Brain Science

[Ginny]

Yesterday I had the first 2 lectures of an 8-lecture course about the brain. There'll be courses from different areas of science, like psychology and biology. When I got home, I felt flooded with so many ideas that I couldn't contain them all.
Has anyone ever studied this subject? Personally I find it very interesting.
So, would any of you be interested in hearing what we're told during the lectures? I can post a summary of each one and discuss it. It's one of those things I can talk for hours about.

The first lecture, by the way, was like a prologue to the subject, and the different ways of looking at "the body and soul problem", the seperation between the physical body (the brain) and the feelings, thoughts, conciousness. Then we had a lecture about drugs and addictions.

So, any interest?

[iamus]

Go for it.

I'll chip in if I can, but I'd like to listen.

[MrColossal]

I took a course called Brains and Minds in college, it was quite interesting, then I took an evolution class [evolution of animals as well as language and writting and society] with the same teacher and then Jess [my girlfriend] took a class with him called Light and Colour all about how the eye and brain see things...

We'd basically teach each other what the teacher said in classes we didn't share because we were so interested...

Why not summarize your learnings and everyone can have a nice chat about it.

[Ashen]

I have a BA in Psychology (well, joint with Education), so I did a little 'brain science' towards that. I think it was about the most interesting part of the course, but was marred by dull, dull lecturers. And often being very hungover. But mostly the lecturers.

I've forgotten most of it now, of course, but I'd be intersted to hear more.

[Tuomas]

WE neared this subject on psychology courses, yes, but merely by analyzing the brain structure and how one's thinking correlates with what one's brains do. So I basically know what brains are, but not how to clear my memory with only one simple stroke in the back of my head

[MrColossal]

Can we talk about "memory space"?

[The Inquisitive Stranger]

My memory space is filled with digits of pi...

[BOYD1981]

this all reminds me of that 'Life and Death 2 - The Brain' game, from that i learned you can't diagnose if a patient has had a stroke by sticking a sharp needle in their eye.
it's on abandonia if anyone's interested.

[MrColossal]

in one of the life and death games [I think, well some surgery game] my brother and I would see how much of our name we could carve into the stomach of a patient before we were pulled out of surgery...

When I open up my medical practice, would you consider joining, Boyd?

[BOYD1981]

[Ghormak]

With 3D graphics having reached the level it has, Life and Death 1 and 2 are clearly overdue for being remade!

(L&D 2 keeps crashing randomly for me. Boo. I used to be so good at it.)

[InCreator]

Whoeee, L&D! That's another game i'm seeking if there's a remake done, sometimes... no luck yet
It was quite terrifying awesome to hear digitized human scream through PC Speaker...

Brain science? There's a question I have not found answer yet... maybe lections like this explain the subject somewhere?

The processing speed of brain. You know, you have all taken a quick nap sometimes. 2-3 minutes or so. Like before work or school, after turning off alarm clock or so.
In this superquick sleep, I sometimes see a dream. What's weird is that I perfectly sense dream "going on" in real time. I even have counted time in dream, or waited... This sleep is usually very "thin", I mean, I sleep and dream, but still realize that it's morning and I must get up very soon and stop dreaming. Sometimes I even gain control of my dream... Virutal Reality, hooray!

Well, what's really weird, is that often, these dreams - if they were recorded directly from "what I see" or how else call this... could make 3-4 hour long movies! Even telling what I saw could take a nice hour. But I saw it all during 2-3 minutes? It gets even stranger if the "real world" voices come into my dream. Like someone waking me up. Someone says two sentences, in real time, with few second interval. But in my dream, I hear this, then live through a whole adventure or take a 300 km walk, and then hear second sentence. Like "Wake up" < long 3hour dream here / 2 seconds in realtime >  "It's 8 o'clock already".

So, wtf? Can brain process so much of content in so short time? And if so, why can't we watch movies on 500% speedup or so?

If I'd ever attend to something named "brain science", I'd go to seek answer to questions like this. And hell I got many of them.
Any tips on good articles?

[Ginny]

Articles was another thing I forgot to mention. If I find anything I'll link, and if anyone knows of any interesting articles then please do post them.
InC: Somewhere along the line we'll have a lecture on dreams and the brain, I can raise the question there about the brain's ability to process a lot of information in a very short timespan. Too bad the lectures are about 2-3 weeks apart each time.

There was the article esper posted in another thread (deja-vu): http://www.crystalinks.com/holographic.html
It's a new approach I find very interesting.

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Anyway, so here's a summary of the first lecture:

A little about the brain: The brain has about 1,000,000,000,000 cells, called neurons. Each neuron can make connections with 1000 or so other neurons. This forms the nervous system. Obviosly, with so many neurons and connections, and if we assume that a different nerve structure is what affects personality, thoughts, knowledge, then it's easy to see why people are so different - the number of possible nervous system structures of the brain is huge.

One of the main subjects that Brain Studies delves into is the "mystery of body and spirit". People are all made of the same kind of matter, the same basic building blocks, as the rest of the universe, including inanimate objects. There is an important difference between them however - since the objects follow the strict rules of physics in our universe, if we know the state of an object at the current moment, we can succesfully predict precisely where this object will be in a minute. If you hold a pen up and drop it, you can predict it will be on the floor a few seconds later. Humans, however, are unpredicatble. If a person suddenly makes a decision to do something, they can. We are limited by the laws of physics, obviously, but we have free will, and this allows us a lot of control over where we will be and what we will be doing a minute from now.

So, where does this free will come from? Supposedly, it's this part of our body, this spongey organ inside the skull that lets us THINK, excercise free will and make decisions.
The problem here is understanding how an organ made of matter like anything else gives us this ability to think. At the base of this "body and spirit" problem lies the contradiction between the brain as a part of the body, and the soul, the spiritual part of our minds - conciousness, thoughts, personality and feelings.

There are 5 approaches to this problem:
1. Materialistic approach - Matter is everything, everything is matter. The soul is an illusion.
2. The soul lies within the brain - In order to understand the soul, you must only understand the brain.
3. The soul and the brain are seperate studies that can't be described using the same set of and terms. It's best not to combine study of the two things.
4. The brain lies in the soul - Understanding the soul will allow us to understand the brain.
5. Idealism - Everything is the soul. It's impossible for us to think about what we don't think about (kinda like the beatles song, now that I think about it. There's nothing you can do that can't be done, nothing you can know that isn't known). Basically, we are trapped inside our soul, we can't conceive of anything outside it.

An idea was raised that the soul does not neccesarily lie in the brain, but in other parts of the body (I believe the person who said it was implying genitals. which, actually, isn't that far fetched), or perhaps in the body as a whole. I once read about a heart implant that was said to have changed the person's personality. It could have been the trauma from the organ transfer that caused the change, but it could be that some of the "soul" is in other organs.

Notice how a lot of things "could be". This is where philosophy was brought into the discussion officially. As I was in a philosophy course last summer, in the same university (Tel Aviv) the points were familiar to me. He presented it like this:
A long time ago there was a man named René Descartes, who said "I think therefore I am" (cogito ergo sum). In his book Meditations, he proved, using logical reasoning alone, that everything can be doubted, except for one thing. As mentioned in another thread, questioning our beliefs is a sure way to make them stronger, or find things we believe in more.
But doubting beliefs is obvious. Now, it may seem trivial to you, for example, that you are sitting in front of a computer screen right now. You don't have a reason to doubt that. But some hours ago, I dreamt that I was sitting at the computer looking at the screen. I was completely certain that the screen was there in front of me, very real. But in fact, this was only a dream. Ok, so I can doubt that the screen in front of me is there. But at least I'm sure that this is my body, my hands and my feet. Right? But then, an hour before that dream, I was dreaming that I was a unicorn with wings, flying over purple lakes. What if I really am that unicorn, and right now I'm dreaming that I'm a human with hands and feet?
So I can doubt my body. What about maths? If I ask you how much is 2+2, you'll say with full certainty 4. And how much is 367*452? Not so sure now? What is the square root of 205,067? If you try to work it out, do you agree that you stand the chance to make a mistake? What if when you say that 2+2=4, you're making a mistake? It's possible. *

What is there left that is undountable? And Descartes came to the conclusion that "I doubt everything, but I can't doubt the fact that I doubt." A paradox led him to the only certain thing. If you doubt, then you must think. And, cogito ergo sum, I think, therefore I am, I exist.
Later he goes on to prove the existence of god using logic, but I don't know the details as to how he does it. The book is supoosed to be a fairly easy read.

Some ways to study the brain and the different parts - studying people who have hurt a part of their brain and how this affects them, brain scans, psychological study (the movie "Rain Man" was mentioned, I haven't seen it but I know it's about a guy with some psychological disorders including OCD).

Moving on to some of the parts of the brain, there is the Central nervous system (the brain in the skull and the spinal brain), and the Peripheral nervous system (nerves in the rest of the body, such as around the intestines). The brainstem is responsible for all the basic functions needed for survival - breathing, the heart pumping blood through the body and our conciousness. The Lmbic system is respinsible for our feelings, personality and thought. The passing of information and the effects of hormones are also part of that system. There's the large brain, Cerebrum, and the small brain, Cerebelum. The small brain is connected with small things like the way we stand. Reflexes, like the famous knee-hit-causes-leg-to-jump thing, are handled in the level of the nerves that are around that area, so unlike insticnts, they do not come directly from the brain.

On the second lecture, which was less about brain and more about addiction and the different effects that drugs have on people, both physical and psychological, a thing called "satisfaction cicrcles" was brought up. Apparantly, when we experience something that causes us pleasure, from hearing a complement, through running into an old friend, to taking a drug, an actual, physical circle is created in a part of the brain. After one experience, we will seek the same experience to fulfill the existing circle's needs. This is an addiction to satisfaction (dopamine is produced when we do or experience anything positive, and that causes the feeling of satisfaction or even euphoria). An interesting notion, since this means that we might be addicted to anything we take pleasure in and would like to experience again. The difference, of course, is the ease of stopping, and in the feeling that you can't survive without what you're addicted to. Withdrawal symtoms aren't severe when stopping an addiction to, for example, swimming.

* A note on doubt: Sure, we can doubt anything and everything, all that we were sure was true could be a lie. As the lecturer so nicely put it (though I think it was accidental), 3000 years ago or so, the world was flat. Now, the world is round. Why is it so? We say we can prove it, we have photographs. But isn't there the possibility that we are wrong? So the world, round or flat, is what we make it, what we decide it is.
If we decide to doubt everything, though, we cannot make any kind of progress. It is equivalent to walking into a dark room and trying to understand, from nothing, what is there. In order to make some kind of progress, we need to build on things we now consider facts, even if it is to discover later that they are false.
Brain study is a relatively new field that is quite "in" right now, and no surprise since now we have the tools to study it, and the desire to understand ourselves better draws us to this subject. There is so much we don't know yet, which makes this field somewhat philosophical in nature.

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Here's a little experiment I'd like to do, not directly related to this lecture but I read about it somewhere:
Try, for one whole minute, not to think about white polar bears. Think about anything you like, just not polar bears. 2..1.. Go!

How'd it go? When I tried I managed to block them out part of the time but the fact that they needed blocking out was in iteself counted as thinking about them. When I did this to a friend I gave her 10 seconds, and she managed pretty much not to think about polar bears, but she kept laughing all through the experiment because of how hard they were trying to get into her thoughts.

[iamus]

Well, what's really weird, is that often, these dreams - if they were recorded directly from "what I see" or how else call this... could make 3-4 hour long movies! Even telling what I saw could take a nice hour. But I saw it all during 2-3 minutes?

Well time's a bit funny like that. Nobody experiences it the same way and nobody really knows how it works. As measured by the clock, it ticks along and we all hit the same points together. We start work at 9:00, go for lunch at 12:00. But inbetween each tick we all live it differently. Ever thought a day totally flew by, while the person beside you dies of boredom because the clock's just crawling along? Why does time seem to stretch or contract depending on mood? Other animals, like flies, experience time completely differently, and they live alongside us.

Einstein told us that time is a "thing", just like space. It can be warped and bent, the way it acts is dependant on gravity. Not just your perception of it, but your place in it changes, depending on how fast you are travelling. The way humans measure time is in how fast the Earth orbits around the moon. But our motion is being slowed by the tides, so even the most accurate atomic clocks lose seconds every so often and need to be reset. We are constantly redefining what time means to us.

Erm, sorry. Gone a bit offtopic. Bare in mind that I'm grasping at something here and I'm not too sure what it is.

Basically, experience of time is a subjective thing, how fast we move through it is dependant on where you are and who you are. When you're dreaming, and it's just your brain at work, who knows in what kind of ways it's moving or if it's subject to the same constraints we are?

The Experience and Perception of Time

I'll shut up now.

[Haddas]

in one of the life and death games [I think, well some surgery game] my brother and I would see how much of our name we could carve into the stomach of a patient before we were pulled out of surgery...

I used to "draw" a house or a happy face.

[iamus]

I liked the incessant poking and screaming.

[Tuomas]

Later he goes on to prove the existence of god using logic, but I don't know the details as to how he does it. The book is supoosed to be a fairly easy read.

A bit shjortly, but Descartes said, that if he thinks, then he must excist. Then he thought, that one can imagine perfect goodness. And since we can imagine it perfectly, there must be something that has given us this image. Yet in the materialistic world there is nothing that is perfectly good. Thus it must be God, as the image whe have of God is that He is perfect in all His goodness and therefore He must excist. Otherwise we wouldn't be able to imagine perfect goodness.

Personally, I think by this he showed the flaws in his own logic. But we must remember, that he was a philosopher in the time when philosopher's most important task was to combine philosophy with religion, and he was very religious man himself. Not a scholastic, but still.

[Tom S. Fox]

As measured by the clock, it ticks along and we all hit the same points together. We start work at 9:00, go for lunch at 12:00. But inbetween each tick we all live it differently. Ever thought a day totally flew by, while the person beside you dies of boredom because the clock's just crawling along?

This reminds me of an old lore:
The speed of time depends on what side of the toilet door you are.

[Ginny]

Tuomas - yeah, that sounds familiar. He wrote a prologue to his book, by the way, in which he apologizes for the chapter about God's existance, and says that he proves it in the end. Basically covering his ass before the church.

What do you think, which of the five approaches to studying the brain and soul is most correct? Or perhaps, which is most efficient?

P.S. Tuomas- about your question on IRC (I have a feeling roger won't give you the message) - go ahead and refer to this if you like, yeah. And if there's anything you'd like me to elaborate on that I might have forgotten to mention, just ask.

[Tuomas]

Well first of all I wouldn't go claiming that we have a soul very quick. But then again, soul doesn't have to mean exactly what comes to mind first. Yet I wouldn't claim that we have no soul either. WEll I know that the things in my head, were they clever or not, are electric impulses, going through my synapses etc. hey, I'll write a song of that, it rhymes. Anyway, I don't see electrick impulses, I don't even think about them. So what are my thoughts? AS far as I'm to think now, is that if my brain was only a lumb with icky things init, there wouldn't be anything to do with it, but ... shite, I had something deep here, but lost my thought because of this stupid tv show