Chapter Two: Almost Final: 1,600

Chapter 2: Neurophenomenology and Embodiment:
Exploring the Chiasm

“If technology changes or augments the body, then - as the body is architecture’s conduit – architecture must change and vice versa. Therefore developments in medicine are as important to the progression of architecture as advances in building material, probably more so.”

In the field of emerging complex relationships between the subjective self in space, none I feel are more pertinent than that of the discoveries made by neuroscience in the past forty years.

As stated already, I have defined two aspects of embodiment, the first being our relationship as subjective biological beings, to the world we live in. This sense of an embodied self within a subjectively created and experienced world has been long been speculated upon by philosophers has recently been extended by the scientific community through their explorations of the brain and the subsequent discoveries of complex systems of representation at play in forming our consciousness.

To understand the inner landscape of our anatomy and to understand its consequences on our perception, is to alter many of our commonly held beliefs about the self. In the following two examples, each of which are startling discoveries made in the past forty years, I will analyse the effect of them on our understanding of our ability to consume and create space. The enhancements of these discoveries with relation to phenomenology could be defined as neurophenomenology.

Plasticity

In the early 1970's William Greenough and a team of neuroscientists first documented the strange phenomenon of the growth of new dendrites and synaptic connections between existing neurons in the brains of rats when they took on new activities. This was the start of a massive upheaval of many of neuroscience’s most basic canons of opinion. Before this point the brain was seen as a fixed entity and therefore the relationship of a person to their environment was viewed as relatively simple. However, what plasticity made clear was that the process of perception created by the brain was highly subjective, that the experiences lived by a person formed the architecture of their brain, changing it every time and thus altering how they perceived space.

In human beings, it is now well documented through brain imaging technology that the human brain goes through a series of stages of development which prune and grow the neural connections according to it use in life. The term ‘use it or lose it’ is often applied to the description of the child’s brain. In the prenatal stage, the brain produces trillions more neurons and “synapses” (connections between the brain cells) than needed, by birth our brain has been pared down to approximately 100 billion neurons, roughly as many nerve cells as there are stars in the Milky Way. During the first years of life, the brain undergoes a series of extraordinary changes. “The frontal lobes become active between 6 months and a year old, triggering the development of emotions, attachments, planning, working memory and attention. A sense of self develops as the parietal and frontal lobe circuits become more integrated, at around 18 months, and a sense of other people having their own minds at 3-4.” “Windows of opportunity” are critical periods in children’s lives when specific types of learning take place. If a child isn’t given the sensory stimulus before the end of each critical stage there are whole neural areas that die, never to be replaced. So experience determines the organisational structure of the brain, thus all future experiences will be experienced via the medium of this moulded brain based on previous experience. The parallels with Merleau-Ponty’s embodied subject are clear.

In adolescence, a large portion of rewiring occurs and by the early twenties the brain is formed, the number of neurons relatively fixed. However, all through ones life, the brain has been shown to have a remarkable ability to rewire itself in response to new experiences and environments. For example if one learns to play a musical instrument, no matter how late in life, the brain grows new dendrites and neural synaptic connections, forming new pathways in which this information is processed.

Philosophically this has massive implications on the relationship of the self in space – to internal embodied architecture. Instead of our sense of self being defined by information that is transmitted directly to our consciousness, we are sponges of information that act in a looping feed; sensory information is communicated to our mind via our body and brain. It forms an internal mental map of what reality is, every time we absorb more information from the outside world our mind checks it for probability against our current mental map. Thus our experience of the outside world is in part created by our previous experiences of it. “(Visual) perception is not an optical image at all: what we call vision is actually a memory of the past, derived in the first place by touch and movement.”

This process continues indefinitely. Information enters, is processed and checked and redesigns the map and so on. Therefore the experience of the self in space is wholly subjective, we truly do create the world we experience. This scientifically proved information correlates with Merleau-Ponty’s assumptions about subjective space and Deleuze’s notion of the crystal image.

“…the indivisible unity of an actual image and ‘its’ virtual image…the image has to be present and past, still present and past, still present and already past, at once and at the same time”

The once merely philosophical is now compounded by biological fact. What was once only accepted by and pondered upon by academics is now mainstream knowledge. This itself alters how we as a culture view ourselves in space and thus how we go on to consume space after this knowledge. Like Newtonian science that viewed the world objectively influenced the mind space of an era before.

“Perception is an internally generated hallucination that we check against ‘data’”

“If our perceptions are models, which we use to make informed guesses about the outside world…The process of perception involves selecting an internal model and then checking it against the data. The best model is the one that fits the data. As Richard Gregory says, perceptions are hypotheses. Sometimes two equally likely hypotheses fit the data, like the ambiguous figures of the duck rabbit and Necker Cube in figure X and the brain entertains them in turn.”

“Hallucinations tell us that the brain can generate perceptions with minimal support from the retinal image. There is probably very little difference between a drug induced hallucination and the perception of faces in the clouds…”

Similar occurrences can happen in real space (as opposed to 2d) Often so thought apparitions are ambiguous shapes that take on anthropomorphic forms to the anthropomorphically biased human eye. Or in more extreme situations where the a person has had large parts of their memory lost (i.e. chunks of their internal cognitive map are lost against which reality should be checked) can ‘remember’ events that never happened as the brain compensated as it does when it is normal and healthy by filling in the gaps. In these case though unlike it merely producing a seamless narration of life, it becomes fictitious.

Our seamless version of what we perceive is in fact our brain making estimations of probability and feeding them back into our consciousness. Noise (random error information) accompanies all of the sensory information fed into our brains from the outside world. Our internal cognitive map screens this information based on its probability, filtering the appropriate and likely from the nonsensical. However, at breakdown points in the brain process, be it through a mental illness like schizophrenia, an accident to the brain or the ingestion of psychoactive drugs, these filtration systems are lost allowing strange connections to be made and strange sensations experienced. These glitches offer glimmers of understanding into the mechanisations behind our normally seamless experience of the world.

“Patients with severe memory loss sometimes produce quite detailed ‘false memories’ to fill in the large gaps. They may well experience these memories as real, even though they are invented to cover up the lack of evidence.

All of the above examples further the notion of a fluid, subjective space, in constant flux; the subject and the world in permanent symbiosis.

Another key discovery in neuroscience which has large implications for the understanding of the self in relations to the outside world is that of mirror neurons discussed in the next section.Mirror Neurons:

“Mimesis may well turn out to be a prerequisite or stepping stone to self-knowledge. We observe, reproduce, impose patterns, and thereby understand.”
“Mirror neurons are neurons that fire when the monkey performs object-directed actions such as grasping, tearing, manipulating, holding, but also when the animal observes somebody else, performing the same class of actions”

The esteemed neuroscientist V.S. Ramachandran believes these neurons to radically change the landscape of perception beyond recognition.

“The discovery of mirror neurons in the frontal lobes of monkeys, and their potential relevance to human brain evolution … is the single most important "unreported" (or at least, unpublicized) story of the decade. I predict that mirror neurons will do for psychology what DNA did for biology: they will provide a unifying framework and help explain a host of mental abilities that have hitherto remained mysterious and inaccessible to experiments.”

This ability to understand ourselves relative to an Other defines our ability to be changed by the world but more specifically by another recognisable subject has strong links with phenomenology’s theory of intersubjectivity. Lacanian analysis of the ‘mirror stage’ previously discussed seems now to be scientifically provable. The stages of the brain defined by neural growth and pruning reflects to a large extent psychoanalysis’ stages of development of a person.
This newly understood complex, dynamic, fluid system of embodiment, requires a medium capable of representing and manifesting it. Standard conventional methods are simply inadequate to relate, debate and reflect on and to this new type of space we understand ourselves to live in. In the next chapter I assess and challenge what this medium may be.