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

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

The Brain's Fast and Slow Thinking

By
Our brain processes information through fast and slow thinking. During the first half of the semester we focused a lot on how we perceive information, and what is occurring in our brains as we are taking it all in. The video begins as it shows a basic contrast between fast and slow thinking. Something that would take a matter of seconds to draw a conclusion would be fast thinking, such as looking at a picture and analyzing the situation at hand. In contrast, a complex math problem would utilize slow thinking as our brains are working out the problem; it is not automatically known. The video emphasizes how our fast thinking is quick to make assumptions without looking deeply enough into a situation. It is up to us to let our conscious system (slow thinking) compensate and deeper analyze. This is seen with optical illusions. We need to use our conscious system to sort these illusions out for what they really are. Learning this importance of conscious thinking shows us that our first
Post a Comment
Read more