Evolving Systems Course, week 12: the usefulness of biparteness?

It worries me when I'm trying to remember this concept of "brain bipartiteness", decide to google it, and only get links on Serendip. Hmmm. Paul, did you make up this word??? Considering the third link on Google is to a paper you wrote, I'm going to answer my own question with yes.

Since I'm still confused, I'm going to go ahead and comment instead on the article posted by Anne. As someone who feels helpless to my own need to muddle on facebook, news on Yahoo!, e-mail, TFLN (texts form last night), and usually Perez Hilton.com before being able get any work done... I'd say I couldn't agree more with the article's point that our lives of "growing up digital" is rewiring our brains. I think of it kind of like working out at the gym. If you're constantly doing cardio works out, you're not building a muscle base. And if you're just doing lifting, you're going to have trouble breaking down fat. This is related- despite what you might think- because our lives are becoming more and more made up of lifting (digital world) and less of the cardio ("real world"). So if someone only does cardio, they will be fit but could be getting a lot more out of their workout. Meanwhile, if someone only does lifting, they will not really be fit but might look "beach-ready". Point being, the digital world is changing our brain because how could it not? The key of this process, moving forward in our lives, is going to be balancing the two and hoping that the digital world does not take over to the point that we are going to lose valuable connections in our brain that cannot be accessed by perusing through neither the latests hilarious texts ( here's a semi-appropriate one... (330): I had fun this weekend too. According to Web MD, my symptoms say I had a miscarriage.) nor, perhaps even, a blog on the brain.

First thought that comes to mind when I ask myself about last week's class: oatmeal. I tapped into my subconscious the way we did at the beginning of the semester by doing the word association/first word that pops into your mind business, and the first word I thought of was oatmeal. My brain felt like oatmeal after all those optical illusions. In fact, I'm pretty sure my brain wasn't sure whether it actually existed enough so that it could drip sadly out my ears like it felt like doing. Our subconscious brains are crazy, scary, wonderful things, and mine was pretty aware of itself after Thursday's class. I even remember feeling a physical sensation about my cranium as if my brain had just run a mile - like a tired muscle. I'm sure there's a lovely psychological explanation for that, because the brain doesn't contain nerve endings. That's another interesting facet of the brain and its consciousness. While the brain is the control and reception center for all of our physical sensations, it cannot feel anything itself. We watched a video in anatomy last year of an awake craniotomy - brain surgery while the patient was awake. The patient's brain was manipulated with electrodes as doctors removed a tumor to determine whether any functioning tissue was being affected. The patient was asked to do things like count on his fingers or other simple tasks, and, depending on where the electrode was placed, he may or may not have been able to complete the task. It was crazy to watch this occur and think about having someone else manipulate my brain, or the fact that surgeons were physically cutting through portions of the patient's brain, and he could not feel a thing.

Those optical illusions were crazy! It was weird to see it and be able to change certain aspects of it. It was like actually talking to your unconscious! I never really thought about the connection between the unconscious and the conscious. The more I think about it though the easier it is to see how they work together to help you. While by brain may not be perfect I no longer feel like it betrays me by not letting me know whats going on all the time. Somethings are better left to the unconscious so we don't have to think about things to hard. While those optival illusions made me sick for the rest of the day I found them to be very helpful in allowing me to make connections between the two parts of the brain.

The last class was really interesting with the conducted experiments drove everybody crazy. One experiment drew mu attention. The pictures can be really different when the size of the picture was shown in different scale. The interpretation can be really diverged. This also reminds me of another brain storm we did in the bio lab class. I was supposed to write down three word first popped out in your mind when think of the given word. I wrote down spontaneous, pattern and unconscious for the word chaos. I think everything happens for certain reason. Everything has its meaning to exist on this planet. Personally, I do believe that everything happens for reasons. For some cases we can solve it with the experience we have or the knowledge we learn during growth. For the others, which we considered random and seem to be a mess at first look, I still think there should be explanations for those phenomena. However, we are not able to reason them at this point. It also is possible that there are some things beyond our abilities. Also, the random could be some pieces of unconsciousness that as Sigmund Freud described as “the underwater part of the iceberg” coming up unexpectedly. The random talking of somebody could be spontaneous reactions in certain situations. In a bigger scale, some observations in nature we consider chaos could be the spontaneous outcomes from the accumulations of different factors in those situations. Chaos can be a kind of expression of the unconscious state.

One point Paul made during his demonstration on Thursday is the constant conversation between consciousness and unconsciousness. Our unconsciousness tries to make up the missing pieces or the make the incomplete parts right with our existent concepts. Our unconsciousness is always trying to fix the incompleteness.

There are still a lot skepticisms for me about the conversations between consciousness and unconsciousness. For example, as I mentioned above, the scale or the level of our observation will affect out interpretation about the observation we make. Make it’s the perspective we look at the things rather than the conversations going on in the brain.  

 The biggest thing I learned this week was the idea of the unconscious as separate from the conscious. I mean, now that it's been presented to me it makes sense, but i never thought of it that way before. Denial is a good example of this, where the unconscious knows one thing but the conscious can't seem to grasp the idea. (At least, that's the way I see it.) I really liked the explanation of the starburst behind the grid as the unconscious predicting the future because i always thought of the unconscious as not really doing anything actively, just harboring complexes and letting them fester for psychiatrists to figure out during your mid-life crisis.  It's just so cool to me, to think that the unconscious is functioning...well, without the knowledge of the conscious. (hurray tautology.) Like playing catch, your brain predicts where the ball is going to go and you know your limbs will get you to where the ball will be. If you keep your eye on the ball, which tends to be my problem.

Another thought i had--if we make conscious decisions based on the information our unconscious gathers, if the unconscious collects information wrong (like mistaking a windmill for a giant) and the conscious makes a logical decision based on it (like tilting at said giant) it would be the definition of crazy, yes?

In Thursday’s class, I guess most of us felt excited, curious but confused. We can not figure out how our brains work to construct such a wonderful optical world, but we enjoy it. Optical illusion pictures intrigued and confused me. I first got to know that those optical illusions are originated from people’s creative perception. The point of view (or to say fact) that we handle informed guesses and have “smart unconsciousness” really interests me. Also, I really appreciate the capability we obtained from hundreds of millions of years evolution.

I watched a video named The Secret Life of the Brain this weekend. I found this interesting too. It mainly talks about some emotional diseases of people and therefore conducts the importance of unconscious emotion in people’s daily lives and how it functions. Our brain can be divided into two parts, not by right hemisphere and left hemisphere, but by cortex and the part beneath cortex. The cortex controls our reasoning, understanding and judging. The large part beneath the furrows of cortex is our “unconscious underworld” which controls our appetites, emotion and moods. There is no properly working thinking without properly working emotion. For example, even though happiness is an emotional expression, it delivers useful information to help us make judgment on the things we are going to meet in the future. We tend to more involve in the things give us happiness, which means these are potentially good for us.

Instead of being thinking machines, human beings are actually emotional machines. The world is constructed by our unconscious informed guess and human beings’ daily lives are also dominated by unconscious emotion.

I think Thursday's discussion was really interesting. While playing the illusion games, I deeply believe how powerful and clever the unconscious part of our brain is. I think that these games let me have a better idea of how our brains function. Thursday's discussion really raised my interest in our unconscious mind. I think it is really difficult to study our unconsciousness. I still believe that there is a limitation to use our brain itself to study brain. Moreover, I am still not convinced that we are able to study the unconscious part of our brain, since this is the part of the brain that gives rise to a collection of mental phenomena( unconscious feelings, unconscious or automatic skills, unnoticed perceptions, unconscious thoughts)that manifest in our mind but which we are not aware of at the time of their occurrence. If we human beings are not even aware of the presence of unconsciousness when it works in our brain to give us intuitive thoughts, how can we study how it works? Hence, I still think it is unjustified to study unconsciousness by the conscious part of our brain. Even though scientists are able to give very logical reasons to explain how brain functions, all the seemingly logical explanations are just stories to me. I am still quite confused about how scientists study the unconscious part of our human brain. I guess that scientists use the conscious part of their brain to study other people's unconscious mind. Am I correct?

 It seems to me that this operation of stimulus, unconscious processing, conscious acceptance or rejection and potential unconscious reprocessing describes the pattern of every evolution that we have studied thus far. (see diagram from Paul's class) Everything is reciprocally influential. Therefore, evolution is both reactionary, controllable, random, and inevitable. And it's not only useful, but important that we continue to explore different logics, or modes of storytelling, to continue to expand our explanations of evolution. Our explanations of evolution help us to situate ourselves within the world around us, and even inside our own heads...which are our worlds.

In response to the re-wiring brain, well, there got to be advantanges and disadvantages.

I have read an analysis about twitter, that the world reflected in twitter has been seperated into millions of pieces of infomation which can be easily absorbed. Facebook, Youtube are the same drivers of floods of infomation. We can possibly learn many things from that with easy access, but as the information is too fragmentary, we tend to jump from one spot to another, and we tend to do multi-tasks at the same time. But doing homework, or reading books is a integrate task which requires long-time focus. That to say, children raised in multi-media world can focus, but the pattern of thinking is saltatory on a vigorous state which prefers fragments of infomation than intergrate task. Consequently we may be able to remember more things in a give time, but we can't think deeply in one direction, and then we just procrastinate and stroll on the internet.

Computer games are quite different though. In my highschool, the very best students, esp. in science, are all great players of Warcraft, CS,FIFA, NBA live or even the minesweeper of windows. They tend to analysis games and try to win the games by developed strategies. Logic training is done partly in the practice of games. Thier brain is spinning so fast that others just can't follow their thinking. And they do very well in school work too. The games give them an alternate way to wire the brain, by interest and passion. In this case, I would say that the time they spend on games is not wasted. As long as the school work, rest, and entertainment are balanced, it should be a very good way for one's brain development.

 Last Thursday I spent a lot of class saying, "oooh!" and "ahh!" and "wow!" Class was pretty entertaining with all of the optical illusions. But I didn't just enjoy the surprises, I also enjoyed the science and reasoning behind those surprises. Whoever knew how intelligent our unconscious was! Before this class and these discussions, I thought of my unconscious only as the thing that gave me dreams when I was asleep. Ok, I didn't think that dreams were the only thing our unconscious did, but it make up a big part of my understanding about the unconscious. Now do I know better. I find it so fascinating that when we see the graph with the starburst in the middle, the reason we see the lines distorted is because our mind is actually making the prediction that the picture is getting bigger and in order for it to get bigger, the lines need to get bigger, making them looked curved. Did I get that right? Anyways, I proud of my unconscious for it. It analyzes and looks our for my best interest without me even knowing. I just want to metaphorically pat it on the back now. 

Clearly through some of the examples Paul showed us, we're not a complete slave to our unconscious. That's a good thing. I don't think I would like it very much if my unconscious was always making decisions for me and I wasn't able to tell it that sometimes it's actually wrong. Life would probably be chaotic if we were completely at the mercy of our unconscious. 

Talking to Anne last Thursday I realized that I actually have mixed opinions about this topic. I like the mysteriousness of the unconscious, but I also like when we put reason behind the mystery. I think I just like a little mystery and a little reason in my life. It's complicated and contrasting but, that's how I see it.

 The discussion on Thursday was very interesting to me. One portion of the conversation that stood out to me was when talking about optical illusions as well as ambiguous shapes  a girl from Paul's class (unfortunately I do not remember her name) brought up a connection between her art class and the optical illusion with the star-burst and the grid (/gifs/changiziillusion.jpg).  Paul then went on to say how artist are in the business of making optical illusions. I have never thought of an artist as having the job of creating an optical illusion, though obviously an artist can't paint a seemingly 3D picture on a 2D canvas without creating some sort of optical illusion. Then this came to my mind: