Nature’s Brains, Part 4

July 8, 2012

Bob Fiske

Nature’s Brains, Part 4

(Note: I invite you to read Part 3 before you dive into this part.)

Sooner or later, in nature’s tinkering with brain designs, a truly superior model was bound to come along.  The simian family lays claim to this prize.  Scientists don’t really understand how this happened, yet we see many descendent species alive today that clearly show the innovative features that formed over time.

One of these innovations was exquisitely fine motor control.  This capability appears to have co-evolved with body characteristics that could express new types of movement.  For instance, all monkeys and apes possess a finger-based hand that shapes itself with greater precision than is given to clawed or hooved mammals.  Also, some of these species are endowed with long limbs and tails that give them the arboreal advantage to swing, climb and hang.  Of course, living in trees also requires balance, eyesight and hearing to match the motor skills.  These are jobs handled by the new brain, and they couple well with this brain’s superior learning ability.

Courtesy of e-mail, I once watched a film of a gibbon teasing a pair of tiger cubs.  (You may watch it here, though be warned that the film quality is low.)  If ever I saw a gymnastic wizard, this little gibbon was it.  It is a remarkable testimony of the superior level of body-and-brain coordination possible using a simian brain.

Other capabilities emerged in the simian brain.  A brain that can learn is a brain that can teach.  Thus, it is possible to pass brain-encoded patterns from generation to generation without relying only on the DNA hard-wiring of behavior.  By the way, the teaching of new generations is not a monopoly owned just by simian brains.  Bears teach their cubs how to forage, and many types of young male birds must learn their songs from older males of the same species and geographic location.  Nonetheless—as we well know—the simian brain would push the ability to learn and teach to new heights.

The most recent brain innovations are sported by the hominids, or great apes.  Some of our less intellectual cousins, chimpanzees and gorillas, show that they, too, carry the seeds of the type of intelligence that flourished in the Homo (human) line.  Chimps have been observed to make simple tools such as using sticks to fish out ants from a nest for eating.  These species show other “human” traits such as problem-solving, concern for the welfare of others, and self-awareness.

And, surprisingly, both chimpanzees and gorillas have revealed that they possess previously unsuspected symbolic language skills.  Given the right expressive media (American Sign Language, computer screens or colored shapes), hominids in research settings have amassed sizeable vocabularies and have shown that they can fashion novel “utterances” to express, wants, needs and general observations.

Finally in this discussion of the “advanced design” hominid brain, I wish to mention a series of brain structures that are loosely bundled under the term “the limbic system”.  The limbic structures lie at the base of the cortex, at the juncture where it surrounds the “old brain”.  In fact, these structures (the hippocampus, the amygdala, the nucleus accumbens, and others) appear in other mammalian brains of less intellectual stature than the hominid brain.  In spite of this fact, it is probable that, in hominid brain design, limbic structures were enhance and pressed into service to perform more complex functions.  Limbic functions are thought to play a role in reward, fear, addiction, emotional memories and memory formation in general.  Perhaps that’s too much anatomy.

The idea I want to paint about the new-and-improved hominid brain might be better conveyed using broader brush strokes.  This brain permitted a new level of behavioral and thought patterns, patterns that were the product of emotions, punishments, rewards and social transactions.  In ape communities we see such things as exchanging grooming services, currying favor and shifting dominance hierarchies.  However, in human communities an entirely new social reality was called into existence.  Its final metamorphosis would be expressed in human culture.  In this culture the social, emotional, symbolic, political, artistic, economic and intellectual components could take on reality as  by-products of a marvelously large brain.

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Art Cries

(NOTE: This is a raw journal entry.  Some stones are unpolished.)

I brought chard to The Growing Experience (my CSA) and met J-Dream-Worker who says he will read my blog.  His schooling was in theater, and he’s starting to return toward his artistic self.  So, he’s hungry for all kinds of input.

I’ve started owning my thinking and my writing as my art, and I’m starting to own myself as an artist.  When you’re an artist you create because you have to.  There’s not much choice involved.  The pressure builds and stuff pours out.

Bangkok-Girl said something about my being an outside artist, kind of like the guy who built Watts Towers.  He worked in isolation and didn’t have the reward of public acclaim while he did his work.  She said this in response to my complaint that I’m getting tired of being insane: the feeling that I’m the only one who understands or cares about what I create.

I’ve been feeling very disconsolate lately.  Like, why bother?  I mean, I even asked her if she read myDawkins vs. Collins essay, and she admitted she read only a third of it, and then it seemed like a bunch of Matrix talk, so she skipped to the end.

Fuck it. I’m surrounded by idiots.  And they’re all so busy embracing the technology that is dumbing them down.  Assholes.

All this Facebook dreck where people post a picture and think they’ve made a meaningful statement.  They don’t know what it means to craft a personal thought.

A picture is not worth a thousand words.  A picture is the loss of a thousand words because someone plucked it off the shelf instead of growing it in the soil of her/his mind.  Where’s the effort?  The creativity?  The risk?  And, social networking tools perpetuate all this bullshit—pouring somebody else’s work into your info-stream.

So, I’m a lonely outside artist.  I guess I still have a responsibility to bring my art to the world.  That’s what it means to be in the world and do your work.  Once you come to know and accept your responsibility, then you’ve passed the point of no return.  There is no choice any more, no opportunity to agonize over should I or shouldn’t I.

You just know your work and do it.  Damn it.  God, are you laughing again?  I thought so.

 = = = = = = = =

I had a thought a couple of days ago.  It’s a little hard to recapture.  “You don’t yet know who you are.”  As if to say that I am tip-toeing around my purpose and my power and my use and my instrumentality.

And it makes me sad.  I feel so far away from the home I knew and the home I’m to make for myself.  Sad about all this work on my path, and seeing that I’ve barely begun.  I ask you, God, how many times must I walk this way before I get it right?  How many times must I live this life before I understand?  How many times around the track for my pitiful self to run into the conscious awareness of what I’m actually doing here?

These are the questions every grain of sand asks.

Tag Enrichment

When Prudence gets down and low she knows not to wallow there.  She knows that the antidote—literally—is a behavior that’s incompatible with sadness: playfulness.

Imagine this game.  You can obliterate graffiti geometrically.  This is better than erasing it or painting over it.  That only creates a blank slate and invites more of the same.  But the geometric enrichment would add extra lines, curves, loops and dots to camouflage the original message.  To work most effectively the additions would have to be rendered using the same style, technique and materials as the original message.  Let’s see an example.

The original message is still there.  It cannot be read very easily, however.  (By the way, see Val’s comments, below.)

Another advantage to this is that doing this doesn’t require any special artistic skill.  (Prudence insists that she has no drawing skills whatever.)  Therefore, just about anybody could participate in such an enrichment activity.  Prudence is sure that kids would love doing it.

There is the possibility that a gang would take offense at its tagging being messed with.  Prudence thinks this consideration is just an opportunity for more creativity, and she goes at it with a passion.  Here are a few suggestions.

• Find one letter that is common to the tagging of rival gangs.  Then enrich only that letter.

• Or, contrary to what she said before, Prudence says you could specifically not use the same technique for the enrichment.  That way the original message remains readable.  Like this.

(Prudence wants to get technical on us.  She says that this variation can be understood as a slight reduction in the signal-to-noise ratio.  Big whup, as Grace might say.)

• Protect the tag message by drawing a boundary around it.  Then do the enrichment outside the boundary.  (This assumes that the tagged surface provides the extra area.)  Here is an example.

VAL COMMENTS:  Val was waitressing at Sizzler where Prudence was working on this.  Val remarked that it made the graffiti look like art.  Then she suggested submitting this idea to the Pepsi Refresh Project for positively affecting your community.  Well, if it comes to that, guess who shares the credit for that?  Right, Val?