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>To: neuroscience at net.bio.net>Subject: Memory and how we think
>>>>Hello, all!
>>Matt Jones <jonesmat at ohsu.edu> posted another of his good and useful
>answers; in this occasion to Billy Bob Bud <robbiep at riverdale.k12.or.us>,
>who >was wondering basicly how we remember things and more
> >about how we consciously and unconsciously think.
>>Surely correctly ,Matt pointed out that
>> neuroscience doesn't have any real answer for how we remember things
>> or how we think, at least in terms of a completely developed picture.
>>But in continuing, Matt ignored the existence of local neurobiological
>traditions working just as the mainstream ones on partial problems, while
>nevertheless contesting the basic issues involved in Robbie's question
>as these are usually managed in European countries and North America.
>For example, Matt (most probably unawarely) endorsed the Pythagoric-
>Parmenidean tradition in qualifying as "main" the Descartes-Exner sup-
>position of engrammation. This Matt did while writing
>>> there are some pretty strong candidate theories about the fundamental
>> processes involved in memory. The main ones these days are long term
>> potentiation (LTP) and long term depression (LTD). These are processes in
>> which the strength of the synaptic connection between one neuron and
>> another is altered under certain conditions. For example, the size of an
>> excitatory postsynaptic current (EPSC) can be increased by high frequency
>> stimulation of the presynaptic nerve (LTP), and this increase can last for
>> hours, days or weeks. The synapse functions more efficiently after LTP than
>> it did before, and one could say that it "remembers" the high frequency
>> stimulation and acts accordingly. LTP and LTD have properties that are
>> similar in some ways to memory processes in animals: conditioning,
>> associativity, forgetting, saturation, etc. In addition to LTP/LTD, there're
>> probably morphological changes that accompany memory storage,
>> that can be likened to the re-wiring of a computer. It's not yet known
>> exactly how these small scale processes give rise to real memory or
>> thinking, but
>> (and against the following emergentistic concept I, Mariela,
> would like to insinuate my chief caveat)
>>> it's sort of a central tenet of neuroscience that the large
>> scale processes must somehow arise from the small scale ones.
>>Diversely, our work here, at the oldest -once, at least, the major- neuro-
>biological regional tradition, has a conceptual context too much different
>from the one abroad. We think that some general prefigurations, there
>widespread, prevented from approaching some important problems. We
>tried to get rid of such prefigurations, by means of devoting considerable
>effort to study the history of ideas. This, however, now makes still more
>difficult our eventual communication, since through such studies we further
>made our framework unlike. We were thenceforth compelled to advance
>in the experimental research without help from the institutions pertaining to
>the circle of ideas that Matt qualifies as
>>> an excellent source of information ... : Scientific American (September
>> 1992, Mind and Brain) ... a whole issue devoted to modern views of the
>> brain and how it works
>>whereas, regarding these basic issues Robbie set, we contrarily found such
>issue pretty emetic.
>>Well, I am not interested in making an exposition of which the views of
>our tradition are, nor in entering now a thorough technical discussion of
>them. This is by no means intended as disrespectful towards the netters:
>I am simply compelled to avoiding enter into further details because of my
>personal lack of time, in these weeks, to sustain due analyses in the Forum.
>My purpose, consequently, is merely to point out Robbie and all co-netters
>that there exist other neurobiological traditions, entirely foreign to the
>circle of basic ideas shared in the main countries about the essentials of
>our science, that nevertheless on partial problems can share adequate
>collaboration on academic grounds but regarding global issues impulse
>revisiting some fundamental prefigurations.
>>May this serve as a caveat against suppossing that the "pretty strong
>candidate theories about the fundamental processes involved in memory"
>ought only to be envisaged on the root metaphor of paper folding!
>>However my having to refuse now due discussion of these most interesting
>issues, let me to include, for the sake of your curiosity and to demarcate the
>neuroscience-approachable issues as different from those requiring basic
>physics and those seemingly unapproachable except for philosophical setting,
>the Abstract of a work from our director Prof. M.F. Crocco, who presently is on
>a short absence; I serve here as research scientist and subrogee officer to him.
>>PHYSICAL ASSESSMENT OF THE ADDED INTERACTIONS
>AMONG NON-DISTRIBUTED REFERENCES
>OF DISTRIBUTED REVERBERATIONS IN THE BRAIN GRAY
>>M.F. Crocco
>Director, Center of Neurobiological Research,
>Argentine Republic Ministry of Health & Social Action,
>and
>Head, Laboratory of Electroneurobiological Research,
>Buenos Aires City s Hospital Dr. Jose Tiburcio Borda,
>Ave. Amancio Alcorta 1602,
>Buenos Aires, 1283 Argentina;
>phone/fax +(54 1) 306 7314,
>email POSTMASTER @NEUBIO.SLD.AR
>and POSTMASTER @ NEUBIO.GOV.AR.
>>Published in: Electroneurobiologia 1 (5), 94-162, Nov. 1994
>>ABSTRACT: Hylozoist stance (of that variety
>bearing just upon observables), a feature of this
>remote neurobiological tradition, rests on
>recognizing physical actions other than the
>usually-acknowledged interaction modes. Such
>stance is sustained upon (1) pointing out a few
>undeducible facts, and (2) discarding, after
>arduous historical analysis, certain cultural
>reasons against such recognition. Professional
>disconnection between theoretical physicists,
>neurobiologists, evolution scientists, historians of
>these natural sciences, historians of cultures, and
>industrial cybernetists needing non-Turing
>machines, confined those remarks and analyses
>locally, preventing integrating those hitherto
>dissociated areas of research into a basic-physics
>perspective. As remedy, a preliminary (that is,
>non-mathematical, though based on almost one
>century of intense local development) unifying
>formulation of this problematic situation is hereby
>provided to the limited purpose of restricting
>predictive solutions. It concludes featuring (a-h)
>what is presently known about such a new
>fundamental action of Nature, namely: (a) To
>execute its couplings such action requires, as
>environment, degrees of freedom of the
>electromagnetic interactions, thus showing itself
>slower than the electro-weak interaction mode;
>(b) Its couplings provide not one but an assortment
>of ranges, each with its own objective
>phenomenology, combination allowances and
>scopes for intensification and remission, to array
>their links; (c) Such links combine systemically
>object stationarities whose conformations interfere
>distributed in the galvanic skeleton of any
>adequate ion-concentring substratum of liquid
>condensed matter, e.g. neurocognitive
>parenchymae; (d) Distributed stationarities keep
>all physical interactions amid their interfering
>conformations up as the dynamics of "lumped"
>referred contents; (e) "Lumped" contents' couplings
>transform their non-structural objectivities inside
>a physical compass lacking elongation function,
>interpreted as a peculiar phase made (by the distributed
>processes) of the spacetime being astronomically
>traversed by the parenchymatous system; (f) In
>concomitance with those objective occupancies of
>said natural assortment of ranges, an observer
>agency is always fixed, for which -only- they form
>instantaneous, directly-observable noema; (g)
>Subjetivities concomitant with every non-structural
>objectivity of an unbroken substratum add up into
>one single observer, the matrix and distributed set up
>of whose links' transforms is a subject of natural
>science -ut forma corporis, ad physica pertinet-,
>but, de-mentalizing heuristically mentation into
>its noema, the three studies of
>(i) such observer agency, always apprehending its
>own acts with delay,
>(ii) its action in apprehending its noema (= its act of noesis),
>and (iii) its own sensing that given concrete noema
>instead than sensing another,
>are still not approachable by contemporary natural
>science, admitting only philosophical elaboration,
>context and criticism; (h) The new coupling acts ferrying
>its natural action through the observer agency for
>introducing object-rearrangement actions making
>up thought and purposeful behaviour.-
>> (End of transcribed abstract)
>> Cheers,
> Mariela
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Prof. Mariela Szirko,
<postmaster at neubio.sld.ar>
Centro de Investig. Neurobiologicas, Ministry
of Health & Welfare, Argentine Republic; and Lab. of
Electroneurobiological Res., Hospital "Dr. Jose Tiburcio Borda",
Municipality of Buenos Aires,
Office: Phone/Fax (54 1) 306 -7314
e-mail <postmaster at neubio.gov.ar>
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