Synthesizing Mcluhan

MCLUHAN's PUZZEL

My PhD research project aims to reassess the work of communication scholar Herbert Marshall Mcluhan (1911-1980) in the light of todays media revolution. During my last three years at the European Journalism Centre (EJC) I was astonished to see many of his predictions becoming central realities in todays new media ecosystem. It buffeled me how Mcluhan's thoughts expressed more then 30 years ago still captures the central characteristics of an ongoing shift in todays values. Not just in economy and business but in politics, technology and society. Reflected in metaphors such as "Social Media", "Web2.0", "Cloud Computing", "Mobile Web", "Realtime Web", "Long Tail", "Creative Commons", "Mashup", "Facebook", "Realy Simple Syndication RSS" a much wider vortex of energy shaping the mindset of 21st century western culture seems to be at work than current theories can explain. Supported by sound scientific metaphers like "Knowledge Society", "Information Highway", "Network Society", "The Cult of the Amature", "ReMix Culture", "Creative Commons", "Knowledge Worker", "Innovation", "Change Management", "Infonomics", "Data is the new oil", "The Wealth of Networks", "Attention Economy" the forces shaping western culture seem to impress themselves upon 21st century digital boys and girls on facebook and elsewhere. To give but one example of the shifts in values underlaying the statistics of popular social network sites I focus on identity.

Uwe Hasebrink, Chairman of the German part of the EU Kids Online Network and director of the Hans Bredow Institute for Media Research in Hamburg said that young people have really embraced social networking sites, which has become an important part in social development and establishing their identities.

Since the internet became 'social' there is much talk about privacy and identity. What invaded over night millions of not only young people people who's sense of identity became watery. Research into media consumtion and habits reveal a dissolution between private and public identity, work and home, not just since facebook is around. Institutions too are faced with new media and are under constraints regarding their choices. Working at Maastricht University School of Business and Economics as webmaster I am shocked how a simple website alters how people see themselves. This ongoing shift definately reached its climax with the introduction of the mobile internet and devices like the iphone in combination with 'social' customer relationship management platforms. Web2.0 gurus like to talk about "The wisdom of the crowd", "The Networked society", "Here comes everybody" and "The cult of the amature", "The swallow" all relating technological imperatives to social phenomena. The shift that turned former passive consumers into active producers is responsible for this shift in selfperception. In a world where the majority saw on TV the spectacle orchestrated by a minority private identity was tacitly placed into the realm of the individual. And from their amplified in the multitudes of channels into the public realm. And this is our twitter, facebook, blogs.... . All that is now imploding on us and causes us to respond by flooding this new space - the internet. Or however you want to call it. A "New Cultural Economy" is unfolding upon the babies of the babyboom generation with increasing speedup of innovation accross all sectors of society. Driven by young entreprneurs accros the globe filling up to discover new markets and tapping into novel enterprises a global media galaxy is shrinking devices to the a level when kids get the feeling of beeing bigger than them: the 'Big Media'. Or the old one if they would only know that there was a time when we had no TV, even no radio or newspaper.

 

Matter and Memory - Henry Bergson part3

IV.

But this theory of "pure perception" had to be both qualified and completed in regard to two points. For the so-called "pure" perception, which is like a fragment of reality, detached just as it is, would belong to a being unable to mingle with the perception of other bodies that of its own body, that is to say, its affections; nor would it be able to mingle with its intuition of the actual moment that of other moments, that is to say, its memory. In other words, we have, to begin with, and for the convenience of study, treated the living body as a mathematical point in space and conscious perception as a mathematical instant in time. We then had to restore to the body its extensity and to perception its duration. By this we restored to consciousness its two subjective elements, affectivity and memory.
What is an affection? Our perception, we said, indicates the possible action of our body on others. But our body, being extended, is capable of acting upon itself as well as upon other bodies. Into our perception, then, something of our body must enter. When we are dealing with external bodies, these are, by hypothesis, separated from ours by a space, greater or lesser, which measures the remoteness in time of their promise or of their menace: this is why our perception of these bodies indicates only possible actions. But the more the distance diminishes between these bodies and our own, the more the possible action tneds to transform itself into a real action, the call for action becoming more urgent in the measure and proportion that the distance diminishes. And when this distance is nil, that is to say, when the body to be perceived is our own body, it is a real and no longer a virtual action that our perception sketches out. Such is, precisely, the nature of pain, an actual effort of the damaged part to set things to rights, an effort that is local, isolated, and thereby condemned to failure, in an organism which can no longer act except as a whole. Pain is, therefore, in the place where it is felt, as the object is at the place where it is perceived. Between the affection felt and the image percieved there is this difference, that the affection is within our body, the image outside our body. And that is why the surface of our body, the common limit of this and of other bodies, is given to us in the form both of sensations and of an image.
In this interiority of affective sensation consists its subjectivity; in that exteriority of images in general, their objectivity. But here again we encounter the ever-recurring mistake with which we have been confronted througout this work. It is supposed that perception and sensation exist for their own sake; the philosopher ascribes to them an entirely speculative function; and, as he has overlooked those real and virtual actions with which sensation and perception are bound up and by which, according as the action is virtual or real, perception and sensation are characterized and distinguished, he becomes unable to find any other difference between them than a difference of degree. Then, profiting by the fact that affective sensation is but vaguely localizde (because of the effort it involves in an indistinct effort) at once he declares it to be unextended, and these attenuated affections or unextended sensations he sets up as the material with which we are supposed to build up images in space. Thereby he condemns himself to an impossibility of explaining either whence arise the elements of consciousness, or sensations, which he sets up as so many absolutes, or how, unextended, they find their way to space and are coordinated there, or why, in it, they adopt a particular order rather than any other, or finally, how they manage to make up an experience which is regular and common to all men. This experience, the necessary field of our activity, is, on the contrary, what we should start from. Pure perceptions, therfore, or images, are what we should posit at the outset. And sensations, far from being the materials from which the image is wrought, will then appear as the impurity which is introduced into it, being that part of our own body which we project inot all others.

V.

But, as long as we confine ourselves to sensation and to pure perception, we can hardly be said to be dealing with the spirit. No doubt we demonstrate, in opposition to the theory of an epiphenomenal consciousness, that no cerebral state is the equivalent of a perception. No doubt the choice of perceptions from among images in general is the effect of a discernment which foreshadows spirit. No doubt also the material universe itself, defined as the totality of images, is a kind of consciousness, a consciousness in which everything compensates and neutralizes everything else, a consciousness of which all the potential parts, balancing each other by a reaction which is always equal to the action, reciptocally hinder each other from standing out. But to touch the reality of spirit we must place ourselves at the point where an individual consciousness, continuing and retaining the past in a present enriched by it, thus escapes the law of necessity, the law which ordains that the past shall ever follow itself in a present which merely repeats it in another form and that all things shall ever be flowing away. When we pass from pure perception to memory, we definitely abandon matter for spirit.

Matter and Memory - Summery and Conclusion part2

Here we seem to return to realism. But realism, unless corrected on an essential point, is as unacceptable as idealism and for the same reason. Idealism, we said, cannot pass from the order manifested in perception to the order which is successful in science, that is to say, to reality. Inversely, realism fails to draw from reality the immediate consciousness which we have of it. Taking the point of view of ordinary realism, we have, on the one hand, a composite matter made up of more or less independent parts, diffused throughout space, and, on the other hand, a mind which can have no point of contact with matter, unless it be, as materialists maintain, the unintelligible epiphenomenon. If we prefer the standpoint of the Kantian realism, we find between the "thing-in itself," that is to say, the real, and the "sensuous manifold" from which we construct our knowledge, no conceivable relation, no common measure. Now, if we get to the bottom of these two extreme forms of realism, we see that they converge toward the same point: both raise homogeneous space as a barrier between the intellect and things. The simpler realism makes of this space a real medium, in which things are in suspension; Kantian realism regards it as an ideal medium, in which the multiplicity of sensations is coordinated; but for both of them this medium is given to begin with as the necessary condition of what comes to abide in it. And if we try to get to the bottom of this common hypothesis, in its turn, we find that it consists in attributing to homogeneous space a disinterested office: space is supposed either merely to uphold material reality or to have the function, still purely speculative, of furnishing sensations with means of coordinating themselves. So the obscurity of realism, like that of idealism, comes from the fact that, in both of them, our conscious perception and the conditions of our conscious perception are assumed to point to pure knowledge, not to action. But now suppose that this homogeneous space is not logically anterior, but posterior to material things and to the pure knowledge which we can have of them; suppose that extensity is prior to space; suppose that homogeneous space concerns our action and only our action; being like an infinitely fine network which we stretch beneath material continuity in order to render ourselves master of it, to decompose it according to the plan of our activities and our needs. Then, not only has our hypothesis the advantage to bringing us into harmony with science, which shows us each thing exercising an influence on all the others and, consequently, occupying, in a certain sense, the whole of the extended (although we perceive of this thing only its center and mark its limits at the point where our body ceases to have any hold upon it). Not only has it the advantage, in metaphysic, of suppressing or lessening the contradictions raised by divisibility in space - contradictions which always arise, as we have shown, from our failure to dissociate the two points of view, that of action from that of knowledge. It has, above all the advantage of overthrowing the insurmountable barriers raised by realism between the extended world and our perception of it. For whereas this doctrine assumes, on the one hand, an external reality which is multiple and divided, and, on the other hand, sensations alien from extensity and without possible contact with it, we find that concrete extensity is not really divided, any more than immediate perception is in truth unextended. Starting from realism, we come back to the point to which idealism had led us; we replace perception in things. And we see realism and idealism ready to come to an understanding when we set aside the postulate, uncritically accepted by both, which served them as a common frontier.

To sum up: if we suppose an extended continuum, and, in this continuum, the center of real action which is represented by our body, its activity will appear to illuminate all those parts of matter with which at each successive moment it can deal. The same needs, the same power of action, which have delimited our body in matter, will also carve out distinct body in the surrounding medium. Everything will happen as if we allowed to filter through us that action of external things which is real, in order to arrest and retain that which is virtual: this virtual action of things upon our body and of our body upon things is our perception itself. But since the excitations which our body receives from surrounding bodies determine unceasingly, within its substance, nascent reactions - since this internal movements of the cerebral substance thus sketch out at very moments our possible action on things, the state of the brain exactly corresponds to the perception. It is neither its cause, nor its effect, nor in any sense its duplicate: merely continues it, the perception being our virtual action and the cerebral state our action already begun.

Matter and Memory by Henri Bergson - Introduction

Introduction

This book affirms the realty of spirit and the reality of matter and tries to determine the relation of the one to the other by the study of a definite example, that of memory. It is, then, frankly dualistic. But, on the other hand, it deals with body and mind in such a way as, we hope, to lessen greatly, if not to overcome, the theoretical difficulties which have always beset dualism, and which cause it, though suggested by the immediate verdict of consciousness and adopted by common sense, to be held in small honor among philosophers.

These difficulties are due, for the most part, to the conception, now realistic, now idealistic, which philosophers have of matter. The aim of our first chapter is to show that realism and idealism both go too far, that it is a mistake to reduce matter to the perception which we have of it, a mistake also to make of it a thing able to produce in us perceptions, but in itself of another nature than they. Matter, in our view, is an aggregate of "images." And by "image" we mean a certain existence which is more than that which the idealist calls a representation, but less than that which the realist calls a thing - an existence placed halfway between the "thing" and the "representation." This conception of matter is simply that of common sense. It would greatly astonish a man unaware of the speculations of philosophy if we told him that the object before him, which he sees and touches, exists only in his mind and for his mind or even, more generally, exists only for mind, as Berkeley held. Such a man would always maintain that the object exists independently of the consciousness which perceives it. But, on the other hand, we should astonish him quite as much by telling him that the object is entirely different from that which is perceived in it, that it has neither the color ascribed to it by the eye nor the resistance found in it by the hand. The color, the resistance, are, for him, in the object: they are not states of our mind; they are part and parcel of an existence really independent of our own. For common sense, then, the object exists in itself, and, on the other hand, the object is, in itself, pictorial, as we perceive it: image it is, but a self-existing image.

This is just the sense in which we use the word image in our first chapter. We place ourselves at the point of view of a mind unaware of the disputes between philosophers. Such a mind would naturally believe that matter exists just as it is perceived; and, since it is perceived as an image, the mind would make of it, in itself, an image. In a word, we consider matter before the dissociation which idealism and realism have brought about between its existence and its appearance. No doubt it has become difficult to avoid this dissociation now that philosophers have made it. To forget it, however, is what we ask of the reader. If, in the course of this first chapter, objections arise in his mind against any of the views that we put forward, let him ask himself whether these objections do not imply his return to one or the other of the two points of view above which we urge him to rise.

Philosophy made a great step forward on the day when Berkeley proved, as against the "mechanical philosophers," that the secondary qualities of matter have at least as much reality as the primary qualities. His mistake lay in believing that, for this, it was necessary to place matter within the mind and make it into a pure idea. Descartes, no doubt, had put matter too far from us when he made it one with geometrical extensity. But, in order to bring it nearer to us, there was no need to go to the point of making it one with our own mind. Because he did go as far as this, Berkeley was unable to account for the success of physics, and, whereas Descartes had set up the mathematical relations between phenomena as their very essence, he was obliged to regard the mathematical order of the universe as a mere accident. So the Kantian criticism became necessary, to show the reason of this mathematical order and to give back to our physics a solid foundation - a task in which, however, it succeeded only by limiting the range and value of our senses and of our understanding. The criticism of Kant, on this point at least, would have been unnecessary; the human mind, in this direction at least, would not have been led to limit its own range; metaphysics would not have been sacrificed to physics, if philosophy had been content to leave matter half way between the place to which Descartes had driven it and that to which Berkeley drew it back - to leave it, in fact, where it is seen by common sense.

There we shall try to see it ourselves. Our first chapter defines this way of looking at matter; the last sets forth the consequences of such a view. But, as we said before, we treat of matter only in so far as it concerns the problem dealt with in our second and third chapters, that which is the subject of this essay: the problem of the relation between soul and body.

This relation, though it has been a favorite theme throughout the history of philosophy, has really been very little studied. If we leave on one side the theories which are content to state the "union of soul and body" as an irreducible and inexplicable fact, and those which speak vaguely of the body as an instrument of the soul, there remains hardly any other conception of the psychophysiological relation than the hypothesis of "epiphenomenalism" or that of "parallelism," which in practice - I mean in the interpretation of particular facts - both end in the same conclusion. For whether, indeed, thought is regarded as a mere function of the brain and the state of consciousness as an epiphenomenon of the state of the brain, or whether mental states and brain states are held to be two versions, in two different languages, of one and the same original, in either case it is laid down that, could we penetrate into the inside of a brain at work and behold the dance of the atoms which make up the cortex, and if, on the other hand, we possessed the key to psychophysiology, we should know every detail of what is going on in the corresponding consciousness.

This, indeed, is what is most commonly maintained by philosophers as well as by men of science. Yet it would be well to ask whether the facts, when examined without any preconceived idea, really suggest an hypothesis of this kind. that there is a close connection between a state of consciousness and the brain we do not dispute. But there is also a close connection between a coat and the nail on which it hangs, for, if the nail is pulled out, the coat falls to the ground. Shall we say, then, that the shape of the nail gives us the shape of the coat, or in any way correspond to it? No more are we entitled to conclude, that there is any parallelism between the two series psychical and physiological. When philosophy pleads that the theory of parallelism is born out of the results of positive science, it enters upon an unmistakably vicious circle; for, if science interprets connection, which is a fact, as signifying parallelism, which is an hypothesis (and an hypothesis to which it is difficult to attach an intelligible meaning), it does so, consciously or unconsciously, for reasons of a philosophical order: it is because science has been accustomed by a certain type of philosophy to believe that there is no hypothesis more probable, more in accordance with the interests of scientific inquiry.

Now, as soon as we do, indeed, apply to positive facts for such information as my help us to solve the problem, we find it is with memory that we have to deal. This was be expected, because memory - we shall try to prove in the course of this work - is just the intersection of mind and matter. But we may leave out the reason here: no one, at any rate, will deny that, among all the facts capable of throwing light on the psychophysiological relation, those which concern memory, whether in the normal or in the pathological state, hold a privileged position. Not only is the evidence here extremely abundant (consider the enormous mass of observations collected in regard to the various kinds of aphasia), but nowhere else have anatomy, physiology and psychology been able to lend each other such valuable aid. Anyone who approaches, without preconceived ideas and on the firm ground of facts, the classical problem of the relations of soul and body, will soon see this problem as centering upon the subject of memory, and, even more particularly, upon the memory of words: it is from this quarter, undoubtedly, that will come the light which will illumine the obscurer parts of the problem.

The reader will see how we try to solve it. Speaking generally, the physical state seems to us to be, in most cases, immensely wider than the cerebral state, I mean that the brain state indicates only a very small part of the mental state, that part which is capable of translating itself into movements and locomotion. Take a complex thought which unrolls itself in a chain of abstract reasoning. This thought is accompanied by images, that are at least nascent(freshly generated in a reactive form). And these images themselves are not pictured in consciousness without some foreshadowing, in the form of a sketch or a tendency, of the movements by which these images would be acted or played in space - would, that is to say, impress particular attitudes upon the body, and set free all that they implicitly contain of spatial movement. Now, of all the thought which is unrolling, this, in our view, is what the cerebral state indicates at every moment. he who could penetrate into the interior of a brain and see what happens there, would probably obtain full details of these sketched-out, or prepared, movements; there is no proof that he would learn anything else. Were he endowed with a superhuman intellect, did he possess the key to psychophysiology, he would know no more of what is going on in the corresponding consciousness than we should know of a play from the comings and goings of the actors upon the stage.

That is to say, the relation of the mental to the cerebral is not a constant, any more than it is simple, relation. According to the nature of the play that is being acted, the movements of the players tell us more or less about it: nearly everything, if it is a pantomime; next to nothing, if it is a delicate comedy. Thus our cerebral state contains more or less of our mental state in the measure that we reel off our psychic life into action or wind it up into pure knowledge.

There are then, in short, divers tones of mental life, or, in other words, our psychic life may be lived at different heights, now nearer to action, now further removed from it, according to the degree of our attention to life. Here we have one of the ruling ideas of this book - the idea, indeed, which served as the starting point of our inquiry. That which is usually held to be a greater complexity of the psychical state appears to us, from our point of view, to be a greater dilatation of the whole personality, which, normally narrowed down by action, expands with the unscrewing of the vice in which it has allowed itself to be squeezed, and, always whole and undivided, spreads itself over a wider and wider surface. That which is commonly held to be a disturbance of the psychic life itself, an inward disorder, a disease of the personality, appears to us, from our point of view, to be an unloosing or a braking of the tie which binds this psychic life to its motor accompaniment, a weakening or an impairing of our attention to outward life. This opinion, as also that which denies the localization of the memory-images of words and explains aphasia quite otherwise than by such localization, was considered paradoxical at the date of the first publication of the present work (1896). It will appear much less so now. The conception of aphasia then classical, universally admitted, believed to be unshakable, has been considerably shaken in the last few years, chiefly by reasons of an anatomical order, but partly also by reasons of the same kind as those which we then advance. And the profound and original study of neuroses made by Professor Pierre Janet has led him, of late years, to explain all psychasthenic forms of disease by these same considerations of psychic "tension" and of attention to reality which were then presumed to be metaphysical.

In truth, it was not altogether a mistake to call them by that name. Without denying to psychology, any more than to metaphysics, the right to make itself into an independent science, we believe that each of these two sciences should set problems to the other and can, in a measure, help it to solve them. How should it be otherwise, if psychology has for its object the study of the human mind working for practical utility, and if metaphysics is but this same mind striving to transcend the conditions of useful action and to come back to itself as to a pure creative energy? Many problems, which appear foreign to each other as long as we are bound by the letter of the terms in which these two sciences state them, are seen to be very near akin, and to be able to solve each other when we thus penetrate into their inner meaning. We little thought, at the beginning of our inquiry, that there could be any connection between the analytical study of memory and the question, which is debated between realists and idealists or between mechanists and dynamists, with regard to the existence or the essence of matter. Yet this connection is real, it is even intimate; and, if we take it into account, a cardinal metaphysical problem is carried into the open field of observation, where it may be solved progressively, instead of forever giving rise to fresh disputes of the schools within the closed lists of pure dialectic. The complexity of some parts of the present work is due to the inevitable dovetailing of problems which results from approaching philosophy in such a way. But through this complexity, which is due to the complexity of reality itself, we believe that the reader will find his way if he keeps a fast hold on the two principles which we have used as a clue throughout our own researches. The first is that in psychological analysis we must never forget the utilitarian character of our mental functions, which are essential turned toward action. The second is that the habits formed in action find their way up to the sphere of speculation, where they create fictitious problems, and that metaphysics must begin by dispersing this artificial obscurity.

H. Bergson
Paris, October 1910

Michael Merzenich - Exploring the re-wiring of the brain part2

The first example I wanna talk about relates to children with learning impairments and we now have a large body of literature that demonstrates that the fundamental problem that occures in a majority of children that have early language impairments - and have a good struggle to learn to read - is that the language processor is created in a defective form. And the reason that it arises in a defective form is because early on in the babies brains life, the machine process is noisy. Its that simple. Its a simple noise problem.

A lot of things contribute to that. There are numerous inherent faults that could make the machine process noisier. The noise problem could also occure on the basis that information provided in the world of the ears - one that was called mental retardation. We knew that they where gonna struggle to learn to develop normal language abilities. And we knew that they where gonna struggle to learn to read. Most of them would be intellectual and academic failures. Thats disappeared. It no longer applies. That inherited weakness, that inherited condition has evaporated. We don't have that anymore. Where did it go?

It was understood by a dutch sergeant about 45 years ago that if you simply fix the problem early enough, when the brain is still in this initial plastic periode so it can setup this machinery adequately in this initial set up time (in a critical periode) non of that happens. And what do you do to correct it? You basically opening up the tubes that drain through it from the middle ears.

The child's native language in such a case is not english, its not japanese, its waffel english, its degraded japanese, its crap. And the brains specializes for it. It creates a representation of language crap. And now the child is stuck with it. And the crap doesn't just happen in the ear, it can also happen in the brain.

The brain itself can be noisy, its commonly noisy. There are many inheritent false that can make a noise here. And the native language for a child with such a brain is degraded. Its not english, its noisy english. And that results in defective representation of sounds or words. Not normal, a different strategy, a machine which has a different time and space concepts. And you look into the brain of such a child and record those time constance, where about an 11 times longer in duration on the average than a normal child. Space constance where about three times greater. Such a child will have memory and cognitive deficits in this domine. Of course they will. Because as the reciever of language, receiving it and representing it in an information thats representing crap.

And they gonna have poor reading skills, because reading is dependent upon the translation of word sounds into this orthographic or visual representational form. If you don't have a brain representation of word-sounds the translation makes no sense. And you gonna have cross bending abnormal neurology and all this children increasingly in evaluation after evaluation and there are operations in reading and language we document abnormal neurology. The point is that you can train the brain out of this. And the way to think about it is you can actually redefine the processing capacity of the machinery by changing it. Changing it in detail... It takes about 30 hours on the average. And we accomplished that in about 430.000 kids today.

And actually when you look at the impacts they are substantial. So here we look at the normal distribution. What we are most interested in is the kids on the left side of the distribution. This is from about 3000 children - and you can see that most of the kids on the left side of the distribution moving into the middle of the right. This is like an IQ test for language. The impact in the distribution if you trained every child in the US would be to shift the whole distribution to the right. This is a substantially impact. Think about a classroom of children or children in language arts. Think about children on the slow side of the class. We have the potential to move most of those children to the middle or right side.

In addition to add to language training it also fixes memory and cognition, speech fluency and speech production and an importent language depended skill is enabled by this training - namely reading. And to a large extend it fixes the brain. So you look down in the brain of a child in a variety of task as scientist have at Standfort, MIT and UCISA, UCLA and a number of other institutions. And children operating in variouse language behaviours or reading behaviours you see for the most extend for most children their neuronal responses - complexly abnormal before you start - are normalised by the training.

And you can also take the same approach to address problems in aging. Where again the machinery is deteriorating now the compliment machinery is going south, noise is increasing in the brain and learning modulation and control is deteriorating. And you can actually look down on such a brain and withness a change in the time constance and space constance with which the brain is representing language again.

Just as the brain came out of chaos at the beginning it goes back in the chaos in the end. And this results in declines of memory, in cognition and in posture mobility and agility. It turns out you can train the brain of such an individual for about 30 hours. And what you see is substantial improvements of their immediate memory, their ability to remember things after a delay, the ability to control their attention, their language and visual/spacial ability.

The Neuropsychological index of trained individuals in that population is about two standard deviations. That means if you sit at the left side of the distribution, I am looking at your neuropsychological abilities, the average person is moved to the middle or the right side of the distribution. It means most people who are at risk of senility more or less immediately are now in a protective possition.

end.

Michael Merzenich - Exploring the re-wiring of the brain part1

This machine that we all have residing in our skulls reminds me of an aphorism of a common Woody Allen that asked about whats the very best thing to have within your skull. And its this machine. And its constructed for change. Its all about change. It confirm on us stability to do things tomorrow that we cannt do today. Things today that we couldn't do yesterday. And of course its born stubid.

The last time we are in the presence of a baby, this happens to be my granddaughter Metra; isn't she fabulous. Non the less, when she poped out. Despite the fact that her brain had actually been progressing in its development for several months before - on the basis of the experience in the wome. She had very little abilities, as does every infant at the point of normal natural full term birth. Her perceptual abilities where to be crude. There is no indication that there is any thinking going on, in fact there is little evidence that there is any cognitive ability in a very young infant. Infant dont respond to much. There is not really much of an indication in fact that there is a person on board. Infants can only in a very primitive and limited way controll her movements.

It will be several months before that infant can do something as simple as reshaping grasp under co-voluntary object can retrieve it. Usually to the mouth. And there will be some month before-ward when we see a long study progression of the evolution from the first wiggles to rolling over sitting up and crawling, standing, and walking. Before we get to that magical point in which we can rotate in the world. And yet if we look forward in the brain we see pretty remarkable advance. By this age the brain can actually store, can fastly retrieve the meanings of thousands, tens of thousands of objects, actions and their relationships in the world. And those relationships can in fact be constructed in hundreds of thousands potentially millions of ways. At this age, the brain controls very refined perceptual abilities. It actually has a growing repertoire of cognitive skills. This brain is very much a thinking machine. And at this stage there is absolutely no question that this brain has a person on board.

And in fact at this age it is substantially controlling its own self-development. And by this age we see a remarkable evolution in his capacity to control movement. Now movement is advanced to the point where it can actually control a set of movement simultaneously. In a complex sequence in complex ways as would be required of playing in a complicated game like soccer. This boy can dance a soccer ball on his head. He comes from São Paulo Brazil, about forty per cent of boys have this ability. You can go out in this community and you have difficulty finding a boy that has this ability. And if he did, he probably be from Sau Paulo. And that is another way of saying that our individual skills and abilities are very much shaped by our environments.

And as an environment extends into our contemporary culture - the thing our brains is challenged with - because what we have done in our personal evolutions is build up a large repertoire of specific skills and abilities. They are specific to our own individual histories and in fact they result in a wonderful differentiation in human kind. In a way that in fact, no two of us are quiet alike. Every one of us has a different set of acquired skills and abilities. And all drive out of the plasticity, the adaptability of this really remarkable adaptive machine.

In an adult brain of course we build up a large repertoire of master skills and abilities that we can perform more or less automatically from memory. And that define us as acting moving, thinking creatures. And we study this as the nerdy, laboratory university scientist we are. Engaging the brains of animals like rats, or monkeys or this peculiar creatures - one of the more bizarre forms of life on earth - to engage them in learning new skills and abilities. And we try to track the changes that occure as a new skill or ability is aquired. And in fact we do this in individuals of any age in this different species, that is to say from infancy and adulthood to old age.

And so we might engage a rat f.e. to aquire a new skill or ability that might involve the rat using its claw to master a particular manual taks behaviour. Just like we might examine a child in its ability to aquire the sub-skills or the general overall skill of accomplishing something like mastering the ability to read. We might look in an older individual who has mastered a complex set of abilities that might relate to read musical notation or performing the mechanical act of performance that apply to musical performance. From these studies, we define two great epos of the plastic history of the brain.

The first commonly called the "critical periode"; And thats the period in which the brain is setting up in its initial form its basic processing machinery. This is actually a periode of dramatic change, in which it doesn't take learning per se to drive the initial differentiation of the machinery of the brain. All it takes for example in the sound domain is exposure to sound. And the brain actually is at the mercy of the sound environment in which it is reared. So. f.e. I can hear an animal in an environment in which there is meaningless dump sound. A repertoire of sound that I make up. But I make just by exposure artificially important to the animal and its young brain. And what I see is that the animal brain sets up its initial processing of that sound in a formless idealized, within the limits of its processing achievements, to represent it in an organized and orderly way.

The sound does not have to be valuable to the animal. I can raise the animal in something that could be hypothetical valuable, like the sounds that simulates the sounds of a native language of the child, and I see the brain actualy develop a processor that is specialized for the complex array or repertoire of sounds. It actually exaggerates their separateness of representation in multi dimensional neurological representational terms. Or I can expose the animal to a completely meaningless and destructive sound. I can raise the animal under conditions that would be equivalent to raising a baby under a moderately loud sealing fan in the presents of continous noise. And when I do that, actually specialize the brain to be a master processor for that meaningless sound. And I frustrate its ability to represent any meaningful sound as a consequence.

Such things in the early history of babies occure in real babies. And they account for the beautiful evolution of a language specific processor in every normally developing baby. And so do they also account for development of defective processing in a substantial population of children. They are more limited, as a consequence, in their language ability for an older age.

Now, in this early periode of plasticity, the brain actually changes outside of a learning context. I don't have to pay attention to what I hear. The input does not have to be meaningful. I dont have to be in a behavioral context. And this is required so that the brain sets up its processing, so that it can act differentially, so that it can act selectively so that the creature that wears it, that carries it, can begin to operate on it in a selective way.

In the next epoch of live which applies for most of life, the brain is actually refining its machinery as it masters a wide repertoire of skills and abilities. And in this epoch, which extends from late in the first year of life to death, its doing this under behavioral control. And another way of saying that the brain has strategies to define the significance of the input to the brain. And its focusing on skill after skill or ability after ability under a specific attentional control. And its a function weather the goal or behaviour is achieved or wether the brain or this individual is rewarded by the behaviour. This is actually very powerful expressed in that its the basis of a real differentation of one individual from another.

You can look down in a brain of an animal that is engaged a specific skill and you can wittness and document this change on a variety of levels. So here is a very simple experiments that was actually conducted 5 years ago. The simple experiment where a monkey had been trained in a task manipulating a tool that is equivalent in difficulty to a child learning to manipulate or handle a spoon. And the monkey actually masters the test in 700 trials. In the beginning the monkey could not perform this task at all and had a success rate of about one in eight trials. And those trials where elaborate, each attempt substantially different from another, and the monkey gradually developed a strategy. And 700 or so trials later the monkeys' performing it flawlessly. Never fails, his successful and its retrieval of food with this tool every time.

At this point the taks has been performed in a beautiful stereotyped way, very beautifully regulated and highly repeated trial to trial. We can look down on the brain of the monkey and we see that its distorted. We can track this changes and have tracked this changes in behaviors across time. And here we see the distortion reflected in the map of the skin surfaces of the hand of the monkey. This is a map down in the surface of the brain in which the very elaborated experiment we reconstructed shows the responses -location by location- in an highly detailed response mapping other responses of its neurons. And we see here a reconstruction of how the hand is represented in the brain. We actually distorted the map by the exercise and that is indicated in the pink. There are couple of fingertips surfaces that are larger and these are surfaces the monkey is using to manipulate the tool.

We look at the selectivity of responses in the cortex of the monkey we see that the monkey has actually changed the filter characteristics which represents inputs form the skin of the fingertips that are engaged. In other words, there is still a single simple representation of the fingertips in this most organized of critical areas of the surface of the skin of the body. And yet knowledge represented in substantially finer grain. The Monkeys getting more detailed information from the surfaces.

Actually we have looked in several different critical areas in the monkeys learning's task. Each changes in ways that are specific to the skill or ability. So f.e we can look to the critical area that represents input thats controlling the posture of the monkey, we look in critical areas that control specific movements and the sequences of movements in the behaviour and so for. There are all remodeled. They all become specialized for the task of the hand. There are fifteen or twenty critical areas that are change specifically when you learn a simple skill like this.

And that represents in your brain really a massive change. It represents the change in a reliable way of the responses of tens of millions possible hundreds of millions of neurons in your brain. It represents changes in hundreds of millions possibly billions synaptic connections in your brain. This is constructed by physical change, and the level of the construction that occure is massive. Think of the changes that occure in the brain of a child in the course of acquiring the movement behaviour abilities in general or acquiring the native language abilities. The changes are massive.

What its all about is the selective representation of things that are important to the brain. Because in most of the life of the brain this is under control of behavioral context. Its what you pay attention too. Its what you worthing to you, its what your brain regards itself as positive and important to you. Its all about critical processing and full brain specialization and that underlies your specialization. That is why you, and your many skills and abilities, are unique specialist. A specialist that is vastly different in your physical brain in detail from the brain of an individual a hundred years ago. Enormously different in the details from the brain of the average individual a thousand years ago.

Now, one of the characteristics of this change process is that information is always related to other imputs or information thats occuring in immediate time and context. And thats because the brain is constructing representation of things that are correlated in little moments of time. And they relate to one another in little moments of successive time. The brain is recording all information and driving all change in temporal context.

Overwhelmingly the most powerful context thats occured in your brain is you. Millions of event have occured in your history that are related in time to yourself as the reciever or yourself as the actor, yourself as the thinker, yourself as the mover. Millions of times little pieces of sensations come in from the surface of your body that are always associated with you as the reciever and that result in the embodiment of you. You are constructed, your self is constructed from this billions of events, thats constructed, thats created in your brain by physical change. This is the marvelously constructed brain that results in an individual form. Because each one of us has vastly different histories and vastly different experiences that driving us, this marvelous differentiation of self, of personhood.

We used this research to try to understand not just how a normal person develops and elaborates his skills and abilities, but also try to understand the origins of impairment and the origins of differentness or variations that might limit the capacities of a child or an adult. And then I talk about using this strategies to actually design brain clusters based approach to drive correction in the machinery of the child that increases the competence of the child as a language reciever and user and thereafter as a reader.

And I rather talk about experiments that involve actually using this brain science first of all to understand how it contributes to the loose of function as we age. And by using that in a targeted approach, where we try to differentiate the machinery to recover function in old age.

Mcluhan and the Brain

What is to show is that the language "they" comprise has a syntax. In fact, it is to show how the mind computes in a fixed way with varying degree of the sensory motor system metaphoric expressions. I want to prove that in artifacts do have a autocathalytic structure formalizable with the tetraeda model. These innate structure of technologies put forward in the thesis comprise the mechanics of an analogical machine that produces a number of "coherant world expectations" in the mind from which an expector has to choose upon to perform the action or not. This analogical machine is a mental organ, simliar to the language organ, and performs the task to translate experience stored as conceptual metaphors into one another. It is a metaphorical device for that deals with the problems posed by ambiguity in words. Cognitive linguistics speak of the organs ability to "facilitate the understanding of one conceptual domain in terms of another".

In "Organism and Environment" in Scientia, and in more popular form in the last chapter of Biology as Ideology, Lewontin argued that while traditional Darwinism has portrayed the organism as passive recipient of environmental influences, a correct understanding should emphasize the organism as an active constructer of its own environment. Building on ideas initially developed by Lewontin (1983), it has been previously proposed that biological evolution depends not only on natural selection and genetic inheritance, but also on "niche construction" (Odling-Smee, 1988, Odling-Smee, et al., 1996; Laland et al., 1996a). By niche construction I refer to the same processes that Jones et al. (1997) call "ecosystem engineering". Niche construction refers to the activities, choices and metabolic processes of organisms, through which they define, choose, modify and partly create their own niches. There are numerous examples of organisms choosing or changing their habitats, or of constructing artefacts, leading to an evolutionary response (Odling-Smee et al., 1996; Laland et al., 1996a). Mens brain computes changes as part of its endownment for adaptation which is nothing more than the capacity to learn and relearn.