>> (Amount of sleep also decreases with age!!)
> Finally correct.
Technically, the proportion of quiet sleep (i.e. greater muscle tone, steady
respiration and adequate temperature homeostasis) remains much the same from
birth to old age, at about 5 hours per night. But rather it's the amount of
active sleep or REM sleep (i.e. eye movements, flaccid skeletal musculature,
erratic respiration and heart-beat, loss of temperature control) that
decreases with age.
> another support to this hypothesis (mine =)) is that when one experiences
great expectations followed by great disappointment, one usually does not
adjust to it
> immediately, but has to "sleep it off".
You're forgetting that word 'subjective' again.
> So maybe the brain is trying to rewire itself during sleep.
Active sleep is believed to be associated with learning and memory.
> Read more while you're in your armchair, please.
Ha, ha, ha, ha, nice one ;-)
T.L.S.
> (a thing known as synesthesia).
PS. Please note: the word synaesthesia ('joined sensation') shares a root
with anaesthesia ('no sensation'). It denotes the rare capacity to hear
colors, taste shapes, or experience other equally startling sensory
blendings whose quality seems difficult for most of us to imagine. A person
with this condition might describe the color, shape, and flavour of
someone's voice, or music whose sound looks like 'shards of glass', a
scintillation of jagged, colored triangles moving in the visual field. Or,
seeing the color green, a synesthete might detect the "scent" of green as
well. The experience is frequently projected outside the individual, rather
than being an image in the mind's eye. The context you used it in is, as
already pointed out, incorrect.
'Laughter lightens the cloudiest day'
maxwell <mmmaxwell at hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:9dlhs7$iuc1j$1 at ID-81739.news.dfncis.de...
yan king yin <y.k.y(at)lycos(dot)com> wrote in message
news:9ditfn$c5j1 at imsp212.netvigator.com...
> "Theophilus Samuels" <theophilus.samuels at btinternet.com>
>> > [snip philosophic stuff]
For example (someone else said this in here before) the baby cries all the
time because thats the only thing it can do,
Huh? Maybe a colicky baby does, but not most I've seen.
ie it generates the full spectrum of behavior. Then the
> feedback of emotions / drives etc causes "bad" circuits to be eliminated.
Your evidence?
> (Postnatal brain development is characterized by a "rise and fall"
pattern, eg total number of synaptic connections plotted against age.)
_Prenatal_-- by postnatal the declining function is prevalent, though not in
all CNS regions-- some are still on the upslope.
>> ie a feedback loop in multiple dimensions of love/hate/fear/etc/etc.
Evidence?
>> another support to this hypothesis (mine =)) is that when one experiences
great expectations followed by great disappointment, one usually does not
adjust to it immediately, but has to "sleep it off".
Presumably, in the self-same armchair from which you hypothesize?
> So maybe the brain is trying to rewire itself during sleep.
Some support for this, but note that though hippocampal theta waves are most
noticeably present in sleep, they are not absent in wakeful states,
especially subsequent to perceptions of novel stimuli/circumstances.
Frankly, the 'restorative/reorganizational' notion of sleep functionality
has _some_ merit-- but surely fails to explain the ubiquity of sleep, or the
wide cross-species and intraspecific variation in sleep stages, and absolute
durations of sleep.
(Amount of sleep also decreases with age!!)
Finally correct.
>> > If we were to consider a basic construct for the sensation of pain, in
the beginning (i.e. neonates) then there might be some way of recognising
this sensation by 'reading the mind' (I'm not saying that there is!), but as
time passes this construct could, in essence, evolve into something
completely different from the original because of the subjective experiences
of the> individual. In which case, if you wanted to read someones mind then
you would have to possess every single 'neural reading' for that individual,
> > i.e. it's probably impossible to use any form of template to read the
mind of any individual picked at random from the population unless their
specific contructs were known [agreeing with your last statement, but with a
different reason].
So is the reason why we can't 'read' our own minds some other reason?
>> If the Hebbian view is correct,
Which Hebbian view?
there should be some "basic" emotions that
> form the "basis set" of more complex feelings. For example, the feeling
of fear is somewhat similar to hunger and also to that of looking down from
a tall building
> (a thing known as synesthesia).
You totally misuse the word.
>> Which brings in the relation between brain / body (sensory organs and the
PNS), and how brain development is conditioned by these organs. well, i
think i'll read more on this later.
I wish you had read more *previously*
>> To answer the original question -- there is as yet no way at all, to
> stimulate the brain in any localized and noninvasive manner. When new
techniques are available to do that, things might be alot different.
This does not answer the original question, and your answer also reveals
your ignorance of trans-cranial magnetic stimulation.
Also, why in the world do you think that being able to locally stimulate the
brain might help you "read someone's mind?"
Read more while you're in your armchair, please.
-Maxwell