Friday, September 03, 2010

Neural net neutrality

There’s a space inside my mind that opens up from time to time …and in those rare moments I’m in there, everything resonates with equal potential. I think it’s a place Eastern-practitioners call ‘Buddha mind’ …a neutral state free from forces of passion and indifference …and nagging questions about what’s right and what’s wrong. In other words, it’s out of reach of my judgmental mind. Apparently neuroscientists have discovered this place too. They’ve located a network inside the brain that comes online whenever the analytic networks are at rest. They call it the ‘default state network’ [link] and it lies somewhere outside regions of the brain dedicated to analysis and judgment. It skirts areas that are active in weighing alternatives and narrowing down possibilities. These areas are never at rest. Even when they go offline, the ‘default state network’ keeps them humming in unison. This creates a state of equilibrium where no one tendency outweighs another. They say it restores a sense of balance and even-mindedness. In some ways it sounds as though they’ve discovered what Eastern practitioners have experienced for the last 25 centuries.

Thursday, September 02, 2010

Sensory orientation

Presented to the
Santa Barbara Institute for Consciousness Studies
It was interesting for me to see a recent study in neuroscience that supports my theory of reading comprehension [link] Bear with me while I try and explain (or you can duck out now and I won’t be offended). What they found is that working memory interacts with the senses in order to produce a stable view of our surroundings and reduce errors of perception. For one thing, it has to identify signals that are the result of actual sensory events and filter out extraneous signals that are produced by fluctuations inside the nervous system itself (like those caused by changes in activity levels, neurotransmitter concentrations, circadian rhythms, etc..). Neuroscientists refer to this as the ‘sensory orientation’ function [link]. The visual areas in the brain must distinguish changes in actual sensory events from changes in internal activity in order to follow the ‘genuine’ action. They claim that the brain makes this estimate based on principles of ‘Bayesian inference’, which are not much different than principles of ‘Pragmatic inference’. It works something like this: Incoming signals that are considered likely to occur, based on the contents of working memory, are given a boost. Signals considered less likely are held in abeyance and immediately suppressed if subsequent events don’t do anything to rehabilitate them.