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Back to Marks and Mind Book Series Symbol Grounding and Scribbling in the context of the work of Walter J. Freeman. Updating Neuroconstructive Theory. Walter J. Freeman’s paper “The Physiology of Perception,” 2001, makes it clear that the shapes of an animal’s brain patterns indicating recognition become increasingly organized as circling, spiraling layers.2 These non-symbolic patterns are very like children’s earliest circling scribbles. That observed similarity gave rise to my paper, “The Neurobiological Significance of Children’s Drawings: The Scribble Hypothesis,” 2002.5 Recently, Dr. Freeman’s 2009 paper, “The neurobiological infrastructure of natural computing: Intentionality”, provides further possibilities and support for my theories and practice. In the context of Dr. Walter J. Freeman’s 2009 paper, “The neurobiological infrastructure of natural computing: Intentionality”,4 if the first elementary operators in natural computing vis a vis children’s thinking are fingers and toes, then Neuroconstructive theory proposes that the second level of elementary operators for natural computing are scribbling and drawing. In fact, the index finger is critical to holding a pen or pencil firmly, with precision; the index finger is our guide to pointing. The toddler uses that finger, along with the rest of his hand, to create his first point/dot/mark on paper, a gesture which will have enormous consequences for human symbolic thought. As Freeman observes, “The hand is the prime agency for symbolic representation… It is primarily through the hands that flow the execution of patterns created within the brain from stable networks.” 4 “The Scribble Hypothesis” 5 provides support for the position that the handmade patterns we call children’s scribbles and drawings help to create and generate patterns in the brain responsible for the stable networks from which symbolic thinking arises. PROPOSITION: Neuroconstructive theory proposes - as it has since the late 1980's in my comprehensive papers and in my 1990 dissertation - that scribbling and drawing operate as neural operators which create the spatiotemporal patterns which are necessary for symbolic thought. Freeman writes, “We can assert with confidence that the categories and operations constituting symbols and symbol manipulation of natural computing require spatiotemporal patterning of neural activity as the basis for creating and manipulating symbols.” 4 Neuroconstructive theory proposes that microscopic and mesoscopic and macroscopic recordings of electric and magnetic fields of potential in children’s gesturing, babbling, scribbling and drawing brains will reveal how children’s mark-making transforms itself from spontaneous operations into intentional symbols, shedding light on how the construction of a symbol “differs from an intentional non-symbolic act” (Freeman, 2009). One of the contexts which “must be captured and used in discovering the nature of the difference in neural activity between a symbolic pattern and a non-symbolic pattern”4 are children’s earliest marks. Freeman observes that the issue is “how to describe the operators created by masses of neurons that direct the body to construct and manipulate symbols (those)… must have a “generic form of spatiotemporal patterns of neural activity that are closely related to the patterns of neural activity that… support and mediate the action-perception cycle in non-symbolic action”. Neuroconstructive theory proposes that one of these sets of generic forms of spatiotemporal patterns that support and mediate the action-perception cycle that moves from gesture to marks of meaning and thus, to symbolic action - as literacy - is children’s seminal marks, which are similar across time and culture. Neuroconstructive theory proposes that these seminal scribbles are responsible, along with the infant’s gestures and early babbling, for the neural activity which will, with time and natural unfolding and mentored support and training in speech, reading and writing (provided by mothers and other caregivers, including teachers), become symbolic reasoning, or thinking with words, numbers, musical notes, and other symbols. In Walter J. Freeman’s 2009 paper, “The neurobiological infrastructure of natural computing: Intentionality”, he is searching for “koniocortex”, or that dustfine distribution of cells in the human cortex “with no distinguishing architectural features, suggesting an all-purpose type of cortex” which, he hypothesizes, should function as “facilitators for higher-order organization of very wide synchronization of cerebral activity”. It is in this dense, fine, protected area of cortex that Freeman expects patterns of neural activity to arise which he calls AMH (amplitude modulation human) - patterns necessary for symbolic thought - which spring from more general spatial patterns of amplitude modulation (AM) and which occur when a brain is activating a portion of its knowledge base, say, in recognition. “Aha,” thinks the rabbit, “That is a carrot!” PREDICTION: Neuroconstructive theory and the Scribbling/Drawing/Writing practice support the position that when children’s brains are scribbling in Middle to High or Mature Stages and surely, when children are engaged in Early, Middle and High or Mature Drawing, their brain patterns will show a progression from AM patterns to the AMH patterns signaling symbol construction. Even more pronounced will be the sigmoid S-shaped curve wave heights (Freeman, “The Physiology of Perception”, 2001) in both the generative neural AM perceptual patterns of Early Scribbling and in the full-blown AMH patterns when the child “writes” and “reads” her own marks of meaning (silently, internally and rightbrainedly at first and audibly, externally, verbally, left-brainedly, later) as the child becomes more comfortable with speech, expounding on her very own scribbles and drawings with interest and enthusiasm and curiosity and discovery. It is the intentional patterns that arise in children’s scribbles after this initial state of focused arousal which point to the patterns which should identify where human thinking and creaturely intentional thinking diverge. This transition in scribbling and in the child’s EEG’s must be where the potential for human symbolic thought begins. In my 1990 dissertation, "Drawing/Writing: a brain research-based writing program designed to develop descriptive, analytical and inferential thinking skills at the elementary school level”, I proposed 13 brain-based recommendations for helping children’s brains grow. Sustained attention and a range of symbols were critical to that brain growth, as well as the quality and timing of language-based experience, the importance of interesting visual searches, feelings of control and tasks that require cross-domain storage and construction (Sheridan, 1990, pps. 42-46). In the late 1980’s, I was focused on the connections between drawing and writing. It took me another ten years to realize I needed to include scribbling. Freeman’s 2001 paper, with its phase portraits of the brains of rabbits recognizing a smell, pushed my thinking toward scribbles because scribbles and phase portraits of perception as recognition are isomorphic; they map onto each other. Over the first few years of a child’s life, the patterns generated by children's scribbles and drawings become increasing organized, varied, and complex. Spirals become mazes. Euclidean geometry emerges. “Combines” and “Aggregates”29 appear. The scribbling/drawing hand is a motor organizer for these increasingly complex, nested and overlayed “landscapes” 4 or space phase/ “sandwiches,”3,1 and they indicate - and, in fact, generate - a special order of cortical, intentional neural operations within, presumably, the koniocortex and thus have global distribution or influence. Early scribbles - a hodge podge of lines and dots - are not symbols, yet, but they are dynamic operations, early evidence of what will become intentional chaotic organizers on a symbolic level. PROPOSITION: A child’s earliest circling scribbles act as neural operations, or pattern generators, or Strange Attractors,5 which will direct/organize/tune up the body/brain to make symbols. I feel strongly that symbols first arise from the internal geometry of intentional thought itself and that the babbling, scribbling child intuitively, motorically, sensitively and sensibly, accesses an internal, perceptual neural geometry shared by all creatures who make meaning of their environments and that children are peculiarly able, because of their prehensile hands and larger, cooler (human) brains, to make those intentional perceptual geometries visible to their own eyes using a crayon or a marker and then to elaborate upon these neural geometries, using a crayon or a marker. Dr. Freeman’s 2009 theory4 on general AM patterns of perceptual arousal shared across creaturely brain patterns supports this position (Sheridan, 1990 and thereafter). The visible geometry that arises first in children’s mark-making is the child’s first true symbolic language. Arithmetic thinking comes much later, preceded by a kind of analogic, algebraic thinking, expressed in simile and metaphor by the child at about age three. In the Neuroconstructive continuum, children’s early mark-making captures the internal geometry of neural brain activity, which then gives rise, through more nested scribbling and embedded drawing, to algebraic/ analogical thinking as visual patterns and as verbal simile and metaphor. It is proto-analogical and algebraic thinking in the child after this that can become the formal use of algebra and arithmetic by the child. The linguistic constructions for relationships and comparisons based on sameness and difference precede and imply and require algebra. This means that the algorithms for analogy are embedded in the koniocortex, either inherent or potential which are stirred up and organized by the child’s babbling tongue and scribbling hand. The operations of arithmetic - again - are implied by and embedded in simile and metaphor, in analogy, in algebra and in the algebraic phrases a child generates, in the complex figures the hand creates by adding, subtracting, multiplying, dividing shapes into more shapes, less shapes, new shapes. This combinatorial, computational mark-making uses the same rules as the child’s strings of spoken language. The child elaborates the structure and grammar of verbal relationships using visual marks. The "language instinct"107 is based on an instinct for Euclidean and non-Euclidean geometry. Scribbles show that the child’s brain waves and thus her scribbles are Riemannian, first, and Euclidean, second. The child’s elaborated geometries - Euclidean, non-Euclidean, Riemannian - become the building blocks of the marks-based, multiple literacies available to the human mind: drawing, writing, algebra, calculus, geometry, art, music, and physics. QUESTION: Can we accept the idea that children’s scribbles and drawings are operators of natural computing which form symbolic categories under intention and both create and depend upon Hebbian nerve cell networks which are key because they “access nonconvergent (chaotic) attractor which regulates spationtemporal pattern of cortical activity”? 4 As creators of Hebbian nerve cell networks, scribbles and drawings must operate as a collection of attractors, forming an “attractor landscape,” or “space phase sandwich”.1,5 The child’s drawings of Euclidean and non-Euclidean shapes demonstrate the existence of attractor landscapes and hierarchies of nested landscapes within the child’s koniocortex. “The basin of attraction is defined by the cumulative set of coactivated sensory receptors on all past experiences. The process constitutes inductive logic: forming a category by repeated sampling of many-to-one convergent dynamics. The categories are inferred to correspond to forms that exist in the environment” and confirmation of these categories or hypothesis receives “neurochemically mediated reinforcement”.4 I propose that children’s scribbles create and confirm these neurochemically rewarded categories which exist in the environment of the child’s mental/motor world. In addition, my research as a teacher and as a scholar, supports the idea that sustained attention using marks of meaning, including scribbling and drawing, and writing and reading across symbol systems, receives positive emotional/chemical reinforcement because such thinking conserves energy by creating order, allowing greater outputs than inputs and by resolution, or the settling of the thinking system into minimal energy states1,5,6,7,8 as a decision or a solution or a completed work (of art, say, or music) is achieved by the child or the adult. PREDICTION: Dr. Freeman sees a discontinuity as crucial to the phase transition necessary for symbolic thought. Neuroconstructive theory predicts that markmaking, as it moves from Early to Middle scribbling, provides a discontinuous bump in energy.5,6,7 When children’s scribbles are examined by neurobiologists and physicists, these transitional, “bump” marks will emerge as important, early neural events in “the complex topology of attractor landscapes in the insulated neocortices that accompany performance of the most elementary arithmetic (and other symbolic) operations” (Freeman, 2009, p. 9). Parenthetical comment added by Sheridan. In terms of "The Scribble Hypothesis," 2002, and its postulated SIT’s, these moments of intense self-induced transparency provide radically discontinuous bumps in phase transitions and, thus, in consciousness states on the level of symbolic thought. Proposed research experiment A test could be made with aplysia and a rat pup and/or a rabbit and a human child to determine the contours and boundaries of shared and unshared neural geometries of perception/recognition, or the neurodynamics of intentionality. When aplysia reaches for nutrients, when a rabbit smells a carrot, when the infant recognizes his mother’s face for the first time and bursts into laughter, how do the sigmoid S-curves of brain activity compare in terms of amplitude and periodicity? The space phase sandwiches,1,5,6,7 or tensor transformations,3,109,110,111 or Freeman’s recorded neural “landscapes” must change. What happens to the brain activity in young children as babbles turn to words and as scribbles transform themselves into intentional mark-making? What is going on in the koniocortex? What is going on, brain-wide? What happens in the limbic system? In the hyperthalamus? In the planum temporale? The child’s ability to selectively and sustainedly attend because of his own mark-making must affect brain waves’ amplitude, shape, speed, synchronicity. Marks continue to engage the eye and brain of the child until the child stops making marks and then, still, the child can look at the marks, talk about them, think some more about them, go back to them and elaborate on them - just as writers, composers, scientists do. How many marks were necessary for Einstein to be able to write, at last, E=MC2 squared? How much symbolic thought? Neuroconstructivism in the context of Walter J. Freeman: Summary The taxonomy of scribbles and drawings recorded by Rhoda Kellogg and Sylvia Fein and organized in the books Saving Literacy, and HandMade Marks (Sheridan, 2009), provide an observable, empirical set of body/brain behaviors which, I believe, prepare the brain for pre, proto- and fully realized symbolic thought. Literacy, or more precisely, multiple literacies (the reading and writing of images, words, mathematical and musical symbols) share one wellspring: the progression of universal, unambiguous, increasingly intentional, handmade marks enacted by the child. Brain scans (MRI’s and EEG’s) across biological systems, including other mammals and infant humans through literate young adults, should support this position. A child’s scribbles and drawings are different from other creatures’ trails or marks and a human child’s brain patterns change as her mark-making becomes more intentional. Neuroconstructive theory proposes that human brain tissue, brain activity and meaningful marks and sounds developed together to allow humans to speak and to write and read. Children babble, then learn to speak. Children scribble, then learn to write and read. The fundamental computational wiring is in place in Freeman’s AM brain waves of shared creaturely recognition. EXPECTATION: Supported by Dr. Freeman’s work (2009), Neuroconstructivist theory would expect that the human (amplitude modulation) patterns that serve as the foundational neural substrate or preliminary operators for symbol construction, change when children begin to babble and scribble, starting to show signs of what Dr. Freeman calls the AMH patterns (amplitude modulation human) - patterns which will differ from the non-symbolic perceptual creaturely AM patterns. On the other hand, Neuroconstructive theory would not support the position that the AMH patterns (of human brain patterns for symbolic thought) “cannot be directly involved with implementation of motor-sensory-perceptual processes, as are the more concrete activity designated as AM patterns” (Freeman, 2009). We believe scribbles are directly involved in the motor-sensory-perceptual processes necessary to human symbolic thought. Neuroconstructive theory proposes that human mark-making (along with directed, human speech) is responsible for human AMH brain patterns for symbolic thought, or thinking using images, words, numbers, musical notes and other symbols - as the spoon relates to batter in the baking of a cake. As the spoon dips into the bowl of batter, it encounters a mass of ingredients. Similarly, scribbles dip into the ingredients of AM brain patterns of creaturely perception in the brain. As the spoon changes the composition of the ingredients in the batter, so scribbling changes AM patterns, stirring them into tighter, ever more orderly, more coherent AMH patterns. AMH patterns (the patterns of symbolic thought) both arise in and drive scribbling and drawing in young children, letting them access and influence that special, dense, sequestered, quieter area of the cortex which Dr. Freeman has labeled the koniocortex, identifying that area as the place where symbolic reasoning arises and is refined. Neuroconstructive theory proposes that handmade marks are part of the child’s repertoire of natural language, in line with Dr. Freeman’s position that, “AMH patterns may be close kin to and perhaps indistinguishable from the elements of natural language as the neural commands (as Freeman's computations or as Sheridan's "deep spacial grammar") that produce spoken and written words. The central hypothesis of this essay (Freeman’s 2009 essay) is that natural computation emerges and evolves from intentional action… The development is unique to humans beyond the most rudimentary capabilities for subsymbolic operations in non-human species… related to some unique structures and functions (of) human neocortex… collections of neurons… beyond the micro-meso-macro designations.”4 Neuroconstructive theory fully supports this position, agreeing that there is brain tissue beyond the current designations and that tenets #5 and #6 of the Scribble Hypothesis, along with its attempt at a quantum position, hint at the extraordinary, entirely discontinuous, “jumped-up” operations the human mind can achieve using marks of meaning, including translations across systems of representations, and epiphanic/enlightening/break-through SIT’s, or events/ experiences of Self-Induced Transparency. The human brain is uniquely self-organizing for AMH patterns through the multi-modal potential of infant brain tissue112 and through embedded neural cues like the hertz rate of the infant planum temporale.49,50,112,113,114,115 These special tissues and neural cues for speech and literacy are first evidenced in the wave forms of babbling and scribbling. “The step in brain dynamics that goes beyond categorizing inputs from a collection of objects or events in creating a symbol of a category that has no objects or events” (Freeman, 2009) is glimpsed and then realized through the unfolding of children’s marks of meaning. Freeman observes (2009), “An obvious location… for AMH pattern signs is in the convexities of the frontal, parietal and temporal lobes,” and that natural computation probably arises in neocortex near Broca’s and Wernickes areas, as well as "in the motor, premotor, and parietal areas that control the digits of the hand… The symbol-generating cortices may require as yet unknown neurodynamical properties. Hence I (Walter Freeman) suggest using the histological term koniocortex.” Neuroconstructive theory proposes that areas of neocortex dedicated to fundamental “heart beats” of fetal and infant activity like the planum temporale, as well as Broca’s and Wernicke’s language areas and the sensory/motor areas devoted to fingers and the tongue are all involved as organizers in the koniocortex. Quantum effects of babbling and scribbling - as these generative, communicative activities prepare and organize the human brain for intentional symbolic reasoning - were and are so important that they receive and merit encouraging, self-sustaining neurochemical rewards (the neurochemical rewards described in Panksepp as outcomes of SEEKING and PLAY), setting up a feedback loop between the quantum effects of SIT’s (ecstatic states of self-induced transparency) and infant laughter, the three year old’s metaphor and similes and pleasing and meaningful scribbles and drawings. This feedback loop becomes extremely powerful in writers, artists, musicians, mathematicians and theoretical neurobiologists! Closing Comment If Freeman’s statement is correct:4 “The brain is an open system with respect to energy and information but a closed system with respect to meaning. Its unity is inviolate” (2009), then - because dynamic systems are continuous across creation - the universe must be both open and closed, too, and so must our brains and their relationship to language (as both innate and learned). The universe, the brain, and the nature of language learning are unified dualities. Can we ever tease apart these relationships? Do we need to? As in the case of gravity, the as yet unresolved 4th force, we will forever have mysteries to understand about the relationship of brain to mind to language and literacy. We do not have to understand everything to embark upon the journey of marks and mind, starting with scribbles - anymore than we have to understand everything about a person to love him or to love her. Existence, language, love - none is strictly reducible. Every symbol system is approximate. No single system - not drawing, nor writing, nor painting, not mathematics, nor even music - has the entire answer to any question. Still, several symbol systems, including translations across symbol systems, will bring us closer to a fuller understanding. That is why the human mind devised multiple literacies. Footnotes: 2 Freeman, Walter J.; Broadhead, Peter. 1991. "The Philosophy of Perception." Scientific America, Feb. 11, 1991. pp 78-85. 4 Freeman, Walter J.; March 2009. "The Neurological Infrastructure of Natural Computing:Intentionality." Kozna, R., Caulfield, H.J. (Eds.), Singapore: World Scientific. 5 Sheridan, S.R. "The Neurological Significance of Children's Drawings: The Scribble Hypothesis." Journal of Visual Literacy 2002; 22(2): 107-128. Sheridan, S.R. 2002. 29 Kellogg, Rhoda, Analyzing Children’s Art, figures on pages 14, 49, 56, 101, and 109 © 1969, 1970 by Rhoda Kellogg. Reprinted by permission of McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. 3 Churchland, Patricia Smith. 1986, Neurophilosophy, Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press. 1 Sheridan, S.R. 1990. "Drawing/Writing: a brain-based writing program designed to develop descriptive analytical and inferential thinking skills at the elementary school level." UMASS School of Education doctoral dissertation. 107 Pinker, Steven, 1994. The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language, New York: HarperPerennial. 6 Sheridan, S.R. 2004 "Scribbles: The missing link in a bio-evolutionary theory of language with implications for human consciousness," Toward a Science of Consciousness, Tucson, abstract #209. 7 Sheridan, S.R.. 2005. “A Theory of Marks and Mind: the effect of notional systems on hominid brain evolution and child development with an emphasis on exchanges between mothers and children,” Medical Hypotheses Journal, V64(2):417-427. This article is downloadable in on-site version at www.drawingwriting.com by permission by Elsevier. Hypertext link to Medical Hypotheses ScienceDirect Page at: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/03069877 8 Sheridan S.R.. 2006. "Glossolalia, Consciousness states, and the mind/body benefits of fluent spiritual speech: Extending the purpose of linguistic experience." Poster session, abstract 300, sixth Toward a Science of Consciousness Conference. University of Tucson, Tucson Arizona. 109 Llinás, Rodolfo R., 1986, unpublished paper, given to Sheridan, late 1980’s. 110 Llinás, Rodolfo R., 2001. I of the Vortex: From Neurons to Self. Cambridge, MA:MIT Press. 111 Llinás, Rodolfo R., and Elean Leznik, 2005. “Role of gap junctions in synchronized neuronal oscillations in the inferior olive." Journal of Neurophysiology. 94: 2447-2456. 112 Holowka S., & Petitto L.A. "Left Hemisphere Cerebral Specialization for Babies While Babbling." Science 2002; 297: 1515. 49 Petitto, L.A., Zatorre, R.J., Gauna, K., Nikelski, E.J., Dostie, D., & Evans, A. C. 2000. "Speech-like cerebral activity in profoundly deaf people while processing signed languages: Implications for the neural basis of all human language." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol 97, 25, 13961-13966. 50 Petitto, L. A., 2000. "On the biological foundations of human language." In K. Emmorey and H. Lane (Eds.) The Signs of Language Revisited: An anthology in honor of Ursula Bellugi and Edward Klima. Mahwah, N.J.: LEA, pp. 447-471. 113 Katanode, K, Yoshikawa K, Sugishita M. 2001. “A functional MRI study on the neural substrates for writing.” Human Brain Map 2001 May:13(1):34-42. Kawamura M, Midorkkawa A, Kezuka M. 2000. “Cerebral locationalization of the center for reading and writing music.” NeuroReport 2000:11(14):3299-3303. 114 Lesser R.P., Lueders H., Dinner D.S., Hahn J., Cohen L., "The location of speech and writing functions in the frontal language area. Results of extraoperative cortical stimulation". Brain 1984 Mar;107(Pt 1):275-91. 115 Nakada T., Fujii Y., Yoneoka Y., Kwee I.L., "Planum temporale: where spoken and written language meet". Eur. Neurol. 2001;46(3):121-5.

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