Intersubjectivity - lydgate/mindmeld GitHub Wiki

Reading list for further thinking about intersubjectivity and its basis for thought, creativity, regulation, and so on:

Notes on The Remarkable Ways our Brains Slip into Synchrony (link above):

  • URL:: https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/the-remarkable-ways-our-brains-slip-into-synchrony/

  • Highlights first synced by #Readwise April 3rd, 2022

    • The Remarkable Ways Our Brains Slip Into SynchronyMany of our most influential experiences are shared with and, according to a growing body of cognitive science research, partly shaped by other people.MIT Press ReaderMichael J. Spivey
      • Note: All part of the science of belonging
    • The information that makes you who you are includes not just the information carried inside your brain, body, and nearby objects but also the information carried by the people around you.
      • Note: Premise: the self is constituted by more than only your brain, body, and even nearby objects, but also by the people most close to you (emotionally and cognitively, but presumably also spatially)
    • old Spanish proverb that goes, “Dime con quien andas y te diré quien eres”: Tell me with whom you walk, and I’ll tell you who you are. intersubjectivity
    • And just like Kelso’s two index fingers, as these two people speed up their antiphase leg movements, they tend to slip into an in-phase pattern.
      • Note: cool: Kelso's finger wagging phase/anti-phase experiment works with two separate people trying to anti-synch their leg movements.
    • Your own action-perception cycle can share information back and forth with someone else’s action-perception cycle, in a manner that makes the two of you synchronize and behave a little bit like one system.
      • Note: while observing another and trying to resist coordination, it becomes almost impossible to avoid acting as one system when the task gets fast/hard enough... we have a natural inclination to act as one when "stressed"

So when we are stressed, and we are together with a trusted other, we are more likely to become quickly synchronized and behave as one system. When we are "at rest" or safe, then we can act as an individual, and self-explore, meditate, write, create, etc on our own, decoupled from others. But there needs to be a continual "touching social base(line)", I think, to maintain that sense of safety so that one can explore on one's own. As the securely-attached infant with their mother, they can be "alone in the presence of the other" and exploration and play is joyful and productive. But we start, and go back to, our baseline social dynamic to fuel up on the social-emotional juice we need to keep going. It is not that we are alone, and should be so, and we seek out social connection once in a while for the fun of it.

  • Girard wrote about how people do not desire things, they desire being like the people who have the things (cf Adam Smith: Wealth and attention). * advertisers know this well: people don't want the shirt so much as to be LIKE the person who wears/likes the shirt; we aspire to be someone, not to have things * mimetic desire is wanting to imitate what those you admire have * shame is felt when you desire something authentically, out of your own individual tastes or needs, but it's incommensurate with what others who you admire would want or need * "One of the tragic elements of mimetic desire is that it induces a lot of self-deception: lying to yourself in order to reshape your perceptions,your experience and your identity to be consistent with who you feel you ought to be."

I'm really interested in the various ways we might be navigating intersubjetivity differently in the digital now, compared with periods before web 2.0. Related, I think what we understand about these new ways people (especially YOUNG people, growing up expressing themselves and sharing their narratives online from the start of adolescence) are sharing their experiences and identity-related constructions has huge implications for language development, the phenomenology of consciousness, and (maybe?) shifts to a collective consciousness that may be important to consider deeply (there's a rabbit hole we could spend an entire new wiki on). For example, this article: https://aaronzlewis.com/blog/2020/02/18/being-your-selves-identity-r-and-d-on-the-pseudonymous-internet/

  • Part of Lewis' argument is that online identity experiments, like using an anonymous pseudonym for the purposes of working through trauma and healing, can and does really work for some people
  • Similar to our offline social selves, these pseudo-anonymous (alt) accounts come alive when people start responding to them, when people feel "seen." Through social feedback, you learn who you are or are becoming; what works and sticks for others about yourself will become amplified for yourself. And this feedback, critically, becomes INTERNALIZED. You start responding to your own cognitive machinations in a way that mimics the audience you explicitly shared parts of yourself with.
  • Lewis puts it this way: "Without any strategy or forethought, you end up with an indescribable sense of “where you are” in cyberspace by paying attention to who and what shows up in your notifications. There’s a mysterious quality to it all. The algorithm seems to route tweets to the very people who will understand what the hell you’re talking about. You think you’re typing inside jokes to yourself, but it almost always turns out that there are others out there who get you."
  • The impact of this type of feedback is that you start using these platforms/tools to augment your own internal voices, leaving it very hard to figure out what comes from your own genuine values/beliefs/identity core and what comes from trying to "please" or connect with your "audience" * authenticity, in this light, becomes a very murky concept

zettel innate intersubjectivity We are born with the ability to cultivate intersubjectivity from our very first days, with babies quickly becoming entrained to their mother's voice, gestures, eye contact, and body postures in synchronized, attuned dances that give rise to language.

Trevarthen

  • Keywords:: intersubjectivity infancy language ontogeny-phylogeny

  • Authors:: Colywyn Trevarthen

  • Key Points::

    • human adults' cognitive capacities seem so complex and it is by virtue of this complexity that it's presumed that they can socially interact in the varied ways they do (built on their years of development that includes practical experience, abstract thinking skills, language capacities, and so on); its this complexity that is usually implicated in our unique capacity for intersubjectivity
      • Love the idea that intersubjectivity precedes the adult complex cognitive skills, and also that it may produce those skills. This is similar to the view from Enactivism, isn't it?
      • Question: Are you saying that cognition itself is built on top of interaction, or that cognition itself is inherently interactive?
        • The former is definitely what Trevarthen is saying and maybe even the latter. This is very much related to Alan Fogel's main premise (another dynamic systems-informed developmentalist; a mentee of Kelso), which you can read more about in this book (I can't seem to find a good article that summarizes his approach right now). His research showed how embodied self-awareness (interoception and awareness of emotional states), is essential for healthy development and self-regulation and is "learned" through early body-based, attuned, intersubjective experiences. Summary of the premise of Developing Through Relationship: "Fogel explores the origins of communication, personal identity, and cultural participation and argues that from birth communication, self, and culture are inseparable. He shows that the ability to participate as a human being in the world does not come about only with the acquisition of language, as many scholars have thought, but begins during an infant's earliest nonverbal period. According to Fogel, the human mind and sense of self start to develop at birth through communication and relationships between individuals."
    • But Trevarthen argues (and to some degree demonstrates empirically) that infants as young as 2 months old (and even younger) exhibit intersubjective capacities
      • "...detailed research on how neonatal selves coordinate the rhythms of their movements and senses, and how they engage in intimate and seductive precision with other persons' movements, sensing their purposes and feelings, gives evidence that it is so."
        • Babies on youtube: Rhythm, movement, senses. These were played during this lecture with Morten Kringelbach; I'm still trying to get the video.
        • So these babies are a great example of when co-regulation and coordinated intentionalities are working harmoniously. What's interesting is that Ed Tronick (another developmentalist) provided a bunch of evidence for the very early capacity for infants to coordinate intention and action with a valued adult from a research paradigm that examined what happens when this connection breaks. By observing infants in standardized experiments that perturbed the system from its stable, synchronized dynamic state, Tronick was able to show that infants DO anticipate this coordination, and fundamentally need/crave this type of connection. He did this with the "still face" paradigm in which after a little bit of mother-infant dance, mothers had to put on a "still face" (neutral, completely unresponsive). Babies got SUPER freaked out, many of them started crying, from this simple breaking of entrainment. This is so compelling to me, on so many different levels I want to elaborate later on (in relation to basic understandings of suffering, our evolutionary need for belonging, our creative peaks in collaboration, the defenses we build very early on when our bids for connection are ignored or unpredictably met).
      • Here's the "still face" paradigm in action (really worth watching to get a sense of how distressing the experience of breaking connection is, and how many bids to repair or re-connect are made until melting down entirely: Still Face
      • within minutes from birth, infants are able to will themselves into emotionally charged co-regulated movement and "become part of a dramatic narration of being in companionship with another person (Brazelton, 1979; Trevarthen, 1979)."
    • We are born with a neural system that allows us to pick up subtle shifts in motivated attention in the other
      • the infant knows to adjust and coordinate to those shifts in attention, seeking affection, interest, and connection from the other
    • Before Trevarthen's (and some of his contemporaries like Tronick, Fogel, Stern, Bretherton)work in developmental psychology, it was presumed that the infant, like non-primate animals, had no self-awareness and no awareness of other human selves (essentially, they were not yet a "person")
      • instead, the infant needed to get to a later stage of development at which language capacity comes on line and only then can intentions, feelings, and consciousness be experienced (see also neuroscience work by LeDoux)
      • but lots of empirical, observational work started to show the extent to which the newborn draws interested adults' attention and initiates synchronized actions that grow, over the first few weeks, into rituals of gaze, body sways, and affective modulation... long before words are learned, but that function as a sort of protolanguage
        • human infants are born with motives and emotions that fuel action that sustain intersubjectivity and build attunement: "a human being is born capable of seeking and playing with others' attentions and feelings in a rich variety of provocative, humorous and teasing ways (Reddy, 2008)."
        • Trevarthen (2001... also Breaten w/ Treverathen?): these rituals that first emerge in synchronized actions with adults become the seedbed of imaginative learning and shared cultural forms
    • These early synchronized, modulated, co-regulatory dyadic dances are the basis for not only a coherent sense of self, but also a model of others' minds
    • This kind of fine-tuned co-regulation of affect and movement is not seen in any other animal (it's not just pure mimicry, which you DO see in other animals)
    • Darwin was fascinated with these co-regulation processes himself:
      • "My first child was born on December 27th, 1839, and I at once commenced to make notes on the first dawn of the various expressions which he exhibited, for I felt convinced, even at this early period, that the most complex and fine shades of expression must all have had a gradual and natural origin." (Darwin, 1887/1958, p. 131).
    • innate gestural and vocal expressions between mother and infant exhibit coordination by an 'intrinsic motive pulse', a time sense generated and regulated in the brain (Trevarthen, 1999 and also: Stern, 1985, 1999).
      • there was a lot of describing of these dynamics in terms of music, poetry, rhythm, dance, especially by Stern... He basically argued that much of the power of these artforms took their roots from these very early mother-infant temporal patterning
      • they spoke of "entrainment" a lot, and how intention and affect would be co-captured (my weird term, but that was the gist) and then played with in an exploratory way, forming the basis of how relationships would emerge
    • see also Merlin Donald's theory of how the human mind evolved (2001): he says a culture of expressive and creative mimesis was the foundation for the emergence of language. Infectious mimetic fantasy play

  • Examples of emergent oscillating/entrained systems I'd like to collect a bunch of interesting examples of systems that become entrained in real time. Their properties might give us a set of principles by which to think about how human interaction examples can be evaluated, measured, modified. Some I can think of (I'll provide references for some later):

    • babies rocking to dad guitar...
    • Synchronized pendulums
    • coo-coo clocks
    • the menstrual cycles of women living in the same house become synchronized (ok, not in real time, bad example)
    • brain regions oscillate at same frequency

  • Random thoughts post Trevarthen

    • i’d like to think more about how these early proto coordinations and synchronizations and playful regulated motoric dances grow into early concepts, categorizations, relational words, and then full-blown narratives that are internalized but always from intersubjective processes
      • It feels like this relates to resonance, frequency, "connnectome-specific harmonic waves" in the brain. I read this phrase here and know little about it otherwise, though actually I've just remembered that Carhart-Harris 2014 also mentions oscillatory rhythms.
        • YES. I think we need to dive deeper into the neuroscience of brain-wide oscillations and entrainment of brain regions from disparate parts of the brain. I remember the research being really compelling. Varella's mentees went off in this direction and linked it to neural phenomenology research. I'll return to this when I have more information.
    • what happens when the Grasping, the "apprehension," is not a solitary act and not one about objects (only), but grasping gets extended from the individual baby grasping and apprehending a thing, bringing that thing towards the mouth, the face, closer to the eyes... to grasping for the other, the apprehension is of the other, the other's intention, the other's physical attunement, the other's affective reach and how does that extend out into language later?
      • Grasp is super important, I'm creating a page for this. Merleau-Ponty and McGilchrist, maybe also Jaynes write about it.
      • I wonder if grasping is also really important from a Buddhist perspective. As you know much better than I, so much of meditation and buddhist thinking focuses on grasping being the root of our suffering. At first glance this seems just a semantic play, but when you look at the Still Life scenario, you can see that, indeed, grasping without your object of desire responding, is very much at the seat of suffering and learning to let go of that emotional need may be one way to "be here now." (there's lots of reasons we can call bs on that, but I'm just putting the basic thought down for now). Does this idea belong here?

Why this is of interest

  1. Intersubjectivity interests me on a purely theoretical level (basic science/just wanting to know how it works level)
  2. on a developmental level for the purposes of considering how kids could grow up with another model of learning and creative output
  3. and on a very pragmatic level, for purposes of (maybe) writing a book and using that as the cornerstone of workshops/training/public talks/mentorship relationships going forward.

I can say this for many other topics we've covered in the last few weeks. The playful bouncing of ideas between us works for my mind well, and the emergence of new stuff keeps me super engaged.