The Strange Workings of the Brain

Outline Phobias Phantom Limbs Prosopagnosia and the Capgras Delusion Synesthesia Memory Consciousness

Phobias

Phantom Limbs Sensation that missing limb is still present Often painful Can sometimes be controlled, sometimes act on their own accord Not necessarily the same as missing limb – Missing arm felt “6 inches too short” Related to mapping of body onto brain Mirror treatment

Cortical Homonculus

Phantom Limbs Sensation that missing limb is still present Often painful Can sometimes be controlled, sometimes act on their own accord Not necessarily the same as missing limb – Missing arm felt “6 inches too short” Related to mapping of body onto brain Mirror treatment provides visual feedback

Mirror Box Treatment

Prosopagnosia and the Capgras Delusion Prosopagnosia: inability to recognize faces – Can follow from traumatic brain injury Usually associated with damage to fusiform gyrus (part of temporal lobe) – Different forms: Apperceptive: severe, can’t even tell gender of person, ‘faces make no sense’ Associative: can’t make links between face and person – Subject may have emotional response without conscious recognition

Prosopagnosia and the Capgras Delusion Capgras Delusion: person holds a delusion that a friend, spouse, parent, etc. has been replaced by an identical-looking impostor Thought to be like reverse of Prosopagnosia – Conscious ability to recognize faces, but without automatic emotional response Can be caused by traumatic brain injury – Possibly due to disconnection between temporal cortex (facial recognition) and limbic system (emotions)

Neurological condition in which stimulation in one cognitive pathway causes stimulation in another Examples: Symbol --> color or spatial location Sound --> color Symbol --> personality

“T’s are generally crabbed, ungenerous creatures. U is a soulless sort of thing. 4 is honest, but… 3 I cannot trust… 9 is dark, a gentleman, tall and graceful, but politic under his suavity” Can test for synesthia 1 in 23 people have mild synesthesia Likely due to cross activation of different brain regions

Testing for Synesthesia

“T’s are generally crabbed, ungenerous creatures. U is a soulless sort of thing. 4 is honest, but… 3 I cannot trust… 9 is dark, a gentleman, tall and graceful, but politic under his suavity” Can test for synesthia 1 in 23 people have mild synesthesia Likely due to cross activation of different brain regions

Synesthesia can be beneficial to those effected Can aid memory – we’ll see this in a bit Many artists have synesthesia Synesthetes are truly gods among men Famous Synesthetes include: John Mayer, Pharell and Eddie Van Halen!!! Some think that synesthesia can be related to the development of language Kiki or Booba?

Memory Impressive capacities for memory: – Solomon Shereshevsky Russian dude active in the early 20 th c. Could reproduce incredibly long lists of sounds, words, formulas, etc. without error after indefinite amounts of time Diagnosed with 5-fold synesthesia – Music  color, touch  taste, etc. Would memorize things by placing them in imaginary landscape – Might forget something if he couldn’t find it in this landscape

Memory Impressive capacities for memory: – Shass Pollak: Jewish mnemonists who memorized more than 5,000 pages of 12 books of Babylonian Talmud – A pin would be placed on a word, let us say, the fourth word in line eight; the memory sharp would then be asked what word is in the same spot on page thirty-eight or fifty or any other page; the pin would be pressed through the volume until it reached page thirty eight or page fifty or any other page designated; the memory sharp would then mention the word and it was found invariably correct.

Memory Disorders Henry Gustav Molaison (H.M.) – Anterograde amnesia: can’t form new memories – Bad epilepsy  brain surgery, removed parts of medial temporal lobes – Lost ability to form new long term memories – Could still learn new motor memories, but wouldn’t remember having learned them K.C. – Intact semantic memory, no episodic memory – “unable to describe an event that took place in school that specifically included him; however, he knows that he went to school, and he retains the knowledge that he gained there“ Clive Wearing – Memento syndrome as result of Herpes simplex – ‘Waking up’ every 20 seconds – 8:31 AM: Now I am really, completely awake. 9:06 AM: Now I am perfectly, overwhelmingly awake. 9:34 AM: Now I am superlatively, actually awake.

Consciousness Physical theory for consciousness – Some argue that consciousness must be a quantum phenomenon Orchestrated Object Reduction (Orch-OR) – Formulated by Roger Penrose and an anesthesiologist – Godel’s theorem  brain can go beyond axioms/algorithms Theorem relates to un-provable-ness of theorms

Consciousness More Penrose – For non-algorithmic physics, look to quantum theory – Collapse of wave function is probabilistic – “states are proposed to be selected by a 'non- computable' influence embedded in the fundamental level of spacetime geometry at the Planck scale.” – Plato: pure values and forms exist in abstract realm – Penrose: this realm is the Planck scale – Suggests that brain contains these isolated quantum systems – possibly in microtubules inside neurons

THE END