[Music] so it's now my pleasure to introduce the first speaker for today Dr Evan Thompson Evan is a lifelong friend having first encountered each other Evan was 14 our fathers knew each other and attended many events created by evans's father so we're not going to go into detail about the extraordinary accomplishments of today's speakers for the introduction for each one of you because your program contains in their words their uh what they want you to know um but Evan uh is currently a u professor of uh philosophy at the University of British Columbia he's the author of waking dreaming and being mind in life um he is uh author with Francisco verella of the and Elanor rash of the embodied mind and um he was a professor at the University of Toronto and he has recently moved to the University of British Colombia and he's going to frame in a very large way uh a way to think about um what it is that this Enterprise um may be creating so Evan thanks very much cliff and um thanks for inviting me and thanks for letting me talk first so that I could really pay attention to everybody else's talks instead of thinking about my own upcoming one um so the take-home message of my talk is that we need to do a much better job of tracking the looping effects at work in the science of mindfulness and if you don't know what a looping effect is I'm going to say what that is in a minute and that embodied cognitive science that is the embodied approach in cognitive science or embodied cognition as it's sometimes called that it can help us do this it can help us track looping effects so what do I mean by looping effects the modern mindfulness looping effect comes from starting by conceptualizing mindfulness as inward-looking awareness and inward regulation regulation of the of the individual mind and then taking that conception so a kind of internalist individualist conception projecting it onto the brain thereby endowing it with a biological reality biologist sizing it you could say and the result then is an individualist conception of the mindful subject superimposed onto a neural substrate and then the looping effect comes from that whole construct looping back onto how we conceptualize ourselves so we'll see not just journalists but scientists saying things like to be a mindful parent or a mindful coworker or a mindful Soldier you need to learn how to downregulate your amydala through mindfulness training so we can conceptualize ourselves through the construct of mindfulness as something happening inside me we take ourselves to be our brains in some fundamental sense and then we redescribe ourselves that way and we organize social practices around that kind of construct so this is an example of what the philosopher Ian hacking meant when he introduced the term looping effect we create a category we treat it as real and then we reconceptualize ourselves in terms of the category and here the treating of it re as real means we treat it as real by way of the biological substrate because Neuroscience has a tremendous Authority for us in our culture so there are two problematic assumptions that I want to highlight that are underlying this looping Effect one is treating mindfulness as internal awareness of the individual mind and the second is taking the mind to be generated by and located inside the brain and so I'm going to be focusing on both of these problematic assumptions and I'm going to be doing so by way of an image that appeared in the Scientific American article that Cliff mentioned and I've I've raised these complaints with the authors so I'm not sort of speaking behind their backs here in this article we there was this um image presented where a number of contemplative practices were distinguished focused attention mindfulness or open monitoring compassion and loving kindness and then focused attention was identified in terms of a kind of cycle of mental processes that were identified with neural regions or neural regions as nodes of of networks where mind wandering is identified with say the default Network then becoming aware of distraction is identified with the um salience Network and then reorientation and sustaining of focus of attention are identified with dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex so what we have is we have a map in which certain cognitive functions or cognitive processes mind wandering distraction awareness reorientation of attention sustaining focus of attention are identified with regions in the first instance and then the more sophisticated qualification would just be to say well the regions are markers for networks but if you look at the at the image itself that's being represented or that's being presented is very much the regions that are that are being highlighted okay so I'm going to present two critical arguments against this way of thinking that highlight for me a number of really important points that are that are at stake in what's going on so here's the first argument and being a philosopher we like to lay out you know our arguments in premise to conclusion form the first one is that mindfulness in quotation marks because how we Define that is of course a big question but I'm going to submit boldly that however we Define mindfulness it consists in an integrated exercise of a host of cognitive affective and bodily skills in context in what cognitive scientists would call situated action in some context of of um embeddedness so that's first point second point is that brain processes this is a conceptual Point are necessary enabling conditions of mindfulness they facilitate it but they're only partially constitutive of it that is to say that mindfulness can't be exhaustively accounted for in terms of things like neural regions and networks of neural activity and moreover those brain regions and networks become constitutive only given the wider context of embodied and embedded cognition and action without that context they wouldn't function in in the partially constitutive way that they do so they're necessarily enabling or facilitating conditions of something that's actually context situated and much wider so it it's a conceptual mistake then to superimpose mindfulness onto the differential activation of distinct neural networks in the way that that diagram in Scientific American does okay so if that's all very abstract here's an analogy parenting however we might Define that and of course that's going to be dependent on context dependent on culture parenting consists in the integrated exercise of a host of cognitive affective and bodily skills in situated action especially if it's good parenting whatever that might mean in whatever context brain processes facilitate that they're necessary enabling conditions of parenting but they're only partially constitutive of it and they become constitutive only given a wider context the context of say the family the context of what counts as a family in a in a certain Society so it's just a confusion a conceptual mistake to superimpose parenting onto the differential activation of neural networks okay so that's argument one second argument and I'll take a little bit more time with this one is that when we attribute a cognitive function to a system like the function of attention we're talking about the whole system in context the whole embodied subject now this is arguable but it seems unlikely and I'll I'll cite some um evidence or considerations in support of this it seems unlikely that there's any one one map between cognitive functions and neural networks especially as currently identified using fmri that the um mapping from function to network is many many not one one and it's many many because it's context dependent and dynamically changing and variable so it's empirically unwarranted to map the cognitive functions constitutive of mindfulness onto distinct neural networks especially as currently identified using fmri which was the basis for the Scientific American that I started with okay so I want to go through each of these steps in a little bit more detail so this first point that attributions of cognitive function like attention apply at the level of the whole embodied subject so here I want to call your attention to a work by a colleague of mine in the philosophy department at UBC called attention is cognitive Unison and basically what Christopher mole argues in this book is that attention is not a distinct process in the brain but a mode in which multiple cognitive processes unfold in relation to each other so rather than trying to identify it in terms of a particular neural process it has to do with all sorts of things going on being coherent or in unison as he puts it that that mode of processing is cognitive Unison so that task relevant cognitive processes whatever they might be in whatever context are operating in unison within a certain window of time where what would be facilitating Unison in the brain might be if you have a biased competition model it might have to do with biased competition or if you're thinking in terms of neural phase synchrony it has to do with the coherence of oscillatory activity within certain frequencies within a certain window of time that's a level of description in terms of biological more biological specificity but at a higher level what's happening is that there's a phenomenon of cognitive Unison and just as there's no place in the orchestra where Unison resides that's not the kind of phenomenon that Unison is it's a relational phenomenon it doesn't sit in any particular place so there's no place where attention resides in the brain that when we talk about attention we're talking at a different level of explanation and description so given that point mapping sustained attention onto the dorsal lateral PFC for example even as a node of a network that's a category mistake it's a it's a kind of conceptual confusion in certain contexts that region facilitates attention but it doesn't generate or constitute attention Okay so then second point in this critical argument the point about it's unlikely that there's any one- one mapping between cognitive functions and neural networks so here I'm relying on work by Michael Anderson and Luis pasoa who in a series of Articles have argued this point and in the article at the top what they did is they did a meta analysis of a whole bunch of fmri studies is looking at networks that are identified functional connectivity networks that are identified in fmri and they created what they call functional fingerprints where for example the default Network or frontal parietal network is displayed in terms of all the different kinds of task situations that it shows up in experimentally and so these different networks have different functional fingerprints but the point is that they're mobilized in all sorts of different contexts so flattening their description down into it correlates with this particular phenomenon of sustained detention in the way that the diagram representing focused attention meditation does is is just an incredible simplification now this is an arguable point but um pooa argues for it I think pretty um compellingly which is to say that although everybody would agree that the mapping from neural regions to cognitive processes is many many people want to say well no but the relevant unit unit of analysis is the network and that's not going to be many many but P argues or presents a a good case I think for thinking that the many many mapping is going to hold in terms of networks and cognitive processes as well so two networks can instantiate similar cognitive processes for example and it can go the other way because individual variability context dependence dynamical change over time and what and what these networks are doing is going to make this mapping many many so for those two reasons then it doesn't make sense empirically either to map the cognitive constitutive the the cognitive functions constitutive of mindfulness however we're using the term mindfulness onto distinct neural networks in the way that is being done in the literature okay so that's the kind of critical part what I want to do now is say that we can look at this differently if we use the framework of embodied cognitive science and specifically what I'm thinking of here is what sometimes called 4E cognition or 4E cognitive science where and I'm going to go through each of these there's an emphasis on cognitive processes as embodied as embedded as extended and then as inactive so let me say something about those so the idea that cognition is embodied is that it depends directly on the body as a functional whole and not just the brain so to give you an example in the case of um visual perception if you hold the visual stimulus fixed it's an optic flow stimulus in this in this um particular experiment that I'm thinking of so the stimulus is exactly the same but the perception of the 3D structure perception of depth differs according to whether you are actively moving your body in relationship to it or whether your body is being passively moved in relationship to it so this is Mark wexler's work so the point here is that self-generated motor activity motor signals proprioceptive signals directly contributes to the content of what you see so that motor action is constitutive of the perception it's not just a passive um process in which you could be moving not in virtue of your own self-generated activity but being passively carried along in relationship to the stimulus so that's a case of what embodiment would mean in the domain of visual perception think of walking meditation for example where you have a practice that involves self-generated movement and mindfulness of movement the the the movement is is the content of the visual experience is in part determined by the fact of movement and the signals that are the motor and propri receptive signals in the study of language and thought David mcneel's work calls attention to gesture and also music um as we just saw and heard where gesture isn't a mere adornment or accompaniment to speaking and thinking it's an integral component of them so mcneel argues that gesture actually is thought and action and if you're not able to gesture you're not able to speak and think in certain ways there's the movement or the approach that Larry Barcelo calls grounded cognition the basic idea here is that instead of there being a kind of central cognitive system that's a modal for math or for language that doesn't depend on um particular sensory motor or perceptual modalities that cognitive phenomena are grounded in and emerge from a variety of bodily processes where that means after effective perceptual and motor processes so this is the this is the work on Grounded cognition so that's all by way of the idea of embodiment second embedded this term comes from the study of things like navigation where in work by Randy beer the idea is that you treat the nervous system the body and the environment as couple dynamical systems in which behavior is a property of the entire brain body environment system and can't be attributed to any component in isolation third extended this I think is especially important in thinking about mindfulness in work by Michael tomasel he argues and here he's building on votsi among other theorists that the Apparently inward-looking mental capacities of metacognition and meta awareness both constituents of mindfulness under under various definitions of mindfulness that those are actually internalized forms of social cognition and they're dependent on our being able to share intentions that is to have a mutual understanding of intentions that we both have to imitate others and to share attention or the phenomenon of joint attention that these cognitive capacities are required for metacognition and meta awareness so it's not as if you start with an internal view you actually start with an outside view that you internalize and mindfulness especially versions of mindfulness that emphasize the metacognitive monitoring would be an instance of this something that actually is constitutively dependent on social cogni extending that point even further work by Merlin Donald he argues in a number of Publications beginning with this book in 1991 that the human brain is a cultural brain in the sense that it's adapted to the environment of symbolic culture modern mine here means modern Homo sapiens so the the the the brain of the homo sapiens is adapted to the environment of symbolic culture it can't function properly unless it's embedded in that environment and he talks about biological memory and external memory say in the form of writing or now for us with with computer technologies that that constitutes an extended hybrid cognitive system so what counts as memory is not just what's in the head it's a feature of an extended system that's culturally embedded and culturally constituted so this is what we meant when we use the term anactive going back to the book with Francisco verela and Ellena rash that in being embodied embedded and extended cognition enacts or brings forth a lived world of meaning and relevance rather than representing a pre-specified world okay so coming then into the end the implications of this perspective the embodied cognition perspective is that mindfulness in however we want to to talk about the the meaning of that word is embodied is embedded is extended and is inactive it's it's a way of sense making it's con constituent cognitive capacities so voluntary mental attention or metacognition or SM Sati in the sense of holding in mind recollective remembrance that those are internalized forms of social cognition so we can't understand those cognitive processes unless we have a rich view of the human mind as structured through social cognition so mindfulness in any form then is a social practice not just a psychological process so concluding then embodied cognitive science I would propose offers a different explanatory framework from that of the Neuroscience model of mindfulness at least as currently practiced in the main the model is one in which context is constitutive and context is irreducibly embodied embedded extended and inactive now it's an open question I think whether pursuing that approach can amate the deleterious looping effects of the Neuroscience of mindfulness so by deleterious effects I mean things like the consumerist construction of the mindful subject that we saw some wonderful images of or not so wonderful depending on how you want to look at it um that that Cliff showed us so it's an open open question I think how much that's going to help but my hope is that it can I mean that's my motivation for for presenting this framework is that it can help us deal with thinking about these looping effects and maybe shifting them in certain ways so the next steps then would be to begin by deifying or indeed one might even say de fetishizing mindfulness through analyses of the social factors at work in mindfulness practices and analyses of the diverse and sometimes contradictory conceptions of mindfulness at work in Buddhist contexts and in secular contexts and that's meant to point to things that I believe Bob and John are going to talk about in different ways and then to use those analyses to generate new kinds of investigative questions for an embodied cognitive science of mindfulness practices one in which we would need to see a much stronger role played by cognitive anthropology and also by science studies to track what it is that we're doing when we construct these categories represent them in terms of say a neurological substrate and then conceptualize ourselves through that um kind of construction my point is not that we can do away with looping effects looping effects are always going to be there my point is that we have an epistemological and ethical duty to track them and that we need anthropology and science studies as part of the investigative team in order to do that thank you [Applause] thank you Evan we have time for some questions comments we'll have time from discussions in a bit but uh Philip you said you spoke with the authors of this Scientific American article are you at Liberty to share what they said yeah or they response to your thoughts and ideas so they um um they agreed and pleaded the pressure that Scientific American put on them to construct the representation in a certain way and they tried to Nuance it this is what Richie told me they tried to Nuance it and that they really came up against pressure they weren't essentially weren't allowed to yeah yeah so I mean that doesn't surprise me uh to hear yeah yeah but I think I mean if we just were to take that as as meaning you know oh it's not really a problem it's just it's just a problem with you know science journalism then I think that would not be right I mean because we myself included you know um we we all I think fall into this way of of thinking about um we all fall into this looping effect that I that I described so I mean i' I've said things in which I've fallen into it too it's not as if I'm immune from it so that's I think the important thing is we become more Vigilant about that hi thank you I really enjoyed your presentation um so I'm going to just uh be a little bit of a maybe Devil's Advocate which is to say um what would you say if I said okay we can do a new Thompson figure we can put in three more not motor networks and some ey gaze trading yeah and just to have a kind of slightly more complicated figure is that I mean that's it seems like you're saying something more than that mhm and what's the sort of like revolutionary outside the box part and what is sort of like let's just expand our networks expand it to other people expand it to the motor system you know expand it to hand gesture which it seems to me is a is a in a way a sort of incremental move um yeah so that's a that's a good question I would say that the the more radical part um would be that we need to really step back and reconfigure it in soou cultural way and make that the starting point and then understand the biology in terms of what's going on in the soou cultural context that's the radical part radical not in the sense that other people haven't thought of it but just in the sense that that's not the way we normally go about it um and then all the other things the adding in the motor processes and so on are going to be situated differently if we do that so adding in the motor stuff you know that's that's great but even adding in like two and three person networks I mean it seems like a lot of um what you're say saying can can sort of be recuperated into a new figure fairly easily um well so there's I mean there's two things yeah there's two things to say about that one is um figures are abstractions and representations and we need to remember that and we and we often forget it especially when we're seduced by the you know image of the brain so if we complexify our figures in a way that lessens that particular seductive power of the of the brain as it's presented to us normally then I think that's good but we would still need to remember it's a representation and it's not you know the map is not the territory thanks yeah you can't study everything all at once right so do you have specific proposals about how we and we so essentially we have to do analysis break things apart into things that we can study in Practical terms are you suggesting that we need to have a different way of breaking apart let's say brain function or are you are you proposing some new method um of analysis yeah so the new method part would be that I think the investigative team needs to have cognitive anthropologists and and critical science studies people as part of the team and we need I mean that's happening in some places so that's on the methodological side I'm not going to dictate to neuroscientists how they should develop their methods in EEG or fmri or something like that that's not for me to say um it's more how those methods fit into a context that includes other things and that gets so that they get framed differently from the way they're usually frame philosophers always know what the weakest part of their argument is so what would you say is the most debatable uh but profound but debatable point you were trying to make during your talk I mean everything is debatable you know one person's modus pins is another person's modus tolin you know that I mean so you can get off anywhere you want in the argument but I think that I think the substantive issue that that's maybe most interesting to think about is how much would Shifting the focus from a brain centered one to a sociocultural one in which the brain is situated how productive is that for any given field of investigation and you know how how much would we want to pursue that that's the substantive question that would be debatable I suppose yeah thank you we're going to move thanks [Applause]