Comments for thoughts on thoughts

Comment on The thalamus as conductor by Raphael

Raphael — Wed, 08 May 2013 03:27:26 +0000

That is a good tip particularly to those fresh to the blogosphere.
Simple but very precise information… Many thanks for sharing this one.
A must read post!

Comment on Human astrocytes are different by Neuroskeptic

Neuroskeptic — Sat, 09 Mar 2013 09:35:34 +0000

Interesting! Have you read The Other Brain? It’s a great book about glia & their role in information processing. Here’s my review: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/neuroskeptic/2011/02/28/the-other-brain

JK: thanks for the link

Comment on Temporal binding due to causality by iphone 5 case

iphone 5 case — Fri, 08 Mar 2013 02:40:00 +0000

nice post,thanks

Comment on Chemical imbalance by Vivek Misra

Vivek Misra — Mon, 25 Feb 2013 18:01:11 +0000

The keywords should be, “Brain is not a chemical soup”. This is exactly what I discussed on my blog (http://goo.gl/Shsf7) while sharing Prof. Anderson’s TED talk

JK: Thank you for the link

Comment on Looking at the thalamic reticular nucleus by Boris Kazachenko

Boris Kazachenko — Thu, 14 Feb 2013 14:14:09 +0000

This seems to be a good overview: http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Bursting : bursting increases stimuli detectability at the expense of its resolution.
Thalamic relays burst when inhibited by TRN, which seems to be competitive. My understanding is, in SWS bursting generates slow waves, in awake state, – gamma waves. It might be that inhibition by TRN doesn’t really affect transmittion of most stimuli in the awake state. Rather, when those rare inhibited relays finally fire, that acts like a computer “clock” signal. That is, bursts make concurrent tonic stimuli detectable by the cortex. So, tonic stimuli decay by default, without any inhibition, unless they coincide with local bursts. That would be necessary but not sufficient for conscious perception, which seems to require that the bursts themselves are synchronized across thalamus. I remember reading that during sleep, I think REM, activity looks superficially similar but is not globally synchronized. Just my speculations.

JK: Thanks for the link

Comment on Looking at the thalamic reticular nucleus by Boris Kazachenko

Boris Kazachenko — Wed, 13 Feb 2013 18:08:58 +0000

Fascinating stuff, Janet!

“From the viewpoint of a gate-keeping state of the thalamus, tonic mode firing in the thalamus may be responsible for a thalamic-gate passive mode (unconscious state), whereas burst firing may account for a thalamic-gate active mode (conscious state). In keeping with such a gate-keeping mechanism, I hypothesize that a conscious state would be established when a TRN-modulated thalamocortical network activates over a certain threshold to initiate overall synchronization. In contrast, in the sub-threshold state, sensory inputs may simply pass through the thalamus without the generation of conscious awareness.”

Actually, this is contrary to my assumption: tonic mode, in which thalamus is “passive”, transmits spikes with high temporal fidelity (accurate spacing & timing), while burst mode aggregates them into bursts, hence reducing temporal fidelity. So, my guess is that tonic (not burst) mode would generate conscious perception, which is supported by the fact that burst mode is dominant during slow-wave sleep.
I am probably wrong here, vs. the experts, but I’d like to know where exactly?

JK: I'm still looking for a description of tonic and burst activity that makes perfect sense to me.

Comment on I am taking a holiday by judith copithorne

judith copithorne — Tue, 22 Jan 2013 05:09:51 +0000

Hi Janet -Hope your move is going well. I am impressed to see that you are on twitter! I just heard a short talk on it a couple of days ago which made it seem interesting.Talk to you again soon.

Comment on I am taking a holiday by marianasoffer

marianasoffer — Fri, 28 Dec 2012 08:22:25 +0000

Hope you have a great time, enjoy life!

Comment on Word retrieval by judith copithorne

judith copithorne — Thu, 06 Dec 2012 02:45:39 +0000

This is very interesting to me as I have been aware of making taxonomic in my speech but I am not much aware of making thematic errors which I suspect wouldn't be as easily noticed or explained. Mainly I make taxonomic errors in my speech when I am behaving in a somewhat attention deficit way either because my mind is running ahead of my speech and not watching what I saying carefully enough or else I have been distracted by something with the same result. Now I need to watch myself more carefully to see how often I make the thematic errors.
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JK: Surely a poet is allowed to make creative connections not errors.

Comment on Controlling focus of attention by Boris

Boris — Wed, 28 Nov 2012 01:28:32 +0000

This is the paper he attached: http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/357/1428/1767.full.pdf+html