Alfred Korzybski Series #8
If you read Korzybski’s Science and Sanity you will find that he not only wrote a lot about the visual representational system, but he valued it as the most important one. In fact, he made visualization central to the neuro-linguistic training that he did in the 1940s. He valued the visual system over the auditory and kinesthetic channels and made comments about limiting oneself to the others could possibly infantalize a person.
He also used his “levels of abstraction” to provide a mathematic explanation for translating the processing levels in the brain so that we can translate "dynamic" states into "static" states and vise versa. And why would we want to do that? Primarily because there are both brain and representational levels in the movies that we visually represent. There are levels within those movies— levels processed at different levels and in different ways that creates two kinds of experiences: emotional experiences and mindful-conceptual experiences.
In 1933 neuro-linguistic training focused on distinguishing the levels of abstracting. The reason is so that we do not confuse different the logical or meta levels. And one of the ways Korzybski did this was what he called “training in visualization.”
"... experience and analysis show that all forms of identification may be successfully eliminated by training in visualization ...” (p. 423)
What is the mathematical function that we can do in our mental processing via visualization? Namely, we are able to translate a dynamic experience into a static representation. And why do that? So that by analyzing the static representation we can not only feel and experience the story emotionally, but also understand it at a higher level of perception. And by going in that direction, we can also go in the other direction—and translate a static representation back so that we experience it as dynamic thereby translating what we know into neurology and muscle memory.
Korzybski illustrated all of this by referring to watching a movie. Normally we experience a moving picture as dynamic and because we do, we experience it as emotionally moving. We “live through” the visual images as if it was our experience— it induces us into states and emotional experiences.
"When we watch a moving picture representing some life occurrence, our 'emotions' are aroused, we 'live through' the drama; but the details, in the main, are blurred, and a short time after seeing it either we forget it all or in part, or our memory falsifies most effectively what was seen. It is easy to verify the above experimentally by seeing one picture twice or three times, with an interval of a few days between each seeing. The picture was 'moving', all was changing, shifting, dynamic, similar to the world and our feelings on the un-speakable levels. The impressions were vague, shifting, non-lasting, and what was left of it was mostly coloured by the individual mood, etc. while seeing the moving picture. Naturally, under such conditions, there is little possibility of a rational scientific analysis of a situation.
"But if we stop the moving film which ran, say, thirty minutes, and analyse the static and extensional series of small pictures on the reel, we find that the drama which so stirred our 'emotions' in its moving aspect becomes a series of slightly different static pictures, each difference between the given jerk or grimace being a measurable entity, establishing relations which last indefinitely.”
Here are two ways to view a movie and each way evokes a different state. When we look at a movie as a whole, we are induced into an emotional state. When we slow it down and view it as individual pictures, as a series of pictures, the level of our brain is activated that enables us to analyze the movie.
"The moving picture represents the usually brief processes going on in the lower nerve centres, 'close to life', but unreliable and evading scrutiny. The arrested static film which lasts indefinitely, giving measurable differences between the recorded jerks and grimaces, obviously allows analysis and gives a good analogy of the working of the higher nerve centres, disclosing also that all life occurrences have many aspects, the selection of which is mostly a problem of our pleasure and of the selection of language.” (p. 292)
Each way of viewing the movie involves a different level of the brain and therefore a different kind of understanding or intelligence. But it is not an either-or choice. We need both and we need both for different reasons.
"The moving pictures gives us the process; each static film of the reel gives us stages of the process in chosen intervals. In case we want a moving picture of a growing plant, for instance, we photograph it at given intervals and then run it in a moving-picture projector, and then we see the process of growth. These are empirical facts, and the calculus supplies us with a language of similar structure with many other important consequences." (p. 292)
In a movie the same “information” is communicated at two levels—separately as a series of static images that are measurable in their differences. At this level and dimension we can see and appreciate the differences. Seen in this way we can learn new things that we didn’t see before. Seen as a movie, we see something else that cannot be seen at the separate static level, we see the gestalt— the overall experience and it moves us.
Similarly the human nervous system has two key parts for differentiating the dynamic and the static. "The cortex receives its material as elaborated by the thalamus. The abstractions of the cortex are abstractions from abstractions, and so ought to be called abstractions of higher order.”
Both of these kinds of thinking, the emotional one and the thoughtful or mindful one which enables us to process the same information conceptually, are needed. The first level of thinking occurs in the lower levels of the brain and generates our emotional thinking which creates a sense of an alive world, always shifting and changing.
"According to our daily experience and scientific knowledge, the outside world is an ever-changing chain of events, a kind of flux; and, naturally, those nerve centres in closest contact with the outside world must react in a shifting way. These reactions are easily moved one way or another, as in our 'emotions', 'affective moods', 'attention', 'concentration', 'evaluation', and other such semantic responses. In these processes, some associative or relational circuits exist, and there may be some very low kind of 'thinking' on this level. Birds have a well-developed, or, perhaps, over-developed, thalamus but under-developed and poor cortex, which may be connected with their stupidity and excitability.
"Something similar could be said about the 'thalamic thinking' in humans; those individuals who overwork their thalamus and use their cortex too little are 'emotional' and stupid. This statement is not exaggerated, because there are experimental data to show how through a psycho-neural training the semantic reaction in such cases, can be re-educated, and with the elimination of the semantic disturbances, there is a marked development of poise, balance, and a proportional increase of critical judgement, and so 'intelligence'.
The higher level generates our conceptual thinking:
"When these shifting, dynamic, affective, thalamic-region, lower order abstractions are abstracted again by the higher centres, these new abstractions are further removed from the outside world and must be somehow different.
"In fact, they are different; and one of the most characteristic differences is that they have lost their shifting character. These new abstractions are relatively static. ... The value is chiefly in the fact that such higher order abstractions represent a perfected kind of memory, which can be recalled exactly in the form as it was originally produced." (pp. 290-1)
[So in a movie] "... we see a very good representation of life with all its continuity of transitions between joy and sorrow. If we look at an arrested film we find a definite number of static pictures, each differing from the next by a measurable difference or jump, and the joy or sorrow which moved us so in the play of the actors on the moving film, becomes a static manifold of static pictures each differing measurably from its neighbour by a slightly more or less accentuated grimace.”
A movie in slow motion enables an observer to see processes that are too fast at the normal speed to see and detect. Today we film things, slow the film down to the slow-motion speed and learn a lot about the dynamics involved in various activities and experiences.
"If we increase the number of pictures in a unit of 'time' by using a faster camera and then release this film at the ordinary speed, we get what is called slow motion pictures ... In them we notice a much greater smoothness of movements which in life are jerky, as, for instance, the movements of a running horse. They appear smooth and non-jerky, the horse looks as if it were swimming.”
Next we can slow things down even more for an even more thorough study or modeling.
"The above ... is the best analogy ... of the working of our nervous system and of the difference between orders of abstractions. Let us imagine that someone wants to study some event as presented by the moving picture camera. What should he do? He would first see the picture, in its moving, dynamic form, and later he would arrest the movement and devote himself to the contemplation of the static extensional manifold, or series, of the static pictures of the film. It should be noticed that the differences between the static pictures are finite, definite and measurable.”
All of this highlights the power of taking any experience and viewing it from multiple perspectives.
"The power of analysis which we humans, possess in our higher order abstractions is due precisely to the fact that they are static and so we can take our 'time' to investigate, analyse, etc. the lower order abstractions, such as our looking at the moving picture, are shifting and non-permanent and thus evade any serious analysis. On the level of looking at the moving film, we get a general feeling of the events, with a very imperfect memory of what we have seen, coloured to a large extent by our moods and other 'emotional' or organic states. We are on the shifting level of lower order abstractions, 'feelings', 'motions', and 'emotions'. The first lower centres do the best they can in a given case but the value of their results is highly doubtful, as they are not especially reliable.
So we need both perspectives. With both the emotional experience and the considerate thoughtful understanding of an experience, different levels of our brain is activated. And because of the order of the brain levels, from lower to higher, we also need to bring the lower emotional processing up to the higher levels so that we can understand them. That’s what allows us to take control of them. Doling that is as Korzybski here said, a “survival mechanism” for us humans.
"Now the higher order abstractions are produced by the higher centres, further removed, and not in direct contact with the world around us. With the finite velocity of nerve currents it takes 'time' for impulses to reach these centres, as the cortical pathways offer higher neural resistances than the other pathways. So there has to be a survival mechanism in the production of nervous means for arresting the stream of events and producing static pictures of permanent character, which may allow us to investigate, verify, analyse, etc. It must be noticed that because of this higher neural resistance of higher centres and the static character of the higher abstractions, these abstractions are less distorted by affective moods. For, since the higher abstractions persist, if we care to remember them, and the moods vary, we can contemplate the abstractions under different moods and so come to some average outlook on a given problem. It is true that we seldom do this, but we may do it, and this is of importance to us." (pp. 578-9)
So in your Movie-Mind —the neuro-linguistic challenge is to welcome and embrace experience at the lower and the higher levels, to feel them emotionally and to understand them conceptually. And after you have taken the time for analysis, investigation, to verify, and to contemplate, then take your “knowing” at that level and translate it back down to the emotional level so that you can experience it fully in your neurology. In Neuro-Semantics, we call that the mind-to-muscle process.
L. Michael Hall, Ph.D.
