brain

Neurotensin, How Your Brain Encodes A Good Or Bad Moment

/ John / Leave a comment

I found this interesting in how your brain figures out what is good, bad, positive or negative and helps us act accordingly.

It’s pretty heady stuff, but the part about helping with anxiety, addiction and other things has great potential.

For Introverts, a lot of it happens in the reward/pain zone, the Amygdala…you know, the fight or flight place.

Here is an excerpt and a link to the whole article:

Now let’s rewind. You’re on the vacation of a lifetime in Kenya, traversing the savanna on safari, with the tour guide pointing out elephants to your right and lions to your left. From the corner of your eye, you notice a rhino trailing the vehicle. Suddenly, it sprints toward you, and the tour guide is yelling to the driver to hit the gas. With your adrenaline spiking, you think, “This is how I am going to die.” Years later, when you walk into a florist’s shop, the sweet floral scent makes you shudder.

“Your brain is essentially associating the smell with positive or negative” feelings, said Hao Li, a postdoctoral researcher at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in California. Those feelings aren’t just linked to the memory; they are part of it: The brain assigns an emotional “valence” to information as it encodes it, locking in experiences as good or bad memories.

And now we know how the brain does it. As Li and his team reported recently in Nature, the difference between memories that conjure up a smile and those that elicit a shudder is established by a small peptide molecule known as neurotensin. They found that as the brain judges new experiences in the moment, neurons adjust their release of neurotensin, and that shift sends the incoming information down different neural pathways to be encoded as either positive or negative memories.

To be able to question whether to approach or to avoid a stimulus or an object, you have to know whether the thing is good or bad.

Hao Li, Salk Institute for Biological Studies

The discovery suggests that in its creation of memories, the brain may be biased toward remembering things fearfully — an evolutionary quirk that may have helped to keep our ancestors cautious.

The findings “give us significant insights into how we deal with conflicting emotions,” said Tomás Ryan, a neuroscientist at Trinity College Dublin who was not involved in the study. It “has really challenged my own thinking in how far we can push a molecular understanding of brain circuitry.”

Which Is The Ex With No Brain And Which Ex Is The Rat

/ John / Leave a comment
I know for dead sure who the rat is. It’s an ex of mine who served cokes in the sky for a living. It turns out she was also the cheating bicycle in the sky that many other guys got to ride while away on trips, behind my back of course. As for no brain, there is a long list with a lot of them competing to be in the top 10, but can’t even make that list either. The bicycle had stewardess friends who lied to my face as they knew she was cheating on me, with surprisingly little remorse. I always found that revealing about her and her friends. It was a pattern for her.

I’ve met a lot of rats who seemed to function without a brain. Some are in my family. I went to high school with a den of rats. Most that worked with in Armonk or Somers for IBM were that. How they made it through life is beyond me. They are like Forest Gump, only not rich, not famous, not good looking, not friendly and are just surviving at this point. Yet here they are, probably able to survive a nuke with the roaches, in NY

Senior Moments or What happens in my brain when I can’t recall something I know?

/ John / Leave a comment

An interesting subject, sometimes called a brain fart.  These are not my answers, but I thought it would be interesting until you can’t recall it.

While it is not known for sure what is happening, this is how current models of memory recall would explain it:

Memory recall in the brain is not like retrieving a file from disk on a computer. In the brain, memories are reconstructed rather than retrieved. The brain is constantly augmenting what is in “working memory” with related information from the past. This is why stream of consciousness and memory recall often work by free association: The information association process is already there and we just make use of it.

When attempting to recall something specific, like a name, we “trick” the name into appearing in working memory by thinking about concepts related to it: the person’s identity, when we saw them last, what they look like. Normally this process automatically brings the information into working memory as a side-effect of filling in related facts.

When a word is missing but you “think you know it,” what is probably happening is that a lot of information about that word has been reconstructed in working memory, but not enough to trigger the production of the word itself. The presence of related information signals that you’ve “almost recalled it,” but the failure to produce the word shows that the recall is incomplete.

Often when people can’t recall a word, someone else can fill it in for them. But sometimes the “tip of the tongue” word does not actually exist. Related words may come to mind and it may seem like there “should be a word” for whatever it is. Thus the tip of the tongue feeling is not infallible.

Or: you can use this one….

A Neural Network (computer software) is just a simple model of the brain – not sure if the brain has something to do with it, but NN is composed of interconnected neurons with synapses (software model artifacts.)

Each neuron is an adder with a threshold, and each synapse has a weight. Both the threshold and the weight holds a small unit of information (could be digital or analog.) The entire NN has a certain information capacity, and used wisely (as in VOT (voice to text) or OCR (optical character recognition)) they do quite a job!

However, NN theory (and practice) shows (if I recall well) that when this capacity has been used/filled more than 11% (or something like that) while ‘learning‘,  the network starts ‘ forgetting!’

I want to stress again that I’m not aware of any evidence that the real brain works like a computer neural network – even more a computer NN would be to a brain like a dog house to New York city – but here there is something to think about…

For more information, go here.