orpheus last chant

i am pretty ignorant in this field, and many poeple who try to convince me that i'm wrong about things like soul, spirituality take up this subject so....help!

how exactly is information stored in neurons? can i take a neuron and decifre it's contents (man that sounds silly but ....i had to say it)

how can i respond to the awful retorical question :
we only use 10 percent of the brain...adn geniuses use 30 percent max. did you know that? what, the brain is a battery....???

is it true that when you think you kill neurons...and the more you think the more you kill them...but in the same procces between teh remaining neurons new ties are made. there was a study of poeple who kept a clear mind at old ages (over80) and they all used their brains a lot.

does the brain resemble a computer with hardware and software?

and how can i respond to the question"what if you dont' believe that ther is a soul...that....uh....horror ....you think love is a chemical imbalance..."

if you don't want to bother explaining this...can you give me a site that explaines this?

thanks....

Tau

I don't know much about the rest of your questions, but I can answer this one. If they have time for it, you can show them this snopes page on the myth. For an immediate response, you might ask: "Why do we never hear of people who get head wounds of some sort, but suffer no mental damage because the wound only hurt the 90% of the brain they didn't use?"

sakrilege

Tau already answered the 10% myth, so I'll try this one. It is not true that thinking kills neurons. What does happen is connections between neurons will increase with learning more things, but existing connections between neurons can also change. Forgetting things is more a matter of connections being rewired rather than neurons dying.

ps418

From what I've read, memory is not thought to be stored in neurons per se, but in the form of connections between many neurons that fire together (neurons that 'fire together wire together'). You can find a lot of information by google searchign for "long term potentiation."

That's not a question, its an assertion. You could hold that there are brain states that correspond to feelings of affection and so forth, without reducing the emotion to being "just" a chemical state. Emotions need not be unreal or unimportant or whatever just becaue they have some kind of physiological underpinning.

Anecdote: In some cases however I do think its much more helpful to try to understand emotions as arising from brain states. For instance, when I was 20 I took MDMA for the first time, 3 days in a row. I had a great time. However, after the third day, I suddenly became profoundly depressed, for no apparent reason whatsoever, and stayed that way for several days, after which my mood gradually returned to normal. Much later I found out that this was a common occurence, and that MDMA use can damage serotonergic neurons, and over the short term can caused depletion of serotonin. In cases like that, even if I believed in a soul, as I did at the time, I would have no problem concieving of a brain state producing an emotional state.


Patrick