1. DISCUSSION PERIOD
A Model of the Text Generator, Michael W. Mair
A "Model of the Text Generator" purports to be an Organic Basis for Consciousness. The
Project thus represents an ultimate in theoretical ambition, and the validity of even attempting
such a thing is much challenged. These challenges take two forms.
The first comes from those, usually working in some aspect of brain science, who say that our
present state of knowledge is such that we cannot even imagine what such a model would be like.
They denigrate all such attempts to the status of a kind of after-dinner entertainment, not for
serious consideration. These critics may well be right. But it is the view of this author that we do
not know even that which we do not believe until we state it, that there are many stages in the
evolution of a true theory, as Marcel Kinsbourne has emphasized. This paper is an attempt at a
synthesis, certainly not an assertion of "how things are" in the brain and behaviour. It seeks to
render visible and explicit some trends in the literature.
The second challenge is more radical, and more ancient. Basically it comes from those who insist
that thought and experience have to be unamenable to accounting for by any mechanism. It is the
ambition of this study to contribute to the emergence of a theory whereby the brain might be
rendered "transparent," that is, completely understood in principle if not in detail. There may still
remain, when and if this is done, aspects of experience which do not seem to derive from "in here"
at all. This point of view will emerge during my paper. I am reminded of a recent conversation I
had with a woman psychologist at a conference who, on learning what it was that I considered to
be the legitimate goal of the enquiry, said, "Well., I hope you never succeed!" She never stayed to
hear the argument. If she had, she might have found the conclusion a little too unphysical.
But this second challenge has been well worked over by philosophers. For example, J. D. Searle
(1979) speaking at a recent symposium on Brain and mind, said of the theory that philosophy is
not continuous with the empirical disciplines:
I myself think that this theory is not refuted, but just became irrelevant by the march
of events. Philosophy is much more interesting today than it was twenty years ago
simply because we no longer want to make a distinction between philosophical questions
and other kinds. If this means that the empirical researchers are marching in on our territory,
so much the better, because if they look behind them, they will see that we are marching in
on their territory too.
But enough of the apologia; Kenneth Craik, writing in the 1940s, well defined the problem, and if
in attempting to formulate a stage in the solution I have looked extensively to the work of Karl
Pribram, it is not only because I reviewed the work of the latter for this Institute, but because truly
his contribution has made of these topics a "Pribram world."
From Craik (1966) :
The adequacy of our examples and explanations of animal mechanisms and behaviour will be
largely governed by the general view we take of animal life and its function. There are various
theories--such as the stimulus-response theory, the theory of instincts and drives, and the theory
of conditioned reflexes and modifiable responses. None of these seems to me to put the emphasis
in the right place; the nature of the animal and human mind seems rather to be to copy its
environment within itself in an active dynamic model which is capable of realising tendencies and
2. possibilities of that environment which are obstructed in this outer, world by the separation of the
wrong energy-relations among the parts of that environment; and once these possibilities have
been mentally realised they can often be brought to pass physically through the motor
mechanisms of man and animal. This notion of life bringing to fruition the possibilities of
things and acting as a mode of communication for the phenomena of inanimate nature seems to
fit, though perhaps in a somewhat romantic way, most of the phenomena. It entails, of course,
many actions which seem to be just responses to stimuli and also involves certain tendencies of
inner origin which suggest instincts and drives; but if the explanation is framed in terms of these
the emphasis will, I think, prove to be in the wrong place: we shall find our postulated mechanism
grossly inadequate to explain these phenomena.
I will start with an assertion. "The brain generates text."
What is text? Whole courses at the summer institute were devoted to approaching this question.
Figure 1 is a graphical transcription of certain instrumentally derived parameters of the speech-
with-movement stream with which two participants to a dialogue patterned their space-time
during a 3.7-second fragment of a half-hour-long conversation recorded four years ago. The
methods used to obtain both the data and the transcriptions of this and other fragments have been
described elsewhere (Mair, 1977), but in brief, a "four eyes" split-screen video presentation of
their faces was obtained using one video-camera and recorder, while the subjects were in elective
eye-contact. Then a three-dimensional nose movement plot ("x" and "y" co-ordinates against
time) was achieved by taking the position of each nose on the "x" and "y" axis of the video
monitor for each one-tenth of a second time interval for each fragment. The head movement plots
were drawn by the computer graphics programme "Picasso," in a format designed to be visually
pleasing. The effect is of a garden fence viewed from a first floor window, which has height ("y"
axis), recedes from and approaches the observer ("x" axis), and the long axis of which is time,
from left to right. Naturally, heads move in four dimensions ("x," "y," "z," "t") but this seems
near impossible to transcribe or represent on a two-dimensional surface such as Figure 1. That this
is the case has a resonance which transcends the merely technical aspect, and which I think of as
"The Dimension Problem."
The voice transcription was obtained by using two "Laryngographs" (Fourcin, 1974), a device
which delivers a plot of fundamental frequency against time from an impedence measure taken
across the larynx. My two young human subjects were thus captives, not only in the sense that
they were constrained in this highly structured environment, but also in that they were physically
wired up to the machines. Nevertheless, with wine, tact, and time, they would at times become
quite enrapt in each other's performance, and I have concerned myself with characteristics of the
"joint production" at these times. It is possible to point to certain characteristics of shared text
which may occur during such states. It must be admitted, however, that an important criterion in
the selection of fragments such as this for transcription was they were aesthetically pleasing.
speech and movement plots are drawn to the same scale within and between interactants, and
precisely aligned by visual inspection of plosives and visualisable auditory events such as the
striking of an object in the view of the camera.
This is then a fragment of "The Text of Everyday Life" in Paul Bouissacl's sense (Bouissac,
1977) delivered as a voice and movement choreography. It is rather like concrete poetry. Indeed,
this fragment once formed the frontispiece of a poetry magazine.
Linguists seldom attend to the nuances conveyed by speech melody. When they do, the result is
scarcely if ever convincing. Similarly semioticians and others, when they analyse poetry,
generate many words. Monique Leon, in a recent study of a fragment of French colloquial
speech, attempted to categorise all the things one can tell, or at least thinks one can tell with high
inter-observer agreement about people from the way they speak. The striking thing that a text
4. fragment demonstrates when plotted in time like this is that although such nuances are in a sense
there (I could write, I think, for ever about the contextual surround of this fragment which feels to
imbue it with such meaning), it all happened very quickly. I try to work out how the brain has
done this. My method is that of the "temporal microscope." As Reng Thom has pointed out (in a
lecture at this institute),there are two ways of studying a phenomenon: to collect many examples
and generalise--study the "species" characteristics, or to take just one example and analyse, and
then see if what one has discovered holds true for other examples. Another way of putting it
would be to say that I try to put the brain back in its natural habitat (time) to see how it turns out
this tremendously detailed object, the text, its natural product. From this and a very few other
fragments I make my as yet very incomplete theory. To the future belongs the task of seeing
whether it will work or keep on working globally.
In many words, around the time of this fragment, the male voice speaker was trying to tell his
partner the location of the technical college in Cambridge. He's already told her it was near the
station. She's said, "Well that's... well..." with high and hesitant pitch. He then said, definitively,
to clinch it, "You know where the swimming pool is." Her answering, "No," was coquettish, to
me, as if to say, "So what if I don't." At that point, he gave up this line of attack and turned
towards me (I was standing around nearby) and said (still to her): "Perhaps HE can tell you where
the swimming pool is." But first he had plonked the wine bottle which he happened to be holding
in his hand onto the table, and then they had both laughed. This fragment is also analysed in
Mair, 1977.
What is the brain doing? If one wishes to know how something works, one must know what it
does. But that has always been the problem of behavioural science, its methodology, to know
what data is. As Craik has said: "The adequacy of our examples and explanations . . . will be
largely governed by the general view we take 11 (1966). The fragment of data that I have
installed in this paper is just and only an instrumentally derived extraction from what was the
case during those 3.7 seconds. If the nuances of an extended poetical description of it, even such
as I have given, were "in it" rather than imposed on it (e.g., "he said, definitively, to clinch it...,"
or "her answering 'No' was coquettish..."), and I think the latter is at least half the reality, then
they had to be active in the very limited time span during which that text was generated. Because
it was all so quick, we can look to known temporal processes in the brain to see whether or if their
time forms intersect with the time forms in our text fragment. Truly, we might discover "how the
brain did this" (p. 43). But for them and for us, the fragment was in context, both past and future.
The text actualises the moment in the context (Benson & Greaves, 1979), and as we discuss it
now, or at some other time, we re-embed it in contexts of our own, some of which we try to infer
as theirs; and so we generate our extended poetical descriptions.
Even when I try to describe the physical characteristics of the wave forms and timings in the
fragment, I abuse the reality. I believe that one of the brain's own properties gets in the way of
felicitous description. The brain makes categories out of continuities, it "isolates out" discrete
entities in what would otherwise have been a continuum. So if I make a list of what the brain has
done in this fragment, the elements in the list are some-what arbitrarily demarcated. If I do not
create such isolates, then I cannot talk to you about it at all! Such are brains.
The Brain is:
1) Segmenting Time. This fragment has a kind of chronometer ticking in it, or more
accurately, two chronometers. One is of roughly syllable duration (Allen, 1973; Mehler, 1980),
and the other is of suprasegmental, or prosodic span. The rhythms of the second, for this
fragment, are also fitting into the rhythm of the "plonk" of the wine bottle, and of the synchrony
of the laugh. There is a supra-individual beat running through the fragment.
5. 2) A supra-individual beat implies one timing device for two people, two brains. That this
might indeed be an appropriate interpretation is seen at the temporal synchrony. Brains can work
synchronously.
3) There is melody, that is to say, fundamental frequency varies in time. The melody looks
like a trajectory. Its form has a continuity through the unvoiced phonetic patterning.
4) There are phonetic micro-patternings. These form clusters of syllable length. Other work
(Lieberman, 1972) has demonstrated that there are formants, i.e., bi-modal discontinuities in the
identification of phonemes with continuous change within their component frequencies.
5) There are non-articular movements, in this case, head movements as transcribed by the
movements of the nose. These are absolutely integrated with the temporal process of speech.
They constitute one patterning programme, one trajectory of speech with movement (Kendon,
1973).
6) There are Plans, Percepts and Cognitive Change Points. We know that there are Plans, in
the sense of motor programmes, because the time forms of the speech/movement trajectories have
clearly demarcated boundaries and singular shapes. Thus they are manifested plans, and must
have been present in the brain prior to their engagement in real time. But also, prior to plan, there
must be the percept of which the plan is a transformation. The text is an ordered concatenation of
plans and percepts. It tells a story. There must be and is relevance in the ordering of this
concatenation.
The sequence Percept/Plan/Manifestation (motor action) does not just occur at any old time, or in
any old order. It is possible to place in time, by this technique, where the Percept/Plan transition
must have come, within a very few tenths of a second, and occasionally, in other examples, within
about one-tenth of a second.
All these arbitrarily demarcated parameters of text have been fitted into 3.7 seconds in this
fragments. The brains did this. HOW?
Figure 2 is a three-dimensional model of the brain. It is a caricature, and like all caricatures, its
construction reflects the preconceptions of the artist. It represents a kind of "conceptual
anatomy," not of course the real thing--a pedagogical device for explaining my argument. It is
just the sort of thing that most neuro-physiologists abhor. An extended description is in order.
We see three paired plates, forming sections of the side walls of an oval box. The two front
(frontal lobes) and the two back (occipital lobes) are converging. The two side ones (an
imaginary compaction of parietal and temporal lobes) are parallel. This brain, like real brains, is
bilaterally symmetrical.
There is a bridge joining the two temporo-parietal plates. In real brains, it joins the paired frontal
and occipital lobes to each other as well. In fact, the identification of these three paired entities is
as arbitrary in conventional anatomy as it is in this caricature. The brain has no names. Here, to
add insult to injury, the atrophied remnant of that magnificent structure which has excited the
popular imagination so much because of the consequences of severing it has been torn away
altogether so that we can "see in" to the deeper structures. That transverse connecting band is the
corpus callosum.
The deeper structures, the core brain, were hard to draw. They are very complex, and poorly
understood. I have a colleague who spends her working life staring down a microscope at
sections of the core brain to try and have structure stand out from the tangle. Even those structures
that are larger and well-established as entities in the literature, are not immune from occasional
redefinition. Such a revolution in conceptual anatomy may be upon us in such matters as the
supposed separate anatomical and functional reality of the corpus striatum and the limbic system.
7. What is worse, without even making decisions about anatomical and functional identity, just
drawing the substance is hard. The thing bends at its top end; as the spinal cord goes through its
transitions in becoming the core brain, it kinks forward so that all one's carefully understood
topographical relations in, say, the developing story of spinal cord and brain stem, must be bent as
they change to become the poorly understood structures of the core brain.
I have represented this forward kinking in my diagram. For neuro-anatomists and anyone else
who cares, the hind brain (fourth ventricle, floor of same, with associated cranial nerve nuclei)
might be just below the kink. The cerebellum is not there at all! It would stick out of the back of
the brain stem as it approaches the kink. I have not put it in because it seems that it may just
be a very sophisticated timing device for making trajectories smooth, a kind of calculus machine
(Braitenberg, 1977). If this were so, then of course the absence of or damage to the cerebellum
would be (and IS) disastrous for the entrainment of motor programmes. But all the same, it seems
to be somewhat of a "dumb box," and can be dispensed with in our conceptual anatomy.
The aqueduct and mid-brain are located at and forward from the kink. Students of "blind sight"
(Weiskrants, warrington, Sanders, Marshall, 1974) should note that the tectum is here. We are
approaching the "business" end of this business. The Edinger-Westphal nucleus, which controls
the focus of the eye is around here. But if "focus" cannot focus (as in the blind) wherewith
shall it be focused? Focus "in mind" and focus "in sight" are tantalisingly close concepts.
Meanwhile, the cranial nerves continue to sprout from the sides of the mid-brain.
Just a little further forwards, the great tracts carrying sensation from all parts of the body get to
their great relay station, the thalamus. From there, they project somatotopically to the cortical
plates. This is not shown in this diagram. Nor are the great descending tracts in the "internal
capsule," which go straight into the spinal cord and thus to effector organs, or to cerebellum, or
both, or other. They would fit, however, sprouting out sideways from thalamus to cortex, and
plunging down on either side of the thalamus into the cord, between the central kinked stem
(bifid up front), and the paired "ears." How strange to caricature the brain and just leave out the
fibre tracts of the internal capsule! There is an embryological justification and a new
interpretation of conceptual anatomy which justifies this omission. The paired thalami, the relay
stations, are here imagined to be in each side of the bifid front portion of the stem.
Now what of these ears? "Up Front," here, we have a bewildering array of clumps of cells and
fibre tracts, with their inter-connections which have been conceptually demarcated into such
entities as the Basal Ganglia (Caudate, Putamen, Globus Pallidus, perhaps red nucleus and
substantia nigra, perhaps including even the subthalamic nucleus, the one to which damage
appears to give the wild yet formed movements of hemiballismus and chorea), the Hypothalamus
which is the supposed "head ganglion," of the autonomic system yet whose lateral nuclei are
involved with such motor processes as the satiation of hunger and thirst; and the Limbic system,
this controversial set of entities, sometimes thought of as a circuit, which are thought by some to
constitute a "visceral" (MacLean, 1978), i.e., base functions brain, but to which some others, like
Karl Pribram, and the author of this paper following him, seek to ascribe such elevated tasks as
the generation of the text itself. This supposed system includes the hippocampus, of "memory"
fame, the amygdala, the pillars of the fornix, the lateral hypothalamus, the mammary bodies, the
septal nuclei, and the nucleus accumbens. For a thorough description of this system the reader is
referred to Isaacson (1974). But it must be emphasised that exploration of these core brain
structures is very much "hot topic" in contemporary neuro-physiology. What I have done is just
to say that the core brain structures can be thought of as a circuit, lumped them all together, and
drawn them accordingly. This renders explicit one trend in neuro-physiological thinking. It
thereby negates others; but it makes our model make sense, if not the reality.
8. Action segments time. It also delivers a world that has been conceptually rearranged. My "C"-
shaped core brain circuits are incomplete. They are closed by action on the world. As one acts
(the down push on the pedal of the bicycle), one monitors what one has done, and it is this which,
in association with an idea of direction, engenders the next action, and so on. So we pedal
through time, in which we can only travel one way, and thus engender or have engendered for us
the experience, the sort of time we are having in both conceptual and segmentary senses
simultaneously. The circuit lays down a track in time, a text. Only the unfortunate with specific
hippocampal damage can achieve the Zen ideal of "no track" (Leggett, 1977).
Is there any evidence that the brain works even remotely like this? Naturally, I say yes. Karl
Pribram is one who may have had such an idea in mind since at least 1960 (Miller, Gallanter &
Pribram, 1960). With his co-authors then, he speculated on the limbic system as the "processor,"
a terminology which although not that of a circuit, certainly gives it a bigger function than that of
mediating those imagined entities, the "emotions." More recently, in a paper "How Is It That
Sensing so Much We Can Do So Little?" (Pribram, 1974), he describes the way that the basal
ganglia might play an active role in perception. in between these two papers we have many
others from him, on "Attention," which subdivide that concept into registration, effort, and
readiness/significance mediated by Hippocampus, Amygdala, and Basal Ganglia respectively
(Pribram &McGuinness, 1980). Creuzfelt too (1979) writes warmly of the basal ganglia in this
regard, and there is the work of R. Hassler (1978) that he cites in which that author says (of his
work on cats): "the three parts of the Corpus Striatum control intentional actions (my emphasis)
and not simple movements without conscious representation." Perhaps we might conceptualise
the core-brain as a kind of "circuit of the self" and this notion becomes an effective organiser of
many observations on cortical (as distinct from core-brain) pathology--the self in the sense of
acting subject can be there, despite the scotomas,. specific incompetences, distortions of body
schema, personality changes, and localised motor weaknesses of cortical damage and atrophy
(Gardner, 1977). It is of special interest to note that babies with very little in the way of a cortex
can do surprisingly well, sometimes for months, in eliciting by their relevant motor actions the
caring behaviours in their custodians necessary for their physical survival. But lesions produced
within the core brain itself produce specific, repeatable, and drastic consequences for behaviour.
Again Isaacson chronicles these effects, but the phenomenon of supra-nuclear palsy (a slowing
down without loss of competence) is well known. I have personally seen unfortunates with intact
cortices who are awake, but do--nothing. They had had tumours scooped out of their
hypothalamuses. Finally, it has been found possible (Robbins, Sahakian,.1979; Kelly, Seviour,
Ivreson, 1975) to differentiate the polar opposites perseveration and hyperactivity (doing the
same thing again and again, and doing many different things very quickly) by specifically placed
"transmitter lesions," a kind of internal bombing of cells working with particular transmitters.
The structures involved appear to be a component of the corpus striatum, and the nucleus
accumbens. Perhaps, later in this paper, when we come to try and make a mathematical reality of
the notion of "cognitive change point," we should put that part of our text generator circuit just
there. After all, it is transmitter disturbance which characterises the "high" of LSD, the same
transmitter (on the Dopamine series) which is crucial, up here, in the circuit of the self. The oors
of perception might be cleansed thereby (Huxley, 1954), but participation in text, that is, in the
concatenation of relevancies shared by others, is decidedly impaired.
Now what of the cognitive change points, which subjectively we might identify as the moments
when we realise something. We might also realise Consciousness as the span of time and
structure between these. I take this idea of Consciousness being none other than the dominant
plan from Tim Shallice (1972, 1978). The fact that it involves spatial span as well as temporal
segment is most interesting, and will be highly relevant when we come to discuss the Fourier
transform analysis of sensory input that the cortex may be doing. As Shallice points out (1978),
that little space called consciousness would in this model not be the end of the road in our search
9. for the springs of human action "in there." I avoid making a hierarchy of this, but that little space
of consciousness, always and forever just too short to be caught by itself (a finite limit to
introspection) is evidently but the tip of the iceberg of a vast organisation.
But as distinct from Shallice, who would seem to see a kind of competition occurring on the
cortical surface for access to the "action system," between plans (and Mountcastle 1979) argues
similarly when he writes of the "Command Function"), I am arguing, after Pribram, that it is the
core-brain which accesses, selects, and delivers from the diversity of informations present in the
parallel processing cortex (and employing and validating from the "frontal stacks") the
concatenation of relevancies that constitutes the text, segmenting time as it does it. From Craik,
it may be the cortex which has the "active dynamic model" of the environment, and the core-
brain which realises the possibilities in the relations between parts of that environment, thus
bringing them to pass physically through the motor mechanisms (Craik, 1966).
What of this parallel processing cortex, where everything is going on all at once? The reciprocal
arrows from core-brain to cortex in Figure 2 are not thalamic projections or cortical projections to
the spinal cord. They are meant to symbolise this reciprocity whereby the core-brain can access
selectively. Accessing selectively can be interpreted as either turning off diversity or letting in
singularities. Hence the reciprocity in the arrows. It is quite possible that this reciprocal relation
to the cortex is not everywhere in the core-brain. My guess would be that it is the property of the
Corpus Striatum.
In his book on the limbic system, Isaacson (1974) calls the cortex "The Guru" because he stresses
its abilities in the manipulation of time. Certainly the human brain has most expansion in those
cortical areas--frontal and temporal lobes--which deal in plan and memory, and I have suggested
elsewhere (Mair, 1980) that the cardinal human innovation might be a "time trick"--the ability to
spend present time organising things for another time. Although the mechanism of text
generation might be the same in man and animals, animals are quite constrained in their exigeses
by their immersion in their physical environments. They can go places and do things, that is all.
Even where they would appear to make rudimentary tools (Van Lawick Goodall, 1971), they get
thrown if the context-embedded motor sequences are broken, e.g., the phenomenon that Michael
Chance has discussed as the "recombinatorial" abilities (Chance) of man as distinct from animals
in the construction of motor programmes for dealing with the world. Rene Thom (1975) has
christened this physical-context-free world of ours the Virtual World, but he stresses: "If man
has escaped from the fascination of things through the use of language, he remains under the
fascination of action incorporated in the grammar of language (a verb conjugates etc.)" (p. 311).
In a sense, in the arbitrary sign system (in Saussure's sense) of language (1966), our species would
appear to have turned out a brain product into the world (or rather a great number of such systems
of brain products) and then continued to live within these diverse logico-semantic systems (or
"Cultures"). But as far as the humble processor is concerned, this sophistication of the human
virtual world and cortex which gives us the ability to recognise a sharp phenomenological
difference between classes of sign (e.g. Peirce's Index., Icon, and Symbol [Peirce, 1940; Savan,
19761) might not be relevant to the mechanics of access, assembly, and delivery which constitute
the cycle of the text generator in man and animals alike.
On the question of "Localisation of Function," which was the topic of Karl Pribram's address to he
colloquium of the summer institute, we can see that the access problem and the localisation
problem are likely to have a joint solution. Looking once more at Figure 1, the Swimming Pool
Fragment, it is evident that the speaker had to find "swimming pool" as a concatenation of
articulatory targets very quickly, such as to deliver it as an intonational form, a trajectory.
similarly, his partner had to match this against some version of a logico-semantic system. Peter
10. Salus has referenced some work which suggests that a search procedure (looking for a word) is
self-terminating. It's like a little quantal "pulse" of search. Then one must try again.
A hologram analogy is appealing aesthetically. It would explain why there can often be such a
sparing of function with extensive cortical damage. It shows how classes of function might be
lost--there can be a regionalisation of function with the hologram model (e.g., it is true, as Karl
Pribram pointed out, that with loss of the "face area" in the Right Inferotemporal cortex
recognition of all faces is lost, not just certain particular faces [Hecean & Ajuniaguerra, 19521).
And in the matter of access, it would certainly facilitate matters to have, within a regional
specialisation, all data simultaneously co-present and at the same place. But then notions of
space and time do tend to become subjectively less comprehensible as one ascends each level of
integration in the calculus. (Like musicians, mathematicians start young!) However, we must
never lose sight of the destination of our argument--to understand the text generator. Although
the model may work by differential topology--although this and other mathematical theorems may
describe the time courses and the interactions of the processes involved, the product is text.
Where text is incomprehensible to everyday subjective understanding, then text and generator
have failed, in all senses.
In addition to these circumstantial advantages of a hologram theory of cortical processing, there is
the hard data with which Pribram and others have backed up this model of cortical (not core,
note) function. This evidence was convincing, but would need separate review. As Pribram put
it, the battle in this argument is between the "Feature Creatures," those who think that a kind of
componential analysis is performed on the world in the cortex, and that perception is a kind of
reasserably, and the "Frequency Freaks" of which he is one, who think that a Fourier Transform
analysis of both auditory and spatial frequency is performed on the world, and that perception is a
kind of "tuning in." Personally, I have seen spatial frequency analysis demonstrated for the visual
system, and am convinced that this principle plays at least some part in the operation of the text
generator.
In summary of this section on the anatomy and physiology o'f the generator, we have outlined
conceptually if not in nerve fibre and electricity a device which could generate text. It consists
of a dynamic parallel processor (the cortex), and an assembler and projector (the core). So we
swim into time, like time fish, leaving behind the debris or order of our texts. As we swim, we
move in space as well, either in the architecture of the environment, or the models of the virtual
world which we span in our arguments. I would like to conclude this paper with an attempt to
apply Rene Thom's catastrophe theory to my model of text and generator. This is of course the
most ambitious part of the enterprise --and the most speculative. But catastrophe theory is at least
a very apt metaphor for the process of text elaboration that I have observed, and would seek to
understand. It "looks pretty." The suspicion remains, however, and it is just a hint from the
aptness of it, and the timing of it, that like Fourier transform for the cortex, and theorems of
structural stability and morphogenesis may be more than a metaphor in the circuit of the core.
The Catastrophe Theory Metaphor for the Process of Text Generation: The Predator Prey Cycle
Rene Thom provides an application for his catastrophe theory in the metaphor of the cycle of
predator and prey. I find, at the level of text, that I can present a model of the process of its
generation in this way. First, I must present the diagram of the process of text generation which
is in the final paper of Steps towards Principles of Text Regulation (Mair, 1978). The
presentation is similar in format to the voices in Figure 1, but it has been both improved, and
denatured. It is improved in that the female voice "NO" has been extended into an up-going
11. melodic form, to complement the shape of the down-going male voice trajectory. It has been
denatured in that there are no phonetic micro-patternings--a "song without words."
FIGURE 3
Now that this artificial stylisation has been done, we can discuss the chief conceptual elements in
the presentation without the noise of mere contingency. We see that we have a sine wave, the
nodes of which are punctuated with a Percept/Organise/Plan sequence, deriving alternately from
one participant and then the other. Real life dialogue is seldom like this. A musical taxonomy
might best describe the diversity of overlappings, simultaneities, interruptions, and ruptures, etc.,
etc., each of which is the unique characteristic of a text episode.
However, when the process is stylised and rendered accessible to visual comprehension, we can
see that the metaphor of capture and captured (Predator and Prey) is apt. In Tim Shallice's sense
(1978), the immediate content of consciousness of the one comes to constitute the immediate
content of consciousness of the other. THIS HAS TO HAPPEN IF THERE IS MUTUAL
UNDERSTANDING. Of course, there can often be interaction without contentful, shared inter-
change (and Roch Lecours used the example of "Glossolalia" in his presentation at the
colloquium). Incidentally, songs without words need not always be empty (Bouissac, 1977).
Let us explore this metaphor more fully. Catastrophe theory is an extension of the theorems of
differential calculus which have proved so manifestly successful when applied to such physical
sub-strata as the orbits of planets and the trajectories of projectiles. Naturally such applications
must allow for the perturbations of ideal trajectories contingent on the imperfections of mere
substance--mass maldistributions, wind resistance and so on. Rene Thom is decidedly coy about
the point where analogy can be homology in the application of catastrophe theory. If we have a
theory which behaves in a similar way to a process in the environment, it does not follow that the
environment is working off that theory. Is everything that snaps a catastrophe? An application so
general must be vacuous. However, let us continue. I do not have the tools to elaborate this
analogy/homology argument further. Thom's argument is that: (1) feeding implies predation, (2)
predation implies capture. He represents this as one of his diagrams of an archetypal morphology,
which may be more than just a picture--in some sense a transcription of a mathematical
transformation within the theorem (perhaps a theorem is something proven which might not
apply, a theory something which one can apply, but which has not been proven).
The idea of a diagram being a transcription from a theorem is illustrated in the top drawings of
Figure 4. Admittedly, this copying is not quite faithful to Thom. In particular, the lines should
splay out from the centre of the round figure, not half way up. Now the idea seems to be that these
12. shapes are the graphical manifestation of mathematical absolutes. So that the idea of a
discontinuity in a system achieves precise expression in them.
Figure B is a projection of Figure A. Thus as one travels in some idealised mathematical realm in
the circuit 1, 2, 0, 3, 4, 5, 1, 2, ... etc., one has thereby experienced/generated a discontinuity
drawn by yet another mathematical transcription (a kind of taking of cross-section), and sub-
figures one through five tell the story. They are sections, in a sense, of Figure A.
To understand it, it is helpful to fill the basins in the sub-figures one through five with an
imagined fluid. At:
5. All is well, there it is in one place.
1. Trouble. The singularity at that one place is being distorted. Just after 1,
2. and quite definitely by 2, it is clear that there are TWO basins. It is the fact of the sudden
development of this bi-modal condition which constitutes the "catastrophe," as in Figure A,
when proceeding downhill, one glides, or suddenly one comes to an edge.
3. At 3 the bimodality is being distorted, so that at
4. Quite suddenly, singularity is re-established once more. All the water is
5. Back in the same pot.
So we have a cycle here which generates a discontinuity, or rather two such. This is the most
elementary of the elementary catastrophes, of which there are only the finite number of seven.
And it's getting worse! Let's try and tell the story of Thom's metaphor in easy terms.
Imagine a Fat Cat. There it is at 5, digesting and content, until the biological cycle impels it to
seek prey. Then something troubles its sight. It becomes obsessed by the idea of mice. As it
approaches point 1, it in a sense has lost its identity to the very idea of mousehood. It is the prey
of the rodent species. Its nervous system has become (in Thom's terms) an "Organ of Alienation"
for it. Ah-ha. Then it spies a mouse. In an instant, it is itself again, in the sense of "Here am I.
and there's the mouse." It has an Instantaneous Cognito experience. This occurs at point 1. It is
Perception. As it leaps to engulf the poor creature, the singularity of the mouse for it, though
remaining present, diminishes until the second instantaneous event, of Capture, occurring at 4.
Thereafter, it resumes its career of the Fat Cat, until the instability endemic to its nature manifests
once more.
I have noted that in interaction there is in some conceptual sense at least a cycle. One turn round
a cycle generates a sine wave. I have illustrated this in the lower figures "C" and "D" of Figure
4. I have also noted that in speech, over the apex of the wave, a "POINT" gets made. In the
terminology of the linguist Halliday (1967), tone groups are so demarcated, information points.
I give an example of this from the second paper of Steps (Figure 4D). The percipient reader may
have already spotted what I am trying to do, but I am mixing the level of Analogy with the level
of Homology. Speech delivers percepts. The Point of Expulsion of a "POINT" in utterance may
be metaphorised by position 4 in Rene Thom's circuit. But what got predated was this
consciousness content of the other person. He, like the cat, was quite alienated into the idea of
getting the other person's idea, as the motor programme went across. We might identify this stage
with "Listening." At 1 in their own personal cycle, however, he grasped it, got the percept, or
perhaps one should say, "got the picture." The latter conception is more apt, because the moment
of perception is here being imagined as the "rush" into a stable visual percept, of which the
details--the rest of the tone group--are filled in later. The idea is that the speech of one does this
to the consciousness of the other--delivers a vision--more or less synchronously with the actual
details of the melody. This would only be so for the "enrapt" diad. We have the principle of
supra-individual beat in a text episode explained as an idea of the direct manipulation of the
circuit of the generator of one by the time form of the melody of the other.
13. FIGURE 4
I have adapted Figure 3 for this model in Figure 5. The diagrams corresponding to points 1
through 5 in the Percept/Organise/Plan/Act sequence are to be read from Figure 4. one can see
that while one "Fat Cat" rests, a kind of "refractory period" in Craik's sense (and see Figure 2),
the other is being entranced, grasping the percept, and then, through point "O" capturing, i.e.,
expelling the intrusion of the content of consciousness of the other from her own. This is her
own succeeding utterance. Of course, one can be captured by another, be unable to "cap" the
argument, be persuaded or charmed, and the model easily accounts for this. Finally, I am
suggesting that the form of the melody of the other drives one's own core-brain processor. So
that's how we get to hypnotism. when you control the circuit of the self, YOU "have" the other
person completely.
15. We have, then, a model of text and generator, which perhaps does justice at least in its scope to its
subject. As Professor Stephen Hawking (1980) said in his inaugural lecture to the Chair of
Physics at Cambridge, "However it is too difficult to think up a complete theory of everything all
at one go (although this does not seem to stop some people. . . )." Yet there is a fundamental
schism in the human sciences between those who believe in the possibility of a general theory at
all, however remote its achievement might be, and those to whom the very idea is anathema. Of
what are they so afraid? Whether this theory be right or wrong, or just naive and disorganised,
the attempt was there, it seemed worth trying. What are they, who deny the right to try, so afraid
of? They need not have worried. Hawking (1980) remains convinced that space-time is four-
dimensional. It seems likely that our text generator is for processing and generating four-
dimensional shapes. That is the experience, and there is nothing in this model in more than four
dimensions. But ultimately, the model itself, even if right does not generate human reality. For
that, as it was for the original limbic time fish, one must Project (Urion, 1978).
Addendum
It has been pointed out to me that one cannot claim any sort of application of Catastrophe theory
unless one can label axes on a graph of one of the elementary catastrophes themselves. In this
addendum, I shall attempt to do this for the application of the cusp catastrophe in my model of the
process of text generation. In so doing, it has been gratifying to find how the model describing
the discontinuities in consciousness can be found embedded in the wider cultural matrix from
which convictions derive. Also, the model predicts, when so labelled, that text generation is only
possible within a certain physiological range (of values in x, y). Some of the organic brain states
can be seen as being outside this physiological range, and mimic the outcomes of interaction
when these too deliver the individual to states outside the range within which text generation can
occur.
I have termed these finite number of discrete motor patterns (such as laughter, tears, violence,
embarrassment) "Tropisms" else-where, to emphasise that when the shared text has entered in on
one of them, they tend to proceed to completion. It is as if the configuration of elements which
constitutes each immediate shared state of play has a certain internal tension which resolves into
the next state of play, which is then established by motor action either of speech or movement
direct action, in both cases, but on a model which is virtual, or physical, or an intermingling of
these analytic levels, as is usually the case in human text). This is the concatenation of
relevancies, but if any one of these states of play transgresses certain limits of instability or over-
stability, there is no more concatenation but--one of the "Tropisms" ensues. I represented this
diagrammatically in Steps Towards Principles of Text Regulation (Mair, 1977, p. 28).
An axis vertical to the paper = Time ie, continuing argument (between Tropisms)
N.B The identification and demarcation of "Tropisms" is at present a little haphazard
There was no discussion of pitch range in this "model of the text generator" paper. There were
suggestions about how pitch change creates rhythm, about how the "point" of an utterance comes
16. with the going over an apex of pitch wave (usually), and that how the identity of rhythm and
creation of the discontinuities in states of play in the mind of the other might together approach an
explanation of such phenomena as "charm" (in its performance aspect), or even hypnotism. But it
is the characteristic of longer sections of text to show a variable range over which such rhythmic
and syntactic functions of pitch are enacted, and in earlier papers I depicted a high pitch
excursion-~a "going over the top of the melody"--as a bid for topic control (Mair, 1977, p. 42).
The suggestion is that, in naive speech such as the speech of children at least, the stability or
instability of a cognitive state of play--the obstacle that one must overcome in shifting it for
example--does not only depend on the immediate contextual and longer-term cultural values of
the elements of its constitution, but also on the range in pitch with which it is delivered. In
interaction, there IS always continuity in the melody across participants, and a winning argument,
unless asymmetric status relationships have skewed the bias, WILL always recruit a melody
asymmetric to and which completes that of the vanquished opponent. This retrospective
predictability is perhaps the most disconcerting insight gained from prolonged study of single
real-time texts. It needed the concept of "Projection" to escape from that impasse, and thus, of
course, opened up the epistemologically more serious problem that the theory now has with the
concept of "dimesion".
The axes of the three-dimensional cusp can be labelled for dimensions of "x" (commitment), "y"
(pitch or energy), and "z" (change in state of play) to produce a syntheisis which transends these
divers theoretical issues.
It has to be noted that the parallelogram x, y is the control space of the third cusp, its
representation minus one dimension. Thus the dotted line circle is meant to be the cycle of normal
interaction as portrayed in Figure 4, which has a fast phase (of the discontinuity) and a slow phase
(of recovery, or refractory period), but his only holds for a certain range of values "x" and "y".
Suppose we now apply the suggested labels to these axes, we can consider some hypothetical
existential predicaments. If "x" is of a value below the cusp point at all parts of the cycle, the
17. dotted line at no point generates discontinuity. There is no state of play delivered. Action depends
on coherent plan. Such a cycle would not generate discrete actions at all. Behaviourally, this id
"Dither". Extreme hyperactivity is like that.
If one person has a high value of "x" in a state of play, then the other, travelling in "y" with his
pitch excursion, might not achieve the necessary value of "y" for that value of "x" to reach the
cusp fold. Thus the state of play of the first would remain unchanged. Here our model approaches
theoretical adequacy for such matters as "conviction in the voice." A higher value in "Y" (pitch)
for the speaker would perform the necessary "flip" in the recipient. It must be noted that this way
of argument involves a duplication within each self. Each is recipient and projector in a fashion
which interacts internally, and alternately with the other; and becomes the other in turn, the
internalisation of the other in the self. Such duplication is convenient for the explication of "inner
speech," as well as being necessary for the theory of interaction. It is of interest that Rene Thom
himself proposes a duplication of cycles (motor and sensory).
If the value in "x" is so high in one interactant that it "cannot be reached" by pitch excursion in the
other ("y") such as to change the immediate state of play, then we have confrontation, and the
tropism of "Violence" if topic is continued. Action continues, without change in cognitive state of
play. Such a synthesis employs the same model for the textual consequences of changes in "x"
and "y" as variables which are at once personal and organic.
To state the argument a different way, one can say that normal interaction can only proceed while
the individual is operating within a defined range of potential commitment and energy, the actual
position in this range for any immediate state of play being cultural and contextual; and that
normal interaction is the experience of an individual in that range as manipulated in and by the
text. The text moves the individual within the physiological range. Where the text itself moves
the individual outside that range, we get Tropisms. But for an individual whose system is already
outside that range, the text is one long tropism, and one has witnessed some unfortunates for
whom this would be an apt description; as, for example, the extreme agitated schizophrenic (low
"x," high "y"), the depressive (low "x," low "y"), the psychopath (high "x," high "y"), and the
perseverating Parkinsonian (high "x,'. low "y"). Doubtless, this is all too neat, there are other
dimensions and variables involved. But this paper is only an exploration! The author has
already exceeded the limits of his competence.
Note
I am grateful to Gereth Leng for some discussion of these ideas. He cannot be held responsible,
however, for the mathematical naivete which might remain. I have also benefited greatly from
discussion with Jane Adam and Solome Fester. I am grateful to Eileen Ghosh for her
sympathetic typing.
Cambridge, November 1980
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