Among certain psychologists, there is a belief that the mind is composed of “modules” that have been designed by evolution to account for very specific tasks. This kind of thinking has also been linked to the assertion that the mind is a computer, resulting in the natural rhetorical extension that “modules” are essentially equivalent to the “apps” we have on our phones.Just as your digital device has apps for banking, socializing, navigating, and finding restaurants, your mind has “modules” for tracking resources, socializing, and foraging, or so the argument goes. My own approach to and training in psychology is highly comparative and mechanistic. So, I am sympathetic to the “brain = computer, mind as modules” approach to psychology. I don’t think it is correct, though.
Let’s think this through – and not in an overly academic way. First of all, the brain is not a computer. Both might be machines that deal with inputs and outputs, but many systems deal with inputs and outputs. The solar system, is a collection of matter that handles inputs and outputs in a particular way. A hammer is a system that handles inputs and outputs in a particular way. This does not make the solar system or a hammer computational systems, at least not in any profound way. Similarly, sure, brains and computers share some descriptive features. Both make use of “memory,” both are energy intensive and need a regular replenishment of resources, and both transform information in particular ways. But this does not make brains and computers the same thing. Brains are not computers, even if the brain computes. Ultimately, computers are tools designed by humans for particular tasks. Brains are tools for… well, we’ll get to that.
Secondly, the brain is not composed of modules, even if it is modular. Sure, as we learned in the last post, perception is assembled from “products” that have been created in different areas of the brain. In other words, perception is a distributed process. However, it is a distributed process of shared networks. Just as we discussed with reference to supply chains, different visual “products” do not come from isolated modules. There is no “face” module or “chair” module. Instead, there is a system of shared networks that assemble faces or chairs.
Still, one strength of taking a modular approach to psychology is that it emphasizes the adapted qualities of our psyches. There are indeed deep currents given to our psyches by natural selection. We do seem predisposed to detect cheaters, learn languages, use tools (at least more so than other animals), see and hear a particular range of frequencies, have a sensitized disgust response during the first trimester of pregnancy, and on, and on, and on. Even the most religiously inclined must come to terms with the animal in which each soul resides. Through natural selection, our bodies and minds have been designed to encounter and assemble their worlds in particular ways. This is where the utility of thinking in terms of modules comes in. It allows mind scientists to cleanly carve up their subject matter into the traits and adaptations that allow for research. Every science needs its units, after all.
But let’s not forget that the assembly that is done by our minds is done for a particular reason. Fundamentally the psyche is designed to locate the organism within a problem space. Where am I within this space, and what do I need to do? These are the questions that the psyche faces at every moment of its limited existence. And to answer these questions, the psyche is composed not of modules, but of maps. Perception is essentially a means of creating landmarks, directions, and layers of information on maps. Yes, the supply chains of our perception assemble “percepts,” but on some level, all supply chains, themselves, are mappings of inputs onto outputs. We are not “modules all the way down;” we are maps all the way down. It is not a collection of goods that give our psyches meaning, but directions. Our psyches are composed of, and designed to assemble maps, and in doing so, our psyches search for and achieve meaning.
Our minds are composed of maps, not modules, even if those maps show modularity. Maps locate the organism in problem space, and it it through this that we define meaning.
Neurons as supply chains. This image shows somatosensory neurons of a mouse that have been imbued with a a green flourescent protein. The bright blobs at the bottom are cell bodies, and the rising strands are apical dendritic bundles. In neurons, dendrites are the cell structures that receive inputs from other neurons. “new_20x” by Robert Cudmore is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0
Since it’s been a while, I’m going to rehash some ideas and then weave in few more concepts: supply chains and maps. We’re still dealing with perceptions and beliefs in all of this.
So, in a recent post, I introduced the idea that emotions and motivations might be more accurately thought of as “visceral beliefs” – a category of perception that originates within the body, and which is built up from basic processes and learned expectations. We call these things “feelings” (I feel angry. I feel hungry. I feel curious. I feel tired…). In each case there is no such thing, really, as say anger. Rather there is a perception originating in our body that we term “anger.” One thing to realize, though, is that even if “you are not feeling it,” this does not mean that your emotional machinery isn’t nonetheless whirring away and influencing your behavior. Not all perception reaches our awareness, just as not all perception is universal. The logic is the same as what is applied to “normal perception” – sight, taste, touch, and so on. So let’s remind ourselves of some of the principles underpinning “normal perception.”
Shipping as neurons, and yes, I’d like you to associate this image with the first image of the post. Paths of shipping in the San Francisco bay. The solid, dark grey areas are land, while the lavender / purple areas are ocean. See this post at Mapbox.Com in order to learn more about how this visualization was created.
Perceptual Machinery
Psychologists long-ago established that perception isn’t a passive transcription of external sensations, but rather involves both a direct construction and an active interpretation. The result of these bottom up and top down processes gives us many of the furnishings and rooms of our psyches. The direct construction is done by the machinery at hand. We have been imbued by evolution with machinery such as rods, cones, chemical receptors, and hair cells that react to a particular range of environmental energies and that turn those inputs into patterns of neural firing. Do all animals, or individuals for that matter, use the same machinery? Of course not. Some birds possess machinery that allows them to “see” the earth’s magnetic fields. Some fish possess machinery that responds to electric fields, and honeybees can see patterns of polarized light that can be used to navigate. As Hamlet would say, “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” The dimensions of our perception are but a sliver of all possible dimensions, and humility (and wonder and a certain arrogance) goes hand-in-hand with doing good psychological science.
Further, even within a common assembly line of perception, e.g., vision, different tools allow organisms to handle different ranges of resources. Our own visual system cannot “handle” electromagnetic spectra from the ultraviolet bands, but honeybees would respond to management’s request to process UV light with “bring it on.” For honeybees ultraviolet inputs are part of their normal experience, while longer wavelengths (i.e., the color “red”) are not (see page 138 of provided link).
To use a crude metaphor, the machinery of perception is like a supply chain that assembles the lived-in environment of the psyche. Depending on the desired product, different supply chains make use of different resources. The supply chain for a rocking chair is quite different from the supply chain for an iPhone. Similarly, the supply chain for a melody will differ from one that produces the smell of cinnamon.
Supply Chains and Perception
Let’s go ahead and push this analogy between supply chains and perception because it will allow us to intuit some general principles of perception.
Here is a map of the supply chain for the Jansport Big Student Backpack. Be sure to click through to the original site, because each of the nodes can be clicked on for further information about the specific factories. Among other things, in this visualization we learn that there is a thread supplier in Malaysia, a yarn manufacturer in India, dying facilities in Thailand, rubber, zipper and yarn facilities in China and Taiwan, and an assembly facility in Indonesia that puts together the final backpack (along with many other products such as shoes, windbreakers, umbrellas, etc.) before shipping it to a primary distribution center in California. This distribution center then introduces the backpack into consumer awareness by placing it on the racks of a store or in the pages of a catalog. The consumer “sees” the final backpack, not the undergirding supply chain that makes the backpack possible.
Our own perception works according to similar principles. Dedicated areas of the brain specialize in “producing” vertical lines, horizontal lines, colors, visual movement… , and yet other areas receive these inputs and assemble them into larger products. At some point these perceptual products enter our awareness, but there is a considerable amount of assembly and processing that has already happened prior to this point. Below, for example, is a crude diagram showing the “supply chain” for visual information in Homo sapiens. Interrupt that supply chain at different locations and particular visual goods will no longer be available.
A map representing the supply chain of vision in humans. It is an adaption of Figure 4 from Behnke’s Hiearchical Neural Networks for Image Interpretation. Notice that visual supply chains classically separate into two crude pathways: one that assembles WHAT something is, and one that assembles WHERE something is. For our purposes, prosopagnosia could be thought of as involving disruptions to the WHAT supply chain. Blindsight, on the other hand, involves damage to the V1 area of the supply chain…a critical choke point for conscious perception of visual information. Nonetheless, in many blindsight patients visual factories are still hard at work in the SC, pulvinar, and from the inter laminar portions of the LGN. Additions to Behnke’s diagram are based on a number of readings, but anyone interested could start with Cowey 2010 and Fulton’s 21’st Century Paradigm Describing the Neural System (p. 129). The latter is kind of eccentric, but for this post you only need to worry about the visual circuitry diagram on page 129. Basically, we now have a better understanding of the pathways from the lateral geniculate nucleus (LGN) and pulvinar nucleus that by-pass the V1 area of visual processing. Also, this diagram is still extremely crude. Not shown, for example, are the many feedback pathways that are known to exist among the different cortical areas.
Prosopagnosia, for example, is a phenomenon in which individuals lose the ability to “see” faces (click here to read an article about potential treatments). prósōpon = face, a = not, and gnosis = knowledge. Prosopagnosia usually results from damage or congenital alterations to a brain region known as the fusiform gyrus. Individuals with prosopagnosia might be able to describe the components of a face just fine: the nose is bulbous, the eyes are brown, the hair is curly and black. However, despite possessing the components of a face, they simply don’t possess the ability assemble those components into a face.
The condition known as blindsight also illustrates how disruptions in the visual “supply chain” are not an all-or-nothing thing. Blindsight is characterized by a functional blindness in which individuals nonetheless possess abilities that are dependent on vision. (If you have access to online articles, here is one that provides a nice overview and here is another.) An individual with blindsight might not be able to see a baseball, but could potentially catch one tossed their way. They might not consciously know that an object is present, but nonetheless could correctly guess as to the direction of its movement. In general the reason for the blindness of blindsight involves damage to area V1 of the visual cortex. This is an area at the back of the brain that receives the bulk of input from our retinas. However, as the figure above shows, several inputs from our retinas are sent in parallel to other brain regions (the superior colliculus and the lateral geniculate). It is thought that these inputs allow for the “sight” of blindsight. Conceptually, though, we can think of this with reference to our supply chain analogy. If we lose our “distribution center” or our “assembly factory” certain types of perception might never reach our awareness. Nonetheless, this does not stop the thread, zipper, or fabric dying factories from producing their goods – goods that can be used in other supply chains, as needed.
Figure from “To See, But Not to See.” A nice representation that uses the supply chain analogy to describe how disruptions along one pathway still allow for “deliveries” to take place along other pathways. It just so happens that only one of these pathways involves conscious awareness (the one indicated in blue).
Issues in supply chains don’t only have to do with the loss of resources such as we “see” in individuals with blindsight or prosopagnosia. For example, what would happen if a supply chain began to include inputs of colored fabric to an assembly factory that normally only received black fabric? We might end up with rainbow colored backpacks! Synthesia resembles just such an outcome. This syndrome refers to a phenomenon in which some individuals experience the stimulation of multiple sensory pathways when only a single pathway is objectively stimulated. Numbers and sounds might be “seen” to have particular colors; observing another individual’s hand being touched, might produce a sensation of touch in the observer. It should be noted that synesthesia is not an imagined or arbitrarily conjured sensation. Rather, the synesthete simply and consistently perceives a mixed sensory experience relative to what others experience.
I don’t want to push the analogy between the machinery of perception and supply chains too far. After all, it’s just an analogy. Computers aren’t the same things as brains and supply chains are not the same thing as perception. However, there’s one more point I’d like to squeeze out of the supply chain / perception analogy, and that’s the concern with balancing resilience and efficiency.
A central issue faced by the management of supply chains involves balancing efficiency and resilience. For example, the coronavirus outbreak has made news for disrupting supply chains through China, and many green technologies currently face vulnerabilities in their supply chains that might affect their ability to scale up. In order to handle these issues capable managers need constantly to grow and prune their supply chains in ways that minimize costs while maximizing resilience. Extra supplies need to be maintained, backup factories need to be kept at the ready, and of course all of these contingency plans impose costs. If the world were perfectly predictable, these costs would be unnecessary. But the world is not predictable. Storms, viruses, political unrest, new technologies and competitors all impose costs. Such is life.
Supply chain or brains? In this case it’s neural networks, but conceptually the figure originates from work that seeks to emulate the synaptic pruning observed in brains. Taken from Singh (2019). Pruning deep neural networks.
Perhaps not surprisingly, the machinery of perception deals with similar demands for resilience and efficiency, and the way that our brains manage these demands shapes the environs of our individual psyches. For example, the development of our brains is characterized by an overproduction of connections, followed by a pruning of these connections. This “blooming and pruning” occurs in different areas of the brain at different times in our lives. Below, for example, is a figure showing the approximate developmental time course for several brain regions along with their hypothesized functions. What it shows is that our visual and auditory “supply chains” are crudely mapped out with a hodgepodge of connections that are then tightened up over the first three years of life. Areas involved in speech production, on the other hand, have a later “blooming” that is followed up by a pruning that occurs until approximately age 7. [Remember: these are averages and say nothing about what is happening in the brain for any single individual.]
Figure 1 from Thompson and Nelson (2001). Developmental science and the media: early brain development. American Psychologist, 56, 5 – 15. The curves estimate the number of synapses in different brain regions at different times in an individual’s life. The central point is that waves of “blooming and pruning” are a regular part of brain development across (at least) the first 20-odd years of life.
The pruning of pathways in our brains is crudely guided by a “use it, or lose it” maxim. Connections that are repeatedly stimulated are strengthened and maintained, while those that are rarely stimulated are deleted. The result is that our perceptual supply chains are made more efficient at delivering the products that we apparently need. If you do not need to distinguish between “l” and “r” sounds, then your brain will eliminate the wasted circuitry that produces the perception of these two distinct sounds. Simultaneously we become worse / better at associating particular lip movements with particular sounds. Similarly, as I brought up in another blog post, if you do not need to distinguish between faces that have particular racial characteristics, then your brain will eliminate the “wasted” circuitry that produces the perception of these differences. In extreme cases, experimenters have even been able to create environments in which animals lose the ability to perceive horizontal or vertical lines. Again, use it or lose it. If the world does not need you to “see” vertical lines, then your brain is not going to waste the supply lines necessary to create a perception of vertical lines. In psychology this phenomemon is termed perceptual narrowing and it is the result of synaptic pruning, but conceptually perceptual narrowing and synaptic pruning are no different from what supply chain managers do every day.
Summing up the Supply Chain / Perception Analogy
All right, the main principles to draw from our analogy between supply chains and perception are:
Just as supply chains construct products by integrating and orchestrating a network or factories, the machinery of perception constructs our psychological world from many distributed areas in the brain.
Just as a zipper or yarn factory can help in the assembly of many different goods, perceptual “factories” can provide outputs that are used for many different types of percepts (e.g., faces, objects, animals, etc.).
Just as much of a supply chain is invisible to the consumer, much of the machinery of perception is invisible to our consciousness.
Just as supply chains are molded by concerns for efficiency and resilience, our brains mold the machinery of perception by balancing physiological costs and environmental demands.
A post in honor of the Christmas season. If all goes to plan, I’ll have more to say in the coming year about “declarations.” I encourage any readers to come up with their own. Principles to reflect upon and hold up as a compass or perhaps a challenge. Hope can be a habit, an emotion, a value, or even a perception. In other words — a belief. Too often, perhaps, it borders on fatalism. The hope of my own believing is more active and defiant than that. What’s more punk than hope? Not much.
Habits learned in darkness
Took this photo at Beacon Dia. For the life of me, I can’t recall the artist (and the Dia website isn’t any help). Isn’t it amazing how the spray of white paint on black is all you need to see curves and shape?
The problem with being –“etre” — is that you are lots of things you don’t want to “etre.” Passive, often afraid, insecure, a little bit lazy, and more than a little bit angry. Avoiding. That’s what you are doing. Like a beach that fools itself into thinking it is building something by letting the tide repeatedly wash over it. You can point to many instances in your life when you ran away from what was possible or watched yourself inhibit what was possible. Maybe you were waiting for salvation and simultaneously hoping it would go away: hoping for a message, a sign, that would clarify, absolve and unify your life, thinking, “I can’t do anything now, but I will be able to accomplish something grand as soon as it comes,” that thing which is an answer.
While you wait for it to come, you stay in the dark. But you’ve been in the dark so long, waiting, that your eyes have had time to adjust and you realize that it is possible, in fact, to see in the dark: the darkness is not as absolute and unqualified as you thought at first. At that point, you say, “This isn’t so bad, I can see my way through this cave while waiting for the light,” the answer, which may or may not be at the entrance/exit. But how much do you have to believe in the light to keep waiting for it when you can see well enough to survive where you are?
And what is the dark, anyway? It’s all of your habits and fears and weaknesses: I just wasn’t meant tos; faith predicated upon things not working out; wishing for external, effortless, even inherited legitimacy — all the while knowing deep down that true paths to self-value aren’t simply given.
Living in the dark one can’t avoid fantasies of escape. They spring up like dreams, both beautiful and nightmarish. Thoughts about suicide… coming in waves, but never do you think in terms of what might be missed (after all, why would you miss the dark?), more along the lines of release, a way out, a well-reasoned evasion strategy. And then there are addictions: Hoping that another person can lead you to the light, or show you the escape hatch, or become the escape hatch. Writing words and words in order to avoid, taking walks in order to escape, chalking up “accomplishments” all in an effort to crow-bar yourself away from the reality of darkness. Addictions that are seductive and frantic and desperate and “passionate:” despair instead of sadness, enduring suffering instead of acting bravely, collapsing inward instead being resolute. Like buying a cup of coffee from the departmental coffee machine and drinking it on the way to class instead of taking the time to acquire good beans, make an espresso and pour warmed milk into it.
The worst part about the cave is sensing the light, but not feeling capable of moving towards it. Maybe sometimes you even feel you’re on the verge of making a change (or at least that’s the story) and then something happens to show you how, frankly, impossible change is for you. And maybe you wonder, “Who am I kidding by doing the math — counting years, reworking the budget, making the checklists? This is it, man. This is who I am. If I haven’t done it by now, what are the chances?” It’s like that horrible feeling of the clock ticking down and ticking down while you remain in a situation that is being dictated by someone else. Or maybe you can’t even sense the light, but you can remember it. You know it existed once. Is the darkness payment for once being in the light? You say, “Everything has a price: the going price of beauty is health; satisfaction costs exactly one life.”
So maybe this explains why you can’t quite believe in the light. Could it be that waiting for all these years, desiring an “ultimate answer,” is really just a trick to convince yourself to stay put, to maintain the life of darkness and shadows in which fantasy can still be believed in and regret over past decisions can sap all available energy?
The revelations of vision
A night path and lightning bugs
Maybe the cave would be enough. Maybe fantasy and endurance and the fetal position would suffice if the cave were only darkness; if reality were only, purely darkness; if you could convince yourself that the memories of light were not real, or even if they were real once, the light is gone now, irretrievable. Time to grow up and be responsible. But like an itch, there is a pinprick of light: turn away, or cover your eyes, it remains, interrupting sleep, ending fantasies, requiring active avoidance. The light refutes — no, actively changes — the darkness. Fantasy becomes cheap, and there, way off in the distance, there is the possibility of something different. The light is true, and it is demanding, so much so that you sometimes think you can’t take it anymore, that you want an easier and more convenient life. But at the same time there is a part of you that is excited because the light is there, and it is beautiful and it lets you, finally, see.
Vision brings with it the possibility that you can act and you can move — reach instead of hope for the lucky stumble. You see that, indeed, goals are external things not achieved by the internal states of dreams and fantasy. It’s like realizing after many years of college that the key is just to go to class, or realizing that the goal in a race is actually to cross the finish line as fast as possible. Simple realizations. Maybe obvious to some. And no doubt you’ll use these thoughts about how easy it is for others to stay in the dark. But the “damage” has been done. You can’t help but become suspicious of your sealed fate because now you can see that light is found and achieved and lost. That you’ve had to work to not notice the light, just as you have to work to see it. You know now that strength is more than passive endurance. What used to be hoarding “Good Things” to make the dark more bearable becomes a commitment to try to act in accord with that which is good. The light, you see, changes not only the external world, but the internal one, as well.
Of course, this is no Hollywood movie. All those habits, acquired over years, do not just fall away. And you are bound still to stumble — you are still in the dark, after all. Nonetheless, this first choice — to get up, to stand, to move forward — now that is a leap and it does terrify. “You’re in danger, you’re exposed, you’re weak!” is the voice of your mind. All you can answer is, “I trust the reality of the light.” And you realize that the light has engendered your body. You see now that you really are a woman; you see now that you are a man, not just in fantasy, but in fact. And in a way, all of this new information requires a new kind of acceptance, a different kind of passivity. You know by now that passivity is dangerous, that it is something you need to fight against so that it doesn’t take over, but this new passivity is wonderful because it’s only possible with trust. As a heart is the body of a soul, and around a heart beats a physical life, you begin to see that it is possible to be reformed from the inside out.
Right now your only goal is to move toward greater illumination. So, you set up schedules and come up with rules: Set money aside. Avoid dissipation of purpose whether that purpose involves exercising, staying in touch with friends, listening to music. Value the finish more than the initiation. Get through the drudge. Strength — that is what you want, and need, because the cavern still surrounds you, even as you walk. You know that to reach the entrance of the cave, you have to be resourceful. You can’t be wasteful. And this in itself is a new sensation. It is something to be grateful for. And only in this way is living in the dark neither bleak or doomed because it makes you attentive and sensitive to the light. For the first time you see the surrounding rock of the cavern for what it is so that when you do stumble you understand that good and bad things happen, but they really are independent — that living is experiencing/feeling both the good and bad things fully. This is also why it doesn’t make sense to go looking for signs. Being open to their possibility, though, is a different thing. Signs are not destiny or judgment or the word of God. They are more about the meaning that goes along with action or potential action, and that meaning can be accepted or rejected.
At first, the walking is difficult. How many years were you fetally curled? You don’t know. Yes, walking is difficult and you are not even sure if you remember how to do it: you try out anger, telling the world, “Fuck you, I’m doing exactly what I want, when I want it.” Or maybe instead you think in terms of sacrifice — that you will make your life a bit harder than it has to be and that will make you virtuous, where virtue means bringing yourself into the light. But then you see these mental tricks for what they are. It’s not about selfishness or sacrifice: it’s about feeling like you are enough so that you don’t have to mediate between yourself and how you act in the world. There’s no need to self-censor or to put up guards to protect yourself. It’s about chipping away at the middle conscientiously, in mind and in practice, all along, experiencing life healthy enough, safe enough, confident enough, trusting enough — so that living becomes automatic. It is like traveling alone in another country. Or going out with a friend, drinking just a little too much beer and talking about philosophical things. It is swimming in the lake in the summer, hiking in the mountains and skiing in the winter. Appreciating the food, and the way it is eaten, prepared and sold. You see that it is possible for your life in the light to be miraculously easy…easy not because the demands are easy, but because those demands are seen to be so clearly right in spite of their costs.
Then a strange thing happens. You have been moving toward the light, scrabbling over rocks, taking detours, all under the impression that to do so was a leap of faith. And it was. Like driving a car and focusing down the road versus looking at each painted line. The light is the answer. It is a demanding and overflowing thing that you want to experience as clearly and as often as possible. But now that you are moving, you realize that to move is no longer a leap, but a choice of one existence over another. And the choice is not between good and evil, between right and wrong; it’s not that simple: it’s more like choosing right over less right. Only in the light can you see the finer distinctions between things: justice is more right than beauty, the life of earth and of land is more right than the life of commerce, a community centered on healing is more important than one centered on consumption. You choose justice over beauty at every turn and earth over commerce in every act of living. And even though the choices are right, they don’t eliminate fear or pain. There is no way to get around the pain of any choice — either guilt and terror or sacrifice and terror and defeat and bitterness. But you trust your choice, just as you trust the light.
At the entrance: the life of sunlight
Make a wish
So, on you go. The light brightening more and more of the rock around you, revealing more and more of what a cavern is when shadows are pulled back. And maybe your steps begin to falter. Yes, you’ve become accustomed to light, but what is actually outside the cavern? What are you really moving towards? Might it not be best to camp out right here, the light pouring in from the entrance that is still a ways off? Isn’t it possible to live in the warmth of the light and the safety of the shadow? Just enough reality and just enough fantasy. Well, that’s the thing. You can only guess what the world is like outside the cavern. You can only hope. What comes next? Etre, strength and mystery. All “shoulds” fall away. All guilt and all shame. You will be compelled to incorporate without fear (which is different from “consideration”) of any other’s reaction. Become…What? That is the mystery. Being through faith. Those are the words, but there is no way of knowing if they are true or not, at least not while you are still here. What you do know is this: that part of you will be brought into the light of day, and that this is a choice, and you know, even, that you made this choice long ago. You chose light. You choose light. Every step is as preposterous as the last. Yet they happen. It was and is true. Maybe you can’t figure out what awaits. For certain you can’t. It is the stone thrown that never reports its landing. But that is true of every step taken. You might not have planned it or puzzled it all out — the possibilities were given to you by the confluence of darkness and light — but you were prepared, you did plan and you did choose to walk into the light.
You know what’s cool? Movies that offer something more than the sullen pseudo-politics of “Joker” or the elaborate pro-status-quo theatrics of “Avengers.” Movies that, rather than fetishizing self-pity or sentimentalizing domination, illuminate the cruelty, the comedy and the grace of the human condition. Movies that treat you as something other than a passive spectator or an obedient, presold “fan.” Movies that are actually worth arguing about, and thinking about.
Replace “Movies” with “Living,” and you’ve got a challenge that might be worth pursuing. “Living that, rather than fetishizing self-pity or sentimentalizing domination, illuminates the cruelty, the comedy and the grace of the human condition.”
I personally had never really given Susan Rice much thought, but I saw her interviewed a couple of times a month or so ago. Man, what an articulate intellect! In a column she wrote in the NY Times Rice wrote:
This combination — being a confident black woman who is not seeking permission or affirmation from others — I now suspect accounts for why I inadvertently intimidate some people, especially certain men, and perhaps also why I have long inspired motivated detractors who simply can’t deal with me.
Yep.
Deep fakes, disinformation, and belief
One of the reasons that I started this blog has to do with concerns I have about the origins of our beliefs. I don’t mean religious beliefs, although those certainly need occasional challenging. No, I mean beliefs that devalue other individuals who simply want a slice of dignity. Beliefs that lead some to charge into pizza parlors with guns. Beliefs that lead some to disregard mountains of data about global warming. Beliefs that lead to visceral declarations of “I just don’t like them.” Anyway, everyone should be aware of the forces out there that are trying to influence their beliefs. Here is a collection of a few articles that deal with that issue.
Want an online game that let’s you play at planting disinformation? Here you go.
Deep fakes refer to video that has been doctored to make it look like someone is doing something they didn’t do. These things are coming. What if we had video of Donald Trump taking money from Putin? What if we had video of Hillary Clinton giving money to a bunch of Ukrainians? How many people would want to believe their lying eyes? Many.
Not all beliefs are spoken – at least not in the way that I’ve been unpacking the term so far in this blog. We have beliefs that we articulate, but we also have beliefs concerning what we see and hear. We have beliefs about what is in the future (anticipations, predictions, hopes, expectations, etc.) and beliefs about what has transpired in the past (memories, post-hoc rationalizations, etc.). Our consciously experienced reality is in a sense nothing but belief – a constructed amalgam of history within which we each reside…indeed, within which the totality of our lived existence transpires. We see an external world, but that external world is constructed for us according the imperatives of a history embodied in the form of an eye, the tunings of neurons, and the expectations of experience. At some point I do want to pivot and think through what sort of freedom and responsibility this science permits, because I don’t think that it therefore follows that anything goes – that the mechanistic churnings of historical contingency eradicate morality or freedom. More that these things are a choice and can’t merely be taken for granted. In answer to question from Waterland a few posts back, “Does this mean that the individual never happened / doesn’t matter?” No. But we can only make that assertion when we understand what, exactly, that individual is.
So, I’d like to sit a bit longer with how our embodied beliefs of psyche are constructed. This post is going to start rummaging through a set of perceptions I’m going to term “visceral beliefs.” These are things like pain, emotions, motivations (hunger, thirst, fatigue), but I’m going to focus on emotions in this post.
This past week it just so happens that I went to see “A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood” with my parents. A few days later we went to hear a performance of excerpts from Handel’s Messiah. The connection? Emotion. When I was a kid – maybe 10, I remember the first time that I heard Handel’s Messiah. It was on a set of vinyl records (I think). Anyway, what I remember is not being able to get enough of the shivers the music sent through me – a weave of layered voices, voices calling out and responding, solitary and unified, and yeah, that Hallelujah chorus! I don’t know how my parents stayed sane, because my memory is of playing the vinyl records over-and-over-and-over-and-over. The reaction I remember having then, is the same reaction that I’ve since had watching an athlete perform at an the unexpected level, or a child returning with bandages to help an injured animal, or a group of people rising to stand in solidarity with an individual, or a red car in space with earth in the background. That reaction, that emotion is something that I connect to potential. A participatory wonder and exhilaration in raw human potential.
The world, though, isn’t necessarily designed for wonder. A book that I once assigned for a seminar, entitled Reality is Broken, essentially argues the societal imperatives of the 21st c. U.S. have minimized the emotions of wonder and exhilaration. Specifically, essential motivations connected with feelings of autonomy, competence, and meaningful social interactions have been removed from our daily experience. This is why, according to the author Jane McGonigal so many individuals have turned to games and virtual environments. Only in these environments do they encounter the sense of raw potential that they crave. In a sense this theme is no different from that found in the book The Giver. A colorlessness. An imposed blindness. And this is how “A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood” comes in. The movie is essentially an episode of Mr. Rogers for adults. An emotionally stunted, “blinded” protagonist learns to attend to his emotions, to accept them, and to own their meaning. Mr. Rogers is the guide, and the protagonist follows him into a place of, well, new potential. What was unseen becomes seen. As William Carlos William’s writes:
so much depends upon a red wheel barrow glazed with rain water beside the white chickens
Something I drew a long time ago: charcoal on paper
This poem is partially about seeing. Noticing. Attending, and it is a beautiful poem. I’m mentioning it, though, because a similar poem could be written for the perceptions that we label “emotions.” So much depends upon a feeling of sadness, or a feeling of joy, or a feeling of contentment, or a feeling of urgency. If a wheelbarrow is worthy of notice – and it is – then the emotional landscapes we inhabit are equally worthy of notice.
Emotions are curious things. We are taught the need to control them, and some of us even have a fear and an embarrassment of them. An emotional reaction to emotion! Classically, too, emotions have been held to be in opposition to reason. Reason = good = human. Emotions = bad = animalistic. The thing is, though, emotions are merely another type of perception. They are really no different from vision or smell or hearing. Would we say that vision = bad = animalistic? And yet to denigrate emotional information is really no different from purposefully wearing a blindfold throughout the day.
But what kind of information is contained in an emotion? Well, as I pointed out a while back, our perceptions are constructed things. They are beliefs about the world, and illusions are fun because they remind us of this fact. I apparently have beliefs about color and shade and times of day, and these beliefs construct for me a gold and white dress where others have constructed within their psychological interior a blue and black dress. Likewise, the Hermann grid illusion produces beliefs about discolorations that are not actually present.
Emotions, too, are a form of perception. They don’t “just happen” any more than yellow and white dresses “just happen.” Emotions are constructed things. They are a perception or set of beliefs, albeit of visceral sensations. So, in that sense (ha! intended pun, there) emotions are visceral beliefs. In fact, I’d argue that the term “visceral belief” is a much more accurate expression than “emotion.” Here is the entymology for “emotion“:
1570s, “a (social) moving, stirring, agitation,” from Middle French émotion (16c.), from Old French emouvoir “stir up” (12c.), from Latin emovere “move out, remove, agitate,” from assimilated form of ex “out” (see ex-) + movere “to move”
Culturally, then, emotions are things that cause agitation – a stirring up from the inside. However, is gratitude a type of “stirring up” from the inside? Is depression? Is contentment? Or let me ask a different question. Is “age” an emotion? Is it a motivation? Is it a belief? From the perspective of psychology the answer is yes and yes and yes. Age is a visceral thing. A set of visceral stimuli that we psychologically “read,” build upon, learn about, and fit like a puzzle piece into cultural / social systems. In other words, we feel it. We might not attend to the feelings of “age” or have any basis for comparison or prefer to look at its “sensation scale” (i.e., more or less feelings of age / youth) from one direction vs. another, but regardless, age is a sensation, a perception that originates in the body. “Youth is wasted on the young.” “I am 40 years young.” “I’m really feeling my age, today.” All of these expressions relate to the feelings that we term “age.”
These feelings of “age” are real, and age is certainly both an objective measure as well as a feeling. But when we use that word “feeling” what we are speaking of is a perception that originates in the body. If vision is a set of constructed beliefs about “things out there,” feelings are a set of constructed beliefs of “things in here” – where “here” is the body you inhabit. The precise terms are exteroceptive vs interoceptive stimuli. Exteroceptive stimuli are those that originate from outside the body, while interoceptive stimuli originate from within the body. Interoceptive stimuli are the change in body temperature, the constriction of blood vessels, the beat of the heart, the tingling rush of adrenalin, the vertigo, the rise of body hair, the rhythm of a walk, the roil of the stomach.
Here’s a diagram showing how perception is (at the very least) determined by both exteroceptive and interoceptive cues. Exteroceptive cues refer to information that originates outside the body, while interoceptive cues refer to information that originates inside the body. We call the latter “feelings.”
Here is a figure to help visualize all of this. Perception is the category of experience given by our senses. Some of those senses respond to information that originates outside the body (sound waves, light waves, chemicals, pressure, etc.) while some of those senses respond to information that originate from inside the body. This latter category is what I’m terming visceral beliefs, and emotions are one type of visceral belief. Others are states like “hunger,” “thirst,” “ennui,” “age,” and so on.
I’ll quickly explain the other boxes, but I don’t want to dwell on them right now. Homeostatic state refers to the fact that our bodies are designed to monitor particular “needs.” Some of these needs are common to other animals. We monitor salt, and when we “need” salt, we crave it, and it tastes particularly good. We monitor temperature, and when we “need” temperature, warmth feels particularly good and we take actions to procure it. These homeostatic needs partly define the type of animal that we happen to be (Homo sapiens), and so we have social needs that, for example, might be absent from a turtle, and as mammals we engage in nurturing and attachment in ways that I would categorize as “motivational” (i.e., connected with homeostatic “need”). Finally, behavioral systems refers to the species typical way that we satisfy our homeostatic needs. Do we hunt in packs? Do we play? Do we perform mating rituals? Finally, learning, of course, can layer all sorts of complexity into this system, but as a starting point, it’s a decent way to begin thinking about the mechanisms constructing our psyche.
Here’s an exteroceptive cue that might just start interacting with motivational states and interoceptive cues to produce the feeling “Mmmmmm.”
Emotions and feelings are visceral beliefs. A kind of perception that originates within the body, and which is built up from basic processes and learned expectations. Sometimes we attend to these “feelings” and at other times we do not, just like sometimes we attend to the clouds in the sky and sometimes we do not. Sometimes we purposefully “look away” from feelings in the same way that we might look away from a panhandler, or we learn to ignore feelings in the same way that we learn to ignore the train that passes by every night at 4:00. We feel tired, but push on through the night in order to complete an assignment. We feel sad, but believe that sadness is “weak” and ignore the sensations. The point is that just as the room you visually inhabit is partially constructed from color and lines and assumptions of depth, the emotional room you inhabit is constructed from the stuff of the body.
Soapbox Aside: I’ve been meaning to remind everyone that when it comes to psychology, we need to be careful about ascribing a particular state to everyone. Just as some individuals are “color blind,” not everyone experiences empathy or fear or anxiety. Not everyone experiences pain the way that you do. Some people see colors when they hear music. Some people experience extreme disgust to situations to which others merely shrug their shoulders. Some people are attracted to women. Some are attracted to men. But “men” and “women” are variable categories, too. Some are tall. Some are short. Some have penis-like appendages. Some don’t. There’s no such thing as a “real” woman or a “real” man. Not in any scientific sense, and most of us do know this when we pause to think about it, but there is a tendency to get sloppy. For example, the other day I was listening to the radio and a very reputable commentator said, “I believe that everyone is fundamentally good.” Depending on what the commentator meant, the odds are that, no, not everyone is fundamentally good. If the commentator meant that everyone has “fellow feeling,” that is wrong. Most might possess this perception, but there is variance. Some experience it more often, while others experience it less often. On the other hand, perhaps the commentator meant that all humans have the potential to be “good,” or the commentator might be using short-hand for a belief that all individuals possess “value,” but that is a very different thing that saying that everyone is fundamentally good. The latter statement is passive, shirks responsibility and is simply inaccurate. Variance is the norm, even if broad strokes (e.g., averages, medians, modal frequencies) allow for certain generalities. Speaking of which, there is a realted generality known in psychology at the fundamental attribution error. This a tendency for people to allow variance for themselves, while dismissing it for others. Why did you do poorly on the test? Because you didn’t get a good night’s sleep. Why did that other person do poorly on the test? Because they are stupid, lazy, a member of a racial category, etc. In this blog, if I make overarching generalizations I am either being lazy, or I am trying to make a broad point as efficiently as possible. Sometimes it makes sense to refer to averages, but it is important to always remember that there is almost always variance around and average, and that variance is normal.
I have been going on for a bit about how our psyches are constructed things. But I’ve been doing so in kind of general terms. So, let’s take a breather and see if we can’t assemble a simple belief engine from some of the pieces that have shown up on the blog so far. Or if engineering isn’t your thing, you can think of this as a sort of recipe.
Ingredient List
1 c. Visual perception of faces
1 c. The other race effect
1 Tbs. Generalization
Stir with a dash of cultural experience
Faces. Faces are a construct of our visual system, and a lot could be said out them. For example, here is an image from a well-known experiment seeking to determine if infants are born with an innate ability to recognize face-like images
The basic idea is to take a face and show it to infants of different ages. Of course, you then need other images so that you can make comparisons. Like, maybe make sure that the infant isn’t simply responding to the nose, mouth, etc., no matter how they are arranged (Linear). Or maybe check out if it’s a triangular arrangement of stimuli that the infant “likes” and compare that a more normal face, and the same image with the triangular arrangement flipped. This is some of what psychologists do!
Whether infants are innately predisposed to respond to face-like images, over time, most of us become better at distinguishing between faces. When our eyes encounter a face-like stimulus they tend to bounce around in a manner that picks out particular features.
Saccades registering the features that will be turned into a face Orginal work done by Alfred Yarbus (1967) and image found here.
Like any skill, this is something at which we become better and more efficient with repeated practice. We don’t just pick out faces as generic visual objects, but individual faces for our friends, parents, siblings and so on. And yes, we know that all of this construction is happening in a brain, and since that is the case, damage to the brain can interfere with our ability to construct faces. Prosopagnosia is a syndrome that refers to an inability to recognize faces brought on by strokes / damage. Individuals experiencing prosopagnosia might be able to perfectly describe the features of a face: the nose, the color of they eyes, the shape of a chin – but they cannot “see” the face.
The Other Race Effect. As we encounter faces, we become more and more adept at pulling out features that allow us to efficiently “recognize” the individual attached to any particular arrangement of these features. The general thinking is that this process results in the creation of a prototypical face. You can think of this as being the weighted average of all of the face-features that an individual has encountered in their day-to-day living. That prototype is then going to become your psyche’s starting point for recognizing new faces. Just like a few posts back, when we talked about how our visual system has beliefs about depth, and size, and relative brightness, our visual system constructs beliefs about faces. One of these beliefs goes by the name the other race effect.
Basically, the other race effect refers to the fact that your psyche is better at recognizing prototypical faces. If you’ve ever tried to use money in another country, you’ll have an appropriate analogy. Even after living in Germany for four year, I would sometimes get hung up on counting out change. I had trouble remembering which coins went with which amounts, and strangely this made it more difficult to simply add up and subtract amounts. The other race effect is something like that. It refers to the fact that individuals who regularly experience faces within a particular ethnic / racial category find it harder to distinguish between faces outside of that category.
A study from 2007 published in Psychological Science provides a nice conceptual demonstration of the other race effect.
In this particular study, the researchers asked about the development of the effect. In other words, they asked whether very young children showed the effect, and if not, when did it become pronounced. Their subject pool consisted of Caucasian infants from three age groups: 3-month, 6-month, and 9-month. In the experiment, these infants were presented with faces from four “ethnic categories”: Caucasian, African, Middle-Eastern, and Chinese. Please note that these are the designations from the article. All of the faces were taken from students who were 23 – 27 years old.
The way that these experiments typically work, is that an infant will be shown a stimulus until they become bored. “Bored” is measured by the amount of time that the infant spends looking at a stimulus vs. looking elsewhere (remember, in science we have to measure something!). This “boredom” is referred to as habituation. Once an infant is habituated to a stimulus, an experimenter can show that infant another stimulus and ask: “Does the infant remain bored?” If so, then that means that the infant doesn’t recognize a difference between the two stimuli. On the other hand, if the infant’s attention perks up, then we can conclude that the infant DOES recognize a difference between the stimuli.
That is the logic that was used to examine the development of the other race effect in the Daley et al. study. Infants were be shown a particular face until they habituated to it. Then there were shown the same face along with another novel face. That novel face either came from the same or another ethnic category. The question was whether the infants would recognize the difference of novel faces within an ethnic category. For example, if the infants were habituated to a Chinese face, would they perk up when presented with a new Chinese face?
Re-visualization of data from Kelly et al (2007). Bars above the dotted line indicate that the infants are recognizing faces as unique.
Here is their data. I’ve changed it from what was provided in the actual paper, because the data there consisted of numbers in a table. I took those numbers and created a graph that makes the same points. Any bars above the dotted line indicate that the infants “recognized” the novel faces as novel. 3-mo old infants essentially treated all faces as unique. 6-mo olds, though, treated Caucasian and Chinese faces as unique, while tending to clump African and Middle-Eastern faces into generic categories. Finally, at 9 months, the infants showed the full on “Other Race Effect.” They treated faces from their own ethnic group, Caucasian, as unique, but tended to treat the faces from the other three ethnic categories as generic.
Generalization. Ok, so we know that faces are visually constructed things. We also know that we tend to learn to distinguish between commonly encountered faces, and that is going to tend to produce better recognition of faces within our ethnic group as opposed to outside of ethnic group. All of this is simple engineering. Let’s start to push it in a direction that we’d connect with more traditional notions of belief. We’ll do this by reminding ourselves of a psychological phenomenon known as generalization.
Like so many things in psychology, generalization is conceptually simple, but incredibly complex in its details. The basic phenomenon is this. If you learn something about a situation, you will tend to transfer that learning to “similar” situations. This transfer to “similar” situations, contexts and stimuli is termed generalization, and it is seen in so many animals that it is considered a basic feature of learning. Here is an example of generalization in pigeons. Pigeons that have learned that a vertical line either indicates food or the absence of food, will tend to generalize that learning to other line orientations.
Figure from Honig et al (1963). Responses here are pecks at the stimuli shown on the x-axis. Positive or negative training occurred to the vertical line.
However, notice that I put “similar” in quotes. Usually we think of “similar” as sharing features. If you are humiliated when you recite a poem in 4th grade, then maybe you will feel emotions of humiliation whenever you enter any classroom. Classrooms, after all, are “similar.” However, when we use the term “similar” what we really mean is that your brain is not recognizing a situation as completely unique. Someone else’s brain might very well. Also, this is not to say that at some point in the future you won’t recognize difference. You might very well learn that situation A is quite different from situation B.
So “similar” is a subjective thing. When we transfer learning, feelings, and assumptions to new situations, this says more about what we as individuals recognize as “similar” at that particular moment. As an example, when we learn a new language, one of the humps we have to overcome is hearing sounds as unique that we start off hearing as generic. In any event, generalization is the phenomenon of transferring learning to “similar” situations and stimuli. But remember, “similar” means, to some degree, “not recognizing difference.”
A Dash of Cultural Experience. So here is where we mix all of our ingredients together to construct a larger belief. First, we’ve pointed out that our visual system uses features in the environment to construct faces. Whether some of this construction is innate, or not, is beside the point. Faces are constructed things. Second, we’ve pointed out that how this happens creates categories of faces that we recognize as unique, and categories of faces that we treat as generic. Thirdly, we’ve reminded ourselves that if stimuli are generic, then this means that they are “similar,” and learning will tend to generalize across similar stimuli. What will happen, then, if culture pulls out a single face from an ethnic group and portrays it in a particular way? For example, let’s suppose that we are Caucasian child from the Kelly et al study. We see a show that portrays a Caucasian as a criminal. Well, since we tend to treat Caucasian faces as unique, then we won’t generalize criminality to a broad range of Caucasian faces. On the other hand, if we see a show that portrays an African, Middle-Eastern, or Chinese individual as a criminal, we will be more likely to generalize “criminality” to a broad range of African, Middle-Eastern, or Chinese individuals. That’s the thought experiment for this blog post.
Since it is the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, how about a study about gratitude? This particular study comes from the lab of David DeSteno. Prof. DeSteno is at Northeastern University, and he is the PI for a group that studies emotional effects on prosocial behaviors. You could do worse than to read his book, Emotional Success: the power of gratitude, compassion and pride. I would quibble with some of the evolutionary accounts that he provides in the book, but the general gist – that emotions are informational, adaptive “lenses” – is an important perspective. I’ll definitely try to unpack this perspective a bit at some point in this blog.
Anyway, for this particular study, Desteno asks a question concerning impulsivity. The question is whether all emotions get in the way of non-impulsive, rational, deliberative choice. Or, are there particular emotional states that actually reduce impulsivity? Certainly the zeitgeist is that emotions are a hindrance to deliberation. Zen, man. That’s the ticket.
A modern psychologist, though, would tend to say that “Zen, man” is as much an emotion as “anger.” The issue isn’t clearing away emotion, so much as it is understanding the congruence between the decisions you are being asked / attempting to make and the emotional state from which you are attempting to make them. If you are being asked to saw a board in two, a hammer isn’t of much use. The same could be said of emotions. So, is there an emotional state that helps rational, deliberative choice?
That’s a loaded question, of course. So let’s anchor it with a more specific question. Are there particular emotions that make us less impulsive? This is the question that DeSteno et al sought to address in their study “Gratitude: a tool for addressing economic impatience” (DeSteno, Li, Dickens and Lerner, 2014).
Now, the first thing to appreciate about any scientific study, is that when a researcher asks about whether x affects y, x and y are going to be defined in operationable terms. This means, they are going to be defined in measurable terms. Not only that, but they are going to be defined in measurable terms that are described in such a way that other scientists can go out an perform the same measurements. Impulsivity is a word. You might be able to provide a meaning for it: “actuated or swayed by emotional or involuntary impulses” However, this definition is meaningless for a scientist. How do you determine actuated or swayed? What counts as an involuntary impulse? What counts as an impulse?
Here is how DeSteno et al operationalized impulsive behavior: How much money do I need to give you in T amount of time so that you will choose to wait rather than take a different choice of money now? For example in the image below a subject has been presented with a choice between $4.50 now versus $10.00 in 30 days. Which would you choose?
Which of these two outcomes would you choose?
Impulsivity, then, is being measured in terms of a choice between a dollar amount now vs. a dollar amount in the future. Sometimes in the literature this is referred to as a temporal-discounting or delay-discounting curve, and the information it provides is essentially “how easily you can wait.” The more money I have to give you to wait, the higher your impulsivity score.
Ok, so in the the DeSteno et al study subjects will be primed with a particular emotion: happiness, neutrality, or gratitude. This is done by having the subjects in each of these groups write about an autobiographical moment in which they felt this emotion. Next, the subjects will be given a series of questions that ask them to rank (1 – 5) their current emotional state. Finally, the subjects will be given a series of choices between a dollar amount now versus a dollar amount in the future. By the way, subjects had a 1-in-3 chance of actually receiving one of the dollar choices that they made. If you were one of these lucky subjects, the experimenters randomly selected one of your choices (e.g., $30 in 6 months), and made it a reality.
Trigger Emotions: Happy, Neutral, Grateful.
Compare subjects in each group in terms of their impulsivity scale.
That’s the study. Here is what was found.
Figure is taken from Desteno et al (2014)
What this figure shows is the average impulsivity score for each group. The numbers on the y-axis can essentially be interpreted as a measure of patience. Specifically, they indicate the ratio between an amount of money now, and an equivalent psychological amount a year from now. In other words, a discount factor of .5 would mean that $10 now equals an offer of $20 a year from now. A discount factor of .1 would mean that $10 now equals $100 a year from now. In other words, you would need to pay the “.1 subject” five times as much money to wait a year, than you would need to pay a “.5 subject.”
Back to the figure, when you look at how the different emotional groups scored, it is clear that the gratitude group displayed more patience. This is true even when compared to another group that was feeling a positive emotion – the happy group. Feeling happy did not make a subject any more patient that feeling “neutral.” The only emotion of the three manipulated that improved impulsivity was gratitude.
Gratitude. Patience. The season stretches out towards winter and the cold settles in. Thanksgiving readies our waiting, keeping a future spring valued and available.
Happy Thanksgiving 2019!
Some fall colors
[Edit: Talk about coincidence. Who should have a column in the NY Times, but David DeSteno! Give it a read to learn some more about the science of gratitude.]
I’m no fan of bad poetry, but I do understand the lyrical impulse — that attempt to connect pure sensation with something available to the declarative self. So, here’s something I wrote a while back, while living in the Northeast but thinking of my two grown-up daughters and reflecting on memories of growing up, myself, in southeastern Tennessee. Btw, as I continue to learn about HTML and the ins and outs of WordPress, I apologize for wonky layouts.
Devil’s
Shoals
(for Delphi and Lydia)
Before
the Hiwassee widens like a settled ribbon
of
sunlight across the hills, husk yellow and green,
where the
old train bridge passes overhead —
before
the widening slow of the river
at the
gravel lot filled with the church buses
that
carry the tubes for the weekend faith groups,
lies the
last rapids, the Devil’s shoals.
And
when I was a kid canoes would eddy out there,
and pull
up to the beaten path that stepped up
boulders
and blackberry brambles.
Where
the path leveled we’d follow
the
tracks laid straight, blasted out of shale,
and then
down the embankment to slip into the water
that
sucked as smooth and as cold as any promise ever could.
Wading
out into the current, we held hands like sentries,
through
the rushed lashings, our breath catching
when the
water hit the belly, until
we
dropped, one-by-one, buoyed
by our
life jackets past the shore’s retreat
as we
floated down into the mouth of the shoals
desperate
of breath and arms flailing.
Water
slapped the face and pulled – pulled us below
to where
darker flows reversed and crossed
under the
heavy waves and sunlight.
Our
sneakered feet kicked out and fought,
our lungs
ached in their insistence, until hands
joined
the pull of preservers to heave us heavenward
where
eye-blinking vision washed up like fish.
Once
upon a time a boy lost his strength in the shoals,
and
crying out to his father for help,
was
carried past the hitched boats.
Another
time a boy who had lost his father
and seen
his mother remarry a Methodist minister
took to
the tracks, and walked the mile to the parking lot,
each stubborn
tie after each stubborn tie hammered firm.
Either
way, the devil sought us all —
like a misguided gift to the homesick-buried
in a
place where breath and Will battled for supremacy.
And
ever when the day closed, tired and content,
the youth
directors gathered up their charges
and
bussed them back to their beds
still hearing the rush of the shoals in the dusk of
mid-summer.
