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Quixix

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Everything posted by Quixix

  1. I would absolutely agree with you, but I have terrible doubts. According to my latest thinking, the cortex appears in evolution much after the limbic and reptilian brain. Much after instinctive and emotional behaviour, that is, built and evolved in order to improve on the capacities of survival of the species.Like if the cortex and its cognitive capacities were an appendix at the service of the more primitive functions . This does not seem to leave much room for free will. And this has nothing to do with genes or manipulation, it is not important what you think about what you will or will not do. The result will be the same. Best wishes Pau
  2. I am left handed, left footed, but have a right dominating eye, which makes me close the right eye when shooting with a shotgun (Most people don't close any). But anyway, the motions of the left side are still commanded by the right side. Speech centers are only on the left hemisphere, although in some cases the right can learn. Also, this crossover is not 100%, some senses are not crossed; unfortunately I missplaced my book "Maping the Mind" and can not check which are not crossed. The real amazing thing though, is the case of "split brain" lessions, where right and left hemisphere have lost the comunication. The left arm, many times undoes what the right does; the right arm pulls your pants up and the left pushes them down.
  3. Something for you to think about: Difference between irony and sarcasm. For the sake of your paper, you must also clear yourself about when you talk about "tendancies" (perhaps you mean tendencies?), and when you talk about behaviour. Whereas behaviour is a well defined and observable phenomena, tendencies, to me, is not a concrete term applicable to the mind, and therefore is difficult to study. We have emotions such as hate, anger, etc, whic have been studied, that may or may not produce violent behaviour. But and I insist, violent behaviour is not necessrily negative. It is adequate and necessary in certain cases. It is true that indiscriminate violent behaviour is undesirable, probably in all kind of cases. The regions of the brain that are active when experiencing the above emotions, have been studied with the different methods available, and you would have no doubt success running a search for them. It is another matter when you try to investigate how those emotions translate themselves into a given behaviour and when not. The "fight or run" dilemma. Here innumerable factors enter the equation, inborn circuits and learned neuronal circuits. The final behaviour depends on the balance between those factors.
  4. You are again wrong, some people do care what I think. Some actually ask. Self gratification, uh?. Well, you are about the age the right age for plentiful indulgence.
  5. There is not such a thing as positive and negative behaviour and I think you are waisting your valuable time. OUr brain evolved during millions of years and the behaviour that helped survival stayed with us. 1.-WHat is positive in some conditions, is negative in others and you can not eliminate from your brain those emotions that are genetically built in. You may damage an organ such as the amygdala and loose fear emotions. But this will make you too bold and will not make you capable of taking the right decisions. Take away the reactions to stimulus that give rise to our motivations and values and you will have a thoroughtly disconcerted individual. 2.- What was a desirable mechanism of stimulation and reward in the preagricultural hunting society, may not be adequate for todays forms of living. The continuous stress of todays civilization is different from the occasional stress of our hunting days, and our circuits suffer from it. But mans inventiveness is faster than evolution. Perhaps a genetic alteration could aid along, but I believe, not only that we do not know which mechanisms should be modified, but that we wouldn't at these time, know how to do it. My conclusion is that it would be smarter to try to live more according to what we are, after we underdtand well enough what that is. Best wishe for the new year. Pau
  6. Sorry about the omision: http://www.plosbiology.org/plosonline/?request=get-document&doi=10.1371/journal.pbio.0020394 Here is another address that tangentially touches the subject: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2004/11/1119_041119_brain_petri_dish.html
  7. I am sorry to completely disagree with you, that is I and several professional researchers and authors. The way many of those changes occur have been extensively studied and published, as well as the results of such changes.
  8. I have read some arguments in past threads about amorphous solid, supercooled liquids, even some going back to Aristotle! There is even a quote saying that it is a solid because it will not flow under a "moderate force", without stating neither the amount of the force considered moderate, nor the temperature at which this statement may be true, which makes it completely invalid. I do not like the use of the term solid (amorphous) in relation to a material that does not have a fixed melting point as true solids do. With increasing temperatures, a glass softens without a given melting point or latent heat of fusion. Crystals may soften, or perhaps lower their yield point, with increasing temperatures, but they reach a definite point at which they undergo a change of phase with considerable absortion of energy. I suppose we could consider another category of material, neither glass nor solid (in the sense of crystalline), which does not soften with increasing temperatures. Could thermosetting plastics be included in this group?
  9. At the beggining of the century, ricin was used as a laxative to "clean up "your insides. Pau
  10. I am rather confused on this subject. As I understand, learning or memory formation is mainly achieved by synaptic plasticity. I don't think that reinforcing should achieve any learning. Also, I believe that most new synapsis or connections are formed as the result of associative inputs, that is, a connection is strengthened when activated simultaneously with an already active synapsis. Therefore, can a new stimulus that isn't related to the activation of any previous connections lead to new knowledge? Pau
  11. Learning or encoding is not necessarily always conscious, it can also be implicit.
  12. ¿Could you please tell me why you don't believe it?
  13. Yes, more or less. We also process abstract concepts (just to be precise,in your example, "big" is a concept, not a visual image). I don't think that logics has much to do with mental thinking, although you may say that there is logical thinking and illogical thinking. I, for one, am aware of having absolutely illogical thoughts! (But I try to keep them to myself!)
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