Good Nova, as usual. Anil Seth appears.
Your Brain: Who’s in Control? A review.
(my comments are usually in brackets, always in italics)
Dive into the subconscious to see what’s really driving the decisions you make.
PREMIERED: 5/24/23, RUNTIME: 53:31, TOPIC: BODY + BRAIN
{Interestingly they advertise “body + brain” but do they walk the walk they talk? Let’s take a look.}
Sleep and sleep walking
7:50 Being conscious isn’t an all prefrontal cortex dynamic, it involved other regions of the brain.
Consciousness
8:55 Anesthesia renders a person unconscious.
“Her brainstem is “out”, she is unconscious."
14:00 split brain = two brains
The two sided brain
(Regarding the two sided brain and the corpus callosum - before all our philosophizing about two brains (or two minds) in one person, we need to absorb the fundamental concept of our bilateral bodies, the neural signals traveling from left go to right and vis verse allows the left and right side of the body to track what the other side is doing, moment by moment. That’s a simple requirement for all bilateral creatures.)
22:35 Here’s an example of the philosophizing that irks me so. It’s a constant reinforcing that we should be thinking that our brains are a unitary “being”- I don’t think it’s “intentional,” simply an intellectual undercurrent (attitude?) rooting in history.
Yet, think deeply about yourself, you contain a multitudes of personalities, driven by your various interactions with different people and situations. Also, not to forget, is the influence your physical body’s condition and circumstance play upon the entire brain.
It’s fascinating, insightful, but I don’t think it should be overblown into a grand mystery, the way it happens. It’s something we’re already aware of without appreciating it.
22:45 I like how Nancy Kanwisher explains it. “… a search for where am I in all of this is a little bit misguided. Because the “I” is not such a unitary thing in the first place.”
(After that, I think Bobby Kasthuri drops the ball when he says: “That feeling of unity of me is actually distributed across almost the entire 90 billion neurons. This illusion that there is a single person inside our skulls.”)
(He drops the ball because he fails to mention the entire body is an integral part of that brain’s 90 billion neurons and our feeling of “I” - along with our brain’s nonstop processing what the body is nonstop doing.)
23:26 “I think that most human beings like to imagine their mind is under their own control.”
(Ironically, a litany of human psychological issues revolves around the dysfunction caused by us not being in control of our mind, wanting to be in control and “failing”. Meaning it’s something we are actually already aware of, even if it’s not enunciated or understood.)
23:50 Finally the revelation that there are things around you that influence your brain.
(Which brings me to appreciation that consciousness is not about ‘receiving information’, consciousness is about “interacting with outside information (influences).)
24:08 Thalia Wheatley: “A lot of our brains are devoted to understanding other people.”
Daniela Schiller: “Our brain doesn’t work in isolation. They constant learn, take, compare to other brains”
Luke Chang: “Our brains have evolved to effortlessly reason about other people, and emotions similarly have evolved as ways that guide our behavior.”
26:00 How does that work?
Emotions and regulators.
Insula - brains (personality) thermometer . . .
Information processing . . .
Ventral Medial Prefrontal Cortex
Prefrontal Cortex
The case of Phineas Gage*, (learned about this guy while still at Tabor (<12).
28:40 Whalia Wheatley: “That was the key moment in neuroscience history. When people realized oh it’s not just memory, language, that’s up there in the brain, your personality is up there, your morality is up there. Things that make you, you, are up there.”
“We are the company you keep. Other people bring out things in us, in particular ways.”
30:10 Great image (mathematical rendition) of our brain.
30:15 How experiences interacts with biological evolutionarily, experience, brain, and passed along generations.
31:50 Bianca Jones Marlin: “Researchers began to discover that your environment and your experiences can change the way genes are activated in your body and your brain.
(then why imply, through silence, that the brain is separate from the body? The should be reinforcement of the awareness that the two are intimately connected. It comes back to understanding consciousness as the inside reflection of our body dealing with life.)
“Our genes are constantly changing based on our environment.”
34:10 “Which means there’s a memory that’s somehow transmitted through sperm and egg, through implantation and represented in offspring. It is as if we are observing a change in evolution over the timespan of one generation.”
There is no “as if”, we are observing … !
If you think about it, “evolution over generations” is a human construct built upon limited understanding.
Evolution plays out on a daily basis, one moment after another,
This moment right now is the living spark of evolution, built upon all the days that preceded this one, and that will be superseded by all the future moments.
After 35:00 Seth Anel: “Feelings of Agency, but the science is telling us these are not necessarily bound together. Different aspect of your self can be manipulated, or taken back all together.”
35:40 Heather Berlin: “… we feel like we have control. Like we have agency, right?”
36:00 Uri Maoz: “An agent is the author of their own story.
Most of what’s happening in our brain we are not conscious of. Then I think this gets you starting to think, wait a minute, this there really everything under my control?”
Where’s our body in any of this perspective?
I read a continuation of being trapped within our mindscape, and blinkered to the physical. That Abrahamic self absorption I harp on. The lens of understanding the body brain connection, within the light of billions of years of evolution has more to offer.
“Choice and agency aren’t always that straightforward”
Why should they be? We are biological creatures in a constant dance with a reality and events we don’t control, but must react to and flow with. How else could it be? We don’t come out of the mists of myth, we have body/brains honed to work together by hundreds of billions of year of experience.
This dynamic becomes straightforward through the lens of appreciating our consciousness as the inside reflection of our biological/physical body in action. It puts the entire body/mind conflict within a manageable framing.
TMS and a rather dubious test
40:00ish
“We are feeling like we are the authors of our actions, with just a little messing around it tends to fall apart.
It’s fragile.
Memories, our sense of agency, they are all things our brains evolved over time, but they are fragile and can be manipulated under circumstance.
Everything has to align …”
Well, yeah. Should we be expecting anything different? These things aren’t revelations, they are currents we must navigate during our individual live.
I believe too many people try to process all this through the strength of their own minds, without deeply appreciating the evolutionary biological reality of our consciousness being produced by our body/brain.
42:14
Levels of agency, sure
44:20 “Your sense of agency also has to do with the feedback you get after you make a decision, physical, social and emotional. …”
I think, sure, of course, how could it be any different.
Appreciating consciousness as an interaction, not command and control.
Having a little bit of a grasp of all the layers within your body and how the brain communicates with every millimeter of the body, being aware of the neural impulses from our limbs, always high fifing their counterparts as they flash past each other on the way to the brain via the corpus callosum.
46:00 Letting go of your consciousness … improving . . . being in the zone, thinking about it ruins ‘the zone.’
Here again, all of this makes all the sense in the world, through the lens of appreciating our intimate brain/body system, rather than the brain being a command and control center.
50:40 Whalia Wheatley: “The brain is who you are, it’s really different than any other organ in that sense.”
That was really sad to hearing her framing it like that, especially coming from her since she had some of the most relatable attitude - but that quote demonstrates what, to me, seems like an unnecessary disconnect, one that simply isn’t warranted by the data. One that modern philosophers ought to be embracing and wrestling with.
51:00 “my particular pattern of neuronal connections actually creates me.”
Another very poor framing.
My particular neuronal connections actual creates my “mindscape.”
It is the body I inhabit that creates the “me” through which I live and experience the world.
I am the consummation of my human mindscape driven by my physical body/brain.
It is not a matter of, “I think, therefore I am”
All the modern evidence is pointing to it being a case of: “I am, therefore I think.”
Why not stress that perspective? Don’t have to change anything about the scientific evidence being amassed, this is all about our expectations, and the myths and attitudes that have been ingrained in us as we grow.
Fascinating show and fun exercise, thanks for posting it Lausten.
Question: How do you interact with your environment? How do you perceive the influences that forces “you” (your brain) to produce “action potentials” that lead to responses to those influences?
How does our environment interact with us?
In a scrambled order,
Attentiveness (what are you present to), temperature, humidity, air quality, does your body’s homeostasis indicators feel comfortable, or are you hungry, food and drinking water availability, water quality, ambient sounds and the signals they project, how we perceive those signals, threatening, reassuring, misleading, the smells (chemicals) that waft through the air, sleep, doesn’t sleep quality depend on environmental conditions, and so on and so forth.
It’s an interesting question and at first glance that above might not satisfy you, but chew on it a while, our reality is in all the nuances.
It’s an excellent question, with a cornucopia of answers. The material and cells in our bodies have an unbelievable turn over time. Being replaced with material our body’s collect from the environments around us.
All that stuff is real, yet easily dismissed as inconsequential, when through my lens it all matters.
What makes you think that I have dismissed that “stuff” as inconsequential? It seems that I have provided a range of consequential information about the relationship between chemistry, Prokaryotic and Eukaryotic life, biology, flora, fauna.
I have not neglected any portion of life as it relates to Gaia, the host biome.
It’s the words you use to explain yourself.
Ironically, or not, I stumbled on this, this morning:
"We need to return to the question: what’s at the root of all this?
18:20
The neuroscientist Antonio Damasio has influentially argued that we think with our bodies as much as our minds – we feel sensations, emotions, affects on our bodies – the pressure on the feet, the photon on the eye, the quickening of the heart – before we think. He said ‘‘feelings point us in the proper direction, take us to the appropriate place in a decision-making space, where we may put the instruments of logic to good use.’’ "
Then & Now - April 14, 2023
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Although listening to that video we shouldn’t overlook he’s referring to modern tamed wilderness. We have culled the wilds of most deadly animals, even insect populations are a fraction of what they used to be. I can be a happy hippy grooving on the moment while walking the woods around me in complacent comfort, be they in South Carolina or my rural Colorado home - whereas a couple hundred years ago and beyond, my grooving butt would have been annihilated by anyone of countless creatures and traps - with that same attitude. (not that it doesn’t get ‘real’ now and then, but that’s the exception, rather than the norm )
I don’t particularly like killing, so I’ve only been on a couple deer hunting expeditions with in-laws (a bonding thing ), I myself never had one in my sights, which would have been fascinating, (I can imagine myself not pulling the trigger, or not, after all, I have no qualms about doing the butchering and eating the meat. So in the moment I might have felt compelled to pull the trigger, as a moral test of my self-consistency. Or not. I have had to kill a couple dogs over the years so it’s not like I’ve never been bloodied, so to speak. ). But the really important thing that I did experience, with a sort of revelatory impact, when walking through the forest as a focused stalker, is how entirely differ my experience was from my usual happy nature’s child la-de-da.
This brings us to the fog of nuance.
This used to come up around here. There are some very long threads that mention it. I don’t think the article really answers the title, but don’t good history and explaining anyway
This, … what this?
“it”, … what it?
“I don’t think the article really answers the title”, … agreed
“don’t good history”, what does good history do?
“explaining anyway”, explaining?
Well since that lost me here, I thought I’d go back to your opening opinion and the linked story, and the transcript from the introduction.
___________________________________________________________
Mind you I don’t question any of these people’s science, but in this example here, we are dealing with a question about communicating with non-experts - so I have this to say about that, . . .
HEATHER BERLIN, PH.D., M.D. (Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai): But what exactly is going on in your unconscious brain? What part of your brain is really in charge?
Why would she say that?
Scientists have learned enough to be able to state, its symphony of interwoven, coordinated, potentials, no one is in charge. Brain actions are best understood from an overarching holistic perspective, with potentials not switches.
HEATHER BERLIN: So, you might think you’ve made a choice, but in the back of your mind you wonder “Was that really me?” We might feel like we’re in control…
What’s the point of answering that without coming up with a nice concise definition of “me”.
For example: I am an evolved biological organism.
My physical body is the product of over half a billion years worth of some creature giving birth to more of its own kind, experiencing life, adapting in accord to circumstances, flourishing enough to leave behind another generation of creatures who will, likewise, add something to their genetic heritage, which becomes the foundational legacy for the next generation to live, and so on.
Our sense of consciousness can most accurately (consistent with the science) be conceptualized as the inside reflection of our body communicating with itself. And the dynamic can be most simply and accurately illustrated in a formula that reads: Body + Brain + Interaction (interior and exterior) = Consciousness. Of course, science’s cumulative understanding gets devilishly difficult the closer we look. Thing is, most people are not scientists, their understanding depends on wrapping facts and data in stories they can wrap their heads around.
The Hard Problem is the stuff of intellectual parlor tricks, it does nothing but help procrastinate facing the reality of our evolved animal selves, it’s simply a continuation of that impulse to glorify in our magical uniqueness, and dream about the heavens, and invent Gods, rather than looking to this planet that created us, for our answers.
What’s the problem with many philosophers you ask me? The worst failing is getting lost within one’s own mindscape and losing track of the divide between our minds and our biological–physical-evolved creature self (and this planet Earth for that matter, that will bite us.).
ANIL SETH, PH.D. (University of Sussex): This idea that we’re the author of our own actions seems critical to our sense of identity.
We make understanding so difficult on ourselves, that framing is utterly inappropriate:
Our evolved creature bodies possess layers of understanding, agendas, awareness that go many layers deeper than our introspective consciousness can be aware of. That’s the whole point, it took hundreds of millions of years for living creatures, to evolve a body as find-tuned and complex as our human body-brains. That is what the space and energy and foundation for introspection grew out of - emergent properties and all that.
That needs to be put into the introduction. ‘
Whereas now it’s still the discombobulated blind men going at the elephant, without a clue. We should do better. We have the biological understanding, it’s the getting through the human ego, that seem to be impossible.
HEATHER BERLIN: …but our brains may have other ideas.
Brain is nothing without the input of the body. The condition of the body, has everything to do with the experiences said body hands over to the brain to process.
Body + Brain + Interaction (interior & exterior) = Consciousness
That may just be a stick figure diagram, still all we know fits into it. Plus removing any component does end consciousness.
NARAYANAN “BOBBY” KASTHURI, PH.D., M.D. (University of Chicago, Argonne National Laboratory): The brain is made of almost 90-billion neurons, but it produces this illusion that there’s a single person inside our skulls.
That reflects the strangle hold of religious/philosophical thinking.
A single person is a single biological unit. My current body went through over half a billion years of evolution, one moment after another, one day after another, one generation after another - an unbroken chain of life and the moment of NOW.
There is no illusion! How one process the physical biological information is an entirely different story.
LUKE CHANG, PH.D. (Dartmouth College): For every Pinocchio, there’s always someone kind of pulling the strings behind the scenes.
Right! That “someone“ is this half a billion years of evolutionary experience and learning: One moment after another; One day after another; One generation after another - an unbroken chain of life and the moment of NOW. 600 million years, built upon the foundation of the previous 3 billion years, built upon Earth’s stage that was produced by the previous 14 billion, or whatever, years.
I still believe that belongs up front and center in this Ego driven story of our.
MICHAEL GAZZANIGA, PH.D. (University of California, Santa Barbara): There can be two separated minds inside one system.
Sure, the nervous system and the endocrine (hormone) system - but it’s way more complicated. This sort of binary approach fails. Here, AI mode offer a list.
Even within the nervous and endocrine systems, the level of complexity is staggering. The brain, as the central part of the nervous system, is considered the most complex object in the known universe. Yet, this incredible complexity is still just one component of the entire organism.
The total intricacy of the human body includes:
The sum of all organ systems.
The constant, adaptive communication among these systems.
The billions of cells that constitute each system, from neurons to immune cells.
The ability to self-heal and adapt to countless different environmental situations.
When all of these factors are considered together, the complete human body represents a level of biological complexity that far surpasses any of its individual parts.
Add to that newly appreciated stuff, such as previously unimagined functions of facia (connective tissue). At every level, the body is more complex than imagined. That’s worth acknowledging.
THALIA WHEATLEY: It’s not just that motor, memory, language is in the brain. Your personality is up there, your morality is up there.
That example is an utter fail. Revealing a disconnect from how we actually live our lives. How much of a young man’s morality is driving by forces coming from down in his cojones? And how much of a person’s emotional make-up, and outlook, is wrapped up in one’s health and looks? Not even so much their looks, as how do they and others perceive their looks. Also the reality that certain actives can only be done by certain body types within certain health parameters.
My body is experiencing the impulses, and acting on a combination of preconditioning and the moment, and more and more. While the outside world is reacting to my actions in combination with my body, etc.
Your body will take you places your mind is impotent to do anything against. So while life is happening, your mind is left with scrambling to justify and make sense, and dream of future events.
We are in control. How well we handle our control levers, that is what matters
We are individual creatures and if we don’t take responsibility for ourselves, no one else will, and nature will take its course.
The question of where does our mind go when we are anesthesia.
Sorry for the typo. “Don’t” just slipped in there. There’s good history of anesthesia in the link
Yeah, some of the science of anesthesia
For what?
To claim the Mind disappears?
Based on what? Because you can’t remember? Oh but sometimes we do remember when under. Where could the Mind be hiding?
The mind doesn’t not disappear, connections are interrupted.
My question, why oh why does the mention of our biological evolved bodies (where all this stuff unfolds) seem to shut down the discussion???
Posting billboards is cute, but not being able to discuss what the billboard is about, doesn’t do much for anyone.
We can’t make a home run, without touching all the bases.
Not me. That was Write4U. It seems he has retired from the forum. I wish I would have had this article back then. It might have shed some light.