What makes up the human mind? With a brand-new building as a catalyst, USC’s pioneering program in the neurosciences is attempting to wrest the secrets of the mind from the damp recesses of the brain.
by Sheldon Teitelbaum
Headco Neurosciences. Glancing at this imposing $18 million red brick structure recently erected near the heart of the University Park campus, one might recall the playful attempt during the 1960s to levitate the Pentagon by the sheer force of will of those surrounding it.
Not that there is anything untoward happening here. But if the program taking shape at USC (as well as a few others like it nationwide) successfully wrests the secrets of the mind from the damp recesses of the brain, floating buildings will be the least of it. The truth is that nothing anywhere will ever appear quite the same.
Barely a decade after it was conceived, USC’s pioneering Neural, Informational and Behavioral Sciences (NIBS) program has already launched an unprecedented foray into the nether reaches of an organ many now regard as one of the last true frontiers in science. Moreover, NIBS researchers hope to adapt the principles of organization found within the brain to the task of designing a new generation of intelligent computer systems.
This, says Richard Thompson, the program’s director and holder of the William M. Keck Chair in Psychology and Biological Sciences, may make it possible to explore the eternal verities in ways never before dreamed. ,
“] don’t know if we will like what we find,” he says, “but I think that ultimately we will know everything there is to know about our brains save, perhaps, the ethical basis of behavior.”
Thompson and his colleagues are determined to go about this by, quite simply, assembling the sharpest minds from an ever-increasing array of disparate scientific disciplines and asking them to work in proximity, to talk with each other, to learn each other’s specialized language, to become enmeshed in each other’s world views, and to collaborate in ways which, only a generation ago, would have been deemed highly unusual, if not entirely inappropriate.
If NIBS succeeds merely in nudging the explosion of neuroscience many believe to be impending, “the potential exists in that building,” says administrative director William McClure, a professor of biological sciences and neurobiology, “to change our culture irrevocably.”
Weighing in at a mere three pounds, the human brain is millions of magnitudes more complex than any computer presently conceivable. Comprised of billions of nerve cells, or neurons, intricately connected with each other, this soft, spongy, pinkish gray mass of nerve tissue is the seat of consciousness, emotion, thought, reasoning and associative memory (which allows for recording, recalling and exploiting past experiences).
The sundry connections its component neurons are capable of forming are almost beyond comprehension. The brain, we are learning, does not work in the linear fashion of the computer; rather, it processes information multidimensionally. Thoughts which may begin in one sector of the brain trigger storms of biochemical activities that fleetingly lace their way through its intricate neuronal latticeworks. If such activities could actually be seen as they happen, the brain would appear to twinkle and shimmer like the desert night sky.
Moreover, this astounding lump of “wetware” (as some neuroscientists and literary cyberpunks presently think of it) is constantly in the process of rewiring itself. The current wisdom supports a view of a brain which completely refashions its internal synaptic structure every few days. Some, like professor of computer science, engineering and biological sciences Christoph von der Malsburg, believe the brain may actually reformat its own circuitry every few seconds, which makes the prospect of ever getting a clear handle on its workings as daunting as anything researchers have ever faced.
Indeed, a brain's ability to understand a brain’s ability to understand is proving to be one of the most damnably confounding abilities in the natural world. Despite the inroads made by brain researchers over the last decade or two, there is room to wonder if, despite Thompson's optimism, the human mind is equipped, by its very nature, to grasp its own entirety.
The problem borders on the metaphysical. It stems largely from our growing awareness that, despite what our senses may tell us, there really is no single natural world to begin with. Rather, there are many of them, and each is anchored in a particular point of view.
This is not to say that an objective reality beyond our ken does not exist; rather, that there are many different ways of perceiving it. The universe experienced by a frog, for instance, is as different from that perceived by a person as ours might be from that of a methanebreathing balloon creature floating through the tidewinds of Jupiter’s upper atmosphere.
Plato might have been talking about the brain’s penchant for erecting and manipulating symbols when he introduced his famous allegory of the cave. Inside an underground cave, Plato imagined, were people chained from childbirth and incapable of turning their heads toward the fire-lighted entrance behind them. All they could see of the outside world were shadows cast upon the cave wall facing them. For these people, such shadows constituted the extent of human reality.
Ina sense, the human brain perceives reality similarly — at several removes from it. For scientists, however, using an organ itself once removed from the real universe to fathom its own workings poses a serious problem. The human brain is second to none at projecting its own dreams and visions outward. Sometimes, these can get in the way of understanding how things actually work.
don’t know if we will like what we find, but I think that ultimately we will know everything there is to know about our brains save, perhaps, the ethical basis of behavior.”
Take, for instance, the business of skull-bumpery. During the 19th century, some of Europe’s best minds — among them Charles Dickens and George Eliot — subscribed to the claims of the quaint pseudoscience of phrenology. Phrenology held that a person’s character and personality could be ascertained by the shape and size of bumps on the skull. These, in turn, were believed to have been fashioned by the development of various brain centers, each ostensibly responsible for individual traits. It was thought, therefore, that there might be a specific area of the brain responsible for, say, acquisitiveness, another for affection, and even one for piety.
Lacking the technology to properly examine their assumptions at this early juncture of anatomical discovery, it became an easy matter for the phrenologically inclined to presume that naturé had, in this marvelous organ called the brain, anticipated the moral distinctions they themselves were prone to make in their daily lives.
Of course, research methods improved as the 20th century progressed, and scientists discovered that these phrenological provinces simply did not exist. (There was, however, something to the business of dividing the brain into regions. Later it would become apparent that these regions were distinguishable, if not by quality, by function; and that in some instances the brain was sufficiently versatile to permit one region to compensate for another whose capacities may have been damaged.)
During the last two decades, breakthroughs in molecular biology, membrane biophysics, electrical engineering and computer science have made it possible to subject the living human brain to close, nonintrusive scrutiny and, still in very small part, to mimic some of its activities mechanically,
As a consequence, we stand at the verge of actually seeing, among other wonders, the electrochemical twinklings that comprise a human thought.
At the conclusion of his acclaimed television series and book The Body in Question, British physician and historian Jonathan Miller noted that, in recent years, scientists and philosophers had been struck by the similarity between the way in which the brain perceives reality and the way in which scientists explain it.
Both, he argued, depend upon creating fictions and subsequently refining them until they self-evidently coincide with the outside world.
“Natural science is the native idiom of the brain made explicit,” he said. “The human brain has handed back to its owner the most