The Brain-Body Circuit at Work [The Brain-Body Circuit 1-3]

1-3 The Brain-Body Circuit at Work

We have seen how a brain-body circuit works when we walk: the automatic relaying system accomplishes its task without the intervention from the conscious control. You would say that to walk is a mere physical task and our mental activity is too complicated for a brain-body circuit that works on the simplest of the simple principles: ‘stimulated or not’. If I say that a computer does an intelligent task on the similar principle: ‘0 or 1’, you would resent that our intelligence is far beyond the reach of a machine. And I am still saying that it works. I would like to take the example in how we process a word: a single word, not a whole sentence. It is simple enough to start analysing how brain-body circuits handle intelligent tasks. Still it is complicated enough for you to realise a possibility that it works.

When we hear a word, we know without a delay what it refers to. When we read a word, we know immediately what it stands for. When we think of something, we know the word to describe it almost always without a delay. We consciously use words most always, still when we recognise a word or to choose one, we do so without giving it a thought. We sometimes seek a word and feel it clinging to the tip of our tongue. That is a rare occasion, but I will explain the phenomenon later in this section. It reveals another important point with the brain-body circuit, but let it rest for now.

We hear a word and know it immediately, so the sound of the word comes as the first stimulant to the brain-body circuit. We read a word and know it immediately, so the optical information comes as the first stimulant to the brain-body circuit. We think of something and the word for it comes to us immediately, so our mental image or feeling also stimulates the circuit. What we have here is that a certain piece of information triggers a system to retrieve another piece of information from the storage. As a former system’s engineer, I cannot help but comparing this mechanism to a database system in a computer.

A database is basically an electronic version of the books you keep, such as a balance sheet, an address book, and so forth. Electric or physical, they all store information in quite an orderly way. On the books you have a line or few for each entry; on a database system each entry is called a record. A record contains several kinds of information such as a name, an address, a date, an amount, etc. and each kind is classified as a field. What distinguishes a database is the mechanism of index, which facilitates an immediate retrieval of the specific data we require. Please imagine that you are looking for someone in a crowded square. It would be quite easy if that someone responds to your call. Otherwise you have to go round and round the square looking into each one’s face. When we look up certain information in a conventional book, the printed one that is, we have to read through it until we find the information. The table of contents and the index help but still you have to see for yourself in which page it is written and read the page through until you get the specific information. In the database system, an index empowers the record with the ability to answer the call. When a record is called by its index, it answers with all the information you have requested. With an index a record is no more inert but functional. This functionality facilitates a computer to summarise or analyse a certain group of data. A computer is indeed very good at computing but it needs to gather relevant data before starting computation.

For a farther inspection on the index mechanism, I would like to invite you for a shopping. At a shelf in a shop, you find something you want and wonder how much it costs. Is the price printed on the item? Nowadays less and less items have the price printed on them, and the price is most always shown on the shelf. You see the price on the shelf, find it adequate and bring the item without a price tag to the register. The clerk there has a gadget called a barcode reader and uses it on the item you have brought. When a barcode reader reads a barcode, it reads for the database and not for itself. A barcode reader interprets the row of bars, each with different width, into electric information that a computer can understand. The register machine relays the information from the reader to the database, which tells the necessary information in return. So a receipt is printed out with the name and the price of your item. Why is this relay necessary? Why can’t the barcode reader read all the necessary information from the barcode? Because a barcode does not record the whole information: it only records a unique number to identify the item. With this number the database retrieves the necessary information and sends it back to the register machine in an electric form. The display and the tiny printer on the register machine interpret the electric information into the physical form or the letters that the human eye can catch. On a day of a bargain sale, the prices in the database are changed. In this way, a register clerk does not need to know the prices at all. The unique number serves as a very important index to get information about the item from the database.

The database stores other information such as the stock and the sales. The information about the sales occurs every working day, so the database often stores a day’s sales of an item as one record. Such records consists of the fields such as the item number, the sales date, and the number and amount of the item sold. Only the item number and the sales dates are designated as indices among all the fields in most cases. As indexing is to add functionality, it sure is taxing and it is wise to limit the indexed fields to those you usually use for searching so that you can reduce the burden.

When you ask the sales information for a specific date, you will have as many records as the number of items sold on the day. When you ask one for a specific item, you will have many records, too. When you ask one for a specific item on a specific day, you will have only one record. In this case the date and the item number combined serves as the unique number to identify a record. Of all the indices the one that defines the record without ambiguity is called the main index and the others secondary indices. With the information about the item itself, which have its name, price, manufacturer and such, the item number alone serves as the main index. The sales records have the item number and the date combined for the main index.

Please remember two important features about the database system: indices and interpreters. Indices make a record functional. Interpreters are the peripheral equipment such as a barcode reader, a display and a printer. A barcode reader interprets a row of bars with differing width into the language of computer. A display and a printer interpret the language of computer into the language that we humans can see. The interpreters connect the database to the world around.

Words in our brain are functional, too. They respond to audio and visual stimuli and to your thought. In other words, what you hear, what you read and what you feel or think stimulate indices that attach to a word. This doesn’t mean that the word circuit is directly connected to our eyes or ears. Other circuits are connected directly to our eyes and ears. They work like a barcode reader, which does not transfer the image of a barcode to the computer like a fax machine but interprets the code into an electric signal that a database understands. The brain-body circuits to handle the incoming sound or image interpret the incoming information into signals or stimuli that other circuits can recognise. But how exactly do they interpret? It seems they classify the information into patterns already stored in the brain. Take a sound ‘r’, for example. The sound differs from person to person and language to language, but when we recognise the sound we are not much disturbed by the differences. When we hear an ‘r’ sound, the circuit verifies it with the stored pattern ‘r’ and relays this pattern ‘r’ to the next circuit. This is when we are trying to recognise each sound: when we are to determine who is speaking, we need more sensitive analysis. When we are to recognise a word, which is the collection of sounds, we cannot afford to recognise each sound precisely.

Let us do a little experiment to determine if it is practical to recognise each sound when we are to recognise a word. I describe a word by the sounds: phoneme by phoneme, or each bit of sound in order, and you reconstruct the word. Something like ‘Charlie, alpha, tango’ for ‘cat’, but this time not with letters but with sounds. Now, the first phoneme is ‘l’ in ‘lion’. The second: ‘u’ in ‘butter’. The third: ‘n’, then ‘d’, and the first ‘o’ in ‘conductor’. The last one is ‘n’. Do you have the answer or a headache? The strict analysis on the sounds of a word seems troublesome to say the least. In reality we hear the sound of a word not as the sequence of phonemes but as the collection of familiar chunks of sounds. The hearing circuit compares incoming sounds chunk by chunk with patterns stored in our brain. The chunk-by-chunk recognition works against us when we hear foreign words. Foreign languages have so many unfamiliar chunks that the mother tongue lacks, we are almost unable to recognise them.

To speed up the recognition, we seem to store patterns in two different forms for each word: one is the equivalent form that treats each phoneme precisely, and the other catches the essence as ‘LUNdn’ for ‘London’ or ‘aNAPle’ for ‘an apple’. The essence form works as the index to call a corresponding word. A written word, too, has two forms in our brain: the equivalent and the essence. When we proofread, we must be very much careful otherwise we cannot detect a misspelling. We store a visual index after we reduce the queue of letters into some kind of pattern that is easier to catch in an instant. We have some words we hear and know without problem but we cannot say. For those words we have the sound index in the essence form but not the equivalent form. It is easier to remember the essence form than the equivalent form. As we already have necessary patterns for the essence, we only have to remember the combination. With the equivalent form, we have to remember the exact sequence of phonemes and that is hard. With foreign words, the situation is reversed. Until we store in our brain all the sound patterns unique to that language, we have to keep toiling to know and store all of them. This explains why we have harder time learning to hear the language than to speak.

Between the word circuit and the voicing circuit, a word exists as the instructions for the motion. The instructions form deals the sequence of phonemes as one chunk. When we speak, the instructions form is relayed from the word circuit to the voicing circuit. We do not aware how our vocal organ is toiling to make sound after sound. We speak without consciously controlling our voicing circuit; we get awkward once we try to speak under the conscious control. This is observed in a simple word game between two players with three-syllable word. Take ‘potato’ for instance and the game goes like this: one player says the first syllable ‘po’, then the opponent says the next ‘ta’, again the first player the last ‘to’, and the opponent gets back to ‘po’; so they continue to pronounce each syllable in turn. This simple exchange can serve as a game because we more than often err during the exchange. We err because the instructions form is always ready to blurt out the whole word.

So, the instructions form is for the automatic function. In other word, it does not tell our consciousness how to make each phoneme. As a result, we have hard time pronouncing an alien word even when it has no alien sound. One of such words for Japanese people is ‘yeast’. Although the Japanese language has the sound of ‘y’, it is always followed by the vowels ‘a’, ‘u’ or ‘o’ and not ‘i’. A native Japanese speaker pronounces ‘ya’, ‘yu’ or ‘yo’ without knowing exactly how to make the ‘y’ sound. Without the exact knowledge at the conscious level, the new combination ‘yi’ cannot be reconstructed. In the second language acquisition, alien pronunciations should be presented with the exact instructions for the motion. It is futile to attempt mimicking the sound without knowing exactly how to make it.

The brain-body circuit deals three forms for the sound of word: the equivalent form, the essence form and the instructions form. The same threefold forms work with written words. There are some words we can read without difficulty but we cannot write. When we misspell a word, it is more than often recognisable as the intended word. This is because the relation between the pronunciation and the spell has some regularity as we see in the group of ‘all’, ‘call’, ‘tall’ and ‘fall’ or in the contrast between ‘bat’ and ‘bate’, ‘fat’ and ‘fate’, between ‘cut’ and ‘cute’, ‘us’ and ‘use’, or ‘bit’ and ‘bite’, ‘sit’ and ‘site’ and the like. We can reconstruct a passable fake with such patterns. When the stored visual form is not precisely equivalent, we still can write a readable word if only we know how to pronounce it. For some words the stored visual form can be not the equivalent form but the plan to reconstruct from the stored patterns. The more you learn to write English, the more easily you learn to write a new word. This is because you get more of the reliable patterns on the way.

We have seen that the several circuits are involved in dealing with a single word, and they relay several forms of the word to accomplish tasks such as to hear and know, to read and know, to pronounce or to write. When we see the whole as one, we have a word circuit as a workgroup. In this workgroup several interpreter circuits work around a functional record that stores relevant information about the word.

When I read, I pronounce each word in my brain. I do not have a visual index directly connected to the word circuit. My reader circuit translates visual signs into sound index and take a detour through the sound-to-word circuit. As a result the speed of sound in my brain stands as the barrier to read fast. Similar detours occur when we learn foreign languages. At first, a foreign word is translated into the mother tongue to be recognised. This hinders not only the simultaneous recognition but also the exact understanding of the word, as many words lose something in translation. When we get familiar enough with a foreign word, we do not need the translation detour. This is when the circuit for this specific foreign word gets ready to serve. We know the process as our own experience. But how can it be explained in terms of the brain-body circuit? So far I have described the circuits that handle different appearance of a word itself: audio and visual forms and a motion form. Now I have to deal with the circuit that connects between a word circuit and the object or our thought.

A word represents a certain object. A word ‘shadow’ is useless unless it is connected to shadows around us. But how a word is connected to the object either in the world around or in our thought? When I see someone’s shadow, why does a word ‘shadow’ come to my mind? Why not ‘person’, ‘picture’, ‘grey’ or not even ‘shade’? And why do those other words come to us in other occasions? When I seek refuge from the scorching sun under a tree, why a word ‘shade’ comes to me, and not ‘shadow’? When I hear a word ‘shadow’, what do I know from the word?

Linguists say what I am asking is a matter of semantics. They may say and the others will definitely say that it is the meanings. I am sorry but I have come to avoid these two words for grave reasons. First of all, what they represent is too cumbersome. With them, we think of a dictionary entry, which is a very long list. I cannot imagine our brain consults with such a list within a split second after we hear a word. It may be my prejudice but the lengthy lists in a dictionary are possible only in a study where intelligent people spend as much time as they please. In a rush of conversation, we need something far simpler that can be relayed between brain-body circuits. What can it be?

When I feel a word clinging to the tip of my tongue, I am aware of what I want to say but I do not know any form to represent it. What I am aware then is definitely not that lengthy list of a dictionary entry. It is one concrete image and almost tangible. It is definitely some kind of existence, not that I advocate mysticism. I also see this existence when I read a dictionary. When we read through one voluminous entry for a single word very much carefully, we can feel that something common runs through the entry from the top to the bottom. That is the existence I am talking about, and I call it the focus of a word. It is, indeed, simple enough for the brain-body circuit, and it is rich enough to explain the wide range of usages some words have. Now, let us talk about the heart of a word.

I met a lady who had ‘shadow’ for her name. It was during my business stay in Singapore. I wondered what parents would name their daughter as such, and I believe you do, too. The answer lay in the actual word she had for her name. The lady was from India and her name was Anya, which comes from a verb that means ‘to follow’. Wherever you go, your shadow never leaves you. Therefor a shadow can be seen as a follower. I am sorry for the modern women, but I understand the wish of Anya’s parents: the wish for her to live happily ever after. If you have seen ‘Gandhi’ the 1982 movie by Lord Richard Attenborough, you will recall old Gandhi and his wife re-enacted their wedding ceremony in which the bride always followed the gloom and swore to do so for the rest of her life. A shadow as a follower is not quite negative. There is nothing dark in children playing to step on others’ shadow to tag them.

Then why do we get a certain negative feeling from words like ‘shadow’ or ‘shade’? As the Indian word ‘anya’ focuses on the shadow’s behaviour to follow the substance, the other words have their own focal point. ‘Shade’ focuses on the condition of light. ‘Shadow’ focuses on the shape. In olden days, the English language had only one word for ‘shade/shadow’: they did not distinguish between light and shape. Then the focus of the word was on a condition as a whole created when an object blocks light; it is darker than the world around, and its shape is similar to the object which blocks the light, similar but lacks the substance completely. As time went on, the focus was divided into two areas: ‘shadow’ came to focus on the shape, and ‘shade’ on the difference in brightness or colour. The focus of word works like the main index in a database system: it identifies a word without ambiguity. And when your focus shifts a little sideways, you get another word.

The Chinese language also distinguishes a shade from a shadow: ‘yin’ for ‘shade’ and ‘ying’ for ‘shadow’. They call a movie ‘dian-ying’: an electric shadow. ‘Yin-yang’, literally meaning ‘shade and the sun’, presents a philosophical notion of the harmony or conflict between negative and positive elements.

The Japanese language has only one word for ‘shade/shadow’. But as we borrow many letters from Chinese, we are expected to be careful in choosing which letter to write, ‘yin’ for ‘shade’ or ‘ying’ for ‘shadow’. When we dry clothes or foods avoiding the sun, we write ‘dry in shade’. We write a shadow theatre as ‘shadow picture(s)’. In our case, letters help to sharpen the focus.

I have a theory that a similar effect worked when the Chinese developed their letters, hieroglyphs as you may know. In their letters, they have simpler letters that represent elements and complex letters created by combining a few elemental letters. Those elements are classified into two categories: those represent the sound and those represent the meaning. In close observation I came to think that the element for the sound represents a larger field of focus and the ones for meaning shows categories to narrow the field.

The diagram above shows how a single sound element is combined to an additional element to sharpen the focus. In the olden time the sound element, or the basic form, meant that something stays at a same place. When it is combined with the element ‘tree’, it represents the part of a tree that keeps it stationary, namely the root. With an eye, it represents an anatomical eye that is rooted in our skull with nerve fibres. With the heart, it represents hatred which is a feeling that takes root deep in our heart.

The complex letters are created this way. I suppose all the letters with the same sound element had the same pronunciation in the beginning. Then there was only one word for all the letters that shares the same sound element, and this word covered a large field of focus. As the letters were assigned with reference to its genre, each letter was granted the opportunity to stand from others, or each letter started to develop as an individual word. In the end, the letters with the same sound element have come to hold different pronunciations.

The linguistics tells us that a word has a denotation and a connotation. A denotation refers to the actual object the word is assigned. A connotation adds a certain flavour to the denotation. If I am to interpret the work of brain-body circuits in accordance with this view, the process to choose a word becomes a little complicated. As ‘shadow’ and ‘shade’ refers to the same object, one circuit recognisees this object as ‘shade/shadow’. Then another circuit intervenes with the order to choose between ‘shade’ and ‘shadow’. And an evaluation follows to determine if the attention is on the shape or on the light. The process is too cumbersome to be done in a split second after you conceive the object.

With the focus of word as the main index, we can reconstruct a far easier process. When we conceive an object and will to name it, we are seeing a certain relevance the object has for us. The relevance can be our need, desire, curiosity or disgust. And such relevance is directed toward a specific facet of the object, which corresponds to the focus of word. When you are looking for someone, your attention is already directed toward shapes, so that you can easily have the word ‘shadow’ for ‘shade/shadow’. When you are under the scorching sun, you would very much like to avoid the sun, so that you are already seeking ‘shade’. When you are watching a curtain on which the light and the tree over there create some strange patterns, you are attracted to the shadow. When you are following a bug walking on the ground and suddenly you lose the clear sight as it proceeds to a dark place under a leaf, you will curse the shade.

I have just blurted out the process with the focus so hastily that I owe you a more detailed explanation. I was not clear about the timeline and the relations that a word has in our brain. In the examples with ‘shade/shadow’, the focus seems to be set even before the conception of the object. I have to explain how that can be possible. I also need to explain how our knowledge and words are connected in our brain, as our knowledge helps to set our focus: for example, to look for a shade under the scorching sun, we need to have known that a shade gives us a relief. To illustrate the process along the timeline, I have a pretty good example here. It is a word puzzle from the TV program ‘CSI’.

- Say ‘silk, silk, silk’.
- Silk, silk, silk.
- What does a cow drink?
- Milk.
- Wrong. A cow gives milk, and drinks water.

It seems the sound of ‘silk’ has excited the brain-body circuit for ‘milk’ even before the actual question was asked. Then the question excites it further with ‘a cow’ and ‘drink’, and the victim was tricked into the wrong answer quite easily. The first step here is to activate the ‘milk’ circuit with the sound of ‘silk’. I must remind you that billions of nerve fibres reside in our brain and one fibre can be connected to multiple fibres; therefore one stimulant can trigger multiple fibres or multiple brain-body circuits. The case with ‘silk’ and ‘milk’ is about a group of related words. ‘Silk’ and ‘milk’ have the same sound pattern. Such a group sometimes gives us fun with puns or joy with rhymes but often more troublesome than useful in choosing a word as we have just observed. We have other groups here which are quite useful. One is the group with a cow and milk, and another is the one with ‘what to drink’, or beverage, and milk. A cow and milk are linked through knowledge. Beverage and milk form a category. Such groups always help our conception of words. When we talk, when we read, when we hear, the words relevant to the topic are activated, not that all the relevant words spring up from the memory at once but they are set ready to serve so that we can follow the narrative with much ease. Most words in our brain are usually dormant and need to be activated when we use them. We have stored too many words to recall all of them at once. It is far less taxing to activate words in a group for the occasion and the activation saves us from the trouble to seek each word in turn. The same can be said with our knowledge and experiences.

It seems that a certain condition activates a set of vocabulary or knowledge before they are actually used. We know the trigger as ‘context’. The pre-activation through context helps to distinguish homophones, or to sharpen the focus of a word. When you are talking about regulating prices the word ‘ceiling’ will not make you look upward. When we hear a medieval tale, we can know if the night came or the knight did. When we are talking about old films, the name ‘Elizabeth’ will trigger our memory of the actress who played the queen of Egypt, not the actual Queen of England. When we are talking about recent ones, the same name will trigger either or both of the actual Queens of England. I must confess that I cannot distinguish ‘crowd’ from ‘cloud’ or ‘grass’ from ‘glass’ on the sound, as R and L sound the same to my Japanese ears. I seldom get confused because the context helps me to expect what will be said.

I would like to return to the ‘milk’ puzzle to make further observation about the connections among words and knowledge in our brain. The sound ‘milk’ and the object ‘milk’ are directly linked together, so that the sound triggers our conception of the object immediately. The sounds ‘milk’ and ‘silk’ are not directly connected; they are only connected through a sound pattern. Such a link is indirect but still works as an index to retrieve a word. Such indirect links can be seen between ‘milk’ and ‘a cow’, or between ‘milk’ and ‘beverage’. And as those links are formed through experiences and knowledge, each of us can have different links; in other words the links can be quite personal. For example those farmers who tend cows should have a link between ‘a cow drinks’ and ‘water’ so that they will not be fooled by the puzzle. We know as a general rule that animals drink water, but the knowledge does not crystallise into the link for each species except for those which we care very much. Generally, we have to follow an indirect route to see that a certain species drinks water: we need to remember that the species is one of animals, then we know it drinks water. On the other hand, when we are asked about a specific animal, we automatically assume that the answer must be unique to it. A unique answer can be quite important in our lives and we often have a special link between someone special and his or her favourite beverage; for example, a Star Trek fan may have a link between Capt. Jean-Luc Picard and ‘tea, Earl Grey, hot’.

We must not forget that links in our brain are so personal and so diverse. The condition we are in also varies from time to time and that affects our choice of a word. I started talking about choosing a word with ‘shade/shadow’. But in reality it is rather a rare case that we choose among the words with the same denotation. Here is a wise observation from ‘Star Trek: The Next Generation’.

Counsellor Deanna Troi: We are stranded on a planet. We have no language in common, but I want to teach you mine. (holing a glass of tea) S'smarith. What did I just say?

Capt. Jean-Luc Picard: Cup... Glass.

Counsellor Deanna Troi: Are you sure? I may have meant ‘liquid’, ‘clear’, ‘brown’, ‘hot’.

We are not a gadget to tell the names, so that we do not analyse the world around us to have a word. We feel the world and find words to express our need or feeling. Our attention retrieves words, and not the intelligent analysis. When our attention is focused upon something or upon the condition it is in, we get the word. The focus is a very important index to retrieve a word. It is also unique: the focus can determine one word without ambiguity. A man of letters will completely agree with me. They toil to find one specific word which cannot be replaced by any other words. I insist that the focus is the main index of a word.

Back to the ‘milk’ puzzle once again. It is imperative to notice that it depends on asking without ambiguity what a cow drinks and not what beverage a cow gives. The question itself is indeed straightforward; quite different from the three-word message that troubled the crew of classic Star Trek: ‘NO KILL I’. How do we combine words to send an unmistakable message? Can I explain the process in terms of the brain-body circuit? In the next entry I will extend the observation from a single word to sentences, or what the linguists call syntax.

To Establish a Brain-Body Circuit [The Brain-Body Circuit 1-2]

1-2 To Establish a Brain-Body Circuit

You may think some brain-body circuits are established without effort. You may present your experience with a computer mouse and insist you have never experienced any difficulty. You have forgotten any inconvenience you felt when you started to use this simple equipment. I recommend you to have an experiment in which you use a mouse with the other hand.

Most utensils are designed for the right-handed people and the left-handed cannot use such utensils easily. A computer mouse for Windows is considered to be among such utensils, because it has two buttons side by side on the top. And it is also assumed that you should push the right button with your index finger and the left with the middle. That leads to the Windows’ special feature that enables you to exchange the right and left buttons; thus the left-handed people can do the same thing as the right-handed majority. Still some learn to switch hands in using a mouse without any special arrangement. I am among them as I felt that a keyboard had far more keys on the right side than on the left side: it seemed illogical to task the right hand further with a mouse. Those effortless learners of a mouse would think that they could handle a mouse with the other hand as effortlessly as ever. But when actually they try, they will know the need to take some careful steps until they do right and switch hands at will. First we have to tell ourselves ‘The middle finger to the left, the index finger to the right’ and we have to repeat this several times with a very good concentration. Some get used to this change rather quickly but even they experience confusion and blunders several times. In the end they will have to admit that it takes some time to master this simple art. And I tell you that everyone has been through the similar uncertainty when they first learned to use a mouse. So I insist that a brain-body circuit is, indeed, hard to establish.

I have shown many people how to use a computer mouse. Some of them had hard time especially when they double-click. Their hardship is caused by the way they hold a mouse: almost without exception they hold or pinch a mouse with a thumb and a little finger. The best way is to hold it down lightly with your palm.

Our common sense suggests that, when you hold something small as a mouse, you do so with a thumb and fingers. If not, why do we have an opposable thumb? But with a mouse, you can use only the little finger and perhaps the ring finger to oppose to the thumb. And they do not give you a firm hold on the mouse. That is especially inconvenient when you double-click. If the mouse moves between the first and second clicks, the computer does not take them as a double click but as two separate clicks. So the common sense or the instinct does not always lead us through a right path. In this case the first error comes from the supposition that you hold a mouse; in reality you drive a mouse and you need a good rein as well for the firm grip as for the mobility. Your palm gives you the perfect rein here, if only you put your palm lightly upon a mouse.

You may believe that you learn many important skills in the childhood without conscious efforts: all you have to do is to grow up in a certain culture. Thus many people believe that those grown in the Far East, specifically China, Korea and Japan, learn to use chopsticks expertly without exception. In truth less and less people there learn the art properly: they manage to eat with the sticks anyhow but only some handle them with ease.

Handling chopsticks is a fascinating task. Chopsticks are the simplest of the simple tools the humanity have ever devised: just a couple of straight sticks, with no blade to cut, no hook to catch and no concavity to scoop. Still when you have the full control of the two sticks you can perform several kinds of tasks quite beautifully. But how do we accomplish the feat? The trick is that you move only one stick: you keep the lower one stationary, and concentrate on moving the other. You need not to handle both at the same time.

Yet it is not easy to handle one stick if you do not have the proper rein at the beginning. As the rein for a mouse is established with how you hold a mouse, how you attach the sticks to your hand gives you the perfect rein here. You may find it odd that I used the word ‘attach’ between a tool and a human body. Please know that, when you get at ease with the stick, it has become the extension of your body and no longer a tool. Today we are eager to see ourselves with machines or computers embedded in our body so that we are given the extra capability; in olden days people did not wait for a special gift given to them but they took time and effort to have the perfect control of their tools. Chopsticks are not the exceptions but only one among many tools our ancestors had for the extension of their body: take carpentry, needlework, writing or farming, people took long time to train themselves with the tools. An abacus even extends our mental ability. All they needed was time and effort to be one with the tools. No fancy sci-fi thing was needed. Nowadays we are too lazy and too impatient.

I am getting into detail about how we attach the stick to our hand. Please follow my words and try to do so yourself, if you like. Have one small stick: a new pencil makes a perfect substitution as far as you do not actually handle food with it. Straighten the index finger, but you needn’t do so with force. It is just a temporally thing to give the middle finger a chance to welcome the stick properly. So we are now keeping the index finger out of the way. Bend the middle finger at the root a little and a little more at the next join. Leave the joint at the top as it is; it will get slightly bent. Now you have an arch with your middle finger continuing to your thumb. Put the stick as if to cut the arch: the stick touches your hand at two points, one to your middle finger at about the point between your nail and the joint to the tip, two to the root of the thumb where the point near to the rear end of the stick touches. The stick will easily roll off from your hand, so use your thumb to support the stick. Do not try to bend the thumb. Put the tip of the thumb onto the stick. Let’s see how we are doing with the finger and the thumb. The thumb is almost straight and it does not block your sight to the middle finger. If the stick is transparent, the tip of the thumb will appear as if to slightly touch the middle finger. With this positioning the middle finger still can bend further. So repeat bending it and straightening it. Your thumb is going along with the motion, and the tip of the stick moves up and down at your will. Now get the index finger touch the stick from above at about the same spot as the middle finger does. You are holding the stick quite securely with the tips of the three fingers and able to move the stick at will with considerable force.

When you have the good grip on one stick, you can have the other which you do not move. Put it through the loop formed with the thumb and the index finger, let it rest below the other stick and on the tip of your ring finger at about the place between the nail and the joint to the tip. It is kept stationary with the tip of the ring finger, the thumb from the other side and the root of the thumb where the point near to the rear end of the stick rests. This is all you have to do when you take a pair of chopsticks.

The procedure might be shown with only one picture but I needed so many words to describe it. I am sure a picture really paints a thousand words, unfortunately it won’t speak loudly enough for you to hear everything you should hear: you need to read things through the picture. That is what I have just done for you, and I needed so many words and careful phrasing. I am afraid I am still not clear in some points but I am sure I have made a point: it is a huge task to know exactly how to do things.

The art of handling a pair of chopsticks may excite your curiosity, and I am afraid that is all. It will change if I say that the way to hold the mobile one of the pair is almost identical as the way you hold a pen. I am telling the truth. It is just you do not hold a pen at the end but near to the nib, or the pen point. If you are well versed in dynamics or good at handling tools, you will affirm ‘it is the lever’. With chopsticks you do not need strength while you move them because you are only moving a light stick and doing no significant task. And what you hold with them is only a morsel, so you do not need much strength. On the other hand you want to move the stick widely to bundle noodles or to scoop rice: the rice there is so sticky that you can scoop after you cut through the sticking mass to a morsel: it may be like you lift hay with a pitchfork. With a pen you do not need to move the tip very much, but when you move it, you need considerable strength to keep your stroke steady. Thus you keep the working end short, but not too short. If you grip at the tip, you cannot move it well. Then how high at the pen should we hold? As high as your hand hovers over the writing surface. When the side of your hand stays on the surface, you cannot move the pen well. When it keeps distance from the surface, you can move your hand with your wrist as the axis. Now you have two axes: one at the wrist and the other at the point where three fingertips meet to hold the pen. Around the axis with fingertips you can only draw a vertical line and you need the second axis to draw horizontal, diagonal or round ones. And the wrist provides you with this second axis. This is the reason you should keep your hand from sticking to the writing surface. Awkward writers among Japanese children dirty the side of their hand with graphite from their pencils. They are awkward in writing because they stick the side of their hand to the surface to lose the second axis. They dirty their hand because they write from top to bottom and from right to left, thus their hand blushes the surface where they have already written letters. It is not good for the Western way of writing, either: the hand keeps moistening or oiling the yet-to-write surface. You cannot write well on an oily surface.

In a Japanese tale, famous for the English narrative by Lafcadio Hearn, a blind minstrel with a lute was haunted by warriors of ghosts who loved his music. A Buddhist monk wrote holy texts all over his body to exorcise the poor player. I do not believe the Westerners dare do such a thing. With the hard tip of a pen, you have to scratch the skin and that will be quite uncomfortable. The hardness of a pen is only one side of the story. To write with the soft tip of a brush, the Easterners hold it in a considerably different way from a pen.

People used to keep the books or write a letter with a thin brush. They hold such a brush at the considerable height and keep it almost vertical. It is accomplished in the following way. Bend the wrist up nearly to its limit to keep the palm vertical. Bend the middle finger at the root and at the joint next to the root. Keep the thumb almost straight to cross with the middle finger. Now you can hold a brush with the middle finger and the thumb. The brush is vertical and parallel to the palm. Use the index finger to hold the brush from the far side. You keep the root of the index finger almost straight and bend it at the next joint. In this way the index finger hold the brush at considerably higher point from the middle finger. This looks quite different from the way you hold a pen but the basic is the same: three fingers to hold. And now you are holding the brush almost vertically.

The verticality is to draw as thin a line as possible with the soft tip of a brush. Your wrist hovers far above the desk top and your hand gets a little rigid. This rigidity must give you the sense of limitation when you write alphabets which consist not only of vertical and horizontal lines but also of diagonal and round ones. But the Chinese characters consist mostly of vertical and horizontal straight lines and they write considerably larger letters than the Westerners do. On the other hand, keeping your wrist far above the desk top has its advantage: you don’t need a desk to keep a sheet and you can write on whichever surface stable enough. So, you can write on a human body. To write on a human body is something they do not always do, but they often write on something they hold with the other hand: bamboo strips before the invention of paper, rolled paper for which the rolled part assures the stable surface, or the strip of thick hard paper on which the Japanese write a short poem. I have to mention that, in this way of holding a brush, you feel far more comfortable writing text-lines vertically than horizontally, which explains the custom of the Far East.

When you use a bolder brush to write larger letters, you hold the brush almost at the end. The principle of the lever has some relevance here: it is difficult to move this long stick. You don’t control the stick with your hand. Now it is your arm that draws lines. Your hand and fingers work to add nuances or serifs.

When you write Chinese characters, it helps a lot if you learn the order of strokes you draw. I offer you one example. The characters for right and left are quite similar and you would expect to draw lines exactly in the same order, especially the first two strokes which make seemingly identical part. But you are recommended to change orders between the two. With ‘left’ you draw the horizontal line first and then the diagonal one. With ‘right’ the diagonal one comes first. The reason should be found in the origin of these two letters, but I do not go so far. I just point out that the trained eye can catch slight difference in design of these seemingly identical parts. With the character ‘left’ the horizontal line is a bit short and the diagonal one stretches long and free. With the character ‘right’ the horizontal line is longer and the diagonal seems rather hasty to stop its advance. How does the design affect the order of strokes? When you see a written character, you consider each stroke as individual line. But when you write, your brush travels through the void between the end of one stroke and the top of the next. As far as the movement of the brush is concerned, strokes are connected. With ‘right’ and ‘left’ you draw the first two strokes as one. You are far more comfortable prolonging the last stroke than the previous one. That is the reason why you write these two characters in different orders of strokes.

The order of strokes is decided to mediate between the shape of a character and the movement of our limb. And the letters we write, the way we hold a writing apparatus, the materials we write on: they all affect each other. The relations among them are not simply interpreted as the cause and effect: we’d better understand them as the web of causes and effects. It is an extremely complicated and intricate web. Truly, the establishment of a brain-body circuit involves almost all aspects of the laws of nature and the styles of our culture. That is because the brain-body circuit is the bridge between us and the world outside.

I have been talking about proper brain-body circuits, not the one that works anyway but well. And I try my best to describe each in detail so that you see exactly how. I hope you understand the absolute necessity to begin the learning process with the clear knowledge of ‘how exactly’. You need a very conscious effort in learning to do things right without any conscious control. This is a mildly interesting and mighty important feature about the brain-body circuit.

What is the brain-body circuit? [The Brain-Body Circuit 1-1]

Chapter 1: A brief introduction to the Brain-Body Circuit

1-1 What is the brain-body circuit?

When we think about our brain, we picture a grey mass in our mind. And we think that this grey mass as a whole works a miracle called intelligence. Actually this mass is a collection of interconnected nerve fibres. Billions of them reside in our brain to control our body functions, to perform intellectual tasks and to give us the joy and annoyance with all kinds of emotions. Some of them extend to the eyeballs to look and see, some to the ears to listen and hear, some to the heart to control the beats, some to the arms and hands to move them and feel the outside world, some to the legs and feet, still many others to elsewhere in our body; in short, nerve fibres permeate all through our body to interact with the world. So when we think about our brain, we cannot stop at the picture of the grey mass.

Usually a multitude of nerve fibres cooperate to carry out tasks. The cooperation is necessitated from the complexity of the tasks. Take walking for instance. It seems so simple a task that we seldom pay attention to how our body performs the task. It is not an easy task, I assure you, and so will the robot scientists do. First of all, almost every joint in our body moves when we walk, or almost every muscle has to be controlled. We know that our toes, ankles, knees and hip move. Then the spine and the neck, this column is indeed a series of short bones and quite flexible: it flexes to absorb the swinging motion resulted as our legs competing each other to step forward. If not, we cannot keep our eyes straight ahead to watch our way. Our shoulders also move to counter the imbalance that the wild motion of our lower body causes. Even when we put both our hands into pockets, our shoulders do not cease from this balancing act. Furthermore our sense organs keep detecting the changes of the terrain: paved, rough, slippery, ascending or descending. The information keeps being translated into the orders for the limbs to adjust to the change. To walk is indeed quite a complicated task.

So many nerve fibres are involved in the task that it is imperative to keep the close communication among them. To facilitate the communication, the fibres concerning a certain task are connected each other to form a permanent workgroup. It is like an electric circuit with all the complicated wiring. So I call the workgroup of nerve fibres a circuit. An electric circuit is connected to motors, lights, speakers or sensors to perform a task. Likewise the workgroup of nerve fibres are extended through our body to connect to sensory organs and to muscles. So I prefix the circuit with ‘brain-body’; thus I call the workgroup of nerve fibres the brain-body circuit.

When we walk, our brain works so hard to coordinate the muscles and senses. Yet we do not feel a bit that our brain is working. This is the power of the brain-body circuit: once established, it works autonomously beneath our consciousness. Yet the consciousness is the key figure to establish a circuit. For example, while we learn to walk, we watch how others walk and mimic them with repeated trial and error. In the beginning our consciousness summons nerve fibres to perform the task. In time those fibres summoned start to connect each other to coordinate the task without the intervention from our consciousness. When the connections get permanent and completely do away with conscious controls, the brain-body circuit is established.

When we learn to walk, we do not learn all about walking for the first time. Then we already know how to move our limbs and how to sense the world around. Before we start to walk, we crawl around. Considering how the crawling requires the coordination of limbs, spine, neck and sensory organs, we crawl not only to strengthen our muscles but also to learn the coordination. Before then, while we cannot leave our crib or the protecting arms, we already keep moving and sensing. We are progressing from the state where we move aimlessly and to the state where we control our movements. While babies are kicking, they are establishing a brain-body circuit to move their legs at will. While babies are watching something and extending their arms to touch it or grab it, they are learning to coordinate hands with eyes, or to measure a distance with the stereovision. So we learn step by step: we begin with controlling a simple movement and with sensing the change in the world around, then develop to coordinate several simple movements to do a bit complicated move, and to use the sensory information to calibrate the move. In terms of the brain-body circuit, we build simple circuits first; then combine some of them to form a bit complicated workgroup. Again we combine the relatively simple workgroups to build a bigger, more complicated workgroup. In other word, most of the brain-body circuits are the combination of simpler circuits, and all of the circuits are the reusable parts for future circuits.

Starting from walking I get back to the crib but we can go further back into the womb: mothers feel the life within them when the unborn kicks the womb. What we can do from the day one in this world, we may have prepared in the womb.

We can know further about a brain-body circuit through our own experience: we do not need any elaborate lab-machine or a series of intricate experiments. Let us contemplate on how we walk in order to see further about the brain-body circuit.

When we are to walk on a straight line, we tend to be quite awkward. We walk without a conscious control; that is the work of the autonomous brain-body circuit. Here we falsely suppose we need to control our walk consciously in order to be very precise, and end up disturbing the autonomy. The conscious control and the well-established brain-body circuit conflict with each other.

We learn to walk and that is a very long process starting from the days while we are still in the womb. We keep establishing circuit after circuit, most of them quite a little one, until all the necessary circuits are ready and combined to walk smoothly. We learn to walk through mimicking and by trial and error, and not by following an exact guidance. As a result each of us walks differently. Some walk kilometre after kilometre to feel exhilarated; and some only to tire themselves within the first one hundred meters. In other word some walk in an efficient way and some in an inefficient way. Some people try to improve their gait for graciousness, for masculinity or for a catwalk and go through a considerable effort to succeed. The effort is lost if they stop midway before the new circuit is firmly established. They need to continue their effort until they firmly establish the new circuit for a desirable gait. When they have succeeded, they can revert back to the old way, especially when their attention slacks. Here is another trait of a brain-body circuit. Once well established, a brain-body circuit cannot be removed but can be put dormant. When you want to change your way, you establish a new circuit and attentively keep following the new way until the old way gets safely dormant.

So, you cannot remove a well-established circuit but can keep it dormant. This feature troubles us more than often when we have developed a bad habit or learned to do things in a wrong or inefficient way. Sometimes the die-hard circuit works for us. Once you learn to ride a bicycle, you can ride all through your life, no matter how long a period you spend without riding one.

I described how nerve fibres work together to perform a complicated task. But what can a single fibre do? The answer is perplexing, to say the least. A single nerve fibre does not do much: it receives a simple message and relays that to other fibres. The message takes a form of chemical molecules or electric impulses; it is more a stimulus than a message. Then how can relaying stimuli culminate into a complex task? You may find it impossible. But considering that a computer works on the simplest of the simple principles, 0 or 1, it does not look quite farfetched. Every brain of ours consists of billions of nerve fibres. Surely the number is enough to form sophisticated circuits to execute complicated tasks. We just need good imagination and enough patience to see the plan. It is often our laziness to look for something special to explain things.

We are indeed far lazier than we like to think we are. This is also observed in our reluctance to learn new ways. Once we establish a brain-body circuit for a certain task, we stick to it no matter how inefficient it is. We seem to prefer keep suffering from inefficiency for life than to take finite length of time to establish a new circuit. Reusability of a brain-body circuit can be another testimony of our laziness. We are quite comfortable to take already-established circuits and add a little something to create a new one. Then we are ready to grab whatever circuits seemingly suitable to take part in the new circuit without verifying their appropriateness. Thus we tend to end up relying on an inefficient circuit.

To summarise, the brain-body circuit is the automatic relaying system which accomplishes its task without the intervention from the conscious control. We must not forget that a brain-body circuit works on the simplest of the simple principles: ‘stimulated or not’. This simple principle forces us to re-evaluate the depth of our intelligence. And the whole questions about the brain-body circuit open our eyes to the ethics not as a set of rules but as the foundation of our goodness. The quest sends me to a long and troublesome journey, and I would like to go the distance with you.

Foreword for the Brain-Body Circuit

Foreword

How can we be the last winner in the evolution? I have none but a very stupid answer which is best unsaid. On the other hand I definitely believe that the humanity can stand above the evolution. The key lies in how we nurture our brain. We are forgetting that our brain is like a seed: if only we nourish it and cherish it properly, we will have an enormous harvest. I say ‘if only’, because we are far too negligent in this matter. Today’s schools let majority of students graduate before they get properly versed in the subjects. It would sound offensive but I have to say this: a factory with such a high rate of deficiency is not allowed to operate. Even the most intelligent people live through their lives without knowing the full extent of their brain’s possibility. In short our brain is malnourished and underdeveloped. I fear that we are in no better place than the dinosaurs were in when they ruled the earth long, long time ago.

The scientists enumerate big crises that can be the cause of their extinction. Do the intelligent people believe that those oversized creatures would have continued ruling the earth but for such dramatic crises? The fact is that they were in the never ending battle called the evolution. The theory stands on the fact that things change: the climate changes so that we have ice ages several times, the earth shifts and the volcanoes erupt so that the face of the earth never stayed the same and the new species are ever ready to spring up to play in the battle for the survival. They sometimes say jokingly that the dinosaurs had the brain the size of a walnut. That is not an accurate description but the point is well taken. Their brain was too small for their huge body to give them enough flexibility in the changing world. If they had to compete with agile mammalian predators like lions or wolves, which know to hunt in a group, how good a chance would they have had? In terms of hunt, to be bigger does not give a definite advantage. Remember the ice age humans; with only stone knives and bearskins, they hunted down the hairy elephant called mammoth into its extinction.

Yes, our ancestors survived the last ice age and did more. They exploited the extremity of the cold climate to spread throughout the surface of the earth. Their success was the reward for their diligence: they utilised their brain power to the full to secure the food supply in scarcity. They also know that they could only survive as a group and not as an individual: a single brain is not enough, only the combined power of the whole brains in the group has a chance. They were the proud people. How about us? What do the modern humans know? To push buttons and to delegate complicated tasks to machines and to smart minority. Can the humanity today laugh at the dinosaurs for their brain?

In 2010 we had the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. It began with a terrible explosion. But we have been tapped into the ocean depth for decades; we should have prepared for the deep-water operation that can be extremely difficult due to the enormous pressure. We allowed the great damages done on the environment and on the lives of people before the leak was stopped.

In 2011 we had the nuclear crisis in Fukushima, Japan. We have been made believe that they have completely harnessed the nuclear energy and the humanity has evolved far beyond Hiroshima and Nagasaki: the tragedies at the close of the World War II. The power plant was not designed to withstand the tsunami. Neither nuclear scientists nor engineers had effective contingency plans. I am not aware any scientists present at the scene to end the crisis.

We have countless economists and we still have army of jobless people in the industrialised countries, and the underdeveloped countries have stayed as such for decades.

We have enormous numbers of smart people in the university, in all kinds of institutes and committees, and in every sort of governments. Yet people are dying from hunger, curable diseases and violence. Many people are barely surviving without hope for tomorrow.

A president of a certain powerful nation likes to boast that to give a crash course on high technology promises people new jobs. How many people have the proper academic training to attend such a course? And such jobs get obsolete soon; new machines will replace the humans and the new technology will replace that specific technology.

We need more and more power from whole humanity to solve problems. Can we have enough power?

I have been teaching students and learning from them about our brain. I have been watching them struggling to do better. I have found out why they had to suffer. I have found out the way out from their distress. Then again I had to face the deep-rooted problems they have. They are almost resigned: they cannot believe that they too have as wonderful a brain as smart people do. They believe that nothing short of miraculous formulae can make their performance improved. It takes a long time for each student to have confidence in him- or herself and to take the first firm step toward really improving his or her performance. Where does their defeatist attitude come? How can we give all the children confidence in themselves? How can we make all the parents happy for their confident children? To those questions I am going to answer. And when I have answered, I have also answered how to stand above the evolution. Then we can embark on the new endeavour to ‘ensure a more fruitful life for all mankind’. The quest begins here with the observation of the brain-body circuit.