After my last Top Down or Bottom Up post, a few nuts and bolts appeared on the radar screen. For the last several posts I’ve been pulling bullet points from Daniel Levitin’s 2014 book entitled The Organized Mind—Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload. In this follow-up post I’d like to quickly look at these nuts and bolts. These nuts and bolts come from (or were triggered by) my last post entitled Top Down or Bottom Up. You may wish to read my last post before reading this one.
Behaviorism: After reading my Top Down or Bottom Up post, a colleague commented on my observation that the Enlightenment was about the (white male) rational mind lording over the emotional and animalistic body. She correctly pointed out that the central ideology behind behaviorism is also about the rational mind controlling the irrational emotions. I agreed with my colleague and suggested that much of psychopharmacology also falls into this category of mind over matter. For more on this topic, see Ernest Keen’s Chemicals for the Mind. The mind over matter paradigm tends to devalue such things as emotion and innate behavioral systems. This is in part why Bowlby took such a strong stand against behaviorism. “[F]or Pavlov there was no mind, only behavior,” writes James Gleick in his 2012 book entitled The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood (which Levitin references). Gleick continues, “Mental states, thoughts, emotions, goals, and purpose—all these were intangible, subjective, and out of reach. They bore the taint of religion and superstition.” Behaviorists put thoughts, emotions, goals, purpose, etc., into a black box, and then placed that black box between stimulus and response. Behaviorists had no interest in the black box; only those things that could be measured: stimulus and response. Suffice it to say that Bowlby spent his career looking at the contents of the black box, especially emotions, goals, and purpose. [1]
Recent Research: After I put the finishing touches on Top Down or Bottom Up, I ran across the following article: The brain can be trained to regulate negative emotions, study reports. This article appears over at MedicalXpress.com (January 5, 2016). The article talks about how through training a person is able to get the amygdala to work together with centers within the frontal cortex. The article states that “intense training resulted in increased connectivity between [study] participants’ amygdala and a region in the frontal cortex shown to be involved in emotion regulation” (quoting Ben-Gurion University researcher Dr. Cohen). Sure, an early safe and secure attachment relationship is the preferable way to get the various brain centers to work together as a coherent system. However, if such a secure attachment environment was not present, an adult can engage in training that will bring the various brain centers together. The Adult Attachment Interview assesses for such training experiences and can code an interview as “earned secure.”
The Value of Context: Levitin spends a lot of time looking at the value of context or background. Levitin points out that when we experience the same environment over and over, that environment becomes a background or context. Backgrounds or contexts tend to take on a nonspecific or general character. [2] Here’s a quick example. I walk around the block three times each morning. My trip around the block has become a context or background environment. Many mornings I find myself asking, “OK, how many times have I gone around the block?” I cannot remember how many times I have gone around the block because there is nothing about going around the block that stands out from the background. Using Levitin’s insights, I now try to pay attention to something that stands out from the background. A FedEx truck parked at a house stands out. A neighbor waving hello stands out. Stepping in some dog poo definitely stands out! I then can use these standouts as marks that mark trips around the block that are otherwise undifferentiated. I now find myself saying, “Oh yeah, Ed my neighbor waved at me … that was on my second time around … I still have one more lap to go.”
Levitin tells us that emotion is critical in encoding information. We need safe, calm, secure feelings to create a context or background. Then stronger emotions can make things or events standout in our minds, in our memories. This is why Bowlby talked about natural fear triggers such as sudden loud noises, darkness, sudden movement toward us, etc. Without some type of context these triggers elicit amplified fear reactions. One of the characteristics of PTSD is amplified fear reactions largely divorced from context or background. For a brief time back in the 1980s I was a student pilot. To pilots context or background is critical. To a pilot (or any person in charge of operating machinery) the generalized background of normal noises and sensations means “safe.” A pilot depends on that safe background because it is against that safe background that problems present themselves: an unfamiliar vibration, an unexpected buffeting, an engine hum that is slightly off, etc. In order for the brain to be effective at filtering information, it needs that safe background. Children raised in chaotic environments never have the opportunity to develop that safe background. As a result, everything appears to be foreground. This is exactly what the Internet does to our brains: makes everything foreground divorced from context or background. As my father (who served during WWII) used to tell me, “When your background is gunfire and explosions, silence can make you very afraid.”
The broader point here is the role emotions play in encoding and storing information. This ties to neurologist Antonio Damasio’s idea that the body (via emotions) creates images that give rise to consciousness. The mind over matter paradigm attempts to do away with the body part of consciousness. This is why there is such an allegiance between the mind over matter paradigm and the artificial intelligence paradigm (i.e., Singularity advocates): both wish to do away with biological body. As mentioned in my last post, there are similarities between Damasio’s focus on the images arising from body and Bowlby’s focus on Inner Working Models. It’s too bad that attachment researchers have effectively dropped the ball as far as Inner Working Models are concerned. However, researchers such as Damasio have provided us with a wealth of new information on body images or body maps. I highly recommend Damasio’s 2010 book entitled Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain.
Notes:
[1] As Gleick correctly points out, many sociologists and psychologists (like Bowlby) back in the 1950s embraced the emerging field of information processing as a way of countering the behavioral stranglehold. Information processing allowed sociologists and psychologists to effectively say, “the black box of thoughts, emotions, goals, and purpose can be studied, should be studied, and can be studied scientifically.” With the arrival of brain scan technologies, the embrace of information processing by sociologists and psychologists has loosened considerably. Today behaviorism is as strong as ever (as evidenced by the popularity of cognitive–behavioral therapy). Information processing still undergirds the digital world. And many psychologists sound a lot like the early Ludwig Wittgenstein (who I paraphrase here): “That which cannot be shown by a brain scan should be passed over in silence.”
[2] I just thought I’d point out that according to the information that Richard Nisbett presents in his 2003 book entitled The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently…and Why, Eastern cultures tend to value the background whereas Western cultures tend to value the foreground. As a result, Eastern cultures tend to think more collectively whereas Western cultures tend to think more individually. I may be alone in this opinion but Bowlby’s work seems to have an Eastern feel to it. Bowlby spends considerable time looking at how early attachment relationships can create a background for people that remains “from cradle to grave” (quoting Bowlby). This may in part explain why some attachment researchers (i.e., Dan Siegel) have moved Bowlbian attachment theory in the direction of Buddhism (via the mindfulness movement). In contrast, a theory like behaviorism has a Western feel to it. Behaviorism focuses on an individual’s ability to use willpower to lord over emotions. Neither approach is necessarily better than the other. They just are: like the liberal focus on WIIT (we’re in it together) here in the US, and the conservative focus on YOYO (you’re on your own).
