Chapter Two: Unfinished (1,900)

Chapter 2: Neuroscience and Embodiment:Discoveries of the Body

“Perception is no more than successful hallucination.”

“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 sides of embodied architecture, 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.
[The application of a phenomenological approach to neuroscience is one which may elucidate both the fields of philosophy and neuroscience.]
H does our ability to understand our biology relate to our ability to understand ourselves existentially? To understand the inner landscape of our anatomy and to witness its consequences on our sense of self and existence, is to give ourselves an altered sense of what may traditionally be believed through common sense. In the following three examples, each of which are startling discoveries made in the past twenty years, I will analyse the effect of them on our understanding of our ability to consume and create space.

1. 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 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.
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 to 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 the current mental map. Thus our experience of the outside world is in part created by our previous experiences of it.
The word Perception can easily be substituted on this statement on visio:
“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 comes in, 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 once merely philosophical is now compounded by biological fact. (and extended??)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.
“…perception is an internally generated hallucination that we check against ‘data’”
An intrinsic part of this process, is the fact that our brain as the mediator of experience, is constantly making decisions about what we perceive based on previous experience and thus forming probability levels of reality. Therefore, our seamless sensical 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. The internal mental map screens this information based on its probability, filtering the sensical from the non sensical. 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. This offer glimmers of understanding into the mechanisations behind our normally seamless experience of the world.
“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…”
“If the Bayesian philosophy of perception is correct, 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.”
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.

“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:

TO BE WRITTEN UP BASED ON INFO BELOW:

mirror neurons:
“In the last decades, special mirror neurons have been found in the premotor area and in the posterior parietal cortex. They directly link perception to action: the perception of actions activates the relevant parts of the observer's motor system. Emotional expressions evoke resonance states inside the observer in a similar way. Besides underscoring the prereflective and implicit nature of intersubjectivity, this can provide an access to the neuronal basis of empathy and intuition.”
“Mirror neurons are premotor neurons that fire when the monkey performs object-directed actions such as grasping, tearing, manipulating, holding, but also when the animal observes somebody else, either a conspecific or a human experimenter, performing the same class of actions”
“Researchers at UCLA found that cells in the human anterior cingulate, which normally fire when you poke the patient with a needle ("pain neurons"), will also fire when the patient watches another patient being poked. The mirror neurons, it would seem, dissolve the barrier between self and others. [1] I call them "empathy neurons" or "Dalai Llama neurons". (I wonder how the mirror neurons of a masochist or sadist would respond to another person being poked.) Dissolving the "self vs. other" barrier is the basis of many ethical systems, especially eastern philosophical and mystical traditions. This research implies that mirror neurons can be used to provide rational rather than religious grounds for ethics.”
The connections that can be made between Merleau-Ponty’s symbiotic world of intersubjectivity, one where the subject
“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.”
(wikipedia)A mirror neuron is a neuron which fires both when an animal acts and when the animal observes the same action performed by another animal (especially by another animal of the same species).[1] Thus, the neuron "mirrors" the behavior of another animal, as though the observer were itself acting. These neurons have been directly observed in primates, and are believed to exist in humans and other species
Many scientists also believe that neuronal mirroring can reflect in two directions, illuminating both the external world (of others) and the internal world (of self). By constantly observing and imitating others, we not only learn about them but about ourselves: How we see and think of ourselves; the meanings we ultimately give to our most intimate and “unsharable” experiences like pain; indeed the ongoing project of human creation in general as it works to fill the world with things that possess the capacity to reflect our humanity (5).
Thinkers like Sartre, Foucault and Lacan may have been exquisitely prescient. Mimesis may well turn out to be a prerequisite or stepping stone to self-knowledge. We observe, reproduce, impose patterns, and thereby understand. We can do this with objects that happen to cross our field of vision like the patient encountered by Friges Karinthy or the seal by Mark Doty. But we could also do this on a more sophisticated level. If a potential doppelganger doesn’t exist we can invent one. As Alphonse Daudet does in his dream of the boat with the damaged keel (mirroring his diseased keel-spine). And as many artists do in their poems and paintings. After finishing his masterwork, Flaubert is famously reported to have said of his creation: Emma Bovary, ces’t moi. The re-production leads to recognition. The same thing that painters do perhaps more self-consciously in their self-portraits and in the case of Frida Kahlo, her double self-portraits. Here the dictum of philosopher Nelson Goodman is most transparently realized: Comprehension and creation go on together (6).
.to be finished
(all references are included in the word document, the blog doesn't recognise them)