GPS for the Brain Meia Chita-Tegmark Boston University Ph.D.

 candidate and Harvard Graduate School of Education alumna

Posted: 04/11/2014 9:44 am EDT Updated: 04/11/2014 10:59 am EDT

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/meia-chitategmark/gps-for-the-brain_b_5130257.html

I only met The Brain fairly late 

in my intellectual and self-discovery pursuits, 

but when I did, it completely changed 

the way I thought about the world and about myself. 

I call it "The Brain" because I feel 

that the boom in neuroscience research 

and the media attention it gets 

has transformed this organ 

into a cultural phenomenon, 

into a character that one meets frequently 

(Google returns 2,430,000,000 results 

when you search for the word brain), 

sometimes uncomfortably 

(not all of us are OK 

with being reduced to a blob of neurons), 

sometimes reassuringly 

(if scientists see it in the brain, 

it must be real! people often say), 

a character that haunts our collective imagination. 

The Brain is here to trick us in sketchy accounts 

about right hemisphere and left hemisphere people,

to genuinely disturb us in reports of new versions 

of Libet's experiments on free will, and to wow us 

in very science fiction sounding like mind-reading studies. 

The Brain has become a superstar, 

and as a true superstar it's here to rock 

our world, our imagination, our souls.

For all of us trying to better navigate 

the intricate paths of the soul, 

getting to meet and know The Brain 

can be a transformative journey in itself. 

It certainly was for me and I wonder 

if you too resonate with it. 

For a very long time I had an attitude 

of respectful indifference towards The Brain. 

I had a healthy fear of traumatic brain injuries 

and meningitis from my mom who is a doctor, 

but at the same time the idea 

that all the richness of experience, 

of learning, loving and being 

could be reduced to patterns of neural firing 

was more than unintuitive to me, 

it was downright appalling. 

It took many years until it dawned on me 

that the brain was central to the shaping 

of the landscapes of the mind, of the soul, 

of that intricate structure 

that I called my experience and my world-view.

I remember the moment very vividly. 

I was taking a neuropsychology class 

and we were discussing 

a case of Wernicke's aphasia, 

reading through a transcript 

of a conversation with a patient. 

What struck me was 

how undisturbed the patient seemed 

by her inability to understand 

what others were trying to communicate to her. 

I remember the professor commenting on this 

and saying that the patient does not understand 

that she does not understand. 

Her language was simply gone. 

A stroke, a tiny damage to this blob of neurons, 

and to her, language just stopped existing.

These days I get to spend a great amount of time

 thinking about The Brain in the context 

of my research on autism, but I also think 

about it when attempting to follow 

the imperative "know thyself". 

Here are a three of the many things 

I learned about myself from The Brain:

1. Happiness belongs to the brain as well.

I used to believe that meanings were purely in the mind, that they were the results of thought processes and that they followed the logic of a thought process, but then I learned about reward systems in the brain and how differently they create meaning. Back then I was in the bad habit of always making myself predict bad outcomes: being harshly criticized for an idea should I share it, being rejected should I approach someone etc. In my mind I was doing this in order to lower my expectations and be pleasantly surprised whenever something good happened. But that pleasant surprise never came, even when good things did happen, (which was actually most of the time). Why were the meanings of my experiences so negative all the time? Why didn't they follow the logic of my reasoning?

If one looks at the way reward systems work in the brain the picture becomes more clear. In the brain, dopamine gets released whenever a prediction is actually confirmed. That's how we learn to notice patterns in the world, that's how we learn to associate actions with their consequences. When a prediction turns out to be wrong, the brain responds with a drop in dopamine levels, which gives rise to a negative emotion. That's how we learn to reevaluate things. What I was doing to myself was simply cruel. Whenever something negative would happen that would confirm my prediction, my brain would reward that with dopamine. But that wasn't enough to make me feel happy, since something bad had just happened! Whenever something good happened, my brain would get a dopamine drop to teach me to reevaluate my predictions, which in turn did not allow me to stay happy and enjoy the positive nature of the outcome! So I had to learn to respect the mechanisms in my brain and work with them to make myself happy.

2. Experience should not be taken for granted.

Experience as well, became so much more complex and rich for me when I started thinking of it as the result of a brain process. Every time I climb a mountain now, I climb it in awe not just of the beautiful scenery but also of the amazing ability of my brain to calculate with such precision all the bumps in the trail and carry me to the top unharmed. But even more fundamental than the processes that allow me to navigate the world and enjoy the exhilarating experience of the mountain-top view I am in awe of the pure existence of this experience.

You've probably heard of people with hemineglect, who are simply not aware of half of their visual field. So when they draw a clock, for example, they only draw the left side of it. What keeps fascinating me about this condition, just like in the case of Wernicke's aphasia, is the fact that these people are undisturbed by their condition. It's not that they cannot see half of their world, but half of their world simply does not exist anymore. This has taught me that the fact that I have an experience, that the world gets manifested in my mind is something I should not take for granted. Pondering on how a world can emerge for each of us from the firing of neurons, how this world's features can be shaped by these firing patterns, attempting to understand consciousness as a state of the brain is to me the most exciting adventure we can embark on.

3. Neurons deserve respect.

But how can experience emerge from the brain, from a blob of flesh? As I already confessed, this idea seemed to me very dissatisfying, so what got me fired up about it? It was firing neurons! Or rather an enactment of firing neurons. Several times I played the role of a little firing neuron in a neural network game where people pretending to be neurons "fire" (wave their hands) according to some pre-established rules. After repeated trials one can get the group of people to blindly wave in ways that correspond to recognizing letters. It's a very intricate game and getting the network to recognize letters is a difficult process. However, one time, we managed to get our network to read a word -- "no". We didn't mean to, but the person who was supposed to select the letters to be recognized accidentally showed the group two pictures instead of one. We couldn't believe it! Our simulated neural network could read! The idea that something as intelligent as reading can arise from a process so simple as firing to basic rules taught me to be deeply respectful and mindful of the blob of neurons in my head, of the substrate of my mind and consciousness. This to me means things like eating right and sleeping right, taking care of these precious cells that allow me to read, to think, to love.

Learning how to think and love myself as a brain has been one of the most transformative and exciting experiences of my life. When I look back, I think of my initial indifference towards The Brain as lack of imagination. My husband, Max likes to put it this way: thinking of one's consciousness as firing patterns in a brain takes a leap of imagination analogous to the one it takes to realize that our cute bunny Peter is simply rearranged grass. But once that leap of imagination is taken, the repertoire of self-knowledge increases tenfold. People often say that we need others in order to get to know who we are. I needed to meet this colosal character, The Brain in order to discover and get to love the brain in me.