Читать книгу The Form Within - Karl H Pribram - Страница 38

The dendritic formative process is directly addressed by the circuitry of the brain, organized along two very different principles: 1) by local circuits to form flexible cell assemblies that, in turn, are addressed 2) by long-range “executive” circuits of larger axons.

The short-range flexible assemblies directly sample the neuro-nodal web in an organization called “heterarchical” by which the members connected interact on an equal level. These heterarchical organizations are the basis of self-organizing procedures in the formation of complex systems.

The long-range, more or less fixed connections form a “hierarchy;” that is, each level of organization controls a lower level.

In practice, the distinction between flexible assemblies and long-range circuits is the distinction between gray and white matter in the cortex. I have made fairly extensive removals limited to gray matter (performed with a specially designed suction apparatus that would not sever the white fibers) with only minor effects on behavior. When, however, the removals invade the white matter underlying the cells and their short-range connections that compose the gray matter, extensive deficits in behavior result. (The distinction between resections of gray and white matter came to my attention when evaluating the effects of lesions of parts of the prefrontal cortex. My resections were carefully limited to gray matter; others were not so careful, so their resections invaded the white matter connecting other parts of the prefrontal cortex, making their results uninterpretable.)

Once again, the long-range, more or less fixed connections form a “hierarchy,” that is, each level of organization controls a lower level.

The two principles, heterarchy and hierarchy appear to be ubiquitous wherever the members of an organization with equal potential for interaction become organized.

Warren McCulloch, a lifelong friend and one of the founders of cybernetics, the study of control systems, used to enjoy telling the following story regarding the risk of making decisions that are dependent on heterarchical controls:

After the World War I battle of Jutland, in which many British ships were disastrously sunk, the British and American navies changed from a hierarchical control organization, in which every decision had to be referred to the admiralty, to a heterarchical organization in which control and the formation of a relevant organization was vested in whomever had information relevant to the context of the situation. During World War II, two Japanese air squadrons simultaneously attacked an American fleet in the South Pacific from different directions. These attacks were spotted by different sections of our fleet, the information was relayed to the relevant sections of our fleet and, as was the practice, they were taken as commands. As a result, the two sections of our fleet steamed off in separate directions to deal with the separate oncoming attacks, leaving the admiral on his centrally located ship completely unprotected. Fortunately, both Japanese attacking forces were routed, leaving the fleet intact. McCulloch liked to suggest that this story might serve as a parable for when we are of two minds in a situation in which we are facing an important decision.

I have learned even more about the nature of human heterarchical and hierarchical self-organizing systems from Raymond Trevor Bradley. Bradley did his doctoral dissertation at Columbia University in the 1970s, observing several communes and meticulously documenting the way each member of such a closely articulated community engaged each of the other members. Bradley (Charisma and Social Structure: A Study of Love and Power, Wholeness and Transformation, 1987) found that each commune was self-organized by a heterarchical structure made up of personal emotional transactions as well as a hierarchical structure that guided the motivations of the overall commune as a whole. Further, the hierarchy was composed of heterarchical cliques that were often connected by a single bond between a member of one clique and a member of another.

Those communes that remained stable over a number of years were characterized by a balanced expression between heterarchical and hierarchical processing. Bradley’s results held for all communes whether they had strong leadership, temporary leadership, or no consistent leadership. If the motivational hierarchy overwhelmed the emotional heterarchy, the communes tended to be short-lived. Likewise, if the emotional structure overwhelmed the motivational structure, the commune also failed to survive.

The striking parallels between social and brain processing brought Bradley and me together, and we have collaborated (e.g., Pribram, K. H. and R. T. Bradley, The Brain, the Me and the I; in M. Ferrari and R. Sternberg, eds., Self awareness: Its Nature and Development, 1998), in several brain/ behavior/ mind studies over the years.

These parallels—parallels that compose General Systems Theory—make a good starting point for inquiry. They form the foundation of our understanding of the relationship between our world within and the world we navigate—the contents of Chapters 9 to 17.

At the same time, the parallels tell us too little. Just because a brain system and a social system have similar organizations does not tell us “the particular go,” the “how” of the relation between brains and societies. For understanding the “how” we must know the specific trans-formations (changes in form) that relate the various levels of inquiry to each other—brain to body and bodies to various forms of society. I take up the nature of transformations, what it takes to transform one pattern into another, in Chapters 18 and 19.