quote:Jack Cowan, a mathematician and neuroscientist at the University of Chicago, has built a neural network so powerful it can trip out.
More accurately he's designed a model that can replicate convection currents in an idealized situation: Benard Vortices. And he's done so with a connectionist neuronal model: basically a set of inputs, outputs, and rules for connectivity. He's only modeled a specific area of the neocortex and doesn't account for interaction among areas, emergent properties, and the model is propbably, unless he's running some fantastic array, fairly slow.
I fail to see how changing a few connectivity rules accounts for broad spectrum changes it several different types of nuerons and areas of the brain, including the brainstem, whose structures are very different from the ones in the neocortex.
But maybe he's onto something. I wouldn't mind having a vast roadmap of everything in there.
quote:From the Article
Cowan makes no apologies for being one of the White Smocks. He thinks that the "visual skyrockets" and that "certain indescribable feeling" are part and parcel of the same experience. As the drug penetrates to deeper and deeper areas of the brain--visual layers, cognitive layers, emotional layers and, finally, whatever part of the brain gives us our sense of self-awareness--our subjective experience becomes enormously more complicated and richer. And yet what's going on at the cellular level may not be so different at each layer.
The science has already come far enough that the white smocks can sort of cursorily collapse the self/other perception, or generate it. It's too bad Cowan and someone like Pettigrew won't hook up for a little spiritual research.
quote:Klüver classified these patterns into four types or "form-constants": tunnels, spirals, cobwebs and honeycombs.
The replication of Kluver's patterns is also a bit simplistic given Kluver, under the influence of mescaline himself, and "keeping a commendably straight head, ...eventually saw patterns in the patterns," described by several interviewees, although such weren't immediately visible from the interviews alone. |
