What part does the brain play in all this?

[Az]

I am just curious as to what people here think the brain does. What part it plays in identity. What it governs and whether anything governs it. So lets hear it. What part does the brain play in all this?

[nebenaube]

1. It's all in your head man!

In a locus of cells referred to as the God Nodule. I can't say where specifically perhaps in the pontine but hey who cares anyway.

[saltpoint]

2. The novelist Tom Robbins felt that "If nothing else, the brain is

an educational toy."

Kinds of brains differ, which is why it is so difficult for us to get along.

[cosmik debris]

3. It is all bio-electricity

When the sodium, potassium, or calcium ions on one side of a cell membrane become too numerous, the polarity of the cell changes and a synapse fires.

Suddenly you think your dog is telling you to go kill people, or that a stain on a window looks like a holy person.

The brain is a self-organizing bio-electrical generator. It simply repeats the activities that produce results that help it cope with its environment. But, of course, it is not perfect.

[Occam Bandage]

6. Does any bioelectrical activity give rise to consciousness?

What is it about the frontal lobe in particular?

[cosmik debris]

7. Consciousness is bio-electricity in action. n/t

[Occam Bandage]

8. Is the enteric nervous system conscious?

[cosmik debris]

9. Not all bio-electricity is consciousness.

But then I have no idea how you define consciousness.

So, in order to avoid semantic arguments, I will suppose that you define consciousness as something other than bio-electric activity.

You are welcome to that belief.

I do not share it.

[Occam Bandage]

10. Asking you what you believe is not the same as asking you to suppose what I believe.

"Bio-electric activity" is, I think, more than a bit simplistic. The human body is full of electric activity, and yet of all the ion channels in all the cells of the body, and of all the neurons and all the sodium channels in the nervous system, only a limited part of the cerebrum governs consciousness.

"It is bio-electric activity" is true, but isn't particularly useful when it comes to explaining consciousness, any more than "It is metal" would explain how an aircraft flies.

[cosmik debris]

12. You are welcome to that belief.

I do not share it.

[Occam Bandage]

13. Considering that I have not elucidated a belief,

I am confused. I've simply stated that "it's all bio-electric activity" is correct but insufficient to explain consciousness, as the activity of ion channels do not give rise to consciousness is some places and do in others. You seem insistent that I believe something in particular, and I'm not sure why.

I have no idea why cascading action potentials in the frontal lobe and limbic system (and to an extent temporal and parietal lobes) gives rise to a phenomenon that apparently does not occur with other, seemingly-identical action potentials elsewhere in the brain, elsewhere in the body, and elsewhere in the non-biological world.

Is it a function of complexity? Is it a function of recursion? Does, then, any sufficiently-complex system experience consciousness? No idea.

I don't believe my gut is conscious, and yet it has its own complex nervous system with its own action potentials. I don't believe any separate consciousness is involved with the process that occurs when a doctor taps a ligament in my knee, and my spinal cord processes the temporary extension and kicks my leg out in response.

Are those the beliefs you refer to when you say you don't share my beliefs? I haven't met anyone who believes their gut possesses consciousness, so I find that hard to believe. I'm getting the feeling--and I might be wrong here--that you have somehow come to the conclusion that I believe in a non-physical source of consciousness, and are changing the subject to that proposed belief to deflect the question. I don't, and I don't recall writing anything to that extent, so I'm not sure why you're responding with allusions to my beliefs.

[cosmik debris]

14. I'm OK with that. n/t

[Occam Bandage]

15. I hit "post" too early by accident. Edit contains full reply.

[cosmik debris]

16. You said:

"I have no idea why..."

And I'm OK with that.

[Occam Bandage]

21. Do you?

If so, why are you sitting on that information? There's a Nobel prize waiting for you.

[pegleg]

17. Pretty hard to deny the bio-electric argument because that's what it is.

You first need to understand that before you can go any further.

[Occam Bandage]

20. I haven't denied anything.

I've said that an understanding of basic neurology is necessary but insufficient to explain consciousness. That does not mean that it is not the case that "bio-electricity is all there is."

[pegleg]

18. I think it is safe to say that all PHYSICAL consciousness is bio-electric.

Beyond that we are still trying to define.

[Occam Bandage]

22. As opposed to what? Do you have evidence of non-physical consciousness?

[bananas]

34. You are what you eat. nt

[edhopper]

4. If you are asking

if there can be consciousness or thought outside the brain. I would say the answer is no.

[Occam Bandage]

5. Well, I'd say there's ample evidence to claim

that every observable and instrument-verifiable aspect of consciousness, cognition, and identity is at minimum governed by the brain.

[TZ]

11. It depends on which hemisphere is more "used"

Right brain vs. Left brain..witness the scientist who didn't become religious/spiritual until a stroke damaged one side of her brain and like in many cases where part of the brain is damaged, the other healthy side picks up the slack...

[moobu2]

24. Years ago

my sister became intensely religious, completely changed her appearance and began stealing things. Turned out that the breast cancer she thought had been successfully treated, had metastasized to her brain. This was many years ago and I’m not sure now which lobe the tumor developed in but it’s very odd to watch someone literally change into another person.

[Azooz]

19. Brain: How To Use It

What is "all this" anyway? - Please do not answer that :)

"Govern" defines how well a brain is used, wise people govern their brains well and in return it rewards them by working a lot better, an ungoverned brain will have the same IQ but no breaks or no gas peddle. In religious terms "govern" would mean the fear of God, in that they have a set of rules of things to avoid (that comes first) and then things to do (second). In non-religious terms it is the same, a wise atheists knows the proper things to avoid and the proper things to do - as defined by them and those that call them wise anyway.

The human brain's main function is survival, it got us to the top of the food chain, and if there is an after life it can help us survive that to. The first and only requirement for going to a better place should be that we use our brain properly, and the bad place if we do not.

What part it plays in identity?
I think that is what role we permit it to play in how we talk and act, that is after all the end result of it's role in defining (and refining) our identity - this means what we say and do is who we are, and how we judge ourselves and others judge us. A person with a well governed brain is a very wise person, while a person with an ungoverned brain is a fool of the type that parents dread and best avoided. Think before you talk, think before you act - that is good advice that parents never get tired of giving, and the brain tends to think a lot better if we heed that advice, the more we heed it the better the brain performs with time.

[cyborg_jim]

23. The brain is an organ much like the heart

When the world tells it that it is time to pump - it will pump. That is its job.

[knitter4democracy]

25. Yeah, but look who's telling you that.

;) I love Emo Phillips.

I'm becoming less and less convinced that the brain acts on its own. Everything's so interconnected in our bodies that the theory that the brain controls everything seems, I don't know, partial at best.

I was doing yoga in a class once when we used the wall to help open up our hip joints. All of a sudden, I had the weirdest flashback to labor and birth of my youngest child. It wasn't so much that I was seeing and reliving it as my body started remembering the contractions and pushing my son out along with the pain. I started crying, and after awhile, everything stopped, and I felt better. I don't know that my brain was as involved in that as the muscles around my hips were, since it wasn't like a full-on vision or anything.

[cyborg_jim]

26. Is that a theory?

"Everything's so interconnected in our bodies that the theory that the brain controls everything seems, I don't know, partial at best."

I mean for a start there are certainly many functions that are clearly not under any control by the brain - the reflex mechanisms of the nervous system for example.

[knitter4democracy]

27. All the main ones seem to be, though.

Heart beat, breathing, the basics like that are in the brain stem, and there's a whole lot of other important stuff that the brain regulates. I'm not so sure that the brain is the sole repository of memory, though, or that it's as in charge as it's telling us it is. ;)

[cyborg_jim]

28. Why do you assume "it" is telling you "it" is in charge?

I take it you're referring of course to the idea of the "ghost in the machine" pulling the strings as it were. That's a pretty naive if populist attitude towards self.

Even for people convinced of this "man at the levers" concept of their conscious perspective that without any information to act on it's pretty hard to make any sensible decision - like being asked to pick up a coloured ball in a dark room. So it's pretty much a non starter to pretend that somehow the information the brain gathers about the position it is in is not as - or more - important as the decisions it sends out.

The more interesting thing is that this is NOT a universally accepted self-concept as you might expect to see if this were "obviously" what was going on. This lends weight to the idea that how an individual formulates concepts about itself may well be culturally driven. That is to simply say that your view of your self may say "I'm in charge," but that doesn't mean that someone else who says something similar to that is appreciating that experience in the same way at all.

As to memory what we know of how memory works is that it is not like a hard-disk where you store frames of information in nice organised files that can be recalled and played back. It's more like there are fragments of sensations that are keynotes but the rest of the speech needs to be filled in with something sensible at the time. Most of what we consider "remembered" is actually fabricated by the brain at that point to connect the dots between different memory fragments to formulate an entire "scene". This leads to phenomena such as False Memory Syndrome - you can become convinced you remember something even when it can be categorically shown not to have occurred!

If you want to propose that memories are somehow "stored" in non-brain tissue though I fail to see how any part of your story would possibly indicate, for example, that your hips were involved in remembering your labor. For example, would you expect to lose those memories if you had a hip replacement?

[knitter4democracy]

29. You must not have seen that Emo Phillips riff.

I can't seem to find it on youtube, though. It's in his Harvard performance video, but I can't find that actual bit. If I remember right, it goes like this:

"I was thinking one day about how smart our brains really are, and then I realized, well, look who's telling me that!"

Btw, muscle memory is a known phenomenon, and no, they don't replace your muscles in a hip replacement. So, no, I wouldn't lose those memories. There's the cognitive memories of labor and birth--I remember the timeline, what I was thinking at the time, stuff like that. The experience I had of remembering labor while doing that yoga pose, though, was much more visceral and really was of things I had forgotten, as the brain's not that great about remembering pain.

[cyborg_jim]

30. Muscle memory?

What, exactly, do you think that is? Because from what I know I still fail to see how that really has anything to do with it - the muscles don't "remember" anything - it's the motor neurons controlling them that do.

"I was thinking one day about how smart our brains really are, and then I realized, well, look who's telling me that!"

I've seen the riff. The point you miss entirely is that our brains don't tell us that - our culture does. You wouldn't even know you had the organ if you weren't told about it. In the ignorance of the source of the location of these attributes all sorts of stuff has been proposed over the years.

The brain, as an organ, doesn't understand what it is any more than the heart is aware of how it pumps or the intestinal wall is clued in on how it absorbs nutrients.

as the brain's not that great about remembering pain.

I don't recall seeing any evidence of that. I do know it is possible to experience pain without it actually being there however.

This article also indicates that memory can most certainly trigger pain:

http://www.biologynews.net/archives/2007/06/04/old_memory_traces_in_brain_may_trigger_chronic_pain.html

[knitter4democracy]

31. Look, I'm no biologist. I only know what I've experienced.

I realize that's availability bias. I also think it's more than a little ironic you're taking my joking around seriously. Emo Phillips is funny! Laugh a little. :D

I've lived in pain. I had chronic appendicitis for ten years, the last year of which was sheer hell. I don't remember the pain, really. I remember that it was bad. I remember crawling around the house to change the baby's diaper because I couldn't walk. I remember the time I couldn't drive just yet in the worst of the pain and a friend tapped on my car's window to ask if she needed to call an ambulance. When I remember the pain, my muscles tighten up a bit as a shadow of the pain, but that's it. Same with both natural births. Same even with the pain I had when I woke up from my kidney surgery with no pain control at all. My body remembers only a shadow of it. When I hear a story of a hard labor, my muscles tighten and a shadow of the pain happens, but it's nowhere near how bad it really was.

As for experiencing pain that really isn't there, I've heard that way too many times from my husband to believe it. Before we knew it was my appendix, I was told it was in my head. Nope, they just didn't know what was causing the pain. When someone loses a limb and feels their hand hurting that isn't there anymore, that doesn't make the pain not real--their body still hurts from losing the hand or the arm. I still hurt sometimes where my kidney was, but according to my surgeon, that's not my mind making shit up--it's scar tissue and other organs moving around into the scar tissue.

[cyborg_jim]

32. It IS in the head

I was told it was in my head.

It is always "in the head". The question is whether or not what is "in the head" actually reflects what is "in the body".

When someone loses a limb and feels their hand hurting that isn't there anymore, that doesn't make the pain not real--their body still hurts from losing the hand or the arm.

Yes, that makes the pain "not real".

The pain is "not real" in the sense that it is not, clearly, being caused by the phantom limb since it doesn't exist.

"Real" pain and "not real" pain is still pain. Why would one expect a difference in the sensation? It's the interpretation that's in question here.

[knitter4democracy]

33. When you sever nerves, though, pain happens.

When they took my kidney, I lost three inches of rib as well as a pound of flesh (mostly tumor, though they had to make sure to get clean margins all around). That rib still hurts. It's not the missing part that hurts, it's the cut edge that gets sore on rainy days. Those nerves that wrap that bone got cut, and cut nerves aren't happy nerves. Heck, I still have weird stuff from the 10" long incision and all the nerves they cut for that sucker. Nerves don't like being cut and don't tend to handle it all that great.

[bananas]

35. Play or work?

If it's playing, is it having fun, or just bored silly?
If it's working, is it drudgery, or creative and exciting work?
Is it an actor on a stage playing a role,
or a cog in a machine working with precision and efficiency?

[morningglorysunday]

36. I would first separate the brain from the mind

The brain is this hunk of slimy tissue and dies when the body dies. There are people who have been pronounced dead (I know someone who was 'dead' for a half hour) and leave their bodies whilst observing what is happening to 'them'.

Consciousness is not dependent on physical form, which is why it survives death. It is part and parcel of the soul. Think of it as the soul's brain...