A single principle organizes everything that occurs
within our CNSs, including their developmental wiring
up...
...our nervous systems are physically structured,
throughout their entire extents, so that their
functioning will automatically "seek" to achieve a single
goal... the minimization of the topologically-distributed
ratios of excitation to inhibition that are occuring
within them...
...a straight-forward example of the functionality of
this unifying principle exists in the dynamics of pain
avoidance... the problem of activating the effectors so
that the body will move away from environmental sources
of noxious stimulation is of infinitely-large scope
because the sources of pain can come from any direction
in the environment...
...a survey of the experimental literature shows that
"the" nervous system resolves the infinitely-large pain
avoidance problem by "simply" transforming
relative degrees of topographically-mapped excitation
into proportionately-correlated, topographically-mapped
inhibition, thus inverting the the original stimulus set,
and projecting the result back to the effectors...
colloquially, the pain sensation comes into the nervous
system as a "mountain" of excitation, and, while
preserving topographical-mapping correlations with
respect to the body-environment interface, that
"mountain" is inverted into a "valley" of excitation, and
the "valley" of excitation is passed back to the
effectors...
...thus, the topography that is correlated with the
greatest degree of noxious stimulation receives the least
post-inversion excitation... this means that the effector
activations that were responsible for moving the body
into contact with the environmental source of noxious
stimulation will now be most inhibited... thus, an
"arrest reaction" will occur with respect to motion in
the direction of the environmental source of the noxious
stimulation...
...the easiest way to see that all of this stands
verified is to consider the curious loss of pain &
temperature sensation that occurs following unilateral
hemisection of the brain stem at the level of the
medulla... pain & temp sensation are lost on the same
side of the face but on the opposite side of the body...
...this syndrome occurs because pain & temp sensation
from the face is conveyed via the ipsilateral spinal
trigeminal tract, but pain & temp sensation from the body
is conveyed by the crossed spinothalamic tract...
...both of these tracts give off collaterals which
converge upon reticular nuclei which project
ipsilaterally to the cerebellum... the outputs of the
cerebellum, which arise exclusively from the purkinje
cells, are entirely-inhibitory...
...the logic of the head-body pain-temp-difference
becomes clear when one considers how the head should move
with respect to pain to the fact and to the body...
...the head should move away from pain to the face...
thus sparing the eyes from injury, but the head should
orient toward pain to the body so that the eyes can
assist in the avoidance problem...
...and when these dynamics are correlated with the
functional neuroanatomy, it is verified that all that is
occurring is that the topologically-distributed ratios of
excitation to inhibition are, in fact, being blindly
minimized, and that behavior that is appropriate with
respect to environmental sources of noxious stimulation
are automatically produced via such TD E/I
minimization...
...it is just as straight-forward to show that the same
TD E/I minimization principle applies to the whole CNS...
although to give an introductory account of such requires
about 5 hours of presentation time because there is so
much that has to be covered and integrated...
...what's presented here will stand as incontrovertible
Truth for all time... or at least until evolutionary
dynamics modify the very fundamental neural architecture
of "the" CNS... K. P. Collins
_____________________________________________________
People hate because they fear, and they fear because
they do not understand, and they do not understand
because hating is less work than understanding.
