Chapter 11: Changing your Mind – the Seventh Sense

 

 

The previous chapter indicated that the thalamus, in using a system of lobes, intensifies or ‘collates’ the re-emergence of memories because the memories are ‘filed’ or ‘keyed’ together. In other words, the ‘net’ of different memories come together from ‘attractors’ that are (parts of the) the lobes, because a memory consists of a sequence of the contents of different lobes. The Mathematics of the Mind attempts to handle patterns, like these, that change with time.

 

Much of the following is necessarily speculative, but, from the Rule of Life, above, that only essential body parts are kept, the retention of the thalamus shows that ‘pooling’ memories by type are necessary for the efficient functioning of the animal. Secondly, the thalamus, I believe, plays an important role in tying the lobes together. The thalamus is at the centre of the hemispherical cortex and it makes sense that the nerves from each lobe, containing the action potential of the memory contained in each lobe are linked together at the thalamus. It also makes sense that the parts of a memory from each lobe take the shortest distance to the assembly point and more importantly the same time so that synchronicity occurs.

 

The thalamus can be thought of as a ‘search engine’ or index to the ‘facts’ stored in the cerebrum and the result of a search is a somewhat normal distribution of results (about the required memory, because of creative thinking), as are found in computer search engines. The thalamus contains a map or index of the knowledge stored in the cortex and a signal passes a particular neuron in the cortex and the action potential ‘spreads’ through the dendrites of the following neurons and multiple action potentials return to the thalamus along the return paths of the memories stimulated. The strongest signal is the required memory, but other related memories are stimulated, and form the basis to ‘creative’ thought, because they are similar but only ‘segments’ of other memories.

 

Creative thoughts are caused by induction and/or additional memories, as above, whilst factual memories are already stored in two ways. Firstly, long-term storage is chemically ‘fixed’ in the cortex and changes minimally through the strength of the neurotransmitters. If not used regularly, the neurotransmitters weaken and the memory gradually becomes a part of the subconscious. Secondly, I believe that ‘registers’ exist in the hippocampus, which are the short-term memory (up to 10 years).

 

‘During dream sleep the brain is influenced by a different set of neurochemicals than when we are awake. During dream sleep the brain is cholinergically driven, while in waking consciousness it is driven by aminergic neurotransmitters, like norepinephrine and serotonin.’ (Memory and Dreams, George Christos, p 53) Clearly, during dream sleep the brain chemistry changes and something unusual is happening. It appears that memories are being laid during dream sleep.

 

Over evolutionary time, organisms tended to feed at certain optimal times, and at other times, were at a greater disadvantage due to changes in light intensity etc, so, logically they hid at these times. This also provided an opportunity for the body to repair itself and also to update the brain. However, from above, two states of the brain exist so in humans the brain uses the normal aminergic neurotransmitters and the cholinergic system in dreaming. ‘These are used alternatively, and the sleep stages become less deep and the Rapid Eye Movement (REM) which indicates dreaming become longer.’ (p 107) This is logical, to my mind, in that as repair of the body is effected, more time is given to the brain’s needs.

 

The ‘registers’ in the hippocampus are the short-term memory. They are memory that has not been consolidated in the cortex. This process can take up to 3 years. ‘From studies of H. M. it appears that the hippocampus slowly offloads its memory to the neocortex over a period extending up to three years. In addition … the hippocampus may act as a temporary store of memory itself. If memories are not encoded with sufficient intensity and repetition, they might not be relayed from the hippocampus to the neocortex, allowing them to be forgotten’. (p 70)

 

From the Rule of Life, above, the method used will be logically simple but there is no turning back, so, if I outline a ‘simple’ method, the method used in practice will be that method or ‘simpler’.

 

‘Lucid dreaming research has found that dreams last for roughly as long as they appear to last while we are dreaming. (p 153) This means that the action potentials from the sensors are going to the cortex in the same form as they are stored in the hippocampus. I surmise that the action potentials go into a circular ‘register’ for each type of sensor and ‘circulate’ in the hippocampus. Remember that action potentials are relatively slow-moving at 250 miles an hour and a reasonably amount of sensory input could be circulated. The thalamus is at the centre of the hemispherical cortex, so (roughly) equal times are taken for an ‘offshoot’ of the ‘register’ to go to the cortex. The ‘offshoot’ contains the same action potential as that in the ‘register’ because it is the nature of a biological ‘computer’ to ‘hive off’ equivalent action potentials into the terminal fibres.

 

So, the hippocampus sends the action potentials of each sensor to the thalamus via a nerve fibre, which allocates them to the respective lobes in the cortex.. Going the other way, from some neuron in the same lobe grows a new (or existing) terminal fibre to the thalamus and then back to the register in the hippocampus. These constitute the wiring and the problem is how to match the content of ‘pattern of paths’ in the cortex with those held in the ‘register’ in the hippocampus.

 

Using the Rule of Life, above, the actual (or for our purposes, a possible) means of accomplishing the storing of the string should be (one of) the simplest that will accomplish the task. The simplest scenario is similar to a roomful of monkeys with typewriters producing (say) a sonnet of Shakespeare. The only method of putting a sequence of action potentials into the cortex is by iteration. The memories of many people seeing the same occurrence of an action etc will differ markedly in detail as police witnesses attest, and memories tend to be curtailed and specific in content. Clearly, the smaller the memory that is recorded, the better, assuming that it is adequate, because there would be some exponential relationship with length. Thus a simplified and truncated ‘sonnet’ is all that is necessary from the roomful of monkeys.

 

This sounds a little ‘far fetched’, but the growing fibres cause an ‘iteration’ of the action potential until the memory is ‘sufficiently similar’ to that held in the hippocampus. At this point, the connections from the hippocampus to the thalamus would be ‘pruned’, and the ‘memory’ resides in the cortex. When music is replayed or a scene revisited the process is repeated, but because ‘parts’ of the pattern can be reused as parts of new patterns, our memory of that music etc gets better and better. In other words, a ‘learning curve’ that gets better with time and repetition is established. At the same time that patterns are intermingling, the neurotransmitters are strengthening and the memories are strengthening. This is autobiographical memory and equates to remembering where food can be found, remembering herd members etc. In other words, low stress remembering.

 

postscript: the two paragraphs describe an iterative process of creating memories in the cortex, which is a more energy (and logically) efficient method than retaining action potentials, as mentioned previously. A similar method is used in the making of antibodies to viruses. ‘The first step in generating a specific measles antibody gene occurs in the nuclei of immature immune cells. Among their genes are a very large number of DNA segments that encode uniquely shaped snippets of proteins. By randomly assembling and recombining these DNA segments, immune cells create a vast array of different genes, each one providing for a uniquely shaped antibody protein. When an immature immune cell produces an antibody protein that is a “close” physical complement to the invading measles virus, that cell will be activated. Activated cells employ an amazing mechanism called affinity maturation that enables the cell to perfectly “adjust” the final shape of its antibody protein, so that it will become a perfect complement to the invading measles virus. (Li, et al, 2003; Adams et al, 2003) (The Biology of Belief, Bruce H. Lipton, p 8)

‘Chris Brewin and his colleagues have argued that there is a fundamental difference between the extraordinary flashback memories of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and those of ordinary autobiographic memory and have provided much psychological evidence for such a difference’. (Hallucinations, Oliver Sacks, p 242) I suggest that this difference is controlled by the level of the emotional ‘tag’ supplied by the amygdala. One would expect that memories of life threatening situations should be not only remembered but should be replayed at intervals, especially in like circumstances or similar geographical situations. It could be said that animals are in a constant state of fear of ambush and similar geographical situations should throw up mental reminders. It might be hard on the animal but it makes good sense!

 

‘If you listen in while the rat is acquiring new information, like learning to navigate a maze, you soon will detect something extraordinary. A very discrete “maze-specific” pattern of electrical stimulation begins to emerge…. a specifically timed sequence during the learning. Afterward, the rat will always fire off that pattern whenever it travels through the maze. It appears to be an electrical representation of the rat’s new maze-navigating thought patterns (at least, as many as 500 electrodes can detect).’ (Brain rules, John Medina, p 164)

 

‘When the rat goes to sleep, it begins to replay the maze-pattern sequence. The animal’s brain replays what it learned while it slumbers … Always executing the pattern in a specific stage of sleep, the rat repeats it over and over again – and much faster than during the day. The rate is so furious, the sequence is replayed thousands of times.’ (p 164) These two paragraphs appear to suggest that the experimental evidence supports the theoretical derivation, above.

 

The following is from http://www.sciencemag.org on April 27, 2007: ‘“There is a young student at this university,” says Lorber, “who has an IQ of 126, has gained a first-class honours degree in mathematics, and is socially completely normal. And yet the boy has virtually no brain…. When we did a brain scan on him,” Lorber recalls, “we saw that instead of the normal 4.5-centimeter thickness of brain tissue between the ventricles and the cortical surface, there was just a thin layer of mantle measuring a millimeter or so. His cranium is filled mainly with cerebrospinal fluid.”

 

‘”Scores of similar accounts litter the medical literature, and they go back a long way,” observes Patrick Wall, professor of anatomy at University College, London, “but the important thing about Lorber is that he’s done a long series of systematic, rather than just dealing with anecdotes.” ‘The most severe group, in which ventricle expansion fills 95 percent of the cranium. Many of the individuals in this last group, which forms just less than 10 percent of the total sample, are severely disabled, but half of them have IQ’s greater than 100. This group provides some of the most dramatic examples of apparently normal function against all odds.’

 

‘Lorber concludes from these observations that “there must be a tremendous amount of redundancy or spare capacity in the brain, just as there is with kidney and liver.”’ ‘He also contends that “the cortex probably is responsible for a great deal less than most people imagine.” “It may well be that the deep structures in the brain carry out many of the functions assumed to be the sole province of the cortex.” It has been suggested that the cortex has evolved to be larger in the ‘higher’ animals for ‘social’ reasons. Herds of animals appear to have a hierarchy that becomes more complex with evolution and presumably allows more protection for those engaged in ‘grooming’ the animals higher on the social ‘ladder’. This is in line with the paragraph above, that half of the severely disabled had ‘IQ’s greater than 100’. As an IQ of 100 is ‘normal’, it would appear that ‘severely disabled’ implies interaction problems with other people on an emotional level.

 

This seems to support the idea that the hippocampus has a huge capacity to remember facts that have to be remembered exactly (consider London taxi drivers), whereas the cortex is an integrating, forgetting, and inaccurate record, although the hippocampus is costly in terms of energy for maintaining storage.

 

“Hydrocephalus is principally a disease of the white matter. As the ventricles enlarge the layers of fibers above them begin to be stretched and very quickly they are disrupted, with the axons and myelin sheaths surrounding them breaking down. Even in severe and extended hydrocephalus, however, the nerve cells in the gray matter were remarkably spared, though eventually there began to be a loss here too.” ‘The sparing of the gray matter even in severe hydrocephalus could go some way to explaining the remarkable retention of many normal functions in severely affected individuals.’ This seems to agree with the previous that probably most of the ‘functioning’ is carried out in the gray matter, and the white matter is for insulated transmission of action potentials.

 

(D) The brain, as a biological computer, contains another ‘dimension’ that should be considered. ‘An interesting point that is often mentioned by people who use drugs is that they seem to have a different set of memories depending on their state of mind, that is, whether they are under the influence of a drug or not. (There is some experimental evidence to support this.) This suggests that people may lay down different memories when a different neurochemistry (induced by a drug) is operative in their brain, and these memories may not be retrievable unless the same neurochemistry is attained again.’ (Memory and Dreams, George Christos, pp 52-53)

 

‘The blood-brain barrier (BBB) is a separation of circulating blood from the brain extracellular fluid (BECF) in the central nervous system (CNS). It occurs along all capillaries and consists of tight junctions around the capillaries that do not exist in normal circulation. Endothelial cells restrict the diffusion of microscopic objects (eg., bacteria) and large or hydrophilic molecules into the cerebrospinal fluid (CSF), while allowing the diffusion of small hydrophobic molecules (O2, CO2, hormones). Cells of the barrier actively transport metabolic products such as glucose across the barrier with specific proteins.’ (Wikipedia, Blood-brain barrier)

 

Further, ‘there are some biochemical poisons that are made up of large molecules that are too big to pass through the blood-brain barrier. This was especially important in primitive or medieval times when people often ate contaminated food. Neurotoxins such as Botulinum in the food might affect peripheral nerves, but the blood-brain barrier can often prevent such toxins from reaching the central nervous system, where they could cause serious or fatal damage.’ (Wikipedia, Blood-brain barrier, Pathophysiology)

 

From previously, the Rule of Life says that living systems can be extremely complicated, whereas the logic becomes simplified. As an example of the effect that one common simple molecule can have, consider ethanol. ‘Ethanol acts in the central nervous system by binding to the GABA-A receptor, increasing the effects of the inhibitory neurotransmitter GABA (i.e., it is a positive allosteric modulator). (Wikipedia, Ethanol, Drug effects, Short-term, Effects on the central nervous system) ‘A positive allosteric modulator (PAM) induces an amplification, a negative modulator (NAM) an attenuation of the effects of the orthosteric ligand without triggering a functional activity on its own in the absence of the orthosteric ligand.’ (Wikipedia, Allosteric modulator) ‘In biochemistry and pharmacology, a ligand (from the Latin ligandum, binding) is a substance (usually a small molecule), that forms a complex with a biomolecule to serve a biological purpose. In a narrower sense, it is a signal triggering molecule, binding to a site on a target protein. The binding occurs by intermolecular forces, such as ionic bonds, hydrogen bonds and van der Waals forces. The docking (association) is usually reversible (dissociation).’ (Wikipedia, Ligand (biochemistry))

 

The blood-brain barrier has long been useful over our evolution as a defense against large molecules, but looking more closely at the ‘small’ molecules that can be let in, we find a ‘seventh sense’. Traditionally, the five senses are taken to be hearing, smell, taste, sight and feel in humans, and the sixth is balance. But do we find extra senses in animals in general?

 

‘Sonar has evolved at least four times in animals on our planet (in bats, whales, and two separate kinds of cave-dwelling birds). There are fish that have evolved the ability to find their way about using distortions in an electric field that they themselves create. In fact, this trick has evolved twice independently, in a group of African fish and in a completely separate group of South American fish. Duck-billed platypuses have electric sensors in their bills which pick up the electrical disturbances in water caused by the muscular activity of their prey.’ (The Magic of Reality, Richard Dawkins, pp 201-202)

 

So, what is the current perception of the ‘seventh sense’. ‘In the mid-1990s, for example, no less an arch-skeptic than the late astronomer Carl Sagan rendered his lifelong opinion that all psi effects were impossible. But in one of his last books, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, he wrote, “At the time of writing there are three claims in the ESP field which, in my opinion, deserve serious study: (1) that by thought alone humans can (barely) affect random number generators in computers; (2) that people under mild sensory deprivation can receive thoughts or images “projected” at them; and (3) that young children sometimes report the details of a previous life, which upon checking turned out to be accurate and which they could not have known about in any other way than reincarnation.” (Psychology Today, Is There a Sixth Sense, Dean Radin, Colleen Rae, Ray Hyman, July 01, 2000)

 

postscript: It is shown later that as we live, in my opinion, in a probability space with universe-wide entanglement from the Law of Conservation of Energy, and every source of energy and matter are (logically) entangled, but I hardly think that this logic has a capacity to carry human thought or wishes. Some religions believe in reincarnation, but I won’t pursue it here.

 

The following paragraphs satisfy the definition of ‘seventh sense’ in that the interaction of the creature with the world at large distance, but is somewhat less than many people would hope for. As listed above, the ‘‘evanescent’ wave – is special because the wave disturbance dies away very rapidly the further away we go from the surface’. This fact allows creative thoughts to be concentrated around the same subject, as evidenced by the use of lobes, or areas of storage of one type of sense.

 

However, it is possible that the ‘induction’ in our thoughts, referred to above, in respect of creative thinking may translate into some sort of ‘thought transference’ over a short distance such as ‘pillow talk’. The other two effects could be classed as ‘action at a distance’.

 

This ‘seventh sense’, to which I am referring, is part of the basic structure of the brain in mammals (at least from experiments on rats and humans), and incorporates a ‘tasting’ or ‘feeling’ of the environment at a distance. The ‘seventh sense’ that occurs in the brain comes through ingestion of chemicals as distinct from ‘survival of the fittest’ which is derived through the eyes, ears, muscles, reaction time etc. As animals feed through different seasons, weather patterns etc, the chemistry of the food changes and thus their memory and interaction with their environment changes. In extreme cases, such as drought, the fodder includes increasing amounts of ‘bitter herbs’ with increasing phytotoxins which could (possibly) change the individual’s thinking from the ‘herd thinking’ to ‘survival of the individual’ and thus a radiation to other niches.

 

“The psychiatrist Ronald K. Siegal holds that all creatures, from insects munching psychoactive plants to human children playing spinning games to get dizzy, have an inborn need for intoxication. He writes, “This behavior has so much force and persistence that it functions like a drive, just like our drives of hunger, thirst, and sex”. Do we, in fact, have an innate drive to alter the function of our brains? And if so, why?’ (Pleasure, David J. Linden, p40)

 

In particular, the recreational drugs affect a number of neurotransmitters. ‘Cocaine and amphetamine act on the dopamine system…. ecstacy acts on the serotonin system… heroin and other opium-related substances act on the mu and delta opoid receptors. Alcohol works through GABA A receptors and through the NMDA glutamate receptors. (Looking for Spinoza, Antonio Demasio p 123) ‘All of these accounts report a remarkably uniform set of changes in the body – relaxation, warmth, numbness, anesthesia, analgesia, orgiastic release, energy. Again it makes no difference whether these changes actually occur in the body and are conveyed to somatosensing maps, or are directly concocted in these maps, or both.’ (p 122)

 

After four chapters on the mind/brain, I hope that I have shown that the Rule of Life is a good working model, and that, whilst the chemistry is complicated, the logic is simplified and the next chapter will show how there is no turning back and our bodies do the best that they can by building on the past.