While there is no way to prove my energy model directly, however if it provides the best explanation for what we observe and the way things are, then it is the strongest theory, circumstantial evidence notwithstanding. I also believe that were the scientific community to apply its tools to the model, it could indeed be verified according to the scientific method. But for now, the way I’ve built my model is by observing behavior as a function of energy rather than being due to thoughts. This then makes vivid the principles by which energy moves, what we otherwise call evolution, learning, personality development and even so-called dysfunctional behavior. I believe that knowing that behavior is a function of attraction which works according to the laws of nature, allows us to reverse engineer the nature of sociability.
As certain laws become clear I keep my eyes open for scientific evidence to attach to such principles. I know it has to be there because I’m convinced that emotion is energy and its principles of movement are the basis on which physiological systems and organs evolved. I’m confident in this conviction because this is the most conservative interpretation of evolution, the formed arising from the unformed, matter from energy. This means that various aspects of the emotional dynamic are mirrored by specific organs, systems and physiological adaptations because as hard as it is for our linear intellects to apprehend, the latter are based on the former.
Unfortunately I’m not able to mine the research directly because I would have to understand its technicalities and in all its intricacies in order to pull out what I’m looking for. Rather I have to wait until a scientific journalist, or a scientist trying to reach the public brings out some finding or paradox from which I can glean its network implications. Often what I’m looking for comes out in a throwaway line of no seeming consequence. For example, in his book “Balance” Scott McCredie observes that camel jockeys and elephant drivers, no matter how experienced, often experience motion sickness whereas equestrians no matter how novice, never do. It was mentioned as an interesting but inconsequential factoid whereas it hit me like a ton of bricks because I realized that the horse shifts its emotional center-of-gravity to include the rider, unlike any other animal, and therefore even the rank amateur on their first ride at a dude ranch is no more likely to experience motion sickness than were they walking on foot. And this explains the incredible connection between man and horse, the only animal other than the dog of which we can say is “all heart.” The horse can feel in its heart the rider-plus-its-self and then move accordingly, two beings composing one emotional body via a common wave function.
Finding just such a scientific correlate may have happened yesterday when reading the comment sections on the NPR story concerning the dog experiment I wrote about. While we should for now remain skeptical about the source until the information is fully verified, the author Margaret Hyde seems knowledgeable and credible and so I feel comfortable quoting her remarks below. I hope this exchange can prove an opportunity to vet the remarks.
It appears to be a very promising confirmation of the model of how emotion becomes unresolved due to resistance and then this physical memory is projected onto complex objects of attraction, i.e. other social beings, by way of piggybacking on primal and seemingly unrelated systems.
It’s been my experience that the most vital clues are most often seen as meaningless (junk DNA) or as accidents. For example, mainstream biologists interpret the fact that since the organs of sexuality also double as organs of elimination this is evidence of unintelligent design, nature as a haphazard random cobbling together of parts, rather than as perfect telescoping of network functions from primal systems. (See the article http://naturaldogtraining.com/blog/why-do-dogs-investigate-the-eliminations-of-other-dogs/ )
In her passage, I’ve added emphasis to what I find especially compelling.
Margaret Hyde: “Just for your information about how this part works. At 3 years of age, the frontal lobes complete the formation of the pathways that go from the frontal lobe to cells deep in the anterior medulla’s reticular formation that are responsible for informing the temporal lobe that there are changes in the baby’s external universe (these cells are mentioned below). The anterior medulla houses clumps and scattered cells all over it (reticular formation, cranial nerve nuclei, metabolic, satiety, and emotion centers). THESE STRUCTURES ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR RELATING OUR EMOTIONS TO OUR RELATIONSHIPS WITH FAMILY AND OTHER PEOPLE AND PLACES FROM THE PAST AND TO THE FUNCTION OF MUSCLES, BONES, LIGAMENTS AND TENDONS. (Why are emotions linked to the latter? An embryological accident-the mesoderm giving rise to the latter lies directly over the part of the nervous system that will develop the anterior medulla and thus is segmentally allied with it at the start). The anterior medulla also houses the pons which executes commands and sorts incoming sensory information from all over the body. Critical to the functioning of the anterior medulla is our external and internal universe–a map of what we see, hear, smell of the world around us.”
In other words, physical and psychological systems are predicated on emotional systems. What’s happening within the body and brain is a direct extension of what’s happening in the invisible emotional mind because the emotional mind requisitions these systems by virtue of how they are composed so as to interrelate in a network coherent manner.
The body’s means of registering resistance to physical movement is directly linked to family and social relationships (and I can think of no greater source of resistance to emotional movement than a family member). This linkage is no accident. When the infant experiences physical resistance to movement toward an object of attraction, she experiences stress; and this is stored in the body/mind as emotional battery, the core repository or densest layer being what I call the emotional center-of-gravity, and this core composes the animal mind’s sense of its “self.” This is that aspect of consciousness displaced by eye-contact and deflected onto where another persons’ focus is directed.
This e-cog is then projected onto complex objects of attraction that offer resistance to emotional expression in order to divine and break down the energetic signature of that complex being. This then allows her to become the equal/opposite in order to fit (two beings aligning around a common emotional c-o-g) with this complex object of attraction, and this subsequent mutual interlocking then allows the group they thus form to overcome greater challenges by virtue of being able to work together (i.e. create an overarching feeling or bond, a.k.a., a wave) that can entangle others and other objects into its function.
Two beings so aligned comprise one emotional body and the emotional body works according to the same principles as the physical body. The emotional body has a backbone (axis of connection between A and B), a center-of-gravity common to A and B, and a brain (the heart as an auto-tuning/feedback dynamic that serves as a synchronizing meter between A and B). And just as every physical expression of a body’s movement is symmetrically aligned around the body’s physical center-of-gravity, likewise, every physical expression of the emotional body’s movement is symmetrically aligned around the emotional center-of-gravity. The physical body generates rhythms over distance; the emotional body generates rhythms over time. In some behaviors the symmetry can take days, months or even years to manifest.
Unfortunately we miss this symmetry because to our intellectual eye we think we are seeing two separate entities of intelligence endowed with two separate brains as sources of their separate and distinct intelligences. We then read thoughts into their behavior because we’re so impressed with their capacity to synchronize over time. Whereas I’m arguing that the physical body with two poles at either end (Big-Brain/little-brain) composes the animal mind as a collective intelligence rather than just the Big-Brain in the head.
Emotional resistance is processed the same way that physical resistance is processed. But of course we should say physical resistance is processed the same way emotional resistance is processed.
Just as the Brain can’t feel a thing, Heart can’t move a muscle because it doesn’t exist within any one being. It takes two to make one Heart. (No animal is an island) Heart must evolve into existence in real time; it cannot be genetically encoded because genes are too static and also because the function of genes is to receive information that Heart generates and then reliably transcribe this, genes don’t create information.
In this interplay within the body/mind, Heart cannot communicate with the Big-Brain directly; it must go through the little-brain in the gut. This implements the principle of emotional conductivity. Hence we have “gut feelings” as precursors to integration. So I call the Big-Brain in the head the executor of action, I term the little-brain-in-the-gut the social brain, and Heart is the network brain. At the moment the Big-Brain gets all the credit and seemingly is the source of all the information but I believe a proper reading of animal behavior will ultimately prove that this is as sensible as saying that what comes out of a radio, or what is on a computer’s screen logged onto the internet, was generated by the radio or by the computer’s CPU. I’m proposing that we likewise turn our attention to the invisible waves that animate and inform such complex electro/magnetic devices. I’m proposing that animals are picking up a signal that they collectively generate.
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I agree there is energy – everything does have energy – but there are also plain old basic learning principles that have been around for a long time.
Behavioral science is indeed being consistent by not using the term energy, and it’s also quite wise to avoid any use of the term because once we add energy into a discussion of behavior, then the paradigm shifts wholesale. On the other hand we can’t agree that there is energy, that everything has energy, and [...]
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Click to purchase the Natural Dog Training Book!
Natural Dog Training is about how dogs see the world and what this means in regards to training. The first part of this book presents a new theory for the social behavior of canines, featuring the drive to hunt, not the pack instincts, as seminal to canine behavior. The second part reinterprets how dogs actually learn. The third section presents exercises and handling techniques to put this theory into practice with a puppy. The final section sets forth a training program with a special emphasis on coming when called.Tags: anterior medulla, attraction, balance, e-cog, emotions, margaret hyde, scott mccredie
Fantastic article Kevin! Makes me think of the word ‘hsin’ in chinese. It stands for Heart/mind, the ideogram looking like a actual heart. But it also stands for Being, with a big B. I like the image of the Heart being the interface to the greater working of the group Mind.
Hi, Kevin,
You misread the name of the NPR poster. It’s Martha Hyde, not Margaret. I googled her and found an assistant professor of biology at West Texas A&M University with that name. I don’t know if it’s the same person, but her academic position seems to dovetail nicely with what was written.
LCK
i have been wanting to say, in my “theory” if I had one, thoughts would be energy as much as emotions are- who’s to say that thoughts do not go the same route as emotions, (for instance, as per your theory, gut, heart, big brain etc..)
maybe, the distinction between thought and emotion is completely arbitrary and human-made, and nature does not make this distinction…
You bring up a point that speaks to the crux of the matter. While as humane and nice as such a gesture at first seems to be; whether we know it or not we are all busy deep in our subconscious working on a theory of behavior and so I would argue that what you’re suggesting isn’t in fact possible. By this I mean that if we don’t see our dog as a function of energy, then the default setting of dog-as-person fills in the blank. B.F Skinner himself was building a personality theory as evidenced by his expression “little-black-box.” A person is a self-contained autonomous entity of intelligence. So in my view there’s no alternative because there’s no such thing as a detached or impartial observer of nature. We either see what we want to see or what we need to see. The instinctual intellect needs to see a person so that it can generate a pattern to what it’s seeing.
I would also add that a completely laissez-faire attitude between dog and owner is fine by me, but I believe that would only work if one lived in the middle of nowhere where everything is always the same and one is prepared to never try to change anything about what their dog does. The dog is free to come and go and do as it pleases and whatever will be, will be. If though one ever anticipates having to make any demand on the dog’s behavior and attempt to make any degree of change to what it does, then one needs to know about the distinctions between emotion and instincts, thoughts and feelings in order to understand the principle of emotional conductivity by which complex social behavior evolves in real time. This way the dog is free to be a dog without getting itself killed.
While it takes energy to generate thoughts, thoughts aren’t energy because you can’t feel them. This is why thoughts by themselves aren’t infectious but the feelings attached to them can be. When a speaker is really excited about a subject, the audience feels this and can likewise become excited. Yet the speaker could convey the same message with the same word but without passion and this leaves the audience unmoved. And because thoughts aren’t energy per se, they also don’t have a thermodynamic quality so that we experience an inevitable consequence in regards to what we think. We are free to think anything without consequence. For example, I could think about wanting to go to California, or I could feel an emotional pull to California and there will be a distinct consequence in the case of the latter but not the former if it turns out that I’m not going to be able to go to California. These distinctions are not inconsequential if we’re going to try to alter a dog’s behavior when it begins to matter to us (the thermodynamic consequences in emotionally investing, i.e. projecting our “self” into another living being) whether the dog lives or not.
hm so what about doing this emotion is a consequence of thought- thing, where we say we have to stay Positive in our thinking, otherwise, the emotions will be tainted and we get all tedious and depressed.
i.e. if you feel sad and frustrated about not being able to go to California, it is best not to think about it. but think about the stuff you CAN do…
also, if an owner keeps thinking about all the bad stuff a dog has done and might do, the dog will perhaps pick up on that vibe, and do exactly what the owner is projecting. visualizing in his anxiety, anger, whatever negative emotion the owner might have about the stuff the dog is doing wrong for him….but if the owner is completely positive emotionally about the dog’s behaviour, the dog will, potentially, feel that kind of a spin coming off off the owner and have a better success ratio in training,
…going back to this pendulum experiment, that Mrs. Dunbar did not think was so entertaining.. that i posted on the dogstardaily blog,
when we try to move the pendulum, we do not FEEL “right”, we (mostly) think “right”, and the pendulum twirls to the right etc…
like those atomic particles in certain physics experiments, where the observer anticipates an outcome and thus influences the experiment – which is why scientists decided they need double blind studies… (am I getting this right >?)
so as a result of this, I am thinking that..energy is also generated by thought, not only emotion ?
Kevin’s statement about how horses shift their center of gravity to include the rider, sparked the following thoughts on teaching a dog to heel by finding a shared emotional center of gravity. (The original is posted on the NDT forum site: http://ow.ly/RrCO)
I read something interesting on Kevin’s blog yesterday (or the day before), about how nearly everyone who takes their first ride on a camel or elephant experiences motion sickness, but this doesn’t happen when riding a horse for the first time. Kevin’s reasoning is that this is because horses know how to adjust their movements to incorporate the rider’s center of gravity.
In thinking about that statement, and in working on a blog article of my own which will compare Cesar’s method of teaching a dog to heel, another, new example from the positive training field (linked below), and Kevin’s work with Laszlo, I realized that what’s missing from both the dominance and +R approach, and what’s now more clear to me about what Kevin does, is that dogs really do have an emotional center of gravity, as Kevin postulates. And when we teach them to heel using thoughtcentric models they have to figure out, on their own, how to match their forward momentum and energy with ours. But when we teach them using Natural Dog Training techniques, no matter how bad we are at it initially, if our goal is to teach the dog to be in-synch with us physically and emotionally (instead of by teaching them to respect our leadership, or by rewarding external behaviors only), at some point we’ll find that we’re creating a feeling in the dog of a shared center of gravity. In that respect, heeling not only feels natural to the dog. It feels really, really good.
This also reminded me of how I taught Freddie to heel years ago using techniques from Kevin’s book, where I put him in a high-energy state and found, somewhat clumsily, the invisible point in space where our emotional centers of gravity were aligned and locked together.
“Fine. So what?” Some might argue. “A heel is a heel. The dog learns it or he doesn’t.”
Well, a year or so after I taught Freddie to heel in this way, I was at an ad hoc dog run in my neighborhood (an asphalt basketball court behind a high school on Second Avenue) with Freddie and a Jack Russell terrier named Mack. At one point, it started to drizzle, and some kids in another part of the park started setting off firecrackers. Mack decided he’d like to go home, so he found a gap in the chain link fence, wriggled through, and started trotting up 68th Street toward Second Avenue. I’d been working on Mack’s recall but hadn’t perfected it yet. So I had no choice but to either let him wander into traffic and get run over or to go after him.
I couldn’t wriggle through the fence the way he did, though. In order to get out of there, I had to go the opposite direction. I ran toward the gate and called Freddie in an excited tone, but didn’t waste any time putting his leash on. I just ran and he ran with me.
We crossed 68th Street together and ran toward Second. I was scanning the sidewalk, looking for any traces of Mack, though I couldn’t see him; he’d already turned the corner at the end of the block. Then I finally looked down and saw that Freddie was running right next to me, in perfect synch with my gait, and had been gazing directly up at me the whole time. I hadn’t commanded him to heel. The only thing I’d done was to call his name and run. And he ran with me in a perfect heel. (We turned the corner, I questioned some pedestrians about Mack’s whereabouts, and finally found him wandering the aisles of a video store, pestering the employees for treats!)
The point is, we may get a pretty good heel by training a dog through either dominance or positive reinforcement. But unless we understand how the dog experiences such training techniques as actually interfering with his ability to be in-synch with us both physically and emotionally, we automatically lose the ability to have the kind of pin-point control I had with Freddie in a high-energy, high-pressure situation.
Here’s a link to video, chosen at random off YouTube, showing one example of teaching the heel using “positive reinforcement.” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vQYlAkA8gDg&feature=fvw
LCK
That’s exactly right Lee. The emotional center-of-gravity is the key to animal consciousness, it’s completely immaterial and yet it’s the aspect of reality that is what is most real to an animal. So we’re not focusing on how to teach a dog this or that in order to get high points and win an obedience title, but rather why a dog does this or that so that we can live with them in harmony. Good job.
Amen! And Good Job all around to good questions leading to good answers. I especially enjoyed yesterdays conversion between Heather and Kevin in “Errors and Physical Memory”. These types of “back-and-forth” sessions are very helpful in sorting things out so that ideas/concepts can coalesce into, hopefully, real understanding. Thank you all!
i think if we move with more speed, heeling.moving with us as one center of gravity unit. is easier for our dogs….how would that fit into the energy theory ?
i would like to poll you all about having sled dogs on a chain with a house, straw inside etc. in a big sled dog kennel environment.
have any of you seen any studies etc, have any theories, is that a humane way to keep a dog ?
since i am working with sled dogs, and helping at a kennel, i would like to know more. the dogs i work with seem very happy…maybe this is the exception,,,
i just read some comments on the below web site, they do not seem to be very scientific…
http://www.helpsleddogs.org.
This is an important observation. The emotional cog is configured around the p-cog so you could say it is the p-cog plus physical memory. Physical memory in body/mind as emotional battery is triggered by intensity, and it is smoothly released by a concordant frequency. So when a handler is moving fast, the intensity of all this motion triggers the p-cog, and then the frequency, i.e. the wave function of their body language is high smooth rhythmic motion, allows for the p-cog to be PROJECTED (hence it is an emotional cog) and so it’s much easier for the dog to sync up with handler when going fast. (When a dog tucks its tail it’s trying to hold back from projection, and when a dog’s tail is over 90 degrees over topline, it’s trying to keep p-cog from moving after having begun to project it. It’s trying to hold on to a safe frame of reference, afraid to let its “self” go.)
This is exactly akin to why it’s easier to balance a bike that’s going fast. The physical cog of rider leaves their body and goes lower into the bike because the spinning wheels increase the bike’s mass. So when there’s flow in the system between dog and handler, much easier for dog to be close and in alignment with handler because it is now able to feel the midpoint between them as a means of connection. By projecting its e-cog into handler, it then it works its way to being a midpoint between them, (that is then felt in the heart) the concern about balance now subsumed into the arousal for the movement of energy. In this state heartbeats mean quickening of feeling of suspension/weightlessness rather than sensation associated with fear.
Ah !
is it possible to get my dog to keep her tail a bit down and let the energy flow during the skijoring?
her tail is almost always all the way up when we do this.
so she is holding back, says the senior musher, and it looks as though you agree.
i would like to participate in a race with her and Freddie next week so it would be nice to get her to really run without holding back.