The brain as the subject’s heir?

2017 ◽  
pp. 29-66
Author(s):  
Thomas Fuchs
Keyword(s):  
Naturalistic Fallacy ◽  
Freedom Of Choice ◽  
Neuronal Processes ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Mereological Fallacy ◽  
The Brain ◽  
Category Mistakes

‘The brain as the subject’s heir?’ critiques the claims according to which subjectivity is to be regarded as an epiphenomenon of neuronal processes and thus one’s experience of agency and freedom of choice should be seen as an illusion. First it is shown that the subjectivity of ‘experiential facts’ cannot be reduced to objective or physical facts about brain processes. Likewise, the reduction of the intentionality of consciousness to relations of representation is refuted. Moreover, the identification of the subject with the brain leads to fundamental category mistakes which are examined as the ‘mereological fallacy’ and the ‘localization fallacy’. On this basis, a critique of the thesis of the powerlessness of the subject is developed. The summary analyses the basic ‘naturalistic fallacy’ of an objectifying account of consciousness which believes it can remove itself from its rootedness in the lifeworld.

scholarly journals Sublethal Exposure Effects of the Neonicotinoid Clothianidin Strongly Modify the Brain Transcriptome and Proteome in the Male Moth Agrotis ipsilon

Insects ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 152
Author(s):  
Camille Meslin ◽  
Françoise Bozzolan ◽  
Virginie Braman ◽  
Solenne Chardonnet ◽  
Cédric Pionneau ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Sex Pheromone ◽  
Molecular Mechanisms ◽  
Insect Pest ◽  
Agrotis Ipsilon ◽  
Positive Effects ◽  
Male Moth ◽  
Hormetic Effect ◽  
Pest Insects ◽  
Neuronal Processes ◽  
The Brain

Insect pest management relies mainly on neurotoxic insecticides, including neonicotinoids such as clothianidin. The residual accumulation of low concentrations of these insecticides can have positive effects on target pest insects by enhancing various life traits. Because pest insects often rely on sex pheromones for reproduction and olfactory synaptic transmission is cholinergic, neonicotinoid residues could indeed modify chemical communication. We recently showed that treatments with low doses of clothianidin could induce hormetic effects on behavioral and neuronal sex pheromone responses in the male moth, Agrotis ipsilon. In this study, we used high-throughput RNAseq and proteomic analyses from brains of A. ipsilon males that were intoxicated with a low dose of clothianidin to investigate the molecular mechanisms leading to the observed hormetic effect. Our results showed that clothianidin induced significant changes in transcript levels and protein quantity in the brain of treated moths: 1229 genes and 49 proteins were differentially expressed upon clothianidin exposure. In particular, our analyses highlighted a regulation in numerous enzymes as a possible detoxification response to the insecticide and also numerous changes in neuronal processes, which could act as a form of acclimatization to the insecticide-contaminated environment, both leading to enhanced neuronal and behavioral responses to sex pheromone.

scholarly journals VI. On the comparative structure of the brain in rodents

1882 ◽  
Vol 33 (216-219) ◽  
pp. 15-21
Keyword(s):  
Olfactory Organ ◽  
Cortical Surface ◽  
Complex Relationship ◽  
Comparative Structure ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Brain

I have endeavoured in this abstract to summarise the results of my recent researches into the minute structure of the brain in the smaller Rodents. The pig and sheep, which were the subjects of my former memoir, possess a highly developed olfactory apparatus conjoined to a well convoluted cortical surface; but in the smaller animals now under consideration the surface of the hemispheres is almost perfectly smooth, while the olfactory organ, from its comparative size and complex relationship, has an important part to play in the architecture of the brain. Animals possessing the latter type of cerebrum have been classed together as the Osmatic Lissencéphales, in contradistinction to those which were the subject of my former enquiries, the Osmatic Gyren-céphales. My researches into the structure of the brain of prominent members of the former group, viz., the rabbit and rat, may be considered under two heads:— ( a .) The histology of the complete cortical envelope.

Transfer of consciousness. Considering its possibility or fantasy from the religious and scientific perspectives

DIALOGO ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 189-200
Author(s):  
Tudor-Cosmin Ciocan ◽  
Any Docu Axelerad ◽  
Maria CIOCAN ◽  
Alina Zorina Stroe ◽  
Silviu Docu Axelerad ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Artificial Intelligence ◽  
Eternal Life ◽  
Human Consciousness ◽  
Religious Believer ◽  
Actual Knowledge ◽  
Holistic Understanding ◽  
The World ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Human Feature ◽  
The Brain

Ancient beliefs such as astral projection, human possession, abduction and other similar are not only universal, taught by all religions, but also used as premises for core believes/expectations, such as after-life, eternal damnation, reincarnation, and many others. Transferring Consciousness to a Synthetic Body is also a feature of interest in our actual knowledge, both religious as for science. If immortality were an option, would you take it into consideration more seriously? Most people would probably dismiss the question since immortality isn’t a real deal to contract. But what if having eternal life was a possibility in today’s world? The possibility of the transfer of human consciousness to a synthetic body can soon become a reality, and it could help the world for the better. Thus, until recently, the subject was mostly proposed by religion(s) and saw as a spiritual [thus, not ‘materially real’ or ‘forthwith accomplishable’] proposal therefore not really fully engaged or trust if not a religious believer. Now, technology is evolving, and so are we. The world has come to a point where artificial intelligence is breaking the boundaries of our perception of human consciousness and intelligence. And with this so is our understanding about the ancient question ‘who are we?’ concerning consciousness and how this human feature sticks to our body or it can become an entity beyond the material flesh. Without being exhaustive with the theme's development [leaving enough room for further investigations], we would like to take it for a spin and see how and where the religious and neuroscience realms intersect with it for a global, perhaps holistic understanding. Developments in neurotechnology favor the brain to broaden its physical control further the restraints of the human body. Accordingly, it is achievable to both acquire and provide information from and to the brain and also to organize feedback processes in which a person's thoughts can influence the activity of a computer or reversely.

scholarly journals Astrocytes: Heterogeneous and Dynamic Phenotypes in Neurodegeneration and Innate Immunity

2018 ◽  
Vol 25 (5) ◽  
pp. 455-474 ◽  
Author(s):  
Colm Cunningham ◽  
Aisling Dunne ◽  
Ana Belen Lopez-Rodriguez
Keyword(s):  
Neural Circuit ◽  
Phenotypic Diversity ◽  
Significant Heterogeneity ◽  
Therapeutic Implications ◽  
Numerous Cell ◽  
Health And Disease ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Brain ◽  
Substantial Heterogeneity ◽  
Homogenous Population

Astrocytes are the most numerous cell type in the brain and perform several essential functions in supporting neuronal metabolism and actively participating in neural circuit and behavioral function. They also have essential roles as innate immune cells in responding to local neuropathology, and the manner in which they respond to brain injury and degeneration is the subject of increasing attention in neuroscience. Although activated astrocytes have long been thought of as a relatively homogenous population, which alter their phenotype in a relatively stereotyped way upon central nervous system injury, the last decade has revealed substantial heterogeneity in the basal state and significant heterogeneity of phenotype during reactive astrocytosis. Thus, phenotypic diversity occurs at two distinct levels: that determined by regionality and development and that determined by temporally dynamic changes to the environment of astrocytes during pathology. These inflammatory and pathological states shape the phenotype of these cells, with different consequences for destruction or recovery of the local tissue, and thus elucidating these phenotypic changes has significant therapeutic implications. In this review, we will focus on the phenotypic heterogeneity of astrocytes in health and disease and their propensity to change that phenotype upon subsequent stimuli.

scholarly journals Short-term saccadic adaptation in the macaque monkey: a binocular mechanism

2013 ◽  
Vol 109 (2) ◽  
pp. 518-545 ◽  
Author(s):  
K. P. Schultz ◽  
C. Busettini
Keyword(s):  
Saccadic Eye Movements ◽  
Initial Response ◽  
Macaque Monkey ◽  
Double Step ◽  
Adaptive Process ◽  
Adaptive Mechanisms ◽  
Second Shift ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Brain ◽  
Saccadic Responses

Saccadic eye movements are rapid transfers of gaze between objects of interest. Their duration is too short for the visual system to be able to follow their progress in time. Adaptive mechanisms constantly recalibrate the saccadic responses by detecting how close the landings are to the selected targets. The double-step saccadic paradigm is a common method to simulate alterations in saccadic gain. While the subject is responding to a first target shift, a second shift is introduced in the middle of this movement, which masks it from visual detection. The error in landing introduced by the second shift is interpreted by the brain as an error in the programming of the initial response, with gradual gain changes aimed at compensating the apparent sensorimotor mismatch. A second shift applied dichoptically to only one eye introduces disconjugate landing errors between the two eyes. A monocular adaptive system would independently modify only the gain of the eye exposed to the second shift in order to reestablish binocular alignment. Our results support a binocular mechanism. A version-based saccadic adaptive process detects postsaccadic version errors and generates compensatory conjugate gain alterations. A vergence-based saccadic adaptive process detects postsaccadic disparity errors and generates corrective nonvisual disparity signals that are sent to the vergence system to regain binocularity. This results in striking dynamical similarities between visually driven combined saccade-vergence gaze transfers, where the disparity is given by the visual targets, and the double-step adaptive disconjugate responses, where an adaptive disparity signal is generated internally by the saccadic system.

Lantern Demonstration of Gross Lesions of the Cerebrum

1901 ◽  
Vol 47 (199) ◽  
pp. 729-737 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph Shaw Bolton
Keyword(s):  
Cerebral Cortex ◽  
Dura Mater ◽  
Royal Society ◽  
Mental Disease ◽  
Post Mortem ◽  
Pyramidal Layer ◽  
Gross Lesions ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Brain ◽  
Morbid Conditions

This demonstration was a further report on the subject laid before the Association at the meeting at Claybury in February last, viz., the morbid changes occurring in the brain and other intra-cranial contents in amentia and dementia. In a paper read before the Royal Society in the spring of 1900, and subsequently published in the Philosophical Transactions, it was stated, as the result of a systematic micrometric examination of the visuo-sensory (primary visual) and visuo-psychic (lower associational) regions of the cerebral cortex, that the depth of the pyramidal layer of nerve-cells varies with the amentia or dementia existing in the patient. At the meeting of the Association referred to it was further shown, from an analysis, clinical and pathological, of 121 cases of insanity which appeared consecutively in the post-mortem room at Claybury, that the morbid conditions inside the skull-cap in insanity, viz., abnormalities in the dura mater, the pia arachnoid, the ependyma and intra-cranial fluid, etc., are the accompaniments of and vary in degree with dementia alone, and are independent of the duration of the mental disease. Since that date the pre-frontal (higher associational) region has been systematically examined in nineteen cases, viz., normal persons and normal aments (infants), and cases of amentia, of chronic and recurrent insanity without appreciable dementia, and of dementia, and the results obtained form the subject of the present demonstration. A paper on the whole subject will shortly be published in the Archives of the Claybury Laboratory.

scholarly journals Context-Based Filtering for Assisted Brain-Actuated Wheelchair Driving

2007 ◽  
Vol 2007 ◽  
pp. 1-12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gerolf Vanacker ◽  
José del R. Millán ◽  
Eileen Lew ◽  
Pierre W. Ferrez ◽  
Ferran Galán Moles ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Control System ◽  
Shared Control ◽  
Eeg Signals ◽  
Intelligent Processing ◽  
Intelligent Wheelchair ◽  
Brain Signals ◽  
Brain Interface ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Electroencephalogram Eeg ◽  
The Brain

Controlling a robotic device by using human brain signals is an interesting and challenging task. The device may be complicated to control and the nonstationary nature of the brain signals provides for a rather unstable input. With the use of intelligent processing algorithms adapted to the task at hand, however, the performance can be increased. This paper introduces a shared control system that helps the subject in driving an intelligent wheelchair with a noninvasive brain interface. The subject's steering intentions are estimated from electroencephalogram (EEG) signals and passed through to the shared control system before being sent to the wheelchair motors. Experimental results show a possibility for significant improvement in the overall driving performance when using the shared control system compared to driving without it. These results have been obtained with 2 healthy subjects during their first day of training with the brain-actuated wheelchair.

scholarly journals Is There a Link between Oropharyngeal Microbiome and Schizophrenia? A Narrative Review

2022 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 846
Author(s):  
Stanislas Martin ◽  
Audrey Foulon ◽  
Wissam El Hage ◽  
Diane Dufour-Rainfray ◽  
Frédéric Denis
Keyword(s):  
Periodontal Disease ◽  
Research Team ◽  
Oral Microbiome ◽  
Oral Microbiota ◽  
Future Studies ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Moment ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The Brain

The study aimed to examine the impact of the oropharyngeal microbiome in the pathophysiology of schizophrenia and to clarify whether there might be a bidirectional link between the oral microbiota and the brain in a context of dysbiosis-related neuroinflammation. We selected nine articles including three systemic reviews with several articles from the same research team. Different themes emerged, which we grouped into 5 distinct parts concerning the oropharyngeal phageome, the oropharyngeal microbiome, the salivary microbiome and periodontal disease potentially associated with schizophrenia, and the impact of drugs on the microbiome and schizophrenia. We pointed out the presence of phageoma in patients suffering from schizophrenia and that periodontal disease reinforces the role of inflammation in the pathophysiology of schizophrenia. Moreover, saliva could be an interesting substrate to characterize the different stages of schizophrenia. However, the few studies we have on the subject are limited in scope, and some of them are the work of a single team. At this stage of knowledge, it is difficult to conclude on the existence of a bidirectional link between the brain and the oral microbiome. Future studies on the subject will clarify these questions that for the moment remain unresolved.

scholarly journals A Graphlet-Based Topological Characterization of the Resting-State Network in Healthy People

2021 ◽  
Vol 15 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paolo Finotelli ◽  
Carlo Piccardi ◽  
Edie Miglio ◽  
Paolo Dulio
Keyword(s):  
Resting State ◽  
Brain Regions ◽  
Brain Network ◽  
Induced Subgraphs ◽  
Topological Characterization ◽  
Network Information ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Euclidean Distances ◽  
The Brain

In this paper, we propose a graphlet-based topological algorithm for the investigation of the brain network at resting state (RS). To this aim, we model the brain as a graph, where (labeled) nodes correspond to specific cerebral areas and links are weighted connections determined by the intensity of the functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Then, we select a number of working graphlets, namely, connected and non-isomorphic induced subgraphs. We compute, for each labeled node, its Graphlet Degree Vector (GDV), which allows us to associate a GDV matrix to each one of the 133 subjects of the considered sample, reporting how many times each node of the atlas “touches” the independent orbits defined by the graphlet set. We focus on the 56 independent columns (i.e., non-redundant orbits) of the GDV matrices. By aggregating their count all over the 133 subjects and then by sorting each column independently, we obtain a sorted node table, whose top-level entries highlight the nodes (i.e., brain regions) most frequently touching each of the 56 independent graphlet orbits. Then, by pairwise comparing the columns of the sorted node table in the top-k entries for various values of k, we identify sets of nodes that are consistently involved with high frequency in the 56 independent graphlet orbits all over the 133 subjects. It turns out that these sets consist of labeled nodes directly belonging to the default mode network (DMN) or strongly interacting with it at the RS, indicating that graphlet analysis provides a viable tool for the topological characterization of such brain regions. We finally provide a validation of the graphlet approach by testing its power in catching network differences. To this aim, we encode in a Graphlet Correlation Matrix (GCM) the network information associated with each subject then construct a subject-to-subject Graphlet Correlation Distance (GCD) matrix based on the Euclidean distances between all possible pairs of GCM. The analysis of the clusters induced by the GCD matrix shows a clear separation of the subjects in two groups, whose relationship with the subject characteristics is investigated.

scholarly journals Product innovation design and its method: From the perspective of embodiment cognition

2021 ◽  
Vol 236 ◽  
pp. 04057
Author(s):  
Shengfang Peng ◽  
Baoying Peng ◽  
Xiaoxuan Li
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Psychology ◽  
Embodied Cognition ◽  
Human Body ◽  
Product Innovation ◽  
Natural Interaction ◽  
New Approach ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Body Complex ◽  
The Mind ◽  
The Brain

In recent years, embodied cognition has become a new approach in the field of cognitive psychology. The shift in cognitive psychology from a focus on the brain to a focus on the human body，just as from the disembodied cognition to the embodied cognition is valuable for many fields related to cognitive science including product design and its method. With Gibson’s theory of affordances, embodied cognition is a perfect explanation of today’s products guided by the idea of intuitive design and its logic. On the premise of embodied cognition, it is the “Mind-Body complex” that serves as the subject of behavior and interaction, the basis of “natural interaction” in Intelligent age, and the foundation for building a more complete theory of “user experience”. Based on the embodied cognitive, the method of design and its research should put more emphasis on specific tools.

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