The Unified Theory of the Nervous System
and Behavior
Cognitive Philosophy /Brain Theory by Steven Michael Harris
Doctors and researchers have identified various locations in the brain where they say that certain functions or abilities are located and where they say certain memories are located.
They find a cell in the brain and excite it with an electrical probe and the patient starts to experience the sounds of a particular symphony. The patient is hearing that piece of music every time the probe stimulates that particular cell, so the doctors say that the memory of music is stored in this part of the brain. (The other method of identifying these centers is to sever the connections or identify those with a lesion in that part of the brain and then discover what functions or memories are lost as a result.)
But the excitation of this cell results in the excitation of many cells throughout the brain.
The conclusion that particular abilities or particular memories are stored in certain regions of the brain (or even in certain cells of the brain) is a conclusion resulting from an incomplete understanding of the system and how it works.
Instead of saying that a certain function or memory is stored in a certain region of the brain, it would be more correct to say that the function or memory was intersecting to a greater degree in that part of the brain. (And this explanation is not perfect either, but it is the best explanation our language is going to provide at this time.)
(By the way: in the example of the doctor getting the same memory from stimulating the same cell and proclaiming that a particular memory is stored in that cell, they conveniently ignore the fact that the particular memory is not experienced every time that cell fires in the course of that person's brain activity. That cell is involved in other decisions and memories as well. They are just lucky to find a consistent experience of the patient under the influence of this unnatural clinical influence. Any conclusions drawn from this experiment must be doubted and disputed.)
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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.
