memory of what the visual world was like before he became blind, since the same (now damaged) cerebral networks engaged in reviving that world are involved in perceiving it. All that is available at present is what can be perceived or revived in the present state. There is no storehouse of actual experience in the affected domain of function that can be matched to ongoing events. There are no copies of perception that can be retrieved from memory, since the “retrieval” of memory “traces” is its full microgenetic traversal (Brown, 2004). Accordingly we can assume that JO could not be aware of his cognitive dysfunction because he could not revive the experience of himself with intact ability, and compare it to his current state. His conscious experience after the stroke no longer contains the option of representing the historical intact state. One final question raised by our case is as follows: Since JO exhibits a “derailed” specification of visual objects midway from meaning to a fully individuated object, why does he behave in a relatively “normal” fashion in other domains of cognition? Why, for instance, do we not see our patient producing semantic errors in reading aloud (as do deep dyslexics), or in naming objects on confrontation? Why does he not show the visual diffi-

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culties shown by patients with visual agnosia or with cortical blindness? It is difficult to imagine why symptoms in brain damaged patients are often seen in a limited domain of functioning, without resorting to an explanation based on highly specialized neuronal networks. Perhaps cerebral networks themselves behave along the lines of percepts as theorized by Brown: they function initially in a diffuse, more global and widespread system at subcortical levels, and progressively become more specialized (but never encapsulated) as they transverse in cortical areas, from “association” areas to highly specialized primary sensory and motor areas (the latter process was proposed years ago by Brown, 1990). Whatever the case may turn out to be, the microgenetic approach, as our present case demonstrates, can provide a coherent, alternative theory to account for symptoms in brain damaged patients, which may coalesce one day into a global account of perception and reality. References Brown, J.W. (1990). Preliminaries for a theory of mind. In E. Goldberg (ed.), Contemporary neuropsychology and the legacy of Luria. Hillsdale, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum. Brown, J.W. (2001). The self-embodying mind. New York: Station Hill Press. Brown, J.W. (2004). The illusory and the real. Mind and Matter, 2(1), 37-59. Kosslyn, S. & Sussman, A. (1995). Roles of imagery in perception: Or, there is no such thing as immaculate perception. In M. S. Gazzaniga (ed.), The cognitive neurosciences (1035-1042). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Murray, H. A. (1943). Thematic Apperception Test: Manual. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Schweiger, A. (1999). The process approach in perception: support from studies of brain damage patients. Salzburger Theologische Zeitschrift, 3, 207-213. Schweiger, A., Frost, M. & Keren, O. (In press) From coma to consciousness: recovery and the process of differentiation. In M. Weber & G. Anderson (Eds.), WPN II. Wilson, B.A., Cockburn, J. & Halligan, P.W. (1987). Behavioral Inattention Test. Bury St. Edmonds: Thames Valley Test Company.

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Chapter 15 Beyond neurology: Jason Brown, microgenesis and psychoanalysis MICHAEL TRUPP Weill Cornell Medical College, New York, NY, USA Introduction Freud’s metapsychology and Brown’s applications of microgenesis – which might be termed a metaneurology – form a sort of isomeric couple. Psychoanalysis attempts an epic macro-narrative of life via the study of emotional evolution and its conflicts and compromises. Microgenesis – as applied by Brown – conjectures the CNS micromodalities by which life is momentarily and sequentially realized. Put somewhat glibly, perhaps, psychoanalysis attempts to explicate the overall view of a life entire. Microgenesis presents (potentially) infinite “slices” (instantiations) of life process as they are organized and expressed by continuous and contiguous brain/mind function. Brown suggests that of all extant efforts at functional theory only microgenesis and psychoanalysis aspire to a “complete” neuropsychology. Freud and Brown, physicians inhabiting different countries, cultures and adjoining centuries, both trained in neurology. Freud essentially abandoned an established career in neurobiology as he elaborated a supraordinate sui generis psychodynamic theory and treatment. In contrast Brown, who was initially attracted to psychiatry - and psychoanalysis – evolved a unique vision of neurodynamic development and expression. Brown’s oeuvre has strong diagnostic and explanatory focus, but no therapeutic aspiration. He is generally critical of “reflexologies,” “modules” and neural networks, as well as alternative explanatory systems (including psychoanalysis and its “developmental” variations), which, instead of “organic” evolutionary branching and instantiation, in Brown’s view, postulate “competing mental agencies” and “abstract psychologic solids.” The two systems – in ways to be elaborated – stem from a common historic base; but, as noted, bifurcate into separate (but to a degree overlapping) hermeneutic domains. I shall attempt to frame this “split,” first metaphorically and then clinically.

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A word about “Trees”

Brown often employs “tree” and arborization symbolism to emphasize the evolving, branching and blue horizon perimeter of microgenetic formulation. “Where is the tree?” Brown asks. “In the root? The branch? The leaf?” This botanical allusion is not mere persiflage in Brown’s schemata, since, as we shall see, the relationship of part-to-whole and whole-to-part dynamics is central to both his neurologic and philosophic concerns.13 Pursuing this metonym in order to differentiate psychoanalytic from microgenetic modeling (and vice versa) we might note that there are two main categories of trees: conifers and flowering (deciduous.) Both of these giant contemporary plant forms share a common primordial ancestor (seed ferns). Both utilize chloroplasts, photosynthesis, and a root-trunk-branch architecture. Beyond these commonalities, however, substantial differences burgeon. Their gross and fine design, their reproductive tools and strategies, their demographics and susceptibility to invasive harm all markedly diverge. Thus both their fractal architectonic and metabolic dynamic sharply contrast. Red maples (deciduous) and white pines (conifers) are both “trees,” but they differ, even genetically, more than do tree shrews and elephants. Demographics

To push the phyletic analogy a bit farther, what is the bright line of demarcation between psychoanalysis and microgenesis? Psychoanalysis monitors the developmental and interactive vistas of the specifically endowed individual and his particular surround in order to explain the profound shaping forces of his/her experience. Instinct, the vicissitudes of early life, inevitable and circumstantial trauma, the nature of attachment, identity, groups and society, myth, fantasy and art are all – via the application of psychoanalytic method and clinical case narrative – illuminated in their manifold variety, continua (and discontinuities). Microgenesis in contrast is generic. It is neurologically explicit, detailed, dynamic and ambitiously explanatory; but its context is pro forma. Microgenesis does not encompass idiosyncratic life history, circumstantial conflict, psychological trauma, defensive strategies, gender effects, “character” and so forth (i.e. the very warp and woof of psychoanalytic theory). There are thus no elaborate microgenetic case narratives. At the same time microgenesis has much to say about experiential realms allotted only vague allusion by Freud and his followers: the nature of time, bodily space, direc13

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At other times Brown employs “fountain” analogies (see p. 15)

tionality, basic neurologic process, semantics and part-whole relations, to name but a few. Like the decidua and conifera, the intellectual territory and linguistic and semantic taxonomy of psychoanalysis and microgenesis differ. But their evolutionary history is shared. In an attempt to further clarify the resonance of psychoanalysis and Brown’s application of microgenesis, I shall (briefly) sketch the historic origin of both within the study of speech and aphasia. We shall see in this context the conflationary trajectory by which Hughlings Jackson “discovered” Darwin and Spencer and Freud “discovered” Jackson. Brown then deconstructed and reconfigured elements of both Jackson and Freud/Jackson as well as those of Paul McLean,14 Heinz Werner,15 and many others within the bioevolutionary thinking of his (i.e. Brown’s) 20th (and 21st) century eras. This review will be followed by a (skeletal) précis of microgenesis. A clinical psychoanalytic vignette will then be presented, followed by some microgenetic observations on the issues raised. Fons et origo: Aphasia

Microgenesis places a high value on the hermeneutics of “time” and “place.” While a current neurologic function reflects (and transmits) the genetic accretion of millennia, so, too, do the iterations of less distant history form a continuing and transforming sequence in the history of thought. Thus both Freud and Brown were attracted, early in their respective careers, to the study of aphasia. For both Freud and Brown speech pathology proved a rich arena for clinical scrutiny and theory building. Freud’s first book was On Aphasia (1891). Brown’s first book was Aphasia, Apraxia and Agnosia (1972).16 Both books consist of their author’s detailed, precise, ambitious and sustained scrutiny of speech apparatus aberration.. This exploration and review in each case engages the work of outstanding contributors to the field. (Since Brown and Freud worked in essentially different centuries, the neurologists cited often – but not always – represent different generations of a continuing discipline.) A word about the clinical appeal of aphasia is in order. 14

Paul D. MacLean (1913-2007), American physician and neuroscientist, proposed the retention of primitive evolutionary morphologies and function in the human brain. 15 Heinz Werner (1890-1964), Austrian developmental psychologist. According to his orthogenic principle, development “proceeds from a state of relative lack of differentiation to a state of increasing differentiation and hierarchic integration on all levels of the person.” This is the first articulation of microgenetic schemata. 16 It should be noted that agnosia – the inability to name familiar objects – was a term first coined by Freud.

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Speech

For all its seemingly spontaneous and familiar ubiquity, speech and speech production are enormously, even infinitely, complex. Speech is at once mysterious in many ways and immediately accessible to clinical examination. It is the vehicle of meaning, rich not only in linear information, but also (unlike most e-mail, for example) cadence, complex grammatical structure, phrasing, tone, undertone and so forth.17 Anatomically, mechanically and cybernetically speech is both dense and “deep.” To sample some of this complexity – and subjectively “touch” unconscious process – note the following: before speaking aloud you inhale just enough breath to deliver the (phonologic) message stream required – and at the volume required. This “perfect” anticipatory titration is without conscious contemplation or awareness; yet it clearly reflects a complex series of cybernetic operations preliminary to speech. As an exquisitely intricate “apparatus” headquartered, as it were, in the brain, speech is vulnerable to a countless variety of injuries and deformities, all clinically accessible and theoretically, i.e. “neuroanatomically” explicable. From Neurology to Psychology

In On Aphasia Freud critiqued his (then) more famous contemporaries in the field of aphasia (Broca, Wernicke, Bernheim, Meynert and others) regarding their insistence on hypothetical tracts and word-containing “cells” shuttling information to and from receptive and expressive “speech centers.” In his book On Aphasia with its accompanying diagram (see Fig. 1), Freud suggests that the speech “center” (and writing “center” and reading “center”) were really nodal points at which related (bihemispheric) potentialities intersected. He explained these conclusions in ambitious clinical detail derived from cases cited in the literature, cases with known brain lesions, and via the application of stringent analytic logic.

17

It is noteworthy that in psychoanalytic treatment (“the talking cure”) the analyst sits out of sight, behind the reclining patient, empathically and acutely attuned to the patient’s voicestream – its flow, silences, fluctuations – and to its overt and subtle aberrations (“slips,” omissions, peculiarities of phrasing and so forth).

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Fig. 1.

Freud’s representation of the neural mechanisms responsible for speech, reading, and writing

It was within this diagnostic context that Freud broached corollary concerns regarding symbolism, a subject largely ignored by neurologists of his time (and none too plentiful in the neuroscientific speculations of our time). Symbolism, of course, proved central to all of Freud’s later writings, for example, his early studies of hysteria, giving rise to his first theory of psychogenic symptom formation, and later, to his interpretation of dreams.18 Clearly, when viewed through Freud’s sharp prism, speaking, reading, writing and symbol formation must all be accounted for in any comprehensive explanation of pragmatic lexical pathology. It seemed to Freud highly unlikely that compromise of this or that autonomous “center” – in contrast to nexal points in a vastly complex and dynamic network – could explain the many exceptions to “delivered truth” which Freud critiqued in exquisite detail. Indeed, in retrospect, the very issue of aphasia seems poorly conceived until Freud’s conceptual reformulation. (A similar, manifold and resonant model, not notably influenced by Freud, construes Brown’s first text on the aphasias.) The diffuse and dynamic mental matrix outlined in On Aphasia plus Freud’s speculations on libido as “mental energy” likely staked out the individual psychoanalytic “field” to be explored via free association. This

18

An example of “clinical” symbolism, its interpretation and meaning, will be presented in the case of Ms. C., see below.

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same “background,” in a theoretically different “bottom up” process and refinement, shapes the trajectory of microgenetic theory. Jackson

In his analysis of aphasia Freud did not articulate only objections to the positions of his neurologist contemporaries. In the work of John Hughlings Jackson (1835-1911) he discovered both a pre-existing context for his views on aphasia, and one which provided – in statu nascendi – a model for Freud’s emergent analysis of psyche via attributions of structural symbolism: the unconscious, ego, id, superego. Jackson was a major contributor to 19th and early 20th century neurology. His many interests included the neuropathology of seizures and the use of the ophthalmoscope in neurologic examination. The ophthalmoscope was invented by Herman Helmholtz (1821-1894), one of the pioneer founders of experimental neuroscience, whose students (Meynert, Bruche and Fechner) were Freud’s mentors during Freud’s laboratory years.19 Jackson was powerfully influenced by the evolutionary theorist Herbert Spencer (1820-1903), who applied Darwinian “survival” principles to the nature of society and to the sexes. Jackson transferred this Spencerian view to the CNS. He compared the “higher” – and later evolved – cortical functions to first and second tier ministries of government. Via their executive authority and administrative sophistication these executive groups maintain control and order over their more numerous, impetuous and primitive fellows comprising the lower tiers of society. Removal of leaders, or other disorganization in the upper echelons, favors rebellion and chaos among the less controlled “masses.” In the nervous system cortical injury permits the expression of dysregulated activity (such as seizures) which would otherwise be held in check via top down control (Jackson’s theory of evolution and dissolution).20 This model segued into Freud’s psychological model of an ego (cortically derived in Freud’s metapsychology) and superego (based on the young child’s identification with powerful parents) holding sway over instinctual (id) forces inexorably pressing for expression/gratification.

19

To further entangle this historia, Jackson had originally considered philosophy as his primary field of study. Brown’s expository corpus having begun with specifically neurologic concerns, has become increasingly “philosophic” over time. More recently Whitehead’s process philosophy has attracted his attention. See Brown (1996, 2000). 20 This feature of Jacksonian modelling, with certain variations, could also serve as a template for microgenesis (see Tucker’s comments on encephalization in the present volume).

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There were many additional details of Jackson’s thought which likely influenced Freud: Jacksonian epilepsy or march epilepsy “progresses” in a particular sequence following cortical mapping. Such conceptual progression factors strongly in psychoanalytic theory; for example, in psychic causality, symptom development and, at a different level, the surface to depth – and depth to surface - vectorial aspects of free association. The “last words” retained by stroke victims prior to aphasia onset likely influenced Freud’s ideas on cathexis intensity. Also the (not uncommon) ability of stroke victims to retain full language comprehension – while being unable to speak – likely reinforced Freud’s view of unconscious mentation; as did Jackson’s theory of parallel mental systems. The latter likely shaped Freud’s idea of an indirectly accessible (active and fluid) “primary process” unconscious, beneath a more directly accessible and “rationally” organized consciousness.21 “Brownian Motion”

Freud’s dynamic consists of developmental agencies of differing origin and vintage, constraining, enhancing and/or transforming the expression of sexual and aggressive instinct. Brown’s microgenetic dynamic allots no exceptional organizing primacy to sexual and aggressive expression. Its emphasis is on neural evolutionary structures and functions designed to operate adaptively – and be realized in – the phenomenal present. It is a system which simultaneously conflates and expresses phyletic, ontogenetic and morphogenetic currents. Each and every “neurologic moment” expresses, microgenetically, the potentiality of the entire CNS, the entirety of the past – personal/experiential and inherited – all within a (present) cognitive matrix of part/whole and whole/part elaboration. This “present” is immediately transient, forming thereby the termination of one (microgenetic) era and the foundational baseline of the next.22

21

Four years after the publication of On Aphasia Freud completed the manuscript of his Project for a Scientific Psychology, an unsuccessful attempt to further explicate and embody the dynamics and vicissitudes of mental energy. Thereafter Freud did not write anything substantive which took as its core purely neurologic concerns. In most of his later writing, however, he speculates again and again about the likely biologic substrates of his metapsychology (i.e., a psychology lacking a clearly defined connection to its – then, and even now, largely unknown- biologic substrate(s).) Freud hoped that future discoveries and technologic advance, perhaps from adjoining fields, would confirm the legitimacy of his clinically derived hypotheses. (Many contemporary neuropsychoanalysts believe that era of confirmation has arrived. Indeed, this paper and several others in this volume may exemplify this Zeitgeist. 22 At a philosophic level, Brown’s holistic constructs bear a certain resemblance to Jasper’s existentialist Dasein concept and Heidigger’s “thing-in-itself” realm of authenticity. Both of these philosophers, however, finesse – to a remarkable degree – the issues of both “consciousness” and “unconsciousness.” Brown does not. (See Mind, Brown and Consciousness 19___)

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There is a striking resonance between Freud’s comments on the dream’s “navel” – which connects with the dreamer’s entire life experience – and Brown’s formulation of a diffuse experiential matrix sculpted in emergent and evolving transit to a final ideational specification. Relatedly, a well-known pioneer analyst (Otto Isakower) discouraged his patients from writing down their dreams, preferring them to be voiced for the first time “alive” in psychoanalytic (i.e., free associative) discourse. He referred to written dreams as “used tea bags.” In Brown’s schema the final forms or articulation of thought are phenomenologically “dead on arrival,” but, as noted, serve as core ingredient for the next “process segment.” When applied to waking life it is this same unconscious and preconscious experiential universe of the individual from which the “final” thought, idea, desire etc., emerges.23 In elaborating this symptotic trajectory Brown switches from an “arborization” to a “fountain” analogy. Unknowingly, perhaps, he thereby exchanges a (mathematical) fractal model (tree) for a “chaotic” (fountain) mathematics. Mathematically, a fountain – no matter how “steady” its pulse – is a chaotic system, the spray returning to its origins in unpredictable variety. A tree, in contrast, is essentially a fractal system, repeating genetically stabilized patterns. Interestingly, both tree growth and fountain dynamics display a densely complex “bottom up” alignment (see Fig. 2), a key element in Brown’s application of microgenesis to CNS functions.

Fig. 2

23

Two matrix representations of computerized repetition (254 iterations) of cellular automata expressing respectively “regular” (linear) and random (non-linear) rules. Figure 2A evolves into a nested fractal symmetry. Figure 2B is chaotic and asymmetric albeit with segments of regularity here and

If accurate, a significant segment of this “sculpting,” honing and fine tuning of neurologic and/or mental content may prove attributable to the functions of basal ganglia. These centrally positioned and massive neural nuclei perform a proven – and exquisite – refining function in the motor realm. Their influence on thought remains somewhat obscure – but intensely suggestive.

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there. Both pyramids evolve sequentially “bottom-up.” [After Wolfram, 2002b in Piers, Muller, Brent (2007) SelfOrganizing Complexity in Psychological Systems, p. 94 and 95.] Utilizing speech as an example, and depending upon the specific neurologic defect, deflection or interruption, Brown notes that an aphasia may result in a dysnomia with category preservation (chair for table, for example), semantic dysfunction with category dissolution (engine for chair), or “total” speech aphasia (mutism or echolalia). A victim of progressive dementia may early on recognize “a chicken.” Later he may term the same picture “a bird;” still later, “an animal.” Note the holistic continuity in each case, regardless of the symptom specifics. That is, in all of these (abnormal) examples a potentially normal, and appropriate process of speech – and thought - has been (neurologically) modified to deliver a symptomatic (final) specification. Analysis of the clinical aberration in each case thus reveals normal (whole) components displaced from their legitimate (adaptive) trajectory to present instead in reduced, displaced, anachronistic or chimeric form (the latter in the case of word salad or neologisms). As in speech, so too – suggests Brown – in all mental process: perception, affect development, the vicissitudes of memory, “self” – and “nonself” differentiation, and so forth. Brown’s model, evolving via 5 books and nearly 200 clinical papers,24 has the following hallmark characteristics: 1) A “bottom up” organization

Synchronized neuronal events traverse an axis from neuroanatomically primitive zones to more recently evolved neuronal sectors. This evolving flow is marked by automatism generated at the brainstem level, disembodied dream – like affects at the limbic, and object conception, consciousness and action choice at the cortical and neocortical levels. 2) Iterations and nesting

At the neurophysiologic – and neuropsychologic – interstices of the process (and processes) outlined, there is a microgenetic resonance between past and present via the emerging brain/mind “event” and its expiring predecessor. Thus there can be no realization of a “present” devoid of a remembered past, no “now” without a “then.” These interactions condense 24

It should also be noted that Brown, in addition to being Professor of Neurology at NYU, and the founder and director of a private clinic, is a designated scholar at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute, where for several years he directed the neuropsychoanalytic seminars (now the Arnold Pfeffer Center for Neuropsychoanalysis.)

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and configure the experiential world. They also make learning (and adaptation) possible. 3) Wholes and parts

Brown suggests that microgenesis voids the meretricious models of neural networks, connectionist and module theories, wherein myriad parts are conjectured to somehow assemble or concatenate into wholes. Apart from there existing scant organic evidence for such popular models, microgenesis presents a “whole” potentiality from the beginning, sculpted in transit and refined selectively to final multipart – or part – form. (This refinement resembles, or parallels conceptually, the early life morphogenetic pruning of a too copious neural mesh.) Unlike the “worlds in collision” format of Freudian dynamics (expressed via drive repression and related defenses, acting-out, conversion, etc.), the core “action” for Brown resides in evolutionary and adaptive pressures and, in symptoms, their derailment. In Brown’s view primitive experiential wholes are constantly and continually derived, sculpted and refined to final form. 4) “The world” and its contents

All subjectivity and perception is mental, even the reality of “time” and the awareness of an “external” world. Time perception is generated – as noted above – within microgenetic process. The valid operational space of the individual extends – mentally – to his/her outer extremities. If one uses a stick as a tool, for example, the stick is an extension of the sensory self; as is a megaphone, reflex hammer, telescope, microscope or MRI, etc. Brown’s schema thus provides not only for “arborization,” but also for segmentation and an emergent harmonic: like a whole bracelet consisting of links of varied design, all of the same metallic composition; the totality in the service of an emergent (Platonic?) symmetry and adaptive ideal. Such ambiquity of analogic form (trees, fountains, segmentation) likely reflects the symbolic limitations of language. Freud, too, used a variety of models (structural, libidinal, dual instinct) in attempting to specify his thought. It is likely that in the pursuit of a “true” baseline reality, numbers – and number functions, such as Fourier transforms, graphs, equations, tensors, algorithms and so forth – must ultimately appear. In such conceptual “redirection,” however, what is gained in perceptual(?) clarity often proves costly to the experience of “organic” complexity, dynamism and texture. This sensual contrast and competition likely reflects an essential aspect of “mind,” perhaps intrinsic to evolved right and left hemispheric specializa-

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tion. The reader may experience something of this in the next paragraph, where the text abruptly shifts from relatively abstract concerns with neurologic models, their precursors and variations, to a “living” case. A psychoanalytic case; wherein a sensory “neurologic defect” is at once “known” and “hidden” Ms. C, a well-educated, childless woman, never married, had undergone psychoanalysis - off and on - over many years, sequentially, with 3 different male analysts.25 She had first sought treatment at age 34 because of a depressing and visceral conviction that her life “was going nowhere.” Attractive, intelligent, articulate and professionally credentialed, Ms. C would achieve advanced station in her highly competitive, male-dominated career field, only to “lose” her position during periods of market instability, and related organizational turbulence, over which neither she nor her colleagues had significant control. In response to these reversals she would seek to appropriately modify her career goals and resumé and pursue a “new” work trajectory. This attempt would have a promising beginning and good course for a few years, only to “sputter” when peripheral events again became volatile. In her sexual life, too, Ms. C did not succeed in establishing substantive and protracted relationships. Her romantic involvements with men were rare, shallow and brief. At the same time she had many friends of both sexes, enjoyed literature, theatre, music and travel. She seemed to experience no same sex attraction, and there was no history of homosexual experience. In spite of her many disappointments in love and work, Ms. C endured her “setbacks” with relative aplomb. The negative pattern(s) described seemed to her to be her “fate”, eliciting a now familiar need for “mature” resignation, accommodation and adjustment. Her analysts had all linked her (depressive) “fate” neurosis to her being her parents’ second child, and only female, of three siblings. Her birth order suggested an attempt to replace an adored first-born brother who had died in early childhood. Her clinically depressed mother had never recovered from this loss, and Ms. C felt that she could never compete in her mother’s eyes with her “lost angel” brother, particularly as a female. She never experienced her mother as cheerful in her presence, nor appropriately pleased by Ms. C’s many accomplishments, both in childhood and later. 25

All analysts were graduates of “orthodox” training institutes affiliated with the American Psychoanalytic Association. Treatment was conducted 3-5 times weekly with the patient on the couch.

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Another important aspect of the mother’s mood difficulties involved the mother’s mother (the patient’s maternal grandmother) having been deaf throughout the mother’s life.26 Ms. C’s compensatory attempts to be close to her father were frustrated by both his emotionally distant personality, his attempts to recruit Ms. C’s “understanding” in placating her chronically discontented mother, and by his sudden death due to cardiac disease when Ms. C was 17. In analysis, too, Ms. C’s attitude paralleled her “forbearance” elsewhere. She did not seem to expect much. She came to sessions, followed the analytic rules (of free association), paid her bill. Perhaps the sustained, exquisite, exclusive and focused attention(s) of the male analyst(s) compensated for the (historically and internally) missing investment of the parents.27 Significant progress in this sector – i.e., her anhedonic resignation – occurred after many years of analysis when associations to a dream (and to the word/idea GRAND-mother) led to exploration of the patient’s highly positive relationship to the deaf grandmother. This grandparent, who read lips, had acquired speech before contracting meningitis in her teens. She was very fond of Ms. C. Although the grandmother lived alone and at some distance, she visited her daughter 2-3 times yearly and was very loving toward her grandchild, Ms. C. Between visits she sent gifts and lengthy, illustrated letters to which Ms. C looked forward – and kept. (Ms. C recalled with surprise that she still had these letters “somewhere,” preserved in a book which the grandmother had given her. She had not thought about them for years.) Ms. C recalled how as a child – and later – she had felt how brave, uncomplaining, courageous and independent, how generally admirable the grandmother was in spite of her (hearing) “defect.” It was now possible to help the patient see how identified she was with the grandmother, the only adult who had supplied Ms. C unconditional approval and affection “as she was.” Like the grandmother, Ms. C lived alone. She, too, was uncomplaining, independent and so forth. Ms. C was also able to connect her (imagined) “defect” – the trials of being female – with the grandmother’s “missing” hearing. (This “defect” symbolism could now be explored – and analyzed – at a number of levels.) Re-examining the patient’s discumbobulation during times of professional crisis it was now possible to see her fail26

It has been noted that the children of hearing impaired parents often demonstrate special problems in the realm of empathy and vulnerability to depression. See Renik (1980) 27 Freud discusses such patterns in Analysis Terminable and Interminable See Freud (1937).

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ure to “connect the anticipatory dots” as a kind of deafness. She seemed to have no “ear” for rumors, early warnings, political rumblings and group dissonance that forecast impending organizational shakeups. In her personal life, too, she was often caught unaware and “flat-footed” by a lover’s sudden departure from the relationship. Space does not permit (nor require, really) further analytic elaboration or commentary on Ms. C’s identification(s) and their multitudinous – and often maladaptive – “arborizations.” We shall, instead investigate a possible clinical/theoretical resonance between Ms. C’s psychoanalytically delineated symptoms and microgenesis. Can microgenetic and psychoanalytic theory really converge?

Microgenesis cannot in its present form explain or encompass the psychodynamic universe which psychoanalytic treatment attempts to engage, explicate and (therapeutically) modify. At the same time (returning to botany) one senses a “root” clinical compatibility in the two systems. Both are, in related senses, “evolutionary” and “bottom up.” Both negotiate living “process.” As previously noted, the fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis – attachment, transference, identification, conflict, defense, compromise formation and so forth – could in principle be viewed as complex macrovariants of dense microgenetic process. In this sharing of clinical and dynamic phenomena, both psychoanalysis and microgenesis are fundamentally different from a large number of essentially mechanistic theories of brain/mind modus, none of which venture deeply into the realm of either meaning or clinical symptom theory. This diverse group would include connectionist and neural network models, neural Darwinism, holographic, tensor and metatensor applications, microtubule/quanta, and chaos/fractal theorizations; Bose Einstein condensates, cellular automata, neuronal mirroring models and others – many others. Relatedly, contemporary brain imaging projects form the nuclei of many theoretical speculations, most of them (to date) suggesting – or at least couched in – “Freudian” mind/brain architectures.28

28

The physical problems of interpreting – i.e., what to make of - PET, FMRI, magnetoencepholograms and so forth at a theoretical level is extremely challenging at a fundamental physical level. For example, is a PET scan “hot spot” actively expressing or repressing neural potential. Similar ambiguities plague neurogenetic studies. See Uttal (2001) It should be noted that there is a general overestimation of the degree of explanatory clarity achieved thus far in contemporary neuroscience, even when utilizing the most advanced technologic instruments. For example, the fundamental electrochemical model of neural transmission, first explicated in 1952 and universally accepted for nearly sixty years has recently been vigorously re-evaluated (see “A Sound Theory,” Science Illustrated, May/June 2008; pp 56-58.)

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Most practicing psychoanalysts would likely argue that in contrast to all existing non-psychodynamic instrumentalities and models, only the (self-informed) living human brain, with its multi-trillion connections and gradients, its infinitely variable hormonal and neurotransmitter spectra, and its equally infinite mathematical permutations and combinatories is at once sufficiently complex (and – via millions of years of mammalian evolution – sufficiently empathic) to supraordinately sense, observe, record, integrate and speculatively construct an intellectually legitimate model – and theory – of itself, its functions and vicissitudes. Ms. C redux and the psychoanalytic moment of truth

There may be a particular (hopefully, common) psychoanalytic “moment” or event wherein a convergence of psychodynamics and something akin to microgenetic phenomenology become visible. This involves therapeutic interpretation within the analytically revivified flux of transference. In Ms. C’s treatment the following event - and exchange(s) – occurred: The analyst expressed some vagueness regarding when Ms. C would be taking vacation. When he casually requested that she confirm specific dates, she fell silent – a protracted (sullen) silence. After some (silent) time the following exchange took place: Analyst: Why did that question make you angry? Ms. C: You don’t listen. I had told you the dates. Analyst: So I’m like your mother. I sort of ignored you.29 Ms. C: (after long silence) I’m really sorry. It’s no big deal really. (Tells the dates.) I shouldn’t be so short-tempered. Analyst: You should be more tolerant, reasonable and sensitive, like your grandmother? Ms. C: Yes . I hate it when I act like mother (i.e., sullen, discontented).

Most analysts believe it is these emergent transference interpretations which bring home the immediate reality of both the patient’s life experience and the “living” psychoanalytic enterprise entire. By illuminating the continuum of past and present they facilitate, via their stark immediacy, simultaneous expansion and reconfiguration of the patient’s awareness. They mobilize and organize (diffusely) dormant structural potential, a potential only ambient before such transferential “flashbulb” insight(s). Speaking microgenetically, the mobilization of such a defensively “frozen” trajectory –which might otherwise have lasted “forever” – may 29

best.

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It seems both poignant and ironic that, from the patient’s point of view, the deaf grandmother “listened”

initiate the beginning of a new cognitive era. The analyst would speak of “insight” and an expansion of consciousness, the mutative transferential realization. Note, however, the whole-to-part-to-whole oscillations in this discourse (the grandmother’s real deafness, the mother’s empathic “deafness,” the patient’s defensive, symptomatic “deafness,” the “defective” females, the patient’s life.) This psychodynamic, symbolic – and microgenetically realized? - process conflates and transports vast time sequences and infinite semiotics into the immediate “now.”30 In truth, to sample a decade of psychoanalysis via a few paragraphs – or pages – is akin to studying the Pacific by collecting a drop of seawater at Malibu.31 Brown might suggest, however, that even such a sample, properly perceived, tells us much – albeit far from everything – about the vast and mighty oceans. Bibliography Brown, J.W. (1972). Aphasia, apraxia and agnosia. Springfield, Illinois: Thomas. Brown, J.W. (1977). Mind, brain and consciousness. New York: Academic Press. Brown, J.W. (1988). Life of the mind: Hillsdale, New Jersey: Erlbaum. Brown, J.W. (1996). Time, will and mental process: New York: Plenum. Brown, J.W. (2000). Mind and nature: essays on time and subjectivity: London: Whurr. Freud, S. (1891). Zur Auffassung der Aphasien. Eine kritische Studie. Leipzig: F. Deuticke. English translation: On aphasia: a critical study, trans. E. Stengel. New York: International Universities Press, 1953. Freud, S. (1895/1985). Project for a scientific psychology. In J. M. Masson (ed. & trans.), The complete letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, 1887-1904. Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA & London: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

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Is this “deafness” resonance in the patient’s now mature psyche a (living) fractal? Does such an architectonic underlay Freud’s “overdetermination” and “repetition compulsion?” Brown’s nested process iterations? The holonomic and tensor consolidations of Pribram and Llinas? Is this repeated mental/behavioral pattern (the explicatory blood and bone of every symptom analysis) the mathematical and phenomenologic rule in the CNS? Does such complex commonality prevail, that is, in both normal and abnormal circumstance (drive and control; order and regression, etc.)? One author (Palombo 1999) suggests that the “edge of chaos,” with its admixture of order and randomness, its infinite and fluid combinatorials is the (key) adaptive interface of the organism with its “world”: the human organism no less than the amoeba. Do combinations of “stable” linear symmetry and “chaotic” indeterminacy form the alpha and omega of human (adaptive) capacity? 31 Any senior – or not so senior – psychoanalyst could easily elaborate ex tempore for several hours on the brief clinical material presented. This is true even though the clinical précis omits infinite vistas of data: Ms. C’s oedipal and sexual fantasies, for example.

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Freud, S. (1900). Die Traumdeutung. Leipzig: F. Deuticke. .English translation: The interpretation of dreams, trans. A. Brill. London: Allen & Unwin, New York: Macmillan, 1932. Freud, S. (1937). Analysis terminable and interminable. International. Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 18, 373-405. Freud, S. (1953-1966). The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud, trans. J. Strachey. London : Hogarth Press. Hameroff, S.R. (1987). Ultimate computing: biomolecular consciousness and nanotechnology. Amsterdam: North Holland Press. Jackson, H. (1932). Selected writings of Hughlings Jackson, vol. 2. London: Hodder & Stoughton. Maclean, P. (1972). Cerebral evolution and emotional processes: new findings on the striatal complex. Annals of the New York Academy of Science, 193, 137-149. Palombo, S.R. (1999). The emergent ego: complexity and coevolution in the psychoanalytic process. Madison, Connecticut: International Universities Press, Inc. Pellionisz, A. & Llinas R. (1985). Tensor network theory of the meta organization of functional geometrics in the CNS. Neuroscience, 16, 245-73. Piers, C., Muller, J. & Brent, J. (2007). Self-organizing complexity in psychological systems. Chapter 4 (92-96). New York: Jason Aronson. Pribram, K. (1977). Languages of the brain. Monterey, California: Brooks/Cole Publishing. Pribram, K. (1991). Brain and perception. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Reece, W. L. (1980). Dictionary of philosophy and religion, Eastern and Western thought (216-217; 266-267). New Jersey: Humanities Press Renik, O. (1980). Psychodynamic conflicts in hearing children of deaf parents. International Journal of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy, 7, 305-315. Trupp, M. (2000). On Freud. Belmont, California, USA: Wadsworth Thomson Learning. Tucker, D. (2008). Self-organizing ontogenesis on the phyletic frame. In: M. Pachalska & M. Weber (ed.), Neuropsychology and philosophy of mind in process: essays in honor of Jason W. Brown, Process Thought VI. Frankfurt/Lancaster: Ontos Verlag. Uttal, William R (2001). The new phrenology: the limits of localizing cognitive processes in the brain. Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA: MIT Press. Werner, H. (1940). Comparative psychology of mental development. New York: Harper & Row.

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Chapter 16 Self-organizing ontogenesis on the phyletic frame DON M. TUCKER Electrical Geodesics, Inc., University of Oregon Introduction Jason Brown’s microgenetic neuropsychology wove together a number of key insights, including those from developmental psychology, psychoanalytic psychiatry, and both modern and classical evolutionary neuroscience (Brown, 1977; 1988; 1994). In this approach, the microgenetic process requires recruitment of multiple levels of brain structure in the organization of each thought and experience. Remarkably, thinking and feeling thereby engage a microgenetic process that is phyletic in structure, sequentially recruiting the major functional residuals of vertebrate neural evolution. These include not only telencephalic and diencephalic circuits of memory consolidation but essential mechanisms of mesencephalic and rhombencephalic control of arousal and visceral response in each cognitive process. The original notion of microgenesis was based in developmental psychology. Heinz Werner (Werner, 1957) drew on classical Nineteenth Century reasoning to suggest that psychological development, including that of each mental process, can be analyzed most clearly using the principles of biological ontogenesis. These principles are manifested by embryology, and they recapitulate the broad outlines of species phylogeny. Each psychological process then develops from a primitive and syncretic “posturalaffective” base to become differentiated into discrete perceptions and action. The Orthogenetic Principle states that “Wherever development occurs, it proceeds from relative globality and lack of differentiation toward increasing differentiation, articulation, and hierarchic integration” (Werner, 1957). Jason Brown’s microgenetic neuropsychology brought this model of the mind’s actions to an explicit neuroanatomical architecture, in which ontogenesis has itself been guided by the embedded, hierarchic structure of the multiple stages of vertebrate neural evolution. The result is a new opportunity for theoretical insights into the dynamic interplay of psychological operations within the full neuroanatomical framework of the human

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brain. There may also be an opportunity here for philosophical insights into what it means to have evolved. A key principle comes from the modern realization that, in mammals, embryonic mechanisms for self-organizing neural plasticity – and the brain’s anatomy – extend into postnatal life (von de Malsburg & Singer, 1988). Psychological development, then, turns out to be morphogenesis – the formation of the individual from single cell to maturity – carried on by other means. After many hundreds of millions of years serving as the passive recorder of more or less accidental adaptation to the exigencies of the current environment, the genome has woken up, as it were, and extended its still unfolding morphogenetic process into life after the womb. The effect is to incorporate the environment’s essential information within the genome’s unique morphogenetic product, the self-organization of the brain. This is the process we know as learning. In this paper, I will attempt to build on Jason Brown’s neuropsychology of microgenesis both to explore the evolved roots of recently discovered memory systems, and to consider certain philosophical implications. These implications may become apparent as we recognize that human experience and behavior require a continual developmental mechanism, a recurring microgenesis of psychological process, in order to recruit the multiple phyletic levels of the neuraxis within the continuing, self-actualizing morphogenesis. Nested recapitulation

Studies of neural plasticity in the young brain have shown that the mechanisms of neuroembryogenesis have become the basis for juvenile cognitive and emotional development in mammals (Greenough & Black, 1992). There is exuberant overproduction of synapses in early development, and then functional sculpting by Hebbian use it or lose it mechanisms. In humans, functional sculpting appears to become accelerated in adolescence and to continue into adulthood. Neoteny in mammals, exaggerated to the extreme in humans, has been integral to this extension of embryonic plasticity in ontogenesis, thereby sculpting flexible brains that adapt to changing environmental demands (Tucker, 2007). The realization of the critical role of ontogenetic mechanisms in psychological development leads to a model of nested recapitulation in the formation of each individual mind, and each microgenetic instance of mind. Understanding how experience is embedded within the nested physiological frames is important not only to an accurate neuropsychology:

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it may yield philosophical insight into the evolved, organic nature of personal experience. The primary embeddedness is one of ontogenetic recapitulation of phylogeny. The individual brain begins the embryonic journey through tracing the major outlines of rhombencephalic, mesencephalic, diencephalic, and finally telencephalic neural structures. The exceptions to recapitulation – such as the pyramidal motor system and the early maturation of neocortical networks – serve to emphasize the flexible and opportunistic nature of evolutionary selection of mutational wanderings of the genome. But the constraints of the vertebrate plan have been strong, and the mechanisms of embryogenesis trace the phyletic journey clearly and sequentially. Here is a fundamental insight into what it means to be alive and grow. In a scientific sense, and perhaps philosophical one, personal experience is embedded within evolutionary mechanisms that remain operative in the microgenetic process. Functional anatomy

The genome of each person organizes morphogenesis in a generally linear sequence, beginning with the evolutionary primitives, and elaborating these into more highly evolved structures of recent evolutionary mutations. The embryonic process thus recapitulates the broad outlines of phylogenies. Although the ancestral genetics are directly causative, they are not fully deterministic; the embryonic process is also self-organizing and thus self-determining from an early stage. We naturally recognize motility as the sign of life. Life begins with the quickening, the first sign of animation in the womb. When Hamburger peered into the fertilized chicken egg, he saw the evidence of selforganizing actions, in the chick embryo’s twitches and spasms (Hamburger, 1977; Hamburger, Balaban, Oppenheim & Wenger, 1965). We now know that these actions are the mechanisms of activity-dependent specification of the microstructural anatomy of the nervous system (Diamond, 1990). Extensive arborization of the neuropil occurs through exuberant synaptogenesis, and subtractive elimination of unused connections sculpts the functional architecture. The critical engine for self-stimulation and thus self-organization of the somatosensory system is the fetus’s own spasmodic actions. It is difficult not to think that the struggle for identity and autonomy in psychological development reflects a continuation of similar primal mechanisms of embryonic self-determination.

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Vertical integration

Once the mechanisms of activity-dependent specification of neural connectivity became understood, it became possible to recognize them in adult neural tissue, neuroplasticity as the result of learning. The neuroembryonic process allows juveniles to map brains (and their component sensation, visceral, and action patterns) onto unique and differentiated ecologies. This process, anatomy created through learning, is a fundamental transformation of the agency of organisms. Whereas genetically specified behavior must be hammered out on the crude anvil of accidental mutation and natural selection, learned behavior reflects a new era of active selforganization. The biological machine becomes an animate agent for experience and behavior. This transformation of the ontogenetic process may be essential to understand if we are to appreciate the human capacity for self-determination. Yet the process continues to work within a common anatomical context. The structure of the machine is fixed in broad outlines – a structure formed from the residuals of vertebrate neural evolution (Tucker, 1992). Not only that, the residuals are stacked historically. At the base are the rhombencephalic structures providing elementary reflexes, somatic and visceral motor patterns. From these emerge the mesencephalic structures with not only the integrative reticulum (a primitive representation and integration network) but the activation and arousal projection nuclei of the neuromodulator-specific reticular activating system. At the diencephalic level the hypothalamus extends the visceral integrative function of the mesencephalic reticulum, as the thalamus orders the somatic interface with the world in specific sensory, motor, and activity control centers. The primitive telencephalon maintained continuity with the diencephalic mechanisms, with the neostriatum (caudate and putamen) emerging to inhibit and extend the paleostriatum (pallidum). Both these motor pattern systems operate under control of the limbic primordium (amygdala and hippocampus), and at the same time they loop through the thalamic circuits. As the neocortex mutated from the external striatum (Nauta & Karten, 1970), it provided an astronomical expansion of neural networks, enabling the extension of embryonic plasticity into the juvenile period. Yet the neocortex was fully embedded within not only the primitive telencephalic networks (retaining reentrant connectivity with the neostriatum and limbic connectivity with the basal forebrain), but with the diencephalic controls as well (with somatic sensory and motor networks interdigitated with the

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thalamus and visceral sensory and motor functions fully regulated by the hypothalamus). These evolutionary frames embed embryogenesis. Their functional residuals – the neural strategies of self-regulation that could not be replaced by later mutations – remain the global controls on activity dependent specification, even as the combinatorial capacity for that specification explodes within the massive neocortex of the human juvenile. The functioning of the brain remains dependent on the integration of function across the multiple evolved levels. The neuropsychology of microgenesis is a way to view this integration developmentally, within the dynamic organization of each cognitive process. Encephalization

A psychological, and perhaps philosophical, analysis of human functioning thus must cross primordial levels of neural evolution. Yet vertebrate evolution has resulted in a progression of transformations in which the brain’s functional algorithms have been reworked by powerful new information processing capacities. The result is encephalization, in which a function such as motor control is taken over in large part by a recently evolved neural structure, such as the neocortex, subordinating, and many times redirecting, the neural mechanisms provided by more primitive control centers. A functional understanding of the brain’s nested control systems, and their ongoing microgenetic products, must deal with the profound reorganization required by encephalization at each major phyletic advance in neural complexity (Tucker, 2007). In the example of motor control, the neocortex of mammals provides a highly precise and deliberate motor control, through a remarkable evolutionary appearance of the pyramidal motor pathway that projects directly from motor cortex to the brainstem control centers, bypassing the telencephalic-diencephalic circuits of the more primitive “extrapyramidal” motor system. Although the extrapyramidal system remains integral to motor function in humans, the degree of encephalization of motor control within the neocortex increases from rodents to felines to humans, such that a substantial motor cortex lesion to a feline, for example, is followed by fairly complete recovery (with function reorganized by the extrapyramidal system), whereas in humans a similar cortical lesion results in severe and lasting hemiplegia (Denny-Brown, 1966). With encephalization of behavioral capacity in a newly evolved structure, the function of the now subordinated structures must change to be

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compatible with the more complex operation of the newly configured brain. The example of pallidotomy for Parkinson’s disease may be instructive in this regard. The dyskinesia of Parkinson’s appears due to impaired dopaminergic modulation of the neostriatal (caudate-putamen) division of the extrapyramidal motor system (Henselmans et al., 2000). In the nested structure of the extrapyramidal motor system, the cortex regulates the neostriatum, which regulates the paleostriatum (pallidum) which projects to the thalamus, which projects back to cortex (Alheid & Heimer, 1988). Surprisingly, lesioning the pallidum alleviates the Parkinson’s dyskinesia, leading to two interesting implications. First, the dyskinesia appears to reflect a disinhibited paleostriatal system (because the neostriatal influence is lessened by dopamine depletion). Second, lesion of the paleostriatal system leaves motor function relatively intact, implying that pyramidal motor control is so encephalized in humans as to require little contribution from the extrapyramidal system. We can infer from this clinical evidence that understanding microgenesis of action in the normal brain requires not only an appreciation of vertical integration – with complex inhibitory interactions across multiple levels of the primitive telencephalon and diencephalon – but also of encephalization – as actions may be organized effectively in humans through the operations of limbic-thalamic-neocortical mechanisms of the pyramidal motor system, with minimal extrapyramidal control. Dynamic cortical organization

With the extensive encephalization of function within the human cortex, and with the period of juvenile neural plasticity extended over a decade or more, the cortex is perhaps the primary domain in which selfdetermination is realized anatomically. Nonetheless, the field of cognitive neuroscience notwithstanding, we are not naked cortices. Adequate function of the cortex requires extensive regulation by limbic, striatal, thalamic, brainstem, and, remarkably, cerebellar networks. Because each form of subcortical regulation influences the activity of the cortex, it simultaneously influences the activity-dependent specification of neural plasticity in the process of neuroanatomical morphogenesis. Thus not only the sensory data from the eye is required to establish ocular dominance columns in the visual cortex of the kitten; adequate modulation of arousal and reactivity by brainstem noradrenergic projections to the cortex is essential as well. Translated into functional terms, learning is dependent not only on the pattern of information that exercises representational space, 376

but the states of motivational and emotional arousal that set the tone for neural activity. The processes of representation and arousal control are not simply active in parallel; rather, they interact dynamically. Morphogenesis through activity-dependent specification of cortical anatomy is synonymous with learning because it is achieved by the mechanisms of memory consolidation. These are mechanisms of reentrant, two-way, interaction between limbic cortices (at the core or inner border of the hemisphere) and the neocortices (at the lateral surface of the hemisphere), which at the same time engage both brainstem neuromodulator projections and critical diencephalic (thalamic, hypothalamic) circuits (Tucker & Luu, 2006). With multiple linked networks, each representing sensory or motor patterns in a different instantiation, and with consolidation requiring processing across multiple networks, the process is reentrant and continual. Because consolidation continues in the background for hours, days, and even years (Squire, 1987), cortical morphogenesis – and the corresponding actualization of personal experience – is not limited to discrete events, but is an ongoing process in the life of the mind. Truly remarkable facts of this process, such as the separation of specific neuromodulatory influences to specific sleep stages (Steriade & McCarley, 1990), point to major insights that await the next scientific advances in understanding the consolidation process. Visceral embryonic plasticity

The cortical boundaries of consolidation can thus be understood as limbic networks at the core of the hemisphere, representing visceral functions, and neocortical networks at the lateral surface, representing sensory and motor functions (Mesulam, 2000; Tucker, 2007). Between these are two intermediate networks (unimodal and heteromodal association cortex), such that reentrant processing from each level to the next crosses four levels (Pandya & Seltzer, 1982; Pandya & Yeterian, 1984). In this network topology, we can infer that perceptions, as they are integrated with memories, have four different mappings, each interleaved with its adjacent neighbors through point-to-point reentrant couplings. Actions, as they are developed from motives and memories, must invert this topology in the networks of the frontal lobe (Luu & Tucker, 2003). In a way we cannot yet access phenomenologically, this multifaceted network topology must be the microgenetic structure implicit to daily experience. In the morphogenetic process, the somatic neocortical networks are specified early in life, retaining only moderate degrees of plasticity in the 377

adult brain. In contrast, recent anatomical studies have shown that limbic networks retain an embryonic plasticity – as evidenced by fetal-like growth factors – in the primate brain well into adulthood (Barbas, Saha, RempelClower & Ghashghaei, 2003). Here is another fascinating clue that neuroscience is offering to the structure of the developing mind, the ontogenetic frame of the microgenetic process. As we gain insight to this structure, we have new perspectives on otherwise quizzical observations. For example, in learning a foreign language, a motivated adult may progress quite rapidly with the vocabulary (engaging the still malleable limbic memory networks) but will be almost unable to speak without an accent (because of the early fixity of the somatic motor networks) (Tucker, Frishkoff & Luu, 2008). Motive roots of representational freedom

The somewhat paradoxical implication is that encephalization has allowed a brain that is organized on the phyletic frame – such that we must understand the primordial roots of the mechanisms of self-control – and yet has the key cognitive functions emergent in a general-purpose corticolimbic network that can be shaped not only by the culture of the mind, but the progressive choices and actualizations of the self. Perhaps even more remarkable is the implication that the plasticity of the visceral sphere forms the root mechanism for self-determination throughout life. A microgenetic phenomenology From such clues to developing architecture, we may gain insight into the biological terrain on which we play out the life of the mind. Although it requires coping with the languages of both neuroscience and psychology, scientific theory now clearly informs philosophical inquiry. Embodied experience

And philosophy may then offer new insight for personal experience. An important perspective is recognizing the embodiment of the mind, the fact that mental processes are not divorced from the body (Lakoff & Johnson, 1999). Scientists and philosophers alike often seem to have found the mind a difficult subject to address objectively, without personal, emotional bias. The solution seems to have been a consensus to rigidly objectify cognitive functions, thereby to witness the Twentieth Century ascension of mind into the academic ether of pure disembodied mentalism.

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In contrast, the more recent philosophy of embodiment recognizes mental functions as emergent from bodily tissue (Johnson & Lakoff, 1999; Varela, Thompson & Rosch, 1992). In so doing, embodiment philosophy seeks to be informed by knowledge of the bodily mechanisms of the mental process (Johnson, 2007). Microgenetic process

In this context of a long tradition of mind-body separation, Jason Brown’s microgenetic neuropsychology has provided a concrete and striking model for the embodiment of mind. The brain is discovered to be organized across multiple levels, each of which provides differing forms of biological structure for both representation and control. The processes of perception, cognition, and action are microgenetic because each must develop from primitive anlagen toward articulated and differentiated forms. In broad outline, the microgenetic process works across the phyletic structure of the brain, beginning with elemental motive and arousal vectors in the brainstem and midbrain, elaborated in relation to affective-memory representations within limbic networks, then articulated through the process of consolidation in relation to specific sensory and motor structures in neocortical networks (Derryberry & Tucker, 1990). As it organizes conscious awareness, the microgenetic process engages multiple levels of neuropsychological structure, many of which remain fully implicit within the neurological unconscious. This is not a Freudian unconscious that is relegated out of awareness by defensive repression, but a de facto biological unconscious that reflects neurophysiological mechanisms that are causative for experience, but which we now know only through scientific inference. Reentrant process

Microgenesis can be described most easily as a linear developmental process: a syncretic fusion of motive and meaning progresses to become both differentiated and integrated to create end points of articulate concepts and actions. However, the evidence on consolidation, and the reentrant connectional corticolimbic architecture in which it occurs, show that microgenesis is linear only in a given moment (Deacon, 1989). In the next moment it is circular, as visceral-limbic representations of primitive meaning and motive significance resonate to recently articulated ideas, thereby spawning new generations of images and propositions, which – if they gain purchase in the visceral representational matrix of felt meaning – become candidates for lasting memories, soon taking up positions as regular constituents of the body politic (Tucker, 2001).

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Neurocybernetics of personal agency As we study the mechanisms of neural control to gain insight into the microgenetic process, the goal may be an awareness that could guide the development of more effective thought and action. A promising area of theory in neuroscience that promises new perspectives on awareness deals with the mechanisms of memory consolidation. Several lines of evidence have suggested that the consolidation of memory is achieved by dual systems (Mishkin, 1982; Ungerleider & Mishkin, 1982). Each one operates to shape reentrant neurophysiological traffic across the corticolimbic hierarchy, from visceral limbic cortex to somatic neocortex (Tucker, 2002). Each one includes circuits through specific nuclei of the limbic (midline) thalamus and hypothalamic targets. Furthermore, it is a remarkable and unintuitive fact that these dual memory systems operate in parallel, with relatively separate processing in both their subcortical circuits and their corticolimbic target networks. One system appears to have evolved from the hippocampus (archicortex) to form the cingulate gyrus (dorsal limbic networks for visceromotor control), interacting with the association areas and finally sensory and motor areas of the dorsal surface of the cortex (Pandya & Seltzer, 1982; Pandya & Yeterian, 1984). Connections from the hippocampal center of this pathway proceed to the anterior ventral nucleus of the thalamus and mammillary bodies of the hypothalamus, as originally observed by Papez (1935). This dorsal corticolimbic circuit and network supports spatial memory and the representation of configural information, providing a holistic concept of the environmental context. A second system appears to have evolved from the pyriform cortex (paleocortex) and associated ventral limbic networks that are closely connected with the amygdala, anterior temporal pole, and orbital frontal cortex (Pandya & Seltzer, 1982; Pandya & Yeterian, 1984). Connections from the amygdala form a circuit through the mediodorsal nucleus of the thalamus that suggests a second major memory circuit in parallel to the Papez circuit. Certain regions of neocortex seems to have evolved from paleocortex in a similar fashion as others did for archicortex, with the result of the ventral trend, the cortex on the inferior or ventral surface of the brain including occipitotemporal and orbital frontal regions (Pandya & Seltzer, 1982; Pandya & Yeterian, 1984). This corticolimbic pathway supports object memory and the separation of specific items from the perceptual array (Mishkin, 1982; Ungerleider & Mishkin, 1982), allowing focused attention and sustained representation of individual objects.

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Memories of the future

Modern cognitive neuroscience has characterized the differing psychological features of these differing memory systems, but has yet to give much insight into mechanisms – how neural networks organize to integrate configural representations on the one hand and to differentiate specific objects on the other. A perspective that may provide clues to mechanisms comes from examining the differing strategies of motor control that emerge from these dual corticolimbic systems. Motor control is not typically the first function we consider in relation to memory systems. The view of memory consolidation naturally faces back in time, as events now past are worked into the synaptic microstructure through the morphogenetic process. Yet, as David Ingvar recognized in his studies of the frontal lobe, memory also forms the basis for one of the most unique human capacities: planning, or what he described as memories of the future (Ingvar, 1985). Both future and past extensions of present cognitive representation are essential mechanisms of consciousness. Without assembling the residuals of the recent past, consciousness would be vanishingly ephemeral. Without an implicit projection of current memory representation into the anticipated future, even the simplest action sequence would be impossible. The capacity for integrating past experience to anticipate the requirements for goaloriented action forms the essential basis of the “executive function” as neuropsychologists learn from studying the disruptive effects of frontal lobe lesions. This capacity is also essential for the expansion of consciousness, as current awareness gains depth and breadth from its increasing temporal span. It is therefore potentially quite instructive to learn that both past and future perspectives of personal memory are shaped by unique cybernetics – unique control systems – of which we have heretofore been fully unconscious. By suggesting ways to understand the unique controls of dorsal and ventral corticolimbic systems, a theoretical analysis may uncover the evolutionary roots of these dual channels of the microgenetic process. While fully opaque to introspection, these channels of microgenesis appear to serve as intimate guides to ongoing experience. Projectional self-control

Unique and complementary strategies for controlling action seem to emerge from the dorsal (archicortical) and ventral (paleocortical) limbic bases of the frontal lobe, extending through the mediodorsal and ventrolateral frontal pathways, respectively. The mediodorsal pathway appears to support a projectional mode of action control, in which an action is gener-

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ated from internal motives and direction, and then operates on the environment in a feedforward or ballistic fashion, without ongoing guidance by feedback on the course of action (Goldberg, 1985; Passingham, 1987). Consistent with this model, recordings of single units in the dorsal limbic premotor region (supplementary motor area) of monkeys show neurons that respond prior to the action, as if indicating the preparatory activity that leads to launching the action (Shima, Mushiake, Saito & Tanji, 1996). In humans, lesions in the supplementary motor area cause patients to be unable to repeat a sequence of actions from memory (internal control), even though they can repeat the sequence with external guidance (Tanji, Shima & Mushiake, 1996). Visceral motor cybernetics

Why does the dorsal corticolimbic pathway show this feedforward or projectional mode of controlling actions? One interesting explanation may be that this control mode has emerged from the visceromotor function that is carried out by the limbic base of this pathway, in the anterior cingulate cortex. The representation of visceral need leads directly to the goal impulse, the action expressing that need. This kind of progression – from internal homeostatic urge to motivated impulsive action – was described in Yakovlev’s concept of the “exteriorization” of nervous system activity (Yakovlev, 1948). The basis for motility in the neuraxis was seen as the “sphere of visceration” with the organization of energy and the rhythms of bodily function. From this basis in motive, Yakovlev described the process of behavior as retracing primordial developmental patterns of motility, as an action is first organized in the axial, postural muscles and then progressively articulated in the appendicular extremities. The control of behavior in Yakovlev’s account is organized in explicitly phyletic nested structures, with the “diffuse network of short neurones” in the medial forebrain bundle and periventricular fiber system representing homeostatic states, the limbic lobe, striatum, and reticular formation initiating axial and postural motility in the outward expression of internal states, and finally the outermost interface with the environment, apparent only in mammals, in the cells of the cerebral cortex. Yakovlev’s anatomy of motility provided an explicitly microgenetic account of behavior that anticipated not only Brown’s analysis of the microstructure of action, but also the modern view of corticolimbic networks that emerged from the Boston neuroanatomists (Pandya, Mesulam, Barbas) in the 1970s. In reviewing the nested structure of corticolimbic networks, Mesulam emphasized that the limbic networks, at the core of the hemi382

sphere, were strongly influenced by the internal visceral state, whereas the neocortical networks representing with sensory and motor capacities, must provide the interface with the external world (Mesulam, 2000). Because this set of linked networks is the architecture upon which the consolidation of memory and cognition must be achieved, an interesting question is how the representational forms – from diffuse holism at the visceral core to articulated specificity at the somatic shell – can be combined to create hierarchic and abstract forms of conceptual representation (Tucker, 2007). Configural control

The unique feedforward cybernetic bias of the dorsal premotor corticolimbic pathway may be consistent with not only the visceromotor function at the core of the hemisphere, but the specialization of the dorsal networks for configural representation in the posterior brain. With feedforward control, cognition is holistic. Associations among elements spread without restraint, such that concepts of the perceptual space naturally span broad domains of context. With this control mode elaborated within the motor system, actions are vectoral, targeting goals directly. Guided self-control

If the dorsomedial limbic-motor system launches actions in a ballistic fashion, as with a ballistic missile, the ventrolateral system appears to use feedback mechanisms similar to those of a guided missile: actions are monitored at each stage in reference to set points or guide posts, and adjusted accordingly. This is a more discrete form of action regulation, in which movements are separated and specified through inhibitory control, such that each can be related to target set points through sensory feedback. In monkeys, cells in the arcuate premotor area of the ventrolateral motor pathway are active only as actions are performed with visual guidance (Tanji, et al., 1996). Visceral sensory cybernetics

Whereas the projectional control mode emergent from the visceromotor base seems clearly consistent with Yakovlev’s exteriorization and Brown’s microgenetic process, the feedback control mode may not seem congruent with these accounts. Still, it may be useful to recognize that the ventral limbic networks at the base of the ventrolateral motor pathway, including the insula, are responsible for viscerosensory functions. The microgenetic process of organizing actions in this territory of brain may be somewhat more complex than that in dorsal regions. Whereas actions may be directly

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and impulsively implemented by the visceromotor networks, they may be only guided and evaluated by the viscerosensory networks. This line of reasoning would suggest that the ventrolateral pathway would be relatively poor at generating actions, and important primarily to evaluating and directing them under sensory, and particularly viscerosensory, control. The lesion evidence in aphasia may be consistent with this suggestion. Mediodorsal lesions lead to transcortical motor aphasia in which patients fail to use speech spontaneously (loss of the motive urge) but show good speech skills upon confrontation (Goodglass, 1993). In contrast, ventrolateral (Broca’s area) lesions lead to continued and motivated efforts to speak, but without the feedback guidance on articulation of the speech objects (lexical and grammatical structures) that allow the communication urge to take form with verbal objects (Goodglass, 1993). Inhibitory specification

There may be a common basis in control theory that explains how the feedback control of the ventral frontal lobe emerges from the object perception and memory of the ventral sensory-limbic networks. This would be the mechanism of inhibitory specification. In the domain of perceptual representation, some form of lateral inhibition appears to allow objects to be separated from their embedding context, and thus to be differentiated as discrete objects. When this control mode is extended into action regulation, inhibitory specification may allow action objects, discrete packets of action components that are now differentiated, and that can then be maintained under feedback control as they are individually linked to feedback targets and sequenced in a process of sensory guided action. Affect and agency in action regulation

If a theory of visceral and somatic algorithms could explain how specific motive control systems organize actions adaptively, the result may be an embodied, microgenetic approach to explaining human executive functions. Without an elementary explanation, the concept that the frontal lobe exercises executive functions raises the specter of the proverbial homunculus pulling the marionette strings. In a microgenetic theory of action regulation, the self-control capacities of the frontal lobe can be explained by its dual boundaries in limbic and motor cortices (Tucker & Luu, 2007). Such executive capacities as creative planning or delayed gratification could be understood to emerge as encephalized products from the primitive substrates of unique motive biases on developing actions.

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Self-regulation through activation and arousal

The differing cybernetics of dorsal and ventral pathways may stem not only from the unique functions of visceromotor and viscerosensory networks, but from the specialized brainstem neuromodulator systems associated with those networks. In the dorsal corticolimbic division, preferential modulation by norepinephrine (NE) may be integral to the feedforward cybernetics of both posterior and anterior networks, and it may help explain the affective bias integral to these cybernetics. Elation and Impulse. The primary forebrain NE projection system, the dorsal noradrenergic bundle, proceeds from the locus coeruleus of the mesencephalon toward the anterior cingulate and frontal pole, where the fibers turn caudally and innervate the dorsal networks of both anterior and posterior neocortices (Foote & Morrison, 1987). Because NE modulation appears to facilitate orienting to novel events, but also to decrement rapidly to repetition, this control influence may be described as a habituation bias integral to phasic arousal (Tucker & Williamson, 1984). Consistent with the classic catecholamine hypothesis of the affective disorders, a strong influence of NE on brain arousal appears to lead to an elated affective state, whereas the depletion of NE may be associated with depression. If this reasoning is correct, then an elemental brainstem arousal mechanism, NE, would result in a qualitative state of affective arousal – elation – and at the same time engage the unique neurocybernetics of the dorsal pathway. In the posterior brain this would be an expansive mode of attention and working memory that facilitates not only a broad configural representation of the environmental context, but expansive, inclusive semantic processing as well (Tucker & Williamson, 1984). In the anterior brain, a strong engagement of this modulation would result in highly impulsive, hedonic, goal-oriented actions, such as seen in clinical mania. In contrast, suppression of noradrenergic modulation of the mediodorsal pathway would lead to the anhedonia and psychomotor retardation of clinical depression. The effect is not unlike that with lesions of the mediodorsal pathway, leading to loss of speech initiative in transcortical motor aphasia, or with more extensive lesions to akinetic mutism. Anxiety and Restraint. An opposite neurocybernetic bias appears to shape cognition and behavioral control emerging in the ventral corticolimbic pathway, with an inhibitory influence integral to the motivational control. Although the brainstem neuromodulator projection systems operate with complex interactions, the primary control system that can be singled out for the ventral pathway is the mesolimbic dopaminergic (DA) system.

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Whereas DA has been widely assumed to reflect a “reward system,” and it indeed has a role in facilitation of motor habits in response to rewards, it is equally engaged in motor readiness under conditions of threat. Perhaps more instructive is the effect of strong and chronic DA modulation, leading to a fractionation of behavior into routinized habit sequences repeated in stereotyped actions. DA modulation may be described as supporting a redundancy bias that facilitates a tonic activation of cognition and behavior (Tucker & Williamson, 1984). The operation of inhibitory control, as is seen with the cognitive mode of ventral limbic memory consolidation, may be integral to the redundancy bias of exaggerated DA modulation. As a result, the inhibitory specification of behavior integral to object memory and feedback control of actions in the ventral pathway may not only depend on DA influences normally, but both may be exaggerated in pathological stereotypy. The relevance to human disorders of inhibitory excess and stereotypic action should be clear. Engagement of the ventral pathway, with a redundancy bias as an apparent cybernetic feature, is integral to anxiety and anxiety disorders, including not only avoidant but obsessive-compulsive syndromes. Affective control of experience

By examining the affective quality of the major arousal and activation control systems, it may thus be possible to understand the motive bias that is integral to the differing memory systems of the dorsal and ventral pathways. By biasing memory consolidation, these control systems bias not just memory but the anticipation of future events that is built upon memory representation. These are affects that serve as tools of expectancy (Tucker & Luu, 2007). If it is correct that the depression-elation dimension of neural arousal preferentially modulates function in the dorsal pathway, then the unique cognitive contributions of the dorsal pathway would be apparent in direct proportion. To be elated is to have actions primed for release onto the world, launched toward attractive hedonic targets. Not only is memory strongly engaging of configural relations in representing the immediate context, but the representation of meaning is both expansive and hedonically charged, to the point of becoming grandiose in clinical mania. In contrast, when anxiety is the dominant regulatory mode, the ventral brain’s function includes not only the primitive vigilance for threat, but the priming of motor readiness – simultaneously under strong inhibitory constraint – that together mark the ventrolateral frontal lobe’s mode of action regulation. Cognition becomes highly analytic, as the inhibitory specifica386

tion of object memory separates individual features for focused attention, even at the expense of holistic attention and memory integration. The unbalanced executive

If it is correct that the cognitive and memory operations of the ventral and dorsal pathways are energized by these differing motive influences, each applying its unique cybernetic bias, then the frontal lobe’s executive selfregulation can not only be understood as rooted in motivational functions, but balanced between opposing self-regulatory constraints. The evidence on lesions to dorsal and ventral frontolimbic pathways may be consistent with the opposing modes of motive control described above. Mediodorsal lesions produce syndromes that in severe cases result in akinetic mutism. In the specific case of language these lesions impair spontaneous speech in transcortical motor aphasia. When examined more generally, mediodorsal lesions create the pseudodepression syndrome, including anhedonia and varying degrees of psychomotor retardation (Blumer & Benson, 1975). In contrast, lesions of the orbital frontal networks at the ventral base of the frontal lobe lead to a pseudopsychopathic syndrome, with disinhibition of impulsive actions, puerile behavior, and apparent inability to exercise socially appropriate restraint (Blumer & Benson, 1975). Roots of regulation As experience is organized within the nested neural networks of the dual corticolimbic pathways, the microgenetic process must recruit multiple levels of contribution, most likely in recursive, reentrant cycles of arousal, motive, felt significance, representational articulation, and specification in image or action. The recursive corticolimbic process engages opposing structural biases at the visceral-limbic core (syncretic holism) and somaticneocortical shell of the hemisphere (differentiated specificity of environmental interface). Recognizing these structural boundaries of the memory consolidation process, it is tempting to speculate that it is only through recursive opposition of these bodily constraints that abstract thought can be constructed, organizing referents that retain the general application of the visceral core and yet become differentiated with respect to the specific exigencies of the world captured in sensorimotor patterns at the somatic shell (Tucker, 2007). Through the multiple influences that must be assembled for each instance of memory consolidation, we can see the embodied territories to be

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traversed by the microgenetic process. At the brainstem level are mechanisms of arousal and activation that have pervasive affective and regulatory effects. Although they are the roots of the microgenetic process, their influences must be mediated by recursive operation of consolidation and self-regulation. For example, a thought of an impending threat engages the tonic activation and inhibitory specification of anxiety, which then biases attention to threat, which then engages a further focusing of attention. In another instance, an unexpected success engenders a mild rush of elation, which expands the semantic consolidation process, allowing creative imagination for hedonic opportunities which are then followed with expectant impulses. Microgenesis must therefore be cyclical, guiding the reentrant consolidation process, continually weaving the visceral and somatic constraints – in concert and in opposition – with the differing patterns of woof and warp in the dorsal and ventral pathways. So too must the process of consciousness be cyclical, oscillatory, as it convolves the apparent texture of present awareness with that of the unconscious fragments of mind that continually resonate to the implicit residuals of experience. To understand the mechanisms of experience, and thereby the opportunities for participation in the microgenetic process, it may be critical to study not only the products of the mind’s process – the urges, thoughts, and reflections that are fully formed in the mind’s eye – but the root mechanisms of strategic cybernetic biases that take shape differently in the dorsal and ventral pathways. There are a few clues, from both comparative evolution and embryology, to these ancient roots of the mind’s process. Mutation of the cortex from the external striatum

A key theoretical challenge is to understand the functional regulation of the mammalian cortex. We have seen that the concept of microgenesis first points us to primitive bases of cognition, and that these are found in subcortical regulatory mechanisms. However, we have also seen that once we understand the extensive encephalization of the human brain, in many ways a radical exaggeration of the mammalian plan, microgenesis becomes a highly epigenetic developmental process, in the sense that the complexity of self-determined patterns of cortical organization have caused conceptformation to be highly flexible, embedded in the personal-cultural psychological matrix, with only the essential regulatory influences of the vertically-integrated vertebrate neuraxis. To fully understand the freedom and power of representational capacity emergent with the human cortex, we

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may, paradoxically, need to understand the primitive regulatory controls that are still essential to guide these new capacities of cybernetic selfdetermination. Both evolutionary (phylogenetic) and individual developmental (ontogenetic) perspectives may be useful. The evolutionary Anlage of the cerebral hemisphere is the pallium, the cloak surrounding the brainstem. In fish, a division described as archipallium is thought to have given rise to the mammalian hippocampus. In reptiles, anatomists described the emergence of the neopallium (Herrick, 1948). Importantly, in birds and mammals the thalamic projections defining visual and auditory regions do not proceed to the pallium, but rather to a structure known as the external striatum (Nauta & Karten, 1970). Because the external striatum disappeared in the evolution of mammals, and because the thalamic sensory projections are then taken up by the neocortex, Nauta and Karten speculated that neurons (and projections) of the external striatum were incorporated into the pallial mantle, creating a mammalian neocortex with a new, combined, architecture. Dual vectors of neuroembryogenesis?

Recent embryological evidence may be consistent with the Nauta and Karten speculation, and may suggest not only the incorporation of striatal inhibitory influences by the cortex generally, but a specific role of these influences to the ventral corticolimbic pathway. Observation of embryogenesis with modern tracers suggests that two major classes of neurons in the cerebral cortex – inhibitory interneurons and excitatory pyramidal projection neurons – derive from different regions of the embryonic telencephalon to form the neocortex. Whereas glutaminergic excitatory neurons migrate radially from the pallium (dorsal anlage of the cortex), GABAergic inhibitory interneurons migrate from subpallial progenitor zones (more ventral subcortical telencephalon) through tangential patterns to take their places in neocortex (Marin & Rubenstein, 2001; Xu, Cobos, De La Cruz, Rubenstein & Anderson, 2004). Given this pattern of more dorsal embryonic origin of excitatory pyramidal cells and more ventral telencephalic (subcortical basal forebrain) embryonic origin of inhibitory interneurons, an obvious speculation is that this pattern manifests itself differently in the archicortical (dorsal) and paleocortical (ventral) divisions of the mammalian cortex. The result would be an emphasis on pyramidal neurons in the dorsal (archicortical) pathway and on granular cells (with greater influence of inhibitory interneurons?) in the ventral (paleocortical) pathway, as is observed (Pandya & Yeterian,

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1984). The intriguing theoretical question then becomes whether the control biases apparent in the dorsal and ventral corticolimbic pathways of the neocortex reflect differential elaboration of excitatory versus inhibitory intracortical regulatory devices. Complementary connectional patterns of pyramidal and granular cytoarchitectonics?

How can we understand the implications of these differing cytoarchitectonics (pyramidal vs. granular) for the differing cognitive network architectures of these divisions of cortex? With pyramidal cells providing specialized excitatory projections, is there a network architecture in the archicortical division of cortex that is suited not only to holistic configural representations but a corresponding long-range excitatory connectivity? With the apparent incorporation of inhibitory interneurons supporting the object memory of the ventral, paleocortical corticolimbic pathway, is there a corresponding network specialization for cognitive representations optimized by local inhibitory control? One possibly related line of evidence points to different patterns of cortical network architecture in the left and right cerebral hemispheres (Semmes, 1968). This is relevant under the interpretation that right hemisphere specialization for spatial cognition has elaborated specifically on the configural representation skills of the dorsal pathway, whereas the left hemisphere’s specialization for analytic cognition has elaborated on the object memory and item specification of the ventral pathway (Liotti & Tucker, 1994; Tucker & Luu, 2007). If this alignment of lateral specialization is correct, then it could be important that both electrophysiological and lesion evidence points to a more holistic pattern of interconnection in the cortex of the right hemisphere, compared to a more locally isolated pattern of connection on the left side (Semmes, 1968). Telencephalic progenitors of cortex

Although we do not understand them well, it is almost certain that the evolution of the mammalian cortex has led to novel algorithms of representation and control that cannot be explained fully by study of their more primitive origins. Nonetheless, the classical evolutionary-developmental approach to biological mechanisms leads us to search for the roots of the dorsal and ventral subdivisions of cortex within unique information processing strategies of the premammalian telencephalon. Considering both embryological and evolutionary evidence on the roots of these neurocyber-

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netic strategies may provide insight into fundamental vectors for the microgenetic process. Dual pathways of neocortical differentiation

Classical evidence of dual origins of the archicortical and paleocortical divisions of mammalian cortex was summarized in a pivotal paper by Sanides (Sanides, 1970) that anticipated many of the fundamental discoveries of the connectional anatomy of the primate cortex by Pandya and his associates in the following decades. One concept in Sanides’s analysis proved highly controversial, although it appeared to be clearly supported by the evidence on cortical connectivity in the modern anatomical studies. This was the notion that the mammalian neocortex not only evolved from the dual limbic formations (hippocampal and pyriform), but that it did so through successive waves of tissue differentiation (Sanides, 1970). The first indication of dual origins of the cortex was provided by Dart and his associates (Dart, 1934), who showed that the primitive general cortex of reptiles emerged from the pyriform formation at one boundary and hippocampal formation at the other. The notion that cortex evolved from these points of origin in successive waves of differentiation was suggested by Abbie (Abbie, 1940, 1942) who observed that within the primitive cortices of monotremes, the spiny anteater and duck-billed platypus, there was no clear differentiation of neocortex from the hippocampal formation, at one point, nor from the pyriform formation, at the other. Rather, the neocortex appeared to have developed from these two limbic formations of primitive cortical tissue through “successive waves of differentiation” as Obenchain had suggested in 1925. From his studies with myeloarchitectonic methods in the early 1960s, Sanides argued that the cortex of primates and humans showed a similar architecture of evolutionary differentiation. With the new tracers for detailing cortical connectivity available in the 1970s, Pandya soon realized that Sanides’s analysis was correct (Pandya & Seltzer, 1982; Pandya & Yeterian, 1984, 1985). In his integration of this anatomical evidence with behavioral observations, Mesulam built upon this line of work to provide a general view of the cortex as integrating a limbic base concerned with internal self-regulation, and a neocortical specialization for sensory and motor interface with the external environment (Mesulam, 2000). Within this corticolimbic architecture, the mechanisms of consolidation can be seen to operate across differing structural constraints. At the visceral-limbic base, meaning is holistic, syncretic, implicitly connotative 391

within the matrix of personal significance. At the somatic-neocortical apex, meaning is differentiated, veridical, and denotative of environmental sensory evidence or motor affordance. From these structural constraints, and through consolidation recursively interleaving the contents of motive influences and goal apprehension, the microgenetic process may weave abstract concepts (Tucker, 2007). Anlage of inhibitory specification

The microgenetic process appears to take a unique representational form in both archicortical and paleocortical moieties, and in each case this form is shaped by a unique cybernetic bias. For the paleocortical division, the control bias appears emergent from mechanisms of inhibitory control that appear to have evolved with the elaboration of neostriatal circuits. This suggestion would be consistent with the close connections between pyriform cortex, the amygdala, and orbital frontal cortex, on the one hand, and the neostriatal control of motor sequencing, on the other (Miller, 1991, 1993). Inhibitory control is essential to guiding behavior by complex and hierarchic representations, such as necessary in sequencing actions. When neurons interact only through excitation, the ensemble result is predictably a feed-forward spread of activation. This mode of network interaction is suitable to simple reflexes or seizures but not to stable ordered structures, such as are required for the serial order of behavior (Buzsaki, 2006; Buzsaki, Kaila & Raichle, 2007). With inhibitory control, such as provided by GABAergic inhibitory interneurons, separation can be achieved between elemental packets, such as movements of one limb before another is engaged. Inhibitory control within the neostriatal circuitry is clearly important to sequencing complex actions, such as in the quadripedal gait newly evolved in reptiles. However as inhibitory interneurons were incorporated within the cortex, there may have been a particular specialization on inhibitory neurocybernetics, within the pyriform primordium of the ventral pathway. When Bagley and Richter applied electrical stimulation to the pyriform cortex of the crocodile, they observed regular stepping actions typically associated with striatal sequencing of behavior (Bagley & Langworthy, 1926; Bagley & Richter, 1924). We can infer from a functional analysis that inhibitory control is particularly important to the ventral corticolimbic pathway, both to object memory and the feedback control of actions. Objects are isolated from the perceptual field through inhibition of the surrounding information. Feed392

back control of action requires delineation of sensory targets and differentiation and restriction of individual movements with specific reference to those targets. In both perception and action, the ventral corticolimbic pathway may provide inhibitory specification, drawing on the cortical networks that are specialized for the regulatory capacities of inhibitory interneurons. In contrast to more holistic operation of large scale networks in the dorsal pathway, inhibitory control through GABA interneurons may allow more local modular representations to operate within the ventral networks, supporting regional specialization (Semmes, 1968). Such specialization may differentiate networks for hand control from those for foot control, and it may differentiate local networks such as Broca’s area for language production from those such as Wernicke’s area for language comprehension. Mammalian renaissance of the dorsal strategy?

Thus a model of inhibitory control, perhaps elaborating neostriatal mechanisms, may explain some aspects of neurocognitive function in ventral networks. How are we to understand the subcortical roots of the dorsal division of mammalian cortex? Recognizing that the hippocampus is the primitive base of dorsal cortex, one interesting speculation is that the hippocampus and its cortical derivatives evolved to elaborate not only the archipallium, but the more primitive motor control properties of the paleostriatum (pallidum or globus pallidus) rather than the neostriatum (caudate-putamen). When Bagley and Richter applied electrical stimulation to the hippocampal formation of a crocodile, the effect was rhythmic swimming movements of the tail, as if engaging the paleostriatal, pallidal motor system (Bagley & Langworthy, 1926; Bagley & Richter, 1924). We can speculate that the primordium of the dorsal corticolimbic pathway is a similar “excitatory” mode of motility, leading to the feedforward cybernetic bias of the mediodorsal networks of the mammalian frontal lobe. Just as the capacity for inhibitory specification emergent from dopaminergic neostriatal control became integral to the paleocortical corticolimbic mechanisms evolving in the ventral trend from the pyriform cortex, the advent of mammalian cortex may have involved a corresponding development of the more primitive cybernetics of the paleostriatal motor system, such that the hippocampus and dorsal trend came to operate with a noradrenergic feedforward bias. The result was a capacity for holistic attention to the configural context and a goal-biased, ballistic, and impulsive mode of action regulation. 393

As we come to understand the operation of the dual corticolimbic hierarchies in coming years, it may become apparent that the mammalian brain has elaborated each neurocybernetic mode within its own networks, such that both inhibitory and impulsive modes are allowed to optimize their influences on a highly structured cortical network, without being overly damped by the opponent influence. As a result, the mammalian brain operates with opponent control biases, each applying a unique mode of consolidating representations, with each cybernetic mode rooted in both holistic visceral and differentiated somatic domains. With its lateral specialization, the human brain seems to have gained new flexibility of cybernetic morphogenesis, through allowing each hemisphere to be dominated by one or the other of the dual neurocybernetic modes. Within this anatomy, microgenesis may be not only recursive and cyclical, but dialectical, as the integration of experience and behavior spans network representations that are highly specialized for opponent – and complementary – neurocybernetic strategies. Self-organizing on the phyletic plan From this speculative line of reasoning, we can imagine that primitive algorithms of neural control have been progressively elaborated in myriad successive mutations, each nested within the frame of prior evolution, to shape a vertically integrated human neuraxis. Microgenesis provides an analysis of the psychological process that is embedded within this frame, this evolutionary order of the brain’s anatomy (Brown, 1987). Just as it is difficult to understand embryology without understanding evolution, it may be difficult to understand psychology without understanding its developmental order. For each person, the mind’s operations unfold within a continuing tapestry of neuroplastic self-determination. In the life of the mind, the context for each idea is the ongoing morphogenetic context. In the life of each person, synaptic differentiation of the self-matrix plays out in the context of the venerable mammalian evolutionary plan. The intimate presence of the evolutionary process

In this way, the functional residuals of evolution are integral to the process of experience. Understanding these residuals may have both scientific and philosophical implications. Scientifically, developmental and evolutionary reasoning is essential for understanding each system of the brain. More generally, analyzing the mind’s biological basis may provide a scientific basis for modern philosophical inquiry. As a metatheoretical framework,

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microgenesis invites a biological analysis of each operation of mind (J. W. Brown, 1988). In this analysis, everyday awareness is continually shaped by evolved, adaptive mechanisms of memory consolidation and retrieval. For example, you sense a vague anxiety as you think about a meeting with a friend. We can infer that this anxiety involves subtle, connotative representations unfolding within the corticolimbic memory system. Furthermore, the principle of microgenesis teaches that the consolidation process recruits neurophysiological roots for this anxiety extending not only to the limbic circuits (primarily amygdala and insula) but also to the brainstem circuits that will set the activation tone and consolidation mode of anxiety. These circuits include the mesolimbic dopamine projections that shape the redundancy bias, focused attention, and inhibitory specification of object memory that together constitute the unique cognitive profile of anxiety. If you are to understand the significance of this meeting with your friend, your affective response signals that multiple levels of the evolved neuraxis, including brainstem, mesencephalic, diencephalic, and several levels of telencephalic evolution must be recruited to guide the effective operations of memory. When microgenesis is understood to be a continuation of the ontogenetic process – extending the mechanisms of embryonic neurogenesis and subtractive pruning into postnatal maturation – then the personal actions of motivated memory can be appreciated concretely, as evolutionary mechanisms continuing to guide tissue differentiation. Psychological control

Psychological development is thus guided by evolved controls on neural plasticity, yet it is not deterministic in any simple way. Rather, because cognitive representations are themselves formative for the mechanisms of consolidation, we find that the process of development is recursive, with each advance in cognitive complexity providing a context of selfregulation that then provides new stability and complexity to the vertical integration of the multiple levels of the neuraxis. Microgenesis in this sense is embedded in the psychological organization of the self, as concepts, plans, and aesthetic appraisals become the structures within which the mechanisms of memory consolidation must operate. They operate, recursively, to recruit the primitive tools of activation and arousal that then energize their unique neurocybernetic constraints within the visceralsomatic workspace of the corticolimbic networks of the self.

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In most cases, morphogenesis of the cortex – and the personality – is more or less passive. An emotionally significant event captures arousal and consolidation capacity, thereby engaging the memory apparatus over time. And we are changed. In other cases, neural plasticity is psychologically self-organizing, as we engage certain patterns of thought which have inherent motivating capabilities, thereby recruiting the requisite motive arousal – and stabilizing the vertical relations – to allow optimal operation of memory. Fortunate children thus learn – through trial, error, and the occasional effective role model – to self-regulate actively. Mechanisms of anxiety and focused attention then specify critical thinking, not simply because of fear or defensiveness, but because this is the way to think independently. Mechanisms of elation and expansive attention are recruited from small successes, and perhaps sustained through private hopes. These mechanisms of a good mood allow not only creativity and flexibility in thought but the emotional stamina to pursue goals in the face of adversity. The lessons of microgenesis are thus not restricted to a narrow biological determinism. Because these are the mind’s engines of growth and differentiation, they may offer essential tools for psychological self-determination. References Abbie, A. A. (1940). Cortical lamination in the Monotremata. Journal of Comparative Neurology, 72, 428-467. Abbie, A. A. (1942). Cortical lamination in a polyprotodont marsupial, Perameles nasuta. Journal of Comparative Neurology, 76, 509-536. Alheid, G. F. & Heimer, L. (1988). New perspectives in basal forebrain organization of special relevance for neuropsychiatric disorders: The striatopallidal, amygdaloid, and corticopetal components of substantia innominata. Neuroscience, 27(1), 1-39. Bagley, C. & Langworthy, O. R. (1926). The forebrain and midbrain of the alligator with experimental transections of the brain stem. Archives of Neurology and Psychiatry, 16, 154. Bagley, C. & Richter, C. P. (1924). Electrically excitable region of the forebrain of the alligator. Archives of Neurology and Psychiatry, 11, 257-263. Barbas, H., Saha, S., Rempel-Clower, N. & Ghashghaei, T. (2003). Serial pathways from primate prefrontal cortex to autonomic areas may influence emotional expression. BMC Neuroscience, 4(1), 25.

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Blumer, D. & Benson, D. F. (1975). Personality changes with frontal and temporal lobe lesions. In D. F. Benson & D. Blumer (eds.), Psychiatric aspects of neurologic disease (151-170). New York: Gruen and Stratton. Brown, J. (1977). Mind, brain, and consciousness: the neuropsychology of cognition. New York: Academic Press. Brown, J. W. (1987). The microstructure of action. In E. Perceman (Ed.), The frontal lobes revisited (251-272). New York: The IRBN press. Brown, J. W. (1988). The life of the mind: selected papers. Hillsdale, New Jersey, USA: Lawrence Erlbaum. Brown, J. W. (1994). Morphogenesis and the mental process. Development and Psychopathology, 6, 551-563. Buzsaki, G. (2006). Rhythms of the brain. New York: Oxford. Buzsaki, G., Kaila, K. & Raichle, M. (2007). Inhibition and brain work. Neuron, 56(5), 771-783. Dart, R. A. (1934). The dual structure of the neopallium: its history and significance. Journal of Anatomy, 69, 3-19. Denny-Brown, D. (1966). The cerebral control of movement. Springfield, Illinois, USA: Charles C. Thomas. Derryberry, D. & Tucker, D. M. (1990). The adaptive base of the neural hierarchy: elementary motivational controls on network function. Nebraska Symposium on Motivation, 38, 289-342. Diamond, A. (1990). The development and neural bases of higher cognitive functions. Introduction. Annals of the New York Academy of Science, 608, xiii-lvi. Foote, S. L. & Morrison, J. H. (1987). Extrathalamic modulation of cortical function. Annual Review of Neuroscience, 10, 67-95. Goldberg, G. (1985). Supplementary motor area structure and function: Review and hypotheses. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 8, 567-616. Goodglass, H. (1993). Understanding aphasia. New York: Academic Press. Greenough, W. T. & Black, J. E. (1992). Induction of brain structure by experience: substrates for cognitive development. In M. Gunnar & C. Nelson (eds.), Developmental behavioral neuroscience: Minnesota symposium on child psychology, vol. 24 (155-200). Hillsdale, New Jersey, USA: Erlbaum. Hamburger, V. (1977). The developmental history of the motor neuron. Neuroscience Research Progress Bulletin, 15, 1-37. Hamburger, V., Balaban, M., Oppenheim, R. & Wenger, E. (1965). Periodic motility of normal and spinal chick embryos between 8 and 17 days of incubation. Journal of Experimental Zoology, 159(1), 1-13. Henselmans, J. M., de Jong, B. M., Pruim, J., Staal, M. J., Rutgers, A. W. & Haaxma, R. (2000). Acute effects of thalamotomy and pallidotomy on regional cerebral

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metabolism, evaluated by PET. Clinical Neurology & Neurosurgery, 102(2), 8490. Herrick, C. J. (1948). The brain of the tiger salamander. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Ingvar, D. H. (1985). “Memory for the future”: An essay on the temporal organization of conscious awareness. Human Neurobiology, 4, 127-136. Johnson, M. (2007). The meaning of the body: aesthetics of human understanding. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lakoff, G. & Johnson, M. (1999). Philosophy in the flesh: the embodied mind and its challenge to Western thought. New York: Basic Books. Liotti, M. & Tucker, D. M. (1994). Emotion in asymmetric corticolimbic networks. In R. J. Davidson & K. Hugdahl (eds.), Human brain laterality (389-424). New York: Oxford. Luu, P. & Tucker, D. M. (2003). Self-regulation by the medial frontal cortex: limbic representation of motive set-points. In M. Beauregard (ed.), Consciousness, emotional self-regulation and the brain. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Marin, O. & Rubenstein, J. L. (2001). A long, remarkable journey: tangential migration in the telencephalon. Nature Reviews. Neuroscience, 2(11), 780-790. Mesulam, M. M. (2000). Behavioral neuroanatomy: large-scale networks, association, cortex, frontal syndromes, the limbic system, and hemispheric specializations. In M. M. Mesulam (ed.), Principles of behavioral and cognitive neurology (1-120). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Miller, R. (1991). Cortico-hippocampal interplay and the representation of contexts in the brain. Berlin: Springer-Verlag. Miller, R. (1993). Striatal dopamine in reward and attention: a system for understanding the symptomatology of acute schizophrenia and mania. International Review of Neurobiology, 35, 161-278. Mishkin, M. (1982). A memory system in the monkey. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, B: Biological Sciences, 298(1089), 83-95. Nauta, W. J. H. & Karten, H. J. (1970). A general profile of the vertebrate brain, with sidelights on the ancestry of cerebral cortex. In G. C. Quarton, T. Melnechuck & G. Adelman (eds.), The neurosciences (7-26). New York: Rockefeller University Press. Pandya, D. N. & Seltzer, B. (1982). Association areas of the cerebral cortex. Trends in Neural Science, 5, 386-390. Pandya, D. N. & Yeterian, E. H. (1984). Proposed neural circuitry for spatial memory in the primate brain. Neuropsychologia, 22(2), 109-122.

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Pandya, D. N. & Yeterian, E. H. (1985). Architecture and connections of cortical association areas. In A. Peters & E. G. Jones (eds.), Cerebral cortex. Volume 4. Association and auditory cortices (3-61). New York: Plenum Press. Passingham, R. E. (1987). Two cortical systems for directing movement. In C. Foundation (ed.), Motor areas of the cerebral cortex (151-164). New York: John Wiley and sons. Deacon, T. W. (1989). Holism and associationism in neuropsychology: an anatomical synthesis. In E. Perecman (ed.), Integrating theory and practice in clinical neuropsychology. Hillsdale, New Jersey, USA: Erlbaum. Sanides, F. (1970). Functional architecture of motor and sensory cortices in primates in the light of a new concept of neocortex evolution. In C. R. Noback & W. Montagna (eds.), The primate brain: advances in primatology, vol. 1 (137-208). New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts. Semmes, J. (1968). Hemispheric specialization: a possible clue to mechanism. Neuropsychologia, 6, 11-26. Shima, K., Mushiake, H., Saito, N. & Tanji, J. (1996). Role for cells in the presupplementary motor area in updating motor plans. Proceedings of the National Academy of Science USA, 93(16), 8694-8698. Squire, L. R. (1987). Memory and brain. New York: Oxford University Press. Steriade, M. & McCarley, R. W. (1990). Brainstem control of wakefulness and sleep. New York: Plenum. Tanji, J., Shima, K. & Mushiake, H. (1996). Multiple cortical motor areas and temporal sequencing of movements. Brain Research. Cognitive Brain Research, 5(1-2), 117-122. Tucker, D. M. (1992). Developing emotions and cortical networks. In M. Gunnar & C. Nelson (eds.), Developmental behavioral neuroscience: Minnesota Symposium on Child Psychology, vol. 24 (75-127). Hillsdale, New Jersey, USA: Erlbaum. Tucker, D. M. (2001). Motivated anatomy: a core-and-shell model of corticolimbic architecture. In G. Gainotti (ed.), Handbook of neuropsychology, 2nd ed., vol. 5: Emotional behavior and its disorders. (125-160). Amsterdam: Elsevier. Tucker, D. M. (2002). Embodied meaning: an evolutionary-developmental analysis of adaptive semantics. In T. Givon & B. Malle (eds.), The evolution of language out of pre-language. Amsterdam: J. Benjamins. Tucker, D. M. (2007). Mind from body: experience from neural structure. New York: Oxford University Press. Tucker, D. M., Frishkoff, G. A. & Luu, P. (2008). Microgenesis of language: vertical integration of neurolinguistic mechanisms across the neuraxis. In B. Stemmer & H. A. Whitaker (eds.), Handbook of the neuroscience of language. New York: Oxford.

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Chapter 17 Process and individuality MICHEL WEBER Center for Practical Philosophy “Chromatiques Whiteheadiennes”, Brussels Alfred North Whitehead’s (1861–1947) organic philosophy has become more and more widely acknowledged as the most potent form of process philosophy – but this by no means implies that all its challenges are properly acknowledged, or even that its failures are explicitly denounced and surpassed. Of exceptional importance for philosophy and psychology alike is the assessment of the question of individuality (and of personality). The conditions of possibility of individuality have been – and, to a significant extent, still are – addressed through a simplistic substantialistic framework. And when they were not – Hume’s figure stands out here – the entire picture seems to collapse. This paper attempts to define how far Whiteheadian process thought can rejuvenate that crucial debate with the help of one simple stroke of insight: “process and individuality require each other. In separation all meaning evaporates” (MT 97). Individuality Without individuals, the use of any language whatsoever seems irremediably compromised. Accordingly, it is not surprising that a fair part of the history of philosophy can be reconstructed through the single lens of the evolution of the concept of individual. The concept names the existence of objective, i.e., identifiable, particulars in everyday experience and, by extension, in more refined (i.e., abstract) forms of experiences such as scientific experience. Experience discloses for sure becoming, flux, variability, change – but some patterns can be identified and some individuals seem totally stable, if not in direct sense-perception, at the very least through intellectual cognition. Hence the question that promptly imposed itself in the history of thought: how to articulate these two ontological dimensions? Can we understand the togetherness (in the strong sense of the word) of being and becoming? Or should we rather be satisfied to explain (away) being by be-

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coming – or becoming by being? When Plato (427–347 bce) faced the dilemma expressed by the (non-historical) dialogue between the Ionian Heraclitus (all things flow: there is nothing but a never-ending flux) and the Italic Parmenides (the One is ungenerable and imperishable, unshakable, neither was nor will be since it is whole now, either perfectly whole or not at all; equally poised from the center in every directions…), he choose to articulate the two claims in a system that still has strong remnants nowadays: a two-world theory in which becoming is apparent while solely Being is ultimately real. From the perspective of contemporary psychology, the leading philosopher seems to be still(!) Descartes (1596–1650), whose worldview is thoroughly dualistic (there are two separate substances: the extended nonthinking substance and the thinking non-extended substance): (cf. a certain computational metaphor32). In consciousness studies, for instance, he remains the most cited figure, while the literature is fond of noticing that the contemporary discussion is defined by the same set of theoretical options that became established in early modern philosophy, ranging from materialism to epiphenomenalism to various forms of attribute or substance dualism. Even idealism remains on the table if we include the extreme forms of social and linguistic constructionism, where the world-creating subject of traditional modern philosophy is replaced by the world-creating language or social praxis. In short, it seems that scholarly debate has not so much reached an impasse as remained at the one reached in the 17th century. So much so that, given the massive effort currently invested in research and debate, the lack of progress towards a general (and generally accepted) theory of consciousness begins to make consciousness look like a kind of 21st century Philosopher’s Stone, whose hidden nature seems to hold the key to the greatest mysteries, but continues to elude us. As we will suggest below, the key to the understanding of the natural state of consciousness, that we call consciousness-zero (short for consciousness degree-zero), cannot be found in a substantial activity but is to be profiled with the help of a spectrum of possible states of consciousness (cf. Weber & Weekes, forthcoming). For philosophers, individuality has to be granted in order to meet the requirements of common sense and, more importantly for most of them (a priority that should need of course to be properly assessed), in order to al32

Some notable exceptions are worth mentioning (all having an implicit or explicit Whiteheadian ring): J. Brown of course (who has recently published Process and the Authentic Life. Toward a Psychology of Value in ontos’ process thought series, Brown 2005), G. Edelman (1992), Pickering (1997), Karl H. Pribam’ (1991), Francisco J. Varela (1991), Max Velman (2000).

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low recognition (and hence science) and responsibility (hence ethics and social stability – the two being strictly correlated). If nothing is recognizable, no discourse can be held on the world and nobody can be hold responsible for anything (there is neither anybody nor anything to enter the epistemological dance). According to the Greek intuition, there is one single rationality (or “logos”) that is at work both in the world and in human beings, allowing the macrocosmos and the microcosmos to be (with local exceptions) in tune (hence science and ethics constitute meaningful strivings). But this view has been obliterated many times: G. Bruno and C. Darwin stand out, but Planck, Bohr, Poincaré and Einstein should not be forgotten. For psychologists, the debate is usually narrowed down to the level of the paraphernalia of the conscious embodied individual that is the human being. Of special relevance in this context is the concept of self in its relationship with the questions of consciousness and agency. How is it that, conscious or not, the subject’s idiosyncrasies tend to pervade all the subject’s actions? What matters most? The material – embodied – self, the social – interpersonal – self, or the spiritual – transcendental – self? Are these concepts naming fundamentally different phenomena (or even fundamentally different beings)? Or are these overlapping realities (or processes)? In that case, is there a core reality (a “pure” Ego) or should one be satisfied with peeling the ontological onion as far as one chooses to do so? When the subject withdraws from all social intercourse in order to meditate or simply in order to sleep, does she remain the same “individual”, does the subject become more what s/he truly is? In a similar context Arendt (1971) reminds us of the “curious sentence that Cicero ascribed to Cato”: “never is a man more active than when he does nothing, never is he less alone than when he is by himself” (numquam se plus agere quam nihil cum ageret, numquam minus solum esse quam cum solus esset). William James’ (1842–1910) psycho-philosophical legacy has to be explicitly mentioned here since it displays an acute sense of what is at stake in these matters: from the “Consciousness of self” chapter of the Principles (1890) to the celebrated “Does ‘Consciousness’ Exist?” paper (1904) and the posthumous Some Problems of Philosophy (1911), one sees the ever-expanding quest of an adventurous thinker in regions yet to be named for scientific – and salvific – purposes. More precisely, James might be the most important link between the two trends that have pulled apart psychology ever since it departed from philosophy: on the one hand, the necessity to adopt new standards in order to engage with the scientific challenge that was

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epitomized by Kant; on the other hand, to remain faithful to the uniqueness of the human existence. In sum: to do justice to quantities without obliterating qualities – better: to show precisely how quantities shelter the emergence of qualities that in turn settle in quantities. Now, the basic mental construction that has framed most of the Western understanding of the intricate web of questions mentioned above is pretty straightforward: substantialistic thinking. The concept of substance and its most enduring pattern – materialism – provides one single answer whose applicability nobody doubts. Directly inspired by the subjectpredicate linguistic construction, the substance-attribute mode of thought has literally carved Western culture (at least) since the fifth century bce. According to substantialism, at the core of any genuine reality, there is a stable base or platform that will successively accept or loose properties. The core is purely necessary; the properties are purely contingent. What defines above all an individual (etymology is helpful here: the Ancients spoke of atomon and scholastics of individuum) is that indivisible and hence enduring core. But, alas, applicability has to be carefully distinguished from adequacy and from consistency and coherence… One should not underestimate the link between predicative languages, Aristotelian logic and substance metaphysics. The substantialistic account of individuality (and consciousness-zero) can indeed be boiled down to a Boolean triad33: the principle of identity states that we come to know all things in so far as they have some individuality (i.e., unity and identity); the principle of contradiction (somewhat the negative side of the principle of identity) claims that the same attribute cannot, at the same time and in the same respect, belong and not belong to the same subject; according to the principle of excluded middle, there cannot be an intermediate between contradictories: of one subject we must either affirm or deny any one predicate.34 Hence: individuality is a well-defined, absolute, independent entity (principle of identity); one cannot be at the same time a genuine individual and being dependant on something external to oneself (noncontradiction); and one has to be either genuinely individual or not (excluded middle). The technical impact lies in the concepts of internal and external relations: substantialism makes the meshing of the two impossible ex hypothesi (exactly, Whitehead systematizes such a two-fold relation33

The simplest way of discussing this is to take a quick look at Aristotelian logic, which George Boole (1854) defined by three principles in his An Investigation of the Laws of Thought on Which are Founded The Mathematical Theories of Logic and Probabilities. 34 Cf., respectively, Metaphysics Beta, 4 and Iota, 1; Metaphysics Gamma, 3 and Posterior Analytics I, 77a10-22; Metaphysics Gamma, 7 and Posterior Analytics I, 77a22-25.

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ship, cf. Bickhard, 2003). Accordingly: consciousness is a well-defined entity (principle of identity); one cannot be at the same time conscious and unconscious (non-contradiction); and one has to be either conscious or unconscious (excluded middle). In sum, substantialism, individualism and consciousness-zero are strictly correlated concepts. Now, with the help of a multi-layered processual – genetic – perspective, it becomes feasible to show how individuality is a construct: first at the level of the epochal events themselves; second at the level of the societies (of societies) of these events (see infra). Likewise, consciousness-zero is a construct in the double sense that it is processed by developmental structures in ontogeny, evolution and socialization and that it is a concept carved out, precisely, by the rationality at work in the zero state. In other words, the reader should keep in mind during our discussion the idea of a spectrum of consciousness unfolding within the zero-state (actualizing it) and without the zero-state (from the perspective of the continuum in which it is inscribed). The spectrum is furthermore compatible with clinical tools such as the Glasgow Coma Scale,35 but the question of its quantification cannot be analyzed here. Before we turn to the process paradigm, let us insist once again on the high applicability of the ontology of substance: not only does it enjoy a very “easy-going” relationship with everyday experience and its commonsensical understanding, it has also allowed the emergence of Greek and Renaissance scientific movements (and their Enlightenment and Positivist extensions) and even provided a beautiful intellectual gate in religious and theological matters. So much so that Jung, for one, was interested in the alchemical process that is transubstantiation36: after philosopher-scientists like Descartes, Leibniz and Newton, he saw the importance of the concept of substance for the Western theological Weltanschauung. But, as we have already pointed out, applicability neither guarantees adequacy (provided that it could be reached of course) nor coherence. Process It is indeed precisely here that Process and Reality strikes: although Whitehead’s knowledgeableness in the history of ideas leaves at times a bit to be desired – he does not for instance differentiate sharply enough the

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Depending on the patient to assess, one scale is preferable to another. See A. Schweiger’s paper in this

volume. 36

E.g. in his Psychologische Typen (1921), cf. Bensaude-Vincent & Stengers, 1993.

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Greek and the Modern concepts of substance – , he makes it clear that Descartes’ ontology is totally incoherent: Logical contradictions, except as temporary slips of the mind – plentiful, though temporary – are the most gratuitous of errors; and usually they are trivial. Thus, after criticism, systems do not exhibit mere illogicalities. They suffer from inadequacy and incoherence. […] Incoherence is the arbitrary disconnection of first principles. In modern philosophy Descartes’ two kind of substances, corporeal and mental, illustrate incoherence. There is, in Descartes’ philosophy, no reason why there should not be a one-substance world, only corporeal, or a one-substance world, only mental. According to Descartes, a substantial individual “requires nothing but itself in order to exist.” Thus this system makes a virtue of its incoherence. But on the other hand, the facts seem connected, while Descartes’ system does not; for example, in the treatment of the body-mind problem. The Cartesian system obviously says something that is true. But its notions are too abstract to penetrate into the nature of things. (PR 6)

Let us carefully notice that Whitehead does not claim that the concept substance has to be totally disposed of, but rather that the concept has to be relativized: “The services to mankind rendered by the Newtonian System of Nature are incalculable” (AI 156). Although the concept of substance provides no access to the ontological ultimate, it has to be reconstructed for pragmatic purposes. Whitehead’s categories (ultimate or otherwise) are notoriously difficult to sketch in a single paper’s section, but his basic worldview isn’t. Like all thinkers worthy of the name, Whitehead recognized the urgency to do somehow justice to both becoming and to being. With Bergson and Alexander (to name only two philosophers with who he enjoyed special Wahlverwandtschaften), he envisioned the ultimacy of time, i.e., of creativity and becoming. In other words, he also claimed that if we start from substance-like premises, i.e., from “being”, we will not understand “becoming” (as the history of philosophy eloquently proves); but if we rather choose to proceed with process-like premises, i.e., from “becoming”, both dimensions can be coherently articulated. If we turn specifically to the question of individuality, it seems at first hand that process thought, by exploding the substantialistic framework, makes any reconstruction of identity difficult, if not impossible. (Hume’s critique of substantialism and his redefinition of individuality as a flux of perceived contents remains a landmark.) And indeed, Whitehead’s philosophy is frequently presented as an unfortunate aggravation of the problem. On the contrary, this paper argues that, thanks to its epochal theory,

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Whitehead’s processism institutes a significant improvement both from the perspective of substantialism and from the perspective of Greek or contemporary streamlined processism. A few further distinctions are in order before we can show this. We have so far worked with unspecified concepts of being and becoming; it is about time that some technicalities are introduced. As a matter of fact, the basic criterion is time, i.e., whether time is taken “seriously” or not, whether there is a creative advance of nature or rather a bare “block-universe”. And, Whitehead argues, time is epochal, i.e., involves discontinuous processes.37 But let us not anticipate. Among the various forms “process thought” has taken (Rescher, 1996), the non-temporal ones – read the non-epochal forms, i.e., the continuous ones – are the far most numerous. The Greeks had no linear irreversible time, while the Moderns used only a spatialized form a temporality (Koyré’s premises are quite significant from that regard: his masterpiece addresses only the opening of space). Historically speaking, it is rather difficult to define when exactly the variable “time” has acquired significance in a domain other than eschatological. There are various candidates: the irruption of the notion of “progress” (1771),38 of the second law of thermodynamics (1865)39 or, more doubtfully, of Einstein’s special relativity (1905) – a relativity that neither Bergson nor Whitehead nor Prigogine accept at face value. Strictly within theoretical physics, however, the problem of time’s arrow (and of the general temporal symmetry or asymmetry of processes), has a sharp christening date: Clausius, 1865. What matters is the shift from universal determinism and reversibility to relativism, irreversibility and indeterminism. Without these concepts, genuine novelty cannot be conceived – which does not mean of course that it wasn’t actually happening. Now, even when time was acknowledged as an ultimate feature of reality, its ep37

Cf. of course SMW and PR, but also his 1926 “Time” conference (Brightman 1927). Although Ludwig Edelstein claimed in his posthumous book The Idea of Progress in Classical Antiquity (1967) that “the ancients formulated most of the thoughts and sentiments that later generations down to the nineteenth century were accustomed to associate with the blessed or cursed word – progress”, eschatological origins put aside, the idea of progress or unbounded improvement (of individuals and societies alike) was brooding in the Dutch Republic (1579–1632), got expressed especially by Priestley (1771), was then fully specified by Condorcet (1793) and eventually sanctified by Spencer (1855) and Darwin (1859). Creativity – and the free rational subject – lie now at the heart of human existence and this has necessarily a strong impact on how society has to be thought: there has to be some form of enhanced bottom-up capillarity; the social order cannot be given anymore from above, once and for all. Cf. Mason, 2003. 39 The so-called Second Law of Thermodynamics embodies the fact that the universe gets a little bit more disorderly all the time. Its history runs from Sadi Carnot’s (1796–1832) and Rudolf Clausius’ (1822–1888) first works to their expansion by William Thomson (1824–1907) in 1852 and the actual formulation of the entropy law by Clausius in 1865 (known now as the principle of Carnot-Clausius of the degradation of energy). Cf. Prigogine & Stengers, 1986, pp. 180 sq. 38

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ochal consequence did not follow: the atomic mechanicism of Modern science understood the Universe as a lifeless (totally reversible) machine secured by external relations (basically allowing and requiring the fragmentation of gnoseological fields) and carved by a rational creator. In conclusion, two broad concepts of process are useful to interpret competing worldviews. On the one hand, a weak concept that simply pushes forward becoming, flux, change, unrest, movement, you name it, and does so in a spatialized way, i.e., under the main guise of continuity, of infinite divisibility. Its historical (but necessary) corollary has been a closed world. Its paradigm is the trans-formation or meta-morphosis of a pre-existing material. A good example is constituted by mechanical waves, that continuously (sometimes rhythmically) change patterns and do so with the same building-blocks (molecules of water). On the other hand, a strong concept that promotes the ultimacy of becoming in a temporal way – read: durational way –, i.e., under the guise of discontinuity. Its necessary corollary is an open universe and its paradigm percolation. A good example is constituted by the constant re-creation of the flame of a candle or, more to the point, by quantum phenomena, which become abruptly and randomly. Change in an open universe is no more simply trans-formative, it is creation. Accordingly, we use the concept of percolation in order to clearly differentiate epochal processes from continuous processes. Percolation advantageously synthesizes in one word the Whiteheadian scansion becoming / perishing / being, i.e., concrescence / satisfaction / transition. In the light of these distinctions, we can now reassess the question of individuality. In the case of the weak concept of process, individuality becomes indeed a fuzzy concept and substantial materialism still has a point. For instance, Rescher’s discussion of Strawson (according to whom individuality does require material objects (Rescher, 1996, pp. 60-64; cf. Seibt, 2004), is not fully convincing simply because Rescher advocates a weak – or more inclusive – concept of process. But with the strong concept of process – Whiteheadian percolation –, individuality is unequivocally granted. For one thing, it is a matter of principle: “personal unity is an inescapable fact” (AI186; cf. the full quote below) and Whitehead intends to give new roots to what Griffin has called the “hard-core common-sense notions” (Griffin & Smith, 1989, esp. pp. 90-91) to qualify the universal and primordial beliefs that human beings do not question in practice: their individuality and fundamental freedom, the causal efficacy of their actions, the existence of values and of a temporal drift. For another, individuality is back at two complementary conceptual levels: at the micro level of the ac-

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tual occasions (Whitehead’s monadic-but-open events) and at the macro level of the variously structured societies emerging out of these events. Relativity Last but not least, we need to show how process and individuality are meshed – not simply juxtaposed – by Whiteheadian percolation. Whitehead’s motto – “process and individuality require each other” – gives rise to three complementary interpretations, parallel to the concepts the philosopher borrows to Plato and Locke – becoming, being and perishing – and to their systematic articulation. First, an individual per se is an individual in process in the strong sense of the word, i.e., in becoming, i.e., in concrescence. Technically, it is an actual occasion subject prehending its past world (“the many become one”) and creatively overcoming it (“and are increased by one”). This process is well-defined and indeed can be said to meet the Boolean criteriology introduced above minus the excluded middle: its spontaneity is foreign to any such constraint. In sum, on the one hand, the genetic analysis of concrescent actualities operates within the territory paced by the principle of identity and the principle of non contradiction; on the other, the genetic process itself is worthy of the concept of the non-rational opacity of experience. Opacity is rooted in the genuine novelty that manifests itself in the world and that gives its meaning to the strong pluralism advocated by James (again: a pluralism featuring a constant renewal of the crude variety of experience). In other words, non-rationality embodies the intrinsic – or primordial – opacity of concrete reality (cf. Weber 2004, pp. 203-220). Second, when this process of becoming has ended, the fulfilled subjective individual perishes and topples into objectivity. The actual occasion object replaces the actual occasion subject: the concresced individual does not vanish, it is now of the order of being and it influences later processes through transition (the concrescing subject was devoid of any causal efficacy). The past is, by definition, settled. This process completely meets the Boolean criteriology, basically because spontaneity is replaced by efficacy – and opacity by transparency. In Whitehead’s own words: The individual immediacy of an occasion is the final unity of subjective form, which is the occasion as an absolute reality. This immediacy is its moment of sheer individuality, bounded on either side by essential relativity. The occasion arises from relevant objects, and perishes into the status of an object for other occasions. But it enjoys its decisive moment of absolute self-attainment as emotional unity. As used here the words ‘individual’ and

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‘atom’ have the same meaning, that they apply to composite things with an absolute reality which their components lack. These words properly apply to an actual entity in its immediacy of self-attainment when it stands out as for itself alone, with its own affective self-enjoyment. The term ‘monad’ also expresses this essential unity at the decisive moment, which stands between its birth and its perishing. The creativity of the world is the throbbing emotion of the past hurling itself into a new transcendent fact. It is the flying dart, of which Lucretius speaks, hurled beyond the bounds of the world. (AI177)

The basic interpretational problem is thus straightforward: how to understand the meshing of, on the one hand, the efficacy of the past pushing the present in the furrow of habit and of, on the other, the creativity of the present that accounts for the possibility to break all past behavioral patterns. The answer lies in the vector-structure of prehensions. Third, as a result, becoming and being, actualities subject and actualities object unambiguously require each other; their prehensions weave the cosmic stuff itself (no antecedent static cabinet is needed, cf. AI276). Relativity is the key-word: Any description of the unity will require the many actualities; and any description of the many will require the notion of the unity from which importance and purpose is derived. By reason of the essential individuality of the many things, there are conflicts of finite realizations. Thus the summation of the many into the one, and the derivation of importance from the one into the many, involves the notion of disorder, of conflict, of frustration. (MT51)

In Process and Reality’s categoreal scheme, this mutual requirement receives a double formulation: the principle of process, according to which “how an actual entity becomes constitutes what that actual entity is[…;] its “being” is constituted by its “becoming”” (PR23) and the principle of relativity, according to which “it belongs to the nature of a “being” that it is a potential for every “becoming””. (PR22; cf., e.g., PR148) In other words, it is through becoming that an actuality constitutes its being while all beings are potential constituents for new becomings. Never such a strong codependence was more subtly exploited. Let us furthermore remark that this principal synergy seals a radical pluralism that is not guaranteed at all by other categories of the scheme (like the ontological principle). It suggests thus the following hierarchy of ontological principles: creative advance, category of the Ultimate, principle of process and principle of relativity, ontological principle and reformed subjectivist principle, and eventually the other categories of PR Part I. As James claims, we live forwards, but we understand backwards: creativity

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will necessarily remain a conceptually nebulous affair because it involves a constitutive opacity. Creativity per se, i.e., creativity in the making is ultimately beyond our categorical attempts precisely because it is in the making. We fully rationalize only creativity made. Conclusion Whiteheadian organic philosophy exploits a two-fold vision: one the one hand it is a Philosophy of Organism proper (Whitehead does not speak of “process philosophy”40); on the other hand, it promotes the creative advance of nature, i.e., its complete openness. In short, it is thus a matter of organic growth treated conceptually (for the sake of the quality of experience) and logically (for the sake of quantitative dimensions of experience).41 From a historical perspective, this hybrid dimension makes it akin to the most promising characteristics of, respectively, Greece and Renaissance. Whitehead is the heir of Greek organicism, the promoter of the destruction of all bifurcations. But Whitehead inherits also from Bruno and Darwin the destruction of the cosmos (i.e., the opening of the world) and the geometrization of space (i.e., its homogenization). Helio-cosmocentrism institutes an infinite mechanical universe, free from the Aristotelian hierarchy (i.e., topology) of natural laws. This hybridism, which at first sight seems contradictory (since it both argues for and against a cosmos), is the spring from where its applicability gushes. It is worthy of Joyce’s chaosmos. SMW offers a beautifully synthetic passage that we now peruse by means of conclusion. There are two principles inherent in the very nature of things, recurring in some particular embodiments whatever field we explore – the spirit of change, and the spirit of conservation. There can be nothing real without both. Mere change without conservation is a passage from nothing to nothing. Its final integration yields mere transient non-entity. Mere conservation without change cannot conserve. For after all, there is a flux of circumstance, and the freshness of being evaporates under mere repetition. The character of existent reality is composed of organisms enduring through the flux of things. (SMW201) 40

PR’s leitmotive is “according to the philosophy of organism”; B. Loomer coined the term “process theology” and then later tried to replace it with process-relational. 41 Lowe underlines the importance of D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson’s epoch-making book On Growth and Form [1917], that pioneered the treatment of biological growth and form in mathematical terms, to understand PR. Thompson was a good friend of Whitehead from his undergraduate days at Trinity. One shouldn’t forget either the everlasting impact the Timaeus had on Whitehead’s soul. Cf. Lowe, 1985 & 1990, I, pp. 81-83 & II, p. 86.

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Although the main concrete fact is process, flux and change, this does not mean either that being, stability and conservation are non-factual, nor that it could be so. On the one hand, philosophy needs to do justice to all experiential data; on the other, it would make no sense to speak of a pure difference, without reference to repetition – or of pure repetition, without reference to difference (this is the problem of rationality-zero). On the top of it, the gearing of change and conservation allows growth. As such, it is a necessary (but not sufficient) condition of the creative advance. Whitehead now focuses on identity and individualization with the help of a plastic distinction between low-grade and high-grade processes: The low type of organisms has achieved a self-identity dominating their whole physical life. Electrons, molecules, crystals, belong to this type. They exhibit a massive and complete sameness. In the higher types, where life appears, there is greater complexity. Thus, though there is a complex, enduring pattern, it has retreated into deeper recesses of the total fact. In a sense, the self-identity of a human being is more abstract than that of a crystal. It is the life of the spirit. It relates rather to the individualization of the creative activity; so that the changing circumstances received from the environment, are differentiated from the living personality, and are thought of as forming its perceived field. (SMW201)

The grades of complexity and intensity are correlated with the grades of permanence. The self-identity of low-grade actualities is not really problematic, says Whitehead: they basically reproduce themselves endlessly; difference is less likely to occur here. Hence, the self-identity of high-grade actualities is – relatively speaking – more abstract. The philosopher then provides an interesting exemplification: In truth, the field of perception and the perceiving mind are abstractions which, in the concrete, combine into the successive bodily events. The psychological field, as restricted to sense-objects and passing emotions, is the minor permanence, barely rescued from the nonentity of mere change; and the mind is the major permanence, permeating that complete field, whose endurance is the living soul. But the soul would wither without fertilization from its transient experiences. The secret of the higher organisms lies in their two grades of permanences. By this means the freshness of the environment is absorbed. (SMW201)

Whitehead’s neutral monism is, just like James’, the perfect antidote to the bifurcation of nature, and especially to the mind-body problem. According to him, there is only a difference of degree between the low-grade individualization of the body and the high-grade individualization of the soul (what Leibniz called a “dominant monad” and what Whitehead calls a

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“society of presiding occasions” cf. Hartshorne, 1936, pp. 193-220). Hence, the psychological struggle to cope with the creativity disclosed in experience. Common sense testifies for the need of a worldview that allows both the local stabilities disclosed in sense-perception and the necessary openness required by the conditions of possibility of meaning. As Whitehead says: In our account of human experience we have attenuated human personality into a genetic relation between occasions of human experience. Yet personal unity is an inescapable fact. The Platonic and Christian doctrines of the Soul, the Epicurean doctrine of a Concilium of subtle atoms, the Cartesian doctrine of Thinking Substance, the Humanitarian doctrine of the Rights of man, the general Common Sense of civilized mankind, – these doctrines between them dominate the whole span of Western thought. Evidently there is a fact to be accounted for. Any philosophy must provide some doctrine of personal identity. In some sense there is a unity in the life of each man from birth to death. The two modern philosophers who most consistently reject the notion of a self-identical Soul-Substance are Hume and William James. But the problem remains for them, as it does for the philosophy of organism, to provide an adequate account of this undoubted personal unity, maintaining itself amidst the welter of circumstance. (AI186-187)

Whitehead launches then an ambiguous speculation driven by Plato’s “perplexed and obscure” concept of Receptacle or Locus qua “natural matrix for all transitions of life” (AI187 adapting the Timaeus). A bit like Leibniz (who is the usual exemplification of the historical depth of Whiteheadian philosophy of organism), he apparently suddenly realizes that his previous speculations do not give full justice to the substantial manifestations of experience, and especially to individuality qua personality. In conclusion, this paper has made two main claims. On the one hand, the relativity of individuality and process is essential to understand everyday experience; on the other, this fact is embedded in Whitehead’s organic philosophy, that furthermore argues for a very strong concept of individual, at the epochal as well as at the societal level. References Arendt, H. (1971). The life of the mind. San Diego, New York, London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Bensaude-Vincent, B. & Stengers, I. (1993). Histoire de la chimie. Paris: Éditions La Découverte.

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Bickhard, M.H. (2003). Some notes on internal and external relations and representation. Consciousness and Emotion, 4(1), 101-110. Boole, G. (1854). An investigation of the laws of thought on which are founded the mathematical theories of logic and probabilities. Cambridge: Macmillan. Edelstein, L. (1967). The idea of progress in classical antiquity. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Einstein, A. (1905). Elektrodynamik bewegter Körper. Annalen der Physik, 17 (4-17), 891-921. Griffin, D. R. & Smith, H. (1989). Primordial truth and postmodern theology. Albany, New York: State University of New York Press. Hartshorne, C. (1936), The compound individual. In F. S. C. Northrop et al. (eds.), Philosophical essays for Alfred North Whitehead (193-220). New York: Longmans, Green and Co.; reprinted in Hartshorne, C. (1972) Whitehead’s philosophy: selected essays, 1935-1970. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press. James, W. (1890). Principles of psychology. New York: H. Holt James, W. (1904). Does “consciousness” exist? Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods, 1(18), 477-491. James, W. (1911). Some problems of philosophy: a beginning of an introduction to philosophy. New York: Longmans, Green & Co. Jung, C.G. (1921). Psychologische Typen. Zürich: Rascher. Lowe, V.A. (1985/1990). A. N. Whitehead: The man and his work. Volume I : 18611910 ; Volume II : 1910-1947 (edited by J. B. Schneewind). Baltimore, Maryland and London: Johns Hopkins University Press. Mason, J.H. (2003). The value of creativity: the origins and emergence of a modern belief. Aldershot, Hampshire: Ashgate. Pickering, J. (ed.) (1997). The authority of experience: essays on Buddhism and psychology. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Pribam, K.H. (1991). Brain and perception: holonomy and the structure in figural processing. Hillsdale, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlaum Associates. Prigogine, I.& Stengers, I. (1986). La nouvelle alliance. Métamorphose de la science. Paris: Gallimard. Rescher, N. (1996). Process metaphysics. an introduction to process philosophy. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Seibt, J. (2004). Process and particulars. In M. Weber (ed.), After Whitehead: Rescher on process metaphysics (113-134). Process Thought I. Frankfurt / Paris / Lancaster: ontos verlag Thompson, D’Arcy Wentworth. (1917). On growth and form. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Varela, F.J. (1991). Embodied mind: cognitive science and human experience. Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA: MIT Press. Velman, M. (2000). Understanding consciousness. London: Routledge. Weber, M. & Weekes, A. (eds.) (forthcoming). Primary glimmerings: consciousness studies from a Whiteheadian process perspective. Whitehead Psychology Nexus Studies II. Weber, M. (2004). James’ Non-rationality and its religious extremum in the light of the concept of pure experience. In J. Carrette (ed.), William James and the varieties of religious experience. a centenary celebration (203-220). London & New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Whitehead, A.N. (1929) Process and Reality. An Essay in Cosmology, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, and New York, Macmillan, 1929. Reprint: New York, Macmillan Free Press, 1969. Corrected edition: Edited by David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne, New York and London, The Free Press. A division of Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc. and Collier Macmillan Publishers, 1978 (abbreviated PR). Whitehead, A.N. (1933) Modes of Thought [Six lectures delivered in Wellesley College, Mass., 1937-1938, and two lectures delivered in the University of Chicago, 1933]. New York: Macmillan, and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1938. Reprint: New York: The Free Press, 1968 (abbreviated MT). Whitehead, A.N. (1933). Adventures of ideas. New York: Macmillan Company and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Reprint: New York: The Free Press, 1967. [Expands the material delivered in (i) four Mary Flexner Lectures at Bryn Mawr College, during the session 1929-1930; (ii) the Davies Lecture in Philosophy, at the Institute of Arts and Sciences, Columbia University, March, 1932; (iii) a lecture at the Harvard Business School; (iv) as the presidential address to the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association, at New Haven, December, 1931.] (abbreviated AI). Whitehead, A.N. (1927). Time. In E.S. Brightman (ed.), Proceedings of the Sixth International Congress of Philosophy (59-64). New York & London: Longmans, Green and Co.

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Part II. Biography of Jason W. Brown

Chapter 18 Jason Walter Brown: an authentic life MARIA PACHALSKA University of Gdansk, Poland

Introduction It is the usual practice, for perhaps obvious reasons, to include in a volume such as this a biographical sketch of the honoree. As a general rule, such a biography is laudatory in tone, brief, and focused on scientific or scholarly achievements, with a minimum of personal information, rather as though one were to read off the high points from the person’s CV. A few anecdotes may be added to demonstrate that the honoree is/was a good colleague, teacher, raconteur, or what-have-you, but the private person is largely left untouched. The present study is different by design, in a way that particularly fits its subject. According to process thinking, thought emerges from life, bottom up, and then forms in memory an essential part of the matrix of remembered experience in which not only subsequent thinking, but indeed the whole of subsequent experience takes shape. Compartmentalizing life into public and private spheres is convenient and not infrequently necessary, but it is a move made at the expense of truth. The public persona and the private individual are woven from the same fabric. Jason Brown’s theory is thus, in its own lights, inseparable from the life of the individual who developed it. That is why this biography must be just that, a bio-graphe, a picture of a life, based in part on memory, in part on documents, in part on reflection. Many of the quotations given in what follows come from letters, sketches for an autobiography that was never written, remembered conversations, and other such sources seldom quoted in scientific work. Whether or not this renders the present study more or less useful is, of course, a judgment for the reader. Childhood Jason Walter Brown was born on the first night of Passover in the early morning of April 14, 1938, in the lower east side of Manhattan, the oldest of four children. Two years later his brother Richard was born.

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The stoops and alleys of the Grand Concourse in the Bronx, where Jason spent the first formative years of his life, have not changed much in terms of bricks and mortar, but the largely Jewish neighborhood is just a memory. The life Jason remembers from his childhood, with air-raid drills, victory gardens, ice delivered daily to the front door, coal in the basement, schoolboys in knickers, the playground bullies, fitful nights on the fireescape in the moist heat of summer, the fear of polio, the smell of sawdust on the floor of his grandfather’s diner – all this is gone, replaced by a different reality. As Jason himself puts it: What do I know of that dreaming child? Old men, not children, write memoirs of their childhood and the child recounted is writ of fact and fantasy by the errant hand of an aging memory. A child given stories of its childhood risks losing the original for the copy, contaminated by a time before memory could distinguish a feeling and a description, or pain and pleasure from their recurrence in symbol and metaphor, dream, imagination, all going in to what became for me, as for all children, a myth of a childhood in which I was the hero of my own imaginary tale. How am I to resurrect the self of those early days, replaced in a parade of other children, other selves, all woven into the fabric of my being? Alas, the fragments of recall are inessential details; what I strive to recapture is unforgotten, alive, buried in the bones of my soul.

California

In 1945, the Brown family moved to Los Angeles, where Jason’s father founded and developed his business. As the business flourished in California, so did the family, to which two daughters were born, Darlene and Leslie. These were boom years in California, which in the post-war period was making the transition from a sleepy province to the most populous state in the US. The rising fortunes of the Brown family during this time took them from a wooden shack in Santa Monica at the close of the war, with splinters on the floors and sand fleas in the carpets, to a serviceable middle class home with a separate apartment for the grandparents until Jason was 14, to an elegant 18-room manor with pool, tennis court and cabana located in the luxuriant hills of Los Feliz just below the Griffith Park observatory. Sunny Southern California was a distinctly different place from the teeming streets of New York. During these youthful years Jason and his younger brother Richard attended a summer military school. The experience left a lasting impression on Jason – not necessarily a positive one as regards the military mentality, a theme that returned more than a decade later, when Jason was drafted into the Army during the Vietnam War.

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Fig. 1.

Summer military school (on the right: Jason at age 14 with his brother, Richard, about 12)

On weekends, young Jason would often awaken at 4 AM to go fishing with flour and water bait, riding his bicycle to the early morning trolley downtown to Echo Park Lake, where he had to wait until 6 AM for the park to open. As in the Bronx of his early childhood, this has become much too dangerous a place for a young boy from a middle class family to go fishing in the early morning hours, but in those days there were perch and bluefish aplenty in the lake. There were also carp, faithfully delivered to Jason’s grandmother to make gefilte fish. Jason always felt, however, that his roots were really in New York. This is one of the factors that distinguishes him from his younger siblings, especially his sisters, who were born and raised entirely in California. Richard, who was five when the family left their Bronx home for Santa Monica, had only vague memories of New York, though at several periods in his young adult life he returned there for a few years. Jason eventually returned to New York, and to this day is never happy for long outside the shadow of the Empire State Building. Father

Jason’s paternal grandparents, whose surname was Bronschtein or Braunstein, came to New York in the late 1800s from Odessa. Grandfather was an intellectual, an opera lover of openly communist sympathies, one of only two children from a family of fourteen to survive the hardships of life in Russia; Jason remembers listening to his legendary collection of Caruso

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albums, but never knew him, as he died several months before Jason’s birth. Grandmother, born in Poland, was a seamstress, older than her husband, who followed him in death a year later; according to a family legend, she whispered “ales a cholem [all is a dream]” as she died. Jason’s father, as the oldest of three children, though not a religious man in the usual sense, faithfully performed all the duties expected of an oldest son: walked his father’s empty shoes around the block to liberate his soul and said Kaddish at the Synagogue every day for two years.

Fig. 2.

Jason’s paternal grandparents: Jacob and Rachel Bronstein

Samuel Robert Brownstein, Jason’s father, was born in 1903 in New York. As a young man he knew hard times and worked in many different jobs. He dreamed of medical school, but with no financial support he had to work at whatever jobs he could find, and his plans were sacrificed to his strong feeling of obligation, first to his parents, then to his young family. Finally, he attended the Palmer College of Chiropracty and opened a practice in New York, but after two years he realized that he would never be happy and successful in that profession. He then launched a career in business, beginning as a buyer in lady’s clothing at Norton’s Department Store. He finally put aside enough money to open a lingerie business of his own, “Glydon’s,” which prompted the move to Los Angeles shortly after the end of the Second World War. There the company prospered, and the family name was further “Americanized” to Brown.

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Jason writes of his father with great feeling: Father was determined, decisive yet unassuming, reticent to a fault, not so much shy as uncomfortable, playful with women, uneasy with men, aloof from those who did not share his few enthusiasms, giving little of himself to friends, even family, inward, private, even reclusive, a man one might say unfit for business, better suited for solitary work, the aptitude of a physician, a writer or a scholar. His conversation with others was mostly interrogatory, inquisitive, asking of work and motivations, dismissive of his own accomplishments. With me he was all wonder and fascination, asking the most naive yet fundamental, unanswerable questions about the mind and brain, what is memory, how do we think, where do words come from, what is the nature of identity across sleep or time?... He was not literary, but with his boyish candor, gentleness of heart, reverence for the life around him, awe and sensitivity, he could have been a Haiku poet on a pilgrimage about the countryside. He too could have written that “no joyless forms shall regulate our living calendar”... This kindly businessman, without a grain of arrogance or spite, was for me inspirational as a reminder of the humility and consecration that nature requires of her votaries if, with a receptive heart, they are to be given mute instruction at the living throne of her deity.

Samuel Brown died in his sleep at 87 after years of debilitation and suffering. Mother

From his mother’s side, Jason remembers well his maternal grandmother, born in Lodz, Poland, a very round woman invariably dressed in black, long black hair in a bun, the signs of a hard life etched on her face, her Yiddish phrases. Three times widowed, she had seen her share of sorrow. One of her sons, Walter, from whom Jason has his middle name, died at the age of 18 from appendicitis, and a daughter, who would have been Jason’s aunt, died in infancy. At 88, bedridden with heart failure, she awoke one night to dance around the room and, like Mahler on his deathbed, sang Polish folk songs from her youth. The next morning she was dead. Sylvia, Jason’s mother, was born in New York in 1912. She later said that she could not remember a period in childhood when she was not working, beginning at age 9 in her mother’s restaurant. For most of her married life, she worked with her husband at the lingerie factory, designing patterns, entertaining clients, running much of the day-to-day business. The workers, mostly women, remained close to her for twenty years after the business was sold, with annual luncheons, gifts and get-togethers. They showed up in large numbers at her funeral to pay her a final tribute, and one of them delivered a spontaneous eulogy.

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Fig. 3.

Jason’s parents, Samuel and Sylvia Brown

By all accounts she was an extraordinary woman, smart and attractive even into her eighties, able to attract and hold the attention of small groups and large in all kinds of different social settings, a brilliant conversationalist, well read in a range of topics: history, politics, military strategy, economic relations, and many more. Thanks to his father’s scholarly bent and his mother’s love of debate, Jason grew up in a home where the talk at the dinner table was more often a debate than a conversation. She encouraged competition among the children, aware that the desire to please a parent who expected the best and allocated praise in a way that always left room for improvement was an unerring source of motivation. Jason recalls: Mother had a way of giving a compliment and leaving one still wanting approval. As a child, I showed her a poem I had written; she said it was beautiful but added, “With such talent you could make a lot of money working for Hallmark cards.” An interview on television made her happy, yet she asked, “When will you be on the Merv Griffin show?” Good but not good enough. “My boys are so smart,” she would say, “no one can read their books.” That was to cheer us up about the low sales. Then she would suggest that we write something to make money, in my case a book on “everything you wanted to know about the brain, but you couldn’t afford to ask your doctor.”

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At the same time, she created and presided over an oasis of warmth and love for the family and a wide assortment of friends. The Brown home was a magnetic and vital place for all who came there, whether a date or a schoolmate, or a dinner party for 30-40 guests, which was held almost monthly, for buyers and manufacturers in the garment industry, their friends, assorted others, actors, bon vivants. Jason’s mother suffered a final debilitating heart attack two months before her 84th birthday. Jason writes: A slow recovery for several weeks left her an invalid at home, visited daily by friends and family and bathed in the love and veneration she so much deserved. She succumbed in her sleep like my father, the peaceful death that god grants to the tzadik, the one who is blessed. Richard and I gave the eulogies. Mine closed with an apology, that a mother described by a son is not the subject of a description but the theme of a life, the blood of her biographer. She is the standard for all of the acts of my life and labors, her look of judgment, her critique and smile, are the approval, the reproach, the challenge for all my actions, the voice of my conscience, she is with me always, never in the past tense as a memory but present even now, ever with me, so much so that to finally say goodbye would be to discard the greater part of my own being, the better half of my heart, my model and guide, my companion and advisor, my sounding board, my skill, what skill I have, my reason, my star.

Siblings

Of his three siblings, Jason had by far the closest relationship with his brother, Richard, who was only two years younger than he. Richard’s untimely death in the fall of 2003, after a long and valiant struggle with cancer, was one of the greatest tragedies in Jason’s personal life, the loss not only of a member of his family, but in many ways his closest friend as well. Jason writes of him: Richard may be more deserving of a biography than his admiring elder brother. He is brilliant, acerbic, witty, conversational, perhaps he tends to be easily ruffled when refuted, a family hindrance in the rough and tumble of academic life.

Richard made his career in sociology, where as Professor of Sociology and Comparative Studies at the University of Maryland he was guru to a whole generation of young sociologists, and the author of an impressive scholarly bibliography. Those who have read books by both brothers can see some important common threads in their work, though in fact their closeness did not extend to taking much interest in each other’s published

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work. When Richard came to Katowice, Poland, a few months before his death, to attend a conference given there in his honor, Jason accompanied him and listened to him speak; later, Jason had a public lecture in Katowice, which Richard attended. Both of them admitted privately that this had been the first time either of them had ever heard the other one lecture, and also the first time either of them had really understood what the other was trying to do! Darlene, born and raised in Los Angeles, gave up a career as a entertainment attorney to become a psychotherapist, especially interested in alternative modalities of psychotherapy; her website currently includes an essay on healing and neuroscience. Her struggle with fibromyalgia has all but confined her to home for the last several years, but she remains confident that someday she will return to the active life she enjoyed before. Leslie, 14 years younger than Jason, as an impressionable young girl in the early “hippy” era, came under the influence of Bubba Free John, a guru from Brooklyn holding court in Berkeley, her guide and mentor through the college years. After years of interest in Advaita and Mahayana Buddhism, she is now, like Darlene, involved in alternative therapies, and has written a book on biocircuits, the effects of energy redistribution on nervous and other disorders. Despite the differences in age and outlook between the perpetual New Yorker, Jason Brown, and his California-bornand-bred younger sisters, certain common threads are nevertheless clearly visible: the intellectual restlessness, impatience with the uncritical repetition of platitudes generated by conventional ways of looking at things, and the attempt to delve ever deeper into the innermost reaches of the psyche. Education There could be little doubt that Jason, after finishing Marshall High School in Los Angeles (where both he and his brother Richard are now listed as “Distinguished Alumni” on the school’s website) would fulfill the dreams his father had not been allowed (or had not allowed himself) to pursue. As Jason himself explains, his father was ...a pattern for many of his generation, ambitious, often irreligious sons of hard-working European Jews, the men who built great American industries, film, fabrics, independent, defiant, opinionated - oblivious, God bless them, to deconstruction, political correctness and moral relativity - the men of Barry Levinson’s fine film, Providence, and the moving play, I Never Talked to My Father, those energetic Red Queens who continuously keep moving just to stay in the same place. Their sons, the professors, shrinks,

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artists, writers, every one a ‘write-off,’ a business failure, but they all made their fathers quietly proud.

Jason entered premedical studies at the University of California in Los Angeles, and then after two years transferred to Berkeley, where he received his Bachelor’s degree in 1959. Though in view of his chosen profession and a lifelong fascination with animals and nature he concentrated on topics related to biology, in the Berkeley years he began a much broader program of reading, in poetry, philosophy, psychology, physics and other fields that attracted his interest. Several attempts were made by professors to induce him to abandon medicine and pursue a purely academic career. Of particular importance, however, were his studies with Ledyard Stebbins, a prominent evolutionary biologist, and Sherwood Washburn, a physical anthropologist, the traces of whose influence can be seen in microgenetic theory to this day. Some premonition of the eclecticism of Jason’s interests, his broad erudition, both combined in an extraordinarily complex way with a single-minded, passionate, lifelong pursuit of One Great Idea, can be seen in this gifted undergraduate, by his own admission passing many exams without ever having attended the lectures and spending most of his time reading the books that he considered most important. After graduation from Berkeley in 1959 Jason was admitted to medical school at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. Despite the mythical rigors of medical school, his approach to his studies at USC did not differ much from the undergraduate days; he ruefully tells the story of his mother intervening with the school authorities when he received a failing grade from a particular professor due to non-attendance in lectures, though he had passed all the examinations with the highest possible grades. One of the few professors whose lectures he attended faithfully was Johannes Nielsen, then in his early 80s, a visiting professor of behavioral neurology at USC. It was Nielsen who focused Jason’s attention on the brain, evoking the lifelong fascination with neuropsychology that has been one of the major strands from which microgenetic theory has been woven. For several years, while a resident at UCLA, he often returned to sit in on Prof. Nielsen’s neurology rounds. He received the M.D. in 1963, with the intention to specialize in psychiatry. Thus the choice of an internship at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington, D.C., was hardly accidental, since at that time this was the only psychiatric facility in the United States that was approved for medical training. Psychiatry (especially psychoanalysis) represents a kind of fourth strand, along with philosophy, poetry, and neuropsychology, in the fabric

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of microgenetic theory. In fact, the American poet Ezra Pound was a patient at St. Elizabeth’s, which was one of the attractions for Jason to do his internship there; in the months prior to beginning work there, he made a thorough analysis of Pound’s Cantos. He also had the occasion to work with a group of neurophysiologists who were working there at that time, but fell into conflict with them due to his objections to animal experiments that he found cruel and morally unjustified. The internship ended after a year, though it had been a most eventful year to be in Washington, where Jason was present for both Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech and President John F. Kennedy’s funeral. The internship also put an end to Jason’s original intention to become a psychiatrist, especially after he was enthralled by the lectures of visiting neurologist Harold Stevens, who reminded him in many ways of his mentor, Johannes Nielsen. The fascination with mental illness and its complex brain correlates, however, colored of course by his characteristic rejection of simple answers to complex questions, has remained a significant part of his work, and accounts for his appointment in 1993 as Visiting Scholar in the New York Psychoanalytic Institute. Jason returned to Los Angeles with the intention to obtain a postdoctoral fellowship in neurophysiology at UCLA, but after several weeks of uncertainty and false starts, he decided to apply for a residency in neurology that had just become available when the leading candidate was drafted into the US Army for medical services in Vietnam. Military service (1967-1969) The residency at UCLA ended in June of 1967, and Jason was mulling over various alternative plans for the future when his long-dreaded-but-notunexpected draft notice arrived. After a period of uncertainty as to whether it might not be better to emigrate to Canada, Jason made the decision to serve in the Army, at the height of a very bloody, nasty, and unpopular war, whose rationale he, like many young Americans of his generation, completely failed to understand. With mounting casualties, the Army needed doctors, and there was an excellent chance that after completing basic training and a commission as a Captain of the United States Army, Jason would be sent to Vietnam. In fact, however, though almost all the other young doctors with whom he trained in San Antonio, Texas, were indeed sent to field hospitals in Vietnam, Jason was sent to an Evacuation Hospital in Korea. There he experienced the horrors of war at second hand, talking to his young, horribly mangled patients before they were sent home

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for rehabilitation. However, his wife was able to join him there, and their first child, Jonathan, was actually born in Korea. One positive aspect of this experience, perhaps the only, was virtually unlimited access to the resources of the National Library of Medicine. It was at this point that Jason began to focus on aphasia, accumulating by his own count 30 books copied cover-to-cover and ten cases of photocopied articles. During the second year of his military service, promoted to Major, he was sent to Letterman Hospital in San Francisco, where he enriched his library with texts from the great German pioneers of neuropsychology, such as Pick, Liepmann, and Lange. Several years later he published a translation of their important papers into English, a tribute to the impact they had exerted on his intellectual formation. Boston (1969-1970) Jason Brown’s microgenetic theory represents at present (now that the influence of Luria has largely faded in the West) arguably the only intellectually viable alternative to the connectionist theories of brain function now largely attributed (not entirely fairly) to Norman Geschwind. It is no small irony, then, that at an early stage of his career Jason was sponsored by Geschwind. In 1968, upon his discharge from the Army, Jason applied for a post-doctoral fellowship in Geschwind’s famous Aphasia Unit at the Boston Veteran’s Hospital, and after a personal interview Geschwind chose him to fill the available post, perhaps motivated by the young man’s enthusiasm for the classics of neurology. This was, however, rather as though the young Lenin had been sent to work as an intern in the London Stock Exchange, since Jason would soon become one of the foremost critics of the disconnection theory of aphasia. Nevertheless, the personal relationship between the two men was not embittered by any particular animosity, so that even in his criticism Jason often expresses more respect for Geschwind’s intellect than for his theory. In a review of Geschwind’s last book, published posthumously, Jason wrote: Right or wrong, whether hammering away at a point for the hundredth time or in lively improvisation at aphasia rounds, over a drink or in a conference hall, whether in banter, advocacy or debate, he was a stimulating companion and a formidable opponent who – and it is a measure of his brilliance that one can say this – will be as much missed by his adversaries as his friends.

While at Boston Jason came to know many of the other leading figures of what is still known as the Boston School, including Edgar Zurif,

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Alfonso Carramazza, Eugene Green, Davis Howes, Laird Cermak, not to mention Frank Benson, Edith Kaplan, and Harold Goodglass. Despite his admiration for the rigorous research standards associated with the Boston school, however, Jason became convinced that the fundamental paradigm with which they operated, differing little from Carl Wernicke’s late 19thcentury metaphor of the brain as a telegraph system, was faulty, unable to provide a satisfactory explanation of the clinical phenomena of aphasia without putting the evidence on the proverbial bed of Procrustes. The Boston School of neurolinguistics was attempting to demonstrate scientifically Chomsky’s hypotheses about the innate character of grammar and grammatical rules, while the connectionist theory of Wernicke and his students, revived by Geschwind, lent itself to the modular and cognitivist theories that were to become so fashionable in the last decades of the 20th century and well into the 21st. For Jason, this was all one theoretical edifice, and his was (and remains) almost the only voice of protest against the imposition of this project and its assumptions. Thus the debates in which he engaged during the Boston years constituted a crucial moment in the crystallization of microgenetic theory. In 1970, after his stay at the Boston Aphasia Center, Jason was invited to join the staff of the famous Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital in New York as an assistant professor, with a simultaneous appointment as Director of Neurology at St. Barnabas Hospital in the Bronx. There he worked with several active neurosurgeons, including the well-known stereotactic neurosurgeon Irving Cooper. At one point it appeared that this would prove to be a very fruitful collaboration, especially when at Jason’s urging Cooper performed unilateral and bilateral ablations of the pulvinar in patients with aphasia and dystonia. Jason described several of these cases (the procedure turned out to have little effect) in a series of articles, which cast doubt on Penfield’s theory that the pulvinar was responsible for top-down transmission of linguistic material from posterior to anterior language areas. Jason had increasing doubts, however, about the efficacy and moral justification of many surgical interventions, and the cooperation with Cooper began to break down. Later, when asked to see patients with anoxic brain damage following coronary bypass operations, he voiced reservations about the safety of the operations, which led him into conflict with some senior staff and ultimately with the hospital administration. It was in 1972, during the St. Barnabas years, that Jason published his first book, entitled Aphasia, Apraxia, and Agnosia.

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Fig. 4.

The cover of Jason Brown’s first book, Aphasia, Apraxia, and Agnosia: Clinical and Theoretical Aspects

With this book, Jason began an intellectual journey that has continued consistently in the same general direction for over three decades. Each successive book has built on the foundations built by its predecessors, which in itself is a kind of model of the way microgenetic theory represents mental process, as a continual re-actualization of the past in every successive moment. In Aphasia, Apraxia, and Agnosia, Jason laid the foundations for a process theory of aphasia, which culminated in The Life of the Mind in 1988. Although the books that followed seemed to have less and less to say about the clinical material, and especially aphasia, nevertheless (as Jason reminds his readers at the beginning of each new book) there is an important continuity of subjects, making the whole corpus a single (though enormously rich and complicated) intellectual fabric. In an important sense, also, this first book emerged directly out of Jason’s contact with Norman Geschwind in 1969, followed by the clinical work at St. Barnabas. There is an attempt to demonstrate the inadequacy of disconnection theory, though it is typical of Jason’s work that this is not approached as a polemic, or even as a point-by-point refutation. Rather than “deconstruct” disconnection, Aphasia, Apraxia, and Agnosia demon-

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strates that there are better solutions to old problems, provided that we put off the blinders imposed by the received wisdom. The general trend of aphasiology, especially after the Second World War, was to compartmentalize aphasia syndromes and assign each of them to the destruction or disconnection of specific brain centers, generally identified with the discrete processors of cybernetic theory. The difficulty with this point of view is that, for all its theoretical neatness, it cannot be made to fit messy clinical reality. “Pure” aphasia syndromes almost never occur, and even when they do, the particular constellation of symptoms does not last for very long. What typically happens, however, in reaction to the dynamism of clinical reality, is not that the theory is adapted to fit the facts, but rather that the facts are cut, trimmed, and paraffined to fit the theory. By pointing out the uncomfortable fact that there are no sharp lines of demarcation over the spectrum of clinical pathology, and emphasizing continuity instead of boundaries, Jason was taking a stand in defiance of a powerful establishment, whose power is only now beginning to show signs of weakening. Another important contribution of Aphasia, Apraxia, and Agnosia, implicit in the very title, likewise consists in a deliberate transgression of boundaries in search of continuities. This is the observation that the course of symptoms in these three neurological syndromes reflects a parallelism – or rather, an identity – of mental process in the areas of speech and language, action, and perception. In clinical reality it is difficult not to notice that these syndromes often co-occur, a fact which disconnection theory passes off by attributing it to the purported physical proximity of processors and pathways affected by the same lesion. In microgenetic theory, by contrast, a lesion produces a disruption in the unfolding of mental process at a particular moment, and it is the moment that defines the symptom. Disruption of analogous moments in the creation of an object in perception, of a behavior in action, or of a speech act in the language system, will produce specific, and yet fully analogous syndromes of agnosia, apraxia, and aphasia, respectively. The basic idea, which is the foundation block for microgenetic theory, is that the progression from semantics to phonology in language, from object concept to object form in perception, and from action plan to implementation in motor behavior, is not only identical in all three domains, but also identical in the relation to stages in the evolution of the forebrain.

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Paris In 1974, two years after the publication of Aphasia, Apraxia, and Agnosia, Jason resigned his position at St. Barnabas, and spent a brief but fruitful period at the Columbia University Medical Center working with Prof. Joseph Jaffe in the Department of Psychiatry. After one year, he received a fellowship from the Foundations Fund for Research in Psychiatry to spend a year at the Centre Neuropsychologique et Neurolinguistique in Paris, founded and headed by Henri Hecaen, one of the leading, though largely forgotten figures in the history of neuropsychology.

Fig. 5.

Jason Brown (center) in conversation with Henri Hecaen (left) and Luigi Vignolo (right)

Although he was not an easy man to like personally, Hecaen inspired Jason’s respect by the breadth of his learning and experience, along with his dedication to a method and approach that avoided theory in favor of thorough, nuanced description of concrete symptoms. As Jason put it, “Hecaen saw the whole of the elephant, albeit as an assembly of parts, while the psychologists worked on the separate quarters.” Much of his work at the time when Jason was working in his center was focused on the right brain-left brain asymmetry with which his name is mostly associated today. Although disagreeing with many of Hecaen’s conclusions, Jason found that the issues he raised could be usefully addressed from the per-

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spective of process theory, and his approach to asymmetry as a phase in microgenesis, rather than a fixed constraint of brain structure, was worked out in detail at this time. The idea that the specification of functions to left and right hemispheres is an example on the macro scale of the way a mental state is sculpted in microgenesis is one of the basic insights of microgenetic theory. Upon his return from Paris, in 1975, Jason began his professional association with the New York University Medical Center, which continues to this day (he was promoted from Clinical Associate Professor to Clinical Professor in 1979). At the same time, he was named Director of Neurology at Goldwater Hospital, a hospital for the chronically ill located on an island in the East River between Queens and Manhattan.

Moscow In February 1976, Jason was invited to Cairo for two weeks, to participate in a conference on rehabilitation and aphasia. The Cairo meeting was an important moment in his career, since it was attended by a number of persons who later played important roles in his career, such as Anton Kreindler, Anton Leischner, Macdonald Critchley, and Eberhard Bay. Many of these initial contacts led to long-standing and significant cooperation. For example, over many years, with the support of a grant from the Humboldt Stiftung, Jason worked in the aphasia laboratory of Prof. Anton Leischner in Bonn, Germany. Several long conversations with Prof. Bay also proved to be particularly important, focusing Jason’s attention on largely forgotten early case studies in aphasia. Returning to the classics of early 20th-century neuropsychology with a fresh perspective has been a significant strand in Jason’s career, marking a contrast to what we usually read about the history of neuropsychology: that is, the mere listing of names and titles accompanied by uncritical recitals of the received wisdom about their observations and theories. As Jason put it in the Preface to his 1988 edition of selected papers by Liepmann, Lange, and Pötzl,

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Those unaware of history are, as we know, destined to repeat it, but in science this is not always a bad thing. Science is the application of changing methods to recurrent problems, and the repetition of a past that may even be unconscious has formed the basis for many a modest career. On the other hand, those who are aware of history can use their knowledge as a starting point for a deeper understanding. The uses and avoidances of the past are good reasons to pay attention to it, but there is for me another, better reason, and that is, that it is only through a careful study of the past that one can be certain a science has been delivered into the present in all its richness and possibility.

One of the important figures in neuropsychology not present in Cairo was Alexander Romanovich Luria, who declined the invitation for reasons of health. The following May, however, Jason obtained a grant from the Fogarty Center at the National Institutes of Health, as part of the US/USSR Cultural Exchange Program, and spent a month each with Kreindler in Bucharest and with Luria in Moscow. At that time Luria was recovering from a heart attack at a convalescent hospital for academicians, but his treatment program involved daily walks, on which Jason accompanied him. Luria spoke excellent English, and the two men formed a cordial friendship, which can be seen in this photograph.

Fig. 6.

Jason W. Brown (on the left) with Alexander Luria

Jason had arranged a meeting in Moscow between Luria and his brother Richard, whose wife Natalie was of Russian origin, the daughter of Isaac Babel, a famous Russian writer who died in one of Stalin’s labor camps. Needless to say, however, Luria carefully avoided raising any politically sensitive issues, and steered the conversation to neuropsychology. At the time when Jason was meeting with him in Moscow, Luria was emphasizing the importance of further studies of the frontal lobes. Shortly 433

before his death he was looking at story recall in cases of frontal tumor and vascular lesion. He was impressed by the fact that such patients showed derailments in recall, but eventually were able to retrieve the core events of the story and its meaning. The importance of these cases pertains to intersentential connectedness in the generation of utterances from memory or, conversely, the effect of frontal lesions on memory and conceptual associations in recall. Other “frontal lobe” topics that were of interest to him at the time included the degree of generality or specificity in perseveration (motor, speech, writing, and so on) according to the laterality and depth of the brain lesion, and the application of electrophysiological measures of habituation to phonological and semantic stimuli in cases of adult brain damage and normal and retarded development (Pribram & Luria 1973). Luria’s main concern at the time of Jason’s visit, however, was his autobiography, later edited by Michael and Sheila Cole (Luria 1979). In spite of the obvious tendency to gloss over political problems, this book is a valuable record of his professional life and his debt to Vygotsky, Anokhin, Bernshtein and other Soviet thinkers. Luria did not leave behind a fully developed program of neuropsychological research to be implemented by his followers, but his ideas were so wide-ranging and powerful that they will continue to influence the field for years to come. In Jason’s opinion, “The work on the frontal lobes was ingenious and innovative and, more importantly, was on the right track; the work on memory, aphasia and perception will not survive; and the functional system approach will follow the uncertain fate of componential theory.” Luria, like Jason himself, was critical of the quantitative neuropsychological test batteries that have dominated work in the field, and believed that psychometric methods should not replace a thorough bedside examination with emphasis on qualitative change. The nature of the symptom was of crucial importance. This insight was in turn an important inspiration for the development of the microgenetic theory of the symptom (Brown & Pachalska 2003). The next year, 1977, brought the publication of Jason’s second book, Mind, Brain, and Consciousness. This book attempted to perform two major tasks, the first of which was to begin showing how linguistic processes can be associated with brain structure without following Geschwind’s path back to the Wernicke-Lichtheim model. The challenge for any nonlocationalist theory of brain function is of course the inescapable fact that there are some clear relations between the nature of the symptoms that oc-

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cur after brain damage and the location of the lesion that seems to be causing them. The essentially holistic approaches of such eminent figures as Hughlings Jackson, Kurt Goldstein, and Alexander Luria are often criticized in the neuropsychological literature for a certain lack of consistency, in that having subjected locationalist theories to a thorough critique, these authors then present clinical material demonstrating the precise symptoms associated with lesions in particular areas. The criticism is valid insofar as none of these authors actually produced a convincing alternative explanation for lesion effects, but not valid, as Jason Brown has many times demonstrated, in concluding that the locationalist explanation must be accepted, faute d’un mieux. In Mind, Brain, and Consciousness Jason argued that there was another and better way of explaining the relation between brain anatomy and brain function, based on the process model. A given place in the brain represents a given moment in the bottom-up flow of mental process, not a processor performing a discrete function. The second important function of Mind, Brain, and Consciousness was to propose an agenda for the further development of microgenetic theory. Thus by design this book asks many more questions than it answers. At the same time, and for the same reason, it is perhaps the best available “beginner’s introduction” to microgenetic theory. In Jason’s own view, it is his most readable book, though it should be borne in mind that on the subject of clarity he is fond of quoting Kant: “There is no art in being intelligible if one renounces all thoroughness of insight.” Mind, Brain, and Consciousness is a kind of manifesto for a revolution in neuropsychology that has in fact scarcely begun. Though it is gratifying to note that process-oriented approaches are gradually coming into the mainstream of neuropsychology, and the edifice of locationalist-connectionist theory is obviously cracking, still, a decent regard for the proprieties of science should be sending more readers back to Mind, Brain, and Consciousness. Rockefeller University In the academic year 1978-79, at the invitation of one of the founding fathers of cognitive psychology, George Miller, Jason was named Visiting Associate Professor at Rockefeller University, a position funded by a grant Jason received from the National Institutes of Health. At this time, the Sloan Foundation was proposing to develop programs in cognitive psychology. The University sponsored numerous conferences and seminars during this period, in which Jason took an active part. Among the participants who figured importantly in the development of this field were John-

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son-Laird and Michael Gazzaniga, Jason has recounted this period as one of great ferment and interest in his career, though he was not seduced by modularity and componential theory. Indeed, he says that he has “battle scars” from the many seminars during that period in which he argued for an alternative way of thinking. The effort to make psychology a science involved not only the relegation of historical work to the status of descriptive anecdote, but substituted quantitative methodologies for the qualitative, error-based accounts of traditional neuropsychology. Further, the attempt at the time was to go from experimental cognition directly to neuroscience, bypassing neuropsychology or using it as a testing ground for family quarrels within the cognitivist paradigm. Near the end of the year, the Psychology Department at Rockefeller was closed and George Miller left for Princeton, where he directed the McDonnell Foundation for Cognitive Science. This is not to say that the rise of cognitivism , in bringing to full flower a more virulent and widespread form of localization, was exclusively a negative influence on the development of microgenetic theory; but despite Jason’s great respect for George Miller, microgenetic theory is as opposed to cognitivism as to connectionism. Indeed, a close look at the work of the early cognitivists, beginning with Chomsky’s famous attack on Skinner in the early 1960s, shows that cognitivism, transformational grammar (as well as its more recent transfigurations), Fodorian modularity, and Geschwind’s neuroanatomical theories are all parts of the same movement, emerging from the Zeitgeist of the 1970s and 80s. In Jason’s view, modularity merely replaced the big black box of behaviorism with the little boxes and arrows of cognitivism. Moreover, the notions of input and output, central processors, buffers and so on, have nothing to do with the neurological or psychological reality of normal or pathological function. Jason’s dissent from this approach, which he himself compares to “a child throwing a rock at an advancing tank,” caused him to feel increasingly isolated in the academic environment in which he had been moving. Nevertheless, he persevered, encouraged and supported by friends such as Karl Pribram, Marcel Kinsbourne, and Paul Maclean.

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Fig. 7.

Jason W. Brown (on the left) with Karl Pribram

Bellevue In 1984, Jason left his position as Director of Neurology at Goldwater Hospital and started a neuropsychology laboratory at New York’s famous Bellevue Hospital, which had been home to such great figures in neuropsychology as Morris Bender, Lukas Teuber, Paul Schilder, and David Wechsler. At the height of his work at Bellevue, Jason supervised a staff of six post-doctoral fellows and a number of graduate students. In a European university, this would have been a suitable empire for a Great Professor, surrounded by assistants eager and willing to do whatever work he assigned them in return for the privilege of basking in the glory of the Great Man. In the more egalitarian atmosphere of the US, however, this was scarcely possible. Thus Jason quickly found that his responsibilities for his “flock” were hindering rather than supporting his own work, keeping him continually busy without contributing to the development of his theory. He writes: The activity in the lab was at the same time stimulating and a source of chronic discontent. The post-docs brought with them the interests and habits of graduate training; they were well versed in the topics of their dissertation but oblivious to the wider scope of neuropsychology, not only the case material and the problems I thought were important, but even the research of their co-workers, acting like selfish children who ignore each other’s efforts and compete for a parent’s attention. The experiments in the lab were often ingenious, but of parochial interest, in that they were designed to test, more

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accurately, to support, models that were for the most part derived from studies in experimental cognition in normal subjects.

Microgenetic theory

In The Life of the Mind (1986), Jason makes the claim that microgenetic theory is the first and (at that time) only viable theory of how the brain works that could serve as an alternative to the models advanced by Wernicke and his followers at the turn of the 20th century, as reformed and restored by Geschwind and others in the 1960s. In the more than 20 years that have gone by since this book appeared, that claim remains valid. What is more, the more recent work has shown that microgenetic theory is more than merely a particular brain model: it is a paradigm that has enormous implications for other fields of study as well as the neurosciences. If the mind can be conceived as those segments of mental process which devolve from the brain through a microgenetic process, we can conceive of a mind/spirit that is intimately related to the organic brain without either being simply reduced to brain function or divorced from the organic brain as a non-material essence. The essence of microgenetic theory can be expressed in a single sentence: The mental state is a recurring process of flow from the archaic to the recent in forebrain evolution that retraces, in a fraction of a second (microgenesis), formations in the evolution of the human brain (phylogenesis) and patterns in the growth of the individual (ontogenesis or morphogenesis).

This description carries with it a series of premises and implications that cut across the grain of much contemporary thinking about the brain. Microgenesis is first and foremost a bottom-up theory, i.e. it is assumed that no mental state originates or resides in the cortex but, rather, individuates from beneath. The cortex mediates the final phases of the process, articulating or analyzing that which is derived from antecedent phases. The salient aspect of the theory, as Jason developed it, is that it is rooted in biology, and yet leads by a series of logical steps to a concept of mind and consciousness that is, in a profound and historically correct sense of the term, idealistic and subjectivist. Although each of Jason’s books is a complete and self-contained whole and represents a stage in the development of his thought, they all form a coherent series with few obvious signs of a change in direction. The earlier books contain the clinical material that forms the basis of the theory, while the later books are more speculative in nature, and extend the theory

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into philosophy of mind. Nonetheless, the speculations are deeply rooted in the clinical material. The theory has been expounded and advanced from start to finish in a consistent manner. It is difficult to fully understand the recent work on value without reference to the earlier work on aphasia and process psychology. Microgenesis is based on the following principles: − An act of cognition is derived through distinct, qualitatively differentiated phases. − The final phase of the process is not the output of a production line but incorporates all of the preceding phases. − The derivation of the mind/brain state is a series of whole/part or context/item transformations. Inner and outer objects develop by the partition of antecedent wholes, not by assembly or construction. − Each act of cognition elaborates a present moment of novel actuality within which life is played out. This moment is replicated in the next microgenetic sequence. These principles are applicable to the cognitive and physiological transformations that co-occur in the actualization process. The early work involved the discovery of patterns of mental process that could be mapped to phylogenetic stages. The relation to ontogeny was problematic, since the brain matures as a whole, and studies of the regression concept in neuropsychology did not support a simple retracing of the acquisitional sequence. Thus, the ontogenetic part of the theory came later, as Jason realized that the morphogenetic concepts of parcellation and neoteny that related to the fetal and juvenile mind/brain could be linked to micro- and phylo-genesis. Some implications of this idea are: − The transition from core to surface is one from phases that are unconscious to conscious contents, from self to world, from past to present, from memory to perception (or from phases that appear memorial to those that appear perceptual). There is a continuous sheet of mind from the onset of the state in the archaic core to its termination as the world surface. − The appearance of novel abilities, such as language, does not represent a terminal addition to the existing repertoire of behavior, but rather a branching from earlier penultimate stages. − The state deposits in a fraction of a second and is replicated. The sequence is from potential to actual, not from cause to effect. This

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means that the causal interaction of objects in the world is, from the standpoint of the observer, an iterated sequence of inert actualities, i.e. objects that perish and are replaced by the ensuing sequence. − In the sculpting of potential at each successive phase, the objectdevelopment is a microcosm of the evolutionary struggle in which the environment eliminates unfit exemplars. Sensation plays the role in perception that the environment plays in adaptation. − On this account, change occurs in the transition from potential to actual, not from one actuality to another. − The perception is wholly endogenous. It is shaped by intrinsic (e.g. habit) and extrinsic (sensation) constraints. Sense data do not enter a perception; they are not combined to objects. Rather, sensation is external to perception, acting to delimit, sculpt or parse the objectdevelopment so as to model the physical world. − The result is that consciousness is trapped in the bubble of the mental state, leaving us to infer properties of physical nature that are ultimately unknowable by direct experience. The world revealed to the mind by perception is a negative image of the real world. − The mental state arises in drive expression, which combines intensity of feeling with conceptual primitives, as in hunger. This state, in which a percept carries with it a stereotyped reaction, develops into conceptual feelings, then to affect-ideas. Thus concept (“what is this? what is going on here?”) and feeling (“so what? what difference does this make to me?”) are bound together in every cognition. The microgenetic approach to brain/mind, based on process, evolution, and change, has broad implications for neuropsychology, psychology, psychiatry and the philosophy of mind, and indirectly for many other fields of scientific endeavor. At the same time, it runs counter to many currently prevailing views on the brain, the mind, and the troublesome relation between the two. For example, it is generally assumed that structure precedes function: that is, a structure appears in the brain and then assumes a function designated to it. In the microgenetic approach, structure and function are more closely related, in that function appears as the expression of structure in the fourth dimension. Specialized brain structures are not created according to a blueprint in order to perform a necessary stage in the production process, but rather consolidate as replicated acts deposit a structure over innumerable repetitions. Perception and action are not serial functions, where perception is a construction of input and action is the discharge in output. Rather, perception and action, and/or the posterior and

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anterior systems of microgenesis, are initially inseparable, but they diverge as the process develops “up and out.” The symptom is not simply an omission or deficit, or the appearance of an anomaly, but rather the surfacing of a fragment of behavior that is ordinarily hidden or transformed under subsequent microgenetic phases. Symptoms reveal, rather than obscure, the foundations of normal behavior. In a later book, Time, Will and Mental Process (1996), Jason extended the theory to problems in process philosophy and theory of mind. The present moment, the relation of past to present and their relation to change, and the importance of genetic accounts such as gestalt psychology, comparative (Heinz Werner) psychology and percept-genetic (Gudmund Smith) approaches to process philosophy, were discussed at length, as well as in later papers. In addition, the book takes up such problems as the nature of the self, free will, agent and object causation, causal persistence and creativity. In later works on process theory, and as an introduction to the book The Authentic Life, Jason explored the ancient debate over being and becoming. His approach was that the process within a forming object (idea, etc.) constitutes the becoming of the object, while the object that is formed is the being. The conflict between process and substance is resolved in the notion of being as a momentary category of process, and process as the activity that creates categories of being. This led to the idea of energy in inorganic matter developing to feeling in primitive entities, and evolving slowly to feeling in progressively higher organisms. There is a continuity from energy to primitive feeling to drive, and in humans, from drive to desire and value. In many of the later works, esp. Mind and Nature (2000), Brown enters into a specific dialogue with the legacy of Sigmund Freud, whom he treats with considerable more understanding and respect than do the vast majority of neuropsychologists. The Freudian unconscious is transformed in microgenetic theory from the vast, uncharted and impenetrable jungle of the Id into the phases of microgenesis that individuate from below (literally as well as figuratively) into consciousness. Drives arise in the midbrain and hypothalamus, developing into conceptual feelings by way of limbic system, with further analysis in neocortex. Freudian repression points to a failure of individuation of certain contents in the potential of memory. The mass of neural firings generated by the sense organs is successively constrained into: Gestalt-like objects and stereotyped, automatic reactions at the level of the brainstem and diencephalon;

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affects and impulses in relation to conceptual primitives (conceptual feelings) at the level of the limbic system, as in dreams; percepts, cognitions, and actions realized through the neocortex. Drive energy does not cathect or activate an idea. This mistaken notion creates an artificial problem: how does the affect find the idea, or the reverse? Instead, drive and concept are part of the same construct at every phase, individuating to successively more refined derivations. The feeling that accompanies the object-formation goes out with the object into the world, investing the object with value (interest, worth). Psychoanalytic theories of consciousness in Freud’s work were shown to be inconsistent with microgenetic accounts. Jason’s most recent work has involved pursuing the implications of this theory into areas that at first glance are rather remote from the neurological clinic where he began his work. Ethics and aesthetics constitute fields of inquiry that have not been of much interest in the neurosciences, though the mere fact that changes in both these areas are known to occur as a consequence of brain damage should have long since served to draw attention to these problems. Yet the reluctance of scientists to enter the territory of value judgments and personal preferences has lead to the formation of great gaps in our knowledge. In microgenetic theory, both moral and aesthetic judgments (what is good and what is beautiful respectively) must be understood in the same terms as all other mental processes, i.e. microgenetically. As objects and behaviors are successively constrained over phases in microgenesis, so the moral and aesthetic values take shape in stages. It is not the case, then, that moral and aesthetic decisions result from learned criteria imposed or imparted by the society, or from limbic affect disguised as taste, but rather that perception, cognition, action and valuation evolve together on unitary and parallel but diverging paths. This most recent phase in Jason’s work is clearly the most dangerous, and at once the most creative, as he transgresses boundaries and canons, forcing into dialogue those who ordinarily do not speak to each other. The neuroscientists who read these books may often be baffled or even annoyed by the scholarly apparatus, the absence of statistics and the high level of abstraction, while philosophers with little knowledge of brain anatomy or pathology may be no less confused. For those willing to risk the journey, however, the profit from the investment is more than worth the risk.

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Closing thoughts In 2005, during a memorial symposium held in Wroclaw, Poland, to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the death of Carl Wernicke and the 75th anniversary of the death of Alois Alzheimer (both men spent part of their careers in Wroclaw, then known as “Breslau”), Jason was awarded the Copernicus Prize, the highest distinction conferred by the Polish Neuropsychological Society. This event marked in a particular way his important role in shaping the development of contemporary neuropsychology in Poland (his grandmother’s homeland), where the lingering influence of Luria has created a climate more open to non-locationist, process thinking about the brain. He has since returned to Poland on many occasions, lecturing to ever larger and more enthusiastic audiences of Polish students and scientists. The level of enthusiasm for his theory among the best and brightest of the next generation of neuropsychologists in Poland gives grounds to hope that the scientific edifice Jason Brown has constructed will be, to borrow Horace’s famous motto, aere perennius: “more lasting than bronze.” This biography is, as I am more than happy to confess, manifestly incomplete. This results not only from the sheer amount of work that Jason has done over the years, with his boundless enthusiasm, energy, and determination, and the extraordinary range of his intellect, but also from the fact that his scientific career is happily far from over. Further chapters in this biography will surely need to be written. It is my own fondest hope that on the occasion of Prof. Jason W. Brown’s 80th birthday, I will be able to present him with the next chapter of this modest biographical effort. References Brown, J.W. (1972). Aphasia, apraxia and agnosia. Springfield, Illinois, USA: Thomas. Brown, J.W. (1973). Aphasia, tran. of A. Pick, Aphasie. Springfield, Illinois, USA: Thomas. Brown, J.W. (1977). Mind, brain and consciousness. New York: Academic Press. Brown, J.W. (1988). Life of the mind. Hillsdale, New Jersey, USA: Erlbaum Brown, J.W. (1991). Self and process. New York: Springer-Verlag. Brown, J.W. (1995). Luria: a personal memoir. Aphasiology, 9(2), 101-103 Brown, J.W. (1996). Time, will and mental process. New York: Plenum Press. Brown, J.W. (2000). Mind and nature: essays on time and subjectivity. London: Whurr. Brown, J.W. (2002). The self-embodying mind. Barrytown, New York: Station Hill Press.

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Brown, J.W., ed. (1981). Jargonaphasia. New York: Academic Press. Brown, J.W., ed. (1988). Agnosia and apraxia. Hillsdale, New Jersey, USA: Erlbaum. Brown, J.W., ed. (1989). Neuropsychology of perception. Hillsdale, New Jersey, USA: Erlbaum Brown, J.W. & Chobor, K.L. (1988). Frontal lobes and the problem of perseveration. Journal of Neurolinguistics, 4, 65-85. Brown, J.W. & Pachalska, M. (2003). The symptom and its significance in neuropsychology. Acta Neuropsychologica, 1(1), 1-11 Goldberg, E. (1990). Introduction and tribute. In E. Goldberg (ed.), Contemporary neuropsychology and the legacy of Luria. Hillsdale, New Jersey, USA: Erlbaum. Luria, A. R. (1979). The making of mind: a personal account of Soviet psychology, edited by M. Cole & S. Cole. Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA: Harvard University Press. Pribram, K. & Luria, A.R., eds. (1973). Psychophysiology of the frontal lobes. New York: Academic Press.

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