Neurons, DNA, Memory and Learning

[Feeble Wonk]

It gets pretty complicated really. There are a lot of feed back mechanisms with various neural connections between different areas of the brain. There's biochemistry involving neurotransmitter release that can trigger or inhibit nerve impulse transmission. But, the general idea is that as you learn something (how to respond to a given stimuli, motor skills, etc.), changes develop in the synaptic connections within the brain to facilitate the learned behavior more efficiently... more reflexively. Some nerve cells do change their shapes somewhat in the process, but it is not that structural change that achieves anything. It's the new synaptic connections that develop that change the function of the brain.
Having said all of this, it seems to me that you might be struggling with a deeper more subtle idea regarding memory, which is the experience of mental "qualia". That starts moving into a philosophical discussion regarding the nature of consciousness, but we're really supposed to avoid that on this forum. You can google "qualia" to get a better idea of what I'm referring to. You might pay particular attention to the "neurobiological blending of perspectives" portion if you prefer to concentrate on the neurophysiological subject matter.

 

[icakeov]

Yah, I would love to avoid going into philosophy on this too.
I am just trying to wrap my head around understanding the retaining of memory.
DNA holding information is very clear, how it "stores" it and where and how it distributes it and creates new cells and so on.
But when it comes to memory/information, it seems much muddier, since clearly, it is a very complex system. So far, I am understanding it as "complex circuit information patterns of reinforced synapses" that can get reinforced or not, depending on stimulation.

 

[Feeble Wonk]

That's the nuts and bolts of it, yes.

 

[DiracPool]

So far, I am understanding it as "complex circuit information patterns of reinforced synapses" that can get reinforced or not, depending on stimulation.

That's pretty close. Sort of concluding all the discourse above, the best way to look at brain function is as a system that internally generates its own pattern structures based on the very complex arrays of synaptic "weight" distributions between and among the neurons. The brain is organized into hierarchical systems where these dynamics unfold. We can break these down into simplicity as constituting 3 basic layers or levels; macroscopic, mesoscopic, and microscopic. Macroscopic deals with the dynamics between major brain regions, or what we call "interareal" dynamics, mesoscopic dynamics deals with the interactions within any given cytoarchitectonic brain region, such as visual cortex V1, V2, TEO, TE etc. Microscopic dynamics deals with interactions between neurons within and between individual cortical "columns" and mini-columns, as it were.

The collection of all these regions is always active all the time and is doing something...What it is doing depends on the situation. If you are sitting around on the couch like a couch potato, it may be self-generating random internal patterns that you interpret as daydreams. If there's a knock on the door it's going to trigger a locomotor chaotic attractor to ambulate you towards that door. If your limbic system is sensitized because you're hungry and you see a food ad on TV, then you are going to ambulate toward your fridge. If you are not hungry then that ambulatory attractor will not be triggered.

To put it simply, the brain does not simply "respond" to stimuli as in a stimulus-response paradigm, the brain is always creating something internally regardless of what happening in the environment, even if that something is just sitting on the couch. It will expend a great deal of energy and glucose just to watch the latest "Blue bloods" episode. And if no other stimuli is around, it will create it's own patterned "thoughts," so to speak. But typically, what it does it churn it's own wheel in a direction that is fed to it by external sensory stimuli. In other words, the brain is not dependent on sensory stimulation to drive it's dynamics, it can do just fine without it. But when that sensory stimulation comes in, what it does is influence/direct the "tornado" of chaotic activity that is already self-generated in the brain to in order to trigger an appropriate chaotic attractor that has been reinforced/rewarded in previous experience to deal with the current situation.

 

[SeanS6]

The understanding of how the brain does what it does is at the alchemy stage. A proto-science if you like. You can reasonably take the position that each of the 100 billion neurons in the brain can store only about 1 byte. In which case a current computer you could buy for less than $20,000 is as powerful as the human brain, however with no clue as to the algorithms to run on it. At the other extreme is Penrose's quantum mechanic view of the brain in which case emulation with even the most powerful digital computer would be hopeless. There is some evidence that particular biochemical molecules have been evolved to have very specific quantum behavior.

 

[icakeov]

Here's another question about the brain:

I wonder if there has been any research in figuring out specifically which parts of the brain are involved in the processes that allow humans (and some other social animals) to have the "theory of mind" ability? Would that be only the pre-frontal cortex or some other parts too? (including the amygdala of course)

Also, humans clearly have the ability of performing high end rational, computational functions, and the ability to ask and answer the question "why", and be able to say things like "I know that you know that I know". Have by any chance these functions been assigned to a specific area in the brain that only humans (and no other animals) possess?

 

[DiracPool]

Would that be only the pre-frontal cortex or some other parts too? (including the amygdala of course)

The amygdala is, at best, distally related to any "theory of mind" capacity. You're more on the mark with the prefrontal cortex. Again, as I've said in other posts, it is not helpful to try to compartmentalize brain functions with specific regions. In the literature, we call this "localizationalist" models of brain function. "Theory of mind" models are well-presented in the literature, but they are at present speculative enough to be be relegated to the psychological journals.

 

[DiracPool]

And thanks DiracPool. I am really realizing after reading all the answers here why it is said that the brain is such a complex system.
With the way it works, it sounds like, the brain as a whole is constantly active, and depending on what environment a specific organism is in, it will learn different things, perhaps not the best learning at times when the brain is not exposed to it, but the neurons are firing regardless, hungry to accumulate learning.

Yeah, another book I recommend is Walter Freeman's "Society of brains."

https://www.amazon.com/dp/0805820175/?tag=pfamazon01-20

It was actually (still is) a favorite book of mine. I held out to get the paperback version cause I'm a cheap a#$. But I did meet him at a conference in 2003 in Memphis and had him sign the book. Of course, somehow I lost the book.

The principal message in that book, though, is that the brain is a dynamic system that creates it's own activity, it doesn't necessitate external stimuli for the most part. What the brain does is USE environmental stimuli to drive behavior. This as opposed to a model where the environmental stimuli DRIVES behavior. This is an important distinction.

 

[icakeov]

Basically, since it is impractical to segregate brain functions into specific brain areas, because they are so deeply integrated throughout the whole brain, perhaps it would be a bit more descriptive and helpful to say that for this specific example, it is the "socially intelligent species" that have developed brain capacities of "theory of mind" and "empathy". Keeping it descriptive like this could be much more practical than trying to point out a specific brain area, except of course, for the prefrontal cortex, as one example of a brain part that performs very specific task in certain species.
And thanks for that book recommendation, I will check it out, sounds really interesting and exactly what I am looking for to answer all these questions. :)

 

[icakeov]

Here is another thing I am curious about:
Instant traumatic emotional conditioning. If it takes a brain many reinforcements to learn something, how is it that when it comes to traumatic experiences, something can be conditioned in an instant, for life?
Is this some kind of a big "cluster" of reinforced patters firing back to back a thousand times in a few seconds, creating a very strong neural pathway?
Or is there some other procedure, perhaps a simpler one, at work?

 

[atyy]

Here is another thing I am curious about:
Instant traumatic emotional conditioning. If it takes a brain many reinforcements to learn something, how is it that when it comes to traumatic experiences, something can be conditioned in an instant, for life?
Is this some kind of a big "cluster" of reinforced patters firing back to back a thousand times in a few seconds, creating a very strong neural pathway?
Or is there some other procedure, perhaps a simpler one, at work?

I think this is not fully understood. However, simple considerations like what you mention suggest there are, as said before, different types of learning in different parts of the brain. They differ in whether they constantly store memories, or only when memories are "emotional" enough, as well as in how many times something has to happen before it is remembered, or how quickly it is forgotten.

You can google "one-shot learning" to see what you get. There are animal models too, eg. the link given in post #7.

 

[icakeov]

Here's another question, this one is more in lines of memory/learning/communication transfer between different species.
Although we can't "talk' to whales, dogs or cats, we clearly are able to communicate with them on some level. I am imagining that there is certain types of interactions that we share with animals, perhaps on an emotional level? Or authoritarian level?
I've read stories of children running away from home and being adopted by wolves for a few years. And similarly, humans have pet animals that they coexist with.
But can any of this "co-living" be labeled as proper "social communication and/or interaction"?
I found this chart that seems to be pretty descriptive:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_relation
Where on this list would the interaction between humans and their pets be? And vice versa, if a human lived amongst animals (another example that comes to mind is that guy that hangs out with lions and hyenas)
Even thought we can't pass on mathematics on to our pet cats, can we pass on behavioral learning. Can we "compare" or "equate" the learning cats get to the ones humans have. Do they have same (or similar) types of neural pathways that deal with that kind of learning? Or are they in their "own world", acquiring type of learning in their neural pathways that is completely different from ours? I would imagine it would be basically the same, as all mammals evolved to have the amygdala, unless its function drastically changed since we parted in evolution from our ancestors.
On that note, I can imagine that cetaceans might have a way of thinking and communicating that is completely foreign to us and we couldn't understand even if we tried, mainly because our brains don't have the cortex evolved in the same way as them.

 

[DiracPool]

Where on this list would the interaction between humans and their pets be? And vice versa, if a human lived amongst animals (another example that comes to mind is that guy that hangs out with lions and hyenas)
Even thought we can't pass on mathematics on to our pet cats, can we pass on behavioral learning. Can we "compare" or "equate" the learning cats get to the ones humans have. Do they have same (or similar) types of neural pathways that deal with that kind of learning? Or are they in their "own world", acquiring type of learning in their neural pathways that is completely different from ours? I would imagine it would be basically the same, as all mammals evolved to have the amygdala, unless its function drastically changed since we parted in evolution from our ancestors.
On that note, I can imagine that cetaceans might have a way of thinking and communicating that is completely foreign to us and we couldn't understand even if we tried, mainly because our brains don't have the cortex evolved in the same way as them.

I think you're pretty much on the mark here. Humans have the ability to use a formal structure to perform operations on recorded manifestations of stimuli in an unhindered fashion. This is what gives rise to language, art, mathematical ability, and the "texting" phenomenon in teenagers. Non-human animals do not have this capacity, but they pretty much have everything else.

 

[icakeov]

I'm pondering another angle to this thread.
Which animals have the capacity to culturally transmit information?
I saw a reference from the "thinking ape" book that intelligence is ability to respond flexibly to new or complex situations, to learn and to innovate, and social intelligence the ability to pass on to others this new innovated information that is not genetic.
And currently there are a few identified socially intelligent animals besides humans, such as cetaceans, apes, elephants, then there is crows, rats, more birds. Even fish seem to be able to do simple copying behaviors, such as "follow" the movement of their school and retain that information, which I imagine wouldn't necessarily fall into the category of "intelligence" as they don't necessarily respond to complex situations nor innovate.
I am wondering if there is any information out there that describes a necessary prerequisite for an animal species to be able to start culture transmission amongst their brains? For example, certain part of the brain that would have evolved at one point, without which no animal can stand a chance to retain and transmit information in their community through generations?
Hope I was clear enough with this question. Thanks again :)