The Neuro Times

The Death of the “Book Review”?

2013-05-15T07:41:00.001-04:00

The book review has died. It lives. But it is dead. It is an anachronistic zombie. Let me explain.

Perhaps some of you are employed in universities that use Digital Measures? I’m sure you are at least savvy enough to imagine precisely the aims of this wondrous digital panopticon. If you have not yet discovered Digital Measures, then rest assured someone, somewhere, is plotting to bring it your university soon enough. In any case, it is a software that promises to measure and value everything you do. And should you have dared to publish a book review, then it will measure it in a way that values it least of all.

Originally when Digital Measures was introduced at my university, it did not even possess a capacity to enter “Book Review” as “work” into one of the literally hundreds of drop-down menus for measuring academic labor. When the issue was raised, there was complete confusion. “What is a book review?” was a serious question. Some thought we meant “peer-review” and couldn’t understand how they could be published.

Suspicion festered. Everywhere people suspected that some of us were trying to get credit for something twice.

But then it began to dawn on people that were still some odd academics who published weird antiquarian objects of yore, and thus those were probably peer-reviewed in manuscript form and perhaps this was what was meant by “book review”. We then had to explain by invoking reviews of books in The New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, and the Times Literary Supplement. We showed them reprints from journals, whereby some evinced surprise that journals looked like books, and they confessed that they had not heard of the publications or thought their activities mere journalism.

Thus, success! Eventually a drop-down menu item was added to the “Professional Service” menu. “Published Book Review” was, however, a bit at sea in the world of “Professional Service,” where there were such serious menu items as “Committees.” For one thing, the book review was published while and everything else was not. That made its location an odd choice. So eventually a compromise was adopted. Published “book reviews” would be entered into the area called “intellectual contributions”. But in the final output of measure, book reviews would not appear anywhere near other publications. And thus it was, at least in Digital Measures, that the genre of “book review” passed into memory. It died, even as it lived.

1. Who murdered the “Book Review”?

How might we explain the death of the academic book review? Firstly, academics killed it – not administrators. I know this is a harsh truth, but for those of us who loved the genre (reading them and writing them) we had heard too-often from our fellow academics that they didn’t count and that the time spent on them would be better dedicated to other more productive ends – productive ends being measured of course in the rhetoric of market pantheism.

Partly academics in the sciences were to blame. Remember when you first heard someone working in the sciences say to you glibly “no one reads books anymore”? I do. I was fifteen. Please respect my later bewilderment when as a graduate student a senior colleague looked at me severely and asked why I was reading a thick volume from 1905 and stated flatly “no one read books then”.

A cynic might suggest that academia in the last three decades had become deprofessionalized in such a way that a serious suspicion of people who loved books had begun to blossom. Academics began to feel that they had to apologize for reading-qua- laboring – this despite the fact that the only means of knowing anything was to engage in a serious effort of study (which often included books).

But then there were so many bad books too. And there were such horrible conventions about being polite and nice and disinterested when reviewing the bad books. So it was hard to imagine that the art of writing a lively book review that stated in a clear way “consign this book to the fire” would be much applauded in circles where the art of taking criticism had already declined in any case.

Of course, I am speaking here in generational terms and exaggerating for effect. The death of the book review will come as a surprise to many, not least those who persist in reading book and publishing reviews of them. Like me. But the reality is that they have become non-measurable units. If anything, they suggest in managerial culture that you were ‘reading on the job’ – and no one had better being doing that! They are factually to academia as zombies are to the census.

2. An Obituary for a Living Genre

It is not clear to me when the “book review” emerged. I’m sure that histories of the literary and philosophical societies of the long-eighteenth century, histories of the book or library practices, and perhaps even early histories of the spread of literacy would have explored the emergence of this practice. It is, however, obvious that forms of fakery, commentary, gossip, and innuendo trace back at least as far as Cervantes. Boswell had more than a few things to say on the topic as well, and so, too, did Rousseau in his Confessions. Admittedly those authors judged critics in the harshest of possible terms, but, nevertheless, the vitriol that they aimed at their glib commentators suggests the work of idealism in literary culture was always dialectical.

In any case, most historians would probably agree that the great age of the book review came after 1789 and with the advent of widespread literacy and the industrialist discovery of an appetite for words among all the classes. Indeed the sheer desire for “news” and “stories” described by the likes of Richard Dana or Mark Twain among sailors or crews on riverboats is astounding. So, too, is the proliferation of social resistance through book-reading and criticism among socialists, unionists, anarcho-syndicalists until the 1950s. Or, from another ideological window, the conservative love affair with the essays of Arnold, Chesterton, and Lippmann were often deep social commentaries in the form of reviews.

Nowhere were book reviews livelier than in the worlds of science. To aver that the world now would be a little less rich but for the snarky reviews of the members of the Athenaeum Club is to state the obvious. Evidently there was a Victorian culture of nastiness that might lend that period a properly rosy moniker as the “Age of Admirable Honesty.”And at those times when the anti-Semitic, misogynist, and racist slipped through as subtext, they helped future generations detect as well the arrogance of the many-sided “Age of Chauvinisms”.

But beyond that, it is easy to see that a significant source for the many material achievements of science in that period derived as much from outbursts of energy directed at “stupid critics” as from great “genius” or serendipity. It is hard to imagine, for example, that Thomas Huxley would have bull-dogged quite as as ferociously without the fillip of his nastiest critics. And the reciprocal must be true as well.

However, it may well have been the process of abstracting literature and producing digests that marked the decline of the review, and I suspect that it was in the sciences and in medicine that the life of the review began to show its age. Perhaps there was a transformation of professional culture too – a Taylorisation of professional time, work, and labor that began in the Progressive Era. And, perhaps, a civilizational assumption about the progress of knowledge that made accessing knowledge a utilitarian enterprise out of necessity.

Whatever the case, the book review in the academy by 2012 had no value in those systems of measurement that people in positions of power took seriously. Strive as we might to dismiss the ends of academia’s many arbiters, their power has determined that reading and commenting on a book is not knowledge-making.

What then is to be most regretted in the passing of the book review? Fascinating as it would be to trace, for example, how Marx’s or Hayek’s ideas came to America and were received by readers-cum-authors of reviews in either the interwar or cold war eras and to compare their reception, no one could seriously propose that a genre should last purely for the needs of historians. But there is something that will be lost: the immediacy of, for instance, Lippmann reading Terman, Said reading Foucault, or (less pretentiously) you reading me. The loss is thus of a particular form of intellectual culture, a form that was arguably the Enlightenment Project at its best.

3. The Zombie Lives

There can be little doubt that undergraduates will continue to write 650-word appraisals and responses to the authors we force them to read. Words like “unique” or “aspect” or “bias” will persist in inelegant fashion. A few of them will not be tone-deaf to the polemic; most will spot rhetoric; and almost all of them will recognize the value of the content. Reading in these circumstances will become mainly an exercise in information reconnaissance and recapitulation. The Age of Information need not be an Age of Readers, still less an Age of Writers, and increasingly these essays will all appear little more than paraphrases of the Sparknotes commentaries.

Reviews will persist as marketing devices for books (as they will for all entertainment). They will be ‘sponsored content’, the package of advertising-things meant to tempt would-be consumers with a ‘preview’. The irony in the postmodern age may likely be that publishers will increasingly require that authors of new books ghostwrite five or six different reviews to be released after publication.

Information management moreover in the big publishing houses will mean forging an ever-more suspect relationship with newspapers and online traffic juggernauts, which by the close of the millennium were already beginning to show evidence of efforts to manipulate the consensus about proper academic subjects. Opinion columnists and news reports will splash discussions of new cutting-edge topics in the human sciences and humanities. Appearing in hallowed venues like the ‘Grey Lady’ and mainstream education literature, these sundry devices for marketing particular memes will become omnipresent and be accorded a reverence in universities akin to the shiny subjects of the funding moment in science.

The academic review will also persist, albeit in elite public culture. And here their persistence will actually become great evidence of their Zombie status. For it will always be the orthodoxy that will find column space there; one can imagine the irony in postmodernity of a column called “Dissent” written perhaps by some eastern-European or South American radical who will provide the elite with a smug sense of their own balanced openness and beneficence.

4. Can the Intellectual Culture of the Book Review Survive?

There is no use pretending that this essay is overwrought. At this point, it is naïve altruism to write book reviews if you are a junior scholar. We live in jaded times – even if we need not be jaded. The act of writing the review provides people with your free, un-credited labor so that they can avoid keeping up on the latest trends in scholarship.

Writing dozens of amazing book reviews won’t get you a job. Writing dozens of them won’t get you promoted. Nobody will give you a grant to be a book reviewer. While it is true that there is a pleasure in the labor itself, it is categorically wrong that the same pleasure cannot be found in similar activities for which measurable reward is also provided. At this point, the free book is insufficient.

I don’t practice what I’m preaching here. Chances are you don’t either. I love reading books, and I love writing about the books I’ve read. I love excoriating crap books. I love lauding terrific ones. But the point is that the book review simply isn’t a recognized tool for this activity anymore. Putting it differently, the labor of thinking, arguing, debating, deliberating, and ruminating is as important now as it has ever been. Because of that fact, we need to begin to devise a replacement for the book review that retains the intellectual vibrancy reviews agitated in the past.

In postmodernity resistance begins by subverting the ends of others to our own ends. Arguments, ideas, and facts still matter. Rather than fearing the excoriation of our work and ideas, we should fear silence, apathy, and nihilism at the appearance of our ideas. If we love ideas, then it behooves us to love even those ideas that are wholly in error. And it behooves us as well to seek out those who would deign to show us the error of our ways. In an open world where ideas reign, love of ideas will become its own politics.

10 Hz

2013-05-04T10:59:00.001-04:00

... and a little review

Primary Care Watch (American Edition)

2013-04-25T09:28:00.002-04:00

Media critiques of circumstances for primary care providers are on the rise, doubtlessly as a result of the soon to be implemented A.C.A. Here is one illustration:

"Primary care is highly respected here. That's not the case anymore in America," said [Grady] Snyder. "In the United States, health care has become more about the business of making money. The personal side of medicine is going away." In fact, Snyder said he wouldn't be surprised if more primary care doctors in the U.S. look for opportunities elsewhere. His own contract expires at the end of June but he's renewing it for another two years.

Much of the critique seems to be directed at hospital profits, regardless of quality care. The Washington Post, for example, observes in a blog post:

The study underscores how ludicrous the incentives are in the American health care system, generally paying doctors for each medical service they provide, even if some of that care is the result of a surgery gone wrong. “If you personalize this and a relative is having heart surgery, which gets complicated by pneumonia, I don’t think we would want a hospital’s profit to go up as a result of that pneumonia,” said study co-author Barry Rosenberg, a partner in Boston Consulting Group’s health care practice. The study does not imply that hospitals intentionally complicate surgeries to bring in more revenue. Most surgeries, about 95 percent, go off without a hitch. What it does suggest to the surgeon, writer and Harvard professor Atul Gawande is that hospitals now see little reason to invest in technologies that would reduce complications when the only prize at the end would be lower income.

Steven Brill's essay "Bitter Pill" publish by Time Magazine is yet another example - and a very good one at that. But maybe - just maybe - there is another question we should be directing at media outlets. Where were you before this? Oh, sure, there were some opinion columnists who took stands on these issues. And the medical and scientific press have been discussing these problems for decades. But the sad reality is that these healthcare problems have been recognizable and growing for decades. Sociologists, historians of medicine, doctors and surgeons, and medical consumers have been talking about these issues for decades. But how often have major media outlets stated "our healthcare is the best in the world for those who can afford it" or "healthcare access and quality in America when compared to other nations declined again" without bothering to go deeper. If you don't remember, just revisit commentaries and analysis of Michael Moore's Sicko to see how willing mainstream and non-mainstream media outlets were to address in a rigorous way points raised in Moore's documentary. Recall these remarks?

What happens when you wring out a washcloth in outerspace? orbiting

2013-04-18T13:20:00.000-04:00

Awesome.

For Brain Box "Statistical Power is Truth Power"

2013-04-16T07:28:00.003-04:00

In a really excellent essay, "Brain Box" argues that too-much scientific analysis relies upon under-powered data collection:

If you were previously content with 20 participants for fMRI, then perhaps you should recruit 40. If you have always relied on 100 cells, then perhaps you should collect data from 200 cells instead. Yes, these are arbitrary values, but there is nothing arbitrary about improving statistical power. And you can be absolutely sure that the extra time and effort (and cost) will pay dividends in the long run. You will spend less time analysing your data trying to find something interesting to report, and you will be less likely to send some other research down the miserable path of persistent failures to replicate your published false positive.

I would add to this point that too little attention is paid to the actual interpretations attached to the statistical findings. Recall Danziger's comments about statistical analysis in his Constructing the Self:

In the older kind of practice one manipulated experimental conditions in order to test hypotheses about the processes going on in individual psychophysical systems. Now, the direct purpose of experimentation was to make predictions about how certain variations in conditions affected the response of an abstract individual. Because in practice such an individual was statistically and not psychologically real, questions of psychological inference very easily became transformed into questions of statistical inference....

It seems to me that statistics are the major problem for philosophers and sociologists of science. Statistics work perfectly but it is not transparent that their object transcends statistics. Putting it differently, statistics would work as well in a Freudian paradigm of self-hood as they could in a neurochemical paradigm of self-hood. I am sure that there are any number of statisticians who could identify even more profound cases.

COLLOQUIUM ON THE HISTORY OF PSYCHIATRY AND MEDICINE

2013-04-15T14:08:00.000-04:00

Department of Postgraduate and Continuing Education, McLean Hospital and the Center for the History of Medicine, Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Ware Room, fifth floor, Countway Library of Medicine, Harvard Medical Area

Open to students of history and those valuing a historical perspective on their professions.

4:00 P.M.—5:30 P.M., September 19, 2013
The Spread of the Lamaze Method of Childbirth 1940s-1970s: Ideologies and Poiitics

Paula Michaels, Ph.D.: Lecturer in Modern History, Monash College

4:00 P.M.—5:30 P.M., October 24, 2013: The Crackers and the Trick Cyclists: The Treatment of Mental Disorder in Royal Air Force Flying During the Second World War

Lynsey Shaw, B.A. (Hons.), M.Sc.: D. Phil. Candidate in the History of Medicine, The Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine, University of Oxford

4:00 P.M.—5:30 P.M., November 21, 2013: From the Parachuting Psychologist to “Mental Health and Psychosocial Support”: Humanitarian Mental Health Interventions Since the 1980s

Ilil Benjamin, M.A.: Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Science and Technologiy Studies, Cornell University

4:00 P.M.—5:30 P.M.m December 19, 2013: Good Spirits and Strong Bodies: Mental Health Treatment in Syria 1903-1961

Beverly Tsacoyianis: Assistant Professor of History, University of Memphis; Doctoral Candidate, Washington University in St. Louis

For further information contact David G. Satin, M.D., Colloquium Director,
phone/fax 617-332-0032, e-mail: david_satin@hms.harvard.edu

Barbaric Rage & Love

2013-04-15T12:20:00.004-04:00

I have rather enjoyed Barbaric Rage & Love's motivations for blogging about neuroscience, evolutionary biology, art, and culture.

Barbaric Rage & Love is meant to ask questions, raise issues, consider possibilities. I don't have any answers. I'm searching too. This is all so new. Universal Darwinism, evolutionary biology, evolutionary psychology, consciousness studies, neurolaw, functional magnetic resonance imagery, genomics, memetics -- most of these and more only started in the last quarter of the twentieth century, or even more recently.

Obvious I don't agree with the triumphalism - but I must also say that I really admire the enthusiasm, curiosity, and boldness. Blogging as a reflection of the "public self" can offer a surprising intimacy for total strangers.

E. O. Wilson has two cents on math

2013-04-10T07:26:00.004-04:00

In the Wall Street Journal, E. O. Wilson suggests that math, while useful, is not essential for good science. He writes:

Over the years, I have co-written many papers with mathematicians and statisticians, so I can offer the following principle with confidence. Call it Wilson's Principle No. 1: It is far easier for scientists to acquire needed collaboration from mathematicians and statisticians than it is for mathematicians and statisticians to find scientists able to make use of their equations.

This imbalance is especially the case in biology, where factors in a real-life phenomenon are often misunderstood or never noticed in the first place. The annals of theoretical biology are clogged with mathematical models that either can be safely ignored or, when tested, fail. Possibly no more than 10% have any lasting value. Only those linked solidly to knowledge of real living systems have much chance of being used.

If your level of mathematical competence is low, plan to raise it, but meanwhile, know that you can do outstanding scientific work with what you have. Think twice, though, about specializing in fields that require a close alternation of experiment and quantitative analysis. These include most of physics and chemistry, as well as a few specialties in molecular biology.

I confess that I'm glad someone has said this - I loath that dreaded acronym STEM! But I do wish Wilson had followed up with something equally obvious. While math may matter less than meets the eye for scientists, being a good writer matters more than practically anyone wishes to see for everyone. In short, I'd be all for talking about STEW (Science, Technology, Engineering & Writing), especially because STEW gets at the underlying flaw in throwing STEM into the same pot. Hah!

Putting it differently, I cannot think of any famous scientist who was not also in the first instance a competent writer. Then why do we permit generations of undergraduates studying STEM subjects to undervalue the importance of writing and reading?

Median Specialist Compensation in American Medicine (1995 & 2008)

2013-04-09T16:53:00.000-04:00

B. Sigsbee (2011) p. 924

B. F. Skinner Short Film

2013-04-01T11:50:00.002-04:00

Revue acéphale

2013-03-18T16:46:00.000-04:00

[ ... a variation on a pet theme of mine, written up a good little while ago, to be put up somewhere else. this never happened,

so here it goes.]

“Our thoughts ... were so far mainly focused on the subject of neurology, and more specifically the human nervous system, and there primarily the central nervous system. [...] We selected from prompt action the most complicated object under the sun – literally.”

These second-thoughts – for, there might have been less complicated objects, it seems, but ones more productive to think with - in late November 1946 were making their way into the hands of mathematician Norbert Wiener, the chubby MIT prodigy with a faible for anti-aircraft-defense as well as, evidently, the central nervous system. To no avail, we must assume. Complicated or not, Wiener famously would bring these various objects together, notably in a 1948 treatise (equally famous), titled: Cybernetics. Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. And so would (occasionally at least) the sender, as it were, of above soul-searching message, and quite despite it: physicist John von Neumann, hardly a lesser figure himself and he too a man of many talents - his unfinished, posthumous The Computer and the Brain (1958) would only cap off a far-flung oeuvre .

Maverick thinkers both of them, both Wiener’s and von Neumann’s names, to be sure, have come to stand for many things: dawn of the information age, the figure of the cyborg, game theory, artificial intelligence, ‘non-modern’ ontologies and more – a great many narratives of departure, incision and transformation. The one that interests me here, you may have guessed it, has to do (but not quite) with that most complicated object under the sun, the brain; and to be precise, with its history. This history too, in one way or another, is a story prominently featuring these two cyberneticists above, whose scandalous equation of men and machines, of brains and computers, has been eagerly embraced by a great many scholars in order to – whatever the case may be - celebrate, castigate, frame, or (at its best) historicize our own, contemporary condition: a condition that has everything, or at least a lot, to do with the brain – and its science.

This at any rate is a notion that would appear quite inescapable for anyone drawn, in some capacity or another, to the multiplying discourses surrounding this (according to some) science of the 21^st century; it would seem quite inescapable as well should you be a believer when it comes to pursuing things in their ‘neuro’-prefixed variety (say, neuro-aesthetics or neuro-economics). And certainly the histories of neuroscience that we tell, or that are being told, tend to suggest this much, whether your choice is academic or not-so-academic (‘popular’) history, whether you turn to wikipedia or the BBC 4: it’s primarily the central nervous system that will be featured. Thus, while in fact the genesis of the so-called ‘modern’ (ie. twentieth-century) neurosciences remains a largely uncharted territory, when it comes to accounting for how we may have arrived here, in a world that so seemingly is, or will soon be replete with neuroscience’s profoundly biological vision of the human, not unlikely that the answer will be: we’ve been there before. The little vignette above, to be sure, picks up on only one, if rather influential, such cerebro-centric storyline: cybernetics - or the “study of control and communication in animals, machines, and Society” (in Wiener’s words). Historians know of many. You name it: the heretic doctrines of a Descartes or de La Mettrie; the science of phrenology in the early 19^th century; the rise of the “double brain” in the Victorian era, or the spread of biopsychiatry in Wilhelmine Germany; the origins of the EEG and of neuro-transmitters in the interwar period; the stories of lobotomy, of psychopharmaceuticals or of the confluence of computational machinery and minds in the 1940s and 50s. What is more, as would all good and proper history of science, such (pre)histories of neuroscience largely spell “history of culture” today; and for all practical purposes this too implicates the brain and more specifically the notion that we’ve already lived through so many cultures of the brain or “neuro-cultures”: namely, all those that have preceded, shaped, and preconfigured the current one. Perhaps, then (or this would be the not entirely untypical gesture in this connection), let’s not get too excited; for, all knowledge is local, historical specific, and relative. Or perhaps then (if you are so inclined), all this was just groping in the dark; time to worry about the science of the 21^st century (this too, a perfectly possible reading of the record). I wouldn’t know; and at any rate, my point will be a different one. My point will be that the thinkers/critics of neuroscience might do well in thinking twice before entangling neuroscience too emphatically and exclusively with heady concepts such as (especially) brains and minds, culture and human nature.

Taking my cue from von Neumann above – the one apropos the main focus of “our thoughts” - this little piece, then, aims to sketch a slightly different way of looking at things. Not because I believe that there isn’t much to learn from histories of the brain (indeed, much remains to be done); but, because I believe that, being histories with that particular and peculiar focus, they tend to be complicit with the neuro-scientific discourses they profess to critically engage. Not that all such histories do come with this critical impetus; not that all such histories would share one single, simplistic agenda. What stories of neuroscience tend to share however – and that would be true not only for its histories, but most analyses and appropriations of neurosciences - is that they usually, typically, and at times very programmatically so, indeed are stories of the brain; which, implicitly or explicitly, tend to be stories of human nature in turn. And here resides the problem, I should think; at least in so far the goal is to think through the present neuro-vogue: because it is so charged, the brain, as von Neumann feared, might not be the most productive object to thing to think with. Take his own case: the ways that cybernetics - never exactly a modest enterprise - has come to routinely frame accounts of mid-twentieth century neuroscience, is a vivid example of how our stories tend to reproduce, rather than question, the dramatic categories prescribed by the neuroscientific discourses themselves: revolutionary departure (or discontinuity), mind/body problem, (post) human nature, grandiose topics such as language, life and memory - it’s all prominently there; titles tend to speak for themselves: Transformations of the Human, The Mind’s New Science, How we came Posthuman, or Sketches of Another Future, to cite just a few. The common reading, accordingly, of above message is, that, however unhappy von Neumann might have been with the focus of “our thoughts”, these cyberneticists still had their hands in the making of a new science of the brain and mind; the implication typically being that, of course, it is human nature that must have been stake.

And no doubt that the brain did get “complex” at the time, and imagined and made accessible by wholly new terms and means. Quite certainly that was the message that, for one, cyberneticists were expertly communicating (and by all means successfully): until very recently the “living brain” had been beyond the reaches of science - for lack of appropriate technologies and concepts - as another prominent such specimen, the British neuropsychiatrist Grey Walter, styled it in 1953; and even so, he added, one did not “accept the brain as a proper study for the physiologist” (who merely “carried to the extreme” the study of nerve, muscle, and other peripheral things: the brain, at best, had been a case for morbid anatomy). These were heady days, to be sure, and there is something to be said, of course, about such ways of telling things. We must already be tuned to the significance of brains, however, to find them entirely persuasive. Looking more closely, above second thoughts indeed can easily point us to another, quite uncerebral reading of such constructions: it will lead us off now into the direction of somewhat less complicated objects – said muscles, nerves and other such peripheral, rather bodily and mindless things. Quite undramatic objects, in short. And we might dwell as well a little longer with Norbert Wiener above to see the point I wish to make plausible here - that it might be worthwhile trying to deflate the accounts of the neuroscientific past that are in circulation; not least, in order to consider in a more sanguine fashion (and in less dramatic terms) the present.

Less appreciated, in any case, than the message apropos the central nervous system which Wiener had received (von Neumann, it should be said, really was interested in coming to terms with calculation machinery), is that Wiener in fact had already made up his own mind in the connection of complicatedness. Indeed it were such second thoughts that made him decamp to Mexico at the time where he and his pal, the neurophysiologist Arturo Rosenblueth, were to study (“rigorously”) a number of other and simpler objects, particularly heart “flutter” and the spike potentials of single nerve fibers. Curiously enough, even these less seemingly more benign objects turned out to exhibit quite complicated, because “non-linear”, behavior. (Very much to Wiener’s excitement, in fact). More relevant here is that they nevertheless, and utterly, failed to impress Wiener’s contemporaries; or, more properly, certain contemporaries and, for that matter, posterity. Tellingly, for example, the cybernetician-cum-anthropologist Gregory Bateson politely declined having them at the Macy Conferences, that (in the view of one its frequenters, the physiologist Ralph Waldo Gerard) “most provocative” cybernetic think tank, asking Wiener to please supply something more provocative instead. Wiener ardently obliged. And he himself, soon to be drawn into the vortex of public fame, never made much of these forays into the non-linearities of the heart, to be sure (as one well-meaning journalist advised him at the time, one better had used ‘channel[s] ... [that] would make the implications of CYBERNETICS amenable to presentation in dramatic and concrete terms with meaning for the average man.”). Well, so what, you may think; poor Norbert Wiener, perhaps he should have kept his hands off cardiology.

Perhaps. And perhaps we need not worry much weren’t it case that Wiener and Rosenblueth had been toying here with objects that were, as far as the sciences of the nervous system were concerned, rather typical; not to say, paradigmatic and mainstream: hearts, and even more so, muscle and nerve – in brief, peripheral nervous systems and not central ones. There was some truth, in other words, in Grey Walter’s cerebro-proselytizing above, that no one, certainly not the physiologists, had bothered much about the “living brain”. And not even about dead brains, we might add, but about its peripheries: the muscles and nerves, the spines and hearts; or, to put things more emphatically, it were neuromuscular bodies that bothered folks. It was this latter subject - smoothly moving, efficiently performing, skillfully labouring bodies - not the living brain, that had been made salient in those years - by, and in, the factories and offices, the sporting grounds, battlefields, and modern machines of mass and high-speed transportation and communication; and hence, the laboratories: “The fitness and the physique and the beauty ... of men and women in their prime”, as muscle-physiologist turned Britain’s foremost biomedical spin-doctor, Walter Morley Fletcher, then defined the object of modern physiology, and of those “living in submarines below the sea, mining far into the earth, or flying to great heights in the air.”

Indeed the obsession of the interwar period especially with the performance of bodies implicated in all these modern situations is all too easily forgotten – thanks, not least, to the (by now) usual focus of “our thoughts” in the matter, and thanks not least to a new generation of brain-ideologues such as Wiener or Grey Walter. Seen through the lens of a later, more brain-aware age, at best it was/is construed as an aberration, a kind of primitive proto-neuroscience not quite ready yet for its true, and truly complicated object. “After World War I, popular demand ... ha[d] reinforced the popular notion limiting physiology of its application relative to the functioning human body,” above Ralph Waldo Gerard would lament in his (very uncybernetic) Mirror to Physiology: A Self-Survey of Physiological Science (1958). And sure enough that this other, bodily and un-cerebral focus was systematic, as Gerard in fact was acknowledging here, and the enterprise correspondingly huge (as might, in fact, not surprise you, if you are versed in the clichés of interwar history). Bodies counted. And what I’d like to sketch below now is an argument as to why one might care - not because it might improve our understanding of Wiener’s thinking or of cybernetics’s pre-history (if anything, the suggestion would be to by-pass, marginalize them in our accounts altogether); not because I want to suggest that neuroscience was really prefigured there and then; not even in order to pit ‘the body’ against ‘the brain’ (though there might be some justification in doing that, given the brain-centredness of today’s discourses apropos “human nature”). The goal would be, as mentioned, to deflate.

Alas, “the body” itself is a category much abused and, not infrequently, romanticized in this connection; as when, for example, theorists of “affect”, “emotion”, or of bodily “flows” tend to flirt with forms of biologism that we might find worrisome in its typically uncritical and selective embrace of (neuro)science. As shall become clearer now as we turn, however briefly, to the peripheral nervous system, ca. 1930, it’s not “bodies” in this sense I wish to remind ourselves of. What I wish to remind ourselves of is the, by and large, banality of its science or, indeed, of the sciences of the nervous, generally. The case at hand – focused as it was on the peripheral nervous system – simply conveys that point quite vividly: Poking a frog’s muscle or the eggs of sea-urchins with an electrode; frightening decerebrated cats; measuring the processes of fatigue of Olympic runners, steel workers or office girls; determining the reaction times and hand-eye coordination of pilots or motorists. There were few things infusing the interwar sciences of the nervous body that would seem to have implicated the brain and/or mind; and fewer still, that would have affected “human nature”. Or if they did, it wasn’t because of “science”, but because “bodies” (and “science”, too) were transforming, anyway. Pick your (brute) cause: taylorism, capitalism, fascism, communism.

There are many ways to make this point; here, let’s have a slightly closer (if much too brief) look at the subject of “skills”, something, it turns out, very bodily indeed (but especially then). While this might not strike you as particularly neuroscientific, its potential relevance in matters of managing dexterous bodies in the (proverbial) “machine-age” is self-evident enough; and it sure does illustrate very nicely the broadly uncerebral “neuroculture” of the interwar period. For, that was an affair that was being played out not least on “the fields of sport and of war, the factory and the farm, the desert, the jungle and the mountains,” as one so-called nerve-and-muscle physiologist had it, writing in 1936 (mind you, the concept “neuroscientist” didn’t even exist at the time). And in this connection, skills, even the certain “subtler” and “high-grade” skills such as those displayed by the stage dancer, motorist, aviator or speed-skater, were a matter too obviously important so as to be “left alone” - or so ventured the physicist-turned-industrial-psychologist Tom H. Pear, operating out of Manchester. For his part author of the seminal Skill in Work and Play - devoted to “the problems in the acquisition of muscular or bodily skill” - Pear belonged to those numerous investigators of bodily performance who, sure enough, did not plan to leave them alone. Though they were not easily communicable - the muscular sense, or kinesthetics, “possesse[d] no usable language”, as Pear noted - fortunately, such muscular pursuits no longer eluded the “higher form[s] of thought analysis”: “making”, that was, “the paths of rapid bodily movements visible or of adequately symbolizing them in verbal formulae”.

Such higher forms of analysis now were easily performed indeed, thanks to modern high-speed cinematography, artfully crafted notation systems, and all manner of psycho-physical and physiological methods. Quite apart from Pear’s crusade for the recognition of the muscular sense, prominent clues in the matter were provided by the nature of the tonic and postural reflexes, for example – a surprisingly complicated thing even though it was, primarily, a problematic reaching no further than the spinal cord (hence, too, the popularity in those years, next to factory workers, soldiers and other such “mass material”, of the “decerebrate animal” as a subject of study); clues were also provided by the discharges - strangely patterned and issuing from the body’s peripheries - from the proprioceptive receptors that were hidden away, it turned out, aplenty in the muscles, tendons and ligaments; or again, they were provided by investigations into the then popular subjects such as biomechanics, psychomotorics, or oxygen consumption - the latter a sure sign of “the economy (“skill’’)” with which people consumed their bodily energies (and on which they might want to improve). Both “industrialists” (who, Pear above allowed, might prefer to “skip the illustrations taken from games”) and “open-air athletes” (who, in turn, may “avoid ... those paragraphs containing the word industry”) thus better took notice – here was exposed the elusive, mindless and bodily substrate of what was “an endless variety and complexity of movements”.

Unlike the Wieners and Grey Walters, then, Pear and his allies were not in the habit, in other words, of wasting a lot of thought on the central nervous system. What is more, it was them, and their forays into the mysteries of the muscular sense, or those of the sense-organs, or those of the biophysics of nerve, that defined and shaped what the nervous system in the early twentieth century was all about. And if all this simply smacks of behaviorism to you, or of dodgy Psychotechnik, think twice. At stake weren’t crude reflex-mechanisms and not the raw muscular machines that populated nineteenth century factories and imaginations, as the Psychologie der Arbeitshand [Psychology of the Laboring Hand] helpfully explained - another such telling title (this one penned by the German applied psychologist Fritz Giese who, we might add, traded not simply in psychology here but in a rather more eclectic, and insofar typical, mix of psychophysics, nerve-muscle physiology, and biomechanics). Theirs was a rather more inclusive, complicated and, if you will, de-centred notion of the nervous system and its behaviors: “Nothing”, as Pear’s sometime colleague, Archibald Vivian Hill, wrapped it up on the occasion of the 1933 Century of Progress Exhibition in Chicago, “perhaps can better illustrate nervous action than a short discussion of muscular skill:” “What does a skilful muscular movement feel like to the performer himself; how does he control it as it proceeds; how does he learn it; how does he remember it; how does he reproduce it? [...] How is this done?”

Dashing, sun-tanned and athletic himself (as admirers liked to point out), Hill in his illustrations, here as elsewhere, was fond of gesturing not, as we might be inclined to assume, towards the mysteries of the brain, but the “interplay” of “all moving parts of the body, muscles, tendons and joints” and, to be sure, the “system of nerves” guiding and controlling it (“as accurate and as well-coordinated as may be”). No doubt that his complicated machinery, “fearfully and wonderfully made”, had some sort of “steersman”, as Hill conceded; and nevertheless, coordination, control, or skill (its “economy”) for the likes of Hill were an assemblage of very bodily things: a matter of their actual manifestations, a question of energetic resources, a problem foregrounding the intricate interplay of muscles and nerves: “displayed to perfection [it was] ... in the gracefulness of the expert dancer or figure skater.” And Hill and his numerous assistants (Ralph Gerard above having been one of them), too, spared no effort to elucidate that gracefulness: “vigorous male subjects”, they exerted themselves preferably outdoors or, if need be, on bicycle ergometers; methodologically innovative, they liked to hang up athlete-dummies in wind tunnels or to travel abroad researching Olympic athletes; not liking their all-too-modern London surroundings very much, as often as possible they escaped to the idyllic seashores of Southern England in order to study the phenomena of nervous action, exhaustion and fatigue in spider crabs and other such unlikely partners of the laboring body. Indeed to Hill was due the (then) groundbreaking notion that the very processes underlying “nervous action” themselves were essentially a variation of muscular activity, which in turn was best conceived as a scaled-down version of athletic, efficient motion: violent “exercise”, fatigue, exhaustion, restoration, their economy and coordination: these were universal, neuromuscular phenomena; and, as Hill said, “the problem [was], in a sense, a single one in all these cases.”

Considering that at the time Hill was one of the world’s foremost experts on the physiology of muscle and nerve, indeed pioneering a physiology of athletic movement, such views - cementing the near-identity of muscle, nerve and human bodies - might not strike you as very surprising; they might strike you even less surprising in light of the fact that his patrons (just like Pear’s) – the British, so-called Industrial Fatigue Research Board – had chosen as their express mission the psycho-physiological elucidation of man’s “industrial surroundings”. In practice this meant, next to some industrial psychology and statistics, researches into the physiology of muscular work, the physiology of ventilation and heating, the physiology of vision; or in more concrete terms: studying the effects on bodily performance of heat, noise, atmospheric conditions, lighting, dust, and machinery (ie, its design as well as the “bodily and mental adaption” to it). In brief: so many lines of forces converging on the body, its reactions, its performances, its skills. The brain, while not wholly absent, was nothing like central, not in their discourses and certainly not in practical terms; and the situation would not have differed much elsewhere, whether we had looked into Russia, Germany, France or the USA.

Much more, of course, would need to be said about this, the brain’s absence. But something of this other, uncerebral and bodily neuroculture might have transpired no less; and in this connection, one could certainly do worse than end here on Hill – by any criterion a towering figure in matters of neuromuscular objects (at the time). Hill is also one of those figure who nevertheless cannot be said to have deeply impressed the chroniclers of neuroscience. If so, we may suspect among the reasons the somewhat brain-and-mindless nature of Hill’s entire oeuvre; he, let alone his many rather less distinguished comrades and allies, do not quite seem to fit, that is, the stories we tell, or want to tell about, well, the brain and the advent of its science. Their common object and focus of thought, if there was one, was the peripheral, not the central, nervous system. And gone with that mystified center, I would argue, are many of the subjects we like to invest with significance in this connection, blurring them with implicitly philosophical or anthropological accounts of human nature: mind, memory, language, personhood, free will, the nature of art or literature, and so forth. At any rate, once we discard the assumption that “neuroscience” is, should be, or ultimately will be about the brain/mind, it would seem rather less inevitable that narratives of neuroscience need to fall into the dramatic genre, invariably. The bodily story I have sketched here - periphery-centred as it is - simply was to make plastic, how, more often not, we’re prone to reach too quickly perhaps towards the overly dramatic categories in analyzing the significance of neuroscience, past or present. It might not be warranted; certainly there is a lot of room for less pathos-laden, more nuanced, and indeed, less brain-centered narratives of neuroscience’s genealogies. And it’s little more than this - the relative, actual banality of (most of) neuroscience’s objects - what I was aiming at here; it wasn’t to rehabilitate the Hills or Pears or Gieses, to be sure, or be disrespectful to Wiener and his cybernetic friends. And neither was it to point up, to repeat, some undue neglect of the body in the contemporary neuroworld. The point was to remind ourselves, by way of heeding von Neumann’s advice, as it were, that the brain isn’t all there was (or is); and by implication, that what the stakes involved might be a little lower than what our brain-centred narratives tend to suggest.

Music and the War on the Nerves

2013-03-14T13:15:00.003-04:00

Dr James Kennaway

Dr James Kennaway studied at LSE and the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine before completing a Master's at King's College, London and a PhD at UCLA in 2004. Since then he has worked at the University of Vienna, Stanford University and the Viadrina University in Frankfurt-an-der-Oder, Germany.

When I started work on my book Bad Vibrations: The History of the Idea of Music (link) as a cause of disease on the strange story of medical fears about music, I assumed that the story was more or less over by 1945. The crushing military and ideological defeat of Nazism, with their notions of ‘degenerate music’, did not, however, mean the end of the debate on music as a medical threat. Not only was the Cold War fertile ground for paranoia about music’s effects, it was also a period in which serious work was done to attempt to establish music as a deliberate means of inflicting harm of people’s physical and mental health via the nervous system. Pavlovian and Behaviourist conceptions of reflex action were used to promote a view of music as a trigger of neurological responses that could be manipulated by those in power. Moreover, it soon became clear to me that our own times are the real Golden Age of anxiety about music and its medical impact. The internet has provided scope for the development of many new (and old) theories about the supposed impact of certain kinds of music on physical and mental health. More alarmingly, it also seemed that after outlining innumerable nineteenth and twentieth-century accounts of fears about music, my book would have to end with music that was actually doing people serious harm in the context of acoustic weapons and the systematic use of music in torture. This blog post takes a look at the bizarre and worryingly topical question of the use of music in the ‘war of nerves’.

Music as a Weapon

The use of music in warfare, to give courage to one side and intimidate the other, has been a recurring theme in many cultures. In some ways, of course, the military use of music goes back at least to Joshua’s trumpets at the battle of Jericho. However, the emergence of sound as a serious weapon has depended on recording and amplification technology and is still perhaps in its infancy. The German media theorist Friedrich Kittler pointed to the military roots and connections of much modern media technology, noting for example, that radio broadcasting was merely an extension of the military communication systems of World War One without the ability to speak back. Audiotape, stereo sound and many other developments also owed their origins in large part to the military. As he put it, ‘The entertainment industry is, in any conceivable sense of the word, an abuse of army equipment’.

The development of acoustic weapons has often occurred in response to particular military and political circumstances, most notably the American experience in Vietnam, the British in Northern Ireland and the Israeli occupation of the West Bank. It is no coincidence that such techniques have been pioneered by democratic states, where there is greater incentive to develop means of causing pain and controlling others that do not look bad when featured in the media. Weapons with science fiction names such as Beams, Blast Wave, Bullets, Curdler Unit and Deference Tones have been created and marketed. Some of them use ultrasound, that is, sound lower than 20 Hz per second, below the limit of human hearing and therefore beyond the realm of music. Others, however, use music to inflict physical and psychological harm, potentially damaging the health of those affected. Although media coverage of the subject tends to veer from hysterical technophobia to smirking trivialization, acoustic weapon are making progress.

The American use of music as a weapon in Vietnam was most famously exemplified in the scene in Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now in which General Kilgore has Wagner played from assault helicopters. This was by no means artistic license, but reflected the practical military reality of ‘audio harassment’ in the war. Since the end of the Vietnam War, the most well known use of music as a psychological weapon was during the American siege of the Vatican embassy in Panama in 1989 when US troops in Panama played music at Vatican embassy to flush out the ousted dictator Manuel Noriega. A few years later, the American authorities played Nancy Sinatra’s ‘These Boots were Made for Walking’ at the disastrous Branch Davidian Cult siege at Waco, Texas. The ‘War against Terror’ has been a boom time for the developers of acoustic weapons, especially the Long Range Acoustic Device (LRAD), which is sold both to concert organizers and to the military, a striking example the emerging entertainment-military complex. The LRAD has been used to repel so-called ‘looters’ in New Orleans in the chaotic aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and to control crowds at protests in Pittsburgh.

Music and the Conditioned Reflex: Brainwashing

The idea of music as a potentially dangerous hypnotic force that might overwhelm listeners had been fairly common in the late nineteenth century, but had faded considerably during the early decades of the twentieth century. With the rise of dynamic psychology in the wake of Freud, the assumptions made by Charcot and his colleagues about the automatic character of hypnotic responses to music went out of fashion. However, after the Second World War, the influence of Ivan Pavlov and Behaviorism in psychology and beyond led to something of a revival in medical attention to ‘musical hypnosis’, especially in the context of the emerging concept of ‘brainwashing’ - the idea that external forces could destroy the autonomy of listeners and achieve real mind control. Although many on the Left have fretted about the music’s power to undermine the political autonomy of the audience, it proved particularly popular on the Right. This is perhaps due to the emphasis the right has put on unconscious irrational drives and their lack of faith in the power of the autonomous self to resist external forces, something which has often made them interested in the psychology of automatic response. In any case, the theme of musical brainwashing has recurred many times since the Second World War, generally relating to fears of subversion of the individual and national will by external forces.

The term ‘brainwashing’ emerged during the Korean War, when it was feared that Communists had developed powerful forms of mind control. The CIA then promoted the term to explain the behaviour of American POWs and began its own research into such techniques, some of which used music. The CIA supported extensive research into sensory deprivation, sometimes using noise, as a means of extracting information. For example, it was later revealed that much of the work done in Montreal in the 1950s by Donald Hebb into sensory deprivation techniques and by Ewen Cameron on ‘psychic driving’, the use of drugs, insulin and tape recordings to wipe the memories of mental patients, was funded via CIA front organizations such as the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology. In the following decades the US authorities developed forms of ‘no touch torture’ including music at places such as the School of the Americas, an American training centre for anti-Communist military and paramilitary personnel. Music appears to have been used in torture in a number of regimes that had secret policemen trained by the CIA. For instance, Julio Iglesias was played to political prisoners by the Argentine military dictatorship.

A Pavlovian view of music as brainwashing was apparent in books such as Battle for the Mind by the prominent English psychiatrist William Sargant, which portrayed rock ‘n’ roll as a dangerous threat to the mind. He later argued in an interview in Newsweek that Patty Hearst had been turned from an heiress kidnap victim into a politically motivated armed robber by loud rock music. The notion of music as a means of brainwashing appears in Anthony Burgess’s 1962 novel A Clockwork Orange and the 1971 Stanley Kubrick film adaptation, both of which depict the fictional ‘Ludovico Technique’, a form of aversion therapy that involves being forced to watch scenes of graphic violence while hearing music, finally combining images of Nazi atrocities with the protagonist’s favourite music, Beethoven.

In America right-wing evangelical Christians have used the idea of rock music as a sinister form of brainwashing to argue that it was literally a Communist plot. David Noebel, today better known for writing bestsellers with the ‘Left Behind’ author Tim LHaye, argued that, ‘The Communist scientists and psycho-politicians have devised a method of combining music, hypnotism and Pavlovianism to nerve-jam the children of our nation without our leaders, teachers or parents being aware of its shocking implications’. ‘If [such] scientific programmes [were] not exposed,’ he warned, ‘degenerated Americans will indeed raise the Communist flag over their own nation’. He provided ingenious if paradoxical reasoning to explain why Communist states banned rock music although it was their own sinister invention - it just showed that they know how dangerous it really was! Along with well-worn themes relating to sex and drugs, Noebel also brought to light a less common aspect of music’s dangers – the threat posed to plants. He reported an experiment conducted by Mrs Dorothy Retallack of Denver that demonstrated, he claimed, that avant-garde classical music made plants wilt and Led Zeppelin made them die.

Cold War fears about Soviet capacities in this regard were reflected by the joke scene in Billy Wilder’s 1961 comedy One, Two, Three in which the song ‘Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weeny Yellow Polka-Dot Bikini’ drives the young Communist Otto Piffl to make a false confession. The CIA supported extensive research into sensory deprivation, sometimes using noise, as a means of extracting information.

The American anxiety about musical brainwashing that developed in the context of the Cold War in the 1950s was in part shifted onto another supposed worldwide conspiracy during the Reagan era - Satanism. During the 1980s and 1990s a full-scale moral panic swept the country, linking the pseudo-science of brainwashing, the literal belief in a supernatural satanic threat and the musical genre of heavy metal. A wide range of books with titles like The Devil’s Disciples, and (my personal favourite) Hit Rock’s Bottom accused certain bands of brainwashing innocent American teenagers with subliminal messages to lure them into the worship of the devil, sexual immorality, murder and suicide. One apparent element of this diabolical plot was the use of so-called ‘Backmasking’, hidden messages in the music that only made sense to the conscious mind when played forwards, which, it was argued, could influence listeners subliminally and thus damaging their mental health. Self-proclaimed experts often disagreed about what dangerous message was hidden in the music, and exposed themselves to ridicule with their analysis of backmasking tracks. One well-known preacher in Ohio publicly burned a recording of the theme tune to the TV series Mr. Ed (which featured a talking horse) because he said it had ‘Someone sing this song for Satan’ backwards.

The Musical War on the Nerves in the ‘War on Terror’

The notion that music could play a role in manipulating automatic and conditioned responses in the nervous system to control behaviour has found an alarming echo in government policy over the past few decades in terms of the use of music in torture. Since the attack on the World Trade Center in New York in September 2001 the use of torture in the West became an overt political issue. In a way that would have seemed inconceivable beforehand, torture in certain circumstances has been openly advocated in the press in democratic countries. At the same time, senior Bush administration figures began to redefine the terms ‘torture’ and ‘prisoner of war’ to allow ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ to be used against captives held at a large number of camps, most famously at Guantanamo Bay in the American enclave in Cuba, Abu Ghraib in Iraq and Bagram in Afghanistan. Typically for a democratic state in the post-war era, the American techniques avoided the clichés of torture and anything that would leave obvious physical scars. Nevertheless, these techniques, which as well as the use of music, included extreme temperatures, being shackled in stress positions for hours and waterboarding, were intended to cause extreme levels of physical and mental distress. They are considered to be torture by most observers, including the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture, and in many cases, the American authorities have previously treated them as torture when they were used against their own soldiers.

The kinds of music used to inflict pain on prisoners varied widely. A Freedom of Information Act request from the National Security Archive, a civil rights organization, revealed that the following music was regularly used. ‘AC/DC, Aerosmith, the 'Barney & Friends' song, The Bee Gees, Britney Spears, Bruce Springsteen, Christina Aguilera, David Gray, Deicide, Don McLean, Dope, Dr. Dre, Drowning Pool, Eminem, Hed P. E., James Taylor, Limp Bizkit, Marilyn Manson, Matchbox Twenty, Meat Loaf, the 'Meow Mix' jingle (an ad for cat food), Metallica, Neil Diamond, Nine Inch Nails, Pink, Prince, Queen, Rage Against the Machine, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Redman, Saliva, the 'Sesame Street' music, Stanley Brothers, the Star Spangled Banner, Tupac Shakur’. In some ways this may seem a fairly random list of contemporary American music. However, several different strategies appear to be at play. Some of the music used, such as the song ‘Fuck your God’ by the heavy metal band Deicide aimed at the religious humiliation of Muslim prisoners. Similarly, sexually explicit songs by the likes of Britney Spears and Christian Aguilera were a form of the sexual humiliation of prisoners from socially conservative countries that also took the form of enforced nakedness and worse.

Much of the music concerned clearly amounts to what Slavoj Zizek has called an ‘initiation into American culture’, an attempt to browbeat and terrify foreign captives with the signs of American victory. Often this is done with an implicit assertion of victorious American masculinity over the vanquished. That certainly seems to be the context for the comments made by American Sergeant Mark Hadsell, interviewed by Newsweek, who said that his personal favourites include the song ‘Enter Sandman’ by the heavy metal band Metallica. ‘These people haven't heard heavy metal before’, he explained. ‘They can't take it’. Another form of psychological suffering using music relates to what some in the US military termed ‘futility music’, highly repetitive songs, often from children’s TV, which would break the will to resist in those being questioned. These elements, combined with the sensory overload that could be (and is) achieved with white noise, is designed to ‘fry’ detainees, making them pliable for questioning. As Hadsell put it, ‘If you play it for 24 hours, your brain and body functions start to slide, your train of thought slows down and your will is broken. That's when we come in and talk to them’. The psychological effects of this cannot easily be dismissed. There are reports of self-mutilation caused by many hours of such treatment. One detainee left in a cell with loud rock and rap music and strobe lighting for many hours literally tore his own hair out.

When the use of enhanced interrogation techniques became well known, some organizations, such as the American Psychiatric Association and the American Medical Association passed resolutions against their members’ involvement in such practices. However, the American Psychological Association did not do so until 2007. In 2005 they explicitly stated that members were not barred from ‘national security endeavours’, and as late as August 2006, the US Army Surgeon General, General Kevin Kiley, spoke at the American Psychological Association, dressed in full uniform and declared that ‘Psychology is an important weapon system’. Although musicologists were certainly not directly implicated in the same was as psychologists, it is striking that the American Musicological Society only passed a resolution against the use of music in torture in 2008, after a similar resolution failed in 2007. Among musicians there has been a variety of responses. Some, like R.E.M., Pearl Jam, David Gray and Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails, complained about use of their own music and objected to the practice in general. In Britain, the anti-torture charity Reprieve started the ‘Zero dB’ campaign to protest against the use of music in torture, which has supported by a significant number of musicians. Others, including Stevie Benton of Drowning Pool and James Hetfield of Metallica, have publicly supported the use of their music as part of interrogation techniques. Benton told Spin magazine that he took it as an honour.

Much of the media coverage of the music as torture issue has been in shockingly bad taste. American TV, radio and print media in particular have generally regarded this possible breach of the Geneva Convention against people who on the whole have not even been charged with a crime as a subject for humour. Indeed, some of the reports have been stomach churning. For instance, the American musician Christopher Cerf, whose music for the children’s television programme Sesame Street seems to have been used as part of interrogation techniques, expressed satisfaction that it ‘might really help out’, and cracked jokes about the royalties he was due. However, in subsequent media appearances, Cerf has been vociferous in his condemnation of torture. Susan Cusick acutely notes the extent to which American press reports on musical torture seem to invite the reader to identify with the torturer rather than the victim and to regard the whole business as a joke. This attitude was reflected in the pivotal scene in the film adaptation of Jon Ronson’s book Men who Stare at Goats. Having achieved some form of redemption by releasing a man being tortured with music in Iraq, the protagonist is sickened to see the idea being a subject for humour on American TV on his return.

The ways that music has been instrumentalised to inflict damage on the neurological and psychological health of ‘listeners’ over the past few decades is of course in sharp contrast to most people’s associations with music with wellbeing and music therapy. Along with the continuing debate on the hypnotic powers of the ‘wrong’ sort of music on the young, it also displays a remarkable degree of continuity not only to twentieth-century debates on Pavlovian conditioned response but also to nineteenth-century worries about music as a source of nervous over-stimulation. Discussion of Victorian psychiatry often takes a rather moralising and critical tone about the authoritarian character of the discipline and the abuses involved. What has been happening over the last few decades, with the active collaboration of a good number of physicians and psychologists, has been in many ways just as sinister. Critical approaches to neuroscience and the history of medicine have often been implicitly political, but issues of this kind perhaps demand more active engagement.

Deep History vs. Big History

2012-12-16T09:14:00.000-05:00

In a rather remarkable demand for serial contextualization in "Big History", David Armitage writes of deep history:

Big history in all its guises has been inhospitable to the questions of meaning and intention so central to intellectual history. This is not simply for the banal reason that the big historians usually scrutinize such a superficial slice of recorded history at the end of their grand sweeps: the skin of paint on the top of the Eiffel Tower, in Mark Twain’s marvellous metaphor. Nor is it just because human agency dwindles in significance in the face of cosmological or even archaeological time. It is due, for the moment at least, to the essential materialism of the two main strains of big history, what we might call the biologistic and the economistic tendencies.

The biologistic tendency is neurophysiologically reductive: when all human actions, including thought and culture, can be explained by brain chemistry, reflections approximate to reflexes. In the economistic strain, intellect is assimilated to interests. Each age simply “gets the thought that it needs”. For instance, whether it’s Buddhism, Christianity or Islam in the Axial Age, it’s all the same in the end: simply the product of the problem-solving capacity of some rather clever but needy chimps. In these regards, at least when it treats the questions of most concern to intellectual historians, deep history can appear to be somewhat shallow.

Oh, it’s so mainstream now.

2012-12-11T13:58:00.000-05:00

You’re unlikely to have missed Alissa Quart’s op-ed piece ‘Neuroscience– Under Attack’ the other week in the New York Times. Indeed it has caused, or so it appears, some considerable stir in and beyond the tiny (one assumes) sub-universe of the social-media-sphere peddling in ‘neuro-doubt’; appreciations in the more visible online formats – including Psychology Today, The New Yorker, or NPR - were quick to celebrate the news that, apparently, ‘neuro-criticism’ now must have ‘hit the mainstream’. The ‘backlash has begun!’

The impression, of course, that the era of untrammeled neuro-fandom is somewhat beyond its peak is probably quite correct - whether or not the New York Times is in fact a good indicator of things becoming ‘mainstream’ (given the flurry of reposts etc in the case at hand, it might be a better indicator of the intellectual universe traversed by the more neuro-minded people); and whether or not things becoming ‘mainstream’ is necessarily a good thing (as a cultural snob might doubt). At any rate, perusing what Quart’s recent intervention seems to have precipitated in terms of ‘backlash’ is, on the whole, somewhat disheartening: almost invariably commentators chose to pick up on the term ‘brain porn’ only, (mis)interpreting the piece as merely condemning as a bad and risible Thing ‘pop neuroscience, coarsened for mass audiences’ and more broadly, the ‘popular press’ and ‘simplified pop’ produced by sensation-mongering and, well, ignorant and unscientific science writers. The Real Neuroscientists here, busy unearthing their unsettling Truths about Human Nature; the public mob there, incapable of understanding and thus poised to distort.

It’s a reassuring and conveniently naive construction, of course - if one that would seem to fall short of everything one might be able to learn about the presumably more intricate mechanisms of knowledge production, neoliberal and otherwise (but especially neoliberal). It’s thinking, one might paraphrase it, as ‘sloppy’ as Naomi Wolf’s. Incapable, it seems, of entertaining even a slightly more complex narrative than there being some problem with the merchants of ‘brain porn’ – which, it’s worth pointing out, include some Big university presses (rather than, as tends to be intimidated, a lot of shoddy ‘science writers’) - much of the recent and rather blinkered ‘backlash’ indeed more properly is labelled damage-control (of course, ‘if we want to understand our minds, from which all of human nature springs, we must come to grips with the brain’s biology’). Quart’s piece admittedly didn’t help it by prominently featuring, and slightly misrepresenting, a Neuron survey from earlier this year as concluding that, apropos those regular-distortions-by-the-media, ‘logically irrelevant neuroscience information imbues an argument with authoritative, scientific credibility.’ The latter proposition was due to McCabe and Castel’s much belaboured ‘Seeing is believing’ (2008); said Neuron authors – without a hint of doubt that indeed neuroscience has ‘profound social and policy implications’ - for their part simply assumed that ‘brain research is now a powerful rhetorical tool’ (plausibly enough), while venturing, for instance, (in a more content-oriented mode of analysis) that a ‘particularly noticeable feature’ in all those popular ‘assimilations’ of neuroscience was ‘the focus on brain optimization’ (something unlikely the fault, one assumes, simply of either short-hand: the ‘media’ or ‘neuroscience’).

Either way, and rather tellingly, the story of popular distortions featured quite prominently in the Quart-aftermath, still further incensed by yet another recent study on the ‘seductive allure’ of fMRI - albeit one geared towards questioning the inherent seductiveness of such visual devices (i.e., ‘The seductive allure of the ‘seductive allure’’). The very prominence of such a somewhat scholastic debate in a putative ‘backlash’ might make it seem trivial enough - and, to be sure, not particularly rising above the popular, common sense (An image is worth a thousand words) or what’s been intuitively grasped, somehow, by every Jesuit counter-reformer and propaganda ministry (Ars Magna Lucis et Umbrae etc). More to the point: though largely immaterial, it might tell you just how mainstream the putative ‘mainstream’ really is: Framing things as matters of ‘distortion’ or some psychology of ‘persuasion’ first, and then reducing them to a clever experimental design, would seem to be a strategy squarely in line with the very naturalistic, biologizing tendencies the enemies of ‘brain porn addiction’ allegedly take issue with (the pathology-infused wording itself is revealing in this connection). It certainly would seem to tell you very little indeed about ‘brain porn’; and even less about the cultural and intellectual climate within which it thrives.

But then again, perhaps small wonder: that ‘larger cultural tendency’ which Quart also gestured at, one ‘in which neuroscientific explanations eclipse historical, political, economic, literary and journalistic interpretations of experience’, barely has been registered by any kind of ‘mainstream’, let alone pondered in ways worthy of the name ‘critique’; it certainly didn’t figure much in the ‘backlash’ of late, and neither did those ‘humanities scholars who question the way that neuroscience has seeped into their disciplines’, as Quart put it. That, of course, might not be a topic of potential mainstream interest; but even for that to become productive, a little more will be required than some ‘pop-neuroscience’ witch-hunt.

GIS & "The Blitz"

2012-12-10T15:00:00.000-05:00

This really cool source provides some geographical texture to the impact of the bombing campaign on London during 1940 and 1941. It is staggering.

The First Night of the Blitz.

My paper on civilian morale provides some further context.

Networked Dystopia and The Differend

2012-12-09T09:04:00.002-05:00

Ubisoft Montreal_Watch Dogs "Blackout" from Patrick Clair on Vimeo.

What is invoked in the phrase of freedom is not a power in the sense of an eventuality, but one in the sense of an ability to act, that is, an ability to be a first cause from the cosmological point of view. Such a cause cannot be validated through experience. No fact can be presented which might serve as an example of this first causality or spontaneity. If it is possible, however, to deduce the spontaneity of the situation of obligation, which is apparently its contrary, it is because the latter necessarily implies the former.

Jean-Fraçois Lyotard, The Differend

Darwinism; Philosophy; Neurology

2012-12-07T15:51:00.002-05:00

In 1928 a review of Samuel Alexander Kinnier Wilson's Modern Problems in Neurology dressed the pages of the British Medical Journal. In an otherwise rather dismissive statement, the reviewer proffered towards the close the following observation:

We have outlined above some of the principle problems which confront the neurologist at present. It is natural to conclude with an inquiry as to the direction in which we may look for their solution. Comparative physiology received an immense impetus from Darwinian emphasis upon man's animal characteristics. The neurologist nowadays, however, is constantly being reminded of human uniqueness. Man's erect attitude sets a wide gulf between himself and his nearest simian relatives, and it is becoming increasingly evident that there are many human neural activities upon which experiment, even though apes and monkeys be the subjects, can throw little or no light. Disease and war are the great experimenters in human physiology, but the size and often multiplicity of the lesions produced by these blind and careless workers renders the task of drawing physiological deductions from pathological states extremely complex. But the refractoriness of his material adds zest to the work of the artist, and it is to an element of art in neurological, and indeed in all medical, research that we would draw conclusion. Neurology has always proved attractive to minds of philosophical outlook, for the neurologist has continually to deal in a practical way with those problems of the relations of body and mind which exercise the philosopher in the rarefied atmosphere of his study. (BMJ, Nov. 3, 1928, p. 803)

Who exemplified this fact the most? Of course it was John Hughlings Jackson!

Ophthalmology and General Medicine, Britain 1951

2012-12-06T12:25:00.003-05:00

The ideal of the generalist, c. 1951

The work of Allbutt, Jonathan Hutchinson, Gowers, and a multitude of other clinicians has forged a permanent link between ophthalmology and general medicine. It was encouraging, therefore, to see this traditional relationship being maintained at the annual congress of the Ophthalmological Society of the United Kingdom, which was held in London from March 29 to 31.

"At the Ophthalmological Congress" British Medical Journal (1951): 879.

"Integrative Action of the Nervous System": Notes to Charles Sherrington's Important Lectures

2012-12-06T08:09:00.005-05:00

Charles Sherrington, The Integrative Action of the Nervous System, 1 ed., (London, Oxford University Press 1906).

"It is then around the cerebrum, its physiological and psychological attributes, that the main interest of biology must ultimately turn".

- Charles Scott Sherrington, 1906

About the author and book see here for an early precis of everything below.

Unanswered questions - that I wish someone would answer

1. Why are the prefaces from each of the editions of "The Integrative Action of the Nervous System" different and what do those differences represent?

2. Take note of the way that knowledge from medicine, zoology, histology and pathology is integrated into Sherrington'sargument. Explain the "generality" in historical terms.

3. How are metaphors used throughout this work. What do they do? What historical contexts and realities do they reveal? This may require a close reading and some creative inferences. Consider:

“The direction of the stream of liberation of energy along the pattern of the nervous web varies from minute to minute. The final common path is handed from some group of a plus class of afferent arcs to some group of a minus class, or of a rhythmic class, and then back to one of the previous groups again, and so on. The conductive web changes its functional pattern within certain limits to and fro. It changes its pattern at the entrances to common paths. The changes in its pattern occur there in virtue of interaction between rival reflexes, "interference". As a tap to a kaleidoscope, so a new stimulus that strikes the receptive surface causes in the central organ a shift of functional pattern at various synapses. The central organ is a vast network whose lines of conduction follow a certain scheme of pattern, but within that pattern the details of connection are, at the entrance to each common path, mutable. The gray matter may be compared with a telephone exchange, where from moment to moment, though the end-points of the system are fixed, the connections between starting points and terminal points are changed to suit passing requirements, as the functional points are shifted at a great railway junction.” (p. 233)

4. Sherrington writes, “It is widely and wisely held that natural knowledge pursues the question "how" rather than the question "why". The "why" involves a judgment whose data lie so beyond present human experience and comprehension that self-abnegation in regard to the desire to attempt it is not only prudent, but to the unbiased judgment a necessity” (p. 235). Does such a thoughtful remark bode well for the future direction of the neurological turn? Are these observations still true?

5. Sherrington states that “Professor James writes: "our natural way of thinking about these coarser emotions (e.g. grief, fear, rage, love) is that the mental perception of some fact excites the mental affection called the emotion, and that this latter state of mind gives rise to the bodily expression. My theory, on the contrary, is that the bodily changes follow directly the perception of the exciting fact, and that our feeling of the same changes as they occur IS the emotion. Every one of the bodily changes, whatsoever it be, is FELT acutely or obscurely, the moment it occurs.” How does Sherrington’s theory of emotions compare with those of other philosophers, psychologists, and physiologists?

6. Is this text "bio-medicine?"

Lecture I: The Simple Reflex

(p. 1)
The cell theory at its inception depended for exemplification largely on merely morphological observations; just as these formed originally the almost exclusive texts for Darwinian doctrine of evolution. But with the progress of natural knowledge, biology has passed beyond the confines of the study of merely visible form, and is turning more and more to the subtler and deeper sciences that are branches of energetics.

(p.2)
The physiology of the nervous system can be studied from three main points of view.

In the first place, nerve-cells, like all other cells lead individual lives, -- they breath, they assimilate, they dispense their own stores of energy, they repair their own substantial waste; each is, in short, a living unit, with its nutrition more or less centred in itself. Here, then, problems of nutrition, regarding each nerve-cell and regarding the nervous system as a whole, arise comparable with those presented by all other living cells. Although no doubt partly special this specially differentiated form of cell-life, these problems are in general accessible to the same methods as apply to the study of nutrition in other cells and tissues and in the body as a whole.

Secondly, nervous cells present a feature so characteristically developed in them as to be specially theirs. They have in exceptional measure the power to spatially transmit (conduct) states of excitement (nerve-impulses) generated within them. Since this seems the eminent functional feature of nerve-cells wherever they exist, its intimate nature is a problem co-extensive with the existence of nerve cells, and enters into every question regarding the specific reactions of the nervous system. This field of study may be termed that of nerve-cell conduction.

But a third aspect which nervous reactions offer to physiologists is the integrative. In the multicellular animal, especially for those higher reactions which constitute its behaviour as a social unit in the natural economy, it is nervous reaction which par excellence integrates it, welds it together from its components and constitutes from a mere collection of organs an animal individual. This integrative action in virtue of which the nervous system unifies from separate organs an animal possessing solidarity, an individual, is the problem before us in these lectures.

(p. 3)
But the integrative action of the nervous system is different from these, in that its agent is not mere intercellular material, as in connective tissue, nor the transference of material in mass, as by the circulation; it works through living lines of stationary cells along which dispatches waves of physico-chemical disturbance, and these act as releasing forces in distant organs (p. 4) where they finally impinge.

(p.5)
It is in view of this interconnecting function of the nervous system that the field of study of nervous reactions which was called at the outset the third or integrative, assumes its due importance. The due activity of the interconnection resolves itself into the co-ordination of the parts of the animal mechanism by reflex action.

It is necessary to be clear as to what we understand by the expression "reflex" action.

In plants and animals occur a number of actions the initiation of which is traceable to events in their environment. The event in the environment is some change which acts on the organism as an exciting stimulus. The energy which is imparted to the organism by the stimulus is often far less in quantity than the energy which the organism itself sets free in the movement or other effect which it exhibits in consequence of the application of the stimulus.... p. 6 In such cases there exist, three separable structures for the three processes -- initiation, conduction, and end-effect. Yet to cases where neither histologically nor physiologically a specific conductor can be detected, it seems better not to apply the term "reflex". It seems better to reserve that expression for reactions employing specifically recognizable nerve-process and morphologically differentiated nerve-cells; the more so because the process of conduction in nerve is probably a specialized one, in which the qualities of speed and freedom from inertia of reaction have been attained to a degree not reached elsewhere since not elsewhere demanded.

(p. 7)
The conception of a reflex therefore embraces that of at least three separable structures, -- an effector organ, e.g. gland cells or muscles cells' a conducting nervous path or conductor leading to that organ; and an initiating organ or receptor whence the reaction starts.

For our purpose the receptor is best included as a part of the nervous system, and so it is convenient to speak of the whole chain of structures -- receptor, conductor and effector -- as a reflex-arc.

The reflex-arc is the unit mechanism of the nervous system when that system is regarded in its integrative function. The unit reaction in nervous integrative reaction and no nervous action short of a reflex is a complete act of integration.

Co-ordination, therefore, is in part the compounding of reflexes. In this co-ordination there are therefore obviously two grades.

The simple reflex. There is the co-ordination which a reflex action introduces when it makes an effector organ responsive to excitement of a receptor, all other parts of the organism being supposed indifferent to and indifferent for that reaction.

(p. 8)
A simple reflex is probably a purely abstract conception, because all parts of the nervous system are connected together and not part of it is probably even capable of reaction without affecting and being affected by various other parts, and it is a system certainly never absolutely at rest. But the simple reflex is a convenient, if not a probable, fiction. Reflexes are of various degrees of complexity, and it is helpful in analyzing complex reflexes to separate from them reflex components which we may consider apart and therefore treat as thought they were simple reflexes.

(p. 9)
Co-ordination in the simple reflex.

From the point of view of its office as integrator of the animal mechanism, the whole function of the nervous system can be summed up in the one word, conduction.

But we have first to remember that in dealing with reflexes even experimentally we very usually deal with them as reactions for which the reflex-arc as whole and without any separation into constituent parts is laid under contribution. The reflex-arc thus taken includes the receptor. It is assuredly as truly a functional part of the arc as any other. But, for analysis of the arc's conduction, it is obvious that by including the receptor we are including a structure which, as its name implies, adaptation has specialized for excitation of a kind different from that obtaining for all the rest of the arc. It is therefore advantageous, as we have to include the receptor in the reflex-arc, to consider what characters its inclusion probably grafts upon the functioning of the arc.

(p. 12)
The main function of the receptor is therefore to lower the threshold of excitability of the arc for one kind of stimulus, and to heighten it for all others.

(p. 14-15)
Indeed there is no go evidence that neuroglia is concerned directly in nervous conduction at all.

(p. 16)
We know of no reflex -arc composed of one single neurone only. In other words, every reflex-arc must contain a nexus between one neurone and another. The reflex-arc must, therefore, on the cell-theory, be expected to include not only intracellular conduction, but intercellular conduction.

…if there is not actual continuity of physicial phase between them, there must be a surface of separation. Even should a membrane visible to the microscope not appear, the mere fact of non-confluence of the one with the other implies the existence of a surface of separation. Such a surface might restrain diffusion, bank up osmotic pressure, restrict the movement of ions, accumulate electric changes, support a double electric layer, alter in shape and surface tension with changes in surface-tension or in shape, or intervene as a membrane between dilute solutions of electrolytes of difference concentration or colloidal suspensions with different signs of charge.

(p. 18)
In view, therefore, of the probably importance physiologically of this mode of nexus between neurone and neurone it is convenient to have a term for it. The term introduced has been synapse.

(p. 19)
It would seem, therefore, that the more intense the stimulation the more the conduction along the reflex-arc comes to resemble in speed the conduction along simple nerve-trunks.

[The reflex latency may occur because:] The neurone itself is visibly a continuum from end to end, but continuity, as said above, fails to be demonstrable where neurone meets neurone -- at the synapse. There a different kind of transmission may occur. The delay in the grey matter may be referable, therefore, to the transmission at the synapse.

(p. 35)
Conduction along reflex-arcs presents in contrast to that along nerve-trunks characters that may be figuratively described as indicating inertia and momentum. It is as though in the case of a weight to be pulled from a position of rest the attractive force were applied through a rigid rod in nerve-trunk conduction, but through a relatively yielding elastic band in reflex-arc conduction. But there are other differences between the two forms of conduction which this simple simile does not figure.

Lecture II: Co-ordination in the Simple Reflex

(p. 36)
Summation of subliminal stimuli so that by repetition they become effective is practically unknown in nerve-trunk conduction. But it is a marked feature of reflex-arc conduction. Nor is it attributable to muscles whose contraction may serve as index of the reflex-response, since summation of this extent is not known for vertebrate skeletal muscle, though found by Richet in the claw-muscle of the crayfish.

A striking dissimilarity, therefore, between reflex-arc conduction and nerve trunk conduction is that in reflex-arc conduction and nerve-trunk conduction is considerable resistance is offered to the passage of a single nerve-impulse, but the resistance is easily forced by a succession of impulses; in other words, sub-liminal stimuli are summed.

[In contrast to the Medusa] In the chains of nerve-cells of higher animals such as Arthoropods and Vertebrates, although the conduction is reversible in each nerve-cell -- at least along that piece of it which forms a nerve-fibre -- the pluricellular chain in toto constitutes a polarized conductor, conductive in one direction only. In such cell-chains the individual nerve-cells are characterized morphologically by possessing two kinds of cell-branches, which differ one from another in microscopic form, the one kind dendrites, the other axons.

(p. 42)
Since in many well-known instances the dendrites conduct impulses away from their free ends, while axone conducts towards its free end, it is possible on mere microscopic inspection of nerve-cells of this type to infer by analogy the normal direction of the conduction through the nerve-cell. But in the nerve-cells forming the nerve-network of Medusa there seems no such distinct differentiation of their branches into two types.

(p. 42)
…if the synaptic membrane be permeable only in one direction to certain ions, that may explain the irreversibility of conduction. The polarised conduction of nerve-arcs would be related to the one-sided permeability of the intestinal wall, eg to Na Cl.

(p. 45)
Refractory phase was first called attention to by Kronecker and Stirling in 1874, in the heart, and recognized by them as a fact of central importance for cardiac rhythm. In 1876 Marey met the phenomenon and gave it the name by which it is now known. A year later Romanes' fundamental work on Medusa demonstrated the existence of the same phenomenon there. The inconspicuous duration of the phase in nerve-trunk conduction and the progress of the view that regards the heart beat as of myogenic origin have contributed to delay recognition of refractory phase as a character of reflex-arc reactions.

By refractory period was originally meant by Marey the time during which the heart was inexcitable to a stimulus however intense. But to-day by refractory phase is understood a state during which, apart from fatigue, the mechanism shows less than its full excitability.

(p. 55)
The reflex-arc consists, therefore, of at least three neurones. It is convenient to have a term distinguishing the ultimate neurone FC from the rest of the arc. For reasons to be given later it may be spoken of as the final common path. The rest of the arc leading up to the final common path is conveniently termed the afferent arc.

(p. 69)
It is clear that an essential part of many reflexes is a more or less prolonged refractory phase succeeding nervous discharge.

Refractory phase appears therefore at the one end and the other of the animal scale as a factor of fundamental importance in the co-ordination of certain motile actions. In the lowly animal form (Medusa) it attaches locally to the neuro-muscular organ, and so also in the visceral and blood-vascular tubes of Vertebrates. But in higher forms (dogs) refractory phase occurs as regards the taxis of the skeletal musculature, not in the peripheral neuro-muscular organ, but in the centres of the nervous system itself.

Lecture III: Co-Ordination in the Simple Reflex (concluded)

(p. 70)
A further difference between the reaction of a reflex-arc and that of a nerve-trunk lies in the greater ease with which in the latter the intensity of effect can be graded by grading the intensity of the stimulus.

(p. 72)
The scratch-reflex, though it resembles the heart beat in relative immutability of rhythm under change of intensity of stimulation, differs from it is the change of intensity of its beat, which follows change in intensity of stimulus. It does not observe the "all-or-none" principle. It is obvious that in the heart beat the object is to put a pressure on the contents of the ventricle higher than that obtaining in the aorta, and that aim reached, any further excess of pressure is useless or harmful, for it subjects the heart and arterial wall to an unnecessary strain. Clifford Allbutt remarks: "It is the function of a healthy heart and arteries to promote the maximum of blood displacement with the minimal alteration of pressures."

(p. 80)
Again, a number of agents, e.g., strychnine, tetanus toxin, etc., that do not appreciably affect nerve-trunk conduction enormously alter reflex-arc conduction. All these seem to exert their influence on some part of the reflex conductor which lies in gray matter. It is interesting to ask whether they, e.g. (p. 82) strychnine, have an effect similar to their spinal effect when exhibited Bethe's preparation of the second antenna ganglion of Carcinus, whence the motor perikary have been removed. If these agents have their locus of incidence at the synapse, it must be conceded that they act with very different intensities at different synapses.

Lecture IV: Interaction between Reflexes

(p. 114)
We have hitherto dealt with reflex reactions under the guise of a convenient but artificial abstraction, -- the simple reflex. That is to say, we have fixed our attention on the reaction of a reflex-arc as if it were that of an isolable and isolated mechanism, for whose function the presence of other parts of the nervous system and of other arcs might be negligible and wholly indifferent. This is improbable. The nervous system functions as a whole. Physiological and histological analysis finds it connected throughout its whole extent.

(p. 115)
A reflex reaction, even in a "spinal animal" where the solidarity of the nervous system has been so trenchantly mutilated, is always in fact a reaction conditioned not by one reflex-arc but by many. A reflex detached from the general nervous condition is hardly realizable.

The compounding together of reflexes is therefore a main problem in nervous co-ordination. For this problem it is important to recognize a feature in the architecture of gray-centred (synaptic) nervous system which may be termed "the principal of the common path". If we regard the nervous system of any higher organism from the broad point of view a salient feature in its scheme of construction is the following.

At the commencement of ever reflex-arc is a receptive neurone extending from the receptive surface to the central nervous organ. This neurone forms the sole avenue which impulses generated at its receptive point can use whithersoever be their destination. This neurone is therefore a path exclusive to the impulses generated at its own receptive point, and other receptive points that its own cannot employ it.... Yet all its reflex-arcs spring from the one single shank or stem, i.e. from one afferent neurone which conducts from the receptive point at the periphery into the central nervous organ.

But at the termination of every reflex-arc we find a final neurone, the ultimate conductive link to the effector organ (muscle or gland). This last link in the chain, e.g. the motor neurone, differs obviously in one important respect from the first link in the chain. It does not subserve exclusively impulses generated at one single receptive source, but receives impulses from many receptive sources situated in many and various regions of the body. It is the sole path which all impulses, no matter (p. 115) whence they come, must travel if they are to act on the muscle fibres to which it leads.

(p. 116)
Reflex-arcs show, therefore, the general features that the initial neurone of each is a private path exclusively belonging to a single receptive point (or small group of points); and that finally the arcs embouch into a path leading to an effector organ; and that their final path is common to all receptive points wheresoever they may lie in the body, so long as they have connection with the effector organ in question. Before finally converging upon the motor neurone the arcs converge to some degree. Their private paths embouch upon intenuncial paths common to various degree to groups of private paths. The terminal path may, to distinguish it from internuncial common paths, be called the final common path. The motor nerve to a muscle is a collection of final common paths.

[2 consequences here for p. 116-117:] "one of these seems the preclusion of essential qualitative difference between nerve-impulses arising in different afferent nerves." "A second consequence is that each receptor being dependent for final communication with its effect organ upon a path not exclusive its own but common to it with certain other receptors, such a nexus necessitates successive and not simultaneous use of the common path by various receptors using it to different or opposed effect.

(p. 118)
We note an orderly sequence of actions in the movement of animals, even in cases where every observer admits that the co-ordination is merely reflex. We see one act succeed another without confusion. Yet, tracing this sequence to external causes, we recognize that the usual thing in nature is not for one exciting stimulus to begin immediately after another ceases, but for an array of environmental agents acting concurrently on the animal at any moment to exhibit correlative change in regard to it, so that one or other group of them becomes -- generally by increase in intensity -- temporarily prepotent.

[RESPONSE TO THIS PROBLEM TWO WAYS:] p. 118. In the simultaneous correlation of reflexes some reflexes combine harmoniously, being reactions that mutually reinforce. These may be termed allied reflexes, and p. 119 the neural arc which they employ allied arcs. On the other hand some reflexes, as mentioned above, are antagonistic one to another and incompatible. These do not mutually reinforce, but stand to each other in inhibitory relation. One of them inhibits the other, or a whole group of others. These reflexes may in regard to one another be termed antagonistic; and the reflex or group of reflexes which succeeds in inhibits its opponents may be termed "prepotent" for the time being.

(p. 129-130)
"There exists a further important class of cases in which reflexes have "allied" relation. Throughout a vast range of animal types the bulk formed by the organism presents to the environment a surface sheet of cells, and, beneath that, a mass of cells more or les screened from the environment by the surface sheet. Many of the agencies by which the environment acts on the organism do not penetrate it far enough to reach the cells of the deep mass inside. Bedded in the surface layer of the organism are numbers of receptor cells constituted in adaptation to the stimuli delivered by environmental agencies. But the organism itself, like the world surrounding it, is a field of ceaseless change, where internal energy is continually being liberated, whence chemical, thermal, mechanical, and electrical effects appear. It is a microcosm in which forces which can act as stimuli are at work as in the macrocosm around. The deep tissues underlying the surface sheet are not provided with receptors of the same kinds as those of the surface, yet they are not devoid of receptors. They have receptors specific to themselves. The receptors which lie in the depth of the organism are adapted for excitation consonantly with changes going on in the organism itself, particularly in its muscles and their assessory organs (tendons, joints, blood-vessels).

(p. 135)
But not all reflexes connected to one and the same final common path stand to one another in the relation of "allied reflexes". Suppose during the scratch-reflex a stimulus be applied to the foot not of the scratching side, but of the opposite side. The left leg, which is executing the scratch reflex in response to stimulation of the left shoulder skin is cut short in its movement by stimulation of the right foot, although the stimulus at the shoulder to provoke the scratch movement is maintained unaltered all the time. The stimulus to the right foot will temporarily interrupt a scratch reflex, or will cut it short or will delay its onset; which it does of these depends on the time-relationships of the stimuli.

(p. 141)
It was argued above (Lecture III), from the morphology of the perikaryon, that it must form, in numerous cases, a nodal point in the conductive lines provided by the neurone. The work of Ramon-y-Cajal, van Guhchten, v. Lenhossek, and others with the methods of Golgi and Ehrlich, establishes as a concept of the neurone in general that it is a conductive unit wherein a number of branches (dendrites) converge toward, meet at, and coalesce in a single outgoing stem (axone). Through this tree-shaped structure the nervous impulses flow, like the water in a tree, from roots to stem. The conduction does not normally run in the reverse direction. The place of junction of the dendrites with one another and with the axone is commonly the perikaryon. This last is therefore a nodal point in the conduction system. But it is a nodal point of particular quality. It is not a nodal point where lines meet to cross one another, nor one where one line splits into many. It is a nodal point where conductive lines run together into one which is the continuation of them all. It is a reduction point in the system of lines. The perikaryon with its convergent dendrites is therefore just such a structure as spatial summation and immediate induction would demand.

(p. 144)
It is the transference of the final common path from the group of one set of reflexes to another which constitutes the change which occurs at each step of the orderly sequence of reaction that we see normally succeeds each other in animal behavior -- leaving aside all question of consciousness in relation to the sequence. This transference is most obvious when the sets of reflexes between which the final common path is exchange are antagonistic reflexes. Two classes of this kind of case of specially common occurrence are "alternating reflexes" and "compensatory reflexes".

Lecture V: Compound Reflexes: Simultaneous Combination

(p. 150)
A large part of co-ordination consists in the orderly combining of reflexes. In studying this co-ordination we have to deal with and discriminate between simultaneous combinations and successive combinations of reflexes. We may proceed to attempt the former problem.

Irradiation
If by appropriate stimulation of the skin of the foot, say by unipolar faradization of a spot of the plantar skin of a digit, the ordinary flexion-reflex of the hind limb of the dog be evoked, the extend of the reflex increases with increase in the intensity of the stimulus. The reflex effect spreads over a larger and larger field, irradiating as it were in various directions from a focus of reflex-discharge, which takes effect on the limb itself.

(p. 151)
The more intense the spinal reflex -- apart from strychnine and similar convulsant poisoning -- the wider, as a general rule, the extent to which the motor discharge spreads around its focal area.

(p. 152)
That the reaction should spread in its spatial extent is not surprising. The afferent neurone on entering the central organ, the spinal cord enters a vast network of conduction of paths interlacing in all directions. A glance at any Weiget preparation of the spinal cord shows a tangle of branching nerve fibres, the richness and intricacy of which seems practically infinite. Into this forest the receptive neurone conducts impulses, and can itself be traced breaking up into divisions that pass in many directions and various distances. And this web of conductive channels into which the centripetal impulses of the reflex are thus launched is known to be practically a continuum in the sense that no part of the nervous system is isolated from the rest. [Sherrington quotes A Donaldson’s American Textbook of Physiology, 1900) "A group of nerve-cells disconnected from the other nerve-tissues of the body, as the muscles or glands are disconnected from each other, would be without physiological significance. To understand the physiology of the nervous system it is important to keep in mind the fact that by histology it is found to be continuous throughout its entire extent.

Short and Long Reflexes

(p. 157)
The cord may, in its relation to the receptive surface and skeletal musculature, be considered divisible into right and left lateral halves, each subdivisible into regions of neck (cervical, including pinna), fore limb (brachial), trunk (thoracic), hind limb (curaral), and tail (caudal). A reflex action in which the stimulus applied to a receptive area in one of the above regions evokes a reaction in the musculature of another of the regions is conveniently called a long spinal reflex. A reflex reaction in which the muscular reply occurs in the same region as the application of the stimulus is conveniently called a short spinal reflex. Short spinal reflexes are, as a rule, more easily and regularly elicitable than are long spinal reflexes.

(p. 178)
Thus at any single phase of the creature's reactions, a simultaneous combination of reflexes is in existence. In this combination the positive element, namely, the final common paths (motor neurone groups) in active discharge, exhibits a harmonious discharge directed by the dominant reflex-arc, and reinforced by a number of arcs in alliance with it.

(p. 179)
Therefore it is that the reflex initiated by one group of receptors while in progress excludes in various directions the reflexes of other receptors, although these latter may be being stimulated. In this way the motor paths at any moment accord in a united pattern for harmonious synergy, co-operating for one effect.

The notion, therefore, that we arrive at of such a motor reflex reaction is that it is referable to a constellation of congruous stimuli of which one is prepotent, and that the reaction taken in its totality gives the nervous intercommunications of the central organ a certain pattern, which pattern may ramify through a great extent of the central organ.... Even in extensive reflexes of the bulbo-spinal animal it is probably that though great fields of the nervous centres are involved in the reaction at any one time, large parts are still left outside the reaction. This part of the neural network would therefore be indifferent to that particular reaction. That amounts to saying that it is open during the reaction to be thrown into activity by some concurrent and distinctive other reaction. But this possible neutrality and discreteness of reflex reaction and its fields is probably far less in the intact higher vertebrate than in the lower or in the mutilated higher vertebrate. In the presence of the brain the knitting together of the whole nervous network is probably much greater than in its absence.

Lecture VI: Compound Reflexes: Successive Combination

(p. 181)
We consider last the co-ordination of reflexes in simultaneous combination. We now turn to sequences of reflexes. Reflexes are seen to follow one another in consecutive combination. And in this chaining together of successive reflexes in different instances different kinds of processes seem traceable. Of these, one consists in the reaction to one external stimulus bringing about an application of an external stimulus for a second reflex.

(p. 182)
Orderly sequence of movement characterizes the outward behaviour of animals. Not least so where, as in the earthworm crawling, or the insect in flight, or the fish swimming, every observer admits the coadjustment is essentially reflex. One act succeeds another without confusion. Yet tracing this sequence to its external causes, we recognize that the usual thing in nature is not for one exciting stimulus to begin immediately after another ceases, but for an array of environmental agents acting concurrently on the animal at any moment to exhibit correlative change in regard to it, so that one or other group of them becomes -- generally by increase in intensity -- temporarily prepotent.

(p. 192)
We do not yet understand the intimate nature of inhibition. In the cases before us now, its seat is certainly central, and in all probability is, as argued above, situated at points of synapses. I have urged that a prominent physiological feature of the synapse is a synaptic membrane. It seems therefore to me that inhibition in such cases as those before us is probably referable to a change in the condition of the synaptic membrane causing a block in conduction. But what the intimate nature of the inhibitory change may be we do not know.

(p. 193)
One view [of inhibition] has been that, as the process of conduction along nerve-fibres is an undulatory one in the sense that the nerve-impulse travels as a disturbance with wave-like configurations of intensity, inhibition is due to a mutual suppression of two wave-like disturbances impinging on the same point of the conductor but in opposite phases of disturbance.

(p. 194)
Moreover, as we shall see presently, central inhibition is not a neutral process, for, at least in many cases, it leaves the reflex centre surcharge for subsequent response.

The most striking thing that we know of inhibition is that it is a phenomenon in which an agent such as in other cases excites or increases an action going on in this case stops or diminishes an action going on. Now, the activity of a tissue can be lowered or abolished by production in it of deleterious changes such as exhaustion or, in the highest degree death. But there is no evidence that inhibition of a tissue is ever accompanied by the slightest damage to the tissue; on the contrary, it seems to predispose, the tissue to a greater functional activity thereafter.

(p.222)
The waning of a reflex under long maintained excitation is one of the many phenomena that pass in physiology under the name of "fatigue". It may be that in this case the so-called fatigue is really nothing but a negative induction. Its place of incidence may lie at the synapse. It seems a process elaborated and preserved in the selective evolution of the neural machinery. One obvious use attaching to it is the prevention of the two prolonged continuous path by any one receptor. It precludes one receptor from occupying for long periods an effector organ to the exclusion of all other receptors. It prevents long continuous possession of a common path by any one reflex of considerable intensity. It favours the receptors taking turn about. It helps to insure serial variety of reaction. The organism, to be successful in a million-sided environment, must in its reactions be many-sided. Were it not for such so-called "fatigue", an organism might, in regard to its receptivity, develop an eye, or an ear, or a mouth, or a hand or leg, but it would hardly develop the marvelous congeries of all those various sense-organs which it is actually found to possess.

(p. 226) Species of reflex. A fourth main determinant for the issue of the conflict between rival reflexes seems the functional species of the reflexes. Reflexes initiated from a species of receptor apparatus that may be termed "noci-ceptive" appear to particularly dominant the majority of the final common paths issuing from the spinal cord.

(p. 227)
With its liability to various kinds of mechanical and other damage in a world beset with dangers amid which the individual and species have to win their way in the struggle for existence we may regard nocuous stimuli as part of a normal state of affairs. It does not seem improbably therefore that there should under selective adaptation attach to the skin a so-to-say specific sense of its own injuries.

(p. 194)
Moreover, as we shall see presently, central inhibition is not a neutral process, for, at least in many cases, it leaves the reflex centre surcharge for subsequent response.

The most striking thing that we know of inhibition is that it is a phenomenon in which an agent such as in other cases excites or increases an action going on in this case stops or diminishes an action going on. Now, the activity of a tissue can be lowered or abolished by production in it of deleterious changes such as exhaustion or, in the highest degree death. But there is no evidence that inhibition of a tissue is ever accompanied by the slightest damage to the tissue; on the contrary, it seems to predispose, the tissue to a greater functional activity thereafter.

(p. 222)
The waning of a reflex under long maintained excitation is one of the many phenomena that pass in physiology under the name of "fatigue". It may be that in this case the so-called fatigue is really nothing but a negative induction. Its place of incidence may lie at the synapse. It seems a process elaborated and preserved in the selective evolution of the neural machinery. One obvious use attaching to it is the prevention of the too prolonged continuous use of a "common path" by any one receptor. It precludes one receptor from occupying for long periods an effector organ to the exclusion of all other receptors. It prevents long continuous possession of a common path by any one reflex of considerable intensity. It favours the receptors taking turn about. It helps to insure serial variety of reaction. The organism, to be successful in a million-sided environment, must in its reactions be many-sided. Were it not for such so-called "fatigue" an organism might, in regard to its receptivity, develop an eye, or an ear, or a mouth, or a hand or leg, but it would hardly develop the marvelous congeries of all those various sense-organs which it is actually found to possess.

(p. 226) Species of reflex: A fourth main determinant for the issue of the conflict between rival reflexes seems the functional species of the reflex.

(p. 231)
It would seem a general rule that reflexes arising in species of receptors which considered as sense-organs provoke strongly affective sensation caetris paribus prevail over reflexes of other species when in competition with them for the use of the "final common path". Such reflexes override and set aside with peculiar facility reflexes belonging to touch organs, muscular sense-organs, etc. As the sensations evoked by these arcs, e.g. pain exclude and dominate concurrent sensations, so do the reflexes of these arcs prevail in the competition for possession of the common paths.

(p. 231-232)
Therefore, intensity of stimulation, fatigue and freshness, spinal induction, functional species of reflex, all these are physiological factors influencing the result of the interaction of reflex-arcs at a common path. It is noticeable that they all resolve themselves ultimately into intensity of reaction. Thus, intensity of stimulus means as a rule intensity of reaction. Those species of reflexes which are habitually prepotent in interaction with others are those which are habitually intense; those specially impotent in competition are those habitually feeble in intensity, e.g. skeletal muscular tone. The tone reflexes of attitude are of habitually low intensity, easily interfered with and temporarily suppressed by intercurrent reflexes, these latter have higher intensity. But these latter suffer fatigue relatively early, whereas the tonic reflexes of posture can persist hour after hour with little or no sign of fatigue. Fatigue; therefore, in the long run advantageously re-dresses the balance of an otherwise unequal conflict. We can recognize in it another agency working toward that plastic alternation of activities which is characteristic of animal life and increases in it with ascent of the animal scale. The high variability of reflex reactions from experiment to experiment, and from observation to observation, is admittedly one of the difficulties that has retarded knowledge of them. Their variability, though often attributed to general conditions due to changes produced in the central nervous organ by its own functional conductive activity apart from fatigue. This functional activity itself causes from moment to moment the temporary opening of some connections and the closure of others. The chains of neurons, the conductive lines, have been, especially in recent years, by the methods of Golgi, Ehrlich, Apathy, Cajal, and others richly reveals to the microscope. Anatomical tracing of these may be likened though more difficult to accomplish, to tracing the distribution of blood vessels after Harvey's discover had given them meaning, but before the vasomotor mechanism was discovered. The blood-vessels of an organ may be turgid at one time, constricted almost to obliteration at another. With the conductive network of the nervous system the temporal variations are even greater, for they extend to absolute withdrawal of nervous influence. Under reflex inhibition a skeletal muscle may relax to its post-mortem length, ie there may then be no longer evidence of even a tonic influence on it by its moto neurone. The direction of the stream of liberation of energy along the pattern of the nervous web varies from minute to minute. The final common path is handed from some group of a plus class of afferent arcs to some group of a minus class or of a rhythmic class, and then back to one of the previous groups again, and so on. The conductive web changes its functional patter within certain limits to and fro. It changes in its pattern occur there in virtue of interaction between rival reflexes, "interference". As a tap to a kaleidoscope, so a new stimulus that strikes the receptive surface causes in the central organ a shift of functional pattern at various synapses. The central organ is a vast network whose lines of conduction follow a certain scheme of pattern, but within that pattern the details of connection are, at the entrance to each common path, mutable. The gray matter may be compared with a telephone exchange, where, from moment to moment, though the end-points of the system are fixed, the connections between starting points and terminal points are changed to suit passing requirements, as the functional points are shifted at a great railway junction.

Unlike reflexes have successive but not simultaneous use of the common path; like reflexes mutually reinforce each other on their common path. Expressed teleologically, the common path, although economically subservient for many and various purposes, is adapted to serve but one purpose at a time. Hence it is a co-ordinating mechanism and prevents confusion by restricting the use of the organ, its minister, to but one action at a time.

Lecture VII: Reflexes as Adapter Reactions

(p. 235)
It is of course as impossible to disprove as to prove that psychical events accompany, or that they do not accompany the nervous reactions of the spinal animal. It is significant, however, that the best-known controversy (Pfluger, Lotze) as the psychical powers of the spinal cord, occurred prior to the advent of the Darwinian theory of evolution. This latter suggests how purposive neural mechanisms may arise. If furnishes a key to the genesis and development of adapted reactions and among these latter, reflexes.

That a reflex action should exhibit purpose is no longer considered evidence that a psychical process attaches to it; let along that it represents any dictate of choice or will. In light of Darwinian theory every reflex must be purposive. We here trench upon a kind of teleology. It is widely and wisely held that natural knowledge pursues the question "how" rather than the question "why". The "why" involves a judgment whose data lie so beyond present human experience and comprehension that self-abnegation in regard to the desire to attempt it is not only prudent, but to the unbiased judgment a necessity.

Older writings on reflex action concerned themselves boldly with the purpose of the reflexes they described. The language in which they are couched shows that for them the interest of the phenomena centred in their being regarding as manifestations of an informing spirit resident in the organism, lowly or mutilated thought that might be. Progress of knowledge has tended more and more to unseat this anthropomorphic image of the observer himself which he projected into the object of his observations. The teleological speculations accompanying such observations have been proportionately discredited.

The impetus given to biology by the doctrine of adaptation under natural selection, felt so strongly by morphological studies, seems hardly as yet to have begun its course as a motive force in physiology. But signs being to be numerous that such an era is at hand. The infinite fertility of the organism as a field for adapted reaction has become more apparent. The purpose of a reflex seems as legitimate and urgent an object for natural enquiry as the purpose of the colouring of an insect or a blossom. And the importance to physiology is, that the reflex reaction cannot be really intelligible to the physiologist until he knows its aim.

In general terms we may say that the effect of any reflex is to enable the organism in some particular respect to better dominate the environment. One often hears objections take to epithets -- common in writings on biology -- "lower" and "higher" as applied to organisms, plant and animal. Such objection seems valid if the phrase assumes that the "lower" organism any less perfectly fulfils its "purpose" or "design" than does the higher, or in those respects in which it has commerced with the environment is any less admirably adjusted than is the higher. But "lower" and "higher" may be used without any connotation of that kind. In the course of evolution a number of organisms have become so adapted to the environment as to dominate it more various and extensively than do other organisms. In that sense some organisms are higher and some are lower. In that sense man is the highest organism. And if evolution be a process of gradual and more or less uninterrupted course it is obvious that the highest form achieved will also be among the latest of the forms achieved. This grading of rank in the animal scale will be nowhere more apparent than in the nervous system in its office as integrator of the individual. The more numerous and extensive the responses made by a creature to the actions of the world around upon its receptors, the more completely will the bundle of reflexes, which from this standpoint the creature is, figure the complexity of the world around, mirroring it more completely than do the bundles of reflexes composing "lower" creatures.

(p. 238)
Grainger's conclusion was that spinal cutaneous reflexes "are either of a preservative character or resemble the movements which the functions of the organ require."

(p. 239)
There are of course two modes of preservation, namely, escape and defense.

(p. 255)
Bodily Resonance of Emotions. Some sensations are neutral or devoid of affective tone, while others are rich in affective tone. The development of these latter is closely connected with the origin of the coarser emotions. A physiological interest attaches to these states of emotion since certain reactions of the bodily organs are, as is well known, characteristic of them. That marked reactions of the nervous arcs regulating the thoracic and abdominal organs and the skin contribute characteristically to the phenomena of emotion has been common knowledge from time immemorial.

To this bodily resonance of the emotion has in recent years been assigned by some authorities a prominent role in the mechanism of the production of the emotional state itself in certain of the coarser emotions. Instead of the emotional state beginning as Ladd puts it as "a sort of nerve storm in the brain, whence there descend an excitement which causes commotion in the viscera and vascular regions -- thus secondarily inducing an organic reverberation" -- the vie has been advance that the cerebral and psychological processes of emotion are secondary to an immediate reflex reaction of vascular and visceral organs of the body suddenly excited by certain stimuli of peculiar quality.

(p. 256)
Of points where physiology and psychology touch, the place of one lies at "emotion". Built upon a sense-feeling much as cognition is built upon sense-perception, emotion may be regarded almost as a "feeling" -- a feeling excited, not by a simple little-elaborated sensation, but by a group or train of ideas. To such compound ideas it holds relation much as does "feeling" to certain species of simple sense-perceptions. It has a special physiological interest in that certain visceral reactions are peculiarly colligate with it. Heart, blood-vessels, respiratory muscles, and secretory glands take special and characteristic part in the various emotion. These viscera, though otherwise remote from general place of psychical process are affected vividly by the emotional. Hence many a picturesque metaphor of proverb and phrase and name -- "the heart is better than the head" and "swells within the breast", "Richard Coeur de Lion". It was Descartes who first promoted the emotion to the brain. Even last century, Bichat wrote, "The brain is the seat of cognition and is never affected by emotions, whose sole seat lies in the viscera". But the brain is now thought to be a factor necessary in all higher animals to every mechanism whose working has consciousness as an adjunct.

What is the meaning of the intimate linkage of visceral actions to psychical states emotional? To the ordinary day's consciousness in the healthy individual the life of the viscera contributes little at all, except under emotion. The perceptions of the normal consciousness are rather those of outlook upon the circumambient universe than inlook into the microcosm of the "material me". Yet heightened beating of the heart, blanching or flushing of blood-vessels, the pallor of fear, the blush of shame, the Rapelaisian effect of fright upon the bowel, the secretion by the lachrymal gland in grief, all these are prominent characters in the pantomime of natural emotion. Visceral disturbance is evidently a part of the corporeal expression of emotion. The explanation is a particular case in the problem of movements of expression in general.

(p. 257)
They must have an explanation the same in kind as that of instinctive movement. There is no real break between man and brute even in the matter of mental endowment. The instinctive bodily expressions of emotion arose, in the opinion of those quotes above, as attitudes and movements useful to the animal for defence, escape, seizure, embrance, etc. These as survivals have become symbolic for states of mind. Hence, an intelligible nexus between muscular attitude, the pose of feature, etc., and the emotional state of mind. But between action of the viscera and the psychical state the nexus is less obvious. This latter connection adds a difficult corollary to the general problem.

The fact of the connection is one all hands admitted, but as to the manner of it opinion is at issue. Does (I) the psychical part of the emotion arise and its correlate nervous action then excite the viscera? p. 258 Or (2) does the same stimulus which excites the mind excite concurrently and per se the nervous centres ruling the viscera? Or (3) does the stimulus which is the exciting cause of the emotion act first on the nervous centres ruling the viscera, and their reaction then generate visceral sensations; and do these latter, laden with affective quality as we know they will be, induce the emotion of the mind? On the first of the three hypotheses the visceral reaction will be secondary to the psychical, on the second the two will be collateral and concurrent, on the third the psychical process will be secondary to the visceral.

Professor James writes: "our natural way of thinking about these coarser emotions (e.g. grief, fear, rage, love) is that the mental perception of some fact excites the mental affection called the emotion, and that this latter state of mind gives rise to the bodily expression. My theory, on the contrary, is that the bodily changes follow directly the perception of the exciting fact, and that our feeling of the same changes as they occur IS the emotion." Every one of the bodily changes, whatsoever it be, is FELT acutely or obscurely, the moment it occurs."

(p. 267)
In view of these general considerations and of the above experiments, we may with James accept visceral and organic sensations and the memories and associations of them as contributory to primitive emotions, but we must regard them as reinforcing rather than initiating the psychosis. Organic and vascular reaction, though not the actual excitant of emotion, strengthen it. This is the kernel of the old contention about actuality of emotion in the art of the artist. Hamlet's description of the actor as really moved by his expression may be accepted as an answer.

(p. 270)
Progress of knowledge in regard to the nervous system has been indissolubly linked with determination of localization of function in it. This has been so from the time of the Bell-Magendie discovery of the difference of function in the two spinal roots and Flourens delimitation of the respiratory centre in the bulb. The discovery of localization of function in parts of the cortex has given the knowledge now supplies to the student charts of the functional topography of the brain much as maps of continents are supplied in a geographical atlas. The student looking over the political map of a continent may little realize the complexity of the populations and states so simply represents. We looking at the brain chart of the text-book may never forget the unspeakable complexity of the reactions thus rudely symbolized and spatially indicated.

(p. 303)
Hughlings Jackson with characteristic penetration of thought argued nearly thirty years ago that rigidity ensuing in hemiplegia (hemiplegic contracture) is not owing to the cerebral lesion nor to the lateral sclerosis. He said, "Whilst the primary cerebral lesions can account for the paralytic element it cannot (nor can the sclerosis of the lateral column) account for the tonic condition of the muscles. My speculation is that the rigidity is owing to unantagonized influence of the cerebellum. Whilst the cerebrum innervates the muscles in the order of their action from the most voluntary movements (limbs) to the most automatic (trunk), the cerebellum innervates them in the opposite order. This is equivalent to saying that the cerebellum is the centre for continuous movements and cerebrum for changing movements. Thus, in 'walking' the cerebellum tends to stiffen all the muscles; the changing movements of walking are the result of cerebral discharges overcoming in a particular and orderly way the otherwise continuous cerebellar influence. When the influence of the cerebrum is permanently taken off by disease of the cerebrum, as in hemiplegia, from the parts which it most specially governs (arm and leg) the cerebellar influence (p. 304) is no longer antagonized; there is unimpeded cerebellar influx and hence rigidity of the muscles which in health the cerebrum chiefly innervates. The spinal muscles are those which the cerebrum influences least and the cerebellum most. In health the whole of the muscles of the body are double innervated -- innervated both by the cerebrum and cerebellum: there being a co-operation of antagonism between the two great centres."

(p. 306)
Finally, it seems to me that the number of reflex actions which are "neutral" to each other, in the sense expressed in Lecture II, is less with the cerebral cortex present than without it. This amounts to expressing concretely an inference that the cerebral cortex augments the motor solidarity of the creature. Since there is more solidarity as well as more diversity in those movements of an animal which are directed to its outer environment than to its inner -- meaning by this latter the fraction of environment embraced within its own pulmono-digestive cavity -- the representation of visceral movement in the cortex will be relatively slight and chiefly concern parts where alimentary canal open on outer surface.

Lecture IX: The Physiological Position and Dominance of the Brain

(p. 308)
We may now attempt to gather from the various notions, however fragmentary, that have occupied us, some general conception of the neural architecture of an animal as a whole; though of course only in its motor aspect, for its truly sensorial aspects we have hardly had before us. The problem is too difficult for me to expect much success. Yet it will repay us if from the attempt we glean something at least of one cardinal feature of the scheme, namely, the dominance attained by one limited set of neural segments, the brain, over all the rest.

(p.350)
The head is in many ways the individual's greater part. It is the more so the higher the individual stands in the animal scale. It has the mouth, it takes in the food, including water and air, it has the main receptive organs providing data for the rapid and accurate adjustment of the animal to time and space. To it the trunk, an elongated motor organ with a share of the digestive surface, and the skin, is appended as an apparatus for locomotion and nutrition. The latter must of necessity lie at the command of the great receptor-organs of the head. The co-ordination of the activities of the trunk with the requirements of the head is a cardinal function of the synaptic nervous system. Conducting arcs must pass from the cephalic receptors to the contractile masses of the body as a whole. The spinal cord contains these strands of conductors in vertebrates and is from this point of view a mere appendage of the brain. A salient feature of these conducting arcs is that the nerve-fibres from the cephalic receptors do not run, as might perhaps a priori have been thought natural, direct from their cephalic segment backwards to react the common effector paths upon which they embouch.

(p. 353)
To say this is to say no more than that the motile and consolidated individual is driven, guided, and controlled by, above all organs, its cerebrum.

Lecture X: Sensual Fusion

(p. 354)
The animal whose nervous construction we have been attempting to follow thus far, we have supposed merely a puppet moved by the external world in which it is immersed; and we have supposed it a puppet without passions, memory, feelings, sensations, let alone ideas concrete or abstract. From time to time we have purposely invoked appeal to sensations and feelings such as out own experience of ourselves provides in order to see better whither lead the blind reactions of the thing that we have been imagining a fatal mechanism. Whether such sensation or feelings accompany or do not accompany the reactions we have been studying we have left open. We tacitly consented that our point of study of those reactions leaves that question to which the present time gives no clear answers, as one with which we are not concerned. But we may agree that if such sensations and feelings or anything at all closely like them do accompany the reactions we have studied, the neural machinery to whose working they are adjunct lies not confined in the nervous arcs we have so far traced but in fields of nervous apparatus that, though connected with those arcs, lie beyond them, in the cerebral hemispheres.

(p. 357)
Can we at all compare with the simultaneous co-ordination of the nervous factors in a motor reflex the synthesis of the nervous elements whose combination underlies a simple sense-perception?

(p. 386)
We are thus warned against any hasty conclusion that the neural mechanisms which synthesize reflex movements illustrate in their arrangement also those concerned where sensual fusion is the phenomenon. But that does not invalidate a broad practical interference which study of the nervous system in regard to motor reaction allows. This inference is that toward the solution of the problems of motor taxis help is obtainable by appeal to characters evident in sensual reaction. This practical inference need not in the least involve any doctrinal attitude whatever toward the hypothesis of pscyho-physical parallelism. It simply insists on the likeness of nervous reactions expressed by muscular and other effector-organs to reactions whose evidence is sensual. It insists on this likeness being close and fundamental enough to make each of the two classes of phenomena of use to the student of the other.

(p. 387)
Instances might be multiplied, but they have risen prominently in several minds now. A practical inference from them is that physiology and psychology; instead of prosecuting their studies, as some now recommend, more strictly apart one from another than at present, will find it serviceable for each to give to the results achieved by the other even closer heed than has been customary hitherto.

Besides this similarity of time-relation and other features between the physiological and psychical signs of neural activity, another link connects the psychological and physiological for the biologist. To the physiology of pure reflexes, that is, reflexes devoid of psychical accompaniment so far as introspection can discover, psychological interest nevertheless attaches, and on a very distinct ground. This ground of connection is seen if inquiry is followed along the animal scale in the direction from higher forms to lower rather than by the usually more favorable reverse approach. This is partly because we directly observe psychical phenomena by introspection only, that is, only in ourselves; and the facts discovered by introspection are applicable to other beings the more readily the more those being resemble ourselves, namely, are animals ranking near to man.

Pure reflexes are admirably adapted to certain ends. They are reactions which have long proved advantageous in the phylum, of which the existent individual is a representative embodiment p. 388. Perfected during the course of ages, they have during that course attained a stability, a certainty, and an ease of performance beside which the stability and facility of the most ingrained habit acquired during an individual life is presumably small. But theirs is of itself a machine-like fatality. Their character in this stands revealed when the neural arcs which execute them are separated, e.g. by transection of the spinal cord, from the higher centres of the nervous system. They can be checked, it is true, as we have seen, by collision with other reflexes as ancestral and as fatally operative as themselves. To these ancient invariable reflexes, consciousness, in the ordinary meaning of the term, is not adjunct. The subject as active agent does not direct them, and cannot introspect them.

Yet it is clear, in higher animal especially so, that reflexes are under control. Their intrinsic fatality lies under control by higher centres unless their nervous arcs are sundered from ties existing with those higher centres. In other words, the reactions of reflex arcs are controllable by mechanisms to whose activity consciousness is adjunct. By these higher centres, this or that reflex can be checked, or released, or modified in its reaction with such variety and seeming independence of external stimuli that the existence of a spontaneous internal process expressed as "will" is the naive inference drawn. Its spring of action is now our question; its seat in the nervous system seems to correspond with that of processes of perceptual level. It is urgently necessary for physiology to know how this control -- volitional control -- is operative upon reflexes, that is how it intrudes and makes its influence felt upon the running of the reflex machinery.

No exposition of the integrative action of the nervous system is complete, even in outline, if this control is left without consideration. Reflexes ordinarily outside its pale can by training be brought within it. The actor, it is asserted, can shed tears at will, or blush, or blanch.

(p. 390)
It is significant that, although the reflexes controlled are so often unconscious, consciousness is adjunct to the centres which exert control. A biologist, Professor Lloyd Morgan, has urged that "the primary aim, object, and purpose of consciousness is control. Consciousness in a mere automaton is a useless and unnecessary epiphenomenon."

A biological inference arises at this point. We have admitted that the organs to which psychosis is adjunct, namely, the brain, and especially in higher vertebrates the cerebral hemispheres, supply the surest touchstone to rank in the scale of animal creation. That is to admit, in other words, that development of these organs constitutes on the whole, the best criterion to the success of an animal form in the competition which lies at the toot of animal evolution.

(p. 392-3)
We thus, from the biological standpoint, see the cerebrum, and especially the cerebral cortex, as the latest and highest expression of a nervous mechanism which may be described as the organ of, and for, the adaptation of nervous reactions.

(p. 393)
These adjustments, though not transmitted to the offspring, yet in higher animal form the most potent internal condition for enabling the species to maintain and increase in sum its dominance over the environment in which it is immersed. A certain measure of such dominance is its ancestral heritage; in this is based its innate right to success in the competition for existence. But the factors and elements of that competition change in detail as the history of the earth proceeds. The creature has to be partially readjusted if it is to hold its own in the struggle. Only by continual modification of its ancestral powers to suit the present can it fulfill that which its destiny, if it is to succeed, requires from it as its life's purpose, namely the extension of its dominance over its environment. For this conquest its cerebrum is its best weapon. It is then around the cerebrum, its physiological and psychological attributes, that the main interest of biology must ultimately turn.

Allen Frances Reflects On the DSM-5

2012-12-02T11:18:00.000-05:00

In a staggering excoriation (here) at Psychology Today, Allen Frances of Duke University writes:-

Except for autism, all the DSM 5 changes loosen diagnosis and threaten to turn our current diagnostic inflation into diagnostic hyperinflation. Painful experience with previous DSM's teaches that if anything in the diagnostic system can be misused and turned into a fad, it will be. Many millions of people with normal grief, gluttony, distractibility, worries, reactions to stress, the temper tantrums of childhood, the forgetting of old age, and 'behavioral addictions' will soon be mislabeled as psychiatrically sick and given inappropriate treatment. People with real psychiatric problems that can be reliably diagnosed and effectively treated are already badly shortchanged. DSM 5 will make this worse by diverting attention and scarce resources away from the really ill and toward people with the everyday problems of life who will be harmed, not helped, when they are mislabeled as mentally ill.

It is a serious business - isn't it? Many proponents of the neuro turn seem to believe that the ends of neuroscientific knowledge lead away from these challenges by giving us "science". Normal things need not be pathological things. Yet, the neuro turn, especially as promulgated by so-called Third Culture, seems to do precisely that. Perhaps "the Neuro Times" should be renamed "the Faddish Times"?

Watch this ad. Think about it. Seriously.

2012-12-01T18:37:00.002-05:00

So this really is an advertisement floating around on the internet today. "I am happier with my brain." Peddlers of superstition? Wow. Just wow.

(Posting is not endorsement.)

NeuroPun: Neurothian

2012-12-01T11:33:00.003-05:00

Neurothian: a mimetic revision of Neurath’s Ship of Theseus, whereby the gradual reconstructive intellectual project is of the Ship of Everything with the new planks of neuroscientific knowledge.

Rhyme possibilities: Leviathan; Hylothodayian

(Is this a too-inside history of science joke?)

Studies Focused on Women & Math: A Contrast in the Politics of Gender

2012-11-29T08:09:00.001-05:00

Authors of two different studies (2011; 2012 respectively) attempt to understand the difficulties women encounter in entering STEM fields. What unites both groups is a desire to create positive change in the experiences of women in STEM fields, and so it seems we may assume the best of intentions in both studies.

Yet there is for me a remarkable difference in assumptions, questions, and expectations between these two studies. In short, the politics of these studies appears to me to be separated by an enormous perhaps insurmountable distance, even as both studies ostensibly aim for the same end.

Am I wrong that these passages fundamentally demonstrate the functionalist-structuralist divide?

Conclusion 1

The present research demonstrated that the activation and pursuit of romantic goals has distinct and far-reaching effects on women’s attitudes, preferences, and involvement in activities related to STEM. Using ecologically valid methods, we found that college women showed less interest in STEM when the goal to be romantically desirable was activated, either by environmental cues or by personal choice. Together, the findings from this research highlight the value of examining everyday romantic goal pursuit in understanding why women show diminished interest in pursuing the male dominated fields of STEM.

Lora E. Park, Ariana F Young, Jordan D Troisi & Rebecca T Pinkus, 'Effects of Everyday Romantic Goal Pursuit on Women's Attitudes Towards Math and Science' Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin (2011) here

Conclusion 2

In summary, we conclude that gender equity and other sociocultural factors, not national income, school type, or religion per se, are the primary determinants of mathematics performance at all levels for both boys and girls. Our findings are consistent with the gender stratified hypothesis, but not with the greater male variability, gap due to inequity, single-gender classroom, or Muslim culture hypotheses. At the individual level, this conclusion suggests that well-educated women who earn a good income are much better positioned than are poorly educated women who earn little or no money to ensure that the educational needs of their children of either gender with regard to learning mathematics are well met. It is fully consistent with socioeconomic status of the home environment being a primary determinant for success of children in school.

Jonathan M. Kane and Janet E. Mertz, 'Debunking Myths about Gender and Mathematics Performance' Notices of the AMS 59:1 (2012) here

I find the distance here breathtaking. I wonder if I'm alone?

NeuroPun: A New Label

2012-11-25T13:58:00.000-05:00

"The New York Times" discovers "the Neuroscientific Turn"

2012-11-24T09:19:00.002-05:00

The New York Times discusses the limits and insanity of much neuroscience in popular culture. They have done a real public service by publishing this essay. Among the nuggets:

A team of British scientists recently analyzed nearly 3,000 neuroscientific articles published in the British press between 2000 and 2010 and found that the media regularly distorts and embellishes the findings of scientific studies. Writing in the journal Neuron, the researchers concluded that “logically irrelevant neuroscience information imbues an argument with authoritative, scientific credibility.” Another way of saying this is that bogus science gives vague, undisciplined thinking the look of seriousness and truth.

Some elaboration, I think, should be made for the situation in 'the university'. The rise of the 'neuro' in the humanities and social sciences could underpin a dramatic shift in the ways that humans conceptualize awe, emotions, randomness, selfhood, and even history. Proponents of the 'neuroscientific turn' in the humanities and social sciences are largely optimistic about the promise of neuroscience and neurology to provide significant and lasting answers to problems that have long plagued philosophy and the social science.

Opponents of these trends see little merit or rigor in the claims made for neuroscience and neurology as it applies to questions of humanistic or social science interest. Many feel - I certainly do - that it is easy to say that neuroscience or neurology may show something salient about these questions eventually, but we suspect that the predictive value of neuroscience or neurology will collide with the comparatively harder problem of human variability.

There is, however, a further point that can be made: were humanists and social scientists to take the 'neuroscientific turn' seriously, it is not clear that the logic of the science would inevitably demonstrate the value of philosophy, humanities, art, or literature. On the contrary, adopting 'the neuro' might eliminate the need for the humanities and social sciences completely. Consider Alex Rosenberg's reaction to efforts to make historical scholarship more scientifically rigorous in his Atheist's Guide to Reality:

Gene sequence differences, slight differences between dialects and languages, and other quantifiable variables are already allowing biological anthropologists to uncover large swaths of human prehistory and even to correct written histories of settlements, migrations, technological advances, and military conquests. But even what these scientific means uncover can’t really amount to more than entertainment. The narratives about what actually happened in the past have no more value for understanding the present or the future than the incomplete and even entirely mythic narratives that they might replace. History, even corrected by science, is still bunk.

With similar logic, Rosenberg also eviscerates economics, sociology, and cultural studies. For a host of reasons, I consider his argument contradictory and solipsistic, but those reasons have nothing to do with the philosophical rigor of Rosenberg's statement. If he is right and if 'the neuro' is the logic of the new Epoch, then many of his claims follow. It seems clear that the logic of 'the neuro' must lead inevitably to his 'nice nihilism' - and in that Brave New World such fields of study as history, the humanities, and social sciences can serve no end whatsoever, save perhaps as rather shallow entertainments. And, for that reason, thoughtful people would devote themselves to neuroscience instead.