THE SONG OF THE TURTLE

These many recent breakthroughs about how neurons work are possible because now we have the ability to look at one cell at a time, to see messages go slipping down the axons to the next cell, to figure out what’s happening to the molecules in the cell, even which atoms of the mitochrondria are going on walkabout and what it means when electrons jump.  We know now that the neocortex is six layers thick and the layers are connected through and through by columns.  Only mammals have this, but ALL mammals have this.  All mammals have that neocortex wrapped around the brain.  Only humans have a PRE-FRONTAL neocortex behind their forehead, over their eyes.

http://3tags.org/article/for-the-first-time-researchers-see-structure-that-allows-brain-cells-to-communicate 

But recently, by being able to describe cell by cell, the scientists have figured out that birds do have neocortex, but it’s not in sheets wrapped around the rest of the brain.  If it’s a matter of how many neurons they have, they’re smarter than monkeys, so numbers can’t be the whole story.

“Both the mammalian neocortex and a structure in the bird brain called the dorsal ventricular ridge (DVR) originate from an embryonic region called the telencephalon. But the two regions mature into very different shapes, with the neocortex made up of six distinct cortical layers while the DVR contains large clusters of neurons called nuclei.”

It appears that one little nuclei of neurons is what enables birds to sing, and the premise is that an equivalent, possibly “Broca’s brain”, is the same thing in humans and enables us to speak.  Our words are songs.

“A similar experiment was conducted in a species of turtle, and revealed yet another anatomical possibility for neocortex-like cells. Instead of a six-layer neocortex or a cluster of nuclei, the turtle brain had layer 4- and 5-like cells “distributed along a single layer of the species' dorsal cortex.

If turtles had that little nuclei, perhaps they could sing, but the Song of Solomon meant turtledoves.  There are no singing reptiles.  Right?

Brains are cumulative — that means that the old brain versions are not discarded when new ones develop, but rather the old parts are kept whether changed and newly useful, or simply there, or interfering.  The connecting filaments wind back and forth through old and new.

Brains are ecologies, not homogenous tissues but clusters of specialized but communicating cells, some grouped into organs and others as independent as the original eukaryotic one-celled animals we came from, still capable of telling which direction is forward and what the environment tastes like.  

I don’t understand this passage, so I’ll just note it and leave the wiki-links.  “There are two types of cortex in the neocortex, the proisocortex and the true isocortex. The pro-isocortex is a transitional area between the true isocortex, and the periallocortex (part of the allocortex). It is found in the cingulate cortex (part of the limbic system), in Brodmann's areas 24, 25, 30 and 32, the insula and the parahippocampal gyrus.”

So far what I get about a lot of brain stuff is that they can tell the little bits are subtly different and sometimes what they do, so they just label them to make a way of talking about them.  “Archicortex is a type of cortical tissue that consists of three laminae (layers of neuronal cell bodies).  It has fewer layers than both neocortex, which has six, and paleocortex, which has either four or five. Because the number of laminae that compose a type of cortical tissue seems to be directly proportional to both the information-processing capabilities of that tissue and its phylogenetic age, paleocortex is thought to be an intermediate between neocortex and archicortex in both aspects, and archicortex is thought to be the oldest and most basic type of cortical tissue.”

So now I’m going to say that ideas are just big echoes of brain tissue;  first we label, then we guess, then we test -- often by ablation which means destruction.  The brain is limited by the size of the skull, the turtle is limited by the size of its shell, and people are limited by the boundaries of their experiences.  My visitors over the past couple of weeks were all friends in the Sixties when I was in Browning.  Unlike the people in Valier, who are full of fantasies about the rez except for those who moved here after years there, these friends had real experience in the same place, but a time long ago, a time that amounts now to a far distant place.

We all left for various reasons, some of us continued to cross paths in Portland or maybe just on the Internet, and so our constructed idea-shells are quite different.  As it turns out, because since 1999 I’ve deliberately limited myself to this little house lined with binders of writing and books for reading, I’m probably the most different. Some of the characteristics that I have strengthened for writing, are not good for socializing.  For instance, my rigid daily workflow or my long chains of logic and failure to pause for response.  Hard on conversation.  It seemed to me that they just didn’t believe much of what I said.  They were urban-suspicious, rejecting of difference, and echoed the conventional media, though it's the subset for educated urban people.

Portland, OR

They don’t care to know all this detailed stuff about the brain or thinking.  Why should they?  They cling to the world of our college years when there was science over here and humanities over there and “religion” was anything it said it was.  They still think "church."  All these friends are writers in a passing way, but still are totally naive about the developments of print and publishing over the past decade.  When I get intense about it, they ask what I’d like for dessert.

But somehow that culture — polite and limited, competent but not quite informed, charming but exasperating — must be wrapped around by layers of the one I live in — not the one represented by a physical town, but the one built since 1999 out of ideas as they evolved into an ecology of premises, many of them created out of the destruction/conversion of dyads from oppositions into interacting continuums.  My ideas are worrisome, full of danger, crossing into taboos they’ve skirted all their lives, while using secrecy as a shield.  They think I’ve been hoaxed.

The Pearl District

I’m not really here and yet I’m more deeply here than I am anyplace else.  Because I live in ideas and one of the strongest ideas is that my body in its grappling is my brain/self but the grapple extends through empathy into the world far outside my body.  I just have to remember to eat and pay the bills.  My friends get that (they fed me) and they’re doing well.  All I can give them is my time and my ideas, but it’s awkward.  They accept politely and lay them aside.  We don’t quite have the right structure for our brain cells to communicate.  It’s okay.  But it makes for incoherent posts like this one.

HACKING THE ECOLOGY OF SMALL TOWN CULTURE

Fort Mac Fire smoke

The weather is glorious — if you don’t mind the burnishment of the FORT MAC smoke plume turning everything a little brassy.  Their evacuation is continuing.  The fire is almost to Saskatchewan.  Two babies have been born in the midst of the confusion.  They’re safe.  The pilot of a just-landing fire retardant plane had a medical incident, lost control which was seized by the copilot, but not before the plane went off the runway.

Instead of working on my yard, I’m here at the keyboard thinking about — oh, you know, small towns, world overpopulation, the Trump atrocity, and the two beautiful but sad movies I watched in the last few days: “Amour” and “The Keeping Room”. (Reviews later maybe.)  I’m trying to think of an overarching concept.  The main thing is an ecological approach to everything — that is, how the different entities and processes fit together, affect each other, die out, and leave spaces for something new — mutation and evolution being part of all that.

What is the homeostasis of my subjects?  For instance, small towns like Valier-- since the monthly town council meeting is tomorrow night.  How much stability on the one hand and disruption on the other can we tolerate without collapsing?  The mayor has been inquiring into the global venture capital practise of buying properties auctioned for failure to pay taxes, bundling them as toxic assets.  49 properties in Valier (out of something like 200) are vulnerably delinquent.  I don’t know how many have reverted to county ownership nor how many have gone to satisfy liens on estates of penniless elderly people who died in nursing homes.  Probably a few are just abandoned with no clue to the location of their owners.

Across the street from the town hall

 

Such information is technically public, rarely reported, but it represents a considerable shift in wealth in a little town whose supporting infrastructure is aging out.  Property ownership is boom-and-bust as much as anything else.  How do you handle a sewage lagoon or a water supply in response to that?

The holocaust in Fort Mac is only beginning to be felt in long terms.  The downturn in high-pay oil field work has already plunged roughneck workers into unemployment and closed down oil companies.  Will the rebuild of tar sands losses—which will undoubtedly begin as it cools — pull back former employees or create a new set with different skills?  Or will the companies find that it pays to leave the tar sands black and blank for a while until oil prices go back up?

Big, strong, not-necessarily-educated men are having a knock-on effect in small Western towns.  Bars provide an interface between tired lonesome guys away from any previous family, causing new alliances of unstable but fertile relationships.  To quote the movies, “there will be blood” but also there will be babies.  We make a fuss about marijuana being an “entry drug” to cocaine or meth, but say nothing about alcohol as an entry drug, far more violent and pervasive than pot.  

At first we thought in terms of veterans returning from combat and struggling with PTSD, but now we’re thinking about common drunken bullies fueled by a pervasive culture of extreme superheroes and “religious” systems of dark and evil far more magnetic than the anemic mainstream churches.  There are certain men in neighborhoods whom we avoid.  When he’s out shouting bare-chested in his yard, we go indoors.  We can’t control him so we control ourselves.  We never really know what's happening indoors.

Such men are catnip to women susceptible to the idea that a man will finance and protect a family and to the emotional extravaganzas a man can stage after a siege of abuse.  The women are local but defiant of family, maybe shunned.  

Since the Internet is so handy, I spent some time looking for what to do about families with abuse and violence.  There are a lot of hotlines and websites.  The bottom line is that such families fall between laws to protect families and keep the peace, and another set of laws meant to protect private life from invasion by authorities.  Basically, everyone is stumped.  It’s a gap in the ecosystem being filled by floaters attracted by big salaries for uneducated hard labor.  In small towns we are more exposed to them when they show up.

Businesses that had been run in stable and growth-supporting ways, originally built on a strong work ethic and willingness to accept hard conditions, have been sold to people who are climbing the learning curve and expecting profits to support luxuries.  Families who have resources have essentially bought the town.  Offend them or be offended by them and it will be necessary to drive thirty miles to get groceries.  

Sources of pride are high school sports teams, ancestor worship of 1900’s immigration, and a nice yard.  Someone in another town said to me, “Don’t you think Valier is a pretty town?”  She was entirely unconscious of the blocks of metal grain storage or side-street properties collapsing and unoccupied.

At a town council meeting a few years ago, also several council versions ago, a man came who asked to give a testimonial.  He was leaving town for a new job he couldn’t resist, but he was broken-hearted about leaving friends in town and his feeling of belonging.  I don’t know who he was or where he went or what happened, but I’m very curious.  Was he just lucky, or was there something in his personality?  Was it the timing?

Bill Houff

The Reverend Bill Houff of the Spokane UU church, used to tell a story about a guy wanting to move to a community that was peaceful and prosperous.  He figured rural and small was the way to go, so he drove out along country roads until he came to a field where an old-timer was working and hailed him for conversation.  “Is this a good town to live in?” the guy asked.

The old-timer looked him up and down.  “What was the last town like where you lived before?”  City guy explained what made him want to move.

Old-timer, before turning back to his tractor and field, opined, “Towns you move to are always pretty much like the town you left.”  In short, it’s a self-fulfilling expectation.

Entering Valier

It’s one of those survival conundrums:  what is good for the individual may not be good for the community and vice versa.  How does one achieve balance and mutual contentment?  Are those qualities to strive for anyway?  Doesn’t every context need threat, defiance, discomfort, in order to realize something toxic that had been unconscious?  Isn't mutation in the interest of evolution always scary?

In short, how can one hack small town culture problems that paralyze the normal routes, like elections, churches, or the sheriff?  Few want to be on a council forced to react to intractable problems.  But now there are new planetary dynamics shifting the terms of settlements on every continent:  global weather change, disease pandemics, visible and invisible famine, and the exhaustion of resources, including soil fertility, exotic metals, and mountain water-making.  

Australian firefighter gives a koala a drink.

Oh, yeah.  And this is the kind of continental conflagration fires that Australia has lived with for centuries.  Don’t go planting fire-loving eucalyptus trees.  There are no koala bears in Canada.   Alberta is importing firefighters from Jalisco, Mexico, with whom they have had a training relationship for years. But what about their tribal firefighters? Are they as professional as the ones in Montana? We’re all in this together.