Neurovigilance

The brain exists because it has helped us survive as individuals and as a species. The massive brain of the sapiens (ma non troppo) is there because it proved its value as a navigator through the uncertain world of evolution.


The sapiens (m.n.t.) brain was born with many circuits but with a lot to learn. The programs’ modulation is pending: the what, when, how, where, why and for what of almost everything.


Before there were neurons, the immune system cells used to detect proteins-signals of danger (germs, cancer cells, uncertain cells, cell corpses). They would only respond in the presence of those signals. Often, too late.


Neurons provided the possibility of establishing a correlation between physicochemical signals of all types and potential danger before the harmfulness contacted the organism. Neurons had the ability to convert the internal and external variables into appetitive reflex actions (food, family) or aversive (predators, fire, traumas). Distant smoke that gives away the fire. Smell, sight, hearing, touch, taste, attributed value to the environment promoting adapted behaviours of rejection or getting closer. All this with time and space between them. Warnings, premonitions ...


Immunovigilance analyzes the danger of the agent by feeling its molecular signals of identity with the receptors of the vigilant cells’ membrane. The neurovigilance feels the agents through physicochemical variables that they generate in the environment: reflected light, mechanical vibrations, volatile substances. Neurons see, hear and smell the danger before it shows up.


In many cases, the dangerous agent appears docked to harmless states and agents. The neurons take notes of the scenario in which there may be something relevant, positive or negative and register all types of signals that coincide in time and space with it. If immediately after the sound of a bell the food arrives, hearing the bell will be enough to make the salivary glands to start salivating. If we associate the sound of a bell with an electric shock, hearing the bell will be enough to run away. Hearing bells is both for activating the salivary glands and activating the fight-flight response.


Neuronal preventive capacity gained from own experience was expanded through distant observation and covered from the adversity of others. Neurons learned how to sense the harm in others’ events. It’s an emotional, empathetic feeling. Otherwise it wouldn’t be useful.


For the sapiens (mnt) brain, all those features of the conditioned reflexes (bells, saliva and electric shock) and empathy with the exciting events of others weren’t enough. We are a fragile and vulnerable species, without armor, claws, poison or speed. We need more security.


Living things associate when they feel threatened. They turn into multi-individual organisms, societies, following informational signals that express stress, adversity that is unbeatable on their own.


Then, sapiens organized in bands that increased and/or reduced capacities. Something to share was, undoubtedly, information. The sapiens (mnt) brain became compulsively gossipy, nosy, story teller, plus imitative and empathic. Now not only could it sense others’ events by seeing and hearing them from a distance. The story inside the group appeared, in the heat, in the place of the events and and in the cold, in the den. Gestures, shouting ... and finally, language.


The sapiens (mnt) brain needed time and rest to process all that huge amount of uncertain signals about danger. Sensations, observations and stories ... Too much uncertainty ... It promoted space-times of ruminant reflection of all that material, all that the conscious and alert individual let free. Dreaming, sleepiness, mental wandering are universes in which the brain seeks order, regularity, analogies, associations, causes, probabilities.


The representation of the world in a virtual, dreamed, imagined environment, generated new hypotheses that proposed a theory of events, their causes and remedies. Some individuals were born touched by the ability to sense, guess, interpret, predict, advise.


Their imagination created doctrine.


Expert and/or illuminated information provided certainty and uncertainty to the network.


The vigilant brain integrates all those evolutive levels of knowledge (own experience, observation of others’ events, stories, doctrines) and turns on perceptions, emotions and actions while all that complex imaginative world assesses at each space-time the probability of an event.


The neurovigilance needs rest to order so much information, but maybe it needs, above all, a criterion to filter incredible knowledge.


Newton gave mechanical order. I’m not really sure of what Einstein said. For many people, he opened the door to free will. Everything is relative, they say he said. Some believe that this authorizes any proposal of truth. Everything is true and false. You choose. Freud warned about the brain basements but opened the door to somatization as a universal explanation. Darwin reminded us that we are shared history.


Perhaps we already need a substantial blow of knowledge in such an important subject as neurovigilance. Perhaps we need to know about the socialized, educated, culturized brain,.


At the moment they speak about evolutionary botch jobs, about proteins that reuptake serotonin, the drug of happiness, thus preventing our good mood. Luckily we have found the necessary antidote, the inhibitor of serotonin reuptake. That way, the serotonin will stay a few more milliseconds in the synapses, blowing sanity and happiness.


Someone suggested more Plato and less Prozac. I’m not sure. I'll stick with Newton and Darwin. I don’t get Einstein and Freud’s somatization doesn’t convince me.


For now, I’m glad that I have a protein that reuptakes serotonin.


Prozac? No, thanks.