The human brains outer strucutre - the cortex - is an expansion upon the lower-level subcortical areas. Thus, the necessity of an evolutionary stage where certain features of the environment generated certain brain functions.
Between the inner and outer brains, it is now known, is a split between 'explicit' and 'implicit' processing. Below the cortex, experiences are generated as if by automata. The phenomenology is the sensation of doing something because one always does this. Indeed, to resist the enaction of a behavior - to conceptualize it mentally as a want and then to impede the execution of an action - feels a bit like a mental '360'. Something wanted, no longer attended to in the same way.
This development must follow from earlier, simpler, ways of being. Tomasellos theory of shared intentionality is an obvious background for human development. His work parallels work from developmental psychology (Beebe, Tronick, Trevarthen, Stern, Emde, Fonagy, Schore) which sees the infants first forms of communication as gestural; but these communications are unconscious, or implicit, in that they act on and through procedural systems. The infants brain detects intentionality/affects via facial expressions, body movements and intonation of voice, and orients accordingly to threat or safety.
What does such information mean for human evolution? It tells me that our ancestors in the genus homo, as suggested by Tomasellos shared-intentionality hypothesis, first began to "share intentionality", or from the perspective if a developmental psychoanalyst, began to experience symmetrical affects that mutually generate a shared attentional focus.
The question, of course, is how these "shared-intentionality" processes evolved in the brain. Developmental psychologists have an under-appreciated term for this process, which they call "implicit relational knowing", or relational "internal working models". They're the most subtle aspects of procedural learning: how to self-organize in particular relational contexts: how to process the object, make meaning of the object, etc, all in accord with a prediction system that guides the organism to act vigilantly towards threatening objects and relaxingly with safe objects.
Early evolution therefore had to establish a sense of trust and confidence i.e. safety, in the human interaction. This could only have happened in small-band hunter-gatherer groups and those close knit connections they formed with one another. Question: what was their attentional focus like? Is it possible that early homo was drawn to perceive more and more in his neighbors intent? So over centuries, faces could become less hairy, eyes more white, as the face of the other was probed for more and more intentional meaning?
The degree of sensitivity in humans to the information held in the face of the other strongly indicates that Schores theory of intepersonal regulation to be true. It pretty much makes sense of the mind in a way that Freudian and behaviorist thinking can never do: it integrates evolutionary logic into the developmental process: the organism self-organizes in terms of a larger 'system' of psychological dyadic regulation. This requires another person, so that mind after mind is patterned and 'recreated', but of course the process is strongly cultural and psychological; genes don't matter, as they set general parameters that can be undone (barring serious neurological injury) by experiences. The evidence of therapy is the strongest demonstration of the power of human relationships. Cozolinos ideas about a 'social synapse' sound appropriate. The idea beneath it is salience: human beings stand as 'desired objects' for one another. Good emotions depend on the other; yet paradoxically, the individual acts for the pleasure of the emotion generated by the interaction: it takes the emergence of a secondary take, explicit consciousness, to notice the contextual factors that determine the feelings generated by interaction.
Perhaps emotional connection between early homos within tribes deepened their sense of one another. This may have been a period where mirror neurons multiplied as the organism mapped "more" of the others intentional state. But attentional state os . They also, of course, must have been compelled by both sides of the ledger: the carrot of love, friendship, laughter, pleasure; and the stick of fear, anger, anxiety, and shame. The organism is 'pulled' into a dynamic system that requires a dyd
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