November 24, 2010 10:08 PM
lately i have been reaching for a word that covers both cognitive and other psychological dynamics. there really is a missing term that refers to all aspects (experience and behavior) of a human’s cognition, perception, affect, motor, and other neuro-bio-chemical systems - the psychological mind and body, so to speak. it includes thought and feeling and automatic action all of which may or may not be consciously experienced.
mind and body are hierarchically related, not separate things. just like a verbal statement can be expressed with different words, statement and sentence are related hierarchically. the mind is the effect of the body in process.
but lately it has become clear that a psychological state involves a dynamic system of input, process, output, and feedback. in other words the fundamental unit of psychological description is a whole action pattern in a context. stimuli and responses are always part of a process that involves the whole responsive body that constantly learns and enhances a repertoire of contextual action patterns. behavior is made up of action patterns.
culturally we act as if individuals were conscious of what they are going to do in a situation. it is looking more and more like most of time we act unconsciously and, after the fact, construct a self-consistent account of the situation, creating an illusion of conscious choice.
as Albert Camus said, consciousness happens when we suffer, so that suggests when an action pattern is performed, failure causes suffering and we then become consciously aware of the elements of the situation.
[update: June 23, 2011. see Morsella - awareness of instrumental and incentive systems to coordinate them to execute an integrated skeletomotor action plan.]
over many years of learning, we adjust our action patterns which is the main basis for treating people as having free will.
most of our daily actions are repetitions of variations of well learned action patterns. a variation in the situation causes a variation in our action pattern.
November 24, 2010 10:54 PM
most of this is covered by embodied cognition ideas:
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“embodied cognition — the notion that specific brain circuits responsible for abstract thinking are closely tied to those circuits that analyze and process sensory experiences— and its role in how we think and feel about our world.”
“Recent theories of embodied cognition suggest new ways to look at how we process emotional information. The theories suggest that perceiving and thinking about emotion involve perceptual, somatovisceral, and motoric reexperiencing (collectively referred to as "embodiment") of the relevant emotion in one's self. The embodiment of emotion, when induced in human participants by manipulations of facial expression and posture in the laboratory, causally affects how emotional information is processed. Congruence between the recipient's bodily expression of emotion and the sender's emotional tone of language, for instance, facilitates comprehension of the communication, whereas incongruence can impair comprehension.”
“As we read, our mind mentally simulates what we are reading about: As a character grabs something, areas of our brain involved in grasping objects become activated, and as a character is running, motor areas in our brain will light up. ... mental representations may actually help us make sense of what we are reading. In addition, these representations are being updated in real-time (as we are reading), so that changes in our brain activation correlate to changes we are reading about”
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“Dynamical systems theory is not only an appropriate language for understanding the activity of the brain, it is also the key to under- standing the brain as part of a brain-body-environment system. It is quite natural for dynamical systems models to have some parameters that are in the brain, some that are in the body and some that are in the environment.”
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