Chapter two - Rough, no references

Chapter 2: Neuroscience and Embodiment

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 a subjective biological being to the world we live in. This sense of embodied self within a subjectively created and experienced world has been speculated upon by philosophers since the beginning of accounts and is now today being proved scientifically as we explore inside the brain and discover the complex systems of representation at play.

The application of a phenomenological approach to neuroscience is one which may elucidate both the fields of philosophy and neuroscience.

To begin with, how does our ability to understand our biology relate to our ability to understand ourselves philosophically? 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.

Plasticity

William Greenough and a team of neuroscientists over forty years ago 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.

In human beings, it is now well documented. 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. As a baby we have between a trillion to x neurons.Between the age of 0 and x (3-6) over 2 thirds of these will be pruned away to form clear neural pathways as the child learns to talk / walk and think. The sad thing is that this stage is so critical and if a child isn’t given the sensory stimulus at this 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.

All the way through life this process continues in a more refined manner. 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 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. 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.

What is interesting about this phenomenon beyond the subjectivity of experience, is the fact that, unbeknownst to our consciousness, a high level of noise (random error information) is also fed into our brains. 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. Is this a truer sense of reality? Clearly not but it does offer glimmers of understanding into the mechanisations behind our normally seamless experience of the world.

mirror neurons