Exercise & the Mind-Body Metaphor

The mind and body are not only opposites of one another; they are also very alike. There are many metaphorical connections we make between the two, and these connections often seem so natural to us that we hardly recognize that the connections are indeed metaphorical. I'm relying on this metaphor in my anti-jump muscles imagery, for example.

All of the nouns listed below (separated into two categories) apply to both mind and body

I Strength, power, endurance, exhaustion, exercise/exertion, ease/difficulty

II trauma, pain, injury, scarring, healing, stress/relaxation

Each one applies more fundamentally to the body and only to the mind by analogy — the first set pertain to intelligence or knowledge or determination, the second to emotions or well-being. Am I right in thinking you never pondered the connection between physical healing and emotional healing? Between physical exhaustion and mental exhaustion? Is one's recovery from a broken arm even slightly related to one's recovery from a broken heart?

It would be interesting to try to apply mind descriptors to the body rather than the other way around. People do speak of body intelligence or muscle memory, but I assume those apply to aspects of unconscious mind rather than to the body per se, as a physical phenomenon. Is it just because humans developed a language for the body before they did so for the mind? Is that the only reason we use the same words for the mind...because there were already handy, useful words around to cover the bases?

It occurs to me that learning is primarily mental and might apply to the physical side of things metaphorically. Might one be said to have learned to dead-lift 200 pounds? You could certainly learn to do it properly, but might one have gotten strong enough to do it by a process of learning? Eh. Meh. The metaphor seems weak, but it might hold some water.

This little essay mostly concerns the idea of exercise in the two realms of mind and body. Readers be warned that conclusions are not reached. This writing is more in the nature of fumbling around, although I have some sort of agenda in mind.

In order to learn to play the piano, learn algebra, memorize a poem, or increase our mental acuity, we do mental exercises. When we want to get stronger, increase our endurance, or improve our cardio-vascular health, we do physical exercises. Is this just a metaphorical relationship or is something more direct and immediate involved in the relationship between the two? Let's at least entertain the notion of a deeper connection — what I call an ontological connection (by which I mean a connection at the level of being), if only because people tend to associate the two sides so completely. For what it's worth, I think there probably is such a deeper connection, but it's hard to pin down the subtleties. Perhaps we still don't have a language that applies very well to the mind.

What connects the two interpretations of exercise? In the most general terms, it is the idea that repetition facilitates improved performance, that usage facilitates itself. Performing an activity in the present (even ineptly) makes one better able to perform a similar activity in the future — whether it's running a mile or writing a clear declarative sentence.

We might be able to go even deeper and say that exercise is the application of intentionality to goals. That is, we try to gain knowledge and strength, and, by trying, slowly achieve them. This latter accentuates persistence over repetition, but the best way to express persistence is through repetition, I suppose.

This fortuitous ability we humans have to accumulate powers for ourselves involves a ratcheting up that preserves progress. That is, once you run a sub-five-minute mile or solve a quadratic equation, you're apt to be able to do it again. In what does this ratcheting consist? I guess that's the hard question under consideration here. On the face of it, the mind and body have very distinct ways of doing this ratcheting, and I'm searching for a meaningful connection or natural overlap.

By the way, it didn't have to be this way, did it? Nature might not have made such ratcheting possible. Or this kind of ratcheting could have been possible in only one mind/body realm and not in the other — these realms that seem separate and quasi-independent. (That is, our explanations or pathways for each realm sound unrelated as we'll consider shortly.) I could even imagine a world not too different from our own in which usage doesn't facilitate itself at all, where practice doesn't make perfect and powers don't accumulate. Insects, for example, don't get stronger through exercise, do they? Or learn through doing. They only learn through generations as their genes happen upon arrangements that promote successful abilities and behaviors — genetic ratcheting. In this genetic version of ratcheting, it isn't repetition or intentional effort that leads there but ecological fit and biochemistry — the meta-repetition of many different lives in similar circumstances perhaps. Anyway, it seems to me that a universe as complex and realistic as one with insects but no people could exist without physical or intellectual exercise. Maybe there are inhabited planets that have no exercise.

We probably couldn't have human culture without mental exercise or something to take its place, but I can imagine humanity much like it is without the benefits of physical exercise. That is, there's a plausible science fiction universe where we are automatically maximally physically fit. You'll see why I think this is plausible later. If it were the case that exercise wasn't necessary for strength and endurance, it would change social and power relationships a lot, but much of our world would be the same.

Animals invented the physical exercise component long ago, I would guess. Is it only mammals that benefit from physical exercise? Can birds and reptiles develop their muscles? I wonder if there is direct scientific evidence one way or the other? At what point in evolutionary history did the mental exercise component kick in? Do dogs practice their barking? Play-fighting among puppies seems like a kind of mental practice or rehearsal, which amounts to the same thing. Presumably though, frogs can not improve their frog skills by practicing them. Maybe a little as they adjust to say weather conditions.

Exercise is about changing one's abilities during a lifetime rather than between lifetimes. It's clear that those who have a means of improving capabilities during a lifetime -- metagenetic capacities -- can respond more flexibly to their environments and gain a survival advantage, so a Darwinian explanation definitely comes into play. But that doesn't explain how such a thing would actually work. Did the benefits of mental and physical exercise evolve separately or together? Did the genome at some point acquire a propensity for ratcheting in general that began to work in both spheres at once? Could it be that exercise ratcheting is deeper than Darwinian evolution? Sorry for so many questions, but I really have no clue.

Perhaps usage facilitating itself is deep in the nature of reality — ontological natural selection. By ontological natural selection, I mean something like this: The universe, in its infinite fecudity and creativity, throws up all kinds of phenomena. One presumes that most of these event-types are entirely evanescent and have no opportunity to evolve; they're gone before they can reach the first ratchet. Some of these processes, however, have the capacity to facilitate their own continuance — they persist in time or they copy themselves or they have some level of stability. By virtue of that quality, they are capable of playing the evolution game (or the ratcheting game) at some rudimentary level. (Ratcheting may be implicit in the idea of a steady state, in mathematical attraction.) These stable systems may lack genetic inheritance or genetic mutation, but through repetition they can be shaped and preserved. That's certainly what Rupert Sheldrake would say. (Given mainstream scientific opinion of his ideas, I may not be helping my case by invoking his name, but his notion of the presence of the past and morphogenetic fields would go a long way toward explaining why mental and physical exercise both do what they do.)

[I'm to some extent stealing these ideas, I now realize, from Lancelot Law Whyte. "All structures facilitate the processes which develop them." That sounds a lot like ontological natural selection. There's some Lyall Watson in here too.]

It's of some significance, I suppose, that both the physical and mental senses of exercise often apply simultaneously. When we repeat a forehand tennis stroke over and over again, our minds are getting feedback on what works and what doesn't which we somehow take in unconsciously (or so the explanation might go), while at the same time our legs, shoulders, back, lungs, and arms get stressed in ways that lead either to injury or to greater strength/endurance the next time around. What doesn't kill you makes you stronger...or weaker.

Let's take a step back here and ask the question, "How does physical exercise lead to strength and endurance?" The usual physiological explanation is something like this, I think:

Muscular exertion depletes oxygen and other chemicals from muscle tissue, stressing and/or killing cells. As part of healing the tissue, the body reacts by bathing the muscle tissue in chemicals which promote new cell growth. The body knows (via the lessons of natural selection) that increased use in the present predicts continued use in the future, so it allocates more resources to the site which builds more and/or more-efficient muscle fibers. Heavy loads trigger the generation of strength (more), while continuous lower loads trigger endurance (more efficient).

Other physiological effects of exercise are subtler — calluses form, ligaments stretch, etc. The effects I'm mentioning here are all working toward facilitating better performance at the same activities the next time around.

I hope I got that right in very general terms. It seems reasonable. This description de-emphasizes repetition and emphasizes stress as the key to physical exercise.

The conventional scientific view of the path from physical exercise to physical strength thus has a couple of intermediate steps which involve selected-for biochemical processes. For my purposes, that's the important thing: Exercise, by this explanation, doesn't seem to build strength directly or inevitably or "ontologically" as people may often think. It isn't some kind of law of physics. Or cosmic justice, paying for gain with pain.

Could one bypass the exercise component by, say, injecting chemicals into the tissue that mimic the chemical state induced by exercise? Possibly. This isn't quite what steroid injections do, is it? ( I have asked elsewhere if increasing your heart rate by holding your breath might be equivalent to a cardio workout). What if some surgical (physical) intervention could put muscle tissue in the same state as exercise? Would the same ends be met? Doesn't this idea offend your sense of justice? Gain without pain?

Let's point out here that the steps to increased physical strength made no reference to the mind, and the forthcoming explication of mental strength doesn't seem like it will have much to do with muscles. Despite the cliche to the contrary, the brain is decidedly not a muscle.

Okay, I was about to try a half-baked description of what happens in the brain during and after mental exercise that facilitates improvements in future activities, but then I realized that I don't really have a clue, not even a phony scenario as above. I wonder what the state of knowledge on this subject is — what is the received wisdom of neuroscience? (Research time.) In trying to grasp a concept, you might mimic the activity of the teacher. You fake it until you make it, until the aha moment. Suddenly the skill is easy. What does this look like in the brain? My best descriptive account off the top of my head is more schematic, more about the mind than the brain, making no reference to the underlying physical substrate. Perhaps that's appropriate. It involves canalization (reinforced neural pathways, perhaps) and memory storage and retrieval. But then where is that aha moment? In any event, my point is that there's not much obvious connection between how physical and mental practice achieve their ends. That is, whatever a reasonable description for mind exercise might turn out to be, it won't be about damage and repair or marshalling of resources — I dare to say!

How is mental exercise like physical exercise? What intermediate biochemical steps — or correlates of biochemical steps — account for the benefits of mental exercise? In the step-by-step explanations of how neither physical and mental exercise work do we get an account that satisfies our intuitive sense of what's happening — nothing about how it feels to learn or to transform our bodies, nothing about the nature of reality.

My guess is that this outline is rather incomplete. I think there is an ontological aspect to the benefit of exercise that I'm struggling to express (or even find an entry point for the discussion) that goes deeper than biochemistry. That is, there's some as-yet undiscovered explanation that better ties physical and mental exercise together. My only guess is that the following statement almost has the status of a natural law:

Repetition facilitates further repetition. Use doth breed a habit, and habit eases use. If that is the case, then, at the very least, the "selected-for" part of the process takes on a different meaning — selected for not only through genetics or biochemistry but through a sort of preference of reality. My Sheldrake is showing again.

An odd but important distinction: Both realms of exercise involve energy expenditure but in very different senses of the phrase. Physical energy is — duh — the energy of physics, a conserved quantity that can be stored in batteries, in suspended masses, in fuels, then unleashed or transformed in order to accelerate masses, etc., and ultimately devolving into heat through friction. Mental energy does rely on a substrate of physical energy, but isn't essentially energetic in the physical sense, and I wouldn't think it is remotely measurable nor conserved. Rather than unleashing, it's about leashing (according to my bold theory!), about focusing attention, managing information, controling randomness, relaxing anti-think muscles rather than flexing think muscles. Thought is what happens when mental chaos is held at bay. That is, it's something we allow rather than make.

Despite my inability to find a way to motivate or justify this conclusion, I'm going to go ahead and say that mental and physical exercise are not separate developments ; somehow they are the same thing and arose mutually. In fact, my impulse is to say that the aforementioned natural selection itself is a kind of exercise or something more general, in the sense that it too is usage facilitating itself, ratcheting up through genes rather than muscles or minds — not that I have any inkling what the connection could be. I'm just saying...

And this essay comes to a crashing thud of an ending.

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A side question: under what conditions would it behoove the body, would it be an appropriate allocation of resources, to be in less than perfect cardiovascular condition — given a certain level of available resources, nutrients, etc. Thus, since exercise is apparently unnecessary for conditioning, why are we not automatically fit. Is there or could there be such a thing as a fat and unfit cockroach? Is not their conditioning automatically optimal?

(Oh my God. What a great title for a diet and exercise book — From Fat and Unfit to Fit and Unfat)

related topic: physical computation. Someone gives you a stone weighing 3 pounds that you've never seen before and asks you to toss it into a circle of two-foot diameter that's on the ground 20 feet away. No problem. You manipulate the stone for a few seconds, sensing its mass and aerodynamic properties, and then you let it fly. Bet you get within five feet of the mark, and most people would do a lot better than that. Maybe a skilled basketball player launching three-pointers is a better example. How is this computation done? Can this computational mechanism, this analog computer, be harnessed to do numerical computation? Is Steph Curry really a sort of genius? Is this a related topic? Perhaps only in the sense that the physical and mental are tied together in a weird way -- muscular release closely tuned by mental simulation.

I'm thinking about how mental exercise is related to memory. How much is learning equal to memorization? A lot but not completely, I guess. How many kinds of things are called memory? Remembering how to ride a bike (is this memory in anything but name)? Remembering your 5th birthday party. Remembering what I said at the beginning of this sentence so that I could finish my... Remembering that Riga is the capital of Latvia. Remembering the date of my anniversary. The lyrics to a song I haven't heard in 50 years. The buttons to press to turn off the house alarm. Is there a memory scheme that encompasses them all? Does one remember where to position the racket to perform a topspin lob or does one just do it. What's the difference (between doing, knowing, and remembering)? Maybe all memory is just doing it. Memory may be a misleading name, a mere reification, for an aspect of reality that just is, inappropriately singled out from a flowing reality. The act of remembering is a real process but the memory itself doesn't have an existence of its own. Memories are the actual past.

What's the difference between knowing and remembering. Do you know anything that you don't remember (such as a fact or how to hit top spin)? Sitcom amnesia victims know a lot but remember nothing. They know what a refrigerator is for, but don't know where they grew up. They know who the Chicago Bears are, but don't remember if they root for them. If actual amnesia is anything like this, it suggests very compartmentalized types of memory. Do the modern concepts of short-, medium-, and long-term memory cover the gamut? What is the supposed physical difference between those three types. Current favorite catchphrase: memories aren't in the brain; remembering is.

this really approaches the crux of the mind-body problem. Mind-body = mental influence (psychology, persuasion)-physical influence (physics, gravity). How about: persuasion is to gravity as learning is to physical conditioning . Persuasive influence is to information as force (coercive influence) is to energy -- vector to scalar.

look at the law of entropy for clues. Information=negative entropy (re Shannon). If influence is an information "vector", is directed information, teleologic information, information with a mind of its own, then what is the energy equivalent of influence? Physical causation? The exercise continuum fits in here

physical influence-> psychological influence

physical healing-> emotional healing

physical exercise->mental exercise, learning

physical exertion->mental exertion

physical control->mental control

Canalization? Repetition is fundamental to exercise per se but not to science's understanding of exercise's benefits. Science says the same results are possible chemically. Strength can be imposed on the muscles. Learning can be imposed on the brain. But we actually achieve both through repetition.

What is the physical correlate of intellectual insight?

There's actually at least two different kinds of mental exercise. Learning a tennis stroke, through repetition, experimentation, feedback is very different from learning a fact through contextual understanding or memorizing your lines — or providing opportunities for reflection. Maybe the latter type doesn't count as exercise.

what doesn't kill you makes you stronger

a healthy mind and a healthy body

practice makes perfect

Powers accumulate

use it or lose it

no pain, no gain

Fake it till you make it.

[doing stuff now makes you better at doing stuff next time]

If intentions seek out pathways, as I was once fond of saying, then an underlying tendency of usage to facilitate itself will find its various physical and seemingly unrelated expressions in different contexts

the mind-body distinction and the map-territory distinction are joined at the hip. I find m-t more fundamental. On the other hand, fundamentalness is artificially hierarchical

If the connection between mental and physical exercise is more than metaphorical, it would seem on the surface to imply at least one of two things:

1) Physical strength and endurance are learned or at least involve a kind of concentration.

2) The brain is a kind of muscle, knowledge is literally power.

The first of these is more appealing to me at a visceral level, but I don't see either of those options going anywhere rewarding. The only other option I can think of is to look for a third thing underlying both — like natural selection.

let me try something out here.

In the exercise realm, repetition leads to a ratcheting upward. In the evolution realm, it's kind of reversed in a weird way — genetic ratcheting leads to repetition (sex drive, reproduction and species survival).