Microgenesis of Consciousness

The Structure of the Mental State

Microgeny is the process by which a momentary mental state is formed across successive, qualitatively different phases that represent (in a rather literal sense of that term) phases in brain evolution (phylogeny), whereas ontogeny is replicated in the processual aspects of the microgenetic sequence. The clinical observation of cognitive, emotional, and behavioral symptoms in brain-damaged patients provides evidence in support of a process-based approach to the brain/mind problem. Microgenetic theory is contrary in both substance and spirit to much contemporary theorizing in psychology and the neurosciences, still largely dominated by cognitivism and information theory, but it harks back to certain ideas found in older theories from psychology (William James, Sigmund Freud, Gestalt psychology), behavioral neurology (John Hughlings Jackson, Karl Goldstein, Alexander Romanovich Luria) and philosophy of mind (Charles Peirce, Henri Bergson, Alfred North Whitehead).

Microgenetic theory offers a theory of the mind/brain state as such, that is, without reducing mind to brain or brain to mind. Mapping the cortex actually tells us very little about what the brain is, or what it does, because the brain is a four-dimensional object that does what it does precisely by changing and becoming. Microgeny begins with the “reptilian” brain, that is, the brain stem and hypothalamus, the first part of the central nervous system to appear in phylogeny (similar to Plato's thymos and Freud's Id), then moves to the “paleomammalian” brain (the limbic system, the seat of emotion and some aspects of memory), and from there to the cortex. The overall movement, literally and metaphorically, is from an inner core outward to the periphery, from simple wholes to the increasingly detailed parts, where the outside world is not the beginning of the process, but the end.

From a philosophical standpoint, the theory postulates that mental or external objects are not solid or static entities, such as the solid chair out there in the world, but that there is a brief micro-temporal history in the mind that is part of their structure. In its journey out from the mind to the world, the chair passes through unconscious stages of form, concept, and meaning relations, in which the figural appearance of the chair, its recognition and category-relations to other similar objects, and to the life experience, are traversed. This means that the chair is not the solid object it appears to be, but is the outcome of a dynamic series of phases.

Consciousness is interpreted in microgenetic theory, then, as the relation across these phases in the mental state, that is, the relation of the empirical self (the subjective center of experience) to images in personal space and/or objects created by the mind/brain in an external space that is the final phase of a subjective process of object and space formation. Specifically, it is a relation across the phases that constitute a single mind/brain state, an epoch of microgenetic time, as depicted in Figure 1.

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