Introducing the brain: how the brain perceives reality (Introduction)

by David Turell , Wednesday, June 08, 2022, 21:41 (897 days ago) @ David Turell

A neurology researcher has an idea:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-the-brain-constructs-the-outside-world/

"The challenge for me and other neuroscientists involves the weighty question of what, exactly, is the mind. Ever since the time of Aristotle, thinkers have assumed that the soul or the mind is initially a blank slate, a tabula rasa on which experiences are painted. This view has influenced thinking in Christian and Persian philosophies, British empiricism and Marxist doctrine. In the past century it has also permeated psychology and cognitive science. This “outside-in” view portrays the mind as a tool for learning about the true nature of the world. The alternative view—one that has defined my research—asserts that the primary preoccupation of brain networks is to maintain their own internal dynamics and perpetually generate myriad nonsensical patterns of neural activity. When a seemingly random action offers a benefit to the organism's survival, the neuronal pattern leading to that action gains meaning.

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"An implicit practical implication of the outside-in framework is that the next frontier for progress in contemporary neuroscience should be to find where the putative central processor resides in the brain and systematically elaborate the neuronal mechanisms of decision-making. Indeed, the physiology of decision-making has become one of the most popular focuses in contemporary neuroscience. Higher-order brain regions, such as the prefrontal cortex, have been postulated as the place where “all things come together” and “all outputs are initiated.” When we look more closely, however, the outside-in framework does not hold together.

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"In other words, neurons in sensory cortical areas and even in the hypothetical central processor cannot “see” events that happen in the world. There is no interpreter in the brain to assign meaning to these changes in neuronal firing patterns. Short of a magical homunculus watching the activities of all the neurons in the brain with the omniscience of the experimenter, the neurons that take this all in are unaware of the events that caused these changes in their firing patterns. Fluctuations in neuronal activity are meaningful only for the scientist who is in the privileged position of observing both events in the brain and events in the outside world and then comparing the two perspectives.

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"The contrast between outside-in and inside-out approaches becomes most striking when used to explain the mechanisms of learning. A tacit assumption of the blank slate model is that the complexity of the brain grows with the amount of experience. As we learn, the interactions of brain circuits should become increasingly more elaborate. In the inside-out framework, however, experience is not the main source of the brain's complexity.

"Instead the brain organizes itself into a vast repertoire of preformed patterns of firing known as neuronal trajectories. This self-organized brain model can be likened to a dictionary filled initially with nonsensical words. New experience does not change the way these networks function—their overall activity level, for instance. Learning takes place, rather, through a process of matching the preexisting neuronal trajectories to events in the world.

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"The inside-out model:...The way the brain strikes this balance relates to vast differences in the connection strength of different groups of neurons. Connections among neurons exist on a continuum. Most neurons are only weakly connected to others, whereas a smaller subset retains robust links. The strongly connected minority is always on the alert. It fires rapidly, shares information readily within its own group, and stubbornly resists any modifications to the neurons' circuitry. Because of the multitude of connections and their high communication speeds, these elite subnetworks, sometimes described as a “rich club,” remain well informed about neuronal events throughout the brain.

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"During the course of natural selection, organisms adapt to the ecological niches in which they live and learn to predict the likely outcomes of their actions in those niches. As brain complexity increases, more intricate connections and neuronal computations insert themselves between motor outputs and sensory inputs. This investment enables the prediction of planned actions in more complex and changing environments and at lengthy time scales far in the future. More sophisticated brains also organize themselves to allow computations to continue when sensory inputs vanish temporarily and an animal's actions come to a halt.

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"In addition to its theoretical implications, the inside-out approach has a number of practical applications...In real brains, neural processes that operate through disengagement from the senses go hand in hand with mechanisms that promote interactions with the surrounding world. All brains, simple or complex, use the same basic principles. Disengaged neural activity, calibrated simultaneously by outside experience, is the essence of cognition.

Comment: nothing we do not know already. From birth the brain learns to know reality and anticipate how it can help us be prepared for action. Reference Libet.