#8 neurology marries psychology

#8 Neurology Marries Psychology

Transcript Philosophy Unveiled 8Welcome to episode 8 of the series Philosophy Unveiled, by the author Lane Friesen. This is Rachel, and I’ll by doing the reading today.Our previous episode completed Part 1 of the series. We covered two main ideas. First, philosophers appear to have differing cognitive styles, and secondly, this difference in consciousness allows us to work out the structure of the brain. This episode begins Part 2 of the series. We’re moving to psychology because this gives us the connections between regions. These connections define loops, and this enables working memory.Let’s begin with a simple definition of ‘working memory.’ Working memory is a circuit that cycles from one place to another, and then comes back again. Thoughts can only develop when components move in a loop, so that the end builds up and maintains the beginning. Some circuits may be quite complex: In the body, for instance, blood leaves the heart, and travels through multiple tiny capillaries before returning to the initial pumping station. It doesn’t matter that the loop is complicated; still, it’s a circuit, and that’s the important thing.It happens that cognitive styles also cycle their way to consciousness, and this too is somewhat complex. There is a theory that describes some of the possible paths. I refer of course to the description, with the trademarked name that we cannot use, which speaks of Thinking, Feeling, iNtuition and Sensing, and that for legal reasons we will therefore rename MBNI. Why does a description of the mind require MBNI in addition to cognitive styles? I’ll say it in one sentence: MBNI GIVES THE WIRING DIAGRAM OF THE HIPPOCAMPO-SEPTAL STRUCTURE IN THE HUMAN BRAIN. The hippocampus is a central region in the lower middle of each of the two hemispheres of the brain. Its role was discovered many decades ago from the misfortunes of a child called HM: “When HM was nine years old,” we read, “a head injury in a bicycle accident left him with debilitating epilepsy. To relieve his seizures that could not be controlled in any other way, surgeons removed parts of HM’s hippocampus and adjoining brain regions. The operation succeeded in reducing the brain seizures but inadvertently severed the mysterious link between short-term and long-term memory. Information destined for what is known as declarative memory - people, places, events - must pass through the hippocampus before being recorded in the cerebral cortex. Thus, memories from long ago that were already stored in HM’s brain remained clear, but all his experiences of the present soon faded into nothing. HM saw his doctor on a monthly basis, but at each visit it was as if the two had never met.”How does the hippocampus relate to cognitive styles? Let’s just say for now that the ‘capillaries’ of cognitive style travel into the hippocampus through a mixing which generates MBNI entities. It turns out that MBNI Thinking, Feeling, iNtuition and Sensing are the things that go through the hippocampus, and not Perceiver, Mercy, Teacher and Server cognitive strategies. By the way, we’ve looked at Perceiver and Mercy, and seen that they are in the right hemisphere; Teacher and Server are the exact parallel in the left hemisphere - we’ll be discussing them more later. There are sixteen possible routes that Thinking, Feeling, iNtuition and Sensing can take through the hippocampus, and they are described by MBNI names such as ESFJ.The hippocampus does its translation from cognitive styles to MBNI entities in a very precise way. MBNI Sensing is an interweaving of Teacher and Server working memory, with Server strategy in charge. MBNI iNtuition is the same two strategies of Teacher and Server, but with Teacher thought in control. MBNI Thinking combines Mercy and Perceiver strategies, and puts Perceiver analysis in charge; MBNI Feeling is the same two strategies of Mercy and Perceiver, with Mercy thought this time in control.We notice that this MBNI mixing uses only four of the cognitive strategies. The other three - Exhorter, Contributor and Facilitator - coordinate what is happening. Exhorter strategy, it turns out, works with Teacher and Mercy thought, and provides the drive for the mind. Contributor analysis integrates Perceiver and Server modes, and does planning and optimization. Facilitator strategy is sort of a telephone switchboard for everything else.In a sense, MBNI also describes this division of labor between the initial four strategies of Mercy, Perceiver, Server, and Teacher, and the final three of Exhorter, Contributor and Facilitator. It does it by splitting up Sensing, Feeling, iNtuition and Thinking into Introverted and Extraverted segments - so that there is an Introverted Sensing as well as an Extraverted Sensing, and an Introverted Feeling as well as an Extraverted Feeling, and so on with iNtuition and Thinking. Extraverted Thinking, Extraverted Feeling, Extraverted Sensing and Extraverted iNtuition are actual physical brain areas in which Exhorter, Facilitator and Contributor strategies reside. We’ll be giving the details later. The four Introverted regions in contrast link to the other four styles of Mercy, Server, Teacher and Perceiver.Extraverted Thinking, for instance, includes the upper portion of the premotor region in the right hemisphere. Introverted Thinking reaches from areas in the superior temporal sulcus and the temporoparietal junction into the lower part of the premotor region in the right hemisphere. Extraverted Sensing and Introverted Sensing extend into symmetrical regions in the left hemisphere.Here’s a diagram of the way in which Exhorter, Contributor and Facilitator strategies coordinate thought, according to our current simplified model. We notice a dotted line, first of all, down the center. The brain has two halves, and this line represents the division between the two hemispheres of the brain. Things on the left side of the diagram are in the left hemisphere of the brain; things on the right side of the diagram are in the right hemisphere. The top of the drawing is the front of the brain; the bottom is the back. The picture thus represents the brain of some person who is looking up at the top of this page, as we look down on him from above.We can see, first of all, that Exhorter analysis moves information from left hemisphere Extraverted iNtuition, or EN, up to Introverted Sensing or IS. In a symmetrical manner, it also transfers data from right hemisphere Extraverted Feeling, or EF, up to Introverted Thinking or IT. The fact that Exhorter strategy lives equally in Extraverted iNtuition and in Extraverted Feeling means, of course, that there are wires extending across the hemispheres, which we are not depicting, and they are coordinating things - it turns out that these connections go way beyond a simple linking of one cortex to the other. Similarly, Facilitator analysis transfers data from left hemisphere Extraverted Sensing, or ES, down to Introverted iNtuition or IN. It also moves information from right hemisphere Extraverted Thinking, or ET, down to Introverted Feeling or IF. This again is coordinated by a whole lot of highly complex bilateral wiring across the hemispheres. We’ve depicted left hemisphere raw sensory input as entering in at the door of Extraverted Sensing. Right hemisphere sensory input in a symmetrical manner comes in at the Extraverted Thinking entrance. It turns out that these same regions of Extraverted Sensing and Extraverted Thinking are also planning buffers for Contributor strategy, which is the highest form of thought in the mind.I should add, for the neurologist, that some aspects of the Exhorter and Facilitator channels are highly unusual. The Exhorter link, for instance, is mediated in part by the chemical dopamine. The Facilitator channel represents top-down focusing. When we put it all together, though, the result is an elegant and quite wonderful machine - and it generates personality, speech, curiosity and love. All from wires, chemicals and little bits called neurons. Let’s look now at a second diagram. It contains the links between sections of cognitive style, as they are handled in the hippocampus and described by MBNI.We notice that the two diagrams are fully complementary - things missing in one illustration are found in the other. Cognitive style and MBNI turn out to interact very nicely; they in fact need each other. As we learned from HM and his bicycle accident, when the brain with its cognitive styles lacks the hippocampus and its MBNI modes, then nothing new can be learned.Let’s summarize what we have so far. The cognitive styles were distilled from a study of history. Brain regions can be determined from neurology. As we’ve seen so far, we can find out about consciousness from the philosophers. We’re currently examining psychology to give us the connections. By the end of Part Two, we’ll understand about connections and can start looking at loops. These loops determine personality. We now have all the tools to look at one of the loops. Let’s look at the loop of Judging.You remember that in Part One we worked out the right hemisphere of the brain, by looking at Locke, Berkeley and Descartes. You see right here in the diagram we have the same thing - it’s the right hemisphere. But we’ve got lots of arrows too. What do they mean?Let’s look at what we have in red. Start at the bottom. See the letter E: that represents Exhorter. And the letter P, above it, is Perceiver. Exhorter is in Extraverted Feeling; Perceiver is in Introverted Thinking, and that’s the connection we had in the very first diagram we presented of this session. You see also there’s a further connection from P to C; that’s an extra connection that hasn’t yet been discovered by psychology; we’ll be looking at it further.Now look at the connection from Facilitator down through Exhorter up to Mercy. We remember from philosophy that the Exhorter was Locke’s substratum, and that it helps to assign a label of pain and pleasure between Facilitator and Mercy analysis. If we wanted to simplify we could say it’s from Extraverted Thinking, Facilitator region, to the final destination of Mercy, Introverted Feeling. We can see, though, that philosophy let’s us know much more information than psychology.If we put all of the connections together, we see that they form a loop. A loop forms working memory, and that can become cognitive. We see that part of the Judging loop can actually break off and form its own small complete working memory loop. We’ll call it the Classification loop. Things here can break away totally from reality. If you look you see that Mercy strategy, where Berkeley was conscious, has nothing to do with it. That’s why Berkeley the Mercy said that it’s incoherent for things to depart from reality.We’ve looked so far at the right hemisphere, and we’ve seen that it has its own working memory circuit, the Judging loop. Now, in the left hemisphere there’s a parallel loop; it’s called Perceiving. But that’s not all. There are sixteen pathways between the two hemispheres and these are described by psychology, and when we put them together we’ll discover at least two dozen further working memory loops.OK, where are we going from here? In the next episode, we’ll be looking at the names for the pathways of these sixeen connections between the two hemispheres. They each have a name like INFJ and ENTJ. We’ll look at how to decode these names and how to map them on to the brain regions. That concludes episode eight of Philosophy Unveiled. Thank you for listening.