Greetings, Ray and Keith,
Many thanks for your thoughtful and helpful postings on the idea of the
holographic brain. I am taking the liberty of replying in this email to
both of you, and of troubling you with some additional questions based on
what you describe.
1) I do understand, Ray, the point you made about each cell containing all
the 'information' of a person: our DNA is replicated in each of our cells.
That the cells end up doing different things as the organism forms ( cell
development) is, as I understand it, still one of the big mysteries in
biology. But I think that this passive, activatable coding is not quite the
same as the coding of an idea, say, in the brain, no? That is, the functions
of the brain are the results of collections of neuronal cells acting
together, and not contained within a single neuron. Does this make sense?
2) Holographs.... If a holographic plate is shattered, does each piece then
still depict the whole of the original picture, or just a part of the whole?
If brain function is generally resilient and can be restored though much of
the relevant parts of the brain have been destroyed, could it not, instead
of many duplicated learned act copies, be because the learned act is
supported by a dense and redundant set of neural pathways? If many of the
neurons are destroyed, this restoration might be ensured by the undamaged
neurons in the original network, with only a bit of re-learning, and, if
necessary, re-growing of some of the messing neurons. It would be very
interesting to compare the recovery rates of brain-damaged individuals to
the time it takes new pathways to be adopted by learned acts that have been
damaged, and the growth of new neurons where the original redundancy was not
adequate.
These are just speculations of course, based on your notes. I am very
interested in what your thoughts are on this.
3) If synapses deteriorate with lack of use, might the opposite not also be
true: and if this is so, might it not be possible that carrying out mental
exercises would actually strengthen specific brain functionings? Gosh!
Might it be possible to train two entirely independent neural networks to do
the same thing, but locate them in different parts of the brain, so that if
one part were damaged, the remaining network would be able to carry on the
functioning, unimpeded? If a person 'can't make up their mind' about
something, might among the reasons for this be that indeed a person has
developed to independent neural nets for the same function, but that they
are just sufficiently different that in some number of cases, they end up in
conflict with each other? More speculation, I know...your thoughts?
4) On this matter of Wernicke's areas and the sensory channel that is being
activated to handle a thought ("tomato"): are you saying that in Wernicke's
areas cells carry out sensory specific operations (visual/tactile/auditory,
etc.)? And that a few cells destruction might cut off a given channel's
access to the thought?
If this is an adequate summary, how does the idea of synesthesia fit in, in
which experience or memory of a thing in one channel triggers a fuller
experience of it in other channels? For example: If I ask you now to
"imagine walking down a street in a quiet village, and you pass by the open
door of a bakery...."
What is happening here, in Wernicke's areas, if anything?
5) I can well imagine that functions of analysis and thinking are
distributed throughout the body and that the 'brain is human and limbs are
servants' model is lacking. Why does this seem to make immediate sense to
me? In information technology, we are coming to realize that dispersed
decision-making centers, meshed together through redundant networks, may be
the superior design, in terms of speed of action, local wisdom, overall
wisdom, repair, and resilience to outside damage or attack. So it may be
that the human or other organisms, faced with the need for all of these for
hundreds of millions of years, have 'figured it out' (and I do NOT mean this
teleologically!) through the processes of evolution, and adopted this kind
of architecture for our organic information systems.
6) That our understanding of the brain and human functioning is in a very
young stage is obvious, if frustrating. I have personal experience of this.
One of the areas that I have been trained in is NLP. I was able to improve
on it in some areas that were critical to me, and in the course of doing
this pushed the limit of research pretty aggressively in some the advanced
courses that I taught. In one class, challenged by one of the students, I
was able to cure him of his substantial and debilitating arthritis (elbows
and knees). He and I have stayed in close contact over the 17-18 years that
have passed since then, and he has had zero reoccurrence. Now, the amazing
thing to me is that this worked at all. I had winged an approach after he
offered curing this as a challenge to me. All I did, literally, was talk
with him, and touch him lightly on the arm. The whole thing took about 30
minutes. Everyone in the class was pretty surprised, when over the course of
the next days of the remainder of the class he reported no symptoms at all.
Of course, I don't have any understanding of how this happened, what was
happening mentally or physically. I used a metaphoric model of how people
function to guide my intervention, but metaphorical is all it was. So I am
immensely optimistic that we will find much that is fascinating and of great
human values in the decades ahead on these kinds of questions.
I like Pribram's speculations, even if they now don't seem correct; or
rather, I like the person for the speculations he offered. We are going to
need a lot of imagination and 'what-if' tolerance to come to understand
these questions. When a thing studies itself, there are bound to be great
meta-procedural challenges....
Your posts, Keith and Ray, are fascinating, and I deeply appreciate the time
you both but into them, and the generous effort you made to make them
understandable to me.
Best regards,
Lawry
