“I start with the seedling. I don’t feel I really know the story if I don’t watch the plant all the way along. So I know every plant in the field. I know them intimately, and I find it a great pleasure to know them.” … “I have learned so much about the corn plant that when I see things, I can interpret [them] right away.” Barbara McClintock, A Feeling for the Organism
Word cloud of the past two blog entries created in
Wordle.
The mirror of EcoSentience has a shape and a language
that is cropping up everywhere. It is the language of visionaries. You’ve seen
it before, I’ve seen it before - we’ve been glimpsing it for years. But we are
just now beginning to recognize it through a larger context – through our
understanding of the emergent global mind.
Our newest visualization technologies are beginning
to hold up an accurate reflection of the superorganism of collective
thought. These patterns are
biological, they are scale independent – the patterns we see when we use our
powerful lenses to explore the outer reaches of the cosmos and the inner
dimensions of the cell. Visionary
language mirrors the history of knowledge, the neurostructure of synaptic
behavior, the self-assembly of crowd consciousness, the ubiquitous mobility of
swarm behavior, the ephemeral architecture of smart mobs. But it does more – it mirrors the span of self-awareness to mass introspection by engaging our emotional
intelligence through the act of seeing our reflection. In the words of biologist Barbara McClintock, it offers us “a
feeling for the organism.”
Like Nature herself on the scale of the grand to the
invisible, the activity of the global mind is beautiful. The mirror images of
self-reflexivity delicately weave a fabric of mind that is, quite simply,
gorgeous to behold. It is the gift of visuospatial intelligence, a
characteristic mode of thinking that is more prevalent in brains of women, of
musicians, artists, dancers – perhaps that is why our visualization
technologies have made way for aesthetics relatively early in their decade long
evolution – they are ushering in an entirely new artform.
The newest patterns of data and information are not
merely stunning - they feel good to look at. This beautifully emergent visionary
language is already capturing and rendering the organism of thought, dimension,
biology, history, knowledge and time on multifarious scales – for all to see
and marvel at. Yet not happy to simply marvel at it as art, we can logically toggle around this language from
various scales and points of view to engage in a functional dialogue with its
message.
Since I call it a reflection, a “mirror” let’s first
look at one instantiation of the reflective organism on the scale of the
individual mammal through a special class of neurons called - what else? - mirror
neurons. Mirror neurons were proven
to exist in the mammalian brain when experiments with macaque monkeys in the late 1980s, demonstrated that the same neurons fired off when they were
observing other monkeys doing something they had done before as well as when they actually carried out the action themselves. Hailing these neurons “monkey see, monkey do neurons,” the results of this study ushered in over a decade of new
scientific research on the neural basis of social behavior. The mirror neuron
system is said to be the core of our empathic response, hence, these neurons
are often called “empathy neurons” or “Dalai Lama neurons.” The first
introduction to the notion of to mirror neurons actually excites the sociality
of our mammalian brains – no wonder the term has caught on as a popular meme for
today’s mobile, connected human.
Mirror neurons are currently at the forefront of
studies of the neurostructure and the nature of consciousness, at the heart of the
latest studies in artificial intelligence, of philosophy, language and
theater - and yes, also in advertising (witness the rash of new marketing books
such as Buyology whose author Martin Lindstrom unabashedly touts that he uses the discovery of mirror neurons to expose the “hidden truths behind how
branding and marketing messages work on the human brain.”)
In just the last few years, neurologist Vilanur
Ramachandran linked the improper development and functioning of mirror neurons
to the some of the underlying causes of autism. As Director of the Center for
Brain and Cognition at UC San Diego, Ramachandran has been on the leading edge
of the intersection of the visual perception and neurology. He is one of the
Fathers of the emerging transdiscipline of neuroaesthetics. In Ramachandran’s
most recent discussion at Edge.org, he explores what he calls the "Last Frontier of Self Awareness." Mapping
function to structure, Ramachandran identifies “touch mirror neurons” to suggest that mirror neurons not only elicit the empathic response, but also play a
role in human introspection and self consciousness.
In the same way that Howard Gardner’s theory of
multiple intelligences arose in the early 1980s from his years of looking at the
margins of the human brain – the paradoxical underpinnings of autism and genius
– Ramachandran takes case histories of obscure and unusual psychological
behavior, from Capgras Delusion to Phantom Limb Syndrome, in order to winnow
out significant truths about the behavior of our brains.
We must do the same thing with our first vistas of
the emergent global brain as Ramachandran has done with perception and the
functioning of the neurostructure. Truth is a liminal thing – it takes place in
the margins of self-awareness, in the valleys of thought, in the ambiguous
tendrils of idea generation, in the activity of random elements and strange
attractors of dynamic systems.
Visualization brings to light these compelling designs too, and makes us
comfortable with a new kind of pattern language.
Let’s move from this theoretical view above to a
visual feast of global consciousness.
To do that, my next entry will take us on a little journey through the
visual landscapes that make up what I see as a language we can now adopt as a
toggling mechanism, a Lingua Franca for the global mind -Visioning the
Invisible.
"Mirror Neurons" by Tony DeVarco