Perfectibility of Our Brain

Perfectibility – the Mixed Blessing

The idea of the brain as plastic has appeared in previous times, in flashes, then disappeared. But even though it is only now being established as a fact of mainstream science, these earlier appearances left their traces and made possible a receptivity to the idea, in spite of the enormous opposition each of the neuroplasticians faced from fellow scientists.

As early as 1762 the Swiss philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778), who faulted the mechanistic view of nature of his time, argued that nature was alive and had a history and was changing over time; our nervous systems are not like machines, he said, but are alive and able to change. In his booke Émile, or on Education – the first detailed book on child development ever written – he proposed that the “organization of the brain” was affected by our experience, and that we need to “exercise” our senses and mental abilities the way we exercise our muscles. Rousseau maintained that even our emotions and passions are, to a great extent, learned early in childhood. He imagined radically transforming human education and culture, based on the premise that many aspects of our nature that we think are fixed are, in fact, changeable and that this malleability is a defining human trait. He wrote, “To understand a man, look to men; and to understand men, look to the animals.” When he compared us with other species, he saw what he called human “perfectibility” - and brought the French word perfectibilité into vogue – using it to describe a specifically human plasticity or malleability, which distinguishes us in degree from animals. Several months after an animal's birth, he observed, it is for the most part what it will be for the rest of its life. But human beings change throughout life because of their “perfectibility”.

While we may rejoice at the thought that the brain and human nature may be “improved”, the idea of human perfectibility or plasticity stirs up a hornet's nest of moral problems. Illustration by Elena.

It was our “perfectibility”, he argued, that allowed us to develop different kinds of mental faculties and to change the balance among our existing mental faculties and senses, but this could also be problematic because it disrupted the natural balance of our senses. Because our brains were so sensitive to experience, they were also more vulnerable to being shaped by it. Educational schools such as the Montessori School, with its emphasis on the education of the senses, grew out of Rousseau's observations. He was also the precursor to McLuhan, who would argue centuries later that certain technologies and media alter the ratio of balance of the senses. When we say that the instantaneous electronic media, television sound bites, and a shift away from literacy have created overly intense, “wired” people with short attention spans, we are speaking Rousseau's language, about a new kind of environmental problem that interferes with our cognition. Rousseau was also concerned that the balance between our senses and our imagination can be disturbed by the wrong kinds of experience.

In 1783 Rousseau's contemporary Charles Bonnet (1720-1793), also a Swiss philosopher and a naturalist familiar with Rousseau's writings, wrote to an Italian scientist, Michel Vincenzo Malacarne (1744-1816), proposing that neural tissue might respond to exercise as do muscles. Malacarne set out to test Bonnet's hypothesis experimentally. He took pairs of birds that came from the same clutch of eggs and raised half of them under enriched circumstances, stimulated bu intensive training for several years. The other half received no training. He did the same experiment with litter-mate dogs. When Malacarne sacrificed the animals and compared their brain size, he found that the animals that received training had larger brains, particularly in a part of the brain called the cerebellum, demonstrating the influence of “enriched circumstances” and “training” on the development of an individual's brain. Malacarne's work was all but forgotten, until revived and mastered by Rosenzweig, and others in the twentieth century.

Though Rousseau, who died in 1778, could not have known Malacarne's results, he showed an uncanny ability to anticipate what perfectibility meant for humanity. It provided hope but was not always a blessing. Because we could change, we did not always know what was natural in us and what was acquired from our culture. Because we could change, we could be overly shaped by culture and society, to a point where we drifted too far from our true nature and became alienated from ourselves.

Perfectibility means that we can no longer be so certain about what it means to perfect ourselves. Photo by Elena.

(The Brain That Changes Itself by Norman Doidge, M.D., excerpt).

Where Is Prague?

Cosmic Mystery or the Hand of God, Geometer

Johannes Kepler stood at a cusp in history; the last scientific astrologer was the first astrophysicist of the Earth.

In 1598, one of the many premonitory tremors of the coming Thirty Years’ War engulfed Kepler, a provincial schoolteacher of humble origins, absolutely unknown to all but a few scientists. He was living in Graz, a cozy German town, when the war began. Fortunately for Kepler, Tycho Brahe, a famous astronomer offered the mathematician to join him in Prague.

Leaving Graz, Kepler, his wife and stepdaughter set out on the difficult journey to Prague.

Chronically ill, having lost two young children, his wife was described as “ignorant”. She had no understanding of her husband’s work and, having been raised among the minor rural gentry, she despised his impecunious profession. She didn’t know where Prague was and what country was it the capital of.

Kepler for his part described his thoughts toward his wife as follows: "for my studies sometimes made me thoughtless; but I learned my lesson, I learned to have patience with her. When I saw that she took my words to heart, I would rather have bitten by own finger to give her further offense”.

But Kepler aspired to become a colleague of the great Tycho Brahe, who for thirty-five years had devoted himself to the measurement of a clockwork universe, ordered and precise.

Kepler’s expectations were to be unfulfilled. Tycho himself was a flamboyant figure, festooned with a golden nose, the original having been lost in a student duel.

“Hypocrisy I have never learned. I am in earnest about faith. I do not play with it”, Kepler said and he tried to work harder and harder in order to forget that his wife didn’t know where they lived.

Kepler’s fundamental innovation is nothing short of breathtaking: he proposed that quantitative physical laws that apply to the Earth are also the underpinnings of quantitative physical laws that govern the heavens. It was the first non-mystical explanation of motion in the heavens. This discovery made the Earth a province of the Cosmos.

“Astronomy”, Kepler said, “is part of physics”. He considered that his first aim was to show that “the celestial machine is to be likened not to a divine organism but rather to a clockwork…, insofar as nearly all the manifold movements are carried out by means of a single, quite simple magnetic force, as in the case of clockwork, where all motions are caused by a simple weight.”

There were only six planets known in Kepler’s time : Mercury, Venus, Earth,  Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. Kepler wondered, why only six? Why not twenty or a hundred? Why did they have the spacing between their orbits that Copernicus had deduced? No one has ever asked such questions before. There were known five regular or “platonic” solids, whose sides where regular polygons, as known to the ancient Greek mathematicians after their time of Pythagoras.

Curiously enough, within the symphony of voices, Kepler believed that the speed of each planet correspond to certain notes in the Latinate musical scale popular in his day – do, re, mi, fa, sol, la, ti, do. He claimed that in the harmony of the spheres, the tones of Earth are fa and mi, that the Earth is forever humming fa and mi, and that they stand in a straightforward way for the Latin word for famine.

Kepler believed he had recognised the invisible supporting structures for the spheres of the six planets. He called his revelation the Cosmic Mystery and thought that connection between the solids of Pythagoras and the disposition of the planets could admit but one explanation: The Hand of God, Geometer.

One week after Kepler’s discovery of his third law of nature, the incident that unleashed the Thirty Years’ War transpired in Prague. The war’s convulsions shattered the lives of millions, Kepler among them. He lost his wife and son to an epidemic carried by the soldiery, his royal patron was deposed, and he was excommunicated by the Lutheran Church for his uncompromising individualism on matters of doctrine. Johannes Kepler was a refugee once again. He had envisioned Tycho’s domain as a refuge from the evils of the time, as the place where his Cosmic Mystery would be confirmed, but he had to flee Prague, a town whose whereabouts his wife ignored.

The Hand of God, Geometer, revealed the Cosmic Mystery and created a Holy Geometry. Image by © Megan Jorgensen.

Embracing Our Cosmic Insignificance

Embracing Our Cosmic Insignificance 

Some find life too short because spanning an average of 67 years it seems too short to have any meaning. Other say it is too long and intentionally shorten their life story, but one thing is certain about living it eventually ends. The story of every fruit fly, king, janitor, beggar, computer guru, politician and so on doesn’t have a happy ending. We all perish and we perish only once.

This insignificance of life has bothered many of us, as our single and short life implies that it can be taken lightly. However, the fact that we are given just one life – no second chances, no secret shortcuts to endless options, no dress rehearsals – makes the lightness unbearable.

This lightness of being from the cosmic point of view proves to be liberating and a little less unbearable because it reminds us how fortunate we are for our existence. So let’s take several steps back and examine our current position. In doing so, we find what is perhaps best said by Daniel Dennett:

Every living thing is, from the cosmic perspective, incredibly lucky simply to be alive. Most, 90 percent and more, of all the organisms that have ever lived have died without viable offspring, but not a single one of your ancestors, going back to the dawn of life on Earth, suffered that normal misfortune.

You spring from an unbroken line of winners going back millions of generations, and those winners were, in every generation, the luckiest of the lucky, one out of a thousand or even a million. So however unlucky you may be on some occasion today, your presence on the planet testifies to the role luck has played in your past.

Carl Sagan also offers this cosmic perspective which helps us view our beloved Earth a “pale blue dot”. As soon as we adapt this vision, patriotism, nationalism and other dangerous words, which usually end in –ism or –ion, suddenly lose their importance. Instead, according to Carl Sagan, it highlights the importance of dealing more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the only home we’ve ever known.

Nei Degrasse Tyson, the Carl Sagan of today shares the same opinion. He argues that visiting Sagan’s cosmic vantage points renders the constant conflicts in the name of boundaries or religion immature, silly and egoistic. This is similar to an adult (a word to which we generously associate the labels matured and grown-up) who treats a child’s complaints about broken toys and bruised knees as small problems (however these accidents are all traumatic experience to a kid).

Astronomy is unfairly and unfortunately considered “useless” compared to other sciences. However it has the power to reform our character and behaviour towards each other and the world we live in. It has the power to expand our view.

Astronomy lowers the omnipresent egoistic sentiments related to social status, culture, race, language. Lessons learnt through astronomy are capable of maturing up the mindset of any individual, family, institution, corporation and country.

Anyone who relishes the cosmic outlook will have qualities that will make him or her a better policy maker.

Thus, a crash course in astronomy is needed at every level. The situation should inspire us to spend less time on our cell phones and social media sites. It should broaden our minds, reduce unattractive competitiveness over journal names with the number of pages one has published in comparison with his or her neighbor. As researchers we should develop our attitudes towards learning.

As human beings, we should humble us down so that we can live up to our scientific name – homo sapiens (wise man).

We don’t suggest replacing the Bible in the motel rooms with a picture of the universe and an arrow showing where we are. We think this picture should complete the offer. Thus we could truly develop this fraction of an iota of a crumb of a grain of the universe which we call home.

Steve Jobs, an undeniable innovative man, said once (and we see here how our mortality influences our thoughts): “Remembering that you are going to die is the best way that I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose”. Yes, Steve Jobs used his cosmic lessons selectively, but these words illustrate the fact that our unbearably light life can be full of lights for everyone.

Cosmic Insignificance. “As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods. They kill us for their sport.” (William Shakespeare, King Lear). Illustration by Elena.

Termites

Termites

I don’t suppose you know much about termites, so I’ll remind you of the salient facts. They are among the most highly evolved of the social insects, and live in vast colonies throughout the tropics. They can’t stand cold weather, nor, oddly enough, can they endure direct sunlight. When they have to get from one place to another, they construct little covered roadways.

The termites seem to have some unknown and almost instantaneous means of communication, and though the individual termites are pretty helpless and dumb, a whole colony behaves like an intelligent animal.

Some writers have drawn comparisons between a termitary and a human body, which is also composed of individual living cells making up an entity much higher than the basic units.

These creatures are often called “white ants”, but that’s a completely incorrect name as they aren’t ants at all but quite a different species of insect.

Excuse this little lecture, but I get quite enthusiastic about termites myself. Did you know, for example, that they not only cultivate gardens but also keep cows – insect cows, of course – and milk the, Yes, the termites are sophisticated little devils, even though they do it all by instinct (supposedly).

To communicate with termites, we must do for them what von Frische had done with bees – he’d learned their language. But the language of the termites is much more complex than the system of communication that bees use, which as you probably know, is based on dancing.

Our technology enables us to listen to the termites talking among each other, but also permit us to speak to them. Actually that’s not as fantastic as it sounds, if you we use the word “speak” in its widest sense. We speak to a good many animals – not always with our voices, by any means. When you throw a stick for your dog and expect him to run and fetch it, that’s a form of speech - sign language. Thus we could work out some kind of code which the termites understand, though how efficient it will be at communicating ideas I didn’t know…

Have you ever wondered who will take over when we, the Humans, are finished? Remember that the termites, as individuals, have virtually no intelligence. But their colony as a whole is a very high type of organisms – and an immortal one, barring accidents. Their progress froze in its present instinctive pattern millions of years before Man was born, and by itself it can never escape from its present sterile perfection. It has reached a dead-end – because the termites have no tools, no effective way of controlling nature. But you cannot judge the termitary by human standards. What we can hope to do is to jolt its rigid, frozen culture – to knock it out of the groove in which it has stuck for so many millions of years. I will give it tools and new techniques, and before the next generation comes we’ll to see the termites beginning to invent things for themselves.

I do not believe that Man will survive, yet I hope some of the things he has discovered, will be preserved by the next tenants of the Earth. If the Man is to be a dead-end, another race should be given a helping hand. A supertermite, if it ever evolves, will have to remain for millions of years and reach a very high level of attainment.

Besides, Man has no rival on this planet and thus it may do him good to have one. It may be the Mankind’s salvation. (Not that I’m hostile to mankind. In fact, I’m sorry for it. I simply believe that humanity had shot its bolt, and I wish to save something from the wreckage. Perhaps there may be some kind of mutual understanding, since two cultures so utterly dissimilar as Man and Termite need have no cause for military conflict. But I couldn’t really believe this, and if a contest comes, I’m not certain who will win. For what use would man’s weapons be against an intelligent enemy who could lay waste all the wheat fields and all the rice crops in the world?

I think we should let the termites have their chance. I don’t see how they could make a worse job of it than we’ve done. Illustration : Megan Jorgensen.

Neutron Star

Neutron Star

Neutron star matter weighs about the same as an ordinary mountain per teaspoonful – so much that if you had a piece of neutron star and let it go (hum… you could hardly do otherwise), it might pass effortlessly through the Earth like a falling stone through air, carving a hole for itself completely through our planet and emerging out the other side – perhaps in China.

If a peace of neutron star matter were dropped from nearby space, with the Earth rotating beneath it as it fell, it would plunge repeatedly through, punching hundreds of thousands of holes before friction with the interior of our planet stopped the motion.

Let’s imagine: people there might be out for a stroll, minding their own business, when a tiny lump of neutron star plummets out of the ground, hovers for a moment, and then returns beneath the Earth, providing at least a diversion from the routine of the day.

Before it comes to rest at the center of the Earth, the inside of our planet might look briefly like a Swiss cheese until the subterranean flow of rock and metal healed the wounds.

Large lumps of neutron star matter are unknown on Earth. But small lumps are everywhere. The awesome power of the neutron star is lurking in the nucleus of every atom, hidden in every teacup and dormouse, every breath of air, every apple pie. The neutron star teaches us respect for the commonplace.

A star like the Sun will end its days, as we know, as a red giant and then a white dwarf. A collapsing star twice as massive as the Sun will become a supernova and then a neutron star. But a massive star, left, after its supernova phase, with, say, five times the Sun’s mass, has an even more remarkable fate reserved for it – its gravity will turn it into a black hole.

Thermonuclear reactions in the solar interior support the outer layers of the Sun and postpone for billions of years a catastrophic gravitational collapse.

For white dwarfs, the pressure of the electrons, stripped from their nuclei, holds the star up. For neutron stars, the pressure of the neutrons staves off gravity. But for an elderly star left after supernova explosions and other impetuosities with more than several times the Sun’s mass, there are no forces known that can prevent collapse.

The star shrinks incredibly, spins, reddens and disappears. A massive star will shrink until it is the size of a city, the crushing gravity acts irrevocably, and the star slips through a self-generated crack in the space-time continuum and vanishes from our universe.

What if every neutron star is an intelligent being? Image : © Megan Jorgensen.