Louis Cozolino’s book The Social Neuroscience of Education is a great book. It warms the cockles of my Nurturant Parent heart. Sadly, it does not go far enough. In fact, it only goes fifty percent of the way there. By “there” what do I mean?
In a recent post I talked about framing and cultural cognitive models pulling from the latter work of cognitive psychology and linguistics researcher George Lakoff. In that post I said that the U.S. is a 50/50 country: fifty percent liberals and fifty percent conservatives, as the recent election evinces.[1] To use terminology developed by Lakoff in his book Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think, our country consists of fifty percent Nurturant Parents and fifty percent Strict Fathers. In my opinion, Cozolino is a Nurturant Parent who argues from and for the Nurturant Parent cultural cognitive model. Nothing wrong with that. Again, the Nurturant Parent in me gets what Cozolino is talking about from mirror neurons and their role in empathetic connections to the idea of embodied cognition: the idea that we use our bodies to think.
Interestingly, I was first introduced to the idea of embodied cognition by reading Lakoff’s book, which he wrote with Mark Johnson, entitled Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind & It’s Challenges to Western Thought. Yes, embodied cognition throws the entrenched Western idea of mind separate from body (traced back to Descartes) on its ear. This brings up my point: embodied cognition, along with the idea of mirror neurons, are two very controversial ideas. At the heart of this controversy stands the long entrenched battle between Nurturant Parents and Strict Fathers, between liberals and conservatives. Heck, the Old Testament reflects Strict Father sensibilities while the New Testament reflects Nurturant Parent Sensibilities. This battle is that old. So, Cozolino has set up an echo chamber for Nurturant Parent sensibilities. We never get the other fifty percent, the “rest of the story” as radio personality Paul Harvey used to say. If you’re interested in the controversy surrounding mirror neurons looked at from a conservative, Strict frame, I would suggest the 2014 book by Gregory Hickok entitled The Myth of Mirror Neurons: The Real Neuroscience of Communication and Cognition. I’d like to flesh out the controversy surrounding embodied cognition a bit mainly because it brings us back to Bowlby and the “Bowlbian film” on the cutting room floor.
In his TED Talk, Scott Galloway says what many of us think but would never say in public:
Let’s take advantage of the flaws in our species with medieval institutions, Paleolithic instincts, and godlike technology.[2] I think Mark Zuckerberg has done more damage to the young people in our nation while making more money than anyone in history.
How did we get to this place of crisis, to this place of the Internet, social media, and disembodied information? If Cozolino is right and safe and secure attachment relationships are about embodying information and, in turn, allowing us to think with our bodies, then it behooves us to know who or what is trying to put body and information asunder.
The story starts during WWII and takes place largely in New York City, home to what are known as The Macy conferences.[3] What follows is pulled largely from Katherine Hayles 1999 book entitled How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. I’ve talked about this story in earlier posts, so I’ll be brief here. Simply, any person or thing wishing to put body and information asunder also wish to destroy attachment relationships and embodied cognition. And, as I will argue, Bowlby had a front row seat for the start of the campaign to disembody information. It’s one thing to say that “Mark Zuckerberg has done more damage to the young people in our nation,” however, knowing how and why will help us potentially turn the tide.
The Macy conferences took place from 1941 until 1960. Apparently 160 conferences were held over that nineteen year period. The Wikipedia entry for the Macy conferences defines them thus: “The Macy conferences were a set of meetings of scholars from various academic disciplines held in New York under the direction of Frank Fremont-Smith at the Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation….” The Wikipedia entry continues, “The explicit aim of the conferences was to promote meaningful communication across scientific disciplines, and restore unity to science.” These conferences covered myriad topics including child psychology, medicine, anthropology, Gestalt psychology, psychodynamics, neurology, robotics, group processes and dynamics, and on the list goes. However, the lion’s share of the conferences were on cybernetics and information science, both in their infancy at that time. Norbert Wiener, often considered the father of cybernetics and information science, offers up this definition of cybernetics: “The science of control and communications in the animal and machine.” In addition, many of the conferences brought their findings back to the realm of cybernetics. As an example, the following topic was covered at a 1952 conference: The Relation of Cybernetics at the Microlevel to Biochemical and Cellular Processes.
As Hayles points out in her book How We Became Posthuman, information scientists like Wiener and Claude Shannon started out designing mechanical control systems using models drawn from biology. WWII was the testing ground for a few of these control systems such as guided missiles and guided anti-aircraft guns. The central concept ported from organic systems to mechanical systems is known as homeostasis (a concept Cozolino mentions in passing in The Social Neuroscience of Education). Homeostasis describes the process whereby organic systems achieve a set of optimal parameters such as temperature, pressure, energy consumption, waste expulsion, etc. Because organic systems are importing energy from the environment and expelling or exporting waste to the environment, they exist within an open system that allows import from and export to the environment. Organic systems are also goal-corrected, that is to say, they have the ability to monitor their progress and make corrections as they move toward a goal such as importing energy, typically food or even sunlight.
Hayles tells us that these early information scientists and cyberneticists built into their mechanical control systems, such as guided missiles and anti-aircraft guns, such things as homeostasis and goal-corrected behavior. In the case of the latter, a guided anti-aircraft gun must fire a shot not where the target (such as an aircraft) is now but where the target will be in the future. And that same guided anti-aircraft system must have a way of correcting its future predictions based on past attempts. It must be goal-corrected. To get a sense for a mechanical control system that is able to maintain homeostasis, think of the heating and air conditioning thermostat in your home. You set the temperature and the thermostat sends a signal to the heating furnace or air conditioning unit to turn on or to turn off, all the while trying to maintain an optimum set temperature.
How does John Bowlby fit into all of this? Well, turns out that there was a set of sister meetings that I am calling the Geneva conferences. Although smaller in time period (1953–1956) and number (about five), the Geneva conferences were modeled after the Macy conferences and were run once again by Frank Fremont-Smith. They were held in Geneva. I get the impression that the Geneva conferences were funded by the WHO (World Health Organization) as opposed to the Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation. One of the local organizers for the Geneva conferences was—wait for it—John Bowlby.
It was through my study of John Bowlby that I discovered his participation in the Geneva conferences, which, in turn, have a connection to the Macy conferences as pointed out above. And, yes, several scientists and researchers presented at both the New York and Geneva conferences. Examples here would be the aforementioned Fremont-Smith, Margaret Mead (cultural anthropology), and W. Grey Walter (electrophysiology and robotics). I should mention that the Geneva conferences also featured such luminaries as Jean Piaget (developmental and cognitive psychology), Konrad Lorenz (ethology), Julian Huxley (evolution theory and biology), Erik Erikson (psychoanalysis), Ludwig von Bertalanffy (systems theory, biology, and evolution theory), and of course John Bowlby. The Bowlby–Erikson connection will become important in a future post.
Whereas the Macy conferences were centrally focused on cybernetics and information science, the WHO conferences were centrally focused on topics such as evolution, biology, organic systems theory, ethology, and developmental psychology. That being said, cyberneticists and robotics scientists like W. Grey Walter (of Robot Turtle fame[4]) did make presentations at the Geneva conferences. It should come as no surprise that Bowlby’s work following the WHO conferences—as evidenced by his three volumes on attachment theory—is shot through with these same themes: evolution, biology, developmental psychology, and ethology or the study of animal behavior. It could be said, arguably, that the Macy conferences birthed cybernetics and information science while the WHO conferences birthed Bowlbian attachment theory. Whereas the Macy conferences represent the headwaters for the Internet technologies and AI (artificial intelligence) that now surrounds us,[5] the Geneva conferences represent the headwaters for not only classical Bowlbian attachment theory but also modern attachment theory as exemplified by Cozolino’s work. So what went wrong? Why did information science and cybernetics gain in popularity while attachment theory, both Bowlbian and modern, largely wither on the vine?
According to Hayles’ research, these early information scientists and cyberneticists became worried that by modeling mechanical control and information systems after biological processes (such as homeostasis, goal-corrected behavior, and open systems) their efforts would be overly constrained. They came up with a solution: why not remove information from organic bodies and functioning? That is exactly what they did. They argued that if information could be disembodied, then disembodied information could be put into any body of their choosing such as a robot, computer system, or cyborg. In essence, these early information scientists and cyberneticists dissociated information from body once again strengthening Descartes’ idea of mind separate from body.
Without going into a lot of detail here, Bowlby saw this split happening through his association with the Geneva conferences and through the confluence of information running between the Macy conferences and the Geneva conferences. In fact, Bowlby would later make reference to guided anti-aircraft guns in his trilogy on attachment as a way of getting the reader to embrace the idea of organic systems theory. Bowlby saw the beginning of information science and cybernetics and made a conscious decision to stay on the side of embodied information (the same side Cozolino advocates for), on the side of safe and secure attachment relationships. The key here when considering disembodied information is the process of “psychological dissociation.”
Information science and cybernetics wish to bring about wholesale dissociation, that is to say, mind separate from body. I’m speculating here, however, I imagine that Bowlby saw that early insecure even traumatic, attachment relationships carried with them the ability to keep mind and body from working together as a coherent whole. Work by modern attachment researchers proves him right (as Cozolino’s work shows). So, I think he was legitimately concerned that the agenda of cybernetics and information science—that of disembodied information—could adversely affect attachment functioning. In addition, Bowlby probably could have sensed that mechanical systems born of disembodied information could see to it that natural organic cycles such as life, trauma, separation, loss, grief, mourning, and rebirth, would be greatly crippled if not destroyed.
Bowlbian attachment theory is centrally about the systems-oriented organic cycle of life with its focus on Attachment and Loss, or more specifically, Attachment, Separation, Anxiety, Anger, Sadness and Depression—the words used in the titles to Bowlby’s three volumes on attachment. What cybernetics and information science wish to destroy (and modern attachment theory has largely forgotten) is mourning: a natural organic process designed to repair the damage brought about by trauma. Given that cyberneticists and information scientists wish to keep body and information separate, then, by extension, they will have no need for an organic process like mourning, one designed to bring them back together again. What we have here is Bowlby advocating for attachment and the organic cycle of life, and information scientists and cyberneticists arguing for “anti-attachment” or disembodied information.
When Galloway suggests that “Mark Zuckerberg has done more damage to the young people in our nation,” we now have a better understanding of this damage. It’s the damage born of disembodied information birthed during and just after WWII. It’s the damage born from dissociating body from mind. And it’s the damage born from a nation not able to heal loss, to mourn loss. These are just some of the pieces of Bowlbian attachment theory that have been left on the cutting room floor. We need to find these pieces and once again put them into the so-called “directors cut” of attachment.
In the next post I’ll take a longer look at dissociation and what it can do to people specifically and a nation generally. As a bit of a tease, I would suggest that dissociation is what is driving the six graphs that Galloway shows us. Bowlby saw all of this coming, warned us, and gave us possible solutions. We can ignore Bowlby’s work and stay on the current course, or we can go back, embrace his work, and rediscover the paths he provides out of this mess. More in the next post.
Notes:
[1] – I was pulling from Thom Hartmann’s work when I made this statement. See his 2024 book The Hidden History of the American Dream.
[2] – A geology colleague of mine pointed out that the phrase Galloway uses—Medieval institutions, Paleolithic instincts, and godlike technology—is from a quote by E.O. Wilson. The actual quote goes: “The real problem of humanity is the following: We have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology. And it is terrifically dangerous, and it is now approaching a point of crisis overall.” According to Wikipedia, Wilson “was an American biologist, naturalist, ecologist, and entomologist known for developing the field of sociobiology.”
[3] – If you would like to quickly read up on The Macy conferences, here’s a Wikipedia link for you:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macy_conferences
If you would like an in-depth look, by all means, grab a copy of the Hayles’ book. It’s a bit academic, however, it’s the best book I have read on how the idea of disembodied information got its start, and how disembodied information is key to understanding the current march toward becoming posthuman or “humans as machines” (also known as transhumanism).
[4] – You can find YouTube videos of Walter’s Robot Turtles Elmer and Elsie, who Allison Marsh argues were the early ancestors of the present day automated Roomba cleaning robots. Here’s a link to Marsh’s 2020 article:
https://spectrum.ieee.org/meet-roombas-ancestor-cybernetic-tortoise
[5] – See this article by David Tse wherein he argues that Claud Shannon was the chief architect of the information systems that now surround us:
https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-claude-shannons-information-theory-invented-the-future-20201222/
