Lecturing and performing on the football pitch are very complex motor routines that depend on an intact neocortex with access to new declarative information via the hippocampus (Corkin 2002). Complete ablation or the severe reduction of the neocortex (as found in hydrocephalic patients) does not abolish the righting reflex, walking, swimming, grooming, feeding, fighting, and the wake-sleep cycles (Merker 2007; Vanderwolf 2007), but it has a profound impact on the concatenation of thinking and body movements, which depend on stored and retrievable declarative information in the neocortex (Dickey et al. 2022). This access to declarative information allows for hygienic behavior, the efficient manipulation of objects, food collection, home building, maternal behavior, adaptive courting/mating behavior, and pro-social behavior, as evidenced mainly in rodents with ablated neocortices including the hippocampus (Vanderwolf et al. 1978). These deficits can be generalized to humans.
Homeless individuals have largely given up on themselves and are in a state of depression, which is realized via the catecholamine system (Nutt et al. 2007; note that serotonergic drugs were useless in ameliorating my depression). Homelessness is very visible on the main streets of Houston TX, for example (see Figs. 1 and 2). George Orwell, who wrote “Down and Out in Paris and London”, described it thus through his personal observations that it is not the lack of food that is the most devastating part of homelessness but the lack of purpose that pushes people over the edge. Extreme ‘visible’ depression is caused by a 98% reduction of dopamine (the volitional neurotransmitter) in the ventral tegmental area/substantia nigra, which stops one’s train of thought and movement and can lead to death (Fuentes per. com 2011; Sacks 1976, 2012), and dopaminergic fibres innervate all the association areas of neocortex, especially those of the frontal lobes (Berger et al. 1986, 1988; Haber and Fudge 1997; Maqbool et al. 1993; Mogenson 1977; Toonen et al. 1998). It is a sufficient level of dopamine that ‘motivates’ a healthy flow of information and hence consciousness in individuals. It is no surprise that cocaine, which potentiates the effect of dopamine, is the drug of choice by many Wall Street executives (Duff 2017).
Figure 1: Main Street that passes through the downtown area of Houston (TX) is illustrated in blue starting at the bottom center-left of the map and passing through the Medical Center to terminate at the top of the map in the downtown area.
Figure 2: Main Street in Houston is peppered with homeless people, which starts as soon as one approaches the downtown Greyhound bus station (next to Highway 45) while walking from the Medical Center next to the Houston Zoo (Fig. 1). The photograph is of downtown Houston. From the Houston Chronical.