Part VI Essentials and Unifying Trends in Brain Body Mind

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1 Part VI Essentials and Unifying Trends in Brain Body Mind Prelude to Part VI Part VI aims to summarize and draw conclusions from the important impact of various chapters of the book. Further, after surveying all data chapters, philosophy chapters, review chapters, and concept chapters, we aim to arrive at some synthesis or to establish a tentative new trend. Most of the chapters within Part VI are very short, so as to highlight the most relevant ideas and essence of the book. Accordingly, the reader may also start to read the book by beginning with this last part. After this, the reader can return to appropriate chapters to grasp the basic leitmotifs of the book. At the end of this part, the most general and global conclusions are described. The Curious Story of These Blackboard Drawings Before presenting the leitmotifs and unifying trends leading to three adjacently described and interwoven models in Chaps it seems to be interesting to describe a type of brainstorming process employed in the first days of planning this book. After finishing this final part, I found three neglected and somewhat forgotten photos in my book archive. The cardinal step to develop these semi-empirical Gedankenmodels in Part VI was explained 4 years ago with to my coworker B.G.,1 during a 30-min graduate course. Dr. Bahar Güntekin told me later that the language of my short talk was very difficult to understand. My talk was in Turkish; however, I seemingly used a number of words, mostly in English, but also frequently in German and French. Therefore, she took pictures and we discussed the matter in more expanded sessions during the following week. I remember, according to this event, the words of Henri Bergson: In reality, the past is preserved by itself automatically. In its entirety, probably, it follows us at every instant; all that we have felt, thought and willed from our earliest infancy is there, leaning over the present which is about to join it, pressing against the portals of consciousness that would fain leave it outside. (From Bergson, 1907, Creative Evolution.) Possibly, I lived in the past by compressing the time and work of the last 40 years into only 30 min. 1

2 390 Fig. 1 Description of multiple causalities and web of brain CNS, OMS (overall myogenic system), SC (spinal cord) and organs as kidneys and heart Figures 1 3 show a collection of findings and ideas, illustrated as blackboard notes, which opened the way to the writing of the present book. To explain the essence of the machineries of mind (as I see them) I needed only half an hour; completion of the present book took more than 4 years. Figure 1 presents a number of initial ideas in the form of these immediate spontaneous drawings, briefly described in the following: 1. The mind is under the influence of Milieu Intérieur and Milieu Extérieur. 2. There are multiple causalities in the machineries of brain-mind: The overall myogenic system, the vegetative system (including the heart and kidneys) are interwoven and lead to multiple causalities (see also Chaps. 4, 5, and 9). 3. The central nervous system (CNS), the overall myogenic system (OMS), and the organs of the vegetative system (including the respiratory system and circulation) show mutual excitability. 4. The CNS, OMS, and vegetative system (comprising circulation, respiration, etc.) are all embedded or interact with the biochemical pathways (transmitters). 5. All the physiologic systems are governed with invariants that are natural frequencies of brain-body functioning. 6. Emotions from the milieu extérieur may have catastrophic consequences.

3 391 At the beginning of the book we presented preliminary trends to define What is Mind? by starting with the pioneering work of Renaissance philosophers. Earlier thoughts on mind and the popular definition of mind are also presented in Chap. 1. Four centuries have passed since the time of earlier definitions of mind. However, even in the twenty-first century there are some explanations of the mind as a deep version of cognition, i.e., thinking process. According to the standard definition presented in encyclopedias, mind refers to the collective aspects of intellect and consciousness, which are manifest in some combination of thought, perception, emotion, will, and imagination. After presenting considerable empirical evidence on the psycho-physiologic basis of the brain, vegetative system, and spinal cord, we are confronted with a new strategy of how to approach the mind, or observations to understand the mind. This task is advanced as follows. Chapters 21 and 22 bring together all evident empirical findings that are described in earlier chapters of the book. As presented in these chapters, there is concrete empirical evidence to describe the machinery of the mind and common phenomena in nature. Furthermore, several schools of thought made considerable progress toward understanding the machinery of brain-mind. The question of whether new schools are needed is treated in Chap. 26. However, there is also some empirical evidence that is impossible to explain analytically. For example, work on the creative mind, unconscious problem solving, and intuitive mind provide empirical evidence that is currently impossible to explain analytically. They are processes that we cannot physically or chemically localize, whether inside the brain or in the vegetative system. However, such processes are observable and are constituents of mind. According to these results, the need is clear to develop models that could bring together all measurable unifying concepts, hypotheses based on these and also tentative Gedankenmodels.2 Such models do not clarify precisely the related phenomena; they are, however, useful to plan further experiments and identify the shortcomings in future planning. The Gedankenmodels in Chaps are based on the most important message: The mind cannot be considered a unique entity originated or located only in the brain. Only the web of brain-body can provide a framework for understanding the mind. It is evident that, as yet, it is impossible to develop a clear definition and model of the mind. On the other hand, it is also evident that oscillations, neurotransmitters (biochemical pathways in Fig. 2), and the evident links described between brain and vegetative system (body) provide crucial keys to understanding the web of Thought models (from the German). 2

4 392 Fig. 2 Blue shaded areas correspond to biochemical pathways; CNS and OMS, etc. are schematically embedded in biochemical pathways. Do not forget that this is a very rough explanation. All three whiteboards were filled in about 30 min. brain-body-mind. The titles of Chap reflect the steps to the elevation3 of ideas. Part III discusses the necessity of analyses using a new nebulous Cartesian system to integrate multiple causalities. This was explained in the photo of the blackboard shown in Fig. 3. Chapter 23 includes a quasi-deterministic model, mostly an engineering approach to explain coupled oscillators in the brain, spinal cord, and organs of the vegetative system. Although individual oscillators can be described as being predictable, less predictable non-deterministic resonance phenomena can arise from multiple couplings or a multiplicity of subgroups. Chapter 24 is a consequence of steps undertaken in Chaps. 14, 15 and 16 related to the quantum brain. Although the oscillators in these cases are also globally coupled, the individual oscillators are highly non-predictable. This model is inspired by the unifying string theory in physics. Chapter 25 provides a most tentative (extravagant) metaphysical argument that is based on globally coupled oscillators and the string model, and also describes the influence of intuition and creativity, as interpreted through the views of Bergson, Kandel, and Andreasen. Chapter 25 also includes the reasoning s on brain-bodymind that can be considered as a final essential of the book.[1] 3 The reader is advised to read the poem Elevation by the French poet Charles Baudelaire, inspired by the Prelude to Lohengrin, by Richard Wagner. An English translation can be found via Google.

5 393 Fig. 3 From causalities to a nebulous Cartesian system: Note the irregular and multiple axes in the unusual and hypothetical coordinate system.