Maybe it's not all in your head, but there's enough interesting stuff going on above the neck for me to maintain a funky set of ideas about what happens in there. The best place to start is with Joseph LeDoux's book, "The Deep History of Ourselves". I almost copied the following website to this blog, but didn't in spite of its usefulness. https://deep-history-of-ourselves.com/pages/table_contents.html
Taken individually, each chapter is a short review of the latest neuroresearch thought on some step of the development (evolution) of animal life from its beginning as a drop of certain molecules captured in a skin to the elaboration that is us, who are also extremely complex collections of these drops, expanded into a community of cells enclosed by a bigger skin, able to think about ourselves and our worlds. The chapters are short but packed, so a person is well-advised to read one, stop to reflect and recover, then go to the next.
This is not about a tree graph, a simple progression, so much as about repeated adjustments, doubling back, opportunities, losses and redundancies. (Read Quammen. http://www.davidquammen.com/home) I like to quip that vertebrates came before mammals, which means that one must grow a spine before developing balls. But in truth it means that the DNA of vertebrates (for instance, reptiles) is the substrate of mammals, especially when it comes to preconscious rage and fear before they are realized in behavior. LeDoux likes to refer to the First Shared Ancestor, like the earliest reptile that began to be mammalian. Then the first mammalian that began to be a primate. It's all so much more complex than we thought and more chance-dependent when we consider all the hominins who seem to be a recurring development of primates.
The point is that a brain, as the book by Gary Marcus with that name suggests, is a "Kluge." "A kludge or kluge (/klʌdʒ, kluːdʒ/) is a workaround or quick-and-dirty solution that is clumsy, inelegant, inefficient, difficult to extend and hard to maintain. This term is used in diverse fields such as computer science, aerospace engineering, Internet slang, evolutionary neuroscience, and government." (Wiki)
For instance, why is the brain in two halves, one "assigned" to one way of looking at the world and the other different but capable of learning to read and write? Is it some way like the binary halves of the reproductive humans, male divided from female? (Which is never quite complete.)
Neuroscientists often begin with this puzzle and the psych experiments proving that in a person with a severed connection between the two, the halves in the same head don't talk to each other. One side has to make up fantasies to explain what the other half can see. In fact, much of human thinking is making up explanations about what they "see" but don't really understand.
This is because we are inside our skins with only electromagnetic code being perceived as it comes through the skin from the world, but needing interpretation, translation in pictures, words and tastes or smells. Besides being acquired by the sense organs and sense cells (which we have only begun to find and sort - possibly a hundred types of cells!) and sent to the brain, once there the "connectome" transforms it. When the infant is born, a lot of circuits and loops are already endowed, logically mostly about subconscious functions, the stuff any mammal has. Researchers were a little disconcerted that during gestation sexual arousal is present along with the regulation of blood chemistry, heart beat, and breathing.
After birth the child expands its abilities by pushing against the environment, sometimes literally when learning to turn over and stand, but also by forming a subconscious mental and emotional structure about trust, pleasure, danger, other people, so on. After the first three years or so, including the mastery of grammar and first vocabulary, new things must either fit into the old neural matrix or create a new circuit. By that time, all the "born-with" circuits that weren't used have died. Everything after those first years must build upon experience as much as genetics. Often experience is controlled by culture, which is an adaptation of community pushing against ecology. Boundaries arise because of all this pushing.
Different cultures produce differently "wired" children which we speak of as "generations" and speculate have different characteristics. Humans, unlike the early ancestors, are able to "stand apart," observe their own behavior and thoughts, and even change them. This is studied as the puzzle of "consciousness". For the first twenty years or so, we are at the mercy of "not-knowing," just responding, and many will stay in that bubble, usually people in a restricted environment. But for those who were always open to new experience or even speculation, and those who become "enlightened," a multitude of new circuits grow in their brains. This is called "being plastic."
Being trapped in the tangle of one's own connectome takes effort to work out of, but there are methods known. One is the experience of liminal time and place, one is change due to growth, another is being in an extremely intense situation of very strong emotion (either negative or positive), and a fourth is taking drugs, particularly LSD or ayahuasca, but not randomly. One needs guidance about amounts, timing, and situation. People who insist on preventing change, always thinking the same way, will fight these forces. They are not just symptoms, but also means of escape from paralysis. An intense intimacy with another person can do that.
Cultures prevent change in individuals through schools (grades, promotions, graduation, awards), work (money, status, control), and social status. Let your connectome get too unraveled and you're likely to be stigmatized or even defined as crazy or criminal, justifying incarceration. To be a poet, a musician, or some kinds of writer is to get a little protection in some cultures.
This is a kludgey and maybe unjustified away of thinking about what a human being is and how the body/brain works. Today there is far more detail and accuracy in the research done by LeDoux and others. After all, LeDoux is a musician and a jazz appreciator, welcoming new ideas. Check out YouTube.
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