The failing of a legacy and a bit of neuroscience

One of my sources of income involves me working as the projectionist for the local Air Force base theatre. Before the start of many films geared towards younger audiences there often tend to be various shorts. The film company Pixar has become quite notable for the creativity they put into these shorts. However the short I saw just the other day was not done by them and did not have anything remotely similar to creativity. In fact I would go so far as to say it was the very opposite of creative and nothing more then a cookie-cutter style cartoon.

Now generally I would not have much to say about such a forgettable animation. But this was different, as when it started I was actually a bit excited to watch what I was sure to be an enjoyable cartoon. Why was I so sure of this at the start and thus, left with such a feeling of emptiness upon its conclusion? I was so sure because it was a Wile E. Coyote and Roadrunner cartoon.

I remember especially loving these cartoons when I was younger. I knew they were absurd and filled with gratuitous violence. And I also knew what to expect when I watched each one. But this is not why I have always loved them. What drew me to them was the fact that they were the perfect juxtaposition of Goldbergian and Murphian philosophies. It was the fusion of the ideas of "anything worth doing is worth over doing" and "anything that can go wrong, will go wrong". The two concepts play off one another so perfectly that each episode of the original cartoon offered a new example of engineering absurdity failing in the most spectacular fashion possible.

But the cartoon that I watched was nothing more then repetitive slapstick. There was no variation, no build up as we watched a ludicrous series of contraptions failing or working too well, just the Coyote jumping off a bridge with a bungee cord to grab the roadrunner who was feasting on a strategically placed pile of bird seed. The series of events were nothing more then just a play of the same theme over and over, Coyote jumps off the bridge, when he reaches his nadir he is struck by an on coming truck and flung away. In successive attempts, he is volleyed between trucks or is stretched and then released. There are no other apparatuses or contrived schemes. Just the same concept done over in differing ways. It lacked the finesse of the original cartoons and left me with a feeling of hollowness.

Must all cartoons be dumbed down to the lowest common denominator like this? What happened to playing to the intellectual audience while still giving the child the laughs they sought? Do the producers think so little of the current generation or have they lost that spark of creativity and now only create to make a pay check? Is comedy that requires a bit of thought to appreciate really too much to ask of an audience?

Now some have criticized these cartoons as being overly violent and conditioning children to laugh at the pain of others. While I will agree that one does get a hearty serving of Schadenfreude with every episode, I would not say this is inherently a bad thing. We as humans are naturally conditioned to laugh at the pain of others. This is not because we enjoy inflicting harm upon others. But because we are an empathic species.

Our brains are loaded with mirror neurons, a genius innovation by evolution that fires whenever we see someone doing something or experiencing something. These mirror neurons and mirror neural pathways allow us to learn by proxy. This is why we can see something done and put ourselves in the place of the person doing the action. It is also why our hands flinch when we see another persons hand injured or wince when someone else is harmed. They are both a wonderful learning tool as well as an invaluable capability for empathic bonding and interpersonal understanding. In fact, the evolutionary trait of having such unprecedented levels of mirror neurons is what contributed to the development of our social system and intrinsic moral compass.

As a side effect of having all these mirror neuron complexes is the problem of dealing with the emotional strain of feeling the pain of others so often. If we did not have an outlet for this, the emotional turmoil we would suffer from seeing others injured would tear us apart. So an outlet did form, our natural reaction to laugh when we know there is nothing that can be done to help the person and that the injury is not life threatening. When such injuries occur we often cannot help ourselves but laugh, this is because when the mirror neuron systems fire and our brain recognizes the situation as one that is not life or limb threatening and one we cannot do anything to assuage the pain of the other, our limbic system kicks in and releases endorphins and various parts of the brain that involve emotional and pain responce such as the amygdala, hippocampus, periaquductal gray and hypocampus all start firing sending us into Gelotoleptic fits, otherwise known as laughter. This whole series of events is an emotional survival mechanism, one that if we lacked, we would soon all become so emotionally frail that seeing the slightest injury inflicted upon another would send us into extreme duress.

A meeting of science and music

I have recently started reading a book called This is Your Brain on Music: the Science of a Human Obsession by Daniel J. Levitin. I have been in love with music for as long as I can remember, just as long as I have been in love with science. So when I came across a book that fused the two, I absolutely had to purchase it and moved it to the top of my 'to read' list. I have only just begun and already I am finding it to be everything I had hoped it would be and more. Having an understanding of music theory has made much of it a bit easier to digest, though even a musical layman would be able to understand what is presented as the author takes his time to explain the concepts quite well without being deprecative towards the reader. The author is both one of the more renowned musical producers alive as well as one of the leading researchers in the field of cognitive neuroscience. For anyone with a passion for music, this book is a must read. It goes about answering questions such as: what is music, does listening to music make us intrinsically smarter, when do musical preferences form, how does our brain process music, and many other questions.

But what I really wanted to mention (other then a laudatory reference to the book and a quick review) was an experiment mentioned within this tombs pages. An experiment that asked the question 'do other organisms perceive sound as we do?' as well as 'how does the brain process sound?'.

The experiment was conducted by a then graduate student by the name of Petr Janata (He is now an Associate Professor at UC Davis in the Psychology Department and at the Center for Mind and Brain). Other then being a student of biology, Petr is a lover of music. He is a pianist with a preference leaning toward rock and jazz and currently uses music as a model for a neural basis of auditory attention, imagery, and memory as well as working on the relationship between music, emotion, and memory.

The experiment revolved around a phenomena that occurs when a listener hears music with the fundamental frequency removed. Every note we hear is composed of multiple pitches. The base pitch is the 'fundamental frequency'. Often, every other pitch is an integer of the fundamental frequency, these other pitches are known as 'overtones'. An example being, if a note has a pitch of 110Hz, then the overtones will have a pitch of 220Hz, 330Hz, 440Hz, etc. When ever we hear a sound, our brains look for the fundamental frequency. It is so key to how we perceive sound that, if you were to remove the fundamental frequency from a tone, your brain would create it for you.

In Petr's experiment, he was curious as to whether other animals perceive music as we do. So he placed electrodes on the inferior colliculus (a portion of the brain responsible for auditory comprehension) of a barn owl (Tyto alba). He then proceeded to play Strauss's "The Blue Danube Waltz", but with a significant change. The fundamental frequency was removed from the piece.

So a computer recorded the firing of neurons in the brain of the barn owl as it listened to that piece of music made famous to my generation thanks to the film 2001: A Space Odyssey. After the waltz was over, Petr sent the recorded data through an amplifier and a loudspeaker. Confirming Petr Janata's suspicion and amazing everyone who was within earshot, the sound that came out was the melody of The Blue Danube Waltz, complete with its own fundamental frequency. The barn owl's brain had restored the missing pitch just like any human brain would.

This confirmed that music, the arrangement of pitches in time, was not a human invention, but something that has been with us for a very long time. Considering the last common ancestor between a human and an owl is the reptiles that divulged into the anapsids (the turtles and tortoises), diapsids (the dinosaurians and, later on, the avians), eurapsids (the line that led to the ichthyosaurs) and the synapsids (which a branch of, the therapsids, became mammals). Sound in time, music, has been a part of life, it seems, for at least many millions of years.


So it seems that my obsession with music is not only healthy, but something that is ingrained within us, coded in our deep genetic past. The experiment further proves that we are just another animal species amongst many, living on this tiny rock of ours. And that those other species, the ones that many of us look down upon, also comprehend the world around them. That they perceive it in a fashion quite similar to our own. That they hear music as we do...and their minds process it just as we do. By seeing this, there really is not much separating us from them. Though, there never was much barricading us away. We just wished it were so, to feed our egos, to make us seem more important. But by understanding our connection, we find that our importance is not lost, but strengthened, and so is the meaning behind every other living organism.


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Reference:

Daniel J. Levitin. (2006). This is Your Brain On Music: The Science of a Human Obession. London, England: Penguin Group

Janata, Petr. (August, 1994, last change April, 2010). Petr Janata's home page. http://atonal.ucdavis.edu/~petr/

University of California at Berkeley. (last change, July, 2010) One subset of Gnathostomata is Osteichthyes, bony vertebrates. http://locolobo.org/Clades2.html

Evolution of religion

The question of how religions have developed is one that has been thought through for as long as people have been questioning religion. Why do religions seem to develop in similar patterns and support similar social structures? As of now, the best hypothesis is that religions developed out of our naturally formed social structure. It developed as a meme to explain the various occurances of the natural world.

The human mind is geared towards seeing patterns as a survival technique. A good example of this is that it allowed our early ancestors to pick out the panther from the background visual 'noise' of tall grass and thus get away before becoming someone else's lunch. This reinforced the pattern seeking tendency and it began to be applied everywhere. This pattern defining 'software' was applied especially towards unknown events such as natural disasters, death, disease, social structure, and any other natural phenomenons they could not explain or understand. Religion reinforced a hierarchical social system that was useful as populations grew in number. It also out competed opposing belief systems through normal memetic evolution)

Many characteristics of religion can be directly traced to how our early ancestors naturally formed social groups as populations increase. Observer any small group of humans and there generally will be no clear leaders. People will take on roles based on skill and chores are passed around on a basis of need and ability and not through command from a central authority

This can be seen whenever we observe any small surviving tribes of humans, we see that the population generally does not exceeds approximately 150 individuals. In fact if the population increases, the tribe will splinter, a section moving off to live elsewhere. In these limited population groups, every person is required to stockpile the necessary supplies to sustain the group. Thus every person is of equal standing to everyone else for survivals sake. The superstitions and religions that are held by these groups mirror this as they are invariably polytheistic with mostly equal power between the various deities. Any variation is based solely on the importance of the role that the individual deity has (the deity for fertility will be more important then the deity for something more obscure like the night sky). To further support the idea of 150 as a limiting number we can look to recent developments in Neuroscience. Here, studies and experiments on how the brain stores information has shown that the region of the human brain responsible for remembering individual faces has a limit on average around 150. Thus giving more evidence that humans initially evolved to be in communal groups no larger then this size.

But if we increase the number past the 150 mark, we find that there are more then enough people to gather food and other resources, creating even a stockpile. Suddenly we find individuals who actually have some free time away from general hunting and gathering. This extra time allows individuals to become specialists. Such specialists would include artisans, storytellers/historians, dedicated child rearing groups and much more. Each of which creates greater efficiency and allowing for more specialization.

As these independent skill groups develop another task oriented group naturally arises through emergence, this is the governing class. A group who starts by acting as a central processing to allow the burgeoning society to run more smoothly and effectively. This development of this new class adds an extra boost to the rate of development within the other individual skill classes as well as streamlining food production and availability, thus reinforcing its own existance.

This process is actually quite similar to the emergence that is seen in nerve tissues. As neural nets become more complex, densely packed regions of nerve tissue develop to allow for processing of the now expanding regions of complex nerve nets. These clusters are known as ganglions, and as evolution presses forward they too begin to arrange themselves into distinct control systems. These control systems start out as multiple ganglions converging into a single structure. A structure that eventually will become the central nervous system.

Just like in the case of nerve tissue developing complex systems, societies develop a ruling group that will become more influential as the population increases. With more people comes the need for strong central authority. This is then reflected in the belief systems held by the society. Before the population explosion there was an anarchic-commune of individuals with equal purpose. There was also a general equality in their religious beliefs. But as the population increase and one group of humans becomes more influential over the others, so too does one group of deities become more influential.

This places even more power and influence in the hands of the governing body and often allows for a schism. A split between the classes that controls the daily functions within the community and the group that keeps track of the beliefs.
The governance side dictates what is to be done within the community and the clergy keeps up the superstitions and beliefs that have developed, often forming a belief system where the governing body is in place at the will of the deities, or even that the head of the governing body is a deity or otherwise connected to them in some way. By doing this, they solidify the governing bodies place in society as the head of society instead of just a managerial system. This symbiosis allows for both groups to raise in power.

This leaves us with a belief system that enforces the status quo, explains away natural phenomenons as well as keeping the people in line. Looking at it from this angle it seems completely natural for such a system to form. Therefore religion seems to be nothing more then an evolutionary process to allow for survival under new conditions.

It is not the size of the mind...

Recently, there has been quite the upheaval in thought surrounding the functionality of small brains. Quite a number of studies have shown that the size of an organisms brain does not reflect its inherent intelligence, as was thought for the longest time.

What is being found now is larger brains are more frequently found in larger organisms not because they are more intelligent, but because they have more body mass to regulate. Having a larger body requires more computing power to operate all the necessary functions. This is why Cetaceans have some 200 billion neurons yet are less intelligent then humans with our measly 85 billion neurons. A whale has much more bio-mass, larger muscles to regulate, and more massive systems or operate. As such, they need more neurons to simply perform daily life functions.

As well as needing more neurons for regulating larger amounts of tissue, larger brains are also known to have a great deal of redundancy. Entire pathways are written and re-written again. While this does help in the case of injury or for increased parallel processing, the extraneous neural routes also consume a great deal more energy, making the over all system less efficient. This redundancy is seen consistently throughout the animal kingdom as brains increase in size. The reason for this is the genetic code. Our genes do not list every neuron nor does it list every connection. If it were to attempt this, it would be hundreds if not thousands of times larger then it currently is. The reason for this is that our genes encode our neurons as a repeating pattern. So when the genes are read to begin forming the organism after conception, a base template is created and replicated through multiple iterations until the requisite amount of neural tissue is formed.

This trend can be seen in the other direction as well, as we are now learning. An insect does not have that much tissue to constantly regulate, so its required amount of neurons for basic life functions is relatively few. This allows for the remainder to be used for other processes. In fact only a few hundred are required for tasks such as counting and a mere few thousand neurons are needed to produce a very basic consciousness.

With this new information, we are realizing that insects are much more then simple reactionary beings, as we have assumed for so long. They are able to recognize objects and individuals, categorize objects, count how many of something there is and quite possibly much more. This, quite obviously, makes insects far more interesting. There is even a chance that when you watch a praying mantis and she appears to be looking back at you, she might just be pondering you just as you are contemplating her.

What really counts is the number of synapses, not the overall number of neurons. More synapses means more links, more connections. The more connections you have, the better parallel processing speed you have. More links also grant greater storage by being able to connect disparate concepts together in the mind.

This discovery is also quite important to computer scientists. With the knowledge that synapses, not neuron count, is what really matters, scientists and engineers can now start creating smaller systems of emulated neurons that will have greater functionality then we previously have had. Instead of relying on redundancy as higher organisms do, we could emulate neurons with an increased inter connectivity. This would grant a more complex system, but being built from a much simpler construct. Such knowledge may allow such neural emulations to bound forward faster then we had previously predicted.