International Encyclopedia of Systems and Cybernetics

In his paper: "Unidad biológica de cerebro y mente", J.M. RODRIGUEZ DELGADO (1993, p.265-6) shows that the brain do structure and organize itself by way of the learning process. The following facts can be mustered in support of such an opinion:

1. We do not remember our first infancy precisely because our brain had not yet created many of the structures needed to register most events.

2. Our mental faculties can express themselves only through what we have learned. DELGADO points out for example, that "Most of western people are illiterate respect to Chinese, Arabic or other languages… because they did not learn the corresponding reference frame" (p.261).

3. The so-called wolf children, even when back to civilization, are very difficult to educate "because their brain did not receive the needed sensorial stimulations and grew up without language, a fact which produces grave anatomical, neuro-chemical and functional deficiencies" (p.266).

This basic fact has been thus stated by H.von FOERSTER: "I believe that the ultimate reason… systems should learn at all is that learning enables them to make inductive references. In other words, in order to enhance the chance of survival, the system should be able to compute future events from past experience".

As stated by V. ROWLAND: "… the organization of learning involves the development of timing within ensembles of neurons that enable the organism… to have the timing of all elemental processes brought into coherence with the activity of a total ensemble" (1976, p.124).

This understanding is consonant with the autopoietic concept of organizational closure. In J.L. LOCKE words: "Long before they utter a word, infants are talking themselves into a language" (1994, p.436). It seems to be a kind of endogenous organizational process, based on preexistent physiological structures, and on selective interpenetration reactions to the perception of external events.