2011-02-19 22:08:43
Life is what happens to us when we look back to see what happened.
A good friend once told me that there are three types of people: those who make things happen, those who see things happen, and those who ask…what happened? We all have a little of each of those three types of people.
We have all experienced the feeling that life is what happens to us when we look back to see what happened. And daily life continually confronts us with an enormity of sensory stimuli that compete to reach our consciousness, and they do so both among themselves and with our own imagination and mental rumination. The brain must choose what to pay attention to. We are, therefore, not aware of the entire world in which we live, and many events happen without us realizing it because our brain decides to separate them from our reality.
The research that gives rise to these interesting considerations has been recently carried out with a group of epileptic patients resistant to pharmacological treatment. The only possible treatment for this type of patient is neurosurgery, aimed at eliminating the region of the brain causing the attacks.
solitary neurons
To find out precisely which region of the brain is the least likely to be removed, these patients have a device, consisting of 64 microelectrodes connected to a computer, implanted over the part of their brains that contains the neurons whose malfunction is responsible. of the attacks.
This region is called the middle temporal lobe. It turns out that decades of research have discovered that this brain region is the one that encodes and stores in memory the concepts of the images we see. The encoding of these images involves, sometimes, just a single neuron, which is activated when seeing again, or simply imagining, the image that has been encoded. For example, a certain neuron in the medial temporal lobe could encode the image of Marilyn Monroe, another, that of Barack Obama, and another, that of Jesus Christ himself.
The 64 microelectrodes record neuronal activity in the medial temporal lobe when patients suffer an epileptic seizure. In this way, the precise region of said module involved in the attack can be analyzed to plan the surgical intervention. But since no one knows when the epileptic seizure will occur, patients must be connected to the device until it occurs. In the meantime, some of these patients can volunteer to perform experiments aimed, for example, at finding out how the brain selects between two images that compete for its attention.
This is what an international consortium of researchers set out to study, publishing their results in the journal Nature. To do this, the 12 volunteer patients connected to the microelectrodes were shown 110 photographs of well-known people, such as Michael Jackson and Marilyn Monroe. After analyzing the activity of the neurons recorded by the electrodes, four images were selected whose vision activated only one of the neurons in the middle temporal module of each patient. That is, four images were selected that, for each patient, were coded by the activity of a single neuron.
Mental filtering
The patients were then shown two of these images superimposed 50% on a computer screen and, here comes the interesting part, they were asked to do their best, consciously, for ten seconds to perceive only one of them and eliminate the other. This conscious perceptual filtering activity induced a change in neuronal activity in the medial temporal module that contained the two neurons that were activated when viewing both images. This change in activity was analyzed and coded by computer, and used to increase, on the computer screen, the sharpness of the image whose neuron was most activated, and decrease that of the other.
The patients thus saw how their mental efforts translated into a greater or lesser decrease in the sharpness of the image that they wanted to eliminate from their perception. This information allowed the patients to learn to modulate their conscious mental activity to completely eliminate, in subsequent tests, the image that they did not want to see, and leave only the one they intended to perceive, and they achieved this in no less than 70% of the cases.
This experiment shows how the human brain, voluntarily, can learn to filter reality and select only the part of it it wants to see. Reality is, perhaps, one, but it multiplies into different realities in the brains of each of us. It is not surprising, therefore, that reaching an agreement between different human beings is so complicated. It’s not that we don’t want to accept reality, it’s that we don’t see it.
A popular saying says that the world is the color of the glass through which it is viewed. However, this research indicates that the world can be the color of the glass with which our brain decides that we look. That decision may depend on our education, our experiences and our desires. We already knew that objectivity does not exist, but we did not know that it is our brain that decides not to do it. Thus, the organ that we intend to use to reach an objective truth is the same one that is responsible for hiding it from us. Terrible irony on which to reflect as objectively as possible before going to sleep…, if we can fall asleep now.
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