The Unified Theory of the Nervous System
and Behavior
Cognitive Philosophy /Brain Theory by Steven Michael Harris
Scientists and doctors in the field of neurology have made claims that there is no coordinated language of the nervous system in the manner of nerve cell firings. To make the discovery of such a language requires new ways of looking at various experiences and new ways of looking at the nature of those firings. (I’ll get to the explanation of how the frequencies of the firings are able to communicate the language in a later essay.)
To look at an organism and be able to see the language of the nerve cells is like looking at the programs operating on your computer and using that information to figure out that the system is running on a binary series of 1’s and 0’s. Fortunately, the nervous system has more logic that is embedded in the basic nerve coordination than a computer (as a computer programmer can use the machine language in any arbitrary way for the purposes at hand).
The language that is coordinated in the central nervous system is very consistent (in the brain). Evolution has needed to make a few twists and turns in that language at the periphery of the nervous system for the success of the larger organisms that have evolved (in the control of muscles and movement especially). The coordinated language of nerve cell firings makes all intelligence possible.
When you touch something that is cold you feel cold. If you touch something that is extremely cold (such as dry ice) you feel a burning sensation. Too much cold becomes hot. But when you touch something that is hot you feel hot, but when you are exposed to too much heat you don't feel cold. Too much hot does not become cold. (Too much hot can cause a temporary deadening of feeling - the reason a cook might burn a finger twice to make the pain go away.)
If you look at light you see light. Should you look directly into a very bright light you could go blind. Too much light becomes dark. But too much dark does not make you see light.
Eat something that is sweet and it is pleasurable. Eat something that is too sweet (such as an artificial sweetener that is in too concentrated a form) and it tastes bad. But eat something that tastes foul or bitter or toxic and it tastes bad in any concentration. (Too much foul taste does not end up tasting sweet.)
We tend to think that if something happening is too good it might be bad ("it's too good to be true"), but we do not have a tendency to think that if something happening is too bad it must be good ("it’s too bad to be true") (except where logic is twisted by religion and culture).
During the pleasure of sexual activity the muscles of the body relax and extend, the back arches back, the head lifts up, the eyes open... until the pleasure is too intense and then the opposite reaction occurs with a stress response of muscles contracting, the upper body and head bending forward and down, the eyes closing tightly. Too much sexual pleasure (orgasm) ends with the same startle response as if the flinching was created by a sudden loud noise (or by a prolonged period of physical stress). But too much physical stress or startle response does not flip to a reaction of pleasurable sexual relaxation.
If you are too awake, too manic, too alert - eventually you will crash and then sleep. If you are too fatigued or stressed, have too much need for sleep, you can go into a coma and possibly die.
These experiences can swiftly switch to the opposite experience when taken to an extreme:
These experiences do not switch to the opposite when taken to an extreme:
In spite of the subtlety of the needed observations, further examination and deductions will show that all experiences follow the same rules where one side of a binary range of experience will flip to the other side of experience, and that other side of the range of experience does not create a reverse when taken to an extreme.
Looking at these lists you might be able to notice a theme from one side to the next. (For instance, think about our cultural associations of darkness with evil and pain.)
The way we use our languages gets in the way of finding the right words for labeling these lists. The best words I can find for describing these groupings have been misused for a long time. New understanding will change the way we use these words.
I call the awake, upright, relaxed, sexual, pleasure, sweet, light, cold grouping the STIMULANT CATEGORY. And I call the asleep, stooped, tensed/contracted, flinched, pain, sour, dark, hot grouping the STRESS CATEGORY.
I'm using these words in a new way and now I have to show you what I mean by these words.
By the way, it is not a coincidence that nerve cells that are too excited will quickly become inhibited through various mechanisms, but that nerve cells that are too inhibited will not as quickly become excited. (Inhibitory transmitters sweep into the ion channels of excited synapses, but not the other way around, for instance.)
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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.
