Sometimes the obvious is not so obvious. An idea like the “connectome” meaning the various bits of the brain that are played like music in chords so that code we might identify as 1-5-7-16 (to use Arabic numbers to indicate nodes instead of the medical Latin names since I’m just making this up), gives a person -- when connected -- one emotional state, while the combination 3-1-7-5-5-5 shifts the person’s thought over to a skill on the other side of the brain, perhaps analysis. Except that the nodes and pathways are far more multiple and resourceful than this sort of safecracker combination might suggest. For instance, if one node is damaged by trauma or disease, the other nodes might find a way to workaround.
The workaround might even be social, among people, so that it’s hard to catch Alzheimer victims in the early stages because they are so clever at inventing explanations or just creating distractions, even by quarreling. The human brain is a pattern-making organ (like a pipe organ playing Bach or Rock) with rhythm as a unifying force, just like music. (They call them brain waves and they cannot be found by dissection, but they are the essential sign of life. They are not the chords played by the nodes, but they keep order among them.)
We never really know whether our instrument is controlling our understanding of the world, the cosmos -- all else besides what goes on inside our skin. We do realize that one’s instrument determines what one can detect, but it makes us suspicious that the sensory information we can collect (far more than six senses, including senses in the muscles and the gut) tells us that what we pick up out there is something organized in the same way we are. On the other hand, once the elements of existence find a good strategy, they tend to repeat it over and over fractally -- just on different scales. We have our music preferences and so does Mother Nature.
There I go again -- anthropomorphizing “elements of existence.” First thing you know, I’m liable to be giving them names and calling them gods. This seems to be in our nature -- or is it in our culture. Probably both. When in doubt, use inclusion.
And then there’s emergence. In the brain’s structure there are many rooms. Maybe small ones, little more than compartments. But when they are added together and interacting, changing modes, “playing the notes,” what emerges is our identities, our music, our architectural style. We think the world emerged this same way. Lots of little things accumulated until one day their interaction jumped existence to a new plane, called “life.”
One of our abilities is to think of things that are “more so” but nonexistent as far as evidence goes, so what’s beyond “life?” What’s beyond human beings? That’s hard to think of, so let’s apply this connectome idea to society, humans in the aggregate. One of the nodes is called “religion,” which another one of those things that doesn’t exist except as a concept and, in fact, is greatly confused because it mixes so many things. What most of us mean is a social institution -- not an individual belief system -- and that institution can include congregational worship, hierarchies, budgets, buildings, various relationships to governance, morality, long documents, charity and more. What emerges from all this? Sometimes order and sometimes chaos. It has little to do with the feeling of the holy.
Right now we are in a time of chaos. Something is budding up through our lives but we can’t tell what it is. TED to the rescue with statistics which are a whole new kind of knowing when we look at them via animated video. This one is full of energy:
TED enthuses, “You've never seen data presented like this. With the drama and urgency of a sportscaster, statistics guru Hans Rosling debunks myths about the so-called "developing world." This is fascinating but probably already out of date. (The vid is dated 2006.) Something else seems to be going on in the past seven years. Part of the change is NOT showing up in data, nor is ever digested into useful ideas. As Rosling says, in his blunt Swedish way, there are too many people hoarding data for some reason (probably mostly commercial, but then consider the obsession with governmental secrecy), partly because of the fixation on passwords and the failure to present information in any kind of intelligible way, and partly because they just like being the “only ones who know.” Or maybe the data says something they don’t like.
I can think of two more barriers against people collecting data in the first place. One is that too much is criminalized, so that no sensible kid on the street -- even one not infected with HIV or using drugs -- is going to allow himself or herself to be detected because he or she will immediately be “taken into care,” that is, incarcerated. Likely without the most basic provisions for food,comfort and safety, let alone disease treatment.
Beyond that, too many “sets” of people out there simply "don’t compute": inquirers have no name for the types, don’t even conceive of them existing. Old vets living in hooches in the woods. Lunch counter waitresses with no home address. Some people are invested in being unseen. Illegal immigrants. Self-administered witness protection plans. My crazy brother avoiding diagnosis. Likewise, it took a while for medical people to even figure out that HIV was a retrovirus that arose in Africa. They still don’t get that it’s a SYNdemic, in which poverty, a host of diseases, empty food, drugs, family breakdown, economic factors, lack of shelter or a place to wash-up and so on, ALL interact so that it doesn’t matter how powerful any drug is, how adherent the compliance to protocols. If the other pressures are not addressed, the virus cannot be defeated. It will simply self-renew while possibly morphing. It has too many allies and workarounds. In the culture.
Now we’re talking culturomics, the connectomes of society, which are as many and various as the brain connectome. Tracing graphs doesn’t have to be grim. Here are a couple of brilliant jokesters turning out what patterns they can from the google avalanche.
Fractal-style, each sub-culture has its own culturomics, often unseen by the mainstream and particularly overlooked by the media though now that we have the concept of “black ops” and so on, there is increasing suspicion of a super-rich “black cabal” controlling things. Yet this is such a recurrent trope from the earliest days that one has to look at it with suspicion. It may simply be a personification of paranoia that keeps focus from splintering out in unmanageable ways. All in your head. Well, you can’t keep a culture in your hip pocket, can you? Maybe in a book or movie, though. Even a poem. Or an image.
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