JAI VIGNAN
All about Science - to remove misconceptions and encourage scientific temper
Communicating science to the common people
'To make them see the world differently through the beautiful lense of science'
The breakthrough is the first to demonstrate how a person’s intention to say specific words can be gleaned from brain signals and turned into text fast enough to keep pace with natural conversation.Neuroscientists decoded people’s thoughts using brain scans. The method captured the gist of what three people thought, but only if they wanted it to
Researchers tried to compare the electrical activity inside our brains while gazing out upon the same scene, and running some statistical analysis designed to actually tell us whose brain activity indicates more richness(6).
One of the newest frontiers in the science of the mind is the attempt to measure consciousness’s “complexity,” or how diverse and integrated electrical activity is across the brain. Philosophers and neuroscientists alike hypothesize that more complex brain activity signifies “richer” experiences.
The idea of measuring complexity of brain processes stems from information theory — a mathematical approach to understanding how information is stored, communicated, and processed.
The approach to understanding richness is to look at how it changes in different mental states. Recent studies have found that measures of complexity are lowest in patients under general anesthesia, higher in ordinary wakefulness, and higher still in psychedelic trips, which can notoriously turn even the most mundane experiences — say, my view of the parking lot outside my office window — into profound and meaningful encounters.
Increasing richness isn’t just like cranking up the colour saturation of a picture or getting a bigger hard drive. It seems to imply an increase in the depth of how we experience the world. Complexity is what you see in the equations, richness is what that feels like in the mind.
Although measuring brain complexity is still in relative infancy, the nascent ability to gauge something like richness is a pretty incredible development — not only for neuroscience but for how we think about well-being more broadly. With innovations like these, we can go beyond the blurry questions of happiness, which doesn’t have an accepted neurological measure that can translate across social and cultural differences, and ask more targeted questions, like whether our experiences are richer. As these approaches mature, scientists might develop a deeper understanding of all the different, tractable ways that consciousness can change for the better.
Recent improvements to electroencephalography (EEG, those skull caps with a bunch of electrodes that measure the brain’s electrical activity) made it possible to look deeper inside the workings of the brain, opening the way for neuroscientist Giulio Tononi and biologist Gerald Edelman’s 1998 paper: Consciousness and Complexity.
Their publication was the first to propose a direct measure of the complexity of brain activity, an idea that matured into Integrated Information Theory, or IIT. According to IIT, consciousness arises where the underlying neural activity is both “integrated” and “differentiated.” Integration refers, roughly, to how synchronized electrical activity is across the brain. Differentiation is the diversity of that activity. You can think of them in terms of weaving a tapestry. Integration is how many different threads are woven in, while differentiation is the variety of colors used. Together, these two determine the complexity of a given state of consciousness. That, in turn, approximates its richness
The brain is constantly buzzing with electrical activity. Here's how scientists study the signals (7): Electricity is the language of the brain. Continuously, electrical impulses, also known as action potentials, are buzzing around between your ears. Your neurons, and the synaptic junctions where neurons meet, are bathed in a chemical bath — in the form of neurotransmitters like dopamine — that mediate the electrical activity in their neighboring cells. This is the reductive basis of neurological communication, and somewhat mysteriously, these interactions underpin every thought, feeling, or action you have ever experienced.
But as scientists have learned more about the brain, they’ve noticed that large-scale states of brain activity are also important in its overall function. Different regions of the brain are known to synchronize as they fire neurons in tandem at different frequencies. These neural oscillations, or brain waves, are thought to facilitate communication between different regions of the brain. That means that scientists need to look at all scales of brain activity, both at the cellular level and within these larger networks, in grappling with the task of understanding consciousness: If we focus too closely on, say, the individual firing of neurons, then we risk missing the bigger picture, like mistaking a single drop of water for the entirety of the ocean.
Meanwhile, blood oxygenation, also known as the hemoglobin response, is thought to be most tightly coupled with specific synaptic events that play a significant role in neurological communication.
Much like a digital camera or computer screen, an fMRI brain scan can be defined in units of spatial resolution, but with images in 3D, rather than 2D. These volumetric pixels are called voxels; in a typical scan a voxel might cover 3 cubic millimeters of tissue, a volume that would carry approximately 630,000 neurons.
Few brain scanning methods have better spatial resolution than fMRI, barring intracranial recordings like electrocorticography (ECoG) that can isolate activity from single cells. But these invasive techniques, where electrodes are placed directly on the brain, are limited to animal models or specific clinical contexts where patients suffer from conditions like epilepsy that require a high level of precision when locating seizures. By contrast, fMRI strikes a good balance between precision and coverage.
However, you can measure the quantity of thought activity in a brain but what about the quality of those thoughts?
What are good thoughts? That is a measure which is highly subjective. Of Course there are some guidelines that originated in the cultures and societies we live in. Thoughts that are useful to everyone around are good and selfish ones are bad. But that good and selfish are again subjective in nature. So the measurements become somewhat hazy and still in experimental stages.
Now let us deal with emotions and feelings.
(Image Source: ref 2)
Emotions are intense, instinctual responses that arise from the brain’s subcortical regions, serving as our immediate reaction to stimuli. Feelings, on the other hand, are our subjective interpretations of these emotions, shaped by personal experiences, thoughts, and social conditioning, and are processed in the neocortical regions of the brain. Understanding the “difference between feelings and emotions” provides valuable insights into human behavior, offering a window into the complexity of our internal worlds and how these worlds influence our external actions.
Another difference is the duration and intensity of emotions compared to feelings. Emotions are intense but brief, lasting for seconds to minutes, and are immediately triggered by specific events or stimuli . They are powerful but fleeting, reflecting the body’s immediate reaction to its environment.
Feelings, conversely, develop over a longer period and can last for hours, days, or even longer. They are less intense but more enduring, as they incorporate the emotion’s initial impact along with cognitive appraisal, making them more nuanced and reflective of the individual’s ongoing mental state.
How emotions are measured: They are measured in an objective way.
Objective methods for researching emotions primarily focus on the physiological aspects, offering quantifiable data on the body’s response to emotional stimuli. These methods include:
Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa
13
Apr 25