"Use-it-or-lose-it" pruning of brain cells. An on-the-fly brain mechanism for dynamic minds?

Does the pruning of unused synapses happens more often and much faster than has been thought of? Does the phrase 'make-up my mind' is a literal equivalent of a pruning process, the severing of all unused synapses, lightening the burden, getting rid off unnecessary baggage and therefore streamlining the thinking process? Coupled with an equally fast ability to form new synapses? On-the-fly? Thus improving the efficiency of the thought process? The analysis of the problem and the solution used to assist in the making of a decision?

And any difference attributed to individuals, depend upon how fast or how slow that pruning and synapse-forming processes are? Which would determine the levels of efficiency? That probably would entail a better use of neurotransmitter substances or other brain-enhancing chemicals produced by cells, their production directly controlled by the genes in genetic make-up carried by individuals? A quick learner's aptitude based on an ability to create synapses very fast, on-the-fly?

Creativity and other innovative faculties a result of the speed of forming of synapses between disparate locations in the brain? And the oblivion that sets in, on the ways we take, in the course of our lives, a paradigm shift in every level, a literal cutting off of the synapses responsible for the abandoned thought processes? A severe pruning that makes us to totally forget our old ways?

Responsible for the mind we carry day-by-day for our daily needs? And even responsible for the mind we use for gradually longer periods? A survival mechanism and the reason we maintain imperfect consciousnesses?

Consciousness sinister role

Consciousness plays a much bigger and more sinister role, than I would expect or have even contemplated as yet. Because not only from within an individual but from the mirrors of its image in other individuals, a yours/theirs consciousness, is ever ready to praise or mollify you.

It is when you identify yourself, sheepishly follow, with whatever it prescribes for you, hooked hopelessly to whims of yours/theirs consciousness, when everything goes awry. The mirrored consciousness becomes enhanced, blown out of proportion, exaggerated. You usually become trapped, unable to get free, either from its deriding claws, a helpless pawn or a pitiful buffoon from its overindulgent attention, when it places you in a pedestal.

It has been widely accepted that the human individual is a social being, that can not exist by itself. That the human individual thrives among other individuals. That idea brings along a horde of other ideas, which are needless and surplus to requirements and incapacitate our potential. Hinders our efforts to think of ourselves, by ourselves, for ourselves. Our consciousness development is overly influenced. Instead of the individual promoting its singleness, it submits unquestionably to the commands of a pack consciousness, our very own consciousness becoming the overseer.

Social consciousness contents

Julian Jaynes puts as the generating power that created consciousness, the language. That consciousness as we know it has evolved as a result of the evolution of language.

Social consciousness and its contents need be examined as I suspect it plays an important role in shaping the way the individual makes decisions.

Concepts and especially redundant concepts that have developed as consciousness has evolved, determine its contents, the stimuli that consciousness will draw its attention to.

Concepts that do not reflect reality have created a world of their own, and are responsible for the illusions individuals have in deciphering what reality is. As they are not directly related to reality therefore their contents are out of reality, they are unreal, only illusions.

Therefore in order to clear the debris consciousness is riddled with, we should look at language as language is responsible for bringing them in, spawn them, in the first place. And we are talking about the 'problem solving/decision making' consciousness mainly. The language made it and the language controls it. Language is responsible for its drawbacks, flaws as well as its ... advantages.

Freedom of choice translated to freedom to ignore

There are myriad of choices laid out before us and our freedom of choice becomes overwhelmed. It becomes a freedom to ignore than a freedom to choose. The data the world lays in our doorstep are abundant, too many for all to be processed. We need to separate the wheat from the chuff.

Our freedom of choice is largely employed to ignore more than to choose. Alternative viewpoints presented to us and actions suggested are not considered. A rich bank of alternative ways of providing solutions to problems already exists in the world wide web, but we can not do anything but disregard a lot of them primarily because the pressures every day life bestows upon us, are so overwhelming that give us no time to fully explore their significance and applicability. The simplified models, each of us follow, become so overriding that push their directives right in front of us demanding to be chosen. Choices alien to our needs. The pressures to be in tune with others are paramount.

People continuously talk about the freedom of choice and raise that particular quality of mind to heights unparalleled for any of the qualities the human mind possess. They cherish their freedom of will more than it deserves, even when the choices made prove to be detrimental to their lives. It becomes so overriding in providing solutions to problems faced, that ignores all other options presented.

It stems from a general behaviour prevalent in the group each of us belongs to, and as a result the principle of being free to choose become free to choose to ignore. General behaviour based on cultural norms and attitudes that have constantly been an inexhaustible source of powerful suggestions. Suggestions which lead us towards adapting norms in our behaviour as caused by an external source instead of the self. We act how we believe we are supposed to act. Qualities like self-esteem and assertiveness is driving us to succumb to suggestions more easily. As we measure our self-esteem and assertiveness by gauging at the surrounding individuals responses, taking their suggestions as guides in our pursuit of achieving self-esteem and assertivenesses and therefore tend to conform overtly to the views of others without private acceptance or experience. Exhibit behavioral compliance without our acceptance or belief.

Our lives, soap bubbles.

We build our lives along apparently rigid solid foundations but in reality they are nothing but fragile soap bubbles that a little prick will burst them open, shedding their contents wide open. In the meantime we go about undeterred, oozing from assurance, boasting content within our little worlds unaware and unprepared from that little prick that lurks around the corner.

The little prick, the insignificant fluttering from a tiny butterfly will wreak havoc in our lives. Immersed deeply we go about in the world among other individuals, with their lives similar soap bubbles, and built together bigger soap bubbles. We share our ideas, our ways of life, we relate to and become even more content and secure. But again the fact remains, that these bigger bubbles are just as fragile and just a little prick will burst them open too.

In fact our whole world is just a soap bubble too which accordingly a tiny little prick will burst it open. All the furore of global warming bears witness. Though it does not need that. The conditions that make our world able to support life are so fragile that a tiny perturbation, in comparison, on either side would have made it inhospitable and our human presence doubtful.

We live at an edge whether we like it or not. We can not do anything. The only thing we can do is to be aware of it and from time to time it pays to come out of our bubbles and look at them exactly as they are. Soap bubbles that a little prick can burst them open, as we talk.

It will make our lives and the lives of other individuals around us easier.

... achieving ...

.... to strive to be like others or to strive to be yourself ... each should take a dose of solipsism once in a while ... the media wants us to believe the content they provide is what the people demand ... it is not, this idea is nurtured by the media ... the useless engagement in the pursuit of trivial knowledge ... governments and industrialists lament for the lack of skills in the population and the same time maintain an educational system streamed towards the creation of elitists ... favours elitism ... built on elitist structures ... the over-indulgence in exceptional individuals ... the leadership dogma prevalent in state and industry demeans the individual ... greatly undervalues the individual ... the individual becomes dis-interested feels unrecognised ... work becomes a chore greatly despised ... the provided service largely compromised ...

I was impressed last time out in the blogs. Some of my consciousness strings got pulled, and by consciousness I refer to the things I pay attention to, the things I hold dear, the things I find important, the things I find worth reading, talking and listening about.
I felt like I was paying a visit and had a chat. Got to know you. I kept some things of yours for myself though. Like the profound "I am greater than the sum of my parts", what better way for one to describe oneself, the strange dislikes (fish eggs) some people have, the "insurmountable inertia of mere existence" whereas another blog stated that as we grow "we absorb our culture's arrogant conviction that we manufacture everything" in protest against looking at the world as raw material in need of our ingenuity to put value in. I think probably they will not see eye to eye with the blog where passion is framed and used to promote sales, a commodity. From the same circles still there comes a deep insight of human nature, a measure of the influence each has over another as they elaborate on the concept of "social proof, a powerful psychological mechanism by which we look to others to guide our own actions", the recent massacre in a school in Finland stands as an example.
A similar website offered tips about blogging but I prefer the kind of blogging where you put your stream-of-consciousness window into your faulty mind out there, and it attracts like-minded readers and when I can go on your blog and in your brain via the internet.

I agree.

Constants are not constant

Constants are not the rigid structures, the unquestionable truths which we are
led to accept but rather is the fruit of the limitations of the human intellect to fully comprehend nature's workings.

One of the many widespread beliefs in every culture is, that you can not change
your character, attitude and behaviour, your way of life, your life. It becomes a nagging reality, an inescapable feature for an individual. They represent constants in the very same way as the constants in hard sciences.

The introduction of Gerald Schueler, in his paper "The order/chaos relationship in complex systems" gives an intriguing use of constants. Or rather an ignored dimension of the concept of constant.

Let start again to appreciate the depth of his observation. Nonlinear equations have
been known for a long time, but no one was able to solve them. Traditional scientists
and engineers simply ignored the nonlinear portions of their calculations, the
nonlinear solutions to the equations, and instead used solutions which are close
approximations than exact. They contain one or more factors of nonlinearity which are
typically ignored, or approximated by using constants.


Constants are a recurring thing in almost all aspects of knowledge accumulated in the

task of explaining phenomena in the world. To accept this line of thought regarding

their origin and the reason for being introduced in the first place poses questions

in need of answers.

The constants are ubiquitous objects, their use is universal and

usually goes along unquestioned. Their use surpasses the limited boundaries of the

hard sciences and have permeated into areas defined by aspects of an individual's

activities including human behaviour and personality attributes. Their rigid

unquestionable use by the sciences have enforced a similar stance while used in much

softer subjects.


My impetuous mind goes to such lengths which even compels me towards a complete

overhaul of many established values for which to a great extent they have been based

in accepting without question a great number of constants. The alternative is to

refuse the overbearing burden imposed by the overwhelming beliefs and norms prevalent

in society and instead to constantly seek the underlying causes in a manner dictated

by the premises of chaos, complexity and emergence.

Visit our culture shop. Bargains galore.

Under construction

Pre-conceived ideas about the qualities of the culture, each one of us belongs to and prefabricated notions of other cultures and their members. Off the self in each culture's megastore, be that French, American, Chinese, Siamese, ready made, handy, for all occasions and all circumstances.

hand-me-downs from father to son, from mother to daughter, generation after generation as old as the hills that surrounds us, solid strong, written on stone, petrified and putrefied.

they need the exchange of ideas

each culture eventually reaches a point where there is a stalemate, it requires a fresh load of ideas, notions, conceptions to carry on and where could somebody find new ideas, sometimes mature ready for picking, but in the ideas proliferated in other cultures. By denigrating other cultures they are denying themselves a rich cauldron of ideas which if they were infused in their culture would have provided solutions to nagging problems in their culture.

All in all, such an approach is short-sighted, skin-deep literally and figuratively and is down to ignorance and the proliferation of ignorance among their midst.

for the other part, anti-racist propaganda reeks of pitiness, sympathy and condescension, spend an enormous amount of effort on terminology and technicality and doe not take into consideration or is oblivious of the real reason of why a culture's individuals should shed and shun all negative notions for individuals from other cultures and let the flow of ideas move unhindered from culture to culture, the cross-cultural exchange.

the shrewd store-keepers, display their products ingeniously, usually individuals with an insatiable thirst for wealth and power. In their pursuit for wealth and power they require unconditional undivided support for their schemes to work plays with their fears cashes in on their ignorance
deeply involved are address the most basic instincts
in their employ the race's intellectual elite who by their skills in prose, verse or oratory tirelessly, effectively and efficiently declare the prowesses of their race. To accomplish such a task, it requires a comparison guide, something to compare against, easily to be found in members of other races which wholeheartedly denigrate. This, by no means being the sole privilege of any particular race. All races possess or possessed willing participants who taken up, lost in the swirling embrace of their magnificent elaborate exposition and want of admiration advanced the pride of their race to ever dizzier heights contributed bred wholesome ideas bred on the state of ignorance, not seeking to understand, refusing to reason and instead customed to hate.

Avoid these all-annoying tingling, fanciful agitations in your brain, they call thinking, time consuming. Instead use easy to use solutions, will ease your problems, success guaranteed. Special discounts for our young clientèle. You can explain everything. Each culture has its own all-in-one shop of off-the-self ideas about members of other cultures and each of us (has bought) must have experienced their effects. In cultures kept isolated from other cultures this is not a problem. The problem arises when in a society there are more than one influential culture.

That was ok 100 1000 years ago when travel and communication was minimal and people seldom ventured outside their limited boundaries and formulated their culture whereas purely matter of limited contact kept them ignorant and distant of other cultures and their members and the only contact they had was based on the grounds of their differences which were bringing up disputes which were often resolved by the knife, in heroic battles for the nourishment of their ethnic identity and belittlement of other cultures ethnic identity.
What then? Of course as each culture representative use its own culture corner shop, to purchase his of-the-shelf values, there would be problems of various extent. Do we need that? We need a culture shop, it expresses the continuity in our lives,it somehow blends with our disposition and with our genetic make-up.
What we do not need are the of-the-self images about the members of other cultures. The stereotypes produced. It induces people to behave in ways alien to the disposition, as is defined in their culture. Against their true disposition. Multicultural societies present a great opportunity for co-existent cultures. Each culture to assimilate within it, revised ideas about the stereotypes of other culture and their significance is valuable in the establishment of a state of harmony in the world. Its whenever, when you try to apply it doesn't fit. What do you do then? You return the goods to the shop and demand refund. You demand another that deals (with) that easily fits the situation or ignore any discrepancies, dismiss them (as details) and continue to use the old ill-fitting model, ignoring any protests from the ill-fitted subject, and blaming the subject not the model.

Adopting incorrect viewpoints leads to knowledge incapable to explain phenomena

     Nature is quite frugal in the amount of information that makes available for us to understand and explain phenomena. Therefore we rely on a limited set of features and conditions pertained in the phenomena, to build knowledge and improve understanding. Moreover, our capacity to discern subtle differences in features and conditions, is limited and this further deteriorates the quality of knowledge gained.

      This continues on when we assign incorrect weights in selected attributes driven by motives other than valid reason. Such action ignores valid attributes, or even distort chosen attributes, misrepresenting the phenomenon. Assumed viewpoints lead to a body of knowledge incapable of explaining the phenomena in question. The knowledge thus produced is incomplete, in its mild form, misleading and unrealistic, to outright harmful, in its most severe form.

     This process affects all knowledge systems, humans develop to explain phenomena. From the physical sciences to the social sciences to the systems of knowledge we develop to explain social and historical phenomena. Phenomena that are driven by human interactions in the scale of civilisations, societies and communities as well as to the scale of markets, organisations, industries, educational establishments, workplaces, right down to an individual's own personal relationships.

     This is more significant if attained knowledge is used to define the behaviour of human individuals in social structures. Assuming the chaotic influence in the evolution of life systems, behaviour so defined is reproduced by self-similarity across scales. Reproduced patterns of behaviour, spread and become dominant. They form a set of automated responses, habits, and provide the rules for human-agent interactions. Human-agent interactions, that are based upon incomplete, misleading, unrealistic or harmful body of knowledge, adversely affect the systems they provide the foundations for. Thus systems, by definition, have a built-in element of self-doubt that erode their integrity from within.

Our linear and non-linear lives

     Describe the ways changes propagate in our lives, under the constant cause and effect relationships between the conditions of the environment and features of the agents in a system. Conditions and features vary, they are variable. Variables of either features or conditions, become connected with one another by the cause and effect relationships.

     The variable that causes a change in another variable is the independent variable and the variable the effect is directed to the dependent variable. The changed dependent variable acts further as an independent variable, and becomes the cause for change in other dependent variables. These, in turn, affect other variables and so on, creating chain reactions that propagate within the state space of a particular system.

     Affected variables change the conditions and features in a system. The system undergoes a transformation. The transformation is either linear or non-linear. Whether a certain transformation is linear or non-linear is consequent to the position of the independent variable in the dependency hierarchy. The lower in the hierarchy the independent variable is, the greater the transformation effected upon the state of the system, as it will affect a great many variables in the chain-wise fashion, and the greater the effect, the greater the transformation, a greater amount of change. It is described as an exponential function and in a graph is drawn, not with a straight line but with a curved line, a hyperbola, therefore the non-linear term.

     Linear transformation takes place when the independent variable is found higher in the dependency hierarchy of variables in a system therefore it affects a smaller number of variables, a limited effect, a smaller size of transformation. In a graph its effect is shown by a straight line, a linear transformation. Most of the transformations in real life phenomena are linear transformations.

     The linear or non-linear mode of transformation effected by interacting variables is universal and apply to all systems in each end of the scale, from the microscales to the macroscales. John Gribbin mentions about the expansion of the Universe: "That, today the Universe is expanding at a more or less steady rate, in a linear fashion. It is like a walk down the road, in which each step takes you the same distance as the previous step. But in the very early Universe, the scalar fields that we have mentioned caused exponential expansion. This is like taking a walk in which the second step takes you twice as far as the first step, the third step four times as far, the fourth step eight times as far, and so on".
     So in a linear transformation, the dependent variable matches step by step the independent variable whereas in the non-linear transformation a step in the independent variable can be matched by hundreds of steps by the dependent variable.

     In our lives this can be seen in the events that surround the beginning of romantic relationships as is accompanied by excitement anticipation and fervour, when we first meet the person we start a relationship with, the non-linear phase. Later on as this is followed by a settling down period, we enter the linear phase. If at the weekend we stay home and relax then we are content being in a linear state, whereas if we go out have fun and enjoy ourselves we enter the non-linear phase. We always make choices in life in what path to follow, linear or non-linear; what mode to engage into at any time. We lead either linear or non-linear lives.

Pinpointing phenomena and states

     Multitude of states. Phenomena are, what we experience as the development of states. Phenomenon describes how states came to be, or come about. Phenomenon description contains the features, the rules, and the states that result by the application of the rules. An agent, (in the case of "adapting chaos in our lives", the individual), applies, follows, enforces the rules. Agents, in the case of chemical reactions, are the atoms, and the atoms are the entities that follow the rules, as they interact with one another. The features in this case, are the electrons in their outer electron shell, which represent the conditions. Are these the conditions? And what about heat, pressure, concentration? Are these not, the conditions? Certainly they are. Can we refer to the features of: outer electron shells, atom size, isotopes as conditions? Certainly not. Conditions refer to the state of the environment, where the agent acts in, whereas features, to the state of the agent. Both can be described by variables. Conditions are continuous variables, taking values within a given range and features are discontinuous variables, discrete states, constants just as parameters are defined. A calium atom has for example two electrons in the outer electron shell, a given atom size. These are stable values, do not commute, the state configuration presented by that particular agent, the calcium atom.

     How can these premises be transferred to other phenomena? What would represent features and what conditions in weather phenomena, people's relationship systems, or personality constructs? Can conditions and features be both present in the weather system, for example. Conditions are easily discerned as the temperature, water content, altitude; and they are continuous. But what would constitute features? And what are the agents? Hard, not easily discerned. I need more information. That can lead to the conclusion that agent presence is not necessary for the occurrence of chaos phenomena, if I can not distinguish agents and features. Of course, a weather system involves air molecules; or not only, as other molecules are involved too. Water molecules as well as dust, all mixed up to form fluid, confined within a vast but nevertheless finite space. These certainly can be regarded as agents, and the features presented by these agents, along with rules directing interactions, are responsible for the weather phenomena.

     Are these the only features? What else? What about the space, all these molecules are included in. Or regions of space, as weather phenomena are developing locally. Would it be then, more spread out, parameters that have to do with features presented as masses of air molecules and not as single molecules. Molecule-population-connected features, which once the population of molecules reaches an adequate size, it presents the features, becomes the agent, which responds to the existing, prevailing conditions and develops, in the states described by the phenomena of rain, wind, storm, hurricane.


What about phenomena of personality constructs?


     What would be the conditions, the features, the agents? Certainly the main candidate for agent is the individual itself. But when we are talking about personality, it is a structure based on that very same individual, that we assume as agent. Can it be possible to have an agent that acts upon itself? The space where all these activity takes place, within it? Features, yes, we can discern. But what about rules? What are the rules that the agent, within the agent follows? What is personality for that matter? Everything that defines us as a person. How good we are at things that we do, what makes us tick, what triggers our emotions, to what extent our emotions are expressed, how tuned we are to changes around us. OK, that's enough. Can we discern any agent among these, any carrier, rules followed? Any features? Rules must be simple. Features must be stable, discreet variables, given parameters. There are features, all these genetically determined qualities, imprinted in our genomes.

     But how can genes determine features? That can act as agent features? Let us consider about how good we are at things we do. Depending on the task to do, we take a different approach. If the task is physical, it requires dexterity of hands, arms, legs and dexterity is determined by genes. We are equipped by birth, with abilities which we make use, to accomplish physical tasks. In the same way we handle mental tasks, which again depend on the level of ability, as dictated by genes responsible for the construction of our brain, brain mechanisms, the neurons, the nerve cells.

     Neurons, and not only, as they act as groups of neurons, each group with a specific task at hand. Can we say that these groups of neurons, are the agents; with stable features, discreet, given parameters, non-commutable that define a state, the state of our mind? Our mind presents different aspects, mental planes, each mind aspect, a component of mind is brought about, out of the physical interactions, of their designated neuron groups. And mind, the whole, out of the interactions of its component aspects, along with the associated neuron groups.

     And there, there are the features, the stable, discreet, non-commutable and genetically determined. And these are, the neuron firing patterns, firing threshold of neuron, neuron fatigue, degree of development of specialised regions of the brain (themselves neuron groups) all genetically determined and stable. Do the groups of neurons constitute the agent? Can we say that our personality is constructed by the interaction of groups of neurons? What about the conditions?

     The continuous variables, the environment within which the agent acts? If the groups of neurons are regarded as agents, then the environment is our brain itself. The internal conditions that affect our brain mechanisms. The level of oxygen, of glucose, of neurotransmitters, of sodium and potassium ions. Their presence or absence, their concentration, as they are regulated by diet as well as by the different situations an individual finds itself in. As the internal environment mirrors the external environment, in a specific manner for each indiviual, as it reflects its genetically determined features of neuron activity.

     So there, these are the features and conditions that determine personality constructs and influence people's relationships. But what about rules? .....

Act in comedy series operate under chaos directives

     abc1 sitcom comedy "Less than perfect" episode, Lydia's (played by Andrea Parker) and Jeb's (played by Patrick Warburton) relationship reaches breakpoint when innuendos about imaginary dates shake each other emotionally and physically, leaving both shattered, as each other's comments, about going-out on dates with other people, undermines their system of beliefs, by creating shifts on the initial conditions upon which the system of their relationship has been built.

      Life situations tinkering with chaos determinants as the punts, the innuendos, the jibes, are targeted to shake up the initial conditions each has established its personality structure around, a bona fide system by itself, entitled to the same treatment as hard-edged systems as the weather, by the all-including chaos principles of universality and self-similarity. The shattering of their relationship structure similar to hurricane development in a weather system, symmetry of large to small scales, as both cases respond violently to minute changes in the initial conditions.