| Thagard; Brain and the Meaning of Life | |||||
| Book | Page | Topic | |||
| Thagard; Brain and the Meaning of Life | 44 | Steven Pinker was asked on a TV show to explain in five words or fewer how the brain works. Pinker's brilliantly concise response was "Brain cells fire in patterns." | |||
| Thagard; Brain and the Meaning of Life | 45 | Functional model of two connected neurons. (Diagram) | 1 | ||
| Thagard; Brain and the Meaning of Life | 48 | Neurons fire in patterns. | 3 | ||
| Thagard; Brain and the Meaning of Life | 49 | Retrieval of a memory works by reactivating a pattern of firing in a population of neurons. | 1 | ||
| Thagard; Brain and the Meaning of Life | 49 | When you remember something, it is because your brain has revived patterns of neural activation. | 0 | ||
| Thagard; Brain and the Meaning of Life | 49 | Eric Kandel won a Nobel Prize for his research on how learning works in the sea slug, Aplysia. | 0 | ||
| Thagard; Brain and the Meaning of Life | 50 | Donald Hebb hypothesized that two neurons that "fire together wire together." | 1 | ||
| Thagard; Brain and the Meaning of Life | 51 | Literacy is a recent development in human history, going back only about 5000 years to the Samarians. | 1 | ||
| Thagard; Brain and the Meaning of Life | 52 | Because of increased concentrations of the neurotransmitter dopamine, there is increased activity in the nucleus accumbens, a brain area associated with feelings of pleasure. | 1 | ||
| Thagard; Brain and the Meaning of Life | 52 | In addition to increased activity of dopamine, alcohol also increases activity of the neurotransmitter GABA, which enables some neurons to inhibit the firing of other neurons. | 0 | ||
| Thagard; Brain and the Meaning of Life | 52 | Alcohol's increased activity of GABA, can produce relaxation in small doses, but in larger doses can lead to a lack of coordination, slurring of words, and even passing out. | 0 | ||
| Thagard; Brain and the Meaning of Life | 53 | Stimulants such as cocaine and amphetamines, including the popular drug Ecstasy, increase brain concentrations of the pleasure-inducing neurotransmitter dopamine, as well as other energizing neurotransmitters such as norepinephrine. | 1 | ||
| Thagard; Brain and the Meaning of Life | 53 | Opiates such as heroin stimulate special receptors in the brain leading to release of dopamine and subsequent feelings of pleasure and relaxation, producing strong inclinations toward addiction. | 0 | ||
| Thagard; Brain and the Meaning of Life | 53 | For depression, millions of people take drugs like Prozac that inhibit the reuptake of the neurotransmitter serotonin. | 0 | ||
| Thagard; Brain and the Meaning of Life | 53 | Some drugs that alleviate depression may involve the production of new neurons in the hippocampus as well as increased availability of serotonin in the synaptic gaps between existing neurons. | 0 | ||
| Thagard; Brain and the Meaning of Life | 53 | Bipolar disorder, formally known as manic depression, can be effectively treated with lithium, which affects various neurotransmitters. | 0 | ||
| Thagard; Brain and the Meaning of Life | 53 | Schizophrenia can sometimes be treated with drugs that inhibit dopamine and also can affect levels of other neurotransmitters. | 0 | ||
| Thagard; Brain and the Meaning of Life | 53 | Increasing concentrations of dopamine can alleviate the symptoms of Parkinson's disease. | 0 | ||
| Thagard; Brain and the Meaning of Life | 53 | The use of recreational and therapeutic drugs provides overwhelming evidence that changing brain processes causes changes in mental processes. | 0 | ||
| Thagard; Brain and the Meaning of Life | 54 | Neural bases of perception, memory, learning, emotion, and other mental processes. | 1 | ||
| Thagard; Brain and the Meaning of Life | 54 | Transcranial magnetic stimulation that can cause changes in thinking by noninvasive alteration of the electrical activity of neurons. | 0 | ||
| Thagard; Brain and the Meaning of Life | 61 | Artificial intelligence, which is the construction of computers capable of reasoning and learning. This view is called functionalism. | 7 | ||
| Thagard; Brain and the Meaning of Life | 62 | First few decades of modern research in cognitive science, from the 1950s to the 1970s. | 1 | ||
| Thagard; Brain and the Meaning of Life | 63 | Much of the most exciting current progress in cognitive science combines experimental studies of the brain with computational models of how it works. | 1 | ||
| Thagard; Brain and the Meaning of Life | 65 | Inference is a neural process involving parallel interactions among neural populations, not just a step-by-step linguistic procedure. | 2 | ||
| Thagard; Brain and the Meaning of Life | 70 | Gestalt figures such as the reversing duck / rabbit. | 5 | ||
| Thagard; Brain and the Meaning of Life | 70 | The duck-rabbit inference consists of the parallel dynamic interaction of neurons that encode sensory information with neurons that encode expectations and knowledge of what ducks and rabbits look like. | 0 | ||
| Thagard; Brain and the Meaning of Life | 71 | Duck-rabbit reversing figure. (Diagram) | 1 | ||
| Thagard; Brain and the Meaning of Life | 71 | Perception is a kind of inference. | 0 | ||
| Thagard; Brain and the Meaning of Life | 71 | When we speak or write, we encounter one sentence at a time, and seem to infer the next sentence from the ones that came before, just as with a proof in mathematics. | 0 | ||
| Thagard; Brain and the Meaning of Life | 71 | Inference in the brain does not operate in a serial, step-by-step way. Each neuron is synaptically connected with thousands of others, so it's firing pattern is affected by all of the neurons that excite or inhibit it, and it in turn affects the firing of all the neurons that it excites or inhibits. | 0 | ||
| Thagard; Brain and the Meaning of Life | 71 | Thus inference in the brain is parallel, in that many neurons are firing at around the same time, and asynchronously, in that there is no central clock that coordinates the waves of firing that spread through the neural populations. Hence perception is very different from the kind of serial steps of linguistic inference. | 0 | ||
| Thagard; Brain and the Meaning of Life | 71 | Brains perform inferences using parallel activity of millions of neurons -- Perception can elegantly integrate both bottom-up and top-down information. | 0 | ||
| Thagard; Brain and the Meaning of Life | 71 | Emotional feelings involve a dynamic integration of multiple kinds of information. | 0 | ||
| Thagard; Brain and the Meaning of Life | 72 | When you smell something, the smell is the result of a dynamic interaction of different brain areas involving both sensory inputs and previous knowledge and expectations. | 1 | ||
| Thagard; Brain and the Meaning of Life | 72 | Perception requires brains to be able to relate inputs from the sensory organs with information that they have already stored in the form of synaptic connections between neurons. | 0 | ||
| Thagard; Brain and the Meaning of Life | 72 | Brain is a parallel processor capable of assessing many aspects simultaneously. | 0 | ||
| Thagard; Brain and the Meaning of Life | 72 | A few micrograms of a drug like LSD can disengage your brain's perceptual apparatus from the usual sensory inputs and generate fantastic images that have no correspondence to anything in the world. | 0 | ||
| Thagard; Brain and the Meaning of Life | 72 | Every night when you dream your brain generates complex and often compelling sensory experiences that are not directly caused by anything in the world. | 0 | ||
| Thagard; Brain and the Meaning of Life | 76 | Constructive nature of perception with both top-down and bottom-up processing. [gestalts] | 4 | ||
| Thagard; Brain and the Meaning of Life | 96 | Feelings of pleasure and anticipation of desirable outcomes are associated with circuits of neurons that employ the neurotransmitter dopamine, running from the ventral tegmental area through the nucleus accumbens to the prefrontal cortex. Such brain circuits are reciprocal, with many feedback loops. | 20 | ||
| Thagard; Brain and the Meaning of Life | 100 | Perception involves simultaneous parallel processing that combines top-down knowledge with bottom-up perceptual input. | 4 | ||
| Thagard; Brain and the Meaning of Life | 100 | Emotions can be understood as dynamic interactions of brain areas that perform both bodily perception and cognitive appraisal. | 0 | ||
| Thagard; Brain and the Meaning of Life | 101 | EMOCON model of how different brain areas interact to produce emotions as a result of both cognitive appraisal and bodily perceptions. (diagram) | 1 | ||
| Thagard; Brain and the Meaning of Life | 108 | When hearing some good news makes you happy, the change is the result of your brain's undergoing neural processes such as activation of your nucleus accumbens. | 7 | ||
| Thagard; Brain and the Meaning of Life | 124 | A crucial part of the brain's representation of goals is their association with rewards and punishments. | 16 | ||
| Thagard; Brain and the Meaning of Life | 126 | Cognitive revolution of the 1960s. | 2 | ||
| Thagard; Brain and the Meaning of Life | 127 | Artificial intelligence pioneer Marvin Minsky. | 1 | ||
| Thagard; Brain and the Meaning of Life | 127 | Children naturally develop strong emotional attachments to their caregivers, usually parents. Caregivers transmit to children not only factual information but also emotional values. | 0 | ||
| Thagard; Brain and the Meaning of Life | 133 | Psychology is largely concerned with the descriptive task of saying how people do make decisions, whereas philosophy is mostly concerned with the normative task of prescribing how people ought to make decisions. | 6 | ||
| Thagard; Brain and the Meaning of Life | 135 | The brain assesses the priority of goals using the combined activity of neural populations involving multimodal representations of situations, including populations in areas such as the amygdala required for emotional interpretations. | 2 | ||
| Thagard; Brain and the Meaning of Life | 135 | Thinking is often skewed by stimuli with powerful emotional influences. | 0 | ||
| Thagard; Brain and the Meaning of Life | 135 | Natural brain tendency to place more weight on short-term goals such as eating than on long-term goals such as being healthy. | 0 | ||
| Thagard; Brain and the Meaning of Life | 135 | By focusing short-term rewards, the brain can primarily employ the midbrain dopamine system rather than the frontal and parietal regions needed for assessing long-term implications. | 0 | ||
| Thagard; Brain and the Meaning of Life | 144 | When the parents of Terri Schiavo resisted her husband's decision to remove her feeding tube in 2005, she was still important to them, despite her extensive brain damage. Her apparent inability to form any representation of anything seems to suggest that Terri Schiavo's life really had become meaningless. | 9 | ||
| Thagard; Brain and the Meaning of Life | 147 | Widows and widowers require on average seven years to regain the level of life satisfaction they had a year before the death of their spouse. | 3 | ||
| Thagard; Brain and the Meaning of Life | 148 | Marital satisfaction decreases dramatically after the birth of the first child and increases only when the last child leaves home. | 1 | ||
| Thagard; Brain and the Meaning of Life | 149 | A meaningful life is one where you still have something to do, even if doing it may not make you happy every day, week, or year. | 1 | ||
| Thagard; Brain and the Meaning of Life | 149 | Slacker serenity, the happiness that supposedly comes from abandoning challenging goals and simply accepting what you have. | 0 | ||
| Thagard; Brain and the Meaning of Life | 149 | A source of temporary happiness can be drugs such as cocaine and heroin that manipulate the brain's pleasure machinery. | 0 | ||
| Thagard; Brain and the Meaning of Life | 152 | Love | 3 | ||
| Thagard; Brain and the Meaning of Life | 153 | When people looked at pictures of their new romantic partners, their brain showed increased activity in regions that mediate reward via the dopamine system, particularly the ventral tegmental area and the nucleus accumbens. | 1 | ||
| Thagard; Brain and the Meaning of Life | 153 | The brain reward areas activated by thoughts of new romantic partners are the same areas activated by reward-producing drugs such as cocaine that also lead to exhilaration, sleeplessness, and loss of appetite. | 0 | ||
| Thagard; Brain and the Meaning of Life | 153 | Cortical areas associated with emotion include the insula, the anterior cingulate, and the amygdala. | 0 | ||
| Thagard; Brain and the Meaning of Life | 153 | The fact that viewing a romantic partner stimulates brain areas associated with reward and pleasure explains why it feels so good to fall in love. | 0 | ||
| Thagard; Brain and the Meaning of Life | 153 | The caudate nucleus of the basal ganglia contributes to the representation of goals, expectation of reward, and integration of sensory inputs to prepare for action. | 0 | ||
| Thagard; Brain and the Meaning of Life | 153 | Romantic love can be viewed as a goal-oriented state that leads to a set of specific emotions such as euphoria and anxiety rather than as an individual specific emotion. | 0 | ||
| Thagard; Brain and the Meaning of Life | 153 | The neurophysiology of romantic love seems to differ from that of mere sexual attraction and also from that of long-term attachment. | 0 | ||
| Thagard; Brain and the Meaning of Life | 154 | Oxytocin increases trust between strangers. | 1 | ||
| Thagard; Brain and the Meaning of Life | 154 | Trust is an important part of friendship, a less intense relationship than romantic love and marriage, but also of great importance to people's satisfaction with their lives. | 0 | ||
| Thagard; Brain and the Meaning of Life | 154 | Brain processes involved in interpersonal bonding have much overlap with those for romantic and familial attachments. | 0 | ||
| Thagard; Brain and the Meaning of Life | 154 | Spending time with friends is highly pleasurable, involving dopamine brain circuitry. | 0 | ||
| Thagard; Brain and the Meaning of Life | 155 | Chemical similarities between social and physical pain; both are affected by opioids such as morphine. | 1 | ||
| Thagard; Brain and the Meaning of Life | 155 | Social threats in humans can lead to decreases in pain sensitivity, just as injury does. | 0 | ||
| Thagard; Brain and the Meaning of Life | 155 | Social rejection in humans leads to increase blood pressure and levels of the stress hormone cortisol. | 0 | ||
| Thagard; Brain and the Meaning of Life | 155 | Social and physical pain have similar mechanisms that can be understood in terms of brain regions such as the anterior cingulate and chemical processes that occur in them. | 0 | ||
| Thagard; Brain and the Meaning of Life | 155 | People often respond to the misfortunes of strangers with compassion, as we see in many acts of charity. | 0 | ||
| Thagard; Brain and the Meaning of Life | 156 | A full account of the brain mechanisms underlying love should be able to accommodate all of its manifestations, from romance to friendship to compassion. | 1 | ||
| Thagard; Brain and the Meaning of Life | 156 | Pleasure-related brain areas such as the nucleus accumbens and circuitry based on neurochemicals such as dopamine and oxytocin are highly relevant in the brain mechanisms underlying love. | 0 | ||
| Thagard; Brain and the Meaning of Life | 158 | Work | 2 | ||
| Thagard; Brain and the Meaning of Life | 158 | Many people obtain satisfaction from their jobs. | 0 | ||
| Thagard; Brain and the Meaning of Life | 159 | Happiness does not depend on the absolute amount of wealth, but rather on how you are doing compared to others. | 1 | ||
| Thagard; Brain and the Meaning of Life | 161 | Play | 2 | ||
| Thagard; Brain and the Meaning of Life | 162 | Children like to roughhouse with each other in ways that are intimately linked to somatosensory information processing within the midbrain, the thalamus, and the cortex. | 1 | ||
| Thagard; Brain and the Meaning of Life | 162 | Synaptic chemicals that are effective in arousing play include acetylcholine, glutamate, and opioids. | 0 | ||
| Thagard; Brain and the Meaning of Life | 162 | Fun of rough-and-tumble play can continue into adulthood, through the pursuit of interactive sports. | 0 | ||
| Thagard; Brain and the Meaning of Life | 162 | Play produces widespread release of opioids. | 0 | ||
| Thagard; Brain and the Meaning of Life | 162 | Activation of serotonin and noradrenaline systems reduces play, and so does blockade of dopamine systems. | 0 | ||
| Thagard; Brain and the Meaning of Life | 162 | The evidence seems to suggest that play is fun because of its neurochemical effects. | 0 | ||
| Thagard; Brain and the Meaning of Life | 162 | People enjoy recreational drugs such as alcohol because of their effects on various neurochemical pathways, including ones involving dopamine and endogenous opioids. | 0 | ||
| Thagard; Brain and the Meaning of Life | 162 | Exercise can stimulate the production of endorphins, natural opioids in the brain that reduce pain and produce feelings of well-being. | 0 | ||
| Thagard; Brain and the Meaning of Life | 163 | One of the main sources of entertainment is music. | 1 | ||
| Thagard; Brain and the Meaning of Life | 163 | Musical experiences arise from neural processes of perception and emotion. | 0 | ||
| Thagard; Brain and the Meaning of Life | 163 | The ability of people to reproduce the tempo of a song accurately is probably due to activity in the cerebellum. | 0 | ||
| Thagard; Brain and the Meaning of Life | 163 | Listening to music and attending to it structure activates a region of the left frontal cortex called the pars orbitalis, which is also involved in language comprehension. | 0 | ||
| Thagard; Brain and the Meaning of Life | 163 | Attending to music also involves activation in an area of the right hemisphere not used for language. | 0 | ||
| Thagard; Brain and the Meaning of Life | 163 | Perception of music and memory for music have common neural mechanisms that explain how songs get stuck in our heads, producing so-called earworms that are hard to stop. | 0 | ||
| Thagard; Brain and the Meaning of Life | 163 | Intense musical emotions -- thrills and chills -- are associated with brain regions involved in reward, motivation, and arousal: the ventral striatum, the amygdala, the midbrain, and regions of the frontal cortex. | 0 | ||
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