Brains & Machines

The Evolution of Faith           

As a neurosurgeon who treats patients with malignant brain tumors, there are many  times when I have to give people very very bad news.  I have told a wide variety of men and women that they have a diagnosis that is going to take their life.   Those are moments I don’t look forward to.   Regardless of race, wealth, and education, the patient and their family are often in shock after the news.  What they do after that, however,  varies quite a bit.  On one end of the spectrum, some seem to manage with a fortitude and grace that is truly inspiring.  Others can become mired in a depression that paralyzes their ability to recover.

An interesting thread that seems to unify those patients and their families that seem to rise above their diagnosis are those that appear to have a strong religious faith.  I am often struck by how my more faith-oriented patients can find a higher meaning in their suffering, and as a result seem happier and more capable in dealing with their disease.  When confronted by the very terrible question of “why,”  they have a psychological architecture that accommodates some of life’s unfair mysteries.

Setting aside the metaphysics for a moment, I don’t want to make any arguments about the presence or absence of God. Nor do I want to make any judgments about people who do or don’t believe in a higher being.  Rather, I think  the  interesting thing about faith and how it helps a patient deal with disease is that it tells us something fundamental about how humans are put together.

The basic tenants of evolution are that there is a selective pressure for traits within a species that favors its ability to survive.  So thinking about various animals and plants that have a bunch of genetic variability within the group (some are bigger, some are smaller, some are this color or that color, etc).  In any case, as the environment changes some aspect to that creature favors it surviving and making it more likely to breed and thus increasing the presence of that trait in the population.  In a simple example, it’s the reason that you’re more likely to see moths that are brown and black, because the white ones all gotten eaten in the past.  But survival traits can go far beyond color and size.  If you irradiate a spider (and injury the DNA in its sperm and eggs), its offspring will have distorted spider webs.  The point here is that very complex behaviors can be genetically encoded. 

Despite the modern perception of free will, humans are not immune from genetically dictated behaviors.  Study upon study has shown the influence of one’s genes on their proclivity for depression and personality disorders.  So that begs the question,  how high up the cognitive food chain of thoughts and ideas do our genes go?

Joseph Campbell spent his life studying religions throughout the world. He clearly documents through his multicultural studies that religion (i.e. some belief in a higher divine reality) is present throughout every nook and cranny of human existence.  Even more interesting is that not only is faith intrinsic to a social culture, but quite often the themes of religions are also strikingly similar.

So why? Why do humans believe in things and why do they believe in similar things.  Just like certain configurations of a spider webs give that arachnid a better chance of passing on its genes, so to do certain cognitive predispositions enhance (on average) the human species’ ability to survive their environment.   I think even the most strident atheist-evolutionist  and hardcore evangelical fundamentalist can probably agree that human society has done a lot of good for the propagation of the human species.   Through the formation of social groups we pool resources (e.g. grain silos, oil reserves, and water towers), subspecialize work duties (e.g. farmers, miners, doctors, etc), and create infrastructure (planes, trains, and highways).  Thus, no one person has to do it all to survive.

That said, we all know that the group isn’t always kind to the individual and many times a society can be quite bad for a human’s health (e.g. every war).  Also, keep in mind that evolution is for survival of the species. (see last blog Living in the Giant). Thinking back to Homo Erectus back several million years ago, what compelled them to start working together?  They realized they could get more food and have more kids by acting as a group.  Again there may have been the “go-it-alone Erectus.”  But he, like a white moth, didn’t do very well.  So for the species to really flourish required it to become hyper-specialized.  Different people had to do different things. Some had to get more and some had to get less.  There needed to be hierarchy.  If we assume that our selfish genes are only looking out for number one, that is never is going to happen and also the species will suffer as a result.  Enter the survival need for religion.   Believing in something beyond one’s self – something bigger allows an individual to sacrifice - to give up something for the whole.  As a result the group does better and the human species as a whole has a better survival advantage.

The cognitive convention also provides the Homo Sapiens some additional survival benefits. As our frontal lobes increased in size and we start looking to understand the workings of our environment and ourselves, humans became confronted with mysteries they couldn’t explain (droughts, famine, and the whole cadre of human suffering). Early on there was plenty of unexplainable stuff.  Again, those who could create a system that put these things into a framework that  enable them to operate in their lives in a more ordered and social manner, likely enabled them to survive and have offspring.  Or at the very least be more compliant with a social order (think of the pharaohs and all the slaves) which served the group faring well where many individuals maybe did not. Either way, having a predisposition in believing in a higher reality in the face of suffering made the human species collectively more resilient. 

So just as it is hardwired in us to have  drives for self preservation and propagation (hunger, thirst, and sex drive), humans have a fundamental drive to believe in something bigger, a need for meaning.   And just as we try to satisfy those needs we need to be careful not to over or under do it.  If we eat too much we get fat and unhealthy, and if we eat too little we starve and die.  Similarly, “over-believing” or trying to believe to the exclusion of everything else leads to bizarre behaviors like conspiracy theorists, and  “the world was made in seven days” types who are protesting the teaching of evolution of in our schools – essentially belief to the exclusion of knowledge.  If we believe too little we get the existentialist who likes to say “God is dead” but falls apart when they are dying or under stress.    So to quote another famous religious figure -  “the path to freedom from suffering is one between the extremes of austerities and sensual indulgence,” namely, the “Middle Way.”  

Living in the Giant

If you ask one of my neurons, or a myocyte taken from my arm, it won’t tell you its name is Eric. Similarly, if you ask me what my name is, I won’t say the United States of America.  Common sense tell us that the cells that make up our body are all part of a larger whole that makes up a unique and self-aware entity. In my case, it’s Eric Leuthardt. It goes against everyday intuition, however, to think of a nation as a sentient organism that is conscious.  A hive consciousness usually harkens to far-out notions like “the Borg,” which as we all know, nothing kills conversation like a reference to Star Trek.

             So putting space fantasy aside for a moment, the actual notion is likely more real than our human egos are likely to accept.  I was recently reading an article by the evolutionary biologist Mark Pagel. http://edge.org/conversation/infinite-stupidity-edge-conversation-with-mark-pagel.  He argues that ideas are essentially the new DNA of the human species. For the last 1.5 billion years the combination of nucleotides (a biologic pattern) which is encoded in DNA (a biologic carrier)  has been the cellular software that has shaped the physical development of biological organisms.  Over the past two hundred thousand years, however, he posits that ideas (a biologic pattern) carried by human brains (a biologic carrier)  are the new information bearing medium that has played the dominant role in our evolutionary development. While I think he is right that ideas held in human brains are the new form of biologic information that shapes development, he misses the mark in its importance.  Ideas are not only the “DNA” that are shaping our human development, they are the DNA that underpins a whole new form of life– a “social macro-organism,” or more simply, the Giant.

             It’s probably a bit of our own hubris to think that the evolutionary process stopped aggregating living components when it came to us.  Ongoing biologic development has favored compiling biologic structures.  It started with the formation of amino acids, which eventually became combined into proteins.  Proteins then became embedded within plasma membranes to form the first single celled organisms.  These differentiated and eventually formed molds, slimes, and early plants.  Complex cellular structures eventually became mobile and more differentiated. Creatures were no longer clusters of cells, but had specialized substructures (different tissues, organs, appendages, etc) that did various things to give them some selective advantage to survive – legs to run, gills to breathe, teeth and claws to hunt.  Eventually after a lot of trial and error, humans and their idea-carrying brains came on to the scene.  My question here is why would nature stop aggregating life forms for higher levels of specialization and survival benefit? 

            Our government has already tacitly acknowledged that certain groups (i.e. corporations) can be treated as “people” in the eyes of the law.  Namely, a corporation (a group of humans) has a legal personhood with rights equal and equivalent to single human. Corporations can exercise human rights against real individuals and the state, and they can themselves be responsible for human rights violations.  Wikipedia is quick to note, however  “that corporations are not living entities in the way that humans are.”  Really?  Why not?  It’s a cluster of organisms (humans) that consumes resources,  is built to grow, and has behavior that is distinct from any of its components with regards to self preservation.  That is the same description of any multicellular organism – humans included.  One could counter that a corporate entity  (i.e. company, nation, or social movement),  is not self-aware like a human. There is an absence of sentience like a living breathing creature (no matter how primitive).  Returning to the individual homo sapien– is any one of the cells that make up my body “aware” of my thoughts, my feelings, and my intentions?  No - just as any one cell or any one part of a body is not equipped to understand my higher order consciousness, so to we as individual humans may not be able to appreciate the sentience of a larger social organism. Who is to say self-awareness hasn’t already happened on the large scale, but we don’t have the capacity to understand or communicate on that level.

The perspective is a little disconcerting because it demotes one’s self-perceived importance in the world. I am in relationship and in someway bound by the giant I live in.  Using a medical example to underline this point.  I typically take care of myself and try to avoid any physically self-destructive behaviors  – smoking, drug abuse, car surfing, juggling sharp objects, etc. That said,  if a part of my body threatens my health, such as an appendicitis, or a cancerous growth – I’ll remove it – regardless if it’s a part of me.  If the whole is threatened, the part has to go.  Corporations and countries certainly act the same way when it comes to people for the purposes of self-preservation.  Despite being a citizen, if one of those citizens endangers the greater health of a nation; that individual (or group of individuals) are removed.   The US didn’t hesitate to kill Anwar al-Awlaki and another America-born militant with a drone – he was a threat.  The point here is that we are not only in relationship with each other, we are in relationship with a larger being that we don’t fully understand and can not communicate with.   

Taken together, the Giant may, and often does, have it’s own priorities.  Moreover,  just as history has shown, the evolution of the nervous systems leads to more complex and sophisticated means for the transit and processing of information.  Just as our neurons became more numerous and myelinated with more complex connections, the Giant’s integration of information has been exponentially increasing with the printing press, telephones, and the internet (see Blog: Why is the World Changing So Fast?).  Thus, the Giant is also getting smarter and more nimble.  So in returning to the early Star Trek reference of the Borg, will we ever become part of a collective consciousness that can think and acts on its own? Well, in truth, I think we have already been assimilated. 

Mirror Neurons and the World Series – The Neuroscience Behind Being a Fair Weather Fan.

  I have to confess that I am a fair weather fan when it comes to the Cardinals. Under normal circumstances I find baseball boring ( I know this is heresy, but bear with me).  Sitting at a stadium waiting for a hit or a run, or something, anything, to happen generally is not on the top of my list of things to do.  The World Series though is different.  There is an excitement and a tension to those long pauses, a suspense that the crowd, both in the stadium and in front of the TV, collectively share.   The same basic stuff is happening, guys standing in a field, pitchers exchanging cryptic hand motions with catchers,  batters batting,  but the difference is that every moment means something.  To the players it means the prestige and benefits of being remembered, being considered by baseball history as one of the greats.  As a fair weather fan, watching the athletes and the die-hards emotions rise and fall, the experience becomes infectious, and other fair weather fans start to fall into the excitement like dominos.

As it turns out, I think there is an interesting science behind the fan suffering the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat.  In doing brain computer interface research, people a while back realized that when you looked at brain activity in humans it didn’t make that much of a difference whether you did some type of movement (moving your hand) or imagined doing that movement (imagining moving your hand).  The brain signals looked virtually identical.  That became important for paralyzed patients, because if they had to generate the control signals for a brain computer interface by actually  moving that wouldn’t make much sense – they’re paralyzed.  Even more interesting, scientists realized in studying single neurons in monkeys that it also didn’t matter whether they did the movement,  or saw the movement being done.  Similar neurons would activate when other monkeys or humans were performing arm and hand movements. People call the neurons that would fire when seeing other people do various tasks “mirror neurons.” Whether there are actually “mirror neurons” or this is basic phenomenon to all neurons is not clear.  Regardless, whether we do something in the real world, imagine doing  that same thing (in our inner world), or see it being done by somebody else (somebody else’s world), it creates very very similar signals in our brain.

So enter the fair weather fan. In ordinary season, if I watch a game or I watch the standard fan watching a game it doesn’t mean that much.  There isn’t that much emotional weight to every moment in the game. To be honest, I think there is probably more interest in the beer guy coming by.  In the World Series, it’s different.  Both the players and the fans exalt and suffer with each step forward or each step back. When me and the other fair weather fans are around that emotional intensity, like it or not, our brain’s will experience those same emotional upheavals. We get to share in that transcendent moment, when the Cards win the World Series, we get to feel it just a little bit like the players are feeling it on the field as they pile onto each other. Our brains are built to experience what other people around us experience.  From an evolutionary standpoint it makes sense, because the more information and knowledge that can rapidly transmit between the group, the higher likelihood that that community will survive. This phenomenon, which a lot of us would call empathy, is more than a pleasant personality trait, it’s a fundamental part of our human biology and collective experience.  Go Cards!

Why my daughter likes Chagall…

 My wife and I have made it a habit to take our new born daughter, Ellie Claire, to the  museum every weekend.  Being  three months old, she wiggles and squirms and coos and seems generally distracted at the world around her. As we walk through the museum, amidst blowing spit bubbles, certain paintings seem to stop her cold.   Specifically, she likes Chagall.  All that relatively uncoordinated jerky movement will come to a halt and her eyes will scan the painting for the better part of ten minutes.   Like some of those art connoisseurs who I see sitting in front of a piece for interminably long periods of time, Ellie will watch these paintings with an intensity that rivals any leather elbow-patched academic.  Other paintings, however – the German expressionist Max Beckman, or the American post-modernist Cy Twombly — she’ll just  continue to jiggle and crank until we move on to the next artist that she actually likes.

So what’s the difference? Is it the colors? The composition?  For a baby who has been in the world for 12 weeks and doesn’t have much in the way of memories why is one painting different from another?  In a sense, I would argue that she may be a better art critic than any martini wielding New York cognoscente.  Her little brain is relatively unfettered by a world and lifetime of experience. She is not worrying about the social context of the piece, the political allegory,  the “artistic statement” of an avante garde personality – none of that — when she sees something that captures her attention, it’s likely because there is something intrinsic to the form of that piece that gives her pleasure. The shapes, the patterns, the colors combine in a way that resonates with the way her brain is put together and compels her to seek more. Thus, at an early age there is something deeply rooted in our sense of aesthetics (the way our brain preferentially processes visual information) that may transcend memories and life experience.  When it comes to art, the brain is more like a tuning fork that will only hum when certain frequencies hit it just right. Similarly,  Chagall rings Ellie’s visual cortex in way different than other visual stimuli.  There is thus something neuroscientifically rooted to Chagall’s aesethic that is fundamentally pleasurable.  More so than say a Dadaist’s sculpture consisting of a toilet seat which is simply there only to induce a cultural reaction. 

The question then becomes do all babies like Chagall, or do some like Matisse and others Picasso?  Likely, each of our brains, akin to slightly different sized tuning forks, have enough variability in them that a given aesthetic piece rings them differently.   Thus,  while there are some fundamental visual configurations that create pleasure in us, they are not all the same across people.  Hence the reason we shouldn’t put too much weight into what an art critic has to say.  He’s just speaking for his brain, and moreover, its likely been sullied by  the indoctrination of a cultural fringe (i.e. affluent neurotic socialites struggling to differentiate themselves).  I guess when its all said and done, when it comes to how we should judge art it comes down to finding those things that make us feel like we are sucking on a binky.