Nature's Little Helpers.

OK thus far my left wing stance has railed against the wanton greed of the financial sector as they strip mine our economies into individual pockets. It has seemed grossly unfair, but a recent report on our abuse of the planet makes some sense of it. Above or below our consciousness there are factors at play not immediately obvious to it. We are being plunged into austerity and we don’t like it. We are used to growth, jobs, wanting and getting, it seems like a birthright and we won’t of our own volition change it for a more meagre existence. We would think it retrograde. But if in our system of wanting and getting we create super specimens who can absorb impossible amounts of that system’s fiscal currency they will suck the system dry of its life force. It will die back as naturally as leaves fall in autumn. And as these individuals can’t use much more of the planets natural currency than any of us, however big their yacht, the planet’s currency will recover as our wanting and getting dwindles. It becomes a transient bubble of aberrant consciousness that nature, above that consciousness, brings back into line. In essence we are being saved from ourselves by financial greed causing the austerity we are objecting to. Only by this process will we reduce our usage of the planet’s resources by ~50% as is necessary for it to recover. It’s our choice as to whether we consider this a hardship or a blessing. So thank you billionaires for doing nature’s work. Strange how things work out.

A Night Out.

Come nice weather I sometimes have a night out. Mat, sleeping bag and a pillow and off into the back garden. Around midnight Britney walked over me and a little later Domino slept by my feet for a few hours. Around three the noise began. It sounded like a gurgling pigeon to begin with and went into raucous sniffling. I figured it must be a hedgehog but couldn’t see anything so lay back down, but it was too loud to sleep. Fifteen minutes and it was still hoovering round the flowerbeds so looked up and it was about three inches from my nose next to my pillow. A few more sniffs and off it went. And continued sniffing for I don’t know how long so I decided to put out some cat food for it but Dave our own black fury food hog snaffled it before the hedgehog got to it. Then Dave joined me on my sleeping bag. By this time it’s near 5am, the sky is a touch lighter and half a dozen early morning pigeons are flapping back and forth to our helipad bird table like manic tea towels. I’m thinking this isn’t turning out to be the restful open-air kip I’d imagined. So if you’re fancying a night under the stars, don’t bother, it’s like an all night rave out there.

Selling Face.

It’s today! Face Book is being sold at $38 a pop and Mark Zuccaberg et al are going to make so much money their personal tax bills of around $1.5 billion will pay off 25% of California’s current deficit. It values the site at around of $104 billion, more than many multinational companies actually producing things. That means in these dire economic times there are still enough deluded people willing to stump up that huge amount. Who are they? What are they thinking? Current profits from Face Book are around $1 billion, 1% of that valuation when most companies expect to produce around 10%. That means Face Book will require strategies to extract a further $9 billion a year from its users. Now I don’t know about you but I dip into FB to hear from friends, which is rarely more than marginally interesting. I don’t go there to buy things. I use it because it’s free and there’s no intrusive advertising. Where Google search earns money by providing me with results from companies that pay the most per hit Face Book doesn’t provide anything like searches, adverts, cheap deals etc. The intrusion required to earn that extra $9 billion will definitely turn me off. It’s on a knife-edge for me as a user as it is. It may have 90 million users but their allegiance to it is paper-thin so a viral whim, a change in fashion, another smart bedroom boy etc could kill it off with a mouse click. But on the bright side say it continues to make $1 billion a year. It’s valuation would then sink to ~£10 billion, and somewhere there will be losses of $90 billion that will feed back into the banking system and cause us more austerity. And Mark and thousands like him will, perfectly legally, walk away with our money in their back pockets. Each and every one of us has become the lender of last resort to a finance system gone mad.

Myalgic Encephalomyelitis Soup.

Do you love life? Do I? Isn’t it wonderful to love life, the trees, sunsets, ikle children, kittens, achievements, one’s sensitivities to the multifarious aspects of the universe under the suns daily traverse? And isn’t it wonderful to share one’s appreciation of them all with others? No. When I was about four playing shop with the little girl across the street she tried to convince me a selection of stones were in imaginative fact potatoes. I wouldn’t have it; they were stones. Any fool could see that, and no amount of paying for them and getting change with pinched fingers into open palms would convince me otherwise. I am thus a wholly unimaginative insensitive beast. What right have I to object to other people helpfully pointing out all the beauty and miracles of daily life I’m so obviously missing? Unless of course it’s a classic Ducati 916. Oh and I’ve just noticed a smear of last night’s gravy has given the back of my left hand a rather convincing tan. Anyway. So a tree is a tree for me, the sky is the sky for I and, well I looked up ‘me’ in a thesaurus for another personal pronoun and got myalgic encephalomyelitis, so that’s the end of that witty rhyming scheme. I guess I’m suspicious of percolating what surrounds me through the coffee pot of my persona if that makes any sense at all. I don’t want my I to make chirpy uplifting comments about how I feel about stuff. It’s just one big soup of being and I’m just a pea chasing a crouton. That’s it, that’s my mantra of forty years, “Everything is.” You can never use less than enough adjectives.

Alternative to Comfort.

Someone posted on Facebook a while back a diagram, all black apart from a circle and a dot outside it. The circle was labelled ‘Comfort Zone’ and the dot, ‘Where life begins.’ Though it was appreciated for its subtle wisdom I wanted to draw a circle round the lot labelled, ‘Discomfort Zone’ with other dots in it labelled ‘broken leg, flue, sinking ship, arguments, broken glass etc.’ I understand the drift but it sat awkwardly with me. It’s true there’s a natural feeling of apprehension when approaching any new threshold of life and that can feel uncomfortable, and that avoiding invites will make life safe but boring, but is discomfort really the natural equivalent to growth? I would draw a different distinction, one between repetition and difference, that life begins in doing everything anew. Here the currency of comfort has no equivalence. Framing ‘where life begins’ in the context of comfort or discomfort places it in the territory of the self. It’s the self that feels apprehension in difference and comfort in the lack of it. Without the self ‘different’ is the preferred option under the natural outward tensions of exploration, love, curiosity, desire, joy and the inward tension of fear from sensed danger. For me this distinction is vital. Framing ‘new life beginning’ outside one’s ‘comfort zone’ suggests apprehension, difficulty, work and stress in going there, where as new life beginning in simple non-judgemental difference compared with reductive repartition feels exciting, life and energy giving. Who wouldn’t want to go there? So comfort? Bring it on, I’m all for it. It means I can go exploring and I love that.

NOT The Evolving Brian.

Having killed off my small but perfectly formed readership with by my PhD thesis I’ve strapped it to a horses back, shot it and put it up for sale. It’s a shame because it explains how all our many aspects of human foolishness are to be expected from our current particular brain function. And before you say well, der, that’s obvious, it doesn’t need a thousands words, consider the following. When you take your car in for servicing the mechanic says, “Your carburettor diaphragm has been leaking and causing petrol to seep into the air filter, which has gone back down the crankcase breather pipe into the sump and mixed with the oil. That has..” You break in and ask for the only two points you’re interested in; how much and how long. “Well basically your engine and gearbox are fucked. If I were you I’d drive it into a brick wall and claim on the insurance.” My point is the garage guy understands what’s going on but you just want the outcome. Conversely I asked my garage how much to replace the heater matrix. Same answer, more than it’s worth, but after investigation it turned out to be a blocked windscreen drain pipe; cost, nothing. For all our technical advances humanity seems deliberately uninterested in the carburettor diaphragm of our foolishness. We’ve had religious, spiritual and psychological attempts at looking at the car from the outside but no one’s written a workshop manual on how it works. Well bugger it, now you’ll just have to buy the horse. It’s on ebay, search words; “Solid-hoofed herbivorous domesticated quadruped. Condition- Dead.”

Evolving Brain 3.

The nature of consciousness.

I was stumbling, surely each neuron can’t hold specific complex data, assign itself some even insignificantly small element of meaning because how would it encode a million different meanings?

This is breathtaking!

All objects that we create are process based, i.e. we embed in them a process designed to provide a certain function, be it a chair, car or computer. When it doesn’t provide its function, ‘it’s broken.’ As we have become surrounded by these process-based things we have a tendency to think we are also process based, but I suggest we’re fundamentally different; we are outcome based. We are essentially an experiential learning system rather than a predefined process system. The difference is profound and essential to the following hypothesis of how the brain works.

In a process-based computer a pixel on the screen might be 233 down, 516 across, linking its geographical position with its process position. Now take a single receptor in an eye. It receives varying levels of light and transmits a signal, but how does the overall (brain) system ‘know’ where it is in the picture? Though the retina is an array it’s unlikely that it’s strictly geometric like the sensor in a video camera or that each receptor has a matched response to all other receptors.

If the brain is a ‘learning’ system it may, in response to its relationship with its environment, ‘learn’ the places of all the receptors so as to cause a recognisable picture to form, and creates a meta awareness of each receptors ‘place’ in the received picture. Similarly it learns to attenuate different receptor responses to give an even picture. This is totally different from a ‘process-based system’ that pre defines the position of receptors in an array and relies on the fixed geometry and even response of it.

Imagine for simplicity a screen of say 10 x 10 pixels, non of which are positionally defined, and a computer is programmed to run through all the permutations of assigning a100 picture elements to them until the user sees a recognisable picture. When the user recognises the picture and presses ‘stop’ that particular set of assignments is logged and ‘wired in’ as ‘the usable set’.

The learning relationship does not define the receptor positions in any geographical positional sense but in a ‘does it provide a good picture?’ sense, and ‘if it does use it there’. In this way a meta awareness is created of each individual receptor’s relative position and sensitivity. (This has been tested in a simple way with up-side-down glasses but could be tested further by more complex mixing up of an image.)

The systems learning relationship with its environment creates the ‘wired’ connection that becomes the system’s meta awareness of the receptor. The receptor then has two qualities, 1/ its response to brightness, and 2/ its meta position.

Though vision is a special case it provides an understandable example of the triggering and action of all neurons. Each neuron is switched on when some new element of experience is added to some existing experience and placed in the chain of previously activated neurons relating to that existing experience. As such its cognitive ‘position’ is defined by these preceding relationships. In the same way that a meta awareness gives every receptor its position in the picture by learning from the environment, each neuron acquires a meta position in the overall cognitive process by the neurons associated with it. It then goes on to trigger and be associated with other neurons, wiring them in turn into their meta positions.

In this way each neuron has an element of ‘meaning’ associated with its meta position; it is in effect assigned its meta position ‘in the picture’ of overall consciousness. It functions like the eye receptor in taking the signal level it receives ‘in its meta position’ and branches to associated neurons in accordance with how that level relates to their meta positions. Simplistically, ‘more than x go that way, less than x, go this way.’ The individual neuron thus has only a relatively simple task of comparison just like the eye receptor, but because it has a ‘wired in’ meta position in cognition it appears to hold a meaning specific to itself. The actual process though is a much simpler choice of ‘with respect to the meaning associated with its meta position’ what comes next in the systems relationship with its environment? Where in a process-based system ‘what comes next’ is fixed and preordained by the initial designer, here in an outcome based system “What might come next?” is the fundamental element of system behaviour, a sort of gravitational imperative, driving it towards an outcome. Where a process-based system is limited to the outcome of its fixed process an outcome-based system is limited by its ‘learnt’ capacity to provide a quality outcome. Where a process-based system is fragile, in that it can break if any element ceases to function, an outcome-based system is robust, in that it will always continue to an outcome even if that outcome is flawed by faulty elements along the way. Where a process-based system has one, for want of a better term, methodology, an outcome-based system is free to adopt any methodology in its imperative to achieve its best outcome.

Here then memory, that we might perceive as the brain’s data storage, is not fixed or held data, nor is it held ‘in’ the individual neurons but is formed by each neuron’s meta position in the overall cognitive meta framework. Memory is a meta construct created in real time, simply a slight variant of the same process as perception.  Similarly imagination is a real time construct of the same meta framework. Consciousness therefore is created in the brain by ongoing experience ‘wiring in’ each neuron into a meta position in the meta structure; in effect forming a meta brain, or what we may refer to as the mind. When these structures are revisited or re-cogn-ised for the purposes of perception, memory, imagination or dreaming the exact same process is used to create what we perceive as these different functions.

Our perception, memory, imagination and creativity are all held in and created in real time by the meta structure connecting up very simple functioning neurons.

A silly example: “If I’m in the pub, it must be Tuesday.” The meta element is that “Tuesday is 2 for 1 night down my local”, the positional element connecting the two that ‘makes sense’ of seemingly disassociated events.

As there is a high level of consistency in our environment, if our system maps that consistency onto our meta brain, then wherever our brain finds itself, momentarily at a certain neuron, the next neuron and the next will flow from and mirror the structure of that environmental consistency.

It might be likened to written language. As I type one letter, C, from only 26 choices, then another, A, from the same limited choices, then another, T, by a combination of the character and position I make the concept, CAT. Only by sequentially choosing the next character to occupy the next place does the sequence begin to hold our meta meaning of it. The neurons, originally blank spaces _ _ _ _ _ _ , are initially triggered by experience to hold a meta meaning and subsequently perform a simple choice at each particular stage in some real-time ongoing sequence being created in the meta structure. As the sequence unfolds each choice, though meaningless on its own, contributes, because of its position in this meta language structure, towards an understandable outcome, i.e.

N  O  T      A  L  L   _  C  A T  S  _  A  R  E  _  B  L  A  C  K   

Because environmental experience wires each neuron to a particular position in the meta structure the neuron’s simple choice ‘in that position’ contributes immeasurably more to the outcome than its individual functionality. It’s clear from this text example that 22 simple choices between a small number of relatively meaningless symbols, when taken as a sequence based on a meta structure, can produce any number of complex outcomes.

As the brain continues to make these meta connections it creates a meta structure and embeds new elements of experience into this growing structural mirror of its environment. It acts always as a complete cognitive entity whatever it contains or lacks, and produces all its cognitive outcomes in real time

What I find breathtaking is the conclusion that all cognitive processes are derived from one single ‘real-time’ process and that all cognitive ‘meaning’ is derived from the meta mapping of neurons ‘experientially added’ to mirror the environment in the moment of experiencing and reacting to it.

Recent brain scans have shown that activity in a particular area of neurons associated with a particular movement is observed not only when the movement is made but also when it is observed in others and when the movement is imagined or dreamed of. Though this seems to have come as a surprise to neuroscientists it is totally predicted by this hypothesis. It suggests that ongoing experience lays down a neural map or meta structure that is subsequently used for all cognitive processes; that all forms of cognition, be they perception, action, memory, imagination or dreams are all real time traverses across the same meta structure.

I have here for simplicity described a quite linear one-dimensional process as if one neuron leads to another and another and so on. In reality the brain is 3 dimensional with a high level of cross-linking placing each neuron on multiple paths. Never the less the option chosen is governed by the ongoing process towards finding a solution. As mentioned elsewhere the neuron doesn’t ‘choose’ an option, it simply surrenders to the flow of the overall brain activity towards a new equilibrium state that it defines as the best outcome or solution. The brain produces electrical energy that is dispersed through the network producing a perceived solution, rather like a capacitor discharging through a filigree of filaments.

Evolving Brain 2

A designers view.

A lot of work has been done on the biochemistry, circuitry and locations of brain function, etc, but little on how the brain creates consciousness, perception, memory and imagination.

Here I’m trying to offer a theory of how the brain creates consciousness.

Disregarding deep philosophy, our environment is both common to us all and a reliably consistent entity. Things are hard/soft, hot/cold, bright/dark etc and if things change they do so in some consistent manner. Only in scary movies do unexpected things happen; walls turn to jelly, people morph into grotesque figures etc. So we live in a highly regulated, consistent, and so relatively easy environment to map. Once I have experienced a brick wall, all subsequent brick walls will be broadly similar.

Here then I am trying to imagine how an efficient sensory cognitive system might have developed to work in tandem with this environment. 

The game ‘Twenty Questions’ shows that countless numbers of things can be identified by twenty questions with simple yes/no answers. Of course the process relies on suitably framed questions but a simple, low cost child’s toy can follow this process successfully. As 2²⁰= ~1 million a process of 20 layers of 2 way branching can generate 1 million discrete answers. In other words a binary number of 10111001010001011011 is able to identify a million different things but not describe them. If though each subsequent digit was positioned relative to its predecessor in a three-dimensional matrix in a form of cognitive topography, a cognitive image could be built that both identifies and describes the item by not only the digit value but also the vector relationships between them.

It might be seen as a dot-to-dot picture that by the process of traversing one dot (synapse) to the next creates the resemblance of a picture. Interestingly if, as I suggest elsewhere, each brain wave cycle equates to the asking and answering of one question then one can complete a game of twenty questions and select one from a million in the space of around one second. As our day to day existence contains far less than a million different objects and our perception of our environment moves seamlessly from one moment to the next giving clues as to what’s coming it’s clear our perception and cognition can easily keep up with the demands of ordinary life.

In the same vein an alphabet of only 26 characters can be assembled to create ALL the stories, philosophy, ideas and poetry of the western world. We have created a form of linguistic DNA where a small number of different simple symbolic elements repeated in various orders can describe or model every real and imagined experience. It appears to me a strong possibility that we have created the letters, words and structures of language to mimic our cognitive structures.

It is this massive multiplication from the arrangement of a small number of very simple elements into the complex sophistication of our mental interpretation of everything together with the consistency of our environment that allows us to cognitively image or to ‘map’ that environment with a relatively small if sophisticated brain.

I see a mapping system where the raw, basic essentials of something newly sensed is added to a constantly expanding experiential matrix of what has been sensed before that constantly asks a very simple question, “With reference to my existing experiential matrix are there any new elements in this experience? If ‘no’ then refer to the existing matrix, or if  ‘yes’ then add an element to the matrix to account for it.” As my environment is very strongly regulated by the laws of nature my mapping of it can reflect this consistency and, rather than having to account for a constant torrent of new weird and wonderful things, my experiential map can be a consistent, incrementally growing cognitive meta image of my environment.

Everything I encounter has to be recognised by this process; basically like counting 1 through 7 or 22 or 1,257; whatever it takes to reach a recognition or understanding that I find satisfactory. But what if I want to use my brain in another way, I want to remember something? Am I really using a different process to perception? Aren’t both slightly different forms of recounting? I find my toothbrush by remembering what it is and what it looks like, only then can I perceive and recognise it when it’s in front of me. The only difference is when someone asks me to ‘remember’ my toothbrush I use the same process to picture or in some way call up ‘a memory’ of it when it isn’t there in front of me. The two things are just different ways of using the same process. In fact the words we use like recount, re-cogn(ition)ise all suggest a process of ‘constructing again’ from elements.

Similarly if I’m asked to create a design for a new toothbrush I will use the same process to construct or ‘see’ an elephant shaped toothbrush in pink. After assembling the various basic elements in a new way I can use the same process to create new ideas.

In essence perception, memory, imagination and creativity are all slightly different ways of using the same single cognitive process, and that process is built or better still, grown by experience one bit at a time to mirror our consistent environment. We create numerous perceptual series by which we identify and form an awareness of our environment and go on to interact with it, and those series consist of sequential nodes, each branching to and uniquely linked to others conformed by our growth of experience and hence mirroring exactly our environment. In this way nature equips us with a raw brain able to conform to any environment it encounters, such as an environment where sound runs like water and the air screams if you squash it.

Evolving Brain 1

Brain Evolution.

If we consider evolution in terms of ‘reactivity’ and define reactivity as the capacity of an entity to perceive and react to its environment we might draw up four distinct levels;-

1-     rocks react on a purely mechanical level

2-     plants additionally react on a cellular level

3-     animals additionally react on an instinctual level, and

4-     humans additionally react on a conscious level.

The last three constitute life and the last two constitute moving or ‘non-planted’ life.

Planted life takes in nutrients from the ground, rain and sun and only needs a cellular reactivity to its environment so as to bend with the wind or towards the light, grow and flower in response to the conditions it finds itself in.

Non-planted life, however it came about, had initially one serious problem to overcome, how to get sustenance. It may have achieved freedom to move but at the expense of a ready supply of nutrients from the ground. Early moving life probably ‘fed’ from its surroundings much like plants but more movement would need far greater reactivity with its environment to survive.

I imagine this would begin in the sea as movement will occur without having the capability to cause it. Following on an awareness of chemical and organic ‘smells’ coupled with some simple means of movement towards sustenance. As cells became more diverse their special properties would be used to further enhance survival. As the unique element of moving life is a capacity to travel it required spatial awareness to locate food. After smell, light sensitive cells would be useful, proliferate and become more specialised. After a trillion generations of variation each guided by the necessities of survival a combination of sensory organs and a means to ‘use’ them effectively was developed. I would imagine this was all done in parallel, an improvement here followed by an improvement there; in other words the sense/brain/bodily functions developed in tandem. Also as life is in a sense cellularly economic these developments would be based on the minimum of new cell types, i.e. ‘if a particular cell or structure evolves to have a useful property then it would reproduce until no further improvement is gained.’

In this context the brain together with its sensory inputs and nervous system developed in constant relationship with both its other body components and its environment under the influence of environmental demands. This cellular economics would suggest the brain, like other body organs, is made from repeats of the simplest capable ‘cellular unit’ with the resulting multiplicity of units structured to form the most elegant and efficient organ capable of what the overall organism finds necessary for survival. It seems likely the sensory cells came first as there would be no use for an organisational brain without them, and possibly the brain evolved out of modifications of these cells. As such the sensory organs might be seen as outposts of the brain seamlessly integrated with it yet on the outside of the body in order to collect information.

During this long process of evolution our sensory/ brain organ has been constantly developing to maintain our survival and is still evolving today.

It is important to recognise that the human brain is the result of this evolutionary process and its continuous longstanding relationship with the earth as its environment, and that our current capacity for cognition is the embedded summation of this process with a constant view to survival. I believe this explains many things, most of all that our cognition is not primarily concerned with what or who I think ‘I am’ as a discrete individual, a ‘constructed self’, but simply my, albeit personally unique, reactive cognitive mirror of my environment to aid my survival in it.

As our cognition exists behind an impenetrable ‘sensory wall’ it works unilaterally and in isolation, yet by having evolved in constant relationship with its environment it is predicated to act multilaterally with its environment to aid survival. It is in a sense half a circle that is coupled with, yet existing in a different isolated domain from, our environment which forms the other half circle; the two when put together,  (  ) forming a circle of interaction or reactivity; a sort of yin and yan whole.

I am struggling to get this idea across but I believe it is important to recognise that considering our cognition as ‘what I think’ suggests a separate entity in which a complete circle of interaction can occur totally internally. I am suggesting that though my cognition has evolved to the point where it can, this view of cognition ‘in isolation’ is fundamentally at odds with the evolved nature of our brain to work multilaterally with the environment. It’s not ‘wrong’ it simply takes us out of the flow of evolution, which is extremely perilous.

If we pursue this false view we will and are isolating ourselves from our environment. We will and are isolating ourselves in a non-existent cognitively constructed world. This is a severely practical problem for us. The environment is obviously suffering, the purely cognitive economic world is devastating human energies and even the process of art has ground to a halt in the cognitive world of modern, post-modern and now alter-modern, where the concept of ‘modern’ has taken the ‘now’ and placed it in respect to a raft of purely cognitive references. As suggested by Eckart Tolle this literally cancerous quality of misused cognition needs to be addressed.

Though we humans, being the most autonomously reactive of all animals, tend to see ourselves as separate entities we still have a long continuous history of being inseparable from the environment. In other words, though we can intellectually recognise that on a practical level we can’t live without an environment we find it extremely difficult to recognise we are far more deeply an inseparable reactive part of it. It’s not just that we would starve without an environment but that our brain and cognition would suffocate without the environmental stimulation that is the ‘air’ our reactivity requires to breath. It is only our increased capacity for cognitive reactivity that has offered us the unique possibility for our consciousness to construct a belief that we are separate, yet our supposedly unique internal cognition is as much a creation of our environment as sand is created from a stone by constant weathering.

When one perceives our current human condition in the context of our use of the reactivity of our cognitive organ I believe many things fall into place.

Of course human beings have many failings, but the vital addition of this approach is that our troubles are not the result of individual frailties but simply the state of evolution of our cognitive organ.

To construct an understanding of its current functionality and limitations could be a first step to understanding it and our best use of it.

The Evolving Brain.

As a change from my normal blogs for the next week or so I'm going to post my personal PhD project about the brain. It's approach is to in a sense reverse engineer the brain's evolutionary process. Hope you like it.

Brain1 Introduction.

As we celebrate the 150^th anniversary of Darwin’s publication ‘The Origin of Species’, brain science is making massive strides forward. Though we acknowledge that we are the product of evolution and the survival of the fittest we rarely consider the development and nature of our brain and sensory system from this viewpoint. Though we are aware of our progress from crouching ape to standing man and of the brain’s long evolution before that, we rarely consider the inner evolution of the brain and how that evolution has formed and re-formed it over the millennia. It is the basis of our niche potential as an animal and it seems important that we explore how the necessities of evolution might have formed our brain’s function and capabilities.

            Where the physical sciences have their roots in first principles it is notable that the study of human behaviour has never taken that approach believing it too mechanistic to describe our complex, esoteric cognition and behaviour. I suggest our reaction is a form of defensiveness. Without thinking we see ourselves, our species, as not simply another animal but in a category of one, as perfectly capable but for our many individual weaknesses and foibles. Might it be though that we have intrinsic incapabilities?

            In these essays, though I accept the experiential programming of the brain is individual and infinitely variable, I am searching for the ‘first principles’ of its functionality as might have been formed by the necessities its our long evolution.

It is neither a neuroscience view nor that of evolutionary psychology but rather it stems from my education in maths/physics, art/design and my career as an innovator, and more recently training in numerous strands of therapy. It is I believe unique in being essentially an engineer’s approach. These essays will suggest our best option is to identify our intrinsic and universal incapabilities and work with them rather than assume all our failures are due to the weaknesses of individuals. One would never assume steel to be perfectly strong and conclude every structural failure was due to some local imperfection. Steel and our cognitive powers have very finite capabilities. 

Note. Though the phrase ‘survival of the fittest’ is generally used I suggest it adds a certain misleading colour to our understanding. I suggest it’s more accurate to say the ‘proliferation of the best adapted.’ Only when the best adapted proliferates and becomes dominant do the less well-adapted struggle to survive. Taking this alternative phrase the emphasis is on adaptation rather than fitness and proliferation rather than survival.