Reflections on Human Nature on the 4th of July

We Are Marching to Utopia....We Will Soon Be There

...optimists and idealists -- with their ignorance about the truths of human nature and human society, and their naive hopes about what can be changed -- have wrought havoc for centuries....instead of utopian efforts to reform human society or human nature, we [should] focus on the only reform that we can truly master -- the improvement of ourselves through the cultivation of our better instincts. _OUP Review of "Uses of Pessimism"

Sure as I know anything, I know this - they will try again. Maybe on another world, maybe on this very ground swept clean. A year from now, ten? They'll swing back to the belief that they can make people... better. And I do not hold to that. _Captain Malcolm Reynolds

There is something deep in human nature which has resisted change -- despite the best efforts of crusaders, utopians, religionists, and wishful thinkers -- for many [tens of?] thousands of years. After countless failures to reform the human spirit, most utopians are unfazed. If they can only grab enough power and control over how resources are distributed, they are sure that they can bring perfection to the land, under their own benevolent leadership. "The land will heal, the sea levels will begin to subside, and every man will say to every other man, you are my brother." And so on.

Philosopher Roger Scruton -- author of The Uses of Pessimism -- takes a somewhat more reluctant view:

The belief that humanity makes moral progress depends upon a wilful ignorance of history. It also depends upon a wilful ignorance of oneself – a refusal to recognise the extent to which selfishness and calculation reside in the heart even of our most generous emotions, awaiting their chance. Those who invest their hopes in the moral improvement of humankind are therefore in a precarious position: at any moment the veil of illusion might be swept away, revealing the bare truth of the human condition. Either they defend themselves against this possibility with artful intellectual ploys, or they give way, in the moment of truth, to a paroxysm of disappointment and misanthropy. Both of these do violence to our nature. The first condemns us to the life of unreason; the second to the life of contempt.


...In order to see human beings as they are, therefore, and to school oneself in the art of loving them, it is necessary to apply a dose of pessimism to all one’s plans and aspirations. _GloomMerchant

In another piece, Scruton presents a paradoxical recommendation for how to teach children to think for themselves, logically and clearly:

...children are drawn to magic...they spontaneously animate their world with spirits and spells...they find relief and excitement in stories in which the heroes can summon supernatural forces to their aid and vanquish untold enemies – these facts reflect layers of deep settlement in the human psyche. But they also remind us that, in the life of the child, belief and imagination are not to be clearly distinguished, and that both serve other functions than the pursuit of truth.


...humanists should wake up to this point, and be careful when they seek to deprive their children of enchantment, or to replace their spontaneous fantasies with the cold hard facts of empirical science. It could well be that religion is a better discipline than pop science, when it comes to shaping the rational intellect, and that [we can offer our] children more in the way of a solid foundation, by anchoring their imagination in sacred stories and religious doctrines, than they are likely to be offered by those “Darwinian fairy tales’” as David Stove has called them, which have gained such currency in the wake of Dawkins and Hitchens.


In response to a child’s metaphysical curiosity grown-ups can say that everything has a scientific explanation. But they will know that this is a lie. The proposition that everything has a scientific explanation does not have a scientific explanation – it describes an amazing fact about our universe, a point where reasoning falls silent. There are many such points, as anyone who has children knows: why is there anything? Why should I be good? What existed before the Big Bang? What is consciousness? You can wrestle with these questions through philosophy, but science won’t answer them.


Children have an inkling of this. They also recognise that behind these questions lies a huge void – an emptiness which must be filled with love and reassurance, if their existence is not to seem like an accident. _Art_of_Certainty

Utopians try so hard to purge their children's minds of falsehood and "error", to create the perfect children of rational thought, capable of seeing through all the corrupt fables of the past. Except...children will be who they will be. You cannot make boys into girls or girls into boys without destroying who they are. And you cannot make humans into angels without ruining the essence of what they are. And still the utopians continue to try -- until they finally throw their hands up in complete exasperation at and condemnation of the utter evil of those who do not think along the same lines as themselves, the utopians.

The disgusted dismissal of homo rapiens and all his works that we find spelled out by John Gray in Straw Dogs is not a form of pessimism. It is an attempt to dismiss humanity entirely, as a kind of plague on the face of the earth. That kind of misanthropic nihilism is of no use to us. It removes the ground from all our values, and puts nothing in their place. _GloomMerchant

At that point, they often begin to plot and fantasize the great dieoff, to cleanse the otherwise pristine Earth of the incorrigible human demons who infest the lands and oceans. Fortunately, utopians are as incompetent in planning the great dieoff as they are in most other aspects of their lives.

The point is not to resist all change or improvement of humans. But any lasting change for the better is likely to happen from the bottom up, not from the top down.

Nothing illustrates the different approaches to a better world than the contrast between the French and American revolutions of the late 19th century.

The primary difference in causes that led to the American Revolution and the French Revolution was based in the world view of the innate goodness or innate evil of man. _Hyperhistory

Not all utopians believe in the innate goodness of men -- sometimes they only believe in the innate perfectibility of men. But utopias born of such ideas all come to a bitter end.

Every child has to learn to think for himself, from the beginning. But he must have a beginning from which to start.

The need for foundations is quite clearly an adaptation, and these foundations must provide the promise of protection and love, if they are to fit the new organism for its brief time in the world. If that is so, you are not going to eliminate the need for faith: the best you can do is to withhold all objects of faith, so that a child goes hungry into the life to which he or she is destined. More often than not, a humanist education will leave a child exposed to massive and mind-clogging superstitions of the Harry Potter and Star Wars kind. But these superstitions contain far less in the way of insight than is contained in the first chapter of Genesis.


Religious stories are also the result of natural selection – though selection at another level: they have come down to us because they have fulfilled a moral need. They have survived refutation because they contain, beneath their superficial falsehood, the moral truths that people need, when they must order their lives by good examples. _The Art of Certainty

This is true not only of religious stories, but of all the mythology and lasting moral fables from antiquity. Children must have some kind of foundation that transcends deductive logic, because that is how minds begin. Then, later, when they choose to either reshape or reaffirm their beliefs, they will have a sense of having decided for themselves, and feel stronger for it.

Yes, humans can make choices that make them better. Improved nutrition of mother and child can make humans stronger, smarter, taller, and sometimes capable of clearer thought. But a power structure that attempts to legislate morality, to engineer the moral and ideological purity of the human souls of its citizens -- that power structure is morally bankrupt, and deserves to die quickly. If it is allowed to continue, its leaders will eventually decide that the recalcitrant citizens do not deserve the benefit of the leaders' great wisdom. Then, beware.

This question has been acquiring an ever greater urgency over the past century -- even longer. It is now coming to a head in the demographic and economic crises of many of the world's most advanced nations. A culture that has rested on its own laurels, that has comforted itself with mental images of its own progressive improvement, is soon to be reawakened to a coarse and unruly history.

This article is re-published from an original Al Fin article first published 9 June 2010

A Brief Insight Into Human Nature from Minot, ND

Suffering and loss are widespread in the town of Minot, North Dakota, as flood waters continue to rise. How are the people of Minot dealing with this ongoing tragedy?

First of all, if you can’t tell from the pictures, this a tragedy of almost unthinkable proportions. The Souris River carves a winding path through an otherwise flat terrain. The river valley is relatively shallow, about 150′ lower than the prairie on either side, and maybe 2 to 3 miles wide. The river is also crooked, and makes a horseshoe shape. The town of Minot straddles the river, with roughly 1/4 of the town on the north hill, 1/4 of the town on the south hill, and 1/2 the town in some part of the valley.

...12,000 people have been displaced, and hundreds more are in a state of voluntary evacuation. Hundreds, if not thousands, of houses will be destroyed...People have made their best efforts to move their belongings and prized possessions to higher ground, but everyday seems to bring worse news. 3 days in a row the predicted crest level has been higher than the previous day. Friends that two days ago thought they were safe found out yesterday that they were not. By the time this thing is over, perhaps a third of the town’s homes and businesses will be destroyed, along with the vital infrastructure that links the north hill and south hill neighborhoods.

...I am not from this part of the country (I hail from the East Coast) and nowhere that I have lived has ever faced this kind of adversity. But I would be proud to call this town my home. I have not seen one person whine or complain. I have not heard one hopeless person ask when the government or FEMA would rescue them. The town mobilized itself days ahead of the impending disaster and began planning for the worst; secondary levees and sandbag walls went up with breathtaking speed, and thousands of homes were evacuated without incident. Think of it as the anti-Katrina. Once the townspeople saw that their worst fears were about to be realized, and their homes and livelihoods destroyed, instead of giving up, they have only redoubled their efforts to save what can be saved. Their stoic determination in the face of absolute catastrophe amazes me. _Instapundit

"Stoic determination in the face of absolute catasrophe...." A society made up of competent individuals determined to work their way through to the other side of catastrophe largely on their own sweat, will, and competence -- that is a somewhat resilient society or community. It can make the hard decisions and sacrifices it needs to make in order to survive as a unit group.

Politicians and other public servants often call on citizens to display such fortitude and sacrifice -- at the same time as they, the politicians and bureaucrats, fly around the world playing golf, drinking cocktails with peers, attending fundraisers, twittering their photographs, and dispensing public resources to private supporters and hangers-on so as to maintain their hold on power. Societies which depend on politicians and public servants for their survival, will fall.

Inner grit -- the type of resilience and determination displayed by the people of Minot -- cannot be conjured out of thin air by some political messiah, wordsmith, or witch doctor. Such determined and competent perseverance combines both lifelong immersion in a certain mindset along with constant training and responsibility in mundane day to day needs of living. And although it is far from politically correct to say this, breeding also comes into play in human resiliency or the lack of it.

Floods and other natural disasters are inevitable, as is a growing societal dissonance due to debt and demographic decline. And yet most modern governments persist in forcing citizens to grow more dependent upon government, and less resilient or competent in meeting their own needs and exigencies.

The lesson, for those who want to see it through, is to build networks of competence in your neighborhood, community, and region. Instill competence and resilience in your children and yourselves. Problems and catastrophes are inevitable. They do not have to turn into large scale doom unless you allow it.

Young Russians Fleeing a Sinking Ship

Scared, fed up and feeling disenfranchised, many successful Russians are investing in citizenship in Western countries, according to consultants who have made a business of facilitating such emigration.

"It seems that the whole generation of 25- to 45-year-old Russians is actively thinking about running away, especially considering the prospect of seeing the same people in power for another 12 years, starting 2012. All dinner conversations tend to finish with this subject," said the general director of a multibillion-dollar multinational company in Russia, who asked not to be identified because of the blunt nature of his comments. _MoscowTimes

In our People Risk study, we found that Russia currently has the highest brain drain risk compared to the other three countries (see Figure 2). The issue of an ageing population is also an important factor for companies to consider as it can, and will, impact the company's workforce planning and costs in the future. Russia poses the highest risk of an ageing population, with close to 18% of its population above the age of 60, as compared to Brazil (9.9%), India (7.4%) and China (11.9%). _aon.com

Al Fin has been told by several readers that he is too hard on Russia. But compared to many young modern Russians, Al Fin's criticisms are quite mild.

In recent times, the posting of one blogger, who has left Russia, is popular in the Russian segment of the internet.

He, in particular, writes: «Russia is an evil, moreover – of a worldwide scale. Evil must be annihilated. Consequently, everything that is directed against Russia is a good.

…In general, to emigrate is much easier than this seems from Russia. To get a tourist visa now is not a problem, a residence permit – of course, is more complex, but here too there are different paths. As an example, if there are no provable grounds to ask for the status of a refugee – one can get a work visa to Australia or Canada; there, unlike in the USA, they give it automatically, if you gather the necessary quantity of points, given by profession (from a rather large list), education, knowledge of the language, age (the younger, the better), etc. Of course, nobody’s waiting for us anywhere with open arms, certain difficulties, especially at the start, will have to be overcome everywhere. But what is being spoken of is not getting into paradise. What is being spoken of is breaking out of hell. From a hell that in the foreseeable prospect is going to be getting ever worse and worse. By the way, a country and a people consistently standing up on the side of evil don’t deserve anything else.

I still don’t know how my own personal destiny will turn out, will they give me asylum in the USA or will I have to look for another country for myself. I know one thing – I will not return to Russia in any event…» _EurasiaReview

The situation inside Russia can be very bleak for the young, bright, and ambitious.

As chief of the migration laboratory at the Russian Academy of Sciences, Zhanna A. Zayonchkovskaya has studied previous waves of emigration, including in the 1990s, when as many as 6 million people left. But her desire to research this one puts her up against the wall others are confronting.

“Brain drain is a very urgent topic now,” she said. “We would like to study it, but we cannot get the money to do it.”

President Dmitry Medvedev drew attention to the brain drain in October, when two emigre scientists born and educated in Russia won the Nobel physics prize. They work in Britain, where they have attracted a number of other Russian-born scientists.

“We need to make an effort so that our talented people do not go abroad,” Medvedev said, adding that the government had failed to invest sufficiently in research. He has been trying to recruit foreigners to make Russia more competitive. _WaPo

Russia's human infrastructure is crumbling along with its physical and technological infrastructures. Vodka makes Russians feel warm at night, but it is a false warmth with no future.

For many educated young Russians, Western countries seem to have an intractable allure, whether there are more work opportunities, a better educational system, or simply nicer weather. While this last reason may seem trivial, many students are beginning to wonder if the grass is literally greener on the other side.

“Each year, I ask my master’s students where they see themselves three or four years from now,” Moscow State University economics professor Alexander Auzan said at a conference in the Polytechnic Museum this year. “In September 2010 roughly half said they envisaged themselves working abroad: not just anywhere but quite specifically in Germany, Britain, Ireland, or Argentina.” _Indrus.in

Young Russian women may find more paths open to them for emigration, not all of them with happy endings. But for the young who are bright, well trained, and ambitious, the rest of the world holds many possibilities.
For most of the men who stay in Russia, the picture is not very pretty.

RUSSIA is suffering from a serious shortage of men, with a high male mortality rate fuelled by heart disease and alcoholism, The Moscow Times reported today.

Preliminary census results showed that Russia's population dropped by 2.2 million since 2002 to just under 143 million, suggesting the government's efforts to boost the population were not working.

Just 46.3 percent of Russia's population was made up of men, down from 46.6 percent in 2002, the report said.

"Women here live longer," the newspaper quoted demographics researcher Boris Denisov as saying.

Men "do not want to live" in Russia, he added.

Russia has experienced a dramatic drop in population since the fall of the Soviet Union, fueled by alcoholism and unhealthy lifestyles as well as emigration. _HeraldSun.au

Interestingly, Russian women live about ten years longer than Russian men, but retire 5 years earlier at 55. Sadly, most Russian men never live to 60 to enjoy retirement, while retired Russian women have only the vodka to keep them company those long cold winter nights.

No wonder so many young Russians want to leave, to avoid such fates.

Clear Genetic Links to Poor Impulse Control, Drug Dependency

University of Michigan medical researchers have identified genetic links to aberrant brain function leading to alcohol and drug dependencies.

The results, published online April 12 in Molecular Psychiatry, suggest that variations in the GABRA2 gene contribute to the risk of alcoholism by influencing impulsive behaviors, at least in part through a portion of the cerebral cortex known as the insula, says study senior author Margit Burmeister, Ph.D., research professor at U-M's Molecular and Behavioral Neuroscience Institute.

...Individuals under distress who also have the risky genetic variant tend to act impulsively, a behavior that may lead to the development of alcohol problems, says lead author Sandra Villafuerte, Ph.D., a research investigator at U-M's Molecular and Behavioral Neuroscience Institute and Department of Psychiatry.

"Developing deeper understandings of the various genetic and environmental factors involved in risky behaviors may guide prevention and treatment efforts in the future," Villafuerte says.

The study included 449 people, who came from 173 families – 129 of whom had at least one member diagnosed with alcohol dependence or abuse. Those with certain variations in the GABRA2 gene were more likely to have alcohol dependence symptoms and higher measures of impulsiveness in response to distress, the study found. Stronger associations were found in women than in men.

...Researchers also used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to observe changes of blood flow in the brains of 44 young adults from these families as they performed a task in which they anticipated winning or losing money.

"The neuroimaging allowed us to see for the first time how these genetic variants create differences in how the brain responds in certain situations," says Mary M. Heitzeg, Ph.D., a research assistant professor in U-M's Department of Psychiatry and U-M's Addiction Research Center.

They found that individuals with one form of the GABRA2 gene associated with alcoholism showed significantly higher activation in the insula when anticipating rewards and losses than those with other combinations. This higher activation was also related to a greater level of impulsiveness in response to distress.

..."We believe these results suggest GABRA2 exerts an influence on an underlying neural system that impacts early risk factors and, later, alcohol dependency," says Burmeister, also a professor of psychiatry and human genetics at the U-M Medical School. "In the future, we hope to further examine the effects of family environment and other behavioral and environmental factors." _PO

Genetic influences on behaviours are too numerous to count, yet are extremely difficult to pin down with specificity. That is because multiple causes at several different levels are influencing the events which we observe. It will take many years to sort the many levels of causation -- many of them circular (incorporating feedbacks) in nature.

Persons who are indoctrinated into the religion of political correctness tend to eschew all discussion of genetic influences on behaviour. Funding for research can be difficult to obtain if highly indoctrinated "ethicists" feel that the valid findings of the research may be misconstrued in a way as to contradict politically correct dogma.

But such a PC approach only dooms persons who suffer from genetic disadvantages of behaviour to lifetimes of suffering. Much better to learn everything we can about these phenomena, so as to be able to compensate for these genetically based behavioural and cognitive disadvantages on as many levels as possible.

One approach to compensating for genetic defects in brain functioning is to run a low level dc current through the skull into the brain.

Better Genes, Better Brains

Better brains tend to run in families. The crucial brain determinants of life success -- IQ and Executive funtion -- are between 60% and 80% heritable. Exciting new tools for studying the genomics of the brain, such as the Allen Human Brain Map (read more here), are being used in conjunction with imaging tools such as diffusion tensor imaging, to study the individual nature of how human brains manifest underlying genomes.

A recent study from Australia looks at how genetics influences the efficiency of how human brains are wired -- and how well they work.

“Some brains are wired better than others, and 60% of the differences can be explained by genetic factors,” said lead author Alex Fornito from the Melbourne Neuropsychiatry Centre at the University of Melbourne. “The novelty is that we now have new methods to identify different aspects of brain network organisation. Previously it was very difficult to try and map these connections.”

...“We found some of the strongest effects in the prefrontal cortex, where up to 80% of the differences between people were attributable to genes. The prefrontal cortex plays a vital role in planning, strategic thinking, decision-making and memory.”

Previous work has shown that people with more efficient brain connections score higher on tests of intelligence, and that brain network cost-efficiency is reduced in people with schizophrenia, particularly in the prefrontal cortex. _Cosmos

Finding the links between genes and intelligence, or between genes and impulse control, requires extensive research and great deal of time. At the US NIMH, the Functional Neurogenomics Program is dedicated to teasing out the numerous connections between the genome and all aspects of brain function. Likewise, in research centers around the world, scientists are hard at work discovering how differences in our genes create differences in our brains, which create differences in the worlds which each of us experiences.

This is not merely an academic problem. The endeavour holds keys to unlocking many of the most vexing problems of human societies worldwide.

Like Nothing Else We Know

The conventional view of neurons is that synaptic inputs are integrated on a timescale of milliseconds to seconds in the dendrites, with action potential initiation occurring in the axon initial segment. We found a much slower form of integration that leads to action potential initiation in the distal axon, well beyond the initial segment. In a subset of rodent hippocampal and neocortical interneurons, hundreds of spikes, evoked over minutes, resulted in persistent firing that lasted for a similar duration. Although axonal action potential firing was required to trigger persistent firing, somatic depolarization was not. In paired recordings, persistent firing was not restricted to the stimulated neuron; it could also be produced in the unstimulated cell. Thus, these interneurons can slowly integrate spiking, share the output across a coupled network of axons and respond with persistent firing even in the absence of input to the soma or dendrites.
_Abstract NatureNeuroSci

Cortical Network Image Source
Our brains contain about 100 billion neurons, with about 10 billion of those in the neocortex. There are perhaps 40 million neurons in the hippocampus, naturally decreasing with age. Each neuron in the brain is a computer in itself. Connected together in cortical columns and short, medium, and long-range networks, the collection of neurons in a human brain possesses complexity of behaviour beyond comprehension. Science is still learning new things about how neurons function individually and in small groups.

Spruston and his team stimulated a neuron for one to two minutes, providing a stimulus every 10 seconds. The neuron fired during this time but, when the stimulation was stopped, the neuron continued to fire for a minute.

"It's very unusual to think that a neuron could fire continually without stimuli," Spruston said. "This is something new -- that a neuron can integrate information over a long time period, longer than the typical operational speed of neurons, which is milliseconds to a second."

This unique neuronal function might be relevant to normal process, such as memory, but it also could be relevant to disease. The persistent firing of these inhibitory neurons might counteract hyperactive states in the brain, such as preventing the runaway excitation that happens during epileptic seizures.

Spruston credits the discovery of the persistent firing in normal individual neurons to the astute observation of Mark Sheffield, a graduate student in his lab. Sheffield is first author of the paper.

The researchers think that others have seen this persistent firing behavior in neurons but dismissed it as something wrong with the signal recording. When Sheffield saw the firing in the neurons he was studying, he waited until it stopped. Then he stimulated the neuron over a period of time, stopped the stimulation and then watched as the neuron fired later.

"This cellular memory is a novelty," Spruston said. "The neuron is responding to the history of what happened to it in the minute or so before."

Spruston and Sheffield found that the cellular memory is stored in the axon and the action potential is generated farther down the axon than they would have expected. Instead of being near the cell body it occurs toward the end of the axon. _PO

The real complexity does not even arise until you go up at least a couple of logical levels of brain function from the neuron. So if science is still learning basic facts about neuronal function, it is likely that there is quite a bit left to learn at multiple levels.

Mammalian brains -- particularly primate and cetacean brains -- are amazing universes where spontaneous order is created out of chaos. The most adventurous of these brains wants to not only understand itself and its world: it wants to know what else is out there.

How Do Your Sparks Spray? How Do Your Dominos Fall?

PO

A human brain works very much like a chain of small explosions -- tiny sprays of spark strung together in chains of rising and falling energy potentials. Like falling dominos, the chain reactions trace tracks that were pre-determined years ago by unique combinations of novel experience working within a novel genetic substrate.

...the "synfire chain" model, in which neurons fire in a chain reaction -- each one triggering the next in the sequence, like a cascade of falling dominos.

In a new study, which appears in the October 24 online issue of Nature, Fee and colleagues have now tested this idea using intracellular recordings, an approach that can record tiny voltage fluctuations in individual HVC neurons. In a technical tour-de-force, they developed a method in which these recordings could be made while the bird was freely moving around his cage and engage in natural behaviors such as singing.

Their results support the chain of dominoes model. When individual HVC neurons fire, they do so suddenly, as if hit by the preceding domino. There was no prior build-up of activity; instead, each neuron remained silent until its turn came to fire, at which point it showed a sudden burst of activity, presumably caused by excitatory input from the previous neuron in the chain. In further experiments, the authors showed that this burst of activity is triggered suddenly by an all-or-none influx of calcium through specialized membrane channels that open in response to this excitatory input. _SD (MIT study)

But those chains of dominos had to be set up "just so." How were these patterns of chain-reaction set up to begin with?

When rats and human beings create a new memory, they are effectively forming a representation, or “mapping” that location or moment and encoding it in their brains. Using advanced monitoring technologies, Markus has been able to actually “hear” place cells in a rat’s mind firing as the animal creates a memory and encodes its route through a maze. The burst of place cell activity the rat experiences when it searches for a food source is conveyed as a staccato series of “pops,” like tiny firecrackers, when picked up by the high-tech monitors in the lab. _PO (U. of Connecticut)

The intermediate details of cascading memory formation depend upon the particular type of memory that is being laid down -- sensorial, spatial, experiential, conceptual etc. -- but the underlying neuronal process is the same, and intriguingly complex.

A human's brain becomes very much like a dynamic sculpture over time, revealing intricate sprays of light and dark, as circumstances inevitably vary in its environment. Circumstances change, but they often vary in cycles. As the cycles of circumstance repeat, so do the dynamic chain reactions of spraying sparks and falling dominos. For example: How do we know what someone close to us is going to say before they say it? How do we often anticipate the exact words an author will use to describe a character or a scene?

We are attracted to other brains both for their ability to surprise us, and for their ability to create a comforting stability around us. In that sense we are really not that different from children.

The differences in our genes place each of us in a different starting point on the path to a well-sculpted brain. Our brain dominos will fall differently -- and will form different chains of falling -- depending upon how our genes (and epigenetics) are laid out in the beginning. Take one simple example: sleep.

Simple gene variations determine how well a person can function on limited sleep. This difference in function can easily determine the fate of an individual in a highly competitive society.

...The people with the DQB1*0602 gene variant were sleepier and more fatigued while both fully rested and sleep deprived. Their sleep was more fragmented. For example, those with the gene variant woke up on average almost four times during the fifth night of sleep deprivation, compared to those without the gene variant, who woke up on average twice. Those with the gene variant also had a lower sleep drive, or desire to sleep, during the fully rested nights....“This gene may be a biomarker for predicting how people will respond to sleep deprivation, which has significant health consequences and affects millions of people around the world. It may be particularly important to those who work on the night shift, travel frequently across multiple time zones, or just lose sleep due to their multiple work and family obligations. However, more research and replication of our findings are needed,” said lead study author Namni Goel, PhD, of the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine in Philadelphia. _AAN (U.Penn, NIH)

Sleep is a complex phenomenon which determines much of a person's trajectory through life. There are certain moments in time where an alert mind makes the difference between life and death, success and failure. One tick of the clock and that moment has passed. If sleep -- and the ability to function optimally on limited sleep -- is genetically determined, then how many other determinants of a person's quality and quantity of life are hidden in the molecules?
We are learning more about how the human brain is re-charged and re-built during sleep. A person's memories -- the "lay of the land" in a person's brain -- is re-built and re-furbished on a regular basis, with slight modifications over time. Sleep is a critical part of that ongoing program of maintenance.

And so we humans, we slightly advanced apes, blunder into the future riding a cresting trajectory of saccadic memories. It is a bit like riding a surfboard, except that we are the surf, the board, and the rider. The environment is the storm hundreds of miles offshore, and our genes are the shallowing seabottom and the reefs and kelp. Always a balancing act, never exactly the same wave twice. Learning to let go is the hardest part.

The Brain: Wired and Introspective

ImageSource

The brain contains tens of billions of neurons, and trillions of synaptic connections (plus unknown numbers of other types of connections). Scientists from several universities are collaborating in an attempt to improve our understanding of the brain's "wiring diagram." At its best, it will still be crude compared to the real thing, but it's a start.

Working with $30 million and just half a decade, the Human Connectome Project aims to create a first-of-its-kind map of the brain’s complex circuitry, detailing every connection linking thousands of different regions of the brain.

The team consists of 33 researchers at nine different institutions, including Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and the University of Minnesota, the lead universities in the effort and the sites where much of the brain-scanning will take place. Their success will depend in part on another HCP grant to another research consortium headed up by Massachusetts General Hospital and UCLA that will develop advanced, custom brain scanners with higher spatial resolution and increased sensitivity. The funds themselves come from various bodies within the National Institutes of Health.

How big is the project? It’s at least 90 billion neurons big, but that doesn’t even convey the enormity and complexity of the human brain. There are something like 150 trillion synapses – the connections between neurons across which signals pass – that electrical signals must negotiate. These neurons and the connections between them make up the circuitry of the brain, and the HCP aims to create a better picture of that circuitry than we’ve ever had before. _PS

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But brain researchers cannot sit around on their hands until others provide them with a more detailed map of the brain. They must continue to muddle through with what they've got, in trying to understand how the brain creates the world. One interesting aspect of brain function is the variation in accuracy between different persons' judgement of the accuracy of their own educated guesses. Scientists at University College London looked at this question of introspective accuracy recently.

A specific region of the brain appears to be larger in individuals who are good at turning their thoughts inward and reflecting upon their decisions, according to new research published in the journal Science. This act of introspection -- or "thinking about your thinking" -- is a key aspect of human consciousness, though scientists have noted plenty of variation in peoples' abilities to introspect...

...To begin, Fleming and Weil recruited 32 healthy human participants and showed them two screens, each containing six patterned patches. One of the screens, however, contained a single patch that was brighter than all the rest. The researchers asked the participants to identify which screen contained the brighter patch, and then to rate how confident they felt about their final answer. After the experiment, participants' brains were scanned using magnetic resonance imaging, or MRI.

Fleming and the researchers designed the task to be difficult, so that participants were never completely sure if their answer was correct. They reasoned that participants who are good at introspection would be confident after making correct decisions about the patch, and less confident when they were incorrect about the patch. By adjusting the task, the researchers ensured all of the participants' decision-making abilities were on par with each others'—only the participants' knowledge of their own decision-making abilities differed.

"It's like that show, 'Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?'" said Weil. "An introspective contestant will go with his or her final answer when they are quite sure of it, and perhaps phone a friend when they are unsure. But, a contestant who is less introspective would not be as effective at judging how likely their answer is to be correct."

So, although each participant performed equally well at the task, their introspective abilities did vary considerably, the researchers confirmed. By comparing the MRI scans of each participant's brain, they could then identify a correlation between introspective ability and the structure of a small area of the prefrontal cortex. An individual's meta-cognitive, or "higher-thinking," abilities were significantly correlated with the amount of gray matter in the right anterior prefrontal cortex and the structure of neighboring white matter, Rees and his team found.

...The new study will be published in the 17 September issue of the journal Science. Science is published by AAAS, the nonprofit science society. _PO

This variation of introspective accuracy and depth is likely to play a crucial role in the development of cultures and civilisations. There should be little question that both environment and genetics play a role in the ultimate complexity of the pre-frontal cortex and other cortical and sub-cortical centers which are involved. Testing the participants additionally for both IQ and executive functions (EF) would almost certainly reveal strong correlations between the three concepts.

Thinkers who develop complex cognitive structures must be able to "hold" multiple thoughts in their heads simultaneously, while weighing the "fitness" of slight variations in the cognitive models. These models must often be of a dynamic nature -- particularly for engineers and scientists of several types.

Popular culture tends to downplay the importance of the mental skills of top-level theorists and explorers of knowledge fields, but these are the people who determine the ongoing prosperity and security of a civilisation over time.

Western civilisation is going through a period of time when generations worth of capital is being skimmed and scavenged by a de facto ruling class, which values political correctness over real world validity -- as a matter of ruling class survival. That is too, too bad for the rest of us, who very much need for our institutions to be under the discipline of real world checks and balances....


Given how badly the ruling class is fucking up, I am mulling over a series of posts on the topic of "peaceful insurrection." You may want to consider what that term might mean. Hint: I am referring to something a bit more determined and forceful than the "Tea Party" type of anti-big-government political movement. Yet still peaceful. How can that be? More later.