If you’re a new visitor to the Dark Gift, this FAQ is a good place to start. I update the FAQ regularly. Latest edits: June 26, 2024
Q: I’m an academic and I don’t see any references or citations on the Dark Gift! What is the source of all your material about neuroscience, consciousness, and autism? Can't you please cite the publications you're drawing your articles and arguments from?
Though my PhD is in mathematical neuroscience, I am not an academic and am not motivated by the incentives and drives that motivate working professors. In particular, my central interest is explaining the science of Mind to the general public.
Most of the science here on the Dark Gift is derived from the research of Stephen Grossberg and Gail Carpenter. As I’ve written elsewhere [and will soon post in an article here], I believe Dr. Grossberg is the second greatest scientist in human history, after Isaac Newton who earned the top stop by inventing human science single-handedly (though Newton tied all his science to his private deity, Ancient of Days).
Briefly, Grossberg is the second greatest scientist because, at first single-handedly and then with the help and support of Gail Carpenter, he became the first scientist to comprehensively and accurately mathematize the neural dynamics of most major functions of the human brain. In terms of his mathematical and conceptual contributions, they are greater than Einstein’s theory of relativity and the modern account of quantum physics combined.
How can I say this? The dynamics of aimlessness (physics) is characterized by a mathematics that is easier to compute and far more intuitive for humans to think about than the dynamics of purpose (mindscience). This is amply demonstrated by the fact that physicists raced through their understanding of the physical sciences during the Renaissance and Victorian ages without the aid of computational devices—classical mechanics, classical electromagnetism, statistical physics, atomic theory, and so on and so forth, while mindscience didn’t meaningfully get started until the late 1950s when Grossberg, at the age of 17, created the first mathematical model of the neural dynamics of a high-level function of the human brain—and indeed, one of the most sophisticated and inscrutable brain modules on Earth, the When module which stores and retrieves lists of items of indeterminate length.
Though Newton’s breakthroughs were quickly built upon by his peers, Grossberg’s breakthroughs were ignored by the mindscience community in the 1950s, 60s, 70s, and 1980s, even after he correctly identified the neural dynamics that embody consciousness in the early 1980s. This ignorance was due to a simple and unflattering reason: working mindscientists simply did not possess the mathematical chops to comprehend Grossberg’s work. Which, again, is based upon mathematics more challenging than what physicists wrestle with, both in its raw complexity and because it’s different math than what physical scientists are familiar with, and so nobody has any background or training in the math of the mind.
The only way to get exposed to the math is to get exposed to Grossberg’s work. Or read the Dark Gift. Or study the mind yourself and wrestle with how it works, for then you’ll converge onto Grossberg’s math independently, just as anybody who studies electricity independently will converge onto James Maxwell’s math.
And today, in 2024, the universal ignorance of the math of neural dynamics hasn’t really changed. Now there’s maybe a few dozen folks across the planet who understand Grossberg’s mathematical account of the brain, which encompasses detailed evidence-based models of vision, hearing, motor control, planning, navigation, emotion, social cognition, targeting, creating, memory, language, free will, and consciousness.
The bulk of the science you will find here on the Dark Gift is derived from Grossberg’s daunting magnum opus, Conscious Mind, Resonant Brain.
The rest is from Dr. Sai Gaddam and I’s extension of Grossberg & Carpenter’s mathematical framework, Journey of the Mind: How Thinking Emerged from Chaos, which contains plentiful citations for the reference-hungry.