scholarly journals A Dual Mind Approach to Understanding the Conscious Self and Its Treatment

NeuroSci ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 224-234
Author(s):  
Fredric Schiffer
Keyword(s):  
Clinical Research ◽  
Human Nature ◽  
Subjective Experience ◽  
Physical Nature ◽  
Brain Regions ◽  
The Other ◽  
Brain Hemisphere ◽  
Experimental Support ◽  
And Behaviors ◽  
The Brain

In this paper I will address questions about will, agency, choice, consciousness, relevant brain regions, impacts of disorders, and their therapeutics, and I will do this by referring to my theory, Dual-brain Psychology, which posits that within most of us there exist two mental agencies with different experiences, wills, choices, and behaviors. Each of these agencies is associated as a trait with one brain hemisphere (either left or right) and its composite regions. One of these agencies is more adversely affected by past traumas, and is more immature and more symptomatic, while the other is more mature and healthier. The theory has extensive experimental support through 17 peer-reviewed publications with clinical and non-clinical research. I will discuss how this theory relates to the questions about the nature of agency and I will also discuss my published theory on the physical nature of subjective experience and its relation to the brain, and how that theory interacts with Dual-Brain Psychology, leading to further insights into our human nature and its betterment.

scholarly journals Pain Detection and the Privacy of Subjective Experience

2007 ◽  
Vol 33 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 433-456 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adam J. Kolber
Keyword(s):  
Subjective Experience ◽  
Brain Regions ◽  
Physical Pain ◽  
Medical Evidence ◽  
Functional Magnetic Resonance ◽  
Positron Emission ◽  
Pain Symptoms ◽  
The Brain ◽  
Insight Into ◽  
Neuroimaging Techniques

A neurologist with abdominal pain goes to see a gastroenterologist for treatment. The gastroenterologist asks the neurologist where it hurts. The neurologist replies, “In my head, of course.” Indeed, while we can feel pain throughout much of our bodies, pain signals undergo most of their processing in the brain. Using neuroimaging techniques like functional magnetic resonance imaging (“fMRI”) and positron emission tomography (“PET”), researchers have more precisely identified brain regions that enable us to experience physical pain. Certain regions of the brain's cortex, for example, increase in activation when subjects are exposed to painful stimuli. Furthermore, the amount of activation increases with the intensity of the painful stimulus. These findings suggest that we may be able to gain insight into the amount of pain a particular person is experiencing by non-invasively imaging his brain.Such insight could be particularly valuable in the courtroom where we often have no definitive medical evidence to prove or disprove claims about the existence and extent of pain symptoms.

Where Is Size in the Brain of the Beholder?

2015 ◽  
Vol 28 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 285-296 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dietrich Samuel Schwarzkopf
Keyword(s):  
Subjective Experience ◽  
Visual Space ◽  
Brain Regions ◽  
Future Research ◽  
The Brain

Despite advances in our understanding of how the brain represents visual space, it remains unresolved how the subjective experience of an object’s size arises. While responses in retinotopic cortex correlate with perceived size, this does not imply that those brain regions mediate perceived size differences. Here I describe how the percept of an object’s size could be generated in the brain and outline unanswered questions that future research should seek to address.

Performative Bodies and Non-Referential Images

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Veronica Pravadelli
Keyword(s):  
Subjective Experience ◽  
The Other ◽  
Intrinsic Nature ◽  
Artistic Production ◽  
Gendered Identities ◽  
One Step ◽  
Human Psyche ◽  
And Behaviors ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
Woman's Film

This chapter focuses on the 1950s musical. In contrast to melodrama, the musical combines spectacle with reflexive strategies and is able to comment in a sophisticated fashion on the fiction/reality dichotomy and on the relation between cinema and the other media, especially theater and television. While noir and woman's film used expressive techniques to emphasize the split nature of the human psyche—the opposition between conscious and unconscious realities—1950s musical goes one step further. Many films show that gendered identities are the product of a series of performances, rather than the expression of an intrinsic nature, and that the same character may well embody opposite tendencies and behaviors. In a similar fashion, other films suggest that the opposition between fiction and reality is no longer tenable, and that the performative register has started to invade both the realm of artistic production and of subjective experience.

ELISA Evaluation of Tau Accumulation in the Brains of Patients with Alzheimer Disease

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mitsuru Shinohara ◽  
Junko Hirokawa ◽  
Akemi Shimodaira ◽  
Yoshitaka Tashiro ◽  
Kaoru Suzuki ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Alzheimer Disease ◽  
Brain Regions ◽  
Insoluble Fraction ◽  
The Other ◽  
Disease Stage ◽  
Brain Areas ◽  
Postmortem Brains ◽  
Biochemical Level ◽  
The Brain ◽  
Control Samples

Abstract Despite the routine use of sandwich enzyme-linked immunosorbent assays (ELISAs) for quantifying tau levels in CSF and plasma, tau accumulations in the brains of patients with Alzheimer disease (AD) have rarely been evaluated by this method. Thus, by introducing several tau ELISAs that target different epitopes, we evaluated accumulated tau levels in postmortem brains depending on disease stage, brain areas, and other AD-related changes. Notably, tau levels in insoluble fraction determined by each ELISAs differ depending on the epitopes of antibodies: non-AD control samples yield relatively high signals when an antibody against the N-terminal region of tau is used. On the other hand, ELISAs combining antibodies against the later-middle to C-terminal regions of tau produced substantially increased signals from AD samples, compared to those from non-AD controls. Such ELISAs better distinguish AD and non-AD controls, and the results are more closely associated with Braak neurofibrillary tangles stage, Aβ accumulation, and glial markers. Moreover, these ELISAs can reflect the pattern of tau spread across brain regions. In conclusion, Tau ELISAs that combine antibodies against the later-middle to C-terminal regions of tau can better reflect neuropathological tau accumulation, which would enable to evaluate tau accumulation in the brain at a biochemical level.

scholarly journals Market cognition: How exchange norms alter social experience

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
jamil zaki ◽  
Eric Neumann ◽  
Dean Baltiansky
Keyword(s):  
Social Interaction ◽  
Human Nature ◽  
Social Experience ◽  
The Other ◽  
Cultural Norms ◽  
Market Exchange ◽  
Group Boundaries ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
And Behaviors ◽  
The One

Market exchange and the ideologies that accompany it pervade human social interaction. How does this affect people’s beliefs about themselves, each other, and human nature? Here we describe market cognition (MC) as social inferences and behaviors that are intensified by market contexts. We focus on prosociality, and two countervailing ways MC can affect it. On the one hand, marketplaces incentivize individuals to behave prosocially in order to be chosen as exchange partners—generalizing cooperation and trust beyond group boundaries. On the other hand, markets encourage a view of people as self-interested, and can thus taint people’s interpretation of prosocial actions and erode more communal forms of cooperation. We close by considering how MCs can become self-fulfilling, altering relationships, communities, and cultural norms.

scholarly journals Neuronal Oscillatory Signatures of Joint Attention and Intersubjectivity in Arrhythmic Coaction

2021 ◽  
Vol 15 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexander Maÿe ◽  
Tiezhi Wang ◽  
Andreas K. Engel
Keyword(s):  
Executive Control ◽  
Emotional Processing ◽  
Subjective Experience ◽  
Phase Synchronization ◽  
Specific Activity ◽  
Brain Activity ◽  
Neural Correlates ◽  
Brain Regions ◽  
Music Making ◽  
The Brain

Hyper-brain studies analyze the brain activity of two or more individuals during some form of interaction. Several studies found signs of inter-subject brain activity coordination, such as power and phase synchronization or information flow. This hyper-brain coordination is frequently studied in paradigms which induce rhythms or even synchronization, e.g., by mirroring movements, turn-based activity in card or economic games, or joint music making. It is therefore interesting to figure out in how far coordinated brain activity may be induced by a rhythmicity in the task and/or the sensory feedback that the partners receive. We therefore studied the EEG brain activity of dyads in a task that required the smooth pursuit of a target and did not involve any extrinsic rhythms. Partners controlled orthogonal axes of the two-dimensional motion of an object that had to be kept on the target. Using several methods for analyzing hyper-brain coupling, we could not detect signs of coordinated brain activity. However, we found several brain regions in which the frequency-specific activity significantly correlated with the objective task performance, the subjective experience thereof, and of the collaboration. Activity in these regions has been linked to motor control, sensorimotor integration, executive control and emotional processing. Our results suggest that neural correlates of intersubjectivity encompass large parts of brain areas that are considered to be involved in sensorimotor control without necessarily coordinating their activity across agents.

scholarly journals The Illusory Flow and Passage of Time within Consciousness: A Multidisciplinary Analysis

2018 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 125-153 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ronald P. Gruber ◽  
Ryan P. Smith ◽  
Richard A. Block
Keyword(s):  
Subjective Experience ◽  
The Other ◽  
Discrete Observations ◽  
Object Persistence ◽  
Multidisciplinary Analysis ◽  
Perceptual Completion ◽  
Flow Of Time ◽  
Upper Level ◽  
Illusory Percept ◽  
The Brain

Flow and passage of time puzzles were analyzed by first clarifying their roles in the current multidisciplinary understanding of time in consciousness. All terms ( flow, passage, happening, becoming) are carefully defined. Flow and passage are defined differently, the former involving the psychological aspects of time and the latter involving the evolving universe and associated new cerebral events. The concept of the flow of time (FOT) is deconstructed into two levels: (a) a lower level ― a perceptual dynamic flux, or happening, or flow of events (not time); and (b) an upper level ― a cognitive view of past/present/future in which the observer seems to move from one to the other. With increasing evidence that all perception is a discrete continuity provided by illusory perceptual completion, the lower-level FOT is essentially the result of perceptual completion. The brain conflates the expression flow (passage, for some) of time with experiences of perceptual completion. However, this is an illusory percept. Converging evidence on the upper-level FOT reveals it as a false cognition that has the illusory percept of object persistence as its prerequisite. To research this argument, an experiment that temporarily removes the experience of the lower-level FOT might be conducted. The claustrum of the brain (arguably the center of consciousness) should be intermittently stimulated to create a scenario of discrete observations (involving all the senses) with long interstimulus intervals of non-consciousness and thereby no perceptual completion. Without perceptual completion, there should be no subjective experience of the lower-level FOT.

Psychiatry between Psyche and Brain

2021 ◽  
pp. 181-195
Author(s):  
Thomas Fuchs
Keyword(s):  
Mental Disorders ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Subjective Experience ◽  
Mental Illnesses ◽  
The Other ◽  
Brain Diseases ◽  
Neural Processes ◽  
Neural Substrate ◽  
The One ◽  
The Brain

Since its development around 1800, psychiatry has been moving between the poles of the sciences and the humanities, being directed toward subjective experience on the one hand and toward the neural substrate on the other hand. Today, this dualism seems to be overcome by a naturalism which identifies subjective experience with neural processes—according to the slogan “mental disorders are brain diseases.” Psychiatry thus tends to isolate mental illnesses from the patients’ social relationships and to neglect subjectivity and intersubjectivity in their explanation. What should be searched for instead is a paradigm that can establish psychiatry as a relational medicine in an encompassing sense: as a science and practice of biological, psychological and social relations, and their disorders. Within such a paradigm, the brain may be grasped and researched as the central “relational organ” without reductionist implications.

Making Connections

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jack M. Gorman
Keyword(s):  
Prefrontal Cortex ◽  
Anxiety Disorders ◽  
Lived Experiences ◽  
Brain Regions ◽  
Imaging Studies ◽  
Complex Interactions ◽  
Complex Emotions ◽  
And Behaviors ◽  
Fear And Anxiety ◽  
The Brain

Although some functions, like speech and vision, can be linked to single, specific locations in the brain, complex emotions and behaviors usually involve complex interactions among brain regions. As our brains mature, these connections are shaped by our lived experiences. Scientists in basic neuroscience laboratories have traced the pathways and networks necessary for the acquisition, expression, and extinction of one emotion: fear. Brain imaging studies have shown that these same connected brain regions are activated by fear and anxiety in humans. The “fear network” includes the amygdala, hippocampus, and prefrontal cortex. Abnormalities in activity and strength of connections in the fear network are present in children and adults with anxiety disorders and depression. Brain networks that are necessary for other emotions and behaviors have been identified, so that today we look to how our brains are connected to understand our actions and emotions.

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