Blogging on the Brain is Hard

Aiming to distinguish myself from the horde of left-of-center bloggers, I had hoped to blog about subjects other than politics. Since I have fairly varied interests, I thought achieving a breadth of high-brow content would be fairly easy.

It isn't. To illustrate this, consider my attempts to post about neuroscience, a subject whose literature I'm becoming conversant in. The difficulty with making intelligent observations about neuroscience is that... the brain is really complicated, and our understanding of its workings constantly evolves through new research. Whereas a single monograph in the New York Review of Books can provide a succinct and thorough overview of, say, health-care economics, even the most articulate neuroscientists such as Michael Gazzaniga require full-length books to convey their ideas appropriately.

If I cannot add anything to even lay debates about neuroscience, I least I can relay useful summaries of the specialized knowledge one must have to even comprehend what the debates are about. Here is Gazzaniga's conclusion to quick-and-dirty overview of neuro 101 (The Social Brain p. 25).

These few glimpses into basic brain mechanisms are sufficient to tell us what we need to know about the basic nature of the issue. Four principles emerge: (a) the brain develops under tight genetic control; (b) its basic architecture can be modfied only very early in life and then only in a negative way; (c) it is organized in such a way that relatively independent processing modules exist everywhere throughout the brain system; and (d) it has methods of self-modulating influences from the environment through an intricate, self-governed brain chemical system.

Translation:

• (a) genes largely determine brain development;
  
• (b) environment cannot measurably improve the brain, but can harm it, such as a head injury decreasing verbal IQ (and the brain is most susceptible to such injury in the first year of life);
  
• (c) when there is sensory input to the brain, it is not processed once-at-a-time in different areas, but rather processed simultaneously in many areas (the brain as a parallel processor as opposed to a factory line);
  
• (d) the body's chemical system mediates environmental influence to modulate pain and pleasure. For example, the (p.14) "self-produced opiates called endorphins which are crucial to a body's well-being. These chemicals are activated under conditions of bodily stress and serve to curb some of the pain we would otherwise feel in their absence. There is no doubt that we would feel more pain without them."
  

Feeling smarter yet?