In recent years, Posner and other psychological scientists have discovered that during infancy, the orienting network handles most of the regulatory functions. Later in childhood, the executive network begins to assume most of the responsibility for maintaining attention. See more from the Kavli Keynote Collection. For a while, psychological scientists wondered whether infants had executive networks at all. They showed 7-month-olds a screen with a puppet.
At one point, a hand came in and placed down another puppet, but in the next shot there was only one puppet again. All the while, the infants had electrodes strapped to their heads. Berger and colleagues detected a brain marker in infants that nearly matched what they found in adults when they detect errors e.
The target arrow can be flanked by congruent arrows pointing the same way or incongruent arrows going different directions. The reaction time between congruent and incongruent trials is a strong measure of the executive attention network.
Work by Posner and Rothbart has shown that these ANT reaction times correlate very closely with behavioral measures of self-control. A study in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences reported that higher effortful-control scores as early as age 4 can predict health less sickness , wealth higher income , social relations reduced likelihood of being a single parent , and crime lower rates at age 35 Moffitt et al.
Indeed, Posner and others have validated the ancient belief that people can learn to control their minds through practice. Attention training helps strengthen the mind with straightforward executive network tasks. When they took the ANT again at the end of the training period, the children showed changes in the brain network toward the direction of adult functioning. In other words, a simple 5-day regimen had improved their attention.
At least 10 subsequent studies, using a variety of executive training methods, have found improved performance due to training, said Posner.
In a paper, Posner, Tang, and their colleagues reported that test participants given a mere 5 days of IBMT training showed higher executive attention as well as greater positive mood and less secretion of the stress hormone cortisol compared with a control group that just did basic relaxation tasks. Simply put, their minds seemed to exert more control. Subsequent tests found that white matter around the anterior cingulate seemed to change following 2 to 4 weeks of IBMT.
So, a month of meditation had altered the brain structure in critical parts of the attention network. Cris Niell of the University of Oregon is testing that idea right now using mice in a cage receiving theta stimulations via a laser light inserted under a tiny protective skullcap.
Take, for instance, smoking addiction. For a study, Tang and Posner recruited a group of smokers and nonsmokers, randomly assigning some to receive basic relaxation training and some to receive IBMT. Brain scans confirmed an increase in brain activity in areas related to self-control, including the good old anterior cingulate. The changes in their brain had given them more self-control without their realizing it. At the end of his talk, Posner apologized to the packed ballroom for going 4 minutes longer than scheduled.
He thanked them for controlling their attention so impressively, especially as cocktail hour approached. Berger, A. In fact, simply believing a physical reality about yourself can actually nudge the body in that direction—sometimes even more than actually being prone to the reality. The researchers, publishing in Nature Human Behavior , were interested in two areas—endurance during exercise and satiety during eating.
For the endurance part, they did genetic testing on the participants to see whether they carried variants of a gene that make a person more or less prone to tiring easily. They also had people run on a treadmill to measure their endurance. Those who were told they had better endurance ran a bit longer, regardless of what genes they actually carried.
Similar results were found for the part that focused on a hormone that signals satiety or fullness to the brain during eating, so is protective against obesity. When the participants ate a meal after hearing the true or false results of their genetic tests, their bodies performed differently from how they had before hearing the news: those told they made more of the fullness hormone actually released 2. And that was also reflected in how much they ate.
The impression is given that the fundamental mechanism is settled and that only details need working out. The rest of us who are not biologists have been schooled through popular science literature, radio, and television to regard this reductive program as the undisputed and legitimate scientific explanation.
Can mental or experiential functions be the outcome of the laws of physics? Can the laws of physics capture the nature or essence of experience? There are a number of schools of thought that endeavor to explain how mind is derived from matter on the assumption that the latter is the only reality. A more radical approach is to deny the existence of experience completely, thus avoiding the task of explaining it. D Dennett claims that subjective experience is illusory. This denial of the phenomenon whose existence is self evidently more certain than the existence of anything else is considered by a number of philosophers, to say the least, as bizarre.
However, this view has considerable support as it bypasses the hard problem. So the phenomenon of liquidity is wholly dependent on phenomena that do not in themselves involve liquidity. The profusion of rival theories gives a flavor of the confusion underlying the attempts to derive mentality from passive matter.
It seems logical that for experience to emerge from something such as matter, then matter must be experiential in some sense or other. It must be experiential in its essential and fundamental nature no matter what conventional materialism believes. This though, is not to ascribe to atoms consciousness in the way humans experience it. It is important to stress that this view in no way contradicts the fact that experience is associated with neurons firing.
However, in contrast to the prevailing materialist view, the proposal is that there is a lot more to neurons than physics and neurophysiology. At the very basic level, elementary particles are in continuous interaction with their neighbors. They are attracted or repelled by the surrounding charges and have many alternative futures.
Physicists have developed mathematical theories to account for these behaviors. Many phenomena in quantum physics are paradoxical. In the two slit experiment, elementary particles appear to communicate. David Bohm developed a quantum theory 3 in which mind and matter are brought together. This being so, what knowledge have we of the nature of atoms that renders it at all incongruous that they should constitute a thinking object?
Absolutely none. Science has nothing to say about the intrinsic nature of the atom. The schedule of pointer readings is attached to some unknown background.
Why not attach it to something of spiritual mental nature in which a prominent characteristic is thought i. Panpsychism is the philosophical position that confers a mental quality to all the elements of the physical world.
On the plausible basis that elementary particles enjoy a rudimentary experiential quality, physical aggregations of them as in rocks and non-biological systems have no discernible increased coherent unified mentality. One of the organizing processes is evolution through natural selection. Like all viewpoints, panpsychism is not problem-free. The question is how in biological systems the micro-mentality of elementary particles combines in a coherent way to generate higher levels of experiential properties as we move up the evolutionary tree from prions to cells to plants to animals to human beings.
We can only authoritatively make statements about our own human experiential quality, which we perceive as unified and not fragmentary. An analogy from physics may shed some light. The core of an unmagnetized piece of iron consists of a great number of microscopic magnetic domains with their axes distributed in a haphazard way that renders this piece externally non-magnetic. If, however, an appropriate external magnetic field is applied, the domains align themselves along its direction.
The combined effect of the micro-magnets caused the iron piece to become a permanent magnet. The two states of the magnet may be loosely thought to represent haphazard non-organic and coherent organic matter respectively. The panpsychist process of enhanced levels of experiential quality in organic systems through the combination of lower levels is, though, still a mystery but not one that offends logic.
Science is driven by the assumption that the world is intelligible, but likely to be wrong in its certainty that we know enough about the physical to claim that the experiential cannot be physical. The intelligibility of the world is no accident. Nature is such as to give rise to conscious beings with minds, and it is such as to be comprehensible to such beings.
Mind is not just an afterthought or an accident or an add-on, but a basic aspect of matter.
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