7. Free Will and Executive Functions

• Phase Transitions and Psychopathology by James Brody, 2/18/98
  
  

Kauffman's suggestion in regard to the balance of chaos and stasis, the narrow range of evolutionary creativity, applies regardless of the nature of informational links between units. Sensory input, neurons, or wires. Genes as well. Phase transitions are a function of the number of interconnections between logic units, whether germs, neurons, or stars. The mathematics of these phenomena demand that the creative interval, that has variability and durability, be associated with an average of three inputs to each decision unit. One or two produce stasis; four, chaos. The former characterized by unchanging, boring forms, the latter by a failure of organization and no enduring structures on which natural selection can work.

Sometimes we access those units through the tricks of "learning and free will," recent gifts of natural selection, and sometimes by checking with our allies, especially, if we are wise, allies who don't agree with us. Any cognitive module, any PA can be switched in a binary fashion, from inactivity to maximum focus. The phenomena of obsessions, panic, and rage depend on impairment to whatever competing reaction systems that might have been called into play. There is a reduction of parallel processing whether due to excessive arousal of a single module (that suppresses all others via lateral inhibition), to head injury, or the social analog of a coalition dispersing. Even the repetitive tunes that I sometimes hear seem to be most likely when I am tired or under substantial stress. I commonly see an inability to find options when my clients are pressured. For example, Susie didn't think of finding a babysitter in her own block or of passing her cancellation fee to the sitter who failed to keep an appointment.

Some Psychological Adaptations (Barkow, et al, 1992) are likely to be activated in an analog manner, simply because they are phylogenetically older. Pennington (1991) speculates that newly evolved structures, such as those underlying language, may be easily disrupted because there is less redundancy. This possibility is amplified because of the anatomical arrangements. Newer structures seem to be near the top, on the surface of the ball, where information has further to travel than if it located more medially... Things have to be slower to allow interaction of spaced units. More central locations are associated with fewer units while allowing greater and faster reciprocal access. Moving up meant that action routines could be more specialized, that reflex subtlety could occur; cross talk still depended on things happening more slowly. Thus, the advantage of response inhibition ... waiting needed for other things to happen cogntively. Impulse inhibition, a chicken or egg?)

Free Will is often confused with an Ability to Argue. However, arguing and oppositional behavior are often highly bound to immediate stimuli. Behavior shifts with a shift in social cues. (I once nudged an oppositional gentleman onto a low dose of medication by stating to him, "Of course you would NEVER consider taking ..." He reacted beautifully with "I dunno, I'd think about it." He didn't but he did and it worked.) Free Will may be conceived instead as the ability to plan activity for Friday but on a Monday and then to stick to that plan when Friday eventually arrives.

Barkley (1997) discusses Free Will as an expression of Executive Functions, bits of mental behavior that direct other bits. He also sees EFs as elaborations of response inhibition, our ability to wait. (Note re EFs and Waiting foundation) There are many creatures who can "wait" and who seem little endowed with EFs. Nonetheless, EFs exist in humans and include the building of memory layers perhaps by rehearsing immediately past events. These memories become a future reference, allowing for a growing sense of the Self and of time. The next step occurs when we process past experiences before acting, using memory to project imaginary futures, to plan and to share those plans with each other. Finally we can suppress emotional responses (themselves an older, global device for ensuring task persistence) and search for options before we act. We also have the perhaps unusual capacity to kindle emotional surges artificially, as if we reach into an older quiver for a trusted weapon in order to accomplish boring but needed things ahead of deadlines. The temporal cushion then becomes valuable for making "last minute" corrections in our plans.

The Kauffman model is consistent with Barkley's description of EFs. This is no great surprise since both gifted theoreticians describe similar events. Kauffman's notions have the additional contribution of predicting that more complex behaviors are a function of more interconnections, and not necessarily a function of cell bodies. Kauffman allows us to be less dependent on response inhibition as a foundation of either the EFs or of Free Will.

We should be less surprised that brain scans, of any resolution, do not reveal missing nucle or variations in metabolic activity that could account for impulse disorders. Measures that reflect the number and types of inputs to different cell assemblies for specific psychological adaptations should be highly productive. It is has been a waste to look for differences in the size of brain centers as a basis of ADHD. Data generated since 1991 is inconsistent with regard to males; females show diffuse changes that are also difficult to characterize. The data is consistent with an extrapolation from Kauffman that impulse disorders reflect a problem not with the number of neurons but with the density of interconnections. Treatments that correct cortical arousal patterns (stimulants, exercise, shorter tasks, increased blood flow, among others) seem to increase sustained task performance. On the other hand, stark MRI patterns shown with OCD should be less surprising.

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