Memories ... In the Corners of My Mind

Where Do Memories Go? Where Do They Stay? How do we get them back?

There has been some debate about where memories end up in our brains, whether in the hippocampus exclusively or distributed through much of the neocortex. The spectacular case of HM, who could not form new memories after his entire hippocampus was removed, (plus some other nearby structures), indicated that older memories were still accessible from elsewhere, while all new memories are formed and reside at least temporarily in the hippocampus. However some types of memories do not appear to get re-distributed from the hippocampus. HM was missing quite a bit of explicit (also called declarative) memory from prior to his surgery, for instance, including everything in the prior year, and decreasing amounts going backwards for eleven more years. Other types of memory, such a short-term, working, implicit, motor, and procedural memories remained functional, however, for new formation as well as retrieval.

It is known that sleep plays an important role in the "consolidation" and redistribution of explicit memories within the hippocampus and from there to the cortex. During sleep, significant memories are replayed, which strengthens their encoding and allows their replication to more stable storage in the cortex. Ironically, sleep prevents forgetting. The redistribution process can take months to years, accounting for the deficits experienced by HM. On the other hand, sleep impairs, while new novel experiences enhance, the consolidation of some memories within the hippocampus, probably by enhancing the salience of the entire sequence of experiences. Current work indicates that memories get to the cortex quite quickly, with a "parallel process" between both areas strengthening them over time.

A recent study looked at this memory consolidation process, and asked what happens to conflicting memories- which might prompt over-writing of an initial memory with a later, corrected one. Yes, this was another study done with rats and mazes, testing their ability to retain memories of locations over various time periods, and over intervening activities, such as sleep, after the target location was changed. The rats learned the locations of both targets quite quickly, and returned to those locations preferentially in future trials, a week later, no matter where the actual target was.

If the rats where allowed to sleep between the switched training sessions, they lost the first memory more than if they had been deprived of sleep and exposed to further novel events between training sessions. This led to a conclusion that the hippocampal encoding (but not the cortical) is enhanced by activity and novelty, rather than sleep. The next step in the experiment was to alter the memory type by allowing the rats to explore the training area extensively for a few days prior to the training. This allowed them to gain a fuller context for the experiences to come, context that is believed to be stored not only in the hippocampus, but also in the cortex, being part of the consolidated and distributed memory system. After this protocol, rats allowed to sleep significantly out-remembered the sleep deprived rats when tested, and performed particularly well if the experimenters threw in a cruel trial a day after training, where no target was present in the maze at all.

An example of one test of a rat trained the week before. The training runs were, first target top left, followed by sleep, and second, target at bottom right, followed by distraction and sleep deprivation. The rat clearly remembered the second training much better. This was true even if the training regimens were reversed, and the one followed by sleep occurred second.

Lastly, the researchers studied molecular markers in their subject's brains, to see where cell and synapse growth was taking place in response to all these exciting events. For all conditions, the brains showed a great deal of neural activity and synaptic consolidation, i.e. expression of genes like cFos and Zif-268, right after training. However five hours later, things were a little different. Expression in the hippocampus was significantly down among animals who had gotten some sleep, but up if they were sleep deprived.

Conversely, marker expression in the cortex was the reverse- up in rats who had slept, down in those continually kept awake with more play and other novelties. This was particularly interesting since sleep alone drove a significant decline in cortical expression of these genes in control animals. That such brief training events can have effects on such gross brain areas through subsequent sleep, for hours and days, may argue more for the traumatic nature of the training, (done in water mazes, where the rats are desperately searching for a hidden platform), than normal learning in, say, a school environment.

Nevertheless, this kind of work shows what is going on in the field of memory research, as we try to figure out why, where, and how memories are distributed in the brain, which ones are kept, which ones erased, how they are schematized and compressed, and how they are retrieved again and altered during that retrieval. In this case, the researchers make the claim that their procedures have dissected a difference between cortical memory formation, which is enhanced by sleep and inhibited by intervening learning and activity, versus hippocampal memory formation, which experiences the reverse.

They did not have much to say in the end about conflicting memory formation, since the rats seemed to deal with this aspect just fine, (though less well after sleep). They remembered both maze solutions, even if one had been superceded by another for a few training runs. But the relational nature of cortical memory, which seems to grasp memories better if they are situated in a known matrix of prior experience, is interesting. And the speed of this cortical memory consolidation is also interesting- a matter of days, not the weeks or months that has been the model in the wake of HM.

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• Treason is only if the other party does it.
• China is the story of our time.
• Review of Too Big to Fail.
• We do not need to settle for depression economics.
• Remember the EPA!
• Sanity is getting the upper hand, and the nuts won't have it.
• What the Islamic & Persian world did for math.

Truth is the First Casualty of Fascism

Is he a clown, or a fascist? Depends on who believes him, and who follows him.

We are in new territory, in American politics. Never before has such a vile know-nothing bully been elected as president. George Washington is surely spinning in his grave. But other countries have been here before- Italy perhaps foremost, with its experiences of Benito Mussolini and Silvio Berlusconi. Each was thought to be a clown, at least originally. The dark side of political clown-ishness, however, is fascism.

The signs are everywhere, from the campaign, to the inaugural address, to the flurry of hate unleashed in the first weeks in office. The pillars of fascism are an authoritarian mind-set, use of hate as the most powerful political emotion, scapegoats to focus hate on, lying, systematic hatred and denigration of the press, dedication to business interests, militarism, and use of extra-legal means and general destruction of institutions and due process in favor of direct use of, and displays of, power. And then more lying.

The President's inaugural address and festivities exemplified all these trends. There was national renewal and rebuilding the country, as though it was not already built. There was "American carnage". Really? Crime hardly our biggest problem. It was a play for power, to justify extreme measures and authoritarian approaches. God was invoked constantly, not only by the blessers and benedicters, but by the President himself, as though he had a theological leg to stand on. "We will be protected by God", "... the same almighty creator". There was the cheap nationalism. "America first, America first!", and "a total allegiance to the United States of America".

There were fawning claims of putting power back in the hands of the people in several places in the speech. Which makes the ensuing flurry of executive orders seem rather odd, since they exemplify the power of one, not of the many. Even in representative terms, he represents a minority of those who voted. But no matter. The narcissistic identification of the leader with the whole is another facet of authoritarianism. And of narcissism.

The order banning Muslim and refugee immigration was further evidence, among many other orders and tantrums. The claim was that this would make us safer, evidently in light of the carnage that such immigrants were causing on US streets. Scapegoating and the lying are, as usual, inextricably linked. The authoritarian has to have enemies and can not have enough of them in reality, at least ones who are easy to hate. Thus Hitler and the Jews, or Mussolini and the pacifists and communists. We will have to watch the ratchet of hate and scapegoating very carefully. Now it is Muslims and Mexicans. Next is the press, whom the President calls garbage, and the worst people on earth- when he isn't sucking up to them, that is. Who will be next? The civil servants? The Democratic states unwilling to join immigrant roundups? The lawyers of the ACLU? The scientists? The logic of bullying is that anyone who is not clearly cowed is a threat and must be hounded into submission, or else the bully does not feel secure.

Bulldozing through institutions was another part of the immigration order, now being so thoroughly picked apart in the courts. Fascism is impatient with process and legal forms. The scapegoats must be eliminated immediately, and the leader must show his virile power to crush all opposition, with scathing tweets, if not with his armed followers or suborned organs of the law. It is ironic, though not surprising, that he has landed in the wrong end of federal court mere days after pledging so faithlessly to protect and defend the constitution.

But truth is the most serious casualty of this process, and ingredient in the many facets of fascism. All politics involves lying and coloring the facts to some degree. But most politics takes place in a zone of acceptable shadings of the truth, through a normal discourse of free media filtration and critique. This President has been notoriously immune to fact-checking through his campaign, and keeps tweeting lies. His enablers and advisors seem to be selected for their pusillanimity in accepting such alternative facts. The internet has brought us an unmediated liar as president, whose voters loved that he was not a normal politician. Little did they realize that this means he lies more rather than less!

The danger of Muslims in the US- lies. The carnage in the "inner city"- much less than a decade ago. The bad deals with Mexico, China, Iran- lies. The crowd size at the inauguration- lies. Voter fraud, and the idea that the actual popular vote favored the President- lies. Each lie is engineered to set up an false enemy or normalize an appalling view or policy. Each lie is engineered to augment the President's power, needing immediate executive action to fix. Who buys it? Well, the poll numbers have been dropping by the day, so this round of lying does not seem very effective.

The destruction of truth in our political discourse owes relatively little to the President and his appalling acolytes, however, but much more to the larger ecosystem of the right, particularly FOX news. They have been building startingly false and destructive narratives for decades, which curiously support the corporations and the rich while denigrating the government- the one entity that can stand in the way of the rich gathering the rest of our economy into its greedy fingers.

---

Thankfully, the President does not have the full toolchest of fascism at his command. And this goes beyond brains! He does not have enough popular support to alter the basic rules of the system. The Women's march was a very important warning shot in that respect. He does not have his own armed forces. He has only a modest grip on his own Republican party. That party is more dedicated to neutering the state than to building it up, at least in most respects. A crisis may change all these equations, but at the moment, a descent into fascism seems unlikely, despite his best efforts.

Starting with brains, it has become painfully apparent that the President's ravings are not the calculated distraction of a clever fox. Rather, they are his utmost effort at clarity and strength. There is no there there. He does not seem to have enough of a grasp of reality to manage it. Nor is the power behind the throne much more fearsome. Steven Bannon has a long history of right-wing agitation, and I studied one of his more recent films to gather an impression of his thought process: Occupy unmasked. It is an incoherent salad of clips and snark. But little sustained argument to be worried about. His actual speeches are more insidious, but they are very standard Republican pablum- the deficit is too big, the country is drowning in debt, the government needs to be cut. Nothing very novel there, just a fundamental misunderstanding of economics, an anti-worker agenda, and perhaps a note of warning to those Republicans who want to blow up the debt for tax cuts.

And the milita- the blackshirts or brownshirts, beholden to the fasicst leader- where is it? Thankfully, we have not stooped to that depth quite yet. But the way the customs and immigration service jumped to do the President's bidding, almost before the ink was dry, was highly disturbing. The order was half-baked at best, something that should have met with a bureaucratic friction and pushback for clarification, if not resistance. Likewise, the support the President has gotten from the border patrol union, to the point of incapacitating their leader, is also troubling. No one seems to be minding the values of common decency in those departments. Otherwise, the President and his acolytes are militaristic, but the military for its part sees how fake their values and rhetoric are, and will doubtless keep the crazy at arm's length. They may have disliked Obama, but that doesn't mean they want to jump from the frying pan into the fire.

How does the media environment look? Not that great, surely, but compared to something like Putin's Russia and Berlusconi's Italy, it is quite free. No amount of vitriol from the President is going to alter that, and the other institutions of government, principally the Congress, are unlikely to alter that, other than perhaps cutting public funding for the public media. Indeed the humor that has been unleashed is most cathartic and positive. The danger is mostly indirect, from a further unleashing of corporations on the public sphere, which will further pollute and damage our very notion of free speech and truth.

There have been many authoritarians, but few fascists. We can take comfort in the incompetence, small-mindedness, and stupidity of the current President to save us. But mostly, in our fellow Americans, who must draw a line. How the President was voted into office remains a conundrum, but his followership looks unlikely to grow. Quite the opposite- the poll numbers are going down; support is dwindling. The incompetence and meanness on display is offending everyone near and far. Other than base Republicans, of course. What will they do who are closer to power? Will the President's aides and advisors draw a line anywhere for decency and our long-term interests? Will the bureaucracy offer some resistance? That will only happen in concert with, and as an expression of, a general revulsion in the political system.

• The signs are clear.
• The establishment is appalled and uneasy.
• Fake olds: re-writing history. Religions have been doing it forever, of course.
• Lies as an excuse for oppression.
• Who will follow? Who will not? Especially when the crisis comes.
• Workers? Savers? Who cares?
• Cringely on H1B and L1B visas.
• Science and truth- another humdrum Democratic constituency.
• Enemies are accumulating on all sides.
• 60,000 to 100,000 visas flushed down the drain- it is shameful and culpable.
• First Things- high-end religion for Trump. And yes, racism is the left's fault.
• Trump crumples like a wet bathrobe on Taiwan.
• Afghanistan, still a quagmire.
• This what resistance looks like.

Brain: Is Size Everything?

Properties other than size also make human brains different.

There is no doubt that humans experience a unique sense of consciousness and form of cognition. While other animals like chimpanzees, dolphins, dogs, elephants, and crows are amazingly smart in general and have highly developed capabilities of their own, they don't touch our abilities for planning, remembering, focusing, and at the top of the list- language, both spoken and thought. It remains hard to characterize these differences, because we are still learning so much about the cognition of other animals, and because even with introspection, language, science, and the rest of our inquisitive armamentarium, our own mental processes remain opaque to a large degree.

However, there are clear differences, and how can they be expained? We turn out not to be the only animals with large brains. Sperm whales have brains about nine times as heavy as ours. Even some dolpins have bigger brains than we do. Monkeys typically have smaller brains than cows, despite much higher intelligence. Mice have brains that are, per body weight, almost ten times as large as ours. So size is not, by itself, the issue. There is more going on.

Biggest does not equal smartest. At least that is what we think.

On the other hand, over the last few million years, size has clearly meant something, as our brains have grown at a very rapid clip. So it appears that within a given lineage, size increases may serve as the easiest way to change cognitive capacity, and can serve as a proxy for intelligence. But it is far more hazardous to make comparisons between different lineages, since their architectures and thus capabilities may be very different. So who knows- maybe octopuses are smarter than we are, despite having smaller brains, and several of them.

But bigger is better, among our closer relatives.

For example, thanks to our particular architecture, we pack more neurons into a gram of brain than do whales, so we end up with as many or more brain cells as elephants and whales. And what is more, our brain being more compact gives those neurons a distinct advantage in speed / connectivity. There has been a good deal of work on the genetic level to look for genes and other genetic features that show accelerated evolution in the human lineage- quantitative work that can show with high confidence that some gene variation or regulatory site is novel and significant in humans. But linking that data to the human phenotype has been a challenge, as is true generally with human genetics. The best route has typically been to find other variations in the same area that lead to disease or other pathology, which can give strong clues about the overall function. Or providing mice with the human version of the gene, though the chances of seeing something informative, let alone amazing(!), by this route are rather slim.

Getting back to brain function, a recent paper discussed new work in the field, particularly on the properties of neurons themselves, which might help explain some of our mental distinctiveness. This was all done on brains from recently-living humans, which are understandably hard to get and hard to work with, in a brain slice+electrodes system. One finding is that we have a unique class of "super-neurons"- cells which fire so strongly that a single one can set off responses to the next neuron and thus to larger cortical circuits. This is not seen in other species (per their claim) and is unusual because in typical brain tissue / circuits, it takes converging firings from several or many upstream cells to bump a neuron into action- which is, after all, the whole point of information integration.

The efficiency possibilities are clear. If a percept can happen from the firing of a single famous face cell, (though these are likely to be part of a neural network, rather than regimented as one cell per face), then we need fewer of them to carry memories. The cells and synapses discussed here actually target inhibitory neurons, but the logic remains the same- that if single cells can control large-scale network activities, you need fewer of them, though their tuning and activity then are of paramount importance.

Two neurons meet... The intensely spiking pyramidal neuron (red) which firs first, and the post-synaptic, receiving cell  (blue) are portrayed (C) as they were stained and micrographed in the tissue. The layers of the cortical sheet are given roman numerals. Synapses between them are numbered in D. Panel B shows an averaged stimulus -> response graph of the two cells, showing that the receiving basket cell (bc) quite frequently fires (74% of the time) when the sending cell fires, despite their very sparse synapses. The lower graph (26%) shows the other events, when pyramidal cell firing evokes only a grudging sigh in the receiving cell. In other species, this is all one would see in such single-cell stimulus / encounters. Panel A shows that the receiving cell not only fires once, but several times per upstream spike.

"Although the ratio of triggering poly- versus monosynaptic postsynaptic potentials was 0.01 in the rat and 1.73 in the human in our hands, it should be emphasized that the human patients were treated differently during anesthesia and surgery, and the excitability of human neurons might be different in the external solution also used for rat experiments."

"However, the human neocortical neurons also exhibit specializations only reported in our species. One such feature is the capacity of excitatory principal cells to elicit firing in local inhibitory interneurons with a single action potential via very strong excitatory synapses. It has been suggested that this feature has specifically evolved to enhance coordinated firing of neuronal ensembles in higher brain functions."

Additionally, learning happens very quickly among these super-neurons, so that they do not regularly overwhelm their targets. After ten minutes of stimulation, the downstream cell had already learned to ignore the stimulus. So while most processing takes place in the usual integrative network pathways to come up with usefully transformed information, there seem to be cases when directness and efficiency rose in importance, in the human lineage, and thus led to the development of these super-neurons. This kind of study adds a cell-biology level to the much-better characterized, but as yet tenuously connected phenotypic and genetic levels of differences that make humans distinctive from their ancestors and fellow-beings on the planet.

• LSD is one hell of a drug.
• How now, Afghanistan?
• We are in fascist territory.
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• A beard of transformation.
• A war may be brewing...
• Not only does California have a public pension crisis, but also a pension management crisis.
• What really happened to Lehman?
• How did we get to this partisan hellscape?
• But truth remains a value to some.

The Challenge of Collective Action

The left habitually under-appreciates the difficulties of collective action.

Joining the recent protests against our new president, I found myself marching along in a wonderful crowd, all with common purpose and strong emotion. But what struck me was the utter innanity of the chant- Hey, Hey, Ho, Ho, etc... It was an embarrassing regression to a minimal, indeed infantile, common denominator.

Why? Why do leftist actions and protests routinely look so shambolic and fritter away their energy? Why are the high ideals not matched by high rhetoric and disciplined action? The Occupy movement added squatting to the menu of marching and chanting, but ended up in the same place- lodging a mostly inarticulate cry of protest against the System.

The same disappointments abound across the spectrum, though. The Dilbert cartoon lampoons the difficulties of corporate communication and management, among people who work together every day, yet still fail to communicate and collaborate effectively. Participating in organizations is difficult, at all levels. But that already supposes an organizational hierarchy, which is more than the deep left is willing to countenance. Can anarchists and egalitarians accomplish anything?

The System is made up of organizations of all kinds- corporations, parties, legislatures, think tanks, unions, magazines, clubs, non-profits- a wide range of institutions each with some kind of mechanism of translating personal, privately held intentions and desires into communal action. Each can get more done than a simple mob, by virtue of its mechanism- its hierarchical organization.

That is how inarticulate cries get translated into sustained action- through organization. The left creates organizations profusely, but does not typically sustain them very well. There are countless peace and justice movements, non-profits, and coalitions, which typically operate on a shoestring and have a tenuous and brief existence, due to their anti-organizational temperament.

The right is more temperamentally suited to organzation life. Hierarchy is ingrained and desirable, not an evil to be torn down. Existing organizations and orders of society are assumed to be good, not regarded skeptically, with a revolutionary glint. The corporation is a prime example of this, an organizational style that pervades our lives and politics, and is run, as a rule, by people of a right-ward temperament. Power is also understood better by those on the right, assuming as they do an organizational structure rather than a menu of nebulous ideals. The problems of gaining and using power are typically separated from those of justifying it, as hierarchy is regarded as good in itself. Thus we have the spectacle of Karl Rove rising through means that were completely immoral, but highly effective, through a succession of Republican youth groups. Thus we saw the utter nihilism of Newt Gingrich, and later Mitch McConnell, in their pursuit of power, in collaboration with a whole ecosystem of secret money, state-level gerrymandering, and media pollution.

And what is the point of all this? For the right, the preservation of hierarchy and order, of the rule by the strong over the weak, seems to be the point of whole exercise of having power. Organizational success results in successful organizations. Inquality and oppression of the powerless is part of the deal. On the other hand, for the left, the point is to make of the state a bulwark against the strong and powerful, so that inequality and injustice are reduced. But to do that, a super-powerful organization is required, i.e. the state itself, whose capture by either right or left is then the most momentous condition of society in general.

In this way, the right seeks its goals in natural fashion, while the left needs to use temperamentally unnatural and disliked methods to get to the same goal. The left thus faces an existential question- how to reconcile the dogged pursuit of power with the overall goal of taming power in society. This temperamental and philosophical problem is at the core of why democratic majorities are not enough, and why the right, despite representing in effect a very small sliver of the populace, regularly gains power.

One way to look at this is via the two-dimensional political temperament graph, plotting authoritarianism vs left-right orientation. Above, I have been conflating the two, since at least in the Anglophone world, there is high correlation of authoritarianism and right wing-ism. Indeed, one might add that the authoritarian dimension is far more momentous, historically speaking, than the left-right dimension, whatever their correlation. The diagram should look more like a vertically elongated diamond.

Left/Right vs Authoritarian/Libertarian layout from politicalCompass.org. I would disagree with their placement of the main candidates, as Trump is clearly more right-wing, perhaps to an unprecedented extent in US history, as shown by his actions of just the first week of his administration. The researchers may have been hoodwinked by his various lies and poses during the campaign. Clinton, in contrast, could hardly be as rightist as shown, let alone farther right than Trump. It is an example of misreading people's characters, even by experts.

Take the Bolsheviks, as an example. Ostensibly leftist, they were also mad with lust for power, and in the end were both successful in seizing power from a rotten system, and in totally betraying their ideology to create just another version of Russian despotism. Such dedicated, organizationally competent, and doggedly power-seeking people (i.e. authoritarian) are rare on the left, since they operate against the natural temperament and ideological tendencies, which are disinterest in hierarchy and institutional power, free love, free work, free couch crashing, etc. This is the original non-profit sector. This internal, psychic opposition makes such authoritarianism particularly unstable.

Similarly, the Black Panthers only survived as long as they did thanks to some very authoritarian tendencies- hard-asses who ran the show, brandished the guns, and enforced hierarchical organization in the face of overwhelming right-wing infiltration and opposition. Relying on left-ish authoritarians to run one's organizations is clearly a recipe for disaster, however, as their temperament tends to a greater commitment to authoritarianism (i.e. power) than to leftism.

The left thus faces a deep problem. One needs leadership and hierarchy, even though few on the left are temperamentally suited to it. And one needs an ongoing diet of activities that allow groups to bond and grow their commitments and competence. The corporation, with its ongoing struggle to win the marketplace, is a good example. Churches are another, with the various personal and social goals that merge into a more or less stable institution that can occasionally be active politically as well.

The university is another, more left-aligned institution, where the society's need for knowledge and human development is channelled into maintenence of a cadre of left-leaning academics. It is typical that our universities have never taken up leadership of a larger social mission, but remain dutifully atomized in small departments, indeed individual labs and scholars, who are as distant as possible from social action. It is an example of how the temperament and interests of the left combine with subtle but influential incentive stuctures imposed from above (the competitive grant system, constant budget crises) to neuter a possible source of left social comunity and leadership.

• Getting real about the Trump agenda.
• If inequality is the problem, why elect a plutocracy? What were they thinking?
• Does anyone buy it any more?
• On the importance of truth and epistemology.
• Example: climate change no longer exists.
• But facts lie on a spectrum, so to speak.
• VOA could be turned into Pravda.
• EPA about to be destroyed.
• Our decline is palpable.
• Cybercrime is a huge economy. We need a better, and more open, defense.
• Money is the only consideration now in the mainstream political system.
• Exhibit A: Goldman Sachs is back to running our government.

Cultural Trauma and Authoritarianism

What the Mongols did to the Muslim world, China, and Russia.

Russia is certainly in the news now, and what do you know, but over the holidays Santa Claus brought me Martin Sixsmith's history of Russia. It breezes all too quickly through the first millenium or so of Rus, from its semi-mythical origins in the 800's as yet another Viking outpost, like that of the Jutes, Angles, and Saxons in England, and the Normans in France, England and later in Italy and Palestine.

Sixsmith paints a picture of a reasonably cosmopolitan and open society (centered in Kiev) in the very early period, though always quarreling and lacking centralized leadership and legitimacy, as was true for most other Western regions during the middle ages (and elsewhere in human history). All that changed in 1240, when the Mongols concluded a lengthy conquest, and put Russia under a severe yoke for the following 240 years.

While there has been quite an effort in recent years to rehabilitate the Mongols, one can make the case that the rise of Western Europe over all other areas of the world in the last few hundred years is due in large part to the destruction or hobbling of its competitors by the Mongols. This applies to China, to Russia, and most profoundly, to the Muslim world.

In Russia, the Mongols exterminated entire cities and forced the remainder to pay heavy tributes, as well as a lot of bowing and scraping, to their new overlords. But contrary to Sixsmith's portrayal, the Mongol rule was not terribly heavy-handed. They ruled through the local nobility, which, while neutered, was not destroyed. The Mongols also instituted some administrative efficiencies that accelerated institutional development. Perhaps the main effect, however, was the general trauma of violation and subjugation. With no natural borders, and predatory neighbors, the Russians evidently came to the conclusion that: 1. With regard to governing style, if you can't beat them, join them (i.e. the autocratic, despotic, and extremely effective military organization of the Mongols), and 2. That autocratic central power is the only way to keep Russia whole against its many neighbors. We in the US live in such a pleasant and peaceful neighborhood (Oh, Canada!), yet still are strikingly paranoid about Communism, Islam, immigration, etc.- take your pick. Imagine if those threats were actually real!

The enormous Mongol empire, 1200's.

Sixsmith certainly draws a line between this trauma and the continuing dedication of Russia to statism and autocracy, now exemplified by Vladimir Putin's nouveau despotism. China has ended up in a very similar place, from a much longer history of dynamic centralization, but similar subjugation by the Mongols. It is easy to draw the lesson that strength is the only way to survive in such a rough neighborhood. Yet it is a conclusion a little too-easily drawn by those already in power, whose only real interest is staying in power. Both China and Russia are exemplars of the extremes of depotic rule, particularly after it was given a whole new propagandistic lease on life by a Western ideology far more amenable and convenient than liberal democracy: communism. In China, it works tolerably well at the moment, but only by being radically tamed from the heights achieved by Chairman Mao.

But the saddest trauma was suffered by the Muslim world, which was at its height when the Mongols trashed Baghdad. In the centuries since, they have not gained a continent-wide empire (excepting the conquests and splendors of Mughal period), and have fallen progressively behind Western Europe. Whether the low point was the cavalier carving up of Muslim countries by the British (and French and Russians) after the fall of the Ottoman empire, or the current Islamist insanity, the Muslim world has had an increasingly frought relationship with the rest of the world, and with Modernity.

The Muslim approach to statehood and governance has always been lacking, based as it is on Muhammed as a singular and unreplicable example. A tribal and militaristic style succeeded after Muhammed's death, in channelling the energies of the unified community to winning an enormous empire. The caliphate then kept things together loosely, with religion as the core of identity. But it was always by civil war that God decided on the winners in the battle for the next ruling family. In Europe, the Catholic church (and its monastic affiliates) provided a much more stable model of governance, via election out of an oligarchy of cardinals. Later on, the Protestant reformation prompted ever greater attention to the role of the individual, as arbiter of celestial as well as terrestrial salvation. These threads of practice and theory led, in excruciatingly slow fashion, to the secular democratic state we have today.

When crisis threw Muslims back onto their religion as the bulwark of communal identity, there was little to go on to develop state institutions. Thus states tended to revert to tribal autocracy as the model. In the Arab core of the Muslim world, this remains the rule to this day. In outlying areas, however, such as Indonesia, Pakistan, and Turkey, (possibly Egypt and Tunisia), non-religious ideologies and influences have been more powerful, such as British colonialism, and the active Westernizing secularism of Ataturk. These countries have highly authoritarian tendencies, but have so far successfully cast aside enough of their Muslim ideological baggage to make democratic systems work to some degree.

This lack of legitimate state development in the bulk of the historical Muslim world, perhaps accentuated by the trauma of Mongol destruction, is central to its current complaints. It was central to their lack of resistance to Western imperialism, to their lack of effective post-colonial governance, to lack of human development and the economic development it leads to. It was also central to our disasters in Iraq and Afghanistan, where the US dreamed of quickly implanting democracy, only to be faced by a culture utterly unprepared for it, with far more fissiparous fish to fry. If God anoints the strong to rule over the weak, by way of warfare in general and jihad in particular, what is the point of legally bound representative state institutions?

• Trump and Putin... it makes no sense, unless Trump is a clown.
• Incoming HHS secretary is corrupt.
• We have a media problem.
• Splenetic clown can dish it out, but can't take it.
• Work, yes. Capitalist work, not necessarily.
• Web design.. by the young, for the young?
• Integrity and democracy can make a difference.
• The youth are worried. Then why didn't they vote?
• Are we ready for world equality?
• Thank you, god!
• Why are private schools allowed to exist?
• We need a new economic deal, and we need it fast.
• Economic graph of the week: Corporations are paying less, workers are paying more.

Why Have Brain Waves?

A theory about the function of electrical brain oscillations.

The phenomenon of brain waves have been the topic of many posts here, because they are such a tempting target for brain-wide information synchronization and management. Disparate analogies such as radio broadcasting, and the clock-ing of CPU chips come to mind. Yet the phenomenon is complicated, with lots of noise and a variety of active frequencies, spanning a ten-fold range. There have been many clues about their function, such as correlation with various mental states, (attention, sleep, resting non-attention), but no coherent theory about what they do has arisen, yet.

A recent paper tries to rectify that, by dialing back the expectations of what brain waves are doing, and coming at the problem from a very basic level. Information, after all, is not being carried directly by these waves at all- they are too variable and weak for that. Information in the brain is carried by the individual cell activations, in the context of their anatomical connections, which together form patterns that dynamically model variable information states.

One problem for this system is that neuron firing needs to be sparse in order to be useful. If everyone fires at once, you have epilepsy, instead of information modeling and transfer. Inhibitory neurons help with this, dampening feedback loops and preventing runaway activation. But most phenomena that one wants to model are stable over time, or vary relatively slowly. If you are looking at a scene, little changes from one 50 millisecond frame to the next, which is why our MP3 and video compression technologies work so well. Modeling stable phenomena with sparse, randomly firing neurons leads to quite a bit of error, as shown in the author's panel b, below.

Theory for the usefulness of partial neuron synchronization for accurate data encoding. Panel b shows what happens when neurons (black slashes, for each firing) are unsynchronized, while representing a constant stimulus (signal, blue). The cumulative representation (black line) is not an optimal representation of the original signal (blue). In contrast, if the neurons still fire sparsely, but are clocked to a global rhythm, even a very rough rhythm (yellow) gives as good overall accuracy as the fully randomly firing ensemble, and shorter time intervals provide the possibility of greater accuracy (salmon, green). Panel d represents conceptually the tradeoff between random firing and synchronized firing, as measured in data reconstruction error. The optimum is somewhere in the middle.

The observation is general to all data, whether stable or not, actually. Some synchronization provides more accurate data representation over a completely random ensemble of neurons, especially if the neurons are firing sparsely enough that (as in panel a, above) none fire at exactly the same time. This is a very significant point, and by itself predicts that neuron oscillations will happen in roughly the way they are observed- widely enough to be observed and to entrain much of the neuron firing that happens, but not strongly enough to cause epileptic-like mass synchronized firing.

It turns out that that there is even more room for improvement, however. Ironically, adding a little noise can also be helpful for signal reconstruction. Since the network has to include inhibitory neurons to dampen overall feedback and also prevent simultaneous spiking of nearby neurons, they cause an additional degradation of final representation, especially since they have delays in their own response, as do the activating neurons. The problem is that despite the presence of inhibitory neurons, they can not always act fast enough to dampen spike trains, which tend to run away a bit before inhibition. Modelling this all out, the authors find that adding a bit of noise to the system helps prevent excess synchronization, with quite beneficial effects, seen in the next figure.

 "Thus, optimal coding was achieved when the balance between excitatory and inhibition was the tightest. Further, at the optimal level of noise, the spiking CV [coefficient of variation] value was near unity, implying irregular (near-poisson) single cell responses."

The population firing rate power (panel h) shows most clearly the dangers of the low or no noise regime. Adding just a little noise (blue) helps dampen runaway spike trains significantly, while also (panels e, c) improving data reconstruction accuracy. In each panel d,e,f, the stable dashed line is the orginal data to be reconstructed. CV = coefficient of variation, exc. = excitatory neurons, in. = inhibitory neurons, ram = root mean squat, an inverse measure of correlation between the original signal and the reconstructed signal. Lower numbers (error) are better.

Taken together, this work argues strongly that neural oscillations (aside from the sleep spindles and other slow-wave phenomena that have distinct maintenance purposes) have a loosely analogous role to clocking cycles in computers. They do not themselves convey any data, but facilitate better data modelling. Their strengthening during attention, motor activities, and the like would then be a sign of weak synchronization, which may be significant over large areas of the brain for assembling mental constructs, but not of anything like information broadcasting. I would take this as the leading theory, currently, of their function.

"Neural oscillations have been hypothesised to fulfill a number of different functional roles, including feature binding (Singer, 1999), gating communication between different neural assemblies (Fries, 2005; Womelsdorf et al., 2007; Akam and Kullmann, 2010), encoding feed-forward and feed-back prediction errors (Arnal et al., 2011; Arnal and Giraud, 2012; Bastos et al., 2012) and facilitating ‘phase codes’ in which information is communicated via the timing of spikes relative to the ongoing oscillation cycle (Buzsáki and Chrobak, 1995). 

Many of these theories propose new ways in which oscillations encode incoming sensory information. In contrast, in our work network oscillations do not directly code for anything, but rather, are predicted as a consequence of efficient rate coding, an idea whose origins go back more than 50 years (Barlow, 1961)."

• Yes, we can say farewell.
• And welcome institutional erosion.
• Bill Mitchell vs Obama.
• Is gerrymandering unconstitutional?
• Voters? Who needs voters?
• Deficits and liars. And more liars.
• Economic liars.
• I would never discuss an investigation!
• We are losing, slowly, in Afghanistan.
• What happened, between us and Russia?
• Future official going rogue.
• We are entering banana republic territory.
• Millennials are getting the shaft.

Which is More Real: Global Warming, or Jesus Christ?

An exercise in epistemology.

A recent article in the magazine Free Inquiry urged atheists to not get seduced by the theory that Jesus was a mythical creation, instead of a real person. This has been a persistent and highly interesting sub-current in the community, yet the academic consensus, even among non-believing scholars, is that Jesus really did exist. As the writer, Bill Cooke, states: "Part of the problem is that there is no convincing explanation as to why a body of mythological exegesis should have built up quite quickly around someone who never existed."

The consensus of the field is not that Jesus is entirely mythical, but rather that the religion that we have now as Christianity is mostly mythical, going far, far beyond whatever kernel Jesus provided. For example, Jesus was Jewish, and had no interest in founding a non-Jewish, let alone anti-Jewish, religion. He was likely a reforming preacher, and may possibly have presented himself as an inverted Jewish messiah. But the idea that he was god, or part of a trinity, or born on Christmas, or was resurrected, or will come again ... are total fabrications, even to discerning theologians who understand their history.

But all this gets far ahead of the point of the mythicist exercise, which is not to state in some fundamentatlist way that "Jesus never existed, so nya-nya!", but rather to point out the paucity of evidence for that existence, making of it a valid question rather than glorious certainty, and making of the Bible a multi-layered amalgam of myth, piled around a little pea which, while probably real, might also be myth.

There is no direct evidence that Jesus existed. No inscriptions, no contemporary texts, no mentions at all in any text until fifty years or more after his death. And those first mentions, by the Apostle Paul, have a curiously mythical character to them, never mentioning Jesus as a person in any distinct way, but only as the crucified apotheosis of the new movement. The Jesus seminar, to take one example, has tied itself in knots trying to figure out what slivers of the Christian corpus have anything to do with its founder.

Do electric Magi dream of animatronic gods?

So the epistemological status of Jesus as a human being is not secure, but rests, as mentioned above, on the measured judgement of historical scholars about the likelihood of this cult developing the way it did, with or without the putative founder. It is a circumstantial, and preponderance-of-evidence kind of argument, far from an empirical certainty. And the epistemological status of Jesus as a current being / target of devotion, who listens to our prayers, accepts our love from the hearts that we open to him, and will return to set everything right ... well, that is completely untethered from reality, naturally. There is no more evidence for this than there is for praying to pet rocks.

Compare this with global warming and our role in causing it, which is, ironically, the subject of wide disbelief, especially among the religious and others with financial or ideological interests in not believing it. It is, like religious belief, more or less invisible and a matter of careful inference, by a priesthood of experts with occult instruments and practices. But truly, the evidence is now available in profusion, both of its existence and its inexorable (if slow) and dire consequences.

Yet disbelief persists. If god is running things for our benefit, the earth could hardly be going to pot due our greed and negligence, could it? And anyhow, if Jesus is coming back soon, who cares? The idea that humanity will be around for thousands, even millions, or, inconceivably, billions of years into the future is foreign to a mindset where one's horizon is hardly farther than a generation past or future, and everything beyond that resides in an archetypal, dreamy haze.

• Truth is a political act.
• And democracy is a value that not everyone shares.
• We are afflicted with stupidity.
• Postmodernism- a disaster to all.
• Basic, unearned income already exists, though it is not universal.
• Regression in economics.
• Regression in geopolitics.
• Draining the swamp begins in a high note.
• It is going to be a long four years.
• Flynn facts.
• No need for the piety, anymore.
• Should we be surprised at the outcome, if billionaires run our media system?
• Brightening up the nursing home, in the Netherlands.