Francisco J. Varela, Special
Guest Lecture, First European Feldenkrais Conference, Heidelberg
1995, reported by Ilana Nevill
Carl Ginsburg prepared the ground well for this talk in
his keynote address, "Is There a Science of the Feldenkrais
Magic?" at the beginning of the conference.
Carl discussed our dilemma as Feldenkrais practitioners:
We, as well as our students and clients, know in our experience
how effective this work is; we know that "body and mind
are one". But we are unable to supply" scientific
proof" for this, at least not by way of the standard
controlled experiment where, ideally, all variables are kept
equal except for the one to be tested. Carl touched on a
number of developments in modem science that have begun to
address the phenomenological realm of lived human experience
and consciousness, considered as purely 'subjective' and
therefore of no immediate relevance in the strictly 'objective'
traditional approaches, such as Behaviorism. That relatively
new research,.including the work of the Chilean biologist
and neuroscientist, Francisco Varela, corroborates what Moshe
Feldenkrais discovered through systematic experimentation
with movement and awareness, first within his own experiential
field and later by teaching and observing others individually
and in groups. Varela actually met Moshe in the 70's, a time
when the biologist was still a marginal 'heretic' in neuroscience.
Varela began his lecture by saying that he had accepted
the invitation to speak at the Feldenkrais Conference because
he sees a significant degree of convergence and resonance
between his scientific and our practical work. The point
of contact is human experience, how people embody their minds
in daily life. He wanted to give us an insight into Cognitive
Science and the tremendous evolution it has undergone during
the last twenty years. Cognitive Science was established
as a discipline after the war, bringing together various
traditional fields concerned with study of the mind, to which
the newly formed field of Artificial Intelligence was added.
Twenty years ago, Varela's own ideas about mind and cognition
were quite different from those held by most of his colleagues.
But over the past two decades, what used to be minority views
have become much more prominent. Today, there are thus two
opposing styles of work: the old, still widespread, approach
and a new direction. These contrast with each other in the
their guiding metaphors and leading ideas.
After the war, the computationalist view predominated. Here,
a clear-cut distinction is made between inside and outside.
The mind is thought to be in the head ('embrained'), while
the brain is likened to a computer, an information system,
processing a certain amount of 'input' from the outside world
and eventually producing a specific 'output' in the form
of behavior.
Knowing is understood as an internal representation of what
is perceived or can be extracted from the outside, while
the internal processing of such information is understood
to be happening "in the best Western tradition (mathematics
and logic), namely 'symbolically'. The computationalist approach
is therefore also known as the representationalist view.
Later in his talk, Varela added that this model deals with
inexperienceable entities. Thus, the mind is something disembodied
yet somehow present in the system. The computer called Hal
in the spaceship of Stanley Kubrick's film "2001" is
a "perfect incarnation of the idea that mind is some
kind of pattern that eventually creates a self. Very difficult
to imagine how!"
The alternative embodied point of view. to which Varela
adheres, is now growing in strength.
Here, the mind is seen to be 'embodied'. This means that
perception and action, sensory and motor processes, are inseparably
linked as the living organism interacts with its environment.
The distinction between inside and outside is "erased
by the fact that the fundamental point is how the body is
handling, moving, perceptually acting - and therefore what
you do and how you perceive and understand are inseparable",
This is also called the enactive point of view because the
cognitive system is seen to be shaping the world in which
it finds itself, "bringing forth its world by action."
From the 'embodied' point of view the key problem is: "How
do you integrate all the other specialized processes and
regions of the brain and the fact that the brain is literally
rooted in the rest of the body in a dramatically rich way?" As
an example, Varela mentioned the intimate interconnection
between nervous and lymphatic systems: minute nerve terminals
innervate each lymph organ; all the cells of the nervous
system are surrounded by fluid so that "your brain is
literally bathed in the rest of the body's balance".
Therefore, even gases can act as neurotransmitters as they
are diffused through the body. The understanding of 'motor-sensory'
action in this model goes beyond muscles and nerves. It includes
all the spheres of the body where there is a root for a bi-directional
neural process.
Using the function of vision as an example, Varela sketched
two diagrams in order to demonstrate the shift from the traditional
view and its idea of stage by stage local information processing
to what he called large scale or long range integration.
Conventionally viewed, in terms of the inner-outer model,
vision involves aspects of the world. being picked up by
the retina, nerve impulses being transmitted by the optic
nerve to the thalamus (a kind of first relay station in the
brain), and then on to the visual cortex in the-occipital
lobe and other specific areas for so-called "higher
processing."
The second diagram made clear that the shift of paradigm
is literally to be seen if one looks at the same process
from a slightly changed perspective, taking the entire set
of embodiment into account. The one-way routes from the outside
to the cortex are replaced by a network of bi-directional
connections, or sensory-motor loops, linking all the parts
involved in vision in an ongoing, two-way, large scale interaction.
Thus, the very action of the retina is part of a sensory-motor
loop. In this model, visual 'input' has been replaced by
the concept of visual 'coupling'; whatis picked up , outside
is modulated to a greater or lesser extent by processes inside
the system and vice versa. The most astonishing research
result within the framework of the embodied model: each neuron
in the thalamus receives more electrical influences from
within the brain than from the eye.
Studies focusing on the processes involved in understanding,
knowing, and cognition required a similar shift in the interpretation
of the brain, which can be summed up in the statement, "As
a fundamental true rule there is no unidirectional action
in the brain; everything is bi-directional".
Initially, research mainly involved simple living organisms
and animals, particularly trained monkeys with electrodes
implanted in their brains. A small Californian snail (called
Aphysia), whose organism basically constitutes a pool of
sensory and motor neurons became especially important to
neuroscientists. Slow and easy to work with, it helped validate
the idea that sensory-motor integration or coupling is the
one thing all living creatures with a 'brain' have in common.
They all understand and come to be in the world by the same
fundamental logic: if there is no movement, there is no brain.
By injecting dye material into the snail, the creature's
entire nervous system could be observed by optical means
while it was moving about, encountering edges, responding
by a change of direction, etc. The experiment showed that
the body surface with which the snail encountered the world
(two of its sense and motor organs are called siphon and
gill) is the surface of sensory-motor coupling. The dye began
to glow and colors changed wherever neurons were active.
Transient patterns of simultaneous neural activity in many
cells appeared and disappeared, proving clearly that "the
whole bowl of spaghetti" was involved with all its bi-directional
connections. That is to say, there are no 'lines of transmission'
as posited by the computationalist logic. Instead, whole
cell-assemblies momentarily come together in large-scale
interaction. Using a mathematical term, such instances of
transient cell-resonance are called RELAXATION RESONANCE
or RELAXATION RESPONSE.
Varela employed a number of diagrams to illustrate how the
size of cell-assemblies involved in this process can vary.
For example, when a cat takes a step to press a lever, one
third to 40% of its brain is involved in that action. In
the case of the snail changing direction, this increases
to nearly 100%.
He compared the relaxation response to a more sophisticated
conversation at a cocktail party which goes backward and
forward until understanding or agreement has been reached. "Out
of all that chaotic back and forth, something shapes up as
a coherent transient pattern which then disappears." In
this way, the living system constantly creates moments of
presence, action and perception. The relaxation response,
which only takes a fraction of a second to achieve, constitutes
moments of coherence corresponding to chunks of time. Behavior
can thus be seen as coming in groups; and the idea that time
is linear cannot be upheld any longer.
As an example, Varela demonstrated how turning around to
look at Carl constituted one such cognitive present or relaxation
response, while recognizing his face - instead of a turtle
- constituted another, involving an even greater number of
neurons. There is a mystery though: "How can the body-brain
create those consistent functional aggregates that allow
me to turn and foveate instead of falling down the stairs?" There
simply is no higher command or attention center controlling
all the neurons involved in the complexities of human behavior.
Instead, there is true cooperation, a kind of democratic
game between many different areas of the brain that have
to do with vision, emotional tonality, memory, attention,
sensation, etc.
Looking for a plausible answer, Varela and other colleagues
found inspiration in Walter Freeman's work. Freeman had been
saying for the last 20 years that there is one simple way
self-selection of cell-assemblies can happen, namely in a
musical way. Groups of neurons enter into literal resonance
with each other, firing in fine-tuned synchronous patterns.
For a fraction of a second, before a new relaxation response
arises, this temporal synchrony creates "true coherence
in long stretches of the brain and body". (This happens
in the gamma band, involving rapid oscillation between 30
and 100 cycles per second.) It was found that these fine-tuned
synchronous processes are self-enhancing, involving ever
larger cell-assemblies, creating the conditions for the arising
of new moment of cognitive presence ("The more we synchronize,
the more we synchronize" - " The more together
we are, the more temporal glue that binds us together").
Such insights constitute the beginnings of a mechanism capable
of explaining how large-scale integration of all the components
of a mental cognitive act can create the totality of unity
experience and behavior. Over the past 5 years, a handful
of research projects have been devoted to the study of lived
human experience. The topic of human consciousness is therefore
no longer taboo. To deal with it effectively, however, required
adoption of a new style of research as a fresh challenge.
The moment cognitive scientists ask such questions as, "How
is the cognitive present constituted?", they are faced
with the phenomenological issue of how we experience and
live in time.
PHENOMENOLOGY
A few scientists began to regard first person accounts as
valid and vital in the pursuit of this issue. They started
to employ the methods developed by phenomenology, a discipline
concerned with practical ways in which the structures of
human experience can be submitted to methodical analysis
and checked intersubjectively.
Varela briefly hinted at three other directions in cognitive
science which all shy away from first hand experience, relying
solely on third person accounts:
"REDUCTIONISM" can be summed up in a quote from biologist
and Nobel Prize Winner Francis Crick's book The Astonishing
Hypothesis: “You
have to come to realize that you are just a whole pack of
neurons."
"FUNCTIONALISM" accepts individual experience as valid,
but believes that observation can only happen from the outside,
with the scientist proceeding like an anthropologist looking
at other cultures.
"MYSTERIANSIM" attempts to find interesting arguments
about why consciousness-mind, consciousness-brain interaction
is an insoluble problem.
Varela stressed that his own work belongs in the tradition
of Phenomenology. Like Edmund Husserl and Merleau-Ponty,
the originators of Phenomenology, and certain schools of
Buddhism, he is convinced that "we owe an unpayable,
eternal debt to experience, for that is where we find ourselves
and where we start. Everything we do is based on experience.
So better put the immediacy of our own experience at the
very foundation of our research!" In other words, embodiment
of mind cannot be understood unless the scientist makes reference
to his or her own experiences.
The structure of human time is a particularly deep and difficult
issue in Phenomenology. Relevant western studies, including
Varela's research in Paris, confirm what many Buddhists have
understood all along: that lived time is a combination of
'flow' and discreet aggregations of presence, chunkiness
superimposed on continuity. There is no contradiction in
the fact that we live in a stream of consciousness and also
in discrete moments of experiences. Varela and his team are
now in a position to begin to show how their research data,
the external scientific account of 'cognitive present,' 'large-scale
coherence of cell-assemblies', etc. is matched and illuminated
by phenomenological subjective accounts, and vice versa.
Varela foresees two important transformations in the cognitive
sciences:
1) more general acceptance of the 'embodied' point
of view, i.e. the fact that cognition is about being in the
world; perception-action is the central and basic grounding
of all cognition, and the body sustains what happens in the
mind.
2) a revival of the study of human experience which
will require some revolutionary, potentially subversive steps:
incorporation of the first person account into detailed scientific
description; and training scientists in an unfamiliar style
and method.
"Good science and disciplined accounts of human experience
have to shake hands!"
Varela closed on an optimistic note: “I am convinced
that a phenomenological training has to be introduced into
the cognitive sciences. The kind of work you are doing is
already moving in that direction...” and expressed
his belief that the resonance he had initially talked about
can become a powerful fact if, in future, we really push
the frontiers of mind and embodied consciousness.
Francisco J.
Varela, Chilean, neurobiologist
and consciousness researcher, was one of the world’s
leading cognitive scientists. Until his premature death in
2001 he was Director of Research at the Centre National de
Recherche Scientifique and Professor of Cognitive Science
and Epistemology at the Ecole Poly technique in Paris. Apart
from numerous articles in the fields of sensory physiology,
biological modeIing, and immunology; he has written several
books.
The following titles give a good insight into Varela's
ideas:
Co-authored with Humberto R. Maturana:
- The Tree of Knowledge: The Biological Root of Human Understanding
(1987)
Co-author/id with Evan Thompson and
Eleanor Rosch:
- The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience
(1991)
Co-edited with Jeremy Hayward:
- Gentle Bridges: Conversations with the Dalai Lama on the
Sciences of the Mind (1992) . .
On Becoming Aware – A pragmatics of experiencing (2002) appeared posthumously
Co-authors: Philosopher Natalie Depraz and psychologist Pierre Vermersch
Swiss film-maker Franz Reichle interviewed Francisco Varela
shortly before the scientist’s death at the age of
54. Reichle’s film “MONTE GRANDE: What is life?” (2005)
is an inspiring tribute to Francisco Varela’s invaluable
contribution to a more sane and humane science.
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