Letter to a professor

Professor B - ,

Thanks for your wonderful reply.

No I did not think you were implying theoretical neuroscience was actually doomed. Indeed as "doomed" would be a pretty dreadful way to think about the subject that I think is one of the most important aspects of studying neuroscience. None the less considering the advance of Computational Neuroscience in relation to the advances of Theoretical Physics, and also as I suggested in class as in relation to Theoretical Economics is an interesting way to frame the study. I hope that my point was not too distracting to your lecture on Thursday, but I am always very intrigued by the philosophical framework that scientific fields occupy and what might be called the ideological framework within which scientific investigators and theoreticians see themselves as working.

It was from a discussion of theoretical physics that Thomas Kuhn derived the notion of 'paradigms' in the evolution of scientific ideas. The basic idea is that science does not advance along a steady path towards greater knowledge but rather moves in a stepwise fashion. Real advances occur as discrete leaps and bounds, they form discontinuities in our working knowledge of a subject.

I believe that the explanation of why scientific thought moves through paradigms includes the radical genius of thinkers like Newton Maxwell and Einstein but also includes sociological principles concerning the collective perception of the scientific society. In a way that is often not apparent to the individual researcher, the mode of inquiry - the questions that an investigator asks as well as the means and methods by which he or she goes about asking them - is the product of social relationships and societal structures.

It is by understanding the relationships between scientists, the interactions between scientific theory and scientific practice and also the way that scientists perceive their own inspirations and advances that we can really understand the sporadic nature of scientific advance. Thus understanding why the early 20th century saw such terrific success in physics and the late 20th century saw an impasse in the efforts to unify the field involves asking questions about the goals and aspirations of the physicists of each epoch.

In your lecture you correctly suggested that there are good reasons behind the intimate connections between the field of theoretical neuroscience and theoretical physics. The most obvious reason that the fields are connected is that so many brilliant physicist have made important contributions to theoretical neuroscience. These include the men you discussed below and also Leon Cooper who won a Nobel in physics before moving to Neuroscience at Brown. A second reason for the connection is that the mathematical tools developed in physics are also applicable to the study of neuroscience. The similarity of the math is itself an explanation for why a good physicist makes a good theoretical neuroscientist. If we compair the history of neuroscience with the history of physics, we are in the 21st century occupying the position in neuroscience that the ancient Greek natural philosophers occupied in physics. Seen in this light, the relationship of theoretical neuroscience to physics is like that of a big brother and reason for tremendous optimism.

My point is that there are other implications of the connection between physics and neuroscience. A first is that the kind of impasse that physics has encountered in recent years could also occur in theoretical neuroscience even though the field is currently advancing at a remarkable pace. Only in this limited sense might we say that neuroscience is doomed: it is 'doomed' to conform to the same stepwise evolution - leaps ahead followed by years of crawling at a snails speed.

A second implication can be seen by comparing the position of neuroscience in relation to physics with the position of economics in relation to physics. Just as the flow of scientists and mathematical methods makes neuroscientists see their field as physics little brother, economists have long tried to think of their field as emulating the study of physics. Appeals to physics can been seen in the works of economists throughout the history of the study. Adam Smith thought of himself as replicating Newton's Principia when he wrote The Wealth of Nations. Ricardo though of himself as a Natural Philosopher turned political economist. All of these classical liberal thinkers appealed to notions of gravitation in their discussion of economic equilibriums. Marx often used the language of chemistry and physics to describe the workings of the capitalist economy. Finally Keynes framed his famous The General Theory by comparing his work to Einstein's paper of the same title.

Similarly modern economists continue to try to think about their study by transferring the mathematics developed in physics over to their study of economics. This kind of effort is frequently very profitable, but there is also an important way in which it affects the way that economists see themselves as working and the way that they conceptualize the market itself. I think that some of the blame for events like the 2008 collapse can be placed in the inaccurate atomization and rationalization that is involved in the transformation of concepts from physics into thinking about economics.

If the case of economics, using the language of physics is frequently a means of disguising a thinkers actual motivation for making claims about the marketplace. Discussing employment in the terms of gravitation can become more than a metaphor - it can be a way of hiding or minimizing problems like unemployment and poverty.

These types on concerns are not present in the study of theoretical neuroscience. However, in the context of our discussion, the mode of inquiry in neuroscience can complicate the application of mathematical models developed in the context of physics. In an important way, all efforts in neuroscience are attempting to uncover the function of the material that we are studying and how the material's structure performs the function. This type of investigation is radially different from the study of a mere physical system - an ideal gas has properties but it does not have a function. In the example of facial recognition, the quality of recognizing faces is a functional quality of the cortex.

While the mathematical rigor of physics is an important tool in the study of neuroscience and is essential the continued advance of the field, it is important to recognize that the direct comparison of theoretical neuroscience with physics can be misleading as well. I would argue that trying to consider neural systems as no different from physical systems can obscure a true appreciation of the the biology even while mathematics is an essential tool in the study of the brain.

All this being said I cannot agree with you more about the importance of mathematical rigor in the advancement of neuroscience and I really look forward to your class this semester. Perhaps we can continue this conversation in a context less distracting.

Regards,

Jeff

"Cellular Communications"

JK '09

Additional Anatomical Drawings:

http://sites.google.com/site/nowwehaveyourattention/anatomical-drawings

Song Maps

My new website is up Song maps are plots of songs through time and frequency, constructed by a cutting edge simulation of the inner ear. Using original computational techniques, I simulate the inner ear as pressure waves of dance along a 3-Dimensional graph. Frequency is segregated into a high resolution matrix that records a Newtonian simulation driving Euler's method. The result is that you see sound as you see the world around you. Watch a song and watch it transcribed into a most fundamental language; formed when ears first began to listen and rooted deep within our biology. Watch as sounds move to the harmony along a map of space and time. More

The Brain in Love

Is not the brain in love a most ripened commodity?

Animal love, they say, is material needs and chemical desires. But defined by its boundaries, all love is pains and promises, specially formulated to control us. In the very way that they delight us, at the very moment that they dig us the deepest yet the highest euphoria, and most of all in those seconds when they decide that nothing else matters, then, men women and men and women become tacit in a domination.

In Contrast, this figure, from Wilson 1975 is an evolutionary interpretation of man, near equal in its comedic and scientific values.

Make it explicit here, this is not a genetic analysis of humanity. Neural plasticity is the transformation of man by his environment. The physiology of a brain is controlled by its history, its beliefs, its comrades and its master.

To be sure, the capacity for human complexity, that intricate wiring which we connect as worst fears and greatest dreams, this is the product of miracle evolution. But just as propaganda can be written on the same paper as poetry, and words themselves are nothing but the place holders for their real meanings, the human brain is the raw material which by living, we transform into art and argument, romance and horror, thought and forgotten, commodity and slave.

Genes do not encode an ideology, but paper is not the laws that are written on it.

Our brains are the media of society.

State, Sweat and Pleasure in a Neural Reward Circuit

The Prairie Vole, featured in a story published recently in the AP is studied more than any rodent out side of mice and rats because it takes part in that most sacred human behavior. The species a engages in monogamous social pairings that resembles the pairing of human sexual partners. In that species and in ours, love forges molecules of social complexity through a tacit neural contract.

But unlike the English Philosophers John Locke and Thomas Hobbs, this modern biology implies the ultimate in materialism and shows directly that chemicals can construct the foundation of love. What is more, the same brain system, here implicated in voles, also has a phenotype in humans. An artifact of a primal love, the center is profound and powerful but also poisonous and perverted; it serves both beauty and a whore. The mesolimbic reward circuit is a group of neurons that release dopamine, that neurotransmitter which encodes pleasure and Parkinson's, hopes and habits, and here, love and psychotropic chemical addiction

This work was presented in a course on genetic neurobiology at Brown University, taught by professor Giliad Barnea. A former Israeli solder, the man seems like a giant especially when he is compared to the mice he studies.

They had it coming for scheduling this topic on valentines day. In a prepared lecture, I told the class that pair bonding is the root of capitalist ideology, the stump of religion, and like opium to the masses.

Nonetheless, there is a real study of vole neurobiology that centers on a series of experiments performed in the lab of Young and Wang (2004). These scientists marked the peptides Oxytocin (not to be confused with the synthetic opiate derivative) and Arginine Vasopressin (AVP) as pheromones that dictate a repertoire of behavioral commands. In the lab and in nature, these chemicals switch voles from polygamous rodents into wild romantics who remember love for a life time.

This animal love is material needs and chemical desires. But defined by its boundaries, all love is pains and promises, specially formulated to control us. In the very way that they delight us, at the very moment that they dig us the the deepest yet the highest euphoria, and most of all in those seconds when they decide that nothing else matters, then, men women and men and women become tacit in a domination.

In political theory, the social contract is an experimental construction, a thought test where men put themselves on the shoulders of some ideal type yet impossible ancestor. From thought experiment, they extrapolate an ever present force of chaos implicit in the relations of men. In the contract, men exchange their rights for protection, nature for order, freedom for slavery.

In the contract State catches man. It is by the contract that a corrupt city may is tolerated because he is a friend to each, even while a parasite of all. It is by the contract that a dead end job gives enough to live in poverty, but squashes all hopes and dreams. It is by the contract that a system of prolitarianism lays rooted in the small oppressions.

In modern political thought, social contract theory influences both the far right and the far left. It is at the heart of neoliberalism and guides that invisible genius, the market. It is the parent of freedom but also the project of ideology.

Yet as in man, also in nature.

In an analysis of behavior and brain complexity, Dunbar and Shultz (2007) argue that another social contract occurs when animals live in pairs. Within a group of related species, animals that engage in pair bonding tend towards a larger brain than those of relatives which exhibit other mating strategies. Dunbar and Shulltz contend that an evolutionary force makes bonded individuals smarter because, contracted by love, they are better able to cooperate in a social system. Is not the brain in love that most ripe for prostitution to society?

But make it explicit here, this is not a genetic analysis of humanity. Neural plasticity is the transformation of man by his environment. The physiology of a brain is controlled by its history, its beliefs, its comrades and its master.

To be sure, the capacity for human complexity, that intricate wiring which we connect as worst fears and greatest dreams, this is the product of miracle evolution. But just as propaganda can be written on the same paper as poetry, and words themselves are nothing but the place holders for their real meanings, the human brain is the raw material which by living, we transform into art and argument, romance and horror, thought and forgotten, commodity and slave.

Genes do not encode an ideology, but paper is not the laws that are written on it. Our brains are the media of society. This is the view that pair bond evolved as a means of organizing social complexity. By creating a molecule out of atoms, pair bonding forms the crucial bridge between individual gain and group well being.

Economics terms these relations "public goods" and considers them to be the one great failure of the market. But the pair bond, a genetic phenotype, serves in animals the role of the state in modern society.

In the circuitry of the mesolimbic reward system, that highest emotion is manifest in a soup of cells and ions. Best represented in the diagram, these neuclei are arranged so that together with pleasure felt during copulation (1), pheromonic signals detected by the olfactory system get stored in the nulceaus accumbans, the prefrontal cortex, the lateral septum, and the amygdala. Here, written in the strength of synaptic embraces, the physical root of love is manifest.

But in humans, this same dopaminergic pathway from the ventral tegmental area to the nucleaus accumbans is also the site of addiction. These same cells store our most intimate relations and our most oppressive objectification. With that same potency that lover binds to lover, parent binds to child, brother binds to brother, drug addiction makes man object, chemicals master.

neuron, man and society

Here is an example of a neural system mapped out a way analogous to the cartoons posted on this website. Each of the boxes in this diagram corresponds to a part of the human brain. Each part, which neuroscientists refer to as a "nucleus", can be analyzed in terms of electrical signals, called action potentials. As discussed in the introduction, the number of action potentials produced per second by a neuron can encode information and messages. Each nucleus of neurons serves as a computational center that receives information as action potentials, processes it through spatial and temporal integration, then transmits results again as action potentials. By analyzing networks of nuclei and their transmissions, neuroscience has developed accurate and insightful models that show how the human brain works.


I see it as possible that society works, and can be analyzed, in a way similar to the human brain. Biology, psychology and sociology all seem to agree that there is no clear boundary that can sharply define the individual. Rather, the sense of self and personhood that convinces each of us that we are discrete beings is a neurological, evolutionary and social construct. In practice, there is no enduring boundary between the neurological centers known as nuclei, the physical self and larger social organizations. While different phenomena, all share a common pattern of existence. It, I or we, all material terms we use to differentiate nodes in a more general network of communication.

My argument is twofold. First, the human mind is less cohesive and defined then traditionally thought. It is an evolving entity adapting through genetic nature and environmental nurture. Surely psychological phenomenon such as "multiple personality" are evidence of the arbitrary nature of our physical bodies. Second, social units of organization are less static and solid that usually conceived. Rather society is composed of poorly defined units constructed through a process social interaction. Taken together, these two points suggest that there is no real difference between the neural networks in our brain, and social the social networks present in society.

In fact, the shape and order of the brain is a product of social experience. Just as the neurology and sociology are so intertwined, the same tools of analysis that work in neuroscience should also work as a valid methodology in the analysis of social interaction. The same computational and network models used in neurobiology may make accurate predictions about social networks. As social networks become computationally intertwined with the human mind, scientific frameworks we use to analyze the biological phenomenon might be relevant to our understanding of the social phenomena.

Sex and broken windows

Mullets, hippies and the culture war