Brain areas have localized, specific functions
From People’s Cyclopedia of Universal Knowledge (1883).

Apart from this, there are many other theories that fall into one of the two categories and some combine concepts from both. However, Jeff Hawkins (Ted presentation approx 20 minutes long) believes that we are far from having a respectable brain theory … because we have an intuitive, strongly held but incorrect assumption that has prevented us from seeing the answer. He thinks that we need to reconsider our basic frameworks and start to look in different directions to get a good brain theory. In order to build theory, one needs to have well-framed questions and, from Hawkins’ perspective, this might be the problem – the lack of challenging questions.

Take a look at Henry Markram’s Ted presentation. He presents a theory from a computational/biological perspective (15 minutes long). Markram’s theory proposes that the brain creates a version of the universe and projects this version of the universe like a bubble around us. The key to his theory is that decisions are what support our perceptual bubble. It is of particular interest that much of his explanation centres on visual spatial perception as the mechanism through which the brain makes decisions. Part of his theory includes the evolutionary development of the neocortex. One of his key concepts is that the most important secret of the brain is diversity and the neocortical column.

Every neuron in the brain is different and no two people have a single neuron that is the same. However, we do share the same fabric of the brain – also referred to as the circuit. Although the circuitry is different between people, the pattern of how the circuitry is designed is the same. This he suggests is why we are able to communicate within species (the fabric being species specific). The imagery and simulations are excellent – I recommend watching the video. We could, according to Henry, have a good brain theory within the near future.

For a different perspective (and if you have two hours to spare) take a look at Wai Tsang’s presentation of his Fractal Theory of the Brain. The first section (up to about halfway) describes the complex structures of the brain. It is very detailed and informative. The second half is where he presents his actual theory. His brain theory is a multi-disciplinarian hypothesis that uses Mandelbrot’s geometric fractal patterns and compares it to the brain, assuming that the brain is functionally specialized.

David Bohm, who we have met in a previous post, believed that the brain obeys the mathematics of some quantum effects at a cellular level. He reasoned that thought was a distributed process – non-localised – just like the way quantum entities do not easily fit into the usual model of space and time.

Grid structure of major pathways of the human left cerebral hemisphere. Image by MGH-UCLA Human Connectome Project .

Some recent research (2012), reported by Pappas and made possible by the advancement of technology, shows how the wiring of the brain uses a surprisingly simple pattern in the way it is organized.

Of particular interest is how all of the research of the brain is heavily reliant on visual imagery to explore this complex subject.

The theories (concepts) drive the investigation but the results are visual and it is from the visual data that sense is constructed and the theory tested. This points to the importance of visual thinking in our trajectory to understand ourselves better.

Detail of a diffusion spectrum MR image of rhesus monkey brain showing the sheet-like, three-dimensional structure of neural pathways that cross each other at right angles.
Image by Van Wedeen, M.D., Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, Massachusetts General Hospital.

Scientists have been answering lot questions regarding how or rather some parts of it.  How motor functions work? How speech is processed? How vision is processed? all to some extent be explained. Neuroscience is field where lot of experiments are done (on animals) and lot of data is collected and interpreted to some extent. It is data driven way. Lot of miss interpretations always happen based on classic errors of correlation leads to causation which is totally bad. But still its the best we have now.

Few researchers want to mimic the working to capitalize on real world application and few argue we don’t even need to do that. AI will advance with the computing capacity and we can surpass the brain capacity. So researchers put forward their own theory with or without proof for shaping the future research. It is one of the important field of research in coming years. Decoding DNA is a ground breaking achievement. But understanding brain will be equally or even more ground breaking.

Lot of people think there is something above use controlling us which they call it consciousness. Religious people call it soul. Lot of  researchers from different decades and centuries all wanted to unravel it.  So its a big deal! It a good mental exercise  to actually think about it philosophically and also scientifically. What is consciousness? What is intelligence?  How we are here? I had this interesting discussion with my colleague about why some people are successful in start ups and others not. His take on the question was very simple. Lets say they are 1000 people and all toss a coin. Only people who get heads go to next round and this goes on till one person is left. So is it true that the person who wins is an expert coin tosser. He is intelligent enough to get heads all the time?? It is a big exaggeration of luck but most of the beings or things are there because the environment dictates it to be there. The environment under which the being is there is the cause of the behavior of the being or the being with correct behavior towards environment survives.  So basically we prevail because the events which took place were favorable to us. It has nothing to do with intelligence etc. Its just a name given by us to our self.

So now coming to brain. Why is it so complex? The simplest reason is the complexity of the behavior by a being is proportional to the dynamics of the environment he is in. We live in a really dynamic environment. There are different sensory inputs coming all over the time. For brain everything is environment outside of it. It sees other humans and even our own body as an environment. The complexity has increased with speech, vision, touch, proprioception, co-operative behavior etc everything has made the complexity so huge. So to survive humans have to do lot of modelling and planning. The time scale at which this is done is dramatically increasing. Humans have to continuously update the model and predict the future. As a social being  we are influenced by the success and failure of other people. So we have a reference signal ( or rather a perceived reference signal) for success. So we have this model of past and prediction of future and a reference signal. All we have to do is reduce the error of prediction with the reference signal. All motivations and goals set by us short term or long term, the emotions involved with it like betrayal, friendship, love etc etc everything is just a cause of this behavior of going towards the perceived success. There is nothing above us driving our behavior. Its the environment we are in making us behave the way we behave. The laws set by it we have to obey. Or we die. We exists because the conditions are right for us.

( On the side note its kind of funny how the people pray to elements of environment before. They pray sun, wind, earth, water, air. They know it  effects their behavior and fate. So they pray so that the environment will be friendly to them. Now they are lot of other problems for humans so the God is morphed into different concepts. )

Yes what a title for a post ! Well you will need to read a bit more to understand [Oh! give me a break] what I am saying here.

The “U” word, i believe will have more significance in the next 20 years of technology development that any other word in the English dictionary. Have you ever been told to try understand what you are reading and not just memorize it. Have you been told that you can recall things better if you
relate it to something.

For instance you can recall planets in order by memorizing this phrase. “My very educated mother just serves us nasty pickles” Where the planets are related to the words. “my = Mercury, very =Venus, educated =Earth, mother =Mars, just =Jupiter, serves =Saturn, us =Uranus, nasty =Neptune , pickles =Pluto.”

You may have used several such phrases while in school to remember bits of information that would have been hard to memorize. My 2 year old kid today heard me saying 2 lines in order and then he formed the 3rd line which was actually made sense.

What is happening here? Have you wondered.
What does it mean to understand, what does it mean to makes sense of something, what does it mean to figure out some thing. All these word/phrases are related to showing signs of intelligence. So the U word is probably the very basis of Intelligence and Intelligent beings. And we are at the beginning of a decade or two where this can be harnessed and put to use .

So what does the “U” word mean. Let me take a few examples

• Do you understand how this works
• Did you understand this email
• Can you make sense of this equation
• Do you understand how the human heart works
• Do you understand how the combustion engine works
• Do you understand Italian

As you can see here, The U word means the ability to identify patterns in the information presented to us.

So what is a Pattern?

A pattern is “a type of theme of recurring events or objects”. Once you have identified the theme of recurring events or objects. You can create a model of the same. The model can then be used to relate to other bits of information that you encounter.

For instance when you see 1+2=3 , you create a pattern like this. [ Something + Something = Sum of all somethings ] . You can now you this pattern to 2+3 or
1 apple + 2 apples etc and arrive at an answer that is accurate. You can apply this pattern to millions of such scenarios you would encounter in your day to
day life, and you don’t need to have separate patterns to add numbers or apples . This is an incredibly important concept. It means that you are able to
reduce the amount of information you need to capture and store and use. And you can us the information that you know to other bits of information that you
have never encountered before. This is Intelligence.

Over time we create thousands or millions of such patterns in our minds. These patterns help us make sense of new information by relating to it to what you already know. And that in turn creates new patterns. Without formal schooling we still can do regular chores. And we are able to learn patterns that we have encountered in our daily lives. However a formal schooling process ensures that we are able to assimilate new patterns much faster than we would have encountered in our daily lives and there by increasing the rate at which we are able to create patterns in our minds and there by increasing our Intelligence.

Intelligence and Patterns

So Intelligence itself must be

• A measure or the number of patterns we have stored in our minds,
• The ability to identify patterns in new information and
• The ability to relate these patterns to the existing patterns in our minds.

Popular tests like GMAT or CAT test exactly these areas like Analytical writing, Quantitative and Verbal skills. So in-order to emulate or show signs on Intelligence you will need to be able to Understand information or in other words. Identify patterns, store and retrieve patterns and apply it to new information.

I believe we will see new products and solutions in the market over the next few years that will address this field. And has the potential to be the next big leap in technology.

Let me give you some background on the Conditions of Learning Theory. According to the authors, there are eight conditions that affect student learning, they are: Immersion, Demonstration, Engagement, Expectation, Responsibility, Employment, Approximation, and Response. He states that these conditions are necessary for student learning. Each one of these conditions has a connection with a principle on how the brain learns. After, I read the article I chose three of these principles/conditions and linked to equity in education. It is interesting to notice how the lack of implementation of these principles in the classroom can lead a teacher to promote inequity in his classroom. I am working with the subject in an inquiry manner.

First condition of learning is immersion and the brain principle states that, “An enriched learning environment increases cell weight, branching of dendrites and synaptic process with in the brain”. The question for us to ponder is, are we immersing our students in learning experiences, or are we in the business of “exposure”.  I am trying to create an image for your brain here. How are Oreo cookies and milk linked to inequity in education? I think Oreo cookies are dipped more times into a glass of milk than students in our public school system into learning experiences. Why?

Let me explain. Right now, in education teachers are in frenzy, trying to “cover” the material that may appear on the test. As teachers “cover” the material, who guarantees learning? We cannot guarantee learning because each one of us learn at a different  pace and the idea of “covering” does not ensure deep learning because there is no time for deep learning!

“Plato paints the picture of a Charioteer driving a Chariot pulled by two horses. One horse is white and long necked, well bred, well behaved, and runs without a whip. The other is black and short-necked, badly bred, troublesome. The Charioteer represents intellect, reason, or the part of the soul that must guide the soul to truth; the white horse represents rational or moral impulse or the positive part of passionate nature (e.g., righteous indignation); the black horse represents the soul’s irrational passions, appetites, or concupiscent nature. The Charioteer directs the entire chariot/soul, trying to stop the horses from going different ways, and to proceed towards enlightenment.”

In some sense what Plato tries to understand of human is true. I don’t know if the concept of evolution is well known at that time.  Most of the humans body and its behaviour can be explained by evolution.  The basic way in which I understand evolution is making it as a analogy with Optimization Theory. The nature ( Earth ) can be thought of as  a function provided for which the organisms have to optimize in order to live. They have different parameters to measure the function and try to get the optima to survive. The survival depends on how effective the parameters are changed. With the discovery of DNA we can say that this DNA is the parameter that has to be changed in order to adapt to the function the nature.

argmax     ƒ( DNA ) = Survival

DNA

Well most of the people know evolution and is scientifically proved. Now main idea I want to explain in this blog is to explain the irrationality in humans and how evolution explains it. Irrationality like desires, emotions can be very well explained by it. If we see the development of brain we can understand which parts where developed long back and which are developed recently. The apparatus for sense, breathing, Heart pumping are very essential and has evolved first. The vision which is a very important sensing part evolved and is major part of the brain. Then we later developed  speech. Then Pre-frontal Cortex where most of the reasoning and ethical part is evolved. Now brain has evolved so that Humans can survive in this ever changing world. It has to continuously adapt to circumstances. Evolution as such is a very slow process.  So to evolve an eye it took millions of years. So the organism can’t wait those much million of years for that product to be out ( Like we are waiting for our next generation  iPod )  It has to make use of what is available and try to survive.  So there are lot of micro releases like HUMAN v1.0.0.01 etc etc. The problem of human brain is same as that of the software development in current age. We release a version but takes time to adapt to newer version. But we can’t continue older version as such as newer versions are better. The brain is nothing but a complex structure of neurons. The new neurons which are evolved make use of existing structure and build on top of it. So evolution makes a new release v.1.0.0.02 which can survive  for new conditions on earth ( May be it will survive the HIV v100.0.01 in future ). So we can think of it is as multiple layers of neurons are added like the hidden layers in the Artificial Neural Networks.

Evolution of Brain

As we can see from the figure the effect is that the newer version are built on top of older versions. Now  coming to what Plato was arguing is that the soul is the reasoning part and should control the emotional and desire part. The reasoning part is one which evolved later i.e.  the pre-frontal cortex which is the decisive part of the brain. The desires is the reflexive part of the brain.  To understand what is happening lets take some example.  When we see some delicious food or an attractive mate our reflexive part of the brain makes an instant decision. The decisive part which is higher level has to do some processing to make another decision. So there are different decisions made at different level. These has to combined somehow and output is got. The internal conflict we get is nothing but this conflicting outputs we get. To make a rational decision is to make a decision after weighing all this outputs in a sensible way. The reflexive system gives an immediate output and so basically targets on immediate needs. The decisive systems takes longer time to calculate or process the long term needs. And also timing is very important. I think that is the reason why the addiction is common in humans. Addiction is basically choosing the decisions made by reflexive part of brain. Like the alcohol or video games as its a instant reward system when compared to getting a PhD. ( Takes torturous years to complete ) . This is one of the reasons of making irrational decisions.  The self control we all say is nothing but the pre-frontal cortex the decisive part of the brain taking control of the emotional and reflexive part of the brain.

Now, consider emotion. How does emotion comes into equation. To understand it lets take an example. We see a delicious cake. Now if the reflexive part says to eat and decisive part says no  and we eat then we feel guilt and if we don’t eat then we feel anger. If the reflexive and decisive part both says to eat and we eat then we feel happy. Its not causal as emotion may change decision and decision can change emotion and it may go few cycles and act as a bistable system.  So truly as Plato says to make a rational decision the decisive part should control both the reflexes and emotions to attain self control. In scientific point of view emotion is nothing but the conflicts or conformance of the fuzzy decisions made by different levels of brain. The human always tries to weigh the options to optimize his return. Rational decision is made only if emotions are in control and reflexive decisions are weighed. ( The reflexive system as such cannot be discarded as when we avoid a punch or fall our survival depends on this reflexive system ). This conflicts and conformance’s are not restricted to self.  Human as a social being interacts with others and communicate through speech, body gestures etc. The emotion may arise if there is conflicts or conformance of interacting beings also. The level of interaction is more than we think. For example say a persons mental state and physical state effects other person. SAy if a person  is carrying a heavy load or  if a person losses a loved one . What would be once reaction in general. We instantly feel empathy. This is the interaction of our internal system with other persons system. Recently a group of scientists discovered mirror neurons in the brain. These neurons are activated if a person is doing a specific task or if he is watching other person doing it. This explains a lot of empathy in humans. This is infact one of the fundamental part of how brain gets trained. Learning by example can only happen if we have mirror neurons. When father teaches kid to catch a baseball bat then surely we can say that mirror neurons are in action.

Now coming to theorizing how the human being is performing and learning actions we know that evolution and learning are the two important processes human will go through to enable him gain skills he needed. Evolution gives him the ability to learn things and learning is the realization of his ability to learn. It is called genome/phoneme.Genome is basically the ability and phoneme is the realization.

One important consequence of this processes is that neurons in the brain are wired based on these both processes of evolution and learning.So most of the human behavior can be understood systematically by studying this processes.

Most of the irrational(novel) feelings in the human are basically a stimulus of neurons in most different way than it is wired based on evolution and the individuals learning. ( Irrational here is not used in negative sense. It is basically a new feeling. Which is outside the scope of prior learning of human. The effect of it may be good or bad depending on his and other observers perspective and the current ethical system in the society )

Most of the irrational feelings we experience are due to the stimulus of the neurons in most unusual way.

Case Studies:

Laughter:

What is the reason of laughter? When you ask this question the natural way to think is that laughter is nothing but  a sensory output. So the reason for laughter is there has  been a sensory input which the neural system in brain has processed it and mapped it to the laughter action. So the flow is

SensoryInput( Sound, Video ) -> Brain Process -> Sensory Output

Here the interesting thing is how the brain process the input. For this particular case lets say joke is the sensory input i.e. speech of a person. So the brain has to process this speech and decide if any action has to be taken. Normally brain processes the speech based on the prior knowledge it has gained from learning. So the neural connections are established so that speech is cognizant. So the neurons will initiate the thought process and activate any outputs if needed. Now the joke intiates a thought process in brain which has not yet been learnt. So new connections are made for the first time. This process of making new connections which doesnt have any predefined outputs matched makes you feel laugh. Even the same joke doesnt give same reaction to all persons. The amount of response depends on the prior knowledge and the neural connections of that particular person. 

Art:

Likewise in art also the same kind of reasoning can be applied. Art has inputs like sound, image, actions etc. If these inputs are not learnt prior then the feeling you get is the appreciation of art. So being artistic or creative is nothing but finding input which stimulate new connections in the observer. The more the connections are learnt the appreation to that art is decayed.

Glenda Beamon Crawford’s experiences with young adolescent learners span nearly thirty years. She has taught in grades 4–12 and currently coordinates the middle grades program at Elon University, where she is a professor of teacher education. She has authored three books, including Managing the Adolescent Classroom and Sparking the Thinking of Students, Ages 10–14, as well as articles on structuring classrooms for adolescent thinking and learning. She consults and presents regularly at state, national, and international conferences. Her research and teaching honors include the 2002 North Carolina Award for Outstanding Contribution to Gifted Education, the North Carolina ASCD Outstanding Research Award, and the Teacher of the Year Award.

Sage Publications

Elon University – Masters of Education Faculty

Glenda Beamon Crawford, Professor – Education

Address: 2105 Campus Box, Elon, NC 27244
Email: gcrawford@elon.edu
Phone #: 336-278-5865 Fax #: 336-278-5919
Office: Mooney Building 301C

Dr. Glenda Crawford has been researching the cognitive, social and personal development of adolescent learners for more than 20 years. She has published three books based on her research, including Teaching With Adolescent Learning in Mind and Managing the Adolescent Classroom. Dr. Crawford has taught elementary, middle and high school students. She is an international consultant on middle-level education.

I know very little, thus far. Maybe some of you know more.  

My own concept development on this started yesterday as part of a professional development seminar.

Here is a Google Book on the topic.

Crawford, Glenda Beamon (2007). Brain-based teaching with adolescent learning in mind. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press.