Charles Scott Sherrington was one of the giants upon whose shoulders today’s scientists stand. He laid one of the foundation stones upon which neuroscience rests. He stood at the precipice of understanding the mind. He described it, eloquently, using the metaphor of a loom. And yet, he stopped short of articulating the mystery. I wonder, was that a failure on his part, or a failure of the system into which he was immersed.
Oh, Sherry
Sherry, as he was known to his colleagues, taught us something very important. Others taught us that nerves seem to work by some principle related to electricity. Had we stopped there, we might have gotten the idea that nerves are wires, and that was that.
Sherrington showed us that the signals only travel in one direction.
His methods were clever, though I wonder if the modern world would have approved of blocking nerve signals in live animals. He found that:
- stimulating a motor neuron never produced a sensation – the subject never felt it
- stimulating a sensory nerve never caused movement unless it was routed through the spinal cord (stopping the flow at the spine stopped it from functioning)
- stimulating the spinal cord internally produced effects only in one direction
And so, thanks to him, we know that neurons are a one-way street.
The Enchanted Loom
Towards the end of his life, Sherrington waxed poetic. In 1940, he published Man on his Nature. In it he describes the mind as this magnificent loom, quickly and skillfully weaving a tapestry of fine but ephemeral and decidedly temporary threads.
“Swiftly the head-mass becomes an enchanted loom where millions of flashing shuttles weave a dissolving pattern, always a meaningful pattern though never an abiding one; a shifting harmony of subpatterns.”
I, like many before me, couldn’t help but be captivated by this depiction. Not just because of its beauty and subtlety, but because of its accuracy.
I went into this research to understand the man and his work. What I found was a kindred spirit. A man that looked into the same abyss I myself have been staring into for 40 years. He saw what I saw.
My own version framed it not as a tapestry, but as music.
He Saw The Truth
There he stood, toes dangling over the edge, staring into the abyss. Scrutinizing it.
Eloquently and poetically describing it . . . accurately, I might add.
He saw it. At some level, he understood it. Well enough to depict it so beautifully. Even if all he could do was craft a metaphor for what he saw.
He Stopped Short
“The brain is a mystery – it has been, and still will be. Not that we do not know many facts about it . . . but they all fail to give us a key to the mystery of how it creates — if it does create — our thoughts and feelings; that is, said more concisely . . . our mind.”
Wait a minute! As a neuroscientist he was more deeply immersed in it than I was or will ever be. He stood where I stood. He saw what I saw. Why did he stop?
I considered, did he not see it because the necessary knowledge was not known yet? Maybe, but the idea that nerves conduct electricity has been known or believed since the late 1700’s. And we’ve known that electricity produces fields and fields result in induction for hundreds of years . . .
Not an Isolated Event
Like du Bois-Reymond and his Ignoramus et Ignorabimus. “We do not know, and we shall not know.” Not now. Not ever.
Sherrington and du Bois-Reymond are not alone. Many times there have been folks staring deeply into the within. And many a person, across all walks of life, from neuroscientist to poet to philosopher to musician saw what is there. And yet, what they saw, what they intuitively understood . . . they couldn’t articulate it.
How sad. How frustrating. To see it with the mind’s eye but be unable to articulate with the tongue.
Worse. To believe so firmly that what you see and comprehend intuitively can not be known intellectually. I find that unconscionable.
But hey, if I’m going to be honest, I have to ask: Is it really unknowable?
If it is, then is my work little more than self-delusionary hubris?
Or is there a reason why so many see without seeing, and know without knowing? Is there something that stands in the way of these great minds. Or do they all know something I refuse to see?
Learned Blindness
I have a theory.
Sherrington spent his life immersed in reductionist materialism. It framed his work. With it, he accomplished much, including establishing an essential understanding for all mankind.
And yet, towards the end, he sensed something. He sensed the gap. He knew that what we call the mind might lay beyond the reach of this beloved scientific paradigm. Suggesting that this paradigm was not up to the task.
Which is why he lamented: “facts . . . fail to give us a key to the mystery”.
Don’t get me wrong. The scientific process exists for a reason. It is calculated to prevent crackpots from enslaving the masses with their heresies . . . their falsehoods. Their kooky theories that don’t lead anywhere. I respect science. And I respect the demand for reproducible measurements. I get it. Trust me, I get it.
And I got on this soap box when I talked about Du Bois-Reymond — the fallacy of projecting your own limitations as the boundaries of what is knowable. I won’t repeat it here.
But I wonder.
Could it be that focusing on one aspect of science to the exclusion of all others creates a cognitive bias that limits our ability to see what is floating right before our eyes?
We know a lot about bias. Those in the Machine Learning world, especially. An artificial neural network that is not exposed to a balanced training set develops a bias. It will become exquisitely expert at the common case, at the expense of being utterly incompetent when it comes to the outliers.
Or as the saying goes: When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
Or that more esoteric but accurate expression:
“We become what we think about.” – Earl Nightingale, The Strangest Secret
Has our educational system fallen into a similar trap? We give folks a foundation. Then we start narrowing the focus more and more.
How does the joke go?
B.S. = Bullshit
M.S. = More of the Same
Ph.D. = Piled Higher and Deeper
Is it possible that by spending so long focusing so narrowly we actually induce tunnel vision?
As I said, I have a theory. My theory is that had he been educated the way that Leonardo da Vinci had been, he would have seen it, he would have articulated it, and science today would have the answer to the great mystery of cognition.
The Renaissance
You know, Leonardo da Vinci. The Renaissance man. Painting. Drawing. Sculpture. Architecture. Music. Anatomy. Engineering. Mathematics. Physics. Astronomy. Geology. Paleontology. Botany. Hydrodynamics.
The renaissance was a time when mankind made advances at an unprecedented rate. We think we are advancing fast. But we are doing it with the help of tools — computers — and the sheer number of people working in parallel.
But the luminaries of their age . . . they connected the dots like no other time in recorded history.
Why?
The answer is right there. Scientists did not focus their whole lives on just one specialty. There are principles in every field that can be applied to virtually every other field. The best way to achieve outstanding results is not by going heads-down and staying in your lane. It’s by learning about everything, learning those principles, and then applying them where they are needed.
And we know this.
The Rise of T-Shaped Engineers
I know we know this because lately there has been a rise in the concept of combined engineering and the so-called T-Shaped Engineer. The concept is simple enough: If you plot your knowledge on a graph, if all you know is one thing, you get a graph that is very DEEP, but very narrow. Just a vertical line. Whereas, if you are a generalist you know a little bit about everything, but no depth in anything. That’s your horizontal line. T-Shaped is where you are a generalist who is also a specialist in an area. Hence, T-Shaped is a description of the graph.
Why is this becoming so popular? Because companies have figured out that what we’re trying to accomplish, our products, our problem domains, are sometimes very complicated. And worse, the size and scale of the systems we build is often far too vast for a single mind to fully comprehend. You need people to work together, to collaborate. The problem is, having people in cognitive silos stifles collaboration. By expanding the minds of these specialists, making them T-Shaped, then everybody can at least participate in conversations, can understand the problem, and offer well considered insight and alternative perspectives. And that, right there, is the magic sauce.
You see the connection, of course. We’re trying to recreate the Renaissance.
The Lesson for Education
Problems like Consciousness or the long sought Grand Unification Theory of Everything, these are tougher nuts to crack than anything any company is trying to engineer.
And I’m going to go out on a limb and say that if we were to define and prove that grand unification theory, I bet it would inform our plans to build quantum computers. And I bet we could build quantum-based AI. But I digress.
The point is, I predict that in due time the educational system will wise up and start outputting T-Shaped or even V-Shaped individuals.
Don’t get me wrong: I get why we have pre-requisites. That’s supposed to be the generalist part. But the lack of ongoing emphasis on keeping those fields fresh in people’s minds means it can and will atrophy.
It’s not a huge change. More classes. Maybe a different kind of class, focused more on understanding and less on career readiness. Of course, taking those extra classes will take time and money. And the incoming generation won’t understand why that matters.
But if we are motivated by the pure love of truth and progress, and a burning desire to answer life’s greatest mysteries . . . and not just economic interests . . . then we’ll take the time and energy to make the case for why this is what’s best for the shaping of your mind and producing the thinkers that are going to be the next da Vinci.
And who knows, maybe we’ll stop pretending that the past is irrelevant for anything other than history class. Oh, wait, sorry, was that a dig on the youth of today? No, the youth from every generation!
But seriously, maybe we’ll experiment with re-instituting the old ways for education. It’ll be expensive, because having a tutor is expensive. Unless that tutor is a carefully trained AI. Once we hit AGI, that may be a viable option.
But then again, just for fun, let’s invoke the conspiracy theory card: Or will those who dumbed down education in order to keep the populous docile and compliant resist this trend, for fear that minds that can think are minds that are harder to control, and it will ultimately lead to revolution?
Please tell me that theory is just that. That there is no conspiracy to keep us from thinking for ourselves. That would be so short-sighted it’s not funny.