We are our brains! Yes, literally!

Everything we do or feel is because of the material embedded inside the top portion of our heads.

Our senses such as touch, vision, taste, hearing etc. are pictures built by our “crowning achievement of evolution” (brains for scientists). Our perception of the world is only brain generated! Sensory organs simply act as transducers ( devices that convert variations in a physical quantity, such as pressure or brightness, into an electrical signal, or vice versa). For example, light travels through the eye and causes photoreceptor neurons to fire action potentials. In that way, stimuli (ex. light) are turned into action potentials.

How do we perceive things? The answer is essentially that certain neurons firing is highly correlated with certain perceptions. For example, there are certain neurons in visual areas of the brain that always fire when a bar of light is directed a certain way. Other neurons always fire in response to more complex stimuli, like two parallel lines moving counterclockwise. As you get further and further along a pathway, neurons respond to more and more complex features. When you have, say a square with a rectangle in it and a triangle on top of it, along with contextual information of the sound of kids playing and the smell of a garden, you'll infer that it's a house. So, we perceive things based on the neurons that fire.

Cells fire, neurotransmitters cross synapses, and brain regions light up- forming or evoking a particular memory of a sensory experience. Neuroscientists can open up your skull and stimulate certain areas in your brain giving you the sensation of tasting chicken or smelling roses or even having sex. Our sensory organs simply collect the information. Our brain then interprets and integrates this input into an emergent sensory experience that we can then "feel". Without the brain painting the picture for you, sense organs are useless!

In some studies, neurologists watched brain scans to see which neurons fired while people and monkeys observed other people and monkeys perform specific actions or experience specific emotions. They determined that a set of neurons in the observer “mirrors” what they saw happening in the observed. If you are watching an athlete, for example, the neurons that are associated with the same muscles the athlete is using will fire. Our muscles don’t move, and sadly there’s no virtual workout or health benefit from watching other people exert themselves, but the neurons do act as if we are mimicking the observed. This mirror effect goes for emotional signals as well. When we see someone frown or smile, the neurons associated with those facial muscles will fire. But—and here’s the significant part—the emotional neurons associated with those feelings fire as well. Visual and auditory clues trigger empathetic neurons. And we feel what others are feeling!

Do we really see exactly the way the world around is? No! Sometimes our brains create an illusionary world around us.

What we see is actually a perception created by our brain from what's actually being captured by our eye. For one thing, eye's light receptors are not smoothly distributed, and it has a big hole roughly in the center of it. If our brain doesn't modify it, we would see things as being distorted and has a big hole in the center of it. But we don't! So the magic of the brain is it's capable to patch them up and create a perception of a smooth view. How does the brain do it? It patches up from our experience of how a view supposed to be. Really.

If you find this hard to believe, see this following picture:

The color of the rectangles marked A and B are actually the same, but our brain gives a perception that they have a different color!

See the cylinder and its shadow. These two things fit our perception nicely of how they should appear and affect the look of the checker box. By then, our brain concludes that the rectangle B must have a darker color, because it's being covered by the shadow from the cylinder. But our brain also knows that it cannot be too dark as it must be the whiter part of the checker box. Thus even though rectangle A and B have the same color, our brain decides that we must look a whiter look of rectangle B. Hence we perceive it as having a different color. It looks very very convincing, but they're not!

Here is the proof that the colors of those two rectangles are the same:

 Images Source: WIKIpedia

For our brain, all those colors, shapes, smells, touches, etc, are just combination from bunches of electrical signals in its trillions of synapses. It builds its perception only from those electrical signals. Thus it has no problem to build whatever perceptions and models it needs to. What we see need not be what the world really is.

Yes, this is an illusionary world. The philosophers are right when they say this!

If scientists say we can see without our eyes, taste without our tongues, hear without our ears they are speaking the truth!

Have you heard about the Bionic eyes? A bionic eye is a prosthetic vision device - a retinal implant, placed at the back of the eye to restore a sense of vision for people with profound vision loss due to degenerative conditions of the retina. An external camera captures the visual scene and sends data to the implant. In a bionic eye, the visual display is bypassed and send the electrical signals from each pixel in the camera to the array of stimulating electrodes positioned on the eye. When placed into the eye of a blind patient, the electrodes stimulate the nerve cells that would normally receive input from the absent photoreceptors. The nerve cells have no idea that the electrical stimulation they are experiencing is coming through a man-made electrode array: they interpret the signals as if they were coming from normal photoreceptors. As a result, they send the information to the brain, which in turn experiences a pattern of electrical signals that replicates those experienced via the normally functioning eye.

Bionic Lens ( Art work by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa )

 http://www.kkartfromscience.com

In addition to the neurons of the eye, researchers have also targeted the brain to stimulate artificial vision in humans. Early experimentation in epileptic patients with persistent seizures by German neurologists and neurosurgeons Otfrid Förster in 1929 and Fedor Krause and Heinrich Schum in 1931, showed that electrical stimulation of an occipital pole, the most posterior part of each brain hemisphere, resulted in sensations of light flashes, termed phosphenes. By the mid-1950s, Americans John C. Button, an osteopath and later MD, and Tracy Putnam, then Chief of Neurosurgery at Cedars-Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles, had implanted stainless steel wires connected to a simple stimulator into the cortices of four people who were blind, and the patients subsequently reported seeing flashes of light.

The first functional cortical visual prosthesis was produced in England in 1968, when Giles Brindley, a physiologist, and Walpole Lewin, a neurosurgeon, both at Cambridge University, implanted 80 surface electrodes embedded in a silicone cap in the right occipital cortex of a patient. Each electrode connected to one of 80 corresponding extracranial radio receivers, which generated simple, distinctly located phosphene shapes. The patient could point with her hand to their location in her visual field. When more than one electrode at a time was stimulated, simple patterns emerged.

The subsequent aim was to provide patients with visual images comprising discrete sets of phosphenes—in other words, artificial vision. Scientists had begun studying electrical stimulation of the visual cortex in the late 1960s with sighted patients undergoing surgery to remove occipital lobe tumors. Implanted surface-electrode arrays, first temporarily, then permanently, in the visual cortices of several blind volunteers were used. However, it was not until the early 2000s that the technology became available to connect a miniature portable camera and computer to the electrodes for practical conversion of real-world sights into electrical signals. With the resultant cortical stimulation, a patient was able to recognize large-print letters and the outline of images!

Today, with the use of wireless technology, a number of research groups are aiming to improve cortical vision prostheses, hoping to provide benefit to millions of people with currently incurable blindness. One promising device is the Gennaris bionic-vision system, which comprises a digital camera on a glasses frame. Images are transmitted into a small computerized vision processor that converts the picture into waveform patterns, which are then transmitted wirelessly to small electronic tiles that are implanted into the visual cortex located in the back of the brain. Each tile houses 43 penetrating electrodes, and each electrode may generate a phosphene. The patterns of phosphenes will create 2-D outlines of relevant shapes in the central visual field.

Need more proof?

And here is another one...

Our brains can taste without our tongues!

Stimulating the "taste cortex" in the brain was enough to trick mice into thinking they'd tasted sweet or bitter substances, when in fact their tongues tasted nothing at all.

What scientists have discovered just a few years ago is that there are regions of the brain—regions of the cortex—where particular fields of neurons represent these different tastes again, so there's a sweet field, a bitter field, a salty field, etcetera.

Nick Ryba, a sensory neuroscientist at the National Institutes of Health, US and his colleagues found that you can actually taste without a tongue at all, simply by stimulating the "taste" part of the brain—the insular cortex. They ran the experiment in mice with a special sort of brain implant—a fiber-optic cable that turns neurons on with a pulse of laser light. And by switching on the "bitter" sensing part of the brain, they were able to make mice pucker up, as if they were tasting something bitter—even though absolutely nothing bitter was touching the tongues of the mice.

In another experiment, the researchers fed the mice a bitter flavoring on their tongues—but then made it more palatable by switching on the "sweet" zone of the brain. "What we were doing here was adding the sweetness, but only adding it in the brain, not in what we were giving to the mouse." Think adding sugar to your coffee—but doing it only in your mind. The findings appear in the journal Nature (1).

Ryba says the study suggests that a lot of our basic judgments about taste—sweet means good, bitter means bad—are actually hard-wired at the level of the brain.

Can we make people hear without ears? Yes, yes and yes! The human ears only collect sound waves. They then translate these sound waves into electrical impulses and send it to the brain. The brain translates these impulses into actual sounds (that you hear). If you can directly send the electrical signals (which represent the voice) straight to the target's brain, then the targeted person will "hear" sound without actually hearing it through the ears. The ears is completely bypass in this "hearing process" (evidence of this type of communication was reported in an article in the DISCOVER Magazine of June 1993. The researchers reported: "They have enable deaf people to talk on the phone again by putting electrodes into the ears of deaf people" & "they've made a blind woman see patterns of light by putting electrodes in the back of her brain".

Seeing is really chemical reactions in your retina setting off chains of impulses in the optic nerve. Your brain can remember the sight of, say, the sky by recreating the patterns of neural firings in the visual cortex that happened the last time you saw the sky. Hearing consists of nerve impulses triggered by the vibrations of tiny hairs in your inner ear; your brain remembers sounds by storing the resulting patterns of activation of your auditory cortex. You see with your mind's eye and hear with your mind's ear by setting off patterns of neural activation in the relevant brain areas similar to the ones that happened when you had the original sensation.

Sense memories can act together to form memories of memories -- chains of neural activation set off by other chains of neural activation. Your memory of a person is a complex network of stored sights, sounds, smells and touches, plus your reactions to those sights/sounds/smells/touches, plus your reactions to those reactions, plus your reactions to recalling the memories of your reactions to your reactions, and so on.

The desire to recall something triggers a chemical reaction that activates neurons that lead to the memory. Upon finding the memory another series of chemical/neuron events establish the perception of the event in your cortex. The triggers are paths of neurons to the memory created by the senses. Repetition and strong emotional states strengthen these paths as well as the richness of the memory stored.

And what is consciousness?.......

Scientists studied the brain activity of Ariel Sharon, the former Israeli prime minister, during his coma. Although he has never woken up, he showed normal brain activity on an fMRI scan when listening to the voices of his family members compared to when those voices were scrambled into meaningless sounds. But does that mean that he was in some way conscious? Perhaps, as Dr. Nicholas Schiff, professor of neuroscience and anesthesiology at Cornell noted It might help to think of consciousness as more of a spectrum rather than an all-or-nothing state. In fact, there are clearly levels of awareness, not just “aware” or “unaware.” Consciousness is a brain process. It’s not an on-off switch, it’s an emergent property.

That’s the latest thinking among neuroscientists about what distinguishes conscious brain activity and unconsciousness. They are also realizing that consciousness doesn’t seem to be entirely localized to any specific brain region. While some areas are clearly more important than others, people don’t  automatically lose consciousness when one particular brain area is shut down, but rather when multiple regions are disconnected from each other. How many connections need to be severed before consciousness becomes impossible— and which ones matter most and where— are questions that experts are still investigating.

Very importantly, whatever we do or say is based on the cognizance of our brains. This understanding makes us comprehend people and the world around us in a better and humane manner! For instance, if a person behaves badly with me I try to understand that his or her brain is configured differently from mine and therefore the person is having a different world to mine and is finding it difficult to understand in the way I grasp the situation we are in.

Our behaviour is nothing more or less than our brain activity, and brain activity is a function of our genes and our environment. When we punish an individual for bad behaviour , then, we're not reprimanding poor choices, we are punishing differently oriented electrical and chemical events in the brain! Sometimes we cannot change people from bad ways without changing these brain chemical and electrical orientations and configurations. Yes, this is true!

Our bodies cannot exist without our brains. Therefore, medical practitioners treat a brain that has ceased all functions as the mark of the death of that person. Brain death is the real death. We are our brains. Without them we don't exist.

References:

1. http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature15763...