Microgenesis and Buddhism: The Concept of Momentariness

Abstract

There have been few attempts to relate Buddhist thought to current trends in brain psychology. This is not surprising since the dominant force in contemporary psychology, that of a modular cognitivism, considers mental contents to be logical solids that interact in a function space-an approach that is incompatible with a metaphysics of relation and change, and equally inhospitable to process philosophy.' The temporality that is central to Buddhist metaphysics, and foundational to all phenomenal entities, has been largely eliminated from the reified objects of psychology, which severs the temporal relations between modules and reinserts them in the connectivity. The aim of this article is to bring to the attention of Buddhist scholars another approach to the human mind, one that has developed out of the study of the symptoms of individuals with brain damage. This account, the microgenetic theory of cognition, had its beginnings with the disorders of language (aphasia) that result from damage to focal brain areas. The various forms of aphasia were interpreted as anticipatory phases in the neurocognitive actualization or becoming of an utterance. Gradually, it became clear that the brain model of language was applicable to the account of action and perception as hierarchic systems of momentary actualization. Indeed, such a range of clinical phenomena could be explained by this theory that microgenesis appeared to constitute a general model of brain and behavior. According to the theory, the mind/brain state is a continuous sheet of process from self to world, rhythmically ?generated out of a subcortical core and distributed over phases to a neocortical rim.2 The basic operation is a cascade of whole-topart or context-to-item transformations in which parts arise out of wholes through constraints on emergent form at successive phases. The progression is from the archaic to the recent in brain evolution, from the past to the present--loosely, from memory to perception-in a momentary cognition, from unity to multiplicity, and from the intrapsychic to the extrapersonal. Mental process is unidirectional, obligatory, and recurrent. The complete sequence from depth to surface constitutes the mind/brain state. In this theory, reality is not the starting point but the goal of an act of knowledge. In the course of a reflection on the metaphysics of microgenetic theory, so many areas of correspondence to early Buddhist thought are evident-the arising and perishing of phases, the recurrence of moments, the phenomenal quality of perceptions-that one might suppose it to have been the starting point of the work in neurology. Indeed, for many years, after lectures on theoretical psychology I have