Chapter 29 self-assembled brain

self-assembled brain Looking back two decades later, Longton says, that night of epiphany changed his life.But at that time it was just a feeling above intuition. "It's the kind of thing when an idea comes in an instant and then it's gone. It's like a hurricane, or a sweeping wave, changes the face of the land, and then disappears without a trace. The impression that night left in my mind It actually faded away, but it established my special feeling about certain things. Anything that can touch me can remind me of this kind of activity model. So I have been trying to follow this feeling since then. Of course , This kind of feeling often leads me to one place, and then I just run away, making me not know what to do next."

But in fact he still underestimated the situation. Langton in 1971 neither knew what he felt meant, nor was he far from being a systematic scholar.His so-called "follow your gut" idea is just to go to the library or bookstore and search here and there for a few articles on analog machines, emergence, patterns of collective behavior, or local rules that lead to global dynamics.He also took random courses now and then at Harvard, Boston University, or whatever.But basically, he's content to do what comes naturally to him.There was so much else in his life.His real passion is playing the guitar.He and a friend of his tried unsuccessfully to start a professional country folk band.He also put a lot of energy into resisting the draft and resisting the Vietnam War.The whole counterculture around the universities made Cambridge and Boston a very pleasant place for him.Longton hadn't felt happier than this in a long time.

"Secondary life was a disaster for me," he said, when he was fourteen in 1962, when he went from a small elementary school in his hometown of Lincoln, Massachusetts, to Lincoln-Shadbury High School. Regional, very large high school "I go to school every day like I go to prison. It's a very industrial high school where unless you can prove you're outstanding enough to get into special classes Treated like a juvenile delinquent. And I just don't have the kind of mentality and morals that the whole system demands. I have long hair, I play the guitar, I listen to folk songs, I'm a hippie, and I don't have A hippie, so I was isolated."

His parents did nothing to help him change the situation.His mother, Jane Langton, was a detective story writer, and his father, William Langton, a physicist, had been "radicals" since the days of the human rights movement and the Vietnam War. "When I was in middle school, my parents would occasionally take me downtown to a sit-in for equality, or to speak at a school. We went to a lot of downtown schools, we took the bus to Washington, and we protested this, protested That. I was arrested by the police as a protester for participating in a protest.” Longton eventually graduated from high school in 1966.He said: "That was the beginning of the hippie era. So a friend of mine and I hopped on a bus that summer and went to California, where the recognition of hippies was far ahead. We went straight to Haight-A Shborley, go hear Chaplin and the Jeffersons. It was a great summer."

Unfortunately, in the fall, he had to report back to Rockford University in Illinois.In private, he didn't want to go to college at all, and the university treated him in the same way: Since his grades in middle school were always fluctuating around three points, schools like Harvard and MIT would not give his application. A categorical refusal.But his parents insisted he go to college elsewhere.Rockford University had just changed from a women's college to a liberal arts comprehensive university and was actively recruiting students. To Langton, Rockford University's new campus, nestled among cornfields, looked like a loose prison farm. "Perhaps it would be better to have barbed and razor wire fenced around the walls of the campus." Because the school was overcrowded, ten of its five hundred students were from the East Coast that year. Recruited hippies. "We got there and looked around, and it was all these filthy peasant kids and extreme right-wingers. This place was like a militia base during the American Revolutionary War. At least on the East Coast, there were movements going on, and on the In the cornfields of Illinois, time is still stuck in the McCarthy era. In central Illinois in 1966, the only way to die for hippies. When they saw me when they signed up, they put me in the women's gym section One time, a few of us had just walked into a donut shop when we were followed by some state police, and one of them said, 'I don't know who it was, but one of you guys Personal girlfriends are ugly enough.' We were kicked out of all the restaurants and no one wanted to serve us because we had long hair. The school soon began to suspect us of drug use and all the other bad things."

It was clear that the only thing to do was to go north.Longton and other "undesirable" companions began hitchhiking free along the way to the University of Wisconsin in Madison, often staying for weeks at a time. “Madison was where I stayed. The whole counterculture movement of the sixties was in Madison, and Rockford was conservative and stuffy. In Madison, there was a lot of anti-war activity, and a lot of hippies started doing drugs, so I Got into drugs too. I had an electric guitar and a friend of mine was into Albera folk music, so we went to some jam sessions very successfully. Lots of stuff going on in Madison, just none of it with It's about what you have to do in college."

Not surprisingly, Langdon was placed on academic probation just after his sophomore year at Rockford.After the fall semester ended, the school let him leave the school, and he also told the school that he was withdrawing. He said: "I wanted to stay in Madison, but I didn't have a job there, I couldn't make a living. So I had to go back to Boston, where I became more political and involved in anti-war activities." Because With no student status for deferment, he applied to the conscription board for conscientious objector status.After a long struggle, the conscription committee finally approved his application. "So I went to Massachusetts General Hospital in 1968 to perform substitute services."

Once there, of course, Longton found his niche.He would be more than happy to work on computer programming without restriction."It was a great job. I learned a lot, and I had a great time with the people," he said. But by 1972, he had no choice.Alvin, the moderator of his group, accepted a teaching position at UCLA and took the lab with him.At a loss, Langton hooked up with another psychologist's group.The team of psychologists studied the social behavior of macaques in Southeast Asia. On Thanksgiving, 1972, Langdon arrived at the Caribbean Primate Institute in the jungle, forty miles from San Juan, the capital of Podrico.

It turned out to be an unsatisfactory job.Longton really liked monkeys very much.During the experiment he spent eight to ten hours a day monitoring them, fascinated to observe their culture and how it was passed on to the next generation.Unfortunately, the people at the Primate Institute behaved too much like the monkeys they were observing."One of our experiments was to see how the social system of monkeys responds to stressful situations," Langton said. "So we gave a monkey a bit of a status in the hierarchy a bit of smoke and observed when the How does the hierarchy react when only one monkey fails to do its job.” For example, the highest-ranking male monkey should be responsible for intimidating other monkeys, mating with all the female monkeys, settling disputes, and chasing certain unruly monkeys.So when it can't take full responsibility, its domain splits into factions.The subordinate leaders are still very respectful to the leader monkey, but they will attack it from time to time, and then retreat quickly.You could see them trying to support his work, but in doing so they had to do so with the responsibility of the leader monkey, and the leader monkey was still in place, so there was a comic tension.

"And the head of the primate research center is a total alcoholic. He drinks a gallon of Bloody Maris early in the morning, and then he's too drunk all day to work and function. So the staff don't get Work is allowed, but work has to be done. All these disputes that happen are: 'You should discuss this with me!', 'I could have used these data sheets that I use to observe monkeys.',' Lift the lid off the research center.' It was just like the monkey experiment. The institute split into factions, there was some kind of revolution, the one I was a part of ended up being defeated, I was told to get out of there, and I was doing the same. Ready to get out of there."

Langton, dazed after a year in Podrico, realized it was time to get serious about life. "I can't just wander around all the time, living the day without any long-term plans." But where?He wondered if that mysterious feeling could give him some enlightenment.In Podrico, he had been thinking about this question, and he began to think that maybe, just maybe, he could follow this trail: choose cosmology and astrophysics. "I wasn't computer-qualified at the primate research center, so I didn't do any computer work that could be called a thing, but I did a lot of reading," he said.The origin of the universe, the structure of the universe, the nature of time—all these seemed to be the feeling he was looking for. "So when the primate research center got worse, I went back to Boston and started taking math and astronomy classes at Boston University." Of course, he had studied a lot of mathematics before.But Langton figured a good way would be to start from scratch. "I didn't pay attention to studying at all. I didn't go to school because I wanted to, but because I had to. It was like being squeezed from a toothpaste tube in middle school to a toothbrush in college!" Financial constraints As a result, he could only take a few courses at a time as an auditor, and worked various jobs to earn money after class.But he threw himself into his studies and did very well.Finally, a teacher with whom he had become good friends said to him: "Listen, if you really want to do astronomy, go to the University of Arizona." Boston University is really good in many subjects, but Arizona is the best astronomy in the world. capital.The university in Tucson is right in the middle of the Sonoran Desert, where the clearest, brightest, most transparent skies are.The astronomical telescope domes on the top of the mountain are scattered like mushrooms.The National Observatory at the top of Kitt Mountain is only forty miles away from the school, and its headquarters are located on the campus.You should go to the University of Arizona. Langton thought it made sense.He applied to the University of Arizona and was accepted in the fall of 1975. Langton said that he learned to dive in the Caribbean, and he likes to swim in the three-dimensional space of coral and fish.It's mesmerizing.But when he returned to Boston, snorkeling in the frigid brown waters of New England was a different story.So he played hang glider instead.He was hooked on the first day.Floating on the ground, slowly rising with the help of bursts of thermal airflow, this is the ultimate state of three-dimensional space.He became a glider maniac, bought his own hang glider, and spent every spare minute on it. That's why, in the early summer of 1975, Longton set off for Tucson with a few hang gliding friends.These partners have a car and head to San Diego.They plan to travel around the country at the slowest speed in a few months, stopping and gliding when they encounter suitable mountains.So they did, starting from the Appalachian Mountains all the way to Grandfather Mountain in North Carolina. The highest peak of Grandfather Mountain is the Blue Ridge, and its mountains have infinite scenery.In fact, it's a privately owned tourist attraction that also happens to be a perfect place to paraglider. "If the wind is right, you can hang in the air for hours!" Langton said.Indeed, when the owner of the mountain realized how many hot dogs and hamburgers he could sell while tourists watched these lunatics defy gravity, he offered Langton them a stay here for as little as twenty-five dollars a day. summer. "We couldn't possibly find a better place than here," Langton said, so they agreed to live.As a tourist holy place, Shanzhu's move was a great success.At the same time, the mountain owner himself has developed a strong interest in hang gliding, and is planning to organize a national hang gliding competition at Grandfather Mountain in late summer.Longton felt he could take advantage of the location if he played, so he stayed there all summer to practice. The accident happened on August 5th.His friends and their cars had long since left by then, and he planned to leave here the next day.He plans to report to Tucson first, then return to Grandfather Mountain to compete before the course starts.But now, he wants to practice fixed-point landings again.When doing a spot landing, you have to land exactly where you want. So he started doing the last practice of the day.The whole set of movements of the fixed-point landing was very coordinated.Since the target was a small clearing among the trees, the only way to achieve a fixed-point landing was to ascend to a certain altitude and then hover down at a near-stall speed.But the wind that day did not cooperate, which made people nervous, and it seemed impossible to succeed.Longton had already failed four times and was already feeling very frustrated.This is his last practice before the competition. "I remember thinking: 'Damn it, I'm skating too close and too high, but I'm going to try anyway. What the hell.' And then I was down to tree level, about fifty inches off the ground , I was stuck in the still air. I was too slow, and the stall height was not right. I remember thinking: 'What the hell?' I realized I was going to fall, and I was going to fall hard. Miserable, I remember thinking: 'God, I'm going to break a leg, what the hell!'" In a desperate struggle, he tried to control the speed, control the glider, and turn the glider into a dive, but couldn't, so he just Extend your legs to absorb the shock as you learned in training. "You know, you break your legs, but you can't get them back" because if your ass hits the ground, you break your spine. "I don't remember how I hit the ground, I've lost my memory by then. But I do remember lying there and knowing I fell so badly and lay there immobile, my friends came running up and at the top of the hill A lot of people who heard about this on the road also ran down the mountain. The mountain owner was taking pictures, and someone with a walkie-talkie called an ambulance. I remember it was a long time before the ambulance personnel showed up and asked me: 'Where does it hurt?' I Said: 'My whole body hurts.' I remember they mumbled something to each other and put me on the stretcher." An ambulance took Langton to the nearest emergency station down the hill, Cannon Memorial Hospital in tiny Bene Elk.Much later, he remembers lying half-conscious in the intensive care unit and hearing the nurses say to him, "Oh, you broke your legs and you have to stay here for a few weeks before you can get out of here, and Running around like before." "I was on morphine, so I took them at their word," he said. In fact, Longton was thrown to pieces.His helmet protected his head, and his legs acted as a cushion, protecting his pelvis.But he broke thirty-five bones, broke both legs, both arms, and nearly knocked his right arm out of place.He broke most of his bones and shattered a lung.His knees smashed into his face, breaking a knee, cheek, and pretty much everything else on his body."My face was basically smeared with ointment," Longton said. His eyes could not move, and his cheekbones and eye sockets were cracked, unable to support the eyes.His brain was also thrown and not quite right.Serious internal injuries were caused by a fall to the face. "They did a lot of bone setting in the emergency room and inflated my lungs," Langton said. "I didn't wake up until a day later when I was supposed to wake up normally. They were worried that I was in a vegetable state." Finally he woke up.But it took a long time to fix all his parts.He said: "I had a strange feeling of watching my mind come back to normal. I could see myself as a passive observer, my perception was knocked to pieces, it reminded me of a virtual computer, Or it's like watching the game of life. I can see the bits and pieces of the model self-organizing and reverting back to the original me in some way. I don't know how to describe it in an objective and measurable way In this case, maybe the morphine they gave me was causing these hallucinations, but it's like you break up a kingdom of ants, and then watch the ants come back together and reorganize and build up their kingdom." "My brain has also been rebuilt in this wonderful way. But I can tell that, in many ways, my mind is different. Some features are gone, though I can't say what. Like a computer crashing: I can see layers of my operating system forming, each layer more powerful than the one before. I'll wake up one morning like I've been given an electric shock, and I'll be shaking my head , it felt like I was suddenly on a very high plateau. I thought, 'Hey, I recovered! Then I realized I didn't really recover. Then, sometime in the future, I went through it all over again. experience—did I recover? or didn’t I recover?’ That’s a question I still don’t understand to this day. I had another experience of this kind a few years ago, and it was a very significant event. So, who knows? When you're on one level, you don't know what's on the higher level." Langton's accident was the worst ever seen by Banai Elk Hospital.The hospital was more used to taking in patients with gunshot wounds and ski falls.What's more serious is that Langton is doing traction from head to toe and must not move.But Langton did have some luck in one area.The owner of Cannon Memorial Hospital and the son of the founder of the hospital, Dr. Lawson Tate had studied medicine in many famous medical schools before coming to the hospital and is the highest-level orthopedic surgery expert in the country.Over the next few months, he rebuilt Langdon's shattered cheekbones, inserted supportive plastic pieces to rebuild Langdon's eye sockets, reopened acupuncture points, and reconstructed his facial bones.He patched Langdon's broken knee with skin from Langdon's butt.The misplaced right shoulder was spliced ​​so that the nerves could regrow in the paralyzed arm.By Christmas 1975, Longton was finally flown to Emerson Hospital in Concord, Mass., not far from his parents' home in Lincoln.Tate has had fourteen orthopedic surgeries on him."The doctors there were amazed how one person could endure so many surgeries," Longton said. At Concord, Longton finally recovered enough to begin practicing how to regain his body's movement, which was a long process. "I've been lying flat on my back for six months," Langton said. "A lot of the time I was in a plaster cast and my jaw was fixed with wire. My weight dropped from 180 pounds to 100 pounds. One hundred and ten pounds. I didn't do a little bit of physical rehab that whole time. So the body changed a lot during that time. You lose all your muscles, muscles just go away. All your ligaments and The tendons are all tied up. Your whole body becomes stiff, because if your joints are not flexed frequently to protect the joints and leave a certain amount of room for movement, the joints of the limbs will be covered with a substance that secretly replaces the tired cartilage , until there is no room for movement in the joints of the limbs.” "So I became an ugly ghost-like anorexic. Of course, because my upper and lower jaws were held in place with wires, the musculature that controlled the upper and lower jaws was atrophied. It took me a long time to put Mouth opened to about an inch. Eating was very difficult, chewing was very difficult. And speaking, I almost gnashed my teeth. My face became funny. My cheeks should be full and bulging, but now they are It sunk in. So my face looked like a grimace. The shape of my eye sockets was very different, and it still is.” Physiotherapists at Emerson Hospital tried to restore function to his right arm by training him to get up and walk."I rehabilitated my right arm mainly by lying flat on my back and playing guitar. I forced myself to do it. I don't care if something else happens, but I can't stop playing guitar," he said. Meanwhile, Langdon read every science book he could get his hands on.At Banner Elk, he started reading science books just after his eye sockets had been corrected and he was no longer seeing double images. “I asked people to send me books and they were trucked to me and I devoured them. Some were about cosmology. I also read math and solved math problems. But I also read a lot thinking I read Life of a Cell by Lewis Thomas. I also read a lot of philosophy of science and philosophy of evolution.” He says he doesn’t really get absorbed in books .The hospital in Banai Elk gave him antidepressants and meperidine, enough to completely anesthetize him.Moreover, his mind was still in a weird process of reorganization. "But I'm like a sponge, doing a lot of general thinking about biology, physics, the concept of the universe, and how those ideas change over time. And then there's this feeling that I've been talking about. In In thinking about all this, I have been following this feeling, but have not found any direction. Cosmology and astronomy seem to fit this feeling, but I know basically nothing about them. I am still looking, because I have not yet I don't know where it is."