Notes Toward a State-Regulation Phenotype Construct
Essay one
Psychophysics, Neuroception, Signal Detection, and the Social Construction of Sensitivity
Epistemic status: Not Yet a Theory
I am not ready to call this a theory. What I’m writing herein is not a theory. A theory is epistemologically warranted narration of data. I owe a much greater debt than I’m prepared to pay in this essay to take myself to be theorizing.
A theory owes more than I can yet pay. Honestly I feel the sum of these essays will not reach much beyond a provisional construct, even if it gets that far.
For now, let’s agree, or not, to approach this as an essay on speculative psychophysics. Not that psychophysics is speculative. It is not. Psychophysics is one of the oldest branches in “scientific” psychology. What I am speculating about is the extent to which my stitching together a number of well-settled psychophysical principles will be successful.
Over the coming weeks I’ll be presenting distinct facets of a construct: state-regulation phenotypes. I’d be satisfied if the outcome helped us ask whether some nervous systems are being mismeasured.
I believe some nervous systems are being mismeasured. That may sound obvious. The harder question is whether the mismeasurement can be specified. I am optimistic that it can. The work begins when we ask how.
The room counts public completion while the body continues to count the costs of gain and valence.
The problem revolves around mismeasurement. Measurement is hard.
Huh? How many ways can one miscount? Are you talking about making a clerical error? No. I'm talking about what gets counted. Mismeasurement in this sense is discounting: not counting, or not accounting for, all the relevant variables.
Imagine the ordinary Thursday afternoon meeting.
The room counts minutes. The body counts cost. That may be the beginning. Not the conclusion.
Everyone more or less notices how long a meeting lasted, and may reflect on how well the meeting used one’s time; but most will not notice the cost Mary pays to wear the mask after being shamed by her boss.
The ordinary transaction may be described as lasting twenty-seven minutes or evaluated as we ran thirty minutes over schedule. However, minutes are not the only descriptors to make a meeting legible. There are a number of ways one can make sense of individual differences across modal registers. “The Thursday meeting lasted twenty-seven minutes” is a way to measure an aspect of the meeting. So is “Mary was shamed by her boss”. “Minutes” and “shame” both describe, in part, what transpired, but they are categorically incommensurate.
A “category error” occurs when one conflates two (or more) distinct categories for the same kind of thing. Like counting beautiful and rich. Beautiful and rich are fundamentally distinct categories. Here is why that matters.
Mary paid more than twenty-seven minutes. Perhaps her co-workers told her it was nothing, the kids told her to cheer up, her spouse told her to settle down. Relax, as if such states were a matter of choice.
Individual variation in nervous-system valence or gain may produce physiological costs substantially greater than the office average. It may also produce costs substantially lower than the office average. Mary may still be frazzled nine hours later, while Jane whose boss tried to shame her, told him, “If you ever pull that shit again, I’ll walk out on the spot". Those two ends—not morally: physiologically—of a range from fragility (Mary) to resilience (Jane) form what I refer to as temperamental variation: the organism’s native regulatory architecture—state-regulation phenotypes.
The critique of social ledgering serves as a platform to anchor the research program.
The room counts: minutes, public completion, visible composure, professional output, disruption or non-disruption. The room says: don’t be fragile, don’t be sensitive, don’t be weak, don’t be dramatic. Suck it up just like everyone else.
Writ large, the room fails to realize not everyone is just like me. People complain: I hold my shit together, like it or not, why won’t you? Not, why can’t you—why won’t you? That is the category mistake I’m interested in.
“People are people” is morally attractive, but psychophysically crude. People do not enter the same room with the same temperament, threshold, gain, valence, or recovery slope. That is where ordinary office language fails to be explanatory.
There are very many ways, morally and descriptively we can lump together or pull people apart. To insist that people are all identical is a category mistake. And, there is where ordinary office language fails. Fragile, sensitive, weak, dramatic, overreactive and ungrounded are predicates. Such predicates are often taken as explanatory when in practice they are transactional social or institutional moralizing.
This research proposal is not concerned with whether Mary chose fragility or Jane chose resilience. My question concerns nervous-system factors biasing one body to absorb, retain, discharge, withstand, or regenerate after load.
For now, I am working with three guiding analogues: Temperament: the nervous system’s native regulatory architecture: phenotype. Permittivity: what the system admits, registers, or holds. Permeability: what the system allows to move through, discharge, or reorganize.
Recognition of social ledgering exposes office predicates as moralizing where mechanisms have yet to be specified. If those predicates point to anything real, then the reality must be sought in variation: temperament, permittivity, permeability, gain, valence, threshold, retention, resilience, and recovery.
Office talk may account for how a response appears to the room. Office logic misses the mark making tacit inferences about how homogeneous the office’s state-regulation phenotypes are expressed.
From a point of view of the psychophysicist, if we were studying rods and cones, we would not stop at saying one photoreceptor was dramatic. We would ask about transduction, cGMP breakdown, channel closure, and signal propagation. The same discipline is needed here.
From the point-of-view regarding state-regulation phenotypes, we ask whether some of these office predicates point toward discoverable variation in temperament, permittivity, permeability, gain, valence, threshold, retention, and recovery.
Over the coming weeks, I’ll unpack a cluster of related ideas: neuroception, peptide profiles, psychophysics, signal detection theory, valence weighting, gain, masking, recovery, data clustering, and the social construction of sensitivity.
I am not saying I can explain autism. I cannot. I am not saying at the end of this series of essays you will know what is ADHD. I’m not working on that at all. Nope. I am not claiming my essays will make hash out of clinical categories. I have no interest in that project, even if I had the subject matter-expertise, which I do not.
I am not saying sensitivity is always wisdom. I have not much of anything to say about clinical constructs. I’m not that guy.
I am saying something more modest: state-regulation phenotypes are much less office talk, and holds much more promise of identifying significantly associated explanatory variables.