Brain : Food for thought

[Tao_Equus]

From this weeks New Scientist, (sorry but you need subscription to read full article).
The secret life of the brain - being-human - 05 November 2008 - New Scientist
"....what exactly is the idling brain up to, anyway? Their work has led to the discovery of a major system within the brain, an organ within an organ, that hid for decades right before our eyes. Some call it the neural dynamo of daydreaming. Others assign it a more mysterious role, possibly selecting memories and knitting them seamlessly into a personal narrative. Whatever it does, it fires up whenever the brain is otherwise unoccupied and burns white hot, guzzling more oxygen, gram for gram, than your beating heart."

I would love to have copied the whole article here but I am sure Brian would be pissed off at me for copyright violation.

None the less the snippet from it gives you some idea that a few scientists have been studying the human, (and monkey), brain from a new angle. The brain is actually more active when we are not using it. And it is the 'core' of the brain, the bits of it that evolved long, long ago in our evolutionary journey that fire up at every opportunity and start doing something that uses masses of energy. The article shows a couple of functions, data sorting and scenario run-throughs, are taking place during these times. But it does not even hint at what it got me thinking.

Perhaps one or two of you will remember the Gaia thread and my intermittent posts speculating on how Gaia functions as an organism. It has to communicate between its component parts if it is an organism. And this communication would take energy. Lots of energy. Now persoanlly I find it implausible that the brain would demand so much resource from the body simply to sort data into coherant memories. Indeed other studies I have looked at show that synaptic connections, that make memories, are formed as data is recieved and not during 'rest'. And the idea that the brain uses so much power to rehearse scenarios that might never happen is stretching assumptions a bit. Maybe it does to an extent, but I find it hard to believe the body would use 20% of the calories it consumes just for speculative musing.

Ok, so my speculation is that we should be looking for evidence of the brain actually using all this energy for transmission of data. Even a godless heathen like me recognises that the brain does things, can know things from distant locations for example (remote viewing), that defy explanation unless some 'transmission' is taking place. Remote viewing is also proven, in several studies now, to be a faculty various animals such as cats, dogs, rats and parrots have ably demonstrated. This fits with the idea that whatever part of the brain is involved it is very ancient. As the above study reported.

So does anyone agree, have anything to add or see any major flaws in this idea? Have we found our Gaia spot deep within the ancient core of our brains? Are we uploading and downloading experiences to the super-organism of Gaia? Is this what explains synchronicity, ESP and other related phenomena?


tao

[Tao_Equus]

Lol....made me remember this:

[juantoo3]

Mandelbrot would be proud! Practical fractals.