| Susan Greenfield - Journey to Centers of Mind | |||||
| Book | Page | Topic | |||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 1 | Inner world of your particular consciousness arises from a kaleidoscope of memories, prejudices, hopes, habits, and emotions, which are constantly expanding and enriching your life as you develop. | |||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 2 | Brain electricity and brain chemistry are ultimately all there is to your mind. | 1 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 2 | We experience consciousness most the time we are not asleep. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 3 | At this time there are simply no terms of reference, no framework for capturing an objective description of subjective consciousness. | 1 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 4 | We all "know" what consciousness is, but find it impossible to articulate what it is using an objective frame of reference. | 1 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 5 | Fighting and fleeing are extreme examples of arousal. | 1 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 9 | Mental life of one individual's mind is not transferable to any other brain. | 4 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 9 | A signature is the only universally accepted outward sign of an individual. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 10 | We produce, day after day, a consistent signature. | 1 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 10 | Everything we see, hear, taste, touch, and smell is laced with associations from previous experiences. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 10 | World of a newborn infant, a world of meaningless abstract forms and sounds. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 10 | Associations can reasonably be assumed to contribute to a consistent profile of individuality. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 12 | How exactly does nervous tissue calls consciousness? | 2 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 20 | Neuronal communication. (diagram) | 8 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 36 | Computer HAL died in the film 2001. | 16 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 37 | Daniel Dennett (1991) -- proponents of mechanical minds, similarities between the brain and modern parallel processing devices. | 1 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 39 | At least 50 basic neuronal shapes in the brain, which can affect the efficiency of signaling. | 2 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 39 | Neurons with very long dendrites. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 39 | Small cells are excited more easily than larger ones. (Smaller cells have higher resistance, so any current produced as an incoming signal is transformed into a larger voltage) | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 39 | Size, together with the number and length of processes that extend from a cell are critical factors in its behavior. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 39 | Physical shape of neurons in the brain goes a long way in determining neuronal response. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 40 | Interactions between neurons and neuronal aggregations are most accurately described as networks (a combination of hierarchies and parallel processors). | 1 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 40 | Neuronal networks are the functional building blocks of the brain. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 40 | Neurons in a network entail a certain amount of redundancy, if we assume several neurons can do the same job. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 40 | Neuronal network redundancy acts as insurance against the death of an otherwise unique single cell. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 40 | Learning is the key property of neurons in groups. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 40 | Shifting relations among neurons in a network. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 41 | Psychologist Donald Hebb -- the more two neurons communicate with each other, the easier communication becomes (1949). | 1 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 41 | Weighting the strength of communications among various neurons in a network depends upon prior experience or learning. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 41 | The more certain synaptic contacts in the neural network are used, the more efficient those synapses become. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 43 | Researchers in 1973 observed and named long-term potentiation (LTP). When stimulated intensively, neurons become more sensitive to subsequent stimulation for several hours later. | 2 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 44 | Hebb's ideas of strengthening. | 1 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 44 | When a particular chemical fits into a receptor, it acts as a trigger to open or close channels in the cell membrane for the subsequent passage of a particular ion in and out of the cell. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 45 | Calcium is a far more versatile and powerful ion inside a neuron than sodium. | 1 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 45 | Calcium ions can promote many changes, such as the activation of genes. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 45 | When certain genes are activated, the neuron may change the amounts and types of particular chemicals it contains and even undergo a modification in its overall appearance. It will have been adapted over a period of time to the sustained increase in input. It's response will have become weighted to respond in different ways to future signals. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 45 | After you gain experience for a while, during a period of rest, your brain sets in motion LTP, which is responsible for your adapting to or learning from the experience you have just had. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 46 | Mechanism of long-term potentiation (LTP); schematic drawing of a slice of hippocampus. (diagram) | 1 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 46 | Nerve fibers from the entorhinal cortex, enter the hippocampus and make contact with cells in the dentate gyrus. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 46 | Cells in the dentate gyrus make contact with cells in CA3. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 46 | Cells in CA3 make contact with output pyramidal cells in CA1. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 47 | Humans do not have to be on the move to gain experience; intense thought or stimulating conversation or attendance at a lecture generates neural activity. | 1 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 47 | Over time, LTP decays. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 47 | LTP can occur rather promiscuously in a variety of totally different situations. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 47 | Rudolfo Llinás has shown that if inputs to a cell cause an on-and-off excitement in rapid oscillation, then a potentiation can also occur. This type of LTP is not mediating memory, but may represent a requisite condition related to it, such as attention. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 48 | Loose relationship between the physical mechanism of LTP and the phenomenological process of memory. | 1 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 50 | Apart from size and the percentage of brain it represents, cerebellum has changed little during animal evolution. | 2 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 51 | When we ski, drive an automobile, or play the piano, we perform the manual movements of these skills automatically. | 1 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 51 | Although we are conscious, we are not consciously planning each movement by which we execute a skill. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 52 | Modulocircuitry of the cerebellum. (diagram) | 1 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 52 | Neurons of the cerebellum are organized into repeating modules. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 52 | Purkinje cell, the major cell of the cerebellum, receives two types of inputs directly, (1) climbing fibers and (2) parallel fibers; as well as a third, indirect input (mossy fibers). Purkinje cell sends its output signal to neurons deep within the cerebellum, the cerebellum nuclei. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 53 | We rarely respond in exactly the same way a second time to a given situation. | 1 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 53 | There is always some uncertainty in neuronal events. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 53 | Neurophysiologists speak of the probability of neuronal events rather than of certainty. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 53 | Roger Penrose in 1989 pointed out that it is hard to form fixed and rigid rules for intuition and common sense. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 54 | Memories are labile and highly suspect to revision. | 1 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 54 | How often we rewrite past events, suppressing certain scenes and distorting others, to make ourselves seem braver, clever, wittier, or more justified in acting a certain way. Capricious and inconstant type of memory. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 54 | Spontaneous mental states such as nostalgic daydream or fantasy, which entail neither sensory inputs nor movement outputs. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 54 | Form abstract concepts such as love, truth, and beauty from the bits and pieces of information flooding into us. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 54 | Our actions are frequently generated from an internal thought, not external sensory triggers. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 54 | Our minds are frequently driven by some external sensory inputs. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 54 | Some movements are stereotyped or almost stereotyped -- knee-jerk; jumping out of the way of a car; or even routine driving a car much of the time. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 55 | Frequently we are proactive, carrying out various acts that are seemingly spontaneous but far from random, and are thus engaged in voluntary movement. | 1 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 55 | Behavior not requiring consciousness, such as stereotyped automatic motor skills. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 55 | LTP is not the essence of memory, but a possible requirement for it. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 55 | Computational cognitive processing may be a necessary but not a sufficient requirement for processes in the brain leading to consciousness. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 55 | One of the most vigorous opponents of the view that an algorithmic, computational basis of consciousness consciousness can ever be found is Roger Penrose. He cites mathematician Kurt Gödel's theorem, which states that the validity of an argument in logic is dependent on premises that are additional to that argument. [arcane and etherial] | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 55 | Penrose states that our consciousness is governed by something more than a fixed set of rules, more than a series of algorithms. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 55 | Consciousness would be nothing without intuition, common sense, and insight. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 56 | Advocates of a mechanical mind, such as Churchland, claim that motives, moods, and appetites may be part and parcel of information processing to a degree hitherto unsuspected. | 1 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 59 | Blindsight patients possess some kind of visual ability, but this ability has become totally disassociated from conscious awareness of events in the visual field. Weiskrantz (1974) | 3 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 59 | Critical factor for consciousness of movement is that two particular parts of the cortex (V1 and V5) should be able to interact. Neurons in each of these two regions must be able to sustain a dialogue, emit signals in synchrony, oscillating at the same frequency. It is this oscillation, this neuronal cooperativity, that is crucial for conscious perception of movement. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 60 | The idea of consciousness arising from brain regions working together, achieve more than their mere sum, is an emergent property. | 1 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 60 | Multiple brain regions work transiently together. By their reverberating interaction, their temporary and transient dialogue, consciousness is emergent. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 60 | A dynamic, resonating dialogue among parts of the cortex may well be necessary in order to explain the paradox the blindsight. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 61 | We are either conscious or unconscious of things according to their importance, strength, or intensity. | 1 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 61 | Strength of objects of our consciousness might determine the extent of the dialogue among participating brain regions. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 63 | Prosopagnosia literally means a failure to recognize faces. | 2 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 65 | Split brain -- in certain cases of severe epilepsy, surgically severing the corpus callosum prevents the spread of the seizure from one hemisphere of the brain to the other. | 2 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 67 | Experiments with human split brain patients confirmed that the two halves can work independently of each other | 2 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 67 | Consciousness arises as a result of traffic to and from many brain regions, some of them within the central part of the brain, well below the cortex and far below the area that is cut apart in split brain patients. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 67 | Consciousness may be variable, but it does not depend on the degree of incoming information from any one sensory modality. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 67 | If a person is in a quiet, dark room, consciousness is not diminished, although it is obviously quite different from a normal lighted room. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 67 | Split brain cases show that the two halves of the brain process incoming information separately. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 68 | Memory appears to be in inextricably linked to consciousness. | 1 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 75 | Ongoing stimulation of the five senses is not necessary for consciousness. | 7 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 77 | Unconsciousness is graded and meshes gradually with consciousness. | 2 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 78 | Consciousness is continuously variable and can occur to greater or lesser extents at different times. | 1 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 82 | Rigid distinctions among higher order consciousness, primary consciousness, and no consciousness are not very helpful. | 4 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 82 | Consciousness deepens gradually as an animal's brain grows and develops. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 82 | Variations and degrees of consciousness continue throughout the rest of our lives. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 82 | There are times when we are tired or have the flu or overindulged in wine, when our consciousness will be blunted. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 82 | There are times, such as when we have just fallen in love or are on an isolated beach or listening to Mozart, when we have never felt more alive, when our consciousness seems heightened. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 84 | Associations occur as our neurons form connections in certain ways as the result of exposure to particular environments, utilizing mechanisms such as Hebbian weighting. | 2 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 84 | Connections among neurons are highly plastic and capable of great change. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 84 | Even in the mature brain, the continuing ability to learn and remember is mediated by neuronal connection plasticity, which retains the ability to adapt to inputs as we go through life. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 84 | Consciousness emerges in relation to the complexity of neuronal interactions. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 85 | Consciousness is a property of many transient groupings of neurons. Our brains are a restless grouping and re-grouping of temporarily relevant neurons with greater and lesser connectivity. | 1 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 88 | A property of consciousness is its spatial multiplicity combined with temporal unity. | 3 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 88 | Aggregations of neurons must not be committed full-time and irrevocably to consciousness; they should have no special feature. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 88 | Consciousness may be generated at different times by shifting populations composed of different groups of neurons. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 89 | Non-specialized groups of cells are distributed throughout the brain, and these groups are constantly reforming their connections and changing their size and pattern. Such groups of cells are the appropriate physical bases for multiple potential consciousnesses, only one of which is realized at any one time. | 1 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 89 | Schizophrenic trains of consciousness can change too rapidly upon one another so that one line of thought cannot be sustained but is sidetracked by extraneous and irrelevant association. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 89 | Schizophrenic patient was unable to disregard whatever invaded his senses. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 90 | Effects of hallucinogenic drugs have often been compared with the symptoms of schizophrenia. | 1 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 90 | Central problem with hallucinogenic drugs is that the person is overly obsessed with an object or thought or is too readily distracted on some tangential or idiosyncratic pathway. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 90 | Consciousness-changing effects of hallucinogenic drugs or schizophrenia. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 91 | We are always aware of something at any one time. It is a contradiction to be conscious of nothing. | 1 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 91 | Consciousness can be focused on an internalized representation, such as a hope or a memory. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 91 | Usually, we are receptive to both our inner thoughts and the outside world. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 91 | Consciousness always entails a stimulus or focus; it develops from a kind of epicenter. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 91 | Consciousness devolves from some sort of triggering epicenter. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 92 | Two types of pain are objectively recognized -- (1) fast pain, transmitted in the brain quickly by way of myelinated nerves, is relatively easy to localize, (2) slow pain, a far more unpleasant experience, is transmitted slowly on unmyelinated nerves. | 1 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 92 | Only slow pain is effectively combated with morphine. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 92 | In one of the great discoveries of modern neuroscience, sensation and suppression of pain are linked to a naturally occurring morphine in the nervous system, enkephalin (1986). | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 94 | Degree of pain perception can be as affected by attitudes and beliefs, as well as emotional and psychological states. | 2 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 94 | Patients taking morphine have claimed that they can still sense the pain, but it is no longer relevant or significant -- i.e., it does not dominate their consciousness. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 94 | When consciousness starts to shrink in the first stages of anesthesia, there is also analgesia, reduced awareness of pain. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 94 | Consciousness of the same noxious stimulus can certainly vary according to circumstances. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 94 | A variable, or waxing and waning consciousness, devolving around a particular epicenter. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 95 | Degree of consciousness can be the product of the extent of associations triggered by an epicenter. | 1 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 95 | Power of an epicenter can be defined in terms of the number of neuronal associations recruited. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 95 | Cognitive associations, such as anticipating a pain, will make the pain worse and our consciousness of the pain more extensive. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 96 | "Priming" has proven so valuable, and psychoanalysis has furnished its amazing revelations. | 1 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 96 | Identification of associations normally covert and constituting the quality of a moment of consciousness. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 96 | Consciousness can be viewed qualitatively in terms of different neuronal assemblies, and quantitatively in terms of the size of the neuronal assembly and the extent of its interconnections. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 96 | The neuronal assembly is recruited by a triggering epicenter. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 96 | At any one time, one neuronal assembly will predominate, only to give way to a new grouping of a greater or smaller size, which in turn will be superseded by a third, and so on. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 96 | If consciousness is a continuum such that it can vary quickly in time, then the degree of consciousness would be directly proportional to the extent of the objects or concepts entailed and the number of diverse and idiosyncratic associations triggered. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 97 | Concentric description of consciousness is based on a triggering epicenter which sets in motion nonlinear, concentric associations. The more extensive or sustained the associations are, the more consciousness will be experienced at that particular time. We are not conscious of each of these associations as separate components. The components conspire together to give a single experience at a specific moment in time. | 1 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 97 | Consciousness is spatially multiple yet effectively single at any one time. It is an emergent property of noncommitted and emergent groups of neurons that is continuously variable with respect to and always entailing a stimulus epicenter. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 97 | If consciousness is an emergent property, it means that the whole is more than the sum of its parts. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 97 | Importance of the relationship among components in giving rise to a higher order of product was introduced in 1912 by a group of German psychologists who call their philosophy gestalt (pattern). | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 98 | Idea behind the gestalt school of thought is that perception is global, not local; objects or features are perceived in relation to one another, giving a final holistic view that cannot be inferred from the individual components alone. | 1 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 99 | Behaviorist school of thought popularized later by B. F. Skinner. | 1 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 99 | Neuronal gestalt -- a highly variable aggregation of neurons which is temporarily recruited around a triggering epicenter. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 99 | Size of the gestalt corresponds directly and simultaneously to the degree of consciousness at a given time. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 100 | Formation of neuronal gestalts and subsequent generation of consciousness are influenced by factors in the external environment. | 1 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 100 | Size of an existing gestalt, the depth of our current consciousness, influences how we interpret sensory inputs as they bombard us from the outside world. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 100 | Arousal is a powerful factor in determining the final quality of consciousness, although it is not the same as consciousness. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 100 | Arousal can be described as a generalized degree of alertness: it is low when we a relaxed and high when we are frightened or angry. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 100 | Electroencephalogram, EEG, uses electrodes on the scalp to record the combined output of neurons in the cortex. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 100 | When neurons create low-frequency, high-amplitude waves, where neurons work together in slow and steady unison, arousal is low. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 100 | In non-REM sleep, the EEG gives a characteristic waveform that is very different from when we dream. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 101 | During dreaming, the EEG pattern becomes desynchronized; neurons are more active, and the pattern recorded is far more scrambled, resembling that when we are awake and alert. | 1 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 101 | When arousal is high, we find it hard to sit still and concentrate on any one issue. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 101 | Attention has been referred to as focused arousal. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 101 | Normal behavior can be viewed as a compromise between arousal and attention. As we move around the world, we become excited and aroused by new and different features, but at the same time we focus attention to make sense of the new features. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 101 | We are constantly balancing a tendency for distraction with a need to pay attention. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 101 | In the dream world, rapid shifts of scene and highly idiosyncratic associations defy logic and common sense. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 101 | In the dream world, multiple potential consciousnesses, all jockeying for dominance. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 101 | Since there is no guiding restraining or overriding sensory input in the dream world, no neuronal population is sufficiently extensive in its recruiting associations to last very long or to ensure a smooth continuity of awareness. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 102 | Dream states can be generated by relatively modest neuronal aggregations, where ripples from the epicenter are weak in the absence of ongoing external sensory priming. The depth of consciousness at any one time is slight, and the gestalts are small. | 1 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 102 | When we are very excited or highly aroused, it is hard to stay still and concentrate on any one idea. Consciousness is a disconnected jumble of impressions, reactions, and surprises at each new sight. Consciousness in such circumstances can be interpreted as one of small gestalts. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 102 | When we are dreaming we can scarcely be said to be highly aroused; we are insensitive to our immediate sensory world. It is possible, then, that very low of arousal levels (dreaming), like very high ones (excited), have the same result, small gestalt formation. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 102 | Critical difference between the dreaming state and the excited wake time state is a recruiting power or strength of the epicenter. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 102 | When awake and highly aroused, the sensory epicenter is very powerful: External objects are strong stimulants with the potential for recruiting large numbers of neurons. Due to constant distractions from new epicenters available as well as ongoing movement affording the opportunity of still more novel sensory experiences, epicenters recur in rapid succession. Each gestalt does not have time to grow, but is jostled out of place while it is still small. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 102 | When we sleep, the memories that constitute the fragile epicenters of the scraps of consciousness of our dreams are relatively weak The gestalts in this case do have time to grow, but the epicenter is not sufficiently strong to maintain such growth. Hence, rival highly transient, and only tenuously associated gestalts slides into place, and you are suddenly transposed from a house in England to an African beach. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 103 | The fragile epicenter of neuronal gestalt in our dreaming consciousness is still more powerful than no consciousness, no gestalt at all. | 1 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 103 | It is harder to wake someone in REM sleep who is relatively more aroused than someone in non-REM sleep. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 103 | In non-REM sleep there is no competition for the formation of the first gestalt that will comprise our waking consciousness of an alarm bell or whatever has dragged us back into awareness. When we are dreaming, a gestalt has been formed, however fragile. This scrap of consciousness serves as a modest initial form of competition to the external, powerful alarm bell. It is a subtle interaction between arousal and gestalt size that dictates our prevailing consciousness. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 104 | Arousal is a continuously variable factor. Psychologists have for a long time plotted levels of arousal against performance in certain tasks. Efficiency at a task is optimal in the middle range of arousal; if we are too relaxed or too distracted, then performance declines. | 1 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 104 | Maximal efficiency corresponds to the situation of large gestalt formation. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 104 | There is a possible balancing between attention and arousal. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 104 | There is a trade-off in terms of survival value between being able to concentrate and being aware of change. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 104 | Arousal is in interactive factor, along with the strength of epicenter, in determining the final size of gestalt formation and hence consciousness. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 104 | High and low degrees of arousal can be associated with the formation of small gestalts, rapidly shifting states of shallow consciousness, whereas an intermediate level of arousal favors the formation of fewer, longer-lasting, and larger gestalts, amounting to promoting a deeper consciousness, attention. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 104 | Consciousness is spatially multiple yet effectively single at any one time. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 104 | Consciousness is an emergent property of nonspecialized and divergent groups of neurons that is continuously variable with respect to, and always entailing, a stimulus epicenter. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 104 | Size of the gestalt, and hence the depth of prevailing consciousness, is the product of the interaction between the recruiting strength of the epicenter and the degree of arousal. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 105 | Idiosyncratic connections have been formed not just a result of one's genes, but, more significantly, as the brain interacts with the environment. | 1 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 105 | Transition from one conscious state to the next is unique for any individual, as the "ripples" emanating from the epicenter recruit a particular pattern of neurons. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 105 | Our continuity of consciousness occurs as a chain of associations devolved around an epicenter. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 105 | "Ripples" on one gestalt spread out to ever more remote associations, so a new epicenter starts to recruit neurons into a gestalt. This new gestalt supplants the original, and our consciousness subtly shifts. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 106 | Individual size and shape of gestalts, and the particular transition from one to the next, might actually be a plausible basis for an enduring individuality. | 1 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 106 | We are not aware of all of the associations that might be contributing to a specific state of awareness. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 106 | Consciousness theory must include: (1) the importance of the intensity of the focus or epicenter of consciousness, (2) the importance of previous associations (memory), the presence of a consciousness in animals and children that is different from adult humans, and the elimination of a fixed consciousness center. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 106 | We are speaking of large groups of neurons in time as well as space, and giving them a special name (gestalts). | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 110 | Transient teaming up of neurons into a gestalt. | 4 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 110 | How aggregations of neurons might operate and function in both time and space like theoritical gestalts. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 111 | Gestalts do not have a rigid, fixed anatomy and are not localized in one brain area. | 1 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 111 | Transient aggregations of neurons are forming, operating, and reforming all the time in multiple areas of the brain, such that at any one moment one particular subnetwork generates consciousness. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 111 | Neuronal gestalts are influenced by arousal. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 111 | Arousal and gestalt formation act in concert to generate consciousness. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 111 | Donald Hebb's "assembly of neurons" as a network of connections between neurons where communication is made easier or strengthened by experience. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 111 | Correlational assemblies of neurons are groups of neurons active to the same extent, in the same way, at the same time. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 112 | Neuronal gestalts are a type of neuronal assembly. | 1 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 112 | Gestalt is defined as a highly variable aggregation of neurons that is temporarily recruited around a triggering epicenter. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 112 | Not all neuronal assemblies are gestalts, but all gestalts are neuronal assemblies. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 113 | Neuromodulation occurs when certain neurochemicals do not necessarily participate in direct signaling but, rather, reduce or enhance the excitability of a neuron in response to a signal coming in at another time | 1 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 113 | Neuronal groups, even of the simplest, hardwired, and smallest kind, are capable of giving rise to highly versatile emergent properties, depending upon how the cells have been biased. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 114 | Modular arrangement of neurons in the cerebellum. | 1 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 114 | Modular arrangement of the cerebellum consists of two inputs converging on an output cell. Even this elementary arrangement allows for a simple form of automatic motor learning. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 114 | Cortex consists of six anatomically distinguishable layers parallel to the surface of the brain. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 114 | Cortex neurons in each layer reach up and down, at right angles to the brain surface, to connect in vertical columns. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 114 | Columns are the basic modules of the functionally complex cortex. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 114 | In more highly evolved animals, the critical factor that changes is not the number of layers and not necessarily the number of cells, but the potential complexity of connections among the cells. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 114 | Neuronal gestalts are transient groupings of neurons where the connections among them are only temporarily functional. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 115 | Groups of neurons in the brain do not have to be irrevocably hardwired. | 1 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 115 | During development, dramatic occurrences in the outside environment can change the internal arrangement of brain cells. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 119 | When the thalamus and the cortex are acting in unison, there is evidence for focused arousal. | 4 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 119 | Perhaps under direction from the thalamus, a synchrony may occur among subsets of neurons in the cortex, where members of transient groups can be recruited over relatively large distances, up to 7 mm apart. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 119 | In a normal situation, the nearer one neuron is to another, the more likely they are to be excited by each other, since any chemical messenger release locally within a group will not have far to diffuse. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 119 | Recruitment of neurons into a gestalt is not on the basis of mere proximity. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 120 | It is far more flexible to generate an extensive gestalt of neurons spanning a large area from which they are selectively recruited, perhaps by their frequency of oscillation. | 1 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 120 | Wolf Singer has shown that disparate neurons large distances apart in the area of the cortex associated with vision can oscillate in their excitability in a synchronous fashion, if they are processing respective parts of a pattern with a common feature. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 120 | Gestalts are ceaselessly at work, shuffling and reorganizing their internal communications. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 120 | Oscillations of specific groups of neurons have been shown to have a momentary frequency, i.e. they do not oscillate at a fixed rate under a particular condition all the time. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 120 | Oscillations and neuronal groups can vary from one moment to the next, corresponding to changes in the interactions within the network. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 120 | Where a gestalt may be generating consciousness, we might expect shifting changes within a gestalt as further associations are triggered and new associations are made. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 120 | The process wherein gestalts are undergoing shifting changes as further associations are triggered and new associations made, might constitute the behavior or phenomena of thinking. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 120 | A determining feature of the size of the gestalts is the relative strength of the epicenter. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 120 | The stronger and more powerful the epicenter, the more neurons recruited in an assembly. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 121 | Plasticity needed for learning and memory entails changes that occur over hours or days and has a degree of permanence. | 1 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 123 | By Hebbian strengthening, neuronal contacts become more efficient. | 2 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 123 | Timeframe of Hebbian strengthening over hours. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 124 | Enhanced sensitivity of a group of cells linked to a persistent epicenter can enhance the recruiting power of an already-existing epicenter in fighting off a rival gestalt, a consciousness of something else. | 1 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 124 | Gestalts will only generate appreciable consciousness when they are sufficiently large. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 125 | Arousal might prime the formation of transient neuronal groups. | 1 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 125 | Arousal occurs when active neurons in the cortex are not in synchrony, producing a desynchronized EEG. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 125 | Neuronal connections among brain areas have long been seen by scientists as a key factor in consciousness. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 126 | Basic type of consciousness of the immediate world that Gerald Edelman terms primary consciousness. | 1 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 128 | Three published biological descriptions of consciousness, including those by Francis Crick and the physiologist Rudolfo Llinás focus on a particular loop between the cortex and the thalamus. | 2 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 128 | Not only does the thalamus project into the cortex, but the cortex projects back into the thalamus. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 128 | Cortex and the thalamus are in constant conversation. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 128 | Interplay among the cortex and the intermediate thalamus is very important. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 129 | Dennett's model of multiple drafts. | 1 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 129 | So much emphasis is placed on the loop between the cortex and the thalamus, we end up almost regarding the loop as the center of consciousness. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 129 | Francis Crick's (1984) searchlight of attention. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 129 | Attention is associated with synchronous discharge (oscillations ~40 Hz) of neurons in thalamocortical assemblies. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 129 | Francis Crick suggested there are many thalamocortical loops with the potential for generating consciousness. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 130 | Entrain the cortical neurons, for a time, to be active in synchrony. | 1 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 131 | Crick claims that the all important factor is the degree of reverberation in the thalamocortical loop. There must be a high degree of traffic, dialogue, shuttlecock, or whatever metaphor you like between the respective portions of the thalamus and the cortex. | 1 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 131 | Crick's idea is similar to Edelman's in that the emphasis is placed on vigor of communication between two regions in the brain, what Edelman refers to as reentry. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 131 | Llinás has suggested that it is the dialogue between the thalamus and the cortex that generates subjectivity. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 131 | Internally generated cognitive states such as memories or dreams. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 131 | Crick deals mainly with visual awareness, whereas Llinás is expressly concerned with consciousness that is independent of sensory inputs. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 131 | Llinás focuses on another part of the thalamus, the nucleus reticularis, which seems to be involved with more generalized states of arousal during sleep and waking. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 132 | Llinás claims that since the brain is capable of autonomous rhythmicity, which can occur independently of sensory inputs, the sensory inputs are merely incidental, an optional extra in consciousness. | 1 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 132 | Sensory inputs are insufficient in themselves to generate consciousness. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 132 | Consciousness can occur without sensory inputs. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 133 | A frequent result of head injury, whether from internal stroke or external force, is coma. | 1 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 133 | To be in a coma means that the brain is not working at all. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 133 | The reason a coma is so life-threatening is that the mechanisms in the primitive brain stem, which control basic life processes, cease to function. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 133 | Heart has its own internal autorhythmicity. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 134 | Persistent vegetative state -- patients in this condition regain sleep wake cycles and are able to regulate body temperature and successfully fight infection. | 1 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 134 | Patients in persistent vegetative state have reflex responses whereby they withdraw from painful stimuli, and they may even smile or scream occasionally. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 134 | Patients in persistent vegetative state have suffered cognitive death. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 134 | Persistent vegetative death is frequently the final stage of degenerative disorders such as Alzheimer's disease. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 134 | Persistent vegetative state is important for understanding the nature of consciousness, since it is a situation where there is arousal without consciousness. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 137 | Susan Greenfield's concentric theory suggests that consciousness is composed of two principal components: (1) arousal; (2) the formation of transient neuronal assemblies, gestalts. | 3 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 137 | Consciousness is spatially multiple yet effectively single at any one time. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 137 | Consciousness is an emergent property of nonspecialized and divergent groups of neurons (gestalts) that is continuously variable with respect to, and always entailing, a stimulus epicenter. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 137 | Size of the gestalt, and hence the depth of prevailing consciousness, is a product of the interaction between the recruiting strength of the epicenter and the degree of arousal. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 138 | When an animal is aroused or threatened, groups of neurons fire in synchrony much more easily than in normal, more relaxed conditions. | 1 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 138 | Brainstem is the origin of the basic arousing system. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 138 | Brainstem neurons project their axons over long distances into the center of the brain and into the cortex. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 138 | Conspicuous divergence of the pathways of the brainstem neurons, by which the oldest part of the brain in evolutionary terms influences the newest, suggests a very diffuse and generalized form of communication. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 139 | Neural modulation is a process for biasing the response of neurons for relatively short periods of time, ranging from seconds to hours, without changing the response of the neurons permanently. | 1 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 139 | Neuromodulators are in a position to influence large populations of cortical cells rather than transmit highly specific signals across discrete contacts. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 139 | Neuromodulators all emanate from relatively small cell groups in the brainstem, yet they project into the front of the brain in a diffuse manner. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 139 | Modulatory neurons are of critical importance to brain function in that they are perfectly positioned to influence the formation of large gestalts for the generation of consciousness. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 140 | A number of amine chemicals are associated with states of arousal. Four of them are: (1) serotonin, (2) acetylcholine, (3) dopamine, (4) norepinephrine. | 1 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 140 | Serotonin is very important for sleep. When it is injected into the spinal fluid, dreamless sleep ensues. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 140 | Acetylcholine is also linked to sleep, but in the opposite way. The chemical contributes to the transition to and from dreaming states. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 140 | Increases in serotonin are associated with a release away from consciousness, whereas acetylcholine is linked to the time when we return back to awareness. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 140 | Dopamine may be associated with the enhanced general (as opposed to focused) arousal, a distracted state where it is hard to settle on any one project and hard to sit still. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 142 | Increases in the release of norepinephrine are associated with increases in alertness. | 2 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 142 | Hypothesis -- large gestalts generate consciousness, and gestalts are large groups of neurons. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 155 | An epicenter must be some small aggregation of neurons. | 13 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 155 | The particular combination of connections within the more hard-wired hub of cells of an epicenter act to trigger the ripples that encompass wider and wider populations of cells. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 155 | Strength of an epicenter can be reflected in the intrinsic electrical activity as well as the number of working interconnections entailed. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 155 | When an epicenter is strong, because of either the strong physical qualities of a particular external object that impinges on the senses or that that objects triggers certain extensive idiosyncratic associations, we can imagine that a group of neurons would be either highly active and/or had already developed extensive interconnections. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 155 | A highly active group of cells with a large number of connections would have a higher probability of recruiting into a gestalt still more neurons. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 155 | A weak epicenter where the signaling was more intermittent by way of fewer neurons. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 155 | The greater the initial number of neurons, the greater the potential number of working connections to other cells. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 155 | Once conscious of something, it is harder to become conscious of something else. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 155 | Synchronous cooperativity or ripples emanating from a particular epicenter, and the gestalt consequently created, make it harder to establish a rival gestalt. This is why it is harder to be awakened from dreams than from normal sleep. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 157 | Dennett's multiple drafts theory. | 2 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 158 | Penrose suggests that connections in the brain are like atoms in crystals in that they are in a constant state of change. Incessant quantum mechanical reorganization of neuronal connections. [arcane and etherial] | 1 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 159 | Large neuronal assemblies (gestalts) can change remarkably rapidly. Consciousness can shift seemingly instantaneously. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 159 | Rapid change in state is typical of chaotic systems where there is a systematic order that is nonetheless so complex that it defies analysis. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 159 | In systems as elaborate as gestalts, where there are many influences all interacting to produce a certain outcome, a seemingly minor change can have large-scale consequences. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 159 | A change in consciousness might arise if two potential gestalts were rising simultaneously. In this way it is possible that a rival gestalt could curtail another gestalt. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 160 | Principles governing and regulating gestalt formation include rapid and sensitive global changes where new formations of neurons can occur as a result of competing systems -- hence the genesis of new states of consciousness, of original ideas, of insights and imagination. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 160 | Principles of gestalt formation include the physical basis for generating false beliefs. If new gestalts can be generated independently of the outside world through internal competition, they no longer are assured to have a direct correspondence and faithfulness to the outside world, i.e., to reality. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 161 | Consciousness is spatially multiple yet effectively single at any one time. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 161 | Consciousness is an emergent property of nonspecialized and divergent groups of neurons (gestalts) that is continuously variable with respect to, and always entailing, a stimulus epicenter. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 161 | Size of the gestalt is a product of the interaction between the recruiting strength of the epicenter and the degree of arousal. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 162 | Neuronal assemblies have many of the properties that gestalt theory requires -- highly dynamic and transient; size dependent on strength of the epicenter; size dependent on the strength of rival gestalts; active selection of neurons according to their functional state rather than passive recruitment of any nearby cells; context dependent formation. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 162 | Interaction between the recruiting strength of the epicenter and the degree of arousal could determine the quality and quantity of consciousness we are experiencing at any one time. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 162 | Consciousness is spatially multiple but continuously variable. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 162 | Consciousness is an emergent property. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 164 | Neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield (1963) exposed brain areas of conscious patients with intractable epilepsy; he stimulated parts of the cortex and reported the resultant effects on awareness. The stimulation evoked memories but lacked specific space-time reference points and were reported as seeming dreamlike. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 165 | Dreams were postulated to be the result of mimimal gestalts. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 165 | Demonstrations of Penfield could be explained as the stimulation of minimal gestalts where, as in dreams, there is no clear logic, no continuity, but rather, a disembodied scene. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 165 | Failure of the stimulation most frequently to produce any affects at all might simply be that not enough neurons were recruited or that a stimulating electrode was in a poor site to trigger an appropriate epicenter. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 165 | Stimulation of the same site could give different results. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 165 | Same memory could be generated from different stimulation sites. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 165 | Small, minimal gestalts, produced artificially by Penfield but more normally during dreaming state, could be regarded as scraps of consciousness torn from seemingly cohesive fabric of our awareness. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 170 | Daydreaming is an extreme example of consciousness dominated by highly complex cognitive epicenters, when sensory input is minimal. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 170 | How easy it is to walk home alone, unaware of the route, so involved in our own inner fantasy that we are effectively blind and deaf to all around us. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 171 | To generate a deep or heightened consciousness, we need a powerful epicenter. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 171 | A powerful epicenter could be cognitive, such as an all-pervading worry, or it could be external and strong, due to an intrinsic brightness or loudness of an outside object or to a heightened arousal. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 171 | We are frequently highly conscious of very minimal stimuli, such as a whisper or a light touch on the skin. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 171 | Weakness of a stimulus should not be assessed on its own but, rather, in the light of signal-to-noise ratio. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 171 | If someone whispers in a library, we are immediately aware of it because there is no other sound, as compared with a whisper at a cocktail party. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 171 | If there is a situation relatively devoid of powerful incoming sensory stimulus, such as being alone in a house at night, then even the smallest creak on the stairs may dominate our consciousness. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 171 | A weak stimulus can also be powerful if it triggers a large gestalt, either because it has strong cognitive associations and/or because arousal is high. At a party, a whisper or small gesture of a lover may have immediate significance, even in a crowd of people. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 171 | Awareness of pain is highly variable and may be attributable to different degrees and manners of subconscious associations, generating gestalts of varying sizes. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 172 | Potent painkiller morphine and the brain's own equivalent enkephalin might be involved in restricting the formation of gestalts. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 172 | Reports of the analgesic effect of morphine are that the pain is still present, but that it no longer matters to the patient; it no longer has significance. We might say that the pain no longer triggers extensive associations, as it would in normal sized gestalts. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 172 | For someone experiencing pain, the brain would be dominated by a larger than usual gestalts. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 172 | As gestalts start to grow larger than normal, A sufferer might be more deeply conscious. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 172 | Size of a gestalt has a direct relation to depth of consciousness. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 172 | Large gestalt implies a sustained period of deep consciousness around a particular epicenter that triggered many associations. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 172 | Small gestalt implies a shallow consciousness of short duration, centered around an epicenter where associations were sparse or where there was insufficient time for many associations to be made. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 172 | Examine whether different pathologies have a common problem of neuronal gestalts. Should speak of factors rather than causes, because the formation of gestalts is an interactive process with the environment. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 173 | Small gestalts occur either in the case of a weak epicenter (as in dreams) or where too many gestalts compete (as an over arousal). | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 173 | In dreams and in over arousal, there are no strong, continuous, associated links from one small gestalt to the next; ripples never extend far enough to recruit another epicenter cognitively. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 173 | When awake, a person who has only small gestalts, would experience an abrupt shift in consciousness governed by the caprices of the external sensory world as it floods the brain. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 173 | Gestalts might overlap just enough to cause tenuous connections in the flow of consciousness. Connections might be sparser, more obscure, less obvious, trains of thought that are illogical, just like dreams. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 173 | Small gestalts may be associated with less concern with pain. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 173 | Subjective sensation of pain is metaphorical, depending on the variable number associations the painful stimulus triggers. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 173 | If pain associations are sparse, the reaction to pain may be similar to that of the morphine taker, for whom pain is no longer significant and for whom consciousness is often reported as dreamlike. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 173 | Small gestalts, where the associations arising from an epicenter are limited, would imply that memory for past events will not be strong. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 173 | If a person is unable to form large gestalts, the chances of forming a new gestalt by focusing on a new epicenter would be maximized if he moves about, thereby increasing the variety of novel sensory cues. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 174 | Someone with a small gestalts, might be restless, with incessant movement combined with the inability to concentrate, think logically, or form abstract concepts. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 174 | Someone with small gestalts might have poor long-term memory. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 174 | Someone with small gestalts would have an active interest in their surroundings and a breezy attitude toward pain. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 174 | For someone with small gestalts, life would be lived in the present as a continuous reaction to the outside world. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 174 | Schizophrenia is a type of psychosis in which there is often a departure from reality. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 174 | Two types of schizophrenia have been proposed (1980) as Type I and Type II. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 174 | Type I, or acute, schizophrenia may not last indefinitely and is characterized by abnormal thoughts and actions, hence positive signs. In Type I schizophrenia there is motor restlessness, where the same actions is repeated over and over outside of its normal context. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 174 | Type II, or chronic, schizophrenia last indefinitely and is characterized by what the patient does not do, hence negative signs. Patients turn inward, seemingly oblivious to all around them. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 174 | Negative-symptom schizophrenia (Type II) is in itself indistinguishable from depression. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 176 | In Type I schizophrenia there is motor restlessness, where the same action is repeated over and over outside of its normal context. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 176 | Schizophrenics use a higher turnover of sensory epicenters. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 177 | Normal people, in contrast to schizophrenics, form fewer and bigger gestalts, thus allowing them to have more abstracted and longer lasting lines of thought and deeper consciousness. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 178 | In schizophrenia, with small gestalts; glowing, brilliant objects might well be construed as proof of superhuman godlike perception, which is a frequent schizophrenic delusion. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 178 | Dreaming is describable in terms of small gestalts. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 178 | World of the schizophrenic is not that much different from our world of dreams or, rather, nightmares. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 178 | Illogical associations, the unquestioned leaps from one scenario to another, and a lack of logic and space-time references would all be consistent with the distorted perception describable in terms of small gestalts. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 178 | Many of the signs and symptoms of Type I schizophrenia can be described in terms of abnormally small gestalts. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 180 | Schizophrenics cannot follow a chain of thought, but just repeat words or ideas -- a sign of weak associative connections amounting to small gestalts. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 181 | Consciousness deepens gradually as larger gestalts are able to form and develop more neuronal connections. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 181 | Children would be expected to have small gestalts. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 183 | Large gestalts would be favored by increases in serotonin. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 184 | A widespread treatment of depression is to administer drugs that increase the availability of serotonin. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 184 | Depression is associated not with a paucity of serotonin but with a target receptors being too sensitive. By bombarding these receptors with massive amounts of drug-induced serotonin, after about 10 days they become far less sensitive. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 184 | When receptors to serotonin are less sensitive, serotonin is less efficient, and so large gestalts are not formed so readily. The all-embracing despair requiring a large gestalt is therefore no longer possible. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 184 | Small gestalts would be favored if the action of serotonin was blocked. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 185 | Hallucinogenic drug LSD works in the brain by reducing the effectiveness of serotonin. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 185 | LSD could be said to cause the formation of small gestalts, equivalent to those postulated as characterizing schizophrenia. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 185 | The elderly in certain respects resemble those with short-term memory deficit and depressives. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 185 | Elderly do not move around much; they are very sensitive to pain and illness; and they tend to live in the past. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 186 | Large gestalt would furnish the infrastructure for intense sensation of pain. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 186 | Brain and environment are in constant dialogue. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 186 | Small children have little sense of time passing; they are living in the present, where every day seems like an eternity. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 186 | For the elderly, life can hurdle by, and distant events can seem like only yesterday. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 186 | Time perceptions can perhaps be viewed in terms of gestalt formation. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 186 | With a schizophrenic or a child, time is perceived as passing slowly. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 186 | Prolonged concentration leaves us with the feeling that the morning has rushed by. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 186 | If there are no gestalts formed and no consciousness at all, as in anesthesia or sleep, time will pass most quickly, almost instantaneously. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 186 | The more rapid the turnover of gestalts, the more slowly time seems to pass. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 187 | Time perception might indicate to us the speed or the turnover of gestalt formation. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 187 | Time perception, and its correspondence with groups of small and large gestalts, suggest a means for us to tell how quickly our own gestalts might be changing in our brains. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 187 | Size of gestalt might determine the type of consciousness experienced. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 187 | If the gestalts were of, for pathological reasons, dramatically diminished, this could be the situation in Type II schizophrenia in which the symptoms are negative and insensitive to medication. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 187 | IN Type II schizophrenia, the patient does not know who he is nor where he is; his consciousness sinks down toward the bottom of the continuum, a scenario of diminishing gestalts. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 187 | Degeneration of the brain in Alzheimer's disease is very similar in signs and symptoms to Type II schizophrenia. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 188 | Contribution of acetylcholine to consciousness and maintaining moderate levels of arousal is particularly relevant in view of the fact that in Alzheimer's disease there is a marked deficiency in acetylcholine. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 188 | In initial stages of Alzheimer's disease, with a degeneration prior to complete loss of all gestalt's, we might expect that the patient would go through a period resembling that of schizophrenia or a childhood profile of small gestalts. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 188 | In senile dementia, the patient is frequently restless and active, in accordance with the small gestalt profile. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | 188 | If we think of gestalt size and thus consciousness as a continuum, we can easily imagine that our momentary states of awareness lie between large and small gestalt type profiles as we live each day, progressing along a line of epicenters. There will be times of deep reflection interspersed with moments when we open up to the vivid sensuality of the outside world. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Centers of Mind | |||||