Tuesday, April 2 at 9am Pacific Daylight Savings Time
Guest Speaker: Luca Tateo, Professor, Department of Special Needs Education, University of Oslo, Norway
Summary: Human action is based on an imaginative reconstruction of the past in function of an imagined future. Rethinking imagination in psychological sciences requires a different look at the relationship between mind and the environment. Imagination is a fundamental psychological higher function that elaborates meaning by linguistic and iconic sings, related to memory, fantasy and intelligence, playing a crucial role in scientific thinking, art, and societal change.
Please Contact Francine Smolucha at lsmolucha@hotmail.com for the Zoom link (and send her any questions or topics you would like to discuss.)
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Throughout our Spring 2024 sessions there were many important lines of inquiry that need to be explored further.
Luca Tateo’s presentation focused on “Imagination as a Higher Mental Function”.
If I understand him correctly, Luca considers semiotics as the defining characteristic of a HMF. Anna Stetsenko mentioned that classifying certain mental functions as being higher
than others could be seen as colonial oppression and we should decolonialize our terminology. I thought I heard Anna suggest using the term secondary.
Luca responded that there is nothing inherently prejudicial in the terms higher/lower or
taller/smaller. I will add that the assumption that non-Western people might lack
semiotically mediated HMFs is itself pejorative. But there is a value loading in the classification of phenomena as being of a higher order {more sophisticated, of a higher
status} that we should keep in mind.
Vygotsky’s criterion for classifying a HMF is that HMF are consciously directed by internalized speech. This is different from Luca’s criterion of semiotic thought. Also, Vygotsky used the term Higher Psychological Functions as he was including consciously directed emotions, will, attention, perception, imagination, as well as thinking in concepts.
For Vygotsky, the difference between Lower Psychological Functions and HPF is that
the lower functions are spontaneous/involuntary whereas the higher functions are consciously directed [what we might call Executive Functions]
In contemporary neuroscience, there is much interest in spontaneous/involuntary imagination associated with the Default Mode Network – and how creative imagination involves a co-ordination of spontaneous imagination (DMN) and consciously controlled/voluntary thinking (Executive Control Network). This is the topic of our next
session on April 30th.
In regard to using the term secondary to refer to HMF, the neuroscience research that
I just mentioned harkens back to Freud’s concept of primary and secondary process thinking. Primary process thought being the spontaneous imagery of dreams and daydreams. Secondary process thought being rational and reality oriented under the conscious direction of the Ego. According to Ernst Kris, creativity involves Regression in Service of the Ego (i.e. the ability to voluntarily allow imagery from the
PPT to emerge and be reworked by the SPT}. Sandra Russ has written a marvelous paper in which she makes the connections between these psychoanalytic concepts and the
neuroscientific concept of creativity as a co-ordination of the Default Mode and Executive Control networks.
The missing link. in all this. is the process of the internalization of speech and its role in the
self regulation and co-ordination of Higher Psychological functions as neuropsychological systems. With Charles Fernyhough’s research on the neural network for inner speech
(Dorsal Language Stream}, we can start to unravel how cultural development shapes the development of neural networks. {And vice versa}
The discussion was very stimulating and fruitful. I agree with Anna Stetsenko, although the use of HMF is just an established one since Aristotle (or better higher psychological function, as convetionally Vygotsky is translated). If one adopts an holistic and systemic perspective, the hyerarchy is rather a matter of configuration, not of course a value judgement. In different phases of phylogenesis and ontogenesis, different psychological functions assume different historically situated configurations (and order of appearance) in reponse to the organism-environment (or person-context relationship).
Concerning the problem of semiotic mediation, I find more productive to work with the general concept of semiosis, of which internalized speech is a special – though most powerful – case.
If one thinks in semiotic terms, also the consciously/unconsciously directed problem takes a different form. If one defines semiosis as the process of producing and interpreting signs, under some constraints, that mediate the organism/enviromnet exchanges, this is an attiribute also present in clear absence of consciousness (cells, viruses). Hence, the notion of semiotic freedom, the more independent from interpretation constraints, the more one gets close to consciously directed action (to the most complex level which is the symbolic and totally conventiona, though not totally free from cultural constraints).
My impression is that neurosciences thend to conlfate the concept of causal with a 0 degree of semiotic freedom. In other words, neuronal firing is causal to the extent that there is but one single possibitily (firing/not firing). This is not true at the level of a single cell (semiotic freedom is very llimited but not totally absent) how can it be true at the level of a neuron?
I personally like the semiotic perspective because it tends to look for continuity and articulation across levels of complexity rather than associationism and discontinuity or discrete categories. I find it also closer to Vygotsky’s idea of qualitative differences.