Doping the Brain
by Melanie
Anne Phillips
From the moment of conception the cells that are to
become the human brain function chaotically. There is no order nor sequence to their
firings and no self-awareness can form. This condition is much like the gaseous clouds
from which our solar system was spawned.
In order for consciousness to take hold, there must
be a force that focuses the mind, pulling it into a single perspective. This force comes
into being at the twelfth to fourteenth week of pregnancy when a flush of testosterone or
estrogen washes over the largely developed brain, doping it with one of two essential
biases. Either bias serves as a sun at the center of the mental solar system, calibrating
the mind with a different weight with which all subsequent experience will be measured.
A testosterone wash biases the mind toward a
Spatial Brain Operating System; an Estrogen wash biases the mind toward a Temporal Brain
Operating System. All minds sense both time and space, but the bias determines which is
favored and which gets second-hand information. As a result of this bias, men and women
perceive the same sensory input in different ways, creating both a commonality in what
they are looking at and a divergence into what it means to them.
After several days, the brain has established
patterns of data organization under the influence of the hormonal bias that act as planets
in orbit around the sun. Once these patterns are established, the hormonal flush recedes
as if the sun disappeared from the center of the solar system. Why do not the planets fly
off into space? Because they have formed a dynamic stability where each mental item is
counterbalanced by another item on the opposite side of thought - equally massive planets
in the same orbit 180 degrees out of phase.
Of course, the mental solar system has many more
than two items of mind (points of view) and therefore the entire framework is constructed
from a multitude of balanced items creating a structure not unlike a geodesic dome, built
of dynamics rather than objects: stable because of its inertia. As an analogy, one might
view the hormonal bias as providing a coriolis effect, putting the mental solar system
either into a clockwise or counter clockwise spin. One it recedes, like a wave from the
shore, the bias leaves patterns behind in the mental sand that form a record of its
currents and eddies.
When one looks for the seat of consciousness in the
brain, it cannot be found for self-awareness does not reside in the fabric of the brain
itself but in tendencies established in mental processes that have become self-sustaining
and are no longer tied to a physical "battery". The chaotic nature of the
sensory perception of the brain coming into conjunction with the ordered nature of the
biased dynamics of the mind might create fractal patterns in electrical functioning
visible through brain scans. The mind, however is a machine made of time: it exists only
when in motion. Therefore, static fractals are limited to describing the state of mind at
any given moment.
To understand the processes of the mind,
which describe the dynamics of problem solving and justification, the temporal record of
the interaction of the senses and the mind must be documented. This can only be achieved
through studying frictal (friction + fractional) patterns of self-awareness residing not
in the structure but in the dynamics of the mind.
