SPUTTERING BRAIN CONNECTIONS

So many interesting ideas have come from the investigation of the pre-frontal cortex that the rest of the brain is almost neglected.  But maybe it was the enthusiasm for lobotomies, which shoved a knife through the eyehole in order to destroy that pre-frontal cortex with devastating and inhuman consequences, that kept researchers from looking at those other parts.  The fact that the two halves of the brain could be separated by severing the corpus callosum, a band of tisssue that connected them, was kept quiet, though it was a surgery sometimes used in desperation to treat uncontrollable and life-threatening epilepsy.

Then it was realized that there was a cohort of the people who had separated brain hemispheres and that they could be studied to understand what difference it made.  The people seemed to be functioning well-enough, but the main discovery was that their two half-brains became two people or rather two aspects of the person.  Our culture so dearly loves binaries!  More carefully designed experiments revealed that the right side, connected crossover-style to the left hand, had a different “style” from the opposite side of the X — left side to the right hand.  Somehow involving “handedness” and literacy, the right brain was artistic, based on image, while the other side was logical, fact-based.  Immediately the people who want to explain everything in gender binaries decided the artistic side was “female” and the rational side was “male.” 

The more scientific folks were still pondering “fabulation.”  The two hemispheres, when presented separately with different input, would construct fabulous little conflations that accounted for both sides.  These stories were like those of early dementia sufferers who encountered things they could not reconcile without inventing a cover story.  This research by now is extensive and fascinating (look for “split brain studies”), but it has distracted from getting down to the actual organic and discernible operation of the corpus callusom.  What does it DO?

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3163989/  is technical, official, and uses acronyms.  Like all the other names based solely on observation, the parts of what seems a whole have Latin names based on shape:  “spenium” is the thicker part (it means “bandage”) and “genu” is a part that looks a bit like a knee.  (I recommend Google.  My medical dictionary was soon outdated.)  The areas form and elaborate at different rates, beginning right after birth and continuing into adulthood.  

“By 11 years, both the anterior and posterior callosum have reached 90% of their maximum fiber directionality, and by 20 years they have 90% of their maximum external axonal structures “  (Harumph!)  In short, these connections are still developing in the years a person (esp. a boy) are most exposed to damage from sports or abuse.

“There is evidence that callosal microstructure correlates with cognitive test performance in adolescents (ages 16–18 years). Specifically, FA in the body of the callosum (∼middle third) correlated positively with copy accuracy of a complex figure. FA in the splenium was positively correlated with processing speed, expressive vocabulary and single-word reading. Regression analyses confirmed that visuospatial performance was associated with FA in the body of the CC, whereas language performance (expressive vocabulary and single-word reading) was associated with FA in the splenium (Fryer et al. 2008).”

FA does not stand for “fuck all” but rather for “Diffusion tensor fractional anisotropy of the normal-appearing seven segments of the corpus callosum in healthy adults and relapsing-remitting multiple sclerosis patients.”   https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15906348  

Problems of this kind are called AgCC, meaning “agenesis of the corpus callosum”  (It also stands for Abundant Grace Community Church.)  Here’s the bottom line, which is a whole paragraph.

“Taken together, the neuropsychological findings in Primary AgCC highlight a pattern of deficits in problem solving, processing speed, and the social pragmatics of language and communication, which may result in significant complications of daily life. Parents report that children with AgCC and intact early motor development (i.e., sitting and walking within normal age range) are significantly likely to display clinically relevant behavior problems by the 6- to 11-year-old age range (Badaruddin et al. 2007). These include exhibit somatic complaints, attention problems, aggressive behavior, social problems and thought problems. The frequency of psychiatric diagnoses in AgCC is unknown, however diagnosis of learning disabilities, developmental delays and/or psychiatric disorders appear to be common (Brown and Paul, unpublished observations). The social impairments in AgCC are remarkably similar to those seen on the autism spectrum. In a sample of sixty-one 2- to 11-year-old children with AgCC, 34% of the sample met criteria for at least one item in the social interaction domain (with maximum of 46% who had impaired peer relationships). In the communication domain, at least 30% met on one item (with a maximum of 51 who had difficulty sustaining conversation).”

This subtly organic brain structure problem, whether developmental or caused by trauma, can be interpreted as being stupid, deficient and balky, thus adding more of a burden on a youngster who is by definition perhaps unable even to understand his problem, much less what to do about it.  And the adults around him or her are probably not much better equipped.  Their response can be an attempt to control behavior by punishment, maybe violent.

The following material is from “Medpage” and was written by Kristin Jenkins  (pub. 3-17-17).  Mercifully, she provides the origin of the acronyms.

“    A new biomarker that shows promise as a predictor of outcomes in children who sustain moderate to severe traumatic brain injury (msTBI) may help identify which youngsters could benefit from more aggressive treatment.

    Note that the study found that early measures of interhemispheric transfer time (IHTT), the time required for signals to traverse the cerebral hemispheres through the corpus callosum, can predict which children will recover after msTBI and which will continue to decline neurologically and cognitively more than a year following injury.”

“The Recovery After Pediatric Brain Injury Study (RAPBI) demonstrates that early measures of interhemispheric transfer time (IHTT) can predict which children will recover after msTBI and which will continue to decline neurologically and cognitively more than a year following injury. . .”

“Demyelination of white matter is commonly found post-TBI and can have adverse cognitive repercussions, the researchers noted. This gets compounded in the maturing brain, since "myelination continues well beyond age 30.”

Myelin is the white insulation that protects individual neuron axons.  If it is missing or too thin, the result is short-circuits and failure to transmit, just like a household extension cord.  If I were an artist, I’d draw a brain in two halves with a corpus callosum throwing off sparks, maybe starting fires.

CAN'T STOP DREAMING!

The Blackfeet people (probably most of the prairie tribes pre-encounter) had a culture based on dreams, that is, internal experiences that were vivid guides to life.  They valued these, even went out of their way to experience them.  They were the key to ceremonies and an assurance that life was far more than the daily routine of the camp, the hunt, and the family.  

There is a tribe — not in the Americas, but I forget where — that values dreams in a slightly different way.  Their practice is to tell each other their dreams every morning.  They greet children with the question, “Did you dream anything last night?”  As I remember, they were just interested, not trying to find symbols or predictions.  

My mother, however, had a dream book she kept by her bedside and consulted if her night had been vivid.  It made no sense to me.  Gypsy stuff.  “You will meet a handsome stranger.”  “You will travel across water.”  I write out my dreams and reflect on what they might mean.  Once in a long while, if under extreme pressure, a dream that’s neon in its intensity will “happen.”  I take them seriously.

But I had never run across quite this version of the subject until this morning on one of my site feeds:  https://broadly.vice.com/en_us/article/when-does-obsessive-daydreaming-become-a-mental-illness?utm_source=broadlytwitterus

I think Cinematheque might recognize this, even draw on it for their videos.  

There’s a website:  http://wildminds.ning.com   It might be diagnosed as autism or dissociation, which are part of the shattering consequences of abuse in childhood or extreme trauma even in adults.  The brain goes on a runaway, and in this article that is not unpleasant, even invited and valued.  The trouble is that it interferes with what is traditionally called “real life.”

Using those structures and images, those story-paths and visions, can be very helpful for an artist or writer and, in fact, they may reach out to what is formally called entheogens, drugs which are hoped to break through into another “world.”  Maybe religious, certainly mystical.

With the recent invention of fMRI and other technical scrutinizing and recording devices, we have added new ways of looking at experiences such as these.  Let’s make a list:

1.  Scientific laboratory evidence of brain activity by tracing electrochemical signals, by recording blood flow, by infecting neurons in ways that make them light up when active (only done with animals so far), by radioactive tracing, and so on.  In this way we have direct observation of where things are happening but not WHAT, except that we know some places in the brain specialize in pleasure or pain or mapping or memory, which may cause hormonal molecules to be created and disseminated.

2.  Direct observation of someone may be video-recorded.  Possibly a researcher might interfere with someone’s brain by using magnets, or playing sounds, or introducing chemicals.  In rather desperate attempts to jolt a malfunctioning brain into “normal”, we might use electroconvulsive therapy, or insulin shock.  Animals may have parts of the brain surgically removed or, even in humans, the two hemispheres separated.  (We don’t do lobotomies anymore, do we?)

3.  Reports by people of their internal life while under hypnosis or taking “truth serum.”  Somehow this seems more compelling than people in a daily ordinary state reporting their moods or fantasies, though lying down and free-associating can work to some degree.  That’s psychoanalysis and usually responds to some proposed “system” devised by some authority.  

It is subjective and personal, but interpreted by someone who knows the system, which is also subjective but not originating in the dreaming person.  It is a common “folk” practice to assume that a fish means this and a teakettle means that, universally, everywhere, even though the person might not even know what a teakettle is, and indeed, teakettles vary.  Smart analysts ask the patient what a teakettle means to that individual.  

4.  Religious interpreters are a special and culturally validated sort of psychoanalyst using a system likely to be ecologically based, the family being a personal ecology.  Christianity and Shinto use the family as reference.  Ag cultures dream of lambs and seeds.

5.  Philosophers, especially males in their twenties in an academic setting, spend a lot of time introspecting, ransacking their inner thought constructs in a way usually more like math than evocative art forms.  Sometimes these internally generated systems become more real than the real world, but mostly — in a setting where people argue constantly according to objective rules and principles — philosophy remains engaged with real life and possibly even useful.

Brains are the dashboards of the bodily symphony of perceptions, most of them entirely unconscious like the heart beat or peristalsis, but capable of prompting waking mood and even calling up dreams.  As I age, I’m aware of much going on that is just under consciousness, like the word I’m trying to think of or the information about where I left the pickup keys.  Beyond that, when I read something packed with revelations, the physical feeling (it IS physical to me) of understanding, of seeing the meaning of it, never quite breaks up through the ice-sheet separating conscious from unconscious.  Some thoughts will keep trying to get through and may arrive in thought as a dream or simply when my brain’s guard is down and I’m only washing the dishes.

There is no scientific method for philosophy.  One asks “artistic” questions: is it a beautiful idea, is it parsimonious, is it precedented, is it confirmed by others (often a sub-group of the larger culture).  There are boundaries enforced by opinions from peers and by the “foundations” of the traditional educational canon.  It can be a great shock to Westerners when they discover Asian assumptions.  The Islamists have still not recovered from forbidden Western ideas.

But there IS a scientific method for the “objective” study of the brain’s mechanisms — gating, intensifying, editing, transforming, interpreting — in terms of results.  For these people in the article who are seized by dreaming, there may be some tiny neuron nexus that isn’t turning down the volume or ending7hyju persistence of dreams.  Or it may not be in the solid flesh of brain tissues but rather in the molecular loops of hormones and enzymes.  One can hardly keep from thinking of the stereotypical opium den in China where people lie on couches with their pipes, dreaming and dreaming.  Someone must have written down what they “saw.”  Coleridge?

Children seem to have trouble separating the reality that is shared with everyone else from their own private world.  As a pre-schooler I was convinced that a little red airplane landed in the street in front of our house.  I was so insistent that my mother took me outside and showed me that there were so many high wires between poles that no plane could get through.  Kenner’s question would be “what did it mean?”  But no one asked me that at the time.  I ask it now.