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NT Issue 2 correspondence: p. 1 Frontispiece, "Born to Organize", p. 30–35, "Born to Make Meaning", p. 48-53

Francisco Varela on the nervous system:

 
Varela:
The key element is the fact that the body of all animals, including human beings, is organised in a loop of sensorimotor coupling. In other words, everything we do always happens in a cycle of perception and action, and this circular loop of perception and action is the fundamental core, or the logic, of the nervous system.

From the origin of neural life, that is, from basic animal life such as sponges, to vertebrates such as human beings, with a very complex brain. But the logic of the nervous system is common to all animals: it’s this sensorimotor loop.

This loop is the coupling. It is by way of this loop that we couple with what we call the environment.

There is much to learn from the way the brain is organized. It is both a generalist and a specialist. It both controls and executes. At the same time it plans, pilots, regulates, evaluates, emits hypotheses, imagines and invents.

The secret of our brain is mainly its enormous capacity for connectivity. It is precisely this surplus of labor that will allow it to function probabilistically and thereby escape the determinism into which it risks forcing itself, precisely because of a lack of flexibility.

It’s the fact that, embedded in this history of the nervous system, there is really a desire to stabilize the world, a passion for constituting meaning.

The workings of the nervous system give us an example of a behavior which prefers:

INITIATIVE OVER PASSIVITY
OPENNESS OVER NARROWNESS OF MIND-
COLLABORATION OVER COMPETITION
FLEXIBILITY OVER RIGIDITY
AUTONOMY OVER DEPENDENCE
CRITICAL THINKING OVER BELIEF IN AUTHORITY

Thus, think that we have a very important message for the youth, that it is important for them to realize that the fluidity of the world will not get resolved by trying and fixating it, but by trying and getting the most out of the flexibility that we are given.

We have said that in regards to key concepts or key words we must modify our current language and replace "obtaining information" with "coupling", and coupling which is in most cases it should involve a coupling that is active, participative.

Secondly, "information processing" should be replaced with "making meaning emerge", "creating meaning". And thirdly, instead of thinking of acquiring a domain of information, it is rather a matter of finding path of learning or a path of transformation.

That, it seems, is one of the greatest problems that we must certainly overcome in the future. We must replace this culture of information, which is associated with a certain mode of command or control, with a culture of autonomy of the individual. Well, not only of the individual, but also of the social group.

Mallarmé, in THE BOOK: A SPIRITUAL INSTRUMENT (NT Motto):

Each of us has within them that lightning-like initiative which can link the scattered notes together.

Santiago Ramón y Cajal:

Cajal made discoveries that turned contemporary views on the structure and function of the nervous system upside down. Most researchers of the day held that the nervous system was made up of a continuous network of cells. Cajal proposed that each cell was a separate, independent entity ending in so-called synapses, where nerve impulses were transferred from one cell to another.

Unable to find any scientific journal willing to publish his findings Cajal founded a journal of his own. Though by no means rich (and, besides, a father of six), he used his own money to publish it and mailed sixty copies of each issue to anatomists around the world. His most revolutionary finding was the utter lack of evidence for either axons or dendrites fusing and forming networks like those described by Golgi. He observed that, on the contrary, it seemed neurons did not need to touch to communicate. They only had to be contiguous for signals to be transmitted from one to the other. (The term “synapse”, used to describe the structure that permits a neuron to pass on its signal, would not be coined, by Charles Sherrington, until 1897.) *

Santiago Ramón y Cajal started investigating nervous system in 1887 using Golgi stain. In the first issue of the Revista Trimestral de Histología Normal y Patológica (May, 1888) Ramón y Cajal reported that the nerve cells were not continuous in the brain of birds. Ramón y Cajal's discovery was the decisive evidence for the discontinuity of nervous system and the presence of large number of individual nerve cells. Golgi refused to accept the neuron theory and hung on to the reticular theory. Golgi and Ramón y Cajal were jointly awarded the 1906 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine, but the controversy between the two scientists continued. The matter was finally resolved in the 1950s with the development of electron microscopy by which it was unambiguously demonstrated that nerve cells were individual cells interconnected through synapses to form a nervous system, thereby validating the neuron theory.

In his 1894 Croonian Lecture, Ramón y Cajal suggested (in an extended metaphor) that cortical pyramidal cells may become more elaborate with time, as a tree grows and extends its branches.

F. Kiesler: "IMPORTANT IS IT'S RELATIONSHIP TO THE ENVIRONMENT"