The Buck Stops with You and Me on the Issue of Breaking the Cycles and the Spells That Cauterize Our Brain’s Ability to Provide Sane, Safe, Suitable Actions and Answers

Listening to myself—talking with my children about (grand)children or the neighbors about the (neighbor)hood or my friends about (geo)politics or my colleagues about where “descent with modification” (Darwin’s definition of evolution) has brought us—I hear myself opining more and more these days:

We need to break the cycle. Or,
We need to break the spell.

I usually use the first pronouncement when discussing situations where people’s actions are clearly rooted in pathologies of the past. Breaking the cycle is what Supernanny Jo Frost often does so effectively (at least for the duration that she and her badly dysfunctional families are being videotaped) on the popular ABC-TV show. And what Cesar Millan, the dog whisperer, does with dogs and their owners (as much as with the latter as the former) on the popular National Geographic channel show. To a surprising extent, both of these interveners are challenging and seeking to change assumptions and behaviors that have often been handled down from generation to generation. (Views about dogs, too? Well, for example, think about dogs were viewed and handled in your family as you were growing up.)

“I spank. I yell. That’s who I am,” an earnest, totally ineffective young mother of three kept telling Frost the other night. Why did she think that was who she was? Mostly surely because, for the most part, that’s who her mother thought she was. Watching the Frost program, even Frederick F. Flintstone could have deduced in about 90 seconds that if this cycle wasn’t broken, in a few years, this woman’s daughters were going to be screaming, “I spank. I yell. That’s who I am”—and looking for excuses to beat the crap out of their children. On his dog training show, Millan also demonstrates again and again the importance of breaking the cycle of dysfunction, first with the dog or dogs and then with the owner or owners.

And the second pronouncement?

Breaking the spell (as opposed to the cycle) is an even grander, more difficult task because the kind of brain processing being challenged is one that extends beyond simply a single brain and its forebears. Spells result from interlocking “memes” of ideas inculcated in the host mind by the multiple beliefs of multiple people from multiple generations. These memes are so deeply rooted that their origins can be literally lost in time. And their validity can be considered so sacrosanct and unquestionable that merely to raise the suspicion of these memes’ non-utility, obsolescence or mindless destructiveness invites preemptive disqualification of the questioner. Then he or she is likely to be labeled as “traitor,” “heretic” or “enemy” by those captive to the spell.

As our extraordinary new century continues to unfold, it is as clear as the evening news that we are going to continue to suffer bigtime because of our to-now limited success in breaking the spells that block rational thinking on important issues. To name a few of the more egregious ones:

• The spell that allows religion (any religion!) to propagate itself largely unexamined, untested and unjustified to its followers often at the expense of desperately needed and highly desirable choices and alternatives.

• The spell that assigns a mystical, majestic role to war. And the assumption that war is often inevitable and nearly always justified, even just, no matter whose side is impassionedly arguing for such sanctification. And the belief that fighting a war is automatically noble and that dying in one somehow is peremptorily a more suitable, acceptable, admirable substitute than having had an opportunity to live out one’s days in a more normal, less catastrophic manner.

• The spell that permits the mindless assumption of automatic superiority of one’s own kind—the blind and blinding influences of family and tribalism and often nationalism. The first casualty of sameness deified and ossified is the ability to empathize with the needs, rights and pain of "outsiders"—of the other. Of such inanity is atrocity and neglect born again and again.

• The spell that generates the magical transmutation of the idea that special responsibilities attend wealth and the wealthy into the idea that “the rich are different than you and me—and fully entitled to their differences.” Economically speaking, this is the greatest entitlement of all: that the wealthy are deserving of their ability to disappear behind gated walls, tinted windows, purchased privilege and privileges, accountability to the law and obligation to the community and to ignore a solumn responsibility if not to actually act to relieve the suffering of have-nots, at least to not act in ways that aid and abet their pain or cause a blind eye to be turned toward it.

• The spell that spawns the hazy acceptance of the idea that technologies and their implements don’t kill or maim, people do. The very definition of technology is something that extends the ability of people to do something. If people can’t do it, then the idea may never occur to them. If the idea occurs to them but they lack the means, they’ll often leave matters be even if they retain the idea. The failure to be accountable for the consequences of technology often enjoys the cover of plausible deniability right up to and beyond the moment that a life or lives are forfeited, cheapened or weakened. It would be a just, defensible logic that accountability for the consequences of technology gets backdated all the way to the source of the choices that made it possible. Only this almost never happens.

Is it possible to break the cycle, break the spell? If so, how do you do it?

Yes, it is possible. As I read the history of our development, this is a happy by-product of "descent with modification." Slowly, over the eons, and more recently than formerly, there is learning at work. The unhappy aspect is that knowledge still hasn't learned very well to speak wisdom to power or ineptitude and still hasn't found readily effective ways to contravene the consequences of a brain acting against its own self-interest as it mindlessly repeats cycles and spells.

When progress is made, it is usually done one mind at a time. And usually because one insightful, courageous mind took an outsized interest in another. Good questions for each of us to ask: have we taken a look at the spells we continue to live in the clutches of lately? And have we done anything to seek to prevent their pernicious influences from corroding the quality of our children’s lives, the quality of our communal life, the robustness and fairness of lives reaching to the farthest corner of the planet we all share?

In America today and all other regions of our increasing asthmatic, systems-challenged globe, as families and political polities and entities and economies and corporations and professions and educational institutions, we have an earnest need at numerous levels and in numerous arenas for Supernannys and Dog Whisperers of insight, courage and effectiveness. For our brains continue to be beset with many cycles and spells sorely in need of being broken.

Daniel C. Dennett’s pathfinding work on examining the quality of our thinking about religion is available here: Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon

For info about Jo Frost, go here: Supernanny

Go here for some of Cesar Millan’s ideas about breaking the cycle: Cesar’s Q&A Column and Dog Whisperer

For some fascinating insights about the discoverer of "descent with modification," go here: Charles Darwin III

Posted on December 14, 2006

What the Brain Does With the Waves It Makes May Be the Most Important Discovery (So Far) in All of Brain Science. A New Book Explains Why

For the non-scientist reader (present company included), a really good science book is almost never about science as much as it is about the scientist. Science today—most any science—has become so complex, difficult and specialized (particularly in vocabulary) that even the most patient and intelligent of lay readers will usually scream “uncle” and flee after only a few paragraphs. (If you doubt this, pick up, say, a molecular biology textbook or an astrophysics journal at your next library book sale and begin reading.)

But then along comes a book by a literate, engaging scientist. This author, you quickly realize, is willing to take a complex topic and explain, with patience, humility and a modicum of humor as the effort progresses, (1) why he or she thinks one way and not another, (2) discuss with honesty and integrity what is known about the subject and what isn’t close to being confirmed and (3) detail candidly the dirty little secrets of the experimental laboratories and the secret little condescensions and the subtle omissions of the experimenters. In short order, you can easily conclude that you’ve got yourself a “read.” Along the way, you may even learn a little, or a bunch, about the science in which the writer specializes.

György Buzsáki’s new work, Rhythms of the Brain, is such a book. Dr. Buzsáki is a neuroscience professor at Rutgers. As the title of this work suggests, his specialty is brain oscillations. If the brain’s unmatched capacity for generating waves were all he talked about in Rhythms, he’d quickly put all but the most knowledgeable and dogged reader to sleep (as he often does his research subjects in the laboratory). But without any discernible conscious effort, Buzsáki repeatedly demonstrates what makes for a great 21st Century scientific personality (the book’s dust jacket says he is among the top 250 most cited neuroscientists): an oceanic interest in knowledge for knowledge’s sake, a multidisciplinary mastery of the scholar’s craft as well as his/her own specialty and an interest in being understood far beyond one’s own scientific kind.

With admirable and rapier swiftness, he explains the thrust of his book and the theme of his entire career in the first sentence: “The short punch line of this book is that brains are foretelling devices and their predictive powers emerge from the various rhythms they perpetually generate.”

Not long after, he explains the who, what, when and where of his first awakening to the importance of such a realization. It came, he said, “in April, 1970, during a physiology lecture given by Endre Grastyán in the beautiful town of Pécs, on the sunny slopes of the Mecsek mountains in Hungry.” Professor Grastyán argued that brain outputs, such as movement and cognition, control its inputs. Buzsáki says he rushed home to read more only to discover that his textbook for the course contained not a word about what he’d just heard. He was captivated. Forever in his career—or at least thus far—he’d be hooked on the brain’s outputs, and the feature that would rivet him most would be the brain’s rhythms. “Neuronal oscillators,” he calls them. Sure, as we’ve long known, they make it possible for us to do things like walk and breath. But only recently, says Buzsáki, has the suspicion grown that the brain’s perpetually active rhythms—including its cycles of electrical activity—are essential to its “deepest and most general functions” in the sense of French molecular biologist Francois Jacob’s words: “One of the deepest, one of the most general functions of living organisms is to look ahead, to produce future.”

Buzsáki is more than a little excited by insights he says are recent to neuroscience and have come to it from other disciplines, such as physics and general system theory. Ideas about open systems in perpetual change. Ideas about spontaneous activities that are self-organizing in far-from-equilibrium states. Ideas about the complex, nonlinear behavior in such dynamic systems that, when perturbated, causes them to become more than merely the sum of the parts. “The brain is such an adaptive complex system,” he concludes. And expressly because of its ceaseless internally generated, future-producing rhythms.

As is every successful scientist, Buzsáki is ambitious, particularly for his ideas and findings. For example, he admits that consciousness “is the crutch of cognitive neuroscience, perhaps the most widely used covert explanatory tool of the classification of mental phenomena. Yet, this frequently used hypernym does not even have a definition. Is it a product, a process, or a thing? There is not even good agreement what the theory of consciousness would be like?”

Buzsáki is eager to be part of the solution to the problem. And he suspects strongly that (to quote Sigmund Freud) “anatomy is destiny.” He notes that the brain-cell-rich cerebellum (which has roughly the same number of cells as the remainder of the brain) is forever constrained expressly because, as organized structures go, it is highly efficient and highly localized.

Buzsáki says, in the book’s closing words, “Cerebellum-type organization can never give rise to conscious experience, no matter the size. On the other hand, the cerebral cortex, with its self-organized, persistent oscillations and global computational principles, can create qualities fundamentally different from those provided by input-dependent local processing. It may turn out that the rhythms of the brain are also the rhythms of the mind.”

As it turns out, the rhythms of Dr. Buzsáki’s mind have produced a fascinating, though often demanding, read that a scientifically curious non-scientist can follow if they are willing to make the effort.

Order the book here: Rhythms of the Brain

Visit the author’s Web site at Rutgers: The Buzsáki Lab

Posted on December 02, 2006