Interviews with Jason Brown
by David T. Bradford
Preface
In November, 2006, I met with Jason Brown for a series of interviews, the first two of which now appear in Psychoscience. The first focuses on scientific and philosophical influences that shaped his early work in aphasia and anticipated the development of microgenetic theory. The second is concerned with his adaptation of evolutionary principles in describing and explaining the mind/brain state.
Footnotes and textual references are not included. A bibliography of Brown’s book-length publications has been appended, also several additional entries that provide commentary on his work.
In reviewing later interviews, I see their guiding thread is the mind/brain state, a central feature of microgenetic theory. In grasping the nature of the state, one sees into the genesis of mind and the neural process that delivers experience of the world.
I welcome comments about these two interviews and shows of interest in publication of those that followed.
David T. Bradford, PhD
Austin, Texas
Editors Note: Further interviews will by added to this page as they become available.
Interviews with Jason Brown
I. Early Influences
DB: David T. Bradford, PhD
JW: Jason W. Brown, MD
DB: Major scientific projects often have a guiding metaphor which shapes the work and serves implicitly as a measure of adequacy. Were there certain images or metaphors that influenced your work from the beginning?
JB: The guiding metaphor has been a tree or fountain, understood as the recurrent generation of form, as compared with a river, which portrays time as flowing. These metaphors have been in my mind since the earliest days. I could say now, years later, that the root is the core self, the branch is the concept, and the leaf is the object.
DB: Root, branch, and leaf represent progressive degrees of differentiation. A fountain’s water rises from a single source to traverse a given set of paths. Both the tree and fountain imply recursion with small adjustments. A river carries novel objects, always in one direction. These metaphors turn on different conceptions of time and change. Was there a particular source for your interest in time and the manner in which it brings about change?
JB: A source of which I am very much aware was Bergson and his work on pure duration. He does not have recurrence as a prominent theme, but he does have the notion of time as a point rather than a continuum. He notes that the typical way of thinking about time is to stand above and see it as a line in space rather than a point that recurs. He also viewed perception as an active, productive process which contrasts with the passive in-processing account in neuroscience at that time and up to the present day. I read Bergson as a teenager and I think somehow these ideas were percolating in the shadows as I began my medical studies. I drifted quite far and did not return to this topic until many years later when I began to study psychology and brain function, starting with work on aphasia.
DB: What scientific work influenced the early aphasia studies?
JB: One early influence was Paul Weiss, in embryology, who wrote about plasticity and specification; and there were others who had the idea of progressive specification, of individuation or differentiation, rather than accumulation or aggregation. Instead of aggregation or combination as the manner of formation, the idea of wholes that specified into parts was also a guiding metaphor. The metaphor of depth-and-surface was there, too, beginning with Freud’s topographic theory, his metapsychology, the work on symptom formation and the transition from unconscious to conscious. Hughlings Jackson, in neurology, had similar ideas. There were several sources in evolutionary biology, people like Herrick, not well known today, and Jennings on the idea of an archetypal or iconic form that is transmuted in different organisms.
An important influence on my studies of aphasia was the work of Arnold Pick, some of whose writings I had translated into English. Pick had a genetic model of language production, in that an utterance is realized over stages. Paul Schilder also took this approach in neuropsychology, postulating a succession of stages in the realization of an object or utterance. His paper on the development of thought was critical in my early years. Along with David Rapaport, he might be considered the father of a genetic school in psychoanalysis, in which a qualitative development from unconscious to conscious phases replaced the various interpretations of how ideas become conscious in Freudian orthodoxy.
None of this was formulated in any systematic way, but was lodged somewhere in memory and framed the way I approached the work that followed on aphasia. I was well prepared for my year in Boston with Norman Geschwind. I had been reading extensively on aphasia and was in the process of writing a book on the topic when I came to Boston. The book on aphasia had a microgenetic approach, though it was buried in the academic detail.
I should say that another tendency has been to try and explain as much as I can in terms of an underlying theme or model instead of separate models for different phenomena, as is the case in classical localization theory or more recent modular approaches. The coherence and uniformity of the theory were always essential, which I suppose is another way of speaking of beauty.
There was also a tendency to incorporate a range of observations as arguments for the model, as if the explanatory power of a model derives from its breadth; and to show, or at least prove to myself, that the model was general, authentic, and consistent across the many psychopathological disorders. As the model took shape, I tried to extend it to as many phenomena as possible. Actually, the model was developed in aphasia study. When the account of the aphasias was relatively complete, and the derivational process from depth to surface linked to the different forms of language pathology was mapped to levels in the evolution of the forebrain, it became apparent to me that the model was applicable to the apraxias, or disorders of action-development, as well as to the agnosias, or the disorders of perception that account for deviations in object-development.
Eventually, the model came together in The Life of the Mind. The earlier aphasia book was an attempt to understand the different approaches to aphasia and to survey the literature on the topic, in relation to a formative or genetic account. Aphasia study was, and still is in some respects, the doorway to neuropsychology.
DB: Aphasia was the theory’s earliest testing ground. You then turned to other functional areas. The search for a comprehensive theory was under way. Decades were required.
JB: The theory did not spring up fully formed, but developed slowly, first in terms of language disorders. As you know, the history of aphasia is the history of progressive localization, leading from the phrenologists to Broca, who was as much the last of the phrenologists as the first of the aphasiologists. This led to more precise descriptions and localizations of part-functions, and finally to functional modules, columns, and command or grandmother cells. Those who protested -- the holists - did not have an alternative model; as Rapaport said in a different context, they were ministers without portfolios, critiques without solutions. The problem was to organize the aphasia symptoms in a theory that was consistent within a given domain of function and across different aspects of language performance, both normal and pathological. This required one to see language perception and production from a unitary standpoint.
When it became clear that the posterior aphasias, which have been
considered problems in both production and perception, and the anterior aphasias, which are thought of as production disorders, could be understood in terms of a common processing sequence, this allowed me to meld perception and production in a common system. This goes back to Bergson who had an active or productive theory of perception rather than one that was passive or receptive.
DB: Holistic accounts were unwelcome or ignored when you began the aphasia studies. Say more about this.
JB: Consider the history. The standard theory goes back to Meynert and Flechsig. This was the basis for the earliest schemas of aphasia, and the basic outline that has guided thinking on the topic ever since. It is important to stress that the early history of aphasia is also the history of neuropsychology. Since language has been the most localizable function of the brain, the thinking was that if one could not localize language, forget about localizing everything else. Certain conditions like word deafness and auditory agnosias were interpreted as defects at different points in the processing of auditory information. The auditory or the visual signal was thought to arrive at the primary areas, then on to secondary and tertiary areas, and to association cortex, what Geschwind called the association cortex of association cortices -- what others have called conversion zones. In this view, there is a linear progression to more complex and multimodal areas by way of association pathways. The secondary and tertiary areas served for higher processing and the combining or assembling of sensory data. It was common knowledge that the association or integration cortex in the frontal and parietal regions had undergone the greatest growth in the evolutionary sequence leading to man, and so they were naturally treated as the highest regions of the brain mediating the most complex modes of human thought. This was a fundamental error. So was the view of the cortex as a Michelin map of cities and highways, or centers and pathways, with higher cognition attributed to interaction on the cortical surface.
This way of thinking had serious defects. Apart from the simple-minded schemas of language function and the ad hoc localization, there were anatomical difficulties relating to the standard model of neocortical in-processing. For example, work by Bishop and Sanides showed that primary cortices were more recent in evolution than association or integration cortices, so if the direction of the cognitive process had anything to do with evolutionary process there should be a mapping of the evolutionary pattern of forebrain growth to the pattern of realization in language perception and production. What prevented researchers from considering this idea was the computer model of the brain. Here, both the substrate and the sequence of manufacture were presumed to be unrelated to function, so the anatomical substrates of language were seen as secondary to the theory of language. The idea of input and output mechanisms reduced the complexity of perception and action systems to a sensory and motor apparatus.
In this view, the brain was conceived as a fixed structure, like a radio or television set, now a computer, and the mind as something that overlaid this structure or was discharged through it, like software driving the brain machinery. This is clearly not a dynamic system. The introduction of evolutionary anatomy and the idea that cerebral growth persisted in patterns of cognitive function offered a dynamic perspective on prevailing structure, but the field was not ready for such a paradigm shift. Moreover, the details of the new concept still had to be worked out. In the early days of aphasia work, before studies on object perception and other aspects of cognition, I could only attempt to develop from the pathological material a concept of normal and pathological language, and map this system onto evolutionary stages in the brain. The idea of the brain state came later, partly on realizing that the model of aphasia could be extended to perceptual disorders, and partly in a better understanding of ontogeny. The idea of the momentary development of an utterance was extended to that of an act of cognition in a fraction of a second over an evolutionary structuration. Ontogeny became important in a theory of the symptom. The problem was that ontogeny depicts the growth of the brain as a whole, while evolution has millions of years to tease structure apart.
DB: The theory differed from established views on several counts. Linguistic process was viewed as exclusively neocortical and advancing in a point-to-point fashion from primary areas to higher centers. The understanding of structure was neutral with respect to evolutionary and morphological development. This outlook lends itself to later computer analogies in which structure is analogous hardware, and cognitive process is viewed as software which runs without intrinsic links with structure. The localization theory of the time laid the groundwork for the modularity of later cognitive neuropsychology. You were intent on understanding language and later perception and action as expression of a single process whose pattern of activation accorded with the growth planes of brain development.
JB: Yes. The work of Sanides was important to me, not as a basis for my own thinking, but as an affirmation of my heading in the right direction from an anatomical standpoint. Another anatomist who offered support was Dee Pandya, whom Geschwind had brought to Boston to confirm his association ideas. Dee was a closet Sanidesian, so to say, with an evolutionary way of thinking. He encouraged me to pursue the path that I was on, a quite radical path, in which the primary areas were conceived, not as the initial sites in the reception of sense data which are then assembled into more complex entities, but as termini of the bottom-up actualization. One could have all sorts of theories of language, and there have been many, but at the time there was only one theory of brain and language and that was the old model of centers and pathways. I studied this with my first teacher, Johannes Neilson, in California, who wrote a book on aphasia and was the leading expert of his day. He was thought to be a localizer but his work was subtler than is commonly believed. My next teacher, Norman Geschwind, was a true believer. The static model of the brain that he advanced, in which language functions were deposited in bins or boxes, was impossible to map to a dynamic neurology, much less to a dynamic theory of cognition.
When it dawned on me that one could explain the posterior aphasias in terms of levels of perception which correspond with levels of action production, this opened the way for a unified theory. Many thought at the time, and still do, that language is put together in the back of the brain and sent to the frontal lobes for speech. The idea of a simultaneous development from bottom up, from the archaic to the recent in evolutionary structure -- a posterior system for language perception, an anterior system for production -- was so far outside the usual paradigm that it did not receive attention in the aphasia community. I was certain it was correct, since it explained the different forms of aphasia as segments in a phase-transition, in contrast to local models for this or that form, and also because linguistic functions were seen as offshoots of the main lines of act and object development, consistent with the evolutionary thrust of the theory. Language did not spring de novo from a genetic mutation, but was grafted on perceptual and action systems inherited from our animal ancestry.
DB: You glimpsed the whole and felt the possibility of a comprehensive theory.
JB: Yes, though the initial stages of synthesis occurred without full conscious attention. I recall William James, who wrote, probably in his essay on Fechner, that philosophy is not so much a matter of logic as of vision, the logic coming afterward to fill in the vision. So there was this idea, and then one looks for evidence in order to document it. You have to remember that work in those days was in terms of feature analysis in neocortex, much of it centered on vision. Nobel Prizes were given for work on successive stages in feature detection and object assembly.
Interviews with Jason Brown
II. Evolutionary Principles in Microgenetic Theory
JB: Jason W. Brown, MD
DB: David T. Bradford, PhD
DB: The principles operative in mental process are like those active in evolution. For example, as selection pressures determine physical adaptations, so sensory constraints shape object-formation, doing so on a moment-by-moment basis. This is one example. The comparison of evolutionary and microgenetic theories is a rich topic and worth some time.
JB: Darwin had certain basic principles in his theory of evolution into which he collapsed the diversity of life forms; survival of the fittest, selection pressure, and adaptation to the environment are the main examples. One could say he tried to explain the diversity in terms of a few common principles. My objective or rather my way of thinking has been similar: to understand the diversity of pathological forms by means of a few underlying principles. As it turns out, they are evolutionary principles similar to the Darwinian idea of natural selection and competition among organisms. The concept of sensory constraints on object-formation corresponds with the elimination of the unfit. The environment in the form of sensation trims the potential for a diversity of objects to those that conform to the external world. The objects before us are momentary adaptations that have competed for survival during the final phases of the object-formation. In this way, the organism, its acts, objects, words, and thoughts, come into conformity with passing external states of affairs. The multiplicity of organisms sacrificed for the few that survive and reproduce corresponds with the potential of the core which is parsed or specified to the individuality of a single act or thought. The reproduction of populations corresponds to the replication of the mental state, understood in terms of recurrence rather than an open-ended progression. The microgenetic idea that sensation does not form the building blocks of perception but sculpts a changing endogenous configuration from outside is comparable to the role of the environment in evolutionary theory in the elimination of unfit exemplars. Sensory data restrict the developing act of cognition to mirror the external conditions. The constraints that exclude alternate paths of development are the equivalent, in evolution, to the competition with other organisms. They eliminate all possible developments save that which actualizes and best fits the real world on the other side of our perception of it.
The evolutionary theme plays out in the micro-temporal of the unfolding of thought, act, object, and utterance. A person without natural constraints on object-formation has an illusory or hallucinatory world, and will be, or soon become, psychotic, perhaps placed in an institution where his fictitious perceptions will not subject him to risk.
DB: We are moving quickly. The mental state is a central feature of microgenetic theory. Its synonyms include cognitive epoch,mind/brain state, and simply state. Micro-temporal refers to the state’s composition and temporal characteristics. A series of phases or transitions activates neural strcture from brainstem forward, subjecting content to a series of qualitative changes. Pathology impedes or truncates transitions, and the result is symptoms. In later writings, you say the state constitutes the basic unit of time. This is a difficult topic which overlaps ideas in process philosophy and the Buddhist theory of momentariness. For now, better to stay with evolutionary principles in microgenetic theory.
JB: Phylogenesis is a theory of a population dynamic in the derivation of species. Microgenesis is a theory of the specification of an endogenous act or image in a single individual. One occurs over millions of years, the other in a fraction of a second. In evolution there is excessive or exuberant production of organisms. Many more are born than will survive, and those that do survive must live long enough to reproduce through competitive interaction. This compares with the object-formation. Its earliest phase is that of a potential for the development of many different objects, images, dream-like forms. There are intrinsic constraints such as habit and the just-preceding state, and the extrinsic constraints of sensation, that limit the possible routes of development. In evolution, the less fit, or less lucky, organisms die in the world, though anomalies can die stillborn. In microgenesis, objects die or remain unrealized, as others take their place. At successive phases, the forming pre-object is subjected to continuous sculpting, trimming, and parsing. In other words, a continuous partition of the developing configuration underlies the final outcome.
DB: All of which is preconscious.
JB: Yes, preconscious. But there are also constraints at the final phase of consciousness. This could be interpreted, in agreement with Libet’s work, as a veto on final action. The difference is that we are conscious of the final veto, or constraint, not of the constraints active in antecedent phases. These are unconscious. It is not that volition acts at the terminus of the development to sculpt the final act. Rather, we are just aware of the potential for inhibition or sculpting when the microgeny passes through those segments that give rise to choice or decision.
DB: Decision-making amounts to negation of an imminent possibility. The wholly free agent is absent from microgenetic theory, although the feeling of agency accompanies thoughts and action as they pass into conscious awareness. Amid the preconscious proliferation and the largely automatic suppression of competing possibilities, is there room for choice and to what degree is it conscious?
JB: We have the opportunity to develop images, thoughts, or pre-actions in the sense of an implicit choice at each phase. By implicit I mean unaware. The choice or selection is carried on to the next phase, where it is transformed into something else. The process has a fractal-like quality, except that the transform is qualitative, not a sequence of self-similar representations. When a choice becomes explicit, or conscious, and open to introspection, this gives the feeling that we are making conscious decisions. Whether or not we make conscious decisions or are instead informed of decisions that have already occurred is another issue, but the becoming-conscious of implicit choice is part of the feeling of agency and decision. It is important to see that in microgenetic theory, introspection is a coming-to-the-fore of earlier phases in the actualization process, not an addition to the cognitive process. Incidentally, the notion that consciousness of mental content, introspection, is not appended to the mental state but emerges at a penultimate phase in its development, is consistent with the evolutionary principle that new form arises at earlier, less specialized stages, not by terminal addition.
DB: What is the briefest possible comparison of evolutionary change and microgenetic process.
JB: Evolution is a theory based on speciation over millions of years in populations, while microgenesis is a theory of recurrence in a fraction of a second in the mind of an individual organism. Evolution is a dynamic that involves multiple organisms while microgenesis is the momentary evolution of a single act of cognition.
DB: Early on, evolutionary principles were seen to be active in microgenesis, then afterward you incorporated new information about brain-related changes during fetal and later development.
JB: Later on, the model incorporated work in morphogenesis, specifically sculpting and parcellation. Papers on parcellation were appearing in the late eighties by which time my theory was relatively well formed, but the parcellation concept helped me to see the ontogenetic dimension in morphogenesis. This had previously eluded me, since microgenetic phases were mapped to phylogenetic growth planes without including ontogeny. In the development of the embryonic brain during fetal life, many more cells are produced than survive, and many more connections. It has been shown, for example in macaque, that trillions of connections are lost in the post-fetal growth of the primate forebrain. This demonstrates that selectivity is achieved by the elimination of cells and connections. In cognition, specificity is achieved by the inhibition of established connections, and then, by a selective individuation leading from potentiality to actuality. More precisely, the elimination of cells and connections in morphogenesis continues in cognitive development by way of inhibition, which accomplishes much the same thing as elimination of connections. The transition from elimination to inhibition then continues as the constraints on the process of actualization, which account for the individuation of parts out of antecedent wholes. I see this as a cascade of context-item shifts. The point is that the patterns of embryonic growth lay down the pattern of the cognitive process. Morphogenesis does not just give us a brain that outputs function. Instead, the lines of fetal growth continue into maturity as the lines of cognitive process. One could say that specification by the elimination of cells and connections in early life becomes specification by inhibition of established connections, and also the inhibition, or transformation by constraints, as the cognitive process develops over evolutionary layers. Process is 4-dimensional growth. Early in life, form is laid down in the form of morphology. Later, form is laid down in the form of behavior. A single process underlies structure and function.
DB: I organize this material as an extended analogy with three terms. The first is evolutionary change; the second is ontogenesis and the developmental changes of morphogenesis; the third is microgenesis. Each has its respective time frame, ranging from highly extended periods in the case of evolution, to months and years in the case of the individual organism, to the fraction of a second required for completion of individual states. All are subject to comparable patterns of change, with such patterns identified as process. The emphasis on process shows how the terms are alike. Further elaboration would be helpful.
JB: In evolution, speciation occurs over millions of years. The cat that rubs its back against my leg is the same cat that rubbed its back a thousand years ago. The same cat over and over, like transformations with some novelty over evolutionary time. The growth, death, and replacement of organisms occurs as a cyclical process spread out over the lifespan, while the arising, perishing, and re-birth of a cognition occurs in a fraction of a second as an epoch of change that replaces itself. The cyclical nature of replacement differs from the historical nature of a linear concatenation or causal chain of events. It is rather like the tide that surges and withdraws and surges once again, or like the seasons that come and go. Later, I became aware that the concept of the arising and perishing of a temporal point, the mental state, was linked to certain traditions in Indian philosophy as well as process metaphysics.
DB: We return to Bergson and his idea of time as a recurring point.
JB: Well, Bergson was important to me in other ways. For one thing, he described perception as active, not a passive input. He also wrote that time given to disputation is time lost. Disputation was not something I wanted to expend energy on, especially since the criticism of the holists has been their lack of an alternative approach that is respectful of the detail. The effort to develop an alternative model was my primary concern. However, working in the context of cognitive psychology, even participating actively in many seminars and conferences during the birth pangs of this new field, it was difficult to avoid taking into consideration the cognitivist perspective and seeing my work as one in opposition. I would say the work did not develop out of opposition to cognitive science, or to localization approaches in neuropsychology, but rather developed naturally on its own, though many of the conceptual problems required confronting strongly entrenched views in both of these overlapping fields. Still, there was a rather hostile environment, and I well recall the many arguments, even the ridicule, at many scientific meetings. Maybe in that sense it was revolutionary, for one has to fight for the survival of a theory as well as in other affairs. Needless to say, I did not find a receptive environment, whether from those in cognitive psychology or from the school of my former teachers, Johannes Nielsen and Norman Geschwind. After Gesschwind died, localization theory evolved to an even more virulent modularity.
DB: Which continues to this day.
JB: Yes, and with the semblance of a science offered by neuro-imaging techniques, it is becoming still more pervasive, making it that much more difficult to sustain a holistic view, as well as to convince others of its importance. The data accumulate faster than theory can accommodate them. One can challenge modularity on many grounds, as I have. The flow diagrams and circuit boards do not correlate with psychological reality but are a facile means of resolving local findings without an over-arching theory. The recent impact of binding theory is a good example of an attempt, purely artificial, to tie together the multiplicity of anatomical and functional elements, which have been separated in the trend to ever finer analysis, by an improvised external linkage. At some point, I realized the futility of argument against the tide of research and decided to dedicate myself to exploring the theory as deeply and widely as possible. In some ways, the progression has been similar to that of Freud, whose theory, having gone through various forms, was extended to literature, religion, and social concepts.
DB: Your most recent book, Process and the Authentic Life, extends the theory into literature, religion, social concepts, and other areas as well. To some extent, the same applies to Self-Embodying Mind. The earlier neuropsychology serves as the implicit and occasionally the overt context of both. The latest book focuses on the expressions and neuropsychological formation of value. What stimulated your interest in the matter of value?
JB: I think the evolution of my interest in value began with a paper on aesthetic perception. This had to do with the idea that one does not see an object and then think about it as a separate phenomenon, though this is the natural assumption. In microgenetic theory, one thinks up the object, the object is a thought product. A great deal of thought goes on unconsciously, implicitly and evanescently in perceiving the object. When you see a chair, you know it is a chair. You have a history of encounters with chairs or chair-like objects and the relations of chairs to other kinds of furniture; the richness of the underlying category “furniture” is the background of the perceived chair. When one thinks about an object, thought is not added to the object. What happens is that you withdraw to preliminary phases in the original object-formation, phases that are more thought-like, less object-like. You retreat into the infrastructure of the object and explore its depth. Thought is kind of an archeology of perception since objects are externalized concepts or their objectifications, while object-concepts are themselves realizations of yet deeper categories. It is categories all the way down, so to say, as the Buddhists have argued, and I would as well. So, on this way of thinking, aesthetic perception is not an interpretation added to a perception, say the interpretation of a painting or a piece of music, but an exploration of the underpinnings of the original object. The exploration furthers a growth of the concept through metaphoric and other mechanisms.
Of course, this is all counter-intuitive. The commonsense idea is that we see an object, any object, or a work of art, and we think about it, rather than that the object grows out of thought. This “growing out” is reflected and captured in artistic creation. The artist creates the object the aesthete enjoys, but the latter also creates the object with greater or lesser depth. It is generally assumed that once an object is produced, it is an independent thing in the world, not that subsequent observation and thought on the object is accessing the infra-structure of the original perception.
This approach to aesthetics led me to think about drive, desire, and other feelings, including moral feeling, that are also preliminary in the derivation of objects. The microgenetic idea is that feeling accompanies the pre-object outward in its trajectory from mind to world, from the core of the mind to its surface. In my theory, the world is the external rim of the mind. In a word, feeling travels outward as part of the object, and inhabits the object as interest, worth, or value. We do not see an object and add the feeling, but revive the earlier psychic segments of the configuration from which feeling trickled into the externalized object.
Let me say that there was another problem in thinking about feeling or emotion. Those who study concepts, objects, or language tend to separate them from emotion. Certainly, cognitive psychology and much of prior psychology tended to ignore emotion. Even William James, in his theory with Lange, thought of emotion as a kind of peripheral phenomenon, with emotions attached to thoughts. This is also the case with Freud’s concept of cathexis. I could not understand how a thought called up a feeling, or a feeling lured the appropriate thought. Not to diverge into Freud’s theory of repression and drive energy or the metapsychology, but the problem was how feelings and ideas come together, and it did not seem to me that they did come together, but rather, that they were fused from the start in what one could call, after Freud, a drive representation, or an archaic categorical primitive invested with an affective tonality. I referred to this togetherness of concept and feeling simply as conceptual feeling which individuates into what appear to be discrete concepts and feelings, though even the most abstract concepts have a feeling tone and the most primitive feelings devolve out of categories. For me, it was natural to think of a drive-like construct individuating into partial affects and partial concepts, then into lexical and object concepts, and action plans, each having a feeling tone. The feeling can become exaggerated at the expense of the concept, and the concept can become so dry or abstract it seems drained of feeling, but they trace to an earlier phase where the concept and feeling are part of the same entity.
DB: Here is a definition of conceptual feeling: a categorical primitive invested with affective tonality. You mention Freud; a closer analogy is Jung’s theory of the complex. An archetypal structure organizes its content and amplifies its emotional power; in this sense, the complex is like a categorical primitive.
JB: To anticipate, I later came to see the feeling as the becoming, and the concept or object as the being, of the same entity. The feeling is the process, the concept is the substance. It seemed natural to think that feeling travels with the object into the world and that this feeling is part of the object. In microgenetic theory, the object is not merely the endpoint of the process, as a product on a conveyor belt, nor the output of the earlier phases, but the entire epoch from bottom to top. An object and the world of which it is a part, is the whole cognition that includes the early phases through which it has been derived.
DB: We are moving into the later process philosophy, with feeling understood as becoming, and concept and object as being. The epochal or momentary nature of the mind/brain state figures in some earlier writings, but is only incipient in the earliest neuropsychological work. The point you were just now emphasizing is that object-formation is inherently emotional, and the same would apply to thought and action.
JB: Yes, emotional. The idea that one has a naked object to which feeling or interpretation is added seemed odd to me, since in microgenetic theory all of that was subsumed within the original perception. This under-surface is not apparent to the observer, and so what the observer has to do is delve back into the formative phases in the pre-history of the perception. I warned you this would be very counter-intuitive!
DB: I suspect that personal temperament influences how counter-intuitive these ideas seem. Introversion inclines attention to preliminary phases of object-formation, which may have a salience comparable to fully differentiated objects. Persons trained in certain forms of meditation would experience directly the rising formation of objects in preliminary phases preceding their assumption of definite form and meaning in fully conscious awareness. I suppose these ideas are most counterintuitive for extroverted persons with relatively little capacity for introspection. Obviously they are counter-intuitive for the commonsense view that things appear whole-cloth without trailing the residue of earlier cognitive formation. But do continue.
JB: So the problem with aesthetic perception was not, as some analytical thinkers argued, that of applying interpretations to objects but to access the unconscious richness of what is already there. This is related to the microgenetic concept of memory, where an object, as it develops into the world, passes from long-term through short-term memory to perception. The different phases in object perception are the different stages in memory. It is not as if you see something which is then conveyed to short-term and long-term memory, but rather the reverse. It develops out of long-term memory, out of the past, through short-term memory, closer to the now, and finally into a present object. The direction of microgenesis is from unconscious to conscious, from depth to surface, from self to world, and from past to present. So, the object actually brings the past into the present.
DB: Long-term memory draws on the category that prompts the immediate perception of a given chair.
JB: Yes. But the perception of a chair is also highly constrained by the sense data hitting the brain and conforming an endogenous and wholly intrinsic process to represent the chair.
DB: As if the sensory constraints pick and choose from memory.
JB: Essentially. Sensory constraints arising in brainstem bias early phases in perception in a certain direction. Subsequently, there is a relative suspension of sensory constraints on the developing object as it passes through the limbic system, a phase of personal or experiential memory and feeling. Then, sensation is again exerted on the terminal phase where the final feature details and externalization of the object occur. The object passes through a dream-like phase of personal memory and experience to final exteriorization and detachment as something independent in the world. In pathology, we see all the intermediate phases. The theory is grounded in pathological disorders of object-perception or image-formation where one sees the intermediate phase, and its linkage to stages in forebrain evolution.
I was once asked by Frances Crick when I gave a paper on this topic, why couldn’t you just reverse the whole process? You know, instead of going bottom to top, just go top to bottom? My answer to that question was that it would be like reversing evolution, and because the growth of an object or the growth of an utterance or an action follows an evolutionary pattern. Evolution is unidirectional, and so is microgenesis. The direction of cognition has to be that of evolutionary growth. There are other reasons why the process is irreversible, but because the theory reverses the standard view of the direction of percept formation, it was unpalatable to many who research this area, not to mention the entire historical bias in thinking about the organization of the neocortex. Moreover, in computational psychology and the computer model of the brain, many would argue that it does not matter how you assemble a computer, which parts you put in first. It is similar to the function of a car, which is unaffected if the carburetor is put in before or after the wheels. A brain as a machine is approached in the same way. The stage at which a certain structure appears in evolution was thought to be irrelevant to function. On my way of thinking, the evolutionary growth pattern is fundamental to the processing direction in cognition. Later, this idea led to the view that cognition and growth are the same process -- that cognition is a mode of growth. Learning and forgetting are the evidence that cognition is a growth process, while behavior involves the dynamic in structure. We will come to this later.
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Commentary
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