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September 2 - November 8, 2020
genetic sculpting of the synaptic organization of neural systems is the key to the process.
It’s a linguistic quirk, or a revealing cultural assumption, that the older (unconscious) processes are defined as negations of the newer one (consciousness). Language isn’t perfect.
explore the biological mechanisms by which the brain makes the self.
But, ultimately, because philosophers and brain scientists are pursuing different concerns, progress in one field does not necessarily signal an advance or defeat in the other.
A reasonableness not always found in scientific works. Scientism has taken over much modern work.
Cognitive scientists, however, were studying mental processes rather than the content of consciousness.
If we are to understand how the mind, through the brain, makes us who we are, we need to consider the whole mind, not just the parts that subserve thinking.
This point is also critical to distinguishing between computers and thought generally. The mind is impacted by subtle dampners and amplifiers and whatever is initiated by various emotions. Possible to model i am sure but not straightforward as a reproduction as a neural net could be of pure cognition.
capable of learning and storing information implicitly, which is to say without conscious awareness.
Inaccessible Learning is indeed a fascinating concept. implicit but accessible is a good distinction but less impressive
The way we characteristically walk and talk and even the way we think and feel all reflect the workings of systems that function on the basis of past experience, but their operation takes place outside of awareness.
But not inaccessible to awareness. Its important to maintain a proper distinction here. Just as with awareness of impicit bias, anything acessible is something ultimately i control ajnd potentially change through higher order thinking
We especially need to explain how different systems interact with and influence one another. Without these interactions, and the mental integration they engender, each of us would simply be a collection of isolated mental functions rather than a coherent person.
find the equivalent (or at least the semblance) of a neocortex in both birds and reptiles, suggesting both that it wasn’t so new after all and that it certainly wasn’t unique to mammals.
Projection cells tend to activate or excite postsynaptic cells.
In general, the inside of a neuron that is not being stimulated is about 60 millivolts (60 one-thousandths of a volt) more negative than the outside. In other words, the resting potential of the cell is about −60 mV.
In the amygdala, however, some cells can be as negative as −80 mV, 58 due to sustained or tonic inhibition by GABA.
As Gould’s exaptation argument points out, something can be innate (passed on genetically) even if the role it plays today is not the one for which it evolved.
brain and the shaping of the developing self by wiring synapses.
Its interesting to think about how learning and cognition may be limited by area specialization and subcortical hard wiring. While the general purpose cortex suits us well - allowing an animal evolved 200 thousand years ago to live in modern society - in what ways are we limited in grasping more profound concepts ? maybe we would be better at understanding multiple dimensions or infinity if not so wired.
LTP in input A is an instance of Hebbian (associative) plasticity because the response of pathway A to the test stimulus was modified not by its training stimulus (LFS of A does not induce LTP, as shown in top left), but because it was active at the same time that another input to the cell (input B) received a plasticity-inducing HFS. This is the associative property of LTP. Synapse specificity and associativity are two properties that any model of associative memory should possess.
Sensitization is considered nonassociative because the touch-test stimulus and the shock were never related, and the learning is not specific to the test stimulus—many stimuli given after the shock produce bigger effects.
Because the increase in the efficiency of transmission between the sensory and motor neuron is due entirely to alterations in the sensory neuron terminal, it is referred to as presynaptic facilitation.
frontal lobe damage,
The stuff were are conscious of is the stuff that working memory is working on. 81
Typo but also a good summary of the difficult distinction between thought and consciousness and further the sense of self. what we're thinking about is smal bit of consciousness but is our selfs view of everything but even that is not true as we would be hard pressed to explain all of the details of our thoughts .
Thus, the way the stimulus looks, sounds, and smells has to be integrated with relevant information stored in memory, including facts and past experiences, as well as stored information about the emotional and motivational significance of the stimulus.
make decisions and take action relevant to that stimulus. 97 They argue that the additional ingredient needed is neuronal synchrony. This term refers to the simultaneous firing of populations of neurons. Synchrony is proposed to achieve two important goals—enhanced activation of postsynaptic cells and coordination within local areas across widespread regions.
Gary Aston-Jones of the University of Pennsylvania and others have shown that brain stem arousal systems underlie vigilance, sustained behavioral engagement in a task. 103 Such connections could make possible focused attention even in creatures lacking a prefrontal cortex and its multimodal integrative capacity and executive functions.
Anecdotally, the highly developed lateral and prefrontal corticies actually interfere with attention as well. A dog with a bone is far more attentive than a boy with a toy car.
The key element that distinguishes working memory from sensory consciousness is that the former allows for the simultaneous interrelation of temporarily stored information across domains and the flexible use of such information in decision-making, capacities that prefrontal circuits seem to make possible.
This is key to the entire discussion. Integrated circuits from domain specific areas being mixed for further new information. This fits well with the GEB concept of hierarchical layers of conceptual categorical information
It is, in my opinion, the structuring of cognition around language that confers on the human brain its unique qualities.
A purely cognitive view of the mind, one that overlooks the role of emotions, simply won’t do. As we begin to assemble the self in terms of synapses, emotions must play a major role.
This is an important part of understanding intelligence as well. The computer has intelligence but its hard to imagine an ai with qualities like a human where drive and yearning play a role in decision making - and are not always wrong. see On Intelligence
Specifically, from this point of view, emotion can be defined as the process by which the brain determines or computes the value of a stimulus.
The feeling of fear came after you jumped and after your heart was already pumping—the feeling itself did not cause the jumping or the pumping.
And fear may or may nogt be there and determiknes what happens next. So the big questuon from this standpoint is the specific role played and how you could still have a reliable measure. so afraid of the bus near miss sets a value for later firing which avoids all streets for exampld. What is yhe fear value / measure that makes a meaningful change.
This can be done in a number of different ways, but one commonly used is backwards masking.
The description of this test seems unlikely to me. I think ironically this is so because a subliminal response is not something we think will happen. However i also find it odd that something flashed too fast to see could have any impact. I would love to see this in action.
As a result, the old/new cortex distinction broke down, challenging the evolutionary basis of the assignment of emotion to the old cortex (limbic system) and cognition to the neocortex.
mild shock to the skin.
Is pain the same as fear? no I suppose the dread associated with recurring pain based on the conditioned stimuus. This may be even more narrow than just excluding fear of failure. to what extent is emotional fwr rooted in past pain we dont want to experience again? Stated like that perhps a lot. though i think of horror movies or books abd theyre often playing on imagoned threats or the unknown.
GABA inhibition prevents much from happening in response, and if the sound is repeated without consequence, the cells quickly stop responding. But if the sound is followed by a shock, the weak preexisting response is greatly amplified following the rules of Hebbian plasticity: the shock activates the postsynaptic cell while the sound is causing the presynaptic terminals to release glutamate. During the activation, calcium enters the postsynaptic cell, and then a host of intracellular chemical reactions, involving kinases and transcription factors, activate genes, inducing them to make proteins
...more
Quick overview of conditioned response via neuronal change
The tone was the most salient cue, but other cues in the chamber were conditioned as well.
Yes. I was thinking of the places my dog doesnt like to go because he has been locked in there. he doesnt have a specific stimulus but a memory of a contextual clue that is the space - one of which is the basement. I wondered would he refuse to enter a strange basement. I bet it would depend on how closely the context reminded him but of course he has no concept of basement and is happy to go down other stairways
This finding thus indicates that unconscious emotional learning occurs through the path from visual sensory areas of the thalamus to the amygdala. The low road is indeed used in both the rat and human brain.
Emotions, in short, amplify memories.
Not only did researchers have to find ways to study love behaviorally, they also had to find species that were monogamous.
Love equals sex? What about moms that care for young long term?
In this view, we don’t have to postulate the existence of hypothetical concepts like drives or subjective states to explain motivated action. All we need to talk about is real brain systems and their functions.
This seems like word play more than a helpful distinction. A drive is antype of brain function perhaps different from other brain functions.
These emotionally primed instrumental responses have as their goal, their motive, the alteration of the brain state, the emotional state, that the organism is in.
For example i complete a task to resolve anxiety or to reward myself by thinking about praise or success following the action
the anticipatory state but instead during consummation. Since dopamine is involved only in the anticipatory phase, and not in the consummatory phase, its effects (at least in the case of primary need states) cannot be explained in terms of pleasure.
comparable to looking at pictures of a loved one when he or she is away).
The picture stimulates love feelings even though you cannot connect. Is this the same as initiating tunes which you think lead to food? One is more unintentional than the other for sure. looking at pictures can also reinforce feelings and may be used to intentionally create sentimental feelings. These extra feeling states would i think be reduced by the author but seem to be both additional variables and motivation feedback loops. Hard to compare directly.
This would be similar to what occurs in declarative or explicit learning: initially, both the hippocampus and neocortex are involved, but once the hippocampus has slowly taught the neocortex the memory, the memory persists without the aid of the hippocampus
The ability of humans to explicitly learn anything also complicates the ways in which purely behavioral learning paths are necessarily implicated in results in humans. i woud say most learning is by experience even when explicitly taught but it leaves the door open.
We use our capacity to think, reason, and evaluate. We make decisions.
Indeed. This was my point in the last two notes
Consciously accessible, verbally encoded, explicit motives acquired through the use of language are also an important part of human mental life, especially in social situations. The self-consciousness view of motivation thus complements rather than contradicts the implicit view.
A brain on antidepressants can be brought back from its state of isolation from the outside world and encouraged, even forced, to learn. The brain, in other words, is duped into being plastic by these treatments.
When the organism, through working memory, conceives that it is facing a threatening situation and is uncertain about what is going to happen or about the best course of action to take, anxiety occurs.
This is probably best achieved by traveling down the pharmacological road to recovery with someone who understands not just the drug or the person, but the drug, the person, and the life situation the person is experiencing.
By distributing the workload across the various processors, they can perform the task much faster than serial computers. (Don’t plan on getting one for your home or office, however: they cost millions of dollars.)
Oops a little dated. Computer research and advancement seems to have vastly outpaced brain pharmacology at the least, if not all forms of advancement.
Although the different neural systems have different functions, because they are part of the same brain they will be involved in encoding the same life events.
If cells processing sensory events can undergo plasticity as a result of the kind of activity those events trigger in sensory systems, then why can’t cells processing a thought change the connections of the cells with which they communicate? Obviously, they do;
Thoughts are potential change agents
And because more brain systems are typically active during emotional than during nonemotional states, and the intensity of arousal is greater, the opportunity for coordinated learning across brain systems is greater during emotional states.
