Michael Tomasello, The Origins of Human Communication (2008)

Every work morning I board the subway to travel to my office, and approximately halfway on this journey I change trains.  Changing trains entails exiting a train into a crowd of people who are looking to board the train I am leaving, walking some 50-70 steps to a staircase while passing many people who are, like myself, leaving the train I just left, or, heading in the opposite direction to the train I just left.  I descend stairs to another platform and then walk roughly 20 steps on the platform to wait for an oncoming train that will take me to my destination.  During this change of trains, I probably come close to 100 or more persons within a 5-10 foot radius of my person. I do not know these people.  Most people are not talking.  A few I recognize as having seen previously on this journey, but still I don't know them.  I don't talk with them.  Some I see only out of my peripheral vision.  The amazing part of this brief, everyday journey navigating through a mass of people is that I almost always avoid any physical contact with them, and the same is true for most of them as well.  It is easy to think that each individual is merely moving autonomously toward their individual goal, but the reality is that each individual is acting cooperatively with the others to ensure that the others are able to move toward their individual goals by not colliding (with modest, likely accidental exception) or inhibiting the others as they move.  It is like a dance.  Occasionally someone crosses diagonally in front of me, but I avoid a collision by slowing down or moving sideways.  Avoiding contact with and staying out of the way of other moving persons is a shared intention; in the case of humans, cultural rules have played a key role in enabling the individual to realize their shared intention:  e.g., stay on the right of oncoming persons; follow the person ahead of you.  But the individuals are not merely blindly following rules; they are watching the faces and body movements of others and reading their minds. 

Place a camera high above this subway station and make a video of the masses transitioning between trains.  The flow of people almost seems choreographed; it is not as chaotic as one might think it could be.  Now watch this video of ants marching.  The movement of ants seems just as orderly as my video of humans passing in the subway station.  But it is different.   Ants communicate differently, relying on chemicals and touch. They are acting automatically, inflexibly.  Chemotaxis (see May 19, 2013 post) is at play here.  In contrast, humans read the intentions of other humans in their facial expressions, gaze, and motions (see July 16, 2010 and  September 18, 2009 post), even when no words or spoken, and this is relatively unique in the animal kingdom.  Apes are known to understand intentions of others, and apes are known to experience empathy.  (See November 9, 2010 post). Mirror neurons, which some argue enable us to feel what others are feeling or experiencing, were first discovered in monkeys.  (See September 18, 2009 post).  What apes do not do --- and humans do, according to Michael Tomasello --- is share intentions and goals with others.

Mindreading introduces us to theory of mind.  (See November 21, 2012 and  June 12, 2011 posts) It is not a "theory" so much as it is a state of awareness:  our ability to attribute mental states to others --- mindreading.  In my little "everyday vignette" just described, our theory of mind is almost unconscious, and I would submit that this ability is close to unique, if not unique in the animal kingdom. If apes enjoy a theory of mind, it is certainly not as well-developed as humans.  It plays out in nearly every other human scenario imaginable because we are social animals.  (See November 21, 2012 post).  Our theory of mind undoubtedly varies among these scenarios, for example, if our attentiveness to something specific about another person is heightened, there is probably a heightened attentiveness to another's specific mental state; whereas in my vignette the subway passenger's theory of mind is likely ascribing generic mental states to the masses of other humans around. 

Michael Tomasello's Origins of Human Communication is not specifically about verbal speech or language, which is the focus of Christine Kenneally's The First Word.  (See August 31, 2009 post).  It is about human communication. In Tomasello's view, language is not hardwired genetically into the brains of humans, and while he does not debate whether language is an adaptation or exaptation (see October 25, 2011 post), Tomasello treats language as an emergent property, emerging from antecedent forms of human communication --- specifically gestures such as pointing or pantomiming.  And Tomasello is armed with a lot of research data to advance his argument.  Given that humans do not generally utter a spoken word of language until they are older than one year (14-18 months), Tomasello finds his antecedents in babies and, with an evolutionary longer gaze, in apes, the genetically closest animal to homo sapiens sapiens.  Pointing and pantomiming are gestures human babies use before they begin to speak (with language essentially becoming a substitute for pantomiming). 

Tomasello's thesis is that the "ultimate explanation for how it is that human beings are able to communicate with one another in such complex ways with such simple gestures is that they have unique ways of engaging with one another socially.  More specifically, human beings cooperate with one another in species-unique ways involving processes of shared intentionality."  By "simple gestures," Tomasello is referring to the acts of pointing and pantomiming.  He notes that apes point and respond to pointing, but the key difference here with humans is that when apes point they are making requests --- demanding action by others. "Bring me that food." Apes possess the ability to follow gaze direction.  Apes want the other to see something and do something.    Humans, by contrast, point not only to direct the other human's attention to something, but to share information with others, request help and cooperation, even when there is no benefit to themselves.  (See September 27, 2012, September 12, 2012, and October 13, 2010 posts for discussions of direct and indirect reciprocal altruism). "Pointing," says Tomasello, "is based on humans' natural tendency to follow the gaze direction of others to external targets, and pantomiming is based on humans' natural tendency to interpret the actions of others intentionally.  This naturalness makes them good candidates as an intermediate step between ape communication and arbitrary linguistic conventions [of humans]."  While there are some primatologists who credit apes with more cooperative, social behavior than Tomasello acknowledges, what differentiates apes and humans, he says, is an underlying psychological infrastructure --- made possible by cultural learning and imitation that allows humans to learn from others and understand their intentions.  That leads to shared intentionality --- sometimes referred to as "we" intentionality --- collaborative interactions in which participants share psychological states with one another and have shared goals and shared action plans.  This brings us to the research observations about human babies.  Tomasello (2007):

"[H]uman adults quite often teach youngsters things by demonstrating what they should do – which the youngsters then respond to by imitating (and internalizing what is learned.  Adult chimpanzees do not demonstrate things for youngsters (or at least do this very seldom). Interestingly, when human adults instruct their children in this way (providing communicative cues that they are trying to demonstrate something), 14-month-old infants copy the particular actions the adults used, and they do so much more often than when adults do not explicitly instruct – in which case they just copy the result the adult achieved (Gergely & Csibra, 2006). Furthermore, there is some evidence that 1-year-old infants are beginning to see the collaborative structure of some imitative interactions. Thus, they sometimes observe adult actions directed to them, and then reverse roles and redirect the actions back to the demonstrator, making it clear by looking to the demonstrator’s face that they see this as a joint activity (Carpenter, Tomasello & Striano, 2005). Chimpanzees may on occasion redirect such learned actions back to their partners, but they do not look to their partner’s face in this way (Tomasello & Carpenter, 2005). Thus, chimpanzees’ social learning is actually fairly individualistic, whereas 1-year-old children often respond to instruction and imitate collaboratively, often with the motivation to communicate shared states with others.

 ***

 "Human children, on the other hand, often are concerned with sharing psychological states with others by providing them with helpful information, forming shared intentions and attention with them, and learning from demonstrations produced for their benefit. The emergence of these skills and motives for shared intentionality during human evolution did not create totally new cognitive  skills. Rather, what it did was to take existing skills of, for example, gaze following, manipulative communication, group action, and social learning, and transform them into their collectively based counterparts of joint attention, cooperative communication, collaborative action, and instructed learning – cornerstones of cultural living. Shared intentionality is a small psychological difference that made a huge difference in human evolution in the way that humans conduct their lives.

"In terms of ontogeny, Tomasello et al (2005) hypothesized that the basic skills and motivations for shared intentionality typically emerge at around the first birthday from the interaction of two developmental trajectories, each representing an evolutionary adaptation from some different point in time. The first trajectory is a general primate (or perhaps great ape) line of development for understanding intentional action and perception, which evolved in the context of primates’ crucially important competitive interactions with one another over food, mates, and other resources (Machiavellian intelligence; Byrne; Whiten, 1988). The second trajectory is a uniquely human line of development for sharing psychological states with others, which seems to be present in nascent form from very early in human ontogeny as infants share emotional states with others in turn-taking sequences (Trevarthen, 1979). The interaction of these two lines of development creates, at around 1 year of age, skills and motivations for sharing psychological states with others in fairly local social interactions, and then later skills and motivations for reacting to and even internalizing various kinds of social norms, collective beliefs, and cultural institutions."

The cooperative homo hunter-gatherer phenomenon is believed to have emerged among homo erectus, hundreds of thousands of years before homo sapiens. (See November 21, 2012 post).  Exactly when their social structures emerged is a matter of debate, but as forms of homo cooperation evolved forms of communication would be expected to emerge as well and how those forms of communication might have evolved is what Michael Tomasello explores in The Origins of Human Communication.   The timing of the emergence of verbal language among homo is also a matter of debate and no consensus, but some put that event as occurring among homo sapiens 50-70,000 years ago and perhaps as early as 100,000 years ago, but perhaps earlier.  That timing would correlate with what we believe is the evolutionary origins of modern humans, homo sapiens sapiens, in Africa. Whatever the timing for the origins of human speech, there is a gap of hundreds of thousands of years between the origins of communication and verbal speech. But it is over these hundreds of thousands of years, if not over a million years, of the evolution of cooperation among the species of genus homo, that the psychological infrastructure critical to human eusociality cited by Tomasello developed:

 
"[O]ur proposal," Tomasello writes, " is the relatively uncontroversial one that human collaboration was initially mutualistic --- with this mutualism depending on the first step of more tolerant and food-generous participants [see e.g. March 28, 2013 post].  The more novel part of the proposal is that mutualistic collaboration is the natural home of cooperative communication.  Specifically, skills of recursive mindreading arose initially in forming joint goals, and then this led to joint attention on things relevant to the joint goal (top-down) and eventually to other forms of common conceptual ground.  Helping motives, already present to some degree in great apes outside of communication, can flourish in mutualistic collaboration in which helping you helps me.  And so communication requests for help --- either for actions or for information --- and compliance with these (and perhaps even something in the direction of offering help by informing) were very likely born in mutualistic collaboration.  At this point in our quasi-evolutionary tale, then, we have, at a minimum, point to request help and a tendency to grant such requests --- with perhaps some offers of help with useful information --- in the immediate common ground of mutualistic collaborative interactions."

Helping by informing becomes the cornerstone of indirect reciprocity, which Martin Nowak finds makes humans "supercooperators:" the only species that "can summon the full power of indirect reciprocity, thanks to our rich and flexible language."  (See September 17, 2012 post).

Missing from Tomasello's discussion of social cognition and the human communication is the emotional content and perhaps underpinnings of that communication.  Tomasello cites inflexible ape vocalization as "tightly tied to emotion," but as prior posts in this blog point out there is uniquely human social behavior anchored in emotions arising in the more ancient part of our brains.  (See May 19, 2013 and November 21, 2012 posts).   Jaak Panksepp's discussion (May 19, 2013 post) of the care system, the grief system, and the play system are just examples of the emotional underpinnings of the psychological infrastructure that Tomasello relies upon to build his viewpoint.  I do not purport to have read everything that Tomasello has researched and written, so maybe this discussion occurs elsewhere.  I note that he does comment in his 2005 article, that "theorists such as Trevarthen (1979), Braten (2000), and especially Hobson (2002), have elaborated the interpersonal and emotional discussions of early human ontogeny in much more detail than we have here.  We mostly agree with their accounts . . ."

There are two final points in this discussion.  First, the evidence from babies supports the conclusion that our social cognition and behavior is not innate.  Tomasello calls this ontogenetic, which is the nurture side of the nature versus nurture (post natal learning) debate.  (See September 18, 2009 post).  With respecting to language, for example, V.S. Ramachandran believes that what is innate is our "capacity for acquiring rules of language," not language or verbal speech itself.  (See October 25, 2011 and February 15, 2012 posts).  Tomasello certainly concurs with the view that "[t]he actual acquisition of language occurs as a result of social interaction. Ramachandran believes that language was enabled by cross linkages in the brain between different motor maps (e.g. the area responsible for manual gestures and the area responsible for orafacial movements).  (Id.)  Second, Marco Iacoboni's suggestion (September 18, 2009 post) that the individualistic or competitive models of human behavior leave much to be desired is worth invoking.  As a prior post (id) observed, "Self and other are 'inextricably blended,' says Iacoboni. The sense of self follows the sense of 'us,' which is the first "sense" of awareness an infant has immediately following its birth as a result of mother infant interactions. We are social animals first."  While competition and individual behavior is not necessarily a vice and might be deemed virtue (see January 30, 2010 post), it is not the endpoint in our understanding and modeling of our human cognitive framework.   In the contentious political conversation that now embraces America, it is not sufficiently recognized that the social and cooperative dimension of the human cognitive framework is dominant to competition in that framework as well as our evolutionary history as a key to human survival.  (See November 21, 2012 and August 22, 2012 posts).  If we can cooperatively navigate our way successfully through a subway station without thinking too deeply about what we are doing, we ought to be able to collaboratively solve a public policy issue.

 

Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza, Genes, Peoples and Languages (2001)

Information is typically packaged.  The smallest unit of information (something like a bit) (see August 23, 2009 and August 17, 2009 posts) has limited meaning (information value) on its own.  Aggregating, absorbing, connecting, colliding, and communicating with other units of information expands the information value associated with the package of bits.  These packages of information include small subatomic units, electrons, atoms, chemical compounds, photons, waves of sound and light, proteins, genotypes, cells, organs, phenotypes, letters, words, songs, books, and culture. (See November 27, 2010 post).

Information migrates.  (See May 20, 2012 post)  It is in nearly constant motion.  And when it is in motion, information can be altered and its meaning changed.  (See August 15, 2011 and  August 23, 2009 posts).  Sometimes information is degraded by change; sometimes information is enhanced. Information moves with its package; the package migrates, and information moves along.  Genes, Peoples and Languages is about the movement of genetic information in the package of a phenotype and the scientific quest to track the movement and transformation of modern human genes over the course of roughly one hundred thousand years.  And along the way, as a result of natural selection, and in some geographic areas, genetic drift, the information in this genetic package was edited and revised from the general population that preceded it:  hair texture and color changed, skin color changed, small genetic changes enabled humans to digest milk, immunized them from diseases such as malaria in certain areas, morphologies changed, and so on. 

This research supports the Out of Africa hypothesis:  that modern human origins begin on the African continent approximately 100,000 years ago, likely in southern Africa; that intra-continental African migration ensued northward along East Africa in the thousands of years afterward; and the first migration of homo sapiens out of Africa occurred roughly 50-60,000 years ago to the Arabian peninsula and the Levant, likely along the coast, and ultimately to southern Asia (India), southeast Asia, and Oceania (Australia) about 45,000 years ago.   And about the same time that modern humans were reaching Oceania, migrations out of the Levant northward in the direction of Europe, and later in the direction of central Asia and ultimately to North America roughly 15,000 years ago. What should not be forgotten in this focus on modern human migration is that a similar migratory path may have been taken over a million years earlier by homo erectus.

Cavalli-Sforza sees a parallel between genetic evolution and cultural evolution. The units and type of information as well as the means of information transmission in these two circumstances, however, are radically different.   Speech acts (including rituals) and language are the means of transmitting cultural information, and Cavalli-Sforza treats linguistic evolution as a type of cultural evolution.  But genes and culture do not co-evolve. As mentioned in an earlier post, "Language is a social institution, and social institutions and culture evolve, albeit at a different and faster pace than biological evolution."  (August 31, 2009 post). Language changes can occur as a result of migration and conquest of another's territory.  Cavalli-Sforza documents this in a number of cases.  Religion is another attribute of culture that likewise can change as a result of migration and conquest.  (See May 12, 2010 post).  And ideas can change as a result of migration and conquest.  (See May 20, 2012 post).  "There is a fundamental difference between biological and cultural mutation," writes Cavalli-Sforza.  "Cultural mutations may result from random events, and thus be very similar to genetic mutations, but cultural changes are more often intentional or directed to a very specific goal, while biological mutations are blind to their potential benefit.  At the level of mutation, cultural evolution can be directed while genetic change cannot."   Later he adds, "We must note a significant difference between biological and linguistic mutation.  A genetic mutant is generally very similar to the original gene, since one gives rise to another with only a small change.  Words vary in more complicated ways.  The same root can change meaning.  One word can have may unrelated senses.  One could try to establish greater similarities between genes and words taking into account all of the peculiarities, but it is not clear that would be useful."  The curious aspect of Cavalli-Sforza's discussion of biological and cultural evolution and transmission is the absence of any discussion of the evolutionary debate about whether evolution operates on genes, phenotypes, or groups that has laced this subject for several decades now.  (See November 4, 2009, November 30, 2009, September 12, 2012, and September 17, 2012 posts).  References to Richard Dawkins, memes, and Edward Wilson are not to be found.  Cavalli-Sforza's discussion on this subject is disjointed, and one wonders how he would treat the subject of the unit of information on which evolution operates.

Rodrigo Q. Quiroga, Borges and Memory (2012)

Memory is a subject that is no stranger to this blog.  (See February 26, 2013, December 2, 2011, November 6, 2011, September 20, 2011, August 15, 2011, April 8, 2011, November 27, 2010, September 9, 2010 posts.).  Rodrigo Quiroga's Borges and Memory effectively assembles most of the comments and observations in these earlier posts and weaves in the parallel observations of Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges' about human memory, demonstrating that Borges' astute observations hold close to the empirical research of neuroscience.  Borges' artistic tool drafted by Quiroga to make his point is a short story authored by Borges in 1942, Funes the Memorious, about a man who could not forget the most trivial facts and datum and sustained an incredible memory.  In Borges' words, Funes had an "infinite vocabulary for the natural series of numbers, a useless mental catalogue of all the images of his memory."  He was "almost incapable of ideas in general," which means he could not abstract and generalize.  In light of Daniel Schacter's characterization of the human mind's near universal capacity for forgetting (see September 20, 2011 post), sometimes instantly, sometimes only over considerable periods of time --- and the evolutionary benefits of forgetting --- the story of Funes is a unique story, one far removed from normal experience.  But Quiroga informs and documents that there are real cases of persons like Funes, who are simply incapable of forgetting the slightest details and their memories are clogged with useless data.  He also confirms that these individuals are limited in their ability to generalize and abstract.  There is the case of Solomon Shereshevskii of Russia, a patient of Alexander Luria, whose capacity for memorizing meaningless sequences of numbers, formulae, words, sequences of syllables, and retaining them in memory for years is much like the Funes of Borges' imagination.  Shereshevskii's diagnosis includes severe synesthesia. (See November 20, 2011  and October 25, 2011 post). Shereshevskii reportedly tells Luria that he could not read nor study because it made him lose track of what he was reading if he had to think about words beyond their literal meaning.

And there are others, and they are often referred to as savants and in other cases are regarded as autistic:  Kim Peek (whom the story Rain Man was based upon) who was diagnosed with FG Syndrome, Daniel Tammet whose incredible ability to recall sequences of numbers (including large numbers such as primes) was ascribed to synesthesia, Leslie Lemke who suffered from cerebral palsy and was blind, but was nevertheless a highly skilled pianist who had an enormous memory for music after hearing a song only once, and Jill Price, for whom the inability was a curse.

We sometimes refer to a person's "photographic" memory.  But that is not the way memory works, particularly memory based on visual perception.  Recall Antonio Damasio's account of how the brain retains and retrieves memories.  (See April 8, 2011 post).   Larger human brains lack the storage capacity for "large files of recorded images of prior events." To solve this problem, Damasio argues, human brains "borrowed the dispositional strategy" from early evolution that allows us to be able to retrieve those memories without, figuratively speaking, having to film and store those images. Here is how Damasio says this works. He refers to ancient dispositional networks, which we can identify as the subcortical systems discussed by Jaak Panksepp in his account of  human emotional systems (see May 19, 2013 post), and these are unconscious, automatic dispositions that are essentially hardwired into our biology. Recall Panksepp's discussion of the Fear System and the link between emotions and memory:  "Learning and memory are automatic and involuntary responses (mediated by unconscious mechanisms of the brain), which in their most lasting forms are commonly tethered to emotional arousal. Emotional arousal is a necessary condition for the creation of fear-learning memories."  (May 19, 2013 post). The ancient dispositional networks and the more recent, evolutionarily speaking, mapping networks in the brain, says Damasio, are now connected. A current perception triggers the dispositional network that directs the brain to reassemble aspects of past perceptions from the part of the cerebral cortex that had been previously activated when an original perception of an object occurred and where the representation or image was mapped. This occurs in what Damasio refers to as convergence-divergence zones that record "the coincidence of activity in neurons hailing from different brain sites, neurons that had been made active by the mapping of a certain object." A part of the cerebral cortex is devoted to image space where images of all sensory types occurs and map-making occurs; a separate part of the cerebral cortex is devoted to dispositional space where the tools exist to reactivate and generate images previously experienced --- affectionately called "grandmother cells" after our ability to recall our grandmother. The contents of dispositions, Damasio says, are always unconscious --- he says they are "encrypted" and "implicit" --- in contrast to the explicit images in the image space created by current perceptions. The "encrypted" dispositions are not themselves images, but merely implicit formulas for how to reconstruct maps in image space. Our "knowledge base" is, by this hypothesis, part of our unconscious brain, stored in code, waiting to be retrieved from what Damasio refers to as "association cortices" (and hence the analogy to Hume's associationism).

Quiroga concurs in substantial part.  "The brain does not reproduce visual stimuli like a digital camera or television, but rather processes their meaning starting from relatively little information and a set of unconscious inferences.  Now, if the neurons in the primary visual cortex do not simply copy information detected by the retina, what do they do?  This was what David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel at the Johns Hopkins University set out to study in the late 1950s.  Following a serendipitous event and a spectacular series of experiments that ensued (which earned them the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1981).  Hubel and Wiesel discovered neurons in the primary visual cortex that respond to oriented lines.  This information eventually reaches the inferior temporal lobe where "face cells" -- ie., neurons that respond to human or monkey faces but not to other images, for example of hands, fruits or houses --- were found in experiments with monkeys. . . Each neuron in the retina responds to a particular point, and we can infer the outline of a cube starting from the activity of about thirty of them [retinal neurons].  Next the neurons in the primary visual cortex fire in response to oriented lines; fewer neurons are involved and yet the cube is more clearly seen.  This information is received in turn by neurons in higher visual areas, which are triggered by more complex patterns --- for example, the angles defined by the crossing of two or three lines.  . . As the processing of visual information progresses through different brain areas, the information represented by each neuron becomes more complex, and at the same time fewer neurons are needed to encode a given stimulus.  In the late 1960s, Polish psychologist Jerzy Konorski wondered if at the end of this process there might be individual neurons that represent an object or a person as a whole.  Is there, for example, a neuron that represents the concept of 'my home,' another one that responds to 'my dog,' and another for 'my grandmother.'"  Quiroga believed the answer lies in or near the hippocampus, because of a case made famous by Brenda Milner involving split brain surgery that removed a patient's hippocampus and resulted in an inability to form explicit, new memories. 

Quiroga became engaged in research with Christof Koch at Caltech that studied recordings of activity of individual neurons in the medial temporal lobe that responded not to a generic face, but responded uniquely to the faces of individual humans:  actress Jennifer Aniston, soccer star Diego Maradona, and Mr. T.  Medial temporal lobe structures that are critical for long-term memory include the amygdala, brainstem, and hippocampus, along with the surrounding hippocampal region consisting of the perirhinal, parahippocampal, and entorhinal neocortical regions. The hippocampus is critical for memory formation, and the surrounding medial temporal cortex is currently theorized to be critical for memory storage. The prefrontal and visual cortices are also involved in explicit memory.  The firing of neurons that begins in the retina (or in the case of auditory stimuli, in the cochlea), goes through the primary visual cortex (or other primary cortical areas), passing through higher visual areas in the temporal lobe ultimately reaches the hippocampus.  The many individual neurons in the retina respond to many discrete visual stimuli that does not represent the image as a whole.  At some point in the brain's pathways from the retina to the hippocampus the brain assembles these varied discrete stimuli.  What Quiroga and others found is that the "Jennifer Aniston neuron" did not respond to a single image of Jennifer Aniston, but to multiple images of Jennifer Aniston.  Further research found that a specific neuron would also respond to a multitude of Star Wars characters --- Luke Skywalker, Yoda, Darth Vader.  What this signified is that the unique neuron did not associate with a particular camera image, but to a conceptual image.  This "loss of detail" led Quiroga to conclude that the neuron codes for an abstraction of Jennifer Aniston.  "We can see Funes," writes Quiroga, "as someone lacking those Jennifer Aniston neurons that encode abstract concepts."  He repeats, "We do not process images in our brains in the same way a camera does; on the contrary, we extract a meaning and leave aside a multitude of details.. . . Just like perception, memory is a creative process; when we remember something we do not repeat the experience as it was; rather we relive it in another context, create a new representation, and even change its meaning."  If we integrate Damasio into Quiroga's thinking, the convergence-divergence zones assemble "a cascade of processes that involve memories and emotions," "extracting particular features that help us recognize these people and objects in very different circumstances."  (See November 6, 2011 post).

Quiroga quotes Francis Crick (The Astonishing Hypothesis):  "What you see is not what is really there; it is what your brain believes is there.  Seeing is an active, constructive process.  Your brain makes the best interpretation it can according to its previous experience and the limited and ambiguous information provided by our eyes." This recalls Michael Gazzaniga's "Interpreter" (see July 25, 2013, September 27, 2009 posts).  A previous post that quotes Crick and Gazzaniga is likewise worth recalling (see May 22, 2011 post).  This latter post introduces the subject of the brain's capacity to engage in self-deception, to imagine things that don't exist in reality.  I think in most cases we do not engage in self-deception, the brain's default mode is to construct a reality as close to the reality that is out there.  So what we see, most of the time, is really there, or at least close to it.  (See February 4, 2012 post).  Information in our quantum world is probablistic. It is true that the brain quickly discards much information that is never encoded.  As Daniel Schacter has explained --- and Quiroga acknowledges --- our memories can become very fragile if not unreliable, and our "reality" can read more like fiction.  (See September 20, 2011 post).  And that is interesting, because the minds of savants like Funes have the ability to recollect and retain for considerable periods of time incredible detail without assigning meaning and in those cases the brain does not filter out reality from gibberish.

Roberto Saviano, Beauty and The Inferno (2012)

In All The Names, Jose Saramago tells the story of a civil servant in an unnamed city of an unnamed country charged with maintaining the birth, marriage, and death records of a nation's citizens.  The government agency, the Central Registry of Births, Marriages and Deaths, operates a data warehouse combining records of both the living and the dead.  Of course, there is a story, a life history, for every one of these citizens and former citizens, but the data warehouse does not record those stories.  In a revolutionary moment, Saramago's protagonist, an equally anonymous "Senor Jose," rebels against his assigned duty and follows his curiosity to uncover the story of one citizen whose data record on an index card prompted his curious interest in a life beyond data. 

Sr. Jose had a secret hobby that propelled him to look deeper into a person than the data in the data warehouse.  He collected news items about famous citizens of his country, and he would supplement his curiosity about the famous by climbing the walls of the Central Registry to collect their birth data, including information about the names of parents, godparents, birthplaces, addresses, and the like.  And one night, in the Central Registry, while collecting the index cards of five famous persons, he inadvertently pulls out a card of a sixth person, an unknown woman, not famous, and he becomes obsessed with learning her story.  He can't turn to the newspapers.  She's not famous, after all.  He puts her index card back in the file along with the five cards of the famous, but not before copying the data on the card.  Sr. Jose "makes a decision," writes Saramago: he decided to look for the unknown woman.  Saramago's discussion of this "decision" assembles in one paragraph a succinct discussion of free will comparatively similar to the way free will (or the lack thereof) is discussed in two recent postings on the subject (see July 15, 2013 post and May 19, 2013 post):

"Senhor Jose's decision appeared two days later.  Generally speaking, we don't talk about a decision appearing to us, people jealously guard both their identity, however vague it might be, and their authority, what little they may have, and prefer to give the impression that they reflected deeply before taking the final step, that they pondered the pros and cons, that after intense mental effort, they finally made a decision.  It has to be said that things never happen like that.  Obviously it would not enter anyone's head to eat without feeling hungry, and hunger does not depend on our will, it comes into being of its own accord, the result of objective bodily needs, it is a physical and chemical problem whose solution, in a more less satisfactory way, will be found in the contents of a plate.  Even such a simple act as going down into the street to buy a newspaper presupposes not only a desire to receive news, which, since it is a desire, is necessarily an appetite, the effect of specific physico-chemical activities in the body, albeit of a different nature, that routine act presupposes, for example, the unconscious certainty, belief or hope that the delivery van was not late or that the newspaper stand is not closed due to illness or to the voluntary absence of the proprietor.  Moreover, if we persist in stating that we are the ones who make our decisions, then we would have to begin to explain, to discern, to distinguish, who it is in us who made the decision and who subsequently carried it out, impossible operations by anyone's standards.  Strictly speaking, we do not make decisions, decisions make us.  The proof can be found in the fact that, though life leads us to carry out the most diverse actions one after the other, we do not preclude each one with a period of reflection, evaluation and calculation, and only then declare ourselves able to decide if we will go out to lunch or buy a newspaper or look for the unknown woman."  Sr. Jose walks out his door and goes to see the street where the woman purportedly lived. Sr. Jose's search to find the woman named on the sixth index card becomes an obsession to learn her story, driven by what Jaak Panksepp calls our Seeking system urges (see May 19, 2013 post).

Consider the life of an exceptional journalist, an investigative journalist who wants to tell a story, not just report data.    Roberto Saviano made a decision to investigate and expose the Camorra, one of the Mafia clans in his native Naples area of Italy.   Saviano probably did "reflect deeply before taking the final step," to borrow a phrase from Saramago, After all, inquiry and publicity of a Mafia sect knowingly undertakes a risk to self-preservation.  He knows that the people he writes about in his book Gamorrah  are killers and will not hesitate to kill him if it suits them.  He knows this; he must have reflected deeply about this.  This is, in the words of Richard Ryan and Edward Deci, "self-determination.  (See July 15, 2013 post).  Saviano assented to his course of action in exposing the Camorra, although he may very well have been driven by his Seeking system and perhaps modulated by his Fear system.  (See May 19, 2013 post).  Jose Saramago described Roberto Saviano as someone who "mastered the art of living."  (See July 17, 2011 post).  He is referring to Saviano's "courage," which refers to a mental persistence to persevere in the face of fear.  Courage has to be found in the neocortex of the brain, not the subcortical emotional systems that Panksepp finds controlling.  But yes, Senhor Jose made a decision that probably did not involve much reflection to search for the story of a woman who is more than a piece of data; Roberto Saviano made a decision to confront fear and seek truth that undoubtedly involved substantial reflection.  Their intent is different:  Senhor Jose is out to satisfy his own curiosity and perhaps derive some private reflection on the meaning of his life; Roberto Saviano is not interested in merely satisfying some private need, but to engage in social communication with a broader public, perhaps to arouse the public's reflection to some collective action.

"A writer can never be a good person," writes Saviano.  "Often he comes to writing precisely because he realizes he cannot be a good person.  He ends up writing with a sense of guilt for not being able to change things, in the hope that his indirect actions will multiply in his readers' consciousness, that they might act in his stead or alongside him, creating the ultimate dream of a community of people who understand, feel and walk together.  People who live." 

Beauty and The Inferno represents Roberto Saviano's further reflection on his infernal life in the wake of the publication of Gamorrah, in which he lives a life guarded by police charged with protecting his life from the threats of the Camorra.  The parallels with the life of Salman Rushdie following the Iranian fatwa issued after publication of The Satanic Verses immediately come to mind, and the parallel is not lost on Saviano who writes an essay about his invitation to join Rushdie for a panel discussion at the Swedish Academy.   But Beauty and The Inferno also reads a bit like Profiles in Courage.  And among all the names that Saviano recognizes for leading a courageous life not dissimilar from his, some of whom suffered a fate we call premature death, include:  Joe Pistone who squealed on the American mafia; Giancarlo Siani who also wrote about the Camorra; Uwe Johnson; Gustav Herling; Varlam Shalamov; Anna Politkovskaya.  Names that may have remained anonymous pieces of data, but Saviano has captured their stories.

George Saunders, Tenth of December (2013)

I rarely read a short story.  I respect that writing a good short story can be as challenging, if not more challenging in many respects as writing a novella or novel.  There is less time to dawdle and get to the point in a short story, but in my experience the fleeting taste that one experiences in a short story is not as satisfying as a well-developed character, cast of characters, and extended plot of a novel.  In several of George Saunders' short stories in Tenth of December , I was left with that same level of satisfaction (I don't want to say dissatisfaction, because that is not what I mean; but I do mean to say less than satisfying).  I expect a short story to figuratively punch me in the face and get my attention.  And one of Saunders' stories, Escape from Spiderhead, did just that.  A world manipulated by soma -- Huxley's Brave New World --- comes to mind. 

Saunders introduces a brave new world of drug-induced manipulation imaginatively different than Huxley.  Soma leaves  Huxley's masses anesthetized; Saunders' imaginary pharma cocktails manipulate and heighten every subcortical emotional system in Jaak Panksepp's lexicon (see May 19, 2013 post). The drugs from Saunders' imaginary MobiPak manipulate the Seeking, Lust, Fear, Care and Rage systems, for example, driving passionate sex among people who would likely have no interest in one another.  Add some Verbaluce to the cocktail, and suddenly your cortical regions are verbalizing your feelings more honestly than your emotional systems can feel them.  Veritalk and ChatEase are also available to manipulate communications capabilities.  And so are the drugs to reverse everything that the other drugs manipulated in the first instance.

And who submits to this life?  Very subtly Saunders unfolds this regime.  I nearly missed it when one of the manipulative experimenters begins a conversation, "Do you even know her story?  You don't.  You legally can't.  Does it involve whiskey, gangs, infanticide?  I can't say.  Can I imply, somewhat peripherally, that her past, violent and sordid, did not exactly include a dog named Lassie and lot of family talks about the Bible while Grammy sat doing macramé, adjusting her posture because the quaint fireplace was so sizzling?"  And then a page later:  "Mom always looked heartsick when our time was up.  It had almost killed her when they arrested me.  The trial had almost killed her.  She's spent her savings to get me out of real jail and in here."  These lab rats are criminals diverted from the penal system; something like a halfway house where the only escape may be suicide.  But the suicide that closes this short story --- in stark contrast to Albert Camus' treatment of suicide as a rejection of freedom and a refusal to embrace life passionately --- presents one of the more enobling characteristics of human behavior:  sacrifice in order to avoid harm to another --- altruistic behavior of a type considered in several previous posts (see October 13, 2010 post).   This is the stuff that vividly punches you in the face.  It could have been a novel.

Michael Gazzaniga, Who's In Charge? Free Will and the Science of the Brain (2011)

What do we want to be free from?  That is the question that drives Michael Gazzaniga's inquiry about free will and the science of the brain.  "We don't want to be free from our experience of life, we need that for decisions.  We don't want to be free from our temperament because that also guides our decisions.  We actually don't want to be free from causation, we use that for prediction.  A receiver trying to catch a football does not want to be free from all the automatic adjustments that his body is making to maintain his speed and trajectory as he dodges tackles.  We don't want to be free from our successfully evolved decision-making device.  What do we want to be free from?"

I awaken at 5:30 in the morning.  Gradually my mind becomes cognitive (conscious) again.  My body is telling me to stay put.  Don't get up.  Rest some more.  I lie still for many more minutes, and inevitably my mind starts to race about what I need to do (or don't need to do) in the coming day.  I need to get out of bed and start doing things.  But when?  I can probably afford to lie in bed until 7am and still do what I need to do over the course of the remaining day.  I lie still for awhile longer.  It is now forty-five minutes later.  My mind wrestles with whether I should continue to try and rest or get out of bed and start being active. I cannot lie still anymore. I tell myself I will get out of bed and read a chapter of Michael Gazzaniga's book, Who's In Charge? and I do.  I had a decision to make and I made it:  I got out of bed at 6:15am instead of perhaps 7am.  Is that what free-will is all about?  What was I free from?  No one else was dictating that I stay in bed.  There was no social rule telling me I had to stay in bed until 7am.  My body was not chained to the bed.  But was this decision entirely unchained from all causes?  Jaak Panskepp has compellingly explained that our Seeking urges begin with our automatic impulses deep in the subcortical areas of our brain, (see previous post), so perhaps my urge to read and learn and cease lying down was something less than volitional? 

Much of what we humans and other animals do in our lives is automatic, unconscious, instinctive.  As Panksepp points out, even learning, memory, and habit formation is unconscious.  What is learned and habitual is not the stuff of choices and decision trees, and yet choice is what free will is purportedly about.  And choice, the hallmark of "who's in charge," is typically assigned to the neocortex of the brain that resides on top of the limbic system and the forebrain.  Yet if we concur with Panksepp that it is the brain's subcortical emotional system that energizes the neocortex, not the other way around, the role of the neocortex appears to be only regulatory of the urges that come from below the cortex:  controlling and inhibiting impulses, instinct, and habit, not initiating behavior in the first instance. 

For Gazzaniga, neuroscience (the study of the brain) does not offer much support for the common understanding of free will.  The evidence from neuroscience is inconsistent with free will.  Gazzaniga's first point is that there is no single executive decision center in the brain.  The brain is composed of distinct modules, and while we may have a unified sense of self and making decisions, neuroscience does not support our sense that we are making decisions entirely liberated from either the environment around us or within us. Our sense of psychological unity, says Gazzaniga, emerges out of specialized system in the left side of our neocortex, which he call The Interpreter. (See June 12, 2011 post and June 5, 2011 post).  This is the area of the brain in which the human tendency to want to explain things is found as well as our capacity for imagination.  (See May 22, 2011 post).  But as Gazzaniga explains, The Interpreter is slow.  It comes to life after the event it seeks to explain has occurred.  So what does it mean that we humans build our theories about ourselves after the fact?  "This post hoc interpreting process has implications for and an impact on the big questions of free will and determinism."

Gazzaniga cites research by Hakwan Lau of Columbia University that purports to show how the brain could lead the mind into thinking that the explanation developed by The Interpreter after a certain behavior was an intention occurring before a spontaneous action occurred; in essence, tricking the mind into thinking that the explanation was an intention.  Lau discovered that an area of the brain in the frontal cortex known as the supplemental motor area (SMA) (involved with planning of motor actions that are sequences of action done from memory).  An area called the pre-SMA is involved with creating new sequences of action in memory, which gives one the feeling of the urge to move (perhaps not unlike my getting out of bed in the morning to read Gazzaniga's book).  It is the pre-SMA area that is activated when humans generate actions of their own choice.  Lau applied transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to the pre-SMA that locally activates nerve cells in the pre-SMA.  Describing Lau's research, Gazzaniga explains:  "When TMS is applied over the pre-SMA after the execution of a spontaneous action, the perceived onset of the intention to act, that moment when you become conscious that you intend to act, is shifted backward in time on the temporal map, and the perceived time of the actual action, the moment when you are conscious that your acting, is shifted forward in time."   In other words, the perceived onset of intention depends, at least in part, on neural activity that takes place after the execution of action.  While Lau is careful to say that without further experimentation "one cannot draw the strong conclusion that the experience of having conscious control of a simple motor action [e.g. getting out of bed in the morning] is entirely illusory," he adds that his experimental "results throw doubt on the commonsensical view that the experience of intention, including the experienced onset, is completely determined before an action."  Lau adds, "An alternative view that is compatible with the data is that one function of the experience of intention [even if it occurs afterwards] might be to help clarify the ownership of actions, which can help to guide future actions."  Gazzaniga concludes, however, that The Interpreter "makes the story fit with the pleasing idea one actually willed the action."  Free will is illusory, he says.

There is certainly no consensus among neuroscientists and psychologists over this research, just as thousands of years of philosophical debate has not achieved consensus about free-will.  But one truth about free-will drawn from the philosophical debate is that it is at least a theoretical construct used to justify the notion of personal responsibility for one's actions.  And that leads to the discussion of whether our free-will, if it really does exist, is limited to self-control and regulating existing tendencies of human behavior that are selfish or impulsive or emotionally driven?  This is where I think Jaak Panksepp is coming from (see previous post) when he says, "At primary-process levels of emotional processing there is no free will, there is no 'controlled cognitions.' Neither do the automatic secondary processes of learning and memory functions, that are molded by our wild animal passions developmentally, exhibit free will.  That can only emerge from well-sculpted, deeply reflective, cognitive attitudes."  Free-will is reflected in those "controlled cognitions" that respond to the neocortex being energized by the emotional systems of the subcortical areas of the brain.  There is consensus that the ability to deliberate and rationally choose between different courses of actions.  As Antonio Damasio has documented in Looking for Spinoza and Descartes Error, choosing between different courses of action is not an act of cognition alone, but of cognition and emotion in tandem.  (See also April 8, 2011 post).  There are certain emotions that are linked with feelings of responsibility such as sympathy and regret and these emotions do not originate in the cortex where the brain's "executive control" is said to reside. 

Yet what inspires those controlled cognitions?  I submit it is memory and culture and our body's biochemistry.  And that brings us to Gazzaniga's chapter on the "the social mind," a subject that is covered in many previous posts dealing with mirror neurons, mimicry, moral feelings and related emotions.  (See November 21, 2012, September 17, 2012, September 12, 2012, December 10, 2011, posts). Gazzaniga endorses this point of view. Echoing Christopher Boehm (see November 21, 2012 post), Gazzaniga writes, "If Michael Tomasello and Brian Hare are correct that we have been domesticating ourselves over thousands of years through ostracizing and killing those who were too aggressive, in essence removing them from the gene pool and modifying our social environment, then we have been making rules for groups to live by and enforcing them throughout our evolutionary history."  Gazzaniga adds, "The culture to which we belong actually plays a significant role in shaping some of our cognitive processes."  And in terms of our biochemistry, Gazzaniga notes, "'Easterners and Westerners also vary in their genetic makeup . . . Much research had already shown that serotonin plays a part in attention, cognitive flexibility, and long-term memory, so [researchers] decided that looking into a specific serotonin system polymorphism (a DNA sequence variation), which was known to affect an individual's mode of thinking, could prove fruitful [in accounting for differences in attention across cultures].  They looked at different alleles (genes which have different nucleic acid sequences occupying the same position on a paired chromosome that control the same inherited characteristic) of the 5-HTRIA gene that ultimately controls neurotransmission of serotonin.  They found that there was a significant interaction between the type of 5-HTRIA alleles a person had and the culture in which he lived.  This interaction affected where that particular person's attention was directed.  Those person processing the identical DNA sequences in the matched gene pairs (homozygous) G allege, which is associated with the reduced ability to adapt to changes, more strongly endorse the culturally reinforced mode of thinking than those with homozygous C allele. . . Summarizing these findings, these researchers concluded, 'The same genetic predispositions can result in different psychological outcomes, depending on an individual's cultural context.'"

Gazzaniga suggests that what is sorely needed in this discussion is new terminology, which may be another way of saying that the discussion needs to be repurposed.  For example, we can abandon thousands of years of debate that this discussion is between causal determinism and free-will.  This is essentially conceding to neuroscientists and others that our actions are determined in many respects by biology and the environment (including culture), and that cognition is not truly independent of biology and the environment.  Professors Ryan and Deci at the University of Rochester and others use a different terminology, "self-determination" and autonomy (self-regulation).  Self-determination and autonomy are not liberated from causal influences that motivate behavior ("people's autonomy lies not in being independent causes but in exercising their capacity to reflectively endorse or reject prompted actions").  They are not "free" in that sense.  Critical to these terms is that our neocortex "assents" to whatever we have been motivated to do after some reflection.  This rules out instinctive, habitual, unconscious behavior, and since we arguably assent habitually to much of our behavior each day without much reflection, it focuses on true choices.  This cognitive scenario may very well involve a narrow subset of human life.  I would think this is heavily an exercise exhibiting self-control.

Responsibility is a social construct, Gazzaniga says, echoing John Searle's deontological view of how humans construct a social reality.  (See February 24, 2013 post).  "Responsibility is not located in the brain.  The brain has no area or network for responsibility. . . the way to think about responsibility is that it is an interaction between people, a social contract.  Responsibility reflects a rule that emerges out of one or more agents interacting in a social context, and the hope that we share is that each individual will follow certain rules."  But there are aspects of the brain that do lead to this interaction between people in a social context and support the development of rules for responsibility, and we have identified these in prior posts:  the emotional systems and structures of the brain that promote care, grief, play, empathy, sympathy, fear, among others.  (See May 19, 2013 post and November 21, 2012 post).

Jaak Panksepp and Lucy Biven, The Archaeology of Mind, Neuroevolutionary Origins of Human Emotions (2012)

At its most fundamental level, the neurosensory system of every animal, including humans, is a physiological system related to monitoring our entire physical system, whether the animal is awake or not, and, when awake (including the sleep-wake transition period), reacting to stimuli.  The latter is referred to as the arousal system.  In the case of vertebrates, four neurotransmitters (chemicals) --- acetylcholine, norepinephrine, dopamine, and serotonin --- stimulate different arousal systems originating in the brain stem, evolutionarily the oldest part of the vertebrate brain, and motivate certain behaviors such as seeking food, flight or fight behavior, and sexual activity.  There are certain emotional systems that are virtually at the core of the arousal system, at least during periods of wakefulness, and for several decades now, Jaak Panksepp has been researching and advocating that these emotional systems have their origins with animals evolutionarily older than humans, located in the older subcortical areas of mammalian brains and only later connected with the cortical areas. 

The Archaeology of Mind begins and ends with vertebrate animals, yet the evolutionary story is older, and to tell the story of what is missing from Panksepp's account I excerpt heavily from Steven Rose's The Future of the Brain, which outlines the evolution of the brain from unicellular organisms, to eukaryotes, to invertebrate animals and vertebrates.  This excerpting is important to a point I wish to make.  Rose says this:

"By the time that cells capable of metabolism and faithful replication, of symbiogenesis and competition appear, all the defining features of life have emerged:  the presence of a semi-permeable boundary separating self from non-self; the ability to metabolise -- that is, to extract energy from the environment so as to maintain this self --- and to self-repair, at least to a degree when damaged; and to reproduce copies of this self more or less faithfully.  All of these features require something we may term adaptability or behavior --- the capacity to respond to and act upon the environment in such a way as to enhance survival and replication.  At its simplest, this behavior requires neither brains nor  nervous systems, albeit a sophisticated set of chemical and structural features.  What it does require is the property that some would call a program:  at its most general way of describing both the individual chemical components of the cell and the kinetics of their interactions as the cell or living system persists through time. ***

"Built into this program must also be the possibility of modifying its expression, transiently or lastingly, in response to the changing contingencies of the external environment.  *** One way of conceiving of this capacity to vary a program is as an action plan, an 'internal representation' of the desired goal-- at its minimum, that of survival at least until replication is achieved.  I will be arguing that, in multicellular organisms, such action plans are ultimately what brains are about.

"Amongst the most basic forms of adaptive behavior drawing on such action plans is goal-directed movement-- of a unicell swimming towards food for instance. [Emphasis added].  Dip a thin capillary tube containing a solution of glucose into a drop of bacteria-rich liquid, and the bacteria collect around the mouth of the capillary from which the glucose diffuses--a phenomenon first noted as long ago as the nineteenth century.  Such simple responses engage a series of necessary steps.  First, the cell needs to be able to sense the food.  In the simplest case the food is a source of desirable chemicals --- perhaps sugars or amino acids-- although it may also be the metabolic waste products excreted by another organism.  Indeed the molecule does not have to be edible itself provided it can indicate the presence of other molecules that can be metabolized-- that is, it acts as a signal.  *** But signals are only signals if there is recipient who can interpret the message they bear.  Cell membranes are studded with proteins whose structure is adapted to enable them to trap and bind specific signaling molecules floating past them, and hence read their message.  This chemical detection system is the most basic of all sensory mechanisms.

"Interpreting the message --- using it to develop a plan of action -- should make it possible for the cell to determine the direction of the gradient and finally to move up it to the source.  Moving towards a specific chemical source --- chemotaxis --- requires that the cell possess some sort of direction indicator or compass.  One way of creating such a compass, employed by bacteria, is to swim in a jerky trajectory, enabling the cell to interpret the gradient by comparing the concentration of the attractant chemical at any moment with that a moment before.***"

If Jaak Panksepp were reading this passage he would certainly connect it to his research of emotions in animal brains.  It describes the precursor to what Panksepp regards as the most central emotional system in mammals: the SEEKING system (see below).  Rose continues:

"The molecules trapped by the receptor on the surface membrane serve as signals, but very weak ones.  To produce as dramatic a cellular response as turning and moving in the right direction requires that signals are highly amplified.  The mechanism by which this is carried out, even in the seemingly simplest of unicells turns out to be the basis on which the entire complex apparatus of nervous systems and brains is subsequently built.  The receptors are large proteins, oriented across the lipid membrane, with regions sticking out into the external environment, and also 'tails' which reach into the interior of the cell (the cytoplasm).  When the signal receptor binds to the receptor protein its effect is to force a change -- a twist, if you like -- in the complex shape of the receptor.  ***

"One way of speaking of this process, favoured by neurologist Antonio Damasio, even in so limited an animal as Paramecium, is as 'expressing an emotion.'   Emotion for Damasio, is a fundamental aspect of existing and a major driver of evolution.

"*** With multicellularity, 'behaviour' becomes a property of the organism as a whole, to which 'needs' of individual cells are subordinated.  The internal representation which makes possible the action plan for organism can be delegated to specific cell ensembles.  This requires new modes of communication to be developed.  Where previously there were only two classes of signals -- those arriving from the external environment to the cell surface, and those internal to the cell --- there are now three.  Signals from the external environment are still registered by sensory cells on the surface and are transmuted by molecular cascades with them, but now the response to those cascades requires that further messages be sent from the sensory cells to other regions of the body, including of course the contractile cells.  Sometimes the sensory cells make contact with intermediaries whose task it is to synthesise and secrete the necessary 'messenger molecules.'  [Emphasis added]. The messengers can then be distributed through the body either by way of a circulatory system or by diffusion through the extracellular space between the body cells, and are detected as before by specialized receptor proteins on the surface membranes of their targets.  When molecules that served such messenger functions were first identified in mammals, they were given the generic name of hormones.  It was only later, and to some surprise, that it was discovered that many of the same molecules also serve as intercellular signals in very early multicellular organisms, another powerful example of evolutionary conservation.***

"It is easy to imagine a sequence whereby neurons evolved from secretory cells.  Instead of discharging their contents generally into the surrounding space and circulatory system, the secretory cells could have put out feelers (called 'processes') enabling them to make direct contact with their targets so as to signal rapidly to them and them alone.  Messages could be conveyed between the two either electrically or chemically --- by a depolarizing wave or by secreting a messenger molecule across the membrane at the point where the two cells touch.  In fact, both phenomena are know to occur.

"The first step towards such nervous systems can be seen among the large group of Coelenterates, believed to be amongst the earliest true multicellular animals.  The best known is perhaps the Hydra, a tiny creature that sits at the bottom of streams attached to rocks or water plants, waving its tentacles above its mouth.   When a potential source of food brushes past its tentacles, the Hydra shoots out poisonous threads, collects the paralysed victim and thrusts it into its mouth.  *** A well fed Hydra is quiescent; when hungry it waves its tentacles vigorously, or moves its location by repeatedly turning head-over-heals, seeking food-rich or oxygen-rich environments (once again, Damasio would regard these acts 'expressing emotions').***

"What distinguishes a fully-fledged nervous system --- our own for instance --- is a one-way flow of information through the system, from dendrites to axon, from sensory cell to effector.  Of course this is mediated via all the feedback loops, but none the less there is a directionality to it that the Hydra's does not possess.

"Whereas the Hydra's neurons are scattered throughout the body, the next crucial step was to concentrate them within an organized system. *** C. elegans  has a head and tail end, and as it is more important for it to know where it is going than where it has been, many of its sensory cells are clustered at its head end.  From these, nerve connections run to clusters of interneurons, pack into groups (ganglia) with short interconnecting processes between the cells within the group and longer nerve tracts leading out along its gut and ultimately to the effectors:  contractile, egg- and sperm producing cells.  These neurons use many of the neurotransmitters that are found in mammalian brains (notably the amino acid glutamate), an indication of how far back in evolutionary terms these molecules were adapted for signaling functions.***

"The evolutionary track I have been mapping," writes Rose, "has led from proto-cells to faithfully replicating eukaryotes capable of responding adaptively to patchy environments, from single-celled eukaryotes to multicellular animals with internal signaling systems, and from these to fully-fledged nervous systems capable not merely constructing action plans, but of modifying those plans, at least temporarily, in response to environmental contingencies.  But we haven't yet arrived at brains.  This must have been the next step along the evolutionary path that led to humans.  Concentrating neurons in ganglia is a way of enhancing their interactions and hence their collective power to analyze and respond to incoming stimuli.  Locating them at the front end of the organism is the beginning of establishing not merely a nervous system but a brain, though head ganglia or brains only slowly begin to exert their primacy over the other ganglia distributed through the body.*** [Turning to invertebrates] although insect (arthropod) and molluscan neurons are pretty similar to human neurons, and the biochemical motors that drive the system -- their electrically excitable membranes and the neurotransmitters --- work in the same way, the organization of the system is entirely different.  In molluscs and arthropods the central ganglion --- the nearest any amongst these huge numbers of species have to a brain --- and the principal connecting pathways between it and other ganglia lie arranged in a ring around their guts.  This is a device that can be seen even in earthworms, and it imposes a fundamental design limitation on the complexity of the nervous system.***

"The development of large brains required two major changes in the construction of nervous systems:  the separation of the nerves themselves from the gut, and the concentration of nervous power.  It also required the first step towards the development of a bony skeleton.  Amphioxus,  small sea-floor fish, is an example.  Less behaviourally sophisticated than octopus or bee, it has a flexible rod of cartilage, a notochord, running down its back --- the forerunner of the spinal column --- with the merit of providing a bracing device against which muscles can pull.  More relevantly for the present argument is that eh major nerves and central ganglion lie in a continuous tube running the length of the creature's body, thus disentangling them from the gut and giving space for growth."

We have not even discussed Panksepp's research yet, but there is much here in Steven Rose's account of the evolutionary development of the animal nervous system that indicates the system of neurotransmitters and specialized receptors found in vertebrates long preceded the development of the brain stem in vertebrates.  And there is a suggestion by Steven Rose that this system was capable of "expressing emotions," although probably not in the same sense that Panksepp intends.  But it would be fair to say that human emotional systems and those of other mammals not only have their origins in vertebrate animals older than humans, but in the earliest forms of life on earth.  This is an anthropomorphic view of human emotions as described by Frans DeWaal in The Ape and The Sushi Master (see June 17, 2010 post).  To be sure, Panksepp is careful to admonish in his discussion of similarities between the neurological systems of humans and other mammals that "similar does not mean the same."  There are similar structures and similar transmitters and receptors in the brain, but their location within the brain may be slightly different or even vastly different, and those differences may result in small or even large differences between humans and other mammals.  But in identifying these similarities, Panksepp observes, as the book's subtitle hints, the neuroevolutionary origins of human emotions.  Panksepp decries the history of human psychological research that declined to recognize emotions in animals.  There is considerable research available today that rebuts that notion.

Panksepp discusses several emotional systems, but central to nearly all of them is what he has labeled the SEEKING system.  And in beginning this discussion, we can think back to Steven Rose's reference to the "goal-directed movement-- of a unicell swimming towards food for instance." 

Panksepp is controversial within the neuropsychiatric community, challenging some of the dogmas of neuroscience and human psychotherapy.  One of the dogmas is reflected in this statement from Rita Carter's Mapping the Mind (see November 6, 2011 post):  "A huge volume of evidence suggests that consciousness emerges from the activity of the cerebral cortex that the particular type of consciousness that includes the sense of self requires activation in the frontal lobes.  Ask yourself this:  Where, precisely, do I feel that "I" am centered?  If you are like most people, you will point to a position just above the bridge of your nose.  It is right behind here that you will find the prefrontal cortex --- the area of the frontal lobe most closely associated with the generation of consciousness.  This region is also responsible for our conscious perception of emotion and our ability to attend and focus.  Most important of all, it endows the world with meaning and our lives with a sense of purpose.  The symptoms of schizophrenia, depression, mania and Attention Deficit Disorder are mainly due to frontal lobe disorder."  Carter's sentiment reflects a view that leads psychotherapists to focus on treating the executive, regulatory capacity of the human brain in the frontal cortex in order to overcome these disorders.  While Panksepp does not dismiss the role of the prefrontal cortex in the conscious life of humans, he does disagree with the directionality implicit in this statement:  for Panksepp, like Antonio Damasio (see April 8, 2011 post) "the generation of consciousness" begins with the evolutionarily older parts of the brain --- in the midbrain, where neurotransmitters are generated  --- as well as the limbic system, which together are at the foundation of the seven emotional systems he describes in Archaeology of Mind.   It is here that the "core self" of consciousness emerges, or as Panksepp calls it, the core affective self.  The symptoms of certain mental disorders, Panksepp believes, are not "mainly due to frontal lobe disorder" but may have more to do with the imbalanced (excessive or diminished) production of specific chemicals in the brain in the more ancient parts of the brain.  And as the previous post suggests, epigenetics provide some explanation in the case of stress disorders caused by early childhood abuse leading to excessive production of cortisol that overwhelms the ability of the limbic system to restore calm. 

The seven emotional systems described by Panksepp (and he does not rule out that there may be more) are these:

The Seeking System.  This does not immediately sound like it describes an emotional system, but clearly Panksepp is correct in characterizing the Seeking System.  This is the system "that allows animals to search for, find and acquire resources that are needed for survival.  Arousal of this Seeking System produces all kinds of approach behaviors, but it also feels good in a special way.  It is not the kind of pleasure we experience when eating a fine meal, or the satisfaction we feel afterwards.  Rather it provides the kind of excited, euphoric anticipation that occurs when we look forward to eating that meal . . . the anticipation of sex . . . the thrill of exploration."  Panksepp refers to the Seeking System as the primary process emotional powers that makes animals into active agents in their environments.  "Among animals in the wild, it is easy to see the Seeking system in action.  Resources are not readily available and animals must persistently seek them out in order to survive.  They must hunt or forage for food and search for water, find twigs or dig holes to fashion sheltering nests.  The Seeking system urges them to nurture their young, to search for a sexual partner, and when animals live in social communities, to also find nonsexual companions, forming friendships and social alliances. . . Although this system vigorously responds to homeostatic needs, to emotional urges and to enticing temptations, it operates more or less continuously in the background, albeit at much lower levels when people and animals are not in any particular need of resources or troubled by problems that urgently require solutions.  This system keeps animals constantly exploring their environments so they can remember where resources are."  Importantly, in Panksepp's view, it is the Seeking System that is the motivator behind the intellectual pursuits of the neocortex:  "the neocortex does not provide its own motivation; the neocortex is activated by subcortical emotional systems . . . the neocortex is the servant of our emotional systems."  It is the Seeking System that urges architects, artists, writers, politicians, and scientists to discover new and better ways to solve problems and express themselves.  It "energizes all human creativity."  Seeking arousal "is an anticipatory gift of nature that provides seemingly infinite opportunities for learning; with the developmental/epigenetic emergence of higher mental processes, it gradually fine-tunes reasonable expectations, working hypotheses, as in the conduct of science."  It is intimately connected with learning, which Panksepp describes as an "automatic, unconscious process that enhances are natural proclivity to engage with the world in ever more subtle ways as our minds mature."  In contrast, affect (behavioral outcomes connected to arousal of instinctual emotional systems) is never unconscious; it is felt.

Chemically, the Seeking System is understood to be aroused by dopamine transmitters, but glutamate, which functions in learning and memory, and neuropeptides such as orexin and neurotensin are understood to activate the Seeking System while dynorphin is believed to deactivate it.  The neurons for these transmitters are found in the midbrain:  anatomically, ventral tegmental area, the medial forebrain bundle, the lateral hypothalamus, the nucleus accumbens, and then running to the medial prefrontal cortex via the mesolimbic and mesocortical dopamine pathways.  "In all mammals," notes Panksepp, "the nucleus accumbens interacts with the medial frontal cortex to promote simple appetitive learning (and addictions).  Because the Seeking System energizes the frontal neocortical regions, especially the medial zones that focus on immediate emotional needs, we are able to devise strategies to obtain rewards and escape sanctions (pain) and other pitfalls.  We remember particularly pleasurable experiences and the possibility of addiction is created.  Dopamine transmitters are associated with drugs of abuse, and when they are overly excited there can be negative consequences from addiction.  On the other hand, when the Seeking System is underactive, depressive feelings can emerge. Humans differ from other animals here in one important respect; the dopamine pathways that energize the cortex are linked not only to the frontal cortex but to other sensory-perceptual cortices in the back of the brain.

The Rage System.  The Rage System needs little explanation:  the foundation of anger and aggression.  What it is not deserves some explanation:  it probably has little to do with war among societies (group aggression), nor is it about predatory aggression such as seeking food.  In contrast to the Seeking System, which is largely a "positive" emotion, the Rage System produces unpleasant affects.  The Rage System is connected to dominance systems in species.  The Rage System runs from the medial areas of the amygdala to the medial hypothalamus to areas of the periaqueductal gray (PAG). As with the Seeking System (and all the other emotional systems Panksepp describes), these are the ancient areas of the brain.  The chemicals that can promote rage include testosterone (known to promote physical aggression in males to a greater extent than females), Substance P (important to pain perception), norepinephrine, glutamate, acetylcholine, and nitric oxide synthases.  The Rage System can be controlled by chemical inhibitors such as gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA) and oxytocin. 

The Fear System.  Similarly, the Fear System needs little explanation.  Like the Rage System, it is not a positive emotion; it produces anxiety, stimulates flight, fight or freezing.  The Fear System operates between the PAG and the amygdala and it is aroused by external and internal stimuli, notably pain, but some responses appear to be innate caused by hard-wired sensory inputs.  Panksepp mentions rats fear of open spaces, sudden movements and loud noises as example innate fear responses.  But fear is connected to memory as well, and memory plays a significant role in conditioning fear responses.  On memory, Panksepp explains, that learning and memory are automatic and involuntary responses (mediated by unconscious mechanisms of the brain), which in their most lasting forms are commonly tethered to emotional arousal. Emotional arousal is a necessary condition for the creation of fear-learning memories.

The Lust System. The Lust System drives basic mammalian physical impulses (sexual affects) on the one hand and social emotions on the other, which can be both positive and negative.  It can drive anti-social behavior (rape, stalking) as well as building families and promoting other forms of well-being.  In the male brain the center of primary sexual urges is in the medial regions of the anterior hypothalamus, (although Panksepp notes that "the precise brain location varies from one species to another).  Testosterone stimulates pleasure in the male, which activates neuropeptides such as vasopressin and promotes sexual ardor, courtship, intermale aggression and possibly jealousy.  Testosterone also activates nitric oxide in the brain, which promotes heightened sexual eagerness.    In females, estrogen and progesterone (the estrus cycle) controls sexual arousal, but adrenal testosterone plays a role in sexual receptivity.  The Lust System, Panksepp says, "recruits" the Seeking System "dopamine-fueled search for companionship.

The Care System.  The Care System is not universal in the animal kingdom, but nearly all mammals and birds exhibit maternal care for their young.  In fish, the job of tending to a nest of eggs is left to fathers, and the brain circuits that drive this behavior Panksepp calls the Care System.  Panksepp notes that researchers learned of the existence of the Care System in mammals when they discovered that blood transfusions from postpartum female rats to virgin rats would lead to maternal behavior in the virgin rats, including nest building, hovering over young, and gathering the young who strayed from the nest.  Panksepp concedes that researchers still do not which chemicals in the transferred blood interact in the brains of virgin rats to cause these behaviors, but given similarities between the urge to provide Care and the urges underlying the Seeking System, brain arousal from dopamine in conjunction with opioids, as well as oxytocin and prolactin are likely involved.  Panksepp hypothesizes that the evolution of the Care System might be traced back to chemicals found in the Lust circuits of reptiles, such as vasotocin, which has a calming effect and promotes nurturant moods in some birds, and neuropeptides like mesotocin that may have evolved in vasopressin and oxytocin, which is recognized as a key maternal chemical.  The maternal (and paternal) nurturing behavior must be recognized as a critical factor in the development of social brain systems.  Research shows that both oxytocin and vasopressin strengthen social memories and are believed to be promote social bonds among mammals.  (See July 16, 2010 post).

Research on the Care System in rats also reveals evidence of epigenetic changes leading to more prosocial behavior.  Female rats lick their pups during early development and this has been shown to influence the emotional abilities of young rats later in life.  Abundantly licked rats grow up to be less anxious, more resistant to stress, and more capable of exhibiting learning and other adaptive behavior later in life.  These adult rats have diminished stress hormones (corticotrophin-releasing factor (CRF)) and adrenocorticotrophic hormone (ACTH), more GABA receptor cites, which promotes reduced anxiety, and more receptors for glutamate and norepinephrine, which facilitate learning.  Emotionally, these animals are less anxious, showing more activity and fearlessness, and better learning and performance in a variety of fear-inducing situations.  This research could have been cited by Nessa Carey in The Epigenetic Revolution.  (See April 28, 2013 post). 

The Panic/Grief System.  Panic and grief intuitively seem like strange bedfellows but the common emotional/behavioral link in this "system" is separation anxiety, something that is seen across a number of species.  Grief connotes a sadness that arises from social loss; panic connotes a separation from a secure or stable environment.  Immediately, one can conjure linkages between what Panksepp labels the Panic/Grief System and the Care System, the Fear System.  The Panic System is seen in early childhood development over anxiety in separation of mother and child ("Born to Cry" is the title of this chapter), but it has also been found to be less active in adults.  The Panic/Grief circuits are found in several of the same subcortical areas identified with other systems, including the PAG and surrounding subcortical regions including the dorsomedial thalamus, the ventral septial area, the dorsal preoptic area and the bed nucleus of stria terminalis.  Previously identified stress neuropeptides such as CRF and  ACTH, and glutamate (an excitatory neurotransmitter associated with every emotional response) arouse the Grief System.  Imbalances in the Grief System are a key factor in a variety of emotional disorders because so much mental illness, Panksepp notes, is rooted in the incapacity to enjoy the security of warm interpersonal attachments.  Panic attacks, depression, autism, and a variety of other social phobias are part of the Grief pathologies.  The identification of neuropeptides that actually diminish separation distress and mediate the Care System, such as oxytocin and prolactin,and the stimulation of mu-opioid receptors in the brain may have role in treatments of these disorders.

The Play System.  Finally, but not least, something that one might not think of as an emotional system, but Panksepp clearly documents that it is, particularly in mammals: the Play System.  "Physical playfulness is a birthright of every young mammal and perhaps of many other animals as well. . . It is now certain that a genetically determined Play network that mediates positive affect exists in mammalian brains, although many details remain to be worked out."  The Play System is likewise concentrated in subcortical brain regions, intimately linked to the Seeking System: the urge to play is like a type of hunger, and is not necessarily a social need, although it is linked to social emotional systems. Play is linked to the capacity to laugh, a positive emotional affect. Laughter is not merely found in humans, but also noises made by rats, chirping of birds.  Laughter is stimulated early in children, including mimicry.  Like the Seeking System, dopamine, which is engaged during activity that entails considerable positive anticipation and euphoria, is believed to fuel the Play System because it is aroused (correlated) during play.  Play activates sensory inputs, such as touch, which go directly to older midline regions of the brain such as the parafascicular complex and the posterior dorsomedial thalamic regions. 

In the foregoing, I have catalogued for each of Panksepp's seven emotional systems of the brain the suspected chemistries and at the outset I tried to demonstrate that research documents the ancient role of chemicals in the neurological systems of species and their potential link to the development of emotional system.  My objective in this outline is to highlight a point in a previous post about social emotions, including moral emotions.  In his book Moral Origins, Christopher Boehm concludes by saying that in a few generations we "may have identified some of the genetic mechanisms that help us to behave egoistically, nepotistically, and altruistically, along with others that make for sympathetic generosity, domination and submission, and a variety of other socially significant behaviors that are relevant to morality, including our shame responses."  The earlier post (see November 21, 2012 post) observed that "Boehm may well be right that we will identify the genetic mechanisms behind moral and immoral behavior in a few generations, but the roadmap of investigation is already before us and it begins with emotions.  I say this for two reasons:  first, if anything, genes code for our body chemistry; genes may or may not code for specific behavior (moral or otherwise), although I doubt it (see November 30, 2009 post).  But emotions are driven by electro-chemical actions and reactions in our various body systems and ultimately the neurological system leading to our brains, and genes do code for these electro-chemical actions and reactions and genes code for our brain and other body organs.  If we want to understand the genetic basis for moral and immoral behavior we will look for the genes tied to these body systems and the chemistry that drives emotions."   Panksepp's aggregation of the research on these primary process emotions is a good peek into the links between genes, chemistries, and anatomical structures related to emotions.  In addition to linking genes with the chemicals and brain structures that drive these emotional systems, the inquiry contemplated by Boehm would presumably link these seven emotional systems to other more complex emotional systems not considered "primary process" systems,  including the social emotions discussed in the November 21, 2012 post such as embarrassment, shame, guilt, contempt, indignation, sympathy, compassion, awe, gratitude, and pride. 

One cannot help read The Archaeology of Mind without feeling that Panksepp believes he has been walking in the wilderness of neuroscientific research that treats emotional systems as fundamental, more fundamental than research of the neocortex.  While he now believes that Antonio Damasio has joined his crusade with the publication of Self Comes to Mind (see April 8, 2011 post), in which Damasio gave a tip of the hat to Panksepp's research, Panksepp is skeptical of Damasio's earlier somatic marker hypothesis and the assertion that core consciousness (a higher order mapping process outside the subcortical regions) generates inner emotional feelings of what is happening by synthesizing information from maps abut the body and about the environment. As stated earlier, it is the subcortical emotional system that energizes the neocortex, says Panksepp, not the other way around.  Fundamentally, Panksepp believes that mental and emotional disorders go hand in hand and are best understood as a chemical problem, and when understood in that leads to two important conclusions:  (1) that chemistry will have a key role in providing treatment, and (2) it will cause psychotherapists to recognize that treatment must deal with the emotional aspects of the older subcortical parts of the brain.  For Panksepp, the key question for all neuroscientists and biological psychiatrists is this:  "How are raw affective experiences created in the brain?"  The answer he believes will clarify the foundational nature of experience in general as well as affective disturbances.  For example, Panksepp writes, for depression he would ask:  Why does depression feel so bad?  Why does depression hurt?  Why is it so psychologically painful?  What does it mean to experience social pain?  Few neuroscientists have been willing to ask these questions.

One cannot conclude a statement about Panksepp's research without noting what he neither ignores, but nonetheless does not dwell on: the role of the cortical areas of the brain in human consciousness.  When he does acknowledge higher order BrainMind structures, he says this:  "Although arousals of the primary process emotional networks of mammalian brains are intensely experienced by humans and other animals, it is especially important to recognize that the secondary processes of the BrainMind, the basic forms of learning, memory, and habit formation are among the most unconscious 'mental' processes of them all.  Once we understand this, then many of the bizarre and faulty views from psychology's past may be rectified.  For instance, 'free will' is not a figment of our imagination as too many scientists are ready to claim these days.  Free will is a higher tertiary-level neurocognitive function that we use on a regular basis (and quite effectively when we are not too emotionally aroused) for future planning actions.  This is brought out beautifully in the concept of 'autonomy' and 'self-determination' as developed by Ryan and Deci (2006).  However, we cannot readily will ourselves out of underlying emotional turmoil that has been created through the consolidation of maladaptive affective patterns at primary and secondary levels of BrainMind organization.  At primary-process levels of emotional processing there is no free will, there is no 'controlled cognitions.' Neither do the automatic secondary processes of learning and memory functions, that are molded by our wild animal passions developmentally, exhibit free will.  That can only emerge from well-sculpted, deeply reflective, cognitive attitudes."  He adds, "It is surely our vast cerebral 'thinking cap' --- our extensive cortico-cognitive apparatus --- that distinguishes us mentally from our animal ancestors.  That adds layers of complexity that cannot be readily addressed with animal models."  Michael Gazzaniga would agree.  (See September 27, 2009 post). But "language," Panksepp says," our most unique cerebral skill, "emerges through emotional guidance.  Through language, however, we can uniquely study the extended tertiary-process cognitive affective consciousness of humans.  And this is why there continues to be enormous growth in descriptive (ie. nonneuroscientific) emotion studies in psychology (Davidson et all., 2003)." 

And with that paragraph, I pull the next book off of The Bookshelf.