The Body Helps Create Understanding

Hannah Devlin wrote an awesome article in the TimesOnline, The day I had my brain switched off. With a title like that, how could any brain junkie resist? I couldn't.

It’s December 15, the morning after The Times’ Christmas party, and I have a single, looming appointment: 10.30am, Brain Zapping, UCL. I have agreed — in what now seems a moment of complete recklessness — to take part in a scientific experiment in which my brain will be temporarily “switched off”...

Sitting in the reception of UCL’s psychology department, the scientist in me says: “Relax. This is definitely safe.” The other 99 per cent of me is pondering a more disturbing possibility: what if, afterwards, like Phineas Gage, I am never the same again? What if I am wheeled out of UCL unable to utter anything apart from the word broccoli?

The weirdness of it all. Yet when parts of the brain accidentally get destroyed by disease or lesions, behavior changes. This quality underlies the field of neuropsychology and has generated significant insight into the workings of the brain.

Hannah might be joking - a little gallows humor, but this turn-off-brain thing is serious science.

It is well established that listening to action words such as lick, pick and kick activates the brain areas that control the tongue, hand and foot. Pulvermuller’s research goes a step farther, suggesting that the brain’s action system does more than respond to meaning — he believes that it contributes to it.

To test this theory, Pulvermuller ran a study in which he stimulated different parts of the action system using TMS while volunteers listened to tongue, hand and foot-related words... He found that stimulating the hand region made people quicker to comprehend hand-related words, such as stitch and pick. The same was true for foot-related words, such as kick and run, when he stimulated the foot area of the brain. “We found it wasn’t just a one-way flow from the language system to the motor system. People actually use these brain areas to understand the word,” he said.

Turn-off-brain studies demonstrate we have an easier time understanding action-words when we can simulate the action in our bodies. Studies continue to show how our mind arises from by events in the body. These turn-off-brain studies show the significance of the body to the nature of understanding.

The idea that we feel words as well as understand them, he adds, has wider implications for the “theory of mind” — the way that we attribute thoughts, desires and intentions to other people. There has been a long debate about whether we relate to other people by theorising about their point of view or simulating what it must be like to be them. Morris says that the latest research tilts the balance towards the more empathetic view. “It shows that simulation is implicitly embedded in language processing,” he says.

My recent post Mirror The Body, Mirror The Emotion discusses mirror neurons and empathy at more length and cites a prominent recent study¹, focusing on body-based simulations. If an emotion dictates the automatic behavior of others, it triggers a more generalized simulation (and more generalize awareness of the event) in us. Our response is empathic rather than specific. The quality of our empathy relates to quality of our own simulation. Similarly, two people observing the emotion of a third person, will have different empathic experiences.

The studies of language using turn-off-brain techniques show simulations are also embedded (embodied?) in our natural language processing.

Just as revealing, the professor says, are the aspects of language that are the last to go. Even in the advanced stages of dementia, patients can retain a good grasp of grammar. In one study he asked a patient to explain the meaning of the sentence: “The boy rides the horse”. Her response? “If you tell me what a boy is and what a horse is then I’ll tell you what it means.”

An understanding of the structure and syntax of language endures even after the meaning of the words is lost. Some neuroscientists argue that this demonstrates the extent to which language is hard-wired into the human brain.

I added this last piece as a reference to innate language. Earlier I also wrote about innate intuitions of biology and psychology. These three qualities together give rise to the powerful sensation of one mind. How do we reconcile our intuition of a singular self with the fact that the brain is pieces which can be turned off and human nature complex?

In their article, Posttraumatic Growth: Conceptual Foundations and Empirical Evidence,¹ Tedeschi and Calhoun create a valuable framework for evaluating a routine consequence of trauma - personal growth.

Traumatic events are “profoundly disturbing,” cause significant anxiety and stress, can give rise to “dysfunctional patterns of thinking,” including “repetitive intrusions of thoughts and images,” cause unpleasant, potentially significant physical reactions, and can cause or exacerbate psychiatric disorders. Said bluntly, traumatic events are bad.

Posttraumatic Growth (PTG) is how adaptive personal development arises from the harsh circumstances of traumatic events. PTG is the consequence of “the struggle with in the aftermath of trauma.”

Tedeschi and Calhoun:

In the developing literature of posttraumatic growth, we have been finding reports of growth experiences in the aftermath of traumatic events far outnumber reports of psychiatric disorders... The widespread assumptions that traumas often result in disorder should not be replaced with expectations that growth is an inevitable result. Instead, we are finding that continuing personal distress and growth often coexist...

An approach to a traumatic experience, however old, should focus on both the healing of the distress and the opportunities for development. Many of the self-selected avoidant-responses to emotional distress limit the capacity for PTG. Even more constructive coping strategies might also be too narrow in scope.

Growth is the consequence of suffering and struggle. Perhaps the more intentional the process of struggle, the greater the realization of self development. In this sense, the re-viewing of our collection of traumatic experiences is a necessary foundation for on-going personal development.

The contemporary, pop-psychology, self-help approach to past distress is to use a positive frame, and describe traumatic events as “opportunities,” or “challenges,” and focus on positive outcomes rather than the hardship. This bias limits the sense of suffering and struggling. Ironically, excessive positive thinking might diminish the opportunity for PTG.

Tedeschi and Calhoun:

PTG is not simply a return to baseline - it is an experience of improvement that for some persons is deeply profound...

The psychological processing of the crisis events has a highly emotional element connected to it. What makes these experiences transformative seems to be that they have this affective component, so that the lessons are not merely intellectual reflections...

PTG is most like a consequence of attempts at psychological survival, and it can coexist with the residual distress of the trauma.

Because a traumatic event involves attempts at psychological survival and are highly emotional, these events and their residual distress are likely to have significant body-based qualities. In general, we would expect that the memory of a traumatic event would be “visceral.”

Because of such a significant affective quality, traumatic events are likely to highly “instructive” and “informative.” These experiences are not just “lessons” in a simple cognitive sense, but rather in the experiential sense which alters internal working models, schemas, sense-making beliefs and even autobiography. Working with past traumatic experiences may be central to developing a constructive outlook on life and a durable sense of well being.

Trauma thoughts, such as “I’m unable,” “I’m unworthy,” or “I’m ignorant,” all have a strong aversive visceral feel and sense of vulnerability. Too often, the aversive visceral feel limits the capacity to be at peace with a deep sense of vulnerability. It triggers defensive responses such as avoiding or splitting off the pain and also stifles PTG. These defensive responses partly explain the difficulty in reworking aspects of a personal outlook based on trauma thoughts.

Tedeschi and Calhoun:

The identification of strength (to handle the suffering and struggle) is often correlated, almost paradoxically, with an increased sense of being vulnerable.

PTG is, in one significant way, the development of the capacity to sit with an increased sense of being vulnerable. We feel highly vulnerable with the archetypal trauma thoughts: “I’m unable,” “I’m unworthy,” and “I’m ignorant.”

The development of resources to sit with these thoughts, rather than simply push them aside, might be a significant quality to personal growth. The spirit is born of suffering.

I explore the subject of trauma thoughts in more detail in my essay: Peanut Butter: Able, Worthy and Wise.

I intend to write more on the article by Tedeschi and Calhoun.

In their study, Evidence for mirror systems in emotions,¹ Bastiaansen et al., examine the relationship between mirror systems and embodied simulation.

This examination highlights and advances the connections between body changes, emotions and the simulation of body changes and emotions. These systems also play a significant role in the creation of consciousness.² The neuroscientific sense of body-mind connection provides great insight into the development of resilience and cultivation of well-being - the two main topics for this blog.

Emotion is the basis for the neuroscientific sense of body-mind connection. An emotion is a physical event in the body. See a large object hurdling rapidly at your head, and your body changes - heart beat accelerates, muscles tense, blood flow accelerates to the legs, time sensation dilates, and the head and face react - head draws back, eyes widen, mouth opens, lips grimace, eyebrows push up in the middle. You fear.

When another body acts out an emotion, what happens to our body?

From Bastiaansen et al.:

Observing the actions and tactile sensations of others activates premotor, posterior parietal and somatosensory regions in the brain [systems for sensing and moving the body] of the observer which are also active when performing similar movements and feeling similar sensations.

In other words, what we see in the body of others, occurs similarly in the neural maps of our own body. It is as if the physical experience we observe is happening to us.

One noteworthy exception: The simulation does not engage the earliest stage of somatosensory procession. This stage is reserved for our own body emotions. We duck when the hurling object flies at our head, but do not duck (although we might wince in sympathy) when the hurling object flies at someone else’s head.

From Bastiaansen et al.:

Seeing the emotions of others also recruits regions involved in experiencing similar emotions... Emotion simulation seems to involve a mosaic of affective, motor and somatosensory components [instead of simply mapping one observed emotion to one specific brain system].

We do not act exactly as others act, and we do not emote exactly as other emote. If an emotion dictates the automatic behavior of others, it triggers a more generalized simulation (and more generalize awareness of the event) in us. Our response is empathic rather than specific. The quality of our empathy relates to quality of our own simulation. Similarly, two people observing the emotion of a third person, will have different empathic experiences.

From Bastiaansen et al.:

Recent experimental evidence suggests that motor simulation may be a trigger for the simulation of associated feeling states. This mosaic of simulations may be necessary for generating the compelling insights [my ital.] we have into the feelings of others. Through their integration with, and modulation by, higher cognitive functions, they could be at the core of important social functions, including empathy, mind reading and social learning.

In other words, simulations in our body trigger simulations of feelings. This pathway generates “compelling insights” valuable for our social behavior. We understand others through simulating our own experience of the events and emotions of others.

We are emotional about the emotions of other. Our body changes in a direct relationship to the body-state changes of others. This relationship is evolutionarily advantageous. For example, if after eating, one person starts throwing up, we should all throw up to expel potential poisons from our bodies.

Evolution provides for a) emotion and b) simulated emotions about the emotions of others. These systems developed before the systems needed to create a mental experience of these body events. Emotion, empathy and theory of mind evolved first.

It is highly likely that the development of consciousness is significantly based on the ability to simulate emotions about emotions. If changes to our body-state is the basis for having emotions about emotions, our body-state changes are also the basis of consciousness. How our body experiences an event is a precursor to our mental experience of an event.

For every person that you know, there is a body. You many never have given any thought to this simple relationship but there it is: one person, one body; one mind, one body - a first principle...

Why should we not commonly find two or three persons in one body?.. Or why should not persons of great intellectual capacity and imagination inhabit two or three bodies?.. Why should there not be bodiless persons in our midst, you know, ghosts, spirits, weightless and colorless creatures?.. The sensible reason why [such creatures don’t exist] is that a mind, that which defines a person, requires a body, and that a body, a human body to be sure, naturally generates one mind. A mind is so closely shaped by the body and destined to serve it that only one mind could possibly arise in it. No body, never mind. For any body, never more than one mind.

Body-minded minds help save the body. When creatures like us appeared, which had bodies and conscious minds, they were, as Nietzsche would call them, “hybrids of plants and of ghosts,” the combination of a bounded, well-circumscribed, easily identifiable living object with a seemingly unbounded, internal, and difficult-to-localize mental animation.

- Antonio Damasio
The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness pp 142-143.¹

Damasio wrote three books to describe how events in the body give rise to the mind, feelings, consciousness and the sense of self. It’s groundbreaking work by a brilliant neuroscientist. He is a master of the trope: brain lesion A causes defect-in-self B. These patterns show how brain systems give rise to numerous aspects of the self. Neuropsychology goes so far as to report we have a brain system for nouns and a different one for verbs.

Yet Damasio still feels the need to step back and make the singular point - one body, one mind. He acknowledges the ghost-sensation we all experience. It can also be found on Steven Pinker’s list of innate intuitions:

• An intuitive version of biology... Its core intuition is that living things house a hidden essence that give them their form and power and drives their growth and body functions.
• An intuitive phychology, which we use to understand other people. Its core intuition is that other people are not objects or machines but are animated by the invisible entity we call the mind or the soul. Minds contain beliefs and desires and are the immediate cause of behavior.

-Steven Pinker,
The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, pp 219-221.²

Damasio’s ghost-sensation and Pinker’s essences: These concepts seem so obvious and valid. Our innate sensibilities say so. Where do we go when we reflect on these qualities? Up? Out? Elevated?


If elevation and admiration really do involve feelings of self-transcendence—a reduction in attention to the often all-consuming self and its goals—then a simple-minded prediction would be that these emotions dampen brain activity in regions that map and track the self and its bodily incarnation. But the findings of Immordino-Yang et al.³ suggest a much more interesting possibility: that brain areas related to introceptive processing may be more active during self-transcendence.

-Jonathan Haidt⁴

Haidt acknowledges the more our ghost-sense takes us out of our body, the more our brain is grounded in body-awareness. The less we feel it’s about our physical body, the more it seems to be about just that.

To add to the circularity of this discussion, Haidt’s citation references work by Damasio. Should it be circularity or singularity or synchronicity?