Brain complexity: solving visual confusion (Introduction)

by dhw, Thursday, June 30, 2016, 13:36 (3068 days ago) @ David Turell

QUOTE: We're still working with crude human neuro-imaging techniques. The tools we have to visualize what is happening inside the human brain are exciting, but each point in our data is actually the average response over millions of neurons, making it very difficult to understand the micro-structure of neural information processing. There are 86 billion or so neurons, each an individual cell that transmits information in the human brain, and we are very far away from neuroscientific methods that will allow us to see how each of these units interact with one another. We're limited by that."-David's comment: This all plays to my overarching point. Our brain is a biological camera. It cannot be like the camera eyes of a robot running on a computer, so as described our brain adds necessary parts to give us an integrated picture, that is obviously very useful and accurate. We cannot expect anything else. Can we be fooled? Obviously. is that critical? No.-Thank you for these two articles. I'm not at all sure what your overarching point is. You emphasize “that the brain is built to help us, not confuse us. Yes, the brain controls what visual results we perceive, but it is a useful result”. I don't think any of us would doubt that the brain is useful, or that it is highly efficient, even though it is fallible (can be fooled). But what these scientists are trying to find out is how it all works, and there are two points that strike me about these articles in relation to two of the subjects we keep returning to over and over again. One is the question of what constitutes the “us” that the brain helps, i.e. our identity; and tied in with this is the nature of the cell. Approximately 86 billion individual cells are transmitting information to and interacting with one another - and that's in the brain alone. I have seen an estimate of 37.2 trillion for the number of individual cells in the human body (a trillion = 1,000,000,000,000), and they all in their different ways pass on information and interact. “We” consist of all these communities, which for the most part get on with their work quite independently of “us” (in the sense of the identity that appears to exercise control over “our” conscious actions). And so quite apart from the wonder of it all, we have the mystery of it all. What is the “dark energy” that controls the microcosms when they act independently of “our” control, and what is the “dark energy” that enables the macrocosm of the “self” to mobilize the microcosms? Or is it the microcosms that direct the macrocosm?