Sleep

    I flipped my bedroom light off at 11:00 PM yesterday, shut my laptop, and let Parks and Recreation on Netflix play off of my desktop computer.  I turned my head away from the screen, closing my eyes, gradually, increasingly ignoring Nick Offerman's satirical comments.  At one point, the noise faded–no, it didn’t–indicating to me that I was falling asleep.  I was proud of myself; I usually am for managing to fall asleep.  It’s difficult to relax sometimes.  Knowing that I have to wake up the next day at 6:00 AM–maybe later, but not too late, and I have to worry about that too–start classes not two hours later, interact with others, complete a variety of essays reports & assignments before deadlines, rehearse for a musical at a playhouse twenty minutes from here, simply knowing that those things are coming is enough to proffer a moderate, stressful annoyance.  Of course, it could be worse; I could be sitting in immovable traffic just as an angry driver walks up to my car with a pipe, capable of and intending to assault me.  Imagine that pipe were a knife, the driver was C. Thomas Howell, and you were alone on a dark road, about to become another one of the Reaper’s multiply-stabbed victims.  Or, perhaps, I could be an infant both without my mom around and near a jackhammer.  There are many possibilities, many of which unrealistic, some impossible, some simple yet scary fantasies, but the thought can provoke as much anxiety as anticipating any real source of stress.  

    Or I could open my eyes and watch more of Amy.  But I can’t turn my head, and I can’t open my eyes.  I could open them, but I don’t want to.  I did, and I will, but I don’t, and I won’t, so I can’t.  My limbs are also paralyzed; I can’t lift them, but I feel like I’m typing right now.  This happens way too much; I wonder if I’ll be able to move this time, I’d like to finally conquer the paralysis.  It’s hopeless, though, most of the motor neurons below my neck have been strongly inhibited starting from the third and fourth stages of sleep, when my brain’s neuronal circuits all oscillate in almost perfect synchrony, slowly, powerfully, at a single cycle each second, varying from up states of ubiquitous activity, almost everything firing all at once, to down states, when absolutely nothing is firing.  Everything to nothing.  Nightmares could happen right now, though they aren’t necessary; it’s just everything and nothing.  If nothing is happening anywhere in my brain, then the astrocytes–the star-shaped cells that hold up the neurons and provide them with energy in the form of glycogen–can rest briefly, periodically, and replenish its glycogen levels.  Those levels drop each time an astrocyte’s neurons fire.  Every time I think, feel, remember, watch, stare, daydream, anything, if my neurons fire then they use energy, and each time they use energy my brain also secretes adenosine into itself. 
   
    The adenosine accumulated somewhat slowly yesterday.  I didn’t do much.  Nothing particularly strenuous except for watching my C# course videos.  I watched about ten consecutively, actively engaged in the lessons and following along, and I fell asleep for an hour or two.  Most of the adenosine that built up during my learning broke down during that nap.  It accumulated again afterward as the day grew darker, Parks and Rec played, I had dinner, played Minecraft, thought, imagined, imagined becoming a famous game designer.  I could walk to up someone and ask them if they’d ever heard of the game Zeitgeist, and they’d say yes, and I’d say that I wrote it.  I could ask if they’d read Muse, and they’d say yes, or no but they’d heard of it, and I’d tell them that I wrote that.  Someday that’ll be true, and that’ll happen, but for now I can’t move my arms or legs.  I want to raise my head, and there’s nothing else I want more than that.  I accidentally open my eyes, though.  It’s disappointing, but before I close them, I open them again, look up, and Parks and Rec is playing off of my laptop instead of my desktop.  It was closed, though, and I knew it was closed even while it was open.  If someone were to walk into my room at that moment, they’d have found me sleeping, but if I was awoken, then I’d have definitively denied being asleep.  I’d have told them I was resting my eyes for a few seconds, as some patients in hospitals do when nurses give them pills to swallow at midnight.  There’s a lot of destructive interference in a brain when its corresponding body is asleep but mostly aware of its surroundings, and aware of its awareness.  On average, the various neuronal circuits are operating quickly, at a frequency that’s known as theta-level activity.  Alpha and beta neuronal activity happens during wakefulness: the former when the brain isn’t doing anything particularly intensive, the latter when it is. 

    Theta is also known as stage 1 sleep.  After about 10-15 minutes, stage two begins, during which periods of clustered, synchronous yet dissonant activity occur throughout the brain.  These clusters are sleep spindles, and foreshadow a slower-wave sleep, as do the K complexes that also betide the stage two sleeper.  His brain’s activity occasionally spikes, all the circuits interfering with each other constructively.  The amplitude of a wave of a K complex is greater than that of the rest of the regular, destructive theta activity.  Then stage 3 begins, and stage 4 soon after.  Delta-level activity; much slower.  Nightmares can happen here, sometimes.  Everything and nothing.  During the everything, the periods of absolute activity, the current that passes through the different neuronal circuits is regular enough to encourage electrical coupling enough to consolidate explicit memories.  Memories of the color of my brown desk, or of the desktop that should be playing Netflix and not the laptop that’s suddenly become impossibly close to my face. 

    What if I suddenly flew away?  It wouldn’t matter; once I’m at the delta-level sleep stages, before REM sleep even begins, my prefrontal cortex has also become strongly inhibited.  During its active times, it distinguish illusion from reality as best it can, it suppresses irrational behavior, interprets social situations and regulates decisions through the scope of long-term plans and social contracts and norms.  It keeps track of the passage of time.  But now it’s stopped, and if I heard the name Muse then I’d wonder whether I’ve ever heard any songs by Muse.  If I heard Zeitgeist,  I’d remember arguing with my old history teacher about creationism.  If I started flying, I’d fly into a mall, totally beyond my control, and buy the entire building.  I’d make a reasonable revenue.  There would be sources of stress, but C. Thomas Howell wouldn’t come to murder me, and I wouldn’t be a baby near a jackhammer.  I might lose my hair, but I’ve already lost it, or am about to, or it won’t go anywhere.  If I were awake and about to be murdered, my hypothalamus would stimulate the adrenal gland, which would secrete cortisol and begin to trigger the sympathetic nervous system’s response to my imminent demise.  My blood pressure and heart rate would increase dramatically, I’d be alert, scared, and feeling stressed.  The same would happen if I were that baby; the same would happen if I dreamt it all.  If I read, from a book, a quote from 1982 by a fellow called Melges, “the dreamer often has no feeling of striving for long-term goals but rather is carried along by the flow of time by circumstances that crop up in an unpredictable way,” and felt it were creepy, I would experience the same emotion if I had dreamt reading it.  A dream is nothing more than a set of auditory, motor, tactile, visual, sensory hallucinations that doesn’t even have to occur while your eyes are moving rapidly.  But it’s a hallucination in which you have no ability to understand the world around you.  There is no difference between fantasy-fantasy and fantasy-reality, no real flow of time, no logic, no causality, and none of that even matters to you.  You, the dreamer, are dust in the wind; dust doesn’t care that it’s dust, and when you dream, during slow-wave sleep, REM sleep, or even during the day, neither do you.  Slow-wave dreams and REM dreams are also storylike in format as you experience it and if you were to report it, which indicates that what you experienced in that dream made complete sense to you.  You may even recall having been interested in a particular goal; I am typically interested in attempting to move my body despite the self-inflicted paralysis. 

    Has this post confused you?  Have you followed it with relative ease?  Has your day been a stressful one?  Was there any reason that corresponded to the difficulty, or had a variety of problems presented themselves to you simultaneously?  The disorder in the universe is everywhere, yet we arrange it into patterns and reason daily and regularly.  Dreams more obviously reflect that very process, and you are as conscious during them as you have been reading this.  I suppose that raises an important question: do you need to wake up right now? 

   

Aggression

Two children were born into an abusive family.  They were fraternal twins, and born at least fifteen years after their parents’ first child.  Both grew up in the same house with the same ornery, alcoholic father and strict, unforgiving mother who often resorted to violence as a means of punishment.  The twins were emotionally neglected and probably could have had better parents if the mother and father each transmogrified into a different type of rotten fruit.  This will be case A.
    In case B, another pair of fraternal twins was raised by an alcoholic mother and violent father, and had a much older sibling.  Case C is identical to case A except the C parents annually made 200 thousand dollars more, and in case D the fraternal twins were raised by a rusty can and a turtle.  Which of these four environments would most predictably elicit consistent aggressive, antisocial behavior in the respective sets of twins?  Go ahead, guess. 
    If you chose any of them, you’d be wrong.  It may very well be that all, none, or most of the cases above besides the can/turtle scenario produced callous, antisocial children, but no direct correlation exists.  The behaviors the fraternal twins watch their parents perform consistently certainly impacts the children, but in no one specific way.  Why not? 
    The process by which humans learn their behaviors and beliefs from the myriad environments each encounters as he develops–socialization–is simple to conceptualize, but inherently difficult to quantify.  In the first case, it could have also been stipulated that one of the twins were homeschooled while the other attended public school regularly.  The homeschooled twin spent disproportionately more time watching his parents interact with each other–watching them fight, curse, and attempt to inculcate within their child a dubious moral code while in a drunken haze–and the other twin spent each day watching how other kids his age interacted with one another.  One day during kindergarten, the public-schooled twin noticed that whoever last left the classroom would have the teacher ask him to help clean up for a few minutes.  Impatiently and consequently, he diverted more energy towards ensuring he wasn’t the last to leave; however, he saw that a couple of the other children scrambled more quickly than he did–more quickly than he could–to escape the room before they were the last and had to stay past the end of the school day.  Feeling abandoned by his parents because he was stuck trying to run away from extra cleaning all on his own while his brother was homeschooled, he felt his only recourse was to take matters into his own hands, and he therefore began to start hiding his classmates’ belongings so they would have to spend the time he used to pack up and leave looking for their own things. 
    About a decade later, the same boy’s sibling, no longer homeschooled, rode the school bus everyday to high school, where he discovered that some of his peers more readily spent time with him if he could make them laugh.  He wasn’t exactly sure how to do that, so he experimented with various styles of humor–slapstick, deadpan and the like–until he discovered that deprecating jokes almost universally elicited some giggles.  Insults were, of course, fairly empty (if not downright stupid) without substance, and so there had to be a way for him to reconcile the need to make people laugh with his utter lack of knowledge about his peers.  So he thought of his brother, the wunderkind who simultaneously smiled, did well in class, and went to parties every few weeks, and he came to conclude that he could joke about the brother who poorly rapped Eminem songs alone in his room.  His brother’s idiosyncrasies were a hit with his friends, and as he become more comfortable around other kids his age, the deprecating humor gradually came to an end. 
    Another decade after that, the initially-homeschooled twin still lived with his parents while the publicly-schooled twin was a clever, successful accountant with an above-entry-level job at a firm in New York City.  The latter brother had been working at the firm for almost two years, and he had been promoted thrice.  He worked, on average, about forty hours each week, and had rented an apartment a few blocks from his job with a roommate he met in high school.  The former twin spent most of his time writing fruitlessly in his bedroom, and usually fancied himself a published author–although he was not once–when he went out with acquaintances and the few friends he had managed to hold onto.  He rarely spoke with his parents.  Six months from this point in the twins’ lives, the homeschooled twin will finally finish and publish his first collection of short stories, and the accountant-twin will commit suicide. 
    What detail from this brief account of the two lives would lead anyone to conclude that one of the two boys eventually kills himself?  Is the relevant detail even mentioned?  Is there even a specific event that would have engendered it.  Perhaps his job was too high stress and his aloof and distant parents hadn’t helped him learn how to cope, although it could be said that other accountants who had similarly negligent parents lived long and somewhat comfortable lives.  Or, perhaps, one day he drank too much, remembered reading a story, years ago, about a girl who committed suicide, and was suddenly inspired.  There are far, far too many confounding factors that make such conclusions almost impossible to draw, but it can, at least, be said that there are some genetic and environmental circumstances that will definitively impact someone’s socialization.  For example, if the two twins were identical instead of fraternal (if they were monozygotic rather than dizygotic), it would have been more likely that both twins would have more readily exhibited aggressive, emotional behavior or that neither of them would.  It is, of course, true that development due to the environment–ontogeny–could and does easily impact how aggressively anyone will act, and there is a more general, physiological description of the likelihood of aggressive, impulsive behavior than the identical twins scenario. 
    The ventromedial prefrontal cortex, the vmPFC, and a region of it known as the subgenual anterior cingulate cortex play a special role in inhibiting emotional responses: the vmPFC accepts input from the dorsomedial thalamus, olfactory system, temporal lobe, and the amygdala.  From these regions, it receives information regarding the environment and what plans the other regions of the cerebrum are currently making, and outputs to regions such as the hypothalamus and amygdala in a way that allows it to affect emotional responses, often through inhibiting them.  It’s the region of the prefrontal cortex that essentially checks aggressive, antisocial, impulsive, emotional, or violent behavior, if the behavior is inappropriate in a real, personal context.  There was a man in the mid-1800s named Phineas Gage, who suffered from an accident involving a steel rod that exploded forward, through his cheek, and up out of his skull.  He lived, but he was different.  Before the accident, he was focused and had a good work ethic, but afterwards he became callous, irresponsible, and prone to emotional outbursts.  Guess why. 
    The steel rod had destroyed most of his vmPFC, and as a result he acted much more impulsively, and also became almost entirely unable to make or keep plans.  The region of his brain that once held his hand and sternly whispered in his ear don’t had been gimped.  Of course, those who suffer from accidental impalements aren’t the only ones who act childishly, and so another explanation is possible.  In London, cab drivers were once required to learn whole maps of London so they could get around more quickly, and it was shown that this requirement caused their cabbies’ brains to devote more neurons to the spatial memory center, the hippocampus.  On average, London cab drivers have significantly larger hippocampi than you or I would.  As discussed in the post Moral Dilemmas, children are more prone to emotional outbursts because their vmPFCs have not yet sufficiently grown as to more successfully inhibit the amygdala and the impulsive behavior it helps engender.  Here lies perhaps the only quantifiable aspect of this discussion on anger and aggression: the bigger the vmPFC, the less likely a volatile reaction will occur.

Andrew Speers

Moral Dilemmas

Are moral choices rational?  Nope.

    Imagine a walnut.  You are allergic to them, and have two bags of nuts: one has walnuts, the other has macadamias.  A recipe you’re following calls for a bag of unspecified nuts.  Would you use the walnuts?

    Imagine a runaway train.  Out of control and unstoppable, it and its five passengers are about to plummet off of an unfinished bridge and into the canyon below.  You can stop it by throwing a lever that redirects the train onto another intact track, but the train would kill the worker standing on the track.  Would you throw the lever?

    Imagine a speeding car on a cliffside road.  It’s about to corner too quickly, and doing so would sent it and its five passengers off of the cliff.  You are a thin man standing next to a much larger fellow who hasn’t noticed the car and its imminent doom.  To save the passengers, you could push the other man in front of the car, slowing the driver and saving his family (you are too thin to sacrifice yourself).  Would you push the fat guy?

    The former is a nonmoral problem, the second is an impersonal moral problem, and the latter is a personal moral problem.  For most, nonmoral problems like the walnut ‘dilemma’ engender utilitarian decisions; that is, the chooser will consider the benefits of each choice and select the one with a more ‘useful’ outcome.  Therefore, the average human will use macadamia nuts in the recipe and not kill themselves. Impersonal moral problems offer circumstances and outcomes thereto that the chooser is directly detached from.  In the train problem, all you must do is throw a lever to save five people but kill one, and in this case most people will, again, select the utilitarian decision.  Decisions that conclude personal moral dilemmas defy the utilitarian pattern and conventional wisdom. 

    They’re emotional; when people consider personal moral choices, their brains use several regions that relate to emotional reactions including the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC), located in the frontal lobe at the bottom of the cerebrum.  The vmPFC is the brain region associated with fear, risk, and decision making, and its development helps explain the emotional volatility of decisions that younger people make.  The amygdala is a region deep within the temporal lobe of each cerebral hemisphere, is primarily responsible for anger and violent emotional reactions, and develops before the vmPFC does.  Someone with a mature brain will react to an angering situation angrily and perhaps violently, which the vmPFC most often inhibits potentially violent behavior by considering the negative consequences of their actions.  Hence more irrational, less controlled emotional reactions in younger people.  The vmPFC functions similarly in the personal moral dilemma.  It causes the chooser to consider the consequences of pushing the fat man, namely, directly killing someone, which is an upsetting idea.  Other emotional centers in the brain process the hypothetical murder and elicit upset or repulsed reactions.  As a result, people who consider the speeding car problem more often favor letting the five die to killing one. 

    The same process produces the same reaction in most people if they were to consider incest.  When presented with a scenario wherein two relatives have sex but without the possibility of having children, the principal argument against the act is simply “Yuck!” I contend that moral arguments are actually no more than appeals to emotion; every moral criticism of crime, incest, religion, etc., succeeds or fails because of the audience’s emotional association with their concept of the issue.  If there is no emotional association, the moral judgement won’t hold water; if theirs contradicts the speaker’s, then no effect; and if theirs matches the speaker’s, then the argument will succeed.  Emotions guide personal moral choices, and so the less someone cares for, is interested in, or can empathize with a scenario, the more utilitarian their final judgement becomes, as seen in the train problem (of course, if the lever-thrower had some past experience with throwing levers and letting people die, they may have already formed some emotional association that would then guide their choice–at that point, though, it wouldn’t be an impersonal dilemma).  In other words, the more important the issue is to the chooser (value and interest/emotion have a directly proportional relationship), the more likely they are to ignore the utilitarian perception and favor the emotional.  The question “what feels better?” most often trumps “what has the best outcome?” 

-Andrew Speers

Psychology vs. Neuroscience

Psychology is flawed. It, along with psychiatry, was conceived at a time in which the 'mind' was not greatly understood. It employed rational reflection upon different concepts of the 'mind' a.k.a philosophy, and, as such, it is not as deeply rooted in true science itself a.k.a observation. Case in point, Sigmund Freud is a widely studied and highly held figure in the field of psychology and psychoanalysis, and yet the large majority of the notions he broached to the scientific community are simply untrue. The id, the psyche, the 'subconscious' and 'conscious' minds, these are things that are not truly representative of the 'mind.' And how have we come to know this to be true? Neuroscience.

The term the 'mind' is a term which has arisen from ancient, rudimentary psychology that implies the 'mind' is an entity all its own. It is not. It is a function of the nervous system, and calling that function by a term which implies a separate entity is attributing to that function some transcendental, metaphysical nature. This is stone-age thinking in science, in REALITY, and a so-called 'science' that employs the use of the term 'mind' on an official basis; that employs the simply untrue assertions of Sigmund Freud (who by the way used drugs); and has an integral component of philosophy imbued within it, can never be entirely accurate. Many psychology magazines publish articles which have no scientific ground and are, in some cases, blatantly untrue.

But what, then, could be a viable substitute for something so flawed, that is not imbued with thus flaws?

Neuroscience.

A Broken Mind

    The brain is the most complex organ in the human body, and as such, it is responsible for the control and regulation of everything else within us.  While its functions vary greatly in number and in role, the underlying physiological processes that are responsible for each given function tend to be quite similar.  Throughout the history of neuroscience, there have been multiple attempts to identify these processes and explain them, and I have described some of these attempts (Dualism, Descartes' model) in my previous entries.  And like I have also said before, we now realise that the brain is a large aggregation of nervous tissue in which a few glands of the endocrine system are present, such as the pituitary gland and the pineal gland.  Specifically, nervous tissue refers to neurons, the nervous cells which communicate information, and the cells which provide them with nutrients.  About 20 days after conception, the origin of the nervous system, the neural tube, will be formed after a portion of the posterior of the embryo hardens and curls inward.  This tube will close off at the bottom and form the bottom of the spinal cord, and the top will send forth progenitor cells which give rise to the neurons and nutrient-providing cells of the brain.  These cells will arrange themselves in a manner specified by the genetic instructions coded for by the DNA of the organism, and, once they have all been formed and moved to their specified locations, they will send out extensions of themselves, or processes, to connect with the other neurons of the brain.  Meanwhile, the neurons which comprise the rest of the nervous system are being formed from progenitor cells located down the rest of the soon-to-be spinal cord, and will connect with each other, the cells of the brain, and the organs of the body.  All this entails, really, is that the brain is a complex conglomeration of nerve cells.  Ergo, the functionality of the brain can be attributed to biological processes of the cells, or, at least, this was the classic model of the brain until a scientist I had referenced in my previous post, "The Rhythm of Memories," introduced a new model which used another variable to explain the processes of the brain: time. 
    A function of neurons is that they propagate messages along their bodies using electricity.  The aforementioned scientist whose name is Rodolfo Llinas, discovered in the mid 80s that the electric charge of a group of neurons would become constant in that grouping, and that those charges would then begin to oscillate in rhythm with one another.  He found that this would occur without any perceptual or cognitive stimulus, and is, as a result, intrinsically present as a process of the brain.  The scientist used this intrinsic oscillation, and therefore time, as a variable in a model of the brain he proposed.  As I had described and subsequently challenged in my previous post, Llinas found that regions of the brain that were responsible for movement, such as the cerebellum, oscillated at a different frequency than regions of the brain responsible for interpretation of sensory information, such as the cerebrum.  Another region of the brain, the thalamus, is also comprised of groups of neurons which oscillate together, however the inside of the thalamus naturally does so at the same frequency those regions of the brain involved with movement oscillate at (around 10 Hz), and the outside oscillates in conjunctive frequency with sensory information processing regions of the brain, around 40 Hz.  Rodolfo Llinas used these findings to conclude that we move at a frequency of about 10 Hz, whereas we perceive and sense at a frequency of about 40 Hz.  The neuroscientist stipulated that this disparagement between oscillation frequencies of movement and perception was in part to an evolutionary 'allowance' of sorts, so that the brain could have time to process information before it acted. 
    As his research continued, Llinas began to focus moreso on the thalamus, a region of the brain commonly known as the sensory relay station.  That is true to an extent, however the outside of the thalamus is what is majorly responsible for this, and the inside is mainly responsible for attentiveness, or arousal.  Because the inside of the thalamus and areas of the brain responsible for movement oscillate at the same frequency, it can be asserted that they are connected to each other, both in anatomy and functionality, and it can then be logically concluded that an organism will make movements that are not caused by reflex arcs based on what it is paying attention to.  Following this line of reasoning, the outside of the thalamus is connected to the sensory information processing areas of the brain such as the cerebrum (a set of connections which Llinas coined to be the thalamocortical system), and that the functionality of those regions is based on the information being relayed by the thalamus.  Furthermore, as I had originally described in my post, "Subjective Perception," multiphasic cognitive relay is a term which I use to refer to the general illusory state of consciousness, being that the individual will be conscious of something if two or more cognitive faculties are perceiving information from it.  Because regions of the brain which oscillate at the same frequency play a role in the processes of one another, Llinas found that if the outside and inside of the thalamus are oscillating at the same frequencies, then the individual is paying attention to, or aroused by, the cognition, from (as I personally stipulate) two or more sensory systems, which the thalamus is perceiving, and is therefore conscious of it.  Simply put, an organism is conscious of what it is paying attention to, be it vision, audition, proprioception, interoception, or any of the senses. 
    As further proof of concept, Llinas continued onward to discover a class of disorders collectively known as thalamocortical dysrhythmia.  These disorders entail a region of the thalamus oscillating at a 'mismatched' frequency than the rest of the brain area, and, depending on the region, will produce a different disorder.  The neuroscientist, along with other neuroscientists who have been taking increasingly vested interests in thalamocortical dysrhythmia, discovered that it is the cause of disorders such as Parkinson's Disease, tinnitus, and even schizophrenia, among other previously recognised conditions and disorders.  Specifically, schizophrenia is a disorder which humans have known of since the classical age of Ancient Rome and Greece.  The word literally means "broken mind" in Greek, and is philosophically referred to as perceiving reality as if it were a dream.  But what is a dream?
    As I said in my introductory paragraph of this entry, the brain is responsible for a myriad of functions, however the physiological processes which perform these functions are not as varied, in fact I would go so far as to assert that they all revolve around the same intrinsic chattering that occurs between groups and circuits of neurons.  In my posts "The Genius Gene" and "The Memory Circuit," I go into detail concerning the nature of what a memory is, and attribute it to a circuit of neurons that "loops" through different regions of the brain depending on which regions were activated due to the experience the stored memory entails.  I've also said that the frontal lobe of the cerebrum is responsible for the planning of behaviours and strategies as well as the solving of problems.  Because the brain is capable of synthesising stored memories to create new concepts, ideas, strategies, etc., I stipulate that a dream is simply a conglomeration of synthesised memories.  Moreover, it has been found that brain activity during dream-sleep, or REM (Rapid Eye Movement) sleep, is consistent with levels of brain activity during wakefulness, and logic can then lead to the conclusion that a dreaming individual can be considered conscious.  And as I had said before, you are conscious of something if you are paying attention to it, so an individual is, very simply, paying attention to the conglomerate memory synthesis when he is dreaming.  Furthermore, because of the illusory nature of consciousness, it is not something which is able to actually to "do" anything at all, which means that processes such as conglomerate memory synthesis are not ones that are initiated by functions classically thought of as conscious.  However does that mean this synthesis process is one that is facilitated by sensory information, or one that happens intrinsically, similar to the chatter-like neuronal oscillation?
    A commonly referred to phenomenon is one in which the given individual reports to have been dreaming about a TV show he had been watching before he went to bed.  Another instance of this would be if the individual is upset by something.   He would then report that his dreams were related to that feeling of being upset in some way.  Therefore it can be asserted that previously perceived cognition can and does play a role in dreams.  Somnambulism, or sleepwalking, is, very simply, interaction with the environment as if the interacting individual was awake.  These interactions tend to be repeated behaviours such as cleaning, and could be attributed to some type of cognition the individual did not consciously perceive due to his inherent focus on his dreaming, and therefore has no ability to inhibit the habitual behaviour.  The interactions might also have the possibility of being driven by events the individual is dreaming of.  The recurring theme in each of the aforementioned cases is that the sensory events are affecting the dream state, which means that the conglomerate memory syntheses would occur intrinsically, without any need for cognitive manipulation.  For example, when we daydream, we tend to "zone out" and focus on the daydream, however we are capable of "snapping out of it" due to some outside stimulus, perhaps someone yelling.  The daydream originally occurred, though, because the individual began to pay attention more and more to it. 
     Schizophrenia is, as I had mentioned previously, generally refers to difficulty in differentiating between reality and dreams.  Because dream-like processes, or conglomerate memory syntheses, occur intrinsically, a difficulty in reality and dream differentiation would simply refer to the frontal lobe having difficult solving the 'problem' of whether or not something is real, which would be, as Rodolfo Llinas has found, in part to thalamocortical dysrhythmia.  To conclude, it is becoming more and more evident that using time as a variable in a model of brain functionality is critical to the realism of the model, and the processes of the thalamocortical system, as well as the thalamus itself, point further to the plausibility of my original concept of multiphasic cognitive relay. 

The Rhythm of Memories

    I recently read an article from Discovery magasine called "Brainsong," in which the author had interviewed a neuroscientist by the name of Rodolfo Llinas.  The string of questions concerned Llinas' perspective as to how the brain functions, and this perspective "emphasizes frequency, time, and coherence as much as anatomy and neurochemistry."  Llinas has found that neurons intrinsically communicate with each other in low-level electric oscillatory rhythms, and that they do so intrinsically.  That is, this rhythmic neural oscillation occurs without the need for any sort of sensory input.  The generally thought of model of the brain is that it is akin to a computer, where it simply receives an efferent, sensory input, and then outputs a response using afferent motor neurons, however what actually happens is that incoming stimuli simply alter the inherent "chatting" that is already occurring between neurons of a given group, and then other neurons in that group will adjust to that altered oscillation frequency.  This is similar to the beating of the heart: it can be slowed or sped up, but it will always pump, and, in the case of the neural oscillations, they can be increased or decreased in frequency, but they will still already be occurring.  Furthermore, according to Rodolfo, regions of the brain that are involved in movement and coordination, such as the cerebellum, oscillate at 10 Hertz (Hz), or cycles per second, whereas faculties such as perception and cognition oscillate at 40 Hz, a frequency which is called gamma band.  But, while Llinas' findings are indisputable, I stipulate that his interpretation of what they entail is mistaken.  Why?
    In my post "The Memory Circuit," I had said that memories are comprised of circuits of neurons which "loop" through different areas of the brain.  What I did not say, however, is that each of these memory circuits are maintained by constant low-level electrical oscillations.  These oscillations could be what Llinas refers to when he said the cerebellum oscillates at 10 Hz, something which he interpreted to be the simple functioning of the region.  As I had referenced in my post "The Genius Gene," the brain stores basic statements, ideas or movements that it deems to be axiomatic in nature as memories, and then connects multiples of these simpler memories to form more complex conclusions.  I think that the memory of a simple movement or complex behaviour would be comprised of a neural circuit which "loops" through corresponding regions of the brain, such as the cerebellum, and I further stipulate that the neuroscientist's observation of brain regions responsible for movement oscillating at 10 Hz instead refers to memory circuits that involve movements in their stored recollections.  As a final point, I convict that if a memory circuit were to begin oscillating at 40 Hz, the individual would still only consciously recall it if multiple different cognitive stimuli were responsible for increasing the oscillatory frequency. 
   My next few posts will concern various points which Rodolfo Llinas made in the interview featured in a special edition of the Discovery magasine. 


References
"Brainsong." Interview by Kat McGowan. Discover May 2012: 15-22. Print.

Habits, Neuroplasticity, and the Origin of Emotion

    There are two manners in which an individual grows and develops:  genetically, or pathologically.  Genetic development refers to processes which are both defined and initiated by the genetic code, or DNA.  The DNA of humans is located in the nuclei (plural of nucleus), or centers, of the individual cells that compose all organisms, and sequences of it, known as genes, account mainly for the development and functionality of these cells that lend themselves to the collective organism's mass, function, and growth.  Essentially, genes build organisms from the ground-up.  Pathological development, on the other hand, refers not to development which originates from the genetic code, but rather that which is formed or altered in part to what is known as sensory input.  In the context of development, it also always refers to the nervous system, and the many 'pathways it contains.'  Sensory input occurs when some manner of stimulus, for example, the heat source referenced in my post, "The Decision Reflex," acts on receptors located on neurons that connect to, or innervate, whatever other bodily system the sensory input corresponds to  (in this instance, the sensory input corresponds to the integumentary system, or the skin).  The input will be communicated by the sensory neurons (whose receptors it originally acted on) to other areas of the body, where it will temporarily alter current functionality.  An example of this would be if you were told by a trainer or instructor to begin to run.  This stimulus will be received by the auditory system, and communicated to the brain.  The brain will then formulate a plan that corresponds to the trainer's instruction, and then communicate with muscles in the legs, so that the individual begins to run.  Although something like this is considered a behaviour (and a conscious one at that), the course of events remained the same: you received a stimulus in the form of a command, and it thereafter altered the current functionality of the body, both by the brain processing the command, and the muscles of the legs carrying it out.  However, the alterations described above are only temporary.  In order for sensory input to cause pathological development, the same or similar sensory inputs must occur repeatedly over a larger period of time.  For example, according to the text The Physiology of Behaviour, an infant must begin to experience seeing things with both eyes simultaneously at around two months of age, or else he will be cross-eyed.  But in respect to biology, what actually happens? 
     In my post, "The Genius Gene," I referenced the limbs, or processes, of neurons, which are known as axons and dendrites.  What I did not mention, is that both axons and dendrites branch off into smaller processes of themselves, and axons specifically terminate in what are known as terminal buttons.  These buttons then form what are called synapses with one of the dendrites, cell body (or "soma"), or even an axon of another neuron (how synapses are created will be discussed in a later post).  A synapse formed by a terminal button and a dendrite is axodendritic, one formed by a button and a soma is axosomatic, and one formed by a button and an axon is axoaxonic (Use the below visual as a reference).  Chemicals known as neurotransmitters are released by terminal buttons when the rest of the neuron is stimulated by a communication from a sensory input or another neuron, and are the neurons' primary method of information transmission.  Released neurotransmitters will briefly float through the space between the button, and the surface it has formed a connection with, known as the synaptic cleft, and consequently affect the dendrite, soma, or axon of whatever neuron with which the synapse had been formed.  The newly affected neuron will then either propagate or inhibit the transmission which caused the original release of chemicals into the synaptic cleft, and this depends on the type of the neurotransmitter.  This will continue, from neuron to neuron, until the transmission is inhibited, or completes the communication of the information being transmitted. 

Three synaptic connections: leftmost is axodendritic, center is axosomatic, rightmost is axoaxonic

    Neurons are actually capable of changing the synapses they have formed with other neurons, and are able to cease communication by terminating a synaptic connection with one neuron, and creating a connection with another.  This process is referred to collectively as neuroplasticity, and will also be discussed in more detail in future posts.  For now, though, the ability of neurons to alter their synaptic connections are the changes caused by the aforementioned gradually altering sensory input which I had called pathological development.  An example of this would be habitual behaviour, or recurring behaviours of an individual that he did not consciously initiate.  This can refer to many behaviours, including (but by no means limited to) grinding teeth, biting nails, and a psychological disorder that entails the habitual pulling out of hair known as trichotillomania.  Habits are formed when the individual receives a sensory input which causes him to consciously perform a given behaviour, and then receives the same or a similar sensory input on a few later occasions which cause him to consciously repeat the same given behaviour (the neurons which communicate the brain's plan to initiate a behaviour to the necessary muscles are known as motor neurons).  After enough instances of the same sensory input causing the same behavioural response, the neurons which have been involved with the communication of the sensory input, known as efferent neurons, and the motor neurons (or afferent neurons), will display neuroplasticity and rearrange some of their synaptic connections in what can be described as an attempt to predict the transmission of both sensory and motor information in instances similar to those which caused the original sensory inputs.  Therein lies a question: why are these recurring processes, or habits, not initiated consciously?
    In my post entitled "Subjective Perception," I had discussed what I stipulate to be the nature of consciousness, a phenomenon which I had referred to as multiphasic cognitive relay.  Essentially this term entails the requirement for a sensory system to be processing information that corresponds to information currently being processed by other sensory systems in order for the individual to become aware of the information.  In the previous paragraph, I had said that before a behaviour becomes habitual, it is still planned and initiated consciously.  The frontal lobe, responsible for the planning of behaviours (among other things), communicates with the other three lobes of the cerebrum: the temporal, parietal, and occipital lobes.  These lobes are responsible for processing their corresponding sensory information, possibly storing that information as memory, and then associating previously stored sensory information with either that which is currently being perceived, other memories, or plans the frontal lobe might be formulating.  I will refer to this process of association as cognitive association, and the frontal lobe employs thus each time it attempts to create a plan.  In the case of a behaviour which is not habitual, I stipulate the individual is conscious of cognitive association relative to the given situation because the brain is using multiple different cognitive faculties in order to process the sensory inputs of the situation.  Furthermore, I convict that the individual is not conscious of the initiation of habitual behaviour because of the pathological development that caused the efferent and afferent neurons that communicated information on same or similar previous occasions where perception and response, on the part of the given individual, was consistent, to display neuroplasticity and alter their synaptic connections in order to "predict" similar transmissions of information.  Therefore, only one sensory input would be necessary in order to at least begin the efferent transmission of information to the brain, where the same cognitive association would occur, and the same afferent motor neurons would be triggered, thus resulting in a habitual behaviour.  This would also account for conscious interruption of a habit, that if another sensory system receives an input from the situation whilst the first sensory input is being processed or the motor neurons are carrying out the consequent behaviour, the individual will become aware of the process. 
    Neuroplasticity entails the alteration of synaptic connections on the parts of involved neurons.  However, what had the original state of the synaptic connections been, before any processes displaying neuroplasticity had occurred?  In my previously referenced post, "The Genius Gene," the brain of the child learning basic addition creates what I referred to as intellectual precedents that correlate to the basic postulates that are needed to prove the legitimacy of addition.  And just as the infant needs to begin experience what is known as stereoscopic vision (vision with both eyes) early in their life, I hypothesise that it is at this point in the child's life, it also experiences the emotional reactions to different situations of those around him, for example his parents, and his brain then creates intellectual precedents which correspond to those emotional reactions, and uses them as a basis for how the child himself will feel in relation to different situations.  After that initial intellectual precedent, neuroplasticity can occur repeatedly and alter the way in which the individual will feel about the same or similar situations, or situations which remind him of the ones in which he witnessed his parents respond emotionally, as an infant. 
    As in my previous posts, I will reference both the plausibility as well as hypothetical nature of my stipulations.  What is interesting to note, however, is that my idea as to how emotions originate within individuals correlates to what I have recently discovered to be the most generally accepted theory of emotion within the scientific community: the James-Lange Theory.  I will actually go more into detail concerning the actual nature of emotions, or irrational thought processes, in later posts, as well as all else I made clear I would discuss further.  I also suggest you read my previous posts if you have not already, because I use each one as a reference point in this post, and I will continue to do so in future entries. 

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

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.

 

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.'