Deviate, page 6
Echolocators like Ben Underwood (there are a growing number, with training seminars occurring around the world) build meaning through what does and doesn’t work, but really they are no different from you or me or anyone else. Just like the rest of us, echolocators aren’t able to perceive reality accurately. Instead, they perceive it usefully (or not).
We all have experiential realities that form our brains, so we’re really all just kittens pawing at a perceptual past that allows us to make sense of the present. Each and every one of us has the same two choices: to engage hungrily with our world… or not. This is because we are adapted to adapt in order to continually redefine normality.
Adapting is what our species (and all other species) has been doing since day one. Our brain simply looks for ways to help us survive, some banal (find food, eat it), others wildly innovative (use your ears to see). This is why active engagement is so important: it taps into a neurological resource that is core to you and your biology, and thus can lead to innovations in perception that have a physical basis in the brain, if you know how to exploit it. Such hands-on experimentation is the cutting edge of neural engineering.
For nearly a decade, the Magnetic Perception Group, a research initiative at the University of Osnabrück, Germany, has been studying “the integration of new sensory modalities using a novel sensory augmentation device that projects the direction of the magnetic north on the wearer’s waist,” as the group describes it on their website. While this may perhaps sound like a veiled product blurb for a newfangled sex toy, it absolutely isn’t (at least not yet, as “vibrotactile stimulation” is indeed involved). It is a description of the feelSpace belt, an experimental device expanding the frontier of human perception and behavior.
The belt is rigged with a compass set to vibrate toward earth’s magnetic north, giving the wearer an enhanced sense of sorts, and an opportunity for adaption. (Remember how birds use magnetic fields to navigate? The belt is like being given this avian power.) For their most recent study, published in 2014, the Group had participants wear the feelSpace belt for every entire waking day over the course of seven weeks.17 This meant they wore it while out walking, working, driving, eating, hiking, spending time with friends and family—in short, during daily life, though they were allowed to remove it during extended periods of static sitting. The goal was to study sensorimotor contingencies, a theoretical set of laws governing actions and the related sensory inputs. “I was a subject in one of the first studies,” says Peter König, the head of the Magnetic Perception Group in Osnabrück, “and for me it was [a] very playful time.”18
The results of the feelSpace studies conducted by König and his team offer an exclamation point supporting the innate adaptability of the brain. The people who wore the belt experienced dramatic changes in their spatial perception. They developed a heightened sense of cardinal directions and an improved “global ego-centric orientation” (knowledge of where they were). But for a more vivid sense of what wearing the belt was like, it’s best just to read the accounts of the participants, which are both concrete and poetic: “The information from the belt refines my own mental map. There are for instance places where I thought to know where north is and the belt gave me another picture.”… “Now that my maps have all been newly realigned, the range of the maps has been much increased. From here I can point home—300 km—and I can imagine—not only in 2D bird’s eye perspective—how the motorways wind through the landscape.”… “Space has become wider and deeper. Through the presence of objects/landmarks that are not visually apparent, my perception of space extends beyond my visual space. Previously, this was a cognitive construction. Now I can feel it.”… “It happens more and more often that I know about the relations of rooms and locations to each other, of which I was not previously aware.”… “In a lot of places, north has become a feature of the place itself.”
In addition to spatial perception, the participants’ navigation style and performance also changed. Again, their experiences speak for themselves: “I am literally less disoriented.”… “Today I stepped out of the train and I immediately knew where I have to go.”… “With the belt one does not have to always care so much whether there is a turn (in the way you go), one simply feels it without much thinking!” Quite interestingly, there were even “belt-induced feelings and emotions” as well (the non-belt control participants rarely ever mentioned emotions): joy of use, curiosity, and security (mirrored by insecurity without the belt), though also plenty of irritation with the device itself, which is very understandable considering that it’s a foreign object vibrating on your waist all the time. Yet in spite of these transporting accounts by the experiment participants, König explains that verbalizing their experience was very challenging, often leading to contradictions, as if the words to describe it didn’t exist. “My conjecture,” König says, “is that if you go to a secluded little village in the Alps and equip all one hundred inhabitants with a belt they will modify their language. I’m pretty positive about that.”
The feelSpace belt has the potential to have meaningful real-world applications. It could be used to help people navigate disorienting landscapes (deserts, Mars), and it could help the blind better navigate their environment (in lieu of echolocation). But the big-picture takeaways from the belt are more exciting than anything else, since they are an example of the applied viability of seeing differently. I don’t mean this in the futurist, transhumanist sense that fifty years from now we’ll all be wearing feelSpace belts and other body modifications that will make us proto-superhumans. I’m excited for what the feelSpace belt says about what you and I can do without the belt right now.
The work of König and his team shows that we can augment our perception and thus our behavior by “playing” with the contingencies of our brain’s neural model.19 For this to happen, it means that physiologically the participants’ brains changed—in less than two months. They engaged with the world in a new way and created a new history of interpreting information. As König puts it, “Your brain is big enough that you can learn anything. You can learn sense six, seven, eight, nine, and ten. The only limitation is the time to train the senses. But in principle your capabilities aren’t limited.” Does the belt have any lasting effect after it has been taken off ? “The memory of how it felt, the perception, is abstract,” König says, laughing at how this question always arises. “But I feel that my type of navigation has changed. Some small effect remains. It’s hard to quantify, but there is a permanent effect. For a public exhibition I was wearing the belt again after a break of two years and it was like meeting with an old friend and you’re chatting at a high speed in order to catch up. So some structures remain, even if they’re not permanent, and can be easily reactivated.”
During their time wearing (and perceiving with) the feelSpace belt, people still didn’t have access to reality, but they easily adapted to a new way of making meaning. All they were doing was only what humans have always done: make sense of their senses. But you don’t need a laboratory-designed belt or other apparatus to do this. Your own daily life, personal and professional, provides abundant opportunities for meaning-making. We have the process of evolution in our heads.
We are products and mirrors and creators of evolution as evolution evolved to evolve (called evolvability), like a book written by evolution that is also about evolution. As such, our brain is a physical manifestation of that ecological history, yet not only our cumulative human history. We also share a past with the living things around us, since each one has had to evolve in the same environment in which we evolved, while at the same time forming part of that environment in which we are evolving… and in doing so, transforming it. Birds, dolphins, lions; we’re all just brains in bodies and bodies in the world with one goal and one goal only: to survive (and in the case of modern-day humans, flourish!). Here’s the thing: survival (and flourishing) requires innovation.
We evolved to continually redefine normality. We have mechanisms of adapting that are all doing the same thing, just with different timeframes for trial and error. Evolution is one, and it is the lengthiest frame, a kind of long-distance runner of adaptability/transformation covering an enormous span in which some species disappear while others flourish.
The characteristics of fish at different depths in the ocean illustrate evolution at work in the nonhuman realm. Fish in the deep sea inhabit an environment with no light, surviving in a landscape of darkness in which the only source of illumination they encounter is bioluminescence (light emitted by creatures that have evolved lamp-like qualities). Fish at this depth have only one receptor for light, since evolutionary innovation… or any type of innovation for that matter… doesn’t just mean gaining useful new attributes but shedding useless ones as well, like having more light receptors than is necessary. But the higher you get in the ocean, and the closer to the surface where sunlight penetrates, the more visual receptors the fish have, with an orientation toward blue. Right near the top is where you get the most complex vision, and this is naturally where our old friend the stereophonic-eyed stomatopod lives… in the shallows. The neural system reflects gradual, advantageous adaptation.
The complexity of the ecology is matched by the complexity of the sensing apparatus.
If evolution is long-term trial and error, then what are the other timeframes? Think about the feelSpace belt and countless other perceptual activities of varying intensities—for example, getting the hang of Angry Birds, driving a car, or becoming a wine connoisseur. Gaining skill in such activities demonstrates how the brain is adapted to adapt, but along the shortest timeframe. This is learning.
You learn minute-to-minute and even second-to-second how to do something, and in doing so you build a short-term individual past of what works and doesn’t work. Yet this brief history has the potential to change your brain, since it clearly influences outcomes from your behavior (how good were you the first time you played Angry Birds and how good are you now?). More dramatic physiological changes, however, occur during another timeframe, one in which growth periods play a key role: development.
The kittens in Held and Hein’s famous Kitten in a Basket experiment were in a highly developmental stage in their lives, which is why their ability or inability to adapt produced such a powerful contrast. But developmental changes in the brain don’t just occur in formative early periods; there are other “critical periods” too, and in fact certain regions of the cortex can change throughout your life. For example, it has been shown that speaking two languages on a daily basis can delay the onset of dementia.20 As a researcher of neural development, it’s clear to me that development takes place over the course of a lifetime.
The work of the neurobiologist Dale Purves is a case in point. Dale is a brilliant scientist who has positively impacted neuroscience for decades (and who I’m fortunate enough to call a true mentor in both work and life). He started one of the world’s most important neurobiology departments (at Duke University) and was the director of Duke University’s Center for Cognitive Science. His work examines adaptive malleability along the development timeframe with regard to not only our brains but also our muscles. Much of his earlier research explores the neuromuscular junction, the meet-up point for the nervous system and the muscle system. One of Purves’s breakthroughs was showing that this junction is in essence a sort of crowded dating game for muscle cells and nerve cells, in which the muscle cells that don’t find a nerve cell to pair up with get shown the door. What’s happening on a less tongue-in-cheek, metaphorical level is this: Creating the mechanics of your body is such a massively complex biological undertaking, with so much genetic information to encode, that your brain can’t know where to place every cell, much less the connections between them. So it takes a practical approach and says, “Alright, we kind of know we want nerves to go to that muscle, and other nerves to that other muscle, but we can’t know exactly how it’s going to all play out. What we’ll do is we just make a bunch of muscles and a bunch of nerves and let them innervate (i.e., supply the muscles with nerves). There’ll be lots of extras but, hey, they’ll figure it out.”21
The neuromuscular junction indeed does figure out what to do with the redundant nerve-muscle cells. Since there are too many, they auto-select and prune each other, the body creating competition for the “neurotrophic factors,” the proteins responsible for the nurture and upkeep of neurons. The goal is to have one nerve cell for one muscle activity, so the muscles select by saying, “OK, I’m going to create enough food for only one of you, and the one that gets it is the one that’s going to stay active.” Or, to bring it back to the singles game, if you miss your one chance to find a mate, then you’re gone. This is, of course, very similar to the deep-sea fish eliminating excess light receptors, the muscle-nerve cell pruning acting like a sped-up, localized microcosm of evolution. Once they have been pruned to a single nerve cell innervating a single muscle fiber, then another essential process happens: growth. The single nerve fiber starts branching, creating more and more connections along the same muscle cell. The more active it is, the more branches it makes, enabling finer and finer control of the muscle cell that it innervates.
Purves’s research on the neuromuscular junction has been instrumental in my own work, as well as that of many others, because it made me ask myself if a process similar to the one that takes place at the neuromuscular junction takes place inside the brain too. Could a similar protocol of auto-selection and pruning… followed by activity-dependent growth… govern the central nervous system, the command post from which we do our thinking? I centered my research on studying the cortex and thalamus in mice during a late embryonic stage, and discovered that the answer was an emphatic… yes.
The cerebral cortex is the outer part of the brain where our “gray matter” is located. It is the place where our senses and motor abilities meet, containing the brain tissues that allow us to have consciousness. In mice it is also what allows them to “think,” just on a scale different from that of humans (and in some instances actually at the same scale, and even at a higher scale when it comes to olfaction and certain other abilities). The thalamus is a deeper aggregation of cells in the middle of the brain straddling the two cerebral hemispheres, and it plays an integral role in sensory perception, serving as an extremely assiduous executive assistant to the high-powered CEO that is the cortex. What David Price and I discovered in my in vitro experiments with mice, however, revealed that this relationship is actually much more important. The cortex and the thalamus represent one of the less common phenomena inside the brain: a love story.
My goal was to study the mechanisms of brain plasticity, so I removed cells from both the cortex and the thalamus. I found that in early development, the cells could survive in isolation, since the relationship between the two still wasn’t firmly established or important… they hadn’t yet gotten to know each other. This is because they actually hadn’t formed interconnections. But later, further on in development, when I separated the cells from the two after they had connected, this caused heartbreak: in isolation, both the cells from the cortex and the cells from the thalamus withered and died.
From early development to late development, the cortical cells and thalamic cells had adapted to each other and had, in essence, “fallen in love” and so could no longer live without the other (like a lot of real-life relationships, some functional, some not). What’s even more fascinating is that their codependence begins at exactly the same time that they would have formed connections. Thus, when I removed thalamic cells three days before they would meet a cortical cell, and kept them in isolation, three days later they would start dying unless I starting adding growth factors released by the cortex, a substance required for cell growth. In other words, their “love” is fated. This means their relationship changes as development progresses, and these two parts of the brain become codependent and extremely social, each relying on the other to bathe it with growth factors. So if Purves’s work showed that the neuromuscular junction is a no-frills matchmaker, the cortex and the thalamus demonstrate the neural equivalent of all-consuming, can’t-live-without-you love.22
Now we know that the timeframes for neurological adaptability are as follows: short term (learning), medium term (development), and long term (evolution). All three offer opportunities for adaption of perception through the shaping and reshaping of the network that underpins behavior, which is a fundamental principle that unites all three and opens the way toward seeing differently: Minds match their ecology!
Ecology simply means the interactive relationship between things and the physical space in which they exist. It’s a way of saying environment that better captures the fluid, inextricably connected nature of the things that occupy it. Since our ecology determines how we adapt and, in adapting, innovate; and since adapting means our brains physically change, the logical conclusion is that your ecology actually shapes your brain (and that your reshaped brain results in a change in behaviors that in turn shape your environment). It creates an empirical history of trial and error that molds the functional architecture of your cerebral tissues, and your neural tissue molds the world around it through the physical interaction of your body. You and all your subsequent perceptions are a direct, physiological manifestation of your past perceptual meanings, and your past is largely your interaction with your environment, and thus your ecology. It is precisely because… and not in spite… of the fact that you don’t see reality that you are able to so fluidly adapt and change. Sit with this idea: Not seeing reality is essential to our ability to adapt.
