Neurobiology and Behavior, Week 13

When discussing the movie "Beautiful Mind" about the schizophrenic John Nash, it made me wonder--aren't we all a little schizophrenic? Like Nash, we see so many things that look real but in actuality are not. For example, when we looked at the checker board and we thought some of the colors were different, but when put under the right type of light, they were actually the same color. There can be much variation in the accuracy of sensory perceptions. Many animals have much more sensitive and accurate senses than humans, for example bloodhounds for smell and eagles for vision. Compounding the problem is the interpretation of sensory signals done by the brain is not perfectly accurate. What passes for real may only be an approximation. Inaccuracies are not diseases, but limitations. When the source is unknown it might be difficult knowing if a person is speaking in the next room or the DVD. The defect in distinguishing what is real in disease states like schizophrenia usually goes beyond figuring out that the TV is not a real live person.

I’ve been thinking about how people often see what they want to see and don’t see what they don’t want to see.  From they way we’ve been talking about vision, the I-function and stories in class, it would be easy to say “we’ll never truly know what ‘reality’ is because everything we perceive is only a story in our heads” and be done with it. I don’t think that is a useful thing to do. There seems to be a large amount of standardization in the way people see things. For instance, in the case of the ambiguous images we looked at in class, there were four main responses: 1) It’s a woman standing by a tree with buildings, etc. in the background. 2) It’s a face.  3) It’s both a woman by a tree and a face, depending on how you look at it.  4) It’s neither a woman nor a face, only a pattern of light and dark. However, very few people would look at the image and see something other than one of those four options. Very few people would see a space ship, or the inside of a library, or a basket of fruit, no matter how much they wanted to. The same goes for all the ambiguous images we looked at.  We can make several different stories about what we see, but we can’t really make an infinite number of plausible stories.  This leads me to believe that there is some degree of “truth” to the images, or at least we are all similarly limited in what we are able to perceive.

 The fact that the picture in our head is the result of a conglomerate of interconnected pathways, a pattern of activity across a number of neurons makes sense, especially in relation to creativity. I think the world would be an incredibly boring place if we all saw the world in the same way. Like we talked about in class, some of the greatest technological advances have been the result of creating a picture or story in one’s head of something that has never been seen before. Without this ability it might take ten times as long for the world to benefit from inventions such as the airplane or computer. Both of those were novel inventions, not simply updates of previously existing objects. Part of the excitement that accompanies the world of science is the ability to imagine a solution and then determine if it can be put into practice.  In my last web paper I wrote about the world of bionics, and specifically bionic arms. Before the first one was constructed no one ever thought that after an amputation they would ever use that limb again. And with what was probably considered to be an “outrageous” idea, amputees were given the chance to live more normally. The first prosthetic was realized via a picture in the head and made possible due to the notion that, because this picture is simply the brain’s best guess, the best guess allows us to bring into existence things that aren’t actually there.  

A large part of our “perception” of the world involves experiencing what we sense. It was interesting to determine, in class, that the picture in the head is being reported to the I-function and that the experience of the world can change without a functional I-function. In class we said that without the visual cortex you can see things, in the sense that you can respond to them, but you can’t experience seeing them. This is a strange phenomenon to imagine because so much of my understanding of the world involves experience, and making decisions and “guesses” about the world based on previous experiences. If this is true for the visual system, then it seems to me that it would apply to the other sense systems as well, maybe most particularly the auditory system. Does this apply to the other sensory systems? What about our sense of touch? How much of what we feel is just our brain creating a story? 

I found the example of cube with just outlines, how we can see it as one way (sides as outside of the cube) and another (sides as inside of the cube) depending on how other object pass through it. Without those objects, I could still make myself to see it (wait, I’m still seeing it as same, but perceiving it differently? – it’s getting confusing!!) one way and another, alternating back and forth, but it took some effort and took awhile to change back and forth. However, with other objects passing through, transferring the thought was so much easier and more instant. And there was an example of checkerboard, from last week, where even though we know what’s the truth, we can’t change how we see it. So, now, I was wondering if the I-function for each of these examples were behaving differently.

I keep thinking about the picture of the leopards that we looked at this week. After looking at them, I have come to the conclusion that the leopard in the foreground is looking straight ahead, and the one in the background is looking over its left shoulder. Of perhaps more importance, what is it about our visual system that allows us to perceive multiple meanings in a single image?

Whenever I see optical illusions I think of elementary school when we used to look at optical illusions in art class. I distinctly remember heated arguments about what the pictures displayed. Each one of us saw an image and adamantly defended this perception as the sole interpretation. Of course, we knew that there was another meaning to the picture but it took great effort and time to get a classroom of first graders to see both sides of the optical illusion. The teacher would have to slowly and meticulously point out the aspects of each illusion. Even still, many of us struggled to easily switch between the two images.

Unfortunately throughout most of my education I have been deprived of optical illusions, until the other day. This was the first time I looked at one in a classroom setting since first grade. I was immediately struck by the dynamic visual ability of such mature adults. What is it that allows us to see both images of an optical illusion? We can switch between the images (like the animated cube), whereas previously I could only see one version without great effort.

I am guessing that as we mature, we also gain a more dynamic relationship with our sensory input. Perhaps we learn how to interpret these inputs in more complex ways. More importantly, we seem to realize that our senses should not be endowed with unquestioning faith. It is possible that our interpretation of the world is not the sole interpretation. As we cross between interpretations, we identify that our surroundings may have multiple meanings. This is a sign of maturity; we are not arguing like first graders whether the leopard is looking forward or backwards (but you should know that my interpretation shown above is the best one). Maybe this is the sign of a more experienced relationship between the i-function and the sensory inputs?
 

            I also found the optical illusions very interesting during class and the illustration of different objects moving through a 3d drawing of the cube in class was a good example of the fact that the nervous system has the ability to interpret objects in different ways. I think the fact that people’s brains see and interpret things differently adds to the fact that we are all different and because of this, our “stories” of what is actually out there differ to some degree. This relates to the fact that we aren’t limited to what’s actually there because of the creativity we have and if different individuals interpret things differently, it only adds to the variation of creativity. I also agree that we constantly use cues to check our sense of reality. For example, we may not have to constantly make sure whether an individual is real or not like the example of the schizophrenic in class, but we may check to see if others found something as surprising as we do by their reactions. I often see people look to one another when something crazy or surprising has happened to “check” if others also reacted the same way. I found the discussion about the striate cortex and the loss of the ability to see everything on the left of the fovea quite interesting as well. In particular, the fact that people with this condition are able to locate where the lights are coming from was amusing, but made sense considering the picture in the head is not in the I-function.    

The concept that the brain fills in the blanks for us (with colors) is starting to really make sense to me.  This concept must save the brain a lot of time, as it doesn't have to interpret every pixel, like a camera.  Also, it probably saves our brains time in that it answers questions to prevent confusion.  For instance, if see something from far away and it appears to be covered in dots, then you just go with 'its covered in dots" unless you personally choose to question what you are really seeing.  I can't imagine how much time it would take if I needed to think about each object I saw, and question the color or pattern or texture.  To me, it seems that our brains are set up to make these assumptions and save us time from thinking about what the color or texture is to everyone else.  I know I could drive myself crazy if I looked at a shirt that was greenish blue, and debated which color it was with myself.  It always seems to me with those kinds of discrepancies that i'm not fighting with myself over the color, but I may disagree with other people as to what color the shirt really is (green or blue), because my brain made a quick one time decision about the color.   

I found it really interesting this week that we looked at many optical illusions. They were always intriguing to look at as a kid, but now we have the ability to look at them and analyze the functions in our brain that relate to them. Every illusion we looked at doesn't have a true image; it is merely a pattern of lines and light. How we interpret those patterns is what creates the image in our head.

This may be slightly off topic, but our discussion of the movie 'A Beautiful Mind' was interesting as well. I can't possibly imagine attempting to ignore something that I thought was reality. Is there any possibility that schizophrenic patients can actually find the will power to ignore their hallucinations? It's an interesting thought that patients with schizophrenia are only seeing another version, or story, of reality. And yet humanity deems them 'crazy.' In class, we discussed how we can never truly know what's out there because we can only see it through human eyes. If there are different 'stories' of reality, who decides where to draw the line of stories between sanity and insanity? Surely someone who is colorblind is not considered insane, but someone who has hallucinations is. Isn't everyone's reality slightly different? Perhaps our conception of insanity is a story so different that it is difficult to function in everyday life.

This spring break, I was in Turkey with the Bryn Mawr and Haverford Chamber Singers and we had spent the entire semester learning about Turkish music which is closely tied to Arabic music . One of the things that struck me most about Turkish music were the nine in-between tones between notes.  I learned that some of the most talented Turkish singers could pin point and sing all nine of the in-between tones. This really impressed me because in Western music, we really only distinguish between semitones/half-tones (C and C# or B and Bflat).  When I listened to examples of the 9 in-between tones that were distinguishable in Turkish music, I was hardly able to tell the differences between them. I suppose that this was an example of my brain filling in what I was hearing to a scheme of notes and tones that I had learned and was familiar with.  What then can be said about the relationship of the brain filling in gaps (in hearing) and the learning through a certain schemas?