The Psychobiology of Mind

William R. Uttal

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317668978
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Cognitive Psychology & Cognition
• Index: Psychology

Originally published in 1978, this book develops a conceptual synthesis of the field of physiological psychology, the science specifically concerned with the relationship between the brain and the mind. It was designed to elucidate the important questions under investigation, the basic intellectual and technical problems that were encountered, and the significance of the major empirical results of the time. Of equal or even greater importance is the author's derivation of the general principles relating brain and mind that had emerged after decades of modern research into this important question. Included in the volume are historical and philosophical perspectives on the mind-brain problem as well as extensive discussions of instruments, methodology, empirical findings and theory.

Here is a powerful heuristic tool that informs the reader about the concepts and ideas implicit in this science rather than simply exhaustively listing experimental results. The author does not ignore findings; he organizes them into three broad categories – localization; representation, and learning – then emphasizes the relationships among experiments. This is a book that synthesizes, integrates, and stresses concepts, principles and problems. The careful organization of the book makes it especially useful for students of brain and mind at all levels.

Part I

BASIC CONCEPTS

1

A Survey and Introduction

A. THE PROBLEM

For millenia, since the emergence of consciousness and symbolic thought, our species has been concerned with a set of problems of such magnitude that all other issues of philosophy, science, and practical technology pale to insignificance in comparison. This set of problems concerns the nature of the relationship between our physical bodies and the insubstantial–but no less real–mental life of which each of us is personally aware. The search for an explanation of this relationship has come to be known as the Mind-Body Problem, an issue of such consequence that one philosopher (Schopenhauer, 1788-1860) referred to it as The World Knot–a play on words both of magnitude and of complexity.

At the dawn of human consciousness, man must have asked about the difference between the vitality of a living friend and the lifeless corpse into which he might so suddenly be transformed. The implications of the difference between the dead and the living, in contrast to the personal self-awareness of each individual, were profound, yet also compellingly straightforward; each man is forced to ask–Will “this” happen to me, too? Each man and each society is concerned with the problem. History is dominated by examples of the impact of this concern: The architecture, the literature, the wars, and other geopolitical interactions all show the effect of the popular, religious, philosophical, and scientific concern with the fundamental perplexity of the mind-body relationship. The folkways of man’s daily life and his relation to his fellows, his psychology, and his attitudes toward kinsmen and strangers, all may be traced back to the basic urge to untie the “world knot.”

What is the solution to the mind-body problem in general, in detail? The answers to these questions have varied over the numerous epochs of human history, but generally it can be agreed that man has attempted to determine the relationship between his body and his mind by generating theories or explanations that provide satisfactory answers in the context of the intellectual and technological environment of each epoch. The answeres were, at various times in history, based upon premises that either treated the mind as a separate and distinct entity (the soul) that survived the body or, in total contrast, treated the mind as nothing more than the function of a material information processor. If there is any consistency among the classic explanatory models, it is that the mind has been taken as a real thing, as an entity that itself must be explained and related. In light of these classic models, the modern concept of mind as a process, rather than a thing, is a highly revolutionary development. Curiously, the concept of the body–another aspect of the problem–has been somewhat more variable in spite of the fact that it is more tangible. From time to time, various organs have been proposed to be the seat, locus, or receptacle of the mental processes.

Throughout all of this speculation and theory, however, the problem has been: How is it that the body of man transmutes the physiological processes into the mental states the existence of which each individual is totally confident because of his own personal self-awareness? This question, or some variant of it, is asked by all men, whether they be philosophers or farmers, at one time or another. Although the technical sophistication of the philosopher may obscure the great personal issue–Will “my” consciousness survive the inevitable decay of “my” body–his concern does not differ in quality from the most primitive worries about personal survival. Apparently, something about man’s evolutionary heritage and his ability to process symbols impels each of us to seek to survive both as a species (sex is pleasurable) and as an individual (life, in general, is sweet and filled with experiences, pleasant or not). Whatever selective forces operate to guarantee the survival of our species and individuality have also led to the multifaceted expression of the will to survive, the most universal expression of which has been the urge to find some form of personal immortality.

And yet, all around us is evidence of death and the transitory nature of our personal physical existence. It is hard to avoid the fear of a similar termination of mind or spirit in light of this evidence. Our species has evolved self-awareness and has been provided with the ability to analyze the nature of its own consciousness only to find that the results of that analysis promise only terminal unconciousness. What a cosmic joke that is!

This “joke” is an exaggerated example of the kinds of considerations, primitive and elemental, in man’s mental life, that have led to the human preoccupation with the many aspects of the mind-body problem and to the development of all of the many solutions that have permeated human history. For example, the many theologies, in spite of the social utility of their ethical codes, primarily represent the responses of the collective urgency of many individuals to find a solution to the mind-body problem and to answer the question of personal continuity after death.

Early in human history, the proposed answers to the mind-body question came mainly from prophets and philosophers, but beginning in the Middle Ages with the emergence of a more modern quantitative and experimental scientific tradition, formalized finally in the writings of Francis Bacon (1561-1626) and René Descartes (1596-1650), a trend away from purely philosophical or theological solutions occurred. A completely different theoretical and empirical approach, placing mind within the domain of biology, has gradually been substituted for metaphysical and theological speculations.

Psychobiology, the culmination of this trend, is a new interdisciplinary science that has evolved from experimental psychology on the one hand, and neurophysiology on the other. The basic axiom of modern psychobiology is that it is possible to compare and relate the observations obtained in the psychological laboratory with those forthcoming from the neurobiological sciences. So far, psychobiology is a correlative science in the first approximation, but the adequate biology of mind (the true or valid psychobiology) that will ultimately evolve must be more than that now at hand. It must seek to reduce the psychological observations to their underlying, unique, necessary, and sufficient neural determinants to whatever extent possible.

The proposition of a psychoneural or mind-body equivalence is the basic credo of the present volume. The idea that it is possible to compare and relate mind and body has within it an implicit commitment to one particular solution to the mind-body problem. The reader should not underestimate this point; this credo directly and absolutely implies that there is a basis of comparison that goes far beyond simple concomitancy–one, in fact, that implies an equivalence and not just a correlative correspondence between the two domains. Simply put, this approach contends that the mind and the body are related in such a basic manner that without the body, the mind does not exist. This explicit statement of the basic premise of modern psychobiology involves a philosophical position that is highly likely to have a massive impact on human society. This idea of equivalence is, therefore, not simply another theoretical utterance of interest solely to a few specialists, but a concept that could affect our attitudes toward social systems, education, national politics, and international conflict.

It should also be acknowledged that the idea of psychoneural equivalence is a relatively unpopular credo and one for which there is still no general acceptance even among scientists. Furthermore, many people express this point of view in some aspects of their lives while ignoring or rejecting it in others. The psychobiologist, like any individual human being, is likely, in fact particularly likely, to dichotomize his professional and personal lives because of the dual pressures of his work and the society to which he is subject.

In spite of the gentle and compromising tendency on the part of each of us to agree that each person should decide the issue for himself, the premise of mind-body equivalence implicit in modern psychobiology conflicts in a fundamental way with the predominant theologies of our society, and that conflict is becoming increasingly explicit today. The contradiction between the premise of this small science and the personal philosophies of most people living today may be a profoundly important world issue of the next few centuries even in comparison to the more practical problems of population and food supply. Such a fundamental disagreement is almost guaranteed to offend some thoughtful people as the implications become more generally known. Although mind-body equivalence is a relatively recent development, and it takes an astonishingly long time for even the most relevant (to problems of daily life) ideas to percolate from the studies of scientists and philosophers to the communally accepted body of wisdom, this conflict is certain to ensue. And when it does, the idea of mind-body equivalence is so personally and institutionally threatening that the intellectual upheaval may be enormous. Like evolution, which shook nineteenth century thinking to its foundations and which has not even yet been universally accepted, the problem of psychoneural equivalence, far more recent and probably far more influential because it deals with each man’s future rather than the species’ past, may dominate human intellectual activity in the centuries to come.

For the present, however, we play some curiously inconsistent games of intellectual duplicity. An interesting example of an attempt to draw an arbitrary line between the equivalence premise of psychobiology and a conflicting idea strongly held by another part of human society, can be read in a dialogue quoted in the preface of the report (Eccles, 1966) of an extraordinary scientific meeting held at an even more extraordinary location. John C. Eccles organized a conference on brain and conscious experience that was held at the Vatican City under the auspices of a little-known but highly prestigious organization: the Vatican Academy of Science. Eccles reports in his prefatory remarks to the volume that, during the planning of the meeting, he was informed that: “the Academy by its constitution has for aim to promote the study and progress of the physical, mathematical and natural sciences and their history. Thus the discussion of philosophical questions is excluded” [Eccles, 1966, p. vii).

But as may be obvious to the reader, many psychobiologists feel that this greatest of all philosophical issues is precisely the content of the natural science we know as psychobiology–the actual topic of that meeting. Eccles found that it was hardly possible to follow the prohibition of the Chancellor of the Vatican Academy and summed the problem up very well in his reply:

I fear that some of your concern derives from the different linguistic usages that we have. For example, to me all sciences have a philosophical basis and it is generally agreed that there is a philosophy of science which is in fact basic to all scientific investigations and discussions. Certainly when one comes to a Study Week devoted to brain and mind it is not possible to exclude relations with philosophy, though I agree that there are certain philosophical questions which the Academy would be well advised to avoid. I do not think that any of the proposed subjects fall into this category [Eccles, 1966, pp. vii-viii].

In spite of this exchange and without Eccles knowledge, the following statement was distributed by the church hosts to all of the participants of the meeting, further expressing the view of the Academy on this matter.

As to the meaning of the term “consciousness,” the Study Week intends that it strictly designates the psychophysiological concept of perceptual capacity, of awareness of perception, and the ability to act and react accordingly.

Consequently, the subject which the invited scientists are requested to discuss, has to be duly delimited by this semantic acceptation, which is of a strictly scientific character.

It is obvious, that every extrapolation of the meaning of the term “consciousness” leading the subject into an extrascientific field, would be contrary to the spirit of the Study Week [as quoted in an article by H. Schaefer in Eccles, 1966, p. 522].

Obviously, as this dialogue exemplifies, modern approaches to the solution of the mind-body problem are sensitive matters and trespass on some very deeply held beliefs. The premises of psychobiology, unspoken though they may be, are patently “philosophical”; it would reduce both the Vatican meeting and the science of psychobiolgy to absurdities to have igno...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Part I Basic Concepts
• Part II Mind-Brain Associations and Correlations
• Bibliography
• Author Index
• Subject Index