The Blog Trip-Tik

There is a backlog of posts sitting in the outbox awaiting some free time for final edits, but instead of tackling them, I want to lay out what lies ahead in the next 5 months for the Root System before the proto-human becomes the Kid

Part I.
My goal is to get a general, but complete, understanding of the brain functions that let each of us connect and root into the world. Which parts of the brain do what? Using what mechanisms? How does a single neuron work? How do neurons transfer information? How do they store information?

Part II.
As the Big Day gets closer, I'll start peering into the emotional and behavioral aspects of connection. When are the critical periods for learning different capabilities or developing certain interests? As the brain wires up, how do the emotional and experiential needs of the proto-human change? How can understanding what is happening in his/her brain help us understand and respond to the needs of the proto-human.

Part III.
Finally, there is the adventure itself. All the obsessed mucking about in neurons and glia and neurotransmitters can't hide that it is a real human being on its way, not a mechanical automaton driven by those chemical and electrical processes. And all the soaring meta talk can't resolve the urgent worry and eager anticipation I, we, feel.

At the end comes the unlearning, when the temptation to go all reductionist and mechanical fades. I am looking forward to those moments when the super-realistic details of parenthood shatter my simulated mastery and control.

Thanks for joining me.

When Does Consciousness Show Up

When an egg is fertilized, a new cell is created with the combined genetic material of the father (me) and the mother (Mikaela). The newly formed zygote (from the Greek for "76 points in Scrabble" ) splits into many new yet identical cells until a small blackberry like glob of proto-human is floating it's way down to the uterus, inside its Zona Pellucida spaceship (marked one on the picture below.



-Image courtesy of the Swiss Virtual Campus

After five days of manufacturing genetically identical cells, differentiation begins at last. The cells on the outside of the blackberry, separate and form a globe (called the trophoblast). The inner-blackberry cells form a glob along one side of the dome (called the embryoblast)



-Image courtesy of the Swiss Virtual Campus

Those light blue cells become the placenta. The pea green cells the kid.

Of course biologists have shuffled the cells around right before segmentation, taking the inside cells destined for decades of greatness and shuffling them to the outside and taking the outside cells, destined for the brief and inglorious life of the placenta.

What happened to the potential for consciousness in those cells? Our existences are clearly contingent, from the very first moments when "your" sperm made it through "your" zona pellucida to this morning when you weren't creamed by MUNI on the way to work. One is the contingency of existence at all. The other is the contingency of existence continuing.

This is different from that familiar kind of contingency and I am fixated on it. The cells are identical in every way except their position relative to one another. Some become a human and some become an organ.

While the proto-human is a zygote, there is nothing we would call consciousness there, but potential is in every cell to create it. And when some of the cells drift one way and some of the cells drift another, there is still no consciousness. But there is a change.

In some cells there is still potential for consciousness while in others that door has closed. Actual consciousness is still many months away, but an irreversible, invisible and flip-of-the-coin lucky split in their fates sends one to life, the other to the mute darkness of a bladder or a fingernail.

This is a kind of contingency of potential. Coulda woulda shoulda, but wrong place, wrong time.

Next: So when does consciousness show up? Is it like a light switch or the lifting of fog?

And does the same thing happen in reverse as the work is undone? Do we diminish back into the fog, passing through the dimmer consciousness of the placenta before dissipating?

I felt a kick tonight

It felt like a kettle drum hit by a felt covered mallet.

It felt like a gentle rocking bump from passenger standing next to you on the subway.

It felt like touching a cheek flicked from the inside by a tongue.

It was round and soft and muffled, but urgent.

It was a reminder that life is restless, impatient, and eager.

Some vocabulary: Coronal, Sagittal & Axial

There are some complicated concepts when you're reading about the brain. But sometimes the simplest things stand in your way.

For example, coronal and sagittal and axial just confused me. I kept forgetting which was which and what I had changed when I went from one to the other. Disorienting really.

So I looked them up and now I understand why I found it confusing. There are two reasons really.

First the definition of sagittal in the Houghton-Mifflin Medical Dictionary is

1. Of or relating to the suture uniting the two parietal bones of the skull.

2. Of or relating to the sagittal plane.

Did anyone find that helpful. Well that would make one of us.

Secondly, the words weren't really describing a characteristic of the thing I was looking at. Instead the words were orienting me in space. These little words were reaching out from the computer screen, picking me up and telling me where to go stand or float or lie down. Depending.

No more mystery.

Coronal: You're looking from the front or the back.



Sagittal: You're looking from the right side or the left side.



Axial: You're looking from above or below

We thought you'd like to know.

What if We're Alone?

It looks like the odds aren't great that there is intelligent life out there. Is there anybody out there? -

A mathematical model produced by Andrew Watson, Professor of Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia, suggests that the odds of finding new life on other Earth-like planets are low, given the time it has taken for beings such as humans to evolve and the remaining life span of the Earth.

The Earth is about four-billion years old and only has about a billion years of habitable life yet before the swelling sun burns the last bacteria into ash. We showed up late, and took some improbable evolutionary trails before we got here.

[If] we had evolved early in this period, then even with a sample of one, we’d suspect that evolution from simple to complex and intelligent life was quite likely to occur. By contrast, we now believe that we evolved late in the habitable period, and this suggests that our evolution is rather unlikely. In fact, the timing of events is consistent with it being very rare indeed.”

Intelligence is not impossible, given enough time but limit the time, and out of the dross of statistical possibility (monkeys; typewriters; Shakespeare) rises this happy exception.

In the posts labeled "ontogeny + phylogeny", I'll be exploring those evolutionary steps our ancestors took and that in many cases the proto-human is taking him/herself in the womb.

Are Humans Hardwired for Fairness?

Saw this article about why people turn down economically beneficial windfalls when they think they're being misteated. We talked about the irrationality of these decisions in upper-level economics classes a decade ago. Now those conversations are everywhere.

But this is interesting. From the article Are humans hardwired for fairness? in the journal Psychological Science. The Money Quote -

[T]he brain finds self-serving behavior emotionally unpleasant, but a different bundle of neurons also finds genuine fairness uplifting. What’s more, these emotional firings occur in brain structures that are fast and automatic, so it appears that the emotional brain is overruling the more deliberate, rational mind. Faced with a conflict, the brain’s default position is to demand a fair deal.

I wonder what that "fast and automatic" part of the brain is and why they contrast it with "deliberate and rational" parts of the brain. I've sent an inquiry to the authors of the article to find out and to fins out if deliberate (read slow) always goes hand-in-glove with rational. Are there any automatic but rational parts of the mind?

Nitpick: What does "[T]he brain finds self-serving behavior emotionally unpleasant" mean? Metaphor gazing is one thing, but does the brain itself conclude things? Do you find that phrasing, at the least, incomplete? How much of the brain has to be involved before you can say with authority, "the brain finds" something? Is there a difference between me finding something unpleasant, and my brain doing so? Is one the intermediate step to the other? And if so, which comes first?

Stubbing Your Toe on Metaphors

It may be possible to study brain formation not as a metaphor. Just the facts. But, boy, I sure find it hard.

The way your experiences carve your brain into a physical manifestation of those interactions seems to leave a lot of metaphors laying around to be stepped on.

Like, for example, the neuron that does not build strong connections dies. What happens to the kid who doesn't connect? As Passover approaches, I can't help but think that they live forever in the Narrows of limited experience.

So for example, a motor neuron dies if it doesn't connect to the muscle it is supposed to wire up. And that happens an awful lot. Between 40 and 75% of fetal neurons die.

Toe: stubbed.

Trees

The origin of the name dendrite from the good people at Scholarpedia -

The receiving or input pole [of the neuron] generally consists of extensively branching tree-like extensions of the soma membrane known as dendrites (coined in 1889 by William His from dendros (Greek) meaning tree) which arises in vertebrate neurons directly from the cell body (the body is also a receiving site in most neurons).

This stuff is probably taught on day one in school. Self-teaching is a truly haphazard path.

The Mind of the Bricoluer

I came across a reference to the idea of the bricoleur today while poking around looking for some thinking on the haphazard construction of the brain. It's all in preparation for an interview next week with Gary Marcus, the author of Kluge.

Claude Lévi-Strauss wrote Savage Thinking in 1963 and introduced the Bricoleur, a handyman or, maybe more period correct, a hacker. Here is how a Lévi-Strauss (translated by Professor Herve Varennes) explains it -

The 'bricoleur' is adept at performing a large number of diverse tasks; but, unlike the engineer, he does not subordinate each of them to the availability of raw materials and tools conceived and procured for the purpose of the project.

His universe of instruments is closed and the rules of his game are always to make do with 'whatever is at hand', that is to say with a set of tools and materials which is always finite and is also heterogeneous because what it contains bears no relation to the current project, or indeed to any particular project, but is the contingent result of all the occasions there have been to renew or enrich the stock or to maintain it with the remains of previous constructions or destructions.

How does this connect to our Root System and the proto-human? Well, what caught my eye was that Lévi-Strauss was opposing two kinds of scientific thinking. The western, "advanced" mind discovers the world using powerful rule-driven systems and by creating and using specialized tools.

The bricoleur-scientist, on the other hand:

"does not move abstractly and hierarchically from axiom to theorem to corollary. Bricoleurs construct theories by arranging and rearranging, by negotiating and renegotiating with a set of well-known materials.

What a neat distinction! Are children born bricoleurs and trained engineers? How early they can they develop as systematic scientists, or does the plastic, intuitive scientific exploration come second after the basic survival skills are rigidly put into place? How soon do they have the awareness to create theories about how the world is? How soon do they develop the long term memory necessary to test those theories in a systematic way?

And as a father, how do you encourage the blooming of both ways of thinking?

Reification

-Saggital section of the optic nerve (marked #1) from the Atlas of the Fathead Minnow.


Quite the fancy little word. I don't claim to really understand what Marx meant when he referred to reification. I just barely parsed Merriam-Webster's definition for the word "to regard (something abstract) as a material or concrete thing"

This is not the same thing as believing a lie. It is a subset of that. It is misconstruing (maybe deliberately) a convenient descriptor for the thing it describes. Almost like looking at the pointing hand instead of what it points at. A side-bar here: babies don't understand pointing, and don't point themselves, until they are about a year old and just as they begin to understand language.

Anyway, it isn't just Golden Retrievers who look at your hand when you're trying to point to the where the ball went off to. We do it all the time when we assign human emotions things that don't actually have them, like, say, the nature. We talk about the "market" as if it had a mind of its own, instead of being an aggregation of individual actions. The list goes on.

But with the brain, I feel like we are in different territory. The physical orientation and structure of synapses map and mirror the connections that we make outside in the world.

I love that.

As we decipher and track back what each part of the brain does, we realize certain parts of the brain are better at understanding certain aspects of the world, but only if they are given a chance to interact with the world. A dead optic nerve transforms a useful eye into a metaphorical puddle of jelly, but it will also reduce the primary visual cortex. Fewer neurons, fewer synapses. (see this link for an important caveat, and subject for a future post)




- image from the The Brain from Top to Bottom


Even if you could fix the optic nerve, once the brain passes a certain golden age, that ship has sailed, that barn door is closed.

The same is true for the part's of the cerebral cortex that handle the really complicated, nearly abstract processes.

Is it a fallacy to propose that this is reification? You lack love and attention as a child, stunting and withering of the part of the brain that responds to love and attention, making love and attention harder to recognize in the future. The abstract "lack of" becomes a material lack. In the soft tissue of neurons, abuse becomes a concrete thing.

Why do fewer neurons NOT make you dumber?

A blogger I like references a study he can see and I can't. In the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences some Columbia University researchers stopped the development of neurons in some rats to see how it affected their performance on Rat IQ tests like maze figgerin'.

In a demonstration of how intelligence seems to work, fewer neurons did not make the rat dumber. Lets let one of my favorite brain bloggers, On the Brain by Dr. Michael Merzenich, Ph.D. explain:

"In most of the brain — including the cerebral cortex and the primary brain centers that support the cortex’s contributions to learning, cognition and memory control — there is little or no neurogenesis in adult brains. Nonetheless, the brain is, by its very nature, a plastic (LEARNING) machine, and the cortex is crucially involved in all memory-guided learning! It learns through changing synaptic weights (strengthening synapses that are engaged in a good ‘try’; weakening those whose actions are irrelevant for it), and NOT because new neurons pop up!"

(Via On the Brain)

When There's No Going Back

The brain uses more energy severing ties than it does creating them. Glucose usage in the child's brain is not highest when the neural spines are formed or dendritic connections are made, it is highest during the cull.

As a proto-father, this terrifies me. I understand the wisdom of a strategy of over-production and then re-trenchment. I know it isn't a strategy as such. No one planned it, right? But it still feels like the forces that impact brain development have a brain of their own.

Because it feels like an adversary.

I understand from all I've read that living with a baby's infinitely plastic and hyperconnected brain your whole life wouldn't be so great. One writer described it as living in a world where every phone call went to twenty different places: it's totally awesome to get twenty different perspectives on line, but occasionally you just want to say hi to grandma without your big brother on the line calling you a fag. Or something.

Because, you do gain something with the loss of some of the connections-waiting-to-be-fired: focus, mastery and precision.

But it terrifies me, especially when I see these movies about child prodigies. There the kid is, center of the frame, playing the piano at age five, and the mother, coolly behind him almost out of the frame, knitting, deeply satisfied that they had created a diverse - yet focused - enough array of experiences that their child toys with what other children don't even notice.

What a responsibility! How do you not become a freak? How do you strategize on this? Do you start with the yuppie flash cards? Do you play music all the time? Speak in two different languages? What if Baby Yoga is the only reliable path to create a love of learning in modern babies. God help me.

Because I love life. I love the richness of new foods, and the mysterious smells of other people's apartments and the shine of light off oily leaves in the woods and the way sea water tastes in winter. And I want, more than anything, for my kid to love it too. And not the specific experience; i want them to love experience seeking. I want this little dude/tte to be a universal scientist, experimenting with everything, and not just the things that can be measured.

I want them ecstatic in love with the way wind feels when it blows through your hair and I want them to wonder if the wind in China feels the same way. And then I want them to go there and find out.

But I have a foot in both camps. Because prodigious mastery -while it has never been my strong point- is the whisper that silences a noisy room. I can weld better than probably 298 million Americans, but that's only because most people don't know how to weld. When a weld is beautifully done, with the puddles of hardened steel laid like a row of dimes and the metal anodized in silvery blues and honey yellows, it makes you, well me anyway, want to kiss life on the lips.

So what if my kid doesn't love the sight of a beautifully welded joint. But what if they can't see what is good and special about it at all because a synaptic connection was severed somewhere deep in the cerebral cortex when I was finishing a Monday New York Times crossword puzzle instead of rolling a nine-month old through Little Afghanistan in Fremont.

Because, who knows what will fire a synapse? There's something like 100 billion neurons. During what neuroscientists call "exuberant period"when brain plasticity is at its highest before age eight, the brian has twice as many synaptic connections as i have as I'm writing this now. And it haunts me. What don't I see? What do i never notice? What rich coincidence passes me by because a withered synapse was primed for a stimulation that came years too late?