We are born with circuits and programs that are already formed in the neural network. Certain stimuli will lead to reflex, predictable, forced responses. A harmless tactile stimulus applied near the lips generates the sucking action in the newborn. The little hand will close around the mother’s finger. An offensive stimulus will produce a strong retreat from the injured area.
The newborn has a congenital, programmed nervous system. The circuits that form it will always be active. They don’t disappear along with growth. They don’t evolve or change. Stimuli and responses are linked perpetually, immutably.
However, as the child’s development progresses, he/she stops responding in predictable ways. The same stimuli that used to produce always the same answers generates a different response in each individual. Stimuli that were irrelevant before become significant and what once seemed appetitive or aversive now evokes indifference.
Congenital, reflex responses have a neural architecture with a variable complexity of one or more layers of processing. The centers that integrate stimulus and response may be located in the spinal cord, the brain stem (joint area between spinal cord and brain), the deep brain or the corticothalamic circuit. There’s a hierarchical interaction between every level. It’s about circumstances, the event and its context. In general, the upper layers, the most complex ones, control the reflex, sensitive character of the lower layers’ responses. Control is, basically, inhibitory. Instincts are moderated.
The Nervous System contains circuits of closed, congenital architecture and an extensive network of outlined connections, taking care of tuning more precisely, analyzing the meanings of reality from a more complex perspective with more factors to consider and, above all, a distance in time and space. A stimulus or set of stimuli can mean many things. Nothing, something, a few, a lot. It depends on many circumstances. The significance of actions and events contains a lot of uncertainty. We must learn to separate the grain from the straw. To do this, we need to train not only the interpretation of sensory data every time, but especially memorize past and future relevances, the theoretical possibilities of variable probability.
The neural network’s open, alert, plastic architecture learns from the contact with reality. It continuously reorganizes its connectivity. It weaves and unweaves. It sensitizes and numbs. It removes and attributes relevances. It practises. It makes mistakes. It recognizes errors or gets stuck in them.
The brain is not intelligent by design. It’s a system that’s capable of learning, acquiring, evaluating. The “learnings” generate variable results. The course of our lives depends on them. The Acquired (learned) Nervous System can give meaning to our existence or make it an irrational hell.
Neuronal learning needs experience to collide with an appetitive and aversive reality, but also learns from observation of events in others and of what it’s said to be known about the occult. We have models and tutors.
Events, models and doctrines mark the course of learning. Depending on how our and others’ things go, depending on the moments and circumstances, depending on availability and attitudes of caregivers and the judgements and opinions from our tutors, the circuits with acquired connectivity will attribute relevance or deny what happened, happens, is going to happen or is believed to happen.
The connectivity of the Acquired Nervous System is culturized, embedded in beliefs, sayings, clichés, expectations, models. The responses are configured based on what the tutored learning process has generated. We are drawn according to predictable, known beliefs, those that the culture we are created in induce.
The Congenital Nervous System responds to the universal nocivity: extreme temperatures, mechanical energy over the tissue resistance, lethal metabolic conditions (lack of oxygen, acidity), germs ... and it’s indifferent to any state or agent that doesn’t contain such universal harm.
The Acquired Nervous System complements the congenital ability to feel the consummated or imminent damage. It senses danger. It’s always paying attention to an extensive set of signals that providing the display of hidden danger.
The Congenital Nervous System is intelligent. It’s always right. It moves us further away from the real harm but doesn’t sense danger. It just feels it. The Acquired Nervous System is the one that deals with presentiments.
The symptoms: pain, fatigue, dizziness, itching, hunger, thirst, loneliness, sadness, discouragement, anxiety ... arise, they are sometimes projected to conscience by the impulse of congenital connectivity, by an impact of the universal, by objectively intolerable states and agents that generate adversity or lack. Other times, they arise from the acquired, learnt connectivity, of the imaginative brain that has learned to sense the relevance from the uncertain viewpoint of beliefs and expectations. The symptoms are the same. Pain is pain, loneliness is loneliness, but the significance is different if the pulse comes from congenital connectivity, universal connectivity or acquired connectivity.
Wherever congenital sensitivity fails, the acquired pre-sensitivity can be right, and wherever this one senses threat it may have gone better for us with the indifference of congenital circuits.
It’s accepted that there is a Congenital Immune System and an acquired one. Surprisingly, the Acquired Nervous System is not considered.
Some inflammations are activated by the congenital immune system and others by the acquired one. There are default errors from the congenital and excess errors from the acquired.
There are pain and other somatic symptomatic perceptions projected to conscience by the impulse of congenital connectivity and there are also pain and other somatic perceptions projected to the same conscience with the same perceptive quality from the acquired, learned connectivity. There are default congenital errors and errors acquired by excess.
We find attenuators for the errors in the decision making of the acquired network in genes, in supposed neurotransmitter deficiencies, in reparative botched jobs of old tissue and heart wounds. The schooling process is not analyzed.
The Acquired Nervous System exists. It’s always there, learning and unlearning.
Learn to sense and feel it. Don’t let your guard down for the detection of errors.
Don’t rely on models or tutors. Demand rigor. Learn. Inject intelligence in the network. It doesn’t just fall from the sky.
Strive.
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