brain body movement lecture series e-book
TRANSCRIPT
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Brain Body MovementLecture Series 2009
Sam Gill
Sam Gill delivered a series of fourteen lectures in a graduatecourse Brain Body Movement at the University of ColoradoBoulder during spring term 2009. The lectures discuss
implications of human embodiment from a variety ofperspectives including philosophy, psychology, neuroscience,cognitive science, critical theory, and medicine. He discussesthe implications in terms of the academic study of religion,the academy in general, and the way we understand dancing.
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Contents
Introduction to Lecture Series 3
Lecture 1: Introduction 4
Lecture 2: The Meaning of the Body 8
Lecture 3: Tradition and Change: Memory and Neuroplasty 12
Lecture 4: Imagination, Theory, Story 19
Lecture 5: Color and Reality 25
Lecture 6: Phantom and Reality 31
Lecture 7: Making, Agency, Action, Artifice 37
Lecture 8: Self and Other: Proprioception and Exteroception 45
Lecture 9: Consciousness and Emotion 53
Lecture 10: Touch, Flesh, and Vision 58
Lecture 11: Emotion, Depth, and FleshPart I: Dancing as Pure Depth 65
Lecture 12: Metaphor, Gesture, Language 72
Lecture 13: Thought and Cognition 80
Lecture 14: The Backside of God 87
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Introduction to Lecture Series
In the spring semester of 2009 at the University of Colorado at Boulder I taught a course titled Brain
Body Movement. It was offered in the Department of Religious Studies where I have been teaching
since 1983.
Topics covered include:
The Meaning of the Body Tradition and Change: Memory and Neuroplasty Imagination, Theory, Story Color and Reality Phantom and Reality Making, Agency, Action, Artifice Self and Other: Proprioception and Exteroception Consciousness and Emotion Touch, Flesh, and Vision Emotion, Depth, and FleshPart I: Dancing as Pure Depth Metaphor, Gesture, Language Thought and Cognition The Backside of God
While the course was taught primarily to senior majors and graduate students of religion, the bulk of the
discussion focused on the current research outside the academic study of religion on the many topics
covered. Psychology, cognitive science, philosophy, neuroscience, medicine, and critical theory are
some of the fields represented. My lectures present important aspects of these topics, including criticalreviews of the readings that support each topic. The primary intent of the lectures was to creatively
contribute to our understanding of the bodied nature of being human and to extend how we may best
take advantage of the many and diverse areas of research on brain, body, and movement. My primary
academic and personal interest is in dancing. For many years I have been a dancer, a dance teacher, and
academically I have studied dance traditions all over the world. My continuing work is to construct a
theory of dancing that allows us to use dancing as a comparative category for the study of cultures
throughout the world. In these lectures I occasionally turn to dancing to provide a concrete example of
how a particular topic may be effectively applied. As a result aspects of a new dance theory are
presented. I was excited to offer innovative extensions and alternative understandings to many of these
important topics. Because I believe that I am making a significant contribution to the discussion of these
topics I want to make these lectures immediately available. A podcast is available presenting each
lecture. The full series of fourteen lectures is available as an e-document. For details seewww.Sam-
Gill.com.
http://www.sam-gill.com/http://www.sam-gill.com/http://www.sam-gill.com/http://www.sam-gill.com/http://www.sam-gill.com/http://www.sam-gill.com/ -
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Lecture 1: Introduction1
The role of the body in the academic study of religion
As it well known, the academic study of religion developed from a heritage of Christian studies and thecomparative study of religion, the study of religions beyond Christianity has been deeply modeled on
Biblical studies. Christianity has a deep ambivalence regarding the body, however strange given that
Christianity is based on the bodied incarnation of the deity and on the killing and bodily resurrection of
this god. The principal rite, the sacrament of the Eucharist, is the grizzly affair of eating body and
drinking blood. Still, spirit is understood as the enduring, as the dependable, and the body is considered
corruptible by sin and the inevitable aging and death. At best the body is the temple for the soul, mere
housing and transport. Furthermore, since Platos interest in ideal types the invisible has been
understood as more real than any manifestation. Descartes furthered this thing by valuing the mind as
that which distinguishes us, sets us apart as human beings: I think therefore I am. The body again is
residual or a mere housing, or a fearful distraction, to the mind.
Modern western universities, indeed, most of western education, embodies (physically, actually, and the
irony is intended) these valuations of mind over body. We instruct our children to sit down and be quiet
so that they may learn. Educational spaces are containers isolated from the actions of cultures where
people go to look into books, read words, learn theories, exercise minds. Academic furniture disables
bodies and focuses eyes and ears on the source of wisdom, the only one permitted to stand and walk
about. Our minds match our mountains. Our minds are the products of the university. Graduation
exercises for learning institutions are the largest of our public rites (save occasional presidential
inaugurations) and the academic garb renders the body below the neck inarticulate and the effect is an
appropriate sea of floating heads.
Stereotypical images of the intellectual, the scholar, are consistent: bespectacled, slight or stout pear-
shaped bodied, unkempt, scruffy facial hair, and exuding an air of distance, vagueness, contemplation,
befuddlement.
Bodied activities in the educational system are isolated to either extreme: athletics as some remnant of
the full and rounded human being, now exaggerated through commercial attachments to an almost
separate entity uncomfortably tolerated by the academic mission, and theater and dance, a remnant of
high culture where participants are politely excused for the most part from intellectual matters.
Athletics has become a performance of spectacle, an advertising gimmick, dealing with huge budgets,
television, and arenas. Theater and dancing have become shrinking programs increasingly marginalizedand isolated and underfunded. To survive they must take on some aspects of the male productive world
by putting on productions and making works. Universities have yet to formalize their actors and dancers
into companies, although this perhaps shows their naivet.
1Delivered January 19, 2009
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As educational environments have slipped in cultural value displaced by business, production, and
economic competition, the tolerated bodied activities have been progressively reduced. Even the
residual Physical Education programs in pre-university education are being left behind and sports
continues to exist only to the extent it is successful and productive.
The academic study of religion created in this heritage remains largely a study of texts. Indeed, the verything that makes legal the teaching of religion in state supported institutions is the word about.
Typically the method that assures the distance required to attain about is the reading of texts. Texts
are about, are distant, are accessible in lieu of the actual, the bodied. Often the closest students of
religion get to bodies through the metaphorical terminology associated with texts that have physical
parts identified by terms such as headings, footnotes, and bodies.
Alternative
While the devaluing of the body distinguishes what we do and how we do it, and indeed this same
valuation distinguishes our deep cultural and religious heritage, increasingly and building strength and
energy over the past century are many who have re-evaluated the relationship of mind and body, spirit
and body, soul and body. This too is part of our heritage corresponding with the rise of modernity, the
reshaping of the place of religion in modern and western life, and the rise of secularism, even science.
Despite this movement which has occurred in philosophy, biology, neurology, anthropology, and other
fields, the study of religion has remained largely ignorant of these developments, doubtless because of
its tacit theological underpinnings, tacit as much as any reason because overtness would be illegal.
Perhaps the principal opening to these ideas has been in the slow recognition of the importance of field
study. Such studies continue to be largely serving textual studies, yet, it has opened an inroad.
Given the work that is being accomplished and the discourse that is broadening, it seems high time forthe academic study of religion to begin to open itself to the perhaps frightful, even revolutionary,
possibility that the body is more than a meaty vehicle for the mind. Stemming from mid-twentieth
century we may have retained some residue of that old notion that religion is sui generus, that is, a
distinction (or some say incorrectly a uniqueness) of being human, and, as such, must not be reduced
in any way by our study of it. While it has long been accepted that all academic study is reductive, this
reluctance to include body, with its meaty alliance with biology, neurology, and physicality, nonetheless
persists.
This course ventures into this dangerous territory. The motivation is not to somehow reduce religion to
mere biology, mere neurology, mere genetics; to even think this possible is a misunderstanding of
biology, neurology, and genetics as well as religion. Rather, this course endeavors to complement and
enlarge the study of religion by including additional perspectives and understandings of religion by
beginning to appreciate how body, brain, and movement contribute importantly to what it means to be
human, including being religiously human.
We will address many of the issues that commonly concern the study of religion and culture such as
issues of meaning, value, action, imagination, story, agency, art, self, consciousness, emotion, language,
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and so on, but we will do so from perspectives developed from research that foregrounds body, brain,
movement. This is a new arena for most of us and it will require that we gain our introduction through
intermediaries rather than the hard scientific and philosophical researchers themselves, that is, by
reading non-technical scientific and philosophical writings. Fortunately, this literature is abundant.
This is not a religion and science course. Such framing suggests an unresolved tension between thetwo. I suppose that such a tension might be felt in our very reluctance to go this route; that it seems
somehow threatening and that wed like quickly, too quickly, to dismiss it as simply irrelevant or
reductive. However, matters of the modern universityare thoroughly scientific in their mythology and
ontology and the fact that we are still doing our best to hide our theological leanings may provide this
tension. All I care to accomplish in this course is to draw to our work a full arsenal of ideas and tools to
do the very best we might in the exploration and appreciation of our subject.
There is another arena in which I hope this course may contribute to university education: the
expansion and stimulation of our academic imaginations. This should come from a greater appreciation
through these studies of what we are as human beings. My hope is that in doing so it will stimulate our
creativity, hone our imaginations, expand our power as both humans and scholars. To know more about
how we work in ways that include the very mechanics of thinking and moving; to appreciate how we
human beings are actually integrations of mind, brain, and moving bodiesshould we allow ourselves to
be considered any less!will help us, will motivate us, to be more deeply feeling, more imaginatively
and creatively thinking, and more humane beings.
Personal Background and Interest
I think it accurate that education is holistic, that, in some sense, we never get on to anything really new;
that we continue exploring facets of the same issues again and again throughout ones life. I started out
studying mathematics, then moved to business, then religion. In religion I elected to study NativeAmericans because, for as much as any reason, I could feel connected to them by sharing a common
landscape. Native Americans have few, if any, texts; therefore, studying these cultures had, necessarily,
to be a study of bodies in action. Among the first things I wrote about were prayer acts, dolls and
dances. I had physical experience with these things; they were bodied and physical. In the broader
terms of the academy, wanting texts, I needed to align myself with ritual studies; only to find this an
absurdly undeveloped area of study, particularly given that almost every religious action might be
referred to as ritual. I also found that the study of prayer was shamefully poorly developed given that
this action might be the most ubiquitous action of religious peoples. Later, I found myself interested
much more broadly in these issues and began to study masking and dancing in cultures the world over.
Once again I found the same patterning: no one has or is studying dancing as a religious action despitethe commonly known fact that, in most religious cultures (Christianity is the rather conspicuous
exception), dancing and religion are considered to be nearly synonymous. Prayer acts, ritual, dancing
all central to most religious traditions the world overyet practically ignored, I might say religiously
ignored by students of religion. The reason is perhaps obvious: these phenomena are not textual; they
are bodied and involve movement.
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The concerns of this course are not to make esoteric the study of religion by reducing it to biology; our
concerns are to engage materials insights knowledge that might allow us to include what are undeniably
important and centrally religiousprayer acts, dancing, ritual, masking. It is also to allow the study of
story, text, language, history in enriched ways that significantly enhance and deepen our understandings,
our appreciations.
Yet, there is a more pressing urgency for my interests in what we are going to do in this course. Over
the past decade I have become increasingly involved in creating ways in which I can engage in my
culture in innovative and ways; an interest in creative service that engages the disparate aspects of my
personal historyat once thoroughly academic and deeply bodily active.
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Lecture 2: The Meaning of the Body2
In his discussion of meaning-making in art, Mark Johnson,3noted The idea that only words have
meanings ignores vast stretches on the landscape of human meaning-making.4 Students of religion
need take this seriously. Surely compared to religion there is no subject of study more richly textured byimages and actions that are not based in words or that can be adequately captured by wordsart,
music, architecture, ritual, pilgrimage, landscapes, colors, mountains, trees, dancing, dramatic
performances, praying, gesturing, clothing and vestments, hair styles, even underwear, eating, drinking,
animals, fasting, killing, birthing, initiating, dying, marrying, nurturing, loving, laying on of hands,
circumcision, tooth extraction, menstruation, sub-incision, singing. Is there an end to this list? Yet,
surely there is no academic endeavor more word-bound, headier, than the academic study of religion.
It seems incomprehensible that the study of religion has been so unchallenged in the tacit insistence
that embodied meaning has little to do with religions or the study of religions. I suppose it has much to
do with the historical influence of Christianity and its less than eagerness to have much to do withbodies and also with Western intellectual history whose attitude towards body is classically articulated
by Rene Descartes. It seems that the academic study of religion has looked at meaning in the same
terms as does analytic philosophy, that is, that meaning is limited to objective, propositional, conceptual
matters all of which can be fully captured, and necessarily so, by words.
Yet, as Johnson shows, for at least the last thirty years, scientists and scholars in a variety of fields have
powerfully established what was adumbrated early in the twentieth century by William James and John
Dewey. They were American pragmatists, a field now rather poorly understood and also easily
misunderstood and misrepresented. We ought, I think, to trace this pragmatism back to C. S Pierce, the
father of pragmatism and the preeminent American philosopher. And I think we might even look back
to Frederick Schiller, whose On the Aesthetic Education of Man, published in 1793, powerfully influenced
Pierce as a teen, creating the intellectual foundation that would carry him through a very long life and
an enormous body of work.
The modern academic study of religions is based historically in the tradition of Biblical studies, and the
comparative study of religions emerges from the proselytizing efforts of Christian mission interests.
While such influences have become tacit, perhaps as much as for any reason so that we might continue
to be legal, the pungent flavor of colonialism is always present in the study of the religions and cultures.
As students of religion we study words, texts, written descriptions and what we produce is almost
exclusively written and spoken words. Our task is to find or make meaning in our subjects, but, to be
clear, our subjects are not the people, nor their experiences, nor their relationships with their gods,
nor their rituals, nor their dances and musics and actions and joys and feelings. No, our subjects are
the words that, I suppose, we somehow believe to represent or describe what we have termed the
religions of these peoples. Jonathan Smith made this abundantly clear in his discussion of map and
2Delivered January 26, 2009
3Mark Johnson, The Meaning of the Body(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007).
4Ibid., p. 9.
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territory. He said that we suppose there are territories of real people and their religions, yet, in the
study of religion, maps are all we have.5The meanings we find or make are intended to be objective,
conceptual, propositional, theoretical, and directed to the establishment of truths and knowledge. Such
meanings are produced by the mind, by the powers of great minds. We recognize as legitimate only the
most disembodied meanings. The privileging of the mind/soul/transcendent spirit, while ignoring that
the body and experience, shape, without our conscious awareness, what comes into the field of vision,the scope of our studies. Such a philosophy of meaning truncates our subject to words, and even more
limiting, to particular types of words and to specific types of relationship with these words.
With the rarest of exceptions virtually every religious human being who has ever lived did not traffic in
written words of any kind (including scriptures) in her or his understanding of religion and most certainly
did not engage in any level of intellectual religious discourse. For all of them, the meaning of their
religions has been felt, experienced, enacted, practiced, and grounded in their bodies. That religions are
embodied is not the condition of some prior era that we have now, in our expanding literacy, surpassed.
I certainly recall my parents shock and disbelief when I attempted to talk to them about the great
concepts, theories, ideas, writers, thinkers I was so excited about while I was in graduate school studyingreligion. My father-in-law, a church-going man, told me frankly that he noticed that I lost my
religiousness when I began my study of religions. He was right. Thus, the object of study we call
religions scarcely corresponds at all with the religious lives of almost all religious peoples.
My academic colleagues would likely find my remarks outrageous. They could promptly offer numerous
examples of the more embodied study of religions such as the recent increase in field research, so-called
site visits required of students, and the recent interest in lived religions and religions on the ground.
There is also the interest in religion and politics and ritual. These are indeed important developments.
The test is whether or not these studies actually give any attention to materials other than written
words and if these studies recognize the value of any type of meaning beyond the propositional,objectivist, conceptual, word-centered.
I dont think at this point we have much of a clue how to take that giant step beyond our limited
understanding meaning. But I also believe that now is the time to accept the challenge to be open to
what we might do. The potential is surely great and the promise is exciting.
Mark Johnson shows us how the human body tends, by its own structure and methods, to hide from our
awareness of it. We live as bodied minds, since our bodies arent normally the object of our attention
we relate to the world beyond our bodies as body-minds. We dont see our seeing, hear our hearing,
taste our tasting. Yet, it is clear that we have no access to the world or ourselves as anything but body-
minds.
Johnsons focus is on meaning and meaning-making. The heart of his proposal is that while we are
conditioned to understand meaning rather exclusively in terms of concepts and propositions expressed
and enacted as words, there is another whole level of meaning-making that occurs more or less outside
5Jonathan Z. Smith, Map is Not Territory, in Map Is Not Territory: Studies in the History of Religion(Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1993).
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of our consciousness. Interestingly, he understands this type of meaning-making as lower6than that
of the higher meaning-making we are more accustomed to. The low-high metaphor seems to reflect a
number of associations. One is the association of the head with conceptual meaning while the grosser
below-the-neck body, the traditional location of the so-called lower or animal senses, seems to
operate on sensorimotor body schemas with little sense of meaning at all. This suggests that the
conceptual, language based meaning is more important, more advanced than body meaning. Yet,Johnson clearly also sees lower in the positive terms of foundational for and prior to conceptual
meaning.
Many might accept and grant value to body schemas as being meaning-like, yet, they are usually set
apart as of another order, thus paralleling the divide between mind and body. Johnson repairs this
disjunction by invoking John Deweys principle of continuity7that holds that these two levels or
domains of meaning cannot be separate and unrelated; rather they are built on one another and are
fundamentally alike or congruous. Johnson insists that, indeed, the higher forms of meaning-making
depend on, in a fundamental way, the lower body-meanings. Much of his book is devoted to
demonstrating this from a number of perspectives each reflecting a different area of research. Theweight of the argument builds throughout the book.
Granting the existence of body-meaning, it is essential for us to ask, given that such meanings are
subconscious, how might we discover and uncover these meanings and, if words fail to adequately
express or describe them, how can we articulate whatever we might uncover? Johnson describes these
body-meanings as qualities, images (but not necessarily visual or conscious mental images), patterns,
sensorimotor processes, and emotions. One can describe the environment for the generative formation
of these types of meanings. One can describe the qualities and values that are associated with these
types of meanings. Such attention cannot be understood as constituting a statement of conceptual or
propositional meaning nor any kind of conclusive truth. Yet, accounting for the factors in the formationand presence of these deep-lying body-meanings adds much to our appreciation and understanding of
religion as it is practiced, inseparable from emotion, feeling, value, qualities, expectations, associations
even if they cannot be articulated in the higher sense of conceptual meaning. Further, this
complementation to our restricting focus on higher meaning enriches our appreciation of the quality,
power, passion, engagement, emotion, affect, of all the articulated meanings we endeavor to analyze
and construct.
Perhaps our first example should be self-analysis. The question really is, what body-mind schemas
unconsciously underlie and shape the way we have come to study religion, that is, with such a truncated
view focusing on words and propositional knowledge, theoretical constructions, and objective truth?
What in our body-mind meanings allows us students of religion to restrict our subject matter so as to
exclude nearly everything that has ever been experienced as religious, and to do so without seemingly
noticing that we have done so?
6Note that George Lakoff does as well. See Lecture 13.
7Johnson, p. 10.
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Inspired by Johnson we should consider the formation of patterns, images, schema, and sensorimotor
processes for contemporary academia and for students of religion in particular. Johnsons first chapter
shows how we come to an understanding of ourselves and our world through our bodily movements.
Sheets-Johnstone is quoted by Johnson, We literally discover ourselves in movement. We make sense
of ourselves in the course of movement.8 Can we apply these principles to our academic selves? From
our earliest associations with learning, what bodily movement, what sensorimotor patterns areconstructed in relation to the cultivation of making and discovering meaning? This is easy. From our
earliest days of formal learning we are told to sit down and be quiet. We are told to use our heads. We
identify bodily activity with recess or sport, not learning. Learning is reading and writing. Speaking,
which is bodily involved, is interestingly limited. Learning is not only word centered; it is almost
exclusively word. As we progress in learning to higher education, the frame narrows andthe
disembodying patterns are more strongly enforced. The patterns, qualities, values of learning are built
through the limited movement of eyes on words and, now, index fingers on mice. It is not that we do
not discover ourselves through movement; it is that we have discovered ourselves as learning and
meaning-making creatures through the explicit limitation of movement. It would be quite easy to
continue this exercise, yet surely you get the point is clear.
I believe, consistent with Johnsons proposition, we would say that the practices of bodily movement
identified with learning have created body-meanings in the form of sensorimotor behaviors, qualities,
patterns, images, schemas. Thus, our very idea of what constitutes meaning and meaning-making are
founded on these body-meanings. Because they ultimately reside here, in this deep body locale, they
are more powerful even than the propositional meanings that we believe are our stock in trade. We
remain unaware of how they are conditioned by body-meanings. We may also understand now why
even the idea of body-meaning seems threatening to us; it rubs the deepest conditioning of our body-
mind meanings.
So there are two essential general notions that we must engage in Johnsons work and all the works that
he represents. The first has to do with the scope of our domain of study. Surely it is time to seriously
consider the expansion of what we do. The second has to do with how we understand meaning. Here
too we have, it seems to me, overly narrowed our field to allow as worthy only propositional and
descriptive meanings with an objectivist stance, even though we well know that in this post-modern
world such a stance has been completely discredited.
There are then new and daunting challenges that are possible for the academic study of religion and
culture.
8Quoted in Johnson, p. 20.
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Lecture 3: Tradition and Change: Memory and Neuroplasty9
Certainly one of the most fascinating developments in the brain sciences during the last quarter century
has been the shift in understandings about brain plasticity. It is also notable that the emerging ideas on
plasticity were anticipated by Freud and others more than a century ago.
The traditional view, still widely held, is that the brain is highly plastic only during the first few years of
human life. In these first years a child is capable of uttering perfectly any phoneme, becoming fluent in
any one or several languages, learning to read, to speak, to walk, to play piano, to perform complicated
bodily and mental tasks. Yet, once this critical period passes the brain becomes fixed and mental
capacities are then set. During the rest of ones life change certainly occurs through learning, yet the
basic equipment and capabilities to learn are considered pretty much set. Thus, human development
throughout the early critical years is understood as of a different order and type than change
throughout the balance of life. At the end of the critical developmental period where brains are plastic
the door is closed, the equipment and tools are fixed, and from then on one is rather stuck, for better orworse, with the mental equipment one has at that point. While the influence of genetics and
environment, nature and nurture, is hotly debated, most believe that environment plays a significant
role in child development, consequently there is much attention given to what parents and schools may
do, and most acknowledging that genetics also has a powerfully deterministic effect.
Interestingly my examination of the literature on youth brain development reflects a marked difference
in tone and attitude between the critical period of child development and the post-critical period of
child development. The literature on critical-period child development has an urgent positivity about it.
It hums with the concern that everything possible be done to support brain development during these
critical years. The adult brain is being formed so schools and parents are prodded and pushed into
providing every opportunity and encouragement to these adult-brains-in-the-making, that they develop
as fully as possible. Notably the Bush administrations no child left behind legislation is considered by
many to be significant. A shift in attitude takes place as youth reach their teens. Suddenly the lions
share of the literature addresses human development in terms of teens being seen as problems.
There are endless articles and programs devoted to curtailing the brain-damaging effects of drugs,
alcohol, television, risky behavior, careless sexual behavior, and so on. Surely it is not incidental that
this shift from potentiality to problem, from positive to negative, correlates almost perfectly with the
belief that brain development ceases at the end of the pre-teen critical developmental period.
Recent scientific studies, conducted in both clinic and laboratory, have markedly shifted these beliefs
about brain development and, though it remains controversial, the impact has yet to be widely felt in
the general population.
In her book The Primal Teen,10Barbara Strauch outlines the research findings of Jay Giedd of the
National Institute of Health. Giedds research findings, based on the studies of 150 living teen brains
9Delivered February 2, 2009
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beginning in 1997, convinced him that teenage brains undergo periods when the cerebellum keeps
getting bigger and better throughout the teen years. Teen brains experience periods of exuberance
followed by a rapid reduction to their final set adult brain level. Periods of exuberance likely continue
into the early twenties. What this discovery means is not all that clear. Interestingly Strauch, a mother
of teens, finds it important as a way of understanding the erratic behavior of her teens, that is, it
explains why they are problems. But it certainly raises the question, which seems to follow on theattitude about critical period brain and human development, of what environmental elements influence
what happens to the teen brain during these periods of exuberance and refinement. It is commonly
held that some parts of the brain are more plastic, less genetically fixed, during these periods than
others. The issue of what to do to assure full and healthy teen brain and human development seems to
be only informally discussed. There are a few ideas here worth noting. There is a general pervasive
attitude that is effectively expressed as use it or lose it. There is a general belief that since the teen
brain is more malleable than formerly believed the potential for damage from environmental causes
drugs, video games, etcis greater. But it isnt yet that clear what sorts of experiences teenagers might
have that would be most beneficial to this seeming gift of extensions to the critical period. Giedd
simply says, If that teenage brain is still changing so much, we have to think about what kinds of
experiences we want that growing brain to have. 11Chuck Nelson at the Institute of Child Development
at the University of Minnesota wrote, The thing is, we know experience matters, but we just dont
know what nature of experience matters, whats best for the brain. 12Curious to me in light of my
having for a long time studied the importance of play, Giedd wrote, What if we find out that, in the end,
what the brain wants is play, thats certainly possible. What if the brain grows best when it is allowed
to play?13 Im not really sure what he means here by play; Im thinking he has something like lacrosse
in mind. Provocative in any case.
Paralleling in time this idea that the critical period of brain plasticity may be extended through the
teenage years are the numerous studies of neuroplasty of adult brains, most notably those conductedby Paul Bach-y-Rita and Michael Merzenich. Their research findings and those of a number of others are
presented in a bestselling book The Brain That Changes Itselfby Norman Doidge.14 Notably the science
of brain plasticity seems invariably to arise from dramatic individual cases of severe trauma or
malfunctions that have, seemingly miraculously, been overcome in clinical settings. Doidge engages us
in this book by focusing initially on important cases which opened doors to the expanding evidence that
brains remain plastic throughout life.
While there isnt enough space here for an adequate reflection, it is essential to remind of Paul Bach-y-
Ritas invention and development of amazing devices that map sensory data of one sense through the
experience of another in the brain to allow, for example, the congenitally blind to see throughstimulation on the skin and generally to enrich the localizationist perspectives on the brain.
10Barbara Strauch, The Primal Teen:What the New Discoveries about the Teenage Brain Tell us About our Kids
(New York: Anchor Books, 2003).11
Strauch, p. 21.12
Quoted in Strauch, p. 42.13
Quoted in Strauch, p. 44.14
Norman Doidge, The Brain that Changes Itself(New York: Penguin Books, 2007).
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We must carefully study Merzenichs extensive works which have provided much evidence that brains
remain plastic, in some senses, throughout life. Merzenich recognized the profound implications of his
findings on many developmental and disabling situations. He developed Fast ForWord, a computer
software program directed to children with learning disorders, even disorders as acute as autism. The
results from extensive trials and use have shown phenomenal results. He has also developed a business
called Posit Science directed toward creating computer based tools to keep malleable the brains of
aging people.
Michael Gazzaniga has long been a prominent brain researcher. In his book Natures Mind,15Gazzaniga
posits a position that explains apparent brain plasticity in terms of genetic programming and the
processes of selectivity that are consistent with long term evolution. He argues that all cells, as
genetically determined, have a wide range of potential roles when confronted by differing demands. He
argues for biological determinism. And he explicitly argues that brain malleability claims made for aging
adults, such as Merzenich has made, are wrong. I have read his discussion fairly carefully, yet, clearly
based in my limited knowledge and obviously shaped by the deep patterned schemas that bias me
toward brain plasticity. As I see it, Gazzaniga can certainly be correct,16
while we may still continue toaccept the results that demonstrate brain plasticity. For example, should a brain cell have the genetic
possibility of being mapped to many different body parts, a remapping may certainly be based in this
selection of genetic coding rather than some fundamental change in the cell or the creation of some
completely new cell. While I dont pretend to fully understand Gazzaniga, and his work is well worth
much fuller study, I continue to be totally convinced by the work of Bach-y-Rita and Merzenich, and
frankly, even if I was intellectually convinced that their work was without grounding in brain physiology
and neurology, their demonstrated practical results are so extensive that I would still follow the
implications of their work.
Given that these brain studies can be read by those of us without technical knowledge in the variousscientific fields is relieving. However, I think that as we begin to direct some of our attention to studies
based on the implications of these works we need to invest ourselves at least to a degree in the
descriptive aspects of these technical studies. It would be irresponsible and perhaps reckless to shirk
this task.
What is the significance of all of this new information on brain plasticity to us as human beings and to us
as students of religion and culture? Perhaps there is an analogy that may be of value drawn from our
experience with computers. We are familiar with the difference between hardware, software, and
application. In the realm of science fiction we can imagine a merging and intelligent interaction of
hardware and software and the field of artificial intelligence is directed to progressively bridging the gap
between them. Our science fiction and fantasy are built on the overlap of hardware and software.
Certainly the dancing humorous emotional wisdom of WALL-E is a recent and one of the most successful
15Michael S. Gazzaniga, Natures Mind: The Biological Roots of Thinking, Emotions, Sexuality, Language, and
Intelligence (New York: Basic Books, 1992).16
Gazzanigas argument is that each cell is multiply capable of many tasks, thus under different demands adifferent capability is selected rather than the brain actually changing. To some this can still be evidence ofendless plasticity.
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examples. We may think of the brain as the hardware we use to learn and drive our bodies, essential for
us to live and interact with the world. Yet, we also acknowledge that not only is the brain physically
growing and developing, but it is being trained and shaped. This second function is similar to the
installation of more or less permanently resident software. We believe in the magic of the influence of
the development of brain hardware and resident software during the critical period, but after that we
resolve ourselves to the fact that the brain is now hardwired with relatively fixed resident software andclosed to physical extension. From this point forward the brain works like our quotidian computer.
Most intriguing to me is how this belief correlates with a wide range of attitudes and practices related to
post critical period human life. We accept without question, and therefore act decisively in accordance,
that teen brains are hardwired and thus anything having to do with teen brains is restricted to how to
protect them against damage. Stroke victims are commonly relegated to the permanently disabled,
because it is assumed that since a brain is not plastic, brain damage is permanent. However, Paul Bach-
y-Ritas fathers remarkable recovery from a disabling stroke was the very motivation that led Paul to
embark on his remarkable studies of brain plasticity. Two important things for us to remember in this
case is how difficult, how highly repetitive, how physically based was his fathersrecovery. And we must
be amazed that he recovered to near normalcy despite nearly 97% loss, through stroke damage, of the
nerves that run from the cerebral cortex to the spine. Aging brains are considered to be like computer
mother-boards, certain to become outdated, increasingly slow, and progressively useless. Declining
memory, forgetfulness, dementia, Alzheimers disease, slowing, malfunction, are expected of aging
adults. It is remarkable to me how our understanding of the life history of brains corresponds with our
understanding of the human life cycle. Perhaps it is actually the cause of a wide range of social practices
that pervade our culture, from no-child-left-behind to the very ideas of retirement and assisted living.
The radical message that is presented to us by neuroplasty studies is that the critical period of early
childhood where the formation of brain hardware, semi-hardwired resident patterns, is not completely
closed at the end of the first critical period of development. There is abundant and increasing evidencethat aspects of the malleability, adaptability, growth, change in brain hardware and resident software
can and does take place throughout the entire life cycle, or it has the potential to do so. Further, while
it is not altogether clear specifically what environmental factors have the most impact, it seems clear
that changes to semi-hardwired brain are interconnected with experience. I believe another quite
radical idea presented in this research is the emerging sense that while brain functions are localized to
specific parts of the brain, the brain nonetheless is so aware of itself and its vast complexity that
changes in any parts of the brain tend to be experienced in some respects throughout the brain. Again
use it or lose it applies as does neurons that fire together wire together,and neuronsthat fire apart
wire apart or neurons out of sync fail to link.i17
New ideas on brain plasticity are nice, but what do they have to do with what we are about? First of all,
it seems to me that there are clear links between Mark Johnsons discussion18of various types of body-
mind meanings and research results focused on brain plasticity. Clearly a major portion of the brain
hardware developed and designed through experience in the critical periods contributes to what
17Doidge, p. 64.
18Mark Johnson, pp. 11-14.
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Johnson referred to as that foundational body-based type of meaning that is pre-cognitive, non-
linguistic, comprised of images (though not visual or even mentally visual), schemas and so forth. These,
he argues, underlie and inform the so-called higher forms of meaning that we recognize as meaning
more properly, that is, propositional, descriptive, and conceptual, all based in language. Indeed, what
seems to be fixed through critical periods of brain development are just these foundational patterns and
schemas and images which provide the ground patterns and processing routines that we use to learn, toperceive, to adapt to the world, to comprehend ourselves as selves and bodies. They seem to be
established in the hard wired circuitry of our brains and the semi-hardwired resident programs.
To consider these kinds of ideas allows us to begin to see that brain plasticity may also be powerfully
connected with the kinds of experiences we may describe as cultural and religious. Should this be
correct then the critical periods are imprinting periods for culture. We know that the brain becomes
deeply patterned through enormous repetition of sensorimotor activities. The brain is the seat of our
kinesthetic selves. The ways of a culture and a religion insinuate themselves onto human beings
through the high repetition of patterned movements and practices and value/meaning/feeling
associations. Once enculturated, change is as difficult as breaking a bad habit because culture does notoccur at the propositional level, but at the subconscious body-based level of meaning. Change of these
patterns requires high repetition. And change can scarcely be separated from kinesthetic activities. If
we want to change the way we think, we cannot simply think our way from where we are to this new
place. Such change requires a lengthy, repetitious, kinesthetic process. It is at once humorous and
frightening to think of academics engaging this process.
Were we to follow up these ideas, we would likely understand that religions and cultures might be
better understood in terms of the repetitious sensorimotor activities that occur during critical periods of
brain development, when cultures and religions become inseparable from brain hardware; it remains
malleable, yet with reticence. To continue to maintain a distinction between the hardware and semi-hardwired resident programs and the later use of the hardware of the brain is of further value. It helps
us understand why cultures and religions are so difficult to change. Change in culture or religion that is
propositional is of the type we may call history. History is parallel to the level of learning in non-critical
brain developmental periods. It is propositional, conscious, a matter of application. Yet this change is
firmly grounded in the hardwired patterns, schemas, special processors of the brain. We may draw a
useful parallel between tradition and the hardwiring of the brain and change/history as parallel to the
use of the brain to learn and live, in other words, application. Like the new understandings of the brain
that recognize that the brain may remain plastic throughout life, so too is tradition. There can be
changes made in fundamental values, patterns, sensorimotor values, and so on. Yet, for both, these are
slow processes often inseparable from serious trauma, crisis, or threat. Significant change in tradition issimilar to a shift in paradigm. To draw this analogy, and to suppose that it may be more than analogy, is
to give us important insights into the nature of tradition and change, into how something can remain
unchanged yet ever changing, how tradition can be formed and have distinct identity, how tradition
itself has the potential to change. Ill mention the implications for the study of religion and culture
below.
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I think it quite remarkable, when seen from a relatively nave perspective that cultural, religious,
personal, and political identities are so powerful and seem to persist outside of any influence by
propositional, objectivist, and conceptual knowledge. There is an irony here I think since we so strongly
tout the importance of objectivist knowledge and reason, yet our actions are almost wholly determined
by our cultural, religious, political, and economic identities imprinted on the hardwiring and semi-
hardwiring of our brains. Evidence of this is everywhere in the world today. We are often confoundedby, but shouldnt be, the seeming impossibility of even talk occurring betweenthe Israelis and the
Palestinians. The same seems to apply to the so-called liberals and conservatives in the US government,
who cannot seem to compromise or see any gray areas on anything. The pattern is that we despise our
rivals and actually cannot see in our foes anything of value.
I think we can actually understand ourselves, our religions and cultures, more interestingly by placing
ourselves in the context of neuroplasty and we may be more insightful about how to change ourselves,
relate to others, and to understand human processes.
A quick agenda for the development of the study of religion and culture that proceeds from these ideas
can be quickly drawn. The role and treatment of children in the establishment of tradition is critical.
Children are the subjects of education and psychology, but rarely of interest to the study of religion and
culture. Adult converts to religions are of special interest here in understanding how a tradition is
embodied, that is, how body-minded meanings based in sensorimotor activities are insinuated onto an
adult. Likely the experience for the adult is markedly different than for children. Also we may now
understand why adult converts to a religion often act quite differently than those born into it.
Agency, which is currently so often our concern, must now be understood as based in these brain
patterned schemas. Action and inaction rest in these bodied meanings perhaps much more than being
produced as the result of conscious considerations and choices.
We have a significant challenge in developing methods for the appropriate articulation of schemas and
sensorimotor patternings. We may begin to understand that stories and myths and rites and
ritual dance dramas may be ways in which religions and cultures articulate these schemas.
With an appreciation that it requires highly repetitious experience of sensorimotor actions to establish
or change our semi-hardwired body-mind meaning schemas, we should have a much different kind of
interest in ritual and repetitive quotidian cultural patterns. Presently we study ritual primarily through
texts and have no patience or interest at all in the repetitiveness that is a distinctive mark of ritual.
Repetition in music and dance, the partners to ritual, would also begin to be appreciated differently.
Even our incessant interest in thought and theology and philosophy may enjoy an expansion when
we begin to account for how these word-based phenomena are themselves grounded in semi-hardwired
brain patterns.
Issues of tradition and change pervade the study of religions and cultures. We are confounded by how
traditions remain the same, yet operate in the processes of the sequence of changes we document as
histories. The strong analogies, if not the actually causal bases, between brains becoming semi-
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hardwired, yet capable of applications and learnings, should provide us with extensive insights in how
we think of and study issues of tradition and change. We may be able to understand the phenomena of
change in new and interesting terms, seeing learning and applications as quite different orders of
change from those sensorimotor based schemas that have come to be nearly hardwired.
From these perspectives we may even reflect on our own academic processes to see that theyparticipate in the same patterns. Thomas Kuhn, in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions,19described
the developmental process of science as progressing within paradigms (correlating to the application of
a given set of theories) and as the result of a paradigm shift, where the basic operative and established
theories are replaced by new ones. The difficulty of changing the hardwired patterns is so great that he
noted that paradigm shifts usually do not take place except between generations. We may appreciate
why this is the case recognizing that the presumptions on which a whole view of the world do not
operate at the propositional, objective, cognitive, conscious level, but below that in the emotional,
feeling, deeply body-based meanings.
These few suggestions arise from just a few minutes of reflection. They are indeed cursory, superficial,
and general. Still, I do not think even this quick list is superficial nor trivial nor insignificant in the
potential for the study of religions and cultures. I think that any of these ideas might be effectively
developed into a forum for the comparative studies of religions and cultures. Nor are these explorations
limited to some completely new phenomena to be studied, but may well enrich the kinds of materials
we have traditionally been interested in.
19Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).
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Lecture 4: Imagination, Theory, Story20
Hmm. Separate the visual fields so the right eye cannot see what the left eye sees. Show a picture of a
snow scene to the left eye, show a picture of a chicken foot to the right eye. The left eye connects with
the right brain hemisphere; the right with the left. A special condition pertains to this little scenario: theperson looking at these pictures has had his corpus collosum, the neurological super highway that
connects brain hemispheres, severed so his brain hemispheres work independently. Now show the
person groups of pictures from which he is to select an object that is related to the picture he sees. He
correctly chooses, among a series of objects, a shovel to match the snow scene and he also correctly
matches, among a group of objects, a chicken to correlate with the chicken foot. The left hemisphere
has the special capacities for quantitative concerns and language and speech. Michael Gazzaniga refers
to it as the interpreter.21 The right brain, which Diane Ackerman calls the strong silent one,22is
concerned more with emotion and intuition (a feeling kind of knowing). When this person is asked why
he selected the shovel (chosen by the silent right hemisphere) his left brain must speak for the right
brain, yet it cannot communicate directly with it. Rather than being befuddled about the shovel, heimmediately responds Oh, thats simple. The chicken claw goes with the chicken, and you needa
shovel to clean out the chicken shed.23
Herein lays a most fascinating revelation about being human. Our brains come equipped to make up
stories. They have the mission to do so in order to explain and justify the world we live in and the
actions we take. Note that what the left brain does automatically, instantly, naturally, and seemingly
without conflict, is to examine the factors at handchicken, chicken foot, and shovelconstruct an
hypothesis about how these objects may relate. Then to use a logical argument chicken is to chicken
foot so the inference is that the shovel must have something to do with chickens which very logically
would be to clean out the chicken shed. One small problem is that there is no chicken shed and thesilent right brain hemisphere accurately selected and thus knows, but cant tell the left brain that the
shovel matches the snow scene, quite distant from a chicken shed.
Such behavior may be disturbing on the one hand. If we acknowledge this behavior, we must conclude
that our left brains are habitual prevaricatorsand perhaps we should thank god for the moral control
exerted by the right brain. But surely the creative intuitive right brain is otherwise occupied. To
contemplate that this brain hemispherethe one most closely associated with rational thought and
languageis built to make up stories raises complicated and frightening questions about those rational,
logical, objective processes we so strongly rely on in our studies, our research, and our lives.
However, we might find the presence of chicken shit in this story a source of wonderful humor and
delight at our hardwired human brainy being. Human beings are story-makers and storytellers. I have
on more than one occasion written about what I think is so engaging about the word story. I accepted
20Delivered February 9, 2009
21Gazziniga, pp. 124-29.
22Diane Ackerman,An Alchemy of Mind: The Marvel and Mystery of the Brain(New York: Scribner, 2004)
23Gazziniga, p. 124.
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the invitation to revise my book Native American Religionsfor the sole reason that I wanted to tell
several stories. In the epilogue of that book I wrote, I particularly like the ambiguity ofthe word story.
It is commonly used to refer to myth, folktale, anecdote, history, as well as an out-and-out lie. Often
we never know.24 It is the never knowing that I most love. Wheres the fun in finding out?
In the epilogue of that book I recounted in personal terms a number of stories related to my studies ofNative American religions and my own life history. They were stories about stories, both told and untold.
One of those stories was about my fathers family. I recount my childhood when I had a wonderful
relationship with my grandmother and my adventures as a farm kid. Then I told about my interest in
tracing genealogy and that, after my grandmother died, I was given a bible of hers. Consulting the pages
in the bible that recorded births, marriages, and deaths I discovered something of interest. Recounting
what I found in the bible, I wrote, Mattie Delphine Fulton *my grandmother+ was born in the year 1870
in Zenia, Ohio, to Isaac B. Fulton and Ruth Ellen McGoogen. And in tiny fine script beside her name was
written born Saskwehana. My dad always told me that Elizabeth was a descendant of the president
Adams family and that Isaac Fulton was a descendent of Robert Fulton, the inventor of the steamboat.
These are his stories, now also mine and it seems there were other stories left untold. Of course, I wasreferring to the untold story about the inclusion, using a fine pen, which indicated that my great
grandmother was born with an Indian name. I think it is funny that no one has ever asked me about this.
I focused on my mothers family in another story I wrote for this epilogue. In this story I recounted the
family history that placed my mothers aunts, when they were children, with their family at the land
rush that took place to open the Oklahoma Strip in 1889. After I recalled some of the stories they had
told me about their encounters with some outlaws known as the Dalton Gang, I turned to a ribbon tied
bundle of letters I found putting things in order after my mothers death. These were letters written
among the sisters, siblings of my mothers grandmother. The cursive in these letters was written first in
one direction on the paper and then the paper was turned ninety degrees and written the otherdirection overlaying the first, a method used when paper was scarce. I tell of reading these letters and I
give some detail of one in particular. Heres what I wrote, One letter dated March 1881 was to Susan
Maria Bales (b.1853) wife of Joseph Avey, from her sister, Sarah. A line from that letter reads, Joy be to
God that Ocy Lenore *my mothers mother+ was born healthy and sound into the wilderness you call
home. The secret of your Cherokee paramour is safe with me, though Ocys features may one day
betray you. The hint of a story swallowed by the territory and time. No one has ever asked me about
this either.
N Scott Momaday once wrote that people can endure anything if it is rendered into a story.
There is a conjunction between story and science and between story and belief. The structure of storyproceeds from a condition of incongruity or incredulity, to the creation of an hypothesis that can render
this condition congruous, then on to recount the evidence to support the conclusion. This is the
scientific method: motivating problem, hypothesis, data, argument, conclusion. Belief works pretty
much the same way. And curiously, given our distancing of science and religious and other belief
24Sam Gill, Native American Religions: An Introduction(Wadsworth, 2
nded. 2004), p. 129.
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systems, as Gazzaniga shows,25both tend to focus on supportive information while quickly dismissing
conflicting information. Seems as humans we want to understand the world and are happier with a
good story than with being completely objective, disinterested, and technically correct. Wheres the
fun in that?
While I respect the immense knowledge and experience of Michael Gazzanigas long career in brainscience, there could scarcely be a greater divide between his beliefs and mine regarding what
distinguishes human greatness. The conclusion to his chapter called Selecting for Mind, reads this way,
When the interpreter goes to work on more complex events, the resulting hypotheses and beliefs
about the world also seem resistant to change. Even though the similarities are striking [I think he
means the similarity between hypotheses and beliefs], the quintessential human property of mind
rational processescan occasionally override our more primitive beliefs. It isnt easy, but when it
occurs, it represents our finest achievement.26
Frankly Ill put my destiny with the invention of chicken shit. Ill try out my own rational faculties here. It
seems to me that rational processes are not engaged until an hypothesis is present. So where do
hypotheses come from? Certainly not rational thought.27 The issue is, how do we think a new thought.
Or, put differently, how do we make up a new story? Gazzaniga was interested in showing that, from
infancy, our brains are designed to interpret. He recounted the research done on infants to discern
what knowledge and types of awareness are built in to being human and those that are not. Since
infants cannot answer questions, an infants knowledge is measured by its reactions as reflected in its
facial expression and bodily comportment. Infants have little or no change in expression or body
comportment for things they expect or know, while they show an expression of surprise for things they
do not know. Gazzaniga and others are focused on documenting that infants are pre-set with some
knowledge. What they ignore, but take for granted, is, to me, the more interesting thing. And this is
that babies have obvious bodily responses to surprises. Yes, surprise is the word Gazzinaga uses todescribe it. Also in a figure28the infants surprise is graphically shown by a thought bubble with an
exclamation mark and a question mark in it (!?).
Charles Sanders Pierce studied hypothetic inference throughout his entire life and I dont believe that
his work has been surpassed or even adequately integrated into how we understand ourselves.29 We
are all taught in science classes about the two standard inferential methods: induction and deduction.
These are rational processes, those wonderful highminded processes Gazzaniga so loves. Pierce,
however, noted that neither of these methods increases our knowledge by one whit (his term). Why?
Well, he argued that since they are rational processes they simply move around in different ways what is
25Gazzaniga, Natures Mind, p. 135-37.
26Ibid., p. 137.
27C. S. Peirce argued that this process has a rational base simply because hypotheses are so often supportable
while a random hypothesis would not be; however, clearly for him this was not a conscious rational process.28
Ibid., Figure 6.2.29
See Charles Sanders Peirce, Collected Papers, vols. 1-6, ed. C. Hartshorne and P. Weiss, vol 7-8, ed. A. W. Burks(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1931-58), 5.196 and K. T. Fann, Peirces Theory of Abduction(The Hague:Martinus Nijhoff, 1970).
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already known. The real issue for Pierce was how we think something new and throughout his entire
life he wrote on this topic again and again, usually using the term abduction; sometimes alternately
hypothetic inference. The term is, to me, quite fascinating. Technically abduction refers to the
movement away from the center. But it also means to be caught or captured by something; kidnapped
as it were.
Pierce argued that abduction differs in kind from induction and deduction in that it is not strictly a
consciously used rational process. Rather, the process that gives rise to a hypothesis is initiated by the
element of surprise and the subconscious iterative process that is initiated by the visceral experience of
being surprised. Hypotheses arise for the purpose of dissipating the emotion of surprise. Abduction,
Pierce said, is a feeling kind of knowing. 30It is the rise of belief, of hypothesis, of a kind of knowing
that isnt yet established by conscious rational process of inductive or deductive reasoning, by the
objective application of data; but it is the kind of knowledge that is most fully felt.31 Pierce referred to it
as a best guess; Ackerman wrote, Were devotees of the hunch, estimate, and best guess.32It is why
we constantly ask why? It is the kind of knowing that can, using other inferential methods, be
extended in useful ways to the world around us. It is the knowing that grounds us, drives us, impassionsus, and that, because it is felt, experienced in our bodies, is inseparable from emotion, motion, and life.
We see on infant faces the birth of this distinctive human trait.
So while Gazzaniga is more interested in documenting that infants come prepackaged with certain kinds
of knowledge expectation, I am much more impressed that they come prepackaged with abductive
capacities which even in infancy show that the body is inseparable from the mind, that even infants are
capable of feeling surprised, of inventing a little chicken shit where needed. Surprise and the
accompanying feeling kind of knowing ground our creativity, our stories, our art, our ritual, our myths,
our sciencesall these lies that feel like truths. Gazzanigas longing for that rare human moment when
a primitive belief may be bludgeoned to death by that quintessential human property of mind remindsme of those who commonly identify religion with those mountain top experiences of enlightenment or
transcendence. They can await their pinnacle moments for all I care. For my tasteokay, maybe its
one of my many primitive beliefsgive me a good surprise any old day, a nice crisis, a nasty blow, a
crappy response to a lecture from my students. Our innate capacity to invent some chicken shit is our
finest achievement.
**********
Okay, I have some issues with the implications made by Norman Doidge, in his book The Brain That
Changes Itself, regarding the work of Alvaro Pascual-Leone and others.33 Certainly I need to caution
myself about dismissing information that contrasts with my own beliefs. So be it. At least Im going totalk about it. These are the studies that show that we can acquire bodily skills, such as playing piano,
and that we can build body strength, by simply imagining our bodies performing these tasks.
30Ibid.
31Peirce here anticipates the discussion of blending in Faucconier and Turner. See Lecture 13
32Ackerman, p. 15.
33Doidge, pp. 196-202.
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Let me fast forward to those Winter Olympic personal moments where we see an ice skater with
earphones on, eyes closed, sitting behind stage awaiting her performance. We are told that she is
imagining her performance, seeing herself with her minds eye (why is this always singular? Shouldnt it
be minds eyes?). I get that and realize that it really works. I practice this technique myself in dancing.
When also told that doing this imagination exercise also fires the same neurons as actually doing the
skating, Im okay with that, too. After all they can document this with an fMRI. My embodied beliefs
get in the way, however, since I dont think this imagination process can work for very long or can on its
own make but the smallest progress toward building bodily skill and strength. By the fifth day of piano
finger exercises, we are told, there was some small discrepancy beginning to appear, but this was made
up for by two hours of physical practice.
I dont have a problem with the implication that imagination and action are truly integrated; that sounds
obvious. I just have a problem with moving to the conclusion that Doidge makes that the brain is so
easily altered.34Two comments here. First, were the brain so easily altered I believe we would be in a
perpetual state of chaos. I know a woman who spent ten days on a rough sea in Indonesia. Her brain
responded too quickly to remap itself to these challenging conditions. Now off the sea, for manymonths her brain has stubbornly retained this mapping and she can scarcely walk, she is dizzy, she has
short-term memory problems. If our brains are always this plastic any brief conditioning would rewire
them to the new condition and we would be in a constant turmoil to have brain mappings that we could
simply rely on to allow us to live our lives.
Second, were this imagination method of acquiring bodily skill and strength capable of extending
beyond preliminary beginning stages or refining and fine tuning, we could start schools where we simply
had students imagine playing piano every day without ever touching a piano with some expectation that
they might be capable at their first bodily encounter with an actual piano of playing Bach after a couple
hours practice. We might expect that a weight-lifter might imagine himself lifting weights without evergoing to the gym and he could watch his muscles physically grow. Might we expect that he gain the
benefits of nutritional supplements by imagining taking them? Maybe I am going a bit too far; being
driven by my primitive beliefs. I am all for brain plasticity, but were these effects of imagination actually
possible, Id still prefer to hear my wrong notes on a physical piano and drip with sweat in the gym.
***********
So what does this have to do with our studies of religion and culture? The old notion of homo religiousus
is interesting. This term man the religious suggests that humans are religious by nature; we are
designed as religious beings. This belief has been used and misused by students of religion for some
time. The studies of how our brains are wired and what they are designed to do, gives us some insightinto what it means to be human. It appears clear that human brains are designed to be surprised by
what they dont know and that this condition of surprise is instantly physically reflected throughout our
bodies; that the brain/body has sensorimotor and emotional/feeling components. Accompanying this
capacity, it seems that the human brain/body is then built to create stories which may take the form
34Doidge, p. 209.
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of fictions, hypotheses, beliefs, guesses, hunches. It appears that we are designed so that our best
guesses are more readily confirmed rather than challenged; that we actually feel, that is, have
emotions, related to those things that threaten or challenge or confirm our theories and beliefs.
Our propensities to create stories that diminish our surprises, our confoundments, our incredulities are
surely as much at the heart of religion as they are of science. Religion creates and abides by story, myth,beliefs; science by hypotheses, inferential rational processes, and theories. I cant see how we can
possibly understand these as separate in any way other than the contexts and contents. If you stand
with Gazzaniga, youll understand religion as limited to those rare and rarified moments of
transcendence, enlightenment, balance, harmony, heaven, order, being centered, goodness, and what
comes next sweetness? If you are with me, youll see religion as conflict, wonder, struggle, repetitive
acts of ritual dancing singing walking praying crying fighting arguing storytelling mythmaking searching ...
what comes next suffering and sacrificingand pain and dying.
I also believe that as students of religion we havent known much what to do with story, folklore, myth,
and ritual. What our scientific colleagues are showing us is that our brains are designed to make stories,
myths, tales, and many of those arts are understood as lies that tell the truth. Surely we should be
comforted, on the one hand, by this information and energized and inspired, on the other, to return
with new appreciation and interest to these aspects we know are essential to religions and cultures.
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Lecture 5: Color and Reality35
Some years ago now I realized that I had a difficult time making choices regarding some personal
preferences. I could make decisions about many things, many of them having gravity and consequences,
yet I found I couldnt say what color I most liked for a shirt or a car or the walls of a room. I had becomeincreasingly aware of this lack.
The tipping point came in two phases. In a moment of weakness I watched the popular film Runaway
Bride. There was that scene where Julia Roberts saysthat she ran away from the altar and numerous
betrothed because she didnt even know what kind of eggs she liked. She had always fallen forguys and
just taken on, chameleon like, whatever they liked. Thus when she would get to the altar, shed realize
that she was losing herself without ever knowing herself. As silly as was the movie, I resonated with her
problem. I recalled the scene in my mind now and then. The final call to action, the tipping point
came when I flew to some city or other to do a lecture. Dont now recall where it was. I was picked up
at the airport and taken to dinner then to my hotel for the night. Bored but not tired, I flipped on the TVto see what was on. Amazingly as the TV came on, it was playing the very scene in Runaway Bride
where Julia Roberts is explaining to Richard Geer that she needed to determine what kind of eggs she
liked. I took this extreme coincidence as a sign from the universe and decided I needed to follow Julias
lead. At that time I was living in a large home in Niwot, Colorado, with a 400 square foot room that I
wanted to redecorate as a dance studio, I decided it was time to address this issue and that color was as
good a way as any to start.
It didnt seem enough to simply go to Sherwin Williams, look at paint chips, and make a decision, so I
began to do research on color. I looked at color charts to try to see the relationship between primary,
secondary, tertiary color combinations and how colors go together. I wanted to understand why colors
can be placed on a wheel and why so many people have such strong opinions about what colors go, or
more strongly, dont go with other colors.Then I bought a bunch of color design books and looked at
hundreds of photos of rooms and design ideas and various perspectives on how to use colors and how
to put colors together for different affects. I began to see that color schemes are most often identified
with valuescool or warm, invigorating or soothingor with erasthe fifties for exampleor with
culturesMoroccan or Chinese or Ghanaian.
Then, one day I was talking to someone about my burgeoning interest in color and my new-found
knowledge of the association between culture and color. She replied, Oh yes, thats why red is so often
a royal color. Only royalty could afford red dyes. Well, this statement hit me like a brick and I have to
say that it took me a few days to admit, even to myself, the implications. You see, for some odd reason,
I had stupidly not thought that chemically based colors have only been available in rather recent times.
It had not dawned on me that not everyone in human history could simply run to a Home Depot and
pick any color at all paying the same price for any choice. Once I had swallowed my own
embarrassment I had newfound passion about learning more about color.
35Delivered February 16, 2009
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Historically every color has a story and Victoria Finlays book Color: A Natural History of the
Palette36does a fascinating job of discovering and telling these stories. Color is of the earth or, perhaps
more accurately, color is an amazing aspect of our relationship with the earth. Color is of people and
their specific historical, geographical, geological, relationship with the earth and one another. Color has
often been a factor in world politics and economics and war. Color is also of the imagination and can be
appropriated to apply to surfaces to color things. Color has a psychological dimension in that we feelemotional responses to color in our bodies much more powerfully than we have responses to color from
the interpreter language-generating part of our brains. The use of color as pigment or dye, in some
fashion or other, is fundamental to art.
And then color has major philosophical and physiological and neurological and anthropological and
psychological dimensions as well. Indeed, it is fascinating that studies of color have become watershed
examples in a number of fields of study. Modern studies of color spanning several fields have revealed a
great deal, in quite concrete ways, about what we are as human beings.
To me the immediately most important findings in color studies are:
Those that convince us that color does not exist independent of our perception of it. While thisaspect of color is a philosophical position at some point, it is a physiological and neurological
finding at another.
Those that convince us that while color tastes and color terms are culturally determined, certainaspects of color perception are universal among humans because of our common
neurophysiology.
Those that convince us that the physiology of the color receptors in the eye, conjoined with theneurological processing of this information, determines our identification of primary colors
despite the continuum of the color spectrum of light. This is why we see color bands in the
rainbow rather than a smudge or blur.
Those that convince us that the categories we construct and by which we live are, like color,constructs that emerge from a complex combination of physiological, neurological, biological,
cultural, and personal sensorimotor involvements. Here color is an exemplar of our human
distinctiveness.
Knowledge of these studies of color, in my experience, actually make living as a human being in the
world pop with vitality like a Kandinsky painting.
The idea that color does not exist independent of our perception of it, is astounding, particularly when
we extend this to all human experience of the world. It addresses an issue I have long struggled with.Ive thought of it primarily in terms of what is sometimes called the anthropic principle. I have been
unable to let it go. Strangely Ive always connected the idea with dinosaurs. You see, I cannot bring
myself to believe that dinosaurs existed in some distant past. In fact, I have trouble accepting that
anything can exist totally free of any awareness, conscious or subconscious, at all that it exists. This
would be a world empty of meaning in any possible sense. I certainly recognize that this is a
36Victoria Finlay, Color: A Natural History of the Palette (New York: Random House, 2002).
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homocentric view, but I cant let it go. I hear folks when they say, you know existence may just not be
about us. Still, there is no about, no existence, no distinction, no categories, apart from some meaning-
making perspective, apart from some awareness, apart from some confoundable being of some sort
asking questions. It is arrogant to hold that the world exists only so that we may perceive it. But then I
think that is precisely what these studies of color are telling us. We create color in the world as we
interact with it. Thus, apart from us, there is no color, in any sense we can imagine color to be. If adinosaur can have no color, apart from us, can be there be dinosaurs? Varela, Thompson, and Rosh, in
The Embodied Mind,37 refer to this interdependence as enaction. They put itquite well when they
write
Color categorization in its entirety depends upon a tangled hierarchy of perceptual and cognitive
processes, some species specific and others culture specific. They also serve to illustrate the
point that color categories are not to be found in some pregiven world that is independent of
our perceptual and cognitive capacities. The categories red, green, yellow, blue, purple,
orangeas well as light/warm, dark/cool, yellow-with-green, etc.are experiential, consensual,
and embodied; they depend upon our biological and cultural history of structural coupling.38
It is really amazing that these color studies are able to demonstrate so convincingly this tangle of
processes.
I am about to tell you something you will not ever forget because the image is so distinctive as is the
revelation it makes. Kittens were raised in the dark and exposed to light only under controlled
conditions. The kittens were divided into two groups. Kittens in one group were free to move around as
they pleased; however, the kittens in the other group were confined to a little cart attached to the freely
mobile kittens. Thus they moved about the world together in pairs, yet one actively engaged the
environment through movement, while the other passively, that is, without motivating movement or
actively interacting with the environment. Only the actively moving kittens developed sight. The
passive kittens were functionally blind.39 The image of those kittens being pulled about by their siblings
leaves us with another remarkable insight.40Perception, indeed our world, depends on our willful and
experiential action; we must explore our world through directed bodily movement in order to even see
it. Non-directed movement, even the experience of differing perspectives through non-directed
movement, is not enough to wire up our brains for meaningful sight. We must explore the world with
our moving experiential touch-based bodies to see the world. This example shows us that even sight is
actually based in the sense of touch, the sense that is itself grounded in movement.
Like my fixation on dinosaurs, I cant help but be concerned that as academics we explore the world
almost exclusively with eyes peering out of long immobilized bodies. I cannot help but be concernedabout our whole educational system that discourages touch and movement. Our understanding of
37Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosh, The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human
Experience (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1993).38
Ibid., p. 171.39
Ibid., pp. 174-75.40
Ibid., p. 175.
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learning is captured by the phrases we so often use to beseech our kids to learn, such as, Sit down, shut
up, and keep your hands to yourselves. Of course, I understand that sight is enabled early in life,
however, believing that neuroplasty is possible throughout life, I cant help but think that the
sensorimotor patterning of bodily inaction, of restricting movement to the stuttering index finger and
the movement of mouths and eyes, has a major effect on what we value, on the values born in those
subcon