Background to these pages
This set of interlinked web pages (43 separate pages at the time of writing) has been many years in the making, and all the work has been done by me in my spare time. This page gives some details on the background to that process that may (or may not) be of interest.
- Over more than twenty years from the 1990s onwards, I had read quite a number of books and magazine articles about the workings of the human brain, but most of them covered only one particular area from one particular angle and were quite narrow in their focus. I had hoped that somewhere there must be a coherent overall explanation of how it all worked, but I never found one.
- Books classed as “popular science” quite often discuss new ideas that are interesting, but usually they don’t provide much evidence, so they are mostly speculative.
- Magazine and newspaper articles often report progress being made in various areas, but rarely give many details, and sometimes do not give the references to the research papers they are based on1.
- In following up references that were given in books and articles, I discovered how easy it often is nowadays to access scientific research papers online.
- In the 20th century, the only real way of accessing these would have been via big libraries, particularly in universities, but online access is now so much easier.
- A useful summary of online resources is on the “Science Buddies” page on
Resources for Finding and Accessing Scientific Papers.
- There have been, and probably will continue to be, a number of places on the Internet where research papers have been made available online without the publishers’ permission. However, publishers or trade organisations have sometimes taken action against these sites, so I do not allow download of any source documents that
are in my possession.
- I first noticed in an article in 2005 the curious term “grandmother cell” to refer to a hypothetical neuron that represented a concept in the brain.
- A section of my page on symbol schemas gives details of the article and the rather strange conclusions drawn from it in the popular press.
- Some years later it seemed to me that, although the existence of structures in the brain that represent concepts had been proved beyond reasonable doubt, very few people were following up what this meant, how they were created, and how they were used.
- I have always felt that the best way for me to really understand a subject is to write down my understanding in such a way that I can explain it to other people if necessary.
- In my professional career, I was always quite good at making summaries of technical subjects in a structured form to present to other people, who were perhaps less technical, or at least were unfamiliar with the areas I was talking about.
- In my private life outside work, I created a number of resources that attempted to explain complex subjects in a straightforward and structured way, usually either on PowerPoint slides or on web pages.
- I started writing up my thoughts about how the human brain worked in 2016, initially in a Microsoft Word document, and started moving these ideas to a small set of web pages in early 2018.
- Initially, there was a hierarchical structure with just two levels of detail.
- The additional levels of description were added in 2019, see structure of this website.
- As I read more detailed book and articles, I discovered how strange some research papers are.
- Many use jargon and technical ways of writing that seem to try to exclude those who do not work in that immediate field.
This is particularly true in the area of philosophy, but also sometimes in the area of
neuroscience2.
- Other papers use such imprecise and vague language that it is difficult to decipher what is actually being said.
Others seem to be trapped in working with data they have without being aware of what they are actually dealing with,
resulting in claims that seem to be total nonsense3.
- In the past, perhaps before 2000, it was clear that psychologists, philosophers and neuroscientists worked in different fields, spoke different languages and hardly ever communicated with each other. The situation is better now, but still there are some obvious gulfs, particularly in the terminology used.
- As I looked into some areas in more detail, I discovered a number of areas that had some very convincing arguments but which did not seem to have been publicised much outside their own very tight-knit areas; and some other areas that were clearly dead-ends and appeared amazingly naive. Other areas used many different words for what appeared to be the same things, and I looked in vain for reviews that pulled them together.
- I read about the Attention Schema Theory by Michael Graziano in 2020 and realised that it was the most convincing explanation of consciousness that I had come across, but also that it seemed incomplete. It proposed that self-awareness is a model or schema of attention.
- The theory was very convincing with respect to how self-awareness might arise, but did not seem to acknowledge that
consciousness is a lot more than just self-awareness.
- In 2021 I realised that, if self-awareness is formed by the brain creating a model of attention, but that there are other
aspects to consciousness that are also models of other brain processes, then what I call “I”, my very soul, must
reside in that schema.
At that stage, I had not come across this suggestion anywhere else, which I found very surprising.
- Towards the end of 2022, I discovered that this suggestion was not totally new after all, but that the implications of the idea had not
been taken seriously, with several writers calling the self-symbol an illusion or a mirage, and the idea was certainly not well known.
- In January 2023, I realised that my proposal of afferent processing,
when applied to meta-data from within the brain related to attention, could show how self-awareness might arise.
- The proposal that I am my self symbol schema then implies that
feelings, qualia, emotions, meaning and pain are generated by the self symbol schema and
“felt” inside the schema.
This then raises philosophical questions about what we mean by “feel” anyway.
- The first publication of this set of web pages on the Internet was 1st February 2024.
- Version 1.0 consisted of 41 pages with the pages on sleep and memory yet to be finished.
- There is no index yet.
- There will be updates to a number of pages in the future, it is a “work in progress”.
-
^
Multitasking by Brain Wave - Scientific American magazine May 2016
This is just one example of an article in a much-respected science magazine that gave no reference to the original research on which the article is based (although I found it by chance later, see reference 3 below). The wording of the article caught my attention because of the unusual claims about brain waves (see also details of why brain waves may be a unhelpful area of research on my page about levels of description), but I could not get any more details about what was actually found, or the past research being referred to.
“...past research suggests that when place cells encode spatial memories they produce theta waves, which operate on a relatively slow, long-wave frequency. Yet these theta oscillations do not work alone. They also contain shorter and more frequent gamma rhythms nested within them like folded accordion bellows. As each wave of electrical activity pops up at the gamma frequency, it conveys information nuggets to the interacting theta wave, effectively presenting a highlights reel relative to the longer theta wave.”
-
^
Time-locked multiregional retroactivation: a systems-level proposal for the neural substrates of recall and recognition - Damasio 1989
doi: 10.1016/0010-0277(89)90005-X downloadable here or see
GoogleScholar.
I could have chosen from any number of examples of jargon-laden text, but here is one from some years ago, by someone who is now a well-respected writer of popular science books. To someone in the same field, the meaning of this may be very clear, but to others it is not.
Page 30, last paragraph:
“That the bilateral destruction of those cortices should preclude the perception of reality as a coherent multimodal experience and reduce experience to disjointed, modality-specific tracks of sensory or motor processing to the extent permitted by the single modality association cortices;”
-
^
Spatial Sequence Coding Differs during Slow and Fast Gamma Rhythms in the Hippocampus - Zheng, Bieri, Hsiao and Colgin 2016
doi: 10.1016/j.neuron.2015.12.005
downloadable here or see
GoogleScholar.
This is one of a number of examples of a paper that may contain some useful research, but the summaries in the paper and the various press reviews contain statements that are clearly nonsense.
One press review of this paper is in reference 1 above. Another is in the magazine Newsweek, which published “Brain waves compress memory files”, which is a very strange headline to start with, and said:
“...researchers announced the discovery of a mechanism that compresses information we use for memory retrieval and planning future actions, and encodes that data onto a brain wave frequency that’s separate from the one our brains use to record experiences in real time. This second brain wave frequency is the one we use to play back memories much faster than they actually happened, the researchers found.”
Brain waves of any variety are electrical signals picked up by an EEG machine that show some sort of periodicity, i.e. neuron activity in the area being monitored that has a reasonably regular rhythm at a particular speed, and the fact that (this is a quote from Wikipedia on EEG: “EEG activity therefore always reflects the summation of the synchronous activity of thousands or millions of neurons that have similar spatial orientation. If the cells do not have similar spatial orientation, their ions do not line up and create waves to be detected. ... Because voltage field gradients fall off with the square of distance, activity from deep sources is more difficult to detect than currents near the skull.”
Since there is no known mechanism by which the brain could modulate/encode memory (or any other) data onto a brain wave, or unmodulate/decode from a brain wave, these claims cannot be true. What is actually meant is that EEG results show that the compression is being done at the time a particular brain wave frequency is detected, and played back at a time when a different brain wave frequency is detected. There probably is a correlation, but there is no encoding going on.
Page last uploaded
Wed Jan 31 07:50:27 2024 MST
