hi dude,

Am I getting this right?  Words have literal meanings of which the unconscious aware of and incongruently the conscious part isn't.  I can understand that especially in light of hypnotic language use, but, a word like 'reaction' just seems too complex to be better understood by unconscious processes.  I suspect I am missing some information that would help me understand your example.  Like I said, I know that words have nuances that influence the output behavior, but I can't see how "reaction" is inherently "dysfunctional" except by arbitrary definition. 

By the way, what does CC stand for?

The explanation of WAITING as a sub-process makes sense to me.  Funny feeling to think that we have also designated a whole class of people to literally wait on us for life.  Servants have the task to lead lives with no significant events of their own. 

sirhinojo



I

Hi dude,

We face the same problem all curious people do -life and the mind are incredibly complex. And there's a lot of information here so there's gonna be long mails and a lot to say. Some of it can really bake our noodles, but grasping the ideas is really worth it. If you're happy with that, on we go...

Sirhinojo wrote: Am I getting this right? Words have literal meanings of which the unconscious aware of and incongruently the conscious part isn't.

That's often true, but 'not being aware' is not the source of the incongruity. Incongruity happens when the conscious takes on a FALSE meaning and the unconscious knows the true one.
Example: if our unconscious believes that the color orange is a danger to us because it raises our blood pressure, there's no incongruity if the conscious mind doesn't know that. Only if the conscious mind believes something like 'this room will be much better now I'm painting it orange' -then we're in trouble. Because the unconscious is thinking, “No it wouldn't” and the conscious is thinking “Yes it would”.
When C/U believe opposite things, or things that contradict each other like this, we get incongruity. There's a lot of stuff about this going in T10 & T11, but for now here are some everyday examples that most people experience:
A The conscious mind thinks it knows what a 'good diet' is, but the unconscious knows the body & brain isn't getting what it needs.
B The conscious mind believes that whatever job we are doing is a good thing because it makes money, and the unconscious knows it's destroying our creativity and sending us down the road to alzhheimers.
C The conscious mind believes we need 'x' amount of sleep per night but the unconscious knows the body and brain need more.
D The conscious mind believes we feel love for someone but the unconscious knows we feel lust.
E The conscious believes that when people die they go to heaven, but the unconscious is grief stricken at the loss of a friend.
F The conscious mind is told that parents/teachers are smarter than us, but the unconscious knows they're dumb, dysfunctional and coercive.
It doesn't make sense.
Most people have these 'standard' incongruities and a whole lot more. Our task in NH is to cut through to the truth and get both ends of our consciousness continuum in agreement about reality, and to do that we need to look into the mind's ontology and beliefs and make sure they fit with the available evidence and the facts of reality. That's in T10 too.
The rabbit hole goes much deeper than words. Individual SOUNDS mean things to the unconscious. A steady heartbeat (or drum beat) in our ears is unconscious code for “all is well”. Sudden loud or harsh noises (and even a high wind) mean “danger”. Everything in our immediate experience tells us something, gives us unconscious information, and this sensitivity is only lost through lack of use or wronguse.
The combination of sounds in any word conveys information to the unconscious. This has nothing to do with what the word 'means' in a dictionary. If we have a dude called “Darth Vader” and a dude called “Anakin Skywalker” we know who the baddie is just from the sound of their names. If we had two alien dudes, one called “Boloba” and one called “Kiku”, and we tell you that one is short and fat and one is tall and thin, the unconscious automatically assumes that 'Boloba' will be the fatter, shorter dude and Kiku the tall thin one. If asked to guess “which one is probably the female alien?”, it would automatically say Kiku.
Okay let that bake our noodles for a moment before going on...the unconscious makes assumptions based on sound.
Now let's flip over the noodles and bake the other side by considering this: These unconscious  assumptions are correct. In reality, certain sounds do associate with certain conditions, good or bad, nasty or nice, harmful or beneficial. In reality, sound affects our neurotransmission and physiology bigtime.
It is remarkable. If humans had known about this stuff, of course, they would have designed words to 'sound like what they mean' and we would have a fully congruent conscious language.
We haven't developed as a species enough to get that far yet, but some older cultures came close by accident because originally 'language' was totally congruent, when it was only grunts and squeals and expressive sounds. The noises that we made conveyed the same message to the unconscious as the words' literal meanings conveyed.
A lot of this still shines through: think of the words “Yuck!”  “Poo!” and “Ugh!” when we're disgusted, or the words “Ha!” “Yippee!” and “Wow” when we're excited. The very sound of the words agrees with their meaning. Onomatopoeic words work too: examples are atchoo, cuckoo, hiccup, splash, crash, bang, miaow, sizzle, frizz.
And enough remains for our language to be congruent in many areas, but much has also degraded. Words now convey less meaning than they did hundreds of years ago, because most people aren't aware of this connection. Those who are, are considered inspirational speakers, great poets or amazing lyricists, and all they are doing is exploiting the sounds of words in congruency with human unconscious responses. Self hypnosis makes us more aware of this sort of ability.
What is meant by 'words convey less meaning'? Let's take a modern word: “Responsible”. What does it mean in everyday colloquial speech?
The dictionary gives us: “answerable or accountable, as for something within one's power, control, or management”, and “able to discharge obligations or pay debts.”
That sounds like the definition of a society that needs someone to blame when things go wrong. “He is responsible” has come to mean “It was his fault! Blame him!”
If we want the original meaning of a word, though, we need to look at its etymology and if we dig there, we find the meaning “Able to respond appropriately”. To say “He is responsible” USED to mean “He is competent”.
In effect the word has reversed its meaning, but still sounds exactly the same, and hence the conscious/unconscious conflict.
This is explored in George Orwell's 1984 with “newspeak”, where people use the words love and peace (which sound great to the unconscious) to mean war and hatred consciously.
Awareness of what language does to the unconscious is a very useful tool, but we need to know a few other bits before it all fits together.

[s] I know that words have nuances that influence the output behavior, but I can't see how "reaction" is inherently "dysfunctional" except by arbitrary definition.

You're right; it isn't. As I said above, if you used the same word ('reaction') in the literal context of chemistry, the unconscious would NOT send the 'problem' message, which is why contexts are really important. If you used the same word to describe lighting a rocket fuse and the reaction makes a rocket take off, it wouldn't send a problem message either. The word 'reaction' only implies dysfunction in the personal human response context, NOT in other contexts (where it makes sense.)
Asking someone what sort of reaction they had is like asking them whether they had a heart attack or a shock response or some sort of seizure. It leaves no room for anyone healthy to reply. Those who don't experience any such thing are left with 'no box to tick' unconsciously.
In short: Chemicals react. Combustion engines react. Humans respond. Reactions are automatic, responses are autonomous. Lots more on this in T10.

[s] Funny feeling to think that we have also designated a whole class of people to literally wait on us for life.
We haven't; the TE has. I personally don't have servants or slaves, and I'm guessing you don't either. In this context, the word 'waiting' has been used to mean 'serving'. It too doesn't make sense.
We have to remember we are a minority and not use “we” when referring to 'most people'. What 'we' are doing is something really rather special.
  :  )

Hello Dudes,

wow, this is all very interesting.  It seems we are crossing out into a new open territory, full of new information.  A lot of questions are pushing me from behind me, but let me take it slowly.

A quick note...  I checked out one of the references you made about the brain imaging studies that show where nouns and verbs are processed in the brain.  Here is a quote from the paper:

"Learning nouns activates the left fusiform gyrus, while learning verbs switches on other regions LEFT inferior frontal gyrus and part of the left posterior medial temporal gyrus)," says Antoni Rodríguez-Fornells, co-author of the study and an ICREA researcher at the Cognition and Brain Plasticity Unit of the University of Barcelona.

I am confused because you said that verbs are processed in the 4th Network and the 4th Network is in the right half of the brain.  Here they say "left inferior frontal gyrus". 

But isn't my question really about anatomical specificity of brain processes?  According to neuro-plasticity, all kinds of brain areas can jump in to replace other areas.  For example, visual cortex re-organization into a tactile processor in blind people, etc..

And you mention the phonetic bits of language.  Kiku vs. Boloba for example.  Are these phonetic bits tied into our animal mind?  Is this what we mean by the unconscious?  Or is the unconscious as we are referring to it just as "human" as the conscious, only a parallel stream that is left out of awareness by... inhibition???

I feel like I am getting a bit sidetracked and over-whelmed by this new information, it will take time to put it all into context.  But I certainly want this discussion to continue, and I hope my questions are somehow on-track. 

I am a fan of the psychonaut Terence McKenna, and I am left now wondering how the idea of human transcendence, eschaton, and entelechy can fit into the NH model of the brain having to base all its higher functions of abstraction on earth-bound, animal wiring.  It seems that the three big words I just used all point to a potential that is free of earth-bound, incarnate being.

Ooooh, I feel like I am wading into the deeper water....

When I think of looking at a human brain, all slimy organic tissue, and I think that this is our interface to the world of all experience,  I get this very quiet and peaceful sensation of wonder.  I am left mute, with no answers, and I want to stay in this state of infinite wonder, because it seems like the most wonderful, peaceful, innocent place to be.  But I can't stay there, because immediately some desire takes over.  It appears to me that life is just a continuum of wants and desires.  One could spread the continuum to include the universe.... but I am really digressing now....  I will continue on this track of transcendence as the discourse unfolds.

hoping there is little confusion!

sirhinojo

Long mail, but not silly  :  )

[sirhinojo Wrote: ]the 4th Network is in the right half of the brain.

The 4th network, and all other networks, are all over the brain. Networks are not lobes.

This raises an important issue as it's a recurring problem of misunderstanding by a majority of students and I'd appreciate any ideas y'all have on how to get this concept across. I'm aware (but unfortunately still kinda baffled) that tutorials don't yet manage to convey that “the map is not the territory”; that what we are working with is a model of how intelligence works, just like the standard model is a model of how physics works.

Normally, we grasp these relationships between the real world and models. The physics standard model when portrayed in 2D places protons on the left hand side and force particles on the right, but we understand easily that in real life all protons are not on the left hand side of the universe and forces do not only work in the right hand side (actually that would make a great sci fi story*)  :  )

How can we help students (and ourselves!) to grasp this same relationship in a model of intelligence?  Is there difficulty in using a concrete model for an abstract concept (and if so, how did quantum physics manage?)
Maybe inserting more info in earlier tutorials would help but I'm also wary of going on and on about things and getting too repetitive and boring, so it's a difficult one.

Anyway, I digress: Why is N4 on the right hand side of the model and referred to as the 'front/right network'? -Most of N4's cell bodies are found towards the front and one side of real live brains (which side, in real life, varies according to the individual, and also as you note in cases of injury or damage other areas can indeed take over tasks and/or bits of other networks). N4's axons are everywhere throughout the brain's 3D space (and some axons of N1 & 2 are over a meter away from our brain, in our toes!)

Our whole body is filled with brain networks, because neurons are nerves. We have to standardize the model in order to look at the relationships between things, so we chose the areas of neuron cell body amalgamation hubs (ascertained by DTI) for the architecture of the model, then flattened it out to 2D, which gives a nice hexagonal cell and looks pretty in diagrams.


[s] Are these phonetic bits tied into our animal mind?

It appears so, yes. From T9:
“Micromuscular responses
Researchers filmed newborn infants as the babies listened to various sounds. Their analysis showed all healthy infants displayed micromuscular responses (micromovements) in response to the phonemes ('bits') of language, in synchrony with the rhythms of human speech.

Every person's micromovement repertoire is as individual as their fingerprints, and they last for our whole lives. Random noise, rhythmic tapping, or disconnected vowel sounds will not produce this "language-response-dance." Only the natural rhythms of human speech have this effect. The same muscle moves in response to the same phoneme each time the phoneme sounds, like an automatic coupling between specific sensory input and specific motor response.”

I wouldn't call the unconscious the 'animal' mind though. All of our mind is an animal mind, because we're animals. We're very smart animals, but still animals.

The unconscious is the part of our mind we're not consciously aware of, and that's most of it. No 'inhibition' is necessary, most processing just doesn't need to be displayed in conscious awareness in the same way that most of the processing on our computers doesn't need to be displayed on the screen. The conscious bit is our 'user interface'.


Re: McKenna, we choose our own role models for our own specific needs and reasons, but I don't think I'd be taking too seriously opinions on neurology from someone who died of what he died of. In fact I'd take it as a strong sign to avoid modeling them. (I hope nobody takes this personally as it isn't meant so.) Nor does this mean that sound evidence should ever be ignored, regardless of who does the experiments.

The brain doesn't perform higher functions, the mind does. Hardware becomes software when code is given meaning. There's no reason why a mind couldn't run on other equally complex hardware without a biological basis, but we haven't quite got there yet so we're stuck being animals and we gotta live with it, messy and inconvenient though it may be.

That doesn't mean we can't have transcendent experiences, as many of us know well  :  )  I think coming  to terms with it is about realizing how super nature is rather than  assuming it's supernatural. We are after all a part of all things. The atoms inside us were once inside stars. We literally 'embody' the universe.

I think we are racing ahead of ourselves with too much information and not enough defragging, and that's causing confusion too. It would be good to consolidate what we've looked at already in tutorials before adding more information. We are exploring one of the most complex things in existence, so shouldn't be surprised if we get confused sometimes. Just a short time ago the mind was mostly unfathomable, that's partly why its so exciting being the first generation with MRI, PCR, electron microscopy etc, who can 'boldly go'.

I get exactly this problem from time to time because I'm too impatient to understand things, and when it happens I go away and watch movies or do gardening or socialize with friends, and deliberately stop thinking about neuroscience. While we take that 'time out' the mind does a marvelous job of putting all the info together in more coherent ways, so sometimes we have to just sit back and let it do that  :  )

I share your wonder about how meat can think LOL  :  ) even though we know it's 'electrochemically'. The concepts that codes can be embodied and a whole mind can be a series of patterns are remarkable and magnificent and strangely exciting in an ACh/endorphiny sort of way, so who knows what my biology is doing there and who knows what the future holds for mind?  :  )
Yum.
AR

*But a very brief one  :  )

Hi dudes,
sirhinojo Wrote:
you could just write a short caveat paragraph and have it flash on the top of every webpage.
I considered whether to put the golden rules and other bits like this here and there in this way (but not flashing. We gotta be careful with flashy things 'cos people with epilepsy come here.) Ideally though I'd like to get the ideas across without repetition, especially when it may be out of context.

Do you think the 'hardware/software' analogy might make it clearer; for example if we think of the brain as robotic parts or machine parts whose behavior is controlled by software. The machine parts are the structure. Different bits of the structure can be used for different things depending on priority of processing, just as a computer can run a variety of software and in each application, different parts of the hardware do different things; the display on the screen is different for example but its the same screen; the same structure; running different programs. What we are modeling is not the structure; MRI does that best. We're modeling software and the behavior it prompts, and learning about the mind's different applications and how to hack them.

[s] I understand the brain"s networks are messily rather scattered about. But at least with the frontal (and network 3) are pretty well defined by hemisphere.

I still have quite some trouble telling from available data whether some things are going on courtesy of root processes in 4/5 or 6, and N3 sits in the middle but invades both temporal lobes and the parietal cortex. N2 uses segments of parietal as well as occipital lobes and many 'middle' structures. I'm not certain anyone can correlate structure/network/function that closely yet. But it's coming, it's definitely coming.

There certainly are specialized-by-hemisphere tasks and they're usually turning out to be complementary parts of the same process (language is a good example), but this idea in the past got very exaggerated by the 'split brain' brigade and a lot of dualistic ('reason versus feeling') type speculation has in retrospect turned out to be not true. It happened at a time when we had much more data about the brain's left half than the right half, and that's no longer the case. It's also becoming apparent that a lot of r/l complementary functions also use other networks (language is a good example here too). So it's still possible that all functions use parts of every network just like memory does. I find that quite exciting  :  )

[s] But I am sorry and I realize that it is misleading to think that anatomical locations are assigned to mind.
I don't get what there is to be sorry about? (Sorry; Mr Spock again)  :  )  It's hardly our fault that neurobiology is complex and mind software such a big unknown that those of us flying around the frontiers all get lost in it on a regular basis  :  )  We didn't design it, after all (although that would make another great sci fi story).

[s] It isn't the nerves themselves so much as the neurotransmitter soup that determine what happens....
Ooh, important bit this! Okay this is one step closer to software rather than hardware, but still not quite there. Remember the experiment where two groups people were both given norepinephrine, one group then had a sexy experience and one group had a scary experience? Exactly the same transmitter produced very different results. Likewise an anxious person can react to an unknown situation in fear whereas a non-anxious person can respond to the same unknown with excitement.

So this tells us it's not quite the transmitters that are determining what happens, it's what the mind believes is happening. It's thought. Thought controls everything; the SW controls the HW. Feedback from the HW gives the SW data but the SW has to decide what it means. Belief about what's going on modulates transmitter release.

Without the physical hardware nerves of course transmitter release wouldn't be possible, but at the bottom of it all whatever the unconscious mind believes is going on shapes every response, from the molecular to the physical to the behavioral to the psychological.

If what the unconscious believes is going on fits the observable facts, we have congruity.

[s] I was interested in actually taking a look at some of the references you provide. I usually dont click on them because I do not enjoy reading scientific papers.

It can get tedious. One of the reasons this site happened is we were thinking, wow no wonder people don't self-educate when it's this boring  LOL  :  )  It's not because most researchers are frontloaders, it's because the system of scientific reporting was set up by frontloaders centuries ago and everyone still chooses to conform to it. The 'abstract' sections are usually a relatively coherent approach with less details, so at least we know from a relatively short read whether the rest of the work is relevant to what we're pursuing.

[s] Poor Terence McKenna. Are you saying that he is someone not to be modeled because he got brain cancer?

Behaviors are really the issue not people. Certain behaviors are not good to model regardless of whom they are seen in, even if they turn up in someone really cool. Example: by all means model Hendrix's guitar style but don't model his benzo/alcohol habits. Most of us do things that nobody should model too; bad habits that we're getting rid of over time.

[s] Did he do something to get the brain cancer?

I never met the dude and have no idea at all of its origins or his response. The public info says he'd suffered a long time from headaches, which is certainly something I would follow up right away if either of my parents had suffered cancer (his mom did apparently), and that they worsened into migraines (at which point I'd be demanding brain scans) and finally seizures which led to diagnosis.

I realize there are many reasons for pursuing NH, and some are not prioritizing mind health they are prioritizing spirituality, altered states and/or fun, so fair play to this dude for doing what he wanted to do. But I don't see much factual information in this work that isn't intermingled with woo woo and it's a lot of work to disentangle the two. It's hard not to compare against Alex Shulgin, whose work with psychedelics is legendary but whose personal philosophy is virtually unknown.

Anyway, I guess the short version is: if we get a headache we should find out why  :  )

I shall be away for one week Mon 3rd – Saturday 8th sept. Consequently, replies to mails etc  may be late.
Best
AR

Long mail, get coffee

Sakiro Wrote: . if i remember well when we are anxious we overproduce the NT norepinephrine right? and cortisol (fight and flight response) .. but the problem is not so much the neurotrasmitter per se (i mean, norepinephrine is as useful as the other ones) than the lack of bloodlow in the frontal networks that comes with it?

NE is needed for anything important that we want to remember -from tutorials (remember the slime mold?) you'll recall how its used in the first part of memory consolidation, so we release it when anything 'important' happens.

Cortisol is the stress hormone necessary for learning and only affects frontal lobe blood supply when in excess. Stress is good for growth, anxiety (chronic stress with no relaxation) is the problem. It's in chronic stress that blood flow shuts down.

[s]  maybe norepinephrine is the one selected because affects the body as well as the brain? (increasing blood supply in the legs so you can avoid the danger,increasing hearth pulse etc) that's the reason that norepinephrine is the NT that is most produced in an anxious state and not the other ones???

Strictly speaking, Norepinephrine affects the brain, epinephrine affects the body. Cortisol causes the release of epinephrine in the kidneys, that's the onset of the fight/flight response that shunts blood to muscles and bones rather than brain. Check the HPA axis diagram in T9. ACTH is part of the Cortisol cascade.
So we got:
NE in the brain preparing for learning & memory
NE in the ANS waking up the body and preparing it for interaction. All fine so far...
With anxiety we get:
Too much Cortisol in the brain signaling a fight/flight response, which causes:
Too much ACTH in the bloodstream triggering epinephrine
Epinephrine putting the body into defense mode
Frontal lobes shut down, mood shift to defensive.

All the stages of a chemical cascade would take up whole pages, include gene transcription, and be way too confusing for newbies, so we cut down to essentials in basics tutorials and start filling in the details in intermediate level. In advanced tutorials we'll see a lot more of the steps including epigenetic changes in some of these cascades.

[s] That release happend in n5?? or in other areas of the brain?? or just the body? (i ask this because i wonder how it can affect front loaders vs rear ones ..)

See above, plus: Most transmitters are made in rear nets, but the nature of neurotransmission is like wireless transmission-it goes all over the place but only the areas with receivers can detect it. Blood flow is what supplies the system with power. If blood flow to an area is restricted, that area has no power to transmit OR receive. It's like some hacker pulling the plug on half the network terminals. Doesn't affect the server, does affect the terminals.

[s] The people in that experiment .. which could be the difference if they gave them dopamine instead norepinephrine?? ...

It would be fairly easy to design an experiment where dopamine was given and two different scenarios presented, say, a sexy encounter versus a parachute jump.

Hypotheses: Those partaking in the sexy encounter would produce oxytocin as a second messenger and mood would shift into lust for sex, those participating in the parachute jump would release a small amount of cortisol, feel excitement and possibly slight alarm (if healthy) or anxiety & fear (if cortisol production did not stop). In both cases NE would be released to facilitate memory. In all healthy cases serotonin & endorphins would be released afterwards.

In the extremely anxious, even the sexy encounter would cause cortisol release and we'd see the sentiments of shyness/embarrassment or arrogance and possessive behavior.

...If anyone wants to run this experiment, can I try both?  :  )

[s] I don't know to what point given a "meaning" to some experience/stuff can override the effects of having x neurotrassmitter floating around our system ..

It doesn't override them, it just directs them in different ways, determined by our interpretation of context. Our interpretation of what a neurotransmitter-induced feeling MEANS and which behavior should be primed for is shaped by the context events occur in. If someone in a dark alley is holding a knife, we have a very different response than if someone in a restaurant or a butchers store is holding a knife. Intelligence must able to discriminate between risk and hazard, fact and fiction (otherwise we'd run from the butcher's knife, and the tiger on the movie screen). Context changes meaning even when events and objects remain the same.

[s] which should at least "prime" you to have some kind of behaviour

Yes, and 'which' behavior is the issue here. What we are learning is that context determines choice of interpretation of 'what's going on', and we prime for what we think is going on. Dopamine can create desire (second messenger Oxytocin) or alarm (second messenger Cortisol) because the desire not to die is just as strong and important as the desire to reproduce. Interpretation of our current context (imagination combines memory, prediction, current state of mind and current input to decide what the context IS) gives us the 'second messenger' transmitters that prime distinct behaviors rather than just 'a feeling'

Maybe i must interpret that, in a person without anxiety the behaviour that is prompted is the ones in "the green zone" and when we have anxiety will we have the ones in wronguse?

Yes, spot on, but more. Not just behaviors in the green zone, but the particular specific behaviors that are congruent with and appropriate to our current context. We won't for example feel lust when looking at an Anaconda, even though lust itself is a perfectly healthy green zone behavior.
...You could argue that some kinky people WOULD feel lust when looking at an Anaconda, and I'd say that's an example of how association-rewiring can be used deliberately for humor, fun or personal entertainment, but can also lead to serious mistakes.   :  )

[s] So .. NT could determine what happend in a healthy state because will always be "green zone" responses/behaviours?

With the 'contextual' caveat, yes (see above). The Amy has two choices for each network (like two bits of a jigsaw puzzle, only one of which fits the current picture) and N3 has the overall picture of what's going on. Once N3 matches up the two, it signals to put the pieces into the picture (the correct second messengers go out.)

[s] the problem is when axiety step in our path .. and the differente in wronguse/nonuse reactions.

Prolonging this analogy, once anxiety steps in, we've got the wrong pieces AND either the wrong picture, or no picture. The more pieces we try to shove in, the worse the confusion seems to get because none of them seems to fit.
Best,
AR