Zombies and Brain Ghosts...

This is an interesting profile on the psychologist Ellen Langer: "best known for two things: her concept of mindlessness - the idea that much of what we believe to be rational thought is in fact just our brains on autopilot - and her concept of mindfulness, the idea that simply paying attention to our everyday lives can make us happier and healthier."

I found the contrast with other research psychologists illuminating: "Researchers like Daniel Gilbert, Antonio Damasio, and Dan Ariely saw mindless behavior as a trove of clues, and in many cases, psychologists discovered that there could be a value to “mindlessness” - our seemingly irrational instincts were not only quicker, but often more accurate than our more considered ruminations.

In an interview with Marina Warner which I linked in the thread on Thinking About Stories, Warner discusses the historical context through which the concept of the Zombie entered British/American culture at the beginning of the 19th century (this is towards the end of the interview which is fairly long).

What Warner said got me thinking about the kind of historical and political frame which might be influencing the way we're thinking of the brain and the "executive" function versus the zombie.

I've been reading a feminist history of the novel which actually begins by talking about the representation of the individual that's central to Rousseau's social contract.  The social contract rests on the idea of the individual as completely free from any kind of historical/political/cultural/social background.  Only this complete freedom of external influence allows for an entry into the social (the social and the individual as two separate signers of the contract).  The idea of the individual that comes to us from the enlightenment is one free from any kind of class, gender, race, etc. influence.

And thus any achievements of the individual or any failures are his/her responsibility alone.  If someone is at the top of the corporate ladder, it's because they deserve it.  We can't restrict the kind of rewards those at the top receive because those rewards are hypothetically available to all of us.  We just haven't earned it yet, baby (to paraphrase a Smiths song).  The executive is the "self-made man."  Conversely those at the bottom of the ladder are there not because of any kind of social/political barriers.  And when someone commits a crime--it is their individual responsibility--it does not require us to look at ourselves.  We are innocent because they are guilty.

So is it any wonder that the two paradigms science offers at this same moment in history either see the brain as completely free-willed--the not unrelatedly named "executive" version of the "I"--our own little CEO homonculus; OR the zombie, completely determined by the material--as in the view of ourselves as mindless and manipulated consumers (heh---in need of BRAINS!!--not unsurprisingly), slavish and alienated workers ruled by our own desires?

(ETA: Just a little bit of what Warner's talking about re: Zombies--the words comes into English usage out of the slave rebellions in the West Indies and is then picked up by people like Coleridge, who was an abolitionist, and takes on the meaning of "slavish" or "unwilled" [the opposite of it's original meaning actually].  I also was talking to my brother who's reading the parody book "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies" [which I linked up in the "News that Made Me Smile" thread] and he was mentioning how many opportunities there are for the author to add zombies into Austen's original work.  And that also made me think how 19th century an idea zombies are.)

I was poking around this web site at Bryn Mawr that has lots of very cool essays (the one about the Storyteller that I cited below is also from there).  It's called Serendip.

This particular essay is about expanding the notion that genetics+experience or nature+nurture is what shapes the brain, our choices, our behavior.  The author details those two (and in some interesting ways) but adds a third element which makes each individual's behavior undetermined--that is dreaming/imagination.

Here are a few snippets:

Genetics: "Each of us has a different and unique summary of the experiences of our ancestors. In short, the genome with which one is born is not something to be frightened of; it is something to value and cherish. It is a rich source of information about how to deal with the world which one gets for nothing and a distinctive birthright."  I liked that way of thinking of the genome as the memory of the experiences of our ancestors.  Even in the genome we're getting experience mixed in--experiences from before we even existed.  How cool is that! :-)

Experience: Here too, it's really impossible to separate out two--genetics and experience--and in fact useful perhaps to take genetics into account as both an aide and limitation to what we can learn from experience: "... there is some intriguing evidence that at least in some cases, things that one finds difficult to learn may be so because they are in conflict with genetic information, and one has to in some sense unlearn the latter in order to learn the former."

Dreams: "You are having experiences, but they are not experiences with the environment, with the real world. They are experiences your brain is making up for itself...Elements of experiences you have actually had (and probably elements of genetic information as well) appear in dreams, but they are put together in odd, frequently apparently random ways. It's almost impossible to prove, but there is every indication that not only could no one else fully predict your dreams, but you couldn't either. You have, within yourself, an ability to make for yourself experiences no one else has ever had and hence to see things no one else has ever seen and learn things no one else has ever learned."

Genomes to Dreams

How to Hallucinate With Ping-Pong Balls and a Radio

Things you can do to explore the boundaries of your brain without using drugs.  I thought this was interesting and cool.  I haven't tried any yet.  It's reminds me of some of the optical illusion visual tricks you can play on the brain.  I wonder what this could teach us about ourselves and our mental capabilities.

New research into how the brain reacts to colors: Red seems to improve attention to detail while blue sparks creativity. (article excerpts)

"People are not aware of this effect at all," marvels lead researcher Juliet Zhu of the University of British Columbia, who studies how environmental cues affect behavior.

"It's really this learned association with these colors that drive these different motivations," Zhu said.

The bottom line: "What color research shows is our behavior is driven by things we aren't aware of, by things we see on a regular basis," he said.

I've also been interested recently in diseases that are effectively treated with light therapy.  There is a biological component to this as well.

S.A.D. is an  obvious disorder to mention here. 
-  The mood swings caused by seasonal affective disorder has been correlate to hormonal imbalance.

Jaundice in infants if often treated with phototherapy. 
-  Bilirubin is a pigment that changes conformation when exposed to light and is similar to photsynthetic pigments in algae.

Studies show certain wavelengths of blue and red light reduce acne lesions and inflammation. (another function of the liver)

Related is the fact that Vitamin D is created by exposure to sunlight. 
- Vitamin D is essential to the maintenance of your internal organs and deficiencies linked to certain cancers.

I was reading a great article this morning which touches on a lot of these discussions with the addition of conceptualizing the conscious brain as storyteller.  The author, Paul Grobstein, begins by pointing out that although human beings tend to conceptualize of organizations as hierarchical, this is not the case in nature.  He gives as an example the V formation of geese flying--in which humans would tend to tell the story of the "leader" and "followers".  But what is forming the structure is actually a feedback loop.  (Grobstein calls it "distributed interactive architecture.")  I think Seven Life Lessons of Chaos Theory also points to flying geese formation as a way to illustrate biological organization.

What these organizations have in common is that there is no one controlling element, each element has only partial information, and there is no element possessing an objective or goal for the organization (such a goal can only be seen by an outside observer looking at the whole).

The human brain has the same kind of organization--with this major difference--the conscious part of the brain, or the storyteller--can observe and describe itself to itself, not only attempting to understand what it is, but what it can be--it can set objectives/goals.  So the storyteller capacity gives the ability beyond simple architectual forms in nature to affect/change that architecture--to mold and change ourselves.

However, the storyteller can also mislead--for one thing because it is not conscious of its dependence on the other elements that go into the whole.  It imagines for instance that it is interacting with the world when in fact it has no direct contact with the world--everything about the world comes through the other elements on which it depends and interacts.  It does not then have the absolute power or authority that it represents itself to have in an "I"--or in that executive function (or the author of it's own story) but is in a relation of "continuing report and negotiation" with all the unconscious parts of the brain.

Grobstein goes on to suggest ways in which we can start to rethink social organization by rethinking our own stories--acknowledging interconnection rather than relying on the fiction of hierarchy.

Social Organization as Applied Neurobiology: The Value of Stories and Story Sharing

Wow, great job of pulling all those threads together.  You're certainly demonstrating the power of the brain thinking about itself thinking (I love stuff like that).

You reminded me of all kinds of cool conversations that have been going on here--and very useful for me as I'm thinking about this stuff in relation to several projects.

So one thing I'm thinking about again in relation to all this is the question of ethics and responsibility.  Both in our legal system and in our day to day interactions, it seems to me that a framework we apply for judging someone's responsibility is the degree to which their actions are under their own control.  So if the zombie was shown to be the only cause of an action a person would not be held responsible for that action.  It's our conscious self, the "I,' which is described as "free"--free to make choices and therefore responsible (free of outside control or cause).  If the zombie is in charge, we (our "I' or sense of self) is being controlled by the material (by our body or brain process)--we are "meat puppets."  But if the "I" is in charge, we have "free will."  And it's the latter which makes us morally responsible.

But if that division is a false one, and I think it is, then what is it that makes for responsibility?  If that executive function of the "I" sitting in a control room is just as much a myth as the idea that we are puppets?  That is, do we need to separate the two and have that idea of the executive function--a free will--in order to assign responsibility.  Even apart from the fact that I think the whole separation of these two parts is false, I'd even argue that the conscious part of us is also not "free" in that it is shaped by learning and thus by family and culture.

I think a more useful way of thinking about moral responsibility is to acknowledge the limitations of our knowledge and control of self, not in order to abrogate responsibility but both to know ourselves as clearly as we can and thus take responsibility, and at the same time acknowledge that we will always need forgiveness.  Instead, what I think happens with the current model is a denial of limitation and a consequent denial of responsibility.  I think people need to be held accountable for their choices, but when we construct those choices as completely free what we wind up doing is denying our capacity for making bad choices.  So for example if someone commits murder and we say that everything that went into making that person who he/she is has to be ignored in order to hold them responsible for the murder, then what we wind up doing is saying that it can only be the person's free willed self that is responsible.  Our own free willed selves have not made such choices--so we are innocent and good.  But all the forces that went into shaping that person--some of them we share, some of them we don't--if circumstances had been different, that could be me.  In other words, there but for the grace of (fill in your determinants of choice--God, period of history, family I was raised in) go I.