SSRN Social Neuro Neuro Neuro

 

  

https://www.ssrn.com/link/Social-Neuroscience.html

Dr Iain McGilchrist: We are living in a deluded world

Proyección cerebral de la realidad percibida

 

Forever Young: Venimos poco hechos

En su historia de la complejidad, de la humanidad y de la humanización (El lugar del hombre en el cosmos), Fred Spier se adhiere a una interesante teoría que podría explicar en parte la evolución del cerebro humano y algunas de sus peculiaridades cognitivas. A saber, la teoría de la encefalización por neotenia, o humanización altricial.

 Texto completo:

Forever Young: Venimos poco hechos

https://doi.org/10.17613/8w56-6b7

Author(s):

José Angel GARCÍA LANDA (see profile)

Date:

2011

Group(s):

Anthropology, Philosophy

Item Type:

Article

Permanent URL:

https://doi.org/10.17613/8w56-6b7

 

 

English abstract: In his history of complexity, of mankind and of humanization ("Big History ad the Future of Humanity") Fred Spier adheres to an interesting theory which could partly explain the evolution of the human brain and some of its cognitive peculiarities—to wit, the theory of encephalization through neoteny, or altricial humanization. _______________________________________________________________________________ Keywords: Altricity, Neoteny, Evolution, Cognition, Evolution, Humanization, Human origins, Anthropology,

 

 

 También aquí: 

_____. "Forever Young: Venimos poco hechos." In García Landa, Vanity Fea 24 Sept. 2011.* (Neoteny, human origins).

         http://vanityfea.blogspot.com/2011/09/forever-young.html

         2011

_____. "Forever Young: Venimos poco hechos." Ibercampus (Vanity Fea) 10 Oct. 2011.*

         http://www.ibercampus.info/articulo.asp?idarticulo=14545

         2013 DISCONTINUED 2021

         https://www.ibercampus.es/forever-young-14545.htm

2021

_____. "Forever Young: Venimos poco hechos." SSRN 19 Jan. 2022.*

         http://ssrn.com/abstract=3952116

         2021

_____. "Forever Young: Venimos poco hechos." Academia 9 Jan. 2022.*

         https://www.academia.edu/67674836/

         2021

_____. "Forever Young: Venimos poco hechos." ResearchGate 29 Jan. 2022.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/358213845

         2022

_____. "Forever Young: Venimos poco hechos." Humanities Commons 7 March 2022.*

         https://doi.org/10.17613/8w56-6b77

         https://hcommons.org/deposits/item/hc:44861/

         2022

_____. "Forever Young: Venimos poco hechos." In García Landa, Vanity Fea 8 March 2022.*

         https://vanityfea.blogspot.com/2022/03/forever-young-venimos-poco-hechos.html

         2022

 

—oOo—

"El mundo por montera: el cerebro" (Debate televisivo, años 90)

Another kind of Blindsight

The brain's fusiform face area responds preferentially to faces even in people blind from birth. When congenitally blind people touch a face, it produces a similar pattern of activation in the FFA to that produced in sighted people when they look at one. https://t.co/i0T98Qqnoe pic.twitter.com/HWikTapRUE

— Steve Stewart-Williams (@SteveStuWill) September 1, 2020

Macroestructura y microestructura cerebral

Algo que parece consistente con las teorías sobre la humanización altricial y de la formación sociocultural del cerebro:

"Mientras que la macroestructura del cerebro es determinada principalmente por los genes, experiencias específicas del individuo, no relacionadas con la crianza familiar, juegan el papel más importante en la formación de la microestructura. https://t.co/3IPaJ5hiUH

— Pablo Malo (@pitiklinov) July 18, 2020

Baxi, Madhura, et al. "Quantifying Genetic and Environmental Influence on Gray Matter Microstructure Using Diffusion MRI." Cerebral Cortex bhaa174 (2020).*

         https://doi.org/10.1093/cercor/bhaa174

         https://academic.oup.com/cercor/article-abstract/doi/10.1093/cercor/bhaa174/5872616?redirectedFrom=fulltext

         2020

Y el mono se irguió y habló

—oOo—

Green Needle Brainstorm

WTAF: If you think "brainstorm," that's what you'll hear; if you think "green needle," you'll hear that instead. 😮😮😮 https://t.co/hHL6semJl3 pic.twitter.com/b28pRvPqYl

— Steve Stewart-Williams (@SteveStuWill) April 16, 2020

Exaptación, coevolución (morfológica y cognitiva) y emergencia

Los mecanismos de exaptación, coevolución y emergencia cognitiva son los que más van a caracterizar al género Homo dentro de su nicho cognitivo-culturalhttps://t.co/47ROlQmTVs pic.twitter.com/qlq57xMma4

— Angel Rivera (@arqueocognitiva) April 16, 2020

Evolución y psicología humana

Argumentos contra la realidad

Ibercampus. "Nuestros sentidos y el cerebro construyen la realidad para vivir, no para percibir la verdad." Ibercampus  30 Jan. 2020.* (Donald Hoffman).

 https://www.ibercampus.es/imagen-fija-utilizada-por-donald-hoffman-para-avalar-su-teoria-del-39275.htm

         2020

 —oOo—

Un cerebro para dominarlos a todos

The Virtual World We Inhabit

Richard Dawkins explains why we all move in a perceptual world which is not "the" world, but a virtual reality model of the same, a mental model which we take for the real thing itself. 

This may seem far-fetched to the naive assumptions (and perceptions) of many people, yet it is self-evident from the moment we realize that although we may partly share our mental maps and models of the objective world, the section of the world I perceive and attend to is different from yours, a different location, a different point of view, etc. etc. Fairly obvious, actually. 

Listen to Dawkins:

You and I, we humans, we mammals, we animals, inhabit a virtual world, constructed from elements that are, at successively higher levels, useful for representing the real world. Of course, we feel as if we are firmly placed in the real world—which is exactly as it should be if our constrained virtual reality software is any good. It is very good, and the only time we notice it at all is on the rare occasions when it gets something wrong. When this happens we experience an illusion or a hallucination, like the hollow mask illusion we talked about earlier.

The British psychologist Richard Gregory has paid special attention to visual illusions as a means of studying how the brain works. In his book Eye and Brain (fifth edition 1998), he regards seeing as an active process in which the brain sets up hypotheses about what is going on out there, then tests those hypotheses about what is going on out there, then tests those hypotheses against the data coming in from the sense organs. One of the most familiar of all visual illusions is the Necker cube. This is a simple line drawing of a hollow cube, like a cube made of steel rods.

The drawing is a two-dimensional pattern of ink on paper. Yet a normal human sees it as a cube. The brain has made a three-dimensional model based upon the two-dimensional pattern of ink on paper. yet a normal human sees it as a cube. The brain has made a three-dimensional model based upon the two-dimensional pattern on the paper. This is, indeed, the kind of thing the brain does almost every time you look at a picture. The flat pattern of ink on paper is equally compatible with two alternative three-dimensional brain models. Stare at the drawing for some seconds and you will see it flip. The facet that had previously seemed nearest to you will now appear farthest. Carry on looking, and it will flip back to the original cube. The brian could have been designed to stick, arbitrarily, to one of the two cube models, say the first of the two that it hit upon, even though the other model would have been equally compatible with the information from the retinas. But in fact the brain takes the other option of running each model, or hypothesis, alternately for a few seconds at a time. Hence the apparent cube alternates, which gives the game away. Our brain constructs a three-dimensional model. It is virtual reality in the head. (...) The model in the brain (...) is constructed. But (...) it is, like the surgeon's computer model of the inside of her patient, not entirely invented: it is constrained by information fed in from the outside world.  (275-77)

One might compare the brain to a Popperian scientist, projecting hypotheses onto the world, as a working model of the same, and correcting those hypotheses only when reality fails to replicate the experiment. If the perceptual/conceptual model is thus falsified, a new perceptual pattern or "hypothesis" is generated to see if it delivers in terms of workable action.

This "top-down" model of perception corrects the naive "bottom-up" account of the same, which gives a more passive role to the mind. On this account, the mind would simply receive the input from the senses, and would construct its mental model of the world as the result of a one-way process, world-to-mind. Using the scientific analogy, this would be a Baconian model of experience: from the collection of data, through induction and generalization, to the building of laws which account for the world (the mental models). Our Popperian account of the mind makes for a much more dynamic role of the mind: it is top-down to a large extent (although of course it is a dynamic two-way model, both top-down and bottom-up in a continuous feedback cycle). The mind is not merely receiving the input of "reality", it is also constructing and projecting that reality around the mental subject, so that minds are reality-generation machines, and the more elaborate the mind, the more mental and more virtual the reality it inhabits. The mind generates its own space for interaction with the world and with other minds, to the extent that both physical reality and (especially) social reality are the result of self-fulfilling expectations. 

Expectations that we call institutions, frames, places (as socially defined), encounters, situations, discourses and disciplines.

For another take on this issue, I refer the reader to these two articles:

- "Goffman: La realidad como expectativa autocumplida y el teatro de la interioridad" — On the nature of social reality as a system of self-fulfilling expectations as theorized by Erving Goffman in his Frame Theory.

- "Constitución reflexiva de la percepción". By way of Hegel, a reflection on the construction of visual space as a mental intervention on reality, with our eyes (in a way) acting as a kind of Super-8 film projectors in a dark room, a bit like those 17th-c. prints which show Anatomical Men projecting light beams from their eyes, beams which illuminate the objects and allow them to be seen. (This is of course an image or analogy the better to visualize my point).

But it brings me nicely to the my last observation about our Virtual Reality in the Mind, having to do with the discovery of this artifact. Of course we would have to go back through a number of shades of awareness in a number of idealistic philosophers, from Plato's cavern to Descartes' evil genius. Nevertheless my example of choice comes from a celebrated materialist, Thomas Hobbes. We are of course at that point of reasoning about the world where matter becomes mind becomes matter, and thus Hobbes gives us (in his account of perception in Leviathan) a memorable definition of how exactly the world we perceive is a mental construct—minds being nothing but machines for the construction of such constructs, including, at a further ratchet of virtuality, their past and their future states, that is, time itself as a moving image of reality. (1)

CHAPTER I. OF SENSE

Concerning the Thoughts of man, I will consider them first Singly, and afterwards in Trayne, or dependance upon one another. Singly, they are every one a Representation or Apparence, of some quality, or other Accident of a body without us; which is commonly called an Object. Which Object worketh on the Eyes, Eares, and other parts of mans body; and by diversity of working, produceth diversity of Apparences.
The Originall of them all, is that which we call Sense; (For there is no conception in a mans mind, which hath not at first, totally, or by parts, been begotten upon the organs of Sense.) The rest are derived from that originall.
To know the naturall cause of Sense, is not very necessary to the business now in hand; and I have els-where written of the same at large. Nevertheless, to fill each part of my present method, I will briefly deliver the same in this place.
The cause of Sense, is the Externall Body, or Object, which presseth the organ proper to each Sense, either immediatly, as in the Tast and Touch; or mediately, as in Seeing, Hearing, and Smelling: which pressure, by the mediation of Nerves, and other strings, and membranes of the body, continued inwards to the Brain, and Heart, causeth there a resistance, or counter-pressure, or endeavour of the heart, to deliver it self: which endeavour because Outward, seemeth to be some matter without. And this Seeming, or Fancy, is that which men call sense; and consisteth, as to the Eye, in a Light, or Colour Figured; To the Eare, in a Sound; To the Nostrill, in an Odour; To the Tongue and Palat, in a Savour; and to the rest of the body, in Heat, Cold, Hardnesse, Softnesse, and such other qualities, as we discern by Feeling. All which qualities called Sensible, are in the object that causeth them, but so many several motions of the matter, by which it presseth our organs diversly. Neither in us that are pressed, are they anything els, but divers motions; (for motion, produceth nothing but motion.) But their apparence to us is Fancy, the same waking, that dreaming. And as pressing, rubbing, or striking the Eye, makes us fancy a light; and pressing the Eare, produceth a dinne; so do the bodies also we see, or hear, produce the same by their strong, though unobserved action, For if those Colours, and Sounds, were in the Bodies, or Objects that cause them, they could not bee severed from them, as by glasses, and in Ecchoes by reflection, wee see they are; where we know the thing we see, is in one place; the apparence, in another. And though at some certain distance, the reall, and very object seem invested with the fancy it begets in us; Yet still the object is one thing, the image or fancy is another. So that Sense in all cases, is nothing els but originall fancy, caused (as I have said) by the pressure, that is, by the motion, of externall things upon our Eyes, Eares, and other organs thereunto ordained. 

Perhaps augmented reality, a kind of Google Glass vision, is a better analogue for Hobbes's account of perception. The mind, subject to perceptual stimuli, constructs a fanciful or imaginary version of the world, so that the real and very object seem[s] invested with the fancy it begets in us. Objects may well be in the world, but objects of perception are mental constructs: there is no visual appearance of the object without an eye and a brain, there is no sound whatsoever in a waterfall without the ear and the brain. Berkeley would extract some further consequences of the empiricist account of perception, and would brazenly define objects and the world in which they are placed as the products of the mind's activity, synthesizing the input from the senses and generating something which is not in the senses nor in any understandable sense in the "world without minds". Which is not of course what we usually mean by "the world": it is not the least of paradoxes that this non-mental "raw" world is only conceivable, when we come to examine it, as the result of an elaborate scientific abstraction from the much more intuitive world we inhabit, the virtual world constructed by our mind and our senses.

__________


(1) For more on the cognitive construction of time, see my paper on "La cartografía narrativa en la articulación del mundo humano: El papel de los esquemas y los textos narrativos."

"Lo mismo despiertos, que soñando": 

Hobbes sobre la virtualidad de lo real

—oOo—

Finding the Brain's Compass

https://t.co/D2sRAN5ddg

— José Miguel Martínez Gázquez 🐚 (@jmmgazquez) August 19, 2019

Evolución del cerebro en el género Homo

Retropost (1 de diciembre de 2008): Dos medios cerebros

Dos medios cerebros

... valen más que uno. Dos veces me he encontrado en una semana alusiones a la lateralización del cerebro y especialización de sus hemisferios—una referencia más centrada (o más lateralizada) en el hemisferio derecho, y otra más en el izquierdo.

La primera. En este vídeo, la neuróloga Jill Bolte Taylor habla de la lateralización cerebral y de su propia experiencia de sufrir un infarto cerebral del que tardó años en recuperarse. Narrado en primera persona, y por una persona especialmente capacitada para describir e interpretar lo que le pasó, algo que describe como "My Stroke of Insight"—"mi ataque de iluminación". Como explica Bolte, nuestros dos medios cerebros—y muy separados están, como se ve en el vídeo—tienen funciones distintas, y de hecho "personalidades" distintas. El lado izquierdo es donde se alojan nuestros instrumentos de segmentación, ordenación, clasificación, individuación, sentido de la identidad.... y es el que se le fundió a ella por la rotura de un vaso. Así que describe su experiencia del "Otro Lado" del cerebro, una experiencia supongo parecida a la de los bebés, o como dice ella al Nirvana: un cúmulo de sensaciones simultáneas, una fusión con el todo, una pérdida de los límites entre el yo y el cosmos.

Es curioso el tono de la conferencia—aun para una conferenciante americana, es atípica por la manera en que mezcla géneros de oratoria: conferencia de neurología + testimonio de autoayuda + show de humorista + sermón New Age.

Pero véanlo, véanlo:



El segundo sitio en el que he oído hablar de lateralización cerebral es en este post de Babel's Dawn. Los neurolingüistas de la nueva ola chomskiana buscan la mítica ubicación de nuestras facultades sintácticas que, según Chomsky, son las que hacen al lenguaje ser lo que es. Vamos, el locus primigenius del lenguaje—el instrumento cerebral innato que nos hace aprender un idioma (y que se vuelve tonto pasada la adolescencia, en la mayoría de los casos). Bien, pues ahora se nos dice que es el cerebro izquierdo el encargado de procesar secuencias sintácticas. Y (presumiblemente) ordenar lo que sería un caos de sentido o sinsentido, para producir oraciones gramaticales. Es una explicación un tanto precipitada en la versión que aquí doy; apenas menos en el original. 

Como le digo al bloguero de Babel's Dawn en un comentario, me parece fundamentalmente erróneo el buscar en la sintaxis la base cognitiva del lenguaje—algo que Chomsky lleva haciendo de una manera u otra desde los años cincuenta. A mí la sintaxis en su estado actual me parece un desarrollo tardío, una fosilización de estructuras anteriores, o quizá mejor dicho una elaboración secundaria, emergente sobre una base cognitiva que no es sintaxis en el sentido de sintaxis pura—porque es "sintaxis semántica". Y esa formalización semántica—de agentes, pacientes, acciones, sustancias, accidentes, procesos, etc.—se basa en una pragmática previa, en la acción, que según decía Trotsky, era la que estaba en el origen: no el Verbo, y menos aún la Conjugación.

Así que localícenme las estructuras cerebrales que se activan al identificar objetos, acciones, cualidades; las que generan los procesos cognitivos que asocian actos y efectos, agentes, acciones y efectos de la acción—y es por allí por donde empezaremos a comprender las bases neurológicas del lenguaje, y de la sintaxis. Y sí, seguramente se encontrarán en el hemisferio izquierdo los principales circuitos que intervienen en los procesos de clasificación, secuenciación, relación y subordinación (me refiero a subordinación cognitiva—un marco cognitivo subordinado a otro, no una oración subordinada a otra, pues el marco viene aquí antes que el cuadro completo).

En suma, que me parece mal orientada la obsesión sintáctica de estos biolinguistas. Más cognición, más pragmática, más semántica, más gestos y menos sintaxis: por ahí localizamos mejor el origen del lenguaje. Por cierto, una de las comentaristas del post de Babel's Dawn también observa que los mecanismos cerebrales de procesamiento de comunicación gestual también se encuentran predominantemente en el hemisferio izquierdo—cita a Gazzaniga y otros— Y eso sí que es más relevante para seguirle la pista al origen, y a la base, de la comunicación humana.

Bio/Neurolingüística

—oOo—

Estudio transdisciplinario sobre la autoconciencia

Rivera Arrizabalaga, Ángel, and Sara Rivera Velasco. "Estudio transdisciplinario sobre la autoconciencia." Ludus Vitalis 25.48 (Jan. 2018). Online at ResearchGate.*
    https://www.researchgate.net/publication/322631901
   
(Hay que descargar el artículo para poder leerlo).

Es el típo de artículo que debería ir a Narratología Evolucionista, si los cenutrios de Facebook no me hubieran obligado a dejar de trabajar con ellos, por su intolerable política de desatención, censura, y maltrato a los usuarios.

—oOo—

The Curious Case of the Decapitated Frog

The Curious Case of the Decapitated Frog

---

SAVOIRS ENS http://savoirs.ens.fr/expose.php?id=3115 jeudi 08 juin 2017

Descriptif

---

Durant le mois de juin 2017, le labex TransferS et Mathias Girel (CAPHÉS) ont accueilli Alexander KLEIN, professeur de philosophie à l’Université d’État de Californie, Long Beach (États-Unis).
Cette première lecture d'Alexander Klein est organisée dans le cadre du colloque "La notion de conscience. À partir de William James."
Lecture 1 : The Curious Case of the Decapitated Frog

Physiologists have long known that some vertebrates can survive for months without a brain. This phenomenon attracted limited attention until the 19th century when a series of experiments on living, decapitated frogs ignited a controversy about consciousness. Pflüger demonstrated that such creatures do not just exhibit reflexes ; they also perform purposive behaviors. Suppose one thinks, along with Pflüger’s ally Lewes, that purposive behavior is a mark of consciousness. Then one must count a decapitated frog as conscious. If one rejects this mark, one can avoid saying peculiar things about decapitated animals. But as Huxley showed, this position leads quickly to epiphenomenalism. The dispute long remained stalemated because it rested on conflicting sets of intuitions that were each compatible with the growing body of experiments. Understanding this controversy in physiology is a necessary background to grasping James’s evolutionary account of consciousness.

Thèmes : Philosophie
Catégories: Professeur invité - Labex TransferS
La notion de conscience. À partir de William James, Mot-clés : société, conscience, William James

Roy Baumeister -The Why, What and How of Consciousness

We are all stories in the end. —Are we ongoing stories as well? 

 I’d like to open up the discussion with this question which alludes to the background image for the group (a rare narratological meme). ‘We’re all stories in the end’ reminds me of the ending of Oedipus Rex—’count no man happy until the days of his life are over’, for it is then and only then you can shape his life as a complete narrative. As to our being ongoing narratives, I was thinking of current neuropsychological approaches (see e.g. today’s video on the blog) which show that the brain has an ‘interpreter’ function which creates and sustains the coherence of our world and our self as a kind of ongoing movie, made out of a feedback of attention, expectations and perception. The world is not nearly as narrative without as as it turns out to be as we pass through it and shape it into our stories.

—This is my opening discussion in the Narrative Theory and Narratology group forum.

Narrative Theory and Narratology blog

—oOo—

Perception as Controlled Hallucination