## Wednesday, May 18, 2005

### Topo-sense?

Michael Persinger has a vision - the Almighty isn't dead, he's an energy field. And your mind is an electromagnetic map to your soul.

Persinger's research forays are at the very frontier of the roiling field of neuroscience, the biochemical approach to the study of the brain. Much of what we hear about the discipline is anatomical stuff, involving the mapping of the brain's many folds and networks, aperformed by reading PET scans, observing blood flows, or deducing connections from stroke and accident victims who've suffered serious brain damage. But cognitive neuroscience is also a grab bag of more theoretical pursuits that can range from general consciousness studies to finding the neural basis for all kinds of sensations.

IN a materialistic sense I wanted to show how matter constructed phases and brain thinking, could be exemplified. Just as mathematics can, and this requirement of models of math, somehow need it's inception to arise from that same brain?

Rafael Núñez and George Lakoff have been able to give an elaborate first answer to the questions: How can advanced mathematics arise from the physical brain and body? Given the very limited mathematical capacity of human brains at birth, how can advanced mathematical ideas be built up using the basic mechanisms of conceptual structure: image-schemas, frames, metaphors, and conceptual blends?

Now I have done some home work here to say, that the thinking is leading from a brain orientated perspective, although this evidence is overwhelming, I have countered it with another thought.

Stanislas Dehaene
Like Lakoff, I am convinced that cognitive studies of mathematics will ultimately provide beautiful examples of the limits that our brains impose on our thoughts. As I tried to show in The Number Sense, we have very strong intuitions about small numbers and magnitudes, which are provided to us by a specific cerebral network with a long evolutionary history. But one could probably write another book describing the limits on our mathematical intuitions. Take topology, for instance. At home, I have a small collection of extremely simple topological brainteasers. Some of them (essentially made from a metal ring and a piece of string) are strikingly counter-intuitive ‹ our first reaction is that it is simply impossible to remove the ring, but of course it can be done in a few moves. Thus, our sense of topology is extremely poor. Yet it's easy enough to imagine a different species that would have evolved a cerebral area for "topo-sense", and for which all of my brain-teasers would be trivial

This intuitive feeling that is generated once math processes are understood are realized in dynamical movement revealled in the brains thinkng? Had to arrive from lessons it learnt previously? Pendulums, time clocks, great arcs, and gravity?

• Damasio's First Law The body precedes the mind.

• Damasio's Second Law Emotions precede feelings.

• Damasio's Third Law Concepts precede words.

• What if the condensation of the human brain was the reverse, of Damasio's First Law. I mean we can train the neuron pathways to be reconstructed, by establishing the movements previously damaged by stroke?

What is the evolution of the human brain, if mind is not leading its shape?

In Pioneering Study, Monkey Think, Robot DoBy SANDRA BLAKESLEE

Monkeys that can move a robot arm with thoughts alone have brought the merger of mind and machine one step closer.

In experiments at Duke University, implants in the monkeys' brains picked up brain signals and sent them to a robotic arm, which carried out reaching and grasping movements on a computer screen driven only by the monkeys' thoughts.

The achievement is a significant advance in the continuing effort to devise thought-controlled machines that could be a great benefit for people who are paralyzed, or have lost control over their physical movements.

In previous experiments, some in the same laboratory at Duke, both humans and monkeys have had their brains wired so they could move cursors on computer screens just by thinking about it. And wired monkeys have moved robot arms by making a motion with their own arms. The new research, however, involves thought-controlled robotic action that does not depend on physical movement by the monkey and that involves the complex muscular activities of reaching and grasping.

Now the direct connection, is self evdient once the brains mapping is understood and connections made. In computerization the mathematical structure is very importan,t so such a math mind and the computer persons would excell if the equaitions would demonstrate the math as a model constructed. In this sense, if we think of the Torso, rotation turns 360 degrees, or 720, would somehow bring it back to it's original position.

Monkey Moves Computer Cursor by Thoughts Alone, By E.J. Mundell

Going one step further, her team then trained the monkey to simply think about a movement, without reaching out and touching the screen. A computer program, hooked up to the implanted electrodes, interpreted the monkey's thoughts by tracking flare-ups of brain cell activity. The computer then moved a cursor on the computer screen in accordance with the monkey's desires--left or right, up or down, wherever the electrical (brain) pattern tells us the monkey is planning to reach,'' according to Meeker.

So I must put here some information to show the counter proposal.

Lets say my own brain did concieve a process within it's own structure that I had been able to identify as a process of continuity and called it a inductive deductive process, according to that shape? Would this reveal something about my own brain, but of others as well? Hw el have tunnels served to help the mind engage a physiolgical process, to find it self decribing the math, in experience?

The counter proposal I am making, is disguised in Persingers own words. That such a field manifested in the brain dynamics, as neuronic developmental pathways? Could this have been initiated from thinking structured born in mind and as a model assumption, somehow transformed the process of the whole brain?

A Paradigm Change? Penetrating the unpenetrable?

This plate image is a powerful one for me becuase it represents something Greene understood well. His link on the right hand side of this blog is the admission of "cosmological and quantum mechanical readiness," to tackle the cosmological frontier.

How do you classify some experience where mind might have projected ahead of itself, while the neurons would become the basis of thinking. Something had to exist before a personality could develope. Personality is our man made, while deeper is the essence of that flows through to expression? How would you have concieved of this in a physiological processes? Einstein crossing the room, and in this, "higgs will have found it's comparison?" "Neurons," that fall in behind the projected mind?

Brian Greene:
it turns out that within string theory ... there is actually an identification, we believe, between the very tiny and the very huge. So it turns out that if you, for instance, take a dimension - imagine its in a circle, imagine its really huge - and then you make it smaller and smaller and smaller, the equations tell us that if you make it smaller than a certain length (its about 10-33 centimeters, the so called 'Planck Length') ... its exactly identical, from the point of view of physical properties, as making the circle larger. So you're trying to squeeze it smaller, but actually in reality your efforts are being turned around by the theory and you're actually making the dimension larger. So in some sense, if you try to squeeze it all the way down to zero size, it would be the same as making it infinitely big. ...

So you look for the topological equivalent.The sphere and the torus? So there is this struggle of sorts. Where energy can flow through, in and out, and how had it changed, and this field becomes the image of gaussian curvature easily expressed in Maxwells delivery as part of some greater whole?

But it is more then the relationship of that same cosmological partnership to reductionistc attempts at defining the beginning of the universe, will somehow have found it's relevance through the expression of the mind? The universe 's beginning?

Melencolia II
[frontispiece of thesis, after Dürer 1514]

Historically this development of the geometry of consciousness was working hard to bring itself to light? The manifested realization, of those early universe indications.