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Bodies, Brains, People and Machines
Bodies, Brains, People and Machines
Bodies, Brains, People and Machines
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Bodies, Brains, People and Machines

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Memory, consciousness, thought, emotion and pleasure generated by our brains underlie choice, values, morals, communication, avarice, aggression ans social interaction. Behaviors depend largely on inborn brain circuitry but are modifiable by experience. Although impressive in versatility and power our brains are not perfect. They often mislead us.
To compensate for limitations in intelligence, memory, speed of processing and physical power we use our brains to develop increasingly autonomous computerized machines. If we are to continue to enjoy life we must improve our own behaviors and remain masters of our inventions.
This book has been kept deliberately succinct and accessible to the general reader with the intention of providing an appreciation of the wonders of the amazing but fallible human brain and to provoke discussion of some of the challenges that it generates.

LanguageEnglish
PublisherJohn Pearson
Release dateMar 25, 2013
ISBN9781301859214
Bodies, Brains, People and Machines
Author

John Pearson

John Pearson is the author of All the Money in the World (previously titled Painfully Rich), now a major motion picture directed by Ridley Scott film and starring Michelle Williams, Mark Wahlberg and Christopher Plumber (nominated for the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor). He is also the author of The Profession of Violence, on which the Tom Hardy film Legend is based, and the follow-up, The Cult of Violence. Born in Surrey, England in 1930, Pearson worked for Economist, The Times, and The Sunday Times, where he was the assistant of Ian Fleming, the creator of James Bond. Pearson published the definitive biography of Fleming, The Life of Ian Fleming in 1966. Pearson has since written many more successful works of both fiction and non-fiction. Biographies remain his specialty with accomplished studies of the Sitwells, Winston Churchill and the Royal Family.

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    Bodies, Brains, People and Machines - John Pearson

    INTRODUCTION

    Every one of us owns a versatile body and a powerful brain. This short book briefly describes their form and function as well as some of the ways in which they lead and mislead us. It is stripped of detail and uses a minimum of technical jargon. The human body is introduced before describing how genes govern its making and many of our day to day behaviors. There are outlines of the ways by which our brains are built and develop to give us consciousness, process thought, store memories, generate emotions and reward or warn us as we move through life. They serve as a foundation for reflections on the ways in which we behave as people in making choices, developing morality, dealing with knowledge, and constraining or letting run wild our innate acquisitiveness and pugnacity.

    Our brains are superb compilers of information and rich in stored memories. They give us the unique communication tool of advanced language so that we can form rich social bonds, share skills and pass them to our offspring. They have permitted the pace of cultural evolution to exceed that of our bodies. If used well they will ensure our continued progress.

    Obliged to live together on a tiny planet we form systems, societies and governments as we attempt to ensure our survival. Some of the ways in which we succeed or fail in these essential endeavors are touched upon before contemplating whether we or computerized machines will dominate in years to come.

    If we are to triumph we must know what makes us who we are at present and find ways to optimize our behaviors in the future. Though skeletal in form it is hoped that this book will seed interest and discussion regarding topics that are of vital interest to us all.

    BODIES

    You yourself made the body that you own. Every part of it was built by you on the basis of instructions from a tiny fragment of genetic material. You alone did all phases of construction. Not one of your cells or body parts was delivered ready made from your mother who did you the great service of supplying raw materials and some defensive antibodies while disposing of your waste.

    All of us started the same way. Using instructions encoded in genes we built a multitude of proteins that were structural building blocks, enzymes, guideposts and timing switches. Based on chemically coded directions and without any possibility of thought we entirely self-assembled. We divided our cells at a breakneck pace until we had trillions upon trillions of them. Some cells sacrificed themselves so that special shapes could form, such as separate fingers from the primitive paddles that began our hands.

    We were very busy. What we each did during nine months in a protective, nurturing womb was wonderful. Then, at the moment of our births, we pulled off an amazing trick. We forced open, against huge resistance, a pair of previously airless, fluid saturated lungs. We rightly yelled our triumph.

    Our skin kills many viruses on contact, keeps undesirable substances out, keeps essential water in, protects underlying delicate tissues from the sun, helps maintain body temperature, and gives us the ability to detect touch, pressure, pain and heat. Beneath the skin our muscles act on intricately jointed skeletons to let us move at will while the bones support our bodies and protect our delicate brains.

    When we move, muscle proteins use energy derived from glucose and oxygen that are delivered in blood via a system of tubes made of arteries and then capillaries so narrow that red cells, way too small to be seen with the naked eye, must distort to be squeezed through before reaching the veins on the other side. The pressure that pushes the blood comes from the constantly beating, carefully regulated, variable rate pump that is the heart. The blood that it circulates contains foodstuffs, oxygen, clotting substances, and antibodies, together with immunity producing and scavenger cells, as well as waste gases and chemicals. It carries crucial proteins and small atoms such as the sodium and chlorine found in common table salt that are so closely controlled by the excretion system of our kidneys that our blood chemistry still resembles, as it must to maintain our health, the ancient seas in which our remote fish-like ancestors evolved.

    Our kidneys selectively remove the toxic wastes resulting from the death of tired cells that are constantly being replaced by new microscopic birth within us. That continuous rebirth could not take place without the provision of raw materials taken in by our mouths under the control of selective appetites directed by our brains. The food we eat is digested into molecules small enough to be absorbed through the gut before being passed on to the liver for processing and temporary storage. Those molecules would be useless without the presence of oxygen arriving in exactly the right amount via the huge internal surface of our precisely controlled lungs that also serve us by dumping waste carbon dioxide back into the air.

    Our bodies, with their exquisitely balanced, mutually supportive systems that let us live and strive to maintain us in good health deserve our admiration but, in their internal form and functioning, they are, with one exception, much like those of mice, cats, pigs or elephants. All mammals have similar organs that work in similar ways and are coordinated by similar mechanisms. It is our brains that make us vastly different.

    Every miniscule nucleus inside our trillions of microscopically small cells contains all the information required to build and maintain a body. It is an amazing degree of miniaturized information packaging. If the individual instructions in our approximately thirty thousand genes were letters we would each have enough of them to fill a library of books. The information they contain permits us to build our bodies and to keep them functioning throughout life.

    Suggested Reading.

    The Human Body Book, Steve Parker, HK, 2007

    GENES

    Genes persist. Once they have been proven, by natural selection, to give any form of life an advantage they tend to stick around. Some of those that we contain have been passed down to us over billions of years. As a result we have genetic similarities to creatures as lowly as worms and microbes. The DNA that makes up our genes is different from theirs but not by as much as our vanity might prefer.

    Genes must regularly be checked for breaks and errors, then repaired. Our cells do this automatically without us being in the slightest bit aware of the process. Repair is not always successful. Defects may lead to congenital disease and cancer. Nevertheless, we have reason to be grateful for changes in genes for, without them, evolution would not have occurred. It is far more interesting to be human than to be a worm.

    Our genes are made very versatile by using some repeatedly, by activating them on different occasions, by selecting parts or the whole or any one of them for expression, by the precise timing of their activity and by using the same genes for different purposes depending on where they are switched on in the body. Controller proteins do the switching, themselves the product of earlier gene action in an exquisitely orchestrated cascade of events that permits the balanced construction and continued maintenance of our bodies. Genes respond to changes within and around the cells that contain them so that activity is appropriate to what needs to be made, repaired or maintained at any given moment or location in the body.

    Genes supply codes for the production of proteins that vary tremendously in form and function. Some direct the replication, repair, maintenance and reading of DNA itself. Some proteins are tough building materials like collagen. Others, like those in heart and muscles of limbs, can contract.

    Instructions in genes provide for the construction of the flexible walls of cells and make them specifically receptive to the signals to which they must respond in order to carry out their functions. Some genes code for the insulation around the cable-like fibers that connect nerve cells to one another.

    Enzymes are gene directed proteins that guide the chemical reactions upon which our lives depend. Specialized enzymes let us digest food, transport it into our blood, burn it to release energy, or convert it into fats and glycogen for energy storage. Enzymes are essential for the manufacture of hormones and other chemical transmitters that carry signals from nerve endings to genetically encoded receptors on target nerve cells, glands, heart, blood vessels, lungs and muscles.

    Many of the cells that took part in forming us had short but useful lives. Genes contained the instructions for some cells, derived from our eggs, to make the placenta and umbilical cord on which we were completely dependent before birth but for which we had no use after we were born. Some cells within our tiny fetal bodies were initially needed but were then programmed to die so that useful structures could be formed. When body parts reached their appropriate size controllers reduced gene activity to maintenance levels.

    Some of our developmental genes led to activities that occurred only once, such as the closing of passages in the heart that had to be open in the womb so that blood could bypass our fluid saturated lungs but had to be shut after they filled with air at birth. Our first breaths were aided by a soap-like substance that enzymes transiently made when the appropriate genes were briefly activated.

    We contain many loyal, short-lived servants. Our continuously churning guts contain teeming populations of bacteria in a soup of aggressive digestive enzymes that give the lining cells such a rough time of it that they do not live long. In the layer beneath them are the precursors of replacements with gene-coded orders to divide and line up for the sacrifice. When we get an infection our white cells are genetically instructed to reproduce in droves, but they die in the process of gobbling up the germs. All through life red blood cells and skin cells develop then digest their own nuclei, and the contained genes that directed them to do so, in order to be better at their jobs. Having sacrificed their DNA, they must die after they have served us for a few weeks more.

    All through our bodies chemicals and structures are continually being used up or wearing out. Without the ongoing activity of genes none could be replaced. If that replacement did not take place we would simply waste away. If it were excessive we would be variously misshaped monsters. When we are injured, emergency signals are generated and new cells are formed to bring about repair. Throughout life the chemicals in the body are being refreshed, even in structures such as bones that look unchanged. Our chemicals are not exactly the same as they were five years ago and they will be different again five years from now but our bodies, brains and memories stay much the same because our genes precisely direct the exchange processes.

    In the brain, gene action leads to the setting up of connections between myriads of nerve cells in an exquisitely ordered manner. The genes themselves are mindless but, based on their instructions, the end product is a master controller with a thinking mind. Genes are essential throughout life to to provide instruction for the maintenance of brain components. They are needed for the controlled supply of transmitter substances that act within the brain and switch on muscles, control the heart, adjust blood pressure and release hormones. The activity of some genes is modified in response to alterations in our internal chemistry or in the environment and, as a result, they permit the brain to undergo adaptive change.

    Genes that govern the modification of long-term sensitivities of nerve cells enable us to learn. Without their action we would remain as ignorant and helplessly dependent as on the day that we were born. We could not learn to speak. We would have no factual knowledge or skills. Remembering no sights and sounds we could not logically seek food and shelter nor learn to avoid serious threats. We would be doomed to early death.

    Genes carry instructions for intricate behaviors. Monarch butterflies do not go to school. Leaving northern parts of the Americas, the summer generation starts out for Mexico. They get about a third of the way there before mating, laying eggs and dying. Caterpillars hatch, eat, form pupae and become new adults that

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