NONVERBAL CONSCIOUSNESS
.
For the first time in four billion years a living creature had
contemplated himself and heard with a sudden, unaccountable loneliness, the
whisper of the wind in the night reeds. Perhaps he knew, there in the grass by
the chill waters, that he had before him an immense journey. --Loren Eiseley, The Immense
Journey (1957)
Concept. The state or condition of being
aware--apart from the effects or influence of words--of one's own existence, environment, and
sensations, i.e., of one's own self and place in Nonverbal
World.
Usage: Approaching human consciousness from a novel
perspective--i.e., from that of the nonverbal
brain--promises to shed new light on the perennial, philosophic
issue of mind. Our species's bias for speech
has to date obscured the preverbal origins and underpinnings of
consciousness.
Significance. Ironically, the feeling that
something is real, true, and right comes not from the thoughtful speech areas
and association modules of our neocortex, but from evolutionary older--and
nonverbal--emotion centers of our limbic cortex (see MacLean 1990:17).
Word origin. The word conscious comes from Latin
com-, com- + scire, to know.
Animal consciousness. "I feel that the play of young
animals is a convincing criterion of consciousness, as also is curiosity, and
the display of emotions, in particular the evidence of devoted attachment"
(Eccles 1989:174-75).
Animal
images. "Animal images woven into human consciousness form the
vocabulary of our dreams and visions, our mythology, our attempts to understand
and find . . . our place in the universe" (flyer distributed by the Zoological
Society of San Diego, 1999).
Animal psychology. "Finally, the kinds of questions
that emerge from the Nagel criterion--What is it like to be a bat, a dog, a
dolphin?--are ominously reminiscent of the protracted arguments about the
consciousness of ants and amoebas that caused so much trouble in psychology
around 1900. Not that such "bat" questions are forever closed to scientific
inquiry; but they certainly do not provide us with a modest, workable and
consensus-building approach to the problem" (A Thoroughly Empirical Approach to
Consciousness," Bernard J. Baars, Psyche1(6), August, 1994).
Anthropology. 1. "We have no idea at
present how the modern human brain converts a mass of electrical and chemical
discharges into what we experience as consciousness" (Tattersall 2000:62).
2. "It is impossible to be sure what this innovation [leading toward
consciousness] might have been, but the best current bet is that it was the
invention of language" (Tattersall 2000:62).
3. "It was not in the nature of the Comanche to be [consciously]
introspective. Nor was it in his nature reflectively to state his motives or
ways of acting in formulae" (Wallace and Hoebel 1952:185).
Art.
1. "For each [Baumgarten and Kant] came to regard aesthetic consciousness
as a significant and unitary element of human experience generally" (Flew
1979:6). 2.
"Art is closely tied to metalinguistic awareness; the objects/feelings
themselves can be conveyed by these depictions. The discovery of the linguistic
self, the locus of intentional action, would lead to personal ornamentation and
other indications of individuality . . ." (Foley 1997; for discovery of the
nonverbal self, see WORD, Author's
note).
Biology I. Consciousness first appeared in vertebrates ca. 200
m.y.a., in mammals, according to neurophysiologist John Eccles of the Max Planck
Institute for Brain Research in Frankfurt [378:234].
Biology
II. By introspection {indigestion} we
have access only to a limited amount of what is going on in our brains.
--Francis Crick (CNS Note: We are not trying to be cute here, but only to
point out that scholars--who are highly verbal creatures--often favor verbal
modes of introspection over those available by nonverbal means, despite a
possibility that consciousness itself may be nonverbal, i.e., may exist as a
state of emotion or as a nonlinguistic feeling [see below, Philosophy
II].)
Biology III. "We can speak
of an animal as conscious when it is moved apparently by feelings and moods and
when it is capable of assessing its present situation in the light of past
experience and so is able to arrive at an appropriate course of action that is
more than a stereotyped instinctive response" (Eccles 1991:173).
Biology IV.
NEW. "I believe that it is the result of an inherited human
propensity to pay special attention to the actions of other people" (Young
1978:31). Author's note: This is reflected in, and adumbrated by, the
worldwide linguistic use of personal pronouns, such as "you," "she," and "me,"
which open consciousness to ourselves and
others.
Biology V. Francis Crick (Salk
Institute) and Cristoff Koch (Cal Tech) study consciousness by looking at the
neural correlates of vision {touch}.
Blindness
and deafness I. "Once I knew the depth where no hope was, and darkness lay
on the face of all things. Then love came and set my soul free. Once I knew only
darkness and stillness. Now I know hope and joy. Once I fretted and beat myself
against the wall that shut me in. Now I rejoice in the consciousness that I can
think, act and attain heaven. My life was without past or future; death, the
pessimist would say, 'a consummation devoutly to be wished.' But a little word
from the fingers of another fell into my hand that clutched at emptiness, and my
heart leaped to the rapture of living. Night fled before the day of thought, and
love and joy and hope came up in a passion of obedience to knowledge. Can anyone
who escaped such captivity, who has felt the thrill and glory of freedom, be a
pessimist?" (Helen Keller, "Optimism," 1903)
Blindness and deafness II.
"Intensely imitative and sensitive to all aspects of her
environment that she could touch, taste or smell, she [Helen Keller] quickly
learned to do household and kitchen chores and delighted in them" (Wills
1993:285).
Blindsight. Cortically blind people can "see" the
location of a light flashed on a wall, with an accuracy of 80% (Restak 1994).
This ability, which is entirely unconscious, is known as blindsight. It
is made possible by vision centers of the midbrain called the superior colliculi. Blindsight
has implications for the study of nonverbal consciousness. The feeling that
"something or somebody" is present in a room, e.g., may be due to sensations
received by similarly unconscious modules of the central nervous system. Another
area of the brain known to work in the background, i.e., out of conscious
awareness, is the hindbrain's cerebellum.
Classical science.
How it is that anything so remarkable as a state of consciousness comes about
as a result of irritating nervous tissue, is just as unaccountable as the
appearance of the Djin, when Aladdin rubbed his lamp. --Thomas
Huxley
Color. "Isolated
Neuroscientist in a black-and-white room knows everything about how the brain
processes colors but does not know what it is like to see them. This scenario
suggests that knowledge of the brain does not yield complete knowledge of
conscious experience" (Chalmers 1995:81).
Color red.
Q: "What, for example, could a complete map of the visual
pathways ever tell us about the subjective redness of the color red?" (Loosemore
2000:10 [Scientific American]). A: "Loosemore does
not have to accept my proposal, but the aim of my effort is clear: to understand
not just how, say, the color red is mapped but also how we have a subjective
perspective of redness" (Damasio 2000:10 [Scientific American]). [In the act of
pointing at a bright red balloon, e.g., an excited young child shows mother his
emotional response to the balloon and its color; see Zen and
Neuro-notes III below.]
Coma &
death. When does nonverbal consciousness cease? Presumably, when a.
doll's-head eye movements cease; b. pupils do not react to light;
c. there is no response to corneal stimulation; d. there is no eye
deviation in response to ice-water irrigation of the tympanic membrane; e.
there is no gag reflex; f. there is no cough reflex; g. there
are no cranial-nerve-mediated motor responses to strong stimulation of the nail
beds or supraorbital area; and h. there is no spontaneous breathing
(Gray's Anatomy 1995, 38th Ed., p. 1011).
Evolution. "And
standing thus [while making eye
contact with a frog] it finally comes to me that this is the most
enormous extension of vision of which life is capable: the projection of itself
into other lives. This is the lonely, magnificent power of humanity. It is, far
more than any spatial adventure, the supreme epitome of the reaching out"
(Eiseley 1957:46).
Facial images. "Research shows that right in
the delivery room an infant will pay attention to [i.e., become conscious of] a
person's face or a picture of a face, and will follow its movement with his
eyes" (Chase and Rubin 1979:66).
Hypnosis.
1. "And proofs are not wanting in hypnotic behaviour itself that the
'subliminal soul' is in reality only the 'animal soul' still present in man's
mentality" (The Soul of the Ape; Marais 1969:148). 2. In human
beings, ". . . certain characteristic attributes of instinctive mentality at
once become clearly recognisable in hypnotic behaviour. The chief of these are:
1. Absence of consciousness. 2. Suggestibility. . . . . 3. Extreme
sense-acuteness [see above, Altered states]. 4. High perfection of the
'place memory'" (Marais 1969:149). 3. In 1882, "Viennese physician Joseph
Breuer, 40, discovers the value of hypnosis in treating a girl suffering from
severe hysteria, pioneering psychoanalysis" (Trager 1992).
Immunology. "'How do you know who you are?' Rodney
Langman asks his students. Langman, a staff scientist at The Salk Institute, is
not bidding them to ponder existential philosophy. Rather, his inquiry is meant
to stir up their minds about the workings of the immune system--the army within
that protects each of us from invasion by pathogens" (Clancy 2000:17).
Japanese tea ceremony. Many cultures have devised ways for their
members to periodically break the bonds of linguistic consciousness,
distraction, and thought. The Japanese tea house, e.g., is designed as a
nonverbal consumer product whose theme is an approximation of Nonverbal
World: "Tea houses were a place for [wordless] concentration. The garden
was and is not in view so the inhabitants will not be distracted. Guests go from
a waiting lodge to a waiting bench both in the outer tea garden. This is where
the host meets them. In the meantime they are able to absorb the beauty of the
garden and prepare themselves spiritually for the tea ceremony" (Anonymous,
N.D.:4).
Language. 1. "The use of the term 'forced
observation' must not be construed to imply that a speaker of a language is
conscious of being compelled to notice certain aspects of his environment. Most
often he makes these observations naturally, almost unconsciously, and certainly
with no feeling of constraint" (Henle 1958:383). 2. "In the case of the
left [brain] hemisphere, consciousness is linked with language capacity" (Restak1994:127). 2. "Of all the characteristics
that differentiate humans from their nonhuman cousins, the ability to
communicate through the use of a sophisticated spoken language is, I believe,
the most significant" (Goodall 1990:208).
Levels of
consciousness. The five levels of consciousness used in the standard
neurologic examination include a. alert, b.
lethargic (drowsy), c. obtunded (asleep), d.
stupor (semicoma, can be aroused but returns to unconsciousness without
strong stimulation), and e. coma (deep coma, cannot be aroused;
Nolan 1996:24).
Literature. Not a word he [Captain Ahab]
spoke; nor did his officers say aught to him; though by all their minutest
gestures and expressions, they plainly showed the uneasy, if not painful,
consciousness of being under a troubled master-eye. --Herman Melville,
Moby Dick (1980 [1851]:130)
Media. "Kick a dog and you can be pretty sure that the
next time it sees you it will associate you with being kicked," said [Gerald]
Edelman [Neurosciences Institute, La Jolla]. "As a result, it may run away or
bite you. It will not, however, sit there quietly and plot how to destroy your
tenure as a professor." The latter ability, Edelman thinks, belongs only to
human beings, and is due to a "higher-order consciousness." (San Diego
Union-Tribune, Jan. 29, 1999, E-5)
Mind-body. "As to the mind-body problem, [Roger] Sperry defines
consciousness as 'a holistic or emergent, functional property of high-order
brain activity.' And that's about as elegant a definition as one can hope for"
(Falk 1992:109). {Editorial comment: But where's the
beef?}
Neanderthals. "We found that the two communities
[Neanderthal and early Homo sapiens sapiens] were supported by different
capacities for communication--verbal, visual and symbolic--and that this in turn
affected their organization of campsites, their exploitation of the landscape,
and their colonization of new habitats" (Stringer and Gamble 1993:219).
Neurobiology. There is no working definition of
consciousness--or more accurately, there are hundreds of working
definitions. --Terrence J. Sejnowski (Computational Neurobiology Lab, Salk
Institute)
Neuropsychology. But having reached that [higher
level of] understanding [of the biology of consciousness], which we
have not, I don't know if it will tell us much about the magic of consciousness,
how and why we get something like self-awareness {happiness} out of matter. --Larry
Squires (University of California, La Jolla)
Neuroscience I
(prefrontal cortex). Further, damage to our frontal areas can reduce any
of us to an almost subhuman level of functioning, a kind of psychic limbo where
we dwell in an eternal present, devoid of what I consider our most evolved
mental ability: our capacity to empathize with {care
for} others. --Richard
Restak
Neuroscience II (split-brain experiments). 1. "Our
consciousness may be a single stream because it is the consciousness of our
dominant hemisphere only" (Carter 1998:51). 2. "Or it could be that there
are many streams of consciousness in each of us . . ." (Carter
1998:53).
Paralysis. "I gradually learned to live day by day, to
block from my consciousness any thoughts about the final outcome of the illness,
to repress from awareness any vision of the unthinkable" (Murphy 1987:25).
Philosophy
I. Suppose that there be a machine, the structure of which produces
thinking, feeling, and perceiving; imagine this machine enlarged but preserving
the same portions, so that you could enter it as if it were a mill. This being
supposed, you might visit it inside; but what would you observe there? Nothing
but parts which push and move each other, and never anything that could explain
perception. --Leibniz
Philosophy II. Consciousness: "A term
with two related philosophical uses: first, as for example, for Locke, in the
sense of self-knowledge acquired by virtue of the mind's capacity to reflect
upon itself in introspective acts analogous with perception; and second, in a
broader modern sense, opposed to anaesthesia, designating what is held to be the
general property of mental states" (Flew 1979:72-73). Would the pleasant "full"
feeling after a meal count as an introspective act? (See, e.g., ENTERIC
BRAIN, REST-AND-DIGEST.)
Philosophy III.
Consciousness is the ultimate mystery, a mystery that human intelligence will
never unravel. --Colin Tudge (Prof. of Philosophy, Rutgers)
Philosophy IV. "We laugh,
therefore we are." (CNS staffers)
Physics. "At the atomic level,
'objects' can be understood only in terms of the interaction between the
processes of preparation and measurement. The end of this chain of processes
lies always in the consciousness of the human observer" (Capra 1977:126).
Primatology. 1. "Having opened a
window onto nonhuman consciousness, we discover a mental landscape resembling
our own. We find that other primates, at least, are capable of elementary logic,
jokes, banter, deliberate misinformation, cajoling, deep sorrow, [and] rich
communication" (Hooper and Teresi 1986:54). 2. ". . . it was proved,
experimentally and beyond a doubt, that chimpanzees could recognize themselves
in mirrors--that they had, therefore, some kind of self-concept" (Goodall
1990:21). 3. "Some chimpanzees love to draw, and especially to paint"
(Goodall 1990:22).
Right brain, left
brain. Studies agree that as nonverbal cues are sent and received, they are
more strongly influenced by modules of the right-side neocortex (esp. in
right-handed individuals) than they are by left-sided modules. Anatomically,
this is reflected a. in the greater volume of white matter (i.e.,
of myelinated axons which link nerve-cell bodies) in the right neocortical
hemisphere, and b. in the greater volume of gray matter (i.e., of
nerve cell bodies or neurons) in the left. The right brain's superior fiber
linkages enable its neurons to better communicate with feelings, memories, and
senses, thus giving this side its deeper-reaching holistic, nonverbal, and "big
picture" skills. The left brain's superior neuronal volume, meanwhile, allows
for better communication among the neocortical neurons themselves, which gives
this side a greater analytic and intellectually narrower "focus" (see, e.g., Gur
et al. 1980).
Robotics. A third generation of robots ". . . will
learn very quickly from mental rehearsals in simulations that model physical,
cultural and psychological factors. Physical properties include shape, weight,
strength, texture and appearance of things, and how to handle them. . . . . The
simulation would track external events and tune its models to keep them faithful
to reality. It would let a robot learn a skill by imitation and afford a kind of
consciousness" (Moravec 1999:135).
Sleep. For early 20th-century
psychologist, William James, consciousness is what we lose when we fall into a
deep, dreamless sleep.
Space. "A section of the [London taxi]
cabbies' brains, called the hippocampus, became enlarged during the two years
they spent learning their way around the vast, complicated metropolis" (Boyd
2000; see PRIMATE BRAIN, Climbing
cues).
Synonyms. Nonverbally "known, supraliminal; aware,
appreciative, cognizant (KNOWLEDGE); sensible, aesthetic or esthetic,
passible (SENSITIVENESS); calculated, studied, premeditated (PURPOSE)" (Lewis
1978).
Time. "Mental chronometry can be defined as the study of
the time course of information processing in the human nervous system"
(Posner 1978:7).
Vision. "It can be postulated that
in evolution the emergence of conscious mental experiences matched the evolution
of the visual processing mechanism (see, e.g., FACIAL
RECOGNITION, Neuroanatomy I & II), and that it was essential
in guiding the behaviour of the animal" (Eccles 1989:175).
Zen.
"So long as we merely talk about it, so long as we turn over ideas in our minds
about 'symbol' and 'reality,' or keep repeating, 'I am not my idea of myself,'
this is still mere abstraction. Zen created the method (upaya) of 'direct
pointing' in order to escape from this vicious circle, in
order to thrust the real immediately to our notice {eyes}" (Watts
1957:126-27).
RESEARCH RESULTS: 1.
"Consciousness resists definition partly because it
is so familiar" Restak1994:123). 2. "But the right [brain] hemisphere's abilities (the
intuitive apprehension of geometrical properties, copying designs, recognizing
faces, and reading facial expressions) clearly imply that some degree of
consciousness, albeit a nonverbal one, must exist [alongside the left
hemisphere's linguistic consciousness (see above, Language)]"
(Restak1994:127).
Neuro-notes I. It
is within the thalamus that a human's central nervous system first
experiences a consciousness of incoming sensations, before they are re-examined,
upstream, in the neocortex.
Neuro-notes
II. As conscious creatures, we "can and do react with fear
even though consciously we haven't the slightest idea what it is that is
frightening us. Heightened 'startle responses,' sudden onsets of anxiety or even
panic, personality characteristics like being 'hyper' or 'edgy'-these are
everyday examples" (Restak1994:147).
Neuro-notes III. "Objective brain processes knit the subjectivity of
the conscious mind out of the cloth of sensory mapping [e.g., of a seen object
on the visual cortex]. And because the most fundamental sensory mapping pertains
to body states and is imaged as feelings [the mammalian cingulate cortex is key for
Damasio], the sense of self in the act of knowing emerges as a special kind of
feeling--the feeling of what happens to an organism caught in the act of
interacting with an object" (Damasio 1999:117).
Neuro-notes IV. "Some neurobiological models of consciousness, such as the global workspace theory, assume that the contents of consciousness are widely distributed in the brain" (source: McGill University Web tutorial on the brain
NONVERBAL IDEATION
Ideation is the formation of thoughts, concepts, and ideas by the mind. Ideation may be verbal, nonverbal, or a combination of both. Verbally, for example, the mental concept of sacredness may be expressed by the English word, "sacred," meaning divine, eternal, and worthy of great respect. Nonverbally, the concept may be expressed in gesture:
Plains Sign Language. Native North American tribes devised manual sign systems enabling members to communicate with speakers of mutually unintelligible languages. The systems include both grammatical, iconic, linguistic and symbolic hand shapes and movements. In pointing to another person ('you'), e.g., Na-Dene speakers may aim, adduct (hold together) and extend the index and middle fingers, symbolically to refer to combined female and male aspects of the person one points to. To point at oneself, speakers may use an extended thumb to symbolize one's own sacredness, just as they thumb-point at babies (considered sacred) and sacred medicine bags. To point to animals in a distant field, speakers may adduct and extend all four fingers, palm down, to symbolize Earth. To greet a friend, a Na-Dene speaker may point to the left or heart-side of the chest with the extended thumb, followed by the palm-down, four-finger gesture extended horizontally away from the body. The sign's sweeping, physical extension symbolically extends one's own sacredness outward to the friend and world at large" (Givens and White 2021, p. 273).
Nonverbal "branches." Many scientists (the most notable being Albert Einstein) think in visual, spatial, and physical images rather than in mathematical terms and words. That the theoretical physicist, Stephen Hawking, used an arboreal term to picture the cosmos (i.e., affirming that the universe "could have different branches") is a tribute to his very visual primate brain.
Neuro-notes. We respond to hand signs and gestures with an extreme alertness because specialized nerve cells in the lower temporal lobe respond exclusively to hand positions and shapes.
See also NONVERBAL
LEARNING.
Copyright
1998 - 2022 (David B. Givens and John White/Center for
Nonverbal Studies)
Photo of imaged brain (from Kandel et al. 1991; copyright 1991 by Appleton & Lange)