Behind the Scenes of The Brain Show

by Zeev Nitsan

  There is an ancient saying that experience is a flashlight that illuminates backward, to the road we have already traveled. Using experience in a manner of extrapolation, however, turns the future into something partially predictable and enables us to change the direction of the beam of experience flashlight toward the dark depths of the future.

  One of the definitions of wisdom is a correct mix of heart and brain (in a neurological tone: between the amygdala, as the main representative of emotion, and the frontal lobe, as the main representative of rationalism).

  Some ascribe the wisdom of middle age—the age of “matured adulthood”—to the amount of white matter in the brain, which reflects a more efficient transmission of signals between brain cells. In contemporary jargon, it may be referred to as a wider “band width.” It was found that, at certain areas of the temporal and frontal lobes, the lining of myelin—due to its light shade, brain areas that contain a large amount of it are called “white matter”—reaches its peak at about the age of fifty.

  Life is like a novel whose ironic truths are hidden from the eyes of those who have just started reading the book. A “non-ideal” by-product might be added as we grow older, when idealism tends to be covered by the scaled armor of cynicism.

  Wisdom does not only mean familiarity with the facts of life, but also the ability to apply these insights, in practice, by means of real actions. The guiding power of wisdom is reflected in outlining a practical course of action.

  Snow on the roof does not mean that the fireplace inside the house does not spread heat, just as white hair and the burden of years do not prevent the intellectual burning in the brain of an old person.

  Young and Old Hemispheric Action Profile

  The hypothesis according to which the center of the cognitive gravity moves toward the left side as we grow older, which means a reduction in the volume of activity on the right side, is supported, inter alia, by brain-imaging studies. These studies show that among young people, the basic activity at the prefrontal cortex on the right is more significant from the prefrontal activity on the left side, almost regardless of the nature of the cognitive task. An inverted mirror image was found among old people, in whom a larger volume of basic activity was detected at the prefrontal cortex on the left side. At a young age, we tend to look at the world through the lens of pursuing innovation and coping with it, whereas at an older age we tend to view the world through the lens of accumulated past experience.

  The Personal Pattern of Aging

  Each person experiences the crises of life in a personal, unique way that is based on the circumstances of his life, his beliefs, and his views. The fact that time has limits is known to every child, but it seems that only adults, in the second part of their life, really sense it. As in many other aspects of life, the pace of brain aging changes from one person to another. “The wisdom of the individual” includes the personal insights of a person, which are stored in his brain throughout the years. The repertoire of insights becomes larger as we grow older, and the insights are piled in the cellars of our brain.

  The number of volumes of information patterns on the brain shelves predicts the cognitive durability against the moth of forgetfulness, which nibbles at the volumes in the neural library.

  Every one of us has weaknesses and strengths in our mental armor, which, to a large extent, derive from the patterns we have acquired in the course of our life. The level of vulnerability with respect to the fading of various thinking skills depends on the depth of the backup and the richness of the patterns that are stored in our brain and relate to these thinking skills. If an animation painter and a literary critic are affected by dementia, it is likely that the literary critic will suffer more damage related to spatial orientation, while the animation painter will suffer more damage related to language skills.

  The Indented Shoreline of the Sea of Forgetfulness

  Even when dementia is developing, the frontline of cognitive deterioration is not uniform.

  The shoreline of mental deterioration’s frontline is indented, full of islands and peninsulas, and does not have a uniform interface with the sea of forgetfulness. Islands of cognitive excellence might be preserved in people who suffer deterioration in specific aspects of their cognitive skills.

  Each one of us has a personal map of mental strengths and weaknesses. Cognitive strengths and cognitive weaknesses might be compared to peaks and valleys in the personal map of skills. This map is a significant actuarial marker with regard to the skills that are more prone to be damaged as a result of cognitive deterioration processes. The valleys—areas of weaknesses—are more susceptible to calamity and to being flooded by the wastewater of loss and extinguishing. The cliffs of strengths will still sprout from the boggy swamp.

  As we grow older, the birds of thought and emotion migrate from the “lands of daringness,” at the right side of the brain, to the “lands of safety,” at the left side of the brain (although they still nest at the right side as well, their spreading pattern becomes more bilateral as we grow older)—this migration process is not uniform in terms of pace and contents.

  The process of universal change in the human brain that takes place as we grow older involves tilting of the information-processing pendulum from a unilateral tendency toward the right, to a growing collaboration of the left brain (and a more cooperative action pattern based on both hemispheres). Nevertheless, this tendency also depends on personal aspects.

  At an old age, people sometimes feel as if there is no excitement left—as if the circus has left town.

  Sometimes it seems that, as we grow older, the glow in our heart becomes dimmer from winter to winter, but the ability to “enjoy differently,” such as enjoying a quiet musical piece, might compensate for losing our ability to enjoy jumpy computer games. We can enjoy in different ways.

  Part C: Aspects of Body and Soul

  Chapter 18: Body and Soul—Are They the Same?

  Domain of the Individual and Domain of the Numerous

  The issue of the connection between body and soul is a central branch in the Tree of Knowledge of philosophy, and there are many who walk the intellectual track that attempts to understand the descent of spirit from substance.

  According to a common supposition, since we do not have the ability to rise above the limits of our senses we are not able, by means of direct observation, to grasp the body–soul essence, although we do have some perceptional images that represent it. All we can do is infer inferences according to the impressions of the perception that conceptualizes the inner aspects of our being (the world of phenomena restricted by our epidermis).

  This is not a unique case. Other basic entities in science cannot be perceived or directly observed, either. Inferring the existence of these entities derives only from their perceived results. An example of that is gravity. Each apple that falls from the tree to the ground attests to its existence, but for a long time, no gravitational radiation or gravitational particles, which confirm its existence, have been registered. We inferred its existence only by means of results that are perceived by our senses.

  Many soul researchers claim that when the object of investigation is ourselves, as conscious entities, the main barrier of knowledge derives from the fact that our subjectivity sometimes seems as if it cannot be reduced.

  We cannot observe the double-headed creature called body–soul. We gain insights about it out of inferences that result from cold, objective, scientific observation, such as during brain surgery, and out of a warm sense—the subjective awareness.

  Today there is growing awareness of the incapacity of a single discipline to explain the complexity of the soul. Relying on a single discipline in the field of mental research might lead to interpretive failure similar to that in the fable about the six blind men who tried to assess the shape of an elephant. Each of them touched a different part of the elephant’s body but could not grasp the overall being of the elephant.

  It seems that the language that
describes the soul of human beings must be “multilingual” and include concepts that are taken from different disciplines. Understanding the human soul requires hermeneutic thinking, which combines insights taken from numerous disciplines: from philosophy and psychology to biochemistry and neuropsychology.

  The mental mechanism can be observed from two points of view simultaneously: as subjective consciousness that can only be peeked into by its legal owner (i.e., every owner of a soul can observe only his own soul from within), or as material entity. A combination of these two modes of investigation creates an added value, compared to each of the modes separately. In this way, we get a more fitting picture of the mental reality. The combination of the world of subjectiveness, which is invisible to the eye of an outsider, and the study of visible brain tissues might greatly improve our understanding of mental life.

  The two observable aspects of this entity—the material aspect of the brain and subjective awareness—greatly vary in terms of their availability to be observed, in the sense that the human brain can be observed scientifically by other brain owners, due to the fact that it is tangible and measurable and can be quantified (available to the domain of numerous) while, on the other hand, subjective awareness belongs to private territory and is unavailable for observation except by its owner (the domain of the individual).

  The situation in which, despite the great differences between our brains and our unique perception, we share numerous conventions in common might be termed “objective subjectiveness.” Some believe that our common perception of reality is like a collective mirage, similar to the one shown in the movie Matrix.

  A common definition of the “me” is a subject who is aware of himself. The qualitative aspects of our experiences are hard to explain (how it is to “be me from within”), similar to the confusion we sense when watching films like Being John Malkovich or Fight Club.

  Many scientists tend to focus their work on the “domain of the numerous.” They prefer to focus on phenomena that can be observed by a multitude of spectators. The great number of observations increases, as they see it, the reliability of the findings of observation, and the risk of bias, which might exist with respect to observations whose findings are only reported by a single spectator, decreases.

  As part of the “domain of the numerous” approach, some use evolutionary models of cognition, in the spirit of the work of Darwin, who searched for the element that unifies life manifestations, as opposed to the trend of searching for the element that differentiates, which was common in his time. The tendency of evolutionary models of cognition is to search for the unifying, universal elements and to focus less on the cognition of the individual.

  In this sense, the tendency of these models is mythic—they reveal the almost-“timeless” causes (as representatives of evolutional eras) that define the human condition.

  It seems that the combination of the domain of the numerous observations, which can be refuted or confirmed by means of contemporary scientific methods, and those that are related to the domain of the individual and which rely on a testimony of a single witness who “owns the soul” and cannot be refuted or confirmed by means of contemporary scientific methods, offers us panoramic observation as part of the attempt to better understand the mysteries of body–soul.

  The researcher Alexander Luria stood out in his attempt to reflect the elements that rise on opposite sides of the barricade. Along with the objective information, he tried to reflect the inner experience of the investigator. According to Luria, “When the observation is performed appropriately, it realizes its traditional purpose—to explain the facts, and at the same time, it is focused on the romantic purpose of maintaining the varied richness of the subject.”

  The Weight of the Soul

  Does our soul, the refined core of our being, become as thick as a cloud at the moment of death and wander off to an invisible heavenly plane—as in the common, enchanting image?

  The attempt to extract the honey of the soul from the brain beehive and to grant scientific acknowledgement to the existence of the soul led Dr. Duncan MacDougall to carry out a study whose results were published in 1907. As part of the study, the weight of patients was checked carefully at the moments of dying and right after death. The findings of the weighing led Dr. MacDougall to conclude that the weight of the human soul is twenty-one grams. His findings were not confirmed in other studies. As part of an interview with the New York Times, Dr. MacDougall told of his ambition to document the human soul in an x-ray scan.

  Studies that involve innovative technologies in brain imaging, such as functional MRI, try to detect correlations between neural activities and mental phenomena, but the portrait of the soul has not been captured in a photograph yet.

  The Ghost in the Machine

  Artificial intelligence constitutes, in the eyes of certain brain researchers, an alternative to the complicated approach of finding a correlation between conditions of the soul (which are subjective conditions in essence) and aspects related to structure (anatomy) and function (physiology) of the brain. Certain researchers of artificial intelligence aspire to reach a point in which they will be able to create consciousness out of substance in practice.

  Is the creation of artificial consciousness the key to understanding consciousness, in the spirit of the words of physicist Richard Feynman, who said that we cannot understand what we cannot create?

  Is it possible to exchange human intelligence with digital intelligence, or is it as the physicist Roger Penrose claimed in his controversial book, The Emperor’s New Mind: brain activity cannot be imitated by a digital machine, since cognition and thought are not algorithmic actions but rather actions that are subject to the laws of quantum mechanics?

  People who suffered brain damage and afterward experienced changes of perception and exceptional insights and behaviors were described by neurologist Oliver Sacks as “giants who walk in lands beyond imagination—lands we would not have heard of if it weren’t for them.” These people were forced to embark on a discovery journey into themselves, during which they exposed hidden talents and abilities within themselves and extracted from their brain new insights about the reality inside and outside.

  The birth date of the self, in its common meaning, does not overlap with the date of our birth. The sense of self, in the sense of our being as an entity that is separated from others, is probably born at the age of eighteen to twenty-four months, and a manifestation of that is that this is the time at which infants are able to identify themselves in photos.

  The Self—A Multi-Entities Entity

  The self is multifaced and is not a unified entity whose boundaries are well defined. The “cluster” of the aspects of the “self” get together and create the overall sense of “self.” In this sense, the “self” is like a multi-aspects cocktail in which each aspect of the self has presence and weight that constantly change. Since the weight and the level of presence of each aspect of the self is weighted in a sequential pattern within the overall self, this self actually changes constantly according to the mixing changes in the subgroups of the self that compose it, but within it exist a preservation of the “preserved core” of the self representations, which are like a guardian angel for the continuum of our being.

  The “self” includes many “selves”—for example, the self that places us in the sense of time; the self that places us in the sense of the physical location; the self that places us in the sense of social sphere; the self that looks inside (the introspective); the physical self that monitors body senses; the emotional self that is attentive to emotional waves; the autobiographic self that preserves the core memories of our identity; the reflexive self, which is like a mirror that reflects ourselves to ourselves; the self of self-esteem, which determines the value of our self-evaluation in changing circumstances; and the perspective self, which sets us in a unique square in the chess board of the situation.

  The Fata Morgana of the “Self”

  Is our consc
iousness a fata morgana—a mirage that derives its liveliness from the shadow theater within our brain?

  In philosophical terms, we might define this approach regarding the building of the “self” as “naive realism”; we refer to the representation built by our brain as if it were reality itself.

  David Hume, the eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher, wrote, “Selves are nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions which succeed each other with an incomparable rapidity…. The mind is a kind of theater where several perceptions successively make their appearance.”

  And, contrary to the common approach of cause and effect, it is possible that our thoughts and emotions generate us and not the other way around.

  A similar approach sees a human being as a collection of “selected representatives” (with respect to the perceptions, memes, and memories that reside in his brain, in particular) whose composition might change every now and then, and, in this sense, it is constantly changing.

  Just as a collection of wooden boards that are organized according to a certain pattern is termed “a ship,” so is the collection of personal impressions termed the “self.” The self is like a turning wheel whose spokes are our memories and the core memes that nest within us.

  The perception according to which the “self” is an illusion and the sense of self is nothing but a cluster of changing impressions is common in Buddhism as well.

  According to an interpretation of the view of the British philosopher George Berkeley, there are not any entities that exist in themselves in our world—the existence of these entities depends on someone else who perceives them in his senses. This view is illustrated in the saying that in the absence of ears that can hear, a tree that falls down in the forest makes no sound.