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Mental Construction

How We Think. Neuron Imposed Properties

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  • Table of ContentsOrderly development. Neural threshold to cognition
  • Stimuli to ConceptsInternal worldview. Abstraction and categorization. By neural threshold.
  • Maps in the BrainFrequency and simularities mold our concepts. Hebb’s Law of neural connections.
  • Brain BuildingHuman brains from earlier brains. Adult minds upon younger distinct stages.
  • CreativityEveryone has creativity. Some are blessed, and cursed, with an excess.
Mental Construction…

Brain at War

11 Oct 201911 Oct 2019
At the coffee shop, I overheard two fellows discussing the opposition between hemispheric thoughts. They agreed upon on various points: The left hemisphere was usually verbal dominant.The right hemisphere had…
Learning

Culture in Nurture

25 Sep 201925 Sep 2019
When I hear the nature-nurture debate, it always falls into what genes you have or what experiences you have, bBut your experiences (your nurture) arrives via two distinct paths. That…
Language

Speech and Neurons

16 Sep 201916 Sep 2019
Figure 1. Growth in neural connections within speech generating area. Development of the Child’s Brain and Behavior by Bryan Kolb and Bryan D Fantie Do you find Figure 1 as…
Learning

Synapse Weights, Memory and Learning

25 Aug 201925 Aug 2019
Quora: How do changes at the synapse level affect our memory processing? We learn our memories. Learning is evidenced by changes in the magnitude of the signal that is transported…
Learning

3S Imperatives, Emotions, and Consciousness

13 Jul 201911 Oct 2019
Figure 1. 3S Imperatives, Emotions, Consciousness Figure 1 depicts how much more primitive the 3S imperatives (Satiety, Sex, and Safety) are than emotions and consciousness. Satiety The imperative to satisfy…
Thought Modes

Nature-Nurture

13 Jul 20196 Aug 2019
In a Law and Order rerun, Assistant District Attorney Jack McCoy, as usual, started with the presumption that the perpetrator freely chose to commit the murder. However, the defense lawyer…
Thought Modes

Can You Strengthen Intuition?

10 Jul 201910 Jul 2019
The Question: How does one train the mind to primarily function intuitively? Adults Once you are an adult, your mind’s style of thinking is basically set. You may make tweaks,…
Creativity

Creativity Examples in Science

28 Jun 20192 Aug 2019
The history of science offers excellent examples of intuitive leaps. Here are two that reveal a manner in which creativity is beyond logic, but not beyond investigation nor insights. Dmitri…
Mental Construction

Neural Pathways and Their Content

23 May 20192 Aug 2019
Neural pathways connect one part of the brain to another using bundles of axons called tracts. These pathways are revealed by functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) in the laboratory.  …
Thought Modes

Parallel Thought Paths

11 Apr 201915 Aug 2019
The brain is composed of 100 billion neurons, of which the cerebral cortex has 10-15 billion. Those 10-15 billion cerebral neurons each have approximately 10 thousand interconnections with other neurons,…

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Spitzer, Manfred. The Mind Within the Net. Models of Learning, Thinking, and Acting. The MIT Press, 1999. Print. ISBN 0-262-69236-8

Information is believed to be transmitted not by a single firing of a neuron, but by the neuron’s spike train: either by overall rate of firing or by  precise timing of firing.

I have removed that complication in the discussion, because it does not alter the fundamental idea. Any set of input which exceeds the neuron’s threshold  is treated the same thereafter. The Almost Gate is operational.

Scholarpedia. http://www.scholarpedia.org/. Web site. Dec. 15, 2017.

Sternberg, Robert J. and Sternberg, Karin. Cognitive Psychology, 6th Edition. Wadsworth Cengage Learning, 2009. Print. ISBN 978-1-133-31391-5

From Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy

The mathematical proof technique called “mathematical induction” is deductive and not inductive. Proofs that make use of mathematical induction typically take the following form:

Property P is true of the natural number 0.
For all natural numbers n, if P holds of n then P also holds of n + 1.
Therefore, P is true of all natural numbers.

When such a proof is given by a mathematician, and when all the premises are true, then the conclusion follows necessarily. Therefore, such an inductive argument is deductive. It is deductively sound, too.

From WikiPedia article. Bolding added.

Working memory is a cognitive system with a limited capacity that is responsible for temporarily holding information available for processing. Working memory is important for reasoning and the guidance of decision-making and behavior. Working memory is often used synonymously with short-term memory, but some theorists consider the two forms of memory distinct, assuming that working memory allows for the manipulation of stored information, whereas short-term memory only refers to the short-term storage of information

James, William. The Principles of Psychology. Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc and Henry Holt and Company, Inc.1952. Print. ISBN 0-85229-163-9

Memory is not a photograph of external reality stored in the brain, but a reconstruction based on observed event, personal emotional impact, and learned relationships.

Consider the Almost Gates that the current situational features go through. Our remembered situations also go through the same path. When there is sufficient matching of results (neural thresholds are surmounted), the situations fit in the same abstract category. Other features of the situations may or may not be comparable.

 

Carter, Rita. The Human Brain Book: An Illustrated Guide to its Structure, Function, and Disorders. DK. London,  New York, Melbourne, Munich, Delhi, 2009. Print with DVD. ISBN 978-0-7566-5441-2

Professor Maguire quoted in a Wellcome press release in Dec. 2011.

The current situation, remembered situations, and 3S imperatives – in their manifestations as emotions, personality traits, goals, desires, and fears – feed into neurons whose outputs lead ultimately to different actions.

The neuron whose Almost Gate is surmounted triggers its action chain. With so many neural inputs streaming from various sources, it’s unsurprising that typically our 3S imperatives are not completely satisfied by our response.

 

“… the cortex works as a rule-extraction machine and produces maps of input according to the principles of frequency and simularity.” Spitzer (p 138).
Spitzer, Manfred. The Mind Within the Net. Models of Learning, Thinking, and Acting. The MIT Press, 1999. Print. ISBN 0-262-69236-8

The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, A Peer-Reviewed Academic Resource, ISSN 2161-0002, http://www.iep.utm.edu/, Dec. 13, 2017.

Encyclopædia Britannica. Encyclopædia Britannica Ultimate Reference Suite. Chicago: Encyclopædia Britannica, 2012.

The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is the theory that an individual’s thoughts and actions are determined by the language or languages that individual speaks.

The strong version of the hypothesis states that all human thoughts and actions are bound by the restraints of language, and is generally less accepted than the weaker version.

The weaker version says that language only somewhat shapes our thinking and behavior.

Instead of considering linguistic relativism as limiting the possibilities of thought, a better perspective is that language organizes experience in a manner which has yielded useful thoughts and behaviors over the language’s lifespan.

Pinker, Steven. The Language Instinct. Harper Collins Perennial Modern Classics, NY, NY, 2007, original William Morrow Company, 1994. Print. ISBN 978-0-133646-1

Garlick, Dennis. Intelligence and the Brain: Solving the Mystery of Why People Differ in IQ and How a Child Can Be a Genius. Aesop Press, Burbank, California, 2010. Print. ISBN 0-615-31921-1.

Kahneman, Daniel. Thinking Fast and Slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011. Print. ISBN 978-0-374-53355-7

Klingberg, Torkel. The Overflowing Brain: Information Overload and the Limits of Working Memory. 2009. Print. ISBN 9780195372885

Stanovich, Keith E. What Intelligence Tests Miss: the psychology of rational thought. Yale University Press, 2009. Print. ISBN 978-0-300-12385-2

Hofstadter, Douglas and Sander, Emmanuel. Essences and Surfaces: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking. Basic Books, Perseus Books Group, New York, 2013. Print. ISBN 978-0-465-01847-5

Bayes’ theorem describes the probability of an event, based on prior knowledge of conditions that might be related to the event. For example, if cancer is related to age, then, using Bayes’ theorem, a person’s age can be used to more accurately assess the probability that they have cancer, compared to the assessment of the probability of cancer made without knowledge of the person’s age.

Martindale, Colin. “Biological Bases of Creativity” in Handbook of Creativity. Edited by Robert J. Sternberg. Cambridge University Press, 1999. Print. ISBN 0 521 57604 0

Baddeley, Alan. Your Memory: A User’s Guide. Firefly Books, Buffalo, NY, 2004. Print. ISBN 1-55297-985-7

Hadamard, Jacques. An Essay on the Psychology of Invention in the Mathematical Field. Dover Publications, NY, NY, 1954. Print. ISBN 0-486-20107-4

Fields, R. Douglas. The Other Brain: From Dementia to Schizophrenia. Simon & Schuster, New York, 2009. Print. ISBN 978-0-7432-9141-5.

Kalat, James W. Biological Psychology, 8th Edition. Thomson Wadsworth, 2004. Print. ISBN 0-534-58836-6

Klawans, Harold, M.D. Strange Behavior. Tales of Evolutionary Neurology. W.W Norton & Company, NY, NY, 2000. Print. ISBN 0-393-32184-3

Caudill, Maureen and Butler, Charles. Understanding Neural Networks. A Bradford Book, MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, London, 1992. Print.

[M]emory is not entirely faithful. When you perceive an object, groups of neurons in different parts of your brain process the information about its shape, colour, smell, sound, and so on. Your brain then draws connections among these different groups of neurons, and these relationships constitute your perception of the object. Subsequently, whenever you want to remember the object, you must reconstruct these relationships. The parallel processing that your cortex does for this purpose, however, can alter your memory of the object. McGill Memory and Learning

Zeman, Adam. A Portrait on the Brain. Yale University Press, New Haven, 2008. Print. ISBN 978-0-300-11416-4.

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ET Jaynes, 2003 (p133). Jaynes, E. and Bretthorst, G. (2003). Probability Theory: The Logic of Science. Cambridge University Press. Cambridge