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Neurocity
Matthew Fuller
A new report published this week by researchers at the Center
for Neural Science at New York University and corroborated by
additional research from the University of Cologne Medical Branch
has provided the most compelling description to date of the cellular
basis of learning and memory in the vertebrate brain and its relationship
to the development of urban structures.
In the human brain the process of memory formation is thought to occur at the connection sites, known as synapses, between neighbouring nerve cells. Activity in particular pathways in the brain somehow alters the strength and position of these connections so that the pathway remembers its previous activity. Each time the pathway is triggered, the connections become further strengthened and the pathway easier to activate. At the same time, alternative experiences are able to weaken or re-organise links.
Much of the research done in this area has been developed through the scientific use of rats. Fear-conditioning is a technique originally developed by Pavlov. It is associated with experiments where he managed to make caged dogs respond by salivating or attempting to hide when hearing noises that they learn signal the arrival of either food or an electric shock. In recent years, Pavlov's theories and experimental technique have become widely discredited as cruel and unethical in their use of animals and their easy use as support for the idea that human beings are also simple programmable machines. However, several contemporary researchers have revised this one-sided popular understanding of his work. They suggest that we must now look at behavioural conditioning of this sort as an aid to learning and not as a form of primitive mind-control.
Taking this development one step further, the researchers have suggested that there is compelling evidence not only that synapse strength and subsequent nerve cell activity levels change during a learning process inside the human mind, but that this neural structure of connection or disconnection is in addition quite discernible outside of the human body.
Possibly the most visible result of the human presence on planet earth is the development of cities. The result of massive technical and economic effort, they are at once the sites where the most profound elements of human culture are achieved alongside the meeting of peoples' most basic needs for food and shelter. They exist as political spaces which twist in and out of their location as geographical spaces, and geographical spaces which themselves mutate under the energy rush of communications and other influences. Whilst it is easy to recognise the part that human reason has played in the historical development of the urban environment, new scientific theories propose that much of our environment has come about as the result of an interplay at a very deep level between our neural structure and chemical matter in the form of material culture, of buildings and urban infrastructure.
Just as a new experience produces new memory pathways and sublimates older ones in the brain, the use of cities can now be seen to be similarly effective. Learning a new way to get from one place to another; opening up an old building; connecting a certain type of activity between areas; building a new road; writing graffiti on a wall; increasing the price of land; choosing to open or close a window; making a telephone call; the movement of a forbidden commodity; a car crash; evicting residents; gentrification; pollution; from grand projects to litter - all effect the city in the same way as the development of new synaptic connections reformats the brain. The effects also travel in both directions. As the city changes, so also does the structure of the human nervous system.
As suprising as these discoveries might sound, they are not new. Much of what is known as urban planning has long been an attempt to channel, hide or control this nervous activity. Whilst cities have even been subject to psychotic attacks in the form of earthquakes, they have also developed evidence of other forms of psychological condition. The erection and destruction of the Berlin Wall and its subsequent distribution around the world as a relic of another time; the way in which what is ostensibly a form of communication -the building of a road - is often used as a way in which to separate working class areas from expensive property developments; the removal of gardens to the roofs of skyscrapers, are all representative of certain synaptic connections within the city.
As a discipline, the field is extraordinarily varied and subtle. It is one that scientists of many fields often draw from without being fully aware of its full extent. The new publications from the centres at New York and Cologne however, reveal a diversity and richness of research and practice that has often only been open to those with the largest of scientific budgets: the military. Now, as a contribution to the wider understanding of this work some of the primary material gathered by the centres has been made available to the public.
The following transcript is a section of a data-stream intercepted and machine transcribed from a United States military satellite in geo-stationary orbit over Honshu. A record of exactly one-half of a millisecond?s activity for one of the satellites sixty-four processors, it represents a typical example of a neurological reading of an urban situation:
...remains inside trousers of Mayors assistant demonstrating to
his colleague how easily and invisibly he could please himself
with his pocket whilst listening to customers. Door jamb of the
Chanel shop in Mido-Suji Avenue aligned with a squall of water
leaving the gills of a tiger shark captive in the city aquarium.
The torque of a skateboard as it swerves past a lamppost. The
form of the ghost misalignment of the walls of Osaka castle with
its ancient ruins re-emerging as a pattern of ripples in the sake
cup of a drunk cashier speeding at 20kmph along the Hanshin Expressway
towards Kobe as he passes underneath an NTT billboard advertising
a campaign for compulsory connectivity for all SOHO workers. The
memory of giant plastic crab with mechanical arms in the mid of
a ten-month old baby connected to a cold water tap on the fifth
floor of the Festival Gate. Two maps, a tourist brochure, an article
from a copy of the Japan Times taking a feed from Nature News
Service in collision with the jet-lagged mind of a stupid tourist
and a collection of photographs published by the Tokyo Neuro-Geography
Unit in 1996. A telephone exchange meeting its double ...
Inter Medium Institute,
Osaka, December 1997
© Matthew Fuller