Into The Rabbit Hole

I had a semi-revelation here regarding my Behavioral Neuroscience paper that was due two weeks ago.

Honestly, I’ve been resisting this.  I don’t think the topic is that interesting, and I don’t agree that the researchers who are exploring the topic have necessarily justified their reasoning behind why they’re so interested in figuring out neuronal pathways that a brain uses to identify an object or mentally rotate it.

They’ve come up with results that generally don’t support their theories, which I suppose is truthfully how you go about researching something so great a feat as figuring out How the Brain Works and what not.  Have a theory (an educated guess) and construe a study that will either support or dispute your theory.  Much of what I’ve read thus far has been a whole lot of disputing although the researchers still tend to throw a happy twist on to it by saying, “Yes but we think that blah blah blah doesn’t quite eliminate our theory…”

Whatever.   It really doesn’t matter to me personally, and I’ve had a really challenging time embracing this whole thing.

Then I read this article, which I just finished a summary on, and it sort of changed my perspective on it all.  It gave reasons behind why it’s interesting to learn how we process object identification and mental rotation.

First of all what IS mental rotation, really?  Well, it can be the technical this is your object in this orientation (point A), and then this is your object in a different orientation, rotated around an axis (point B).  And how do we come from point A to point B?  Well, I’ll give you a little hint: imagination.

Yes, we imagine this rotation around the axis.  We are using our imagination when we see one object and mentally rotate it.  Undeniably, there is a strong connection between imagination and… well, a whole lot of interesting things.  Consciousness, for one.  We have to be conscious to have an imagination… or do we?  I suppose this depends on your definition of consciousness– is consciousness being awake?  Because if dreaming isn’t a use of the imagination, I’m not sure what IS.  Is consciousness the act of being aware of yourself?  For example, I’m here typing out my thoughts because I can think them, then I can identify that I’ve thought them, and then I can type them out here on this warm laptop, putting my thoughts (imagination) out for the world to see.  I am aware that I am a thinking being and therefore find value in my ability to share my thoughts with you, other thinking beings.

Physiologically, what IS imagination?  And what IS consciousness?

If we can start with the tiniest building blocks– visual perception, mental rotation, object recognition, and find connections through measurements such as response times and functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI), then we may be able to build up a bigger picture of understanding just how the brain works.

Of course, I still think this is a much greater task than can be found by simply asking subjects to mentally rotate an object and then watching the electrical activity in their brains.  I don’t think that our brains are all the same, and I think, instead, that our awareness is all greatly unique based upon what we’re taught from day one of existence as a human.  (When that exact point is, I’ll not go into, that’s another post entirely.)  I think we associate things with each other and THAT is how our network of consciousness evolves.  I think that we begin with a completely egocentric perspective– one where we feel physical pains (hunger, gas, defecating, cold, warm, etc), and we learn to interact with our environment by crying, grunting, suckling, and smiling.  As we get older we learn to integrate visual, audio, and tactile stimuli into meaningful patterns– where we discover the things our parents are demonstrating for us as examples of what it’s like to be human.  We learn that humans walk on two feet and use our hands to eat, and express our needs and desires through language.  We learn to be afraid of what our parents teach us to be afraid of, and we learn to be confident in the ways they encourage us to be confident in.  After time, we move forward to learning from people other than our parents.  We learn from other children, from other family members, and become socially educated in how to elicit what we want from our environment.  All of these things we tie into our memory (our cortex) as associations.  I associate smells with food.  I associate food with mouth watering.  I associate the sound of keys jangling with being told to put on my shoes and jacket.  I associate getting a positive reaction from adults when I say the words “Please” and “Thank you” and “May I.”

I don’t believe that we all store all visual stimuli in a storage place in our brains that allows us to identify them.  I think we use all forms of stimuli (visual, audio, gustatory, taste, tactile) and save that data all together relative to the other things with which we associate them.  For instance, some of us have strong associations with smells, such as the smell of cherry pie.  I associate the smell of cherry pie with being with my family on holidays, and I associate it with the memory of my great grandmother.  Perhaps the visual cue of cherry pie, my grandmother’s house, and the image of my great grandmother are not all stored along-side of my other visual cues– like apple pie, my aunt’s house, and other family members as much as they are with the experience, or memory of the experience.

I’m not entirely certain that we are going to be able to do an experiment that eliminates all variables to test my theory– an I suppose I would be okay if the results dispute my theory.  After all, those of us researching this stuff have to pin point somewhere to begin.