Grasping - lydgate/mindmeld GitHub Wiki

Buddhism

Merleau-Ponty

In "Digitalizing Literacy" I learned that Merleau-Ponty wrote about the importance of grasp in habit formation. Direct link to passage:

Metaphors and colloquialisms are additional indicators of the importance of the haptic modality in cognition. Numerous expressions for understanding and comprehension consist of terms and concepts referring to dexterity: expressions such as "to get a hold of someone," "to handle a situation," "to grasp a concept" all point to (pun intended) the paramount influence of our hands and fingers in dealing with the environment. Such an intimate connection between the human body – for example, our hands – the lifeworld, and cognition is a hallmark of phenomenology, in particular the somatosensory phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty:

It is the body that 'catches' […] 'and 'comprehends' movement. The acquisition of a habit is indeed the grasping of a significance, but it is the motor grasping a motor significance. […] If habit is neither a form of knowledge nor any involuntary action, then what is it? It is a knowledge in the hands [Merleau-Ponty's example is knowing how to use a typewriter], which is forthcoming only when bodily effort is made, and cannot be formulated in detachment from that effort. (Merleau-Ponty, 1962 [1945], pp. 143-144).

Aeon interoception article: Noka Arikha summarises Manos Tsakiris' research on the RHI. Hypothesis: selfhood.

Ernie: "And seems tied up to Merleau-Ponty with all of the phantom limb research." Phantom limb, rubber-hand illusion, selfhood, grasping. There's something in here.

McGilchrist

Here's me searching McGilchrist for "grasp":

First, the left-hemisphere view is designed to aid you in grabbing stuff. Its purpose is utility and its evolutionary adaptation lies in the service of grasping and amassing ‘things’. As such it is seductive. It is probably for this reason that Eastern cultures which used to be more balanced in their outlook are now adopting the current Western model of the world with such enthusiasm, and appear set, very sadly, on outdoing the West at its own pernicious game. It is my view that we should be learning from them, not they from us. In the case of the Greeks, the Romans and the post-Enlightenment West, the decline of civilisation has been associated, not just with more left-hemisphere ways of thinking, but appropriately with forms of military or economic imperialism, and a consequent overextension of administration, a coarsening of values, and a failure of vitality, vision and integrity.

Essentially the left hemisphere’s narrow focussed attentional beam, which it believes it ‘turns’ towards whatever it may be, has in reality already been seized by it.105 It is thus the right hemisphere that has dominance for exploratory attentional movements, while the left hemisphere assists focussed grasping of what has already been prioritised.106 It is the right hemisphere that controls where that attention is to be oriented.107

Not only does the right hemisphere have an affinity with whatever is living, but the left hemisphere has an equal affinity for what is mechanical. The left hemisphere’s principal concern is utility. It is interested in what it has made, and in the world as a resource to be used. It is therefore natural that it has a particular affinity for words and concepts for tools, man-made things, mechanisms and whatever is not alive. The left hemisphere codes for tools and machines.179 References to tools and actions of grasping activate the left hemisphere even in left-handers, despite the fact that they habitually use the right hemisphere/left hand to grasp objects and use tools in daily life. And right-hemisphere damage leaves the ability to use simple tools unaltered, whereas left-hemisphere damage renders the sufferer incapable of using a hammer and nail, or a key and a padlock. However, right-hemisphere damage particularly impairs naturalistic actions involving a sequence of steps – for example, making a cup of coffee or wrapping a present.180

In general the right hemisphere is critical for making attributions of the content, emotional or otherwise, of another’s mind, and particularly in respect of the affective state of another individual.197 According to Simon Baron-Cohen, the right hemisphere is engaged even in listening to words describing the mind, such as ‘think’ and ‘imagine’.198 But the right hemisphere will empathise with, identify with, and aim to imitate only what it knows to be another living being, rather than a mechanism – a point of interest in view of the roles we have seen the two hemispheres play in the division of the world into the animate and the inanimate.199 When we look at either a real hand or a ‘virtual reality’ hand grasping an object, we automatically activate the appropriate left-hemisphere areas, as if we too were grasping – but, strikingly, only in the case of the real, living hand do regions in the right temporoparietal area become activated.200 We have an unconscious, involuntary urge to imitate someone we are watching carrying out an action – so much so that, especially if it’s something we’ve practised ourselves, the empathic entrainment is actually stronger than the voluntary desire to do something we’d like to see happen. But this is true only if we think it is a real person that’s acting. If we think it’s a computer, we just are not engaged.201

The left hemisphere likes things that are man-made. Things we make are also more certain: we know them inside out, because we put them together. They are not, like living things, constantly changing and moving, beyond our grasp. Because the right hemisphere sees things as they are, they are constantly new for it, so it has nothing like the databank of information about categories that the left hemisphere has. It cannot have the certainty of knowledge that comes from being able to fix things and isolate them. In order to remain true to what is, it does not form abstractions, and categories that are based on abstraction, which are the strengths of denotative language. By contrast, the right hemisphere’s interest in language lies in all the things that help to take it beyond the limiting effects of denotation to connotation: it acknowledges the importance of ambiguity. It therefore is virtually silent, relatively shifting and uncertain, where the left hemisphere, by contrast, may be unreasonably, even stubbornly, convinced of its own correctness.434 As John Cutting puts it, despite ‘an astonishing degree of ignorance on the part of the left (supposed major) hemisphere about what its partner, the right (supposed minor) hemisphere, [is] up to, [it] abrogates decision-making to itself in the absence of any rational evidence as to what is going on’.435

It was one of the earliest perceptions that the left hemisphere is the seat of conscious self-awareness, certainly for the expression of its selfhood through the conscious will.525 I have already suggested that the expression of the will, in the sense of the conscious, rational will – grasping and manipulating – may have been responsible for the expansion of the left hemisphere. Nonetheless it turns out that when we are acting ‘for ourselves’, in the sense of initiating new action rather than following another’s lead, the activity is largely in the right hemisphere, though this may be restricted to practical, habitual actions.526 There is a tendency for independence and motivation to be associated with the right hemisphere, and passivity with the left hemisphere. This is related to its stickiness, described above, its relative inability to shift set, espouse a new way of looking at things, rather than get locked into environmental cues. ‘Environmental dependency’ syndrome refers to an inability to inhibit automatic responses to environmental cues: it is also known as ‘forced utilisation behaviour’. Individuals displaying such behaviour will, for example, pick up a pair of glasses that are not their own and put them on, just because they are lying on the table, involuntarily pick up a pen and paper and start writing, or passively copy the behaviour of the examiner without being asked to, even picking up a stethoscope and pretending to use it. According to Kenneth Heilman, the syndrome, as well as aboulia (loss of will), akinesia (failure to move), and impersistence (inability to carry through an action) are all commoner after right, rather than left, frontal damage.527 In four out of the five cases of environmental dependency in Lhermitte’s classic paper in which the syndrome was first described, the only or principal lesion was in the right frontal lobe. In each case the patient explained that ‘you held out objects to me; I thought I had to use them’.528 However, the situation is far from straightforward, since my reading of further data provided by Lhermitte is that the syndrome is as common after lesions in either frontal lobe;529 and a lesion in either frontal lobe may, in any case, ‘release’ behavioural patterns characteristic of the posterior hemisphere on the same side (see below), as much as impair the functioning of the hemisphere as a whole (or indeed the contralateral hemisphere via the corpus callosum). But it would be in keeping with other research that shows forced utilisation behaviour after right-hemisphere damage: one patient not only showed exaggerated responses to external cues (utilization behaviour), and motor impersistence, but a right-handed instinctive grasp reaction, after an infarct in the right thalamus, which was associated with under-perfusion of the entire right cerebral cortex, especially the frontal area.530

Moreover if we look once again at the higher apes, it also turns out that some of them begin to prefer the right hand to grasp things – despite the fact that, though they may use sticks and stones, they are certainly not tool-makers in the human sense.24 Any asymmetry in their brains is unlikely to be due to the need for brain space to house the complex skills of tool making. Their grasping right hands must be a sign of something else.

And especially...

LANGUAGE AND THE HAND

The location of grasp in the left hemisphere, close to speech, is not accidental and tells us something. We know from experience that there are many connections between the hand and language. For example, there clearly is a close relationship between spoken language and the wealth of gesture language that often accompanies it. In normal subjects, restricting hand movement produces an adverse effect on the content and fluency of speech.77 Ramachandran even reports the case of a young woman, who was born without upper limbs. She experiences phantom arms; and the fact that she has phantom arms at all, replicating a number of such findings in the congenitally limbless, is interesting enough (phantoms are usually thought of as being the residual of a limb that is lost, that in other words must have been there originally).78 But, even though these phantom arms do not, for example, swing by her side as she walks, she cannot stop them gesticulating when she speaks. Even though she has never been able to use an arm or hand, speech activates these areas of her brain.79

At the neurophysiological level, too, it turns out that there are similarities between the skills required for speech production and those required for hand movement, specifically movement of the right hand.80 In fact, according to Marcel Kinsbourne, language develops specifically in relation to ‘right-sided action and, particularly, rightward orienting’.81 It is, according to him, an ‘elaboration, extension and abstraction of sensorimotor function’, originating in a proto-language formed by the ‘utterances that were coincident with and driven by the same rhythm as the movement in question’.82 As if to confirm the close connection between language and the body, especially pointing and grasping movements of the right hand, babies and young children can be seen to point while they babble, and the child ‘always points while naming and does not name without pointing – stretching out the right hand … Babbling can also be heard in conjunction with the motor sequences that are sequelae of the orienting response – locomotion, grasp, manipulation.’83 And the association holds not just for the child: even in the adult, language, gesture, and bodily movement are ‘different actualizations of the same process.’84

Manipulospatial abilities may have provided the basis of primitive language, and such abilities and referential language require similar neural mechanisms.85 The syntactic elements of language may well derive from gesture.86 And not just from gesture, but from the more functional, more manipulative, hand movements: tool making and speech are both ‘serial, syntactic and manipulatory behaviours based on complex articulations of biomechanical patterns.’87 In fact, so strong is the connection that one theory is that referential language may have evolved, not from sounds at all, but actually direct from hand movements – not only that, but specifically from motions to do with grasping.88 The closeness of function is imaged in anatomy by the proximity of the area for speech and the area of the brain designed to promote grasping. As mentioned, Broca’s area, the motor speech area of the frontal lobe, involves certain specialised nerves called mirror neurones which are involved in finger movements, and are also activated in watching others carry out hand movements.89

This complicity of language and grasping movements of the hand is not just an interesting neurophysiological and neuroanatomical finding. It is intuitively correct, as evidenced by the terms we use to describe linguistic comprehension and expression. It is not an accident that we talk about ‘grasping’ what someone is saying. The metaphor of grasp has its roots deep in the way we talk about thinking in most languages (e.g. the various Romance derivatives of Latin com-prehendere, and cognates of be-greifen in Germanic languages). In his fascinating study of the human hand, the German-speaking Hungarian psychologist Géza Révész writes:

In German the notion of ‘handeln’ embraces all meaningful and goal-directed human activities. It characterises unequivocally the total personality of man. This idea is not limited to external manipulation, that is actions which effect changes in the outer world. It also includes inner action, the purposeful activities of the mind. In his mode of manipulation man experiences his real ‘I’. Through it he acquires power over physical nature, gathers a rich fund of material from experience, enlarges his range of effectiveness, and develops his capacities … Impulses, aspirations, wishes, decisions press for realisation, and this takes place chiefly through the mediation of the hand … If we wish to convey that we have acquired something mental, we say that we have grasped it.90

He points to words such as Erfassen, Begriff, begreiflich, Eindruck, Ausdruck, behalten, auslegen, überlegen. We have them too in English – not just grasp and comprehend, but words such as impression, expression, intend, contend, pretend (from Latin tendere, to reach with the hand).

Among other things which Révész draws attention to is the fact that, though touch is the first, most basic and most convincing of the senses (the simplest organisms have only tactile hairs or cilia), it can nonetheless provide only a piecemeal image of something. Handling something gives one bits of information at a time, and one has to put together the parts: it does not deliver a sense of the whole. He also points out that in distinguishing things with the hand it is a question of what type of a thing, and not of which particular one.

All of this – this grasping, this taking control, this piecemeal apprehension of the world, this distinguishing of types, rather than of individual things – takes place for most of us with the right hand. And so it is not surprising that hidden in these reflections are clues to the nature of left-hemisphere processes. In all these respects – not just in the taking control, but in the approach to understanding by building it up bit by bit, rather than being able to sense the whole, in the interest in categories of things, rather than in individuals – grasp follows a path congenial to the operations of the left hemisphere. It is also through grasping things that we grant things certainty and fixity: when they are either uncertain or unfixed, we say we ‘cannot put our finger on it’, we ‘haven’t got a hold of it’. This too is an important aspect of the world according to the left hemisphere. The idea of ‘grasping’ implies seizing a thing for ourselves, for use, wresting it away from its context, holding it fast, focussing on it. The grasp we have, our understanding in this sense, is the expression of our will, and it is the means to power. It is what enables us to ‘manipulate’ – literally to take a handful of whatever we need – and thereby to dominate the world around us.

And, as if to confirm the deep relationship between the left hemisphere and instrumentality, an attitude of grasping and use, it will be remembered that tool use is preferentially represented in the left hemisphere even in a left-handed individual. This is surely a remarkable finding. Even though the individual’s brain is so organised that the right hemisphere governs day-to-day actions using the left hand, concepts of tool use preferentially activate not the right hemisphere but the left.91 And still further evidence, just as remarkable, shows that, again even in left-handers, actions specifically of grasping are associated with left-hemisphere control – the concept is separate, therefore, from control of the hand as such.92 Meanwhile exploratory, rather than grasping, motions of the hand activate the right superior parietal cortex, even when the hand that is doing the exploring is the right hand.93 These findings from imaging are in keeping with clinical experience. Subjects with right-hemisphere damage tend to grasp anything within reach, or even brandish their right hand about in empty space, as if searching for something to grasp. And this is not just the release of a primitive reflex: unlike those subjects who exhibit a grasp reflex, they are able to loosen their grip immediately, when asked to do so. It is volitional.94 And the contrast with those with left-hemisphere damage, therefore relying on their right hemisphere, could not be more stark:

The patient, when asked to copy the examiner’s gestures, tries to put his own hands on the examiner’s … When his hands are brought into action, it seems as if they are seeking not to remain isolated, as if trying ‘to find companionship in something that fills up the empty space.’95

LANGUAGE AND MANIPULATION

I am not the first to have surmised that referential language originated in something other than the need to communicate. The philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder, who in 1772 published one of the most important and influential essays on the origins of language, noticing that what I would call the ‘I–thou’ element in communication at the most intuitive level, the empathic force that is present in music, is hardly characteristic of human language, concluded that ‘language appears as a natural organ of reason’.96 That might require qualification, since, as I have emphasised, reasoning goes on without it; but what he points to here is the importance of language primarily as an aid to a certain particular type of cognition. Nearer our own time, the distinguished American neuroscientist Norman Geschwind ventured that language may not, after all, have originated in a drive to communicate – that came later – but as a means of mapping the world.97 I would agree with that and go further. It is a means of manipulating the world.

Understanding the nature of language depends once again on thinking about the ‘howness’, not the ‘whatness’. The development of denotative language enables, not communication in itself, but a special kind of communicating, not thinking itself, but a special kind of thinking.

It is certainly not so important for personal communication within a relationship, and may even be a hindrance here. Telephone conversations, in which all non-verbal signals apart from some partially degraded tonal information are lost, are unsatisfactory not only to lovers and friends, but to all for whom personal exchange is important; one would not expect the medium to work well as a means of, for example, conducting therapy sessions, or for any type of interviewing. It is unattuned to the ‘I–thou’ relationship. Where words come into their own is for transmitting information, specifically about something that is not present to us, something that is removed in space or time, when you and I need to co-operate in doing something about something else. It almost unimaginably expands the realm of the ‘I–it’ (or the ‘we–it’) relationship.

And what about the role that language plays, now that it exists, in thinking? Once again, language’s role is in giving command over the world, particularly those parts that are not present spatially or temporally, a world that in the process is transformed from the ‘I–thou’ world of music (and the right hemisphere) to the ‘I–it’ world of words (and the left hemisphere). Words alone make concepts more stable and available to memory.98 Naming things gives us power over them, so that we can use them; when Adam was given the beasts for his use and to ‘have dominion’ over them, he was also the one who was given the power to name them. And category formation provides clearer boundaries to the landscape of the world, giving a certain view of it greater solidity and permanence. That may not have begun with humans, but it was obviously given a vast push forward by referential language. Language refines the expression of causal relationships. It hugely expands the range of reference of thought, and expands the capacity for planning and manipulation. It enables the indefinite memorialisation of more than could otherwise be retained by any human memory. These advantages, of memorialisation and fixity, that language brings are, of course, further vastly enhanced when language becomes written, enabling the contents of the mind to be fixed somewhere in external space. And in turn this further expands the possibilities for manipulation and instrumentalisation. The most ancient surviving written texts are bureaucratic records.

Language in summary brings precision and fixity, two very important features if we are to succeed in manipulating the world. And, specifically, though we may not like to recognise this, it is good for manipulating other human beings. We can’t easily hide the truth in non-verbal communication, but we can in words. We can’t easily direct others to carry out our plans without language. We can’t act at a distance without language. Language, it would seem, starts out with what look like imperial aspirations.

Of course there is nothing wrong with manipulation in itself, with having designs on things that we can control, change, or make new. These are certainly basic, human characteristics, and they are the absolute foundations of civilisation. In this sense language is, as it is conventionally but simplistically conceived, a vastly precious and important gift.

Reverting to the needs of the frontal lobes, it provides the framework for a virtual representation of reality. Language enables the left hemisphere to represent the world ‘off-line’, a conceptual version, distinct from the world of experience, and shielded from the immediate environment, with its insistent impressions, feelings and demands, abstracted from the body, no longer dealing with what is concrete, specific, individual, unrepeatable, and constantly changing, but with a disembodied representation of the world, abstracted, central, not particularised in time and place, generally applicable, clear and fixed. Isolating things artificially from their context brings the advantage of enabling us to focus intently on a particular aspect of reality and how it can be modelled, so that it can be grasped and controlled.

But its losses are in the picture as a whole. Whatever lies in the realm of the implicit, or depends on flexibility, whatever can’t be brought into focus and fixed, ceases to exist as far as the speaking hemisphere is concerned.

It also shifts the balance towards the concerns of the left hemisphere, which are not always consonant with those of the right. There are many links between language and grasp, and they have a similar agenda. Both sharpen focus on the world: mental grasp, like physical grasp, requires precision and fixity, which language provides, making the world available for manipulation and possession. Was it the drive for power, embodied in the will to control the environment, which accelerated symbol manipulation and the extension of conceptual thought – already present in some apes,99 and present in our early ancestors – resulting in the expansion of the left hemisphere before language and grasp evolved? In this light, language and grasp can be seen as expressions at the phenomenal level of a deeper lying drive in the left hemisphere: effective manipulation of the world, and beyond that competition with other species, and with one another. Once the capacity for manipulation was established in the left hemisphere, and no doubt especially once the power of abstraction was embedded there with the beginnings of a referential language, the preferential use of the right hand to carry out the literal manipulation of the environment would naturally have followed.

Anne Mangen and Jean-Luc Velay, ‘Digitizing Literacy: Reflections on the Haptics of Writing’, Advances in Haptics, 1 April 2010, https://doi.org/10.5772/8710. Digitizing Literacy: Reflections on the Haptics of Writing | IntechOpen.

Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World (Yale University Press, 2019).