Jeff Hawkins, On Intelligence (2004)

The scenario described in the previous post (see October 26, 2013 post) of the mass of commuter humanity changing trains in a crowded subway station, silently cooperating to avoid colliding with one another as they cross paths was intended to introduce the subject of humans reading and understanding the intentions of others as a foundation of human cooperative activity.  But there is another characteristic of the human brain besides mindreading that supports this outcome:  the human brain constantly anticipates, predicts the future.  In this scenario, it predicts (perhaps not perfectly) the future behavior of others (more likely their immediate behavior), where they are directing their motion, where they are turning, whether they are accelerating or slowing down.  Jeff Hawkins labels this intelligence:  how the brain predicts behavior and future events is the subject of On Intelligence. Hawkins' interest is in understanding human intelligence to build a foundation for improved machine intelligence. The focus of his inquiry is the neocortex, the outermost layers of the human brain, and memory.  What Hawkins offers up is the memory-prediction framework of intelligence.  This differs from a computational framework.

Hawkins is not out to explain what makes us human (compare September 27, 2009 post).  Nor is he out to explain human consciousness (compare April 8, 2011 post).  But he does briefly touch on these matters.  Previous posts in the blog address human imagination and creativity as a hallmark of what makes us "human,"  (see November 6, 2011 and May 22, 2011 post), and Hawkins presents a model discussed below about the role of the neocortex in imagination, including imagination by false analogy.  What he does not touch on is the role of the brain in generating and controlling emotions, the subject of Jaak Panksepp's research (see May 19, 2013 post), which naturally links to the origins of the moral and social aspects of what makes us human.  (See November 21, 2012 post).  So while Hawkins does connect the neocortex and thalamus within his memory-prediction framework (see below), he does not elaborate upon the role of the large thalamo-cortical system that resides in the human brain that plays a substantial role in what makes us human and the biological basis of human consciousness.  (See April 8, 2011 post).

Prior posts identify the critical role of the hippocampus in memory formation, but ultimately long-term memory is shifted to the cerebral cortex through a process known as consolidation that occurs during sleep.   (See September 10, 2013 and November 6, 2011 posts).  As a prior post described:  "Memories are distributed in the same parts of the brain that encoded the original experience. So sounds are found in the auditory cortex, taste and skin sensory memories are found in the somatosensory cortex, and sight in the visual cortex. But procedural -- "how to" --- memories are stored outside of the cortex, in the cerebellum and putamen, and fear memories are stored in the amygdala."  Hawkins' thesis is that the cortex is critical to human capacity to predict events because of the linkage to memory storage in the cortex.  In focusing on the neocortex, Hawkins is looking at, evolutionarily speaking, the most recent adaptation in the development of animal neurological systems.  The neocortex is unique to mammals, and the human neocortex is larger than the neocortex in any other mammal, facts that suggest the human neocortex is critical to understanding what makes us human. This is just the opposite of Jaak Panksepp's focus on the older parts of the brain, the brain stem and the midbrain.  (See May 19, 2013 post).  It is not as though Hawkins believes these older parts of the brain are irrelevant to human behavior.  "First," Hawkins says, "the human mind is created not only by the neocortex but also by the emotional systems of the old brain and by the complexity of the human body.  To be human you need all of your biological machinery, not just a cortex."  But Hawkins is ultimately interested in the creation of an intelligent machine, and he believes that in the pursuit of that interest he needs to understand what makes humans "intelligent."  He finds that understanding in how the neocortex is structured and proposes a model for how it operates to predict future events. 

Hawkins' model is based on our current knowledge of the structure of the neocortex.  That much is known.  And here is a graphical representation of that structure:



                                                           SENSORY INPUT

Each region of the neocortex is known to consist of four areas, labeled 1, 2, 4 and IT. The graph above represents those four layers, with IT at the top and 4, 2, and 1 below it for one of the regions of the cortex (visual, auditory, somatosensory, motor). The visual cortex layers are labeled, from bottom to top, V1, V2, V4, and IT; the auditory cortex layers labeled A1, A2, A4 and IT; the somatosensory (touch) cortex layers labeled S1, S2, S4 and IT, and similarly for the motor cortex.  The arrows are pointed in both directions, indicating that information moves in both directions between the areas. 

Neurons fire in a specific pattern in response to a specific sensory stimulus.  For the exact same sensory stimulus, the same neurons will fire in the same pattern within this hierarchy.  For a different sensory stimulus, different neurons will fire in a pattern.  The brain's capacity to recognize (predict) these patterns is at the heart of memory.

Recall the discussion in connection with Rodrigo Quiroges' book, Borges and Memory (September 10, 2013 post):  "Each neuron in the retina responds to a particular point, and we can infer the outline of a cube starting from the activity of about thirty of them [retinal neurons].  Next the neurons in the primary visual cortex fire in response to oriented lines; fewer neurons are involved and yet the cube is more clearly seen.  This information is received in turn by neurons in higher visual areas, which are triggered by more complex patterns --- for example, the angles defined by the crossing of two or three lines.  . . As the processing of visual information progresses through different brain areas, the information represented by each neuron becomes more complex, and at the same time fewer neurons are needed to encode a given stimulus."  The arrows representing sensory input from the retinal neurons are the arrows pointing to area V1 of the visual cortex.  A particular pattern of neurons firing in V1 leads neurons in V2 to fire, and all the way up to IT.  As just noted, in each higher layer "fewer neurons are involved."  In V1, the cells are spatially specific, tiny feature-recognition cells that infrequently fire depending on which of the millions of retinal neurons are providing sensory input; at the higher IT, the cells are constantly firing, spatially non-specific, object recognition cells.  One of way of thinking about this is that certain neurons in V1 fired in recognition of two ears, a nose, two eyes, and perhaps even more details like the texture of skin, facial hair, the color of hair; neurons in IT fired in recognition of an entire head or face.  Cells in the IT encode for categories; Hawkins calls them "invariant representations."  In philosophy, these invariant representations might be analogous to Plato's forms.  It is here one would find neurons firing in response to things --- rocks, platypuses, your house, a song, Jennifer Aniston or Bill Clinton.  (See September 10, 2013 post). 

Psychologists recognize the same phenomenon, although in different terms.  Paul Bloom asserts that humans are "splitters" and "lumpers," but for the most part we are lumpers. Borges' Funes was a splitter.  (See September 10, 2013 post).    "Our minds have evolved," Bloom says, "to put things into categories and to ignore or downplay what makes these things distinct.  Some categories are more obvious than others: all children understand the categories chairs and tigers; only scientists are comfortable with the categories such as ungulates and quarks.  What all categories share is that they capture a potential infinity of individuals under a single perspective.  They lump."  Bloom says, "We lump the world into categories so that we can learn."  He adds, "A perfect memory, one that treats each experience as a distinct thing-in-itself, is useless.  The whole point of storing the past is to make sense of the present and to plan for the future.  Without categories [or concepts], everything is perfectly different from everything else, and nothing can be generalized or learned."     

The neocortex consists of six horizontal layers of cells (I-VI) each roughly 2mm thick (shown below for area V1 of the visual cortex).   The cells within each layer are aligned in columns perpendicular to the layers.  The layers in each column are connected via axons, making synapses along the way.  "Columns do not stand out like neat little pillars," explains Hawkins, "nothing in the cortex is that simple, but their existence can be inferred from several lines of evidence."  Vertically aligned cells tend to become active for the same stimulus. 

 

Again, as was the case with the different areas of a region of the cortex, information is moving both up and down the layers of a given area.  Inputs move up the columns; memories move down the columns.  "When you begin to realize that the cortex's core function is to make predictions, then you have to put feedback into the model; the brain has to send information flowing back toward the region that first receives inputs.  Prediction requires a comparison between what is happening and what you expect to happen.  What is actually happening flows up, and what you expect to happen flows down."
 
Memories are stored in this hierarchical structure.  "The design of the cortex and the method by which it learns naturally discover the hierarchical relationships in the world.  You are not born with knowledge of language, houses, or music.  The cortex has a clever learning algorithm that naturally finds whatever hierarchical structure exists and captures it.  When structure is absent, we are thrown into confusion, even chaos. *** You can only experience a subset of the world at any moment in time.  You can only be in one room of your home, looking in one direction.  Because of the hierarchy of the cortex, you are able to know that you are at home, in your living room, looking at a window, even though at that moment your eyes happened to be fixated on a window latch.  Higher regions of cortex are maintaining a representation of your home, while lower regions are representing rooms, and still lower regions are looking at window.  Similarly, the hierarchy allows you to know you are listening to both a song and album of music, even though at any point in time you are hearing only one note, which on its own tells you next to nothing."  Critical to this capability is the brain's ability to process sequences and recognize patterns of sequences.  "Information flowing in to the brain naturally arrives as a sequence of patterns."  When the patterns are repeated through a repeated firing of a particular combination of neurons, the cortical region forms a persistent representation, or memory, for the sequence.  In learning sequences, we form invariant representations of objects.  When certain input patterns repeat over and over, cortical regions "know that those experiences are caused by a real object in the world." 

One of the most important attributes of Hawkins' model is a concept called auto-associative memory.  This is what enables the brain to recall something by sensing only a portion of that memory.  In the case of the brain, that input may belong to an entirely different category than what is recalled.  Auto-associative memory is part of pattern recognition:  the cortex does not need to see the entire pattern in order to recognize the larger pattern.  The second feature of auto-associative memory, says Hawkins, is that an auto-associative memory can be designed to store sequences of patterns, or temporal patterns.  He says this is accomplished by adding a time-delay to feedback. 

The cortex is linked to the thalamus.  Hawkins says that one of the six layers of cells (L5 - second from the bottom in a given cortical area) within the neocortex is wired to the thalamus, which in turn sends information back to Layer I (the highest layer in a given cortical layer), acting as a delayed feedback important to learning sequences and to predicting.  The thalamus is selective in what it transmits back to the cortex because the number of neurons going to the thalamus exceeds the number of neurons back to the cortex by a factor of ten.  This requires an understanding of reentrant activity and recursion, which need not be explained here.  But Layer 1 (at the top of a given cortical area) is also receiving information from higher cortical areas (e.g. in the case of the visual cortex, layer 1 in V4 from layer 6 in IT; layer 1 in V2 from layer 6 in V4, etc.)  So layer 1 now has two inputs:  from the thalamus and from the higher cortical area.  Layer 1, Hawkins emphasizes, now carries "much of the information we need to predict when a column should be active.  Using these two signals in layer 1, a region of cortex can learn and recall multiple sequences of patterns." 

Cortical regions "store" sequences of patterns when synapses are strengthened by repeated firing.  "If this occurs often enough, the layer 1 synapses [at the top of the region] become strong enough to make the cells in layers 2, 3, and 5 [below] fire, even when a layer 4 cell hasn't fired--- meaning parts of the column can become active without receiving input from a lower region of the cortex.  In this way, cells in layers 2, 3, and 5 learn to 'anticipate' when they should fire based on the pattern in layer 1.  Before learning, the column can only come active if driven by a layer 4 cell.  After learning, the column can become partially active via memory.  When a column becomes active via layer1 synapses, it is anticipating being driven from below.  This is prediction.  If the column could speak, it would say, 'When I have been active in the past, this particular set of my layer 1 synapses have been active.  So when I see this particular set again, I will fire in anticipation.'  Finally, layer 6 cells can send their output back into layer 4 cells of their own column.  Hawkins says that when they do, our predictions become the input.  This is what we do, he adds, when we daydream, think, imagine.  It allows us to see the consequences of our own predictions, noting that we do this when we plan the future, rehearse speeches, and worry about future events.  In Hawkins' model, this has to be part of what Michael Gazzaniga refers to as our decoupling mechanism.  (See May 22, 2011 post)

This is Hawkins' model of the brain's capacity to predict, intelligence if you will.  Of course, it is a  more complex than I have regurgitated here.  "If a region of cortex finds it can reliably and predictably move among these input patterns using a series of physical motions (such as saccades of the eyes or fondling with the fingers) and can predict them accurately as they unfold in time (such as the sounds comprising a song or the spoken word), the brain interprets these as having a causal relationship.  The odds of numerous input patters occurring in the same relation over and over again by sheer coincidence are vanishingly small.  A predictable sequence of patterns must be part of a larger object that really exists.  So reliable predictability is an ironclad way of knowing that different events in the world are physically tied together.  Every face has eyes, ears, mouth and nose.  If the brain sees an eye, the saccades and sees another eye, then saccades and sees a mouth, it can feel certain it is seeing a face."

This begins at a very early age in our post-natal development.  The two basic components of learning, explains Hawkins, are forming the classifications of patterns and building sequences.  "The basics of forming sequences is to group patterns together that are part of the same object.  One way to do this is by grouping patterns that occur contiguously in time.  If a child holds a toy in her hand and slowly moves it, her brain can safely assume that the image on her retina is of the same object moment to moment, and therefore the changing set of patterns can be grouped together.  At other times, you need outside instruction to help you decide which patterns belong together.  To learn that apples and bananas are fruits, but carrots and celery are not, requires a teacher to guide you to group these items as fruits.  Either way, your brain slowly builds sequences of patterns that belong together.  But as a region of cortex builds sequences, the input to the next region changes.  The input changes from representing mostly individual patterns to representing groups of patterns.  The input to a region changes from notes to melodies, from letters to words, from noses to faces, and so on.  Where before a region built sequences of letters, it now builds sequences of words,  The unexpected result of this learning process is that, during repetitive learning, representations of objects move down the cortical hierarchy.  During the early years of your life, your memories of the world first form in higher regions of cortex, but as you learn they are re-formed in lower and lower parts of the cortical hierarchy."

Michael Shermer (see June 12, 2011 post) made the same point in a slightly different way when he referred to "patternicity."  According to Shermer, as sensory data flows into the brain, there is a "tendency" for the brain to begin looking for meaningful patterns in both meaningful and meaningless data. He calls this process patternicity. Shermer asserts that patternicity is premised on "association learning," which is "fundamental to all animal behavior from which is "fundamental to all animal behavior from C. elegans (roundworm) to homo sapiens." Because our survival may depend on split-second decisions in which there is no time to research and discover underlying facts about every threat or opportunity that faces us, evolution set the brain's default mode in the position of assuming that all patterns are real, says Shermer. A cost associated with this behavior is that the brain may lump causal associations (e.g. wind causes plants to rustle) with non-causal associations (e.g. there is an unseen agent in the plants). In this circumstance, superstition --- incorrect causal associations --- is born. "In this sense, patternicities such as superstition and magical thinking are not so much errors in cognition as they are the natural processes of a learning brain." Religion, conspiracy theories and political beliefs fit this model as well.

My surmise is that beliefs and concepts rooted in false analogy become stored in memory in higher cortical areas when they are reinforced over and over through cultural transmission.  Something like this may be what Edward O. Wilson means when he refers to epigenetic rules and culture. "Human nature," Wilson says, is the "inherited regularities of mental development common to our species. They are epigenetic rules, which evolved by the interaction of genetic and cultural evolution that occurred over a long period in deep prehistory. These rules are the genetic biases in the way our senses perceive the world, the symbolic coding by which we represent the world, the options we automatically open to ourselves, and the responses we find easiest and most rewarding to make. . ."  (See April 8, 2013 post).  Storytelling --- the creation of works of fiction --- may be important to making and reinforcing memories.  (See August 15, 2011 post).  Thus, when a prediction based on a false analogy is violated and one would normally recognize an error, the error message is transmitted back up to the higher cortical areas for a check.  But because the belief based in false analogy resides there in the higher areas, the false analogy may never be corrected. The false analogy becomes an invariant representation.  Paul Bloom explains in Descartes' Baby just how these concepts and beliefs can be rooted in our brains at a very early age, and as Hawkins describes above, memories formed earlier in life form in the higher regions of the cortex.  These false analogies can be difficult to dislodge.

Hawkins has been helpful in providing a model of the cortex as the part of the brain devoted to our capacity to predict.  When tied into the models of other parts of the brain relating to consciousness and emotion discussed elsewhere in this blog, we begin to assemble the whole human brain and begin an appreciation of what makes us "human."  (See September 27, 2009 post discussing Michael Gazzaniga's reference to Jeff Hawkins).  While Hawkins' interest lies in the intelligent machine, he does not believe a machine can ever become "human."

And finally, Hawkins confirms why I have had held to my instinct that John Searle's Chinese Room argument was intuitively correct.  The man in the Chinese Room must have been human.

Rodrigo Q. Quiroga, Borges and Memory (2012)

Memory is a subject that is no stranger to this blog.  (See February 26, 2013, December 2, 2011, November 6, 2011, September 20, 2011, August 15, 2011, April 8, 2011, November 27, 2010, September 9, 2010 posts.).  Rodrigo Quiroga's Borges and Memory effectively assembles most of the comments and observations in these earlier posts and weaves in the parallel observations of Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges' about human memory, demonstrating that Borges' astute observations hold close to the empirical research of neuroscience.  Borges' artistic tool drafted by Quiroga to make his point is a short story authored by Borges in 1942, Funes the Memorious, about a man who could not forget the most trivial facts and datum and sustained an incredible memory.  In Borges' words, Funes had an "infinite vocabulary for the natural series of numbers, a useless mental catalogue of all the images of his memory."  He was "almost incapable of ideas in general," which means he could not abstract and generalize.  In light of Daniel Schacter's characterization of the human mind's near universal capacity for forgetting (see September 20, 2011 post), sometimes instantly, sometimes only over considerable periods of time --- and the evolutionary benefits of forgetting --- the story of Funes is a unique story, one far removed from normal experience.  But Quiroga informs and documents that there are real cases of persons like Funes, who are simply incapable of forgetting the slightest details and their memories are clogged with useless data.  He also confirms that these individuals are limited in their ability to generalize and abstract.  There is the case of Solomon Shereshevskii of Russia, a patient of Alexander Luria, whose capacity for memorizing meaningless sequences of numbers, formulae, words, sequences of syllables, and retaining them in memory for years is much like the Funes of Borges' imagination.  Shereshevskii's diagnosis includes severe synesthesia. (See November 20, 2011  and October 25, 2011 post). Shereshevskii reportedly tells Luria that he could not read nor study because it made him lose track of what he was reading if he had to think about words beyond their literal meaning.

And there are others, and they are often referred to as savants and in other cases are regarded as autistic:  Kim Peek (whom the story Rain Man was based upon) who was diagnosed with FG Syndrome, Daniel Tammet whose incredible ability to recall sequences of numbers (including large numbers such as primes) was ascribed to synesthesia, Leslie Lemke who suffered from cerebral palsy and was blind, but was nevertheless a highly skilled pianist who had an enormous memory for music after hearing a song only once, and Jill Price, for whom the inability was a curse.

We sometimes refer to a person's "photographic" memory.  But that is not the way memory works, particularly memory based on visual perception.  Recall Antonio Damasio's account of how the brain retains and retrieves memories.  (See April 8, 2011 post).   Larger human brains lack the storage capacity for "large files of recorded images of prior events." To solve this problem, Damasio argues, human brains "borrowed the dispositional strategy" from early evolution that allows us to be able to retrieve those memories without, figuratively speaking, having to film and store those images. Here is how Damasio says this works. He refers to ancient dispositional networks, which we can identify as the subcortical systems discussed by Jaak Panksepp in his account of  human emotional systems (see May 19, 2013 post), and these are unconscious, automatic dispositions that are essentially hardwired into our biology. Recall Panksepp's discussion of the Fear System and the link between emotions and memory:  "Learning and memory are automatic and involuntary responses (mediated by unconscious mechanisms of the brain), which in their most lasting forms are commonly tethered to emotional arousal. Emotional arousal is a necessary condition for the creation of fear-learning memories."  (May 19, 2013 post). The ancient dispositional networks and the more recent, evolutionarily speaking, mapping networks in the brain, says Damasio, are now connected. A current perception triggers the dispositional network that directs the brain to reassemble aspects of past perceptions from the part of the cerebral cortex that had been previously activated when an original perception of an object occurred and where the representation or image was mapped. This occurs in what Damasio refers to as convergence-divergence zones that record "the coincidence of activity in neurons hailing from different brain sites, neurons that had been made active by the mapping of a certain object." A part of the cerebral cortex is devoted to image space where images of all sensory types occurs and map-making occurs; a separate part of the cerebral cortex is devoted to dispositional space where the tools exist to reactivate and generate images previously experienced --- affectionately called "grandmother cells" after our ability to recall our grandmother. The contents of dispositions, Damasio says, are always unconscious --- he says they are "encrypted" and "implicit" --- in contrast to the explicit images in the image space created by current perceptions. The "encrypted" dispositions are not themselves images, but merely implicit formulas for how to reconstruct maps in image space. Our "knowledge base" is, by this hypothesis, part of our unconscious brain, stored in code, waiting to be retrieved from what Damasio refers to as "association cortices" (and hence the analogy to Hume's associationism).

Quiroga concurs in substantial part.  "The brain does not reproduce visual stimuli like a digital camera or television, but rather processes their meaning starting from relatively little information and a set of unconscious inferences.  Now, if the neurons in the primary visual cortex do not simply copy information detected by the retina, what do they do?  This was what David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel at the Johns Hopkins University set out to study in the late 1950s.  Following a serendipitous event and a spectacular series of experiments that ensued (which earned them the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1981).  Hubel and Wiesel discovered neurons in the primary visual cortex that respond to oriented lines.  This information eventually reaches the inferior temporal lobe where "face cells" -- ie., neurons that respond to human or monkey faces but not to other images, for example of hands, fruits or houses --- were found in experiments with monkeys. . . Each neuron in the retina responds to a particular point, and we can infer the outline of a cube starting from the activity of about thirty of them [retinal neurons].  Next the neurons in the primary visual cortex fire in response to oriented lines; fewer neurons are involved and yet the cube is more clearly seen.  This information is received in turn by neurons in higher visual areas, which are triggered by more complex patterns --- for example, the angles defined by the crossing of two or three lines.  . . As the processing of visual information progresses through different brain areas, the information represented by each neuron becomes more complex, and at the same time fewer neurons are needed to encode a given stimulus.  In the late 1960s, Polish psychologist Jerzy Konorski wondered if at the end of this process there might be individual neurons that represent an object or a person as a whole.  Is there, for example, a neuron that represents the concept of 'my home,' another one that responds to 'my dog,' and another for 'my grandmother.'"  Quiroga believed the answer lies in or near the hippocampus, because of a case made famous by Brenda Milner involving split brain surgery that removed a patient's hippocampus and resulted in an inability to form explicit, new memories. 

Quiroga became engaged in research with Christof Koch at Caltech that studied recordings of activity of individual neurons in the medial temporal lobe that responded not to a generic face, but responded uniquely to the faces of individual humans:  actress Jennifer Aniston, soccer star Diego Maradona, and Mr. T.  Medial temporal lobe structures that are critical for long-term memory include the amygdala, brainstem, and hippocampus, along with the surrounding hippocampal region consisting of the perirhinal, parahippocampal, and entorhinal neocortical regions. The hippocampus is critical for memory formation, and the surrounding medial temporal cortex is currently theorized to be critical for memory storage. The prefrontal and visual cortices are also involved in explicit memory.  The firing of neurons that begins in the retina (or in the case of auditory stimuli, in the cochlea), goes through the primary visual cortex (or other primary cortical areas), passing through higher visual areas in the temporal lobe ultimately reaches the hippocampus.  The many individual neurons in the retina respond to many discrete visual stimuli that does not represent the image as a whole.  At some point in the brain's pathways from the retina to the hippocampus the brain assembles these varied discrete stimuli.  What Quiroga and others found is that the "Jennifer Aniston neuron" did not respond to a single image of Jennifer Aniston, but to multiple images of Jennifer Aniston.  Further research found that a specific neuron would also respond to a multitude of Star Wars characters --- Luke Skywalker, Yoda, Darth Vader.  What this signified is that the unique neuron did not associate with a particular camera image, but to a conceptual image.  This "loss of detail" led Quiroga to conclude that the neuron codes for an abstraction of Jennifer Aniston.  "We can see Funes," writes Quiroga, "as someone lacking those Jennifer Aniston neurons that encode abstract concepts."  He repeats, "We do not process images in our brains in the same way a camera does; on the contrary, we extract a meaning and leave aside a multitude of details.. . . Just like perception, memory is a creative process; when we remember something we do not repeat the experience as it was; rather we relive it in another context, create a new representation, and even change its meaning."  If we integrate Damasio into Quiroga's thinking, the convergence-divergence zones assemble "a cascade of processes that involve memories and emotions," "extracting particular features that help us recognize these people and objects in very different circumstances."  (See November 6, 2011 post).

Quiroga quotes Francis Crick (The Astonishing Hypothesis):  "What you see is not what is really there; it is what your brain believes is there.  Seeing is an active, constructive process.  Your brain makes the best interpretation it can according to its previous experience and the limited and ambiguous information provided by our eyes." This recalls Michael Gazzaniga's "Interpreter" (see July 25, 2013, September 27, 2009 posts).  A previous post that quotes Crick and Gazzaniga is likewise worth recalling (see May 22, 2011 post).  This latter post introduces the subject of the brain's capacity to engage in self-deception, to imagine things that don't exist in reality.  I think in most cases we do not engage in self-deception, the brain's default mode is to construct a reality as close to the reality that is out there.  So what we see, most of the time, is really there, or at least close to it.  (See February 4, 2012 post).  Information in our quantum world is probablistic. It is true that the brain quickly discards much information that is never encoded.  As Daniel Schacter has explained --- and Quiroga acknowledges --- our memories can become very fragile if not unreliable, and our "reality" can read more like fiction.  (See September 20, 2011 post).  And that is interesting, because the minds of savants like Funes have the ability to recollect and retain for considerable periods of time incredible detail without assigning meaning and in those cases the brain does not filter out reality from gibberish.

Jose Saramago, Small Memories (2009)

Memory is fragile.  (See September 20, 2011 post).  Jose Saramago's honest account of his memories of some events in his life when he was small in Small Memories concedes as much.  "Sometimes I wonder," he writes, "if certain memories are really mine or if they're just someone else's memories of episodes in which I was merely an unwitting actor and which I found out about later when they were told to me by others who had been there, unless, of course, they, too, had only heard the story from someone else."  He refers to memory's "reconstructive powers," and the capacity for memory to be refreshed:  "Thanks to some documents I had assumed lost, bet which providentially turned up when I was searching for something else entirely, my disoriented memory has finally been able to fit together various disparate pieces of the puzzle and replace what was uncertain and doubtful with what was right and true."

"We often forget what we would like to remember, and yet certain images, words, flashes, illuminations repeatedly, obsessively return to us from the past at the slightst stimulus, and there's no explanation for that' we don't summon them up, they are simply there.  And it is for those memories that tell me that although, at the time, I was basing myself more on intuition than, of course, on any real knowledge of these facts. . ." 

This is not the first time that a post in this blog has connected Saramago's work with the subject of memory.  In The Notebook (September 28, 2010 post), the Nobelist created a memory bank in blog form.  In the posting on his final novel, Cain (December 20, 2011 post) I remarked, "I also believe storytelling evolved in part to preserve our memories of things past. (See August 15, 2011 post). And storytelling, whether historical or fictional or both, enables the construction of both personal and social/group identity."  And Saramago is a master at clutching collective memory --- history we call it --- and creating stories --- fiction we call it --- as in The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reiss (June 28, 2011 post) and Baltasar and Blimunda (January 1, 2013 post).

A series of postings in September 2010 revolved around the subject of memory (September 9, 2010 post) but more recently a posting observed: "Personal identity is a matter of autobiographical memory. This is our autobiographical self (see April 8, 2011 post). But our autobiographical memories are shared, and this facilitates social bonding and the building of relationships. It also influences our story-telling and the stories we tell each other, whether represented as fact or fiction. Cultures are built on the sharing of autobiographical memory, yet at the same time personal identity is strongly influenced by the culture that one personally experiences. While at the outset I said that personal identity owes its existence to cultural or group identity, the reverse is true as well.  Cultural identity ultimately owes its existence to the sharing of many personal identities. Autobiographical memories are merged and revised into a collective memory. But as we have seen in prior posts, memory is fluid, constantly changing and redeveloping in incremental ways. (See November 6, 2011 post)."

It is collective or shared memory that I believe is one subject that is missing from John Searle's accounting of the creation of a social world (see February 24, 2013 post).  Memory, observes Searle, is important for intentionality, and therefore collective memory should be just as important for collective intentionality.  That evokes the importance of culture in the creation of the human social world.  That is not lost on Saramago.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Adolescent (1875)

The subjects of personal identity and group identity have surfaced in a couple of previous posts in this blog,  (see April 1, 2012,  December 10, 2011 and December 2, 2011 posts), and now personal identity resurfaces in Dostoevsky's The Adolescent.

The circumstances here underlying the search for personal identity are not remarkable:  Dostoevsky's protagonist and narrator, Arkady Makarovich Dolgoruky, has two fathers, a biological father and an adoptive father.   The more unique circumstance is that neither of these "fathers" has played much of a role in his life through adolescence.  Arkady does not really know either father. The adoptive father is a wanderer across Russia who returns home to Arkady's mother once in awhile; the biological father, a nobleman who has squandered his wealth, who like others of his class during the second half of the 19th century seem to flit back and forth between Russia and other European countries, while  arranging for someone to take care of Arkady as he is growing up. Alternatively, Dostoevsky's protagonist is referred to by some as Arkady Andreevich (patronymic name derived from his biological father) and Arkady Makarovich (patronymic name derived from his adoptive father). From which father does Arkady derive his personal identity?  "How can you not feel your father's blood in you?" Arkady is asked at one point, suggesting a blood or genetic basis for identity.  Personal identity, as another posting on this blog has observed, is a matter of autobiographical memory, and is not always a matter of genetic identity.  (See April 8, 2011 and December 2, 2011 posts). 

This is Russia, between the reign of Tsar Nicholas I (1796-1855) who authorized landowners to free their serfs and Tsar Nicholas II (1868-1918), the last of the Romanovs.  It is a period of great change in Russia, including the beginning of the industrial revolution and liberal reforms under Tsar Alexander II (1818-1881), including emancipation of the serfs.  The intellectual air in Russia at the time is full of "ideas," and Dostoevsky, I believe, more than any other Russian writer of his era, brings the exchange and conflict of ideas to dramatic life, not only in The Adolescent, but his more famous novels, Crime and Punishment, The Devils, and The Brothers Karamazov. 

As The Adolescent opens, Arkady, age 20, fresh from completing the equivalent of high school in Moscow, arrives in Petersburg with an "idea" in his mind.  He has developed the naive, if not "adolescent" idea that he can achieve a life of independence of mind and solitude, whereby he is liberated from a life that depends on others.  Moving into adulthood he has to be prepared to no longer be a dependent.  But solitude, he believes, requires"power."  And to achieve power, his idea is to become a "Rothschild."  He is therefore determined to work, earn and save, with "persistence and continuity" until he is financially independent and can control his own destiny. His family now resides in Petersburg, including his adoptive father, his biological father, his mother and sister, as well as coterie of friends of immediate family members.

Ideas have a way of not maturing to actualities, which certainly happens here. As the plot progresses our protagonist is unable to flee the mix of his adolescent friends, family and relatives, and friends of relatives.  Instead of a life of solitude, Arkady encounters an ocean of social interactions, social emotions and feelings (see November 21, 2012 post) and by the end of his narrative he admits that his "idea" is "no longer recognizable."  Instead of working to accumulate the wealth he believed he needed to pursue a solitary life, Arkady believes he must now work to support his mother and his sister.  Even "Rothschild's", as another posting in this blog describes, cannot live and succeed in solitude.  (See June 30, 2012 post).

Arkady's first discovery is that his biological father possesses a moral anchor.  Andrei Petrovich is embroiled in litigation over an inheritance.  After arriving in Petersburg, Arkady is presented with a document, which he is told contains information that is inconsistent with his biological father's claim to the inheritance.  Arkady is presented with his own moral crisis: should he deliver the document to his father? or should he deliver it to the other party to the litigation? or should he conceal it?  After all, there is a possibility that Andrei Petrovich's inheritance might trickle down to his mother and even Arkady.  Arkady is assured that the document has no decisive legal significance because his father would win his case even if the court knew of the contents of the document: the testamentary instrument (will) is clear; the document, on the other hand, contains only precatory language that expresses a hope or a wish and does not create an obligation or a command.  The document, then, presents "a matter of conscience."  Arkady agonizes over the correct course of action before finally deciding to place the document in his father's hands, who in turn, after the court has ruled in his favor, renounces his claim.  Arkady is a "dumbstruck, but delighted" about his father's noble choice.  Arkady repents his own "cynicism and indifference to virtue" in light of his father's example.  Comparing his father to the example of Joshua of Nazareth:  "this man was dead and is alive again, was lost and is found."

The Adolescent reaches a crescendo as Arkady (who is recalling and recording the events of his reunion with his fathers and others a year later) recalls a conservation with his biological father in which the latter imagines a life without God.  "A calm has come, and people are left alone, as they wished:  the great former idea [of god] has left them; the great source of strength that had nourished and warmed them all then is departing, like the majestic inviting sun in Claude Lorrain's painting, but it already seemed like the last day of mankind.  And the people suddenly realized that they remained quite alone, and at once felt a great orphancy.  My dear boy, I've never been able to imagine people ungrateful and grown stupid.  The orphaned people would at once begin pressing together more closely and lovingly; they would hold hands, understanding that they alone were now everything for each other.  The great idea of immortality would disappear and would have to be replaced; and all the great abundance of the former love for the one who was himself immortality, would be turned in all of them to nature, to the world, to people, to every blade of grass.  They would love the earth and life irrepressibly and in the measure to which they gradually became aware of their transient and finite state, and it would be with a special love now, not as formerly.  They would begin to observe and discover such phenomena and secrets in nature as they had never supposed before, because they would look at nature with new eyes, the  eyes with which a lover looks at his beloved. *** Every child would know and feel that each person on earth was like a father and mother to him."  If we stopped loving god, Andrei Petrovich suggests, we would naturally turn to loving each other and becoming more appreciative of nature  after experiencing only a brief period of orphancy.  Profound, but not implausible given what we know about the origins of morality and conscience.  (See November 21, 2012 post). But it may leave one to wonder:  who is the adolescent, the son or the father? And then Andrei Petrovich explains, "this is all a fantasy, even quite an incredible one; but I have imagined it only too often, because all my life I've been unable to live without it and not think of it.  I'm not talking about my faith:  I have no great faith, I'm a deist, a philosophical deist, like all the thousand of us."  Arkady realizes his father's love more mankind is genuine ("the falseness I had feared wasn't there") and he realizes that his father is extremely comfortable with himself --- happy.  "I wouldn't exchange my yearning [for brotherhood among mankind] for any other happiness," his father confesses.  "In this sense, I've always been happy, all my life.  And out of happiness I came to love your mama then for the first time in my life." 

There is more to this novel than what I have focused on, and what I have focused on prefigures themes that later appear in Dostoevsky's final novel, The Brother's Karamazov.  As a first-person narrative written as young Arkady's "notes" of events that occurred only several months earlier, the notes have the character of autobiographical memory that lies at the core of extended consciousness and the autobiographical self.  (See April 8, 2011 post). 

Daniel J. Levitin, This is Your Brain on Music (2007)

A debate has raged over the past fifteen years as to whether music is an adaptation, a trait that emerged as a result of an evolutionary process. Several well-known psychologists and neuroscientists have weighed in on this subject including Steven Pinker, Daniel J. Levitin, and Pascal Boyer. Pinker, on the one hand, has dismissed music as "auditory cheesecake," while Levitin is convinced that music is an adaptation. Neither, in my view, is precisely correct. In the parlance of evolution, an adaptation is a trait that has a functional role in the life of an organism that evolved and is maintained as a result of natural selection. What we typically think of as music --- a song, with or without words --- is not an adaptation; it is not a trait. As is the case with language and learning, it is our capacity for appreciating, learning, creating, and performing music that is the trait. That capacity has a functional role in the life of an organism.

In How the Mind Works, Steven Pinker referred to music as "auditory cheesecake." It confers no survival advantage, he asserts, but music is merely a "confection crafted to tickle the sensitive spots of at least six of our mental faculties." Music, says Pinker, is a "technology [or a "spandrel" as Stephen Jay Gould might have said], not an adaptation." With music, humans merely exploit the language and communication system that evolved through survival and sexual selection pressures.

Levitin, a former musician and sound specialist turned neuroscientist at McGill University, explains that he "took notice" when Pinker called music "auditory cheesecake" and described music as "useless" as far as biological cause and effect are concerned. In contrast, Pinker puts language, vision, and social reasoning in the category of adaptations that have survival value for the human species. "Music could disappear tomorrow," Pinker says, and our "lifestyle would be virtually unchanged." The musician in Levitin was clearly professionally enraged. So he wrote a book on the subject, This is Your Brain on Music. The final chapter of this book, where Levitin challenges Pinker's views, is titled "The Music Instinct," borrowing a phrase from an earlier Pinker book titled The Language Instinct.

By "instinct," Pinker means that language does not have to be learned. But at its most fundamental level, Pinker does not mean that a language --- the English language, or the Chinese language, or the French language --- does not have to be learned. Humans are not born with genes for English, Chinese, or French language; specific languages are not inherited. At the biological level, we are born with a capacity for language and speech and a capacity for learning a language and speaking that language. In support of his claim that language capacity is a human adaptation, Pinker relies on several attributes, including the fact that it is universal across all cultures and that there are specific brain structures that recognize the rules of speech.

Levitin argues that our capacity for music and learning and creating and performing music is no different. The auditory system that detects, senses, and computes the attributes of music, as well as hands and feet that can be used to to create or establish rhythm, the vocal system that can create tone and pitch, and brain structures that uniquely relate to tone, rhythm, pitch, and chords are physical traits. "Music's evolutionary origin," Levitin writes, "is established because it is present across all humans (meeting the biologists' criterion of being widespread in a species); it has been around a long time (refuting the notion that it is merely auditory cheesecake); it involves specialized brain structures, including dedicated memory systems that can remain functional when other memory systems fail (when a physical brain system develops across all humans, we assume that it has an evolutionary basis); and it is analogous to music making in other (non-human) species. Rhythmic sequences optimally excite recurrent neural networks in mammalian brains, including feedback loops among the motor cortex, the cerebellum, and the frontal regions. Tonal systems, pitch transitions, and chords scaffold on certain properties of the auditory system that were themselves products of the physical world, of the inherent nature of vibrating objects. Our auditory system develops in ways that play on the relation between scales and the overtone series. Musical novelty attracts attention and overcomes boredom, increasing memorability."

Like the English, Chinese or French languages, we still need to learn classical music, folk music, jazz music, and rock and roll music and we need to learn how to perform (speak) these different types of music. And we create technologies for performing music, just like we have created technologies for communicating words.

In The Information, James Gleick (see August 15, 2011 post) cites a 19th century missionary's experience in Africa with tribesmen who communicated across great distances with drum beats, on the one hand an early form of Morse Code, and on the other hand, the drumming relied just as much on rhythm as well as the tone from the beat for conveying meaning. Although it will likely prove impossible to determine, I do not think we can rule out that music (not the same kind of music we think of today) may have been an early prototype for language. Linguistics has led to the discovery that the human brain has formal rules for language syntax. Is the brain not hardwired with formal rules for mathematics and music as well?

Pascal Boyer writes in Religion Explained, " The fact that the brain comes equipped with many specialized inferences and can run them in the decoupled mode may explain why humans the world over engage in a host of activities that carry no clear adaptive value. To illustrate this, consider the auditory cortex of humans, which must perform several complicated tasks. One of these is to sort out the sounds of language from other noises. Information about noises is sent to associative cortical areas that categorize the sounds and identify the nature of their source. Information about the source's location is handled by other specialized circuitry and sent to specific systems. The auditory system must also isolate the sounds of language. All normal humans have the ability to segment a stream of sound emerging from someone else's mouth in terms of isolated sounds, then send this purified representation to cortical areas specialized in word identification. To turn a stream into segments, the system must pay attention to the specific frequencies that define each vowel and the complex noises of consonants, as well as their duration and their effects on each other. To do this, the auditory cortex comprises different subsystems some of which specialize in pure tones and others in more complex stimuli. All this is clearly part of a complex, evolved architecture specialized in fine-grained sound analysis, a task of obvious adaptive value for a species that depends on speech for virtually all communication. But it is also has the interesting consequence that humans are predisposed to detect, produce, remember, and enjoy music. This is a human universal. There is no human society without some musical tradition. Although the traditions are very different, some principles can be found everywhere. For instance, musical sounds are always closer to pure sound than to noise. The equivalence between octaves and the privileged role of particular intervals like fifths and fourths are consequences of the organization of the cortex. To exaggerate a little, what you get from musical sounds are super-vowels (the pure frequencies as opposed to the mixed ones that define ordinary vowels) and pure consonants (produced by rhythmic instruments and the attack of most instruments). These properties make music an intensified form of sound experience from which the cortex receives purified and therefore intense doses of what usually activates it. So music is not really a direct product of our dispositions but a cultural product that is particularly successful because it activates some of our capacities in a particularly intense way." Boyer adds, "This phenomenon is not unique to music. Humans everywhere also fill their environments with artifacts that overstimulate their visual cortex, for instance by providing pure saturated color instead of dull browns and greens of their familiar environment. . . . These activities recruit our cognitive capacities in ways that make some cultural artifacts very salient and likely to be transmitted."

My own view is that language and music are means of communicating information and that language and music were preceded by proto-language and proto-music, both probably emerging in the same relative human time period. Both, in my view, were likely essential to human evolution as a social species. It also may be true, as Darwin surmised, that music was favored by sexual selection pressures. I think back to the views of V.S. Ramachandran (see October 25, 2011 post) attempting to resolve the discrepancy of views between Steven Pinker and S.J. Gould on language and evolution. For Ramanchandran, language did not evolve from some general mechanism for thinking (Gould), but neither did it evolve specifically for purposes of communication (Pinker). What is innate and what evolved, says Ramachandran, is the competence to acquire rules of language. The actual acquisition of language occurs as a result of social interaction. Ramachandran believes that language was enabled by cross linkages in the brain between different motor maps (e.g. the area responsible for manual gestures and the area responsible for orafacial movements). Can we say that what is innate about music is the competence to acquire rules of music, and that the actual acquisition of music occurs as a result of social interaction? If we think of music simply (at least initially) in terms of rhythm and vocal intonation, there is little to separate music and language including symbolic attachments. The most significant difference, however, is that music appears to reach and appeal to human emotions in a way that language perhaps does not. (See January 14, 2012 post and November 6, 2011 post).

Neuroscientist Daniel J. Levitin has made his career studying music and the human brain. In This Is Your Brain on Music, Levitin explains each of the attributes of music --- pitch, rhythm, tempo, contour, timbre, loudness, reverberation, meter, key, melody, and harmony --- and describes how the brain's architecture is essentially hardwired to deal with each element. "Different aspects of music are handled by different neural regions --- the brain uses functional segregation for music processing, and employs a system of feature detectors whose job it is to analyze specific aspects of the musical signal such as pitch, tempo, timbre, and so on. Some of the music processing has points in common with the operations required to analyze other sounds; understanding speech, for example, requires that we segregate a flurry of sounds in words, sentences, and phrases, and that we are able to understand aspects beyond the words, such as sarcasm. Several different dimensions of a musical sound need to be analyzed --- usually involving several quasi-independent neural processes --- and they need to be brought together to form a coherent representation of what we are listening to."

When we comprehend music, not as a song, but in terms of its attributes --- pitch, rhythm, tempo, contour, timbre, loudness, reverberation, meter, key, melody, and harmony --- we can recognize that these are not "technologies" as Pinker refers to music.

In the discussion of Christof Wolff's biography of J.S. Bach (see January 14, 2012 post), I mentioned the long-associated relationship of music and mathematics. Steven Pinker describes our "mathematical intuition" --- babies have the capacity to register quantities very early, which may not necessarily involve counting as we know it, but to distinguish between more or less and later to distinguish intuitively in terms of probabilities. From early mathematical intuition emerges human activity such as counting, measuring, shaping, estimating, moving, and proving. Each of these activities leads to more formal mathematical reasoning: counting (arithmetic), measuring (real numbers, calculus) shaping (geometry, topology) estimating (probability, statistics), moving (mechanics, calculus, dynamics), proving (logic). Formal mathematics emerges from our mathematical intuition, says Pinker. This same reasoning informs me that formal music emerges from our musical intuition --- our capacity for appreciating, learning, creating, and performing music.

While music exploits some of the same neural pathways that speech and language exploit, the fact that there are specially evolved components of the brain that are used in processing some of the elements of music would suggest that our capacity to appreciate, learn, and manipulate the attributes of music had some independent evolutionary value. Levitin observes that music "technology" has been around a long time --- at least 60,000 years based on musical artifacts that have been uncovered. But our capacity for music --- by which I mean our capacity for appreciating, learning, creating and performing music --- must have preceded the creation of musical artifact: there is music in song; there is music in tapping fingers and feet, which does not require a flute or drum. The origins of human language and whether it preceded music are, like the origins of music, murky. There is evidence that human language is at least 50,000 - 100,000 years old. For those who subscribe to the view that a FoxP2 gene mutation contributed to the development of human speech, that might put language in the 50,000 - 60,000 years ago range, about the same time as the oldest age of musical artifacts. It is therefore not entirely outside the realm of plausibility that our language instincts and our music instincts co-evolved or that one only slightly --- in the eons of evolutionary timescale --- preceded the other in human evolution.

Howard Jacobson, The Finkler Question (2010)

While I am not uninformed or without experience on the subject of this book --- Jewish identity --- I am probably not qualified to address it, at least competently. This small vignette from the novel explains my sentiment. One of the novel's characters, Hephzibah, who is the curator of a museum-in-the-making on Anglo-Jewish Culture, asks her non-Jewish lover, Julian Treslove, to take a break from his role as "assistant curator" because he would not have much to contribute until the museum was open. Almost immediately after making the request, she regrets it, because she realizes she has effectively said that a non-Jew is not competent to organize a museum about Jewish culture. "It wasn't fair to him. Jews might have been possessed of a crowded almanac of Jewish events, a Jewish Who's Who extending back to the first man and woman, but Treslove couldn't be expected to know in every instance Who Was and Who Was Not, Who Had Changed His Name, Who Had Married In or Out. What is more he would have no instinct for it. Somethings you cannot acquire. You have to be born and brought up a Jew to see the hand of Jews in everything. That or be born and brought up a Nazi." I don't have the instinct to address Jewish identity. Except for the last sentence of this quote, Hephzibah is probably correct, but I ask, does it have to be that way?

At a certain level, it is possible to generalize the subject of identity so that what is true for the Jewish identity is true of the Russian identity, the German identity, the Muslim identity, the atheist identity, the WASP identity, the African America identity. But reducing human cultural identity to its lowest common denominators deprives us the richness of the stories that define the culture and ethnicity of different humans.

The subject of identity, in this case Jewish identity, has to be approached in two ways: personal identity, what does it mean to be Jewish?; and cultural or group identity, what does Jewish mean? Howard Jacobson zigs and zags between both, as he should, because it is impossible to separate the two. Personal identity owes its existence to group identity: we humans are social animals. The title of Jacobson's novel, The Finkler Question, reveals the inseparability of the two. Finkler is Sam Finkler, Julian Treslove's lifelong friend, and a man with his own personal identity issues. For Treslove, his friend Sam Finkler is emblematic of all Jews. Privately, Treslove refers to Jews as "Finklers." "It took away the stigma, [Treslove] thought. The minute you talked about the Finkler Question, say or the Finkler conspiracy, you sucked out the toxins. But he was never quite able to get around to explaining this to Finkler himself." Substitute Finkler for Jewish and one of the themes in this book is immediately revealed by it title: the Jewish Question.

The phrase the "Jewish Question" first appears in 18th century England as part of a debate over the rights of Jews in England --- voting rights, property rights. I did not dwell on it in my discussion of David Liss' The Paper Conspiracy (see November 16, 2011 post), but Liss fairly describes and frequently mentions the legal status of Jews in early 18th century England and their lack of property rights and voting rights. But while it began as a neutral phrase, the "Jewish question" evolved and took on an anti-semitic tone by the 19th century. A discussion of the "Jewish question" ultimately could not avoid a discussion of a "solution" --- whether it be assimilation, deportation and resettlement --- and by 20th century Nazi Germany, the solution became wedded with malice in the so-called "final solution," extermination. The phrase the "Jewish question" is a little bit like Treslove substituting Finkler for Jewish in his lexicon. Here the word "question," particularly in its anti-semitic context, really means "problem." Problems are in need of solutions.

The origins of the "Jewish question" begin long before 18th century England. They begin with the demonization of the Jews by Christians as early as the founding of the Catholic church, as former Catholic priest, James Carroll, has so thoroughly documented in Constantine's Sword. Regrettably, oppressors --- in this case, both Christians and Christian institutions --- almost never confess to their own problems and look at themselves in the same way that they look at others, and so we do not hear simultaneously from them about the "christian question." But there is in this history of demonization a "christian question," just like in other times and places there is a "muslim question," a "hindu question," a "communist question," or a "Hutu question." Jacobson at least implicitly, if not expressly, recognizes this through Finkler, who turns the tables on the "jewish question" by drawing attention to the plight of Palestinians in Israel and Gaza at the hands of their Zionist/Israeli oppressors through his involvement with a group of Anglo Jewish intellectuals known as "ASHamed Jews." Samuel Finkler, a man who is so thoroughly cloaked with a Jewish identity, has the capacity to assess critically his own cultural identity in the same way he assesses the identity of others. The "Finkler question" is as much about a Jewish assessment of the Jewish identity as it is about a non-Jew's assessment of the Jewish identity or a Jew's assessment of the non-Jewish identity.

Turning to the question of cultural identity, what does "Jewish" mean? Is the term's meaning found in the story told by Thomas Cahill in The Gifts of the Jews: the first people to provide humanity with a narrative history of near linear progress and hope that tomorrow will be better than today, which is better than the day before, in contrast to the "circle of life and death" narrative common to other cultures, such as the Mesopotamians or Hindus before the common era? Is the term's meaning found in the first people to embrace monotheism? After all, the first four of the Ten Commandments, purportedly given by god to Moses and the Jews, are about the unity and singularity of one God who is the source of all life. Is the term's meaning found in the covenant story of chapter 17 of Genesis, a story of a real estate bargain for a narrow swath of land east of the Mediterranean, south of Assyria, and north of Egypt, cleaved and sealed with a promise that all of Abraham's male descendants would thereafter be circumcised? A significant part of The Finkler Question's conversation, as well as Treslove's ruminations, are about circumcision and land. The ASHamed Jews' diatribe about Zionists and Israel is as much a diatribe about the illegal occupation of land as it is about the contradictions of Jews who "throw their weight around and then tell you they believe in a compassionate God." Is it found in the larger story read and re-read every year, along with the laws, rules, customs of the Torah, beginning with Abraham, continuing through to the story of Moses and those who wandered out of Egypt with Moses, found in Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy, and perhaps the oral tradition as well? Or is the meaning of Jewish found in the diaspora story, a wandering tribe in exile, yet seemingly able to assimilate in the communities of others until someone comes along and says we need to purify our community?

I did not ask whether the meaning of Jewish is found in connections among people to some mitochondrial DNA that links a genealogical family of people across generations. The phrase l'dor v'dor suggests that what Jewish means is connected through the traditions that are passed along between generations. The Nazis certainly thought in terms of a blood connection. But the Jewish treatment of the Marranos who converted to Christianity in order to avoid persecution in the times of Inquisition indicates that those who failed to continue to practice Judaism, even privately, were no longer full Jews. Likewise conversion to Judaism by a non-Jew brings about full membership in the Jewish community. Blood lineage is not an essential element of what Jewish means. Jacobson does not seem to think so either. Finkler is married to a woman, Tyler Gallagher, who converts to Judaism after they marry, and the story contains enough information that could lead one to conclude that Tyler is "more Jewish" than Finkler.

As for the novel's main character, Julian Treslove, unsure of his own identity, explores creating a Jewish identity. Treslove cannot maintain a relationship with any woman more than an evening, a day or a week. As the novel opens he seems to adore every woman who walks by him. He is the father of two children conceived during what appears to be little more than a one-night stand. In the novel's central act, Treslove is walking home after a dinner with Finkler and their mutual friend, an older Jewish man, Libor. He is assaulted by a woman, injured, and robbed, and she curses at him. At first he thinks he hears his assailant say, "Your jewels." He thinks again, maybe she said, "You're Jules." And the more he thinks about, he thinks she said "You Jules, you." No, it was more succinct: "You Ju." Treslove concludes that his assailant has mistaken him for Finkler. She thinks Treslove is a Jew. He rejects the idea that mistaken identity is one of mistaken appearance: he is the wrong size, the wrong temperature, the wrong speed to be perceived as Jew. It must be something else, he tells Finkler: it is a matter of spirit and essence. Spiritually I am like the Jews. He is reminded that Finkler once told him, "Ours is not a club you can join." And then he meets Hephzibah --- at a seder-in-November meal hosted by Libor. He begins a year long relationship based on mutual love and appears to be on the cusp of trying to establish a Jewish identity. Once again, however, he cannot consummate a relationship after a year of trying. Treslove cannot establish his personal identity.

As far as individual identity is concerned, there is no monolithic Jewish personal identity in Jacobson's novel. There are Jews who regularly go to synagogue and read the Torah every year; there are Jews who do not go to synagogue or rarely go to synagogue and do not read the Torah every year. There are Jews who are ardent Zionists and defenders of the modern Jewish state of Israel, and there are Jews who believe that the Zionists and the State of Israel have lost their way. There are Jews who will only marry another Jew. There are Jews who marry non-Jews, and sometimes they raise their children as Jews and sometimes they do not. There are Jews who are converted Jews. There are Jews who will only have marital affairs with non-Jews. There are Jews who consider themselves Orthodox, there are Jews who consider themselves "conservative," and there are Jews who consider themselves "reform." There are European Jews and there are Sephardic Jews.

Personal identity is a matter of autobiographical memory. This is our autobiographical self (see April 8, 2011 post). But our autobiographical memories are shared, and this facilitates social bonding and the building of relationships. It also influences our story-telling and the stories we tell each other, whether represented as fact or fiction. Cultures are built on the sharing of autobiographical memory, yet at the same time personal identity is strongly influenced by the culture that one personally experiences. While at the outset I said that personal identity owes its existence to cultural or group identity, the reverse is true as well as cultural identity ultimately owes its existence to the sharing of many personal identities. Autobiographical memories are merged and revised into a collective memory. But as we have seen in prior posts, memory is fluid, constantly changing and redeveloping in marginal ways. (See November 6, 2011 post). What is meant by "Jewish" for one era, is, and is likely to have a slightly different meaning in another era. What it means to "be Jewish" in one era, is likely to have a slightly different meaning in another era.

Rita Carter, Mapping the Mind (Rev. 2010)

Five postings in 2011 on books and subjects related to the mind and brain, and I was consciously aware of that fact and a desire to move on to something new. But as I wrapped up V.S. Ramachandran's The Tell-Tale Brain (see previous post), his remark that as neuroscientists map the brain they are "grouping their way toward the periodic table of elements" reminded me that a book on The Bookshelf that I had purchased last year, Rita Carter's Mapping the Mind, was waiting to be read. I found this book at the bookshop at the conclusion of the American Museum of Natural History's exhibit on The Brain. I recalled that what impressed me toward a purchase was the exquisite drawings of the brain, many of which included arrows to illustrate the interconnectedness of specific brain regions to explain a specific neuronal process. For those who are not practicing neurologists, a picture can nicely supplement a thousand words.

By the end of Mapping the Brain, I wondered if this should have been the first book I ever read on the brain. Would I have better appreciated all the other material I have read on this subject if I had already read this book? I can't answer that, but studying Rita Carter's text after I had read these other books, many of which are discussed or mentioned in prior posts, was facilitated by my prior exposure to the subject. Either way, Mapping the Brain is a good overview and introduction to the brain and a good review as well.

Ramachandran's analogy that neuroscience's understanding of the brain is moving in the direction of establishing something akin to chemistry's periodic of table of elements is best left as a metaphor rather than a suggestion of equivalence (as I think the statement was intended). It is fair to say, like the periodic of table of elements, that the brain is organized, but it is not sequential in the same sense that the elements can be organized sequentially according to their atomic weight or related in their properties as part of one of 18 different groups. While thinking about this, it crossed my mind that evolutionary age would be one way of sequentially organizing the parts of the brain. Antonio Damasio did something like this in Self Comes to Mind (see April 8, 2011 post), describing the sequential evolution of the brain stem, the limbic system, and ultimately the cerebral cortex. But the brain is indeed very complex, as Carter notes in her closing paragraph, when she says that "today's mind voyagers are discovering a biological system of awe-inspiring complexity." One could also try to organize the parts of the brain sequentially, starting with a particular sensory input, and follow the connections to other parts of the brain to conscious awareness and action (or unconscious action, as the case may be) that ensues. In the end, however, that effort would not be particularly useful given the multi-layer network of sensory inputs that are processed simultaneously, including the presence of variable emotional reactions in connection with a particular sensory input that could stimulate a different behavioral outcome.

Both Carter and Ramachandran caused me to question a statement I made in a prior post (June 12, 2011 post) while discussing Michael Shermer's The Believing Brain. I wrote:

"I strongly suspect that if we dissected human brains and a network of connected neurons from a representative sample of humans, we would find a very high level of near identity among brains. There will be some differences due to DNA, and there will be some pathological differences as well, perhaps caused during embryonic development. But I believe that by and large we will find that human brains, neuron by neuron, are organized and folded and layered in substantially identical ways." There is substantial truth in my remark --- I did not say identical, but I did say "near identity" and "substantially identical." These words came at the risk of maybe overstating the case. Carter writes, "Human brains are constructed along fairly standard lines and so we all tend to see the world in a fairly standard way." And as I noted, there are differences due to DNA, pathological injury, and embryonic development. But I overlooked perhaps the largest exception --- experience (nurture) and its impact on memory -- and what is referred to as synaptic plasticity. And it is long-term memory -- enhanced by repeated experiences in some that others do not share --- that gives rise to our autobiographical self and what makes each one of us unique. So while we may "tend to see the world in a fairly standard way," Carter notes:

"Every brain constructs the world in a slightly different way from any other because every brain is different. The sight of an external object will vary from person to person because no two people have precisely the same number of motion cells, magenta-sensitive cells, or straight line cells. . . . An individual's view is formed both by their genes and by how their brain has been moulded by experience. Musicians, for instance, have brains which are physically different from others and which work differently when they play or hear music. . . . Extraordinary individual ways of seeing things may also arise from strange 'quirks' of brain development. Albert Einstein, for instance, had a very oddly constructed brain which might account for his astonishing insights into the nature of space and time."

Carter's treatment of language pretty much follows that of Ramachandran. And her treatment of memory restates much of what Antonio Damasio (see April 8, 2011 post) and Daniel Schacter (see September 20, 2011 post) discuss, but I still learned something new. For example, "Episodes that are destined for long-term memory are not lodged there right away. The process of laying them down permanently takes up to two years. Until then they are still fragile and may quite easily be wiped out. It is this replay from hippocampus to cortex and back again -- a process known as consolidation, that slowly turns fleeting impressions into long-term memories. . . Much of the hippocampal replay is thought to happen during sleep. Recordings from hippocampal cells show them engaging in a 'dialogue' with cortical cells, during which they signal one another, back and forth, in a call-and-reply formation. Some of this is known to take place during the 'quiet' phase of sleep, when dreaming, if it occurs at all, and is vague and instantly forgotten. Until memories are fully encoded in the cortex they are still fragile and may quite easily be wiped out. And even when they are established, they are not fixed. A memory is not, in fact, a recollection of an experience but the recollection of the last time you recalled the experience. Hence our memories are constantly changing and redeveloping. The process by which a memory changes is more or less the same as the consolidation process that lays it down for the first time. As we will see, each time we recall something, it is changed a little because it becomes mixed up with things that are happening in the present. Reconsolidation is a process by which this slightly altered memory effectively replaces the previous one, writing over it, so to speak, rather like re-recording over a rewritable DVD." I mentioned this phenomenon in the September 20, 2011 post discussing Daniel Schacter's discussion of the consistency bias, whereby the brain infers past beliefs from our current state and the reference to Joseph LeDoux's discussion of reconsolidation. Carter explains it better.

I also learned that not all memories are stored in cortical areas. While long-term memories are initially stored in the hippocampus, as described above, over the course of roughly two years they are transferred to the cortex and the hippocampus is no longer required for their retrieval. These memories are distributed in the same parts of the brain that encoded the original experience. So sounds are found in the auditory cortex, taste and skin sensory memories are found in the somatosensory cortex, and sight in the visual cortex. But procedural -- "how to" --- memories are stored outside of the cortex, in the cerebellum and putamen, and fear memories are stored in the amygdala.

Carter also addresses, albeit briefly, the subject of imagination, which I have touched on in several previous postings (see, for instance, July 30, 2011 post and May 22, 2011 post) and describes the connection to memory. "Our ability to conjure up scenarios which have not actually happened is prodigious. Imaginative capacity runs along a spectrum from the mundane skills required to envisage what your supper might taste like if you combined the onion, mushrooms, and left over chicken in the fridge with some curry sauce, through to the awe-inspiring visions of artists, writers, and excitable children. Even the humblest of these skills outranks the abilities --- as far as we can tell --- of every other species. . . . At first sight memory and imagination seem quite distinct: the first in concerned, after all, with what happened already whereas the second is all about what has not. But recent studies show that imagination is wholly dependent on memory, because memories are its building blocks. When we imagine something happening we root around in our memory and come up with experiences which seem likely to recur, then combine them, chop them, shake them and blend them until they come out as something entirely different." In my view, this is cannot be unrelated to the process of reconsolidation that I mentioned above and some of the biases that other writers have described (see September 20, 2011 post and June 12, 2011 post) whereby memories are altered.

A text box entitled "Remembering the Future" by Eleanor Maguire is inserted by Carter, which perceptively quotes Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland: "It's a poor memory that only works backwards." Maguire cites an MRI study that found recalling past experiences and imagining future possible ones activated a network of brain regions in common including the hippocampus. She notes a new theory of 'scene reconstruction,' which allows for the internal rehearsal of events or scenes, which underpins the process of creating a simulated event. Maguire writes: "[I]n humans, the use of this scene reconstruction process goes far beyond simply predicting the future, to general evaluation of fitness for purpose and ultimately creativity. For example, a scriptwriter or novelist who is writing a passage in a film or book may play out the whole scene using their construction system, not with the idea of predicting the future, but instead for the purpose of evaluating its aesthetic suitability." This is the sort of discussion I was hoping to find in The Tell-Tale Brain (see previous post). What is missing from her discussion is the identification of the parts of the brain involved in imagination, although the text seems to identify the hippocampus as one candidate for assembling disparate memories. Also missing is the evolutionary basis for this ability. Obviously, the ability to plan for the future has survival value, and our planning capacity is lodged in the frontal cortex, where working memory occurs. The building blocks for understanding creative imagination are before us, and understanding a collateral capacity --- the capacity for deception, including self-deception --- by imaginatively rearranging memories and treating them as factual, when they are not, needs to be understood as well. Part of this is reflected in the previous discussions of mental biases. Carter notes that the subject of belief and non-belief is not unrelated to how the brain treats statements it believes to be true and those it believes to be false. Research, she says, shows that truth telling appears to be the default position for the human brain, and that telling lies involves extra cognitive effort. I am not sure this is entirely true, as bias mechanisms appear to be short-cuts for resolving conflicts in our memories.