Transcript Consciousnessx

CONSCIOUSNESS
The term, Ghost In The Machine, isn’t just a reference to
an album released in 1981 by The Police.
Your Sensory Experience Is Partitioned
Into “Frames” Lasting 60-70 milliseconds
Your Brain Will Generate Contours And Borders
Where None Exist But That “Should” Be There
Your Brain Will Fill In Missing Information To
Make Your Experience More “Sensible.”
Your Brain Will Even Do Both At The
Same Time And You Can’t Even Stop It
It Gets Even Freakier: Blindsight
Circuits Involved In Blindsight
Take Home Message So Far:
• Your sensory experience is bound together in 60-70 millisecond-long “chunks” or “video
frames”. And whatever occurs at any point within period is treated as happening
simultaneously, being the same “event.”
• Your brain is constantly active, “tinkering with” sensory information to make it more
comprehensible for your conscious experience.
• It will even fill in missing information with an approximation of what “should be there.”
• Therefore, your conscious mind does not have access to, nor is aware of, all the
activity in your brain which supports and enriches your consciousness.
• Consciousness is similar but not equal to brain activity. There is more brain activity than
what consciousness has access to.
Consciousness ~ Brain Activity
Consciousness ≠ Brain Activity
Brain Activity > Consciousness
An Old School Neural Network Model
That Was The First Of Its Kind
More About That Old School Neural Network
Model That Was The First Of Its Kind
Once Again, The Take Home Message So
Far:
• Any model, neural network or otherwise, simplifies the problem
to make working on it easier. That means leaving out some
elements of the problem that are judged to be irrelevant. If
there’s a mistake in judgment, the model will not work
accurately
• By modeling a part of the rat brain that was anatomically well-
understood and combining it with what was known about how
long-term potentiation (LTP) worked in those circuits, a neural
network model organized the information it learned into
categories without being specifically programmed to form
categories. It did it on its own.
And, no, the model was not named SkyNet.
Consciousness:
The Binding Problem, Or How Do All Those Neurons Work Together At The Same Time?
Introducing The Intralaminar Nucleus of the Thalamus:
Possible Answer to the Binding Problem?
Maybe It All Comes Down To Timing
And Yet Another Ambiguous Figure…
You’re Welcome
The Last Take Home Message So Far:
• The answer to the binding problem may have to do with
how assemblies of neurons in distant parts of the brain
coordinate the action in a temporal (rhythmic) pattern
• The Intralaminar nucleus has the anatomical connections
to facilitate coordinated temporal activity of distant
neurons
• There has been a 40 Hz pattern of magnetic oscillation in
brain activity which seems to match the intentional focus
of attention in both awake subjects and in subjects in
REM (dream) sleep