Moreover, it is important to realize that abstractive memory is not based on a single hierarchy but on several interlocking hierarchies pertaining to different sensory realms such as vision, hearing, smell. What is less obvious is that there may exist several distinct hierarchies with different criteria of relevance operating within the same sense modality. I can recognize a melody regardless of the instrument on which it was played; but I can also recognize the sound of an instrument regardless of the melody played on it. We must therefore assume that melodic pattern and instrument sound (timbre) are abstracted and stored independently by separate filtering hierarchies within the same sensory modality but with different criteria of relevance. One abstracts melody and disregards timbre, the other abstracts the timbre of an instrument and disregards melody as irrelevant. Thus not all the detail discarded as irrelevant by one filtering system is irretrievably lost, because it may have been retained and stored by another filtering hierarchy with different criteria of relevance.
The recall of an experience would then be made possible by the cooperation of several interlocking hierarchies, which may include different sense modalities, for instance, sight and sound or odour, or different branches within the same modality. You may remember the words of the aria 'Your Tiny Hand is Frozen', but have lost the tune. Or you may remember the tune after having forgotten the words. And you may recognize the unique timbre of Caruso's voice on a gramophone record, regardless of the words and the tune he is singing. But if two, or all three of these features have been abstracted and stored, the recall of the original experience will have more dimensions and be the more complete.
The process could in some respects be compared to multi-colour printing by the superimposition of several colour-blocks. The painting to be reproduced -- the original experience -- is photographed through different colour-filters on blue, red and yellow plates, each of which retains only those features that are 'relevant' to it: i.e., those which appear in its own colour, and ignores all other features; then they are recombined into a more or less faithful reconstruction of the original input. Each hierarchy would then have a different 'colour' attached to it, the colour symbolizing its criteria of relevance. Which memory-forming hierarchies will be active at any given time depends, of course, on the subject's general interests and momentary state of mind.
Although this hypothesis represents a radical departure from both the behaviourist and the Gestalt schools' conceptions of memory, some modest evidence for it can be found in a series of experiments carried out in cooperation with Professor J. J. Jenkins in the psychological laboratory of Stanford University;* and more tests on these lines can be designed without much difficulty.
* See Appendix II. This is a rather technical paper of possible
interest to experimental psychologists, which the general reader
can safely ignore. The gist of the experiment was to show to each
subject for a fraction of a second only (by means of an apparatus
called a tachistoscope) a number of seven or eight digits, and
then let him try to repeat the sequence. The results of several
hundred experiments show that a highly significant number of errors
(approximately fifty per cent) consisted in the subject correctly
identifying all numbers in the sequence, but inverting the
order of two or three neighbouring digits. This seems to confirm
that the identification of individual digits, and the determination
of their sequential order, are carried out by different branches
of the perceptual hierarchy.
14
The 'colour printing' hypothesis may provide part of the explanation of the complex phenomena of memory and recall, but it is based solely on the abstractive type of memory which by itself cannot account for the extreme vividness of the 'spotlight' type of memory mentioned at the beginning of this chapter. It is a method of retention based on principles which seem to be the exact opposite of memory formation in abstractive hierarchies. It is characterized by the recall of scenes or details with almost hallucinatory clarity. They are rather like photographic close-ups, in contrast to abstractive memory's aerial panorama seen through a haze. The emphasis is on detail, which may be a fragment, torn from its context, that survived the decay of the whole to which it once belonged -- like the single lock of hair on the shrivelled mummy of an Egyptian princess. It may be auditory -- a line from an otherwise forgotten poem, or a chance remark by a stranger overheard in a bus; or visual -- a wart on Nanny's chin, a hand waving farewell from the window of a departing train; or even refer to taste and smell, like Proust's celebrated madeleine (the French pastry, not the girl). Though often trivial from a rational point of view, these spotlighted images add texture and flavour to memory, and have an uncanny evocative power. This suggests that, although irrelevant by logical criteria, they have some special emotive significance (on a conscious or unconscious level) that caused them to be retained.
Nobody, not even computer designers, thinks all the time in terms of abstractive hierarchies. Emotion colours most of our perceptions, and there are indications that our emotive reactions also involve a hierarchy of levels -- including archaic structures in the brain which are phylogenetically much older than the structures concerned with abstract conceptualizations. One might speculate that in the formation of 'spotlight memories' these older levels in the hierarchy play a dominant part.
There are some further considerations in favour of such a hypothesis. First, from the neurophysiologist's point of view, they receive strong support from the Papez-MacLean theory of emotions.* Second, from the standpoint of the communication-theorist, abstractive memory generalizes and schematizes, while spotlight memory particularizes and concretizes -- which is a much more primitive method of storing information.** Third, from the standpoint of the psychologist, abstractive memory would be related to insightful learning and spotlight memory to a process resembling imprinting. But imprinting in Konrad Lorenz's geese is restricted to a critical period of a few hours, and apparently results in a very coarse and vague imprint. On the human level, imprinting may take the form of eidetic imagery. According to Jaensch [22] and Kluever [23], a considerable proportion of children have the eidetic faculty -- they are able to 'project' a photographically accurate, coloured image of a previously fixated picture onto a blank screen and to repeat this after long intervals, sometimes even years. Penfield and Roberts' [24] experiments, evoking what is claimed to be total recall of past scenes by electrical stimulation of the patient's temporal lobes, may be a related phenomenon.
* See above, Prologue.
** The term 'information' in modern communication-theory is used in
a more general sense than in common parlance. Information includes
anything from the colour and taste of an apple to the Ninth Symphony
of Beethoven. Irrelevant inputs convey no information and are called
'noise' -- on the analogy of a noisy telephone line.
But though apparently quite common in children, eidetic memory tends to vanish with the onset of puberty, and is rare among adults. Children and primitives live in a world of visual imagery. In William Golding's novel The Inheritors, the author makes his Neanderthalers say, instead of 'I have thought of something,' 'I have a picture in my head.' The eidetic child's way of 'imprinting' pictures on the mind may represent a phylogenetically and ontogenetically earlier form of memory formation -- which is lost when abstractive, conceptual thinking becomes dominant.
To sum up, abstractive memory, operating through multiple interlocking hierarchies, strips down the input to bare essentials according to each hierarchy's criteria of relevance. Recalling the experience requires dressing it up again. This is made possible, up to a point, by the cooperation of the hierarchies concerned, each of which contributes those aspects it has deemed worth preserving. The process is comparable to the superimposition of colour-plates in printing. Added to this ar
e 'spotlight' memories of vivid details which may include fragments of eidetic imagery, and carry a strong emotive charge. The results of this exercise in re-creating the past is a kind of collage, with glass eyes and a strand of genuine hair stuck on to the hazy, schematized picture.
15
When the centipede was asked in which precise order it moved its hundred legs, it became paralysed and starved to death because it had never thought of this problem before and had left its legs to look after themselves. When an intent is formed at that top level of the hierarchy which we call the conscious self -- an intent such as tying one's shoelaces or lighting a cigarette -- it does not directly activate the contractions of individual muscles, but triggers off a coordinated pattern of impulses -- functional holons -- which activates sub-patterns, and so on. But this can only be done one step at a time; the top echelons in the hierarchy do not normally have direct dealings with the lowly ones, and vice versa. Brigadiers do not concentrate their attention on individual soldiers; if they did, the operation would go haywire. Signals must be transmitted by 'regulation channels' as the army calls them, i.e., step by step up or down the levels of the hierarchy.
This statement may sound trivial, but ignoring it carries penalties of various kinds. The short-circuiting of intermediary levels by focusing conscious attention on activities which otherwise proceed automatically, usually ends in the centipede's predicament -- reflected in symptoms that range from the awkward condition we call 'self-conscious' behaviour to disorders such as impotence, stuttering or spastic colons. Viktor Frankl, the founder of 'logotherapy', coined the term 'hyper-reflection' for disorders of this type. [25]
On the other hand, the ancient practices of Hatha Yoga and some derivative techniques at present much in vogue aim at deliberate control of visceral and neural processes (including the alpha waves of the brain), through meditation aided by biofeedback gadgets. But under normal conditions, the 'one-step rule' holds in all types of hierarchies -- from ontogeny and phylogeny to social institutions and the processing of the sensory input on its step-wise ascent from the receptor organs to consciousness.
16
I have repeatedly referred to the 'apex' of the hierarchy. Some hierarchies do indeed have a well-defined apex or peak, and a definite bottom level -- e.g., a small business enterprise with a single proprietor and a stable work force. But the grand holarchies of existence -- whether social, biological or cosmological -- tend to be 'open-ended' in one or both directions. A laboratory chemist, analysing a chemical compound, is engaged in a stepwise operation, where the apex of his tree -- the sample to be analysed -- is on the molecular level of the hierarchy, branching into chemical radicals, branching into atoms. For his particular purpose this hierarchy of a limited number of levels is sufficient. But from a broader point of view, which takes into account sub-atomic processes, what appears to the chemist as a complete tree turns out to be merely a branch of a more comprehensive hierarchy. Just as holons are, by definition, sub-wholes, so all branches of a hierarchy are sub-hierarchies, and whether you treat them as 'wholes' or 'parts' depends on the task in hand. The chemist need not bother about the so-called elementary particles which, as somebody remarked, have a disconcerting tendency not to remain elementary for very long, and seem to consist ultimately -- or penultimately -- of patterns of energy-concentration or stresses in the universal foam of space-time. Our laboratory chemist can safely ignore these surrealistic developments in modern quantum physics; but he must not forget -- under the penalty of mental dehydration -- that his tidy little hierarchic tree extends only through a very limited number of levels in the great open-ended hierarchies of being.
The same applies at the other end of the scale to the astronomer faced with the wheels -- within -- wheels display of solar systems, galaxies, galactic clusters and the possibility of parallel universes in hyper-space.
By way of a summary, I would like to call the reader's attention to Appendix I, 'Beyond Atomism and Holism -- The Concept of the Holon'. This is the edited text of a paper read at the Alpbach Symposium which attempts to put into concise form the characteristic properties of open hierarchic systems discussed in this chapter (and also some other properties, still to be discussed).
II
BEYOND EROS AND THANATOS
1
One further universal characteristic of holarchic order which remains to be discussed is of such basic importance that it deserves a chapter to itself.
The holons which constitute a living organism or a social body are, as we have seen, Janus-like entities: the face turned towards the higher levels in the holarchy is that of a subordinate part in a larger system; the face turned towards the lower levels shows a quasi-autonomous whole in its own right.
This implies that every holon is possessed of two opposite tendencies or potentials: an integrative tendency to function as part of the larger whole, and a self-assertive tendency to preserve its individual autonomy.
The most obvious manifestation of this basic polarity is found in social holarchies. Here the autonomy of the constituent holons is jealousy guarded and asserted on every level -- from the rights of the individual to those of clan or tribe, from administrative departments to local governments, from ethnic minorities to sovereign nations. Every social holon has a built-in tendency to preserve and defend its corporate identity. This self-assertive tendency is indispensable for maintaining the individuality of holons on all levels, and of the hierarchy as a whole. Without it, the social structure would dissolve into an amorphous jelly or degenerate into a monolithic tyranny. History provides many examples of both.
At the same time the holon is dependent on, and must function as an integrated part of the larger system which contains it: its integrative or self-transcending tendency, resulting from the holon's partness, must keep its self-assertive tendency in check. Under favourable conditions, the two basic tendencies -- self-assertion and integration -- are more or less equally balanced, and the holon lives in a kind of dynamic equilibrium within the whole -- the two faces of Janus complement each other. Under unfavourable conditions the equilibrium is upset, with dire consequences.
We thus arrive at a basic polarity between the self-assertive tendency and the integrative tendency of holons on every level, and, as we shall see, in every type of hierarchic system. This polarity is a fundamental feature of the present theory and one of its leitmotifs. It is not a product of metaphysical speculation, but is in fact implied in the model of the multi-levelled holarchy, because the stability of the model depends on the equilibration of the dual aspects of its holons, as wholes and as parts. This polarity or coincidencia oppositorum is present in varying degrees in all manifestations of life. Its philosophical implications will be discussed in later chapters; for the time being let us note that the self-assertive tendency is the dynamic expression of the holon's wholeness, its integrative tendency the dynamic expression of its partness.*
* For 'integrative tendency' I shall occasionally use as synonymous:
'participatory' or 'self-transcending' tendency.
As far as the holons in social hierarchies are concerned, the polarity is obvious -- shouting at us from the headlines of the daily newspaper. But in less obvious ways the dichotomy of self-assertion versus integration is ubiquitous in biology, psychology, ecology and wherever we find complex hierarchic systems -- which is practically everywhere around us. To paraphrase Gertrude Stein again: a whole is a part is a whole. Each sub-whole is a 'sub' and a 'whole'. In the living animal or plant, as in the body social, each part must assert its individuality, for otherwise the organism would lose its articulation and disintegrate; but at the same time the part must submit to the demands of the whole -- which is not always a smooth process.
We have seen earlier on that each part of the living creature, from complex organs down to the organelles inside the cell, has its intrinsic rhythm and pattern of activity, governed by its own built-in code of rules, which makes it function as a quasi-independent unit. O
n the other hand, these autonomous activities of the holon are released, inhibited and modified by controls on higher levels of the hierarchy which act on the holon's integrative potential and make it function as a subordinate part. In a healthy organism as in a healthy society, the two tendencies are in equilibrium on every level of the hierarchy. But when exposed to stress, the self-asserting tendency of the affected part of the organism or society may get out of hand -- i.e., the part will tend to escape the restraining controls of the whole. This can lead to pathological changes -- such as malignant growths with an untrammelled proliferation of tissues which have escaped genetic restraint. On a less extreme level, virtually any organ or function may get temporarily and partially out of control. In rage and panic the sympathico-adrenal apparatus takes over from the higher centres which normally coordinate behaviour; when sex is aroused, the gonads seem to take over from the brain. The idée fixe, the obsession of the crank, are cognitive holons running riot. There is a wide range of mental disorders in which some subordinate part in the cognitive hierarchy exerts a tyrannical rule over the whole, or in which some chunks of the personality seem to have 'split off' and lead a quasi-independent existence. The most frequent aberrations of the human mind are due to the obsessional pursuit of some part-truth, treated as if it were the whole truth -- a holon masquerading as the whole.
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