of his orbitofrontal cortex removed because of a cancerous growth. The operation completely changed his personality. His ability to plan was still present—because dorsolateral frontal cortex was reasonably intact.
However, these schemes lacked emotional depth—because orbitofrontal cortex was missing. For example, soon after he returned to work, he
“established a partnership with a man of questionable reputation and went into business, against sound advice. The venture proved catastrophic. He had to declare bankruptcy and lost his entire personal investment…His wife left home with the children and filed for divorce…He married within a month after his first divorce, against the advice of his relatives. The second marriage ended in divorce two years later.” Ten years further on, at the time when this paper was written, he was “considering a third marriage to a woman 14 years his senior and planned to establish a luxury travel business in which he would drive vacationing persons around the country in a motor home.”5 Notice that his internal world was full of Perceiver
Perceiver Automatic Thought
Perceiver
Internal
World
facts, Server actions, and Contributor plans. These entities, though, were unaccompanied by either Mercy feelings of appropriateness or by Teacher understanding, and he completely ignored the Mercy feelings and Teacher words of those who were close to him.
Researchers have discovered two behavioral tests which can only be completed with an intact dorsolateral frontal cortex. The first is a simple one that researchers use on monkeys, called delayed response. An animal is placed in front of two covered containers. The monkey watches as a person lifts up one of the lids, puts some food in the container, and then replaces the lid. After a delay of a few moments, during which the animal is forced to look away from the containers, the monkey is then permitted to reach for the food, which requires remembering in which container it was placed. If the monkey finds the morsel, then for the next test, the food is placed in the other container.
“Delayed Response performance in monkeys has been shown to depend upon dorsolateral prefrontal [another word for frontal] cortex…The association between Delayed Response and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex is one of the best established brain-behavior relations in the study of cortical localization.”8
I suggest that the delayed response test depends upon the knowing of the Perceiver internal world. Remember that a Perceiver fact is a set of connections between Mercy experiences. In this case, Perceiver strategy must know which container is connected with the food, and which is not connected with the food. The alternation and distraction ensures that automatic Perceiver thought is insufficient: The location of the food alternates, therefore repetition cannot be used to build up a sense of reasonableness. Moreover, the location of the food must be remembered.
Thus, the visual object recognition provided by automatic Perceiver cortex is inadequate. In order to remember the current location of the food, the monkey must observe where it is placed and pull this connection between food and container into the internal Perceiver world as a belief.A
This connection between belief and behavior is seen clearly in the second test, called the Wisconsin card sort, which is given to humans.
Performance of this task also depends upon the integrity of the dorsolateral frontal cortex. The test uses a set of cards similar to a normal deck of cards.
A Belief, I suggest, involves the right dorsolateral frontal cortex. The monkey must also choose to do the action of reaching for a container, or not to do the action of reaching for it. This choice involves the internal world of Server thought, which I have suggested is located within the left dorsolateral frontal cortex. It is possible that either the Perceiver or the Server internal world would be sufficient for carrying out this test. Thus, the monkey would only be impaired after damage to both right and left dorsolateral frontal cortices.
Each card has symbols printed on it, which vary in number, shape and color. The subject is given the deck, and told to sort the cards, but not given any instructions on how they should be sorted. Instead, after the subject makes some particular choice, the examiner tells him whether his sorting decision has been right or wrong. Whenever a person has made ten correct decisions, the examiner then changes the criterion for judging, also without telling the subject. For instance, the tester may begin by expecting the subject to sort the cards according to color. He may then change to accepting decisions based upon shape.
In order to complete this task successfully, a person must use Perceiver thought to decide how Mercy experiences are connected, believe in those facts, and then on his own initiative, change these beliefs when they are no longer correct. It is this altering of belief which humans with dorsolateral frontal damage find especially difficult. Instead, they tend to stick with the first sorting rule that they discover. Amazingly, when the criterion for sorting changes, they may even tell the examiner the new rule while simultaneously continuing to sort by the old one, even saying “This is wrong, and this is wrong,” while repeatedly making those same incorrect decisions.8
We have looked at the brain locations for Perceiver automatic thought and for the Perceiver internal world. I suggest that the brain also contains a processor which handles Perceiver thought, called the hippocampus. There are two of these brain centers, one located underneath each temporal lobe, behind and above the amygdala.
The neurological evidence connecting Perceiver thought with the right hippocampus is quite clear. In fact, some researchers even make a distinction between the right and left hippocampi, associating Perceiver- like thinking with the former and Server-like thought with the latter:
“Evidence from single unit and lesion studies suggests that the hippocampal formation acts as a spatial or cognitive map…Computations within this framework enable the animal to identify its location within an environment, to predict the location which will be reached as a result of any specific movement from that location, and conversely, to calculate the spatial transformation necessary to go from the current location to a desired location…In infra-human species such as the rat, the cognitive map is confined to the analysis and manipulation of spatial information; but for the human the concept is broadened to include the notion of a semantic map in the left hippocampus. This map acts to organize abstract linguistic material into a map-like narrative. The right human hippocampus is held to function as a purely spatial system.”9
Objects in Space and Time
Let us review. We started this section by looking at object recognition.
I suggested that this task is performed by automatic Perceiver strategy
working together with automatic Mercy thought. I then suggested that automatic Perceiver and Mercy thought and the internal world of Perceiver and Mercy thinking operate in exactly the same way, and that the only difference between these two aspects of thought lies in the method by which information is allowed to enter. We then compared the advantages and disadvantages of each of these two methods. Finally, we took a detour into neurology.
If automatic thought and the internal world operate in the same way, then we can gain some clues about how one works by looking at the operation of the other. Therefore, I would like to take another look at the topic of object recognition, the simplest form of Mercy-Perceiver interaction.
Normally, when we think of an object, we are reminded of some specific thing which just „sits there‟: a car, a knife, a pair of scissors—in other words, a collection of bits which is spatially related. You can see this type of fact illustrated by the diagram of the „car.‟ Notice how the Perceiver
fact of „car‟ ties together the individual Mercy elements of wheels, motor, steering wheel, doors and seats. All of these Mercy experiences are connected by space: The wheels are at the bottom, the engine is (usually) at the front, the doors are on the outside, and the steering wheel is somewhere in the middle.
When we discussed facts and Perceiver processing, however, we said only that Perceiver thought notices connections between individual Mercy experiences; it looks for events which belong together. We did not say anything about space. We only assumed that these connections involved space—that the various bits were above, below, inside and behind each other.A
It is also possible for Perceiver processing to tie together Mercy experiences which are connected by time. Analyze, for instance, the process of jumping off a cliff. First a person jumps, then his body sails through the air, and finally it goes „splat‟ at the bottom of the slope. Unlike the Mercy
experiences which make up the fact of a „car,‟ these Mercy experiences do not occur at the same time. Rather, one event occurs, and then the next.
A Here is another example of being tripped up by an assumption.