Fable

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?