2a. Seeking Safety: the Physical Environment

2a. Seeking Safety: the Physical Environment

2a. Seeking Safety: the Physical Environment

Humans are complex creatures. Arguably, the most complex creatures on the planet! No matter how complex we get, though, we share the same problem as all other living things: how to survive. 

The prime directive and universal problem that unites all living things is  how to keep on living. The more complex the organism, the more variables. The more options and opportunities to manage that survival. The more moving parts.

The Physical Environment 

A single celled organism has a simple “straight line” nervous system. A single input stimuli (light, for example) yields a go, no-go response. That's it. Not a lot of variables. Light = Go. (literally, go to the light) No light = No Go. (literally, no movement) Opportunities and options may be minimal, but so are decisions. Not a lot of room or need for rumination. No deep existential processes to gum up the quest for survival! No guilt, no judgement: Just go/no-go.

As we move up the complexity ladder, we increase incoming information. Complexity is literally defined as more: more variable, more choice. Instead of a single stimuli: light. With one determined response: go. We introduce more and  more stimuli coming from more and more receptors: eyes, ears, nose, skin, fascia. Light, sound, smell…temperature, pressure…pain. More information offers more detail. 

Thankfully, not all input is weighted equally. As we saw in the last article, we create filters and parameters to determine what is necessary and useful (to survival) and what is not. The vague smell of roses is far less important than the growl from behind the bush. To sort through the incoming mail we need some sort of overseer. A managing director, to prioritize both incoming messages and outgoing responses. We develop the intricacies of the central nervous system. 

Don't worry, though, as with most human systems, it is actually pretty simple. 

The Nervous System

The nervous system’s entire job is to keep us alive. Stimulus, response. Cause and effect. It can be thought of as having a peripheral and a central aspect. The peripheral nervous system takes information from the outside world. The central nervous system interprets the incoming information and offers up a response. The peripheral then delivers that response to the necessary tools (hands, legs, heart, etc.) 

The information gets transmitted through electrical signals. In a way we can consider it Code. If something changes in the external or internal world, and is significant enough, this change gets picked up by our sensors. Sensors translate the data into Code (electrical signals) which travel up the branches of the peripheral nervous system and arrive at the central nervous system (brain or sometimes just the spinal cord). 

In the central nervous system this Code gets run through our database, our Historical Record of Code (Memory). If there are any “hits”, if we have encountered this Code in the past, the nervous system mobilizes the resources appropriate to that historical situation. 

Resources such as adrenaline, glucose, dopamine, or serotonin, insulin, oxytocin. All the hormones and neuropeptides that tell the internal environment to run and fight or rest and love. 

Continuing the Code metaphor: IF the current situation turns out to NOT require those resources, a healthy, resilient nervous system will learn. It will accept the new information and adapt. The next time that Code is encountered, there will be a new response.

If the current situation DOES require those same resources, we have Reinforced the response. And the third time will be even faster at the required resource distribution. 

But what if the incoming information has never been experienced before? The Code runs through the database and gets no perfect match? A further level of priority comes into play. For example: If a Code is made up of 8 data points (this is still just a metaphor!) maybe 3 of those points are survival level input. (The smell of the roses versus the growl from behind the bush.) The closer a datapoint is to the difference between life and death the higher the priority. 

So, say we are in a new situation. We have never experienced this particular sequence of data points before. We have no historical reference for it and so no handy recipe for the necessary resources for surviving it. Instead of being completely unprepared, (our species would not have survived millennia if we were!) we start sifting and filtering smaller sets of data and even single data points for a previous experience from which to guess at survival requirements. 

If even 1 point, of the 8 points that make up the new Code, if even 1 point gets a hit in the system and is high enough priority, the system will ignore the other 7 points. The system will mobilize the resources required to survive the historically recorded experience of that 1 datapoint. 

For example, if I walk into a room I've never been in before and everything's new: the lights are a different color, it smells different, the people are different, everything is new and offers no historical reference. Except! I see a black coil on the floor in the corner. With no history of snakes in the situation I may still jump at the adrenaline rush as if it were in fact a snake. 

Given no previous mitigating information to bias the situation towards safety, my nervous system did the very logical thing to ensure my survival. It took the most likely deadly possibility and responded to that! 

Even at this level of complexity, we are still at a go, no-go level of response. Run away or stay. Eat the offered food or don’t. Mice function at this level. Still no existential conundrum. Still no guilt or question of motive. 

The nervous system is still just a receiving, prioritizing, reference and distribution manager for surviving the physical environment.

We are clearly not done.