IUBio

Drug-induced advances in neuroscience

Mentifex mentifex at scn.org
Thu Nov 19 19:13:26 EST 1998


Frank LeFever:
>> First, a general observation: we have often seen (in this newsgroup)
>> people who know a little bit about something (often scattered and
>> poorly-understood terms and facts) assume that others know even less,
>> adolescent "big insights" proclaimed naively (to others who had and
>> worked through such "insights" long ago) as if it were a private
>> revelation, etc., etc.

Dag Stenberg:
> First, it was nice to meet you at the Neuroscience meeting in L.A.
> One does not always meet the people in person that one has discussed
> with on the net, and we had a nice talk about real (Westie) science
> matters.  

> It is certainly true that in my about 35 years in neuroscience
> I have never had as great revelations (subjectively) as when I
> as a young student misused the nitrous oxide (no, boys, not nitric
> oxide) supply in the lab to get revelations and insight.  Oh, how
> I understood God and the world and felt myself like the Messiah
> whose task it would be to tell His truth to everybody around.
>(Bad metallic taste in the mouth afterwards, though!)
>  Real life has been considerably different, although I nowaday         
> appreciate the smaller pieces of understanding much more than the  
> pseudohallucinatory insights of long ago.. 

  As we now confess the drugs we took decades ago, Mentifex admits:
  - "De Anima" and other works of Aristotle in the original Greek;
  - "Der Wille zur Macht" and other opiates of Friedrich Nietzsche;
  - "The Cerebellum as a Neuronal Machine" injected by J.C. Eccles.

  No cannabis sativa or papavera somnifera.  Lo, the hallucination:

  /!i!i!i!i!i!\         ________                  /iiiiiiiiiii\
 /visual memory\       /        \                / auditory    \
|               |     /  syntax  \--------------|------------\  |
|               |     \   node   /    ______    |  memory    |  |
|               |      \________/----/      \   |  channel   |  |
|               |           |       /function\  |            |  |
|      /--------|--------\  |       \ cable  /  |            |  |
|      |        |        |  |        \______/   |    ____    |  |
|      |        |       _V__V_           |      |   /    \   |  |
|    __|__      |      /      \          |      |  /stored\  |  |
|   /image\     |     /logico- \---------|------|--\ stem /  |  |
|  /percept\----|----/conceptual\        |      |   \____/   |  |
|  \_______/    |    \ cable    /   _____V__    |     |      |  |
|               |     \________/   /        \---|-----'____  |  |
|               |                 /inflection\  |     /in- \ |  |
|               |                 \  cable   /--|----/flec- \|  |
|               |                  \________/   |    \tion  /   |
|               |                               |     \____/    |
--
http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Agora/7256/ The Cyborg Syllabus
http://www.scn.org/~mentifex/ Artificial Intelligence for Robots



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