NCC and Schiavo, some observations on the No There There hypothesis

[Doyle Saylor <djsaylor@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Greetings Economists,

NCC stands for NeoCortical Columns which is a lively area of current
research in Human consciousness.  I want to ground a discussion of Schiavo
in this area of what is technically possible to know about consciousness.
To get some idea of what continuity is in a person or at least establish
that as a concept in considering disabled people.  A good anecdotal example
appears in the first part below. Secondly, IBM is creating a research
computer modeling NCC's in alliance with a Swiss University.  How does this
approach alter our view of Consciousness which then affects a social view of
a society that includes disabled people?

Part one,

Persistent Vegetative States come from a variety of insults to the brain
organ.  Two types of injuries are most common, Traumatic Brain Injury from
accidents (mainly cars), and Oxygen deprivation.  Schiavo unarguably
suffered a lack of oxygen which dramatically injured her brain.  Similarly,
Fireman, Donald Herbert, suffered severe brain damage after being struck by
debris in a burning building in 1995,
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/04/nyregion/04brain.html?pagewanted=print&pos
ition=

Doyle,

Herbert was reported to say a few yes and no s over the years, so his damage
while similar to Schiavo s to include oxygen deprivation did not block
completely any sort of language structure.  From the NY Times article;

Mr. Herbert, a member of a fire rescue squad in Buffalo, was buried under
debris after rushing into a burning building on Dec. 29, 1995. He was
knocked unconscious and slipped into a coma, but two and a half months later
entered a state of faint consciousness that left him mostly unresponsive,
according to family members.

Doyle,

I m not saying we could have expected Schiavo to have regained the ability
to speak as Herbert did as reported here:

Donald Herbert broke 10 years of virtual silence on Saturday and announced
that he wanted to speak to his wife, his family and doctors were astonished
and bewildered.

Doyle,

The question really is what does the no there there theory of Schiavo mean?
Is there a continuity in someone that might supplant the no there there
theory?  Unlike traumatic brain injury (which more often people seem to
recover to consciousness from) oxygen starvation kills brain tissue in a
more generalized process than blunt force trauma to specific regions.  For
example, the autopsy Pathologist claimed of Schiavo half her brain weight
was gone, but does that mean consciousness continuity is gone?  To
understand that conundrum we have to understand at least where the
neuroscience is now with understanding consciousness.  We have to define the
NCC (see below in regard to the IBM project) as the fundamental grouping of
consciousness.  Primarily, why a NeuroCortical Column is more than just the
cells as in a network.

What continues? Part two,

Quote take from this site;

http://www.sci-con.org/articles/20040601.html

Do you know the half-life of a microtubule, the protein filaments that form
the internal scaffolding a cell? Just ten minutes. That's an average of ten
minutes between assembly and destruction.

Now the brain is supposed to be some sort of computer. It is an intricate
network of some 1,000 trillion synaptic connections, each of these synapses
having been lovingly crafted by experience to have a particular shape, a
particular neurochemistry. It is of course the information represented at
these junctions that makes us who we are. But how the heck do these synapses
retain a stable identity when the chemistry of cells is almost on the boil,
with large molecules falling apart nearly as soon as they are made?

The issue of molecular turnover is starting to hit home in neuroscience,
especially now that the latest research techniques such as fluorescent
tagging are revealing a far more frantic pace of activity than ever
suspected. For instance, the actin filaments in dendrites can need replacing
within 40 seconds, making microtubules look like positive greybeards (Star
et al, 2002). A turnover time of five days for NMDA receptors seemed pretty
steep when it was reported a few years back. (Shimizu et al, 2000). But
recently Michael Ehlers at Duke University Medical Center in Durham, North
Carolina, reported that the entire post-synaptic density (PSD) the protein
packed zone that powers synaptic activity - is replaced, molecule for
molecule, almost by the hour. Ehlers had expected the turnover to take days
and when he found no labeled protein on his first 24 hour assay, he thought
he must have mucked up the experiment (Ehlers 2003).

Doyle,

This frenetic activity is not visible in fMRI scans (I have quoted the
Schiavo brain scan image below the signature of this email) performed on
Schiavo.  The micro detail is really when we will know there is something
there, or can resolve the issue of continuity.  The public debate really
never was about the structures of continuity in Schiavo s brain organ, not
the NCC, but instead on the right to suicide the husband claimed for his
wife.  More on understanding the NCC,

http://www.sci-con.org/articles/20040601.html

All this Byzantine complexity does matter. To make sense of the brain as an
information processing system, clearly we must be physically able to locate
its information. And it's long been an almost unquestioned tenet of
neuroscience that neurons with their weighted junctions and crisp connection
patterns are devices for trapping information. The hardwired network is the
solid foundation for all the pretty patterns that play across it. Yet when
we zero in on these synapses, suddenly their "information" appears to
scatter. The synapses turn out to be merely reflecting a living confluence
of top-down and bottom-up pressures. The information is now out there in the
system and it is making the synaptic patterns we observe.

This kind of topsy-turvey picture can only be resolved by taking a more
holistic view of the brain as the organ of consciousness. The whole shapes
the parts as much as the parts shape the whole. No component of the system
is itself stable but the entire production locks together to have stable
existence. This is how you can manage to persist even though much of you is
being recycled by day if not the hour.

Copyright © John McCrone, 2004

John McCrone is the author of four books on the brain and consciousness.

More at: http://www.btinternet.com/~neuronaut/

Doyle,

So Herbert s persistence over a decade is not so much a visible circuit, but
the level of activity that is involved.  A holistic approach to the matter
of consciousness.  Which doesn t tell us much, but gives us a little sense
of the principle of continuity to being there in Schiavo that could be
discovered, and is most likely there just as it was for Herbert.  In fact
observing the claims about Schiavo from the autopsy report the autopsy
pathologists declaratively described Schiavo was such and such and incapable
of recovery, but medically the profession knows better and wrote days ago;

http://www.medpagetoday.com/tbindex.cfm?tbid=789&topicid=82

"The [pathologic examination of the] brain can't tell if there is a
persistent vegetative state or not," says Harvard neuropathologist E. Tessa
Hedley Whyte, MD. "The autopsy will show damage -- probably mostly scarring
now -- and that damage will most likely correspond to some extent to what
was seen on images."

According to court records, CT scans performed in 1996 and 2002 revealed
"diffuse encephalomalacia and infarction consistent with anoxia,
hydrocephalus ex vacuo, neural stimulator present."

Dr. De Georgia says that the extent of brain damage, confirmed on autopsy,
"does reflect the absence of viable brain cells and the fewer brains cells a
patient has the less likely it is that the patient will be conscious. But
there is no standard cutoff that says if you lose this many brain cells you
are in a persistent vegetative state."

Michael Williams, MD, an associate professor at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore,
puts it this way. "If you only had the brain to look at and you didn't know
anything about the history of the patient, pathology alone cannot prove or
disprove a diagnosis of persistent vegetative state."

Dr. Williams says it is likely that autopsy will show "widespread damage to
the cortex -- a condition called laminar necrosis -- and it is likely that
there will also be significant damage to the thalamus."

While Dr. Williams says the autopsy can't confirm the diagnosis of
persistent vegetative state, he says that receiving an autopsy report
sometimes helps a family that is struggling to accept the diagnosis.
"Sometimes additional evidence from a CT scan or an autopsy report --
something concrete -- helps bring some final understanding or acceptance,"
he says.

Doyle,

In other words rather than challenge the prevailing right to suicide ethos
in conventional wisdom, the medical community knows full well ignorance
shields us from knowing what sort of possible continuous structures are
really there in Schiavo.  That is why I am writing here about Schiavo in
order to move the discussion away from Conventional wisdom expressed in this
NY Times report;

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/16/politics/16react.html?hp&ex=1118980800&en=
08769a38d4907a7a&ei=5094&partner=homepage

By ANNE E. KORNBLUT

Published: June 16, 2005

...

Democrats cited the autopsy results as proof that Ms. Schiavo's husband -
and critics of federal intervention - had been vindicated.

"I think it will be seen at some point as a turning point in America about
what's going on with the Republican Party - namely that you have this
fanatical party willing to impose its own views on people, and frankly,
powerful enough to do it," said Representative Barney Frank, Democrat of
Massachusetts, who was among the most vocal critics of the Schiavo bill.
"This is particularly a problem for Dr. Frist. This is a direct refutation
of his TV diagnosis."

...

Doyle

toward a serious examination of the hypothesis there is no there there in
Schiavo.  The issue is an economic issue since the NCC is the model for the
super computing effort to model the human brain.  IBM is attempting to build
the first fully functioning super computer model of a human brain to test
what happens in trauma to the brain:

http://businessweek.com/print/technology/content/jun2005/tc2005066_6414_tc02
4.htm?chan=tc&</A>

&On July 1, the Blue Brain computer will wake up, marking "a monumental
moment" in the history of brain research, says neuroscientist Henry Markram,
founder of the Brain Mind Institute at Switzerland's Ecole Polytechnique
Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL). The event could usher in a new era of
scientific discoveries about the workings of the human mind.

The Blue Brain computer is the latest installation of IBM's (IBM )
BlueGene/L system, a radically new approach in supercomputer design. EPFL's
machine has a peak speed of some 22.8 teraflops -- meaning it can
theoretically spit out 22.8 trillion calculations every second&.

Then, with a bigger Blue Brain, he hopes to build a cellular-level model of
the entire brain. This may take a decade -- even with IBM's next-generation
system, BlueGene/P. Markram can't wait to get his hands on one of these
number-crunching beasts.

&

Fifty years ago, he notes, "we believed that memories were somehow hardwired
into the brain. But our lab [EPFL's Laboratory of Neural Microcircuitry] has
been one of the main propagators of a new theory, in which the brain is
incredibly fluid. It's restructuring itself continuously -- self-organizing
and reorganizing all the time."

HUGE SIMULATION.  If brain circuitry is in a constant state of flux, Markram
insists that long-term memories can't be permanent, hardwired fixtures. To
explain how memories are preserved, he and his colleagues cooked up the
"liquid-computing" theory. Validating this concept with Blue Brain, he
hints, might point to new types of silicon circuits that perform new and
more-complex functions -- which IBM could use to build a revolutionary
brain-like computer.

&

FANTASTIC ACCELERATION.  This setup will form the foundation for studying
neocortical columns -- the building blocks of the cortex and the part of the
brain that differentiates mammals from other animals. Each column is a
bundle of networked neurons and is roughly 1/2 millimeter in diameter and 2
millimeters long. That's only about the size of a pinhead, Markram notes.
"But packed inside are 50,000 neurons and more than 5 kilometers [3 miles]
of wiring," he marvels.

"The neocortical column is the beginning of intelligence and adaptability,"
Markram adds. "It marks the jump from reptiles to mammals." When it evolved,
it was like Mother Nature had discovered the Pentium chip, he quips -- the
circuitry "was so successful that it's just duplicated, with very little
variation, from mouse to man. In the human cortex, there are just more
cortical columns -- about 1 million."

Since the neocortical column was first discovered 40 years ago, researchers
have been painstakingly unraveling how it helps perform the miracles of
thought that enable humans to be creative, inventive, philosophical
creatures. "That's been my passion, my mission for 10 years," says Markram.
"Now, we know how information is transferred form one neuron to another. We
know how they behave -- what they do and whom they talk to. We've actually
mapped that out."

&

Doyle

One of the most important elements of challenges to the Disabled Rights
spokespersons during the mob atmosphere around Schiavo is the issue of what
actually can be done for Schiavo?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/life/science/story/0,12996,1489699,00.html

David Smith, technology correspondent

Sunday May 22, 2005

The Observer

&They are the deadly earnest predictions of Ian Pearson, head of the
futurology unit at BT.

'If you draw the timelines, realistically by 2050 we would expect to be able
to download your mind into a machine, so when you die it's not a major
career problem,' Pearson told The Observer. 'If you're rich enough then by
2050 it's feasible. If you're poor you'll probably have to wait until 2075
or 2080 when it's routine. We are very serious about it. That's how fast
this technology is moving: 45 years is a hell of a long time in IT.'

&

But anyone who believes in the uniqueness of consciousness or the soul will
find Pearson's next suggestion hard to swallow. 'We're already looking at
how you might structure a computer that could possibly become conscious.
There are quite a lot of us now who believe it's entirely feasible.

'We don't know how to do it yet but we've begun looking in the same
directions, for example at the techniques we think that consciousness is
based on: information comes in from the outside world but also from other
parts of your brain and each part processes it on an internal sensing basis.
Consciousness is just another sense, effectively, and that's what we're
trying to design in a computer. Not everyone agrees, but it's my conclusion
that it is possible to make a conscious computer with superhuman levels of
intelligence before 2020.'

&

Doyle,

So the engineering project is being proposed to get to consciousness 15
years from now.  And Schiavo?  30 years from now?  Or more realistically in
a broader sense what would Disability Rights Movement conclude at that point
about what society ought to do?  What is this civilization we intend to
shape?  What do disabled people want in a democratic sense of justice and
equality as opposed to the business interest controlling what is to be made
of consciousness.

The Economist,

http://www.economist.com/science/displayStory.cfm?story_id=4054975

&In a partnership announced on June 6th, the two organisations said they
would be working together to build a simulation of a structure known as a
neocortical column on a type of IBM supercomputer that is currently used to
study the molecular functioning of genes. If that works, they plan to use
future, more powerful computers to link such simulated columns together into
something that mimics a brain.

In a real brain, a neocortical column is a cylindrical element about a third
of a millimetre in diameter and three millimetres long, containing some
10,000 nerve cells. It is these columns, arranged side by side like the
cells of a honeycomb, which make up the famous grey matter that has become a
shorthand for human intelligence. The Blue Gene/L supercomputer that will be
used for the simulation consists of enough independent processors for each
to be programmed to emulate an individual nerve cell in a column.

&

Charles Peck, the leader of IBM's side of the collaboration, reckons it
should be feasible to emulate an entire human brain in silico this way in
ten to 15 years. Such an artificial brain would, of course, be a powerful
research tool. It would allow neurological experiments that currently take
days in a wet lab to be conducted in seconds. The researchers hope, for
instance, that their simulated brain will reveal the secrets of how certain
psychiatric and neurological disorders develop. But that is probably not the
real reason for doing it. The most interesting questions, surely, are
whether such an artificial brain will be intelligent, or conscious, or both.

Doyle,

To summarize, Schiavo or other persons like herself and Herbert probably
have some sort of continuity bridging from before the injury to their
present state, hence Herbert s sudden emergence to consciousness.  The
injury stops the NCC from functioning in a global sense (disrupts
Consciousness).  There is good reason to think these NCC s are about to be
realistically understood in our life times.  Which leads us to question the
efficacy of those opinions about what is consciousness upon which guide the
conventional wisdom.  I.e. language and consciousness in disabled people are
the most fundamental ways that disabled people are excluded from human
society.  Schiavo in particular exemplifies the old drive to put to death
those who don t fit the social structure of consciousness.  Since we will
soon know what consciousness is we can offer realistic options about how to
decide what is to be done.

Doyle,

Graphic of Schiavo Brain scan

http://news.yahoo.com/photos/ss/events/ts/012405terrischiavo;_ylt=AhdLWTXauY
4xqRZVR3IQcQzdyl4A;_ylu=X3oDMTBiMW04NW9mBHNlYwMlJVRPUCUl

There appear to islands of disconnected neuron networks which supports the
possible continuity of Schiavo s underlying lived history despite no
consciousness.