Who You Are is an Interactive Process (Big Think)

For years, I have argued both here and elsewhere that our notions of self, identity, and consciousness are misguided. We typically think of them as nouns, as objects we can study and measure. I believe, however, based on my experience as a Buddhist and as a student of neuroscience, that who we are is not a noun, not an object.

From the Buddhist Abhidharma:

Here (in the the Dhammasangani), the human mind, so evanescent and elusive, has for the first time been subjected to a comprehensive, thorough and unprejudiced scrutiny, which definitely disposes of the notion that any kind of static unity or underlying substance can be traced in mind.

Here is more on the Abhidharma from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

The mature Abhidharma thus assimilates the analysis of phenomena-in-time-as-constituted-by-consciousness with a highly complex description of the consciousness process, dissolving the causal relations between ordered successions of consciousness moments into the activity of perception.

We are verbs, we are process. It's slightly humorous that it has taken the West almost 2,500 years to catch up with these ancient ideas, but even now this is still a fringe perspective in the neuroscience community.

Last year Virginia Hughes' Only Human blog covered a couple of then-new research findings about consciousness, and concludes that "consciousness, too, is a process — a very slippery one."

Allan Combs has written about Consciousness as a Self-Organizing Process (An Ecological Perspective). In that paper, he offers this definition of consciousness, which is one of the best I have seen anywhere:

Consciousness is perhaps best understood from an ecological perspective in which the ongoing events that structure it are seen as a rich interacting complex of informing cognitive, perceptual, and emotional information subsystems analogous to the interactive energy driven metabolism of a living cell. The result is an organic, self-generating, or autopoietic, system constantly in the act of creating itself.

YES! Consciousness is constantly in the act of creating itself. But we are not aware of this process happening unless we have spent some considerable time in meditation watching the mind. So why is this? Again, Combs:

Informal introspection reveals the overall fabric of conscious experience at each moment to be constructed of a variety of undergirding psychological processes such as memory, perception, and emotion (e.g., James 1890/1981; Combs, 1993b; Combs, 1995b). This idea is consistent with Tart's (1975, 1985) view that states of consciousness, including dream and non-dream sleep, various drug-induced and ecstatic states, as well as ordinary waking consciousness, are formed of unique patterns of psychological functions, or processes, that fit comfortably together to make something like a gestalt. We may suspect that this comfortable gestalt represents an energy minimum from the brain's point of view.

Anyway, all of this is simply food for thought - as is the article below.

Perhaps if we did not see our self as fixed and unchanging, we might more easily change the dysfunctional patterns that disrupt our lives.

Who You Are is an Interactive Process

by David Shenk
December 23, 2013

We study savants - you know, Rainman and people like that - and we think there’s obviously evidence of innate gifts because these guys are obviously born with different sorts of brains. They’re born with these gifts that enable them to remember every calendar date going back to the year 1200 or whatever.

When you actually look at what is going on yes, these people are born with birth defects if that is what you want to call them. Their brains are certainly wired differently. There is no question about that, but it turns out that the actual skills that they acquire then come after that and that we can actually manipulate our own brains.

The word is plasticity. Everyone has heard the term plasticity. There is a difference in quantity between what these savants are born with and what we can do with our own brains. There isn’t really a qualitative difference. We can alter our own brains but we don’t actually develop the skills to do what the guy in Rainman did or these other amazing savants do. Those differences are already in place. It’s the process of developing these skills, not just being born with the skill or the gift.

I'm trying to help people understand that the old notion of innate, the old notion of giftedness, the notion that we are born with a certain quantity of intelligence or a quantity of talent really isn’t there. We’re all born with differences, no question about that. We have genetic differences, but how those genetic differences actually lead to differences in traits - that’s a dynamic process that we are all very much involved with on the family level, as parents, as kids ourselves, culturally, in terms of nutrition and the environment. Everything we do and everything we are is an ongoing interactive process, which affects how those genes are then subsequently going to be turned into the traits that work for us and against us.

In Their Own Words is recorded in Big Think's studio.
Image courtesy of Shutterstock


by David Shenk

 

Do plants have minds? Is Watson (the Jeopardy winning super-computer) little more than a smart plant? Did you know there is a field called plant neurobiology?

See: Do Plants Have Minds? by Alva Noë (NPR, Dec 02, 2011), The Society for Plant Neurobiology, and Do Plants Think? an interview with Daniel Chamowitz (Scientific American, Jun 5, 2012).

Maybe being a vegetarian is not so ethical after all?

Mind of Plants: The Intelligence of Plants

An insightful and well researched documentary on plants, about their place on our planet, in the food chain, and showcases mind blowing evidence that not only are they more evolved than even humans, but they more than just passively produce oxygen; they actually think and interact with the world around them in a much more active way than most people could ever imagine.

From learning that there are over six hundred species of carnivorous plants, to hearing about trees purposely raising the levels of a chemical in their leaves to kill the animals feeding on it, Mind of Plants is the ultimate in re-education about the living beings all around us that we take for granted every day.

Some of the newest theories in social cognition have moved beyond the isolated brain as a foundation for cognition - almost all of which is social. Some believe, and I count myself in this group, that "cognition is shaped—or even constituted—by mutual interplay and co-regulated coupling between interacting agents embedded in their environment."

This is an interesting paper that serves primarily as a review of the new directions emerging, but it seems to be an important perspective for those of us who seek a better understanding of how minds emerge from brains.

Non-local mind from the perspective of social cognition

Jonas Chatel-Goldman, Jean-Luc Schwartz, Christian Jutten and Marco Congedo

Two main conceptual approaches have been employed to study the mechanisms of social cognition, whether one considers isolated or interacting minds. Using neuro-imaging of subjects in isolation, the former approach has provided knowledge on the neural underpinning of a variety of social processes. However, it has been argued that considering one brain alone cannot account for all mechanisms subtending online social interaction. This challenge has been tackled recently by using neuro-imaging of multiple interacting subjects in more ecological settings. The present short review aims at offering a comprehensive view on various advances done in the last decade. We provide a taxonomy of existing research in neuroscience of social interaction, situating them in the frame of general organization principles of social cognition. Finally, we discuss the putative enabling role of emerging non-local social mechanisms—such as interpersonal brain and body coupling—in processes underlying our ability to create a shared world.

Full Citation: Chatel-Goldman J, Schwartz J-L, Jutten C and Congedo M (2013) Non-local mind from the perspective of social cognition. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 7:107. doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2013.00107

Here is the introduction to the paper.

Introduction

Recent years have seen a flourishing interest in exploring underlying mechanisms of social interaction, as illustrated by a recent special topic in this journal. Motivated by the study of multiple interacting individuals in ecological social contexts (Hari and Kujala, 2009; Schilbach, 2010; Dumas, 2011) this research trend departs from traditional focus on sole investigation of brains in isolation (see Table 1). A central question here is to what extent cognition is shaped—or even constituted (De Jaegher et al., 2010)—by mutual interplay and co-regulated coupling between interacting agents embedded in their environment (Coey et al., 2012; Hasson et al., 2012; Krueger and Michael, 2012). First results in this direction come from sparse and heterogeneous studies, with experimental paradigms ranging, e.g., from use of economic games (De Vico Fallani et al., 2010), music playing or singing (Müller and Lindenberger, 2011), hand movement imitation (Dumas et al., 2010), speech production, and perception (Stephens et al., 2010), to facial communication of affect (Anders et al., 2011).

TABLE 1 (opens a larger image)

Table 1. Comparison between paradigms of isolation and interaction in studies on social cognition.

Since a large conceptual gap remains between the “isolated” and “interactive” approaches (Di Paolo and De Jaegher, 2012; Konvalinka and Roepstorff, 2012), much effort is needed today to situate new contribution in the complex picture of social cognition. It was claimed recently that social cognition itself may be fundamentally different from an interactor's vs. from an observer's point of view (Schilbach et al., in press). In consequence, when entering the multiple- brain and body methodological framework we need to disentangle the social mechanisms revealed in isolation paradigms (offline) from those that are presumed proper to genuine interaction (online).

In this paper, we aim at facilitating the conceptualization when investigating cognitive processes (Box 1) during social interaction. Using a reductionist approach, we propose a classification of explored functions into distinct domains and stages of information processing (Figure 1).

BOX 1

Box 1. Operational definitions.

FIGURE 1

Figure 1. Taxonomy of current studies on interacting brain and bodies presented from the perspective of investigated social processes. Each cylinder represents a distinct research cluster adopted by the community. The schematic view describes how social neuroscience research aggregated on three main categories depending on investigated social cognitive processes. Vertical dimension of the diagram situates these studies in the context of general organization principles of social cognition (see main text). This diagram should not be seen as architecture of neural mechanisms per se, but as a general map of social processes as they were inquired in actual studies.

This comprehensive frame:

• Enables to fit the recent and heterogeneous advances made in research on interacting individuals into the bigger picture of social cognition.
• Highlights a categorization of current works into three distinct groups, each corresponding to the use of specific experimental methodologies, types of interaction and theoretical approaches.
• Uncovers the domains and processes of social cognition for which we still lack a fine understanding of interactive mechanisms, i.e., mechanisms that have not been explored yet, or for which new methodologies may be applied.

In the following, we give clarifications on the different dimensions of the drawing and their implications in terms of methodological as well as conceptual approaches. Then we consider a few examples of studies on human interaction as an illustration for the provided taxonomy. We conclude discussing the potential enabling role of emergent non-local mechanisms on social processes.

Here are two additional sections, which follow immediately on the introduction, that offer a vertical and horizontal dimension to this model of cognition.

Horizontal Dimension: Domains of Investigated Social Processes

Each cylinder in Figure 1 represents a research focus adopted by the community. Up to now three main clusters gather most of the neuro-imaging studies in neuroscience of social interaction, whether focusing on the general themes of theory of mind (ToM), emotions in a social context, or joint action. Few outer studies also begin to link up these different categories of explored social processes. Interestingly, this domain-based distinction corresponds at least in part to specific brain mechanisms. It is admitted, for instance that empathy and mind reading rely on different neuronal circuitry and display different ontogenetic and phylogenetic trajectories (Singer, 2006). Meanwhile, some brain structures are known to play a critical role in multiple aspects of social cognition. Finally, several investigations demonstrate an interaction across processes depicted in Figure 1. For example, mimicry can contribute to an empathic response (Singer and Lamm, 2009), and motor contagion arises from the observation of biological movements and could in turn be a first step for automatic inference of goal-directed actions (Blakemore and Frith, 2005).

Vertical Dimension: Stages of Social Information Processing

Besides the aforementioned partitioning, we propose to situate neuroimaging studies of social interaction within commonly recognized organization levels of social cognition. To do so, we situate the social processes along bipolar continua together with their key attributes often considered in the literature. Extensive source material in line with this architecture can be found e.g., in Adolphs (2010), highlighting multiple stages of social information processing and in Frith and Frith (2008), showing the importance of implicit vs. explicit processes of social cognition. Progressing from lower to higher stages of social information processing, from perception through cognition to regulation, in Figure 1 we highlight the changes in attributes, such as automaticity and control, process speed, sensitivity to context, age of development in normal infant, and probably phylogenetic trajectory.