Quixix

I remember watching a show' date=' and reading online, an article that stated that a woman needed surgery that asked for most of her blood to be removed from the body (probably a heart replacement or something), which then sent her into temporary death (quite literally, her body temperature was around 70 or 80 degrees fahrenheit).

 

So one would think that she wouldn't remember any of it (by the way, the surgery was successful and she is still alive today). But, she states that she was in a concious state outside of her body. She said that she was in the corner of the room, watching down on her body, and not really caring about it. She said she felt completely at peace. When she was resurected, she could recall many of the conversations the doctors had when she was dead, and they were correct.

 

Kind of erie to think that we exist outside of our body, as well as our memories, eh?[/quote']

 

If you wish to think that you are not you, I suppose you can also think that you can exist outside of your body, you can also go ahead and think that you can exist out of existence or any other play of words you can think of that tickles your fancy. How does the you that is not in your body communicate with your body? I suppose it is easy to respond that trough soul talk or any other unscientific explanation that occurs to you.

For my part I am comvinced that my body and I are one and the same thing. No dualisms for me.

Pau

Sounds like a noble cause, but the "cure" looks worse than the disease. Unless I'm mistaken, you want to tamper with an individual's free will. Free will is part of an individual's essence. I believe the obvious moral concerns with your idea distracts most folks. [b']Example: gene cleansing (Hitler).[/b]

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

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.

Wow... does no-one here get joking sarcasm?!!! Anyway, I understand his point of view. I'm just saying that I'm trying to get as much info to positivly[/b'] further my research paper. I already have enough negative input for my peers as well as myself, trust me. I'm just getting a little agitated. I keep repeating myself in other areas and no-one is really paying attention. BY NEGATIVE BEHAVIOR I MEAN VIOLENT TENDANCIES! I'm not asking whether or not eating icecream or cutting ones-self is a negative behavior, I'm trying to find a way that I might be able to target a part of the brain that possibly produces (produces doesnt seem like the right word...) violent tendancies. Everything that I am doing is thoretical and there is no way that I can test this at this point in time. I understand that in all likelyhood this is not possible, but I dont want to take that for an answer.

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.

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.

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

Very interesting reads. And now for my rebuke.

 

First of all' date=' with respect to Stefan Lovgren's article, there's a few quotes that seem to touch on the differences between computers and brains. A couple of the most relavant are...

 

"Silicon-based computers are very accurate and fast at processing some kinds of information, but they have none of the flexibility of the human brain."

 

and

 

"Brains can easily make certain kinds of computations that computers are unable to do, such as answering open-ended questions about what happened sometime in the past."

...

Overall, I'm not convinced. That's not to say I can't be. When I started this thread, what I was generally trying to ask was if there are any studies or evidence out there to support the idea that it requires more than just the phenomena of electric impulses traveling down the axons of neurons and chemicals crossing the synaptic gaps in order to explain the activity of the brain. Obviously, it would require more than this to explain consciousness, so never mind that for now. Let me restate the question: "Is the human brain a deterministically closed system? Any unassailable evidence for or against this?" And, honestly, I am open to good points on either side.[/quote']

 

I am no trying to convince anyone, just trying to help along with different thoughts an ideas. I refer back to your first post:

"So I was just wondering: is this all there is to it? I mean, I'd expect that the exact nature of a neuron is a little bit more complicated than being a conductor, and there might be mysteries to them that to date stump the neuroscientific community, but from what I understand these mysteries (if they exist) shouldn't change how we currently understand the brain to work (i.e. as an organic computer)"

As far as I know, computers do not have (yet) plasticity in their connections. I am an expert at neither computers or brain. But I do know that the role of neurons is much more complex than that of a simple conductor. They have mechanisms by which they recognize from which synapse the inputs come and "remembering" it, they can generate new synapses, reinforce them or weaken them. These mechanisms are quite well known. But to me they don't explain quite well how knowledge is stored, if it is not by forming networks that are continuosly being modified and activated by inputs, be they endogenous or exogenous, reliving the original experience.

Handling information is one thing, storing it is another. I can not visualize any simil of the function of the hard disk (or any other memory gadget) with the function of any particular part of the brain. Perhaps there is one, but I have not been able to find it in the literature.

I do not know if computers can progress from specific to abstract concepts, which the brain does.

And there us also the "mistery" of consciousness. Although it has had some strong crticism, for me the best explanation comes from A. Damasio.

Best wishes

A reference to Hawking's work would be nice. I google searched for Hawking exhaustively and could only find computers for sale from Hawking Technology and a quote from Stephen Hawkings about AI taking over the world.

 

 

.

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

No it doesn't. And that's part of the reason I'm asking. See' date=' I've always had a nagging suspision that our quest to find the foundations of consciousness has been leading us down the wrong road so long as we've been assuming that the brain is responsible for "producing" consciousness. What if, instead, the brain only ALLOWED for consciousness? (the old "correlation-not-causation" argument). But who knows, I could be wrong (hence the questioning).

 

 

 

There is research supporting the existence of engrams, a type of neurological circuit predicted by Karl Lashley which can be thought of as a neural pathway that forms a feedback loop with itself. When stimulated, this loop keeps exciting itself thereby "keeping a thought in consciousness". This is very much like the flip-flop, the basic hardware piece in almost all computers responsible for memory (it stores exactly 1 bit). As for knowledge, most things that we feel we know correspond to fixed neural pathways that have been established over time such that it is unlikely for a signal to deviate from it. Come to think of it, when you talk about memory and knowledge, aren't they the same thing. I mean, if you remember something, you know it, and if you know it, you remember it. So whatever physical explanation you have to explain the one, it could be adequate to explain the other.

 

But all this is only insofar as I know, and I'm no expert.[/quote']

According to some authors, engrams make sense, others completely ignore them. I am derfinitely no author, nor a proffesional of the subject, but engrams to me, could only make sense in the context of working memory. The cmparison of computers with brain function has very much been discarded. An interesting new view has recently been given by Hawking (Not Stephen Hawkings).

You say that when you remember something you know it... . This statement does not correlate very well with the concepts of implicit and explicit memory.

But no specific change falls under the term "synaptic plasticity" and no one agrees upon what it means exactly. Microbiologists almost inevitably use the term very differently from psychologists' date=' for example. If you try to publish a paper and are using the term "synaptic plasticity", Im quite sure reviews will want you to be more specific and say exactly what you mean.

 

Don't give me that "I and several professional researchers" crap. I'm tied close enough to the area to know what is going on...[/quote']

 

Here is somemore "crap" :

This in an excerpt from LeDoux:(The Chronicle of Higher Education

December 11, 1998)

"One of the most important contributions of modern neuroscience has been to show that the nature/nurture debate operates around a false dichotomy: the assumption that biology, on one hand, and lived experience, on the other, affect us in fundamentally different ways. Research has shown that not only do nature and nurture each contribute (in disputable proportions) to who we are, but also that they speak the same language. Both achieve their effects by altering the synaptic organization of the brain.

 

Synapses are the connection points between brain cells that allow the cells to communicate with each other. Synapses are responsible for much of the brain's activity. The particular patterns of synapses in a person's brain, and the information that those connections encode, are the keys to who that person is.

 

We are born with a hefty dose of preprogrammed synaptic links -- this is why we can cry and wriggle around the moment we leave the womb. But experience alters synapses as well, either creating new ones or changing the strength of existing ones. Our ability to see the world the same way other humans do is programmed in us. But unless we have the right kinds of visual experiences at the right time, synapses in the visual system of the brain won't develop normally and, as a result, we will not see normally. For example, if a child's eyes are misaligned during a certain period in early life, the brain's visual system is deprived of depth cues and depth perception is impaired.

 

The process by which experience shapes synapses is referred to as "synaptic plasticity." Although a great deal of synaptic plasticity occurs during early childhood as the brain is developing, plasticity in the form of learning and memory continues to shape our synapses throughout our lives.

 

We are used to thinking of memory in terms of our ability to consciously recall past events. Recent advances in neuroscience and psychology have revealed that this explicit memory -- sometimes called declarative memory -- is only one of many forms of memory. Various other kinds are implicit, which is to say that they work unconsciously. They are what enable us to learn skills as diverse as how to ride a bike or play the piano, as well as to avoid stimuli previously associated with pain or danger.

 

Damage in the part of the brain that controls explicit memory can prevent you from remembering when you learned to ride a bike, for example, but not your ability to ride it. Damage to your implicit memory can interfere with your ability to ride but not your memory of having learned how."

This article is six years old. MOre progress has been made since.

Appears what you are referring to is Hebbian learning which is really just a primitive form of learning at the single neuron level. Hebb postulated that "when an axon of cell A is near enough to excite cell B or repeatedly or consistently takes part in firing it' date=' some growth or metabolic change takes place in one or both cells such that A's efficiency, as one of the cells firing B, is increased."

 

Pavlov was on a similar track with his dog experiments, a form of classical conditioning involving the repeated presentation of food while ringing a bell. The dog would eventualy associate the ringing of the bell with food and would salivate. Again a very basic form of learning....believe adaption is another.

 

I think the "real learning" you are referring to, be it cognitive or motor, would be far more involved than this. Think about the first time you tried to ride a bike or read a book. I'd say learning at this level would require a complex interplay of various neuron assemblies that each follow some ,as yet, unknown "rules" for synaptic modification. The purkinje cells of the cerebellum is a good example.

 

http://www.robotic.dlr.de/Smagt/research/cerebellum/cerebellum.html[/quote']

 

Interesting site. Shall have to study it with more time.

Since the time that Hebbs proposed his theory, many advances have been achieved.

I agree that learning any little matter must involve groups of neurons, complete circuits, some operatingalmost synchronously. But learning can occur at two levels, implicit (unconscious )and explicit (conscious).

I think riding a bike belongs to implicit, yet, the fact that several (millions) of neurons, would not change the fact that plasticity, formation and reinforcement of synapsis, is involved.

The term "synaptic plasticity" doesn't explain anything at all. You would be better off thinking of the term as an advertisement for research than as a scientific term. [it has no agreed upon meaning. It is mostly just a codeword for "changes occur" without any specification of what those chages are, on what level they occur, why they occur, and what they do.]

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.

No. It's an amorphous solid.

 

What is the point of having threads if nobody is going to read them before they post?

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?

glass' date=' OLD glass will indeed shift towards gravity as a liquid may, it is however

an amorphous solid !

it`s not actualy a TRUE solid in the way of a structured Crystal is.

 

Pitch is similar, if left hung up, it will drip every 10 years or so, it also is an Amorphous solid and will shatter when struck like glass.

 

Add another term to your thinking, there is Solid and Liquid, and Amorphous solid

 

it`s not quite as Black and White as would be convenient [/quote']

 

Glass is actually a liquid of extremely high viscosity. Heavy glass panes standing for a long time have benn noticed to increase thickness at the bottom. A liquid, in my old days, was defined as a material with short length order, a solid, as one with long distance order. But notice that a crustal can also creep.

Also look into a phenomenon called "long term potentiation" which is also used as a model of learning.

 

As for everything else' date=' I'm not sure what you mean by "I don't think reinforcing should achieve any learning".

 

And lastly, it seems intuitive to think that a "new stimulus not related to the activation of any previous connections" would result in learning. At some point in our lives, every stimulus we encountered was essentially "new". How would we have learned anything otherwise?[/quote']

 

What ifsomething is intuitive thinking or not? I love intuitive and speculative thinking; I am not postulating any new discovery or writing about any scientific paper

.

LTP is basically a mechanism that increases post synapsis response by repeated or strong pre synapsis stimulus. I would think of that as reinforcing, but it involves a neuron and connections that already ract to a given pre synaptic stimulus. It could be conceived as a part of learning, but to my way of thinking it is hardly so.

I would tend to interpret real learning as the formation of new synaptical connections or activations. Synapsis that "learn" to activate the neuron and create a post synaptic reaction, by being activated simultaneously with a strong signal to another synapsis. In this way, the synapsis whose stimulus was previously not significant enough to produce post synaptic firing, becomes strong and its firing becomes capable of producing the post synaptic firing.

Pau

That sort of toxins are bloody awful. Ricin especially sucks since it's rather easy to get hold of.

At the beggining of the century, ricin was used as a laxative to "clean up "your insides.

Pau

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

Caffeine makes us more alert because of its chemical properties. I once heard that a glass of apple juice first thing in the morning is just as effective. Can this be true? If so' date=' what are the properties in the apple that cause this?

 

I have also heard that the seeds of apples contain cianide. It is said that if you collect enough seeds and pulverize them, the resulting mixture would be deadly.

 

It makes me wonder whether apples contain special properties that don't we know about. An apple tree symbolizes life, and think about Adam and Even and the notion that an apple can keep the doctor away.

 

Any thoughts?[/quote']

I know nothing about apples, but many seeds contain cyanide. One that contains quite a bit is peach seeds. Some bitter almonds also.

Pau

PD: I drink apple juice every morning for breakfast, but I remain half sleep until noon!

The term 'learning' does imply some deliberate intent and so, in many cases is not an appropriate term. 'Encoding' is a better one, the non-volitional formation of memories resulting simply from perceiving. Episodic, or 'flashbulb' memories are not formed deliberately (i.e. learned, per se), but are formed unconsciously due to perceiving events under specific/heightened emotional states. It is thought that in these cases, the emotional state acts as a signal that the currant events are important and the intensity aids encoding.

Learning or encoding is not necessarily always conscious, it can also be implicit.

Are you sure about that statement? I thought the pygmies height was genetic' date=' just as is the Watusis. I would think that there may have been a natural selection for people with shorter bodies when food it in short supply, and that stunted growth can occur when there is not enough food to promote growth, especially of the long bones.

 

I'm not saying your wrong - just asking you where you got that info.[/quote']

Yes, I am also surprised by the statement. I would think that lack of food would create other deformities and sicknesses, not just small bones.

I don't think it's about hardwired are not it's about keeping the body in balance with the brain.

¿Could you please tell me why you don't believe it?

I think that it`s more a question of thinking in terms of Symbolism and it`s related associations to mental imagery.

as a student of Sign Lang for the deaf' date=' it`s quite apparent that verbal lang and gestures have little in common with regards to direct specifics, it DOES require a different way of "thinking" to get just right.

 

I`de also feel fairly confident in saying that long before language "Ugg, grunt, etc...) certain signs were used that are TODAY still unmistakable

and also SOME of which we have little to no control over either (happy/sad/angry).

 

such things are used by animals too, I can`t discount the idea that Dolphins or even cat`s and dogs don`t expand their "vocabularies" either, and maybe pass it on?

 

Just a though )[/quote']

The sign you refer to above (angry, sad, happy), which are all related to emotions and facial (or bodily) expressions, are today thought to be quite involuntary and universal. Most thinkers believe these type of expressions and their recognition are hardwired - genetically inherited. Of course, as you say, this is not exclusively human.

I was actually trying to say that by having a more efficient labeling system the verbal functions help us to think. Not only does it help us to communicate with others by giving us exact labels' date=' but it also helps us to communicate within our own brains. I don't know how much of an impact this has on our thinking process but I would imagine it has some.

 

 

 

I think that we would have to have a form of logic to have reason. Logic includes the the kind of mathmatical logic with the, if then, or, nor, symbols. I think it is essential to reason that we make these kind of connections between the different objects in our mind. If we are going to dedcutively reason that since the butler is a canadian, and all canadians love asparagus, that the butler loves asparagus then we must need a kind of logic to deduce this. I'm not saying its any kind of strict system, just that reason impicictly implies logic.[/quote']

I agree completely with you on this. My last post, (perhaps went to the wrong place) was referring to "decision making", which I believe to be a different and independent process from reasoning

I think we do use a form of logic in our decision making process. Early on' date=' either from a natural hard wiring or from an early learning process, we establish an association between a series of actions with the concept of correct. When every we go through the process of making a decision to do something we run through our memories to decide if its a good idea. For example, when we are young we learn that eating is a good thing because it takes away the hunger and gives us energy. There may be some instinctual influences but this is irrelevant because I am only referring to our intellectual understanding of hunger.

 

So this is how our logic goes: correct = good, if full then good, and if I eat then I will be full. Therefore we eat. I believe our minds go through this process when we make most of our decisions. The difference between our logic and the logic of a computer is that our logic is malleable. It also makes comparisons between two pieces of logic. Later on when we are middle aged and we are deciding if we want to eat that piece of pie our logic might go bad = incorrect, if we are fat then that is bad, if we eat that pie then we will get fat. So we don't eat that pie. But sometimes we do because we compare the two sets of logic and we give values to how bad it is to be fat and how good it is to be full.

 

 

 

 

I agree. I believe words are just a means to label concrete and abstract terms. I think they are more than just a means of communication because they give abstract concepts a definite title that allows us to more efficiently categorize and store our data.[/quote']

I think you have now introduced a new concept, "decision making". Several studies on people with impaired brains, show that in certain circumstances, usually related with emotion centers, reasoning abilities continue intact, while decision making ability is lost.

My thoughts:

Just want to add that words aren't 'thinking' functions they are just data/links.

The thinking is done with logic.

The questions you ask is: do we process word or visual data.

 

If you see something big first you have the impression of big then it's translated to the word 'big'. So words were never part of the process of thinking (compare function) in this example only at the end for communication purpose.

 

edit:

more or less what Quixix said.

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!)