Societies of Brains

A Study in the Neuroscience of Love and Hate

Walter J. Freeman

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317779261
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psicologia
• Subtopic: Storia e teoria della psicologia

This monograph from a leading neuroscientist and neural networks researcher investigates and offers a fresh approach to the perplexing scientific and philosophical problems of minds and brains. It explains how brains have evolved from our earliest vertebrate ancestors. It details how brains provide the basis for successful comprehension of the environment, for the formulation of actions and prediction of their consequences, and for cooperating or competing with other beings that have brains. The book also offers observations regarding such issues as: * how and why people fall in and out of love;
* the biological basis for experiencing feelings of love and hate; and
* how music and dance have provided the ancestral technology for forming social groups such as tribes and clans. The author reviews the history of the mind-brain problem, and demonstrates how the new sciences of behavioral electrophysiology and nonlinear dynamics -- combined with the latest computer technology -- have made it possible for us to observe brains in action. He also provides an answer to the question: What happens to a stimulus after it enters the brain? The answer: The stimulus triggers the construction of a percept and is then washed away. All that we know is what our brains construct for us by neurodynamics. Brains are not logical devices that process information. They are dynamical systems that create meaning through interactions with the environment -- and each other. The book shows how the learning process by which brains construct meaning tends to isolate brains into self-centered worlds, and how nature has provided a remedy -- first appearing in mammals as a mechanism for pair-bonding -- to ensure reproduction of the young dependent on parents. The remedy is based in the neurochemistry of sex which serves to dissolve belief structures in order to open the way for new patterns of understanding and behavior. Individuals experience these changes in various ways, such as falling in love, collegiate indoctrination, tribal bonding, brain washing, political or religious conversions, and related types of socialization. The highest forms of meaning for humans come through these social attachments.

Chapter 1

Brains and Minds

What is man, that Thou art mindful of him? … for Thou hast
made him a little lower than the angels. Psalms 8:2-5

We and our ancestors for countless generations have followed two roads in pursuit of understanding our minds in relation to our bodies. One has been observation of the effects of physical and chemical damage to our bodies on our thinking and behavior. The other has been introspective reflection on our experiences, thoughts and feelings, and their relations to similar processes in other beings like ourselves and those imagined to exist in animals, objects, events, or pure abstractions not of this world.

1.1 The origin and growth of introspection

Far from being a solitary preoccupation, introspection as distinct from mere experiencing is an intensely social enterprise, as much as eating, defecating, being born, and dying. Reports that we have heard and read from others tell us what to look for, how to interpret nuances of feeling, and what to accept or reject as valid or invalid. The task is incomplete until we have compared our notes with those of others in conferences and late-night talk shows. Moreover, the capacity for introspection requires the prior existence of awareness of the self as distinct from the world and others like the self. The emergence of this capacity in the evolution of mankind is lost in the remote past, but it recurs in each individual at some time in childhood. Then as now the realization of the self must have had catastrophic consequences. The self comes quickly to the realization that the self will inevitably die. Children respond to this insight with denial and levity. They sing:

Did you ever think as the hearse rolls by

that you will be the next to die?

The worms crawl in, the worms crawl out,

the worms play pinochle on your snout,

and dissolve into laughter. They play

Ring around the rosy, pocket full of posy,

ashes, ashes, all fall down,

without realizing that they inherit this game from children 700 years ago, who exorcised their experience of the bubonic plague by re-enactiment: the ring of red swelling around lymph nodes in the groin, the openings that drained pockets of pus, the ashes placed on doors and bodies, and the demise of entire villages.

Adults who were faced with death in battle, childbirth, illness, and old age were less able to laugh at the fatal outcome, but they could still deny it. Then as now the concept must have emerged of the spiritual “I” that could survive the dissolution of its body. Otto Rank (1932) described this concisely: originally, man became soul at his death, while later, living man had a soul which only parted from his body at death.” Egyptian rulers tried to have it both ways by mummifying their bodies and building giant tombs to protect their remains, so that their spirits might live on. The cost was prohibitively high, and the results unsatisfactory (Breasted 1933). The conception of the existence of spirits whether or not embodied took deep root and was extended to family and friends, animals, trees, and all manner of identified objects in the world. It must have been a short step then to attribute causes and effects to thereby inspirited objects of the world, seeing that this is an integral aspect of the way humans understand things (Section 7.3).

Art historians have proposed that the emergence of representations in the forms of statuettes, pictographs, paintings, and abstract designs reflected an effort to concretize and objectify the spirits, as a way of affirming their existence, working out their desires and tactics, and attempting to control them. “The kind of satisfaction which [artists in primitive cultures] looked to obtain from art was not, as in Western art, that of sinking themselves in the external world, and finding enjoyment in it, but that of depriving the individual thing in the external world of its arbitrary and apparently haphazard character; that is, to immortalize the object in giving it an abstract form and so finding it a resting place in the flight of phenomena” (Worringer 1953). “Compared with the idea of the soul or its primitive predecessors even the most abstract art is concrete, just as on the other hand the most definite naturalism in art is abstract when compared with nature” (Rank 1932).

With the help of Egyptian social organization and mathematics the Greek philosophers developed complex systems of abstract thought, which culminated in the dialogues of Socrates and Plato. These and their antitheses in co-existing schools still largely define the terms of contemporary introspection. In the past three centuries great advances took place in the works of European and American novelists, who discovered in the process of creating fictional characters a means for examining inner space in richer detail than was possible on the stage. Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung provided systems that mechanized the thermodynamics of inner space, in many ways analogous to the machinations of gods in the Greek and Roman pantheons, giving an aura of scientific respectability to their approaches, though it infuriated James Joyce, among others, to hear attribution to Freud of the discovery of the unconscious. Recent advances have brought introspection new power (Smythies 1994), especially in the visual experience of space (Ramachandran 1992) and in the neuropharmacology of hallucinogens (Fischer 1971).

1.2 Artificial Intelligence (Al) and cognition

The 20th-century mechanization of the laws of thought in Boolean algebra and symbolic logic has given introspection a new twist, in which the artificial intelligentsia propose to simulate or emulate the operations of their minds, as they perceive them, with algorithms implemented in silicon. The intent of the predecessors of Al, Immanuel Kant, Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell, was to surmount the vagaries of biological minds by distilling the essence of thinking and expressing it in fixed mathematical forms. The movement has undergone transformations in each generation through logical positivism to contemporary cognitive science – not to be confused with cognitive psychology, the study of “Brains [and Minds] in Rats and Men” (Herrick 1926). Cognition is the process of learning or constructing knowledge. Within this domain, conventional cognitivism holds that knowledge is expressed in symbols, and that knowing is the manipulation of the symbols according to logical rules. The symbols are said to exist in minds where the knowing takes place. The problem for strict cognitivists is how to connect symbols in their logical systems with meaningful objects and events. Attempts to get computers to perform simple tasks, like ordering a hamburger in a realtime unstructured environment like MacDonald's, have foundered in the infinite complexities of everyday life. There are solid reasons for this failure (Dreyfus 1979, 1991; Dreyfus and Dreyfus 1986; Sections 3.11, 5.6, 6.3).

Biological brains are not logically necessary for minds. It is hydrocarbon chauvinism to suppose that minds cannot or should not exist in silicon, selenium, iron, or interstellar dust clouds, as Fred Hoyle (1957) speculated. Grey Walter (1963) built electronic turtles on wheels with a few relays, two motors, and two sensors, one for light and the other for touch. His turtles learned to prowl his living room and avoid objects while searching for both an agreeable intensity of illumination and electric power to replenish their batteries, though sometimes he found one stuck behind a couch, starved to death. The point is that Al as distinct from neuroengineering deliberately avoids consideration of the properties of brains and deals only with the perceived properties of minds. Its logical position is that since one need not know the physics of solid state devices in order to implement software or use feathers in order to fly, one need not know the properties of brains in order to do what brains do. If Al and other variants of cognitivism (Section 5.7) have failed to live up to their promise, what essential properties of brains did they omit in simulations of what they think brains do?

Strict behaviorists share this exclusionary thinking with cognitivists. In the same decade that Whitehead and Russell undertook their monumental but failed task of describing human thought in terms of logic and mathematics, John Watson (1924) discarded introspection and disavowed the need to know what is happening between the ears in order to model and control behavior. Behaviorists refuse to accept introspection as a legitimate form of behavior, and suppose that knowledge about brains is either irrelevant or unattainable.

Philosophers and physicists have recently focused attention on consciousness, with various responses: delight in discovery; denial of its existence or suitability for scientific discourse; attempts to incorporate it as an operational component of silicon minds (Lucky 1989; Penrose 1994; Dennett 1991; Herbert 1993); or adoption as the sine qua non of mind-brain function (Searle 1992). For centuries the concept of consciousness has been regularly re-introduced into biology at intervals of fifty years or so, suggesting that alternating generations have felt compelled to expel it after those preceding had re-discovered it. Darwin (1872) accepted it, as did the early anesthetists, but Jackson (1884) did not. James (1890) contemplated it, but Watson (1924) excluded it. The last preceding reentry was in 1954 with publication by the senior neurobiologists of their day (Adrian, Bremer and Jasper) of a symposium modestly entitled “Brain Mechanisms and Consciousness” (and, not of). The book was based on the discovery by Magoun (1958) of the midbrain reticular activating system, where bleeding from head injury as in boxers causes coma. But consciousness was soon discarded or ignored by most neurobiologists, such as Hubel and Wiesel (1962), though not by Sperry (1969). Among current enthusiasts there is little agreement on how to explain it (Section 7.1), and an overview of the turmoil of 20th century philosophy gives a sense of how little has changed in the 2,500 years since the ancient Greeks formulated the terms of debate (Pirsig 1974).

1.3 Brain studies in the material world

Concepts concerning brains as the source of mental life do not grow in isolation. They arise in a framework of ideas about the material world, in which the body is understood as being made of the same substance and conforming to the same laws as the rest of the world. The first written record of such knowledge came from ancient Egyptian glyphs and medical treatises, such as the Ebers papyrus. Illness was described as the result of an escape from the large bowel into other parts of the body of a noxious substance transliterated as “wchdw”. Treatment consisted of removal of the poison by cupping, bleeding, sweating, and use of purgatives and emetics. This system has been described as “the dawn of rational medicine“, in that the mechanisms of diseases and their treatments were conceived as material processes and not as inhabitations or possessions by spirits and malign powers to be conjured by incantation and magic ritual. These medical procedures persisted unchanged as the backbone of Western medical practice for 3,000 years, into the 19th century, even though, or perhaps because, through the years medicine suffered considerably less favorable regard than its sister science, astrology, which, like Al, had a stronger base in physics and mathematics than in biology.

Observations relating more specifically to brains are manifested by the residual effects of a surgical procedure. Skulls in large numbers from ancient burial grounds all over the world show scars of trephination, which was the opening of the skull by scraping the bone with a sharp stone or by two pairs of crosscuts like a tictactoe. The practice may have been grounded in a materialistic belief that a hole would relieve hydrostatic pressure inducing headache. More likely the ancient surgeons believed that evil spirits were trapped inside, leading to unacceptable behavior in their patients thus possessed. The Inca priests were thought to have chewed coca leaves with lime for alkaline extraction of cocaine and to have spit into the wound, perhaps (as we would say) for local anesthesia, but more likely for the infusion of benign, priestly powers. Many skulls show evidence of healing; some have multiple trephinings in different stages of knitting together, showing that their owners survived the procedure and that, as today, the treatment did not always succeed on the first try.

The next documented step toward a rational basis for explanation of behavior appeared in the writings of the Hippocratic school (probably derived in large part from the Egyptians), in which the material world was conceived as composed of four essences: water, earth, air and fire, each with its associated quality: moist, dry, cold or hot. Human bodies consisted of these elements in combinations forming humors, such as blood (fire + water), phlegm (water + air), black bile (water + earth), and yellow bile (earth + fire), whence come our Hippocratic temperaments: sanguine, phlegmatic, melancholic, and choleric. Disease was from an excess or deficiency of one or more humor. It was treated by the Egyptian methods and was prevented by regimens of good diet, clean water, and exercise.

One ought to know that on the one hand pleasure, joy, laughter, and games, and on the other, grief, sorrow, discontent, and dissatisfaction arise only from [the brain]. It is especially by it that we think, comprehend, see, and hear, that we distinguish the ugly from the beautiful, the bad from the good, the agreeable from the disagreeable …. Furthermore, it is by [the brain] that we are mad, that we rave, that fears and terrors assail us – be it by night or by day – dreams, untimely errors, groundless anxiety, blunders, awkwardness, want of experience. We are affected by all these things when the brain is not healthy, that is, when it is too hot or too cold, too moist or too dry, or when it has experienced some other unnatural injury to which it is not accustomed. (Clarke and O'Malley 1968, pp. 4–5)

These conclusions were solidly based on clinical observations. The authors knew, for example, that damage to one side of a brain was accompanied by convulsions and paralysis on the opposite side of its body, and that the level of severance of the spinal cord was related to the extent of dysfunction below.

Tedious debates occupied physicians for the next 2,500 years concerning the ratios of combination of the four humors. Pythagoras and Aristotle added a fifth essence, whence quintessential, which was the ether of the heavenly spheres. Some alchemists confused their ether with our alcohol, which may have rationalized the actions of many a Bacchanale who drank the nectar of the gods and indulged in orgiastic fertility rites. The entire system was scrapped after the development of the periodic table of the chemical elements by Mendeleev, the slow emergence of organic chemistry from alchemy, and the transforming of fermentations of alcoholic beverages into the bacteriological hypothesis of disease by Pasteur. By these advances surgeons developed the techniques of anesthesia in 1847 and asepsis after Pasteur, which led to improvements in experimental surgery on animals and the more common recovery of individuals with penetrating head wounds particularly in wartime. Some dramatic insights into brain and behavior accrued from the American Civil War (Mitchell, Morehouse & Keen 1864), World War I (Goldstein and Gelb 1939), and World War II (Luria 1966).

1.4 Medicine, philosophy, and intentionality

These reports have not been absorbed as integral components of cognitivism, reflecting the persistence of the classical division between medical science and philosophy. In Greece the primacy of brains as the organ of behavior was a medical view. Philosophers held with Aristotle that the seat of mental faculties was the heart, since brains in dead animals were cool to touch and were thought to act as radiators to cool the blood. This was good physics, since heads are indeed a prime site of heat loss from bodies and should be covered in freezing weather and shaded from hot sun, but it was bad biology. Contrariwise, Aristotle did share with the physicians the medical view that bodies including brains were the material substance of thought, and that the mind was its form, that is, process. The majority of philosophers held the spirit-centered view of Plato, that bodies were mere shadows of the eternal forms of ideas. As a good experimentalist Aristotle said one should not confuse wax with the form taken by the wax, a particularly apt metaphor considering the choice of word by Roman soldiers for brains: cerebrum meaning head-wax, owing to the consistency of the material on their swords after battl...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Prologue
• Chapter 1 Brains and Minds
• Chapter 2 Nerve Energy and Neuroactivity
• Chapter 3 Sensation and Perception
• Chapter 4 Intention and Movement
• Chapter 5 Intentional Structure and Thought
• Chapter 6 Learning and Unlearning
• Chapter 7 Self and Society
• Epilogue
• Notes
• References and Author Index
• Subject Index and Glossary