BRAIN

President Obama’s BRAIN Initiative (Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies) seeks to decipher how the brain’s circuitry produces thought and behavior. The Science News Brain Shot reports on this initiative. This is an excerpt.

Ambitious goals: While the BRAIN Initiative’s objectives are hard to express in concrete terms, the project is full of visionary promise. “The ultimate goal is to understand who we are,” says Terry Sejnowski of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, Calif. “How is it that our brain is able to look out into the world and see things? How is it that we are able to make decisions? How is it that we’re able to coordinate enormous amounts of knowledge?”

I can’t help but feel such questions are only fully answerable by subjectively observing how one thinks and feels. Isn’t this how humanity has always perceived the subtler side of the human experience? Buddha’s Four Noble Truths is a superb example of this. Others scripture concur with his view to various degrees, e.g., Bhagavad Gita, Tao Te Ching, Christ, even Genesis. The problem we face in understanding ourselves is often an innate unwillingness to accept reality. We look for “understandings” that don’t threaten the preconceptions we hold dear. We often chase our tails in search of answers. Chapter 65 hints at this self-deception…

Of ancients adept in the way, none ever use it to enlighten people,
They will use it in order to fool them.
People are difficult to govern because they are too intelligent... Chapter 65

Chapter 65’s observation, not to enlighten, but to fool, puzzled me for a long time. It seems at odds with humanity’s spiritual aspirations. It is easy to interpret this as a deliberate attempt by the ancients to avoid enlightening the people. The common belief that we humans possess free will would suggest this to be a deliberate act on their part, i.e., these ancients chose to fool us, we assume. Why would they ever want to do that?

My breakthrough on this came when I fully faced up to the fact that we only understand what we know (p.254). This is a truly hard pill to swallow… at least as hard as the fact that our mistaken sense of free will is an inevitable consequence of the “illusion of self”. Seen in this light, the ancients didn’t fool anyone deliberately. People fool themselves by misunderstanding the message. That would be the natural outcome of being capable of truly comprehending only what we already know intuitively. In other words, we naturally interpret what we hear in accord with our own deeply held needs and fears… “Truth is in the eye of the beholder”. If the eye is fearful, the truth it sees legitimatizes or deals with that fear in some way.

Therefore, I’d imagine that we can only understand “how our brain is able to look out into the world and see things and make decisions” to the extent that we are intuitively ready for and comfortable with the facts we find. As usual, our needs and fears will invariably color our interpretation of the facts and any conclusions we make. Understanding begins within as chapter 47 observes…

Without going out the door we can know all under heaven.
Without looking out the window we can see Nature’s way...

This excerpt is from Cataloging the connections. (Google [Cataloging the connections Viewing the brain as a network may help scientists tackle its complexity]

Eventually, scientists want to map everything. Their ultimate goal is a catalog of all the connections between all the brain’s cells and regions, a master map known as the connectome. It’s a formidable task, comparable to identifying every building in the country and then tracing the routes of all the people and cars that travel among them.

That “scientists want to map everything” is akin to knowing the layout and biology of every cell of every leaf on a tree. But will you know the tree? One must ‘become’ a tree to understand a tree, which no doubt sounds impossible. It all depends on what we mean by become. Setting that aside, knowing all the facts certainly doesn’t hurt, and can enhance one’s experience. However, without some becoming, knowledge is relatively blind. Chapter 15 and 49 speak to this somewhat:

Of old, the adept student was minutely subtle, open and deep beyond knowledge.
He alone cannot be known, hence his strength lies in allowing… Chapter 15

How does the wise person exist, all under heaven, breathing in?
Becoming all under heaven, simple and natural his intention.
All the multitude explain with their knowledge;
The wise person, each and every child… Chapter 49

This last excerpt is from the Science News report, How pieces of live human brain are helping scientists map nerve cells

A blow to the ego: Research may disappoint people who think that our brains have specialized neurons that let us talk and think in ways other animals can’t. “The overall number of cell types in the human cortex and in the mouse cortex is roughly the same”, says Christof Koch, chief scientist at the Allen Institute for Brain Science. (Google [Live human brain helps scientists map nerve cells].)

“People, including scientists, have this strong need [for] human exceptionalism,” Koch says. But the fact that the overall resident population of the human brain and mouse brain is remarkably similar adds to the list of blows to the human ego. First, Darwin downgraded humans to just another animal on the tree of life. Then, the Human Genome Project shocked us with the news that we have a similar number of genes as mice (and fewer than water fleas). Now, add brain cell types to the list of things that make people more like other mammals.