"The Embodied Mind," by Francisco J. Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch 1991, The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Review by Brian Van der Horst
This is a book about the terrible tension between science and experience.
"With the exception of a few largely academic discussions cognitive science has had virtually nothing to say about what it means to be human in everyday, lived situations," say the authors of the "The Embodied Mind." "On the other hand, those human traditions that have focused on the analysis, understanding, and possiblities for transformation of ordinary life need to be presented in a context that makes them available to science."
These words could easily be those of a researcher in the field of neuro-linguistic programming, describing the conflicts between NLP's research paradigm and the presuppositions of classical science.
But the authors of "The Embodied Mind" are a rare combination of respected scholars: Franciso Varela, Director of Research at the Centre National de Recherche Scientifique and Professor of Cognitive Science and Epistemology, CREA, at the Ecole Polytechnique in Paris; Evan Thompson, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Toronto; and Eleanor Rosch, Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Berkeley.
Perhaps the most valuable volume I have read in 30 years research into the mind, the spirit, and the nature of reality, this book should be required reading for anyone wishing to study the structure of subjective experience.
"This book begins and ends with the conviction that the new sciences of mind need to enlarge their horizon to encompass both lived human experience and the possibilities for transformation inherent in human experience," continue the authors in their introduction.
This is also a book about a revolution in cognitive science from its roots in cognitivism, to current models of emergence, toward new territory of enaction and embodiment.
Cognitivism is the hypothesis that "cognition is mental representation: the mind is thought to operate by manipulating symbols that represent features of the world or represent the world in as being a certain way."
Emergence is typically referred to as connectionism. "This name is derived from the idea that many cognitive tasks (such as vision and memory) seem to be handled best by systems made up of many simple components, which, when connected by the appropriate rules, give rise to global behaviors."
The authors have chosen the term enactive "to empasize the growing conviction that cognition is not the representation of a pregiven world by a pregiven mind, but is rather the enactment of a world and a mind on the basis of a history of the variety of actions that a being in the world performs." This experiential performance is a quality of being in the world, or world constructing that the authors designate as embodiment.
Below, the reader familiar with NLP will find much in common with the authors' map of the cast and setting of their inquiries.
Figure 1.1 A conceptual chart of the cognitive sciences today in the form of a polar map, with the contributing disciplines in the angular dimensions and different approaches in the radial axis.
You will probably notice that the disciplines used here to define cognitive science are the same ones ascribed to NLP, with the telling exception of philosophy. For me, this is a sobering map of our lack of awareness of the traditions and disciplines with which we could interact. Several of the researchers named here have contributed to the roots of NLP, but our founders are not listed. Nor is NLP included in the authors' list of traditions focused on investigating human experience, which includes the phenomenological tradition of philosophers Edmund Husserl, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Martin Heidegger; psychoanalysis; and various Eastern schools of mindfulness/awareness meditative practices.
"Mindfullness means that the mind is present in embodied everyday experience; mindfulness techniques are designed to lead the mind back from its theories and preoccupations, back from the abstract attitude, to the situation of one's experience itself."
Sound like a good definition of NLP?
The authors have not chosen NLP, but another great optic for their examination of the self and subjective reality: the philosophy of Buddhism. They date the inspiration for this book from the late seventies, when Varela was teaching at the summer Science Program of the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado. Evan Thompson prepared the first draft with Varela, which was then presented at a conference on cognitive science and Buddhism. Eleanor Rosch, has been teaching and researching both cognitive psychlogy and Buddhist psychology for many years at Berkeley.
I can only imagine the position of the authors. They had probably enjoyed the experiential results of meditative practice-- call it satori, insight, samahdi, enlightment, or however you want to characterize a trancendental peak experience. My guess is that a good deal of the book was motivated by a certain frustration each of them felt in not being able to utilize their individual disciplines to examine or communicate the power of their personal experiences. But happily, they have brilliantly avoided the pitfall of writing yet another book from scientists about the nature of spiritual experience. They have succeeded in drawing on the essence of Eastern philosophy in a breakthrough application of Western critical analysis.
Is Buddhism a useful tool for addressing subjective reality? Here are some of the "Categories of Experiential Events Used in Mindfulness/Awareness," from the Abhidharma School of meditation:
The Process of Mind (cittta/caitta)
A. Consciousness (vijnana)
1. Visual consciousness
2. Auditory consciousness
3. Olfactory conciousness
4. Gustatory conciousness
5. Tactile conciousness
6. Mental consciousnes (what we would call sub-modalities)
B. Mental factors (samskara)
1. Contact (sparsa)
2. Feeling (vedana)
3. Perception (samjna)
4. Intention (cetana)
5. Attention (manas)
This list goes on to read like a summary of NLP meta-program distinctions. The language is a bit different, but the meanings --clearly the result of nearly 3000 years of modelling-- are quite familiar.
Essentially, Varela, Thomson and Rosch have done a lot of our homework for us in this tome. I found this book very difficult to read, but immensely rewarding.
The authors begin with a nifty review of cognitive science in terms of cybernetics, brain science, psychology and artificial intelligence-- into the very question, of how human beings represent and treat reality mentally, and the frustrating search in science for the "self," the coherent and unified point of view from which human beings think, percieve and act.
They next turn to the mindfulness/awareness tradition for its definition of the self, comparing recent neurological studies with various Eastern models. Varela, by the way is a veteran neuroscientist who accomplished landmark work on vision, neurological anantomy, and immunology. In both meditative practices and citing several elegant neural-network experiments, the authors point to the origins of the ego/self in terms of self-organizing emergent properties. Just as an image emerges from an interaction of dots in color photography, self is examined as arising from interactions between brain functions and conciousness.
Here's one of my favorite examples. "The standard information-processing description (still found in textbooks and popular accounts) is that information enters through the eyes and is relayed sequentially through the thalamus {in the lateral geniculate nucleus (LGN)} to the visual cortex, figure A."
Figure 5.3 Connections in the visual pathway of mammals at the thalamic level.
"The second diagram in figure 5.3 depicts the way the LGN is embedded in the brain network. It is evident that 80 percent of what any LGN cell listens to comes not from the retina, but from the dense interconnectedness of other regions of the brain... The enounter of these two ensembles of neuronal activity is one moment in the emergence of a a new coherent configuration... Other partners, such as the superior colliculus, or the corallary discharge of neurons that control eye movements play an equally active role. Thus the behavior of the whole system resembles a cocktail party conversation much more than a chain of command."
In other words, whatever the brain looks at is really about 20% of signals from the outside world and 80% of old templates, filters, memories and beliefs about the world. "What we have described for the LGN and vision, is of course, a uniform principle throughout the brain."
Cognition is then defined, after appraisal of work from Sherrington and Palov to S. Wolfram (cellular automata) and Stephen Grossberg (neurocomputing) as "The emergence of global states in a network of simple components." That work "...through local rules for individual operation and rules for changes in the connectivity among the elements."
The authors next mix the "Society of Mind" approach of AI expert Marvin Minsky and cognitive scientist Ray Jackendoff's Conciousness and the Computational Mind with object relations theory from psychoanalysis and large ladlings of Buddhist dharma analysis and -- Voila! -- they arrive very close to something resembling the NLP parts model of conciousness, or Leslie Cameron-Bandler's Imperative Self analysis.
However they arrive at the conclusion that there is no self to be found in cognitive science, rather like Minsky has written, " perhaps it's because there are no persons in our heads to make us do the things we want-- not even ones to make us want to want-- that we construct the myth that we're inside ourselves." This brings us close to the work of Charles Faulkner and his "Operating Metaphors."
Riding this shockwave of the implosion of the unfound self, the authors next revist the nature of cognitive representation. Minsky again leads the way, "Why are processes so hard to classify? ...brains use processes that change themselves... brains make memories, which change the ways we'll subsequently think. The principal activities of brains are making changes in themselves."
"The key point," follow Varela and company, "is that such systems do not operate by representation... they enact a world as a domain of distinctions that is inseparable from the structure embodied by the cognitive system."
The authors then turn to current experiments into how the eye perceives color, in a marvelous case study of the interaction of neurology, linguistics and physiology. Their illustration of physiology, or perceptual guidance merits special mention: "In a classic study, Held and Hein raised kittens in the dark and exposed them to light only under controlled conditions. A first group of animals was allowed to move around normally, but each of them was harnessed to a simple carriage and basket that contained a number of the second group of animals. The two groups therefore shared the same visual experience, but the second group was entirely passive. When the animals were released after a few weeks of this treatment, the first group of kittens behaved normally, but those who had been carried around behaved as if they were blind: the bumped into objects and fell over edges."
Additionally, visual perception appears to be an active exchange with other sensory modalities. Furthermore, a chart of the identified anatomical subnetworks in the brain that operate in parallel simultaneous information streams is highly reminiscent of Minsky's societies of agents.
At this point in the narrative, Varela, Thompson and Rosch take a surprizing turn and devote a chapter to modern advances in theories of evolution, and recent writings about evolution as a mutual "ecology and developement in congruence," rather a co-evolution of species and self-organizing configurations, conecting organisms in "structural couplings" with their biological networks.
"As we can now appreciate, to situate cognition as embodied action within the context of evolution as natural drift provided a view of cognitive capacities as inextricably linked to histories that are lived, much like paths that exist only as they are laid down in walking. Consequently, cognition is no longer seen as problem solving on the basis of representations; instead, cognition in its most encompassing sense consists in the enactment or bringing forth of a world by a viable history of structural coupling."
So far, this book has read like a scientific dectective story. By the time the reader arrives at the final chapter, although he has learned a great deal about the mind and subjective reality, he is also haunted by what the authors call, following Richard Bernstein, "The Cartesian Anxiety." "The anxiety is best put as a dilemma: either we have a fixed and stable foundation for knowledge, a point where knowledge starts, is grounded, and rests, or we cannot escape some sort of darkness, chaos and confusion." This is also a tension between belief in complete objectivity or complete subjectivity, sometimes expressed as a a flight toward either absolutism or nihilism.
"There is a profound discovery of groundlessness in our culture-- in science, in the humanities, in society and in the uncertainties of people's daily lives," conclude the authors. "...In Buddhism, we have a case study showing that when groundlessness is embraced and followed through to its ultimate conclusions, the outcome is an unconditional sense of intrinsic goodness that manifests itself in the world as spontaneous compassion. ... Although late-twentieth-century science repeatedly undermines our conviction in an ultimate ground, we nonetheless continue to seek one. We have laid down a path in both cognitive science and human experience that would lead us away from this dilemma."
Varela, Thompson, and Rosch are to be applauded for their effort. Is their work too skewed toward trying to promote a scientific foundation for meditative practices? In my opinion they have chosen the most rigourous example: a discipline that has investigated the structure of subjective experience for nearly 3000 years. Had they used NLP instead of Buddhism, I doubt if they could have made a better demonstration of our own research program.
Anybody daring to investigate the nature of personality or the human experience of the spiritual in NLP would do well to know this book. As they say in Buddhism, why re-invent the wheel of life?
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Brian Van der Horst has been a professional trainer for 15 years. For the past 10 years he has lived and worked in Paris as a director of Repere, an international NLP training institute. Previously, he was a consultant with Stanford Research Institute in the Values and Lifestyles Program in the Strategic Environments Group, and director of the Neuro-Linguistic Programming Center for Advanced Studies in San Francisco. He has worked in journalism for New Realities, Practical Psychology, Playboy, and The Village Voice. He has been an editor for J.P. Tarcher Books, Houghton-Mifflin, and had a television program in San Francisco. Before this time, he worked in the entertainment industry for 10 years, serving as Vice-President of the Cannon Group, and as Director of Advertising and Publicity for Atlantic Records.