Israel Rosenfield

There is so very much emphasis on the human brain, and so little knowledge behind it. Researchers and billionaires talk of “uploading” all the knowledge in a brain so that a “person” can “live forever”. We are endlessly probing and poking in an effort to catalog what every square millimeter of a brain does for a living. But no one can say how something as basic to us as memory works. In this latest effort to try, Edward Ziff employs his and the late Israel Rosenfield’s work to try, aided by the dreamscape artwork of Fiammetta Ghedini, in From Chaos to Stability. To me it doesn’t get very far.

I liked that they describe humans in terms of memory. Without memory, we are mobile plants. It is memory that enables talent, personality, history, and actions with some sort of basis. Without memory, consciousness itself has no meaning. Right in the introduction, they say “Brains create something that is not there.” So they’ve sort of given up trying to find the physical location of consciousness, of personality, of intelligence. They’ve pretty much exhausted looking at the brain, and there is no such corner of it that contains these things, separable from everything else. This is a big and important step.

Another helpful discovery is that the brain needs contrasts to reproduce what we see and hear. It needs two colors to reproduce, because one alone will come out neutral, there being nothing to contrast it with. Similarly, it needs edges to define and separate one thing from another. These things can affect how we remember, including, if not especially, faces. That’s helpful information.

However. The book then settles into the mechanics of the brain. Neurons and synapses, dendrites and ions - the stuff we have known for decades. They postulate that the mind does not “save” whole images, but key parts of them, so that the whole picture can be reassembled for a different reason, from a different angle, at a different time, and so on. And it means that memories are not static or stable. They change according to when and why we recall them. Time changes aspects of memories because they are not Polaroid snapshots. In our print and video era, it is easy to prove this as people recounting a precise memory today, remember it far differently than when it happened. It’s why eyewitnesses cannot be totally trusted.

It then becomes an Oliver Sacks-like tour of various syndromes, conditions and diseases, which demonstrate that various corners of the folds in the brain control quite discrete activities, and damage to them can have unsettling manifestations. There’s the man who can read single numbers, but not three digit numbers. Another can draw letters as if he were copying works of art, but he cannot read them or pronounce their names. Another sees letters as if they were foreign languages and all unreadable. There’s the (famous) man who incorrectly had a part of his brain removed that happened to control all short term memory. He could not remember what he just ate. The researcher on his case had to introduce herself for the first time every time she saw him, over decades of working together. And there’s one man who could write perfectly well, but could not read a word. The brain is an amazing machine.

This detour is, as always, both fascinating and diverting, but is of no help in understanding how Man creates and stores memories, what the rules and limits are, or how to access them later.

One thing we do think we know is that the brain alone is of no use in replicating a personality. There are so many functions that go into creating character, that relying on the mind alone would miss 95% of that person’s intellect and attitude. Even physical deformities and chronic conditions affect a personality and that would not be part of a “download”. That’s the conceptual level.

At the physical level, we still do not know how the synapses treat images. How does a chemical neurotransmission store the image of a sunset, when it would logically seem to be a binary choice – on/off, open/closed and so on? We can say the brain does not store whole animations, yet we cannot say how it stores and reassembles single images.

The authors are honest about this: “What remains elusive about the engram is exactly how a sparse group of engram neurons can represent a detailed image, or and emotion or the text of a poem, all of which can reside in our memory. Intrinsic to this representation is how a physical group of neurons can project information into our consciousness.”

Their answer is frank: One reason why the search for memory molecules and specific information storage zones in the brain has so far been frustrating may be that they are just not there.”

Even up to the minute tools fail to penetrate the secrets: “Artificial intelligence has failed to reveal the deep inner working of the brain.” We are still waiting for the big breakthrough, but we don’t even know what it will look like. So all the talk of uploading the contents of brains to the “singularity” within 20 years is total nonsense. We do not know how or where memories are stored, and utterly no idea how to access them except by asking the person a question. Bulk memories is fantasy. And the brain remains a secret where consciousness is concerned.

The book says we think that once a memory is recalled, it is sent for enhancement, with spatial, audio, sensory and olfactory associations that might go with it. But it does not identify these cortices in the brain. Do we know where exactly this processing takes place so instantaneously? Is it ordered and prioritized, or all at once, for example. What affects the brains choices for emphasis in the recalled memory? How does the memory coding differ between that sunset in Hawai’i and the Solstice sunset at Stonehenge? No clue.

So the book remains largely unsatisfying, despite some tidbits of new (to me) information.

The real problem is parallel to teaching a language. If you teach someone to read a foreign alphabet, and then words and then sentences, they can read competently and maybe even sound authentic doing so. But if they have no idea what the words mean, let alone the sentences, you have accomplished nothing. And that, it seems to me, is where we are in understanding consciousness. We know all about neurons and synapses, dendrites and neurotransmission. But how that creates and maintains “you”, and how you deal with your knowledge and your memories, is beyond us.

My favorite example of how little we know remains this: Think of your first kiss. You probably have not thought about it in decades. It has been stored somehow, somewhere, and totally abandoned. Those synapses should have long ago withered and died from lack of use. Or been reassigned to something more often needed. But there it is, right in front of you, in an instant, on demand. We have no idea how you did that.

David Wineberg… (more)

I took a genetics course in college. Needless to say, I didn't do so well. This book Sums up everything from that class, with easy to understand pictures. Some concepts that I was really didn't understand made a whole lot more sense. I really could of used this book in the genetics course, and, I would think, it would cost considerably less than my bulky genetics books.

This book isn't perfect. I would have liked the subjects more separated. As it is written, its hard tell when a new topic starts and an old topic ends. Also, my version was written in 2011. Not a long time ago, but each year more is understood about how DNA controls protein function, that I suspect that this book might be a bit outdated.

Highly recommended if you want to know more about the subject, or need a study guide for a basic genetics/cell biology course.… (more)

I absolutely loved the first part of this book, where all ideas we tend to have about the brain and memory are questioned. That part hasn't aged either, on the contrary, new things found since (such as false memories, or mirror neurons) fit in seamlessly.
However, the second half, where he offers a theory of his own, doesn't live up to the expectations. It's still interesting, but not riveting anymore.
Still, I wish I hadn't left this book on my TBR pile for so long and started reading it sooner. Definitely recommended for anyone interested in the workings of the brain.… (more)