THE ACTING MIND

The role of motricity in mental representation processes.

Montessori Centenary Conference, 1907-2007, Rome January 1^st, 2007

Alberto Oliverio

University of Rome “La Sapienza”

Growing knowledge on brain functions point out to the important role of sensorimotor processes in different cognitive operations. The function of motricity has been accounted for when the stages of infant development are considered, namely in Jean Piaget’s theories, but also in terms of their pedagogical implications. Today, the availability of brain functional data, mostly related to brain imaging such as functional nuclear magnetic resonance (fNMR) almost give birth to a “neuro-pedagogy”, in line with the theories and methods of Maria Montessori: as a matter of fact she has often stressed out the important outcome of a direct involvement of the child, and more specifically of his motor competency within the framework of child development and education. “The child who has never learned to act alone, to direct his own actions, to govern her own will, grows into an adult who is easily led and must always lean on others.” (Montessori, 1932).

Today, these words acquire a very important meaning: there is a growing risk that in times in which the audiovisual culture predominates, an excessively abstract and symbolic culture, together with poor direct experiences, generate heterodirected children and therefore heterodirected adults.

During the course of its development the brain relies on tactile and motor experience in order to develop those sensorimotor areas representing the starting point for the maturation of higher cortical areas, namely those of language and complex cognitive abilities. In its precocious stages the mind of a child is mostly concrete, based on direct interactions, on a series of trials, also if unproductive, produced by the child and not belonging to a genetic program. These characteristic of the child’s mind have been described by Maria Montessori in her book on “The absorbent mind”. Well before the dawn of neuroscience and of cognitive psychology she stressed out that “Impressions do not merely enter [the child’s] mind; they form it. They incarnate themselves in him. The child creates his own ‘mental muscles,’ using from this what he finds in the world about him” (Montessori, 1967, pp. 25-26).

This statement is almost one century old: in the meanwhile, motor development has taken a central role in developmental psychobiology. For example, it has been underlined how movement play not only affects motricity but also socialization and emotional intelligence, the ability to recognize other people’s emotions and to answer empathically. Open air play involves sensations, emotions, movements and, above all, a real cognitive training. When they play, children learn social rules, take note of the material consequences of their actions, of the pain deriving from excessive rough and tumble play and learn the diplomacy necessary to restore frozen relationships.

Somatic signals play an important role in the process of constructing the mind. States of muscular tension, cardiac rhythm, changes related to the activation of the vegetative system are a series of perceptions that contribute to the representation of the outside world. The mind must take account of the body, of its movements, of the consequences of such movements and of what we will do next. The body is an essential component of the mind and it is most unlikely that any symbolic function exists without requiring, depending on or being controlled by an exchange of information with the rest of the body.

In the newborn, the so called “interactive synchrony” is the first sign of the involvement of the body. The body of infants aged a few weeks responds with a sequence of micromovements to human language. It is a sort of “dance” activated by the voice and by the rhythm of the spoken language (any language). The child does not react with this “dance” to other types of sounds: this indicates an inborn susceptibility to the human voice and also shows that language is not just a mental or abstract matter but also involves the body. The speaker himself accompanies his words with mimic and bodily micromovements: these add further meaning to his language and increase the sense of his message, thus motivating the listener to take part into the “dance”.

The role of motricity in the edification of the mind is evident since the first developmental steps: the vermicular movements of the embryo, the reflexes of the foetus and the more elaborated actions of the newborn are the building blocks of motor behaviour and of an ensuing number of “sequential” activities, based on consecutive steps. To approach this topic to a deeper extent we may start from the first stages of the life of a newborn when her mind brings to life. At the beginning the newborn has a mostly passive role and just takes note of a series of movements and actions resulting in events that involve her comfort. Each movement of her mother or caretaker has generally positive outcomes: hugs satisfy her need of physical contact, food relieves her hunger, gestures and words respond to her curiosity and need to explore the environment. An adult who approaches her, smiles, hugs, lulls her: these are the beginning of neonatal life, initially set by the movements of the adult.

Very soon, however, the newborn herself, through movements more and more selective and precise, will give birth to actions resulting in modifications of the surrounding environment. Postnatal motor development takes place gradually and is characterized by well defined stages. After a few weeks the newborn produces gross movements, for example is able to pull towards her body an object by means of a non selective movement of her arm. From the second to the fourth month she can grasp her foot, through a simultaneous grip of the hand fingers. Later on she is able to guide her hands and to develop a precision grip, as to say oppose the thumb to the index finger in order to grasp a small object such as a spoon. As time goes, these motor actions are more and more coordinated and based upon a sequence of acts depending on memories. These memories code a sequence of movements allowing to respond to specific situations.

Such motor procedures also entail more complex muscular skills as those involving the imitation of adult’s facial expressions. Limbs movements and mimicry form an initial core of motor schemes, muscular memories gradually enriched by further memories such as a sort of weft little by little woven by a progression of experiences and mental activities. These muscular or bodily memories -the technical term is procedural memories since the not involve meanings as in the case of semantic memories- represent the starting point for further linguistic skills relying upon motor sequences which are very similar to hand movements, though finalized to produce a series of meaningful sounds.

In actual fact, actions and movements play a central role in the processes of mental representation as early as the embryonic stage, when the embryo starts making a series of movements that constitute the building blocks of future motor behaviours. The embryo is first and foremost a motor organism even before being a sensory organism: action precedes sensation and not the other way round as we tend to conceptualise in most schematic representations of the mind, beginning with those of the English empirical philosophers John Stuart Min and Alexander Bain. Their diagrams present an initial sensory input which is analysed (perception) and ends with a motor output: and yet we could represent this sequence in the reverse manner by means of a cyclical diagram, and not a linear one, where the initial step is movement followed by the consequences that this produces on the surrounding environment, the perception of these consequences and the changes that such perception exercises on subsequent movements.

A. Sensory input ® Analysis ® Motor output

Modified environment

B. Motor output

Analysis Modified environment

Sensation

In a more classic representation (A) a linear sequence of events is emphasized proceeding from perception to its analysis and action. In “B”, on the contrary, events take place in a circular way: actions modify the environment and perceiving these changes induce further actions.

Within the framework of this conceptualisation, conscience is merely a mechanism through which an organism initiates movements enabling information to be collected on the present and past environment. Thinking, therefore, might merely consist in deciding what next movement will be. From this standpoint, movement is not merely a way of meeting the needs of the higher brain centres, namely the mind; it is, rather, mental activity that is the way of carrying out the actions...

This mode of considering mental reality may appear to be paradoxical and provocative: in general, motor functions are considered as being low level functions, sub-ordinate to the structures that underlie the highest cognitive activities, the rationality of “pure” thinking. Thus in most cultures, the body is considered as an entity having a lower status than the mind. In actual fact, conscious thought is strictly related to the activity of areas of the cortex that are responsible for real or “imagined” movements: in other words, the same area of the brain comes into operation both when we imagine a movement and when we are planning it. According to some neurophysiologists, like William Calvin, the evolution of some types of motor behaviour, for instance the ability to construct and manipulate instruments, has led to the prevalence of a motor logic based on the structuring of sequences of interrelated steps: little by little the motor cortex (where the neurons controlling muscles reside) and the premotor cortex (where the neurons that plan muscle movements reside) have developed a sequential capacity, inducing an area - the Broca area that controls the motor action of language - to generate the sequences of syllables that underlie speech.

In the most general terms, there is a close interrelationship between motor action and thought, from the standpoint of human natural history, from the ontogenetic point of view, and from today’s mental perspective. For instance, concentrating on a problem, that is to say, thinking, implies an increase in the muscular tension of the neck, just as relaxing our face muscles or smiling can modify our sensations and emotions as indicated by the experiments of Ekman and Friesen (1989): these experiments indicate that if an actor contracts groups of face muscles in order to end up with the facial expression of a given emotion, his muscles send signals to the brain, thus inducing vegetative changes typical of a real emotional state. In other words, composing a facial emotion from a mere muscular point of view deceives the brain-mind, thus stirring up the vegetative changes (heart rate, blood pressure, perspiration, etc.) typical of a real emotional state.

Our brain is a huge archive of motor repertories, complex schemes that the Russian psychologist Alexander Lurija defined as “kinetic melodies” to indicate the complex fluency that each of us puts into operation in going about our various everyday deeds. Brain imaging techniques, which began with CAT, proceeding to PET and functional nuclear magnetic resonance (fNMR), have contributed to the understanding of motor schemes: asking a person to think about moving his/her hand, as if to grasp an object, activates his/her premotor cortex, which is located in front of the motor cortex, in the frontal lobe. This signifies that there are areas in the brain that prepare the movement and other areas that accomplish the movement. This parallelism between imagination and action holds also within the field of imagination and sensation: indeed, just imagining an object, for instance a rose, stimulates the areas of the visual cortex that are activated when that object is actually seen. It can therefore be clearly demonstrated that planning precedes action even without using complex systems.

A further level of the relationships existing between imagination, or rather the phase that precedes the action, and the action proper, concern the existence of “mirror” (or reflecting) neurons studied by Giacomo Rizzolatti and Vittorio Gallese: these are localized in the premotor cortex of primates and are activated when an animal observes another animal making a movement. For instance, a monkey grasping an object will activate in an observing monkey the neurons in the premotor cortex that can then alert the neurons of the motor cortex to accomplish a similar action; these neurons, which establish a sort of bridge between the observer and the actor, are active also in our species and indeed are the core of mimicking, imitative behaviours that play a fundamental role in linguistic intelligence.

The complex motor schemas that govern the time sequence in the activation of the muscles of a limb are merely a procedural memory. Procedural memories are distributed among the circuits forming the brain: each procedural memory starts from a “simple” initial circuit, the one consisting of the motor nerves that descend from the brain to the bone marrow and of sensory nerves that serve to rectify any errors and send information to the brain on the state of implementation of the movement. By trial and error, the movement is corrected, refined and finally delivered to a memory that codes its scheme, finally allowing it to be carried out in a stereotyped, fluent form. You will realize how long the motor learning process is if you think of the difficulties you had as a child in learning to write and the way in which you write now. Motor control is somehow the opposite of what happens with perception: perception means constructing a representation of the outside world whereas action begins with an image of the desired consequences of a movement, and then continues by carrying it out. Acting, i.e., making movements, therefore means beginning from a map of the environment, that is to say from coordinates that depend on the parietal cortex and on the hippocampus, a subcortical structure responsible for many aspects of spatial memories. These coordinates are fed into the premotor cortex, which represents the movement, and finally to the motor cortex, the “primary” cortex that carries out the movement.

Motor control depends on a complex hierarchical system consisting of cortical and subcortical structures: of these, great importance is assigned to the so-called basal ganglia (striate nucleus, accumbens) which control cognitive activities such as spatial memories, the execution of motor actions in a given context and the motivational components of learning. The cortex and the basal ganglia are closely intertwined and they control the motivational aspects of a movement (preparing for action), its contextual aspects and state of execution: also the cerebellum takes part in these tasks. Basal ganglia and the cerebellum play also a role in different aspect of linguistic functions, a fact that increases the points of contact between motricity and language.

Studies on the relationships between brain areas and language increasingly indicate that language depends on our immediate perceptions and actions and on past memories of objects and actions. Therefore, the areas of the brain cortex that process sensory information and control movements are also involved in the various aspects of linguistic memories. For instance, uttering words indicating a colour (red, blue, yellow) activate the areas of the ventral temporal cortex that are responsible for the perception of colours; uttering words relative to movements (running, hitting, screwing) activates areas located in front of those involved in the perception of movements as well as the motor areas of the frontal cortex.

Instead of being an extremely specific and autonomous system, language depends on complex coordination with other systems and areas of the brain linked to the representation of objects, perception and motor actions. In other words, there are interactions between the areas that are specifically responsible for language, such as Broca’s or Wernicke’s araeas, and those that refer to the body, to the environment and to the context in which the body operates. In order to appreciate the interactions between language structures and motor structures it will be sufficient to do the following experiment. Ask a friend to speak and you repeat what he is saying while he is speaking, as if you were his “shadow”. As you do so, start to tap the table with the middle finger of your right hand at a regular rhythm; now try doing the same with the middle finger of your left hand. For most people it is more difficult to tap the table with the middle finger of the right hand (controlled by the motor cortex of the left hemisphere) since a competition takes place between the language and motor resources of the left hemisphere. The same occurs when a deaf-mute individual imitates the sign language of another person while tapping the table with his right hand.

The logic of our body and of its movements in the context in which we live (up, down, sideways, inside, rotation, etc.) could represent the foundation on which the operational logic of language is based. On the basis of this assumption, many of the motor operations are so important in terms of body experiences that they are translated into classes of perception, behaviour and language conventions that are fairly universal. So the “verticality” schema emerges from the use that we make of the aspects of experience (getting up, getting to, climbing up, etc.) that give shape to linguistic concepts and structures. Metaphors such as “the tension is rising”, “prices are falling”, “reaching the top”' and so on, emerge from body experiences innate with our motor and perceptive experiences. Similarly, kinaesthetic experiences like upwards, downwards, to the right and left, inside and outside, have gradually provided the physical and concrete basis for the development of symbols and metaphors that are used in language. In developmental terms language is believed to be the product of the refinement and enhancement of a series of cognitive activities already involved in sensory, motor, memory and communication functions. Speaking, namely articulating a sequence of syllables, is similar, in terms of sequential muscle events, to those that brought our ancestors to chip a stone or to throw a spear. Thus, in evolutionary terms, language may be considered as the product of refining and potentiating a series of cognitive activities already involved in motor and sensory functions as well as in memory and communication.

In general, both in developmental psychology and in general psychology, we tend to divide the various aspects of mental function, in the belief that they are autonomous modules: in actual fact the mind, whether it be language or other cognitive and perceptive functions, has its own sort of unity and is influenced by its motor constituents, the oldest component in evolutionary terms which depends on systems, such as the cortex, basal ganglia and cerebellum, that encompass motor, motivational and cognitive features. Among these cerebral nuclei the striatal formation (caudatus-putamen and accumbens) takes a central role. The ventral striatum is reached by information originating from the limbic system, an ensemble of nuclei involved in emotional functions such as the amygdala, the hippocampus, the prefrontal and entorinal cortex. Therefore the striatum represents a crossroad between the limbic system and the frontal cortex and exerts a crucial role in attention, motivation, reinforcement and in behavioural expression. The latter implies muscular tensions, actions, facial expressions -as also shown by Ekman and Friesen (1989)- that not only inform the mind on the state of “its” body but also tell other people what our emotions, motivations and intentions are. Motor components have been until now undervalued in favour of a cognitive disembodied dimension: this does not mean that we should ignore the phenomenological aspects of experience or those general schemes and views that confer unity to our vision of the world, but that we should not undervalue the bodily aspects of our interaction with the environment and with our mind.

In conclusion, language, duly considered as one of the most important functions of human mind, when it is not regarded within the abstract view of philosophy or logics only, points to a continuum that spans from movements and gestures to abstract meanings. Verbal language is at the top of a chain of acquisitions based upon complex relationships where gestures and sensations not only warrant the contact with the outside world, but also the meaning of words and their memorization. This syncretism, typical of child learning, is at the ground of progressive language interiorizing. Thus, the case of language tells us, in the most general terms, that in its initial stages child learning is syncretic: the younger the child, the more he will learn by “immersion”, very little by abstract analysis or reasoning. In order to promote his learning the child must be plunged in a sort of sensory bath where gestures, postures, movements and emotions motivate and confer efficacy to his experiences. Well before the rise of neuroscience, Maria Montessori has underlined many years ago a primary aspect of development: the importance of motor control and of a direct involvement of the child, two factors that have relevant consequences on cognition and that underline the existence of close mind-body relationships in every age of life.

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Abstract. The acting Mind.

Somatic signals play an important role in the process of mind construction. States of muscular tension, cardiac rhythm, changes related to the activation of the vegetative system and emotions are a series of perceptions that contribute to the representation of the outside world. The mind must take account of the body, its movements, the consequences of such movements and of what we will do next. The body is an essential component of an extended mind and it is most unlikely that any symbolic functions exist without requiring, depending on or being controlled by an exchange of information with the rest of the body. These factors are discussed in terms of child learning and of a “neuropedagogic” approach in which neuroscientific knowledge an the Montessori method are considered.

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