Broken Symmetry

Homophily and Mimetic Desire

From Rene Girard:

My work has often been presented as a discussion of archaic religion through comparative anthropology. Its goal is to shed light on the process of hominization: the fascinating passage from animality to humanity that occurred thousands of years ago.

In all of this, my hypothesis has concerned mimesis: Because humans imitate one another, they have had to find a means of dealing with contagious similarity, which could lead to the pure and simple disappearance of their society. The mechanism by which they have done that is sacrifice, which reintroduces difference into a situation in which everyone has come to resemble everyone else.

Seemed topical given the recent post on homophily and influence.

See also this earlier post relating mirror neuron's to Girard's theory of mimesis.

Feedback Loops in Education

From the Frontal Cortex blog:

Kids learn material much faster when they screw-up first. In other words, getting the wrong answer helps us remember the right one.

Not only kids, I might add. The information content of negative feedback is greater than that of positive feedback. The trick is creating an environment in which it is both encouraged and welcomed.

The work of Carol Dweck has been covered in earlier posts here and here. When I heard her speak to an audience of parents in Palo Alto about a year ago (all there to figure out how to get their kids into Stanford, natch), I asked her whether anybody had looked to see whether the growth mindset was correlated with higher levels of flow experiences. She said that a study had been done of race car drivers, which found some correlation between the two. I haven't been able to find a link on the web.

Ecological and Constructivist Rationality

Vernon Smith has articulated a distinction between "constructivist" and "ecological" rationality in economics:

We have become accustomed to the idea that a natural system like the human body or an ecosystem regulates itself. To explain the regulation, we look for feedback loops rather than a central planning and directing body. But somehow our intuitions about self-regulation do not carry over to the artificial systems of human society...

"[C]onstructivist rationality (or ‘constructivism’) ... stems particularly from Descartes (also Bacon and Hobbes), who believed and argued that all worthwhile social institutions were and should be created by conscious deductive processes of human reason...In summary, constructivism uses reason to deliberately create rules of action, and create human socioeconomic institutions that yield outcomes deemed preferable, given particular circumstances, to those produced by alternative arrangements...

Since our theories and thought processes about social systems involve the conscious and deliberate use of reason, it is necessary to constantly remind ourselves that human activity is diffused and dominated by unconscious, autonomic, neuropsychological systems that enable people to function effectively without always calling upon the brain’s scarcest resource– attentional and reasoning circuitry...

These considerations lead to the second concept of a rational order, as an undesigned ecological system that emerges out of cultural and biological evolutionary processes: home grown principles of action, norms, traditions, and ‘morality’.

An analogy may be helpful in understanding and remembering the difference between these two concepts of rationality. In a dance performance, the choreographer may exercise constructivist rationality by designing and explaining the moves to the individual performers. But it is ecological rationality that takes over as the individual performers together -- though practice and attention to their neighbors -- execute the performance:

Both forms of rationality are necessary to the pleasing result.

Here's an interesting question to consider: By what mechanism does constructivist order become embedded in ecological order? By reference to the analogy we can make this question more concrete: By what mechanism does the choreography influence the performance of the dancers?

In considering the dance analogy, the answers are not so difficult to see, although the details are surely interesting and important. The choreographer communcates her design with verbal or written instructions to the dancers, who then practice under the choreographer's direction until the design is reproduced. But when we drop the analogy and consider the question more broadly in the context of markets and market-based institutions, the answers seem fuzzier and more difficult to envision.

Perhaps one slice at the answer is provided in a paper by Barbara Drossel reviewed earlier here on Broken Symmetry:

These systems essentially have three states which are called quiescent, excited, and refractory. If there is an excitation, it spreads to the quiescent neighbors. After excitation, a region is refractory to further stimulation and needs some time to recover its quiescent state. The model discussed in this paper describes an excitable medium in the limit where excitation spreads fast on the scale of the refractory time, and where spontaneous excitation is rare. In cases where this limit can be realized experimentally, such a system should show either synchronization or SOC, depending on whether the transition from the refractory to the quiescent state and from the quiescent to the excited state are deterministic or stochastic.

Within Drossel's terminology, sync is acheived through excitation from a quiescent to a refractory state. When in a refractory state, any additional excitation will be passed onto neighboring states. In this regard, Drossel's model seems to have fundamental links to models of population inversions, which produce the coherent radiation of masers and lasers.

Given the right circumstances, even a weak coupling between the neural networks of individuals might be enough to induce a group of people into a state of sync or self-organized criticality.

What do Ants and Neurons Have in Common?

From Seed Magazine:

According to Cornell University neurobiologist Thomas Seeley, the social insect metaphor can be scaled up even further, all the way to government. He is currently writing a book entitled Honeybee Democracy (Princeton University Press, 2010) about how we can improve our group decision making and government by imitating honeybees, which, like ants, are social insects. Honeybees have been making group decisions for tens of millions of years. And as Seeley says, “Democracy among humans traces back only 2,500 years or so to Athens, Greece, so it is perhaps not surprising that we are still fumbling around.”

Again via Omnivore

Self-Organized Criticality in Neural Networks

From the New Scientist:

In 2003, John Beggs of Indiana University in Bloomington began investigating spontaneous electrical activity in thin slices of rat brain tissue. He found that these neural avalanches are scale invariant and that their size obeys a power law. Importantly, the ratio of large to small avalanches fit the predictions of the computational models that had first suggested that the brain might be in a state of self-organised criticality (The Journal of Neuroscience, vol 23, p 11167).

To investigate further, Beggs's team measured how many other neurons a single cell in a slice of rat brain activates, on average, when it fires. They followed this line of enquiry because another property of self-organised criticality is that each event, on average, triggers only one other. In forest fires, for example, each burning tree sets alight one other tree on average - that's why fires keep going, but also why whole forests don't catch fire all at once.

Via Omnivore.

Music and the Brain

From an interview of Oliver Sacks:

Using loud music as torture draws on these qualities of music, as well as simple sensory overload. I personally find the assault of loud public music—in stores, restaurants, airports–a minor form of torture. One wants to listen to one’s own music, in one’s own way, not to have it force-fed, especially at great volume.

One of the things I found remarkable about Beijing when I visited in 1998 was the ubiquity of public address speakers, which were usually playing some kind of music in the background in between and during public announcements. One had the sense that people there were uncomfortable without these sounds, since one could have observed these speakers installed even in improbable locations. Here's another quote from the interview:

Rhythm, actual or imagined, activates areas of the motor cortex, crucial in synchronizing and energizing movemen... There is a great deal of debate about the relationship between music and language, and speculation about which capacity evolved first. It has often been suggested that music emerged as a by-product of linguistic capacities. But musical rhythm, with its regular pulse, is very unlike the irregular stressed syllables of speech.

Musicophilia may be worth a look.

Resonance and Neural Networks

A demonstration courtesy of Bobby McFerrin:

Via Cosmic Variance. Don't miss the earlier post (and linked PDF) on music and quantum mechanics here.

Quick Illustration of Rotational Symmetry Breaking

From the Built on Facts blog:

Why do mirrors reflect right and left, but not up and down?

After a conversation with a friend over the weekend about this, it occurred to me that this is actually a pretty good way to illustrate how broken symmetries may be hard to spot. You can click through to read the answer in the comments at Built on Facts.

As my friend pointed out, there is also a neurological component to this explanation. We know that our brains are pretty good at inversion -- the lens in our eyes is an inversion center, but we don't see everything upside down and backward. So why don't our brains simply undo the effects of a reflection in a mirror?

The answer is that they can. If you spend enough time studying organic chemistry, for example, you get pretty darn good at distinguishing right from left-handed symmetry. And when you look in a mirror, what you're seeing is actually your enantiomer. The trick is that most of us aren't a close enough study of our appearance to immediately notice the change in handedness. Most of the time, we assume we are looking at a 180 degree rotation of ourselves.

But when we see the reflection of an object that breaks rotational symmetry -- such as English text -- our brain's rotation strategy runs into a snag. We read text from left to right and from top to bottom -- i.e., with z axis pointing out of the page. In a mirror, the same text reads from left to right and from top to bottom, but with z-axis pointing into the page. There's no rotation that will get you into that space.

The Female Brain by Louann Brizendine

This is a useful book for any man who lives or works with women. Among other facts that I learned from reading this book, I was especially amazed at the following:

• Until eight weeks old, both male and female fetal brains look exactly alike. A testosterone surge at eight weeks turns the unisex brain male by killing off cells in the communication centers and growing more cells in the sex and agression centers.
• During the first twenty-four months after birth, female brains marinate in estrogen, and imprint their early social environment.
• Estrogen affects responsivity to light and the daily light-dark cycle.
• During puberty, many new synaptic connections -- including those between the amygdyla and the prefrontal cortex -- remain uninsulated by myelin, making control by the prefrontal cortex slower and less reliable.
• The amygdyla has to shut down before the female brain can experience orgasm.
• The female brain may have more mirror neurons (although I am told that this conjecture has been called into question recently).
• The oxytocin/dopamine response to touching significant others or children (which I knew about from reading The Happiness Hypothesis by Jonathan Haidt, basically drops off dramatically at menopause, with only a modest recurrence when grandmothers come in contact with their grandchildren.

Carol Gilligan should be pleased. Catherine MacKinnon perhaps not so much. (Although I think the work is not technically incompatible with MacKinnon's work.) Highly recommended. I wish I'd had the chance to read this book while still a teenager.

The book greatly benefits also from the wealth of experience that Brizendine has through her psychiatric practice. Some of the stories rang very true for this reader.

Neuroaesthetics

From Jonah Lerner at The Frontal Cortex:

Mark Rothko painting might be nothing but perplexed neurons in the V4 area of the visual cortex, or abstract art might be nothing but the peak shift effect. That, I think, is reckless hyperbole. The beauty of art is that it needs to be explained at multiple levels, from the action potential of retinal photoreceptors to the cultural shifts of 19th century France. Each of these descriptions is valid and important and essential. There is no privileged kind of discourse when it comes to understanding why we stare at Pollock's colorful drips of paint, or Cezanne's mostly empty watercolors. What intrigues me about neuroaesthetics is that it's another (and mostly novel) way to understand art.* But that doesn't mean it's the only way.

The senstivity of a set of symbolic rules and procedures to the context in which they are communicated could be described as a continuum from thin to thick -- i.e., from mathematical equations that are contextually invariant to English, for example, which can express multiple nontrivial messages to different (or even the same) audience simultaneously. There is a tradeoff between economy of information and adaptability with context.

Creating My Own Create Your Own Economy

On Saturday, I received my hard copy of Tyler Cowen's latest work of popular economics, Create Your Own Economy: The Path To Prosperity in a Disordered World. Although a work of popular nonfiction, which read easily over the course of a few hours this weekend, this book is chock full of creative insights into what might be called an alternative economic vision of social life. I say "alternative" because until recently most academic economists had confined their interests to finance rather than culture, although Cowen is careful to trace the threads of Adam Smith, F.A. Hayek, and Thomas Schelling (among others) from which his unique vision is woven together. In the sense of developing this alternative vision, this book is actually the continuation of his last, Discover Your Inner Economist: Use Incentives to Fall in Love, Survive Your Next Meeting, and Motivate Your Dentist. In both books, Cowen assumes the point of view of individual consumers; his data is drawn from individual stories and experiences; his understanding of group behavior and consumption are correspondingly richer with local and temporary detail than most economic analyses of culture. Read in conjunction with Schelling's Micromotives and Macrobehavior and Robert H. Frank's The Economic Naturalist, one can see how the methodologies of Thomas Schelling are facilitating a gradual evolution in economic thought among his students and (thanks to their attention to the needs of non-economists), the public at large. All are recommended reading.

A central premise in Create Your Own Economy is that technology is fostering a more "autistic" lifestyle. Cowen envisions "autism" as a superior ability to filter out particular bits of information from the barrage of stimuli we experience in everyday life, to absorb those filtered bits, and to imbue those disparate bits with meaning by ordering and re-ordering them into a collage of our own creation. John Milton would be proud. It is part of Cowen's project in this book to encourage a more positive definition of autism, a definition that focuses on the cognitive strengths of people who might otherwise be called autistic only because of their inferior ability to communicate in traditional social settings. We might even call this "positive abnormal psychology." Although this aspect of the book is interesting, and is sure to get attention from both the autistic community and the community of psychologists and clinicians who specialize in working with people diagnosed with autism, my focus as reviewer will be on how this vision of culture could be seen through the lens of science. More specifically, I'm going to explain how Cowen's vision of a more creative economy fits with the systems theory that has been the theme of Broken Symmetry. I think it would give Prof. Cowen pleasure to see somebody using his own work as a source of information to be re-ordered within the particular mental framework I bring to bear on understanding economics and culture -- i.e., to see me creating my own Create Your Own Economy. So here's how this book fits within my interior world.

I see Cowen's book as premised on a particular epistemology of culture. Although that epistemology is not quite laid out systematically, what is clear from his unique vision of autism, Hayek's Sensory Order, and his pyramid diagram is that culture is embedded in the neural networks of individuals. For Cowen, economics and culture emerge organically from a process of filtering, absorbing, and reordering information. This is an appealing vision because it promises the possibility that someday economic theories might be understood in terms of biology. And Cowen mentions neuroeconomics in passing, but again Cowen's focus is on culture.

What is interesting is what Cowen does not say about these neural networks and their process of development. Cowen's emphasis is on the largely individualistic process of ordering information that flows into our neural networks. What he does not emphasize is the activity -- especially the social activity -- required to obtain desired bits of information and (perhaps more importantly) to decide what bits should be given privilege in our internal ordering.

For example, in his Chapter on the contrast between autism and Buddhism, Cowen's vision seems heavily weighted in favor of the autistic approach to interior life. On Cowen's view, educational institutions are mostly about using social influence to encourage non-austistic young people to develop more autistic habits. The trouble with this view is that it does not seem to leave enough room for the possibility that some learning and information processing may occur at the social level -- i.e., that some ordering of information cannot be done autistically.

In that vein, I find another theory of learning interesting. According to psychologist Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi, learning is an individual process, but one that alternates between modes of openness and closedness to external feedback. There is potentially a deep scientific basis for Csikszentmihalyi's theory, which is drawn from the science of networks and self-organized criticality. Given the right balance of external stimuli and internal constraints, networks can self-organize into structures that optimize the flow of information. Optimal flow through networks was studied by Mandelbrot in connection with Zipf's Law. But today it is known that the same self-organized critical structure can be found in an incredibly diverse array of networks in nature, including neural networks and even our economy. In each case, the network structure emerges from an evolutionary process whereby particular network structures persist over time only so long as they can accommodate the stable or unstable variations in flow through the network.

This theory of flow is complementary with Cowen's vision of autistic culture. In particular, the closed mode of operating corresponds directly with Cowen's vision of autism. What seems to be missing from Cowen's vision is the other phase, the phase of extreme openness to feedback and diverse stimulus. (Is this what zen meditation is designed to facilitate?) Within the theory of autism presented by Cowen, it would seem that such openness would be difficult for autistics. Yet it would seem equally important to the creativity and learning characterized by Csikszentmihalyi as "flow."

But why is it so important to maintain balance between openness and closedness? By the end, what becomes clear is that Cowen envisions a radically different structure for society in which individuals cluster into small units -- perhaps even as small as one. And perhaps Cowen is right that this is where current technology is leading us. But can that kind of culture survive?

Robert H. Frank, also a student of Schelling, provides an answer in a recent NYT editorial titled, "The Invisible Hand, Trumped by Darwin?":

By calling our attention to the conflict between individual and group interest, Darwin has identified the rationale for much of the regulation we observe in modern societies... Ideas have consequences. The uncritical celebration of the invisible hand by Smith’s disciples has undermined regulatory efforts to reconcile conflicts between individual and collective interests in recent decades, causing considerable harm to us all. If, as Darwin suggested, many important aspects of life are graded on the curve, his insights may help us avoid stumbling down that grim path once again... The competitive forces that mold business behavior are like the forces of natural selection that molded elk. In each case, we see instances of socially benign conduct. But in neither can we safely presume that individual and social interests coincide.

Technology has enabled us to take finer and finer control over the flow of information and goods that we access as individuals. But over very long times, the benefits of finer control over flow have tended to accrue to the most well-organized groups rather than the most well-ordered individual minds. So perhaps the most dramatic impact of technology will be in how it enables us to be more social, even as autistics.

More Organic Economics

From Neurophilosophy:

Neuroimaging has revealed that remembering and simulating the future are now known to depend on common neural substrates; the core network activated in both cases includes the hippocampus, poserior cingulate gyrus, inferior parietal lobule, and medial frontal and lateral temporal cortices. Interestingly, activity in this network is greater during simulation of future events than during remembering. This may reflect processes that do not occur during remembering, such as the recombination of memory fragments or, if imagining the future involves merely recasting the past, the addition of a new "timestamp" to the memory of a past experience.

See earlier post on Organic Economics here.

Organic Economics

Since the Arrow-Debreu-McKenzie model was introduced to economics in the 1950s, changes over time have been given less consideration in economic models. See, for example, this statement about changes in market prices by Eugene Fama. The efficient-market hypothesis implies that at any given moment an equilibrium market price exists, and (here's where the flow of time drops out of the picture) that the current price at any given moment is most likely the equilibrium price. Unless you have some information that nobody else in the market has, then you're probably making a mistake by guessing that most people are either underestimating or overestimating the value of a particular good. There are exceptions, of course, but in general economists and policymakers (including judges and lawmakers) think about (or at least did think about prior to this recession) economic equilibrium as static —- a perfect allocation of people and things that the market maintains more or less constantly.

Is there a more realistic way to model an economy? How about as an hierarchical social network? The social network must be hierarchical because smaller markets (i.e., smaller subnetworks) are usually connected to larger markets (i.e., bigger networks) such that there is nesting and overlap among them through the mechanism of cross-elasticity in demand.

Already, our model of the economy is of networks within networks. But the hierarchy goes deeper still. Each individual within an economy has his or her own neural network, which orders decisionmaking and behavior. In principle at least, we could identify subnetworks within an economy by looking to see whether particular individuals share substantially similar neural networks. Similar brain structure and dynamics are probably a physical (and biological) manifestation of consensus in belief and perception about past, present, and future within a subnetwork. Market equilibrium could be identified as the state of the system in which neural networks are matched in structure and dynamics so that the flow of goods through the economy is stable over a period of measurement. Such stability would be manifest in a market price that fluctuates only within the range of transactions costs.

From time to time, however, an individual within a subnetwork might make a new connection in his or her neural network. The new connection would arise from a new structural or dynamical pattern within that individual's neural network. Such a new pattern might be induced directly by exposure to new sensory information or statistically random variations in the individual's neural network, or indirectly from exposure to a new pattern communicated by another outside the subnetwork. In any case, the result would be a modification to the preexisting structure and dynamics of that individual's neural network.

An individual with a new pattern in mind (literally) might then attempt to reproduce the new pattern in the subnetwork of individuals who share (now similar, but not the same) neural network structure and dynamics. Through communication, the new pattern is either recognized, thereby rerouting every neural network in the subnetwork (albeit, through feedback loops, probably with some refinements), not recognized at all because too great a variation from preexisting patterns to be communicated, or rejected as inconsistent with important preexisting accepted patterns. Although a ridiculously difficult problem to solve mathematically, whether a new pattern would be accepted or rejected by the subnetwork could in principle be characterized using control theory to analyze the stability of the system including the new pattern within its preexisting environment. In practice, it's probably necessary to carry out the experiment to know.

The iteration of such a process eventually results in an increasingly sophisticated neural network shared among the subnetwork, with more and more specialized ability to recognize and explain more and more complex information over time. Interconnections among subnetworks, although difficult to achieve, might be expected to produce large returns to the individuals who are capable of matching the patterns in otherwise disconnected subnetworks.

To understand the new insights that such a model would give us in understanding economics, consider how individuals within the network of an economy include both entrepreneurs and customers. A successful entrepreneur, in practice, is one who is able to anticipate what patterns are going to be accepted by the neural networks of customers. Within this organic model of economics, capitalism is a game in which entrepreneurs conduct experiments in order to discover what patterns of behavior (i.e., what neural networks of prospective customers) will adapt by accepting a new pattern offered as an alternative to a preexisting pattern of behavior used to live with time-evolving resource constraints. Correct predictions are rewarded by the mass of individuals that adopts a new pattern of behavior. Incorrect predictions -- or inappropriately timed predictions -- generally disappear without a trace.

Not coincidentially, this game of capitalism provides a social parallel to the flow experience described by Mihalyi Csikszentmiahlyi as optimal to individual psychology. The same basic rules of the game apply both at the level of neural networks and at the level of networks of individuals within an economy. Because of how neural networks constitute economic networks, it should not surprise us to see that similar mathematical structure and dynamics apply to both. Consumer internet marketing professionals probably already know more about how neural networks work than do many neurologists!

Neoclassical theory offers zero insight into any of these dynamics.

Synchronized Flow in Your Brain

From the NYT:

When something bright or novel flashes, it tends to automatically win the competition for the brain’s attention, but that involuntary bottom-up impulse can be voluntarily overridden through a top-down process that Dr. Desimone calls “biased competition.” He and colleagues have found that neurons in the prefrontal cortex — the brain’s planning center — start oscillating in unison and send signals directing the visual cortex to heed something else.

These oscillations, called gamma waves, are created by neurons’ firing on and off at the same time — a feat of neural coordination a bit like getting strangers in one section of a stadium to start clapping in unison, thereby sending a signal that induces people on the other side of the stadium to clap along. But these signals can have trouble getting through in a noisy environment.

Donald T. Campbell on Multiple Inventions

From Evolutionary Epistemology available here:

A major empirical achievement of the sociology of science is the evidence of the ubiquity of simultaneous invention. If many scientists are trying variations on the same corpus of current scientific knowledge, and if their trials are being edited by the same stable external reality, then the selected variants are apt to be similar, the same discovery encountered independently by numerous workers. This process is no more mysterious than that all of a set of blind rats, each starting with quite different patterns of initial responses, learn the same maze pattern, under the maze's common editorship of the varied response repertoires. Their learning is actually their independent invention or discovery of the same response pattern.

Sociologists could have just checked with the Patent & Trademark Office, where multiple simultaneous inventions have been a way of life since way before Darwin.

But is Campbell right here about there being no difference between blind rats in a maze and inventors tackling the same problem? Maybe. But doesn't the "pattern of initial responses" matter in terms of how fast a particular rat runs the maze? And if some rats run mazes faster than others, then don't we want to reward those rats?

In fact, the "initial pattern of responses" of an experienced inventor may take on the characteristics we more typically associate with artistic or mathematical genius after a lifetime of inventing. But who will devote a lifetime to inventing without inventions being protectible as property? Rats in a maze indeed.

Poincare on Inventing Mathematics

Poincare wrote an extraordinary book called The Foundations of Science, which is now in the public domain and available through Google Books here:

In fact, what is mathematical creation? It does not consist in making new combinations with mathematical entities already known. Any one could do that, but the combinations so made would be infinite in number and most of them absolutely without interest. To create consists precisely in not making useless combinations and in making those which are useful and which are only a small minority. Invention is discernment, choice.

What did Poincare mean by "useless" and "useful"? Poincare goes on to describe some of his experiences with mathematical discovery. Solutions often came to him while he was engaged in other activities, such as a geological expedition for the School of Mines: (my italics)

Most striking at first is this appearance of sudden illumination, a manifest sign of long, unconscious prior work. The role of this unconscious work in mathematical invention appears to me to be incontestable, and traces of it would be found in other cases where it is less evident. Often when one works at a hard question, nothing good is accomplished at the first attack. Then one takes a rest, longer or shorter, and sits down anew to the work. During the first half-hour, as before, nothing is found, and then all of a sudden the decisive idea presents itself to the mind. It might be said that the conscious work has been more fruitful because it has been interrupted and the rest has given back to the mind its force and freshness. But it is more probable that the rest has been filled out with unconscious work and that the result of this work has afterward revealed itself to the geometer just as in the cases I have cited; only the revelation, instead of coming during a walk or journey, has happened during a period of conscious work, but independently of this work which plays at most a role of excitant, as if it were the goad stimulating the results already reached during the rest, but remaining unconscious, to assume the conscious form.

For every successful new business model in an economy, there are many failed companies that packaged the wrong combination of capabilities. As an economy, we are less conscious of these failures than we are of the successes, which tend to explode on the scene when they are hit upon.

The similarities between the processes of mathematical creation and economic innovation were well-known to F.A. Hayek.

Global Consciousness

Another fascinating excerpt from the Edge symposium, this one by Danny Hillis:

In 1851, Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote, "Is it a fact — or have I dreamt it — that, by means of electricity, the world of matter has become a great nerve, vibrating thousands of miles in a breathless point of time? Rather, the round globe is a vast head, a brain, instinct with intelligence!" He was writing about the telegraph, but today we make essentially the same observation about the Internet.

One might suppose that, with all its zillions of transistors and billions of human minds, the world brain would be thinking some pretty profound thoughts. There is little evidence that this is so. Today's Internet functions mostly as a giant communications and storage system, accessed by individual humans. Although much of human knowledge is represented in some form within the machine, it is not yet represented in a form that is particularly meaningful to the machine. For the most part, the Internet knows no more about the information it handles than the telephone system knows about the conversations that take place over its lines. Most of those zillions of transistors are either doing something very trivial or nothing at all, and most of those billions of human minds are doing their own thing.

If there is such a thing as a world mind today, then its thoughts are primarily about commerce. It is the "invisible hand" of Adam Smith, deciding the prices, allocating the capital. Its brain is composed not only of the human buyers and sellers, but also of the trading programs on Wall Street and of the economic models of the central banks. The wires "vibrating thousands of miles in a breathless point of time" are not just carrying messages between human minds, they are participating in the decisions of the world mind as a whole. This unconscious system is the world's hindbrain.

The whole of this one should be read for the full effect.

Learning at the sub-neuron level

Broken Symmetry readers already know that F.A. Hayek's theory of learning in Sensory Order has been borne out by scientists through the study of long-term potentiation. Hayek was way ahead of the game in linking economic theory and organizational theory to neuroscience.

A recent paper on the biochemistry of long-term potentiation (LTP) is too cool not to share with readers. In a nutshell, researchers have demonstrated (through what must have been a truly grueling number of years of experiments) that the mechanism for LTP involves movement of AMPA receptors into the post-synaptic dendritic membrane through the use of myosin motors (like the ones that flex your muscles) on a structure of actin filaments. To borrow an analogy from electrical engineering, it's as if your neurons are dynamically assembling and reassembling a phased array of antennae in response to stimulus from other cells. The myosin motors are initiated by the calcium gradient, which transmits electrical signals down the synapse.

Collective consciousness precedes individual consciousness

In an earlier post I ruminated on the potential for global consciousness to emerge through the Internet.  One of the observations made in this context is that our awareness of other people tends to precede our self-awareness.

I was interested to see that this seems to be true of the notion of individual consent to social contract:

William Blackstone’s account, published only 11 years before the Declaration of Independence, follows Coke’s dicta but with an important twist.

Natural allegiance is such as is due from all men born within the king’s dominions immediately upon their birth. For, immediately upon their birth, they are under the king’s protection;.... Natural allegiance is therefore a debt of gratitude; which cannot be forfeited, cancelled or altered by any change of time, place or circumstance, nor by anything but the united concurrence of the legislature.... For it is a principle of universal law that the natural born subject of one prince cannot by any act of his own, no, not by swearing allegiance to another, put off or discharge his natural allegiance to the former: for this natural allegiance was intrinsic, and primitive, and antecedent to the other; and cannot be divested without the concurrent act of that prince to whom it was first due. (my emphasis)

The twist is, of course, the reference to the power of the legislature to alter allegiance—to that, rather limited, extent Lockean notions of consent had influenced Blackstone’s concept of allegiance.  It did, however, not occur to Blackstone that allegiance was a matter of an individual’s consent.

From Gerhard Casper's study of U.S. laws requiring new citizens to forswear allegiance to foreign sovereign during naturalization.  Worth reading.

More on the Neuroscience of Synchronized Flow

"Long-term potentiation" is what the neurobiologists call it when two neurons that have not fired together before show an increased frequency of firing after being stimulated together at high-frequency once.

Neurons "learn" to cooperate over a longer time period by being stimulated together at high-frequency for a short time period.

See my earlier post on the connection between this research and Hayek's Sensory Order.  The mechanism for learning at the level of institutional design has similarity to the mechanism for learning at the cellular level.

In Rainbows

Seems to be the best Radiohead album since Okay Computer (1997).  I'm very into Reckoner and House of Cards.  Don't miss this post on the making of the video for House of Cards.  They reconstructed 3D images of the band playing in pitch darkness using spinning lasers and detectors.

F. A. Hayek and the Theory of Synchronized Flow

Readers know I've been advocating a Synchronized Flow Theory of the Firm.  In a few posts, I've noted some speculative connections between the theory and neuroscience.

It's nice to see that Hayek was here first.  I wish I could have met the guy.  The central thesis of his Sensory Order, published in 1952 (!) is here:

We shall maintain that a classification of the sensory impulses which produces an order strictly analogous to the order of sensory qualities can be effected by a system of connexions through which the impulses can be trasmitted fibre to fibre. . . [when] in the course of development of the species or individual, connexions are established between fibres in which impulses occur at the same time.

That settles it.  I'm not doing anything new here.  I'm just explaining in better English what Mr. Hayek understood over fifty years ago.

The Internet and the Brain

Neuroscientists now distinguish between two different types of tissue in your brain:  There is white matter and there is gray matter.  The white matter performs a switchboard function -- i.e., it connects the external stimuli you receive from your eyes, ears, nose, skin, taste buds, and inner ear to your gray matter.  The gray matter performs a processing and storage function.

If you read this linked article, then you get an interesting insight into the importance of these two complementary brain functions.  It turns out that psychopaths and pathological liars have a higher ratio of gray to white matter, and autistic people a lower.  How should we interpret this?

Given the existence of mirror neurons, I think it's not wholly outside the pale to interpret this to mean that the gray matter in autistic people is simply not getting enough information about affect from other people.  Pathological liars have the inverse problem -- they're not processing enough of the affect information that's coming in.  You can explain a lot of the phenomenology of these two disorders as resulting from the improper balance in input to processing and storage.  Autistic savants are making up for the lack of input by reconstructing the complex external world in their heads.  Psychopaths are making up for their lack of ability to process input by exerting their own (deadly) order on their perception of chaos.

Incidentally, the switchboard function of white matter also relates to Alzheimer's because the current physiological theory is that amyloid fibers are selectively blocking white matter switches.  The random precipitation and dissolution of the amyloid fibers could explain some of the phenomenology of Alzheimer's.

I'm excited about what this means for the people who study and treat these diseases because there are obvious therapeutic implications to the theory.  Especially if you couple the research with the work that has been done on neuroplasticity, which has shown that certain types of cognitive behavioral therapy could treat neurological dysfunctions by rerouting input through a different part of the white matter.

But this post is meant to suggest a very broad analogy between white matter and Internet search algorithms.  If you analogize the Internet to a human brain, then we would be the nerve endings -- each person on the network provides "senses" to the Internet, and the storage and processing units are the gray matter.  It is the search algorithms (like Google's PageRank algorithm) that play the role of white matter.

With that analogy in mind (no pun intended), some of the current problems with the Internet begin to take on a different sense.  For one thing, the importance of search algorithms and other means for connecting the various nodes within the network seem to become much more important.  Everybody is content with Google right now, but is Google really the best we can do at connecting people?  The success of YouTube (acquired by Google) and Facebook seem to suggest not.  We're only getting started at this game of synchronizing billions of people through the Internet.  For another thing, the gray matter of the Internet is probably getting close to being comparable to the human brain.  Already most nodes on the network have enough storage and processing power to beat most humans at chess.  That's not bad.  I wonder how much better our gray matter is at processing?  But maybe it's much better if it's doing quantum computing.

Second, notice that neither psychopaths nor autistic (or Alzheimer's) patents are "conscious" in the sense that we normally think of consciousness.  Now what if the Internet were to get into that sweet spot, which balances input, switching, processing, and storage just right.  Would it become conscious?

I think not, at least not so long as there is only one Internet.  What's missing is the ability to learn from another brain.  What's missing is the opportunity to mirror another conscious being until, perhaps noticing for the first time that we are not perfectly mirrored or mirroring, we become self-conscious.

Anybody up to building another Internet?  We should be careful if we do.  Remember it didn't take Adam and Eve long to get themselves kicked out of the garden.

P.S. Arguably, the building of multiple networks, which derive their consciousness from relative comparisons to each other, is exactly what nationalism is.

A Neuroscientific Explanation for the Hypothesis of Periodicity and the Synchronized Flow Theory of the Firm?

Regular readers know that I've been exploring an extension of the traditional economic theory of the firm.  Specifically, I've been exploring the following hypothesis:

A firm will emerge when a single team of people can synchronize the flow of supply to demand at lower costs than two independent teams relying on market price signals alone.

"Flow" here means a unit quantity of goods per unit time.  You can read the original post, in which I place the hypothesis in the context of earlier work by Coase, Alchian & Demsetz, and Williamson, here.

To my surprise and joy, it turns out that there have been some discoveries in biology and neuroscience over the past few decades that have some very interesting affinities with the synchronized flow hypothesis.  Specifically, relatively new work on mitochondria, neuroplasticity, mirror neurons, and collaborative memory seem to fit well with the theory of synchronized flow.

The Connection between Mitochondria and the Hypothesis of Periodicity

First, the synchronized flow hypothesis was inspired by the observation that human consumption and production occur in cycles with a measurable frequency distribution.  Integrated up into cumulative distribution functions, these frequency distributions can be shown to be equivalent to aggregate supply and demand for a population within a window of time.  Over the past few days, I've been reading Nick Lane's recent book about mitochondria (thanks to Tyler Cowen for the recommendation), and have discovered that, over a fairly wide range, a power law applies to the basal metabolic rate of mammals.  In other words, some network topology is responsible for the periodicity in our metabolism.  Since mitochondria are responsible for quite a bit of our metabolism, the hypothesis of biologists is that it is the network topology of mitochondria that determines the rhythms of metabolism, at least for mammals.  In other words, our network of mitochondria provides a biological mechanism for explaining the hypothesis of periodicity.

Mitochondria and Neuroplasticity

As if that weren't enough, it appears that mitochondria are also responsible, at least to some extent, for neuroplasticity.  See here for a description of the function of mitochondria within the brain.  Neuroplasticity is the phenomenon whereby certain neural pathways are reinforced by experience.  I started reading about neuroplasticity in this book by Norman Doidge, in which he describes (among other things) how blind people have been taught to see through the use of cameras hooked up to tactile feedback transducers.

Are you with me?  So far we've got a biological mechanism for explaining why we observe particular rhythms of consumption and production, which happens to be related to the mechanism that permits us to learn by repetition.

Neuroplasticity and Mirror Neurons

Another result we've gotten recently from neuroscience is that there are certain neurons in the brain that will fire both when we do things and when we see another person do the same thing.  If you pair that up with neuroplasticity and the mitochondria, what you've got is a mechanism for us to teach and learn from one-another, including a mechanism for indirectly influencing one-another's rhythms of consumption or production at a biological level.

Consider this: if I perform zen meditation in front of you, because of mirror neurons, your brain is going to start firing along similar pathways to the ones that my brain is firing along while I'm in meditation.  The result is that you are going to be more likely to want to do zen meditation and in fact, you may get some of the benefits even just from watching me do it.  Zen meditation, of course, is a pretty benign example of the power here.  Investors should see immediately how much this means.

Collaborative Memory

Has anybody looked empirically to see whether any of this neurophysiology is borne out at the level of psychology -- much less at the level of economic hypotheses (such as rationality)?  In fact, yes.  Here is a summary of work done on "collaborative memory."  The surprising results of this work are the following: certain cognitive tasks are negatively affected by collaboration, including group brainstorming for word-list retrieval.

In an earlier post, I explored a theory of why that might be, based on the results of other neuroscience research reported in Daniel Goleman's new book, Social Intelligence.  My thought is that the synchronized flow theory can be explained on a neursocientific basis as the result of comparative institutional advantages in how and what information is communicated in order to synchronize supply and demand.  In particular, the thought is that integration of firms will be favored when mirror neurons and plasticity will lead to better flow synchronization.

Obviously, this is all speculation at this point.  But it's really fascinating stuff, and I couldn't help throwing it out there to see whether there was anybody else who would be similarly interested in it.  I realize that the connection between these various steps is fairly tenuous.  Yet lots of research has been done at each step.  If you simply connect the dots, you've got a fairly solid biological explanation for why groups of people choose to work together on one set of tasks, but not another.

The Neuroscience of Synchronization

Today I got my hands on a copy of the newest Daniel Goleman (author of Emotional Intelligence) book, titled Social Intelligence.

Goleman summarizes research showing that there are "high road" and "low road" channels of communication operating most of the time in social interactions.  The high road corresponds roughly to processing of ideas.  The low road to emotional signals, which are exchanged through facial expressions, tone of voice, and language including body language.

Interestingly, the low road can function smoothly even as the high road is disrupted, but the converse is not true.  In other words, most people, if distracted with math questions while playing chess, won't play chess as well; but the same people will usually be able to detect whether the voice asking the math questions sounded happy or sad.  By contrast, the high road gets disrupted when the low road is disrupted -- if I shout angrily or sob while I'm asking you complicated questions, you'll most likely show less accuracy in answering them.

Assuming I'm understanding the summary of research correctly, this has fascinating implications for the synchronized flow theory of the firm.

• When low road information is likely to be disruptive (e.g., in buying and selling securities because of the powerful herd instincts triggered by mirror neurons), market signals may be the best means for synchronizing the flow of supply and demand.
• When low road information is likely to be important (e.g., in supplying specialized services, such as legal advice or psychiatry), market signals may be a poor means for synchronizing the flow of supply and demand.

Another finding summarized in the book is that low road communication tends to improve through repeated cooperative interactions.  A firm that has success with internal flow synchronization will thus tend to build on its strength, whereas a firm that tries and fails may disintegrate -- even when a second or third try might be successful.