1. Lars Taxén Associate Professor Linköping University, Sweden
The Activity Modalities A neurobiological perspective on coordination, action, and thinking
Lars Taxén
Associate Professor
Linköping University, Sweden
When thinking about thinking from an evolutionary point of view, thinking is obviously something that has enabled out species to survive in the world. But thinking alone does not help. You cannot just sit and watch a lion coming running at you; you have to do something. We have to act, be that running away from a predator or acting together to fulfill some social needs.
So, thinking and acting go together. The purpose of this contribution is to make an inquiry into how thinking and acting may be related.

2. Thinking without acting?
A first observation then, is it possible to conceive of thinking without action?

3. Acting without thinking?
Or acting without thinking?

4. Thinking or acting? “I do not separate thought from behavior”
Conscious?
Thinking?
Connect to Polanyi tacit knowledge
“I do not separate thought from behavior”
(Piaget, 1962)

5. Thinking and acting!
The mental is inextricably interwoven with body, world and action: the mind consists of structures that operate on the world via their role in determining action (Love, 2004)
Neural realm
Mind
Social realm
World
Analytically, we may think of this as a neural and social realms which are interwoven
And the question then is what such a point of departure implies for theorizing about thinking?

6. Theoretical inspiration
Vygotsky’s structural-systemic research program
Higher psychological processes emerge when individuals act in their cultural environments
Individuals cannot be understood without taking their cultural environment into account
The cultural environment cannot be understood without understanding the individual
Individual
Cultural
environment

7. Coordination, acting and thinking
“I do not see any way to avoid the problem of coordination and still understand the physical basis of life” (Pattee, 1976)
Acting depends on coordination
Thinking and action are inextricably related
Thus, thinking also depends on coordination
(read quote)
So the focus will be on conceptualizing coordination from a neurobiological perspective
Neural realm
Mind
Social realm
World
coordination?

8. Research problem - Which individual mental capacities are necessary for coordinating actions and thus, thinking?
In order to answer this question, we have to take a step back and look at what enables ordinary, every-day actions
Cannot understand the complex before we understand the simple

9. Contextualize relevance
Focus on target
Contextualize relevance
Which capacities must the mind have in order to participate in an activity like this?
So, to begin with, every activity is about something, in this case a concert.
In this situation, we attend to relevant things and disregard that which is not relevant, we cognize a context of relevance For example, players, guitars, scores, note stands, the public are certainly relevant.
The books in the shelves are not

10. Notation is more than 1000 years old!
Normative
Spatial
Temporal
Action is carried out using means like the guitar and the score
What is required of an individual actor in order to employ these means?
Cognize a temporal dimension …
Guido of Arezzo (991/992 – after 1033) was a music theorist of the Medieval era. He is regarded as the inventor of modern musical notation (staff notation)
Notation is more than 1000 years old!
Harmonized with human mental organization

11. Refocus to related activities
For example, when discussing with the guitar builder about how the guitar should be built

12. Requisite mental capacities
Focusing on the target Contextualizing relevance Spatial comprehension Temporal comprehension Normative comprehension Refocusing
The dimensions just outlined seems to be indispensable for carrying out any human activity

13. Contextualizing relevance Spatial comprehension Temporal comprehension
Focusing on the target
Contextualizing relevance
Spatial comprehension
Temporal comprehension
Normative comprehension
Refocusing
If we take this activity some years ago, we find the same dimensions
That is a strong indication that the ultimate origin of these dimensions are to be found in the neurobiological constitution that evolution has brought about in order for our species to act and survive in the world

14. The Activity Modalities
Objectivation
Contextualization
Spatialization
Temporalization
Stabilization
Transition
The dimensions just outlined seems to be indispensable for carrying out any human activity
Necessary mental capacities for coordinating actions
Consequently, thinking also has these aspects

15. Neural realm Social realm Activity modalities
These modalities have of course to be grounded in neuroscientific research, and this is quite naturally a tricky business indeed. This illustration is an attempt to embark on such a route, where you can see the dependencies between various capacities needed for acting.
So, for example, spatialization is realized by among other areas, the entorhinal or hippocampus areas in the brain
Based on this, by I have suggested that coordination can be considered as a higher mental function and modeled as dependencies between certain factors,
No time to explain this in detail, other NeuroIS conferences.
Staring down here with ‘conation’, striving, including desire and volition.
Sensing… attention …
The idea is then that the AMs provide, as it were, a “wormhole” or gateway between neural and social realms in that we may device external artifacts attuned to the AMs
For example, when you first come to a new place you are probably lost without a means like this – a map. After a while you get around without it. What has happened is that networks in your brain that realizes spatialization, the entorhinal or hippocampus areas, have been restructured to accommodate the new place
If these areas are destroyed by a lesion in in the brain, spatialization and thus action is inhibited

16. An example Social realm Target: travel to Tallin Objectivation
The route: actions
Temporalization
The map: orientation in space
Spatialization
The scale in km: convention
Stabilization

17. Artefacts and the activity modalities
Neural realm
Mind
Social realm
Action
Activity modalities
Artefacts
A further step in the conceptualization of the link between mind and action is provided by the notion of functional organs

18. Functional organs (Luria)
“External, historically formed artefacts such as tools, symbols, and objects ‘tie new knots [functional organs] in the activity of man’s brain’”
“This means that areas of the brain which previously were independent become the components of a single functional system”

19. Mstislav Rostropovich (1927 –2007)
Functional organs
“There no longer exist relations between us. Some time ago I lost my sense of the border between us…. I experience no difficulty in playing sounds…. The cello is my tool no more”
Mstislav Rostropovich (1927 –2007)
Here is an example
Cannot understand the whole by reduction and analysis of parts; parts get new properties by being parts in a certain whole
This is a beautiful example of the dialectics between the individual and the cultural environment, the individual is formed by the cultural and the cultural from the individual
The dialectics between the individual and the cultural environment

20. Joint action - individuals acting together
So far we have been focusing on coordinating of individual actions.
In order to theorize about the situation were several individuals work together, we may use the concept of “joint action” suggested by the American sociologist Herbert Blumer
"joint action" refers to the collective form of action that is constituted by the fitting together individual lines of behavior.

21. Common identifier Neural realm Idiosyncratic Social realm Common
Activity modalities
Joint action
temporalization
spatialization
stabilization
So if we take the example of the guitar quartet again, the layout of the score is basically the same as before, only now arranged to mitigate the coordination of individual actions;
it functions as what Blumer called a common identifier for fitting together the playing of each individual into a nice musical experience.
And as before the common identifier signifies the same modalities

22. Summary – main points
Thinking and action are inextricably linked
Coordination
Requisite for action and thus thinking
Activity modalities
Neurobiological requisites for coordination
Bridging the neural and social realms
Functional organs
Brain structures formed in interaction with extracortical artefacts
Joint action
Fitting together individual lines of action to achieve social needs
Neurobiological predispositions for coordinating actions
Emerged during evolution of humankind
Coordination as a mental complex functional system
Contributing factors realized by groups of cortical zones
Activity modalities
Mental factors in coordination which can be manifested externally in artefacts attuned to the modalities
Functional organs
New structures in the brain resulting from interacting with artefacts
Joint action
The social constitution of the individual
Conceptualizes the dialectics between the individual and the cultural environment

23. Implication for thinking
Action an indispensable element in thinking about thinking
Metacognition
New thinking organizers (TOG)?
Derived from the activity modalities
Subconscious (tacit dimension of knowledge)?
Mental capacities not made explicit in the social realm
The dialectics between individual and environment?
Cultural environment a requisite for understanding the individual
Individual a requisite for understanding the cultural environment

24. Take-home message
Cognitive processes are so closely intertwined with action that cognition would best be understood as ‘enactive’, as the exercise of skillful know-how in situated and embodied action
Engel et al 2013

25. That’s it!