Is consciousness search?

Search is all the rage in apps and the internet. What if search is consciousness as well?

After reading Antonio Damasio's book "Self comes to mind", about consciousness, I am little wiser than before. One of its few significant points is to reiterate that explicit memory is a matter of replaying data stored entirely unconsciously in certain areas of the brain (like the frontal lobes) in other areas regularly involved in presenting sensory information. Thus, if we remember a day at the ocean, a brain scanner would see our visual, hearing, and smell processing areas light up with a muted version of the actual experience, presumably transmitted there as a pattern from memory storage areas that, as we learned, basically dump out in reverse what previously played into them.

The book's second significant point is that consciousness is largely about learning, by using long-term, large scale context drawn from unconscious sources to train unconscious modules elsewhere in the brain. Consciousness doesn't directly execute anything, as anyone learning a new skill can attest. If we are learning to play a musical instrument, a very painful process of setting a conscious goal alternates with halting execution as we consciously try to get our body to adopt new actions and habits. Then we consciously perceive the woeful result, and the learning cycle continues. Once the relevant unconscious processes form, conscious direction can be devoted to ever-greater levels of abstraction and indirect control.

"In the words of William James, ‘‘consciousness’’ appears as ‘‘an organ added for the sake of steering a nervous system grown too complex to regulate itself’’ (James, 1890, chapter 5)."   (All quotes taken from this article, not from Damasio)

Third and last is that Damasio is convinced that consciousness involves very low levels of the brain- the stem and thalamus, in addition to higher cortical regions. In one of the few items of data presented, he claims that hydrancephalic patients, born with with no cortex at all, (and who can live into their 20's), still have a rudimentary and responsive form of consciousness. They like some people and not others, like some foods and not others, etc. He also notes that only very few lesions, such as some in the higher brain stem, can radically impair consciousness, indicating that consciousness is a rather broad and evolutionarily primitive function.

So much for the book review. Thankfully, I ran across a much more lucid and up-to-date review of the field, which seems to be freely available, and which supplies relevant quotes below.

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What gets me going are databases, so I would naturally see consciousness as a search function over a database. Are feelings involved? Sure, they are just another datatype in the database! Specifically, I'd propose that consciousness is the integration of connections drawn from a vast database which instantly (that is to say, within about 0.3 to 0.5 second) inbue perceptual or recollected data with context, meaning, valance, and feeling. That, I would argue, is the solution of the consciousness problem... the hard problem that is posed as: what makes the "redness" of red?

On its face, red is just a brain-encoded category plucked out of the electromagnetic spectrum more or less arbitrarily. What makes it conscious and rich for us, unlike what a video camera might experience of the same visible phenomenon, are the feelings and knowledge associated with red in our internal constellation. Perhaps we "like" red, and have special associations with various shades of red. Perhaps we know a little about interior design, or graphic design, and see the power that red can lend to projects in those areas. To a baby, red is just flat data, though it may also be intrinsically attractive, based on biological programming of our perceptual apparatus and feelings. Red is the color of blood, after all, and of ripe fruits- doubtless a powerful color on purely inborn biology alone. But to adults, it can be far more meaningful, in qualitative terms of association, which leads to the term "qualia".

Our brains are connection machines, (and also modelling machines, at a higher level). All data that pours into our heads are automatically linked to a web of ambient data- how a cookie smelled as it was being dunked in an aromatic tea by our fingers which felt its slightly greasy, crumbly surface, as we fumbled through a conversation and thought about the morning ahead. Stream-of-consciousness is old-hat by now in literature, but it is important to recognize how significant it is, relative to what is possible with current computers. In database technology, we struggle to relate individual pieces of data, and have to frame them into arbitrary classifications, numerically indexed and neatly tucked into bins. The technology is utterly unlike the freewheeling automatically everything-connects-with-everthing-else analog methods of brain data storage.

Once the data is in, it is ready to come back out, whether implicitly as we go about our lives and keep associating whatever is new with all that has gone before, or explicitly via reverie and replay in our sensory brain regions. One can have more or less data, thus more or less consciousness. Without training, one might be oblivious to the subtleties of classical music, or baseball, in effect being less conscious. Animals have all sorts of levels of consciousness, depending on how much information they can muster, and how much of it their brains keep in close and immediate connection, rather than in the vast unconscious troves of senstivities and implicit memories that far outnumber what is conscious.

What differentiates unconscious from conscious data? Unconscious data is surely usable in specialized systems, and through the mysterious processes of the dynamic unconscious, may create truly novel linkages (ideas) that pop into consciousness from time to time. Unconscious processing is also parallel, in contrast to consciousness, which, while maybe disjoint, still exhibits a linear "flow". This makes unconscious processing far, far more efficient and powerful than consciousness. But it is not continuously integrated and available, perhaps via the high-frequency gamma-wave attention system and long-range axons that seem to correlate with consciousness. The cerebellum is an example- a module of the brain devoted mostly to fine motor control, which processes information without contributing one iota to consciousness, probably because it isn't wired into the top-level consciousness system that exchanges information all over the brain, if in limited amounts.

"Human ERP [event-rrelated potential] and MEG [magnetoencephalography] recordings also revealed that conscious perception is also accompanied, during a similar time window, by increases in the power of high-frequency fluctuations, primarily in the gamma band (>30 Hz), as well as their phase synchronization across distant cortical sites (Doesburg et al., 2009; Melloni et al., 2007; Rodriguez et al., 1999; Schurger et al., 2006; Wyart and Tallon-Baudry, 2009)."

"Nonconscious stimuli can be quickly and efficiently processed along automatized or preinstructed processing routes before quickly decaying within a few seconds. By contrast, conscious stimuli would be distinguished by their lack of ‘‘encapsulation’’ in specialized processes and their flexible circulation to various processes of verbal report, evaluation, memory, planning, and intentional action, many seconds after their disappearance (Baars, 1989; Dehaene and Naccache, 2001). Dehaene and Naccache (2001) postulate that ‘‘this global availability of information (...) is what we subjectively experience as a conscious state.’’"

What form does this "information" take? That is a significant question, even if we accept the overall hypothesis about a global information exchange network or workspace that correlates closely with consciousness. Information all over the brain takes the form of action potentials, quite different from whatever we might imagine as qualia- cloudy whisps, movie images, compositions by Bach, etc. Consciousness would clearly take the same form, being a subset of the wider information flow in the brain, with the properties of being integrative, linear, and consistent in form while varying in content. Positing any other form that this information could take wouldn't make biological sense, nor would it help clarify what makes qualia special.

"A notable feature of the dynamic core hypothesis is the proposal of a quantitative mathematical measure of information integration called F, high values of which are achieved only through a hierarchical recurrent connectivity and would be necessary and sufficient to sustain conscious experience: ‘‘consciousness is integrated information’’ (Tononi, 2008)."

One special property of consciousness is that it can reach into many other areas, depending on attentional focus. Special long-range axons (pyramidal) are thought to provide some of these connections:

"The ‘‘special morphology’’ of the pyramidal cells from the cerebral cortex was already noted by Cajal (1899–1904), who mentioned their ‘‘long axons with multiple collaterals’’ and their ‘‘very numerous and complex dendrites.’’ ... Furthermore, quantitative analyses of the dendritic field morphology of layer III pyramidal neurons revealed a continuous increase of complexity of the basal dendrites from the occipital up to the prefrontal cortex within a given species (DeFelipe and Farin ̃ as, 1992; Elston and Rosa, 1997, 1998) and from lower species (owl monkey, marmoset) up to humans (Elston, 2003). ... These observations confirm that PFC [prefrontal cortex] cells exhibit the morphological adaptations needed for massive long-distance communication, information integration, and broadcasting postulated in the GNW [global neuronal workspace] model and suggest that this architecture is particularly developed in the human species."

Outside the brain, search has evolved rapidly over cultural history. First, we gave up our deep cultural memories, such as epic poems and stories, in favor of writing and books, such as scriptures. Now we give up our medium-term memories to the internet, not bothering to remember the blizzard of factlets that can so easily be looked up on Wikipedia. Perhaps the next step is supplementing consciousness itself- our moment-to-moment short term memories that make up the database that connects everything in our heads into meaningful constructs. While technically fanciful, or at any rate very far off, (cue the singularity people), if we could get faster and bigger analog memory storage from chips implanted into our heads, and connections between them made compatible with the existing consciousness network, then search would be internalized and create new levels of consciousness.

As an example, head-mounted displays are already in existence that automatically annotate ambient scenes, for instance for military pilots. So imagine looking out, but instead of a bare streetscape, it is covered with highlighting colors or text annotations that indicate properties of interest, like restaurants, or street signs, or dirt ... whatever you are concerned about. This would be a richer form of consciousness than we are normally used to, though still limited by what we can pack through our existing sensory apparatus. Suppose that these annotations were internally generated and spontaneously pop up in response to whatever we were thinking or looking at ... that would be consciousness itself.


Some more interesting papers and links on the topic:

• Phase transitions and chaos.
• Gamma and the coding of consciousness.
• More on gamma.
• Relations of gamma and theta waves.
• Not all gammas are the same.
• Another all-around review of the field.
• The demented Stuart Hammeroff retreats from quantum consciousness, to only slightly more plausible dentritic gap junction consciousness.

"Interestingly, recent research also suggests that spontaneous brain activity, as assessed by resting-state EEG recordings, may be similarly parsed into a stochastic series of slow ‘‘microstates,’’ stable for at least 100 ms, each exclusive of the other, and separated by sharp transitions (Lehmann and Koenig, 1997; Van de Ville et al., 2010). These microstates have recently been related to some of the fMRI resting-state networks (Britz et al., 2010). Crucially, they are predictive of the thought contents reported by participants when they are suddenly interrupted (Lehmann et al., 1998, 2010). Thus, whether externally induced or internally generated, the ‘‘stream of consciousness’’ may consist in a series of slow, global, and transiently stable cortical states (Changeux and Michel, 2004)."

• Unemployment is also a civil rights issue.
• Stiglitz speaks.
• Trickle down? Nope. Wages are declining.
• Corporations to rule over us all.
• Christians still hunting for Adam and Eve.
• It's just a fish, so who cares? 
• Another telling of the regulatory and free market debacle.
• Bradley Manning, Hero.
• Economics quote of the week- Warren Buffet:

"If Greece could print its own drachmas, it wouldn't have a debt problem."

Blogging alone

A review of Putnam's Bowling Alone, about social connections as social capital.

In "Bowling alone", (2000), sociologist Robert Putnam offers a wide-ranging critique of recent US society as having become more disconnected and socially poverty-stricken, even as we have gained in many other forms of intellectual and material wealth. It is enough to make one wonder whether the Islamists and related extremists have something of a point, as they resist the destruction of traditional Afghan and other Islamic societies by the steamroller of Western commercialization.

I was reading another delightful book, the Big Bonanza, by Dan DeQuille, about the silver mining days of the 1880's Comstock lode, which mentions the dizzying array of social associations in Virginia City in its glory days: the Ancient Order of Hibernians, Ancient Order of Druids, Knights of Pythias, Knights of the Red Branch, Improved Order of the Red Men, Masons, Champions of the Red Cross, Caledonia Society, Society of Pacific Coast Pioneers, German Turnveriens, trade unions for miners, printers, and others, churches, Virginia Benevolent Society, St. Mary's Orphan Asylum and school, two daily papers, and more. This in a town of 30,000. I realized that this connected significantly with Putnam's thesis, though I had never read his book. Not having TV back in the day, they entertained each other in grand style, making music, gambling, meeting, lecturing, dining, doing good deeds, prospecting, and pontificating. Now, much of that social connection has fallen by the wayside as we cacoon in our homes with professional entertainment piped in profusion, via cable, internet, broadcast, and radio. We have gained immeasurably, but what have we lost?

So I read Putnam's book, which provides a detailed and multifaceted analysis of what he calls social capital. The first thing to ask is- what is social capital, and what is good about it?

Social capital is the kind of thing that researchers like to visualize with complicated maps, like the 6 degrees of Kevin Bacon. It is the degree to which we are connected to other people by bonds that are social, and thus reciprocal and feeling, rather than commercial and anonymous, or imagined via novels and film. It is saying hello to someone on the street, making both of you feel more human and connected in a society, rather than anonymously alone. It is voting, and marrying, and writing letters to the editor, and conducting meetings of the bridge club or neighborhood group, and running the library. It is baby-sitting for others and looking in on an elderly neighbor.

Social connections generally make us feel good and improve health. Marrying raises life expectency the same amount as quitting smoking. "Regular club attendance, volunteering, entertaining, or church attendance is the happiness equivalent of getting a college degree or more than doubling your income." On the work front, connections are self-evidently conducive to getting better jobs and greasing the wheels of commerce. "Rainmakers" are hired in many businesses almost solely for their Rolodexes. And in the political sphere, those with more social capital vote more, and those with more connections have more influence. Organizing is all about aligning the participation of the many towards shared ends. The tea party is an example of (relatively few) people of like mind banding together on behalf of an agenda and gaining influence from that solidarity.

But there is a flip side to social capital as well, which is freedom. Moving to the anonymous city from the gossipy small town can be hugely liberating. Everyone needs some personal space, and some, such as many artists, intensely need quiet and solitude to plumb the depths of their muse. So there needs to be a balance. Putnam notes that when it comes to happiness, while attending club meetings monthly is far better than attending none, attending them daily is worse than monthly ... there are diminishing returns to sociability. We observe the same among monkeys and chimpanzees, that infants need intense social connection to their mothers, but thereafter, there is an ongoing and shifting balance between independence / exploration and the need to be part of a group- to have a sound home base to work from.

Additonally, social capital is not always positive, but can bond in intolerance and bigotry. The KKK was a voluntary civic organization, after all.

So what's the problem? Putman points to a variety of studies and statistics that show that our civic life and social connections have become weaker over the last few decades. Membership in all kinds of organizations has declined. Many organizations that used to be truly civic and locally based are now skeleton membership and lobbying operations based in Washington DC. Graph after graph shows declines in such things as membership rates in chapter-based national organizations, local meeting attendance, service as an officer, volunteering in campaigns, voting, social visiting, family dinners, stopping at stop signs, philanthropy, subjective happiness, card playing, and yes, bowling as part of a league.

For example, membership in the PTA, per family with children, is less than half what it was at its peak in 1960. Union membership is less than half of its peak in 1950. United Way giving is roughly half of its peak in 1960. The number of security guards has doubled per capita since the 1950's, as has the number of lawyers. Hitchhiking has become unheard of. Suicide is three times more prevalent among youth in the 90's than it was in the 50's. Putman makes quaint reference to people raking their own leaves before they blow onto someone else's yard, in the general (socially rational) expectation that similar good turns would be done by others. Today, of course, the name of the game is to power-blow your leaves and other detritus onto as many neighbor's yards as possible.

Probably this is not surprising to anyone. All kinds of civic virtues have been faltering noticeably, as have bridge clubs, entertaining, smoke filled rooms, percolators, and the rest of it. Despite all the hoopla surrounding the many internet communications technologies, one has to say that facebook is a social wasteland- focused on the barest of substance- "like"!- and the barest of interaction, however far-flung. Blogging can occasionally furnish more substance, but its interactions remain rather disembodied, as well as parochial.

More interesting is Putnam's analysis of why this social decline happened. There is a long list of possibilities, of which I will give a few, mixing in some of my own:

• The auto-addled suburb

The twin benifices of oil and prosperity allowed most of us to move out of the warm Jane Jacobs urban community into sterile Levittowns, requiring an isolating and draining car trip to go anywhere and do anything. While the genteel ideal of living in the country took the US by storm, it left in its wake neither the closeness of traditional rural country life nor the close-packed inescapable community of the traditional city.

• The demon tube

TV is the only form of entertainment that, according to Putnam, destroys social capital, sitting us on our couches and frying our brains. The average household has their TV on an average of eight hours per day, shockingly enough. Those who watch only what they plan for in advance are far more resistent to its corrosive effects on social engagement than those who watch "whatever's on".

• The greatest generation

In a word, war is the greatest social glue, especially if you win. 

• The feminist vacuum

Not vacuums that are feminist! The 50's and 60's were the age of stay-at-home moms driven bonkers by their isolation in the above-mentioned suburbs by the problem that had no name, who then devoted their vast energies to den-mothering, league of women voter-ing, and all the other worthy pursuits of social gluing and betterment they have no time for today.

• The forgetting of Keynes

Life was supposed to be getting better about now, with jetpacks and endless leisure. Instead, most workers face stagnant living standards, higher risks off-loaded by their employers, (principally in the areas of retirement and job security), less effective leisure time, and longer working lives due to the downturn and the lack of secure retirement. Meanwhile, income has risen immensely for the fewer rich, making the entire society, as an economic system, poorer and less prosperous than it could be if wealth and spending were more evenly distributed. All this is principally due to the ideological forgetting of Keynes, whose policies were aimed at maintaining overall prosperity through full employment.

• The prosperous cacoon

The home has taken on increased significance in modern America, as the consequence of all the above trends, principally those of suburbanization and electronic entertainment. 

• The inequality curse 

Putnam has numerous graphs of social metrics tabulated by state, where states of the South always come off worst. One could view this through an economic lens, since economic inequality has long been higher in the South than elsewhere, with its stronger class distinctions, glorification of hereditary wealth, and antipathy to unions, not to mention the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow. In recent decades, the entire country has moved in the same direction, dramatically losing union membership and seeing rising economic inequality. Republicans keep trying to repeal inheritance taxes as the purest expression of their plutocratic proclivities. Of course, as mentioned above in the discussion of Keynes, inequality is fundamentally corrosive to prosperity. But it is also directly corrosive to social capital, as the rich rule the political system and airwaves from within gated communities, served by a pliant underclass, and feel less beholden to and less like the "little people". 

"Inequality and social solidarity are deeply incompatible." 

• The red scare (not one of Putnam's theses)

Communism was far more popular during the Great Depression and WW2 than it is today. Social solidarity, socialism, unions, and similar sentiments had great traction, while today, even being a community organizer seems to be a dirty word. Of course as the 50's wore on, the revelations of Stalinism and McCarthyism eroded this legacy, focusing communitarian sentiments on less liberal practices like keeping women in the kitchen and showing wholesome family dramas on TV. Still, the greatest generation had significantly more exposure to and practice of serious socialism than we would dream of today, with FOX news keeping a careful watch over our bodily fluids.

• A surfeit of civil rights (not one of Putnam's theses)

The civil rights movements of the last century, encompassing successive waves of inclusion of, well, virtually everybody, have been unquestionably good. But is it possible that the club that everyone can join has become devalued in the process? One theory of our unique national founding is that the founders were especially conscious of liberty and the rights/values of association because they denied them so systematically to their slaves. Putnam makes a substantial point about social capital taking two forms, either bonding capital, which can be quite introverted within a community and exclusionary, versus bridging capital, which is open to all and encourages cross-fertilization. But there may be less to this distinction than meets the eye, if a society is class-structured so that no truly bridging capital is really possible. In short, in psychological terms, do we always need an out-group, however distant and implicit, to support in-group social solidarity?

"Slavery was designed to destroy social capital."

So what's the answer? Mostly, it's war that's done it. Putnam tracks the changing complexion of civic engagement, and finds a very strong generational component, where engagement rose in a small spurt after WW1, then massively around WW2. The WW2 generation has been consistently more civically inclined throughout their lives than those before or after, for several probable reasons. First was that the war directly trained US citizens in countless acts of engagement, from actual military service with their fellow bumpkins from all over our fair land to intensive mobilization on the home front for victory gardens, scrap drives, bond drives, and all sorts of other sacrifices. As religious leaders know well, the greater the sacrifice, the greater the psychological commitment.

Secondly, the whole mood of war is rather electrifying and unifying. In my lifetime, we have experienced faint echos in the various Middle Eastern wars, but none in the existential way that world war against utter evil engendered. And lastly, winning the war certainly helped as well, with the added flourish of devising and dropping the most incredibly powerful weapon ever. This mood of sheer power and potency was later sapped away in the Vietnam war, as we faced an enemy that made a mockery of our technological power with its understanding of social capital, ironically enough.

So, the greatest generation was highly trusting of each other and their institutions, expressed in their high degree of involvement in those institutions and in other forms of social engagement. Call them square, but they were cohesive and civic-minded in a way that our later jaded, ironical generations are not. It is also noteworthy that the Civil war, for all its internecine horror, also engendered a generation of civic activity that was reflected in the profusion of social organizations mentioned above in Virginia City, Nevada.

The other factors listed above also have roles in the drama, especially TV, which Putnam blames for perhaps a third of the decline. The TV epidemic is indeed serious, as bad as the much discussed obesity epidemic, and closely connected to it. Both are characterized by the ingestion of junk and the displacement of healthy fare. Both make us less fit and are promoted by corporations pushing what are essentially drugs in the guise of free choice, individualism, and easy living, not to mention better sex, ironically enough. TV presents the additional insult of the thoughts and desires of corporations themselves in a constant barrage of deceitful harangues that form our ambient intellectual atmosphere, and as a bonus, forms our current mode of politics as well.

Is there any hope? Putnam has an absolutely dreadful concluding chapter, full of stentorian "Let us find ways to ..." pronouncements. More interestingly, he devotes a long chapter to the Gilded age, also called the progressive age (1870's through 1920's), when the US really transitioned to modernity and when most of the large associations that survive today were born, like the Boy Scouts, League of Women's voters, Red Cross, NAACP, Goodwill industries, Lion's Club, Teamsters, and Sierra Club. It wasn't just the civic energy from Civil War mobilization that caused this flowering, but the deep social changes of urbanization and immigration that posed the problem of rootlessness as never before. Social entrepreneurs of many stripes devised new organizations to replace some of the rural civic connections that had been lost, using the dense new urban neighborhoods as springboards to restore social connection.

Conservatives might comment that it was precisely the lack of government meddling that called forth the private action and philanthropy that made this flowering possible. Ironically, in that view, the aim of many of the new organizations was to regularize their charitable activities as part of the state, in which they succeeded in cases like hospitals, welfare, work training programs, and Carnegie's libraries. Did they succeed too far?

In essence, these organizers discovered and promoted novel public goods, which are most fairly provided on a public basis. If we find that various social services (like, say, Kindergarten) are important to have on a universal basis, then leaving them to the vagaries of sociability as it ebbs and flows with the generations, let alone leaving them to the free market, isn't a fair, efficient, or consistent way of providing them. So government provision simply makes sense, even if it has an eroding effect on our voluntary scope of activity. One of the last bastions of social solidarity occurs during natural disasters, when communities pull together to pile sandbags, evacuate the elderly, rescue pets, and eventually rebuild and sue oil companies. Yet even these sacred tasks are being seized by FEMA and other government agencies! Where will it all end?

One wrinkle in the greatest generation theory above is that the older generation still votes at far higher rates than succeeding generations. And despite their higher civic-mindedness, they also vote their pocketbooks, which in California has meant the decline of public eduction, and nationally means the government-mandated transfer of wealth from the young to the old, in the form of social security and medicare.

What is the solution? As has been often remarked, we missed a significant opportunity after 9/11, when we were told that more tax cuts and more shopping were the proper sacrifices to make for this new war effort. While a nice world war against an evil empire might be just the ticket, that doesn't seem to be in the offing, largely due to the good work of the greatest generation who, through WW2 and the long cold war, sought to reduce the scourge of war, more or less successfully. Very well, there we are!

Politicians have long been calling us to the "moral equivalent of war", against poverty, inflation, cancer, oil shortages, obesity, whatever... These faint echos only accentuate the dilemma, which is that only a real war presents the existential threat that calls forth the commensurate social solidarity. Were it up to me, the new war would be waged against global warming, in a global Kumbaya effort to save the biosphere, uniting not just one nation, not just all humanity, but all life forms in one intense shared effort to make a greener, richer, and sustainable world. Unfortunately, that seems psychologically naive. All of evolution and anthropology tells us that there is no quarry or enemy nearly as lethal nor as numinously significant as our fellow humans.

Thus we may just have to settle for a less-than-greatest-generation level of social solidarity. Without unifying wars or sufficient rates of natural disaster, the US still has a strong civic mythos, whose cultivation remains of great importance. On the other hand, we don't have to give in to twitter, facebook, and TV as they dumb down our discourse and keep us glued to our individual seats & tray tables. I am hardly one to talk, blogging and all, but perhaps the odiferous tide of faux-reality TV may finally prompt viewers to turn themselves into doers ... to go outside and say hello to their neighbors.

• Arctic village tells of a fascinating and rich society in the 1930's Alaskan wilderness.
• Along with social capital, remember natural capital.
• Pax Mongolica, successor to the Islamic golden age, precursor to the Renaissance.
• "Tomorrow's China will be a country that fully achieves democracy, the rule of law, fairness and justice, ..."
• Speaking of rotting our brains, the decepticons will enslave us all.
• Joseph Stieglitz relates how globalization has not helped its targets- the underdeveloped masses, cancelling out our global hearts and mind operation, such as it is.
• Krugman on books that inspired him.
• The Bank of International Settlements hires Lehman's former risk manager.
• Economics quote of the week, from Krugman:

"The key insight is that while debt does not make the world poorer – one person’s liability is another person’s asset – it can be a source of contractionary pressure if there’s an abrupt tightening of credit standards, if levels of leverage that were considered acceptable in the past are suddenly deemed unacceptable thanks to some kind of shock such as, well, a financial crisis. In that case debtors are faced with the necessity of deleveraging, forcing them to slash spending, while creditors face no comparable need to spend more. Such a situation can push an economy up against the zero lower bound and keep it there for an extended period."

• And even Martin Wolf recognizes that government deficits play an essential role in allowing private deleveraging in the current depression:

"The question I have is this: does the BIS know that every sector cannot run financial surpluses at the same time?"

Intuition, projection, and the forgetting of Keynes

Are we doomed to forget inconvenient intellectual achievements?

Paul Krugman gave an outstanding talk to an English economics conference about the current "little depression", or great recession.. take your pick. To encourage you to read it directly, I will try to be brief myself. We are reliving the essentials of the great depression, and had even gained a more recent preview via Japan's meltdown and stasis over the last two decades. Yet our central bankers declare themselves "puzzled", and worse still, we are all forced to relive the intellectual battles from great depression which had already been won by Keynes.

Relevant book on the topic.

Economists have forgotten a great deal. However painful it is to realize, the ideology of ever-increasing progress in education and intellect seems to not be true- it is possible for whole institutions and generations to revert to prior ignorance, at the hands of lazy textbook writers, ideologs pushing simplistic mantras, and greed posing as enlightenment. The paradigmatic case is of course the fall of Rome and the ensuing descent into metaphysical darkness. Krugmann's message, at the end, is that the forgetting of Keynes may be a history we are doomed to repeat, over, and over, and over, and over ...

"By ―unstable, I don’t just mean Minsky-type financial instability, although that’s part of it. Equally crucial are the regime’s intellectual and political instability."

...

"If we’re living in a Dark Age of macroeconomics, central banks have been its monasteries, hoarding and studying the ancient texts lost to the rest of the world."  ... "... sooner or later the barbarians were going to go after the monasteries too; and as the current furor over quantitative easing shows, the invading hordes have arrived."

Such mantras as crowding out, Say's law, monetarism as the sole regulatory tool, and most flagrantly, the government-as-household analogy, are all convenient, easy to teach, and easy to digest fallacies, shown to be fallacies by Keynes 75 years ago. But understanding Keynes is hard- it is often counterintuitive. Thus people, even economists, and most especially economics journalists, fall back into intuitive, relatively mindless slogans that may work on the micro level, but are inapplicable, even dangerous, on the macro level.

This has religious implications, if I may digress. Religion represents easy intuitions and superficial analysis perpetually competing with difficult to understand, or at least difficult to stomach, concepts of realism- of the void and of our true place in the universe. And especially the projection of whatever we value most, fear most, or most hope for onto the cosmic tapestry. In a similar way, classical economics, as Krugman presents it here, is a projection of micro-thought to the macro level.

So the problem is very similar- how to preserve learning, especially counter-intutive learning, in the face of our intution which is always gets the first at-bat? Our most important, devilish problems are precisely those with counter-intuitive forms or solutions. The easy ones were dealt with long ago. Quantum mechanics, religion, most of the remaining problems of philosophy, and macroeconomics are prime examples. When easy intuitions converge with the agendas of interested parties, like the rich in the case of anti-Keynesianism (taking a myopically short-term view of their interests), or the clergy and their brainwashed sheep, the retreat into ignorance can look inevitable and tragic.

• Krugman on greedism.
• Romney- just as nuts as the rest of them.
• Republicans attach sign to self: "We are idiots".
• Al Gore, on science, reason, and the media.
• The importance of better batteries.
• As far as I am concerned, no fish are OK to eat, ever. But if you need a fix...
• RIP Clarence Clemmons.
• But in a bit of positive economic news, another economics quote, from Bill Mitchell

"The news from those that opposed the MFI [Milton Friedman Insitute, at the University of Chicago, which was just closed] is that the University of Chicago has had trouble raising funds to support the institute partly because of the 'declining value of the Friedman name and reputation'"

Consciousness vibrations

New method assesses consciousness in people in vegetative and similar states.

The world has recently become aware that some paralyzed or comatose people may be more conscious than previously assumed. The medical profession had assumed that there is always some modality of behavior available to a conscious person- perhaps a finger point, and eyelid raise, or an eye-roll. But fMRI studies show that consciousness can exist in a fully "locked-in" state. Doctors have also assumed, with perhaps more cause, that some sensory modality is always preserved. If not vision, then at least hearing or touch. Whether exceptions exist here is unknown, and may be impossible to tell without much more knowledge and invasive methods of stimulation.

It is a deeply frightening prospect- to wake up from a coma, but be completely paralyzed, unable to tell the world you are there, and thence sentenced to a life of vegetative warehousing or worse. A recent fMRI study demonstrated that when one subject was asked to imagine a tennis game, the scanner could pick up distinct patterns of the characteristic activity, yet nothing else transpired.. no hand motions, no head nods, no meaningful eye blinks.. nothing. This subject's hearing was fine, evidently.

The current paper extends this work by using a different and cheaper method of diagnosis, (EEG scalp surface electrical wave monitoring), and develops out of it a deeper theory of what is going on during consciousness. MRI scans are expensive enough in usual practice (about $4000), and functional MRIs take more still time and expense. EEGs, in contrast, are easier to administer and are normally performed anyhow in cases of doubtful brain function, though they only "see" the brain's surface, and at quite low resolution.

In other ways the data from EEGs are quite rich, however, comprising the superficial brain waves that can come in many frequencies and locations. Could it provide a map of the brain's communications that reflect the long-range connections thought to be characteristic of consciousness? These authors devise a dense matrix of sixty electrodes for the patient's head, with data processing methods that provide a geographic and temporal map of electrical activity. They use two classes of patients- vegetative state (VS) and minimally conscious state (MCS) along with conscious controls, to ask whether the three groups can be reliably differentiated.

The patients had been pre-evaluated by an extensive panel of more conventional criteria, to separate some cognition without communication (MCS) from the non-cognitive VS state. For example, "... if visual pursuit of a mirror is present at least two times in the same direction, the patient is then considered to be MCS". The researchers didn't reclassify anyone based on their EEG analyses. They also wheel in a form of analysis called "Dynamic Causal Modelling" (DCM), which "... allows for for inferences about the neuronal architectures that generate hemodynamic [fMRI] or electromagnetic [EEG] signals." This is the key to their work- a model devised in their own prior work (drenched in Bayes-style statistical methods) that uses the timing and amplitude relations between EEG signals to develop simple models of communications links between major areas of the brain.

These areas are:
The inferior frontal gyrus (IFG), which is involved in decision making and risk assessment. This is in the lower part of the frontal cortex.

The superior temporal gyrus (STG), which is involved in auditory and speech processing. This is in the upper part of the temporal (side) lobe.

The primary auditory cortex (A1), which it says is at the first stage of auditory processing, is very close to STG in the temporal cortex.

The model is that not only do signals flow upward from A1 to STG and thence to IFG, but signals return back from IFG to STG while the patient is conscious, perhaps as the mechanism of attention.

The test the researchers did was very simple, offering the patients auditory tones where strings of monotonous tones were sporadically shifted to new pitches. The signals they were looking for were of the brains "noticing" the shifts.

The top diagram shows tones used, including noticeable deviations. The bottom diagram shows a sample trace (ERP) from one EEG electrode in a control subject, where the shifted sound is reflected/recognized in a later blip (red) which is proposed to be the conscious recognition of ... something different.

Here, all sixty electrodes are mapped out spatially on a notional scalp, and temporally relative to tone shifts. One can see that the controls have far more active resonating activity after such a shift than either the MCS or VS patients. Yet the MCS patients show a discernable peak at 172 milliseconds that the VS patients don't. Below in black are shown the same data thresholded to a significance level of P<0.001 for each population.

The theory is that auditory processing is intact for all the subjects, reflected in early activation (~60ms) of difference detection in the primary auditory areas. Yet consciousness, which is known to lag sensory processing by larger intervals (up to 0.5 second), happens later on, and would necessarily be picked up later on in the EEGs. The question is where exactly the conscious signal lies, what does it mean, and can its detection be automated in a practical EEG test that can be widely applied in hospital settings?

The researchers apply their home-grown DCM model of intra-brain communication, and conclude that by far the best model (of all the theoretically possible connection schemes among the A1, STG and IFG regions) that matches the data is one where the missing ingredient in VS patients is not conduction of auditory information all the way up the chain from A1 to STG to IFG, but where recurrent conduction back from IFG to STG was absent, shown in red below.

They note that by their model, recurrent connections are still active in all cases between the lower STG and A1 levels, but while these may have important roles in auditory processing, they are all unconscious. "These findings stress the importance of recurrent processing in higher-order associative areas in the generation of conscious perception and do not support the view that recurrent processing in sensory cortex can be equated with consciousness."

VS patients lack the long-latency EEG signals that indicate reaching-back of the cortical areas back to the sensory areas. The authors characterize the role of such connections as Bayesian predictive modelling that is executed by the cortical areas and constitutes "inference on the causes of external stimuli". But the inference isn't enough on its cortical pedestal. It needs to continually check back on its inputs to validate its modelling, and perhaps thus create the sensation of "realness" and the sensation of time passing as differentiable events.

Another group puts the thought similarly:
"These findings challenge the pivotal role of the prefrontal cortex in consciousness. Instead, it appears that specific brain areas (or cognitive modules) may support specific cognitive functions but that consciousness is independent of this. Conscious sensations arise only when the brain areas involved engage in recurrent interactions enabling the long-lasting exchange of information between brain regions. Moreover, recent evidence suggests that also the state of consciousness, for example, in vegetative state patients or during sleep and anesthesia, is closely related to the scope and extent of residual recurrent interactions among brain regions."

• Modern monetary theory, in basic terms.
• Haircuts are still needed.
• Those darn Afghan soldiers. Not to mention our own darn soldiers & bad intelligence.
• China doubles coal consumption.
• IBM, helping a nation's physician with his examinations.
• Children, imagination, science, and causality.
• Vibrations of the rastaman kind.
• Economics quote of the week: Jonathan Swift, courtesy of Bill Black.

"The Lilliputians look upon fraud as a greater crime than theft. For, they allege, care and vigilance, with a very common understanding, can protect a man’s goods from thieves, but honesty hath no fence against superior cunning. . . where fraud is permitted or connived at, or hath no law to punish it, the honest dealer is always undone, and the knave gets the advantage."

The not-so-great society

Do we even care about unemployment?

Suppose we enter a world of increasing efficiency, where what once required labor is done by robots, or done overseas, out of sight and mind. Anti-trust concerns have continued to whither away, so the US might have only a handful of corporations that bring us all we need: MegaAgCorp, MegaRoboCorp, MegaMediaCorp, MegaCareCorp, and MegaBankCorp. Indeed efficiencies are so high that each of these corporations has one CEO and just a few programmers tending the machines. Everyone else in the country can do as they please ... they are not really needed. Because of the excess of trained programmers, the CEO hardly has to pay the programmers anything, so he gets all the profits, shared to some degree with the CEO of MegaBankCorp, which is a major shareholder.

This is entirely acceptable and plausible in the capitalist model of laissez-faire, given the technological premises. The CEOs in this model would have to spend furiously to keep other citizens in the country supplied with the funds to buy food and goods, if they wished to do so. They might be prodigious philanthropists, supporting tens of millions of people each with handouts, arts, circuses, and make-work. An entire trickle-down economy could be modeled in this way, resembling in some ways the extremely concentrated wealth conditions of imperial Roman antiquity.

On the other hand, the CEOs might pile up their profits as money- or even as gold if they were infected with Austrian economics. The rest of the population could then go to hell, so to speak. Unfortunately that system wouldn't get very far because with no spending, there is no income, whether in the form of gold or other money. This economy, while perhaps a model of Ayn Rand go-Galt-ism, wouldn't even work on its own terms, let alone larger moral terms. The CEOs would quickly cease to get income, along with everyone else.

It is a problem we are increasingly facing as we live in a new economic landscape with new types of shortages and excesses. For the last two centuries, new machines and cheap energy challenged us to find ever more complex uses for labor. Indeed, labor virtually ceased being labor at all, and turned into thinking. Now with the advent of computers, thinking is getting increasingly displaced as well, and we may end up doing little more than entertaining each other.

It would be a fine pass to come to, but only if the essential supports coming from the concentrated, automated parts of the economy are distributed widely. The idea that everyone should do something for others as far as they are able is certainly important and virtuous. But who evaluates who is able, and what is the worth of their work? If all of this is judged by the Mega CEOs who are the vaunted "producers", the culture is impoverished, and if taken to its economic extreme, such policy becomes rapidly fatal to any semblance of an economy or society.

I think the lesson should be obvious. The productive capacity of our hyper-developed economic system is largely the patrimony of past inventors, researchers, innovators, educators, and laborers. (Matrimony, if one wants a more feminist-friendly spin!) I don't even mention its more general dependence on cultural & natural resources. The managers and capitalists of the means of production are important cogs in the machine's current instantiation and productivity, but are also custodians on behalf of a much larger society of stakeholders. They may deserve a larger than average share, but they do not deserve the whole pie, no matter what market forces or cronyism may say to the contrary.

The idea that workers who are no longer needed in some corner of this vast enterprise can be simply "voted off the island" and sent into jobless penury seems callous to say the least. When amplified to the 10 to 20% levels we see today in the under- and un-employment picture, it amounts essentially to society-wide masochism. Not only are individuals and families reduced to destitution, for which food stamps are not a reasonable and dignified answer, but the entire system is, as Keynes pointed out, made poorer by the waste of so much labor.

Solution 1
I think there are four paradigmatic solutions that the leading ideologies put forward for such a condition. In the idealistic Republican Horatio Alger story, the unemployed work their fingers off inventing new products, services, and business models which so melt the hearts of reluctant bankers that new lending happens, new businesses arise, and more spending occurs in the economy generally. This investment both brings forth new money (via lending) and also brings money out of the savings of the rich as investment and consumption, thereby redistributing income downwards and keeping the economic cycle turning.

Solution 2
A more realistic, hard-headed version of the Republican approach would be that the unemployed remain invisible to the larger economy and good riddance. Perhaps they subsist on alms from private charities, redistributing small amounts of money downwards on a sporadic basis. Money that is rapidly re-collected to the higher levels by the usual mechanisms of private enterprise- payday loans, tobacco and alcohol addiction, and other advertised necessities. Perhaps the unemployed start their own gardens, bartering goods with fellow outcasts and starting an underground economy that remains invisible to the top end of town. They may even develop alternative currencies and markets. Back in the erstwhile conventional economy, contraction occurs and labor becomes cheaper, but as long as the remaining money concentrates upward, all is well.

Solution 3
On the Democratic side, there are two basic approaches, both slightly more socially responsible. The classic counter-cyclical balancing approach is to redistribute public money (from taxes or from de novo money creation) on a more systematic basis than alms, paying unemployment insurance, health insurance, income support of other sorts, and tax cuts weighted to the middle and lower classes. These are designed to raise aggregate demand, raising economic activity and enployment in the private economy back to self-sustaining levels. A very simple relationship, really, which is proven Keynesianism.

Solution 4
Last is the public works approach: direct employment of the unemployed, in public works the country needs so desperately. Our roads are recognized to be of third world status. Our bridges are falling down. Our energy system is antiquated. Our seniors need aid and assistance. Our broadband is sub-par. There is plenty of work to do, and it doesn't take a rocket scientist (also government supported!) to see that unemployment + work that needs doing = solution. The many public works of the Depression, such as Hoover dam, are still paying dividends today. In the wake of enormous money contraction / credit destruction in the private banking collapse, we have plenty of scope for the government to create money needed for such programs. It doesn't all have to go to the banks through various rescue packages, pumped up reserves, etc!

The stakes could not be more serious, both for individuals being crushed by the current downturn, and for our general prosperity and well-being. The simple fact is that we are not "broke". We may be intellectually, politically, and compassionately broke, but that is a different issue!

• Skidelsky thinks about it..
• Paul Solmon thinks about it.
• Executives rake in billions.
• Tech and the concentration of useful work.
• Bill Black agrees that Goldman Sachs was doing god's work.
• Krugman on debt and interest payments ... not a big deal.
• Solar capacity is growing and getting cheaper.
• Planet wrecking heads to new heights.
• Black hats and white hats in the cyberworld.
• On corruption in Afghanistan.
• The State Department bunker in Iraq. What on earth are we thinking?
• Our new Senate: nothing gets done.
• And the civil war, still going.
• Be good to your dog.
• Bill Mitchell quote of the week: A graph of unemployment duration, which is indefensible in a civilized country, putatively the richest and smartest on Earth.

Sustainable energy when?

Notice anything weird about the weather? It is high time to reform our energy system.

Climate change is bringing is raging tornadoes, floods, wildfires, droughts, famine, and probably an active hurricane season, not to mention untold harm to the biosphere for millennia to come, especially via permanent extinctions. Putting aside the political and ideological battles, what do we need to address it? We have the technology. What we need is the economic and political will to use it. Truthfully, the only thing we really need is a price on fossil carbon.

Right now, a few cars are being run from electricity, and various carbon-free options exist for generating electricity, including nuclear, hydro, wind, and solar. The elephant in the room is cheap fossil fuels- coal and gas for electricity, and oil for transportation. If we avert our eyes from their various environmental costs, as is the wont of mainstream economics, they are very cheap, and as long as they remain cheap, carbon-free energy will not be economically viable.

They may not be cheap forever- oil is already hitting global peak production and higher prices. But coal and gas seem less supply-limited, with fracking all the rage. Coal is particularly noxious in this regard- incredibly dirty, and evidently endlessly plentiful, in the US, India, and China. Some existing regulations on coal pollution raise the effective price of coal-fired electricity, but not enough to make carbon-free sources economically viable, or as the aim should be, economically superior.

Prices of wind and solar energy have been trending downwards, however, so the state of affairs seems very close to tipping. Unfortunately, good information is very hard to come by, since each source pushes its story with various related costs put in or left out. I attempt to quote final electricity prices from various sources, in rough terms:

Source	¢ per kWh
coal	5 to 10
gas	5 to 20
wind	5 to 10
nuclear	10 to 15
geothermal	5 to 10
solar plant	12 to 20
residential solar	20 to 30

So we are certainly within striking distance of economic parity for several forms of non-fosssil energy production. Adding a carbon tax of $0.10 per kWh, summing over annual electricity production of 3,101 TWh gives a cost of $310 billion yearly. Is this a lot? Not in a $14 trillion dollar economy, especially when the entire amount stays in the system. It can be used to displace other, less efficient taxes, or pay off the debt, give back credits on income taxes, build parks, employ the unemployed, give more money to bankers, or whatever else we would like to do with it.

Adding in oil consumption with a comparable tax of roughly $1 per gallon, over 7.3 billion barrels consumed per year nets another $300 billion- another significant increment to all those who are concerned about the federal debt!

The point of all this isn't, of course, to make money for the federal government, but to put a proper price on all the harms flowing from our use of fossil fuels- which extend to foreign policy, our endless support of enemies like Iran, Venezuela, and Saudi Arabia (woops they are a friend ... a friend!), destruction of landscapes through mining, horrors of ash disposal, not to mention the emissions. The new normal should be concern for future generations and the environment, not for the easy guzzling of today.

A couple more issues come to mind- the role of nuclear power, and the intermittency of solar and wind power. Fukushima was an honest-to-goodness disaster, and will incidentally increase Japan's fossil energy consumption for a long time to come. But it was also a very old design. Future nuclear plants will have safer designs, benefitting from experience, including that at Fukushima. And there are also very interesting reprocessing schemes that could eventually make the nuclear fuel cycle far more benign and manageable than it is today. So nuclear shouldn't be counted out. But like fossil fuels, its costs, including enormous design margins, waste costs, and occasional catastrophic (or at least highly dramatic and disruptive, if not terribly lethal) events, need to be factored in.

Solar and wind power are inherently intermittent power sources, so current policy is reluctant to make them more than 10-20% of the mix on any grid. The solution is energy storage, in the form of water reservoirs, flywheels, compressed gas, or other mechanisms. Such mechanisms will become more efficient with a sufficient market, another important goal of carbon taxes. The situation is reminiscent of the key problem with the electric car- its battery. Indeed, these problems may connect through smart electricity grids that use the fleet of connected cars to stabilize and even out loads on the grid itself. The difficulty of storing energy at both small and large scales certainly highlights the amazing convenience of concentrated, reduced, fossil carbon.

Do electric utilities even care about fuel costs? Aren't they regulated monopolies that pass on all their costs to the consumer, whatever they are? Haven't they been given free passes to charge customers for the enormous and unforeseen costs of nuclear energy? Isn't direct regulation via mandates and rules the better path? I can't claim any expertise in this complicated area. California has accomplished a great deal with enlightened regulation of its electricity providers, keeping its electricity consumption far lower than other states. Nevertheless, all stakeholders need stronger incentives towards sustainable energy, from the householder and driver, up to the power generator, whether well-regulated or not. Simplicity alone argues for a blanket fee on fossil carbon that automatically reaches all of its uses.

Should we wait for China to act first or agree to act in concert? Obiviously, this is the most transparent stalling tactic. Peak oil is coming anyhow. The US has contributed the most to global warming to date, and despite falling behind China in the polluting race, has the greatest moral responsibility to act. The best way to pressure other countries to act is to act ourselves, rather than holding everyone hostage in a game of mutually assured environmental destruction.

I know it seems pollyannish to repeat this theme of carbon taxes in the current political environment of politicians racing to the bottom of demagogic "principles" of greed and corporate subservience, but someday, we will get our heads out of the sand and take responsibility for the future.

• Gregor discusses overall energy usage in the US.
• The Saudis want the addiction to go on as long as possible.
• Putative centrist Michael Lind says ... no worries- let's keep smokin' the dope.
• A commenter on the right says we have plenty of energy, no environmental worries, and "... we are in the midst of a Cold Civil War in which each election cycle offers another critical battle." That, at any rate, is true enough.
• Economic benefits to California from green energy (pdf).
• Where have all the fish gone?
• Are we facing a domestic religious war?
• What happened to rule of law?
• There's someone in my head, but it's not me.
• Working for free... has it come to this? Is labor completely neutered?
• Krugman- apparently facts have a liberal bias. But facts never stopped anyone...
• Economics quote of the week, from Paul Krugman via Bill Mitchell:

"So someone needs to say the obvious: inventing reasons not to put the unemployed back to work is neither wise nor responsible. It is, instead, a grotesque abdication of responsibility."

• And from Bill Black:

"... the IMF was blind to the developing crises. It even praised nations like Ireland during the run up to the crisis, missing the largest bubble (relative to GDP) of any nation, an epidemic of banking control fraud, and the destruction of any pretense to effective Irish banking regulation."

Phones of doom?

Bonus post on cell phones ... a pet peeve.

I don't own a cell phone. Nevertheless, as a scientist, the discussion of cell phone dangers intrigues me to no end. The topic was brought up breathlessly by some neighbors a few years ago, with anecdotes about a rash of coworkers who had come down with brain tumors. I replied that the physics simply didn't merit any concern at all. Now the WHO has flagged cell phones as "possible" carcinogens, putting them in the same class as virtually every other substance on earth ... it is not a very meaningful designation, really.

The radiation we are talking about here is a thousand-fold less powerful, per photon, than visible light. And while UV light beyond the upper end of the visible range can damage our skin, break chemical bonds, and cause cancer, the much less powerful photons of radio waves can't do anything of the sort. At most, they might induce a little bit of jiggling of our molecules- some extra heat beyond that naturally flowing through our veins. It is the high-energy ionizing radiation that we need to worry about- the kind we get from CAT scans, mammograms, radon, living & flying at high altitudes, and from breathing in the exhaust of coal plants, among many other things.

For me, it comes down to data, and these graphs say it all:

First, the adoption of cell phones.

Second, the incidence of brain tumors (data from Minnesota).

You can see that so far into the cell phone epidemic, there has been no correlated cancer epidemic of the brain (or anything else). One might claim that it could take decades for such cancers to develop. In that case, the anecdotal evidence of cancer clusters is contradictory and worthless. Even if the average gestation time is long, a serious cancer risk will cause early cases as well, since some part of the population is already older and predisposed to be pushed over the edge by this new carcinogenic insult. The cases would already be showing up at some detectible rate.

What this is really about is magical thinking, as people wonder at "waves" going through them, feel instinctively violated, and fall prey to archetypal fears. This extends to researchers as well, who routinely, especially in social and medical sciences, get the results they expect from studies which, when replicated, show lower and lower effect sizes with each replication. Our unconscious exerts strong effects on everything we do, and it is the premiere accomplishment of the scientific method to, at times when we want accurate data, find ways to cordon off reality and the hypothesis at issue from all the other biasses we can subtly bring to bear on such a question. Yet this is easier said than done.

So don't worry. And while science keeps on going and may yet find that cell phones pose some measurable risk, the epidemiology already tells that the risk is certain to be vanishingly small- much less than the chance of dying from driving while using a cell phone.

Neural waves of brain

The brain's waves drive computation, sort of, in a 5 million core, 9 Hz computer.

Computer manufacturers have worked in recent years to wean us off the speed metric for their chips and systems. No longer do they scream out GHz values, but use chip brands like atom, core duo, and quad core, or just give up altogether and sell on other features. They don't really have much to crow about, since chip speed increases have slowed with the increasing difficulty of cramming more elements and heat into ever smaller areas. The current state of the art is about 3 GHz, (far below predictions from 2001), on four cores in one computer, meaning that computations are spread over four different processors, which each run at 0.3 nanosecond per computation cycle.

The division of CPUs into different cores hasn't been a matter of choice, and it hasn't been well-supported by software, most of which continues to conceived and written in linear fashion, with the top-level computer system doling out whole programs to the different processors, now that we typically have several things going on at once on our computers. Each program sends its instructions in linear order through one processor/core, in soda-straw fashion. Ever-higher clock speeds, allowing more rapid progress through the straw, still remain critical for getting more work done.

Our brains take a rather different approach to cores, clock speeds, and parallel processing, however. They operate at variable clock speeds between 5 and 500 Hertz. No Giga here, or Mega or even Kilo. Brain waves, whose relationship to computation remains somewhat mysterious, are very slow, ranging from the delta (sleep) waves of 0-4 Hz through theta, alpha, beta, and gamma waves at 30-100+ Hz which are energetically most costly and may correlate with attention / consciousness.

On the other hand, the brain has about 1e15 synapses, making it analogous to five million contemporary 200 million transistor chip "cores". Needless to say, the brain takes a massively parallel approach to computation. Signals run through millions of parallel nerve fibers from, say, the eye, (1.2 million in each optic nerve), through massive brain regions where each signal traverses only perhaps ten to twenty nerves in any serial path, while branching out in millions of directions as the data is sliced, diced, and re-assembled into vision. If you are interested in visual pathways, I would recommend Christof Koch's Quest for Consciousness, whose treatment of visual pathways is better than its treatment of other topics.

Unlike transistors, neurons are intrinsically rhythmic to various degrees due to their ion channel complements that govern firing and refractory/recovery times. So external "clocking" is not always needed to make them run, though the present articles deal with one such case. Neurons can spontaneously generate synchrony in large numbers due to their intrinsic rhythmicity.

Nor are neurons passive input-output integrators of whatever hits their dendrites, as early theories had them. Instead, they spontaneously generate cycles and noise, which enhances their sensitivity to external signals, and their ability to act collectively. They are also subject to many other influences like hormones and local non-neural glial cells. A great deal of integration happens at the synapse and regional multi-synapse levels, long before the cell body or axon is activated. This is why the synapse count is a better analog to transistor counts on chips than the neuron count. If you are interested in the topics of noise and rhythmicity, I would recommend the outstanding and advanced book by Gyorgy Buzsaki, Rhythms of the Brain. Without buying a book, you can read Buzsaki's take on consciousness.

Two recent articles (Brandon et al., Koenig et al.) provide a small advance in this field of figuring out how brain rhythms connect with computation. Two groups seem to have had the same idea and did very similar experiments to show that a specific type of spatial computation in a brain area called the medial entorhinal cortex (mEC) near the hippocampus depends on theta rhythm clocking from a loosely connected area called the medial septum (MS). (In-depth essay on alcohol, blackouts, memory formation, the medial septum, and hippocampus, with a helpful anatomical drawing).

Damage to the MS (situated just below the corpus collosum that connects the two brain hemispheres) was known to have a variety of effects on functions not located in the MS, but in the hippocampus and mEC, like loss of spatial memory, slowed learning of simple aversive associations, and altered patterns of food and water intake.

The hippocampus and allied areas like the mEC are one of the best-investigated areas of the brain, along with the visual system. They mediate most short-term memory, especially spatial memory (i.e rats running in mazes). The spatial system as understood so far has several types of cells:

Head direction cells, which know which way the head is pointed (some of them fire when the head points at one angle, others fire at other angles.

Grid cells, which are sensitive to an abstract grid in space covering the ambient environment. Some of these cells fire when the rat is on one of the grid boundaries. So we literally have a latitude/logitude-style map in our heads, which may be why map-making comes so naturally to humans.

Border cells, which fire when the rat is close to a wall.

Place cells, which respond to specific locations in the ambient space- not periodically like grid cells, but typically to one place only.

Spatial view cells, which fire when the rat is looking at a particular location, rather than when it is in that location. They also respond, as do the other cells above, when a location is being recalled rather than experienced.

Clearly, once these cells all network together, a rather detailed self-orientation system is possible, based on high-level input from various senses (vestibular, whiskers, vision, touch). The role of rhythm is complicated in this system. For instance, the phase relation of place cell firing versus the underlying theta rhythm, (leading or following it, in a sort of syncopation), indicates closely where the animal is within the place cell's region as movement occurs. Upon entry, firing begins at the peak of the theta wave, but then precesses to the trough of the theta wave as the animal reaches the exit. Combined over many adjacent and overlapping place fields, this could conceptually provide very high precision to the animal's sense of position.

One rat's repeated tracks in a closed maze, mapped versus firing patterns of several of its place cells, each given a different color.

We are eavesdropping here on the unconscious processes of an animal, which it could not itself really articulate even if it wished and had language to do so. The grid and place fields are not conscious at all, but enormously intricate mechanisms that underlie implicit mapping. The animal has a "sense" of its position, (projecting a bit from our own experience), which is critical to many of its further decisions, but the details don't necessarily reach consciousness.

The current papers deal not with place cells, which still fire in a place-specifc way without the theta rhythm, but with grid cells, whose "gridness" appears to depend strongly on the theta rhythm. The real-life fields of rat grid cells have a honeycomb-like hexagonal shape with diameters ranging from 40 to 90cm, ordered in systematic fashion from top to bottom within the mEC anatomy. The theta rhythm frequency they respond to also varies along the same axis, from 10 to 4 Hz. These values stretch and vary with the environment the animal finds itself in.

Field size of grid cells, plotted against anatomical depth in the mEC.

The current papers ask a simple question: do the grid cells of the mEC depend on the theta rhythm supplied from the MS, as has long been suspected from work with mEC lesions, or do they work independently and generate their own rhythm(s)?

This was investigated by the expedient of injecting anaesthetics into the MC to temporarily stop its theta wave generation, and then polling electrodes stuck into the mEC for their grid firing characteristics as the rats were freely moving around. The grid cells still fired, but lost their spatial coherence, firing without regard to where the rat was or was going physically (see bottom trajectory maps). Spatial mapping was lost when the clock-like rhythm was lost.

One experimental sequence. Top is the schematic of what was done. Rate map shows the firing rate of the target grid cells in a sampled 3cm square, with m=mean rate, and p=peak rate. Spatial autocorrelation shows how spatially periodic the rate map data is, and at what interval. Gridness is an abstract metric of how spatially periodic the cells fire. Trajectory shows the rat's physical paths during free behavior, overlaid with the grid cell firing data.

"These data support the hypothesized role of theta rhythm oscillations in the generation of grid cell spatial periodicity or at least a role of MS input. The loss of grid cell spatial periodicity could contribute to the spatial memory impairments caused by lesions or inactivation of the MS."

This is somewhat reminiscent of an artificial computer system, where computation ceases (here it becomes chaotic) when clocking ceases. Brain systems are clearly much more robust, breaking down more gracefully and not being as heavily dependent on clocking of this kind, not to mention being capable of generating most rhythms endogenously. But a similar phenomenon happens more generally, of course, during anesthesia, where the controlled long-range chaos of the gamma oscillation ceases along with attention and consciousness.

It might be worth adding that brain waves have no particular connection with rhythmic sensory inputs like sound waves, some of which come in the same frequency range, at least at the very low end. The transduction of sound through the cochlea into neural impulses encodes them in a much more sophisticated way than simply reproducing their frequency in electrical form, and leads to wonders of computational processing such as perfect pitch, speech interpretation, and echolocation.

Clearly, these are still early days in the effort to know how computation takes place in the brain. There is a highly mysterious bundling of widely varying timing/clocking rhythms with messy anatomy and complex content flowing through. But we also understand a lot- far more with each successive decade of work and with advancing technologies. For a few systems, (vision, position, some forms of emotion), we can track much of the circuitry from sensation to high-level processing, such as the level of face recognition. Consciousness remains unexplained, but scientists are definitely knocking at the door.

• Subjective time, with David Eagleman.
• A philosophy bite with Eagleman, on free will.
• Lies, trickle-down economics, and more lies.
• Double-dip is quite possible, yet austerity is "in".
• Economics quotes of the week, from Krugman:

"As I’ve often written, we’re in a strange state now where people who actually take textbook economics and simple arithmetic seriously are seen as dangerously radical and irresponsible, while people who believe in invisible bond vigilantes and confidence fairies, who claim to know what the market will want even though there’s no sign of that desire in current asset prices, are viewed as Very Serious."

• and Bill Mitchell:

"... many readers have been writing in asking me about price manipulation in international commodity markets – which is aka how financial markets caused a jump in world starvation and death."