I Got to Thinking About Eating
Now, before you start waving a neuroscience degree at me, I know perfectly well that a brain cell does not sit down to a plate of fried chicken, biscuits and gravy and then loosen its belt a notch. But I’m trying to understand something, and when I don’t understand something I generally start by comparing it with something I do understand. At eighty-four, eating qualifies.
Let’s say you’re feeding your hogs. Well, they’re gonna grow. Feed them more than they need and, depending upon the hog and what you’re feeding them, you may wind up with considerably more hog than you intended. Keep feeding them and the evidence eventually becomes pretty hard to overlook.
Muscles work something like that too, although you have to make the poor things do some work before supper. Exercise a particular group of muscles over and over and the body responds to what you keep asking those muscles to do. You don’t just become generically stronger. The pattern of the exercise helps determine what develops.
That got me wondering about the stuff between my ears.
I have been calling what happens there feeding, mostly because I don’t know what else to call it without climbing into terminology that belongs to people who know considerably more about brains than I do. I know neurons don’t eat experiences. I also know that repeated experience can strengthen some of the machinery involved in learning and memory. So for the moment I’m going to call that feeding, and the neuroscientists can come straighten me out after I’ve finished thinking.
Because I’ve got another hog to feed.
What Happens If You Throw Everything in the Same Trough?
Suppose your brain is full of elements capable of becoming parts of patterns. I don’t know whether one of my “elements” is a neuron, a bunch of neurons, a connection among them, or something else entirely. That’s above my pay grade, and I haven’t been receiving a paycheck anyway.
But let’s suppose an experience of yours activates some of them. Another experience activates others. Things you encounter repeatedly keep activating certain bunches, and over time some relationships become easier to activate than others.
If you spend forty years doing accounting, for example, accounting is going to feed a lot of the same mental livestock. You see balance sheets, tax returns, payrolls, businesses, numbers and problems that have certain relationships. After enough repetition, you ought to get pretty good at seeing those relationships. Otherwise you should probably find another line of work.
But suppose the accountant also spent time in restaurants. And radio. And banking. And farming. And franchising. And advertising. Suppose he fooled around with machinery, tried to invent things and spent most of his life sticking his nose into places where nobody had invited it.
Now something peculiar can happen.
A problem walks in through the accounting door, but there are a whole bunch of other critters already loose in the barn.
The accounting problem may stir up something learned in a restaurant. That may bump into something remembered from banking. Something mechanical may wake up from a forty-year nap and stick its head over the stall. None of those things were put into the brain for the purpose of solving today’s problem, and most of the resulting combinations probably aren’t worth a bucket of warm spit.
But one of them might be.
Maybe We’ve Been Looking at the Wrong Thing
This is where I think I’ve been trying to explain my thought backward.
I’ve talked about memories and ideas as though they were things stored in the brain. Somewhere up there is a memory about Molly, our mule. Over yonder is the restaurant memory. Down behind my left ear somebody has apparently misplaced several years of commercial lending.
But some recent neuroscience made me wonder whether that picture is too tidy. Researchers studying memory formation found that different groups of neurons were recruited during different portions of an experience, and those different groups could contribute later when the memory was expressed.
That doesn’t prove what I’m talking about. Not by a country mile. Those researchers weren’t testing the Old Git’s hog-feeding theory, and I’m not about to crawl under their laboratory fence and steal their cows.
But their work does give me reason to ask whether what we call a memory might sometimes be better thought of as a pattern involving different elements rather than one complete object sitting on a shelf waiting to be retrieved.
If that’s so, then maybe the pattern is what matters.
And if the pattern is what matters, the next question becomes considerably more interesting: Do all the elements forming a new pattern have to come from the same place?
I can’t see why they necessarily would.
There Are Too Many Damn Possibilities
Now we’ve got ourselves in trouble.
If a brain contains an enormous number of elements that can participate in different patterns, and experiences from all over creation keep activating different ones, the number of possible arrangements ought to get ridiculous pretty quickly.
You can’t have every cow on the farm breeding with every other cow, the hogs joining in, three chickens contributing suggestions and the tractor trying to mount the hay baler. Somewhere there have to be rules.
That’s where I keep coming back to probability.
I don’t mean there is a little fellow sitting inside your skull with a calculator figuring the odds. I’m thinking of probability as something more like the strength in a muscle. Exercise a muscle over and over and it gets stronger. When you need it again, that muscle is more likely to do the work simply because you’ve spent years building it up. Maybe connections among the elements in our brains work something like that. The ones that have been fed and exercised over and over become stronger, and their strength makes them more likely to participate when the next pattern starts forming.
So maybe strength is what the past has built, while probability is the advantage that strength gives it in whatever happens next. A connection you’ve exercised ten thousand times ought to have a better chance of joining the next pattern than some scrawny little thing that hasn’t been out from behind the barn since Truman was president.
But that can’t be the whole story. If the strongest connections always won, we’d keep making the same patterns forever. Repetition may matter. Timing probably matters. Attention may matter. Emotion may matter. And whether a new arrangement actually accomplishes anything ought to matter quite a bit. Somehow, something unfamiliar occasionally gets enough of a foothold to compete with all those well-fed old connections.
Most of those possibilities must go nowhere. They have to. Something has to keep most of the possible combinations from becoming consequential, because otherwise we’d all be wandering around with twelve million unrelated thoughts hollering at us at once.
Whatever does that may be part of what keeps us sane. But the strengths we’ve built over a lifetime also change the odds of what will happen when the next thing comes wandering through the gate, and that may be part of what makes each of us different.
Maybe We Start Growing Our Own Pasture Early
Suppose a child gets interested in something. Maybe it’s machinery. Maybe it’s people. Maybe it’s numbers, animals, music, baseball cards or taking the clock apart to find out why the damned thing ticks.
That interest causes the child to pay attention to certain things. Paying attention feeds those patterns. Stronger patterns make related things easier to notice. Those new encounters feed the patterns again, and pretty soon we’ve got ourselves a little circular operation going.
The developing pattern helps determine what gets noticed, and what gets noticed strengthens the developing pattern.
That child isn’t merely accumulating facts. He may be changing the odds of what his mind will notice and connect next.
Now put two children in front of the same tractor. One sees a machine and wants to know how the power gets from the engine to the wheels. The other notices Granddaddy driving it and wonders why Granddaddy lets Billy drive but won’t let him. A third may be fascinated by the sound. A fourth is trying to catch the grasshopper beside the rear tire.
Same tractor. Same field. Four different feedings.
Give that process fifty years and you don’t merely have four people who know different things. You may have four minds with very different well-worn paths through them.
That sounds a lot like specialization to me.
Then Along Comes a Stray Cow
But now suppose our specialist gets fed something that doesn’t belong in his usual pasture.
This is the part that has me scratching my head.
Similar experience keeps exercising the established patterns. That’s useful. That’s how somebody gets good enough at something that you want him doing it instead of me. If I need brain surgery, I want the fellow who has spent a ridiculous number of years specializing in brains. I don’t particularly care whether he has recently broadened himself with macramé.
But what if, every once in a while, something from outside his specialty gets in?
A dissimilar experience activates elements that aren’t usually active alongside his established pattern. For a moment, things from different parts of the farm are standing at the same fence. Most of them won’t do anything. They’ll sniff one another and wander off.
But every once in a while, maybe something connects.
If that connection survives, gets used, proves useful and gets fed again, then perhaps the old pattern has changed. The specialist hasn’t stopped being a specialist. His established pattern may actually be what made the new relationship useful in the first place.
But now there’s something in his pasture that wasn’t there yesterday.
Maybe That’s Where Some Ideas Come From
I don’t know whether any of this is right. That’s important enough to say plainly.
I’m a country bumpkin trying to make sense of something scientists study with equipment I couldn’t turn on, much less understand. I’m using hogs, muscles, pastures and stray cows to think about neurons, memory, activation, learning and patterns. Somewhere a neuroscientist may already be clutching his chest.
But the picture lets me ask a question I couldn’t quite ask before.
Maybe specialization and creativity aren’t opposite things at all.
Maybe specialization develops when certain patterns are fed repeatedly until they become strong and influential. And maybe some new ideas occur when that established pattern encounters elements fed from somewhere completely different.
If that’s even approximately right, then having unrelated experiences may matter for a reason considerably more interesting than “variety is good for you.” Those experiences could put things into the same mental pasture that ordinarily would never have met.
Most won’t amount to anything. Some will produce nonsense. A few might produce something nobody deliberately put there.
So take whatever you’re particularly good at, young’un. You’ve probably been feeding it for years. You’ve exercised certain mental muscles until they know their business, and that’s probably one reason you’re good at what you do.
Now here’s the question this old country boy can’t get out of his head:
When was the last time you threw something completely unfamiliar over the fence and let it wander around in there?
Because you never know what the damned thing might bump into.