Neuropolis: A Brain Science Survival Guide. Robert Newman

experience of atoms and electromagnetic wavelengths. We experience wetness and cold. The stream’s pebbles are treacherously slippy, with a sort of slime on them, and wedge the feet bones apart in a surprisingly painful way.

      Are these merely subjective impressions when what science demands are objective measurements? Not if science demands an accurate description of animal interacting with environment. If that’s what we want then an accurate description must be at the ecological level. That is the appropriate level for the job in hand, since our lives are lived at the ecological scale – not among the celestial objects of astronomy or the neutrons of the microphysical realm, ‘but in the very world’, as Wordsworth wrote,

      which is the world

      Of all of us, – the place where in the end

We find our happiness, or not at all!*

* William Wordsworth, ‘The French Revolution as It Appeared to Enthusiasts at Its Commencement’, The Prelude, 1805.

      Austerity on the brain

      For David Eagleman, austerity is deeply woven into the fabric of nature. It is not an invention of humans, as he believes colour to be, but intrinsic to matter, to reality. Not only is nature austere as in grey and dour (a claim we examined earlier) nature is also austere as in pinched, frugal, economizing. Eagleman doesn’t apply austerity measures to the living world, he just discovers that the living world proceeds according to austerity principles. It turns out that organs such as the brain, for example, conduct a thorough review of all non-essential services:

      So why doesn’t the brain give us the full picture? Because brains are expensive energy-wise… brains try to operate in the most energy-efficient way possible.

      I know energy-efficiency would seem to be something you might expect from a clever organ like the brain, but, for better or worse, that appears not to be the case. Whereas a smart electrical appliance, for example, powers down when not being used, our brains are more active when we sleep.

One of the most wonderful features about how the brain works, in fact, is the sheer extravagance of neural activity, its superabundance. The technical term used to describe the synaptic proliferation that characterises early brain development is ‘exuberant synaptogenesis’. In the landmark paper ‘The Physiology of Perception’, Walter J. Freeman and his colleagues found that ‘perception depends on the simultaneous, cooperative activity of millions of neurons spread throughout expanses of the cortex.’*

* Walter J. Freeman, ‘The Physiology of Perception’, Scientific American, 1991.

      Not exactly a slimmed-down organization. A rationaliser seeking ambitious saving targets would ruthlessly downsize such a sprawling operation, and would also take the axe to this sort of spare capacity:

vast collections of neurons … shift abruptly from one complex activity pattern to another in response to the smallest of inputs.*

* ‘Walter J. Freeman, ‘The Physiology of Perception’, Scientific American, 1991.

      We are told every day that public sector social services should be streamlined. This is dunned into us with such monotony that it begins to look like a Law o’ Nature, rather than one political choice among many other possible ones. Defunct economic dogma does not apply to how the brain works. Whatever the political and economic weather the brain continues its extraordinarily successful policy of being extremely unstreamlined. Just take a look at the Spanish practices going on in entorhinal cortex.

      The entorhinal is famous for spatial navigation and memory. Two paths – lateral and medial – lead from the entorhinal to Memory Central in the hippocampus. The lateral path is for spatial navigation ‘Where am I?’ and the medial for memory ‘What happened?’ Management consultants, who make it their business to rationalise a firm to its knees, have a horror of what they call ‘duplication of function’, but I’m afraid that’s what we have here. In a regrettable recidivism, wholly ignorant of best practice guidelines (helpfully supplied by Goldman Sachs) and the harsh new economic realities (also helpfully supplied by Goldman Sachs) the brain simply refuses to ‘operate in the most energy-efficient way possible’. I blame the unions.

      The only time the entorhinal cortex is not guilty of ‘duplication of function’ is when it is busily triplicating. It’s not enough for the entorhinal cortex just to check sense data from the hands against data from the eyes, it also insists on cross-checking with the middle ear, in a process called reentrant mapping. Here we have unforgivable ‘triplication of function’. Yet it all works very well, and has done since before records began.

      Now it is true that bodies need to conserve energy. But the reason the brain doesn’t give us the full picture has little to do with the brain being anxious about squandering the energy budget all in one go. (After all, the brain never seems bothered by wasting its 20 per cent share of our energy budget watching three-minute clips of The Sopranos on YouTube for five hours straight.) The reason the brain doesn’t give us the full picture is not to do with making energy savings, but because it has evolved to privilege motor activity above all else.

      We need to act in real time. We need to do things now. We are surrounded by predators and prey, many of whom come equipped with vastly quicker reflexes than our own.

      When Homo ergaster is sprinting to grab her toddler, she doesn’t need to know whether the puma is male or female, or in fact a jaguar. For now, Big Cat Prowling will do. Once you have your toddler in your arms, once your shouts and screams have brought stone-throwing elders to your aid, once the big cat is at bay, then and only then is it useful to notice second-order facts: that the puma is arthritic or old, or that is only a much less scary lynx or linsang. But in those split seconds of your initial reaction all you need to know is where and what in the roughest possible sense. Your picture does not at first need to be more detailed than that – in fact, more detail would not help but hinder.

      A good illustration of this is the story of why, during the World War II, my Auntie Ada was discharged from the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF). From 1940–42, Ada Newman, aged 22, worked in the map room of the RAF Group Operations HQ located in a secret bunker beneath the Strand in central London. Her job was to push model tanks and planes across a giant horizontal map with a croupier stick in response to grid references being called out by WAAFs on headphones. The map was enormous, the size of four table-tennis tables stuck together. It was a relief map with models of forests, mountain ranges, and painted streams and roads. When pushing a model tank through the model forest, or landing a model plane on the shore, Aunt Ada used to do engine noises and gunfire sounds.

      Superiors gave her verbal warnings but she couldn’t help herself. She said she didn’t know she was doing it. The bending end came when Air Chief Marshal Hugh Dowding came to the map room with senior figures from the Admiralty on the eve of a joint sea-air attack. While Aunt Ada was moving a line of German infantry, the top brass overheard her saying:

      Gott in Himmel! Once again Tommy’s air cover has proved superior to our anti-aircraft fire. But I die … for … ze … fatherla—aannnggh!

      Minutes later, while moving an aircraft carrier from the open sea of grid reference A1 to the harbour of E3, it seems Ada Newman found herself doing a ship horn, followed by the sort of nautical rhubarb the Beatles get up to on Yellow Submarine. She was relieved of map room duties and then discharged from service. In her dismissal hearings, she claimed that she’d only been trying to concentrate the minds of top brass by giving them a more vivid picture of reality down on the ground. In response to this, her superior officer read out the transcript of what Auntie Ada had said:

      ‘Aye, Aye Cap’n. Full Speed Ahead. Steady As She Goes.