#neurones

[sabinerondissime]

[transparentgentlemenmarker]

Nous sommes quand même bizzare. Obsédés par les kilos en plus, jamais par les neurones en moins. Que dire des synapses ???

We're still weird. Obsessed with extra kilos, never with fewer neurons. What about synapses

[artofthemindblog]

Emotion and Energy

An excerpt from Incomplete Nature by Terrence W. Deacon

Emergent dynamics: A theory developed in this book which explains how homeodynamic (e.g., thermodynamic) processes can give rise to morphodynamic (e.g., self-organizing) processes, which can give rise to teleodynamic (e.g., living and mental) processes. Intended to legitimize scientific uses of ententional (intentional, purposeful, normative) concepts by demonstrating the way that processes at a higher level in this hierarchy emerge from, and are grounded in, simpler physical processes, but exhibit reversals of the otherwise ubiquitous tendencies of these lower-level processes Emotion and Energy

  An emergent dynamic account of the relationship between neurological function and mental experience differs from all other approaches by virtue of its necessary requirement for specifying a homeodynamic and morphodynamic basis for its teleodynamic (intentional) character. This means that every mental process will inevitably reflect the contributions of these necessary lower-level dynamics. In other words, certain ubiquitous aspects of mental experience should inevitably exhibit organizational features that derive from, and assume certain dynamical properties characteristic of, thermodynamic and morphodynamic processes. To state this more concretely: experience should have clear equilibrium-tending, dissipative, and self-organizing characteristics, besides those that are intentional. These are inseparable dynamical features that literally constitute experience. What do these dynamical features correspond to in our phenomenal experience?

Broadly speaking, this dynamical infrastructure is “emotion” in the most general sense of that word. It is what constitutes the “what it feels like” of subjective experience. Emotion—in the broad sense that I am using it here—is not merely confined to such highly excited states as fear, rage, sexual arousal, love, craving, and so forth. It is present in every experience, even if often highly attenuated, because it is the expression of the necessary dynamic infrastructure of all mental activity. It is the tension that separates self from non-self; the way things are and the way they could be; the very embodiment of the intrinsic incompleteness of subjective experience that constitutes its perpetual becoming. It is a tension that inevitably arises as the incessant shifting course of mental teleodynamics encounters the resistance of the body to respond, and the insistence of bodily needs and drives to derail thought, as well as the resistance of the world to conform to expectation. As a result, it is the mark that distinguishes subjective self from other, and is at the same time the spontaneous tendency to minimize this disequilibrium and difference. In simple terms, it is the mental tension that is created because of the presence of a kind of inertia and momentum associated with the process of generating and modifying mental representations. The term e-motion is in this respect curiously appropriate to the “dynamical feel” of mental experience.

This almost Newtonian nature of emotion is reflected in the way that the metaphors of folk psychology have described this aspect of human subjectivity over the course of history in many different societies. Thus English speakers are “moved” to tears, “driven” to behave in ways we regret, “swept up” by the mood of the crowd, angered to the point that we feel ready to “explode,” “under pressure” to perform, “blocked” by our inability to remember, and so forth. And we often let our “pent-up” frustrations “leak out” into our casual conversations, despite our best efforts to “contain” them. Both the motive and resistive aspects of experience are thus commonly expressed in energetic terms.

In the Yogic traditions of India and Tibet, the term kundalini refers to a source of living and spiritual motive force. It is figuratively “coiled” in the base of the spine, like a serpent poised to strike or a spring compressed and ready to expand. In this process, it animates body and spirit. The subjective experience of bodily states has also often been attributed to physical or ephemeral forms of fluid dynamics. In ancient Chinese medicine, this fluid is chi; in the Ayurvedic medicine of India, there were three fluids, the doshas; and in Greek, Roman, and later Islamic medicine, there were four humors (blood, phlegm, light and dark bile) responsible for one’s state of mental and physical health. In all of these traditions, the balance, pressures, and free movement of these fluids were critical to the animation of the body, and their proper balance was presumed to be important to good health and “good humor.” The humor theory of Hippocrates, for example, led to a variety of medical practices designed to rebalance the humors that were disturbed by disease or disruptive mental experience. Thus bloodletting was deemed an important way to adjust relative levels of these humors to treat disease.

This fluid dynamical conception of mental and physical animation was naturally reinforced by the ubiquitous correlation of a pounding heart (a pump) with intense emotion, stress, and intense exertion. Both René Descartes and Erasmus Darwin (to mention only two among many) argued that the nervous system likewise animates the body by virtue of differentially pumping fluid into various muscles and organs through microscopic tubes (presumably the nerves). When, in the 1780s, Luigi Galvani discovered that a severed frog leg could be induced to twitch in response to contact by electricity, he considered this energy to be an “animal electricity.” And the vitalist notion of a special ineffable fluid of life, or élan vital, persisted even into the twentieth century.

This way of conceiving of the emotions did not disappear with the replacement of vitalism and with the rise of anatomical and physiological knowledge in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. It was famously reincarnated in Freudian psychology as the theory of libido. Though Freud was careful not to identify it with an actual fluid of the body, or even a yet-to-be-discovered material substrate, libido was described in terms that implied that it was something like the nervous energy associated with sexuality. Thus a repressed memory might block the “flow” of libido and cause its flow to be displaced, accumulated, and released to animate inappropriate behaviors. Freud’s usage of this hydrodynamic metaphor became interpreted more concretely in the Freudian-inspired theories of Wilhelm Reich, who argued that there was literally a special form of energy, which he called “orgone” energy, that constituted the libido. Although such notions have long been abandoned and discredited with the rise of the neurosciences, there is still a sense in which the pharmacological treatments for mental illness are sometimes conceived of on the analogy of a balance of fluids: that is, neurotransmitter “levels.” Thus different forms of mental illness are sometimes described in terms of the relative levels of dopamine, norepinephrine, or serotonin that can be manipulated by drugs that alter their production or interfere with their effects.

This folk psychology of emotion was challenged in the 1960s and 1970s by a group of prominent theorists, responsible for ushering in the information age. Among them was Gregory Bateson, who argued that the use of these energetic analogies and metaphors in psychology made a critical error in treating information processes as energetic processes. He argued that the appropriate way to conceive of mental processes was in informational and cybernetic terms. Brains are not pumps, and although axons are indeed tubular, and molecules such as neurotransmitters are actively conveyed along their length, they do not contribute to a hydrodynamic process. Nervous signals are propagated ionic potentials, mediated by molecular signals linking cells across tiny synaptic gaps. On the model of a cybernetic control system, he argued that the differences conveyed by neurological signals are organized so that they regulate the release of “collateral energy,” generated by metabolism. It is this independently available energy that is responsible for animating the body. Nervous control of this was thus more accurately modeled cybernetically. This collateral metabolic energy is analogous to the energy generated in a furnace, whose level of energy release is regulated by the much weaker changes in energy of the electrical signals propagated around the control circuit of a thermostat. According to Bateson, the mental world is not constituted by energy and matter, but rather by information. And as was also pioneered by the architects of the cybernetic theory whom Bateson drew his insights from, such as Wiener and Ashby, and biologists such as Warren McCulloch and Mayr, information was conceived of in purely logical terms: in other words, Shannon information. Implicit in this view—which gave rise to the computational perspective in the decades that followed—the folk wisdom expressed in energetic metaphors was deemed to be misleading.

By more precisely articulating the ways that thermodynamic, morphodynamic, and teleodynamic processes emerge from, and depend on, one another, however, we have seen that it is this overly simple energy/information dichotomy that is misleading. Information cannot so easily be disentangled from its basis in the capacity to reflect the effects of work (and thus the exchange of energy), and neither can it be simply reduced to it. Energy and information are asymmetrically and hierarchically interdependent dynamical concepts, which are linked by virtue of an intervening level of morphodynamic processes. And by virtue of this dynamical ascent, the capacity to be about something not present also emerges; not as mere signal difference, but as something extrinsic and absent yet potentially relevant to the existence of the teleodynamic (interpretive) processes thereby produced.

It is indeed the case that mental experience cannot be identified with the ebb and flow of some vital fluid, nor can it be identified directly with the buildup and release of energy. But as we’ve now also discovered by critically deconstructing the computer analogy, it cannot be identified with the signal patterns conveyed from neuron to neuron, either. These signals are generated and analyzed with respect to the teleodynamics of neuronal cell maintenance. They are interpreted with respect to cellular-level sentience. Each neuron is bombarded with signals that constitute its Umwelt. They perturb its metabolic state and force it to adapt in order to reestablish its stable teleodynamic “resting” activity. But, as was noted in the previous chapter, the structure of these neuronal signals does not constitute mental information, any more than the collisions between gas molecules constitute the attractor logic of the second law of thermodynamics.

As we will explore more fully below, mental information is constituted at a higher population dynamic level of signal regularity. As opposed to neuronal information (which can superficially be analyzed in computational terms), mental information is embodied by distributed dynamical attractors. These higher-order, more global dynamical regularities are constituted by the incessantly recirculating and restimulating neural signals within vast networks of interconnected neurons. The attractors form as these recirculating signals damp some and amplify other intrinsic constraints implicit in the current network geometry. Looking for mental information in individual neuronal firing patterns is looking at the wrong level of scale and at the wrong kind of physical manifestation. As in other statistical dynamical regularities, there are a vast number of microstates (i.e., network activity patterns) that can constitute the same global attractor, and a vast number of trajectories of microstate-to-microstate changes that will tend to converge to a common attractor. But it is the final quasi-regular network-level dynamic, like a melody played by a million-instrument orchestra, that is the medium of mental information. Although the contribution of each neuronal response is important, it is more with respect to how this contributes a local micro bias to the larger dynamic. To repeat again, it is no more a determinate of mental content than the collision between two atoms in a gas determines the tendency of the gas to develop toward equilibrium (though the fact that neurons are teleodynamic components rather than simply mechanical components makes this analogy far too simple).

This shift in level makes it less clear that we can simply dismiss these folk psychology force-motion analogies. If the medium of mental representation is not mere signal difference, but instead is the large-scale global attractor dynamic produced by an extended interconnected population of neurons, then there may also be global-level homeodynamic properties to be taken into account as well. As we have seen in earlier chapters, these global dynamical regularities will exhibit many features that are also characteristic of force-motion dynamics.

[littlelightfish]

They bonding here

[charlikesalmon]

seabass 🎸

[cloud-ya]

sobbing.....her little brother is her guardian angel

[immunobiz]

Rôle du stress oxydatif et du système glutathion dans la perte de neurones dopaminergiques due à une altération du métabolisme énergétique

Role of oxidative stress and the glutathione system in loss of dopamine neurons due to impairment of energy metabolism

Papel del estrés oxidativo y del sistema del glutatión en la pérdida de neuronas dopaminérgicas debida a la alteración del metabolismo energético

[blackholesfilm]

Barbecue sauce and fried neurones

[kenchann]

as usual i love drawing the hw boys with my yuu o(*￣▽￣*)ブ yuus fit (i might change it lol etcetc)

[ess-presso]

i like resting potential more than action potential

[bloominflowers]

funny dungeon dwellers

[periwinkla]

Goodmorning kiss... ♡ what's with me and kissy narumitsu sketches lately...?

[almondemotion]

Hospital picnic, sleep and brain health.

Doctor, I am having a hard time, do you have any sleepers? Yes, I know they don't work. Still, can I have some?

If you go out to the hospital tonight, You’re in for a big surprise. If you go out to the hospital tonight, You’d better go in disguise… No, the teddy bears will not be having a picnic. If you go out to the woods at night, it will likely be silent. There might be the rustle of leaves, A fox returning to its earth. Hospitals at night are noisy. I have written about this before – it used…

[matchabot]

swordmaster fashion

[kidofthe90s]

IMAGINATION! With that, we invented Science and Spirituality. What a wonderful thing!

[noodelak]

kissing him to make him shut the fuck up