Sleep, modularity

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The only way to make understandable autism (not with many results) is to explain what modularity is. We are accustomed to consider our brain as a compact unity this for two reasons. One is that we tend to overvalue our self as a not negotiable quality of our being alive. If there is no unitary self, there is no soul; even if we are not religious we are still attached to some substitute of the soul, “personality”, “character”, accountability to a single subject of our deeds and misdeeds. This is also a cultural need. Ho to justify the judiciary machine of repression, with all its cruelty if you take away individual accountability?

A little example about bird’s sleep may come to help on this matter. Not all animals need sleep, like we need, Turtles for example don’t need sleep, but birds need sleep. If so, how is it possible for migratory birds to cover 12.000 kilometers or more, without sleep? One answer is (NYT of 8.23.07) that birds brain in subdivided in separate compartments and that it is possible for birds to switch off a compartment and put it to sleep ("Birds may be able to put parts of their brains to sleep while keeping others awake" NYT), while keeping awake those compartments necessary for moving the wings, finding direction, and keep the right distance in the flock (there are computational model, called boids for this problem).


a boid concerning cohesion in a flock



concerning alignment




concerning separation to avoid crowding

Cohesion: The attraction of the boids to each other.
Alignment: The adjustment of each individual boid's velocity to match up with the rest of the flock's velocity.
Separation: The avoidance of any direct collisions with any other boids.

These are the problems which each member of a flock or school must solve while flying or swimming in order to maintain the compactness of the group and reach the destination. These problems are solved while a part of the brain is put to sleep. Compactness is necessary to reduce predation by other animals and reduce effort of attrition of air or water.

I think it's possible for people to do this (though I HIGHLY suggest against it). I once drove 15 miles through winding roads after being awake for 26+ hours and swear I slept through the whole thing. (until eventually I was rudely awakened by the horn of an oncoming car)

Come to think of it, I have done (or seemed to try to do) many complex tasks while falling asleep.
-20 minutes or so of factory machine operating, eyes closed and oblivious. The machine had a buzzer that went off and shut down if not operated for 30 seconds.
-Took notes in biology class (strait through from left page, to right page, to desk, them my pen fell on the floor.)
-Held conversations with my wife (sitting up, lights are on, I don't even know my eyes are closing), eventually she starts laughing. The conversations go some thing like:
"I'm not sure why your mom said that.....but when I looked up the car door was open and the rabbit was out and I was pretty sure I hadn't started smoking again...CAKE!! !"

Awake there are many tasks you can perform at the same tame, like knitting, talking and looking the TV; driving a car, smoking, and explaining complicate things on a mobile. If centralized conscious control of you acting were necessary you couldn't type at high speed, you could play piano. Many activitites require decentralization of will, or fragmentation of the subject. There are also actions committed "on a trance". Lastly if you look a quadruped (a horse) moving (in trot, galop etc.) you realize very well that a centralized movement of all muscles is impossible. Acting must in many cases be decentralized, delegated, so to speak, to separate agengies of the brain. This is to say that a unified actor often does not exist. An this is the reason for which you can have an intelligent individual who can perform some tasks and not others. Decentralizazion of acting requires specific organ (modules), who may be there or may be defective or absent.

And by the way galop in not an acceleration of trot, is a quite different series of movement. To bring the parallelism further, an Asperger is a horse that can trot but not galop, because of defective decentralized circuitries.

Up to now I have not found a better way to explain why one may be Asperger. Glen Gould was a great musician, but couldn't court a woman.