Photo: Dr. Gallagher with the Dalai Lama at Dharamsala. The Dalai Lama is holding a copy of Dr. Gallagher’s book, Brainstorming

How Yoga Works: Bodies, Experience and Yoga

Shaun Gallagher asks the Dalai Lama about practice as he explores the body’s response to the actions of others

BY MAGAZINE EDITOR SUSAN MAIER-MOUL

Book Review How the Body Shapes the Mind

Conversation Shaun Gallagher, Part One

In the second part of our conversation, Shaun Gallagher delves into the action of practicing in community. We review, for example, what is known about the effect of doing the same thing as the person next to you when that person is paying attention to something different than what you are paying attention to.

The implications for the potential of physical community and the possibility of understanding the “energy” or vibe of a practice as innate to the way our bodies are born to function offer compelling reasons to live our practice all day with as much attention and focus as we do in sadhana.

A dialogue with the Dalai Lama about practice

Susan Maier-Moul Let’s talk a bit more about practice itself.

Shaun Gallagher Very good. Let me mention another aspect of embodied cognition that I’ve been working on recently – embodied social cognition. I can put this in a context that might bring it close to yoga practice.

I recently had the privilege of being one of nine scientists and scholars invited to a five-day conference to dialogue with the Dalai Lama at his residence in Dharamsala, India. The conference was focused on the topics of attention and memory, and I presented my work on embodiment and social cognition.

One of the questions that I posed to the Dalai Lama concerned the practice of meditation under two different conditions: practicing alone versus practicing along with others.

His response emphasized the importance of finding a good teacher and the support of a good community for learning the practice. I think this is an important part of an answer and reflects generally on the fact that learning almost always includes interacting with others.

Susan He responded with compassion for the practitioner. He seems to have heard this or it was translated to him, as a question wherein “alone” meant without support. I hear a different question, though, in what you asked.

Embodied social cognition

Shaun There is another aspect of the question that he didn’t answer. I can put it like this: Is the experience of meditation or any other bodily practice, for example, yoga, different when it is done alone or with others?

Does the fact that other people are present and participating in the practice actually change our experience of the practice?

I suspect that the answer is yes. That’s because there is some scientific evidence that suggests that what others are doing will have an effect on our perception.

For example, what others are looking at influences our perception of objects in regard to significance, motor action, and the emotional value the object has (Becchio et al 2008).

Action-related areas of the brain are activated when we see someone reach for an object, or simply if we see them gaze at an object. Subjects who see another person looking towards or away from an object will evaluate those objects as more valuable than objects that do not receive much attention from others. And if the other person has an emotional expression to the face, one gets a stronger effect (Bayliss et al. 2006; 2007).

The “Social Simon Effect”

Or consider what can be called the Social Simon Effect. In a traditional and very simple stimulus-response task, participants respond to different colors, pressing a button with their left hand when they see blue and their right hand when they see red. They are asked to ignore the location of the color (which is displayed either to their right or to their left).

When there is a mismatch, e.g., when red is presented on the left side and they have to press the button with their right hand, their reaction times increase, compared to the situation when red is presented on the right side and they use their right hand to press the button.

This is called the Simon Effect, named after J. R. Simon who first discovered it in 1969.

Add another person, doing the same thing, almost

A more recent experiment is even more interesting. Note first that when a subject is asked to respond to just one color with one hand, there is no conflict and no effect on reaction time.

But when the subject has exactly the same task (one hand, one color) but is seated next to another person who is doing exactly the same thing, but responding to a different color – each acting as if they were one of the fingers in Simon experiment – reaction times increase. (Sebanz et al. 2006; Takahama 2005).

Susan This really bears out teachings that how we live our lives is the most powerful action for change. How we do what we do is more influential than what we tell other people.

It seems like you’re saying we respond this way innately – we’re biologically designed to be involved with other people.

Shaun The point is simply that we should think about what effect the presence of others may have on our practices. I would like to think that they may enhance our practices, but that may depend on what they are doing.

What the Dalai Lama suggested seems right – that support from a good community is important – with the emphasis on ‘good’.

Experiencing self through observing an other

Susan Some of your research reminds me of Alva Noë’s Experience Without the Head. Perhaps we could say more about this. 

Noë, A. 2005. Experience without the head. In Perceptual Experience, ed. T.S. Gendler and J. Hawthorne. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Susan In How the Body Shapes the Mind you counter the idea of a “translation process between initially independent spaces” with an “intermodal code”  in which “the visual and motor systems speak the same ‘language’ right from birth.”

From early infancy, then, my visual experience of the other person communicates in a code that is related to the self. What I see of the other’s motor behavior is reflected and played out in terms of my own possibilities.

This communication is organized on the basis of an innate system that does not necessarily give priority to my own body awareness over and against my perception of the other. Quite literally, in any particular instance, it may be the other’s movement that triggers my own proprioceptive awareness.

There exists in the newborn infant a natural intermodal coupling between self and other, one that does not involved a confused experience.

Rather than confusion, a self-organizing collaboration between visual perception and proprioception, between sensory and motor systems, and between the self and the other is operational from the very beginning.

Susan It sounds as though we propagate meaning, we bring the world into being or bring ourselves into relationship with it continuously, rather than sequentially as a comparison of two versions that we repeatedly update.

Your explanation makes sense for yoga practitioners who want to “be present.” Would you say it’s possible we’re returning to the fully integrated state that is our birthright, rather than constantly laboring to bring it into being?

Shaun This is a very rich question. You link the fact that our senses are intermodal — that is, they are connected in ways that do not require a translation from one sense, e.g., vision, to another, e.g., touch or proprioception — to the idea that the meaning of the world is propagated, or as phenomenologists might say, is ‘constituted’ in that intermodal experience.

It’s interesting that you mention Alva Noë in this regard since I think that his work on enactive perception is quite consistent with this view. You may also know Andy Clark’s work on the extended mind. Both the enactive and the extended view of the mind agree on the idea that the mind is not just “in the head,” but that much of what we consider cognition depends on bodily processes and environmental interactions. 

Though there is this general agreement, enactivists and proponents of the extended mind do not agree on everything.  Some of the disagreements concern just how much of a role the body plays in our experience of the world. 

Despite the fact that Clark downplays the role of the body, in his recent book, Supersizing the Mind, he does commend Noë’s account as showing how our embodied experience, with strong intermodal connections between sensory and motor processes, helps to constitute the perceiver-relative world we live in without denying the objective reality of the physical world.

What is “inward gaze”?

Susan My reason for asking is the practice of “inward gaze” which is so often a part of yoga practices. I’d like to be able to extend some of your ideas toward the concepts that are typically in play when we’re directed to look “inside”.

The distinction you make seems of great interest and utility to practitioners, as one that offers an entirely different model of what we are examining.

Following your explanation, in inward gaze we literally “drop in” to the hum of intermodal code.

Shaun That’s an interesting way to put it. I think that I would rather say that we become reflectively attuned to our bodily processes. There is much to be said about the fact that sensory-motor processes shape the way that we experience the world. This applies to all animals. Philosophers, since the time of Plato, however, like to ask whether there is something that makes the human animal capable of transcending this sensory-motor experience. 

Humans do seem to be able to reflect on their experiences in ways that non-human animals cannot.  So what gives us this ability to turn inward, or upward, or in a direction that transcends purely sensory-motor experience? 

Some philosophers, like Clark, would say that cognition involves different, more abstract levels of representation that allow for higher thought processes. If we ask how these higher levels of representation work, and how they develop, many philosophers, and psychologists, will point to our language abilities.

A motor and sensory practice: language is of the body

Shaun Language in some way allows us to transcend the contingencies of our sensory-motor experience. But let’s push this just one more step. Language, in its origins, and our ongoing linguistic practices of all sorts, are, at bottom, motor and sensory practices.

Susan It isn’t just that we “have” a body, and we as someone “in” it are using this external system of language.

Shaun Right. We are our bodies and we constitute ourselves in our embodied practices, and especially in our interactions and communications with others. In regard to language, we move our lips and our tongue to form words; we move our hands to gesture and also to write; we move our eyes to follow the perceived shape of the words in order to read, we turn our head to hear better, we nod our head to affirm what is said, and so on. 

So we should acknowledge that language, and any higher-level representations that are built on language, are not themselves cut off from our human embodied processes, although in some ways they allow us to think, reflect, introspect, plan, evaluate, and so forth, in ways that are not slavishly tied to the immediacy of our sensory-motor processes. 

This is a fascinating topic to think about — how our sensory-motor abilities allow us to go beyond our sensory-motor abilities.

© 2011, The Magazine of Yoga, LLC.