Status Updates From The Mind & the Brain: Neuro...

Constraint-Induced Movement Therapy (CIMT) enabled stroke patients to regain function in their affected limbs in as little as two weeks, yielding a remarkable 97% improvement in functional recovery.

Vocab words, look these up:
- somatosensory system
- Cortical representation
- erogenous
- The Brain Map (Cortical Homunculus)

The brain can use areas of the brain and different synapses to re-wire them for different tasks. Even when a portion of the brain is removed, the tasks that portion of the brain is responsible for can be transferred to different areas to share the load. Wow!

It’s so common these days to recognize that your OCD is not your “ true self”. But rather something else that hasn’t effect on you. Even with other disorders/disabilities. It’s very common to consider yourself separate from “ whatever is wrong with you”

The orbital frontal cortex is responsible for generating the feeling of “ something is wrong here”

They compared a normal functioning rate to an automatic transmission and an OCD brain to a sticky manual transmission - at times having difficulty shifting gears. The orbital frontal cortex is either hyperactive or prevented from being adequately active.

Consciousness - why did nature bother to produce beings with subjective inner consciousness and inner experience ?

Mental does not change with physical change to accompany.

Does the brain produce mind?

Matter alone does not make up the mind entirely, there is a component of mentalness that does not have a physical component but it's definitely exists

The mind is a machine and the body is subject to mechanistic rules

An interesting point in western thought, There exist in unbridgeable divide between the world of the mind and the world of matter

Julien Offray de La Mettrie described the brain as the “organ of thinking” and maintained that brain size determines mental capacity.

This book is very cool and there are many interesting points to think on.

Last thing I heard before taking a break: a neural state is not a mental state. So interesting how we can observe how the brain physically changes due to stimulus like color, sound, and memory. While this feels like I’m listening to a textbook, I do enjoy the facts and I do enjoy hearing about the research.

Interesting how the intro is drawing a comparison between the mind and the brain. This entire conversation about neuroplasticity is very interesting to me. It makes me wonder how the neurons forged new pathways physically in the brain. At some point, the brain is literally growing and connecting itself to other areas. All on its own.