Edelman; Wider than the Sky
Book	Page		Topic
Edelman; Wider than the Sky	3		Some people take the view that consciousness is a mere epiphenomenon with no material consequences.
Edelman; Wider than the Sky	4		We all know what consciousness is - it is what you lose when you fall into a deep dreamless sleep and what you regain when you wake up.		1
Edelman; Wider than the Sky	4		Consciousness is utterly dependent on the brain.		0
Edelman; Wider than the Sky	5		Consciousness emerges from the organization and operation of the brain.		1
Edelman; Wider than the Sky	5		When brain function is curtailed, after strokes, and in certain limited phases of sleep, consciousness is not present.		0
Edelman; Wider than the Sky	5		No return of the functions of the body and brain after death. Post mortem experience is simply not possible.		0
Edelman; Wider than the Sky	5		What features of the body and brain are necessary and sufficient for consciousness to appear?		0
Edelman; Wider than the Sky	8		Consciousness - "remembered present" - reflecting the fact that all past experience is engaged in forming an integrated awareness of this single moment.		3
Edelman; Wider than the Sky	9		Primary consciousness is the state of being mentally aware of things in the world, of having mental images in the present. It is possessed by animals lacking semantic or linguistic capabilities.		1
Edelman; Wider than the Sky	9		Higher-order consciousness involves the ability to be conscious of being conscious. Recreate past episodes and form future intentions.		0
Edelman; Wider than the Sky	9		At a minimal level, higher-order consciousness requires semantic ability, that is, the assignment of meaning to a symbol.		0
Edelman; Wider than the Sky	9		In its most developed form, higher-order consciousness requires linguistic ability, that is, the mastery of a whole system of symbols and a grammar.		0
Edelman; Wider than the Sky	9		Different levels of consciousness - In REM sleep, dreams are conscious states.		0
Edelman; Wider than the Sky	10		In diseases of consciousness, such as schizophrenia, hallucinations, delusions, and disorientations can occur.		1
Edelman; Wider than the Sky	10		In normal conscious states individuals experience qualia (e.g., greenness, warmth, painfulness).		0
Edelman; Wider than the Sky	10		Qualia are high-order discriminations that constitute consciousness.		0
Edelman; Wider than the Sky	15		Brain contains at least 30 billion neurons.		5
Edelman; Wider than the Sky	16		Brain contains 1 million billion synapses. (1015)		1
Edelman; Wider than the Sky	17		About 200 different kinds of neurons in the brain.		1
Edelman; Wider than the Sky	20		Corpus callosum connects the two cortical hemispheres and consists of more than 200 million reciprocal axons.		3
Edelman; Wider than the Sky	21		Hippocampus is an evolutionarily ancient cortical structure, lined up like a pair of curled sausages along the inner skirt of the temporal cortex. Cross section looks like a sea horse.		1
Edelman; Wider than the Sky	21		Neural function of the hippocampus provides synaptic mechanisms underlying memory but should not be equated with memory itself. While synaptic change is essential for the function of memory, memory is a system property of neural network connections.		0
Edelman; Wider than the Sky	22		Increased synaptic strength or efficacy within a pathway leads to a higher likelihood of conduction across a pathway.		1
Edelman; Wider than the Sky	23		A long-term memory record results when particular synaptic connections between the hippocampus and the cortex are strengthened.		1
Edelman; Wider than the Sky	24		Basal ganglia connect to the cortex via the thalamus.  Reciprocal connection patterns existing in the cortex itself and between the cortex and the thalamus are lacking in the basal ganglia.		1
Edelman; Wider than the Sky	24		Activity of the basal ganglia is through inhibitory neurons using GABA has neurotransmitter.  Since inhibition of inhibition (or disinhibition) can occur in these loops, they can stimulate target neurons as well as suppress their activity.		0
Edelman; Wider than the Sky	24		Basal ganglia are believed to be involved in the initiation and control of motor patterns.		0
Edelman; Wider than the Sky	24		Much of procedural memory (e.g., ride a bicycle) and other nonconscious learned activity depends on the functions of the basal ganglia.		0
Edelman; Wider than the Sky	25		Value systems, by projecting profusely, affect large populations of neurons simultaneously.		1
Edelman; Wider than the Sky	25		Value system bias neuronal responses affecting both learning and memory necessary for survival.		0
Edelman; Wider than the Sky	26		Three main neuroanatomical motifs in the brain: (1) thalamocortical, (2) polysynaptic loop structure, (3) diffuse ascending projections of the different value systems.		1
Edelman; Wider than the Sky	29		No two individuals, not even identical twins, possess the same anatomical pattern.		3
Edelman; Wider than the Sky	29		Earliest stages of development, the cellular organization characteristic of a species, is controlled by families of genes, including the Hox genes.		0
Edelman; Wider than the Sky	29		At a certain point in development, the control of neural connectivity becomes epigenetic; it is not prespecified as "hardwiring" by genes, but rather is guided by patterns of neural activity. Neurons that "fire together, wire together."		0
Edelman; Wider than the Sky	29		Result is a pattern of constancy and variation leading to highly individual networks in each animal.		0
Edelman; Wider than the Sky	30		Ablation of cortical area V1 leads to blindness.		1
Edelman; Wider than the Sky	31		There are areas of the brain that if damaged or removed will lead to permanent unconsciousness: midbrain reticular formation; region of the thalamus containing the intralaminar nuclei.		1
Edelman; Wider than the Sky	31		Consciousness is comprised of a dynamic interaction of multiple brain regions.		0
Edelman; Wider than the Sky	32		One simple principle governs how the brain works: it evolved; It was not designed. Natural selection acting in complex environments over eons of time.		1
Edelman; Wider than the Sky	33		Neural Darwinism - the theory of neuronal group selection.		1
Edelman; Wider than the Sky	33		Explanation of consciousness will require an understanding of perception, memory, action, attention.		0
Edelman; Wider than the Sky	34		Extraordinary amount of variation in each individual brain.		1
Edelman; Wider than the Sky	34		Enormous variation at the levels of neuronal chemistry, network structure, synaptic strength, temporal properties, memories, and motivational patterns governed by value systems.		0
Edelman; Wider than the Sky	36		In sensory systems such as vision, multiple cortical regions that are functionally segregated (e.g., color, movement, orientation), can exceed thirty in number, distributed all over the brain.		2
Edelman; Wider than the Sky	36		No superordinate area or executive program binding these functions together into a coherent percept.		0
Edelman; Wider than the Sky	37		Remarkable tendency of brains to seek closure and avoid gaps.		1
Edelman; Wider than the Sky	38		Closure phenomena - responses to strokes, extraordinary adaptation and integration, damaged brain responds to the loss of cortical area.		1
Edelman; Wider than the Sky	38		Brains of higher-level animals autonomously construct patterned responses to environments that are full of novelty.		0
Edelman; Wider than the Sky	39		Theory of Neuronal Group Selection, TNGS - three tenets: (1) Developmental selection, (2) Experimental selection, (3) Reentry		1
Edelman; Wider than the Sky	39		Developmental selection - during early development, epigenetic variations in the patterns of connections, create repertoires in each brain area; millions of variant circuits or neuronal groups. Neurons that "fire together wire together."		0
Edelman; Wider than the Sky	39		Experimental selection - large variations in synaptic strength, positive and negative, result from variations in environmental input during behavior. Synaptic modifications are subject to the constraints of value systems.		0
Edelman; Wider than the Sky	39		Reentry - during development, large numbers of reciprocal connections are established both locally and over long distances. This provides a basis for signaling between mapped areas across reciprocal fibers.		0
Edelman; Wider than the Sky	39		Reentry - recursive interchange of parallel signals among brain areas, coordinate the activities of different brain areas in space and time.		0
Edelman; Wider than the Sky	41		Unlike feedback, reentry is not a sequential transmission of an error signal in a simple loop. Instead, it simultaneously involves many parallel reciprocal paths and has no prescribed error function.		2
Edelman; Wider than the Sky	41		Consequence of this dynamic process is the widespread synchronization of the activity of widely distributed neuronal groups. Binds their functionally segregated activities into coherent output.		0
Edelman; Wider than the Sky	41		Reentry is the central organizing principle that governs the spatiotemporal coordination among multiple selectional networks of the brain.		0
Edelman; Wider than the Sky	41		Reentry solves the binding problem. Through reentry, for example, the color, orientation and movement of a visual object can be integrated.		0
Edelman; Wider than the Sky	41		Various individual maps that are functionally segregated can be coordinated by communicating directly with each other via reentry.		0
Edelman; Wider than the Sky	42		It is the neuronal groups made up of excitatory and inhibitory neurons in particular anatomical patterns, rather than individual neurons, that are selected.		1
Edelman; Wider than the Sky	43		Proposal of the TNGS in 1978, neuronal groups connected by reentrant interactions are the selectional units in higher-level brains.		1
Edelman; Wider than the Sky	43		Brain is so versatile in its responses because those responses are degenerate. Degeneracy is the ability of structurally different elements of a system to perform the same function.		0
Edelman; Wider than the Sky	43		Genetic code -- Code words are degenerate. Third position of many triplet codons can contain any one of the four letters without changing their coding specificity.		0
Edelman; Wider than the Sky	44		Identical twins who have similar immune responses to a foreign agent do not generally use identical combinations of antibodies to react to that agent.		1
Edelman; Wider than the Sky	44		Many structurally different antibodies with similar specificities can be selected in the immune response to a given foreign molecule.		0
Edelman; Wider than the Sky	44		Mutual reentrant interactions, for a brief time, link various neuronal groups in each map to those of others to form a functioning circuit. Neurons that yield such circuits fire more or less in phase with each other, or synchronously.		0
Edelman; Wider than the Sky	45		In the next time period, different neurons and neuronal groups may form a structurally different circuit, which nevertheless has the same output.		1
Edelman; Wider than the Sky	45		These different circuits are degenerate - they are different in structure, but they yield similar outputs to solve the binding problem.		0
Edelman; Wider than the Sky	45		As a result of reentry, the properties of synchrony and coherency allow more than one structure to give a similar output.		0
Edelman; Wider than the Sky	45		As long as such degenerate operations occur in succession to link distributed populations of neuronal groups, there is no need for an executive.		0
Edelman; Wider than the Sky	46		Different cell can carry out the same function, and the same cell can, at two different times, carry out different functions in different neuronal groups.		1
Edelman; Wider than the Sky	49		In the mammalian nervous system, perceptual categorization is carried out by interactions between sensory and motor systems by  what Edelman calls global mapping.		3
Edelman; Wider than the Sky	49		Global mapping is a dynamic structure containing various sensory maps, each with different functionally segregated properties, linked by reentry.		0
Edelman; Wider than the Sky	49		The global mapping is linked by non-reentrant connections to motor maps and subcortical systems such as the cerebellum and basal ganglia.		0
Edelman; Wider than the Sky	50		Higher-order cortical maps in the prefrontal, parietal, and temporal areas carry out this global mapping. No linear sum of global mappings could give rise to such a generalization. Instead, the generalization arises by abstracting certain features of the mappings by higher-order maps.		1
Edelman; Wider than the Sky	50		Perceptual categorization and concept formation would not be adaptive to an animal in the absence of memory.		0
Edelman; Wider than the Sky	50		Understanding of memory is essential for formulating a theory of consciousness.		0
Edelman; Wider than the Sky	50		Memory results from changes in synaptic efficacy (synaptic strength) in circuits of neuronal groups.		0
Edelman; Wider than the Sky	51		After changes have occurred, they tend to favor recruitment of certain of these circuits to yield reenactment. This recruitment may occur in more than one way - it may be degenerate.		1
Edelman; Wider than the Sky	51		Certain forms of memory require fast changes in synaptic efficacy in time periods less than about one-third of a second.		0
Edelman; Wider than the Sky	51		Other forms of memory require slower, but more stable, changes in synaptic strength.		0
Edelman; Wider than the Sky	51		Episodic memory depends on interactions between the hippocampus and the cerebral cortex.		0
Edelman; Wider than the Sky	51		Procedural memory - reflects motor learning		0
Edelman; Wider than the Sky	51		Episodic memory - long term recall of sequences of events or narratives. Depends on interactions between the hippocampus and the cerebral cortex.		0
Edelman; Wider than the Sky	52		Memory cannot simply be equated with synaptic change, although changes in synaptic strength are essential for it.		1
Edelman; Wider than the Sky	52		Each event of memory is a dynamic and context-sensitive. Memory involves a repetition of a mental act that is similar to but not identical with previous acts. Memory is recategorical; it does not replicate an original experience exactly.		0
Edelman; Wider than the Sky	52		Memory should be looked on as a property of degenerate nonlinear interactions in a multidimensional network of neuronal groups. Such interactions allow a non-identical "reliving" of a set of prior acts and events.		0
Edelman; Wider than the Sky	53		Memories are necessarily associative and never identical.		1
Edelman; Wider than the Sky	53		Mechanisms leading to perceptual categorization - global mappings, concept formation, dynamic short-term memory - all call upon three major motifs.		0
Edelman; Wider than the Sky	53		(1) Thalamocortical maps		0
Edelman; Wider than the Sky	53		(2) Subcortical organs concerned with temporal succession (hippocampus, basal ganglia, cerebellum)		0
Edelman; Wider than the Sky	53		(3) Diffuse ascending value systems.		0
Edelman; Wider than the Sky	53		Value-category memory system - constraints of value systems can determine the degree and extent of recall.		0
Edelman; Wider than the Sky	54		At a point in evolutionary time corresponding to the transition between reptiles and birds and between reptiles and mammals, a new reciprocal connectivity appeared in the thalamocortical system.		1
Edelman; Wider than the Sky	54		Massively reentrant connectivity developed between the cortical areas carrying out perceptual categorization and the more frontal areas responsible for value-category memory based on fast changes in synaptic strength.		0
Edelman; Wider than the Sky	55		Dynamic reentrant interactions in the thalamocortical system.		1
Edelman; Wider than the Sky	55		Bootstrapping between memory and perception is assumed to be stabilized within time periods ranging from hundreds of milliseconds to seconds.		0
Edelman; Wider than the Sky	55		"Remembered Present" -- dynamic interaction between memory and ongoing perception that gives rise to consciousness.		0
Edelman; Wider than the Sky	55		Activity of the reticular nucleus of the thalamus gates various combinations of activity of those specific thalamic nuclei corresponding to different sensory modalities.		0
Edelman; Wider than the Sky	55		Intralaminar nuclei of the thalamus, which send diffuse connections to most areas of the cortex, helps to synchronize thalamocortical responses and regulate the overall levels of activity in these multiple reentrant systems.		0
Edelman; Wider than the Sky	56		Reentrant pathways leading to primary consciousness - (diagram)		1
Edelman; Wider than the Sky	57		Ability to create a scene by reentrant correlations between value-category memory and perceptual categories is the basis for the emergence of primary memory.		1
Edelman; Wider than the Sky	57		Some of the earliest categorizations are related to signals from the animal's own body and brain.		0
Edelman; Wider than the Sky	57		Signals from "self" systems begin even before birth and remain a central feature of primary consciousness.		0
Edelman; Wider than the Sky	57		Memories conditioned by the history of reward and punishment during an animal's past behavior - key role in emotional responses and associated feelings.		0
Edelman; Wider than the Sky	57		Ability to construct a conscious scene in a fraction of a second is the ability to construct a remembered present.		0
Edelman; Wider than the Sky	58		Higher-order consciousness confers the ability to imagine the future, explicitly recall the past, and to be conscious of being conscious.		1
Edelman; Wider than the Sky	67		Brain complexity via differentiation and integration - contrast with (1) perfect gas, which had no integration and (2) perfect crystal, which has integration but no variety. - (diagram)		9
Edelman; Wider than the Sky	70		Responses triggered by the reentrant dynamic core can also stimulate non-conscious responses through the basal ganglia network.  These travel along parallel, polysynaptic, one-directional pathways that leave the cortex, reach the various components of the basal ganglia and certain thalamic nuclei, and finally return to the cortex.		3
Edelman; Wider than the Sky	70		Responses subserving consciousness can connect to activity patterns in unconscious areas, served mainly but not exclusively by the basal ganglia.		0
Edelman; Wider than the Sky	71		Dynamic Core - (diagram)		1
Edelman; Wider than the Sky	89		Basal ganglia consist of the striatum (caudate nucleus and putamen), globus pallidus, substantia nigra, and subthalamic nucleus.		18
Edelman; Wider than the Sky	89		A major portion of the basal ganglia, constituting input nuclei from the cortex, is the striatum, which consists of the caudate nucleus and putamen.		0
Edelman; Wider than the Sky	89		Globus pallidus and one part of the substantia nigra make up the major output nuclei projecting to the thalamus.		0
Edelman; Wider than the Sky	89		Basal ganglia receive inputs from practically all regions of the cortex.		0
Edelman; Wider than the Sky	89		Basal ganglia project to the prefrontal cortex and to the association areas, which weigh decisions related to action.		0
Edelman; Wider than the Sky	91		Motor circuit of the Basal Ganglia - (diagram)		2
Edelman; Wider than the Sky	91		Connections between basal ganglia and cortex are involved in the execution of automatic motor programs.  [FAPs]		0
Edelman; Wider than the Sky	91		During conscious learning of tasks, a considerable amount of cerebral cortex is engaged.		0
Edelman; Wider than the Sky	91		With practice, conscious attention is not required, and acts become automatic.		0
Edelman; Wider than the Sky	93		An attractive hypothesis is that collaborations between the cortex and basal ganglia set up synaptic changes that lie behind procedural learning.		2
Edelman; Wider than the Sky	93		For example, practicing musical passages will eventually result in the ability to "rattle them off" without detailed attention.		0
Edelman; Wider than the Sky	94		A pianist playing a concerto may execute passages without conscious attention, note by note, but simultaneously may plan consciously or think ahead about an upcoming musical phrase or tempo.		1
Edelman; Wider than the Sky	94		Certain portions of the cortex may be engaged in interactions with the basal ganglia without being directly involved in the operation of the dynamic core.		0
Edelman; Wider than the Sky	101		Evolution of higher-order consciousness. (diagram)		7
Edelman; Wider than the Sky