Posted by boBB on June 2, 2000, at 18:23:29
In reply to Re: more science, Adam? bob? anyone?, posted by Noa on June 2, 2000, at 15:20:19
> Is it plausible that thoughts are encoded in auditory or visual "terms"?
Actually, it would be more like that auditory and visual terms are encoded as thoughts. I couldn't write two sentences about brain language without falling off the horse, but there is a biological language that is indigenous to the brain, and a group of mainstream researchers working to describe that biological language. If we keep chatting about it, we might flush out someone with some familiarity with that study.
But this stuff about auditory, visual and kenisthetic modes indicates that the biological language would favor auditory regions in one individual, visual in another and kensithetic in others. This might be about as wrongly deterministic as Freud but also as promising as Freud in offering an elementary explanation of things science is only beginning to understand.
>> I read somewhere that when you look at something, neurons in the occipital lobe actually become active in a way that creates a sort of image of that object in your brain. So, if looking at the brain with imaging technology, an image of the object "lights up" on the occipital lobe. I would then imagine (operative word: imagine) that the concept of that object is associated with that "imprint", that it is, at least in terms of visual information, encoded as that visual pattern of affected neurons.The experiments that establish this, as I recall, involve clamping a monkeys head in a vice and making it look at a pattern while radioactive tracers are pumped into its blood. The critter is then sacrificed and the occipital lobe excised, which then shows patterns in the occipital lobe identical to the pattern it was forced to watch. This is considered to be the first level of thought processing and the patterns are then processed and reprocessed as they are transitted and integrated into other areas of the brain.
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> I also imagine (again, the operative word here is "imagine") that a similar process happens with verbal thought--it gets encoded in auditory patterns in various parts of the brain.
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> I think that we humans do most of our thinking in the auditory mode, and secondarily, perhaps, the visual mode. Some of us do more in one or the other, probably. I am not a very good visual thinker myself. Visual thinking can cover more ground contemporaneously, while verbal-auditory thinking is more sequential and temporal, well at least this is my impression.
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> Kinesthetic experiences seem more in line with emotions than thoughts. Similarly with olifactory, gustatory senses. We may develop thought associations to go with those senses, but the primary activity isn't thought perse. I think a lot of emotions get encoded through activation of parts of the brain associated with these senses, although perhaps many emotions are also associated with thoughts.
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> What do y'all think?Auditory, visual, kinesthetic modes have been discussed in research literature. As with many brain subjects, a body of popular literature was published that attempted to summarize and interpret the research but in doing so likely went a few steps beyond what the experts had said been saying.
A popular book about modal thinking is "Instant Rapport" which posits that we can tell what mode a person prefers by watching the placement of their eyes - whether they gaze up, down, or level and left or right. and then build rapport by saying "I see" if they are visual, or "I hear what your are saying" if they are auditory, or "I know how you are feeling" of they are kenisthetic.
Regarding quantums, quantum physics theory can be vastly esoteric, but it is easy to understand that quantums of "energy" - chemical, electrical and perhaps subatomic, are involved in the language of the brain. A sufficient "quantum" aka a particular amount of energy in the brain can make your car go faster by negotiating to fire neurons along the motor cortex that in turn fire acetecholinergic neurons in the leg and foot muscles that press down on the accelerator, which applies pressure or electrical shocks or something to squirrels racing in a ferris wheel device under the hood of the car that drives the transmission that turns the wheels.
poster:boBB
thread:35642
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20000526/msgs/35755.html