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Dr. Bob is Robert Hsiung, MD,
[email protected]Shown: posts 1 to 16 of 16. This is the beginning of the thread.
Posted by Eddie Sylvano on September 22, 2002, at 12:06:31
I'm sure that other people have already postulated this idea, but after experiencing a very mild bit of psychosis last night, it occurred to me that full blown psychosis, such as is seen in schizophrenia, might just be a manifestation of a process that is active in everyone, but is typically highly regulated, and whose function is to generate "new" ideas (or images/music,etc). Being a programmer, I tend to view the brain as being constrained to the same informational limitations as computers. Given that it is simply matter, it isn't imbued with the ability to generate novel information (that which is not an inhernet property of it's structure). I imagine that perhaps the brain simply (like a computer) scans all of it's input for patterns, constantly, and on a subconcious basis. Many of the patterns it "sees" are incorrect (there isn't really a pattern), and these are typically discarded. However, in people with brain anomalies, such as inherent dysfunction (schizophrenia), or drug induced dysfunction, these ideas aren't fully suppressed, and are given relevance by the higher centers of the brain. Precisely because this is unusual, the patterns that result aren't typical (i.e., they are novel). It seems that schizophrenia occurs in a relatively high frequency of people relative to its debilitating features. It's as if evolution has given this flaw a pass, because at a low level, it can serve a useful function in an intelligent, social species.
It's obvious that the typical schizophrenic isn't very utilitarian, however, so I wondered what would govern the gradient of "functionality." There must be an executive, or "logical" center of the brain that allows some such people to evaluate psychotic ideas, and discard incorrect ones (much like a higher order version of the subconcious process). This deferral of the lower order to higher order evaluation would allow more patterns to be evaluated by the individual, with the more "rational" persons being able to successfully recognize quality ideas, and the less rational appearing simply more disorganized (by presenting poor ideas).
As to why some people are more rational, I originally had several ideas, but ultimately found them unsatisfying. It is rationality, however, that I would define as intelligence, and psychosis that I would define as creativity. I suspect that other central building blocks of the brain would be loosely define as gradients of emotion (which supplies motivation/restraint) and activation (which determines the level of overall activity).
Psychotic creativities might also be divided into the specific senses they are genereated from (auditory, visual, verbal, etc), explaining the various fields of creative accomplishment.
Anyway, I was pleased with my ideas, and had to put them in writing. Any thoughts?
Posted by Eddie Sylvano on September 22, 2002, at 12:34:23
In reply to Creativity:psychosis:emotion, posted by Eddie Sylvano on September 22, 2002, at 12:06:31
I realized that I forgot to mention a tidbit about emotion. It seems to me that emotion (in its relation to constant pattern seeking), is an ingrained response table to specific types of patterns, as a way of rewarding or punishing the individual for experiencing them, and thus steering them into productive lines of action, for the species. This table evolved over millions of years, and serves as a good set of general rules to deal with expected patterns (stimuli).
Overall, it seems that mental disorders are, in a sense, the brain tipping its hand on the systems it employs to create our sense of being. It's only when the system's actions are exaggerated by some defect that they become so manifest.
Posted by Mal on September 23, 2002, at 12:11:09
In reply to addendum, posted by Eddie Sylvano on September 22, 2002, at 12:34:23
> I realized that I forgot to mention a tidbit about emotion. It seems to me that emotion (in its relation to constant pattern seeking), is an ingrained response table to specific types of patterns, as a way of rewarding or punishing the individual for experiencing them, and thus steering them into productive lines of action, for the species. This table evolved over millions of years, and serves as a good set of general rules to deal with expected patterns (stimuli).
> Overall, it seems that mental disorders are, in a sense, the brain tipping its hand on the systems it employs to create our sense of being. It's only when the system's actions are exaggerated by some defect that they become so manifest.
>Maybe I am being far too simplistic (as your previous posts were mostly above my head), but do you think this "emotion" part of the brain might be at the root of the biological clock that women (and perhaps men, in a "midlife crisis") experience? Thoughts and emotions spur one to take action to procreate? Interesting concept.
Posted by Eddie Sylvano on September 23, 2002, at 14:52:54
In reply to Re: addendum » Eddie Sylvano, posted by Mal on September 23, 2002, at 12:11:09
>do you think this "emotion" part of the brain might be at the root of the biological clock that women (and perhaps men, in a "midlife crisis") experience? Thoughts and emotions spur one to take action to procreate?
-------------------------I've always been fascinated by the relationship between thoughts and emotions. Which causes which? I've come to think that the situation is mutable, with thoughts causing emotions, and emotions causing thoughts. Ultimately, though, I see things falling back to my previous posting, where emotions are the body's responses to specific stimuli, and in the case of thoughts causing emotions, the referral of the thought to a previous experience which caused emotion.
Say that whenever you experience isolation, you become sad. That's a stimulus-response situation. Now say that something happens in your life to make you *think* that you'll be isolated (you see a pattern that leads you to believe that). Your brain accesses it's emotional link to the experience of isolation, and you become sad.
The weird thing is that people, based on their experiences, create different associations. The response table I referred to in my other post is very general, with a handful of rules to the effect of "be around people. touch people. avoid physical pain." As babies, these simple rules are all we follow. As we advance, however, we begin to assign ever more complex associations between events and those basic emotional rules, but it's all just an elaborate refinement of them.
Much like the rumbling of your stomach tells you to eat, your emotions spur you to fulfill your social/reproductive needs. If it weren't for emotions, why would we ever do anything? What would be the payoff? It's why I'm not concerend about robots or computers becoming really smart and taking over the world (unless they were programmed specifically to do so). Why would they want to? Without emotion there is no sense of motivation, satisfaction, pain, or reason.
The ultimate craziness is that the potential for all of this behavior and diversity of action comes from, essentially, our lowly genetic code.
Posted by Mal on September 23, 2002, at 15:17:17
In reply to Re: addendum, posted by Eddie Sylvano on September 23, 2002, at 14:52:54
Now genetic code- that is so fascinating to me...
I may be missing the point, but I think you'll agree that a person is not a slave to his/her genetic code. For instance, identical twins separated at birth and raised by different families will have different experiences (different data to analyze for patterns) and therefore different associations between emotions and thoughts. [However, twins separated at birth sometimes DO have uncanny similarities in their preferences, talents, etc. I think I have seen a show about it on Discovery Health.]
I think your idea that emotions are the ultimate reward/punishment/motivation is very interesting. And as parents, we try to associate good emotions with safe, productive behavior, and bad emotions (or a little physical discomfort for the proponents of corporal punishment) with dangerous or destructive behavior.
Gosh the people who post here are really brilliant.
Posted by Dinah on September 23, 2002, at 18:49:06
In reply to Re: addendum, posted by Eddie Sylvano on September 23, 2002, at 14:52:54
I've really sometimes wondered about the chicken/egg thought/feeling relationship too. Obviously sometimes thoughts produce feelings but more and more in my life I find that feelings produce thoughts.
I'm officially diagnosed as cyclothymic, and I find that I can experience the same things in different phases of my mood cycles and have completely different cognitive reactions. I'm also pretty good at thinking the "right thing" and believing it, and being rational, while it still has no effect at all on my emotions.
On the other hand, I definitely have triggers that must produce thoughts or beliefs (although darned if I can identify them) that send me crashing into panic or agitation. Rationally it makes no sense to me, but it happens nonetheless. And I look back later and say "What on earth?" Some sort of reptilian brain reaction, no doubt. Do thoughts precede the reaction? None that I'm aware of. So can experiences trigger emotions while bypassing thoughts entirely?
I'm confusing myself.
Posted by Eddie Sylvano on September 24, 2002, at 10:13:08
In reply to Creativity:psychosis:emotion, posted by Eddie Sylvano on September 22, 2002, at 12:06:31
Ok, I've stated that creativity is a product of the brain's constant vigilance in finding patterns in our sensory input and memories (even nonexistant patterns). So why do most of us not experience these interpretations?
The brain is born knowing nothing about how sensory input represents the real world, so it must devise a way to do so. It makes sense to me that (without any road map) it would begin by simply generating many different interpretations of the senses (seeing many different patterns), and then keeping those that (through feedback with other senses) best represent the world. A baby's brain would then be constantly refining itself by forming a bias towards representations that provide the most useful model of the world. If one model fragment showed a soccer ball as a human face, and other senses failed to validate it, it would be whittled away. In this way, we slowly focus in on the real order out of the chaos of our creative brain's many interpretations. This model implies that the brain also has a module that can appreciate what constitutes an accurate interpretation of the world, which I see as constantly comparing the differing sensory patterns for meta-patterns (higher order patterns) that are the most consistant over time.
By the time we are adults, our brains have a highly refined and durable waking preference for sensory patterns, which is only vulnerable to things like heavy drugs or brain damage. The invalid patterns that we highly tune out linger in the background, and may only make themselves known if we attempt to focus on them (think), degrade our primary focusing mechanisms (drugs), or fall asleep (dream).
It's all a grossly simple model, but I like trying to figure it out; to reverse-engineer it.
Posted by Eddie Sylvano on September 25, 2002, at 10:34:11
In reply to Re: addendum » Eddie Sylvano, posted by Mal on September 23, 2002, at 15:17:17
> Now genetic code- that is so fascinating to me... I may be missing the point, but I think you'll agree that a person is not a slave to his/her genetic code.
-----------------------------I tend to think about people as a running computer program (with the code being our DNA). One of the major tenets of programming is that you cannot get more information out of a system than you put into it. I think that most people will see that this makes sense. There's an inherent limit to how much you can compress and encode information.
That said, the human genome has a finite amount of information. This amount is obviously not enough to account for our teeming sea of behavioral and cerebral information. The complexity is due to the very elegant way in which our DNA operates. It's a program written through trial and error over billions of years, and in the most archaic fashion, which uses lots of simple rules in tandem to produce a higher level system of behavior (the body). The DNA is, in a sense, the "least you need to know" to get started as an organism. It's enough information for protein plans and body structure, and its translation in a human egg results in a secondary system.
The elegance is that this second system is itself imbued with a system of simple rules that describe how we will learn to learn. It's the level I mentioned earlier, that's looking for patterns, and pulling associated emotions. The concert of these secondary activities ultimately results in the topmost level, a functioning mind, which turns the stream of information it recieves into an adaptive model of the world, a personality, and creativity. If you wanted to be even more abstract, DNA is governed by a set of simple rules called physics (simple to nature, anyway), which life has exploited for its ultimate order. It's all simple rules resulting in more simple rules, all playing out, and it's ultimate output looks very orderly.
In this model, we're slaves to both our environment and our genes. Our genes define the rules we operate under, and our environment provides the information that we operate on, and the behavior that results. Different people operate on *ever* so slightly different rules, and with different information. It's hard to appreciate, given my crude definition of this setup, just how striking and diverse the results of running simple rules can be. The universe is essentially a lot of blips of energy that follow a finite number of simple rules.
One of the more unsettling conclusions that this brings me to is that free will isn't so free. If you were building a robot or a program, how would you provide for such a thing? It's logically impossible. Nature is predictable and reactionary at its base, and we're just higher level representations of nature. The best you could do is to cleverly simulate it.
Posted by Mal on September 25, 2002, at 12:31:06
In reply to Re: addendum » Mal, posted by Eddie Sylvano on September 25, 2002, at 10:34:11
But Eddie, are we not more than the sum of our parts? It seems to me that the *essence* of being human is not accounted for in our environments nor our finite DNA sequences. Maybe you are right, and maybe I just *want* to believe that there is more to being a human than to act out a script that was written at the moment of conception, but that view seems quite hopeless. Isn't there some room in the "program" for each individual to have some randomness that is unique, unscripted.
I do struggle with the idea that this might be all there is, but I can't bring myself to really believe it, (although I don't have any model or data to back me up). Perhaps I suffer from a DENIAL of a bleak reality, but I see a gap between apes and humans in the realm of self awareness, "civility", and sensitivity that I can't explain.
Posted by Eddie Sylvano on September 25, 2002, at 14:34:33
In reply to Re: addendum » Eddie Sylvano, posted by Mal on September 25, 2002, at 12:31:06
>Isn't there some room in the "program" for each individual to have some randomness that is unique, unscripted.
-----------------------------In much the same way that no two snowflakes look alike, the systems that our DNA generates guarantee that no two people will be exactly alike. Snowflakes are obviously much simpler than people, but the fact that the tiny differences in their formation (based on their immediate environment, and the small differences in shape between the dust specks that they each form around) can account for such a great diversity is crudely illustrative of the vast potential for differentiation inherent in people.
The DNA isn't infallible, either. Mutations occur in it, errors get introduced in its execution, etc, so that even on a biological basis, identical twins will harbor small differences (such as fingerprints). The fact that the environment we're in is so rich in stimuli, and we're designed to be so receptive to it (and manipulate our interpretations of it on higher levels than other creatures), leads to almost infinite range of behavior.
>Perhaps I suffer from a DENIAL of a bleak reality, but I see a gap between apes and humans in the realm of self awareness, "civility", and sensitivity that I can't explain.
-------------------------There's definately a difference between us and other orders of animals, that difference being our enhanced ability to evaluate our experiences for patterns (i.e. "think" about our lives). Lower animals spend a lot more time in the present than we do, without as much rumination on events. Also, this enhanced pattern recognition and comparison is responsible for our ability to use language, which gives us a unique mechanism for communicating our patterns to other people, and makes it easier for us to structure our internal patterns for comparison. Language is our premier facility as humans, and opens the door to both an exponential swapping of ideas and a means of storage and archival of previous generation's ideas (and a way to post on psychobabble). Thus, we get to benefit from the experience of everyone before us, while animals must learn for themselves, in a shorter lifespan, without the ability to label things internally for more efficient categorization. Language also ties us to other people much more strongly, because we benefit from exchanging ideas with them (though we would percieve it in practice more as "being social"). This makes us a social species on a much larger scale than other animals, and introduces a new environmental dynamic which shapes us as thinking, feeling people. It also gives us the incentive to be "civl" and, well, "human."
In short, then, we're highly advanced, with a dazzling repetoire of expression, because we're designed to organize our behavior by linking patterns from our environment (which is dripping with difference), using a finite set of rules that is programmed into us (and differs very slightly between us). A gross oversimplification, to be sure, but I think that it's a decent big picture. Part of the great difficulty in understanding ourselves as a species is that we're so immersed in being human, that we don't think about it. It's intrinsic and automatic. We only experience the end result of all these simpler processes, and we percieve it to be irreducible and genuine because that's how we're supposed to percieve it. Otherwise, it wouldn't work. I've had to come up with my ideas about the process by thinking about how to make something like a human mind from a simple sequence of genetic information. The fact that that's how we start out has ramifications that I've mulled over for a while. I'm probably off the mark, but it's fun to tinker with.
Posted by Mal on September 25, 2002, at 14:50:23
In reply to Re: addendum » Mal, posted by Eddie Sylvano on September 25, 2002, at 14:34:33
DISCLAIMER: the following post is loosely realted to Psycho-Psycho-Babble topic guidelines. It may require re-routing to social??
It is fun, isn't it? I enjoy a rigorous discussion of these things. Curious to know if you have read any books/taken any classes on evolution. I have and really enjoyed thinking about it. An interesting theory about human origins was postulated by Elaine Morgan called the Aquatic Ape theory. I have read her books "Scars of Evolution" and "Origin of Woman"- also interesting to think about.
Posted by Eddie Sylvano on September 25, 2002, at 16:44:58
In reply to Re: addendum » Eddie Sylvano, posted by Mal on September 25, 2002, at 14:50:23
>Curious to know if you have read any books/taken any classes on evolution.
------------------------------I read Origin of the Species, which I guess would be the seminal book about it. Most of the books I read aren't necessarily about evolution, but they weave its tenets into their arguments. A couple of intersting books that I've read lately are Genome, which covers both the evolution of the genome and its effects on us as a species (mentally, physically, etc) and Consciousness, which attempts to explain how the brain gives rise to consciousness.
Amazon link for Genome:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0060932902/drbobsvirte00-20Conciousness:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0716750783/drbobsvirte00-20
Posted by omegaman on September 27, 2002, at 22:48:36
In reply to Creativity:psychosis:emotion, posted by Eddie Sylvano on September 22, 2002, at 12:06:31
I'm sure that other people have already postulated this idea, but after experiencing a very mild bit of psychosis last night, it occurred to me that full blown psychosis, such as is seen in schizophrenia, might just be a manifestation of a process that is active in everyone
>
Yes I postulated this idea here years ago..but I'll keep quiet about that....
but is typically highly regulated, and whose function is to generate "new" ideas (or images/music,etc).
>
Illness has not really got a function, All you see in Psychosis is desperate behaviour. A part of the wastage. The decay of thought as it gets laid bare spinning out fragments...Being a programmer, I tend to view the brain as being constrained to the same informational limitations as computers.
>
Don't ever think that. Programming traditionally is tied by nature to logical systems and tend to resemble left brain modelling which is 50% of whats happening. All the Languages I have seen so far just encourage structures and algorithmns. Fuzzy programming resembles Real thinking.Given that it is simply matter, it isn't imbued with the ability to generate novel information (that which is not an inhernet property of it's structure).
>
Its imbued with the ability to generate information, the novelty is a matter of perspective or abstraction. I mean whats novel ? the information, or how you view the information ?I imagine that perhaps the brain simply (like a computer) scans all of it's input for patterns, constantly, and on a subconcious basis.
>
I tend to think a repeating thinking in your thinking. Your opinions ringing my analysis bell that youre a left hemisphered thinker...Drrrinng Patterns being the givaway.
I was just thinking the other day how much I hate having to use patterns to make music.Many of the patterns it "sees" are incorrect (there isn't really a pattern), and these are typically discarded. However, in people with brain anomalies, such as inherent dysfunction (schizophrenia), or drug induced dysfunction, these ideas aren't fully suppressed, and are given relevance by the higher centers of the brain. Precisely because this is unusual, the patterns that result aren't typical (i.e., they are novel). It seems that schizophrenia occurs in a relatively high frequency of people relative to its debilitating features. It's as if evolution has given this flaw a pass, because at a low level, it can serve a useful function in an intelligent, social species.
>
I used to say this a while ago, having read stuff, however I was defending my own fragmented state and trying to see it as good. A bit of borderline insanity can be good in a bored society, but really you become entertainment fodder.
Shizo or any disorder like this as a sick brain reacting, throwing"in a relative manner" more half baked ideas quicker. Yes it can be measured as creative without the full function of the healthy individual to realise the fruits of his fragments, everyone else benefits. A free lunch.
What real use is this ? Most real creativity is done by teams of cognent individuals usually with slight degrees of impulsion. Whats creative anyway. Isn't most creativity just women talking ?It's obvious that the typical schizophrenic isn't very utilitarian, however, so I wondered what would govern the gradient of "functionality."
There must be an executive, or "logical" center of the brain
>
Youre falling into the trap of thinking your own neural structure on to your ideas. There is no center in the brain, and if there was it would'nt be logical.that allows some such people to evaluate psychotic ideas, and discard incorrect ones (much like a higher order version of the subconcious process). This deferral of the lower order to higher order evaluation would allow more patterns to be evaluated by the individual, with the more "rational" persons being able to successfully recognize quality ideas, and
the less rational appearing simply more disorganized (by presenting poor ideas).
>
Youre discussing ideas I had years ago here on this very forum, yet I was seen as a disorganized irrationalist by Dr Bob. Some of my poor quality ideas influenced a scientist to do some Neurogentic research.
youre saying this as a thinker who seeks the solid and hence your discussing how the neural nets on the left side look to converge to points or quality, good, superior, right etc etc. The question is, "is your thinking you or the language manifestation of your neural structure ?"
To me it is..and I predict as I read more of this I will see you seeking to looks for definites regarding the brain. I hate to dissapoint you but years ago I found out the the right hemisphere is a mess.
Neurons grow like a tree into neighbouring regions...But the good news is that the brain makes beautifull (to me ) sense. First of all you'll have to understand opposites, chaos theory, self organization (how consciousnous evolves). If you want some help just know that the brain is split 50% on the left where Neurons converge to points, and 50% right where Neurons branch eternally. The brain is a balance of opposites like many emergent things in many dimensions.
When you understand the opposites of thinking and perception and how they shape the Neurotransmitter systems, (just sticking to thinking in the Cortex) you'll realize how to seek the balance. Whats in the coretx is the result of the senses and society, and all the eternal opposites within.. sounds religious ?It is rationality, however, that I would define as intelligence
>
The ability of the brain to process more information in increasing complexity is a better measure of intelligence, and this definition spreads its story from the individual to society and possibly feeding back into something called "genetic" memory.
When I take omega 3 I become more intelligent by the way I can take in more information, rather than react, however if I take to much people get bored with me just doing nothing, and no-one visits me and so I feedback into myself, and just become a Psychotic with even more mental energy than before.I suspect that other central building blocks of the brain would be loosely define as gradients of emotion (which supplies motivation/restraint) and activation (which determines the level of overall activity).
> Let me tell you this. It makes it so easy.Look at the brain as a volume of flux lines, like iron filling over a magnet, and you start to see how Neurons split of. I think what happens is that the Nerurons on the right side are getting pulled by their counterparts on the left while spreading everywhere else. The neurology bears it out. All functions on the left side are mirrored on the right by on opposite but equal process, so on the left the region where syntax splits up into points of language, smears out into musical impressions... etc etc ..
Posted by Zo on October 18, 2002, at 23:18:55
In reply to Re: addendum, posted by Dinah on September 23, 2002, at 18:49:06
Doesn't that have to be the case, inasmuch as infants inarguably have feeling. . but we are far less certain there is a predicating thought. Thought seems to arise from the nexus of feeling-response. . is it good, is it unpleasant, what happens. . .I tend to think that the underlying grammar of life is what is, that the sentence, for example, is the geography of the desire, thought out, then written.Hi,
Zo
Posted by Dinah on October 20, 2002, at 17:33:03
In reply to Re: addendum » Dinah, posted by Zo on October 18, 2002, at 23:18:55
Hi Zo,
> Doesn't that have to be the case, inasmuch as infants inarguably have feeling. . but we are far less certain there is a predicating thought. Thought seems to arise from the nexus of feeling-response. . is it good, is it unpleasant, what happens. . .Hmmm. Yes. Could I be getting confused by the seeming logic of cognitive therapy? My therapist is big on CBT.
>I tend to think that the underlying grammar of life is what is, that the sentence, for example, is the geography of the desire, thought out, then written.
>
I'm not at my best right now, but that sounds like a fascinating concept. Could you expound on it a bit more?Thanks,
Dinah
Posted by Dinah on October 20, 2002, at 17:34:04
In reply to Re: addendum, posted by Dinah on October 20, 2002, at 17:33:03
This is the end of the thread.
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