The mind as a polyviscous fluid

About a year ago I uploaded a post with a typically ungainly title, The structured physical system hypothesis (SPSH), Polyviscous connectivity [The brain as a physical system]. It’s that word, “polyviscous,” that’s got my present attention. Since then I’ve done a number of posts using that idea, whatever it is. This is another of those ideas.

So, viscosity. Honey is more viscous than, say, water. It flows more slowly, much more. What happens if you drop a lump of honey into a tumbler of water? It sinks to the bottom in a continuous lump and flattens out along the bottom. It will begin to diffuse into the water along the boundary, but I don’t know how long, if ever, it will take to mix completely. Now, put a stick down into the tumbler until it extends into the honey. Give is a stir or three, but no more. Now you’ll have gobs and threads of honey mixed in with water in a complex and somewhat irregular and ragged way. That’s a simple polyviscous fluid. It has regions of relatively high viscosity and other regions of relatively low viscosity. Now imagine a fluid with 5, 10, 27, 48, and more different levels of viscosity, from all but solid like cold tar through the wispiest whatever. Polyviscosity.

As the title of the year-old post indicates, I was thinking in terms of connectivity:

Thus I say that the cortical network as a whole exhibits polyviscous connectivity. What do I mean? Some connections are highly resistant to change, and thus have high viscosity. Others change quite readily, and have low viscosity.

OK. Now let’s shift our thinking just a bit and think of the mind as a polyviscous fluid. The mind, as the saying goes, is what the brain does. And that is very complex.

Imagine that you’re watching a movie, make it a Hong Kong martial arts movie. Your mind is entrained to the images on the screen. During a fight scene the level of mental viscosity is relatively how. The fight is over and the hero rests, contemplating the sunset, let’s say. The viscosity is somewhat higher.

Yet, while you’re entrained by the film, you’re not completely absorbed into. While the hero contemplates the sunset, you take a bit of popcorn. And maybe you were munching furiously during the fight. So, even as you were watching the film you slipped in some mental popcorn “frames” among the film frames. Very slippery, low viscosity.

When I wrote my book on music, Beethoven’s Anvil, I talked of the mind as neural weather. Thus (p. 72):

If the functional proclivities of a patch of neural tissue are not relevant for a current activity, those neurons will not be firing very often, but they will still generate some output. The only neuron that does not generate any output is a dead one. Neurons that are firing at low intensity one moment may well be recruited to more intense activity the next. As Walter Freeman has said, a low level of activity is still a means of participating in the evolving mental state.

The mind, in this view, is thus like the weather. The same environment can have very different kinds of weather. And while we find it natural to talk of weather systems as configurations of geography, temperature, humidity, air pressure etc., no overall mechanism regulates the weather. The weather is the result of many processes operating on different temporal and spatial scales.

At the global level and on a scale of millennia we have the long-term patterns governing the ebb and flow of glaciers which, in one commonly accepted theory, is a function of wobble and tilt in the earth’s spin axis and the shape of the earth’s orbit. At the global level and operating annually we have the succession of seasons, which is caused by the orientation of the earth with respect to the sun as it moves through the year. We can continue on, considering smaller and smaller scales until we consider the wind ripping through the twin towers of the World Trade Center or even the breeze coming in through your open window and blowing the papers off your desk.

Weather is regular enough that one can predict general patterns at scales of hours, days, and months, but not so regular that making such predictions is easy and routinely reliable. Above all, there is no central mechanism governing the weather. It just happens.

I develop that idea further in a couple of posts, The Mind is What the Brain Does, and Very Strange, and Neural Weather, an Informal Defense of Psychoanalytic Ideas.

So, neural weather, polyviscous fluid. Perhaps we’re getting somewhere. The mind IS what the brain does, and what the brain does is complex and varies along a wide range of time scales. The brain’s overall physical structure is relatively constant throughout life, barring injury and disease. But the connectivity changes over a variety of time scales from seconds through hours and days and even longer (think of cortical plasticity). There is much, perhaps most, millisecond to millisecond, activity that produces no synaptic change at all. A very fluid phenomenon, over multimer time scales.

Neural Weather, an Informal Defense of Psychoanalytic Ideas

I’ve been wrestling with a post on unity of being, of all things, in two films, Fantasia and Dumbo, of all films, and I round myself thinking psychoanalytic thoughts. Not particularly deep thoughts, and certainly not up on the latest ideas, whatever they might be, but psychoanalytic nonetheless. There’s nothing else in my conceptual repertoire that can do the job those ideas do.

I first found Freud in the basement of the house on Luther Road. There was a small closet in the corner and my father had a box or two of paperback books in it. I don’t remember but a few titles; in fact, I’m only sure of two: Wodehouse on Golf, which I never read, and 1984, which I most certainly did read, as it had a pulpy cover that promised sex – a buxom brunette in a tight blue jumpsuit emblazoned with “Women’s Anti-Sex League” – in THAT costume! Yowzah! Of course, the book wasn’t quite what the cover advertised, but that was OK. I may also have found Brave New World there, I’m not sure. Come to think of it though, that probably IS where I found War of the Worlds. So that’s three titles I’m pretty sure of.

I probably found some Bertrand Russell, too, though just exactly what, I can’t recall. I went on to buy a bunch of Russell, including his history of Western philosophy. I also found something by Theodore Reik, and went on to buy more of THAT. And I found Freud, perhaps Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality; after all, it has that magic word in the title: s e x.

In the summer between my freshman and sophomore years at Johns Hopkins I read The Interpretation of Dreams. Somewhere in there I picked up a five-volume set of The Collected Papers from my book club. I’ve still got them, though they’re in storage along with some other Freud. But I’ve still got Totem and Taboo, Civilization and It’s Discontents, and The Future of an Illusion on the shelves in my apartment. They’re slender volumes and so don’t take up much space & Civilization plays to my interest in cultural evolution.

But the book that really sold me on psychoanalysis was Erik Erikson’s Childhood and Society. I read him in a developmental psych course taught by Mary Ainsworth. I found his account of the developmental unfolding (epigenisis) of the organ modes (oral, anal, etc.) quite compelling. Ainsworth also introduced me to the work of John Bowlby. I read the first volume of his Attachment and Loss series in typescript in 1967 or ’68, before it came out in 1969. His reworking of object relations theory using primate ethology and systems theory, I found that very compelling. And his remarks on defense and information processing in the final volume, Loss (which didn’t appear until 1980), seem and seemed quite promising.

There’s something in all this that’s indispensible and foundational. Just what, though, I’m not sure. If you look at my published work you won’t find much psychoanalytic thinking there – e.g. in At the Edge of the Modern, or Why is Prospero Shakespeare’s Greatest Creation? or Talking with Nature in “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison” – but it plays an essential role in those few publications and it pervades my thought in areas where its influence is too diffuse for meaningful citation

 

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What’s important about psychoanalytic thought, what makes in indispensable, is that it is a theory of mind. Not of the brain, but of the mind. Yes, I understand that neuroscience is careening its rough way toward an understanding of the brain, and yes, I understand that there’s a good deal of work being done on the neural underpinnings of psychoanalysis, but it is the mind that interests me. And it is the mind that I see at work in Fantasia and Dumbo, and in Much Ado About Nothing, Wuthering Heights, “Kubla Khan” and many other texts.

The mind. Not the brain.

In thus distinguishing mind and brain I do not mean to elevate (or is it lower?) the mind to some ethereal realm mysteriously apart from yet causally implicated in the material brain. The mind IS what the brain does. And the brain does it more subtly that we can imagine.

It’s that subtlety that we’ve got to attend to.

The brain consists of some 100s of neurofunctional areas. Enormous time and effort has gone into figuring out just what each area does and how it relates to what goes on in other areas. Much of this thinking seems like it follows from a vision of a Kafkaesque bureaucracy in which each neurofunctional area is a separate office. These offices receive messages written on scraps of paper sent around through pneumatic tubes. A functionary receives a bunch of such scraps at his desk, reviews them, and writes this or that on fresh scraps which he then sends out through tubes taking them to other anonymous functionaries. This is called information processing.

The thing is, those 100s of neurofunctional areas are each composed of millions upon millions of neurons, each of which is directly connected to 10,000 or so other neurons. Some of those neurons are connected to immediately adjacent neurons; others are connected to more distant neurons in the same neurofunctional area; and many others are connected to neurons in other neurofunctional areas, some close by, some quite distant. If two neurons don’t share any direct connections, chances are they are indirectly connected by multiple chains, some of them of only two or three links, others of five or six links.

Whatever the brain IS, it IS NOT an information-processing bureaucracy.

In my own work I’ve used the metaphor of weather, the mind as neural weather. Think of the brain as a complex landscape and the mind as the swirls and eddies of air, water, and dust blowing through it. And think of defense mechanisms as forms of neural weather. Denial, projection, dissociation, repression, sublimation, and all the rest, they’re complex patterns of activity each involving the whole brain. This, it seems to me, is one area where psychoanalytic thought is going to prove out.

Don’t ask me just how that’s going to go, because I don’t know. But if I were to make the reconstruction of psychoanalytic theorizing a central concern, that’s one of the things I’d concentrate on, that and the organ modes, which I’d investigate through Warren McCulloch’s concept of behavioral mode. (Curiously enough, McCulloch was bitterly opposed to psychoanalysis and inveighed against it in “The Past of a Delusion,” published in Embodiments of Mind, 1965, pp. 276-306.)

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The Mind is What the Brain Does, and Very Strange

Having now clearly established memes as properties of objects and events in the external world, properties that provide crucial data for the operation of mental “machines,” I want to step aside from thinking about memes and cultural evolution as such and think a bit about the mind. I want to set this conversation up by, once again, quoting from Dennett’s recent interview, The Well-Tempered Mind, at The Edge:

The question is, what happens to your ideas about computational architecture when you think of individual neurons not as dutiful slaves or as simple machines but as agents that have to be kept in line and that have to be properly rewarded and that can form coalitions and cabals and organizations and alliances? This vision of the brain as a sort of social arena of politically warring forces seems like sort of an amusing fantasy at first, but is now becoming something that I take more and more seriously, and it's fed by a lot of different currents.

A bit later:

It's going to be a connectionist network. Although we know many of the talents of connectionist networks, how do you knit them together into one big fabric that can do all the things minds do? Who's in charge? What kind of control system? Control is the real key, and you begin to realize that control in brains is very different from control in computers. Control in your commercial computer is very much a carefully designed top-down thing.

That’s the problem David Hays and I set ourselves in Principles and Development of Natural Intelligence (Journal of Social and Biological Systems 11, 293 – 322, 1988). While we had something to say about control in our discussion of the modal principle, we addressed the broader question of how to construct a mind from neurons that aren’t simple logical switches.

It is by no means clear to me how Dennett, and others of his mind-set, think about the mind. Yes, it’s computational. I can deal with that. But not, as I’ve said, if it’s taken to mean that the primitive operations of the nervous system are like the operations in digital computers, not if it’s taken to imply that the mind is constituted by ‘programs’ written in the ‘mentalese’ version of Fortran, Lisp, or C++. THAT was never a very plausible idea and the more we’ve come to know about the nervous system, the less plausible it becomes.

The upshot is that we need a much more fluid, a much more dynamic, conception of the mind. In Beethoven’s Anvil I talked of neural weather. Here’s how I set-up that metaphor (pp. 71-72):