The meta loop
Increase the path length information travels, increase consciousness
I’ve written previously about how memory is necessary for consciousness because it provides space for the not-present—i.e., future and past—to project from (“The Mind and the Pandemic of Anxiety” essay). As memory is collected and associated, which is to say as our neurons become more coherently connected, the consciousness phenomenon begins to appear. For many this occurs in early/mid adolescence and matures somewhere in the mid-twenties, and language appears to be an important accelerator of this process because it aids in memory formation.
David Hartley writes about language acquisition in his Observations, describing how the sensations and effector muscles form interesting pairs that aid in memory consolidation through the association of sensations. Most basically, your eyes take in written language, which makes its way into the brain via the occipital lobe before dissemination into the parietal, temporal, and frontal lobes. Your hands then express this visual information out of the brain via the motor cortex (frontal lobe). Your ears take in auditory language via the temporal lobe and your mouth/neck muscles express this auditory information again via the motor cortex. Additionally, you can of course cross these pathways, i.e., express visual information you read as speech and auditory as written, which further aids in associating neurons together.
Given association is the mechanism that neurons use to strengthen synaptic connections and build information networks (re Hebb, long term potentiation, etc.), it’s easy to see how our effector muscles in the hands, mouth, and throat aid the association of language information that our eyes and ears receive to crystalize memory. This is why taking notes or actively participating in class by talking are so helpful when listening to/watching a lecture, because you’re forcing information from the occipital and temporal lobes to transit into the frontal, all the while passing by other areas of the brain where new and stronger connections have the propensity to form with neurons firing at that moment. The same principles apply to brail and sign language. This reinforcement of auditory, visual, touch, or any form of sensorial language allows the information to become more stably embedded in your neural network, and this stability is ultimately memory.
Language facilitates the association of neurons and memory formation in another way as well. Words are like anchors, or central nodes that we can use to associate many different things together. Consider all the ideas the word “beauty” brings to the front. It’s not just a series of letters defined by a series of words, but also a series of subjective experiences; maybe you think about a person, a place, etc. Language helps us organize our thoughts, and this organization is what leads to consciousness. Consciousness does not arise from a scattered brain, but one that is synchronized.
If our brains didn’t require neuronal pruning, then we’d be conscious the moment the neural tube formed in the 3rd week of gestation. But we don’t remember our birth because the brain is a cacophony of neuronal firing in early life, and thus we aren’t aware. Our arms and legs writhe while we struggle to see and hear, we flex our vocal cords in response to nothing other than existence. The only order in the nervous system at this time is in the peripheral component where the reflexes govern, because the pyramidal neurons from the motor cortex have not fully intercepted between our muscles and sensory receptors (re “The reflex arc intercepted by consciousness”).
Our toes fan out upon stimulation of the foot, our fingers grasp upon stimulation of the palm, we suck when the roof of our mouth is touched, our arms and legs extend and then retract when we’re startled. These reflexes are the ordered, unconscious pre-programmed movements with which we begin, whereas any signals from the cortex are disorganized (consider the random movement a newborn makes when laying undisturbed). Very quickly however the cortex starts to associate sensation with movement, the pyramidal neurons strengthen their synaptic connections in the spinal cord, most newborn reflexes disappear or change (save blinking, gag, etc..), and memory begins to form out of this cortical order with consciousness soon to follow.
As more neurons become synchronized, action potentials travel down longer chains of neurons, and I believe at some length threshold consciousness, time perception, and distance perception arise together (I’ve written previously about how time doesn’t exist for an unconscious being, and how time and distance are irrevocably linked in “The Mind and the Pandemic of Anxiety” and “Time and Distance are Irrevocably linked” essays, respectively). I’m using the word perception here to mean observation of something, and consciousness to mean awareness of oneself and one’s surroundings. Action potentials are membrane depolarization events that can be imagined as the information our neurons transit to one another. These events begin in the dendritic spines/dendrites, travel through the neuron’s cell body (where the nucleus/DNA reside) and exit through the axon to cause neurotransmitters (e.g. Dopamine, Glutamate, Serotonin, etc.) to release into the synapse of the next neuron, which causes the process to repeat over again in the next neuron (assuming they’re excitatory, more on that later…. :^).
Suppose you have a neuron that initiates an action potential, and this transits to another neuron, and another, etc., and suppose the final neuron in this sequence synapses back onto the first neuron; we have just generated a loop that can be timed and a distance that can be measured. The longer this circuit, the longer the time before that first neuron will be stimulated to initiate the action potential again. I believe this process scaled up by billions of neurons and a hundred trillion synaptic connections is what gives rise to the strange loop we call consciousness.
I think small loops of cortical neurons begin forming during infancy, and as we age, they grow larger and become more interconnected with each other until an even bigger meta loop is formed. If the distance/time it takes for the action potential to transit over this meta loop before returning to the “start” neuron is large enough, consciousness, time perception, and distance perception will appear. I’ve put “start” in quotations because in reality, any neuron in the circuit can be thought of as the start neuron, because it’s a loop.
Time and distance appear to form the basis of every measurement in science. All things like energy, velocity, magnification, momentum, etc., can be broken into different proportions of time and/or distance. They are the only continuous variables, and therefore Zeno’s paradox could just as easily be applied to time (if you subdivided a moment infinitely, would you ever get out of it?). The reason these are the basic measurements of all science is because they’re the basic measurements of our mind, and science is just an outgrowth of our mental attempts to make sense of and predict reality.
Our perception, and more specifically our discretization of time and space scales with consciousness, meaning the more conscious we are, the smaller the interval of time and space that we’re able to perceive. In childhood moments and distances feel longer because the neuronal pathways in our cortex are shorter and more disjointed. As we age, the moments get shorter, the world gets smaller, and we ask ourselves, where has the time (and space) gone? Into our heads of course.