Unveiling the Cognitive Mechanisms of Eyes

2014 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 36-50 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yingxu Wang
Keyword(s):  
Eye Movements ◽  
Knowledge Base ◽  
Crucial Role ◽  
Cognitive Mechanisms ◽  
Brain Science ◽  
Internal Memory ◽  
Cognitive Knowledge ◽  
The Mind ◽  
The Brain

Eyes as the unique organ possess intensively direct connections to the brain and dynamically perceptual accessibility to the mind. This paper analyzes the cognitive mechanisms of eyes not only as the sensory of vision, but also the browser of internal memory in thinking and perception. The browse function of eyes is created by abstract conditioning of the eye's tracking pathway for accessing internal memories, which enables eye movements to function as the driver of the perceptive thinking engine of the brain. The dual mechanisms of the eyes as both the external sensor of the brain and the internal browser of the mind are explained based on evidences and cognitive experiences in cognitive informatics, neuropsychology, cognitive science, and brain science. The finding on the experiment's internal browsing mechanism of eyes reveals a crucial role of eyes interacting with the brain for accessing internal memory and the cognitive knowledge base in thinking, perception, attention, consciousness, learning, memorization, and inference.

Subjectivity as a sentient perspective and the role of interoception

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Helena De Preester
Keyword(s):  
Crucial Role ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Basic Form ◽  
Bodily States ◽  
The Brain ◽  
Phenomenological Point

This chapter argues that the most basic form of subjectivity is different from and more fundamental than having a self, and forwards a hypothesis about the origin of subjectivity in terms of interoception. None of those topics are new, and a consensus concerning the homeostatic-interoceptive origin of subjectivity is rapidly growing in the domains of the neurosciences and psychology. This chapter critically explores that growing consensus, and it argues that the idea that the brain topographically represents bodily states is unfit for thinking about the coming about of subjectivity. In the first part, four inherent characteristics of subjectivity are discussed from a philosophical phenomenological point of view. The second part explores whether a model of subjectivity in which interoception maintains its crucial role is possible without relying on topographical representations of the in-depth body, and giving due to the inherent characteristics of subjectivity.

scholarly journals Making Enactivism Even More Embodied

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shaun Gallagher
Keyword(s):  
Embodied Cognition ◽  
Facial Expressions ◽  
Empirical Studies ◽  
Wide Sense ◽  
Sensory Motor ◽  
The Mind ◽  
The Brain

An enactivist approach to understanding the mind, in its fullest sense, is not just a matter of action-oriented processes; enactivism is about more than action and sensory–motor contingencies. To understand cognition as richly embodied this chapter considers factors involving affectivity and intersubjectivity. Empirical studies show that affectivity, in a wide sense that includes hunger, fatigue, pain, respiration, as well as emotion, has an effect on perception, attention, and judgment. Likewise, intersubjective factors, including the role of bodily postures, movements, gestures, gaze and facial expressions, and dynamical aspects of interaction, have similar effects. This richer conception of embodied cognition also holds implications for understanding how the brain works.

Enactivist Interventions

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shaun Gallagher
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Processes ◽  
Brain Function ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Mathematical Reasoning ◽  
Relational Dynamics ◽  
Close Coupling ◽  
Affective Processes ◽  
The Mind ◽  
The Brain

Enactivist Interventions explores central issues in the contemporary debates about embodied cognition, addressing interdisciplinary questions about intentionality, representation, affordances, the role of affect, and the problems of perception and cognitive penetration, action and free will, higher-order cognition, and intersubjectivity. It argues for a rethinking of the concept of mind, drawing on pragmatism, phenomenology, and cognitive science. It interprets enactivism as a philosophy of nature that has significant methodological and theoretical implications for the scientific investigation of the mind. Enactivist Interventions argues that, like the basic phenomena of perception and action, sophisticated cognitive phenomena like reflection, imagining, and mathematical reasoning are best explained in terms of an affordance-based skilled coping. It thus argues for a continuity that runs between basic action, affectivity, and a rationality that in every case remains embodied. It also discusses recent predictive models of brain function and outlines an alternative, enactivist interpretation that emphasizes the close coupling of brain, body, and environment rather than a strong boundary that isolates the brain in its internal processes. The extensive relational dynamics that integrates the brain with the extra-neural body opens into an environment that is physical, social, and cultural and that recycles back into the enactive process. Cognitive processes are in the world, situated in affordance spaces defined across evolutionary, developmental, and individual histories, and are constrained by affective processes and normative dimensions of social and cultural practices.

THE ROLE OF VASCULAR MICROENVIRONMENT IN THE FORMATION AND DEVELOPMENT OF BRAIN TUMORS

2018 ◽  
Vol 64 (5) ◽  
pp. 570-577
Author(s):  
Aleksandr Dorosevich ◽  
N. Buzgan
Keyword(s):  
Stem Cells ◽  
Brain Tumors ◽  
Tumor Cells ◽  
Cell Lines ◽  
Crucial Role ◽  
Tumor Stem Cells ◽  
Intercellular Interactions ◽  
Resident Cell ◽  
The Brain

Processes of neovascularization are key for the growth and spread of tumor cells. This article describes unique patterns of angiogenesis, which are considered as specific exclusively for brain tumors. At present the role of specialized perivascular niches in the development of oncological processes of the brain acquires a growing importance in the eyes of researchers. Perivascular niches play a crucial role in intercellular interactions between resident cell lines in the development of the tumor process and are also a source of tumor stem cells.

Natural Brains and Motivated, Emotional Mind

2021 ◽  
pp. 82-138
Keyword(s):  
Neural Network ◽  
Brain Structures ◽  
Evolutionary Development ◽  
Synaptic Coupling ◽  
Subjective Character ◽  
Brain Organization ◽  
Conscious Mind ◽  
The Mind ◽  
The Brain

We know that the brain is the seat of the mind. Constructing the reductive model of the conscious mind requires an indication of the laws according to which the mind emerges from biophysical processes occurring in natural brains. Because in Part I, the authors presented the theoretical model referring to the ideal structures of the imagined neural network, we now have easier task, because we need to indicate in the brains of the living beings those processes that functionally correspond to our postulates. Such suitability is not guaranteed by known processes occurring in specialized parts of the brain. The role of the primary sensory areas is a detailed analysis of sensory stimuli with specific modality. They result in analysis of the meaning of all useful stimuli and their interpretation used in various parts of the cortex. The high specialization of individual cortex areas is striking and are the result of evolutionary development of the brain. New brain structures, such as the new cortex, were added on the outskirts of existing structures, improving their performance in the ever more demanding environments, where other intelligent beings ravened. But even as we know the brain organization, we struggle to understand how it works. How neurons that make the brain work together to create the conscious mind. To discover functionally effective processes in the brain, one need to reach for the biophysical properties of the astrocyt-neural network. In this chapter, the authors suggest that some concepts of neuro-electro-dynamics and the phenomena of neuro- and synapto-genesis as well as synaptic couplings may explain the processes of categorization, generalization and association leading to the formation of extensive, semihierarchical brain structures constituting neural representations of perceptions, objects and phenomena. Natural brains meet the embodiment condition. They are products of evolution, so they have intentionality, their own goals and needs. So they can naturally show emotions, drives and instincts that motivate to act. This determines the nature of constructed mental representations. They are the subject of psychological research, which shows the motivation of pain and pleasure in the field of intelligent activities, as well as the motivation of curiosity and the need for understanding in the domain of propositional and phenomenal consciousness. They describe the way pain is felt in organisms as basic quale. The role of other qualia for “how-it-is-like to feel something” and their subjective character was explained, as well as their interspecies specificity was characterized. In this chapter, the authors present an elementary biophysical phenomenon, that is a flash of consciousness. This phenomenon is synaptic coupling formed in the course of learning. They justify that the stream of such phenomena is the foundation of consciousness. They also point out that the astrocytic-neural network meets all the conditions required to generate conscious sensations.

scholarly journals Social Robots to Test Flexibility of Human Social Cognition

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (6) ◽  
pp. 1203-1211 ◽  
Author(s):  
Agnieszka Wykowska
Keyword(s):  
Social Cognition ◽  
Social Robots ◽  
Action Representation ◽  
Cognitive Mechanisms ◽  
Human Agent ◽  
New Type ◽  
The Brain ◽  
Psychological Experiments ◽  
Perception Action

AbstractAs the field of social robotics has been dynamically growing and expanding over various areas of research and application, in which robots can be of assistance and companionship for humans, this paper offers a different perspective on a role that social robots can also play, namely the role of informing us about flexibility of human mechanisms of social cognition. The paper focuses on studies in which robots have been used as a new type of “stimuli” in psychological experiments to examine whether similar mechanisms of social cognition would be activated in interaction with a robot, as would be elicited in interaction with another human. Analysing studies in which a direct comparison has been made between a robot and a human agent, the paper examines whether for robot agents, the brain re-uses the same mechanisms that have been developed for interaction with other humans in terms of perception, action representation, attention and higher-order social cognition. Based on this analysis, the paper concludes that the human socio-cognitive mechanisms, in adult brains, are sufficiently flexible to be re-used for robotic agents, at least for those that have some level of resemblance to humans.

Towards the Synergy of Cognitive Informatics, Neural Informatics, Brain Informatics, and Cognitive Computing

2012 ◽  
pp. 1-19 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yingxu Wang
Keyword(s):  
Intelligent Systems ◽  
Reference Model ◽  
External Information ◽  
Cognitive Computing ◽  
Cognitive Informatics ◽  
Learning Machines ◽  
Cognitive Knowledge ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Cognitive Robots ◽  
The Brain

The contemporary wonder of sciences and engineering recently refocused on the starting point: how the brain processes internal and external information autonomously rather than imperatively as those of conventional computers? This paper explores the interplay and synergy of cognitive informatics, neural informatics, abstract intelligence, denotational mathematics, brain informatics, and computational intelligence. A key notion recognized in recent studies in cognitive informatics is that the root and profound objective in natural, abstract, and artificial intelligence, and in cognitive informatics and cognitive computing, is to seek suitable mathematical means for their special needs. A layered reference model of the brain and a set of cognitive processes of the mind are systematically developed towards the exploration of the theoretical framework of cognitive informatics. A wide range of applications of cognitive informatics and denotational mathematics are recognized in the development of highly intelligent systems such as cognitive computers, cognitive knowledge search engines, autonomous learning machines, and cognitive robots.

Brain science of the mind

2011 ◽  
Vol 50 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-38 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tsutomu Nakada
Keyword(s):  
Functional Unit ◽  
Self Organization ◽  
Self Organizing Map ◽  
Human Cerebral Cortex ◽  
Brain Science ◽  
Pólya’S Urn ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Enormous Number ◽  
The Brain ◽  
Self Organizing

The human cerebral cortex contains more than one hundred billion neurons and 1014 synapses. Even without regard to the size of the genome, it can be easily deduced that a deterministic blueprint for connectivity of such an enormous number of networks is unrealistic. Existing scientific knowledge indicates that nature utilizes principal rules instead of complete deterministic descriptions to fashion a desired structure, namely, the rules of self-organization. The brain is a complex system and self-organizes based on the Markovian process. Accordingly, brain functionality can be seen as specific patterns created by self-organizing processes based on conditions defined by genes and the environment. Three categorically different systems are now recognized based on their physiological functional unit configuration. While the oldest system is made up of deterministic connectivity, the remaining two systems, namely, cerebellum and cerebrum, utilize modifiable units, often referred to as cerebellar chip and brain chip, respectively. Classical conditioning, as in the case of Pavlov’s dog, is now recognized to be based on functionality of the cerebellum and its learning unit, the cerebellar chip, which in principle works as McCulloch-Pitts neurons. The cerebrum utilizes the concept of Kohonen’s non-linear self-organizing map in the organization of the brain chip, a system that effectively creates entropy fields. In contrast to cerebellar learning which is adaptive, cerebral learning is stochastic in nature, and follows the rule known as Pólya’s Urn.

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