#43. Sunshine in Covey's Gap [evolutionary psychology, neuroscience]

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Red, theory; black, fact

It is difficult to make a disagreeable emotion go away before one weakens and act it out, to their detriment. Techniques of true emotional control, i.e., making the bad feelings disappear rather than white-knuckle, open-ended resistance to acting them out, are not impossible, just non obvious. You just have to persuade yourself that this bad is good and believe it.

For the modern person, that second part, the believing, is difficult to achieve robustly if one is using religious solutions to the problem, the domain of soteriology (being "saved"), easier with psychoanalytical solutions, and easiest of all with scientific solutions. "Believing," here means being prepared to bet your life on the truth of a proposition.

Steven Covey writes in "The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People" that between stimulus and [emotional] response, humans have a gap in the causal chain and animals do not. In the gap are  imagination, self-awareness, conscience, and self will. George Santayana seems to have grasped this truth when he wrote: "Our dignity is not in what we do but in what we understand. The whole world is doing things." [source, Wiki quotes, accessed 11-06-2018]

Neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux has elucidated what could be the neural pathways that make Covey's gap possible. A direct pathway from the thalamus to the amygdala mediates the basic fear response, but an indirect pathway that leads from the thalamus up to the cerebral cortex and then down to the amygdala provides a more nuanced, intelligent amendment to the first response. Full cancellation of the direct pathway by the indirect would account for Covey's gap, and this could be done by a cortical relay through the inhibitory interstitial neurons of the amygdala that terminate on the amygdalar projection cells.

The doctrines of classical religion probably lead to such cancellation of emotions such as hate and fear by activating the same circuits that are used by a parent to reassure a needlessly fearful infant.

Apparently, classical religion is about getting people to do the right things for the wrong reasons. When the discipline of evolutionary psychology is sufficiently developed, we can look forward to the age when people do the right things for the right reasons.

#40. The Sadness Cycle [evolutionary psychology, neuroscience]

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Red, theory; black, fact

Niccolo Machiavelli by Tito

The anger cycle and the sadness cycle may reach their full flower in wars of dispersal and wars of depopulation, respectively. 

The Function of the Sadness Cycle 

Wars of depopulation would serve to prevent Malthusian disasters such as general famine. The sadness cycle is a form of altruism that facilitates this depopulation by making a portion of the population sad and suicidal and the remainder contemptuous and entitled. The contemptuous ones take everything the sad ones have, ultimately their lives, and the sad ones let them.

If the sadness signalers were fighting tooth and nail, the transfer of property would leave the contempt signalers with many injuries, which would defeat the purpose of the whole process, which is to leave the residual population stronger and healthier than before under conditions of restricted food supply. Moreover, the sad ones and the contemptuous ones are playing two roles within the same adaptation, and if you can play one role, you can play the other. 

The Sadness Cycle in Evolution 

Since no altruism can evolve in the presence of selfishness unless the altruists are only altruistic to each other, a signaling cycle is required to lock the altruists together to the exclusion of non-altruists. Thus, sadness induces contempt and contempt induces sadness, and so on in a vicious cycle leading to the complete destruction of the sad ones and the transfer of all their property specifically to the contemptuous ones. This dynamic could be the origin of elder abuse and clinical depression.

History Repeats 

Machiavelli wrote, "He is made contemptible who is held to be changeable, light, effeminate, pusillanimous, irresolute, and from these the Prince must guard himself as from a reef." The traits listed appear to be the symptoms of unacknowledged sadness, and were no doubt quite lethal in Macchiavelli's time. Due to the present skyrocketing of the world population with the concomitant "Calhoun effect" from crowding stress, we are no doubt due for a remachiavellianization of daily life. 

The Anger Cycle 

Much of human unhappiness comes from destructive, escalating signaling cycles, usually between two persons. Examples are arguments, feuds, schools of thought, gang wars, and revolutions. The signals exchanged are initially personal expressions of anger. Importantly, these expressions are multi modal, and therefore highly redundant. (e.g., threatening utterances, tones of voice, facial expressions, gait, crashing and banging things, spying, following, etc.) Your anger comes out of you "through every pore."

The Function of the Anger Cycle

These signals are too many and varied for conscious control, which is why most people remain enslaved by their signals and cycles. The anger cycle may be selected so as to escalate until one of the parties must leave the country. When people are threatened, they seek allies, so all of society eventually gets drawn in and polarized as the escalation proceeds apace, like a black hole. Therefore, it is a group that must eventually leave, not a single individual, which is the basis of the refugee phenomenon. 

Evolution of the Anger Cycle 

In ecological terms, the refugee phenomenon is clearly sub-serving dispersal. However, dispersal-producing behavior is fundamentally altruistic in a backhanded way. The benefit to the supposed loser, the group that eventually gets driven out, is that occasionally they find a newly-emptied vacant habitat in which to settle and therefore can reproduce without competition. This is a tremendous benefit in evolutionary terms and may once have been great enough to redeem all the waste and suffering of human-style dispersal. 

However, altruistic behavior cannot evolve in the presence of non-altruists unless a signaling system is established to ensure that altruists are only altruistic to each other. That is why signaling is emphasized here. The reason why the signals are multimodal is that the altruism program probably breaks down occasionally because of the short-term advantages of being a non-altruist. This has probably happened many times in the past and the broken algorithm was repaired each time by natural selection with the addition of yet another signal component. 

The Bigger Picture 

The various signal cycles may reinforce each other. The four signal cycles that seem to form the framework of human life seem to have such an interdependence. These are: mother-child bonding, which could potentiate man-woman bonding, which could potentiate the anger cycle (via jealousy), which could potentiate the sadness cycle.

 

Picture credit: Wiki Commons

#39. The 1950 Ramp [population, evolutionary psychology, engineering, neuroscience]

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Red, theory; black, fact

A schematic of a simple rate-of-increase controller mechanism

Historical 

Since about 1950, the world population has been increasing along a remarkably steady ramp function with no slackening in the rate of increase yet apparent, although one cycle of oscillation in the slope occurred during the Sixties. Malthusian reasoning predicts an exponential increase, which this is not. Several lines of evidence point to the idea that humans have a subconscious population controller in their heads, and yet such a controller would have leveled out the increase by now. Until now, no theory has sufficed to explain the facts.

Human Population is Being Controlled for Endless Trouble

The natural population curve for humans in good times may be a saw-tooth waveform, with population ramps alternating with political convulsions that result in a large group being expelled permanently, resulting in the precipitous but limited drop in local population density that ends the saw-tooth cycle. This cycle accomplishes the ecological dispersal function. The population must ramp up for a time to sustainably create the numbers needed for the expulsions. The WHO population curve shows only a ramp because it is a worldwide figure and therefore population losses in expelling regions are balanced by population increases in welcoming regions. This also implies that human population has been increasing in a way unrestrained by food or resource availability or any other external constraint since 1950, to now.

Clearly, human population is being controlled; not to a constant absolute density, but to a constant rate of increase. Population density would go up along the much faster, steeper, and more disastrous exponential curve of Malthus if there were actually no controller.

Neuroscience Aspects

Researchers should look first for such a controller in the hypothalamus, already known to control other variables, such as temperature, by feedback principles.

"Nature does not reinvent the wheel" [quote from my old Professor], which I understand to mean that once a brain structure evolves to serve a particular computational function, it will be tapped for all future needs for such a calculation. This process may make it grow larger or develop sub-nuclei, but additional, independent nuclei for the same computation will never evolve.

Engineering Aspects 

The population controller may contain a conventional PID controller. To make it control rate of increase rather than absolute population density, you put a differentiator in the feedback pathway. If you are of the opinion that human population control is urgent, then you must knock out this differentiator and replace it with a simple feed-through connection. 

Back to Neuroscience 

Fortunately, one common way for evolution to implement differentiation in mammals is to begin with such a feed-through connection and supplement it with an inhibitory, slow, parallel feed-forward connection. If this is the case here, then you  inhibit the feed-forward pathway pharmacologically with sufficient specificity and the job is done. Subjectively, the effect of such a drug would be to take away people's ability to get used to higher population density in deciding how many children to have. An increased propensity to riot should not occur.

The political convulsions that produce dispersal would be triggered by the value on the integrator of the PID controller rising above a threshold. The amygdala of the brain may mediate this. Consistent with this, bilateral removal of the amygdala and hippocampus in monkeys is known to have a profound taming effect accompanied by hypersexuality, known as the Kluver-Bucy syndrome.

#12. The Neural Code, Part I: the Hippocampus [neuroscience, engineering]

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Red, theory; black, fact

Santiago Ramón y Cajal (1911) [1909] Histologie du Système nerveux de l'Homme et des Vertébrés, Paris: A. Maloine. The French copyright expired in 2004.

"Context information" is often invoked in neuroscience theory as an address for storing more specific data in memory, such as whatever climbing fibers carry into the cerebellar cortex (Marr theory), but what exactly is context, as a practical matter?

Requirements for a Learning Context Signal

First, it must change on a much longer timescale than whatever it addresses. Second, it must be accessible to a moving organism that follows habitual, repetitive pathways in patrolling its territory.

The Fourier Transform as Context Signal

Consideration of the mainstream theory that the hippocampus (see illustration) prepares a cognitive map of the organism's spatial environment suggests that context is a set of landmarks. It seems that a landmark will be any stimulus that appears repetitively. Since only rhythmically repeating functions have a classical discrete-frequency Fourier transform, the attempt to calculate such a transform could be considered a filter for extracting rhythmic signals from the sensory input. 

From Repeating to Rhythmic 

However, this is not enough for a landmark extractor because landmark signals are only repetitive, not rhythmic. Let us suppose, however, that variations in the intervals between arrivals at a given landmark are due entirely to programmed, adaptive variations in the overall tempo of the organism's behavior. A tempo increase will upscale all incoming frequencies by the same factor, and a tempo decrease will downscale them all by the same factor. Since these variations originate within the organism, the organism could send a "tempo efference copy" to the neuronal device that calculates the discrete Fourier transform, to slide the frequency axis left or right to compensate for tempo variations. 

Thus, the same landmark will always transform to the same set of activated spots in the frequency-amplitude-phase volume. 

A Possible Neuronal Mechanism

I conjecture that the hippocampus calculates a discrete-frequency Fourier transform of all incoming sensory data, with lowest frequency represented ventrally and highest dorsally, and a with a linear temporal spectrum represented between. 

Tempo Compensation 

The negative feedback device that compensates tempo variations would be the loop through medial septum. The septum is the central hub of the network in which the EEG theta rhythm can be detected. This rhythm may be a central clock of unvarying frequency that serves as a reference for measuring tempo variations, possibly by a beat-frequency principle. 

Fourier Transform by Re-entrant Calculation 

The hippocampus could calculate the Fourier transform by exploiting the mathematical fact that a sinusoidal function differentiated four times in succession gives exactly the starting function, if its amplitude and frequency are both numerically equal to one. This could be done by the five-synapse loop from dentate gyrus (DG) to hippocampal CA3 to hippocampal CA1 to subiculum (sub) to entorhinal cortex (EC), and back to dentate gyrus. The dentate gyrus looks anatomically unlike the others and may be the input site where amplitude standardization operations are performed, while the other four stages would be the actual differentiators. 

Differentiation would occur by the mechanism of a parallel shunt pathway through slowly-responding inhibitory interneurons, known to be present throughout the hippocampus.

The two long spatial dimensions of the hippocampus would represent frequency and amplitude by setting up gradients in the gain of the differentiators. A given spot in the hippocampal array would map the input function to itself only for one particular combination of frequency and amplitude. 

The self-mapping sets up a positive feedback around the loop that makes the spot stand out functionally. All the concurrently active spots would constitute the context. This context could in principle reach the entire cerebral cortex via the fimbria fornix, mammillary bodies, and tuberomamillary nucleus of the hypothalamus, the latter being histaminergic.

Learning and Novelty 

The cortex may contain a novelty-detection function, source of the well-documented mismatch negativity found in oddball evoked-potential experiments. A stimulus found to be novel would go into a short term memory store in cortex. If a crisis develops while it is there, it is changed into a flash memory and wired up to the amygdala, which mediates visceral fear responses. In this way, a conditioned fear stimulus could be created. If a reward registers while the stimulus is in short term memory, it could be converted to a conditioned appetitive stimulus by a similar mechanism.

It Gets Bigger

I conjecture that all a person's declarative and episodic memories together are nothing more nor less than the context data that were instrumental in conferring conditioned status on particular stimuli.

Context is Required for Novelty

To become such a memory, a stimulus must first be found to be novel, and this is much less likely in the absence of a context signal; to put it another way, it is the combination of the context signal and the sensory stimulus that is found to be novel. Absent the context, and almost no simple stimulus will be novel. This may be the reason why at least one hippocampus must be functioning if declarative or episodic memories are to be formed.