Adonis Diaries

How causality relation and invariant are perceived by the brain; (Dec. 24, 2009)

We are born with 25% of the total number of synapses that grown up will form.  Neurons have mechanisms of transferring from one section of the brain to other parts when frequent focused cognitive processes are needed. A child can perceive one event following another one but it has no further meaning but simple observation.  A child is not surprised with magic outcomes; what is out of the normal for a grown up is as valid a phenomenon as another to him (elephant can fly).

The brain attaches markers or attributes to impressions that it receive from the senses.  Four markers that I call exogenous markers attach to impressions as they are “registered” in the brain coming from the outside world.  At least four other markers, I label “endogenous markers” are attached to internal cognitive processing and are attached to information when re-structuring or re-configurations are performed during the dream periods because massive computations are needed to these endogenous markers. There are markers that I call “reverse-exogenous” and are attached to information meant to be recorded on external means such as writing or performing art work. Maybe animals lack these reverse exogenous markers since evolution didn’t endow them with external performing limbs for writing, sculpting, painting, or doing music.

The first exogenous marker directs impressions in their order of successions. The child recognizes that this event followed the other one within a short period of occurrence. His brain can “implicitly” store the two events are following in succession in a qualitative order (for example the duration of the succession is shorter or longer than the other succession). I label this marker as “Time recognizer” in a qualitative sense of sensations.

The second marker registers and then stores an impression as a spatial configuration. At this stage, the child is able to recognize the concept of space but in a qualitative order; for example, this object is closer or further from the other object. I call this marker “space recognizer”.

The third marker is the ability to delimit a space when focusing on a collection of objects. Without this ability to first limit the range of observation (or sensing in general) it would be hard to register parts and bits of impressions within a first cut of a “coherent universe”. I label this marker “spatial delimiter”

The fourth marker attaches a “strength” of occurrence as the impression is recognized in the database.  The child cannot count but the brain is already using this marker for incoming information. In a sense, the brain is assembling events and objects in special “frequency of occurrence” database during dream periods and the information are retrieved with a qualitative order strength of sensations in frequency.  I call this attribute “count marker”.

The fifth marker is an endogenous attributes: this marker is attached within the internal export/import of information in the brain. This attribute is a kind of “correlation” quantity that indicates same/different trends of behavior of events or objects.  In a sense, this marker will internally sort data as “analogous” or contrary collections on a time scale. People have tendency to associate correlation with cause and effect relation but it is not. A correlation quantity can be positive (two variables have the same behavioral trend in a system) or negative quantity (diverging trends). With the emergence of the 5^th marker the brain has grown a quantitative threshold in synapses and neurons to starting massive computations on impressions stored in the large original database.

The sixth marker is kind of a “probability quantity” that permits the brain to order objects according to “plausible” invariant properties in space (for example objects or figures are similar according to a particular property, including symmetrical transformations). I label this the “invariant marker” and it re-structures collections of objects and shapes in structures such as hereditary, hierarchical, or circular.

The seventh marker recognizes interactions among variables and interacts with reverse exogenous markers since a flow with outside perceptions is required for comprehension. I label this the “design marker”.  Simple perceived relationships between two events or variables are usually trivial and mostly wrong; for example thunder follows lightning and thus wrongly interpreted as lightning generates thunder.  Simple interactions are of the existential kind, the Pavlov reactions, where an existential rewards, such as food, are involved. Interactions among more than two variables are complex for interpretations in the mind.  Designing experiments is a very complex cognitive task and not amenable to intuition: it requires learning and training to appreciating the various cause and effects among the variables.

The brain is very performing for rhetorical associations and cognitive methods are basically formal decoding the various alternative procedures that brain may process information.  Whatever is created or conceived by any individual the brain has already the mechanism of processing it.

I need more time and reflection to figure out the reverse exogenous marker. This is a first draft to get the project going. I appreciate developed comments and references

Note: This article was not meant to analyze sensations, emotions, or value moral systems.  It is very probable that the defined markers are valid for the moral value systems with additional markers that might be needed to store and retrieve data from the special moral system structured .  In general, rational thinking retrieve data from specialized databases that are already processed and saved for pragmatic utility.   I conjecture that emotions are generated from the vast original database and the endogenous correlation marker is the main computation method: the reason is that emotions are related to complex and almost infinite interactions with people and community and the brain prefers not to consume time and resources on complex computations that involve thousands of variables. Thus, an emotional reaction in the waking period is not necessarily “rational” but quick and dirty resolutions. In the dream sessions emotionally loaded impressions are barely processed because they are hidden deep in the vast original database structure and are not refreshed frequently to be exposed to the waking conscious cognitive processes and thus they flare up within the emotional reaction packages.