How you programme your own brain

This is another article in my challenging of conventional thinking about human psychology phenomenon that we take for granted. This article originates in a number of lunch conversions I has some years ago at Commons with Prof Ian Robertson, Director of the Neuroscience Institute at Trinity College Dublin.

Ian’s first challenge when setting up the Institute was to work collaboratively with other similar institutes around the world to design equipment to monitor brain (more specifically cortical) activity unobtrusively. He and his colleagues had observed that what we knew scientifically about brain function was deducted from mental and physical dysfunction following brain injury. With the development of the motor car and industrialised warfare, case studies of the relationship between brain injury and human mental and physical dysfunction became relatively abundant. The modern research issue Ian and his colleagues faced was firstly that such case studies were individual cases not population based studies and secondly that there was a high risk that brain damage cases were not ‘typical” in that other physical and psychological damage will have occurred in addition to the specific areas being examined.

Less intrusive methods of studying brain function were developed in the 1950’s and 60s to map dead brain tissue prior to brain surgery. These involved drilling a hole in the patient’s skull and inserting and electronic probe. When a small electric charge was delivered the patient reported sensations, memories, sounds etc, and it was concluded that the area of the brain that the needle was in was therefore responsible for that specific function. If there was no response it was concluded that the needle was in dead tissue. Of course, today this invasive technique has given way to modern developments such as CAT Scans. From the perspective of population studies of brain function however the limitation of this method of research is the very serious restrictions it placed on recruiting volunteers on any scale whatsoever.

Complex maps and models of human and animal brains were thus developed locating physical, cognitive, emotional and behavioural functions in specific physical structures in the brain following the biological principle of structure determining function. Hearts pump blood, lungs breathe, veins and arteries carry blood, glands produce hormones, cavities provide environments for bacteria, etc. Although we all now recognise Fowler’s phrenology as a piece of 19th Century quackery, it followed a similar logic – specific parts of the brain do specific things.

Ian’s team took delivery of the boxes of headsets, monitoring and recording equipment including screens that displayed cortical activity. Ian reports a degree of excitement and scientific playfulness in the atmosphere. Just prior to the completion of the construction of the four sets, Ian decided that they should all be looking at the same object when they turned on the machines. He casually took the closest object to hand, the apple from his lunchbox and placed it on the desk at which they were sitting. 

As the pattern emerged on the screens something utterly unexpected appeared. All four subjects (researchers)  were processing the apple in multiple places in the cortex and all four were processing it in different places! Being sceptical scientist a couple of hundred subjects were then run through the headsets – still using an apple albeit a different one each day. And yes the structure of the cortex does not determine its function - people process objects in multiple places in the cortex and each of us process them in different places. There was no left brain – right brain distinction either and the frontal lobe was just as likely to be involved in processing apples as any other part of the cortex.  Is it time for a serious rethink about brain function?

One of the first basic principles of brain plasticity is that “neurons that fire together, wire together”. This must also be true of the developing nervous system and the brain. As babies develop nerve systems form, receptor organs begin to develop and brain cells accumulate in the scull. All these are pretty much unconnected initially but as they begin to join up signals begin to travel randomly along and between them.

The sensory experience of the unborn baby is very rich. There is an enormous amount of noise in there and a great deal of movement and the influence of gravity, but not much else. Sound and movement receptors pick these up send nerve impulses down the developing conductors where they run amok among the jungle of unconnected brain cells. Where sound and movement signals randomly cross, pathways fuses. Perhaps music and dance are the very first cognitive function that the brain develops.

After birth this process continues. The production of brain cells continues after birth and as the cortex doubles in size it pushes out the soft bone of the scull to form a rounded shape at the back of the head and a forehead at the front. Free of the confines of the womb, these new brain cells are now bombarded with a mass of new signals; light and dark, more complex sounds, touch, taste, smell, hot and cold, pain, hunger, etc. As new sets of connections are formed in these new cells, layers of complexity develop. Effectively we program our own brains from the time our nervous system begins to develop, creating our own unique network of cognitive function.

Generally speaking our gestation experience and exposure to our environment in the womb is relatively similar wherever the experience happens in the world. As mammals we maintain the same body temperatures, make the same internal movements and are exposed to very similar sounds and physical forces. Once we get out things change rapidly. New pathways form in both the old brain cells and in the new ones in the frontal lobe.

Maybe there are many more things to explore and to challenge our assumptions about how the brain works. Obviously neural pathways are only part of it.  Have you ever watched the jam slid off the cream on your scone?  How powerful is the pull of gravity? If a baby was to develop in space (a weightless environment) would their brain develop differently?

The above insights explain

Why we assumed that specific areas of the cortex were responsible for specific functions, how we discovered this was probably wrong, and how we self-program our own brains to work uniquely for us. We need to be extremely careful about brain function thinking and wary of the tendency to fit new knowledge into existing frameworks. It is probably also worth trying to figure out what human intelligence is first before trying to replicate it artificially.