The Social Brain

	Book review on Mind and love by Lloyd Fell (2010) Reviewed by David Lorimer, 2011 published in Network Review No 106
	(order this book from amazon.co.uk)

I had the pleasure of meeting the author at the Sydney group of the SMN in March (and again at the Mystics and Scientists conference), and readers will find an account of his recent lecture in the news section. This book is the fruit of 30 years reflection, bringing together developments in social neuroscience with the biological theories of Maturana and Varela, with a particular emphasis on autopoiesis - the way in which we create ourselves and meaning, largely through conversation and social interaction. Lloyd sees our minds as a fusion of love and will, more specifically as 'the property of our being which connects us to one another and our world in such a way that we can maintain our autonomous existence and create the meaning we need.' This means managing the unavoidable tension between being oneself and belonging to the world, or, as I put it in my educational project, the capacity to stand out and to fit in. We all need to be both autonomous and connected.

The structure of the book is based around seven aspects of knowing: autonomy, connection, proactive perception, 'emotioning', acceptance, conversation and unity or mindfulness. Each of these aspects has its own blind spot. When we fail to recognise our autonomy, we think of ourselves as determined by outside influences and look outside for a corresponding security. When we deny emotional interconnectedness, we place too much emphasis on abstract rationality and denigrate imagination. When we misrepresent knowledge, we overestimate expertise and underestimate the power of conversation in creating culture.

There is an interesting chapter on seeing and hearing, pointing out that perception and illusion are in fact the same process, as Richard Gregory suggested. Thoreau is quoted as saying that it is not what you look at that matters, it's what you see, while Mark Twain quipped that you can't depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus. In a visually dominated culture like our own, it is easy to forget the importance of listening, as Yehudi Menuhin observes when he says that it is not sufficient to touch and see to begin to comprehend the mystery of life, but rather we need to hear, to listen, and in this way Unite heart and mind and soul. This reminds us of our multifaceted capacities.

Another interesting chapter discusses the limits of language and metaphors, quoting Wittgenstein as saying that the limits of my language are the limits of my mind. I'm not sure if he is correct here, because it seems that he's referring to explicit rather than what Sir Michael Polanyi called tacit knowledge, which we may not be able to express in words. Metaphors are even more powerful since they 'define our reality, shape our thoughts, our plans and our expectations, and form the basis for our actions.' They are intimately connected to our sense of meaning and indeed our very self-identity. For this reason, Lloyd seeks to embrace what he calls the whole spectrum of knowing, a continuum from knowing to not knowing, from physical to spiritual, from material to nonmaterial. Chris Clarke advances a similar argument but in a rather different form in his book also reviewed in this issue.

One legacy of mechanistic thinking, as Mary Midgley and Iain McGilchrist have also pointed out, is the depreciation of feeling and emotion characteristic of right hemisphere thinking. Yet, as Lloyd insists, it is our emotional connections that make life meaningful. Indeed, thinking and feeling are inseparable, and we now know a great deal more about molecules of emotion and the importance of oxytocin. The brain is not only a means of cognition but also the social organ, as modern neuroscience has demonstrated. Culture itself is the product of a co-creative process involving different forms of social interaction. Think of the Paris salons of the 18th century, Enlightenment literary and debating societies and 19th century groups for self-improvement - I was just reading in Andrew Carnegie's autobiography about the impact of just such a club to which he belonged in New York. More recently, we have David Bohm's dialogue groups and conversation cafés as new ways of interacting more creatively and democratically. We are coming to realise the importance of meaning and the devastating effects of a culture of meaninglessness as implied by mechanistic science. We cannot live without connection to each other, to the depths within and to Nature, and books like this are a timely reminder of the many levels at which we live, encouraging us to make these connections.

(order this book from amazon.co.uk)