Neurons

[Holiday20310401]

How do neurons behave that constitute for intuition, logic, emotion, etc.?

I'm not looking for the correct answer, just rational speculation

[Didymos Thomas]

Neuron - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

For a better look, check out a psychology text book.

[Holiday20310401]

Yeah I suppose this isn't philosophy now. Sorry, but yeah duh I checked wikipedia

[Didymos Thomas]

The operation of the brain is interesting material. It may not be 'philosophy', but I think the study is useful to any philosopher.

Philosophers have become an important part of the field of cognitive science.

Cognitive Science (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

[Aedes]

There are billions of neurons, and there are many regions of the brain that coordinate things like sensory interpretation, emotion, language, and memory. While the biology of the individual neuron is central to this process, you're being too reductionistic if you're looking to the level of the individual neuron to explain cognitive things.

Better to look into some of the critical areas of the brain, like the frontal lobe, the hippocampus, and the amygdala to understand where some of our cognitive functions take root.

[Holiday20310401]

I should have explained myself better. Didymos, I enjoyed reading on the connectionism stuff. The way neurons are linked is interesting, and I'm wondering whether the neurons are linked differently through intuitive processes compared to critical thinking.

I read an article once on how the mind works to perceive time and there are these 'medium spiny neurons' that are connected to 30,000 other neurons which I suppose is a lot, and these are thought to help give humans the sense of time as in being able to distinguish 10 seconds from a minute.

[Aedes]

It's a good question, and I bet people have studied this at least ultrastructurally. What some cognitive scientists and applied philosophers are doing now is functional brain imaging while their study subjects are performing some kind of mental task. They can then see which parts of the brain have the most metabolic activity during such a task. There is almost certainly a difference in the areas of the brain that are active during conscious versus subconscious tasks. And it would only be a step further to see if the neurophysiology differs from one of these regions to another.

The problem is, these are descriptive associations and it's still a very blunt analytic tool. But it at least provides insight into the biology of one kind of thought versus another.

[Holiday20310401]

I was also wondering if the way neurons are linked, that there could be a few noticeable structural differences between the neurons of conscious and sub-conscious; or being that of intuition and critical thinking.

Like are neurons linked in a kinda way that I've studied the structural diagrams of hydrocarbons. There are aromatic structures, aliphatic, linear, polar, non-polar, chain, cyclic, etc.

[paulhanke]

Originally Posted by Holiday20310401

I was also wondering if the way neurons are linked, that there could be a few noticeable structural differences between the neurons of conscious and sub-conscious; or being that of intuition and critical thinking.

... could be! ... there are noticeable structural differences between the more ancient and more recent areas of the brain ... but what's totally fascinating is that the most recent area of the brain - the cortex - is structurally homogeneous yet at the same time a functional chameleon! ... it's the cortex that is in large part responsible for the "plasticity" of the human brain ... it's as if evolution, after experimenting with specialized structures for this and specialized structures for that, decided "To heck with this!" and invented a universal structure that can be applied in all sorts of contexts! ... now if only I could figure out what that universal structure is and patent it ... ... ...

[Holiday20310401]

"Recent"- meaning that the cortex was never always a part of the human brain?

So we couldn't truthfully draw a structural diagram of neuron links. I'd love to speculate on that. Perhaps get into analog systems being that I suppose the brain is a bit of binary and 'analogness'.