EMDR as it is… Sensing and Imaging
Welcome to installment #3 of EMDR as it is…! In our last piece we considered the fruit fly’s capacity to voluntarily sample its environment and evaluate how life is going. The fruit fly’s behavior is guided by what it senses and perceives. All in the context of what it needs to live well. This is adaptive information processing (AIP). By now you will have noticed how elements of AIP can be found by observing the life around us. We began with sensing, then sensing and perceiving, and next is sensing and imaging. When we arrive at the complex level of human information processing and consider how EMDR works, we want to keep in mind that it all begins with the experience of our body through our senses. We will discuss later the important role of the experiencing self. For now let’s keep it simple and explore the next element of AIP. To do this we will ask the magpie, an incredible bird, to help us see how our senses converge with mental imagery to enhance information processing. Imagery enables us to have a broader range of choices for moving and conserving energy.
The magpie is among the corvid family of birds (not covid!) which includes jays and crows. They have considerably larger brains than other birds and are very social. Rather than assuming larger is better, let’s just consider how self-imagery is functional in it’s own umwelt. For instance, they are very social and aggressive birds. So much so, they can be found entering the territory of other birds, animals (eg. landing on bison to pick off ticks), and people (eg. farms, barns, and out buildings). They are a good example of how the structure and function of an organism, with or without a nervous system, needs to be understood within its umwelt. It moves about differently in the same space as other organisms (bullies) and can even behave similarly with multiple species (budge in on their food).
How might it have evolved to challenge a human for food? Where did it get the audacity to sit on the back of a moose to pick off ticks or challenge a coyote for the maggots growing in its kill? Apparently, sensing and moving and perceiving weren’t enough! The magpie is the only bird and one of only a few animals, who can recognize its own image. Of what use might a bird have of this?
According to the Cornell lab of ornithology, the magpie is known to perch at the top of tree as a way to claim its dominance over territory. Other birds use their call. It is also known to swagger and strut when it walks as a display to others. They, like crows, will band together to subdue a raptor and show off their wing patches as acts of aggression. They also band together in larger groups to keep warm because they don’t migrate as other birds do, leaving them to survive the cold winter seasons where they live (hence prone to finding new ways to get food from other species who do well in winter). Finally, they are known to organize what are called “funerals”. When one magpie finds another dead in a field, it will call out and others will arrive. They will stay together for up to 15 minutes or so before dispersing.
We can see from these unique bird behaviors in the magpie a theme related to aggression and social behavior. We may not have the data to connect all the dots between self-image and the examples above, however, its not hard to see ourselves in the magpie and wonder how image matters.
Magpie strut
Maybe you’ve seen someone strutting around very aware of how their self-image is affecting them by portraying aggressive, social cues? How might this allow them to gain access to environments they might otherwise not easily operate in? Just by matter of the information these behaviors convey. There is no need for physical force or exerting more energy than necessary (no migration) when you can find a way to dominate the space you are in by leveraging the causal properties of information processing vis a vis sensing and imaging. The sub text for such displays would be, “I know where I stand, where you stand, and where the food is!”
This “See me fear me” way of doing business begins to help us understand how an AIP system can be conceptualized in non-dualistic terms to explaining how mental phenomenon causally operate in physical systems (more on that later). For now, let’s consider that the magpie, a bird, non-mammal, non-human uses meaning making to cause changes in the physical environment, without much of an expenditure or energy. For some of us who grew up learning about the limbic system or triune brain (which suggests thinking and feeling are more or less separate functions) we might not expect a bird to be capable of this. However, the magpie’s use of aggression, thinking, and imaging is all part of a strategy to maintain a wide range of food supplies and is an example of the brain being adaptive not triune.
As my Dad liked to say, “Work smarter not harder”. The relationship between information and energy is an intriguing one and can explain how one individual can control a whole group who share similar signs and symbols (as in a tribe). The first client I worked with who had a strong physical reaction to the internal image of a violent caregiver taught me this first hand. No fist needs to be raised when shown an image of someone willing to do violence to you. They just need to suggest they will be violent. Courtrooms and kingdoms will continue to be vulnerable to the prowess of demagogs so long as we subscribe to dualist notions of mental an physical life (but that is another story). This way of doing business can have lasting effects even posthumously as my clients experience. Imagery plays an important role in information processing and we adapt to connection or disconnection in large part due to the imagery we carry on board.
If our internal imagery suggests it’s best to disconnect, we will. Our brain will do the math and make the connections. It will lead us to behave according to what we have experienced, regardless of new environments we move into that may give us new sensations to experience. Our brain will make sense of them through what we’ve remembered vis-a-vis important imagery present in our human umwelt of social relationships. Next time, we will take a look at memory and AIP.
