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<P class=MsoNormal style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt"><FONT face="Courier New">re: the
old posting I’ve appended below: Why would misfortune and lack of control turn
down the body’s two leading learning machines—the cognitive brain and the immune
system?<SPAN style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>Here’s a guess.<SPAN
style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>When I left the music business, I needed
to get away from music completely.<SPAN style="mso-spacerun: yes">
</SPAN>Music, something I’d loved all my life, repelled me.<SPAN
style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>So I went utterly music-less for ten
years. <SPAN style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>Then, when my thirst for
music kicked up again, a strange thing happened.<SPAN
style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>I’d driven the old music out of my
system and was eager for the new.<SPAN style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>A
kid of five or twelve imprints on the first music he hears and loves, the music
that gives flesh to his sense of identity.<SPAN style="mso-spacerun: yes">
</SPAN>Here I was, fresh as a kid, imprinting on music as if I were twelve years
old again, but imprinting not on the music of my youth, but on the music of the
21<SUP>st</SUP> century.<SPAN style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>My musical
death had prepared me to be born again.<SPAN style="mso-spacerun: yes">
</SPAN>It had prepared me to become a Maroon 5 fan. </FONT></P>
<P class=MsoNormal style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt"><FONT
face="Courier New"> <o:p></o:p></FONT></P>
<P class=MsoNormal style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt"><FONT face="Courier New">So
here’s the hypothesis and the question.<SPAN style="mso-spacerun: yes">
</SPAN>Does woe and misery turn down your two key learning machines to prepare
you to grab hold of something new? Does it flush your learning system so you can
stitch yourself into a pattern you previously didn’t see, a team that’s getting
the things you got wrong right?<SPAN style="mso-spacerun: yes">
</SPAN>Does it prepare you to follow new leaders, new ideas, and even new
beliefs? Does it prep you to join a segment of the neural net of society that’s
contributing more than the old weave you were ejected from when you lost your
job, broke up with your girlfriend, were rejected by the grad schools you were
going for, or went through a messy divorce?</FONT></P>
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face="Courier New"> <o:p></o:p></FONT></P>
<P class=MsoNormal style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt"><FONT face="Courier New">Is the
disability the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune impose on you a two-sided
device used by the neural net, the collective learning machine of which you are
a part?<SPAN style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>Does it tune down your
influence and your access to resources so that you don’t get in the way of the
mass mind when you are a failed component, a component that’s chosen the wrong
approach to the problems of the moment?<SPAN style="mso-spacerun: yes">
</SPAN>The evidence I’ve marshalled in The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific
Expedition Into the Forces of History and in <I>Global Brain: The Evolution of
Mass Mind From The Big Bang to the 21<SUP>st</SUP> Century</I> says yes.<SPAN
style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>But does it also prep you to become a
useful module in a more promising part of the neural net? Hb 4-09-05</FONT></P>
<P class=MsoNormal style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt"><FONT
face="Courier New"> <o:p></o:p></FONT></P>
<P class=MsoNormal style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt"><FONT
face="Courier New"> <o:p></o:p></FONT></P><SPAN
style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt; LAYOUT-GRID-MODE: line; FONT-FAMILY: 'Courier New'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA">We’ve
known for several years now that the immune system and the brain are
joined.<SPAN style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>The brain can turn the
immune system up on high or down to underdrive depending on the way it perceives
external reality.<SPAN style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>A brain that
senses social isolation will shift the immune system into low gear.<SPAN
style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>So will a brain whose perceptual powers
tell it it no longer can control its circumstances or predict what’s coming
next.<SPAN style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>(Yes, future projectors that
fail are hacked away by<SPAN style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>apoptotic
processes—they self destruct.<SPAN style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>By
keeping only future projectors that work, evolution compacts past knowledge into
a memory that then has future-predicting powers.<SPAN
style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>But I digress.) The following press
release hints that the brain and the immune system are part of a common learning
loop.<SPAN style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>John McCrone, in material I
posted last night, pointed out the value of a hierarchical learning system.<SPAN
style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>A hierarchical system may have a
processing mechanism that operates at superspeed on problems that need an
instant solution. It may have other processors working on the micro-level with a
clock tailored to nano-speed.<SPAN style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>It
may also have slower processors that work on the big picture, the macro
view.<SPAN style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>All can crank input into the
others—or even reset the others’ controls.<SPAN style="mso-spacerun: yes">
</SPAN>This multi-layered approach gives a neural network system
flexibility.<SPAN style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>The immune system is a
learning machine par excellence, but one that works by rewarding lymphocytes
that are doing useful work.<SPAN style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>It
showers them with resources and with the ability to multiply.<SPAN
style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>Like evolution itself, the immune system
ruthlessly strips assets and the right to reproduce from lymphocytes that just
don’t fit the system’s needs.<SPAN style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>The
brain also works on the Matthew Principle: “To he who hath it shall be
given.<SPAN style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>From he who hath not even
what he hath shall be taken away.”<SPAN style="mso-spacerun: yes">
</SPAN>It rewards neurons that are helping it cope and strips those that aren’t
of such privileges as attention and influence--the right to connect to others,
the right to feed on information, the right to spoon its output to others, and
even, in the cerebral neurons of<SPAN style="mso-spacerun: yes">
</SPAN>babies, the right to live.<SPAN style="mso-spacerun: yes">
</SPAN>Yet the vast system of swiftly changing networks in the brain gives it
many levels of capability, many simultaneous processing powers, all of them
different than those of the immune system. Combine the two—the immune system’s
methods of processing and the brain’s many separate ways of sifting input,
mulling it, stewing it around, and making sense of it—and you may have a more
intricate and able team than we imagined—one doing things throughout the body
and turning literally every limb and circulatory alleyway into an extension of
the mind.<SPAN style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>Howard<SPAN
style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>Ps Note that the system described below
works on attraction and repulsion signals, just like electrons, protons, animal
voices, and bacterial or human pheromones.<SPAN style="mso-spacerun: yes">
</SPAN>Reprinted from ScienceDaily Magazine ...<SPAN
style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>Source: Washington University School Of
Medicine<SPAN style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>Date Posted:<SPAN
style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>Friday, April 20, 2001<SPAN
style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>Web Address:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2001/04/010419072152.htm<SPAN
style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>Molecule That Guides Nerve Cells Also
Directs Immune Cells St. Louis, April 19, 2001 — Researchers have the first
evidence that <B>cues that guide migrating nerve cells also direct white blood
cells called leukocytes, which have to find their way to inflamed, infected or
damaged areas of the body</B>. The study is reported in the April 19 issue of
Nature. "This similarity between the immune system and nervous system might
suggest new therapeutic approaches to immune system disorders such as
inflammation and autoimmune diseases," says Yi Rao, Ph.D., an associate
professor of anatomy and neurobiology at Washington University School of
Medicine in St. Louis. This study was a collaboration between the School of
Medicine and Baylor College of Medicine. Rao and Jane Y. Wu, Ph.D., an associate
professor of pediatrics and of molecular biology and pharmacology, led the
Washington University teams. Lili Feng, Ph.D., led the Baylor team. <B>After a
cell is born, it navigates to its destination, guided by signals from other
molecules already in place. Researchers have found that the nervous system uses
molecules that attract migrating cells, molecules that stop cell migration and
molecules that push cells away. But so far, only attractive molecules have been
identified in the immune system. </B>Neurons take minutes or hours to migrate to
their destinations, whereas leukocytes migrate within seconds. Even so, Rao and
colleagues wanted to determine whether migrating leukocytes and neurons use
similar mechanisms for finding their ways. "These experiments were carried out
to address the question whether there is mechanistic conservation between the
two systems," Rao says. His group studied a protein called Slit, a known
repellent in neuronal migration. Two of the three known Slit proteins also have
been found in organs other than the brain. The researchers simulated leukocyte
migration in a dish, using a molecule known to attract immune cells. When they
added human Slit protein (hSlit2) to the dish as well, fewer cells migrated.
They repeated the procedure in the presence of a bacterial product also known to
attract leukocytes. Again, hSlit2 inhibited cell migration. However, it did not
inhibit other functions of the bacterial product. The team then determined
whether Robo—a receptor that enables Slit to act on nerve cells—plays a similar
role in the immune system. They had previously made a fragment of Robo which
blocks the normally full-length Robo protein. When this blocker was added to the
dish, Slit no longer inhibited leukocyte migration. So Robo and a receptor on
the cells appeared to be competing for Slit. "These results suggest that Slit
also is likely to act through a Robo-like receptor on leukocytes to inhibit
their migration," Rao says. He and his colleagues also are trying to find out
whether Slit can actively repel leukocytes and whether other neuronal guidance
cues influence immune cell migration. This study bridges the gap between two
previously independent fields—immunology and neurology—and highlights the need
for collaboration. "This kind of research could have been done several years
ago," Rao says. "But we all get used to addressing questions in our own fields.
This study shows what happens if we venture out and collaborate with scientists
in other fields." Reference: Wu JY, Feng L, Park H-T, Havlioglu N, Wen L, Tang
H, Bacon KB, Jiang Z, Zhang X, Rao Y. The neuronal repellent Slit inhibits
leukocyte chemotaxis induced by chemotactic factors. Nature, April 19, 2001.
Funding from the National Institutes of Health supported this research.<SPAN
style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>Copyright © 1995-2001 ScienceDaily
Magazine | Email: editor@sciencedaily.com </SPAN></DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT lang=0 face=Arial size=2 FAMILY="SANSSERIF"
PTSIZE="10">----------<BR>Howard Bloom<BR>Author of The Lucifer Principle: A
Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History and Global Brain: The Evolution
of Mass Mind From The Big Bang to the 21st Century<BR>Visiting Scholar-Graduate
Psychology Department, New York University; Core Faculty Member, The Graduate
Institute<BR>www.howardbloom.net<BR>www.bigbangtango.net<BR>Founder:
International Paleopsychology Project; founding board member: Epic of Evolution
Society; founding board member, The Darwin Project; founder: The Big Bang Tango
Media Lab; member: New York Academy of Sciences, American Association for the
Advancement of Science, American Psychological Society, Academy of Political
Science, Human Behavior and Evolution Society, International Society for Human
Ethology; advisory board member: Youthactivism.org; executive editor -- New
Paradigm book series.<BR>For information on The International Paleopsychology
Project, see: www.paleopsych.org<BR>for two chapters from <BR>The Lucifer
Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History, see
www.howardbloom.net/lucifer<BR>For information on Global Brain: The Evolution of
Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century, see
www.howardbloom.net<BR></FONT></DIV></FONT></BODY></HTML>