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In the introduction to the postings for this week Professor Grobstein is “looking forward to seeing what is on our minds this week” but after the discussions in class this week I am inclined to suggest changing that to what is on our brains.

In class we talked about when the nervous system of the leech was isolated from the rest of the body, it was still able to create a pattern of output similar to that emitted of when a leech is swimming. My interpretation of this is that there are systems pre-programmed into different regions of our brain, which are in control of our behavior. These are the little boxes that make up the big boxes which are able to create output without input. This to me is in support of the brain=behavior theory. If we have all these little boxes full of pre-programmed functions, all we need is a  big box of executive function to control which boxes are activated and when.

Some might argue that this executive function is the mind, but I think this executive function resides within one of the big boxes of the brain as research has shown perhaps in the frontal lobe as found from observations of frontal lobe damaged patients. One especially famous example in the psychology classrooms is Phineus Gage. After a rod shot through his frontal lobe, the connections from that box to his other boxes were disrupted, and he no longer produced the same outputs or behaviors. His brain was damaged, his interconnections between boxes were disrupted, his behavior changed proving brain = behavior, to me it is as simple as that.

Getting back to the outputs generated without inputs, it is important to question what is being taught to us and we might say, so what, a nervous system from a leech was able to generate outputs without inputs resembling swimming patterns. How transferable are observations from a leech brain to the human brain, after all they’re way of having a good time is sucking blood. Most of us probably behave very different from leeches and thus have very different brains.

 But this is definitely a start and also not the only thing able to generate outputs without inputs in vitro. The hippocampus, a part of the brain involved in consolidating memories and spatial navigation, can be isolated and kept alive in vitro apart from the rest of the brain. It is still able to perform its function of learning. Through instrumental conditioning, you can train slices to increase or decrease their rate of firing by rewarding them with dopamine. It can be trained to repeat that pattern of dopamine in expectancy of reward. This is an example of one of the boxes that is able to retain its pre-programmed function of learning apart from its connections in the brain, and also this hints at the analyzation abilities of the boxes. These observations can be made from slices in the rat brain, which is somewhat similar to the human brain and also add further support to the leech nervous system example suggesting pre-programmed systems in different parts of the brain.

In sum:

After learning about leeches in vitro, reading about the hippocampus in vitro, and remembering Phineus Gage, I think the brain has pre-programmed systems in different parts of the brain, which are activated from interconnections between all the parts of the brain and an executive system also in the brain. I am even more a believer of the brain being filled with interconnected boxes theory, and brain=behavior.