Perspective
The idea that memory activation is required for the emergence of temporally based scenes is the central idea in this work. It is a productive idea in that it leads to a picture where we can begin to understand why it is that music, for example, has to be played at the rate of at least one note every two or so seconds in order for the melody to sound like something, and to generate the feelings of anticipation and resolution that pervade musical experience. As long as new experiences keep the activation going we are able to make patterns out of the raw stimuli. This is good as far as it goes but there is quite a bit missing from the story. First, we do not have an adequate understanding of the Gestalt properties of auditory pattern formation. But this is a problem that is pervasive across all modalities. There is something quite strange and beautiful about the way the parts of a face make up an expression, the sense of solidity and volume that we get from holding something in the touch modality, and the way in which a song unfolds in hearing. Across the range of human experience psychology has absolutely nothing to say except that this thing we call Gestalt happens where we end up with the whole being greater than the sum of the parts.
It so happens that in hearing we need some kind of memory activity to create auditory scenes and we are able to measure some of the properties of this memory without being able to say exactly what these scenes are. This leads to the second problem, that we do not know how successive moments of activation lead to the impressions we have of temporal pattern. What we do know is that if the memory activity created by one stimulus decays before the next stimulus arrives, then there is no experience of pattern. This is what the 40 bpm metronome limit is all about. But we do not understand what is happening below 40 bpm in the mind. There is some kind of cognitive glue that joins successive experiences together and it requires memory activation. That is the limit of this theory.
I believe that we have been given a strong hint about where to look for the answers to the central questions surrounding our experience of temporal pattern. If it is not a coincidence that the gait cycle is the time that memory activation decays then we should be developing a psychology that is linked to the body. This is not a crazy or even a new idea. It has long been suggested, for example, that kinesthetic experience underlies the development of the visual system. There is this thing called the kitten carousel. One kitten sits on the carousel and goes around and around. Another kitten is attached to the outside of the carousel and causes it to move. Both kittens have the same visual experience. The difference is that one is being carried around and the other is using its body to move around. The kitten that is carried around develops abnormally with low visual function. We have to move in order for the visual system to mature. This idea has been taken even further by a guru in the field of visual perception by the name of James Gibson. Gibson figured out that motion is necessary if we are to see the world as being in-the-round. You will notice after some reflection that you do not see the world from your point of view. We see the world from the point of view of being in it, not observing it from a particular vantage point. This is what theater in-the-round tries to achieve and it is what our visual system achieves with every moment. Gibson reasoned that this sense of the world being-in-the-round occurs gradually as we observe it from many station points over a developmental life-span.
I want to take these ideas one step further and suggest that both hearing and thinking generally are linked to the body. Although we think of our minds as being separate from our bodies, I would suggest that this is not true and the kind of animal we are and the ecology we live in determines what kinds of thinking occurs. In other words, we are not computers that use a kind of neuronal circuitry to effect general computation, but rather are nervous systems that are enmeshed in a body that is trying to stay alive. The general picture in cognitive psychology is that “we” inhabit our bodies and this leads to thinking about cognition as computation. A better way to think might be to just bite the bullet and say that we are our bodies and try to develop a psychology that is principally about how the body is embedded in its world.
The body has a certain feeling to it, called proprioception in the technical literature. This feeling, whatever it is, appears to be reiterated in the way we experience and structure time. From this point of view we are led to the somewhat odd perspective that the stream of consciousness and the way we listen are abstract examples of walking but they are nevertheless controlled by the feeling of walking and the limits that gravity sets on the mechanics of walking.
