I
find it very difficult, if not impossible, to explain how it came to
be that I am here writing these words, and the words that will follow
in ensuing posts, about the science of the brain and why you are
reading them (or in other words, how I came to present them to you).
So I won't explain why, at least not at this point (at any rate, the
story is too long for our time today). It is, however, a fascinating
and interesting story in itself about the human brain so we will get
to it eventually and my greatest hope is that it will serve as an
inspiration to you or someone you care about.
It
is astonishing how little we – the general public, John and Jane Q
– know about the biological computer that is responsible for
everything about who “we” are and every single solitary thing we
will think, imagine and do in our brief appearances on planet Earth.
This was one of the first things that struck me when I dove – head
first into the deep end – into the world of neuroscience; how
little of it was known outside of very small circles. There are
reasons for why this is (and no, it's nothing conspiratorial) and
these reasons are fascinating aspects in themselves about how our brains operate.
These reasons are important, as we'll see, but I believe we need to
do a better job of overriding these reasons and more deeply
understand what truly makes us – the homo sapien species - tick.
The
history of trying to understand what makes us tick is a long one,
about as long as the history of human language I'd wager. About
ninety-nine point nine percent of these attempts involved the only
thing we could do at the time – create theories and ideas based on
the behaviour we observed in each other and ourselves. This is the
foundation of all religions, astrology of all forms, all previous attempts at psychology and
psychiatry, and many, many a myth, fairy tale and novel.
All in attempt to understand, explain, guide and control “human nature” and our behaviour. And all of these attempts failed. We
will see why all these previous attempts – these previous belief
systems - are failures, or at least are grossly inadequate, as we go
along. I know you're probably already upset with me because I may
have listed a pet belief system of yours but please try to set that
aside for now and unleash your inner child's mind of curiosity.
Curiosity may have killed the cat but I promise I'll do you no harm
so do read on.
I
am an innately curious person in that I've always wanted to know why
things were the way they were. I early on found that myths were
unsatisfactory (albeit entertaining) so, though I didn't do well in
science in high school, I felt myself attracted to the scientific
explanation of things and the underlying logic of scientific method.
While I didn't practice science myself, I was attracted to and then
greatly influenced by science writers such as Carl Sagan, Richard
Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Stephen Jay Gould and many others or
documentary presenters such as Sir David Attenborough.
My
greatest curiosity, however, has always been people. I am a people
person. I love people and believe in the good in people. So I've
always been curious about what makes a person do this or that. I'm
therefore an incurable people watcher. I became more deeply
interested in people when I got involved in teaching “little
people” - childhood education. I understood very quickly that I had
very young and undeveloped brains in my hands. I took this very
seriously so I wanted to make sure I did the best job possible and
so, with much help from more experienced colleagues and the research
I did then, I came to know as much as I could about human behaviour
in young children (and older children as well – I taught everyone
from fresh out of diapers kindergarteners to grade twelves). Like
most people, I just did what I could with what was generally known
and widely accepted. I dabbled in reading psychology magazines. I
took pleasure in trying to figure out what made people tick. But
something had always nagged at me. Psychology (and psychiatry, I'd
later discover) didn't strike me as particularly scientific. People
could make claims on pretty sandy foundations of science. In fact, a
lot of claims seemed to have no scientific basis at all – IE: no
way to prove anything with scientific instruments. It was all
seemingly based on “observations” and interpretations of those
observations. As these were people
doing these observations and interpreting and people - as we'll see -
have a lot of built in operating flaws, it all seemed very suspect.
Very interesting and plausible, but suspect nonetheless.
Then
one day – and what brought me to that one day is the story I'll
eventually get to about myself – I came across a description of a
tiny microscopic part of the brain called a “synapse” along with
something called “neurochemicals” and how these related to a
certain human behaviour. Later I attended a talk by the author of
this description in which he further described it, along with some
hand gestures to illustrate what he was describing. I listened in
rapt on the edge of my seat attention as it dawned on me that this
infinitesimally small chemical transaction was in part responsible
for many of our behaviours. I was hooked. I needed to know more about
these synapses and neurochemicals. So I began to read and read and
read some more. Through the wonders of online communities I met
neuroscientists who with great kindness took me and my curiosity under
their wing. They exposed me to the great world of neuroscientific
research methods and data bases which I devoured as if I'd been
starving. I started collecting books about the latest research in
neuroscience. The more I read, the more I was hooked and the more I
read, the more it all tumbled magically into place in my mind (though not magical in the magician's sense). It felt like I'd discovered
something I'd been looking for my whole life. What makes humans tick?
What makes us do all the dizzying amounts of behaviour that humans
are capable of, so much of it seemingly incomprehensible? Our brains.
No mysterious and mythical forces are at work (plenty of wondrous scientific mysteries though,
the explorations of which will be the whole point of this blog), but
the three pound incredibly complex mass of tissue between our ears.
And what makes the brain tick? What makes your
brain tick? Neuroscience is where these answers are being discovered
every day.
I
am a teacher at heart. I've always enjoyed teaching people how to do
things, teaching how things work or how to be better at something.
For many years, in several different countries to several different
peoples, I was an educator to non-English speaking people in learning
the (to them) incomprehensible gibberish that is the English language
and making it comprehensible and become a valuable tool in their
lives. It was deeply, deeply gratifying to me and I was very good at
it. I was good at it because I love two things (among others of
course) – people and teaching (well, three actually. I also happen
to love the English language). So when I became so turned on by and
immersed in neuroscience, I quickly concluded two things – that
more people needed to better understand how brains work (and we'll be
looking at animal brains as well) and that I was the person to
accumulate, digest and teach that knowledge in a way similar to how I
made a difficult foreign language accessible to various peoples. So
why read me and this blog? Because I'm good at taking the complex and hard to
understand and presenting it in such ways as to make it accessible,
fun and easier to understand. Another reason is that I just tend to see things differently. So while you will come across many other blogs about neuroscience, mine will be different and thought provoking in ways that perhaps others are not. Maybe that's because I'm more like you; curious and full of questions.
Some
disclaimers. One, is that of course I don't know everything about neuroscience. I read what I can (which is quite a bit) and I know
and understand a fair amount (which I think I'll prove as we go along) but I
don't know everything (obviously). Then again, no one knows
everything about the brain (which we'll see). But this will be part
of the fun. As I satisfy my curiosity and learn ever more deeply,
I'll satisfy your curiosity and you'll understand ever more deeply.
So we're sort of strapped into this exploration together. Two, is
that neuroscience is making new discoveries all the time. When a new
discovery is made that means a new “truth” is known (we'll examine the meaning of “truth” as we go along) and that an old
“truth” is no longer true or at least not as true as it used to
be. But that's science. Science is all about discoveries and that's why we understand more about
physics, chemistry, evolution, geology, astronomy and so on more than we ever
did before – new discoveries are made every day, further and further increasing our knowledge and understanding and nowhere is this
more true than in neuroscience. So what we need to understand here up front is that there is
still a lot that is not one hundred percent known about the brain so you're not
going to find all the answers here (or anywhere else for that matter) and the answers you do find are …
well, subject to change (though not by much, just the super fine
details or perhaps the broader understandings of previous ideas of
brain functions). There's a lot that
is known
– an astonishing amount as you'll see – but there are a lot of
details that are not yet known, a lot of questions not yet answered (which is part of the fun of neuroscience - there's so much yet to discover!).
I promise you this, however – that I will make every effort to give you the very best of
what is currently known and understood. I am fanatical and assiduous
– almost compulsive - about finding the absolute best scientific
and factual truth currently available from the best possible sources
and I am ruthless about rooting out pseudo-science or BS claims or
just plain old human-nature-jumping-the-gun claims. If there is doubt
about something, I'll pass that along. If something is speculation or
theory only, I'll make that clear. If I turn out to have been wrong
about something or posted erroneous information, I'll acknowledge that and make a correction.
Neuroscience
is, I believe and will passionately argue, the most important field
of study we currently have. If humans are to continue to populate
this earth we will need more and more to cooperate with and
understand each other and to better understand each other that means
better understanding the human brain. If we are going to better
educate our future generations and better prepare them for the
massive challenges we face, we need to better understand brains.
Current popular models of understanding are not only inadequate but
dangerously outdated. To understand each other better, we need to
better understand what makes “us” run – our brains. And to
understand those adequately, we need the best possible methods
available to us. And that's what neuroscience is. For the first time
in our long history and in ways never before imagined as possible, we
are poking into the actual structures and workings of the human
brain and learning how it truly
works, not how we imagine
it works (as we have done for thousands of years). To me this is the most exciting, and important, field of
study or human undertaking currently going on in the world today. I
am, therefore, greatly driven and motivated to do my part in making
the study of neuroscience more accessible to us, the common man and
woman (and children I hope). Hence, the “layman” part of the
title.
A
word about sources. What I present in this blog will be based on well established current research and agreed upon (generally)
understanding of how animal and human brains are constructed (one of your surprises is going to be how closely they are related) and
perform the various tasks they need to survive and propagate
themselves. I'll get to why (it's connected to why I got into
neuroscience in the first place) but I am fanatical about rock solid
sources and reporting that as accurately as I can. One of the great
things about online reading is embedded links. I will link to most of
my sources as often as reasonable (I find that too many embedded
links gets annoying and distracting). I will also list sources for
further reading. One of my hopes is to inspire further reading and
that's partly what the links are there for (other than to establish
and verify the credibility of my writing and the knowledge I'm
presenting with it). If you are a parent reading along, I encourage
you to get your child to read as well. Who knows, between us we might
inspire a future neuroscientist who'll discover an answer to some of
the currently unanswered questions or better connect some of the
countless dots of neuroscientific research data.
I
also hope to inspire you. Within you – and I don't care who “you”
are or what you “believe” you are (AKA your limiting beliefs) -
you have vast amounts of likely completely untapped potential in your
brain. You may also have questions about your own behaviour or that
of your family. That potential and the answers to those questions are
contained in the “inner galaxies” we're going to explore
together. And they are, as we'll see, inner galaxies – vast, vast
galaxies of neurons and connections (and hence the “inner galaxies”
part of the title). But there's scary stuff we're going to come
across in our explorations – exploration and discovery can be scary
by its very nature of being unknown, after all – so be prepared for
that.
Finally,
I hope to inspire more compassion and understanding of our fellow
human beings. I know that when I finally began to understand how
brains work, I began to see human behaviour in an entirely different
light and my compassion levels for people of every kind rose
immensely. I believe yours will too.
So
that's a bit of the background to what brings me and you together. If
human nature is of interest to you – and my extensive experience in
life tells me that that's just about everyone – then you'll enjoy
reading along and you'll learn more about the brain – and yourself
- than you thought possible. I promise.
So
strap on your seat belt. We are about to take a fun, scary, wondrous
and maybe sometimes wild ride through your incredible inner galaxies, which literally, I'll add, are the most complex and amazing galaxies in the known
universe.
Enjoy.
Bradley
Esau
