The Unified Theory of the Nervous System
and Behavior
Cognitive Philosophy /Brain Theory by Steven Michael Harris
There are many similarities in the way this woman thinks and the way that I think but with some particular differences. In any event I have some different ideas to explain much of the subject matter that she contemplates in her book, so the book serves as a useful catalyst for some writing.
Pages numbers refer to a 1996 Vintage Books paperback edition.
From Page 12 (Oliver Sacks Foreward):
"...she has pursued her odd, solitary, stubborn, dedicated life---defining her own place as a professor of animal behavior and designer of livestock equipment, struggling for the understanding and humane treatment of animals, struggling for a deeper understanding of autism..."
Autistics who have difficulty with human touch or eye contact might have different levels of comfort or discomfort with other living forms depending on the severity of the problem with autism, or the real problem of accumulated stress (accumulated sensitivity to inhibition) in a region of the brain.
As I wrote in earlier essays that stress accumulates in a cellular decision or cellular event and eventually a stressful communication in that cell will stop firing under the same influences. Such a cellular decision will be very close to the edge in happening or not happening with any change in the amount of excitation or inhibition that is added into the mix of inputs to that cell. Such a cellular decision is therefore more sensitive to any changes and is a big factor at the cellular level of what becomes sensitivity at the macro level of the entire organism. A large grouping of such sensitive cellular events occurring as part of the organism dealing with some type of subject matter could make the organism much more shy about the subject matter and/or much more excited by that subject matter as well as much more disturbed by that subject matter... more sensitive. But increased stress in sensitive sites at the cellular level leads to complete shutdown - a cell that was firing at a high frequency under the same influences will not fire at all when sensitivity to inhibition increases at all - the most sensitive subject matters or sensitive states of mind or sensitive regions of mental processing will shut down completely with added stress. It is for this reason that I write that the person in the coma is the most sensitive of all. It is for this reason that people with autism, who appear to be emotionally insensitive or emotionally dead, are really having a problem with being too sensitive and too emotional.
Remember that the unity of thought and function of the brain is just an illusion. Everything happening in the brain is broken into very small units with each unit having an equal part of the decision but with some cells taking on greater convergences of different types of information than others. All processing is a matter of pattern recognition with cells able to fire more often when other cells are firing in unison and all thinking is broken into parts. The places in the brain that collect (temporarily or permanently) stress the most will be those places that, at that time or at the same time, are hosting the greatest convergence of different information from different places in the brain... the switchboard (emotion).
Any organism will learn to recognize and be attracted to its own species due to pattern recognition occurring at the cellular level. That organism recognizes the patterns most similar to the patterns the make the self in more regions of the brain (because so many patterns occurring in the self will dominate due to necessary self-concern and because of greater similarities to mother and father too) so there will always be a greater amount of emotional response (greater number of memories relating to the different aspects of that subject matter) occurring in the observation of human activity. Eye contact increases the number of calculations occurring at that moment because we take in the person but also must calculate with great emotional interest what that person is looking at (the self) and the brain also then calculates at a different level more self-awareness knowing that the person making eye contact is seeing each movement, expression, etc. that the self is doing. The brain also calculates that more information (of greater emotional impact) comes from the center of the field of vision than from the periphery. This knowledge of the self is also knowledge of others emotional interest in the focus of vision. From any distance a person feels that they are being looked at if eye contact is made but the person looking someplace else might be looking past or looking at a part such as just an arm or a shirt. Eye contact gives the illusion of having someone look within the mind itself.
As I wrote earlier that, at the cellular level, too much pleasure becomes pain (too much excitation leads to inhibition) then it will be the pleasures (for a normal person) that will become the pains for the one with autism with too much stress in the nervous system. The subject matter that will cause the most pain will be that with the greatest convergence of smaller units of information to create the whole (the greatest amount of emotional import). Those with milder forms of autism might only be too sensitive to eye contact with those they care about the most: members of the opposite sex, relatives they care about but from whom they have not been conditioned to accept affection. At other greater intensities of autism the subject matter they can deal with will change (also a person will have different subject matter they can deal with depending on the personal levels of stress at a particular time). Some might not be able to make eye contact with or speak with adults but be unafraid of children (much of this difference because adults use much more social communication and are not as direct or honest as children which adds levels of complexity and stress into adult interractions). Some might not be able to socialize with humans but be able to show affection with and make eye contact with anthropomorphic animals such as chimps. At greater levels of stress even anthropomorphic animals (those with the most patterns similar to the self) will cause stress and therefore the autistic might only be able to show affection and connect with animals that have little personality (such as cows). At even greater levels of stress the one with autism might avoid all life forms and only want to pay attention to simple things (and perhaps only to enjoy repeating events such as wallpaper patterns or the repetition of spokes flashing by when turning a wheel on a toy car for reasons I mentioned in the previous essay). One reason autistic children seem to play with toys inappropriately or strangely is that they can reduce the amount of nervous system involvement (and therefore avoid pain) by reducing the things they deal with down to smaller parts. To only focus on a spinning tire of a car finds a simple field of vision with a repeating pattern but it also removes the meaning of the car as a whole (because thinking about a car means to also think about all of its parts whereas to think about a tire uses less brain) and also because it removes the anthropomorphic connections to the item which greatly increase the nervous system involvement (therefore they'd rather play with a car rather than a doll because the doll refers to more pattern recognitions of the self and loved ones or play with a part of a toy that was made to be animated in a way that avoids animated (self-referring) thought.
When Temple Grandin shows love and concern for cows but not for people, it does not mean that she does not have love and concern for people (no matter how little she thinks she feels such). Her nervous system is stressed so that she has too much intense feeling for certain subject matter (people) and when a subset of the nervous system is feeling too much it shuts down and goes into a coma in regards that subject matter as a whole. The switchboard that puts such subject matter together shuts off and therefore she is unable to put a whole feeling together about that subject matter and must only examine such issues in disjointed parts (without any convergence of the related parts).
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Many of the problems of medicine, biology, psychology and philosophy require an understanding of the basic mathematical principles behind how the nervous system does what it does to achieve function and experience, and that mathematics is not explained using narrowly-focused statistics. Understanding how this math works will be the tool for the discovery of many answers of great importance to humanity. The case for this concept and the offering of an explanation of this kind of math is made in the many essays of this website.
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This website and the podcasts of Everyone's Revolution explain how the brain creates the mind, but many side issues must be resolved in order to teach this material. Once you realize that the "hard problems" are really the first problems to be answered, you then have a tool for changing all of science and medicine by explaining a massive number of discoveries that will fall into line in order to unify the evidence. All of the evidence is good. The interpretations of the evidence are mistaken in many cases. For ten years now there have been new discoveries of evidence that all move in the direction of supporting this theory (or this school of many theories) and its predictions. Quite a few people have started to pay attention to this theory as well.
