Connection and Separation

In Jewish religious law, as laid out in Leviticus, there are times when a woman must separate herself from the community. There are also times when a man must do the same. Traditional commentary has referred to the state the necessitates removal as tamei, which was translated into English as impure. The call for separation was understood to be a demand, made by the community of the individual. Tahor, by contrast, was translated as pure, and was the necessary state to join in daily life with the rest of the community

There are several ways to become impure and they range from gossiping, contact with a dead body, menstruation and even giving birth. During the time of the first and second temple in Jerusalem, the journey from tamei to tahor was accomplished by a combination of ritual and actual cleansing.



Most commentary on tamei and tahor has either been a legal style analysis of when one state or the other has been achieved or a humble query into what these causes of "impurity" could possibly have in common. Can you see the common thread that would have a community temporarily exile someone who is menstruating or came in contact with a dead body or recently gave birth?

Neither could I. So, what does this have to do with the gender-unspecified proto-human?

Some Jewish commentators have suggested a new way to understand tahor and tamei that transforms the dichotomy from pure/impure to ways that we connect with other people and god.

I learned this from Rabbi Michael Lerner of Beyt Tikkun. In his telling, tamei is not a separation enforced from without, it is the state of connecting to the transcendent and holy on your own. And Tahor is not purity, but connecting as part of a community.

The law in other, more secular, words lays out moments, birth and death usually, when our connection is primarily to the mystery within. How we can transition back to connections in our community is no simple task, and because the section lays out clearly how to go from solitude to community, I divine an assumption on the part of the author of this chapter that it takes effort to connect with others. That we need time and space away from community to be whole.

Rabbi Lerner takes it a different direction, one that doesn't gloss over the inclusion of gossip as a source of tamei as I do. Lerner's belief is that gossip, birth and death all disrupt communities, and the rituals laid out in Leviticus are about mending the rift.

Those first few months after the birth, I've heard them called the Fourth Trimester, have always been described to me as a trying and cloistered time. When I visited my friends and their shiny new son Noah, it was 48 hours lived in an unending twilight of drawn curtains and quiet conversations.

This child of ours will need guidance and nurturing to become fully who they are. What rituals do we have in place these days for the parents to make their own re-appearance in their community? To make their journey from drawn curtains to bright light?


- This is the aforementioned Noah

Weeding my Mental Garden

I wrote about my ignorance of human memory in a previous post.
I need to dig out the inapt metaphors I have growing in my mental garden. I am starting with the kudzu of conceits, the mental weed that has spread widest: human memory is / is not analogous to computer memory.

In my ignorance, I have easily shuttled back and forth between the positive and negative formations of the metaphor. As I read more deeply on the subject I was tethered to the informing metaphor, and limited by it.

Today I seek freedom. My first step was the trusty folks at Science Blogs, a friendly lily pad floating out in the internet pond.

My first stop was this post at Developing Intelligence, titled 10 Important Differences Between Brains and Computers. The four differences I highlight below are just the hoe to do the job:

Number 3: The brain is a massively parallel machine; computers are modular and serial

[T]he idea that computers require memory has lead some to seek for the "memory area," when in fact these distinctions are far more messy. One consequence of this over-simplification is that we are only now learning that "memory" regions (such as the hippocampus) are also important for imagination, the representation of novel goals, spatial navigation, and other diverse functions.

Number 5: Short-term memory is not like RAM

[Human] short-term memory seems to hold only "pointers" to long term memory whereas RAM holds data that is isomorphic to that being held on the hard disk.

Number 6: No hardware/software distinction can be made with respect to the brain or mind

the mind emerges directly from the brain, and changes in the mind are always accompanied by changes in the brain. Any abstract information processing account of cognition will always need to specify how neuronal architecture can implement those processes

Number 10: Brains have bodies

despite your intuitive feeling that you could close your eyes and know the locations of objects around you, a series of experiments in the field of change blindness has shown that our visual memories are actually quite sparse. In this case, the brain is "offloading" its memory requirements to the environment in which it exists: why bother remembering the location of objects when a quick glance will suffice?

I'm not saying I got it yet, but I feel that at last there is room for healthy growth.

One last thing about the Penis Thieves

One last word before I never write about penis thieves again. In the previous post, I wrote about the ir/resistible impulse to surrender to mob thinking.

What baffles me are the "victims", Reuters interviewed Kinshasa's police chief, Jean-Dieudonne Oleko.

But when you try to tell the victims that their penises are still there, they tell you that it's become tiny or that they've become impotent. To that I tell them, 'How do you know if you haven't gone home and tried it'

Its like asking Americans to be rational. It may be tiny and impotent, but please, still try to go home and use it.

That is all.

at 3 weeks

In the first 16-21 days the neural tube closes.

That, my friend, is what you looked like at one point.



That groove right down the middle was what your proto-spinal cord looked like. And that glowing knob on the right? That'd be your brain.

There is also a disturbing resemblance to a fluke worm.



That is pretty gross wondrous.

The Virginia Tech Shooter

It has been over a year since Seung-Hui Cho murdered his community, plowed salt into his soil and then snuffed himself out.

Unrooted.

His sister had deep connections in rich soil. She had friends who nourished her, a bright future to shower sunlight on her leaves and, just as important, it was bright enough to coax greater growth towards the light. Her roots were strong enough and deep enough to support her when foul weather challenged her integrity.

Roots, sunlight and rich soil.

But her brother never found fruitful purchase. The light where he grew was too dim to increase growth to the light. Two seeds, sown in nearly the same soil, nurtured in the same backyards by the same gardeners, and one flourishes and the other stunted, grew first diseased and then poisonous.

It could be malformation. A genetic anomaly. Or bad luck. Maybe the gardeners were more attentive to the health of the one sapling and poor stewards to the other.

What kind of gardener will I be?

We Believe What We Believe to Be Real, Not What is Real

I am starting here by posting a call for Airplane Behavior from you. I've not done this before, so you can be sure I am serious. No inappropriate laughter and no tantrums. When we fly on an airplane, we act like big boys and girls. Period.

For those who don't know, when a parent demands airplane behavior it is Defcon 1: the this-is-not-a-drill moment for childhood restraint.

The parent cannot cry wolf with this. And the child must know that sitting still is the scheduled activity for today. Temper tantrums, attacks of shpilkes and repeated importuning will bring Old Testament style punishment as surely as the tide will rise. No appeals to angels will be honored. Sorry.


When I was a Peace Corps volunteer in Senegal there was a rash of vigilante murders. Mobs roughing up thieves was not frequent, but it was also not unusual. Deadly beatings were extremely rare. So the murders were notewothy, as was the accused crime: penis theft. (Airplane behavior!)

Looks like it isn't unique to. From an article in Reuters, -

Rumors of penis theft began circulating last week in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo's sprawling capital of some 8 million inhabitants. They quickly dominated radio call-in shows, with listeners advised to beware of fellow passengers in communal taxis wearing gold rings.

Nothing in my experience suggests that the alleged crime is possible. This is clearly immaterial.

Purported victims, 14 of whom were also detained by police, claimed that sorcerers simply touched them to make their genitals shrink or disappear, in what some residents said was an attempt to extort cash with the promise of a cure.

The author says the accused were arrested for their own protection. Congolese police wanted to prevent the lethal frenzy that overtook Ghana a decade ago when 12 suspected penis snatchers were beaten to death by angry mobs.

The social dynamic here should be familiar to anyone who has heard of the Salem Witch Trials. Witch frenzies were often an expression of insecurity brought on by xenophobia. Creepy old women. The insufficiently pious. Foreigners. People wearing gold rings. All it takes to rally a torch bearing mob pretty much anywhere is confrontation with the strange and an accusation of crime that is as horrible as it is difficult to verify.

Following cultural conventions is a valuable adaptation in social animals. As we saw in the post about Williams disease, incomprehension of normal cultural conventions can even be sign of disease.

So when the herd begins to run, what will keep the proto-human from running too? What insulates a person from susceptibility to suggestibility? I would prefer that the wee-one never participate in beating a man to death for any reason, and especially so for the impossible crime of penis theft (Impossible short of a Lorena Bobbitt type intervention of course)

But...

If the herd spooks and the future proto-human stands there in the middle of the veld going, "Now guys lets not lose our heads. It might be a lion, or it might just be wind or a shadow. There's no way he could be stealing penises," that isn't too bright either. Nine times out of ten you may be right. But one time you may be dinner.

So I figure the important task is learning balance and discretion. But I don't think evolution is on our side here. Which do you think is more likely: evolution favors those who conserve their energy when the herd tries to burn the penis thieves or evolution favors those spill their energy in the soil every time they see a shadow or a gust of wind jostling some branches?

If history is a guide, there is torch bearer inside you, me, all of us, waiting to be unleashed by rumors of a penis thief.

The Guillotine

Not sure what got me thinking about this. I heard a story. On a playground in elementary school. After Mr Pletcher's history class in high school. Who knows.

The story was that consciousness doesn't stop until oxygen runs out to the brain and just because you cut off NEW blood flow to the brain, the lights don't go out immediately.

So goes the story, Louis XVI was able to stare at his own body as his head rolled slowly away.

For how long though and young me cried out inside. A default mode of brain function -- Raichle et al. 98 (2): 676 -- Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences -

This dependence of the brain on oxygen is highlighted by the fact that failure of oxygen delivery to the brain, usually the result of a stoppage of the heart, results in unconsciousness within seconds.

Now, if you ever find that those poor life choices you've made have spun your life wildly out of control and there you stand before the mighty blade, you can thank the National Academy of Sciences for this small comfort.

The rules on oxygen deprivation are different during birth. We will address that in a future post.

We read it so you don't have to

But if you want to, here you go:

Critical Periods of Vulnerability for the Developing Nervous System: Evidence from Humans and Animal Models

I've been looking for some actual peer-reviewed papers that you can look at to confirm some of the processes I have been chewing over here. This is the most comprehensible one I could find.

But there is probably a master's degree carefully pasted over by that little "most" delicately abutting "comprehensible" up there.

YMMV.

Why Intelligence?

Why did we develop intelligence at all? If it was so great, in oither words, why isn't everyone else doing it? This is from an article in the Literary Review of Canada Online about a new book called - Darwin on My Mind -

The author starts us off with a significant point, namely that most organisms do not think. Most organisms certainly are not rational. Yet they do all right.

The most successful survival strategy is to be unicellular. Evolution doesn't take all that long. Bacteria have survived interstellar travel and multiple asteroid impacts in the 3 billion years they've been around, impacts that took care of some impressive multi-cellular evolutionary achievements. Like dinosaurs.

Moreover, rationality is not necessarily a key to success. Well thought-through courses of action can go wrong; daft decisions can lead to success.

Once again, what started out as an examination of evolutionary truths is skipping gaily into a discussion of individual strategies for making peace with our infuriating intelligence.

So what do we tell the proto-human about this example? "Well, little one, we work hard, though working hard often doesn't pay off and dumb luck is frequently rewarded amply."

The essayist deepens the inquiry into why intelligence ever developed and, by metaphorical extension, why we ever choose to use it:

[We] might.. compound the paradox a bit by pointing out that thinking is expensive. It requires big brains and they in turn demand lots of protein...

So in addition to often failing, being smart costs a lot. Replace "protein" with "lots of homework" and intelligence is becoming a bit of a hard sell. People of all abilities lead miserable and impoverished lives, but smart people add the misery of constantly looking around for protein/learning to cram between their ears.

Why not wish instead for a perfectly simplistic kid, good-naturedly docile who drifts through life unjostled until, well, chomp, a lion eats them.

It isn't like smarts keeps you from being lion food, does it?

Or as the author says it-

As the late evolutionary paleontologist Jack Sepkoski used to say: “I see intelligence as just one of a variety of adaptations among tetrapods for survival. Running fast in a herd while being as dumb as shit, I think, is a very good adaptation for survival.”

Its a convincing argument isn't it? As the men on the mountaintops say, "Pain is mandatory; suffering is optional." Does a cow in the middle of the road have any
idea that the cement truck barreling towards them will cause worrying insults to the cow's bodily integrity. You wouldn't know it from looking at the cow.

So lets play pretend. Monty Hall offered to make us, the wife and I, a deal. Two doors, only this time they are open:

1) a docile, stolid but pretty child who sails through life with pedestrian obsessions and little to no curiosity about the world who sails to the grave in luxurious ignorance and disappears without a ripple

2) a voracious vacuum cleaner of a kid who prods, tests and sucks the skin clean off the bone of reality, never runs with the herd and who could as easily live a life of unremitting suffering as not. Total crap shoot, and no you can't try and negotiate some kind of comforts of intelligence exception. It could be barren, and they would be smart enough to know it.

Which would you choose?

Williams Syndrome

Once you get started looking at how things normally develop, you find eye popping examples of not normal. Most are horrifying. Nightmare inducing.

Williams Syndrome is different.

Only about 25 malformed or missing genes stand between health and illness in Williams. That is 083% of the genes. It doesn't look like much .083%. Maybe a rounding error. But that tiny misquote in a string 30,000 genes long means:

Williams people talk a lot, and they talk with pretty much anyone. They appear to truly lack social fear. Indeed, functional brain scans have shown that the brain’s main fear processor, the amygdala, which in most of us shows heightened activity when we see angry or worried faces, shows no reaction when a person with Williams views such faces. It’s as if they see all faces as friendly.

There are other impariments. Difficulty with math and spacial relationships. And most markedly, imperviousness to social cues. Or Dobbs puts it:

They know no strangers but can claim few friends

.

How can 20-25 genes control such complicated behaviors without causing catastrophic cognitive failures? Does this mean a lot of what we think of as "culture" is actually hard wired?

The brains of people with Williams are on average 15 percent smaller than normal, and almost all this size reduction comes from underdeveloped dorsal regions (along the back and the top of the brain) . Ventral regions (at the front and bottom), meanwhile, are close to normal and in some areas — auditory processing, for example — are unusually rich in synaptic connections

The genes that are screwy in Williams seem to have an important structural role, but one with some room for error. These are not the genes that close up the neural tube (see anencephaly if you dare) or that enforce bilateral symmetry.

These genes retard neural development in one part of the brain and in response synapses that are better formed get more action and grow stronger and more durable.

In Williams folks that means language becomes radically more important. And what atrophies?

Generating and detecting deception and veiled meaning requires not just the recognition that people can be bad but a certain level of cognitive power that people with Williams typically lack. In particular it requires what psychologists call “theory of mind,” which is a clear concept of what another person is thinking and the recognition that the other person a) may see the world differently than you do and b) may actually be thinking something different from what he’s saying. Cognitive scientists argue over whether people with Williams have theory of mind.

They can't see guile. Or manners. Or behavioral conventions where we embed much of the meaning we leave out of speech. Sounds lonely.

at 2 weeks

I had been looking for a few days now for pictures of the very earliest embryonic development, that showed very early neural development. Thank you Institut National de Recherche Pédagogique.



This is what a human embryo looks like at three weeks. The disk itself is only a couple of cells thick. The black line over on the left there is wonderfully called the primitive streak.

- Courtesy of Institut National de Recherche Pédagogique

After the primitive streak fully forms, the neural tube begins to close. This picture is taken at about 22 days after fertilization.

- Courtesy of Institut National de Recherche Pédagogique

Un-Scientific Thinking

Something I've never really understood is how memories get stored. Unlike a hard drive, which I can picture physically holding a static image of a thought, experience, emotion or instructions for cleaning carburetors, living neurons "holding" onto anything baffles me.

I had thought I didn't understand biological memory because I didn't understand computer memory and programming. Which wouldn't be a surprise since I've never studied it. An electron goes to the left this time and to the right that time and that is why my wedding pictures are stored on my laptop. I have never really understood how you go from electrons going this way and that way in the physical world to software.

So when I saw this brief essayfrom the Edge, something was cleared up.

Joseph Ledoux is a professor of Neuroscience at NYU and the author of The Synaptic Self. The essay was his response to the annual World Question, which the Edge sends out to big brains the world over. In 2008 they asked "What have you changed your mind about?"

Ledoux wrote that he had changed his mind about how we remember, and his essay is also a primer on thinking scientifically -

Like many scientists in the field of memory, I used to think that a memory is something stored in the brain and then accessed when used.

LeDoux knows from what he speaks. I don't. I can't grok what he's talking about because I can't make a picture of it in my head, but I believe him, because, well because he knows. He's an expert. He goes on:

Then, in 2000, a researcher in my lab, Karim Nader [showed] that each time a memory is used, it has to be restored as a new memory in order to be accessible later. The old memory is either not there or is inaccessible. [This is called] reconsolidation.

Though I'm still unaware of the details, this makes sense to me. I didn't see the data. I still don't have an inkling of the mechanism involved, and I still don't understand compilers, yet I am all too happy to abandon the explanation that doesn't make sense to me.

And that is what I wanted to explore with the title of this post, Un-Scientific Thinking. Let's take a look again at that sentence there, up above, that I just wrote: "Though I'm still unaware of the details, this makes sense to me. "

If there is a more concise statement of unscientific thinking than that sentence, I do not know of it, and my disease is our disease.

We do things not because of evidence, but because of scraps of knowledge blown in through the window by Morning Edition, Fresh Air or the Times. They mingle in the far recesses of our hippocampi with advertising and stuff our Mom told us. The cognitive contraption then gets held together by the duct tape of mental processes, the baling wire of the un-scientific mind: the inapt metaphor.

This witches brew is recalled and reconsolidated and recalled and reconsolidated again and we put the result into action in our lives. By which I mean we vote on it, or tell stories about it at dinner parties or judge scientific findings about, say, global warming. All by the half-cooked measure "Given what I know, this makes sense."

Ledoux finishes up his essay with a concise description of what scientific thinking would be.

I'm not swayed by arguments based on faith, can be moved by good logic, but am always swayed by a good experiment, even if it goes against my scientific beliefs. I might not give up on a scientific belief after one experiment, but when the evidence mounts over multiple studies, I change my mind.

I can make it a little shorter:

When evidence mounts, I change my mind

So while I still don't understand how memory works yet (which continues to make sense because I'm writing this instead of cracking open that 900 page computer science book on the floor) I do know that some guy somewhere has a new theory about it.

The question nagging me is whether that means I have learned something. Is the darkness of my ignorance any brighter or have I replaced one superstitious belief with another?

The Mental Sunrise- Dennett's View

- From General Science written in 1912 in Philly!

Last time I wrote about consciousness, I was ruminating on how a near flip of a coin separates the wheat from the chaff, or in this case, the baby from the placenta. All cell's in a blastocyst have the potential to create consciousness, but only some are the progenitors of it.

When a cell is chosen for glory, that glory does not yet arrive. Consciousness is still down the road. But how far? When is an embryo sufficiently wired up with efficient neurons and synaptic density to make the transition from mere brain activity to consciousness?

Whatever consciousness is. So that's kind of a big bite to try and chew. Thankfully, lots of smart folks have been ruminating on this and are here to help.

Obviously there is a let-a hundred-flowers-bloom diversity of views on this. I'll focus on Prof Daniel Dennett's view now, and we'll get to differing views down the road a bit.

Professor Daniel Dennett of Tufts has been at the heart of an inquiring community developing a philosophical and biological theory of consciousness. A substantial number of smart people think Dennett's theory of consciousness is likely spot-on. This is his summary of his computational model -

At any given time, many modular cerebral networks are active in parallel and process information in an unconscious manner.

An information becomes conscious, however, if the neural population that represents it is mobilized by top-down attentional amplification into a brain-scale state of coherent activity that involves many neurons distributed throughout the brain. The long distance connectivity of these "workplace neurons" can... make the information available to a variety of processes including perceptual categorization, long-term memorization, evaluation, and intentional action.

We postulate that this global availability of information through the workplace is what we subjectively experience as a conscious state.

A lifetime of Dennett's work can be summarized deformed this way: until some bit of information is accessed simultaneously by many different parts of the brain, you are naught but a glorified flower, dumbly growing toward the light.

Dennett theorizes that individual parts of the brain ("modular cerebral networks") are not conscious. As we've seen, different networks of the brain wire up at different times. Some are fully formed relatively early in the womb and many others don't stop forming new synapses until death. Dennett says that only when "information [is] available to a variety of processes" could there be an experience of consciousness.

How many processes are enough to transform disparate, mental activities into consciousness. When does it happen? Is it before birth? Before 24 weeks of gestation, when I am writing this?


In other words, when does the proto-human become a human? Is it when consciousness arises? If so, what is my little proto-human before that mental sunrise, when the potential is there but unachieved?

Is my kid my kid yet? If not, who or what are they?

I'm trying to arrange a chat with Mr Dennett to find out what he thinks.