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Mutual Interests, Different Lenses: Current Neuroscience and Symbolic Interaction
Author(s): David D. Franks
Source: Symbolic Interaction, Vol. 26, No. 4 (Fall 2003), pp. 613-630
Published by: Wiley on behalf of the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction
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Mutual Interests, Different Lenses:
Current Neuroscience and Symbolic Interaction
David D. Franks
Virginia Commonwealth University
As reflective thinkers, symbolic interactionists may well be curious about
the organ with which we think. Leading neuroscientists are quite aware
that a working brain depends on other brains. This article considers selected
neuroscience approaches to topics traditionally addressed by symbolic
interactionists including some confirmations, refinements, and challenges
from current neuroscience. Confirmations support features of Mead’s
“objective reality of perspectives” and a relational epistemology, the inevitability of ad hoc “accounts,” self-consciousness as behavioral control, and
“self unity” as constantly re-created illusion. Divergence between neuroscience and symbolic interaction mainly involves new evidence for the
importance of unconscious cognition, emotion, and memory in shaping
human behavior. The rooting of cognitive and perceptual processes in
motor activity challenges the extremes of the “linguistic turn.” Refinement
involves reasons for attending to the embodied salience of thoughts produced by “somatic markers” rather than mere content.
Symbolic interactionism has long struggled with an apparent contradiction. It focuses on the extrasensory symbol, yet it is a secular field devoted to demystifying its
subject matter. Thus intangible mentality must arise out of tangible, bodily processes. Mead placed the precondition for symbolic communication in the physical
gesture, but on and off for forty years we have heard calls for a more satisfactory
embodiment for our “airy” subject matter. One candidate, biosociology, was so inadequate that it only served to discourage the further search for a theoretical
grounding in our “preobjective” corporeal existence. This article presents contributions of the more socially oriented writers in neuroscience to the material grounding of our “illusive,” interpretive field.
A socially informed neuroscience is also relevant to symbolic interaction because
the latter has always reflected an interest in the process of knowing per se. How we
know everyday things is essentially what social constructionism, so intertwined with
Direct all correspondence to David D. Franks, 10130 Epsilon Road, Richmond, VA 23235; e-mail:
[email protected].
Symbolic Interaction, Volume 26, Number 4, pages 613–630, ISSN 0195-6086; online ISSN 1533-8665.
© 2003 by the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction. All rights reserved.
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Symbolic Interaction
Volume 26, Number 4, 2003
symbolic interaction, is about. If part of our task as scholars means being aware of
the processes we bring to our production of knowledge, an interest in neuroscience
is more than warranted. If we know with our brains (no one is saying with our
brains alone), persons of knowledge should know about the brain.
At least one other reason justifies attention to the brain. In 1985 Gazzaniga published The Social Nature of the Brain, in which he argued for the brain’s dependence
on culturally variable language. Some sociologists thought he could have gone further into the social; Leslie Brothers did so in Friday’s Footprint: How Society Shapes
the Human Mind (1977). At times this volume reads like a symbolic interactionist
approach to neuroscience. Herein the material brain may be a tangible biological
organ, but a working brain is a social and environmental product.1 In these books
and others, symbolic interactionists can find conclusions from a very different narrative that suggest support for our own stories, allowing us to argue more forcefully
than ever for the social nature of persons. For example, long ago Lindesmith and
Strauss (1969) saw the writings on aphasia by the early neuroscientists Henry Head
(1926), Kurt Goldstein (1948), and A. R. Luria (1966) as areas of “extraordinary interest and relevance” because of the striking evidence they provided for the influence of language on all things human.
Since neuroscience and symbolic interaction have such diverse methods and
mind-frames, we should note convergent validity on basic social behaviorist tenets.
As Lakoff and Johnson (1999:476–77) argue, evidence produced by different methods
and interests prevent our frameworks from being merely another arbitrary narrative. It also minimizes the possibility that researchers will predetermine results.
Considered below are confirmations of the symbolic interaction view of motive
statements, the neuroscience basis for constructionism, evidence for unconscious
emotions, and neuroscience views of the self as process or the lack thereof in autism
and anosognosia. I stress the importance of embodied motor activity to higher cortical functioning and discuss the implications of this activity for social constructionism.
This article also deals with Damasio’s (1994) classic argument that embodiment is necessary for reasoning, as defined as effective decision making. Finally, I note some implications of Damasio’s “somatic markers” for a refinement of our view of mentality.
THE NEUROLOGICAL BASIS FOR CONSTRUCTIONISM
Mead’s argument about the social and revisionist aspect of perception and memory,
once received as extraordinary, is now axiomatic in all varieties of social psychology
as it is in neuroscience. Nonetheless, contention has always occurred over the degree to which we “read things into” the world that are not otherwise there and the
degree to which we “read things out from” the world that are there. Overemphasis
on the “read into” side gives short shrift to reality and objective constraint. Overemphasis on the “read out from” side leads to a dangerously reductionistic “essentialism” that makes a thoroughgoing sociology impossible.2
Physics and biology form such an important backdrop to the neurological under-
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Mutual Interests, Different Lenses
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pinnings of constructionism that a brief summary of their contribution seems appropriate.3 Our limited senses cannot process the vast majority of potential stimuli
in the world. According to Buckminster Fuller in Christian (1977), what man can
hear, smell, touch, and taste is less than a millionth of reality.
Furthermore, our senses are transducers. These two fundamental observations
relegate absolute realism or “correspondence theory” to the dust heap of intellectual history (see Lakoff and Johnson 1999). Our biological transducers4 change environmental information into physiological processes that the organism can receive
and process into something humanly meaningful.5 What do our senses change or
reconstruct? Sight renders different wavelengths and/or frequencies on the cosmic
electromagnetic spectrum into subjective sensations. These “translations” include
our experience of the primary colors, red, blue, and yellow, and their mixtures. Our
sensory experience of colors differs wildly from the energy impinging on the retina.
Arendt (1958:236) quotes Eddington to the effect that whatever we perceive is as
different from the incoming data as “a telephone number is to its subscriber.” To
think that a color is inherent in an object confuses particular human experience
with the “scientific” stimulus object, and thus we refer to it as the “stimulus error.”
Our language commits this error constantly; that is, “That banana is yellow.” The
tree falling in the forest certainly makes compressions in the surrounding air, but
without some ear to change these compressions into something totally different
called sound it is not yet noise.
The brain-created dimension of color-as-perceived is especially evident when
one considers the electrical spikes that the different perceptors send into the brain.
These perceptors are all the same but change into various sensations depending on
the brain area they go to. The brain then provides the biologically given experience
and relational realities that cultures and languages organize and edit. Both biological and social levels are constructions, and each acts on the other.
The second reason “correspondence theory” fails involves the inadequacy of the
senses to handle all that is transmitted to them. The brain must disregard vast portions of impinging perceptual data. Each sense is an extreme simplification, a huge
abstraction. Each eye has 100 million light-sensing cells but only 1 million fibers
leading to the brain proper. Each incoming image must be reduced by a factor of
100. Thus neural abstraction characterizes the whole physiological brain and the
simplification involving linguistic categorization has not entered the picture. Rather
than respond to each microscopic flash, the eye seeks a gestalt or a pattern of the
“shape of things.” Our brains even create patterns where patterns do not exist
(Gazzaniga 1985).
Harth (1993:65), among many neuroscientists, adds detail to the highly transformative part of the neurological aspects of perception. The lateral geniculate nucleus
(LGN) contributes significantly to the “read into” aspect of the visual process. Its
modifications are at the behest of higher cognitive centers and therefore inject information not contained in the primary images received from the retina. Harth conceives of the brain as comprising thick bundles of neurons going up from the motor
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regions and down from the cortex. Fluctuations in signals from these feedback loops
are amplified selectively so those features not present at the input may be generated
in a bootstrap fashion (see also de Sousa 1987:235–64). Thus Harth calls the LGN a
sketchpad on which the cortex expresses its “fancy” by drawing and erasing.
Transactional Limits in Social Construction
Within this brain-given contribution to experience, the joint relation between organism and environment must nonetheless be retained. Too often we attempt to
avoid the problems of dualistic thinking by denying the existence or importance of
one side. In this case, we must see the environment as a peculiarly human one
emerging from the “read into” processes of the brain and the “read out from” aspect
of experience that happens independent of our will, for example, being knocked off
our feet by what we interpret as lightning. However the pure sensation may be interpreted, the force is there. The transactional rule is that we must cancel the antithetical opposition of the contrasts while retaining the possibility of tension between
the sides (Lyng and Franks 2002; Wrong 1961).
Contrasts such as self and society, “knowings and the known,” mind and body,
must be seen as interlocking relation (Emirbayer 1997), but both sides must be retained in this fusion. This is what transaction as the meta-method of pragmatism
means (Swanson 1989). Most of the work I have read in neuroscience makes such
assumptions. As for the above-mentioned transactional balance wherein organism
and environment are in reciprocal relation, Harth (1993:68) writes: “We may think
of what goes on in the LGN as a competition between the reality that is conveyed
from the eyes and the fancy that comes down from the cortex. In the normal alert
brain, reality will have a powerful restraining influence on fancy.” Separated lovers,
preoccupied with each other’s image and yet so dissatisfied until they can literally
perceive each other again, have at least operant if not conscious knowledge of the
differences between perception and conception.6
In the context of the above, Mead (1932) saw the world transactionally in terms
of “the objective reality of perspectives.” Here the perspective is physical rather
than symbolic and is carved out of the world by two interlocking aspects: what the
animal brings to the environment in terms of sensory transducers and what the environment offers in terms of stimuli that can be successfully “transduced.” This
“transactional slab” is objectively “there in nature,” and although relational, it has a
determinate character that can hardly be seen as relative in an arbitrary sense.
“The objective reality of perspectives” places limits on social constructionism. A
purely constructionist view of color as determined totally by linguistic categories
would fly in the face of all of neuroscience and physiology. The significance of certain color gradients—which ones we are taught to attend and which ones we are
taught to ignore—is certainly a matter of culture. Once so selected, their meanings
and associations will be also culturally constructed. Nonetheless, persons can
readily learn to discriminate colors that their linguistic categories gloss over. With
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all due appreciation for the awesome power of linguistic interpretations, it would be
a daunting task indeed to demonstrate how color per se is created solely by words.
Color is a matter of the determinate relation of our biology, our symbolic classifications, and the world.
In sum, Mead, like many neuroscientists today, aimed to break down the reified
separation between the organism and its environment. Looking backward, we can see
this part of Mead’s project as preliminary to a realistic social constructionism and his
transactional framework as most consistent with current neuroscience’s battle against
Cartesian dualisms (see esp. Brothers 1997; Damasio 1994; LeDoux 1996).
THE RETURN OF THE UNCONSCIOUS
One of the early strengths of symbolic interaction was that it offered a unique theory
of voluntaristic self-control of behavior. Here, actors “pulled” themselves through
lines of action by their own anticipated consummations rather than being “pushed”
by the past forces of conditioning and the unconscious. In the post–World War II
years, symbolic interaction raised a stringent voice against Freud’s early versions of
the tensions between the id and the superego, both of which were unconscious and
reduced the self to their passive pawn. Interactionists legitimately cast aside the unconscious in this fanciful overlay because of its dubious validity and also because it
opposed their model of agency. Recently, control over our understandings of
the unconscious has passed from the waning profession of psychoanalysis into the
hands of cognitive psychologists and neuroscientists. Under their watch the unconscious has been disentangled from Freud’s mythical overlay, and the evidence they
have accumulated for the importance of unconscious processes in any adequate explanation of human behavior is substantial if not overwhelming. Although these
processes cannot be the focus of what is distinctive to the symbolic interactionist
paradigm, they nevertheless decisively shape our consciousness and more than warrant our interest simply as students of human behavior.
At least two meanings of the unconscious are often conflated. One is relatively
unproblematic and is often the very theme that informs our own research. For example, Katz (1999:7) makes significant use of the Meadian tradition when he asks,
“What is it that, being itself invisible, is responsible for all that is visible?” Sociology
is replete with examples of inquiries into the hidden background processes making
covert interaction possible (Franks and Harris 2002). We have little difficulty with
social processes below awareness, such as “assumptive orders,” “tacit knowledge,”
or even the “noncontractual element of contract.”
Such background processes also dominate our brains. According to Gazzaniga
(1998a) and Lakoff and Johnson (1999), more than 95 percent of brain function is
below awareness and shapes and structures conscious thought. Much of this percentage includes perceptual operations and amounts almost to a truism. When we see an
interesting object we are hardly aware of the complex neuronal processes enabling
this sight. Students of language acquisition know that children use rules of grammar
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long before they learn these rules in grade school. Such processes shaping behavior
on the implicit, “operant,” or “procedural level” are not new to symbolic interaction.
The unconscious that many still ignore, and some may have difficulty with, has to do
with specific emotions, thoughts, and memories that influence overt behavior and are
not autonomic products of routine perceptual processes. For example, starting as early
as 1889, physicians have reported unconscious memory in amnesiac patients (Reber
1993). On more than several occasions, patients who had been shocked or even pinpricked by their doctors shied away from them accusingly on later encounters even
though they could not remember the original abuses. For a less disconcerting example
from current neuroscience, Damasio’s (1999:44–45) patient, David, had lost all conscious memory largely because of trauma to his hippocampus and amygdala. A working hippocampus is necessary for remembering new facts. Damasio noted that over
time David, who could never remember who his concurrent acquaintances were,
nevertheless made clear and consistent choices about those with whom he interacted.
To explore this further, Damasio placed David in situations with three different
kinds of accomplices. One was pleasant, one neutral, and the other abrasive. Afterward Damasio showed David four photos, including those of the accomplices, and
asked him who was his friend and which one he would go to for help. Though David
recognized none of them, he overwhelmingly chose the previously pleasant accomplice. Damasio concludes that despite David’s lack of conscious memory, his brain
could generate actions commensurate with the original encounters and their resulting emotions. Oliver Sacks (1995) gives similar examples and references. Luria
(1966) reports that all his amnesiac patients hospitalized over any significant time
acquired some kind of “familiarity” with their surroundings.7 We find similar examples of unconscious perceptions in patients who cannot see or hear.
On the cultural level, Lakoff and Johnson (1980, 1999) point to the importance
of taken-for-granted metaphors, the “hidden hand” that determines what makes
common sense to us. There is an important difference, however, in the unconscious
that results from the autonomic workings of our brains, other social routines that
have become taken for granted, and the specific unconscious involved in ego defenses. Here we have entered into findings produced by social psychologists such as
Banaji (2002) on the implicit learning of discriminating tendencies and stereotyping, but we stray from neuroscience proper. Suffice it to say that symbolic interactionists are no longer warranted in rejecting the unconscious because of its Freudian associations or because it categorically takes agency away from the self. For
Gibbs and Berg (2002:100), “[B]rains are not the underlying causal agents for . . .
experience. Mental imagery arises from the neural and somatic activity that is understood by ongoing actions of the whole person.”
Split-Brain Research
Gazzaniga and Smylie (1983), neuroscientists who are leaders in split-brain research,
give us data-driven insights into our tendencies to act first and give explanations to
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ourselves and others later. Elsewhere (Franks 1999) I have described the relevance
of this work to early symbolic interactionist approaches to the problem of motivation and the resulting theory of accounts. Gazzaniga described this research in The
Social Brain (1985) and later updated and qualified it (1998b). By no means should
we associate this work with the oversimplified distinctions between the brain hemispheres in the more popular media. The effects of separating the two halves of the
brain became known when Gazzaniga severed a patient’s corpus callosum in order
to minimize an extreme case of epilepsy. The corpus callosum is a “massive cable of
some 200 million fibers enabling the fully linguistic left brain (in right-handed
people) to know what the relatively nonlinguistic right brain is doing. The largely
mute right brain communicates to the left via electrochemical means. Normally, the
brain hemispheres inform each other and coordinate via the corpus callosum. Such
coordination takes place in other areas but these areas are minor” (Gazzaniga
1998b:51).
Sensory messages generally go to the opposite side of the brain from which they
are received. In vision the left half of the observed field (as seen by both eyes) is
sent to the right brain. Because the linguistic left brain in right-handed people enables consciousness, the left hemisphere is considered dominant and plays the executive role in coordinating the many mute modular parts of the right brain. Modules
of the right brain handle very specific tasks. The ability to identify faces and expression, locate ourselves in space, order things temporally, and move and see color are
produced by modules. Therefore, they all have their different memories, wills, and
“interests.” When the parts of the right brain enabling these perceptions are injured,
these capacities are lost.
While the right brain could respond to the experimenter’s instructions, without
the intact corpus callosum it could not communicate them electronically back to the
left brain. Researchers could send picture-images to the right brain, or even instruct
it to do something, without the conscious linguistic left brain’s knowledge. The researchers and the patients would watch in amazement as the patients’ hands
“obeyed orders” to draw a certain object totally independent of the patient’s conscious intentions to do so.
The conclusion that confirms accounts (Scott and Lyman 1968) from these
studies is that patients make up their own plausible explanations of their behavior
when the researchers alone are privy to the actual cause. For example, the patient’s
right brain was commanded to walk out of the room. When asked why they were
leaving, patients quickly responded with a reason like they were going to get a
Coke. No doubt, they continued to do just that. When researchers asked the right
brain to laugh, the laughing patients never said they did not know why. A reason
was always forthcoming (Gazzaniga 1992:126).
The split-brain studies challenge the notions that a single rational process generates human action and that consciousness is a unitary experience. Diverse modules
produce behaviors, mood changes, and cognitive activity outside the realm of conscious awareness that the left hemisphere’s “interpreter” module must organize
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into culturally defined sensibility. This executive process seeks and creates “meaningful” patterns in these diverse sources of internal tendencies whether they are there or
not. Gazzaniga’s view of the brain is social primarily because of the interpreter’s
dependence on language and belief.
NEUROSCIENCE, THE INTERSUBJECTIVE,
AND SELF AS PROCESS
The concept of role taking breaks down the dualism between the individual and society by combining self-control and social control into one process. It is also symbolic interaction’s answer to intersubjectivity and how self-consciousness develops.
Role taking is the capacity to call out in one’s self the same, or similar, response that
one’s oncoming gesture may call out in the other. We then use this anticipated
response of the other to guide and control our further line of action.
Multiple Meanings of Self
In this context “self” refers to the episodic act of conscious control over oncoming behavior. We are not aware of our whole, unitary person, but of our very limited
emerging behavior of the moment. This separates the situated and processual “selfing”
arising in role taking from the enduring, continuous character of the Western conception of personality.8
Inevitably, many sociologists confuse our culturally construed notion of the person with the role taking self of generic transcultural process. They then talk of “selfless” societies that do not share our notion of the unique, separate person. Strictly
speaking, the self of Mead’s social behaviorism had little to do with particular cultural constructs of self. Presumably, all hominids have the capacity to take some
perspective on their actions. In this limited sense all societies have “selves” involved
in role taking.
When scholars insist there is no self, they often mean that the self is an illusion in
the sense that its apparent unity and continuity are personally constructed out of
cultural meanings. Some neuroscientists say it is re-created at each moment of reflexive consciousness (as is memory). Here, Gazzaniga’s words are worth quoting
in full:
The mind is the last to know things. After the brain computes an event, the illusory “we” (that is, the mind) becomes aware of it. The brain, particularly the left
hemisphere, is built to interpret data the brain has already processed. . . . The interpreter, the last device in the information chain in our brain, reconstructs the
brain events and in doing so makes telling errors of perception, memory, and
judgment. The clue to how we are built is buried not just in our marvelously robust capacity for these functions, but also in the errors that are frequently made
during reconstruction. Biography is fiction. Autobiography is hopelessly inventive. (1998a:1–2)
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Gazzaniga’s statement is quite consistent with constructionism and symbolic interaction. However, regardless of the fabricated nature of culturally variable theories of
persons, normal human behavior would be inconceivable without the very flexible
capacity of individuals to be what we term “self-aware” at critical times. Thus, to say
that self is an illusion is not the end of the story. The self that is an illusion is the
self as autobiographical and as culturally produced object rather than the generic
self control involved in role taking. Gazzaniga does not deny such a process. It is an
absolutely crucial part of the operations allowing us to interact with others and to
incorporate their subjectivities into our own.
A growing number of neuroscientists are breathing fresh life into their own notion of self as process. This is reflected in the title of the neuroscience conference
sponsored by the New York Academy of Sciences in fall 2002: “The Self: From Soul
to Brain.” Brothers and Damasio, for example, study cases in which the self is diminished or nonexistent, as in autism, forms of anosognosia, various misidentification syndromes, and brain lesions to the prefrontal cortexes, among other areas.
However valid an inherently social view of the self may be, pinpointing brain dysfunctions as causes of the above deficits indicates the existence of the biological,
neural enablers of the self. The study of clinical cases also offers a rich empirical
context for the study of the social nature of self-processes (see Sacks 1989, 1995).
Leslie Brothers and the Neuroscience of
Intersubjectivity and Self
Any discussion of role taking may raise considerations of intersubjectivity.
Brothers (1997:xiii) starts her attempt to bridge the gap between mind and brain, as
did Mead, with the assumption of an ongoing network of meanings that she calls
culture. She sees culture as an emergent from the joint activities of human brains.
Mead argues that we must start with an already socially organized animal, but
whether it be culture or social organization, the views are basically similar. Brothers
agrees that we cannot start with the self-contained individual and then proceed in
Hobbesian fashion to explain social order. She concentrates on the brain’s inborn
mechanism (always working interactively with cultural content) that encourages
the perception of other persons and their subjectivities. Like Mead, Brothers sees the
process of symbolic interaction as depending on brain processes that have been developed from more primordial means of communication, namely, the physical gesture.
By the term “person,” Brothers means a being with a mental life—an “owner” of
conscious, subjective experience that is not empirically observable. In her usage,
self and person are interchangeable. The brain’s capacities are vessels for living cultural meanings. The concept of subjectivity springs from the dispositions of the
brain but only in interaction with others. “It is given flesh,” Brothers (1997:143)
says, “by performances and narratives.”
Much of the neuroscientific work on constructing others and thus one’s own person is based on the fact that reports from our senses are produced in collaboration
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with many brain regions. According to Brothers, over evolutionary time some brain
regions became selectively tuned (biased would be appropriate) in attending to and
reporting on purely social events. Primates must be attuned to status and rank as
well as to cooperating as parents with slowly developing dependent offspring.9 The
cortex becomes especially important in “reporting on social events—the more
quickly and accurately the better” (Brothers 1997:12).
Brothers refers to this brain system for keying into facial expressions as the “editor.” It involves the set of neural ensembles in the anterior temporal lobe and related areas that encode social features and link them to action dispositions (Brothers
1997:61).10 For example, nine-minute-old infants paid preferential attention to visual stimuli that look like human faces when the other selections included scrambled faces or blank outlines. This preference obviously came too early to be attributed
to the socialization processes, assuming that what appears facelike to us attracted the
babies’ attention. But very young newborns can imitate facial expressions, assuming
they are present in their environment. Infants one to two months old associate
voices with faces. When a face talks to an infant, the baby tends to shift its gaze
toward the more expressive eyes rather than the ostensibly more interesting movements of the mouth. The child does not attach utterances to persons because of
mere sight but because language perception shares the same neural assembles that
encode expressive faces and voices. The logic of everyday talk, Brothers (1997:15)
notes, is the logic of (imputing) intention. This logic is suggestive of the interactional process of role taking, even though she does not use this term. Interactionists refer to this as role taking instead of person perception, in part because intentions as well as “motives” are so frequently packed into social roles (Turner 1962).
What is “taken” is the other person’s perspective, which is comparable to constructing personhood. Quite possibly autistic children suffer from the congenital absence
of a working brain organ for sensitivity to “inner selves” that they would normally
construct during their infancy. Without the capacity to construct persons and subjectivities beyond observable bodies, effective role taking is impossible.
Brothers cites clear-cut experiments showing that while normal children order
faces according to emotional expression, autistic children search for nonsocial ways
of grouping the same pictures such as who is or is not wearing a hat. As symbolic interactionists would expect, autistics do not use the person pronouns correctly and
have the most difficulty with the self-reflective pronoun, “I” (Brothers 1997:16–18).
Again, understanding of the first-person pronoun implies the ability to take the
role of “generalized others.” However one looks at it, Mead’s theory of mind and
Brothers’s discussion of creating inner persons reflect overlapping concerns of
important mutual relevancy.
Antonio Damasio and the Embodiment of Self and Thought
Another route to discovering the body’s contribution to the self-process and the
neural supports for role taking may be through studies of anosognosia. The term
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means the inability to acknowledge disease in one’s body (Damasio 1994:62). Accounts of highly intelligent stroke patients with this disorder show that they deny
the paralysis or amputation of their major limbs to a vivid and irrational degree
however blatant the evidence may be. But Damasio’s interest does not stop at this
uncanny denial. He is interested in their lack of self. Anosognosics have no ability
to sense the ownership of their tragedies. Neither in his clinical experience nor in
any case study that Damasio has read does an anosognosic say in effect, “My God, I
no longer feel any part of my body, all I have is my mind.” None of them refer their
troubles to themselves (Damasio 1994:237).
To explain this phenomenon, Damasio first describes how the brain is known to
constantly map the whole body and to keep informed of its happenings. The
minded brain began by minding the body. Since the external world can only be
represented through the modifications it causes in the acting and reacting “behavioral” body, these mappings are somato-motor in character. Thus the resulting “internal representations” cause perturbations in the organism, which in turn guarantee endless changes that the brain must track. There is no rest. The brain is constant
re-creation. For the pragmatist, the world becomes known as we interpret its responses to our actions on it. Damasio simply adds a vast and endless neurological
dimension to this theme. The brain is amazingly involved in its own type of mute
reflexivity and self-regulation. This mapping creates a continuous flow of visceral
background feeling so much a part of us and so taken for granted that we only
barely recognize it until pain or emotion disrupts its consistency. Possessing this
biological information on “how we are currently feeling” is more crucial than sociologists may think. To be without this embodiment profoundly disrupts what we
mistakenly think of as the “purely mental” symbolic self-system. Anosognosics
lack this embodiment.
These patients’ inability to sense their own bodies derives from a disruption of
cross talk between regions of the right hemisphere involved in the internal mapping. Researchers have successfully located the particular brain system for this malady in the primary somatosensory cortices, the only place where damage results in
anosognosia. Anosognostics still hold an image of what their bodies were once like,
and they experience this outdated image. Only momentarily, and at the insistence
of others, can the patients recognize that their limbs do not move. Damasio suggests
that his patients’ “selves,” unable to plot body signals from background feelings, are
no longer integral. They are as neglectful of their own symbolic identities and predicaments as they are of their paralysis. The theory that these patients construct of
their own minds and of the minds of others is woefully, irrevocably out of date, out
of step with the historical time that they and their companions are immersed in
(Damasio 1994:155). Language may not be the source of this biologic self, but it is
certainly the source of the “I” (Damasio 1994:243). In the cases above, however,
adaptive language and selves must include their embodiment.
Clearly the biosocial interpretations of these scientists have implications for
embodying our theory of role taking and thus the self. Without this embodiment,
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reflexive cognitions would be too weak and superficial to compel self-control (Shott
1979; Wentworth and Ryan 1992). Our particular conception of self, especially as
“self-sufficient islands of simplistic agency” can, in many senses, be illusions. But
the biological processes producing our somatic sense of existence and the role taking
process enabling self-awareness, social control, and the intersubjective construction
of other persons are real social processes making social life possible.
NEUROSCIENCE AND CHICAGO PRAGMATISM
One of the most recent discoveries in cognitive neuroscience reinstates a key focus
of pragmatism that the meaning of an object lies not only in how we place it symbolically but also in its transactional response to our motor actions on it. Regardless
of how we interpret these responses, predictable aspects of such transactions must
remain or we could not live sane lives. According to Gibbs and Berg (2002) and
Lakoff and Johnson (1999), language and thus thought arise out of and carry the
structure of embodied action, specifically that activity involved in tactile, contact,
manipulative behavior. The new field of cognitive semantics makes the important
claim that much of our knowledge is not static or propositional but is grounded in,
and structured by, patterns of our bodily actions and the indifferent requirements of
the manipulative of objects (Gibbs and Berg 2002).
Lakoff and Johnson (1980, 1999) join this challenge by arguing that thoughts
take on intelligibility through metaphors founded in manipulative activity. Thus
“grasping an idea” makes sense to us because of our experience with grasping material
objects. We see ideas as being “above our heads” or as “escaping our grasp.” They can
be “slippery,” “big,” or “small”—all metaphors taken from sensory motor experience.
This priority has been particularly well received in the field of mental imagery
(Gibbs and Berg 2002). Mental imagery clearly and appropriately implies visualization but only insofar as we understand that the visual is shaped by kinesthetic activity involved in physical manipulation, not merely by the “mind’s eye.” Identifying
an object in the distance involves imagery of how it may be manipulated and how
long it would take us to get there. This confirms Damasio’s (1994:225) earlier statement that “perceiving is as much about acting on the environment as it is receiving
signals from it.” The object’s relevance to furthering our actions selects it for attention. Action is both causally and temporally prior to the selectivity that must characterize perception.
Mead also gave highest priority to touch as the primary sense organ in his theory
of the act. We now know that the sense of touch and the hand takes the largest
amount of sensory cortex in the human brain by far. Mead as well as Damasio conceived perception as a readiness to act, and subliminal muscular movements accompanied perception in preparation for the act. Lakoff and Johnson (1999) go further to
claim that the mechanisms responsible for perception, movements, and object manipulation could most plausibly be responsible for conceptualization and reasoning.
Both earlier and more recent versions of the priority of motor action offer a
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vantage point to evaluate much of the “linguistic turn” that has dominated symbolic
interaction. Several implications of this turn are well known. For example, when
language subsumes all it is difficult if not impossible to privilege one interpretation
over another, much less to evaluate your own. Mead understood this point and
noted the loss of the “possibility of error” or any criterion of evaluation in purely
nominalistic approaches, that is, where theorists saw meaning as carved out of words
alone rather than as reliable responses to our nonverbal actions. In stressing the
priority of such action, the pragmatists of Mead’s generation treated reality as that
which resists our push in the contact experience. The disembodied consensus model
of intersubjectivity left over from Saussurian linguistics leaves out the shared experiences we gain from the impartial world of the motor actions that heeds neither
prayers nor social status.11 This shared experience of the way the physical world
responds to our manipulative actions on it remains an important source of intersubjectivity. Most of us learn to handle fire gingerly regardless of cultural definitions.
COGNITION AND EMOTION IN RATIONAL CHOICE
Here I again use Damasio’s work to expand on the importance of emotion and feeling for effective cognition in decision making and social control. Damasio’s Descartes’ Error (1994) probably presents the most impressive neuroscience evidence
for the very necessity of emotion in reasoning (see Ochsner and Lieberman 2001
for updates). Damasio has specified in neurological terms the intimate connection
between emotion and thought and the area where they come together to form
human emotion in the ventromedial prefrontal cortexes (Damasio 1994:71). After
trauma to these regions integrating emotion and thought, his patients could no
longer get along with their loved ones or avoid decisions that led to business disaster. Hanna Damasio devised tests to pinpoint exactly what type of deficit caused
these patients’ economic and social failures. They could think of emotions but could
not feel them. They could not feel the terrible tragedies of their own demise. The
test she devised was a game that highlighted the specific deficits characterized by
patients with this trauma. If long-term values cannot be felt, life decisions will bow
to short-term interest. The game demanded subliminal judgments and implicit
learning that certain options, which momentarily looked good, were actually disastrous in the long run. Although otherwise intelligent patients could not learn to become suspicious and uneasy about these deceptive choices, normals intuitively
caught on right away. We ignore how the most rational business choices are laced
with emotions. The anticipation of regret, patience in making well thought out decisions, and expectations of long-term success involve emotions, as do intuitive judgments about the attractiveness of business partners (see also Etzioni 1988; Franks
1997).
We have seen above that the symbolic self-system needs embodied background
feelings to be felt substantially and compel social control. Damasio writes about the
weak and unstable images that his ventromedially damaged patients held of their
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futures. The patients could think of their futures and look back on their losses but
not feel or care about them. They “knew” of them in some abstract sense, but their
personal significance was lost. The related images could not be held in play. Damasio presents very plausible evidence for his conclusion that the brain’s incapacity to
endow these images with bodily feelings accounted for their inability to make a difference to these patients.
Images with the same content can vary in the difference they make or the strength
they have in guiding thought. Although we can empathetically feel each other’s
pain, the bodily given vividness with which we feel can be critical. As often as not,
the somatic intensity with which we feel others’ pain varies with whom we see as
powerful and relevant and whom we see as inconsequential (Franks 1985).12 Knowledge is more than its content.
Damasio uses the neurological term “somatic marker” to describe this variance
in personal import, and thus the felt quality, of an image. Obviously, emotions can
mark our thoughts with bodily feeling. But the term “somatic marker” is more general than that and refers not so much to emotion as it does to whatever bodily feeling
gives it relevance in our thoughts and actions.
No pure logic determines saliency; it is a matter of emotional predisposition and
related somatic markers. In this sense, emotion sets the very agenda for thought (de
Sousa 1987) and plays the larger part in its sagacity. Rational decision making and
social control depend on their own supportive embodied markers and emotions.
Damasio has given us a strong argument against “rational efficiency” as portrayed
by Weber that places everything on the periphery of consciousness except the quickest,
most efficient and guaranteed means to our unevaluated ends.
CONCLUSION
Much work needs to be done on our theory of mentality, which, in its warranted
portrayal of the arbitrariness of linguistic symbols, sometimes disregards any process initiated outside of our wills and social constructions. With all its self-monitoring,
mind does not subserve itself; it does not exist for itself, and its functioning cannot
be understood on that basis. We can only understand the social brain in relation to
its social and physical environment. We have seen that mind is a function of images,
some conscious but most unconscious and nonverbal. One hypothesis I draw from
the above is that the important qualities of images do not come from talk where just
about anything goes. Firm images come from the body’s actions on a world not of
our making, even if it lends itself to a plethora of symbolic interpretations. Based on
our knowledge of the relationship between manipulatory behavior and images, we
would expect that those built up by actually making things happen—by walking the
walk instead of talking the talk—are firmer, more refined, and more compelling
(Becker 1964).
Images, as symbolic interactionists know, are not mirror copies of external realities,
but neither are they mere copies of what we have been told through talk. Damasio’s
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nonverbal images that allow for our sense of subjectivity are constructions of our
whole bodies engaged in multileveled actions and interactions. We have seen that
the resulting levels of firmness and saliency can be as important as their content. In
my reading, neuroscience in the hands of LeDoux and Damasio and much of Gibbs
and Berg’s work as well as Lakoff and Johnson’s leads us to a forgotten appreciation
of pragmatism. This is especially true in the convergence of the two fields in their
view of nonverbal and motor actions as primary and fantasy actions untested in
experience as weak.
It is indeed remarkable that so much of current neuroscience, with its highly
technical measures, seems to have confirmed the revisionist thinking of George
Herbert Mead, who died in 1931. I have stressed convergences above but hope we
will be open enough to look to neuroscience for data that give new insights as well.
Acknowledgments: This article is significantly revised and updated from David D.
Franks, “Some Convergences and Divergences between Neuroscience and Symbolic Interaction,” pp. 157–82 in Mind, Brain and Society: Toward a Neurosociology,
Social Perspectives on Emotion, vol. 5, edited by D. D. Franks and T. S. Smith (Stamford, CT: JAI Press, 1999). I would like to thank David Maines, Daniel Miller, and
Audrey J. Franks for their suggestions. The editorial staff of Symbolic Interaction has
provided the most proficient technical editorial support that I have ever received.
NOTES
1. Here Brothers does not see nature and nurture, organism and environment as two qualitatively different realms, each existing self-sufficiently from each other. They must be viewed
functionally instead of statically, and in transactional relation with each other, that is, as thoroughly implicated in each other and as different phases of the common activity of knowing
(Lyng and Franks 2002). The brain creates the perceptual environment of actual human experience as much as the environment. This nondualistic view of environment and organism
greatly differs from the commonsense one popularly and intersubjectively constructed in
which we assume one static universe and believe it to be the same for me and you. Ironically,
this purely theoretically conceived universe is known as the “objective” one and thereby privileged somehow as pure fact. Regardless of how necessary this fiction may be for human
thought to proceed, a specific environment without a brain and a working brain without an
environment must be hypothetical.
2. Given the emotional variations in tolerance for both indeterminacy and the contingency of
human existence, it is doubtful that this balance will ever be resolved (Franks and Harris 2002;
Lyng and Franks 2002:115–17).
3. Granted, the focus of symbolic interaction is on the shared rather than subjective sensation.
My point here, however, is that even on the sensory level, which is so closely associated with
the empirically “read out from” the world, our bodies still actively construct the preobjective
foundations of experience.
4. A transducer changes incoming information into a form that the organism can accommodate. The program that changes Wordperfect into Microsoft Word is a transducer. As such,
we can never perceive the world in and of itself “the way it is.” We can, however, accurately
perceive the result of the organism/environment relation. But the human component is always part of what we perceive and does not necessarily detract from the part the objective
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5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
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Volume 26, Number 4, 2003
environment plays. Organism and environment must be seen transactionally as both playing
their parts. We seem reluctant to give both sides their due, and thus we fall into dualism
despite ourselves.
Of course, I couch the above discussion in what Mead sometimes referred to as the “scientific
object” of the natural sciences wherein hypothetical objects that lie beyond the range of our
actual experience replace the perceived objects of immediate experience. None of this has to
imply a rejection of the term “reality” transactionally defined (Lyng and Franks 2002).
Perception includes cognitive interpretation but is defined by its dependence on direct contact
with the here and now—immediacy. Concepts are extrasensory and have the ability to detach
themselves from immediacy as well as having no connection with the perceivable at all, that is,
grammatical rules. We can conceptualize potentials, possibilities, and hypotheticals that we
cannot immediately see but can only conceive. Purely linguistic categories are conceptual, but
the physiological senses clearly produce their own categories (Gibbs and Berg 2002; Lakoff
and Johnson 1999). Our physiology, as discussed above, seems to create brain-given gestalts
and erroneously simplistic stereotypes.
See Damasio 1999:297–99 for examples of capacities independent of awareness from other
types of patients and the procedural learning of sensory motor skills. Reber’s 1993 volume on
implicit learning gives broad coverage on the “cognitive unconscious.” Lakoff and Johnson
(1999:10–14) provide a succinct introduction to the meaning of the “cognitive unconscious.”
Lyng and Franks 2002 has a relevant discussion of how the majority of our choices of specific
words in ordinary discourse must come before conscious choice.
This replacement of the holistic term “self” with bits of oncoming behavior may make the
Meadian position somewhat more compatible with Jaynes’s Origin of Consciousness in the
Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (1976). Jaynes’s volume represents an interesting challenge
to Mead’s generic notion of self-consciousness as a defining feature of Homo sapiens. On the
positive side, Jaynes leaves room for responding to the anticipated response of others to one’s
oncoming behavior in a preconscious (right brain?) manner. Jaynes’s is only one of several
more current attempts to persuade symbolic interaction of the importance of the preconscious
(see, e.g., Franks 1999; Ostrow 1990:14).
This does not contradict the qualitative difference between Homo sapiens and other animals
but emphasizes that “nature takes no leaps.”
Brothers discusses a population of cells highly selected for human faces (in contrast to all
other complex objects) that she found deep in the superior temporal sulcus.
See Lakoff and Johnson (1999:463–66) for their critique of the doctrine of difference and Saussurian linguistics used in some symbolic interactionists writings.
One way to express this phenomenological variance is the continuum between “subsisting”
and “existing” (Becker 1964). People can “know” that cigarettes are dangerous, but this possibility subsists as an inconsequential abstraction rather than existing as a behaviorally compelling image. Our children’s pain can exist so strongly to us that we would rather carry it for
them, while we only dimly consider another adult’s pain, if at all. Some possibilities and warnings take center stage in our consciousness while others subsist on the periphery.
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