| Susan Greenfield; Private Life of the Brain | |||||
| Book | Page | Topic | |||
| Greenfield; Private Life of Brain | 5 | Psychologist Paul McLean had the novel insight that not only was the brain stem held in check by the limbic system, but that the limbic system in turn was suppressed by the cortex. | |||
| Greenfield; Private Life of Brain | 5 | Cortex is, even to the naked eye, clearly a distinct structure from the limbic system below it. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Private Life of Brain | 13 | Susan Greenfield's definition of mind -- seething morass of cell circuitry that has been configured by personal experiences and is constantly being updated as we live out each moment. | 8 | ||
| Greenfield; Private Life of Brain | 14 | Everyone who is happy expresses that emotion with the same facial expression -- the universal smile. | 1 | ||
| Greenfield; Private Life of Brain | 16 | Some sort of basic emotional state is present whenever you are conscious. | 2 | ||
| Greenfield; Private Life of Brain | 17 | Brain sites eliciting self-stimulation would be more accurately described as "reward centers" then as "pleasure centers." | 1 | ||
| Greenfield; Private Life of Brain | 17 | Psychologists have made much use of the idea of aversion and aversive stimuli. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Private Life of Brain | 18 | Neurophysiologist Joseph Ledoux. | 1 | ||
| Greenfield; Private Life of Brain | 18 | Ledoux has shown that conditioned fear reaction uses two simultaneously yet distinct systems in the brain. One circuit is via the cortex. (the "high road") The Second Circuit bypasses the cortex, instead using a "quick and dirty" circuit to the amygdala. (the "low road") | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Private Life of Brain | 18 | Amygdala has long been implicated in emotion. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Private Life of Brain | 18 | As far back as 1939, lesions of the amygdala were used to suppress violent behavior, and could lead to bizarre syndromes, such as Klüver-Bucy syndrome. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Private Life of Brain | 19 | Amygdala is in a key anatomical position, effectively an intermediary between the hippocampus and hypothalamus. | 1 | ||
| Greenfield; Private Life of Brain | 20 | Emotional behavior, albeit unconscious, robotlike reflexes, is important as a key player in evolutionary terms -- in survival value. | 1 | ||
| Greenfield; Private Life of Brain | 20 | The whole crux of emotion is not so much the response, but the conscious, subjective feeling itself of fear or pleasure. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Private Life of Brain | 20 | For Susan Greenfield, the concept of an unconscious emotion is a paradox. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Private Life of Brain | 22 | Brain weighing only some three pounds and with the consistency of a soft-boiled egg. | 2 | ||
| Greenfield; Private Life of Brain | 28 | Dan Dennett's metaphor of "multiple drafts." | 6 | ||
| Greenfield; Private Life of Brain | 28 | The Self is a compilation of personal memories. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Private Life of Brain | 29 | Psychologist Larry Weiskrantz drawing from his own direct clinical experience with amnesia and "blindsight." | 1 | ||
| Greenfield; Private Life of Brain | 30 | Sleep expert Allan Hobson. | 1 | ||
| Greenfield; Private Life of Brain | 30 | Hypothetical scenario of the Chinese Room, devised by philosopher John Searle. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Private Life of Brain | 32 | Gerald Edelman uses the term "reentry." | 2 | ||
| Greenfield; Private Life of Brain | 33 | Emotion is not tractable to logic. | 1 | ||
| Greenfield; Private Life of Brain | 36 | Philosopher David Chalmers uses a thought experiment to fuel his argument that the actual substance of the brain is irrelevant. | 3 | ||
| Greenfield; Private Life of Brain | 40 | The late Francis Crick and his colleague Christof Koch have their theory of multiple loops of circuits of neurons in the thalamus and cortex that are active only during consciousness. | 4 | ||
| Greenfield; Private Life of Brain | 40 | Physiologist Rudolfo Llinás has posited an elaboration of synchronicity of electrical activity between large groups of cells in different brain areas. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Private Life of Brain | 41 | Deep in the most primitive regions of the brain, the brainstem, are diffuse groups of neurons that send their connections throughout the rest of the brain to release their neurotransmitters. | 1 | ||
| Greenfield; Private Life of Brain | 41 | Diverse neurotransmitters (dopamine, serotonin, noradrenaline, and acetylcholine) are differentially active at different times of the day and night. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Private Life of Brain | 41 | Arousal is important for consciousness, but because biorhythms of arousal can be generated in patients who are brain dead, and thus will never regain consciousness, there must be something additional. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Private Life of Brain | 42 | The more intelligent an animal, the more it can extemporise from one situation to the next. | 1 | ||
| Greenfield; Private Life of Brain | 42 | The intelligent can thus muddle through when the crunch comes. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Private Life of Brain | 43 | The more primitive the brain, the more predictable the action according to the dictates of prewired instinct. | 1 | ||
| Greenfield; Private Life of Brain | 43 | Human's more sophisticated brains will liberate us from single-minded genetic tyranny and allow us to develop individual ontogenetic agendas as we interact with the environment. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Private Life of Brain | 45 | The kind of abstract thinking, in the absence of any cues from our senses whatsoever, is the province of sophisticated brains. | 2 | ||
| Greenfield; Private Life of Brain | 47 | Steven Pinker claims that language is a human instinct. | 2 | ||
| Greenfield; Private Life of Brain | 48 | All creatures that move from one place to another have a primitive sort of brain. | 1 | ||
| Greenfield; Private Life of Brain | 48 | One value of brains is to enable appropriate and fast reactions to a fast-moving, ever changing environment. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Private Life of Brain | 49 | The less at the mercy of the genes you are, the greater the repertoire of behavior, and thus the more choice at your disposal. | 1 | ||
| Greenfield; Private Life of Brain | 49 | The feel of different emotions might be important in guiding choices and thus in aiding survival. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Private Life of Brain | 49 | In evolutionary terms, we can view emotions as processes where one is highly interactive with the environment. If you are interacting with the environment, you are focusing on your senses. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Private Life of Brain | 64 | Certain configurations of neuronal connections imperceptibly personalize the brain, and it is this personalize aspect of that physical brain that actually is the mind. | 15 | ||
| Greenfield; Private Life of Brain | 65 | Visual signals are not just a relay passively into the deep recesses of the brain and up into the cortex, instead, they are also other connections that intercept is incoming stream of information, projecting it back down in the opposite direction to modify the way the incoming signal is relayed and thus how the world is perceived. We see the world in terms of what we have seen already. | 1 | ||
| Greenfield; Private Life of Brain | 65 | The more complex the brain, the greater the potential for variations in neuronal connectivity that underlie its interpretations. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Private Life of Brain | 70 | Enable evolutionary sense, a low-lying wax just above the windpipe suggest the ability for speech. | 5 | ||
| Greenfield; Private Life of Brain | 70 | The adult human larynx is positioned well permitting a fuller range of nasal sounds. Relax acts as a complex valve for exhaled exhaled air to come out and puffs, thus providing the energy for speed shape by the lips and tongue. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Private Life of Brain | 70 | In nonhuman primates, and indeed in all other nonhuman animals, the larynx is positioned high so that it sealed off the windpipe when food and liquids are being ingested. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Private Life of Brain | 70 | Humans have evolved with the unique ability of choking to death. Such a risky anatomical configuration would probably only have been worth it if there were a great payoff, such as the ability to make a wide range of non-nasal sounds. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Private Life of Brain | 77 | Recreational drugs all self administered to change consciousness in a dramatic way, to create a sustained and different sensation. | 7 | ||
| Greenfield; Private Life of Brain | 77 | Despite their distinct modes of action, recreational drugs all have one finally effect in common -- the subjective emotion of some sort of pleasure. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Private Life of Brain | 78 | The most commonly abused drugs of all time is alcohol. | 1 | ||
| Greenfield; Private Life of Brain | 78 | The process of fermentation, whereby he sails convert sugar to alcohol, has been practiced since the earliest agricultural civilizations. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Private Life of Brain | 78 | Just as the initial use of alcohol is buried deep in the history of mankind, so is intoxication through inhalation. Primitive tribes such as those in South America and used to inhale incense as part of religious rituals. Other volatile solvents and demand nowadays include paint banners, blue, and lighter fuel. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Private Life of Brain | 79 | Although solvent molecules in the body through the nose rather than the mouth, they are destined to have the same effect on brain cells as alcohol. The main difference is that the effects are shorter and the onset action is very rapid. | 1 | ||
| Greenfield; Private Life of Brain | 80 | The subject is psychological effects of smoking cannabis can be compared with the pleasures of alcohol, a disconnection with the ordinary world of warriors and expectations, a pronounced sense of amusement, the ability to laugh more, as well as an impaired kind cognitive reasoning ability. | 1 | ||
| Greenfield; Private Life of Brain | 82 | Heroin is a form of morphine treated by a relatively simple chemical reaction to be more freely soluble in fact, and thus to gain access from the bloodstream through the tight barriers of fatty cells that isolate the brain from the rest of the body. | 2 | ||
| Greenfield; Private Life of Brain | 82 | Addicts prefer heroin because they do not have to wait so long for the rush of pleasure that watches over their minds. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Private Life of Brain | 82 | Like cannabis, the opiates have their own specific molecular target, a receptor in the brain specialized for opiates. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Private Life of Brain | 82 | In one of the greatest discoveries in neuroscience within the last few decades, the brain contains its own naturally occurring opiates, enkephalins. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Private Life of Brain | 83 | Enkephalins play an important part not only in pleasure but in the normal relief of pain. | 1 | ||
| Greenfield; Private Life of Brain | 83 | The basis for the analgesia seen in acupuncture might be through large amounts of naturally occurring enkephalins, the release of which is stimulated mechanically by the needles. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Private Life of Brain | 83 | "Jogger's high" is triggered by the process of strenuous exercise, which in turn induces the release of enkephalins in the body. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Private Life of Brain | 84 | The effect sometimes reported by patients taking morphine is that the pain is still present, but it simply does not matter anymore. | 1 | ||
| Greenfield; Private Life of Brain | 85 | Opiates are far more powerful than alcohol or cannabis in the extremes of pleasure they induce and the degree to which they can alleviate pain. | 1 | ||
| Greenfield; Private Life of Brain | 87 | LSD produces a complete reorientation of consciousness. Colors may appear to glow, and nonexistent objects move in once the referral vision, where his erstwhile inanimate objects pulsate, and perception of depth is transformed. | 2 | ||
| Greenfield; Private Life of Brain | 87 | The LSD molecule actually resembles another naturally occurring transmitter in the brain, serotonin. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Private Life of Brain | 88 | Serotonin plays a key role in generalized states of consciousness, such as sleep and mood. | 1 | ||
| Greenfield; Private Life of Brain | 88 | LSD is not a drug of euphoria, but rather opens up a state resembling childhood where person is upset or excited by Mina, meaningless events, and very vulnerable to suggestions and deliver images, without the ability to buy four experiences with the reason. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Private Life of Brain | 89 | Ecstasy works primarily on the serotonin fountain, where it causes an explosive glush of the transmitter. | 1 | ||
| Greenfield; Private Life of Brain | 89 | The taker of ecstasy would be lost in the present moment, and time ceases to be of relevance. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Private Life of Brain | 89 | With ecstasy, the relentless beat up literally meaningless music and flashing lights will ensure that raw sensations to dominate. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Private Life of Brain | 89 | The sensory experiences are frequently shared with many others as a collective -- all are engaged in similar in a rhythmic motion, and all are able to share the same, purely physical propensities of the world -- it sounds, smells, and lights. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Private Life of Brain | 89 | Ecstasy is nowadays regarded as a more likely way to experience an extreme pleasure, where his LSD carries with it a serious risk of a "bad trip." | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Private Life of Brain | 91 | Amphetamine, the most potent upper, all stimulant known. | 2 | ||
| Greenfield; Private Life of Brain | 107 | One sign of schizophrenia is indeed "inappropriate emotion," where the patient will spontaneously laugh or act frightened in an unpredictable way. The schizophrenic may giggle at a funeral or be overly concerned about a picture on the wall. | 16 | ||
| Greenfield; Private Life of Brain | 108 | The transmitter dopamine has for many years been associated with schizophrenia. | 1 | ||
| Greenfield; Private Life of Brain | 108 | The underlying problem factor in the brain of a schizophrenic is an excess of dopamine. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Private Life of Brain | 124 | Antidepressant drugs have become more selective to one or other of the amine transmitters, the latest generation targets serotonin systems specifically, and are known as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, including Prozac. | 16 | ||
| Greenfield; Private Life of Brain | 125 | Antidepressant medications, such as Prozac, take some 10 days before it is effective therapeutically. | 1 | ||
| Greenfield; Private Life of Brain | 126 | Sometimes depression is so severe that medication off of little help in such cases, physicians might consider the powerful treatment electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), which has been in use since the 1930s. | 1 | ||
| Greenfield; Private Life of Brain | 126 | In the United States, 9/10 patients with severe mood disorders show improvement with the CT. Yet the fact that no one really knows how ECT works is obviously a matter for concern. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Private Life of Brain | 126 | A side effect that ECT is amnesia. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Private Life of Brain | 126 | ECT is more ineffective in treating endogenous rather than reactive depression. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Private Life of Brain | 129 | All types of depression share an intriguing common factor -- increased sensitivity to pain. | 3 | ||
| Greenfield; Private Life of Brain | 135 | Fear is a feature of small neuronal networks when they turned over very rapidly. | 6 | ||
| Greenfield; Private Life of Brain | 137 | Emotions can often be driven by internal machinations that are not dependent on any strong sensory input. | 2 | ||
| Greenfield; Private Life of Brain | 140 | The most familiar example of an adult brain left entirely to its own devices is the logic free, literal, and sensual experience of a dream. | 3 | ||
| Greenfield; Private Life of Brain | 140 | In a dream we are normally dominated by vivid, unique processes and events. We do not generalize, think, or reason, but merely observe and react. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Private Life of Brain | 140 | The amines (norepinephrine and dopamine) operate during wakefulness, where is acetylcholine, a compound that is structurally similar, peaks during dreaming. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Private Life of Brain | 141 | According to a sleep expert Alan Hobson, dopamine is suppressed, along with its amine siblings, during dreaming. | 1 | ||
| Greenfield; Private Life of Brain | 141 | Dreaming as many traits similar to schizophrenia that might be summarized as loss of a grasp of reality. Hobson admits that in both cases logic and reason are compromised, while emotions are "just fine." | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Private Life of Brain | 143 | Another important feature common to dreams, schizophrenia, and morphine use is the reduction in or complete absence of the sensation of pain. | 2 | ||
| Greenfield; Private Life of Brain | 143 | Small children, like nonhuman animals, are unable to show remorse or shame if they cannot understand the significance of their actions. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Private Life of Brain | 144 | Prefrontal cortex is active in the kinds of verses that adults are good at, compared to children and nonhuman animals, namely being depressed, thinking abstractly and reasoning. | 1 | ||
| Greenfield; Private Life of Brain | 144 | A memory for an event without its time and space specification becomes a fact, a statement that has become generalized because it no longer occupies a unique slot in one's personal history. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Private Life of Brain | 145 | The type of consciousness that characterizes dreams, so characteristically devoid of abstract thought, calculations, and future plans, corresponds to a flimsy, mindless consciousness where one is at the mercy of the here and now, a consciousness devoid of continuity, logic, and self consciousness. | 1 | ||
| Greenfield; Private Life of Brain | 146 | Brain waves that human fetuses at 11 weeks reveal a fascinating and valuable clue that indicates that dreaming is precisely the dominant type of experience that the brand-new brain might be having. | 1 | ||
| Greenfield; Private Life of Brain | 146 | At the 11 week point in development, the fetus exhibits, for the first time, consistent electrical activity that indicates a cohesive, functioning brain. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Private Life of Brain | 146 | The dominant type of electrical activity in fetuses is indicative of REM sleep, which is associated with dreaming. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Private Life of Brain | 146 | It would appear that the active and enlarged prefrontal cortex of an adult is a prerequisite for superimposing only consciousness charged with emotion and accessing only generic memories, a more sophisticated means of categorizing the world in space and time. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Private Life of Brain | 146 | The prefrontal cortex contributes to a more robust and continuing reality, the type of reality absent in dreams, drug abuse, and any intense physical activity, or childhood. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Private Life of Brain | 152 | The iteration of a painful events in the past or the expectation of an imagined scenario in the future might be one way to describe worry and anxiety that is peculiarly human. | 6 | ||
| Greenfield; Private Life of Brain | 153 | Laughter is a marvelous way of coping with stress and another example of self-generated emotional experience. | 1 | ||
| Greenfield; Private Life of Brain | 153 | Laughter has a beneficial effect on health. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Private Life of Brain | 154 | Laughter causes the release of the body's natural morphine-like chemicals, the endorphins, which induce a sense of well-being. | 1 | ||
| Greenfield; Private Life of Brain | 154 | When chimpanzees are at play, they frequently vocalize a type of sound that has been referred to as laughter. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Private Life of Brain | 154 | Laughter is one of the most sought after states. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Private Life of Brain | 154 | Tickling elicits laughter, but it does not give pleasure. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Private Life of Brain | 154 | Laughter must mean not a cause but a symptom of pleasure. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Private Life of Brain | 163 | Feelings, in Susan Greenfield's hypothesis, are the most basic form of consciousness. | 9 | ||
| Greenfield; Private Life of Brain | 163 | The ultimate question: How do subjective sensations -- different states of consciousness -- occur as a result of the shifting neuronal network activity within the physical brain? | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Private Life of Brain | 163 | No single chemical or process in the brain is solely responsible for consciousness. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Private Life of Brain | 163 | No central brain region for consciousness. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Private Life of Brain | 175 | In everyday conversation, we refer to a "state of mind" that might well influence the short- and long-term status of our health and well-being. And this is where consciousness comes not as a luxury, an "epiphenomenon," but as a physiological necessity. | 12 | ||
| Greenfield; Private Life of Brain | 175 | According to Susan Greenfield's hypothesis, the most rudimentary consciousness is a pure emotion associated with fast interactions with the outside world. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Private Life of Brain | 176 | Although the spinal cord is essential as a conduit for signals concerned with movement and incoming sensations, it is not essential for consciousness, as we saw in the tragic case of Christopher Reeve, for feelings. | 1 | ||
| Greenfield; Private Life of Brain | 176 | Coordination of hormones governing the basic drives of hunger, thirst, temperature, sex, and sleep take place in two key brain areas: (1) hypothalamus, (2) pituitary gland. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Private Life of Brain | 176 | Hypothalamus is situated within the cluster of brain cells comprising the amine fountains modulating the activity of higher reaches of the brain. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Private Life of Brain | 176 | Pituitary gland is a conspicuous stalk protruding out of the bottom of the brain. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Private Life of Brain | 177 | Unlike the rest of the brain, the pituitary gland is not sealed off by the "blood brain barrier," which normally ensures a segregation between many large, water-soluble molecules that are released between brain cells or within the body outside of the brain. | 1 | ||
| Greenfield; Private Life of Brain | 177 | Certain hormones could modify the readiness of neurons to be recruited into an assembly by an action within the brain on the local circuit synapses. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Private Life of Brain | 177 | Hormones modulate the release of amine fountains, which in turn modulate the readiness of cells that communicate and which can vary with biorhythms. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Private Life of Brain | 177 | Hormones are intimately connected with the status of the body as a whole -- glucose levels in the blood, salt in the fluid between body cells, levels of epinephrine released into the bloodstream from the adrenal gland during fight or flight. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Private Life of Brain | 177 | Consciousness is necessary for synchronizing the appropriate readout from brain to body. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Private Life of Brain | 177 | The quality of a moment of consciousness is directly related to the size and turnover rate of neuron assemblies. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Private Life of Brain | 178 | Peptides are a large class of chemicals that exceed all of the other bioactive transmitters in terms of variety. | 1 | ||
| Greenfield; Private Life of Brain | 178 | Peptides are larger molecules than the better-known transmitters such as acetylcholine and the amines. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Private Life of Brain | 180 | Hypothesis that consciousness is an inevitable corollary of mercurial unique assemblies of neurons temporarily growing so large that they preclude the coexistence of any other. | 2 | ||
| Greenfield; Private Life of Brain | 180 | Quandary of how a sequence of objective neural events translates into a subjective sensation. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Private Life of Brain | 180 | Nearest we may come to sharing someone else's consciousness is via poetry, paintings, and music. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Private Life of Brain | 181 | Correlate the net size of transient neuronal assembly with reported degrees of subjective consciousness. | 1 | ||
| Greenfield; Private Life of Brain | 181 | Degree of emotion at any one time is inversely proportional to the extent of prevailing neuronal assembly. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Private Life of Brain | 181 | Emotion is the most basic form of consciousness. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Private Life of Brain | 181 | Minds develop as brains do, as an individual starts to escape genetic programming in favor of personal experience-based learning. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Private Life of Brain | 182 | The more than mind predominates over raw emotion, the deeper the consciousness. | 1 | ||
| Greenfield; Private Life of Brain | 182 | Consciousness characterized by the raw senses is indicative of consciousness at its most minimal. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Private Life of Brain | 182 | Depth of consciousness at any one moment will be the extent of the dominant working assembly of neurons at that time. | 0 | ||
| Greenfield; Private Life of Brain | 183 | Current imaging techniques are inadequate to capture the recruitment of, say, 10 million cells or more in less than a quarter second and their equally rapid disbanding. | 1 | ||
| Greenfield; Private Life of Brain | 193 | In the rhythm of oscillations, no single cell joins in all the activity all the time, but overall, there are sufficient cells to maintain a synchronous activity for long periods of time. | 10 | ||
| Greenfield; Private Life of Brain | |||||