|
|
|
|
By Peter Fong, Ph. D. - To be published 2005. If you know all the answers, you do not need to read this book. In fact you can write it yourself to answer any questions your brain can answer, such as how to be a genius and how to build a financial empire or fortress. The work of the brain has been a mystery for ages but it is a solvable problem It is not the first time this kind of problem has happened in science; the last time was genetics, which is just as mysterious as the brain. But in 1953 Watson and Crick published two papers. The first is a run-of-the-mill paper in physics on the molecular structure of DNA. The second one published in tandem pointed out its implication in genetics. Everyone with common sense realized that the Watson-Crick pairing rule is the master key to genetics and dashed to the gold rush and were amply rewarded by Nobel Prizes and billions of dollars in genetic engineering. Those who hesitated are left out by history. In just a few decades molecular biology has been exploited
close to sunset but biotechnology is the rising star in the stock market.
History is now poised for a repeat of the same drama in neuroscience and the
winners belong to the swift. Miss the chance one day; regret all your life. The basic problem of the brain is that no one knows how the brain does memorizing and thinking just as in genetics no one knew how the information of making the blue eye is stored and transmitted by a tiny germ cell. But we are more fortunate to have known an analogy. The computer has memory and can think such as in playing chess. The IBM computer Deep Blue defeated the chess champion Caspanov. The brain has every components of the computer, the inputs, outputs, circuits and switches except we do not see the memory box. If only we find the key to the memory box we would have the master key, like the Watson-Crick rule, to break the mystery and conquer the frontier of neuroscience, which is the last frontier of biology, and of all sciences. But the problem is more formidable than any biologists can imagine. According to theoretical physics, no thermodynamic systems (most materials we handle) can have memory (equilibrium systems have maximum entropy and thus zero information). Any imaginative biologist trying to hatch up a memory mechanism is pursuing the hopeless, which violates the most fundamental law of physics, the second law of thermodynamics. There is one singular but well-known exception, that is, ferromagnetism, which is in a meta-stable state (not in thermal equilibrium), the retentivity of which can serve as a memory device. In fact, all the memory devices in practical use, from music recordings, to video tapes to all computer memories, use ferromagnetism and nothing else. But brain is not magnetic and this mechanism is out. However, there is a not well-known phenomenon ferroelectrocity, which is a twin sister of ferromagnetism but rare in nature, known only to physicists, which can serve the same purpose. It seems to be the last hope left and brain does operate on electricity. Thirty years ago as a gold rusher in molecular biology and familiar with some of its tricks, I ventured into the new frontier of neuroscience serendipitously and proposed a ferroelectric memory mechanism for the brain, using RNA as the ferroelectric recording tape and the transcription process as the motor to construct an electric recorder to record the electric nerve impulses send to the brain by the sensory cells, such as the sound of a steamboat whistle. Since the nerve impulses are the only thing the brain receives from the outside, this should cover all memories. Professor A. Stanford in the audience of a lecture of mine later performed an experiment that proved that RNA is a ferroelectric material, which is published in Nature, 219, 1250 (1968), thus establishing my track record of predicting the unknown. He launched an ambitious experimental project to prove RNA memory. If successful, it would generate a world shattering headline. Like many other similar experiments at that time, the concept of memory was so vague that no one distinguishes the cognitive memory (as memorizing the telephone number that passes through the brain) from motor memory (as memorizing the skill of swimming that does not pass through the brain). The captivating work of memory transfer experiments of that time ended up with nothing. We learned the lesson, and will propose in the book the correct, easy-to-do experiments to prove the theory of memory, thinking and even genius. That work had some outstanding successes such as the explanation of forgetting (a theory that can explain two contradictory phenomena at the same time is a marvelous accomplishment) and the law of forgetting (the memory span is proportional to the square of the number of repetitions of reading to memorize a sequence). And the limiting length of the sequence is about 7, just as the telephone number guessed right. The work has been circulating in the lecture circuit, invited to talk at International Conference in Prague and published in the inaugural issue of Physiological Chemistry and Physics, 1, 24-41, (1969). But there are formidable problems to proceed further: I cannot extend the one-dimensional memory to the 4 dimensional memory of a movie, such as "Gone with the Wind," which many can memorize vividly. Everybody memorizes the last line of the movie "Tomorrow is another day" and the way actress Vivian Leigh delivered it -- it was memorized as an audiotape of a language message. And this is also the way the multiplication table is memorized, not by a 9 by 9 square table, but by 81 verses such as "four and three make twelve" which take the third grade students a year to memorize. It is plain and obvious to everybody that oral language is the instrument of brain memory. Once we know a physical memory mechanism, such as the ferroelectric's effect to record a voice message and the multiplication table, the brain can be studied as an inanimate computer and the mystery of the brain can be broken. But there is a new problem. Where is the oral language come from? It is created by the brain, and only the human brain (not the ape brain), which is a sophisticated computer, which would need a memory device in the first place to operate and to get started. Thus we have the chicken-egg problem that defies solution in any science. However, once we have a ferroelectric memory mechanism, which can serve as the primeval egg descending from heaven to get the deadly chicken-egg cycle started, then we can break the deadlock and claim the mystery of brain is broken. Nobody has done that, including myself. My intelligence is not better than the chimpanzee who desperately maneuvering a stick to retrieve a bunch of bananas outside its cage without realizing that the bananas are already within reach by its arm, and continues his determined and dedicated effort by maneuvering the stick, arousing raucous laughter of the experimenters standing by. The problem is more than simple ape negligence. When I give a lecture of ferroelectric memory, I always use the memorizing of one's telephone number as an example. Memorizing one's telephone number illustrates many outstanding features of the memory process. The verse of the multiplication table can be used to do all the same things except a major difference: The telephone number is a random signal, like the steamboat whistle, having no information content. The verse "three and four make twelve" is a sentence that has a subject, a verb, an object, grammar, syntax and logic that form a sophisticated infrastructure upon which a sentence can be made and then put in an oral tape. How does the brain build up this infrastructure in the first place? Actually this is not a miracle. The ape has already have most of it. The rudimentary memory had already started a first generation brain computer to work wonders. That is why it can be taught to understand English command such as "Kanzi put onions in the soup" and the ape Kanzi can carry it out faithfully as many have seen vividly on the television screen. Moreover, apes have developed with the aid of the first generation brain computer, a sophisticated despotic political system from which humans copied almost in ditto except a little humble modification such as the introduction of primogeniture for succession. They must have almost all this infrastructure; the only thing they are lacking is the oral language, they cannot translate their language in their brain into the oral form and utter it. If they could speak, they would become another human species and break the Homo Sapiens's monopoly of humanity. A Pandora's box would be opened with endless woes for us. We have no pressing need to know how apes become apes just as to know how the first single cell organism originated. They are there already, but merely fascinating problems to past time in the ivory tower. They are supposed to be solvable by science. But we do have a pressing need to understand how humans rise above apes because that is how we build empires, make millions, not to mention winning Nobel Prizes, and more importantly, humans can use their intelligence to destroy themselves. Apes cannot. Thus a crucial question to be concerned here is why humans alone can speak. Even that is not a mystery that only God can bestow because parrots can also learn to speak English. All birds can sing but the higher mammals cannot, except humans. These questions bring out the point that history is a powerful force that overrides philosophy (structure and function). In fact philosophy and history are two sides of the same coin, complementary and inseparable. Philosopher Kant has said: "History without philosophy is meaningless; philosophy without history is empty." According to Kant, the current educational system studying philosophy and history in separate, airtight compartments is both meaningless and empty. In fact this paramount truth of intellectual pursuit is fully embodied in Newtonianism: The solution of a problem (such as the solar system) requires not only philosophy (Newton's laws of motion and gravity, which are universal and perennial) but also history (the initial conditions which are irrational and accidental, which Newton conceded to God). The mathematical theory of differential equations puts this down to exact minute details. In the second century B.C. the great historian Sze-Ma Chien has already said it in the consummate dictum: To investigate the interactions between Heaven and man; to explicate the transitions from the past to the present. That is why the simple question why humans rose above apes becomes a great mystery because we do not have the proper historical perspective; in fact, we have the wrong perspective. We are ensnared by the web of our own creation -- a naive and totally unjustified generalization of Darwinism to take for granted that all evolution is driven by external environmental forces. And there was no visible external environmental force that drove Homo sapiens to go above apes, which would also drive apes to become humans. Heaven would become too crowded by the addition of apes! How did humans cast a curse on apes to exclude them and preserve their monopoly of the Heaven? It was the human-ape issue that drove the evolutionist Alfred Wallace to turn to creationist, believing the need of a grand design by God to create humans. Logically he was right and the Darwin-Wallace evolution theory was not adequate as Wallace argued. A few modifications of the evolution theory have been made in the past century with some successes. A recent fashionable trend is the emergent evolution theory. It contends that evolution may proceed by sudden emergent features that are not logically connected with the past, which account for the drastic advances in human, cultural, scientific activities. It breaks away from the uniformitarianism and continuity of Darwinism and provides an easy escape from reductionism. But it leaves vacant the cause of the discontinuous changes to replace the Darwinian environmental driving force. I recognized the existence of discontinuous evolution 30 years ago and had published a general theory of evolution in a symposium volume Biogenesis Evolution Homeostasis by Springer (1973). (It could be named quantum theory of evolution but I was afraid to offend my physics colleagues for omitting the concept of wave interference. The term would be correct for the old quantum theory of Bohr-Sommerfield of 1911 to 1924.) The theory is just what needed for the present occasion. The only way to break the spell of Darwinism is to recognize that there are also internal forces that may drive evolution, which breaks the soul of materialistic Darwinism. At the risk of stating the conclusion ahead of convincing arguments, it may be said that it is the need of humans to find a convenient tool to express the language infrastructure already developed in their brain, in other words, to facilitate the alpha male of the primates to rule its roost, that drives the evolutional force to develop oral language. We begin with a less controversial case -- the evolution of the birds. The birds gave up their fore limbs for wings to gain the advantage of flying and were forced to find a substitute to run the errands of the "hand" and the only thing left available for this purpose is the mouth, like Mary Lou Redden holding the socks in her mouth while preparing for gymnastics. But the mouth was created by God to do the job of eating. Now the birds were
forced to use the mouth to do the extra task of picking up materials, building
the nest and feeding the young, which need new skills of the mouth and thus need
new motor neurons to command the mouth muscles to do the new tasks. Now neurons
coming out of the cell divisions of the fertilized egg are all the same in the
beginning and there must be a history of differentiation to produce various
kinds of neurons. The birds caught the crucial moment (later known as the
sensitive period) of differentiation of the mouth motor neurons to differentiate
them further to enable the mouth to do the additional un-God-given jobs and
successfully became birds. An unexpected by-product is the ability of the birds to utter more sound signals (mostly consonants) from the new motor actions of the mouth. The birds made good use of it to produce bird songs--a chirping sequence of consonants to amuse themselves and us. The most skillful of them, the parrots and parakeets can even learn to speak English even though a rotten version with many of the vowels skipped. That is why birds can "sing" and most mammals cannot. Mammals can utter only vowels, like the moo-moo of the cow and the meow-meow of the cat, from their larger and many resonance chambers in their body, (the chest for music notes below G, and the skull for G up). The needed resonance chambers of vowels are absent in the tiny bodies of the song birds. (Parrots and Parakeets do have larger bodies.) Mammal's mouth can only do eating but can utter little consonants. But then why parrots do not become humans? Because Parrots do not have the language infrastructure in their brain and do not have the need of a language and the culture following the language. The birds' social structure stopped at the stage of the pecking order. A peck by the bill is the only language they need and they need no more. There was no evolutional pressure for birds to develop language. Parrot's English is just a meaningless mimic action, like an ape saluting the flag, like the Bosnian girls play nurse without realizing the agonies of the war. That is different for higher primates. They have a sophisticated social structure (everybody must study social primatology to catch up with the 20th century, let alone the 21.) They are desperately in need of a more efficient channel of communication, beyond body language, innuendoes and suggestions, a channel that was later known as the oral language. It does not need a genius for humans to invent oral language. Just follow the footsteps of the parrot to develop the consonants and with the vowels we already have, we would have the basic material of oral language without cost. But we did need the good luck, as the birds, to catch the opportune time, the sensitive period of the mouth motor neuron differentiation, to exert the internal evolutional driving force to develop oral language. And indeed it was a marvelous stroke of a good luck, happened a million years ago, that Homo Sapiens happened to catch the boat to embark on the journey to humanity. The birds caught the boat too early before they have the brain infrastructure and ended up with just bird songs. The apes, alas, missed the boat too late when they later have developed the infrastructure and they remained apes forever. (Anti-Darwinist's worry that humans descended from apes is complete nonsense.) "What a piece of work is a man!...What is this quintessence of dust?" (Hamlet, Shakespeare). The origination of human is indeed the work by a touch of the Angel. It was the touch of the Angel that saved Wallace, not the design of God. In a mere million years the human brain enlarged three times than that of the ape. Thus it has the typical bulged forehead, compared with the slanted back head of the ape. Most of the enlarged cerebral cortex is for language and memory. The motor neurons controlling the mouth area for language take up one-half of the motor cortex in front of the middle fissure of the brain. The resulting product is a savage human, not much different from the ape except the language. It was not English but he can be taught to speak and understand, that is, to use English; the apes cannot. It took tens of million years to change whale's feet to fins. It took only one million years to create humans, just because of the language, and nothing more. (The bi-ped locomotion and the origination of the hand have been studied and published years ago.) The agenda of neuron differentiation is determined by genetics, ignoring whatever environmental changes. To catch the boat at the right time, not too early and not too late, is a historical accident--a tough of the Angel, not a philosophical riddle. We happened to be the extremely rare, lucky one to catch it, among the great variety of lives on the earth. On such and other basis I have recalculated Carl Sagan's probability of finding intelligent societies in the galaxy to be reduced 100 million times to 0.1, which must be rounded to 1 because of the existence of us. This saves us billions of dollars for the futile search of intelligent green men outside the earth. It does prove the possible existence of such beings in other galaxies outside our Milky Way. But it would take thousands of years to send message to them and receive reply. And when the reply comes we are all dead for thousands of years. So we return to the more realistic problem we stopped at the discovery of the oral language. It was truly an epoch making breakthrough because we did not just discover a better communication channel to run the primate despotic government, but also created a new hardware for memory -- the audio tapes such as the verses of the multiplication table, which can be used as a more powerful brain computer memory device (as transistors replacing vacuum tubes) for a more sophisticated second generation brain computer earmarked by the oral language, which can produce more wonderful things such as mathematics (as the silicon revolution). Moreover, the audiotapes of language can also be used as brain computer hardware for thinking. When we think to prepare a lecture tomorrow morning, what we do in the brain is to construct a set of audio tapes on the subject concerned, stored in the brain memory, and retrieve it the next morning and play the tapes out in voice. The language tape provides a concrete handle to maneuver the elusive and fleeting thoughts, lest you "lost the word" you want at the moment of oral delivery. Also it defines the thought more precisely. When you have a flash of bright but undefined insight (some kind of neuron connection process in the brain) you would immediately grasp it and translate it into a verbal language tape for safekeeping, lest it be lost forever. The important lesson we learn here is that language and thinking (reason) are closely related, in fact, two aspects of the same entity in the brain. We cannot think without the language; so cannot the animals. This is already recognized from the ancient times. Logos has two aspects: Oratio (language) and Ratio (reason). Logos in the Greek Bible was translated to Verbum (oratio) in the Latin Bible, missing the other half ratio, and this original sin of the translation was inherited in the English Bible and all modem Bibles with the translation of verbum to "The Word." And "The Word was God" (John: 1,1). Lao-Tze marked the duality of oratio and ratio in the opening sentence of his book: Dao (Logos) could be oratio, but not always the ratio. With the improved memory and thinking capacity, the language-endowed Homo Sapiens embarked on a journey to search for the soul to claim their exclusive position in the Heaven. This fantastic story of the development of language and humanity sounds like a fairy tale. But it is solid science with experimental proofs. The story goes back to Kanzi the chimp. Atlanta scientists were trying to teach chimps English language on an old female and were frustrated that old dogs cannot learn new tricks. The chimp happens to have a baby chimp in her care. And, like many small child under the mother's wing, stays with the mother and plays his own play, while the mother does her own business, in this case, being trained to learn English and failed repeatedly. One day the frustrated scientists suddenly found a Godsend unexpectedly: The baby chimp, named Kanzi, has learned all the English his mother failed to lean in spite of arduous training but he learned as an eavesdropper without being taught. The Atlanta scientists, the Rumbaughs et al, published their findings of the language capabilities of the apes and won national recognition. I, as an Atlantan, had the good fortune of learning this anecdote and use it to my advantage: The learning of oral language is done in a short sensitive period of mouth motor neuron differentiation in which the learning is done by the instant printing process without being taught and trained but has a lasting effect as firm as genetic information (printing was established in ethology by studying ducks). The language so learned is the mother tongue. After the sensitive period has passed, the learning of the second language must be done by an arduous training process, like mice learning to run the maze, and the result is a language with an accent, the residue of the mother tongue that cannot be easily erased. This is every day common sense taken for granted but now it reveals a crucial point in human evolution. The mother chimp missed the boat to learn the accented language because she missed the boat to learn the mother tongue language in the first place. The baby chimp missed the boat a million years ago to learn to speak the mother tongue (the experimenter's English) but caught a tail of it to learn to understand English. Humans are the only ones that caught the boat just at the right time. There is similar evidence in the birds. Bird's song is a language. Each species of bird, like the finch, has its earmark song and can be identified. The song, like human language, may develop dialects according to geographical distribution and may even develop accents. See Professor Sarah Bottjer's paper on Construction of Neural Circuits During the Sensitive Period for Vocal Learning in Song Birds. The circuit change takes place between diencephlon and the midbrain. Thus the fantastic story has a good scientific basis and can be used as a step for crucial study of human evolution. Any objections must come from concrete experimental evidence, not philosophical speculations. The next important step in the Divine Odyssey was the invention of the written language on the basis of the second-generation brain computer. Beginning as a trivial information-keeping device such as a knot on a rope, it soon developed into a system of memory devices -- the books and the libraries. Written history appeared on earth, which is conventionally but not scientifically considered as the beginning of civilized humans out of the savages. As time went on the books became the third generation memory hardware. Written language also became a more precise and efficient tools of thinking (mathematics, philosophy). The two led to the third generation super computer, earmarked by written language, which produced all arts, sciences and civilization. Neuroscience vincit omnia. The Angel's work is done, by the progression of the first to the second and then to the third generation brain computer. Humans with soul emerged on the earth. I hasten to add that our concern here is limited to the cognitive aspect of neuroscience. There are many areas including the motive system, the emotions, feelings and so on that we can touch only barely. We acknowledge much of the neuroscience is not in this book and much of this book is not in other books. The hard work of all the unsung heroes who belabored to cultivate the garden of neuroscience is gratefully recognized. It is on their shoulders we stand to gain a peek of the Angel's work in the Heaven. The third generation brain memory, thinking and computer hardware are literary hardware (such as the library and the desk computer) outside the head. But genetically they are an extra-mural extension of the brain inside the skull to the space outside the body to break the anatomical limitation of the skull. This is the only way the brain size can be expanded a thousand fold in a thousand years, not just three times in the past one million years. Actually this singular development is a general rule in biology. The development of a turtle is instant. When it breaks out of the egg shell, it is a full-fledged turtle, can run straight to the ocean to fight for survival. Higher species with more complicated structure need more time for development. Bird chicks need to be fed for months. The development of a full fledged human needs so much time and space that it cannot be accommodated in the womb and must be expelled when the limit is reached and begins a new stage called childhood, which is genetically an extramural extension of the fetus. This lasted for 16 years and under that age it is not recognized as a full-fledged person; he cannot vote, drink, have a driver license and be sentenced to death. He is an extra-mural fetus! Can he be spanked? Human rights? Extra-mural fetus rights? Intra-mural fetus rights? This unification of extra and intra mural entities is an extraordinary example to illustrate a general truth already expressed in Lao-Tze's second sentence which can now be conveniently translated for the present purpose as "Names can be named differently but the essence is the same entity," an elaboration of the duality of language and reason. The profound effect of this wisdom is beyond expectation and solves many mysteries. The ants' "society" is actually an "individual" with the DNA of all its constituent "cells" 99% expressed (as opposed to suppressed as in all other species) and with the freely moving "cells" controlled by the gaseous pharamone (instead of by the liquid hormone as in all other species). Now you can understand the "altruistic morality" of the ants and the lack of it in humans. Pity those who plan to build a temple in the utopia with the hollow capstone altruism. Incidentally, Lao-Tze's original version may also be translated as "Names can be named the same but the essence is different entities." An outstanding example is the confusion of cognitive memory with motor memory that was the great blunder 30 years ago. Lao-Tze's two opening sentences are obviously to alert the common blunders that happen all the time. In the same way the concept Dao was referred to vaguely (because of the terse writing 2500 years ago) to many contrasting notions: matter and mind, language and reason, the concrete and the abstract, the permanent and the changeable, the grand beginning and the steady state, philosophy and history (more on that later), ... Perhaps it was intentional to suggest the grand unification of all these contrasting ideas, even though without an explicit elaboration of the details. Now that we have explained everything from the brain by language as the memory and thinking as their connections, there is indeed a grand unification of all in the brain. Neuroscience may now be read as an annotated edition of Lao-Tze. A footnote: Professor Yang, a past-President of Wu-Han University, requires his Ph. D. Candidates in Mechanical Engineering to memorize and recite Lao-Tze (or the Analect) to pass the Doctoral Examination. The next fantastic story of human evolution is the appearance of the genius, who created new knowledge which eluded all others and promoted human evolution. The kind of thinking process mentioned before merely involves a reshuffling of existing memory and knowledge, such as in the planning of a vacation tour, which does not involve the discovering and exploring of a new Mammoth Cave that involves a new process of thinking that leads to the discovery of the new. This process is more important in life and is needed in hard thinking to solve tough problems. Perhaps the best way to illustrate this way of thinking is to study Einstein's discovery of the special theory of relativity. Before he did that in 1905 many of the basic hardware materials of the theory were already known: the Lorentz transformation equation, the Lorentz-Fitzgerald contraction, the idea of time dilation, the increase of mass with velocity, the equivalence of mass and energy and so on but they were benign mysterious overgrowths of the old theory (Newton and Maxwell), a box of inscrutable jigsaw puzzle pieces, which irritated but did not harm anybody. It was Einstein who found the missing piece of the jigsaw puzzle and put the box of odds and ends together to form a grand panorama that is now known as the theory of relativity. The missing piece was the idea of the relativity of simultaneity, which is obvious to everybody once the concept of time dilation is known. This illustrates the process of the workings of most geniuses (but not all) that promotes the advance of humanity: a flash of insight to discover a missing link to complete a gestalt that changes the outlook of the whole view. (Like a man finding fault of the chimp's monkeying around with the stick and forgetting to use his own arm.) Perhaps the more important is the foresight to break the shackles of the old, antiquated and never proven ideas and concepts (for Einstein it was the absolute space and time, which Kant claimed to have proven.) An historical Note: Einstein in 1905 published three Nobel class papers (the relativity paper was not the one that won the Prize). This indicates Einstein's genius is more than that analyzed above, even though what we have done is generally adequate for most practical purposes. His relativity paper is unusual in listing not a single reference, including Lorentz, whose equations were quoted in the paper. This is philosophically correct because theory of relativity really started from him. But historically wrong for not citing Lorentz; today even alchemical discoveries are quoted in scientific publications for justifiable reasons. Nevertheless it offers me a convenient excuse for not quoting any references in this book. Another example to illustrate the generality of the process is Archimedes' discovery of the principle that bears his name. The story goes that he was asked by the king to solve the problem of finding out if the crown was made of pure gold. He was taking a bath and a flash of insight appeared and the problem was solved. He jumped out of the bath and rushed to tell the king; the method was to weigh the crown in the water, a thought obviously inspired by the bathtub experience. The flash of insight is a sudden, discontinuous, stochastic process that is an accident, a roll of the dice, or a touch of the Angel. It is unpredictable. But why it happened to Archimedes but not to all other bathers? Obviously the dice the Angel rolls is not an honest but a loaded one. The outcome of a roll of the loaded dice is still not entirely predictable but is comprehensible and even maneuverable. There lies the secret of the professional gamblers. Einstein was known to be against the probabilistic philosophy of the quantum theory. His famous saying is that I do not believe God plays dice. But a loaded dice is not inscrutable and never haphazard. The great world events depend not only on the august will of God (philosophy) but also on the delicate hand of the Angel (history). Philosophy deals with the general, constant, regular, exact, certain, and all-encompassing. History deals with the special, variable, singular, equivocal, flukes, freaks, and once-upon-a-time. It is the interweaving of the two that forms the tapestry of civilization. And the great craftsman of weaving is the consummate genius. This is consonant with the quotes of Kant and Sze-Ma Chien given earlier. It is indeed a delineation of Lao-Tze's Dao as a grand unifier of all contradictions. In this case it is a unification of different qualities into a variation of quantities, a point familiar in dialectics. The difference of philosophy and history, from the mathematical point of view, is just a change of the number of singular points of the analytic system from very few to pretty many. The contrast of consonance to dissonance in music intervals is actually a change of the sound frequency ratio from small integers to large integers. Einstein had no king to rush to report his marvelous discovery. He could only muse over his success in the Swiss Patent Office where he was employed as a clerk. He did confess he suffered a temporary nervous breakdown, a shock comparable to Archimedes' jumping out of the bath to rush to the king. The flash of insight is the neuron activity that closes the missing link and the completion of the jigsaw picture providing a grand panorama that is never seen before which fired a good many neurons in a spectacular fireworks that generated a brain storm that caused him a temporary nervous breakdown. Newton has said he can see far only because he stands on the shoulders of the giants. A genius, by standing on the shoulders of others, can see one step ahead of others, like a human can see a broader view than the chimpanzee. And only one-step ahead, not two. And even that step may be mistaken. Humans run the risk of false prophets and false theories, an extra burden arising out of our newly acquired intelligence. And it requires another genius to correct it; thus history progressed in a zigzag fashion. The two kinds of thinking, the leisurely vacationer's and the probing genius' are two extremes, but simple and uninvolved ones. In between are less dramatic but more involved ones, such as decisions on a career and marriage. The involvement of emotion is obvious which we did not have time to probe. We satisfy ourselves with a peek of Einstein's brain. The broader problems aside, our immediate concern is to learn the biological basis of the genius. He must have much more memories to provide the raw material and much more connections of the memories to weave the grand panorama. In other words he must have more RNA for memory and more dendrites of neurons for connection of the neurons for thinking. This is a point that can be studied by experiments easily, by determining the RNA and dendrite densities of the brain cells (neurons). Einstein's brain has been preserved for scientific research. So far no difference has been found from other brains. Russia has a special institute that has preserved many famous brains, including that of the writer Gorki. So far no difference has been found to indicate the sign of a genius. Actually all we have to do is to compare the brain RNA and dendrite densities of an illiterate with a high school graduate to find the effect of language learning on the brain, and compare the high school graduate to a research professor to find the difference of thinking activity makes on the brain. This kind of experimental work on RNA and dendrite densities can be done by any aspiring high school students who have been belaboring years to compete for the Westinghouse (now Intel) Science Prize and now have a chance to win a Nobel Prize in a few months. On the general problem of the brain, once the history (the threads and connections of the development of the brain) is made clear, the philosophy (the structure and function of the brain) becomes more transparent, and the master key can be recognized readily. The brain is made of ten billion neurons. A mob of one thousand people is hard enough to control. How to manage ten billion? This is the problem of the organization of the brain. The only way to manage such a large number is by a system like the Pentagon, which, at its maximum, manages 100 million soldiers through a rank and file commanding system. This is the only way ten billion neurons can be organized and operated smoothly. Pentagon organization and operation are the master key to the structure and function of the brain. A single neuron in the brain at the end of an affluent nerve receives a sequence of nerve impulses representing a sensory stimulus and recorded them in a RNA tape for memory. This is a single soldier in the brain Pentagon, representing a sensation. A group of sensations organize themselves into a perception which appears as a squad in the Pentagon. Perceptions organize into an idea as a platoon. Ideas organize into a concept as a company. Concepts can be developed into a theorem as a battalion. Theorems can be organized into a theory as a regiment. Theories can be synthesized into a specialized discipline as a brigade. They can be systematized into a science as a division. All sciences can be unified as the unitary science or "The Word" as the army. Then the Pentagon can direct the army to do all the conquest. Needless to say this is an over-simplification. Since the introduction of the ferroelectric memory hardware we have reduced the brain to an inanimate computer and nothing but a computer, and whatever mystery of the brain is now a mystery of the computer that can be swept under the rug of physics, chemistry and biology and taken out of the concern of the Angel. After all, electric engineers have developed all the switches, relays, switching circuits and pattern recognition techniques, sufficient to do all the jobs needed in the brain. What if an experiment should show the ferroelectric mechanism does not work? I do not have the loaded dice of Galileo and Einstein to tease the monkeys to say that the experiment must work but I would be as happy as the boy who received a Christmas gift that is a box of horse manure and exclaimed: with that much horse manure, there must be a pony around! Even though the foundation stone is not firm, the cathedral built upon it will not crumble. It is self-supported by arched roofs, capstones and flying buttresses. At the worst it would be a leaning tower of Pisa and still be a wonder of the world. The story of the brain could have been happily concluded here but for a serendipitous and spectacular appendix: the establishment and the prodigious exploits of the empire of money, which is a creation of the brain. Money is just a piece of paper, its value cannot be analyzed by physics, chemistry and biology, but it is not a ghost. It is a brain product like language and can be analyzed as such. As this brain product is created by the genius with a tough of the Angel, it can bring endless benefits as well as great disaster, such as the Great Depression of the 1930s. What is the value (the essence) of money? I asked this question to Milton Friedman as a student of his money and banker class but his answer did nod satisfy me. I hasten to add that he had answered all my other tough questions in economics and had satisfied me with complete gratification without the slightest qualm. I knew this admirable and yet inconspicuous associate professor will be one day worldly known and it did come to pass ten years later (that was 1960s). From that time on I realized that this thankless problem is one I have to solve all by myself without any help. It is one of the mysteries, like that of the brain, that has dangled before me for decades. In retrospect it is very similar to the brain mystery. Primitive money was a median of exchange just as primitive language is a median of communication. As the fortune of history unfolds, the primitive oral language became an instrument of memory of information in the brain, and the primitive exchange instrument of money became a memory instrument of wealth -- the instrument of saving in the society. Just as the language used as memory helped build the second generation brain computer with all its marvelous exploits, the money used as wealth memory instrument helped build a pseudo brain computer which created a pseudo soul like the monkey brain controlling the monkey life. Even at that stage the pseudo soul is enough to create havoc, such as the Great Depression. But the pseudo soul is still attached to the earthly body and will perish with it. But a great transfiguration has taken place since 1990: The pseudo soul has expiated from the earthly body and has become a free soul, a bona fide ghost, that is detached from the earthly body, having its own free will, can roving around the universe, can do whatever good or mischief as it wishes. It can be an Angel or a Devil. For the first time we are faced with a challenge of developing a science of the ghost something beyond physics, chemistry and biology but has a life and a free will. Yet it is a natural extension of neuroscience. This ghost first appeared as a Devil when it started its odyssey in June 1997 when it descended in Southeast Asia and lifted the curtain of a fantastic melodrama. Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines were devastated. The calamity soon spread to the whole world. By the end of 1998 the world attention was directed to a global economic crisis. In the next spring of 1999 the shocking world crisis disappeared without a trace. The genius of the show Soros declared the crisis is over without a headline. The stock prices of the Four Little Tigers climbed back to pre-crisis levels without being noticed worldwide. As usual good news is always ignored. In the absence of shocking disastrous news, the media has the genius of creating a spectacular revelation to attract attention: The current American economy is the best ever, as if a windfall sent by an Angel from Heaven. It is not a lie: The unemployment is the lowest; the inflation is nearly zero. And the chronic disease of budget deficit has turned into a surplus. What else can one wistfully ask? An icing on the cake is the booming stock market. But is that a harbinger of good fortune or an omen of disaster? The answer to the riddle goes back to the birth of the free-willed ghost of the new economy expiated from the earthly body economic. The first cry of the baby was heard in the new movement called downsizing starting around 1990. To make a long story short, thanks to the personal computer and high technology, companies were able to lay off a large number of workers, white collar as well as blue, stop expansion of production and produce the same products to keep the society going without want, and thus reaping a high profit. But because of downsizing, the large profit generated has no place to go. In the ape stage of the development of the brain, the profit was mainly used for re-investment to speed snowballing of economic growth, which was so impressive that it defeated Marxism, which began its collapse in 1990. Now that the Marxist renegades are swarming under the banner of capitalism (the latest recruit is Vietnam, the last holdout is Cuba), there is no need to flex the muscle of capitalism for expansion. Then what is the use of the profit if not used for reinvestment for expansion? The answer to the problem created by downsizing is to invest the new capital in the capital market (stock, money markets) to produce new capital, which will again be invested in the capital market to do the same (no more reinvestment for production because of downsizing), like rats breeding more rats. For what purpose? Only the rats know! Any way the only thing we know is the increase of the size of this ghost capital (separated from production), the idle capital, the sloshing capital, or technically the short-term investment funds. A byproduct of the triumph of capitalism is the globalization of the capital market. With the active promotion of free economy, the global sloshing capital has coagulated into an organized body and act with a centralized determined free will beyond the national boundary. That is the maturation of the free ghost expiated from the earthly body economic and the beginning of its marvelous pursuits of global conquest. The sloshing capital has been sloshing around the world and found a New Eden in southeast Asia, Thailand, Malaysia, Philippines and Indonesia, the so-called Four Little Tigers. From 1990 to 1996 it has poured in $150 billion a year, building factories, office buildings, apartments, jacking up stock prices and consumer prices--a good, welcomed inflation. To be fair this part of investment did bring better living in the area, giving them a sweet taste of capitalism. But the bitter fruit is yet to come. This New Eden has also attracted a good part of the ghost capital, the international speculative funds, which is essentially a parasite of the global economics system, taking advantage of its institutions and apparatus to fulfill its own needs, like a virus taking advantage of the mechanisms of replication and transcription of a bacterium to produce more virus, eating up the bacterium and leaving it as an empty shell. The speculative capital, led by the new Napoleon, George Soros, crossed the St. Bernard pass of the Alpine and overran northern Italy and later the most of Europe.
This formula of virus attacking bacterium is a sure fire one. After the fall of Thai Baht, fell Malaysia Ringgit, Filipino Peso and Indonesia Rupiah, all down about one third. Malaysia Premier Mahadier characterized Soros as a Devil. His effigy was burned. Soros and the Western establishment retorted that it was the bloated, inflated, mismanaged economy of these nations that invited the robbers with a deep bow. Soros challenged Mahadier for a debate at the Hong Kong meeting of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank at the end of 1997 and the latter declined. The deep bow to invite the robber is one thing; to take anything you see and put in your own pocket is another. That is an ethical issue not to be debated in a meeting, but it is one account to be settled in God's final judgment. Anyway, if the robbers do not sweep everything clean, the bubble economy can still be perpetuated for a while; after all, that is the trick of modern economics until something better is found. As the economy of southeastern Asia collapsed, the sloshing capital quickly fled the area, exacerbating the pain and agony. Here is the bitter fruit: the welcomed Angel became a Devil's accomplice. The remedy of IMF is essentially a punishment of the rogue management, rather than the rogue robbers, thus increase of interest rate, reduce of expansion, which made the crisis worse. The contagion soon spread to South Korea (Fall 1997), Russia (Spring 1998), South America (Fall 1998) and became a full-blown world crisis by the time of the IMF-WB meeting in October, 1998. Debates and accusations abound. World Bank broke with IMF. To the surprise of all, Soros, in an extra-mural lecture sponsored by the Foreign Policy Magazine, attracting more attendance than the regular sessions, remarked that countries have increasingly become slaves to the notion that market is always right and self-correcting, declaring "Right now market fundamentalism is a greater threat to open society than any totalitarianism." Free market economics is based on stable equilibrium, which has an invisible hand to self-correct. But that is only one of three kinds of equilibrium which every high school student should know. The second is unstable equilibrium, notably shown in the banking system, which every fundamentalist knows that it must be controlled. The next is the stock market, which President Roosevelt was the genius who appointed the "fox" Joseph Kennedy (father of JFK) to guard the stock market chicken coop. Then came the money market, which President Clinton did not have the wisdom to appoint the "fox" George Soros to guard the money market chicken coop. Even more elusive and mysterious is the third kind neutral equilibrium which caused the inscrutable stagflation in the 1970s in America and the 10000% inflation in USSR-Russia which reduced the value of one ruble to one kopeck. Soviet President Gorbachov had the wry humor to tell the supreme Soviet meeting that he did not know which of his 50 economists can solve the problem, just as American President Bush did not know which of his 50 body guards is a terrorist and French President Mitterand did not know which of his 50 mistresses has Aides. Economics has indeed become a dismal science. It is interesting to note that in the world turmoil Japan, China and Taiwan's currency and economy were not greatly disturbed. These are the archaic Miser's economies that buried gold underground (in America) and thus are immune to virus attack. China is an outcast of free economy and thus is spared of the ravages of free economy. In between is Hong Kong, admired as the last fortress of free economy but is also a Miser that buried $100 billion of gold in America. As a free economy it is the choice bacterium for virus attack. The first attack happened on Oct. 23, 1997. Hong Kong fended it off by raising interest rate, causing a fall of the stock and real estate prices, with a loss of the total wealth by one-third, certainly an unwelcoming intrusion to the auspicious occasion of returning to the fatherland on July 1, 1997. The third and final attack began on August 4, 1998. It was indeed a battle of Armageddon, a struggle of good against evil. It lasted for 4 weeks and climaxed on August 28. The little David killed the Goliath by a slingshot. The irony is that the Goliath is no other than the good philosopher George Soros. And the slingshot is $16 billion of the Miser's buried gold. And most of all, the free market fundamentalists all over the world, including Greenspan, deplored Hong Kong government's action that broke the holy commandment that Thou shall not intervene the free market. Any medical treatment for a dying patient is an intervention of his natural system. Under a virus attack, strong anti-viral medicine is necessary to save the life first, whatever drastic reactions that may follow. A footnote on Soros. Hong Kong was the Waterloo of Soros. He marshaled $3.6 billion to attack the HK Dollar, lost $1 billion. Hong Kong government made a profit of $1.6 billion serendipitously. Soon after that on Nov. 29, 1998 Soros published a best seller The Crisis of Global Capitalism in 20 languages, expounding the fallacy of free market fundamentalism, emphasizing the intrinsic instability of the financial market, which cannot self-correct and thus must be regulated. But the hedge funds, the financial derivatives,..., have become horses out of the barn and can no longer be corralled. The collapse of the hedge fund Long Term Capital Management at around the same time September 27, 1998 is a good example. A $100 million investment of the managing partners (including 2 Nobel Economics Laureates) can do $90 billion business and the would-be bankruptcy sale loss was estimated to be $1.25 trillion, enough to pull down the Wall Street financial system. Soros was asked how to reconcile his role of the good philosopher with the ruthless financial raider. He said making-money is just his mundane job and his highest pursuit is writing the book and his philanthropic and social services. At any rate he is unquestionably a genius in coining the term market fundamentalist to identify those who stick to the outdated etiquette of a civilization that has gone with the wind by such acts as the valiant charge to the windmill and the debonair genuflect to his lady consort. In early 2000 his fabulous Quantum Fund folded, having lost $5 billion in high tech stocks, the value of which has dropped one-third in a month. So has the other Tiger Fund. He remains high on the multi-billionaire list. Anyway he is the best illustration of the unification of contradictions. This is an epic drama that is full of lessons, inspirations and perspectives, and is a guide to look forward to find out what is in store for us with the much-ballyhooed "best ever economy "we have today. We have no qualm to low unemployment, low inflation, and deficit-turned-to-surplus. But we do have suspicion on the skyrocketing stock price. In the pseudo-soul stage the stock price curve was nearly parallel to the inflation rate curve (except a little steeper as expected) because the two economies are closely related, like a body should have nearly the same temperature throughout. But now one part has a flat curve but the other has a sky-soaring temperature. This is the clear indication that the stock market has become a free ghost, separated from the earthly body and has its own free will. The dismal science has become a schizophrenic science. Before we realize the appearance of the free-will stock market, we thought the stock market suffered an irrational exuberance, as Greenspan admonished, and should be cured by an anti-fever treatment, i.e., by the increase of interest rate. However, the aspirin did not cure the fever of the stock market but upset the stomach of the regular economy. The stock price has almost doubled after that famous admonishment. The stock market phenomenon is a manifestation of the ghost economy which breeds rats after rats, creating a rat peril. The rat peril turned into a fox peril that has devoured all the chickens raised in southeast Asia in 20 years in a few weeks (paraphrasing Mahadier), and has devoured some of themselves LTCM, Quantum, Tiger funds. How do we deal with this ghost in our own stock market, which contains our retirement funds and the outcome is not a mere fairy tale. To be true the ghost is a creation of the mind, or the brain, and is subject to the anatomic scalper of the neuroscience. The schizophrenic personality has its own rationality which is what the psychiatrist wants to find out. As Lao-Tze's disciple Chuan-Tze said: Robbers have their own Dao (morals). Likewise the ghost has its own "Word" and is subject to rational analysis. Sze-Ma Chien's dictum should be expanded: to investigate the interaction of ghost and humans .... We can no longer ignore them as Confucius advised: Pay respect and keep them away. The deterministic and stochastic analysis of the stock market price is shown in the accompanying graph of the stock price history since 1990. The formula may be called the master equation of the ghost economy. The blue smooth curve is the theoretical analysis of the deterministic factors in the three years 1995-1997, (a run-of-the-mill paper in experimental physics), with unpremeditated predictions and forecasting backward to 1990 and forward to 2000 (showing the touches of the Angel).
Bull Market* Master Equation for DJIA * Earnings increase is positive
Formula:
Fractional Change of DJIA (Dow-Jones)/Year = 2.25 multiplied by Net Flow to Mutual Funds (in Billions of $)/Year divided by Price to Earnings Ratio
Red line: Actual Dow Jones Industrial Average Blue Line: Predicted Dow Jones Industrial Average The red experimental curve of the actual stock price followed the blue predicted curve obediently with expected stochastic fluctuations due to the intrinsic instability of the stock market. That is all you need to know to roll the loaded dice in the stock market. Incidentally with a sharp eye you can recognize from the graph the feeble influence of the interest rate on the stock price, contrary to the conventional wisdom, and the futility of the Fed's effort to control inflation by raising interest rate. They ignore the fact of schizophrenia of inflation: one personality is for the stock price and the other is for the consumer product price, both are now separated and no longer greatly affected by interest rate. The graph is the quantitative demonstration that the driving force of the stock market is the large amount of sloshing capital dumped into the stock market. A small fraction 10% is from foreigners, 40% from corporations through buy back, buy out and merger, and the large 50% from individual investors, one-half from their share of the sloshing fund and the other half from their savings for retirement. The total of 401K accounts has mushroomed to $1 trillion. It is the consensus of the stockbrokers that the horrendous flow of money into the market is largely from the baby boomers seeking an egg nest for retirement. In doing so they have forfeited their rights of their savings for future consumption and throw their fortune into the inscrutable whirlpool of stock market. If the stock market crashes, they have nothing left, not even their right for relief. They can only blame themselves. Their unbounded enthusiasm surprised all stockbrokers. They did not have the bitter experience of the Great Depression but only have the sweet taste after 1960 and believe stocks will always go up ever and ever. It was the baby boomers that saved the stock market crash of Black Monday, Oct. 27, 1997 with a drop of DJIA by 554 points. They did not redeem their mutual fund shares and the market rebounded 337 points the next day. This prevailing euphemism led to a new school of thought on the New Economics, contending that the old rule of judgment is outdated and the high stock price is justified, not a bubble sooner or later will burst, and may seem to continue for a long time. As the Devil's advocate I venture to prove that this view could be right mathematically, under one condition, that is, the population will expand indefinitely. Then the pyramid game of the ghost economy can be extended in time to infinity, and the time of burst of the bubble can be pushed back to infinity, that is, it will never burst. Sadly, the earth is finite and cannot be made to expand even a tiny bit. Thus a time of reckoning will eventually come, at which the bubble will burst. It does not need a demographic expert to figure out when. It is not a philosophical problem but a historical issue. The baby boomer is not a secular trend, it is a temporary blip of the population curve and the wave is moving upward fast. In 10 years they will begin to retire. They will change from buyers to sellers of stocks to support life in retirement. The driving force of the bull market will be lost. The sky-soaring curve of the stock price in the graph will turn downward. Once turned down, an avalanche will follow and the over-inflated bubble will finally burst. The stock market will crash by 50%. In previous discussions I carefully excluded retirement savings from re-investment and counted it as future consumption. By investing the retirement wealth in stock market, it has been taken out of the earthly economy as future consumption and become mixed and absorbed as a part of the ghost economy. And the soul is sold to the Devil. One may wonder wealth is matter which obey the laws of conservation. How can it disappear without a trace? This is a tricky point of the interaction of ghost and humans. When a baby boomer buys an extremely high priced stock, there must be a seller who sold that stock and reaps the high profit and that goes into the pocket of the stock speculator as a windfall and spend as a windfall in department stores, restaurants, travels, luxury cars, in an economy that is non-productive and wasteful which may be call the fourth meal economy. And the fourth meal economy, superfluous and extravagant, is the basis of the current "best ever economy," sustained by eating the seed corn of the baby boomers' sweat earnings for retirement, which is squandered in the lavish spending as a windfall by the stock speculators. The granary is empty. The newly created jobs are in the retail, service sectors, which are $5 an hour menial jobs to replace the $20 an hour industrial jobs. This explains the full employment and the prosperity. The low inflation rate of CPI is largely due to the low labor cost of the under-developed nations, thanks to the globalization of the ghost capital, not due to intrinsic economic strength. It is a debt eventually will be paid in the future. This is the truth of the "best ever economy."
As a harbinger, the unruly demonstrators of the odds and ends fringe groups protesting in the Seattle World Trade Organization meeting and in the recent Washington international meeting would swell into a torrent. If American democracy fails, how do we redeem our promises to the Marxist renegades reorganized under the banner of Americanism? This is an appropriate homework problem to conclude this study of the brain. Books by Peter Fong: Brain, Memory, Language, Thinking, Genius, Money Greenhouse Warming, Nuclear Hazards, and the Future of America The Unification of Science and Humanity: Agony and Ecstasy East of Eden
|
|
