What happens when someone loses a body part or use of and feeling in that body part? How completely can a human being adapt to a prosthetic device?
In a recent article, Human Brain Treats Prosthetic Devices as Part of the Body, we can read:
People with spinal cord injuries show strong association of wheelchairs as part of their body, not extension of immobile limbs.
The human brain can learn to treat relevant prosthetics as a substitute for a non-working body part, according to research published March 6 in the open access journal PLOS ONE by Mariella Pazzaglia and colleagues from Sapienza University and IRCCS Fondazione Santa Lucia of Rome in Italy, supported by the International Foundation for Research in Paraplegie.
The researchers found that wheelchair-bound study participants with spinal cord injuries perceived their body’s edges as being plastic and flexible to include the wheelchair, independent of time since their injury or experience with using a wheelchair. Patients with lower spinal cord injuries who retained upper body movement showed a stronger association of the wheelchair with their body than those who had spinal cord impairments in the entire body
This leads me on something of a journey through my own developing thought…
If we are, as I speculate, to be truly unified beings in the world of the resurrected, we are most certainly not unified in this mortal realm. A baby is born with body parts connected by lines and networks of nerves to a brain which is a collection of brain-cells not yet fully functional neurons. The infant brain is more potential than true brain, but those cells have strange inclinations to reach out and to try to form connections. The connections which generate steady activity will be reinforced; the others will die, probably along with some of the brain-cells themselves.
There are also tentative connections to leg muscles and eyes and lips which connections are strengthened when used regularly as some sort of reasonable response to opportunities or problems. The baby learns that those funny things he’ll eventually call fingers are somewhat responsive to his desires. He learns later on how to use his legs to crawl and then to walk. He learns what it means to feel pangs of hunger and his brain and glands react with initially obscure feelings of upset. By his active responses to his mother’s breast, to his father’s caressing hands, by his learning to pull back when gravity threatens to pull him down, that baby begins to unify his embodied self, a process that will, we can pray, continue as he forms his mind and his intellect, as he forms his individual and communal human being. Why would we think this process to have a firm boundary so that only the arms we’re born with can be part of the brain’s mapping of self? Why would we not think that our instruments become extensions of our bodies mapped into our self-images in a way similar to our arms and lungs?
In an essay I published in 2007, What is Mind?: Part 2. Rules or Context?, I wrote about this sort of a phenomenon in more general terms:
Our thoughts are not just in our own heads. The thoughts of an astrophysicist are found in his instruments, his collections of data, his techniques of analysis, and his understandings of what all this means. This is to say that his thoughts are, in principle, in those stars and black holes and in the developmental patterns of the universe. Michael Polanyi pointed out that tools are extensions of our bodies, even in the strong sense that a surgeon’s scalpel probably becomes part of that mapping of his body which his brain makes. This is what makes prosthetics work so well in some cases—the artificial limb doesn’t become the natural limb but it becomes part of the body mapping in place of that natural limb. I’m making a similar but somewhat more vague claim for our thoughts. Our thoughts are contained in our tools —not just the ones so intimate as to become parts of our body mappings, in our social relationships, in all of our habits and customs, in our languages—poetic like Gaelic or flat and prosaic like English, in our books and our musical traditions and even our recorded music. Like physical tools, all the objects of our attention, and the techniques behind them, become part of our mapping of our worldviews and our own selves.
In 2009, I had perhaps made some progress in my understanding of human being, concentrating still on the mind in the essay, So What if the Human Mind is a Product of Evolution?, where I wrote:
What seems interesting to me is my optimistic view of the possibilities of the human mind. I’m optimistic just because of my view of the human being as a peculiar sort of ape which evolved by natural processes in this physical universe. Because our minds have evolved at the species level and then have developed at the individual level, we can encapsulate knowledge—even wisdom—found in a Creation far greater than we are. We can learn to think as our Creator thinks. Our minds can be, in a sense, the entirety of Creation rather than simply what lies inside our skulls. Natural processes have brought about a set of mental capabilities which are retrospectively understandable and also remarkably powerful. Those mental capabilities are totemic in men who are hunters-gatherers, allowing men to put themselves in the place of the animals they hunt, imagining themselves to be fleeing human hunters and anticipating the actions of those animals. In a sense, our minds haven’t changed in fundamental ways, but the modern mind has shaped itself, in some, to knowledge of a greater Creation while that early mind was shaped to knowledge of a local environment of, say, deer and blueberry bogs. While our ancestors imagined themselves to be that mammoth fleeing them, a more recent human being named Albert Einstein imagined himself to be moving along with a ray of light or traveling in various accelerating or non-accelerating elevators. The second set of imaginings were possible because Einstein’s ancestors had evolved the capabilities of anticipating the actions of animals. In both cases, the human mind functioned well just because it was, so to speak, sent out to encounter a reality greater than we can find inside ourselves—until that very reality is encapsulated in our minds.
To accomplish such feats of imagination or the bodily feats of an athlete, the brain needs interfaces to the external environments and to the other parts of the same body, regions of the brain which hold those models of our bodies or models of our greater selves which exist across spans of time and space. Those mental processes have allowed a `self’ to come into being by way of brain activities which are being researched intensely.
Most of us have seen pictures of a homunculus in our brain, reflecting the nervous system resources devoted to specific bodily regions, so that fingers are outsized on that little human being in our brain, more so in a concert pianist or a watchmaker. The brain shifts resources if we lose our sight so that our hearing and touch become more important. When that happens, that cartoonish fellow in our brains loses his eyes and grows elephant ears and still larger fingers. That cartoonish fellow is our main contact with our physical environment and not just a funny drawing in books about the brain.
There’s a far more complex and more mysterious process occurring in the human brain which I’ll describe for now as a modeling of the self as an entity with a somewhat continuous existence in smaller or greater regions of time and space, depending upon the culture and the individual. We construct ourselves and those constructions are us to our conscious awareness because those constructions are the interfaces between our embodied selves and other parts of reality. This isn’t a doctrine of solipsism but rather one of a creature born into and adapted to a world of developmental processes, a world in which evolution of a family line and development of an individual occur as a result of lucky or unlucky, effective or ineffective, responses to opportunities and dangers. Our animal awareness and our self-awareness are interfaces between physical and cultural reality and our bodies and our more abstract selves.
It’s hard to speak of this in simple and straightforward terms without risking error. Words and concepts will develop in time and will allow us to enclose complex ideas into those words and concepts—see one of my more important essays, Shaping Our Minds to Reality, for a discussion of this sort of a process in quantum physics, a process far from complete even in the communities of physical scientists and philosophers.
Over the past few years, I’ve been developing a line of thought: this world was created so that the Son of God could empty Himself to be incarnated in a creaturely nature and live, enjoy, suffer, die, and rise in a perfected human nature united with His divine nature. This Gospel story leads to our ongoing story, that of the development of the Body of Christ in this world. We are saved by, and only by, incorporation into that Body. We are perfected and completed, we become capable of sharing God’s life in the world of the resurrected, by accepting as our own the communal human being of that Body. So it was that, in 2011, I wrote the essay, Does the Body of Christ have non-human components?. The entire essay follows:
We usually think of entities of mixed biological and non-biological components as being monsters though good experience with prosthetics has perhaps eased that prejudice a lot. (I use ‘prejudice’ in a non-judgmental way as some prejudices are valid and some aren’t, some are dangerous to others and our own selves and some are not.)
Is it possible that as we form the Body of Christ, we integrate human technology such as the Internet viewed as a fancy memory device? See this article for a secular and somewhat mundane discussion of what is an important issue: Internet Changes How We Remember: Knowing we can retrieve facts online later alters memory. It’s possible that we are learning how to remember how to retrieve facts rather than remembering the facts directly.
Technology does become part of us. Michael Polanyi was a medical doctor before he left Hungary when the Nazis took over in 1933. He was also a physical chemist whose research was well-regarded and encouraged by Einstein and, in his middle years, became a philosopher of note. Professor Polanyi spoke in Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy of our tools becoming an extension of our bodies when we become truly expert in using them. He spoke in particular of the scalpel from his own experience performing surgery. I would imagine the brain of a surgeon reorganizes itself so that there are regions devoted to the control of scalpel and other instruments. I imagine the brain of a pianist also reorganizes itself and also that of a carpenter.
Truly does technology become part of us and not just the tools we personally use. We grow larger and more active when our health is improved by fresh water systems and sewage systems. Our minds grow as they respond to the use of microscopes and various sorts of technology. Our minds grow also as they respond to proper use of books, even electronic books. There are many books which are a part of my being and some of them alive to the extent that they change beyond what the author had written — this makes it dangerous at times for me to rely on my memory.
Truly does technology become part of our communal beings, our communities. Even our ways of worshiping God are tied to the building technologies of an age. Our forms of friendship, our range of friendship, can change with greater mobility, with electrical and then electronic devices. Our communities grow larger and more complex, safer and more stable, with better energy production. As individuals and as communities, we form relationships, political and economic and intellectual and spiritual, with more more communities, some of them longfar agoway. Yes, even with communities long gone. However superficial the museum experience might be for most, we yet connect a little with the ancient Egyptians and Mayans, Medieval Saxons and Moslems, Renaissance Italians and Ashkenazi Jews, Colonial Virginians and West Indians, and early modern Japanese and Zulus.
We Christians have a tendency to etherealize the nature of heavenly and of resurrected human beings. In fact, our resurrected selves are completed and perfected versions of our mortal selves. If our technology has become a part of us and our communities here on earth, even a part of the pilgrim Body of Christ, then we would be mutilated creatures if we were resurrected without it, without perfected and completed technology of the sort which can aid in that perfection and completion of a true human life and in that perfection and completion of the Body of Christ.
I believe we are seeing a vast expansion of the possibilities of human being, individual to some extent and communal to a great extent. We’re also in danger of these processes of expansion being hijacked by those who would have us develop in ways that enrich them or increase their power. I’m optimistic about the long-run, not the short-run for sure, because of my faith in God and my belief that this world is the story of the Body of Christ. We could increase the odds of good dominating over bad and over evil even in the short-run if we were to get to work on understanding what is going on, which effort can be successful only if we have a good understanding of all of Creation and of the role of individual and communal human being in this story being told by God.