Tone of Voice and Mind : The Connections between Intonation ...

Synchronization 185
amplified cellular sensitivity, i.e., synchronized bursts of receptivity and reactivity
to their environments through the coordination of many cells working
in concert.
I suggest that such amplified sensitivity, typical of the more highly evolved
animal species, can be considered as the smallest unit of “awareness.” It is, in
essence, nothing more than neuronal “openness”–particularly that during the
action potential, but it takes on qualities that are not seen at the single-cell
level due to the temporal coordination of the action potentials of many neurons.
In other words, awareness is a product of animal nervous systems – the
result of the synchronous firing of neurons engaged in sensory, motor and/or
cognitive functions, but the functional unit is the cellular sensitivity exhibited
during the action potential. The magnitude of animal awareness is therefore
a function of the number of neurons involved in synchronous activity, their
level of activity and the precise timing of their firing relative to one another.
As a consequence, larger brains and waking, metabolically active brains will in
general have the potential for greater awareness – the simultaneous, momentary
“feeling” of the biochemical surroundings of many nerve cells. The kind of
feeling that an animal organism will experience is necessarily a function of the
set of simultaneously active neurons: Just as individual neurons do not perform
“cognition,” but rather execute simple excitatory or inhibitory response functions,
the summation of which is the information-processing of whole brains
known as “cognition,” an individual neuron does not “feel” anything beyond
its own surrounding biochemistry, but, when acting in concert with many neurons,
the summation of the sensations of many neurons produces a total “feeling”
for the current state of the “external world” –a feeling of awareness that
depends directly on what subset of neurons within the nervous system are synchronized.
It is specifically the simultaneity of a large number of cells opening
up to the environment that produces a “feeling” in the organism as a whole,
and it is the specific locations and patterns of connectivity that will determine
the psychological content of the feeling. With regard to both sensitivity and
information-processing, the single-neuron event is well understood, but the
related whole-brain events of awareness and cognition can be understood only
by extrapolation.
The lowly paramecium provides convincing evidence attesting to the fact
that “sensitivity” and “reactivity” do not require a nervous system of any kind
(Figure 7-1). If that single-cell organism is prodded mechanically at its rostral
end, the cell membrane reacts with pore opening, the in-flow of ions, a change
in intracellular pH, and consequently a reversal in the flagellating hairs on the
cellular surface: the paramecium backs up. If it is prodded at its caudal end, a