The Neuroscience of Slumber

Unlike the lass above (or fraulein, as that's a German painting), I couldn't sleep the other night. This is not an uncommon occurrence for me and for millions of us who spend nights staring at the ceiling, tossing and turning and making sleep difficult for their significant others. I normally do pretty well with it, to be honest. My health condition is closely linked to sleep and as sleep is very important to manage this condition, I learned to master sleep. But even at that, now and again it's a problem for me. For many people, however, it's a chronic problem.  Since I needed a new column for this blog and since I couldn't sleep, I thought I'd knock off two birds with one stone and read up on the neuroscience of sleep and produce something useful whilst my mind refused to be seduced into slumber. 

Our sleep is at least somewhat governed by our circadian rhythm. Now what is that and how does that get governed? A circadian rhythm is:

 any biological process that displays endogenous, entrainable oscillations of about 24 hours. These rhythms are driven by a "circadian clock" and rhythms have been widely observed in plants, animals, fungi and cyanobacteria. The term "ciradian" comes form the Latin "circa", meaning "around" or "approximately" and "diem" meaning "day". (1)

Now where would this circadian "clock" be? Do we have a piece of little Swiss handy work in us somewhere? Well, no. As we should know by now, just as Apple "has an app for that", the brain has an "app" - a specific brain region - for all of our functions so let's have a look at what brain regions are involved in sleep (and this will be an incomplete list, but we're just looking at the basics today). 

This is why most of us get jet lag when we travel to far away time zones - our ciradian clocks get all thrown off. 

The little brain nodule that rules our sleep rhythms appears to be in the suprachiasmatic nucleus region of the hypothalamus. The hypothalamus - not to be confused with the thalamus - is in our limbic region which lies below our outer cortex. We should be by now getting familiar with the limbic region (and if not, back to neuroscience 101 with you). So inability to sleep could mean the SCN region of the hypothalamus is too stimulated or, more likely, not receiving enough "it's dark out" messages from some special neurons in the retina. These neurons have specifically evolved to detect and be activated by certain wavelengths of light that come at the end of the daylight period just before it turns dark. They then send this message onto the hypothalamus. Let's have a look. 

The hypothalamus is responsible for some pretty basic stuff, as you'll see in this illustration. So you can see that a lot of basic "drives" we have are located here and - back to our topic - so it is with basic sleep cycles. I'll sometimes refer to the brain functions being "bottom up" in nature, that is what drives your thoughts is driven from these "bottom" regions and not the other way around. 

The sub-region that regulates the circidian rhythm, the suprachiasmatic nucleus is, obviously, located where it says "sleep-wake".

Now you see how clever the brain design is? (I say "design" but of course I mean how cleverly it evolved). It routes the optic nerve, in that part called the optic chiasm, so that those "it's dark now" signals from the special neurons in the retina can be dropped off in the SCN so that it can start sending other signals out to other parts of the brain that it's time to shut down. So part of our modern problems with sleep is that we no longer "listen" to these signals. We evolved to follow the rhythm of natural light cycles but today we ignore these and "override" them thus possibly disrupting how our circidian rhythms work. 

So that region is one factor in our wake/sleep cycles and their disruptions. 

Now, another culprit for sleeplesness could be an even deeper brain nodule, the locus ceoruleus. This fellow's sole purpose in life is to crank norepinephrine throughout your brain. Norepinephrine is a major "wakefulness" neurotransmitter. If you can't seem to "wake up", then it could well be your locus ceoruleus is not working up to snuff (for possible reasons far too deep for us here today). And no, coffee - or caffeine - doesn't go down there (though caffeine will sorta mimic norepinephrine). Conversely, if you're lying wide awake at 3am feeling "wired" (and without any stimulants), it could be that your LC is hyperactive for some reason.

Here's the locus ceoruleus and its pathways. 

Overabundence of neropinephrine is a suspected factor in the manic phases of bipolar disorder (which is my particular condition so this bad boy has probably been working overtime - literally - in me recently). What's not well known is how the two regions we've looked at here - the hypothalamus and the locus ceruleus - work together or not but it appears as though the hypothalamus is in the "norepinephrine loop" meaning that the SCN could be receiving this stimulant thus having its "clock rhythm" thrown out.  

So we possibly have two very deep subconscious brain structures in rebellion and not allowing you to sleep. 

There's more though - anxiety is no doubt also playing a role. When anxiety strikes, almost your whole limbic system is on high alert, mostly, perhaps, the cingulate gyrus (which is thought to produce that dread feeling of anxiety) and this is often where that "racing mind" feeling comes from. Again, this is a "bottom up" pathway - from the limbic region to your "seat of thoughts" - so again, we have another deep brain region driving you. And as the cingulate gyrus is part of our elementary "threat alert" system (or stress response system) its role is to force "what could be wrong" thoughts into you conscious awareness which could then be keeping you awake (which is kind of their point - they're designed to make you do something about the ideas it's presenting of "what's wrong"). Anxiety - what's really low level chronic stress - is going to make it really difficult to relax and go to sleep which is why people often turn to anti-anxiety drugs or even anti-psychotics - they can inhibit circuitry activity to and from this region and thus "knock down" those anxious thoughts. But this is a poor long term strategy (for various drug side affect and long term drug addiction problems). It might be better to start working on the basis for those feelings of anxiety (which may or not be imagined). 



Now, what happens when your brain runs down from too little sleep? Well, I could flood you with the science on this and, trust me, none of it is good. Brains absolutely need to sleep no matter how "tough" you think you are about not needing sleep. As the old TV ad used to go, "you can pay me now, or you can pay me later". In other words, you will pay later in life for depriving your brain of sleep. 

And you'll pay in the short term too, the brain just does not function as well on too little sleep. Even in peak conditions the brain does not fire up every region at one time. It "prioritizes"; it only sends energy to those parts of the brain that it thinks are necessary at any given time. And if your brain starts getting tired, it will - with absolutely zero input from "you" - start shutting further regions down to prioritize and conserve energy usage. And guess what your brain considers "non-vital" operations? Your cortical regions, especially your "seat of control", the frontal cortex. Your basic survival instincts and functions are in the limbic region and brain stem so the brain will send more energy there. Which means, hey, more energy to your emotional regions! And you wonder why you get cranky and more emotional when you get tired. As well, your brain will dial back energy to your frontal cortex, which is where your functions of concentration, focus, judgement and higher thinking are, the very things you need to get through that afternoon meeting with the boss. You'll be staring bleary eyed at your boss really regretting staying up half the night on Facebook, I tell ya. 

That's the short term downside to lack of sleep. I know for many of you lack of sleep is a chronic problem. 

Let's have a wake up call on this (pardon the pun) and look at the long term. Remember glia cells from Neuroscience 101? I said we'd be looking more at these little guys and now is the time. 

The science on glia cells and their exact roles is not completely understood and established (and as you can see, there are different types of glia cells doing different things) but the roles of glia cells appear to be so many and so critical that I could easily fill a whole column. Here though is the best basic way to look at them; they are very critical support systems for neurons, dendrite growth (remember, it's dendrites that form key inter-neuron communication connections ... more in a moment) and axon maintenance and two of the more critical roles are supplying neurons with oxygen and other nutrients and - here's the big take away for today - it appears more and more that glia cells are critical for flushing out toxins. And the grand poompah tie in to today's lesson? It's even more and more appearing that glia cells need - ta-da!! - sleep to do their job. Yes, they're the night crew that comes in and cleans up after the day crew. 

Just briefly, it goes like this. Neurons take in nutrients. Neurons are cells. All cells produce waste. Neurons thus produce waste. You know, nutrients in, waste out. All living things are like this. Waste doesn't just disappear into thin air. Someone has to deal with it. And it appears that when it comes to the neurons in your brain that glia cells are that "someone". So to put it another way, neurons produce poop and glia cells are the pooper-scoopers. And the glia cells need you to "shut down things" - IE: sleep - for them to do their job properly. Plus - PLUS! - if you don't shut things down, then the neurons will still be "up" and - ta-da! - still producing neuron poop. So not only are you not allowing the night shift glia cells time to do their job, you're piling up more neuron poop in your brain! Now do you really want to go around the next day with a head full of neuron poop? Ever wonder why you're so groggy when you don't sleep? Well, yeah, it could be a lack of norepinephrine but it could also mean that, because the night crew couldn't do their jobs, you've got a head full of neuron poop. Or what the more scholarly articles call "toxins". Yes, toxins - waste products of brain functions - will build up from chronic lack of sleep. Very, very not good, people. 

Kapish? 

Now back to dendrites and glia cells. Dendrites are the little spikes on neurons that receive signals from other cells. They are, therefore, utterly critical to all brain functions - IE: the passing of information from one neuron to another and thus "thought". Back to Neuroscience 101, dendrites also grow and prune back all the time. When not needed - a memory falls into disuse and the information from a particular neuron is no longer needed, for example - dendrites prune back. But what we need to sear into our memories today is the growing part. Dendrite growth is what makes the learning of new information possible. Learning stimulates dendrite growth. It's critical for new learning to "stick" in our memories for dendrites to seek out new connections with neighbouring neurons and pathways and then to strengthen those new connections. It's these new connections that make learning - and remembering - the new information possible. Quite simply, if those dendrites don't do their thing then learning is not going to happen. And back to glia cells, what helps dendrites grow and seek new connections and then strengthen them? Glia cells it appears. And what is essential for glia cells to do their thing? Once again, sleep. This is why sleep and proper rest have always been considered so important for learning; it's because that without it the dendrite growth essential for new connections - and thus learning and remembering - is simply not going to happen. Meditative breaks during the day help as well but that's for another day. 

Sleep is also essential for reducing stress and the less sleep we get, the more stress will build up and stress as well greatly negatively impacts brain performance thus creating a cycle of poorer daytime performance building more stress (and worry and anxiety) which further impacts sleep and rest and so on. So learning to get a better night's sleep is crucial in helping to break that cycle. You get better sleep, you perform better in the daytime, you perform better in the daytime you stress less and get to sleep easier and on and on. 

"OK", you're saying, "this is all good and fine, Brad, but what the hell do we do about it??". 

I thought you'd never ask. I mentioned the "bottom up" nature of brain functions. Here's where we're going to learn some "top down" management techniques to get those rebel brain regions at least somewhat under control. 

First up is the very thing right before you now as you read this post. The light from the screens of all our various electronic devices is not good for those special neurons in the retinas of the eyes we talked about that are responsible for sensing oncoming darkness. The light wave that emits from device screens - be it TVs, computer screens, tablet screens or handheld devices - is the same wavelength of light in the DAWN sky. So yeah, if you use a device late in the evening before bed? You're sending wavelengths of light that are telling your circadian cycle it's time to get up! Which makes it pretty hard for your eyeballs to communicate to your suprachiasmatic nucleus in your hypothalamus to tell it to kick the circadian rhythm into gear. So it is the light from screens of devices that is almost certainly playing a big part your difficulty in sleeping. Not to mention that what you're reading is probably getting your limbic region all in a huff (and anxious).  

So what to do? This is where you need to make an "executive - IE: top down - decision" and set a limit and stick to it. No more electronic devices after a certain hour and then make that a habit. Need help with that habit? I can think of nothing better than to go to behavioural change expert, Stanford professor Kelly McGonigal whose book The Willpower Instinct is just by far the best I've seen for learning and implementing new habits. And she not only has great habit change techniques, but also good meditation techniques. Win/win there, baby. 

I know - I know - how hard it is to turn your brain off in the evening. You're a busy person, I know. But here's the thing - you'd get a LOT more done during the day with a well rested and maintained brain and thus not feel so anxious in the evening about undone things! Yes, yes, easier said than done; I know. But hey, everything worthwhile takes effort. So give yourself lots of time to wind down. If your sleep time target is 10pm, stop device use by 9.

Then - and this is important - make a list of things to do the next day. This will send a message to your brain that says, "yo, cingulate gyrus (remember, that anxiety centre I told you about), we got this stuff covered. Going to do it all tomorrow just like the list says. So you can relax and go to sleep." And then DO that stuff that next day or the next time you write your list your brain will think you're lying (brains are awfully smart about these things). This is just a terrific habit to get into before bed time. 

You could do a little light reading to feel sleepy. I know books are almost guaranteed to put me asleep in the late evening. You just don't want anything too demanding. Remember, you're trying to dial your brain activity back, not ramp it up. 

Next, you're going to meditate. Turn off all lights and just ... well, I don't have time for a meditation lesson here now but I use an extremely simple one of counting as I breathe in and then out and focusing on those breathes. Inhale - one-two-three, exhale - one-two-three. The key thing is to focus on your breathes. It takes practice, I can tell you, but after several weeks, you'll start to get it. Once I mastered this (after only a few weeks), I'd do my counting and measured breathing techniques for not too long and the next thing I knew it was the next morning and I'd slept like a log.

So not being on a device, making the list for the next day, and doing the sleep time meditating is going to calm some of those deep regions in your brain down. As for longer term ways to deal with stress, I can think of no better methods than my very own Positive Difference Making Fundamentals. I've got a LOT of feedback on these from people "in the know", shall I say. They work.

OK, you say, you can fall asleep but wake up at 2am and can't get back to sleep. I totally hear you on that one. Happens to me often too. The thing to do here is not get into a habit of doing things once you're awake. I won't turn on the light or do anything. I'll keep my eyes closed and repeat my meditative techniques. And if that doesn't get me back to sleep, I'll still be keeping my brain in the most restive state possible. Or it may take an hour but I'll still manage to fall asleep for another few hours of valuable sleep.  

And this is the last big take away for today. Any habit - ANY habit - takes time to change so go easy on yourself if it doesn't go well at first. Most people freak out, throw up their hands and give up if it doesn't happen the first night. This is a journey. It takes time. The goal is to be getting to sleep earlier and getting better sleep in - say - a month or so. Just stick to the fundamentals I gave you here - and maybe research some more on your own - and you'll get there. I promise.

And just think - that next big board meeting? (or whatever it is you do that's important) You'll not be showing up all groggy from a brain full of neuron poop. 


You're welcome. 

Sources:

(1) - Wikipedia

Kelly McGonigal's The Willpower Instinct

Many scholarly articles like this one, this one and this one.

More studies on the importance of sleep in forming new memories

David Suzuki's The Nature of Things

Plus, you can find more ways to beat insomnia here.

Good night and sleep tight. 

PS - sorry about the font size issues. It looks formatted properly in the composition box but then when posted some font sizes where bold or within a link come out larger. 

A Tale of Two Men in a Bar

Two men walk into a bar. Each looks at a third man for no more than a second or two. The third man returns a glance to the two men. The first man impassively passes by the third man. The second man immediately gets angry, approaches the third man and gets into a loud confrontation. 

What gives? The third man - whom we'll call Pete - gave each of the first two men the exact same glance. Why were their reactions so different? We'll call the impassive man Bob and the angry man Roger. Bob further compounds the situation by saying Roger is too sensitive. Roger denies this and now is really in a huff! (I think we can deduce that Bob is the man on the left in our above illustration and Roger on the right). "I don't know why, but that Pete just always pisses me off", Roger tells Bob.

How could Pete piss off Roger with a mere glance and not Bob? What do you think; is Roger too sensitive and he overreacted? Is Bob a cool customer or is he missing something? And what did Pete's expression really mean when he returned Roger and Bob's glances? 

This is a simple scene that plays out every day in dozens of settings throughout our worlds, from kindergarten sand boxes to corporate board rooms. We're going to address a number of different brain region activities all in one go today. One is a common difference among us - individual "sensitivity". Two is going to be a bit of a primer of both how our senses work, in this case how our sense of sight works, and in this particular case a bit about how our "facial recognition software" works. Plus, as an added bonus, we'll further deepen our understanding of what is meant by each of us having our own unique "realities". 

Now, let's return to the scene in the bar. No words were exchanged at first so the auditory sense wasn't involved. Or was it? Maybe there's more there than "meets the eye". We'll exclude the sense of smell for now and no touch or taste was involved. Now these all may have played a role but we'll leave that for now. Let's just focus on the exchanged glances for now and the sense of sight.

Now you may recall from our introduction to basic brain regions in Neuroscience 101 that we don't actually "see" with our eyes. Our eyes are really just highly sophisticated light collectors. The eyes collect light (and a narrow band of the light bandwidth it is) and translate the bits of information contained in those beams of light (a rather complicated business we'll leave for another day) into electrical signals which it sends off to the brain via the optic nerve. What we experience as "vision" really originates in that region at the back of the brain called the occipital lobe. That's where it all happens, not in the eyes. So really when we say someone has a "good eye" for something, what we really mean is that they have a "good occipital lobe" for something!  

Here's where it is:

And it is in the occipital lobe that "facial recognition software" is located. Facial recognition is one of our higher evolved functions, though most primates are pretty good at it. Lower mammals less so (despite what some pet lovers would like to believe but we'll leave that for another time). Our facial recognition software would be an excellent example of being what neuroscientist David Eagleman famously calls our "zombie programs", that is it's a brain function that runs autonomously without any, or at least very little, conscious input from "you". It's also one of the very first zombie programs to come on stream after you're born. One of the first things a newborn will turn its gaze to is people's faces and, with the help of a few other brain processes, it'll very quickly learn to recognize and lock in on its mother's face.

Our facial recognition software is a very complicated process and we are not all created equal in it. There's basic stuff - like analyzing simple things like "data points" to distinguish a man from a woman - and then further stuff to distinguish Bob from Roger for example. This is basic stuff that is now becoming replicated by facial recognition software - as in the computer variety as opposed to our brain "software" - now used in places such as airports and such to pick out known terrorists as one example. So artificial intelligence has started to catch up to us humans there.

Here's an example of the artificial version. Our brain version would track similar points but in far more detail.

  

But now to get to, in part, what we mean by "sensitive". Humans are still better at detecting the wide array of facial expressions we use to display emotions. And it is here that individual people are not created equal. One would assume that we'd all recognize emotional clues from facial expressions in the same way but not so. Some of us not only collect more "data" - the finer points of varying human expressions - but we assemble it better and have a wider array of differing facial models. 

So two different people could see the exact same expression on a third person's face and literally see two different things just like we saw with our two gentlemen walking into the bar. Now, remember what I said in Neuroscience 101 about our each having our own realities? This is just a fraction of what I'm talking about. 

But - but! - it doesn't end there. 

Once the occtipital lobe assembles this "picture" of a given face, it needs to send the data off to another region for further processing. And that would be the "emotional centre". 

All sensory data - sight, sound, touch, taste and smell - gets routed through that little tandem in the heart of the limbic system, the hippocampus and amygdala. The hippocampus is responsible for "filing" data away for future reference and the amygdala is responsible for "tasting" that visual data - Pete's expression when he glanced at Bob and Roger for example - for emotional content and it will also attach an emotional value to it as well. It's the amygdala, not "you", that decides whether you should feel happy, sad, excited, glum and much so on about all the little things your sensory organs take in every second that you are conscious (in the awake sense of the word). Then, in a neat little dance between the two of them, the amygdala and hippocampus will decide whether that data should be filed away for future reference and furthermore, how much priority that data will be given in the future. 

Those little data processing partners, just to remind, look like this:

So back to the facial expression on the Pete's face and Bob and Roger experiencing that expression differently, it is largely the amygdala that differentiates the two individual experiences. One person's amygdala may "decide" that the expression in question is just "meh" and the other person's amygdala may decide that that expression is worth remembering and to make sure you remember it well, it's going to attach a good bit of anger to it (the amygdala actually works with a good deal of other brain regions - emotional regulation centres located in the frontal lobes, for example - but it is the main brain nodule responsible for emotions).  

But to further understand the scene in the bar we have to look a bit further into how Bob and Roger each got the way they were. 

Remember in Why? I said all newborns start out the same? Well, that's only partially true of course. As far as basic hardware goes, yes, each newborn will be much the same but there will be fine differences between each newborn's hardware and wiring and that of course is determined by genetics and its womb environment. 

Let's look at the regions involved in our bar scene; the occitipal lobe, amygdala and hippocampus. They'll look the same on the outside but genetics will kick their development in slightly different directions. In a "sensitive" person, they may be gifted with a more finally tuned facial recognition software system. They may also have a more active amygdala. Their hippocamus may also be slightly different. 

From there it is the individual's environmental experiences that will take over and that will go from our kindergarten sand box right up to our boardroom. From the sandbox, Roger, for example, with his genetically programmed more sensitive hardware, will not only "see" more in his playmates' facial expressions, but his amygdala will attach more emotion to them and with this higher emotional value the hippocampus will give this data higher priority in storing it away for future reference (IE: putting it in short term and long term memory banks). And this feedback loop system will run autonomously for all of Roger's life constantly re-enforcing his "sensitivity". 

Bob meanwhile started out with facial recognition software that simply didn't "see" as much of the nuances in other kids' faces and furthermore, his amygdala would be more "meh" about what he did see and further-furthermore, his hippocampus, because it's receiving a "meh, not important" message, doesn't bother filing as much facial data away. And this plays out throughout Bob's life and thus, when he saw Pete's expression in the bar, he noticed nothing. 

Roger's more highly attuned "facial recognition" software, however, saw a kaleidoscope of information and furthermore, his memory - a subconscious autonomous function, not a conscious function - remembered something about Pete's expression that Bob did not - or could not. Now what might that be?

Well, we can't be sure but I'd bet dimes to doughnuts that it has something to do with speech. We won't get into this too much today but if Roger's facial recognition software is "sensitive", I'd bet that his speech recognition software is as well. Looking at our first brain image again, that's located here, in the Wernicke's area.

Just quickly, to wrap today's lesson up, Roger's brain system quite likely at some point saw a very similar look on Pete's face at some previous point which at that time was accompanied by some nasty words perhaps. In that case, the speech recognition software would have been included in the loop we looked at above which would have attached further meaning to the facial expression. Roger doesn't exactly remember that encounter but his "sensitive" memory does and thus, without Roger really knowing why, Pete's glance at him - with perhaps an eyebrow raised a certain way - set off an alarm bell in his amygdala - "Hey! It's that "look" again!" Likely too, Roger had seen similar looks on other people in the past and perhaps had strong emotional components attached to them as well. 

And all this adds up to a mere glance within a second or two "setting off" Roger. The more passive Bob, meanwhile, because all his hardware never really developed to notice these things, well, notices nothing.

One last factor and we're done for this segment. These systems don't operate at the same rate of speed in each individual either. Roger's brain might be able to jump from face to face more quickly and deduce more. Bob's might run slower and at the moment his eyes took in Pete's expression, his facial recognition software and limbic system may have still been grappling with a face he'd exchanged glances with moments before. 

So when I say someone is "sensitive", I actually mean it as a compliment. They just "get" a lot more out of things around them. And they'll generally be more empathetic because they have "better data" to send off to their brain's empathy centre. Which is a topic for another day. 

So there we go; a look at how some simple exchanged glances in a bar get processed differently and some further understanding of how each of our individual "realities" are created - all in one fell swoop. 

Sources:

David Eagleman's Incognito

Rita Carter's Mapping the Mind

Steven Pinker's How the Mind Works

And scholarly stuff such as this.

Thanks as always for reading along. I hope it was insightful for you and we'll see you next time!

Dopamine the Bus Driver

[correction included]

. 

What is dopamine? What, for that matter, is a neurochemical (or neurotransmitter in this case)? Let's do a brief refresher from Neuroscience 101. 

You have billions and billions of these:

Neurons, as you'll recall, store your "data" (memories, information and so on). You'll see axons and dendrites there as well. Axons pass on information to other neurons and dendrites are on the receiving end. At the junction of an axon and a dendrite you have a synapse (and recall that you have somewhere around a hundred and fifty trillion synapses). A synapse looks like this:

That's somewhat simplified of course but I can assure you that it is a complicated piece of business, a business that takes place over trillions and trillions of synapses in your brain trillions of times per second for every minute that you will draw breath in your lifetime. The business we're talking about is the transfer of signals from neuron to neuron throughout a given pathway. In other words, if these transactions don't take place, then the information from any given set of neurons isn't "brought on board" whatever it is "you" are trying to do. These ridiculously fine transactions (a synaptic cleft is only about 20 nanometers across and the neurochemicals themselves are very fine indeed) govern a massive amount of brain activity which in turn governs "you". 

So that's a neurotransmitter and dopamine is just one such transmitter of about a hundred but, as we'll see, it's a very major one when it comes to animal and human behaviour. Let's review the dopamine pathways. They look like this:

We briefly touched on that in Neuroscience 101 and now it's time to look at it in a little more detail. Dopamine originates in the Ventral Tegmental Area, a small nodule in the limbic system . The limbic system lies between our more elementary "lizard brain" brain stem hardware and our more highly evolved cortex area. The VTM's job is pretty elementary and it acts in accordance to messages from other more prominent parts of the limbic system. Aside from very advanced practitioners of meditation (whom we'll look at in a fascinating future post), this part of our brain is quite "off limits" when it comes to our conscious control. There's a potential kind of "back door" access to the VTM - aside from meditation - that could initiate a modicum of control but we'll touch on that at the end when we look a bit more at dopamine's complete circuit. (correction notice)

From the VTM, the circuit heads to that little bit of hardware that seems to come up in every discussion on human behaviour, the amygdala. We looked at this highly influential little brain nodule in the previous post and examined a bit how much power it has over our perceptions of and reactions to the outside world, and hence our behaviours. We established then that the amydgala is a major driver of our actions. So if the amygdala is a big part of our actions and dopamine is a part of what drives that, then dopamine is part of what controls a very deep part of who we are and what we do. 

Another key destination is the nucleus accumbens. Research has indicated that this nodule (of which there is a left and right in the respective hemispheres of your brain) has an important role in pleasure; including laughter, reward, reinforcement learning, as well as fear, aggression, impulsiveness, addiction and the placebo effect. So again, we see dopamine plays a role in a key region of many of our most human attributes (as well as those in animals; we just take those to higher and more sophisticated levels).

But there's more.

You can see that the end destination of dopamine is the frontal and prefrontal cortex. As I mentioned in Neuroscience 101, if you want to know where "you" are, it's believed by some neuroscientists to be "there" (though recent evidence now puts this in some dispute). It is also in these areas that we experience theory of mind, the uniquely human abilities involved in such things as understanding how others are thinking, our predictive powers and so on. This is, if all goes well, what makes us "human". As well, you can see it's these areas that are responsible for things such as planning and judgment (something we touched on in two different case studies in the previous post). As dopamine is a major influence on what goes on in there, in order to better understand human behaviour (or your pet's behaviour for that matter) and because the neuroscience of human behaviour is the whole point of this blog, we'd better look at this much closer. 

The Reward System

The dopamine system is very often referred to as our "reward system". So let's examine a bit about what's meant by that. 

As I said in Neuroscience 101, dopamine is one of the most widely studied and understood brain systems in neuroscience and there is little doubt as to what forces it has over animal and human behaviour. Dopamine is very strongly implicated in such basic human and animal drives as motivation, pleasure and euphoria, the fine tuning of motor function, and perseveration. We'll look at just motivation and pleasure today. 

Feeling motivated? Feeling "turned on" by what you do? Feeling "driven"? That's dopamine at work in your emotional centre and in your planning and judgment centre, the frontal and prefrontal cortex. Not feeling those things? That's dopamine not working so well (for reasons we'll touch on at the end). The same with feelings of pleasure - that's dopamine telling "you" that whatever you're doing, it feels "good" which is why dopamine is a major part of our sex drive. The pleasure you feel in sex is derived in part, though not all (we'll examine the other factors in a later post), from a dopamine "hit". Dopamine also can - emphasis on can - keep you motivated to keep seeking sex (often to disastrous results). Why it sometimes doesn't is something we have to leave aside for that later post. 

The evolutionary idea is, you see, to "reward" you with a deliciously good feeling for something beneficial to your survival to ensure that you'll be motivated to not only do that again but to keep you focused on it (and motivated and focused and motivated and focused and motivated and focused in the case of addictions). 

How much does dopamine drive our motivations and pleasures? Robert Sapolsky is a world wide recognized leading expert on dopamine and behaviour so I'll let him tell it. As Sapolsky explains;

dopamine levels increase as soon as we start anticipating a reward. Once the dopamine starts flowing, monkeys and people will work and work and work in expectation of receiving a "treat" at the end of their toil. For monkeys, the anticipated reward can be a grape. For humans it can be a pair of sneakers, a shiny car (you'll recall the example I gave in Neuroscience 101 of a "decision" to buy a new car), an MBA that might lead to a high-paying job, early retirement, a couple of minutes of entertaining diversion, a few seconds of sexual gratification, or the promise of eternal salvation. 

A brief five minute video of Sapolsky explaining this in slightly more, and very fascinating, detail can be found here. 

I've said that there are parts of neuroscience that are well known and parts that aren't so well known. The dopamine reward system is very much on the known side of the ledger. Literally thousands of experiments and studies done over very many decades on all manner of animal and human research subjects have very thoroughly cemented dopamine's role in our behaviours. As our dopamine system is indistinguishable from that of rats, cats, dogs, primates (or moose as my humorous lead image shows) and so on, researchers can see that our behavioural drives are not all that different from, for example, a rat driven to go through great lengths to press a lever again and again to receive a reward. What's fascinating (and which Sapolsky explains in the video) is that this drive increases when "maybe" variables are introduced. Which is literally what keeps the city of Las Vegas in business. 

But while we may share a dopamine drive with the average lab rat (and all other mammals), human brains have some additional hardware, that being our vaunted frontal and prefrontal cortexes which is why we're (probably) not going to be motivated by a grape or a bit of rat food like our lower mammal cousins are. It's these so-called regions of "control" that keep us going like rats on a wheel in pursuit of things like sneakers, cars, degrees, trophy wives (or husbands) and all our other "higher" human desires. 

So when we're driven to acquire something - be it an object of desire, money, a sex partner (or companionship) - dopamine is a very large part of what's going on and your drive to achieve goals in life, if it's functioning "normally", is your dopamine reward system.

But the dopamine system is a "blind robot" so to speak. It has no sense of judgment. Hence it will drive you to achieve virtually anything. Which is why dopamine is highly, highly involved in virtually all addictions (including your shop till you drop addiction, ladies, or your manly pursuits, gents). Not only does it have no innate judgment, it impairs yours (as witnessed by its influence on your judgment and planning centres in your brain). 

Is our "highly sophisticated" efforts of planning and judgment merely at the behest of a simple, autonomously running neurochemical? Dopamine won't have complete control - there are other factors - but enormous amounts of research indicates that it does indeed play a major role. This is what I mean by saying we don't really "drive our bus". That all happens in regions that are not only below our conscious awareness but well below our levels of control. 

We're running up to the end of our time today so we're going to have to leave our look at dopamine and addictions of all kinds for the next post. 

Now, I said that there was a "back door" access to the VTA from which dopamine originates. This suggests that there is a modicum of control that we may have over our dopamine system (and thus "us"). This comes from the fact that the reward centre is not strictly an "A to B" road, but one of a loop of output and input. Inputs come from areas it affects and for an idea of how much control this may have, and thus what you may have (as I promised), we have to look into the human species' "social brain", the most highly evolved such area in the animal world. I also said we'd look at why we're sometimes under-motivated and why dopamine may not be "floating your boat". It's a bit complex and a little dicey to explain, but we'll have a go at it. But that, my friends, is for another day. First, however, we're going to look more into dopamine and addictions in another post of case studies coming up in the very next post. 

Correction notice: I initially incorrectly said that the VTM is located in the brainstem when in fact it is part of the limbic system. My apologies. 

Sources:

Too many to list at this time, virtually all of them scientific research papers like this one.The works of Sapolsky are a good place to start for further reading. As always, I have to thank Robert Whitaker, his works and his encouragement over the time I've known him. 

The Neuroscience of Behaviour - Some Case Studies

Examples are always a good way to understand complex issues. What we've looked at so far - a bit of a look at the neuronal circuitry of brains, and in particular the human brain - is a bit complex for sure and there are, for most people, some difficult concepts to wrap one's head around. So we'll look at some case studies in which severe behavioural changes were found to be the result of not being morally "bad" or "evil" but because of how specific brain regions had been negatively affected by factors outside of the person's conscious awareness or control. This will give us a more concrete way of understanding brain functions and behaviour. 

Before we continue, however, a few key points to keep in mind.

Each Brain is Different:

Because of genetics and brain developmental responses to environmental conditions, every brain will develop a little differently. This is even true with very elementary brains such as those found in a bee! So it's especially true with our highly evolved and complex brains. 


The Concept of Differing Realities:

By "reality" I don't mean whether a tree is a tree or is just an "illusion". We have objective methods of measuring physical objects and can agree on what they are (in physics terms). No, what we mean here is that because each of our brains are different, each brain will "assemble" what the five senses take in a little differently and thus we will all "see" - IE: perceive - things a little differently. We'll look more into the fundamentals of this later but this is an important fact to bear in mind for now. We may both see a tree, but our individual perceptions of that tree may well be different on many levels. This is well understood by modern science and is no longer in question but we'll save a more detailed look at this for another day.

Brain Regions and Behaviour:

There are, as we briefly looked at in Neuroscience 101, many microscopic components and larger components (assembled from the smaller components) in any brain (animal or human). Each region will have a basic responsibility such as the amygdala for emotions and the basal ganglia and cerebellum for motor movements (all your physical abilities) as two relatively straight forward examples. Other regions will be responsible for higher functions like reasoning, judgment and so on. It is these components and how they work in concert or not that play very large roles, as we'll see, in driving our behaviours. 


These are the basic premises for the neuroscience of behaviour that we have to keep in mind. And with these in mind, let's dive into some tangible case studies.

Phineas Gage:

We're going get two birds with one stone with our first case study. For one, it'll give us a bit of a look into and a lesson about the history of neuroscience and two, we'll see how damage to specific brain regions radically altered a person's character and behaviour. 

The story of Gage is one of the most studied and cited cases in neuroscience history. When you read the remarkable story and see the illustrations, you'll see why. 

This is Phineas Gage, a railroad foreman from the mid-nineteenth century, and in his left hand is a tamping rod that blew through his skull as the result of a mistimed explosion.  

The tamping rod entered through his left cheek and into his brain where it took out a good chunk of his frontal lobes as we can see in this computer recreation of what happened. Remarkably, 

Gage survived.

While Gage the living, breathing, blood pumping body survived, Gage the person did not. His behaviour radically changed following the accident and his recovery. Prior to the accident he was widely known as, in the words of the doctor who handled his case, "possessed of a well balanced mind, and looked upon as a shrewd businessman, very energetic and persistent in executing all his plans of operations". Friends, acquaintances and coworkers knew him to be polite and well spoken and an excellent and responsible foreman on his railway crew. His employers regarded him as "the most efficient and capable foreman in their employ". After the accident he became profane, wild, sexually out of control, and with little control over his actions and almost all chose to avoid him. He became so unreliable that his employers could no longer keep him. 

While his body lived, in the words of those who knew him, he was "no longer Gage". He became a completely changed man. 

What was lost when the tamping rod took out a portion of Gage's brain were areas in the prefrontal cortex, an area critical for reasoning and judgment (which we'll look at in a little more detail shortly). With this region no longer part of Gage's inner galaxies, he could no longer regulate the animal passions welling up from lower brain regions. 


The Man on the Clocktower:

Some of you may recall from the post Why? that I asked why a bright, educated, gainfully employed bank teller and church going man with no previous history of violence would suddenly tote a number of firearms up to a clock tower and gun down forty-three people. That man's name was Charles Wittman and he will be our next case study. 

Wittman's rampage took place in August of 1966 and dominated headlines. Why, everyone wanted to know, would someone seemingly so mild mannered and "normal" do something like this? (and it was later discovered that he'd killed his mother and wife prior to going to the clocktower). How could he do something like this? Wittman himself, it turned out, wanted answers too. In his suicide note, he wrote:

I do not really understand myself these days. I am supposed to be an average reasonable and intelligent young man. However, lately (I cannot recall when it began) I have been a victim of many unusual and irrational thoughts. 

 Some months prior, Wittman had written in his diary:

I talked to a doctor once for about two hours and tried to convey to him my fears that I felt overcome by overwhelming violent impulses. After one session I never saw the doctor again, and since then I have been fighting my mental turmoil alone, and seemingly to no avail. 

Whittman in his suicide note requested that an autopsy be performed on his brain. He got his wish. What the autopsy found was a brain tumour about the size of a nickel which impinged on or compressed three different key brain regions - the thalamus, the hypothalamus and amygdala. As you may recall from Neuroscience 101, these brain components are part of our limbic system and are at the core of many human and animal behaviours. The amygdala is especially pertinent here as it plays a major role in emotional regulation and governs such things as fear and aggression. As the amygdala is so important regarding human and animal behaviour, let's have a bit of a closer look at it. 

It's hard to overstate the importance of the amygdala in human and animal behaviour. All your "data input" through your five senses routes through this bit of hardware common to all in the animal kingdom. The amygdala "tastes" all this input for emotional content as well as attaching emotional content when this "data" is then shuttled around to other regions (including short term and long term memory). Any fears you have will be generated by this brain node, including all phobias. It will play a major role in not only your perception of fear and other emotions (from love to hate and everything in between) and how elevated that is but also how you respond and take action. When I wrote in an earlier post that there are subconscious systems that "drive your bus", the amygdala is a major driver with a great deal of "say" in how you interact with the outside world. 

Neuroscientist David Eagleman explains:

The role of the amygdala in human behaviour has been recognized as far back as the late 1800's when researchers discovered that damage to the amygdala caused emotional and social disturbances. In the 1930s, biologists Heinrich Kluver and Paul Bucy demonstrated that damage to the amygdala in monkeys led to a constellation of behavioural changes including lack of fear, blunting of emotion, and overreaction. Female monkeys with amygdala damage showed inappropriate maternal behaviour, often neglecting or physically abusing their infants. 

 Just a bit further on the limbic system and behaviour in general, it is known that far more messages from the limbic system travel up to the higher cortical regions than vise versa. In other words, the limbic system has far more "say" in what we do than our so called higher facilities located in the neocortex do. This is a huge part of what is meant by "subconscious" systems running the "conscious" you. These systems go awry and "you" go awry. 


Another Brain Tumour Case Study:

This is a case of something which strikes a strong emotional reaction in all of us - pedophilia. Is pedophilia the result of an "evil soul" or a "sick mind"? I ask that you not jump to conclusions here. Let's look at the case of a forty year man with no previous history of wayward sexual behaviour whom we'll call "Alex". Alex went from being a normally behaved married man to one whose sexual preferences suddenly changed. At the age of forty he developed an obsessive and overwhelming interest in child pornography and began to devote a great deal of time to it through magazines and web sites. He wrote later that he wanted to stop but just could not control himself. His behaviour progressed to the point beyond just pornography, he was discovered, charged and was convicted of child molestation. 

For some time prior to his imprisonment Alex complained of unbearable headaches and finally sought treatment. A brain scan revealed a massive tumour in his orbitofrontal cortex cortex. This is an area of the forebrain, or frontal lobes, known to be involved in sexual regulation among many other functions of judgement, decision making and planning. This is a more highly evolved bit of neuronal hardware that separates human sexual behaviour from that of our evolutionary cousins and fore-bearers. 

This handy bit of brain hardware is located here:

Things go awry here (or at least in a specific sub-region of this region) and sexual behaviour goes awry. It is this region of the brain that recognizes "sexual norms" (whatever they may be in your part of the world) and helps regulate your behaviour accordingly. 

And to further illustrate this point, once the brain tumour in Alex's orbitofrontal cortex was removed, his sexual behaviour returned to normal. And to present even more evidence, Alex's behaviour did take a turn for the worse again. But it was discovered that the surgeons had missed a part of the tumour and it had started to enlarge again. The remaining bit of tumour was removed and again, Alex returned to normal sexual behaviour. It was also a huge part of this brain region that was demolished when the tamping rod blew through Phineas Gage's frontal lobes, forever altering his behaviour. 

While this is but one case study, numerous studies and enough research has gone into the relation of this region and sexual behaviour and preferences to firmly establish that damage, underdevelopment or hyper-activation of this region will lead to sexually perverse behaviour (not to mention other psychopathic or sociopathic behaviour). There are also other ways that this important regulating part of the brain can be bypassed or compromised, not to mention how it was genetically and environmentally endowed in the first place, that we'll look at in future posts. 

So I hope those cases gave you some insight into the relation between brain regions and their functions and corresponding human behaviour. Simply put, damage or somehow alter the functioning of a given region and you alter the behaviour of a person.

Now does this mean I'm saying that brain damage or impaired neural development should absolve people of their anti-social or criminal behaviour? Why, as a matter of fact I am. Neuroscience is shining a vast amount of light into what we have traditionally regarded as "responsible" and "moral" behaviour. And unlike our past clumsy attempts at this, now we have have objective methods to examine and understand human behaviours rather than our traditional subjective (IE: opinionated and crudely judgmental) methods of the past. Understanding human behaviour through objective science means not only can we understand why people behave the way they do, but based on this scientific understanding we can better design methods to correct that behaviour that will be far superior to our ancient, crude and tragically ineffective and costly punitive methods. 

As I said in my opening post, I became far, far more compassionate towards my fellow humans when I began to understand how brains really work and that I thought, or hoped, you'd become the same. What I'm asking that you open your mind to is the fact that outwards behaviour that angers you is almost certainly to be the result of a brain problem and is not a "morality" problem or some sort of intentional act. This will take more to establish than just this one post but I want to set the stage for much of what's to come (though it won't all be just regarding moral behaviour). 

Now am I suggesting that we should just allow any anti-social behaviour and forgive it because their brains are broken? No, not in the least. What I'm suggesting is that when we look at a case of anti-social or criminal behaviour that we realize that simple traditional punishments are highly unlikely to "fix" that behaviour y and understand that there are better, more scientific methods for correcting that behaviour. This is not a matter of being a "bleeding heart liberal"; it's a matter of acting on the most up to date science, pure and simple, and getting better outcomes as a result. What we're learning about the brain and behaviours is as literally ground shaking as learning that the earth was not the centre of the universe and will have as profound an affect on the future of human relations and development. 

This is the direction various branches of neuroscience, philosophy and the studies of ethics are heading, all based on the ever emerging scientific understanding of what drives human behaviour and morality. 

"Now", you may very well be thinking, "but those were clear cases of brain damage. Surely not every pedophile (for example) has suffered brain damage?". And you'd be quite correct. We can't pin all wayward human behaviour on brain damage suffered through injury or disease. But as we go along, we'll see that a great number of factors can affect these different regions and thus the behaviour they're responsible for. Genetics play a large role but we'll see all kinds of environmental factors can have huge and profound affects on the development of these regions and how they perform, or not perform at all. 

While regional brain damage and/or developmental problems have been firmly established to affect specific behaviour, animal and human behaviour is not completely governed by "regionology" (my term), that is, it's not completely just damaged or over/underdeveloped brain regions that govern behaviour. Neurotransmitters play a very large role in lighting up certain regions and thus driving behaviour and the neurotransmitter dopamine is a real linchpin here. So dopamine, and its fascinating role in virtually all of our behaviours, will be examined next. 

Sources:

David Eagleman's Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain

Rita Carter's Mapping the Mind and The Human Brain Book

Daniel Dennett's Breaking the Spell

Neurobiologist Dean Buonomano's Brain Bugs: How the Brain's Flaws Shape Our Lives

Various works and thoughts of Patricia Churchland

Numerous, numerous science websites such as this one.

Thank you as always for reading along. 

A Review and Some Other Thoughts

One of the beauties of presenting learning material in blog form is that blogs can be interactive and the presenter can adjust the presentation on the fly depending on that interaction. For instance, after the opening three posts of this blog I got some valuable feed back. One reader had some very good questions that gave me some valuable insight into how the material I'm presenting is being perceived and another reader felt that the “basics” in Neuroscience 101 were pretty advanced. So now I can adjust my “course” accordingly. In my opening post I said I was a good teacher and gave the reasons. 

Bearing in mind some of my feedback, it's probably a good idea to review some of the key points of the previous post before we go on.

Review:

The brain is made up of a few key components which we looked at in the previous post. Neuroscience doesn't refer to them as components but we'll use that term for now for simplicity's sake. I'll also refer to them as the “ABCs” of neuroscience, or in other words the basic building blocks of the common language we need if we are going to learn and discuss the brain and human behaviour. I said in my introductory post that there is much that is known about the brain and there is much yet to be discovered and understood. The following is of the known variety. This is all beyond any shadow of a doubt. The key components are:

• Neurons (brain cells in common vernacular): We'll say for the time being that neurons encode information, or “data” as I'll refer to it. We'll examine in more detail what this data might be and how it gets to a neuron and how that data gets utilized or not. (that “or not” is no doubt the source of many of your frustrations – like when you're in an exam and can't remember a certain math formula that you were sure you knew or you can't recall the name of person who's standing in front of you and who you'd been introduced to many times and so on. We'll also examine how the brain organizes and accesses this data and what might “block access” to that data (often at the worst possible time)).

• Wiring: wiring carries data between neurons (“local”), between the various brain regions, and between your brain and various parts of your body (“long distance”). Actually, we could break long distance down further by saying between brain regions would be like between states or provinces and between your brain and your body would be like “overseas” long distance. These are the axons and dendrites we looked at in Neuroscience 101 though axons do all the long distance work and dendrites are more just the receiving end of the wiring. Much fun detail on this to follow.

• Individual brain regions: There are three major brain regions as you'll recall; the brain stem, the limbic region and the neocortex. These in turn subsist of highly specialized sub regions. The brain stem has the fewest and most basic, the limbic region has more and slightly more advanced regions and the neocortex is where all the highest and most advanced cognitive functions exist. It is homo sapians' highly evolved specialized regions in the neocortex that make us what we like to call “human”. The wiring (and perhaps other factors that we'll look into) is what connects all these regions and is how these regions work in concert (or not as we'll see).

• Glia cells: These are the “new kids on the block”. Until quite recently they were thought to be just “filler”, kind of a scaffolding, the job of which was merely to hold neurons and their networks in place. That notion has been thoroughly thrown out the window (see how science works? New vital discoveries happen all the time) and it is now known that the various glia cells far outnumber neurons and furthermore they are an ultra critical component in how the brain functions. We'll be looking at some eye popping details about these little guys.

• Electricity, neurochemicals and synapses: I'm going to lump these together for now but we'll see they are quite different things (though also sort of not). I put them together because they basically are how communication takes place between neurons, between the different brain regions and between the far flung regions of your body and specialized brain regions dedicated to those body regions.

• Hormones: hormones are a powerful component, capable of shutting down essential brain regions at the snap of a finger, calling dormant regions into action within the blink of an eye, sending life saving messages to body parts and so on. They can save your butt or kill you (or otherwise get you into a lot of trouble you'd rather not have). We'll want to pay very special attention to how these work.

In our brain anatomy primer series we'll look at all these regions and components in a little more detail and learn more about what they do and how they're all cobbled together to make “you”. It is each our own individual arrangements of these six components and how they interact that is responsible for all of our behaviour (or the behaviour of any animal as we'll see when we look at basic brain structures and what they do).

How all these regions develop themselves and function depend on two other basic things; genetics and environment. Genetics are, basically, the DNA code you were born with. Environment is everything your five senses detect from the time you were in the womb. As you have zero control over the former and next to zero control over the latter, you kind of have had next to zero control over who you currently are. I qualified that statement with “currently” so that you'd not lose hope that you have at least a smattering of input into your “destiny” (1). Trust me, you'll be very interested in the amount of “control” you do have so you're going to want to pay rapt attention as we go along. Knowing what you cannot or potentially (much emphasis on potentially) can control will save you and others a lot of grief, frustration and wasted time and energy. I'll be sure to let you know when we get to those points so that you can stop snoozing, sit up straight, sharpen your pencil and take some notes (no, as much as you'd like to know these things now we're not ready to get to those just yet. Trust me, it would do you little good if you didn't understand how the ABCs work).

Who “you” are or who any individual is – for better or worse – is sort of a “more than the sum of the parts” of how those basic components came to form and function (as dictated by genetics (nature) and environment (nurture). Yes, there is something to the nature versus nurture debate after all. While the debate still rages, we'll see that neuroscience is providing all the answers once and for all. All the six components I listed operate autonomously, quite beyond your “conscious” control (and we'll see why this is a Good Thing. We'll also see why this can sometimes be a Bad Thing). These are parts of the “zombie programs” as neuroscientist David Eagleman calls them. Also, as we go into more detail about these autonomous systems, we'll understand what “subconscious” currently means. Neuroscience has a different way of looking at it than did the pioneers who first discovered the concept and gave it that name (Freud, et al).

ALL human behaviour originates in how these brain regions were formed and function together (or not function together). This will be very exciting so be sure to put on your Sherlock Holmes outfit. There'll be many mysteries solved here.

The human brain (or any brain for that matter) did not just pop out of the oven as is. It evolved to be what it is (and is of course still evolving. It's not like there's an “end point” to evolution. Well, that's not true either. The sun will burn out in a few billion years and that will be the end of that (unless we master inter-galactic travel and living by then)), a process that took billions of years and a lot of what we'll call “trial and error”. Knowing this, it is impossible to learn and discuss neuroscience without delving into evolutionary biology and the various disciplines of evolutionary science. Human behaviour, the brain, and evolution are so tightly wound together that is it literally not possible to understand “us” without examining the three all together almost as a single entity. So yes, I'll be weaving the facts of evolution into our look into our Inner Galaxies. No worries! It'll be fun! (no drab, dry lessons in my classroom)

Again, I said that some things about the brain were known and some not so much. Everything I've listed and told you here is very – and I do mean very – on the known side of the ledger. Yes, I know how distressing it is to learn that you have next to no control over who you are and what you'll do in life but … well, hang on.

The big question in neuroscience (and philosophy) are the twin notions of “free will” and “consciousness”. These are on the not completely known (or agreed upon) side of the ledger. What is known and quite widely agreed upon by the top neuroscientists and related philosophers (we'll see that there's actually quite a bit of crossover) the world over is that if either exist (and many firmly assert that neither do and not, as we'll see, without very solid evidence), it's not very much. We'll see that the “conscious you” - the you that opens your eyes and “sees” the world and experiences “thought” - is more or less a passenger (or perhaps the captain) on a very large biological ship (IE: your brain) that navigates through what will be your time on planet earth. Hey, I did warn you that this trip through your inner galaxies would at times be scary (and by scary I mean disturbing and distressing). But don't worry, there's an “app” in your brain to deal with that (which has already been put on alert and spun into action without you needing to give it any direction. We'll be looking into what we sometimes call “bullshit detectors” in fascinating detail and why, if yours is firing now, it's wrong. It's often wrong so don't worry. At any rate, it'll help deal with any distress you're experiencing). Like you, I believed in “free will” and consciousness and soul but once I understood how a brain works and what's understood about brains, I could see that my previously held notions had nary a leg to stand on. So I get how you feel.

I also touched briefly on “reality”. It is necessary to tie this concept into free will and consciousness. It is also extremely well studied, understood and agreed upon by neuroscience that your unique brain (remember, there's only one like it; not only on the current planet, but in the history of the planet) constructs everything that you perceive as “real”. By real, I don't mean whether a tree is a tree or a rock is rock and all that other nonsense that people get into splitting-of-hairs debates about. We can measure those things with instruments and objectively agree on what they are. However, reality as you perceive it is a very fuzzy concept but about which we must all understand more. So, as your brain is the only one like it in history, your “reality” will be the only one like it in history. Cool, eh?! But here's the fly in the ointment – it's all of these individual homo sapians' different realities that give rise to all human conflict. So, as you can well imagine, it's kind of important that we understand this concept. But don't worry, there are ways we can get our realities to converge more and, as we'll see, how they at times spontaneously converge (a very cool concept known as “collective consciousness”). 

I need, before we go too much further on in our series of lessons, to further establish and defend my position that neuroscience is the best tool we have for understanding human behaviour but I am approaching my word limit for a single post and I can see your attention span is wavering for now.

Again though, this is the beauty of blogs. We don't have to tackle too much at once. We can take them in bite size pieces one or two times a week. And yes, I know, some of you will be swallowing these bites easier and for some these bites are going to require quite a bit of chewing. For the latter, it'll all be worth it, I can assure you (but don't worry, if you let it, your brain itself will do most of the chewing for you without “you” having to do anything! Just wait until you learn how this works!).

(1) – the whole concept of “destiny” is one we're going to thoroughly turn on its head. For now, just know that everything you've likely learned about this concept (unless you're already highly advanced in neuroscience or related philosophies) is all rubbish, the stuff of past mythology, and needs to be set to the curb (or kerb depending on where in the English speaking world you live). Yes, I understand how dear these myths likely are to you and to whatever culture you reside in, but trust me, you'll thank me for this. It's all part of understanding “human nature” and reducing our conflicts so this will be highly worth it as well. 

Sources:

David Eagleman's Incognito

Rita Carter's The Brain Book and Mapping the Mind

Sebastian Seung's The Connectome

Jon Lieff's blog, Searching for the Mind

Various Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins over the years

My circle of dear neuroscientist friends on Google Plus and Facebook who ever so kindly hear my questions and either direct me to various sources or answer my questions outright and who constantly stimulate my mind

Various neuroscience research papers too many to mention