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.
Also from Page 12 (Oliver Sacks Foreward):
"Here we can see, and relive, what it was like for Temple as a child---the overwhelming sensations of smell and sound and touch she could not blot out: how she would scream, or rock, endlessly, disconnected from others; or, in a sudden tantrum, fling feces around; or (with uncanny concentration, and a complete shutting out of the world) fix her attention for hours on a few sand grains, or the whorls of her fingers."
I'll skip for a moment intensity of sensations, and I already wrote about the reason for rocking and for disconnecting from others.
The flinging of feces probably occurs for a few reasons. First, it is probably true that feces were not the only things being thrown around. When the switchboards (convergences of different parts of thinking) are shutting off, then all manner of different behaviors will occur. The thinking that it is socially incorrect and hygienically incorrect to touch or throw feces is disconnected from the observation of the feces. Actually the desire to touch the feces might be greater than for other objects because greater emphasis might have been placed on feces during past experiences with that subject matter ("That is disgusting!" "Don't touch that!") and a thought that it is important "not to touch the feces" becomes an emphasized thought about touching the feces when the brain is unable to unify the parts of a thought so that the "don't" is separated from the "touch that."
The brain that is not assembling the converging parts of a subject matter might enjoy the texture of the feces (when that experience is not assembled with awareness of what is being touched or assembled with the smell... it is common for those with autism to focus on one sense at a time).
Intense subject matter that inspires emotional reaction in normal individuals also inspires emotional reaction in the autistic, but too much emotion so that it shuts down. Therefore in the same way that the person with autism shuts off from loving expressions from a loved one, he/she shuts off the emotional reaction to feces and then the reaction to that item is reversed as well.
I already explained why she would spend time attending to grains of sand or the whorls of her fingers (reducing the subject matter down to parts and seeking repetitive patterns).
The overwhelming "sensations of smell and sound and touch" (and vision I will add) occur because increased stress leads to increased sensitivity as I wrote earlier, but also because the brain cells communicate in reciprocal fashion. Signals go from near the eyes to the higher visual processing regions but signals also go in the other direction as well. This happens throughout the brain.
If a normal person steps into a bakery, the scene of "the bakery" is unified in the brain. The smells go with the sight of the room and the goods on the racks and the feel of the floor under the feet and the temperature and the sound of people giving orders, etc... You might spend a moment trying to remember your shopping list and then your concentration on the smell of the room might diminish. Or you might focus for a moment on the smells of bread cooking and in your reverie lose track of hearing your number being called. People turn up the levels of concentration in one realm by turning down the levels of concentration in other realms. All cells use the same language and type of mathematics to deal with information no matter what realm (conceptual, visual, auditoryÉ) is being considered. When you pull a unified group of information about a topic together, the different realms influence each other. Signals from vision have an effect on signals from kinesthetic awareness or on signals from the ears. Signals coming from types of information that are very different from each other are not very much in alignment and will interfere with each other to a small extent... especially in regions of higher processing that are making the logical connections between these different kinds of experience.
But when a person with autism (or a high degree of stress) encounters the bakery the different realms of experience are separated from each other and not brought together as a whole in thought. The different parts of the experience remain separated. Without the switchboard bringing the parts together, there is less of that inhibiting signal coming to a particular region of the brain indirectly from a region that deals with a different kind of subject matter. So when the focus goes to smell, the smell is much more intense. This is increased also because increased inherent stress also increases sensitivity (leading eventually to pain or shutdown when the stress is great enough).
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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.
