Neuroscience commentary on neuronal spike intervals and brain region metaphors

distributions of neuronal interspike intervals have increasingly /ong tails. Contrary to the behavior of a normally distributed observable, the larger the series of neuronal spike observed, the more likely that a longer interspike interval than had been seen before will occur. Counter-intuitively, long intervals tend to be followed by more long intervals as more shorts follow short intervals. Manic attacks cluster in time as does a number of other brain and body diseases. Maybe it is intuitively obvious that bad stuff tends to cause more bad stuff and good stuff is self-propagating. Having suffered recently does not mean fate owes you one. The brain’s syncopated segmentations of time can be translated into a creatively arrhythmic dance. What makes neurologizing conversations like these about subtle human experience possible are the human subjective scenarios we have agreed to short hand with names of brain parts and neurochemicals. The how is where conceptual connection is filled with post 19'° Century Spanish microscopic neuroanatomist, Santiago Ramon y Cajal-like, intuitions about the functional role of brain structures: we think motor automaticity and pacing when hearing the brain place names such as caudate, putamen and cerebellum; we think limbic lobe when musing about sexuality, rage and depression; we short hand /eft versus right hemispheric places for verbal and sequential versus intuitive and geometric shape cognition; we point to the frontal lobe for the future work of executive control, anticipation and paranoia; the hypothalamus for primitively expressed appetites and to the brain stem for our vital functions such as breathing and blood pressure. With respect to the brain juices, we say dopamine for aggressive activity, norepinephrine for attention and sensory discrimination and serotonin for hunger, mood and sexual inclination. No matter how avant guarde our experimental techniques such as monitoring local functional blood supply by fMRI, regional brain glucose utilization maps, time- dependent changes in_ skull surface voltage using a cap studded with electroencephalographic, EEG, leads, monitoring these voltage field via their transverse magnetic fields by the frozen helmets of magnetoencephalography, MEG, we conclude our work by calling forth named but still enigmatic brain parts and their juices as mysteriously powerful little men and women executing remarkably complex and subtle tasks, sometimes even when called upon. 100 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_013600