Introducing the brain: dementia exposed (Introduction)

by David Turell , Thursday, March 17, 2022, 14:33 (771 days ago) @ dhw

Damage to the brain disrupts normal recognition of confusion:

https://www.the-scientist.com/news-opinion/neurons-damaged-in-dementia-recognize-interr...

"The ability to sense regular patterns is fundamental to making sense of the world. Stimulus from the environment activates a group of neurons in the frontoparietal region of the brain called the multiple demand network (MDN) that’s known to be involved in the organization and control of cognitive functions and general intelligence. Both normal aging and brain diseases can affect the MDN’s ability to detect changes or deviations from regular patterns of sensory stimuli, such as noticing that a road sign is an unusual color while driving down the highway.

"New research published March 8 in The Journal of Neuroscience finds that disruption of the MDN is a common feature of various forms of dementia. According to the study, damage to any of the nodes of the MDN makes patients struggle to cope with changes in their environments, revealing a standard mechanism for this symptom.

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"Dementia is a common multifactorial disease that grows increasingly likely as people age. There are several types of dementia, the most common being Alzheimer’s disease, and all can cause problems with memory, cognition, and language. Dementia can also lead to changes in mood, emotions, perception, and behavior. Although each kind of dementia is different, there are some standard features, including the loss of fundamental properties and capabilities of the brain. “Understanding the biology at the base of those similarities can help develop better treatments,” study coauthor and University of Cambridge clinical neuroscientist James Rowe tells The Scientist.

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"The team combined their MEG data with MRI scans, allowing them to map out which brain structures were activated as they watched the documentary. In the healthy subjects, neurons in the MDN domain recognized changes in sound stimuli. However, in the patients with dementia, the reduction in the second neural response was associated with damage to the MDN. Crucially, these impairments were not driven by global atrophy in auditory brain regions, as confirmed by the lack of significant correlations between the MEG data and grey matter volume. Overall, the team found that neurodegeneration reduced the brain’s capacity to interpret external sensorial stimuli (in this case, sounds) to make suppositions about what is happening in the surrounding environment, which is a property associated with the affected multiple demand nodes."

Comment: this is about sensory confusion, not the higher levels of frontal lobe conceptualization abilities. From a materialism standpoint, many areas of the brain have important specific functions that will affect a state of consciousness but disordered consciousness remains What is amazing is that individuals exist with little brain and normal consciousness as shown here previously. Thus materialism alone cannot explain consciousness.