Biology 202 Neurobiology and Behavior Spring 2001

What's STILL missing if we take the brain=behavior idea seriously? We going to make it ... all the way ... to Emily?

I know that this a movie, but it is a very provocative one and makes you look closer at not only how memory works, but also how the I-function may be involved. This condition occurs after a head trauma, which goes along with what we were talking about on THursday. We learned that head traumas can alter patterning in the NS and that is what causes memory loss, but does that mean that the I-function is not invovled in the process of memory? Somehow, I don't think that the I-function is completely separate from anything. It always seems to work its way in there somehow.

And what is the relation between the GCM model and the I-function? How, for instance, do external cues sometimes override our GCM-determined disposition? And what does this do to the cycle? And how keen is our awareness of these pre-determined dispositions? I, for instance, have learned to disregard my own thoughts when I am extremely tired because I become so grumpy and irritable. And, lastly, what is regulating all of these control mechanisms for sleep, creativity, etc.? I understand that they work through anatomical and pharmalogical specificities, but what is monitoring the cyclic activity within these domains?

One thing I would like to know is if left-brained people and right-brained people have the same motions when remembering or fabricating. Are these little motion clues accurate in most people? We already know from class that the iris of the eyes dilate when a person is interested. What other clues are there to tell people what you are thinking?

How could this be? It seems like either a memory is there or it isn't -- either the neurons have rearranged or they haven't. Does this imply that there's a further complicating step in memory - the recall of a memory by the I-function? It's not enough simply to have a memory; the I-function must be able to access the memory. More significantly, perhaps it implies that the I-function cannot always distinguish between thoughts generated by memory and thoughts generated by creativity; if it could, then we would always be 100% sure about memory - either we remember it correctly or we don't remember it at all. Of course, it can distinguish between them most of the time, so what's the difference? And how does that difference get blurred sometimes?

At the beginning of the course I voted that brain=behavior. I still hold this opinion although I think that there is a lot about the brain that we still don't understand. IT seems that the I-function does play apart in our daily activities. The whole idea of personality and dreaming comes from the brains power, but I do believe that external circumstances do control the way our brain manipulates information.

I have also started to rethink the I-function. I was always trying to place the unique aspects of behavior, such as personality, into the realm of the I-function. But now I believe that the I-function doesn't really account for all that much. We can do many things without regard to the I-function.

The reason my personality is different from yours is primarily due to differences in the processing of inputs and outputs. In addition, my ability to have different views and opinions is not a function of the I-function. The I-function has a much smaller role than I had previously believed. I somehow expected there to be more. All of our individual variabiltiy originates in the nervous system. I guess I was looking to find that the reason people are all different is due to more than just the way the brain processes inputs and outputs.

Scientists performed experiments on both normal rats and rats treated with a poison that kills growing cells (including neurons). The rats heard a sound and immediately after receieved a shock to the eyelid. The normal rats learned to blink upon hearing the sound. The rats treated with the poison, however, were less likely to blink depsite the hundreds of repetitions of the experiment. Such data led the scientists to conclude that new neurons are involved in the formation of new memories.

Another interesting article called "A Busy Brain is a Healthy Brain" summarizes a recent study on linking a lack of intellectual stimulation during midlife to Alzheimer's. It has been proposed that if one engages in intellectual activities (particularly in one's spare time), there may be a decreased risk of developing the disease.

Perhaps in the future we can use this research on memory formation to generate more effective therapies for Alzhiemers. I have an elderly great aunt (age 87) who is currently in a nursing home dying of the disease. She used to be a quick witted retired lawyer just 8 years ago. Now she is as helpless as an infant. On the other hand, my grandmother is 86 years old and she reads the New York Times cover to cover everyday. What is it that allowed her to escape the disease that affects the majority of people by the age of 80? Did my grandmother generate new neurons while my aunt failed to do so? If so, why? After all, my aunt also used to read the paper also. But 8 years later she is in a nursing home while my grandmother maintains her independence in an apartment in New York City.

Now for the naïvete: at first I thought behavior refered to an action which the subject is aware of. Christopher Reeves disproved that pretty quickly. I'm still a little confused-- can we term behavior as all physical processes? Only action?

My whole perception of the I-function has greatly changed as well. At first I imagined it as something that is imbued in all our brain activity. It seems that as this course goes on, the I-function become smaller and smaller, and not only smaller but more and more inconsequential. So much is possible without the self being there. My questions remaining in this area are centered on how the I-function relates to conciousness. What we seem to have gathered from our discussion of sleep is that conciousness, in the sense of being awake, is independent of the I-function. We may dream, in which the I-function is involved, but not be concious. So not only is it difficult to locate a structure attached to the I-function, it is also becoming difficult to define it. Is awareness independent of the I-function also, as Avis asserted?

So although I still come down on the brain=behavior side, these terms have completely new meanings now. It seems that the brain has become bigger and the mind smaller.

As for the argument of Emily Dickinson...i think we have proved in a large sense that she is correct;the brain is greater than the "sky" (mind). We have seen that the I-function cannot control so many aspects of the neural processes, therefore the "mind" must be a part of the brain as a greater whole, and not the reverse (the I-function is a part of the nervous system--i think we're all agreed on that??). Maybe there is a larger discussion to this, but it's been a long day, so I'll try to think about it some more and present other ideas later....

Also, who are we if we have no memories? If, as has been asserted in class, certain personality traits are genetic, then those must be maintained even in the circumstance of amnesia. It seems that individuals with amnesia are the best examples one could find of the personhood=tabula rasa idea, although it is no longer a solid psychological and neurobiological theory. In essence, they have no experiences - who they are is dictated solely by whatever their genes encode. It would be interesting to examine people before and after acquiring amnesia to see how they change and what, if anything, remains unaltered in the process.

"If dreams are like movies, then memories are films about ghosts." ~Counting Crows~

So this is it. The last week of classes. Reading through what everyone had already posted I remembered this song, and one of my favorite lyrics. Are dreams and memories connected and how so? We have talked so much about the I-function and its role: the fact that the I-function is "located" in the neocortex, that the I-function is involved in dreaming. Not necessarily to control dreams, but as we kept asserting in class last week, to reflect upon what the nervous system is doing. Claire mentioned lucid dreaming; is this the I-function acting? I have often heard that all the characters in your dreams are supposed to be you (or versions of you). I suppose that this makes sense in terms of what we have been saying about self and the brain. My question is the location and relationship of memory to dreams.

Is the I-function involved in memory in the same way as it is involved in dreams? The processes of memory formation and recall... are they similar to dreaming? People often report remembering things that they missed while conscious in their dreams; does this signify any connections? I guess I haven't really returned back to Emily, but then, I think that it's much more fun to keep pushing beyond the black and white, asking bigger questions.

Also, since we like the frog so much, what do we know about animal memory? is it true that a fish forgets what it finds out every so-and-so amount of seconds? Why don't we work in the same way?

And one more question, though I'm sure it can't be answered... if memory is the firing of synapses, or even the growth of new connections, what do we think may be the coding process? Why do some people remember visual things easier than things spoken allowed, etc? Do you think that one day we'll be able to extract or at the least, find things in the brain that can be actual pictures and pieces of memories? Just how Specific Is the brain?

another explanation of his injury sort of gets at what Dan was mulling over, the difference between "to know" and "to remember," or, implicit vs explicit memory. HM was tested over and over for years without any evidence of his being able to make new long term memores...until they stopped asking him in ways that required explicit memory of a thing. If they asked something like "what was the weather like yesterday" they'd get nothing. but if they tested in ways that elicited an implicit knowledge, there was some success.

and Dan, I think this is maybe starts to get at the "I dont remember how I know, I just know." Another way to conceptualize it: episodic vs semantic knowledge. Episodic knowledge has all of the contextual tags on it (ie, we remember how we came to know it) whereas semantic knowledge is more general. we know 7x7 is 49, though we dont remember the exact time or circumstances under which we remember it.

Ive been interested in this becuase it gets at interesting patterns of memory errors. Semantic memory is less vulnerable to reconstructive errors, whereas episodic memory is quite vulnerable to them.

The one sort of mini-breakthrough I've had in class recently is with our topic of understanding. I've been taking one language or another since I was thirteen, but untill I was a freshman in college, I was always very bad at them. Then all of a sudden, something 'clicked' and became very good. I always thought of it as ME taking a long time to understand the way language works, but to think that it was MY BRAIN that needed the time to work it out not only makes sense, but makes me look at the situation in a whole new light. It's an explanation for the lightbulb that suddenly comes on inside your head. I never considered this to be the case - I don't know why, I just never thought about it. But it does make the brain seem more like a computer or machine than it did before. I don't know - it's definately funny to be sitting here trying to understand understanding. You could probably devote a whole semester just to that.

There was an article today in the New York Times about the dolphin and what seems to be its ability to also be self aware. Brainy Dolphins Pass the Human "Mirror" Test. It is the only other animal we know of besides primates that seem to have self awareness. There is no frontal lobe in the dolphin's neocortex so it could be an example of convergent evolution.

I still feel like we do not know what the I-function does. Each class we eliminate another element of what I thought it controlled. Does the I-function control anything at all? Or is it just a piece of the brain that is fooled a lot and seems to impede processes? What is its purpose if any in a person's life?

These are my last thoughts for the class. It has been interesting and a lot of mysteries have been explained while presenting even more new ones than I thought were there.

| Course Home Page | Forum | Brain and Behavior | Serendip Home |