Say you walk into an unfamiliar building looking for lunch. After some wandering you find the canteen, eat, and leave. Konstantin Anokhin, a neurobiologist, academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences and director of the Institute for Advanced Brain Studies at Moscow State University, uses exactly this scene to show how a person gets made.
You came away with two things. Your hunger is gone, and you now know the way to the canteen. In Anokhin's theory, that way is a new functional system: a team of cells and micro-actions assembled for one job. It did not appear from nowhere. It grew out of the old system, hunger, as a daughter of it. The next time you are hungry, the old hunger wakes the whole daughter team. Anokhin describes the link as crown-like, fan-like. Each new system hangs off one that was already there.
That has a consequence for what you call "me". A kangaroo joey, a child and a chick all arrive with a starter set of systems for eating, drinking, keeping warm. These are the same for everyone, and they are inborn for a reason: the world they were built for had not changed in hundreds of thousands of years. Everything that makes you different from the person next to you grows afterwards, branch by branch. Your individuality is a tree, and you have been growing it since the day you were born.
What makes a branch sprout? A failure. Suppose the building is under repair, and the corridors and lifts you used to take are closed. The old system can no longer get its result, so the brain starts generating attempts: another staircase, another lift, another combination of moves. Each attempt is held up against the model of the result that the parent system wants. The one that works is fixed in memory and becomes more likely next time. That is how a bird that finds the usual pastures gone learns to fly over the mountains to other green meadows.
The new staircase route is itself a system, so it can sprout its own children when the next detour is needed. Secondary, tertiary, and on it goes.
A new functional system always arises as a small branch off a system that already exists, and that branch is a way of getting, a new way of getting, the result that satisfies this system.
Новая функциональная система возникает всегда как веточка ответвления уже существующей системы, и эта веточка является способом получения, новым способом получения результата, удовлетворяющего эту систему.
— Konstantin Anokhin, Think Like a Scientist, 58:32
Here the tree takes a turn. A branch can cut loose from its root. Anokhin's own example is money. You first need it to be fed, to go to the cinema, to buy a toy. After a while it becomes a currency in its own right and a goal in itself, and you will work for it when you are not hungry and have no wish to see a film. The branch has outlived the need that grew it.
The cells carry this tree in a way that sounds almost unfair to them. A single neuron does not serve one system and retire. Over a life it is drafted into hundreds and thousands of them: play and learning in childhood, other work in youth, others again in adulthood and old age. Each time it records something, through lasting changes in its genes' activity. Anokhin built this part of the theory on 45 years of experiments.
Neuroscience already knows branching of a different kind. A paper by Rafael Yuste in the journal Neuron in March 2024 notes that during development, larger groups of neurons give rise to smaller, more specific ones as neurons and synapses mature.
Then comes the twist about sameness. The inborn roots are shared, and even genes are shared between identical twins. Yet identical twins differ, and Anokhin takes the extreme case: twins born fused, spending their lives together. At any moment one may be asleep while the other is awake. One lies against something warm, the other sees something in their field of view that the first never sees. Two bodies joined at the hip still feed their trees different failures, different detours, different discoveries. They grow two selves.
