To proprioceive or not to proprioceive -- is that the question?

Cognitive Osmosis in a Knowledge-based Civilization (Part #9)

Whilst the noun proprioception is itself not commonly used, the verbal form (proprioceive, to propriocept?) is even more rarely used. The brain is indeed understood to dynamically integrate information from proprioceptive process and from the vestibular system into its overall sense of body position, movement, and acceleration. The word kinesthesia or kinaesthesia (kinesthetic sense) strictly means movement sense, but has been used inconsistently to refer either to proprioception alone or to the brain's integration of proprioceptive and vestibular inputs. Proprioception is often synonymous with balance. When thrown "off balance", the brain is especially challenged to propriocept.

Understandably, academics -- as academics -- have no need "to proprioceive", irrespective of the extent to which they may explain the nature of proprioception. Indicative search results at the time of writing offer: proprioception, 2,280,000; proprioceive, 1,380; to proprioceive, 349; propriocept, 39,000; to propriocept, 3,500. This is strikingly indicative of the conventional attitude to such a process, most notably in the explanatory descriptions offered by natural science and some schools of philosophy. As argued on one website: Don't Neglect to Propriocept! (Ego Performance Training, 5 March 2012).

Provocatively, a contrast may be made between widespread enthusuasm for explanation and the nature of the explaining process -- which curiously results in explanation. The latter implies a successful cognitive dissociation from the plane of reality in topological terms -- whether or not this is a complex plane. It reinforces dubious assumptions regarding global plans emerging from any planning process, speculative explored separately (Is the World View of a Holy Father Necessarily Full of Holes? 2014). Explaining could be understood as a successful cognitive disssociation from the "plain" -- as the latter is promoted in arguments for simple living.

Proprioception has the meaning to make "one's own", to take or grasp, in the sense of recognizing the relative position of one's own parts of the body and strength of effort being employed in movement. It bears an intresting relation to property, its acquisition and its possession. It is distinguished from exteroception, by the outside world is perceived, and interoception, by which pain, hunger, etc., and the movement of internal organs are perceived.

In humans, a distinction is made between conscious proprioception and non-conscious proprioception:

Conscious proprioception is communicated by the posterior column-medial lemniscus pathway to the cerebrum.

Non-conscious proprioception is communicated primarily via the dorsal spinocerebellar tract and ventral spinocerebellar tract to the cerebellum. as recgnized with respect to the human proprioceptive reflex, or righting reflex

Examples of description of the process include Wendy S. Scholz (The phenomenology of movement: action, proprioception, and embodied knowledge, Iowa Researh Online, 2010) and Andy Hamilton (Proprioception and Self-Consciousness: proprioception as direct, immediate knowledge of the body, 2013). As summarized by Schulz:

The intent of this thesis is to provide an account of the phenomenology of movement that collapses the distinction between mental and physical without the elimination of the mental. There are two main ways in which mental and physical converge in this account. First of all, the type of knowledge involved in learning movement skills is a type of nonpropositional knowledge that is literally embodied in the neuromuscular system of the body. Thus the mental phenomena of knowing-how and thinking how to do movement skills are body-wide phenomena. Furthermore, this type of knowledge is genuinely self-referential, since the knower and known are identical. Second, the phenomenology of self-actuated movement reveals that the self is experienced as a psychophysical unity through the experience of the coherence of action and the proprioception of that action. This is due to the sense of effort provided by sensorimotor integration of the peripheral nervous system. This sense of effort is the direct awareness of physical properties of muscle lengths, tensions, and speeds of contraction, and is thus a genuine psychophysical phenomenon. It is also argued that we enjoy a high degree of epistemic security regarding experiences of this type.

Sometimes referred to as the "sixth sense," proprioception includes the sense of position and movement of our limbs, the senses of muscle force and effort, and the sense of balance (Uwe Proske and Simon Gandevia, Proprioception: the sense within, The Scientist, September 2016). For Elise Walker:

Proprioception is a sense that we often overlook because it is only subtly distinguished from movement. And, unlike sight or hearing or taste, we rarely experience the absence of proprioception (dead arm being a rare exception). Yet, a total loss of proprioception might be even more devastating than going blind or deaf. Without sensory information coming in from our muscles, we would be unable to monitor and correct our paths of motion. Imagine trying to walk, gesture, or eat if you had no sense of where your limbs were without looking at them. Few people can understand the burden of proprioceptive loss better than an amputee. When a limb is lost, the ability to move and sense are both gone. (Proprioception: Your Sixth Sense: why movement and sensation are inextricably linked, Helix, 27 October 2014):

Informing his concern with cognitive topology, as noted above, Steven Rosen has argued extensively for a more appropriate understanding of conscious proprioception in contrast with the better known symbolic operations of perception and conception prevalent in conventional science:

Etymologically, to perceive is to "take hold of" or "take through" (from the Latin, per, through, and capere, to take), and to conceive is to "gather or take in." These activities are carried out in the "forward gear,"... The term proprioceive is from the Latin, proprius, meaning "one's own." Literally, then, proprioception means "taking one's own," which can be read as a taking of self or "selftaking." It is true that the term's conventional meaning derives from physiology, where it signifies an organism's sensitivity to activity in its own muscles, joints, and tendons. But [David Bohm (Thought as a System, 1994)] spoke of the need for "proprioceptive thought" (p. 229), which he viewed as a meditative act wherein "consciousness ... [becomes] aware of its own implicate activity, in which its content originates" (p. 232). Years earlier, the social psychiatrist Trigant Burrow spoke similarly of the need for human beings to gain a proprioceptive awareness of the organismic basis of their divisive symbolic activity (see Galt 1995). What I propose here is that a proprioceptive move is required if the dimensional organism is to gain the awareness of itself that is necessary for entering the climactic stage of its Individuation. Whereas the forward orientation of stage two maintains the trichotomy of object, space, and subject, the proprioceptive unearthing of the lifeworld carried out in stage three would disclose through its "backward" action the intimate transpermeation of these three terms. (The Self-evolving Cosmos:: a phenomenological approach to nature's unity-in-diversity, 2008) pp. 126-127) [emphasis added]

Rosen continues (pp. 245-246):

It is a commonplace of neuroscience that cognitive activity is linked to the cortical region of the brain. In Topologies of the Flesh, I drew on the work of psychiatrist Trigant Burrow to demonstrate that it is possible to proprioceive the workings of the brain. Supplementing his laboratory research with systematic self-observation, Burrow kinesthetically detected a unique pattern of tensions around the eyes and forehead that he found to be correlated with the symbolic operations of the cerebral cortex. In this experiential self-probing of the brain's "symbolic segment" (Science and Man's Behavior: the contribution of phylobiology, 1953, p. 316), the area that constitutes the site of thinking and language, Burrow was exploring the seat of his own identity as an individual governed by the thinking function.

Or, in Merleau-Ponty's terms, Burrow was investigating the "l think that must be able to accompany all our experiences" (Merleau-Ponty, 1968/1970, p. 145). Burrow himself came to refer to this cortical center of identity as the "I"-persona. This thinking subject that presides over every facet of human experience and behavior should not be confused with the ego of the allegedly isolated individual.... Therefore, when Burrow became attentive to the "I"-persona rather than continuing to be unwittingly governed by it, he experienced this palpable pattern of tension around the eyes and forehead against the "tensional pattern of the organism as a whole" (Galt 1995, p. 31). He was thus presumably able to apprehend in an immediate way what he called the "phyloorganism" (p. 445), i.e., the organism of humanity at large. Burrow coined the term "cotention" (1932) for his practice of proprioceiving the generic organism. He described the procedure as one of setting aside daily experimental periods in which he "adhered consistently to relaxing the eyes and to getting the kinesthetic 'feel' of the tensions in and about the eyes and in the cephalic area generally" (1953, p. 95). [emphasis added]

Such arguments call for greater recognition of the contrasting perspectives of proprioception, exteroception, and interoception (namely any sense that is normally stimulated from within the body). In their absence it can be readily argued that there are cognitive implications to the current environmental consequences of concreting the environment, canalizing river banks and lining tunnels.

An interesting contrast is offered by the design challenges of ensuring the circulation of plasma to enable nuclear fusion (Enactivating a Cognitive Fusion Reactor: Imaginal Transformation of Energy Resourcing (ITER-8), 2006). More fundamentally it may be asked what should be understood as circulating through the ouroboros (Circulation of the Light: essential metaphor of global sustainability? 2010)

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To proprioceive or not to proprioceive -- is that the question?