Skip to main content
By


One single neuron (seen in blue above) was found wrapped around a mouse brain like a "crown of thorns."  Scientists believe this finding may shed light on how consciousness is developed and how so many different processes of the brain come together so quickly to give us conscious awareness.  The single neuron spans the occipital lobe, temporal lobe, parietal lobe, and frontal lobe.  This means that visual information, linguistic information, face and shape recognition, and somatosensory information, along with our decisions/judgments about all of this information, is all being integrated in the seat of the neuron at the claustrum.  This might shed light on how we, in a split second and without our even knowing it, are able to make prediction and corrections about our perceptions, as in the Predictive Coding Model.  It can also explain Locke's proposal that we make judgments about sense perceptions, such as a flat shape variously colored, without our even knowing it, to give us the idea of a 3-D shape with a uniform color.  I think this new finding is extremely exciting and gives some concrete evidence for the abstract concept of consciousness and how we might make split-second judgments of sense perceptions to form our conscious awareness without us even knowing.

http://www.nature.com/news/a-giant-neuron-found-wrapped-around-entire-mouse-brain-1.21539

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Negative Afterimage

By Anonymous
Reber Shukri Professor Vaughn Negative afterimage is a stimulus which elicits a positive image. In order to experience this, one can look at a bright source of light and then look away to a dark area. The way negative afterimage works is when the eye's photo-receptors which are the rods and cones adapt to over stimulation and lose sensitivity. The photo-receptors which are constantly exposed to the same stimulus will fatigue their supply of photo pigment, resulting a decrease in signal to the brain. The way negative afterimage connects to perception is because of bottom up processing where the stimulus influences what we perceive. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=szy8iNCljlQ <Link to the video
Post a Comment
Read more

Typoglycemia and Predictive Coding

By
https://www.mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk/people/matt.davis/cmabridge/ This article was the basis of my presentation in class, but due to the 5 minute time limit I was only able to mention a fraction of the information. The page focuses on the original "copypasta" text: Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. He breaks this down sentence by sentence, first doing a quick search to see if there's actually research being done at Cambridge University on the topic (there's not). He lists a multitude of studies that are relevant to the orders of the letters, the impact these jumbles have on reading speed, and more. The article makes a strong case that we read wo...
Post a Comment
Read more

Illusions that Confuse Multiple Senses

By
In this video, several illusions are shown that deceive your senses. Illusions such as the Zöllner Illusion and the Poggendorff illusion confuse our bottom up processing by tricking our vision. However, our vision isn't the only sense that these illusions can confuse, blind individuals presented with raised versions of the same illusions are also confused by them. These illusions effect the visual and touch systems by confusing our bottom up processing by tricking out sight and touch. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Je1mkzRU5rc&t=64s
Post a Comment
Read more