Povinelli's Monkey Research
On the evolutionary aquisition of an internal
'body image' and 'consciousness' in our ancestors
Posted to the email forums ‚FELDigest’ and’ rolf-forum’,
in April 1998, by R.Schleip
There is a recent research
article about monkeys which I find very fascinating and relevant.
As probably most of us noticed
there has been a considerable boost of research on 'consciousness' among
scientists in the last few years. After chaos theory and complexity science
this seems to be the 'hottest' subject currently, with new scientific
conferences, books and cover articles popping up all around, and an atmosphere
at related conferences that Daniel Dennett describes as "like in
Woodstock". Some of this new research promises to be able to measure
exactly the physiological difference in the brain between a non-conscious
mental act and a conscious thought or perception. Obviously the scientific
study of consciousness is not only of interest for those of us who are
personally engaged in spiritual and consciousness-related practices, but also
for all somatic practitioners that emphasize conscious somatic perceptions
(body awareness).
Apart from neurologists,
psychologists, and philosophers now also biologists have become engaged in the
question of "how come that our human brains developed this amazing quality
of being consciously aware of ourselves and of our interactions with the
environment?" (... well at least some times :-) The article which I found
so inspiring is written by one of those biologists, Daniel J. Povinelli, who at
the age of 32 yrs has already won several international academic awards and is
the director of the currently largest primatology (monkey) research center in
the United States. The article from him (and his colleague J.G.Cant) with the
title 'Arboreal Clambering and the Evolution of Self-Conception' is
published in 'The Quarterly Review of Biology' (Vol.70 No.4, p.393-421).
Unfortunately it seems this article is not available as full text in the
internet (although
you can order it for a small fee via MEDLINE, your local library, or directly
from the publisher at www.journals.uchicago.edu/QRB , Ph 516-632 6977, Fax
516-632 9282). So I will give
a brief summary here).
What most people call
consciousness or awareness, Povinelli calls 'self-conception', which for him
encompasses such things as an awareness of the self as
- an object of knowledge,
- the subject of experience,
- an entity that exists through time, and
- a causal agent.
He studies in this article only
the last one of those 4 aspects, since there is considerable support for
assuming that this (maybe most primitive) aspect of self-conception - the
ability to conceive of the self as a causal agent - evolved quite recently in evolution.
In fact it seems restricted to humans and some of the great apes only. Humans
usually develop this ability at the age of 18-24 months when they are able to
recognize themselves in mirrors, etc. Apart from us it is only orangutans
and chimps (plus one abnormally reared gorilla) who have been shown to be
capable of recognizing themselves in mirrors. (Irrelevant excursion on my
part: this might explain why I have never been successful in teaching my cat
that his tail belongs to his own body, in order to stop him from chasing it ...
:-) )
One of the most favored
explanations for the biological evolution of this cognitive capacity was the
'social intelligence hypothesis'. It stated that the ability for self awareness
developed as a basis for better social communication; i.e. if I know that I
exist I will show even better empathy with my peers and will be better in
predicting their behavior. Certainly a theory that appealed to me. Yet
Povinelli showed that there are several primates (e.g. pavians) who have an
even more complex social life than chimps or orangutans, yet they are not able
for self-recognition. So he speculates that it must be linked to something
else.
Together with a team of
scientists he videotaped and studied locomotion of different primates in the
jungle of Sumatra. They found that while all other primates move mostly from
tree to tree by applying several stereotyped movement patterns, chimps and
orangutans have a very different way to move. Because of their large
body weight and the fragility of the canopy for them, they move with
non-stereotyped, very creative and variable ways from tree to tree (several
illustrations in the article demonstrate this nicely). Povinelli's suggestion
now is that this change might be linked with the evolution of a conscious body
concept. These monkeys (or better their and our common primate ancestors in the
Miocene period) probably developed the first internal body concept in
evolution in order to move more safely through the fragile canopy. Which means:
the newly acquired body awareness of our clambering ancestors might have been
the basis for the evolution of self awareness in general. (I am tempted now to
assume that those body smart monkeys - as opposed to my cat - knew that all
their body parts belong to themselves). Of course human self awareness can be
much richer and encompass such aspects as being aware of ones history,
character, plans, emotions or even - e.g. in meditation - the process of
perception or cognition as such. Yet the neural and evolutionary basis for all
awareness - according to Povinelli - lies probably in the development of body
awareness.
One of the 5 predictions
based on this model (that Povinelli and other scientists worldwide will test in
the next years) "predicts that performing non-stereotyped movement
should induce states of objective self-awareness in humans, chimpanzees, and
orangutans (in much the same way as mirrors do) .... Forcing subjects to cope
with locomotor situations in which their stereotyped action schemata are no
longer sufficient should induce a state of inward assessment and evaluation ..."
(for which Wicklung and Carver have developed some scientific measuring tools
plus Premack and Woodruff for their application to non-verbal nonhuman primates).
So, to make a long story short:
some biologists are claiming now the existence of a strong linkage between the
evolutionary development of body awareness and other states of 'awareness' in
general. That is nice support for Moshe
Feldenkrais’ premise of „awareness through movement“. Povinelli’s monkey
research specifies it as ”self awareness develops through non-stereotyped
movement”.
