Philosophy Now Forum

A tennis player uses his muscles in such a way that he usually has one big arm. This is a visible disbalance and so tennis players can do something in order to correct it.

I heard during a lecture that different parts of brain are used for different sorts of processing language: understanding, producing sentences etc.

I wonder if one should not take care of using different parts of his brain and for example not read too much but stop reading and produce sentences or listen or write something down etc.
Otherwise some areas of the brain get perhaps used up too much and others disintegrate from lack of use.

Has anyone made observations in this area ?

Raffa for example looks like a fiddler crab because he exercises and uses his left arm day in and day out. Interestingly enough he started out right-handed. If he wanted to 'look normal' he would most likely exercise his right arm. It seems most male players don't, but I suspect Martina Navratilova did. But I could be wrong. So yes, there are a couple of ways to correct it, if it is is seen as a problem.

I think the brain is a different issue and there is still much debate in this area. There are a number of competing theories as far as I know. If we repeat a movement often enough the repetition goes into what is sometimes called 'muscle memory' basically this means that we no longer have to attend to the mechanics of hitting the ball. We experience the hitting of the ball with out racquet, it is just that we are not attending to it. It is a little bit like driving a car over the same route every day. It gets to a stage whereby we don't remember sections of the journey. It not that we lack experience it is just that we don't need to attend to many things while we are driving.

The brain does not actually get 'used up' or some parts become 'redundant' from lack of use so to speak. I think the 40hz theory in relation to attention explains this . Perhaps you might google this. The brain attends to many different stimuli it is just that we tend not to make use of all this input into our senses. I am not an expert in this area but I would say that such things as perceptual blindness and neural pathways come into this as well. It is a very involved area and I don't think there is really one explanation.

I don't know if this is of any help but my knowledge is limited.

Thank you, yes, this is a step forward.

So a truck driver can drive his truck like in a dream but he is not a charming guest at a party (probably).

I once heard that we normal people use about only one eighth of our total brain capacity, as opposed to creative writers who use one quarter of it.

Would it make sense to mobilize the rest of our brains ?

Funny you should make that comment about the truck driver and the guest at a party.

Attentional blindness fails when it involves when it comes to our own name. It is true and I have actually experienced it. When there is a large crowd talking in small groups the sound we hear in the background is just meaningless chatter. But if someone in a group across the room mentions our name our head suddenly turns in that direction. This meaningless babble suddenly becomes meaningful.

I don't think there is any difference between, 'normal people' and 'creative people' in terms of the amount of data that can be experienced. I think the difference is that the creative persons ability to unify this data into something unique and creative. From my point of view, UNITY is the key word. Unity, or the ability to unify our experience/attention into something special and unique is the thing that separates the gifted from the reasonably gifted (most of us are reasonably gifted I would think).

The unity of consciousness theory is quite interesting in this regard. What is even more interesting from my point of view is how it relates to the 40hz theory.

It would seem that we are experiencing many things, but we don't attend to them unless there is a good reason, or more importantly we have the mental capacity to attend to this. I think the mental capacity to make use of all of the different perceptions is the key.
As to whether we can train ourselves to use more of our brain or we are stuck with what we are got is debatable. For me it is a little like the tennis player. Some professionals will always be better than the average professional. This doesn't mean that the average professional cannot achieve. With a lot of hard work they will have their day. But in the end some are just naturally better.

I think we are stuck with how our brain is wired. If we have the required number of interconnections to access data widely available and unify it into something unique then we are lucky that our brain functions in this fashion. In a rough way I guess we could say that gifted people we are using more of their brain, but I think this is a bit of an outmoded in light of the latest theories.

Please note that a lot of this is just my opinion.

Just your opinion is not only just find but the best I can hope for.

Posters quoting from books are like party guests chattering.

Is is possible to wire one´s brain in a new way somehow ?
By learning something completely new perhaps ?

Adults are slower to learn because the new input has to be accomodated together with old input and nonsense put out after a process of struggle. Kids do not have this problem and absorb without hesitation.

Hello duszek,

I guess when it comes to young children everything is of interest. I guess their brains benefit from attending to as many things as possible. Perception and attention are the gateway to working memory. By that I mean when we attend to something the areas of the brain associated colour, sound, movement, form are activated. This naturally doesn't mean you are attending to all of these things. You may well be attending to just the sound and movement of an object, but you still experience colour and form. It is just that you are not thinking about colour and form.

From my point of view this doesn't mean that a large amount of information is unavailable, while a small amount (what we are attending to) is available. It appears everything is available if we can only access it. Can we make use of all this available information and not just the stuff we are attending to is the big question?

It would also seem pointless if we can draw on this additional information but we are unable to unify the whole lot into something meaningful and totally unique (new knowledge). It seems to me like there is a two edged problem here. I think there are two types of cells relevant in this process. First, there are the parameter cells which do the 'lighting up' so to speak when the brain receives a variety of information such as colour, sound, movement etc. Secondly, there are the inter neurons doing the coordinating. Basically I think their job is to determine the information that will go to working memory. I could well imagine that the more information your working memory can handle the better quality your output will be.

Perhaps the key here is the number of inter neurons. In other words, the better the coordination process the better the outcome.
As to whether we can increase the number of brain cells by some artificial means in the future( drugs) or whether we can increase these cell numbers by hard work and training I don't really know. I think we can achieve a lot through hard work and training, but in the end some people just seem to have a bit more than others.

Talking to an expert in the field of neuroscience or neurophilosophy would be better than myself. But I am happy to try and answer your questions to the best of my ability.

Thank you Ginkgo.
Any common sense speculation of yours is welcome. This is not a panel discussion of serious scientists, live and on BBC.
We are in the lounge of Rick Lewis´s villa indulging in idle chit-chat ...
So we can relax and have drink ...

I heard that we cannot increase the number of brain cells, we can only lose cells, especially when we drink alcohol.
What we can do is to create passages and short-cuts from cells to cells.
Any time we make a connection between one content stored in a cell and another content stored in a cell this connection as such is ... another piece of information stored in a new cell ?

Is it healthy for a brain to

1. lie ?
2. pretend to admire someone ?

For the individual brain, work involving pretense, imagination, creating parallel stories, and other 'dissembling' is quite demanding. Few animals appear capable of such trickery.
Some primates other than homo, and some members of the canidae, have been observed acting in ways very suggestive of 'dishonesty', 'secrecy' etc. Possibly these practices have contributed to the development of brains capable of dealing with abstraction?
Surely the practice of such skills would require, and would enhance, some basic 'theory of mind'?

I was wondering if lying and pretending to be someone else did not split your personality in a way and thus lead to schizophrenia for example.

And how about making a fool of oneself ? Not taking things seriously ? (Because the reality is so hard to bear that this camouflage is supposed to serve as a protection.)

there is quite a lot of evidence that reproductive success amongst many primate species depends on an individual's capacity to behave in ways that will gain status amongst the troupe. It ould be that this 'estimating the viewpoint of others', reinforced by selection, develops a theory of mind. Some researchers suggest that the construction of a model 'person' in the brain is a way of building a picture of another's viewpoint, to use as a guide for anticipating another's response to any planned action, and therefore being able to revise plans to achieve something more like a favourable response, for example in the alpha male or female of a particular troupe; and that this interior model person gives rise to the sense of self. So it may be possible to construct more than one 'self'.
There may be more traction in this idea, in terms of understanding human 'psychology', but I'm not very well informed, as yet. Intending to read up on it in the near future.
Seems a common enough tactic in human life, Duszek. When the going gets tough, the tough get flippant

Yes, I would say you are right. A brain dealing with abstractions probably has an evolutionary advantage. A unity theory of consciousness covers this possibility. The idea being that the brain takes all of our perceptions and unifies them into a new experience. If we experience a drink of water from a creek we would have a number of perceptions that enter into our brain via the various senses. For example, the sound of the running water, the look of the water and possibility the smell of the water( assuming it has a smell). Bayne and Chalmers would claim that all these experiences are unified into a new experience we call a drink of water.
The important point from their point of view is that even through drinking water is made up of a number of experiences, these experiences a subsumed into something new and unique. A different type of experience.

As far as we know animals don't have the level of unity that humans have. They may not even have the ability to unify experience.
While an animal may drink for the sake of needing a drink a human also drinks for the same reason. The difference is that humans can also think of the other possibilities associated with water. For example, how can I bottle this on a large scale and sell it to the public for a profit. That may well be an important product of the unity theory. Uniqueness and creativity.

Does a healthy brain require, individual freedom, so I can act on my own, which in turn leads to maximum choice, which is deeply embedded in our lives. Do I inherit my identity or do I invent it?.

In the work environment today, techology enables us to work every minute of the day from any place on the planet. Life is a matter of choice of big things, small things. Is this good news or bad. All these choices have negative effects. One is paralysis rather than liberation. Too many choices and people find it difficult to choose at all.

Secret to Happiness, is low expectations. Depression has exploded. People have expectations that are so disappointing because their standards are so high.

If everything is possible, you don't have freedom, you have paralysis. If everything is possible you decrease satisfaction. Everybody needs a limit, if there is none it is a recipe for misery.

Sounds like good advice to me. To be honest I haven't thought about that side of things.

But you initial question is an interesting one. I think the problem is actually knowing if there is an "I' that does the thinking. It has seemed obvious since philosophy has been around that there must be an phenomenological 'I' of perception. After all there must be someone to put all of this sensory stuff together and make sense of it. 'I' must be doing this processing, after all it is my brain that is receiving this input so it must be me doing the sorting and analyzing. Common sense over the centuries tells us that consciousness is unified and it is the 'I' part of the brain that all of this sensory information eventually finds its way. I decide what is relevant when it comes to choice.

It does not seem possible, but this common sense theory may well be wrong. Consciousness may be dis unified not unified as commonly believed. It has been common for a long time to talk about working memory and where this working memory is located in the brain. In other words to try and find the neural core of consciousness. It now seems likely that there are many places where working memory takes place. There is no single place where consciousness takes place. This immediately gives rise to the idea that there is a plurality of 'I'. or at the very least the 'I' keeps changing its position in the brain depending on what we choose to attend to.

Perhaps it is a bit like a school building. This building might consist of 8 rooms with 30 students in each room. Each room of students doing their own thing. If the teacher walks into the room the class immediately comes to attention (not in the real world I know).

The teacher is conscious of what is happening in the other rooms, perhaps the noise, but is not attending to it. As soon as the teacher leaves the room to visit another room the class immediately lapses back into chaos. The teacher is now attending to another class that has come to attention. The problem with dis unity and the attractive feature of unified 'I' is that we can never find dis unity. The teacher will always be in any one of the classroom, never in the corridor to observe the total dis unity. When we look for unity we will always find it. The fact is that we have no choice in the matters we are compelled to always look for unity.