Brain Influences Itself with Its Own Electric Field

[Q_Goest]

An article in http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=brain-electric-field" states:

The rhythmic electric fields generated by the brain during deep sleep and other periods of intensely coordinated neural activity could amplify and synchronize actions along the same neural networks that initially created those fields, according to a new study. The finding indicates that the brain's electric fields are not just passive by-products of neural activity—they might provide feedback that regulates how the brain functions, especially during deep, or slow-wave, sleep. Although similar ideas have been considered for decades, this is the first direct evidence that the electric fields generated by the cerebral cortex change the behavior of the neurons that engender them.

"I think this is a very exciting new discovery," says Ole Paulsen, a neuroscientist at the University of Cambridge who was not involved in the recent study. "We knew that weak electric fields can impact brain activity, but what no one had really tested before was whether electric fields produced by the brain itself can influence its own activity."

The original paper can be found http://www.med.yale.edu/neurobio/mccormick/pubs/fields.pdf" .

In http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=neural-feedback", they describe a bit about the experiment:

In the study, Yale University neurobiologists David McCormick and Flavio Fröhlich surrounded a still-living slice of ferret brain tissue with an electric field that mimicked the field an intact ferret brain produces during slow-wave sleep. The applied field amplified and synchronized the existing neural activity in the brain slice. These results indicate that the electric field generated by the brain facilitates the same neural firing that created the field in the first place, just as the cloud of enthusiasm that envelops a cheering crowd at a sports stadium encourages the crowd to keep cheering. In other words, the brain’s electric field is not a by-product; it is a feedback loop.

So how ground breaking is this? Is this new news or is this expected? Has there been other, similar studies done in the past? Years ago I've read papers that suggested the brain's own EM field can influence neuronal firing, but this is the first paper I've seen that actually demonstrates this.

Everything our brains are doing, whether it's conscious thinking or unconscious regulation such heart beat and breathing or whatever, must be reflected in brain waves. That is, brain waves are a function of the firing of neurons, so it's been suggested (and not much of a stretch) to suggest there is a specific brain wave pattern that must correspond to a given neuron firing pattern. In other words, the information contained in the firing pattern of the brain should be reflected in the brain's EM field. Further, it would seem this field also influences the firing of neurons. Thoughts?

 

[Pythagorean]

Interesting. I was talking with Markus Dahlem a couple months back who uses volume transmission in his models (other signal pathways besides synapse/gap junction between neurons, like when neurotransmitter floods a region)

http://www.migraine-aura.org/content/e27891/e27456/e27721/e27777/e27805/index_en.html

During our discussion, he mentioned that electric fields are a similar example of volume transmission in that whole regions of the brain are effected globally (in addition to the local synaptic events). It's not surprising from an electrical engineering point of view that inductive coupling would contribute to synchronization of a circuit.

I believe I saw something similar by Freeman too:
NDN, volume transmission, and self-organization in brain dynamics [PDF] from psu.edu
WJ Freeman - Journal of integrative neuroscience, 2005

So, not particularly surprising to me, but still probably needs further empirical verification.

 

[minorwork]

I logged the following article originating from Duke. http://www.dukenews.duke.edu/2010/12/egner_vision.html"

Pretty eye opening for me. I'd figured the brain built up the world, but it looks like, visually anyhow, that a projection of the world, from top down, is always being refined by the senses. How that would match up with the fields you've mentioned I'm not sure. I have heard that http://neuronarrative.wordpress.com/2010/05/05/everything-we-knew-about-human-vision-is-wrong-author-mark-changizi-tells-us-why/" going that the brain generates a vision a tenth of a second ahead that our actions react to in lieu of senses that take a tenth of a second to register. Let's us hit fast balls, race cars, and walk thru crowds without crashing.

Then there's Donald Hoffman who seems to me a bit more philosophical in his explanations and also gives great credit to evolution. http://www.cogsci.uci.edu/~ddhoff/interface.pdf"

In any case the influence of fields on a given conductors signal in my experience are slight if the signal is transmitted slow enough. That in long, miles long, data lines used to communicate serially at slow speed of 1200 baud there was no need for shielding to protect against noise. By the time I left the mine a cable that held three twisted pairs of wires, one pair had 24 volt power positive and negative DC, one pair a 1200 baud com signal on the network to 60 Carbon dioxide sensors monitored by some 50 microcomputers each a different address. The third twisted pair was the kicker for me. It carried a DSL signal to carry Longwall information 6 miles and up top to the longwall office computer. The cable was the very definition of noise, yet it worked. DSL and the 485 differential pair operating at the sedate 1200 baud rate that scanned 60 sensors in 35 seconds.

What I'm saying is that the fields generated by signals might have some influence but the system can be adapted to allow for some crosstalk influence of the fields inducing voltages in foreign lines.

In the brain? This coal miner hasn't done much wiring on that device since the early 70's. I've heard of the fields influences that you mention and even that depression is being helped by generating electromagnetic fields in close proximity to the brain.

There are anedotal reports and some studies that resulted indicative that those really strong http://www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/2004/01.22/01-depression.html"

 

[apeiron]

Everything our brains are doing, whether it's conscious thinking or unconscious regulation such heart beat and breathing or whatever, must be reflected in brain waves. That is, brain waves are a function of the firing of neurons, so it's been suggested (and not much of a stretch) to suggest there is a specific brain wave pattern that must correspond to a given neuron firing pattern. In other words, the information contained in the firing pattern of the brain should be reflected in the brain's EM field. Further, it would seem this field also influences the firing of neurons. Thoughts?

There are two levels of hypothesis here.

1) The first is that the brain employs general fields to synchronise or amplify global neural activity. This is plausible but the experiment still leaves open the question of whether brains do self-drive their activity in this fashion, or that they can simply be driven by a strong enough external field.

Given that we are talking about slow-wave sleep here - where desynchronous activity is what is happening - the idea of global self-driving by EM fields seems dubious. But not impossible.

2) The second level of hypothesis is what you may be suggesting? That the global driving field could be patterned and informational. This seems highly unlikely to me.

It is possible that a pulsing field like this drives the brain to coherent activity via an I/f noise mechanism. It is widely believed that I/f noise must be used in neural processing somehow as it is such a simple signal enhancing mechanism. But I/f noise is chaotic, unpatterned - that is the reason it works.

However I can't see how the brain could sustain EM fields that are more patterned than the neural activity that underlies them. The brain, when busy, generates complex fields - the jumble of "beta wave" activity. But while it is quite plain how complicated neural activity can generate complicated EM fields, there is no such simple picture of how the story could be the other way round. How would an EM field know to be complex? How could it have the memory structure required to be anything else than as simple as possible?

So this is indeed a "sit up and take notice" experimental finding. But it would only in the end be a small revision of standard neurobiological thinking if it turns out to be some kind of I/f noise deal. And there seems zero chance that it will change the arrow of causality that exists between EM fields and neural activity in alert conscious brains.

 

[Proton Soup]

yes, from an electrical-engineering pov, I'm not surprised, either. it's about as surprising that a sleeping brain, depriving itself of much external stimuli, starts firing its neurons in a more synchronized way (low frequency).

for some reason, it makes me think of cohabitating females achieving lunar rhythm with perhaps little more than a few molecules of pheromones floating around.

i also suspect the linkage in the brain is a little more capacitive than inductive.

 

[Q_Goest]

Thanks for the responces, folks. Perhaps I should clarify the question. My understanding is that neurons fire because of what occurs at the synapses (ie: they exchange information or interact at the synapses) but my impression is this article is suggesting neurons are interacting through this electric field as well. To what extent is this paper saying they intereact? Is it only that they synchronize their firing or is the author suggesting neurons are also 'talking' to each other through this field? That is, are the neurons allegedly exchanging information through the field in the same way they exchange information through synapses?

 

[Lievo]

Is it only that they synchronize their firing or is the author suggesting neurons are also 'talking' to each other through this field?

It's quite impossible to demonstrate, but the default assumption should be: first explanation.

Imagine you're in a large room with many folks communicating through written paper. If at one time there is many movements in the room that may increase your arousal and then the rate you wrote your own notes. If there is some oscillation in the overall activity this will push you toward a similar oscillatory arousal and production rate, which in turn will contribute to the oscillation in the oveall activity, which in turns...

However, this is not to say it's not interesting. This may well contribute to organise the communication at the macroscopic level, something we don't know so much about.

 

[Proton Soup]

Thanks for the responces, folks. Perhaps I should clarify the question. My understanding is that neurons fire because of what occurs at the synapses (ie: they exchange information or interact at the synapses) but my impression is this article is suggesting neurons are interacting through this electric field as well. To what extent is this paper saying they intereact? Is it only that they synchronize their firing or is the author suggesting neurons are also 'talking' to each other through this field? That is, are the neurons allegedly exchanging information through the field in the same way they exchange information through synapses?

i guess the way I'm thinking about it has mostly to do with saltatory conduction down the axons. if you have two that are running in parallel in the same direction, there would be some crosstalk. and since the action potential down the axon jumps as a voltage wavefront setting off successive voltage-gated channels, lack of synchrony would only have one wavefront adding or subtracting from the signal of the other, speeding or slowing it down. the lowest energy, most efficient state would seem to be one of synchrony, where the wavefronts like up with each other.

 

[Pythagorean]

Thanks for the responces, folks. Perhaps I should clarify the question. My understanding is that neurons fire because of what occurs at the synapses (ie: they exchange information or interact at the synapses) but my impression is this article is suggesting neurons are interacting through this electric field as well. To what extent is this paper saying they intereact? Is it only that they synchronize their firing or is the author suggesting neurons are also 'talking' to each other through this field? That is, are the neurons allegedly exchanging information through the field in the same way they exchange information through synapses?

The idea is that they're more regulatory. Like they applied a sine wave perturbation to the electric field and the neurons started syncing with the sine wave frequency. It seems more like it maintains stability in the synchronization throughout the network. Gap junctions are thought to play a similar role.

Of course, there's always the evolutionary perspective, too. Having electrical properties, neurons have an inductive property to them, no doubt. Neurons would have had to evolve to either ignore the inductive information or take advantage of it. If it's already synchronous (which all cells are in terms of information processing) then it's probably more efficient to take advantage of it. Induction can cause a lot of problems in electric circuit construction and sometimes you have to tune your circuit around the inductive properties of the components to get it to function how you intended it to.

 

[Lievo]

Neurons would have had to evolve to either ignore the inductive information or take advantage of it. If it's already synchronous (which all cells are in terms of information processing) then it's probably more efficient to take advantage of it.

Yes. In fact, it's http://www.jneurosci.org/cgi/content/short/24/44/9985" more efficient, at least for some situation. I wonder if there is some situations for which we should except it's less efficient? Probably, otherwise natural selection would have favorize a larger uses of this mechanism. But I wonder which ones.

 

[rhody]

From Q's original post:

the brain’s electric field is not a by-product; it is a feedback loop

first direct evidence that the electric fields generated by the cerebral cortex change the behavior of the neurons that engender them

This was too tempting for me and with the curious bunch in this thread who honestly care, maybe we can achieve some new insight, at the very least an underpinning understanding based on QED of what is being observed in experiment. This is a lightweight attempt on my part however. I wish I had more time for this, I would do this 8 hours a day if I could. That being said, consider what http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1965/feynman-lecture.html" over 45+ years ago in his Nobel Lecture, reproduced in the link provided.

Excerpts from that lecture below: (aside, God, I wish he were still with us today...) this is not light reading. I will attempt to provide key concepts:

Perhaps a thing is simple if you can describe it fully in several different ways without immediately knowing that you are describing the same thing.

and

I was very surprised to discover that it was not known at that time, that every one of the formulas that had been worked out so patiently by separating longitudinal and transverse waves could be obtained from the formula for the transverse waves alone, if instead of summing over only the two perpendicular polarization directions you would sum over all four possible directions of polarization. It was so obvious from the action (1) that I thought it was general knowledge and would do it all the time. I would get into arguments with people, because I didn't realize they didn't know that; but, it turned out that all their patient work with the longitudinal waves was always equivalent to just extending the sum on the two transverse directions of polarization over all four directions.

Rhody...

P.S. Aside from this post subject the whole lecture is very good, about accumulation of insight acquired over time with the honesty and humor that is a hallmark of Feynman.

 

[Pythagorean]

Here's a dynamics article on "stable chaos". It reference neural networks and has some of the themes in this thread so I thought it might be of interest.

http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/0902/0902.2545v1.pdf

 

[Lievo]

Here's a dynamics article on "stable chaos".

I was ignorant that such a thing was existing. Very interesting Thank you!

Would you mind to explain the connection you see with the topic? For example are you suggesting that stable chaos could be facilitated through volume transmission?

 

[Pythagorean]

That's the hypothesis I think is intuitive and falsifiable enough to justify investgating.

I still don't understand the difference between transient chaos and stable chaos quite yet though, still absorbing the paper.

But to me, it seems like realistically, most systems we consider chaotic will eventually die out (heat death). If you take time to infinity for the lyaounov exponent, wouldn't this inevitably result in a negative lyaounov exponent? So already it seems that FTLE (finite time lyap constant) are more applicable to me.

 

[Lievo]

I still don't understand the difference between transient chaos and stable chaos quite yet though, still absorbing the paper.

Neither do I. We'll have to discuss this further

 

[rhody]

I was doing my usual monthly review/vetting of alerts for the Daily Galaxy, and http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2010/11/mirrors-in-your-brain-they-do-for-psychology-what-dna-did-for-biology.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+TheDailyGalaxyNewsFromPlanetEarthBeyond+%28The+Daily+Galaxy%3A+News+from+Planet+Earth+%26+Beyond%29" caught my eye. Anytime, anywhere, I read of work promoted by Dr. Ramachandran, a neurologist at the University of California-San Diego and co-author of Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind, it gets full attention. It was Ramachandran who endorsed the book, "The Brain that changes itself" by Dr Norman Doidge that I have reported on and continue work on, to probe the effects of auditory training affecting the frontal/prefrontal lobes of the brain. IMHO, Ramachandran is a brilliant example of what the research world sorely needs, especially in Neurology. That is a story for another post in the future. Back to the subject, then, from the article:

In the early 1990's Giacomo Rizzolatti and his colleagues at the University of Parma discovered that some neurons had an amazing property: they responded not only when a subject performed a given action, but also when the subject observed someone else performing that same action.

and

Anytime you watch someone else doing something (or even starting to do something), the corresponding mirror neuron might fire in your brain, thereby allowing you to "read" and understand another's intentions, and thus to develop a sophisticated "theory of other mind".

From Q's original post:

In the study, Yale University neurobiologists David McCormick and Flavio Fröhlich surrounded a still-living slice of ferret brain tissue with an electric field that mimicked the field an intact ferret brain produces during slow-wave sleep. The applied field amplified and synchronized the existing neural activity in the brain slice. These results indicate that the electric field generated by the brain facilitates the same neural firing that created the field in the first place, just as the cloud of enthusiasm that envelops a cheering crowd at a sports stadium encourages the crowd to keep cheering. In other words, the brain’s electric field is not a by-product; it is a feedback loop.

and

Based on his research, Ramachandran predicted that mirror neurons will do for psychology what DNA did for biology: "they will provide a unifying framework and possibly even explain a host of mental abilities that have hitherto remained mysterious and inaccessible to experiments

It seems that the stimulus does not have to limit itself to the electromagnetic spectrum in order to stimulate a mirror like phenomenon in another individual, separate from the one experiencing it. Being picked up, even at a very early stage, by sense(s) of another individual is equally valid.

Rhody...

 

[Q_Goest]

Hi Rhody,

It seems that the stimulus does not have to limit itself to the electromagnetic spectrum in order to stimulate a mirror like phenomenon in another individual, separate from the one experiencing it. Being picked up, even at a very early stage, by sense(s) of another individual is equally valid.

Rhody...

I'm not sure what you mean by that. Can you help me out? I don't want to put words in your mouth...

 

[rhody]

Hi Rhody,

I'm not sure what you mean by that. Can you help me out? I don't want to put words in your mouth...

Q,

What I said didn't come across the way I intended is an open question, at least to me. Are there underpinning principle(s) not understood and identified, operating in the regime of the laws of physics (including but not limited to the laws of electromagnetism) responsible for it, other than to simply say, some sort of "feedback loop" from sense input to the host. The explanation for it deserves a better one than a "feedback loop". Here is food for thought, again from Daily Galaxy posts along the same line of thinking. One from an environment that does not involve human interaction, and a second that does, not clearly understood triggering mechanisms that result in Mad Cow disease.

http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2010/12/new-theory-the-universe-could-have-been-created-from-nothing.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+TheDailyGalaxyNewsFromPlanetEarthBeyond+%28The+Daily+Galaxy%3A+News+from+Planet+Earth+%26+Beyond%29"

An experiment in the late ’90s managed to generate from a vacuum gamma photons and an occasional electron-positron pair. These new University of Michigan equations take this work a step farther to model how a strong laser field could promote the creation of more particles than were initially injected into an experiment through a particle accelerator.

“If an electron has a capability to become three particles within a very short time, this means it’s not an electron any longer,” Sokolov said. “The theory of the electron is based on the fact that it will be an electron forever. But in our calculations, each of the charged particles becomes a combination of three particles plus some number of photons.”

and

http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2010/12/prions-challenge-the-definition-of-life-todays-most-popular.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+TheDailyGalaxyNewsFromPlanetEarthBeyond+%28The+Daily+Galaxy%3A+News+from+Planet+Earth+%26+Beyond%29"

"prions similar to those believed responsible for Mad Cow disease and similar, rare conditions in humans — are capable of evolving just like higher forms of life, a discovery that could reshape the definition of life"

Large proteins are to chemistry what War and Peace is to the alphabet: incredibly long and stuffed with more data than the human mind knows what to do with. Even the shape encodes information, and amazingly that's the aspect attacked by infectious prions – they're transmitted shapes, twisting healthy prions into catalytic carriers of their own twisted form.
Normal prions, including the ones in your brain, are water-soluble. Which is good because you're mostly water. In prion problems like Creutzfeld-Jakob disease, an 'infected' prion has been folded into a lower energy but non-water-soluble configuration, the exact same chemicals simply arranged in a different way – which alters its chemical properties. This becomes a tiny grain in your brain which triggers the same shift in shape in other prions, building a growing chunk of protein inside your skull. With predictably disastrous results.

What Professor Charles Weissmann and colleagues of the Department of Infectology have shown is that these shapes can evolve and adapt like lifeforms with DNA. As they 'replicate' by triggering shifts in other host prions there are an array of minor errors and changes, and in different conditions the best-suited shapes survive and multiply faster. It turns out that “things better suited to replicating in an environment will replicate better in that environment” is a tautology, not a controversial theory.

Rhody...

 

[Lievo]

IMHO, Ramachandran is a brilliant example of what the research world sorely needs, especially in Neurology.

I'm not sure to understand. Ramachandran is reknown for being very good at selling his work and, more importantly, at promoting other's work. Do you mean neurology sorely need to be more advertized/popularized, or you were thinking at one of his paper that impressed you (which one?)?

 

[Lievo]

an open question, at least to me

Sorry, but I don't understand what is the question.

 

[Pythagorean]

I don't see the connection with electric fields either.

Ramachandran has done some innovative things in neurology (like his solution to phantom limbs) but yeah he's also a pop scientist.

 

[rhody]

I'm not sure to understand. Ramachandran is reknown for being very good at selling his work and, more importantly, at promoting other's work. Do you mean neurology sorely need to be more advertized/popularized, or you were thinking at one of his paper that impressed you (which one?)?

Liveo,

You will have to excuse the professional versus layman's view of the subject . While you who I assume work in the field may not be impressed by Ramachandran's work, you must understand I don't have access to any on-going inside information from dedicated Neurologists who work and experiment in the field. I think as you implied in your response more media attention should be directed at good research done in Neurology. I haven't read any of his technical paper's, other than the book I stated in my post above. Any good suggested reading is welcomed, however...

 

[Lievo]

While you who I assume work in the field may not be impressed by Ramachandran's work

I have to recognized it's hard for me to be impressed as, yes, I'm professionnaly more focussed on what remains to be understood. I'm still impressed by fantom limbs, but not by the little understanding we have of this phenomena. Nothing specific against Ramachandran's work, who's one of the many working in this field. He's very good at selling, but that's to his credit and to the benefice of the field as a whole.

Any good suggested reading is welcomed, however...

http://brain.oxfordjournals.org/content/129/8/2202.full
http://brain.oxfordjournals.org/content/131/8/2181.full
http://psy2.ucsd.edu/~dbrang/images/Ramachandran_NeuroReport_2010.pdf

I think as you implied in your response more media attention should be directed at good research done in Neurology.

Directing attention toward good question would be even better. If something can convince Pythagorean or some his collegues to try to explain mirror neurons from a connectionnist point-of-view, that's great. In my opinion, the day we will understand mirror neurons is the day before we understand our brain. Nothing less

 

[apeiron]

If something can convince Pythagorean or some his collegues to try to explain mirror neurons from a connectionnist point-of-view, that's great. In my opinion, the day we will understand mirror neurons is the day before we understand our brain. Nothing less

But where is any mystery here? The ability to anticipate is basic to the brain's design. That it should extend to the anticipation of the actions of others in social creatures is no surprise. The whole mirror neuron deal is another para-neuroscientific bandwagon that got totally out of hand.

Rhody appeared to be alluding to a morphic resonance interpretation of mirror neurons here. Out of hand and over the event horizon .

 

[Lievo]

But where is any mystery here?

In two words: how do you detect the same thing from a camera and from proprioceptors? There is no simple statistical features such as the ones detected by backpropagation learning. You have to extract a meaning, and despite the incredible rate of growth of our knowledge in these fields, we still have no idea how to do that. Mirror neurons may be our http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosetta_Stone" .

The ability to anticipate is basic to the brain's design. That it should extend to the anticipation of the actions of others in social creatures is no surprise.

There is no surprise that brain is able to do this. What is surprising is that the brain is using the same neurons (or, more cautiously, the same cortical areas) both for acting and understanding. We would never have designed a robot this way, which is a reason to think there is an important underlying principle that we did not discover yet.

Let's put it another way: once you have the ability to understand other's action, don't you have developped the ability to understand yours? Self-consciousness as a a by product of understanding social interaction, how cute is this idea?

The whole mirror neuron deal is another para-neuroscientific bandwagon that got totally out of hand.

Well.. let's say there is a lot of bright minds that would disagree.

* http://www.cogsci.ucsd.edu/~pineda/COGS260Mirroring/readings/Uddin - self and social cognition.pdf
* http://pissaro.soc.huji.ac.il/Shlomo/links/courses/Motor_contributions_2009/Bibliography/Icoboni%202009.pdf
* http://web.mit.edu/achawla/OldFiles/MacData/afs.course.lockers/other/hst.722/www/Topics/Speech/IacoboniDapretto2005.pdf
* http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pbio.0030079

...but some other may agree (and worst, may be right to do so )
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2773693/

Rhody appeared to be alluding to a morphic resonance interpretation of mirror neurons here. Out of hand and over the event horizon .

Don't know, I did not understand what Rodhy were alluding to. Let's agree to give him the opportunity to clarify his questionnement before making such jugement.

 

[apeiron]

In two words: how do you detect the same thing from a camera and from proprioceptors?

This kind of cross modal processing is basic to the brain, so not a mystery. For example the McGurk effect. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McGurk_effect

The mirror neuron bandwagon just irritates me because it was blown out of all proportion by people thinking it was the missing evolutionary link between animal awareness and human self-awareness.

As an example of cross modal processing and anticipation driven cognition, it is interesting, complex and worth studying. But it is not something mysterious, and definitely the wrong way to ask the question about human self-awareness. Social psychology answers THAT more than adequately (cf: Vygotsky, Mead, etc).

There is no surprise that brain is able to do this. What is surprising is that the brain is using the same neurons (or, more cautiously, the same cortical areas) both for acting and understanding. We would never have designed a robot this way, which is a reason to think there is an important underlying principle that we did not discover yet.

I agree that the way people build robots and other sequential input-output devices has been about the main roadblock in theoretical thinking. But anyone who takes an anticipation based approach does not think that way. Which is why mirror neurons were not surprising even on that level.

Self-consciousness as a a by product of understanding social interaction, how cute is this idea?

Not just interaction. Active social construction, scaffolded by language.

 

[rhody]

There is no surprise that brain is able to do this. What is surprising is that the brain is using the same neurons (or, more cautiously, the same cortical areas) both for acting and understanding. We would never have designed a robot this way, which is a reason to think there is an important underlying principle that we did not discover yet.

Liveo,

I did a quick scan of your links to papers in https://www.physicsforums.com/showpost.php?p=3054234&postcount=23", and I have read many more papers that had an excruciating level of detail and analysis that these papers lack. Some of them on synesthesia, I literally had to read 5 or 6 times, redlining as I went to get an inkling of the measurement's etc... The list of referred to research in those papers was much deeper as well. A quick scan of Ramachandran's co-authored papers seem light weight in comparison. So, although not a trained neurologist, I am intelligent enough to see where other author's works and evolving principles are referred to, whereas Ramachandran's work seems to lack depth in comparison.

Perhaps what is needed is for a trained neurologist team combined with mathematical physicists to brain storm some of these subjects where understanding the underlying observation defies current knowledge and to propose concepts that fit the observed, even if the concepts they propose defies conventional theory. A good example is how it took almost 70 years and the work of Dr Merzenich to prove once and for all that the localization theory of the human brain as an infant and as an adult was 100% WRONG, plasticity was the correct model all the time. And I dare propose that even this concept will be open to modification and possible replacement by the next series of experiments and discoveries that have yet to be imagined and tested.

Aperion,

The ability to anticipate is basic to the brain's design.

That is not entirely true in infants, many of these functions are dedicated to the pre-frontal cortex, and until they begin to develop, starting around age 5 or so are not present and they do not fully mature in adults until their mid 20's. Until a toddler recognizes that he or she has intention and is conscious in the world, planning and anticipation is not possible.

Damage to the this area can result in an individual not being able to anticipate subtle input from others, and can lead to an individual gradually withdrawing from social interaction with others. Some of this background came from another book, "http://books.google.com/books?id=U6...=2&sqi=2&ved=0CC0Q6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q&f=false"", by Rita Carter, a science and medical writer in the UK.

I like her style, she relates to the educated layman in a way that is easy to follow, and the artwork in the book is superb, she obviously has artistic talent, she has a section on mirror neurons in her book and suggests among other things that the areas in the brain in which touch and vision of touch have "overlap" or mirror areas. In an experiment, with the same setting, and a plate of cookies is untouched and another has been partially eaten, and each had a hand close by to lift a coffee cup, full of coffee with the full plate of cookies and partially empty with the cookies half eaten, in each case the person lifted the coffee cup and the actions of the observer of the action was recorded. The neurons activated in each case in the frontal cortex suggest that mirror neurons give an "automatic understanding" of the person lifting the coffee cups intentions. There are some other interesting observations that I will get into once I read and re-read this chapter. Hopefully in a straightforward and pithy manner, hehe.

Rhody...

 

[Lievo]

This kind of cross modal processing is basic to the brain, so not a mystery.

I can't sort out whether we disagree on what is a mystery, or on mirror neurons. I see how one can train a backprop neural net to evidence a McGurke-like effect. Don't know if someone tried, but if it works then I'd agree this is not a mystery. But mirror neurons-like effect? If you think this is not a mystery, please explain how you would do that.

The mirror neuron bandwagon just irritates me because it was blown out of all proportion by people thinking it was the missing evolutionary link between animal awareness and human self-awareness.

Can you give a (scientific) reference of someone making this claim? I would be quite surprised, given that to date these neurons has been found only in non human primates.

about human self-awareness. Social psychology answers THAT more than adequately (cf: Vygotsky, Mead, etc).

I don't remember any claim by Vygotsky having solved this problem, although I did not read so much by him and nothing by Mead. Could you say a word about this?

But anyone who takes an anticipation based approach does not think that way. Which is why mirror neurons were not surprising even on that level.

I doubt you'll find anyone predicting this, but my mind is open. Who are these guys that have predicted mirror neurons? If this claim has come only after the discovery... well... predicting the past is not so difficult...

Not just interaction. Active social construction, scaffolded by language.

Here you're assuming that self-awarness is specific to human, don't you?

 

[Lievo]

I literally had to read 5 or 6 times, redlining as I went to get an inkling of the measurement's etc...

You can ask

it took almost 70 years and the work of Dr Merzenich to prove once and for all that the localization theory of the human brain as an infant and as an adult was 100% WRONG, plasticity was the correct model all the time.

A great and prolific researcher, but for this I would credit Hebb, Mountcastle, Hubel & Wiesel... sorry I realize no one care

 

[apeiron]

Can you give a (scientific) reference of someone making this claim? I would be quite surprised, given that to date these neurons has been found only in non human primates.

I thought we were discussing Ramachandran - http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/ramachandran/ramachandran_p1.html

And many fMRI "mirror neuron" studies have been done in humans. ( Iacoboni, Marco; Woods, Roger P.; Brass, Marcel; Bekkering, Harold; Mazziotta, John C.; Rizzolatti, Giacomo (1999). "Cortical Mechanisms of Human Imitation". Science 286 )

I don't remember any claim by Vygotsky having solved this problem, although I did not read so much by him and nothing by Mead. Could you say a word about this?

Not hard to find the material yourself if you are actually interested. If you have indeed read Vygotsky, you will have found him pretty clear about the sociocultural basis of human "higher" mental functions.

 

[Lievo]

Can you give a (scientific) reference of someone making this claim?

http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/rama...andran_p1.html

It's not a peer-reviewed reference, but let's have a look at it:

Mirror neurons obviously cannot be the only answer to all these riddles of evolution. After all rhesus monkeys and apes have them, yet they lack the cultural sophistication of humans

...that's not the claim that made you upset, is it?

Iacoboni, Marco; Woods, Roger P.; Brass, Marcel; Bekkering, Harold; Mazziotta, John C.; Rizzolatti, Giacomo

To my best knowledge, none of these guys have ever pretend that mirror neurons were the missing evolutionary link between animal awareness and human self-awareness, or if they did that was not in a peer-reviewed (scientific) paper.

Not hard to find the material yourself if you are actually interested.

To my average knowledge, Vygotsky said very little about self-awareness, none of which being still of interest. I'll take the fact you can't find any interesting writings to link as a confirmation you were just bullgarbageing.

 

[apeiron]

I'll take the fact you can't find any interesting writings to link as a confirmation you were just bullgarbageing.

It is more that I don't yet see a reason to be doing your homework for you. This is a subject I've written books and papers on. So I'll wait until you make more substantial points before directing you to specific references that might be of interest.

 

[apeiron]

...that's not the claim that made you upset, is it?...To my best knowledge, none of these guys have ever pretend that mirror neurons were the missing evolutionary link between animal awareness and human self-awareness...

I presume you are just selectively quoting and in fact read all the way to the end. But just in case...

Based on this analogy I suggest, further, that even the first great leap forward was made possible largely by imitation and emulation. Wallace's question was perfectly sensible; it is very puzzling how a set of extraordinary abilities seemed to emerge "out of the blue". But his solution was wrong...the apparently sudden emergence of things like art or sophisticated tools was not because of God or "divine intervention". I would argue instead that just as a single invention (or two) by Galileo and Gutenberg quickly spread and transformed the surface of the globe (although there was no preceding genetic change), inventions like fire, tailored clothes, "symmetrical tools", and art, etc. may have fortuitously emerged in a single place and then spread very quickly.

Such inventions may have been made by earlier hominids too (even chimps and orangs are remarkably inventive...who knows how inventive Homo Erectus or Neandertals were) but early hominids simply may not have had an advanced enough mirror neuron system to allow a rapid transmission and dissemination of ideas. So the ideas quickly drop out of the "meme pool". This system of cells, once it became sophisticated enough to be harnessed for "training" in tool use and for reading other hominids minds, may have played the same pivotal role in the emergence of human consciousness (and replacement of Neandertals by Homo Sapiens) as the asteroid impact did in the triumph of mammals over reptiles.
So it makes no more sense to ask "Why did sophisticated tool use and art emerge only 40,000 years ago even though the brain had all the required latent ability 100,000 years earlier?" — than to ask "Why did space travel occur only a few decades ago, even though our brains were preadapted for space travel at least as far back Cro Magnons?". The question ignores the important role of contingency or plain old luck in human evolutionary history.

So to be clear, I see mirror neurons as no particular big deal in a social animal. Or even in terms of neurological design.

And to try to explain homo sapiens' "big bang" based on a theory of imitative capacity is weak when there is already ample evidence to support a Vygotskean approach.

Mirror neurons were hyped because they fitted in with Dawkin/Blackmore's memetics, the Theory of Mind module, and other fellow-travellers of the late 1990s evopsych bandwagon.

 

[Pythagorean]

mirror neurons are interesting, they were not intuitive to me when I first heard about them. I certainly don't agree with Ramachandran's sentiments that apeiron emphasized above. That makes it sound, to me, like humans developed consciousness independently from their ancestors.

This seems kind of silly to me. It seems more natural that consciousness "evolved" along with all of the other more tangible mutations, gradually leading up to what we call a human being today. Even single cells have mechanisms for communicating with other cells; to me, it would be interesting to see if cells have similar molecular networks that operate on the same basis as mirror neurons (performance and perception sharing the same molecular circuits).

But we still don't know the complete story about information flow in biological networks, so that action and perception of actions share the same clump of matter doesn't tell anything about whether they share the same dynamics.

But Vygotsky seems to have this issue too, separating man from animals, from what I've read so far (Tool and symbol in childhood development). He speaks of human children having the imagination, using a stick as a horse. Coincidentally, I have recently posted in the biology forum, an article about young female chimps pretending sticks were their babies/kin.

But honestly, apeiron, I'm looking for a needle in a haystack trying to guess what your implication was about Vygotsky. I would have to spend a lot of time digging. I don't think that's really fair to expect people to take your word for it. If you have a concise idea of what you're thinking, why not just come out with it explicitly instead of letting people coincidentally find some kind of vague resemblance of the topic?

 

[Lievo]

I presume you are just selectively quoting and in fact read all the way to the end.

No, I just went through this popularization paper until I found the cautious statement that I was thinking enough to rebut your concerns. Obviously I should have finish the reading, as the end just contredicts the cautious statement I had referred to.

Mirror neurons were hyped because they fitted in with Dawkin/Blackmore's memetics, the Theory of Mind module, and other fellow-travellers of the late 1990s evopsych bandwagon.

Now I understand how you came to this opinion. I won't defend Ramanchandran's view here, and can understand the upset part. I will just make you notice that it is the view of a single one, published in a pop science journal so that a certain amount of bullgarbageing is to be expected, and, more importantly, that's certainly not the view that led many scientists to be interested in mirror neurons.

there is already ample evidence to support a Vygotskean approach.

For the human specificity, or for self-awarness as we were discussing earlier? You may state that idea for an understanding of the human specificity, but if you want to explain self-awarness using Vygotskean approach, you'll have to pretend that self-awarness is specific to humans. It was maybe possible to think that at Vygotsky time, but not now. That's why I said earlier that all Vygostkean's views regarding self-awarness are simply outdated. Of course, if there is a hidden jewel that can escape this critic, I'll be glad to hear it. But no, I won't trust your word up to consider my homework is to search for something that has all reasons not to exit in the first place.