"Neither hemisphere is 'more advanced' or 'better' than the other; they are merely suited for different dimensions and stages of processing. [...] The capacity to move from a 'common eye' or 'vulgar ear' into artistic skill and expertise goes with the move from right to left hemisphere predominance. [...] while musical perception is chiefly a right hemisphere function in predominantly 'naïve' listeners, it becomes a left hemisphere function in professional musicians and 'expert' listeners (who grasp its 'grammar' and rules, and for whom it has become an intricate formal structure.
[...] A similar shift occurs with those who become mathematical or arithmetical 'experts', who become able to see mathematical concepts, or numbers, as part of a vast, well-organized intellectual universe or scheme. This may be equally true of painters and interior designers, who see space, and visual relationships, as no 'common eye' can do."
Oliver Sacks in, Seeing Voices [pag 105, 106]
Showing posts with label Neurociência. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Neurociência. Show all posts
The left and the right hemispheres
Red pill Blue pill / Time to change the paradigm
"We have been misled to believe that the brain, or the embodied brain, somehow serves up the magic of consciousness. We have, in short, been duped. [...] Evolution shaped our perceptions to hide adaptive behaviour. [...] We do, and should, take it seriously. But it is a fiction — a lifesaving fiction."
Donald D. Hoffman in, The Case Against Reality [pag 179]
And here.
And here.
About Orch OR
About IIT
When the map is better than the territory: here.
"None of these [above] proposals has offered a precise account for a single conscious experience. [...] No answer has been offered and none ever will: these proposals set themselves an impossible task by assuming that objects in spacetime exist when not observed and have causal powers."
Donald D. Hoffman in, The Case Against Reality [pag 180]
Wisdom, intuition and the big picture
"People in the great wisdom traditions and seriously important philosophers have said that wisdom has to do with stopping doing what you commonly mean by knowing things"
do not forget the right brain
"Through the fragmenting lens of social media we are living, increasingly, in the left-brain’s world. By stripping information of context and then actively manipulating it, social media has the power to prey upon left-brain tendencies and preferences by transforming bits of information into world-historic conspiracies."
[...]
"The forces driving left-brain analytical fragmentation are immense and embedded throughout our society and economy. One example is our obsessive focus on STEM skill development while we devalue and reduce investment in subjects like art, literature, and philosophy—a kind of tripling-down on left-hemisphere preferences. This is all happening despite pleas from employers for workers with better right-hemisphere social capacities. Through these policy choices, and the accelerating demands for narrow, technical understanding of the world, we are unwittingly leaving ourselves increasingly vulnerable to false digitized information and the growing social and political conflict it generates."
Other Links:
Nature VS Nurture
So... What is acceptable and what is respectable, is a highly arbitrary phenomenon in our society."
Também aqui
On focussing / Change [in life] is automatic. Progress is not. / Fake it till you make it [rituals] / Conditioning the elephant
WHEN did you decide to accept a specific limitation about yourself?
TONY ROBBINS | 30 Minutes for the NEXT 30 Years of Your LIFE
On Netflix: here
Resolutions ≠ Wishlist
Resolution = to resolve
"If you want to take the island, you burn the boats" (like that, there's no turning back).
on Goals and Standards – "everybody, in life, gets their 'musts'. They don't get their 'shoulds'. Most people have a list of 'shoulds'. When we make 'shoulds' into 'musts', we attach ourselves to the.
"We all act consistently with who we believe we are. We stay consistent with how we define ourselves"
"We live who we believe we are"
"Once you lock into that identity, your brain finds a way to keep you there"
RAS - the part of the brain that tells you what you notice in the world.
So around and around it goes!
RAS:
The reticular activating system (RAS) is a network of neurons located in the brain stem that project anteriorly to the hypothalamus to mediate behavior, as well as both posteriorly to the thalamus and directly to the cortex for activation of awake, desynchronized cortical EEG patterns. It's a bundle of nerves at our brainstem that filters out unnecessary information so the important stuff gets through. ... Your RAS takes what you focus on and creates a filter for it.
Reticular Activating System
RAISE YOUR STANDARD
Sonhos, cérebro, FOMO
"A humanidade dos nossos dias sofre de FOMO – o medo de estar a perder alguma coisa – e embora tenhamos mais por onde escolher, na verdade perdemos a capacidade de prestar atenção ao que escolhemos.*
Além do olfato e da capacidade de prestar atenção, também temos vindo a perder a nossa capacidade de sonhar. Para muitas culturas, aquilo que as pessoas vêem e fazem nos sonhos é tão importante como aquilo que vêem e fazem quando estão acordadas. Assim, as pessoas desenvolviam activamente a sua capacidade de sonhar, de se lembrar dos sonhos e até de controlar o que faziam enquanto sonhavam, naquilo a que se chama "sonho lúcido". Os especialistas em "sonhos lúcidos" moviam-se à vontade nos sonhos e afirmavam que até conseguiam alcançar estados mais elevados de consciência e encontrar visitantes de outros mundos. Pelo contrário, para o mundo moderno os sonhos não passam de, na melhor das hipóteses, de mensagens do subconsciente ou, na pior, de lixo mental. Consequentemente, o papel que os sonhos desempenham nas nossas vidas é muito menor, pois poucas são as pessoas que desenvolvem voluntariamente as suas capacidades oníricas e muitas dizem mesmo que nem sequer sonham ou que nunca se lembram dos seus sonhos."**
Neuro-Psychoanalysis - Where Mind Meets Brain
* The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction, by Matthew Crawford
**The Brain and the Inner World: An Introduction to the Neuroscience of the Subjective Experience
On the importance of forgetting
"The predominant focus in the neurobiological study of memory has been on remembering (persistence). However, recent studies have considered the neurobiology of forgetting (transience). Here we draw parallels between neurobiological and computational mechanisms underlying transience. We propose that it is the interaction between persistence and transience that allows for intelligent decision-making in dynamic, noisy environments. Specifically, we argue that transience (1) enhances flexibility, by reducing the influence of outdated information on memory-guided decision-making, and (2) prevents overfitting to specific past events, thereby promoting generalization. According to this view, the goal of memory is not the transmission of information through time, per se. Rather, the goal of memory is to optimize decision-making. As such, transience is as important as persistence in mnemonic systems."
Aqui
SLOW LOVE and Why him? Why her?
Dr. Helen Fisher: "Anatomy of Love" | Talks At Google
We've got data on over 30,000 people.
Every year I ask a lot of questions, and one is about one night stands and friends with benefits and living together and every year I end up finding that over 50% of people have had a one night stand over the course of their lives, over 50% have had friends with benefits and over 50% have lived with somebody long term.
I thought to myself that it's quite a lot of people doing what in this cutter is a bit frowned upon… They're not all 'crazy', there's got to be something going on here.
Most people think that this is pure recklessness of the young, but the old are just as reckless…
I finally stumbled on a statistic which was that 60% / 70% of people in America today, who are living in a long term partnership before marrying are TERRIFIED of the social, the legal and the emotional and the economic consequences of divorce.
So maybe it's not recklessness. Maybe it's caution. Given an age where we're not scared of pregnancy, we're not scared of diseases, you don't have to walk the walk of shame… and I think an awful lot of people are taking their time to find the right person.
We're moving into an age what I call a long pre-commitment stage, before marriage. We want to know every single about this person, before we tie the knot. before we marry, and I call it 'Slow Love'.
THE 3 BRAIN REGIONS LINKED TO LONG TERM HAPPY RELATIONSHIPS:
What makes a happy marriage?
On those people (in a long term marriage or in a long term relationship) who showed a lot of activity in the brain regions linked with romantic love, and also scored high on a marriage satisfaction questionnaire, we found three brain regions associated with long term happiness. Now, psychologists have a host of different ways of telling you what makes a happy partnership…
This is what the brain says (I'm just trying to add what the brain says):
In these people in long term happy marriages, in two very different parts of the world (America and China), we found activity in a brain region linked with empathy, in a brain region linked to controlling you one's stress, your own emotions, and in a brain region what we call, positive illusions: the ability to overlook what you don't like about this person and focus on what you do.
I would also say that if you really want a long term happy relationship, keep up your sex life with the person (that can trigger romantic love and feelings of attachment), stay in touch with the person (any kind of touch drives up the oxytocin system), and do novel things together (novelty definitely drives up the dopamine system).
But most important you've got to pick the right person.
Q: I want to ask about whether there's any sort of feedback systems between the conscience mind and your undercurrent system and so much that you can control…? Aqui
HF: There's always feedback. Some people are predisposed to alcoholism and they give up drinking. Some people are lazy and they go to their job everyday. Some people would love to philander with this or that and they chose not to. Scientists now think that a good 40 to 60% of who you are is biologically derived, and a good 40 to 60% is culturally derived. And, you know, people began to win Nobel prizes for epigenetics. For the fact that these are always in cahoots. Culture is going to change biological patterns and biology is going to change certain cultural patterns.
On monogamy, poliamory and jealousy. Aqui.
Why him? Why her?
In Match.com, in 40 countries and over 14 million people answered the questionaire.
Adiar a recompensa
"Unnaturally strong explosions of synthetic experience and sensation and pleasure evoke unnaturally strong degrees of habituation. This has two consequences. As the first, soon we hardly notice anymore the fleeting whispers of pleasure caused by leaves in autumn, or by the promise of reward that will come after a long, difficult, and worthy task. The other consequence is that, after awhile, we even habituate to those artificial deluges of intensity.... Our tragedy is that we just become hungrier.
Thanks to the way our brains work, chronic over-stimulation fails to satisfy; it can leave a person nearly insatiable. Someone may find himself wondering automatically about every woman, "Would she engage in...?" Also, any resentment that arises from the mismatch between his virtual reality and his physical reality may raise doubts about his partner/union, making him uncharacteristically irritable and self-absorbed. He'll focus on what his relationship doesn't offer, not on what it does. Nor does dissatisfaction necessarily stop there. Humans tend to project such feelings automatically onto other aspects of life as well... sadly, distorted perception born of neurochemical dysregulation can make a person extremely resistant to understanding what's really driving him or what would ease his misery. His limbic brain has him firmly convinced that only his drug of choice will restore his good feelings.
It can take an uncomfortable month or two to restore normal perception after habitual overstimulation. But as ravenous feelings ease, it's easier to find satisfaction in every aspect of life." Robert Sapolsky, Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers
Language and Thought / Did language evolve for thought?
Language and Thought, Center for Brains, Minds and Machines
Patrick H. Winston:
The 'combinator capability' [that differenciates humans from Neanderthals and primates] allows description, and once you got description there's a trail that can lead you all the way up to the 'strong story hypothesis'
[+/- min 18:40]
Story understanding is very fundamental to any real understanding of human intelligence.
---------
Steven Pinker:
Example: The story of how How doctors killed President Garfield
---------
What makes conceptual development possible, and what makes it so hard?
How is it, we are the only animals who can think thoughts formulated on concepts like cancer or infinity or wisdom or carborator? What makes this possible? The acquisition of concepts, possible?
Cognitive science has the theoretical and methodological tools to answer both questions.
Probably the most seminal work on this classical set of issues has happened at MIT, both in the linguistics department (Chomsky) and the AI department and the brain and cognitive science department.
---------
On language understanding and intelligence.
To use a conceptual system you need to run through a logic. We are trying to figure out the blueprint of this logic.
---------
Q&A:
Q: – On the many levels of meaning (literal meanings, enriched meanings...): How does this affect your research when you work with young children and you test their understanding of number words? In these tasks you have to give them full sentences, you have to ask them things like: "Can you give me two cookies..."
A: – Susan Carey answers.
A: – Gennaro Chierchia answers.
Q: – Do you see any role for the more logical part of the vocabulary. Whether you think that it really needs to be modeled in a precise way to make sense of people understanding stories?
A: – Patrick Winston answers. "How can we humans make ourselves smarter? – If we want to make ourselves smarter, draw pictures and talk, because we have tremendous problem solving power in our visual and linguistics systems. So, to make ourselves smarter, we have to engage these systems, and one way to engage them is to draw pictures and talk. You can't do that when you're answering your email. You can only do that when you're taking notes, with a pencil and drawing, and engaging your language system. The miracle of human language and visual processing systems."
Q: – On language as a vehicle of thought. Language learning is partly like mapping. There's another idea that working in linguistics suggests, that is that natural language IS the language of thought.
A: – Steven Pinker answers. "It's very unlikely that any language that we speak, is a language of thought. There are a lot of experiments that show that. The actual sentences that we speak don't make the kinds of distinctions that are relevant for inference. I'm very skeptical of the idea for which language, as it's ordinarily understood, is what we think in. Although I do think that there is a representation that, in some regards, is language-like. It makes categorical distinctions, it is hierarchically structured, that is very closely related, though not identical to what we think as the semantic representations that align sentences."
A: – Susan Carey answers. "Another problem with identifying language with thought is that, if you do so, you stipulate that other animals can't think. But it partly depends what you mean by 'thought', as what you mean by 'language', because other animals have very powerful abstract conceptual representations, that they can draw inferences over. They have many of the same core cognition systems that human babies do. So you'd have to define that as not thought if you want to make that stipulation.
Gennaro Chierchia adds: "We really work on the functional architecture of language, and that involves such interesting words as: and - or - if - any - not - even - only - 'ing'... And that is where you find what is the most common throughout the languages of the world and also where some key dimensions of variotions take place."
Q: – Susan Carey: "Can animals represent the conditional. Do they have anything like the concept 'not' or 'or'? The evidence is probably yes, but not clear."
Patrick Winston: "I think there is an inner language and I think it came before communication. partly because, there's no point in saying anything if you don't have anything to say. And I think our external language emerged in part because we're social animals and our external language is of great benefit in thinking because I think there's a great deal of creativity in creative misunderstanding of what other people say. But I think there are computational reasons why the inner language ought to be simpler, more economical, because we have to compare things, we have to match them, and it would be extraordinarily difficult from a computational point of view, to try to do that with the raw uncannonicalized language stream. So we can't match a story in the newspaper to Cinderella and say, 'oh that's a Cinderella story', unless we have reduced the story and Cinderella to a kind of inner language in which there's movement through space, there's a capacity to express emotion, there's a capacity to express social relationships... And I think that those kinds of things constitute the inner language, and when they're rendered in simple form they make possible this kind of analogizing and precedent-based reasoning that is fundamental to human thought, and I'll bet you pansies don't do it because they'd be a lot smarter if they did."
---------
The importance of analogies. Analogy is extremely important to create new representational resources. But it doesn't mean we understand how it works. (Carey and Chierchia)
On metaphors and on how analogical the human mind is. Every sentence has some kind of concrete image behind it. (Pinker)
