Your Brain Is On the Brink of Chaos
Nancy Kelly
Nancy Kelly
Quote:At the same time, chaos has its advantages. On a behavioral level, the arms race between predator and prey has wired erratic strategies into our nervous system.1 A moth sensing an echolocating bat, for example, immediately directs itself away from the ultrasound source. The neurons controlling its flight fire in an increasingly erratic manner as the bat draws closer, until the moth, darting in fits, appears to be nothing but a tumble of wings and legs. More generally, chaos could grant our brains a great deal of computational power, by exploring many possibilities at great speed.
Motivated by these and other potential advantages, and with an accumulation of evidence in hand, neuroscientists are gradually accepting the potential importance of chaos in the brain.
Quote:The current research paradigm in neuroscience, which considers neurons in a snapshot of time as stationary computational units, and not as members of a shifting dynamical entity, might be missing the mark entirely. If chaos plays an important role in the brain, then neural computations do not operate as a static read-out, a lockstep march from the transduction of photons to the experience of light, but a high-dimensional dynamic trajectory as spikes dance across the brain in self-choreographed cadence.
While hundreds of millions of dollars are being funneled into building the connectome—a neuron-by-neuron map of the brain—scientists like Eve Marder have argued that, due to the complexity of these circuits, a structural map alone will not get us very far.
'Historically, we may regard materialism as a system of dogma set up to combat orthodox dogma...Accordingly we find that, as ancient orthodoxies disintegrate, materialism more and more gives way to scepticism.'
- Bertrand Russell
- Bertrand Russell
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