Some years ago, I heard a retired Lutheran priest ponder, in radio, about the concept of a prayer, and whether, as an edge case, an unborn child could be able to pray, with the child of that age having no understanding on the required concepts. This is apparently one of those questions that people ponder under the umbrella of philosophy of religion. His conclusion was that prayer was about harmonizing one's self with the universe. It's a beautiful thought, (and I think religions, of all kinds, are really good at providing the fertile ground for thoughts like these).

It's akin to how the saying goes, that when we argue, we need to reach the same wavelength where the other one is to reach an understanding.

In communication studies or sociology or linguistics or one of those fields, there's the idea that communication is about making pacts about meanings, and finding the common ground to understand and delimit the message.

In a sense, from that basing, one could argue that understanding can be seen as an act of harmonizing. I think there's something universal in it.

Ooh thanks for the hijack! It’s so much easier to talk to someone who isn’t stuck in a picture of the brain from the 1980s.

Yes, I fall more towards the camp that a lot of our cognitive models, built from times when we didn’t have the resolution of understanding we have of the capacity of even a single neuron, and before we knew how astrocytes played a role, suffer from being an abstraction describing an abstraction. They are not tethered in the dynamics of the molecules and cells that give rise to the behavior, but rather from an interpretation of observed behavior.

This paper from the field of chronobiogy is one I’d recommend that helpfully contrasts this:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00393...

>In circadian research, the models are not proposals regarding the basic architecture of circadian mechanisms; rather, they are used to better understand the functioning of a mechanism whose parts, operations, and organization already have been independently determined. In particular, circadian modelers probe how the mechanism’s organized parts and operations are orchestrated in real time to produce dynamic phenomena—what we have called dynamic mechanistic explanation.

And what you’re describing, the enactivist description of cognition, (and 4E cognition more broadly as a framework), is one way the neuroscience community is trying to move past these issues.

Few things that give me confidence these are the right track:

1. Circadian rhythms are evolutionarily ancient. Bacteria have em. Plants have em. But different molecular tools shape very different clocks, though the same 24 hour cycle is being tracked. 2. The way these rhythms are generated is not through some central system that broadcasts the information to other regions. Instead, it’s instantiated in every cell in the body, and the behavioral rhythm is due to the synchrony between cells. Resonance absolutely plays a role, and has been well documented. The brains role, via the suprachiasmatic nucleus or SCN, is to orchestrate this synchrony, but it is not the source of the rhythms. 3. This slow rhythm definitely regulates cognition (time of day effects in learning, memory formation, recall etc are well documented), but turns out, the molecular mechanisms by which the clock responds to light hugely overlap with the molecular mechanisms of learning in the synapse, and even more recent work has shown clock proteins are actually in the synapses and synaptic activity affects the clock.

All this points to nested oscillators with cross frequency coupling, and even better, because this is all grounded in actual molecular dynamics, there’s plenty of falsifiability. The phase amplitude links are best established for the faster rhythms, the famous “brain waves”. Highly recommend György Buzsáki‘s work on this:

https://www.jneurosci.org/content/32/2/423.short

What’s missing is going down into lower frequency rhythms, and testing how exactly they all couple. We have a lot of the pieces, but no single experimental paradigm that has looked at the full sweep over different times in the same organism. It’s not easy to do, but we’ll get there.

Clock disruption, depending on how you do it, has huge impacts on time perception, cognition, memory, aging AND consciousness. As that data and evidence gets more and more saturated, I hope we see more studies account for chronotype and the internal dynamical state of their test subjects when assessing outcomes.

Obviously I’m biased (also did chronobiology in school), but hopefully I’ve left you curious. Happy to answer more questions all this may have set off.