Chapter 2. What’s in a Name?

In Chapter Two, I laid out the basic outline of the psychological DDJ model these posts are exploring. It’s time to invent an acronym, as much as I personally dislike alphabet salad, because it’s too cumbersome to keep repeating a long name and standardization has a lot of advantages. Let’s review the components to get started.

The model I’m developing comprises (so far) four components: modules representing the body, the subconscious, and the conscious; and another ambiguous category that the DDJ calls Vital Breaths. That’s a pretty simple model, but I’m sure it’s going to get more complex as I delve into it. Nevertheless, we need a name, and it isn’t going to include a word that could mislead some to think that there is any spiritualism involved. I’m not going to use DDJ words (ambiguous translations from ancient Chinese), so perhaps it would be useful to summarize the three observable components (body, subconscious, and conscious) into a single concept like tripartite, which means split into three parts. That’s pretty easy to remember. There is no way Vital Breaths is going into the name, so we need something more precise than a two-millennia-old definition from before the invention of PET and fMRI instruments, not to mention all of the other tools used by neuroscientists in the modern world.

Qualia  are defined as: “the internal and subjective component of sense perceptions, arising from stimulation of the senses by phenomena.” That’s pretty simple and unambiguous, but it doesn’t quite meet the needs of the model I’m developing because it only refers to sensory input; what we need is a more general concept that will include homeostatic mechanisms as well. Homeostasis uses biochemical factors, DNA transcription networks, bioelectricity, and other physical forces to regulate the cell behavior and large-scale patterning during embryogenesis, regeneration, cancer, and many other processes. Sensory input and homeostasis both operate as stimulus-response processes; a signal is received by a cell, organ, etc, and the system responds.

So far, we have tripartite and stimulus-response. This is primarily a psychological model, but it will be indirectly applicable to the body as well (recall the fourth component); thus, we’ll throw in organismic to explicitly define it as a biological model.

The primary mechanism to which the model can be applied is Cortical Remapping. Cortical maps consist of adjacent neurons within the cortex that are direct (spatial) representations of parts of the body, images from the retina or memory. They can be strengthened and enlarged through reinforcement, whereby connections between the body, subconscious, and mind can be altered and (presumably) augmented as evidenced by learning.

We have identified all of the components of a psychological model based on the ancient wisdom of the DDJ, but updated to be understood and applied by modern people.

For the rest of these posts I will refer to this process as Tripartite Organismic Stimulus-Response Cortical Augmentation (TOSCA) and the model as TOSCAM.