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.