The Unified Theory of the Nervous System
and Behavior
Cognitive Philosophy /Brain Theory by Steven Michael Harris
Einstein was not good at making eye contact. He was obsessive when discussing his topic of interest without showing much awareness for the lack of attentiveness to those he was speaking with. He thought about his subject constantly as if it was a form of addiction. He was not particularly good in dealing with personal relationships. Some have written that he was "strange" in that when discussing aspects of his theories he would encounter resistance from physicists who would offer opposing arguments and Einstein would just say that the theory is right without using the socially expected language of saying he "believed" he was right or saying that he "might" be right or that those others might be right too. He stated his conclusions as absolutes with total confidence. He didn't practice humility in this realm in order to appear polite. His way of making his argument appeared strange to others. He was expected to express respect for the arguments of other physicists in his language and he didn't.
Some who write about Einstein today still consider this as strange behavior that he would express his theories as fact in the days when the ability to confirm some of his predictions was not yet available, even though Einstein was proven to be right in his predictions.
Einstein showed a lack of social awareness in the way he expressed himself. But he was right. Is it really better to speak without confidence in your ideas if you have the ability to know that you are right when nobody else has that ability?
The character known as the "nutty professor" is not just an invention of fiction. This character is not good with social clues, missing some aspects of "common sense," shows strange aspects of posture or gait - but is brilliant in some scientific of mathematical kinds of focus. The character has a strange manner of speech, loses track of time when hyper-focusedÉ basically the character shows all of the traits of Asperger's Disorder.
The special abilities of the "nutty professor" are always mathematical or visual/spatial or musical. (That character is often repeated as the eccentric musician or the eccentric artist as well.) The special abilities are not in the realms of language/social awareness (although there are some similarities in such characters who are poets - and consider the musical nature of poetic meter and the fact that so many poets have mental illness problems that are different but similar in ways).
The Silicon Valley is filled with wealth. Unlike other regions with lots of money and status, comparatively nobody is getting laid in the Silicon Valley. The social life in that region is very different than in other places with so much privilege. These software successes are hyper-focused in their mathematical computer logic worlds. The land of computer-geekdom is dominated by males. They have the ability to create success and wealth through work in computers but they are not as socially adept as a group.
I'll be making my case that the same mathematical factors in neurology that create Kanner's Autism also create Asperger's Disorder and Attention Deficit Disorder. These three disorders are actually different degrees of the same problem neurologically. (Consider for a moment that appearances of Autistic Disorder in a population occur in five boys for every girl. The same for Asperger's Disorder. The same for ADD/ADHD. Probably the same for software "geeks.")
To understand the "nutty professor" - the "Einstein" - you must understand the autistic savant as well.
To understand what I'll be saying about how these disorders work in the brain, I'll need to explain the neurological mechanisms behind schizophrenia as well. Schizophrenia is actually just a later manifestation of the same factors that cause Autism. (Language and social learning change the wiring of the brain and the ways that sufferers of Autism learn to adapt to the stress they experience are no longer easy or possible once certain kinds of understanding and language have developed. Just admit for a moment that the psychotic is not very good with social cues either, not very good at making eye contact, sleeping just as little, moving in ways that are just as strange and just as repetitious...)
The same factors that cause these disorders cause all of the disorders. The differences are in the region of the brain affected, the timing of the onset, the degree of the problem... The hundreds of disorders listed in the DSM-IV are not hundreds of different disorders but different expressions of the same disorder, even if the disorders respond differently to different medications.
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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.
