To find the universe’s most exotic object, you don’t need to look into deep space for quasars, black holes or other astronomical phenomena. Nor do you need to go the opposite route, into the subatomic realm of quarks, gluons and superstrings. You’re reading this article with it — the human brain. This three-pound marvel can make more connections among its 100 billion neurons than the number of particles in the universe. The number of particles is estimated to be about 10 followed by 79 zeroes. The number of possible neural circuits: 10 followed by at least 1 million zeroes.

Neuroscience is the study of this almost incomprehensibly complicated object. It’s an absurdly self-referential effort: thousands of highly trained human brains trying to understand the human brain. Arguably, La Jolla, with its great center of learning and research, has the greatest concentration of these trained brains than anywhere else in the world. The canyons and buildings on Torrey Pines Mesa can be viewed as a topographical analog for the cortical corrugations and folds of a vast meta-brain.

In 1993, that concentrated talent gained a new member: The Neurosciences Institute. Independent, existing only on private donations, The Neurosciences Institute was designed as a “monastery of science,” says its director, Nobel Prize winner Gerald Edelman, who founded the Institute in New York at Rockefeller University in the early 1980s. The Institute has just started a fund-raising program to ensure its 40 faculty members and associated visiting researchers will have the financial security to pursue their daring and controversial work.

Daring: impatient with incremental advances, The Neurosciences Institute encourages its faculty and fellows to take giant conceptual leaps to understand the most profound metaphysical challenge of all, the origin and functioning of human consciousness.

Controversial: prominent scientists have vigorously attacked the astonishing hypothesis put forth by Edelman on how consciousness functions, calling it either trivial or self-contradictory. Likening the development and functioning of neurons to life forms in Darwinian evolution, Edelman calls his theory “neural Darwinism” or “neuronal group selection.” Fellow Nobel laureate Francis Crick at the nearby Salk Institute for Biological Studies famously retorted that the theory should really be called “neural Edelmanism.”

Undeterred, the 70-year-old Edelman points to work the young Institute already has accomplished. For example, its researchers have demonstrated that instinctive behavior can be transferred from quails to chickens by transplanting brain regions. In the March issue of the journal Science, Institute researchers published the startling finding that fruit flies sleep in a manner that deeply parallels mammalian sleep. The research may enable researchers to use fruit flies as models for testing drugs and gene therapies for sleep disorders.

In dry-lab work, Neurosciences Institute researchers also model aspects of brain function in machines. Ergo, meet Nomad, a short metallic cylinder with wheels for locomotion, a photosensor for an eye and grasping arms that can detect electrical conductivity. Most importantly, Nomad is linked by radio to a computer simulation of neurons that controls the device. These neurons, imbued with certain biases such as a preference for conductive objects, control Nomad. Acting on its own, the device patrols a square that’s lined with cubes marked with dots or either horizontal or vertical stripes. Over time, Nomad “learns” which blocks are conductive, and preferentially moves in their direction.

What’s important to note, Edelman says, is that although the device’s brain is simulated in a computer, no one programmed it to make an association between stripes or dots and a block’s electrical conductivity. Nomad did that on its own, by interacting with the environment.

Perhaps most importantly, Nomad makes mistakes. In fact, mistakes are the only way the device can learn — a trait Nomad has in common with a newborn baby learning how to grasp things.

A machine that learns from its mistakes. Not a computer, Edelman stresses, but a learning machine. Here’s an ennobling irony: If Edelman’s hypothesis is correct, computers as they now exist never can and never will possess consciousness or replace mankind. But by understanding brain behavior and baking these concepts into silicon chips, mankind’s own wetware may be the guide to replacing computers.

All this learning and research takes money, and the Neurosciences Institute has kicked off a campaign to raise a $100 million endowment. Invested conservatively, that money will throw off half the funding needed to support the Institute. The other half will be raised on an ongoing basis, says David L. Mitchell, director of institute relations.

In addition, the Institute wants to establish ties with the business community to commercialize its discoveries. It would be a friendly but “arm’s-length” relationship to ensure the Institute’s focus on basic research remains undiluted, Edelman states. Possibilities include development of learning machines that can do industrial jobs requiring flexibility beyond that of traditional computer-programmed robots. Indeed, Nomad’s “brain” already has brought at least one major toy manufacturer down to the Institute to talk about commercial possibilities.

“Having the focus and urgency of a real world application could only be helpful to us, not only in a fiscal sense, by having equity and royalties, but in the sense that our culture and that (business) culture could interact without demonizing each other,” Edelman says. “Someone is going to make billions of dollars out of these ideas.”

But Edelman says he doesn’t envision the Institute becoming some gargantuan creation. Its number of resident faculty is capped at 40 to avoid bureaucracy.

“Whom the gods would destroy, they first make large, especially if you want to be creative,” Edelman quips.

The faculty tends to be young, and its members selected not so much for what they’ve done but for their potential to achieve and test bold ideas. Such bold ideas are not often rewarded in government grants, he says, hence the necessity of private support. “There’s a lot of good science going on, but it’s pretty hard to do breakthrough science, which usually needs patience, uniqueness, individuality, courage and lack of bureaucracy,” Edelman says. “Efficiency is the death of poetry.”

From Darwin To Antibodies To Minds

The road to Edelman’s concept of consciousness begins with the 1972 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine, which he shared with the British researcher Rodney R. Porter. Their research elucidated the structure of antibodies and how these immune system proteins are made by genetic recombination.

Some antibodies are attached to certain white blood cells called lymphocytes. The antibodies are configured in a way that allows them to “dock” with foreign substances called antigens. When an antigen fits a particular antibody, an immune response is triggered and more identical copies of that lymphocyte are made to combat the invader.

It was once thought that the antibodies molded themselves around the antigens, “instructing” the body how to recognize the antigens. However, the immune system works by chance and selection, producing billions of different antibody configurations. When one by happenstance fits an antigen, that antibody configuration is selected and more copies of the lymphocyte which produced that antibody are made.

Edelman says this is a profound reflection of Darwinian concepts of natural selection among populations, but of populations of lymphocytes instead of organisms. The key is that Darwinism is blind; it only acts for the moment and only functions because populations vary. In organisms, that variation comes from differences in genetic makeup. In lymphocytes, the antibody configurations vary. In organisms, the end result is a population that is better fitted to its environment. In immunology, the end result is an immune response that adapts itself to better fight foreign intruders when they next appear.

Edelman says Darwinism, with its emphasis on interaction with the environment, provides a way out of a conceptual trap: the tendency to think of the brain as a computer, with neurons functioning as transistors and programmed with instructions that give rise to consciousness. The trouble with that idea is brains vary considerably from person to person in the exact organization of their neurons and even the number of neurons. Moreover, there are far too few genes to specify the individual position of each neuron. Instead, genes act as a recipe, but the exact developmental path of each brain is shaped by its own individual history as it encounters environmental conditions.

Finally, Edelman points out that brains are famously flexible, able to compensate for partial injuries as its intact parts readapt. Computers are brittle; break a part or feed it incorrect code and it’s likely to stop functioning (a phenomenon well known to those whose computers run Microsoft Windows).

Neural Darwinism, or neuronal group selection, holds that neurons are not hard-wired, but adapt themselves to their environment in a way that successful neural circuits are reinforced, and useless or harmful circuits are eliminated. “Neurons that fire together, wire together,” is Edelman’s felicitous description in his book “A Universe of Consciousness.”

Although for survival reasons a baby is born with certain reflexes and preferences — a baby without a sucking instinct would never survive in nature — its interactions with the environment set corresponding loops and ripples of activity among sets of neurons. These patterns are often overlapping and seem wasteful from the standpoint of an efficient programmer. However, the ambiguity of these patterns is precisely what’s necessary to create an adaptive creature that can survive in an unpredictable environment.

“Now we know from animal behavior and our own behavior that as sloppy as it is, that sloppiness is accompanied by an enormous variability and flexibility against novelty,” Edelman says. “Suppose you were to go hunting in a swamp for birds, on a rainy day, and I offered you an Air Force computer tracking system. Would you take that or would you take a dog?”

However, some renowned scientists such as Crick say they are unimpressed with Edelman’s theories of the brain. Dr. Terrence Sejnowski, a Salk Institute faculty member, says the theory isn’t Darwinian, because there is no differential reproduction in a population of parents and offspring. That Sejnowski would disagree with Edelman can be discerned from his work in computational neurology; he co-authored a 1992 publication entitled “The Computational Brain.”

“I’ve tried reading a few of them, but I’ve never managed to get through them because they’re so turgidly written,” Sejnowski says.

In a milder tone, Sejnowski’s complaint that Edelman writes obscurely is echoed by some of his admirers, such as Dr. Oliver Sacks, the neurologist and famed author of “Awakenings” and “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat.” In a review of Edelman’s “Bright Air, Brilliant Fire,” Sacks concedes the book is “dense and difficult,” but adds that, “if one reads and reads again, the stubborn paragraphs finally yield their meaning, and a brilliant and captivating new vision of the mind emerges.”

A personal Web site devoted to books on the brain includes a page entitled “Why Edelman is a Hard Read.” The page’s creator, John William Schmidt, faults Edelman for using words that may not be familiar to his intended audience. However, Schmidt writes on the site that he thinks “Edelman is on the right track” with his concepts. The page can be found at www.geocities.com/ResearchTriangle/System/8870/books/Edelman.html.

It also is possible to take another view: that consciousness, and especially self-consciousness, is such an extraordinarily complex phenomenon that any easy-to-understand explanation would be automatically suspect.

Amid his allegedly turgid prose, Edelman responds in “Bright Air, Brilliant Fire” to criticisms that his theory is not Darwinian and doesn’t explain what it purports to. Although there is no parent-and-child relationship between neurons, Edelman says the successive waves of reinforcing or weakening connections play that role in the brain. Moreover, he points to research on neurons in the visual cortex conducted by Wolf Singer and Reinhard Eckhorn as demonstrating discrete groups of neurons engaging in patterns of neural firing.

“It is crucial to recognize that while the principles of the sciences of recognition (evolution, immunity and brain science) are shared, their mechanisms must obviously be different,” Edelman writes in the book, challenging critics to either falsify neuronal group selection or to show how other theories better explain brain function.

Independent, Yet Part of San Diego

Even before a visitor enters The Neurosciences Institute, one of its values becomes apparent: a belief that art and science belong together. The building itself at 10640 John Jay Hopkins Drive, with its swooping granite walls, angled windows and courtyard watercourse, manages to be impressive and understated at the same time. Like the nearby Hilton Torrey Pines, it’s built into a hillside so people driving by on North Torrey Pines Road might not even notice it. A tunnel passes underneath the road to The Scripps Research Institute, where Edelman heads the department of neurobiology.

The Institute’s love of art is best embodied in the 352-seat auditorium that is regularly made available for local music groups such as the La Jolla Chamber Music Society, Mainly Mozart and the Athenaeum Music Arts Library. The Institute makes it available free for community groups.

“We also have a music program here, in which we’re studying music in the brain,” says Edelman, an accomplished amateur violinist. “We think if we do all of that right, there’ll be a certain focus in that whole area, because we don’t think science and art should be yanked apart.”

The Institute’s fund-raising drive is intended to provide security for these efforts, says Mitchell, the director of institute relations. Although a small organization at 40 resident faculty members, the center nevertheless spends about $6.5 million to $7 million a year on its works. These include sponsoring visiting scientists, often veterans in their field, who interact with the younger scientists in informal mentoring relationships. Some of these visiting scientists are members of the Neuroscience Research Program, a sort of invisible elected academy of neuroscientists that meets annually at the Institute.

In the long run, Edelman and Mitchell say the Institute may help rekindle support for fundamental research not connected to goal-oriented government grants.

“Two-thirds of the disease breakthroughs did not come from looking at the world straight on, but out of the corner of your eye,” Edelman says. “Someone once asked me about doing the structure of the antibody molecule, ‘What disease did you cure?’ My answer was ‘none.’ All my colleagues and I did was to accelerate the research on all diseases. In the same sense, chemistry existed before the periodic table, but once you had the periodic table the speed of chemistry increased tens of folds.”

Mitchell says pursuing that broad research goal is difficult “because there is such a pervasive disease-specific orientation among the philanthropic community nationally. We have to re-educate donors that there is another way of doing science.”

If that effort succeeds, Mitchell says not only science, but San Diego as well will be a winner.

“It may sound corny, but we are a San Diego-based organization. Just as people lust after a winning baseball team or a UCSD with all sorts of bells and whistles, we think we ought to be in there as one of the crown jewels of the place.”