Your Brain Is On the Brink of Chaos

[n2doc]

BY KELLY CLANCY

In one important way, the recipient of a heart transplant ignores its new organ: Its nervous system usually doesn’t rewire to communicate with it. The 40,000 neurons controlling a heart operate so perfectly, and are so self-contained, that a heart can be cut out of one body, placed into another, and continue to function perfectly, even in the absence of external control, for a decade or more. This seems necessary: The parts of our nervous system managing our most essential functions behave like a Swiss watch, precisely timed and impervious to perturbations. Chaotic behavior has been throttled out.

Or has it? Two simple pendulums that swing with perfect regularity can, when yoked together, move in a chaotic trajectory. Given that the billions of neurons in our brain are each like a pendulum, oscillating back and forth between resting and firing, and connected to 10,000 other neurons, isn’t chaos in our nervous system unavoidable?

The prospect is terrifying to imagine. Chaos is extremely sensitive to initial conditions—just think of the butterfly effect. What if the wrong perturbation plunged us into irrevocable madness? Among many scientists, too, there is a great deal of resistance to the idea that chaos is at work in biological systems. Many intentionally preclude it from their models. It subverts computationalism, which is the idea that the brain is nothing more than a complicated, but fundamentally rule-based, computer. Chaos seems unqualified as a mechanism of biological information processing, as it allows noise to propagate without bounds, corrupting information transmission and storage.

At the same time, chaos has its advantages. On a behavioral level, the arms race between predator and prey has wired erratic strategies into our nervous system.1 A moth sensing an echolocating bat, for example, immediately directs itself away from the ultrasound source. The neurons controlling its flight fire in an increasingly erratic manner as the bat draws closer, until the moth, darting in fits, appears to be nothing but a tumble of wings and legs. More generally, chaos could grant our brains a great deal of computational power, by exploring many possibilities at great speed.

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http://nautil.us/issue/15/turbulence/your-brain-is-on-the-brink-of-chaos

[gtar100]

1. I imagine there is a continuum to that statement.

In which a brain under the stress of right-wing thoughts dips into the chaos just a little more than sanity can handle.

[enough]

2. Thanks for posting. I find this article both very interesting and very calming.

Maybe this says something about why meditation is so vital.

[mopinko]

3. brains. brains. so fascinating.

i have an unintentional demonstration of this in my youngest child.
unbeknownst to me, her brother fractured her skull as a tiny kid. her temporal lobe was injured. this messed with her development in a big way. for 15 years, we tried to figure out what was wrong with her.
she finally started having more overt seizures, and when they wired her up, that injury lit right up.
pretty much her entire autonomic nervous system is a mess. her heart is easily thrown off track, she has bad reynauds and a positional tachycardia. her digestion is a mess. her lungs are stunted. she spent her whole childhood at the bottom of the growth chart. she gets migraines, and frankly, her mind is a bit of a mess.

severe bilateral temporal lobe epilepsy, missed by even the neurologists.
and completely hosing up her body.

has to be the ultimate 'dont tell mom' story.

[phantom power]

4. who are you and how do you know about my brain?