However I've just finished adding some comments to the end, based on the recent book Descartes' Error by Antonio R. Damasio, and the somewhat less recent (10 years old, in fact) book by George Mandler called Mind and Body. I think that both these books have important things to say about the issues raised by my speculations, and so I am reposting my old article now, together with the new comments.

November, 1993.

One thing I notice about the papers by the cognitivists on imagery is that they consider imagery a Big Deal. It's something that special sorts of people do or people do when in a special mental state.

One of the articles I looked at in the library the other day asserted that there are two types of thinking: what he called R thinking, which is primarily verbally based, and A thinking, which is image-based. Here R stands for ``rational'' and A stands for ... ``autistic'' ! (No, not ``artistic'' but AUTistic.)

What I wanted to indicate several postings back (and perhaps didn't make as clear as I should have) is my belief that images are a continual part of everyone's thinking. Certainly this is true for me --- a highly verbal, linear thinker with a never-ending internal dialog going on in my mind. And a person who ``does not visualize.''

Since I don't really ``see'' my images, most of them were lurking down near the threshhold of awareness until I learned to start noticing them. Then I started realizing how ever-present they are. When I start thinking about making dinner, a image comes to mind of the inside of my freezer so I can think about what choices I'm going to have. When I'm on my way to school in the morning and start thinking about what I'll be teaching in my first class, and image of the classroom comes to mind.

Once I realized how image-oriented my thinking was, I learned to use the images more intelligently. I mentioned before that I've discovered that when I'm trying to remember whether I mailed a letter, or took my vitamins, or did some other task during the day, what ``trying to remember'' really means is that I'm searching for the appropriate recent visual memory. Once I learned that that was the process, I could do it more consciously and much more quickly and effectively.

Likewise when I start ``thinking about'' doing a task, such as grading a stack of homework, I'll be making a visual image of that task. From my NLP training, I learned that I can be better motivated by having a visual image of the completed task and remembering the feeling of satisfaction that comes with having that task completed.

And that feeling of satisfaction is also an essential part of cognition, just as important as words and images.

In a previous article I mentioned my complaint that the scientific psychologists believe that cognition, affect, and behavior should be studied separately, and my belief that they thereby miss all the most interesting questions.

Likewise I don't think you can effectively study thinking if you try to study verbal thinking and image-oriented thinking separately. But furthermore, from NLP I know that there's a very important kinesthetic component to thinking, and as far as I've been able to see the cognitive psychologists don't have a clue that that's something they should be studying.

For instance, I just an instant ago wrote:

> ... the feeling of satisfaction
>that comes with having that task completed.

In my opinion, this kinesthetic component is what drives thinking. Without it, the verbal stuff and image stuff will just not happen, except maybe in the case of totally disorganized random streams of dream images and words.

Certainly as a mathematician I'm dependent on kinesthetic cues --- the little bothered feeling that lets me know there's something wrong with a proof, the little feeling of discomfort that alerts me to a misprint or misspelling, the ``feeling of rightness'' that lets me know that a particular chunk I've been working on is now done and I can go on to the next piece.

I believe that these feelings are much less amorphous than many people imagine. Sometimes I know a certain thing is true, and when I try to analyze how I know, I'm not aware of images or words. I just have a very strong feeling that it's true. I ``know it in my bones.''

Moreover, as a mathematician I would not be able to think if it were not for the attendant emotional states. It's a state of excitement that drives me forward, gets me focussed on a line of thought that seems promising. And a feeling of frustration that enables me to work really hard at some sticky point. And the feelings of discouragement and hopelessness --- thank god for those, otherwise I wouldn't know when to quit. I'd be like a computer that just keeps chasing down the same futile blind alley, the same endless loop forever, until someone comes along and turns me off.

If you leave out the kinesthetic and the emotional part of thinking, then I would need of some sort of external control to tell me where my thoughts should go next.

You see, it seems to me that one of the core questions in psychology is ``How does the organism manage to function?'' And more specifically, ``How does the organism know what to do next?''

To start with, the organism needs to have values. And it's not a digression to bring up values here. They don't belong in social psychology or clinical psychology, they are an essential part of cognition.

Rather than ``values'' (or ``priorities'') NLP uses what I find to be a more apt term: criteria. And I remember Leslie Cameron Bandler giving us the definition, ``Criteria are the things which the person [the organism] seeks to satisfy.'' Over the years, I've tried using various other definitions but I've finally decided that hers is the one that is precisely correct.

(A person will have a lot of criteria which are contextual. For instance, I certainly hope that my criteria when interacting with students are very different than my criteria while at a singles bar. But it is the criteria which are invariant across a wide variety of contexts which represent a person's fundamental values.)

Without criteria, I can't do mathematics or function at all. Often I don't like my criteria --- I wind up becoming obsessed with a certain question and say to myself ``Why do I keep thinking about this stupid thing? It's not worth the effort.'' But somewhere in me there's a criterion that says that finding the answer to this question is worthwhile to me even though it doesn't advance me towards any of the conscious goals of my life.

Okay, so the organism has criteria --- maybe for a simple organism these are simply food, warmth, avoiding certain situations characteristic of predators or other dangers, and --- at the appropriate time --- mating. (The organism I have in mind at the moment is a cockroach and, repellent though it is to me, an image of a cockroach forms a part of my thoughts.) So now the organism has to make decisions and to act --- to move. But moving involves quite a bit of coordination of the nervous system. So somehow a signal has to go out to the nervous system, or at least a large part of it, that indicates that this is the moment for action.

Go back to a more complicated organism --- me --- and the process is still essentially the same, but the nervous system, and specifically the brain, is a much more complicated system and many more signals need to go back and forth. And the brain, as I understand it, is not organized like a modern city where any component can pick up the phone and get a direct line to any other component. The brain wasn't planned, it evolved through a process whereby when new needs arose, existing pathways were mostly used.

So consider the process. I have a decision to make. Should I continue writing this article or should I start making dinner? There are various considerations involved, and my own personal decision strategy involves running through all of these, both verbally and by examing various images. Then, most importantly, I have to know what I want.

How do I know what I want? This is not as easy a question for the brain to answer as it subjectively seems. Contrary to my illusion, my mind is not a monolithic consciousness. My brain is a system, and the part of me that wants has to communicate with the part of me that decides. And this communication happens, for me at least and I believe for everybody, by a kinesthetic signal. My belief is that the part of me whose function is to want -- a fairly elemental part which is probably geographically distributed in lots of different locations in the brain --- sends signals down the nervous system to the muscles, perhaps especially the stomache muscles, and these muscles contract minutely, causing different signals to come back up to the brain, and the brain interprets these signals from the muscles as ``I want.'' And the reason the brain uses this rather kludgy way of using the muscles to signify want is that in a more primitive state of development, want was translated immediately into motion. Now, the brain sends a part of a motion signal to the muscles, but actual movement is inhibited.

After that, some other part of the brain evaluates the different ``want signals'' for each option on my list and eventually comes to a decision.

How will I know when I've reached a decision? Once again, there's a kinesthetic signal, stronger this time, that alerts the whole brain (and probably the whole nervous system) to the fact that a decision has been made. And in particular, this kinesthetic signal alerts the relevant parts of the brain to end the decision process, to stop poring over the list of available options and considerations. And instead, to start organizing to implement the decision.

Okay, that was a fairly simply cognitive process (and I've just put something in the microwave!) But this is the sort of cognition that is basic to human psychology, because it's this sort of thing that enables the organism (me) to function, to stay alive and move through the world and teach mathematics.

And you can't understand this process if you only think about the verbal part or only think about the visual part.

I could go on to a more complicated piece of functioning --- going to the grocery store. But rather than analysing that, I just want to point out what a miracle it is that I'm able to go to the grocery store.

In the Sunday funnies there's a cartoon called Family Circle, and in this cartoon when little Billie sets out for the grocery store he makes a tour of the whole neighborhood and often never winds up getting the groceries at all. But that doesn't happen to me. So how does my brain manage this miracle? How does it ensure that I keep knowing what I'm doing --- going to the grocery store --- and how does it make sure that I get there even though my attention is focused on very different thoughts (maybe even planning an article for usenet!) along the way.

I am convinced that the answer to this question is in the visual and kinesthetic realms.

These are the sorts of questions that in my reading so far I haven't seen cognitive psychologists addressing.

And now dinner is ready.

Note added in February, 1996:

Damasio acknowledges that the hypotheses he suggests go beyond what can be conclusively shown from the neurological evidence. But he has certainly made a strong case for his assertions. In general, my feeling is that his conclusions are in many ways strongly in agreement with my speculations above, at least as concerns the essential role that emotions play in cognition and decision making. In any case, his book is well worth reading --- and certainly goes far beyond my armchair theory-spinning above.

The second book is by a psychologist named George Mandler and is called Mind and Body (Norton, 1984). This book was recommended to me by an NLP person on the net. Oddly enough, George Mandler was chairman of the Psych Department at UC San Diego when I was a graduate student, and I had a very brief (and totally non-scholarly, although quite amusing) exchange of correspondence with him when I applied for graduate study and some of my credentials were mistakenly sent to the Pysch Department rather than to Mathematics. (Mandler has now retired from UCSD.)

Mandler's book is about cognition, emotion, and consciousness, with an emphasis on the role in which physiology plays in these. It is a solid work on cognitive psychology, and as such is rather hard reading for someone like myself whose knowledge of that field is slight.

Although Mandler is concerned with the same issues I discuss in my article above, his focus is somewhat different. In some ways, I can find support for some of my speculations in what he says (although this is far from clear cut), in some other ways he would seem to suggest that some of my ideas are a bit naive. (Surprise!) And in still some other respects, I feel that a knowledge of NLP might have suggested some interesting ideas to him.

In particular, he several times mentions the fact that language does not provide a very precise tool for communicating the nature of an individual's particular subjective experience. As I have stated several times, I believe that the type of questions NLPers often put to subjects, eliciting specific and detailed images, as well as precise sentences from the subject's self-dialogue, enable one to partly avoid this difficulty. (Unfortunately, it is hard to appreciate this from the descriptions in books on NLP. Some of the NLP videotapes show it much more clearly.)

On the other hand, something he says relates to a question several people have asked me. Namely, I say above that I used to believe that I normally had no mental (visual) images, but since have learned to be more attentive and thus be aware of the images that fairly constantly go through my mind. In response to this, several people have asked how I know that, rather than becoming aware of something that was always there, I am not in fact now causing images to come into existence which previously didn't exist.

From Mandler, I see that my description of my own subjective experience is based on what he calls the ``spotlight'' concept of consciousness: namely, that images are always there in the mind, but not necessarily in consciousness, and that bringing them into awareness simply amounts to (metaphorically, of course) shining a spotlight on them. According to Mandler, at least (and I've heard somewhat the same from other psychologists), this explanation of consciousness can be conclusively shown to be false.

Since my own interpretation of NLP, at least, has always been based on the spotlight model, I wonder now whether the falsity of this way of looking at things has any practical implications for NLP, and whether it might suggest new ways in which the NLP methodology might be further refined.

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Trying to understand learning by understanding schooling is rather like trying to understand sexuality by studying bordellos.     -- Mary Catherine Bateson, Peripheral Visions