Phatic Workshop

This short historical anecdote -- from an introduction to the Open Dialogue approach to psychotherapy , seems relevant to our interests here: Developmental psychologists Lev Vygotsky and Colwyn Trevarthen describe a process by which the caregiver and baby enter a dialogue straight after birth. Communicating through verbalizations, facial expressions, movements, and mutual attention to the world of objects, they begin to influence each other’s emotional states and behaviours.  There is a gradual maturation of this dialogue, from the use of objects, to signs, and then to language. The mother’s voice is gradually internalized by the child, forming an inner speech through which it regulates its own emotions and behaviour.  Throughout this process, words become building blocks for complex, higher mental functions. From words come our thoughts.  The words that form our thoughts are not static symbols. For Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin, words carry only fragments of meaning, wi

There he goes, one of God’s own prototypes. Some kind of high powered mutant never even considered for mass production. Too weird to live, and too rare to die. - Hunter S. Thompson, in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Now this, from "Experiments on the role of deleterious mutations as stepping stones in adaptive evolution" (PNAS, 2013): Provided that a deleterious mutation is not lethal, the genome carrying it has some expected “half life” and a corresponding chance of reproducing one or more times before going extinct. Occasionally, the mutant subpopulation might acquire a second, hypercompensatory mutation that provides a net advantage. Although such mutations are expected to be rare, new detrimental mutations are constantly generated, thus providing a multitude of potential stepping stones. If the second mutation would also have been deleterious had it appeared without the preceding mutation, then the beneficial combination is said to have a “sign-epistatic” interactio