The biological/psychological (non)dichotomy

You cannot separate mind from body. We frequently do in everyday conversation and in the way we approach ourselves, but, at a fundamental level, our biological and psychological selves are the same. Even if you consider the body and mind separate entities, you have to acknowledge that they are entirely dependent upon each other: a body without a mind will not move, will not eat, will not care for itself, will die. A mind without a body cannot see, hear, feel, taste, or smell; it cannot sense anything; it cannot communicate; it cannot be.

This notion of symbiosis, that the physical and mental rely on one another in an intimate fashion, does not go far enough, though. Our physical and mental selves are linked even more fundamentally than this. Your mind is not housed in your body; rather, it is an extension of your physiology:

You have a brain. You have a physical organ made of millions and millions of neurons, connected in wonderfully complicated ways, conducting action potentials along their lengths, transmitting signals to one another through chemical molecules called neurotransmitters. You have a biological network of neural cells encased in your cranium. Everything that you think, everything that you sense, and everything that you do is dependent on that incredibly complex collection of neurons, your brain. All your thoughts and thought processes depend on the transmission of electrical signals through that tissue. Your sense organs (ears, eyes, skin, etc.) detect stimuli and transmit electrical signals to specific areas of your brain. These signals are processed in incredibly intricate ways, spinning paths through your neural network. Your actions depend on the signals reaching the motor center of your brain, causing you to move your limbs, form words with your lips and throat, and place your hands on the keyboard and type.

Raise your hand.

Okay, you can put it down.

How were you able to get your hand get up in the air? You might say, "The same way I move any other part of myself. I am in control. I think, and I move." The process is more biological than that, though. Initially, you received a visual stimulus from the computer screen, which interfaced with the photoreceptors of your eye, transmitting a signal along your optic nerve to the occipital lobe of your brain. Some processing center in your brain identified the signal as words, which were decoded into meaning by another area of neurons. The meaning was transmitted to your motor centers, which sent a signal to the muscles in your arm and shoulder, and your raised your hand. Unless you didn't. If you didn't raise your hand, it is because another pathway intervened. Maybe you are in a public place and didn't want to look foolish. Maybe you aren't engaged and are just skimming this post. Maybe you don't normally acquiesce to odd written requests. In any case, the signal encountered a group of neurons that did not send it on to your motor cortex. It took a path through your neural network that did not involve movement.

Another important point is that you may or may not have been conscious of your decision to raise your hand. Our brains operate and process stimuli much more thoroughly and deeply than we are aware of. (Many debatably reputable sources will give you ways to harness this unused power--just google 'subconscious.') The point is, your brain is like a biological supercomputer, making innumerable connections and subtle distinctions through complex neural interactions, upon which your conscious mind is entirely dependent.

Raise your hand.

Did you do it that time? It was the same visual stimulus. If you had different responses to the commands, it means that the stimulus activated different pathways each time.

Highly trafficked pathways correspond to familiar thoughts or important subconscious processes (like facial recognition and decoding of written words). New stimuli require the development of unused pathways. Making connections between ideas literally involves making connections between neurons in your brain. That's also why we 'fall into an old way of thinking' of 'get stuck in a rut'; we are playing out the same mental pathways that are present in our brains.

Drucker wrote about this in 1974 in "Functioning Communications." He delineates the effort required by the communicator to reach the listener due to differences in mental processes. Communications can fall upon deaf ears when the communicator fails to take into account the listener's mindset. People hear what they want to hear. People's brains are hard-wired to process stimuli in certain fashions. Drucker writes how communication is almost a battle: As the communicator, you have to bring the listener around to your way of thinking. You have to bypass the natural route in the listener's mind and develop new pathways. Otherwise, they will hear what they want to hear, and not what you want them to hear.

Effective communication from the communicator's standpoint demands messages that speak to the audience. Effective communication from the listener's standpoint demands a receptive attitude and a commitment to the consideration of new ideas. This is a hard thing to accomplish when so much of the information processing that goes on in our brains occurs below our consciousness. It's almost like holding you breath: you can only do it for so long before your natural processes take over.

I recently have been tangling with this issue regarding the interpretation of Gladwell's The Tipping Point. In my mind, Gladwell writes about the population dynamics that allow epidemics to spread. He frames his argument using the spread of syphilis in Baltimore. He explains the concept of the tipping point using a model of a disease. He then generalizes to all sorts of epidemics like fashion trends and waves of violence. The first time I read the book, I viewed it as a study in transmission. Gladwell did everything short of writing a mathematical model with variables like the number of individuals within a population contacted and the probability of spreading the contagion to explain the spread of epidemics. The second time I read the book, I saw the same thing. The specifics of what I have been calling the contagion do not matter--if it can be transmitted, Gladwell is talking about it. It doesn't matter whether it infects through a hostile takeover of the host's cells or by forging new pathways in the recipient's brain to develop a new way of thinking or a new desire for a product. The ultimate goal of the book, only partially achieved, was to elucidate the path that every contagion must take to become an epidemic.

Someone else who read this book saw exactly the opposite. Gladwell's use of syphilis was only a useful starting point toward getting his audience to think about headier, more abstract issues. The point of the book was not to study transmission in general, but to study the diffusion of innovation, of new ideas, and of positive changes in the world. The specifics of a model do not matter. What matters is the elucidation of tools that can be used to create change in society, in our thinking patterns, and in the way we spread our messages. The distinction between biological epidemics and those that really matter is huge: everyone knows that disease spreads; that is disease's basic function; who cares. If we want to spread things that really matter, such as anti-crime waves and learning, we need to identify ways that will help these things, which are not inherently transmitted, to spread to epidemic proportions.

As I stated, I am having a hard time making that distinction. The preceding paragraph sounds like a load of bunk to me. Due to the eccentricities of my own mental pathways, the transmission aspect of the book is most important to me. If a model can be developed that describes transmission throughout a population, that model should yield generalizable conclusions that can be applied to the spread of anything. The mechanism of actually infecting each individual is irrelevant. It is taken for granted. There may be some indication of 'transmissibility' (e.g. only 5% of contacted individuals will be infected), but the actual underlying reason that this phenomenon spreads does not matter.

I think that I am being asked to view Gladwell' Tipping Point from a different vantage point. Rather than focusing on some model, I should be focusing on _________. I'm still not sure. It's nice to talk about the spread of various positive ideas or halting the progress of negative epidemics, but without something generalizable to take away, I am just left with a bunch of anecdotes. I am trying to be receptive to a new interpretation of the book, but I cannot escape the thought processes of my brain that lead me back to the same conclusion every time I try to consider it from a different angle: We can create a model of the spread of a contagion throughout a population of dissimilar individuals; this model will allow us to engineer our own epidemics.

Our "minds" are products of our biology. If we are cognizant of the fact that our thought processes are biological processes, we can try to overcome the limitations imposed by following these same neural pathways over and over again.

Do you find this trivial? Do you think to yourself, "Who cares where our thoughts arise from. There is a distinction between my mind and body. I acknowledge that keeping an open mind is important for communication, but it doesn't matter what underlying physiological phenomena are responsible for this."

I have tried to present my thoughts in an accessible fashion. I hope that I have been able to pioneer an undiscovered path in your brain. I urge you to realize the limits imposed on your mind by your body, and try to overcome them.