FIRE IN THE MIND: NEUROSCIENCE AND THE FISHER PARADIGM©™®

FIRE IN THE MIND: NEUROSCIENCE AND THE FISHER PARADIGM©™®

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© October 26, 2010

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“There never has been any doubt that, under certain circumstances, emotions disrupt reasoning. (On the other hand) reduction in emotion may constitute an equally important source of irrational behavior. The counterintuitive connection between absent emotion and warped behavior may tell us something about the biological machinery of reason.”

Antonio Damasio’s “Descartes’ Error” (2006)

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Reference:

It has been a lifelong fascination of mine to understand why I have been successful given my contrary disposition. Trained in science I gravitated to technical sales without any training, but experienced alarming success. Then I was promoted into corporate management, again without any training, and managed further success, but experienced disenchantment with corpocracy. High strung, bookish, a loner, and narcissistic, I retired in my thirties, went back to graduate school to find answers acquiring a terminal degree in industrial and organization psychology. Consulting in organizational development (OD) followed. At every turn, I was reprogrammed in cognitive rational vertical, and critical thinking, but experienced success despite rather than because of this programming due to counterintuitive lateral and creative thinking, all of which I picked up as my life unfolded. My passion over the past forty years has been an attempt to communicate this in such a way that others would find it useful to them. Alas, I must admit in this attempt I have not been successful. Perhaps Antonio Damasio, a pure scientist, may have the answer.

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Antonio Damasio is a neuroscientist. He spent twenty-nine years (1976 – 2005) at the University of Iowa where he was M. W. Van Allen Professor and Head of the Department of Neurology in the Medical School. He is now at the University of Southern California where he directs the new Brain and Creativity Institute.

Feelings I believe have been the key to my success, and Dr. Damasio has researched and written two powerful books on the subject: Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (2006) and The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in Making of Consciousness (1999). He has come to believe we think with our whole bodies. I have no doubt.

These books hold special interest to me as he charts the power of feelings and mind in decision-making with an interesting set of hypotheses. He sees the brain-body-mind as a single entity. His prose is straightforward although he does go into neural anatomy, neurophysiology, neuropsychology, and brain chemistry in support of his theses. The discussion here is germane to neuroscience as it relates to consciousness and decision-making. .

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He looks at feelings, culture, experience and mind in holistic terms, which is a departure from conventional neurology and traditional medicine. I am not a neuroscientist or a medical doctor, but have found evidence in his hypotheses supportive of my work in OD. In fact, my career has benefited from taking feelings seriously, listening to their messages that have bombarded my senses.

Feelings have no language but can read an individual or a situation more accurately than the mind can alone. It was the basis of the “Fisher Conflict Model of Conflict Resolution” (see Confident Selling for the 90s, 1992), and subsequently led to the creation of THE FISHER PARADIGM©™® (see www.fisherofideas.com, blog entry January 10, 2010).

The motivation to create this paradigm was to demonstrate the limits of cognitive thinking is in the decision-making process, and to show how consciousness involves the whole person and not simply the brain for wont of a better way of putting it.

Success in OD has come as a result of sensitivity to the conflicting stimuli encountered in interventions, and then letting that data percolate through the senses often translated into counterintuitive proposals for action. Feelings are like a FIRE IN THE MIND that ignites the situation with meaning beyond words and what is expected.

That said it is difficult to penetrate cultural programming and see and feel the situation with fresh senses. It demands thinking without thinking, that is, allowing your whole person to speak to you.

Damasio sees a convergent of BODY-MINDED BRAIN as the factor that leads to this increased consciousness in the decision-making.

It is a triangular typology as is THE FISHER PARADIGM

(1) Personality Profile (person),
(2) Geographic Profile (place) and
(3) Demographic Profile (thing).

The convergence of these entities generates intuition, something outside the norm.

Damasio’s triangular typology might be expressed as:

(1) The mind (self);
(2) The topographical (body), and
(3) Consciousness (brain).

The convergence of these entities generates decision-making action. What follows are liberal quotations excised from Damasio’s work with occasional comments or references to THE FISHER PARADIGM.

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INSTITUTIONAL MEDICINE IS NOT HOLISTIC

The mind has been of little concern to mainstream medicine; in fact, the chief focus of the medical specialties to the present time is on the study of the brain, brain diseases, and neurology.

(Comment: Charlie Rose on PBS has had a twelve part series of the top scientists in neurology and brain medicine and not one word was devoted to mind.).

The net result of this has been a remarkable neglect of the mind as a function of the body.

The mind has been left as a major concern of religion and philosophy.

The body has been cut off from the mind. Psychosomatic illnesses have been considered just that, in the patient’s head.

Discounted is the placebo effect, that is, when a patient is not given a medicine but a placebo, yet registers similar or more positive results.

The fact that psychological disturbances can cause diseases of the body is just being taken seriously. Psychopathology can be increased when the human heart is in conflict with itself.

The rift with Western medicine between body and mind has seen a substantial increase in an alternative focus of medicine including acupuncture and herbal medicine.

Modern medicine has “cured” a number of dreaded diseases such as small pox, diphtheria, polio, and controlled a number of others.

Current success of alternative medicine is a symptom of public dissatisfaction with traditional medicine, especially those rooted in non-Western traditions of medicine, and a compensatory response to the problem.

Bruised feelings, desperate pleas for help from pain and suffering, the loss of a sense of inner balance, the desperate cry for happiness, to which most humans aspire, is not likely to diminish soon.

With all the genome research, with all the identity of certain diseases or conditions with genes, much of each brain circuitry at any moment of adult life is individual and unique, truly a reflection of the individual’s history and circumstances.

To understand in a satisfactory manner the brain that fabricates human mind and human behavior, it is necessary to take into account its social and cultural context. And that makes the endeavor truly daunting.

Complicating this further individuals operate in collectives of like thinking and believing humans.

The most elaborate social conventions and ethical structures by which we live, however, must have arisen culturally and been transmitted likewise. The mind and behavior of such individuals operate in a specific cultural and physical environment.

Said another way, individuals are not shaped merely by activity-driven circuitries and even less do genes alone shape them.

Life is about choices. Pain and pleasure are the levers required for instinctual and acquired strategies to operate efficiently. These levers control the development of social decision-making strategies.

The brain plots the pain-pleasure representation of a local body state change. This is a somatosensory (body feeling) perception derived from the skin. The second results from a more general change in body state are an emotion. The perception in that landscape is modulated further in the brain by neurotransmitters and neuromodulators, for example, endorphins (the body’s own morphine), which are important in the perception of a “pleasure landscape.” This can cancel or reduce the perception of a “pain landscape”

(Comment: in other words, feelings can give a clue to the state of the landscape if alert to them).

Suffering puts us on notice. Suffering offers the best protection for survival.

(Comment: When you experience unease, stimuli is bombarding your consciousness telling you what is about. It is an alarm, a signal to direct your attention to envelop the landscape not bothering at the moment to process the information but only to collect it. Patience allows the information to seep into your consciousness unravel itself of its complexities into constructs that eventually provide relevance and meaning.).

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THE BODY-MINDED BRAIN OR THINKING WITH YOUR WHOLE PERSON

The body provides a ground reference for the mind.

When a memory of the seen landscape is formed, that memory will be a neural record of many of the organismic changes just described, some of which happen in the brain itself and some of which happen in the body proper.

This is the landscape of homeostasis and a state of functional balance. The body proper is not passive. The body acts continuously on the environment (actions and explorations did not come first) and the environment acts continuously on the body. This interaction is necessary for survival and to avoid danger. Perceiving (danger) is as much about acting on the environment as it is as it is about receiving signals from it.

The idea that mind derives from the entire body as an ensemble may sound counterintuitive at first. The body contributes more than life support and modulatory effects to the brain. It contributes a content that is part and parcel of the workings of the normal mind.

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[Comment: This is taken from THE FISHER PARADIGM.

In the 1970s I was a contract consultant to the Fairfax County Police Department. In the process of interviewing scores of detectives, when I brought up a sensitive issue, they would adjust their shoulder holsters.

Fast forward to Washington, D.C., after going to a play, and having dinner with the Secretary of State of Iowa, I called FCPD for a ride back to my hotel in Fairfax City, some twelve miles away. The officer couldn’t pick me up for an hour so I went walking down Pennsylvania Avenue. It was 2 a.m. I suddenly noticed three black youths walking parallel to me across the street. They ran across the street about 10 yards from me on my side of the street, jiving as I approached. I sensed danger but didn’t break my stride.

Two things passed through my mind. I remembered that a US Senator had been accosted and nearly killed recently in this manner, and then I remembered how detectives adjusted their shoulder holsters. I was aware of my stature, six-four, two twenty, in a three piece suit and topcoat, ramrod straight posture, quickly imitating a police officer, having spent some nine months with them, adjusting my phantom holster, and saying, “A little past your curfew, isn’t it boys?”

They first looked at me stunned, and then quickly recovered moving aside for me to pass, saying as I did so, “There goes the fuzz.”

When I shared this with the police officer who picked me up at 3 a.m., he said, “You probably saved your life.”

Lessons learned:

(1) Think with your whole body, mind, and brain;
(2) Remember we are all animals with an instinct for survival;
(3) Self-preservation is the animal’s code;
(4) We have the same alarm system as other animals;
(5) Don’t discount intuition;
(6) Be alert to what instinct is bombarding your brain to tell you;
(7) OD educates you to think with your whole person and to use all your senses.

We think and feel with our mind that is in our whole body and not simply isolated in our brain.]

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Damasio continues:

Let us return to the example of your midnight walk home (comment: Damasio’s example dovetailed with the one above). Your brain has detected a threat, namely the person following you, and initiates several complicated chains of biochemical and neural reactions. You will be aware3 that you are in danger that you are now quite alarmed and perhaps should walk faster. The “you” I will call “self” is based on activities throughout your entire body, that is, the body proper and in the brain.

What the brain constructs to describe the situation, and the movements formulated as a response to the situation, depend on mutual brain-body interactive chemistry.

Making mind arise out of the whole body rather than out of a disembodied brain is compatible with a number of assumptions:

(1) The brain generates not only motor responses (actions), but also mental responses (images in the mind). Those images enhance survival by a greater appreciation of external circumstances, perceiving more details about an object, locating it more accurately in space, refining motor responses, predicting consequences by way of imagining the scenario and planning actions conducive to achieving the best imagined scenario (Comment: adjusting the phantom shoulder holster imagining myself as if a plainclothes police officer).

(2) Since minded survival was aimed at the survival of the whole person, the primordial representation of the minding brain had to concern the body proper in terms of the structure and functional state, including the external and internal actions with which the person responded to the environment (Comment: I did not break my stride imagining myself in mind as well as in body deportment a police officer).

We are actually far more aware of the overall state of the body than we usually admit, but it is apparent that as vision, hearing, and touch evolved, that attention usually allocated to their component of overall perception increased accordingly. Thus the perception of the body proper more often than not was left precisely where it did, and does the best job: “in the background.”

I am not suggesting that body representations dominate the landscape of our mind (moments of emotional upheaval excepted), but the images of body state are in the background and ready to spring forward. I prefer to think that the body remains “in the loop” for reasoned outlined.

I am immensely interested in the subject or consciousness and am convinced that neurobiology can begin to approach the subject, confining my comments to one aspect that is pertinent to the discussion on images, feelings, and somatic (body) markers. It concerns the neural basis of the self, the understanding of which might shed some light on the process of subjectivity, a key feature of consciousness.

The self recognizes and understands the situation. The self locates the problem from the vantage point of selfhood. The frame of reference is not different from the one they would use were they referring to a problem with their knees or elbows.

You cannot have a self without wakefulness, arousal, and the formation of images, but technically you can be awake and aroused and have images formed in sectors of your brain and mind, while having a compromised self.

(Comment: Damasio then goes into pathological alterations of wakefulness and arousal that cause stupor, vegetative state, and coma, conditions in which the self vanishes entirely. Our interests here is in the healthy engaged self.).

In using the notion of self, I am in no way suggesting that all the contents of our minds are inspected by a single central knower and owner, and even less that such an entity would reside in a single brain place. I am saying, though, that our experiences tend to have a consistent perspective.

(Comment: This is important in the scheme of OD work.).

I imagined this perspective to be rooted in a relatively stable, endlessly repeated biological state. The source of the stability is the predominantly invariant structure and operation of the person, and the slowly evolving elements of his autobiography

(Comment: Damasio emphasizes autobiography. Somehow I realized the importance of this long ago, and have used it as a source to my OD work. Readers have commented on this, wondering if I am self-conscious about this. The answer is “no.” OD work has no depth without its biographical nature and narrative.).

You might imagine this biographical narrative as a representative picture (a sort of file) that is held in the association cortices of many brain sites rather than as a filing cabinet. This defines our person. Over and above such categorization, there are unique facts from our past that are constantly activated as mapped representations: where we live and work, what our jobs is precisely, our own name and the names of close kin and friends, of city and country.

We have a dispositional memory, a collection of recent events, along with their approximate temporal continuity, and we also have a collection of plans, a number of imaginary events we intend to make happen or expect to happen. This is memory of the possible future.

This endless reactivation of updated images about our identity constitutes a sizable part of the state of self.

What is happening to us now is, in fact, happening to a concept of self-based on the past, including the past that was current only a moment ago. At each moment of the state of self is constructed from the ground up. It is an evanescent reference state, so continuously and consistently reconstructed that the owner never knows it is being remade.

The concept of self is a coordinated activity of multiple brain regions, but our self, or even better our metaself, only “learns” about that “now” an instant later. We are hopelessly late for consciousness.

DAMSAIO’S TRIANGULAR TYPOLOGY

When the brain generates a set of responses to an entity, the existence of a representation of self does not make that self know that its corresponding subject is responding. The self cannot know. However, the “metaself” might know, provided:

(1) The brain would create some description of the perturbation;
(2) The description generated an image of the process;
(3) The image of the self-perturbed would then be displayed in a rapid interpolation of the image that triggered the perturbation.

The description does not use language although it can be translated into language

(Comment: This is similar to the epiphany process toward intuition as described by THE FISHER PARADIGM. Insight registers as a feeling without language in a subjective characterization.).

Having an image alone is not enough, even if we invoke attention and awareness, as they are properties of a self as it experiences images. Having both images and self is not sufficient either. One would not understand what the references consist of, or what they achieve. How subjectivity would emerge from such a process would be entirely mysterious.

[Comment: Damasio suggests a third-party neuron ensemble in a “convergence zone” that supports the images of the object and the images of the self in a reciprocal interconnection that subjectively brings the fontal brain (thinking) and the limbic system (feeling) into play.]

An object that is being represented, a person responding to the object, and a state of the self in the process of changing because of the person’s response to the object – are held simultaneously in working memory and attended, side-by-side in early sensory cortices.

(Comment: Feelings become facts on a subjective basis and are treated as such.).

Subjectivity emerges during the latter step when the brain is producing not just images of an object, not just imagines of the person’s responses to the object, but a third kind of image, that of a person in the act of perceiving and responding to an object.

(Comment: This describes my reaction and behavior with the three boys mentioned earlier.)

Language may not be the source of the self, but it certainly is the source of the “I.” Francis Crick’s hypothesis on consciousness is focused on the problem of image making and leaves out subjectivity altogether.

(Comment: This is not surprising as scientists are committed to objectivity often at the expense of their subjective nature. In OD work, subjectivity is crucial to success as we see, feel and think regardless of the stimuli with our whole person.)

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MY FINAL WORD

At the core of human consciousness is the consciousness of feeling, experiencing self, the very thought of oneself connected to yet separated from significant others. With the OD practitioner, this is the primary tool in his toolkit. This is a modest attempt to make this apparent.

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