The Unified Theory of the Nervous System
and Behavior
Cognitive Philosophy /Brain Theory by Steven Michael Harris
We can explain most of our sensations and abilities in terms of clear needs for survival.
This could be a very long list.
There is an emotional component to every sensual experience as well. Emotion seems to be in everything, but the advantage emotion gives us in survival may not be obvious.
A very loud noise surprises you from behind and you flinch. Muscles throughout your body contract and the body bends forward suddenly. Objects in your grasp are dropped. Thoughts in your mind are dropped. The eyes close tightly and the muscles in the face contract into an expression of extreme stress. Almost every part of the nervous system is affected by such a sudden and extreme change in the environment. The reaction is one of violence. This is an emotional reaction.
A second or two later you are able to process and understand if the noise is coming from a dangerous event that needs to be avoided or from a benevolent friend who is surprising you from behind. In seconds the emotional response to the situation could be extreme fear or violence, or it could be joy. And if the emotion changes to joy at being surprised by a long-lost friend, the emotion of joy can come to you before you fully remember who it is that is surprising you.
You are able to react emotionally to the situation faster than you are able to process an understanding of what is happening in the environment and understand the situation. The emotional reaction involves all of your systems at once. (This quick emotional reaction is the nature of the quick instinctual reactions of animals.)
The fast response of the emotional flinching reaction is protective because it could protect you from a fast-moving danger before you could understand what was happening.
Emotion is basic to the experience of every cell in the nervous system. Nerve cells use emotion as the basis for the calculations that are being performed. I will later show how this emotional experience is coordinated on the cellular level to make intelligence possible.
Most of what we call emotion is really a straw poll of what is going on in the many systems of the body at the same time. An emotion could be a register of activity in various realms of experience that have no relation to each other except through an emotional understanding. Brain cells that have many connections to a wide-array of different areas of perception and processing are measuring emotion in the system. (Emotion is not centered in any part of the nervous system as is suggested by current medical understanding, but it is measured in such centers, or it can be said to converge or intersect in such centers of the brain.)
The fact that emotion is in evidence in everything, and that the experience of everything at once can only be pinned down as an experience of emotion, is all evidence that perhaps the basic experience of a singular cell is an emotional unit of experience as well. Whatever is happening in the individual cell when in different states must be representational of other influences to the organism and must be in some form itself that cuts across all areas of experience. The experience of a single cell responding to light, or touch, or sound is the same. That experience is something apart from light or touch or sound but in reacting to the influence becomes part of it as well.
The wide variety of different emotions that we describe are really the same range of emotions from good to bad (pleasure to pain, happy to sad...) measured in relation to different topics or sensory experiences. And the different sensations are also emotional measures: sweet and sour, light and dark, etc..
The evidence that pain and pleasure of a cell respond to influences of light and dark or one range of wavelengths of light over another, for instance, is very subtle evidence in daily experience, but sometimes such evidence of this theory can be dramatic in the case of disorders such as seasonal affective disorder.
Every cell in the brain has the same range of emotion. It is the same range of emotion that is necessary for the survival of any life form: pleasure and pain.
To be a successful organism of any kind, it is necessary to use pleasure to seek health and success and to use pain to avoid danger and damage or death. It is very difficult for us to comprehend the possibility of this, but the seeking of pleasure and the avoidance of pain are necessary for single cell organisms and also necessary for single cells of our nervous system (as any large organism is really a cooperating colony of single-cell organisms).
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Many of the problems of medicine, biology, psychology and philosophy require an understanding of the basic mathematical principles behind how the nervous system does what it does to achieve function and experience, and that mathematics is not explained using narrowly-focused statistics. Understanding how this math works will be the tool for the discovery of many answers of great importance to humanity. The case for this concept and the offering of an explanation of this kind of math is made in the many essays of this website.
On these pages you will find ideas that should haunt you. Included are new concepts in science, medicine, sociology, evolutionary psychology, philosophy and more...
This website and the podcasts of Everyone's Revolution explain how the brain creates the mind, but many side issues must be resolved in order to teach this material. Once you realize that the "hard problems" are really the first problems to be answered, you then have a tool for changing all of science and medicine by explaining a massive number of discoveries that will fall into line in order to unify the evidence. All of the evidence is good. The interpretations of the evidence are mistaken in many cases. For ten years now there have been new discoveries of evidence that all move in the direction of supporting this theory (or this school of many theories) and its predictions. Quite a few people have started to pay attention to this theory as well.
The newest developments and communications concerning this broad-reaching theory are presented these days in podcast form. "Everyone's Revolution" is the podcast of The Unified Theory of the Nervous System and Behavior. With tens of thousands of downloads, it is the best place to be bringing forth new ideas and new implications concerning the basic ideas that were first articulated in these essays mostly a decade ago. As one neuroscience grad student fan of mine wrote - "you will be hard pressed to find a grad student without an iPod. The podcasts are a great place to hear your ideas." Besides - the broad reach of these theories causes some to pass judgment on my work as "crazy" without investigation, but it is easier to get a sense of what this is all about when you can hear the sound of my voice and the logic of the evidence presented in the podcasts. (The podcast form is much more forgiving and easier for me as well.)
