However, I think that some of the other material on neural plasticity would have a lot to say about how certain patterns of activity might become extremely difficult to change. In particular, I’d recommend The Mind and the Brain by Jeffrey Schwartz and Sharon Begley, which has some great stuff on Schwartz’s work with obsessive-compulsive disorder and the attempt to alter some terribly involuntary behaviours.

In addition, recent books by Norman Doidge, The Brain that Changes Itself, and by Sharon Begley, Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain: How a New Science Reveals Our Extraordinary Potential to Transform Ourselves, might be relevant. One of the podcasts I posted on earlier has an interview with Doidge, a neuroscientist who also works with psychiatry, and he talks specifically about his work on stroke recovery and the difficulty (but possibility) of retraining deeply ingrained mental patterns that are rooted in organic configurations of the brain.

I also appreciated your use of Gibson’s ecological psychology, which has much to offer neuroanthropology. A book I particularly like is Edward Reed’s Encountering the World: Toward An Ecological Psychology. Here’s a little snippet that relates to this post: “According to the present approach, actions are an animal’s modes of changing its relationship to its environment. Actions involve the detecting, obtaining, and utilization of affordances. The components of actions are not neural or muscular events, but are themselves processes of regulation, which I have termed postures and movements, indicating regulations that maintain and transform the animal’s relation to its environment, respectively. Traditional theories of action focus almost exclusively on questions having to do with the ordering and arranging of responses. The present approach implies that explanations of action should detail the various control processes involved in the interlocking movements and postures to achieve the desired functional effects (93).”

Balance as a process of regulation seems to me like it fits a lot of what you are discussing, rather than the built-in module approach.

Finally, I was also struck by Ekman’s work on emotions, in particular how Griffiths explores that in his book, What Emotions Are. The sort of universal emotional features that Ekman discovered seem precisely that, features that are relatively stereotypical and automatic, but then can vary in inputs, sequences, elaborations, and so forth. In reading your piece, I was struck how the brain/body issue is much like language, where it is quite patterned but that any particular piece of language is fairly unique. It’s our ability to combine, to sequence, to shift and adapt that is so impressive–thinking back now to your AAA presentation on human evolution and motor skills. But how about making a direct parallel? Something like the language of the body, where balance would be one basic pattern?