The Strange Workings of the Brain

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The Strange Workings of the Brain
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Outline

• Phobias
• Phantom Limbs
• Prosopagnosia and the Capgras Delusion
• Synesthesia
• Memory
• Consciousness

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Phobias
http//www.youtube.com/watch?vta-FGE7QELQ
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Phantom Limbs

• Sensation that missing limb is still present
• Often painful
• Can sometimes be controlled, sometimes act on
  their own accord
• Not necessarily the same as missing limb
• Missing arm felt 6 inches too short
• Related to mapping of body onto brain
• Mirror treatment

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Cortical Homonculus
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Phantom Limbs

• Sensation that missing limb is still present
• Often painful
• Can sometimes be controlled, sometimes act on
  their own accord
• Not necessarily the same as missing limb
• Missing arm felt 6 inches too short
• Related to mapping of body onto brain
• Mirror treatment provides visual feedback

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Mirror Box Treatment
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Prosopagnosia and the Capgras Delusion

• Prosopagnosia inability to recognize faces
• Can follow from traumatic brain injury
• Usually associated with damage to fusiform gyrus
  (part of temporal lobe)
• Different forms
• Apperceptive severe, cant even tell gender of
  person, faces make no sense
• Associative cant make links between face and
  person
• Subject may have emotional response without
  conscious recognition

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Prosopagnosia and the Capgras Delusion

• Capgras Delusion person holds a delusion that a
  friend, spouse, parent, etc. has been replaced by
  an identical-looking impostor
• Thought to be like reverse of Prosopagnosia
• Conscious ability to recognize faces, but without
  automatic emotional response
• Can be caused by traumatic brain injury
• Possibly due to disconnection between temporal
  cortex (facial recognition) and limbic system
  (emotions)

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• Neurological condition in which stimulation in
  one cognitive pathway causes stimulation in
  another
• Examples
• Symbol --gt color or spatial location
• Sound --gt color
• Symbol --gt personality

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• Ts are generally crabbed, ungenerous creatures.
  U is a soulless sort of thing. 4 is honest, but
  3 I cannot trust 9 is dark, a gentleman, tall
  and graceful, but politic under his suavity
• Can test for synesthia
• 1 in 23 people have mild synesthesia
• Likely due to cross activation of different brain
  regions

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Testing for Synesthesia
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• Ts are generally crabbed, ungenerous creatures.
  U is a soulless sort of thing. 4 is honest, but
  3 I cannot trust 9 is dark, a gentleman, tall
  and graceful, but politic under his suavity
• Can test for synesthia
• 1 in 23 people have mild synesthesia
• Likely due to cross activation of different brain
  regions

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• Synesthesia can be beneficial to those effected
• Can aid memory well see this in a bit
• Many artists have synesthesia
• Synesthetes are truly gods among men
• Famous Synesthetes include John Mayer, Pharell
  and Eddie Van Halen!!!
• Some think that synesthesia can be related to the
  development of language
• Kiki or Booba?

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Memory

• Impressive capacities for memory
• Solomon Shereshevsky
• Russian dude active in the early 20th c.
• Could reproduce incredibly long lists of sounds,
  words, formulas, etc. without error after
  indefinite amounts of time
• Diagnosed with 5-fold synesthesia
• Music ? color, touch ? taste, etc.
• Would memorize things by placing them in
  imaginary landscape
• Might forget something if he couldnt find it in
  this landscape

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Memory

• Impressive capacities for memory
• Shass Pollak Jewish mnemonists who memorized
  more than 5,000 pages of 12 books of Babylonian
  Talmud
• A pin would be placed on a word, let us say, the
  fourth word in line eight the memory sharp
  would then be asked what word is in the same
  spot on page thirty-eight or fifty or any other
  page the pin would be pressed through the volume
  until it reached page thirty eight or page fifty
  or any other page designated the memory sharp
  would then mention the word and it was found
  invariably correct.

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Memory Disorders

• Henry Gustav Molaison (H.M.)
• Anterograde amnesia cant form new memories
• Bad epilepsy ? brain surgery, removed parts of
  medial temporal lobes
• Lost ability to form new long term memories
• Could still learn new motor memories, but
  wouldnt remember having learned them
• K.C.
• Intact semantic memory, no episodic memory
• unable to describe an event that took place in
  school that specifically included him however,
  he knows that he went to school, and he retains
  the knowledge that he gained there
• Clive Wearing
• Memento syndrome as result of Herpes simplex
• Waking up every 20 seconds
• 831 AM Now I am really, completely awake.906
  AM Now I am perfectly, overwhelmingly
  awake.934 AM Now I am superlatively, actually
  awake.

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Consciousness

• Physical theory for consciousness
• Some argue that consciousness must be a quantum
  phenomenon
• Orchestrated Object Reduction (Orch-OR)
• Formulated by Roger Penrose and an
  anesthesiologist
• Godels theorem ? brain can go beyond
  axioms/algorithms
• Theorem relates to un-provable-ness of theorms

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Consciousness

• More Penrose
• For non-algorithmic physics, look to quantum
  theory
• Collapse of wave function is probabilistic
• states are proposed to be selected by a
  'non-computable' influence embedded in the
  fundamental level of spacetime geometry at
  the Planck scale.
• Plato pure values and forms exist in abstract
  realm
• Penrose this realm is the Planck scale
• Suggests that brain contains these isolated
  quantum systems possibly in microtubules inside
  neurons

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• THE END