Neurobiology and Behavior, Week 6

This week's discussion in class was the most fascinating one we've had so far. The idea that our Nervous system knows a lot of things we (our I function) are not aware of both intrigued and made a lot of sense to me.

A lot of us decide whether or not we like a person within the first few minutes of meeting them (or at least whether or not we want to continue a conversation with them). I am wondering if this is a combination of our nervous system's input (the other person's pupil is not dilated enough), or if it is our own decision that we dislike them (for whatever outward manifestations of their character). Or is it that even when we think it is our decision, it actually comes from our nervous system. This is interesting, for if we go Emily Dickinson's way, and the world is a construction of the mind, then isnt all of our minds hiding a parts of the world from us? (Sensory cues the nervous system picks up, beyond the five senses we are accustomed to).

I also read some interesting articles regarding menstrual cycle and pheromones. (That I can't find the link to now). It said that researchers who carried out a study in a nightclub/bar found that lesser men approached women who were menstruating. Evolutionarily this makes sense because women can't typically 'mate' when they are menstruating. Also, pheromones released by women when they were ovulating made them seem more attractive to the opposite sex. I was wondering what the exact evolutionary explanation for co-ordinated menstrual cycles are. I also find the idea of the alpha woman put forth earlier in this forum extremely interesting, and I wonder if the alpha women in our cultures are the one that are socially more popular.   

Our discussion concerning action potentials compels me to ask a potentially crude question.

Are action potentials reaching threshold directly responsible for not only compulsions, but difficult, reasoned decisions?

Take the following mundane occurence:

I am lying under the covers on an extremely cold night when suddenly I realize I left the front door unlocked. Now I am snug in bed, in a considerably comfortable position. What must ensue is a struggle between the urge to remain warm and comfortable and the "thought" or rational realization that leaving the door unlocked might very well facilitate an invasion of my home. Eventually, I do throw myself out of bed, but the process is perhaps analogous to a pressure system, wherein my urge to stay warm is gradually overcome by my fear of danger (or desire to remain safe).

Is this example entirely predicated upon action potentials? was my getting out of bed the result of a self-generated inter-neuron action potential reaching threshold? Or is a thought itself a successful (past threshold) action potential?

Also note that I claim a compulsion (an urge) is coming into conflict with a rational thought, but I wonder if there is any sort of dichotomy when it comes to imperative thought or action. That is, the "decision" to lock my door can only manifest itself toward action as an urge with an emotional basis. A rational thought cannot compel me to jump out of bed and sacrifice my comfort; what started off as an indifferent logical realization came to influence my actions as fear/desire. 

What I am trying to get at, is the nature of willpower. The above conflict between staying in bed and getting up seems illustrative of something significant. Action is an outpout; it requires motor-neurons to fire successfully. However, in the moment where a decision becomes an action, what we have is a thought bearing upon us as compulsion. What signals then, what action potentials, are operating when I finally will myself out of bed? I can imagine there is an integral dynamic to grasp in this moment, wherein thought becomes compulsion and overpowers a competing compulsion.

One thing i see hear here is that the I-function cannot manifest in a moment of action. If every action comes to bear as compulsion, then self-awareness loses salience in that moment. It was after all an emotional fear/desire that propelled me out of bed, not a logical series of thoughts.

Does this not seem an imperative matter to understand? Any claim to morality or responsibility needs to address the inescapable absence of awareness in the discreet moments wherein a thought becomes compulsion becomes action. 

It was interesting talking about our senses that we don’t recognize in daily life.  Just like a submerged part of an iceberg, subconsciousness plays a large role in sensing and determining the human behavior. In my daily experience, I found it interesting that when I don’t wear glasses or contact lenses, I am so easygoing and when my vision is clear, I tend to get nervous more.  So, depending on the vision, my behavior changes.  I guess my clear vision suppresses my subconscious activity of the brain and raising the level of consciousenss and reason. I want to know if there is scientific evidence or observation about the relationship between human eye’s vision, brain, and behavior.

Reading previous posts above, I liked the discussion in which our brain uses selective attention to focus on certain stimuli. I wonder what leads our subconsciousness to pick certain stimuli.  Is it previous experience or genetics or random?  What would be the mechanism of picking out some of the many stimuli?

My second question is why would the brain constantly process input?  Why would the human brain want to satiate itself with stimuli?  Is it about maintaining certain chemical homeostasis—a scientific phenomenon of human’s instict of knowledge generation?

In class we talked about our conscious actions (the actions that go through the I-function) and our unconscious actions (actions that our NS is aware of but we are not). The examples were unexpected, we discovered another piece of ‘common knowledge’ that we take for granted every day (for example that we have 5 senses) without really thinking about what lies behind these assumptions. These realizations make me wonder about our explanations of ‘unconscious’ actions or senses beyond the five conscious ones we experience. Some people belief in paranormal phenomena while others say it’s all random or by chance. I’m interested in the I-function, in the knowledge that our NS is aware of but we are not, and how much of it is just random or by chance.

I remember when i took an introductory psychology course in high school, my teacher taught me that behavior was just a bunch of chemical reactions colliding. It seemed as if the brain was recognizing many strange chemical reactions occuring inside of my body, and it ordered its own chemical reactions to calm or eradicate the unknown reactions and regain homeostasis.

Can someone consider behavior a form of reaction to maintain homeostasis? I mean, for example, when we're sad, we cry and it is said that a good bout of tears can help you feel better. So is that what we have emotions for? to maintain our body's balance but in an external rather than internal move?

Thursday's discussion on extra-sensory perceptions, specifically pheromones, led me to think about what other examples occur in daily life. One question I have is whether danger is at least partially an extra-sensory perception. Let's take an infant or very young child for example who typically responds to fear by crying. Some infants may cry when any stranger enters the room, but others only cry when the person appears particularly "scary," the sort that might even instill trepidation in an adult. Is this fear socialized? Has the child, at such a young age, been trained to recognized certain aspects of one's appearance/body language as dangerous? Or is there something else allowing the infant to sense danger? Do dangerous individuals emit some sort of pheromone? In general, I guess I'm wondering whether individual's determination of a situation as dangerous is due more to extra-sensory perceptions or socialization. Is the "gut" feeling that people get due to such perceptions?

I also wonder if people, like animals, can smell fear. Dogs, for example, are often said to be able to sense fear in humans, and this supposedly explains why they will bark/lurch at people who are scared of them. I wonder if this capacity to detect fear helps a predator find prey and then attack that prey. 

Finally, what are other extra-sensory perceptions and how are they connected to our unconscious? 

1. The idea that neurons in the brain receive many moreinhibitory signals than excitatory signals is very interesting if you think ofthe energetics of the process. The human body is designed to be efficient. Ourcells each have specialized functions, each protein has a specific job, and ourbody is designed to run smoothly and without much waste. It seems that thehuman body is wasting a lot of resources by requiring so many inhibitorysignals in the nervous system. Is an excitatory signal stronger than aninhibitory signal?

2. Could inputs produce inhibitory signals? I think thatthis process is possible because of my experience with distraction. I may bedaydreaming in class and suddenly be startled from my thoughts by a persondropping a book on the ground. In this scenario, my thoughts have been stoppedby an output from my environment. Does this mean that the sound of the bookdropping on the floor produced inhibitory signals that halted the actionpotentials produced by my thinking? Or does the book dropping produceexcitatory signals that are able to “overpower” the signals produced by mythoughts? I don’t think that an input has to be all inhibitory or allexcitatory. The noise of the book dropping may produce inhibitory signals thattravel to the box in my brain that is controlling my thoughts, while otherreceptors in my ears pick up excitatory signals that travel to another box inmy nervous system that makes me turn my head towards the sound. Without boththe excitatory and inhibitory signals, I would never be able to react to theoutside world because there would by no way to turn off the action potentialsthat started without an input. I think that most excitatory signals come frominside the nervous system. Our nervous system is constantly producing actionpotentials that are interrupted by action potentials that are produced frominputs. 

We've been talking a lot about how the subconscious (the part of the nervous system that is not a part of the I-function) influences behavior and I was wondering if we could continue exploring this side of the nervous system. Is this how hypnotism works? Simply tapping into the parts of the brain that we are not always fully conscious of? What about dreaming? Is this where abstract ideas come from? What is the full relationship between the conscious and unconscious parts of the mind?

Is the I-function the only part of the mind that makes up our conscious selves? What other parts of the brain help us take in input and think about it? What other parts of our conscious sselves shape our behavior?

Last year, my pony told me that she didn’t want to compete at horse shows anymore.  She was extremely burnt out, physically and mentally.  She was asking for a long break from the strenuous schedule of chasing year end points. 

There are a variety of reasons why I might choose to justify my decision to limit my mare’s competition schedule this year.  It could be a case of projecting my feelings about competition onto neutral substrate.  Or maybe anthropomorphizing my pony and her behavior. 

Our discussion in Thursday’s class allowed me to add another option to the list.  The idea that my intuition about my pony is informed by the sensory input I receive from her.  This information is processed by my unconscious and crafted into a story that the I-function receives.  This explains how I can know something without knowing how.  Her behavior creates the sensory input that I receive from her and the way she behaves is a reflection of her mental state.  So I can interpret something about her mental state.  Maybe my pony was communicating with me.

For a similar story about a different observation see:

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