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  Links at http://www.sciencedaily.com/news/mind_brain/

A year ago I struck up a conversation with an Indian physicist who posted a few papers of interest in the arXiv, a preprint repository for physicists, mathematicians, and other curious beings. The physicist's name was Moninder, Moni for short, and he talked about publishing a book in India with a chapter called "Conversations between an Indian Physicist and an American Neuroscientist" based on our correspondence. We wrote about math, physics, and consciousness primarily -- here are selected messages relevant to this newsletter. Let's listen in...

Here is the polite introductory remarks:
Dear Dr. David Kaiser, Thank you for your email, and comments. I will have to read your paper, while brief and interesting, a few more times, to fully comrehend its import. I have attached one of my new papers on Godel's incompleteness theorem, and transfinite cardinal numbers. -Regards, Moninder

Moni: " I have been told that EEG of a very experienced meditator lady, in a recording in some university in USA, showed sustained delta activity, with eyes open - even during mental processes such as adding numbers!"

David: Alpha (and theta) are rhythms generated by the thalamocortical network. (Theta is also reptilian -- i.e., hippocampal, but this theta cannot be measured at the scalp, presumably, though some animal researchers get confused on the point). Alpha (8-12 Hz or so) is the rate of RTN firing. The RTN is a sheath of cells surrounding most of the thalamus, controlled locally, but with distal control by the frontal lobes of the cortex. When the frontal lobes want to eliminate sensory info, they activate the RTN to shut down the sensory streams coming in from the thalamus. This is the alpha rhythm.

Delta is the cortex chattering among itself, running on its own, unhindered by subcortical connection or sensory input. It is infant brain activity, when the brain was not well connected. My autistic son shows delta in his right temporal lobe and that is bad, because it means he hasn't developed over his 9 years of life full subcortical-cortical connectivity for this part of his brain. Delta shows up in brain injury and sleep, whenever the cortex is free of lower influences (white matter injury -- the wiring from below is broken or stretched).

Now a fully connected brain that shows delta and which can then return to normal functioning is very healthy. It means the person can return to an infantile consciousness, when the universe and I (source of personal agency) were one. And we all want to get our consciousness up there. Most of us retreat to thalamic consciousness -- we orient against the world, presuming it to be a threatening other. And it's hard to be enlightened among a group of aggressive, sex-starved primates.

Think of the brain as representational levels or unfoldings:

Cortex -4
Limbic -3 (thalamus is its evolutionarily early part)
Midbrain - 2
Brainstem -1

If we all walked around in 4 instead of 2 and 3, that would be heaven. When someone becomes a addict (cocaine, etc), they let 1 usurp 4, a coup d'etat of the mammalian/primate processors by fish processors.

Now what should turn you on in this is that the brain is just very advanced convoluted math, space folded upon itself, with space being relation itself. In fact I like to say the brain doesn't exist yet -- it's merely a dream of the mind.

I like to think neutrinos are those minds (some heavier than others) that have yet to be drawn into this world fully. They are windowshopping, not sure if they want to leave their infinite realm for the solution of light.

Why do we need a special portal for communication between mind and matter? If the universe were necessarily bidimensional, mind and matter, the interface or portal would be all points. Like a crayon mark which has both color and texture, there is no point on the mark where there is color and no texture, nor texture but no color. Substitute mind and matter for these two properties and that's kind of my thinking. There are times where we have more texture than color, more mind than matter; and sometimes the color is all and texture is subtle. Pain could be when matter exceeds mind and joy mind > matter.

In fact I suspect we all share the same brain in actuality. The brain is like a photon, located everywhere at once [all histories, Feyman's interpretation). My belief about the mind's relationship to the universe is exactly opposite most people's. Philosophers and neuroscientists generally speak about emergent properties as if the human mind is being built out of raw, less-mindful materials. I think we're breaking free of the massive symmetries of non-existence, pulling outwards from the infinities to have a unique finite experience.

The human cortex is something like 95 % neocortex, 3% paleocortex, 2% archicortex. Neo = mammalian, I believe. Others cortex types are present in birds and reptiles. Neo in terrestrial mammals has 6 layers but our occipital lobe has only 5.

Neo is the most extensive representation of sensory and intracerebral activity. It provides the endings, what we experience as the meaning. It might provide cognition, with subcortex providing emotion -- some people believe this distinction.

Our neocortex PLUS our hands gives us our status. We change the world, make it us. Some dolphin species have more neo than us, but without hands, they live in a work of art. Our written history (by our hands) lets us stand on 3,000 years of investigation into the world and ourselves whereas dolphins and other species live in an oral culture (as many humans do) and thus they can only stand on the shoulders of their parents and grandparents, not their great^100 grandparents as we do.

Most languages use the same cortical areas -- some controversial evidence of enlarged Broca area with multilingualism, but unlikely. That said, whichever language is school-learned only (not used to navigate culture) resides mostly in the cortex, whereas primary language (L1) or that used extensively also is represented in subcortex. We know this from stroke and recovery in multilinguals.

Surely, to some degree. Language is expressive and receptive, so we could also quiet all but that part. Uptrain delta everywhere but Broca for solely expressive existence, training that site up in beta, perhaps. Wernicke's is the receptive area, right behind the primary auditory area below and behind your ear.

The neural networks do underlie the rapid change in understanding. We go from knowing instincts and nearly nothing to knowing most conventions, symbols, and conceptual structures of our culture in 9 to 10 years. Such rapid expansion of knowledge of a child is reminiscent of the universe's inflatory period. And given that humans, in my opinion, are higher forms of the universe, we surely undergo more delineated versions of everything the universe underwent.

I think of volition emerges in a fuzzy logic kind of way instead of a step function, 0 to 1. The volitional pathway starts in the brain stem and emerges full force in the cortex and perhaps cerebellum, a gradient phenomenon. For instance pleasure and pain are both pathways and although the "pleasure center" is the medial forebrain bundle of the upper brain stem, our conscious regulation of pleasure occurs in left medial frontal cortex. Obviously volition exists in some sense as the quantum foam, or whatever it is called now, and the neurons behavior in conjunction or opposition to the nature of the Canvas (that universe within them) to reject or adopt or absorb the nature.

Considering volition along a pathway means that there is no 0 point, it's fuzzy from the get-go, perhaps. And the latter parts of pathway amplify and self-resonant the alterable alignment into what we experience as volition.

That said, lately I've come to think volition in us is partly having to do with swimming -- aquatic ape theory - as we are the only primates with voluntary breathing (as well as involuntary) breathing,

Humans are the only terrestrial mammal with voluntary breathing, that I am aware of, along with involuntary breathing. I know apes are involuntary breathers. Marine mammals are voluntary breathers, at least I know dolphins are entirely voluntary. I assume seals, sea lions, and manatees are voluntary breathers, and perhaps hippos (?).

The first time John Lilly in the 1960s, I think it was, aesthesized dolphins, they died because no one knew this fact. They sunk to the bottom of the pool, breathing arrested. Sadly he repeated the process 5 times before he stopped trying, or so I was told.

As a species I assume we simply exploited coastal habitats in South Africa, and we didn't fully return to the sea like the wolverine-like creatures that eventually became dolphins. Other evidence of a coastal ecological exploitation by our ancestors is the insulating fat which we share with no other apes but which we do share with all marine mammals, our hairlessness, and even the direction of the hair that remains, which is streamlined for swimming. So perhaps the final push to causal volition emerged in kids foraging for oysters and crabs in South African tidal pools 120K years ago. Vocalization is also important under water for communication given the darkness of water, although all apes are vocal. Bear in mind that the physical anthropology establishment mostly rejects the aquatic ape hypothesis because their granddads found intermediate ape->human skeletons in dry savannahs first and the conventional wisdom set in that we came out of East Africa. Bear in mind that fossilization in aquatic realms is extremely rare - water eats up the bones -- so even if 99% of humanity 100K ago lived in caves around the coast, any remains would be nearly impossible to find.

As for breathing and meditation, I think it may have to do with that interface between volition and automatic or nonvolition, more than blood flow or neurochemistry, per se. I consider its benefits are mental, preconscious to conscious recognition of the large mind within us. When we get into our breathing, we may take notice of that automatic process inside of us that regulates our involuntary breathing. It's a surrender to as well as monitoring of the nonvolitional mind within us. I have my own augmented breathing approach since childhood which I call bobbing. In a swimming pool I bob up and down in the deep end (8 ft/2.5 meters), rising to the surface to take a breath, then descending. This allows me on good days to control my depth (buoyancy) completely with my breathing. When I get things going well I can move down deeper to the bottom of the pool just be expelling more air from my lungs, then I gently kick off the bottom of the pool and crest the surface with just my mouth, and go back under. It's clears the mind entirely after a few absorbed minutes.

There is conscious, preconscious, subconscious, which map reasonably to cortex, limbic, and midbrain/brainstem, which phylogenetically are approximately mammal, reptile, and fish. Damage to mammalian or final iterations of a processing pathway (i.e., cortical) eliminates meta-recognition even if lower representations (recognition of information) remains intact. So a brain-injured person's brain detects info but it does not reach consciousness.

My advice: Don't wake up until evening.

You don't have to surpass, only be authentic. Add a piece to the puzzle that everyone reasonable will use in following the same ideas. Every voice that is unique is a contribution. I work in a clinical field where autheticity trumps erudition, at least in my opinion. And given that I'm one of two editors of my field's journal, I put my money where my mouth is. Also, we often assume that others are more fully informed than us or they have a more well-fleshed out understanding of what they speak. The loudest voices often speak with little understanding or insight.

And there is simply too much to know, so people prioritize and those who attempt to build the largest pyramids are generally building a small pyramid atop the foundation of others, the same size as those who build their own pyramid on new ground. And the old pyramids are always wrong, always!! -- although they are our currency and state of comparison with the new.

The one real problem with bipolar and schizophrenia and mentation-heightening disorders is that the mind-world warps with pressure, like any entropic (open) system. Our observational intensity bends reality like gravitiy and can create a positive feedback loop, making more and more sense of the tight-focus lens view of reality. Which is why poor souls stuck in those worlds are telling a kind of truth when they talk about their paranoias, etc., because as everything becomes symbolic, more and more validation is created.

One can dissociate hearing and speaking, such as playing a voice saying other words into headphones while one is speaking. I suspect the hearing is confirmatory but not necessary for expression.

" (2) What would be internal thought state of a person suffering from Wernicke's aphasia, while speaking a meaningless sentence? Is he having meaning less thoughts - a meaningless mental state?"

They have a proposition in mind, but are unable to organize it into categories, so I imagine they think like a smaller-brained mammal thinks. It is an interesting question, and not easy to probe, as they have input/output problems so it is hard to give complicated instructions.

" (3) Is volition involved in thinking, as much as in speaking? "

Let's say volition is cortical processing, non-volitional/more instinctual states subcortical. We have an unfolding of everything, a pathway that starts at brainstem and continues towards higher, more elaborate representation up through the cortex. So thought is conceived as an inverted pyramid, in a way, a starting point that branches and flourishes out with more neuronal involvement in the process, and somewhere in the process we say volitional processes dominate the nonvolitional

"(4) What can be said about volition in progressive stages of Alzheimer's disease?"

Volition may be there even when expressive skills are lost. So much of our abilities are learned skills, including recall, so the volition is there but unorganized, though it may be compromised by tissue loss and tangles in temporal and frontal lobes.

" Is speed of reading comprehension an example of what you are saying, i.e., is it is 3-4 times faster than hearing the same text read aloud?"

We understand someone's meaning so quickly because we perceive the idea opening up within us, a right brain contribution to communication. We often know where a sentence leads halfway through, or at its opening, especially in face to face conversation, because we sense the goal early on. That is the telepathic aspect of communication we all possess. My autistic son has trouble understanding language sometimes partly because I suspect he relies too highly on word meaning and doesn't let the social energy penetrate and direct him.

Moni, Thanks for the Xmas wish. I built an icerink for my kids last night. I've never done it before but it looks like I got it to work -- now I just need colder temperatures. We're above freezing part of the day. It's 25x20 feet (8x6 meters, I guess) and as I was apologizing to my daughter how small it was, she was exclaiming how huge it was. So everything is a matter of perspective, my friend.

-David

News & Reviews NEW BOOKS

Drug Addiction and Its Treatment: Nexus of Neuroscience and Behavior
by Bankole A. Johnson & John D. Roache (eds)
Behavioral and biological processes of drug addiction are reviewed, along with integrating behavioral and pharmacological treatments. State-of-the-art research techniques for studying the neurobiology of drug addiction including topographical brain mapping are described.

A History of Psychiatry: From the Era of the Asylum to the Age of Prozac
by Edward Shorter
Madness and its treatment for 200 years in the US and Western Europe, a history of biological psychiatry. The source of mental illness moves from spiritual (demonic possession), to psychological (e.g., id disorders) to physical (neural dysfunction) with treatment modalities following the same path.

Discoveries in the Human Brain
by Louise H. Marshall & Horace W. Magoun
History of brain research and emergence of modern neuroscience are chronicled from the first findings of gross neuroanatomy in the ancient world to present-day neural networks and brain modeling. Along the way people and events gradually produced today's understanding of brain anatomy and physiology, with quotations from primary sources.

The Antidepressant Era
by David Healy
Antidepressants treat a range of nonspecific symptoms along a continuum. The author traces the history of antidepressants, which, along with antibiotics and antihypertensives, created a therapeutic revolution after World War II. Concepts of illness and disease are discussed, from Hippocrates to the creation of the FDA. An interesting point: In 1804, 90 patent medicines were listed; by 1857, the list had grown to 1500, doubling in number approximately every 13 years. (Had the rate stayed the same, by the end of 2008 we would have more than four million pharmaceuticals.)

Making Sense of Illness : Science, Society, and Disease
by Robert Aronowitz
Individual differences from lifestyle to and social class are largely ignored in today's disease process. A holistic approach is instead championed by the author.

Deficient brainstem encoding of pitch in children with Autism Spectrum Disorders.: Evoked potentials find some autistics exhibit subcortical impairment in prosody encoding

Density of Familial Alcoholism and Its Effects on Alcohol Use and Problems in College Students.: Smoking often acts as a trigger for increased drinking for those with a family history of alcoholism.

Integrated View of Empathy: Psychology, Philosophy, Neuroscience.: fMRI suggests empathic distress and altruism share biological substrates.

Complementary and Alternative Medicine Use with Chronic Pain.: Complementary and alternative therapies were popular among patients with chronic pain, especially those with a high school education.

Reduced Posterior Hippocampal Volume in Posttraumatic Stress Disorder.: Total hippocampal volume was lower in PTSD patients.

  Archive of NF News since June 1998