

### THE PUPPET SHOW

HOW ORGANISMS DANCE TO THE TUNE OF OUR ENVIRONMENT

Dr. Rajkumar Chetty MD FRCPath

Copyright © 2017 Dr. Rajkumar Chetty MD FRCPath

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CONTENTS

Introduction

1. Celestial Events Tell Us When To Do What We Do

2. The Hardware Of Behavior

3. The Software Of Behaviors

4. Keeping The Brain Fit To Receive Commands

5. Interpreting The Signals Right

6. Is Civilization Just A Herd Behavior?

7. Coupled Oscillators: A Possible Basis For Herd

8. Are We Biological Robots Controlled By Nature?

9. The Purpose Behind The Puppet Show

INTRODUCTION

We are puppets dancing to signals all around us. But we do not want to see it this way. Or we have concluded that it is non-scientific to think about it that way.

We use the catchy expressions like free will or adaptation to explain the way systems behave. It is just not us humans but every single living entity in our planet that is subjected to this game. There are strings all around tying us down to limited, boringly predictable and non-negotiable ways of working. It is one hell of a puppet show. It will be unfair to think of only human beings as puppets. Every single life system comes under this net.

We humans generally like to think that we are the masters of the universe. We love to imagine that we have tamed the environment to our benefit which no other organism could manage. To me it all looks the opposite. We are the ones who adapt to the environment and not the other way around. The same can be said of all other life systems as well. Every single life form on the planet responds to the environmental input with an immediate response (where we call is a behavior) or a late response (where we call it as evolutionary adaptation). We have coined the term 'evolution' or 'adaptation' to denote this delayed response but I do not think the full story is told here because we have no clue at what level this response is computed by the concerned life system. Whether it is a quick or a delayed response it hardly matters to dispel the uncomfortable impression of obedience that an average mind can deduce from the show.

What is intriguing is the cause-effect relationship in the organism - environment interactions. The real question I am asking is: who is the causer and who is the effector? You may ask - does it really matter? What difference does it make? To me the difference is the same as being a puppet or a puppeteer.

Animal behaviors have been studied extensively by biologists all around the world. They are the subject of biology text books as well as countless TV documentaries from the Discovery and National Geographic Channels. To me an animal behavior is a result of a necessity mandated by the environment. Innumerable variations in behavioral manifestations of life forms may point to some degree of freedom in the way biological tasks can be achieved by various life forms but there is always an underlying element of coercion, uniformity and predictability. You always see a life system change and adapt to its environment but you hardly see any environment change as a result of the life systems. It is a top-down approach. It is a one-way affair.

Coercive influences exerted by the environment on the life systems elicit short-term and long-term outcomes. Short-term manifestations are called as behaviors and long-term ones as evolution. The word 'coercion' may be viewed as utter non-sense by the academics and even by a significant proportion of the non-academics. It is so much better, easier and more convenient for us to look at environmental influences as a passive force. The activities induced by this passive force unfold in the form of all the extraordinary animal behaviors that we see. The final outcome is either death or survival for the individual life forms that come within the target range. The range of the target can be at the scale of the planetary level, or even the universal level, for influences like sunlight or gravitation both of which play big roles on living systems. But for other influences they may be having a very local effect.

The planet is a multi-component complex system. The dynamics of interactions between entities determine the net outcome. Every single component of the complex system is under the influence of the other components either through a direct interaction or an indirect one through intermediaries in between.

I suppose the nature of any complex system, wherein multiple types of dissimilar units come to interact, the final outcome will be determined by the random nature of these interactions. Though appearing to be random, and despite the fact that the constituent units are different and diverse in any given complex system, the dynamics of a complex system always leads to predictable, self-similar, scale-invariant and goal-oriented outcomes. This is a fact and every complex system researcher knows this. Though the dynamics of multiple unit interactions happens in a random manner there has to be some degree of constraint somewhere within a complex system that eventually results in enforced predictable behavior. Otherwise the final outcomes would neither be predictable nor similar. Given the fact that we do see predictability and purpose-orientation this assumes, not unreasonably, that there are constraining, coercive influences that emerge within a complex system that presumably direct the puppet-like behavior. It is simply the way nature works when it comes to complex systems. Dynamics of a complex system introduces the non-negotiable traits in the behavior of constituent units while still allowing a certain degree of freedom.

The puppet show is all part of the complex system dynamics. It unveils beautifully in the form of multitudes of behaviors exhibited by living and non-living systems. Simple rules of interactions between diverse components transform strangely into a grand puppet show.

# CHAPTER 1

### CELESTIAL EVENTS TELL US WHEN TO DO WHAT WE DO

Our environment is largely predictable. There are many regular, cyclic, geophysical events happening around us. Our planet revolves around its own axis once every day and it revolves around the Sun once every year. The moon revolves around the earth once every month. The principles of celestial mechanics imposes cyclical changes in the earth's environment like dawn and dusk, annual seasons like winter, summer, autumn and spring, high and low tides, new moon and full moon etc.

The cyclical environmental events are like clocks. Plants and animals have learnt to synchronize their activities with these cyclical events, possibly due to the advantages this scheme has to offer. It is perhaps much better this way because you are able to know when to do what.

Animal behaviors are initiated by sensory stimuli. Life systems are not 'mirrors' that reflect away the incident stimuli. They are, instead, like sponges ever ready to absorb the signals. They look out for cues from the environment to know when to initiate specific behaviors. On close scrutiny, it looks like the physical world could be playing a profound role on all animal behaviors on the planet. This chapter will show how animal behaviors are synchronized to physical cues from the environment raising fundamental questions on free will in the short-term and evolutionary adaptations in the long-term.

Most animal behaviors are rhythmic. They are known as biological rhythms. The most pervasive of them is the circadian rhythm. This is a Latin word for 'About a day'. This means the behavior occurs on a 24-hour cyclical rhythm coinciding with the daily cycles of day and night. There are some biological rhythms called circa-tidal rhythms coinciding with the high and low tides of the ocean. The weekly and monthly rhythms are known as circa-septan and circa-trigintan rhythms, respectively. Yearly rhythms are known as circa-annual rhythms.

When you know that an event will happen for sure at some particular time point, it is easy to have that as a sort of reference point. We can do things correlated to the time of occurrence of the reference event. I can recall the memories of the days we lived in a small town called Kancheepuram in South India. There was a textile mill in the area we lived. A siren would be blown every day at exactly 12 noon in the textile mill. This could be heard over a radius of a few miles, I guess. This siren was actually meant for indicating lunch break for the staff of the textile mill. Yet, people living in that area had come to use it for timing their activities too. Housewives, including my mother, would hurry up with their cooking on hearing the siren because their husbands and children would be home for lunch in a short time!

The siren obviously has no causal connection with my family. But it was a recurrent oscillator which had come to be used as a reference event by us and others. This is what I mean by coupling of oscillators. I will discuss this in a later chapter.

If you look at our own lives, you would realize how much our wrist watches and calendars shape our lives. The monthly salary is another entraining event in our society. Our social lives revolve around this happening. Annual events like vacations, Christmas can also entrain a lot of social activities like visiting relatives, and friends, buying presents etc. Retired people living alone may spend the whole year in anticipation of annual visits of their children and grandchildren.

Cells of organisms can also be entrained by a number of environmental happenings. Solar, lunar, tidal, and even stellar cycles can strongly influence species-specific biological rhythms such as feeding, migration, and reproduction. Such environmental stimuli can alter the period, amplitude or phase characteristics of a biological rhythm. The 24-hour periodicity in the physical and biological components of our environment has led to the evolution of temporal programs in organisms.

Chronobiology is a branch of biology where one studies the relationships between an organism's behavior and its time of occurrence. Birds migrate from one place to another during a particular season. The Crocus blossom signals the arrival of spring. Leaves of certain trees turn bright yellow, orange or red as winter approaches. Nocturnal animals come out in search of their prey only in the nights. Why do the organisms exhibit these behaviors at precisely the same time every day and every season?

Light is the most important physical cue offered by the environment to the organisms. The rising and setting of the sun, and the difference in duration of light exposure per day during different seasons, determine almost all behaviors on our planet. Obviously, there is no causal link between light and biological behaviors such as aggression, feeding and reproduction. Light only helps in synchronizing these behaviors to specific time points.

Our environment can be categorized into a physical component, due to geophysical events, and a biological component due to activities of other organisms. Light is the cue from the physical component while smell, sound, touch and taste are the stimuli from the biological component.

Organismal behaviors and celestial events are independent oscillators. They occur at their own frequency in a recurrent manner, like how a pendulum oscillates. In fact, the name oscillator derives from the way a pendulum oscillates cyclically. The curiosity here is why these independent oscillators end up occurring in a synchronized manner. Why should the oscillating organismal behaviors couple with oscillating celestial events?

This coupling of oscillators is the basis of emergent behaviors in complex systems. A complex system, consisting of dissimilar units, is able to pulsate as one entity with a common motif, because the individual unit behaviors are coupled to each other.

It now becomes necessary to explain how light can initiate biological behaviors. We need to have an interface that will transduce the light signals. What is it?

The eyes capture the light. What links light input to the actual effectors of biological action? The light that impinges on the retina is carried by the optic nerve, after conversion to the electrical format. The optic nerve from the left eye ends up in the right side of the brain and the right optic nerve goes to the left side of the brain. The point at which the optic nerves cross over is called the optic chiasma. The term 'suprachiasmatic' simply means 'above the chiasma'.

Just above this optic chiasma, a group of specialized nerve cells called the Suprachiasmatic nucleus is present in humans, and other mammals. Pineal gland is another structure in the vicinity of the optic chiasma. The optic nerve feeds the light signals to these two structures. It is believed that the Suprachiasmatic nucleus could be acting as the circadian rhythm generator in human beings while the pineal gland could be the timekeeper in other mammals.

60 years ago we never even suspected an internal time-keeping device inside our bodies. In 1939, Erwin Bunning of Germany showed the existence of a biological clock in animals. In 1960, Richter tried to identify the exact location of this clock in the brain by inducing damage to different areas of the brain, until the loss of the clock activity. Moore and Klein, in 1974, proved that the suprachiasmatic nucleus acts as the time-keeping system in mammals, including man. The pineal gland assists the suprachiasmatic nucleus in this function.

The pineal gland is an extremely interesting structure. It has been described as the 'Seat of the soul' in the philosophical discourses of Rene Descartes. It has also been called the 'third eye'. The pineal gland is literally the interface between the environment and living systems.

Until the second half of the 20th century, many thought that the pineal gland was a vestigeal structure. Now we know that it makes a hormone called Melatonin, which is believed to be the molecule responsible for synchronizing the biologic behavior to the light cue.

In the most primitive living vertebrate, the lamprey, the pineal gland is very extensively developed. In humans, it is slightly larger than a pea. The pineal gland is very small and rudimentary in owls, procavians, elephants, opassums and whales. It is absent in crocodiles, armadillos, sloths, and anteaters.

A photo-receptive function was attributed to the pineal gland by the anatomists of the 19th century on the basis of the description of the pineal eye of the reptile, Sphenedon, commonly known as Tuatara or the 'living fossil'. The arrangement of the pineal structure in this animal is reminiscent of a typical vertebrate eye. Even in lizards and some fishes, a well-developed parietal eye is present. The reference to the pineal gland as the third eye is because of the anatomical similarity to the structure of the eye. In fact, photoreceptive function for the pineal gland was suspected by the similarities between the retina and the sensory cells of the pineal gland. Further support for this view came from neurophysiological studies, which showed that the pineal cells could show electrical impulses in response to light, just like what the retinal cells do.

Summing up, the eyes and the pineal gland may have had a common ancestry. The eyes evolved first with the capacity to transmit photic sensory information. Then came the pineal gland. Its function was restricted to detection of light, just the presence or absence of it. This would have been useful for perceiving the onset of sunrise and sunset.

One of the earliest examples of circadian timing of animal behavior was the demonstration that honeybees possess a memory for time sense. When allowed access to sugar water for a limited duration each day, honeybees quickly learn to arrive at the food source during or just before the time of food availability even in the absence of external time cues. They continue to visit the feeding place at the same time for a few days even when food is no longer available. Such training can only be achieved when food is made available at 24-hour or nearly 24-hour intervals, not at intervals of 19 or 48 hours, which lie outside the normal range of circadian entrainment.

Honeybees can also be trained to two or more feeding times per day. They can even learn to visit one food source at time of the day and a different source at another time. In a natural environment, this enables honeybees to make efficient use of their resources by limiting their visits to different flowering plants to the daily times of flower opening and of maximal nectar production.

A capacity for associating specific food locations with specific times of the day has also been demonstrated in starlings (Sturnus vulgaris) and in garden warblers (Sylvia borin). Recent studies have uncovered what appear to be similar abilities in rodents and other mammals. Rats, maintained on restricted feeding schedules, show an increase in locomotor activity just before the scheduled feeding time. Food anticipatory activity occurs under daily light-dark cycle, but only if food is available at intervals that lie within the circadian range. If rats are food-deprived for a few days after being exposed to restricted daily feedings, they continue to show increased locomotor activity at the previously scheduled feeding time. Rats can also anticipate two different feeding times. Birds can also do that. Pigeons remember up to 4 different daily feeding times and in this particular capacity the honeybee has the record. They can remember 9 different feeding times!

It appears that animals are able to time their behaviors in relation to specific time points of the day. It is also clear that such timing ability is possible only if it occurs within a 24-hour rhythm of 12-hour day and 12-hour night. In the real world, this is what you see, isn't it? The sun rises at 6 am and sets at 6 pm. Animals and plants are therefore exposed to 12 hours of light and 12 hours of darkness. Organisms have evolved to synchronize their daily and seasonal behaviors taking the duration of light exposure as the cue.

I said that the pineal gland receives the light input. How does this help in making these organisms start their activities, which requires involvement of different body structures? Is there a way the pineal gland can communicate with other cells in the body? It seems to do it by secreting a molecule called Melatonin. Melatonin has been called the 'Chronobiotic substance' by S.A.Armstrong, to indicate the fact that it is a timer molecule. Once released, it permeates the body of the organism carrying the message to all cells. What kind of message does it carry?

The message appears to be simple, yet valuable. It tells the cells whether it is night or day. You may wonder why you need some special message to indicate it. Can't the organism find that out for itself by seeing? The point is, not all organisms are endowed with the gift of eyes. Secondly, even if they are, how does the eye let the other organs know? There has to be some way the eyes can communicate to other cells. Melatonin does the job.

If you weigh the pineal gland, it will not be the same throughout the day. It increases in the nights and decreases in daytime. This means that it is more active in the nights making more melatonin. The weight of the pineal gland shows a rhythmic increase and decrease, night and day. The pineal gland's weight changes in the course of the day because of quantitative changes in the enzyme, which makes melatonin. This enzyme increases in content in nighttime and this is reflected in the increases in the weight of the gland. The pineal gland makes more melatonin during nights. The cells are therefore bathed in more melatonin in the night and less in the day.

Dark exposure increases melatonin synthesis. As light and dark exposure alternates, over a 24-hour period, the levels of melatonin in circulation decrease and increase in a cyclical fashion. The cells of the body have come to associate periods of low melatonin with daytime and periods of high melatonin with night time.

If you look at the overall scheme, you would realize that there are three rhythmic oscillators here. The first is the day/night rhythm due to the sun. The second is the rhythm in the weight of the pineal gland. The third is the rhythm in the melatonin levels. These three rhythms couple with each other in an inter-dependent manner as to be expected in a complex system. Where does this relate to organismal behaviors?

Most animals on earth are active during the day because the broad daylight is helpful in locating their prey as well as avoiding their predators. The nocturnal animals are active in the nights, helped by their visual capacities evolved to offer better night vision. The basic food seeking behavior, therefore, is dependent on the light/dark cycle due to the sun. It is hardly surprising that animal behaviors oscillate rhythmically, in tune with the sunrise and sunset. A cosmic rhythm is coupled to activities of myriads of tiny organisms on the planet.

On an annual basis, we know that the day is long in the summer and the night is short. In winter, it is the opposite. Organisms have the capacity to measure the duration of light exposure and detect the onset of summer or winter. Animals show distinctly different behaviors in winter and summer. Most animals reproduce in summer. This is made possible by cyclical, synchronized changes in gonadal function in correlation with the light/dark cycle and the melatonin rhythm.

Female hamsters are more aggressive towards males unless they are in heat. Their aggression changes seasonally. They are more aggressive in winter and there is associated reduction in sexual receptivity. The situation changes as summer approaches. Long day and short night brings about hormonal changes in female hamsters such that they become less aggressive towards the males enhancing the likelihood of sexual encounters in summer. This is particularly advantageous because the food is plentiful in summer and the off springs have better chances of survival!

Photoperiodic control of aggressive behavior and gonadal activity is not restricted to hamsters only. Even mice are seasonal breeders. Their gonads regress in winter. That these gonadal effects are due to the effects of duration of light on pineal function is suggested by the observations that removal of the pineal gland prevents gonadal regression in winter!

What would happen if you artificially administered melatonin to mice during summer? The high melatonin level is perceived as indicative of winter, though in reality it is really summer only. Their gonads regress as they would in winter!

These experiments strongly suggest that the pineal gland and the melatonin are the mediators of seasonal changes in the reproductive activity of these animals and others. The rhythmic, seasonal reproductive activities of animals oscillate perfectly in tune with the pineal and solar rhythms incredibly!

Reproduction is not the only behavior sensitive to light/dark rhythm. Look at the Djungarian hamsters that live in the harsh climate of the Siberian steppe. They need to tolerate the chilly temperatures as low as -68C in winter. Even in summer the best they get is -25C. In order to cope with these punishing temperatures these organisms have high thermogenic and insulative capacities. They make more heat in the body and retain it too. This keeps their body warm. Surprisingly, the cold-tolerant ability is seasonal in nature. They show that more cold-tolerant ability in winter than in summer. Obviously, this is sensible. It saves the complex metabolic adjustments from being made in summer when it is not necessary. Here we find that thermoregulation behavior can also be influenced by the cyclical changes in light/dark cycle.

It is found that nest-building behavior is also under photoperiodic control in this species. In winter, the hamsters build consistently larger nests than in summer. Because large nest size helps in thermoregulation by decreasing heat loss!

It is interesting that, in certain animals, even burrowing activity has also been shown to be controlled by day length and ambient temperature in the environment.

It has now been shown that even social interactions in mammals, birds, and fish could be influenced by day-night rhythms. All of us have seen shoaling behavior of fish. It is one of the most breathtaking sights you can ever hope to see. Thousands of fish move around in such an exquisitely coherent manner that cannot be explained. Similarly, even bird groups can fly in an uncannily coordinated manner. Recently, it has been shown that opium-like substances are behind social interactions in mammals, birds and fish. Studies on birds and mammals have also confirmed the effects of opium-like substances in the mediation of social bonding and contact.

Shoaling is thought to enhance sensory contact between individual fish. It also facilitates foraging and feeding behaviors. Shoaling behavior also augments predator detection and avoidance.

Before going on to explaining how shoaling behavior is affected by the daily rhythm in light and darkness, I have to first explain why on earth fish, birds and mammals have opium-like substances in their bodies in the first place. These substances are normal, physiological compounds made by the brain of animals, including us! Can you believe that? They have perfectly physiological functions such as modulation of pain, thermoregulation, and regulation of intestinal motility.

This surprising fact came to light when researchers isolated receptors from the brain that can bind opium and related compounds found in plants. Why should we have receptors for these intoxicating substances? In biology, there has to be a survival value for everything. Nothing makes sense except in light of evolution. The puzzle was solved when acting on the suspicion that the brain could be having the receptors for binding opium-like substances it makes for itself. In other words, the receptors are not present for binding plant-derived drugs but for binding similar substances made by itself, for genuinely physiological functions! Further studies showed that they mediate the above-mentioned functions.

Let us come to the point of why this opium-mediated behavior is important for the current discussion. It is found that there is a day-night rhythm in it. When experimenters administered purified, opium-like substances in to the body of the goldfish, they found that stimulation of shoaling behavior was more in the daytime than during the nighttime. There also seems to be a day-night rhythm in modulation of pain perception.

How come the same substance produces a quantitatively different effect in the daytime as compared to the nighttime? Why does the response to the same agent differ at two different times? The answer came from the observation that the receptors in brain that bind opium-like substance are more in number during the daytime than during the night. Even the amount of opium-like substance produced by the body is more during the daytime because the genes, which code for these substances are more actively expressed during the daytime!

So far, we have been looking at different behavioral responses of a variety of animals. To what extent is man dependent on external cues, particularly the light? Man now leads a life wherein he hardly relies on environmental cues for his basic behavior. He is not ready to go to sleep even if it gets dark. He even plays games in the middle of the night under floodlights. Students read their books even in nights as late as 2 or 3 am. Night shift workers in factories don't sleep in the nights at all. They have learnt to lead a nocturnal life. Jets transport human beings across continental time zones, moving them to places where the clock time and his biological clock are in conflict. It may be night in the new place while it would have been day in his native place. He is asked to go to sleep but his body refuses to sleep. The result is sleepiness.

Today we have come to realize that many cases of sleep disorders have an origin in the disturbances of circadian rhythms. In man and other animals, sleep is a sensitive index for assessing circadian rhythms. Because, in the course of evolution, animals have learnt to go to sleep when the sun sets. It is a very obvious adaptation to a daily onset of darkness when your visual power is very low.

In old people, the pineal function is less than adequate due to the aging process. Due to disturbances in melatonin secretion, they find it difficult to fall asleep. Chronotherapeutic procedures like administration of melatonin or artificial light treatment have been found to be effective in the treatment of sleep disorders. Administration of melatonin has also been found to be effective in restoring different body rhythms and also in removing symptoms of jet lag. Even the night shift workers benefit from melatonin therapy.

Disturbances in melatonin secretory rhythm during menstrual cycle has also been suggested as one of the causes of pre-menstrual syndrome wherein the woman experiences pain and discomfort just before menstruation.

Psychiatrists have come to notice that certain psychiatric illnesses exhibit cyclicity. The symptoms recur at periodic intervals, which prompted the suggestion the mood disorders are also disturbances in the circadian time-keeping system. In support of this theory, researchers have found low levels of melatonin in the body fluids of -these patients, and also a markedly disturbed melatonin secretory rhythm. Not surprisingly, these patients have benefited from therapies such as administration of melatonin or artificial light.

Human beings exhibit rhythms in secretion of a number of hormones as well. Analysis of our blood shows that these hormones are released in a pulsatile fashion conforming to a day-night rhythm. It is found that they are secreted more in the early morning before the person actually wakes up. Less stress hormones are produced in the evenings.

What is the role of these stress hormones? They are responsible for preparing the body for meeting physical and mental demands of survival. We need extra energy to support our physical activities during threatening situations. We need to be alert as well. This kind of preparation obviously cannot wait until we face trouble. It is better to make advance preparations which are what the stress hormones are meant to do. It appears that stress hormones get released early in the morning not in response to actual stress but in anticipation of it. One cannot deny the fact that our modern life is stressful. We start worrying about the day as soon as we wake up. The demands of the job, financial worries, and other personal problems are invariably there waiting for you to wake up.

If stress is going to be occurring on a daily basis, it is indeed profitable for the man and other animals to have some stress hormones handy. Therefore, the tissues that secrete stress hormones release them regularly in a rhythmic manner. This release rhythm is synchronized to the sleep-wake cycle. The idea is to have some stress hormones ready when you wake up just as you find milk and newspaper on arising. You don't tell the milkman and newspaper boy every day. Do you? You give standing orders to deliver milk and newspaper daily in the mornings because that is when you want them. The stress hormones are also released to meet your metabolic needs for the day without being told.

Stress can occur any time of the day but is likely to be more in the early part of the day. I said that stress hormones are secreted in pulses right from early hours of the day even before you wake up. The morning release of stress hormones does the 'housekeeping' job for your body. It is exactly similar to what a housewife would do in a traditional home. She wakes up at around 4-5 am to do the cooking, washing and ironing and other household chores even though her husband and children are not even awake yet. It is the anticipatory preparation by the housewife that helps people in the house to find what they need on waking up. The housewife synchronizes her household preparation to the waking times of the members of the family. Similarly, the body synchronizes the release of the stress hormones to the waking times of the individual, which, in turn, is entrained by the supremely regular event called the sunrise.

Stress hormones are secreted in more pulses in the early hours of the day to be followed by lesser number of pulses as day progresses. In the evenings, they peter out to very low levels. This rhythm occurs daily. The idea is to have some stress hormones ready when you wake up just like you find milk and newspaper.

Human subjects isolated in caves for 3-4 months continued to show a circadian variation in the time of release of stress hormones, apparently in the absence of any modern day stress, whatsoever. This only shows the sturdiness of our biological clocks. Studies on human subjects living in the Arctic confirm this view. In the Arctic region, the day is long. It lasts up to 21-hours. Yet, the stress hormones secretory pattern shows a circadian periodicity corresponding a 24-hour day. These studies show that we have got so used to the 24-hour day/night rhythm that it cannot be shaken off so easily.

Sleep/wake rhythm in man is linked to the rest/activity rhythm, which is true in other animals too. That this is the case has been confirmed in laboratory experiments. In a typical experiment, rats were put in a cage, which has a wheel-running apparatus. This wheel rotation fulfills the needs of the rat in terms of physical activity. What would happen if the wheels are kept locked? Naturally, the rats cannot express the physical activity behavior. The locking of the wheel has a substantial impact on the mouse's sleep/wake pattern. More time is spent in sleeping. This can be reversed by making the wheel available for the rats. On getting back access to the wheel, the rats spend more time in wakeful episodes of activity. Vigorous muscular activity induces the release of adrenaline. In addition, a variety of external stimuli like joint movement, muscle and tendon contraction, etc., keep the brain awake.

These findings on rats take on added significance because they support analogous findings in humans. Several investigators have monitored sleep in healthy human subjects under conditions comparable to wheel-locked conditions for mice. Human subjects were studied under conditions of continuous bed rest with minimal social contact or intellectual stimulation. Under these conditions, daytime sleeping episodes were remarkably more frequent, even if subjects explicitly instructed to remain awake. Even outside the laboratory conditions, one can find normal, old people behave like the above-mentioned experimental human subjects. Old people tend to feel drowsy and take naps during the day. They often sleep poorly in the nights. Reduced physical activity levels play a role in disturbances in sleep/wake patterns. Possibly, elderly people could benefit from some amount of sustained physical activity in the daytime.

I suspect that the human infants fall asleep too often in the daytime because they do not do any physical activity. As they grow older, and start playing around, their daytime sleeping stops.

Rats maintained in cages show increased physical activity, manifested as wheel-running behavior, when they expect the need for food. In the wild conditions, this increased physical activity translates into food searching behavior. In laboratory cages, the rats learn to anticipate the times food is made available to them and increase their physical activity levels several hours before access to food access. This anticipatory activity persists even under food deprived conditions for 3-5 days but is abolished if feeding schedules drastically deviate from the 12-hour day/12-hour night rhythm. A circadian clock is obviously involved.

Periodic restriction of food availability has also been shown to influence circadian rhythms in the gastrointestinal system. The cells lining the alimentary canal multiply rapidly, relative to most other cell types in the body. The cells multiply faster than other cell types because they have a shorter life span than others. The gut cells are stripped off the gut wall and excreted every couple of days normally. The dead cells have to be replaced by new ones and that is why there is faster cell division amongst these cell types. What is important from our point of view at the moment is the fact the cell divisions occur periodically. In the mouse, mitotic activity of the cells lining the alimentary canal has been shown to follow a circadian rhythm under conditions of unrestricted food availability. If you limit food access to restricted times, the cell division rhythm tends to coincide with time of onset of food access.

Food availability is itself a cue, which entrains rhythms in other gut functions necessary for food digestion. Enzymes required for food digestion are released in to the gut 2-4 hours prior to food availability in a kind of anticipatory rhythm. The peristaltic contraction of muscles of the intestine, which is necessary for pushing the food down the gut for absorption of nutrients, increase 3-5 hours preceding food access. As long as your eating times are regular, these functions of the gut get started well in advance of actual food input. For people who don't keep regular timings of eating land themselves in trouble because their stomach starts secreting digestive juices, including acid, which could cause stomach ulcers if food does not come in at the expected time.

Man may be resisting the influence of day/night cues because of artificial lightings. What we should not forget is the fact that we have become adapted to our day/night rhythms for millions of years whereas the artificial lights have been around only for a hundred years. Our body still expects to follow the 24-hour patterns in the release of melatonin. Daily exposure to variable duration of light may be creating disturbances in the 'natural body clocks', which has been set for the past millions of years. I wonder if this is one of the factors contributing to the modern day stress.

I suspect that melatonin rhythm could be altered significantly by disordered light exposure patterns. I said a little while ago that prolonged light exposure could suppress melatonin synthesis. Because most of our biorhythms depend on melatonin for synchronization, all these rhythms will be proportionately delayed. This is technically referred to as phase-shifting. Most humans live as phase-shifted animals. This would result in considerable metabolic problems in our body. I wonder to what extent this factor is responsible for human illnesses. It could lead to problems in digestion and utilization of nutrients in gut, inadequate preparation of the body for handling survival-related stress, disorders in reproductive hormone rhythms, sleeplessness, and a host of other problems. Unfortunately, not a great deal is known about the effects of shifts in 12-hour day/12-hour night patterns. I guess a lot more research needs to be done in this area.

Have you tried to sleep the whole night with your lights on? I am very sure you would not have had a sound sleep. Moreover, you would feel so dull and lethargic all through the next day. This happens to all of us who hasn't had a good sleep. This is because of the disturbances in the pineal clock.

Is it possible for man to substitute his wristwatch for his pineal clock? It may be possible that man has evolutionarily begun to de-pinealize his behaviors. I wonder if it would ever be possible for him to liberate himself from the rhythm induced by the sun. After all, man is not alone on this planet. He needs to coexist with other life forms. In order to do that, he has to coordinate his activities with other life forms. There is no way he can escape. People living in cities of the western world could expect to find food in the middle of the night by flashing their credit cards. It doesn't work that way in most parts of the world. The number of humans living in uncertain conditions, in which they have to actively find food by hard and direct labor, is many times more than the number, which finds everything they want under the single roof of their supermarkets. Man, after all, still needs his pineal gland.

I said in the beginning of this chapter that the pineal gland is absent in some organisms. Does that mean they do not respond to cyclical, environmental cues such as light? Could it be possible that they have different mechanisms of responding to the same light cues that does not involve the pineal gland? Plants exhibit circadian rhythms in their 'sleep' movements. The leaves of certain plants droop in the evenings, and they become upright in the daytime. Obviously, this is a light-dependent behavior without the help of the pineal gland.

The unicellular marine algae, Gonyaulax polyedra, exhibit circadian rhythmicity in many of its properties including photosynthetic capacity, patterns of motility and bioluminescence. Again, light could be involved here without the involvement of the pineal gland. Where is the question of a separate gland when the total number of cells in the entire organism is one only?

Conidation in Neurospora and spontaneous action potentials in the neural cells of the mollusc, Aplysia, are some of the circadian rhythms in other organisms, which do not have pineal glands. Even in the human fetuses and neonates, there are cyclic fluctuations in the spontaneous, stereotyped muscular activity comprised of general movements of limbs, trunk, and head, with a cycle time of 1-15 minutes. The oscillations are apparent by mid-gestation and qualitative observations using ultrasound suggest that there may be characteristic fetal activity in the first trimester as well. The properties of fetal cyclic motor activity persist relatively unchanged after birth during sleep. It is said that these cyclical movements help develop the muscles of the babies.

Horseshoe crabs have sensors for shifting their rhythms in their tails. Eye less fruit flies can reset their clocks! Eyes are necessary for most animals for transmitting the light cues in the environment to the internal clock(s). As said before, certain organisms do not need the visual apparatus for sensing the cues from the external world. They depend on some other mechanisms. What is surprising is, even the animals that use the eye mechanism seem to have an alternative way of setting their clocks in response to cues. This surprising discovery came to light from an experiment done by Russell Foster, at Imperial College London, and Mike Menekar of the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, U.S. They found that a mutant strain of mouse with retinal decay can still set their clocks. We all know that retina is critical for light perception. How do these mice manage to perceive the cues?

Foster reported in Nature (Vol 394, p27, 1998) evidence for presence of light-sensitive pigments in these mice with retinal impairment. These pigments appear to be related to the regular pigments in the retina, useful for our vision. He believes that these pigments probably were the forerunners of the modern forms of the eye pigments. In the mutant mice, these ancient pigments fulfill the role of the missing pigments. Interestingly, these pigments have been found in salmon and other fishes!

Subsequently, other types of light-sensitive pigments have been found in the eyes, brain and skin of frogs! Why would some organism have eye pigments in the skin? We will come back to this issue later on.

Aziz Sancar, a biochemist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, has come up another equally unusual light-sensitive pigment, called 'cyptochrome', in a spindly weed called Arabidopsis thaliana (thale grass). This is totally different from the regular eye pigments but can absorb light. It is proposed that they do indeed play the role of photoreceptors in the plants, apparently with clock-setting powers. In 1997, Sancar and his postdoctoral research associate, Yasuhide Miyamoto, reported that mouse eyes, including the parts that are crucial for re-setting of biological clocks, are filled with cyptochromes. Even the skin and the brain regions have them.

Jeff Hall, a geneticist at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts, and his postdoc Ralf Stenewsky, reported in the journal Cell (25 Nov,1998) that flies lacking cuptochrome can't reset their clocks properly.

It appears, therefore, that organisms have more than one type of mechanisms to sense light cues around them. Hall and Steve Kay of the Scripps Institute in La Jolla, California, reported in 1997 that the fruit flies have clocks in the brain, thorax, wings, abdomen, gut, and testes! These clocks seem to work even when they are severed from the head! This shows that they have mechanisms that don't depend on the light-sensitive eye apparatus. A group led by Ueli Schober, a molecular biologist at the University of Geneva, found such non-brain clocks in mammals too. They have found pacemakers in skin cells grown in a culture dish! Other researchers have found cyclical generators in liver, muscle, the spleen and testes of mammals. It has become such commonplace finding in biorhythm research that people are not surprised to find rhythmic activity in tissues and cells which seem to arise on their own without the help of the eye and the brain.

It has been hypothesized that these extra mechanisms could take care of local rhythmic phenomena in tissues and organs, while the pineal and suprachiasmatic nuclear mechanism takes care of the central control of rhythms. Schibler's team has found that the mammalian suprachiasmatic nuclear cells in culture don't show any re-setting of their clocks in response to continuous light, whereas other clocks in other organs seem to be easily susceptible to changes in external light exposure. What this means is not fully clear. But, as I said earlier, this seems to support my earlier statement that our artificial lights cannot disturb the rhythm set by the sunlight for millions of years.

Scott Campbell and Pat Murphy of the Cornell University Medical, New York, have made the most shocking observation yet. They have found that shining light on human knees can re-set some rhythms! This outrageously shocking finding needs to be confirmed by others.

All these fascinating observations clearly show that organisms have various types of mechanisms to exhibit rhythmic behavior. What controls each and every other rhythm may be in dispute. But nobody doubts the fact that the cellular and organismic behaviors are indeed rhythmic. Why? What are the advantages of cyclical behaviors?

Anticipatory behavior is a cardinal manifestation of synchronization to external cues. It is plainly obvious why advance preparation could help an organism, rather than wait until the actual causative stimulus. Nothing in this world works this way. For instance, we borrow with our credit cards and buy things we need hoping that our salary will come every month. Organizations and nations plan their actions years in advance. Shops plan to keep stock of common items because they know there will be buyers. They cannot wait until the buyer walks in asking for something. Things don't work that way anywhere. Shops make particularly special stocks available during seasonal events like Christmas, for instance. If you look at any of our behavior, it does not take complicated thinking to realize that we always do things on the assumption that it will require doing sooner or later.

In the biological world, the difference between survival and death could be a matter of time. Organisms can gain those crucial minutes, or even seconds, by anticipatory behavior. I can illustrate the advantages of anticipatory activity by a simple example. Look at the 4x100 meters relay race. The world record for men's world record in this event is 37.40 seconds. That means the average time for covering each 100 meters segment is 9.25 seconds. This is impossible. Because, the world record for men's 100 meters event is 9.86 seconds. How can all four runners in the team beat the world record time?

The trick here is in anticipation. Once the first runner gets out of his block, the second runner begins to move out of his block with slow, warming up movement of his legs. He saves the time needed to get his legs to reach peak power. He knows for sure that the baton will be in his hands soon and begins preparing himself in anticipation. If he were to wait until receiving the baton in his hands, before moving out of his block, he will be losing those crucial seconds that matter. This is the case with all the other runners too.

If you look at the results of the race, you would be shocked to find that the difference between the winner and the runner is only a fraction of a second. The world likes to remember only the winner. Nobody is interested in the loser even if you were only a hundredth of a second slower! No wonder we, as well as other organisms, try to be winners all the time by advance preparation. The only way we can do it is by coupling our behavior to some regular cues, which come cyclically.

# CHAPTER 2

### THE HARDWARE OF BEHAVIOR

We keep doing something or other all the time. Even sleeping is an action. The only state of inaction is death itself.

One of the major tasks of this book is to explore the reasons underlying our tendency to behave as puppets responding to external information.

Our world is full of sensory stimuli to which organisms respond in a robotic manner. The behavior of an organism is inescapably driven by the immediate sensory stimuli emanating from the environment around it. Your life is shaped by events happening around you. The sensory system is apparently the basis of the dynamic nature of this world. There has to be a reason or an outcome for this web of sensory reactions.

Every biology student knows that our nervous system is the hardware of our behavior. The basic architecture of the nervous system is very simple. Stimuli from the external environment are picked up by specialized sensory receptors for sound, light, smell, touch etc. The sensory data is carried by the nerves to the brain. The brain processes this data and sends back the appropriate commands, via the nerves again, to target parts of the body. An action follows.

The brain is compartmentalized functionally and structurally. There are different regions in the brain capable of controlling different tasks such as speech, vision, hearing, movement, memory etc. These compartments may need to 'talk' to each other, while accomplishing a task.

A number of experiments have shown that the behavior activation pathway is a mechanical process. There is nothing for the organism to do about it. It must be a rude jolt to the readers but let me explain. I hope to show that behavioral properties like decision making, exploration and motivation are simple hardware tricks of the brain.

A sensory signal associated with a type of behavior is carried by the nerves to that portion of the brain controlling that behavior. It is simply a question of wiring the nerves to the right 'processor' in the brain. From then on, it is a question of mechanically activating a sequence of events leading on to the behavior, as if running application software on your computer! You may find it hard to believe what I say. Let me substantiate my claims.

The brain is a funny object. It is said to be the seat of intelligence. Yet, it is so easy to trick it into activating a behavioral sequence. Behaviors can be induced in an animal by physical stimulation of the brain. Depending on the site of stimulation of the brain, behaviors such as sleep, food seeking and consumption, water seeking and consumption, aggression, rage, depression, and even sexual arousal can be 'induced' for no reason!

Feeding behavior has been evoked by electrical stimulation of the brains of virtually all vertebrates such as fish, amphibians, birds, and mammals. This is achieved by stimulating the brain in or near a portion of the brain called the hypothalamus.

Electrical stimulation of a portion of the brain along the median forebrain bundle, and in neighboring hypothalamus, causes penile erection with considerable emotional display in monkeys!

Sensory cortex takes care of all sensory feelings of our body. Our body is represented here, region for region. For instance, a part of sensory cortex will control sensations in our fingers, the adjacent part will control sensations in the upper arms and so on. If you stimulate the sensory cortex of the brain, you can feel pure sensations of touch, warmth, cold, pain, when you are not touching anything! Stimulation of the sensory cortex part connected with the hand can make you feel as if someone has touched you on the hand! How stupid of the brain! Sounds like hypnotism, isn't it?

Electrical stimulation along a part of the brain called the central nucleus of amygdala can produce a pattern of behavioral and autonomic changes that resemble a state of fear in animals, including humans. Researchers have shown that destruction of amygdala produces a state of abnormal placidity in monkeys. Most traumatic and anger-provoking stimuli fail to ruffle the animal's abnormal calm.

Interestingly, stimulation of some other parts of the amygdala produces rage in cats. Violent episodes of rage can be produced in response to trivial stimuli when these regions of the brain are stimulated. Violent rage attacks in response to minor stimuli have been observed in human patients with brain damage. During brain surgery for treatment of diseases of the pituitary gland, there can be unintentional damage to structures at the base of the brain. Amygdala and the hypothalamus are close by and it is possible that these structures can be damaged in which case the unfortunate patients end up with frequent episodes of rage.

Emotional dysregulation can also result due to diseases of the nervous system, especially influenza and encephalitis, which destroy nerve cells in the limbic system and hypothalamus.

There is also a plus side to such phenomena. It is known that stimulation of the amygdaloid nuclei and parts of the hypothalamus in conscious humans produces sensations of anger and fear. This finding has led to the strategy of inducing damage to the amygdala for treating mental patients. They become placid and manageable after the surgery!

Certain other experiments have shown that electrical stimulation of certain portions of the part of the brain called the cerebral cortex can awaken a sleeping animal, which will remain awake without making any movements. Even locomotion can be elicited by stimulating certain parts of the brain in rats.

Stimulation of certain other areas of the temporal lobe of the brain makes the person feel strange in a familiar place. Or, it may make the person feel that he has been to the place before while, in reality, he has not been there at all. This phenomenon is called 'de ja vu', deriving from the French word for 'already seen'. This experimental observation indicates that the brain has a distinct structure that enables us to categorize objects and places as familiar and unfamiliar. This is interesting because the temporal lobe is where memory is stored in our brains.

The famous neurophysiologist, Roger Penfield, stimulated portions of the temporal lobes of the brains of his patients, and made them recall old, forgotten incidents for no apparent reason. It is interesting that they could not recall past events with such clarity when they tried voluntarily! I suspect that the brain stores memory as we store our data files in our offices. If you want to access data dating back to decades, it is not going to be easy in any office set up. You know that it is there, somewhere, but we do not immediately know where exactly. Your other more relevant, recent data seem to have exhausted all your storage space that is easily accessible. Direct brain stimulation, as Penfield did, triggers the release of this memory having bypassed the search routes that I said must have become clogged.

These experiments show that the 'brain ware' is very impersonal. I am tempted to suggest that the brain is a kind of robotic system, responding to stimuli in a mechanical fashion.

In these experiments, electrical or physical means were artificially used to stimulate the brain. Under normal circumstances, the stimulation would have resulted by electrical current carried by the nerves in response to external stimuli. It appears that what is important in a behavior activation process is not how the brain was stimulated but which part of the brain was stimulated. I said in the beginning that the brain is compartmentalized according to specific functions. It looks like you can bypass the sensory receptors and the nerves, and directly stimulate the brain part and still bring about the behavior! Because the brain does not seem to know if it was a genuine stimulation through the nerve or an artificial one. The brain can be easily duped.

One of the funny things about our brain is its tendency to categorize all stimuli as either 'pleasant' or 'unpleasant'. Different types of stimuli, unrelated to each other, can evoke a sensation of pleasantness or unpleasantness in the brain.

Neurophysiological studies have shown that any sensory stimulus, which reaches that part of the brain that evokes pleasant sensation, will make you seek the same experience again and again. The neurophysiologists call it the 'reward response'. A lot of animal and human experiments have been done to explore this phenomenon. These have shown that there seems to a 'punishment' region in the brain which makes a stimulus feel unpleasant, deterring the animals from doing it the next time!

The brain is organized into a 'yes' or 'no' dichotomy. If it is a pleasure stimulus, do it. Do it again and again. If it is an unpleasant stimulus, don't do it. Categorization of your actions this way is possible, as I said earlier, because the sensory information from the external environment reaches that part of the brain, which pre-determines the next course of action.

Let us look at an experiment that throws more light on this phenomenon. Electrodes can be placed over defined regions of the brain through which a moderate electrical current can be allowed to flow, by pressing a bar that completes the circuit. This current will stimulate the brain regions in a manner similar to normal sensory stimulation. When the electrodes are placed on the 'reward' regions of the brain, animals, including humans, are found to press the bar repeatedly. Animals braved current intensities enough to knock them off to get 'more of it'! They continue to press the bar, ignoring food and water, until they become exhausted. Rats have been found to press the bar 10,000 times per hour, and monkeys up to 17,000 times! Human patients with incurable pain due to cancer and patients with epilepsy and Schizophrenia went on pressing the bar describing the feelings as 'pleasurable' and a 'relief from tension'. Some of the patients could not tell why they liked to press the bar repeatedly.

It is amazing how stimuli from the external environment are perceived as pleasant or unpleasant, based on where the sensory data ends up in the brain. This is apparently a question of 'wiring' the nerves to the right regions of the brain. Everyone understands that this 'wiring' has an evolutionary basis. Obviously, those behaviors felt as pleasant would be repeated too often. Perhaps such behavioral activation pathways would be selected by the organisms for their pleasure potential.

It is interesting that the behaviors felt as pleasurable are the ones that are vitally important for our survival. Eating and sex are the two pleasurable behaviors that I can think of instantly. It does not take much thinking to realize how vital they are for living systems. What would happen if eating is a tasteless affair? Who would take the trouble of finding food for eating? Animals spend much of their time seeking food. Don't they? Apart from the pleasure of eating, the unpleasantness of hunger makes it doubly sure that organisms will strive as hard as they do to find food.

Do you think anybody would indulge in sex if it wasn't so pleasurable? Who would want to take on lifelong responsibility of raising children? Then why do we do it at all? Isn't it a sure way of ensuring reproduction?

Parental behavior, glory and fame are pleasant too. The society praises people when they do acts that find no takers. This praise gives an intoxicating feeling of importance, inducing the unsuspecting souls to do it more and more. There are some jobs like being a soldier in the Armed forces, which not many people want because of the dangers involved. The governments manage to recruit people by two ways. They make it compulsory for all youth to spend some time in the Army. Or, they offer incentives for joining the military service. The glory associated with valiant service in the military is the biggest incentive of all. Fighting (to your death) the unknown faces, to defend your country, is glorified. No wonder people fall for the trap.

People who die in the course of their duties, be it in the Police force, Army or any other service, are glorified with posthumous awards. I wonder if this is a way for our society to try and prevent people from getting too scared of joining these services in future. If such a thing happens who will do the dangerous jobs? There has to be a carrot.

It feels good when somebody says you are a hero. It is a common ploy in the society to make some body do something that finds no takers. This applies to jobs in the army or police force as I said before. Sometimes you wonder why people join these jobs knowing that their life could be in danger. Look at the charity work. Who would do it? It involves a lot of your time, effort and the will to do good to the society. What do they get in return? In the larger scheme of things, the charity work helps improve the society of which the charity worker is a part. Is that the carrot here? Is the motif ultimately selfish after all?

Most of us find our jobs boring and monotonous. Yet, all of us do our jobs because we are compensated for our work with salaries. The salary buys you the pleasures. The salary is the bait for people to do the jobs they wouldn't touch otherwise. I always wonder why people seek jobs so desperately. When out of their jobs, they go through a crisis in their lives. Do you want me to believe that everyone is so eager to go through that monotonous job all day, all year, and all their lives? Whom are we kidding? It is the money that we are after. The money can get you many things that please your senses.

It has to be accepted that we feel bored if we do not have anything to do. It may be true that we may not like our work. But we feel bored if we stop doing our work. By nature, we need to keep doing something or other to keep our minds active. I feel bored if I find nothing to do. Even if somebody is willing to pay me for doing nothing, I still would like to work. This is because our brain is designed such that it seeks to avoid boredom. Boredom drives you to do many things, including most of the adventurous things man does.

On one side, we are paid to do our work. On the other, boredom drives us to take up work. It is made doubly sure that we all do something or other to keep the system ticking.

I wish to suggest that our behaviors are controlled by brain 'programs' activated by external information. The information loop consisting of the sensory receptors, the nerves, the brain and the target organs, works like an automated system.

Obviously, 'hardwiring' of the behavior programs is a combination of evolution and learning. Instinctual functions like fear, rage, sex, hunger, maternal instinct etc., are hard-wired when you are born. Birds fly on their own without anybody teaching it how to fly. Animals walk right after birth. Fish swim instantly after birth. Babies know how to suckle the breast. There is no learning involved in such behaviors.

Ethological studies have shown that naïve nestling, which have never encountered a hawk before, hide and cover themselves on exposure to hawk-like silhouettes. Similarly, when naïve chimpanzees were exposed to snakes, an innate fear response was produced. Naïve kittens when taken to a cliff become very fearful though they have never had a previous experience of falling from a height. Even in human infants, one can see a sort of aversive response to strangers at an early age.

It is interesting to attempt to explain the role of innate fear-releasing signals in the development of various human anxiety states. In humans, anxiety can sometimes be due to anticipation of pain. Anxiety can also be due to anticipation of social humiliation. Blushing, which is apparently an innate vasomotor response to social threat, accompanies this anxiety. Anxiety concerning physical threat is associated with massive sympathetic and parasympathetic discharge. In lay terms, it is the rush of adrenaline. In the panic states, the release of adrenaline leads to increased heart rate. The sympathetic and parasympathetic discharge is also responsible for the fainting attacks, urination or defecation that may be seen when one is extremely afraid.

Simple stimuli that help release the instinctual behavioral response in no less a manner than activating a software program. The babies are evolutionarily programmed to suckle anything that comes near their mouth. They also tend to take towards their mouth everything they can touch. This is probably an instinctual behavior that ensures that food will find its way into the baby's mouth even though it has no way of knowing what it is grabbing in its tiny hands.

Sensory experiences, which the newborn animals receive during the critical period after birth, determine their emotional attachment to their mothers. In animals, it has been found that they become attached to the objects they encounter first after birth. In the life of an animal or bird, the first social encounter will normally be with its mother. It has been shown ducklings will become strongly attached to an unrelated animal or an object, mistaken for its mother, if that animal or object is substituted at its first sensory experience! This is called 'imprinting'.

Geese have been used for such studies and they have been imprinted to accept humans in the place of their mothers. Experimenters have imprinted fowls on such objects as football and a box! Imprinting phenomenon has also been shown to occur in a variety of birds, insects, and fish and in some mammals too.

Imprinting is not an irreversible phenomenon. When all secondary rewards associated with the imprinting object (such as mother providing milk, foster parent providing food, shelter etc.) don't come, the imprinting becomes unstable. This only shows that young animals expect the imprinted objects to provide them with necessary rewards. Imprinting can be considered to be a special form of learning. Organisms instinctively learn to recognize potentially rewarding experiences. Visual, olfactory, and auditory stimuli they receive are not only important for an animal's ability to recognize its mother, the breasts and its shelter, but also for knowing the laws of social interaction.

All mothers feel the maternal instinct right after the birth of their babies. It is believed that release of the female hormones is responsible for it. Certain fascinating studies have shown that injection of estrogen molecule can induce maternal instinct in a virgin rat!

Unlike instinctual behavior, the learned behaviors need more complex information input. We all learn to do so many things all through our lives. We learn to read and write. We learn to play games. We learn to operate machines. We learn to drive. It appears that these new skills are possible because the brain undergoes new neuronal circuits, to link different regions of it, which help accomplish the behavior. The new circuits direct the sensory signals to the right processing centers, within the brain, that help to make meaningful knowledge from information.

Our brain undergoes a tremendous degree of re-modeling in the course of our mental development. Nerve cells grow out new connections with other nerve cells, when new abilities are learned. The point of contact of two nerve cells is called a synapse. Synapses are formed and destroyed all the while in our brain. It is through the synapses information is exchanged between nerve cells, which are the units of our knowledge and skills. It is responsible for our changing ideas and abilities. In crude terms, it is like 'wiring' your house to get your appliances working. It is something like enabling us to get the electrical wiring such that you know that an appliance that you want will work on switching a designated switch.

Another analogy I can think of is the way our telephone exchanges work. New telephone lines, linking new homes, are the order of the day. Establishing these cable links is vital for us to interact with others. That is the way our society retains the combined wisdom of all of us. Information is constantly flowing down the cables all over our heads and beneath our feet, all over the world. People do exchange information by calling others by assigned numbers. When they dial a number, or type their e-mail address or whatever, they know exactly who they are going to get in touch with.

I said new nerve cells connections happen all the time. It starts happening while you are in the womb. Just like an electrician links up the electrical circuits of your house, the nerves are so arranged that sensory information coming in through the nerves will reach pre-determined regions of the brain. I said that brain is functionally and structurally divided into distinct regions, each of them assigned specific functions. Many of them interact, as a network of computers does. A particular type of sensory stimulus will evoke a particular type of behavior only, depending on the region of the brain it reaches. That is all down to the evolutionary and learned hardwiring of your brain! This fact is amply confirmed by the experiments I listed in the beginning.

People could argue that the experiments discussed so far had shown that instinctual functions like sexual arousal, fear, rage, food seeking etc., could only be elicited. They could say that no amount of artificial brain stimulation can make somebody come up with original thoughts and ideas. We need to look at this argument now.

I know that the human brain is capable of extraordinary feats. Does a baby behave like a scientist, a poet or a philosopher the moment it is born? This clearly means that the brain's abilities are not inherent. They are learned abilities only. You need to rely on the knowledge you had accumulated over time. This knowledge is a result of information you had received as sensory data, from the world around you. Without this store of information, can you ever come up with new thoughts?

In other words, what we think as original ideas and thoughts are really your response to information input from all around you, accumulated by you over a long period. This may not be an immediate response, in which case it would have been called as behavior.

A new thought springs apparently from nowhere. We believe that it came from within the brain. In fact, it does. But the memory database is absolutely necessary for new ideas and thoughts. Your storehouse of information, which you have collected diligently over years, is vital for synthesis of the new idea. The brain needs to collect information from around it for many years to be able to do so. That is why a baby is incapable of original ideas. It could come up with certain new ideas and approaches while playing. This happens all the time and can be seen if you carefully observe a child at play. The child observes the conditions of the play as sensory data. It records this information in its memory. This stored memory is vital for it to make any changes to the initial conditions.

Readers may start wondering - what is the role of the human free will in initiating a behavioral response? He does use his brain in this process. But the initiating signals come from all around him in the form of different types of sensations like smell, touch, vision, sound etc. His brain processes this information according to his learned knowledge.

At this point, I would like to bring up my view about evolutionary adaptation. It is staggeringly different from the conventional beliefs. Traditional biologists would be horrified at my view but I can't help it.

An evolutionary adaptation is a response shown by the species to the situation that prevails in the environment. Nobody can argue with this statement. For example, if the temperature of an ecosystem is high, the species living in that ecosystem come up with survival strategies to survive heat. If the temperature is low, the organisms evolve fur and other cold-tolerant strategies. It is very clear that evolution is driven by environmental signals. Obviously, the organisms don't manifest evolutionary changes at the drop of a hat. It is brought about over many generations. Evolution is a slow response to environmental stimuli.

I started this chapter by saying that an organismal behavior is a response to sensory stimuli, emanating from the immediate environment around it. It is almost instantaneous process. Because the response is immediate, we call it by a different name i.e., behavior. If the response occurs over a long period, involving all the members of a species, we call it evolutionary adaptation. In both cases, it is clear that the stimuli come from their surroundings.

We, as well as all other organisms on earth, are puppets responding to them blindly.

Not happy with our natural sensory capacities, human seek more information from the world around them. Artificial gadgets like UV Spectrophotometers, X-Ray telescopes, Gamma ray telescopes, and microscopes help us know more about the micro- and macro-world around us. They act as appendages to our natural sensory system allowing you to access more information than you are biologically entitled to. Is this sensory greediness or an overzealous attempt to respond to more signals from out there?

When you touch a hot object you withdraw your hands so fast that you did not even consciously plan it. This is because such noxious and potentially dangerous sensory stimuli are routed at the level of the spinal cord back to the concerned limbs without going through the normal route all the way to the brain. Sending the signals to the brain and waiting for the response may mean danger in case of situations where you need to act fast. So, certain amount of unconscious or involuntary processing of sensory signals happens at the level of ganglions in the spinal cord. This is called a reflex action. Whereas there are the normal, harmless sensations that can travel all the way to the brain and an action output can happen at the usual pace. To be honest even this happens within a matter of seconds. How long does it take for you to realize that someone has touched you? How long does it take to smell something in the air or to hear a sound?

Perceiving a sensation is quick no doubt. But our brain has to process a lot of other information that is gathered by way of tasks like reading or listening. It may take minutes or even hours for us to read and assimilate the information in a scientific text. It does not and cannot happen like a reflex reaction. Can it?

Let us say there is a document produced by an organization on some topic. For the sake of an example let it be an expert advice on global warming. It would take months for that kind of information to be read, discussed and understood by those concerned. It may not be feasible for a single person to comprehend that on his own self. It may need a group of experts possibly from different countries to grasp the information totally and come up with a plan. It may take again years for effective interventions to be planned and implemented. This type of slow reaction to complex data is akin to the evolutionary process where an environmental input needs to be processed over generations and possibly hundreds of years for a change to occur. We call this change as evolutionary adaptation. To me this is no different from a behavioral sequence albeit it happens over vastly prolonged time frames. One of the most provocative thoughts in the manuscript is my view of evolutionary adaptation as a response to environmental stimuli over a long period of time. It is just a delayed manifestation of a response separated by generations of time.

My view of evolutionary adaptation as a long-term behavioral response to environmental stimuli could make a biologist cringe with disgust. I know, however, deep inside he or she would find it difficult to refute this argument. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if they find this view stunningly elegant!

I have so far been exploring the basis of animal behaviors on the whole. Intriguingly, the animals need to rely on external information to know what to do. They capture this information by their sensory receptors, which act like sleuths. They also need to know when to do what they do, which is made possible by the cyclical, celestial clocks. They are assisted in this process by the brain or a nervous system.

Readers may wonder how to categorize the life of a unicellular life form, which does not have the luxury of a nervous system. How do they perceive their environment? Do they respond to their environment at all? Yes, they do.

Single-celled life forms sense their environment in no different manner than how our individual body cells sense our internal body environment. The unicellular life forms are able to detect the presence of food molecules and toxins in a chemical way. That is how our own body cells detect circulating food, other cells, and toxins. The bacteria can not only detect the presence of a food source but also move towards it by a process called chemotaxis. Our own sperms move towards the ovum by a similar process.

Single-celled organisms are known to come up with incredibly specific strategies to tackle toxins in their environment, secreted by competing life forms. How do they do that if they have no way of 'knowing' what is happening around it?

Bacteria can go into a state of dormancy if the conditions are not right in its environment. They form what is called a spore, which is an encapsulated form of itself, designed to withstand harsh environmental conditions like temperature, lack of food or water. Bacteria can remain in this state for thousands of years! They will spring back to life almost immediately after exposing them to the right conditions. If they can't sense their environment, how can they do it?

It is clear that our environment dictates the behavior of all forms of animal and plant life. We do what is appropriate to the environment we are in. Whether it is our biological behavior or a social behavior, we do behave in a predictable fashion. I raised the phenomenon of the 'herd behavior' in a later chapter. It is not surprising at all. People, as well as all other forms of entities, use the cues around them to direct their behavior. Depending on the entity, the nature of the cue may differ. Once cued, the course of the behavior activation is quite automatic.

In the next chapter, I am going to show that there are other ways of activating behaviors, by duping the organism. In this chapter, I looked at the hardware of behaviors. Now, I am going to concentrate on the software of the behaviors.

# CHAPTER 3

### THE SOFTWARE OF BEHAVIORS

The female sheep and goats show seasonal estrous activity. If you introduce males not in heat, there is resumption of ovarian activity similar to what is seen during heat. This 'male effect' can be produced by material prepared from the ram's fleece or buck hairs. Presumably, the male's fleece and buck hairs contain some scent molecules, which the females can perceive. Surprisingly, the females can be deceived into thinking there is a male around if you bring this purified scent molecule in its vicinity.

'Male effect' has also been seen with the urine of male house mice and prairie voles. Urine from the males of these species can initiate a female rat into reproductive preparation though the real males are nowhere near.

Given the choice between normal and castrated male mice, the female mice tend to remain in the proximity of sexually active, non-castrated males. Urine collected from the non-castrated male mice is said to contain some fatty acid molecules secreted from the preputial gland that acts as the chemical attractant. If you cut off the nerve that carries smell sensations to the brain, the females lose their ability to pick the males with intact gonads. This experiment starkly illustrates the dependence on sensory information from your environment to do what you want to do.

If you put the male and female golden hamsters together in a cage, they begin to show increased movements around the cage. In wild conditions, this could mean an enhanced chance of encountering a mate. In fact, you don't have to physically bring the female into the cage. Just the bedding of the female would do. The chemical compounds excreted by the female into her bed will promote the male sensory preparation.

Once an animal becomes pregnant, and produces off springs, the chemosensory cues from the off springs trigger the maternal instinct in their mothers. Even virgin rats, exposed to odors emanating from the burrow of a lactating rat, shows motherly instincts! In some species, emission of calls by the infant rat can influence maternal behavior. Ultrasonic calls are emitted by them in a variety of situations such as aggression, exploration and in response to adverse stimuli.

These examples show how dumb our body ware is. It is so easy to trick it. It is depressing to know that animal behavior can be this robotic and guided.

Sometimes it is amazing that behavior induction depends on signals from quarters you least expected. Sexual receptiveness of male and female Prairie voles depends not just on presence of a partner. It also depends on something else. What is it?

Prairie voles inhabit grasslands throughout much of the mid-western U.S. These rodents experience typical continental climate and appear to be facultative breeders with high levels of reproductive activity observed during the spring and summer. They don't just look for chemical cues from their mates. They look for signals from some plants! Just what is the relevance of a plant in animal reproduction?

Montane voles inhabit the Alpine meadows where the onset of vegetative growth varies on a yearly basis because of the time at which the snow cover melts. If montane voles relied on photoperiods exclusively to time their reproductive efforts, the young ones may arrive at a time when there is not enough food. To avoid this problem the voles look for another signal, this one from the plants. Growing plants make a chemical compound called 6-methoxy benzoxazolinone, which is a cyclic carbamate. The voles seem to possess the ability to smell this compound. For them, it indicates the growth of plants around because, as I said, this compound is secreted by only growing plants. They begin their reproductive efforts when this signal from plants arrives. This way they know that their off springs are not going to starve. What an incredible adaptation?

It appears that some organisms can interfere with the reproductive preparation of the females of its own species with a selfish objective. They do it to control the population explosion. When food resources are limited, it does not make sense to have too many females pregnant. Researchers have succeeded in finding out how the house mice are able to accomplish these effective 'family planning' measures.

Pregnant mice, and those in lactation, secrete chemical substances in their urine that have the effect of preventing the onset of puberty in young females! They can also inhibit onset of heat in adult females! These substances are secreted, amazingly, only when the number of pregnant females exceeds a critical limit. At the other end of the spectrum, there are certain other chemical compounds, which can accelerate puberty in young females and promote heat in adult females. These substances are obviously produced at times when the density of females in an area becomes low. It is really amazing how animals are controlled by such exquisite sensory control mechanisms, which are beyond their control!

Reproduction is not the only behavior under the control of sensory cues. Animals use sensory chemosensory signals for a number of other behaviors.

For instance, they can use chemical odors, secreted in the urine, to mark their territories! Other intruding members of the same species know where to stop to avoid trespassing.

Studies on stressed rats have shown that they emit odors, which can be perceived by other rats. These odors help them avoid areas previously occupied by the stressed and frustrated conspecifics who emitted the signal. This is a way of letting others learn from experiences of other members. It is a way of letting others use the wisdom gained by others. Investigators have looked at the source of these 'alarm substances' and have come to the conclusion that it could be coming from the urine, feces, or breathed out air. Animals can respond to such alarm substances secreted by stranger animals quite unrelated to them! This shows that behavioral strategy has generic biological significance. The alarm substances seem to have been retained by a number of animals in the course of evolution for the benefits they have to offer. In a way, the alarm substances are not conceptually different from the way man passes his wisdom to others around him. We read newspapers and magazines to learn about the accounts of people's experiences from which we hope to learn something. Elders tell us what to do and what not to do because they have been through them all. If you had to go through all the experiences yourself one life is not enough.

Man is not exempt from the need for sensory cues to initiate and maintain his behaviors. A number of recent experiments have convincingly shown that man is as much dependent on odors from potential mates. Studies have shown that humans use odors to pick females who are at or near the time of ovulation. Females seek males around this period more than during other periods. Human sexual mate selection is not totally a conscious process. It depends on a number of cues, including odors as in the case of animals. Females are known to select males who have a different set of immunity-determining genes by odor signals! The males they choose, based on the odor, seem to have a different set of immunity genes. This helps in generating more variety in immunity gene component to be passed on to the off spring! This may not be feasible if their mate also has the same set of immunity genes. The offspring, in such unions, will have limited infection-fighting abilities!

Other behaviors need no elaboration at all. It is obvious that sight, sound, touch and other signals from all around us drive us constantly.

I have tried to show how the behaviors are mediated by molecules as if they are the software of behavior. It looks like molecules are chemical programs. They seem to be able to dock on specific cellular surface receptors and activate a sequence of cellular events that culminate in a biological action.

As in the case of computer software, the molecules work on all compatible living systems. Pig insulin works in humans. Insulin from cows works in us as well. Medical sciences exploit precisely this impersonal nature of behavior inducers.

Insulin is a hormone secreted by us after feeding. This helps us to lower our rising blood sugar level that normally occurs after eating. Insulin, therefore, is a program to lower the blood sugar. If you inject insulin into somebody who is starving, it will still produce the same sugar-lowering effect. Insulin, by itself, has no way of knowing that it is going to push the sugar levels too low. It runs through the events like an idiotic robot.

The funny thing is the pig 'insulin program' can't distinguish 'pig ware' from 'human ware'!

It is believed that most animal behaviors can be traced to specific molecules. For instance, molecules like estradiol and progesterone can induce maternal behavior in female virgin rats that have not given birth to babies at all! These are the hormones secreted into the blood stream of pregnant rats at the time of delivery.

Administration of extremely low doses of oxytocin has been shown to stimulate memory, foraging, male and female sexual behavior, parturition, milk release from breasts, and even parental care. Just a single molecule that runs several inter-related functions!

Testosterone can induce aggressive behavior in males that have been castrated showing the importance of testosterone in aggressive behavior. Castrated animals are normally placid and defensive. As said earlier, testosterone also induces male sexual behavior.

Most interestingly, testosterone also induces a bizarre infanticidal behavior in male rats. The rats kill the off springs born to other members of its own species in order to prevent competition for food. Over the years, infanticide has come to be viewed as an adaptive behavior, which routinely occurs as an adaptive behavioral strategy in a variety of mammals and other vertebrates. Field studies have shown that African lions and Indian Langurs accrue reproductive advantages by usurping the territory of a rival after killing their infants! In rats, this behavior can be seen under socio-pathological conditions such as overcrowding. Even feeding behavior can be induced by injection of molecules. Pain relief can be achieved by molecules such as opium-related substances, which do the same job under normal, physiological circumstances.

If you carefully look into what I have discussed in this chapter and the previous one, it will be obvious that the behavior induction starts with the sensory information from outside you. The signals may come from members of the same species or unrelated ones. Or, the signals could be from geo-physical sources. These signals drive the behaviors. The usual pathways in the nervous system carry the signals from the sensory receptors to the brain. But, it is possible that the sensory receptors and the nerves, which carry the information, can be bypassed if you directly stimulate the brain. This shows the robotic nature of our behaviors. Under normal circumstances, the nerves would have stimulated the brain into commanding the target organs to secrete molecules that mediate the behaviors. I have shown in this chapter that these purified molecules can bypass not just the sensory receptors and nerves but the brain itself. What we and other organisms do and when we do them is not entirely up to us. We have to be signaled to do them. In fact, we are driven to do them. There are many strings out there tying you down. You hardly realize that. You thing you are the decision-maker sadly.

# CHAPTER 4

### KEEPING THE BRAIN FIT TO RECEIVE COMMANDS

We human beings, as well as most other multi-cellular life forms, are equipped with sensory receptors of various types to gather information from our environment. Touch receptors, pain receptors, light receptors, sound receptors, smell receptors, and taste receptors constantly relay information to the brain, 24-hours a day, 365 days a year. They are stationed throughout the body in eyes, ears, skin, tongue and the nose. The information collected by them is relayed to the brain through the nerves. The evolutionary basis for this arrangement is to be able to respond to environmental signals. You could look at the environmental signals in a passive sense but I prefer to look at signals emanating from the external world around us as an active-goal-oriented, directed, behavioral process. The unicellular life forms are no exception to this. They have a wide variety of chemical sensory mechanisms that can pick up environmental signals like presence of nutrients or toxins. They can sense their enemies. They can do a lot of environmental perception without the luxury of a brain. In fact, inside our own body, we have a lot of internal sensory receptors which work more like the bacterial chemoperception. These internal receptors are of multiple types and numerous. They sense our blood levels of glucose, oxygen, salt levels, nutrients etc. and initiate appropriate molecular and cellular programs to deal with the situations. The funny thing is we do not even realize this consciously. We are responding sub-consciously with a behavioral response. When the blood level of glucose drops we are driven to eat. When our salt levels drop we crave for salty foods. When our body fluid levels drop we feel thirsty and go any amount of distance to find water!!

The amount of information our brain receives is incredible. The need of our brain is not just gathering vital information but to avoid useless information from clogging the system. Our receptors are designed to disregard signals not meeting the minimum threshold levels of signal intensity. Even those signals that meet the required intensity levels are not guaranteed to reach the brain. They have to pass through filtration 'gates' at the base of the brain where they are scanned for significance of the sensory information. If the signal passes this test, it is let through the 'sensory gate' to reach the brain. Only then, we become consciously aware of the sensory data.

Most sensory information is prevented from bothering the conscious part of the brain. The conscious processing space is reserved for important information only. For instance, when reading a book, we are so immersed in the information content of the book, which requires the full use of our conscious brain. During this time, we pay little attention to other sensory data. We do not pay any attention to visual images of people sitting around you, do not pay attention to sounds around you and you are hardly aware of the things scattered around in the room. These sensory details are accessible at any time by voluntary attention if only you want to. But we don't have any use for them because they are not of any immediate benefit while you are at the task of gathering information from the book. That is why they are filtered.

Most of the information we are all exposed is monotonous and dull. We get the same stimuli day in and day out. We live in the same house surrounded by the same interior environment for years together. We go to the same job for many years. We keep doing the same kind of routine work at our offices. We have the same set of friends. We eat more or less the same types of food on most days. No wonder we are all bored easily.

Let us say you buy an audiocassette. You listen to it many times. Initially, you find listening to it a nice experience. If you continue to hear it many times, the level of enjoyment decreases. You do not pay attention to it even while it is being played. Because you know what to expect and there is nothing new to expect from it. Our brain loses interest in anything that does not offer new stimulation and information. This is called the 'habituation response'.

Habituation response is a mechanism to prevent our sensory receptors from relaying useless information all the time. Let us say you walk into a room where there is a lovely fragrance coming from somewhere. It may be a perfume or room freshener or something else. You enjoy the pleasant smell for some time. After a while, you forget it. It is not because you become engrossed in other activities. It is because the smell receptors have stopped relaying the fragrance. Why did they do that? This is because the smell information lost its novelty by its continuous fragrance. Moreover, there was no survival value in it. The brain and the receptors divert their attention elsewhere in the hope that they will not miss out on other useful information in the room.

All sensory receptors act this way. When you walk into a room, you may hear the clock ticking. You pay a brief attention to it. This is called the 'orienting response'. Afterwards, you forget the ticking sound. You don't hear it anymore. You need to consciously think to even realize the presence of the clock! It is eliminated from your conscious space.

This kind of habituation is a filtration mechanism to protect our brains from recurrent, monotonous, useless information and restore it to a state ready to receive new information. Adaptation occurs to varying degrees in different sense organs. Pain receptors adapt very slowly. We feel the excruciating pains for what looks like an eternity. How nice would it be if the pain receptors become habituated as quickly as the smell or sound receptors? If that is the case, we would lose the opportunity to escape from sources of noxious stimuli. We would not be making any effort to flee from potentially life-threatening situations.

Our internal receptors, responsible for sensing our internal environment, never bother our conscious brain. They relay the information to lower centers in the brain, evolved to control these functions. This way our brain has more capacity to process information at a conscious level. It can work without bothering about recurrent, monotonous chemical stimuli coming from within.

All information-selection mechanisms are meant to spare conscious space inside our brain. This is the most valuable part of our brain because it allows us to do creative things. This is the part that helps us to tackle the unpredictable events in the world. It comes up with solutions for complex sensory signals.

Our brain, in spite of its amazing powers, has so little capacity for conscious information processing. It can only do one thing at a time. This is a bit surprising. Can you solve a mathematical problem while you are reading something else, or while talking to someone else? To even think of doing a mathematical task as you talk with somebody is ridiculous. We do one thing only at a time. That is all we can. Even a tiny bit of a disturbance can throw your brain in disarray.

In the case of smaller, less complex organisms, the information-selective mechanisms have evolved to reduce the amount of information they have to process. Their lack of a brain, or a small-sized brain, makes it necessary. All sensory information is processed in an involuntary manner in these organisms. Whatever information they have evolved to download into their systems determine their survival mechanisms. This applies to all the types of organisms. As I said earlier, the organisms have evolved to occupy their own space in the world. The way they can do it is by restricting their share of the information.

Organisms that shared vital environmental with too many others must have found it tough going. They must have failed to survive. It is not that they did it by conscious choice. It is the way interacting units stabilize themselves as part of a complex system. It is the way animals determine their physical territorial limits. No animal would cross this limit under normal circumstances. It is amazing that animals have the sense of territory. All of them have it. A cell membrane is a 'territory' to a cell. This means even a unicellular organism has a territory. We humans have this sense too. Our houses are our territories. Anybody who enters it without authority is said to have committed the offence of trespass. Our national borders are agreed between nations so that they do not infringe into their territories.

Anybody who questions the truth in my argument that organisms restrict their information space would do well to explain why they restrict their physical territorial space. If an organism can come up with physical territorial agreements, why not also have your own personal information space?

We all like to go on holidays. We do that in order to take a break from monotonous stimuli at your home and work. It is hoped that new visual and other sensory experiences will rejuvenate us.

I said that our brain gets habituated to recurrent, monotonous stimuli. It does not respond to them well. I had illustrated this habituation phenomenon with the examples of the stimuli of fragrance and the ticking clock. We want to prevent this from happening in our daily lives. We want to be as alert as possible at our work. Inattentiveness could cost you your job. How do you manage to keep up the alertness of the brain, beating the habituation response?

It is a sad fact that we do not find most things in our daily life stimulating at all. We have been doing them for most of our life and it is hardly surprising that it has gotten to the point of outright boredom. We restore our brain to the alert state by a number of means such as holidaying, entertainment, and sleep.

Holiday breaks are expected to provide your brain with enough new stimulation to restore it to an alert state, which you hope to maintain for a period of time after returning from your holiday. It is like listening to an old cassette after a gap. Songs, heard repeatedly, lose the freshness in it. You do not feel like hearing it. The same song you had got used to sounds a lot more stimulating if heard after a period of time.

We are capable of responding to sensory data even while we are asleep. That might sound surprising because most people have the wrong idea that the brain is shut down during sleep. The brain can never afford to be idle. If the brain were shut down during sleep, it would not be possible to wake up anybody. If that is the case, it is death and not sleep.

People in sleep are able to hear our calling. If their sound receptors and the brain were asleep, then how do people respond to wake up calls? People can also be woken up by touching and shaking. The touch sensation seems to work too.

If someone was sleeping, it is common experience to find them unresponsive to gentle wake up calls. On the other hand, a loud and unusual noise would make them jump out of their bed. This means that our brain does respond to sensory stimulation in a choosy manner. It takes a greater degree of signal intensity, as well as the significance of it, to make the brain take the trouble of listening to incoming stimuli while we are asleep. This is an in-built mechanism to let our brain take a break from the monotonous stimuli every night.

We feel fresh in the mornings precisely because of this sensory break. A person who responded to too much sensory stimulation in the night would hardly feel fresh in the morning. The sleep is an evolutionary development to solve the issue of keeping the brain 'serviced' every day. Otherwise, our information channels would be clogged with inattentive, habituated, adapted and 'bored' sensory receptors and nerve cells.

The sensory input during onset of sleep has to be minimal. Otherwise, they will keep simulating the brain to the extent it will be difficult to fall asleep. You need a quiet room with minimal sound input. You need a dark room to minimize light signal input. You need to have less worrying thoughts on your inner mind. If you recall the days you found it difficult to fall asleep, it would be mostly due to any one of these requirements not being fulfilled.

If you try to sleep in an unfamiliar place, such as a hotel room or in a friend's house, you would find it more difficult to fall asleep than in your own bedroom. This is because your brain is in a heightened state of awareness in a new environment. This is what is to be expected. I said that our brain and its sensory information-gatherers, the sensory receptors, are aroused in an environment full of novel stimuli.

While trying to fall asleep, we tend to adopt a posture that imposes minimal amount of discomfort. We choose a nice and soft mattress to aid in this process. Once asleep, our body movements stop. This reduces the amount of stimulation going to the brain from our muscles and joints. The brain is able to continue with its job of sleeping.

When we are in a life-threatening situation, we are at the height of our ability to perceive. It takes very little sensory stimulation to make the brain to arouse the brain. The brain is pushed into this heightened state of awareness by loosening the grips at the so-called 'sensory gate' that we were discussing before. I keep using this phrase for its effectiveness in conveying the idea of regulated sensory data entry in to the brain. This sensory gate is not a distinct, isolated anatomical structure. It is constituted by a group of nerve cell projections, with the functional objective of modulation of sensory input to the brain.

For a person in fear or danger, every bit of information is vital. The brain has to heed to all sensory data, relaxing the rules of the game. The release of stress hormones, adrenaline and noradrenaline, is responsible for the arousal and behavioral alerting of the person. A person in a state of fear, grief or stress is unable to go to sleep for the same reason. Adrenaline pumps up the arousal pathways of our brain. Every tiny bit of sensory stimulation gains entry into the brain refusing to let it sleep.

The Electroencephalogram EEG) is a very useful procedure for studying the electrical activity of the brain while the person is at rest or busy with perception. The electrical activity is studied because the 'official business language' of the brain is electrical in nature. Nerves communicate with each other and their target cells through electrical discharges. The EEG can be recorded with scalp electrodes through the unopened skull or with electrodes directly on the brain. Hans Berger, a German psychiatrist, was the first to study background electrical activity of thebrain, and introduced the term EEG to denote the record of variations in the electrical potentials recorded from the brain.

The electrical wave pattern of humans at rest, with eyes closed, is a rhythmic one. It is not clear why such rhythmic electrical activity occurs within the resting brain. An EEG of an adult human at rest shows a fairly regular pattern of electrical activity of with amplitude of about 50 µV and a frequency of 8-12 per second. This pattern is called the Alpha rhythm. It is remarkably similar in all mammals, except for very minor variations.

Another type of rhythmic electrical activity in the brain is the beta rhythm, with a higher frequency (18-30 per second) but of lower voltage. The third pattern is the theta rhythm with a frequency of 4-7 waves per second. Theta rhythm occurs in children.

When a man is at rest, with his eyes closed, the electrical pattern in the brain is the Alpha rhythm. As you record the EEG, ask the person to open his eyes. Now the Alpha pattern is replaced by an irregular, low voltage electrical activity with no dominant pattern. This is technically known as the alpha block.

Why did the regular, rhythmic, alpha rhythm disappear when the eyes were opened? It is because the brain starts receiving visual stimuli. The visual stimuli generate electrical activity, which obliterates the background electrical rhythm of the brain. In fact, any form of sensory stimulation can disrupt the rhythmic electrical activity of the resting brain. Neurophysiologists call it the 'de-synchronization response' because it represents the breaking up of the synchronized activity of the resting brain.

De-synchronization of the resting electrical activity of the brain seems to be important for a person to be able to perceive. It is called the 'arousal response'. De-synchronization is correlated with the aroused, alert state of mind.

How does the electrical activity of the brain change when we go to sleep? Interestingly, it depends on whether the person is dreaming or not!

The electrical activity of a person during a dream is similar to what you see in an alert, aroused individual! The person continues to sleep, however!

The electrical wave pattern is different in us when we don't dream. Actually, the sleep sets in distinct stages. In the beginning, the transition from wakeful state to the drowsy, sleepy state occurs. This is a peculiar state because the person is still sensitive to sensory signaling as if the person is still awake. We can hear people talk while we are still in this stage. We can even answer questions meaningfully. This can surprisingly occur without the conscious awareness of the individual. A person who has done the sleep talking will be amazed to learn that he has answered the way he had the earlier night to a question he can't recall being asked.

There is some evidence for sub-conscious registration of facts in memory during this stage of sleep. Quite interestingly, this information is not accessible to the same individual while he is conscious. In an anecdotal case, I have seen this happening in my own experience. I was narrating the course of an event to my wife one day as she was just going to sleep. She had fallen asleep by the time I finished. I assumed that she must have missed the final bit because I did not know at what point she had fallen asleep.

On the next morning I asked her how much she had actually listened before dozing off. She said she can't remember the way the story ended. I assumed that she had fallen asleep before completion of the narration. The following night, I set about narrating the incident and my wife was again in that early stage of sleep, when I came to the final bit. To my surprise, my wife asked me how many times am I going to say the thing. I was puzzled because in the morning, in the conscious state, she said she had not heard the full story. Just to make sure she was not bluffing, I asked my wife, who was still in the early stages of sleep, to tell me what she knew. I could not believe it when she completely narrated the incidence as I had told her. For some inexplicable reason, this memory was accessible only in a sub-conscious state that she was in the early stage of her sleep!

Electrically, the first stage of the sleep is associated with low amplitude, fast frequency EEG waves. The next stage is associated with bursts of alpha-like waves, which are seen in persons with their eyes closed in the wakeful state. In the final stage of onset of sleep, there are characteristic, slow, rhythmic waves indicating synchronization. At this stage, the person is deep asleep.

Sleep researchers have found that we spend about 2 hours going through these stages of sleep without dreaming. Then we go through a phase of dreaming. At this point, the EEG pattern changes to that of the aroused state. We spend about 90 minutes in this phase of sleep. At the end of the dream phase, we go through another cycle of dreamless sleep stages. We seem to be spending about 25% of our sleep dreaming. Towards the mornings, there is more of sleep associated with dreams.

From the point of view of sensory stimulation, it takes a greater amount of sensory signals to wake up a person when he is dreaming. At the other extreme, he is easily woken up at the early stages of the sleep, when he is not sleeping.

The ease of with which a person is woken up to the aroused state is determined by a component of the nervous system called the Reticular activating system. It is what I had so far been referring to as the sensory gate. It regulates the sensory input proceeding to the brain. The reticular activating system receives input from the visual, auditory, olfactory and other sensory pathways. In other words, the nerves carrying these signals send inputs to the reticular activating system. Most interestingly, the nature and source of the sensory stimuli is not important at all.

The reticular activating system determines the information-receptive status of the brain. The brain is not alert when the reticular activating system is inactive. In other words, the person is unconscious. General anesthetics depress the reticular activating system and help prevent pain stimuli from being conducted to the brain.

Certain interesting findings have emerged from neurophysiological studies on people when they are meditating. These people show alpha pattern of EEG waves, which is the pattern found during early hours of sleep. In normal people, I said, alpha rhythm would disappear when an external stimulus arrives. Surprisingly, this does not seem to happen in experienced meditators! What does this mean?

External stimuli de-synchronize the resting rhythmic electrical activity (alpha rhythm) because the nerve cellular electrical activity changes on beginning to process the stimuli. This is what is called the arousal response or de-synchronization. Meditators are able to prevent this from happening by shutting down their awareness to external stimuli.

This intriguing observation has been made on Yoga meditators as well as Transcendental meditators. Yoga is a popular meditation technique practiced in India. Transcendental meditation originated in the eastern world and is now spreading to other parts of the world as a popular means of calming the mind. Even big corporate houses advocate the use of this technique as a stress-relieving strategy for their employees.

Basically, meditation is done by focusing your mind on a single object or image. In India, meditation is aided by chanting mantras, which are words with divine meaning. By repeating these mantras, it is believed that the mind can be so occupied with the task to the extent it can help ignore other stimuli from the world around you. In yoga, the meditators adopt complex physical postures as they meditate.

I am sure every one of us know how difficult it is to concentrate on something for more than a few seconds. Our mind wavers from one thing to another, on a continuous basis. We think about this and that. We see or hear things for no apparent reason. Our mind moves across thousands of miles and many years in a fleeting second! In a wakeful state, it is quite natural that our EEG pattern is different from the resting rhythm.

The idea of the eastern practice of meditation is to try and prevent aimless sensory stimulation. Readers may be surprised why somebody would want to do that. Aren't the meditators losing the chance of getting more sensory information? Here comes the surprise. The meditators seem to achieve more powerful sensory reception when they are not meditating! The mind-control they exercise during meditation helps them to achieve it.

I said earlier that we have a tendency to become habituated to monotonous, repetitive stimuli such as the sound of the ticking clock or the smell of the perfume. Our world is full of such recurrent, boring stimuli. It is a real danger because our brain may refuse to register sensory data in an alert manner, because its perceptivity status is lowered by the habituating stimuli all around you. I said that we take holidays to break free from these monotonous stimuli in order to restore ourselves to an alert state. Our entertainment schedules are designed to do just that. Meditation is one such strategy to do what holiday or entertainment can do, sitting at one place.

Meditators do shut down external stimuli during meditation. But they behave differently after it. In experienced practitioners of meditation habituation response does not happen. They are able to respond to external stimuli without getting habituated. In other words, they achieve a state of 'hyper-awareness'. They are able to perceive sensory data more alertly than others!

Japanese researchers have studied this fascinating phenomenon in Zen masters as compared to normal people. Zen tradition believes in a different type of mind control. They open up their minds to be conscious of every action they do. There is no attempt to isolate the persons from external stimuli. Instead, they are asked to develop a 'present-centered' consciousness and open up their awareness to daily activities while engaged in them. In the more advanced form of Zen, the focus is on breathing movements! Once this is mastered, they move on to skikan-taza, a meditative exercise that involves intensive awareness of the act of just sitting!

In the study that was done on the Zen practitioners, the subjects were asked to sit in a soundproof room. They were asked to listen to a clock, repeated every 15 seconds, while an EEG was taken. The normal subjects showed the customary phenomenon of habituation. Their brains showed less and less response to the clicking sounds. The click had been turned out of awareness for them. In the Zen masters, it was not the case. They responded to the last click as strongly as they did to the first click!

In another study, the meditators were asked to gaze at a blue rose for half an hour at a time for several sessions. Instead of getting used to the image, they said they were able to see it more vividly. The image was more luminous. Some said they felt as if they were seeing it for the first time.

Many psychologists view this phenomenon in different ways. It may be a 'cleansing of the doors of perception'. It may be 'de-growing of the mind' to the level of the child who has not yet developed automatic ways of turning out world experiences. The child sees and hears things for the first time and therefore tries to perceive them to the fullest extent. This is because the sensory experience is novel to them. Whereas an adult does most of his sensory perception in an automatic manner, without pausing to appreciate the beauty of what is out there. This is because he has seen, heard or touched them a number of times. His brain has got used to them.

Studies on the meditators have shown that it is possible to regain the child-like curiosity and intent by de-automating our sensory experiences. Reports on the experiences of those who practice meditation indicate that the primary after effect of the mind concentration is an opening up of awareness or 'de-automation'.

Karma Yoga is a Hindu practice in which everyday activities are treated as a sacrament so that we give them full attention. In Sufism, in the version attributed to Gurdjieff, there is a practice of focused awareness of the body. Another practice in this tradition believes in performing ordinary actions slightly differently, such as putting the shoes on in the other order, shaving the other side of the face first, eating with the left hand, etc. As you can see, these exercises are attempts to return habitual, automatic actions to full awareness. Because the action is done differently, we have to concentrate on them rather than doing them like automatons!

Looking back at our discussions so far, it becomes clear that there are many ways of keeping our brain alert to sensory signals. Meditation looks very esoteric and not many people can be expected to do it in the modern world. In the past, people used to pray either at home or at places of worship. People all over the world still do it. However, less and less people are willing to find time for it. Less people go to church and that is a fact. Elsewhere in the world, men and women are no longer keen on going to places of worship. Many of the older generation still do. Prayer as a means of focusing the mind has lost its place in our world just as meditation has.

Modern man, perhaps, has found holidays and entertainment as the equivalent of meditation. A captivating movie, book or a game holds our attention for a few hours and is a more interesting way of focusing our mind. We are able to divert our mind away from the routine stimuli during this period which is what is required for mind refreshment. The extent people turn their attention towards pop stars and sport stars and movie stars is probably enough to get their minds as focused, if not more, as meditation. The TV shuts us out of our boring world in the evenings in an entertaining way. A holiday to an exotic location does just that. Who needs meditation and prayer to do that?

We all like to listen to good music. The basis of this behavior is that music gives us sound stimuli much different and more pleasant than ordinary speech. We like literature, or anything well written or spoken, because it liberates us from the boring speech expressions all around us. Our fashions probably change just for this reason. How long can you go on seeing the same pattern of clothes worn by everyone around you? Our desire to eat out and taste exotic foods is again a reflection of our inner desire to gain refreshing stimuli.

If somebody needs help, in addition to the sleep, holiday, entertainment and books, they have alcohol, caffeine, narcotics and the like! The fact that they are indeed available in nature makes us wonder how a system can come up with such thoughtful 'remedies' to relieve mental stress!

Considering the amount of time we spend for our entertainment, I wonder if it is sensible at all. An average workweek is 40 hours in most countries. In other words, we work only 8 hours per day out of a possible 24. The rest of the time we spend for sleeping, TV, games, books, movies etc. Two-thirds of the time for 'servicing' the brain and just one-third for work! Honestly, even in the 8 hours of work time, we take breaks for tea, meals, gossip and even do a little bit of personal work!

In one of the earlier chapters, I said that we have limited capacity to process sensory information and therefore have evolved information-selective mechanisms. This helps in reducing the information input to the brain at times such as sleeping as well. However, during other times, we tend to maximize the information capture with other strategies such as entertainment, meditation, holiday etc. They help in alerting the inattentive brain.

This is a bit paradoxical because, on one side, we want to reduce the information input, and on the other, we tend to maximize it. But if you look carefully, we 'reserve' our information space by evolving species-selective mechanisms of information capture. This is different from the attempts to 'wake' up the brain from slumber.

Before we close this chapter and move on, I would like to bring the reader's attention to man's sensory greediness. Man has always tried to enhance his capacities to take in more sensory information in a progressively increasing fashion. Evolutionary increases in brain size, particularly the frontal lobe, no doubt have increased his information-processing power. The most interesting thing is the pooling of the human 'brain power' by the scientific community. The combined intellectual power of humanity is more than the sum of the total. Hundreds and thousands of brains work together for decades to make out what the sensory observations mean. This is necessary for complex sensory data. A single human brain is inadequate to do that. A man's simple brain can only help in straightforward sensory signals. He or she acts on simple signals then and there. When it comes to complex sensory information, we need to put our brains together.

In the past couple of decades, man has come up with another tool to process the information. Computers have revolutionized the way we store, process and transmit the information. If we had left our brains to evolve naturally, it would have taken probably tens of millions of years to come with processing capabilities equivalent to our computers. Have we bypassed the evolutionary process?

We have linked the computers into networks analogous to collective effort of humans. The power of Internet, and Local Area Networks (LAN) is something that we have seen already. We are getting used to it as if it is nothing more complicated than brushing our teeth!

Man has now found ways of accessing sensory information by proxy. His gadgets help him seek information he is not biologically entitled to. We have begun to encroach into the information spaces of other organisms. We have broadened the 'information window' through which we see the world. Do you get what I am trying to say? Let me explain.

The electromagnetic spectrum is like an information aperture through which organisms perceive the world. It starts at the lower end with the ultraviolet waves with wavelengths less than 300 nm. We cannot see the world as it 'looks' in this part of the spectrum. Our eyes have evolved only to see the world in the visible portion of the electromagnetic spectrum i.e., 300-700 nm. This is nothing but visible light. Before the advent of science, man knew nothing of the world other than how it looked in this portion of the spectrum. Now the situation has changed. We have invented the UV spectrophotometers, which can help us peep into the world through the UV part of the spectrum! We use UV spectrophotometers in scientific research for capturing signals from the micro-world of molecules and cells.

There are certain organisms, which can use their natural sensory system to perceive the UV light. We have trespassed into their information space!

If you go beyond the 700-nm wavelength, we have the infrared waves. We have managed to invent the infrared cameras, which can help us 'look' into this portion of the world!

The other 'windows' in the spectrum are the gamma rays, X rays and radio waves. We now have the capability to peep into them as well. Gamma, X and Radio telescopes tell us how the world looks in this part of the spectrum. In other words, we now can access data, in sensory from, from worlds millions of light years away! For what?

We have begun to use these artificial data acquisition capabilities as if they are appendages to our own natural sensory system. In my eyes, it looks like sheer sensory greediness. We are trying to gain access to more information than we could possibly require for ordinary survival.

From my point of view, this sensory greediness can be interpreted as our drive to make ourselves available to more 'commands' from nature. Do you get what I mean? We want to be 'extremely obedient' to our boss. Which boss would like a servant who does not listen well to his orders?

I said a little while ago that our brain is finding it difficult to cope with ordinary sensory information as it is. That is why our brain gets adapted to recurrent, boring stimuli. We use a number of strategies to alert them as discussed before. This being the case, why seek more information through artificial means?

Have we placed too much emphasis on information? In my opinion, we are already bursting at the seams with information. It is said that the Sunday edition of the New York Times, and possibly other Sunday papers, contain more information than what an average 19th century man would have had gathered all his lifetime! No wonder we feel so much stress in our lives! It is true that more than 95% of all information in newspapers, magazines and TV news is junk. They have no relation to your own survival. Most magazines people read contain articles about the lives of pop stars, sports stars and other celebrities. People eagerly read about what they did in the last week. I can't imagine why or how this kind of information can help in our personal lives! Then why do we seek this information? Is it like seeing the movies to escape the drudgery of our own lives? It is true that we do get useful pieces of information, once in a while, by reading newspapers and surfing the internet. That is why we do it. We have to be selective in what we take in. We have no other option than to sift through loads of utter non-sense. Plain gossip is again a mechanism to exchange information with people. We talk about all kinds of things with no aim. We groom our systems with this kind of mutual back-scratching. We are information-hungry. I am afraid it should rightly be called gluttony. Can't we live without this mad rush after information? Are we after information of all sorts because we need them to know what we should be doing? Evolutionary processes have enabled organisms to find more efficient ways of gleaning the information from the outside world and linked them up to almost seamless behavioral responses. It took ages for many of these evolutionary processes to happen. But, the intent is clear. You have to dance to the tune. You make sure you seek more strings to tie you down more. That is why we seek information through artificial means also which clearly widens your scanning area. Do you get now why we do science? We all think science represents progress in the modern world. To me it looks like we are succumbing more and more into the puppet trap.

# CHAPTER 5

### INTERPRETING THE SIGNALS RIGHT

What happens if someone misinterprets sensory information? What happens if you imagine presence of sensory stimuli when there is none really? Psychiatric patients suffer from all kinds of disorders of perception which prevent them from responding appropriately to sensory information coming from around them. That is why we do not entrust them with important tasks. I guess nobody would be willing to employ a mentally ill person.

Psychologically defective individuals are shunned by the society because they are capable of breaking the information chain. The information chain, as I said earlier, begins outside you in the environment. It elicits an action in you. Your action acts as the stimulus for the next guy's action and so on. As long as there is no discontinuity in the sequence of events, the environmental stimulus that drove you to initiate the chain will go on to have a cascading effect.

A mentally unstable person who misinterprets the stimulus, or fails to perceive it, can break the chain resulting in loss of communication of information. An intact, well-regulated society needs its information network to be working properly all the time. There is no place for mentally deranged people in this scheme of things. That is evident clearly in the way treat them. If your office had a computerized operative system to do a vital task, would you risk using it if you knew it had a problem? You would eliminate the problem before the system is put into use. You have to be certain that the system has no defects in its ability to process and store the data.

Our perception and evaluation of sensory data involves inductive and inferential steps. Unconscious processes going on in our mind are continuously developing inferential propositions derived from our immediate experiences. By the term 'inferential', I mean a process of inferring something out of an experience of a sensory nature. Our brain tends to infer the nature and meaning of the experience at a subconscious plane. This is matched with an internal standard set up by us, using our knowledge and previous experiences. Only when the inferred proposition meets the internal standard of logical consistency and rationality, it is allowed to go through to the conscious plane of awareness.

If the unconscious and conscious mental machinery are deranged, then poor matches are made between the inferential perceptual processes and the internal standards. What would have been dismissed as illogical and inconsequential by normal people is accepted by psychotics as being related to their immediate experience. It is noteworthy that such mismatched perceptions are common under the influence of psychotogens such as LSD, Mescaline etc.

Difficulties in 'match-mismatch' mechanism make it difficult for an individual to evaluate his environment and make contact with reality. At some stage, the psychotic delusions begin to take the force of reality, and the person ends up with wrong cognitive conclusions in response to simple sensory data.

Normal persons can have misperceptions bordering on delusions in some situations. A man carrying a lot of money may consider everyone around him as potential robbers. A casual, inconsequential look from a guy sitting next to him could drive him to conclude that he is going to make his move in the next moment! Whereas a deluded patient persists with such misevaluation, we normal people are able to abandon such doubts and realize the inferential inaccuracy of this image of a person who is really a harmless guy.

In certain types of delusions, one feels that his or her thoughts are disrupted by insertion or withdrawal by an external agency. Some may feel that their thoughts are being broadcast for all to receive. These kinds of delusions are exclusively found in Schizophrenics. Such delusions also occur in manic depressive illnesses. Paranoid delusions consist of a belief in the persecutory intent and activity of others. A person working in an office may feel his colleagues don't like him and are hatching a plot to land him in trouble.

In some delusory states, the affected individuals self-misidentify themselves to be historical or mythological figures. One may feel that he is Hitler or Alexander the Great, or even Jesus Christ.

Manic patients preferentially delude themselves special abilities, which they really don't have. Some may think they are greater than Shakespeare. One manic mathematician is said to have had a belief that he could completely alter the basis of arithmetic by his 'brilliant' reasoning!

It is important to point out that lots of mentally ill patients don't have any defects in their bodily functions. They are normal in all other body functions such as eating, digestion, sleeping, excretion etc. That is mainly because our physiological functions are automated and we don't have to consciously command our heart to beat, our lungs to breathe, or our guts to digest. They happen on their own. This is not so when it comes to interpretation and evaluation of sensory data. This requires the conscious thinking ability where the psychotics are deficient.

I have had some experience of coming in contact with mentally ill patients as part of my medical education. I was a young medical student then. I was afraid to approach the patients to pose questions because I was scared they may take an unexpected swipe at me totally unprovoked. I guess that most people have that fear. I can recall some of the peculiar patients that I saw during a brief period. One patient felt that his thoughts were planted by his neighbor. He looked utterly convincing as he described his 'fears'. Another patient thought he was a great film actor called M.G.R who was worshipped by people in the state of Tamil Nadu in India!

After spending some time in the psychiatry wards, I began to get self-doubts whether I was normal in the first place. It was very funny, but scary, feeling. I am sure most of us do insane things occasionally. At least, other people think so. Quite often, the difference between sanity and insanity is only a thin line. We may cross it once in a while. The psychiatric patient does so too often. That separates us from them. I began to wonder if I am really normal because, within myself, I knew that it wouldn't take much to cross the line of sanity.

There are some borderline cases who may shuttle between sanity and insanity. I am sure most of us have come across such people though they are not bona fide psychotics. They may end up in psychological failure later on, or become better with time. Some people show seasonal imbalances in their mental make-up.

I had a friend, who was a doctor like me, whom I met at the medical school I went to. He was doing postgraduate studies in diseases of the chest. He was the husband of one of my colleagues and that is how I came to know him. He was a pleasant chap and had a good sense of humor. One day, as we were chatting, he said that the God Vishnu (a Hindu God) visited him the previous night. My initial reaction was he was joking. What would you do if your friend told you Jesus Christ came to your house yesterday? I was no different. My friend said in a cool and calm manner that he was not joking. He went on to add that his son was none other than Vinayaka, a Hindu God like Vishnu!

On another occasion, he said that he has discovered a novel form of treatment for curing Tuberculosis. He asserted that he was studying for a postgraduate degree in chest diseases so that people will take him seriously when he presents his findings at a scientific conference. I did ask him out of curiosity what it was. He refused to disclose it. However, I persisted in my quest to know what it was. He disclosed his 'discovery' later. It was such a load of rubbish. In his view, he was convinced he had reached a momentous discovery. His ability to reach sane conclusions based on accepted facts was obviously deranged.

I said that people with delusions misinterpret sensory experiences. Interestingly, people with hallucinations imagine a sensory stimulus when there is none. They perceive something when there is nothing to be perceived. It is perception without an object or event. It lacks reality. They may be regarded as representing a breaking through of pre-conscious or unconscious material into consciousness in the form of sensory images in response to psychological needs and situations.

Hallucinations can occur in any sensory modality. Hallucinations of smell, taste, and vision usually have an organic origin in the brain, which means that the brain is pathologically diseased at specific locations.

Illusions are different from hallucinations in that it is an image symbol of a real object but misinterpreted due to psychological reasons. Illusions are prompted by external stimuli and ambiguous circumstances, frequently within a framework of heightened expectations. A person with a deep sense of guilt may even find the rustling of leaves to be reproaching voices.

Neurosis is considered by some psychiatrists to be a milder form of psychosis. It is likely to lead to established psychosis at a later date. Until then these individuals do not exhibit gross distortions or falsifications of external reality like delusions, illusions and hallucinations. There is no gross disorganization of personality also. The most important hallmark of a neurotic state is anxiety.

Anxiety may be looked at as a derivative of a more basic state called fear. Fear is the adaptive emergency reaction to a situation of immediate danger so that there is a greater opportunity for survival. In primates, actual damage to the organism is only recognized as danger. The primitive contact sensory system helps in registering the pain, which acts as the releaser of the fear response. With evolutionary development, actual damage to the organism was avoided by an anticipatory and evaluative mechanism. This learning ability of the organism helps in analyzing the danger signals so that a fear response could be initiated in advance of the real damage.

Anxiety has a biological function of anticipating a threatening situation and protecting us from danger. In people with tendencies to mental illness, the anxiety is itself strong enough to incapacitate them. Normal people have a complex and resourceful anxiety-busting abilities rooted in their psychological make-up. As we develop psychologically, our personality acquires various psychological techniques by which it attempts to defend itself, establish compromises between conflicting impulses and allay inner tensions due to resentments, frustrations and hostilities. These mediating and integrating activities operate automatically and these internal mechanisms are unconsciously selected. Our ability to respond to sensory percepts within the norms prescribed by the society is the essence of good living. We succeed most of the times to evade undue anxiety and keep it within rational limits.

Man frequently seeks the help of substances that can help reduce his anxiety and stress. This is apart from his mental mechanisms, which has evolved over time. Compulsive eating of chocolates is associated with depressive traits in an individual and appears to be a form of self-medication. Young women suffering from hysteroid dysphoria are found to be addicted to chocolates to overcome repeated episodes of depressed mood in response to a feeling of neglect.

It is common to see all the people eating chocolates all the time. I am sure not all of them are hysterical. Then why are people 'chocoholics'? It is common knowledge that man has been consuming chocolates for over 500 years though not in the present form. Hedonic properties of the chocolate were known to the Aztecs as far back as 14th century. Christopher Colombus noticed the Aztecs drinking a preparation called 'chocolatl' made from cocoa beans. Columbus introduced the drink to Europe in 1502, where it achieved popularity after the Spanish learnt to sweeten it. By 1705, there were 2000 chocolate houses in London alone.

Currently, the Swiss are the leading chocolate consumers in the world. Consumption of chocolates is also high in the U.S, especially among the females in the age group 7-14 years.

It is still not known what chemical present in the chocolate is making us eat it again and again. Is it the high sugar and fat combination? Is it the histamine, tryptophan, caffeine, theobromine or octopamine? We do not know the answer yet. Caffeine is a strong candidate because it is a mood enhancer, an euphoric substance. That is why we all drink coffee to the extent we do. There is evidence that coffee also contains a substance similar to the narcotics. Does that mean we are all 'drug addicts', unknowingly?

Use of narcotics is a worrisome aspect of humanity. Surprisingly, man has been using them for many centuries in order to evade anxiety and stress. The mighty Aztec empire, which sprawled across central America, developed a religion centered around certain 'divine plants'. The most important were known as Teonancatl, Ololiuqui and Peyotl.

Teonanacatl, or 'divine flesh' was earlier identified with a mushroom called Psilocybe, which contains the hallucinogen, Psilocybin. Peyotl was identified with another hallucinogenic plant, a lophophora cactus, containing mescaline as an active principle. Ololiuqui, currently called Turbina Corymbosa, has shown the presence of LSD derivatives. A related species, Ipomea Violacea, also used by the Zapotecs, contains 5-fold higher concentration of LSD derivatives. This plant can be seen growing wild on Aztec ruins in Mexico.

Use of these plants turned out to be quite common among Indian groups in Central America even today. Their use has survived centuries of pressure from the Catholic Church and the civil authorities.

It would be unfair to the Aztec civilization if one tends to think they were the only people who were addicted to the narcotics. Evidence for the use of opium has been found for Minoan, Ptolemaic, Assyrian and Hellanic civilizations. Poppy seeds, which are the seeds of Papaverum Somniferum from which opium is obtained, have been found in neolithic sites. The world's oldest surviving list of medical preparations on a Sumerian clay tablet from 2100 B.C appears to describe the poppy!

The psychoactive properties of opium and related compounds include reduction of anxiety, aggression, depression and feelings of inadequacy. They have a medical application as well. They are used for reduction of pain. Opium is bound by the brain cells through specific receptors. It is surprising that a plant-derived compound like opium should have receptors in the brain. Why should our brain evolve receptors for opium?

This line of thinking led to the search for other compounds made by our body that may bind to the receptors to which plant-derived opium binds. This led to the discovery of some opium-like compounds our own body makes. It was found that these opium-like substances made by our own body have the same biological effects like the natural opium. In other words, man has evolved biological mechanisms within his own body to combat stress and anxiety. He is well supported in his effort by plants that make opium and related compounds. When plants can give you food, why not some stress-relief as well?

We all know that a number of medicines are derived from plants. It is really intriguing to find plants taking care of us so well. What is the idea?

I began this chapter with a discussion on why proper interpretation of sensory stimuli is important. I mentioned a number of psychological strategies, made possible by neuro-anatomic evolution over time, we adopt to keep ourselves in the right state of mind. However, there are certain situations when things are beyond your control. I am going to spend some time outlining the circumstances where things are not so easy.

The behavioral make-up of a human being is decided quite early in the life, to a considerable extent. It is a well-known fact that children indulging in crime and violence are born into families devoid of love and care. Studies have shown that these children do not adapt to the society even when taken to a new environment with comforts, care and food. This suggests that the psychological experience they had during critical period of their emotional development have influenced the brain maturation in the wrong direction.

Genetic factors also play a role in how an individual will react to his surroundings. Extremely violent people have been shown to have abnormalities in their chromosomes. In some cases, they have been found to have brain diseases such as a tumor. The presence of pathology in the brain disturbs the normal brain function.

An extremely bizarre form of disturbed perception can be seen in patients with damage to the part of the brain called the parietal lobe, especially the bottom portion of it. Individuals with such lesions do not have any problem with seeing or hearing. There is no difficulty in the sensory receptors for touch, pain or pressure. Yet, they seem to be unable to receive stimuli from both the parts of the body and behave as if their body is made up of only one half only! In extreme cases, individuals shave only half their faces only, dress only half their bodies, or read only half the page, completely ignoring the other half!

People with damage to their occipital and temporal lobes of the brain cannot recognize people by their faces. The occipital lobe of the brain is at the back of your head and the temporal lobe is on the side of the head. These people can identify the persons by their faces, but not by their faces! Interestingly, they show visible emotional signs and body language to suggest that they do indeed 'know' them, but for some reason cannot find their names. They do not have any inability to reproduce and recognize pictures. Why this inability to recognize human faces is unclear.

If the parts of the brain connected with the language function are damaged, the patients can have a variety of defects, depending on the specific location of damage. Some patients cannot comprehend the written or spoken words. Some speak with a type of speech so full of jargon and neologisms that make little sense. Recent studies have shown that even deaf people lose their ability to communicate in sign language if they develop damage to the part of the brain connected with language functions.

The frontal lobe is that portion of the brain, which is in the front of your head. They say that humans have evolved a bigger frontal lobe that is believed to explain their superior thinking power. Other primates also have frontal lobes though less well developed than humans. If this part of the brain is damaged, the animals undergo a period of apathy followed by hyperactivity. They keep pacing back and forth. General intelligence is little affected. Results of tests involving immediate responses to environmental stimuli are normal. However, responses requiring the use of previously acquired information are abnormal. In humans, removal of the frontal lobe leads to deficiencies in remembering how long ago they were exposed to a stimulus. They lose the sense of time.

The effect of removal of frontal lobe of the brain on the personality of a human being has been reported more than 100 years ago. There is an account of what happened to a construction foreman, called Phineas Gage, who lived 100 years ago. He is believed to have been packing blasting powder into a hole with a tamping iron. The powder exploded, driving the tamping iron through the face and out of the top of the skull, effectively transecting his frontal lobes. After this gruesome accident, he is said to have become fitful, irreverent, indulging in 'grossest profanity', which was not his previous custom. He became impatient of restraint or advice when it conflicted with his desires. He went on making plans for the future operations, but abandoned them in return for others appearing more feasible. His mind was so radically changed that his friends and acquaintances no longer thought he was Gage. This report has become one of the classics in our understanding of our brain function and we are thankful to Gage's physician for submitting this report to a medical journal at that time. This account can be seen in almost all physiology textbooks today.

Neurosurgeons have been resorting to remove a part of the frontal lobe as a therapeutic procedure. They do it in individuals who suffer from tensions resulting from real or imagined failures of performance and those who manifest delusions, compulsive behavior, and phobias to an extent enough to incapacitate them. After the surgery, the delusions and phobias are still there but no longer bother the patient. A similar lack of concern for severe pain led to the use of this procedure in treating patients with intractable pain.

Neurologists of today find tranquilizers equally effective and less of a hassle. They don't have to fiddle with the brain! Secondly, this surgical procedure affects the social behavior of the patient. The patients do certainly manage to be unconcerned about their delusions, pain or phobias. Their lack of concern, unfortunately, extends to other aspects of the environment, including relations with associates, amenities and even toilet habits!

Removal of the temporal lobes of the brain can cause a different set of defects. Animals in whom the temporal lobes are removed are called 'Kluver-Blucey' animals because Kluver and Blucey were the first to report it. Monkeys in whom the temporal lobes are removed become docile, excessively hungry, and the males become sexually aroused easily. They also seem to have problems with visual recognition. The monkeys repeatedly pick up all moveable objects in the environment. They manipulate each object in a compulsive way. They try to eat anything they can grab only to discard them after finding them inedible. However, discarded objects are picked up again in a few minutes as if the animal had never seen them before!

It is suggested that the cause of this behavior is inability to identify objects, apparently due to memory loss because the temporal lobes are the sites where memory is stored. In addition to the above symptoms, the Kluver-Blucey animals are easily distracted. They heed every stimulus, novel or not, and approach, explore, manipulate and bite the source of the stimulus. They are unable to ignore the useless peripheral stimuli. This phenomenon is called Hyper-metamorphosis. The animals look at every stimulus as if it is new. The symptoms described here have been observed in human patients who are suffering from temporal lobe diseases. Impaired memory and hyper-sexuality have been noted in them.

The point I want to stress is the fact that it is not enough to access more information. You need to interpret the sensory signals to be able to exist in a meaningful relationship with other entities in the environment you share this world with. That is the way your boss would like it. If organisms misread the environmental signals what is the point? How can appropriate, meaningful interactions happen? No way. We need to depend on sociological learning, supported by neural evolution. Both go hand in hand. Human behavior is different in that it is not a straightforward signal-response that you often see in lower organisms. A lot of complex signal processing happens before a human being reacts. However, there are stereotyped signals we all face all the time. We read emotional signals from other fellow beings and respond accordingly. But that requires a lot of signal processing I said. Overall, our social behavior is directed by what happens all around us. Whether you are happy, sad or angry all depends on what goes on around you.

Your own productivity at your job needs input from your colleagues as well. You never work alone. You need to know what is required. You need to know what has been done and by whom. You deliver your output accordingly. You adjust your actions mainly based on what others have done around you to help reach the final desired outcome. It is not rocket science we are talking about here. It is simple common sense. It is like playing a game. A cricket batsman would choose his shot based on the type of bowling delivery he has received. A given bowler may be known for some unique type of bowling skills and the batsman may even anticipate and prepare his shot-making but a different type of delivery will need to be dealt differently. Our social behavior is all the time like this game play. You have to modify or change your tactics all the time.

Again it is almost childish to keep grinding this simple fact. But, the ultimate point I want to make is that animal behavior is based on sensory inputs from fellow members of the same species, from different species and from the physical environment. Animals need to read these signals right to some reasonable degree of precision. We are predictive in many instances. We know when it is going to rain and we take out our umbrellas. Science sometimes can tell us about impending epidemics, storms and earthquakes etc. and we take preemptive measures. Psychologically, we do rely on such mental predictions all the time. We need to find ways to avoid those predictions from becoming illusions or hallucinations if you want to play the social game well. The society expects this from you. If you do not master this skill you are out. You are not going to be exactly liked by your master? Which master likes a servant who cannot even understand his commands?

# CHAPTER 6

### IS CIVILIZATION JUST A HERD BEHAVIOR?

Why we do things the way we do? It is not just the same thing as what I have been discussing so far. I have been trying to show that behaviors exhibited by life forms tend to be more like a puppet show. The puppeteer is the environment. Life forms cannot escape the clutches of the puppet strings that keep pulling them in all directions. You may want to call these dancing as evolutionary adaptations but what is in a name. The game plan is self-evident.

Now I would like to probe the reasons why we do things exactly as others do. Why are we so interested in being copy cats?

I am sure most of you might have wondered why people always tend to behave like a 'herd'. Apparently, we all believe that the best way of doing a thing is to copy what others are doing. For some reason, behaving uniformly as a group is seen as a sign of order. We are prepared to put in a lot of effort just to show that we are willing to fit in as a group. To a large extent, not doing something like what others do, is considered a sign of deviancy in most situations.

Willingness to behave uniformly can be seen in almost every single human activity. Take fashion for example. When fashion changes, we find the entire population changing to the new trend. You feel odd if you stand out as a non-conformer.

Theoretically, you have the liberty to wear self-designed clothes to your office meeting. Do you ever practice it? It is the unwritten rule that you need to dress formally for such occasions that forces you to behave like others. It is something like wearing uniforms at school or at workplace. Why should we have the system of uniform dress? Even outside our office, I don't think we dress the way we want. Our dress pattern is determined by what others wear and the current trend. It is invariably the same pattern of dress. In Britain, for instance, it is amazing to see exactly similar clothes worn by a larger proportion of people than you could see in other countries. They say the British are conservative. This is certainly reflected in their dress.

People all over the world show herd mentality in a number of other situations too. If you look at the craze for rock music, it would certainly fit in with the definition of group behavior. Men and women behave in a uniformly hysterical manner at a rock show. A couple of decades ago nobody knows why Spice girls achieved so much popularity so soon. At one time, it looked as if every British citizen uttered the word 'Spice Girls' at least once a day, if not more. As if they would forget to do so, commercial companies put their pictures on all kinds of commodities for some unknown reason. It beats me trying to figure out what is the use of having their pictures on my potato crisp packet which I don't think would taste any different if their pictures were not there on the back of the crisp bag. Just in case you didn't see the Spice Girls on the drink bottle or your crisp cover, the magazines and newspapers and TV shows made sure you saw them before going to bed. Even tiny children seemed to like talking about Spice girls with such interest. The children tried to show off their general knowledge by rattling off the names of all the Spice girls. It became their favorite pastime to quiz others if they knew the names of all the Spice girls. The extent to which the people had taken up this habit was evident when even Tony Blair was questioned on the names of Spice Girls on national T.V!

A human being tries very hard not to be left out. If you don't talk about Spice Girls, you don't belong. All of us want to show we are team players. Perhaps, the Diana mania that gripped the nation or even the entire world in the 1980s, is another such herd behavior. You had to talk and read about her because every one else around you was talking or reading about her. Still they do.

The Clinton-Monica Lewinsky affair showed how man can be swept down by the intense desire to behave as group. Virtually, the entire world showed a fierce interest in this. People talked of nothing else for weeks. The news programs permanently had a slot for this affair. I can confidently say that the Clinton affair was mentioned in the news programs of all T.V channels every day since the whole thing started. If you weren't found to be talking about this affair then you are showing that you don't care for the group.

I have used examples from a couple of decades ago. This was partially deliberate just to show that we had started this mass mania even before the days of the social media. This has not changed one bit even now. We always have something or other to be obsessed about in a collective manner. With the advent of the social media the spread of the herd behavior is happening at a dizzying speed. They use the word 'viral' when something gets spread around rampantly on WhatsApp or Facebook. This is when hundreds of thousands or even millions of people read and talk about something simultaneously. It does not matter if they had any relevance at all for their daily life.

Why do groups of people exhibit this tendency to do what the next guy does? Why are we so hesitant to rock the boat? Most of the times, every new practice or trend starts amongst small groups of individuals and then gains force across large sections of the society like a forest fire. At one point, people find no other way than to conform because the force of majority is such.

I guess marketing and advertising practices of modern times play great part in determining what we do in our day-to-day lives. Whether it is buying a computer, taking insurance, investing your money, buying a razor, buying or doing anything for that matter, you see what the advertisements say before doing. That is what every body does. If you see an advertisement quite a few times, it is very likely that it is also seen by a lot of other people all over the country. The current marketing strategies stretch far beyond national borders and this means what you decide to buy or do is probably the same as what a guy in Indonesia, Australia or India did.

People tend to be easily susceptible to suggestive advertisements and somehow imagine that what the advertisement says is probably endorsed by the rest of the world. In reality, the marketing people hire some famous personalities to declare on the TV or newspapers that a product x is the best in the world. This is believed to induce the gullible public into buying it. You really end up buying it, like millions all over the world, and the celebrity is richer by a few more millions of pounds thanks to the jacked-up price of the product. The company obviously makes its share of profit. In most cases the product you bought had no special merit than what a regular product that was selling by the street corner.

The point now is not if the product is really the best or not, or is it really capable of doing what it says it can. From the point of view of our current discussions, I would like to point out that the society ends up doing or buying something similar to what most other people did, thanks to advertisements in the media. In the past, people obtained such information by word of mouth. It was a slow process. Now you can synchronize the whole world into doing or something, almost overnight. Now and then, we see some new models of toys becoming the craze of the children. People spend hours waiting before the shops to buy them! Once some kids have them, the others are pushed into wanting it for themselves too. It is peer pressure. This applies to most of the adult needs as well. No wonder commercial companies exploit this. In fact, much of human life is shaped by commercial organizations. Gadgets like mobile phones, IPODs, IPADs, lap tops etc. pretty much have unified human behavior all over the planet.

Ultimately, information transfer is crucial to herd behavior. It can come in whatever form possible.

We do not realize the extent our lives are regulated by order-generating mechanisms around us. We have so many rules and regulations that govern our behavior in the society. Order is the result of regulated, synchronized behavior. This simply means the citizens are under more pressure to conform. Under normal circumstances, we don't realize the extent to which social order-generating mechanisms impose restrictions on our behavior. You are rewarded when you do things to the common welfare of the society but punished when your behavior harms others. The society can be quite cruel to you if you don't behave properly. Look at the way the law establishment works.

Just why or how people accept to subject themselves to the attachment of all kinds of 'strings' that make them dance to the tune of the society? Morality, ethics, etiquette, law, religion, code of conduct, policies and guidelines are the strings attached to you to make you behave the way your society wants. If people do what they like, it can hardly be called civilized behavior.

We are not even allowed to speak the way we want in public. We believe that we enjoy freedom of speech. This is an illusion. In reality, you have to watch your language in public. It is expected that you don't use obscene language in front of a crowd. You can't talk ill of anybody, unless you can substantiate it or you end up in court for defamation. Secondly, you need to follow the rules of grammar. You have to speak the language the way agreed by others in the society. You can't speak the way you like because nobody would understand you. So much for your freedom of speech.

Science is said to be the most creative of all human endeavors. Even it does not escape the need to comply with standard practices. An experiment has to be done according to a set of rules accepted by the scientific community. Even writing up your findings for publication in science journals need to be done strictly according to the format required by the editorial committee. This is aimed to make the articles look uniform in their presentation of facts.

If you look at the houses in your locality, you would be surprised to see how similar they are to each other. Just why is it so? Why should houses be built so alike to each other? Is it necessary to behave as a herd even here?

Art historians can date a work of art precisely. Is it because artists practiced techniques that were so similar to each other, which is what you expect in a herd? This can be a work of painting, house architecture or dress designs. Can anybody deny this fact? In a given time period, people invariably end up doing things the way majority of people do. It is surprising that even art should suffer from this uniformity and order. People can see for themselves art works of a certain period have distinct characteristics and features that distinguish them from works of other periods.

An opinion that comes to be established is so hard to change. We feel uneasy to express an alternative view simply because it is not in conformity with that of the majority. For instance, people had different opinions about Diana before she died. You saw different negative opinions expressed in TV and newspapers. For example, the Sunday Times started a serialized article titled, 'Diana on the couch' and the first in the series appeared on the very day she died. The article series was stopped after her death. From the title of the article, it can be guessed that she was portrayed as somebody who needed psychological assistance. Since the whole article never saw the light of the day, we do not really know. Once she died, for some reason, everything about her became positive. Nobody dared to speak anything negative about her. I don't think I ever saw anything in 'The Times' that came close to a negative opinion afterwards. For that matter, I don't think anybody saw anything negative about her in thousands of articles on her that appeared after her death in magazines all over the world. It is amazing how this can happen.

I guess we lead our lives constantly within the rules and regulations imposed by the society around us. This way the society ensures that we behave as team players. The restrictions increase with the degree of civilization. There is a general belief that people in the western countries enjoy a liberated, civilized lifestyle. It is true that they have a lot more freedom to do what they want. That is what we tend to believe. Is it really true? In my view, a citizen in a western country has more restrictions than in any other world simply because their society is more orderly than any other.

In a civilized nation, the law and order is powerful and effective. No law enforcement agency would let somebody off the hook if he or she is found to commit an offence that disturbs the well being of the social system as a whole, or an individual constituent of it. Whereas in a less civilized nation, people escape the clutches of the law by bribing the officials, or whatever. They may not even be arrested. Even if they end up in court, they can escape with the help of loopholes in the law structure.

In a less civilized nation, the social sense is a lot less amongst the public. They do not realize the importance of a number of things that are designed for the welfare of the society. For instance, not many people would be paying the taxes properly. Many of them never get prosecuted. By not paying the taxes, they behave as if they don't care about the society. Can somebody in the western countries escape taxes?

People in civilized nations don't have the 'liberty' of a number of things. For instance, they can't behave noisily in their neighborhood without receiving complaints about it by their neighbors, and possible action from the civic authorities. But people can do so in poor, uncivilized nations. You can't even afford the freedom of an unkempt garden in a western nation. You are forced by law to keep your garden good-looking. People in less orderly societies would find it hard to believe that someone can be punished for not keeping their garden clean. I, as an immigrant, find it difficult to believe it myself. Another thing that surprised me was how pet keepers are required by law to keep their pets happy failing which face the prospect of civic action!

Traffic rules are another area of social life that people in advanced social structure face additional burden of more do's and don'ts. You need to face stringent driving tests to start with. In poor countries, it can be obtained so easily. Secondly, keeping your car fit is not a requirement in less advanced countries. In other words, there is no annual MOT. Driving on the road itself is so haphazard and dangerous in many of the third world countries. Even if you meet with an accident, getting off the hook of the law is easy.

My intention is certainly not to suggest that less orderly ways of doing things is better than doing them in an orderly manner. Citizens in western countries know and enjoy the benefits of doing things in a pre-determined, agreed, and uniform manner. They know that order is more desirable than disorder. However, the price they pay is the loss of freedom. It is paradoxical that you find so much less 'freedom' in western countries than in poor countries. In other words, westerners need to fulfill so many social obligations without fail.

I wonder why there is so much hyped talk about individual liberties in rich, advanced countries. People almost take pride in being able to do what they want. I tend to think that this is a deliberate attempt by the society to make the citizens imagine that they are indeed free. In a less advanced society, people hardly talk of individual liberties and freedom to the same extent as people in advanced countries. Is it because people in poor countries don't feel the pressures of too many restrictions? Is the glorified talk of individual liberty in advanced countries really a cry for freedom?

It is not my intention to downplay the human civilization and its achievements. Civilization brings about order and the associated restrictions on you. The motif behind it is apparently the benefits of cooperative behavior. We pay a little bit of a price in terms of losing our liberties to do what we want to do. What I am trying to show is that it is an inevitable consequence of a complex system consisting of individual units, in this case common citizens. Group behavior is the natural outcome of complex systems and I have tried to explain it as an emergent property of the system itself.

People tend to cooperate because they know that their chances of survival are better that way. In the 1950's, Mancur L.Olson, an economist, proposed that repeated iterations of a situation tend to promote cooperative attitudes. The amount of cooperation increases when communication is permitted. In the 1940's, John Von Newman and Oskar Morgenstern developed the mathematical theory of social cooperation within the framework of Game theory. According to the Game theory, individuals rationally choose the action that yields the highest pay-off. The longer the game theory continues, the more likely is the cooperation between the individuals.

Natalie Glance and Bernardo Huberman, at the Palo Alto Research Centre, have investigated social cooperation using both analytical techniques and computer simulations (Scientific American, May 94, 'The dynamics of social dilemmas'). Their studies show that cooperation or defection in social groups can occur abruptly at or near a metastable state, where the group can remain for a long time before going either way. They believe that this explains certain real social phenomena, such as the recent upsurge in recycling, environmental awareness and activism. People may have started worrying about it along time ago. As more information became available on the harmful effects of environmental degradation, it became easier for people to realize the benefits of environmental protection. Initially, it started as sporadic efforts here and there. Later on, as in other spheres of human activity, more and more people agreed to behave like others. Now, the momentum of environmental protection goal is such that countries are required by international treaties to comply with standards set by agencies. As elsewhere, countries have to do something about it as a matter of compulsion. No country is exempt. What started as a move to mutual benefit has ended as an order-generating mechanism that leaves little to your own freedom. For instance, countries have agreed to limit technologies that liberate ozone-depleting chemicals and help reduce damage to our atmosphere in a set time frame. Every country has to agree to this goal.

The phenomenon of sudden synchronization of social responses can also show in the way things fall apart. The fall of the Berlin wall, the breakdown of the Soviet Union, the escalation of events to world wars etc. are such abrupt defections from prevailing social compacts.

Looking at the discussions so far, it appears that a collective group of entities picks up cues from the world around them to take the next course of action. In a way these groups are not any different from an individual organism, which takes sensory data from the environment to decide what to do next. It would be difficult for people to accept the notion that a collective group can also exhibit responsiveness to environmental cues similar to an individual.

Robert Boyd of the University of California at Los Angeles and Peter Richerson of the University of California at Davis, argue that individuals migrating to a new land will reject their old cultural habits in favor of local customs. They believe that the best way to ensure survival in a changed environment is to copy the locals. This way the immigrant gains the advantages of the adaptive cultural practices of the natives. To start with, children of immigrants speak the local languages more than their own even within their own homes. Dietary patterns change to that of the natives too. Immigrants are forced to eat what is available in the new land. Studies have shown that immigrants begin to show the same disease patterns as the natives after some time. I guess it is largely because of the diet and exposure to the new lifestyles.

Richard Dawkins, the chief proponent of gene-driven evolution, has coined the term 'meme' to describe the socio-cultural equivalent of a gene. A 'meme' is an element of culture, which is passed on by imitation. He believes that 'memes' struggle to get replicated. In other words, these cultural bits of information have to be passed onto others, which is similar to social conformation that I was discussing before.

Robert Boyd and Peter Richerson suggest that even sexual attraction between potential mates could be based on the consideration of 'team play' potential of the mates. They believe that those who are likely to conform to group norms, and cooperate, will be selected. Selection of mates may favor a genetic pre-disposition to conform.

Judith Rich Harris, in her recent book, 'The nurture assumption: Why children turn out the way they do?' argues that kids try to conform to other children they play with at school or in their neighborhood. She is convinced that parents play very little role in what the children will end up doing. This theory has shocked Americans, and will probably shock the entire world, because we have always believed that parents play the most significant role in shaping the character of their children. According to her theory, children learn to behave by identifying with a group of people they see as similar to themselves, which in most cases is the peer group.

This theory is not at all surprising in the light of what we have been discussing so far. Man, by nature, tends to conform. He likes to do what others like him to do. That way he has the chance of fitting as a group. If you look at a group of young children, they would be mostly wearing very similar styled clothes. Either all of them will be very studious or none of them so. Either they all smoke or none of them so. Either they will all be drug addicts or none of them. I can say this almost as a matter of certainty. It is what we call as peer pressure. It is exactly what we find in the society as a whole. I said people do what others do. The reason is the same, whether it is an adult or a child.

Group behavior is by no means unique to man. All forms of life exhibit group behaviors. In fact, any complex system made up of individual units will show this tendency. It is an emergent property that springs from nowhere. Next I am going to explore if there is a way of explaining this behavior based on any known mathematical framework.

# CHAPTER 7

### COUPLED OSCILLATORS: A POSSIBLE BASIS FOR HERD BEHAVIOR

Mathematicians have been working on the theory of Coupled Oscillators for over 40 years. This is a branch of mathematics that tries to understand how rhythmic biologic phenomena occur in a synchronized fashion so that all members in a group do the same thing at the same time (Steven H.Strogatz and Ian Stewart: 'Coupled Oscillators and biological synchronization' in Scientific American, Dec 93).

An oscillator is any system that executes periodic behavior. It exhibits an action that occurs repetitively in a clock-like fashion. A large system is made up of many such oscillators almost always ends up in a state where all individual oscillators synchronize with each other. Mathematicians call this the coupling of oscillators. Why this coupling should occur is not known. Synchrony is the commonest state in which coupled oscillators find themselves in.

A wide variety of natural phenomena come under the category of coupled oscillators. I said people tend to end up doing things the same way as others. It is reassuring to know that this herd behavior has a mathematical basis.

Fireflies are known to spectacularly show this type of coupling in the way thousands of them flash in synchrony during their nocturnal mating display. This can be seen along the tidal rivers of Malaysia, Thailand and New Guinea. Thousands of fireflies gather together at nights and flash on and off in unison, to attract the females that fly above. The males arrive there few at a time. Initially, the flashes are haphazard and uncoordinated. As time goes by, more fireflies join. Apparently, each insect has its rhythm, but the sight of its neighbors' rhythm brings its own rhythm into harmony with those around it. After some time, the whole tree appears to flash coherently!

Interestingly, after some oscillators couple together, the combined power of the few coupled oscillators exert a stronger effect on the rest of the oscillators, making them also get synchronized. The collective flash of the firefly community is important after a stage and not the individual firefly's rhythm.

If you look back at our discussions on the herd mentality, it is not difficult to see why it happens. Human preferences and attitudes could couple with that of others in the community, and gain the force that sweeps the non-conformers down.

Chirping of crickets is also another type of synchronized behavior due to coupling of their sounds.

Charles S. Peskin of the New York University has mathematically modeled the synchronous behavior of over 10,000 cells constituting the human heart pacemaker. The pacemaker of the heart is a group of cells with the capacity to generate electrical impulses in a rhythmic manner. It generates about 70-72 pulses every minute, which flow down the heart muscles to make them beat that many times. The catch here is how to make all the 10,000 cells to fire together in order to generate single, unified pulses with enough force to stimulate the whole heart muscle. If that does not happen, you are not going to be able to make the heart muscle to contract together in one powerful stroke. This is where the coupling of rhythmic, electrical pulses come in useful.

Nigel Franks and his colleagues at the University of Bath have observed rhythmic activity patterns among worker ants tending the queen ant and the young ants (Brian Goodwin: 'All for one-one for all' in New Scientist, 13 Jan 98). The species of ants they have studied usually form small colonies of 40-80 members. The worker ants work actively for a period of time. Then they go into a period of inactivity. Each cycle of activity and inactivity lasts for half an hour. What is the basis of this 'colony rhythm'? Is it again a manifestation of synchrony among intrinsically rhythmic individuals?

Blaine Cole at the University of Houston in Texas found the answer to this question. He adopted an experimental technique in which he filmed individual ants and groups of ants of various sizes. He put together the filmed data and analyzed their activity patterns. His conclusion was that isolated ants and those in sparsely populated groups have a pattern of activity-inactivity that is described as deterministic chaos. As the name suggests, this is a state where it is neither random nor predictable. It is not possible to predict what a particular ant will do next. Cole observed that an interesting thing happens when the ant group reaches a particular population density level. At that stage, they begin to synchronize their activity-inactivity rhythms. This is a behavior triggered by encounters between ants mediated by sensitive touch and smell receptors present on their antennae.

Brian Goodwin at Schumacher college, Devon, and his colleagues Ricard Sole from the Polytechnic University of Catalona, Barcelona, and Octavio Miramontes, then at Britain's Open University, designed a computer model of an ant colony to see if that would help in understanding the rhythmic group behavior. They found that the most important type of interaction for generating the rhythmic patterns was stimulation of inactive ants by active ants in a sensory way. Cole found that to be true for real ants too. This is seen in many species such as bees, wasps and termites all of whom live in groups. It is possible to infer that individual members of a large group take cues from members around them to know what to do next. This is exactly we see in a human community too. Isn't it?

Inside the bodies of organisms, even cellular groups in an organ work in an orderly fashion. All the cells have to work together to bring about a biological effect. This orderly behavior of cells is brought about by hormones, enzymes, nervous system, sensory receptors etc. LIFE is the property of generating order amongst cells such that trillions of cells in your body will stop behaving as independent entities and work as a group towards the survival of the body as a whole. You cannot trace this property to any of the individual cells or molecules of the organism. LIFE is not the sum of all constituents of the body. It is an emergent property. It is an emergent phenomenon like the Civilization.

Order is the state reached by a system working uphill. Left alone, all systems would reach the state of disorder. Disorder is the most spontaneous state in the universe. The second law of thermodynamics states that all systems in the universe will progress to the state of equilibrium, which is the state of maximum disorder. No useful work is possible in this state. Life systems work uphill to prevent this state.

The crucial things in order generation are information transfer and synchronization. Basic sensory data such as vision, sound, smell, touch etc. are the means of letting people become aware of their surroundings. In a latter chapter, I have shown how sensory information helps in generation of behavior.

What is surprising is that even cells can synchronize themselves in response to cues, almost always chemical. These chemicals are enzymes, hormones and neurotransmitters. These chemicals bathe the cells in what could be called the internal environment.

Would it surprise you if I told you that even molecules can synchronize with members of their own type? What kind of cues can molecules have?

Recently, some new understanding of the way molecular synchronization is brought about has attracted the attention of coupled oscillator researchers. What led to this model is the quest for understanding bacterial chemotaxis. Bacteria move towards the food sources sensing the concentration gradient in the food molecule concentration in its environment. It swims towards the food detecting the change in the concentration of the food molecules as it chooses its direction. It flips over and changes direction when it finds that the food molecular concentration decreases rather than increasing.

Receptors on the bacterial surface help in detecting the food molecules. It is like a chemical reaction really. In a test tube, two chemical reactants would find each other to react. All biochemical reactions inside or outside the cells happen this way.

On the surface of the bacteria, receptors binding the food molecules tend to exist in two states: 'on' and 'off'. On binding the food molecule, the receptor goes into the 'off' state. If it has not bound any food, it remains in the 'on' state.

The locomotion of the bacteria towards the food is controlled by these receptors. The receptors convey signals to the flagellar motors of the bacteria to keep going or change direction by tumbling. If the majority of the receptors are in the 'off' state, it means that the food presence is more in the direction the bacterium is heading. As I said earlier, the receptors are 'off' on binding the food molecule. On the contrary, if the receptors are mostly 'on', the bacterium tumbles and changes direction randomly. Trial and error ultimately takes it towards the food.

On the face of this scheme of things, it is clear that the more the receptors are bound to food, the choice of direction will be clear for the bacteria. This requires a lot of food molecules to be present for the bacteria to keep going. In other words, the bacteria will find it difficult to keep going if the food molecule concentration is small because the number of receptors in the 'off' state will be less. In actual reality, the bacteria seem to be able to move in the right direction even in presence of few food molecules.

It is far from clear how the bacteria can be sensitive to only a few food molecules. Few receptors obviously will have less of a control over the bacterial motors. Then how do the bacteria do it? A few years ago, Dennis Bray, a biologist at Cambridge University tried to understand this sensitivity in terms of some mathematical models for receptor activity with little success. In 1993, Janine Michigan of the University of Michigan discovered that the bacterial receptors are aggregated into clusters on the cell membrane instead of uniform distribution. This may sound surprising because even distribution of the receptors could be expected to have much better success in binding food molecules coming in any direction relative to the location of the bacteria. This is because the bacteria are likely to have only a limited number of receptors.

If you had a limited number of people to do a job such as gathering information, it would make sense to spread them around to be able to pick up the information from all corners of the region. Do you agree? If you had all of them in one location, it limits your chances of finding out what happens elsewhere. Then, why would the receptors get clustered in one point when it should actually be moving around to detect food molecules?

In fact, receptors of all cell membranes of all living systems function this way. The cell membrane of an organism is fluid in nature. Receptors literally move around from point to point, randomly. This, as can be guessed, makes sense. The receptors have a better chance of making contact with the molecule it is looking for. It could be a food molecule or it could be a regulatory molecule like hormone, an enzyme, etc. On binding the molecule, the receptors start aggregating into clusters. Subsequently, the aggregated receptors are pulled into the cell interior, along with their cargo, by the process called Receptor-mediated endocytosis. This is a well-known mechanism in mammalian cells, including human cells, to take in matter from the environment.

If you look at the bacterial chemotactic mechanism and the mammalian receptor-mediated endocytosis, it is clear that receptors seem to be able to communicate with each other. That is why they are able to aggregate into clusters, in response to signals from their environment. How do they do that?

Answer to this question came from the work of Mike Manson of Texas A&M University. He found that nearby receptors can influence each other. Dennis Bray was quick to see how this could explain his problem. There seemed to be an answer for the question of how a few receptors could influence the bacterial flagella. It looked like the receptors enlisted other receptors by 'talking' to them.

I said earlier that a receptor turns 'off' on binding a food molecule. What Manson and Bray suggest, based on their findings, is the 'off' receptors are able to turn off the neighbor receptors as well. By such cooperation, the few 'off" receptors become able to influence the flagella.

Dennis Bray mathematically modeled this effect by supposing that each receptor, when triggered by an attractant, would respond and take with it a fixed number of nearby receptors. A single food molecule could initially activate a single receptor. Later, the receptor starts influencing others around it. The activated receptors activate more receptors.

The whole point of this discussion here is to show how receptor behavior is so similar to the way people influence each other. I asked why people behave like 'herds', doing things exactly similar to what every one around him does. Here, I show that receptors do no better. They do what their neighbors do.

Bray's model shows that receptors do take cues from their neighbors without explaining how exactly they do it, at the molecular level. Could a receptor communicate with a receptor far away, not in direct contact with it?

Yu Shi and Tom Duke from the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge University have taken this idea further. They seem to have done it at the specific request of Dennis Bray, who wanted them to see if there were any other systems in physics that work this way.

Duke and Shi found that the Ising model of statistical mechanics, the model that describes the behavior of systems made of many interacting elements, could be applied to the problem at hand. This model shows how adjacent domains in a complex system tend to organize themselves in an orderly and uniform state. For example, a piece of iron is made of tiny magnets or domains, each of which point in different directions. At a critical point, the domains orient themselves in one way, resulting in an emergent property of magnetism. The orientation of individual magnetic domains spreads across the system, spreading from one domain to its neighbor.

Shi and Duke thought the receptors play the role of magnetic domains. Nearby receptors tend to agree with one another as to what they should do next. They are coupled to each other. What I want to add here is the fact that it is not unlike people behaving like 'herds'. Do you think it makes sense?

Such synchronized behavior can only be brought about by a common cue, to which the interacting entities respond. This cue can be anything for that matter.

Synchronization is nothing but timing of your behavior in relation to a common reference event. This reference event can also be used by other members of a complex system to time their behavior. This results in synchronized, uniform behavior amongst constituent units of a complex system. The reference event as such may not be causally related to behaviors they help synchronize.

If you observe our world, you would realize that most animal and plant behaviors are cyclical. This means that they recur after defined intervals. Rhythmicity in behaviors is a ubiquitous feature of the world we live in. We sleep at more or less the same time of the day. The majority of the world population does so. We wake up at more or less same time of the day, day after day. We eat at the same time of the day, three times of the day. Our weekends come same time of the day every week. We are paid once a month, on the same day of every month. Most people get their salaries more or less the same time as others. Seasons change rhythmically. Your birthdays come same day of the year, year after year. I can go on like this listing rhythmic behaviors that recur.

One thing about recurrent behaviors is the fact they are synchronized to common reference events. A recurrent event is an oscillator. When this happens with temporal relation to other reference events, you find there is a coupling of these independent oscillators, which are in no way causally related. This is how order comes about in a complex system. The oscillators go on as long as they do, getting locked in a temporal relation. This is what we call as coupling of oscillators.

# CHAPTER 8

### ARE WE BIOLOGICAL ROBOTS CONTROLLED BY NATURE?

Are human beings automatons like their machines? Are all living systems automatons too? Are we all expected to obey the sensory stimuli like our machines respond to our pressing of the buttons?

I fully understand that I have touched upon an incredibly sensitive subject. I have simply questioned the so-called intelligence and free will of man. I will not be surprised if the readers are hurt, insulted and angry at the suggestion that they are like 'robots'. What I am going to do now is try to support my ego-bashing statement.

We seek food and eat it. Once the food is inside your stomach, you have absolutely no control over its digestion. It happens involuntarily. It is taken care of by your gut without bothering your brain. A number of nervous and biochemical actions are responsible for digestion of the food you have eaten. The gut muscles contract periodically driving the food down the gut. You are hardly aware of it. A number of digestive juices are secreted to digest the food like clockwork without you wishing it.

Your digestive apparatus gears up for the act of digestion even before you have eaten your meal. There is a lot of anticipatory preparation by your gut well in advance of the food arrival. Do you wait for your guests to arrive before beginning to cook? The peristaltic contractions and secretion of digestive juices start happening, at the same time every day, much before the food has even been found. Nerve firing to activate muscular contractions is a periodic behavior. Your eating is also a periodic behavior. These two independent oscillators couple with each other the way any other systems would.

In fact, your hunger, and the consequent desire to eat, is a result of unconscious reactions in your brain. You feel hungry because of unconscious reactions inside your brain. The brain is bathed by the same blood that flows all over your body. It uses the same nutrients as any other cell in your body. It needs energy to run. It senses the level of energy in the blood like your automobile senses the petrol level. You stop at a gas station to refuel your car when the fuel level falls. The body exactly does that.

The brain has an anatomical part taking care of the feeding control of the organism. The nerve cells in this portion of the brain start sending out hunger signals when the level of energy falls in the blood. The hunger drives you to seek food. Availability of food is limited to certain times of the day. Your foraging behavior is therefore tuned to the times the prey is available. In the modern days food may be accessible any time of the day and night. Even your ubiquitous Macdonald's isn't open all day.

You have to locate your food. In the modern world, you may think it is as easy as going to the supermarket or the nearest Macdonald's. But the point is you need to rely on sensory data to locate your food store. You can't go wherever you like and ask for food. You have to go where it is available. You need to sense it. What I mean by the above paragraph is that we seek food, even in the modern world, at specified times of the day when restaurants are open. 24-hour operated restaurants are so far and few. If you need lunch you need to be there in the restaurant between 12 and 3 in the afternoon. You have adapted to this idea.

Even the conscious perceptive process, wherein we respond to environmental stimuli, is to a large extent automated in the sense that the whole neurophysiological process happens without your volition. What I mean is there are a lot of background applications that start running in your brain and the body organs following the receipt of the environmental input. You cannot change any of that.

I say that animal behavior is no less robotic than the machines we have built. An input elicits an output. An action results in a reaction. There is a lot of environmental input that modifies the output of the organism that behaves no different from a machine. The sum total of output by the organismal system prepares for its own survival.

Depending on the type of the organismal system the output differs. Plants sense the light and water and perform a wide range of food-synthetic activity through the process of photosynthesis. This output pretty much determines the food chain on the planet. Bacteria perform a wide array of actions that may range from scavenging and recycling of organic matter to new food synthesis. They can even breakdown petrol! Bacteria have been used to clean up oil spills. In areas contaminated by the Exxon Valdez oil spill in 1989 about 11 to 38 million US gallons of crude oil spilt in the sea near Alaska. Oil-degrading bacteria have been shown to produce dramatic results in cleaning up this spill.

Bacteria are metabolically more diverse than all other life forms combined. There are about 5000 species of bacteria coming under the two bacterial kingdoms, _Archaebacteria_ and _Eubacteria._ Some bacteria obtain energy from even inorganic compounds! Nitrifiers, for example, oxidize ammonia or nitrite to obtain energy, producing the nitrate that is taken up by the plants. This process is called Nitrogen fixation and this is an extremely important process for terrestrial ecosystems as plants can only absorb nitrogen as nitrate. Other bacteria oxidize sulfur to produce hydrogen sulfide. On the ocean floor, under depths of 2500 meters, entire ecosystems subsist on this hydrogen sulfide that escapes through thermal vents. There are bacteria that can oxidize hydrogen gas and also other inorganic molecules.

The point is that the plants do something as important as manufacture of food and the 'lowly' bacteria can do the same or contribute significantly to the process! In fact, they can even help the plants in a symbiotic way to make nitrogen available for making the omnipotent proteins without which life forms cannot work!

Availability of sunlight and water from the environment determines the success of plants in food production. The same applies to the bacteria in that the environmental availability of ammonia or nitrite determines the ability of the bacteria to fix the nitrogen for use by plants indirectly making the way for amino acid and protein synthesis. Both forms of life do use chemoperception to sense the environmental signals and that does not matter. Reception of environmental signals need not always be conscious.

The important point is that the sum total of the plant and bacterial output is the much sought-after food. One cannot ignore the argument that suddenly it looks purpose-oriented. These life forms seem to work together, as influenced by the environment, producing something that is vital for almost the entire biosphere.

My question is: is the resultant goal-orientation a random chance event? Or, there is more to it than meets the eye.

I cannot believe the environmental input for modification of the behavior is as non-directed as purists want us to believe.

The ultimate question is - Why does the environment exist in the form and shape as it does? What determines the environmental characteristics? Could the environment change over time? Is the adaptation of the organism a passive event? Why cannot the environment change in response to the organisms instead of the organisms adapting to the environment? Why should it be unidirectional?

Evolution is about adaptation. The adaptation comes about by means of mutations that happen randomly or at least that is what we have been taught to believe. Life systems differ in the rate at which they can mutate. This is related to the rate of cell divisions wherein new daughter cells are created. In addition to the mutations, directed or not, there is also another mechanism called genetic recombination where diversity can be created. In this process there is a merger of bits of information-containing DNA. In the case of bacteria it can happen by way of uptake of free-floating DNA by living bacteria or transfer of DNA elements through vehicles called plasmids. In the case of big life forms like us it happens at the time of meiotic cell divisions.

Whatever is the mechanism of changes in DNA, or the rate of change, the consequent variation in off springs, which in other words refers to the process of evolution, enables the life systems to adapt to the environment. These also apply to the lots of mutations that happen inside the brain in higher animals. The neuro-anatomic evolution in higher animals helps them to adapt to the environment in a big and more complicated way. Why is it so?

New characteristics in life forms are like new updates to the application software held by the life system until then. By and large a number of life systems plod on with their genetic components and the resultant functional or structural capabilities. Driven by random mutations and genetic recombination new characteristics evolve just no different from the way your digital devices are updated. The timing of this update, or change, seems to uncannily follow the need for it in a given ecosystem. A given new change happens in the life systems living in that ecosystem where the change in the ecosystem has exerted a selection pressure on the life systems living there. Something has changed in the environment and the life systems living in the vicinity have to find a 'software update' to deal with it! This is the evolutionary process.

Bacteria, the most abundant form of life on this planet, are capable of responding to the environmental changes so rapidly because they multiply every 20 minutes in most cases. Every single cell division is an opportunity to create a change in the information content of the bacteria.

The above paragraph may read very silly to the scientifically ingrained mind. How could you even think like this? Aren't we supposed to take the theory of evolutionary adaptation as sacred gospel? I am not saying that evolutionary adaptation does not happen. It does. But, there is a purpose-oriented pulling of the strings by the world around us. The doctrine 'Survival of the fittest' has a punitive meaning to me. The 'disobedient' beings are weeded out to die.

Jean Baptiste Lamarck had it rough for his theory of inheritance of acquired traits. People ridiculed him and he died of poverty in obscurity. But Charles Darwin saw him in different light surprisingly. Charles Darwin wrote in 1861: "Lamarck was the first man whose conclusions on the subject excited much attention. This justly celebrated naturalist first published his views in 1801... he first did the eminent service of arousing attention to the probability of all changes in the organic, as well as in the inorganic world, being the result of law, and not of miraculous interposition".

What exactly did Darwin mean by 'the result of the law'? This means there is a non-negotiable direction imposed by the environment on the organism. What Lamarck actually believed was more complex: organisms are not passively altered by their environment. Instead, a change in the environment causes changes in the needs of organisms living in that environment, which in turn causes changes in their behavior. Altered behavior leads to greater or lesser use of a given structure or organ; use would cause the structure to increase in size over several generations, whereas disuse would cause it to shrink or even disappear. This rule — that use or disuse causes structures to enlarge or shrink — Lamarck called the "First Law" in his book _Philosophie zoologique_. Lamarck's "Second Law" stated that all such changes were heritable. The result of these laws was the continuous, gradual change of all organisms, as they became adapted to their environments; the physiological needs of organisms, created by their interactions with the environment, drive Lamarckian evolution.

In my opinion organismal behavior of responding to environmental signals is not a two-way street. There does not seem to be much of environmental change, if any, in the process to accommodate the needs of the organisms. Why is it a one-way affair?

If I said Lamarckian model is elegant then I become a scientific outlaw. I feel it makes more sense than the other.

It is a personal vote. You always have the 'free will' to choose what you want.

But, I thought I had concluded that the free will may be non-existent. So?

# CHAPTER 9

### THE PURPOSE BEHIND THE PUPPET SHOW

So far I have extensively shown the intricate strings that keep pulling life and non-life systems the way they are meant to be pulled. This statement has assumed already that the ways of pulling the strings are pre-determined and possibly goal-oriented. In other words, I am guessing there could be a plan behind the puppet show. What is it?

People over the millennia have wondered if the universe works to a purpose. This line of thinking is forbidden in science. We are told that random phenomena occur in the universe and it is a sheer coincidence that the consequence of the random events is having all the hall marks of design.

I do not want to go to the extent of using the universe as a whole as the model system for searching evidence of design and purpose. I do not want to even look at this phenomenon on the planetary scale either. I am going to use a lowly human body (compared to cosmic dimensions) as the model for studying this. With my knowledge as a medical doctor, with additional training in Biochemistry, I feel I am reasonably well qualified to talk about the human body and its control mechanisms.

Firstly, it is not easy to answer the question 'why?' in most instances. It is a difficult question to answer always. To go beyond the conventions of science and even suggest a goal-oriented program in nature I am sure readers will understand how difficult it is. I do not want to look like a crack pot theorist because I am not. Many readers trained in the ways of modern science would have come to the conclusion already.

The human body consists of trillions of cells. The cells are of many types, each capable of doing specialized functions. Tissues are basically groups of cells, often of dissimilar types. Organs are the next level of cellular organization. The human body's origin started as a single-celled fertilized ovum. I suppose the single-celled nature of the precursor of the human body is akin to the unicellular life forms that existed before the origin of the multicellular life. The fertilized ovum becomes multicellular during the gestational period. The cells evolve over the intra-uterine life as well as the extra-uterine life.

Let us say we ask the question: does a white blood cell know why it 'specialized' to acquire defense skills? What I mean is its ability to fight the microbes on your behalf? Does it even know to whom it is working for? What is it that it is defending? The answer is the white blood cell does not know it and does not have the means of knowing it even if it tried.

The same question can be asked for every single type of cell in our body. Does a kidney cell know why it specialized to acquire sewerage function? No. Nor does it know what it is cleaning up day in and day out.

A liver cell could hardly be supposed to know how or why it differentiated into a liver cell amongst the millions of undifferentiated cells in the fetus. How did it learn how to 'manufacture' a whole variety of biologically vital molecules like proteins and clotting factors? This highly 'technological' manufacturing role gives the liver the status of a factory in the body organization.

How would some cells in the middle of other millions of cells in the fetus know how to become information processors? I am talking about the brain cells. Do they ever hope to know who benefits from it? I am sure they could not care less.

Tissue differentiation and morphogenic development that happens inside a growing fetus is considered as a non-directed event no different from evolution. But, the genetic programs direct these processes temporally and spatially inside the growing fetus. But, what guides the life systems when they evolve? In both processes the participating entities, cells in the case of fetus and species in the case of evolution, have no means of planning. But, it is truly amazing that the outcome is goal-oriented and fit-for-purpose to a degree vastly superior to purposeful design. Every single fertilized ovum goes through the same sequence of events in fetal growth to the minutest detail. That simply means it is not a random event and growing cells in the fetus respond to controlling influences like placental growth factors, an infinite number of morphogenic molecules and female hormones within the woman's body particularly in the amniotic sac. The intra-embryonic growth of a fetus has been mapped to the finest detail but have we got anything close to it when it comes to organismal evolution in the unforgiving, harsh environment?

We spent a lot of time talking about various external controls exerted on life forms. These control mechanisms sometimes even originate from outside the planet. But, I want to tell you that inside your body you have equally complex regulatory mechanisms that control each and every cell present in your body. Cells are as much dancing to the tune of every type of signals and modifiers in your body environment as you and fellow organisms do to the external environment. Our internal environment, intra-or extra-uterine, has the same complexity as our ecology in the form of a whole range of puppet strings.

The endocrine glands like thyroid, pituitary, adrenals and ovaries secrete a number of hormones that act like regulatory influences that tell your body cells what to do when. There is no escape. The brain also introduces another level of control that determines the behavior of the life system at the macro-level. The extent of metabolic control of our body cells, just like other life systems, is mind-blowingly complex. Every single step is tightly regulated.

What I am arguing is that there is nothing wrong in assuming similar controlling influences operate in the external world too. Why shouldn't there be? The planetary environment is able to wield a range of control influences on its constituent entities like life systems just like your internal body environment exerts on the constituent body cells. Conceptually both are the same. You never suspected or questioned the notions of metabolic controls within your own body. It is accepted by science. But, when it comes to the planetary scale or even beyond such notions are forbidden. This is what I want to ask why.

This may be because we have no idea at what level these influences operate in the external environment. We can only describe the phenomena but not the mechanisms underlying this nor the purpose behind it. In other words the level of hierarchy at which these evolutionary influences get selected in nature is not known.

Edward Wilson, the American biologist, promoted a novel concept called Sociobiology in an attempt to explain the evolutionary mechanics behind selection of social behaviors like altruism and cooperation. These traits are supposed to be manifested at the group level unlike individual behaviors. A single individual may find that acting selfishly improves his chances of survival but at some unknown hierarchy within the species, or a group, the greater good takes precedence. Members of the group or species find cooperation or altruism better for the whole group though some degree of selfishness is permitted. Science cannot explain this by way of an equation or a formula. Even for that matter we do not even know how simple evolutionary selection process works. All we have is a descriptive understanding that in a given environment organisms with certain favorable characteristics will survive. This survival advantage is passed on to future generations through the genes. How do the lowly molecules and cells decipher what is good for the organisms in the long term and of course for the species? At some molecular or cellular level this kind of data analysis should be happening leading to some sort of genetic imprinting for posterity. Evolutionary biologists would tell us that random mutations affected the structure or function of some key molecules that led to a change in the survival fitness. If the change was negative then the life system would die out. If the change was positive then the organism would live. The DNA change, due to mutations, is inherited to the next generations. We all know that. What we do not know is that how come the change in the DNA sequences, happening due to random mutations, is so tailor-made for the need imposed by the environment. Whatever gene changes that ensue seem to start happening when there is a selection pressure from the environment. The timing is intriguing as well as the unknown underlying unknown mechanisms that make this happen. To me it is as if the life system was going through a software update. Life systems seem to know what the need is and how to fix it themselves. That is what evolution is all about.

If we were to argue that evolution is a random event we would struggle to explain how come periods in planetary history vary in the rate of evolutionary change. It is well known that evolutionary theory accommodates both gradualism and punctuated equilibrium. Species evolve gradually, undergoing small changes over time at a steady rate, which is called gradualism. On the contrary, fossil records suggest that many species show hardly any change for long periods of time (stasis) followed by periods of rapid and big changes presumably due to bigger selection pressures from the environment.

Even within our own genome, where changes account for the evolutionary progress, there are 'hot spots' of DNA that are hyper-mutable compared to regular portions of DNA. Not all DNA mutates at the same rate. Ok, it does not matter the rate at which DNA mutates and leads to evolutionary change. The more important consideration for this book is how does this happen. Presence of hyper-mutable portions of DNA raises the possibility that this is a facilitated event. These hyper-mutable regions of DNA are there for a purpose I believe.

Take the example of evolution of human speech. A unique requirement that emerged following growth of human societies is the need for speech. You needed to communicate in a way that will facilitate exchange of rich information hitherto not possible with animal grunts. Also you needed to express emotions like fear, grief, happiness which are all non-verbal means of information transfer again not within the scope of abilities with other life forms. How did man respond to this environmental pressure to learn how to speak? How did he comply with the forced need for expression of emotions?

Regions in cerebral cortex called Broca's area and Wernicke's area are concerned with speech ability. These regions are absent or are relatively small in other primates. But, in humans, they are big and well-evolved. This is said to enable speech and comprehension. Neuro-anatomic evolution is dependent on positive changes in certain genes or DNA regions that led to improved or new functions. In this case we are looking at some positive gene changes inside the cortical neurons which resulted in the function of speech. This is no different from the myriads of other examples where evolution led to new characteristics in life forms. In all cases the need emanated from the environment. How this need is translated into molecular changes and later anatomic changes is beyond the current understanding of science.

Human speech is not just about the brain cortex. It requires effector organs like the throat, larynx or the wind-pipe. The throat acts as the resonating chamber capable of a number of sounds. We see the appearance of a skeletal structure supporting laryngeal placement only in the hominids that lived 100,000 years or before. Moreover, to produce consonants you need a short oral cavity which is not available in our nearest primate relatives. They have too long an oral cavity not suitable for this. We see the positioning of the hyoid bone, which is a point of attachment for a tongue muscle, in Homo sapiens only. Due to this positioning highly precise and more flexible tongue movements are possible. Again such anatomic evolution could not have happened without appropriate changes in genes responsible for these bones and muscles.

The size of the hypoglossal canal, an aperture that permits the hypoglossal nerve to reach the tongue muscles, is much larger in Neanderthals and humans than in early hominids and non-human primates.

Human facial nerves and musculature have also evolved more than other life forms. Though they are also present in all vertebrates they support feeding and respiration only in them. Only in mammal they support facial communication by means of expressions of emotions. Unlike in most mammals we see many independent muscles in primates with distinct attachment points in facial skin. This is much more strikingly developed in humans in conjunction with a degree of involvement of lips and eyes that is not present in any other species. This increases dramatically the repertoire of facial expressions something we love to talk about in screen actors.

The point of this elaborate discussion is to understand how this came about and why. Who directed this process? Where did the need come from?

Belief in moral values, altruism etc. and other human traits co-evolved with other traits such as speech and cognition. All have a sound neuro-anatomic basis and gene changes underpin these changes. Expanding human societies exerted a compulsion on the members of the society to find ways of holding the society intact. A gene-culture coevolution made this possible. It is not just learning that made morality possible. Humans have a neurological infrastructure for this. This needed the right gene changes. The same holds good for other human traits. So, at some unknown level sensory inputs from the environment were processed and converted into decision outputs.

This is what I have been talking about all along. The need of the environment matters here more than anything else. For individual human beings the society is the environment to which he or she should adopt in a constructive, productive and obedient way. Self-interest and own free will is overridden. Actions that may offer better return to the individual are manipulated by evolving neuro-anatomy. The end result is altruism, morality, spirituality etc. These are not learned behaviors as many would like us to believe. These are intrinsic qualities which mankind has co-evolved, obviously supported by gene changes in neurons, as our society grew bigger and bigger over a few tens of thousands of years. The last 10,000 years may have been crucial coinciding with the rapid growth of human group size enabled by agriculture.

The internal environment of the human society needed certain things to sustain itself. Its constituent members responded well.

The same is applicable to multi-cellular cellular societies called organisms. When an organism was unicellular it needed nothing fancy to regulate itself. But, as it grew in size and number of cells, the oligo-cellular organisms faced the need for order amongst the cells just as humans needed order generation in their growing societies. The degree of constraints and coercion increased in proportion to the size of the growth seen in the number of cells in the organism or number of humans in the society as applicable. Individual cells and individual human beings are brought under the influence of order-generating mechanisms which in other words means strings start pulling them. There is no freedom beyond limits. But, the most interesting part is that there is an outcome within the system that smacks of design. The repetitive nature of the purpose-oriented design in a scale-invariant manner across all types of biological and non-biological systems suggests that the puppet-strings are inescapable and natural.

Systems also co-evolve with geo-physical phenomena as we saw in the beginning. How cyclical, geo-physical events control all life forms is well understood and well recognized. Life systems, which themselves are highly controlled within their internal environment as well as outside within their next level of hierarchy, have co-evolved with planetary dynamics. Sunrise and sunset pretty much control most if not all living phenomena in a temporal sense. Sunlight and its associated energy get converted to food energy by the plants and form the basis of all life on the planet. All life forms have evolved molecular machinery to combust this food and drive their operations. Hunger in higher life forms and nutrient-seeking in lower forms are the most dominant activities next only to reproduction. I explained in great detail how these activities are orchestrated in life systems no different from a well-directed play where the actors do exactly as told by their director.

