Amerika

A few things of note that may have slipped past your brain as it was inundated by a flood of failure of democracy news, bankruptcy of socialist entitlements news, and the ever-popular “people are insane and entitled” news.

First, a riff on sleep from scientists interested in the big questions:

According to a new study, however, sleep seems to help us process not just past memories, but also future ones. In addition to consolidating and conserving memories while we sleep, the study suggests our brains are also actively preparing us to record upcoming events.

The results highlighted two parallel processes unfolding in post-learning slumber. First, engram cells that initially encoded a memory showed predictable reactivation patterns, part of the brain’s well-documented procedure for consolidating memories during sleep.

The study also revealed another interesting population of neurons, which weren’t yet associated with specific memories. These “engram-to-be cells,” as the researchers call them, grew increasingly synchronized as mice slept after learning. Later, the same neuron groups went on to encode new, different memories.

Maybe like emotions, sleep is a different form of logic.

We think forward, so we dream forward, as if our brains are preparing for the possibilities ahead.

Perhaps the most insightful among us do this consciously with meditation or just thinking with focus on the topic instead of being constantly distracted by internet video and shopping like everyone else.

What this tells us however is that the brain works very hard, like an editor, to index and organize all of our thoughts. The big work occurs after the conscious mind has made decisions and the new data needs to be knitted into an already complex library of conclusions and observations.

Similarly we are finding that as Schopenhauer suggested, music represents pure neural impulse, and can condition it:

According to neural resonance theory, it’s not just that we learn to expect and predict what’s coming; aspects like harmony in the music we make and enjoy sound so good to us because they’re in sync with the brain’s resonant patterns.

One of the key suggestions of NRT is that neural oscillations synchronize with external audio at different rates. On the slower end of the timescale is what we call rhythm, with distinct beats you can dance or bang a drum to. Neurons in the cortex oscillate at frequencies that resonate with those pulses in the music.

Higher frequencies, from about 30 to over 4,000 Hertz, are perceived as pitch. Gamma-frequency oscillations in the cortex sync up with the lower end of that, while the auditory nerve, brain stem, and cochlea resonate at the higher pitches.

All music is rhythm; at higher levels, this is pitch, and lower, the change of notes. Our brains assemble structures from these that resemble parts of our reality or thoughts, and so they “resonate” with us, elaborating on our experience like dreams.

It turns out that experience shapes our brains. For example overwork rewires us into becoming little worker bees:

[S]pending too much time on the job can lead to significant changes in neurological structure.

According to a team of researchers from the Republic of Korea, those changes are in brain areas linked to our ability to plan, organize, and perform tasks; working memory; and managing our emotions.

While the method used in the study can’t distinguish cause from effect, it’s a concern that there could be some kind of association between working long hours and brain health.

What you spend time on, your brain adapts to. What you tolerate, you get more of. As something becomes more prominent, it runs out of spaces to conquer and becomes focused on removing everything but itself. As work takes over your brain, it squeezes out everything else.

This explains why Boomers treated their children like coworkers, subordinates, contractors, or people behind the counter at Starbucks (Boomers love Starbucks).

It also shows us how people become gradually enstupidated over time. At jobs, you have to do a lot of little tasks and not look at the big picture or whole vision of anything, and so you become a clerk, specializing in details and oblivious to consequences.

This mentality spreads like a disease and results in brain entropy. It rewards thintelligence but punishes holistic and cause-effect thinking.

Reliance on recall of details can influence the energy profile of the brain:

As Hopfield envisioned, it helps to conceptualize memory retrieval in terms of an energy landscape, in which the valleys are energy minima that represent memories. Memory retrieval is like exploring this landscape; recognition is when you fall into one of the valleys. Your starting position in the landscape is your initial condition.

The researchers’ Input-Driven Plasticity (IDP) model aims to address this lack of clarity with a mechanism that gradually integrates past and new information, guiding the memory retrieval process to the correct memory. Instead of applying the two-step algorithmic memory retrieval on the rather static energy landscape of the original Hopfield network model, the researchers describe a dynamic, input-driven mechanism.

“We advocate for the idea that as the stimulus from the external world is received (e.g., the image of the cat tail), it changes the energy landscape at the same time,” Bullo said. “The stimulus simplifies the energy landscape so that no matter what your initial position, you will roll down to the correct memory of the cat.” Additionally, the researchers say, the IDP model is robust to noise — situations where the input is vague, ambiguous, or partially obscured — and in fact uses the noise as a means to filter out less stable memories (the shallower valleys of this energy landscape) in favor of the more stable ones.

When the energy cycle of your brain depends on certain operations, it optimizes for those, which makes anything else proportionately more difficult. The brain suffers from repetition and a desire for power.

This in turn creates a kind of intellectual heat-death which precludes thinking:

“Nevertheless,” continued Callisto, “he found in entropy or the measure of disorganization for a closed system an adequate metaphor to apply to a certain phenomena in his own world. He saw, for example, the younger generation responding to Madison Avenue with the same spleen his own had once reserved for Wall Street: and in American ‘consumerism’ discovered a similar tendency from the least to most probable, from differentiation to sameness, from ordered individuality to a kind of chaos. He found himself, in short, restating Gibbs’ prediction in social terms, and envisioned a heat-death for his culture in which ideas, like heat-energy, would no longer be transferred, since each point in it would ultimately have the same quantity of energy; and intellectual motion would, accordingly, cease.” — Thomas Pynchon, “Entropy,” Slow Learner

The brain is our final frontier, but we are treating it like a subordinate instead of something which needs nurturing in its own right, and as a result, we are weakening ourselves into automatons.

Tags: dreams, jobs, music, neurology, sleep, thintelligence