Brain restoration and a rich inner world

{ "translated_text": "Reflections on Miraculous Recoveries\nDespite the summer lull in the flow of scientific news, several recent reports have arrived that could considerably expand our understanding of the plasticity of our own organisms.\nIn 1984, nineteen‑year‑old American Terry Wallis was involved in a car accident and sustained multiple brain injuries. The only thing physicians could achieve was to keep him alive in a comatose state. Then, suddenly, in 2003 Terry began to speak, to get out of bed and to communicate with his daughter, who had unnoticedly become an adult! Tomography showed that the damaged brain areas had not regenerated: instead, other regions had formed. Moreover, during the time that had passed since the patient’s “resurrection,” his brain was reorganized once again: apparently, some of the neuronal networks that had formed during the coma were no longer adequately performing their tasks. They ceased activity, and their functions were taken over by other, newly formed structures. As a result, physicians witnessed the emergence of a person with a brain‑activity centre organization substantially different from that of healthy individuals.\n[IMG_1]\nBrain remodeling can occur not only after traumatic injury. Recall the documented enlargement of brain regions responsible for spatial orientation in London taxi drivers. Even more intriguing is the proven ability, in several cases, of blind individuals to use echolocation. Those who have mastered this gift emit soft tongue clicks and then reconstruct the layout of surrounding objects based on the returning echo. The nationally renowned blind American teenager Ben Underwood, thanks to echolocation, can even skateboard. Thus, our sensory organs are suitable for solving tasks that are highly atypical for humans. The problem lies only in developing the brain structures that would allow control of such abilities.\nRemarkably, such profound reorganization is not limited to neural tissue. After learning about Terry Wallis’s story, it becomes easier to believe the case of the electrician from Calcutta, Sambhu Roy. He suffered a severe electrical burn to the head. Physicians could only watch as the damaged portion of the 25‑year‑old man’s skull detached. Fortunately, new meninges and a new bone formed beneath it. Consequently, the fortunate electrician now poses for the press holding a piece of skull that has separated from his head.\nIn general, recent findings provide grounds for a serious reassessment of the regenerative capacity of humans and their closest relatives. Austrian biologists replicated and extended experiments performed a century and a half ago by the German physiologist Émile Duveau‑Raymond. Experiments on mice confirmed earlier observations that an electric current flowing across a wound surface can markedly enhance reparative processes. With appropriately chosen electric‑field parameters, cell migration ability was found to increase significantly. This concerns a wholly natural mechanism of damage repair, but external stimulation disables some inhibitory mechanism during its implementation.\nCanadian scientists from the University of Alberta, bearing names characteristic of contemporary American science—Jie Chen and Ying Tsui—presented an even more unusual report. They developed an ultrasonic generator that attaches to the jaw like a dental brace and induces the regeneration of broken teeth. A crucial condition is that, as often happens with trauma, living tooth roots remain within the jawbone. These two engineers relied on the results of Tarek El‑Bialy, a medic from the same university, who managed, using a larger device, to trigger the regeneration of lost teeth in rabbits.\nFinally, add to the aforementioned facts a wide range of phenomena associated with stem‑cell action (a topic so extensive that it deserves a separate discussion), and you will understand that we are dealing with numerous possibilities for restoring structures whose loss was previously considered irreversible. Of course, the main implications of these and similar stories are practical. Nevertheless, we will also touch upon some theoretical aspects.\nThe facts presented here fit poorly with the notion of the organism as a step‑by‑step implementation of the genotype. If our traits were the result of a rigid program execution, there would be no mechanism for correcting anomalies in cases of serious deviations from the norm.\nSuppose we could break down normal ontogeny into a multitude of programmed steps: activations of particular genes and the transformations they induce in the developing system. Step 1 is followed by step 2, step 27 by step 28, and so on to the end. Depending on the original hereditary program, we should end up either with the reader of “Computerry,” its author, or its editor. It seems clear; this is roughly how a computer program is installed. However, only those steps that have been traversed repeatedly during the evolution of the control system can be rigidly programmed. How should we handle non‑standard situations—variants 28a, 28b, 28c, 28d, and so on—some of which are fairly probable deviations from the normal trajectory, and others serious damages?\nHow does adaptability arise? The general answer is as a result of prior selection. For example, the ability to heal wounds can be viewed as the outcome of appropriate selection—those who healed more successfully left more offspring. Yet there was no selection for brain‑regeneration ability after a twenty‑year coma, and none could have existed until the end of the 20th century!\nProgram installers either include separate instructions for all anticipated variants, ignore developmental trajectory deviations, or issue error messages. In some organisms (e.g., roundworms) individual development control is organized similarly. Undoubtedly, our program is set differently. This was first clearly realized by the German embryologist Hans Drisch, who studied sea‑urchin development at the beginning of the 20th century (without mockery: our close relatives, especially from the viewpoint of embryonic development). A larva floating in the water develops into a sea‑urchin. And what results from half of a larva cut by the experimenter—a half‑urchin? No, a whole urchin, only half the size!\nWhat then governs the development of a larva that “steers” from an unnatural intermediate position toward the predetermined finale? To answer this, Drisch needed the word “entelechy,” taken from Aristotle’s philosophy. According to Drisch, entelechy is the negation of causal laws in the functioning of living matter. It may seem that Drisch was wrong—causality does act in this case, but it takes a special form. The development of a self‑regulating system can be driven by a predetermined final state, allowing it to reach the required point from a wide range of possible intermediate states.\nAnd what about the developmental control program that is realized through the sequential activation of required genes? It does not exist. In some cases our organism is governed in this way, in others by a different mechanism.\nConsider a conditional example involving programming two robots. The first must pick up a workpiece at one point, rotate it in a certain way, and place it at another point. The second is an autopilot that must bring a vehicle to a desired location. The first robot’s program can be a rigid sequence of instructions covering the entire space of possibilities. However, it is impossible to anticipate every vehicle state and position in a strictly deterministic program. What to do? Provide the autopilot with a map and train it to plot a route to the target point. Yet some fragments of such a program may still consist of rigid instruction sequences.\nThe commonplace today view of the organism as an “automatic” implementation of the genotype cannot explain cases of “miraculous healings.” This category of facts can be attempted to be explained on the basis of the epigenetic theory of evolution and its concepts of ontogeny.\nFrom this perspective, development is influenced by a complex set of factors, including the hereditary program, its functional outcomes, the “pre‑set” properties of cells, and environmental influences. This system is so intricate that element‑by‑element description is impossible. It can only be characterized by the probability distribution of various developmental pathways under given external conditions. This probability distribution defines a multidimensional phase space (a set of points and developmental trajectories) of possible states of the developing system. The three‑dimensional model of such a phase space is called the epigenetic landscape. The normal developmental outcome, from this viewpoint, is not set step‑by‑step and rigidly, but as a potential basin within the described phase space (a depression in the epigenetic landscape). Over many generations, selection deepens this potential basin, increasing the likelihood of a favorable developmental completion.\nTerry Wallis’s organism, as a result of the car accident, entered a completely atypical “location” in phase space, which was also heavily distorted by “non‑standard” external influences. Yet the potential basin corresponding to normal brain self‑organization remained, and there were no insurmountable obstacles on the “path” to it. The organism “slid” into a state reminiscent of a normal ontogenetic stage. Thus, overcoming anomalies, the brain begins to construct the missing structures… It should be recalled that even in normal brain development there is a stage of “neuro‑darwinism.” Brain cells that successfully form contacts with their neighbors and become part of normally functioning neural networks are retained, while others undergo apoptosis. Through self‑organization, the brain “feels out” the optimal architecture for the given conditions.\nThe epigenetic explanation has one important feature: it will not satisfy people seeking unequivocal explanations. The probabilistic nature of the processes described by this model does not allow a strict cause‑and‑effect correspondence. It may seem simple: why is an organism the way we see it? Because it has genes that programmed it that way… Unfortunately, this approach collapses when trying to explain Drisch’s experiments or Terry Wallis’s story: such things cannot be programmed.\nEach era provides its own metaphors for describing reality. For example, a medieval person was so fascinated by clockwork that the whole world seemed to him a clock, and God a watchmaker. Today the world is a computer, and God (or evolution) a programmer. But who said that the development of our explanations must stop at the current stage?\nLooking Beyond the Line of World Division\nDespite the achievements of modern science, which allow us to obtain photographs of events that occurred billions of years ago (i.e., objects at distances of billions of light‑years) and to penetrate the mysteries of the micro‑world, completely inaccessible worlds lie next to each of us. We are speaking of the inner world of other people.\nThe education received by most of us bears the imprint of a philosophy that denied an independent value to the inner world of a person. In the Gorbachev era, the author of these lines (then a member of the CPSU) studied, as part of a university course, the main philosophical work of V. I. Lenin—“Materialism and Empiriocriticism.” The Lenin text made a striking impression with its aggressiveness and lack of evidence. Nevertheless, at that time it was accepted that the “theory of reflection” justified in this text represented the pinnacle of philosophy. Lenin presented it, proving the futility of Machism (the concept to which, for example, Albert Einstein was close). The elimination of the empiriocritics—Ernst Mach and Richard Aventarius—was necessary for Lenin because of intra‑party struggles that now have no reason to be recalled. And Lenin actually borrowed the theory of reflection from George Berkeley, whom the party tribunal denounced as a forerunner of Mach. Once, Berkeley, characterising alternatives to his version of solipsism (the claim that the world is our representation), formulated the idea that the psyche merely reflects the external world. Thanks to Lenin, who understood and appropriated it, this idea became the main pillar of a truly correct philosophy.\nThe historical epoch has changed. Diamat and istmat are no longer trump cards. And the widespread alternative to the idea of reflection has neither existed nor does it exist, not only in the post‑Soviet space but also in the West. Perhaps this is because views on the relationship between the creature and the Creator, consistent with the common understanding of Christianity, roughly correspond to the same notion of the secondary, low‑value nature of the individual world?\nIt would be beneficial (at least it would promote progress in understanding our own nature) to increase the contribution of evolutionary‑biological ideas to the modern understanding of the human and the essence of his consciousness. Our psyche—as with the psyche of all other animals—is a product of evolution. The ways we interact with reality have developed from the interactions of our ancestors with reality. The tasks we solve are developments of the tasks that were solved before humanity appeared by our primate… beastly… reptilian… fish… ancestors. Nobel laureate Konrad Lorenz explained in his underrated book “The Other Side of the Mirror” that the spatial three‑dimensionality of our world is closely linked, for him, to the presence in our vestibular organ of exactly three mutually perpendicular semicircular canals. It is unlikely that these two facts stand in a cause‑and‑effect relationship; rather, both are consequences of other, not yet fully understood causes, parts of a single whole.\nBy the way, as is known, subjective solipsism is logically irrefutable. If you insist that nothing exists beyond your inner world and that everything else is merely your representation, logical arguments will not persuade you. For the author (as for Lorenz and other biologists) one of the compelling objections is that such a position is meaningless from the standpoint of an organism’s adaptation to its environment. Reasoning this way, there is no need to change over time, to evolve. This idea must be alien, detrimental to the evolutionary basis of our psyche. Indeed, the proponents of solipsism seem to accept it as an artificial construct rather than a natural view of things. This is related to the fact that solipsism, however one may phrase it… well, it is ugly—contradicts our nature. On the contrary, when another person addresses you, it is natural for you to imagine his inner world as similar to yours. Social adaptation, interaction with conspecifics—a long‑standing and vital function of the psyche for the survival of our relatives and ancestors.\nSo how can we look into another person? A weak, indirect answer offered by modern science is to use brain tomography. We cannot see the inner world of another person—we can only know its physiological basis, the functioning of the brain. Chinese scientists from Dalian University compared, using magnetic resonance, brain processes of English‑speaking and Chinese‑speaking participants while solving mathematical problems. These processes turned out to be different. To add three to four, participants of different languages used different brain zones. Whether this reflects different learning or different language structure is not entirely clear. But people differing in their native language have different structures of mental associations and their processing.\nAnd if we speak the same language, does that mean that the structure of associations and their processing coincide for us?\n\nD. Shabanov. Looking Beyond the Line of World Division // Computerry, M., 2006. – No. 27–28 (647–648)\n\nD. Shabanov. Reflections on Miraculous Recoveries // Computerry, M., 2006. – No. 29 (649)\n\n1 In Ukraine, for example, the role once played by CPSU historians and Marxist‑Leninist philosophers is now performed by Ukrainian philologists. Their subject has become the main one in higher education, and they can look down on specialists in private disciplines. Back to text\n\n2 How can you consider the inner world of other people as of little value if your “I” is part of your inner world and everything else, apart from it, is for you only a hypothesis that still needs to be proven? And how do you know that the green colour or the octave is the same for me as it is for you? Back to text" }

{ "translated_text": "Reflections on Miraculous Recoveries\nDespite the summer lull in the flow of scientific news, several recent reports have arrived that could considerably expand our understanding of the plasticity of our own organisms.\nIn 1984, nineteen‑year‑old American Terry Wallis was involved in a car accident and sustained multiple brain injuries. The only thing physicians could achieve was to keep him alive in a comatose state. Then, suddenly, in 2003 Terry began to speak, to get out of bed and to communicate with his daughter, who had unnoticedly become an adult! Tomography showed that the damaged brain areas had not regenerated: instead, other regions had formed. Moreover, during the time that had passed since the patient’s “resurrection,” his brain was reorganized once again: apparently, some of the neuronal networks that had formed during the coma were no longer adequately performing their tasks. They ceased activity, and their functions were taken over by other, newly formed structures. As a result, physicians witnessed the emergence of a person with a brain‑activity centre organization substantially different from that of healthy individuals.\n[IMG_1]\nBrain remodeling can occur not only after traumatic injury. Recall the documented enlargement of brain regions responsible for spatial orientation in London taxi drivers. Even more intriguing is the proven ability, in several cases, of blind individuals to use echolocation. Those who have mastered this gift emit soft tongue clicks and then reconstruct the layout of surrounding objects based on the returning echo. The nationally renowned blind American teenager Ben Underwood, thanks to echolocation, can even skateboard. Thus, our sensory organs are suitable for solving tasks that are highly atypical for humans. The problem lies only in developing the brain structures that would allow control of such abilities.\nRemarkably, such profound reorganization is not limited to neural tissue. After learning about Terry Wallis’s story, it becomes easier to believe the case of the electrician from Calcutta, Sambhu Roy. He suffered a severe electrical burn to the head. Physicians could only watch as the damaged portion of the 25‑year‑old man’s skull detached. Fortunately, new meninges and a new bone formed beneath it. Consequently, the fortunate electrician now poses for the press holding a piece of skull that has separated from his head.\nIn general, recent findings provide grounds for a serious reassessment of the regenerative capacity of humans and their closest relatives. Austrian biologists replicated and extended experiments performed a century and a half ago by the German physiologist Émile Duveau‑Raymond. Experiments on mice confirmed earlier observations that an electric current flowing across a wound surface can markedly enhance reparative processes. With appropriately chosen electric‑field parameters, cell migration ability was found to increase significantly. This concerns a wholly natural mechanism of damage repair, but external stimulation disables some inhibitory mechanism during its implementation.\nCanadian scientists from the University of Alberta, bearing names characteristic of contemporary American science—Jie Chen and Ying Tsui—presented an even more unusual report. They developed an ultrasonic generator that attaches to the jaw like a dental brace and induces the regeneration of broken teeth. A crucial condition is that, as often happens with trauma, living tooth roots remain within the jawbone. These two engineers relied on the results of Tarek El‑Bialy, a medic from the same university, who managed, using a larger device, to trigger the regeneration of lost teeth in rabbits.\nFinally, add to the aforementioned facts a wide range of phenomena associated with stem‑cell action (a topic so extensive that it deserves a separate discussion), and you will understand that we are dealing with numerous possibilities for restoring structures whose loss was previously considered irreversible. Of course, the main implications of these and similar stories are practical. Nevertheless, we will also touch upon some theoretical aspects.\nThe facts presented here fit poorly with the notion of the organism as a step‑by‑step implementation of the genotype. If our traits were the result of a rigid program execution, there would be no mechanism for correcting anomalies in cases of serious deviations from the norm.\nSuppose we could break down normal ontogeny into a multitude of programmed steps: activations of particular genes and the transformations they induce in the developing system. Step 1 is followed by step 2, step 27 by step 28, and so on to the end. Depending on the original hereditary program, we should end up either with the reader of “Computerry,” its author, or its editor. It seems clear; this is roughly how a computer program is installed. However, only those steps that have been traversed repeatedly during the evolution of the control system can be rigidly programmed. How should we handle non‑standard situations—variants 28a, 28b, 28c, 28d, and so on—some of which are fairly probable deviations from the normal trajectory, and others serious damages?\nHow does adaptability arise? The general answer is as a result of prior selection. For example, the ability to heal wounds can be viewed as the outcome of appropriate selection—those who healed more successfully left more offspring. Yet there was no selection for brain‑regeneration ability after a twenty‑year coma, and none could have existed until the end of the 20th century!\nProgram installers either include separate instructions for all anticipated variants, ignore developmental trajectory deviations, or issue error messages. In some organisms (e.g., roundworms) individual development control is organized similarly. Undoubtedly, our program is set differently. This was first clearly realized by the German embryologist Hans Drisch, who studied sea‑urchin development at the beginning of the 20th century (without mockery: our close relatives, especially from the viewpoint of embryonic development). A larva floating in the water develops into a sea‑urchin. And what results from half of a larva cut by the experimenter—a half‑urchin? No, a whole urchin, only half the size!\nWhat then governs the development of a larva that “steers” from an unnatural intermediate position toward the predetermined finale? To answer this, Drisch needed the word “entelechy,” taken from Aristotle’s philosophy. According to Drisch, entelechy is the negation of causal laws in the functioning of living matter. It may seem that Drisch was wrong—causality does act in this case, but it takes a special form. The development of a self‑regulating system can be driven by a predetermined final state, allowing it to reach the required point from a wide range of possible intermediate states.\nAnd what about the developmental control program that is realized through the sequential activation of required genes? It does not exist. In some cases our organism is governed in this way, in others by a different mechanism.\nConsider a conditional example involving programming two robots. The first must pick up a workpiece at one point, rotate it in a certain way, and place it at another point. The second is an autopilot that must bring a vehicle to a desired location. The first robot’s program can be a rigid sequence of instructions covering the entire space of possibilities. However, it is impossible to anticipate every vehicle state and position in a strictly deterministic program. What to do? Provide the autopilot with a map and train it to plot a route to the target point. Yet some fragments of such a program may still consist of rigid instruction sequences.\nThe commonplace today view of the organism as an “automatic” implementation of the genotype cannot explain cases of “miraculous healings.” This category of facts can be attempted to be explained on the basis of the epigenetic theory of evolution and its concepts of ontogeny.\nFrom this perspective, development is influenced by a complex set of factors, including the hereditary program, its functional outcomes, the “pre‑set” properties of cells, and environmental influences. This system is so intricate that element‑by‑element description is impossible. It can only be characterized by the probability distribution of various developmental pathways under given external conditions. This probability distribution defines a multidimensional phase space (a set of points and developmental trajectories) of possible states of the developing system. The three‑dimensional model of such a phase space is called the epigenetic landscape. The normal developmental outcome, from this viewpoint, is not set step‑by‑step and rigidly, but as a potential basin within the described phase space (a depression in the epigenetic landscape). Over many generations, selection deepens this potential basin, increasing the likelihood of a favorable developmental completion.\nTerry Wallis’s organism, as a result of the car accident, entered a completely atypical “location” in phase space, which was also heavily distorted by “non‑standard” external influences. Yet the potential basin corresponding to normal brain self‑organization remained, and there were no insurmountable obstacles on the “path” to it. The organism “slid” into a state reminiscent of a normal ontogenetic stage. Thus, overcoming anomalies, the brain begins to construct the missing structures… It should be recalled that even in normal brain development there is a stage of “neuro‑darwinism.” Brain cells that successfully form contacts with their neighbors and become part of normally functioning neural networks are retained, while others undergo apoptosis. Through self‑organization, the brain “feels out” the optimal architecture for the given conditions.\nThe epigenetic explanation has one important feature: it will not satisfy people seeking unequivocal explanations. The probabilistic nature of the processes described by this model does not allow a strict cause‑and‑effect correspondence. It may seem simple: why is an organism the way we see it? Because it has genes that programmed it that way… Unfortunately, this approach collapses when trying to explain Drisch’s experiments or Terry Wallis’s story: such things cannot be programmed.\nEach era provides its own metaphors for describing reality. For example, a medieval person was so fascinated by clockwork that the whole world seemed to him a clock, and God a watchmaker. Today the world is a computer, and God (or evolution) a programmer. But who said that the development of our explanations must stop at the current stage?\nLooking Beyond the Line of World Division\nDespite the achievements of modern science, which allow us to obtain photographs of events that occurred billions of years ago (i.e., objects at distances of billions of light‑years) and to penetrate the mysteries of the micro‑world, completely inaccessible worlds lie next to each of us. We are speaking of the inner world of other people.\nThe education received by most of us bears the imprint of a philosophy that denied an independent value to the inner world of a person. In the Gorbachev era, the author of these lines (then a member of the CPSU) studied, as part of a university course, the main philosophical work of V. I. Lenin—“Materialism and Empiriocriticism.” The Lenin text made a striking impression with its aggressiveness and lack of evidence. Nevertheless, at that time it was accepted that the “theory of reflection” justified in this text represented the pinnacle of philosophy. Lenin presented it, proving the futility of Machism (the concept to which, for example, Albert Einstein was close). The elimination of the empiriocritics—Ernst Mach and Richard Aventarius—was necessary for Lenin because of intra‑party struggles that now have no reason to be recalled. And Lenin actually borrowed the theory of reflection from George Berkeley, whom the party tribunal denounced as a forerunner of Mach. Once, Berkeley, characterising alternatives to his version of solipsism (the claim that the world is our representation), formulated the idea that the psyche merely reflects the external world. Thanks to Lenin, who understood and appropriated it, this idea became the main pillar of a truly correct philosophy.\nThe historical epoch has changed. Diamat and istmat are no longer trump cards. And the widespread alternative to the idea of reflection has neither existed nor does it exist, not only in the post‑Soviet space but also in the West. Perhaps this is because views on the relationship between the creature and the Creator, consistent with the common understanding of Christianity, roughly correspond to the same notion of the secondary, low‑value nature of the individual world?\nIt would be beneficial (at least it would promote progress in understanding our own nature) to increase the contribution of evolutionary‑biological ideas to the modern understanding of the human and the essence of his consciousness. Our psyche—as with the psyche of all other animals—is a product of evolution. The ways we interact with reality have developed from the interactions of our ancestors with reality. The tasks we solve are developments of the tasks that were solved before humanity appeared by our primate… beastly… reptilian… fish… ancestors. Nobel laureate Konrad Lorenz explained in his underrated book “The Other Side of the Mirror” that the spatial three‑dimensionality of our world is closely linked, for him, to the presence in our vestibular organ of exactly three mutually perpendicular semicircular canals. It is unlikely that these two facts stand in a cause‑and‑effect relationship; rather, both are consequences of other, not yet fully understood causes, parts of a single whole.\nBy the way, as is known, subjective solipsism is logically irrefutable. If you insist that nothing exists beyond your inner world and that everything else is merely your representation, logical arguments will not persuade you. For the author (as for Lorenz and other biologists) one of the compelling objections is that such a position is meaningless from the standpoint of an organism’s adaptation to its environment. Reasoning this way, there is no need to change over time, to evolve. This idea must be alien, detrimental to the evolutionary basis of our psyche. Indeed, the proponents of solipsism seem to accept it as an artificial construct rather than a natural view of things. This is related to the fact that solipsism, however one may phrase it… well, it is ugly—contradicts our nature. On the contrary, when another person addresses you, it is natural for you to imagine his inner world as similar to yours. Social adaptation, interaction with conspecifics—a long‑standing and vital function of the psyche for the survival of our relatives and ancestors.\nSo how can we look into another person? A weak, indirect answer offered by modern science is to use brain tomography. We cannot see the inner world of another person—we can only know its physiological basis, the functioning of the brain. Chinese scientists from Dalian University compared, using magnetic resonance, brain processes of English‑speaking and Chinese‑speaking participants while solving mathematical problems. These processes turned out to be different. To add three to four, participants of different languages used different brain zones. Whether this reflects different learning or different language structure is not entirely clear. But people differing in their native language have different structures of mental associations and their processing.\nAnd if we speak the same language, does that mean that the structure of associations and their processing coincide for us?\n\nD. Shabanov. Looking Beyond the Line of World Division // Computerry, M., 2006. – No. 27–28 (647–648)\n\nD. Shabanov. Reflections on Miraculous Recoveries // Computerry, M., 2006. – No. 29 (649)\n\n1 In Ukraine, for example, the role once played by CPSU historians and Marxist‑Leninist philosophers is now performed by Ukrainian philologists. Their subject has become the main one in higher education, and they can look down on specialists in private disciplines. Back to text\n\n2 How can you consider the inner world of other people as of little value if your “I” is part of your inner world and everything else, apart from it, is for you only a hypothesis that still needs to be proven? And how do you know that the green colour or the octave is the same for me as it is for you? Back to text" }

{ "translated_text": "Reflections on Miraculous Recoveries\nDespite the summer lull in the flow of scientific news, several recent reports have arrived that could considerably expand our understanding of the plasticity of our own organisms.\nIn 1984, nineteen‑year‑old American Terry Wallis was involved in a car accident and sustained multiple brain injuries. The only thing physicians could achieve was to keep him alive in a comatose state. Then, suddenly, in 2003 Terry began to speak, to get out of bed and to communicate with his daughter, who had unnoticedly become an adult! Tomography showed that the damaged brain areas had not regenerated: instead, other regions had formed. Moreover, during the time that had passed since the patient’s “resurrection,” his brain was reorganized once again: apparently, some of the neuronal networks that had formed during the coma were no longer adequately performing their tasks. They ceased activity, and their functions were taken over by other, newly formed structures. As a result, physicians witnessed the emergence of a person with a brain‑activity centre organization substantially different from that of healthy individuals.\n[IMG_1]\nBrain remodeling can occur not only after traumatic injury. Recall the documented enlargement of brain regions responsible for spatial orientation in London taxi drivers. Even more intriguing is the proven ability, in several cases, of blind individuals to use echolocation. Those who have mastered this gift emit soft tongue clicks and then reconstruct the layout of surrounding objects based on the returning echo. The nationally renowned blind American teenager Ben Underwood, thanks to echolocation, can even skateboard. Thus, our sensory organs are suitable for solving tasks that are highly atypical for humans. The problem lies only in developing the brain structures that would allow control of such abilities.\nRemarkably, such profound reorganization is not limited to neural tissue. After learning about Terry Wallis’s story, it becomes easier to believe the case of the electrician from Calcutta, Sambhu Roy. He suffered a severe electrical burn to the head. Physicians could only watch as the damaged portion of the 25‑year‑old man’s skull detached. Fortunately, new meninges and a new bone formed beneath it. Consequently, the fortunate electrician now poses for the press holding a piece of skull that has separated from his head.\nIn general, recent findings provide grounds for a serious reassessment of the regenerative capacity of humans and their closest relatives. Austrian biologists replicated and extended experiments performed a century and a half ago by the German physiologist Émile Duveau‑Raymond. Experiments on mice confirmed earlier observations that an electric current flowing across a wound surface can markedly enhance reparative processes. With appropriately chosen electric‑field parameters, cell migration ability was found to increase significantly. This concerns a wholly natural mechanism of damage repair, but external stimulation disables some inhibitory mechanism during its implementation.\nCanadian scientists from the University of Alberta, bearing names characteristic of contemporary American science—Jie Chen and Ying Tsui—presented an even more unusual report. They developed an ultrasonic generator that attaches to the jaw like a dental brace and induces the regeneration of broken teeth. A crucial condition is that, as often happens with trauma, living tooth roots remain within the jawbone. These two engineers relied on the results of Tarek El‑Bialy, a medic from the same university, who managed, using a larger device, to trigger the regeneration of lost teeth in rabbits.\nFinally, add to the aforementioned facts a wide range of phenomena associated with stem‑cell action (a topic so extensive that it deserves a separate discussion), and you will understand that we are dealing with numerous possibilities for restoring structures whose loss was previously considered irreversible. Of course, the main implications of these and similar stories are practical. Nevertheless, we will also touch upon some theoretical aspects.\nThe facts presented here fit poorly with the notion of the organism as a step‑by‑step implementation of the genotype. If our traits were the result of a rigid program execution, there would be no mechanism for correcting anomalies in cases of serious deviations from the norm.\nSuppose we could break down normal ontogeny into a multitude of programmed steps: activations of particular genes and the transformations they induce in the developing system. Step 1 is followed by step 2, step 27 by step 28, and so on to the end. Depending on the original hereditary program, we should end up either with the reader of “Computerry,” its author, or its editor. It seems clear; this is roughly how a computer program is installed. However, only those steps that have been traversed repeatedly during the evolution of the control system can be rigidly programmed. How should we handle non‑standard situations—variants 28a, 28b, 28c, 28d, and so on—some of which are fairly probable deviations from the normal trajectory, and others serious damages?\nHow does adaptability arise? The general answer is as a result of prior selection. For example, the ability to heal wounds can be viewed as the outcome of appropriate selection—those who healed more successfully left more offspring. Yet there was no selection for brain‑regeneration ability after a twenty‑year coma, and none could have existed until the end of the 20th century!\nProgram installers either include separate instructions for all anticipated variants, ignore developmental trajectory deviations, or issue error messages. In some organisms (e.g., roundworms) individual development control is organized similarly. Undoubtedly, our program is set differently. This was first clearly realized by the German embryologist Hans Drisch, who studied sea‑urchin development at the beginning of the 20th century (without mockery: our close relatives, especially from the viewpoint of embryonic development). A larva floating in the water develops into a sea‑urchin. And what results from half of a larva cut by the experimenter—a half‑urchin? No, a whole urchin, only half the size!\nWhat then governs the development of a larva that “steers” from an unnatural intermediate position toward the predetermined finale? To answer this, Drisch needed the word “entelechy,” taken from Aristotle’s philosophy. According to Drisch, entelechy is the negation of causal laws in the functioning of living matter. It may seem that Drisch was wrong—causality does act in this case, but it takes a special form. The development of a self‑regulating system can be driven by a predetermined final state, allowing it to reach the required point from a wide range of possible intermediate states.\nAnd what about the developmental control program that is realized through the sequential activation of required genes? It does not exist. In some cases our organism is governed in this way, in others by a different mechanism.\nConsider a conditional example involving programming two robots. The first must pick up a workpiece at one point, rotate it in a certain way, and place it at another point. The second is an autopilot that must bring a vehicle to a desired location. The first robot’s program can be a rigid sequence of instructions covering the entire space of possibilities. However, it is impossible to anticipate every vehicle state and position in a strictly deterministic program. What to do? Provide the autopilot with a map and train it to plot a route to the target point. Yet some fragments of such a program may still consist of rigid instruction sequences.\nThe commonplace today view of the organism as an “automatic” implementation of the genotype cannot explain cases of “miraculous healings.” This category of facts can be attempted to be explained on the basis of the epigenetic theory of evolution and its concepts of ontogeny.\nFrom this perspective, development is influenced by a complex set of factors, including the hereditary program, its functional outcomes, the “pre‑set” properties of cells, and environmental influences. This system is so intricate that element‑by‑element description is impossible. It can only be characterized by the probability distribution of various developmental pathways under given external conditions. This probability distribution defines a multidimensional phase space (a set of points and developmental trajectories) of possible states of the developing system. The three‑dimensional model of such a phase space is called the epigenetic landscape. The normal developmental outcome, from this viewpoint, is not set step‑by‑step and rigidly, but as a potential basin within the described phase space (a depression in the epigenetic landscape). Over many generations, selection deepens this potential basin, increasing the likelihood of a favorable developmental completion.\nTerry Wallis’s organism, as a result of the car accident, entered a completely atypical “location” in phase space, which was also heavily distorted by “non‑standard” external influences. Yet the potential basin corresponding to normal brain self‑organization remained, and there were no insurmountable obstacles on the “path” to it. The organism “slid” into a state reminiscent of a normal ontogenetic stage. Thus, overcoming anomalies, the brain begins to construct the missing structures… It should be recalled that even in normal brain development there is a stage of “neuro‑darwinism.” Brain cells that successfully form contacts with their neighbors and become part of normally functioning neural networks are retained, while others undergo apoptosis. Through self‑organization, the brain “feels out” the optimal architecture for the given conditions.\nThe epigenetic explanation has one important feature: it will not satisfy people seeking unequivocal explanations. The probabilistic nature of the processes described by this model does not allow a strict cause‑and‑effect correspondence. It may seem simple: why is an organism the way we see it? Because it has genes that programmed it that way… Unfortunately, this approach collapses when trying to explain Drisch’s experiments or Terry Wallis’s story: such things cannot be programmed.\nEach era provides its own metaphors for describing reality. For example, a medieval person was so fascinated by clockwork that the whole world seemed to him a clock, and God a watchmaker. Today the world is a computer, and God (or evolution) a programmer. But who said that the development of our explanations must stop at the current stage?\nLooking Beyond the Line of World Division\nDespite the achievements of modern science, which allow us to obtain photographs of events that occurred billions of years ago (i.e., objects at distances of billions of light‑years) and to penetrate the mysteries of the micro‑world, completely inaccessible worlds lie next to each of us. We are speaking of the inner world of other people.\nThe education received by most of us bears the imprint of a philosophy that denied an independent value to the inner world of a person. In the Gorbachev era, the author of these lines (then a member of the CPSU) studied, as part of a university course, the main philosophical work of V. I. Lenin—“Materialism and Empiriocriticism.” The Lenin text made a striking impression with its aggressiveness and lack of evidence. Nevertheless, at that time it was accepted that the “theory of reflection” justified in this text represented the pinnacle of philosophy. Lenin presented it, proving the futility of Machism (the concept to which, for example, Albert Einstein was close). The elimination of the empiriocritics—Ernst Mach and Richard Aventarius—was necessary for Lenin because of intra‑party struggles that now have no reason to be recalled. And Lenin actually borrowed the theory of reflection from George Berkeley, whom the party tribunal denounced as a forerunner of Mach. Once, Berkeley, characterising alternatives to his version of solipsism (the claim that the world is our representation), formulated the idea that the psyche merely reflects the external world. Thanks to Lenin, who understood and appropriated it, this idea became the main pillar of a truly correct philosophy.\nThe historical epoch has changed. Diamat and istmat are no longer trump cards. And the widespread alternative to the idea of reflection has neither existed nor does it exist, not only in the post‑Soviet space but also in the West. Perhaps this is because views on the relationship between the creature and the Creator, consistent with the common understanding of Christianity, roughly correspond to the same notion of the secondary, low‑value nature of the individual world?\nIt would be beneficial (at least it would promote progress in understanding our own nature) to increase the contribution of evolutionary‑biological ideas to the modern understanding of the human and the essence of his consciousness. Our psyche—as with the psyche of all other animals—is a product of evolution. The ways we interact with reality have developed from the interactions of our ancestors with reality. The tasks we solve are developments of the tasks that were solved before humanity appeared by our primate… beastly… reptilian… fish… ancestors. Nobel laureate Konrad Lorenz explained in his underrated book “The Other Side of the Mirror” that the spatial three‑dimensionality of our world is closely linked, for him, to the presence in our vestibular organ of exactly three mutually perpendicular semicircular canals. It is unlikely that these two facts stand in a cause‑and‑effect relationship; rather, both are consequences of other, not yet fully understood causes, parts of a single whole.\nBy the way, as is known, subjective solipsism is logically irrefutable. If you insist that nothing exists beyond your inner world and that everything else is merely your representation, logical arguments will not persuade you. For the author (as for Lorenz and other biologists) one of the compelling objections is that such a position is meaningless from the standpoint of an organism’s adaptation to its environment. Reasoning this way, there is no need to change over time, to evolve. This idea must be alien, detrimental to the evolutionary basis of our psyche. Indeed, the proponents of solipsism seem to accept it as an artificial construct rather than a natural view of things. This is related to the fact that solipsism, however one may phrase it… well, it is ugly—contradicts our nature. On the contrary, when another person addresses you, it is natural for you to imagine his inner world as similar to yours. Social adaptation, interaction with conspecifics—a long‑standing and vital function of the psyche for the survival of our relatives and ancestors.\nSo how can we look into another person? A weak, indirect answer offered by modern science is to use brain tomography. We cannot see the inner world of another person—we can only know its physiological basis, the functioning of the brain. Chinese scientists from Dalian University compared, using magnetic resonance, brain processes of English‑speaking and Chinese‑speaking participants while solving mathematical problems. These processes turned out to be different. To add three to four, participants of different languages used different brain zones. Whether this reflects different learning or different language structure is not entirely clear. But people differing in their native language have different structures of mental associations and their processing.\nAnd if we speak the same language, does that mean that the structure of associations and their processing coincide for us?\n\nD. Shabanov. Looking Beyond the Line of World Division // Computerry, M., 2006. – No. 27–28 (647–648)\n\nD. Shabanov. Reflections on Miraculous Recoveries // Computerry, M., 2006. – No. 29 (649)\n\n1 In Ukraine, for example, the role once played by CPSU historians and Marxist‑Leninist philosophers is now performed by Ukrainian philologists. Their subject has become the main one in higher education, and they can look down on specialists in private disciplines. Back to text\n\n2 How can you consider the inner world of other people as of little value if your “I” is part of your inner world and everything else, apart from it, is for you only a hypothesis that still needs to be proven? And how do you know that the green colour or the octave is the same for me as it is for you? Back to text" }

1 In Ukraine, for example, the role once played by historians of the CPSU and Marxist-Leninist philosophers is now performed by Ukrainian philologists. Their subject has now become the main one in higher education, and it is they who can look down on specialists in narrow disciplines. Return to text

2 How can you consider the inner world of other people to be of little value if your "self" is part of your inner world and everything else besides it is just a hypothesis for you that still needs to be proven? And how do you know that for me the color green or the octave is the same as for you? Back to the text