by Zeev Nitsan
The Brain Show—Behind the Scenes
what is going on inside our brain while we are living our life
Zeev Nitsan, MD
The Brain Show—Behind the Scenes / Zeev Nitsan MD
© All rights reserved by the author, 2017
No part of this publication may be reproduced, printed, photocopied, presented in public, published, be made into a play or translated in any form or by any means, without prior permission of the copyright owner.
Copyediting of the English edition by Adirondack Editing
Contact information: [email protected]
This book is dedicated to all the people upon whose basis of insights this book was built.
Acknowledgements
There is a French saying: “Gratitude is the memory of the heart, and my heart is full of such memories.”
Observing the horizon reflected in this book was possible due to the permission granted to my brain to observe the horizons reflected in the ideas of many other brains—and I am grateful to them.
Similar to other books, this book is an eclectic combination of insights born in other brains and insights born in the author’s brain.
I owe a great deal to many people. The seeds sprouted in this book originated in various gardens: books, journals, lectures, etc. I allow myself to paraphrase Newton’s words and say I managed to look at the secrets of the brain since I relied on many insights of other brains.
Since it is difficult to compress a comprehensive review of such a broad subject into such a short book, I included selected aspects of the reviewed themes and some aphorisms related to them.
A book sometimes enables us to read about ourselves in words written by another person. Some readers will recognize themselves in all of the pages, some will recognize themselves in some of the pages, and some only in a few of the pages (and I hope in no less than that).
A book is a blind date with an anonymous reader, and I hope this book will create an “affair” between my brain and the brains of my honorable readers. I also hope it will bring you pleasure and be a source of knowledge about the impact of the brain’s function on our daily lives.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Part A: Aspects of Brain Function
Chapter 1: Selected Aspects of Brain Function
Chapter 2: The Perception
Chapter 3: Attention, Consciousness, and Awareness at the Center and Margins of the Attention Beam
Chapter 4: Aspects of Inner Motivation and Reward
Chapter 5: The Story of Dopamine
Chapter 6: Psychonautica
Chapter 7: Memory Functions
Chapter 8: Thoughts About Thoughts: Climbing The Mountain of Thoughts
Chapter 9: A Beautiful Mind
Chapter 10: Stricken Brain—Dealing with Brain Injuries
Chapter 11: Memetics—When the Brain Meets an Idea
Chapter 12: Unity of Contradictions—Two Minds, One Brain—the Hemispheres
Part B: The Seasons of the Brain—Changing of the Brain in Different Periods of Life—How Does Our Brain deal with the Different Stages of Life?
Chapter 13: Patterns of Brain Function in Different Periods of Life
Chapter 14: How the Brain Deals with the Dimension of Time
Chapter 15: Brain Development from Embryo to Adult
Chapter 16: Aspects of Mature Brain Functions
Chapter 17: The Aging Brain
Part C: Aspects of Body and Soul
Chapter 18: Body and Soul—Are They the Same?
Epilogue
Introduction
The Universe Within
Looking from space, Earth seems like a bluish marble, abandoned and solitary, in the gloomy vastness of space, which is colder than any winter known to man.
When one examines the human brain during a neurosurgical operation, the brain seems like a fragile organ whose vulnerable softness is screaming out loud. Examining the naked brain and watching Earth from space are awakening experiences. A possible insight derived from these observations is of a mutual containment of the brain in its physical materialization in planet Earth. On the other hand, there is containment of the earth, a concept in the spiritual perception of the brain. Earth—our collective home—is contained within the brain—our private home—and vice versa.
The Human Brain—an Evolutionary Infant
Earth is four and a half billion years old. Our species, Homo sapiens (modern intelligent human), and our brain, which is unique to us, are two hundred thousand years old—a blink of an eye in evolutionary terms. In a sense, our brain is a living fossil; the contemporary version of our brain has not changed significantly in the last two hundred thousand years. One might say the model of the caveman’s brain is still with us in the twenty-first century.
If we compare Earth’s age to a twenty-four-hour period, however, it means that our brain and our species, in their contemporary version, have existed for a little less than the last four seconds.
Although the size of the human brain has not changed since Homo sapiens first appeared, it does not mean this is the final version of the brain. It is more correct to refer to it as a building in the process of being built, an evolutionary phase. One piece of evidence that the brain is not yet a final product is the lack of integration between certain parts of the brain or, as author Arthur Koestler claimed, a few screws in the human brain are loose.
The Brain as Breacher of Evolutionary Order
A popular perception is that our body is a vessel designed to preserve our genes and make sure they are passed to future generations. In this sense, we are compared to a runner in an evolutionary relay race, who is supposed to pass the stick. The collection of genes represented in our reproductive cells to the next generation is the next runner in the race.
We fulfill the wish of every DNA strand to become two strands and are servants of the dream of every gene to be passed on to a new human being.
Evolution is not about the survival and struggle of an individual but the struggle of all genes the individual is carrying.
The human brain, as a product of evolution, is designed to improve the survival potential of the genes in the body it serves. Thus, the primary purpose of the brain is not researching the phenomena in itself, but researching the phenomena in relation to improving the survival skills of the body that stores the brain and the genes. It seems the human brain avoids the evolutionary order and enables us to examine the roots of certain phenomena, including those that do not serve a direct survival purpose.
Ignorance About the Brain as a Risk Factor
The message that is so popular in different forms in various guidebooks conveys the same meaning: one can live a long life yet live very little. Ignorance with regard to our brain’s capabilities and the best usage of them is one of the main causes of a dull life that compromises our potential as human beings. Familiarity with our brain is highly beneficial to us in the practical sense.
We were thrown into life involuntarily, and our brain resembles a map that can help us determine our destination and a compass that guides the direction of the way to it.
At each and every stage of our life, we will be able to select the best steps for us if we have a clearer picture of what is going on inside our brain. This is how we will be able to better use our most important natural treasure more efficiently and have better control of our destiny. Understanding the rules of our personal brain as well as the rules of the universal human brain is a promising pathway to increase our self-awareness and our sense of satisfaction from life. The blessing of knowledge will enable us to maximize our brain’s potential. “Know th
yself”—the saying inscribed on the top of the Delphi temple and adapted as the first decree by Socrates—means, to a great extent, “Know your brain.”
The human culture will better its values when the knowledge basis of the “culture organ” becomes greater and available to more people.
A Multidisciplinary Approach to Understanding the Brain
Brain research, as with research in other complex sciences fields, has known many downfalls. Brain researchers constantly struggle with unfulfilled forecasts and expectations. A known saying describes a scientific tragedy as a “murder of a beautiful theory by an ugly fact.” The territory of brain science is drenched in the blood of such beauties; thus, in this sense, it is a very tragic place.
It is said nature “loves to hide,” and with respect to the human brain it seems this tendency is even stronger. Mental endurance, which grants the ability to search persistently for what is concealed from the eye of knowledge, is a key ingredient in the recipe for scientific success in this field.
Brain research and mainly – the higher functions of the soul has been traditionally considered part of occultism. Nowadays, the arm of proven facts has turned brain research into an empiric discipline, full of observations and experiments. Nevertheless, the arm of hypotheses that guides research paths also flourishes in the field of brain science. In this book, I will try to share with readers some insights, theories, and guiding insights, all of which are held in the hands connected to these two arms.
Praise for Multidisciplinary Understanding
For many years, brain researchers of various disciplines based their findings exclusively on concepts originated in their disciplines. They would describe the entire phenomenon as it was observed through the narrow keyhole of their specific discipline. Turning this field of research into a multidisciplinary research significantly improved the quality of information related to the brain, as each expert brought his own toolbox, and the gathering of experts from different disciplines will enhance research abilities.
Multidisciplinary study builds bridges. The bridges connect over the wide conceptual gulf separating the disciplines and enable us to move from one kingdom of knowledge to another and intensify our understanding.
Brain research requires an eclectic approach of connecting different disciplines and methodological and conceptual mutual fertilization, which is essential to promoting our understanding. Brain researchers use different types of paintbrushes and draw a picture of the human brain from various angles. Intellectual pluralism is the basis of brain science due to the multidimensionality of the riddle.
“The Theory of Everything” in Brain Science
The human brain is probably the most complex part in the amazing puzzle that is life on planet Earth. Some praise the human brain further and see it as a means through which nature reaches its own consciousness. Nevertheless, cartographers, mapmakers of the human brain, aspire to be able to follow beats of thought and fluctuations in the dial of emotions.
The brain is a multipartite riddle; in addition to being a neuroengineering riddle, well planned and chaotic at the same time, it is a thermodynamic riddle that in its core stands the question of how the rays of meaning and order break through randomly and chaos surrounds our brain.
Similarly to physicists who try to find a formula combining all physical forces, some brain researchers attempt to find the brain version of the “Theory of Everything.” In both cases, success has yet to be achieved.
In the modern era, studies of brain science have turned from intellectual desert soil to green fields of insights. Recently we have witnessed the formation of new disciplines that deal with the reciprocal relationship between the brain and various aspects of human function. These disciplines are termed “hyphen sciences” and include neuro-economics, neuro-criminology, neuro-ethics, neuro-philosophy, neuro-linguistics, neuro-aesthetics, neuro-cybernetics, and so on.
There is no doubt that we will soon witness the birth of new disciplines that will expose the brain’s role with regard to additional aspects of human behavior.
We are in the midst of a brain research odyssey. Most secrets of the brain are still in the dark, but brain researchers are, little by little, revealing the grammar rules for the language of the brain.
In this book, I have tried to gather selected aspects of new and old pieces of information discovered during the explorations journey of the brain continent.
The Limits of Understanding Our Brain
Contemporary hegemonic insights regarding our brain have not led us yet to the Archimedean point that will allow us to form a model explaining the complexities of the brain function satisfactorily. The continuous path of explanation “from the neuron to consciousness” is full of wide and deep gaps we might not be able to bridge. The skeptics among us might say that such uniform understanding is nothing but wishful thinking.
Certain aspects of brain function nowadays seem as a challenge similar to a kōan riddle, which cannot be solved by means of logical processing and requires intuitive, logical thinking.
Discussions about consciousness are characterized by built-in duality. Consciousness is absorbing a subject as well as the absorbed object, and some believe it reflects a built-in fallacy.
The Freud syndrome, or ‘in the splint of era knowledge’, is a situation in which the attempt to conceptualize a field of knowledge is made in spite of knowing the available knowledge is partial and limited, so the conceptualization is doomed to be partial and limited as well.
Such was the gloomy situation of neurologist Sigmund Freud, who felt his ability to peek at the obscurity of the human brain and soul, based on the scientific knowledge of the time, was painfully limited. Thus, he was forced to abandon his impartial scientific observations and wander away to the land of subjectiveness. Such a situation is easy to identify with even today, where the keyhole through which the brain is revealed is much wider. The main role of the scientist is to light up the dark, unknown areas, but the ability to do so depends on the intensity of the flashlight provided by the era he lives in.
Acknowledging the fact that our knowledge of the brain is only partial, and realizing there is no such thing as complete knowledge (and that it will probably remain so for good, though we hope to come closer to full understanding), it may shed appropriate light on the riddle of the brain.
The Brain Makes Us Unique
The saying “The unexamined life is not worth living” attributed to Socrates, is well known. On the other hand, we can quote the cynical, humoristic remark of author Kurt Vonnegut: “Life happens too fast for you ever to think about it.”
The brain is the element that enables us to live a worthy life in the spirit of Socrates’ words. Our reflection as human beings is reflected in the mirror of the human brain. The roulette rounds of our lives’ events wire our brain in different patterns. Each one of us resides on a unique planet created in our brain, though we are all residents of Earth. The head cliff rising above our neck carries “us” within it. Everything that we are, as a unique intelligent entity, rises above our neck. In many senses, the limits of our brain are the limits of our world.
In the fifth century BC, Hippocrates, the father of western medicine, wrote, “Humans ought to know that from the brain, and from the brain only, arises our pleasures, joys, laughter and jests, as well as our sorrows, pains, grieving and tears. Through it, in particular, we think, see, hear, and distinguish the ugly from the beautiful, the bad from the good. In these ways, I am of the opinion that the brain exercises the greatest power in the man.”[1]
The seventeenth-century philosopher John Locke created a thinking experiment examining the question of self-identity[2]. He described a shoemaker and a prince who exchange their brains. He concluded that when the shoemaker’s brain is resting inside the prince’s skull, he becomes a shoemaker wearing a royal gown; on the other hand, there is a horrified prince who finds himself walking barefoot for the very first time in his life.
Our body and
our brain resemble the ship of Theseus, king of Athens. According to myth, when the beams of the ship became rotten they were gradually replaced, until, as time went by, all of the original beams that the ship was built from were replaced. Therefore we might wonder whether the renovated ship, which does not include any part of the original ship, retains its original identity? It seems that almost every molecule of our young body will be replaced by another as we climb the mountain of the years. In the physical sense, there is almost nothing left from the child we once were and left behind. Nevertheless, we do not conclude that it is a different “self,” and our assumption is that our original being is retained.
One might see Franz Kafka’s story “Metamorphosis”[3] as an experiment of thought. The protagonist is a man who wakes up in an insect’s body but retains his human identity, in spite of the bodily metamorphosis. His memories, temper and thoughts are all retained and reflect the perception that mental continuity, rather than physical continuity, is what makes human essence unique.
Each person has a unique brain-print, yet, within the skull of a certain person, this brain-print is constantly changing as a reflection of the continuous transformation that is taking place in the brain. We are similar and different, cut from the same cloth, but have unique characteristics. We are all made of the same star stuff, as Carl Sagan once said, but each and every one of us is a unique star in the universe’s sky. Our brains are the same—they share, as snowflakes, similarity and uniqueness—yet there is not such a thing as two totally identical brains. Each brain is deserve to be called “Atsam Yelash” (an Ethiopian name for girls and boys that means “there is no one like you.”)
