:Analogies for Sustainable Development/Brain as evolutionary ecosystem

Analogy Ranking and Review
Analogy Characteristics Style: analogy, metaphor Directionality: unidirectional
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“ It turns out that it’s not just a jungle out there. It’s also a jungle in there. What I mean is that your brain’s a competitive arena. Competition within your brain does as much to shape who you are as does the competition—physical and figurative—you face externally. ” — David Rosenbaum, Its a Jungle In There

Discussion

Ecosystem management has provided a framework for treating Alzheimer's disease

Quote Bank

Rosenbaum (2014): “Just as few cars can get very close to the toll collector or E-ZPass, very few thoughts can get close to consciousness at any one time—somewhere between 4 and 9 of them for most… To the extent that few actions can be carried out at once, competition for access to the launch pad for action is likely to be intense.” “Finding a healthy region of the brain that’s completely dormant is as likely as looking under a stone and not finding a weevil, worm, or wily bacterium.” “If a “Vacancy” sign appears anywhere in the outer jungle, it doesn’t stay up for long. Vacancies are filled in the blink of an eye. The brain, too, provides a welcome environment for opportunistic bands of neural gnomes to flourish, as long as the living conditions aren’t too difficult. Given the hospitable environment of the brain, a wondrous diversity of neural, and then mental, life can spring up.” “Unnecessary connections between neurons are pruned away. Pruning begins in infancy and is completed in the teen years. Pruning can be seen as straightforward example of natural selection.”

Hubin et al. (2016): “A number of ecosystem management principles and paradigms may be useful to develop novel [Alzheimer’s Disease] therapies. Promising paradigms include the notion that complex systems can exist in alternative stable states, stabilized by feedback mechanisms, and the fact that management can stimulate to reach certain favorable equilibria.” “An evaluation is required to what extent our claim holds true for all aspects of disease and ecosystem management, not to overlook potential fundamental differences, and whether other analogies may provide deeper insight. For example, contrary to species, molecules are typically not self-replicating entities. Their dynamics and turnover are determined by the surrounding tissue that produces them, rather than by differential reproductive success, migration, and mortality, as would be the case for species in an ecosystem.”

Stein (2014): “imagine that each different skill and idea you have is like a living organism; they all grow relative to the time and attention they are given, and as a result of being in some contexts rather than others. If all you do is put yourself in contexts where your attention goes into playing video games, then your skills and ideas related to video games will evolve. Some of these evolving video game skills might form symbiotic relations with other skills, such as eye-hand coordination or skills for collaboration and humor. All of your skills and ideas are co-evolving, sometimes joining together to create higher-order skills, and sometimes differentiating into sub-skills as they are refined relative to environmental niches. Your skills and ideas also compete for energy and exercise, as growing one set of skills, like playing violin, takes up the time and energy that would be needed to grow a different set of skills, such as doing algebra. You are an ecosystem of co-evolving skills and ideas, each developing at a different rate, with complex symbiotic and competitive relations emerging among them over time. You are not simply smart or dumb, having either a fast or slow information processing unit between your ears. Instead, you are an ever-changing, context sensitive, ecosystem in process, with no central tendency or summary statistic. You may have highly evolved skills in some contexts, and primitive ones in others. You may be on the verge of a major evolutionary leap forward (a great “A HA!” is on the horizon), while at the moment you appear to be struggling.”

References

Analogies for Sustainable Development