Brain science of the mind

Abstract

The human cerebral cortex contains more than one hundred billion neurons and 1014 synapses. Even without regard to the size of the genome, it can be easily deduced that a deterministic blueprint for connectivity of such an enormous number of networks is unrealistic. Existing scientific knowledge indicates that nature utilizes principal rules instead of complete deterministic descriptions to fashion a desired structure, namely, the rules of self-organization. The brain is a complex system and self-organizes based on the Markovian process. Accordingly, brain functionality can be seen as specific patterns created by self-organizing processes based on conditions defined by genes and the environment. Three categorically different systems are now recognized based on their physiological functional unit configuration. While the oldest system is made up of deterministic connectivity, the remaining two systems, namely, cerebellum and cerebrum, utilize modifiable units, often referred to as cerebellar chip and brain chip, respectively. Classical conditioning, as in the case of Pavlov’s dog, is now recognized to be based on functionality of the cerebellum and its learning unit, the cerebellar chip, which in principle works as McCulloch-Pitts neurons. The cerebrum utilizes the concept of Kohonen’s non-linear self-organizing map in the organization of the brain chip, a system that effectively creates entropy fields. In contrast to cerebellar learning which is adaptive, cerebral learning is stochastic in nature, and follows the rule known as Pólya’s Urn.