Human Patterns Heuristics and Adaptive Alignment

Human Patterns, Heuristics, and Adaptive Alignment

I wanted to present a richer way to think about Adaptive Alignment to readers of the blog. In a conversation with Martin Groder MD, the most intuitive and adaptive diagnostician I’ve ever encountered; he gave an example of how he learned to shut off his psychiatric education in order to respond to what was in front of him. The example was of his first exposure to the Synanon game, an explosive group process where members of the group (the “rat pack”) sense vulnerabilities in participants and break through their defenses. This was used in the 60’s and 70’s primarily with people with severe character problems. Marty listened to the process, integrated it with his training, listened to the interaction between the group and one of its members, shaped a diagnosis, formulated a summary set of sentences, and offered these to the group. They listened in stunned silence. Then one of the participants said: “I’d like to thank Dr. Groder for showing us his ability to talk like a psychiatrist. Now, if you don’t mind, Dr. Groder, we’d like to get back to doing the work of the group.” Marty says he never “thought” in the game after that. That does not mean he did not use his training. His training gave him shortcuts – heuristics – to approach the people he was working with.

Human Patterns and the plethora of little models that “explain” how an individual might deal with “conflict” or “manage” or select a “work role” are similar shortcuts; they give a little frame and enable a quicker path to the issue at hand. Adaptive Alignment is the ability to use heuristics in real time so we don’t have to think, but are free to react. Software that could help to pre-sort, pre-screen, pre-weight, pre-allocate and yet not prejudice an outcome or a finding would be a tremendous asset for a researcher. The heuristics would be loaded at the front end, but the information or data itself, live and untrammeled, would draw the response from the researcher or end user. Human Patterns Software does attempt to do this; and I think could be engineered to do it even better. These issues are at the interstice of so many disciplines that we often pass each other, even in the daylight, forgetting to react in favor of our customary channels of thought. Following are two excepts from or about folks that are sharing these woods – one (Gonczi) is an Adult Educator, the other (Goldberg) is a Brain Researcher.

Advances in educational thinking and
their implications for professional
education

Andrew Gonczi


“The old research concentrates on coding of items of knowledge and
development of rules to manipulate them. It takes artificial situations such as chess
playing and builds in rules based on precoded information. The new research, by
contrast, attempts to model the real world. It is endeavoring to model a brain prepared
for action. It takes a horizontal slice of the world as opposed to the vertical slice of the
earlier research. So for example robots have been designed to react to their environment
without all the pre-coding of information of the old AI. These new robots have sets of
circuits working in parallel and each system receives information from other systems
and passes them on. The result is that the Robots are able to tolerate imperfect data, are
able to complete patterns and are fast at doing it. They use their environment to solve
problems.

To summarize, the old Cognitive science conceptualizes memory as retrieval from the
container. It assumes that cognition is centralized, that the body is outside the process
and that the environment is a problem to be overcome. Recent research sees memory as
the recreation of patterns in a decentralized way across the brain. The environment is an
active resource which helps us to solve problems and the body is part of the
computational loop (Clark 98). To clarify, it is not that the patterns are stored in the
mind, rather they are in the environment and that our brain interacts with the
environment to produce the appropriate pattern - i.e. to act intelligently.

The implication of this new research for professional education is profound. It
challenges the traditional view of knowledge which is held by most university staff
involved in professional preparation- that there is a distinction between knowing that
and knowing how. Both forms of knowledge are better understood as part of a holistic
process of pattern recognition. What it suggests is a quite different kind of mind to the
one conjured up by the container metaphor. It is a mind which does not contain
knowledge but is knowledgeable (Bereiter 1996, 2000). It also provides us with a
framework for thinking about the perennial problem of professional education, the
theory-practice gap. What it suggests too is that the old dichotomies between thinking
and doing, mind and body are fundamentally wrong and that as a consequence we need
to rethink our assumptions about how to produce capable practitioner. The most
important of these assumptions is the primacy of propositional knowledge in our
courses and the assumption that such knowledge is the basis of the ability to transfer
knowledge and skills over many contexts. This is not to suggest that we abandon codified knowledge but rather that we must rethink its connection to the world of
practice and the tacit knowledge which develops through acting in and on the world.”

The Moment of Truth?
By Sue M. Halpern
by Malcolm Gladwell
Little, Brown, 277 pp., $25.95
by Elkhonon Goldberg
Gotham Books, 337 pp., $26.00
“Goldberg's brain-imaging research has borne this out. The right hemisphere is activated when an individual is in the early stages of acquiring a new cognitive skill but as that task is mastered, the left brain takes over:
The right-to-left transfer could also be demonstrated for various real-life professional skills, which take years to acquire. Novices performing the tasks requiring such skills showed clear right-hemisphere activation. But skilled professionals showed distinct left-hemisphere activation while performing the same tasks.
It is the same across the age span: brain-imaging studies have shown that young people have more activation on the right side of the brain, and that it shifts to the left as we get older:
Contrary to previously well-entrenched beliefs, the right hemisphere is the dominant hemisphere at early stages of life. But as we move through the life span it gradually loses ground to the left hemisphere, as the latter accumulates an ever-increasing "library" of efficient pattern-recognition devices in the form of neural attractors.
Imagine two bird watchers, one experienced, one a beginner. The experienced one catches a glimpse of a large, yellowish bird flickering overhead and calls out "evening grosbeak." Meanwhile the novice frantically flips through a field guide, shuttling between pages of yellow birds, birds with crowned heads, birds with large silhouettes, birds that undulate as they fly. The experienced bird watcher has synthesized all that data and internalized a signature pattern, while the novice must rely on an external device— the field guide—which can only provide information, not synthesis, and inefficiently at that.”

RETHINKING ERIK ERIKSON

RETHINKING ERIK ERIKSON’S DEVELOPMENTAL MODEL

Since I have been considering sustainability from an individual as well as an organizational point of view, my mentor referred me to Terrance Real’s I Don’t Want to Talk About It and Jean Miller and others’ The Healing Connection. Both books do a full court press on the importance of sustained connections with caregivers and the serious consequences that follow from breaks in relationships. Both also use case examples as teaching tools and include disclosures of the clinician about her/his in-session practices processes and methods, so that a reader does not have to already subscribe to a clinical school and point of view to be able to think critically about the material. Both challenge the notion of an uninvolved or removed therapeutic actor. Relationship itself is the both the cause and the cure.

This Buberesque “I-Thou” frame of reference has always been a significant strand in the therapeutic community; but it had been relegated to the touchy feely Rogerians and others of their ilk. More feminine and less potent clinicians like Social Workers, Chaplains, and Nurses used to advocate for this approach. Potent and masculine therapies were more cognitive and behavioral and emphasized thought and reason and control. The third path was chemical or electrical; shocking or drugging a “disorder” into submission.

My Dad was a girly therapist. As a South African GP with a practice in the African Townships, he had worked with Witch Doctors. He told me it was because they could communicate better than he could with his patients; that they understood the context. After emigrating here in the sixties, he became a psychiatrist and did family therapy. He called himself an Eriksonian Sullivanian with a Freudian Analytic foundation. He introduced art therapy to Richmond, Virginia. He died young and unrecognized. There were a group of these girly therapists associated with each other through the Virginia Treatment Center for Children. Mouche Lindermann and Virginia Saunders were also in my dad’s cadre. I don’t remember the names of the others and I think they might all be gone now. They would get together and attempt to fill in an 8X8 matrix based on Erikson’s developmental stages. They had oral, anal and genital correlations, introjects and projections, transferences and …. you get the picture. You can sense their struggle to be true to their faith and traditions, their clinical parents, and their experience of families as fundamental systems. I think they resonated with Erikson because he uncovered a developmental model that went beyond a model of pathology.

I don’t think Erikson ever wrote directly about families, but if you read his work, the intersection of the person with the context is at the heart of it. He wrote a wonderful little article in Daedalus in 1968 that actually evaluated leadership as the intersection of the individual leader with his community. Timing and context and individual synergy all folded together into an elegant property space diagram. As my Dad did, I think Erikson is pretty wonderful. Read his Childhood in Society for a foundation in his developmental model. I think Erikson missed something, though. Here are his eight stages:

Trust versus Mistrust
Autonomy versus Shame or Doubt
Initiative versus Guilt
Industry versus Inferiority
Identity versus Identity Confusion/Diffusion
Companionship (Mating) versus Isolation
Productivity versus Stagnation
Integrity versus Despair

A personality evolves through the resolution of the issue presented by each stage. The interaction between how the environment or context supports the resolution and the resolutions of prior stages drive and shape the resolution of the current stage. It is a dynamic model. It encompasses the entire life cycle. I think Erikson missed a stage between Productivity and Integrity. I would want to label that stage “Generativity”. In line with Terrance Real and Jean Miller, I would contrast it with Depression or Disconnection. It is the setting of the matrix or context for the following generation, the enabling of “Sustainability” for the human race and the planet. In Erikson’s day, I don’t think that the lifespan was long enough or the ecological crisis was present enough for him to see its outline. Look at what happens if this additional stage is interposed. The first three stages of childhood have to do with:

Connection = Trust versus Mistrust (Winnicot’s notion of “good enough mothering” is worth referring to to get the historical sense of this - and then Miller and Real)
Integrity = Autonomy (Me-I) versus Shame
Action = Initiative versus Guilt

The next three stages of youth and young adulthood then reiterate the same themes:

Action = Industry versus Inferiority
Integrity = Identity versus Identity Diffusion/Confusion
Connection = Companionship versus Isolation

In the frame I’m proposing, the next three stages of adulthood also reiterate the themes:

Action = Productivity versus Stagnation (Work Identity and Career Performance)
Connection = Generativity versus Depression
Integrity = Integrity versus Despair (Have I been true to my values and aspirations)

Note that there is another embedded response to the work of Real and Miller: that, while they have correctly focused the lens on a pivot for development that has been undervalued; there are two additional pivots for full development. I can subscribe to the notion that Connection is the base of the triangle of the three, the first line or precursor, but the other vectors must also be present and developed for a rich and full life.