NEUROECONOMICS

NEUROECONOMICS:AN APPLIED INFORMATION THEORY

DANIEL R. THORNE

Copyright © 2014 by Daniel R. Thorne

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or distributed in any manner whatsoever, except for the use of brief quotations in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law without the prior written consent of the author.

Cover image: Gross dissection of the human brain viewed from below. (Johannes Reil, 1812, volume XI, Tafel XIII), public domain.Cover design © 2014 by Daniel R. Thorne

Printed in the United States of America

First Printing, 2014

ISBN 978-1-938859-59-5

www.dthornebooks.com

To all of those who helped,and for all of those who might need it.

Contents

Introduction ixAcknowledgments xiii

ONE Complexity 1TWO The Brain 9

THREE The Mind 29FOUR Information 51FIVE Neuroeconomics 69SIX Cooperation and Exchange 85

SEVEN Breakdowns 95EIGHT Recovery and Therapy 107NINE Free Will 121TEN Discovery 135

Afterword - Not Enough an Art, Not Enough a Science

141

Glossary 149Notes and References 153Bibliography 165Index 171

Introduction

The continual revolution of the scientific age has revealedtime and time again that our intuitions regarding the naturalworld are too often too simple, and as one marvels at thewondrous complexity that is revealed by the avenues ofdiscovery which have sprung up to replace them, theseultimately betray the utter failures of the primal, intuitiveimagination.

At the dawn of the 21st century the products of the lastseveral hundred years' studies in nearly every subjectconstitute the surest known ways to boggle the mind and toembarrass its previous misapprehensions of fact. Theorientation and span of the cosmos, the origins of life, thecauses of disease, the fundamental forces at work in theuniverse, these are all things about which the primitivepeoples of the world can now be seen to have been quitewrong at a very fundamental level.

I invite the reader to consider the possibility that whilethe mind certainly does fall in that category, we cannot yetcount it among the things which we do truly understandtoday, and that while the other sciences have gone from basicatomism to quantum mechanics, from 4 elements to 118 andcounting, psychology remains perched on the brink of its ownmarvelous flight into the future.

INTRODUCTION

It is my belief and conviction that today's psychologists,as well as those who deal with psychological matters andissues such as psychiatrists and social workers, are currentlyoperating with a significantly limited set of tools forcontending with the problems of the mind and its functions,and while its true that some are able to achieve a notable levelof success in the amelioration of these they do so with limitedprecision and with limited means of understanding theunderlying dynamics.

Our study of the brain, meanwhile, has certainly risen tomarvelous heights, and new methods and research haveuncovered wonder after wonder as we have looked deeperinto our inner workings. And yet the weight of thesediscoveries has not thus far matriculated appropriately intothe basic psychological understanding nor, surely, into thecurriculum from which we instruct the next generation.

Still, it is inevitable now, as that weight continues toaccumulate, that this discrepancy will eventually have to beresolved to conform to the facts as we now know them.

In this book I will attempt to aid that transition bysubmitting a new account of the mind's mechanics, drawingfrom several components and theories based in otherdisciplines, primarily neuroscience and general humanbiology, after which I will contribute a series of conclusionswhich I think are logically necessitated by the facts of thematter as they currently appear.

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INTRODUCTION

With this work I hope to resolve a number of the popularconfounds by which modern psychology is confronted, and toimpart both a means for the summary and clarification ofsubconscious operations, as well as a new conceptual view ofthe mind and its behaviors.

There is much in this book that will consist mainly ofthought experiments and reasoned conjecture. The nature ofmost modern biological and behavioral research is that it oftenrequires significant funds and staff to which I simply do nothave access at this time. I will nevertheless make every effortto balance this reasoning with descriptions of establishedscientific fact, and despite my better wishes I will, for now atleast, leave scientific claims to the working scientists.

I therefore consider this a work of natural philosophy,more in line with traditional empirical, observational, andanalytical methodology than purely experimental science, andit owes quite a lot to those whose work has helped to discoverand to inform the facts upon which I have based myassumptions.

I hope at best for this book to allow people to look atthese things in a different way, and that this new perspectivewill refresh the exploration of some of the vexed questions ofmental analysis and will renew the consideration and theexploration of these topics at large.

I hope at least that it makes for good reading.

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Acknowledgments

I would like very much to extend my thanks to a numberof people who have helped me a great deal throughout thewriting and the production of this book.

First and foremost I want to thank my parents and mybrother and sister, as well as my close friends for their supportthroughout this process, for having cheerfully enduredcountless hours of brainstorming monologues and providedad hoc proofreading and feedback services, happily free ofcharge, and for being there for me at each stage along the way.

I would also like to thank Dr. William Simpson at theUniversity of Colorado who taught me philosophy andsymbolic logic, and Dr. Robert Sapolsky at Stanford Universitywho taught me human biology, both of whom played indirectbut indispensable roles in the formation of this book.

A special thanks goes to Judy Spoering and all the otherpeople at the Tattered Cover Press for making the resourcesavailable for this first run to be printed, as well as JudyGordon for her help with the indexing.

Most of all though, I would like to thank my wonderfulpartner, Amandine, for all of her love, for “getting” me, andfor always being my most enthusiastic fan.

ONE

Complexity

THE AMOUNT OF INFORMATION contained within the worldaround us is unbelievably complex. And, as it happens,potentially infinite.

In the context of human experience it could seem absurdto assert this, baffled as any of us can be in the face of the widenight sky or the briefest entertainment of its study over the lastfive centuries, or perhaps at least useless or irrelevant, beingthat very little going on in any of the billions of billions ofgalaxies around the universe are likely to interfere with one'smorning coffee. But you'll notice that I didn't just say “in theuniverse”.

And we need not try to imagine what 7 billion peoplewould look like all in one place or how many elephants orEmpire State Buildings it would take to encircle the globeeither, as we often do when we think of the complexity of ourplanet, because I didn't just say “in the world” either.

When we think of truly massive complexity, we oftencome up with images like the ones above; trying to make aloose account for the size and constituent parts of ourexpanding universe, or considering infinities by trying to wrapour minds around the prospect of counting until the end oftime and then forgetting to stop.

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But throughout our history, as the wide lenses of ourtelescopes drew our eyes out to the cosmic horizon, we havealso come to discover the microcosmic frontiers, and we havefound that this complexity is not solely represented by the vastreaches of space and baffling quantities of matter.

In 1665, the English polymath Robert Hooke produced atruly monumental book, the auspicious first publication of thenewly formed Royal Society, entitled Micrographia: or, Somephysiological descriptions of minute bodies made by magnifyingglasses. It contained astounding and minutely detaileddepictions of common and familiar animals and objects; fleas,gnats, lice, flies, needles, razors, and various plants, all thrustinto magnificence by the lenses of his latest obsession-- ascientific novelty at the time called the microscope.

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This work, along with these and other astonishingimages, not only produced the world's first scientific best-seller and introduced the concept of the biological cell,achievements on their own to be sure, but they also revealedfor the first time that even the tiniest of things can be vastlycomplicated, in genuinely undreamt-of ways.

Under Hooke's technologically-enhanced gaze, it couldbe seen that sheer razor blades were in fact craggy and jagged,that the bodies and legs of insects were covered in tiny littlehairs, and that the eyes of a dronefly, a creature only fifteenmillimeters in length, were made up of hundreds andhundreds of smaller eyes working together.

These observations made the most banal and even peskythings available for true fascination, and they single-handedlyredefined the most reasonable and casual assessments of whatthere was to be known about the world in which we live.

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By 1859, the German biologist Ernst Haeckel was using amore advanced version of the same equipment to studyradiolarians and other protists, drawing and describinghundreds of new species which he observed in single drops ofseawater.

A gifted artist as well as an avid naturalist, Haeckelproduced page after page, and plate after plate, demonstratingthe marvelous capacity of nature's ingenuity even on the levelof single cells. The body of work he left behind, apart frombeing the easiest way to get anyone who is even remotelycurious at heart sat squarely in front of a science book for awhile, illustrates not only the complexity of which theorganism as an individual is capable, but also the splendor

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and variety of life as a whole.

The development of this body of knowledge, from Hookethrough Haeckel all the way up to today's x-raycrystallography and electron microscopy, which allow grainsof pollen, even DNA strands and individual molecules, to berendered with unimaginable fidelity, has been paralleled byother branches of science as well.

Physicists and mathematicians have discovered the mostmind-bending facts about concepts that seem to be rathersimple. Concepts like motion, mass, space, composition ofmatter, infinity; all of these and hundreds more have beenrevisited and revised time and time again throughout thecenturies, and have each time relinquished greater secrets andmarvels.

One of these was discovered in 1978 by the Frenchscientist and geometer Benoit Mandelbrot, who was able todemonstrate that even an infinite amount of data can bebound within a finite space. With the help of computerimaging, he was able to generate his eponymous Mandelbrotset, an object which is, put simply, a portrait of infinity.

An eternity is truly not enough time so see the entire thingbecause, although it has a finite perimeter, however far youzoom in upon any part of it you wish, you are presented withpattern after pattern after pattern, branching and bifurcatingagain and again, until you eventually get to...

another Mandelbrot set.

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And another, and another, and another...

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What arises from these considerations is this: that theworld and the mechanics by which it functions have beenroundly and thoroughly revealed to be fantastically,astoundingly, and incomprehensibly complex, both in waysthat are familiar and accessible to us, and also in ways thatgive us headaches and make us wonder if we're properly ableto understand the languages we've grown up speaking.

But as alien and even startling as the findings andconsiderations above may seem, the longer that I regard themand the more that I survey the mass of information of whichthe world at any glance is comprised, the more startled Ibecome not only by the complexity of the things revealed butat once by the banality of the things first suggested.

I find myself asking a peculiar question-- if the world isindeed so emphatically the way that it is, how is it that we, ifleft unbothered by scientific papers and descriptions of theirfindings, manage to see the world as we do on a regular day?

How is it that simplicity itself arises from this mass ofcomplexity?

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TWO

The Brain

HUMANITY AND OUR OWN inner workings have by no meansbeen immune to this growth in understanding, and some ofour most astonishing discoveries throughout this process havecome from our study of the nervous system and, especially,that mysterious organ we call the brain.

Any understanding of the mind and any assessment ofits functions and capabilities as an information processing unitmust begin with this small, unassuming, three pound mass ofsquiggly, gelatinous, grey and white matter, along with twobasic precepts.

First, that the mind and its activities, our feelings, ourthoughts and ideas, our drives and urges, our experiences andmemories, all begin and end with this brain and its variations,and second, that the brain's architecture and its behaviors arethe product of a number of diverse factors; the genes that codefor its proteins, the prenatal circumstances in which it initiallyformed, and of course its environment, both developmentallyspeaking and in a more immediate sense.

These may seem to be fairly pedestrian considerations,and ones that few modern people would have any difficultyconceding. But this has not always been the case, and in theapproximately two hundred and fifty thousand year history of

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the human species, it was some time before anyone was surethat the brain had anything to do with it at all.

The earliest mention of the brain in the medical literaturecomes from a remarkable Ancient Egyptian text from the 16thcentury BCE, referred to as the Edwin Smith Surgical Papyrus.It is known that this text is a copy and its source is believed tobe somewhat older, though opinions differ as to the date andauthorship of the original.

The text deals with 48 typical cases of various kinds oftrauma, mostly consistent with those incurred by soldiers inbattle, and their treatments. Despite the inclusion of eightmagic spells and incantations to be used as a final means oftreatment, the manuscript is renowned for its practical andrational approach to medicine, particularly when comparedwith other medical texts of the time, and it contains the firstrecorded use of the word “brain” in any language.

Not only does it describe damage to thebrain and spinal chord, but it goes so far asto correlate paralysis on specific sides of the

body with damage to certain areas of the skull, meaning that itwas clear to this anonymous surgeon, at least to some degree,that the brain is specialized in function.

Still, however, these were humble beginnings. The mostsophisticated means of treatment at the time consisted ofimmobilization of the head, or if one was lucky (and prone to

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headaches), a procedure called trepanation in which a hole iscut or scraped through the skull and left open to relievepressure.

At this time Egyptian medicine and that of the world atlarge still held that the heart, not the brain, was the seat ofconsciousness, emotion, and intelligence. This belief persistedthroughout the world up until the time of the Ancient Greeks,and even among these, there was significant debate.

Aristotle, for example, believed that the brain's purposewas to cool the blood as it left the heart, and while herecognized that the larger brains of humans were responsiblefor our greater capacity for reason in contrast to the otheranimals, he thought that this was due to the larger organ'sgreater cooling powers.

In the century preceding him a Pythagorean calledAlcmaeon of Croton had asserted that the brain was the seat ofthe mind, and used surgical methods of experimentation todevelop the link between the senses (particularly vision) andthe brain. This laid the foundation for Hippocrates, acontemporary of Aristotle and the father of Western medicine,as well as those after him, to investigate the brain's anatomyand to solidify the earliest murmurings of the conclusion thatwould come to be known today by the central tenet of modernneuropsychology, that “the mind is what the brain does”.

At this point, however, it was still far from clear exactlywhat it is that the brain does. All the way up through the

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Renaissance and on to the late Victorian age, despitecontributions from the likes of Galen, Averroes, Maimonides,Andreas Vesalius, René Descartes, some of the foremostthinkers and scholars of their times, humanity at large couldmaintain only the loosest grasp on the inner workings of thismagnificent machine.

One of the major keys was discovered in 1771 by anItalian physician, physicist, and philosopher named LuigiGalvani. The legend goes that Galvani and an assistant hadbeen experimenting with static electricity by rubbing the skinof dissected frogs, and that one of the frogs' legs were lying,flayed open, on the table they had used. The assistant wasusing a metal scalpel that had acquired a static charge duringtheir experiments, and he touched an exposed nerve,whereupon there was a spark and, astoundingly, the frog'slegs gave a massive kick.

With that, Galvani and his assistant had made the first ofmany observationsconcerning bioelectricity,and they had realized thatelectricity was the naturalforce that underlay whathad been known toancient philosophers onlyas “animation”.

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This discovery was critical in that it localized activity inmuscles and nerves, as opposed to discussing it as a kind ofdiffuse, elusive, all-pervading effervescence, and itdemonstrated that “life”, in the biological sense of movementand activity, is far more mechanical than magical.

By the late 1800s, the nervous system had fallen underthe gaze of Hooke's old friend, the microscope, and a Germananatomist named Heinrich von Waldeyer-Hartz had coined anew term to identify its tiny, bulbous, branching cells:“neurons”.

But it wasn't until a new staining technique wasdeveloped in 1873 by an Italian physician named CamilloGolgi that scientists could observe the networks that areformed between individual neurons. Golgi found that if hesoaked brain tissue in solutions of potassium dichromate andsilver nitrate, the cells would crystallize with a substance

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called silver chromate, which would make them turn a deepinky black and show up in stark contrast against a yellowbackground.

This technique was in turn used and improved upon by aSpanish histologist called Santiago Ramón y Cajal, who used itto look at the brains of several species of birds and mammals,carefully documenting the connections and networks withinthe various samples of tissue.

For these discoveries Ramón y Cajal and Golgi shared the1906 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine, and with thatthey had not only cemented their reputations and their placein scientific history, they had also given birth to a whole newfield of study, and become the world's very firstneuroscientists.

As we look back on this moment from the vantage pointof today, we are apt to wonder if it is even minutely possiblethat when those neurons were first revealed, and thosenetworks were first observed, that anyone, even theirdiscoverers, could have obtained the shyest glimpse of whatlay within them. But the sheer magnitude of complexity intowhich they peered, displayed in high fidelity by thetechnologies of today and ever relinquishing new and greaterwonders, must surely exceed even our most generousconcessions to these most prescient of the 19th century'sbiological avant-garde.

* * *

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The average human brain contains no fewer than100,000,000,000 (that's 100 BILLION) of von Waldeyer-Hartz'sneurons, and the vast majority of these have somewhere in thearea of 10,000 synapses, or connections to other neurons.

For the mathematically reluctant, this puts the number ofsynaptic connections inside a single human brain at a trulyastounding one thousand trillion (or 1015).

Just so that the reader may take an extra moment toappreciate this number, I have written it out below:

1,000,000,000,000

And yet, it gets more complicated still. Because on eachsynapse there are as many as one hundred thousand differentproteins, primarily in the form of receptors which receive andreact with chemicals in the brain, called neurotransmitters,and ion channels which control the flow of differently chargedatoms of sodium and potassium from one side of the cellmembrane to the other, as well as several other kinds ofprotein switches, the variations in each of which have an affecton the brain's cellular activity,.

Thus, the number of interactive components of a singlehuman brain, speaking solely of the proteins themselves,without even accounting for the chemical or atomic matterwith which they interact, is a whopping:

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100,000,000,000,000,000,000(1020, or one hundred quintillion)

...and all within that same small, unassuming, threepound mass of squiggly, gelatinous, grey and white matterwith which we first began.

Now, the majority of the brain's functions are highlycomplex and sophisticated electrochemical reactions, but thereare a number of general facts of its construction and operationwhich will aid us in the significantly simpler analysis of thebrain's most relateable construction, the mind.

The first is that signals throughout the nervous systemare communicated from neuron to neuron by means of burstsof electrical current called action potentials, which travel froma neuron's long tail, called the axon, through the main cellbody, and out to a series of other branching lines called thedendrites.

These currents are generated when the area outside ofthe axon takes on more sodium ions (Na+) and fewerpotassium ions (K+) than are concentrated on the inside.When this happens, a tiny channel in the cell membrane opensup and allows sodium ions to flow into the axon, and the

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electrical current within it builds up because these ions have apositive electrical charge.

When the voltage reaches a certain level, a secondchannel similar to the first one opens up to allow positivelycharged potassium ions out of the axon, and the electricalcurrent drops off again.

As this occurs it influences the electrical conditions of theneighboring parts, and very quickly the current is passedalong in a chain reaction down the length of the cell. This iswhat is meant when one refers to a neuron “firing”.

There is a short time after these channels close up againduring which the membrane enters a so-called “refractoryperiod” and the axon stabilizes to its original voltage level.When the cell membrane is in its refractory period, no othersuch bursts of electricity can occur, and this period ensuresthat the action potential always travels faithfully in onedirection, from the axon, through the cell body, out to thedendrites.

Once the current reaches the dendrites at the far end ofthe cell, the charge dissipates into the different branches andsmall amounts of electricity are transferred into thesurrounding areas, thereby making it more likely for the sameprocess to occur in a particular neuron's neighbors.

On some neurons the axon is wrapped in a materialcalled myelin, which acts as a kind of insulation for the livingwire. This insulation is not continuous however, as it is with

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electrical wires, but is instead broken up into sections calledSchwann cells.

As an action potential travels down the length of amyelinated axon, it is transported very quickly from point topoint between the Schwann cells, meaning that these currentscan travel faster through myelinated neurons than throughunmyelinated ones.

This difference begins to account for some of thedifferences in the way that information is differentiallyprocessed from neuron to neuron, and it is worth noting thatthe myelination process occurs principally in neurons that fireover and over again. This process writ large is central to thelong-term reinforcement, or “potentiation”, of cell behavior.

Put simply, if there is something that a neuron doesroutinely, the brain wants it to do it faster and more efficientlyas a way of conserving resources like adenosine triphosphate(ATP), which is the fuel that is burned by the cell in order to

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open up the ion channels.Adenosine triphosphate is a remarkable molecule, and

oxidative phosphorylation, the process by which it is burned,is a fascinating cellular phenomenon, but for the sake ofmaintaining the focus of this work, I will dispense with theirdiscussion and skip to something interesting that occurs afterthe process is concluded.

ATP is not only the fuel that a neuron uses to open up ionchannels, but also the fuel that any cell uses to perform itsoperations, and as it is burned ATP is broken down andsimplified adenosine is left over as a by-product. The harderthat the cells work and the more work overall that theyperform, the higher will be the resting levels of adenosine inthe bloodstream, and because of this, these levels serve well asa general indicator of the body's overall level of fatigue.

In the brain there are specialized receptors for adenosine,just like there are for many other chemicals to which the brainresponds (called neurotransmitters), and the molecule andreceptor fit together like a lock and a key.

When the right combination of a neurotransmitter and areceptor bind together a reaction takes place, usually in theform of the production of action potentials or the release ofother neurotransmitters, and the effects of this reaction arepassed along throughout the brain. In this case, the effect isthat the brain begins to shut things down to prepare the bodyfor sleep so that it can regenerate.

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Now, however, enter a nice double espresso.

Suddenly the brain's bloodstream is stuffed full ofcaffeine molecules, which have a chemical structure that issimilar enough to adenosine that they will bind effectively tothe adenosine receptors. This means that the two moleculesare what are called “ligands” of each other; each is a differentkeys that fits the same lock.

And yet, because they are different chemicals, they havedifferent effects. Generally speaking, neurotransmitters canhave excitatory or inhibitory effects, and while it's not quitetrue that caffeine is excitatory, it doesn't exactly speed you up,it does preempt the inhibitory effects of adenosine, and thisallows other chemicals like dopamine and glutamate tocontinue to flow when they might otherwise be shut off.

The most significant factor that dictates whether onemolecule or the other binds to a receptor is its concentration inthe bloodstream, so that while there is a high amount ofcaffeine the receptors are more likely to bind to it than theadenosine, and vice versa. For as long as the caffeine levelsremain high, then, the body's usual shutdown process isstaved off and you can stay awake.

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From this example we can see one of the main ways inwhich the conditions and operations of the brain areinfluenced by variations in chemical activity, and we mustnow look at how they are influenced by electrical activity. Todiscuss this, we need to begin by describing how neuronsrespond to a given stimulus.

If you were to slowly extend one of your hands in thedirection of a strong heat source, your skin would begin toabsorb and conduct more and more of the heat as youapproached it, and as the temperature reached a certainthreshold the neurons would begin sending signals toward thebrain, slowly and periodically at first, and then speeding up asyou got closer and closer:

! … … ! … … ! … …

! … ! … ! … ! … ! … ! …

...and if you were to touch something that was very hot,something that would burn you, the neuron would fire rapidlyand intensely:

!!!-!!!-!!!-!!!-!!! …

In this way neurons communicate emphasis andintensity, through repetition and through an increase in thefrequency of their transmissions, and this pattern is true of all

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kinds of tactile factors, such as coldness, sharpness,pointyness, roughness, and so on, as well as broader kinds ofsensations and other functions. In chapter 4, I will discuss theinformational impact and some of the resulting effects of thisprocess in depth.

This whole sophisticated, highly coordinated business oftransmitting, interpreting, and acting upon incominginformation is centered around the needs and circumstances ofthe rest of the organism. It is an adaptation, like any other,which expends chemical energy and monopolizes resources inorder to aid the survival and prosperity of its host, the body, aswell as its circumstances as a whole.

It is impossible to discuss this tendency, or any propertyor function of an organism without first understanding theway that any such property or function arises within anorganism or species in the first place.

The first scientific description of this process waselegantly put forth in 1859 by an English naturalist calledCharles Darwin, in his book On the Origin of Species.

By that time, it was already clear to observers of thenatural world, including horticulturalists, entomologists, andbreeders of everything from dogs to cabbages, that differentspecies of plants and animals had a way of changing theirappearances and attributes over time. But Darwin realizedthat this change is not governed by an intervening intelligenceas it is in the case of animal breeds or domestic plant varieties,

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nor is the change random or incoherent.Instead, the physical properties of individual organisms

vary, and with this variation comes a differential ability tocontend with pressures within a given individual'senvironment.

These variations may enable an organism to run faster,giving it an advantage in catching prey or evading predators,or to metabolize nutrients better, giving it the ability to makebetter use of its resources and to better endure scarcity, or toblend in better with its surroundings, or to better cope withillness or damage, and so on.

From this vantage point, it became clear that all thedifferent forms of life on earth share a common ancestry whichgoes back many hundreds of millions of years, that everyorganism is ultimately a particular compendium of thesevariations, and that its chances of survival are dictated by theabilities conferred by their particular arrangement.

If we stretched out theancestors of any modernorganism in a line going allthe way back to that firstform of life, we would seebefore us a seamless andimperceptible transitionbetween related individuals.

We could then workour way from that farthest

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ancestor towards the present and we would see various traitsbeing sculpted into existence, and then perhaps back outagain. Tiny stumps would grow into limbs or tails, smallprotrusions of bone would become teeth, and we would seethe gradual extension of a giraffe's neck or an elephant's trunk.

Darwin could see that this process must be governed bysome sort of physical mechanics of heredity, and though hewouldn't have known what to call them at the time, hedescribed the way that traits must be passed down fromgeneration to generation.

Nearly a hundred years later, in 1953, twomicrobiologists called James Watson and Francis Crick woulddetermine the mechanism by which this process is carried out:a series of self-replicating protein-encoding instructions calleddeoxyribonucleic acid, or DNA.

As the body's tissues are generated and regenerated, thephysical language of this biological code is what dictates howthose tissues will be built and what components those tissueswill form in more complex structures like organs and systemsof organs.

Identifiable strings of information within this DNA,called genes, are copied within each of an organism's cells asthey undergo their division process, tightly wound up withinthe cell's nucleus in a substance called chromatin.

Sometimes during this copying process there will be arandom mutation in the physical language of this code, and asthis small difference is reiterated variations arise and traits

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emerge in the species.Darwin knew that an organism's survival gave it greater

chances of reproducing, thereby allowing its traits to be morepresent in that environment. We would now say that thesuccessful reproduction of an organism serves to replicate theorganism's genes, and the prodigious reproduction of one, ortwo, or several individuals allows that certain genes come tooutnumber others in the “gene pool”, and would be morelikely to be replicated again in the future.

So here we have the idea's central thrust, that there is, toquote the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, “randomgenetic variation followed by non-random natural selection”.

Evolution however, while a powerful and essential toolfor understanding how the structure of the brain emerged andcame to be constructed, is not quite sufficient on its own toaccount for the whole of the means from which eachindividual mind comes to operate. There are a number ofperipheral facts about the individual's development whichalso must be taken into account.

One of the most central of these considerations is that ofthe epigenetic influences on fetal development during theindividual's gestation. A salient example of this influence canbe found in the case of a famine that occurred during thewinter of 1944 which has come to be known as the DutchHunger Winter.

During this winter, the German-occupied section of theNetherlands was blockaded as a punishment for their

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resistance to Nazism, and all shipments of food and fuel werecut off from the rural areas and shipping centers. By the timethat the famine had ended nearly 22,000 people had died, andmany others were starved into deep malnutrition and illness.

Many of the nearly 4.5 million people who were affectedby this disastrous ordeal were pregnant women, and apartfrom the predictable consequences of the prematurity and lowbirth weights of the children who were born shortly after, ithas been found that all of those children share a much greaterthan average risk for obesity and types I and II diabetes whencompared with the rates of the general population.

What we can draw from these facts is that the directbiochemical signals that were present in the mother'sbloodstream as a result of her experience of scarcity and wantpermeated the amniotic sac which surrounds the developingfetus, and once these began to indicate consistently thatresources outside of the womb were in limited and infrequentsupply the child's body would forever interact with sugarsand fats in its diet in a very different way, scrounging andhoarding every spare lipid and carbohydrate.

This demonstrates that the individual's environmentbegins to operate upon not only its circumstances but also onthe methods and rules by which it conducts its operationsfrom a very early point, and this influence remains profoundthroughout its development.

* * *

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From all of this it may seem that the brain itself is just asconfusing as the outside world, and we return to a modifiedversion of the closing question from the last chapter: How is itthat all of this eventually produces the world in which we livefrom day to day, and how is it that between the complexities ofnature around us and the complexity of its product within us,there is the comparative simplicity in which we live our lives?

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THREE

The Mind

IN WHATEVER COURSE THAT one should take in the constructionof an answer to these questions, it must at the root be said thatthis phenomenon is a function of the selective processing ofinformation; that not of all the world's information is availableto the brain, and not all of the brain's information is availableto the mind. And indeed, not all of what is available to eitheris necessarily guaranteed to be processed. At any given time,and in any given situation, there are things which come to ourattention, and things of which, for one reason or another, weremain totally unaware.

We can assert, too, that this process is dynamic; that it issubject to certain rather insistent conditions and because thereis variation within these a body of information can beregarded more than once and can be, perhaps must be,interpreted in an at least slightly different way each time.

We can assert that its resources are finite; that because themind arises from the behaviors of cells, which requirebiological fuel in order to perform their operations, which isextracted at cost from the food that is eaten by its host, whichis obtained at cost by the host from its environment, and so on,its powers cannot be unlimited.

And we can assert that this process is bound by its duties

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to its host; that it has been bred and honed by natural selectionin order to steward its resources and perform its operations ina way that provides a net benefit to the state andcircumstances of the body.

From these concessions of fact we can ask a series ofinteresting questions: What must necessarily be involved inthat system of processing? Upon what must it rely? What arethe relationships between its elements? How does variation inone part of the system affect the rest of it? How do itsoperations fulfill their evolutionary duties? What are we tomake of circumstances in which these go awry?

We can begin by taking these four assertions in reverseorder and parsing them out a bit further in order to establishthe context within which the mind operates.

First, we should recognize that the mind is not thought,as it once was, to be the autocratic ruler of the body and itsbehaviors, simply pursuing its own dubious ends to its owndespotic satisfaction.

Instead, the mind is best viewed today as a naturaladaptation, like eyes or a digestive system, which has beendeveloped to assess the world outside of it and to aid in itsnegotiation.

We should be careful not to let this perspective distortour analysis by coming to assume that the operations of thisadaptation can only be interpreted in the context of their

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original use; while it's true that the human eye evolved to seethe full spectrum of visible light, with the conspicuousinclusion of the color red, ostensibly in order to aid in thesearch for reddish berries against a green background ofsimilar color saturation, this evolutionarily salient advantagehas little to do with the appreciation of a sunset or the creativeprocess of an artist in a visual medium, or for that matter withthe way we respond to color emotionally or interpretively aswe view the end product of that creative process.

Nor should we be drawn into the adaptationist fallacy,and come to view every behavior or operation, howeverapparently disadvantageous or even harmful, as inherentlyadaptive.

There are two prongs to the dismantling of thismisunderstanding. The first was put forth in 1979 by twoAmerican scientists, a paleontologist named Stephen JayGould and a geneticist named Richard Lewontin, who invokeda concept from architecture in order to clarify this point.

Gould and Lewontin raised the idea of biological“spandrels”, which are the equivalent in biological life of the

material installed by abuilder between an archand a ceiling, or betweenan arch and anotherarch. This is a physicalnecessity of what is

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being built, and it aids in the weight distribution of the load ontop; put simply, if you want to have an arch that has a roof or asecond level over it, or if you want it to be supported byanother arch, you have to have spandrels between them.

In the same way there are parts of the biological makeupof organisms which may simply be artifacts of the process ofbuilding others, and these can include things which are eitheroutrightly superfluous and serve no direct adaptive purposeor which could even be maladaptive, so long as they somehoware concordant with or supportive of a particular adaptation.

The second critique of the adaptationist fallacy comesfrom two related examples of emergent traits from Russia, thecase of the domesticated Siberian silver fox, and the so-called“wolf dogs” of the Moscow Underground.

In 1959, a Soviet scientist named Dmitri Belyaev began aselective breeding program of silver foxes, a covert means ofcontinuing his studies of genetics despite the USSR's state-sanctioned dogmatization of the botched pseudoscienceknown as Lysenkoism.

In this program, Belyaev conducted a process of artificialselection, the same as breeders of rosebushes or pigeonvarieties, where a trait is identified and then individuals withthat trait are bred together to increase the prevalence of thattrait in the population.

The trait that Belyaev was selecting for was tameness, ortameability, only breeding those foxes that were the least

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aggressive and the most agreeable to being handled, andsurprisingly, by the tenth generation all sorts of otherphenotypic, or morphological, changes had occurred as well.

The newly bred foxes were, in effect, puppies, withdappled and lightly colored fur instead of consistent silver onblack, floppy ears instead of pointy ones, and wagging tails.They were also affectionate, produced lower amounts ofadrenaline, and even had altered reproductive cycles, cominginto estrus, or “heat”, twice a year instead of once.

The program was continued through the fall of the SovietUnion and still exists on a smaller scale today, and thesechanges were shown to be remarkably consistent as theybecame prevalent in greater and greater proportions of thepopulation.

An elegant and unplanned parallel to this experiment hasoccurred over a roughly similar timeline, this time on thestreets of Moscow, and among its population of feral dogs.

According to the latest estimates, there are some 35,000wild dogs that roam the city and particularly the tunnels andstations of its subway system, and these have been studiedover a period of 30 years by an ecologist named AndreiPoyarkov.

During this time, Poyarkov observed the exact oppositeof the process observed by Belyaev; these dogs have evolvedthicker, mangier coats of darker fur, a greater tendency towardpointy ears and wedge-shaped heads, and considerably saltier

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dispositions.Together, these two examples illustrate at least one

version of traits emerging in tandem, and this process exposesthe silliness of trying, for example, to discern the naturalevolutionary advantages of floppy ears.

In considering the mind as a biological adaptation, weshould also consider the broad sense in which it is related toother similar adaptations within the animal kingdom.

Essentially, we can compare the most general sense of theword “mind”, or even “consciousness”, with the most generalsense of the word “eye”; there are many different types ofeyes, from the compound eyes of many kinds of insects, to theeyes of dogs which see the world in mostly blues and yellows,to the eyes of various birds of prey which can spot tiny miceon the ground from hundreds of feet in the air, and even toorganisms that have only a small cluster of light-sensitive cellswhich could detect, at most, a shadow which arises from anobstruction between the organism and a light source.

What all of these have in common is their role, which isto record and respond to information about light within theorganism's environment and to pass these transcriptions on tothe organism's central nervous system.

This basic sense of transcription and transmission isessential to the formation of any kind of mental construct,because if there is going to be thought there must be

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something that can be thought about, and a system ofcognitive reverie and emotional and philosophical significancelike the one we have must have originated in a basic ability toabstract information and respond to it internally rather thanby simple automatic reaction.

We can define the mind broadly as an arena for thismetainformational processing, and define its role as thecoordination both of information arriving from multipleavenues from the outside world and also of the various actionswhich it might attempt to affect within that world.

We can see, under this definition, that any organism inwhich the chain that links sensory information and action isanything less than instantaneous and unbroken can be said tohave a form of mind, and it is possible that the nature of thisadaptation is defined by its ability to process a greater amountof information than can be accommodated by a simplesensation-to-action loop.

Within any mind there is also an element of flexibility,and even if there are only two possible actions and one kind ofsensory information at its disposal, there is the potential forthe selection of one course or the other in response togradations in that stimulus to affect the survival and/orcircumstances of its host.

This we can see as parallel to the proto-eyed organism wediscussed a moment ago, and the spectrum of ability for thisadaptation is similar too. Human beings, naturally, are

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superlative amongst the earth's creatures in the sophisticationand flexibility of their iteration, and this sophistication istypified by their range of experience, their range of actions,and the density of the process that goes on between the two.

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The diagram shown on the page opposite representswhat I believe to be an accurate depiction of that process.

The diagram begins, as it will end, with the environment,which I have here termed the Ordinate External World (shownat top left and top right). This refers to the world that we metin chapter 1, in all of its wondrous complexity.

It includes the billions of neutrinos flowing through eachof us at any given moment, it includes all the forms ofelectromagnetic radiation (X-rays, radio waves, infrared, etc.),most of which we can't see, it includes substances andorganisms from their macro forms all the way down to theirsubatomic particles and all the way up again until they areinvisible specks on the surface of the earth viewed from space,it includes radiolarians and DNA, it includes all of the wordson all of the pages in all of the books in all of the libraries in allof the world, and all of the things that have ever been found orever could be found to exist.

It is the abstract, capital W, “World”, as it really is,inclusive of all its properties, regardless of whether or notthose properties are available to a human being's directconscious perception, and it is the sum total of all of the waysin which that world could possibly be experienced.

Just as all of life diverged from a single life form, andevery organism shares a common ancestry, so too do theyshare this single common bank of information. Any organismthat can be said to have a mind as we have defined it is

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plugged into a section of this World, and it is here thatinformation undergoes its first sequestration; it is contained,limited by, and subject to specific and discrete bundles andpackets contained in within a specific informational area.

Then begins a process of various selections andtransformations, as information is passed down along a chainof various informational operators, beginning with sensationand looping it's way through the system before coming back tothe Ordinate External World as actions, or as I have termedthem here, participations.

Within this chain, information processing is divided into8 categories. They are, in sequence:

S – the sensoryE – the experientialA – the assessiveV – the evaluationalX – the exclusionaryO – the objectionalD – the directionalP – the participatory

Each category is further subdivided into four levels ofoperators which carry out the type of processing in question--(1) primary, (2) secondary, (3) tertiary, and (4) quaternary.Thus we have 32 major operator groups, each of which is

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comprised of varying numbers of individual operators.Each operator has two extrinsic functions, both of which

govern their interactions with a series of adjacent banks.These are the solicitative function (shown beginning on the leftside of the chain), in which it requests information from thethe previous operator, and a depositional function (shownbeginning on the right), in which it submits information to thenext. Together these functions can be called the transitivefunction.

The intrinsic functions of the operators vary, of course,but all of these can be described generally as transmutativefunctions, in which the operator interprets and responds to theinformation on which it is adapted to act.

In short, it is the duty of each operator, regardless of itsfunction, to pass information from one point to the next and tomodify this information according to its capabilities along theway, ensuring that I produces the most accurate representationavailable at that stage.

These operators are punctuated by a series of banks,which are not exactly stores of information, but rathercircumstantial bodies of information as they exist during theexchange process between adjacent operators. On the diagramthese are numbered in sequence, 1-36.

Four of these banks are distinct in that each is supportedby its own interrelated mechanics, and consequently involvesgreater volumes of information than the others. These are the

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Ordinate External World (OEW - 1), the Memorial World(MEM - 10), the Subordinate External World (SEW - 19), andthe Mitigational World (MIT - 28). Together we will call thesethe Conglomerate Operational Realm, and the latter three ofthese account for the familiar processes of memory, higherreasoning, and decision making.

Each section of this chain is composed of operators whichare designated and arranged according to the sequence inwhich they perform their operations.

We can look at this more closely within both the sensoryand the participatory tracks, as these are the operations whichare performed in and beyond the peripheral nervous system.As such, these have had a longer time being studied in detailby anatomists and physiologists, and we can describe theircategorization with some confidence.

The so-called “sense organs” themselves, the eye, theear, the nose, the mouth, the skin and other innervated tissues,and so on, which are the operators that are the closest tosensory stimuli in the Ordinate External World, are thePrimary Sensory Operators (S1), and these are the first meansof filtration and selection of incoming external information.

Because these are categorized on the basis of theiroperations, all subdivisions of these apparatuses remain in theS1 category-- their constituent parts, to whatever degree wewish to examine them (the eye's iris, pupil, and lens, theauditory canal and ear drum, etc.), all remain S1 operators.

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41

EYE, EAR, NOSE,MOUTH, TONGUE, SKIN

RETINA, EARDRUM,CILIA, INNER EAR

CRANIAL NERVES I, II,& VII, THALAMUS,

COCHLEAR NUCLEUS,INFERIOR COLLICULUS

VISUAL, AUDITORY,AND SOMATOSENSORY

CORTICES

GRADED POTENTIALS,BIOCHEMICAL

SIGNALING

GRADED POTENTIALS,VIBRATION,RESONANCE

ACTION POTENTIALS

ACTION POTENTIALS

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The tissues within those sense organs which are the mostessential to the transmission of sensory stimuli, however, (theretina, the eardrum and cilia of the inner ear, etc.) are thesecond means of filtration because they are the primaryconnection between the sense organs and the peripheralnervous system, and it must be taken for granted that not allinformation received by these organs is necessarily passedalong. These are the Secondary Sensory Operators (S2).

The tissues which transport the information of theprevious stages from the peripheral nervous system into thecentral nervous system are the Tertiary Sensory Operators (S3).Specifically, these are the sensory cranial nerves as well astheir corresponding functions in the thalamus and, inincidental cases, specialized regions of the brain which mayact upon particular kinds of information before it arrives in thecerebral cortex.

With the Quaternary Sensory Operators (S4) we reach thebrain itself, and these are the primary cortical regions whichare devoted to particular types of sensory information (e.g.,the visual, auditory, and somatosensory cortices).

Because the direction of the information flow hasreversed (for the third time) by the time it has reached theparticipatory operators in the fourth column, the processextends in the opposite direction, from cerebral cortex, outthrough the peripheral nervous system, and into the rest of thebody.

Thus, the Primary Participatory Operators (P1) are the

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ACTION POTENTIALS

ACTION POTENTIALS

ACTION POTENTIALS

CRANIAL NERVES III-VII, & IX-XII, BRAIN

STEM, SUPERIOR

COLLICULUS

CEREBELLUM

MOVEMENTS

LIMBS, DIGITS, FACE,MOUTH, TONGUE

LOWER MOTOR

NEURONS

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regions of the cerebellum which regulate and coordinate thedirectives from the motor cortex via the basal ganglia, theSecondary Participatory Operators (P2), are its connections tothe upper motor neurons, as well as the superior colliculusand the brain stem, which in turn pass information to thelower motor neurons, the Tertiary Participatory Operators (P3),which in turn stimulate movements, vocalizations, and so on,through the arms and legs, the hands and feet, the face, eyes,mouth, and tongue (P4).

We can see that within these tracks, the operators withinspecific operator groups share related functions and relatedbehaviors.

These eight operator categories can be grouped indifferent ways to show further relationships between the typesof information upon which they act.

We can group them into four pairs, or dyads, based ontheir relationship to the sequence of major banks: 1) S/E –sensory/experiential, 2) A/V – assessive/evaluational, 3) X/O –exclusionary/objectional, 4) D/P – directive/participatory.These groups show the existence of four broad tracks ofprocessing, each divided into two distinct parts.

We can also consider this to be representative of the usualor unimpeded order of processing; that one experiences one'ssensations, assesses that experience, evaluates that assessment,excludes suggested possibilities from that evaluation, raisesobjections to those exclusions, directs behavior in response to

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those objections, and performs those directives accordingly.As such we may also consider this to be the most

optimistic of possible processing structures, performed thisway when there are no unusual burdens upon theinformation, when there is no unusual hurry to perform one'soperations, and when there is sufficient information to sustaineach track of processing.

The alternate set of dyads (E/A – experiential/assessive,V/X – evaluational/exclusionary, O/D – objectional/directive,and P/S – participatory/sensory) demonstrates the relationshipbetween operative tracks and the four major banks of theConglomerate Operational Realm, as well as the relationshipbetween the two operative tracks that act upon any of thosebanks. The E/A dyad is most connected with the MemorialWorld, the V/X with the SEW, the O/D with the MitigationalWorld, and the P/S, as we have seen, with the OEW.

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These relationships are responsible for the ability toanalyze and interpret one's experience, to reason logically, toform suitable reactions to one's situation, and to view andwitness one's own actions.

In addition to the eight major operator groups, there is aset of four interstitial operator groups, each of which has asecondary transitive function, and if this secondary transitivefunction of an interstitial operator is active, the flow ofinformation is diverted from operations in the usuallysubsequent track and is transferred instead to the nextinterstitial operator, whereafter it continues through thesystem as usual even if as usual means being diverted throughthe secondary transitive function of that operator.

As you can see, the secondary transitive function of thefourth interstitial operator feeds information back to the first,and together these four operator groups are referred to as theinterstitial ring.

It is the activity of this track which accounts for a numberof interesting psychological phenomenon: the experience ofnon-sensory information (experiencing one's own mind and itscontents), the non-experiential evaluation of sensoryinformation (autonomic internal responses), the non-exclusiveobjection to information (irrational fear or distress), and non-directive participation (involuntary movements or acts).

This system in action is consistent with a good deal ofotherwise perplexing neural connectivity and behavior, suchas the innervation of the cerebellum by certain sensory

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systems. We know that this connection is inherent in assuringthat intended actions match up with performed actions andensuring error correction, and in neuroeconomic terms theflow of this information is representative of a move throughthe participatory track, out through the OEW, back throughthe sensory track, diverted at I1, passing through theevaluational and exclusionary tracks before hitting the basalganglia (I4), and slight adjustments are made before thisinformation is redirected back through the participatory track.

We can also see the basal ganglia's role as an interstitialoperator as it suppresses actions or movements that arise butare unwanted, and it is due to this function that informationgets rerouted from I4 back to I1 and continues on through theexperiential track, accounting for forms of mental talk and thegeneral awareness of one's own urges and desires.

We can see the adaptive ability which this affords to thesystem, and by extension to the organism; if time in particularis of the essence, and one is in a situation in which survivalcomes down to split seconds of advantage and razor thinmargins for decision making and for action, then a variablebut reliable system, which will process information with thegreatest efficiency when necessary and with the greatestproductivity when possible, is of considerable benefit.

If we return to our dyad sets, we can see as well that thesecond of these demonstrates the group of operations whichare not performed if any such bypass should occur due to the

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activation of this secondary transitive function, and we canfurther see that in such a case the amount of energy whichwould have been demanded by these is conserved.

This leads us at once to the second and third of ourassertions from the beginning of this chapter, the finite qualityof energy and the dynamism of the system, and we can seehow the two compliment and are balanced by one another.

It is important to remember that neural activity is basedon the use of chemical energy, as we discussed in the previouschapter, and that stores of this energy are necessarily limited.One can only eat so much food at a time, from this food thebody can only extract so much energy, the body can only storeso much of what is extracted, and it is the same energy thatfuels not only neurons, but muscle cells, blood cells, skin cells,liver cells, and so on, and so there are many different claimsupon this general resource.

Even if this fact does not quite contribute to an exact sortof competition, in the way we're used to considering it inDarwinian terms, there is a sense in which these simple factorsconverge to put the costs of doing any kind of cellularbusiness relatively high, a cost which rises sharply when theorganism is under duress, being that any command to the legsto run faster or the heart to beat harder carries with it the tacitcommandeering of the resources required to carry it out.

Perhaps as a consequence of this, there is a distinctparsimony with which the brain administers itsresponsibilities, and yet, by adapting its behaviors according

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to its own needs, the brain discovers ways to do more withless, and can often maintain a fairly rudimentary level ofinternal communication while achieving fairly sophisticatedresults.

To look at this more closely, we need to begin byexamining information itself in greater detail, and byreconsidering its composition and some of the ways in whichit is selected, as well as the precept with which we began thischapter; that not of all the world's information is available tothe brain, and not all of the brain's information is available tothe mind.

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FOUR

Information

INFORMATION IS THE SINGLE MOST fundamental substance in ourentire universe. It is more fundamental than energy, morefundamental than matter, more fundamental even thanmathematics, which is sometimes referred to as “the languageof God” because mathematics is the only thing that isguaranteed to be the same no matter where in the universeyou are and no matter what circumstances you may encounter.

We tend to think of this substance in relateable, prosaicterms. We think of it as something to be discovered oracquired, to be divulged or to be withheld, to be transmittedfrom one place to another. In other words, we tend to think interms of strings of information such as, “186,000 m/s”, or, “Myname is Buster.”

But there is more to any given piece of information thanthe organized, transmissible, coherent strings which comereadily to mind, and any single piece which we could discernis composed of a great deal more than is apparent on thesurface.

A single word in any language contains informationabout that language; if the word is spoken, it containsinformation about how that language sounds, approximationsof how that word is pronounced, information about the

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phonemes and vocalizations required to produce the sounds,and if it is written it contains information about what symbolsare used to communicate different sounds and how thosesymbols can be written.

Each word also has an etymological history, whichdescribes where it came from and when, and this containsinformation about the people who speak a given language,about time periods, about proximity of cultures, about transferof language those between cultures, and about relationshipsbetween different languages.

Words in sequence are understood within their context,and they continually reference elements that are not containedwithin the words themselves. Every noun for example can beconsidered as a representation of the thing that corresponds toits dictionary definition or its encyclopedia entry, every verb isconnected with ideas about how and for what purpose thoseactions are performed, every adjective references connotationsto do with those adjectives, and so on.

All materials contain and relate to information abouttheir properties; about transparency, about density, aboutpermeability, about conductivity, about malleability, evenabout the physical laws that hold them together, and so on. Asingle water molecule or a grain of sand contains informationabout quantity, about composition, about structure, aboutlocation, about position, about orientation, about size, aboutshape, about texture, and on and on and on.

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Any individual thing has properties such as these, and itisn't difficult to imagine these properties being listed in onecontinuous sentence, compounding and compounding withreference after reference to various attributes, always beingable to continue the sentence with information about thething's position in the universe and the time at which itsattributes form a particular configuration, as well as itsproximity to its neighbors, however distant they may be, eachof which can be identified by their own particular attributes,and so on.

In fact, I contend that the existence of a particular thingalone spontaneously generates, in this manner, an infinite andcompounding chain of demonstrable, objective information,which if transcribed would be something equivalent to theworld's most epic version of “There's a Hole in the Bottom ofthe Sea”.

As impressive and perplexing, however, as thisconsideration may be, if you are a small creature trying tosustain yourself through chemical means and are investigatinga particular bush and its berries, a particular berry's Latinname or its distance from the planet Jupiter is of no use to youwhatsoever. What you want to know is whether this objectwhich you are regarding is food, and if it is food, is it safe toeat?

So again we come to the central question, of how it is thatthe brain reduces information into a usable form, and we can

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ask it this time in a different way: how is it that the brainselects relevant information from the massive quantities towhich it is privy?

We should begin by making a distinction between thecomplex composites of information in the Ordinate ExternalWorld and the discrete representations of those compositeswhich reside in the human brain and mind.

A very fine term was coined for the latter in 1976 by theEnglish biologist Richard Dawkins, who referred to anydiscrete replicating unit of information as a “meme”.Borrowing from this well-established entry in the scientificlexicon, and from that of “molecule” to describe a distinctcluster of chemical information comprised of identifiableconstituent parts which relate to and combine with oneanother in a particular way, I will refer to the former as“memecules”.

We can take this distinction to refer to the distancebetween a full symphonic composition, played by 50 to 100 ormore instruments all with their own scores and parts, and themelody of its theme, which can be produced on command by asingle voice.

The information contained within the composition itselfis deeply complex, deeper even than can be seen from thescore, because in any performance you have variations in howeach conductor will conduct each orchestra, tiny variations inhow each musician will play each slightly different

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instrument, and there are variations from performance toperformance even within the same group using the sameinstruments.

Even this is already a step down the line from how thecomposer themselves may have considered the construction ofthe piece, and we can begin to see the nature of this reductionto central, common, denominating factors; if there arethousands of violins which will be played to the best ofhundreds of thousands of violinists' ability, at least they are allplaying the notes which they are meant to be playing, atproportionally the appropriate time, at proportionally theappropriate volume, and so on.

A prime example of this reduction at the far end isBeethoven's 5th Symphony, one of the most popular andrecognizable pieces of classical music in the world. On thescore it is composed of four movements, for no fewer than 22instruments, and it takes in the neighborhood of 30 minutes toperform.

But if I want to discuss it with someone, and it happensthat they don't recognize it from its unhelpfully numeric title, Imight say, “Oh, you know, it's the one that goes

Ba-da -da | duuuum | ba-da-da | duuuuuuum...”

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And within a few seconds, I can tell whether they knowthe piece, and we can continue, or whether it must be playedfor them immediately.

We can see under this definition that any object orother identifiable cluster of information is reduced in itsdensity, first in this case through what sounds are beingplayed at a particular time, then through what elements of thesound can be discerned by the listener, then again throughoutthe system with an eye to practicality as it is selected forexchange with another person.

The first of these filters leads us to one important pointabout how sound is processed into experience in the firstplace. Because information comes from many sources,variations within that complex body must be weighed andbalanced into coherence by the brain, not only in terms of theresponses or actions which it generates to accommodate these,but simply in terms of the representations which are affordedto one's experience.

If we stay for a moment just within the auditoryexperience, we can all relate to some process of having toparse out something upon which one has been trying to focusfrom a range of background noise. We disregard repetitivehums, other peoples' conversations, the sound of one's ownbreathing, and so on, from our immediate experience in orderto focus our attention.

A version of this same process is involved in parsing out

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the significant bits of whatever it is we're paying attention toas we assess and analyze those pieces and depending on theattention that is paid to potential directives or participationsthis process' fidelity can vary fairly widely.

A famous experiment which was conducted in 1999 bytwo American psychologists named Daniel Simons andChristopher Chabris provides a surprising example of thisinfluence.

Chabris and Simons produced a short video in which anumber of people wearing either black or white passed a pairof basketballs between each other, and subjects in thisexperiment were asked to watch the video and count howmany times the players in white passed the ball.

The task was easy enough, and in the notes for thischapter there is a link where you can try it yourself, but, ifyou're like approximately 50 percent of the subjects theysurveyed, you too will be unable to spot the man in a gorillasuit who takes a casual ten seconds to walk across the frame,pausing to beat his chest for a moment in the middle of theaction as he does it.

If you watch the video a second time without focusing onthe red herring task from the instructions, the gorilla'spresence is almost impossible to miss, but because of the goal-directed focusing, it's pretty hard not to miss it the first timearound.

In neuroeconomic terms we can see this to be the result of

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the brain's partitioning of its cognitive resources, directingmost of them toward the businesses of counting and primingthe directive track to provide a number in order to completethe task. Because of this, information coming out of theexperiential track was categorized by the assessive track,sorted according to the task by the objectional track, bypassingthe V/X dyad in the middle, the count began ticking throughthe directive track out to the experiential (“1... 2... 3...”), andthis process was continued until the task was over.

In line with the old “fool me once” adage, however, whenthe task is repeated we can imagine greater mental energybeing put into the observational elements of the process, andthe outcome turns out to be different.

I contend that the difference between the two scenarios isthat in the second information travels up through theevaluational and exclusionary tracks before coming down thethe objectional and directive tracks, and that as a result theinformation about sensory information beyond the aims of thetask is no longer objected to and dismissed later on in theprocess.

Another example of this can be seen in the case of certainkinds of abstract art, or of various optical illusions such as theone seen on the page opposite. Initially, the informationwithin this image may be processed as either a duck or arabbit until it is routed through this higher cognitive set ofprocesses. The difference in subjective experience between the

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two successive viewings can easily be confirmed by someonewho sees an illusion like this for the first time, and once onehas seen the two, it is very difficult to see one and only oneagain.

The negotiation of this ambiguity necessitates theenlistment of extra brain regions to share the workload thatcomes with experiencing that ambiguity, and the work of theseextra regions is dispersed into more complex evaluations; “anillusion which can flip back and forth between a rabbit and aduck”, as opposed to just “a rabbit”, or “a duck”.

As we return to physical objects in the real world, we cansee that any identifiable group of information can be said tohave a particular memetic organization or memecularstructure, which is interpreted and used by the brain in a waythat is similar to the way the digestive tract interacts withchemical structures in our diet.

A particular car for example can be referred to as aparticular make, model, and year-model (all three of which are

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shorthands for particular organizations of matter on a fairlylarge scale), of a certain color (itself another reference to acertain wavelength of light), that has certain distinguishingproperties; a particular license plate number, a dent in thebumper or a scratch on the door, a missing or burned outheadlight, and so on.

Each of these compound into a meme for a particular car,and these factors help to distinguish one car from another.Broader categorizations of these factors can distinguish a carfrom a truck, a car produced in the United States from a carproduced in India, and even broader categorizations cangroup distinguish cars from other means of transportation, orman-made objects from natural objects, and so on.

By an extension of this line of thinking, we can see thatthere is a hierarchical system of status which governs theselection of variants between memes that share a commonrelationship.

If I ask you to think of an apple, for instance, and youshould imagine a cartoonish red one, shiny and bright with atypical stem and single green leaf, that particularconglomeration of information is representative of a particularmemecule which corresponds to “apple”, a loose memeticapproximation of which will be referred to by the brain inorder to represent that thing.

Now naturally there are dozens kinds of real apples,

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Honeycrisp, Red Delicious, Granny Smith, Pink Lady, Fuji,Gala, and so on, but because of their complexity and variationnone of these is rendered as primarily correspondent with thememe of “apple” in the case above.

As you read over each of those varieties, whateverrepresentation of each of those kinds of apples flashes in yourmind is primarily correspondent with each of those memes.The ready selection of those images represents that each iswhat I will call here the “primeme” that corresponds mostdirectly to each given set of memecules.

Simply put, a primeme is a representation of informationthat is ear-marked as related to a consistently observed groupof information and pre-approved, or pre-selected, forexpedited travel throughout this system; it is the thing thatone thinks of so that one does not have to expend the mentalenergy required to review the hundreds or thousands ofapples you have previously seen in order to represent “anapple” in the abstract.

These primemes can be said to be selected for theirmemodynamic efficiency, which is a measure of both theircontextual suitability, as described above, and of theiroperational suitability, as will follow. This status is assigned toa given memetic representation by the brain in response torepeated encounters with similar but slightly disparateinformation, and by deducing and observing the consequencesof those encounters.

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The brain synthesizes the common elements of all ofthese encounters and isolates that synthesis into a discretepacket which is then associated with certain of the attributesthat comprised those encounters. We can think of theserepresentations being scrutinized by the brain with an eye tothe probability of each matching a hypothetical immediatelycorresponding memecule in the Ordinate External World.

For example, the apple that you thought of in the abovecase was highly unlikely to have been blue and this is becauseit seems that blue apples are unlikely to arise before you beingthat the staggering majority of apples that you have ever seenwould have been at least reddish, and each encounter with ared apple slightly tips the average probability of thishypothetical apple being red.

Regardless of the actual frequency of blue apples out inthe Ordinate External World itself, the brain's self-correctingsystem focuses centrally on making sure that the “an” applethat we represent is consistent with our experience of apples ingeneral and thus more likely to be an “an” apple that we couldbe dealing with, in the near future, within one's usualenvironment, based on one's experience of that environment.

Similarly, if one should come up with a light greenrepresentation of a Granny Smith apple it is because one hasseen several Granny Smith apples and almost all of them havebeen green, but it is interesting to note that in this example,“green” does not go along with “apple” except in the event

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that “apple” comes bundled along with the “Granny Smith”modifier. This modifier indicates a certain group of appleswhich is distinct from “apples” in general.

Similarly, “Granny Smith” has a reputation for havinghad a consistent relationship to “apple”, and therefore onetends to think of “Granny Smith” as an apple rather than aperson, particularly if one does not have a grandmother oftheir own called Granny Smith and if one has been primed byrecent experience to think of that compound meme within theapple context.

Here again we can see the way in which the brain altersits information processing to fit the needs of the situation athand and again, all of these probabilities are calculated withan eye to a hypothetical example that one might have to dealwith within the coming moments, even if that example isabstract and solely, as it were, for the sake of argument.

One's ability to deal with such a representation in a waythat demands a certain level of logical concession orconsistency, to do so in a way that makes sense, reinforces itslegitimacy and allows for it to be reused with greaterefficiency and ease in the event that such an encounter doestake place.

These links also allow for a certain interchangeabilitybetween certain kinds of memes. Try for a moment to think ofany particular word in more than one language, perhaps acolor, or an animal.

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“Oeuf”, for example, is the same in French as “egg” is inEnglish. Both of these are certainly simpler than:

egg1 – noun /eg/

an oval or round object laid by afemale bird, reptile, fish, orinvertebrate, usually containing adeveloping embryo...

– Oxford English Dictionary

That common definition of those words represents as asimilar computation of the information within a commonmemecular entity which yields a disparate linguisticrepresentation. This shows that words themselves are anextension of the primeme function. A word becomes aprimeme for a concept, and that word then has a primarilycorrespondent representation of the most probably referencediteration of that concept.

This small fact reveals the true complexity of languageand discourse, and as well as the necessity of a commonlanguage if discourse is to occur.

Think of yourself around a group of people who speak alanguage that you do not. Your time in discussion with thempresumably consists largely of nodding and a bit of generalconfusion before your mind wanders off to make better use ofits time.

Even if the subject being discussed is one that you

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happen to know something about, and even if you have a lotof your own information regarding whatever it is that they aresaying, without knowing what words are associated withthose things there is no way to exchange that informationwithout having helpful objects to point to and grunt about.

The other people in the group will have an easier go ofthe entire exchange process because each has conceivablyheard and used each word many thousands or even millionsof times, and thus their associations with those words are thatmuch stronger, and the group therefore possesses a commonset of eligible and exchangeable primemes.

This process, when seen in aggregate, and in the contextof continual reiteration and representational modification,establishes and modifies one's perspective on the naturalworld and allows for cognizance thereof. If one were not ableto store and compute one's experience in this way, one's entirelife would take on that basic sense of having no idea what isgoing on.

All of the human being's methods of discerning not onlywhat is going on based on large quantities of information butalso to construct what has gone on, either in a hypotheticalscenario or as regards the immediate or distant past, and alsoto predict what may or will go on in the future based onlimited quantities of information stem from and revolvearound this process, but there are other factors which bearupon the selection of information.

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We have already discussed the functional selection ofinformation, and the fact that there is a kind of bandwidth interms of how much information can be processed at a giventime. This, however, is only the first of two operationalbandwidths.

Once one has transmuted incoming information into anobject or event, recognized the implications thereof, and thenformed a response, there is still a limited window of time inwhich that information will be useful back in the OrdinateExternal World.

A conversation may wander in the direction of anothertopic before one has been able to think of something to say, amechanical process may stall while waiting for one's input, orto put it in sharp evolutionary relief, if an individual shouldsee a predator, recognize that animal as a predator,understand that they are under threat from that predator,recognize that they object to the harm that may come withoutacting, elect to run away, and then begin to run, and thatwhole process has taken longer than the time it takes for asimilar, converse process to go on in the mind of the predator,the point is lost, and the individual is still dead and eaten.

In light of these considerations we can see how thesystem is optimized for speed, and we can see the advantagesthat are inherent in a system such as this, both those that agiven primeme has within the information processing systemat large and those that a primeme-generating information

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processing system affords to the organism which is its host.We can see the burden from which the subsequent

operators are relieved by the reception of a recognizableprimeme rather than a convoluted and redundant group ofinformation and, as a result of this, the way that a primeme'ssuccessful traffic through this system expedites informationflow.

And in as much as it is beneficial to optimize the businessof one's experience, analysis, and perception, the same is trueof one's directives and participations.

In the next chapter, we will look at the ways in whichthis process shapes and underlies a large proportion ofbehavior, as well as some of the ways in which the brainadapts its functions in order to deal with the scarcity andlimitations of information.

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FIVE

Neuroeconomics

FROM THIS POINT, WE can address the last part of the informationprocessing chain, the objectional/directive (O/D) dyad set, andwe revisit yet another version of the same question we've beenasking throughout this book: How is it that the brain selectsbeneficial information from the range of behaviors andexperiences available to it?

We have seen that external information is received andinterpreted in terms of its relative emphasis within theenvironment, and things which have this kind of significantimpact on the world become neuroeconomically emphatic aswell, both in terms of the energy that is available to the systemand in terms of the level of information which that elevatedlevel of energy represents.

In the case of an intense source of heat, such as the onewe saw in the example from chapter 2, the brain can be saidgenerally to respond to intense stimuli with intense repetitionand reiteration, and we can consider that there is a way inwhich this response induces the production of its own energyas its corresponding information travels through the system.

Even the energy required to render a hot stove asparticularly hot rather than neutral to any form ofconsciousness must come from somewhere, and I think it

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follows with a fair appreciation of reason that the greater theintensity of the initial stimulus, the more energy andinformation there is to go around throughout the rest of theprocess.

I contend further though that these events tend togenerate a level of energy that is surplus to this simplerepresentational requirement and that mitigating behaviors,for instance the ability to pull one's hand back very quicklyfrom that heat source after realizing how hot it is, are at leastpartially funded in the immediate term by the excess of energywhich was spawned to account for and contend with theexperience of the stressor.

In general then we can see that this kind of surplus isdesirable because of the way that it can be converted quicklyinto beneficial action, but if this is so then why aren't we allcontinually burning ourselves to acquire it? The obviousanswer to this ridiculous question will be clear to anyone whohas ever been burned, but from a neuroeconomic perspectivewe can examine that answer a bit more closely.

The pain associated with damage to one's body can beunderstood in terms of the liberties that are destroyed by thedamage incurred; the opportunity costs associated with thelack of a functional hand in addition to the physiological costsof repairing the tissues. Any neuroeconomic benefit accruedfrom the experience is quickly canceled out when these areaccounted for, except to the extent that this quick action has

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either averted disaster just ahead of time or that it has reducedthe severity of the damage. Thus, one pulls one's hand back asquickly as possible in order to reduce the severity of thedamage so that one can spend less time recovering, less effortadapting one's necessary actions while they favor theirdamaged hand during the healing process, and so on.

By extension we can see that using this method to acquireenergy is completely unsustainable; these costs compound andthe cost-benefit analysis becomes more and more stark as thisaction is repeated or maintained. In contrast, pleasureresponses tend to accompany things like the development ofone's relationships and the success of one's endeavors, theeating of a good meal, having intimate personal exchanges,and so on, and all of these are consistent with overt benefitsthat produce net energy gains and increase the likelihood offuture benefits, and their benefits compound as they arereiterated over time.

On this micro level, one can be said to negotiate one's selfin a manner that shifts to accommodate these changes inimmediately accessible values; one acts in one way, says aword or commences a gesture, so that in a few fractions of asecond one can act in a slightly different way.

The majority of behavior can be seen as a continualbalancing of these snapshots of circumstance; if you should bemid-sentence and a large object should come crashing through

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an nearby window, the chances are good that your attentionwill be diverted to that thing because it makes more sense tothe economy of your immediate environment.

This pressure flows in both directions, however,influencing both the execution of one's participations and theexperience and interpretation of one's environment in the firstplace. Someone with an acute fear of heights, for example,who is standing on a flat piece of ground in a craggyoutcropping of rocks where there are a clear number of visiblelevels down to the bottom will feel more comfortable andperceive this situation as less threatening than they willstanding on an incline at the top of a sheer drop, even if thedistance between their point and the bottom remains the same.

I contend that this represents a system of built-in notionsabout what I will call here memeotemporal proximity. Thecalculation of this proximity is an intuitive balancing ofinformation, time, and sequence, and running the calculationis a way of forecasting the potential changes in one'scircumstances as they could be carried out during nearbysegments of time. Put simply, if there are x number of thingsthat have to happen before a given thing can occur, then as thatnumber drops the moment at which it must occur seems moreand more imminent.

In this case it is proximity to the moment of falling toone's death, but the same could be said of other acute fears,such as the anxiety some people feel when flying in an

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airplane. A person who is nervous about that sort of thingpresumably feels more anxious as the plane is taking off, in theair, or landing than they might the week before or certainly theweek after they are on the plane. Essentially, the person ismemeotemporally closer to the event of a plane crash whenthey are in the airport or on a plane than when they are on theground, or on a boat, even if statistically this adjustment is anarrow one, and so the anxieties involved in that experienceare more likely to be activated at that point.

Similarly, one's thoughts might turn to the comparativedelights of various forms of Italian food just as one sits downat a particular restaurant, principally because the moment ofhaving to make a selection and the moment of enjoying it arememeotemporally closer as well.

Other more minor behaviors can be seen from thisperspective too. We can understand the maintenance of one'sambient air temperature or the manipulation of one's radiostations in a car to be minor examples of the shifting of one'senvironment into a way which is slightly of greater benefit.

This, we can see to be undercut by, and in an exquisitelybalanced form of competition with, the need to behave withinthese circumstances in order to affect positive change. Asthese processes are carried out we can see resources beingdivided fairly evenly between conducting behaviors andparticipations and to evaluating the change which thoseparticipations effect.

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With these two underlying forces in mind, we can seethat these occupy a significant chunk of the processes whichsupport and direct most behavior, and we should look here atthe motivations and goals of these processes in order toestablish some general propositions that describe the nature ofbehavior at large.

For any given piece of information, in any given bank,there are two significant preoperational designations: either itis available, meaning both that it exists and that it is in a formthat can be processed by an operator in the next part of thechain (+), or it is not (–), and either it is selectable, meaningthat the operators are in ready form to process it (+), or theynot (–).

Therefore, any particular meme has one of the fourfollowing designations with regard to a particular operator:

SELECTABLE

AVAILABLE+ / + – / +

+ / – – / –

The informational availability of a given piece ofinformation is simply a property of its existence. For generalpurposes, and for objects, events, and constituent information

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this is a fairly simple consideration. The selectability ofinformation however is subject to the considerable variationsavailable to the adjacent operators.

As with any system we can see the importance of a givencomponent most clearly when we observe the consequences ofits failure. Consider some of the pathologies of visualprocessing--

cataracts } S1

corneal opacity } S1

trachoma } S1

onchocerciasis (Robles' disease) } S1

macular degeneration } S2

glaucoma } S2

diabetic retinopathy } S2

glaucoma } S3

All of these are what I will call functional pathologies,which are indicative of a breakdown in components necessaryfor processing, and these all happen to be pathologies of theSensory track. For all of the variation in these pathologieshowever they share a common informational pathology: anobstruction of visual information processing. This obstructiongenerates an experiential deprivation in bank 5, which meansthat regardless of the condition of the experiential operators,the information will not arrive in the experiential banks forthem to process.

This refers to a condition referred to by the southwest

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quadrant of the Punnet square on the previous page, in whichthe information is available to the person's operators, but isnot selectable because of an organic impairment to thoseoperators (+ / –). The conditions are illustrated as follows:

+ / + = lit room, sighted person+ / – = lit room, blind person– / + = dark room, sighted person– / – = dark room, blind person

As you will notice, the information, at least in theclosest possible approximation to its original form, is onlytransmitted in the case of dual confirmation of availability andselectability. From any of the other three perspectives one candiscern that the lack of visual information naturallycontributes to further deprivations; more than just the light ismissing from the person's experience. The lack of lightprevents the recognition of objects, the lack of recognitionforbids the acknowledgment of those objects, and this lack ofacknowledgment eventually precludes the appropriatenegotiation of one's movements with regard to those objects.

A person who is blind may therefore employ the use of acane or the assistance of a guide in order to assure thepresence of this information in their experiential track and asan eventual consequence their Subordinate External World.

This is indicative of what I will here term an integrated

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participation, in which the available/non-selectable condition(+/–) is satisfied by the supplication of the means to translateinformation from an available but unselectable form into anavailable and selectable form.

The nature of these integrated participations isobservable too in broader, more indirect cases. The patternson a flower or leaf, for example, perhaps the guiding light fora small bee and essential information for its survival, would bea complete mystery any human looking straight at them,unless of course they were looking at them under ultravioletlight. An ultraviolet viewing apparatus then, whether in theform of a high-tech camera which can render these patterns inthe visible spectrum or a simple viewing box fitted with anultraviolet lamp, is the technology invoked to convert theinformation and is therefore representative of an integratedparticipation.

In contrast to the functional pathologies described above,there are procedural pathologies, in which the operators aremechanically sound but lack specific information necessary forthe completion of certain subordinate processes. This describesthe non-available/selectable (– / +) condition.

This condition is typically satisfied by means of anorganic participation, which involves the repurposing of anexisting adaptation to provide the available and selectableinformation. This is illustrated by the case of echolocation in

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bats and certain other mammals.A bat, who wants to create a diagram of the layout of its

cave but cannot use its functional eyes because there is a lackof light, shrieks off into the darkness and interprets the rate atwhich the sound bounces back to it.

Similarly, you may feel along the wall of a dark room fora light switch as an organic participation which aids, and onceyou have located it the act of switching it on would be aintegrated participation. In the former case you have alteredyour behavior strategically in order to introduce information,and in the latter case you have altered the conditions of theinformation itself in order to do the same.

We should recognize that this indirect generation ofinformation is used in either case as an alternative means ofmodifying and producing information; this compensatorymethod monopolizes the resources necessary to perform saidparticipations, and importantly it does so in a way which hasnot been evolutionarily or experientially optimized, andtherefore said resources are likely to be more profitablyapplied toward other endeavors.

Compare, for example, the amount of time and energythat it takes for your eyes to glance around the room you aresitting in now with the amount that a non-sighted personwould have to invest in order to get a comparable mentaldiagram of the layout of the same room.

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Consider, too, a reversal of the same capabilities; supposeyou were unable to sense touch, but had perfect vision. Youcould know the temperature by means of an integratedparticipation if you had access to a thermometer, but youwould be unable to discern it as easily or as readily as youwould if you could receive this information from thethermoceptive operators inside your skin, you would have thefurther cognitive burden of translating those numbers intospectra of danger and safety, and you would only have aconversant access to the source of that information while youwere in front of the thermometer itself. A far cry indeed fromthe traditional means.

It is perfectly regular to assert that the eye is adapted toprocess light, the ear for sound, and so on, but looking at it inthis way it seems that we have evolved so that visual andauditory and other kinds of information are readily availableto us through these certain specialized means.

Along these lines, we can begin to discern the role ofmemory as a system of organic participation; thereorganization of mental activity to a produce previouslyencountered information, recalled in the form of condensedand well-traveling primemes, provides some of the mostrelevant features of that encounter and its products for use in atemporally inconsistent but informationally compatiblescenario.

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One may be “blind” in a way to the object or event thatone considers in the abstract but one can nonetheless developa workable comparison to aid in the immediate task.

We should notice too that in any case only a certainportion of the information available from the informationsource in question is obtained by either of these means ofcompensatory participation. In the case of bats, echolocationmay only provide an object's location, position, and perhapssome suggestions as to its density or weight.

It is obvious that the object itself is comprised of manyattributes in addition to these, and the same is true ofinformation presented by any compensatory means. Withmemory in particular, in the recollection of events that oncetook place within the cognizance of an organism, theinformation set forth to describe those events is limited bywhat the organism happened to remember, what the organismregistered on any level at all, and what it was possible for theorganism to register and remember in the first place.

Having addressed the self-correcting nature of thissystem and its tendency to reward efficiently processedinformation, we can observe a strong Darwinian competitionamong variations in information, with some being rewardedfor being processed in the same way that natural selection“rewards” certain variations in nature for being well adaptedto survival and reproduction.

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We can think of each operator as continually seekinginformation of the type which it is most specialized to process.We can describe this as a metaphorical transaction, orexchange, wherein each mechanically sound operator is inconstant readiness to supply its processing capabilities if itshould be activated, and it will trade these services for theenergy required to perform that processing and the attentionwhich the subsequent operators will pay to the products of itslabors.

Thinking from the perspective of the availableinformation, we can imagine each meme as a competitor andimagine each of them wanting to be replicated in the samemetaphorical way that a gene does. Consider then how well ameme for “red” does when it is part of the memeculerepresenting the red apple from the example described inchapter 4. Every time “apple” gets copied “red” does too, andin the process “red” earns a greater saturation of the memepool and bolsters its candidacy for a primeme status of itsown. Certain kinds of information also lend themselves readilyto processing from the perspective of the organism. This isakin to a seemingly paradoxical observation made by theAmerican philosopher Daniel Dennett, who recognized thatsweet things taste sweet to us not because of any inherentsweetness of the thing itself, but because we are mammals thatevolved with a digestive system to which glucose and other

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saccharides are highly valuable because of their energyefficiency and consequently we developed a system of tastethat attracted us to foods high in those sugars.

If we consider molecules of a certain type such as thosedescribed above to be competing for digestion, a symbioticrelationship between nutrient and processor can be described;the saccharides continue to get eaten and the body continuesto be nourished.

Think now of this same mutual, co-adaptive meta-relationship in the context of informational popularity. Whileit does sugar rich food little good to be eaten, informationbenefits significantly from being popular within the mind ofan information processing being. Social creatures such ashumans receive an enormous range of benefits frominformational exchange between individuals in addition toeach individual's internal exchanges.

A large proportion of these benefits are derived in asimple sociobiological sense, in which the better yourtransactions, the more other people will want to interact withyou, the mere presence and exposure concordant therewithincreases the likelihood of prosocial interactions; grooming,mating, the formation of alliances, and so on.

So in this way the popularity of one's information servesto increase the popularity of the one among groups andthereby doubly enhances one's evolutionary viability, and theability for information to become popular in a group stems

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directly from the ability for information to become popularwithin the mind of an individual.

As an extension of this, the following chapter willexamine some of the forms of social economy, and will look atsome of the ways in which neuroeconomically popularinformation comes to be exchanged from person to person,and how these exchanges contribute to various kinds ofinterpersonal relationships.

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SIX

Cooperation & Exchange

WE CAN CONSIDER INFORMATION that is neuroeconomically viableto be a peculiar kind of commodity and, while most of this isvaluable to the individual in the way we have described,among individuals in a group there are certain kinds ofinformation which are selected for exchange.

This chapter will focus mostly on the kind of electiveinterpersonal exchanges that occur within small groups offriends, colleagues, and those with whom we feel comfortableenough to speak freely, as opposed to exchanges that occur insupport of an agenda or which take place within a particularexpectational architecture; those that take place at the grocerystore checkout line, or at the DMV, for example.

Naturally, the selection criteria for these exchanges variessignificantly depending on a wide range of factors; the sizeand constituency of the group in question, the level offamiliarity and compatibility between its members, and so on,and consequently, there is a wide variety in what constitutesexchangeable information.

Most generally then, we can see that this designationrests first on the arbitrarily communicable, what things aperson can communicate using the tools available to them,whether through language, gesture, or by integrated means,

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and subsequently on the circumstantially permissible, whatthings a person might communicate based on the topic(s) athand and the person(s) with whom they are conducting theirexchanges.

In a way, this is an extension of our available/selectabledesignations from the previous chapter, and we have a similarset of four circumstances which govern the transmissibility ofinformation within this context:

PERMISSIBLE

COMMUNICABLE+ / + – / +

+ / – – / –

Here again, a piece of information is eligible to betransmitted only if it generates the double affirmative (+/+)condition, and it is within this broad category that one beginsthe selection of appropriate information, what things oneultimately chooses to communicate.

Leaving aside, for simplicity's sake, the potentialdifferences in how a given piece might be transmitted to oneperson rather than another, the phrasing and emphasis onemight select to communicate different things about thatinformation, and focusing solely on whether that informationis communicated at all, we can begin to describe theneuroeconomic upshot of various kinds of cooperativeexchange.

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We can see that any interaction between two individualsrequires that they in some way, whether ordinarily or throughsome technologically enhanced means like the telephone orthe internet, share a common section of the Ordinate ExternalWorld; there is some common arena of sensation andparticipation between them.

Thus, information within that environment can beprocessed redundantly by two different sets of sensory andexperiential operators, increasing the chances that any givenpiece will be processed either of the two people, whereupon itcould easily be exchanged with the other in the usual way.

In its original pre- and early human forms, this dynamicwould have served to increase one's own chances of survivalby doubling the chances that, for any snapping branch in thewoods or rustle of grass on the Savannah, one or both in agroup of two would hear, register, recognize, understand, andthen move to contend with the predator that might be bearingdown upon them.

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Similarly, one can compare analyses and suppositionsabout one's experiences, share and modify ideas, exchangestrategies for various tasks and objectives, share goals and theworkload of achieving them, all thanks to the fact that thisinformation is processed dually and, importantly, variably byany two parties.

In this way we can see that one's Ordinate ExternalWorld is made more rich as a bank by the presence of apotential exchange participant; not only can one access theinformation of one's environment directly, as usual, but one isalso afforded opportunities to investigate the other's synthesesof that environment, and to incorporate these considerationsin their own environmental and behavioral calculus.

A lot of this type of human interpersonal communicationtends strongly to revolve around the selective display of oneindividual's stores of information within a particular categoryas well as the selective inventory of another's, and theseconsiderations flow the same way within the system as anyother type of information, albeit through different operationalchannels.

Consequently, as we have described, primemeticrepresentations of the other person's tastes and interestsemerge and these are correlated with pieces of one's owninformation, which then can be chosen from and exchanged togreatest effect.

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It emerges here that there is a passive, generalized, anddistal force that drives this kind of relaxed, casual socialinteraction: the intention of each participant to even out thedifferences between the two bodies of information in order tocollaborate more effectively from the same informational basisin the future.

Bits of news, whether about the world at large or one'sown extended social circle, personal stories and anecdotes,and so on are exchanged, in part so that each person canoperate can operate among the elements involved from thebest possible standpoint that the two can come up withbetween them.

Often, however, this process is not as dry and cynical as itseems from this description, and information may beexchanged simply because of beneficial factors inherent in theexchange, as evidenced by most kinds of humor. A personmight say something ridiculous that doesn't necessarilyconform to their own belief systems, or something nonsensicalthat isn't intended to inform or to modify the other person'sinformation or use thereof, simply to make the other personlaugh.

Even within this context though, a version of the sameform of information traffic still exists because the person mayremember the joke and be able to tell it to someone else, ormay laugh about it in the future, or may be able to exchangethe funny story that can be derived from the interaction, and

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so on.In cases like these, the more proximate aim of social

interaction can be observed: simply to enjoy one's self and topromote the enjoyment of others, and I think it no accidentthat, generally speaking, the more pleasurable and gratifyingwe find our exchanges, the more likely they are to benefit thestate of our information.

Even altruistic behavior can be seen within this context.Not only does it simply feel good to help other people, and itmay often indeed be true that there is no ulterior motive, butarguably it does feel good in the moment in part because ofthe way that positive and beneficial exchanges typicallyinfluence and forecast further beneficial exchanges in thefuture.

And, too, even without this consideration there is a levelat which it makes great sense in terms to preserve andpromote the welfare of another's neural economy becausepotential exchanges with that healthy economy will enhanceone's own, in the ways we have just seen.

Within all of these types of exchange there is a fairly widerange of exchange behaviors, which are those behaviors thatregulate the manner of one's exchanges. The fluidity ofinformation, the willingness to exchange or withhold certaintypes of information, the duration of the exchange, one'sreceptivity and willingness to exchange in good faith, and so

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on are all subject to the exchange behaviors of eachparticipant.

Some comparability of experience is essential for thesetypes of exchange, but these requirements can be fairlyflexible. Information of all kinds can be exchanged andintroduced providing there is at least a common experience oflanguage, and information in more limited forms is availablewithout this provision. In all cases however, these exchangesare characterized by the periodic display of one's owninformation punctuated by the entertainment of the relatedinformation of the other.

Over time these factors and characteristics, and thevariations within them, shape the way we bond with certainpeople rather than others, choose to interact with certainpeople rather than others, and over time the exchangesbetween two parties over time are weighed and amalgamatedinto primemetic representations of that viability within theMemorial and Subordinate External Worlds of each, and thesegovern both the light in which one regards previousinteractions and the climate in which they will conduct thosein the future.

If we think of some of the differences between variouspeople in our lives, we find that we think of some of them asfunny, we think of some of them as intelligent, we think ofsome of them as friendly, we think of some of them as fun, we

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think of some of them as particularly capable in one way oranother, and we can see that these perceptions are built out ofa reliable series of observations and experiences having to dowith those individuals.

We tell certain kinds of jokes to certain people who wethink will find them funny, we tell certain stories or share factsand knowledge with certain people who we think will findthem interesting, and we seek certain people's advice incertain situations.

These networks and their fidelity can be seen asextensions of one's informational economic viability, similar inpurpose or function to a limb or an organ.

In fact, these relationships are even more essential andversatile than they initially appear, because once one hasdeveloped a relationship one comes to value not just the pastexchanges between two parties, but the fidelity of theexchange participant in general so that one trusts the other'songoing evaluations and experiences of their environments.

Because each of us lives our lives in variouslyoverlapping territories of information, the exchanges betweento parties constitute links between these spheres of experience,and information gleaned in one area can be contributed to aperson who acts within another.

Consider the parallels between remarking to a friendabout a great new restaurant you found, a great movie yousaw, or an idea you had, a recipe you tried or a technique

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you've developed for something, and more primitive hunter-gatherer-style social exchanges about sources of water, freshkills, etc.

From the perspective of neuroeconomics, there isn't verymuch separating one of these types of exchange from theother; all of these are just the common exchange of useful,entertaining, or beneficial packets of information.

Things that we like about other people, things that makeus laugh and think, things that make us happy and things thatmake us enjoy the company of others, all of these thingsultimately, while perhaps not exactly built from thesebeneficial exchanges are certainly scaffolded and supported bythem. These exchanges provide the space in whichinterpersonal relationships develop, and over time we weavetogether reliable social networks from these banks of commonshared experience.

Personal loss, then, such as that of a close friend or lovedone, can be seen to be disruptive from a number ofstandpoints on a purely informational basis, and themonopolization of resources which is necessary to replacethese networks and to make it back to a level of security inwhich one can function optimally can be overwhelming to thesystem as a whole.

We will view this and some similar types of mentalbreakdown and distress in greater detail in the followingchapter.

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Breakdowns

FROM THE NEUROECONOMIC PERSPECTIVE, we can see that trauma,both the physical and the solely mental or emotional, isconsistent with what I will here call a Catastrophic ExchangeDisruption (CED), in which a massive percentage of one'sroutine and reliable exchanges are dismissed over a very shortperiod of time; the death or loss of a loved one, a rapid changeof environment or culture, physical trauma such as severeinjury or the loss of a faculty, or several other kinds ofsignificantly disruptive events.

We can understand the aversion that precedes areorganization of this type, as well as the emotional rancorthat follows to be illustrative of and to be loosely proportionalto the massive amount of reconfiguration of resources that willhave to be undertaken by a recently stable neural economy.

Consider the devastation that your life would suffer froma purely financial perspective if your house burned to theground, or if you were forced to leave your home due tofamine or war. Whether or not this event would represent adirect pressure on your survival (if, for example, you hadfriends who could shelter you and you could still obtain foodand water), you would still be damaged economically by the

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loss of your personal effects, your clothes, your appliances,your furniture, your books and other media, your electronicdevices, the things you have of sentimental value, and so on.

Similarly, in a catastrophic exchange disruption, theneeds which were once satisfied by the structured network ofsafe zones and reliable exchange relationships that you hadestablished are now once again at your door and in demand ofyour attention, and the processing load at large becomesenormous over a very short period of time.

As a representative example, we can examine twospecific and oddly acute forms culture shock. The first of theseis called the Paris Syndrome, and out of the six million annualvisitors to the City of Light, this affliction exclusively affects anarrow population of Japanese tourists, about 20 per year.

Essentially, these particular individuals are raised withthe belief that Paris is the world capitol of grace,sophistication, etiquette, and culture, and they ultimatelyarrive to find that it is a modern 21st century city, a real place,with all the real problems and real issues that affect a globalmetropolis.

There is crime, there is traffic, there are homelessbeggars, waiters are rude to them and sometimes refuse toserve them, there is drug abuse, there are dangerous areas, thesubways are crowded and frantic, and for some reason, in thisauthor's own personal observation, there is an inexplicable

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amount of dog feces littering the ground.Take this shock, combined with the exhaustion of the trip

and a language barrier beyond which they are unable tocommunicate, and these people have complete and totalnervous breakdowns. They have hallucinations, dizziness,depression and anxiety, elevated heart rate, and delusions, andthe Japanese embassy in Paris actually has a dedicated hotlinefor the assistance and repatriation of sufferers of this peculiarmalady.

Even more surprising, this phenomenon is not onlyfound in Paris; there is a parallel and somewhat moretheatrical version of this breakdown called the JerusalemSyndrome.

Jerusalem Syndrome affects a similarly narrowpopulation, American tourists this time, usually from theSouth, usually from heavily religious Christian backgrounds,usually a part of a tour group who have saved up their moneyto travel to Jerusalem, thinking of it as the Holy City, whereJesus Christ walked and lived, and thinking that it will be aplace of reverence and meditation. Again, they arrive to findthat Jerusalem is a modern 21st century city, a real place, withall the real problems and real issues that affect a globalmetropolis.

And again, these people just completely lose it, andbefore you know it they have wandered off alone for a while,stripped naked, ripped the bedsheets off of the hotel bed and

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wrapped themselves in a toga, and before you know it againthey are out on the street corner waving the Bible andshouting at the people of that city that they must return tomore solemn, holy, and respectful ways, that they have all losttrack of the holy path, and so on, sometimes even claiming tobe the Second Coming of Christ himself.

It sounds ludicrous, of course, but they get 100 cases ofthis per year! There are actually specially trained facilities fordealing with sufferers of this particular form of mentalbreakdown, and in the thirteen years between 1980 and 1993more than 1,200 people were referred for treatment.

These fairly odd, fairly uncommon versions of nervousbreakdown may certainly be out at one end of a spectrum ofthe mechanics mental and emotional failure, but consider therelationship between this form of abrupt, disruptive shock,and the similar shock that might accompany a more usualkind of trauma.

In both cases there is a profound restructuring of one'senvironment at a very rapid rate, both in terms of the factorsand conditions of the Ordinate External World, and in terms ofthe economic environment within which one conducts one'sactivities, and the overt characteristics of the one case arerepresentative of the second as well.

Consider the business one has to take care of on asupporting level as one walks down a new street or a new

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neighborhood of a new city. Simply negotiating one's selffrom point to point and constructing spatial organizationmaps of where things are, finding new places and decidingwhich ones are worth visiting again, learning the intersectionsor subway stops, and so on, is a considerable process for thebrain to undertake, and when it goes smoothly this process isseamless and goes largely unnoticed.

If we imagine this, plus a similar work load being askedfor in order to restructure the metaphorical and philosophicaland historical ramifications of the deeper existential quality ofa 4,000 or 5,000 year old global and civilizational capitol, andwe can see that the system comes under something of a strain.

If at the same time one is also trying to take on thebusiness of sorting out one's purpose or one's “mission” in lifeand confronting all manner of inconsistencies in the way inwhich one is currently living it in the face of shocking newinformation, and perhaps dealing additionally with theirregularities of sleeping in a new time zone and troublesfinding food and the general stresses of travel, it won't be longbefore this particular person is heading for a fully fledgedmeltdown.

We can imagine a very similar person, or indeed the sameperson, reacting to the news and realities of these places verydifferently, say, if they were surrounded by friends and lovedones, all of whom could be reasonably assured either to behaving a similar experience or at least to understand and be

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sympathetic to this experience, or if these were couched withinthe normal routines of their experience, or if they had not beenso heavily invested in the idea of how it should have been inthe first place, and so on.

Put simply, a few factors being otherwise and maybeParis or Jerusalem might not be such hyperventilating, toga-wrapping let downs.

Now, however, consider a world where the exact inversehas occurred. Most everything is normal, everything is thesame, everything is usual, but all of the support structureswithin it have been removed, and as this world implodes uponitself we can begin to see that the amount of alienation thatone confronts is proportional to the amount of informationand strategies which one has that are no longer usable in thisnew context.

One goes through one's own normally recognizable lifeas though they were a stranger to it, and life takes on thatsame quality of having to sort through one's business in thewake of everything else one has to attend to in the meantime.

In this second case, the problem is somewhatcompounded by having a harsh reality that conflicts not withdiffused, abstract concepts which one has imagined and helddear at this particular kind of distance, but with an immediatereality that is inconsistent with a reality that one canremember with devastating clarity.

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The sense of jamais vu and the hollow, muffled gloomassociated with once familiar and bright places and things canbe a shock to the system on its own, and at a very nuts-and-bolts, physiological level this renegotiation process is anenormously taxing one.

This essential manner of this form of breakdown, then,can be seen as the result of a massive strain on an individual'sneural economy, which has been exacerbated to the point atwhich this crisis overwhelms the activities of the system.

Consider that as one comes to embrace goals andambitions, as one develops relationships and makes plans, andeven as one accepts the simple hedonistic realism of our dailylives and tries to make the best of their own experience, thebreadth of that optimism is supported and maintained by thetangibility and accessibility of one's aspirations, and if one issuddenly having to confront a great number of unrelated,more pedestrian considerations, aspiration becomes a ratherlower and lower priority, and the thrust of these becomes oneof a much more prosaic quality as the neuroeconomic cost andthe associated pain of that process continues to rise.

This is true of very basic biological functions as well. Incases of acute stress, as well as as more chronic forms ofdepression and anxiety, most of the functions that are out ofsorts can be described in general as “optimistic functions”. Incrisis situations the appetite diminishes, sexual functions are

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scaled back, digestion slows to a halt, and a number of otherlong-term, future-oriented endeavors are cut off so that morecan be done in the moment.

And, of course, as the confusion of this processcompounds, a similarly catastrophic buildup occurs, andbefore long, the person can turn out to be in really bad shapeas they repeat this cycle.

The neuroeconomic pressure on the system in general isone thing, but this instability can be broken down further bytrack.

Perhaps we can assert that, in the way that complexinformation diverts information flow through theevaluational/exclusive (V/X) dyad with larger packets beingmoved through the system by that network's implementation,a similar process occurs as certain packets are diverted by theSecond Interstitial Operators (I2) out to the objectional anddirective tracks in order to prepare and reinforce action in theparticipatory track either because of a kind of informationalpoverty or because of some distinct factor within theinformation itself.

Thus, track by track, we can discern a condition in whichintense experience in track E is rendered categorically by theA-track operators, this intensifies the action on the O track,and the pressure is greater not only on the D-track operators,but especially on the sensory feedback loop we discussed at

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the end of chapter 3 as we come back through the systemagain; it is important that whatever participation this processhas come up with is influencing one's circumstances in a waythat supports the restabilizing of the system.

If that effect is not achieved and this stress becomeshabituated, the resulting patterns of information flow parallelfeatures of paranoia, of obsessive and irrational thinking, ofpanic disorders, and several other noncognitive or cognitivelydissonant phenomena.

As an inherent consequence of this bypass however, thiscondition can be perpetuated precisely because of the fact thatthe fidelity of the information is not maintained andinvestigated by the more highly analytical operators in the V/Xtract.

We may all at some point have experienced twinges ofwhat the French call l'esprit d'escalier and have thought of aperfect response on our way down the staircase to aconversation which we were having back at the top of it, wemay come out of a difficult or stressful situation wonderingwhy on earth we didn't see the obvious solution, we may evenconvince ourselves that if we could travel back in time wewould know exactly what to do to avert disaster, and this is allrepresentative of a larger fact: that there has been greater timefor the information you had to be drawn through the channelsof the evaluative and exclusionary tracks.

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We are used to seeing the gap left by this network'smalfunctions, but its advantages can be seen from an abstract,evolutionary perspective.

Consider that there are a number of things which arecrucial to your survival and yet over which you have nocontrol. One's heart rate, blood pressure, breathing rate, thedilation of one's pupils, and so on, all fall within this category,a group of functions which neuroscientists call “autonomic”functions.

These are things that don't require cognitive input fortwo reasons: 1) because it is likely that the mechanics for thesefunctions were in place long before the mechanics ofconsciousness, and thus these functions are not predicated onconscious activity, and 2) because even if it could be, thesethings are elaborate and delicately balanced enough so that itdoes little good to have consciousness in charge of them.

Essentially, it seems, there are some calls that are just tooimportant for you to be able to make, and so your brain does iton your behalf.

And whether it is ultimately that a hyperactivity in theseautonomic functions impacts the brain's overall energy levelsand there is less to go around to the V/X operators, or thatthere this is due to conditions within the information itself, orthat there is some function that directs information away fromthem, the net result is that less time is spent in rationaldecision making as one's situation becomes more imperative,

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and more and more of one's functions become more and moreautomatic.

Still, through the entire process, the brain remainsconcerned with one thing-- information. Over time it sortsthrough our experiences and distinguishes links betweenthem, tries to integrate them into a coherent structure, andestimates one's ability to contend with similar circumstancesin the future.

Which, I concede, if you are a plains-dwelling, humanoidhunter-gatherer creature who interacts with a group of maybeup to 100 and rarely if ever gets beyond 3 miles of the placewhere you were born, is a fairly reasonable thing to do.

If, however, you are a modern human being living in the21st century, this process can get somewhat complicated.

There are bound to be a great number of inconsistenciesand even outright incompatibilities in the wide and complexbody of information one is likely to build over the years, andin some cases the dissonance to which this can contribute canbecome overwhelming in and of itself.

The next chapter will look at some ways of unravelingsome of these complications, and will introduce a new methodfor intervention in a number of usual cases.

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EIGHT

Recovery & Therapy

THIS CHAPTER WILL BE the most speculative of this book, as theideas put forth here are the most essentially conjectural andnone of them have been formally tested, but with theseproblems in a new and broader relief as we have analyzedthem here there are a few compelling things to be said aboutsome of these processes.

It can be said first that the current pharmacologicalapproaches to these problems, despite problems of their own,often contribute a great deal to the treatment of many mentalconditions, and depending on the circumstances and thenature of the case these can be essential tools for any therapist.

This fact cannot be understated, because for a widenumber of cases there are these simple, maladaptive functionswhich, if left unaddressed, undermine any other attempts tosort out the ostensible problems of the system and continuallygenerate further confusion and noise.

It is true that there are a number of problems which,because of their inherent natures, must be addressed by theseintegrated means; it seems, for now at least, that there arethings for which organic participations that will satisfy theissues within the system simply do not exist.

For the time being, however, I will dispense with the

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discussion of these kinds of organic impairments, mostlybecause their solutions must be discerned from complexexperimental and pharmacological research and as such theseare beyond my current capacities to deliver.

Briefly though, we can revisit the way that weunderstand the effects of these medicines by looking moreclosely at some of their informational repercussions.

If we assume that a particular operator, say one of thetertiary exclusionary operators, performs optimally if suppliedwith a certain level of a given neurotransmitter, that itsoperations are heavily dependent upon the use of thischemical, and that this chemical is below optimal levels, thenwe can see how this functional pathology might generatedistortions in the information which it deposits in bank 22.

We can see here that the system encounters a version ofthe problems of the visual system which we identified inchapter 5; even if these subsequent operators are in perfectworking order, these distortions populate the bank fromwhich they will draw, and as such there will be distinctvariation in the behaviors of the objectional operators, downthrough the directive, and so on.

A person may rightly object to a possibility that has beenimproperly left for consideration by the exclusionaryoperators, and may reasonably act to contend with thatpossibility despite this behavior's ultimate irrationality.

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If the level of the necessary chemical is corrected then soare the distortions, consequently so are the informationalpathologies produced by those distortions, and possibly, so aresome behaviors which depend on the distorted information.

If, for example, one has a particular genetic variationwhich dictates that one's neurons reuptake a neurotransmittercalled serotonin too aggressively, there will be a pronouncedeffect on the functions which require serotonin to beperformed, and a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI),which scales this process back in some neurons, can be seen tobe in the business of operation maintenance.

With this dynamic off to one side, we can begin toaddress more purely informational kinds of breakdowns.

As we discussed in chapter 5, each of us is continuallyinvolved in some form of maintenance over our experienceand our exchanges, and in addition to this type ofcircumstantial maintenance there is a similar maintenance ofthe fidelity and the immediate viability of our information.

We modern humans have the strange privilege of usingthe internet and other technologies to perform thismaintenance in an unprecedentedly immediate way; we canlook at a watch or a clock when we need the time, we cansearch for information we can't remember, we can consultbooks and other materials on a whim. This is of course anextremely recent development, however, and the original of

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these technologies is our own system of memory.Memory can be described from our perspective as an

emergent record of patterns within previous experience, someof which are correlated with patterns within immediateexperience in order to inform and to enhance the efficacy ofone's behavior within the present situation.

Why, then, do we remember things which seem to beblatantly unhelpful and disruptive to our daily lives? Why dowe have painful or even traumatic memories? And, moreimportantly, how can these be resolved into a form which is, ifnot more helpful, then certainly less demanding of one'sattention and one's emotions?

The most current generally accepted understanding ofmemory is that memory itself is not a broad kind of library,where all of the information one has acquired is warehousedand mothballed until some of it is needed, nor is it governedby a single brain region or group of regions.

Instead it is a creative, integrative, and information-specific process which is the result of particular connectionsand networks between individual neurons, and as one of thesenetworks is activated the familiarity of the activity between arelated chain helps constitute specific memories.

We know this process to be dynamic and flexible, and itparallels what we discussed in chapter 4; that commonalitiesin information sculpt out an average of neural activity, andthen, as these same pathways are used more, commonalities in

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activity contribute again to commonalities in information flow.As we have shown, the reverse is also true, and we can

see here that the system provides an excellent opportunity forintervention, which must naturally take place where thesystem receives input from the natural world, the PrimarySensory Operators.

We can begin by considering this process in a moremundane form. Suppose there was a shop to which you wereused to going for your week's groceries, and that this shop hadmoved so that it was two doors down from its previouslocation, where it had been for years. It seems like a fairlyridiculous question, certainly, but when you make yourweekly rounds, do you try to visit them at their old location?

Of course you don't, but knowing that some change musthave occurred in your own body of information in order tomatch the information of the outside world, it is reasonable toask, why don't you?

It goes without saying that at their old location youwould have no access to their goods and services and you mayeven be unable to enter the building, and that the source ofwhatever beneficial exchanges you might conduct in thisregard is of course at the new location, but it's not as if theinformation you once had is deleted or thrown away. It issimply recycled and recategorized.

The old entrance and address is now where the store used

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to be, and this memorial information can be used to makecomparisons between one and the other. The new location canbe pinpointed and this information can be relayed bypiggybacking off of the old information. “Oh, it's just twodoors down from where it used to be.”

We can refer to this process generally as the reintegrationof information, and it is representative of the system ofrepeated interrogative assessment and modificationcontinually performed by the interior tracks of the system wehave described.

From realizing that the lyrics to a certain song go oneway rather than another, to correcting one's generalmisunderstandings and misapprehensions of fact, tounderstanding various kinds of jokes, to even our narrativeexperience of a movie or novel or play, all of these phenomenaand more are underwritten by these reintegrative processes.

In a broader sense too, much of what it takes to make ourway through the day itself in the context of what hashappened previously requires some level of conversation withthis process. The transition between an action needing to beperformed and an action having been performed alonerequires the interpretation of information passing within themoments between those states, and this active, immediateform of integration is closely related to the reactive system of Iam describing here.

Essentially, the brain reasons and remembers in the

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present tense, with a view to the apparent possibilities andcircumstances of the here and now, and we can view memoryas refreshing the accounts of the way things are in accordancewith how they used to be.

It is not so much that we are told a story by our brains,such as, “hey, remember when x, y, and z happened?”, but thatwe are reminded implicitly that we live in a world in which x,y, and z have happened, and when we encounter things thatare related to those elements the brain produces our closestapproximations of them because our experience with thosethings happening as they did convinces us that they are likelyto happen the same way again.

The relatedness of certain factors within a memorialnetwork will be key to their effective rearrangement andappropriation, but first we should look at some of therelationships between information flow and memory.

As we saw in chapter 2, the mind and brain have beensensitized by evolution toward certain aspects of theirenvironment, and if we consider our example of touching aheat source, we can see that there is a direct relationshipbetween the intensity of a stimulus and one's impetus towardits consideration.

Similarly, in chapter 5 we examined the relationshipbetween the consistency of one's experience and the way inwhich one comes to define that experience through the

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generation and maintenance of representative primemes.Here we can see that these principles apply also to bodies

and arrangements of action or protocols. These are primemeticrepresentations of behavior and event patterns, both those thatone expects to occur within the environment and also thosewhich one's self is likely to attempt as well as roughapproximations of these patterns' expected outcomes.

By looking at these two dynamics in congress we can seethat events and behaviors which affect the circumstances andenvironment of a particular individual with a certain intensityare rendered in a particularly high resolution.

This is easy to see in practice: you might quite easilyremember someone saying something to you, but mightequally struggle to account with any particular clarity for theextended moments when they may have sat there doing notmuch at all for several seconds at a time.

Similarly, within any certain period of time one discerns,extracts, and compresses particular events and theirrepercussions based around the informational impact of these.Thus the density and weight of remembered information isconsistent with the level of that impact.

Every event, like every object, is built from encounterswith its elements and attributes, and each of these has adiscrete and distinct representation in the brain and as theseareas are stimulated by something in the environment,

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associated connections with past events have a higherlikelihood of being stimulated as well.

The reason that one is compelled to think of one thingafter having experienced another is captured in anothercommon adage of modern neuroscience, that “neurons thatwire together fire together”.

And yet this wiring, as we have seen, is not firm andrigid but is instead flexible, malleable, and responsive to newexperience. Up until a certain point it was fairly commonstock to say that one either was born with or developed by acertain point all of the neurons and connections that one wasever going to have and that these formed into very concretestructures, but as our technologies and our methods havedeveloped over the last century we have been able to see thatthis is not the case, and in fact the brain retains an active,dynamic, plastic quality, a high degree of neuroplasticity, wellinto adulthood and in many cases on into old age.

So it appears, even at this level, that these networks aresubject to variation and reintegration, and we can begin tolook at how these facts might be used to ease the pain ofdifficult memories and associations.

We already know that effective cognitive behavioraltreatment revolves around reorganization of thoughts andideas, and around the editing of the means by which weclassify, store, and access certain packets of information, and

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we know that this is important not only in the context ofmemorial events but also in the context of one's outlookregarding the present and the future.

I contend further however, at a more basic level, that thisis true even of the information that is involved in ourconstructions of the past, and about the associations andexperience upon which our memories themselves are based.

Consider that any specific memory is comprised of anumber of attributes, each of which has some certainfrequency within your experience. A memory may stand outbecause it contains elements of a certain rarity, so that one canremember “that time when...”, because there was exactly oneparticular instance when all of those factors were present inexactly those particular proportions.

For certain of these attributes certain memories can claiman informational and associational monopoly, and these can beseen as somewhat isolated connections; “every time that I havedone x, y and z have occurred as well”.

For whatever x should be, y and z will be indicative ofyour own experiences in those situations, and willcategorically come to inform your perceptions of possible andprobable experiences within similar situations involving thatparticular attribute.

So part of addressing painful associations which areisolated in this way is to break the associational monopoly; toexperience the neutral attribute in an alternate context, and to

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spread the weight of the association across a wider area ofrepresentation.

If the memories revolve around or are triggered by aparticular song, or person, or a particular place, or otherdistinct factor, to the point that the mere mention of these isenough to set off a cascade of images and moments, or at leastdim pangs of unease in the background, then the experientialsolution is to create new memories which involve those samethings but which are otherwise unconnected with the sourceof the trauma.

This is already seen indirectly in exposure therapy, wheresomeone who might have a distinct fear of dogs, for example,in connection with being attacked as a small child might havean experience with a puppy in order to break them out of thatblind associative fear, and I argue that this is the result of adiffusion of neurocognitive resources across multiple channelsof experience.

To put it more directly, if one should have a primemeticassociation with a certain event in connection with an isolatedfactor, one can introduce an element of informationalcompetition in order to undermine that primemetic status.

We should look at this dynamic again in terms of theprojected neuroeconomic cost of dealing with that particularfactor. In the hypothetical case above, one might begin with asituation in which the single experience of an encounter with adog is strongly connected with significant pain and fear,

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confusion, suddenly having to attend to one's wounds insteadof whatever else one was up to, of having to adapt one'sbehavior within all future encounters with a dog, and so on,and by the end of the exposure session this massive cost isbeing averaged against the cost of having had to touch a soft,furry thing for a little while, which may have wagged its tail atyou and slobbered charmingly on your hand.

Eventually, perhaps, if one were to see a random dog inthe park one's mind might be more drawn to the considerationof the petting and slobbering possibility than of the attackingand mauling possibility.

When the stressors are less acute than this, and moregeneralized as in the case of the loss of a loved one or havingbeen displaced violently from one's home, in which manythings may remind one of the same loss and pain, this processis more generalized too, and this global reorganization maytake much longer and may be considerably more complex.

Indeed it's often said of complex traumas such as thesethat they “will only get better with time,” and it's true thatmany if not most of these situations require a period of griefand reflection, during which I contend that there is an ongoingform of passive reintegration.

When these problems become systemic however, whenthey become perpetuated and their development stagnates, orto put it another way, when time fails to do its job, there mustbe an appropriate means of activating and expediting this

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process so that the person can transition into a healthier andmore beneficial situation.

If the pain of the past cannot quite be erased, then in thisway perhaps it can at least be diluted, made less insistentlydemanding of one's time and attention, and made less likely todisrupt one's necessary exchanges.

Mental pathology must at its root be equated with thesubjugation of a person's ability to conduct beneficial electiveoperations, its severity must represent the extent to which aperson is tyrannized in this way, and thus, we can gauge theeffectiveness of reintegration or any other method of treatmentby the degree to which they are able to increase the person'sliberty to reason.

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NINE

Free Will

THE COMPLEXITY OF THE brain's functions, the means by whichthey are conducted, and even the concession to materialism onits own have lead some people to believe that theseconsiderations make the human experience somewhatdeterministic. Indeed, some go so far as to say that the bestthat our conscious experience can provide is a compellingseries of post hoc, or after the fact, rationalizations foremotions and behaviors that ultimately we have nothing to dowith.

I think, in light of what we have seen so far throughoutthis book, that this should rank among the more preposterousnotions in modern psychological analysis and I think we haveseen the vitality and complexity of what we refer to ascognitive decision making. In this chapter I want to examinethe flexibility of that decision making and to examine both itslimitations and its range.

It is certainly fair to say that many of the brain's internalmechanics take place beyond the perception and the discretionof our consciousness, and that ultimately we find ourselves ina world within a world. The environment around us, theOrdinate External World, and the environment within us, the

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Subordinate External World, are significant things with whichto contend.

Any of us might be willing to call our internalenvironments persuasive, and acknowledge with reluctancethat they are effective at commanding our attention whenneed be. But perhaps we should ask someone in the throws ofheroin withdrawal, or who is under duress of torture, or whois committing suicide. These people, surely, would have asomewhat more pointed assessment of the conditions underwhich they behave and the extent to which those conditionspromote a given course of action.

The distance between these states and any process thatcould be considered rational decision making is vast indeed,and it is within this context that we will determine what anearnest and genuine absence of free will actually looks like.

To do this, we will begin by looking at a horseshoe-shaped network of regions which runs through the centralbrain called the limbic system.

An assessment of this fascinating structure with sufficientdepth is somewhat beyond the scope of this book, but we canconsider a few generalizations about the way the componentsof this system interact.

Broadly speaking, this group of regions, which includessuch neuroscientific darlings as the amygdala and thehippocampus, can be viewed as a mediator between the higher

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cognitive functions taking place in the brain's frontal lobe andthe primal, autonomic functions which occur in theevolutionarily older lower brain.

It can be loosely described as the brain's emotional center,and some portion of the limbic system is involved in nearlyevery complex neurological process that there is, includingcreativity, memory, the stress response, and anythinginvolving reward systems, like gambling or certain drugs.

It is often thought, as referred to at the beginning of thischapter, that we simply interpret and respond to the will ofthese lower functions, and that we are at the mercy of ouranimal instincts.

This point of view has been reflected in all manner ofphilosophical and political discourse, and it is represented in anumber of popular assumptions about avarice and sloth,about the essential nature of crime and punishment, aboutpeople's deepest and most principal wishes and desires, aboutaddiction and poverty, about how we should be educated,about how business and international relations should beconducted, about the role of government and of parentalinfluence, and so on.

Certain brands of thinking thrive and rely on theseassumptions, and they paint a picture of human life thatconsiders us to be an only loosely contained consortium ofchaos, which is always but steps away from ultimate self-destruction and which must be wrangled and maintained

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ruthlessly for its own sordid good.Legitimately however, influence within this system runs

in both directions; impulses in this system and chemicalsreleased by it influence the higher cognitive functions, andthere are higher cortical processes which release chemicalsthat influence the behavior of the system.

Corticotropin-releasing factor (CRF), for instance, is anexample of the latter. When neurons in the cortex secrete thischemical in response to a stressor, its presence orders thepituitary gland to call for the secretion of stress hormones byglands located above the kidneys, and this kicks off the stressresponse during which the organism will begin analyzing andresponding to its environment and its conditions differently.

Similarly, when an area called the nucleus accumbensbegins receiving a chemical called dopamine the brainbecomes primed for a reward, and the way that one negotiatesone's actions in relation to that reward begin to change as well.

With this in mind, let us consider the three cases from thechapter's introduction in order. We will begin with someonewho is addicted to heroin, and we can visit the case at threepoints; first, at the onset of their addiction, once during, at thepoint when they decide to quit, and again at a point just beforeits conclusion.

At the onset, we can imagine the total effort required toinduce heroin's intense euphoria to be of a low order. Leaving

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aside whatever it may take to elect, procure, and prepare suchan injection, the point of effort required to induce the high isquite small; the small pain of insertion into the vein and thesmall amount of energy required to depress the plunger on thesyringe.

To say that the brain receives a large reward for this smallexpenditure is quite an understatement. Within seconds onebecomes intensely euphoric as the brain's opioid receptorsreact to the opiate compounds, massive amounts ofneurotransmitters which relate to happiness and pleasure arereleased, and this lasts for in the neighborhood of 4 or 5 hours.

Now, without knowing about or simply withoutappreciating the emergent costs which will accrue from thisbehavior's habituation, the answer to the following question isincredibly simple and probabilistically all but assured: will thebehavior be repeated?

From this first transaction, a relationship is developedbetween “what it costs to inject a hit” and “what results frominjecting a hit”, and because this is the singular interactionbetween the two the probability of the same transactionproducing the same payoff appears to the brain to be close to100 percent.

Over time this probability tails off somewhat as the brainlearns to tolerate this experience in order to make it moremanageable and to narrow it because, despite theoverwhelming pleasure experienced by the mind, from the

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standpoint of the brain this experience is also, in its own way,debilitating.

In the mean time, complications may (and as the timelinegets longer, must) have emerged within the person's life, andthe balance of the transaction has shifted drastically whencompared with that original ≈100%. The drug itself may have,for any number of reasons, become more difficult to acquire,its monetary cost may have risen prohibitively, one'srelationships and situation may have reached a catastrophicpoint of instability, the consequences to one's health will havecompounded, perhaps even with the addition of a trulyunenviable biological malady, (they may have overdosed andcome close to death), etc.

Anyone who has experience with this kind of addictionwill tell you that for a long time these profound considerationswill be of a markedly low priority for an addict, at least untilone hits one's “rock bottom”, when their tolerance has risen tothe point where a sufficient high is unachievable and theirsituation has deteriorated to the point where their conditionshave become unacceptable, and it is at this point that thetransaction is deemed no longer viable. From this point we can look ahead to the experience ofquitting, and whether this particular person finds themselvesalone, locked in their own familiar rooms, or in a prison, or ina hospital or a rehab facility, they will be going throughapproximately the same thing; they will have fever, chills,

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achy bones and muscles, terrible cramps and spasms, nausea,vomiting and diarrhea, a complete inability to stay still, apossible variety of other distinctly unpleasant symptoms, and,what I think should be obvious, an additional inability tosleep.

We can see this as the diametric opposite of the initialratio of “do” to “reward”; a relationship between “don't” and“suffer”. In this case the pressure to do the “do”-ing in orderto receive any high at all and escape from this extreme painand pressure is enormous, and it's not difficult to see whyrelapse at some point during this stage is extremely common.

Returning to the theme of this chapter, the question is: atthis point, to what extent can the person choose whether ornot they take a hit if it were available to them?

We can see an answer if we look briefly at our secondcase, that of someone being subjected to torture as part of aninterrogation. If we ignore the circumstances and method, andconsider simply someone in enormous pain and doingeverything they can to keep from divulging an importantpiece of information to their captors, even if they are able toendure enormous amounts of pain, they are up against theidea that their captors' tactics will escalate until either theyhave suffered irreversible and unacceptable catastrophe, oruntil they are dead.

This duress is almost entirely insurmountable, and I

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would contend that the addict's predicament is remarkablysimilar in terms of the pressures on one's decisions, and theirability to withstand these pressures will last only as long asthey are able to keep clear in their minds that, apart fromtaking the hit, there is a second means of causing theirsuffering to come to an end; that it will escalate until a certainpoint, after which it will level off of its own accord with noinput from them whatsoever, and then subside.

If they are able to understand and take to heart that ifthey take that hit everything that they have already suffered inthis linear process will be for naught and they will have to dothe same and more again in the future, their odds will bebetter still.

It seems that the difference between quitting the drug atthis point and quitting the quitting hinges on the belief that“taking a hit” remains a viable option, and it is thereforepossible for the reasoning to be based around “quitting” and“not quitting” rather than around “quitting now” and “failingto quit now and having to relive this whole nightmare asecond time when I try to quit again”.

We can view however, that the determination inherent inthis latter method also has a sinister application, one towardsdetriment rather than benefit; that of our final introductorycase, someone committing suicide.

In each of these three cases one experiences a situation in

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which the brain reasons chemically, emotionally, in response tothe factors in its world, on one's behalf and without one'sinput, and this provides a strong and acute pressure on one'sbehaviors.

Suicide is the most overt of these cases, because it selectsthe end which achieves the greatest possible level of damageto one's neuroeconomic circumstances, a complete deprivationof all information and a total cessation of all possibletransactions.

This is the one circumstance that any living creature hasbeen trained by evolution to avoid at all costs, and to put itsimply, it is a choice that no reasonable person, operatingwithout interference or pressure, would make under anycircumstances.

To this mind the behaviors in the first two cases areclearly intelligible, and there is an obvious benefit to each; inthe first one receives a large neurological reward in the placeof significant pain and in the second one receives remittancefrom pain and secures future transactions. In the suicide casehowever, one receives remittance from pain at the expense ofall future transactions, and for this exchange to be consideredneuroeconomically viable, the situation as it is rendered by theA/V track must be very grave indeed.

In a novel, the American author David Foster Wallacerightly compared someone committing suicide to someoneleaping to their death from a burning building, the idea being

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that this choice might be frightening and upsetting but it isconsiderably better than the alternative, which is to meet thesame end by undoubtedly nastier means.

I find this analogy compelling, but we have to examinethe situation in a slightly modified way in order to contendwith this phenomenon from a neurological andneuroeconomic perspective, and we will find that this allowsfor a more attractive set of options than a choice betweenflavors of doom.

Let us concede the impoverished nature of the person'ssituation, the legitimacy of the flames and fire, let us concedeits remoteness, that the alternative is to jump to one's deathrather than to step down from a first floor window and walkaway, let us even concede the analogy's main assertion, that itis indeed obvious which of the two is the better option. Thequestion that this leaves us with is that of one's ability tocontrol the fire.

Now obviously, the “fire” in this case is burning withinthe Subordinate External World, which is less easily affectedby simple participations and less subject to easy modificationthan is the ordinate, and I want to make it very clear that thissection is not meant to bear the cajole frivolity with whichsome people imagine the depressed condition, thinking that itcan be shrugged off or snapped out of, as if someone's life ison fire simply by choice.

I am talking about the ability within one's own belabored

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volition to discern and affect mitigating change that willimprove their situation, and about the variations within thatsituation.

While it's true that there is indeed such a thing asunipolar depression, in which there is no uplifting mania likein bipolar disorder, and such a thing as dysphoria, in which itis difficult or nearly impossible for people to feel happyfeelings even under the best circumstances, the abject,sustained kind of depression that people who have neverexperienced it usually think of, and that most people think ofwhen they think of this analogy, in which we imagine this“fire” as continuous and of superlative intensity, is a majoroversimplification.

Most depression is at least partly cyclical, and almost allof it is intermittent, whether in terms of presence or ofintensity, and to reflect this, let us try on a slightly differentanalogy.

Let us imagine someone dealing with major depressionas someone stranded out in the wilderness, and let us imaginethe irreconcilable pressures of one's life as a massive, wild,1,500-pound Kodiak grizzly that occupies the same territory asour hypothetical sufferer.

The bear comes and goes, sometimes it picks a fight,sometimes it doesn't, sometimes it menaces, sometimes itdoesn't, sometimes it snoops in one's things, sometimes it

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steals from one's traps or fishing lines, it's sometimes hungry,sometimes docile, but at all times its motivation is quiteseparate from that of Our Hero and it always, even if only bycompeting for similar resources, affects the circumstances oftheir environment.

It is true that at the climax of these situations, when thesituation is stacked acutely against the person at hand, theperson's behavior is very strongly influenced and theirliberties are severely curtailed, which is to say that if thishypothetical bear should attack and one should decide to gomano-a-garra with it, they have few options and their chancesare decidedly gloomy.

In fact, it's easy to see in this example that if it's all goingthat way anyway, a well-placed bullet pointed in one's owndirection would expedite the process greatly and, within thiscontext, that bargain is one which you would be hard pressedto find a reason not to take.

Less assured than this eventuality by far, however, iswhether this ultimate confrontation will be reached at all, andthe chances of this bargain being waged and conducted in thismanner correspond to the presence and the effectiveness of themeans by which it is promoted. It is influence upon these,therefore, which is the order of the day, and it is within thiscontext that we can see the more general form of legitimatefree will.

Can someone simply wish themselves to victory over a

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1,500-pound grizzly in a direct conflict? Of course they can't.Can they, through smiles and positive thinking, convince thebear not to attack? Of course not. But can they act in otherways to ensure their own safety and to keep a distancebetween themselves and this extreme conflict? Yes.

If this were a real situation, one's efforts might bedirected toward securing a place where they could take shelterwhile the bear was around, toward keeping one's food awayfrom their camp and beyond the bear's reach, toward knowingthe bear's location and monitoring its movements, perhapstoward caging or killing it, and ultimately, of course, towardgetting out of the wilderness.

The parallels between these courses of action, particularlythat last one, and anything that would achieve similar effectsin the pertinent case are hazier than I would like, and from a aneuroeconomic standpoint these have yet to be determinedwith precision and confidence. Still, the metaphor is sound;time and energy spent on things which increase the balance ofone's neuroeconomic resources is much better rewarded thanis that same energy and more when funneled into a directconfrontation.

And so we arrive at our modified version of the classicalidea of “free will”. We can think of this quality, this power, asa measure of our ability to guide and direct our own attentionand to maintain the body of information from which we will

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act in the future.We maintain, to the best of our ability, the conditions

within which we operate, we choose, where choice is available,how to act and what to do in a given situation, but moreimportantly we choose, where choice is available, how todispense our neurocognitive resources.

If we can't rightly view ourselves as the ultimate,indomitable masters of our domain, we can still viewourselves as the cleverest things involved in our problems.Painful emotions, unenviable situations, and internal strife arestrong and powerful forces, but even if they can't beoutmatched they can be outsmarted.

Individually, we can rely for our own well-being mostprimarily on our ingenuity, on our creativity, and on thefreedoms which we do retain; the freedom to think, consider,and reflect, the freedom to act thoughtfully instead ofautomatically when we can, the freedom to influence theconditions within which we will operate in the future, and thefreedom to look at the situation from different perspectives tofind real solutions.

Societally speaking, finding the solutions to the vexedproblems of major depression, or of drug addiction, or ofbehavioral disorders, or anything else also requires and relieson this kind of dynamism and flexibility, on reevaluation andreconsideration, and there are many like these that still awaitus.

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TEN

Discovery

WHAT I HAVE TRIED to do in this book is to use the discoveries ofthe last several decades to introduce a new language fordiscussing mental activity and the way that it is influenced bycircumstances and events. A language, hopefully, in whichnew things can be said about that activity.

Almost any psychological process or phenomenon can berevisited in this language and, though I have been careful upto this point not to write beyond what I can prove, I will takethese last pages to indicate some of my thinking for newdirections in which these ideas can be taken.

So far, I have said almost nothing about development,nothing at all about various gender differences (whatever theymay be), nothing about most mental illnesses beyond generaltrauma and specific kinds of breakdown, nothing aboutrelationships, nothing about sex, not enough about art andmusic, nothing about sleep and dreaming, nothing abouteducation, nothing about politics, nothing about humor,nothing about crime or the justice system, nothing about mostforms of social interaction, nothing about war, nothing aboutreligion, very little about clinical applications, very little aboutdrugs (whether recreational or pharmaceutical), nothing aboutcultural variation (if any), nothing about nutrition, nothing

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about societal influence, nothing about media, nothing aboutnative and foreign language acquisition, and nothingcomparative about different kinds of animals. For the mostpart, I haven't said because I simply don't know.

Within all of these subjects, and more, there are a widevariety of interesting and highly uncertain questions raised bythis material, and each requires a careful and consideredinvestigation. There is much that I would like to contributeand much that I think neuroeconomics can contribute to thesematters but I am weary of doing so here without surer footingin fact, before more research can be done.

First and foremost, the operational classification of eachpart of the brain should be determined and justified. Beyondthat, there are many operations and many well understoodprocesses that should be translated into the language I haveintroduced, many classic experiments that might haveneuroeconomic explanations and many current explanationsthat might have neuroeconomic parallels.

Once observed, these and their variations could beexplained and codified, new ones could be discovered bylooking for them within this context, and elements which ourcurrent thinking dismisses could be brought within the scopeof our study.

I think that this research could help us understand whatwe understand, and could hold the key to many psychologicaland social issues, for most of which there are now very limited

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means of recourse.What are the common relationships between various

types of informational experience? What repercussions andresults can events with a known informational architecture besure to have? What types of that architecture can bedetermined and accounted for?

What sort of tests could we develop and what sort ofdiagnostic criteria could we determine if it were found thatcertain operators or operator groups were common todifferent processes, and visible, observable failures in onearena were able to give us a glimpse into the workings ofharder to ascertain functions?

What sort of remedies could we develop for the gardenvariety of mental strife, and what sort of treatments could wedetermine for the rare and the unenviable versions? How canwe make present methods more effective?

What crises and disasters could be averted by being ableto intervene earlier, more effectively, in more cases? Whatdiscoveries and innovations could be made by people whowere educated in the healthiest and most effective possibleway? What benefits could we all derive from the knowledgethese inquiries would bring?

Indeed, these are questions that only further study cananswer.

Many people wonder if the kind of understanding of themind and of human experience that I am talking about is even

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possible, because our lives are so varied and because ourthoughts and our feelings are so specific to our ownexperience. And I do see the problem.

But the simple fact is that if you eat a cheeseburger, or ifyou get bitten by a snake, or if you breathe in carbonmonoxide, we know what is going on in your body,physiologically and systematically, and the same can't yet besaid of the most basic thoughts and experience.

Regardless of our cultural differences or the differencesin our beliefs or our tastes or our ideas, every humanprocesses information, and we should know more about thesystem that carries out that processing, beyond the fuzzy,sentimental level of our subjective experience of it and beyondthe crisp, mechanical level of the neural processing by which itis underlain.

I hope that what I have put down here has offered aglimpse into that middle ground, and if these ideas goanywhere I will feel privileged to be along for the ride.

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AfterwordNOT ENOUGH AN ART, NOT ENOUGH A SCIENCE

THE STATE OF PSYCHOLOGY today is, to put it lightly, anembarrassment and a disgrace to everything that we in the21st century know to be true about the way that people work,and is, or rather I suppose should be, a further embarrassmentto the standards and values of our academic and educationalendeavors as a civilization.

I must concede from the start that there is a great deal oftruly marvelous work being done by research psychologists atvarious institutions, and that the pursuit of therapeuticpsychologists and social workers to mitigate the problems oftheir fellow human beings and to assist in their amelioration isindeed a noble one, but the state of the psychologicalunderstanding from which these professionals operate, as wellas the methodology available to them, is one of truly gravemisapprehension of fact and circumstance.

Dated and vexed theories such as behaviorism andFreudian psychoanalysis, which could not possibly be takenseriously in the context of the known facts of today, are widelytaught in the university level psychology curriculum, not ashistory of psychology or as background for the currently heldscientific consensus, but are offered up selon votre choix as thebest that modern academia has to offer on the subject.

AFTERWORD

And the unfortunate fact is that that is exactly what it is. In modern undergraduate psychology, the modus

operandi tends to be that one is shown various phenomenaand studies, some of which genuinely remarkable andrevealing, whereupon one is usually given around fourseparate and incompatible explanations, some of whichmanage to glance at the truth of the matter, and some of whichmiss it so blatantly as to obfuscate the very pursuit ofunderstanding.

I cannot tell the reader how many times I was presentedconfounds such as these in lessons, and after pressing with toomany questions and witnessing an extremely brief moment ofprofessorial panic, I was asked, as something of a statement,“Well, what do you think?”

Now I am sorry, but that is not the way that thingsshould go in a scientific classroom. The question is, “hasmodern science investigated these things or has it not?” “Isthere a scientific consensus on the subject or isn't there?”“What, with the information available to us, can we discern tobe going on here?”

And, at least according to my experience, not only doesour current understanding break down under this kind ofscrutiny, these are questions which modern psychologicalunderstanding itself is incapable of answering, and their thrustis not one which is representative of modern psychologicalthinking.

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If I were asking similar questions of a biology professor,most often I could presume to be answered either one way oranother, or a different way entirely, or I could be told thateither the professor themselves or the world at large simplydoesn't know, and I would come away with some form of aconcrete, bankable piece of information.

Already, of course, I can hear critics of this critiquediagnosing me with so-called “physics envy”, asserting that Iam jealous of the “harder” science's clear-cut results, models,and experiments, and I concede that there must be a small,latent element of this in anyone who deals in the messy andcomplicated business of the other sciences. And true,psychology is quite often referred to, somewhat defeatedly, asa “soft” science. But I contend that psychology is soft notbecause of its subject matter but because of its methods, andparticularly because of its methods of analysis and reasoning.

At the classroom level we have refused to decide whatconstitutes an explanation and which of our predecessors havecontributed such a thing as it concerns the topic at hand. Wetreat Freud and Jung and Eriksson and Maslow as lawgiverswho have unraveled the mysteries of the universe, and yetthey have knitted these back into incomprehensible messes oftheir own, and I for one think that a smug little pyramid ofneeds, or a trifecta of id, ego, and superego, are useless if theycannot be interrogated to the full satisfaction of the facts whichthey seek to explain.

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I do not envy the elegance and simplicity of the prismand the rainbow, or that distance = rate x time, so much as Ienvy the Krebs' cycle, or the process of ontogenesis, forexample. Yes, the explanation at which we finally arrive maybe complicated, with lots of different parts each of which maytake a long while to explain, and there may be parts of itwhich are wrong (or, as it is said in science, “subject torevision”), but we must raise the bar for what it is that weconsider an explanation at all, if only for our own self respect.

The four approaches that we have for any given analysis,apart from four solutions to one problem being absurd, barelymake one answer between them, and this is representative ofthe void that exists at the heart of our study-- the lack of asingle, unifying means of understanding the mechanics ofhuman thought and experience, and to me this omission isnothing short of glaring.

The state of the pubic understanding is even worse. Onecan scarcely read an article or turn on the radio without beinginvited to entertain the most pedantic, ham-fisted, pseudo-psychological nonsense, confidently propped up asenlightened and educated perspectives, which basicallyconsist of “getting inside [someone's] head”, finding shadowsof something vaguely nasty and creepy, or vaguely tortured,or perhaps even vaguely warm and fuzzy depending on theprogram, and then calling it a day.

Now, of course, I might never have a moment's peace if I

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used a survey of the national media as the barometer ofhuman knowledge and understanding, after all there are somepublications which will never stop printing horoscopes, butthe simple fact is that even at the highest levels of ourendeavor there is no clear alternative to these ideas.

It saddens me to think that even if there was undertakenthe most wonderful campaign for the public understanding ofpsychological science this public would be no better off at theend of it, unless some friends were invited along to speak fromthe human biology department.

Many of my psychology classes have threatened, and notemptily, to go the entire semester without even mentioning thebrain or how it arose, except of course for the token nods itdemands when development comes up or for the attributionsome complex function to a particular region, and so on.

This magnificent organ, far from being seen as the fabricof and basis for our entire lives and experience, is employedonly as the deus ex machina which fills the gaps left inpsychological theory. In fact, with one small and nearlydispensed with exception, every single thing that I have laidout as the foundation for the theory I have put forward in thisbook is material that was covered in exactly none of mypsychology classes.

Psychology contends itself instead with philosophical lifeevents and with their patently assumed consequences. Theseare loosely and vaguely defined, they are informed by the

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sociocultural milieu of the day, and they bring with them ascientifically unpardonable amount of bias, confusion,platitude, and truism.

It too often seems that the goal of much psychologicaldiscussion is to reduce a situation of infinite complexity to ahandful of tired clichés, or to use some opportunisticexperimental data to prop up some inadequate existingconcept, or at least to confirm the folk wisdom and biases withwhich everyone already views the situation.

This, put simply, is not the way that science works. Theproblems in our ideas that this way of thinking has bred couldfill a book on their own, and before I decided that that on itsown wasn't good enough, that was the book I was originallygoing to write.

There are so many things which people tacitlyacknowledge as true without evidence, so many holes in theplot that so few people seem to notice, so many nods to socialconvention and inherited ideas, and far, far too many easyanswers.

Even if I'm ultimately wrong about what I have putforward here, I hope to have taken a step in the right direction.

Thank you.

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Glossary

Action potential – An electrical charge which travels down thelength of a neuron.

Axon – The first part of a neuron, on the proximate end of thenucleus of the cell,where action potentials originate.

Banks – Areas between two operators where information exists afterthe operations of one and before the operations of the next.

Catastrophic Exchange Disruption – An event which is massivelydisruptive to a person's exchanges so that large numbers of theirexchange protocols, particularly those separate from elementsinvolved in the disruption, will have to be revised and reestablished.

Dendrite – The last part of a neuron, on the distal end of the nucleusof the cell; a set of tendrils which connect to other neurons andwhere action potentials are dispersed.

Depositional function – The sum of an operator's connections to thenext operator in sequence; the means by which it transmitsinformation to that operator.

Functional pathology – A breakdown in the tissues or mechanicsthat support a particular function.

Informational availability – A binary measure of a given piece ofinformation's existence within the presence of an individualorganism.

Informational selectability – A binary measure of an individualorganism's ability to process a given piece of information.

GLOSSARY

Integrated participation – An action or behavior that relies on theuse of some tool or technology beyond the body to be completed.

Interstitial ring – A set of four operator groups that lie on the borderbetween the two parts of each of the four tracks of processing, have a“choice” of depositional functions, and can divert information fromone track to another.

Limbic system – A network of regions in the midbrain whichprimarily contends with emotion and which connects the highercenters of rational cognitive processing to the automatic andhormonally regulated processes in the lower brain.

Meme – A discrete unit of information.

Memecule – A complex unit of information which is made fromdistinct, identifiable parts which interact with each other in aparticular way.

Memeotemporal proximity – A measure of the distance in time andin necessary sequence that it must take for a given piece ofinformation to be manifested in the presence of a given individual.

Memodynamic efficiency – A measure of the ease with which agiven piece of information travels through the informationprocessing system, as gauged by the energy which must beexpended to modify it along the way.

Myelin – A membranous substance that coats the axon of a neuronand provides electrical insulation, helping electrical signals to travelsfaster.

Neuron – A nerve cell; the basic unit of the nervous system.

Neurotransmitter – A chemical which the brain uses to communicate

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between its different parts.

Operator – A basic unit of information processing; a neuron or groupof neurons that perform a particular function in a particular network.

Ordinate External World – The ultimate external world, consistingof the sum total of all the information present in the universe, acertain portion of which is responded to and acted within by a givenindividual.

Organic participation – An action or behavior that requires noexternal tool or technology to be completed.

Primeme – A complex meme that corresponds to and is consideredrepresentative of a smaller, less complex meme.

Procedural pathology – An informational breakdown in the abilityof operators to perform their operations.

Solicitative function – The sum of an operator's connections to theprevious operator in sequence; the means by which it receivesinformation from that operator.

Subordinate External World – An arena in which decision makingtakes place and which involves information that has beenexperienced and assessed by earlier operators in the chain.

Synapse – A space between two neurons in which chemical andelectrical signaling takes place.

Transitive function – The combination of an operator's solicitativeand depositional functions; the means by which an operator receivesinformation from the previous operator and transmits information tothe next operator.

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Notes and References

CHAPTER ONE: Complexity

2. “...Micrographia” - A marvelous high-resolution, interactiveversion of Hooke's masterpiece can be found online,courtesy of the National Library of Medicine, athttp://archive.nlm.nih.gov/proj/ttp/flash/hooke/hooke.html

4. “...Ernst Haeckel” - Prestel Publishing has produced twobeautiful volumes of Haeckel's work, Art Forms in Natureand Art Forms from the Ocean, which include the radiolarianprints as well as drawings of jellyfish, trilobites, sea stars,and dozens of other life forms. There is also a superbdocumentary on Haeckel's life and work called Proteus(directed by David Lebrun, 2004), and the three of these arehighly recommended.“...protists” - Single-celled organisms.

5. “...Benoit Mandelbrot” - For a more in-depth analysis of this andother fractals, as well as a description of their discovery, seechapter 4 (A Geometry of Nature) in James Gleick'sremarkable book Chaos: Making a New Science.

CHAPTER TWO: Mind and Brain

10. “Edwin Smith Surgical Papyrus” - An annotated, interactivereconstruction of this scroll is available, also courtesy of theNational Institutes of Health, at http://archive.nlm.nih.gov/proj/ttp/flash/smith/smith.html.

NOTES AND REFERENCES

11. “...trepanation” - In fact this somewhat gruesome and unsavory-sounding practice is thought to be one of the world's oldestsurgical methods, as well as one of the earliest treatments formental illness. It dates to at least 6500 BCE, and was fairlycommon practice right up through the early 20th century. Aversion of it is still used by modern neurosurgeons today,although it is much rarer now, only being used to treatcertain kinds of hematoma or to allow access to the brain forother treatments, and generally the piece of bone is replacedas quickly as possible.

12. “...gave a massive kick” - Interestingly, a similar effect can beachieved by chemical means. The same preparation,followed by the addition of salt rather than electricity, willproduce a mild to pronounced twitching. This effect is usedwith some theatricality in a certain dish in Japanese cuisine,wherein a squid is served sashimi style and begins to“dance” when covered with soy sauce. To see this in action,visit http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dxQmOR_QLfQ.

15. “...100 BILLION” - There are many different estimates of thesefigures, and I have used the most recent, produced byStanford University's Smith Laboratory using the process ofarray tomography. A genuinely awe-inspiring flythrough ofa section of the somatosensory cortex of a mouse constructedfrom data collected using this process, can be found at -http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-YIYPSAyySg. (To be blunt,if this video does not amaze you, either you haven't fullyunderstood exactly what it is you are looking at, or worse,you do not have the capacity for awe.)

16. “one hundred quintillion” - This impressive number is roughly

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NOTES AND REFERENCES

equal to the estimated number of transistors on all of thecomputer chips in all of the computers in all of the world,and the number of possible states and variations within thismassive system actually exceeds the number of elementaryparticles in the universe.

21. “...touch something very hot” - I feel like I would emphasize herethat this is only a thought experiment, and that I do notrecommend actually doing this, except that I don't think Ishould presume to insult the reader's intelligence.

24. “...and then perhaps back out again.” - As we see in the case ofwhales and dolphins, two examples of mammals who hademerged from the fertile oceans onto land to becomesomething like a modern cow, before slowly descendingback into them. This remarkable transition having takenplace is evidenced in particular by the vestigial bones in thehind flippers of each. See an analysis of this on pg.s 169-170of Richard Dawkins' extraordinary book The Greatest Showon Earth (section “I Must Go Down to the Sea Again”).

27. “... produces the world in which we live” - The biological aspect ofthis, as well as the circumstances of its emergence, whilequite interesting in its own right, is both highly technical andhardly the model of scientific consensus. In order to avoidconfusion, and since this particular aspect of the discussionis not central to the aims of this book, I will leave it aside forthe time being.

CHAPTER THREE: The Mind

32. “...Lysenkoism” - Through most of their reign in the early part of

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NOTES AND REFERENCES

the 20th century the Soviets adopted the inaccuratebiological views of one Trofim Lysenko, who rejectedgenetics and falsely believed that the experience of theorganism itself controlled what within its make-up would bepassed down from generation to generation. Apart frombeing completely wrong, these views were very hostile to thestudy of genetics itself, and during this period the stateexecuted or imprisoned several prominent scientists andresearchers.

35. “...arriving from multiple avenues” - Even binocular rivalry,which is to say the competition between the version ofevents coming from each of your two individual eyes, issufficient to necessitate this kind of balancing.

40. “...memory, higher reasoning, and decision making” - It should benoted here that each of these are their own set of complexinteractions, and though these are carried out throughelaborate processes of relayed information I have simplifiedthem into single categorical operation sets for the time being.

47. “...match up with performed actions” - For more on this process,and on the consequences of its failure, see chapters 1 and 2of Vilyanur S. Ramachandran's book Phantoms in the Brainregarding his ingenious treatment of phantom limbs.

CHAPTER FOUR: Information

53. “...Any individual thing” - Obviously, while it can't be said thatentire transcriptions of all the laws of physics and chemistryare bound within each material on earth, each material andsubstance does contain representative examples of

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NOTES AND REFERENCES

interactions with these, and though I think it would be amistake to assert from these propositions that all theinformation in the universe is involved in any particularstring, these examples do form the body from whichdescriptions of those laws may be deduced. The MandelbrotSet, which we discussed in the first chapter, helps to explainthis peculiar feature of the natural world. You may easilywonder, “Well if the set is truly infinite, how is it that it cameto exist and be created at all?” In fact, the object is producedby a few simple lines of code, which build the set based oncontinuous iterations of a few simple, local, self-governingrules.

54. “...unit of information as a 'meme'” - For Dawkins' fulldescription, and his discussion of this unit's relationship togenes, see chapter 11 (Memes: the new replicators) in TheSelfish Gene.

55. “...the notes which they are meant to be playing” - Sound engineersmight scoff at that in fact, because even here there is roomfor slight variation, as each pitch falls on a specificwavelength of sound, and the tuning of any instrument toplay that sound can only approximate that exact wavelength.

56. “...can be discerned by the listener” - I knew of a french hornplayer in high school who once deliberately played the Lordof the Rings theme during a performance of a different piecejust so he could prove that no one could hear him.

57. “...produced a short video” - The original version of this video isavailable at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJG698U2Mvo.

59. “...one and only one again” - This is also true of some other kindsof illusions and visual oddities. Others, such as the Magic

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Eye series of images make it easy to see the second image ifone focuses on adapting their participations to fit therequired technique.“...more complex evaluations” - Another example of this effectis demonstrated by a famous drawing from the Belgiansurrealist René Magritte, which due to the unfortunaterealities of copyright law I am unable to include in this book.You may know it though, if I say that the drawing depicts aflat, brown and black tobacco pipe in profile, with the words“Ceci n'est pas une pipe” (“This is not a pipe”) underneath.

CHAPTER FIVE: Neuroeconomics

81. “...primeme status of its own” - Note too that in discussion of ameme for “red” there is still the question of which red weare referring to. The meme prime “Red” is more likely thecolor of apples and fire engines than it is a kind of red whichis closer to pink or orange. In fact, it is only because we as asociety now have so many kinds and versions of “orange”that we even use that color as a concept; there was a timewhen distinctly orange things were called “red” (robin red-breast, redheaded, etc.), and there was no real distinctionbetween the two.“...[Dennett] recognized that” - Dennett gave a remarkable talkon the subject at a TED conference in 2009, which includedsimilar analyses of how we have evolved to find certainthings cute, sexy, and funny. This video, along with atranscript, can be found at http://www.ted.com/

82. “... little good to be eaten” - Actually, this in itself should not be

158

NOTES AND REFERENCES

so quickly dismissed; if a piece of fruit such as a guava forinstance is sweeter to the taste to a hungry primate, its seedsare more likely to have the chance to stow away throughoutthe digestive process and be sewn over a wider area in theanimal's leavings than it would by simply falling from thetree upon which it was produced. This I think must be afairly clear extension of the metaphor.

CHAPTER SIX: Cooperation and Exchange

86. “...leaving aside” - I have dispensed with this considerationpartly because most of this variation is both subconsciousand difficult to study comprehensively

87. “...interaction between two individuals” - The diagram on thispage slightly belies the complexity of the interaction, if onlyby understating it. This is because the diagram shows twogeneralized individuals and their operator groups, ratherthan showing two specific individuals and their specificoperators, within which there is likely to be significantvariation.

91. “...certain people” - It is true that one also forms rudimentaryexchange relationships with the inanimate, such as one'scomputer or one's car keys or one's grocery store, being thatthere is an established reliability with regard to certainendeavors involving these things, and with our fellowanimals, to a certain extent, but these are more limited thanhuman interpersonal exchanges because of the significantlygreater exchange potential that there is in interacting with abeing of similar complexity and dynamism.

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CHAPTER EIGHT: Recovery and Therapy

107. “...simply do not exist” - At least for the time being. Whatsolutions there are are undefined with any clarity andlargely unsustainable.

109. “...selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI)” - Naturally, SSRIsand other antidepressant medications have their own set ofproblems, and they are by no means perfect drugs. Such asthey apply and are helpful in particular cases, however, theyare one of the few means of affecting real change in the livesand experiences of those who use them. It is up to thedevelopment of medical technology and theory to findsomething that works even better.“...the internet and other technologies” - At present I can neitherattack nor defend with particular confidence the oftencontended notion that the use of these technologies hasdetrimentally affected our internal capacities to conductthese processes unaided, nor can I comment on whether it iseven possible for them to do so. In any case I should say thatfor a number of reasons I find these worries distinctlyoverstated.

110. “...generally accepted understanding of memory” - The details ofthis process from the biological side are still something of ascientific puzzle, but by looking at memory as site- andcondition-specific forms of information recall, we can beginto examine the connection between remembered andincoming information. We do know that two things happenas things are experienced and re-experienced; the

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connections between the neurons that underlie thisexperience become stronger and, consistent with themyelination process described in chapter 2, thesetransmissions become faster, allowing similar transmissionsto travel more easily, along a cleaner path, as they areexperienced in the future.

111. “...which must naturally take place” - Traditionally, that is; shortof transcranial magnetic stimulation and other elaboratetechnological means of influence.

114. “...stimulated by something in the environment” - This refers towhat one might call Proustian connections with one'senvironment, after the French writer Marcel Proust, whosenovels frequently contained flashback sequences to thecharacters' childhoods which had been sparked byinteractions with things around them.

115. “...neuroplasticity” - Applications of this knowledge have beenwide, including a wave of “brain training” games and all theway up to therapeutic methods which promote significantrecovery of function following a stroke or traumatic braininjury.

CHAPTER NINE: Free Will

122. “...the limbic system” - The limbic system is one of the humanbrain's most crucial networks and, despite the fact that it isalso among the most heavily researched and wellunderstood, the complexity of its interactions and the widerange of behaviors in which it is involved make it the

161

NOTES AND REFERENCES

network to which I am most reluctant to apply sequentialoperational designations without further study. I can saywith only modest fear of contradiction, however, that itsexchanges lie comfortably within the central two columns ofthe diagram and portions of the interstitial ring.“...between higher cognitive functions” - An area called theprefrontal cortex lies at the cortical end of the limbic system,towards the top, and at the far end lie a pair of areas calledthe hypothalamus and the pituitary gland, which control thebody's endocrine, or hormonal, functions.

124. “...Corticotropin-releasing factor” - Also called corticotropin-releasing hormone.“...stress response” - The best book, by far, that I have read onthe stress response is Robert Sapolsky's Why Zebras Don'tGet Ulcers, and it is highly recommended for those who wantto understand this phenomenon from a biochemicalperspective.

125. “...insertion into the vein” - I am aware that this, despite itspopularity, is not the exclusive means of using this drug. Forour purposes however it is clearer and simpler to think of itthis way because it reduces the behavior to a single action.“...within seconds” - A good neurobiological view of this andother pleasure systems can be found in David J. Linden'sbook The Pleasure Compass.

129. “...In a novel” - The novel was Infinite Jest (1996).

135. “...things that increase the balance” - Unfortunately, when this isviewed solely in the very short term, when the gap betweenthe very high and the very low is fairly steep, in keepingwith what we saw in the early part of this chapter, this

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NOTES AND REFERENCES

begins to hint at what lies behind the comorbidity of suicidalideation and drug and alcohol addiction.“...our modified version of... free will” - This particular conceptis not my own, nor is it particularly new. An abstract versionof this modified, indirect form of free will is the centraltheme of Daniel Dennett's book Freedom Evolves. I decidednot to cite it directly in the text however because I wanted tomaintain the chapter's focus on the neuroeconomic processwithin that type of freedom.

163

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IMAGE CREDITS

1. (Cover) Public domain. Retrieved from:http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Reil.JPG.

2. Public domain. Retrieved from:http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hooke-microscope.png.

3. Public domain. Retrieved from:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Compoundeye.png.

4. Public domain. Retrieved from:http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Flea_Micrographia_Hooke.png.

167

BIBLIOGRAPHY

5. Public domain. Retrieved from:http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Haeckel_Stephoidea.jpg

6. Public domain. Retrieved from:http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Fractal_Mandelbrot.JPG.

7. Public domain. Retrieved from:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Hieroglyphic-brain.jpg.

8. Public domain. Retrieved from:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Galvani-frogs-legs-electricity.jpg.

9. Public domain. Retrieved from:http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:CajalCerebellum.jpg.

10. Public domain. Retrieved from:http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Neuron.jpg.

11. Public domain. Retrieved from:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Caffeine_and_adenosine.svg.

12. Public domain. Retrieved from:http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Darwin_tree.png.

13. Public domain. Retrieved from:http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Spandrel.jpg.

14. Model of the brain's information processing. Courtesy of theauthor.

15. Detail of the sensory track. Courtesy of the author.

16. Detail of the participatory track. Courtesy of the author.

17. Dyad set 1 (S/E, A/V, X/O, D/P). Courtesy of the author.

18. Dyad set 2 (E/A, V/X, O/D, P/S). Courtesy of the author.

19. Public domain. Retrieved from:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symphony_No._5_%28Beethoven%29.

20. Public domain. Retrieved from:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Duck-Rabbit_illusion.jpg.

21. Cooperative neuroeconomics. Courtesy of the author.

168

BIBLIOGRAPHY

22. Author photo. Courtesy of the author.

GENERAL REFERENCE/ALSO RECOMMENDED

Dan Ariely -Predictably Irrational

Daniel Dennett - Breaking the Spell

Michael Faraday - The Chemical History of a

Candle

James Gleick -Faster: The Acceleration of

Nearly Everything

Erving Goffman - Stigma: Notes on the

Management of a Spoiled Identity

Steven Pinker - The Blank SlateThe Stuff of Thought The Better Angels of Our Nature

Oliver Sacks -Island of the ColorblindAn Anthropologist on MarsThe Mind's EyeHallucinations

Robert Sapolsky -A Primate's MemoirThe Trouble with TestosteroneLecture: The uniqueness of

humans, available at http://www.ted.com/

169

Index

i denotes illustration

AA (assessive) category/track of

information processing, 38, 58, 104action potentials, 16, 17, 18, 19, 41i,

43i, 70actions, 36, 38acute stress, 103adaptationist fallacy, 31, 32addiction, 125, 126–130, 136adenosine, simplified, 19, 20adenosine triphosphate (ATP), 18,

19adrenaline, 33, 71Alcmaeon of Croton, 11alienation, 102altruistic behavior, 92amygdala, 124Ancient Egyptians, 11Ancient Greeks, 11animal instincts, 125animation, 12anxiety, 73, 99, 103apple, meme of, 60–63, 82Aristotle, 11artificial selection, 32aspirations, 103assessive (A) category/track of

information processing, 38, 58, 104assessive/evaluational (A/V) track

of processing, 44, 131

associational monopoly, 118ATP (adenosine triphosphate), 18,

19auditory information, 40, 41, 42, 56,

80autonomic functions, 106, 125autonomic internal responses, 46A/V (assessive/evaluational) track

of processing, 44, 131available (preoperational

designation), 75, 77, 78, 88avarice, 125Averroes, 12axons, 16, 17, 18, 18i, 70

Bbank 5, 76bank 22, 110banks, of information, 37, 39, 44, 45,

75, 76, 90, 95, 110basal ganglia, 44, 47Beethoven, Ludwig van, 55behavior

altruistic, 92based on distorted information,

111as continual balancing of

snapshots of circumstance, 72, 74

exchange, 92–93

INDEX

as information-seeking, 75irrationality of, 110nature of, 74–75primemetic representations of,

116behavioral disorders, 136Belyaev, Dmitri, 32, 33biochemical signaling/signals, 26,

41ibioelectricity, 12biofeedback mechanisms, 69biological cell, 3biological spandrels, 31bipolar disorder, 133blind associative fears, 119, 120blindness, 77, 81bonding, social, 93brain

active, dynamic, elastic quality of, 117

as adapting behaviors according to own needs, 48–49

as administering its responsibilities with parsimony, 48

Alcmaeon of Croton on, 11Aristotle on purpose of, 11and autonomic functions, 106cellular activity of, 15conditions/operations as

influenced by variations in chemical activity, 21

earliest mention of in medical literature, 10

evolution as tool for

understanding how structure ofemerged, 25

interactive components of, 15–16limbic system as emotional

center of, 125lower, 125not all of world's information as

available to, 29number of neurons in, 15operational classification of each

part of, 140as partitioning its cognitive

resources, 57as reducing information into

usable form, 53–54selection of information by, 69self-correcting system of, 62as specialized in function, 10as synthesizing common

elements of encounters, 61and the understanding of

complexity, 9breakdowns

informational kinds of, 75, 111mental, 95, 97, 100, 103nervous, 99, 100

Ccaffeine, 20cataracts, 75Catastrophic Exchange Disruption

(CED), 97, 98cell body, 16, 17, 18icell membrane, 15, 16, 17central nervous system, 34, 42

172

INDEX

cerebellum, innervation of, 46Chabris, Christopher, 57chemical, as correction, 111chemical energy, 22, 48chromatin, 24cognitive behavioral treatment, 117cognitive decision making, 123collaboration, 91communicable designation, 88compensatory participation, 79, 81complexity

images of, 1simplicity as arising from, 7as startling, 7of tiniest of things, 3understanding of, 9

computer imaging, 5Conglomerate Operational Realm,

40, 45consciousness, 11, 34contextual suitability, 61cooperative exchange, 88copying process, 24corneal opacity, 75cortical processes, 126corticotropin-releasing factor

(CRF), 126creativity, 125Crick, Francis, 24culture shock, 98–100

DD (directional/directive)

track/category of information processing, 38, 58, 104, 110

Darwin, Charles, 22, 24, 25, 48, 81Dawkins, Richard, 25, 54decision making, 40, 47, 107, 123,

124dendrites, 16, 17, 18i, 70Dennett, Daniel, 82–83deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA), 5, 24,

37depositional function, of operators,

39depression, 99, 103, 133, 136deprivations

experiential, 75, 77of information, 131

Descartes, René, 12desires, 125determinism, 123diabetic retinopathy, 75directional/directive (D)

track/category of information processing, 38, 58, 104, 110

directive/participatory (D/P) track of processing, 44

disruptive events, impact of, 97dissonant phenomena,

noncognitive/cognitive, 105distortions, 110, 111distress, 46, 95DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid), 5, 24,

37dopamine, 20, 126D/P (directive/participatory) track

of processing, 44dronefly, 3drug addiction, 136. See also

173

INDEX

addictionDutch Hunger Winter, 25dyads, 44, 45, 47, 58, 69, 104, 105,

106dysphoria, 133

EE (experiential) track/category of

information processing, 38, 58, 77, 104

E/A (experiential/assessive) track ofprocessing, 45

echolocation, 78–79, 81economic environmental landscape,

71, 100Edwin Smith Surgical Papyrus, 10Egyptian medicine, 10, 11elective interpersonal exchanges, 87electricity, 12, 17, 21electromagnetic radiation, 37electron microscopy, 5emergent traits, 32, 34emotion, 11, 69endorphins, 71energy

as factor in balance of neuroeconomic resources, 135

as factor in information processing, 22, 48, 58, 61, 69–70,79, 82, 106, 127, 135

finite quality of, 48generation of, 70

environmentimpact of on brain architecture

and behaviors, 9, 26

Ordinate External World, 36i, 37euphoria, 126, 127evaluational (V) track/category of

information processing, 38, 58, 106evaluational/exclusionary (V/X)

track of processing, 45event patterns, 116evolution, 25, 30, 31, 34, 66, 79, 84,

106, 115, 125, 131exchange behaviors, 92–93exchange participant, 90, 94exchanges

cooperative, 88elective interpersonal, 87of information, 91, 93, 94, 95maintenance over, 111metaphorical, 82

excitatory effects, 20exclusionary (X) track/category of

information processing, 38, 58, 106exclusionary operators, 110exclusionary/objectional (X/O) track

of processing, 44experience, range of, and range of

actions, 36experiential (E) track/category of

information processing, 38, 58, 77, 104

experiential deprivations, 75, 77experiential operators, 89experiential/assessive (E/A) track of

processing, 45exposure therapy, 119eyes, adaptation of, 30–31, 34

174

INDEX

Ffamine, impact of, 25–26fatigue, 19fears

acute, 72, 73blind associative, 119, 120irrational, 46

feedback, 69, 105fetal development, epigenetic

influences on, 25–265th Symphony (Beethoven), 55filters, 56filtration, 40, 42flexibility, element of in mind, 35focusing, goal-directed, 57fourth interstitial operator, 46free will

absence of, 124general form of legitimate free

will, 134and heroin addiction, 129modified version of, 135–136

frontal lobe, 124functional pathologies, 75functional selection, 65functions

autonomic, 106, 125depositional (of operators), 39intrinsic (of operators), 39maladaptive, 109optimistic, 103in organisms, 22, 23primeme, 63secondary transitive, 46, 48transitive, 39

transmutative, 39

GGalen, 12Galvani, Luigi, 12gene pool, 25genes, 9, 24, 25glaucoma, 75glucocorticoids, 71glucose, 83glutamate, 20goal-directed focusing, 57Golgi, Camillo, 13, 14Gould, Stephen Jay, 31graded potentials, 41i, 70

HHaeckel, Ernst, 4heart, as seat of consciousness,

emotion, and intelligence, 11heredity, 24heroin addiction, 124, 126–130higher reasoning, 40hippocampus, 124Hippocrates, 11Hooke, Robert, 2, 3

II2 (Second Interstitial) operators,

104infinity, 5information

bandwidth regarding quantity that can be processed, 65

banks of, 37, 39, 44, 45, 75, 76, 90,

175

INDEX

95, 110as brain's one concern, 107chain of operators, 38complex composites of

compared to discrete representations of, 54

conversion of by technology, 78coordination of by mind, 35density/weight of remembered

information, 116dissonance in, 107exchange of, 91, 93, 94, 95factors which bear upon

selection of, 65fidelity of, 105flow of, 104, 113, 115functional selection of, 65generation of, 70, 79groups of, 59interpretations of, 29as most fundamental substance,

51non-exclusive objection to, 46non-sensory, 46preoperational designations of,

75processing of. See information

processingproperties as related to, 52–53reduction of/parsing of, 56reintegration of, 114selection of, 75–76selective display/inventory of, 90strings of, 51visual, 76, 77, 80

words as related to, 51–52information processing

categories of, 38energy as factor in. See energy, as

factor in information processingoperational bandwidths of, 65rewards for efficiency in, 81time as factor in, 47, 66, 73, 79,

82, 105–106information traffic, 91informational competition, 119informational economic viability,

94informational monopoly, 118informational pathologies, 111informational popularity, 83–84informational poverty, 104infrared, 37inhibitory effects, 20integrated participations, 77–80intelligence, heart as seat of, 11internal environments, 124interpersonal communication, 90interrogative

assessment/modification, 114interstitial operator, basal ganglia's

role as, 47interstitial operator groups, 46interstitial ring, 46interventions, 113intrinsic functions, of operators, 39involuntary movements/acts, 46ion channels, 15, 19irrational fear, 46

176

INDEX

Jjamais vu, 102Jerusalem Syndrome, 99–100, 102

Llanguages, 7, 24, 51–52, 63, 64, 87,

93, 99, 139, 140l'esprit d'escalier, 105Lewontin, Richard, 31life

all different forms of as sharing common ancestry, 23

as more mechanical than magical, 13

ligands, 20limbic system, 124–125lower brain, 125

Mmacular degeneration, 75Maimonides, 12maintenance

of fidelity and viability of information, 111

over experience and exchanges, 111

major operator groups, 46. See also specific operator groups

maladaptive functions, 109Mandelbrot, Benoit, 5Mandelbrot set, 5–6mass, 5materials, as related to information,

52mathematics

discoveries in, 5as language of God, 51

matter, composition of, 5medicines, effects of, 110meltdowns, 101meme pool, 82memecular structure, 59memecules, 54, 60, 62, 82memeotemporal proximity, 73memes, 54, 60, 61, 62–63, 75, 82memetic organization, 59memodynamic efficiency, 61memorial events, 118memorial network, 115Memorial World, 40, 45, 93memory, 40, 80–81, 112, 115, 117,

118–119, 125mental breakdown, 95, 97, 100mental conditions, treatment of, 109mental constructs, 34mental pathology, 121metainformational processing, 35metaphorical transaction/exchange,

82Micrographia: or, Some physiological

descriptions of minute bodies made by magnifying glasses (Hooke), 2

microscope, 2, 13mind

as biological adaptation, 34brain's impact on, 9as brain's most relateable

construction, 16context of operation of, 30defined, 35

177

INDEX

flexibility in, 35Hippocrates on, 11not all of brain's information as

available to, 29powers of as limited, 29

Mitigational World, 40, 45monopoly, informational and

associational, 118Moscow Underground, 32motion, 5movements, 43imutation, random, 24myelin, 17, 18myelin sheath, 18imyelination process, 18

Nnatural adaptation, mind as

example of, 30natural selection, 25, 30, 74, 82nervous breakdowns, 99, 100nervous system

central, 34, 42communication of signals

throughout, 16peripheral, 40, 42study of, 9, 13

neural activity, 48, 112neural economy, 92, 97, 103neurocognitive resources, 119, 136neuroeconomic pressure, 104neuroeconomically emphatic, 69neuron firing, 17neurons, 13, 14, 15, 18, 19, 21, 70,

117

neuropsychology, 11neuroscience, 14, 117neurotransmitters, 15, 19, 20, 110,

111, 127neutrinos, 37Nobel Prize for Physiology or

Medicine (1906), 14Node of Ranvier, 18inon-available/selectable (-/+)

condition, 78noncognitive/cognitive dissonant

phenomena, 105non-directive participation, 46non-exclusive objection to

information, 46non-experiential evaluation of

sensory information, 46non-random natural selection, 25non-sensory information,

experience of, 46nucleus, of cell, 18i, 24nucleus accumbens, 126

Oobjectional (O) track/category of

information processing, 38, 58, 104objectional operators, 110objectional/directive (O/D) track of

processing, 45obsessive/irrational thinking, 105O/D dyad, 69OEW (Ordinate External World).

See Ordinate External World (OEW)

On the Origin of Species (Darwin), 22

178

INDEX

onchocerciasis (Robles' disease), 75operational bandwidths, of

information processing, 65operational suitability, 61operators. See also specific operators

availability of/proximity to, 80as continually seeking

specialized information, 82designation and arrangement of,

40duty of, 39exclusionary, 110experiential, 89interstitial groups of, 46intrinsic functions of, 39levels of within categories of

information processing, 38major groups of, 46. See also

specific operatorspreoperational designations, 75primary level of, 38Primary Participatory Operators

(P1), 43i, 44Primary Sensory Operators (S1),

40, 41iin procedural pathologies, 78quaternary level of, 38Quaternary Sensory Operators

(S4), 41i, 42Second Interstitial (I2) operators,

104secondary level of, 38Secondary Participatory

Operators (P2), 43i, 44

Secondary Sensory Operators (S2), 41i, 42

sensory, 89tertiary exclusionary, 110tertiary level of, 38Tertiary Participatory Operators

(P3), 43i, 44Tertiary Sensory Operators (S3),

41i, 42thermoceptive, 80

opiate compounds, 127opioid receptors, 127optical illusions, 58–59optimism/optimistic functions, 103Ordinate External World (OEW),

36i, 37, 38, 40, 45, 47, 54, 62, 66, 71–72, 89, 90, 100, 123

organic participations, 78, 79, 80, 109

organismsadaptive ability of, 47benefits of primeme-generating

information processing system on, 66

biological makeup of, 32complexity of, 4desire to process certain kinds of

information, 82memory and, 81properties/functions in, 22, 23proto-eyed, 35as sharing common ancestry, 37as sharing common bank of

information, 37

179

INDEX

stress response and, 126survival of, 25

oxidative phosphorylation, 19

PP (participatory) track/category of

information processing, 38, 47, 104P1 (Primary Participatory

Operators), 42, 43iP2 (Secondary Participatory

Operators), 43i, 44P3 (Tertiary Participatory

Operators), 43i, 44P4 (Quaternary Participatory

Operators), 43i, 44pain, 69, 71, 121, 129, 131panic disorders, 105paranoia, 105Paris Syndrome, 98–99, 102participations, 38. See also specific

participationsparticipatory (P) track/category of

information processing, 38, 47, 104participatory/sensory (P/S) track of

processing, 45pathologies

functional, 75informational, 111mental, 121procedural, 78of visual processing, 75

peripheral nervous system, 40, 42permissible designation, 88personal loss, 95, 97

pharmacological approaches, 109physics, discoveries in, 5pituitary gland, 126pleasure, 69, 71, 127potassium, 15potassium dichromate, 13potassium ions (K+), 16, 17potential exchange participant, 90potentiation, 18poverty, 125Poyarkov, Andrei, 33prenatal circumstances, impact of

on brain architecture and behaviors, 9

preoperational designations, of information, 75

primary level of operators, 38Primary Participatory Operators

(P1), 42, 43iPrimary Sensory Operators (S1), 40,

41i, 113primeme, 61, 64–66, 81, 82, 116primemetic associations, 119primemetic representations, 90, 93procedural pathologies, 78properties, as related to

information, 52–53protein switches, 15proteins, 9, 15protists, 4proto-eyed organism, 35P/S (participatory/sensory) track of

processing, 45Punnet square, 75i, 76Pythagoreans, 11

180

INDEX

Qquaternary level of operators, 38Quaternary Participatory Operators

(P4), 43i, 44Quaternary Sensory Operators (S4),

41i, 42

Rradio waves, 37radiolarians, 4, 37Ramón y Cajal, Santiago, 14random genetic variation, 25random mutation, 24range of actions, and range of

experience, 36rational decision making, 107, 124reasoning, higher, 40receptors, 15, 19, 20, 127refractory period, 17reintegration, 114, 117, 121reiteration, 65, 69Renaissance, and the study of the

brain, 12renegotiation process, 103repetition, 21, 69resonance, 41irewards

for adaptation to survival and reproduction, 82

for efficiency in information processing, 81

and limbic system, 125, 126, 127Robles' disease (onchocerciasis), 75Royal Society, 2

SS (sensory) track/category of

information processing, 38, 47, 75S1 (Primary Sensory Operators), 40,

41i, 113S2 (Secondary Sensory Operators),

41i, 42S3 (Tertiary Sensory Operators), 41i,

42S4 (Quaternary Sensory Operators),

41i, 42saccharides, 83Schwann cells, 18S/E (sensory/experiential) track of

processing, 44Second Interstitial (I2) operators,

104secondary level of operators, 38Secondary Participatory Operators

(P2), 43i, 44Secondary Sensory Operators (S2),

41i, 42secondary transitive function, 46, 48selectable (preoperational

designation), 75, 77, 78, 88selective serotonin reuptake

inhibitor (SSRI), 111sensation, 38sensation-to-action loop, 35sense organs, 40, 42sensory (S) track/category of

information processing, 38, 47, 75sensory feedback loop, 105

181

INDEX

sensory operators, 89sensory/experiential (S/E) track of

processing, 44serotonin, 111SEW (Subordinate External World),

40, 77, 93, 123, 132Siberian fox, domesticated, 32–33silver chromate, 13silver nitrate, 13Simons, Daniel, 57simplicity, as arising from

complexity, 7simplified adenosine, 19, 20sleep, 19sloth, 125social interaction, 83, 91, 92social networks, 95sodium, 15sodium ions (Na+), 16solicitative function, of operators,

39space, 5spandrels, biological, 31species

changes in appearances and attributes of, 22, 24–25

observed in single drops of seawater, 4

properties/functions in, 22SSRI (selective serotonin reuptake

inhibitor), 111staining technique, 13status, hierarchical system of

(governing variant selection), 60, 61

stimulusimpact of intensity of, 35, 71, 115neurons' responses to, 21, 69transmission of, 40, 42

stress, acute, 103stress hormones, 126stress response, 125strings, of information, 51Subordinate External World (SEW),

40, 77, 93, 123, 132suicide, 130–132synapses, 15system, self-correcting nature of, 81

Ttechnology

for converting information, 78use of in maintenance, 111

tertiary exclusionary operators, 110tertiary level of operators, 38Tertiary Participatory Operators

(P3), 43i, 44Tertiary Sensory Operators (S3), 41i,

42thinking, obsessive/irrational, 105time

as factor in balance of neuroeconomic resources, 135

as factor in complex traumas, 120as factor in information

processing, 47, 66, 73, 79, 82, 105–106

as factor of actions, 72torture, 124, 129trachoma, 75

182

INDEX

traitsemergent, 32, 34inheritance of, 24, 25

transcription, 34transitive function, 39transmission, 34transmutative functions, 39trauma, 10–11, 97, 100, 104, 120trepanation, 11

Uunipolar depression, 133

VV (evaluational) track/category of

information processing, 38, 58Vesalius, Andreas, 12vibration, 41iVictorian age, and the study of the

brain, 12visual information, 75, 77, 80visual processing, pathologies of,

76von Waldeyer-Hartz, Heinrich, 13,

15V/X (evaluational/exclusionary)

track of processing, 45V/X dyad, 58, 104, 105, 106

WWallace, David Foster, 131Watson, James, 24wishes, 125"wolf dogs," 32

wordsas extensions of primeme

function, 63as related to information, 51–52

XX (exclusionary) track/category of

information processing, 38, 58, 106x-ray crystallography, 5x-rays, 37

183

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

DANIEL R. THORNE is an independent researcherand natural philosopher in Denver, CO.

This is his first book.