I have noticed that a lot of activity in this discussion happens to go over
the weekend... Which tells me that perhaps not all of you have 5-year-olds
around you who have not seen you during the week and hence want to catch up
on that by engaging you in their activities which, in its turn, also happen
to change your chemical balance completely (in a positive way, mostly) thus
leaving you with much less time and propensity to contribute to the
discussion.
And then, by Monday, one is faced with this overwhelming diversity of views
and issues to react to.
Regarding AT as disembodied: actually, what is not reflected in L's book but
is certainly reflected in his other works is the concept of the functional
systems. This concept is the legacy of diverse sources varying from Anokhin
and Sechenov to now popular Nikolaj N. Bernstein - another Russian
'revolutionary scientist' (quote from a recent article about him) who is
making his way into Western psychology some 50 years after his works were
written - and, importantly, Luria. The idea behind the concept of
functional systems is that any activity is realized through the complex
systems involving the brain and the whole body - systems formed within the
life time and geared towards specific goals and tasks (and hence
activities). So, the brain and the body are not ignored but they are viewed
as included into broader activities and thus as not having an ultimate and
unique power over human beings separated from the contexts of real life
activities. The brain is viewed as an organ of activity and not as a source
of it (Diane, does this makes sense to you?). Like in the example with a
5-year-old child who literally can make an impact on your brain (as well as
many other things can - such as a change in the whether conditions, for
example) - but not directly, rather through engaging you in different types
of activities. To begin the analyses of any meaningful life event from the
level of a brain chemistry isolated from broader real life contexts would be
an enormous simplification. Broader activity dynamics is exactly what
ultimately counts...
Hence, it does come as a surprise to many mainstream scientists but not to
those from the CHAT-perspective that, as recently has been shown, brain
cells can grow during the life time and, in fact, can respond to how the
specific life activities are structured (findings that are now presented as
breaking news). We certainly do not know how the chemical balances and
disbalances come about in all the details - but there are two different
possible paths to pursue the answers (CHAT and mainstream) with the locus of
causality being so different in these two psychological perspectives.
Anna Stetsenko
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Fri Dec 01 2000 - 01:00:59 PST