Reification

-Saggital section of the optic nerve (marked #1) from the Atlas of the Fathead Minnow.


Quite the fancy little word. I don't claim to really understand what Marx meant when he referred to reification. I just barely parsed Merriam-Webster's definition for the word "to regard (something abstract) as a material or concrete thing"

This is not the same thing as believing a lie. It is a subset of that. It is misconstruing (maybe deliberately) a convenient descriptor for the thing it describes. Almost like looking at the pointing hand instead of what it points at. A side-bar here: babies don't understand pointing, and don't point themselves, until they are about a year old and just as they begin to understand language.

Anyway, it isn't just Golden Retrievers who look at your hand when you're trying to point to the where the ball went off to. We do it all the time when we assign human emotions things that don't actually have them, like, say, the nature. We talk about the "market" as if it had a mind of its own, instead of being an aggregation of individual actions. The list goes on.

But with the brain, I feel like we are in different territory. The physical orientation and structure of synapses map and mirror the connections that we make outside in the world.

I love that.

As we decipher and track back what each part of the brain does, we realize certain parts of the brain are better at understanding certain aspects of the world, but only if they are given a chance to interact with the world. A dead optic nerve transforms a useful eye into a metaphorical puddle of jelly, but it will also reduce the primary visual cortex. Fewer neurons, fewer synapses. (see this link for an important caveat, and subject for a future post)




- image from the The Brain from Top to Bottom


Even if you could fix the optic nerve, once the brain passes a certain golden age, that ship has sailed, that barn door is closed.

The same is true for the part's of the cerebral cortex that handle the really complicated, nearly abstract processes.

Is it a fallacy to propose that this is reification? You lack love and attention as a child, stunting and withering of the part of the brain that responds to love and attention, making love and attention harder to recognize in the future. The abstract "lack of" becomes a material lack. In the soft tissue of neurons, abuse becomes a concrete thing.