The Wisdom Paradox

[James Brody]

“There are things that are facts, in a statistical sense, on paper, on a tape recorder, in evidence. And there are things that have to be facts because nothing makes any sense otherwise.” Philip Marlowe. (Chandler, 1958/1988, Playback. NY: Vintage, 135.)

Chuck Darwin understood the importance of consequences for the emergence of species-uniform characteristics through natural selection…that is, variation leads to outcomes that are retained because they work. His descendants in evolutionary-developmental biology find that genes and their phenotypes execute Darwin’s protocol: repeat what works, vary it slightly, and keep whatever works better. Life turns flux into consistency and swaps what worked yesterday for something different that might work even better tomorrow.

Elkohonon Goldberg, a neuropsychologist and author of The Wisdom Paradox, finds the brain to be not only a homeostatic device but also an opportunist, one that discards most novelty as noise but retains novelty that suggests patterns, regularity, repetition, and, eventually, prediction and control. He also addresses a problem that is just as old: what does the right half of your brain accomplish that is different from the left? (Bogen, 2000; Gazzaniga, 1972; Sperry, 1981; Wigan 1844/2006) According to Goldberg, the left cerebral cortex records familiarity and routines, the right wakes up not for fresh coffee but for a fresh problem.

The EG Model for the Cerebral Hemispheres

“The two hemispheres are functionally different in ways not adequately captured by the classic distinction between linguistic and nonlinguistic processes. The right hemisphere is critical for processing novel cognitive situations. The left hemisphere is key to the processes mediated by routines. The left frontal systems appear to be critical for the cognitive selection driven by the content of working memory and for context-dependent behavior, the right frontal systems for cognitive selection driven by the external environment and for context-independent behavior. The crucial role of the right hemisphere in processing cognitively novel situations underscores the importance of the right frontal systems in task orientation and in the assembly of novel cognitive strategies.” (Goldberg, Podell, & Lovell, 1994, 371. See also Goldberg & Costa, 1981.)

Such is consistent with metaphors from evolutionary-developmental biology (Gould, 1977, 2002; Raff, 1996) and from traditional Darwinism. That is, a copy, a clone, a node, is never exact and, therefore, conducts its life somewhat differently from its parent. Each node, each individual, has its own natural frequency, sensitivity, and output—all of which share mutual influences with parents and offspring. Such is true for the sequence from parents to children, for sequences of hox genes, and for your right and left cortex. Call it a learning model, call it Darwinism, call it neural reentry, or call it evo-devo. Mumble about the wonders of “executive functions,” or call it a smart little kid who, when crossing a stream, considers his ability to get back to where he is before he jumps to the next rock.

Goldberg also wanted an explanation of hemispheric function that allowed for continuity between human and nonhuman species. The popularity of a linguistic-non linguistic dichotomy and our emphasis on the left side may have been a miscue from sexual selection: that is, language is a crab’s claw, a conspicuous but costly adaptation, noticed by nearly everyone, but the claw is not the whole reason there is a crab. Thus, both Goldberg looks for scientific explanations that make us a part of nature, not apart from her.

The implications of his thoughts extend far beyond how the components of your skull manage each other. You can find them in the divisions between male and female, young and old, collectivists and individualists, and the developmental stages of science and religion. They line up with emergent networks in their scale-free and winner-take-all phases, with K- and r-selection, and with genomic imprinting. It may even be true that the vitality of a culture depends on its proportions of young and old and that extending lives without extending vitality collapses their society. He also finds “wisdom” to be the lifetime accumulation of patterns and that most of us should expect to become not only “wiser” but also happier as we age.

Omigod! How much fun can I have with this?

More of What Goldberg Said
1) Brain scans show that novel problems elicit greater activity on the right side than on the left. Continued practice fades the response on the right but amplifies that from the left. This shift is true for language, music, and math.
2) Youngsters are more severely affected by right damage; mature adults by left. (The former need to assemble routines, the latter need to call upon what was already assembled.)
3) With aging, losses of neurons and glia occur primarily on the right side.
4) Frontal activation tends to fade as you age. So does activity on the right side (Aihara et al, 2003). This change in your cognitive “center of gravity” parallels your accumulation of patterns.
5) Suspicion, alarm, and fear lie to the right; comfort, relaxation, and contentment to the left. Success leads to the creation of rules, spoken or not.
6) The cognitive adventures of your cortex line up with those of your amygdalae: left arousal tends to be pleasurable, right arousal tends to provoke fear or anger. Given suspicion about novelty and comfort with familiarity, the amygdalae and the cortex achieve one function.
7) Youngsters and younger adults have greater access to right frontal abilities, oldsters to the left occipital, temporal, and parietal. Any wars between generations may be outcomes from cortical maturation.
8) Dopamine, a “get started, get finished, and enjoy” substance occurs in greater amounts on your left side; norepinephrine, a stress hormone is found more in your right cerebral hemisphere than in your left. If your left is injured, you become despondent and sometimes suicidal. Injure your right and the left chatters as if you were C3PO…a likeable but annoying narcissist with quick explanations for everything.
9) There are two kinds of memory: descriptive and prescribed. The former tends to be factual and shared by most observers; the latter to be self-organized and individually unique. Thus, memory can be lined up with the behavior genetic notions of shared and nonshared environments, the former imposed or resisted and the latter chosen or manufactured.
10) The male human cerebral cortex exhibits “Yakovlevian torque.” That is, in primates, humans, and fossilized human ancestors, the frontal right pole is larger than the left and the left parietal pole is larger than the right! If morphology reflects environmental demands, then the right may keep you in step with changing environments. These effects are more pronounced in adults than infants, more in right- than in left-handers, and more in males than in females (Goldberg, 2001), and their absence has been implicated as a developmental factor in schizophrenia.
11) London cabbies have large hippocampi. Further, violinists, jugglers and linguists each have their greater share of cortex that is specialized for a particular task. The volume of such is correlated with the amount of practice that occurs; terminate the activity and the cortex eventually shrinks.
12) Training old minds may replace lost neurons and protect such minds against decay.

Conjectures and Muddles
1) What to do about the London cabbies and their hippocampi? First, initial small differences in neural substrates may lead to “propensities” that grow as a function of chosen environments. Robert Plomin and his army have told us this for about twenty years in regard to such things as g and to the five personality factors of emotionality, extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and openness. This phenomenon of small differences multiplying because of nonrandom experiences has implications that go beyond cabbies, jugglers, and violin players. For example, homosexuality is something of a puzzle. It can be seen as a) an innate trait that has adaptive value simply because it exists, b) as a developmental disability that results when elaborate systems are built in varied prenatal settings, c) as a means to increase “female” characteristics in stable environments and, thereby, slow population growth, or d) as a changeable characteristic that responds to particular postnatal experiences! After all, most of us tend to fall in love with whatever gives us a shot of oxytocin!
2) The battle between young and old may be a failure of sync that arises because there is less functional similarity between the frontal and posterior areas of the brain. Do cultures fail in response to the proportion of old brains in them? Arnold Toynbee, for example, saw failure of civilizations when a former emergent majority because an imposed one. Leaders become tyrants and the general population finds new leaders. Such lines up well with Goldberg’s model.
3) Given similarity, heritability, and mate-preferences (Rushton, 2005), expect righties to pair with righties and lefties with lefties. Also expect the emotionally-reactive to find their matches and each generation to become more extreme than the prior one whether in regard to intelligence or to craziness. It also could be that each cerebral hemisphere competes for slightly different features when the two of them must compromise on a mate. Will creativity compete with rule-compliance and traditionalism? I suspect so. Will liveliness have a say in mate selection? It seems to. (See Grammer, 2006.) Do the jokes from a male and the laughter of a female allow for a rapid, mutual calibration of intelligence, health, and kindness?
4) Do we find it easier to make rules for what is seen rather than what is heard? Is this why television tends to have a “rule-bound,” leftist political bias while radio forums tend to draw out the individualists? Are kaleidoscopes more interesting to males? Do older adults avoid both young males and kaleidoscopes? Will more males than females either appear as guests or listen through the night to Coast to Coast, a series noted for its huge audience and its attention to space aliens and ghosts?
5) Old dogs…male or female…will often revert to the habits of their childhood and adolescence. There are two reasons: a) the extra layers of kindness that lead to children are no longer necessary. Little girls and older women throw rocks at, respectively, little boys and old guys. b) Vascular corrosion and congestion limit your access to the fine skills developed during your reproductive years. Thus, younger males often need to “make it” in science before their thirtieth birthday, a deadline that nature gave to women for the making of healthy children. Ontogeny over a lifetime will often be a U-turn rather than a straight line.
6) Goldberg attributes geographic exploration to depression and discontent. My intuition is that depressed leaders will have difficulty inspiring recruits to comply and to die. If you are to recruit others, you need to appear confident of your delusions!
7) Older males and females gain higher ranks in the military but on the basis of their compliance with rules! While Golda Meir usually had all the balls in the room, there will always be damned few Meirs. Implication: if you know nothing about two applicants other than their sex, pick the male for executive skills, war, or scientific innovation. More implications: because of self-selection, it is difficult to find executives in legislatures and very few of us of either sex can retain executive creativity while we age. Legislators and women should rarely become Presidents.
8) Art: Goldberg sees it as a brain exercise. He also finds Geoff Miller’s Mating Mind too limiting. Probably not. Further, power law arrangements underlie neural networks and may be the hidden player in our arts when we take evolutionary content and scribble with crayons, a word processor, or a baton (Wilson 1998; Csermely, 2006; Brody, 2008).
9) “Wisdom” could very well cement a culture to its rituals and take it to the bone yards. And the more desperate the threat, internal or external, the more persistent rituals become: if prayer doesn’t work, then pray harder!
10) Maturation is an accumulation of templates, seeded by “generic” species memories and sculpted by experience. A large supply of templates becomes “wisdom,” self-acceptance, and happiness in old age. Barnes and Noble, however, reprints classic literary works; Microsoft helped to archive well-recognized photographs. Is either of these “wisdom” or merely an accumulation of the familiar? Should an invading culture first destroy the churches, the libraries and bookstores, or the Internet?
11) Goldberg finishes Wisdom Paradox with his convictions that programmed mental exercises slow the loss of cognitive skills. I’m skeptical but a recent paper finds: “…evidence for transfer from training on a demanding working memory task to measures of Gf. (fluid intelligence, jb) This transfer results even though the trained task is entirely different from the intelligence test itself. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the extent of gain in intelligence critically depends on the amount of training: the more training, the more improvement in Gf.” (Jaeggi et al, 2008) Goldberg could be right!

Costs and Benefits
“What men have done and what they will do, these are merely aspects of what they are doing now, some well, some badly.” C. D. Darlington, Introduction to Galton’s Hereditary Genius, 1962, 9.

1) The notion that organisms make their environments has been referred, perhaps sarcastically, as “active Darwinism” (Steven Rose, cited in Plomin, 1994). Crickets, worms, spiders, coral, termites all modify their worlds. So do the kids spinning around the shopping mall and so do old men with glasses. That same concept, similar to “non shared” environment is one of the most powerful in our understanding of how individuals come to be different from each other. That is, small differences in heritable traits arrange, discover, and manufacture experiences so that tiny differences eventually become substantial ones (Plomin, 1994). Goldberg’s description of how environments affect neuronal growth is consistent with what behavior geneticists tend to believe. Further, this process weaves each organism into its surroundings.

There is, however, a cost to such a process. If each of us looks for facts and creates memories consistent with our automatic thoughts, the result can be that of a comfortable cell, one that you made and that, as if a cell membrane, protects you from what you aren’t specialized to touch, smell, see, hear, or believe. Also expect intervals in your life when your property, beliefs, and friends take possession of you. I know, for example, a writer who lives on tuna and broccoli so that he protects his intense creativity that visits him at 3 AM. I also know fathers who spend freely on model airplanes, sports equipment, or cocaine and alcohol but scrimp on clothing for their children. As Richard Lewontin put it: “Organisms are extremely internally heterogeneous. Their states and motions are consequences of many intersecting causal pathways, and it is unusual that normal variation in any one of these pathways has a strong effect on the outcome. To be ill is precisely to be dominated by a single causal chain. To be obsessed by an idée fixe which motivates all one’s actions, or to be convinced that all behavior on the part of others, without distinction, is hostile, is a form of mental illness…Indeed, we may define ‘normality’ as the condition in which no single pathway controls the organism.” Lewontin, 2000, 93–94.

Thus, you can use Darwin, Raff, Edelman, Barabási, Csermely, Goldberg, or even Bose-Einstein (Brody, 2008, 2003) to understand why a happy Russian grandmother might seem wise rather than foolish. ,

2) Physics has much to offer neurology. As sensed by D. O. Hebb, synchrony is so pervasive that parts of the brain will conform to it just as if pendulums (Strogatz, 2003). Barabási’s (2002) exciting description of emergent networks opens doors to how concepts and lives are arranged. Further, his notion that emergent networks have living properties implies a Darwinian competition between our appetites, a constructive balance between competing ones, and pyrrhic obsessions when one of them takes over in winner-take-all (Brody, 2008; Lewontin, 2000). Goldberg would also enjoy Peter Csermely’s book on the importance of small players for not only the adaptability but also the stability of large networks.

3) Goldberg dismisses mental “modules” but endorses “generic memories” in ways consistent with what Leda and John said about modules (Cosmides & Tooby, 1992). Further, the doggone neurologists sometimes find small segments of the brain that light up for familiar faces. Similar debates led Skinner to discount neurologies that could not point to nor manipulate the structures that were imagined. While he had great faith in the promise of physiological psychology, Skinner had little patience for the stories of his day.

4) Consider imprinting, often ignored in contemporary psychology, as a powerful means—in utero or postnatally—to achieve pattern creation, recognition, and preferential attachment.

Males and Females, Rights and Lefts: It’s the Same War!
“What it comes down to is that modern society discriminates against the right hemisphere.” – Nobel Laureate Roger Sperry.

There has been too much easy assignment of different mental functions to the right or left side of the brain. I distrust such models but succumb here because the risks of oversimplification bring with them attractive conveniences.

According to Goldberg, the left cerebral cortex in humans is not only the home for language but also for routines and rules. The right frontal areas, more prominent in males than females, may be associated with finding new patterns in external events and passing whatever order is found to the left side. The left side, in women and in feminized males may become more powerful in stable cultures. It also tends to become more dominant as men and women age. Further, neural activity, with age, tends to move from the frontal areas to the rear (Goldberg, 2001, 2006). Expect the oldest to be the most stubborn of us, a stubbornness that is not always wise. And expect “feminine” contributions, whether pre- or postnatal, to be the most bound up in rules.

1) Life changes by duplication with variation and tests the variants by contests between them. If a physical connection exists between the variations, however, cooperation and alliances become likely (Poundstone, 1992). Thus, the left and right cerebral cortices will be similar, they will also be different. Whether you argue from biology (Raff, 1996) or from physics (Kuramoto, 1984/2003), synchrony between players, whatever their nature, is a function of similarity and mutual influence (Strogatz, 2003).

2) “Dinichism” refers to the fact that males and females—of any species—occupy two different niches (Coss & Moore, 2002; Coss & Charles, 2004). The same concept can be applied to the left and right halves of your brain: each half is a unique aspect of the niche occupied by the other half. Further, one half may work closer to chaos, turning it into stability whatever is found today that might be exploited tomorrow. This has gone on for a long time.

Fossilized legs from two million years ago suggest that females moved from the trees to the ground long after males did. The behavior relics that we still carry from those days is that little girls tend to climb higher on monkey bars than little boys and, in computer simulations, respond to danger by going up trees. Little boys look for rocks to climb and holes to run into. It is possible to find a comparable outcome for the cerebral hemispheres: one side explores and dies earlier, the other side, as if a female, lives longer and, in settled conditions, assumes control (Brody, 2008).

3) Unsettled environments call for early reproduction, lots of offspring, and offspring that hit the ground running (MacArthur & Wilson). Such is known as “r-selection” and is true not only for growing children but also for growing neurons. That is, novelty triggers arousal, rapid experimentation, and searches for stability and predictability. In stable environments, fewer children are produced but are larger, slower to mature, and rely more on instruction from parents. “K-selection” may involve greater needs for socialization and more complex relationships between species. Item: Kanazawa (2006) found that nasty males tend to produce sons rather than daughters. So do engineers. Nurses, on the other hand, tend to produce more daughters! (Kanazawa and Vandermassen, 2005)

One outcome is innovative components not only manage external variation but face resistance from yesterday’s traditions. The left, rule-bound, side acts like a woman who sizes up contributions from the right as if it were a courting male: is it bright enough to make a living, popular enough to have allies, and kind enough to share what it has? Mothers pay pediatricians, psychologists, teachers, and counselors to correct the most extreme guys who otherwise head for jail, lose jobs, or beat their wives and children. Such can be viewed as socialization. It can also be seen as a series of contests between novelty and routine, between risk and safety, between exploration and tradition.

4) “Genomic imprinting” means that the effects of a gene to depend on the sex of the parent who supplied it. That is, imprinted genes from mothers tend to limit placental and fetal size, protect mother from fetal control of her blood pressure and blood sugar, and favor development of the cerebral cortex. Bob Trivers, damn his genius, suggested that the imprinted genetic contributions from a male or female have architectural responsibility for whatever business is later transacted in the right and left side of a human brain (Burt & Trivers, 2006). The magic that changes behavior as quickly as environment changes seems to occur prenatally.
That is, the same parents—depending on the turbulence around them—may be able to produce, through genomic imprinting, a hellion or a cleric or even a cleric who leads armies!

Will future studies show a differential contribution of moms and dads to one half or the other? Further, Levine (1966) demonstrated that a pulse of prenatal testosterone is the difference between a brain that becomes “male” and one that retains its templates for “female” behaviors. Would supplemental testosterone—or its precursors—increase the ability of females, at any developmental age, to enhance their abilities for three-dimensional visualization? Would a similar intervention resist or reverse the dominance of older left, posterior brains? (I suspect it would!)
Implication: the “feminization” of society may be somewhat attributable to the more settled economic and military conditions after the Second World War. In this latest contest between rights and lefts, expect us guys also to have more “guilt” as a reaction spun by Mother Nature during peacetime and affluence.

The left cortex now wins Sperry’s war but it also makes its own prison.

Talent and Demands for Equal Success
The problem for women, their teachers, their advocates, and their estrogenized sons is that certain male abilities occur with far less frequency in females than in males (Murray, 2003). These are results less from instruction but more from talent. Guarantees of equal outcomes, as in Title 9 and sports, may lead not to more girls succeeding but to the cancellation of opportunities for males (Sommers, 2008; Finn, 2008). Such would be lethal for our culture if Title 9, as is now considered, were to be applied to math and to the sciences.

The problem is even more subtle: given that talents vary systematically between average females and average males, there will be females who agree with each other than some “rule” is violated that accounts for why there are more males with degrees in the sciences. High-verbal males in academic settings will be apt to agree with the females! Thus, the blind move in sync with the blind and, thanks to similarity, recruit every larger swarms of the equally blind.

Further, if equal successes are to be guaranteed for men and women, so must equal failures. That is, there is to be an equal number of women arrested, fined, and jailed. An equal number must die in childbirth, have developmental disabilities, and trigger allergic reactions in their mothers. Of course, sexual equality also means drastic adjustments in our traditions for property settlements and child custody!

The outcome of these many possibilities is that of rule-bound culture that stabilizes the match between a stable environment and its occupants. Shake up the environment or have an invasion and murder increases, suicide decreases, and nastier guys tend to produce sons. And even in peaceful times, engineers and abusers tend to have sons while nurses tend to have daughters. In such conditions, ritual is more important than romance and spontaneity in such things as medicine, the law, and teaching…all areas where our daughters best our sons. I, like Ulysses, appreciate the girls who look for a hero and the guys who have to be one, even if only in their videogames.

Brains Are Made to Read!

Gazzaniga (1998, 6) remarked that brains are not built to read. He is one of our premier neuroscientists but, in this case, he’s wrong! Musicians make patterns, so do painters, novelists, mathematicians, and code-writers for computers. So do small children when they smell anise in their mother’s blood or perhaps when they hear a screaming father. Children also draw on cement walks; adolescents paint railroad cars, trucks, and walls; and so do old men who tell stories about God or gods. Adolescents who fight wars on computers win not by reacting to each event in isolation but by finding the patterns in what their enemy does. Fortune tellers make patterns and scientists give prizes to finders of a new one. The distinguished biologist, Edward O. Wilson, is only one in many tens of thousands who take messy collections and “…put things right, so to speak.” (Wright, 1988, 138) Such things are so elemental that there should be little surprise if a chimp or orangutan collected stamps! Meanwhile, I’m going to ride my sportsbike and keep my right frontal on full alert…

There.

References*
* particularly helpful!
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——— (2008) Rebellion: Physics to Personal Will. Lincoln, NE: iUniverse. Especially Chapter 6: Evolved Common Sense.
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[James Brody]

Similar concepts in another universe!

JimB

Nonequilibrium generation of information in copolymerization processes

David Andrieux* and Pierre Gaspard

Center for Nonlinear Phenomena and Complex Systems, Université Libre de Bruxelles, Code Postal 231, Campus Plaine, B-1050 Brussels, Belgium
Edited by Stuart A. Rice, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, and approved May 8, 2008 (received for review February 29, 2008)

"Abstract
"We consider general fluctuating copolymerization processes, with or without underlying templates. The dissipation associated with these nonequilibrium processes turns out to be closely related to the information generated. This shows in particular how information acquisition results from the interplay between stored patterns and dynamical evolution in nonequilibrium environments. In addition, we apply these results to the process of DNA replication."

http://www.pnas.org/content/105/28/9516