Week 11 - Neurobiology and Behavior

I think there is a large difference between those that have an imagination and those that are imaginative. I think those that are imaginative can think ouside the box of the things that they believe or assume to be true, while those with an imagination or wild imagination think of crazy things that they covet or think of alternate realities for things that are within the realms of their beliefs. Such as it is easy to imagine how life would be if you were a millionaire and how you would spend these millions. It is even within the ability to imagine how life would be like if you were inside a spaceship. These are within things that you believe are possible because you've seen these types of things on tv. However someone who is imaginative is someone who can use their creativity on a new level, and instead of seeing themselves in these situations, will come up with ways to actually become a millionaire or build a spacecraft. They think outside of the box and the things that already pre-exist in their world of assumed "real things". Imaginative people can even think outside of something so crucial and real in our world: gravity. Imaginative people are not hindered by their beliefs while the imagination normally is.

There's been an awful lot of discussion of reality in our class for the past few weeks, and how everyone's reality may be the same or different. For many people, the idea that their reality may differ greatly from other people's seems deeply disturbing. Me, though...this idea doesn't terribly new or shocking at all.

Think about it. From the time you're very little, in elementary school, you learn simple facts about what animals can perceive and humans cannot. Dogs have a greater sensitivity to and awareness of smell than humans do. Bats can produce and perceive sounds at wavelengths far beyond the range of human hearing. So on and so forth. A little later, you start to learn about differences between humans that could alter perceptions. Some people are nearsighted or farsighted and can't perceive objects clearly without glasses. Some people use hearing aids. Some people use canes, or walkers, or wheelchairs. The word "reality" isn't used in any of these discussions of difference. But the implication is there for sure-people can sense different things from animals, and from each other-and these statements are easily accepted.

Now, enter neurobiology class. Here, the language gets a lot more complicated; we talk about the inner workings of the eye and brain, and the question of reality instead of simply saying "some people need glasses." Deep down, though, these are just the same ideas from elementary school; we've just dressed them up in more ambiguous language to reflect the fact that our reasoning skills are better now, and we use them as jumping-off points for discussion instead of treating them as absolute facts. I have no problem admitting that my reality is not likely to align eactly with anyone else's, because I've been hearing this lesson since I was young, albeit in different contexts. 

Throughout this course I have been extremely interested in memory. During the past few weeks I have had the pleasure of reading numerous articles on “normal” memory, problems with memory, different types of memory, how memory effects behavior, and memory in different people. This week, I read an extremely intriguing article on a specific type of memory loss known as dissociative fugue or dissociative amnesia.

Dissociative fugue, or dissociative amnesia, is a condition in which the brain suddenly and unexpectedly incurs severe memory loss. While the cause may sometimes be due to head injury, stroke, viral encephalitis or temporal lobe epilepsy, it is often based on a psychological cause (such as post traumatic stress disorder or depression). These cases are jarring and scary as many individuals simply stand up and walk away one day, as people without a past or an identity. However, as one playwright describes in the New York Times article I read (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/17/health/psychology/17brody.html?pagewanted=1), “You never lose your memory. It’s always there. It just falls out of the file cabinet.”

These cases astonish and bewilder me, as it seems that the brain has the ability to literally misplace significant amounts of memory for short periods of time. In these cases, individuals must reconstruct their realities until they are able to retrieve their memory.

I think it would be very confusing if the I-function were always aware of how the brain was reconstructing reality.  I can’t imagine going through the world always thinking about how I should perceive it.  It would be far too distracting.  If the I-function were directly involved in the process, we’d always be occupied with how we should be viewing the world.  And we’d probably always be questioning whether or not we were making the right choices of what to see and what not to see.  What if everyone chose to “fill in the gaps” differently?  True, we don’t know for sure that we currently fill them in a similar way, but I assume that since it’s automatic, there is a certain amount of pre-programming involved.  We may not all see the exact same picture, I think we probably see similar ones.  But if the I-function were involved, would it be possible to choose to construct very different pictures?  Would anyone be able to communicate their perception of reality to others?

This is slightly off topic but last week I went to a lecture by John Cacciopo at Haverford about loneliness and isolation.  In a world of technological and medical revolutions people are living longer and the world is becoming a much smaller place.  However, with this business executives are being moved around the world to benefit productivity with out any thoughts about isolation.  In this research Cacciopo found that lonely and isolation are correlated with depression and that lonely and isolated individuals have a shorter, worse life.  However the most interesting part of the lecture I though was that Cacciopo thought that loneliness was a evolutionary construct.  We are organisms whose offspring require a long maturation period in which we need to care for them.  Evolutionarily in a harsh environment it is better and more advantageous for survival if one only has to feed and protect her self without sharing.  However, evolution is based on the reproduction of our genes, not our bodies.  Lonelyness is adaptive because it causes us to miss our offspring so that we do care for them and ensure our genes survival. 

I think that in the same way that loneliness is fitting and evolutionary adaptive our sense of reality is adaptive, this is stretch but the body does not do anything with out a purpose.  We don’t have extrasensory perception, and we cannot perceive all sorts of things around us, because the information would bombard our system and it would be horrible.  I am very interested in the way our brain makes up for things but no so worried as to what we are missing.  If we are so worried about what we are missing then we will never be able to enjoy what we do have.

So after thinking about it for a long time I think that actually I’m quite comfortable with what we’ve been learning these past few weeks. I can accept that the brain makes up the picture in the head…that there is no one picture, but rather a symphony of perception. I am also comfortable with the idea that because things like color, sound and even shape are not intrinsic properties of objects but rather a creation of our brains--every one’s perception of reality is a little different.

The question that remains…the aspect that bothers me a little…is the fact that the brain does all of this completely independent of the I-function. What then is the I-function for? Is it there at all? And if it is there…what does it actually do? Earlier on in the course I thought that eye function was responsible for things that we couldn’t actually see…like abstract concepts or dreams…things that our senses don’t actually perceive but that we will into existence by the power of our imagination. I’m thinking of monsters, fairy tales, philosophical concepts, perhaps even God...in short things that we have never seen, only imagined. It seems however that even this ability doesn’t really have anything to do with the I-function.

In my research for my paper on synesthesia for example I came across an account of people who experience colored synesthesia but who are in actual fact color blind. When they look at numbers they see them in color, even though their retinas have never been able to register the wavelengths that would produce a certain color in their minds. It would seem that their mind is creating the concept of color—color that has never been experienced from any outside source. And all this independent of the I-function. I guess for me this is a little disturbing, the fact that the mind cannot only create things like color from certain inputs like wavelengths, but that it can create color all on its own with out any inputs and without the I-function’s involvement.

I still haven’t gotten over the topic of color. After reading one of the comments in the forum about who we really are and thinking about reality, I came across color. It seems that color isn’t what we think it is? Yellow apparently isn’t yellow. Blue isn’t blue. It all depends on your perspective and what your brain is interpreting that your eyes are seeing. My obstacle for the week brings me to the concept of what does your favorite color say about your reality and about who you are? If you see an average of the wavelengths of light being sent to your eye and your brain is interpreting those signals. What does that say about your favorite color.

Your favorite color is obviously part of your personal reality but what does that say about you as a person. It seems like it says nothing or is that just my interpretation. Is there some neurological reason that our brain interprets one color as better than another? If so is that like astrology where your sign tells your personality or could it say what your favorite color is?

How do one’s visual preferences work? Are they neurological signals or is there more? It seems so difficult as to believe we are just an organism running on electrical signals and chemical signals. We see what is not there and we believe that we see what is not there.

How does this work. Can Color be the door to one’s mind or is it just random or does the amount of exposures of certain color dictate what your favorite color will be.

Why? How? There are no answers and there is nothing more confusing than answering a question with a question. There is no end just a new beginning that never does away.

Making it up. Playing house. Using our imagination. These are activities we play as young children and then believe that we can grow up and grow out of it. It wasn’t until last week when the belief that I don’t do those things anymore all changed for me. Even if we tell ourselves we need to “grow up” and we are too old for playing imagination games, our brain has other ideas. Our brain is constantly imagining, but I think we need to define this term differently in the context of last week’s discussion. Your imagination is a product of the creative part of your mind which is used for constructing a world of ideas and images which may not seem “possible” or are somewhat removed from the reality that you experience. (Note that this is my definition, and is a construction of how I view my imagination.)

We have this tool, that I am calling the imagination which fills in the world as you want to see it. In our society we believe that we control our imagination and when and how we use it. After our discussion of the brain last week, I am not sure that this is really true. Last week’s discussion suggests that imagination may in fact be an innate part of the brain and may be in action much more than we have previously appreciated. Your brain is constantly using your imagination to fill in the gaps and to finish out the details of the picture you have of reality. Your imagination is working to create the picture in your brain and thus also what you see in the outside world. I don’t know if the imagination is really “making it all up,” since I don’t think that your brain is trying to fool your body into thinking reality is something different than it, your imagination is simply helping to tailor your reality to what your nervous system can handle.

It doesn’t seem that odd to me that the “picture in the head” is different for different people. There is a degree to which we do and process much of the sensations around us in similar ways, but this doesn’t necessarily mean that we have the same experience. My ‘blue’ may be very different from yours, but the point is that it is your picture and it works for your sensory system.

The craziest part about all of this is when we think about the role (or lack of a role) the I-function plays in all of this. At the beginning of the course I feel like we determined the I-function to be an integral part of the human brain and we set it aside. Now something creative and requiring interpretation (i.e. the picture in the head) which I would assume to go through the I-function doesn’t. It definitely seems a bit counter-intuitive. The I-function isn’t needed for perception!?! We only need it for accessing this visual information and being conscious of it. I am not yet sure what this says about experience and the I-function’s involvement in consciousness and thus reality. It seems like reality may in fact be out of our conscious control and is a byproduct of the nervous system. We can then only access this byproduct via the I-function; each of these conclusions seem a bit wild to me, probably just because I have never thought about all this before.

Furthermore, what does this suggest about human instincts? In one of my posts earlier in the semester I was thinking about the influence of the I-function and its relationship to instincts. And if there is not a place in the brain for a picture, where do we get the concrete reaction which we attribute to instincts or instinctive actions? If our brain is filling in information/is taking in information but we are not conscious of it, then instincts are not really as we say they are. Instincts are actually then just reactions to information that is already present but not interpreted by the I-function. But then who or what is choosing to react? What is it about the information that causes us to react in the way we do? Can our imagination not fill it in or there are too many options? What causes instinctive actions and how does this relate to the “picture in our head”? So many questions!

Recently, this class has really made me second guess my own assumptions about the world.  Never had I thought that what I was seeing was made up or that there are things out there I am not seeing.  But since this is so, perhaps there’s something to be said for this.  I have never second guessed my perception of reality because other people seem to have drawn similar conclusions.  It is not as if we have to constantly ask if we are seeing or experiencing the same thing.  The majority of the time, it seems like we come to a general consensus about what is going on and what we’re looking at.  Of course there are exceptions like the pictures of the woman/skull, but for the most part, the fact that we unconsciously make up pictures in our head and don't experience everything in the world that other creatures can doesn’t seem to interfere with day to day life.  That being said, why?  How are we as humans able to have such a range of different abilities and talents but then come up with the same image in our head without being conscious of it?  Are there cases when people don’t have this ability and how does this impact their day to day life?     

So we can only see a really small amount of what's actually out there, because we only have receptors for this much.  Frustrating.. in a way, that we know there's so much more, yet so little we can to see it. I started to think about how different people are better- more talented, at different things. Some people are better at sports, some people are better at the arts, some people are better with certain academic subjects.. I think there's research being done on different ethnic groups- on muscle types, etc., to find out why some groups seem to be better at some sports than others, but I wonder if there's a receptor part here involved.. that maybe, for some sports that involve more precise eyesight, or a quicker anticipation- that people better at those sports have a receptor, or receptors, that other people don't have.. maybe we're just not aware of them..