The Unified Theory of the Nervous System
and Behavior
Cognitive Philosophy /Brain Theory by Steven Michael Harris
Kids with Epilepsy Don't Usually Die of Seizures (Reuters 12/10/2004) (link retired)
In 492 cases, a cause of epilepsy could not be identified, but in 121 children the condition was related to a neurological abnormality or to brain damage suffered in the womb, the team explains in the Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine.
During an average follow-up of almost 8 years, 13 of the study participants died. Only two deaths involved patients who were neurologically normal except for the epilepsy, the researchers report.
Specifically, ten deaths were linked to the underlying cause of the seizures, one was unrelated to the illness, and two were associated with seizures.
Seizures represent the goal of all cells in the brain. They are designed to seek a particular frequency but being connected to other kinds of information with other frequencies involved in pattern-recognition the emergent property is that they are recognizing emergent patterns instead. But put a group of nerve cells in a Petri dish and they find a frequency. In the Petri dish they are a group of cells that have no connection to the information coming from the body and the world around the body, so they are not responding to any information, just organizing themselves to find the ideal frequency (and finding it without the need to respond to frequencies representing other kinds of information). When a brain is severely inhibited with stress (with many ways this stress can be experienced) a portion of the brain, a subset of processing, under some conditions can find itself isolated from any information from the body and the world (as if that group of cells was isolated in a Petri dish). When this subset of the brain has no information about which to respond, the subset seeks that ideal frequency from other cells that are also isolated out of the system by these stresses/inhibitions-of-signal. The seizure is caused by a group of cells that have been isolated out of the information of the system and because they find a frequency of firing that is preferred by all of the cells in the system, they recruit more and more cells to fire in synchronicity until more and more processing of information is interrupted until functioning reaches a critical level of failure and the system inhibits this synchronous firing when higher levels of processing calculate the harm that is being done by this subset and inhibitory signals stop the seizure. Seizures get worse and worse over time because more and more cells develop stronger and stronger connections that support the seizure each time it happens. (Practice of the seizure makes it bigger and stronger with a larger number of cells involved in time and therefore greater and greater impairment of function the result.)
A significant level of stress is required to create the wiring in the brain that makes it possible for a seizure to happen. It is extremely unlikely (although possible) for such a high level of stress to be focused on a small portion of the brain without a large amount of the brain having such stress as well. This explains why seizure disorders are rarely the only observable symptoms in these patients. Usually severe brain damage or disorder accompanies a seizure disorder and autistic symptoms of greater or lesser degree will be noticed in most of those with epilepsy.
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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.
