killing the infinite: neurological

Yayoi Kusama's: Aftermath of Obliteration of Eternity.

Through continuous endogenous and exogenous mind-body feedback, consciousness develops in the body, one body, born in one place and time, and nests in the brain.

What goes on between our ears probably limits us most and we know more about the brain than ever. Smart people working in swanky labs spit out wild sounding terms like: Neocortex, Dentate Gyrus, PKMzeta and neural correlates of consciousness.

Neuroscience is in an interesting place right now, philosophically. Our knowledge is ballooning asymmetrically. We can use voltage-sensitive dye to study neural-dynamics with millisecond resolution in brain slices pre and post bidirectional variations in external conditions. We’ve uncovered a chemicalthat inhibits the formation of new memories but we can’t trace a thought in the brain. We know a lot of the what and significantly less about the why and how.

This is not an excuse to deny evidence or ignore findings. There’s a lot we do understand (we’re all probably grateful for the Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s meds our parents and grandparents take) even if hypotheses are tested and confirmed with staggering ranges of uncertainty and results are impactful on microscopic scales, if we’re paying attention, they make fantastic jumping off points for non-scientists to pose gnomic assertions like what follows.

Healthy brains change and are marked by an inability to process big numbers.

These are anecdotal and experimental truths, with interdisciplinary support from the neurological, mathematic and political experts in segments two and three of this Radiolab episode4. Fifteen point seven trillion, a recent estimate for the national debt, is an unfathomable number. We’ve seen patients live normal lives after radical hemispherectomies and neuroplasticity remains a hooded figure of surprise and delight. Neural processes are dynamic and although we’re capable of storing an uncountable volume of information, we’re not good at consciously evaluating or recalling large numbers or large amounts of data. Our brains balance storing and accessing massive amounts of networked data with deriving meaning out of the information we possess. Perceived meaning, feedback from the body and repeated behaviors alter our neurochemistry. In combination, these two truths can explain our most profound forays into the infinite and our everyday, piddling mediocrities.

Our brains have been like this forever, well… a long time, perhaps making it possible for us to develop pleasure responses to growth, to the awareness of formed connections, ultimately, putatively, to learning. Apart from the hedonistic family, the feeling of comprehension, if successfully reinforced, is one of the truly numinous pleasures of man.

New research 5 suggests that a cause of depression may be a lack of new cell growth in the brain. Clinical depression is a psychosocial, neurochemical disorder and a psychopharmacological hot zone linked to addiction, anxiety, eating disorders, insomnia and various other transient dangers of the mind. There’s no umbrella explanation for depression. It’s commonly attributed to an imbalance of neurotransmitters and receptors, particularly those linked to pleasure responses: dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin.

If the new theory has legs, it implies that depression is limitation in cause and effect. It’s certainly concurrent with reports of the experience of depression and adjacent conditions like addiction. Either neural growth dwindles and we’re diagnosable or it’s restricted to harmful networks and we learn ourselves into a corner with self-destructive behavior until our neurochemistry adapts and our condition becomes pathological, leaving us with a rarely euphoric, sometimes comforting, largely painful, somnambulistic illness. Growth doesn’t have to be positive. Pathology becoming pleasantly familiar to the point that it feels easier to live with a limiting (but not life-threatening6) problem than face the uncountable possibilities of a life without the crutch of disorder is blue business.

This is one in a cornucopia of unconfirmed neuropsychological postulates. Neuroscience has a lot of theories. But ask one of the big questions you’ll almost always get a line like: “the underlying local dynamics are not understood.7”

One paradoxical circumstance of our current science is that while we look for truth about the brain, we are unable to see truth in the brain.

Most of what we know isn’t demonstrable, neurochemically. Sum double digit numbers, solve a quadratic equation, play virtuoso cello, recite every U.S. capital city in reverse alphabetical order, love one particular man or woman deeply for fifty years – none of these things are measurable with present tools on existing scales. The information is everywhere and nowhere in the brain, and body, coursing through our somatic souls, lost in seemingly infinite biochemical and electrical interactions. Without measurement science is lost. Right now, measuring the limits of our brains is an intractable problem.

Science may not be great at defining human limits, but society is.

* Want to keep reading? Continue with killing the infinite part 4: psychosocial / conclusion.

 

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4 Jonah Lehrer, Steve Strogatz and Elkhonon Goldberg

5 Presented at the Proceedings of the National academy of sciences of the United States of America

6 Please, if you’re considering harming yourself or others, seek assistance. Obviously, this is serious.

7 I honestly can’t recall if this line was extracted or generalized from any number of peer-reviewed articles. I apologize in the event of infringement.