Neural activity probes your physical surroundings to select just the information needed to survive and flourish
As a young course instructor in seminars for medical students, I faithfully taught neurophysiology by the book, enthusiastically explaining how the brain perceives the world and controls the body. Sensory stimuli from the eyes, ears, and such are converted to electrical signals and then transmitted to the relevant parts of the sensory cortex that process these inputs and induce perception.
The challenge for me and other neuroscientists involves the weighty question of what, exactly, is the mind. Ever since the time of Aristotle, thinkers have assumed that the soul or the mind is initially a blank slate, a tabula rasa on which experiences are painted. This view has influenced thinking in Christian and Persian philosophies, British empiricism and Marxist doctrine. In the past century it has also permeated psychology and cognitive science.
An implicit practical implication of the outside-in framework is that the next frontier for progress in contemporary neuroscience should be to find where the putative central processor resides in the brain and systematically elaborate the neuronal mechanisms of decision-making. Indeed, the physiology of decision-making has become one of the most popular focuses in contemporary neuroscience.
We learn that sticks that look bent in water are not broken by moving them. Similarly, the distance between two trees and two mountain peaks may appear identical, but by moving around and shifting our perspective we learn the difference. This corollary message provides the second opinion sensory circuits need for grounding—a confirmation that “my own action is the agent of change.” Similar corollary messages are sent to the rest of the brain when a person takes actions to investigate the flower and its relationship to oneself and other objects.
To understand the matching process, we need to examine the advantages and constraints brain dynamics impose on experience. In its basic version, models of blank slate neuronal networks assume a collection of largely similar, randomly connected neurons. The presumption is that brain circuits are highly plastic and that any arbitrary input can alter the activity of neuronal circuits. We can see the fallacy of this approach by considering an example from the field of artificial intelligence.
Both rich and poor clubs are important for maintaining brain dynamics. Members of the ever ready rich club fire similarly in response to diverse experiences. They offer fast, good-enough solutions under most conditions. We can make good guesses about the unknown not because we remember it but because our brains always make a surmise about a new, unfamiliar event. Nothing is completely novel to the brain because it always relates the new to the old. It generalizes.
Let me offer an example of such a disengaged mode of brain operation from our work on the brain's temporal lobe, an area that includes the hippocampus, the nearby entorhinal cortex and related structures involved with multiple aspects of navigation . Fifteen years ago my lab set about to explore the mechanisms of spatial navigation and memory in the hippocampus to contrast the outside-in and inside-out frameworks. In 2008 Eva Pastalkova, a postdoctoral fellow, and I trained rats to alternate between the left and right arms of a maze to find water.
These experiments lead us to the idea that the neuronal algorithms that we can use to walk to the supermarket govern internalized mental travel. Disengaged navigation takes us through the series of events that make up personal recollections, known as episodic memories.
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