Part of a series exploring how economic thought leads to cognition and cognitive behaviour
The Germans have a wonderful word in their language; kabelsalat.
Literally translated as cable salad, it refers to the twisted mess that cables, especially electrical ones, manage to get themselves into when you turn your back on them for more than a couple of minutes.
The tangled knot of wires looks complicated – and they’re frustrating to untangle – but the process that gave rise to them isn’t. Effectively the tangle is only a combination of right-over-lefts and left-over-rights with the occasional knot where the end has threaded through itself.
To untangle the mess you just have to reverse the process which got you there in the first place. Okay, this may be more easily said than done, but that’s what you do.
To me the brain is much the same.
We’ve been schooled to think of the brain as a mysterious entity that keeps its secrets from us in a shroud of complexity.
But it is really?
At some point after the moment of conception a potential difference arises between cells. As cells continue to divide, form and specialise some are physically proximal to each other and others are separate. We might say they are networked. In some sense we can refer to a specific network as an organ, whether it is the heart, liver or brain, etc.
As a new born we can’t do much. We are reliant on a parental figure for our survival. We happily recognise the distinctions between our stages are life. We don’t think of babies as young adults; we refer to infants, children, adolescents, adults and pensioners as people progress through their life span.
Each stage though has in common the experience of life.
From some moment after conception to the point of our death differences in the potential of cells in our brain cause electrical signals to zip and ping around and jump across gaps between them.
This is not a complex process, just as a ball rolls down a hill or water drains away from an unplugged sink, impulses flow within the network of our brain.
As we experience the environment, information transduced into signals flows through our brain. Repeated experience causes adaptation. Familiarity of experience creates learning. Like a river carving its path through the landscape the cells with out brain look to connect through the path of least potential.
As we try, practice, fail, repeat and succeed the plasticity of our brains knot and tangle like wires twisting left-over-right or right-over-left as we gain the experience of the environment that marks our change from child to adult.
Looking back we wonder how we got here? How a virtuoso plays a violin or how we can drive a car?
It looks too complicated for us to untangle but somehow within the kabelsalat of our brain there is a path that allows a signal to come from the environment and our response to it to be effected.