BS: Neuroscience-how your brain really works

Subject: BS: Neuroscience-how your brain reaaly works
From: Donuel
Date: 02 Jan 23 - 01:32 AM

While psychologists observe behaviors and choices Neuroscience looks at how the brain processes. Some people think that the way they think is generally shared by most people but we are wired differently in innumerable ways. Our motor functions may have a dominant right side or left. We tend to have a dominant eye. Some of us use language over mental images. Some of us do not even think in mental images at all. We even may have mental images of concepts that may appear as squeezing a balloon and having an effect elsewhere or other unique images.. an alternative may be only in language interpretation. A savant may use biarre symbols in ways even they can not explain.

The biggest myth about the brain is that we use only 10% but in reality we are most often using all of our brains. Another inaccuracy is that the right brain is all subjective/creative and the left is all analytical and computational. The truth is that research was from studying people who had their corpus callosum cut separating the left brain from the right hemisphere. For those of us with intact callosum, there is exchange and interaction that can use either or both sides for subjective or objective tasks although language is a left-centered activity for men.
A lop-sided brain activity is not a bad thing and merely indicates where strengths may be.

New data indicates that coding in Python is done best by those with stronger language skills and bilinguals than those with advanced math skill. This is the opposite of what was previously believed. Serotonin and its calming complement dopamine have different balances in all of us and accounts for varying degrees in competitiveness and factors like introvert and extrovert behaviors.

With 86 billion neurons and even more connections, the differences in how we use them is profound even in the high speed white nerve bundles.

sources: NIH education, Adam Grant and numerous researchers.



;

Subject: RE: BS: Neuroscience-how your brain reaaly works
From: Senoufou
Date: 02 Jan 23 - 02:54 AM

This is interesting Donuel. As a retired teacher, I have many memories of pupils with very different brain activity - some more gifted in language use, others analytical and tending towards the sciences, some disinclined to learn or pay attention to academical subjects. I expect we are all different in our brain function, and this probably affects our characters too.
The brain is an extremely complex and fascinating organ isn't it?

Subject: RE: BS: Neuroscience-how your brain reaaly works
From: Donuel
Date: 02 Jan 23 - 07:44 AM

It reaaly is... even when it doesn't work.

I am right handed, left eye dominant, right brained, poor in verbal speech but fine in writing. I have very early memory which is rare.

Damage a small area and we could lose speech, short term memory, or other amazing functions. Change the brain and you change the person.

Subject: RE: BS: Neuroscience-how your brain reaaly works
From: Steve Shaw
Date: 02 Jan 23 - 09:03 AM

"fine in writing"

?

Subject: RE: BS: Neuroscience-how your brain reaaly works
From: Donuel
Date: 02 Jan 23 - 09:55 AM

I would say it is better than or easier than verbal speech.

Subject: RE: BS: Neuroscience-how your brain really works
From: Helen
Date: 02 Jan 23 - 01:49 PM

As a dyslexic, I am better at writing than speech, and I can proofread what I write, but saying something aloud is harder to "proofread". As soon as I misspeak I realise I have done it and correct it, but it's difficult to stop myself saying the wrong words sometimes.

The numbers 5 and 2 are my biggest downfall because they look the same to my brain if they are mirror imaged vertically, i.e. flip them vertically. That problem occurs if I am copying and typing something, too.

Subject: RE: BS: Neuroscience-how your brain really works
From: Steve Shaw
Date: 02 Jan 23 - 03:15 PM

As a southpaw I'm fine with screwing in (or out) screws that are directly in front of me, but if the screw is underneath (like those wing nut ones under toilet seats) or to one side I'm all at sea, scared to death of overtightening something that I'm supposed to be loosening (yes I know the saying so no need to quote it - it still doesn't work). And don't get me started on left-handed threads such as the ones on my barbecue gas cylinders. Scissors and nail clippers are a complete nightmare. I'm in a repressed minority.

I'm a confirmed left-hander in almost everything, but I use a knife and fork like right-handers (though not a spoon) and I kick a football with my right foot. No-one ever forced these things on me.

Subject: RE: BS: Neuroscience-how your brain really works
From: Donuel
Date: 02 Jan 23 - 08:28 PM

I have classic dyslexia so I can watch TV in the mirror and still read the subtitles. In the mirror American cars drive like in the UK and visa versa. I'm good at geometry and bad at algebra. As a kid I invented my own language with letters and all.
Helen take heart that Leonardo Da Vinci was clearly dyslexic. We all look basically the same and symmetrical from the outside, but on the inside, we are not symmetrical and neurally very different.

Subject: RE: BS: Neuroscience-how your brain really works
From: Donuel
Date: 03 Jan 23 - 05:09 PM

If the heart flat lines and the brain has no electrical activity then it is impossible to be conscious yet this is when people have a near death experience and tell us about them after they return to life.
I guess we don't know everything.

Subject: RE: BS: Neuroscience-how your brain really works
From: Steve Shaw
Date: 03 Jan 23 - 05:51 PM

Leonardo was not "clearly dyslexic" at all. He wrote backwards, which is not dyslexic. We lefties would love to write backwards as, otherwise, we smear what we've just written. Also, he wrote forwards in natural fashion when he wrote to friends. As for "near-death experiences," it's all one hundred percent unprovable claims and nil percent evidence. Unless you can demonstrate otherwise. Which I know you can't.

Subject: RE: BS: Neuroscience-how your brain really works
From: Steve Shaw
Date: 03 Jan 23 - 06:23 PM

And I wholeheartedly agree that we don't know everything. The problem there is that the gaps in our knowledge are vulnerable to being filled in by imagination, flights of fancy and sheer speculation. Anything that doesn't require evidence. In the realm of religion, we call that filling-in "the God Of The Gaps," whereby anything you can't instantly explain via science is "explained" via mysticism (often expressed in obscure ways not intended to be understood by we non-cognoscenti) or resort to the unexplainable supernatural.

Near-death experiences and precognition are prime areas for this distortion of science to prevail...

Subject: RE: BS: Neuroscience-how your brain really works
From: Helen
Date: 03 Jan 23 - 06:31 PM

Thomas Jefferson University article

Was Leonardo Da Vinci’s Dyslexia Responsible for His Brilliance?

Subject: RE: BS: Neuroscience-how your brain really works
From: Dave the Gnome
Date: 03 Jan 23 - 06:52 PM

Full of the usual weasel words

“Dyslexia is probably one of the things that made da Vinci so creative, made him Leonardo,”

"Yet, the possibility that da Vinci might have been dyslexic"

"The possibility that da Vinci had dyslexia, which we can never truly know of course, illuminates how complex and poorly understood the condition is,”

The latter says it all really. Read it carefully. It says WE CAN NEVER TRULY KNOW OF COURSE. Is that one of the truths you are seeking Donuel?

It is fun to theorise and speculate but to package those theories as facts is simply conning your audience. Something that priests, immams and fakirs have done for centuries.

People don't need to be psychic or dyslexic to be special. Just be yourselves and your friends will still love you. Stop looking for things to make you out of the ordinary and be happy in your own skin!

Subject: RE: BS: Neuroscience-how your brain really works
From: Steve Shaw
Date: 03 Jan 23 - 07:17 PM

It's amazing that supposedly scholarly articles can refer to Leonardo as "Da Vinci." This is egregiously and risibly so wrong, folks!

You can google "was Leonardo dyslexic" and you'll get as many answers as there are days in the month. Of course, if you find one that contradicts poor ould Steve, well whack it up here!

This is not the place, but there's a half-decent argument that dyslexia isn't actually a real thing. I won't make that argument myself, but I do know as a secondary schoolteacher that "dyslexia" is widely used by parents of rather reluctant-to-learn teenagers as a get-out-of-jail card...

Subject: RE: BS: Neuroscience-how your brain really works
From: Donuel
Date: 03 Jan 23 - 08:15 PM

I was so wary of posting anything about a near death experience since Steve might conceivably have a stroke. You see, the subject can lead to mediums and spirits and a Dave friendly magic of consciousness beyond the brain. His urge to deny other people's experiences is palpable.
The subjects of ghosts and fairies is so British but it might risk a heart attack. "Might I get Master an aspirin? A Port, very good sir."

Those that have had near death experiences seem more sincere than ghost spotters.

Did Vinci have dyslexia or drain bamage?

Subject: RE: BS: Neuroscience-how your brain really works
From: Steve Shaw
Date: 03 Jan 23 - 08:30 PM

"Those that have had near death experiences seem more sincere than ghost spotters."

You missed out the word "alleged." And it looks like "seems sincere" is good enough for science!

Subject: RE: BS: Neuroscience-how your brain really works
From: Donuel
Date: 03 Jan 23 - 10:06 PM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fDzXbdxeeHI

Subject: RE: BS: Neuroscience-how your brain really works
From: Steve Shaw
Date: 04 Jan 23 - 06:01 AM

I have no urge to deny other people's experiences. I do have the urge to ask them, every time, whether they are being truthful with me and with themselves. That's a perfectly legitimate challenge in the face of claims that can't currently be supported by science. There are plenty of people around who rather like to set themselves apart by claiming special powers or mystical experiences. That can sometimes arise because they feel that they are simply one in a crowd, which makes them somehow feel inadequate, so they have to come up with something to make them stand out as a bit special. Fátima and Lourdes, anyone?

Subject: RE: BS: Neuroscience-how your brain really works
From: Donuel
Date: 04 Jan 23 - 10:34 AM

I accept the fact that many people are broken while most are merely damaged, present company included. Accepting exclusively the truth, will leave you in a world of eternal betrayal and bitterness. That may even include current accepted scientific beliefs. You sound like a person who was hurt by a lie. Well get in line, by that standard we all could be disillusioned for life. Its healthy to be flexible and get over it. I had a therapeutic PHS catch phrase for the betrayed. "Let Go".

Subject: RE: BS: Neuroscience-how your brain really works
From: Steve Shaw
Date: 04 Jan 23 - 11:38 AM

You're confusing eternal betrayal and bitterness with healthy scepticism. You certainly follow your own code of flexibility, that's for sure. You're flexible with facts and flexible with science in ways that would have the average scientist scratching his or her head. And thanks for the advice, though I should tell you that I've never been hurt by a lie.

Subject: RE: BS: Neuroscience-how your brain really works
From: Donuel
Date: 04 Jan 23 - 12:02 PM

You would think you are healthy, but believe me, you are no paragon of perfection.
There are times when studying prior to complete understanding where one only has it half right in all works of progress. The incessant claim of 'liar liar pants on fire' is both bizarre and antithetical to the teaching profession. You my dear boy are more than damaged. Bounding each of my posts with yours like book covers is frankly ill-mannered and compulsive and has nothing to do with expanding ideas. Something is wrong with you that even you can not/will not explain.

Subject: RE: BS: Neuroscience-how your brain really works
From: Steve Shaw
Date: 04 Jan 23 - 01:59 PM

Yeah, what's wrong is that I'm not laughing at you hard enough.

Subject: RE: BS: Neuroscience-how your brain really works
From: Donuel
Date: 04 Jan 23 - 03:12 PM

Yes, it is primarily me you laugh at. I am a survivor which makes me a witness to far more than you seem capable of imagining. It has been a privilege to have 40 years undistracted by an unimportant job with the freedom to think and learn. I have had time to change my mind time and again. You will never change your mind or even have the capability of change. You seem to think I am your competition. I am not.

Like the simple advantage of homo sapiens over Neanderthals, I have the ability to go farther on less than my stocky ancestor with a wider scope of thought and expression.

Now back to the brain...Ever since my middle school sci project 'The electrical brain' with my realistic model of the brain and electrical stimulation of actual muscles I have continued to follow new pathways of communication in the brain beyond electricity. Hormonal, photon, chemical, micro tubuals and others. The secrets of the hypothalamus and the amygdala have been opened. Yet the reason for a symmetrical mirroring of the functions of the brain (top to bottom, left to right) is unanswered.

Subject: RE: BS: Neuroscience-how your brain really works
From: Donuel
Date: 04 Jan 23 - 03:17 PM

Only hearing is processed on the same side. Mostly.

Subject: RE: BS: Neuroscience-how your brain really works
From: Steve Shaw
Date: 04 Jan 23 - 04:41 PM

You've got an ego bigger than my arse, that's for sure.

Subject: RE: BS: Neuroscience-how your brain really works
From: Donuel
Date: 04 Jan 23 - 07:59 PM

For the curious; https://www.sciencedaily.com/news/mind_brain/neuroscience/

Subject: RE: BS: Neuroscience-how your brain really works
From: Steve Shaw
Date: 04 Jan 23 - 08:13 PM

Don't be fooled, dear readers. As Donuel well knows, Science Daily is by no means a proper science website. It deals mostly in press releases and does not indulge in actual journalism very much at all. Not an honest link, old chap...

Subject: RE: BS: Neuroscience-how your brain really works
From: Donuel
Date: 05 Jan 23 - 06:12 AM

Ode to a washed up curmudgeon.

Some things are more than obvious.
There are but two in his audience.
Him and his missus who dismisses
his tired expired licenses
But at night she reminisces
when he imagined his eminence.
Now, only a deluded narcissist.
who thinks he is a scientist.

Subject: RE: BS: Neuroscience-how your brain really works
From: Donuel
Date: 05 Jan 23 - 06:33 AM

You have confused Scientific American with Popular Mechanics again

Subject: RE: BS: Neuroscience-how your brain really works
From: Steve Shaw
Date: 05 Jan 23 - 06:56 AM

Neither Scientific American nor Popular Mechanics have been mentioned anywhere!

And the same post in two threads, eh? Wassermatter, you running out of doggerel?

Subject: RE: BS: Neuroscience-how your brain really works
From: Stilly River Sage
Date: 05 Jan 23 - 11:08 AM

Aggregator sites like Science Daily are a help and a nuisance at the same time. They want to attract eyeballs in order to sell memberships and advertising. They're science click bait. But there is usually enough information in the blurb they let anyone see that you can suss out where the actual science paper has been published and find a way to read it. Google Scholar offers up versions of research that has been stored in university repositories and more.

Subject: RE: BS: Neuroscience-how your brain really works
From: Steve Shaw
Date: 05 Jan 23 - 03:58 PM

It's like choosing the right news source, innit... and probably always better to choose multiple ones. The trouble with science is that potted science is rife in glossy mags. The human race has been doing science since the year dot, and many a wrong path has been chosen. The gold standard is peer-reviewed science that has been done following the scientific process. When some of the stuff we are confronted with here is found wanting, and we mention it, you'd think we were setting out to insult the messenger instead of the potted science...

Subject: RE: BS: Neuroscience-how your brain really works
From: Donuel
Date: 05 Jan 23 - 04:35 PM

Well Steve if you aren't the one man peer review committee for the entire world. Dave asks to keep it simple and dumb it down and Steve wants a Presidential science advisor-certified recommendation.

Subject: RE: BS: Neuroscience-how your brain really works
From: Steve Shaw
Date: 05 Jan 23 - 05:10 PM

Don't be silly.

Subject: RE: BS: Neuroscience-how your brain really works
From: Mr Red
Date: 08 Jan 23 - 07:42 AM

How the brain works?

1) people decide first & justify afterwards. With the aid of the right news sources aka echo chamber.

2) That is because we evolved in a brutal hunter-gatherer world to decide safety and analyse what to do from that position of safety thereafter. It is why we are here to be able to pontificate, as a species to this day.

3) Con men know this to be true.

Subject: RE: BS: Neuroscience-how your brain really works
From: Donuel
Date: 08 Jan 23 - 11:02 AM

In the early days man might face a hungry lion and fight or flight.
Modern man faces employers and has to constipate his anxiety and if he flees he loses his job and food. This makes for a concentrated anxiety that shrinks pretend to water down.

Subject: RE: BS: Neuroscience-how your brain really works
From: Mrrzy
Date: 08 Jan 23 - 11:04 AM

When you come back into your brain you assign meaning to its activity. D'où dreams and near-death experiences. Nothing mystical there.

Subject: RE: BS: Neuroscience-how your brain really works
From: Donuel
Date: 10 Jan 23 - 07:06 AM

We have five senses, 6 if you are into that, after a second all combine for experience in your brain and spinal cord and five times the number of nerve cells in your abdomen than in the spinal cord all speaking to each other.
That experience is nuanced differently in each person. Change one sense like smell and you change the experience.

Subject: RE: BS: Neuroscience-how your brain really works
From: Donuel
Date: 10 Jan 23 - 07:14 AM

The way smell is first processed through the amygdala it influences emotions more than any other sense.

Subject: RE: BS: Neuroscience-how your brain really works
From: MaJoC the Filk
Date: 10 Jan 23 - 05:46 PM

Taste is 90% smell, as Herself found out recently when we both had Covid: "Even chocolate doesn't taste right." It didn't affect me that way to speak of, but then I've got no taste.

For completeness: I read once that it should be at least seven senses: add Balance, and Temperature Discrimination (which is distinct from Touch). I'm also myself in two minds as to whether Pain is distinct from Touch, or is just Touch (and/or Temperature) in overload mode; and some of the hairs involved in sensing Balance have crystals on the ends, so may double up as Which Way Up sensors .... and that's before we get into the controversial area of whether human pheromones still work after all these millions of years.

Subject: RE: BS: Neuroscience-how your brain really works
From: Steve Shaw
Date: 10 Jan 23 - 05:57 PM

"The way smell is first processed through the amygdala it influences emotions more than any other sense."

More than hearing some late Beethoven or seeing nature in all its glory on a spring day? Do tell us more.

Subject: RE: BS: Neuroscience-how your brain really works
From: Donuel
Date: 11 Jan 23 - 02:43 PM

Obama started the brain project at NIH and I am wondering what is coming from it now and if Congress will defund it as revenge.,

Subject: RE: BS: Neuroscience-how your brain really works
From: Donuel
Date: 12 Jan 23 - 12:51 PM

Its not like a lightbulb but the brain makes a biophoton that travels inside the brain https://www.technologyreview.com/2017/09/06/149285/are-there-optical-communication-channels-in-our-brains/
We have grown brain tissue in the lab but the creepiest thing of all is that it also grew tiny eyes.

Subject: RE: BS: Neuroscience-how your brain really works
From: Mrrzy
Date: 13 Jan 23 - 09:32 AM

It isn't that taste is mostly smell, it is that taste and smell are needed to produce FLAVOR.

Try this with an artificial flavor like cherry koolaid: take a breath, take a drink without breathing, you will taste sweetness. Swallow, then exhale. Then, you will get the cherry flavor.

Great book on the natural history of the senses.

Subject: RE: BS: Neuroscience-how your brain really works
From: Steve Shaw
Date: 13 Jan 23 - 11:57 AM

That's why you can't taste food very well with a cold that's blocked up your nose.

Subject: RE: BS: Neuroscience-how your brain really works
From: Stanron
Date: 13 Jan 23 - 01:45 PM

If you can bear it, a few chilli flakes on the tongue will clear a blocked nose. It won't last as long as something like Sudafed but it won't leave you with a worse blocked nose 18 to 24 hours later either. Since I started using chilli flakes in coffee I rarely get a blocked nose now.

Subject: RE: BS: Neuroscience-how your brain really works
From: Donuel
Date: 17 Jan 23 - 10:21 AM

Question time.
1 What is reality?
2 What drives the self, what is the engine of the mind, the mind or the brain?


1 Whatever you believe, perceive or sense the meaning of something to be is your reality. Ergo there are many changeable realities.

2 The brain especially in a cohesive state is the key to endless possibility.

Stroke victims often find that it takes a year to get used to a new brain.

Subject: RE: BS: Neuroscience-how your brain really works
From: Donuel
Date: 17 Jan 23 - 10:59 AM

The engine of the brain is energy. It is older than the Sun. It is as old as the universe itself. The Sun's energy is only equal to 4.5 trillion atomic bombs per second but the universe is far more energetic.
Some life has learned to use the energy of the sun directly but we belong to a different class of life. How we have managed our hunger for energy is a magnificent complex story yet it is a very old story in which our next meal is never guaranteed. Our brain has sought to create more guarantees. We spend energy to protect our energy. Our defenses have now become clever to a fault.

Subject: RE: BS: Neuroscience-how your brain really works
From: Donuel
Date: 17 Jan 23 - 11:09 AM

Energy has but one choice in the universe and that is to be transformed.
Once created it can not be destroyed or so we believe.

Subject: RE: BS: Neuroscience-how your brain really works
From: Steve Shaw
Date: 17 Jan 23 - 11:45 AM

Answer time: if the mind is the engine of the mind (you did give us that choice...), is my car engine the engine of my car?