The Unified Theory of the Nervous System
and Behavior
Cognitive Philosophy /Brain Theory by Steven Michael Harris
Imagine there’s a small city telephone system with a telephone operator who has a compulsion to listen in on phone calls. This operator can try to listen in but needs to be very careful about not being caught.
The system is wired in an unusual way. The various people throughout the city are able to have private calls, one-on-one, but the operator is not technically able to isolate particular phone calls. When the operator listens in, he hears every call in the city all at once. When doing so there is no way of understanding anything because all of the calls at once sound like a meaningless noise (although it is meaningful to hear the noise and know that the system is working properly). It is the roar of a large crowd of people.
But there is a way around it.
The engineers set up the system so that volume switches can have an effect on the phone calls of segments of the population identified by occupation. It is possible to change the volume of every phone call of the lawyers, or the store clerks, or the doctors.
Should the operator change the volume on any of these groups to listen in, the people having the particular phone calls will hear a change in the volume of their calls as well. So listening in is very tricky.
For the operator to listen in and actually understand snippets of the various phone calls of beauticians (his girlfriend is a beautician), it does no good to turn up the volume of the beautician control because to add more volume to the din of every phone call at once does not help to isolate that group and hear anything... it is still the roar of a crowd.
The only way to focus on the beauticians’ calls and understand anything requires turning the volume down on all of the other groups so the beauticians’ calls can stand out and the beauticians’ calls can then be heard and somewhat understood.
But he must be careful about this. The beauticians are not on the phone talking just to other beauticians and turning down those other lines will have some affect on the phone calls of the beauticians as well. So the volume can’t be turned down too much.
Turning the volume down too much on any particular group can also interrupt their ability to have a phone call and could interrupt the functioning of the phone system for these people and the others they are speaking with. So the operator could get caught for this.
To focus on one group of calls and listen in requires dampening the volume of all other calls just enough so the volume of their calls is diminished but they are still able to communicate.
This is the mechanism of focus for this operator.
Now suppose this operator has been caught and fired and a new operator is now at the switchboard. This operator has not been told about the system but is able to fool around with the system and see what happens when various knobs are turned.
This second operator turns one of the knobs down at a time when there is a local election and for some reason this action results in democrats being much more effective in getting out the vote and winning the election.
So the operator over the years makes some experiments and discovers that the democrats do better whenever the knob is turned. The operator makes the conclusion that the knob has something to do with helping the functioning of democrats.
But in reality, the operator was turning off the phone calls of local business owners and this group of people tended to be predominantly republican in this city. Turning off their phone calls made it impossible for the republican volunteers to get out the vote in their phone drives.
The phone line had nothing to do with democrats. It was just a way of focusing on another group of phone lines having to do with small business. But playing with the knob had an indirect effect on this other kind of functioning of the community.
Think of the various knobs isolating groupings of phone calls by volume as like the neurotransmitters of the nervous system that can be generated in the brain to provide a mechanism of focus in thinking by dampening the firing of various centers of the brain except the regions of focus.
Think of second operator in this story as like the doctors and researchers struggling to make sense of these chemicals by experimenting with medications (one by one, instead of temporarily all but one like the brain) and using the changes in functioning to (wrongfully) conclude that the brain uses these chemicals as regulators of the functions that are affected by the medication.
In the phone system analogy, the functioning of the city is maintained by various single communications call by call. The phone system really has nothing to do with the communications of various people with each other in the city. Each phone call makes a different deal and the intelligence of the system has to do with the intelligence of those communications. But indirectly changing the phone system by shutting off regions of calling has an indirect effect on some functioning of the community. That does not mean that that functioning of the community is caused by any particular control knob at the phone company.
In the nervous system the various neurotransmitters are able to temporarily isolate various regions of the brain as a mechanism of focus. The various neurotransmitters are not regulators of various kinds of processing as the doctors maintain because the processing that runs the body is performed by individual decisions of the various cells relative to inhibition or excitation and the influences coming from the nature of the firings of the particular cells that are providing input to each cell. (The particular chemical that is used in a synapse for excitation or inhibition does not matter in the mechanisms for intelligence.)
[Click to Go Back to Unified Theory Directory Page]
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.
