Notes from the Motion Book

“There can be no knowledge without emotion. We may be aware of a truth, yet until we have felt its force, it is not ours. To the cognition of the brain must be added the experience of the soul.” Arnold Bennett (1867-1931) The soul, that moving body.

Moses Maimonides (1135-1204), in The Guide of the Perplexed, writes that “The faculty of thinking is a force inherent in the body, and is not separated from it” (quoted in Book of the Cosmos 82).

“We cannot separate emotion from cognition or cognition from the body” (Ratey 223). “The term ‘emotion’ is derived from the Latin movere—to move. It is important to realize that emotion is movement outward, a way of communicating our most important internal states and needs” (Ratey 227). “The brain mechanisms that evolved to display emotion are the same as for all of our sensory and motor input. The difference is in the intermediate state of processing information. Input from a person’s face that will lead to identification is channeled via different pathways from the information about the emotional expression on the person’s face. The emotional information goes directly to the amygdala and the insula, which then send directions to act to our motor systems in the brain. So there is a splitting of information, and you can identify a face and have no emotional confirmation about it and claim that the person is an imposter, which happens in Capgras’s syndrome” (Ratey 227).

“…when meditation is used to induce a calm mood, or we go jogging to make ourselves happier…. It is the bodily movement that causes emotion, not the emotion that causes the bodily movement [as with flight from fear]” (Evans 105).

“In his book on rhetoric, Aristotle noted that ‘feelings are conditions that cause us to change and alter our judgements [sic]’” (Evans 112).

In “Funes the Memorious,” Borges writes that Funes’ “memories were not simple ones: each visual image was linked to muscular sensations, thermal sensations, etc…” (quoted in Evans 118).

Herbert “Simon proposed that emotions [are]… interruption mechanisms” (Evans 162). The attention of the mind must be disrupted if, say, a rock is observed to be hurling at you: you need to interrupt the task at hand to dodge the rock. See Simon, “Motivational and Emotional Controls of Cognition.” Psychological Review 74 (1967), 29-39.

One of the arguments against artificial intelligence is that computers have no bodies. “One of the few good ideas about consciousness that has gained some measure of agreement is that subjective feelings depend very much on the kind of body you have” (Evans 173). In other words, consciousness is a kind of proprioception.

Emotion is the body electric, the mind in motion. Mind is the awareness of motion. Organic chemists are students of the metabolism of mind, just as evolutionists are students of motion. Bacteria are mindful of all sorts of movement: of the sun, the moon, the tides and currents of ocean and air. Bacteria respond not in “simple” but rather in fundamental ways. Bacteria are not “mindless” reactors to stimuli (their masses have considerable influence on the homeostasis of the Earth); rather, bacteria are emotional. Emotion is the fundamental condition of organic life as we know it.

What separates rocks from bacteria is the same thing that separates mind from matter. Rocks, like life forms, are all ultimately recombinant; that it, rocks at some point communicate and combine with other rocks (volcanoes, subvention). Bacteria are specifically recombinant, and DNA is the archetypal consumer. You want to eat, you got to work. Even sitting zen is work. Reproduction is the gothic cathedral of biological architecture; reproduction is the chronic condition of organic life. But rocks are only ultimate recombinants. While they’re waiting for the Big Magma they’re completely lazy. And heavy besides. Rocks, as daunting and weighty as they are, are merely gravity’s handmaidens.

The universe is a living breathing swap meet of signs. Life is semiosis—the exchange of signs.

William Carlos Williams is “a member of the sanest line of development in our history, those thinkers and artists who insist on the integrity of the human organism—thought and feeling, sense and intellection, mind and body” (Williams EmbKnow xxiv). Heraclitus “also knew that ‘To take thought thickens the blood around the heart’” (xxv).

“Shakespeare took the print, it became fixed. But he had, unknown to him, or any of them, what the city gallant and the scholar were divorced from, a country man’s sense of the fastness of the world of things, the moods of natural phenomena” (Williams EmbKnow 15).

“...there are two main cortical areas that are critical for language, Broca’s area which is responsible for speech production, and Wernicke’s are which is responsible for language understanding. Interestingly, these two areas seem to have evolved from the motor cortex and auditory cortex, respectively. Most sounds made by other animals, from grunts to calls and birdsongs are produced in the midbrain, by areas closely connected to those controlling emotional responses and general arousal levels. Some human sounds, such as crying [?] laughing, are also produced by midbrain areas, but speech is controlled from the cortex” (Blackmore 72). We hear movement. “...recent brain scan studies of living humans show that Broca’s area is also active during skilled hand movements and so cannot be definitive evidence for language. Its development might be connected more to the stone tools made by [Homo habilis]” (Blackmore 89). Blackmore may not be the best authority on the evolution of language and brain however; on p. 93 she ignores Bickerton’s evidence and claims (with Pinker and Bloom) that there are no intermediary forms of language.

“Our most vivid dreams occur during REM sleep, and dreaming is accompanied by frequent activation of the brain’s motor systems, which otherwise operate only during waking movement. Fortunately, most movement during REM sleep is inhibited by two complementary biochemical actions involving neurotransmitters, the chemicals that physically carry signals from one neuron to another at the synapse (the contact point between two neurons). The brain stops releasing neurotransmitters that would otherwise activate motoneurons (the brain cells that control muscles), and it dispatches other neurotransmitters that actively shut down those motoneurons. The mechanisms, however, do not affect the motoneurons that control the muscles that move the eyes, allowing rapid eye movements that give the REM sleep stage its name” (“Why We Sleep” by Jerome M. Siegel, Scientific American, Nov., 2003, p. 93).

In a study cited in the 2001 book Why God Won’t Go Away, “Andrew Newberg… and the late Eugene D’Aquili found that when Buddhist monks meditate and Franciscan nuns pray, their brain scans show strikingly low activity in the posterior superior parietal lobe, a region the authors have dubbed the orientation association area (OAA). The OAA provides bearings for the body in physical space; people with damage to this area have a difficult time negotiating their way around a house, for instance. When the OAA is booted up and running smoothly, there is a sharp distinction between self and nonself. When the OAA is in sleep mode—as in deep meditation or prayer—that division breaks down, leading to a blurring of the lines between feeling in body and out of body. Perhaps this is what happens to monks who discern a sense of oneness with the universe, or nuns who feel the presence of God, or alien abductees who believe they are floating out of their beds to the mother ship” (Michael Shermer, “Demon-Haunted Brain.” Scientific American, March 2003, 47).