Rahul Venugopal’s Reviews > The Deep History of Ourselves: The Four-Billion-Year Story of How We Got Conscious Brains > Status Update

- Nagel is a dualist and argues that phenomenal consciousness can't be studied!
- when a verbal report cannot be given, only the visual cortex is activated
- David Rosenthal and HOT
- HOROR by Richard brown and Charles bonnet syndrome
- we experience the present through the lens of memory
- A,B,C vs 12,13,14 - read down vs across
- Karl Friston’s hierarchical active inference model
- Andy Clark, Friston & Anil Seth

- post decision rationalisation and confabulation
- split brains | Sperry, Gazzaniga, Le doux
- Weiskranz and blindsight
- subliminal stimulation paradigms to study conscious perception
- when stimuli presentation goes below 20-30 ms, people can't perceive
- using paired shock and recording ECG and re testing with images only we can test
- these can be used as non verbal report paradigms
- backward masking strategy

- language paves the rails for cognition to run
- much of memory maintenance is in posterior
- layer 4 has granule cells in neocortex
- Earl Miller's lab has shown that within layer interactions are important in coordinating bottom up and top down interactions
- cultural evolution vs gene-neurobiological evolution
- topic of consciousness is a treacherous conceptual minefield
- Finally arrives, SUBJECTIVITY chapter

- schema, Aaron Beck (Father of cognitive therapy, he passed away recently)
- Jeffrey Young and Robert Leahy have introduced schema-based approaches to cognitive therapy
- Relational reasoning or cognitive branching
- Vygotsky was interested in how children acquire and use inner speech in the process of cognitive development
- What matters is what underlies talking—what language does for cognition | deaf people

- unconscious vs non conscious
- Le doux makes this point that cognitive processes are the ones depending on internal representations
- Author also holds the view that cognition is a product of biological evolution ( I don't think so, these are labels and can arise from non carbon beings too)
- internal representations and nervous system are kind of must needs for cognition!!!
- The Garcia effect | radiation | rats

- star fishes are bilateraly symmetric during larvae stage
- the notochord of chordates and the axochord of early protostomes have a common origin
- In embryonic life, all vertebrates possess a dorsal notochord, which is then replaced by a vertebral column as the embryo matures
- roughly twenty-eight bilateral phyla with distinct Bauplan features
- synapsids and sauropsids
- 65 m years ago, mass extinction happened

- choanocytes capture and amoebocytes transfer
- Cnidarians have a gelatinous mesoderm
- Neurons ans muscles were developed in Cnidarians
- adult sponges are immobile, but their larvae are mobile
- evo-devo
- The brain seems a thoroughfare for nerve-action passing its way to the motor animal
- bilateral body plan and locomotion
- bilaterality and hox genes
- bilaterals are triploblasts
- invertebrates are protostomes

- how do living beings manage energy demands
- dramatic rise in concentration of oxygen in the atmosphere about 800 million years ago coincides with earliest evidence for animal life
- trichoplax is the only known placazoan in existence.
- BAUPLAN - asymmetric, radial, and bilateral
- acoel worm like creature is the LCBA
- Cambrian explosion populated water bodies with bilaterals
- amoebocytes are mobile in sponges

- when food is scarce, via asexual mode smaller and larger cells are formed
- they do sex/unite
- bacterial parasite infection also triggers sex
? Are these cells half in chromosomes
? Do they have mitochondria
- they form colonies
- Nutrients extracted by cells in one part of the colony are chemically transported to their neighbors and shared via the adhesion bridges
- sponges failed to put up nervous system