Brain neuron constantly fire in response to the internal and external stimulus. Most of the time Brain is stable but there are times when it operates as a chaotic system. The video shows the animation of the brain's behavior
Neuroscientists have long suspected as much. Only recently, however, have they come up with proof that brains work this way. Now they are trying to work out why. Some believe that near-chaotic states may be crucial to memory, and could explain why some people are smarter than others.
In technical terms, systems on the edge of chaos are said to be in a state of "self-organised criticality". These systems are right on the boundary between stable, orderly behaviour - such as a swinging pendulum - and the unpredictable world of chaos, as exemplified by turbulence.
The brains is the central organ where most of our decisions are made. It has been a mysterious organ because we could not look inside the brain to observe how we actually make decisions.
There were many old models those divided the decision making mainly into two separate processes. The rational goal orienteddecision making process and the irrational emotion based decision making process sometimes referred to as "Animal Spirits". All the attempts that are made to civilize humans were to suppress the irrational decision making and promote rational decision making. The modernity was based upon the ascension of the rational decision making to the highest pedestal while our instinctual urges were considered bad and relegated to the bottom of the pyramid of the needs.
This two part division provided a satisfactory explanation for our behavior in the past. It also provided guidelines for developing suitable methods to train kids to become rational functioning adults. However, the recent advances in non invasive brain scanning techniques such as FMRI allow us to probe inside the brain while it is trying to make decisions. The technique still lacks fine spatial and temporal resolution but it is getting better with time and it provides a glimpse of inside working of human brain.
The neurons inside the brain are interconnected and we do not find a clear cut distinction between two types of decision making. In fact both of them are involved in all types of decision making. This invalidates the "Rational Actor" model of humans used in Economic theory. Human are not purely rational decision making computers.
We now have new disciplines like Neuro-economics and Behavioral Finance. These disciplines have shown that our decisions differ sometimes considerably from a pure rational actor. All decision are value based decisions including the decisions involving money and morality.
Here is a fascinating video that shows some of the experiments in the field of Neuro-economics showing human decision making and a neuroscience based explanation
We can not find a moral center within the brain making moral decisions. Also, we can not find 'Homo Economus nuclei " within the brain making rational informed decisions on money matters purely out of self interest. This conclusion is fairly obvious to common people but the religious authorities and the big name economists so far are not willing to accept these findings in Neuro-economics despite the mounting evidence supporting the idea that brain is an organic unit and it acts as a single unit to perform calculations leading to making decisions.
Daniel Goleman is an internationally renowned psychologist. He is the author of one of the best selling book "Emotional Intelligence". This book was instrumental in bringing back the role emotions play in our day to dealing with people. It identified emotional intelligence as one of the keys in promoting harmonious relation among people and groups. Also its role in improving the learning abilities of the troubled kids.
He has extended his ideas to include "Social Intelligence". He talks about the role of leadership and how biology plays an important role in creating effective leaders.
The notion that effective leadership is about having powerful social circuits in the brain has prompted us to extend our concept of emotional intelligence, which we had grounded in theories of individual psychology. A more relationship-based construct for assessing leadership is social intelligence, which we define as a set of interpersonal competencies built on specific neural circuits (and related endocrine systems) that inspire others to be effective.Source: Social Intelligence and the Biology of Leadership
The studies in Social Neuroscience is revealing the inner working of the human brain. They are also studying the attributes that some one a good leader. It seems that good leaders show a good deal of empathy towards the people. There is a mirroring effect between the good leaders and the followers. This also highlights the role mirror neurons play in establishing emphatic relationships.
Perhaps the most stunning recent discovery in behavioral neuroscience is the identification of mirror neurons in widely dispersed areas of the brain. Italian neuroscientists found them by accident while monitoring a particular cell in a monkey’s brain that fired only when the monkey raised its arm. One day a lab assistant lifted an ice cream cone to his own mouth and triggered a reaction in the monkey’s cell. It was the first evidence that the brain is peppered with neurons that mimic, or mirror, what another being does. This previously unknown class of brain cells operates as neural Wi-Fi, allowing us to navigate our social world. When we consciously or unconsciously detect someone else’s emotions through their actions, our mirror neurons reproduce those emotions. Collectively, these neurons create an instant sense of shared experience.Source: Social Intelligence and the Biology of Leadership
The leaders and followers almost mirror each others body language when the two are in full agreement over the course of future action to move the organization forward.
Image by azizul hadi via FlickrThe interconnection of Neurons also known as nerve cells creates a massively parallel computer that is responsible for processing all our sensory data. It also holds information in memory cells for later recall.
It is convenient to compare the neural processing of information in the brain to the information processing in a computing device. However, the two of these devices process information in a very different manner. The computer is good at crunching numbers and working with the binary representation of the symbols. The computer can hold massive amount of information on storage devices. Human brain is not very good either at storing vast amount of information or doing quick number crunching. Its main strenght lies in being an excellent pattern recognizer. It can recognize things even if the presented with incomplete information. This observation has lead to the development of an area in computing also known as Neural Computing in which approximate model of neural network are simulated on a computer.
This short video shows a beautiful animation of neurons in the brain. How they are connected and how they function.
The author of the article took a trip to Peru and participated in a ceremony that involved ingestion of Ayahausca in a ceremonial setting that lasted several days under the guidance of an experienced Shaman from Peru. Here are some of the quotes from the article describing the experience of the author during the trance state induced by the ingestion of ayahausa
For centuries, Amazonian shamans have used ayahuasca as a window into the soul. The sacrament, they claim, can cure any illness. The author joins in this ancient ritual and finds the worlds within more terrifying—and enlightening—than ever imagined.
Here the author describes her experience using the metaphor of time travel
Now I'm traveling to a realm where I meet my various incarnations from past lives. We are connected to a large wheel; whenever fear energy leaves the top of my head in puffs of dark smoke, it leaves their heads at the same time. Our lives, it seems, are interconnected and dependent. Outside of linear time, all our lifetimes, all our many incarnations, occur simultaneously. "Past life" is really a misnomer; "other life" seems a more accurate way of describing it.
More on the author experience while in trance
All at once, I willed myself to rise. I sailed up through the tunnel of fire, higher and higher until I broke through to a white light. All darkness immediately vanished. My body felt light, at peace. I floated among a beautiful spread of colors and patterns. Slowly my ayahuasca vision faded. I returned to my body, to where I lay in the hut, insects calling from the jungle.
and her recovery from severe depression that she suffered since her childhood
The next morning, I discovered the impossible: The severe depression that had ruled my life since childhood had miraculously vanished.
Here the author goes into the differences between the world views of the western analytic thought processes and the ancient mystical symbolic understanding of the Universe:
And this notion of a spiritual experience marks the very juncture where Western science and analytic thought depart on the subject of ayahuasca and where indigenous culture and mysticism come in. Most ayahuasca researchers agree that, curiously, the compound appears to affect people on three different levels—the physical, psychological, and spiritual—complicating efforts to definitively catalog its effects, let alone explain specific therapeutic benefits. Says Ralph Metzner, psychologist, ayahuasca researcher, and editor of the book Sacred Vine of Spirits, "[Healing with ayahuasca] presumes a completely different understanding of illness and medicine than what we are accustomed to in the West. But even from the point of view of Western medicine and psychotherapy it is clear that remarkable physical healings and resolutions of psychological difficulties can occur with this medicine."
Here is her final thoughts
Me, I'm ready to go home. I sit up with difficulty, as if waking from decades of sleep. It would be easier for me to call it all a dream, a grand hallucination. Then I could have my old world back, in which I thought I knew what was real and unreal, true and untrue. Now the problem is, I don't know anything.
The Shaman practices for inner mental development are designed to show that we can construct a different reality from the same sensory inputs by making our neurons to process the same sensory data differently by influencing the processing abilities of neurons through the use of psychoactive drugs.
These experiments and the scientific experiments with visual illusions where scientists have created pictures that our brain can not process coherently raises a serious issue. That is how much we should actually rely on our senses to find the truth or how much we should really trust the world view constructed based upon our sensory perceptions and experiences.
The physical senses helps us orient ourselves in the world. They helps us navigate through the spatial-temporal space without running into other objects. Also, to identify and avoid dangerous objects. They are definitely an aid without which we can not survive but they also create a phantasm through over active imagination caused by incessant firing of neurons within the brain that do not have any existence in the reality.
This experimentation with Ayahusaca proves that the brain created reality that is also referred to as imagination of minds is a constructed reality and there are several possible constructions of the same reality depending upon how the neurons are conditions or modified to process this sensory input.
In the final analysis it is up to us on how much weight we should assign to this our own brain constructed reality that can very easily be changed by ingesting some psychoactive drug or through other means such as intense religious practices of fasting or meditation involving breathing practices.
Also, no theory of consciousness and mind will be complete unless it provides a satisfactory explanation for the experiences of brain in the altered states.
The article has a small video of the ceremony and the complete article is here
Disclaimer: This article in no way and form is endorsing the use of drugs to achieve altered state of minds. The information provided in this post is for informational purposes only.
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