How the Brain Works (no more kid gloves!)

Proposal For A Structural and Electrical Conductance Map Of The Brain At The Neuron Scale

Randall Reetz 8/28/01

Goal: To produce (through direct measurement) a digital multidimensional data set (and simulation models) of the human brain capturing sufficient structure and behavioral information (dendrite scale) to accurately derive a robust specification of it's function.

Intro: For hundreds (perhaps thousands) of years, we have wondered what mechanisms drive thinking and the self. Certainly the most complex organ in our bodies, the brain is understandably the least understood organ as well. However, I contend that complexity is not the only hurdle standing between us an understanding of the brain's function and the mechanisms that precipitate function. I believe we have a species-wide (maybe even bio-wide) bias against knowing how knowing works. Is it possible that we are afraid to know what knowing actually is? It is way past time to gather our balls and pull back the terrible curtains hanging between us and this most forbidden Wizard of Oz. In computers we have a modeling medium robust enough to handle the complexity of n-dimentional causal networks. If we apply modern nano-scale scanning techniques to the measurement of the brain at resolutions sufficient to capture relevant structural data (maybe 1 50th the width of a dendrite) and simultaneously augment this 3D data with simultaneously acquired, spectral/chemical and electrical conductance data, then we can begin to build and refine empirically derived functional simulations. We will finely know how the brain works (or at the very least, how it doesn't work)! Time to take the kid-gloves off. Its time to stop talking and philosophizing in the dark. We have all of the tools, technologies, methods, and knowledges we need to illuminate this one great darkness in human knowledge. Its time to shut up and start measuring.


Method: Nano-scale cryo

A. Suspend head and neck (in natural attitude) in electrically neutral medium that will cure into semisolid.
B. Cryogenically freeze suspended head (block) at liquid Nitrogen temperatures.
C. In nano-scale steps... 1. Shave surface of block (in steps of 1/50th diameter of dendrite). 2. Scan surface revealed by each shaving (at resolution of 1/50th diameter of dendrite) with the following detectors... a. Optically at range from infrared through visible light and into the ultraviolet range. b. For Electrical Conductance by dragging a nano-scale probe along surface scanning both surface measurements of conductance with detection plate (covering entire surface of shave) and through magnetic inductance scan at depth. c. Spectral analysis of optical scans for elemental makeup.
D. Run raw scan data set through software filters designed to reduce it to functional and structural maps.
E. Run functional map data sets through software designed to reduce it to computational logic.
F. Run sensory data through computational logic maps to produce input/output sets.
G. Analyze input/output sets do derive description of brain function and methods.

Randall Reetz

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Lunch at an outdoor sopas joint on Santana Row in San Jose, CA. Who says silicon doesn't have a (fake) culture? Life ain't so bad.

Productivity at Base

I have an economic question or two. Why is monetary policy
positioned at the apex of control in our nation's economic
hierarchy? Why is the Fed Board Chairman the go-to lifeguard and man-
on-the-mountain-guru for our entire economy? Failing a lowering of
the prime lending rate or the fed rate, we don't seem to know how to
intervene or plan the economy such that moments of panic necessitate
these quick fixes (that only harm the economy in the long run). And
this makes me confused about everything I have learned and everything
that makes sense about economic theory. In academic circles, there
seems to be a general acceptance of what might be called the standard
model of economic science. From what I have read, serious scientists
of economies almost always agree that productivity alone sits at base
of all influencers at play in any economic system. Ultimately, this
means that other factors weigh in more on the side of effect and that
productivity is THE factor that more often than not is more causal
than any other factor effecting economies. Modelers of economic
systems, like modelers of global climate, implement countless
mathematic dynamics seeking mathematic descriptions that can robustly
mirror and follow the arch of actual economies under actual natural
pressures over time. In these models, the ones that can achieve some
success aping real economies at global scales... productivity rises
to the top of every influence hierarchy. So what is productivity?
How is it different from other metrics of economic influence like
spending, commodity, resource, stock, currency, and geopolitical
trade markets, saving rates, inflation, jobless rate, secondary
education rate, incarceration rate, capital investment rates, basic
research spending, infrastructure amortization, how indeed is it
different from large scale economic measures like GDP itself?

The concept backing the term productivity is a more complex than
other common economic measures. Like evolution it is obvious that it
is central to and at base of the inverted influence pyramid... but
like evolution, it seems also to be a moving target... like the
shadow of a person walking east in the evening, it is right there, it
has a finite length, yet one never catches or completely possesses
it. Wow that is a metaphor out of control. Actually, a moving
target is just what you would expect in a dynamic system that feeds
on it's tail, that is different tomorrow because of what happens
today. And, like evolution, productivity defines the propensity of
today's systems to maximize the effectiveness of tomorrow's systems.

The problem with Fed Rate finagling and other Monetary Policy
doodling is that, like lifeguards flinging life rings, is too public
and too immediate, too much of a band aid, too much after the fact,
and we soon forget that the very use of such stop-gap measures is
usually a good indication of deeper ills, ills that can not be truly
fixed with heroics (with all the screaming and running around, and
with all of the cowboy heroics and wasn't that close brow wiping and
back slapping afterwards, who is going to remember the importance of
swimming lessons and civic behavior, and safe pool design?). Here
come the bank chairman calling out for a quick fed fix (read subsidy,
read absolute disincentive to act responsibly or to care about the
health of the economy) and the here comes the Fed Chairman on his
white horse again to provide a temporary high level fix to what is by
definition always the result of deep low-level wows. And here we
are, the public, by practical necessity (our busy lives) ignorant of
the subtile complexities that make up the grand causal stack that is
the economy, anxiously anticipating a quick fix, so that we can go
back to our blissfully simple understanding of the economic world
around us.

I frequently use the term hierarchy of influence to remind myself and
others that every complex system is an assembly of parts arranged by
hard natural law into an influence tree where some parts have greater
influence on change than others do. On the bottom of this tree
influence tree are the things that cause other things, as you move up
the tree you find things that are more caused by or are the effect of
other more influential things below them. Cause and effect are very
very different. This is the important concept to get. Consider a
simple system, a steel bolt laying on a concrete floor with a magnate
laying on a bench a few feet away. The prime influencer in this
system is gravity. If you move that magnate closer to that bolt, the
influence hierarchy will at some point flip when the attractive force
from the magnate is stronger than the gravitational force between the
bolt and the earth. At all times one must remember, both forces are
at play, it is just their relative influence that changes. The
physical and behavioral state of all systems at any given moment are
simply the sum of all influences at play within them. And these
influences are not equal. If your goal was to move that bolt, it
would be ridiculous to spend much energy worrying about the
orientation of that magnate on the bench. Yes, spinning the magnate
does have some (miniscule) measurable effect on the system... on the
bolt, but there are other potential influencing factors that will
have far greater effect on the system (moving that magnate within a
few inches of the bolt for instance). Same goes for the economy of
course. If you were given the task of defining the indispensable
factors that would absolutely have to be present in a healthy,
growing, regionally and globally competitive economy, prime rates and
cash fluidity would probably not enter the picture until many more
profound factors were taken care of (resource availability, trained
and knowledgeable labor base, save and stable living conditions that
promote individual well being, transportation and communication
infrastructure, physical and virtual markets (where to buy and sell
things), ownership protection, ready availability of credit for
capital expenses, etc. It is when the existence, availability or
balance of these systems fail, that stop gap measures like currency
and lending rate control become necessary.

It's the Productivity Stupid

I am compelled to jump in with a post on "the economy". Financial
markets are crashing. Currency values are crashing. Credit markets
are crashing. Stock markets are crashing. Housing markets are
crashing. Commodity markets are soaring.

What did anyone expect?

Ask the average American what they think drives an economy and you
get answers like "consumer confidence", "healthy job market", "good
wages", "low prices", "low credit costs". The market savvy and
economic professionals might even talk to international indicators
like "trade surplus", "strong dollar", "ready capital", "strong
growth and low inflation", "reasoned and responsive monetary policy",
"well trained labor force".

I read the papers. I watch TV news. I poke around on the internet.
And never does anyone talk to issues that actually CAUSE economic
health.

Never a mention of PRODUCTIVITY. It is a simple concept.
Productivity is simply the total amount of value created, divided by
the number of people. It is the size of the pie, or more
specifically the average size of each individual's slice. What
matters, what seems to have been lost in our collective conversation
about the economy, is that productivity is not a measure of what gets
consumed, but what gets built and how efficiently it gets built.

There is nothing one can do on the consumer end of the economic
machine that will effect productivity. Consumption is a by-product
of productivity... an effect to productivity's cause. Same goes for
monitory policy. Same goes for markets like equity, stock and
commodity markets. Same goes for indicators like the consumer price
index, gross national product, the amount of currency in circulation,
inflation and growth rates, new housing starts, employment rates,
consumer debt, business debt, price to earnings, etc. These are all
more effect than cause. If you want to account for the parameters
that effect the relative strength of one economy vs. another or of
one economy as compared to that same economy at another time, you
have to look to the deepest factors that cause wealth in the first
place.

You have no doubt read that a modern post-industrial society employs
far fewer people in the production of food. In the United States for
instance, only 1.8 people per one hundred produce all of the food for
the other 98.2 percent. Compare this to per-capita food production
figures of other nations or our own nation just 100 years ago and you
get some notion of the power of productivity to indicate the strength
of an economy. Of course all factors that lead to higher
productivity are inextricably linked across an economy. One of the
reasons we need so few people in the fields is the fact that we can
efficiently manufacture large powered farming machinery, the reason
we can manufacture these tractors is our ability to extract raw
materials and smelt them into high quality metals, polymers, and
reactants. The reason we can refine and ship raw materials is that
we have developed a profound understanding of the properties and
behavior of natural elements and systems. The reason this knowledge
can be applied across our economy is because we have developed a vast
and more or less equal and effective education program. All of these
factors together give us the wealth and structure to build and
maintain a stable and consistent public infrastructure that
facilitates reliable transportation of goods, services and people,
clean water, power, refuse and sewer. And with the efficiencies that
result, we build towards other more intangible contributors to
productivity; policing and justice, civil and human rights,
recreation and travel, personal and intellectual expression,
democratic representation, national defense, welfare and protections
for the disadvantaged and unfortunate, etc.

If you can design an industrial process that allows you to build a
pound of steel with one half the labor or one half the coal, you have
doubled productivity. In due time, the value of your currency will
reflect this increase. This is what fuels productivity. If one of
your citizens discovers the true and measurable relationship between
electricity and magnetism, others will parlay this understanding into
profound and powerful new kinds of materials, material processing,
machinery, and computers that help still more people who will be able
to afford the luxury of time and stability that will allow them to
discover yet more about the causal relationships between matter, and
dynamics in nature which will yield yet more wealth as a byproduct of
PRODUCTIVITY.

When did we stop thinking about productivity? When did we start
believing that consumption could replace productivity? When did we
begin believing that we could forever rest on the productive results
of our parents and their parents? The nightly news is jammed to the
brim with stories about the fed chairman's latest action or inaction
in the adjustment of the federal lending rate, about the state of
equity markets, or the health of stock markets, or whether or not we
are going to the mall as often, but nobody talks about building
anything that builds other things that makes it more efficient to
build yet other things that matter. Production is assumed,
forgotten, ignored.

Of course you can't get productivity yields simply by building
things. What you build matters. What you build, what you choose to
build, and how you go about choosing what to build, is what really
matters. These decisions are driven at the most basic level by
knowledge and infrastructure, by the the ability of the member's of a
society to be able to build a better and better understanding of
nature, of the process that is change, to accurately project this
knowledge as predictor of the shape of the future that matters, that
will be more likely to happen. Then, the infrastructure of that
society must have what it takes to facilitate the development of that
knowledge into finished usable process or product.

At base and at issue here is the very real difference between a
superficial, top-down cosmetic approach to understanding or solving a
problem and a causal, bottom up, holistic or paradigmatic approach?
Do we seek a solution to our problems or means to ignore them?
Monetary policy is reactive, productivity building is proactive.
Markets are reactive, they exist only to the extent production has
already happened, research, invention, design, tooling,
manufacturing, providing services and products is proactive.

I am not fundamentally opposed to Fed Board adjustments, but I am
dismayed by the fact that we have no fed or cabinet level policy
organization or institution that seeks to understand and effect
productivity itself. Why do we rather make a science of reactive
adjustments, and consistently ignore awareness, concentration,
attention, design, and intent towards the base of any economy,
production?

I just finished reading a well written, and well intended article in
a major American news paper attempting to demystify the current
market crisis through a historical recounting of the inner workings
and machinations of the novel real estate-facing financial products;
loans and loan aggregation investment packages and the companies that
were formed to take them to the public and the stock markets of the
world. Wow. Well written. Well researched. Well paced. Truthful.
But none of it explains the real reasons behind the collapse of the
dollar. Even so, I understand why it is intoxicating or simple to
come to these conclusions. Its like a woman who says the family is
in financial ruin because her husband stopped going to work and
instead spent his time hanging out at the beach. Technically, it is
true that he made no money at the beach. But the base problem was
his absence from work, where, had he showed up, he would have
continued earning a wage. We would laugh pretty hard if the woman
attempted to remedy the situation with beach related solutions;
conservative sand policy, federal wave intervention, beach towel
restrictions, fiduciary sun screen programs). The author of the
article was dead right about one thing, our ignorance of the causes
of this crisis does indeed impact its likelihood, the effectiveness
of our intervention afterwards, and the frequency with which we will
likely find our selves dealing with such a crisis again.

It is exactly as though we have been living in a shopping mall. We
experience the world as though it is full of ready made products. We
see the economic cycle clipped to the scale of retail consumption.
Why should we not develop an ignorance of the base of an economy,
production? The last president who attempted any kind of
sophistication in understanding and directing economic policy was
Clinton. Even so, his choice for economic advisor (Robert Reich) was
a labor wonk. I am a big liberal and my liberalism is informed by
the kind of fairness and equality principles of the civil rights
movement and rooted in the labor movement of the 20's, 30's and
40's. But labor is only a adjunct to productivity. Necessary, but
more ingredient than product.

And then there is the issue of human nature. We concentrate on and
are attracted to results. It is way more fun to take a trip to the
bank or the mall than to the strip mine or the factory. Way more
engaging or naturally attractive to check and manipulate earnings
statements than it is to invent a new process or material that might
someday lead to other products and materials. Way more fun and
immediately appealing to purchase and use an iPhone than to try to
understand, measure, and predict the parameters that truly effect the
evolution of global economies.

Robert Reich's blog: http://robertreich.blogspot.com/

Getting Practical

So why does any of this, any of any knowledge, matter? Why pay
attention to the structure of reality, to rules of arrangement, to
domain independent meta-pattern and meta-process, to universal
grammars, to stacked grammatical hierarchies, to causal ontologies
and influence cones, to complexity metrics?

Greater knowledge of the dynamics of the system you are a member of
yields efficiencies in processing and access of resources. That is
the game. That is evolution. That, like it or not is the game you
were built to play. And, in this game, the board, the players, and
the rules are evolving as well. There is no standing still. You
play or you get played. You eat or you get eaten.

In this game called evolution, there is profound advantage to being
at the apex of control, the apex of complexity. Know more and you
will exploit more completely and cleanly and your exploits will shape
the future of exploitation, of evolution itself.

We have a tendency to think nature and the cosmos as static. We
romanticize concepts like natural cycles and balance. These are side
effects of our short perspectives, our limited vistas in time and
distance. Our daily experience is restricted to a few tens of miles
and a memory that breaks down at the scale of a year or two. As a
result we think we see yearly weather repeat itself, we think we see
landscapes and vistas as fixed and unchanging. Once the airport
construction is complete, we are at odds to remember what was there
before. We read and try to absorb concepts of much larger cycles,
warm and wet to cold and dry epochs that stretch out over the scope
of tens of thousands of years. Continents that split and drift the
circumference of the globe to smash into each other at the speed our
fingernails grow (a meter a century!). We are experientially retarded
to the very idea of events that are a hundred thousand or a million
times our own life span.

Yet the patterns that matter, that connect our little lives to the
history and breadth of the universe and to the equally distant, but
miniature world of the particles we are made of... these patterns
must be divined and abstracted and forced into simplified and cleaned
up forms acceptable to our very scale-challenged little brains.

We have a tendency to look to the past as a slightly more primitive
form of the present. How many of us can truly grasp the 4.5 billion
years our little Earth has been in existence? Imagine for instance
that our moon was closer when it first formed and even 1.5 billion
years into our planet's history, daily tides were 1000 feet tall.
Oh, and by the way, our moon came at a heavy cost. Just 35 million
years after the earth had reached something like its current modern
size, it smashed into another planet almost as large. The resulting
reverberation of melted rock in space left much material orbiting as
mini moons that slowly smashed into each other to form a single
mass. Remember here that the earth is not now and certainly wasn't
then a solid chunk of rock. The hard cool stuff we experience on the
surface of our world is ridiculously thin, comprising just .7% of its
mass. Animals, the multi-celled kinds of life we think of when we
think of life, you know, with heads and limbs of some sort, came into
existence just three quarters of a billion years ago. Plants first
came out of the water 450 million years ago. That means that for
more than eight ninths of the earths history, there were no plants of
any kind anywhere except in the oceans. Flowering plants didn't
appear until just 130 million hears ago... just one three hundred
fiftieth the age of Earth! The first primitive primates didn't show
up until about 60 million years ago, the great apes appeared just 15
million years ago. Modern humans have existed less than 250 thousand
years. Written language less than 5 thousand years ago.

Then there is the considerably larger scale of the evolution of the
Universe itself, which did its own thing for about 9 billion years
before bothering to build the Earth. Our galaxy is a collection of
second generation stars and stars don't exactly have short lives.
First generation stars were made of the only elements left over from
the big bang, the simplest ones; mostly hydrogen, helium, and
lithium. Anything you could build a rocky planet from simply didn't
exit. The stuff of stuff, rocks, water, air; none of these things
could exist at all until the nuclear fusion caldron that is an
imploding first generation star.

Only the debris (as atomic dust) from the stupendous death of a first
generation star can create the kind of hard stuff (the heavy matter
populating the periodic chart) that will swirl around its own
distributed gravity well and end up accumulating into a new sun and
its attendant planets, rings, dust clouds, astroid belts,
planetesimals, etc.

Nothing stands still. Nothing is truly cyclical. Even the wildly
energetic forces that hold electrons in orbit clouds around an atom's
nucleus loose a little push with each moment that passes. Every
action has its cost. Every action irreversibly changes the
parameters of the game. An orbit is in reality a spiral. A sun is
burning itself out. A fox today is different from what at fox was 30
generations ago. An astroid is a chunk set free from the collision
of two planets large enough to melt heavy elements in a chemical
furness fired by the friction and pressure of its own collective
gravity. A storm this year is in fact different (if only slightly)
from a storm any previous year. Even the word "evolution" means
something different today then it did just months before. Returning
to any previous state is an illusion. Time and its attendant
dynamics force irreversibility on all systems.

If we are to know process, if we are to understand the most basic
parameters of the universe we live in, were produced by, and now play
an active and collective roll as creator, then we must switch our
impetus of understanding from things, places, and events to process,
change, and evolution.

The stuff, the current incarnation of process, is ethereal. Only the
process of change, and the rules of change, remain eternal and
unchanging. But don't choose to be attracted to change because it is
somehow qualitatively more interesting than stasis... it isn't.
Interest your self in change only because reality is set up in such a
way as to make it causally superior to a lack of change. The rules
of change create the the stuff and the dynamics of stuff and any
current state, never the other way around. The laws of change are
more causal than the dynamics of stuff and of domains of stuff. The
laws and parameters that govern change give rise to the subservient
laws that describe stuff and the dynamics of stuff. Not the other
way around.

As culture (the collective collection of what we know and how to
apply it) becomes a more and more accurate and complete abstraction
to process, humans exert greater and greater control over their
environment. Much of this exploitive power was achieved before we
had any conception of the laws of change.

-- more to come --