Subjective Perception

     Suppose you are the parent of a family of five that is facing poverty.  You need to support yourself, your partner, your two teenage children and your 4 month-old newborn, and yet you have almost no money, no job, and are soon to be forced from your home.  You are desperate for cash, so that your family may be kept safe and warm, and to compensate, you attempt to rob a convenient store.  Using what you can scrape together, you purchase a sidearm with the serial number filed off, and break into the nearby 7-11 a couple of hours after closing.  Upon entry, you begin to search for the manager's office where you convict a safe brimming with monetary notes will be hidden, and, after a few minutes, you happen upon it and burst into the room.  You find yourself faced with the manager of the store, whose facial expression is contorting into a mixture of confusion, realisation, and consequential anger as he comes to understand the scope of the situation.  He begins to argue with you, and you come to learn that this man's family is as well about to be forced from their home due to a lack of funds, and that stealing from his store would essentially sentence his family to life in a box in the alley leading off from 3rd Street.  After a brief yet passionate dissertation, he steps in front of his safe, and declares that he will die before he allows you access to it.  Herein you are faced with a decision.  Will you kill the man, rob his store of its money, and save your family?  Or will you let him live, and submit your family, your newborn child, to a life on the cold streets, one which will in all likelihood kill them? 
     The situation described above is one riddled with conflicting morality.  On one side, the man is breaking a number of laws and threatening to kill the manager of the convenient store in order to save his family.  On the other, the manager needs the money he makes from the store to save his own family, and in comes a man who is threatening to take that all away from him.  The only absolute truth to this hypothetical occurrence is that the man is attempting to commit armed robbery.  This is what I will refer to as an objective constant, because the action is the same regardless of a given individual's relation to it.  What can and does change is the perception of the morality of the actions.  One could argue that this man is committing these crimes to essentially save the lives of him and his family, and his actions are therefore justified.  It could also be said that he is still committing a violent and criminal act, and no end morally justifies those means.  This variation is what I will refer to as subjective perception, because it is relative to the morality of the given individual.  However, in order for the aforementioned individual to form an opinion, or to acquire a subjective perception of the situation, his brain must first gather information regarding it, and does so through what is known as cognition.  
     Cognition, or the state of sensing, refers to a number of different faculties, or processes, of the brain.  These processes are the ten senses (yes, ten), and are vision (sight), audition (hearing), gustation (taste), tactition (touch), olfaction (smell), thermoception (temperature), equilibrioception (balance), proprioception (spatial sense, or your body's ability to recognise where it is and how it is positioned), nociception (pain), and interoception (the awareness of processes occurring within one's body).  In later posts, I will go into more depth concerning the senses, however for now I will say that being cognisant, or sensing something, does not mean you are consciously aware of it.  To clarify, I will use the visual system as an example.  According to Neil R. Carlson's The Physiology of Behaviour (a text which I have referenced in previous posts), the visual system is actually divided into two systems: the primitive visual system, and the mammalian visual system.  The individual is not aware of information, or stimuli, the primitive visual system gathers, however is conscious of stimuli the mammalian system receives.  As a point of reference, the primitive visual system is responsible for creating the illusion that our eyesight and eye movement is smooth, along with perceiving reaching movements with the hands and other simple behaviours. 
     In my post entitled "The Decision Reflex," I described what I hypothesise to be the decision making mechanism of the brain.  The frontal lobe begins to formulate a plan or strategy, and then communicates with other lobes in order to gather more information about how the plan could be executed, and that communication is what causes the individual to become aware of it.  This sense of communication between regions of the cerebrum is known as interoception, and can also refer to sensations such as being aware of indigestion or muscle cramps.  Moreover, a stipulation of mine that I did not reference in my previous post is that the frontal lobe is almost constantly forming plans, and that we are, in actuality, hardly ever aware of it.  The idea communication between different regions of the nervous system is required in order for the individual to become conscious of something, such as decision making or a reflex, can be extended to include cognition and the senses.  That is, I hypothesise that in order to be considered conscious, either some, most, or all of the sensory systems must be communicating with each other.  Using the decision reflex as an example, I would convict that the individual would become aware of the frontal lobe's plan to, for instance, get pizza, and its consequent interface with the other lobes of the brain in order to further define its plan if the individual sensed something, a stimulus, using one of his ten senses, that the brain could associate with the frontal lobe's developing plan (such as the olfactory sensation of pizza), then the individual would become aware of that plan.  I will refer to this phenomenon as multiphasic cognitive relay, because the senses are relaying information between each through multiple different connection points, which creates as well as accounts for what I consider to be the illusion of consciousness.
    The nature of consciousness is, as I had said in my introductory entry, perhaps one of the most enigmatic conventions in the universe.  It has been debated by the philosophers and scientists of classic Greece, the renaissance period, the modern day world, and everywhere in between.  I, however, convict that consciousness is an illusion, a blending of the senses created by the functions of the brain, and I will use my next series of entries to further develop my hypothesis into one that might be considered plausible.

References

Carlson, Neil R. Physiology of Behavior. Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 2011. Print.

The Genius Gene

        How do we understand things?  In a geometry class, the student is first exposed to what is known as a postulate.  A postulate is a statement that is so simple and basic in nature that it is axiomatic, and can be considered as such without the need for evidence.  For example, the ruler postulate dictates that every point on a line can be assigned a real number.  After the student becomes acquainted with several postulates, he will then be introduced to what are known as theorems: statements which are proven by use of previously established statements, or, in this case, postulates.  The process of using previously known statements regarded as fact in order to prove something else, more complex in nature, to be true is how we learn.  At a young age, children are taught basic principles of mathematics, such as numbers.  They are taught to accept that each number has its own value, and that each number that supersedes any other given number has a greater value.  Based on these two statements, they can then conclude that if two numbers were to be combined together, their collective value would increase at a rate relative to the values of the original, independent numbers.  Needless to say, it is not explained in this manner, however therein lies a question: how does this manifest on a neurobiological level?
       Refer back to the example of the child learning basic principles of math.  In order to understand that two numbers such as two and three equate to five, his brain must first establish the original two statements as fact, and does so by storing them as memories.  In the same way, the brain uses the memory of the experience of, for instance, seeing the clear sky as blue, to set what might be considered an intellectual precedent, and thereafter the individual will always make the assumption that he will see the clear sky as blue.   It will then use the memories of the aforementioned mathematical principles to conclude that two and three equate to five.  In other words, the brain connects the two memories together, and combines them, and will understand the more complex concept of addition due to this memory combination.  The newly conceived concept will then enter into the process of becoming a long-term memory (not relevant to this post).  The connections between the two memories are made by what are known as axons: long, slender tubes which project from the cell body of a neuron (a cell of the nervous system that transmits information) which transmit information between different regions of the nervous system.  For the purposes of this entry, simply assume that there are a pair of axons which allow for intercommunication between the two memories. The axons are known collectively as white matter, because they are coated in a fatty substance (known as the myelin sheath) that is coloured white.  Furthermore, we can assume that because the axons of the white matter form connections between memories, allowing more complex concepts to be conceived and understood, the ability of an individual to understand these concepts, which is known as intelligence, is directly correlated to the amount of white matter in that individual's brain.  But what dictates the amount of white matter in a person's brain?
       While intelligence has been known to change throughout childhood development, the amount of white matter in an individual's brain is dependent on the genes which control the development of the brain of a baby during pregnancy, development which is referred to as neonatal neural development.  Neil R. Carlson's The Physiology of Behaviour describes the process in which the nervous system forms.  Early in embryonic development, a portion of the ectodermal (out layer) tissue of the embryo hardens into a plate, which then curls into what is called the neural tube.  This tube will develop into the spinal cord, and the cells at the top of the tube will begin to divide and produce neurons and other nerve cells in the brain, which will then also be positioned by the cells from whence they divided.  After these cells fall into their designated places, they will begin to sprout axons as well as small, branchlike processes known as dendrites (refer to the figure below).  These axons will attempt to find other neurons to connect to, and ones that fail to do so will undergo apoptosis, or programmed cell death.  The cells, of course, are programmed to do so by their genes.  I stipulate that if one of the genes responsible for causing neurons whose axons do not make connections with other neurons to undergo apoptosis was perhaps faulty in some way, then maybe some or all of those neurons might remain alive, and they could then be able to form connections with other neurons (as neurons continuously do throughout life) after the child is born.  This increase in white matter due to the faulty gene (or genes) would therefore correlate to an increase in the potential intelligence of the child, or perhaps even allow for the possibility of what might be interpreted as genius. 

A basic visual of a neuron, a nerve cell, which displays the axon and dendrites.

      As I had said in my last post, my stipulation as to the possibility of this "genius gene" is just that- stipulation.  It is a hypothesis I do not yet have evidence for or against, nor do I at the moment have means of acquiring any beyond reading the work of others.  As with my post on the 'decision reflex,' though, I find this concept as well entirely plausible, and will continue to broach my ideas concerning neurobiology and the state of what we perceive to the internet using this blog.

References

Carlson, Neil R. Physiology of Behavior. Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 2011. Print.

Felten, David L., Anil Narsinha. Shetty, and David L. Felten. Netter's Atlas of Neuroscience. Philadelphia, PA: Saunders/Elsevier, 2010. Print.

 

The Decision Reflex

        What are humans?  Certain religions would have us believe we are the center of the universe, however from a scientific and secular viewpoint, we are simply one of the myriad of products of a long and winding evolutionary 'road.'  We are the last surviving species of the genus 'homo,' however we are still organisms, as are house cats and fruit flies.  What makes us different is the long-held concept of consciousness, or a higher level of thinking than most of the animals with which we cohabitate the world.  Does this entail that there is something more in us, as homo sapiens, than there are in other organisms such as horses?  Or are we composed of the same six elements, and bound together by electricity and atomic bonds, just as every other organism that lives or has once lived?  Science has long ago proven the latter to be true, although the nature of consciousness itself has eluded our full comprehension.  In this post, I am going to broach my hypothesis as to how the 'mind' functions, as well as support it.
       What would happen if one's finger was placed on an source of immense heat? The body would react by immediately retracting the finger, or perhaps the entire arm.  However this is not voluntary.  In a situation such as this one, the nerves in the finger which sense the heat communicate that intense sensation to the spinal cord, which is a 'cord' of neural tissue (nerves and cell bodies of nerves), where it meets another nerve that will then send that communication back to the point of the sensation's origin, where muscles in that general area will react by contracting, thus pulling the finger backwards.  Only after this process, known as a reflex, will the individual become aware of it, because the spinal cord will also project this information to the brain, but by the time the individual might reach a state of awareness of the sensation of heat (in most cases, less than a second) the reflex will have already been completed. 
       Suppose the reflex described in the previous paragraph did not occur, and that in order for the finger to be pulled from the heat, the brain must make the decision to retract it.  The same nerves in the finger would sense the heat, and communicate it to the spinal cord.  The spinal cord would send the information to the brain, where it would pass through a number of systems until it reached a particular area of what is known as the cerebrum.  The cerebrum is the largest portion of the brain, and what most think of when they attempt to visualise it.  It is divided into two portions, which are known as the cerebral hemispheres. It is the topmost region of the brain, and its cortex ("bark" in Greek), or the external layer, has many grooves and fissures in it, and these are known as cortical folding.  The cortex of the cerebrum is called the cerebral cortex, and the frontal portion of the cerebrum is called the frontal lobe.  Each cerebral hemisphere has a frontal lobe, as well as one of each of the other three lobes (they are not to be referenced in this post), and the two hemispheres are connected by what is called the corpus callosum ("tough body" in Latin), which allows the two hemispheres to share information with one another (see the below figure).  The frontal lobe is responsible for planning movements, strategies, and things of that nature (all of which can be conscious processes),  and the information the aforementioned nerves received from the heat source would have to be processed by the frontal lobe, and then processed back to the point of the sensation's origin before the finger would be retracted.  But what exactly causes this process to become 'conscious?'

A visual of the cerebrum, its cortex, its hemispheres, and the corpus callosum. 

       According to Sam Harris, a neurologist as well as author of a number of books including Free Will, the decision making process of the brain is principally subconscious in nature: that is, the decision is made before the individual is aware of it.  The time it takes the individual to become aware of the decision is, as it was in the case of the reflex, much less than a second, although it has led myself to stipulate that perhaps the process of making a decision is akin to a reflex, and that the individual becomes aware of it due to the information being sent to a different region of the brain, as one might become conscious of a reflex due to the spinal cord sending the information concerning it to a different region of the nervous system: the brain.  Therein lies another question: which region?
       Neil R. Carlson's eleventh edition of his textbook The Physiology of Behaviour references a procedure known as the split-brain operation.  This operation is performed on those afflicted with epilepsy so severe that it cannot be controlled with drugs.  Epilepsy is a disorder in which the nerves of one of the cerebral hemispheres becomes overactive.  Those nerves then process through the corpus callosum, and cause nerves in the other hemisphere to become overactive, resulting in what's known as a seizure.  The purpose of the split-brain operation is to cut the corpus callosum, so that the overactive neurons cannot reach the other hemisphere.  This prevents the hemispheres from taking part in interhemispheric communication, or the sharing of information and perceptions between hemispheres, as well as causes rather interesting side effects.  In a case referenced by the same text, a post-op split-brain patient had been reading a book.  The book was in the patient's left hand, and the holding of the book therefore correlated to the right side of the brain (connections to the brain are inverted, i.e. left hand to right hemisphere, etc.). In the brain of this patient, the right hemisphere could not interpret individual components of something, such as words to a text.  Because the right cerebral hemisphere could not read what the book said, it became bored with it and caused the left hand to throw it away.  When it was later discussed, the patient was not aware that the right hemisphere had decided to do so, and simply witnessed his own hand "having a mind of its own."  In his textbook, Carlson has interpreted this as a region of the left cerebral hemisphere being involved in consciousness, and I would agree with this.  However, I would further stipulate that it is not the only region of the cerebrum so involved, so much as any region besides the one from whence the communication originated.
        For example, perhaps the frontal lobe is planning to contract the humerus, the long bone in the forearm.  The individual is at first not aware of this, however becomes so when the frontal lobe communicates with one of the regions of the cerebral hemisphere, either ipsilateral (on the same side) or contralateral (on the other side) to it, that is responsible for associating vision, audition, or other sensory information with memories.  At the point in which these two regions of the brain communicate, is the point at which the individual becomes aware of the frontal lobe's current activity.  An analogy which might be employed to conceptualise this process would be two individuals who are having a conversation, and a third who is listening in.  Equate one of the conversing individuals, individual A, to the frontal lobe, and the other individual, individual B, to the region to which the front lobe is communicating with.  The third person (individual C) is the individual whose brain this is occurring in.  Individual A is planning to buy a pizza to eat.  Individual C is not yet aware of this because individual A has not shared this plan.  When he shares it with individual B, individual B can help individual A figure out where to buy the pizza and how much it might cost.  Individual C is not aware of how each of the individual are forming these ideas, however he has now become aware of the plan to buy the pizza due to his listening to the communication between individuals A and B.  This is what I convict consciousness to be: the communication between different regions of the cerebrum, or perhaps between regions of the cerebrum and different areas of the brain in general.
       In the paragraph previous to my analogy, I stipulated that the region of the cerebrum that did not communicate with the right hemisphere (due to the split-brain op) in the patient was not the only one involved in consciousness.  Why?  The patient was not aware of the right hemisphere's boredom with the book, nor was he aware of its plan to throw the book away, which was due to the procedure performed to cure his severe epilepsy.  Would that then not mean that consciousness is isolated to only one hemisphere (left, in this case) of the brain?  Not necessarily, otherwise how would the individual have made the decision to read the book in the first place?  As I had mentioned previously, I convict the process of formulating plans and decisions is a subconscious one, and that this decision 'reflex' would cause the individual to become aware of it after the fact.  My hypothesis would entail the region of the brain that received the communication from the frontal lobe about its plan to pickup the book caused the individual to become aware of it, however the region of the brain that was supposed to receive information from the frontal lobe of the right cerebral hemisphere about its boredom of reading the book had been disconnected due to the split-brain operation, thus preventing the individual from becoming aware of it.
      This is but one of the many ideas I have concerning the brain and the nature of consciousness, and while I cannot yet ascertain whether or not there is truth in the concept of a 'decision reflex,' I deem it to be entirely plausible, and I look forward to being able to either prove or disprove myself in the future, when I have the means to.


References:

Carlson, Neil R. Physiology of Behavior. Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 2011. Print.

Harris, Sam. Free Will. New York: Free, 2012. Print.

My Introduction

What is consciousness? Perhaps one of the most enigmatic conventions the universe features.  Does it perhaps allude to entities that exist within each of our bodies, rendering the silicon, phosphorous, oxygen, nitrogen, carbon, and hydrogen of which we are composed simply a vestige?  Or is it simply a manifestation of the inner workings of the nervous system?  The former question is the principal component of a philosophical concept known as dualism, a concept which dictates the mind, or consciousness, as it were, and the body (the integumentary system, the digestive system, etc.) are separate entities.  Dualism is a premise which had been in the favour of the scientific community moreso in the time of French philosopher Rene Descartes.  He believed a gland within the brain known as the Pineal body was akin to a joystick:  the brain received information from the sensory systems (vision, audition, etc.) and then transferred it to the 'soul,' which, when it made its decision, titled the Pineal body in a particular direction, and fluid in the brain (known as cerebrospinal fluid) would flow in that direction.  Descartes also convicted that our nerves were to our bodies as pipes were to machines, and that muscles were cylinders.  Once the soul chose where to direct the fluid, it would flow through the nerves and then to the muscles, where they would either fill up or empty with fluid, causing contraction or relaxation.  We now know that anatomy of the body is not as he thought, however he laid the foundation for further study.  Today we have many fields which principally concern the nervous system, fields such as neurology, and cognitive and behavioural neuroscience.  The evidence these fields garner suggest consciousness is as the latter of my two previously broached questions suggested-a manifestation of the nervous system.  As such, the scientific community now generally accepts the concept of monism (the mind and body being the same entity) to be axiomatic.  Even so, there is still so very much left to learn.  Neuroscience is a relatively new field,  as well as one which I hope to benefit in my future.  My name is Andrew, and I have created this blog for the purpose of aggregating my conjectures, hypotheses, ideas, and thought processes concerning this immensely interesting and enigmatic topic to the information super highway.  And maybe along the way, I might be able to actually help us understand what truly is 'the human experience.'