“BE well, do good work, and keep in touch.” loc: 83
There in one sentence Keillor captures humanness. loc: 86
I see the human turning around with a knife in his hand and cutting his imaginary tether to the earlier versions, becoming liberated to do things no other animal comes close to doing. loc: 89
Note: Is this where Spinoza and Tielhard come in? Edit
The point is that most human activity can be related to antecedents in other animals. But to be swept away by such a fact is to miss the point of human experience. loc: 107
Part I THE BASICS OF HUMAN LIFE loc: 128
Chapter 1 ARE HUMAN BRAINS UNIQUE? loc: 131
Today the cerebral cortex is thought to be “perhaps the most complex entity known to science.”1 loc: 180
In the mid-1960s, he suggested that evolutionary changes in cognitive capacity are the result of brain reorganization rather than changes in size alone.4 loc: 201
Human brains, however, are four to five times larger than would be expected for an average mammal of comparable size.7 In fact, in the hominid (ape) line in general (from which humans have evolved), brain size has increased much faster than body size. loc: 219
The other problem with the big-brain theory is that Homo sapiens’ brain size has decreased about 150 cc over the species’ history, while their culture and social structures have become more complex. loc: 232
researchers wondered if these genes could answer the question whether the human brain is continuing to evolve. It turns out that they could, and it is. loc: 272
one genetic variant of microcephalin arose approximately 37,000 years ago, which coincides with the emergence of culturally modern humans, loc: 278
An ASPM variant arose about 5,800 years ago, coincident with the spread of agriculture, cities, and the first record of written language. loc: 280
Semendeferi27 confirmed that area 10, in the lateral prefrontal cortex, is almost twice as large in humans as in apes. Area 10 is involved with memory and planning, cognitive flexibility, abstract thinking, initiating appropriate behavior and inhibiting inappropriate behavior, learning rules, and picking out relevant information from what is perceived through the senses. loc: 352
ubiquitous lateral cerebral specialization. Nowhere else in the animal kingdom is there such rampant specialization of function. loc: 512
One of the major facts emerging from split-brain research is that the left hemisphere has marked limitations in perceptual functions and the right hemisphere has even more prominent limitations in its cognitive functions. The model thus maintains that lateral specialization reflects the emergence of new skills and the retention of others. loc: 535
The human brain is on its way to being a unique neural system. loc: 556
Note: the thesis of the book Edit
Chapter 2 WOULD A CHIMP MAKE A GOOD DATE? loc: 636
Humans have an innate ability to understand that other humans have minds with different desires, intentions, beliefs, and mental states, and we have the ability to form theories with some degree of accuracy about what those desires, intentions, beliefs, and mental states are. It was first called Theory of Mind (TOM) loc: 824
TOM is fully developed automatically in children by about age four to five, loc: 828
suggest that the mirror system was fundamental for the development of speech, and before speech for other forms of intentional communication,47 loc: 1081
maybe the speech circuits in humans developed because the precursor structure that later evolved into Broca’s area had a mechanism for recognizing actions in others—and had to have this ability before language could evolve. loc: 1086
Voluntary control of the mirror neurons is the necessary foundation for the beginning of language. loc: 1096
sensory inputs go to the thalamus, a type of relay station. Then the impulses are sent to the processing areas in the cortex and relayed to the frontal cortex. There they are integrated with other higher mental processes and into the stream of consciousness; this is when a person becomes consciously aware of the information loc: 1151
there is a shortcut that obviously is an advantage. It is through the amygdala, which sits under the thalamus and keeps track of everything that is streaming through. If it recognizes a pattern that was associated with danger in the past, it has a direct connection to the brainstem, which then activates the fight-or-flight response loc: 1155
cost-of-grouping theory, which basically states that the size of the group depends on its resources. In an environment where food is seasonal or erratic, the party size will vary accordingly: more food, bigger parties; less food, smaller parties. loc: 1213
some species have evolved to eat high-quality, difficult-to-find foods that aren’t always available, such as nuts, fruits, roots, and meat. Here we are like the chimps. loc: 1216
The type of food that we and the chimps eat has made males more dominant. Traveling to find food slows down the females, who carry and nurse the infants. The guys and the childless females can go farther and faster and get to the patch of food first, and then hang out together. They can afford to have larger parties. The advantage of moving around to find food with a variable party size gives a species flexibility and the ability to adapt to changing environments, but the disadvantage is that when the group becomes small, it is vulnerable to attack from a temporarily larger group. This is what Wrangham calls a party-gang species: species with coalitionary bonds (the males hanging out together) and variable party size. loc: 1219
Part 2 NAVIGATING THE SOCIAL WORLD loc: 1277
Chapter 3 BIG BRAINS AND EXPANDING SOCIAL RELATIONSHIPS loc: 1281
what the human brain does best, what it seems built to do: think socially. loc: 1300
natural selection takes place at more than one level of the biological hierarchy. Selfish individuals might out-compete altruists within groups, but internally altruistic groups out-compete selfish groups. This is the essential logic of what has become known as multilevel selection theory.”3 loc: 1339
If an individual does a favor for an unrelated individual and is sure it will be returned at a later date, then that could provide a survival advantage.4 loc: 1386
reciprocal altruism, loc: 1390
Species that practice reciprocal altruism also have mechanisms to identify cheaters,5 loc: 1393
there is a relentless progression of increasing relative brain size during the evolution of hominids.11 loc: 1433
There is a growing consensus that a major factor in developing larger brains was the banding together in social groups, which made hunting and gathering more efficient and also provided protection from other predators.23 loc: 1482
the higher intellectual faculties of primates have evolved as an adaptation to the complexities of social living.”25 loc: 1496
Living in complexly bonded social groups is more challenging than dealing with the physical world, and the cognitive demands of this social life selected for increases in brain size and function.26 loc: 1500
social brain hypothesis. the bigger the neocortex, the larger the social group. However, the apes required a bigger neocortex per given group size than the other primates.28 They seem to have to work harder to maintain their social relationships. loc: 1516
most likely the increasing size of social groups was driven by the ecological problem of predator risk, and the pressures and complexities of living in the increasingly large social groups drove brain size expansion. loc: 1536
At some point during the evolution of the hominids, as groups became larger, an individual would need to groom more and more other individuals in order to maintain relationships in the larger group. Grooming time would cut into the time that was needed to forage for food. This is when, Dunbar argues, language began to develop. loc: 1554
With physical grooming, an individual invests high-quality personal time. That cannot be faked. With language, a new dimension has been added: liars. One can tell stories displaced in time, so their veracity is difficult to assess, loc: 1560
As a social group gets larger and more dispersed, cheaters or free riders become harder to keep track of. Gossip may have evolved partly as a way to control the slackers.40, 41 loc: 1563
Gossip serves many purposes in society: It fosters relationships between gossip partners,43 satisfies the need to belong and be accepted by a unique group,37 elicits information,44 builds reputations (both good and bad),43 maintains and reinforces social norms,45 and allows individuals to evaluate themselves through comparison with others. loc: 1577
the human mind has a special module designed to detect individuals who cheat in social exchange situations. loc: 1631
Understanding and interpreting language is a conscious process that involves much cognitive energy. If we are concentrating on what is being said, rather than letting visual perceptions and vocal clues register in our conscious brain, we may be lessening our detective powers. loc: 1736
Chapter 4 THE MORAL COMPASS WITHIN loc: 1860
The second type is preconscious processing of perceptual events: You perceive a stimulus by seeing, hearing, smelling, or touching, and your brain processes it before your conscious mind is aware that you have perceived it. This takes place effortlessly and without intention or awareness. loc: 2005
automatic processing is doing is placing all your perceptions on a negative (the room is white, I don’t like white) to positive (the room is brightly colored, I like bright colors) scale and biasing your decisions one way (something about this place isn’t calling to me…let’s keep looking) or the other loc: 2007
affective priming, loc: 2011
In thinking about evolution, one would postulate that those who survived were those who reacted more quickly, that is, automatically, to a negative cue, and a negativity bias should have been selected for. loc: 2024
Your quick emotional response of fear or disgust or anger to the threatening (negative) incoming information will color how you process further information. It concentrates your attention on the negative stimulus. loc: 2043
posterior superior temporal sulcus (STS) is used for the harder personal scenarios, and for the easy ones, the anterior STS. loc: 2092
our brains have neuronal circuits that have developed over evolutionary time that do indeed do specific jobs. loc: 2105
modular brain theory. loc: 2106
modules are defined by what they do with information, not by the information they receive loc: 2114
a stimulus induces an automatic process of approval (approach) or disapproval (avoid), which may lead to a full-on emotional state. The emotional state produces a moral intuition that may motivate an individual to action. Reasoning about the judgment or action comes afterward, loc: 2131
Social reciprocity, having been taken by humans to heights unheard of in the animal world, provides a treasure trove in the search for abstract moral rules. loc: 2143
Humans have evolved two abilities that are necessary for prolonged reciprocal social exchange: the ability to inhibit actions over time (that is, delayed gratification) and punishment of cheaters in reciprocal exchange. loc: 2147
universal moral modules* that are derived from the uniquely human emotion of disgust. Their five modules are reciprocity, suffering, hierarchy, boundaries between in-groups and out-groups (coalitions), and purity.29, loc: 2152
Note: Are these Kant's categorical imperatives? Edit
three areas of moral concern: the ethic of autonomy, which is concerned with an individual’s rights, freedoms, and welfare; the ethic of community, which is concerned with protecting families, communities, and nations; and the ethic of divinity, which is concerned about the spiritual self and physical and mental purity.31 loc: 2159
The fear of feeling guilt or shame prevents you from cheating, and you know (because of your theory of mind) that your partner would also feel the same way. Anger and rage against a cheater is a deterrent. loc: 2187
people are good at picking up on changing patterns of alliance, and this is why they can adapt to different social worlds, loc: 2279
Disgust is the emotion that protects purity. loc: 2292
The social functions of disgust…may be more important than its biological functions.41 loc: 2306
The implications of this are that even if a person seeks to make a rational judgment, most people don’t use information in an analytical manner.47 loc: 2378
rational reasoning has an opportunity to bloom when an issue gets discussed with another person. loc: 2384
people will tend to agree with people they like, so if the issue is neutral or of little consequence, or if an argument hasn’t already arisen, then social persuasion can come into play. loc: 2393
Wright describes the brain as a machine for winning arguments, not as a truth finder. loc: 2400
Haidt’s third possible scenario in which rational judgment is most likely to be used is what he refers to as the reasoned judgment link. In this instance, a person logically reasons out a judgment and overrides his intuition. Haidt suggests that this happens only when the initial intuition is weak and the analytical capacity is high. loc: 2430
The hot emotional system is specialized for quick emotional processing. It responds to a trigger and makes use of the amygdala-based memory. This is the “go” system. loc: 2461
The cool cognitive system is slower and is specialized for complex spatiotemporal and episodic representation and thought. The researchers call it the “know” system. Its neuronal basis is in the hippocampus and the frontal lobes. loc: 2462
The cool system develops later in life and becomes increasingly active. How the two systems interact depends on age, stress (under increasing stress, the hot system takes over), and temperament. loc: 2465
moral behavior, as evidenced by helping others, is more correlated with emotion and self-control. loc: 2482
Religions can be thought of as giant social groups with strong coalitions, often with hierarchical structures, and reciprocity based on notions of purity either of body, mind, or both. Giant social groups can have a survival advantage, whether they are based on religion or not. Ideology can strengthen coalitionary bonds, and that in itself can increase group survival. loc: 2571
Chapter 5 I FEEL YOUR PAIN loc: 2646
One school holds that an individual uses her own version of psychology, which is either innate or learned, and infers the mental state of others from how they are acting and what they are doing, where they are and whom they are with, and how they have been in the past. This is called theory theory. loc: 2662
The other school holds that one infers another’s emotional state by deliberately and voluntarily attempting to simulate or replicate it in one’s own mind—first pretending to be in the other’s situation and seeing how that feels, then feeding that information to the decision-making process, and ending up with what one thinks the other is feeling. This is called simulation theory.2 loc: 2664
In another form of the simulation theory, the simulation is not deliberate and voluntary but automatic and involuntary.3 In other words, it just happens without your control or rational input. You perceive an emotional stimulus through your senses, and your body automatically responds to it by simulating the emotion, which your conscious mind can either recognize or not. loc: 2668
use imitation as communication.13 Imitating others is a potent mechanism in learning and acculturation.14 loc: 2704
People will unconsciously copy mannerisms of others, and not only will they not know they are doing it, but they will not consciously realize the other person even has a mannerism they could be mimicking. That is not all. We are virtual mimicking machines! People will not only mimic mannerisms but also unconsciously mimic the facial expressions, postures, vocal intonations, accents,20 and even speech patterns and words of others.21 loc: 2716
All this mimicking behavior greases the machinery of social interactions. Unconsciously, deep down in that automatic part of your brain, you form connections with, and you like, other people who are similar to you. loc: 2733
the anterior insula participates in transforming unpleasant sensory input, whether it is actual perception of the disgusting odor or flavor or merely observing someone else’s facial reaction, into visceromotor reactions and the accompanying physical feeling one gets with the emotion of disgust. loc: 2833
observation of an emotion in someone else can result in brain activity that matches the experience of the emotion, to a certain degree, automatically. loc: 2857
We have a mirror system that understands actions and the intentions of actions, and it is also involved with learning through imitation and emotion recognition. This is Emotion Recognition 1—elementary emotion recognition. loc: 3053
Indeed we can change our emotion and the way we feel by the way we think. One way this is accomplished is by reappraisal. loc: 3085
during reappraisal, there was decreased activity in regions concerned with emotional processing, and activation in regions that are essential for memory, cognitive control, and self-monitoring.78 loc: 3096
Imagination allows us to simulate our past emotions and learn from those experiences, and project how others may feel or act in the same situation. loc: 3184
our default mode in regard to others is biased toward our own perspective. loc: 3204
we understand and predict the behavior and mental states of others by using our own mental resources. By imagining we were in their situation, we use our own knowledge as our default base to understand others.26 loc: 3212
cognitive control involved has been linked to the development of theory of mind, which emerges at the same age, as well as to the maturation of the prefrontal cortex. loc: 3220
apart from the shared neural network between self and other, when one takes another’s perspective, there is significant activation in the right inferior parietal cortex and the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, which includes the frontopolar cortex and the gyrus rectus. Other studies have had similar results. The somatosensory cortex is activated only when one takes one’s own perspective. loc: 3228
The junction of the right inferior parietal cortex with the posterior temporal cortex plays a critical role in the distinction between one’s own actions and another’s. Called the temporoparietal junction (TPJ), loc: 3231
The overlapping neural activations between judgments of self and similar others take us back to the simulation theory of social cognition, according to which we use knowledge about ourselves to infer the mental states of others. This use of a different substrate to think about unlike others loc: 3267
the evolution of the human temperament might have preceded the evolution of our more complex forms of social cognition. loc: 3346
hypothesis that an important first step in the evolution of modern human societies was a kind of self-domestication that selected for systems that controlled emotional reactivity. loc: 3348
Part 3 THE GLORY OF BEING HUMAN loc: 3368
Chapter 6 WHAT’S UP WITH THE ARTS? loc: 3371
They propose that beauty, as defined by aesthetic pleasure, is a function of the perceiver’s processing dynamics. The more fluently perceivers can mentally process an object, the more positive their aesthetic response. loc: 3498
Some objects are processed more easily than others because they contain certain features the brain is hardwired to process, which it does quickly, such as symmetry. loc: 3500
When we perceive something we process easily, we get a positive feeling. loc: 3502
This positive feeling contributes to our value judgment as to whether something is pleasing or not, unless we question the informational value of this input. loc: 3503
Researchers interested in the origins of human art are of two camps. Some believe there was an explosive event, some sudden and major change in human abilities and creativity that occurred about 30,000 to 40,000 years ago; others believe it was a more gradual process with roots extending back millions of years. loc: 3585
the overwhelming number of artifacts that have been found have their origins in the last 40,000 years. There was an explosion of artistic and creative activity that included cave paintings and engravings found from Australia to Europe, loc: 3589
Many archaeologists conclude that this explosion of creativity represents a fundamental evolutionary event in the Homo sapiens lineage.17 Something changed in our brain that expanded its earlier creative abilities, something unique to Homo sapiens. loc: 3592
Arts give pleasure: Our motivation system seeks them out because they reward us by making us feel good. loc: 3605
Making something special implies intent, and the intent is to distinguish an object or action from the ordinary by appealing to the emotions through the rhythms and textures and colors that it employs. Dissanayake thinks that “making special” is a behavior that increases group cohesiveness and thus would provide a survival advantage. loc: 3607
Dissanayake proposes that it is composed of many parts—manipulation, perception, emotion, symbolism, and cognition—and arose alongside other human characteristics, such as tool making, the need for order, language, category formation, symbol formation, self-consciousness, creating culture, sociality, and adaptability. She proposes that the creation of art in terms of human evolution was “to facilitate or sugarcoat socially important behavior, loc: 3616
He suggests that creative individuals had higher reproductive success. He proposes that the arts are like the peacock’s tail—a fitness indicator. The more intricate, complex, and extravagant an artwork was, the greater the skill that was required to produce it, and the less functional it was for survival, the better it would be as a fitness indicator. loc: 3621
Steven Pinker is not so sure that the arts have an adaptive function at all but thinks rather they are a by-product of the brain’s other functions. loc: 3628
Pinker thinks that the brain has put that together and figured out that it can get the pleasure sensation without all the hard work of actually attaining a goal. One way of doing this is taking recreational drugs; another way is through the senses that were designed to give off pleasure signals when they came across a fitness-enhancing sensation. loc: 3636
Tooby and Cosmides conclude that the fact we have adaptations that prevent the mistaking of fact and fiction, and that there seems to be a reward system that allows us to enjoy fiction, implies that there is a benefit to the fictional experience. loc: 3671
Tooby and Cosmides explain that aesthetically driven behavior only seems to be nonutilitarian because we are analyzing it from the aspect of changes adaptive to the external world, not to the internal world of the brain. loc: 3710
“The payoff on such investments is greater earlier in the lifecycle, when competing opportunities are lower, the adaptations less well developed, and the individual can expect to benefit over a longer subsequent lifespan from her investment in increased neuro-cognitive organization. loc: 3716
“A human should find something beautiful because it exhibits cues which, in the environment in which humans evolved, signaled that it would have been advantageous to pay sustained sensory attention to it, in the absence of instrumental reasons for doing so. loc: 3726
our evolved psychological architecture is designed to motivate sustained attention to them through making the experience intrinsically rewarding.” loc: 3729
The more fictional stories we hear, the more circumstances we become familiar with, without having to actually experience them. If we do run across the same circumstances in life, then we will have a wealth of background info to draw from. loc: 3747
To the modern human mind, alone among all minds in the animal kingdom, the world does not present itself as a series of rigidly defined stimuli releasing a narrow repertory of stereotyped behaviors. It presents itself as a vast and perplexing array of percepts and contingent possibilities. loc: 3764
What people find beautiful is not arbitrary or random but has evolved over millions of years of hominid sensory, perceptual, and cognitive development. Sensations and perceptions that have adaptive value (i.e., that enhance safety, survival, and reproduction) often become aesthetically preferred. loc: 3774
There seem to be certain elements that can be extracted from an image extremely quickly. A preference for symmetry has been shown to exist cross-culturally,27, loc: 3782
Humans easily make aesthetic judgments about shapes. Richard Latto coined the term aesthetic primitive to suggest that a shape or form is aesthetically pleasing because it is more effectively and more easily processed, due to the processing properties of the human visual system.46 loc: 3802
appear to have an innate preference for natural landscapes. loc: 3814
Many natural objects have what is known as fractal* geometry, consisting of patterns that recur at increasing magnification. Mountains, clouds, coastlines, rivers with all their tributaries, and branching trees all have fractal geometry, as do our circulatory system and our lungs. loc: 3830
Humans generally prefer scenes with a D (fractal density) of 1.3 and low complexity,56, loc: 3836
preferences described above are things our brains have evolved to process quickly, and when we process something quickly, we get a positive response. loc: 3853
when subjects were viewing the paintings, the orbitofrontal cortex, which is known to be engaged during the perception of rewarding stimuli, was active, and it was more active when viewing a beautiful painting. loc: 3877
The dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) is known to be critical for the monitoring of events in the working memory and, along with the cingulated cortex, is known to be active in decision making. In this case, the cingulated cortex was active in deciding between beautiful and not beautiful, but the dlPFC was active only when the decision was “beautiful.” loc: 3891
Some researchers think that the brain, at least at an early age, treats language as a special case of music.78 loc: 3966
Music and language also share some of the same neural areas. loc: 3978
Many auditory cortical neurons are tuned to the dynamical properties of the natural acoustic environment,86 which could explain why stimuli with naturalistic amplitude spectra are processed dramatically better than other stimuli.87 loc: 3995
correlation between dopamine release and the response to pleasant music. loc: 4010
Being in a good mood increases cognitive flexibility and facilitates creative problem solving in many different settings. loc: 4015
Chapter 7 WE ALL ACT LIKE DUALISTS: THE CONVERTER FUNCTION loc: 4103
if a way of thinking comes easily to us, we probably have some cognitive mechanism that is set up to think in that way. loc: 4172
We classify plants and animals into species-like groups and infer that each species has an underlying causal nature, or essence, which is responsible for its appearance and behavior. loc: 4174
young infants have innate abilities to distinguish animate from inanimate objects. So, once an object is observed with any of these perceptual characteristics, the detective device surmises that it’s ALIVE, and the brain automatically places it in the alive category and then infers a list of properties. The more life experience you have, the more you add to the list of properties that you infer. loc: 4221
Automatically the brain bestows on the animate object some properties common to things that are alive. Then the object may be further categorized as an animal or even more specifically as a human or a predator, and even more properties are inferred. loc: 4225
children are natural believers in essentialism, the philosophical theory that a thing perceivable to the senses can have an embodied unobservable essence that is real. loc: 4278
Note: is essentialism Kant's a priori knowledge? Edit
Artifacts are classified mostly by function or intentional function,26 and are not hierarchically classified like plants and animals. When something is classified as a man-made artifact, different inferences are made about it than about a living thing. loc: 4349
After the detective device has answered What or who is that? or Who or what did that? the information is sent to the describers, which infer all the properties of what has been identified. loc: 4354
If the detective device says it’s a who as opposed to a what problem, and identifies the quarry, then the agent describer or TOM is engaged. loc: 4360
We are wired to think animate objects have TOM. loc: 4369
teleological thinking—explaining facts of nature as a result of intelligent design or purpose. may actually be a default mode of thinking loc: 4377
You have a nonreflective intuitive belief that the body and its conscious essence are separate. loc: 4484
Because you can mentally separate the physical body from the invisible essence of a person, you can conceive that either one could exist separately. loc: 4491
nonreflective beliefs are the default mode. If you have never been presented with a situation in which you must question your nonreflective belief, then that is what you will believe. loc: 4551
the better a reflective belief merges with a nonreflective belief, the more plausible it seems, the more intuitive and the easier to learn or accept. loc: 4556
When you form a memory, first you have perceived something. Zip, the perception gets funneled through your detectives and profilers, all picking out and editing the info. The interpreter puts it all together in a summary that makes sense and files it away in memory. It has already been edited by your nonreflective belief system, and you are now calling on it as true information to use for forming a reflective belief. loc: 4561
To separate the verifiable from the nonverifiable is a conscious, tedious process that most people are unwilling or unable to do. It takes energy and perseverance and training. It can be counterintuitive. It is called analytical thinking. It is not common and is difficult to do. It can even be expensive. It is what science is all about. It is uniquely human. loc: 4583
Chapter 8 IS ANYBODY THERE? loc: 4604
Progressive levels of consciousness are commonly named unconsciousness, consciousness, self-awareness, and meta-self-awareness, which means you know that you are self-aware. loc: 4652
Some are required for consciousness, and those are connected with the intralaminar nuclei (ILN) of the thalamus. Others are required to modulate consciousness, loc: 4680
These are connected to the basal forebrain,† the hypothalamus, and directly to the cortex.7 loc: 4681
first step on the road to consciousness: The connection of the brain stem to the thalamus must be active, and at least one of the ILNs must be up and running. loc: 4690
ILNs themselves connect to the anterior portion of the cingulate cortex. loc: 4694
the cingulate cortex is where core consciousness and extended consciousness overlap. loc: 4696
During the performance of conscious tasks, connections from the cingulate cortex to brain areas supporting the five neural networks for memory, perception, motor action, evaluation, and attention activate. loc: 4699
another area of the brain also is always activated, along with the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC). That was the dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC). loc: 4701
At some point along the processing route, the input from the modules needs to be synthesized, spliced together, and packaged—or ignored, suppressed, and inhibited. Here is the big mystery. How does it happen? Some controlled processing is going on, and there must be a mechanism that supports flexible links among these processing modules. loc: 4731
We also have to explain how we come out with a feeling of ourselves, with our own autobiography; and why, although our consciousness changes from minute to minute, our conscious sense of self does not. loc: 4754
Experiments have shown that in order for a stimulus to reach consciousness, it needs a minimal amount of time to be present, and it needs to have a certain degree of clarity. However, this is not quite enough. The stimulus has to have an interaction with the attentional state of the observer. This can occur in two ways, which are referred to as either top-down or bottom-up processing. loc: 4759
suggest that the top-down mode, when you consciously direct your attention, may be a result of activity in the thalamocortical neurons, loc: 4762
bottom-up mode, they suggest, the sensory signals coming from nonconscious activity have so much strength that they can reorient top-down amplification to themselves.16 loc: 4763
Attention and consciousness are two separate animals. loc: 4766
our autobiographical self is derived from our conscious musings. If we are not conscious of it, it doesn’t exist. loc: 4786
reflexive (bottom-up) attention orienting happens independently in the two hemispheres, while voluntary attention orienting involves hemispheric competition, with control preferentially lateralized to the left hemisphere. loc: 4863
The left hemisphere persists in forming hypotheses about the sequence of events even in the face of evidence that no pattern exists loc: 4896
The left-brain interpreter makes sense out of all the other processes. It takes all the input that is coming in and puts it together in a story that makes sense, even though it may be completely wrong. loc: 4914
the left-hemisphere interpreter constructs theories to assimilate perceived information into a comprehensible whole. loc: 4939
In doing so, however, the process of elaborating (story making) has a deleterious effect on the accuracy of perceptual recognition, as it does with verbal and visual material. Accuracy remains high in the right hemisphere, however, because it does not engage in these interpretive processes. loc: 4940
How is it that two isolated hemispheres give rise to a single consciousness? The left-hemisphere interpreter may be the answer. The interpreter is driven to generate explanations and hypotheses regardless of circumstances. loc: 4957
the left-hemisphere interpreter may generate a feeling in all of us that we are integrated and unified. loc: 4960
The interpreter is only as good as the information it receives, and in this instance it was getting a wacky piece of information. Yet the interpreter still has to field questions and make sense of other incoming information—information that to the interpreter is self-evident. loc: 5003
The interpreter also has other duties. This system that started out making sense of all the information bombarding the brain—interpreting our cognitive and emotional responses to what we encounter in our environment, asking how one thing relates to another, making hypotheses, bringing order out of chaos—also creates a running narrative of our actions, emotions, thoughts, and dreams. loc: 5013
four categories of self-knowledge that are stored and cataloged in different formats in the brain. loc: 5025
The conceptual self: a fuzzy set of context-specific selves united by a theory of how we got to be the person that we are. loc: 5026
The self as a narrative, which we have constructed, rehearsed to ourselves, and told to others about the past, present, and future. loc: 5030
The self viewed as an image, with details about face, body, and gestures. loc: 5032
An associative network with information about personality traits, memories, and experiences, stored separately in episodic and semantic memory. loc: 5033
I submit that it is the left-brain interpreter that is coming up with the theory, the narrative, and the self-image, taking the information from various inputs, from the “neuronal workspace,” and from the knowledge structures, and gluing it together, thus creating the self, the autobiography, out of the chaos of input. loc: 5036
Note: He's labeled something as interpreter, but he hasn't said what it is. You could just as well say Ego. It has about as much conceptual validity. Edit
The degree to which humans are self-aware is unique. loc: 5041
Semantic memory provides knowledge from the point of view of an observer of the world rather than that of a participant. loc: 5060
Episodic memory retains events that were experienced by the self at a particular place and time. loc: 5061
he considers episodic memory uniquely human, loc: 5063
mental time travel allows one, as an “owner” of episodic memory (“self”), through the medium of autonoetic awareness,* to remember one’s own previous “thought-about” experiences, as well as to “think about” one’s own possible future experiences. loc: 5067
Retrieving information from episodic memory (“remembering”) requires the establishment and maintenance of a special mental set, dubbed episodic “retrieval mode.” loc: 5070
essence of episodic memory lies in the conjunction of three concepts—self, autonoetic awareness, and subjective time.54 loc: 5073
episodic memory always includes the self as the agent or recipient of some action. loc: 5074
The major distinction between episodic and semantic memory is not the type of information they encode, but the subjective experience that accompanies the operations of the systems at encoding and retrieval. loc: 5076
There is some evidence that the frontal regions of the left hemisphere play a pivotal role in setting the goal for retrieval and reconstruction of autobiographical knowledge.63, loc: 5117
whereas the recognition of familiar others relies primarily on structures in the right hemisphere, self-recognition might be supported by additional left-lateralized cognitive processes. loc: 5136
in order to establish if episodic memory is present in other species, they need to possess all the cognitive abilities required. What are these? Beyond some level of self-awareness, they must have an imagination able to reconstruct the order of events, must be able to metarepresent their knowledge (to be able to think about thinking), and must be able to dissociate from their current mental state (I am not hungry now, but I may be in the future). loc: 5238
It also requires the ability to attribute past mental states to one’s earlier self: loc: 5243
Consciousness is an emergent property and not a process in and of itself. loc: 5365
Our cognitive capacities, memories, dreams, and so on reflect distributed processes throughout the brain, and each of those entities produces its own emergent states of consciousness. loc: 5368
Part 4 BEYOND CURRENT CONSTRAINTS loc: 5378
Chapter 9 WHO NEEDS FLESH? loc: 5381
the ability to imitate motor action is the foundation of communication, language, the human level of consciousness, and human culture in general. This is known as mimesis theory. loc: 5858
language and gesture require the refined movements of muscles. And while other animal species have genetically determined rigid types of behavior, human language is not rigid but flexible. Thus the motor skills required for language must also be flexible. There just had to be voluntary, flexible control of muscles before language could develop. He sees this flexibility coming from one of the fundamentals of motor skill—procedural learning. To vary or refine a motor movement, one needs to rehearse the action, observe its consequences, remember them, and then alter what needs to be altered. Donald calls this a rehearsal loop, loc: 5861
Merlin thinks that this rehearsal-loop ability is uniquely human and forms the basis for all human culture, including language. loc: 5867
“The brain doesn’t ‘compute’ the answers to problems; it retrieves the answers from memory. In essence, the answers were stored in memory a long time ago. loc: 6108
The entire cortex is a memory system. It isn’t a computer at all.”38 loc: 6110
The neocortex stores sequences of patterns. loc: 6112
Hawkins proposes that the brain uses its stored memory to make predictions constantly. loc: 6117
Hawkins proposes that prediction “is the primary function of the neocortex, and the foundation of intelligence.”
Hawkins sees intelligence as measuring just how well you remember and predict patterns, loc: 6127