School started August 5, but you can’t start learning until the 12th because they mess up schedules (6 study halls).

In trig, we took a test to see how we learned.

I learn best in a visual manner, like you said, text.

I never watch the daily news, unless I need to know if the tornado is here or over there. I watch the Daily Show and sometimes BBC news, but I get more out of a written or, more often, typed version of the same thing.

I’ve never dreamt in text, though. That’s a new one.

Yeah, my dreams are weird enough, thanks.

And I agree - popping up with an image when I’m concentrating on text? Not a good thing. I think in text. I dream in it. (No joke - even looking at things, there’s a kind of text underlay in my head describing what I’m seeing. It’s weird.) Want to get my attention and have me remember something? Give it to me in text - even if I’m in the middle of reading something else. Try to talk to me or show me a picture? You’ll get either ignored or punched.

As for the potential applications of this, I’ll wait and see. People always surprise me.

I disagree, but I know what you mean.

When I bought my copy of the Stand (paperback, so thick and so short, very funny), I ripped out each illustration since they did nothing but distract and creep me out. The copy I had had illustrated pages with no writing on the back, so I lost nothing. I also tried to cover up King’s face with a Sharpie, but it didn’t stick.

However, I do flip back and forth through my MAD magazines and other comic books, wanting to check this or that.

Besides non-fiction, I don’t think I have many illustrated books. Oh, another type of book where the pictures get in the way and must be passed over - movie-to-book adaptations. They always include glossy pages in the center with pics from the movie and quotes. I ignore them until the next chapter.

I’m just glad we don’t have ads in our dreams (yet).

This sounds counterproductive to me. If I am reading a novel and a page is illustrated, I may very well ignore the illustration for several pages, then page back to see what it was. The change in information to process seems to me likely to be disruptive to concentration for many people. Likewise, if I’m focussing on pictures, I may or may not read the captions/key/whatever, depending on what I am looking for.

Not everyone processes information the same way. Will this really know whether you are ‘overloaded’, or focussed?

the only way to really delve into the mind/body interaction process is to test the nodes, so to speak. but monitoring everything and putting together functional mapping & valuation on the gathered data is one of the biggest hurdles i have noticed in all of the books in the cognitive & brain science category.

the other major dilemma is the extent to which humans can stand stimuli testing before becoming too aware of the test itself, another observation issue with regard to brain study. test subjects sometimes like the attention given during tinfoil hat & MRI styled brain study, and i am quite sure this always disrupts even the best planned studies into human awareness & the an individual brain organism’s actuation at a chemical or electro magnetic level.

it should come as no surprise that the military structure & culture presents the perfect playground for cognition interface research, so long as it doesn’t get too weird and become some twisted MK-Ultra-acid blotter rorschach study. i remember an older veteran from the 50s describing his experience being exposed to nuclear fallout & large dirty bomb made radiation back in the day… he served in the military for over 30 years before finally retiring. he’s got some of the best stories i have EVER heard, and i am mostly sure that they are all mostly true.

once the big major defense contractors get involved at a contractual level, there’s no doubt the sales departments can come up with clever ways to get into a defense budget’s black book. after that, it’s off to the factories and distribution. then, consumer get a piece of the new tech. anyone remember the $5,000US compact disc players there were initially released in low numbers back in the 80s? how about the $1,200US DVD player sold over a decade ago? what’s next? a $30k wall mounted flat screen TV? i’ll buy that.

I’m pretty sure things have been ironed out, but I’ll still respond to you. My wife isn’t home from work, yet.

Well, sure, your though processes manifest as brain activity. But so do a hell of a lot of other things.

“Okay, did we see that flash of activity near the hypothalamus because the subject was watching the pattern of colored lights, or because the subject was daydreaming and not paying attention?�

Good luck ironing that one out.

No problem.

Just because I think that the mind is largely in the brain doesn’t mean that the brain is solely for consciousness. The brain obviously does a lot more than just think thoughts. This doesn’t prevent it, however, from being the almost sole cause of mind.

Er, done!

Heard it all before.

I should have been more forthright, I guess, and simply asked what you meant. For that, I’m sorry. I should have said, “What do you mean when the mind isn’t the brain.” In a couple of places, what you said — and I have heard it before, upon a time epistemology was my field but my brain has rotted since then — veers close to dualism (positively Kantian!) but I catch the gist of it.

I’m not particularly fond of the mind being defined as the brain/body+environment. That strikes me as an unneded multiplication of terms. I believe it arises because studying the brain, directly, is such a pain in the ass (due to it’s complexity and delicacy — taking it apart to study it destroys what you’d try to study about it, f’rex). Still, if I was worried it is because you seemed to be saying that the mind was disjoined from the brain in a spiritual fashion. When most people say that the mind and the brain aren’t the same thing, that’s what they mean, IME. While I might disagree about the body/brain+environment equalling the mind, I understand why that study has arisen and I understand that it’s a purely material definition. (Tho’I will point out it is very odd in science to define a theoretical object as being only existent in context like that. Photons are routinely said to exist as theoretical entities removed from the embeddedness in reality — the same, too, can be said of the mind as existing in (largely) the brain.)

To the extent I have an objection with what you said, it’s here: But we have no real way of proving that the activity of the brain CAUSES a particular mental activity-yet.

That’s an extremely high bar of proof! It is both admirably high (because it is very strict and demanding) and alarming (because it allows god-of-the-gaps types to insinuate that there is not scientific proof linking the brain to purely physical processes). It is also not normal for science.

In the study of genetics, for instance, genes were talked about as physically existing long before DNA was discovered and the physical mechanisms of genetics were puzzled out. Like with genetics, I think that there is plenty of evidence to demonstrate that consciousness resides entirely in matter, even though we have yet to puzzle out some of the specifics of it (just like Mendel was ignorant of DNA, yet meaningfully discussed genes).

Thank you for your detailed answer!

What else would the mind be if not the brain and it’s activity?

Well, sure, your though processes manifest as brain activity. But so do a hell of a lot of other things.

“Okay, did we see that flash of activity near the hypothalamus because the subject was watching the pattern of colored lights, or because the subject was daydreaming and not paying attention?”

Good luck ironing that one out.

1) There is a tendency to localize mental functioning to particular areas of the brain, in essence to compartmentalize cognition. This is simplistic for it tends to devalue the emergent properties of cognition, meaning the cognitive processes that arise through systemic-level interaction between say, the intelligent agent (comprising of the brain + body, so embodied cognition, which is ALSO ignored but that’s an entirely different thing) and its environment. It’s entirely possible, for example, that higher-order cognitive processing cannot be adequately measured without also quantifying the environment that is being perceived. But I often don’t see this in neuroscience, we tend to just say “exposure to this stimulus in a controlled setting”. We tend to *only* look at the brain in isolation, or only with relation to a specific stimulus in a laboratory. Some scientists would call this kind of work ecologically invalid because a laboratory setting simply isn’t real life, but that’s a different issue.

It’s important to recognize that mental state = entirely subjective and hard to quantifiably measure. Brain state, on the other hand, is ENTIRELY quantifiable. This starts to get very close to philosophical arguments about qualia and other sorts of mumbo jumbo (i.e. consciousness) which I have been conditioned to avoid because it’s painful, tends to devolve into illogical arguments, and satisfies no one except those who are the most close-minded. Anyway, I’ll return to this statement in a bit, so continuing on…

2) Let’s go back to that embodied cognition thing. This is an idea that has been bounced around psychological research for awhile but has been gaining steam due to the results generated from intelligent robotics. The idea is as follows: in an Agent (capitalized to indicate importance) cognition does not occur without some body. Some of the computational complexity can be statistically reduced by offloading some of the cognitive processing to the constaints produced by the BODY rather than the CONTROLLER (i.e, the brain). This is a kind of clumsy way to define this theory, but it’s a good way to approach the gist of it; given this concept, it should be clear to see that cognitive processing might not be just the brain. The brain becomes less central to the definition of the mind so much as the whole package of the brain, the body and the environment.

Now, if your definition of the mind is a spiritual one, then these considerations don’t come into play and we probably can’t have a conversation about this anyway. But let’s just work with the idea of the mind being the unique identity of an Agent, where there seems to be some kind of awareness which comes into play during decision-making, observation of surroundings-whatever. That part isn’t as important as recognizing that the mind is entirely internal. The brain is not. It is just like any other part of the universe in the sense that presumably at some point in the future, we will have the technology to measure exactly what happens to the energy that we put into it and what kind of energy it puts out (i.e. neural impulses, consumption of glucose, whatever). But we have no real way of proving that the activity of the brain CAUSES a particular mental activity-yet. I mean, we can’t take some person and arrange their neurons in such a way that we can prove that NEURAL STATE X = MENTAL STATE Y. Furthermore, the very act of communicating a mental state might not be reliable. What if we were actually viewing the process responsible for communicating a mental state and not the mental state itself? On the outside, we’d never be able to tell.

Basically, we have no real proof that the brain IS the mind. We simply can’t prove it and as a true skeptic, I refuse to just assume that is the case just because it seems logical when we don’t even have a reliable data set. What we CAN prove is that there are certain levels of cognitive behavior that seem to be highly correlational to neural states. And granted, it’s theoretically possible that those cognitive behaviors can be controlled via technological discoveries, but I suspect that the kind of behavior we’re all really interested in (prediction of decision-making, etc) isn’t really able to be modeled computationally-as previously mentioned by another poster, it’s possibly impossible. Or at least, not if we only computationally model brain function.

In conclusion, I should probably mention that obviously, this my opinion as well as the theoretical approach from the particular brand of neuroscience espoused from my school (which is heavily influenced by systems theory and cybernetics). This is NOT the standard view of the brain/mind issue, but a rather controversial position. There is a rather famous philosophical debate on the brain = mind issue by a man named Hilary Putnam called Brain in a Vat. I recommend you read it.