Richardthughes
Posts: 11178
Joined: Jan. 2006
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Masterfull. In its entirety:
| Quote | 30
Reciprocating BillApril 30, 2015 at 9:02 pm
NKendall:
>Regarding cause and effect – The thought must arise first, correct?
No – I don’t think this is correct.
>New thoughts arise all the time without the aid of a prior structural change in the brain facilitating it.
Again, I don’t think this is correct.
>If this were not the case then no new thoughts would ever arise except by chance.
I disagree with this statement as well. Quite the reverse: rapid successions of complex, reentrant brain states, very likely involving the simultaneous operation of Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas, accompany and in part determine the creation of thoughts in a verbal modality. The temporal lobes mediate conceptual representations that become increasingly abstract as we move anteriorly. Activation of parietal and visual cortex accompany imagined body states and visual experiences. Limbic activation mediates fundamental emotional states (fear, attachment) and underwrites motivation and interest. And so forth.
If physical changes in the brain were required for learning, then how could you explain that we can learn so quickly?
Learning and memory are hierarchical and multifaceted. Some elements (sustaining the contents of working memory, acquiring and updating an immediate spatial map) are sustained by rapid functional activities, such as reentrant neural activity within the hippocampus and 40 hz synchronization/desynchronization within the cortex. Because they require active maintenance these functions are vulnerable to disruption. Hence the retro- and anterograde amnesia that can accompany traumatic brain injury. Others elements of memory, such as long term biographical memory – including the foundational representation of self and identity to which you refer – are thoroughly baked into the structure and networks of the cerebral cortex and persist despite interruptions brain function. Even at that level, profound structural disruptions, such as severing the corpus callosum, result in equally profound disruptions of the experience of a unitary self – the disconnections of the hemispheres can result in the creation of separate selves (KeithS at TSZ has discussed this at length.)
As if that weren’t enough, positing a further immaterial author of those activities has zero explanatory power. |
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