Chapter 6     Doing our Best

Whatever we may say about our thoughts and our explanations being merely a reflection of our experience there is no getting away from the fact that our physical experience depends upon the workings of our mind. How else do we know what to do at any moment? The decisions we make and the actions we take are not always conscious, of course, but they are surely the result of what is happening in our mind. How and where these mental activities are occurring in our body is something we have not considered in any detail up to now. The mind as a ‘great connector,’ the proactive nature of our perception process and the closed circuitry of this structural coupling through which we engage with one another and with our respective worlds are the features I have emphasised so far. You may recall I suggested that the mind is not contained within our heads, but what then of the wondrous brain with which we humans are endowed? In this session we will look more closely at the role of the brain and nervous system in the everyday operation of our mind and how it is we do what we do.

You will recall that Maturana’s biological explanation of mind applies to all living things, even those without any brain. That is one reason I did not want to focus on mind only in terms of the brain as some people do. The other reason is that we chose to bypass the first part of the ‘mind-body problem,’ which is the virtual impossibility of finding a direct causal relationship between two such different ‘things’ as matter (the cells of the brain) and mind (the intangible thoughts). We can explain a lot about the workings of the mind in a very satisfying way while leaving that so-called ‘hard problem’ of cognitive science aside for the time being. Many neuroscientists do believe that the physiological mechanisms whereby brain cells produce thoughts will be worked out in the not too distant future and it will be useful to us to know about that, but I have not found their progress to be very satisfying so far. Time will tell how successful they will be.

The things we do

Once we start to think about all the things we do as we go about our everyday lives we realise that there may be many of which we are not even aware. It seems obvious when we make a conscious decision and take a certain action that our mind is in charge of what we do and our brain is taking appropriate steps to have our bodies move in the desired way and our voice utter some words that are more or less right for the situation. As we develop habitual patterns of behaviour, however, we do not seem to be thinking about what we are doing at all. A good example is when driving a car on a familiar road we will often seem to be using a sort of automatic pilot to do the driving while our brains attend to all sorts of worries or pleasures from the future or the past. We may develop habitual verbal responses to repeated nagging from our children or to highly predictable work situations in which the words come out without much attention to what is actually happening. We might doodle or play games while daydreaming and most of our attention seems to be unrelated to what we are actually doing.

Then there are all the body processes that are happening without our having to bother much about them such as digestion, respiration, blood circulation, etc. Our gastro-intestinal tract is an enormous hive of activity as it processes the food we put in at one end and clears waste material at the other, not to mention the vital importance of our heart delivering enough blood to every cell in our body at all times and our lungs getting enough oxygen into that blood for the cells to operate. We do not attribute these directly to the operation of our mind because they are not conscious, for the most part, but in this book we must consider all aspects of knowing and all aspects of doing and examine the relationship between the two. Our body does what it knows to do; it does its best at all times and this is its autopoietic nature or its life force – the operation of its mind.

In all these instances we are saying that our mind must still be directing the doing, but it is at a subconscious level – existing somewhere beneath our normal conscious experience. The vast realm of the subconscious has fascinated medical scientists and probably all human beings more than any other aspect of the mind. Freud, Jung and a great many other powerful thinkers developed a huge field that sits between medicine and science and attracts much human attention today. This book is not psychology, however. Our relatively simple task - though not necessarily easy – is to explain whatever biological processes would most plausibly account for the fact that human beings have the capacity to know what they know and do what they do.

The involuntary nervous system

The nervous system we have spoken of so far in this course, with its sensory and motor functions that enable us to perceive and act as we engage with our world, is only one part of our nervous system. Its sensory connection is with our skin, eyes, ears and other sense organs for perceiving and its motor connection is mainly with the skeletal muscles for the doing. There is another extensive network of nerves throughout the body devoted to maintaining our basic body functions. It consists of two types of nerve cells that regulate the operation of our viscera – essentially the heart, lungs and gut. In conventional western science this autonomic nervous system was long considered to be purely an involuntary motor function with no sensory feedback, but this view has been revised bringing it more into line with eastern traditions such as yoga where it was known that visceral functions could be sensed and also regulated to some extent by the conscious part of the mind. For practical purposes we can think of this as the involuntary nervous system.

The two kinds of involuntary (autonomic) nerve connections are the sympathetic and the parasympathetic. Very broadly speaking, they work in opposite directions. The sympathetic stimulates or excites the system while the parasympathetic has a slowing or calming effect. I mention this because the changing balance between these functions is a crucial aspect of the body’s response to stress of any kind and we will be considering stress later in the book. A fear response, for example, activates the sympathetic ‘fight or flight’ mechanism, increasing heart rate, respiration rate, etc., while diverting physiological activity away from less urgent priorities such as digestion of food. The balance between these two ‘sides’ of the involuntary nervous system is a physiological indicator of how successfully we are using our mind to engage with the changing circumstances of our world.

More about the brain

 There is so much new information about the brain appearing every day and it is such a complex organ in terms of the number of cells and networking possibilities that, for the purposes of this book, we cannot afford to get too embroiled in detail. My aim is to simplify, but in such a way that we do not miss those aspects of brain function that are essential to this story of the mind. Some one hundred billion nerve cells, billions of infra-structural cells holding it all together, each nerve cell having many thousands of connections with other nerve cells - is it any wonder we get excited talking about our human brain, especially those of us who think of connectivity as the crucial feature of mind? As we look more closely we must acknowledge, however, that brain connectivity is not a rigid hard wiring; it has extraordinary flexibility that perhaps exemplifies the resilience of our minds.

 The bottom part, known as hind brain and brain stem and including the cerebellum, has been termed the reptilian brain because it is the oldest part in evolutionary terms. This arbitrary division of the brain into reptilian, mammalian and human is a little misleading, however, because we humans need our hind brain just as much as any other part. The cerebellum, in fact, once thought to be only concerned with physical posture and spatial orientation, is now known to be vitally involved in higher cognitive activity. By far the largest part is the cerebrum or forebrain that sits on top and almost surrounds the whole thing. It is because of this part that our brains are much larger, in relation to body size, than any other animal. Two cerebral hemispheres form two sides of the brain with a deep cleft between them. They are joined at their central region by a thick trunk of some 200 million nerve fibres called the corpus callosum. Remarkably, it is possible to cut this connection (as a treatment for epilepsy) without upsetting the person’s mind too much as we will see a little later.

 

 

Figure 8: Diagram showing major regions of the human brain.

In the region between the hindbrain and the forebrain there are several structures that collectively are called the mammalian brain because we have all the same structures and chemicals in this part that other mammals do. These contribute some of the most vital elements of the operation of our mind. They include the hypothalamus to which the pituitary gland is attached. Many basic drives and feelings originate in the hypothalamus including those around hunger, thirst and sex. The seat of the emotional brain is here in what is known as the limbic system, which is a band of structures including the amygdala and hippocampus that have been associated with emotional memory and whose connection with the forebrain is a crucial aspect of the way our mind functions. In the lower parts, through into the midbrain, there is a reticular activating system which has a kind of filtering and distributing function for connections entering and leaving the brain.

 

Finally the brain’s connection with the rest of the body is not simply a network of nerves. Notably the brain produces many hormones, some of which operate at nerve junctions, some spread through the spaces between the cells and many are released into the blood stream so they can travel to other parts of the body to have their effect. We will examine the hormone systems of the body later. There are spaces within the brain containing cerebrospinal fluid that runs down the inside of the spinal column so to some extent the brain floats on the top of your skeleton, which means that your posture and the way you hold your body can influence its function also. Body therapists are particularly aware of the importance of this.

It seems paradoxical that the brain has both highly localised and specialised functional areas and yet seems to also have the ability to distribute very widely many of its functions across all areas of the brain. Every time a part of the brain has been discovered that specialises in a particular function, such as Broca’s area and Wernicke’s area for speech for example, it has also been found subsequently that normal speech involves many other parts of the brain and that these can vary considerably between individuals. This even applies to the functionality of the left and right hemispheres because there are examples of children who had one complete hemisphere removed without losing too much functionality of the brain as a whole, i.e. they had fairly normal knowing and doing. The fact that other parts of the brain can take over the function of parts that have been damaged or removed, which is referred to as redundancy, is perhaps one of the most remarkable of the many remarkable features of this organ. That rescuing redundancy does not always happen, however, as there are also many instances of brain damage from which people can never recover.

Famous experiments, originally by Roger Sperry, with patients whose right and left cerebral hemispheres had been separated by cutting the corpus callosum gave rise to the idea that the left side specialises in verbal language skills while the right side was mainly concerned with non-verbal, more artistic skills. While this is generally true, again, it should not be taken too literally because some people have rather different lateralisation and verbal skills have been found to involve many different parts of the brain including the right hemisphere. It is important to note that no two brains are exactly the same. There are gender differences and a lot of variation between individuals in the way in which different regions of the brain are associated with particular functions.

These specialised functions develop as a result of the activity of the brain cells, not primarily because of their original design. Evidence for this comes from animal experiments in which brain cells from one specialised area, e.g. the visual cortex, were transplanted to another specialised area, e.g. the motor cortex, and they soon took on the new function of sensory-motor coordination of muscles instead of their original function of receiving visual inputs. Perhaps the most telling indication that the brain is still largely a mystery to us is the fact that some children with hydrocephalus (water on the brain) who, when the pressure is released from their brain possess only a fraction of the normal amount of brain cells, are quite normal or even exceptionally bright. Other children in the same situation, however, will die.

One does not need to study every known detail of specialised brain function to come to realise that, through its prodigious connectivity potential, the brain is quite extraordinarily resilient and adaptable and we know only a little about how all this happens. I think this is why it is so difficult to work out the subtleties of the human mind by focusing attention on the details of the brain and therefore we need to look more broadly than this to understand knowing and doing.

We know that doing originates in the brain, but not from an easily defined, hard wired circuitry. Instead the ‘neural net’ of connections develops in a particular way as a human being grows from a tiny embryo into an adult person and it is reasonable to assume that this development follows the course of the connections that the person’s mind is making with everything he or she encounters along the way. Fred Genesee compared the brain to a computer that comes with basic circuitry, but no software. That has to be developed by the individual through his or her experience in order to harness the wonderful connectivity potential that the organ provides. This analogy may be helpful, but it does not do justice to the plasticity of the circuitry itself in the amazing human brain.

Shaping of the neural net

Genesee described the process of learning in the light of recent brain research: “Learning by the brain is about making connections within the brain and between the brain and the outside world. What does this mean? Until recently, the idea that the neural basis for learning resided in connections between neurons remained speculation. Now, there is direct evidence that when learning occurs, neurochemical communication between neurons is facilitated and less input is required to activate established connections over time. New evidence also indicates that learning creates connections between not only adjacent neurons but also between distant neurons and that connections are made from simple circuits to complex ones and from complex circuits to simple ones.”

An example he gave was exposure to unfamiliar speech sounds, which are initially registered by the brain as rather diffuse and undifferentiated neural activity, but as exposure continues, both simple and complex circuits in the auditory cortex of the left hemisphere are seen to be activated repeatably and easily. These then join with other brain regions to incorporate visual, tactile, and even olfactory information related to the sound of the word, which give the sound of the word some meaning. The connections spread far and wide including the right hemisphere to form a complex neural net. The meaning that was at first like a blurry photograph becomes clearer and more detailed. Circuitry that is actively utilised works more rapidly and efficiently than is the case when it was first being formed. This means that for effective learning some time is needed to establish the circuitry.

Every connection that our mind is making with the medium in which we are living presumably has the potential to contribute to the shaping of the neural net. This brings us back to the loop of perception and the relationship between knowing and doing. If what we know is expressed in terms of the patterns of connection in our brain, then what we are doing is shaping our knowing at all times. Simultaneously we are doing our proactive perception of the world and our actions in it according to what we know to do. Doing affects knowing and knowing affects doing within the closed autopoietic system that defines us as a living human being.

Deciding what to do

The study of how conscious and unconscious decisions are made in the brain has led to several differing viewpoints regarding the question of free will. If you think about professional sportsmen, particularly those who use racquets or bats such as tennis or baseball players, you realise that their actions are often so quick that they could not have had time to think about what they were doing – it just happened. Their training has prepared them to react almost automatically. This leads to the interesting question, posed by the pioneering neuroscientist, Benjamin Libet: which starts first: your conscious thought or your brain activity?

His research, later confirmed by others, showed that a conscious decision we make in this moment has invariably been preceded by appropriate chemical and electrical activity inside our brain – it does not initiate such activity. In other words the brain is acting towards the implementation of that decision about 0.2 – 0.5 of a second earlier than our awareness of making the decision. So who is in charge of what we do? Are we being guided deterministically by some unknown forces or do we possess a genuine free will?

The American philosopher, John Searle, was a fervent exponent of all aspects of free will and most of us hold it as a very precious aspect of our mind. Yet the biological mechanisms of our mind seem to have a deterministic element in them as well. It will be possible to resolve this issue completely before we come to the end of this book. There are several more steps along our journey before we reach the vantage point from which this decision-making process of our mind can be clearly seen.

There is an interesting experiment in which subjects are asked to pick up a small metal bar with their thumb and forefinger when the bar is placed on an illusory grid that makes it look longer or shorter depending on where it was placed. The action of their fingers – their actual doing – is never deceived by the visual illusion. Even though to the eyes it appears that the bar is either longer or shorter, their fingers, driven by the motor nerves from the brain, know exactly how long it really is. There was no conscious awareness of how this was achieved.

It is the operation of our mind at the subconscious level that is coming into view, of course. The structural coupling process of an autonomous unity is not confined to those connections of which we are fully aware. The connections that we make with our world are far more extensive and more subtle than our conscious experience knows about, yet they are all a part of our mind and they all contribute to our knowing in the biological sense as we have defined it in this book. As mentioned before, what we do is what we know to do and this knowing may be at a deeper level than what we are actually attending to at the time.

 More about autopoiesis

The operation of our mind is a history of structural coupling between an autopoietic entity and its medium. The principle that describes this process is known as recursion. You can think of this autonomous unity, represented by the circle with the arrow, as a wheel travelling over the ground. It goes around and around, but its point of contact with the ground is continually changing and after one complete revolution it is back where it started in one sense, but on a completely new bit of ground in terms of its interaction with its world. Recursion is a process that is circular and repetitive in one sense, but is constantly refreshing and updating in another sense. Our lives could be described as an autopoietic operation with a history.

Another analogy that reveals a little more about this is the process of walking in a shoe over a period of time. As the shoe encounters different surfaces it is deformed slightly and as our foot engages with the shoe on the surface it is shaped to some extent and it also shapes the shoe, gradually improving the fit. New shoes never feel quite as comfortable as those we have been used to wearing. Recursive connection results in a mutual moulding of our autopoietic unity with our world. Both are changed at every connection point along the way. Usually this change is incredibly slight and goes unnoticed, but it has an important bearing on your life. Not always, but usually, each connection is influenced to some extent by the previous one and by the whole previous history. Each minute change predisposes the system to what is going to happen next to some extent. This can be a major or a very minor deterministic effect.

One principle that becomes self evident, I think, is that we are doing what we know to do in that particular moment and therefore our system is always doing its best with what is at hand at that moment. The fact that our awareness is always incomplete and may constitute only a small part of the total operation of our mind has consequences so far as our patterns of doing are concerned. We will explore these consequences further.

It is also the case that our language arises from and deals with aspects of our mind that are below the level of our conscious thought. Have you ever said something and then wondered: where did that come from? As we use language to hold together our personal story we are incorporating subconscious connectivity that our body makes through its structural coupling. Although we are not aware of it this is a vitally important part of the operation of our mind.

In the next Chapter we will be talking about how we use language to express the meaning that we form and to form the meaning that we express.