Randall Dana Ulveland, Ph.D.
Western Oregon University
Before there is a concept, before a child can say what something is, there is that first disturbance. A flash. A sound. A brightness at the edge of the body. The crib bars, perhaps. A blurred face moving in and out of view. The cold of a spoon. The pressure of a blanket caught under the leg. Something happens, and the body is stirred. Disturbed. Set off balance for a moment. Equilibrium shifts. The body moves to accommodate.
Too much educational and philosophical writing begins too late. It begins after the world has already been cut into objects, after perception has already been treated as if it were a camera, after the head has already been imagined as a kind of storage site. Then the questions come in their familiar form: How does information get in? How is it represented? How is it stored? How is it retrieved? By then, something important has already been left behind.
The first act of perception is not the intake of a finished world. It is a perturbation in a living system. Something shifts in the relation between organism and surround. A pulse of light does not arrive as “light” or formed shape in any fully articulated sense. A sound is not yet “mother’s voice.” A surface is not yet “wood,” “metal,” or “toy.” There is contact, stirring, alteration, recoil, orientation, movement. The body does something. Even before the hand can grasp well, it touches, turns, reaches. Even before the eye can settle, it searches.
Maturana’s biology of cognition matters here because he refused the easy picture in which an outside world simply transfers its structure into the organism. In Autopoiesis and Cognition, Maturana and Varela wrote that “living systems are cognitive systems, and living as a process is a process of cognition” (Maturana & Varela, 1980, p. 13). In that account, the living being is a structurally determined system. Environmental events may trigger change, but they do not instruct the organism from the outside; what happens depends on the organism’s own structure and its history of coupling with its medium. Cognition is tied to this ongoing organism–environment relation rather than to internal representation alone. Perturbation is not a little packet of information entering the head. It is an event in a relational history.
As long as knowledge is imagined as something inserted from outside, understanding shrinks. Information takes over. Delivery. Transmission. Coverage. Input. Even “acquisition” begins to sound strange once the biological comes into view. Something else has to be said, though the language is not always easy.
The infant does not collect the world piece by piece as though stocking shelves or building with blocks. The infant becomes able to move with increasing differentiation in a world that slowly begins to hold together. The face is not merely seen. It becomes familiar through recurrent coordination. The room does not appear all at once as a set of stable objects. It thickens through repeated encounter—through looking, reaching, turning, missing, startling, calming, mouthing, listening.
Hebb helps here, though from another angle. In The Organization of Behavior, he proposed that learning involves the strengthening of coordinated patterns of neural activity, introducing the language of cell assemblies to describe how recurrent firing across groups of neurons might allow something once fleeting to become familiar, repeatable, and available again (Hebb, 1949). Later work on the engram has carried that problem forward in more explicit neurobiological terms, asking how experience leaves a trace that can be reactivated rather than simply stored as a static copy (Josselyn et al., 2017). The familiar paraphrase—neurons that fire together wire together—is a simplification, but it still points toward something important: what becomes stable in experience does not arrive as a copy of the world. It is formed through repeated co-activation, through recurrence, through the gradual emergence of patterns that can hold.
One begins to notice the same pattern in many places. A teacher at the board. A consultant at the screen. A manager walking through a workflow. A policy writer naming categories from a distance. The world is first arranged, simplified, and held still. Then it is presented as though clarity had been there from the start. What follows is often less a formation of understanding than a demand for compliance: attend to this, repeat this, follow this, perform it back in recognizable form. The learner, employee, client, or trainee is expected to take the presentation as sufficient. And when that does not happen—when the person hesitates, misjudges, forgets, or fails to perform—the problem is often located in the individual. But something more damaging may have happened earlier. Presentation has been mistaken for formation. Compliance has been mistaken for understanding. And in the long run, this does not only diminish understanding; it weakens performance itself. What is asked for may be reproduced briefly, sometimes well enough to satisfy the immediate demand, yet still fail to hold under pressure, variation, or change. Something has to form before it can be named with any depth or enacted with any reliability. There has to be enough return, enough embodied variation, enough time in the relation for the thing to begin to hold.
Buzsáki pushes this further. He has argued against the picture of the brain as a passive information-absorbing device and has instead described the nervous system as active, self-organizing, and oriented from the inside out (Buzsáki, 2019, 2022). In that frame, brains do not sit still waiting for the world to write on them. Organisms act, probe, move, and in doing so shape the very inputs they receive. Perception is tied to action, prediction, internal dynamics, and the rhythms of organized neural activity. The old picture of stimulus coming in and knowledge forming as a faithful copy becomes harder to keep.
So when I say understanding, I am not speaking first about a mental possession. I am speaking of a growing capacity to live in more coordinated ways. A child comes to know the staircase by climbing, hesitating, misjudging, grabbing, descending, and eventually moving on it without the same danger or uncertainty. A musician comes to know an instrument by the resistance of strings, keys, breath, tempo, fingers, missed entrances, and that strange moment when what had to be forced begins to move with less force. A reader comes to know a sentence not by absorbing it as inert content but by finding a way into its cadence, its references, its tensions, its world.
This is why Somiology begins where it does.
Understanding grows in and through embodied relational life. Form is not first an abstract outline; it is encountered curvature, edge, rhythm, contour, arrangement. Material is not first a category; it is weight, drag, grain, warmth, brittleness, pliability. Purpose does not descend as a proposition from nowhere; it gathers in the in-order-to of the act itself. Function appears in the unfolding of what the thing does, what it lets happen, what breaks down when it fails. Affordances are not simply additions to a finished object; they are openings and limits felt in the midst of action. These do not arrive one at a time. They come together, though unevenly, in the event.
And even here there is a temptation to rush toward order. To say: very well, then understanding is coordinated embodied engagement across the modalities within a contextual nexus. That is not wrong. But it lands too quickly. It says in one pass what living takes time to build.
A person trying to learn the hammer throw does not begin with “form, material, purpose, function, affordances” as categories in the head. The thrower begins in awkwardness. The ball feels farther away than expected. The turning body loses the line. The feet are late. The handle pulls. The circle narrows. The throw is not yet a throw so much as a series of disruptions. But these disruptions are not empty failures. They are part of the embodied event itself. They are the ground of reorganization. The body is being perturbed again and again, and with repetition some coordinations begin to hold while others fall away. The implement stops feeling like a foreign object strapped onto movement and begins to gather into the action.
Only later do angle, force, timing, radius, and release begin to mean what they are supposed to mean. By then the throw is no longer being met from outside. What might be called instrumental understanding can enter here without distortion because it is being mapped onto something already lived. Objective articulation matters. Analysis matters. Conceptual language matters. Somiology is not trying to cast these off. It is trying to keep them from arriving too soon, before the thing itself has begun to gather.
This changes how one thinks about knowledge as well. Knowledge is not best pictured as content transferred from world to mind, or from teacher to student, as though one container fills another. It looks more like the publicly articulable side of stabilized relational life. Sometimes it takes propositional form. Sometimes procedural. Sometimes perceptual. Sometimes social. What makes it meaningful is not that it mirrors an external reality from a distance, but that it has grown out of viable coordination with a world that resists, answers back, and gradually becomes inhabitable.
There is more to say. About language, certainly. About the thinning effect of premature abstraction. About why two people can pass through the same environment—same lecture, same onboarding session, same strategic meeting—and still leave with very different worlds beginning to gather around them. About why repetition can flatten in one case and deepen in another. About why a concept memorized for an exam, repeated in a meeting, or inserted into a report can carry the shape of understanding without its weight, as though one were speaking from borrowed language rather than from a relation that had begun to hold.
But before all that, there is still this earlier scene: the body stirred by what it meets, a living being whose own structural organization determines what can begin to happen. That is where Somiology begins. With perturbation. With coupling. With assemblies forming through recurrent life. With bodies that dwell in the world.
Understanding starts there, in that unsettlement, and it does not entirely leave it behind.
References
Buzsáki, G. (2019). The brain from inside out. Oxford University Press.
Buzsáki, G. (2022). How the brain constructs the outside world. Scientific American, 326(6), 36–43.
Hebb, D. O. (1949). The organization of behavior: A neuropsychological theory. John Wiley & Sons.
Josselyn, S. A., Köhler, S., & Frankland, P. W. (2017). Heroes of the engram. Journal of Neuroscience, 37(18), 4647–4657. https://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.0056-17.2017
Maturana, H. R. (2002). Autopoiesis, structural coupling and cognition: A history of these and other notions in the biology of cognition. Cybernetics & Human Knowing, 9(3–4), 5–34.
Maturana, H. R., & Varela, F. J. (1980). Autopoiesis and cognition: The realization of the living. D. Reidel.