Ever wondered, how the brain learns to contain information? Ever wondered how we, as humans ‘learn’ empathy and use emotions to respond to our environment? And what does fear has to do with that?
Nothing to fear but fear itself?
I will start of with an eye opener: Fear is the first emotion. ALL, without any exception, organisms are embodied with fear. Why? because it is the most basic and primal survival instinct.
Simple deduction: What is your initial choice between life or death? I am guessing over 60% of the people who read this question ‘well, life of course’. There will be about 30% saying: ‘In what situation?’ and approximately 10% or less will say: ‘I guess it would be death’. Why? Because death means end of existence of you. And why would you not want that? Because that is how our brain works. And from that our mind.
Mortal coil
Before animals were able to see, everything it touched could be instant death, or slow death. Imagine you are a single cell. You have no arms, no legs, no eyes, no nose, no ears, no brain. You consume, but not much else. When you have gathered enough proteins and building blocks, your RNA/DNA starts to split, diffusing the amount of ‘weight’. But if something would touch your cell, or start to lower the fluid-level inside the cell, you would start moving away from the place where that started to happen. You would try to find a safe place. You would go heads on. How would you do that? ‘Bore me to death?’
Figure 2
Is fear a good thing, or a bad thing?
Well, lets see, for a single cell organism it is the only thing that will indicate to the core that it is in danger of perishing. What about a larger organism? A snail, or an worm?
Trigger happy
Even as humans are more complex, the response mechanism is still the same. A trigger when something touches the outer skin, which takes away either density or causes dehydration of the cells (salt on the finger of a human will cause the fluids from a snail to compensate for the solution difference within a cell and outside. Also a snail is not used to warmth, so it will ‘shy away’ from it.) In all, the initial response from such organism is still the same. It will ‘fear’ the change in environment. All organisms after come from the same genepool. Some changed their response to how fear influences the internal system. Predators, for instance will get forced by their hormone levels and neuron response to attack, instead of retreat, unless the situation contains signals or causes enough pain (like the dehydration of a single cell) to make it choose the safer route for survival.
So, though the quote in Figure 2, comes from a seemingly very intelligent person, it is not entirely right. What we should fear, is losing touch with our ability to respond to signals that are cause for fear to survive and to fear too much.
Fear of history
Human history has shown what happens when you are cognitively enabled (self aware and can ‘think’) and still have a very strong sense of fear response for survival. It means that in a changing world, with less dangers, more false positives will occur. False positives are ‘detections of danger’, which aren’t really dangers. This is what we now call ‘superstition’. This caused the early man to see dangers in wind waving the grass, or a bush. And as we know, as a child with limited cognitive understanding of processes of nature, we had little way to see anything more in those false positives, than projections of our fears. Of ourselves.
Figure 3
Prey and Predator
Eventually, in different parts of the world, where humans traveled and settled, different social growth and different cultures caused different ways to fill the false positives. The oldest agreed within the community to different ‘animism’ to cause the wind to howl, or the sun to shine or thunder to strike. Eventually humanity grew and and its freedom from fear of predators in nature, gave it the possibility to explore different ways to survive. But all these new emotions and ways to interact with our surrounding, within our groups, with problems, with opportunities, were still based on the very first: fear. Love for others, is often showing its real face: fear of losing. Fear of losing offspring, fear of losing protection, fear of losing the posibility to be empowered by sheer number (social group dynamics). Anger, love, sorrow, all come from fear.
But as Lucas Jonkman said (Figure 3): Fight your fears and you’ll be in battle forever (fears don’t go away, you can’t kill fear, it is a symptom. Most often for the unknown), face your fears and be free forever (accept that your body and mind responds to something with fear, and find out what that thing is, is it really to be feared?)
When Logically inclined, Honesty frames the view of Reason
The body is an organism that is build to survive. Thus, input and internal processes are meant to have it live and keep living. We have chemical influences to the brain, making sure that the neural responses stay in favor to survival, but of course we have an abundance of neural input from visual, auditive and haptic stimuli. However, most organisms (and humans are no exceptions to this rule) have instinctive behavior to these stimuli. The crux is, that the more complex the neural network, the more diversion there is in processing the incoming signals.
Fear the dream
Emotions are the level where instincts can be ‘conflicting’. Animals have this, where they are ‘instinctive’ to act one way and eventually are forced by either other instinct or stimuli to divert from this. That is why dogs also are sometimes noticed to be vividly dream. Humans have not only instincts and emotions on top of them. They are even self-aware of their choices from both these two layers. The stimuli are electrical current changes in the nervous system. Neurons are the storage/processing containers of these electrical charges and respond to specific ‘levels’ of charges. When something is processed repeatedly, the neurons/nervous system will ‘etch’ it. It becomes an instinctive behavior. Before it becomes something like that, it requires quite some work. The layer above it, is the emotional processing. We store most memories by emotional hooks (do understand that these are also connected to strongest stimuli during these emotions: smell, sound, visuals).
These emotional hooks decide how we will respond to these kinds of stimuli the next time. But before such emotional hook is stored, it has to have a unique flow in the nervous system (If you know what an EEPROM is, you might get some analogy here).
The Alpha and the Omega
When we receive new stimuli, that cause (and they always do, don’t kid yourself) emotional feedback on the nervous system, it doesn’t mean the brain will automatically process it. Often we are cognitively so busy that the default electrical charge on the brain the ‘signals’ to be bouncing through the matter, without having any effect. But you can understand (I guess) that this just adds to the already existing charge in the brain (consider it the Beta, Alpha and Gamma wavelengths, where the level of stimuli adds to the lowest, causing it to move to a higher frequency). When we go to sleep, the average charge is lowered, because we are not actively influencing our own awareness anymore. Visual cortex is ‘shutdown’, Auditive cortex is shutdown. etc. So, the brains ‘instinctive’ and ‘emotional’ responses are shutdown. But what is left is the residual charges that bounce through the brain. This residual charge will fire parts of the cortexes, that will result in dreams. The same is also why especially as a child, our dreams seems so random and often have no limit in weirdness. Because as a child we are learning about our instincts, emotions and cognitive abilities (often most apparent in our social behavior), we dream more during our younger years. Our brain needs more answers to ‘unknown’ emotions etc.
Dream Ja Vu
When we sleep enough (and dream enough in REM level), our brain has time to process all the ‘overhead’ charge. It has time to settle in the sediments and etch or sink down the new behavioral patterns.
When we don’t sleep enough, we tend to feel restless, because these additional charges cause a discrepancy in our instinct/emotional and cognitive responses. Consider the following:
We have experienced something.
We have responded, but are unaware if this is the right way.
We sleep but the emotional charge is not dispersed into the brain.
We experience the same situation, but we are aware we do, but we are also aware we ‘haven’t made up our minds yet’ on how our response will be.
This is a short example on the neuro-biological behavior.
Why does THC influence dreaming?
Because the neurological impulses are held back (basically THC causes the nerve endings to slowdown and stimuli to not reach the brain the same moment for instance visual input does. Unless the intake also influences the visual cortex, in which case, the brain will fill in random blanks with very weird stuff), and therefore there is a disassociation between the different signals (besides the signals being weakened. When you finally stop the THC feed, the nerve endings will discharge and even the slightly lower levels of charge will hit the brains neurons full on, with the extra. Consider it a hose, where you left water in it, because the tap was not closed correctly, and you open the tap and the hose will burst water (including that which was already there).
Because not only humans dream, but other animals, too, we know that dreams are not based on cognitive (thoughts) impulses, but rather emotional ones. This has to do with the fact that our brain works in three layers.
Instinctive behavior
Either by genetic blueprint or attained through learning, any organism will adapt to recurring patterns to prevent it from danger. The genetic part is of course hard to change, but the ‘tree’ of choices (I call it the decision tree), the response mechanism of most mammals is automated. Meaning, if something gives an impulse, especially repeatedly, that causes a positive or negative reaction to the nervous system, it will become an instinctive behavior to move to or from such stimulus.
Emotional behavior
Mammals and especially primates (being very recognizable to us). They differentiate in group sizes and survival mechanisms because of that. They have empathic abilities to survive in social groups. But they also see emotional behavior in strong generational cohesion. Where offspring is heavily dependent on parents, we see the equivalent of our own emotions within such ‘family’. These emotional behaviors have different reasons.
They cause automatic bonding, dependency.
They cause mimicking of behavior (we have seen this behavior between species even, remember the stories of Tarzan, or Romulus and Remus?).
They set a path for pattern recognition within the nervous system.
Certain key values which change with each generation to ensure possible survival. The emotional layer, can be seen as a ‘neural’ filter level.
Cognitive behavior
With awareness comes the growth to conceptualization in communication. Because we are instinctive, emotional beings, but also self aware and sometimes differ in meaning of emotion, we need a way to explain when an emotional behavior is not meant as a threat, etc. You could call it a protocol equivocation behavior. These concepts are starting with leveling of emotional responses between the self and others (independent of species), but evolve through a process of emotional impulses to stimuli and responses within relations and our interactions with the world around us into cognitive structures of words, representations and a general worldview.
Self-awareness
We as humans are in possession of all three layers. When we are young (between age of 3 and 9) we run through many changes in emotional responses. We are first heavily bombarded with positive responses to new abilities we show to parents. At the same time on increasing occasions during that time we are shown that we are also growing within boundaries of the use of such abilities. The brain will process these responses into the emotional layer. That layer starts quite blank and if repeated and found with consistency, will filter into the instinctive layer. If we find ourselves with a conflicting response, it can cause emotional dissonance (not cognitive). When the brain ‘shuts down’ at night, the reflux/feedback of these neural charges will cause the brain to fire memory or general pathways that are perceived as dreams. Because emotional ‘challenges’ are becoming rarer as we grow older (They are more frequent during more active development stages like adolescence), we tend to dream less obvious the older we get.
Keep your dream alive
In general dreams are a process of the nervous system to make emotional conflicts of the day, be adapted into the instinctive layer, so we don’t have to cognitively or emotional deal with them again.
We have a strange sense of humor (no that is not the reason…is it?). We see back and recognize our own evolution, our language, physics, technology, everything. But what we don’t see, is that evolution isn’t just ongoing, but (as far as I can see) we will not use language anymore within the next 1500 years. We will have evolved, in which our communication now will look like bird songs to us then. Or like grunts….perhaps even like ant signals.
See, it isn’t about words, concepts. Concepts are a way of visualisation, of controlling information and processes. We are growing in numbers (though the current state of humanity will cause some decline in the next 50 to 100 years.) and the way we process the future, is requiring faster and faster communication. We will eventually not use words anymore, because our cognition will surpass the emotional limitations that evolution has given us (well…they are leftovers). We will continue to increase brain activity and cognitive awareness. Imagine an individual that needs to transgressing time and space (if that is to be transgressed, when intelligence reaches a threshold that understands the actual quantum entanglement and what is at the levels below. It requires a neurological speed that isn’t possible for humanity yet. It doesn’t allow for one brain to cope with the amount of modelling and layering of data. Perhaps a person who has been on LSD and is autistic (missing large part of the emotional layer) can understand the abstract imaginary that would be required.
In all, at such level, our signals, how advanced they may seem, are less than rocks that tick together as the stream of water pushes them. They sound like something, but it is part of nature.
Imagine to finding out water is actually living individuals?
Those who have children know that from the moment of conception, the future for parents often is an outlook of sleepless nights. The first year or so, this outlook is often true. Mother has to feed the baby and dad has to get out of bed to provide the milk, or the baby. But even when dad doesn’t get out of bed, he is still woken by the cry (paternal instinct) and will have way less sleep as usual. From the moment parents get a baby into a fixed sleeping rhythm (sometimes a child automagically finds it, sometimes it takes over a week to ‘force’ such rhythm. Be sure, that a child benefits from a structured sleeping rhythm. Much more than the parent does. Of course, it depends on the daily walk of a parent, whether the sleep deprevation has much influence, but over all, a child is still on its way of becoming the next generation of humanity.
Sleeping on it
Why is it so important for a child to have a good structure in sleep?
For one, we know that humans need sleep for several reasons: The body needs repair and sleep causes stress to dissipate and other organic functions have effect on the way the body processes physical effects of the day. Next to this, the emotional state (which is the base from which the mind springs) requires ‘unwinding’. Adults have processed most emotions during their lifetime. Children will need to do this at every turn of events. It starts with the very first emotion, like fear, hunger (which is basically a physical stimulance). At first a child doesn’t really hold fear, because they have no idea that they are an individual. Their awareness is of such level, that the neurological pathways are finding their ways to make sure that the brain can access all senses and then the ability of influencing the body’s systems kick in. This could be seen as an equivalent bootsequence of several months (man, are humans slow). However, during the period of learning of what sight, sound, touch and emotions (the instinctive responses of the neurons to patterns), there is something to keep in mind. The simple way to look at it, is: A string of a bow can’t be tense all the time. Likewise, the neurological system of a body can’t be under stress all the time.
Stressing the need of sleep
Are children under stress?? YES, every organism everywhere and always (as long as it is alive) processes differentiation of stresslevels. If you understand ‘transistors’, the analogy is: As long as there is current on a conductor, there is friction in resistance within the conductor/transistor, which is called ‘stress’. Neurons work in the same way. When an impuls is received by the system (body, mind), it will cause a current in the brain. If you shoot enough current into something, it won’t automatically dissipate in one go. The brain has a habit of pulsing currents of input from and too, until the brain has a correct response to it. Children start with emotions, because they aren’t cognitive on a level of processing yet, until they are finished with understanding their physical, emotional and initial cognition/awareness. From that moment, the development moves to the awareness level and cognitive abilities grow. Of course, this is not a switch over, but a transcending phase. The fact that development connects the dots, it is important that the dots are consistent. If the brain is neurologically developed in an environment without structure, the brain and from that the emotions and from that the mind will have several issues (be aware this is a ‘simplified’ depiction, there are many factors that influence this, both hormonal, enivronmental, prenatal state, natural differences). These issues can be observed early in life, but just as easily only come to attention after later development phase shifts (puberty/adolescence/parenthood or other). For the reason to sleep and from that dream, I point to the Dreams part in this research. To put short here: The brain needs to process the most important energy/current that it receives: Emotions. These are the connection between the physical instincts and the awareness of the mind. Also said: emotions are the friction between senses and awareness.
REMark
If a child is not getting sleep, it means that the brain will adapt to two states (not one of both, but both):
1. The brain is constantly active and as the human as organism is prone for adaptation (learning), the brain will adapt to this state and expect constant input.
2. The brain is unable to dissipate residual current/stress and will prevent new input, sensory or cognitive, to be processed.
Be like water
Consider the following as an example: We have a stream of water, which runs on a flat surface. The water will flow freely, until the stream causes indents on the surface and more and the water will start to flow through the indent more and more. The pressure generated will cause the indent to gain length, as the form of the indent will cause water to ‘fall’ into it and move faster for a second in the direction that the water has most space. After some time, the water will start to fully flow in the ‘trenches’ and when water is finding a space that gives no way, the trench is full. No new water can come in. However, as with water, the brain, when the water stream is stopped, will dissipate the tension on neurons and the ‘trenches’ will dry in. They will become instinctive responses to input. This is necessary, because the brain can’t be active on all levels all the time. To be consciously choosing you need to ‘rely’ on the brain to make ‘basic’ decisions without you having to think of them: breath, tilt hand and arm to catch something, evaluation on to the fly whether something is a threat when caught.
How to detect:
children above deviate cognitive level, with lack of sleep can have their cause in high IQ/EQ
children on deviate cognitive level, with lack of sleep can have their cause in attention span deficiency.
children with below deviate congitive level, with lack of sleep can have their cause in irregular sleep patterns from nurture.
This one isn’t as difficult to answer as you might ‘think’ (snort), so which was first? Brain or mind?
The definite thought
Definition of the brain gives us: a : the portion of the vertebrate central nervous system enclosed in the skull and continuous with the spinal cord through the foramen magnum that is composed of neurons and supporting and nutritive structures (such as glia) and that integrates sensory information from inside and outside the body in controlling autonomic function (such as heartbeat and respiration), in coordinating and directing correlated motor responses, and in the process of learning — compare forebrain, hindbrain, midbrain
b : a nervous center in invertebrates comparable in position and function to the vertebrate brain
Mind the gap
Well…that wasn’t hard. Now about the mind: 1. The element of a person that enables them to be aware of the world and their experiences, to think, and to feel; the faculty of consciousness and thought.
1.1 A person’s mental processes contrasted with physical action.
2. A person’s ability to think and reason; the intellect.
Though I don’t agree with the first one entirely, because the mind is not causing us to feel, it only is the aggregated functioning that makes us aware of what we feel as individual, this is the definition that pops up.
Emerging winner
Now, which of those two come first have actually little to do with the definition of both. Rather:
The mind is the aggregated functioning of processes in the brain that cause it to be selfaware and able to experience and act. While the brain has multiple functions for parts of the body and actions of the organism, the mind is dependent on the speed of these processes. Now you might want to argue about speed in neurons and all, but the fact remains that the mind is an emerging property of the brain’s functions. Thus the brain has to exist for the mind to arise.
So, as all mammals have a brain, but not a mind, it should be both logically (from the above) and biologically clear that the brain was and is present before a mind can form.
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