Category Archives: Models

Examples we can productively study

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Facing the Risks in the Soup Isle

Models, Problem Practices, , , , ,

We have a new understanding of where the “front lines” are right now, and they are much closer than the beaches of Normandy the Korean demilitarized zone.

A book series I edit includes two volumes of scholarly research exploring the meanings and feelings associated with the great monuments built in in Washington D.C.  Visitors usually look forward to seeing the elaborate edifices put up to honor Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and others associated with the nation’s real or and sometimes imagined enemies. Most cities emulate these monuments in their own tributes, frequently featuring generals and other leaders on horseback. Statues of generals on top of a horse have become their own urban clichés.

Even so, it strikes me that all of us involved in these projects were busy cataloguing the familiar while overlooking the obvious.  In truth, scores of nameless individuals soldier on quietly doing much of the nation’s work, which can become ominously dangerous.  These men and women are often not in the sights of the hero-makers, but it’s time they were. In the time of the COVID-19 virus we have suddenly realized how much we owe our safety and perhaps our lives to nurses, doctors, sanitation workers, first responders, grocery store employees, senior-care aides, postal workers and delivery men and women.  We now have a new understanding of where the “front lines” are now, and they are much closer than the beaches of Normandy the Korean demilitarized zone.

I’ve never seen a monument to a check-out clerk from Target, an E.R. doctor in scrubs, or the employee behind the Deli counter at the local grocery store. Right now their heroism during hurricanes, natural disasters and especially this virus seems much more tangible than the tributes to individuals who have been affiliated with battle-ready organizations, but never had to consider the possible dire consequences of helping a customer. It’s interesting that the iconic actor John Wayne fought World War II and the Vietnam War only from the soundstages of Hollywood, keeping up his faux toughness with a heedless and rabid form of anti-Communism. And yet, for all of these dubious achievements he’s been honored with his name on a major American airport. Sometimes we seem to miss the greatness of people around us doing essential work.

We should have the grace to realign our thinking to more clearly honor that those who have the patience and perseverance to show up and provide help when the health and lives of Americans are in peril. They deserve our gratitude and far more recognition.

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“Brain” or “Mind?”

Models, Problem Practices, Rhetorical Mastery, , , , ,
                        Times Higher Education

Sometimes neuro-science needs to give way to more useful explorations of an individual that can be derived phenomenologically.

The study of human communication always calls into question the kind of language that will be used to describe a specific person or message.  This discipline has a long tradition of describing someone’s expressed intentions, verbal habits, and preferred appeals in their own words. And the language is description is usually pretty close to the ground, as when a scholar in political communication characterizes Barack Obama’s rhetoric as “cautious,” “detail oriented,” and prone to strings of qualifiers.  Of course we would need to know more.  But its clear that verbal demeanor obviously has something to do with the personality and character of the whole person: what is going on in their mind.

Over time, all of us gain insights into how others think and what they say by noticing the forces that have pressed in on their lives. This is a basic life skill.  When we say we ‘think we know another’s mind, we are expressing confidence that their particular history and life circumstances have made them at least somewhat transparent. We use this process to gain a sense of who another person “is,” and to make predictions about how they might react to events yet to unfold.

These core starting points are now more frequently being challenged by another class of analysts aspiring to be students of human behavior. More cognitive neuroscientists believe the keys to human conduct lie in mapping the organ of the brain; that human behavior can be understood in the aggregate rather than through the signature style of the individual.

 

Interest in the human brain risks outpacing what should be the continual human project of understanding the person as the possessor of a mind.

 

To be sure, the organ itself is awesome: composed of some 100 billion neurons (!) and incalculable numbers of potential neural pathways that can form consciousness and thought.  Thought itself is an astonishing process that allows nearly infinite sets of unique “circuits” and combinations. And, without doubt, we need neuroscience to learn how various centers function, and how the brain learns, ages, or is altered by biological or foreign agents.

But to study a brain is not the same as learning the features of someone’s mind. The sciences naturally aggregate data, looking for valid universal causes and applications.  And there’s the rub.  Interest in the organ risks outpacing what should be the continual human project of understanding the person as the owner of a unique consciousness. To my thinking, it is useful to know that the ear captures and sends impulses to the auditory cortex.  But my interest begins to flag if someone wants to track how the reception of, say, Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony spreads to other neural ‘circuits.’  It would be foolish to claim that nothing of interest could be learned.  But it still strikes me as the equivalent of trying to enter a door through the cat door. It would be more useful want to know a person’s reactions, their feelings and images the music evokes in them.  I short, I’d be interested in what they have to say about the experience.  Those insights would come mostly from queries about their prior experiences, making studies like MRI brain scans of people listening to music seem hopelessly reductionist. At some points, the sciences based on biological observation need to yield what can be learned from phenomenology of human experience.  The scientific method tilts toward not noticing individual uniqueness. And yet it’s our individual attitudes and dispositions that best explain why they behave as they do.