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It’s a question I’m not sure anyone else is considering right now, but my thesis is guiding my thought in this course, and what I brought up in class won’t let me stop thinking about it. Reality is a construction of the mind (that doesn’t really hurt my feelings, nor has it since I learned that years ago), but how does it build this construction?

When I touch and see wall, I get two “elemental” constructions, and then associate them with each other and a certain meaning (which, given Damasio’s discovery that thought is highly complex emotion, could be considered a specific emotional valence).

In Pavlovian fear conditioning, a conditioned stimulus, an emotionally or evolutionarily neutral change in the environment, is paired with an unconditioned stimulus, an emotionally or evolutionarily salient change in the environment, in a manner such that there is a reliable, statistical relationship between the CS and the US. (Rescorla, 1967) Thus a light can come to evoke defense behaviors usually reserved for a shock. Especially in fear conditioning, behavior doesn’t only come to be controlled by a salient CS, but the very context of the environment in which the US occurs can become a generalized cue that something aversive will occur and can support the expression of fear behaviors.

The process of building this association in Pavlovian fear conditioning is thought to be mediated by the amygdala and the hippocampus - amygdala providing the emotional valence and the response behaviors with the hippocampus mediating an “elemental” construction of the context. Lesions to the basolateral nucleus often precludes the building of this association between context (reality) and the meaning. (Maron, 2004)

Do similar structures mediate my associations between the “seen” wall, the “felt” wall and the cognition of wall (built upon a community of verbal agreement about a statistical mean of what walls are)? While lesions to the basolateral nucleus of the amygdala can preclude the association, other researchers have shown that rats can still exhibit defense behaviors when presented with a context in which an aversive US was presented without them. Maron (2004) suggests that there may be more than one structure mediating even this simple relation - so would a more complex relation require more structures, or will the plasticity of the nervous system prove sufficient again? I would also like to point out that these relations occur in the limbic, or proto-mammilian brian - animal research has shown that there is no need for the neo-cortex or a higly developed syntax or even the arguabling human "I-function" to build relations which sum into a construction of reality with emotional valence or "meaning."

It seems strange to me how great a role statistics play in the construction of reality for humans - from matter to verbal agreement about the location and meaning of "wall."