I don’t know enough about this to even phrase the question properly but I will do my best.
When we talk about pathways in the brain that I guess electrical and chemical componets travel on I assume many of these pathways we have developed instead of were born with. Are these pathways something we can physically detect at some level or are they based more on evidence.
Both.
But let’s start with the first assumption. We develop pathways beginning prenatally. From there some pathways develop expectant of experience, some dependent upon experience, and some modified by experience. How much of that middle experience-dependent group requires experience within certain critical windows of developmental time and how much it is just more sensitive to in those windows is among the many open questions.
Some of the pathways are the actually fiber pathways themselves: were the axons from certain cells in certain parts of the brain physically travel to connect to the dendrites (mostly) elsewhere in the brain. Some of course is beyond where the wiring goes to what tends to become active when in response to what … that last part, the functional connectivity, depends on the strengths of all the small individual connections and which ones turn activity on vs which ones turn things off (excitatory vs inhibitory) and a host of supporting player actions as well. That gets studies in a variety of ways such that monitor the activity in real time. A very trendy one in recent years is functional MRI (fMRI) but there are many other techniques used.
Put it all together and you get things like these interrelated projects: The Human Connectome Project; and The BRAIN Initiative.
Not sure myself how strict linear reductionism will work for understanding the function of such a massive nonlinear chaotic system impacted by various external drivers … but it is a start.
That was a great answer, I feel certain that the key to maximizing our potential as human beings lies in a better understanding of this science. Over the course of my life I occassionaly witness what I refer to as pivatol moments in peoples lives. It usually results from being exposed to something new or exposed to something under different circumstances. It will often set off a chain of reactions and events that will have profound effects on the remainder of that persons life.
In the non scientific community we have a sizable population of those amoung us I refer to as the manipulators. These are people who have in various degrees recognized an aspect of our personality that they are able to access and manipulate by supplying us with very specific forms of input. We all do this to some extent and it is just part of human interaction. Cults, religions, motivational speakers, con men and many others have taken this to a higher level.
My real question is while we are waiting for science to finish mapping these very complicated and seemingly chaotic systems shouldn’t we be putting to better use the understanding that we do have when it comes to education and rehabilitation. I feel like our practical working knowledge of this has reached a level where it could be used as a primary tool in aiding those who are strugging to find their place in life. Instead it has barely reached the level of an afterthought in actual application.
To clarify - I use the term “chaotic” in a very precise way in this context, the mathematical concept of chaos as in chaos theory rather than the more usual meaning of unpredictable disorder and confusion. Chaos theory is the study of nonlinear dynamics and brains very much function and develop in a nonlinear manner on a massive scale. Chaos theory is most known for the beautiful designs of fractal with their self-similarity at many levels of analysis and for “the butterfly effect”, in which the smallest, even virtually unmeasurable, difference in starting conditions can and often does lead to drastically different results … which points out the inadequacy of deterministic linear analysis when trying to comprehend large nonlinear (i.e. “chaotic” systems). The part that gets less attention is that chaos theory does not therefore say that end states of such chaotic systems are impossible to predict. In fact many chaotic systems will end up settling into one of several possible end states even if the various pathways to get to them are innumerable and impossible to predict. Certain end states of chaotic systems are considered “attractors”, “strange attractors” or “attractor basins” and are visualized as various basins at the bottom between two long rocky hills: push a ball down one hill and you can state with some confidence that the ball will end up in one of those basins and probably most likely in the widest deepest one more often than the narrower shallower ones, even if the path that the ball takes to get there is unpredictable.
Not much to contribute though regarding your last post. My sense is that many are trying hard to use the understanding we do have to the degree it can be, but YMMV.
Are you asking why advances in neuroscience are not being used to improve things like quality of life, social influence or rehabilitation?
I’m not an expert, but part of it is that neuroscience is a fairly new field. Our scanning technology is recent and we are still in the embryonic stages of understanding.
Having said that, there are devices like transcranial direct current stimulation can enhance learning. Other areas of the brain like the left and right prefrontal cortex are involved in mood and there are some devices designed to manipulate them like transcranial magnetic stimulation. But it may be a few more decades before we have a wide range of consumer and prescription invasive and non-invasive therapies to affect learning, emotions, creativity, etc.
There are multiple devices out already, but I have no idea of their effectiveness.
Thats exactly my point, science considers it a relatively new field yet for centuries many men have had a very good understnding of how to manipulate these chemicals, nothing new here at all. It is like comparing driving a car to building an engine from scratch. We know enough about it to incorporate it into many aspects of society.
Chemistry is just physics at its core, but it was easier to create new rules for chemistry than to derive everything from physics. By the same token, psychology is to neuroscience what chemistry is to physics. We could derive all behavioral info from neuroscience but creating psychological models is a shortcut the way creating chemistry rules is a shortcut for physics.
Also we have only had the scanning tools of neuroscience for a few years or decades. And it is hard to see how the brain changes in real world settings vs a lab. I think the brain is altering millions of synapses a second, we don’t have the scanning technology to see how that changes when people undergo events that have a meaningful psychological impact. In fact it was only recently that neuroscientists created a map of the brain with 20 micron resolution, that was in 2013 and required using a dead persons brain. A synaptic cleft is 0.02 microns, 1000 times smaller.
I agree with your overall point but I think you understate the mind-boggling leaps in complexity from one level to the next. For example, IIRC quantum physics can be used to explicitly derive the chemical properties of single atoms. However, the math becomes intractable with even small molecules. It’s practically impossible to solve the quantum mechanical equations to derive the chemical properties of a medium sized molecule, so you have to start introducing approximations. If you want to model large biomolecules with the best modern supercomputers you have to throw quantum mechanics right out the window and basically model it with classical mechanics, treating atoms and bonds as a collection of balls, sticks, and springs. And such an over-simplified molecular mechanics approach to modeling an entire cell or organism might not even be possible with all the energy and mass available on earth.
There are similar difficulties scaling from molecular neuroscience to psychology. You can model single synaptic receptor, or a collection of simplified receptors and neurotransmitters, or model the synapse with bulk chemical and electrical properties… and you’re still several layers of emergent complexity from anything like what we call “psychology”.
I agree, my point is that we really don’t have the science right now to understand chemistry via physics or psychology via neuroscience on a truly meaningful level for various reasons, so we created new fields of study with their own rules. My understanding of neuropsychology right now mostly consists of ‘this brain area is involved in this personality trait’, and that using devices like tdcs you can raise or lower the firing threshold to affect various personality traits (learning, mood, etc). I am under the impression that the scanning technology, understanding of the brain and the usage of manmade technology (usually electronic) to affect the brain isn’t advanced enough to have meaningful impact on psychology yet. Right now what counts as cutting edge therapy consists of drugs which affect neurotransmitter levels. However I’d like to believe in 20+ years we will be able to non-invasively use electronic stimulation to treat/cure diseases like depression or PTSD (there is already some treatment for this, but I don’t know how effective or non-invasive it is)
I wonder if when we have quantum computers how that will change these fields, but I wouldn’t know.