A Neuro-Psychological Model of Thinking for Footballers

This model of neuro-psychology that I present largely represents neurons of the semantic and linguistic system spatially situated in the left cerebral hemisphere of the neo-cortex which involve clusters of nerve cells in what has been called Wernike's and Broca's areas respectively. This hypothesis can be seen to be based upon the axiom, "What wires together, fires together".

I must forewarn you that I have no qualifications at all in neuroscience, I have never studied at all at a university, and I am presently laying on a mat, in a green field without reference to academic source material that one could gain from the internet or from reading specialised books. This methodology therefore may simultaneously reveal both my prior learning and my ignorance, or both, but please remember, this presentation is only a model or a map and can be updated or reinterpreted in the light of new information. This hypothesis then becomes a map of how my nervous system likes to think about thinking and not of the concrete, objective, or absolute world-out-there, or in here, or both, if it all that could ever be known. 

Specialised cortical neurons represent singular digits or units of information, each digit, or unit is an analog representational processor that becomes connected to other digits, or units of similar association, thus one could have a neuron that represents "ball" connected to a neuron that represents the information for "pitch" connected to a neuron that represents "goal" and "team", "shirt", "red", "badge" and so on and so forth. 

Freud's analytic methodology of "Free Association" whereby he would have the patient or analysand speaking words randomly that appeared into their awareness can give us a rudimentary diagram of which neurons have become connected to which neurons. The longer it takes one to arrive at the next word association may reveal a weaker link or that the connecting cell is much further away which could involve the analysand repressing the associated chain and rejoining at an alternate point. The neuronal digit that represents the information for "jacket" may be further apart than the neuron which represents the information for the word "leaf", but "leaf" and "tree" maybe directly wired and "jacket" and "leather", and maybe "motorbike", maybe similarly connected. Connections may be axonic arborisations that fuse the axon bouton together with the secondary neuron's dendrite.   

Chemical neurotransmitter molecules cross synaptic clefts consisting of extra-cellular plasm and funnel through dendritic receptor sites, like a key in a lock which can stimulate the increase in potential for potassium ions inside the cell to escape through sub-aqueous pores in the membrane into the outside of the cell which through electro-static forces, distillation, and equilibrium balance send chemical cascades of jostling sodium ions into the cell through specialised voltage gated ion channels nestled in the lipid bi-layer.

When a certain voltage level has been attained electricity called an action potential fires from the axon hillock and becomes rekindled anew inside the cell below the individual nodes that are the spaces between each insulatory sheaf of myelin, the firing seems stop, start, rather than a singular and continual spike. The action potential is directional toward the axon terminal where the action potential stimulates vesicles which are containers filled with neurotransmitter molecules which motivate towards the axon's bouton which then releases the neurotransmitter molecules into the synaptic cleft to potentially renew the sequence again. The CNS seems to function like a complex organic stimulus-response machine. 

The processes seem complex and are not fully understood, but seemingly structural physiological processes become psychological function so in my modelling; the electricity, or action potential passing through the nerve cell becomes the conscious information that lights up when stimulated. Maybe we see a ball in the garden and think, "pitch", "goal", and maybe an impressed memory of a specific goal boots up from the hippocampus, like Wayne Rooney's overhead kick against Manchester City, or we may stimulate clusters in the visual cortex and see the apparent greenness of the grass and the neo-cortex responds; maybe we should stop messing around and go out onto the field and play?!  

The more complex the individual thinker, the more arborisations and connections they may have wired to individual nerve cells. 

If the primary neuron is let's say the analog representation that processes the information for "car", then this neuron may be connected to secondary, tertiary, quaternary , so on and so forth, neurons that represent the information for "wheel", "road", "bonnet", "boot" (or "trunk"), "engine", etc. There may be thousands of connections to a single neuron that in turn may have thousands of other connections. One may seem a little weird if one's secondary association to the nerve cell that contains the information for "car" is "Octopus", "What do you think if I say car?" - "Uh, Octopus", until upon further questioning one learns to understand the individual drives a car with an Octopus logo painted across the bonnet, or hood, depending on the regional language of one's geographical locale.

The Octopus can now lead us into the awareness that environmental associations can impinge themselves on and thus manipulate cellular physiology into twinning separate nerve fibres so that one "thinks" of the information from the primary neuron with an artificially stimulated secondary neuron. The secondary neuron is the strongest associational bond, that which one "thinks" first, which can be conditioned by such external environmental triggers as movies, television, newspapers, advertising, novel-environmental settings, word-of-mouth, and can become weaker through the removal of the conditioning stimuli and time. For example, one sells one's car with the Octopus painted bonnet and several years have past so that the previous association has become weaker through lack of usage and the secondary association when I ask "What do you think if I say car?" is "Graffiti!" Upon further questioning one learns that the individual's car was painted by the rather brilliant artist Zio Ziegler.   

Unscrupulous agencies of government, working through media can and do literally wire the cellular biology and physiology of neurons in the CNS using the methodological technique of associational conditioning that forges cellular twinnings and pairings, so that through association we have become arbitrarily conditioned into stereotypical robot responses that link things like "mental illness" and "violence" or/and "anarchy" and "bombs" together which before the 20th century were not correlated at all, anarchy simply meant, "without rulers". My employment of the latter two examples is an attempt at bringing to one's attention how our nervous systems can become artificially and arbitrarily brainwashed or hardwired so as to be able to formulate meta-cognitive perspectives to counterbalance rather than strengthen those presumably already conditioned bonds which can lead us as individuals into further reinforced prejudices.