"The human brain is on the edge of chaos"

I found it at PHYSORG.COM in an article, "The human brain is on the edge of chaos". I have always felt like that, but I did not know that is true with every brain.

Now, I am not familiar with things like Computational Biology, Chaos, Randomness etc., but what I read there is astonishing, I wanted to share this with you.

I would love to share this in Google Reader with my comments, but none of you bother to look in it.

So this has got to be a blog post, it is a waste of resources, so then, please appreciate the kind of trouble I take to get to you.

There is something called self-organised criticality- it means that systems on their own organize themselves to act out at a point somewhere at the edge of randomness and order. This comes out of complex interactions in natural systems- such as avalanches, forest fires, earthquakes and hearbeat rhythms.

And scientists at the University of Cambridge, the Medical Research Council Cognition & Brain Sciences Unit, and the GlaxoSmithKline Clinical Unit Cambridge, say that the same thing happens in the brain also.

I mean, the brain has something to do with perception,  memory, analysis, self-awareness and things like that...

See what the co-author of the study, Manfred Kitzbichler says:

"...self-organized criticality is intuitively attractive as a model for brain functions such as perception and action, because it would allow us to switch quickly between mental states in order to respond to changing environmental conditions"

What does this tell about the self-organised criticality that is found in things like avalanche, earth-quake and forest-fires?

Okay, our brain is also destructive like those things, more often than not, but other than this similarity, is it that the brain acts out a natural process, and/or nature is also intelligent?

Can't find the answer.

You have any ideas?

The Spiritual ME

The greatest thing about the times that we are living in, is that there are great developments in science, especially in research into the structure of the brain, that help us to understand and put into context our beliefs on what spirituality is.

For, I found this article in LiveScience which validates the insight that the less me there is, the greater the transcendental experience.

Brick Johnstone and colleague Bret Glass of Missouri University studied brain-injured patients, looking for correlations between brain region performance and the subjects' self-reported spirituality. Among the more spiritual of the 26 subjects, the researchers pinpointed a less functional right parietal lobe, a physical state which may translate psychologically as decreased self-awareness and self-focus.

The right parietal lobe is responsible for defining "Me. It generates self-criticism and guides us through physical and social terrains by constantly updating our self-knowledge: my hand, my cocktail, my witty conversation skills, my new love interest.

The greatest silencing of the Me-centre of the brain is likely to happen in the deepest states of meditation or prayer, says Johnstone, it is then that the practitioners describe feeling seamless with the entire universe. The highest point of spiritual experience occurs when "Me" completely loses its definition.

Johnstone sums up, "If you look in the Torah, the Old Testament, the New Testament, in the Koran, a lot of Sufi writings, Buddhist writings, and Hindu writings, they all talk about selflessness".

Make a movie out of your dreams

I think YouTube will get better in about five or ten years, being inundated with psycho thrillers produced straight from the dreaming brain.

There is a software that looks at an image of the brain activity taken in a f-MRI scanner and recreates a black and white image from that. This software has been developed by Yukiyasu Kamitani at ATR Computational Neuroscience Lab in Kyoto, Japan.

The implication is that you don’t have to know who is thinking what- you could just plug into his brain and see what picture is running on in his head.

They are hoping to improve the technology so much that they can make a videotape of a dream.

John-Dylan Haynes of the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, Germany. has some concerns about this:

He imagines a scenario where marketing people will sit out in public spaces like railway stations and shopping malls and read our thoughts, and fine tune their advertisements.

More about this in New Scientist

I used to think there is something unique about the human brain, now it looks like it is no better than a DVD player or something, and is totally mechanical, nothing spiritual about it.

Positive Parenting

I think this has some relevance to our parenting discussion. I found this in ScienceDaily.

Dr Eveline Crone and her colleagues from the Leiden Brain and Cognition Lab used fMRI research to study three groups of children: those aged  8-9, children of 11-12, and adults aged between 18-25 years.

Their conclusion is that  Eight-year-olds learn primarily from appreciation, and the learning centres in the brain do not listen to our negative training. They just don't see why we are yelling at them.  But twelve year olds can process negative feedbacks, and  use it to learn from their mistakes.  Adults do the same, but more efficiently. 

Crone says, "From the literature, it appears that young children respond better to reward than to punishment... The information that you have not done something well is more complicated than the information that you have done something well.  Learning from mistakes is more complex than carrying on in the same way as before. You have to ask yourself what precisely went wrong and how it was possible". Young brains have not learned to do this.

What developmental psychologists have been drumming into our unlistening and unwilling ears, has now been underlined by scanning the  workings of the actual brain itself. It is better to appreciate, to reward. To punish, yell at, beat and curse the child is idiotic, and useless.

This does not mean that you are allowed to hit your wife on the lip, just to teach her to watch her tongue. According to the researchers,  the basal ganglia, just outside the cerebral cortex, responds strongly to appreciation. It remains active in every one of us, whatever the age: so you better give her a kiss.

The beast could well be a beauty.