Coupling and Human Community

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Miscellaneous Notes on the Fundamental Physical Foundations of Human Mind, Culture, and Society

• William Benzon •

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Coupling and Human Community

Miscellaneous Notes on the Fundamental Physical Foundations of Human Mind, Culture, and Society

William Benzon

Abstract: Coupling exists when two or more individuals interact in such a tightly coordinated way that we may consider them to be, effectively, a single system. The coupled system has a state space that is smaller than the total state space of the individual members and has fewer degrees of freedom. Coupling is considered in a variety of situations – music, conversation, and sports – and in relationship to the brain. A number of thought experiments are considered along with a variety of different disciplines.

Introduction: Coupling is Fundamental to Human Community ....................................................... 2  Musician's Journal: The Magic of the Bell ....................................................................................... 5  The Sound of Many Hands Clapping: Group Intentionality ............................................................ 8  Cooperation, Coupling, Music, and Soccer .................................................................................... 11  Time after Time: Music and Memory in the Group ....................................................................... 14  The Busy Bee Brain ........................................................................................................................ 16  Brain-to-Brain: A Thought Experiment ......................................................................................... 19  Brain-to-Brain Coupling ................................................................................................................. 21  Relations, Neurons, Culture ........................................................................................................... 22  Jabba the Hut, or, How We Communicate ..................................................................................... 25  Boundaries and Knowing: The Ontogenetic Roots of Animism? .................................................. 28  Synch and Society, Two Articles: A Synthesis and Review and a Study of Applause .................. 30  Entrainment in human conversational turn-taking ......................................................................... 32  Brains Couple When People Talk .................................................................................................. 34  Baboons Decide, Beethoven 9 ........................................................................................................ 35  Thinking Together, One Mind or Many? ....................................................................................... 37  Supercolonies, or: What’s a society? .............................................................................................. 39  

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Introduction: Coupling is Fundamental to Human Community This miscellaneous grab bag of posts is as fundamental as anything I’ve put online. By coupling I (suppose I) the interaction of two or more people in such a close way that we can most effectively analyze them as a single system in which some signal paths go between individuals while most are within the nervous system and bodies of the coupled individuals. I devote two chapters of Beethoven’s Anvil to this, the second, “Music and Coupling”, and third, “Fireflies: Dynamics and Brain States”, and it is the foundation for much of the rest of the book. Some excerpts from that book are included in these posts, as well as excerpts from my notes. Some posts consist of an abstract or two and some commentary; others work up an argument. But there is no argument in the working paper as a whole, just snapshots and vignettes. Since there is no argument, there is no logical arrangement, but it didn’t make sense to arrange them chronologically either. In the following arrangement the first four posts more or less cover the territory. The other sections are loosely thematic. The short descriptions should give you some idea of what’s going on.

* * * * * Taken as a group, these are perhaps the most important four posts and pretty much cover the territory. The first is purely anecdotal while the next two are more conceptual; the third, in particular, is substantial, not so much in itself as in the material it references. The fourth is again anecdotal and retains to the same kind of material as in the first, percussion. Musician's Journal: The Magic of the Bell: An anecdote about four musicians in rehearsal and how, through precise coupling their interaction produced audible sounds that no one of them was playing. In effect, the interactions between the four individuals in this post are not so different from that of the many (hypothetical) bees in the next one. The Sound of Many Hands Clapping: Group Intentionality: This is built on a passage from Beethoven’s Anvil where I consider work that’s been done on synchronized applause where the activity is analyzed as a case of coupled oscillation. I amplify this passage with some old notes where I speculate about the neuro-muscular underpinnings of synchronized applause. Cooperation, Coupling, Music, and Soccer: This post compares the state-space argument for coupling that I argued in chapter 3 of Beethoven’s Anvil with research based on the so-called degrees of freedom problem identified by the Russian psychologist, Nikolai Bernstein, in the 1960s. In Beethoven’s Anvil I argued that the state-space of a music-making group is no larger than the state space of any one member. Michael Riley et al. demonstrate that people interacting on a common neuro-motor task experience dimensional compression so that they have fewer degrees of freedom than they would have when considered individually. Time after Time: Music and Memory in the Group: This is about the peculiar way that individual players in traditional African percussion ensembles depended on the group to be able to remember and execute their individual parts. “The drummer cannot access motor patterns in his own brain and body without help from others.”

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These posts are all about the brain. The first two are thought experiments while the third is a review article covering a variety of neuroscience experiments. The last is more philosophical in tenor and is about the relationships between neurons in different (interacting) brains. The Busy Bee Brain: A Thought experiment in which I imagine that the brain consists of millions of bee-sized brains yoked together in a single physical envelope. The point is that each bee’s brain is a quasi-autonomous agent, pursuing its own goals, but that pursuit is constrained by the activities of the other bee brains. The point is that something we normally think of as a single, if very complex, system, the brain, can also be thought of as a large number of tightly coupled systems. If that is the case for the inner workings of a single brain, then it is not so much of a stretch to think of different brains as being similarly coupled into a single system. Brain-to-Brain: A Thought Experiment: A thought experiment on why it would not be possible to physically yoke two brains together, neuron to neuron, and expect them to be able to exchange thoughts. Brain-to-Brain Coupling: The abstract of a review article with this key sentence: “We argue that in many cases the neural processes in one brain are coupled to the neural processes in another brain via the transmission of a signal through the environment.” Relations, Neurons, Culture: In this post I suggest that the interactions between two neurons in different brains can become like that between two neurons in the same brain if and only if those two brains are coupled. Such interactions are central to the operations of culture.

* * * * * If you think of an infant as a parent’s puppet, or the parent as the infant’s puppet, then the second of these is rather similar to the first. Jabba the Hut, or, How We Communicate: This is another thought-experiment, but one based on a real phenomenon. Jabba the Hut is a creature from the Star Wars films and was played by a a large electromechnical puppet. The puppet was controlled by a small team of operators, each of whom was responsible for some aspect of its physical movement. They coordinated their activities through TV monitors so that the joint effect of their actions was the illusion of an autonomous creature, Jabba, acting in a coherent fashion. Boundaries and Knowing: The Ontogenetic Roots of Animism? Another anecdote, this about the interaction of an infant and its mother. Infants are moved and carried about by others; to what extent does the infant in effect think of these others as extensions of their will? How is the distinction made?

* * * * * Think of these as more or less about conversation. Synch and Society, Two Articles: A Synthesis and Review and a Study of Applause: Two abstracts, one of an article that reviews the literature on human interaction synchrony and the other is a study of applause.

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Entrainment in human conversational turn-taking: When engaged in face-to-face conversation, humans are entrained to one another’s rhythms, the central phenomenon of coupling. Brains Couple When People Talk: A short except from a Scientific American blog reporting research showing that “when two people converse, their brains become coupled.”

* * * * * Here we’re dealing with groups as observed from the outside without close attention to the (temporal) details of their interaction. Baboons Decide, Beethoven 9: On the one had we have the activity of a group of baboons as they interact to arrive a decision on where to travel. That is analogized to the tentative introduction of themes at the opening of the fourth movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. (Beethoven’s Anvil) Thinking Together, One Mind or Many? How is knowledge distributed among a body of practitioners? How is the kind of work output of small groups related to the size of the group? I conclude this short post with a question: “Some activities allow the participants to function as though they were of one mind. Others cannot support such functioning. Why?” Supercolonies, or, What’s a society? Excerpts from Mark Moffett’s work on ant supercolonies. Ants don’t recognize one another as individuals and can live in large unified colonies consisting of as many as billions of individuals.

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Musician's Journal: The Magic of the Bell This experience has had a profound effect on how I think about music. I used a reworked version to open the second chapter of Beethoven's Anvil: Music in Mind and Culture.

Introduction: Together on the One Interpersonal synchrony, moving, precisely, to the same beat as your fellows, is the core of social experience. The thrusts and jerks of an infant’s limbs, the timing of glances and twists of the body, will follow the speech rhythms of someone talking to the infant. Couples casually strolling in the park walk in step. People at a ball game make a “wave” in support of their team. All societies have rituals where people gather together and synchronize their movements, and thereby their hearts and minds, in affirmation of the central values of their culture. I want to consider an example which is immediately familiar to me. This behavior is happened my current homeland, upstate New York, which is as familiar to me as Africa was to the original African-Americans. It involves bell playing based on traditional African techniques.

The Craft However, before getting to the magic, you need to understand a little about the craft. Few physical tasks are easier than getting a sound from a bell by hitting it with a stick. But that doesn’t mean that you can play your bell in a mood of casual somnambulance. No, you must be sensitive to small details, for nuance matters. Generally you hold the bell in your left hand and the stick in your right—if you are right-handed. When you hit the bell with a stick the stick will bounce back. You need to learn to work with the rebound, not against it. If you hold the stick too firmly your grip will damp out the rebound and you will thereby waste the energy the bell has imparted to the stick. Rather, you want to hold the stick lightly and learn simply to redirect the stick’s energy back to the bell. You want to “cooperate” with the stick and the bell rather than “dominate” them. Further, you need to attend to just where you hit the bell. The sound of a bell is complex and varies depending on just where you hit it. Thus, by hitting a bell in different places you can get several distinctly different sounds from a single bell. The different sounds you get from the bell will blend with other bell sounds in different ways. You have to be conscious of these blending possibilities when playing your bell. By hitting the bell with sensitivity to the elastic properties of stick and bell you become one with the bell. By hitting the bell with sensitivity to the way your bell tones blend with other bell tones you become one with the group. While thus “becoming one with” has a mystical aura about it, you need to understand that this mystical aura is grounded in the subtleties of physical technique.

Group Unity Now that you understand that bell-playing is a physical act of some delicacy, you can begin to appreciate the magic which can happen when playing bells in a group. I want to tell about that. I have in mind some sessions organized by Adenola Knowles, a percussionist from Harlem USA who was trained in African percussion by a number of African-born musicians, including Yacub Addy of Ghana, and who has toured with Gil Scott-Heron as a percussionist in the Magic Band.

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There were four of us at the sessions, as I recall, with Ade as the leader. Each of us had a wrought-iron Ghanaian bell with two or more heads on it. Ade assigned three of us simple interlocking rhythms to play. That is, each of us had a particular pattern of sounds we had to play. While one might have a stroke or two in common with another player, most of your strokes were different from anyone else’s strokes. But each individual pattern was designed to interact with the other patterns in a way which produced an overall sense of unity. Once we established the basic patterns Ade began improvising a part beyond the fixed interlocking parts. Melodies began to emerge which no one was playing. By melody I simply mean a sequence of tones that hangs together in time. In these melodies played by all and by no one the melody tones came from one bell, then another, and another, and so on. No one person was playing the melody; it arose from the "cohesions" which appeared in the shifting pattern of tones played by the ensemble. Depending on the patterns he played, Ade could “direct” the melody, but the tones he played weren't necessarily the melody tones. Rather, they served to direct the melodic "cohesions" from place to place. Some of Ade’s tones would be melodically active, some would not. Even though Ade was the leader, he did not have a monopoly on the melody. This is quite different from what happens in part-playing on the European model. In European part-playing, one player (or group of players) has the melody line and the other players (or group) has harmony lines. The melody and harmony lines generally have the same rhythm, but only the melody line “makes sense.” When you listen to a composition arranged and performed in the European manner, the “tune” you take away with you, the sounds you are inclined to hum or whistle, is the melody. You are only indirectly aware of the harmony. And, as I’ve said, one person plays ALL the melody notes, while the others NEVER play melody notes. The bell melodies which arise in a bell choir are quite different. The tones which are in the foreground, i.e. the melody, shift from bell to bell depending on the (pitch and temporal) relationships which exist between the tones. People play different parts and no one plays the melody. Only the group itself plays the melody. In the Ade sessions, three of us were playing the same thing over and over again. Thus the relationships which obtained between our tones stayed the same from cycle to cycle. However, Ade improvised his patterns; they were not the same from cycle to cycle. And the tones he played didn't simply "float on top" of the tones the rest of us were playing like an independent melody line. They existed in the same “tonal space,” and, because of this, they affected the moment to moment gestalt of tones in that space. The variable tones Ade played affected how ALL the tones interacted. This sort of interaction is, in fact, typical of any African percussion ensemble I’ve heard, not just bell ensembles. But the effect was most striking with the bells. The point is that the interaction of various musical lines is such that patterns move into the perceptual foreground which aren't being played by any one musician. The melodic stream, the foreground, moves from musician to musician. If you break the perceived music into perceptually and functionally distinct parts, those parts will be different from the parts being played by individual musicians. This ensemble arrangement is a perfect metaphor/realization of group consciousness. But it is more than a metaphor. It is a technique for achieving and affirming such consciousness. We are one in the melody collectively created. We learn to be one through collectively creating melodies. The bell choir is an instrument which creates unity and harmony from diversity.

The Magic Now we get to the magic. For, when the music is really rocking, when spirits were high and a cool sweat begins to form, you begin to hear tones that no one is playing, high-pitched tones that flit from place to place like melodic butterflies. In talking about these tones, Ade assured me that

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these tones were simply “the magic of the bells.” They were familiar to him, these magic tones, friends who dropped in whenever, and only when, the music was rocking and the musicians locked solid into a deep groove. If you play bells with sensitive and competent musicians, sooner or later you will become part of the magic. That magic is thus nothing special. It is open to all. These magic tones are the sort of thing that tempts one to talk of spirits invoked by the music. And, that, no doubt, is how some people explain those tones. They are spirit voices. However, I am not willing to toss Western science and rationality aside. Thus I am more inclined to explain those tones through the precisely physical. My guess, and that is all that it is, is that these tones result from what physicists call constructive interference. If you have ever watched the surface of a body of water where various boats are sailing, chances are you have seen constructive interference. When the wakes from two boats cross one another there will be some patches where the waves cancel one another out and the water is smooth; that is destructive interference. There will be other patches where the waves reinforce one another, making the water even choppier than that in a single wake. Those patches show constructive interference. In the case of the magic tones from the bells, each bell is vibrating at many different frequencies, some louder than others. If the sounds from the bells are very precisely synchronized, you will get constructive interference between some frequencies which aren’t loud enough in any one bell to be distinctly heard unless they are reinforced with sound from one or more other bells. How do people get so precisely synchronized? By locking in to built-in expressive rhythms that are the same for everyone and that emerge during emotional excitement and engagement. This synchronization is thus not a result of conscious effort at synchrony, but rather, it results from allowing one’s musical actions to be governed by innate patterns of feeling. That is to say, you get the needed precision by playing with passion. This is a very important point. For Western culture has come to see passion and precision as being antithetical. Precision is about measure and control and so is disrupted by emotion or feeling. The physical reality of music gives us reason to question this. For, if I am correct in my explanation of the magic of the bell, then musical passion enhances musical precision and is not antithetical to it. As I say, that explanation is only a guess. The phenomenon of those magic tones, however, is quite real. If you don’t want to accept a mystical explanation for those tones then you have to be prepared to accept, or see the need for, some physical explanation. And one of the things that physical explanation must deal with is the fact that the magic tones occur only when players are relaxed and excited. They can’t be consciously forced to happen. The magical tones exist only during heightened feeling states. Those tones are a palpable sign that the group has become ONE, of one mind and one spirit and one heart. That is the lesson of the bell: that we can become one through attention to craft and trust in our feeling.

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The Sound of Many Hands Clapping: Group Intentionality In my earlier post on the busy bee brain1 I quoted some passages from Beethoven’s Anvil in which I discussed synchronized flashing among fireflies. Now I’d like to quote a somewhat longer passage, one about synchronized clapping (pp. 67-68):

You may be familiar with the synchronized clapping that routinely rewards successful performances—music, drama, circus, etc.—in eastern European communities, but which is less common in western Europe and North America. Z. Néda and colleagues have investigated this phenomenon, recording applause for a number of performances in Romania and Hungary. The applause would start out randomly and then quickly become strongly synchronized. Synchronized clapping would continue for a short while and then disintegrate into random clapping, from which synchronized clapping would reemerge, and so forth. Analysis of the recordings revealed two things:

1. The average noise level was greater during the random clapping than during the synchronized clapping.

2. During random clapping individuals clapped at roughly twice the frequency they used during synchronized clapping.

Clearly the greater volume during random clapping came because individuals were clapping faster. But during this phase, the time between individual claps varied more than when people clapped at the lower rate. That variability made it impossible for the group to synchronize at the higher rate—a result that has emerged in a number of studies of groups of globally coupled oscillators. Néda concluded that audience members were caught in a conflict. On the one hand, they can express one value clapping as rapidly as possible, thereby making the loudest noise. If, however, they wish to express another value by synchronizing their clapping, then they have to clap more slowly, thereby lowering the volume. It is impossible simultaneously to maximize these two aims. The group deals with this conflict by switching back and forth between two different expressive regimes. We would, of course, like to know what these two values are. The investigators assume that the loudness of the clapping reflects the audience members’ enthusiasm for the performance, while synchronous clapping expresses group solidarity. This seems reasonable enough. For our purposes, however, what is significant is the mechanism by which these two values, whatever they are, were expressed by the group. That mechanism is clearly self-organizing. No one leads audiences in this behavior. It just happens. Walter Freeman has techniques for identifying and studying intentionality in the brains of individual animals. Néda and colleagues have demonstrated a method for studying group intentionality in this one very simple

1 http://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2010/05/busy-bee-brain.html

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case—a simple case, however, that is grounded in coupled behavior. If we are to understand musicking we need techniques that work in more complicated cases, … , or the bell magic,2 or the jam session we turn to next. The important point is simply that group intentionality is amenable to empirical study.

What’s particularly interesting about this example is that we have two modes of behavior, synchronized clapping (expressing group solidarity) and loud random clapping (expressing enthusiasm for the performance), and they alternate with one another at quasi-periodic intervals. No one is directing this behavior. It just happens. How? What’s the neural mechanism? As far as I know, we no one has looked into it. But I did a little thinking about it and here are some of my old notes:

Let us begin with the observation that the peripheral motor system has two major sets of fiber tracts, the so-called pyramidal and extrapyramidal systems. These tracts, in turn, have different connections with brain regions governing the skeletal muscles. The extrapyramidal system is phylogenetically older and is associated with general muscle tone, stereotypical behavior, and emotional expression. The new pyramidal system is associated with so-called voluntary behavior and fine motor control. Different though these systems are, they drive (and sense) the same muscles.

Let me repeat and emphasize that last statement. Our muscles are controlled through two different sets of nerves. One set originates in the neocortex and mediates voluntary behavior, actions that you can will, such as pounding a nail, threading a needle, and so forth. The other set originates in subcortical structures – the so-called lizard brain – and governs behaviors which are not under the direct control of our will. We can’t will the facial expression of emotion, for example, or laughter. These two systems sometimes come in conflict, for example, when we try to suppress (voluntary) the facial expression of anger (involuntary). Let’s continue with the notes:

I’m going to associate both the periodic aspect of clapping and synchronization with the pyramidal system. Why? Because there is an area of the motor cortex known as the supplementary motor area (SMA) and it is associated with repetitive and sequential actions in monkeys and humans. The SMA affects muscles through the pyramidal system. I note that, among the primates, the sort of interpersonal synchrony we see in clapping seems to be unique to humans. In contrast, I’m going to associate enthusiasm with the extrapyramidal system and its central correlates (such as the basal ganglia). Clapping is a form of social signaling, and primates do quite a bit of that. I thus speculate that this behavior is neurally grounded in some form of primate signaling that is most likely mediated by the limbic system. This suggests a neural interpretation of the alternation between loud random clapping and synchronized clapping. Rather than thinking of this message as being about the performance (loud) and the group (synchronized) we could think of it as being about the limbic system (loud) and the neocortical system (synchronized). How do we decide between these two alternatives, and any others that might be suggested? I suspect that this question is ill posed. All we’ve got in the signal is an alternation between two modes. That alternation results from the overall properties of the behaving system rather than being explicitly controlled by some switching mechanism. We can examine the system and, on the basis of that examination, derive whatever labels we wish for the two

2 http://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2010/04/musicians-journal-magic-of-bell.html

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modes. But those labels are just conveniences for us, the analysts and modelers. From the point of view of the individuals in the behaving system all we’ve got are two different modes. No more, but also, no less. I suggest finally that the entire behavioral complex displays a form of social interaction that is uniquely human. This social interaction is not mediated by some specific “mental module” but by a pattern of functional interconnections that extends throughout the brain. It is the entire pattern that is the locus of specifically human sociality, not any one neural center implicated in that pattern. The interesting feature of that pattern is the relationship between the cortical and subcortical structures, between the phylogenetically new and the phylogenetically old. I speculate that all of the relevant neural structures predate the final emergence of modern human behavior patterns. The emergence of this form of social interaction thus has no particularly strenuous genetic requirements. It would seem to be something that just emerged when, somehow, some individuals first “captured” the possibility of synchronizing their repetitive moves, thus bringing about a new pattern of neuro-muscular interaction.

I note that this activity is intrinsically a group activity. An isolated individual can be enthusiastic about a performance they’re watching on TV, for example, and express that enthusiasm but jumping up and down and hooting and hollering. But there’s no group around with which they can express solidarity through synchronized clapping. Thus, this example takes us into the realm of memes, the building blocks of collective culture,3 which I’ve been discussing in another series of posts. What about the oscillation between these two modes of clapping: Is that memetic?

3 http://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2010/05/cultural-evolution-3-performances-and.html

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Cooperation, Coupling, Music, and Soccer Early in my book on music, Beethoven’s Anvil, I was interested in conceptualizing group music-making at the neural level in terms of the collective state space (on neural state space, see this post4). I argued, in effect, that the size of this collective neural state space could be no larger than the state space of an individual member of the group. By contrast, if the same group of people were just hanging around chatting in a coffee house or sipping piña coladas by the pool, their collective state space was likely to be considerably larger than that of any individual, as you would expect. What’s the difference? When they’re making music, their actions are tightly coupled together, they constrain one another. Rather severely. As this idea was central to my overall argument I called it a principle and gave it a name: Ensemble State Collapse (Beethoven’s Anvil, p. 61). The state space of the ensemble has no more (and likely fewer) dimensions than the state space of a single individual. “Dimension” is the key word. We’re dealing with spaces of very high dimensionality, millions upon millions upon millions. I now discover that what I called ensemble state collapse has another name, dimensional compression. There’s that word, “dimension.” I discovered this in the following article:

Michael A. Riley, Michael J. Richardson, Kevin Shockley and Verónica C. Ramenzoni, Interpersonal synergies, Frontiers in Psychology, March 2011 2:38, pp. 1-7. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2011.000385

The opening paragraph gives a feel for the article:

We present the perspective that interpersonal movement coordination results from establishing interpersonal synergies. Interpersonal synergies are higher-order control systems formed by coupling movement system degrees of freedom of two (or more) actors. Characteristic features of synergies identified in studies of intrapersonal coordination – dimensional compression and reciprocal compensation – are revealed in studies of interpersonal coordination that applied the uncontrolled manifold approach and principal component analysis to interpersonal movement tasks. Broader implications of the interpersonal synergy approach for movement science include an expanded notion of mechanism and an emphasis on interaction-dominant dynamics.

“Degrees of freedom” (DF) is not the same concept as state space, but it performs similar conceptual work. Thus:

Bernstein (1967) identified the degrees of freedom problem – the notion that the large number of independently controllable movement system DF poses a computational burden to the CNS ... Bernstein’s solution ... was that rather than controlling each DF separately, the DF are coupled to form a synergy, enabling the DF to regulate each other. This reduces the need to control each DF, and allows compensation for variability in one component of the synergy by another.

4 http://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2012/06/of-intentionality-and-nervous-systems.html 5 http://www.frontiersin.org/Movement_Science_and_Sport_Psychology/10.3389/fpsyg.2011.00038/full

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Two central features of synergies are dimensional compression and reciprocal compensation.

What’s dimensional compression?

DF that potentially are independent are coupled so that the synergy has fewer DF (possesses a lower dimensionality) than the set of components from which it arises. The behavior of the synergy has even fewer DF, a second level of dimensional compression as one moves from structural components to the behavior enacted by the interactions among the DF. Dimensional compression at both stages results from imposing constraints, which couple components so they change together rather than independently.

So, I’m happy to discover that, in making up that concept, I wasn’t making up nonsense, though I’m a bit embarrassed that more or less the same notion has been in the literature since 1967, and from such a distinguished researcher as Nikolai Bernstein.6 The Wikipedia article on Bernstein gives a nice analogy to illustrate dimensional compression:

Bernstein suggested that the CNS is capable of "functionally freezing degrees of freedom." As an analogy, controlling the four wheels of a car independently is very difficult. Yet, by functionally freezing degrees of freedom (the two rear wheels are only allowed to rotate around one shared horizontal axis, and the two front wheels are also allowed to rotate in parallel around a longitudinal axis, controlled by the steering wheel) a car becomes much easier to control.

If, instead of the four wheels of a car, we think of, say, a pair of dancers, say, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, you can see more or less how it works. If they’re simply chatting at a cocktail party Fred and Ginger can and do move independently of one another. But when you strike up the band, put them on the dance floor, and have them dance, their moves are tightly coupled. There’s a great deal of dimensional compression underlying that joy and grace.

* * * * * Now let’s consider the soccer game that was at the center of yesterday’s post on agency, ontology, and Rube Goldberg.7 Here’s the passage from Michel Serres:

A ball is not an ordinary object, for it is what it is only if a subject holds it. Over there, on the ground, it is nothing; it is stupid; it has no meaning, no function, and no value. Ball isn’t played alone. Those who do, those who hog the ball, are bad players and are soon excluded from the game. They are said to be selfish. The collective game doesn’t need persons, people out for themselves. Let us consider the one who holds it. If he makes it move around him, he is awkward, a bad player. The ball isn’t there for the body; the exact contrary is true: the body is the object of the ball; the subject moves around this sun. Skill with the ball is recognized in the player who follows the ball and serves it instead of making it follow him and using it. It is the subject of the body, subject of bodies, and like a subject of subjects. Playing is nothing else but making oneself the attribute of the ball as a substance. The laws are written for it, defined relative to it, and we bend to these laws. Skill with the ball supposes a Ptolemaic revolution of which few theoreticians are capable, since they are accustomed to being subjects in a Copernican world where objects are slaves.

6 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolai_Bernstein 7 http://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2012/06/agency-ontology-and-specter-of-rube.html

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If you’ve read my post, then you know that I expressed some skepticism about some of Serres’ formulations in that quite elegant paragraph and about some of the conclusions that Levi Bryant wanted to draw from it. That was yesterday. Today we can talk about degrees of freedom and dimensional compression. But only loosely.

Caution: We must be careful of the word “freedom” in this context. We’re using it in the phrase, “degree of freedom”, where it’s a technical term from dynamics. Whether or not this technical term has any bearing in the question of freedom of will, that’s a different, though not unimportant matter. We’ll set that aside.

First, we have Serres’ contrast between the soccer ball just sitting around somewhere, on a shelf, on the ground, wherever, and then ball when in play. When sitting on the ground, it’s nothing. That is to say, it puts few constraints on anyone’s movement. When in play, though, that’s different. In that context the ball places severe constraints of the players’ movements, for they must follow it and attempt to control it in very specific ways as dictated by the rules of the game. And, of course, the players must cooperate with one another in order to control the ball effectively and efficiently. How much dimensional compression do the players achieve as they pursue the ball (and one another), that’s an interesting question. Do better players and better teams achieve greater dimensional compression? an even more interesting question. As Serres says, the game doesn’t need selfish players who hog the ball, perhaps because they interfere with dimensional compression, and thus grace? Is following the ball a way to facilitate dimensional compression in the ensemble, the collective? And what do these questions have to do with the much vexed question of agency?

* * * * * Bonus philosophy points: Near the end of the article the authors raise the question of causality, noting that the causal relations in such a system are not traditional one’s of efficient “billiard ball” causality. They’re circular. What is this circular causality? Does it fit into Aristotle’s scheme at all?

How might a structure of process be able to exert “control” over movements? This question raises another key point: The interpersonal synergy approach, with its roots in self-organizing complex systems, entails notions of “mechanism” and “causality” that are broader than the usual (Newtonian) sense of the terms as involving only efficient causes, the kinds of forceful interactions produced by colliding cogs or billiard balls ... Complex systems exhibit circular causality; bottom-up processes give rise to macroscopic patterns that simultaneously constrain the components from the top down. Constraints play the role of causal mechanisms in complex systems insomuch as constraints allow or deny certain states. Constraints limit the DF of a system, but do not cause the system to take on particular states by virtue of forceful “pushes” (local, efficient causes). Control (manipulation of the movement system) first entails coordination (organization of the movement system), as anticipated by Bernstein (1967).

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Time after Time: Music and Memory in the Group Or, messing around in one another’s mind space for fun and funk John Miller Chernoff has an interesting observation in his book, African Rhythm and African Sensibility. It’s about playing one’s part in a percussion choir. Each of three, four, five, etc. players has a specific, simple, repetitive pattern to play. These individually simple patterns interlock to create a rich sonic wall of rhythm. Chernoff notes that even highly skilled percussionists often have a difficult time playing a specific part without also hearing the other accustomed parts. This suggests that what the percussionist has learned is not just a motor pattern, but an auditory-motor gestalt that includes the whole rhythmic soundscape and not just one specific part of it. In such a gestalt the motor and auditory components would so intertwined that one cannot simple ‘extract’ the sound of one’s own phrase, along with the motor pattern, in order to execute in isolation. Rather, proper execution requires the entire gestalt and that includes the sounds executed by other players, the group sound, not the individual sounds. It is thus not just that individual parts only sound correct in the context of other parts, but that the motor schema for executing one part is interwoven with the auditory schema for hearing the entire complex of parts. The drummer needs to hear the sound that the others are playing in order properly to activate his own motor schemas. The performance is thus inextricably a collective one. In order to be as explicit as possible I want to suggest a very strained analogy. I am imagining a scene in a certain kind of action movie where it is time to launch the nuclear missiles. The process requires that two people insert keys into locks and turn them simultaneously. In the case of our African drummer, his auditory-motor schema for a rhythm is analogous to the launch of the nuclear missiles. The drummer has the key to one lock, but that isn’t sufficient. Think of the auditory gestalt of the entire pattern as being the other key. Both keys are necessary. The drummer cannot access motor patterns in his own brain and body without help from others. Again: The drummer cannot access motor patterns in his own brain and body without help from others. Both keys must be inserted into their respective locks and then turned in order for the drummer to play his component of the rhythm. Without the full sound the drummer can certainly play something, but it will not be just exactly the appropriate part. What is so very peculiar about my argument is that it contravenes a deep an unquestioned assumption of almost all of our thinking about the human mind. That assumption is that we are masters of our own mind and body. To be sure, there is, for example, the Freudian unconscious, which I do not here deny. But that does not seem germane in this situation. Our drummer’s inability to drum alone is not a matter of neurotic repression. It is quite different. Now set that aside and let’s think about a bunch of protohumans gathered together and stomping away to a highly synchronized beat. Let us then imagine that they begin to superimpose other things on this beat, vocal calls, imitations of animal movements, whatever. They can do this as individuals, people can imitate or respond to one another’s gestures, and so forth. All that interests me is that whatever they do, it is done to the beat – and, Hebbian learning is taking place while they’re doing this. They do it for a while and then stop and go about their business. The next day they gather together and start stomping at the same tempo as they had done the previous day. Again, they start superimposing other stuff on the basic beat. I would imagine, however, that these superimpositions would be biased by the superimpositions from the previous day. Following a seminal insight by Christopher Longuette-Higgins* – who, incidentally, coined the phrase “cognitive science” – I am imagining that an initial period of isochronous (single

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period) beating would evoke the prior day’s superimpositions, thus serving as a memory key. Insert the key, turn the lock, open the door, and out comes yesterdays sonic adventures. I don’t imagine that it would evoke the prior day’s superimpositions so strongly that they would be repeated in exactly the same way. But there would be a bias, and the bias would get stronger over time so that the collective activity would converge on a set of routine moves and gestures. We need not imagine that it would ever converge so tightly that two performances would be exactly alike. What most interests me about this story is that, as a story about memory, that memory is collectively distributed throughout members of the group – recall our African drummers. No one person is in possession of the whole memory pattern. Whatever each one is doing, they all hear and more or less see everything. But each only as one component of the motor pattern necessary to execute the whole pattern. Now, it seems to me that as long as the folks have only a single isochronous beat to which they dance, they’re only going to have one performance they can execute. But if they have, say, three distinct tempos, then they can have three performances. But there’s something else they can do. Instead of using just an ischronous beat in the groove stream, they can develop differentiated patterns. If they have five different periodic patterns they use at a given tempo, then that gives them five different performances for that tempo. I note in passing that the anthropological record indicates that, among tribal peoples, different deities are associated with different basic rhythms. As I believe that protomusic precedes the emergence of language, I am imagining that all this is taking place in groups of people who lack language. Once language enters the picture we have the possibility of superimposing specific lyrics on the musical stream as a further way of differentiating performances. * See the papers on memory, pp. 369-414, Christopher Longuette-Higgins, Mental Processes, Studies in Cognitive Science, MIT Press, 1987. These papers are among the earliest explorations of the idea that the brain uses holographic processing.

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The Busy Bee Brain

Ordering Mark Moffett’s Adventures Among Ants8 got me to thinking about a science fiction novel that knocked my socks off when I was 12 or 13: Man of Many Minds,9 by E. Everett Evans. It’s about George Hanlon, a man who had the ability to project his mind into other creatures. At a critical point in the book, when – I believe – Hanlon is about to be tortured, he projects his whole mind, every last bit of it, into a swarm of bees, thereby escaping the pain of torture. I thought that was pretty neat. But what does it have to do with Moffett’s book? That’s pretty simple. Ants, like bees, live in groups, and it’s not unusual to think of such groups as being some kind of superorganism10 – a notion that, according to this blog entry, Moffett subjects to a critical workout. That swarm of bees in Man of Many Minds is such a superorganism. But when it “absorbed” Hanlon’s mind, what did it become then? The question is a rhetorical one; after all, it’s about something never really happened. It’s just fiction. But a very suggestive fiction. Could the human brain be something like a hive of bees? Yes. There is now a pretty strong consensus that the cerebral cortex (which is, by no means, the entire brain, but it is likely that this is where culture is carried) is organized into small columns of neurons. In a 1978 essay Vernon Mountcastle11 called these minicolumns and suggested that they have about 100-300 neurons each. He estimated that the neocortex consists of 600,000,000 of these minicolumns. He also suggested that these minicolumns are organized into macrocolumns, about 600,000 of them -- implying that there are hundreds of minicolumns per macrocolumn. (Mountcastle was clear that these numbers were just order of magnitude estimates & that is all I need for my purposes.) That makes these macrocolumns roughly the size of a typical invertebrate nervous system of 10K to 100K neurons. So, here’s my metaphor: Your neocortex consists of 600,000 buzzing bees going about their business.

8 http://www.adventuresamongants.com/Adventures_Among_Ants/Blog.html 9 http://www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/e/e-everett-evans/man-of-many-minds.htm 10 http://adventuresamongants.blogspot.com/search/label/Superorganism 11 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vernon_Benjamin_Mountcastle

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The point of the metaphor is that, just as individual bees are autonomous agents (which must, nonetheless, feed and reproduce in a group), so the macrocolumns are autonomous agents (which are physically coupled to many other such agents). Bees go about their business by sensing optical and chemical gradients and features and by moving their bodies and excreting chemicals. The macrocolumns are not directly connected to the external world, but they have extensive inputs and outputs to other macrocolumns and to other regions of the brain and nervous system. From a purely information processing point of view, they are as capable of action as are bees. They “sense” neurochemical gradients in the intersynaptic space and act on their sensations by excreting chemicals into that space. This loose metaphor really gets interesting, however, when we begin to think about human interaction, which of course implies interaction between brains. Some interactions are pretty loose, such as those between people strolling the aisles at a supermarket. Other interactions are tighter, such as people having a conversation over a meal. And some interactions are very tight, such as musicians making music with one another. And that brings us back to insects, fireflies in particular. Allow me to quote a passage from Chapter 3 of Beethoven’s Anvil:

Physicists do understand one element of dance, simple repetitive rhythm. This understanding has been applied to many biological systems, one of which is male fireflies in Southeast Asia. These fireflies gather in large groups on river banks, flashing on and off in unison to signal their availability to females. When they begin gathering around sunset their flashings are uncoordinated. But, as dusk darkens into night, regions of synchronized flashing emerge and spread until whole trees are cloaked in fireflies flashing in synchrony.

That is to say, in some sense, the nervous systems of those flies have become temporarily coupled together into a single physical system where some some signals are transmitted within nervous systems through electro-chemical means while other signals are transmitted from one nervous system to another by energy transduction (sending: chemicals → photons, and receiving: photons → chemicals) and light (i.e. photons). I go on to say:

There is no reason to believe that this activity is directed in the way that a conductor directs an orchestra. There is no lead firefly setting the pace of the others. The flashing simply emerges; it is self-organized. Each firefly is making his own decisions about when he’ll flash, influenced by the activities of his neighbors. This activity has been analyzed as a system of coupled oscillators, a phenomenon first noticed by the seventeenth century Dutch physicist Christiaan Huygens, who invented the pendulum clock—the pendulum being a prime example of an oscillator. One day Huygens saw that the pendulums of two clocks on the same wall were swinging in perfect synchrony. He disturbed one of them so that the synchrony dissolved, but it returned within half an hour. After a bit of experimentation he concluded that the clocks were affected by the vibrations each transmitted to the wall behind them. These vibrations led them to synchronize their periods and thereby minimize their collective energy expenditure.

Any phenomenon common to systems as different as pendulum clocks and fireflies must be very general.

I then go on to develop an argument that music works like that as well. As I say in my review12 of Steven Mithen’s The Singing Neanderthals, “what musicking does is bring all participants into a temporal framework where the physical actions - whether dance or vocalization - of different individuals are synchronized on the same time scale as that of neural impulses, that of milliseconds. Within that shared intentional framework the group can develop and refine its culture. Everyone cooperates to create sounds and movements they hold in common.” While

12 http://www.human-nature.com/nibbs/05/wlbenzon.html

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making music, I argue, we may consider the nervous systems of individuals as being physically coupled together so as to constitute a single dynamical system that is distributed across separate individuals. When the music-making stops, the distributed system dissolves into its individual components; individuals, that is to say, their brains, are free once again to operate independently of one another. The point of this exercise is that, by (the reductive step of) insisting on thinking of brains as physical systems, and therefore insisting that interactions between brains is physical interaction, we can arrive at a concept of a very special human group – one engaged in music-making – as a single distributed nervous system. That is possible only because the fundamental coupling requirements are very simple, simple enough that fireflies and neurons can meet those requirements. If fireflies can teach us about how we can make music, than surely ants have much to teach us as well. I look forward to reading Moffett’s book. Addendum If you're at all curious about what a bee brain might actually be like, well Nature Precedings13 has something similar, an account of the brain of the fruit fly: Virtual Fly Brain: An ontology-linked schema of the Drosophila Brain14 David J. Osumi-Sutherland1, Mark Longair & J. Douglas Armstrong Abstract:

Drosophila neuro-anatomical data is scattered across a large, diverse literature dating back over 75 years and a growing number of community databases. Lack of a standardized nomenclature for neuro-anatomy makes comparison and searching this growing data-set extremely arduous.

A recent standardization effort (BrainName; Manuscript in preparation) has produced a segmented, 3D model of the Drosophila brain annotated with a controlled vocabulary. We are formalizing these developments to produce a web-based ontology-linked atlas in which gross brain anatomy is defined, in part, by labeled volumes in a standard reference brain.

We have developed new relations that allow us to use this well-defined gross anatomy as a substrate to define neuronal types according to where they fasciculate and innervate as well as to record the neurotransmitters they release, their lineage and functions. The resulting ontology will provide a vocabulary for annotation and a means for integrative queries of neurobiological data.

The ontology and associated images, queries and annotations will be integrated into the Virtual Fly Brain website. This will provide a resource that biologists can use to browse annotated images of Drosophila neuro-anatomy and to get answers to questions about that anatomy and related data, without any need for ontology expertise.

13 http://precedings.nature.com 14 http://precedings.nature.com/documents/3980/version/1

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Brain-to-Brain: A Thought Experiment Thought experiments (Gedankenexperiment) have recently been a matter of some contention around here. While I’ve weighed in agains “Wordsworth on the beach,” I have no general objection to thought experiments. In fact, I’ve concocted one myself, though I’ve not published it. It came to mind at some time after my book on music came out. In that book I’d argued that music establishes a coupling between people that must be understood as a physical connection between brains, thus allowing me to think of interaction through music as a case of coupled oscillation, a physical process discovered in the 17th century by Christian Huygens. So, I began wondering whether or not it would, in principle, be possible to create a still more intimate interaction by linking one brain directly to another through some kind of mega-cable or some kind of high-bandwidth radio broadcast. I decided that, given what we know about the brain, this would not work. So what? Well its related to just how humans communicate, to intentionality, and it’s another aspect of the argument I made in my post on story-telling. It also implies that high-tech fantasies of imparting knowledge by implanting knowledge-containing chips into someone’s brain are just that, fantasies. In principle, it can’t happen. Nor would it be possible to establish a direct brain-to-computer link, at least not without a long period of training. My notes on that thought experiment follow the asterisks.

* * * * * My basic point, of course, is the brains coupled through musicking are linked as directly and intimately as computers communicating through a network. And, like networked computers, networked brains are subject to constraints. In the human case the effect of those constrains is that the collective computing space can be no larger than the computing space of a single unconstrained brain. This is true no matter how many brains are so coupled, despite the fact that these coupled brains have many more computing elements (i.e. neurons) than a single brain has. One problem in understanding this connection as being directly physical, as I see it, is that we tend to think of brains as consisting of a lot of elements. Thus, an effective connection between brains should consist of an element-to-element hook-up, no? Music doesn’t achieve anything remotely like that. So, let’s take a ploy from science fiction, direct neural coupling. I’ve seen this ploy used for man-machine communication (by e.g. Samuel Delaney) and surely someone has used it for human-to-human communication (perhaps mediated by a machine hub). Let’s try to imagine how this might work. The first problem is simply one of physical technique. Neurons are very small and very many. How do we build a connector that can hook up with, say, 10M or 100M distinctly different neurons without destroying the brain? We use Magic, that’s what we do. That is, we just declare it into existence and not worry about the messy details of actual implementation. Given our Magic-Mega-Point-to-Point (MMPTP) coupling, how do we match the neurons in one brain to those in another? For each strand in this cable is going to run from one neuron to another. If our nervous system were like that of C. elegans, there would be no problem. For that nervous system is very small and each neuron has a unique identity. It would be easy to match neurons in different individuals of C. elegans. But human brains are not like that.

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Individual neurons do not have individual identities. There is no way to match the neurons in one brain with those in another. In this respect, neurons are like hairs, and unlike fingers and toes. So, that’s one problem, how to match the neurons in two brains. About all I can see to do is to match neurons on the basis of location at, say, the millimeter level of granularity. Perhaps we choose 10M or 100M neurons in the corpus callosum and just link them up. There’s another problem: How does a brain tell whether or not a given neural impulse comes from it or from the other brain? If it can’t make the distinction, how can communication take place? What, then, happens when we finally couple two people through a MMPTP? The neurons are not going to correspond in a rigorous way and they’re not going know what’s coming from within vs. outside. In that situation I would imagine that each party to the coupling experiences a bunch of noise, that’s what. I haven’t got the foggiest idea how that noise will feel. Maybe it will just blur things up; but it might also cause massive confusion and bring perception, thought, and action to a crashing halt. The only thing I’m reasonably sure of is that it won’t yield the intimate and intuitive communion of one mind with another. However, if this coupling doesn’t bring things to a halt, it’s possible that, in time (weeks? months? years?), the two will work things out. The brains will reorganize and figure out how to deal with one another. The self-organizing processes within each brain will learn to deal with activity coming from the other brain and incorporate it into their routines. [Sort of like musicians from different cultures meeting and jamming and gradually arriving at ways to play together.] Self-organization is the key. It’s not only that individual brains are self-organized, built from inside, but that individual brains consist of many regions each of which is self-organized and quasi-autonomous. Each of these regions is connected to many other regions and is interacting with them continuously, incorporating their activities into its own self-organized patterns. [Like musicians jamming. Each makes their own decisions and their own sounds, but is listening to all the others and acting on what she hears.] And, as I said, that’s how brains are built, from the very beginning. The process is quite different from what I did years ago when I assembled my stereo amplifier from a kit. When I did that I laid all the part out and assembled the basic subcircuits. I then connected those together on the chassis and, when it was all connected, plugged it in, turned in on, and hoped for the best. That is, no electricity flowed through any these components until they were all connected. [BTW, it didn’t work at first. There was a cold solder joint in the power amplifier circuit. Once I’d fixed that, I was in business.] Brain development isn’t like that at all. The individual elements are living cells; they’re operational from birth – actually, neurons are firing away prenatally. And the operation of one neuron affects that of its near and distant neighbors. If this were not the case, it would be impossible to construct a large and complex brain like those of vertebrates; the components wouldn’t mesh effectively. So there’s never really a magic moment like that in the life of a stereo amplifier when all the dead elements suddenly become alive. The closest we’ve got is the moment of birth, when the operational environment for the nervous system becomes dramatically changed, all of it, at once, and forever. And then it keeps on growing and developing, self-organizing (region by region) in interaction with the external world. But brains remain forever unique. And that means that our fantasy MMPTP coupler is, in fact, no better than music. Real music, that we can make any time, that we’ve been making since before speech evolved, that’s as direct and intimate as it gets. The Vulcan Mind Meld is science fiction; music is not.

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Brain-to-Brain Coupling Trends Cogn Sci. 2012 Feb;16(2):114-21. Epub 2012 Jan 3. Brain-to-brain coupling: a mechanism for creating and sharing a social world. Hasson U, Ghazanfar AA, Galantucci B, Garrod S, Keysers C. Neuroscience Institute, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08540, USA. hasson@princeton.edu http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22221820 Abstract: Cognition materializes in an interpersonal space. The emergence of complex behaviors requires the coordination of actions among individuals according to a shared set of rules. Despite the central role of other individuals in shaping one's mind, most cognitive studies focus on processes that occur within a single individual. We call for a shift from a single-brain to a multi-brain frame of reference. We argue that in many cases the neural processes in one brain are coupled to the neural processes in another brain via the transmission of a signal through the environment. Brain-to-brain coupling constrains and shapes the actions of each individual in a social network, leading to complex joint behaviors that could not have emerged in isolation.

* * * * * The key statement is that “that in many cases the neural processes in one brain are coupled to the neural processes in another brain via the transmission of a signal through the environment.” I made such an argument the conceptual centerpiece of my 2001 book on music, Beethoven's Anvil. I reprised and extended some of those ideas in my essay-review of Steven Mithen's The Singing Neanderthals. See also my post, The Sound of Many Hands Clapping: Group Intentionality.

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Relations, Neurons, Culture Anyone who’s been following object-oriented ontology and related matters in the blogosphere knows there’s major controversy over relations–a notion that, in the full extent of its abstractness, covers a great deal of conceptual territory. In thinking about that business during the middle of the night I suddenly realized that it provides a way of talking nervous systems in individuals and in groups regardless of its usefulness in general philosophical discussion. Here’s the basic idea: Neurons in an individual nervous system can be said to be internally related to one another. Two neurons in different individual nervous systems will not be internally related, but they may have external relations if the individuals are interacting with one another. Under certain conditions of interaction, however, neurons in different nervous systems can be said to be internally related is much the same way that neurons in the same nervous system are internally related. I made that argument in some detail, though not those terms, in chapters 2 and especially 3 (which begins with fireflies and ends with clapping hands) of Beethoven’s Anvil: Music in Mind and Culture. You can find posts on these and related matters on this blog under the headings of coupling15 and synchrony.16 Now, let’s go through a more leisurely statement of the idea.

Neurons in Nervous Systems: A Small World The neurons in a nervous system have direct physical connections with one another and appear to form what’s called a small-world network. The human nervous system—the whole nervous system, not just the brain—has roughly 100 billion neurons.17 On the average each neuron connects with 10,000 other neurons, but no neuron is more than five or six connections from any other neuron (I’m just guessing there, I don’t think there’s a standard number established for this). THAT’s what it means to be a small-world network, 100 billion elements in the system, none more than and handful of connections from any other. Each neuron in such a system is connected to any other neuron by a relatively short chain of direct links. Let us agree that, by definition, the existence of such a chain means that the neurons are internally related to one another. When the chain is relatively long, five or six links or more, the relationship will be relatively weak. But even if two neurons are directly connected it would be unusual for one neuron to be able to activate or suppress the other without ‘help’ from many other neurons. Neurons in the nervous systems of different individuals obviously have no chains of direct connections with one another. Different individuals do interact with one another, however. So let us say, by definition, that neurons in the nervous systems of interacting individuals can be said to have external relations to one another. (And if the neurons are in individuals that aren’t interacting with one another, they don’t have any relationship at all. This case is of no immediate interest.)

15 http://new-savanna.blogspot.com/search/label/coupling 16 http://new-savanna.blogspot.com/search/label/synchrony 17 http://faculty.washington.edu/chudler/facts.html

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Communication and Change Animals have to communicate with one another for a variety of purposes. And so communication systems have developed. Chemical systems (smell but also taste) are perhaps the most basic. But we have auditory and visual systems as well. The mere fact that two or more individuals are interacting through such systems does not at all imply that neurons in the different individuals are internally related to one another. On the contrary, the point of such communication systems is that they do not require internal relations between different nervous systems. What’s particularly important about internally related neurons is that they can influence one another through learning. They can change one another’s operations in a direct physical way, in an electrochemical way. Externally related neurons cannot do that. It’s this interaction that gives “teeth” to the notion of internal vs. external relations of neurons.

I’m going to leave that last paragraph as a bare assertion for now. But it needs to be argued. Later.

Coupling through Synchrony What I argued in Beethoven’s Anvil is that when the actions of two individuals are precisely synchronized with one another at a scale of 10s of milliseconds their nervous systems are coupled into a single physical system such that neurons in one nervous system can be said to be internally related to neurons in the other nervous system. This connection is mediated, not simply by neurons, but by some physical connection that is external to the two nervous systems. If the communication is through sound, then the external channel will be through the motor system (to produce the sound) and the auditory, which perceives. If the communication is through movement or posture, then the external channel will be through the motor system (to produce the movement of posture) and vision and/or hapsis, to perceive it. Once two or more nervous systems are so coupled the neurons in the two systems can influence one another through learning. They can change one another’s operations in a direct physical way, in an electrochemical way. Such a coupling of different individual nervous systems is now functioning as a single system of internally related neurons.

Music and Beyond THAT’s what culture does for humans. It provides the terms of the coupling. Beethoven’s Anvil is about music, and I make this argument at length and in some detail there. Music and dance provide the most basic case because the nature of the coupling is most direct and obvious. Just how to generalize to all of culture is not obvious to one. Consider language. We know that when individuals are talking with one another that their vocal channels are coupled in the proper wall to establish internal relationships. But the vocal channel only carriers a chain of signifiers. What about the signifieds and the meaning they convey? I have some remarks on that in three posts on cultural evolution and language (Language Games 1, Speech18, Addendum on Language as Game19, and Language Games 2, Story Telling20). More work is needed, obviously. What about writing? Jane Austen wrote at one time and place. I read her at a different time and place. Does that put neurons in my nervous system in an internal relationship with neurons in her nervous system, despite the fact that her nervous system in long dead? I’m not even sure that’s a sensible question. A more sensible and sophisticated question would go like this: You read Pride and Prejudice a year ago, I read it a week ago; we’re now emailing back and 18 http://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2010/06/cultural-evolution-8-language-games-1.html 19 http://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2010/06/cultural-evolution-8a-addendum-on.html 20 http://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2010/06/cultural-evolution-9-language-games-2.html

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forth about the book. Are neurons in my nervous system internally related to neurons in your nervous system through our asynchronous electronic correspondence (through the electronic medium is irrelevant, we could just as easily be exchanging letters by snail mail)? If so, what role does Pride and Prejudice play in that interaction? I don’t know. But I think it’s a good problem to work on. Hell, it’s a great problem.

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Jabba the Hut, or, How We Communicate From my notes:

A number of years ago I saw a TV program on the special effects of the Star Wars trilogy. One of the things the program explained was how the Jabba the Hut puppet was manipulated. There were, I think, perhaps a half dozen operators for the puppet, one for the eyes, one for the mouth, one for the tail, etc. Each had a TV monitor which showed him what Jabba was doing, all of Jabba, not just their little chunk of Jabba. So each could see the whole, but manipulate only a part. Of course, each had to manipulate his part so it blended seamlessly with the movements of the other parts. So each needed to see the whole to do that.

That seems to me a very concrete analogy to what musicians have to do. Each plays only a part in the whole, but can hear the whole.

I don’t know how long ago I saw that program, it may well have been pre-WWW, but certainly not pre-internet, which is older than Star Wars, or at least it’s precursor, ARPAnet, is older than Star Wars. In any event, you can now read about the puppetry behind Jabba at the Wikipedia21 and elsewhere (scroll down to Behind the Scenes22). The above description is accurate enough for my purposes. And that purpose is to provide a metaphor, not just for music making, but for communication in general. In particular, for speech communication. The idea is to provide an alternative that thoughtful people can use to over-ride the pernicious effects of the so-called conduit metaphor,23 which Michael Reddy* analyzed as a pile of lexical habits we employ when talking about language. These habits presume that we communicate by sending meaning through some kind of conduit, whether real (e.g. a telephone line) or virtual (e.g. that air between two people talking). The person at one end of the conduit puts the meaning into a packet of language, sends the packet through the conduit. The other person takes the packet from the conduit and then takes the meaning out of it. It doesn’t work that way, not the meaning part. What does go through the conduit is a speech signal, vibrations in air, analog or digital signals through electrical lines, characters written or printed on paper, and so forth. But the meaning isn’t actually IN the signal. If it were, then we could understand any language with ease because the meaning would be in the physical signal itself. Alas, that’s not the case. Meanings are linked to segments of the signal by hard-learned linguistic conventions; and the conventions are different for each language. What happens, then, is that the listener construes the meaning of the signal according to their understanding of the overall context and their understanding of the governing linguistic conventions. The may or may not get it right. And there’s likely to be a bit of conversational negotiation before the speakers agree on whatever is at issue. And that is what the Jabba metaphor is about. Everyone stands in the same relationship to what appears on the TV monitor showing Jabba’s movements. In the case of a musical group, each person is playing their own part – the drummer, bass player, tuba, glockenspiel, sitar, nose flute, pipe organ, whatever – and is aware of it and what they intend next. The monitor gives them the whole, in which their part must fit.

21 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jabba_the_Hutt 22 http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Jabba_the_Hutt 23 Wikipedia entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conduit_metaphor

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The case of speech is trickier, for one person speaks while the others listen. The Jabba metaphor suggests that the speaker doesn’t actually know what he or she is saying until he or she actually hears it spoken. And that just doesn’t make sense. But, on closer observation, it does. Here’s what I say about Wallace Chafe’s Discourse, Consciousness, and Time in a recent paper on “Kubla Khan”:24

Nonetheless, the linguist Wallace Chafe has quite a bit to say about what he calls an intonation unit, and that seems germane to any consideration of the poetic line. In Discourse, Consciousness, and Time Chafe asserts that the intonation unit is “a unit of mental and linguistic processing” (Chafe 1994, pp. 55 ff. 290 ff.). He begins developing the notion by discussing breathing and speech (p. 57): “Anyone who listens objectively to speech will quickly notice that is not produced in a continuous, uninterrupted flow but in spurts. This quality of language is, among other things, a biological necessity.” He goes on to observe that “this physiological requirement operates in happy synchrony with some basic functional segmentations of discourse,” namely “that each intonation unit verbalizes the information active in the speaker’s mind at its onset” (p. 63).

While it is not obvious to me just what Chafe means here, I offer a crude analogy to indicate what I understand to be the case. Speaking is a bit like fishing, you toss the line in expectation of catching a fish. But you do not really know what you will hook. Sometimes you get a fish, but you may also get nothing, or an old rubber boot. In this analogy, syntax is like tossing the line while semantics is reeling in the fish, or the boot. The syntactic toss is made with respect to your current position in the discourse (i.e. the current state of the system). You are seeking a certain kind of meaning in relation to where you are now.

That is to say, in ordinary conversation the speaker doesn’t formulate a complete thought in the silent privacy of her mind and then just send it on over to the Language Desk for external expression. No, the formulation is done in short, discrete chunks, each of which is checked for accuracy once it is actually heard. If it makes sense, speaking can continue without interruption. If it doesn’t, then the speaker will interrupt the speech stream and reformulate. I go on to say:

Chafe identifies three different kinds of intonation units. Substantive units tend to be roughly five words long on average and, as the term suggests, present the substance of one’s thought. Regulatory units are generally a word or so long (e.g. and then, maybe, mhm, oh, and so forth), and serve to regulate the flow of ideas, rather than to present their substance. Given these durations, a single line of poetry can readily encompass a substantive unit or both a substantive and a regulatory unit.

The third kind of unit, fragmentary, results when one of the other types is aborted in mid-execution. That is to say, one is always listening to one’s own speech and is never quite sure, at the outset of a phrase, whether or not one’s toss of the syntactic line will reel-in the right fish. If things do not go as intended, the phrase may be aborted. Fragments do not concern us, as we are dealing with a text that has been thought-out and, presumably, edited, rather than with free speech, which is what Chafe studied.

With those qualifications in mind, the Jabba puppet is not a bad metaphor for conversation. Conversation becomes a cooperative enterprise in which the participants attempt to arrive at a common understanding. This is true even in the case of a dispute, where the objective is to arrive at a common understanding of the matter under dispute. And THAT, I suggest, is one reason Dawkins’ notion of memes has become terribly derailed. Dawkins and just everyone else implicitly assumes the conduit metaphor and so thinks of ideas as going from one person to another as water through a conduit. And since ideas have become reconceived as memes, we now have these memebots hopping from one brain to another.

24 http://www.academia.edu/8810242/_Kubla_Khan_and_the_Embodied_Mind

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The role of the listener in decoding the meaning is simply forgotten, as is the need for conversational partners to negotiate meanings between them. Writing, of course, introduces complications, as writer and reader are rarely copresent. I don’t see that the fundamental dynamic changes, but I haven’t worked out an explicit story. I will only note, in closing, that learning to write well is difficult, and that written language is frequently misconstrued. * Reddy, Michael J. (1979). “The conduit metaphor: A case of frame conflict in our language about language”, in Metaphor and Thought, ed. Andrew Ortony, 2nd edn. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993): 164-201.

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Boundaries and Knowing: The Ontogenetic Roots of Animism? Here’s an incident that I think about from time to time. It’s about boundaries, between mother and infant, and about knowing the world: What is the infant’s world like and how does she come to know it? My starting point is the truism that an infant’s mother is an extraordinarily ‘large’ (if that’s the word) part of the infant’s world. The younger the infant, the more encompassing is the mother. Prenatally, of course, she is all. And the infant, we know, is active and sentient prenatally. Psychoanalytic theory, but not only psychoanalytic, makes much of this. The point is simply that, phenomenologically, experientially, ontogenetically, the external world is a living being that is, in reasonable circumstances, extraordinarily response to the infant’s actions and needs. How does this infant experience this externality?

* * * * * A few years ago I was sitting in a departure lounge at Newark International Airport and happened to observe a mother and her infant playing together. She was seated in one of the chairs and had her infant on her lap. The infant was, say, nine months old and was playing with some cup-like object, perhaps a plastic container for storing food in a refrigerator. She was turning it around in her hands, looking inside, grabbing it and waving it, and so forth. Then she dropped it and it fell to the floor. She had been following it with her eyes, of course, and so followed it to the floor. At the same time she leaned over and reached down for it. As she did so her mother smoothly lowered her to the point where she could grab the container and thus retrieve the dropped object—dropped deliberately, in exploration? Once she’d grabbed on and started pulling it toward her, her mother pulled her up and back to her lap. This happened quickly and smoothly, as though mother and infant were not two, but one: motherandchild. Biomechanically, I suggest, they WERE one. They’d spent many hours thus playing together. They knew one another’s moves. Mother knew what baby wanted and how it would move; baby was secure in mother’s grasp.

* * * * * So, how did this infant experience she mother’s action of lowering and then raising? Did she experience as her own, as answering to HER will? After all, when she reached for the dropped object, she was intending to reach it and the move was correlative with that intention. And when mother carries her infant from one place to another, how does the infant experience that movement? Say, for example, that the infant spots something across the room and looks right at it, with interest. Mother carries the infant toward the object and then places the infant on the floor a few feet from the object. How does the infant experience that? How much of that movement is within the compass of the infant’s will? All of it? What distinction does the infant make between the carry portion and the crawl portion? And, if the infant is attending to one thing, and mother moves her away from that thing, against her will, how does the infant experience THAT movement? Note that, in neither case, does the infant herself propel the movement from one place to the other.

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* * * * * With that in mind, think of camera movement in motion pictures. The camera moves here and there, but you don’t move at all, you just see the scene shift. When the film cuts from one shot to another, the scene shift is abrupt. More specifically, I’ve sometimes speculated that the world of The Nutcracker Suite in Disney’s Fantasia is that of an infant being carried around from place to place within a fairly small outdoor place. And so . . .

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Synch and Society, Two Articles: A Synthesis and Review and a Study of Applause Here's a review and synthesis of recent work and thinking on human synchrony (from the Dartmouth lab of Thalia Wheatley25):

Thalia Wheatley, Olivia Kang, Carolyn Parkinson, and Christine E. Looser. From Mind Perception to Mental Connection: Synchrony as a Mechanism for Social Understanding.26 Social and Personality Psychology Compass 6/8 (2012): 589–606, 10.1111/j.1751-9004.2012.00450.x

Connecting deeply with another mind is as enigmatic as it is fulfilling. Why people ‘‘click’’ with some people but not others is one of the great unsolved mysteries of science. However, researchers from psychology and neuroscience are converging on a likely physiological basis for connection – neural synchrony (entrainment). Here, we review research on the necessary precursors for interpersonal synchrony: the ability to detect a mind and resonate with its outputs. Further, We describe potential mechanisms for the development of synchrony between two minds. We then consider recent neuroimaging and behavioral evidence for the adaptive benefits of synchrony, including neural efficiency and the release of a reward signal that promotes future social interaction. In nature, neural synchrony yields behavioral synchrony. Humans use behavioral synchrony to promote neural synchrony, and thus, social bonding. This reverse-engineering of social connection is an important innovation likely underlying this distinctively human capacity to create large-scale social coordination and cohesion.

Three comments: 1) It's interesting to see this material framed in terms of The brain's Turing Tests. I take this as an index of how thoroughly the computational conception of mind has come to permeate our thinking. 2) I particularly recommend attention to the section, Neural efficiency: “A hallmark of mental connection is that it feels effortless.” This has an affinity for the conception of pleasure I develop in Chapter 4 of Beethoven's Anvil. See also Bernstein's concept of dimensional compression which comes up in this post, Cooperation, Coupling, Music, and Soccer (see above). 3) Attend to various remarks about loss of a sense of self. Here's an article reporting a study of clapping (see my post The Sound of Many Hands Clapping: Group Intentionality): Richard P. Mann1, Jolyon Faria, David J. T. Sumpter and Jens Krause. The dynamics of audience applause.27 Journal of the Royal Society Interface 6 August 2013 vol. 10 no. 85 20130466

The study of social identity and crowd psychology looks at how and why individual people change their behaviour in response to others. Within a group, a

25 http://wheatlab.virb.com/ 26 http://g.virbcdn.com/_f/files/0e/FileItem-263816-Compass.pdf 27 http://rsif.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/10/85/20130466.full

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new behaviour can emerge first in a few individuals before it spreads rapidly to all other members. A number of mathematical models have been hypothesized to describe these social contagion phenomena, but these models remain largely untested against empirical data. We used Bayesian model selection to test between various hypotheses about the spread of a simple social behaviour, applause after an academic presentation. Individuals' probability of starting clapping increased in proportion to the number of other audience members already ‘infected’ by this social contagion, regardless of their spatial proximity. The cessation of applause is similarly socially mediated, but is to a lesser degree controlled by the reluctance of individuals to clap too many times. We also found consistent differences between individuals in their willingness to start and stop clapping. The social contagion model arising from our analysis predicts that the time the audience spends clapping can vary considerably, even in the absence of any differences in the quality of the presentations they have heard.

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Entrainment in human conversational turn-taking Margaret Wilson has a guest post at Language Log28 that's questioning a recent article arguing that marmoset vocal interactions have a similar style of turn taking. In the course of that argument she gives the following brief summary of the literature on human conversational turn taking, which strongly implies that people are entrained to one another's rhythms:

When humans take turns, there is a cyclic structure to the extremely short gaps between speakers' utterances (Sacks, Schegloff, & Jefferson, 197429; Wilson & Wilson, 200530; Wilson & Zimmerman, 198631). A between-turn gap of, say, 200 milliseconds is more likely to be broken by the second speaker at certain regular intervals (say, odd multiples of 50 ms) than during the "troughs" between those intervals. That is, short silences are not of arbitrary length, but reflect a cyclic passing back and forth of who has the "right" to speak next (Wilson & Zimmerman, 1986). The troughs represent moments when the right to speak has shifted back to the original speaker, hence the second speaker inhibits speech during those fractions of a second. And this is happening at the order of tens of milliseconds. This "structured silence" can only be explained by extremely tight coupling — entrainment — of some oscillatory mechanism in the brains of the two speakers. (For further research on this framework, see O'Dell, Neiminen & Lennes, 201232; Stivers et al., 200933).

Addendum (10.22.2015): It's worth mentioning the pioneering work of psychiatrist William Condon,34 who was publishing on interpersonal synchronization as long ago as 1963. He published an article in Science (183: 99) in 1974: Neonate movement is synchronized with adult speech: Integrated participation and language acquisition. I don't have that paper in front of me at the moment, but I know that in one experiment he filmed neonates (less than an hour old) while adults were talking too them and discovered that their body movements where synchronized to the speech rhythms. He also made observations where autistics failed to synchronize normally with others. David Hays brought Condon's work to my attention back in the 1970s, saying he thought it was of fundamental importance. Since it was Hays telling me this, I read Condon carefully. But I didn't really get it back then. Now I do. The conceptual problem seems to be that this is about how a physical mechanism works, that of the mind-brain. It's got rhythms and when it engages in a certain kind of communication, those rhythms have to be synched among participants. But there's a lot of thinking that's latched on to superficial information speak, where information isn't physical, it's something else. But sending a signal through a phone line IS physical, and information theory arose around that problem. Getting back to Condon and autism. Autism has figured centrally in thinking about so-called Theory of Mind (ToM). ToM has also been linked to gaze following. Could there be a causal link between gaze following and synchronization?

28 http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=7989 29 http://www.cs.columbia.edu/%7Ejulia/cs4706/Sacks_et_al_1974.pdf 30 http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/WilsonWilson2005.pdf 31 http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/WilsonZimmerman1986.pdf 32 http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/ODell2012.pdf 33 http://www.pnas.org/content/106/26/10587.full 34 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_S._Condon, http://www.edu-cyberpg.com/Literacy/whatresearchCondon.asp

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Some years ago in an essay review of Steven Mithin's The Singing Neanderthal,35 I speculated as follows:

Let us push the argument a step further. For the last decade or so there has been considerable interest in the notion that people acquire a so-called theory of mind (TOM) early in maturation and that this TOM is critical to interpersonal interaction (see e.g. Baron-Cohen 1995). Gaze following is one behavior implicated in TOM. Humans beyond a relatively early age will follow the direction of one another's gaze. I would like to suggest that we notice gaze direction in people with whom we synchronize, but not otherwise.

Think about the perceptual requirements of noticing and tracking gaze direction. Even at conversational distance, another person’s eyes are small in relation to the whole visual scene; thus the visual cues for gaze direction will also be small. Further, people in conversation are likely to be in constant relative motion with respect to one another. The motions may not be large – head turns and gestures, trunk motion – but they will be compounded by the fact that one’s eyes are in constant saccadic motion. Synchronization would eliminate one component of relative motion between people and therefore simplify the process of picking up the minute cues signalling gaze direction. But if one cannot properly synchronize with others, then those cues will be more difficult to notice and track. Thus the capacity for interpersonal synchrony may be a prerequisite for the proper functioning of TOM circuitry.

35 http://ssrn.com/abstract=2280061

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Brains Couple When People Talk Uri Hasson, a Princeton psychologist who's also done some interesting work on brain activity while watching movies, has discovered that, when two people converse, their brains become coupled. Writing in a blog at Scientific America Douglas Fields reports:36

There have been many functional brain-imaging studies involving language, but never before have researchers examined both the speaker's and the listener's brains while they communicate to see what is happening inside each brain. The researchers found that when the two people communicate, neural activity over wide regions of their brains becomes almost synchronous, with the listener's brain activity patterns mirroring those sweeping through the speaker's brain, albeit with a short lag of about one second. If the listener, however, fails to comprehend what the speaker is trying to communicate, their brain patterns decouple. . . . In order to find out what happens in the brain when the speaker and listener communicate or fail to connect, Hasson, an assistant professor in Princeton's Department of Psychology, and his team had to first overcome both technical problems using new analytical methods as well as special nonmagnetic noise-canceling microphones. He asked his student to tell an unrehearsed simple story while imaging her brain. Then they played back that story to several listeners and found that the listener's brain patterns closely matched what was happening inside the speaker's head as she told the story.

These results are exciting but not surprising. Back in the late 60s and early 1970s William Condon did high-speed video taping of people interacting with one another. He found, for example, that the listener's head and body movements tracked the intonation patters of the speaker's language. Interestingly enough, this was true even for neonates, their body motions tracked speech patterns of nearby speakers. I made such interactional synchrony the conceptual centerpiece of my 2001 book on music, Beethoven's Anvil. I also reprise and extend some of those ideas in my essay-review37 of Steven Mithen's The Singing Neanderthals. See also my post, The Sound of Many Hands Clapping: Group Intentionality (see above).

36 http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/post.cfm?id=of-two-minds-listener-brain-pattern-2010-07-27&sc=WR_20100728 37 http://www.human-nature.com/nibbs/05/wlbenzon.html

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Baboons Decide, Beethoven 9

Reading a recent Latour essay reminded me that he’s done some work on baboons. I haven’t, but a particular bit of baboon behavior has been on my mind for years: collective decision-making. Here’s a passage from Beethoven’s Anvil (pp. 107-110) where I talk about baboon decision-making and compare it to the opening of the last movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.

* * * * * Let’s consider an example of real social interaction, but not among humans. Let us follow Hans Kummer in observing a resting troop of baboons deciding where to go next. As you read this account you might imagine that you are a baboon situated somewhere in the middle of a troop having, say, eighty members. This is what Kummer sees from his vantage point outside the troop:

The troop performs slow on-the-spot movements, changing its shape like an undecided amoeba. Here and there, males move a few yards away from the troop and sit down, facing in a particular direction away from the center. Pseudopods are generally formed by the younger adult males and their groups. For a time, pseudopods protrude and withdraw again, until one of the older males in the center of the troop rises and struts toward one of the pseudopods. At this, the entire troop is alerted and begins to depart in the indicated direction.

There is thus a fair amount of milling about in which the group ponders its options and, after due deliberation, an elder makes a decision. The troop pulls together and heads out. By comparison you might think about the opening of the final movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony: distinctly different musical ideas mill about at until one of them, the “Ode to Joy,” takes charge. Let’s think about the older males at the group’s center. They cannot see the entire troop in a glance nor even by scanning from a fixed point of view. Each is checking out the various pseudopods and one another, glancing about, picking up indications here and there and integrating it all until one of them decides both that he’s the one to signal a direction, and what that direction is. Whatever the exact nature of the neural dynamics that performs these tasks, all this attending, updating, and integrating requires a pretty sophisticated control system to scan the scene and integrate tens or hundreds of indications about the state of the troop. I suggest the neurodynamics of a single human musicker is comparable to the collective decision-making of this baboon troop and that humans use their Central Social Circuitry to track the music in the same way that baboons track their fellows. The troop’s milling behavior is typical of intentional systems as they “hunt” for a stable state. Unlike musicking humans, however, the baboons are not coupled in rhythmic interaction. The fact that musicking humans are coupled means that the group acts in a unified way that is impossible for a baboon troop.

Imagine then that it is May 7, 1824, and you are attending the premier of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony at the Kärntnerthortheater in Vienna. On the stage you see not only a full symphony orchestra, with its strings, woodwinds, brass, and percussion, but also a full chorus and four solo vocalists. As the music unfolds you have to makes sense of it all. At times that is relatively easy, for only a few instruments are playing. At other times the full orchestra is playing, with the strings, brass, and woodwinds, all playing multiple parts—and then we have the chorus and soloists as well. The problem you have is not unlike that of the older males at the center of the baboon troop: You face a complex system of sonic activity and must make some integrated

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sense of it and maintain your own sense of direction amid all the hubbub. The difference between your group and the baboons, however, is that everyone in your group is effectively an older male scanning the scene, even the musicians.

You direct your attention here and there. Now you’re listening to the violins, then the cellos attract your interest, then the flute, which gives way to the French horn, only to be supplanted by the tympany, and so forth. Even as you attend to this or that specific musical line you remain aware of other lines. Perhaps one thing that pulls your attention here and there is a mismatch between what is currently happening in a specific part and what you been unconsciously expecting based on what you had previously heard. One can imagine all sorts of things. If Beethoven has done his job as composer, and as conductor—despite his deafness, he is conducting the premier you are listening to—then all the interacting strands of melody will be where they need to be when you check on them. The music will flow naturally and you’ll hardly be aware of all the effort you’re expending to track all those sounds. The parallel between our baboon troop and our Beethoven premier is not an exact one, and I have certainly pushed it to its limit. The principles of Equivalence and Ensemble State Collapse show how music allows a human group to function with the coherence of a single brain. Together they constitute the forge in which the Central Social Complex shapes the forms of group interaction and individual neurodynamics into a coherent culture. At a more humble level, one where we have experimental evidence, consider the possibility that subcortical structures in your brain are treating each instrumental line as the activity of a single human actor, a virtual being. This is what Albert Bregman’s book, Auditory Scene Analysis, suggests. The human auditory system evolved to segregate the soundscape into separate auditory streams, each of which is presumed to reflect the activities of a single causal agent somewhere in the world. Many of these causal agents are other animals, perhaps prey or predator, or fellow humans. When this system is presented with music, it operates in the same way, identifying streams and treating them as signs of actions by various agents. When you hear Beethoven’s music your brain is responding to a carnival of virtual beasts, cavorting and fighting, licking their wounds, meeting and greeting old friends, gathering at the water hole for a refreshing drink, nuzzling and snoozing the night away.

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Thinking Together, One Mind or Many? I’m interested in how we think together, in why some conceptual work must be done alone, while other work can variously be shared with others. Without bothering to do more set-up, let’s wade right in, with a passage from Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, (1970, 2nd Ed.). We’re in the first chapter, where he’s developing the concept of a paradigm and using optics as his example and noting that various schools of thought and practice had obtained before optics emerged as a mature science (p. 13):

At various times all these schools made significant contributions to the body of concepts, phenomena, and techniques from which Newton drew the first nearly uniformly accepted paradigm for physical optics. Any definition of the scientist that excludes at least the more creative members of these various schools will exclude their modern successors as well. Those men were scientists. Yet anyone examining a survey of physical optics before Newton may well conclude that, though the field’s practitioners were scientists, the net result of their activity was something less than science. Being able to take no common body of belief for granted, each writer on physical optics felt forced to build his field anew from is foundations. In doing so, his choice of supporting observation and experiment was relatively free, for there was no standard set of methods or of phenomena that every optical writer felt forced to employ and explain. Under these circumstances, the dialogue of the resulting books was often directed as much to the members of other schools as it was to nature. That pattern is not unfamiliar in a number of creative fields today, nor is it incompatible with significant discovery and invention. It is not, however, the pattern of development that physical optics acquired after Newton and that other natural sciences make similar today.

Kuhn continues with further examples and eventually comes up with the notion of a paradigm, which in his original formulation was something only possessed by mature scientific disciplines (within a decade or two the concept had been generalized to everything). Thus Kuhn would speak of the pre-paradigmatic phase of a discipline that, upon adoption of a paradigm, became a science. Because scientists share a certain body of knowledge and assumptions it is possible for scientific work to proceed incrementally. Scientists conduct their observations and write them up in individual and relatively compact articles. Each article assumes a large and mostly unstated body of knowledge which one must know in order to understand the article. These articles each contain relatively narrow bits of observation and insight that accumulate over time in a more or less consistent and coherent fashion. It all holds together. And that’s what interests me here, patterns of practice and publication: the way knowledge is shared in distributed in a community of practitioners. For not all disciplines are organized in this way. Philosophy is not nearly so atomistic and cumulative in style. Major statements make loose assumptions about what readers know and agree on and tends to build the whole argument, if not from the ground up, from pretty low down. Further, collaborative work is not nearly so common as it is in the sciences.

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Why? Why these different styles of disciplinary publication, interaction, and cooperation? What is it about one style of intellectual work that makes it more amenable to collaboration and accumulation than a different style? While I have half a thought or two on that – certainly no more – I’m not so much interested in answering the question as I am in establishing the nature of the issue as I see it. So here’s different piece of the puzzle, this from Mancour Olson, The Logic of Collective Action (Harvard University Press 1965, pp. 53-54):

Professor [John] James found that in a variety of institutions, public and private, national and local, “action taking” groups and subgroups tended to be much smaller than “non-action taking” groups and subgroups. In one sample he studied, the average size of the “action taking” subgroups was 6.5 members, whereas the average size of the “non-action taking” subgroups was 14 members. These subgroups were in a large banking concern. . . . James found that U. S. Senate subcommittees at the time of his investigation had 5.4 members on the average, House subcommittees had 7.8, the Oregon state government, 4.7, and the Eugene, Oregon, municipal government. 5.3. In short, the groups that actually do the work are quite small.

So, here we have one type of task (“non-action taking”) being performed in groups of a dozen or so while another type (“action taking”) requires a group half the size. Why? We could hypothesize that taking action requires a closer level of agreement than not taking action and THAT’s the reason. But still, why? What’s it about a close level of agreement that forces a smaller size? Ultimately the question, as it interest me, is about brains and nervous systems. What is it about this or that activity that allows nervous systems to interact in this or that way? In the early chapters of Beethoven’s Anvil I argued that, when people make music together, their brains are physically coupled (through sound waves) into a single functioning system. This can happen in groups as small as two or as large as hundreds, if not more. (See, for example, posts on coupling, cooperation, and bees.) That’s music, which is very different from discursive intellectual work. In music making, all the actors are present at the same place and time. In discursive intellectual work the actors are not necessarily co-present; in the large, they rarely are. And that – co-presence – is one factor. But hardly the only one. After all participants in a face-to-face discussion are co-present, but such discussions are not necessarily cooperative and collaborative. Some activities allow the participants to function as though they were of one mind. Others cannot support such functioning. Why?

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Supercolonies, or: What’s a society? Mark “Dr. Bugs” Moffett has recently written a review of the literature on certain ants that live in so-called supercolonies:

Mark W. Moffett. Supercolonies of billions in an invasive ant: What is a society? Behavioral Ecology (2012). doi: 10.1093/beheco/ars043, First published online: April 20, 2012. Full text here (PDF38).

As the name suggests, supercolonies are large, with millions to perhaps a trillion members. They can also live in discontinuous sites, sometimes located on several continents, as a result of human transport. What’s “at issue,” Moffett says, “is what we should consider a colony (or society).” However we may wish to characterize colonies from the outside, what’s functionally important is how individuals in societies distinguish between insiders and outsiders, for that’s the distinction that allows colonies to exist as functioning entities. Ants do not recognize one another as individuals.

The recognition system that ants use for identification with a colony and rejection of aliens is based on shared cues, typically a colony-specific odor blend generated by queens or workers (though environment has its influences: Crozier and Dix 1979; d’Ettorre and Lenoir 2010). As a result, ant colonies remain tightly knit without each individual necessarily having been in direct contact with every one of its nestmates.

Compare these “anonymous societies,” as I call them, with the societies of nonhuman vertebrates such as dolphins, elephants, cooperative breeding birds, and primates like the chimpanzee, where societies are defined by members recalling each other individually to know who is in their group and who is not (Wrangham R, Reiss D, Orians G, personal communication). I suggest calling these “individual recognition societies.” As a general rule such societies have at most 100 members.

The point of distinguishing between individual and anonymous recognition strategies, then, is colony size. Individual recognizers must recognize each an every member of the colony as individuals; anonymous recognizers do not. The colony size of individual recognizers is thus limited by the capacity of individuals to recognize one another. There is no such limitation on the colony size of anonymous recognizers. Of course, we humans are individuals recognizers, and we’ve come to live in societies much larger than 100. And we do so by augmenting individual recognition in various ways. As an extreme example, consider passport control at border crossings. The officials who let travelers cross national borders certainly do not recognize individual travelers. Rather, they verify the validity of an official document that generally includes a photograph of the individual presenting that document. The stamps and seals on that document, in effect, play the role that odor blends play in ant colonies. And with that, I turn things over to Moffett, first with the abstract for the article (which I’ve broken into segments) and then with a passage or two from the article itself. Enjoy. 38 http://tinyurl.com/d8a9ew4

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Abstract: All societies are characterized by the capacity of their members to distinguish one another from outsiders. Ants are among the species that form “anonymous societies”: members are not required to tell each other apart as individuals for the group to remain unified. Rather, each society depends on shared cues recognized by all its members. These cues permit societies to reach populations in the low millions in certain ant and termite species, and to grow indefinitely populous, expansive, and possibly long lasting in a few other ant species, which are described as having supercolonies.

Anonymous societies are contrasted with “individual recognition societies” such as those of most vertebrates, which are limited to a few individuals by the necessity that the members individually recognize each other. The shared recognition cues of ants provide clear criteria for defining colonies and are what enables a supercolony to remain a single society no matter how large it becomes.

I examine the often conflicting ideas about the best studied ant with supercolonies, the Argentine ant (Linepithema humile). Its invasive supercolonies, containing in some cases billions of workers and queens spread over hundreds of square kilometers, can be most parsimoniously understood as single colonies that have had an opportunity to expand across regions of suitable habitat because of a lack of well-matched competitors.

This capacity for unrestricted growth is the defining characteristic of supercolonies. There is no evidence that the local patchiness of nests and patterns of worker and food traffic within these wide-ranging populations are so invariant that supercolonies do not exist but instead are collections of numerous independent nest clusters that should be called “colonies.” Nor is there evidence for the hypothesis that invasive supercolonies have been able to grow large and successful overseas only as a result of evolving through genetic drift or selection to become fundamentally different from the smaller colonies typical of the species’ region of origin around northern Argentina.

Three other Argentine ant colonies vie with the Large Supercolony for the land near San Diego, however. They collide along centimeters-wide borders that extend for kilometers: each month, more than a million ants die in battles between 2 of the colonies alone (Thomas et al. 2007). It is a death sentence for an ant to move just beyond its colony’s territory onto ground controlled by one of these competitors (Figure 1). The same would be true if that ant came upon a fledgling Argentine ant colony offloaded from a ship Argentina. In short, at no stage in colony growth is there ambiguity as to the limits of the colony unit. The ants show a universal lack of social strain or dysfunction toward other colony members, and a clear attack response to outsiders, even after their colony range has expanded across continents.

From the article itself, concerning size and location:

Indeed, the invasive colonies of Argentine ants are the largest recorded societies of multicellular organisms. Among the supercolonies of this species spreading globally, Large Supercolony (as it is known in California, where it might contain a trillion individuals: Moffett 2010) is the champion, spanning 1000 km from San Francisco to the Mexican border in California, 6000 km in Europe, 2800 km in Australia, 900 km on the North Island of New Zealand, and ever-widening regions of Hawaii and Japan …. Carry an Argentine ant worker, queen, or male within or between any of these regions and it merges with the ants living there

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with at most a subtle initial pause to inspect them …. It joins the local labor force without a hitch because it is still home, in a sense—- Large Supercolony controls the entire expanse.

Three other Argentine ant colonies vie with the Large Supercolony for the land near San Diego, however. They collide along centimeters-wide borders that extend for kilometers: each month, more than a million ants die in battles between 2 of the colonies alone (Thomas et al. 2007). It is a death sentence for an ant to move just beyond its colony’s territory onto ground controlled by one of these competitors (Figure 1). The same would be true if that ant came upon a fledgling Argentine ant colony offloaded from a ship from supercolony as different colonies, typically when puzzling over how so many ants can live together harmoniously at a specific site.

Individual ants considered as cells:

Moreover, in most healthy ant societies, identification once learned is permanent and nontransferable (though at the same time remarkably adaptable, e.g., Moffett 2010, p. 215). Unlike chimpanzees or elephants, which have social mechanisms for group transfers, adult queens and workers are not able to move between colonies, except as parasites (e.g., chapter 12 of Hölldobler and Wilson 1990). Their unbreakable group identity makes ants in colonies powerful analogs of cells in bodies. This is the superorganism idea sensu Moffett (2010): Ants identify each other using chemical cues on their body surfaces, and in a healthy society, they invariably avoid or kill alien ants with different cues; cells identify each other by means of chemical cues on their surfaces, with the immune system attacking any cells with different cues (thought to originally have been hydrocarbons [Fernandez-Busquets and Burger 2003], as they are in the social insects).

One colony?

The root of much of the confusion about Argentine ants is that the “supercolonies confound our notions about societies, populations, and species like nothing else” (Moffett 2010). Consider how Argentine ants establish independent colonies. With no mating flight to allow a queen to start a nest with an identity separate from that of her natal colony, an intriguing possibility is that no truly new Argentine ant colonies ever arise, except as follows: Geographically isolated populations of the same colony might evolve to shift the genetic basis of their identity to the extent that the groups would start to kill each other if they came into contact again (Moffett 2010, p. 218; as may be occurring on the island of Corsica, which is occupied by what appears to be a long isolated part of the continental Europe portion of the Large Supercolony: Blight et al. 2010). Each Argentine ant colony, both in Argentina and abroad, potentially lasts indefinitely (by spreading locally through budding, or long distance through jump dispersal) as a “closed breeding unit” ..., rejecting both queens and males from outside colonies ... and possessing its own diagnostic genetically based characteristics .... Therefore, the colonies appear to take independent evolutionary paths, virtually as sibling species ....