Perceiving Reality
- Beauty and feelings of attraction are deeply hardwired, steered in the right direction by programs carved by millions of years of natural selection.
- Our neural circuits were carved by natural selection to solve problems that our ancestors faced during our species' evolutionary history.
- When an idea is served up from behind the scenes, your neural circuitry has been working on it for hours or days or years, consolidating information and trying out new combinations. The brain runs it shows incognito.
-If choices and decisions derive from hidden mental processes, then free choice is either an illusion or , at minimum, more tightly constrained than previously considered.
- You're not perceiving what's out there. You're perceiving what ever your brain tells you.
- Hermann von Helmholtz concluded that the brain must make assumptions about the incoming data, and that these assumptions are based on our previous experience. In other words, given a little information, your brain uses its best guesses to turn it into something larger. The brain can take a torrent of input and learn to make sense of it.
- Your brain is in the dark but your mind constructs light.
Vision
- One-third of the human brain is devoted to vision.
- Patients who surgically recover their eyesight after decades of blindness: they do not suddenly see the world, but instead must learn to see again. Even when the optics of their eyes are perfectly functional, their brain must learn how to interpret the data coming in.
- Awareness of your surroundings only occurs only when sensory inputs violate expectations. When the world is successfully predicted away , awareness is not needed because the brain is doing its job well. For example, when you first learn how to ride a bicycle, a great deal of conscious concentration is required; after some time, when your sensory motor predictions are perfected, riding becomes unconscious.
- The predictability you develop between your actions and the resulting sensations is the reason you cannot tickle yourself. Other people can tickle you because their tickling maneuvers are not predictable to you. Interestingly, schizophrenics can tickle themselves because of a problem with their timing that does not allow their motor actions and resulting sensations to be correctly sequenced.
ANTON’S SYNDROME: A disorder in which a stroke renders a person blind- and the patient denies her blindness. Those with Anton’s syndrome are not pretending they are not blind; they truly believe they are not blind They are experiencing what they take to be vision , but it is all internally generated
. The external data is not getting to the right places because of the stroke, and so the patient’s reality is simply that which is generated by the brain, with little attachment to the real world.
Time Perception
Our sense of time and how much time passed is constructed by our brains.
What we perceive in the outside world is generated by parts of the brain to which we do not have access.
Neuroplasticity
When the brain finds a task it needs to solve, it rewires its own circuitry until it can accomplish the task with maximum efficiency.
The more things get automatised, the less conscious access we have.
We're wired only for species-appropriate desire which means that the brain's circuitry are designed to generate behaviour that is appropriate for our survival.
Because foods are useful and vital for survival, we are engineered to find them tasty.
What you are able to experience is completely limited by your biology. 'The Truman Show' movie is a good example of this. In the movie, Truman lives in a world completely constructed around him by an intrepid television producer. At one point an interviewer asks the producer, "Why do you think Truman has never come close to discovering the true nature of this world?" The producer replies "We accept the world with which we're represented." We accept what our brains tell us and stop there.
Synesthesia
Synesthesia, in its dozens of varieties, highlights the amazing differences in how individuals subjectively see the world, reminding us that each brain uniquely determines what it perceives, or is capable of perceiving. Instead of reality being passively recorded by the brain, it is actively constructed by it.
Stimulation of a sense triggers an anomalous sensory experience. For example, a voice or music may not only be heard but also seen, tasted or felt as touch. Synthetic perceptions are involuntary, automatic and consistent over time. In the brains of synesthetic patients, data is processed in the form of several sense at once.
Simon Baron Cohen proposed that “synesthesia results from an overabundance of neural connections. Usually, each of the senses is assigned to separate modules in the brain, with limited cross-communication. In the brains of people with synesthesia, the walls are broken down, and there is more communication among the modules.” Therefore, it can be said that “ microscopic changes in brain wiring can lead to different realities”. The existence of synesthesia demonstrates that more than one kind of brain-one kind of mind- is possible. They accept the reality presented to them, as you do yours.
It is difficult for synesthetic to understand how people cope without a visualisation of time . Your reality is strange to themas to theirs is to you.
Synesthesia, in its dozens of varieties, highlights the amazing differences in how individuals subjectively see the world, reminding us that each brain uniquely determines what it perceives, or is capable of perceiving. Instead of reality being passively recorded by the brain, it is actively constructed by it.
How Genes Influence Humans to Choose Their Mates?
All mammals have a set of genes known as MHC(major histocompatibility complex); these genes are key players in our immune system. When we give female mouse a selection of males to mate with, the mouse will choose a mate with dissimilar MHC genes because mixing up the gene pool is almost always a good idea in biology: it keeps the genetic defects at minimum and leads to a healthy interplay of genes known as hybrid vigor. So finding genetically distant partners is useful. But how do mice pull this off? An organ inside their noses picks up pheromones, floating chemicals that carry signals through the air, signals about things such as alarm, food trails, sexual readiness and genetic similarity or difference.
Do Humans sense and respond to pheromones the same way mice do? Recent work has found receptors in the lining of the human nose just like those used in pheromonal signalling in mice. However, it’s not clear if our receptors are functional.
In a study at the University of Bern, researchers measured and quantified MHCs of a group of male and female students. The males were then given cotton T-shirts to wear, so that their daily sweat soaked into the fabric. Later, back in the lab, females plunged their noses into the armpits of these T-shirts and picked which body oder they preferred. The result came out exactly like the mice. The female students preferred the males with more dissimilar MHCs.
Beyond reproduction, human pheromones may also carry invisible signals in other situations.
The length of women’s menstrual cycles may change after they sniff the armpit sweat of another woman, presumably based on pheromonal cues.
Attachment
-When mice pups are genetically engineered to lack a particular type of receptor in the opioid system (which is involved in pain suppression and reward), they stop caring about separation from their mothers. This doesn't mean that they are unable to care about things in general, it simply means that they don't bond to their mothers.
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