6th Ed. Chap 07. Senses + Language 05

Cycognition 05 Chapter Seven. Senses + Language. Ch 7 Page 1 of 41

CYCOGNITION The Sciences of the Human Brain

Ref: Chap 07 Senses + Language. 05

CHAPTER SEVEN. SENSES + LANGUAGE.

CONTENTS 7.1. Introduction 7.2. Autonomics 7.3. Eyes and the Optic System. 7.4. Ears, Sound and the Audio System. 7.5. Music. 7.6. Representation of the Images in the Brain 7.7. Conclusions 7.8. Handwriting 7.9. Touch, Taste and Smell. 7.10. Auralian Dimension. 7.11. Significance of Language. The Most Recent Evolutionary Development of the Brain

7.11.1. Reorganisation of our brains to process speech and Language 7.11.2. The Expansion of our brains to enable us to control Speaking. 7.11.3. Expansion of our memory systems to accommodate Words. 7.11.4. Understanding ‘time’ and therefore enabling prediction. 7.11.5. A means of accumulating and communicating knowledge. 7.11.6. Reading and Writing. 7.11.7. A new facility to relate words to other sensory input. 7.11.8. A process to associate words to develop meaning and understanding. 7.11.9. Implications of the expansion of Writing 7.11.10. The foundation of Thinking and Reasoning. 7.11.11. Enhanced awareness leading to active Consciousness. 7.11.12. Implications of Language on the bifurcation of the brain.

7.12. An Alternative Paradigm. 7.13. Living Languages 7.14. Limitations of Language 7.15. Notation.


7.1. Introduction We have set ourselves the task of discovering how our brains operate. We have taken on board everything that the neurosurgeons can tell us about the physical properties of the contents of our skulls, and the contribution of the chemists. We know that certain parts of the brain are apparently responsible for certain functions. Our knowledge of the operation of individual neurons is very substantial. Our latest scanning techniques can indicate which parts of the brain appear to be active, but we have not been able to conceive of any way of further dissecting the brain, nor any way of reading, nor translating the electronic activity that can tell us how it operates. We can dissect a muscle, heart, or lung and determine exactly how it works. We can make models that mimic their operation. We can even transplant organs. What we can see of a muscle is all that there is. What we can see of the brain is just a small fraction of its capability. We have no means of communicating with a brain. We can communicate with the person, who owns the brain, and that person is using their brain to communicate with us, but we are not communicating with that brain itself. We have no means of ‘reading’ the coding system, if there is one, nor any way of listing the functions of the brain other than by observation of people. We have only one source of information with which to investigate the whole structure and framework of our brains. We can observe ourselves thinking. We have nothing else. How then can we advance? The psychologists have built up a very considerable body of knowledge of human behaviour and can shed light on many responses that are relatively consistent, but this does not begin to suggest the actual processes that occur. We can divide the problem up. We can identify the principle functions that the brain controls. We can draw conclusions about the conscious and subconscious operations of the brain. We can learn a lot from the surgeons about the automatic functions, which control the performance of our bodies, but we are back to speculation about the interaction of these autonomic functions with our thinking brain. How many things can we do together? Are things happening concurrently, or serially but very fast? We have considerable information to analyse such phenomena as dreaming, imagining and fantasizing. We must bring in the concept of time. This leads us to the relevance and impact of emotions on the operation of the brain. Then we can begin to tackle the great quadumvirate of memory, intelligence, thought and consciousness. The most sensible place to start seems to be with the function of memory, which must be common to all other functions. We cannot think about a problem if we cannot remember it! We can consider information structures. In what form might we remember an image, a letter of the alphabet, a number, a smell, a feeling and so forth? We can try and define how we might store that information. We have more to go on here as we can attempt to quantify the amount of information we remember in a normal life. We can also observe ourselves remembering. A major contribution from the surgeons is the curious fact that if part of our brain is amputated, say 10%, we apparently do not lose a definable 10% of our memory. We can consider all the other information structures, which will at least give us some sort of context in which we can discuss the problem. If we can conceive some workable theory of memory, however crude and perhaps naive, we can then see how this might provide a basis for an explanation of intelligence, and then the process of thought. No doubt we will have to amend and amplify our theories of memory to accommodate what we achieve with our intelligence and our thinking, and as we amplify our understanding of memory we will be able to analyse our intelligence and thinking better. Perhaps, by an empirical process like this, we can at least begin a process that will bring us in time to an explanation that will allow us to explain all the incredible abilities that we daily take for granted. Then the truly difficult task will start; i.e. to see if by using the rules we have created we can produce some desired effect from a given input. No doubt we shall then find that we need to reconstruct our whole thinking yet again as the brain proves to be orders of magnitude


more sophisticated than we had imagined. We can only achieve something if we start somewhere. There is a body of opinion that suggests that science never produces correct answers, just fashionable theories that are later disproved. This misunderstands the operation of all thinking and research. As Carl Popper said, “no theory is ever proved to be right, it can only be proved to be wrong”. As more and more arguments point to any conclusion one may say that the theory is ever more widely supported but it only requires one experiment to disprove a theory for it to be obsolete. Extending our knowledge of the universe is like peeling skins from some cosmic onion. Each skin displays a yet more sophisticated layer beneath. Every time we answer one question satisfactorily we expose a yet more intricate structure beneath, rendering the original solution incomplete. Our Newtonian understanding of physics led us to question various underlying concepts that quantum physics is now struggling to answer. This in no way diminishes Newton’s contribution: far from it. Without Newton and his successors we would not have been able to formulate the questions that quantum physics is endeavouring to answer. The following chapters analyse the various aspects of the brain that we have discovered, and the capabilities that we experience, and suggest a possible and probable structure on which we can build hypotheses of how the whole brain system operates. The logical place to start is that part of the brain that controls our bodily functions, the autonomics system, the information system concerned with what is happening inside our bodies. We can then analyse the inputs that our brain receives from what is happening in the world outside our bodies: our senses. The foundation for all our subsequent analysis must be the memory system of our brains, without which very little further activity would be relevant. What we do with the information we remember leads us directly to our intelligence. Historically we have used ‘intelligence’ as a portmanteau concept to cover almost anything that we can do in addition to storing and recalling information. This may have misled us and obscured the significant differences that we are beginning to realise exist between intelligence and thinking. Some levels of intelligent response are automatic, or subconscious. Consciousness introduces an element of choice, which is fundamental to many of the processes we associate with thinking, and so it is logical to discuss the subject of consciousness after intelligence and thinking. This leads up to a possible theory of memory and thinking and physiological explanations of creativity and inspiration to complete this part of this book. 7.2. Autonomics Part of our brain controls our bodily functions, such as our heart beating and our lungs dilating. We have some control over these functions. We can stop ourselves breathing for short periods. It is extremely difficult, however, to stop breathing for any length of time. Indeed holding one’s breath, say, under water becomes very painful as the automatic system demands to take back control. We salivate and we make our internal organs operate. We operate the food processing and waste systems, with limited control over the output valves. If foreign bodies invade the body we are able to react to defend the body. To what extent this immune system is a brain function, or an automatic, perhaps glandular reaction is unknown, and is a question the medical profession would dearly like answered. It would seem reasonable to presume that the brain controls all these functions, and is the agency that activates the glands. However this is somewhat apart from the conscious functions of memory and thought. However, there is one important point that must be considered. In this shadowy conscious/subconscious area it is very clear that the system is largely in automatic mode. Furthermore, it is very difficult, indeed nearly impossible, to influence, let alone override these automatic functions. The key point is that it can be done. We can train ourselves to hold our breath for increasingly longer periods. There are plenty of examples in the world where people have been able to train themselves to put themselves into a trance like state and achieve varying degrees of control over these functions. It may be very difficult but it is possible, as many eastern mystics can demonstrate.


The next major level of brain activity is the control of movement. We decide to stand up and the brain sends the appropriate commands to the appropriate muscles. Sequences of these commands are learned and this subject overlaps with memory and learning. Walking, cycling, and swimming are examples. Talking comes in this category, as speech involves manipulating the muscles of the lungs, vocal chords, mouth, tongue and lips. Many good examples of brain performance come from the experience of driving a vehicle. We do not remember learning to walk and talk but most people recall learning to drive. Here we can take the example of the sequence of actions involved in changing gear by someone when we are proficient. The decision to change gear may be very nearly subconscious, particularly if we are holding a conversation at the time. We are often very nearly oblivious of having changed gear. Compare this virtually automatic, or ‘autopilot’ activity with the struggle often involved when we are first learning to drive and we are trying to move everything consciously. As we learn to do these things we develop neural pathways through the brain. In effect we grow circuits. Similarly, the most delicate of operations are needed to operate the noise box in the throat. Even the most minute variations of sound can signify large differences of meaning and are therefore of considerable significance. The brain operates in at least two major modes, which we can observe quite easily. We have a conscious mode and a subconscious mode. The subconscious mode is in continuous operation throughout our lives. One definition of death is when our subconscious brain ceases to function. When the power in the subconscious is turned off, we cease to be. The conscious mode is operational when we are awake and closes down when we sleep. The input systems, like hearing and feeling, appear to be processed by the subconscious brain at all times and only some information is passed to the conscious mode while we are awake. Our bodies are continuously feeling our clothes but the subconscious only interrupts the conscious brain with some of this information in special circumstances, like a shirt becoming too tight. If we are asleep and the subconscious interrupts the conscious we wake up. We can smell while we are asleep. We wake if there is a smell of burning. The brain registers very accurately the passage of time. Before we go to sleep we can decide when we want to wake. We then wake up to within a few seconds of that time. These time measuring abilities are not really so surprising as we have had watches and a fixation with the exact measurement of time only very recently. Wakening at a predetermined moment before dawn may well be for many in the animal kingdom a matter of life and death. Input systems like sight are also processed initially by the subconscious, although we can only see while we are awake. The subconscious passes on to the conscious brain only a small amount of the information that the light waves register on the eyeball, so the same selection process is occurring. Although we can only see external images when we are awake we can see remembered images while we are asleep. We dream. Over the centuries people have attributed many things to dreaming, such as second sight and the ability to forecast the future. The fact may be much less romantic. At least part of dreaming is more likely to be associated with the much more mundane need of the brain to sort out its recent experiences and sort these away, or index them, in appropriate parts of the brain. This would be consistent with many dreaming experiences where it is easy to trace some elements in a dream to the most recent experiences; yet other elements in the dream appear to be a jumble. Often, however, this apparent jumble could easily be memories stimulated by the brain accessing associated events as it files its recent experiences. For example it might be that during a day it is necessary to change a punctured tyre on the car. That night one might well dream about somebody one had met on a previous occasion when a tyre had punctured, but perhaps mixed up with somewhere abroad which was the site of another puncture, all taking place in an opera that happened to be an event one had gone to the night of another puncture. The following day it might be quite difficult to identify these connections especially as we often have only an imperfect memory of a dream. Again, it is significant that we can have a memory of something as ephemeral as a dream.


Another theory of dreaming is that we are watching one of the processes of thinking. The brain is continuously looking for patterns - new ideas - new concepts, sometimes in an attempt to find solutions to problems we are trying to solve, sometimes just speculatively without apparent purpose. Perhaps the brain is combining parts of memory trace sequences to see if some new idea is a possibility However, as is so often the case, this may not explain the whole of dreaming. Nightmares and very powerful dreams are more related to issues that are currently very important to us. The brain is capable of ‘worrying’ both consciously and subconsciously. The psychologists will tell us that the subconscious worry can be at more than one level. That worry, for want of a better word, can occur at a fairly shallow level of the subconscious or be very deep; the further the brain appears to be able to lock certain memories away so that the conscious brain is denied access. We are also able to dream while we are awake. We can day dream or fantasize. In daydreaming, as opposed to night dreaming, we have more control over the content of the dream. We can re-enact some event from the past or we can invent, or conjure up completely new events from our imagination. We can generate complex daydreams that are perhaps better called fantasies, where there can be a whole cast and a series of plots and sub plots. We can terminate a period of fantasising, but return to it again and pick up the threads for another instalment. We can memorise our fantasies as though they were reality. In some cases people can, of course, confuse the two because the fantasy is so real. There is a lot to be learnt from our ability to dream, daydream, and fantasize and our imagination. A number of processing functions are occurring together in the brain: the autonomic functions controlling the operation of our bodies, the commands that translate requests for various actions into operating instructions to our muscles, and two levels of activity, conscious and subconscious. It would seem likely that there is more than one level of subconscious activity, and perhaps more than one level of conscious activity. One can listen to two conversations and respond to both. It is possible to hold a conversation, while doing something else like cook a meal, or drive a car. Whether we are actually doing two things at once or just interleaving two operations together is difficult to gauge, however the processing capacity of the brain does appear to be finite, whereas the memory appears to be inexhaustible. If someone is talking and driving, and the conversation begins to require more thinking power, less attention will be devoted to driving; typically the driver will slow down. Similarly, if the driving conditions deteriorate the driver may lose the thread of his sentence. Thus we can deduce that if two functions are occurring together a part of the brain is determining which function is taking precedence. It would seem reasonable to extend this hypothesis to the whole brain, both conscious and subconscious, and that there is a command system that is continually allocating the available resources to the various tasks currently being undertaken. This also seems to coincide with the latest views of brain activity that we can observe. We can probably identify where this command system resides, yet if it is damaged or removed it does not appear to wholly remove this capability. Once again the position is not clear-cut. The functions of control can take place from anywhere; they just appear to work better from their preferred site. This capacity of the brain to perform even if parts are damaged is one of the most sophisticated features of our brains. 7.3. Eyes and the optic system. We can accept information into the brain from the five senses. Sight, sound, smell, taste and touch tell us what is going on outside of our bodies. By far the biggest source of information is through our eyes and ears. An important part of the messages from our ears concerns balance. At our present state of civilisation we tend to think that we acquire the majority of our knowledge from


sound, but this is only true because of our highly developed capacity of speech, which, in Darwinian terms, is the most recent of all our means of communication. Actually, by far the most important source of acquiring information is sight. The eye is one of the principal keys to understanding the brain. The eye provides every form of life that has sight with awareness of its surroundings. The eye is the most crucial step forward in the long saga of the evolution of all the species on earth. Many of the more primitive animals have larger eyes than brains. The earliest forms of life were just single cells. One could argue the first great breakthrough was when numbers of cells grouped together to form a single entity. This allowed various cells to specialise. The earliest life forms are still with us, like the amoeba and the hydra. Both cope with their internal state and reproduce, but their only awareness of the outside world is through touch. Touch such an early creature and it will respond by moving away or curling up. Early creatures could respond to light and dark because all their external cells were light sensitive. As time went by certain cells specialised in reacting to light, which in due course became the eye. Creatures now had some idea of what was happening outside their own bodies It follows that it is of no great use to register patterns of light, or images of things happening outside the body unless these images can be interpreted. The first part of interpretation is to be able to breakdown a mass of image into various component parts. Secondly, these components must be capable of recognition. To recognise something it must have been encountered before and remembered. Therefore, before eyes could be of any use, the nervous system had to be able to separate images into individual patterns, store those patterns in such a way that they could be matched with similar patterns in the future, and when such patterns were matched some action or response could be set in motion. Put another way, eyes were only useful to a creature if the shape of an enemy could be recognised from all the background images, matched with a stored shape so that the danger could be recognised in time for our creature to decide to fight or flee. All the essential components of a brain had to be present in the earliest creatures for their eyes to be useful: classification, dividing up an image into shapes; memory, both storage and recall; pattern matching and response. It can be argued that this is a definition of nearly 90% of the activities of our brains today. It also suggests that in some ways the development of eyes stimulated the development of brains, or at least they went hand in hand. There is an argument that consciousness stems from this very early stage. Response influenced by experience presumes an element of choice, which is one of the bases of consciousness. All eyes work generally in the same way. All mammals are nearly identical. Light waves, or photons, fall on the retina of the eye and are converted into discrete pattern traces that the brain can interpret. Our eyes contain about 110 million light sensitive cells, which under a microscope look like a series of rods and cones. Curiously, the optic nerve connecting each eye to the brain appears to have only about a million nerves, so the first image the retina receives has to be compressed. The optic nerve ends deep in the brain in an area, which has many millions of neurons, known as the lateral geniculate, where the image is apparently expanded again. These neurons are connected in turn to the visual cortex. One theory suggests that between the retina and the visual cortex, light signals are converted to nerve impulses. As these nerve pulses are mapped, first in the lateral geniculate, then onto the visual cortex, they are classified in terms of edges, angles, movement and colour. An alternative theory suggests that the eye and associated neuron circuits divide the mass of light striking the eye into a series of discrete pattern traces of recognisable images. A third theory suggests that visual images are stored using some aspects of the protein memory system we associate with DNA, and therefore the optic system converts visual images into DNA-like strands of proteins which match with similar strands that are our memory in the neurons.


The majority of the nerves from the left eye go to the right half of the brain, while the majority of the nerves from the right eye go to left half of the brain. However, a significant minority of left eye nerves are connected to the left brain and right eye nerves to the right brain. In the cortex, images are further processed to break down the general image into individual recognisable patterns.It immediately becomes apparent that in this process a very large amount of information coming from the retina must be lost, or else we would be swamped by information and we would be unable to perceive anything. Nature is always very profligate. Just as it takes a very large number of seeds to create a new tree, so only a small amount of the information that strikes the retina is finally made use of by the brain. More sophisticated eyes can focus. One of the more obvious effects of ageing is the progressive inability to focus the eyes. Opticians can compute a person’s age surprisingly accurately from the speed with which they can adjust their eye lenses. The fact that we have almost completely overcome this problem with the advent of glasses may have some interesting implications on the whole process of brain ageing. The brain ‘sees’ a stable image. The eyes see the world from many angles. If we roll head over heels we are momentarily disorientated, but if we are bouncing about in some vehicle the world outside stays completely stable. It is worth repeating the simple sentence “Light waves fall on the retina of the eye and are converted into discrete pattern traces that the brain can interpret” because it encapsulates one of the great wonders of the world. The volume of information that the brain receives just from looking at one simple view outside one’s home is quite extraordinary. Whether home is a burrow, a cave or a house in a street, the amount of information visible from the entrance is very great. If one tried to make a list of every detail it could take a very long time indeed to compile. We see every blade of grass, every leaf on every plant and every tree. We can see every single brick in every wall. We can see a whole image, and we can ‘zoom’ in to a small part and pick out an almost infinite amount of detail. Even a relatively simple view could contain tens of thousands of individual images if we attempted to list them. Yet we see and process them all virtually instantly. In fact we do not register every leaf on a tree. The eye must see them, but the brain has the capacity to ignore all the detail and just allow ‘a tree’ to register. It is this observation that has led to the theory that the optic processing system divides the total light image into generalised and familiar discrete pattern traces, like 'trees'. The subconscious brain must process, or ‘see’ the whole image that impacts the eye but has the capacity to filter out a large amount of detail and so just passes on the major images to the conscious brain. If we want to look consciously at some part of the image in detail - zoom into what is happening somewhere - the subconscious brain reshuffles the image it has and passes on more detail in the specified area, at the expense of some part of the overall image. We consciously see the one area more closely but other areas less distinctly. If we are watching a game of football we can look at the whole field, then concentrate on the one goalmouth, then if the ball is cleared, go back to seeing the whole field. If a couple go for the ball our field of vision can be reduced to just the two player’s legs. Part of this selection is focusing, but if we are watching a match from a stand, most of the time we are actually seeing the whole pitch and perhaps a lot of the surrounding stand, yet the conscious brain is concentrating on part only of the information contained in the light waves that are striking the retina of the eyes. To cope with the immense amount of information that the eye is passing to the brain the subconscious must be able to identify familiar objects. When the eye receives an image of a large number of leaves in roughly a circular shape the subconscious eye registers ‘tree’, ‘bush’, or ‘hedge’. If we are not very concerned about trees at the time, the conscious brain is just aware of its presence. If we are positively concerned about something else we will not even notice the tree at all; the subconscious will have filtered it out completely. To be able to filter out images not currently needed still presumes that they are remembered. It follows that memory is the vital component of the first brain function of sight. As soon as the brain can recognise a shape, which means it is able to separate out a shape that matches a stored shape,


that part of the image can, as it were, be labelled and temporarily put on one side while the rest of the image is processed. Unless our subconscious brains could identify, that is recognise, the majority of the input to our eyes in this way we could not cope with processing the image. Our conscious brains would have to work overtime sorting out what we were seeing, as the subconscious could not do its job. To recognise something means that we must be able to compare it with a memory. An example of this can be observed when we first see an abstract work of art that is a mass of novel images. Initially we get no more than a general impression, but as we study the picture we begin to see shapes. When we see the picture again we recognise those shapes and begin to see more. It is quite consistent with our observed behaviour that we actually see very little with our conscious brains. The subconscious brain has filtered out all the currently non-significant sub images, temporarily ignoring them. When we look at a familiar sight - the kitchen in our home, for instance, which we know very well - it might be easier for the brain to show the conscious brain the stored memories, which are all filed and tagged with what they are, than to process the image from scratch each time. What the subconscious brain does do is to draw our conscious attention to a difference between the stored image and the input image. We immediately notice change. As we walk into this kitchen our subconscious brain receives the light image of everything in the room in total detail. It compares this with its stored image and passes a simple generalised image to the conscious brain - the kitchen is here as usual! We will be aware of the kitchen without really seeing it. We will have quite enough information to navigate to the table. Our hand will go virtually automatically to the cupboard handle, all of which is largely from memory supplemented by a small amount of correction information from our eyes. The longer we have lived in that kitchen the more we know its geography and the more we do on autopilot, and the less conscious correction we need from our eyes. If, let us say, a mouse were sitting in the middle of the table we would see that the instant we walked into the room. The subconscious brain would have compared the total image and sent a message instantly to the conscious. “Look at that mouse” and the conscious brain would see virtually nothing else in the room at that moment. The two conclusions that we can draw are that the conscious brain registers only a very small part of the information presented to it. We have the concept of partial acquisition. There are a multitude of examples of this in everyday life. Secondly, the amount the brain does register is closely related to the amount of the incoming information that is familiar. The more that is familiar about the incoming information the more processing capacity is available for other purposes; either to carry out some other operation or to register something unusual. Familiarity also works in the opposite way. If something is not at all familiar, or more importantly we think it is not familiar, we may ignore it. If the brain says, “we do not understand this” then verily the brain will not understand it. This is an example of the ‘concept of presumption’, which we will return to often in the following pages, as it seems to play a crucial part in the operation of the brain at all levels. This also explains the well-established fact that the reports of the same incident witnessed by several people will vary widely. All the reports are likely to be incomplete. Each witness will tend to report the aspects of the incident with which they are familiar. The more familiar they are with the background the more detail they will notice. Sir Frederick Bartlett did many experiments where he monitored closely both the amount and the type of information his subjects could recall after reading short stories. The results were remarkably consistent. The Dutch psychologist, Adriaan de Groot set up various experiments with both amateur and master chess players. He allowed the participants to glimpse the boards set out in various positions for just five seconds. The masters could subsequently reproduce the boards with 90% accuracy, whereas weak players could only achieve about 40% accuracy. This is entirely consistent with the concept that the more familiar the


brain is with what it sees the easier it is to recognise and therefore acquire information. The chess master’s brain is so used to everything to do with a chess board and all the different numbers of pieces that are likely to be present and the patterns they may be in, that a particular number and pattern is easy to assimilate. The weak player uses up brainpower to orient the board, count the pieces, and has to spend time identifying the individual pieces present before thinking about the pattern of their positions. Dr Braddeley and Debra Bekerian analysed the impact of a BBC advertising campaign to acquaint listeners with a change of wavelength on a panel of Cambridge housewives. 84% remembered the exact date of the change. Only 25 % remembered the new wavelength. Radio wavelengths are not something that, perhaps, housewives feel they are comfortable with. It would have been fascinating if there had been a control group of electrical engineers. It would seem to be very likely that the primeval brain, once it had assumed control of the autonomic functions, evolved hand in hand with the eyes. As the eye became more sophisticated in what it could register so the brain developed the capacity to compare the patterns it was receiving with a memory of those patterns and so identify the various images and pass only this selected and processed data to the conscious brain. Better eyes needed better brains, better brains made better use of better eyes. Thus the brain evolved. One of the principle uses of eyes is to help the owner catch food. The lion surveys the grasslands looking for signs of a quarry. The eyes are looking for the slightest sign of movement. Having sighted a herd of whatever it fancies for a meal, it needs to identify the weakest member of that herd. Lions, like many other pack animals will hunt in groups, co-operating with one another to panic a herd, then isolate a weak member, then close in for the kill. The lion with the best eyes to detect the herd, notice the slightest indication of which way the herd will run, pick out the best target, will be the one that survives, and be the one that becomes the leader of the pack, and so fathers the next generation. So evolution favours the eye brain combination that can react fastest and most accurately. Similarly, in the final chase the hunter must follow every twist, turn and subterfuge of the quarry, and choose the exact moment for the final leap to make the kill. This requires considerable co-ordination of eye, brain and muscles. In particular, the lion has to calculate its own speed and the speed of the quarry and leap at exactly the right moment with exactly the right force to catch the quarry in exactly the right place. The mathematics of such an action if carried out by a pair of robots is very complex. The brain can do it automatically. It would be wrong to say ‘easily’ because there is some evidence that the sustained thinking and concentration that this takes is just as mentally tiring as the chase is physically tiring. Perhaps the effort involved in a sustained period of thinking and concentration is so tiring that the brain needs to switch off to re-organise itself, which is what we know as sleep. The significance being that when the conscious brain switches off, so do the eyes, not the other senses. We have tended to presume that after a chase it was either the physical effort of the chase, or the soporific effect of the food that caused animals to sleep. On reflection, one does not need to sleep to rest the muscles, nor sleep to assist digestion. Quite the opposite, movement assists digestion. It is much more likely that we need sleep to rest and revitalise the brain. One of the great conundrums of the performance of our brains is our ability to recognise another human face. It is easy to see how we might recognise an artefact, like a chair, as it remains the same, not only while we look at it, but also it remains the same over time. Faces change. People smile, frown and change their expressions continuously. We can even recognise people from just a profile or side view. Over time, peoples faces grow lines, put on, and lose weight, men grow beards, yet we still recognise that person. How?


The eye accepts a light image and passes an electronic pattern to the brain. The brain then files that pattern together with appropriate information like the person’s name and whatever else seems important to us, or seems important to our brain (which may be different), at the time. Next time we meet that person the eye accepts a light image and passes an electronic pattern to the brain, which then tries to match that pattern with its memory, and when successful informs the conscious brain, first, that this person is recognised, then supplies associated information such as that person’s name. Alternatively, the brain can access the person’s name and compare the image patterns to accept, or reject the information and tell the conscious brain whether this is the person with this name, or it is not. So far so good; one can see how the brain matches two patterns and achieves a match when they are the same, like a chair, but the brain also carries out this staggering feat of matching two patterns when they are different! If one was writing a computer program to recognise various different chairs, one could conceive of an algorithm based on a multitude of measurements and angles, i.e. a sort of geometric solution. We could build up a huge formula that defined each chair. We could even build in a means of rotating the images so that that we could recognise the same chair if we saw it from a different angle, or perspective. However, a person’s face is forever changing. No matter how many measurements one made they would all be meaningless. Optical character readers are now quite clever at ‘reading’ text. It is possible to place a page of printed text in a digitiser - a machine that reduces everything on the page to a series of tiny dots, the opposite of a television, which uses lots of tiny dots to create an image. Photocopiers and fax machine digitise the image then transmit the dots and so output the copy from the photocopier, or from the fax on the other end of the phone line. Programs can now analyse these dot patterns to identify the characters of the alphabet, both capitals and small letters, numbers, punctuation and so forth. The cleverer programs can rotate the images so that if the characters are not printed quite straight on the line they can still be accurately recognised. Over 99% of well-printed characters can now be read accurately. Considerable success has been achieved in reading, storing and recognising fingerprints. Here the problem is not so much that the image changes; people’s fingers do not smile! The problem is more that one is trying to recognise a fragment of an image. When someone’s fingerprints are taken in controlled circumstances, one can get a good clear, complete image. A fingerprint on a stolen artefact is likely to be incomplete. We simply do not know how the brain achieves this feat of recognising other people, but we can observe some interesting phenomena, which might help us formulate some theories, which might start us on the road to solving the puzzle. It is a very worthwhile endeavour, because a solution to this conundrum may well help us to solve the even more fascinating problem of how we remember concepts and ideas. We obviously do not remember dimensions, or dots, but it may be that we do not remember the whole light image pattern of that face, only certain key elements. We need remarkably little information about a face to recognise it. A brilliant artist can produce an instantly recognisable image by drawing surprisingly few lines on a piece of paper. IBM recently published some pictures of Descartes that were made up from just a series of rectangles. Looked at closely, only the rectangles were apparent, but step back and Descartes jumped out of the picture, with all the character of that famous face. Even knowing the face was present, it still disappeared as one looked closely again. When we see a photograph of someone we are often surprised. We claim it is a good, or poor, likeness. This would be understandable with an artist’s painting, but a photograph is the actual light image on the camera lens at that moment. The exact same image that the retina would have ‘seen’ at that moment. We are of the opinion that when we dream we have seen people while we have been asleep. We can recognise


them and we have a memory of seeing them in that dream. Yet it is difficult to close our eyes and consciously see someone. We see what we know is that person, not the actual image. Cartoons are drawn of well-known people. Often only a few lines are used but we recognise them. ‘Spitting image’ puppets are grotesque likenesses. Interestingly, as time goes by, the public figures appear to grow more like their cartoon or puppet image. It is likely that this effect comes about because as we see both images more frequently we just concentrate on the similarities the artists have reproduced. Both images lead to the same recognition. It is easier to recall an image that is static. There are certain images that are very well known. Among the great paintings, perhaps the Mona Lisa is the best example. Most people have a very clear mental image of that famous face. The Mona Lisa’s face does not change; it is fixed. It is often true that we remember deceased relatives from a photograph rather than from life. This may be because we have seen that photograph more frequently in the intervening period, but it could be that it is one more piece of evidence that the image we file of a face is only a very incomplete image. Thus the pattern of pulses that passes across the synapses might be relatively simple. The matching process might then be a function of the multi-connections of the synapses. Imagine two TV sets transmitting two images to be compared. Both transmitters point towards each other and transmit their dots onto a membrane of neurons stretched between them. All the neurons respond whether they are stimulated by either transmitter, neither, or both. A high score of stimulations by both transmitters would indicate a match. However, for this to work the two images would have to be the same size, and be correctly orientated. If the one were on its side, no match would be scored. Now the brain can also work, not just on the basis that a pulse is present or not, but can recognise stronger or weaker pulses as well. So the pattern the brain processes is both digital and analogue. We have both the equivalent of the dots of the TV transmitter, but some dots are more important than others. Now it begins to be possible to conceive that the incoming pattern can be processed by the neurons, through their many connections to be magnified, reduced, and rotated, so that a stream of alternative input image patterns can be generated from the original, and be compared to the stored image. Because of this analogue dimension certain features can be given greater or less significance. Similarly, all the stored images may be filed in such a form that they can be magnified, reduced and rotated as well. Perhaps when we ‘recognise’ a face the brain has processed many thousands of versions of the light image that was received by the retina, and compared it against may thousands of versions of every image that we have filed. On achieving a match there must be some electrical or chemical effect that announces this success to the brain and connects up the information associated with the winning image to the conscious brain. Here again reliance on the computer as a guide can be misleading because the computer can only do one thing at a time. It can take a string of characters into its central processor and compare them serially with another string. To achieve a matching process along the lines suggested above could certainly be done but a very large and powerful computer would take a long time. The computer’s equivalent of a neuron has only three connections, a source and two destinations, while the neurons in the brain have thousands of sources and destinations. The computer has one processor and a lot of memory, but can only address one piece of memory at any one moment. It is remarkably inefficient. The brain on the other hand can use virtually its’ whole capacity as one vast multiple processor, and can use the whole memory simultaneously; hence the remarkable speed. We recognise a face very quickly. It is sometimes the case that there is a delay recalling the name of the person, however the recognition process is very quick and that is the visual pattern match. Time is of the essence. The brain has evolved to do this recognition as fast as possible, not as a social grace for mankind, but so that an animal can identify a friend or enemy: it is a matter of survival. We can observe that our brain processes every face of every person within range of our


eyes. If we are walking along a crowded street every face is processed and checked. This sounds surprising, because it is quite subconscious, but it must be true because we know that suddenly in the entire crowd we recognise a friend. Unless we ‘saw’ everyone we could not do this. It is fascinating that the brain does not make gross errors. As mentioned above we do not mistake a person for a hat stand. We can learn a lot from this phenomenon. It must be that when we look at a face the first reaction of the brain is to determine the general image category, in this case faces. Secondarily, it will try and match to a group of faces; lastly it will try and identify an individual face. If we look back to how we recognise faces initially, we must look back to the earliest images that we ever saw. A newly born infant must see the world rather as we first see an impressionist painting. Parts of that blur move around and so can be separated out. As we see that image again and again, probably a very large part of the brain processes that increasingly distinct image. Soon we learn to identify ‘mother’ and ‘father’ and so forth. As we see more and more of certain images they begin to create stronger neural pathways or networks, but all the additional faces we begin to store are probably interleaved into the general brain area of faces. As the images of frequently seen faces become stronger perhaps the number of neurons needed is less and less as the pathway becomes stronger. The released neurons are available to hold all the variations of new faces. This could be a very logical reason why the memory of faces is spread across a wide area of the brain with many variations of the same face interleaved with all the variations of myriad other faces we have seen and stored. The neural pattern that is created is probably initially very inefficient with vastly more neurons being used to cope with the variability of the images. Mother smiling, mother looking severe. The creation of the image pattern will be exactly what arrives at the visual cortex. If the same image is read out of the cortex and back round to where the image arrives from the eye, then the brain will have the impression of seeing that image. Thus, in a dream what we experience is the sight of stored images. We can deduce from this that the coding system is the original pattern that was established when we first saw the image. Because we have to identify changing images, so we store the components of that image. The result is that we can recognise someone even if they are in disguise, but also we do not get a clear memory image, but the components that go to make up that image. When we meet someone, the image of them is instantly recognised as a face, then we recognise male, female, young, old and any other category, then the minimum of variation which is needed to achieve a fit that says ‘recognised’. This should set off of a train of responses that leads to the stored name. If the neurons that supplied the identity have frequently responded, indicating that we know this person well, the stimulation of the circuit to the name will be immediate. If the image is just familiar, the determining neurons may respond weakly, not stimulating access to the name. We may not retrieve the name at all, or we may have to try and access the name by some other criteria. Perhaps the determining neurons stimulate some other memory. If so, can that be used as a means of accessing the name? Our present knowledge suggests that the nucleus of a neuron can direct a pulse to a particular axon distributor depending on which dendrite is stimulated. When an image pattern is played across a bank of dendrites this means that if a substantial number of pulses match a recorded pattern these pulses will be concentrated to a target neuron, or group of neurons. This is a very powerful way of concentrating power into a small area very decisively. This allows incomplete images to be recognised, but also means that there is likely to be a winner. We have some insight into the growth pattern of visual images. Oliver Sachs has described how adults who have been blind from birth but have had their sight restored in middle life are traumatised to find that all they ‘see’ is one big blur. The inference is that that is all a baby sees. Gradually, faces that are


frequently seen are identified. Adults find this tedious and difficult, but children have little else to do, and maybe their systems are more plastic. There is a school of thought which says that skills like this are only open to us until puberty, when these skills are lost as others take their place. This recognition process is by no means limited to identifying faces. The same process occurs recognising everything we see. It is easier to understand the concept of recognising a human face. The brain actually has to match correctly images that are different. In the same way we can differentiate between oak and elm trees, even if we are comparing a mature oak and a sapling elm. In the world of art, as an example, we can learn to recognise the work of an artist. There were many cartographers in the eighteenth century who all copied each other’s maps. At first sight they all look very similar, however anyone who studies antique maps could tell you who drew, or engraved a map instantly. Just as they will tell you that one map was published by John Speed in 1610, and another by Blaeu in 1645,they will tell you another map is a later copy of a Speed done in the nineteenth century. Similarly, the Art dealer will immediately identify a Rembrandt, a Constable, or a painting by one of Constable’s relatives. Someone who specialises in autographs will instantly identify a forgery. Obviously this applies to the whole visual world. We talk about recognising the ‘style’. Yet it is virtually impossible to specify the differences. Certainly one could teach a class the differences, but always by showing them lots of examples. It would be impossible to teach that class just by describing the differences verbally in a series of lectures. Similarly, we read printed text. We can also read handwriting. Now some very interesting observations can teach us quite a lot about our ability to see and recognise patterns and assimilate information. Recognising a letter, or word, is the same basic problem as recognising a face, however we do not usually look at strings of faces. When we look at strings of words we are trying to recognise at two different levels. We are not only identifying the patterns of individual letters and words, but also we are trying to interpret combinations of words, and make sense of whole streams of images. Therefore another level of memory comes into play. First we need to match the pattern of the letter, then while remembering that, we need to match the pattern of succeeding letters, then we match the meaning of a batch of letters and identify a word, then, whilst remembering that word we assimilate more words and try and match a meaning to a sentence, and so forth. Finally we look for some hidden meaning in a combination of words. As we become better at reading we recognise the pattern of complete words rather than their component letters. There is a body of evidence that suggests that we 'see' whole words, not their components. We can read sentences quite easily if the vowels have all been removed from all the words. Similarly, we recognise the words even if half the letters are missing providing the first and last letter of each word are present. This supports the 'edges' theories. Reading a complex textbook on, say, physics is more difficult than reading an enthralling novel of derring-do. Why? We say that the former is hard work, the other is play. We can explore the implications of this later, but it would seem to be related to the involvement of memory. The textbook is about abstract concepts, thus the pattern matching process is a long way from the problems of pattern matching that the lion needs to solve to enable it to eat. The novel conjures up largely visual images and stimulates the imagination to everyday events and experiences. This is a much easier task for the brain and needs less effort, and concentration. Also these visual images probably do not need to be precise. If the goodies are beating the baddies in the wood, we do not need to take the slightest interest in the trees round about, let alone filter out detail about the leaves. A generalised image of a wood is quite adequate. Studying physics may depend upon our grasp of exactly that detail. Thus we are attempting to hold a great deal more in our current memory. Similarly we have less support from existing images already processed and stored to use as familiar context within which to place the new information. We may well be wanting to remember some of the physics detail which in the novel is irrelevant, whether we remember it or not. We are trying


to slot the physics information into the context of our current knowledge. We can learn a lot from the art of the printer. From the invention of moveable type by Guttenberg in the fifteenth century to the present day, printers have striven to make information on the printed page easier to assimilate. Whether this is to help sell a product, or help people learn, or make reading more enjoyable, the problem is the same. The spaces of letters and text on a page makes a very considerable difference to our ability to understand the content, and affects to a remarkable extent the length of time we can concentrate. The design of all the characters that make up the alphabet plus the numbers and punctuation in one ‘typeface’ makes a great deal of difference to our ability to read easily. It is much easier to read text if the typeface is designed so that the characters which are naturally larger like an ‘M’ take up more space, and characters that are naturally narrower like an ‘I’ take up less space. Typewriters and cheap computer printers mostly have typefaces where all the characters, whether they are naturally wide or narrow, take up the same amount of space. Try reading a page of a novel produced on a typewriter as opposed to one properly printed. The difference is dramatic. Some typefaces are very simple; just the basic shapes without any embellishments; other typefaces have small ‘feet’ at the bottom of the vertical strokes known in printer’s jargon as ‘serifs’. The most famous typeface in the world was designed for ‘The Times’ newspaper and is known as the ‘Times Roman’ typeface. ‘Times’ is a serif typeface. A thicker, or heavier version, will be called bold, and is used to emphasise words. A slanting version is called ‘italic’, also used to emphasise or differentiate words. It is interesting that if one word on a page is printed in italic it will stand out. The more words that are emphasised in this way, the less will be the impact. If a lot of words are printed in italic the brain finds this tiring. Some typefaces are designed with many additional embellishments. Old English, or German Gothic type, beloved of lawyers and designers of headed personal notepaper, is very grand but very difficult to read. It is easier to read text where the right hand margin is as straight as the left hand margin. It is easier to read newspapers where the text is printed in narrow columns. The eye is scanning the text fairly quickly, and so the lateral movement for the eye is less if the lines are short. People train themselves to read pages of text by scanning down the centre of a column or page. The design of a catalogue is important. The object is to arrange the text in such a way that the important words that the reader needs to see stand out and will catch the attention of someone just browsing through the pages. Imagine reading a catalogue listing a variety of books. If one browses through the pages, perhaps without concentrating very hard, the chances are that a book that you may have been looking for and are keen to acquire will catch your attention. The eye must be receiving the image of everything on the page, the subconscious is processing everything, and when it finds a match with a word that is tagged in the memory as an author or title that is required, it alerts the conscious brain saying “look, here is a first edition of Pride and Prejudice that we have been looking for”. There are many examples of the capacity of the eye and brain to see a wealth of detail, match and identify it all, but present to the conscious brain only


a very small selection of information that is relevant to the present circumstances. Reading handwriting is another area of pattern matching and is no different to pattern matching print. A person’s handwriting is like a different typeface. Once the style is familiar, id est learnt, it becomes progressively easier to read. Similarly, people learn to read old English. However, reading handwriting is like identifying faces. The brain is matching images that are different. A person cannot completely camouflage their handwriting any more than they can change their fingerprints, or vary the auralian response they transmit. We all learn in the context of our existing knowledge. It follows that everyone's knowledge, even of the same subject, is fractionally different. Furthermore, as we learn to write, so the neural networks we grow to control our fingers will always be unique to us. These tiny variations are sufficient for us to pick up, thus we recognise who is writing to us from the handwritten address on the envelope. Equally, the more we study someone's handwriting the easier it is to read. However, the images that they write are quite variable. As a result, the brain has to work harder to read handwriting, quite hard to read poorly designed or printed text, and significantly less hard to read well designed and printed text. The less the brain has to work just to acquire the information the less tired it will get and the more useful work it can do. Anything that distracts the eye will reduce the level of concentration. Some people would find the use of the Latin ‘id est’, rather than the more usual ‘i.e.’, in the preceding paragraph annoying, the mild irritation temporarily reducing their level of concentration. The brain has used up capacity by alerting the conscious brain unnecessarily. The same applies to spelling, or typesetting errors. The subconscious brain tries to match the pattern of the wrongly spelt word against the memory of the correctly spelt pattern. Once again the brain is capable of matching different patterns correctly. Two situations can occur. The subconscious brain will interrupt the conscious to confirm that this match is indeed correct. This will cause some irritation, which, to the extent that it annoys the reader, will reduce the concentration level. However, it is quite possible to program one’s mind not to be bothered by spelling errors. To the extent that one is successful in this self conditioning, one need not be annoyed in the first place, and in due course the subconscious will not even bother to interrupt the conscious and as a result one will not even notice spelling mistakes. Such conditioning can also be optional. At any time one can switch modes and see all the mistakes. Quite a number of games are based around the side effects of pattern matching. Pictures can be drawn with images obscured within them. For instance, a picture of a country scene might have a number of rabbits in view, but with a number of other rabbits images obscured in the picture. The curve of a hill might be a rabbit’s back, a couple of trees its ears, and a small pond its eye. The game is to spot the hidden rabbits. The problem is to make the brain stop its normal activity of seeing hills and trees etc., and try to identify rabbit shapes. The more one sees the easier it becomes to spot them. The interesting thing is that once the hidden images have been seen they are, and remain, obvious. The artist cannot understand why they are all not immediately obvious. It is quite a good game for very young children as a step on the road to developing their capacity to think, because the brain is being consciously made to act in a way additional to its natural activity. The brain is being encouraged not just to accept the immediately obvious patterns but also to re-examine the images and view the picture from a different perspective and look for different patterns from the same image. When we dream, we see images although our eyes are closed. Dreams can be very vivid and very real. Sometimes, when we wake we can be quite confused for a short while as to which is the dream and which the reality. We can also remember the dream, or part of it. To the extent that we do see in dreams, the images must be from our memories. If we can see so clearly in dreams then perhaps quite a lot of what we think we are looking at is actually our memories modified or adjusted by any new input coming from our eyes. Thus, sometimes when we have found something we have lost, we realise we have looked straight at


the item more than once during our searching but not identified it. If an image, a view, a person, a picture, a photograph or whatever, is very attractive to us, then whenever we see that image we experience pleasure. We can recreate that image in our minds and to a certain extent generate some of the same pleasure. When we are awake we can visualise a memorised image. We do not exactly see the image as in a dream, but we can read things in the picture. We can identify a tree, the colour of a house; we can make items move, such as a bus travelling along a road. We could read the number on the bus. In a well-remembered image we can view the whole, then zoom in to a particular part to study a detail. Thus our memory stores a wealth of detail in the same way as a wealth of detail strikes the retina of the eye. In the same way, the subconscious brain filters out of lot of detail both of the reality and of the memory and presents the conscious with just a small part of the whole, depending on the priority at the time. Almost all the functions of sight appear to be common to ourselves and most of the higher animals. With the possible exception of our ability to recognise word patterns the whole process of pattern matching appears to be virtually automatic. There seems to be no element of consciousness, or conscious choice, in the process of seeing, processing and identifying the images that we see. To the extent that any level of thought is involved this seems to be associated only with actions once we have identified an image. The brain sometimes says to the conscious “this is the best I can do. What do you make of it?” We recognise a human face extremely quickly, but it may take time to retrieve the associated name or other attributes. Often, we recognise the face as familiar but we cannot recall the name at all. We often see an image which initially means nothing to us, then suddenly we recognise the pattern. Perhaps we are looking at a weather map and we see some vertical lines down the left hand side and a concave half circle on the right - moments later we recognise the southern Irish Sea and the coast of Wales. Similarly, we can look at the drawing of a cube. To start with it appears to be facing towards us, then suddenly it reverses and appears to be facing away from us. As we continue to watch, the image flips back and forth at a constant rate. As we view an image, the brain compares the shape and matches these with our memory. A shape is recognised and the conscious brain informed. We have success; we relax. But if we continue to study the image the brain will continue to analyse the information it is receiving and continue to search for more sophisticated patterns. Try looking at the photograph of someone you know quite well. Initially you just see the familiar face, but if you go on looking intently the face changes expression. The brain starts by acknowledging recognition, but then, like handwriting, goes on to look for more sophisticated matches. This is the process by which we learn to recognise the style of an artist. Gradually, we can identify the subtle sub patterns and mega patterns from just the obvious images. When we identify particular patterns that are more complex than the immediate image we are able to categorise special sub groups in apparently similar conglomerations of images. Thus we can label such sub groups as beautiful and other sub groups as ugly. It is also very obvious in the way we appreciate music. Identifying these mega patterns is a very important pointer to the whole operation of the brain. Christopher Tyler and Leonid Kontsevitch at the Smith-Kettlewell Eye Research Institute in San Francisco think that natural ‘neural noise’ in the optic system is responsible for making people believe that the image they are seeing is subtly changing. If we silently think about some issue we can hear ourselves speak within our heads even if we do not utter a sound. We hear the exact complete words as though we had said them. Not so when we recall images. We do not see the remembered image; we see the components of that image. If our concentration slips off to some aspect associated with that image, we have the sensation of having seen the whole image. As we concentrate back on the image itself it deconstructs again. When we dream, we feel we see the whole image.


We also see largely what we are expecting to see in the context of everything else going on at that time, which suggests that much of the imagery that we respond to consciously is the stored image augmented by the input from our eyes rather than the image newly seen by the retina. If this seems illogical it is part of the simplifying process whereby the brain carries out whatever function is required with the least effort. This ability to see what we expect to see has some curious side effects. Sometimes, unless we have the context, we cannot see anything. (cube behind bars) While this can be demonstrated easily in a visual example it is less easy to understand in terms of learning new concepts and ideas. However, the brain works the same way whether one is processing visual images or the latest concepts in quantum mechanics. The problem is easier to understand in the visual example. There appears to be no element of intelligence purely at the image processing level apart from the speed of operation. If a lion were not very good at leaping for the kill because its brain could not process the images of the running quarry quickly enough, it would lose out to the more successful. That speed of processing is an attribute of intelligence. The only aspect of thought is when we consciously modify the normal procedure, when we look for hidden images, and when we start consciously determining what information the subconscious is to send to the conscious, but that is not strictly a function of sight itself. There is an important effect to our sight that may play an important part in many brain operations. This is the ability to time delay images and processes. It is clear that we process images continuously as we see them. We look at a car coming towards us and gauge its speed and decide if there is time to cross the road. Similarly we watch a cartoon film made up of a series of still images yet we have the illusion of movement. In fact all films, videos and television consist of a series of still frames but the effect is more obvious with cartoons. The same processes apply to digital speech, where we only hear the equivalent of a series of slices of noise like the frames of a film. The brain merges these images and sounds and presents a moving continuum to the conscious brain. If you show someone a succession of blue and yellow cards in quick succession they will see the colour green alone. Various people have tried experiments that seem to indicate that we see things before they occur. If you show someone a succession of cards which first have just a dot on the left followed by more cards with both the original dot in the same position but with a cross on the right and ask them to say if they think the dot moves they will indicate the dot moves to the right when the cross appears. This is simple parallax and nothing to get excited about except that most people will tell you the dot moves before they see the cross. This is an example of the brain’s timing producing an illusion. The dot moves when the cross appears but the brain registers the cross slightly later. However the same timing illusion can occur in the apparent decision making process and has misled many observers to suggest that we do not make conscious decisions, we just react. They produce examples of where we apparently start to respond before we have received the information. We all see effortlessly in three dimensions, or we think we do. The messages go from each eye independently to separate sides of the brain where we match both images together as well as with the memory. This gives us our capacity to measure distance and speed, yet the process works quite well if we close one eye. In theory if the stereoscopic attributes of two eyes measures speed and distance then if we close one eye we would expect not to be able to judge distance and speed. This demonstrates another amazing attribute of the brain, namely its ability to perform even if it is not complete or is damaged. People who have unbalanced eyes, one long sighted, one short sighted, in theory should not be able to judge speed and distance, or see in three dimensions because only one eye is working at any one time. However, people with only one eye can do all these things, but perhaps not as efficiently - the opposite of talent. We observed above that both eyes are largely connected to the opposite hemisphere but they are also


subsidiarily connected to the same hemisphere. The messages from the working eye will go to both hemispheres in turn thus allowing time delayed images to be matched. It is likely that in the three dimensional world, what the one eyed person sees is different to the three dimensional world the two eyed person sees. Single eyed, or unbalanced eyed people have difficulty catching balls because of the extra time the brain takes to see the flight. One other lesson can be learned from sight. Most people can distinguish colours easily. Show someone the word ‘green’ and ask them to name the colour, then show them the colour green and ask them to name the colour. No problem. However, show them the word green printed in red, and now ask them to name the colour. Before the answer can be given the context must be stated. What is the colour named? Or what is the colour of the printing? Two quite different parts of the brain are reacting. The one is decoding light the other decoding the letter shapes. If you show someone a succession of colour names printed in those colours followed by colour names printed in different colours the speed at which they read them out drops. We can draw some very interesting conclusions from these observations. In the first place, the fact that we 'see' a stable image, even though the photon stream hitting our eyes is completely different from moment to moment, suggests that the image that our brains work on is some form of stored image. Perhaps it is a series of stored pattern traces of the components of the complete image in our field of image. Conceptually we could think of this as a form of 'half way house', between our eyes and our memory banks. This half way house is continuously updated from our eyes on one side while it communicates with our memory banks on the other. New information from our eyes warns of new images, computes speed and direction, but also feeds remembered information back to the eyes so that we 'see' information in context. Similarly the half way house pattern traces continuously communicate with our memories. This line of conjecture has a number of attractions. This is the 'remembered present' that Gerald Edelman has suggested is a major part of our consciousness. Also this is the image, or model, of the external world (or at least the visual part of it) that we can duplicate and process 'fast forward' to imagine and fantasise about the future course of events: the model we can use to try our various potential strategies before deciding on a course of action. Furthermore, when we begin to slip off to sleep this may be the last part of the brain to relax. This is the part of the brain that, still communicating with the memory systems but cut off from our closed eyes, is the seat of dreaming. However, there is a more compelling argument. We are beginning to realise that what we refer to as our 'memory systems' are not inert databases but living biochemical machinery. They not so much store information in the traditional way we have been conditioned to think about since we invented filing systems, libraries and computer memory media, but, when stimulated respond with a catalogue of activities. We have also begun to realise that there must be a mechanism that causes the neurons to adapt to new information, or experience. They grow additional links to other neurons and to muscles. We 'grow' new circuits as we 'learn' new skills. The synapses move to fine tune activities. The only mechanism of which we are aware that can 'grow' cells like neurons is DNA or its derivatives. Neurons are the only cells in our bodies that are physically changed as a result of our experience. Now DNA is a very sophisticated memory medium in its own right! DNA could be the medium of memory in our neurons which both controls their physical growth to execute responses and relationships, but also could be the medium that provides the representation of information in the brain, as an extension and adaptation of its role as the medium to represent the specification of our genome. This is not all. We know that DNA can function as a very efficient pattern matching system. In the light of this insight let us look again at the process of sight. The 'hard' question is "how is the stream


of photons that hits the retinas of our eyes related to the memory system in our brains?" Could it be that the 'half way house' concept helps? Perhaps this is the interface. This interface holds a complete image of the field of vision we see (plus our other senses). It is loaded or activated, when we awake and open our eyes. The light striking our retinas updates, confirms, or otherwise, this model. As we see new images this interface can consult the memory system in the media it understands. It can look for matches. A match will stimulate its neuron hosts to generate a reaction. The neurons act as the communication system. DNA is the memory medium that inter alia controls the development of this communications network. As a result of what we experience seeing, we learn. The discrete pattern traces that are the currency of the memory system are integrated back into a complete picture of that part of our field of vision we are concentrating upon together with the other sense information in this half way house, short term memory.

7.4. Ears, Sound and the Audio System. Eyesight is almost as old as multi-cellular organisms. We think that touch and taste and smell may have begun to develop earlier, whereas sound seems to have developed later. For millennia, sight far outstripped the other four senses. All five seem to have been duplicated in both cerebral hemispheres, but with sight taking up by far the largest space. Early sound processing was limited. External natural sounds, like the wind in trees are not complex structures. Some species, such as the bat family, developed sound to a very sophisticated level using it like sonar, as a distance and directional device to allow them to fly at night. All the other animal sounds were limited to warning noises, mating calls and indications of food. These have one thing in common, viz. they are all directly related to emotional reactions. Very recently indeed, in the evolutionary record - a mere 100,000 years ago, a major revolution occurred. Thanks perhaps to standing on our hind legs and stretching our necks which changed the configuration of our vocal chords, our ancestors began to make much more sophisticated sounds. The significance of this development can hardly be underestimated. Observably, speech provided us with an efficient means of communication. It allowed us to pass on our accumulated knowledge. It enabled us to discuss concepts and so begin to think. In addition, language caused a major development in the sophistication of our procedural memory to produce the ever more sophisticated sounds to speak. Prior to speech, the most accurate muscle movement was to hold a tool. Words, sentences and grammar placed a completely new set of demands on our memory systems. We had to be able to recognise and understand the meaning of words, and reply. Prior to speech all our memories had to support were largely emotional responses to simple stimulants. Language allowed us to articulate the fourth dimension. Being able to talk about times past, time present and time future, we had the means to speculate, interrogate and imagine, and the brain responded accordingly. The development of language is worthy of a separate discussion, but here we can look at the remarkable and all pervasive effect of speech on our brains and the clues it may give us about how the systems work. We have studied how our eyes operate and we are reasonably sure that the optic system picks up the ephemeral stream of photons hitting the retina and converts this complex mass of information almost instantly into a set of intricate, stable, recognisable pattern traces, that are integrated into a representation of the image of the visual field we are currently seeing, and images recalled from our memory systems. Our ears had to develop the capacity to do all this, but in more difficult circumstances. A majority of the visual images we 'see' are relatively stable. We can continue to look at an image until we are satisfied we have 'seen' everything. Our ears and audio system have only one opportunity to convert the stream of sound waves hitting our eardrums and convert them into pattern traces we can recognise as words. We have to memorise that word along with preceding and succeeding words to understand the meaning of sentences, and so forth. Similarly we have to compose sentences before we speak as we only have one


chance at any one moment to speak those words. The way the brain has developed to cope with this novel task is highly instructive. The brain did what it always does. It adapted existing facilities. We adapted the process of light recognition to sound recognition. But we did it in a most interesting way. We did not extend the optic system. The brain appropriated half the optic system and developed that as the audio system. Broca identified the area of the brain devoted to sound in the left hemisphere. It is not duplicated in the right hemisphere, and the optic system is no longer duplicated in the left hemisphere. Rather than adapt and extend the visual system, the arrival of audio facilities engineered a take over! However, this 'take-over' was not complete. The original sound processing system associated with simple purely emotional sounds remained in the right brain and, somewhat surprisingly is not replicated in the left brain. Processing language left the original processing system behind. If we look at a stream of sound waves on an oscilloscope it is almost impossible for us to detect whether it is a stream of words or music or any other sounds, and yet the audio system breaks that stream up into words that we can almost instantly recognise. This suggests that the process described at the end of the last chapter is on the right lines - and for both optic and audio processing. Just as the eyes can break up the photon stream into discrete pattern traces of images, so the ears can break up the sound stream into discrete pattern traces of words. The eyes do not 'see' the visual components of each image, the ears do not 'hear' the letters. This statement is not completely true, because we can put both systems into 'micro mode' and analyse a visual image, and focus of the letter sounds. Speech is the only sense where we both input and output; we both speak and hear. We can generate smells but we have virtually no control over what we output. The mirror image of hearing is speech. Speaking seems to us to be so simple, but if we look below the surface, speaking is an incredibly sophisticated function. Our lungs, vocal chords, throats, mouths, tongues and lips are all involved. All the associated muscles are at different distances from our brains, yet we string together a sentence of words and articulate these with absolute precision. Not only must the algorithm stimulate the neurons to activate the appropriate muscles, but it must do this with exquisite timing, taking into consideration the length of the axons each stimulation will have to travel to activate the appropriate muscles at the correct time. And in this discussion of both hearing and speaking we have not touched on the kaleidoscope of variations to every sound of emphasis, like irony and sarcasm, let alone accents and slang. The audio system achieves one other remarkable feat. When we speak with our voices we can hear ourselves with our ears, but we also have a quite extraordinary internal feed back system that short circuits this process. We can speak to ourselves in our heads without uttering the slightest sound. We can talk to ourselves, argue with ourselves, answer ourselves back. As we have seen this has been a major contributor to the concepts of duality. Later, we can discuss how this facility contributes to our ability to think. Here, however, it is useful to introduce the subject of writing and reading. Observation suggests that we assemble in our brain the sentence we wish to write and then actually 'say' it silently to ourselves as we manipulate our fingers to move a pen on the paper, or press the keys of a word processor. In passing, we can observe that because everyone learns to do everything within the context of their own experience, everyone's handwriting is different. We think of reading as a visual skill, but if we observe more closely, in fact, it is both visual and audio. When we read, we are actually speaking the words we see to ourselves. With it's typical efficiency the brain has not duplicated word recognition in both the visual and auditory systems. When we read, the audio system 'translates' the sentences, not the visual system. Hence a definition of reading is the conversion of visual images into speech, while writing is the conversion of speech into visual images. In both cases it is the audio system that is doing the bulk of the work. In


passing, it is interesting to repeat that we see whole words, and we can read them even if all the vowels are removed. We can read them if not all the letters are present so long as the first and last are present. We can do this more easily if we read such a string of words quickly. The ability to 'hear' words, even in poor audio conditions, is a quite extraordinary feat, because we have first to pick up the sound waves, and then match them to some form of memory to be able to recognise them. This observation makes the idea that we pour the semi-processed sounds into a form of half- way house which can communicate swiftly with our memory system even more attractive. Similarly, it could be the mechanism by which we can observe that words have different meanings according to their context. This suggests that there is a feed back system that predisposes the short-term memory to be preparing the ground with potential words that previous sounds infer are likely to heard in the future. There are many examples of the brain' running on ahead' as it were, preparing for what we might encounter, what we might see next, what we might hear next or what we might step on next. All these examples are conducive to the concept of a short term memory system interpolating between our sense processing systems and our memory systems. The mastery of speech gave mankind an unchallengeable lead over the rest of the animal word, but it may also have provided us with another ability. The animal world can compare different images and realise they are the same thing. We can recognise that the same situations can have different answers. And that is one foundation of thought, and crucially, the new idea, viz. that a given set of circumstances with an established solution may actually have a new answer that is different. The impact of speech had a significant impact on our memory systems and language had a similar effect on our ability to think, both of which are referred to in detail later. 7.5. Music Our ears can pick up more than language. Music, rhyme, alliteration, onomatopoeia, rhythm and song can modulate speech or be completely separate. As far as we can judge this, non-speech aspect of sound is the lineal descendent of the limited original noises we could hear before speech, and processing it remains in the right hemisphere. It is directly linked to our emotional systems. Music has a very fascinating part to play in the immense panoply of our brains’ capabilities. A complex of intermingled patterns of sounds can be instantaneously memorable and completely change our mood, raise frightened people to great heights of valour, cause strong people to cry unrestrainedly, calm one crowd, enrage another, relax one person, stimulate someone else. How? We can hear someone speaking against a background noise because we can filter out that noise. The subconscious brain discards the background noises and passes only the required sound through to the conscious. During sleep the subconscious filters out everything. If someone speaks our name, or shouts “fire”, the subconscious interrupts the conscious and so wakes us up. When we are listening to music we are listening to a variety of patterns simultaneously. We can listen to a whole orchestra, but concentrate on listening to just one section and almost cease to hear the rest. The marching soldier concentrates on the base drum to keep in step. The brain is now analysing a set of patterns that is an order of magnitude more complex than anything before because the beauty and power of music is often the interaction of the different sounds being made concurrently by many different instruments and voices. The multi dimensional chord requires a similar level of sophistication of brain processing to the detection of nuances in speech.


A tune is a series of disconnected and disparate sounds that together form an identifiable pattern. Sometimes one hears a piece of music for the first time and the tune is instantly apparent. The pattern is quickly discernable. Popular music, usually played on two or three instruments, tends to have simple patterns and can be enjoyed without too much concentration. It can be enjoyed while concentrating on doing something else. With more complex orchestral music we may need to listen to a composition a number of times before we fully appreciate it. It would seem that the brain just cannot cope with all the different sound patterns assailing the ear the first time it hears, say, a great symphony. The automatic filtering processes of eye and ear, of light and sound analysis that the subconscious achieves cannot operate because the subconscious has no way of knowing which has priority, nothing familiar can be identified and discarded, so it has no choice but to throw the lot at the conscious brain. Nevertheless, some sort of pattern is stored. Each successive time the same music is heard the subconscious has more to go on. Each time the stored pattern can be refined, until ever more sophisticated patterns emerge.

As a piece of music becomes familiar, whether complex or simple, every time it is played we can match the pattern and anticipate the coming pattern. In so far that the following pattern matches our expectation our brain is pleased with itself and so gives us a good feeling associated with successful recognition. And with a piece of music this is a continuing feeling of success throughout the whole composition not just the recognition of one object, or one word. Some music we like, some we do not. This response may be associated with the first time we heard the music, or for other external circumstances, but it seems reasonable that, in the same way that a painting is appreciated most by people with similar eyesight to the artist, so perhaps music is appreciated most by people with similar audio equipment to the composer. People’s mental equipment is most assuredly different, not necessarily better or worse, but different. In the same way as we can adjust the focus of our eyes, perhaps there is some similar capability associated with our ears we have not previously conceived. Different hearing ability could affect our appreciation of different compositions. It seems more likely that it is the level of ability to process the complex patterns that determines our enjoyment. Timing is a very important aspect of music. The difference between a good rendering of a composition and a brilliant one is in the minute variations in the timing of the playing of the notes. To this end, unless children have been specially educated to appreciate classical music, most young people will not have developed the brain capacity to assimilate the complexity of the brain patterns involved and begin to enjoy these types of compositions until they are in their teens, or later. Yehudi Menuhin goes so far as to say that ‘Music creates order out of chaos; for rhythm imposes unanimity upon the divergent; melody imposes continuity upon the disjointed, and harmony imposes compatibility upon the incongruous’ Theme and variations Stein and Day 1972 p 9. There is an interesting echo of this situation in speech. Why do we enjoy poetry? What is there about an iambic pentameter that gives us pleasure? Why do we obtain pleasure from a series of words where every now and then they rhyme? What is a rhyme? Why do some words automatically conjure up an image? Alliteration is fairly easy to follow. Onomatopoeia is more complex. Perhaps this was the beginning of music, where the meanings of the individual words were enhanced when they were set into patterns. One step on from there was to utter the words in the form of song, then accompanied by drums etc., and all the way to electronic synthesisers. Music and poetry have a powerful affect on our emotions. The original ability to process sound was closely linked to emotion; escape, catch food and sex. Music is still processed in the right brain. Perhaps the brain is being extended and stretched to its maximum pattern matching ability so it calls up glandular support to help it cope. Some emotional response will be associated with external influences, for instance, who we were with when we heard the music first. However, some pieces of music can generate very strong emotional responses just because we know the composition. When the brain achieves any pattern


match there must be some reward response internally that announces this success to the rest of the brain, like the secretion of neurotransmitter chemicals. Perhaps music requires such complex pattern matching that so many successes are being achieved that the internal reward spills over into the conscious brain. There is one other important aspect of sound. We hear a word being spoken. We speak the same word and our ears hear it. We can compare the two so that we can modify our speech to mimic others as closely as possible. This forms a closed loop, but with the sound travelling outside our bodies. We noted above the importance of the similar closed loop wholly within our bodies. We can recall sounds like music, but we do not hear the whole sound of an orchestra, only the representation of that sound; we have the impression of the sound. In exactly the same way, we have the representation of an image rather than the picture itself. Both are so close that if we are not concentrating we have the illusion of the original. Words, however are quite different. The internal closed loop is complete and perfect. We imagine the words and we hear them exactly as if we heard them spoken, complete with every nuance. Because we can talk to ourselves in our own heads we can formulate our ideas more accurately. We can re-organise our thoughts so that we can imagine we are teaching ourselves. We can verbalise ideas and concepts, and in all these ways strengthen our capacity to reason, iterate and imagine solutions; in other words it is a major tool in the process of thinking. Great artists, architects and musicians may well be able to visualise the images they wish to create, and they may well have better developed visual capacities, but they still only see the components of images and sounds. Only words are exactly replicated. Perhaps this is because words are very recent in evolutionary terms, and that they use very different neural patterns or algorithms which are susceptible to feed back in a way images and sounds are not. Alternatively, it may be that we invent word sounds while all other sounds and images are external images we merely recognise. 7.6. Representation of Images in the Brain. It is interesting to introduce another concept at this point, although a more detailed study is appropriate later. The brain holds a representation of the images it receives from the retina, ears and other sense organs. This representation must be in a form that allows it to be compared with new information arriving, and also in a form that stimulates the brain to retrieve that image so that we may ‘see’ it in our mind’s eye. The computer analogy, the concept that allows pictures to be printed in newspapers, or seen on television is based on the idea that we can use an arrangement of dots to store and represent images. However, the reason this works is that our brains generalise those dots back into a composite image. We do not process dots in the neurons behind the retina. We have begun to explore the concept that we may not store individual images at all, but that we store a composite generalised pattern trace with variations. For instance, we have the context of faces and then groups of faces, sub groups, and individual variations leading to increasing detail as we know a particular person better and better, or longer and longer. This detail also includes a history of that face so we recognise and contrast a person’s face as it changes over time. This begins to be quite a complicated concept to understand because we have no structure to compare it with in our everyday experience. However, the whole structure may be yet more sophisticated because the storage of sense information may be the same for all the senses. In other words the representation of visual images, sound, taste and the other senses may operate on the same basis. The general ‘discrete pattern trace’ may even be indistinguishable to the external observer. The pattern that we are conscious of is a face may be similar in creation, structure and usage to the pattern of a piece of music or our sense of a smell, taste or feel. The pattern is completely general. Only as it is processed within the brain does it code and decode as a visual image, just as the visual image of a face codes and decodes as a face. Maybe sense image representation in the brain is not sense dependent.


Although this is a very novel concept, it has considerable advantages because it could explain the problem that people without sight, or hearing can still use all their other faculties. The theory that sight and sound were quite independent structures presented the problem that a person blind from birth would have difficulty developing various skills, and this is patently not so. That theory, which also seems the most superficially sensible would suggest that all the pattern matching, image recognition systems would need to be duplicated for each sense. All our knowledge of the brain indicates that this is most unlikely. The brain is extremely efficient and never duplicates anything that can be generalised, thus 'hearing' developed out of 'sight'. There is one other logical derivation from this line of reasoning. The concept that image recognition is based on a generalised context with increasingly sophisticated variations is precisely the same structure that applies to how we learn facts, concepts and all the other memory and thinking functions we that we discuss in succeeding chapters. Thus we may be able to deduce that all our memory and thinking forms are sophisticated extensions of the simple visual image recognition algorithms we developed and perfected aeons ago to survive in the primeval swamps. 7.7. Conclusions. The subconscious brain accepts a multitude of stimulations from the retina and the eardrum and the other sense organs. Initially, the brain categorises recognisable sub patterns out of the whole image, sound etc. The more familiar the patterns, the quicker they will be recognised and the brain then moves on to process the remaining image or sound. Out of the huge volume of information flowing from our retinas only a tiny fraction reaches our conscious brain for our attention. What that is depends upon its current importance to us and its relevance to what we are doing at the time. Similarly, we only consciously hear a small fraction of what is said to us. If we are given a string of familiar instructions we may remember most of them depending on how important they are to us. A long string of unfamiliar instructions are far more difficult. Put this way, these observations seem obvious. However, the whole of our brain functions broadly to this pattern. Committing information to memory – i.e. storing information,- is much easier if it is familiar, if it is in context. If a fact is the last piece of a jigsaw, as it were, of information we have been seeking, then we store it easily. Similarly, the process is the same for the higher level of complexity where we are trying to understand a new concept or abstract idea. We can only build on whatever we already have that is familiar. So it becomes easy to see why anything new is more difficult to process than something familiar. It literally takes more brainpower. A matched pattern generates a good feeling: success. The brain is designed to take the most efficient route to a solution - the line of least resistance - so an unfamiliar pattern needs effort, which generates the opposite to the good feeling of successful pattern matching. For this perfectly good reason, the brain finds novelty and change inimical. This is one of the great paradoxes in that the brain is also an engine of change, novelty and creation; in fact it is our only source of new ideas! Whilst recognising that a pattern generates a mild good feeling and recognising a loved piece of music generates a succession of good feelings, even a change of mood, as we lock into a familiar pattern, nothing transcends the feeling of joy at perceiving - understanding - a new pattern we had not appreciated before. This may be a minor detail that falls into place, or a new idea of earth shattering importance. We may at last have understood some point an instructor has been trying to teach us, or we have suddenly appreciated a hidden pattern never previously noticed and we have realised that it presents a possible novel solution to some problem. Either way this act of creation is one of the most exciting experiences of life.


7.8. Handwriting We earlier touched on the phenomenon of handwriting. We can learn a great deal from this one activity both from the point of view of the reader and the writer. The first time we see a page of someone’s handwriting we may well find it almost indecipherable yet after a number of pages we can learn to read it easily, even to the point that we could tell if some handwriting was a forgery. It is clear that the brain can build patterns out of patterns and mega patterns out of a mass of mini patterns. This is also fairly obvious in sight and sound but exactly the same processes occur in what we call intelligence, thinking and the whole memory system. The brain follows the same pattern to convert memory to understanding, perhaps one of the most difficult of all concepts. So, just as so many things in nature are similar, in the same way the brain follows similar patterns to build up ideas and concepts, not only of visual and audio images, but also of the more immensely powerful but indefinable and ephemeral constructs such as beauty, morality, honour, fairness, behaviour and ideas of how mankind should behave towards mankind. But handwriting also illustrates another fascinating attribute. Not only does it illuminate the way the brain works it also tells us a great deal about the person who is writing, because we graphically illustrate the patterns of our own thinking in the patterns we scribble on paper, which just as clearly bear our signature as our fingerprints 7.9. Touch, Taste and Smell We tend to give a lower priority to the other three senses of touch taste and feel as being less important to us. However, it may be that a study of them may well illuminate how sight developed. The five senses divide into three groups. Touch involves a direct reaction between the stimulant of a foreign body touching the skin and the nerve endings in the skin cells. All skin cells are receptors. Taste and smell are different. They involve a direct chemical reaction between the stimulation of an external substance, perhaps a potential food stuff, or pheromone, coming in contact with specialist receptors in the tongue and nose. Sight and sound are different again, because there is neither direct reaction nor chemical reaction, but the stimulation is indirect. Light and sound waves are monitored by very complex receptors that have to generate some form of intermediate agency, or stimulation, to react with the rest of the brain. The first emergence of a concentration of neurons that was to become a primitive pre-brain was located close to the opening of the gut. Today our brain is close to our mouths. Taste receptors surround the nutrient entry point - our mouths. Smell receptors surround the entry point to our lungs. Our two sight receptors are extensions of our brains, whilst our two sound receptors have been modified from their original quite modest role, but are still very close to the brain. We think that touch was the first sense to develop. Touch automatically sets off a reaction to move, either out of the way of a predator or towards prey. Touch is the simplest and most directly linked sense, being effectively in contact through nearly all the skin cells to the neural network, together with the emotional system into our modern brains. Touch is a major part of the communications system of many animals. Monkeys touch each other a great deal to give each other signals. It is also thought that animals like dolphins use touch in sophisticated ways. Touch is still very important to humans. Taste has a number of functions. Linked to smell it sets off reactions in the autonomic system. Fat causes the liver to secrete chemicals to break down the fats just detected, and so predispose the gut to receive the fat and so forth, so, of all the senses, taste has the most direct and immediate effect. Nutrition is a very important requirement, equal to survival and reproduction. Similarly, our smell receptors respond directly to pheromones. Smell is closely related to taste in detecting food.


It is fairly easy to see that detecting, say, fat and responding accordingly does not require any memory system. However, it clearly became useful in evolutionary terms for organisms to be able to differentiate between food that was good and other matter, or food that was not good. Perhaps taste evolved from a simple reaction to certain chemicals, to a system where the taste buds could represent a taste in a way that other neurons could adapt to replicate that representation. Each time, thereafter, that the taste buds generated that same representation, the neuron net would be stimulated. Over a period, if the food associated with that taste proved beneficial, then the appropriate neuron net would generate a positive set of activities to eat more. If the food proved bad the neurons would develop a response to discard the food. Could this be the foundation of how the senses monitor the outside world and even the beginning of memory itself? The case is quite strong. In the first place, the recognition of taste was an adaptation of the simpler process of a chemical reaction. Secondly, we can see how the neurons responded by extending their communication function, by holding a copy of the representation of the taste for later use. In effect memorising the 'taste'. And finally, the neurons stored responses according to the experience of eating that food. This basic system developed a feed-back loop to assist the recognition process and provide a short term memory long enough for the organism to grab or discard the food. All the basic algorithms were in place to be adapted to enable the growing light receptors and the associated optic system to 'see' prey, chase it and eat it. As these senses evolved, so the advantage of sight, taste and feel working to support each other encouraged the development of an integrated model of the external world. The senses of sound and smell further adapted these simple systems and strengthened the usefulness of this model of the external world, the whole being more efficacious than the sum of the parts. This model enabled the organism to make choices, which infers that it must have some elementary awareness of the options. We have the origins of consciousness, viz. a state where the organism has an element of awareness and some scope for choice. It seems likely that smell played an important role in this saga. Smell is based upon pheromones, which are quite complicated chemical compounds. Both taste and smell sense organs ingest chemicals, e.g. food. Imbibing chemicals directly through the taste and smell receptors suggests the possibility of a chemical reaction with the neurons. Could it be that this is what formed the basis of the representation of external occurrences in the brain? Over the long development of evolution, sight clearly proved to be the most efficient sense, but there were in place processes which could be continuously adapted to enable the neurons to respond to experience by storing and recognising certain pattern traces that in turn generated 'learned' activities. The alternatives and choice of decision proved useful and laid the foundation of limited awareness that nevertheless developed into our present consciousness. The interface between the sense organ networks and this neuron memory system provided feed back that made the whole system faster and more efficient. As increasing demands were made on this, so it developed into a useful short term memory of current incomplete events. The scene was set for the development of speech and language that built on all these attributes, in many ways multiplying their usefulness and capabilities. 7.10. The Auralian Dimension We can accept information about sight, smell, taste, hearing and feeling into our brains. These are all easy to understand, as we are completely familiar with them. We may not fully understand how we process this input but we have few doubts about their form and existence. We may be amazed at the subtlety of what our senses can achieve. Take the ability of our ears to receive the most complex of sounds. The most minute variations in the playing of a particular piece of music can render it ordinarily pleasant, or cause it


to be a masterpiece that can completely change our mood into one of ecstatic excitement and enjoyment. Compare two such performances by reference to analysis and mathematics and we could never identify the differences that are instantly apparent to our ears and brains. Yet there is some evidence that what is perceived to be a masterly performance by the majority may not be thought to be so good by a minority. That same minority might well find another performance better. Similarly with great works of visual art, e.g paintings. This variation of appreciation is easier to understand. There is a great variation in the capacity of people’s eyes. To take the extreme case, some people are short sighted in one eye, long sighted in the other. For everyday purposes this is very useful, although that person does not see in three dimensions in the same way as the person with balanced eyesight. The person with the mixed eyes will be very poor at catching balls, and therefore most games. Similarly a person of mixed eye ability will see a painting quite differently to the person with balanced sight. The genius of the great artist is to portray three dimensions on a flat surface. If the artist has balanced eyesight then people with balanced eyesight will see what he saw as he painted the work and will appreciate his skill. The person with mixed eyesight may feel that this picture is comparatively flat and wooden: and vice versa. The person with mixed eyesight will appreciate a painting by an artist of mixed eyesight. As a considerable majority of the population have broadly balanced eyesight it is beneficial for an aspiring artist to have similar optical equipment. Another example of these divergences is the difference in perception of colour. Some people are colour blind, but we have no real way of knowing if the green or red that one person sees is the same as the green and red another person sees. It is a simple observation that people have different levels of appreciation of all the senses: music for instance. If we discount the obvious fact that the level of knowledge and experience of one person as against another will differ widely, there is still very clearly a difference in how people perceive the senses. We have tended to see this in terms of some people being better or worse. Perhaps we should view this more in terms of being different as opposed to better or worse. If we compare a person with balanced eyesight against someone with one long and one short sighted eye, who is to say which is better? As with any sample of human capacity there will be a few people at each extreme of whatever range one is considering with the majority tending towards the middle. Two people from each extreme may well perceive the world quite differently, not better or worse, but differently. In addition to the five obvious senses there is very definitely a sixth. Like many other things in our world we all know that it exists but we have considerable difficulty in defining it. Because it is difficult to identify and define it has over the years been the subject of much myth, legend, disbelief, or at least scepticism, as with all things we do not understand or fear. One difficulty in discussing this is the imprecision of our language and the words we use to describe certain effects. Looking at the evidence dispassionately, we are well aware that some people have what we call a ‘presence’. We feel instantly drawn to, or repelled by people we meet. In the majority of cases this is quite mild, but in a significant number of cases it is quite marked. The obvious case is the ‘eyes meeting across a crowded room’ syndrome. We tend to joke about it, but there is no doubt that it takes place. People dismiss this as being a purely sexual attraction, and while there is usually a sexual dimension, it is not terribly important if there is or is not. We are concerned with how it works whatever it is. It also works in reverse. Occasionally one meets someone and both feel an immediate and mutual loathing. It is very rare, but so is the positive feeling. It is worth noting that this phenomenon is a pairing effect. It works between two people. In the crowded room only the two people whose eyes meet experience this frisson. It is not the case that, say, one girl walks into the room and is attracted to, and attracted by a number of men in this overwhelming way. Whether this attraction, if this is the right word, lasts, or develops again is not of great significance. The point is, it happens: - how?


We are well aware that one person can exercise considerable influence over another. We talk about people having strong characters, we talk about leadership and we know that people can move whole populations by their oratory. There are clearly a number of phenomena at work, but one can not escape the fact that quite evidently a person can impose his, or her will on someone else. This may be so weak that it is hardly observable, or it may be extremely strong. In this case it may be that one person can impose his or her will on a number of others, or again it is just one to one. It does seem, however, that it is never possible for anyone to be able to impose their will on everyone else. Children can communicate with their parents quite effectively long before they can speak. Deaf and blind children smile and laugh, so the ability must be genetic, but the stimulation must be other than sound and sight. Animals can make their presence known quite definitively. Some pets can put quite a lot of pressure on their owners to do certain things without sound or movement just by the force of their personality. This is particularly true of cats. There are some weaker effects that are nevertheless just as important. A couple that have lived together for a while, or have got to know each other very well, can often communicate to a considerable degree without speech. There are many recorded examples of one person in a pair being aware of some event occurring to the other although they are miles apart. Identical twins are often specifically aware of what is happening to the other. If at no higher level, a couple feel comfortable in each others presence, and are very conscious of the fact if the partner is away; again, without speech or movement. We are aware that the phenomena of extra sensory perception and telepathy exist. We are extremely nervous of them because they are at the same time shadowy and very imprecise, yet we feel, even fear that they might be extremely strong powers if we could understand them. It has not helped that they have been held up to ridicule and been the subject of music hall tricks and jokes. What is unassailable is that there is a means of communication in addition to the five senses. One manifestation of this is in what has recently been identified and described as body language. This however is explainable as part of vision. It may be a part but by no means the whole explanation. Neurons react to eye contact [DC Am 112]. Our eyes react to sexual attraction. [Eysenk] To try and explain this form of communication we use words like ‘people give off vibes’ or vibrations. We talk about people being on the same wavelength. We talk about people being in love. This opens Pandora’s box of other issues but there is no doubting that part at least of this well documented human experience is a mutually experienced attraction. How can it work? One other interesting observation is that the pairing effect is apparently random,- or is there a pattern? Two people who ‘get on’ extremely well together may find that their reaction to a third person is completely different. The one gets on fine with the third person, the other cannot stand being in the same room! Parents, who are very close, may get on superbly with one of their children, but not at all with another of their children. Another person who might get on very well with these two parents can not abide the favoured child yet is neutral or even close to the unpopular sibling. It would seem that children are much more influenced by this form of communication, while adults may be able to modify its impact consciously. One major effect that is clearly observable is that a child learns very well from a teacher where there is a good rapport, and maybe cannot learn at all from a teacher with whom that child does not feel comfortable. Another observation is the behaviour of individuals in crowds. There are so many examples of people carrying out acts quite out of character when caught up in a crowd. Again, a number of other issues may be involved, but the existence of the phenomenon of mass hysteria is too well documented to be ignored. Is this another manifestation of a form of sixth sense: communication en masse? How could this form of communication operate? We are quite at home with the concepts of light waves transmitting images to our eyes, and sound waves transmitting noises to our ears. We now take for granted radio and television, so let us explore the possibility that we can transmit and receive some form of radio wave. It may not be the


correct solution but it may well serve our purpose in trying to understand the properties and effects of this form of human communication. If it seems incredible, then we can only surmise how similarly incredible television would be to anyone, even of great intellect, up to half a century ago. We know that the simplest organisms, like viruses, can transmit general communications that can be received by other viruses in the same community. Flora also seem to be able to communicate. Trees have means of communicating. If trees at one end of a row are attacked by a parasite, or something like Dutch elm disease, apparently all the trees in the row react by secreting a toxin to discourage the intruder. Before we learned how to speak we could presumably communicate. Before a baby learns to speak it has to rely on some other form of communication to identify its parent, and make anything more than the simplest demands known. We know very little about this very early phase of human development, from birth to about three years, but there does seem to be a growing body of evidence to support the theory that some form of bonding takes place, certainly with the mother, and perhaps to a lesser extent with the father in this early period. Common sense would indicate it would occur as soon as possible to ensure that offspring and mother could identify each other and find each other among a crowd of very similar young ones. So let us accept, even if somewhat sceptically that this sixth sense exists. To define this sense we could adopt the word ‘aura’ which is quite useful in defining that peculiar transmission that we can all exude. If an aura surrounds each and every one of us then the ability to transmit it and to receive it could be the ‘auralian dimension’. What might we be able to communicate through this auralian dimension? In the first place, on a scale of a hundred, as it were, we can register a reaction to another person anywhere from the besotted (100), through comfortable (50), to neutral (0), to uncomfortable (-50), to loathing (-100). All the evidence seems to indicate that whereas the values might not be quite exact, both parties will register a similar value. It seems not to be the case that A can register positively with B, and B registers negatively with A. As an adult, perhaps faced with negotiating with another person not of our choosing, with whom our auralian response is negative, it seems we can sublimate our dislike to achieve a settlement. The negotiations are likely to be far easier, of course, if the response is positive. Young children have not learned to control these natural responses. There is, unfortunately, no guarantee that the auralian response between a mother and child will be positive. The mother may be able to sublimate her conscious reactions, but almost certainly cannot moderate her subconscious reactions. The baby has no defence. If the child is in the unhappy position of registering a strong negative response from its mother it is going to be very confused. Its automatic response is going to be to try and escape. A baby cannot escape. Emotionally, it will be very much on the defensive, and increasingly so the more negatively that it registers. Conceptually, if it registers below -90 it is easy to see that it runs the risk of being seriously disturbed. What if it registers opposing values from mother and father? This would seem to be a very possible explanation for the foundation of insecurity in a child. Perhaps for some children, boarding school is a great relief. Parents sometimes feel that whilst they love a child, they may not like them very much, and the same may be true the other way, although perhaps children are less likely to verbalise these feelings. If a child is closer to one parent in this way, the way they speak may offer a clue. If a child’s accent is closer to one parent or another it might indicate a more positive auralian response. Some children pick up accents at school, others do not. Perhaps this might give us a clue as to how close, or otherwise, their auralian response is to their parents. It is entirely understandable that a parent feeling a negative response to its child may well work extremely responsibly to sublimate that reserve, and go out of its way to love that child. The problem is that the auralian response is automatic. It is easy to see that the variables in a child’s position at birth are going to register all the way from two parents both with positive auralian responses with every combination down


to both parents with negative responses. One would suspect that the response to the mother is the most powerful, the father less so, but the response to siblings may also be quite significant. In an extended family, in so far as the grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins are frequently present, the response of a baby to them could be important. At least, positive responses to more distant relatives might ameliorate a negative response to parents. Negative responses to relatives might be ignorable if the response to parents was positive unless the relatives were very frequently present. If a baby is emotionally secure it will learn quickly. Quite simply, if a portion of its brain activity is taken up with defence against a negative auralian response it will have less capacity for anything else. In the pre-cognitive phase, broadly up to the age of three, a child builds up a great volume of information that becomes the foundation of its subsequent behaviour, even if in later life it has no conscious recollection of those experiences. Every input will be filtered by the response of that child to its source. If a parent tells a child ‘white’ and the child has a high positive response to that parent the child will remember ‘white’ plus a good feeling. When the child accesses that memory it will respond comfortably and confidently. If both parents tell the child ‘white, and the child has opposed responses to the two parents the message stored may have conflicting good and sceptical feelings. When the child subsequently accesses that memory it will have conflicting feelings about how to respond. In so far as these are weak responses -all below 25 - no great harm may occur, but this could easily be the source of later insecurity. If the responses are strongly opposed a child could easily become very disturbed. It would seem to be quite possible that if a child has a very negative response to a parent then it will remember ‘white’ with a very bad feeling, which could even be converted into ‘black’. Hence when a child remembers ‘white’ it is impelled to respond with a ‘black’ response. The majority of children who watch a Robin Hood film identify with the hero, Robin, but a small minority will identify with the villainous Sheriff of Nottingham. Perhaps the reason for this is that their auralian responses to those about them have been so negative that they get used to reversing the value judgements. These various responses, which occur immediately from birth and are quite automatic, could be the foundation of how every person’s character is created. Hence, this could account for some people growing up to be well adjusted and confident, while others are insecure and misbehave. It might provide a guide to the actual mechanism to explain the fact that some children rebel, and later even become delinquent, in apparently quite ordinary families. It would also explain the surprising differences between the characters of siblings brought up in a very similar way by thoroughly conscientious parents. As with so much else this is not the sole reason for the formation of people’s characters. Very evidently there are inherited traits, and much else in parental treatment. Whether a child perceives it is loved, or treated physically well or badly is important. However, it is clearly not always words and deeds that determine a child’s relationship with its parents, and therefore the world. This automatic, even primeval, communication plays a large, probably crucial role. Once a child goes to school the whole process repeats itself. If the child has a very positive auralian response to a teacher the child will learn quickly and well. If the response is very negative the child will struggle and probably misbehave. A child may not be aware of its response. A teacher should. Most professional teachers will responsibly attempt to treat all the children in a class equally. However it may not be possible for teachers to modify the automatic messages that they are transmitting. Everyone is human, and however good a teacher may be, a child transmitting a very negative auralian response may well be very difficult to handle. In a perfect world teachers should measure their reactions to children, and all children should only be taught in classes by teachers with whom they have a positive response! Given the resources it is conceivable that this desirable situation could be achieved, although if a child did not learn how to cope with negative response situations at school they might come seriously adrift in later life. However, it is


socially inconceivable that children should only be brought up by parents, or presumably foster parents with whom they had a positive response. To suggest that children were brought up by other than their parents could cause far more problems than it solved. However, if this hypothesis turns out to be correct it might prove much easier to bring up children if we understood more about the underlying pressures, and what might be actually happening in a child’s head. Bullying presents an ever-present difficulty in schools. Sometimes the bullies and the bullied are easy to identify. Sometimes they are not. Again, the auralian responses between children may well be one of the causes. Certainly with young offenders, if they are in the company of guardians, in some form of detention, then if their response to a guardian is negative they are far more likely to respond with opposite behaviour to what they are taught. It has long been recognised that a warder or guardian who has a very good response with an offender will have a very much better chance of helping that person return to normality. In the early days of life all animals have the capacity to ‘bond’ to their parents and human children are no exception. Later in life the desire to find a mate is very strong. Perhaps more has been written about ‘falling in love’ than almost any other human activity. It is a very real phenomenon: it very clearly happens, and apparently quite inappropriate couples fall in love. At times there is the feeling that falling in love transcends the common sense of both participants. Once again many other factors are at work to amplify, or ameliorate the initial emotion, the actual process at work is likely to be the same as the bonding of the newborn to the parent. In both cases it is a physical property that allows two people to communicate quite automatically directly between their two brains, and to the exclusion of everyone else. People in the past have thought along these lines before and have tried to measure the electrical output of the brain to try to identify this means of communication. Although this method of communication appears to be largely visual it is by no means wholly so and can be experienced by the blind. It is even possible that the blind can develop this sense to compensate for the disability. It works over distance and in the dark, so it is not a by-product of light waves even if the eye is not involved. Also, we do not transmit light waves. We reflect light. We do transmit noise. The very act of brain activity may transmit some form of power wave. Possibly we transmit some form of carrier wave. In other words, the medium may well be all around us, so obvious that we have not considered it. For instance we live permanently in a magnetic field. The firmament is overflowing with every sort of electrical activity, and has been long before we learnt how to use all this to transmit radio and television. It took many centuries for us to discover that the atmosphere is full of oxygen and carbon dioxide and that we can only live by breathing oxygen in and carbon dioxide out. Equilibrium is maintained, as plants do the opposite. It is possible that we need the electrical activity in the atmosphere in some way for our brains to work. It is possible that the electrical activity in our brains is picked up from the magnetic field all about us. If this is true then it is quite easy to see how we could send and receive information over this medium. It is possible that, like a fingerprint, we all have a unique auralian profile; a sort of unique call sign. We might remember other people’s call signs. This should mean we could identify other people just by their presence, but there seems to be little evidence to support this. It would, perhaps, explain some aspects of bonding, but as it would seem to be an ex post facto effect it is difficult to see how it might explain the instant attraction phenomenon. Children do not necessarily inherit a similar auralian profile from their parents. However, parent and child would pick up each other’s unique call sign immediately at birth, and so could subsequently identify each other automatically.


There is one apparent inconsistency in the hypothesis that the auralian response is based on something like a radio wave or electrical field. People feel that they have experienced the symptoms of attraction or repulsion as a result of seeing a performance of an actor at a film. There can be no electrical activity to explain this. Conceivably there could be from an actor on stage, but not on film. Also a good actor can influence his audience both positively, and negatively, although an actor can not change his automatic effect on his audience, just conceivably a good actor can modify it. The impact of an actor on film is entirely visual and audio - the feelies, and smellies have not arrived yet! The hero worship of an actor therefore is partly imagination. The words, actions and mannerisms can produce a powerful effect, but like the characters in a novel, the actual emotional impact on the brain largely comes from the imagination. We can fantasise an emotional reaction from and to an imaginary person. The quantum scientists suggest that a number of activities occur in a number of places simultaneously. Only when the waveform collapses do we find that an event has occurred in one place. While this seems to fly in the face of common sense it is now so well documented as to be accepted as true. A number of scientists have gone further to suggest that similar ideas may occur in peoples minds at the same time but only crystallise, as it were, in one. Consciousness may be explained as a raising of the level of quantum electrical activity. In this state atoms give off photons: this is a seductive solution to the concept of transmission of some type. The phenomenon is called the Bose Einstein condensate, and photon transmission has been measured. Some years ago the Russians claimed to have measured minute cranial transmissions by various photographic processes. However seductive these possibilities may be, they depend on two people being in close proximity, unless the quantum phenomenon works over great distances. One other possibility is that we have a capacity to recognise super patterns. This is how we define beauty, style and attractiveness. Perhaps bonding and attraction, or repulsion, is to do with our capacity to recognise these mega patterns, both in vision and speech. Certainly a piece of music can change our mood, so why should not a beautiful image work the same way. This might explain some aspects of the auralian dimension, but not the telepathic aspects. Is it possible that the two may be combined and that we have a sixth sense that allows us to communicate by the transmission of particles or wave forms that are generated when we see or hear, or conceivably smell, taste or feel something that we recognise as a mega pattern, which causes the brain great excitement? Many people have mused over the drive that appears to exist in the whole of nature, a sort of natural imperative. For many centuries mankind mused over the curious way everything falls to the ground, then over the attraction of the planets to the sun. In due course we discovered gravity. This has led a number of people to speculate that there may be, perhaps, a sort of quantum gravity. They envisage some form of power to which we are all connected and through which we can all communicate. It certainly seems plausible that this power might have been stronger in the past and that we have lost the capacity to use it as we developed speech instead. Perhaps we might be able to rediscover such powers and learn again to develop these attributes. At the very least we cannot ignore the very strong emotional reactions people can feel towards each other. There is no doubt they exist. Recent research has identified the curious fact that if a number of women live in the same room for a protracted period of time their menstrual cycles begin to coincide. A group of people walking together on a narrow pathway, like a bridge, will begin to fall into step. Both evidence of some form of communication system. 7.11. Significance of Language. The Most Recent Major Evolutionary Development of the Brain.

Speech led to the:- 1. Re-organisation of our brains to process speech and language


2. Strengthening of our muscular control to speaking. 3. Expansion of our memory systems to accommodate words. 4. A means of understanding ‘time’ and therefore enabling prediction. 5. A means of accumulating and communicating knowledge. 6. Development of reading and writing. 7. A new facility to relate words to other sensory input. 8. A process to associate words to develop meaning and understanding. 9. Implications of the expansion of writing 10. The foundation of thinking and reasoning. 11. Enhanced awareness, leading to active consciousness. 12. Implications of language on the bifurcation of the brain. 7.11.1. Re-organising our brains to process Speech and Language Human beings are different from all the animals in one crucial respect. We have language. Using sound in this way is very recent. The process of eyesight is extremely old. There is evidence of eyes in the fossil record millions of years ago. Mammals process sight with both halves of their brain, although we predominantly use only one half. Around 100,000 years ago emerging mankind began to acquire a new ability. Like most animals, early man could make and hear simple sounds – mostly limited to warnings of danger, indications of food and sexual activity, and these directly stimulated the emotional systems. Perhaps as a result of standing on our hind legs and stretching our necks and vocal chords, we began to increase our repertoire of sounds. From X-rays and casts of the vocal tracts of apes, it is apparent that the larynx in primates like gorillas is high up, directly behind the mouth. This has the advantage that food and drink are less likely to pass into the lungs, but the disadvantage is that this limits the ability to make vowel sounds. At some point in evolution the larynx must have descended, enlarging the throat and enabling mankind to increase the versatility of the vocal tract. The cost is that to avoid choking we have an elaborate swallowing reflex. It is interesting to note that children are born with their larynxes high up in the same position as the apes and can only make a limited range of cries. This supports the theory that for the nine months from conception to birth and for some while afterwards we follow the path of evolution travelled by our ancestors. It has the rather grand name of 'ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny'. Recognising a moving visual image was difficult enough but recognising a sound, which, by its nature is ephemeral, is more difficult. In what many people think is the last major evolutionary change, it appears that our brain divided its resources, and while the right hemisphere continued to service the eyes and the non verbal sounds that predated language, the left side gradually adapted to decode and recognise, not light waves, but sound waves. We can, virtually instantly, pick out words from the continuous stream of sounds that strike our eardrums. This is exactly the same process whereby we pick out visual images. Our


ears and associated neural circuitry converts the stream of sound into discrete pattern traces, which we can match to the patterns we have stored in our memory banks, and identify the meaning. 7.11.2. The Expansion of our brains to enable us to control Speaking. The other side of the coin of hearing words is to speak words. Procedural memory had to develop additional abilities to control the movements of a whole range of muscles, and do so with exquisite timing. First, we have to control the output of air from the lungs, then adjust the vocal chords, and the cheeks, tongue, jaws and lips of our mouths, and do so in the correct sequence, and at the exact times to produce not just a flow of words, but to speak them with emphasis and overtones, which can vary the meaning all the way from conveying one meaning to the opposite. In no point in our previous evolutionary history had we needed to control our muscles with such precision. 7.11.3. The Expansion of our memories to accommodate Words As soon as we began to develop the beginnings of a lexicon of words our brains had to expand our memory systems to accommodate this new information. A lot of our memory is to do with controlling muscle activity, and is usually defined as ‘Procedural Memory’. Prior to the development of language we only needed a small amount of additional memory capacity to respond to emotional situations and to learn from experience how to react to little more than essential activities like avoiding danger, finding food, sex - episodes in our lives: ‘Episodic Memory’. However, the arrival of language put many new demands on our mental skills. Not only did this involve identifying words from the stream of sound reaching our ears, but also how to process, store, recognise and retrieve these words. In addition, we had to develop algorithms to relate words to visual images. This quite recent skill of memorising semantic facts and concepts is usually defined as ‘Declarative Memory’. 7.11.4. Understanding Time and therefore enabling ‘Prediction’ We can presume that for a long period of time our repertoire of sounds increased very slowly. Most research suggests that we started to add sounds to identify things, then actions, and only much later ideas and concepts. The ability to communicate in ever more sophisticated ways would have enabled early mankind to begin to swap experiences. Experiences are, by definition, about times past. This could be the breakthrough we have been looking for to advance our understanding of cognition. We were able to introduce into our pantheon of abilities the fourth dimension – time. If we can communicate about times past, it opens the possibility to speculate about the future. This introduced a new expansion in the visual side of the brain. To accommodate this burgeoning concept of time past, time present and time future, we began to be able to process the sense images like sight and sound of the present in an additional way. Independently of the images and sounds of the present, we began to be able to process the evidence of our eyes and ears, and for that matter, the evidence of our other senses, by conjuring up an imaginary future in parallel, thereby strengthening our consciousness. In its present well-developed form we have the sensation that there are two parts of us. We can live in the present world, but a second part of us can disappear off into an imaginary world in which we can try out different possible ways we might wish to live, and imagine how various alternative present actions might play out in the future. This attribute has been increased and strengthened in many ways, but this is likely to be the foundation of our observation that we have a brain that copes with the present and a mind that can imagine an alternative – a future, or a better world. This development presented mankind with a very powerful intellectual tool. Imagining a possible future is the first step to taking action to prepare for possible future events. We had the means to begin to modify the environment in which we lived.


7.11.5. A Means of Accumulating and Communicating Knowledge. Speech gave us the means to accumulate and pass on our experience to succeeding generations. At the same time it enabled us to speculate about the world about us. It allowed us to ask questions and to dream up possible answers. Language enabled us to discuss our observations about the environment in which we found ourselves. Thus we acquired the mechanics of thinking. The moment we began to develop our imaginations, mankind began to ask many of the questions we still cannot answer today. Where did we come from? Why are we here? What happens to us when we die, (which led to the beginnings of religion). We also began to discuss concepts of behaviour towards each other. We could conceive and discuss ever more sophisticated concepts. Thus we steadily became more aware of ourselves, developing and widening our concept of our conscious selves. 7.11.6. Reading & Writing The invention of reading and writing called for further skills. In particular, procedural memory had to develop additional abilities to control the muscle movements of the arm and fingers with even greater precision to enable us to write. Most people naturally write with their right hand, which is controlled by the left hemisphere of the brain, and the left hemisphere is responsible for sounds. It is possible to train oneself to write with one’s left hand and also with one’s feet. Both are much easier to do as a child when the brain is more plastic. However, we know that the brain can almost always do things more than one way so that material damage to part of the brain is not lethal. One definition of writing is that it is the conversion of speech into visible images. Reading is the conversion of visual images into speech. Looking at a piece of text we can almost immediately recognise the images of the complete words, which we ‘say’ silently in our heads. Likewise, when we are writing we ‘say’ the words silently in our heads and our brains convert these words into the minute, extremely sophisticated muscle movements in our arms and fingers, which enable us to draw the images on paper. 7.11.7. A new facility to relate Words to other Sensory Input. Reading and writing therefore combine the coding and decoding functions of both the visual and audio abilities of the brain. But why stop there? If we could give ‘labels’ to visual images it was only a small step to give labels’, or words to the other sensory experiences, providing a strong impetus to relate all our sensory inputs together to strengthen our ‘model’ of the outside world. 7.11.8. A process to associate words to develop Meaning and Understanding. A word that is no more than a ‘label’ is of use but it’s efficacy is limited. The ‘meaning’ of words and sentences is to do with their relationship and cross references to other words, then to their implications, and finally to our ability to extrapolate the information we have gained in one context and apply it to another. It follows that the processes that linked words in their early form of labels could quite easily be extended to link words with other words and so build up a huge cross referenced ‘dictionary’ that allowed us to build up networks of words that allowed us to describe complex ideas, which in turn enabled us to think of concepts that had no direct link to the senses other than emotional responses. 7.11.9. Implications of the expansion of Writing “I am not so lost in lexicography as to forget that words are the daughters of earth, and that things are

the sons of heaven.” Dr Johnson


Encapsulating speech into written words had one other important side effect, which has had a big impact on the development of our ability to think. When we communicate by speech we can use all sorts of additional facilities to transfer our meaning. We can modulate our voices, use body language and respond to the reactions of our listeners. When we are restricted to written text we have to be very much more efficient. When we invented writing we also had to expand the sophistication of our text and grammar to ensure that, with these aids, we were certain that we could ensure our readers would understand exactly what we meant. Thus, writing vastly increased the precision of our composition, which in turn meant we had to be orders of magnitude more rigorous in our underlying thinking. It is interesting to note that computing has had the same effect of making us define actions and functions we wish to be executed much more rigorously. When the foreman instructed his staff, he heavily relied on their experience and common sense to do what he wanted, even if what he ordered was slightly ambiguous. A computer has no common sense whatsoever, and so will do exactly what we ask it to do, which can be different from what we might want it to do! 7.11.10. The Foundation of Thinking and Reasoning. When discussing our concepts of duality we touched on the fact that we can only think about ephemeral and intellectual subjects in terms of words. The whole process of thinking is dependent on language. Musicians may think in chords, architects in shapes but all intellectual thinking is in patterns of words modified by our emotions. Reasoning involves assembling concepts in different patterns until we ‘feel’ that we have exactly expressed the idea we are looking for. But we can only express concepts in words. Expressing a process can be augmented by drawing visual images; flow charts and such like. Similarly, poets can generate emotional responses by the sequence of sounds, by onomatopoeia and by rhythm, which is close to music, but reasoning is almost entirely the province of words. 7.11.11. Enhanced awareness leading to active Consciousness. Words allow us to express our feelings and to discuss them with others, thus we have a greater feeling of involvement in the world and a greater degree of control over ourselves, and therefore our environment. Words put flesh on the basic structure of conscious awareness. 7.11.12. Implications of Language on the Bifurcation of the Brain. We can build on the concept that the brain adapted its long established ability to identify visual discrete pattern traces, to identify sound pattern traces, and so re-arranged our brain priorities so that only half the brain serviced our eyes and the other half serviced our ears. The right brain continued to specialise in processing sight and non-verbal sounds, while the left brain began to specialise in processing speech and language. This suggests the intriguing likelihood that the massive new expansion of memory to accommodate our expanding lexicon of words, the new declaratory memory, also developed in the left hemisphere. We have seen that language developed into reasoning and deduction. Once the left brain was well into processing words and declaratory memory, it would be the obvious site for this additional skill to develop. And this is exactly what researchers are finding. The left brain preponderantly processes language, reasoning, deduction and logic.The right brain preponderantly continues to process sight, and the non verbal sounds that predated language, which today is represented by sounds like music. Music can immediately affect our mood and stimulate our emotions, thus we would expect feelings to be right brained. And they appear to be just that. Images, music, song, and poetry are all associated with creativity and intuition; again, aptitudes of the right brain. Both hemispheres are joined by the massive communications system of the corpus collosum so both halves support and back-up each other, but we can


now see a possible evolutionary development path to account for the duality that observations have indicated. The left brain is as near a digital system as the brain can provide, while the right continues to develop the skills associated with the analogue world. Thus, as is so often the case, the brain has developed to gain the best of all possible worlds. If we accept the likelihood that the brain adapted its existing systems to accommodate both these new skills, then it seems likely that both sounds and declarative memory use the same method of representation – coding system - as our visual system. There is more. If we accept that language and the associated improved memory capabilities were a powerful driver in the development of our consciousness then perhaps we should be looking in the left hemisphere for indications of specialist neurons that might be the generators of the abilities we associate with our present perceived level of consciousness. Establishing the chronology of the development of our brain also substantially helps us understand other features. For instance, we know that many mammals experience rapid eye movement during sleep, which suggests that our sleep patterns predate much of our present memory capacity. This not only helps us understand sleep, but also substantially narrows down the hypotheses about sleep in general and dreaming in particular. 7.12. An Alternative Paradigm. Another answer. We have explored the immense explosion of abilities that speech and language have made possible, and the physiological advances speaking, hearing and the memory systems to support words that developed together. There is another dimension of the evolution of speech and language, which is illuminating. It is possible that we are misinterpreting how language and our memory systems relate? Could we be observing this relationship through the wrong end of the telescope. We think in terms of our memory systems replicating the sensual information we receive, like the images we see and the sounds we hear, and representing this information in our brains to generate a model of the external world. We can even plot a convincing path from the beginnings of touch to our present complex and sophisticated optic and audio systems. Language is an extension of our original basic sound system so it seems reasonable to presume that it followed the same paradigms. Speech and language, however, were more than just extensions of sound: they wrenched the brain on to new paths, enunciating sophisticated sounds, interpreting sentences and developing major extensions to the memory systems. Speech and language are different. Let us consider for a moment whether the development of language could equally have followed a different path. All the other sense systems appear to have involved the brain tracking the senses. Could it be that the opposite is true of speech and language, and that language is a representation of the brain? Could it be that our tool wielding, conscious ancestors started to produce ever more complex sounds as a response to a growing frustration at their inability to communicate. Let us look with fresh eyes at the structure of language to see if this conjecture could help us illuminate how our neural structures work. Every aspect of language has been researched longer, probably, than any other science. However, it is worth focusing on one aspect of the development of language and that is its’ remarkable similarity to our perception of neural evolution and evolution in general. We think of the alphabet as the notation of language, but in a sense language is a form of verbal notation that allows us to express actions, things and then concepts, ideas, aspirations and so forth. We are reasonably sure that we have identified our memory structures as biochemical engines that carry out


actions and functions (as opposed to inert coded data of some sort). Language can be expressed as a verbal form of notation to represent what we hold in our memories. This is quite helpful in understanding both language and our memory structures and systems. It is easy to see how we can identify 'ground', 'trees', 'water', and give them a label. It is equally possible to see how our ancestors could agree on these simple definitions so that 'water' and 'land' meant the same thing to all members of the community, and these words could be passed on to succeeding generations. The representation of water and land in our ancestor's brains was represented in our language so that when a member of the community said 'water' it generated a similar reaction in the brains of all the people who heard that word. In exactly the same way today we conceive of some complex new concept, perhaps the result of many neural network reactions and we give it a 'label'. Rather than try and explain the detail of all those neural reactions to each other we can use this label - this new word. This single word stimulates in the hearer similar neural signals to those in the speaker. In this sense language is a 'short-cut' to express ever more complex neural constructions. The most obvious is jargon, which is the short hand of the cognoscenti of some speciality to communicate complex ideas that are commonly understood by the group. This concept stimulates our thinking about how neurons and neural nets develop with time to respond to learning and experience. Many words have come into common usage to simplify complex concepts. Thus, a few words in a sentence can set off massive neural reactions and activities representing similar massive reactions in the hearer's mind. As a result we can build ever more complex structures and hierarchies of structures to represent ever more complex concepts and ideas. Someone of the genius of Aristotle, Plato, Newton or Galileo would be lost in today's world as they would not recognise 90% of our present language and would need to have many of these words explained to them. Similarly the bravest of medieval Knights would be unnerved by a modest motor car. We can see that whilst the brain has generated language and words, words in their turn have enabled the brain to expand. The more information we are aware of, the greater the possibilities and probabilities are that we may notice comparisons and connections and, perhaps more importantly, the significance in a slightly different context of some information we already knew. Language is clearly of immense significance for all the obvious reasons - yet, perhaps its greatest impact is the reciprocal impact language has had on the development of the brain. If we can begin to think about the process of 'thinking' we can begin to see that we need first to define the problem, then imagine potential solutions, come up with structures that tend to be initially incomplete, and so iterate between the two as our imperfect solutions illuminate the weaknesses or incompleteness of our definition of the problem until we puzzle out what may be a convoluted complex solution. The next phase is to progressively reduce this complexity until we find a simple, elegant solution. People are dismissive of the 'soundbite', but the ability to distil a complex issue succinctly into a few words is an extremely valuable skill. Recently the whole policy of the Home Office with regard to crime and its plans to address the social causes was brilliantly encapsulated into just eight words. "hard on crime, hard on the causes of crime". Much has been written about grammar and its significance. From the point of view of the development and understanding of the brain, grammar enables us to make far more use of words by stringing them into sentences, thus multiplying their sophistication and value - again mirroring the observation that networks of neurons are more powerful than the sum of their constituent parts. Grammar is almost as important as speech itself because it introduces the fourth dimension - time. The past, the present and the future are concepts almost impossible to convey by any other media than language. Time is the essential component


of imagination. In turn, imagination is an essential component of thinking. Grammar also enables the additional skills of interrogation, conjecture and presumption. We discuss and debate new ideas, new formulations of existing ideas. We consciously struggle to understand new concepts and slowly we begin to construct an acceptable, workable solution. Further thought leads to better understanding and more effective solutions. Hopefully, we puzzle out an elegant solution. This is precisely the same process as learning some new physical skill such as swimming, riding a bicycle or driving a car. We consciously struggle - find a way - practise - then become proficient. We grow new circuits and prune old ones until we can perform the task without conscious thought, so freeing the system to concentrate on where we are we are swimming to, or riding or driving towards - the next level of complexity. Perhaps we go on to perform our new skill professionally. What this line of thinking suggests is that the way language develops may be a clue and pointer to how networks of neurons develop. Parts of existing neuron nets come together in novel combinations to cope with new situations, some new concept or idea we wish to understand, or some problem we wish to solve. This new proto network builds new links to co-operate with other networks and creates a new network in the process. Parts of this new network begin to specialise. Usage strengthens some links, irrelevant loops are pruned, while the synapses are steadily adjusted to improve the result. The continuous process seeks to be both more sophisticated to cope with ever-greater complexity, but at the same time be faster, simpler and more direct. Once a new network is robust the process is repeated at a higher level. What are the rules? Our brain has no means of predicting the future. The only two pieces of information it has to work on are the events that happen to us, and our emotional state on each occasion. Our brain can only presume that whenever an event happens it is more likely a similar event will recur than anything else. Therefore, the brain reinforces and refines its established reaction on the off chance that this response will be required in the future and so it will be able to react more efficiently: the stronger the emotional context, the stronger the reinforcement. This is the algorithm of learning: repetition, reinforcement, reaction. What we are talking about is a dynamic learning process where the neuron structures and networks are in a permanent state of flux. Almost uniquely, these cells are no longer being governed by the DNA specification they inherited from their ancestors. They are progressively coming under the control of a new agency. They are being influenced by the information that they are receiving, by their experience of the world, and to no small extent by the ramifications of their own actions. The neuron networks and their associated proteins and chemicals are totally interdependent and reciprocally reliant on most of the rest of the body, but nevertheless, our brain is a semi autonomous living being in its own right. This exactly mirrors the long term underlying macro trends of all evolution. The underlying process of evolution is the same from the simplest single celled unit or organism to the most sophisticated human units or tribes, communities and nations. Individual units are attracted to each other to co-operate for their mutual benefit. Once a viable co-operative has been established, the individuals begin to specialise to increase the efficiency of the whole. When the efficiency of the new combination begins to exceed the sum of its parts, the new structure begins to reorganise itself, pruning obsolescent parts and optimising its operation to be better able to cope with whatever the future may bring. Throughout every phase organisms mutate to fine tune their behaviour in the way Darwin described. Once the new structures, organisms or communities become successful, they begin to look around for partners to restart the whole process again at a higher level.


7.13. Living Languages. Languages converge and diverge very quickly. While the world is converging on English as the language of commerce, science and technology, it is diverging as, for instance, Indian English is parting company from Californian English. The advent of multilingual communities has been commented upon elsewhere. Language is free of hereditary constraints. Language develops within the lifetime of the individual. If it were not so flexible language would have developed much more slowly. If language had depended upon mutations of DNA to develop it would be a tiny insignificant fraction of its present value to us. This further supports the conjecture that language is partly independent of DNA and increasingly reliant on experience. The ability to speak more than one language fluently is a great and useful skill. Many people have commented on the way a language both moulds and reflects the characteristics of the community of its speakers. To anyone studying the brain, the ability to communicate in multiple languages is indicative of much of the way our brain works. It suggests that there is a divide between the representation of thought in the brain (neurons to neurons) and the representation of those thoughts in language (neurons to muscles), which leads to the procedural function of manipulating the muscles to speak, and at one remove the manipulation of the muscles to write (neurons to neurons to muscles). The well reported observation that skilled linguists begin to 'think', or formulate their ideas in the second or subsequent language is intriguing. Surely this supports the conjecture that language is a reflection and representation of neural activity, the opposite to the long established presumption that neural activity tracks language. 7.14. Limitations of Language There are many things our present language cannot do. It cannot describe any artefact as well as seeing the article in question, or even a photograph or drawing. We cannot describe sounds, or, of course, the attributes of qualia. Language cannot describe amounts, values, shapes or patterns to any degree of accuracy. However, mathematical notation can describe the shapes of geometry, the patterns of algebra and amounts like lengths. Just as twenty six letters can describe every idea, mathematics can describe and define every measurement. It is the language we have to understand patterns. We can conceive of shapes, distance and perspective in our minds and we automatically have a general conception of measurements. We have a clear 'feeling' for the length of a yard, the amount of a pint, the speed of something moving. Are we inventing or are we discovering mathematics? Is the answer that we have invented the notation of mathematics in its broadest sense so that we may discover, understand and communicate the patterns that underlie the universe? Interestingly the brain is remarkably and reliably accurate in general and quite inefficient in detail. Mathematics allows us to measure things precisely, which is an essential element of observation and research. Similarly, mathematics allows us to represent information so that we can identify patterns - the brain does this all the time. Computers allow us to extend this valuable ability to help us identify complex patterns in vast quantities of information. Pattern matching is the basis of all recognition. Without this ability to recognise, memory systems of information, simple or complex, human or manufactured, would have no value at all. 7.15. Notation The notation systems we have invented to represent the sounds of speech and to allow us to define values and describe patterns clearly and unambiguously teach us a lot. Until we developed a notation for music it


was difficult to pass down tunes from one generation to the next, and nearly impossible to compose music. One of the great contributions of Leonardo was to begin the process of defining the way to put down on paper accurate drawing of anatomy and machines. The Greeks worked out ways of drawing the shapes of proposed buildings. Latitude and Longitude enabled us to plot precisely where we were. More recently we have made the understanding of the physical world far easier by our invention of chemical notation. H2O defines water. We have invented ways of measuring distance, sound, temperature, weights and so forth. Again, this reflects the processes of our neural systems and our intellects, because in every case these precise, simple notations provide a framework and structure in which we can think of a multitude of other issues. In almost every case they have developed over time from more complex, convoluted and inefficient initial attempts to solve the problem. In some cases we have not found the optimum solution, but they are now so embedded into our civilisation that they are impossible to change. There are areas of our burgeoning knowledge where we are badly in need of a form of notation to progress our understanding, typically in measuring and defining ability and consciousness, and to debate and measure the relationships between the way our neural systems and our sense systems represent each other.

Documents

6th Ed. Chap 07. Senses + Language 05