Brain Physiology, Cognition and Consciousness group: topic
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Alfredo Pereira Jr
Wednesday, 22 August 2007 18:44 UTC
Dear All:
Wellcome our new members!
Scientific research is providing a large amount of information about details of brain physiology. How does this knowledge impact our understanding of cognitive and conscious processing?
Is this the right time to construct models of how memory is selected, stored and consciously retrieved, departing from experimental results about molecular mechanisms that support these processes?
How brain correlates of consciousness operate to produce subjective experiences with a (cultural) content?
There are two (or more) ways of discussing these issues. We can define a topic and then express our theoretical positions using scientific publications as references to support the positions. The other possibility is to begin with the analysis of a scientific publication and then discuss theoretical implications.
Which style of discussion is more comfortable for you?
Best Regards,
Alfredo Pereira Jr.
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Dear Subrata and all colleagues from BPCC:
Only the reference of the paper is available at E. Morsella’s page, but I can send a copy (for private use) to everyone who is interested.
Please e-mail me (apj@ibb.unesp.br)Best Regards
Alfredo
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Dear All:
E.T. Rolls is proposing a new “computational” approach to consciousness (Abstract below). I do not believe that it is really contradictory to the oscillatory “dynamical” approach criticized by him.
Another controversial aspect of his proposal is considering syntactic “thought” more primitive than feelings and emotions. Biologists and evolutionary psychologists are likely to disagree.Alfredo
Neural Netw. 2007 Nov;20(9):962-82. Epub 2007 Oct 7.
A computational neuroscience approach to consciousness.
Rolls ET.
University of Oxford, Department of Experimental Psychology, South Parks Road,
Oxford OX1 3UD, England, United Kingdom.Simultaneous recordings from populations of neurons in the inferior temporal
visual cortex show that most of the information about which stimulus was shown is
available in the number of spikes (or firing rate) of each neuron, and not from
stimulus-dependent synchrony, so that it is unlikely that stimulus-dependent
synchrony (or indeed oscillations) is an essential aspect of visual object
perception. Neurophysiological investigations of backward masking show that the
threshold for conscious visual perception may be set to be higher than the level
at which small but significant information is present in neuronal firing and
which allows humans to guess which stimulus was shown without conscious
awareness. The adaptive value of this may be that the systems in the brain that
implement the type of information processing involved in conscious thoughts are
not interrupted by small signals that could be noise in sensory pathways. I then
consider what computational processes are closely related to conscious
processing, and describe a higher order syntactic thought (HOST) computational
theory of consciousness. It is argued that the adaptive value of higher order
thoughts is to solve the credit assignment problem that arises if a multistep
syntactic plan needs to be corrected. It is then suggested that it feels like
something to be an organism that can think about its own linguistic, and
semantically-based thoughts. It is suggested that qualia, raw sensory and
emotional feels, arise secondarily to having evolved such a higher order thought
system, and that sensory and emotional processing feels like something because it
would be unparsimonious for it to enter the planning, higher order thought,
system and not feel like something.PMID: 17998072 [PubMed – in process]
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