Okay, so I’m going to tell you all a little bit about this Behavioral Neuroscience (BNS) paper I am in the process of writing!

Hold on to your hats, folks, this’ll be fun. I mostly promise.

The purpose of behavioral neuroscience in general is essentially to understand how our behaviors and actions translate into physiological activity inside or brain. This can also be the other way around: physiological activity within our brain can translate into actuality via behaviors and actions. (And, I think, thoughts and emotions.)

Basically, what these scientists in this field are doing is to identify how our brains work. This is a daunting task considering it is extremely challenging to separate “awareness” from “aliveness” and conscious thought from unconscious thought. No one really _knows_ what a thought IS.

However, as all scientists likely believe, there are always ways of identifying the etiology of all the various manifestations of life existence. Therefore there must be an equivalent physical component without our brains for every actual behavior or process that manifests itself outwardly. Must understand the actual brain activity that causes/responds to outward activity in order to understand the roles and processes within the brain.

This is the overview.

Now, within all of this gobbledy gook of words, there is actual real, live science in there.

Understanding human experience (thought, action, etc.) as a whole is an even more excruciating gesture. Therefore it seems to be a more reasonable task to break down the human experience into very tiny pieces… much easier to identify the physiological part when we’re not studying how the brain works while writing an abstract piece of work, right?

The teacher I am studying under has chosen a field that isn’t entirely uncharted territory. A handful– if not two handfuls– of people have stepped into this bite-sized business of identifying brain activity on how, simply put, we view objects and then identify them. That seems to be a simple enough, small enough, straight-forward enough task, no?

We already generally understand how the stimuli goes from the outside world and translates into data that moves into our brain. We have eyes that see, and within those eyes, there are stimuli receptors in the form of rods and cones which translate light into information. This light takes one of two (I believe) paths to the occipital part of our brain.

We understand the part where we see. What this group of researchers are trying to determine is how it is that we observe what we see. How is it that we recognize objects– the same objects from multiple different perspectives. If you see a dog, you know it’s a dog from all angles. If it is a dog’s butt you observe, somehow you have a pretty good idea of what the dog’s head looks like. Similarly, we know that there are particular parts of our brains that are more electrically active when our eyes see a face. Somewhere along that path, we observe a face, and translate that information, and a particular spot in our brain says, “Ding ding ding, we’ve got ourselves here a FACE!”

Much of this research is far more complicated than this. They use fancy scanning devices that can take a picture of millions of slices of our brain and create a much larger, three dimensional picture. One very special machine, a functional magnetic imaging (fMRI) device is able to identify where in the brain there is activity. Outside of the fMRI scans, researchers are also able to test things like reaction time (say, for instance, how long it takes to accurately identify a novel object), accuracy, and memory as step by step opportunities to see if we can understand any more completely what we’re observing as humans “seeing” and then “identifying” objects.

One even smaller piece has to do with what path (along which neuron sets) action potentials (energy) within our brain take when we are identifying an object from various different perspectives.

Within that smaller piece, there are two general theories:

View-Invariant Theory:
Objects can be decomposed into relatively simple parts and these parts are often easy to extract across changes in object view;

and

View-Fependent Theory:
Several views of objects are stored and serve as a basis of object representation (i.e. some neurons respond more strongly to specific views of objects or faces.

Both theories are fine and dandy and all… but I feel like there’s something left to be desired when you study this stuff. I mean, frankly, this stuff is pretty boring, and it doesn’t really jive well with MY theory.

Basically, both of these theories purport that we save bits and pieces of data in our “minds.”

And I DO acknowledge that it’s too difficult to bite off a bigger chunk of understanding how our brains work…

I just wonder if maybe these researchers are going about this understanding in a somewhat misguided fashion.

I do think that data is saved within our brains… and I think that it makes most sense that memory is something that falls either into the short term or the long term (and somewhere in between) categories. I wonder, though, if our memories of objects (and their appearances) aren’t saved in perhaps a more relationship-relative type manner. For instance, as a small child, the first things we learn are that we want food to fill our bellies in order to fix the hunger pains we experience when we are hungry. We learn to recognize the breast or bottle as a tool or means to get food, which solves our hunger pain. After numerous times of attracting that breast or bottle through the natural act of crying (because of the hunger pains), we eventually discover that we can manipulate our environment, through our tears, and therefore cry when we want something. We saw parallel circumstances when it came to having our diapers changed or when we wanted to be held.

Still with me here? So, I believe that our ability to identify food must be stored within our brain relatively close to the neurons that we use to identify breasts or bottles or hunger pains. As we continue to learn about our environment, we form more and more associations with objects and learn to unconsciously anticipate what an object looks like from many perspectives. As we grow and change and learn, we form other, more strong associations. For instance, when we begin to eat food that does not come from the breast or the bottle, we slowly lose that association, and eventually we will grow up enough to begin to associate breasts with grown women and bottles with other babies. I don’t know that our brains store certain basic objects in one area– even one hemisphere. I am not sure how we “stack” everything that we learn, and what gets priority from the inside out or the outside in… Perhaps THAT would be something to study.

I seriously doubt that anyone’s brain is just like another’s. Perhaps how we stack knowledge is only similar to others because we are all raised in the same culture, and generally are given the same set of parameters are the doctor-recommended ages. Maybe we can see other methods of “stacking” within other cultures that have never seen a television or a car. Maybe their brains are different.

Speaking of differences… it only makes sense to me that each of our brains are completely different. Perhaps our brains are our mediums, and we, the artists, control how we mold them and which associations we make. How on earth would we research that???

Thoughts??

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