The brain, what's going on in there?

Philosophy Forums Psychology and Mind
1

How does it work? Say, I have a fleeting impression of something in the face of another person. Then a thought develops, about something altogether different. And then suddenly I am acutely aware of a strong emotion, related to none of the aforementioned. Could it be that those experiences, which I am aware of only separately, are part of the same neurological tract?

I mean the easy answer this is obviously ‘that could very well be, more information is needed’. But all I mean to ask is, how much is known of the development of small, cognitively meaningless sensory impressions to ‘heavy’ emotions and thoughts, which relate deeply to who a person is and how he/she relates to him/herself. How does an impulse become personal?

2

You ask a good question.

For my part, no fucking clue.

3

To find a starting proof, we might do well to look at how memory loss effects affective memory:

Simply put, those memories with high affective (layman’s: emotional) value are often much harder to forget, even when a physical or psychological trauma takes hold of the brain.

The importance of this? It gives a clear motive for a physiological tract of exploration.

From here, we can take a hop skip and a jump and look at -what- people remember, when looking at old, affective memories:

They remember the smell of a flower. The look of a person’s eyes. The soft touch of lips.

Not a full memory by any standard. Instead, it is physiological responses and affective ties to those responses. From this, we gain a starting idea of the pyramid mapping system’s most basic tiers.

Memory (M) Equals:
Root (R1): Sensory Information
Root (R2): Affective Information

M
/
R1 R2

What does this have to do with how things randomly spring to mind when we get new stimuli? It grants us the basic notion of process and storing. The missing link, of course, is /recovery/.

Recovery of a memory, or of memories, is triggered much like a search function on one of them-there-newfangled-computer-thingies. It works with a portion to find a whole. The smell of flowers brings back the memory of a loved one. The sound of children crying returns a memory of childhood rape, etc, etc.

Take those with my initial notion of motive. As evolutionary beings, we evolve randomly, but useful evolutionary steps generally stay. This in mind, we can see the idea forming that an evolutionary need for quick recall (say…when figuring out how to deal with a tiger or bear in close vacinity). This would facilitate such physiological shortcuts of overmapping, which we can see in other aspects of our physiology (see: eastern pressure point use).

So, this horribly long-winded stream-of-consciousness coming to an end, I would assume that:

1.) Yes, neural pathways may very well carry multiple types of information to and from the brain, and
1-A.) that may indeed allow for spontanious or involuntary memory / affective return when new stimuli are presented.

and,

2.) This method of memory storage and retrieval could quite definitely cause huge changes in personal and interpersonal connection — and often does. The small becomes the large, and a portion of a similar small can recall and mis-assign the large. Psychological shortcuts do that, from time to time.

4

I would recommend Steven Pinker’s ‘How The Mind Works’ - although it doesn’t clear up many of the questions we have about the intricacies of the brain, it’s still a good read.

5

When I was young I used to close my eyes at night and try to observe my train of thought. I’d think about things and let it naturally flow and then I’d remember which thoughts lead to what. From that moment on I have been thinking about this and have not gotten very far. Although, recently i discovered that if I focus hard enough I can permanently make different connections in my mind, that is to say that I can painfully observe which memories are linked neurologically and change them around a bit, but the thing is after I tried this little experiment, not only did it hurt my brain and make me frustrated…every time I think like this all the pathways lead to one thing and that is my experiment and I get lost from there. When I was a kid I didn’t have a lot of memories nor a whole lot of emotional involvement in them and it was a lot easier to observe my thoughts. I agree with a previous poster, its very interesting question and I wish I could contribute more to it.

since this is my first post I’d like to say I love this forum, I have been reading tones of posts but have always been too shy to get involved in them. Looks like it’s time to get a nice healthy dose of humiliation in order to better myself

6

They are many thing that go on in the brain, more then memories.

7

It is known that lower level brain functions are broken up into manageable bits. What I think I am seeing through my eyes has actually been cobbled together inside my head. There are different parts of me that see colour, shape, faces, movement, emotion… This much has been determined through experimentation and observation.
So why can’t the whole brain work that way?
Stray thoughts – related and unrelated – bubbling up and competing for the attention of the single window of consciousness that I (naively) call myself.

8

View the brain as a big computer.
Computers work in binary, very similar to how a brain works.
A neuron with an electrical charge is a 1 and one without a charge is a 0.
The thousands of millions of neurons in your brain make sequences of binary by firing in different orders which are then interpreted as different things by an unidentified part of the brain.