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2. Rhythms of Life
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Neuroscience & Karma
Some programs are performed with basic rhythms that are intrinsic to a cell group in the brain. From our first breath to our last gasp, the nerve-cells of the respiratory centers go through rhythmical changes that provide us with oxygen by breathing. These are nerve-cells that never come to rest, incidentally showing that repose and sleep, whatever they are for, are not essential for basic nervous functions. Also there are sensors in the lungs and in certain sites along the arteries that measure the amounts of oxygen and carbon dioxide in the blood and send messages to the respiratory centers, producing an increase or decrease in the rate of breathing.
Many other programs seem much more exciting than respiration, say the program for speaking or for loving. But let us not despise breathing, after all it is essential and has provided us with a simple example of understanding the brain.
Nearly all the more important programs are compounds of rhythms with periodicities initiated within the organism and stimuli provided from outside. When we eat, drink, we use programs that involve internal rhythms. They are initiated by learned or unlearned instincts which command appropriate action to meet the need and produce the satisfaction of consummation or fulfillment. Both the internal changes and external stimuli are essential for the satisfactory action. It may be recalled that the programs are written by the various sub-species of bodymaking (nāma) karman as well as life-span-determining (āyuṣya) karman in the features of bodily and nervous anatomical and physiological organization that ensures the performance of these actions.
3. Interaction of Feeling and Behavior
Nerve-cells and their connections are organized into higher assemblies of neurons that operate reflex actions such as blinking or drawing away the hand from a hot plate. But the behaviour even of simple animals, cannot be described as the consequence only of reflexes, as if they were puppets performing a series of movements dictated by the environment. In man, as indeed in all animals, much of the impetus to
