The evolution of a nervous system - Unified Theory of the Nervous System

The Unified Theory of the Nervous System
and Behavior

Cognitive Philosophy /Brain Theory by Steven Michael Harris

The evolution of a nervous system: All of the answers will be found in simple and repeating events that can make the complexity possible

The basic principle of all life is to survive. This must be the need of life at any level of complexity.

Even the single-cell organism must seek life and avoid death, must seek chemical balance over imbalance, must seek the good and avoid the bad - must seek pleasure and avoid pain. (I know I'm making a leap for some of you with this but have faith in me on this. I'll be presenting much more evidence later.) Just imagine the possibility that a cell might find life and health much more pleasurable than death and dying.

But the earliest of single-cell organisms had very limited means for seeking anything. Let's start with a path from the simplest of living shapes and offer a progression towards higher intelligence.

Consider a round cell. (With my limited skills creating illustrations, this is a convenient path.) This cell is a three-dimensional life form but the demonstrations must be kept to two dimensions for convenience. It has the ability to move in its environment only by changing its own shape. It can expand in opposing directions on a plane (causing its own dimensions to contract in the perpendicular plane). This particular cell can change shape along any plane.

The mathematics of geometrical movement through space of a living object are very different from the mathematics of moving non-living objects through space. Cells that create movement through changes in shape (using transfers of chemical to kinetic energy) follow different paths. A bunch of cells inspiring movement in each other through collision and chemical communication don't follow the same rules as, for instance, pool balls interacting with each other according to the physics and math of force and direction and collision and gravity and friction and etc.

Now consider a cell that is moving through a liquid environment. It has no way of knowing anything. The closest thing a single-cell organism has of knowing is in the necessary reaction to any physical or chemical substance that comes into contact with itself. Some substances are good for that cell and others are bad. With no predictive ability (such as sight to see dangers from a distance and respond before it is too late) the exposure to the good or the bad is a constant gamble. Therefore some mechanisms are needed to change the mathematics of risk.

One important aspect of the mathematics of risk for the single cell is that the bad is much more important than the good. If a cell floats into contact with the right chemicals, a food source, then life goes on. If there is a need for some substance to maintain chemical balance (nutrition) then movement through an unknown environment is necessary. Cells can store energy and life can go on for some time without either the bad or the good in contact with the cell.

But exposure to a danger when all awareness, as with a single cell, comes through direct contact is extremely important to a single cell. Many dangers will kill a cell if contact is made and awareness of a danger only comes through such contact. Therefore some mathematical factors regarding movement (contortion of shape) are necessary to increase the odds of survival.

Remember that I've already laid out one important mathematical factor: the Bad is more important than the Good. So how can this round cell with the ability to contort operate to bring about the greatest chance of survival?

Consider a billiard ball striking a surface. If it is moving quickly it reflects off from the surface and spends little time in contact with that surface. If it is moving slowly it might remain in contact with that surface (the edge of the table or another billiard ball) because the effect of friction decays the force enough that the friction is greater than the force.

The cell creates movement by a contortion of shape. It has the ability to expand its size across one plane (which means reducing size in the perpendicular plane). If the cell contorts quickly it could push itself away from a toxic surface if the toxic object is of greater size than the cell or push a toxic substance away from the cell if the toxic particle or substance is smaller than the cell.

Another important factor is that the cell interacts with the environment by chemical transfer through the membrane (the outer surface of the cell). The cell benefits by having the greatest amount of surface area exposed to the Good and the smallest amount of surface area exposed to the Bad. Look to the illustrations at the right and notice how the contortion of the cell in a way that expands the shape of the cell along the same plane towards the Bad influence also reduces the amount of surface area of the cell that is in close contact with such a bad influence.

By this logic it is most likely that it would be a disadvantage for the cell to expand in any way at all if the environment was totally unknown (if the cell was not picking up any chemical traces that were either Good or Bad). A quick contortion of shape would push a Good influence away if a Good influence was nearby in the same plane of the cell's expansion. (And a slow contortion of shape towards an unknown nearby Good influence would have the cell finding the Good at the end of the cell with the least amount of surface exposure towards that influence.)

A slow contortion of shape in the direction of an unknown nearby Bad influence would bring the cell closer to a danger and leave the cell without an ability to remove the danger because the cell would have a limited ability to contort in any direction so if it was already contorted towards the danger when the danger was discovered it could only react by contorting in a different direction so that a dangerous smaller particle would be sucked back towards the cell and a dangerous surface on a larger object would not be evaded to any great degree because the cell could not expand any more in that direction to provide a push away from the danger.

In the case of any conflict where there is both a Good influence and a Bad influence; reaction to the Bad influence must always take precedence. The Bad influence could kill the cell. A delay in approaching a Good influence will not immediately kill the cell.

Another factor that will come up repeatedly in understanding a larger organism is that too much of a good thing is really a bad thing. Certain chemicals might be needed by a cell to survive, to maintain the cell's balance, but an excess of those chemicals will destroy the balance. Too much Good equals Bad. Too much Bad also equals Bad. This is a mathematical factor that repeats so often in function and experience that it is practically invisible by virtue of never being noteworthy in identifying aberrations.

Eventually cells would evolve into colonies of cells for a mathematical advantage regarding the single cell. Initially the advantage in grouping together has nothing to do with the good influences that are in the environment and only to do with the bad influences. A harmful particle or substance could kill a cell. Such a poison could only need to touch any part of a cell's surface to kill that cell, no matter how small that part of the surface might be. If the cells are in a group and have the ability to communicate chemically with each other (Good or Bad), the odds or survival increase for each particular cell because the only cells to die in the colony will be those that come directly into contact with the harmful substance. The death of the cell would communicate a danger to the remaining cells and the group of cells could quickly respond by expanding or contracting in a particular direction as a community. To group into a colony does not help the cells most distant from a Good substance when the colony is exposed to a Good influence but it does make it possible that some cells will survive a danger.

One way this could work geometrically would be if the cells evolved different chemical markers in different regions of the cell body to represent the Good and the Bad. So a Bad influence at one end of the cell could signal the release of a Bad chemical signal to the opposite end of that cell body. (Remember that these illustrations and descriptions tend to be in two-dimensions to make it easier to understand, but the cell is a three-dimensional construction so a variety of markers could evolve in several different planes of the cell body.)

One again, even in a colony of cells, the rhythms would be the same that Bad is more important than the Good, that the response to the Bad is faster than the response to the Good, and that too much Good is Bad so therefore would signal the reaction as if to a Bad substance.

A group of cells responding to a chemical influence would not likely respond perfectly in sync as the movement would start with the first cell to respond to the influence and move like a wave of cellular reactions to chemicals that would be released throughout the group. Once again it is important to remind you that movement in a group of objects that is generated by transfers from chemistry into movement (using contortions of shape) are not the same as movement in a group of inanimate objects caused by collision. The cell movement affects the other cells through chemical communication that incites movement in the other cells and also by the physical movement of the cells colliding with each other as well.

For illustration purposes I have made these cells into perfect spheres before contraction and aligned them perfectly. Above you can see how they might respond in the two planes of movement but such symmetry is unlikely and this example does not consider a cell with the flexibility of an amoeba that can change shape in any direction. (Let's forget the cells that use other forms of locomotion such as by the movement of hair-like projections from the cell body. The purpose of this essay is to show how an evolution of muscle and nerve might come about from the same origins. Muscle cells and nerve cells are very much alike in many ways.)

With larger groupings of cells, new problems arise. A movement through a large colony would be less in concert throughout the organism as in influence at one end of the colony takes more time to get to the other end. Different kinds of influence could occur in different directions at different boundaries of the colony at the same time as well. Movement that is in conflict could serve to rip the colony apart or the movements could provide risks when they cancel each other out.

Movements in the grouping of cells would also make it difficult for matching receptors to maintain alignment for the fastest chemical communications from cell to cell. Movements in different directions at the same time in a group of cells would not serve to propel the entire colony away from a danger and bring it closer to a Good influence either. Evolutionary changes become necessary with a larger colony.

One helpful change would be an extension connecting the chemical communicators from cell to cell that match by type of chemical being used. This way the cells would remain in communication in spite of jostling around a bit when movement moves through the colony. If an extension from the cell could maintain a connection with the next cell over, a longer extension could do the same with cells further away in the colony to further influence faster movement of the group as a whole and to coordinate movements.

For instance a cell at one end of the colony might make a connection to the cell at the most distant point on the other end of the colony so that if a Bad influence inspires a fast expansion of that cell to propel itself away from that substance (or propel that substance away from the cell), the chain reaction of cells doing the same thing could start at both ends of the colony at the same time and therefore the organism would have much more force in getting away from the danger.

Here we are getting quite close to the principles behind the nervous system because that extension (axon, dentrite) is representing movement but it is not movement at the same time. It is something else. The waves of movement through the organism could go in many different directions through three-dimensional space. An influence of a Bad substance at one end of the colony could represent the influence of a wave of movement spreading away from that point throughout the organism. But a connection to the opposite end of the colony (or anywhere else in the colony, for that matter) would cause that influence at one end of the colony to influence several waves of movement in different directions spreading from different points in the colony. The connections from cell to cell represent movement, different dimensions of movement, through the body of the organism. The connections are not movement, they are something else, but they can represent different dimensions. Remember that these connections are something else than what they represent and remember that they represent different dimensions of what they represent as well - this will come in handy when we make the leap to nerve cells and what they do. The nerve cell evolved from geometrical movement needs and with further differentiation of cell types (cell purposes) the nerve cell was able to use this geometrical representation to serve other purposes.

But that change alone would not be enough. A large colony would soon have needs for the cells to evolve into different functions to serve the mathematical needs of a colony. The shape of the colony would not serve the needs of survival for the inner cells if it kept growing into a bigger sphere. A hollow sphere would be better so that the inner cells would have access to nutrients. That would evolve into a tube where it might be possible for the group to avoid dangerous substances entering the middle of the tube (and therefore an end of the tube would now be a mouth). The cells could no longer contort in any direction. Groupings of cells that can only contort (or move) in one plane of direction could be opposed with another group of cells that only have the ability to expand or contract in another plane of direction (muscle groups).

But I'm getting ahead of myself here.

As I'm trying to show in the illustrations to the right, a system where cells communicate Bad or Good to other cells to inspire movement can cause conflict when different signals are processed at the same time. The reaction is not the same as if the above illustrations were of a group of billiard balls being struck from different directions at the same time with conflicting forces canceling each other out and friction reducing the influence a ball striking one end of the group would have on the balls at the other end. Communications through chemical signals could cause movement that accelerates as it moves through the colony. Different vectors of movement could cause havoc. This conflict needs a system to sort it out. It needs a system that can assess the influences and make one best choice for the good of the colony concerning direction of movement. This system will need to offer the same mathematical protections to provide the greatest average good for the survival of the most cells. It will need to respond faster to Bad than to Good. It will need to consider that Bad influences are more important than Good. It will need to calculate that too much of a Good is equal to Bad and respond that way. It will need to represent movement without actually being movement. It will consist of cells that have their own needs as cells (to seek survival and avoid death, to seek stasis and avoid imbalance, to seek pleasure and avoid pain) and the system will need to increase the speed of communication from one end of the colony (organism) to the other.

Along with the need for increase in speed is a need for a different way of conceiving these rhythms and patterns. A much larger system causes a need for a different encoding of decisions from what I've explained so far. A cell is a very tiny organism. It is very small compared to the entire organism of such as a human. If a danger, a toxin, a bad anything is in the vicinity of an organism - the distances that need to be covered are massively greater than the distances involved in the reactions of a single cell. The change in scale creates a massive need for a change in the concept of time. But an organism is always a colony of small organisms or cells. The needs of the cells for survival are the only reason that a larger organism exists at all. Anything that appears to be a complicated construct in a larger organism is only the accumulation of smaller events, an organization of smaller life events happening at the cellular level. The change in scale makes the comprehension of smaller units of experience and reaction difficult to conceive. The distances that a mobile cell needs to travel to avoid a Bad substance are extremely small in compared to human sense of distance. A slower form of movement (slower as in slower movement expanding surface area towards a nutrient as explained above) is extremely fast in human time. A massive number of different cellular events will occur in the time that it takes me to flinch from a hot stove. This is very difficult to observe and must be calculated in theory much in the way that nuclear physics is calculated from observation of macro events. The nervous system cells encode these decisions in a different way than the single cells described above. Many individual cellular decisions in cellular time occur in human time and it is the averaging of those decisions, the frequencies, that make the difference in the macro time needs to move a human through an environment (and to explain the qualia - or experience - of an animal or human).

As I mentioned before: in the single cell organism described above the fast movement of expansion of the cell towards the stimulus signals Bad (or disorder or pain or malfunction or danger or "No" or death) and the slower expansion of the cell perpendicular to the stimulus signals Good (or health or pleasure or nutrition or survival or "Yes" or life). But that must change when the cells start taking on different functions for the organism and are no longer mobile cells (with the ability to expand and contract in any significant way). The purpose of all life is to survive and the cells will still be looking for health and avoiding death, seeking pleasure over pain, seeking equilibrium over imbalance - but the action the cell takes to seek or avoid those polar extremes will not be movement but something else. A larger organism will seek to limit the points of entrance into the colony of substances so that dangers are avoided for the entire organism (a digestive system) so therefore the nutrients for the cells will come from within the organism rather than directly from without. Some cells will have a purpose of just growing and dividing and nothing else with a purpose served for the benefit of the rest of the colony by these cells dying (skin cells that multiply until they grow further from the source of nutrition, the blood supply, and eventually protect the organism with their bodies when they die). Some cells will exist only to produce a particular chemical or group of chemicals to serve other cells in the body (pleasure and pain being, health and distress, being encoded into the nature of that chemical production). When a specialized cell no longer has independence - is no longer able to live independently as a single cell - the coordination of pleasure and pain is no longer associated with movement but with that cell's specialty. Mobile cells move to maintain health by seeking nutrients, but a larger organism provides the nutrients for the cells already. The nervous system takes care of rewarding the cells with greater survival and nutrients for serving the body with the specialty activity by increasing blood flow to active areas of the body.

Muscle cells evolved to have a limited range of motion just expanding and contracting in two-dimensions in alignment with other cells in the same muscle group. So there is no longer a directional component to responding to the Good or the Bad. All that remains is the intensity of the expansion or contraction that can be different (slow relaxed expansion relates to the Good or the pleasure and fast tense contraction relates to the Bad or the pain) and this original encoding, the language of these cells as well as the coordination with the nervous system that controls movement, has been hidden very well by the evolution of much more complicated organisms with needs for opposing muscle groups to get through the environment. The nervous system needs to arrange switches to reverse the language (of pain/pleasure related to tensed/relaxed) to make things work as conflicts of movement for the purposes of the organism as a whole are the original reason for the development of a nervous system. All of the mechanisms of the nervous system serve to deal with those conflicts, with amazing results occurring eventually as a result.

Muscle cells are basically nerve cells with limited inputs as they were before evolution took away the ability to move, or the in-between ancestor (or sideways ancestor) or link between the independent and mobile single cell organism and the nervous system cell.

Nerve cells are basically muscle cells that have lost the ability to move or cells that serve the need of resolving conflicts between moving cells in a greater colony of cells and therefore the nerve cell must solve the problems of the greater organism according to the mathematical principals that are important as well to the single cell life form: The Bad (or "No" or stop or pain or&) is always more important than the Good (or "Yes" or start or pleasure or&) and the Bad is always faster than the Good and too much Good always equals Bad. Other mathematical factors are added into the mix to make the network of nerve cells serve the purpose of the larger organism. These factors add up to a mathematics generator, a pattern recognizer, a system with memory (memory being an ability to become more efficient doing the same thing in repetition so that it reoccurs with greater speed with practice) and long-term memory (a different factor caused by the ability of the cells to create new connections to cells firing with the same frequency so that associations occur in the brain between similar events and events happening in synchronicity - all because an ability to create as many connections to other cells firing in the same sequence increases the number of cells that will be firing in synchronicity back to the original cell to increase the likelihood of slow-frequency firing as the more inputs coming in at the same time allow the cell to achieve quorum and achieve the goal of firing its own action potential).

I've let part of the cat out of the bag.

Different pieces of this puzzle I've written about in some essays that I'll list here. Much more will be written to support this later. I'll try to touch on the factors quickly right now:

Instead of different patterns of movement to associate with pleasure and pain, the nerve cells associate experience (pleasure/pain) with the activity of firing an action potential. The mathematics of nerve cells is to seek as much activity as possible within a certain range of frequency. It is the action potential that is the pleasure to the nerve cell. A lack of firing is no experience at all. The stopping of an action potential is the opposite of the starting. It is the small but constant increment of time (a very small percentage of the time of a firing but the unit of pain time is constant while the unit of pleasure time can change in relation to the frequency of firing) that the cell experiences when making the transition from firing to not firing that the pain is experienced. In human time scale that small amount of the experience is not experienced at all but an increase in the number of stops per unit in time increases the relative amount of pain over time relative to pleasure over time. Certain frequencies of firing bring about the greatest amount of growth, health, cell division (when that is still possible), connectivity... The greater the number of input cells sending signals to the receiving cell in the same frequency, the greater the ability to fire in response (as conflicting frequencies will cancel each other out).

Cells could learn in this way by having the ability to make new connections to other cells firing in sequence and by having those new connections being weak or tenuous so that the new connections could be either inhibitory or excitatory and if the resulting atmosphere of firing is more pleasurable or healthy for the cell, then the connection will remain and eventually grow strong enough with enough new offshoot connections that it is unlikely to be severed by the cell (long-term memory). The pleasure of some cells will lead to the displeasure of other cells so an increase of inhibitory signals to some cells in the brain will increase the likelihood of the sending cell firing more often. These conflicts work themselves out with a massive connectivity.

Too much of a Good thing must be a Bad thing. This is mathematically in the fact that too much excitation chemical becomes an inhibitory chemical. (Inhibitory chemicals are actually an excess of ionization compared to that provided by excitatory chemicals.) Too much of a Bad thing is still a Bad thing. (Too much inhibitory chemical is still inhibitory.)

The Bad is faster than the Good (the stop is faster than the start) because of what I wrote in the previous paragraph. Imbalance of chemical causes a stop. Too little excitation and it stops. Too much excitation and it stops. Inhibitory chemicals work faster than excitatory chemicals. This speed difference causes the greater organism to reach slower for goals (especially when there is any nervous system conflict over that action - a lack of confidence) and react faster to dangers such as the quick reflex reaction to an excess of noise or anything else for that matter.

The Good is slower than the Bad also because cells are constructed to need a confident input, to need information coming in from more than one source, before making a decision to fire. A quorum must be reached with enough signals coming in before a signal will go out. A cellular event with a particular array of signals coming in to spark an action potential might be just beyond the needed quorum for that cell under those circumstances and the loss of one of those signals coming in might be enough to change the decision from a yes to a no, also making the Bad faster than the Good.

The numbers of nerve synapses in a receptor site change with activity and certain frequencies of firing optimize these changes. Therefore a receptor site becomes more efficient in stopping or starting if there is a lot of that particular activity (starting or stopping). This is learning.

Many places in the nervous system change back and forth in sensitivity all of the time as they are very active junctions of activity. Because of the mathematical advantage of the Bad over the Good, eventually the very busy sites will become more inclined to be receptive to inhibition than before the very active period of time. Cellular events that make one decision early in the day (or early in life) will then make another decision later in the day (or later in life) and then a start becomes a stop or a "Yes" becomes a "No" or a pleasure becomes a pain, etc. (Paradoxically the opposite will occur in other cells because if the increased inhibition of the system over time. With ten or more thousand connections to other cells a cell that becomes inhibited over time, and which is sending inhibitory signals to these many other cells when firing, will stop sending inhibitory signals to these many other cells when the decision changes eventually, with the outcome that the system seems to be increasingly stimulated due to increased inhibition (which is what happens with any serious disorder such as the manic stage of bipolar disorder). This accumulation of inhibitory tendencies is the mathematical explanation of stress.

Because of what I wrote in the last paragraph, inhibition (stress) will accumulate in busy junctions in the brain and will be most likely to accumulate in portions of the brain with the most connections, especially connections between massively different forms of subject matter that can occur anywhere in the physical geography of the brain.

Changes in cellular events reversing the trend towards greater inhibition require rest of that site (and/or of the entire organism) and may not always be possible without a stressful adjustment.

Frequencies of cell firing follow these principals so that slow frequency firing changes eventually until a threshold is crossed where the decision goes from a Yes to a No and then the acceleration of frequency is exponential until the cell stops firing. Therefore:

Slow frequency firing is more akin to pleasure or Yes or active. High frequency firing is not more active as is currently believed by most professionals but is actually more akin to total stoppage as it is the number of stops per unit of time that increase until it is totally stopped. That is the language of the brain and a big piece of understanding the mathematical principals behind thought and experience. The completely stopped cell is just beyond the range of the highest frequency of firing in the language of cells. Much more will be written about this.

The explanation for sleep, disorders (caused by genetics, trauma, drugs, old age&) movement patterns, personality traits and mannerisms, tics, experience, love, sex& are all explained by these factors.

With the massive connectivity this is difficult to understand and conceive.

As the connections of moving cells to distant cells cause distant patterns of movement in different dimensions, the nerve cell represents movement to solve movement problems using an algorithm of firing patterns related to pleasure and pain as a representative of movement, but since it is not movement but just a representative system - it can then represent just about anything else it wants to represent using the same pleasure and pain. Light and dark (pleasure and pain), sweet and sour (pleasure and pain), hot and cold (pain and pleasure), on up until you have language and advanced thought and philosophy and this essay.

The mathematics of the brain is confusing because as two directions of movement (two dimensions of movement through space in geometrical and physical terms) can be resolved by cells responding to influences and the movements within the colony of cells, the representative cells of the nervous system are resolving conflicts in other dimensions (light patterns related to different arrangements of light receptive cells or sound patterns) but also calculating patterns between realms or dimensions (light with sound with movement) so that every point in the architecture of the nervous system is not only dealing with different factors but different dimensions. Every subset of cells firing is a different dimension of subject matter in cellular terms (with the single cell experiences of averaged pleasure or pain adding up to the qualia of such). Every different facet, every different viewpoint from within a nervous system is dealing with a different dimension or different subject matter of calculation. A portion of a grouping of cells firing in unison is a different subject matter, a different dimension, than the whole of that group. This massive factoring of dimensions can't be explained very well in a language form that is limited to two dimensions. Language can't explain the brain very well. What can't be explained with the mathematical constraints of language must be held back in non-language forms of thought. (What is considered the "sub-conscious" is really the "non-language" thought. Non-language thought has all of the mathematics of the brain at its disposal but under the direction of the limited language form of thought that we are trained to let dominate our thinking.)

When we remember an event, a motion picture is not playing for us in the brain. It is really more like a massive sculpture with much form that is "solid" and much that is "pliable" and instead of being three-dimensional it has trillions of dimensions that give the illusion of a moving world of thought when the dimensions are illuminated in parallel and in succession.

To think in more than two-dimensions is very difficult for most people. To think mathematically in more than three dimensions is impossible for most people. (Four dimensions were considered in Einstein theories.) In thinking about the mathematics of the brain, every turn brings on a new dimension so a trick of the brain is required in order to think of these concepts in many dimensions. Part of the trick requires the elimination of symbols, the elimination of language to conceive of this. The closest thing I can say to explain it is that it is like developing an entirely new sense.

To sum it up, nerve cells have the greatest success when they fire within a certain range of frequencies that corresponds to the greatest ratio of pleasure to pain averaged over time. The changes in connectivity and changes in sensitivity to neurochemicals follow principles that provide for the greatest amount of pleasure possible averaged for the greatest number of nerve cells in the system. Nerve cells operate much like a system of economics where an incredibly complex society forms based on each individual seeking happiness and success in the world as it is present to him or her. In a system of economics each person experiences a range of pleasure or pain, success or failure, dealing with their occupations, so the experiences are in the same language but the tasks attended to are different. We dont feel the experiences of single cells, but the experience of some cells will influence more cells in the system than the experiences of other cells with less individual influence on the system. (Some units are sacrificed with the experience of greater pain or failure for the sake of the success of the colony as a whole.) There is no way to interview a cell to get a sense of the experience of a cell (or to confirm if a cell has any sensation at all), but we can deduce such an event from the patterns found in our own experiences and behaviors.

The living portions of our bodies are made entirely out of the smaller units of billions of cells that are self-contained units of life. The cellular experience can be the only explanation for human experience or animal experience.

This is an absolutely massive subject. The implications of this are beyond belief. (Cures that were never before considered possible are theoretically possible.) It could bring enormous change in understanding of most fields of medicine and biology as well as revolutionize sociology, psychology, education, prison rehabilitation, evolution, genetics, history and etc.

I could write forever about this and it would still not be explained. I'll do my best to explain why this is so in this website or in published works.

[Click to Go Back to Unified Theory Directory Page]