Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.

Gainotti G. Why are the right and left hemisphere conceptual representations different? Behav Neurol. 2014;2014:603134. doi: 10.1155/2014/603134 The brain is a complex organ that controls all bodily processes, including thought, sensory perception, and physical action. Despite weighing only 3 pounds, the human brain contains as many as 100 billion neurons and 100 trillion connections.

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In the working hypothesis, we only considered whether action potentials cause consciousness. Performing our experiments for other neuronal processes might be more difficult than for action potentials and, in some cases, even impossible. However, conceptually, it is straightforward to include them in the hypothesis and even include combinations of multiple processes; for example, membrane potential fluctuations, calcium ion concentrations [ 53, 54], the release of neurotransmitters from the presynaptic terminals, or activity in glial cells [ 55, 56]. To consider multiple biological processes, we first need to record these processes and then test the hypothesis against Steps 1 to 3 by asking in each step whether the participant’s conscious perception changed when the respective cellular processes remained exactly the same.

Cobb runs though the history of certain concepts used to explain how the brain works, including electricity, evolution and The chapter is a bit weaker than the last one. I feel even more confused. The author often talks about how people overall were thinking or what a certain person was thinking. Yet it’s hard to understand who thought what and who these writers were. I guess I should assume they were popular people and that most people had the same ideas? I’m not sure that’s the case.

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We tend to assume that our models of the brain are correct. For example, we “instinctively” think of the brain as separate from the body, the seat of consciousness, as a computer, and as a collection of neurons; we “instinctively” think that what the brain does is think (Cobb’s argument), or remember, or create consciousness. Cobb documents that each of these ways of understanding the brain are relatively modern and incomplete—not instinctive or obvious at all. Memory. Very basic stuff. A bit of a letdown, it's this basic. He goes over some of the big new experiments, but we don’t learn much about what memory is or how it works. In experiments routinely performed in neurobiological laboratories, action potentials are recorded and evoked in single neurons and even in small-scale networks [ 15, 16] using current clamp and voltage clamp techniques. Using these techniques, triggering action potentials at the researcher’s bidding (rather than naturally due to the synaptic inputs) is commonplace and even mundane in a modern electrophysiological laboratory. The rapid development of tools and technologies in neuroscience [ 17– 21] brings the goal of capturing every action potential in every neuron of the brain ever closer [ 22, 23]. To date, the highest number of channels recorded by an electrode array belongs to the Argo system, with 65,536 channels [ 24]. These technologies provide unprecedented insights into the fine details of brain function. Thus, it is perhaps just a matter of time until newer, more powerful technologies will eventually allow us to solve the mechanics of how the brain works. As we converge on this goal, will we get closer to understanding brain function and, with it, the biological causes of conscious experience? Electricity is seen as the force of life. As electricity experiments are popular it makes sense to make these conclusions. Then as we experiment on animals and see muscles move via electricity it makes sense to conclude that this is the power of the soul. Brooker, H., et al. (2019). The relationship between the frequency of number-puzzle use and baseline cognitive function in a large online sample of adults aged 50 and over.