Untitled Document

The Unified Theory of the Nervous System
and Behavior

Cognitive Philosophy /Brain Theory by Steven Michael Harris

How I Did It, And Keep Doing It

It will take much more explanation for how the brain works before I can give a proper accounting for how my brain is able to do this. I will do my best to give a sense of it here, though.

In the world of particle physics there are people with a mathematical gift that can allow them to “see” the logic of how consistent units of energy following the same universal principals at the extremely small scale can bring us to the incredible variety of everything we see around us. They can do the math in their minds taking them up from the same packets of moving energy at the subatomic scale up to the fire in your oven, or the chemical reaction of the cake, or the vaporization of your skin when you touch the cake pan when you touch it without an oven mitt. The same math at one scale allows for many different kinds of substances and activities and math at a different scale. Very few people have the capability to follow completely the logic that allows us to understand how these same microscopic forces provide for the variety of the world around us, but most of us believe it to be true because we have gained a lot of benefits from this knowledge and we have been taught, socially, that we should believe these scientists. We trust the Einstein to be able to perform these logical feats because we are able to witness what this information has given the world in technology.

There are various ways that we can get a sense that there is unity in the nature of the universe at the smallest scales because of things we can witness ourselves. We can chop up any substance that we can see into smaller units until various diverse objects can look the same. We can vaporize anything into a gas with enough heat. We destroy things of diversity and what is left is still something (with less diversity).

But thoughts are of a nature that we can’t take apart into smaller parts and look at them in the same way. We cut our own brain in half and we don’t get half a thought. We have no ability to examine the thought of another person or animal but extremely indirectly by observation of behavior through reports. We have no sense of how different or how much the same the thinking of another being might be because we are not there in that thinking.

Yet there is a massive amount of evidence now that neurological activity, that the mind and brain can be broken into smaller units of function and experience. Lesion studies and fMRI studies show that different kinds of thinking occur in different parts of the nervous system. Damage to a portion of the brain will bring about damage to a portion of the thinking and ability of an animal. There are smaller units. Taking this logic to the smallest unit requires much more intellectual effort and ability than is required to solve the problems solved so far in nuclear physics (or it would have been solved already). And it requires a different kind of math. I discovered this other kind of math by inventing another private math beforehand.

A famous discussion in philosophical circles concerning cognitive science has been the proposal that to understand the mind, so many problems will need to be solved that it will require the evolution of a new sense such as that of seeing or hearing. This implies that millions of years of evolution will need to massively change the nature of our brains before we can achieve the understanding of the nature of the mind. What is wrong about this implication is what is wrong about much of what credit is given to evolution and genetics in the way our abilities have developed (at least as far as the nervous system is concerned). Yes, it takes millions of years of evolution to develop the physical characteristics of the body of the bat that can allow for echo-location, but the nervous system of the bat only needed the time for the evolution of enough cells attached to those body parts and the evolution of the time growing in that body during the individual life of that bat to make sense of the patterns coming from echo-location organs in order to provide that ability from the neurology of that animal. The same mathematical principals in the way nerve cells interact create all abilities (and sensations and qualia and memory and health...). The ability to have a new “sense” is always in the nervous system (although there are inhibitory factors in the way a brain grows its logic that need evolutionary tinkering because language faculty needs not only the organs for speech and hearing, but also the growth of enough cells early enough in development in the right region of the brain relative in connectivity to those speech and hearing organs before the inhibitory factors associated with changes from “plasticity” to specialization take place because of responding to consistent patterns that firm up the organization of those cells. If you connected the body organs that allow for echo-location into the nervous system of a human, early enough in development, or connected a device that did the same, you could give humans some form of that ability of echo-location and that new sense would have characteristics of sensation similar to other senses where there would be greater pleasure or beauty of some echo-location observations over others, etc. because it is the way the nervous system handles logic that creates beauty and ugliness and pleasure and pain.

The nervous system is a form of mathematics that grows and declines according to repeating mathematical principals the same way that the world of substance is a many-varied application of the same repeating mathematics of moving energy at the subatomic level. The nervous system is a “higher power” only because it is the mathematics of intelligence, and intelligence that would have no boundaries if not for the factor that part of what gives the intelligence also subdues that same system over time so that it slows until death. (The factors that subdue the system are also factors that have a hand in the eventual final shape of any creature that evolves from the initial “push” of genetics. And one of the most important factors in the evolution of the next generation is the evolution of the mother that can hold that being in the uterus long enough for enough nerve cells to multiply before the birth where the world is forced on those cells to start fixing patterns of connectivity in response.)

The reason that various functions can be pinpointed to particular spots of the brain (with remarkable exceptions that I can explain) is not that genetic controls provide a genetic “map” of how a brain should organize but that the mathematics of how a brain organizes itself (and the growth of the body as a result) following the original push of genetic differences is a very predictable mathematics and is dealing with very predictable and universal information that is consistent.

The reason that a consistent region of the brain can be found to have a higher statistical reactivity to parallel lines in a field of vision is not that the genetics provided a map of how all the connections would grow but that parallel lines are a consistent event for all of us as we look at the world and the region of the brain that will catch those signals is going to have closer connectivity to the eyes than to the ear and that region will be affected by the different logic that occurred during the early stages of development in the womb that is consistent and on and on (and some connectivity is probably evident to the mechanisms for balance that would spot consistent patterns of up and down and right and left...

There are consistent mathematical similarities that identify human faces as opposed to other kinds of faces and anything that is consistent as a pattern will affect the strengthening of some cellular connections in regions of the brain that are finding synchronous firings during such observations. It is the consistencies of the world and the body that create the consistencies of the organization of the brain more so than the consistencies of a genetic “map.” This makes the genetic task much easier and gives less need for an enormous genome.

Anything we learn that is consistent will become a “sense” of a sort. You learn to play backgammon and you are counting the moves of the pieces every time and using language in your thought as you go over the options. When you reach a very high level of play, you just “see” the moves in your mind. And the instinctual level of play where you can visualize the choice that will give you the best chance of winning is not just memory of previous choices, because you will discover new strategies as you discover a higher level of play without any internal monologue of counting. The brain wires itself to spot patterns and new math and new logic. And the brain finds shortcuts to those patterns so that fewer and fewer cells are needed to perform the same tasks over time. You just think you “know” that this is a better play without engaging any internal monologue anymore (without engaging the language center anymore). You are probably not able to articulate how you know but you will find a way to articulate it later if it is discussed (and you still have connections that can be activated that remember the earlier way of thinking about the moves that is more language-oriented). It is possible to “see” how to do something or how something works long before you can explain how it works to another. (Einstein found it much easier to make his discoveries than to figure out how to explain his discoveries to others.)

Now to explain what I am doing here: (and I know that it is grating when I make any comparisons to Einstein with myself, but his story is the most well-known and useful in explaining how unusual ability of thought is possible)

The ability to understand how the brain and mind work is the ability to understand a new kind of mathematics and to be able to play with that math and work out its implications at a very high level. That is really very much like having a new kind of sense because that ability can be applied to so much information and experience and function that it is, frankly, overwhelming. I used a variety of tricks to make it possible for me to do this. Some of them are difficult to explain without getting into much more theory than I have gotten into so far. But I can explain some.

To have a new sense is like having an addiction. Think of the normal senses. The sense of sight is an addiction to making sense of the patterns of the world as noticed in the field of vision. The sense of hearing is an addiction to making sense of the patterns that are capable of being noticed in sound. (Same for all the others.) You have this addiction because you have organs of sight and sound that connect influences from light and sound to your nervous system. You don’t have to use these influences if you close your eyes or cover your ears (or use the inner mechanisms of the brain that change volumes of focus of attention on such information) but you constantly do use this information because the recognition of patterns gives you pleasure and benefits. Figuring out the mathematics of nervous system gives you new patterns of consistency and pleasure and benefits as well. Getting to the point where you can do this is a very tricky thing. But let me say that trying to create an addiction for this kind of thinking is very useful here. (Gather the implication here that there IS such a thing as a good addiction. And note that all the great thinkers such as Einstein were addicted to their subjects of expertise.)

Changing the way you focus your brain is another part of the ability to do this. We all constantly change the volume levels of different subsets of thinking. We have various abilities in this. The kind of thinking that is involved with Buddhist meditation is very similar to what I’m doing. There is nothing religious about it either. It is a focus ability (and I’m very good at getting into a similar state to what those who meditate for hours achieve). Autistic savants get into this state as a matter of course in creating the ability to do their unique talents for calculation or whatever. One reason they are able to achieve such ability is that they shut down the language thinking of their brains and emotional (global calculation) thinking to a great extent when doing these calculations as the math of the brain uses all kinds of thinking in connection and the emotional and language calculations can corrupt pure mathematical thoughts of certain kinds. Everything the brain does is math but a math that does not use symbols/language. The autistic savant who can find very large prime numbers, for instance, has shut down parts of the brain that are out of the way of corrupting this kind of pattern recognition and a unique ability to see the number (without a language process of working through numbers to find the number) and then shift back into language in order to say what that number is. (This conversion from visual/non-language math to the language of math is what makes it possible for that “Rain Man” trick of seeing a number in a form that is not symbol such as instantly counting the large number of toothpicks dropped onto the floor.)

In normal development we all start out with a very strong ability to sever our different types of thinking from each other but that is lost in normal development with the acquisition of language as language ties various different types of thinking together more than would occur without language so that our senses can be muddied compared to other animals. You say the word “apple” and your thinking includes the language center (“apple”), the visual center (the look of the word “apple” and the look of the apple itself), the auditory center (the sound of the word, the sounds the object can make in various states), the taste and smell centers (you can visualize what an apple tastes and smells like, the purpose of the apple is to eat), and touch (the concrete shape of the apple, what it feels like to have in your hand).

We are also trained to stop thinking with exclusive focus. The child that is focused on a butterfly who does not respond to the parents’ calls to come in is punished for “not listening.” Most of us have witnessed trying to get the attention of a baby that is lost in looking at something and so does not seem to hear us when we are trying to get the baby’s attention. That exclusive focus ability is very strong in the young and can be lost to a great deal. Those with autism (who have a high level of stress in their nervous systems starting at a very early age) will hold onto that ability much more because the inherent pain that is greater for them in their mental processing can be alleviated by focusing on a narrower range of subject matter (just sight or just sound, for instance).

What I am doing is like being a human calculator but in the realm of working out the math of how the repeating mathematical changes that occur in nerve cell interactions and connectivity can lead out to various abilities and functions and senses and experiences. This is very similar to what those physicists do when they can think through how repeating events at the sub-atomic level create the enormous diversity of everything we see around us, but it takes it to another level because I can also see how they think these things (and see a few implications for problems with theory in physics coming from the way the brain works). This does not mean that I can do theoretical physics; I have never bothered to learn it. (But I believe I do have the capacity to do it.)

What I do is also similar to having a kind of synesthesia as well. (My theory, by the way, is a very good explanation for why synesthesia can even exist. That some can “see” in flavors or “hear” in colors is evidence for a nervous system that uses the same mathematical principals applied to all manner of subject matter and sensation.)

Ever since I was very young, I was in the habit of trying to perceive different things using a kind of game of synesthesia. What I was doing was inventing a kind of private and inner mathematics. I had all kinds of trouble understanding social and emotional interactions of any kind of subtlety. I was the smartest kid in mathematics classes, but made gross errors in classes of not following directions correctly if the instructions were given using irony or metaphor or subtle verbal directions. I was a social outcast and could not figure out the subtleties of games if the directions were not clearly spelled out (and, apparently, the other kids did not need these kinds of instructions because what you needed to do was clear to them). I naively blamed my lapses on not having as much ability to handle logic as the other kids and was constantly looking for logic that would explain social interactions. I could learn from experience (and ridicule and embarrassment and failure) but what was instinctual for others was not for me. So I looked for patterns in social interactions and tried to find ways to see them in my thinking. Social understanding that was natural and instinctual in others was not noticed by me until I started working out ways to animate visual models in my mind to get me through these same interactions with some normalcy (although my timing would be slightly different than the others and therefore I would still seem somewhat strange to others, apparently, but not so strange as to be considered as with a disorder although these days things are different and I think I would have been pegged with Aspergers Disorder if I were a child now).

(You would find it very difficult to know me now and think I have some form of autism as I don’t show those traits very much now. I’ve overcome a lot through alternative forms of logic in my thinking and also by treating myself with the medication therapy I invented.)

I am also the product of some very bad schooling. I could have gone on to some accomplishment in mathematics but classes in which I had performed perfectly I was forced to take more than once (I was forced to sit through the lessons of a couple of months of algebra three times because of differences between school districts when I moved). I was not allowed to take independent study, which I begged for when I was totally bored in some classes and I was actually physically punished for trying to learn beyond the lesson plan of one teacher. So I learned that it was bad to learn too quickly and I was completely bored by the way math was taught to me so I lost motivation to continue studying math, a subject that had been my easiest and, early on, my favorite subject. But during some of these classes with very bad teachers my desk was often surrounded by students who wanted me to explain the lesson of the day, which I could figure out instantly (by just reading the book and ignoring the clumsy way the horrible teacher was explaining the material). I remember I could understand this material if I found a way to animate pictures in my mind (and shut off other kinds of thinking at the same time for a moment, kind of like meditating) and then I would just see how it worked and I would have it. Because I was shutting off the language center of my brain to do this, I often had the concepts down pat, but I was not as good at remembering the language parts of the course. I was not as good at remembering definitions of such words as “denominator” and “numerator” or the various equations that we were supposed to have in our repertoire because the actual application of these ideas was just something I could do and I did not feel any need to talk about it.

I was also very good at drawing during a period of a couple of years when I did it (6th and 7th grade until a teacher tried to encourage me to take advanced drawing classes that would involve drawing nudes and I was so shy that the suggestion scared me away from art - and with Aspergers it was also my style to have the symptom of becoming engrossed in some activity with great ferocity for about two years and then drop it to engage another interest - although I was different than others with Aspergers as I did not tend to be interested in the same constricted and boring subject matter). The state of mind that made drawing easy for me was to lose the ability to understand what I was looking at (drop the language thinking and higher processing of visual information) and then I could see the actual lines easier. (The reason very young children draw clumsy figures without the trunk of the body is because they have become language-dependent in their thinking and they draw their figures by going through a mental checklist of the parts of the body in words and they don’t tend to know the word for the trunk yet in their minds.)

I was “visually” animating social patterns and behaviors (it is impossible for me to completely explain what this is like much like it is impossible for somebody with actual synesthesia to explain completely what it is like to hear a color) and I was finding non-visual thinking to do drawing as well. We all do such things to some extent when we dance, for instance, because we are applying sound to kinesthetic movement with varying degrees of ability (I’m a very creative dancer and I have “danced colors and smells” - I know this seems strange).

I was unable to be funny socially. I remember getting my first social laugh of any degree in school when I was a senior in high school. Somebody said that my timing was incredible with whatever I said. I didn’t understand what “timing” meant and I became very focused on figuring out how to be funny. And I succeeded. Now I make money being funny. I can be very creative and funny in improvisational situations and what I do is to convert what I’m responding to into animated kinds of pictures in my mind (or smells or some other inappropriate and synesthetic kind of image) and I do this very quickly shutting off all thoughts in words in my mind, and then I pop out of that thinking and come through with some witty verbal response after I have seen the image in my mind. To do this I developed a persona that was very deadpan in a way that made fun of aspects of myself (slightly autistic) that others were already making fun of at my expense. This way I was able to take control of this manner of mine and make it look like I was always doing it on purpose when I was actually unable to avoid that lost nature at times. I have great timing now and can do it instinctually but for a long time my timing was the result of a kind of mental calculation as I was counting out the timing in my head (but counting using animated images in my thinking). Being a comedian is, by the way, a helpful exercise in gaining the kind of mind required to come up with this theory because it is an exercise in looking for patterns in the world that are not obvious to other people and bringing them to light.

I play trombone and was never trained in improvisation and I have not spent enough time practicing the theory or scales or improvisation but if I get into a certain state much like meditating where I lose the ability to know what notes I’m playing, I can be pretty good and not remember what I did completely and I have spent time playing smells or such although I have not told anyone this. It has seemed too strange to admit.

Juggling has been a similar kind of activity with internal games of applying non-kinesthetic “images” (the word “image” here is not necessarily visual).

These various activities I have performed in the same state of thinking that I would use to figure out mathematics and other kinds of patterns.

This was all a part of my developing a kind of private mathematics that I eventually used to try to figure other people out, branching from my game of animating social observations and then evolving into a game of trying to figure out creativity and disorders and nerve cell function. It eventually evolved into an effort to try to animate a mathematical image in my mind that I could understand that would make sense of how we think and behave the way we do (and to try to understand my own limitations). There was a period of a lot of animated images being tried and discarded in my mind when I started hitting on some animated patterns that kept working - spotting similar patterns across the different senses and functions - and evolved into other kinds of animations that worked better until I found this theory in a very basic form and all of a sudden a massive amount of insights started bombarding me and I got into a very intense period of mind experiments looking for patterns that worked and discarding those that didn’t. Eventually all the pieces came together and a long period of discovery ensued. It is a very beautiful theory. What it can explain is amazing. Thinking these things through is much more fun than explaining the discoveries because explaining the discoveries takes so much more time. (Remember, this ability came from shutting off the language thinking much like occurs during meditation where they tell you that you are shutting out all thoughts but what you are really doing is dampening down the language thinking but you are still thinking because you are awake and alive, of course.)

When I deal with a new issue or problem to explain, I’m looking inward at a massive calculation of a kind, which is not an equation with numbers or symbols as is the basis of mathematical thought for those who are trained in the usual ways. It is more like looking inward at a massive animated sculpture in many dimensions and then illuminating subsets that apply to the subject matter. This is the way the brain works for all thought. The brain is basically creating a many-dimensioned model of the world as impressions from the signals from inside the body and outside the body create changes (through adjustments of connectivity strengths) and thought is the constant movement of illuminations of different subsets of that massive “sculpture” in many dimensions. When you think of some animated memory of something happening, nothing is moving in your mind - the connectivity is a static thing even though it is in constant change - you are just illuminating different parts of this “sculpture” to create the images of movement as you illuminate different models of some subset of your memory in succession.

And the subsets can always be brought down to extremely small subsets of the individual cells experiencing the simple experiences of “on and off, pleasure and pain” which have no meaning alone concerning any particular subject matter without including the massive connectivity to the other cells, the body and the world.

You will not understand this essay with one reading. You will not understand this essay in isolation from many of the other essays I’ve written and still need to write.

The big problem for me in explaining the unified theory of the nervous system is that almost everything we think about the nature of psychology and folk psychology and neuroscience and cognitive science and the real nature of all of our experiences has been formed through history without any understanding of the basic principals of neural processing and thought, and so almost everything in science and culture is wrong to some degree and a great shift of thinking is required. To prove I am right about having this theory is to constantly bring forth “theories” that start with the basic principals at the cellular level (a parallel with the basic forces at the subatomic level of physics) and show new ways to think about various macro observations in all manner of different specialties in medicine and science and culture and I can see the consistencies of bringing the basic theory out to the emergent functions and sensations and abilities and behaviors but at the macro level it will appear that I am providing almost an infinite number of different explanations and theories (a parallel with how those basic subatomic factors create an almost infinite number of different substances and activities in the world around us at a bigger scale). This is a very difficult thing to get any people to believe. I wish I could get any of the right people to give me time to argue my theory. None have given me that time yet. And I have already written hundreds of new “theories” into this website. Perhaps somebody could finally recognize how many different approaches to thinking about life and biology I have already introduced and start giving me some respect about this. I’m getting tired of writing into the void.

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