The monkeys were deprived of sleep for 30 to 36 hours and then given either orexin A or a saline placebo before taking standard cognitive tests. The monkeys given orexin A in a nasal spray scored about the same as alert monkeys, while the saline-control group was severely impaired. The study, published in the Dec. 26 edition of The Journal of Neuroscience, found orexin A not only restored monkeys' cognitive abilities but made their brains look "awake" in PET scans. Siegel said that orexin A is unique in that it only had an impact on sleepy monkeys, not alert ones, and that it is "specific in reversing the effects of sleepiness" without other impacts on the brain.

Adding more processing cores to a CPU should have been a relatively painless evolution of computer technology but it turned out to be a real pain in the ass, programming wise. Why? To understand the problem, we must go back to the very beginning of the computer age, close to a hundred and fifty years ago, when an Englishman named Charles Babbage designed the world's first general purpose computer, the analytical engine. Babbage was a mathematician and like most mathematicians of his day, he longed for a time when he would be freed from the tedium of performing long calculation sequences. All he wanted was a reasonably fast calculator that could reliably execute mathematical sequences or algorithms. The idea of using a single fast central processor to emulate the behaviors of multiple small parallel processors was the furthest thing from his mind. Indeed, the very first program written for the analytical engine by Babbage's friend and fellow mathematician, Lady Ada Lovelace, was a table of instructions meant to calculate the Bernoulli numbers, a sequence of rational numbers. Neither Babbage nor Lady Ada should be faulted for this but current modern computers are still based on Babbage's sequential model. Is it any wonder that the computer industry is having such a hard time making the transition from sequential to parallel computing?

According to my interpretation of the Biblical texts, the cerebellum is a supervised automaton. It is trained by the motor cortex to take over certain routine motor tasks whenever the basal ganglia and motor cortex are busy reasoning internally or engaging in some other motor activity. My understanding of the metaphorical messages to the church of Pergamum (Broca's area) and Laodicea (cerebellum) in the book of Revelation is that speech is always an attentional or volitional (as opposed to automatic) process that involves corrective feedback from the basal ganglia. The cerebellum is not directly involved in processing speech and language. The indication is that the cerebellum can have motor control over the entire body except the mouth, throat and tongue muscles. This means that activities like eating, chewing and swallowing are also excluded from cerebellar control.

The victim of police brutality was a motorist named Jared Massey. Mr. Massey was pulled over on a Utah highway for allegedly speeding. When Mr. Massey asked the officer why he was being pulled over, and then to help him understand why he was accused of speeding before he signed the ticket, the officer ordered him to exit the vehicle. Mr. Massey was then asked to turn around and put his hands behind his back. Mr. Massey began walking back towards the car, obviously confused as to why he was being ordered to put his hands behind his back, and less than 10 seconds later was tased.

The Magical Human Brain

Unlike a computer, the brain does not have the ability to instantly scan a random series of locations in its memory. To do so would require that every memory location be connected to every other location, which is clearly not the case, biologically speaking. Alternatively, it would require an address bus, a data bus, a memory controller and RAM, much like a computer. This is not the case either. Human memory does have a random access capability but it is extremely slow compared to a computer: the axon of a neuron must grow until it physically establishes a synaptic connection. And yet, amazingly, human memory acts as if it does have instant random access capability. For example, we can instantly record (memorize) any short sequence of random musical notes and instantly recite it with no trouble even if we have never heard or used that sequence before. How can this be? How does the brain instantly record a random sequence of events that it has never encountered before and play it back in the same order?

The act of recording a sequence of events presupposes the existence of a recording medium. The only biologically plausible way to record and play back a sequence of events is to use a control neuron that is physically connected to all the neurons that represent the events in the sequence. One can imagine using synaptic strengths to encode the delays and a steady oscillatory firing of the control neuron to trigger each node at its assigned time. One can even imagine using a faster or slower oscillation frequency to play the sequence under different tempos. The point I am driving at is that, in order for the human brain to be able to instantly record and play back short random melodies, it would need a pre-wired network of all such possible sequences to serve as a universal medium. This is an extremely huge number even if we limit the melodies to seven notes each, the capacity of human short-term memory. If we include all the other possible event sequences that human memory can instantly record, the number becomes astronomical. There is no evidence for the existence of such an immense pre-wired network. In fact, the evidence is that much of the wiring of the brain occurs during learning. Is the brain using some kind of magic to do its amazing tricks? The answer depends on what one calls magic. I call it something else. I call it the spirit.

In part II, I will expand on the spirit theme and go over the real reason that dogs can't play chess.