"if you think childlike, you'll stay young. If you keep your energy going, and do everything with a little flair, you're gunna stay young. But most people do things without energy, and they atrophy their mind as well as their body. you have to think young, you have to laugh a lot, and you have to have good feelings for everyone in the world, because if you don't, it's going to come inside, your own poison, and it's over" Jerry Lewis "I don’t believe in the irreversibility of situations" Deleuze
Chapter 5:
Phenomenal time: problems and principles
Entry Directory for:
The Dainton – Gallagher
Phenomenal Time Debate
Barry Dainton’s Stream of Consciousness: Unity and Continuity in Conscious Experience, entry directory
Barry Dainton, “Time in Experience: Reply to Gallagher”
Barry Dainton’s Further Works Continuing These Ideas
Dainton’s “The Experience of Time and Change”, summary
Notes from Barry Dainton’s Time and Space for comparison with his “Sensing Change”
Dainton, “Sensing Change,” Summary
After dinner, if storming, grandmother rejoices outside
Marcel Proust
Du coté chez swann. A la recherche du temps perdu. Tome I
Swan's Way. Vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past
Première partie
Overature
Combray
I.
§13 / §14
Brief summary:
After dinner there would be chatting outside or inside depending on the weather, but grandmother would go out in the rain and even rejoice under a storm.
Summary
Previously the narrator described how the magic lantern shows projected on his bedroom wall unsettled his sense of the distinction between dream-like fantasy and everyday reality, and then his viewings would be interrupted by the call to dinner, which returned him to normal life.
After dinner the adults would chat either outside or inside depending on the weather (with the exception of his grandmother who would go out even in the rain). His father would send him to his room to read a book, while checking the barometer as his mother admiringly observes. His grandmother would love to go out in the storms and rejoice in their refreshing power, despite appearing out of her mind and getting her clothes muddy.
From the English translation:
§14
But after dinner, alas, I was soon obliged to leave Mamma, who stayed talking with the others, in the garden if it was fine, or in the little parlour where everyone took shelter when it was wet. Everyone except my grandmother, who held that “It is a pity to shut oneself indoors in the country,” and used to carry on endless discussions with my father on the very wettest days, because he would send me up to my room with a book instead of letting me stay out of doors. “That is not the way to make him strong and active,” she would say sadly, “especially this little man, who needs all the strength and character that he can get.” My father would shrug his shoulders and study the barometer, for he took an interest in meteorology, while my mother, keeping very quiet so as not to disturb him, looked at him with tender respect, but not too hard, not wishing to penetrate the mysteries of his superior mind. But my grandmother, in all weathers, even when the rain was coming down in torrents and Françoise had rushed indoors with the precious wicker armchairs, so that they should not get soaked — you would see my grandmother pacing the deserted garden, lashed by the storm, pushing back her grey hair in disorder so that her brows might be more free to imbibe the life-giving draughts of wind and rain. She would say, “At last one can breathe!” and would run up and down the soaking paths — too straight and symmetrical for her liking, owing to the want of any feeling for nature in the new gardener, whom my father had been asking all morning if the weather were going to improve — with her keen, jerky little step regulated by the various effects wrought upon her soul by the intoxication of the storm, the force of hygiene, the stupidity of my education and of symmetry in gardens, rather than by any anxiety (for that was quite unknown to her) to save her plum-coloured skirt from the spots of mud under which it would gradually disappear to a depth which always provided her maid with a fresh problem and filled her with fresh despair.
From the French:
§13
Après le dîner, hélas, j’étais bientôt obligé de quitter maman qui restait à causer avec les autres, au jardin s’il faisait beau, dans le petit salon où tout le monde se retirait s’il faisait mauvais. Tout le monde, sauf ma grand’mère qui trouvait que «c’est une pitié de rester enfermé à la campagne» et qui avait d’incessantes discussions avec mon père, les jours de trop grande pluie, parce qu’il m’envoyait lire dans ma chambre au lieu de rester dehors. «Ce n’est pas comme cela que vous le rendrez robuste et énergique, disait-elle tristement, surtout ce petit qui a tant besoin de prendre des forces et de la volonté.» Mon père haussait les épaules et il examinait le baromètre, car il aimait la météorologie, pendant que ma mère, évitant de faire du bruit pour ne pas le troubler, le regardait avec un respect attendri, mais pas trop fixement pour ne pas chercher à percer le mystère de ses supériorités. Mais ma grand’mère, elle, par tous les temps, même quand la pluie faisait rage et que Françoise avait précipitamment rentré les précieux fauteuils d’osier de peur qu’ils ne fussent mouillés, on la voyait dans le jardin vide et fouetté par l’averse, relevant ses mèches désordonnées et grises pour que son front s’imbibât mieux de la salubrité du vent et de la pluie. Elle disait: «Enfin, on respire!» et parcourait les allées détrempées,— trop symétriquement alignées à son gré par le nouveau jardinier dépourvu du sentiment de la nature et auquel mon père avait demandé depuis le matin si le temps s’arrangerait,— de son petit pas enthousiaste et saccadé, réglé sur les mouvements divers qu’excitaient dans son âme l’ivresse de l’orage, la puissance de l’hygiène, la stupidité de mon éducation et la symétrie des jardins, plutôt que sur le désir inconnu d’elle d’éviter à sa jupe prune les taches de boue sous lesquelles elle disparaissait jusqu’à une hauteur qui était toujours pour sa femme de chambre un désespoir et un problème.
Proust, Marcel. Du coté chez swann. A la recherche du temps perdu. Tome I.
From magic lantern fantasy to the dinner table
Marcel Proust
Du coté chez swann. A la recherche du temps perdu. Tome I
Swan's Way. Vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past
Première partie
Overature
Combray
I.
§12 / §13
Previously the narrator described how as a child he watched magic lantern shows projected on his bedroom wall.
Now he explains how his room reflected his personality and that he became unsettled and melancholic by how the images took over his room and thus his sense of himself. He used his door handle so much it became an unconscious habit that was a part of his everyday behavior. But the magic lantern projected the character Golo’s body on the handle, which in a way is an invasion into his sense of self. The dinner bell would ring and he would run to a more familiar world of family and the dinner table.
From the English translation:
§13
And, indeed, I found plenty of charm in these bright projections, which seemed to have come straight out of a Merovingian past, and to shed around me the reflections of such ancient history. But I cannot express the discomfort I felt at such an intrusion of mystery and beauty into a room which I had succeeded in filling with my own personality until I thought no more of the room than of myself. The anaesthetic effect of custom being destroyed, I would begin to think and to feel very melancholy things. The door-handle of my room, which was different to me from all the other doorhandles in the world, inasmuch as it seemed to open of its own accord and without my having to turn it, so unconscious had its manipulation become; lo and behold, it was now an astral body for Golo. And as soon as the dinner-bell rang I would run down to the dining-room, where the big hanging lamp, ignorant of Golo and Bluebeard but well acquainted with my family and the dish of stewed beef, shed the same light as on every other evening; and I would fall into the arms of my mother, whom the misfortunes of Geneviève de Brabant had made all the dearer to me, just as the crimes of Golo had driven me to a more than ordinarily scrupulous examination of my own conscience..
From the French:
§12
Certes je leur trouvais du charme à ces brillantes projections qui semblaient émaner d’un passé mérovingien et promenaient autour de moi des reflets d’histoire si anciens. Mais je ne peux dire quel malaise me causait pourtant cette intrusion du mystère et de la beauté dans une chambre que j’avais fini par remplir de mon moi au point de ne pas faire plus attention à elle qu’à lui-même. L’influence anesthésiante de l’habitude ayant cessé, je me mettais à penser, à sentir, choses si tristes. Ce bouton de la porte de ma chambre, qui différait pour moi de tous les autres boutons de porte du monde en ceci qu’il semblait ouvrir tout seul, sans que j’eusse besoin de le tourner, tant le maniement m’en était devenu inconscient, le voilà qui servait maintenant de corps astral à Golo. Et dès qu’on sonnait le dîner, j’avais hâte de courir à la salle à manger, où la grosse lampe de la suspension, ignorante de Golo et de Barbe-Bleue, et qui connaissait mes parents et le bœuf à la casserole, donnait sa lumière de tous les soirs; et de tomber dans les bras de maman que les malheurs de Geneviève de Brabant me rendaient plus chère, tandis que les crimes de Golo me faisaient examiner ma propre conscience avec plus de scrupules.
Proust, Marcel. Du coté chez swann. A la recherche du temps perdu. Tome I.
A Massacre in Miniature
D.W. Griffith
The Massacre
Le Massacre
In Close
D.W. Griffith
Enoch Arden
[All boldface is my own]
Some (mostly) Recent Scientific Developments in Brain Machine Interface (for Robotic Prosthesis), Neuroplasticity, Neurocomputation, and Whole Brain Emulation
Brief Summary: New scientific advances support the posthuman vision of robotically enhanced and reconstructed post-humans. Neuroplasticity and brain machine interface (also brain computer interface) empower brains to control robotic parts just like biological ones. Whole brain emulation and cognitive prosthetics could allow brain implanted chips to replace or enhance our brain functioning, perhaps even completely “uploading” our brain onto a computerized simulation. Progressive replacement of bodily and neural parts with robotic and computerized ones could enable one to make a complete and continuous transition from human to robot.
"Brain" In A Dish Acts As Autopilot Living Computer
Explore: Research at the University of Florida
Spring 2005 Vol. 10 No.1
http://www.research.ufl.edu/publications/explore/v10n1/extract2.html
Thomas DeMarse has created a miniature living brain on a dish. He placed neurons that grew connections to form a network, and it can perform tasks in a virtual world.
“It’s essentially a dish with 60 electrodes arranged in a grid at the bottom,” DeMarse said. “Over that we put the living cortical neurons from rats, which rapidly begin to reconnect themselves, forming a living neural network — a brain.”
The brain and the simulator establish a two-way connection, similar to how neurons receive and interpret signals from each other to control our bodies. By observing how the nerve cells interact with the simulator, scientists can decode how a neural network establishes connections and begins to compute, DeMarse said.
When DeMarse first puts the neurons in the dish, they look like little more than grains of sand sprinkled in water. However, individual neurons soon begin to extend microscopic lines toward each other, making connections that represent neural processes. “You see one extend a process, pull it back, extend it out — and it may do that a couple of times, just sampling who’s next to it, until over time the connectivity starts to establish itself,” he said. “(The brain is) getting its network to the point where it’s a live computation device.”
To control the simulated aircraft, the neurons first receive information from the computer about flight conditions: whether the plane is flying straight and level or is tilted to the left or to the right. The neurons then analyze the data and respond by sending signals to the plane’s controls. Those signals alter the flight path and new information is sent to the neurons, creating a feedback system.
“Initially when we hook up this brain to a flight simulator, it doesn’t know how to control the aircraft,” DeMarse
said. “So you hook it up and the aircraft simply drifts randomly. And as the data come in, it slowly modifies the (neural) network so over time, the network gradually learns to fly the aircraft.”Although the brain currently is able to control the pitch and roll of the simulated aircraft in weather conditions ranging from blue skies to stormy, hurricane-force winds, the underlying goal is a more fundamental understanding of how neurons interact as a network, DeMarse said.
“There’s a lot of data out there that will tell you that the computation that’s going on here isn’t based on just one neuron. The computational property is actually an emergent property of hundreds or thousands of neurons cooperating to produce the amazing processing power of the brain.”
Monkeys Think, Moving Artificial Arm as Own
By Benedict Carey
New York Times
Published: May 29, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/29/science/29brain.html?_r=0
Two monkeys with brain-controlled prosthetics successfully use their robotic arms to reach for food and feed it to themselves.
Two monkeys with tiny sensors in their brains have learned to control a mechanical arm with just their thoughts, using it to reach for and grab food and even to adjust for the size and stickiness of morsels when necessary, scientists reported on Wednesday.
The report, released online by the journal Nature, is the most striking demonstration to date of brain-machine interface technology. Scientists expect that technology will eventually allow people with spinal cord injuries and other paralyzing conditions to gain more control over their lives.
ALSO reported at MIT Technology Review
Monkey Thinks Robot into Action
A monkey is able to feed itself with a robotic arm.
By Emily Singer
MIT Technology Review
May 28, 2008
http://www.technologyreview.com/news/410189/monkey-thinks-robot-into-action/
“It’s the first time a monkey–or a human–is directly, with their brain, controlling a real prosthetic arm,” says Krishna Shenoy, a neuroscientist at Stanford University who was not involved in the research. (Singer)
TED
Henry Markram: A brain in a supercomputer
Filmed Jul 2009 • Posted Oct 2009 • TEDGlobal 2009
http://www.ted.com/talks/henry_markram_supercomputing_the_brain_s_secrets.html
Supercomputers are being used to simulate brain activity. They began with animals and are moving up to human brain. They first catalogued neurons and described their interactive behavior. They can simulate human neuronal activity on a small scale. Also see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Brain_Project
Rat memory under computer simulation
Eric Mankin
Public release date: 17-Jun-2011
Restoring memory, repairing damaged brains
Biomedical engineers analyze -- and duplicate -- the neural mechanism of learning in rats
Eureka Alert
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2011-06/uosc-rmr061211.php
Scientists have developed a way to turn memories on and off—literally with the flip of a switch.Using an electronic system that duplicates the neural signals associated with memory, they managed to replicate the brain function in rats associated with long-term learned behavior, even when the rats had been drugged to forget.
"Flip the switch on, and the rats remember. Flip it off, and the rats forget," said Theodore Berger of the USC Viterbi School of Engineering's Department of Biomedical Engineering.” (Mankin)
ALSO reported in The New York Times
Memory Implant Gives Rats Sharper Recollection
By Benedict Carey
The New York Times
Published: June 17, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/17/science/17memory.html?_r=0
The authors said that with wireless technology and computer chips, the system could be easily fitted for human use. (Carey)
New horizons in auditory prostheses
Zeng, Fan-Gang PhD
Hearing Journal
November 2011 - Volume 64 - Issue 11 - pp 24,26,27
There are many recent developments in cochlear implants.
All contemporary cochlear implants use similar signal processing that extracts temporal envelope information from a limited number of spectral bands, and delivers these envelopes successively to 12-22 electrodes implanted in the cochlea. As a result, these implants produce similarly good speech performance: 70-80 percent sentence recognition in quiet, which allows an average cochlear implant user to carry on a conversation over the telephone. Interestingly, though, sentence recognition in quiet has essentially remained at this same level since 1994. (Figure 1.)
Active tactile exploration using a brain–machine–brain interface
Joseph E. O’Doherty, Mikhail A. Lebedev, Peter J. Ifft, Katie Z. Zhuang, Solaiman Shokur, Hannes Bleuler & Miguel A. L. Nicolelis
Nature 479, 228–231 (10 November 2011)
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v479/n7372/full/nature10489.html
Monkeys operating virtual robotic arms had their brains given touch stimulations.
ALSO reported by The Huffington Post
Is It Possible To Feel Textures Using Just Brain Waves? New Study Shows How
The Huffington Post
Amanda Chan Posted: 10/07/11 11:49 AM ET
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/10/07/brain-touch-texture-feelings-senses_n_996844.html
This is basically one of the holy grails of this field," study researcher Miguel Nicolelis, a neurobiology professor and co-director of the Duke Center for Neuroengineering, told Bloomberg. "No other study has provided an artificial sensory channel directly to the brain of animals. This is really needed to restore in patients that have a spinal cord injury not only their mobility, but their sense of touch." (Chan)
Going mental: Study highlights brain’s flexibility, gives hope for natural-feeling neuroprosthetics
By Sarah Yang, Media Relations
UC Berkeley News Center
March 4, 2012
http://newscenter.berkeley.edu/2012/03/04/brain-flexibility-gives-hope-for-neuroprosthetics/
Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley have shown that neurons used for physical tasks can be retrained for brain machine interface usage. This shows that neuro-prosthetics can feel natural.
“Their new study, to be published Sunday, March 4, in the advanced online publication of the journal Nature, shows that through a process called plasticity, parts of the brain can be trained to do something they normally do not do. The same brain circuits employed in the learning of motor skills, such as riding a bike or driving a car, can be used to master purely mental tasks, even arbitrary ones.
[…]
To clarify these issues, the scientists set up a clever experiment in which rats could only complete an abstract task if overt physical movement was not involved. The researchers decoupled the role of the targeted motor neurons needed for whisker twitching with the action necessary to get a food reward.
The rats were fitted with a brain-machine interface that converted brain waves into auditory tones. To get the food reward – either sugar-water or pellets – the rats had to modulate their thought patterns within a specific brain circuit in order to raise or lower the pitch of the signal.
Auditory feedback was given to the rats so that they learned to associate specific thought patterns with a specific pitch. Over a period of just two weeks, the rats quickly learned that to get food pellets, they would have to create a high-pitched tone, and to get sugar water, they needed to create a low-pitched tone.
If the group of neurons in the task were used for their typical function – whisker twitching – there would be no pitch change to the auditory tone, and no food reward.
“This is something that is not natural for the rats,” said Costa. “This tells us that it’s possible to craft a prosthesis in ways that do not have to mimic the anatomy of the natural motor system in order to work.”
Simulated brain scores top test marks
First computer model to produce complex behaviour performs almost as well as humans at simple number tasks.
Ed Yong
Nature | News
29 November 2012
http://www.nature.com/news/simulated-brain-scores-top-test-marks-1.11914
A computer simulated brain with 2.5 million virtual neurons can perform simple mathematical calculations.
Mind-controlled robot arms show promise
People with tetraplegia use their thoughts to control robotic aids.
Alison Abbott
Nature | News
16 May 2012
http://www.nature.com/news/mind-controlled-robot-arms-show-promise-1.10652
Two tetraplegics use brain machine interface to gain some lost abilities.
Neurosurgeons implanted tiny recording devices containing almost 100 hair-thin electrodes in the motor cortex of their brains, to record the neuronal signals associated with intention to move.” (Abbott)
Cathy can use her thoughts to direct the motion of a robotic arm. She is able to direct it to grab a bottle of coffee and lift it to her lips. Bob as well operates the arm successfully. There is also a subject who operates a computer cursor using this interface, as if operating a computer mouse. The subjects used the BrainGate2 brain implant system [image below from the BrainGate wiki page.]
(Thanks wiki)
Paralyzed Man Uses Thoughts Alone to Control Robot Arm, Touch Friend's Hand, After Seven Years
Science Daily
Feb. 8, 2013 —
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/02/130208124818.htm
Based on this journal article
Wei Wang et al.
An Electrocorticographic Brain Interface in an Individual with Tetraplegia. PLoS ONE, 2013; 8 (2): e55344
http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0055344
Researchers at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and UPMC describe in PLoS ONE how an electrode array sitting on top of the brain enabled a 30-year-old paralyzed man to control the movement of a character on a computer screen in three dimensions with just his thoughts. It also enabled him to move a robot arm to touch a friend's hand for the first time in the seven years since he was injured in a motorcycle accident. (Science Daily)
ALSO reported by AP
Paralyzed Man Uses Mind-Powered Robot Arm To Touch
Tim Hemmes
By Lauran Neergaard
10/10/11 10:04 AM ET
AP
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/10/10/mind-powered-robot-arm_n_1003204.html
"It wasn't my arm but it was my brain, my thoughts. I was moving something," Hemmes says. (Neergaard)
Bionic Eye Implant Approved by U.S. for Rare Disease
By Anna Edney
Bloomberg
Feb 15, 2013 7:01 AM GMT+0200
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-02-14/bionic-eye-implant-approved-by-u-s-for-rare-disease.html
New neuroprosthetic eye implant restores some visual capabilities.
While the $100,000-plus system won’t restore sight, it gives patients the ability to perceive the difference between light and dark. The device consists of a video camera, a transmitter mounted on a pair of eyeglasses and a processing unit that transforms images into electronic data sent to an implanted retinal prosthesis, the FDA said.
[…]
Konstantopoulos, of Glen Burnie, Maryland, said he was diagnosed with retinitis pigmentosa when he was in his early 40s and became completely blind about six months ago. He can see shadows now with the device and tell if the sun is behind a tree. Argus II is comfortable and the surgery was painless, he said.
[…]
A clinical study of 30 people showed the eye device helped patients recognize large letters or words, detect street curbs, walk on a sidewalk without falling and match black, gray and white socks.
Rats With Linked Brains Work Together
Megan Gannon, News Editor
Live Science
Date: 28 February 2013 Time: 12:23 PM ET
http://www.livescience.com/27544-rats-with-linked-brains-work-together.html
Brain plasticity so great that brains can use information from other brains.
Scientists have engineered something close to a mind meld in a pair of lab rats, linking the animals' brains electronically so that they could work together to solve a puzzle. And this brain-to-brain connection stayed strong even when the rats were 2,000 miles apart.
The experiments were undertaken by Duke neurobiologist Miguel Nicolelis, who is best known for his work in making mind-controlled prosthetics.
"Our previous studies with brain-machine interfaces had convinced us that the brain was much more plastic than we had thought," Nicolelis explained. "In those experiments, the brain was able to adapt easily to accept input from devices outside the body and even learn how to process invisible infrared light generated by an artificial sensor. So, the question we asked was, if the brain could assimilate signals from artificial sensors, could it also assimilate information input from sensors from a different body?"
For the new experiments, Nicolelis and his colleagues trained pairs of rats to press a certain lever when a light went on in their cage. If they hit the right lever, they got a sip of water as a reward.
When one rat in the pair called the "encoder" performed this task, the pattern of its brain activity — something like a snapshot of its thought process — was translated into an electronic signal sent to the brain of its partner rat, the "decoder," in a separate enclosure. The light did not go off in the decoder's cage, so this animal had to crack the message from the encoder to know which lever to press to get the reward.
The decoder pressed the right lever 70 percent of the time, the researchers said.
[…]
"We saw that when the decoder rat committed an error, the encoder basically changed both its brain function and behavior to make it easier for its partner to get it right," Nicolelis explained in a statement. "
[…]
The connection was not lost even when the signals were sent over the Internet and the rats placed on two different continents, 2,000 miles (3,219 kilometers) apart.”
.
[My own commentary is in brackets. All boldface and underlining is my own. Extra spacing between paragraphs follow the paragraph divisions in the original text.]
Frederick B. Mills
“A Phenomenological Approach to Psychoprosthetics”
Summary
Brief Summary
The integration of prosthetic devices into users’ bodies and activities can be seen in terms of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of the body.
Abstract [Quoting]
The phenomenology of human embodiment can advance the practitioner’s understanding of the lived human body and in particular, what it means to incorporate a prosthetic device into one’s body. In order for a prosthesis to be incorporated into the lived body of the patient, the prosthesis must arguably be integrated into the body schema. This article uses the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and others to identify three of the necessary conditions of embodiment that determine the body schema: corporeal understanding, transparency and sensorimotor feedback. It then examines the structure of each of these conditions of embodiment and how they impact the lived body’s incorporation of prostheses and other artifacts. (Mills p.1)
Summary
Introduction
The aim of Mills’ article is to “offer an interpretation of how some of the insights about embodiment contained in Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s work relates to the relatively new health science field of psychoprosthetics. These insights show the value of the phenomenological method to the understanding of human embodiment and introduce practitioners to the practice of phenomenology.” (1Ac)
Methodological considerations
Mills draws from Gallagher et al.’s definition of psychoprosthetics. Psychoprosthetics is “the study of ‘the psychological aspects of prosthetic use and of rehabilitative processes in those conditions that require the use of prosthetic devices’” (1Bd). Psychoprosthetics is concerned with “prosthetic technologies and the behavior and experience of the prosthesis user” (2Aa). Psychoprosthetics makes use of two complementary methodologies: 1) (object-orientation) evidence-based empirical research, which is thus mostly concerned with measurable outcomes; and 2) (subject-orientation) phenomenological efforts, normally concerned more with the qualitative lived experiences of the prosthesis user, and it “includes the systematic use of introspection, testimonials and questionnaires as research tools. Such phenomenological research, when applied to psychoprosthetics, is inter-subjective, empathetic, and focuses on what it is like to be the user of an artificial limb as he or she progresses through the rehabilitative process”. (2Aa.b)
Mills notes the importance of phenomenology in the work of Craig Murray, who claims that clinical intervention that is informed by phenomenological research will make it more likely for prosthesis users to not give up until their device becomes integrated into their body schema; “until the prosthetic device is integrated into their bodies. This is because the qualitative experience of prosthesis use determines to a significant degree whether a prosthesis is really being progressively integrated into the user’s body. The work of Merleau-Ponty is relevant to this task because it helps us to systematically identify and study the basic experiential features of the incorporation of artifacts into the lived body.” (2Ab citing Murray 2008)
Merleau-Ponty does not ignore the importance of empirical research, and he deals with the question of what about human nature that opens it to both subjective and objective study. Merleau-Ponty breaks with the Cartesian substance dualism of mind and extension, which “poses an irresolvable problem of how the activities of the mind and body are nevertheless systematically correlated.” (2AD)
Merleau-Ponty thinks we need to “reach back to our lived experience prior to reflecting about our bodies as objects, we do not find ourselves divided into two separate worlds (a mind and a body) but as living, sensing and moving bodies.” (2Ba)
Our everyday experiences tell us that we do not normally separate mind and body, as for example when we see someone smile, we do not see it merely as flesh moving nor merely as an imperceptible emotion. “With this expressive nature of human behavior in mind, we can engage in a phenomenological investigation into the basic features of human embodiment and its extension in artifacts and in particular, prostheses.” (2Bb)
Basic features of embodiment
The body image and the body schema
Human embodiment’s structure includes both body image and body schema. There is no consensus on their meanings, but Mills will work through some distinctions and relations between them. (2Bc)
Our body image is the way we think we look to others. (2Bc)
Body image is also important for prosthesis integration, but this paper focuses more on body schema. (2Bd)
Shaun Gallagher defines body schema as ““a system of sensory-motor processes that constantly regulate posture | and movement – processes that function without reflective awareness or the necessity of perceptual monitoring” (Gallagher qt in Mills pp.2|3)
Mills broadens this definition. Body schema is the general idea of schema and body schemas are the system or plurality of schemas. Mills also broadens the concept of body schemas to include “processes of which we can be marginally and even focally aware.” (3Aa)
Body schemas are what allow us to engage skillfully with the world. Neuronal descriptions are not enough to describe this; we need to see how the structure and meaning of phenomenal experience correlates with neurophysiological processes in the brain. (3Ab)
Body image helps in the development of our body schema. (3Ac)
To elaborate the concept of body schema, Mills quotes Merleau-Ponty from Phenomenology of Perception [p.160-167]
A movement is learned when the body has understood it, that is, when it has incorporated it into its ‘world’, and to move one’s body is to aim at things through it; it is to allow oneself to respond to their call, which is made upon it independently of any representation. (Merleau-Ponty qtd in Mills 3Ac)
Mills gets three basic features of the body schema from the paragraph this quote comes from: 1) corporeal understanding, 2) transparency, and 3) sensory-motor feedback.
Corporeal understanding
Corporeal understanding is not reflexive because “unless we are learning a new skill, we do not normally represent a situation to ourselves prior to enacting the intended behavior; we merely aim at our purpose and the behavior unfolds in | its very enactment”. (3A-B) But our corporeal understanding is not reflexive either, because our behaviors are normally not mechanical responses to stimuli but instead “Objects call our attention because they have a certain value for us. We are active players in generating our behaviors.” (3Ba)
Corporeal is not something cognitive but is more like as Hubert Dreyfus calls it ‘know how’. We know how an action comes about in the context of a wider activity, like hitting the ‘h’ key while typing, even though we do not have an explicit visual map of the keyboard. (3Bb)
We need to reenact a behavior to recall it, because “corporeal understanding is activated at the lived body-world interface. At the body-world interface, we do not experience our bodies per se, as separate from the world; we experience our bodies as joined with and challenged by the world.” (3Bc)
Transparency (absence and presence)
Cognitive understanding requires that the part of the body that is perceptually and kinesthetically engages with the world be transparent to us. Drew Leder notes that insofar as our body brings some part of the world to presence, revealing it to us, the part of the body that does the revealing withdraws from our view, like our our eyes are absence from our field of vision. (3Bc)
Mills quotes Merleau-Ponty to elaborate [Phenomenology of Perception p.104]:
I observe external objects with my body, I handle them, examine them, walk round them, but my body itself is a thing which I do not observe; in order to be able to do so, I should need the use of a second body which itself would be unobservable. (3Bd)
Transparency is a part of all our kinetic and perceptual behaviors. (3-4)
Michael Polanyi notes how our the motile and perceptive parts of our body recede and in a sense become transparent; Drew Leder “calls this type of absence focal disappearance”. (4Aa)
Also, according to Leder, we experience the background disappearance of our body; through most of the day we have just a marginal awareness of it. Mills will use ‘transparency’ to refer to both kinds of phenomenal absence. (4Ab)
Intentionality is thinking’s manner of being directed towards objects. For Merleau-Ponty, it is the whole lived embodied person who does the thinking, perceiving and behaving.
As living bodies, we are both perceptually and kinesthetically directed towards and engaged with the world. Merleau-Ponty conceptualizes the ways in which we are directed towards our world as rays of intentionality projecting out of the body schema. These rays constitute our many purposes and invest our surroundings with the meaning of possible behaviors. The door is the way out of the room. The keyboard is the potential to enter data. The light switch is the potential to turn the lights on or off. The road is the way out of the neighborhood. The rays of intentionality are correlated with a network of utilitarian relationships between objects in the world. Merleau-Ponty refers to the totality of these rays as an “arc of intentionality” (4Ac)
Normally much in our arc of intentionality remains below our thematic awareness until something brings them into focus. (4A.B)
Things can come into focus for a variety of reasons, depending on the context. (4B.ab)
Changes of thematic awareness can be like Gestalt figure/ground shifts. (4B.b)
Sensorimotor feedback
From the physiological perspective, “sensations are neural events and sensorimotor feedback is a dynamic relationship between the adaptive body and environmental stimuli”; but from the phenomenal perspective “sensations are qualitative experiences.” Mills will focus on the phenomenal aspect. (4B.c)
Sensorimotor feedback can be marginal and focal and involve more than one perceptual Gestalt at a time. (4D) This helps us attend to multiple tasks at one time. (5Aa)
Incorporation of artifacts into the lived body
On these bases will will conceptualize the incorporation of artifacts, such as prosthetic devices, into the lived body.This requires a modification of the three basic features of embodiment. (5Ab)
Incorporation of artifacts involves integrating them into our body schema.
When an artifact is integrated into the body schema such that it modifies the corporeal understanding, the body and artifact merge in such a way that together they interface with the world to generate behaviors that are neither reflexive nor conceptually guided but rather skillful or habitual. This means that the body schema comes to include the artifact in its arc of intentionality. (5Abc)
Incorporation also involves a change in the absence presence dynamic where the artifact becomes absent or transparent.
Ideally the prosthesis can become a part of the body from which a worldly gestalt becomes present and a skillful or habitual behavior becomes possible. Such integration can occur when sensorimotor feedback appears to come from the interface between body-artifact as a unified whole and the world rather than the interface between the body and the artifact. (5Ac)
Examples of the embodiment of artifacts
Merleau-Ponty uses the examples of the walking stick and the typewriter. [At the end of this entry we look at the examples and the passages they come from.] Mills quotes Merleau-Ponty [Phenomenology of Perception 165-166]
The blind man’s stick has ceased to be an object for him, and is no longer perceived for itself; its point has become an area of sensitivity, extending the scope and active radius of touch, and providing a parallel to sight. In the exploration of things, the length of the stick does not enter expressly as a middle term: the blind man is rather aware of it through the position of objects [p.165 | p.166] than of the position of objects through it. (5Ba)
So the walking stick eventually is incorporated into the arc of intentionality and becomes like an extension of her body.
The user literally extends her reach, the stick being lived as part of the extended arm. The stick becomes transparent because the blind person is not focused on her grasp of the walking stick; she is directed towards the ground through the hand-stick combination. Sensorimotor feedback is experienced not as a relation between the hand and movements of the stick but rather as an experience of the texture and location of the ground and other items through the stick as if it were an extension of her arm. (5Bb)
Mills also quotes Merleau-Ponty’s typewriter example [Phenomenology of Perception 166-167]
It is possible to know how to type without being able to say where the letters which make the words are to be found on the banks of keys. To know how to type is not, then, to know the place of each letter among the keys, nor even to have acquired a conditioned reflex for each one, which is set in motion by the letter as it comes before our eye. If habit is neither a form of knowledge nor an involuntary action, what then is it? It is knowledge in the hands, which is forthcoming only when bodily effort is made, and cannot be formulated in detachment from that effort. The subject knows where the letters are on the typewriter as we know where one of our limbs is…. When the typist performs the necessary movements on the typewriter, these movements are governed by an intention, but the intention does not posit the keys as objective locations. It is literally true that the subject who learns to type incorporates the key-bank space into his bodily space. (5Bb.c)
The key, the finger, and other aspects of the body’s positioning and behavior fall into the background. (5Bc)
The corporeal understanding of the skilled typist is not reflexive, because the keys are not stimuli causing her fingers to move. And the typing does not involve representation, because the typist does not make use of a mental model representing the keyboard. “The corporeal understanding is in the hands.” (5Bc.d)
Embodiment of prosthetic devices
So the incorporation of prosthetic devices requires a modification in our corporeal understanding, transparency, and sensorimotor feedback. (5-6) Mills draws from Craig Murray’s empirical studies of prosthetic incorporations.
For there to be transparency, the device must be affixed properly so that no pain or discomfort is felt, for otherwise it will be noticed rather than disappear from awareness. Practice is as well critical for attaining transparency. [Following first quotes Mills, then has Mill’s quote of Murray 2004]
Murray notes that some respondents testify that with practice, walking starts to become natural again:
Walking becomes pretty intuitive after the age of three or four; you don’t think about it, you just do it. Now, I do have to think occasionally, such as when I stand up from a chair. I have to think which foot, is that foot in the right position, is it going to hit anything? You do still have to check for things like that. Occasionally, I’ll get it trapped under a chair as I stand up. So a couple of times it brings it back to you that you have a problem there. But once moving, in general, it’s pretty much a matter of well I want to go from here to there, and I just walk. It’s intuitive now. (6Abc)
Mills continues [again first Mills then Murray 2004]
The prosthesis, in one report, became so transparent, that the user got up from bed without realizing that the artificial limb was not on: “I fell on the floor, landing on the distal end of the stump. It was a very frightening thing. Scary. It hurt like hell, and I stayed off it for about a week. So I guess I have reached a point where I am capable of such foolish acts as that and forget my leg was not on.” (6Ad)
Incorporation could be more likely if sensorimotor feedback occurs “at the interface of the prosthesis and the environment”. (6Ad) Mills notes [second is quote from Murray 2004]
One user in the Murray study reported: “I do sense it [the ground] with the prosthesis on. It is a general awareness of the ground. As I walk, I can feel my heel land, and the foot move forward to the toes”. (6Ba)
There are technologies that can make the feedback appear to come from the environment.
For example, prosthetics fixed to bones rather than fitting in sockets tend to give better feedback. [citing Hagberg et al.]
For example, the sensorimotor feedback provided by boneanchored (osseointegrated) prostheses (OI), osseoperception, seems to be more vivid and detailed than that attained by socket technology. In one study, several patients reported more control over their artificial limb (than with a socket style prosthesis) and the ability to identify the material of the surface they are walking on. Other users report that the osseointegrated prosthesis feels more like a part of the body than did the socket prosthesis. (6Bb)
Another technique for enhancing sensorimotor feedback is targeted re-innervation, which “improves the communication of the surface of the prosthesis with intact nerves on the residual limb.” (6Bb) [When a limb is amputated, it seems in these cases that the nerves of that limb are removed and reattached to the remaining limb nerve channels, so that sensations normally given in the limb are still givable through these nerves. Then, sensors in the prosthetic limb create signals that stimulate the attached nerves so that the user feels as if the sensation is coming from within the prosthetic device.]
There are a variety of technologies that seek to improve the communication of the surface of the prosthesis with intact nerves on the residual limb to improve sensorimotor feedback. One of these strategies is targeted re-innervation. In a 2010 study conducted at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago and led by Paul D. Marasco, an artificial sense of tactile sensation was created for a prosthetic limb so it felt, to the user, as though sensations were coming from the prosthesis and not merely mediated by the prosthesis. Here is how it works. Sensors are placed on the artificial hand. These sensors send a message to a robotic device that is located on the residual limb in proximity to areas sensitized by the re-innervated nerves. The robotic device responds to the sensor information by stimulating “surgically redirected cutaneous sensory nerves... that once served the lost limb”. I want to emphasize that Marasco used both evidence-based medicine and phenomenology. In particular, he made use of questionnaires and testimony as well as temperature changes in the residual limb. He found that the illusion that sensations were coming from the prosthesis were vivid. Marasco suggests that “this may help amputees to more effectively incorporate an artificial limb into their self image, providing the possibility that a prosthesis becomes not only a tool, but also an integrated body part”. If we couple this technology with recent advances in the kinesthetic response of prosthetic devices, users may benefit even more from enhanced sensorimotor feedback. It is likely that the more such devices mimic organic limbs and provide sensorimotor feedback, the more a corporeal understanding and a natural feel can be achieved. [Mills 6Bb citing Marasco et al.]
Conclusion
Not all prosthesis users attain transparency. “However, in those cases where integration is the goal, the insights of Merleau-Ponty on the lived body help us to understand what it means for a prosthetic device to be incorporated into a patient’s lived body.” (6Bd)
Mills concludes “Those rehabilitative strategies that begin to make the prosthesis more transparent to the user; provide finer grained sensorimotor feedback as coming from the (body-prosthesis) – world interface; and restore increasingly more skillful functionality are likely to achieve the maximal prosthetic incorporation.” (7Ab)
Frederick B. Mills. “A Phenomenological Approach to Psychoprosthetics.” Disability & Rehabilitation, 2012; Early Online: 1–7 © 2012 Informa UK, Ltd. ISSN 0963-8288 print/ISSN 1464-5165 online
Gallagher P, Desmond D, MacLachlan M. Psychoprosthetics: an introduction. In: Gallagher P, Desmond D, MacLachlan M, editors. Psychoprosthetics. London: Springer-Verlag Limited; 2008. pp 1–10.
Gallagher S. How the body shapes the mind. New York: Oxford University Press; 2005.]
Hagberg K, Häggström E, Jönsson S, Rydevik B, Brånemark R. Osseoperception and osseointegrated prosthetic limbs. In: Gallagher P, Desmond D, MacLachlan M, editors. Psychoprosthetics. London: Springer-Verlag Limited; 2008. pp 131–140.
Leder D. The absent body. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press; 1990.
Marasco PD, Kim K, Colgate JE, Peshkin MA, Kuiken TA. Robotic touch shifts perception of embodiment to a prosthesis in targeted reinnervation amputees. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Guarantors of Brain; 2011, January 20.
Murray CD. An interpretative phenomenological analysis of the embodiment of artificial limbs. Disabil Rehabil 2004;26:963–973. 3.
Murray CD. Embodiment and prosthetics. In: Gallagher P, Desmond D, MacLachlan M, editors. Psychoprosthetics. London: Springer-Verlag Limited; 2008. pp 119–129.
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