Lapidarium

Mar
1st

Thu

What are memories made of?

“Our memories are not inert packets of data and they don’t remain constant. Even though every memory feels like an honest representation, that sense of authenticity is the biggest lie of all. (…)

“The brain isn’t interested in having a perfect set of memories about the past,” “Instead, memory comes with a natural updating mechanism, which is how we make sure that the information taking up valuable space inside our head is still useful. That might make our memories less accurate, but it probably also makes them more relevant to the future.” (…)

The memory is less like a movie, a permanent emulsion of chemicals on celluloid, and more like a play—subtly different each time it’s performed. In my brain, a network of cells is constantly being reconsolidated, rewritten, remade. (…)

Reconsolidation provides a mechanistic explanation for these errors. (…) Why every memoir should be classified as fiction, and why it’s so disturbingly easy to implant false recollections. (…) The larger lesson is that because our memories are formed by the act of remembering them, controlling the conditions under which they are recalled can actually change their content. (…)

Being able to control memory doesn’t simply give us admin access to our brains. It gives us the power to shape nearly every aspect of our lives. There’s something terrifying about this. Long ago, humans accepted the uncontrollable nature of memory; we can’t choose what to remember or forget. But now it appears that we’ll soon gain the ability to alter our sense of the past. (…)

The fact is we already tweak our memories—we just do it badly. Reconsolidation constantly alters our recollections, as we rehearse nostalgias and suppress pain. We repeat stories until they’re stale, rewrite history in favor of the winners, and tamp down our sorrows with whiskey. “Once people realize how memory actually works, a lot of these beliefs that memory shouldn’t be changed will seem a little ridiculous,” Nader says. “Anything can change memory. This technology isn’t new. It’s just a better version of an existing biological process.”

— Jonah Lehrer, American author and journalist, in ☞ What are memories made of?, Wired Magazine, Feb 17, 2012

Jan
15th

Sun

“Memories are not static entities; over time they shift and migrate between different territories of the brain. (…)

Where memories might be stored. (…) The answer lies in the multitude of tiny modifiable connections between neuronal cells, the information-processing units of the brain. These cells, with their wispy tree-like protrusions, hang like stars in miniature galaxies and pulse with electrical charge.

Thus, your memories are patterns inscribed in the connections between the millions of neurons in your brain. Each memory has its unique pattern of activity, logged in the vast cellular network every time a memory is formed. It is thought that during recall of past events the original activity pattern in the hippocampus is re-established via a process that is known as “pattern completion”. (…) The physical structure of your brain is malleable.”

— Hugo Spiers is a neuroscientist and lecturer at the institute of behavioural neuroscience at University College London, What are memories made of?, The Guardian, Jan 14, 2012.

Jan
10th

Tue

“Metaphor is a fundamental mechanism of mind, one that allows us to use what we know about our physical and social experience to provide understanding of countless other subjects. Because such metaphors structure our most basic understandings of our experience, they are “metaphors we live by”—metaphors that can shape our perceptions and actions without our ever noticing them. (…)

We are neural beings, (…) our brains take their input from the rest of our bodies. What our bodies are like and how they function in the world thus structures the very concepts we can use to think. We cannot think just anything – only what our embodied brains permit. (…)

The mind is inherently embodied. Thought is mostly unconscious. Abstract concepts are largely metaphorical.”

— George Lakoff, American cognitive linguist and professor of linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, cited in Daniel Lende, Brainy Trees, Metaphorical Forests: On Neuroscience, Embodiment, and Architecture, Neuroanthropology, Jan 10, 2012. See also: ☞ George Lakoff on metaphors, explanatory journalism and the ‘Real Rationality’

Jan
2nd

Mon

“Internal mental experience is not the product of a photographic process. Internal reality is in fact constructed by the brain as it interacts with the environment in the present, in the context of its past experiences and expectancies of the future. At the level of perceptual categorizations, we have reached a land of mental representations quite distant from the layers of the world just inches away from their place inside the skull. This is the reason why each of us experiences a unique way of minding the world.”

— Daniel J. Siegel, completed his medical degree from Harvard Medical School and his post-graduate medical education at UCLA, The Mindful Brain: Reflection and Attunement in the Cultivation of Well-Being, W. W. Norton & Company, 2007, p. 166-167.

Dec
30th

Fri

“Mindfulness has never met a cognition it didn’t like.”

— Daniel J. Siegel, completed his medical degree from Harvard Medical School and his post-graduate medical education at UCLA, The Mindful Brain: Reflection and Attunement in the Cultivation of Well-Being, W. W. Norton & Company, 2007

Dec
27th

Tue

“We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native languages. The categories and types that we isolate from the world of phenomena we do not find there because they stare the observer in the face; on the contrary, the world is presented in a kaleidoscopic flux of impressions which has to be organized by our minds-and this means largely by the linguistic systems of our minds.”

— Benjamin Lee Whorf, American linguist (1897-1941), 1956, p. 213, cited in Does language determine thought? Boroditsky’s (2001) research on Chinese speakers’ conception of time (pdf)

“The pattern, and it alone, brings into being and causes to pass away and confers purpose, that is to say, value and meaning, on all there is. To understand is to perceive patterns. (…) To make intelligible is to reveal the basic pattern.”

— Isaiah Berlin, British social and political theorist, philosopher and historian, (1909-1997), The proper study of mankind: an anthology of essays, Chatto & Windus, 1997, p. 129. See also: ☞ ‘To understand is to perceive patterns’ - B. Fuller, Powell, Johnson, West, Kurzweil & video narration by J. Silva

Nov
16th

Wed

“The same statistical errors – namely, ignoring the “difference in differences” – are appearing throughout the most prestigious journals in neuroscience.”

— Ben Goldacre, British science writer, doctor and psychiatrist, The statistical error that just keeps on coming, The Guardian, Sept 9, 2011

Oct
25th

Tue

Iain McGilchrist on how the ‘divided brain’ has profoundly altered human behaviour, culture and society

“The left hemisphere is detail-oriented, prefers mechanisms to living things, and is inclined to self-interest. It misunderstands whatever is not explicit, lacks empathy and is unreasonably certain of itself, whereas the right hemisphere has greater breadth, flexibility and generosity, but lacks certainty.

It is vital that the two hemispheres work together, but McGilchrist argues that the left hemisphere is increasingly taking precedence in the modern world, resulting in a society where a rigid and bureaucratic obsession with structure and self-interest hold sway. (…)

Whatever the relationship between consciousness and the brain – unless the brain plays no role in bringing the world as we experience it into being, a position that must have few adherents – its structure has to be significant. It might even give us clues to understanding the structure of the world it mediates, the world we know. (…)

The structure and experience of our mental world. In this sense the brain is – in fact it has to be – a metaphor of the world. (…)

I believe that there are two fundamentally opposed realities rooted in the bihemispheric structure of the brain. But the relationship between them is no more symmetrical than that of the chambers of the heart – in fact, less so; more like that of the artist to the critic, or a king to his counsellor. (…)

I hold that, like the Master and his emissary in the story, though the cerebral hemispheres should co-operate, they have for some time been in a state of conflict. The subsequent battles between them are recorded in the history of philosophy, and played out in the seismic shifts that characterise the history of Western culture. At present the domain – our civilisation – finds itself in the hands of the vizier, who, however gifted, is effectively an ambitious regional bureaucrat with his own interests at heart. Meanwhile the Master, the one whose wisdom gave the people peace and security, is led away in chains. The Master is betrayed by his emissary.”

— McGilchrist, psychiatrist and writer, ☞ Iain McGilchrist on The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World

Oct
3rd

Mon

“Instead of reality being passively recorded by the brain, it is actively constructed by it.”

— David Eagleman, neuroscientist at Baylor College of Medicine, where he directs the Laboratory for Perception and Action and the Initiative on Neuroscience and Law, Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain, Pantheon Books, 2011 (tnx johnsparker)

David Eagleman on Time and the Brain

“Clocks offer at best a convenient fiction. (…) They imply that time ticks steadily, predictably forward, when our experience shows that it often does the opposite: it stretches and compresses, skips a beat and doubles back.”

A sense of time is threaded through everything we perceive. (…)

The interesting thing about time is that there is no spot. It’s a distributed property. It’s metasensory; it rides on top of all the others.” (…)

The brain, he writes, is like Kublai Khan, the great Mongol emperor of the thirteenth century. It sits enthroned in its skull, “encased in darkness and silence,” at a lofty remove from brute reality. Messengers stream in from every corner of the sensory kingdom, bringing word of distant sights, sounds, and smells. Their reports arrive at different rates, often long out of date, yet the details are all stitched together into a seamless chronology. The difference is that Kublai Khan was piecing together the past. The brain is describing the present—processing reams of disjointed data on the fly, editing everything down to an instantaneous now. (…)

[Eagleman] thought of time not just as a neuronal computation—a matter for biological clocks—but as a window on the movements of the mind. (…)

Reality is a tape-delayed broadcast, carefully censored before it reaches us. (…)

“Time is this rubbery thing,” Eagleman said. “It stretches out when you really turn your brain resources on, and when you say, ‘Oh, I got this, everything is as expected,’ it shrinks up.”

— David Eagleman, neuroscientist at Baylor College of Medicine, where he directs the Laboratory for Perception and Action and the Initiative on Neuroscience and Law, paraphrased by Burkhard Bilger, The Possibilian, The New Yorker, Aprill 25, 2011

Sep
22nd

Thu

Alva Noë: ‘Google Is Not Making You Stupid’

“Does it actually even seem to you as if you have a detailed model of the world around you in your head? Be careful. Yes, it seems to you as if the world is there for you. But not in your head. It’s there. Around you. In reach. And we are made — through evolution — to get the information we need, when we need it.

We have evolved not to be representers-of-the-world, but to lock-in and keep track of where we find ourselves. We use landmarks and street signs to find our way around; arithmetical notation makes it possible for us to calculate with big numbers; we wear wrist watches so that we can know the time without needing to know the time; and we build libraries so that we have access to what we need to know, when we need to know it.

The so-called Google effect is merely the latest expression of a cognitive strategy that is almost as certainly as ancient as our species.

There is no question that the new technologies are changing our lives. But here we need to remember: The more things change, the more they stay the same. All tools extend what we can do, and so, all tools have the potential to extend our minds.”

— Alva Noë, professor of philosophy at the University of Calfornia, Berkeley (B.Phil, University of Oxford, Ph.D., Harvard University), Google Is Not Making You Stupid, NPR, Sept 20, 2011 See also:
☞ Does Google Make Us Stupid?
☞ Steven Pinker on the mind as a system of ‘organs of computation’

Sep
14th

Wed

“What is the self? How does the activity of neurons give rise to the sense of being a conscious human being? Even this most ancient of philosophical problems, I believe, will yield to methods of empirical science. It now seems increasingly likely that the self is not a holistic property of the entire brain; it arises from the activity of specific sets of interlinked brain circuits. But we need to know which circuits are critically involved and what their functions might be. It is the ‘turning inward’ aspect of the self — its recursiveness — that gives it its peculiar paradoxical quality.”

— V.S. Ramachandran, neuroscientist best known for his work in the fields of behavioral neurology and psychophysics, a Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of California, San Diego, The Neurology of Self-Awareness, Edge, Aug 1, 2007

“The discovery of mirror neurons in the frontal lobes of monkeys, and their potential relevance to human brain evolution — which I speculate on in this essay — is the single most important ‘unreported’ (or at least, unpublicized) story of the decade. I predict that mirror neurons will do for psychology what DNA did for biology: they will provide a unifying framework and help explain a host of mental abilities that have hitherto remained mysterious and inaccessible to experiments.”

— V.S. Ramachandran, neuroscientist best known for his work in the fields of behavioral neurology and psychophysics, a Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of California, San Diego, Mirror neurons and imitation learning as the driving force behind “the great leap forward” in human evolution (pdf) (2000)

Sep
12th

Mon

Daniel Kahneman on the power of settings, the power of priming, and the power of unconscious thinking

“We became completely identified with the idea that people are generally wrong. (…) We demonstrated that people are not rational. (…) There is no sharp line between intuition and perception. (…) Perception is predictive. (…)

The main thing in the evolutionary story about intuition, is whether intuition grew out of perception, whether it grew out of the predictive aspects of perception. If you want to understand intuition, it is very useful to understand perception, because so many of the rules that apply to perception apply as well to intuitive thinking. Intuitive thinking is quite different from perception. Intuitive thinking has language. Intuitive thinking has a lot of world knowledge organized in different ways than mere perception. But some very basic characteristics that we’ll talk about of perception are extended almost directly into intuitive thinking. (…)

The confidence that people have in their beliefs is not a measure of the quality of evidence, it is not a judgment of the quality of the evidence but it is a judgment of the coherence of the story that the mind has managed to construct. Quite often you can construct very good stories out of very little evidence, when there is little evidence, no conflict, and the story is going to end up good. People tend to have great belief, great faith in stories that are based on very little evidence.

It generates what Amos [Tversky] and I call “natural assessments”, that is, there are computations that get performed automatically. (…)

So there is a really important distinction between natural assessment and things that are not naturally assessed. There are questions that are easy for the organism to answer, and other questions that are difficult for the organism to answer, and that makes a lot of difference.”

— Daniel Kahneman, Israeli-American psychologist and Nobel laureate. He is notable for his work on the psychology of judgment and decision-making, behavioral economics and hedonic psychology, ☞ Daniel Kahneman: The Marvels and the Flaws of Intuitive Thinking, Edge, July 17, 2011

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