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On the Mitogenetic Account of the Embodied Mind:

Comments on Browns Reflections and Prospects:
Commentary by George Kurian (Punjab, India)
a

George Kurian
a

Punjab, India
Published online: 09 Jan 2014.

To cite this article: George Kurian (2002) On the Mitogenetic Account of the Embodied Mind: Comments on Browns
Reflections and Prospects: Commentary by George Kurian (Punjab, India), Neuropsychoanalysis: An Interdisciplinary
Journal for Psychoanalysis and the Neurosciences, 4:1, 103-106, DOI: 10.1080/15294145.2002.10773383
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103

On the Microgenetic Account of the Embodied Mind:

Comments on Brown's ``Reflections and Prospects''

Downloaded by [Adelphi University] at 00:20 20 August 2014

Commentary by George Kurian (Punjab, India)

The target articlea timely retrospection by one

of the most creative exponents of the microgenetic
theoryis refreshing for its personal honesty and
authenticity. Scholars in the eld of cognitive and
neuropsychology can prot a lot from this brief
historiography of the microgenetic theory. It also
gives a peep into the evolution of ideas of mind in
the mind of the theorist. The microgenetic theory
as articulated in the literature is an account of the
mental processes from their primeval origins to
the potential realization in consciousness as lived
experience. Later, the theory evolved (Brown,
1991, 1996, 2000) to capture the realization of
mind beyond the limits of the intra-personal, and
contentious issues such as value, morality, and
good life were also brought within the ambit of
the original thesis. Even in Mind, Brain and
Consciousness (MBC) (Brown, 1977) one can
glimpse the seeds of this kind of thinking. While
the theory attracted a wider scrutiny at that time,
it was out of sync with those times. Cognitive
psychology then was burdened with its own
baggage of metaphors mostly borrowed from
information-processing theories. The strong AI
version was all too good for simulation studies
and model builders. A process concept of mind in
evolution in real time appeared alien to most
working with ow charts and box diagrams. The
latter was akin to an attempt to characterize the
mind as a static entity, the way engineering
drawings would capture the internal workings of
a motor. An argument for the genetic basis of
language led to the devaluation of the concepts of
development and growth. Chomsky (1979) went
to the extent of arguing that ``. . . In any event, the
crucial point in the present connection is that
cognitive structures and physical organs seem to
be comparable, as far as the possibility of
`biological explanation' is concerned'' (p. 36).

Send communications to: George Kurian, School of Mgt. and

Social Sciences, Thapar Institute of Engineering and Technology,
Patiala 147 004, Punjab, India. E-mail: gkuriansk@yahoo.co.in

To this Changeux (1979) replied: ``. . . The metaphor brain-liver may be useful for an audience of
linguists, but it is misleading for psychologists or
biologists. Indeed, the neuron as a cell is far more
complex than a hepatocyte (. . .) The essential
functions of the nervous system, and in particular
those relevant to learning, are determined by
these intercellular relationships'' (p. 186). In any
case for clinical practice dealing with aphasic
syndromes, this kind of a modular theory with
genetically specied givens would not do. Language breakdown shows a pattern which varies
with the level of cognitive microgenesis, age, and
sex of the patient which in turn dictate the degree
of cerebral lateralization of language functions in
the brain. Brown and Grober (1983) elucidated
this interaction between age, sex and aphasia
types which continues to gain support from
neuropsychological investigations (Witelson,
1990; Witelson and Nowakowski, 1991).
Anti-evolutionary themes were widely prevalent in the early days of cognitive revolution.
Changeux (1979) summarized this attitude thus:
``. . . According to one interpretation, interaction
with the external world does not enrich the system
in any signicant way; its action would be limited
to triggering preestablished programs. It would
stabilize a synaptic organization that had already
been genetically specied. This is the attitude
adopted by Hubel and Wiesel, Chomsky, and
Fodor'' (p. 193). Even when the idea of apriori
structures were posited there were thoughtful
suggestions tempering it within the context of the
evolutionary growth trends or even countering it
(Brown, 1991; Cellerier, 1979; Changeux, 1979).
Microgenetic theory has a rich intellectual
heritage. It relates to the earlier genetic theories in
psychology such as that of Heinz Werner and
Jean Piagetto name two notable instances. And
of course the inuence of Freudian thinking
underlying microgenetic postulates is too obvious
to require a further statement. Warning against
the trend to slip into mysticism when enthralled
by the legacy of holism, Brown in his reections

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104
considers the holistic intuitions as the background
for any organic theory of mind to emerge. He
says, ``It is ironic that the approach was perceived
as largely critical yet, concealed within the tactic
of negation, was the clue to the nature of mental
process. An actuality is the negation of other
possibilities''. The use of negation as a tool for
revelation of the self is intrinsic to some eastern
philosophies too. Adi Sankara, the 8th century
Indian philosopher and founder of the Advaita
Vedanta system of Indian philosophy propounded a kind of monism where the self was
dened by negation of other forms of existence,
i.e., that which is not. But unlike philosophy, the
microgenetic theory attempts to synthesize holistic ideas within the envelope provided by the
theory of organic evolution. It is this synthesis
that provides the strength and reach of the
microgenetic conceptualization of mind and its
categories as embodied. It will not be an
exaggeration if one were to say that Prof. Brown's
early insights into the genesis of mental structures
had an unparalleled impact upon the theories of
mind in cognitive and neuropsychology which
were to follow soon. He emphasized the need to
move away from the mere analysis of symptoms
and their proximate causes. A symptom is like a
performance in an experimental condition. Any
explanation has to tap the psychogenic and neural
substrates that give rise to the symptomsalmost
like a Freudian analyst. If Mind, Brain and
Consciousness (Brown, 1977) was a landmark in
the development of the microgenetic and process
approach, the most recent Mind and Nature
(Brown, 2000) summarizes the scenario along its
long journey. MBC was too brief an account. In a
cryptic style it said almost everything the theory
was to explicate in detail in later years. It was
unconventional too, for it was a sort of assault on
the overly simplistic bottom-up approach to the
study of perception and cognition prevalent in
those times. The methodology itselfthough by
no means originalwas a bit too clinical for most
experimentalists. The method of error analysis
then was widely used by both Jean Piaget in his
study of origins of intelligence in the child (Piaget,
1961), and Kenneth Goodman in the study of
reading (Goodman, 1982) for instance. Of course,
it claimed a direct linkage to the psychoanalytic
tradition. Brown argued that error analysis of this
kind provided a window to the underlying
processes that are now revealed or brought to
the surface by the trauma. The symptom then
becomes an arrested formation in the process of
becoming, and hence not a mere ``decit''.
Again, unlike the information processing
and computational psychologists who posit a

George Kurian
``bottom-up'' or data-driven approach to mental
processes, the microgenetic theory is explicit
about the primacy of meaning in the microgenesis
of a mental function. While assessing the relevance of microgenetic concepts a reviewer found
that its assumptions were at variance with the
prevailing ideas about visual perception. According to the then prevailing view ``. . . the visual
stimulus activates a real-time circuit from retina
to thalamus, branching o to brain stem and
occipital lobe, the latter branching o to secondary parietal and temporal cortex, and nally,
these respectively to parietal and temporal tertiary
cortex'' (Braun, 1989, p. 142). All this descriptive
circuitry is intended somehow to capture the
avor of the genesis of mental categories. In a
trenchant critique of this avowedly simplistic
characterization, Brown (1990) argued ``. . . The
logic is that a behavior is explained when it is
fractionated into constituent operations which are
separately interpreted and then reunited. The
behavior is understood by an analysis of its parts
and the parts, like pieces in a puzzle, satisfy the
explanation when they exhaust the content of the
behavior'' (p. 196).
The microgenetic account of mind turned the
entire scheme upside down. In the case of object
perception for instance, distance, shape, color and
size are considered essentially interlinked and
embedded even at the primary or low-level
processing stage. In a recent report, Dobbins et
al. (1998) showed that spatial distances are
computed early on in visual processing of object
representation. Due to the operation of sizedistance invariance, object and spatial constancy
are processed in synchrony and the object size
cannot be considered as a distinct entity independent of its identity. According to some investigators, even the identity of an object is computed on
the basis of size (Barinaga, 1998). The computationalists would argue that an object is constructed from its constituent sensory elements.
Controversies which plague cognitive psychology
even to this day such as the visual imageryperception debate are an oshoot of this sort of
thinking. It is as if mental images are perceptual
residues deposited after object perception and
mental imagery is a replay of the constructed
object in memory. The question whether visual
perception shares structural components with
mental imagery itself is blocked theoretically
within the microgenetic process point of view
where percept-genesis is considered as the progressive unfolding of meaning directed toward
featural details of the world. Brown (1983) says:
``. . . This approach diers from the classical
account in that sensation does not supply the

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Commentary on Jason Brown's Microgenetic Theory

raw material of perceptionthe object is not
constructed out of sensory elementsbut rather
sensation acts to modulate an endogenous process
of object representation'' (p. 42). The importance
of endogenous processes in sculpting sensory data
has been reported by Arieli et al. (1996) who
showed that ongoing cortical activity can determine the magnitude of the evoked potential to a
peripheral stimulation. Even in the absence of
sensory inputs the spontaneous activity is coherent and they can exert a major inuence on the
incoming sensory inputs. These investigators
concluded that the evoked responses are highly
correlated with the initial endogenous activation
levels in networks.
This leads to interesting thoughts on the
embodied mind and its categories. In recent times,
Lako (1987), Edelman (1992), Tucker (2001),
Varela et al. (1993), have brought to the fore a
theme that is central to genetic and process
theoriesnamely the importance of enactive
construction of categories by an ``embodied
mind''. For instance Varela et al. (1993) says:
``. . . the enactive program takes a further step in
the same direction to encompass the temporality
of cognition as lived history, whether seen at the
level of the individual (ontogeny), the species
(evolution), or social patterns (culture)'' (p. 213).
It is heartening to note that the main stream
cognitivist enterprise is now taking serious note of
the genetic nature of the life of the mind, and a
readiness to return to the ``organic'' roots of the
mind as exemplied in the ``embodied mind''
metaphor. Unlike dualists and computationalists,
the microgenetic account always emphasized the
organic and phylogenetic roots of the unfolding
mental categories. The theory of organic evolution
forms a surround for the microgenetic theory.
Brown (1994) says: ``. . . every organism is in a
constant process of becoming that reinstantiates
itself in some duration. Phylo-ontogeny is the
pattern of reinstantiations over time. Microgenesis
is the time-creating pattern in a single instantiation'' (pp. 7273. Italics in original). The core
argument here is that being is becoming and not a
duality. The implications of this theory for a
science and philosophy of mind is that such an
argument holds equally true for the development
of a theory as well as for the instantiations of
occurrent states (Brown, 1994).
There is now need for more emphatically
restating the microgenetic position given the
current trend in theorizing on the nature of
consciousness. Functionalist and objectivist accounts adhere to a form of dualism which negates
the organic roots of mind somehow construes
mental categories as Platonic, ideal forms, as seen

105
in the works of scholars like. Penrose (1995).
Crucial to Penrose's (1995) thesis is the argument
that the realm of mental categories like mathematics is pure and somehow disembodied and
not a construction of mind. About the origin and
existence of mathematics he says: ``. . . Yet its
existence rests on the profound timeless, and
universal nature of these concepts, and on the fact
that their laws are independent of those who
discover them (. . .) The natural numbers were
there before there were human beings, or indeed
any other creature here on earth, and they will
remain after all life has perished'' (p. 413). To this
kind of a portrayal of mind and its categories,
Edelman (1992) replied rather sarcastically
``. . . Penrose's account is a bit like that of a
schoolboy who, not knowing the formula of
sulfuric acid asked for on an exam, gives instead a
beautiful account of his dog Spot'' (p. 217). A
resurgent conceptualization of embodied mind
will place ``the proximate structures and functions
related to awareness: an account of real psychology, of real brains, and of their underlying
biology'' (p. 217). A physicalist description has
little relevance for a science and philosophy of
mind and as Brown aptly points out in his
reections, ``. . . This would be like trying to
illustrate the ow of a river with a set of bricks''.
The reections thus appear at the most opportune
moment in the evolution of the cognitive sciences
which are now making serious attempts to return
to the organic roots.
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(1996), Dynamics of ongoing activity: Explanation
of the large variability in evoked cortical responses.
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Braun, C. M. J. (1989), Review. Microgenetic theory:
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Cognition, 11: 139143.
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New York: Academic Press.
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Perecman. New York: Academic Press, pp. 4153.
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Luria, ed. E. Goldberg. Hillsdale: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, pp. 195210.
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Stephen E. Levick
Goodman, K. S. (1982), Language and Literacy (Vol.
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Commentary by Stephen E. Levick (Philadelphia)

Introduction
Reading Jason Brown's reections on microgenetic theory reminded me of my rst indelible
encounter with Mind, Brain and Consciousness
(1977), over twenty years ago. Microgenetic
theory still strikes me as full of promise for
helping to understand psychological phenomena,
including what happens in psychotherapy, as
manifestation of brain process. As a paradigm
considered alien by the mainstream, it is not
surprising that its promise has not yet been
fullled, but does microgenetic theory bear some
responsibility for this state of aairs? As a clinical
psychiatrist, I nd microgenetic theory consistent
with clinical experience. As a psychoanalytically
oriented psychotherapist, I also conceive of myself
as a kind of microgenetic facilitator for the patient.
Furthermore, I think of psychiatric medications as
modulating the neural milieu from which the
microgenetic process unfolds. Microgenetic theory has become part of my personal clinical
philosophy, and not that this is unimportant,
but is there more to recommend it than this?
The Appeal of a Theory
A theory can hold appeal on several levels. On the

aesthetic level, I remain enamored. However, if

you ask me to be the art critic, I feel that my
words are inadequate to explain why the theory is
beautiful, and my conviction that it must, at a
minimum contain a deep core of truth. Whether a
theory is true ought to be a separate question
from whether it is beautiful. Beauty is in the eye
of the creator, and if the creator gets is ``right,'' in
the eyes of some but not all beholders. Truth, on
the other hand, should be discernable by unbiased
rationality, assisted by empirical investigation
suggested by the theory to test it. In the end,
theories are either disproved by results or the
results are found not to be inconsistent with the
theory. Theories cannot be proven to be true.
A theory can be useful experimentally if it
suggests lines of investigation, maintaining a
humility that it is not the nal word on how
things may work, only that they may work
something like it suggests.
A theory can be useful clinically if it suggests
ways of understanding signs and symptoms, and
the treatment process. Understanding as explanation encompasses everything from a coherent, not
necessarily theory-based narrative to a consistent
and comprehensive theoretical system. More stringent tests of how well we understand something is