TWTS – Letters In Your Brain

TWTSPodcast – Turil

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TWTS – Episode 59 – Letters In Your Brain

http://www.blooomy.org/podcast/LettersInYourBrain.mp3

DOWNLOAD (right click to save linked file): TWTS – Episode Episode 59 – Letters In Your Brain

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Consider how the brain could function in a way that is pretty literally just recording the sensations that your body physically experiences (from the wavelength of light to the temperature and pressure of touch to the chemicals of smell) when you encounter some unique thing, by drawing little diagrams – like the letter “A” only way more complex and in 3D – in the brain using the neurons as endpoints and the axons and dendrites connecting them as the lines. When remembering something, we might literally just be replaying the physical experience in the body in some way, with full sensurround experience. (Just on a more subtle scale most of the time.)

And memories, ideas, language, etc. are fuzzy because the diagrams that get drawn with the biological stuff inside the brain are like waves describing probability, rather than simple, unchanging, written-in-stone “facts”. When I experience the color purple, most of the time it’s a pleasant experience, but occasionally it’s not, so the brain remembers those edge cases, as well as the more common ones, to use for future predictions about what might happen when those sensory experiences occur again.

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Links referenced in episode:

Podcast on Consciousness is Contraction

PBS Infinite Series’ video on mapping the network diagrams of the brain: https://youtu.be/rlI1KOo1gp4

More of me!: http://www.reddit.com/user/turil

The Examined Life discussion community on Reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/theexaminedlife

Live Streaming Philosophy by Turil (on hiatus): https://www.twitch.tv/turilcronburg

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