quote:

Could what we do change the structure of our brains? It's a radical idea-one that turns on its head accepted ideas of nature vs. nurture

There's a really well written book by Matt Ridley called The Agile Gene - How Nature turns on Nurture that does a great job of explaining current research into genetics and how the body and brain develop and grow, using the 'nature vs. nurture' debate as a conceptual framework to discuss how genetics and experience work together. Very readable. Highly recommended.

gutze, thanks for pointing out Daniel Stern's work. Came across a really interesting article as a result: The Emergence of a New Paradigm in Ape Language Research, that talks about how meaningful communication between people can be thought of as a complex gestural dance, how children learn to communicate, etc.
(I've noticed that there seems to be some kind of gestural communication used by birds and by squirrels when the parents are next to their offspring. I wonder if you could learn how to 'speak' the language used by a different species by analyzing the interactions between an infant of that species and its parents?)

I also came across a really good Podcast interview with R. Douglas Fields, one of the best communicators I've found in the field, able to explain complex neuroscience in a way that makes it easy to understand what is going on. He touches on some really interesting topics - e.g. Genes within a neuron can be turned on and off by stimulating a neuron to fire at a certain frequency, altering the structure of the neuron. A neuron can have up to 100K connections. Through activation of the brain, interaction with the environment, those connections get winnowed away and pruned. Understanding the pruning mechanism is one of the next major research challenges. Favourite quote: "We are always held captive by our analogies."

quote:

Originally posted by gutze:
Very interesting all these neuro-updates. I´m not very skilled in neuroscience myself, but as I´m into speek-language pathologies, I´m often connecting to this knowledge. The "mirror neurons" reminded me on the estimated childpsychologist Daniel Stern and a lecture he gave on the human childs ability not only to mimic shortly after birth, but also to mimic the other persons bare intentions of movement and how this particular skill is dividing humans from I think chimpanses.

I'd say you're becoming skilled quickly though. Hope all is well with the little one! They pick up on body language so fast its hard to hide emotion from them. Like when you know they did something by accident but it still upsets you.

Great Fields article!
I wonder if those synapses that fire out of sync are what cause the dejavu feeling? Or if it is a signal that is almost strong enough so a portion of the event is sent to long term but then to short term and the brain says "wait a minute didn't this happen before". Very interesting.

Allan Alda hosted a Scientific American segment awhile back about memories and false memories. He participated in an experiment at a picnic. Pictures were taken while he was there. After he left, pictures were also staged that resembled events that occurred and that had no resemblence to events during the picnic. When he was questioned about the picnic using the pictures, he denied witnessing some actual events and created false memories about the some of the staged photos.
Eye witness testimony will become obsolete.

Gromit's News is good news.

Everything is just fine with my little son Tao, thanks.
It is a special opportunity to observe the mental-neurological development. The reactiontime at several seconds, at start, from something unpleassant happens, to the facial expression and finally the crying for help. You can almost see the neurological signals making virgin pathways.
And the dominant will and urge to communicate. Tao allready made up his first nonverbal word (with a defined and constant meaning) by grapping his bib and putting it to his mouth, when he wants water while eating. Of course he didn´t make it alone, but in the intricate interplay of guessing, confirming and repeating.

Glad to read everything is going smoothly.

and this is cool:

quote:

...You can almost see the neurological signals making virgin pathways. And the dominant will and urge to communicate...

What did you say, dear?

Neurobiology? Close enough, I guess...

Taking the piss?

Oooo- I love this topic, being a neuromancing biochemist myself!

Machines and creativity- do composers just rearrange concepts they already have learned in new ways when making composing music? So then machines could simulate music in the same way?? Here our explortation (sic) at: http://www.mental-escher.net/podcast_2005/ME_2005-06-04...ne-music_updated.mp3

Cool podcast, defwheezer!

quote:

CGI contruct 'Kyoko Data' (code named DK-96), Kyoko Data renders "Tatu (I'm a) Robot".
-- defwheezer

Fascinating use of language - DK-96 renders a song instead of sings it. Do you refer to DK-96 as 'she' or 'it'?

w.r.t. your 'explortation', you might be interested in this Sound on Sound article - I would guess that the state of the art has progressed quite a bit since it was written...

I'm quite fascinated by how the creative process works. There's a great book called "The Creative Process" by Ghiselin that compiles letters from Einstein, Van Gogh, Mozart and others where the authors try to outline how their creative process works. At a certain level, it seems that there's this sub-conscious inference engine whirring away in the background coming up with countless combinations of memories and 'what if' hypotheses that pass through some form of filter so that only those that are 'beautiful' in some way, shape or form are surfaced. I think there's also another mechanism where inputs trigger a chain of reactions and responses, both emotional and rational that can perturb the mind in ways so that it can enter new search spaces for concepts and ideas.

If a simulation could be built that could learn, create hypotheses, filter out any that are not 'beautiful' or 'interesting' and somehow test them empirically, the rate of innovation will skyrocket and we'll be well on the way to the singularity. Non trivial to be sure, but I doubt that it's impossible. A project to model the human brain (called Blue Brain) was recently announced by IBM and the Brain and Mind Institute at the Ecole Polytecnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland. Combine it with a database of the contextual information needed for 'common sense' understanding (see http://www.cyc.com/ ) and things start to get pretty interesting...

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"Once you have a truly massive amount of
information integrated as knowledge, then
the human-software system will be superhuman,
in the same sense that mankind with writing
is superhuman compared to mankind
before writing." ~ Doug Lenat, June 21, 2001

Does self-preservation drive what we perceive as "common sense"?

"'You have no care for your species. For thousands of years men dreamed of pacts with demons. Only now are such things possible. And what would you be paid with? What would your price be, for aiding this thing to free itself and grow?' There was a knowing weariness in her young voice that no nineteen-year-old could have mustered."

I found this sampler page, DIT.

"Every genuinely creative worker must attain in one way or another such full understanding of his medium and such skill, ingenuity, and flexibility in handling it that he can make fresh use of it to construct a device which, when used skillfully by others, will organize their experience in the way that his own experience was organized in the moment of expanded insight. Among the users of his device may be the inventor himself, who may recover the configurations of his insight in this way, though not the full activity out of which they were crystallized. His device may even fail to remind him of his labor." [Brewster Ghiselin - pg. 29]

Strangely a device making artisan of this type seems like the altruist individuals crazy carlos mentions over in the intelligent design thread. A social neurological evolution of the creative process like WG mentions in _PR_. The creative process may reside outside the individual.

ALRIGHT!

Protein identified with memory

MONTREAL, Aug. 30 (UPI) -- Researchers say they have discovered a protein that might be a master regulator of the switch from short-term to long-term memory.

The scientists determined the protein GCN2 inhibits conversion of new information into long-term memory.

The discovery provides the first genetic evidence that protein synthesis is critical for memory formation and regulation.

Related Headlines

Circadian rhythms affects memory formation (August 23, 2005) -- A University of Houston study suggests the circadian clock affects long-term memory formation, in that learning occurs during an animal's active ... > full story

quote:

The creative process may reside outside the individual.
--Eric

I think I know what you mean by this. My take on it is that the creative process is stimulated by a subconscious reaction to some external event (e.g. some accidental discovery or some idea or comment from another person) that acts as some kind of trigger, opening up new possibilities. Bono says U2 does 'songwriting by accident', where the best songs come from reacting to the random collision of ideas and the unintentional. Picasso said something along the lines of 'You are your mistakes', which I take to mean that things that you didn't intend to do open up new possibilities to explore, and that the things that you discover along the way shape you and become formative experiences.

quote:

Strangely a device making artisan of this type seems like the altruist individuals crazy carlos mentions over in the intelligent design thread.
--Eric

I've been thinking a bit about empathy lately -- it seems like it's the root of much of what is considered 'good' in humanity. Including altruism. And that lack of empathy is the root of a heck of a lot of the 'bad'. And that perhaps empathy is related to mirror neurons somehow.

As to how this may have evolved, there's a fascinating BBC website on human evolution that discusses a population bottleneck that occurred 70,000 years ago...

Clues from genetics, archaeology and geology suggest our ancestors were nearly wiped out by one or more environmental catastrophes in the Late Pleistocene period. At one point, the numbers of modern humans living in the world may have dwindled to as few as 10,000 people.
...
The harsh climatic conditions that accompanied the volcanic winter may have placed pressure on humans to cooperate with each other. Small foraging groups became larger societies. Ambrose calls this the 'troop-to-tribe transition'.

This transition seems to have involved systems of gift exchange between distant peoples.
...
In this way, humans increased the likelihood of survival or 'spread the risk of survival'.


Perhaps those with a higher degree of empathy were better able to help each other and engage in successful trade in order to survive?

Or the empathy talented humans were able to imagine that giving a gift would raise the chances to receive a gift...
No, that´s not all of course. I think the gift theme is important, as it demands a good portion of empathy to give a gift that will be appreciated. It´s terrible to receive something that doesn´t hold that empatic thought of the other, f.ex. a gift representing the givers own desires, revealing the missing knowledge of you. Relations can be formed, changed, destroyed by gifts. The power of donation.

I like the gift theme as well.
No one wants a trojan horse.
Something that is given that mirrors the receiver and allows the receiver to associate self with the giver is what most want (but a cut-up collage is always nice). The mirror neuron effect would be to give a gift in return.

Googling empathy mirror neurons,
I found alot of references to the Head and Holmes studies of 1911-1912 in defining Body Schema, an unconscious body map, which enables us to program and monitor the execution of actions with the different body parts.

Googling Merleau-Ponty, I found something that I associated with gutz comment

quote:

...Relations can be formed, changed, destroyed by gifts...

associating with understanding and pain ( source ):

quote:

The intersubjective nature of the human brain is underscored by the discovery of a neural mirroring system in the premotor cortex and other areas of the brain, obviously serving as the neurobiological correlate of action understanding, nonverbal communication and empathy.[19,20] Mirror neurons discharge both when an action is performed and when a similar action is observed in another individual. They seem to represent a system that matches intentional behavior of others to one's own action experience, and in this way they form a link of mutual understanding through bodily simulation or resonance. Recently, 'pain neurons' activated by pain observed in others have also been found in the cingulate cortex.[21] Though not having direct applicability for psychotherapy, the concept of a mirror matching network supplies strong evidence for what the phenomenologist Merleau-Ponty[22] has called 'intercorporality': there is a sphere of bodily sensibility and mutual resonance which we share from the beginning with others as embodied subjects. To become aware of these prereflective processes going on during verbal exchange may enhance therapeutic effectiveness.

In trying to find an interesting bit on Head and Holmes about the different effects of the written and spoken word on the body schema, I ran across Emily Holmes's bit on Post Traumatic Stress Disorder that reminded me of _PR_

source:

quote:

The research supports a "dual-representation" theory of PTSD that proposes that traumas are encoded both in the form of higher-level verbal memories and as lower-level sensory memories. As a result, sensory and verbal interference may have changed the intrusion rate in opposite ways. Holmes likens visuospatial/sensory memory to raw film footage, filled with incoherent images that surface as flashbacks, and verbal/conceptual memory to a news broadcast, with narration to explain events and put them in perspective.

And that completely solidified DIT's statement for me

quote:

...Picasso said something along the lines of 'You are your mistakes', which I take to mean that things that you didn't intend to do open up new possibilities to explore, and that the things that you discover along the way shape you and become formative experiences...

I wish I said The creative process may reside outside the individual. but I'm pretty sure I stole that from our illustrious WG. Straight from the mouth of Bigend.

re: gifts, I guess you could view WGB, and the Internet in general, as 21st century global info potlatchs...

Eric - I found the passage spoken by Bigend that you were referring to: "the creative process is no longer contained within an individual skull, if indeed it ever was. Everything, today, is to some extent the reflection of something else." Cool! Got me thinking about Richard Dawkins, E.O Wilson and the meme pool as a parallel evolutionary trajectory to the gene pool. Which led to finding this article, which touches on some of the changes to the human brain 100,000 years ago:


Humans have an encephalisation quotient of about 3 relative to other primates. That is, our brains are roughly three times as large when adjusted for body weight (Jerison 1973). The increase probably began about 2.5 million years ago in the australopithecines, and was completed about 100,000 years ago by which time all living hominids had brains about the same size as ours (Leakey, 1994; Wills, 1993). Not only is the brain much bigger than it was, but it appears to have been drastically reorganised during what is, in evolutionary terms, a relatively short time (Deacon 1997). The correlates of brain size and structure have been studied in many species and are complex and not well understood (Harvey & Krebs 1990). Nevertheless, the human brain stands out. The problem is serious because of the very high cost (in energy terms) of both producing a large brain during development, and of running it in the adult, as well as the dangers entailed in giving birth. Pinker asks "Why would evolution ever have selected for sheer bigness of brain, that bulbous, metabolically greedy organ? ... Any selection on brain size itself would surely have favored the pinhead." (1994, p 363).

...

In outline the theory is this. The turning point in hominid evolution was when our ancestors began to imitate each other, releasing a new replicator, the meme. Memes then changed the environment in which genes were selected, and the direction of change was determined by the outcome of memetic selection. Among the many consequences of this change was that the human brain and vocal tract were restructured to make them better at replicating the successful memes.

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quote:

re: gifts, I guess you could view WGB, and the Internet in general, as 21st century global info potlatchs...

Lovely idea!
The brainstuff is very interesting and emphazises how vital the development of language and communication is to humans. I don´t think birds f.ex. are unable to understand their world if they for some reason can´t communicate - but on the other hand, I never met an autistic bird...

In "The Science of Discworld", Terry Pratchett, Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen spend some time discussing "extelligence" - the externalisation of mental processes through culture, and the combination of intelligence and extelligence feeding back into human evolution.

Worth a read. Assuming there's anyone here who hasn't read it already...

Some very interesting reads here. I haven't had time to read most of them, but I do have some of the original SciAm articles. I hope to get around to reading all of them sometime though.

I think these developments in Nanobiology will definetly be a push to the AI people and what they're able to do in the future. I don't really know if that's a good thing or not, only time will tell.

I also think these discoveries will help in the exploritory field of biological computer systems, but the jury's still out on that one...