fcuk

I am not a mother, lisarea, but I know several women who are. They all say that once you bring another human into this world, you are forever attuned to the needs of not only your child, but everyone else's child as well!

My mother would always turn around in panic whenever she heard a childish voice say "Mommy?" in a store, even if the voice was not even close to resembling mine or my sibling. She would say that she always "heard" it as our voices, simply because she was always ready to come to our defence.

galiel

It is just that, crap.

First of all, it is a misunderstanding of evolution, namely how characteristics are genetically imprinted and then transferred. This does not happen from personal experience or memory, in a "Lamarkian" fashion. Our DNA code does not "evolve" due to experience during our lifetimes or that of any other organism.

Second, there is no substrate or known mechanism to encode individual "memories" in DNA. Individual memories of individual experience are a function of intelligence, not life. One can be alive without memory (as our recent elections prove). One can have memory without being alive (witness this machine I am typing on). The two are not necessarily linked.

Third, when we commit something to memory we do not, in fact, imprint it on our DNA. This is simply factually incorrect. When we commit something to memory, we create new synaptic connections between brain cells. This is verified fact.

Part of the problem in all these discussions is that brain science has moved so far beyond public awareness, so far beyond the textbooks an popular media reports. We know so much more about the electro-chemical and physical nature of thought than we did just ten years ago. This is the public's fault, but it does hamper these kind of discussions. Premonition is no longer considered a scientifically valid concept, and the illusion of premonition has been quite thoroughly explained as the result of certain brain processes.

One of the basic differences between brain-scientists' understanding of the brain and the uninformed layperson's understanding is that scientists know that many, many things that appear quite real to individual brains, aren't in fact. For example, people studying the phenomenon of phantom limbs know how "real" the sensations amputees experience are, how indistinguishable from actual sensations generated by stimulation of nerves endings.

When you understand that the brain interprets the information it recieves, in a GIGO (garbage in, garbage out) method, there is nothing miraculous about this, or about NDE's or sensations of divine "presence". These are caused (and can, in a laboratory, be quite reliably stimulated electically in anyone's brain) by stimuli that are so similar to stimuli caused by authentic nervous experiences that the brain can't initially distinguish between the two. This, incidentally, is also the mechanism behind "false memories".

It's all just chemicals and electricity and cell division and connection. Overwhelming, consistent, reproducible and openly exminable experimental evidence and observation have shown that that is all it is, no matter how passionately and irrationally people want to believe otherwise.

There is no more evidence of a soul, or of supernatural phenomena such as premonition, than there is of god.

echidna

While I utterly agree with your post, I also feel the need to add somewhere the phrase “extremely complex”.

Many laypeople when they hear “all just chemicals and electricity and cell division and connection”, misinterpret this to mean “simple” & then respond with incredulity & scorn.

While I appreciate the reductionist interpretations of brain function, I cannot but help also stepping back in stunned awe of the overall achievement.

Echidna
(former Lamarkian but still agnostic over how neurologists can explain self-awareness)

Marduk

“We know so much more about the electro-chemical and physical nature of thought than we did just ten years ago. “

galiel, can you recommend a good book on this? (I’m not a biologist, so nothing too technical) I’m curious about the ‘thoughts having mass business’ No, not the Catholic mass

elwoodblues

Well, you don't have to go to Lamarkian lengths to think that some of these things are based in our DNA.

The human beings who felt what we call 'fear' when they saw a snake survived more effectively than other human beings who walked their damned fool selves up and poked at the snake without an ounce of fear in them. In some of these cases, that fear would be an indirect result of certain DNA patterns. So, we pass on a fear of snakes (and spiders and darkness and fire) to our decendents.

galiel

That is not memory. The "fear" of snakes was not imprinted on the individual DNA of people who were afraid of snakes. A combination of natural variation of DNA among individuals in a species along with mutations result in a mix of the population, some of whom possess a fear of snakes and some of whom do not. As you said, the odds favor those who do, and eventually those DNA characteristics prevail.

Nowhere in this process does "imprinting memory" take place.

galiel

You are completely correct. The process of human brain functioning is extremely complex, quite possibly the single most complex process to arise from natural causes (at least so far as we temporarily Earth-bound humans know).

As for self-awareness, you might be interested to know that researchers have gone even farther; there has been recently intense study into the nature of "intuition", and discoveries have been made that allow organizations to actually "teach" intuition (this is something that has caused the U.S. Marine Academy to completely revise the way they train soldiers to function efficiently in times of extreme stress and urgency.) Much research is going on right now with regard to understanding short-term and long-term memory. This is considered the most exciting field at the moment.

Believe me, I find it as difficult to comprehend and seemingly nonintuitive as quantum physics, but the fact is we are advancing toward a complete understanding of the physical processes that produce self-awareness. I'm not saying a breakthrough is close, but an evolutionary understanding of what literally makes us tick is not a far off as many people seem to think.

[Disclaimer: I speak as an enthusiastic layperson fan of scientific research, not as a credentialed scientist myself; I inevitably commit errors of simplification, omission and misunderstanding in some of these posts, but, believe me, I do my best to eliminate them. One way I do so is never to post merely from memory; I always check a live source or two before I talk about it. I wish more bona fide cuting-edge scientists would take a more public stance and increase popular awareness of their exciting research.]

elwoodblues

Yes, you're absolutely right. But DNA can be involved in brain structures. This complicates matters. It is conceivable that this can be somehow involved. Not likely by any means, but it's in the realm of the possible that there may be some unidentified mechanism at work here.

I'm very skeptical, as well, and wouldn't actually endorse this as anything more than pissing in the dark. But there's so much we don't know about the brain; it's very difficult to make any kind of sweeping statement, even in the negative. Unlikely? Yes. Impossible? I wouldn't say so.

galiel

I'll have to research that one for you. There are so many sources of online information, perr-reviewed magazines, conferences, etc., but books are a bit out-of-date by the time they are finished being written, let alone getting published--and the scientists involved in the most exciting research don't have the time to write them.

I will enquire of some researchers in the field and see if they can make any recommendations for books that are comprehensive and up-to-date, but not too technically dense for us laypeople.

I don't think you will find any discussion of "thoughts having mass" in any reputable scientific book, journal or other publications, however. That is purely pseudo-science.

echidna

To be honest I’d place self-awareness as more base than intuition.

So far the best I’ve seen is the evolutionary theory that the brain creates consciousness as an entity to “externally” monitor the function of the whole if even from the inside. But the nuts & bolts of how it does that are somewhat sketchy to say the least.